Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/195

134 is the very root of joy; evil is the requisite foil for the reaction essential to life.

Still profounder elements of good — subtle, pervasive, even mystic — are contributed by the Law of the Whole. Not only does the ascent of life to higher and higher levels point clearly to the greater fulness of existence as part of the Final Purpose, and so give play to the “influence of the ideal” in the encouraging prospect of the future, but our inseparable union with the Whole, our direct descent from Nature, and our reproduction of its life in ours, impart to us a certain Cosmic Emotion — Dühring calls it der universelle Affect — which, stirring at the foundations of our being, fills us with a dumb sense of the oneness of all things, and by forces coming from beneath consciousness, nay, from the beginnings of the world, binds us to the totality of existence with an attachment that no sum of ills can utterly destroy. It is from this Cosmic Emotion that the inborn love of life and the instinct of self-preservation arise. Our joy in the landscape comes from it; also our delight in art; our capacity for poetry; our bent to science and philosophy, by which we would figure to ourselves the form of this treasured All. It is, finally, the source and the reality of the set of feelings consecrated by the name of religion. To deny the worth of life is therefore to put ourselves in con-