Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/110

Rh moral ideals that we independently form. But the ideals themselves we apply to the course of evolution as tests of its worth, or hold as aims to be realized through knowledge of nature. We do not get them from studying the course of nature as a mere process. There is no doubt of the reality and of the vast importance of the physical fact of evolution. Its ethical importance, however, has been, we hold, misunderstood. Evolution is for ethics a doctrine not of ends, but of the means that we can use. In fact, there is an applied ethic of evolution, but no fundamental ethical doctrine based upon evolution. Those who investigate evolution are doing much to further the realization of ethical ideals, but they cannot make or find for us our ethical ideals. They show us where lies the path to an already desired goal. For them to try to define the goal merely by means of their physical discoveries, is a great mistake. It can lead only to such labored efforts as we have here been criticising, efforts to prove some such opinion as that altruism is a form of selfishness, or that selfishness is the only possible altruism. Whether we are just in fancying that these latter efforts are really identical with the actual efforts of any recent evolutionists, the reader must judge for himself. Altruism we must, at all events, justify in another way.

But now let us turn from those who define unselfishness as a useful means to a selfish end, and let us consider the effort to make pure unselfishness a