Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/217

Rh of evil decreasing. And this is true. Not only does evil decrease, but the tendency is ever toward its disappearance. Gradually the confines of civilization broaden; the central principle of human progress attains greater intensity, and the mind assumes more and more its lordly power over matter.

The moment we attempt to search out the cause of any onward movement we at once encounter this principle of evil. The old-time aphorism that life is a perpetual struggle; the first maxim of social ethics, "The greatest happiness to the greatest number;" indeed, every thought and action of our lives points in the same direction. From what is it mankind is so eager to escape? With what do we wrestle? For what do we strive? We fly from that which gives pain to that which gives pleasure; we wrestle with agencies which bar our escape from a state of infelicity; we long for happiness.

There is another thought in this connection well worthy our attention. In orthodox and popular parlance, labor is a curse entailed on man by vindictive justice; yet, viewed as a civilizing agent, labor is man's greatest blessing. Throughout all Nature there is no such thing found as absolute inertness; and, as in matter, so with regard to our faculties, no sooner do they begin to rest than they begin to rot, and even in the rotting they can obtain no rest. One of the chief objects of labor is to get gain, and Dr. Johnson holds that "men are seldom more innocently employed than when they are making money."

Human experience teaches, that in the effort is greater pleasure than in the end attained; that labor is the normal condition of man; that in acquisition, that is progress, is the highest happiness; that passive enjoyment is inferior to the exhilaration of active attempt. Now imagine the absence from the world of this spirit of evil, and what would be the result? Total inaction. But, before inaction can become more pleasurable than action, man's nature must be changed. Not to say that evil is a good thing, clearly there is a goodness in things evil; and in as far as the state of escaping from evil is more pleasurable than the state of evil escaped from, in so far is evil conducive to happiness.

Another more plausible and partially correct assertion is, that by the development of the subjective part of our nature, objective humanity becomes degenerated. The intellectual cannot be wrought up to the highest state of cultivation except at the expense of the physical, nor the physical fully developed without limiting the mental. The efforts of the mind draw from the energies of the body; the highest and healthiest vigor of the body can only be attained when the mind is at rest, or in a state of careless activity. In answer to which I should say that, beyond a certain point, it is true; one would hardly train successfully for a prize-fight and the tripos at the same time; but that the non-intellectual savage, as a race, is physically superior, capable of enduring greater fatigue, or more skillful in muscular