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246 time, and we are invited to praise a nature that could produce all this blessedness by pure physical law. Now we must indeed wish well for the men of the year 1,000,000, but we can receive no religious support from the knowledge that if all goes right and if the sun keeps well at work, the men of that time will be better than we are. For still the world as a whole gives no support to our real moral needs, for only by a happy accident will this blessedness be possible. Or, in short, two tendencies are seen before us in the world, one working for evolution, for concentration of energy in living beings, for increase of their powers, for progress; the other for dissipation of energy, for death, for the destruction of all that is valuable on our earth. We learn that the latter tendency has triumphed quite near us, on the moon. We hear that it is certain in time to triumph on the earth, and that the other tendency is to be only of transient superiority. We know that its present predominance here is, physically speaking, a happy accident, which a cosmical catastrophe might at any moment bring to an end. And now we are asked to see in this combination of facts a religious aspect. For the writer’s part, he refuses to regard it as anything but an interesting study in physics. He delights in it as science, but it has nothing to do with religion. Yet some people talk of a Religion of Evolution.

But no doubt believers in universal progress are ready with hypotheses that shall show how significant a fact progress really is. A world that has progressed so many millions of years doubtless has