Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/342

328 to saying that there is an equal sanction for the violation of any other natural law with that for its obedience. . The sanction of an action in either instance lies not in the mere fact of its performance, but in the improved conditions, material or social, which, are its resultant effects. That which is upbuilding, which tends to fullness of life, is right; that which tends to deterioration and retrogression is wrong.

Mr. Huxley apparently gives away bis entire case against evolutionary ethics by the assertion that the practice of goodness is directed "not so much to the survival of the fittest as to fitting as many as possible to survive." But surely it can not be doubted that those "fitted to survive" will survive; hence this confession constitutes a complete justification of evolutionary ethics. Viewed at short range by absolute standards, it may indeed be true that "survival of the fittest" is not always survival of the best. Relatively, however, it is the survival of the best possible under existing conditions; it points toward the morally perfect which can only be attained through repeated approximations of the relatively good.

It is true, indeed, that "the theory of evolution furnishes no millennial expectations" for the immediate future, and Prof. Huxley has not emphasized too strongly the importance of human intelligence and will in effecting moral regeneration. But these are powerful for good only as they are duly trained and cultivated; only as they rigidly note both cosmic and social conditions, and correctly estimate the trend and result of all the complex forces which center upon the life of the individual. It is the great virtue of the evolutionary ethic that it calls man back from the cloud-land of metaphysical speculation, and seeks to enlighten his intellect and guide his steps by appeals to the scientifically ascertained facts of human experience and the laws by which they are governed. Back to Nature, not in her statical aspects, as dreamed by Rousseau and the eighteenth-century philosophers, but in her dynamical and evolutionary aspects, must we ever go for ethical guidance, encouragement, and inspiration.

To Herbert Spencer, more than any other among the apostles of evolutionary doctrines, we owe the logical demonstration of the unity of man and the universe which eternally forbids the separation of his moral nature from those conditions out of which his whole being had its birth, and to which it is at all times vitally related. No morality in the universe? None, then, is possible in man. Existing in man, it is predicable also of his great world-mother. This is the irresistible logic of evolutionary ethics. And of him, the ripest thinker on this problem now living, it may well be affirmed, in the language of a poet of the new dispensation: