LIBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Marie B. Wol ford
 
 
 / 

 
 JOHN FISKE
 
 THROUGH NATURE 
 TO GOD 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN FISKE 
 
 Soyez comtne t 'oiseau pose pour un instant 
 
 Sur des rameaux tropfreles, 
 Qui sent player la branche et qui chante pourtant, 
 
 Sachant qu'il a des ailes ! 
 
 VICTOR HUGO 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN F1SKB 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR; 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 TO THE BELOVED AND REVERED MEMORY 
 OF MY FRIEND 
 
 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS CONSECRATED
 
 PREFACE 
 
 SINGLE purpose runs throughout 
 this little book, though different 
 aspects of it are treated in the 
 three several parts. The first part, "The 
 Mystery of Evil," written soon after "The 
 Idea of God," was designed to supply some 
 considerations which for the sake of con- 
 ciseness had been omitted from that book. 
 Its close kinship with the second part, 
 "The Cosmic Roots of Love and Self- 
 Sacrifice," will be at once apparent to the 
 reader. 
 
 That second part is, with a few slight 
 changes, the Phi Beta Kappa oration de- 
 livered by me at Harvard University, in 
 June, 1895. Its original title was "Ethics 
 in the Cosmic Process," and its form of 
 statement was partly determined by the 
 fact that it was intended as a reply to
 
 vi Preface 
 
 Huxley's famous Romanes lecture deliv- 
 ered at the University of Oxford in 1893. 
 Readers of "The Destiny of Man" will 
 observe that I have here repeated a portion 
 of the argument of that book. The detec- 
 tion of the part played by the lengthening 
 of infancy in the genesis of the human race 
 is my own especial contribution to the Doc- 
 trine of Evolution, so that I naturally feel 
 somewhat uncertain as to how far that sub- 
 ject is generally understood, and how far a 
 brief allusion to it will suffice. It therefore 
 seemed best to recapitulate the argument 
 while indicating its bearing upon the ethics 
 of the Cosmic Process. 
 
 I can never cease to regret that Huxley 
 should have passed away without seeing 
 my argument and giving me the benefit of 
 his comments. The subject is one of a 
 kind which we loved to discuss on quiet 
 Sunday evenings at his fireside in London, 
 many years ago. I have observed on Hux- 
 ley's part, not only in the Romanes lecture, 
 but also in the charming "Prolegomena,"
 
 Preface mi 
 
 written in 1894, a tendency to use the 
 phrase " cosmic process " in a restricted 
 sense as equivalent to "natural selection;" 
 and doubtless if due allowance were made 
 for that circumstance, the appearance of 
 antagonism between us would be greatly 
 diminished. In our many talks, however, 
 I always felt that, along with abundant 
 general sympathy, there was a discernible 
 difference in mental attitude. Upon the 
 proposition that " the foundation of moral- 
 ity is to ... give up pretending to believe 
 that for which there is no evidence," we 
 were heartily agreed. But I often found 
 myself more strongly inclined than my dear 
 friend to ask the Tennysonian question : 
 
 " Who forged that other influence, 
 That heat of inward evidence, 
 By which he doubts against the sense ? " 
 
 In the third part of the present little 
 book, "The Everlasting Reality of Reli- 
 gion," my aim is to show that "that other 
 influence," that inward conviction, the crav- 
 ing for a final cause, the theistic assump-
 
 viii Preface 
 
 tion, is itself one of the master facts of the 
 universe, and as much entitled to respect 
 as any fact in physical nature can possibly 
 be. The argument flashed upon me about 
 ten years ago, while reading Herbert Spen- 
 cer's controversy with Frederic Harrison 
 concerning the nature and reality of reli- 
 gion. Because Spencer derived historically 
 the greater part of the modern belief in an 
 Unseen World from the savage's primeval 
 world of dreams and ghosts, some of his 
 critics maintained that logical consistency 
 required him to dismiss the modern belief 
 as utterly false ; otherwise he would be 
 guilty of seeking to evolve truth from false- 
 hood. By no means, replied Spencer : 
 "Contrariwise, the ultimate form of the 
 religious consciousness is the final devel- 
 opment of a consciousness which at the 
 outset contained a germ of truth obscured 
 by multitudinous errors." This suggestion 
 has borne fruit in the third part of the 
 present volume, where I have introduced a 
 wholly new line of argument to show that
 
 Preface ix 
 
 the Doctrine of Evolution, properly under- 
 stood, does not leave the scales equally 
 balanced between Materialism and Theism, 
 but irredeemably discredits the former, 
 while it places the latter upon a firmer 
 foundation than it has ever before occupied. 
 My reference to the French materialism 
 of the eighteenth century, in its contrast 
 with the theism of Voltaire, is intended to 
 point the stronger contrast between the 
 feeble survivals of that materialism in our 
 time and the unshakable theism which is in 
 harmony with the Doctrine of Evolution. 
 When some naturalist like Haeckel assures 
 us that as evolutionists we are bound to 
 believe that death ends all, it is a great 
 mistake to hold the Doctrine of Evolution 
 responsible for such a statement. Haeck- 
 el's opinion was never reached through a 
 scientific study of evolution ; it is nothing 
 but an echo from the French speculation 
 of the eighteenth century. Such a writer 
 as La Mettrie proceeded upon the assump- 
 tion that no belief concerning anything in
 
 x Preface 
 
 the heavens above, or the earth beneath, 
 or the waters under the earth, is worthy 
 of serious consideration unless it can be 
 demonstrated by the methods employed in 
 physical science. Such a mental attitude 
 was natural enough at a time when the 
 mediaeval theory of the world was falling 
 into discredit, while astronomy and physics 
 were winning brilliant victories through the 
 use of new methods. It was an attitude 
 likely to endure so long as the old-fashioned 
 fragmentary and piecemeal habits of study- 
 ing nature were persisted in ; and the 
 change did not come until the latter half 
 of the nineteenth century. 
 
 The encyclopaedic attainments of Alex- 
 ander von Humboldt, for example, left him, 
 to all intents and purposes, a materialist of 
 the eighteenth century. But shortly before 
 the death of that great German scholar, 
 there appeared the English book which her- 
 alded a complete reversal of the attitude of 
 science. The " Principles of Psychology," 
 published in 1855 by Herbert Spencer, was
 
 Preface xi 
 
 the first application of the theory of evolu- 
 tion on a grand scale. Taken in connection 
 with the discoveries of natural selection, of 
 spectrum analysis, and of the mechanical 
 equivalence between molar and molecular 
 motions, it led the way to that sublime con- 
 ception of the Unity of Nature by which 
 the minds of scientific thinkers are now 
 coming to be dominated. The attitude of 
 mind which expressed itself in a great ency- 
 clopaedic book without any pervading prin- 
 ciple of unity, like Humboldt's " Kosmos," 
 is now become what the Germans call ein 
 ueberwtindener Standpunkt, or something 
 that we have passed by and left behind. 
 
 When we have once thoroughly grasped 
 the monotheistic conception of the universe 
 as an organic whole, animated by the om- 
 nipresent spirit of God, we have forever 
 taken leave of that materialism to which 
 the universe was merely an endless multi- 
 tude of phenomena. We begin to catch 
 glimpses of the meaning and dramatic pur- 
 pose of things ; at all events we rest as-
 
 xii Preface 
 
 sured that there really is such a meaning. 
 Though the history of our lives, and of all 
 life upon our planet, as written down by 
 the unswerving ringer of Nature, may ex- 
 hibit all events and their final purpose in 
 unmistakable sequence, yet to our limited 
 vision the several fragments of the record, 
 like the leaves of the Cumaean sibyl, caught 
 by the fitful breezes of circumstance and 
 whirled wantonly hither and thither, lie in 
 such intricate confusion that no ingenuity 
 can enable us wholly to decipher the legend. 
 But could we attain to a knowledge com- 
 mensurate with the reality could we 
 penetrate the hidden depths where, accord- 
 ing to Dante (Paradiso, xxxiii. 85), the 
 story of Nature, no longer scattered in tru- 
 ant leaves, is bound with divine love in a 
 mystic volume, we should find therein no 
 traces of hazard or incongruity. From 
 man's origin we gather hints of his destiny, 
 and the study of evolution leads our thoughts 
 through Nature to God. 
 CAMBRIDGE, March 2, 1899.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL 
 
 I. The Serpent's Promise to the Woman . ) 
 II. The Pilgrim's Burden .... 8 
 
 III. Manicbceism and Calvinism . . -14 
 
 IV. The Dramatic Unity of Nature . . 22 
 V. What Conscious Life is made of . -27 
 
 VI. Without the Element of Antagonism there 
 could be no Consciousness, and therefore 
 
 no World 34 
 
 VII. A Word of Caution . . . .40 
 VIII. The Hermit and the Angel . . . 43 
 IX. Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brute- 
 hood 48 
 
 X. The Relativity of Evil . ... 54 
 
 THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE AND SELF- 
 SACRIFICE 
 
 I. The Summer Field, and what it tells us . 59 
 II. Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 65
 
 xi-v Contents 
 
 III. Call ban's Philosophy .... 72 
 
 IV. Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no 
 
 Relation to Moral Ends ? . . -74 
 V. First Stages in the Genesis of Man . 80 
 VI. The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man . 86 
 VII. The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened In- 
 fancy 88 
 
 VIII. Some of its Effects 96 
 
 IX. Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments , 102 
 X. The Cosmic Process exists purely for the 
 
 Sake of Moral Ends . . . . /op 
 
 XI. M aternity and the Evolution of Altruism . nj 
 
 XII. The Omnipresent Ethical Trend . . 127 
 
 THE EVERLASTING REALITY OF RELIGION 
 I. " Deo er exit Voltaire" . . . '33 
 II. The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of 
 
 God . . . . . . . 747 
 
 III. Weakness of Materialism . . . / 52 
 
 IV. Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Hu- 
 
 man God ...... 16) 
 
 V. Religion's Second Postulate : the undying 
 
 Human Soul ...... 168 
 
 VI. Religion's Third Postulate : the Ethical Sig- 
 nificance of the Unseen World . . 777 
 VII. Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or 
 
 an Eternal Reality ? . . 174
 
 Contents xv 
 
 VIII. The Fundamental Aspect of Life . . 777 
 IX. How the Evolution of Senses expands the 
 
 World 182 
 
 X. Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting 
 
 Reality of Religion , . . .186
 
 THE MYSTERY OF EVIL 
 
 I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, 
 and create darkness ; I make peace, and create evil. I the 
 Lord do all these things. ISAIAH, xlv. 6, 7. 
 
 Did not our God bring all this evil upon us ? NEHEMIAH, 
 xiii. 1 8. 
 
 OVK eoiKt &' r) </>vVw erei<7-o5i<oSj(5 o5(ra tx riav <j>a.wofi.ei><av, aioTrep 
 
 d rpayuSia. ARISTOTLE, Melaphysica, xiii. 3.
 
 I 
 
 The Serpent's Promise to the Woman 
 
 " Your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, know- 
 ing good and evil." Genesis iii. 5. 
 
 HE legend in which the serpent is 
 represented as giving this counsel 
 to the mother of mankind occurs 
 at the beginning of the Pentateuch in the 
 form which that collection of writings as- 
 sumed after the return of the Jews from 
 the captivity at Babylon, and there is good 
 reason for believing that it was first placed 
 there at that time. Allusions to Eden in 
 the Old Testament literature are extremely 
 scarce, 1 and the story of Eve's temptation 
 first assumes prominence in the writings 
 of St. Paul. The marks of Zoroastrian 
 thought in it have often been pointed out. 
 This garden of Eden is a true Persian para- 
 
 1 Isaiah li. 3 ; Joel ii. 3 ; Ezekiel xxviii. 13, xxxi. 8, 9.
 
 4 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 disc, situated somewhere in that remote 
 wonderland of Aryana Vaejo to which all 
 Iranian tradition is so fond of pointing 
 back. The wily serpent is a genuine Par- 
 see serpent, and the spirit which animates 
 him is that of the malicious and tricksome 
 Ahriman, who takes delight in going about 
 after the good creator Ormuzd and spoiling 
 his handiwork. He is not yet identified 
 with the terrible Satan, the accusing angel 
 who finds out men's evil thoughts and deeds. 
 He is simply a mischief-maker, and the 
 punishment meted out to him for his mis- 
 chief reminds one of many a curious pas- 
 sage in the beast epos of primitive peoples. 
 As in the stories which tell why the mole 
 is blind or why the fox has a bushy tail, the 
 serpent's conduct is made to account for 
 some of his peculiar attributes. As a pun- 
 ishment he is made to crawl upon his belly, 
 and be forever an object of especial dread 
 and loathing to all the children of Eve. 
 
 What, then, is the crime for which the 
 serpent Ahriman thus makes bitter expia-
 
 The Mystery of Evil 5 
 
 tion ? In what way has he spoiled Or- 
 muzd's last and most wonderful creation ? 
 He has introduced the sense of sin : the 
 man and the woman are afraid, and hide 
 themselves from their Lord whom they 
 have offended. Yet he has been not alto- 
 gether a deceiving serpent. In one respect 
 he had spoken profound truth. The man 
 and the woman have become as gods. In 
 the Hebrew story Jehovah says, " Behold 
 the man is become as one of us ; " that is 
 to say, one of the Elohim or heavenly host, 
 who know the good and the evil. Man has 
 apparently become a creature against whom 
 precautions need to be taken. It is hinted 
 that by eating of the other tree and acquir- 
 ing immortal life he would achieve some 
 result not in accordance with Jehovah's 
 will, yet which it would then be too late to 
 prevent. Accordingly, any such proceed- 
 ings are forestalled by driving the man and 
 woman from the garden, and placing senti- 
 nels there with a fiery sword which turns 
 hither and thither to warn off all who would
 
 6 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 tread the path that leads to the tree of life. 
 The anthropomorphism of the story is as 
 vivid as in those Homeric scenes in which 
 gods and men contend with one another in 
 battle. It is plainly indicated that Jeho- 
 vah's wrath is kindled at man's presump- 
 tion in meddling with what belongs only to 
 the Elohim ; man is punished for his arro- 
 gance in the same spirit as when, later on, 
 he gives his daughters in marriage to the 
 sons of the Elohim and brings on a deluge, 
 or when he strives to build a tower that 
 will reach to heaven and is visited with a 
 confusion of tongues. So here in Eden he 
 has come to know too much, and Ahriman's 
 heinous crime has consisted in helping him 
 to this interdicted knowledge. 
 
 The serpent's promise to the woman was 
 worthy of the wisest and most astute of 
 animals. But with yet greater subtlety he 
 might have declared, Except ye acquire 
 the knowledge of good and evil, ye cannot 
 come to be as gods ; divine life can never 
 be yours. Throughout the Christian world
 
 The Mystery of Evil 7 
 
 this legend of the lost paradise has figured 
 as the story of the Fall of Man ; and nat- 
 urally, because of the theological use of it 
 made by St. Paul, who first lifted the story 
 into prominence in illustrating his theory 
 of Christ as the second Adam : since by 
 man came death into the world, by man 
 came also the resurrection from death and 
 from sin. That there is truth of the most 
 vital sort in the Pauline theory is unde- 
 niable ; but there are many things that will 
 bear looking at from opposite points of 
 view, for aspects of truth are often to be 
 found on both sides of the shield, and there 
 is a sense in which we may regard the loss 
 of paradise as in itself the beginning of the 
 Rise of Man. For this, indeed, we have 
 already found some justification in the 
 legend itself. It is in no spirit of paradox 
 that I make this suggestion. The more pa- 
 tiently one scrutinizes the processes whereby 
 things have come to be what they are, the 
 more deeply is one impressed with its pro- 
 found significance.
 
 II 
 
 The Pilgrim's Burden 
 
 UT before I can properly elucidate 
 this view, and make clear what is 
 meant by connecting the loss of 
 innocence with the beginning of the Rise of 
 Man, it is necessary to bestow a few words 
 upon a well-worn theme, and recall to mind 
 the helpless and hopeless bewilderment 
 into which all theologies and all philoso- 
 phies have been thrown by the problem of 
 the existence of evil. From the ancient 
 Greek and Hebrew thinkers who were sad- 
 dened by the spectacle of wickedness inso- 
 lent and unpunished, down to the aged 
 Voltaire and the youthful Goethe who felt 
 their theories of God's justice quite baffled 
 by the Lisbon earthquake, or down to the 
 atheistic pessimist of our own time who 
 asserts that the Power which sustains the
 
 The Mystery of Evil 9 
 
 world is -but a blind and terrible force with- 
 out concern for man's welfare of body or 
 of soul, from first to last the history of 
 philosophy teems with the mournful in- 
 stances of this discouragement. In that 
 tale of War and Peace wherein the fervid 
 genius of Tolstoi has depicted scenes and 
 characters of modern life with truthful 
 grandeur like that of the ancient epic 
 poems, when our friend, the genial and 
 thoughtful hero of the story, stands in the 
 public square at Moscow, uncertain of his 
 fate, while the kindly bright-faced peasant 
 and the eager pale young mechanic are shot 
 dead by his side, and all for a silly sus- 
 picion on the part of Napoleon's soldiery ; 
 as he stands and sees the bodies, still warm 
 and quivering, tossed into a trench and 
 loose earth hastily shovelled over them, his 
 manly heart surges in rebellion against a 
 world in which such things can be, and a 
 voice within him cries out, not in the 
 mood in which the fool crieth, but with the 
 anguish of a tender soul wrung by the sight
 
 io The Mystery of Evil 
 
 of stupendous iniquity, " There is no 
 God ! " It is but the utterance of an old- 
 world feeling, natural enough to hard- 
 pressed and sorely tried humanity in those 
 moments that have come to it only too 
 often, when triumphant wrong is dreadfully 
 real and close at hand, while anything like 
 compensation seems shadowy and doubtful 
 and far away. 
 
 It is this feeling that has created the 
 belief in a devil, an adversary to the good 
 God, an adversary hard to conquer or baffle. 
 The feeling underlies every theological 
 creed, and in every system of philosophy 
 we find it lurking somewhere. In these 
 dark regions of thought, which science has 
 such scanty means for exploring, the state- 
 ments which make up a creed are apt to 
 be the outgrowth of such an all-pervading 
 sentiment, while their form will be found 
 to vary with the knowledge of nature 
 meagre enough at all times, and even in 
 our boasted time which happens to char- 
 acterize the age in which they are made.
 
 The Mystery of Evil 1 1 
 
 Hence, well-nigh universally has philosophy 
 proceeded upon the assumption, whether 
 tacit or avowed, that pain and wrong are 
 things hard to be reconciled with the theory 
 that the world is created and ruled by a 
 Being at once all-powerful and alkbenevo- 
 lent. Why does such a Being permit the 
 misery that we behold encompassing us on 
 every side ? When we would fain believe 
 that God is love indeed, and love creation's 
 final law, how comes it that nature, red in 
 tooth and claw with ravine, shrieks against 
 our creed ? If this question could be fairly 
 answered, does it not seem as if the burden 
 of life, which so often seems intolerable, 
 would forthwith slip from our shoulders, 
 and leave us, like Bunyan's pilgrim, free 
 and bold and light-hearted to contend 
 against all the ills of the world ? 
 
 Ever since human intelligence became 
 enlightened enough to grope for a meaning 
 and purpose in human life, this problem of 
 the existence of evil has been the burden 
 of man. In the effort to throw it off, lead-
 
 12 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 ers of thought have had recourse to almost 
 every imaginable device. It has usually 
 been found necessary to represent the Cre- 
 ator as finite either in power or in good- 
 ness, although the limitation is seldom 
 avowed, except by writers who have a lean- 
 ing toward atheism and take a grim plea- 
 sure in pointing out flaws in the constitu- 
 tion of things. Among modern writers the 
 most conspicuous instance of this temper 
 is afforded by that much too positive phi- 
 losopher Auguste Comte, who would fain 
 have tipped the earth's axis at a different 
 angle and altered the arrangements of na- 
 ture in many fanciful ways. He was like 
 Alphonso, the learned king of Castile, who 
 regretted that he had not been present 
 when the world was created, he could 
 have given such excellent advice ! 
 
 In a very different mood the great Leib- 
 nitz, in his famous theory of optimism, 
 argued that a perfect world is in the nature 
 of things impossible, but that the world in 
 which we live is the best of possible worlds.
 
 The Mystery of Evil 13 
 
 The limitation of the Creator's power is 
 made somewhat more explicitly by Plato, 
 who regarded the world as the imperfect 
 realization of a Divine Idea that in itself is 
 perfect. It is owing to the intractableness 
 and vileness of matter that the Divine Idea 
 finds itself so imperfectly realized. Thus 
 the Creator's power is limited by the nature 
 of the material out of which he makes the 
 world. In other words, the world in which 
 we live is the best the Creator could make 
 out of the wretched material at his disposal. 
 This Platonic view is closely akin to that 
 of Leibnitz, but is expressed in such wise 
 as to lend itself more readily to myth-mak- 
 ing. Matter is not only considered as what 
 Dr. Martineau would call a "datum objec- 
 tive to God," but it is endowed with a dia- 
 bolical character of its own.
 
 Ill 
 
 Manichceism and Calvinism 
 
 T is but a step from this to the com- 
 plicated personifications of Gnosti- 
 cism, with its Demiurgus, or in- 
 ferior spirit that created the world. By 
 some of the Gnostics the Creator was held 
 to be merely an inferior emanation from 
 God, a notion which had a powerful indi- 
 rect effect upon the shaping of Christian 
 doctrine in the second and third centuries 
 of our era. A similar thought appears in 
 the mournful question asked by Tennyson's 
 Arthur : 
 
 " O me ! for why is all around us here 
 As if some lesser god had made the world 
 And had not force to shape it as he would? " 
 
 But some Gnostics went so far as to hold 
 that the world was originally created by the 
 Devil, and is to be gradually purified and
 
 The Mystery of Evil 75 
 
 redeemed by the beneficent power of God 
 as manifested through Jesus Christ. This 
 notion is just the opposite to that of the 
 Vendidad, which represents the world as 
 coming into existence pure and perfect, 
 only to be forthwith defiled by the trail of 
 the serpent Ahriman. In both these oppos- 
 ing theories the divine power is distinctly 
 and avowedly curtailed by the introduction 
 of a rival power that is diabolical ; upon 
 this point Parsee and Gnostic are agreed. 
 Distinct sources are postulated for the evil 
 and the good. The one may be regarded 
 as infinite in goodness, the other as infi- 
 nite in badness, and the world in which we 
 live is a product of the everlasting conflict 
 between the two. This has been the fun- 
 damental idea in all Manichaean systems, 
 and it is needless to say that it has always 
 exerted a mighty influence upon Christian 
 theology. The Christian conception of the 
 Devil, as regards its deeper ethical aspect, 
 has owed much to the Parsee conception of 
 Ahriman. It can hardly be said, however,
 
 1 6 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 that there has been any coherent, closely 
 reasoned, and generally accepted Christian 
 theory of the subject. The notions just 
 mentioned are in themselves too shadowy 
 and vague, they bear too plainly the marks 
 of their mythologic pedigree, to admit of 
 being worked into such a coherent and 
 closely reasoned theory. Christian thought 
 has simply played fast and loose with these 
 conceptions, speaking in one breath of di- 
 vine omnipotence, and in the next alluding 
 to the conflict between good and evil in 
 language fraught with Manichaeism. 
 
 In recent times Mr. John Stuart Mill 
 has shown a marked preference for the 
 Manichaean view, and has stated it with 
 clearness and consistency, because he is not 
 hampered by the feeling that he ought to 
 reach one conclusion rather than another. 
 Mr. Mill does not urge his view upon the 
 reader, nor even defend it as his own view, 
 but simply suggests it as perhaps the view 
 which is for the theist most free from diffi- 
 culties and contradictions. Mr. Mill does
 
 The Mystery of Evil 17 
 
 not, like the Manichaeans, imagine a per- 
 sonified principle of evil ; nor does he, like 
 Plato, entertain a horror of what is some- 
 times, with amusing vehemence, stigma- 
 tized as " brute matter." He does not un- 
 dertake to suggest how or why the divine 
 power is limited ; but he distinctly prefers 
 the alternative which sacrifices the attribute 
 of omnipotence in order to preserve in our 
 conception of Deity the attribute of good- 
 ness. According to Mr. Mill, we may re- 
 gard the all-wise and holy Deity as a crea- 
 tive energy that is perpetually at work in 
 eliminating evil from the universe. His 
 wisdom is perfect, his goodness is infinite, 
 but his power is limited by some inexplica- 
 ble viciousness in the original constitution 
 of things which it must require a long suc- 
 cession of ages to overcome. In such a 
 view Mr. Mill sees much that is ennobling. 
 The humblest human being who resists an 
 impulse to sin, or helps in the slightest 
 degree to leave the world better than he 
 found it, may actually be regarded as a
 
 1 8 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 participator in the creative work of God ; 
 and thus each act of human life acquires a 
 solemn significance that is almost over- 
 whelming to contemplate. 
 
 These suggestions of Mr. Mill are ex- 
 tremely interesting, because he was the last 
 great modern thinker whose early training 
 was not influenced by that prodigious ex- 
 pansion of scientific knowledge which, since 
 the middle of the nineteenth century, has 
 taken shape in the doctrine of evolution. 
 This movement began early enough to de- 
 termine the intellectual careers of eminent 
 thinkers born between 1820 and 1830, such 
 as Spencer and Huxley. Mr. Mill was a 
 dozen years too old for this. He was born 
 at nearly the same time as Mr. Darwin, but 
 his mental habits were formed too soon for 
 him to profit fully by the new movement of 
 thought ; and although his attitude toward 
 the new ideas was hospitable, they never 
 fructified in his mind. While his thinking 
 has been of great value to the world, much 
 of it belongs to an era which we have now
 
 The Mystery of Evil 19 
 
 left far behind. This is illustrated in the 
 degree to which he was influenced by the 
 speculations of Auguste Comte. Probably 
 no two leaders of thought, whose dates of 
 birth were scarcely a quarter of a century 
 apart, were ever separated by such a stu- 
 pendous gulf as that which intervenes be- 
 tween Auguste Comte and Herbert Spen- 
 cer, and this fact may serve as an index to 
 the rapidity of movement which has char- 
 acterized the nineteenth century. Another 
 illustration of the old-fashioned character 
 of Mill's philosophy is to be seen in his use 
 of Paley's argument from design in support 
 of the belief in a beneficent Creator. Mill 
 adopted this argument, and, as a professed 
 free-thinker, carried it to the logical con- 
 clusion from which Paley, as a churchman, 
 could not but shrink. This was the con- 
 clusion which I have already mentioned, 
 that God's creative power has been limited 
 by some inexplicable viciousness in the 
 original constitution of things. 
 
 I feel as if one could not be too grateful
 
 2O The Mystery of Evil 
 
 to Mr. Mill for having so neatly and sharply 
 stated, in modern language and with mod- 
 ern illustrations, this old conclusion, which 
 after all is substantially that of Plato and 
 the Gnostics. For the shock which such a 
 clear, bold statement gives to our religious 
 feelings is no greater than the shock with 
 which it strikes counter to our modern sci- 
 entific philosophy. Suppose we could bring 
 back to earth a Calvinist of the seventeenth 
 century and question him. He might well 
 say that the God which Mr. Mill offers us, 
 shorn of the attribute of omnipotence, is no 
 God at all. He would say with the Hebrew 
 prophet, that God has created the evil along 
 with the good, and that he has done so for 
 a purpose which human reason, could it 
 once comprehend all the conditions of the 
 case, would most surely approve as infi- 
 nitely wise and holy. Our Calvinist would 
 ask who is responsible for the original con- 
 stitution of things if not the Creator him- 
 self, and in supposing anything essentially 
 vicious in that constitution, have not Plato
 
 The Mystery of Evil 21 
 
 and the Gnostics and the Manichaeans and 
 Mr. Mill simply taken counsel of their igno- 
 rance ? Nay, more, the Calvinist would 
 declare that if we really understood the 
 universe of which humanity is a part, we 
 should find scientific justification for that 
 supreme and victorious faith which cries, 
 "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in 
 him ! " The man who has acquired such 
 faith as this is the true freeman of the uni- 
 verse, clad in stoutest coat of mail against 
 disaster and sophistry, the man whom 
 nothing can enslave, and whose guerdon is 
 the serene happiness that can never be 
 taken away.
 
 IV 
 
 The Dramatic Unity of Nature 
 
 OW in these strong assertions it 
 seems to me that the Calvinist is 
 much more nearly in accord with 
 our modern knowledge than are Plato and 
 Mill. It is not wise to hazard statements 
 as to what the future may bring forth, but 
 I do not see how the dualism implied in all 
 these attempts to refer good and evil to dif- 
 ferent creative sources can ever be seriously 
 maintained again. The advance of modern 
 science carries us irresistibly to what some 
 German philosophers call monism, but I 
 prefer to call it monotheism. In getting 
 rid of the Devil and regarding the universe 
 as the multiform manifestation of a single 
 all-pervading Deity, we become for the first 
 time pure and uncompromising monotheists, 
 believers in the ever-living, unchange-
 
 The Mystery of Evil 2) 
 
 able, and all- wise Heavenly Father, in whom 
 we may declare our trust without the faint- 
 est trace of mental reservation. 
 
 If we can truly take such a position, and 
 hold it rationally, it is the modern science 
 so apt to be decried by the bats and owls of 
 orthodoxy that justifies us in doing so. For 
 what is the philosophic purport of these 
 beautiful and sublime discoveries with which 
 the keen insight and patient diligence of 
 modern students of science are beginning 
 to be rewarded ? What is the lesson that 
 is taught alike by the correlation of forces, 
 by spectrum analysis, by the revelations of 
 chemistry as to the subtle behaviour of mole- 
 cules inaccessible to the eye of sense, by 
 the astronomy that is beginning to sketch 
 the physical history of countless suns in the 
 firmament, by the palaeontology which is 
 slowly unravelling the wonders of past life 
 upon the earth through millions of ages ? 
 What is the grand lesson that is taught by 
 all this ? It is the lesson of the unity of 
 nature. To learn it rightly is to learn that
 
 24 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 all the things that we can see and know, 
 in the course of our life in this world, are 
 so intimately woven together that nothing 
 could be left out without reducing the whole 
 marvellous scheme to chaos. Whatever else 
 may be true, the conviction is brought home 
 to us that in all this endless multifarious- 
 ness there is one single principle at work, 
 that all is tending toward an end that was 
 involved from the very beginning, if one 
 can speak of beginnings and ends where 
 the process is eternal. The whole universe 
 is animated by a single principle of life, and 
 whatever we see in it, whether to our half- 
 trained understanding and narrow expe- 
 rience it may seem to be good or bad, is 
 an indispensable part of the stupendous 
 scheme. As Aristotle said, so long ago, 
 in one of those characteristic flashes of in- 
 sight into the heart of things in which no 
 one has ever excelled him, in nature there is 
 nothing that is out of place or interpolated, 
 as in an ill-constructed drama. 
 
 To-day we can begin to realize how much
 
 The Mystery of Evil 25 
 
 was implied in this prophetic hint of Aris- 
 totle's, for we are forced to admit that what- 
 ever may be the 'function of evil in this 
 world, it is unquestionably an indispensable 
 function, and not something interpolated 
 from without. Whatever exists is part of 
 the dramatic whole, and this can quickly be 
 proved. The goodness in the world all 
 that we love and praise and emulate we 
 are ready enough to admit into our scheme 
 of things, and to rest upon it our belief in 
 God. The misery, the pain, the wickedness, 
 we would fain leave out. But if there were 
 no such thing as evil, how could there be 
 such a thing as goodness ? Or to put it 
 somewhat differently, if we had never 
 known anything but goodness, how could 
 we ever distinguish it from evil ? How 
 could we recognize it as good ? How would 
 its quality of goodness in any wise interest 
 or concern us ? This question goes down 
 to the bottom of things, for it appeals to 
 the fundamental conditions according to 
 which conscious intelligence exists at all.
 
 26 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 Its answer will therefore be likely to help 
 us. It will not enable us. to solve the pro- 
 blem of evil, enshrouded as it is in a mystery 
 impenetrable by finite intelligence, but it 
 will help us to state the problem correctly ; 
 and surely this is no small help. In the 
 mere work of purifying our intellectual vis- 
 ion there is that which heals and soothes 
 us. To learn to see things without distor- 
 tion is to prepare one's self for taking the 
 world in the right mood, and in this we find 
 strength and consolation.
 
 What Conscious Life is made of 
 
 O return to our question, how could 
 we have good without evil, we must 
 pause for a moment and inquire 
 into the constitution of the human mind. 
 What we call the soul, the mind, the con- 
 scious self, is something strange and won- 
 derful. In our ordinary efforts to conceive 
 it, invisible and impalpable as it is, we are 
 apt to try so strenuously to divorce it from 
 the notion of substance that it seems ethe- 
 real, unreal, ghostlike. Yet of all realities 
 the soul is the most solid, sound, and un- 
 deniable. Thoughts and feelings are the 
 fundamental facts from which there is no 
 escaping. Our whole universe, from the 
 sands on the seashore to the flaming suns 
 that throng the Milky Way, is built up of 
 sights and sounds, of tastes and odours, of
 
 28 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 pleasures and pains, of sensations of mo- 
 tion and resistance either felt directly or 
 inferred. This is no ghostly universe, but 
 all intensely real as it exists in that in- 
 tensest of realities, the human soul ! Con- 
 sciousness, the soul's fundamental fact, is 
 the most fundamental of facts. But a 
 truly marvellous affair is consciousness ! 
 The most general truth that we can assert 
 with regard to it is this, that it exists only 
 by virtue of incessant change. A state of 
 consciousness that should continue through 
 an appreciable interval of time without un- 
 dergoing change would not be a state of 
 consciousness. It would be unconscious- 
 ness. 
 
 This perpetual change, then, is what 
 makes conscious life. It is only by virtue 
 of this endless procession of fleeting phases 
 of consciousness that the human soul ex- 
 ists at all. It is thus that we are made. 
 Why we should have been made thus is 
 a question aiming so far beyond our ken 
 that it is idle to ask it. We might as well
 
 The Mystery of Evil 29 
 
 inquire whether Infinite Power could have 
 made twice two equal five. We must rest 
 content with knowing that it is thus we 
 were created ; it is thus that the human 
 soul exists. Just as dynamic astronomy 
 rests upon the law of gravitation, just as 
 physics is based upon the properties of 
 waves, so the modern science of mind 
 has been built upon the fundamental 
 truth that consciousness exists only by 
 virtue of unceasing change. Our con- 
 scious life is a stream of varying psy- 
 chical states which quickly follow one an- 
 other in a perpetual shimmer, with never 
 an instant of rest. The elementary psy- 
 chical states, indeed, lie below conscious- 
 ness, or, as we say, they are sub-conscious. 
 We may call these primitive pulsations the 
 psychical molecules out of which are com- 
 pounded the feelings and thoughts that 
 well up into the full stream of conscious- 
 ness. Just as in chemistry we explain the 
 qualitative differences among things as due 
 to diversities of arrangement among com-
 
 5o The Mystery of Evil 
 
 pounded molecules and atoms, so in psy- 
 chology we have come to see that thoughts 
 and feelings in all their endless variety are 
 diversely compounded of sub-conscious 
 psychical molecules. 
 
 Musical sounds furnish us with a simple 
 and familiar illustration of this. When the 
 sounds of taps or blows impinge upon the 
 ear slowly, at the rate of not more than 
 sixteen in a second, they are cognized as 
 separate and non-musical noises. When 
 they pass beyond that rate of speed, they 
 are cognized as a continuous musical tone 
 of very low pitch ; a state of consciousness 
 which seems simple, but which we now see 
 is really compound. As the speed of the 
 blows increases, further qualitative differ- 
 ences arise ; the musical tone rises in 
 pitch until it becomes too acute for the ear 
 to cognize, and thus vanishes from con- 
 sciousness. But this is far from being the 
 whole story ; for the series of blows or pul- 
 sations make not only a single vivid funda- 
 mental tone, but also a multifarious com-
 
 The Mystery of Evil )i 
 
 panion group of fainter overtones, and the 
 diverse blending of these faint harmonics 
 constitutes the whole difference in tone 
 quality between the piano and the flute, the 
 violin and the trumpet, or any other instru- 
 ments. If you take up a violin and sound 
 the F one octave above the treble staff, 
 there are produced, in the course of a single 
 second, several thousand psychical states 
 which together make up the sensation of 
 pitch, fifty-five times as many psychical 
 states which together make up the sensa- 
 tion of tone quality, and an immense num- 
 ber of other psychical states which to- 
 gether make up the sensation of intensity. 
 These psychical states are not, in any 
 strict sense of the term, states of con- 
 sciousness ; for if they were to rise indi- 
 vidually into consciousness, the result 
 would be an immense multitude of sensa- 
 tions, and not a single apparently homo- 
 geneous sensation. There is no alterna- 
 tive but to conclude that in this case a 
 seemingly simple state of consciousness is
 
 32 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 in reality compounded of an immense mul- 
 titude of sub-conscious psychical changes. 
 
 Now, what is thus true in the case of 
 musical sounds is equally true of all states 
 of consciousness whatever, both those that 
 we call intellectual and those that we call 
 emotional. All are highly compounded 
 aggregates of innumerable minute sub-con- 
 scious psychical pulsations, if we may so call 
 them. In every stream of human con- 
 sciousness that we call a soul each second 
 of time witnesses thousands of infinitely 
 small changes, in which one fleeting group 
 of pulsations in the primordial mind-stuff 
 gives place to another and a different but 
 equally fleeting group. Each group is un- 
 like its immediate predecessor. The absence 
 of difference would be continuance, and 
 continuance means stagnation, blankness, 
 negation, death. That ceaseless flutter, 
 in which the quintescence of conscious life 
 consists, is kept up by the perpetual intro- 
 duction of the relations of likeness and 
 unlikeness. Each one of the infinitesimal
 
 The Mystery of Evil 33 
 
 changes is a little act of discrimination, a 
 recognition of a unit of feeling as either 
 like or unlike some other unit of feeling. 
 So in these depths of the soul's life the 
 arrangements and re-arrangements of units 
 go on, while on the surface the results 
 appear from moment to moment in sensa- 
 tions keen or dull, in perceptions clear or 
 vague, in judgments wise or foolish, in mem- 
 ories gay or sad, in sordid or lofty trains of 
 thought, in gusts of anger or thrills of love. 
 The whole fabric of human thought and 
 human emotion is built up out of minute 
 sub-conscious discriminations of likenesses 
 and unlikenesses, just as much as the ma- 
 terial world in all its beauty is built up out 
 of undulations among invisible molecules.
 
 VI 
 
 Without the Element of Antagonism there 
 could be no Consciousness, and therefore 
 no World 
 
 E may now come up out of these 
 depths, accessible only to the plum- 
 met of psychologic analysis, and 
 move with somewhat freer gait in the re- 
 gion of common and familiar experiences. 
 It is an undeniable fact that we cannot 
 know anything whatever except as con- 
 trasted with something else. The contrast 
 may be bold and sharp, or it may dwindle 
 into a slight discrimination, but it must be 
 there. If the figures on your canvas are 
 indistinguishable from the background, 
 there is surely no picture to be seen. Some 
 element of unlikeness, some germ of antag- 
 onism, some chance for discrimination, is 
 essential to every act of knowing. I might
 
 The Mystery of Evil 35 
 
 have illustrated this point concretely with- 
 out all the foregoing explanation, but I 
 have aimed at paying it the respect due to 
 its vast importance. I have wished to show 
 how the fact that we cannot know anything 
 whatever except as contrasted with some- 
 thing else is a fact that is deeply rooted in 
 the innermost structure of the human mind. 
 It is not a superficial but a fundamental 
 truth, that if there were no colour but red it 
 would be exactly the same thing as if there 
 were no colour at all. In a world of unqual- 
 ified redness, our state of mind with regard 
 to colour would be precisely like our state 
 of mind in the present world with regard to 
 the pressure of the atmosphere if we were 
 always to stay in one place. We are always 
 bearing up against the burden of this deep 
 aerial ocean, nearly fifteen pounds upon 
 every square inch of our bodies ; but until 
 we can get a chance to discriminate, as by 
 climbing a mountain, we are quite uncon- 
 scious of this heavy pressure. In the same 
 way, if we knew but one colour we should
 
 56 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 know no colour. If our ears were to be 
 filled with one monotonous roar of Niagara, 
 unbroken by alien sounds, the effect upon 
 consciousness would be absolute silence. 
 If our palates had never come in contact 
 with any tasteful thing save sugar, we should 
 know no more of sweetness than of bitter- 
 ness. If we had never felt physical pain, 
 we could not recognize physical pleasure. 
 For want of the contrasted background its 
 pleasurableness would be non-existent. And 
 in just the same way it follows that without 
 knowing that which is morally evil we could 
 not possibly recognize that which is morally 
 good. Of these antagonist correlatives, 
 the one is unthinkable in the absence of 
 the other. In a sinless and painless world, 
 human conduct might possess more out- 
 ward marks of perfection than any saint 
 ever dreamed of ; but the moral element 
 would be lacking ; the goodness would have 
 no more significance in our conscious life 
 than that load of atmosphere which we are 
 always carrying about with us.
 
 The Mystery of Evil 37 
 
 We are thus brought to a striking con- 
 clusion, the essential soundness of which 
 cannot be gainsaid. In a happy world there 
 must be sorrow and pain, and in a moral 
 world the knowledge of evil is indispensa- 
 ble. The stern necessity for this has been 
 proved to inhere in the innermost constitu- 
 tion of the human soul. It is part and par- 
 cel of the universe. To him who is disposed 
 to cavil at the world which God has in such 
 wise created, we may fairly put the ques- 
 tion whether the prospect of escape from 
 its ills would ever induce him to put off this 
 human consciousness, and accept in ex- 
 change some form of existence unknown 
 and inconceivable ! The alternative is clear : 
 on the one hand a world with sin and suf- 
 fering, on the other hand an unthinkable 
 world in which conscious life does not in- 
 volve contrast. 
 
 The profound truth of Aristotle's remark 
 is thus more forcibly than ever brought 
 home to us. We do not find that evil has 
 been interpolated into the universe from
 
 38 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 without ; we find that, on the contrary, it 
 is an indispensable part of the dramatic 
 whole. God is the creator of evil, and from 
 the eternal scheme of things diabolism is 
 forever excluded. Ormuzd and Ahriman 
 have had their day and perished, along with 
 the doctrine of special creations and other 
 fancies of the untutored human mind. 
 From our present standpoint we may fairly 
 ask, What would have been the worth of 
 that primitive innocence portrayed in the 
 myth of the garden of Eden, had it ever been 
 realized in the life of men ? What would 
 have been the moral value or significance of 
 a race of human beings ignorant of sin, and 
 doing beneficent acts with no more con- 
 sciousness or volition than the deftly con- 
 trived machine that picks up raw material 
 at one end, and turns out some finished 
 product at the other ? Clearly, for strong 
 and resolute men and women an Eden 
 would be but a fool's paradise. How could 
 anything fit to be called character\&xo. ever 
 been produced there ? But for tasting the
 
 The Mystery of Evil 39 
 
 forbidden fruit, in what respect could man 
 have become a being of higher order than 
 the beasts of the field ? An interesting 
 question is this, for it leads us to consider 
 the genesis of the idea of moral evil in man.
 
 VII 
 
 A Word of Caution 
 
 EFORE we enter upon this topic 
 a word of caution may be needed. 
 I do not wish the purpose of the 
 foregoing questions to be misunderstood. 
 The serial nature of human thinking and 
 speaking makes it impossible to express 
 one's thought on any great subject in a 
 solid block ; one must needs give it forth 
 in consecutive fragments, so that parts of 
 it run the risk of being lost upon the reader 
 or hearer, while other parts are made to 
 assume undue proportions. Moreover, there 
 are many minds that habitually catch at the 
 fragments of a thought, and never seize 
 it in the block ; and in such manner do 
 strange misconceptions arise. I never could 
 have dreamed, until taught by droll experi- 
 ence, that the foregoing allusions to the
 
 The Mystery of Evil 41 
 
 garden of Eden could be understood as a 
 glorification of sin, and an invitation to my 
 fellow-men to come forth with me and be 
 wicked ! But even so it was, on one occa- 
 sion when I was trying, somewhat more 
 scantily than here, to state the present case. 
 In the midst of my endeavour to justify 
 the grand spirit of faith which our fathers 
 showed when from abysmal depths of afflic- 
 tion they never failed to cry that God doeth 
 all things well, I was suddenly interrupted 
 with queries as to just what percentage of 
 sin and crime I regarded as needful for the 
 moral equilibrium of the universe ; how 
 much did I propose to commit myself, how 
 much would I advise people in general to 
 commit, and just where would I have them 
 stop ! Others deemed it necessary to re- 
 mind me that there is already too much 
 suffering in the world, and we ought not 
 to seek to increase it ; that the difference 
 between right and wrong is of great practi- 
 cal importance ; and that if we try to treat 
 evil as good we shall make good no better 
 than evil.
 
 42 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 When one has sufficiently recovered one's 
 gravity, it is permissible to reply to such 
 criticisms that the sharp antithesis between 
 good and evil is essential to every step of 
 my argument, which would entirely col- 
 lapse if the antagonism were for one mo- 
 ment disregarded. The quantity of suffer- 
 ing in the world is unquestionably so great 
 as to prompt us to do all in our power to 
 diminish it ; such we shall presently see 
 must be the case in a world that proceeds 
 through stages of evolution. When one 
 reverently assumes that it was through 
 some all-wise and holy purpose that sin was 
 permitted to come into the world, it ought 
 to be quite superfluous to add that the ful- 
 filment of any such purpose demands that 
 sin be not cherished, but suppressed. If 
 one seeks, as a philosopher, to explain and 
 justify God's wholesale use of death in the 
 general economy of the universe, is one 
 forsooth to be charged with praising mur- 
 der as a fine art and with seeking to found 
 a society of Thugs ?
 
 VIII 
 The Hermit and the 
 
 HE simple-hearted monks of the 
 Middle Ages understood, in their 
 own quaint way, that God's meth- 
 ods of governing this universe are not al- 
 ways fit to be imitated by his finite crea- 
 tures. In one of the old stories that 
 furnished entertainment and instruction for 
 the cloister it is said that a hermit and an 
 angel once journeyed together. The angel 
 was in human form and garb, but had told 
 his companion the secret of his exalted 
 rank and nature. Coming at nightfall to a 
 humble house by the wayside, the two trav- 
 ellers craved shelter for the love of God. 
 A dainty supper and a soft, warm bed were 
 given them, and in the middle of the night 
 the angel arose and strangled the kind 
 host's infant son, who was quietly sleeping
 
 44 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 in his cradle. The good hermit was para- 
 lyzed with amazement and horror, but dared 
 not speak a word. The next night the two 
 comrades were entertained at a fine man- 
 sion in the city, where the angel stole the 
 superb golden cup from which his host had 
 quaffed wine at dinner. Next day, while 
 crossing the bridge over a deep and rapid 
 stream, a pilgrim met the travellers. " Canst 
 thou show us, good father," said the angel, 
 " the way to the next town ? " As the 
 pilgrim turned to point it out, this terrible 
 being caught him by the shoulder and flung 
 him into the river to drown. "Verily," 
 thought the poor hermit, " it is a devil that 
 I have here with me, and all his works are 
 evil ; " but fear held his tongue, and the 
 twain fared on their way till the sun had 
 set and snow began to fall, and the howling 
 of wolves was heard in the forest hard by. 
 Presently the bright light coming from a 
 cheerful window gave hope of a welcome 
 refuge ; but the surly master of the house 
 turned the travellers away from his door
 
 The Mystery of Evil 45 
 
 with curses and foul gibes. "Yonder is 
 my pig-sty for dirty vagrants like you." 
 So they passed that night among the swine ; 
 and in the morning the angel went to the 
 house and thanked the master for his hospi- 
 tality, and gave him for a keepsake (thrifty 
 angel !) the stolen goblet. Then did the 
 hermit's wrath and disgust overcome his 
 fears, and he loudly upbraided hjs com- 
 panion. " Get thee gone, wretched spirit ! " 
 he cried. " I will have no more of thee. 
 Thou pretendest to be a messenger from 
 heaven, yet thou requitest good with evil, 
 and evil with good ! " Then did the angel 
 look upon him with infinite compassion in 
 his eyes. " Listen," said he, " short-sighted 
 mortal. The birth of that infant son had 
 made the father covetous, breaking God's 
 commandments in order to heap up trea- 
 sures which the boy, if he had lived, would 
 have wasted in idle debauchery. By my 
 act, which seemed so cruel, I saved both 
 parent and child. The owner of the goblet 
 had once been abstemious, but was fast
 
 46 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 becoming a sot ; the loss of his cup has set 
 him to thinking, and he will mend his ways. 
 The poor pilgrim, unknown to himself, was 
 about to commit a mortal sin, when I inter- 
 fered and sent his unsullied soul to heaven. 
 As for the wretch who drove God's chil- 
 dren from his door, he is, indeed, pleased 
 for the moment with the bauble I left in 
 his hands; but hereafter he will burn in 
 hell." So spoke the angel ; and when he 
 had heard these words the hermit bowed 
 his venerable head and murmured, " For- 
 give me, Lord, that in my ignorance I mis- 
 judged thee." 
 
 I suspect that, with all our boasted sci- 
 ence, there is still much wisdom for us in 
 the humble childlike piety of the Gesta 
 Romanorum. To say that the ways of 
 Providence are inscrutable is still some- 
 thing more than an idle platitude, and 
 there still is room for the belief that, could 
 we raise the veil that enshrouds eternal 
 truth, we should see that behind nature's 
 crudest works there are secret springs of
 
 Tbe Mystery of Evil 47 
 
 divinest tenderness and love. In this trust- 
 ful mood we may now return to the ques- 
 tion as to the genesis of the idea of moral 
 evil, and its close connection with man's 
 rise from a state of primeval innocence.
 
 IX 
 
 Man's Rise from the Innocence of Brutehood 
 E have first to note that in various 
 
 ways the action of natural selec- 
 tion has been profoundly modified 
 in the course of the development of man- 
 kind from a race of inferior creatures. One 
 of the chief factors in the production of 
 man was the change that occurred in the 
 direction of the working of natural selec- 
 tion, whereby in the line of man's direct 
 ancestry the variations in intelligence came 
 to be seized upon, cherished, and enhanced, 
 to the comparative neglect of variations in 
 bodily structure. The physical differences 
 between man and ape are less important 
 than the physical differences between Afri- 
 can and South American apes. The latter 
 belong to different zoological families, but 
 the former do not. Zoologically, man is
 
 The Mystery of Evil 49 
 
 simply one genus in the old-world family 
 of apes. Psychologically, he has travelled 
 so far from apes that the distance is 
 scarcely measurable. This transcendent 
 contrast is primarily due to the change in 
 the direction of the working of natural 
 selection. The consequences of this change 
 were numerous and far-reaching. One con- 
 sequence was that gradual lengthening of 
 the plastic period of infancy which enabled 
 man to became a progressive creature, and 
 organized the primeval semi-human horde 
 into definite family groups. I have else- 
 where expounded this point, and it is known 
 as my own especial contribution to the 
 theory of evolution. 
 
 Another associated consequence, which 
 here more closely concerns us, was the 
 partial stoppage of the process of natural 
 selection in remedying unfitness. A quo- 
 tation from Herbert Spencer will help us to 
 understand this partial stoppage : " As fast 
 as the faculties are multiplied, so fast does 
 it become possible for the several mem-
 
 50 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 bers of a species to have various kinds of 
 superiorities over one another. While one 
 saves its life by higher speed, another does 
 the like by clearer vision, another by keener 
 scent, another by quicker hearing, another 
 by greater strength, another by unusual 
 power of enduring cold or hunger, another 
 by special sagacity, another by special timid- 
 ity, another by special courage. . . . Now 
 ... each of these attributes, giving its pos- 
 sessor an extra chance of life, is likely to 
 be transmitted to posterity. But " it is not 
 nearly so likely to be increased by natural 
 selection. For " if those members of the 
 species which have but ordinary" or even 
 deficient shares of some valuable attribute 
 "nevertheless survive by virtue of other 
 superiorities which they severally possess, 
 then it is not easy to see how this particu- 
 lar attribute can be " enhanced in subse- 
 quent generations by natural selection. 1 
 
 These considerations apply especially to 
 the human race with its multitudinous capa- 
 
 i Biology, i. 454.
 
 The Mystery of Evil 51 
 
 cities, and I can better explain the case by 
 a crude and imperfect illustration than by a 
 detailed and elaborate statement. If an 
 individual antelope falls below the average 
 of the herd in speed, he is sure to become 
 food for lions, and thus the high average of 
 speed in the herd is maintained by natural 
 selection. But if an individual man becomes 
 a drunkard, though his capabilities be ever 
 so much curtailed by this vice, yet the 
 variety of human faculty furnishes so many 
 hooks with which to keep one's hold upon 
 life that he may sin long and flagrantly 
 without perishing ; and if the drunkard sur- 
 vives, the action of natural selection in weed- 
 ing out drunkenness is checked. There is 
 thus a wide interval between the highest 
 and lowest degrees of completeness in liv- 
 ing that are compatible with maintenance 
 of life. Mankind has so many other quali- 
 ties beside the bad ones, which enable it to 
 subsist and achieve progress in spite of 
 them, that natural selection which always 
 works through death cannot come into 
 play.
 
 52 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 Now it is because of this interval between 
 the highest and lowest degrees of complete- 
 ness of living that are compatible with the 
 mere maintenance of life, that men can be 
 distinguished as morally bad or morally 
 good. In inferior animals, where there is 
 no such interval, there is no developed mo- 
 rality or conscience, though in a few of the 
 higher ones there are the germs of these 
 things. Morality comes upon the scene 
 when there is an alternative offered of lead- 
 ing better lives or worse lives. And just 
 as up to this point the actions of the fore- 
 fathers of mankind have been determined 
 by the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of 
 pain, so now they begin to be practically 
 determined by the pursuit of goodness and 
 avoidance of evil. This rise from a bes- 
 tial to a moral plane of existence involves 
 the acquirement of the knowledge of good 
 and evil. Conscience is generated to play a 
 part analogous to that played by the sense 
 of pain in the lower stages of life, and to 
 keep us from wrong doing. To the mere
 
 The Mystery of Evil 53 
 
 love of life, which is the conservative force 
 that keeps the whole animal world in exist- 
 ence, there now comes gradually to be super- 
 added the feeling of religious aspiration, 
 which is nothing more nor less than the 
 yearning after the highest possible com- 
 pleteness of spiritual life. In the lower 
 stages of human development this religious 
 aspiration has as yet but an embryonic ex- 
 istence, and moral obligations are still but 
 imperfectly recognized. It is only after 
 long ages of social discipline, fraught with 
 cruel afflictions and grinding misery, that 
 the moral law becomes dominant and reli- 
 gious aspiration intense and abiding in the 
 soul. When such a stage is reached, we 
 have at last in man a creature different in 
 kind from his predecessors, and fit for an 
 everlasting life of progress, for a closer and 
 closer communion with God in beatitude 
 that shall endure.
 
 X 
 
 The Relativity of Evil 
 
 S we survey the course of this won- 
 derful evolution, it begins to become 
 manifest that moral evil is simply 
 the characteristic of the lower state of liv- 
 ing as looked at from the higher state. Its 
 existence is purely relative, yet it is pro- 
 foundly real, and in a process of perpetual 
 spiritual evolution its presence in some hide- 
 ous form throughout a long series of upward 
 stages is indispensable. Its absence would 
 mean stagnation, quiescence, unprogressive- 
 ness. For the moment we exercise con- 
 scious choice between one course of action 
 and another, we recognize the difference 
 between better and worse, we foreshadow 
 the whole grand contrast between good and 
 bad. In the process of spiritual evolution, 
 therefore, evil must needs be present. But
 
 The Mystery of Evil 55 
 
 the nature of evolution also requires that it 
 should be evanescent. In the higher stages 
 that which is worse than the best need no 
 longer be positively bad. After the nature 
 , of that which the upward-striving soul ab- 
 hors has been forever impressed upon it, 
 amid the long vicissitudes of its pilgrimage 
 through the dark realms of sin and expia- 
 tion, it is at length equipped for its final 
 sojourn 
 
 " In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love." 
 
 From the general analogies furnished in the 
 process of evolution, we are entitled to hope 
 that, as it approaches its goal and man 
 comes nearer to God, the fact of evil will 
 lapse into a mere memory, in which the 
 shadowed past shall serve as a background 
 for the realized glory of the present. 
 
 Thus we have arrived at the goal of my 
 argument. We can at least begin to realize 
 distinctly that unless our eyes had been 
 opened at some time, so that we might 
 come to know the good and the evil, we 
 should never have become fashioned in
 
 56 The Mystery of Evil 
 
 God's image. We should have been the 
 denizens of a world of puppets, where nei- 
 ther morality nor religion could have found 
 place or meaning. The mystery of evil 
 remains a mystery still, but it is no longer 
 a harsh dissonance such as greeted the 
 poet's ear when the doors of hell were 
 thrown open ; for we see that this mystery 
 belongs among the profound harmonies in 
 God's creation. This reflection may have 
 in it something that is consoling as we look 
 forth upon the ills of the world. Many are 
 the pains of life, and the struggle with 
 wickedness is hard ; its course is marked 
 with sorrow and tears. But assuredly its 
 deep impress upon the human soul is the 
 indispensable background against which 
 shall be set hereafter the eternal joys of 
 heaven !
 
 THE COSMIC ROOTS OF LOVE 
 AND SELF-SACRIFICE 
 
 O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi 
 
 Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna 
 
 Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi ! 
 Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna, 
 
 Legato con amore in un volume, 
 
 Cib che per 1' universo si squaderna. 
 
 DANTE, Paradiso, xxxiii. 82.
 
 The Summer Field, and what it tells us 
 
 HERE are few sights in Nature 
 more restful to the soul than a 
 daisied field in June. Whether it 
 be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe 
 matin songs still echoing among the tree- 
 tops, or while the luxuriant splendour of 
 noontide fills the delicate tints of the early 
 foliage with a pure glory of light, or in that 
 more pensive time when long shadows are 
 thrown eastward and the fresh breath of 
 the sea is felt, or even under the solemn 
 mantle of darkness, when all forms have 
 faded from sight and the night air is musi- 
 cal with the murmurs of innumerable in- 
 sects, amid all the varying moods through 
 which the daily cycle runs, the abiding 
 sense is of unalloyed happiness, the pro-
 
 60 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 found tranquillity of mind and heart that 
 nothing ever brings save the contemplation 
 of perfect beauty. One's thought is carried 
 back for the moment to that morning of 
 the world when God looked upon his work 
 and saw that it was good. If in the infinite 
 and eternal Creative Energy one might 
 imagine some inherent impulse perpetually 
 urging toward fresh creation, what could it 
 be more likely to be than the divine con- 
 tentment in giving objective existence to 
 the boundless and subtle harmonies where- 
 of our world is made ? That it is a world 
 of perfect harmony and unsullied beauty, 
 who can doubt as he strolls through this 
 summer field ? As our thought plays lightly 
 with its sights and sounds, there is nothing 
 but gladness in the laugh of the bobolink ; 
 the thrush's tender note tells only of the 
 sweet domestic companionship of the nest ; 
 creeping and winged things emerging from 
 their grubs fill us with the sense of abound- 
 ing life ; and the myriad buttercups, hal- 
 lowed with vague memories of June days in
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 61 
 
 childhood, lose none of their charm in re- 
 minding us of the profound sympathy and 
 mutual dependence in which the worlds of 
 flowers and insects have grown up. The 
 blades of waving grass, the fluttering leaves 
 upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare 
 fascination ; for the green stuff that fills 
 their cellular tissues, and the tissues of all 
 green things that grow, is the world's great 
 inimitable worker of wonders ; its marvel- 
 lous alchemy takes dead matter and breathes 
 into it the breath of life. But for that ma- 
 gician chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, 
 such things as animal life and conscious in- 
 telligence would be impossible ; there would 
 be no problems of creation, nor philosopher 
 to speculate upon them. Thus the delight 
 that sense impression gives, as we wander 
 among buttercups and daisies, becomes 
 deepened into gratitude and veneration, till 
 we quite understand how the rejuvenescence 
 of Nature should in all ages have aroused 
 men to acts of worship, and should call forth 
 from modern masters of music, the most
 
 62 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 religious of the arts of expression, outbursts 
 
 of sublimest song. 
 
 And yet we need but come a little closer 
 to the facts to find them apparently telling 
 us a very different story. The moment we 
 penetrate below the superficial aspect of 
 things the scene is changed. In the folk- 
 lore of Ireland there is a widespread belief 
 in a fairyland of eternal hope and bright- 
 ness and youth situated a little way below the 
 roots of the grass. From that land of Tir 
 nan Og, as the peasants call it, the secret 
 springs of life shoot forth their scions in 
 this visible world, and thither a few favoured 
 mortals have now and then found their way. 
 It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og 
 that our stern science leads us, but into a 
 scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and 
 massacre. Macaulay tells of the battlefield 
 of Neerwinden, that the next summer after 
 that frightful slaughter the whole country- 
 side was densely covered with scarlet pop- 
 pies, which people beheld with awe as a 
 token of wrath in heaven over the deeds
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 63 
 
 wrought on earth by human passions. Any 
 summer field, though mantled in softest 
 green, is the scene of butchery as wholesale 
 as that of Neerwinden and far more ruth- 
 less. The life of its countless tiny denizens 
 is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and 
 jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by 
 the way, of starvation from hunger and 
 cold, of robbery utterly shameless and mur- 
 der utterly cruel. That green sward in 
 taking possession of its territory has exter- 
 minated scores of flowering plants of the 
 sort that human economics and aesthetics 
 stigmatize as weeds ; nor do the blades of 
 the victorious army dwell side by side in 
 amity, but in their eagerness to dally with 
 the sunbeams thrust aside and supplant 
 one another without the smallest compunc- 
 tion. Of the crawling insects and those 
 that hum through the air, with the quaint 
 snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, 
 scarce one in a hundred but succumbs to 
 the buffets of adverse fortune before it has 
 achieved maturity and left offspring to re-
 
 64 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 place it. The early bird, who went forth in 
 quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close 
 of a day as full of strife and peril as ever 
 knight-errant encountered, he did not him- 
 self serve as a meal for some giant foe in the 
 gloaming. When we think of the hawk's 
 talons buried in the breast of the wren, 
 while the relentless beak tears the little 
 wings from the quivering, bleeding body, 
 our mood toward Nature is changed, and we 
 feel like recoiling from a world in which 
 such black injustice, such savage disregard 
 for others, is part of the general scheme.
 
 II 
 
 Seeming Wastefulness of the Cosmic Process 
 
 UT as we look still further into the 
 matter, our mood is changed once 
 more. We find that this hideous 
 hatred and strife, this wholesale famine and 
 death, furnish the indispensable conditions 
 for the evolution of higher and higher types 
 of life. Nay more, but for the pitiless de- 
 struction of all individuals that fall short of 
 a certain degree of fitness to the circum- 
 stances of life into which they are born, the 
 type would inevitably degenerate, the life 
 would become lower and meaner in kind. 
 Increase in richness, variety, complexity of 
 life is gained only by the selection of varia- 
 tions above or beyond a certain mean, and 
 the prompt execution of a death sentence 
 upon all the rest. The principle of natural 
 selection is in one respect intensely Calvin-
 
 66 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 istic ; it elects the one and damns the ninety 
 and nine. In these processes of Nature 
 there is nothing that savours of communis- 
 tic equality ; but "to him that hath shall be 
 given, and from him that hath not shall 
 be taken away even that which he hath." 
 Through this selection of a favoured few, a 
 higher type of life or at all events a type 
 in which there is more life is attained in 
 many cases, but not always. Evolution and 
 progress are not synonymous terms. The 
 survival of the fittest is not always a sur- 
 vival of the best or of the most highly 
 organized. The environment is sometimes 
 such that increase of fitness means degener- 
 ation of type, and the animal and vegetable 
 worlds show many instances of degenera- 
 tion. One brilliant instance is that which 
 has preserved the clue to the remote ances- 
 try of the vertebrate type. The molluscoid 
 ascidian, rooted polyp-like on the sea beach 
 in shallow water, has an embryonic history 
 which shows that its ancestors had once 
 seen better days, when they darted to and
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 6j 
 
 fro, fishlike, through the waves, with the pro- 
 phecy of a vertebrate skeleton within them. 
 This is a case of marked degeneration. 
 More often survival of the fittest simply 
 preserves the type unchanged through long 
 periods of time. But now and then under 
 favourable circumstances it raises the type. 
 At all events, whenever the type is raised, 
 it is through survival of the fittest, implying 
 destruction of all save the fittest. 
 
 This last statement is probably true of 
 all plants and of all animals except that 
 as applied to the human race it needs some 
 transcendently important qualifications 
 which students of evolution are very apt to 
 neglect. I shall by and by point out these 
 qualifications. At present we may note 
 that the development of civilization, on its 
 political side, has been a stupendous strug- 
 gle for life, wherein the possession of cer- 
 tain physical and mental attributes has 
 enabled some tribes or nations to prevail 
 over others, and to subject or exterminate 
 them. On its industrial side the struggle
 
 68 Love and Self-Sacrifae 
 
 has been no less fierce ; the evolution of 
 higher efficiency through merciless com- 
 petition is a matter of common knowledge. 
 Alike in the occupations of war and in those 
 of peace, superior capacity has thriven upon 
 victories in which small heed has been paid 
 to the wishes or the welfare of the van- 
 
 9 
 
 quished. In human history perhaps no re- 
 lation has been more persistently repeated 
 than that of the hawk and the wren. The 
 aggression has usually been defended as 
 in the interests of higher civilization, and 
 in the majority of cases the defence has 
 been sustained by the facts. It has indeed 
 very commonly been true that the survival 
 of the strongest is the survival of the 
 fittest. 
 
 Such considerations affect our mood to- 
 ward Nature in a way that is somewhat 
 bewildering. On the one hand, as we re- 
 cognize in the universal strife and slaughter 
 a stern discipline through which the stand- 
 ard of animate existence is raised and the 
 life of creatures variously enriched, we be-
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 69 
 
 come to some extent reconciled to the facts. 
 Assuming, as we all do, that the attainment 
 of higher life is in itself desirable, our minds 
 cannot remain utterly inhospitable towards 
 things, however odious in themselves, that 
 help toward the desirable end. Since we 
 cannot rid the world of them, we acquiesce 
 in their existence as part of the machinery 
 of God's providence, the intricacies of which 
 our finite minds cannot hope to unravel. 
 On the other hand, a thought is likely to 
 arise which in days gone by we should have 
 striven to suppress as too impious for utter- 
 ance ; but it is wiser to let such thoughts 
 find full expression, for only thus can we be 
 sure of understanding the kind of problem 
 we are trying to solve. Is not, then, this 
 method of Nature, which achieves progress 
 only through misery and death, an exceed- 
 ingly brutal and clumsy method ? Life, one 
 would think, must be dear to the everlast- 
 ing Giver of life, yet how cheap it seems to 
 be held in the general scheme of things ! 
 In order that some race of moths may at-
 
 jo Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 tain a certain fantastic contour and marking 
 of their wings, untold thousands of moths 
 are doomed to perish prematurely. Instead 
 of making the desirable object once for all, 
 the method of Nature is to make something 
 else and reject it, and so on through count- 
 less ages, till by slow approximations the 
 creative thought is realized. Nature is 
 often called thrifty, yet could anything be 
 more prodigal or more cynical than the 
 waste of individual lives? Does it not re- 
 mind one of Charles Lamb's famous story 
 of the Chinaman whose house accidentally 
 burned down and roasted a pig, whereupon 
 the dainty meat was tasted and its fame 
 spread abroad until epicures all over China 
 were to be seen carrying home pigs and 
 forthwith setting fire to their houses ? We 
 need but add that the custom thus estab- 
 lished lasted for centuries, during which 
 every dinner of pig involved the sacrifice of 
 a homestead, and we seem to have a close 
 parody upon the wastefulness of Nature, or 
 of what is otherwise called in these days
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 77 
 
 the Cosmic Process. Upon such a view 
 as this the Cosmic Process appears in a 
 high degree unintelligent, not to say im- 
 moral.
 
 Ill 
 
 Caliban's Philosophy 
 
 OLYTHEISM easily found a place 
 for such views as these, inasmuch 
 as it could explain the unseemly 
 aspects of Nature offhand by a reference to 
 malevolent deities. With Browning's Cali- 
 ban, in his meditations upon Setebos, that 
 god whom he conceived in his own image, 
 the recklessness of Nature is mockery en- 
 gendered half in spite, half in mere wanton- 
 ness. Setebos, he says, 
 
 " is strong and Lord, 
 
 Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs 
 That march now from the mountain to the sea ; 
 Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty -first, 
 Loving not, hating not, just choosing so. 
 Say, the first straggler that boasts purple spots 
 Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off ; 
 Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, 
 And two worms he whose nippers end in red; 
 As it likes me each time, I do : So He."
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 73 
 
 Such is the kind of philosophy that com- 
 mends itself to the beastly Caliban, as he 
 sprawls in the mire with small eft things 
 creeping down his back. His half-fledged 
 mind can conceive no higher principle of 
 action nothing more artistic, nothing 
 more masterful than wanton mockery, 
 and naturally he attributes it to his God ; 
 it is for him a sufficient explanation of that 
 little fragment of the Cosmic Process with 
 which he comes into contact.
 
 IV 
 
 Can it be that the Cosmic Process has no 
 Relation to Moral Ends ? 
 
 UT as long as we confine our at- 
 tention to the universal struggle 
 for life and the survival of the fit- 
 test, without certain qualifications presently 
 to be mentioned, it is difficult for the most 
 profound intelligence to arrive at conclu- 
 sions much more satisfactory than Cali- 
 ban's. If the spirit shown in Nature's 
 works as thus contemplated is not one of 
 wanton mockery, it seems at any rate to be 
 a spirit of stolid indifference. It indicates 
 a Blind Force rather than a Beneficent 
 Wisdom at the source of things. It is in 
 some such mood as this that Huxley tells 
 us, in his famous address delivered at Ox- 
 ford, in 1893, that there is no sanction for 
 morality in the Cosmic Process. " Men in
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 75 
 
 society," he says, "are undoubtedly subject 
 to the cosmic process. As among other 
 animals, multiplication goes on without ces- 
 sation and involves severe competition for 
 the means of support. The struggle for 
 existence tends to eliminate those less 
 fitted to adapt themselves to the circum- 
 stances of their existence. The strongest, 
 the most self-assertive, tend to tread down 
 the weaker. . . . Social progress means a 
 checking of the cosmic process at every 
 step and the substitution for it of another, 
 which may be called the ethical process; 
 the end of which is not the survival of 
 those who may happen to be the fittest, 
 in respect of the whole of the conditions 
 which exist, but of those who are ethically 
 the best." Again, says Huxley, "let us 
 understand, once for all, that the ethical 
 progress of society depends, not on imi- 
 tating the cosmic process, still less in run- 
 ning away from it, but in combating it." 
 And again he tells us that while the moral 
 sentiments have undoubtedly been evolved,
 
 76 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 yet since " the immoral sentiments have no 
 less been evolved, there is so far as much 
 natural sanction for the one as for the 
 other." And yet again, " the cosmic pro- 
 cess has no sort of relation to moral ends." 
 
 When these statements were first made 
 they were received with surprise, and they 
 have since called forth- much comment, for 
 they sound like a retreat from the position 
 which an evolutionist is expected to hold. 
 They distinctly assert a breach of continu- 
 ity between evolution in general and the 
 evolution of Man in particular ; and thus 
 they have carried joy to the hearts of 
 sundry theologians, of the sort that like to 
 regard Man as an infringer upon Nature. 
 If there is no natural sanction for morality, 
 then the sanction must be supernatural, 
 and forthwith such theologians greet Hux- 
 ley as an ally ! 
 
 They are mistaken, however. Huxley 
 does not really mean to assert any such 
 breach of continuity as is here suggested. 
 In a footnote to his printed address he
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 77 
 
 makes a qualification which really cancels 
 the group of statements I have quoted. 
 "Of course," says Huxley, "strictly speak- 
 ing, social life and the ethical process, in 
 virtue of which it advances toward perfec- 
 tion, are part and parcel of the general pro- 
 cess of evolution." Of course they are; 
 and of course the general process of evo- 
 lution is the cosmic process, it is Nature's 
 way of doing things. But when my dear 
 Huxley a moment ago was saying that the 
 " cosmic process has no sort of relation to 
 moral ends," he was using the phrase in a 
 more restricted sense ; he was using it as 
 equivalent to what Darwin called " natural 
 selection," what Spencer called " survival of 
 the fittest," which is only one part of the 
 cosmic process. Now most assuredly sur- 
 vival of the fittest, as such, has no sort of 
 relation to moral ends. Beauty and ugli- 
 ness, virtue and vice, are all alike to it. 
 Side by side with the exquisite rose flour- 
 ishes the hideous tarantula, and in too many 
 cases the villain's chances of livelihood are
 
 j8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 better than the saints. As I said a while 
 ago, if we confine our attention to the 
 survival of the fittest in the struggle for 
 existence, we are not likely to arrive at 
 conclusions much more satisfactory than 
 Caliban's 
 
 " As it likes me each time, I do : So He." 
 
 In such a universe we may look in vain 
 for any sanction for morality, any justifica- 
 tion for love and self-sacrifice ; we find no 
 hope in it, no consolation ; there is not 
 even dignity in it, nothing whatever but 
 resistless all-producing and all-consuming 
 energy. 
 
 Such a universe, however, is not the one 
 in which we live. In the cosmic process of 
 evolution, whereof our individual lives are 
 part and parcel, there are other agencies 
 at work besides natural selection, and the 
 story of the struggle for existence is far 
 from being the whole story. I have thus 
 far been merely stating difficulties ; it is 
 now time to point out the direction in 
 which we are to look for a solution of
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice jg 
 
 them. I think it can be shown that the 
 principles of morality have their roots in 
 the deepest foundations of the universe, 
 that the cosmic process is ethical in the 
 profoundest sense, that in that far-off morn- 
 ing of the world, when the stars sang to- 
 gether and the sons of God shouted for 
 joy, the beauty of self-sacrifice and disin- 
 terested love formed the chief burden of 
 the mighty theme.
 
 First Stages in the Genesis of Man 
 
 ET us begin by drawing a correct 
 though slight outline sketch of 
 what the cosmic process of evolu- 
 tion has been. It is not strange that when 
 biologists speak of evolution they should 
 often or usually have in mind simply the 
 modifications wrought in plants and animals 
 by means of natural selection. For it was 
 by calling attention to such modifications 
 that Darwin discovered a true cause of the 
 origin of species by physiological descent 
 from allied species. Thus was demon- 
 strated the fact of evolution in its most 
 important province ; men of science were 
 convinced that the higher forms of life are 
 derived from lower forms, and the old no- 
 tion of special creations was exploded once 
 and forever. This was a great scientific
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 81 
 
 achievement, one of the greatest known to 
 history, and it is therefore not strange that 
 language should often be employed as if 
 Evolutionism and Darwinism were synony- 
 mous. Yet not only are there extensive 
 regions in the doctrine of evolution about 
 which Darwin knew very little, but even as 
 regards the genesis of species his theory 
 was never developed in his own hands so 
 far as to account satisfactorily for the gen- 
 esis of man. 
 
 It must be borne in mind that while the 
 natural selection of physical variations will 
 go far toward explaining the characteristics 
 of all the plants and all the beasts in the 
 world, it remains powerless to account for 
 the existence of man. Natural selection 
 of physical variations might go on for a 
 dozen eternities without any other visible 
 result than new forms of plant and beast in 
 endless and meaningless succession. The 
 physical variations by which man is dis- 
 tinguished from apes are not great. His 
 physical relationship with the ape is closer
 
 82 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 than that between cat and dog, which be- 
 long to different families of the same order ; 
 it is more like that between cat and leopard, 
 or between dog and fox, different genera in 
 the same family. But the moment we con- 
 sider the minds of man and ape, the gap 
 between the two is immeasurable. Mr. 
 Mivart has truly said that, with regard to 
 their total value in nature, the difference 
 between man and ape transcends the dif- 
 ference between ape and blade of grass. I 
 should be disposed to go further and say, 
 ttiat while for zoological man you can hardly 
 erect a distinct family from that of the 
 chimpanzee and orang, on the other hand, 
 for psychological man you must erect a dis- 
 tinct kingdom ; nay, you must even dichot- 
 omize the universe, putting Man on one 
 side and all things else on the other. How 
 can this overwhelming contrast between 
 psychical and physical difference be ac- 
 counted for? The clue was furnished by 
 Alfred Russel Wallace, the illustrious co- 
 discoverer of natural selection. Wallace
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 83 
 
 saw that along with the general develop- 
 ment of mammalian intelligence a point 
 must have been reached in the history of 
 one of the primates, when variations of in- 
 telligence were more profitable to him than 
 variations in body. From that time forth 
 that primate's intelligence went on by slow 
 increments acquiring new capacity, while 
 his body changed but little. When once 
 he could strike fire, and chip a flint, and 
 use a club, and strip off the bear's hide to 
 cover himself, there was clearly no further 
 use in thickening his own hide, or length- 
 ening and sharpening his claws. Natural 
 selection is the keenest capitalist in the 
 universe ; she never loses an instant in 
 seizing the most profitable place for invest- 
 ment, and her judgment is never at fault. 
 Forthwith, for a million years or more she 
 invested all her capital in the psychical 
 variations of this favoured primate, making 
 little change in his body except so far as to 
 aid in the general result, until by and by 
 something like human intelligence of a low
 
 84 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 grade, like that of the Australian or the 
 Andaman islander, was achieved. The 
 genesis of humanity was by no means yet 
 completed, but an enormous gulf had been 
 crossed. 
 
 After throwing out this luminous sugges- 
 tion Mr. Wallace never followed it up as it 
 admitted and deserved. It is too much to 
 expect one man to do everything, and his 
 splendid studies in the geographical distri- 
 bution of organisms may well have left him 
 little time for work in this direction. Who 
 can fail to see that the selection of psy- 
 chical variations, to the comparative neg- 
 lect of physical variations, was the opening 
 of a new and greater act in the drama of 
 creation ? Since that new departure the 
 Creator's highest work has consisted not 
 in bringing forth new types of body, but in 
 expanding and perfecting the psychical at- 
 tributes of the one creature in whose life 
 those attributes have begun to acquire pre- 
 dominance. Along this human line of as- 
 cent there is no occasion for any further
 
 Lome and Self-Sacrifice 85 
 
 genesis of species, all future progress must 
 continue to be not zoological, but psycho- 
 logical, organic evolution gives place to 
 civilization. Thus in the long series of 
 organic beings Man is the last ; the cosmic 
 process, having once evolved this master- 
 piece, could thenceforth do nothing better 
 than to perfect him.
 
 VI 
 
 The Central Fact in the Genesis of Man 
 
 HIS conclusion, which follows irre- 
 sistibly from Wallace's theorem, 
 that in the genesis of Humanity 
 natural selection began to follow a new 
 path, already throws a light of promise over 
 our whole subject, like the rosy dawn of a 
 June morning. But the explanation of the 
 genesis of Humanity is still far from com- 
 plete. If we compare man with any of the 
 higher mammals, such as dogs and horses 
 and apes, we are struck with several points 
 of difference : first, the greater progressive- 
 ness of man, the widening of the interval 
 by which one generation may vary from its 
 predecessor ; secondly, the definite grouping 
 in societies based on more or less perma- 
 nent family relationships, instead of the in- 
 definite grouping in miscellaneous herds or
 
 Low and Self-Sacrifice 87 
 
 packs ; thirdly, the possession of articulate 
 speech ; fonrtlily, the enormous increase in 
 the duration of infancy, or the period when 
 parental care is needed. Twenty-four years 
 ago, in a course of lectures given yonder in 
 Holden Chapel, I showed that the circum- 
 stance last named is the fundamental one, 
 and the others are derivative. It is the 
 prolonged infancy that has caused the pro- 
 gressiveness and the grouping into definite 
 societies, while the development of language 
 was a consequence of the increasing intelli- 
 gence and sociality thus caused. In the 
 genesis of Humanity the central fact has 
 been the increased duration of infancy. 
 Now, can we assign for that increased dura- 
 tion an adequate cause ? I think we can. 
 The increase of intelligence is itself such a 
 cause. A glance at the animal kingdom 
 shows us no such thing as infancy among 
 the lower orders. It is with warm-blooded 
 birds and mammals that the phenomena 
 of infancy and the correlative parental care 
 really begin.
 
 VII 
 
 The Chief Cause of Man's lengthened 
 Infancy 
 
 HE reason for this is that any crea- 
 ture's ability to perceive and to 
 act depends upon the registration 
 of experiences in his nerve-centres. It is 
 either individual or ancestral experience that 
 is thus registered ; or, strictly speaking, it 
 is both. It is of the first importance that 
 this point should be clearly understood, and 
 therefore a few words of elementary ex- 
 planation will not be superfluous. 
 
 When you learn to play the piano, you 
 gradually establish innumerable associations 
 between printed groups of notes and the 
 corresponding keys on the key-board, and 
 you also train the fingers to execute a vast 
 number of rapid and complicated motions. 
 The process is full of difficulty, and involves
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 8g 
 
 endless repetition. After some years per- 
 haps you can play at sight and with almost 
 automatic ease a polonaise of Liszt or a 
 ballad of Chopin. Now this result is pos- 
 sible only because of a bodily change which 
 has taken place in you. Countless molec- 
 ular alterations have been wrought in the 
 structure of sundry nerves and muscles, 
 especially in the gray matter of sundry gan- 
 glia, or nerve-centres. Every ganglion con- 
 cerned in the needful adjustments of eyes 
 and fingers and wrists, or in the perception 
 of musical sounds, has undergone a change 
 more or less profound. The nature of the 
 change is largely a matter of speculation ; 
 but that point need not in any way concern 
 us. It is enough for us to know that there 
 is such a change, and that it is a registra- 
 tion of experiences. The pianist has regis- 
 tered in the intimate structure of his ner- 
 vous system a world of experiences entirely 
 foreign to persons unfamiliar with the piano ; 
 and upon this registration his capacity de- 
 pends.
 
 go Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 Now the same explanation applies to all 
 bodily movements whatever, whether com- 
 plicated or simple. In writing, in walking, 
 in talking, we are making use of nervous 
 registrations that have been brought about 
 by an accumulation of experiences. To pick 
 up a pencil from the table may seem a very 
 simple act, yet a baby cannot do it. It has 
 been made possible only by the education 
 of the eyes, of the muscles that move the 
 eyes, of the arm and hand, and of the nerve- 
 centres that coordinate one group of move- 
 ments with another. All this multiform 
 education has consisted in a gradual regis- 
 tration of experiences. In like manner all 
 the actions of man upon the world about 
 him are made up of movements, and every 
 such movement becomes possible only when 
 a registration is effected in sundry nerve- 
 centres. 
 
 But this is not the whole story. The 
 case is undoubtedly the same with those 
 visceral movements, involuntary and in 
 great part unconscious, which sustain life ;
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 91 
 
 the beating of the heart, the expansion and 
 contraction of the lungs, the slight changes 
 of calibre in the blood-vessels, even the 
 movements of secretion that take place in 
 glands. All these actions are governed by 
 nerves, and these nerves have had to be 
 educated to their work. This education has 
 been a registration of experiences chiefly 
 ancestral, throughout an enormous past, 
 practically since the beginnings of verte- 
 brate life. 
 
 With the earlier and simpler forms of ani- 
 mal existence these visceral movements are 
 the only ones, or almost the only ones, that 
 have to be made. Presently the movements 
 of limbs and sense organs come to be added, 
 and as we rise in the animal scale, these 
 movements come to be endlessly various and 
 complex, and by and by implicate the ner- 
 vous system more and more deeply in com- 
 plex acts of perception, memory, reasoning, 
 and volition. Obviously, therefore, in the 
 development of the individual organism 
 the demands of the nervous system upon
 
 92 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 the vital energies concerned in growth must 
 come to be of paramount importance, and 
 in providing for them the entire embryonic 
 life must be most profoundly and variously 
 affected. Though we may be unable to 
 follow the processes in detail, the truth of 
 this general statement is plain and undeni- 
 able. 
 
 I say, then, that when a creature's intelli- 
 gence is low, and its experience very meagre, 
 consisting of a few simple perceptions and 
 acts that occur throughout life with mono- 
 tonous regularity, all the registration of this 
 experience gets effected in the nerve-centres 
 of its offspring before birth, and they come 
 into the world fully equipped for the battle 
 of life, like the snapping turtle, which snaps 
 with decisive vigour as soon as it emerges 
 from the egg. Nothing is left plastic to be 
 finished after birth, and so the life of each 
 generation is almost an exact repetition of 
 its predecessor. But when a creature's in- 
 telligence is high, and its experience varied 
 and complicated, the registration of all this
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 93 
 
 experience in the nerve-centres of its off- 
 spring does not get accomplished before 
 birth. There is not time enough. The 
 most important registrations, such as those 
 needed for breathing and swallowing and 
 other indispensable acts, are fully effected ; 
 others, such as those needed for handling 
 and walking, are but partially effected ; 
 others, such as those involved in the recog- 
 nition of creatures not important as ene- 
 mies or prey, are left still further from 
 completion. Much is left to be done by 
 individual experience after birth. The ani- 
 mal, when first born, is a baby dependent 
 upon its mother's care. At the same time 
 its intelligence is far more plastic, and it 
 remains far more teachable, than the lower 
 animal that has no babyhood. Dogs and 
 horses, lions and elephants, often increase 
 in sagacity until late in life ; and so do 
 apes, which, along with a higher intelligence 
 than any other dumb animals, have a much 
 longer babyhood. 
 
 We are now prepared to appreciate the
 
 94 Low and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 marvellous beauty of Nature's work in bring- 
 ing Man upon the scene. Nowhere is there 
 any breach of continuity in the cosmic pro- 
 cess. First we have natural selection at 
 work throughout the organic world, bring- 
 ing forth millions of species of plant and 
 animal, seizing upon every advantage, phy- 
 sical or mental, that enables any species 
 to survive in the universal struggle. So 
 far as any outward observer, back in the 
 Cretaceous or early Eocene periods, could 
 surmise, this sort of confusion might go on 
 forever. But all at once, perhaps some- 
 where in the upper Eocene or lower Mio- 
 cene, it appears that among the primates, 
 a newly developing family already distin- 
 guished for prehensile capabilities, one 
 genus is beginning to sustain itself more 
 by mental craft and shiftiness than by any 
 physical characteristic. Forthwith does 
 natural selection seize upon any and every 
 advantageous variation in this craft and 
 shiftiness, until this favoured genus of pri- 
 mates, this Homo Alalus, or speechless
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 95 
 
 man, as we may call him, becomes pre- 
 eminent for sagacity, as the mammoth is 
 preeminent for bulk, or the giraffe for 
 length of neck.
 
 VIII 
 
 Some of its Effects 
 
 N doing this, natural selection has 
 unlocked a door and let in a new 
 set of causal agencies. As Homo 
 Alalus grows in intelligence and variety of 
 experience, his helpless babyhood becomes 
 gradually prolonged, and passes not into 
 sudden maturity, but into a more or less 
 plastic intermediate period of youth. In- 
 dividual experience, as contrasted with an- 
 cestral experience, counts for much more 
 than ever before in shaping his actions, and 
 thus he begins to become progressive. He 
 can learn many more new ways of doing 
 things in a hundred thousand years than 
 any other creature could have done in a 
 much longer time. Thus the rate of pro- 
 gress is enhanced, the increasing intelli- 
 gence of Homo Alalus further lengthens
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 97 
 
 his plastic period of life, and this in turn 
 further increases his intelligence and em- 
 phasizes his individuality. The evidence is 
 abundant that Homo Alalus, like his simian 
 cousins, was a gregarious creature, and it 
 is not difficult to see how, with increasing 
 intelligence, the gestures and grunts used 
 in the horde for signalling must come to be 
 clothed with added associations of meaning, 
 must gradually become generalized as signs 
 of conceptions. This invention of spoken 
 language, the first invention of nascent 
 humanity, remains to this day its most 
 fruitful invention. Henceforth ancestral 
 experience could not simply be transmitted 
 through its inheritable impress upon the 
 nervous system, but its facts and lessons 
 could become external materials and instru- 
 ments of education. Then the children of 
 Homo Alalus, no longer speechless, began 
 to accumulate a fund of tradition, which in 
 the fulness of time was to bloom forth in 
 history and poetry, in science and theology. 
 From the outset the acquisition of speech
 
 g8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 must greatly have increased the rate of 
 progress, and enhanced the rudimentary 
 sociality. 
 
 With the lengthening of infancy the pe- 
 riod of maternal help and watchfulness 
 must have lengthened in correspondence. 
 Natural selection must keep those two 
 things nicely balanced, or the species would 
 soon become extinct. But Homo Alalus 
 had not only a mother, but brethren and 
 sisters ; and when the period of infancy be- 
 came sufficiently long, there were a series 
 of Homunculi Alali, the eldest of whom 
 still needed more or less care while the 
 third and the fourth were arriving upon 
 the scene. In this way the sentiment of 
 maternity became abiding. The cow has 
 strong feelings of maternal affection for 
 periods of a few weeks at a time, but lapses 
 into indifference and probably cannot dis- 
 tinguish her grown-up calves as sustaining 
 any nearer relation to herself than other 
 members of the herd. But Femina Alala, 
 with her vastly enlarged intelligence, is
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice gg 
 
 called upon for the exercise of maternal 
 affection until it becomes a permanent 
 part of her nature. In the same group of 
 circumstances begins the permanency of 
 the marital relation. The warrior -hunter 
 grows accustomed to defending the same 
 wife and children and to helping them in 
 securing food. Cases of what we may term 
 wedlock, arising in this way, occur sporad- 
 ically among apes ; its thorough establish- 
 ment, however, was not achieved until after 
 the genesis of Humanity had been com- 
 pleted in most other respects. The elabo- 
 rate researches of Westermarck have proved 
 that permanent marriage exists even among 
 savages ; it did not prevail, however, until 
 the advanced stage of culture represented 
 by the Aztecs in aboriginal America and 
 the Neolithic peoples of ancient Europe. 
 As for strict monogamy, it is a com- 
 paratively late achievement of civilization. 
 What the increased and multiplied dura- 
 tion of infancy at first accomplished was 
 the transformation of miscellaneous hordes
 
 ioo Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 of Homines Alali into organized clans re- 
 cognizing kinship through the mother, as 
 exemplified among nearly all American 
 Indians when observed by Europeans. 
 
 Thus by gradual stages we have passed 
 from four-footed existence into Human So- 
 ciety, and once more I would emphasize 
 the fact that nowhere do we find any breach 
 of continuity, but one factor sets another 
 in operation, which in turn reacts upon the 
 first, and so on in a marvellously harmo- 
 nious consensus. Surely if there is any- 
 where in the universe a story matchless for 
 its romantic interest, it is the story of the 
 genesis of Man, now that we are at length 
 beginning to be able to decipher it. We 
 see that there is a good deal more in it 
 than mere natural selection. At bottom, 
 indeed, it is all a process of survival of the 
 fittest, but the secondary agencies we have 
 been considering have brought us to a point 
 where our conception of the Struggle for 
 Life must be enlarged. Out of the mani- 
 fold compounding and recompounding of
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 101 
 
 primordial clans have come the nations of 
 mankind in various degrees of civilization, 
 but already in the clan we find the ethical 
 process at work. The clan has a code of 
 morals well adapted to the conditions amid 
 which it exists. There is an ethical senti- 
 ment in the clan ; its members have duties 
 toward it ; it punishes sundry acts even 
 with death, and rewards or extols sundry 
 other acts. We are, in short, in an ethical 
 atmosphere, crude and stifling, doubtless, 
 as compared with that of a modern Chris- 
 tian homestead, but still unquestionably 
 ethical.
 
 IX 
 
 Origin of Moral Ideas and Sentiments 
 
 OW, here at last, in encountering 
 the ethical process at work, have 
 we detected a breach of continu- 
 ity ? Has the moral sentiment been flung 
 in from outside, or is it a natural result of 
 the cosmic process we have been sketch- 
 ing ? Clearly it is the latter. There has 
 been no breach of continuity. When the 
 prolongation of infancy produced the clan, 
 there naturally arose reciprocal necessities 
 of behaviour among the members of the 
 clan, its mothers and children, its hunters 
 and warriors. If such reciprocal necessi- 
 ties were to be disregarded the clan would 
 dissolve, and dissolution would be general 
 destruction. For, bear in mind, the clan, 
 when once evolved, becomes the unit whose 
 preservation is henceforth the permanent
 
 Love and Self -Sacrifice 103 
 
 necessity. It is infancy that has made it 
 so. A miscellaneous horde, with brief in- 
 fancies for its younger members, may sur- 
 vive a very extensive slaughter ; but in a 
 clan, where the proportion of helpless chil- 
 dren is much greater, and a considerable 
 division of labour between nurses and war- 
 riors has become established, the case is 
 different. An amount of degree of calam- 
 ity sufficient to break up its organization 
 will usually mean total ruin. Hence, when 
 Nature's travail has at length brought forth 
 the clan, its requirements forthwith become 
 paramount, and each member's conduct 
 from babyhood must conform to them. 
 Natural selection henceforth invests her 
 chief capital in the enterprise of preserving 
 the clan. In that primitive social unit lie 
 all the potentiality and promise of Human 
 Society through untold future ages. So 
 for age after age those clans in which the 
 conduct of the individuals is best subordi- 
 nated to the general welfare are sure to 
 prevail over clans in which the subordina-
 
 104 kwt an & Self-Sacrifice 
 
 tion is less perfect. As the maternal in- 
 stinct had been cultivated for thousands 
 of generations before clanship came into 
 existence, so for many succeeding ages of 
 turbulence the patriotic instinct, which 
 prompts to the defence of home, was culti- 
 vated under penalty of death. Clans de- 
 fended by weakly loyal or cowardly war- 
 riors were sure to perish. Unflinching 
 bravery and devoted patriotism were virtues 
 necessary to the survival of the community, 
 and were thus preserved until at the dawn 
 of historic times, in the most grandly mili- 
 tant of clan societies, we find the word 
 virtus connoting just these qualities, and 
 no sooner does the fateful gulf yawn open 
 in the forum than a Curtius joyfully leaps 
 into it, that the commonwealth may be 
 preserved from harm. 
 
 Now the moment a man's voluntary ac- 
 tions are determined by conscious or un- 
 conscious reference to a standard outside 
 of himself and his selfish motives, he has 
 entered the world of ethics, he has begun
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 105 
 
 to live in a moral atmosphere. Egoism has 
 ceased to be all in all, and altruism it is 
 an ugly-sounding word, but seems to be the 
 only one available altruism has begun to 
 assert its claim to sovereignty. In the ear- 
 lier and purely animal stages of existence 
 it was right enough for each individual to 
 pursue pleasure and avoid pain ; it did not 
 endanger the welfare of the species, but on 
 the contrary it favoured that welfare ; in its 
 origin avoidance of pain was the surest 
 safeguard for the perpetuation of life, and 
 with due qualifications that is still the case. 
 But as soon as sociality became established, 
 and Nature's supreme end became the 
 maintenance of the clan organization, the 
 standard for the individual's conduct be- 
 came shifted, permanently and forever 
 shifted. Limits were interposed at which 
 pleasure must be resigned and pain en- 
 dured, even certain death encountered, for 
 the sake of the clan ; perhaps the individ- 
 ual did not always understand it in that 
 way, but at all events it was for the sake
 
 io6 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 of some rule recognized in the clan, some 
 rule which, as his mother and all his kin 
 had from his earliest childhood inculcated 
 upon him, ought to be obeyed. This con- 
 ception of ought, of obligation, of duty, of 
 debt to something outside of self, resulted 
 from the shifting of the standard of con- 
 duct outside of the individual's self. Once 
 thus externalized, objectivized, the ethical 
 standard demanded homage from the indi- 
 vidual. It furnished the rule for a higher 
 life than one dictated by mere selfishness. 
 Speaking after the manner of naturalists, I 
 here use the phrase " higher life " advis- 
 edly. It was the kind of life that was 
 conducive to the preservation and further 
 development of the highest form of animate 
 existence that had been attained. It ap- 
 pears to me that we begin to find for ethics 
 the most tremendous kind of sanction in 
 the nature of the cosmic process. 
 
 A word of caution may be needed. It is 
 not for a moment to be supposed that when 
 primitive men began crudely shaping their
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 conduct with reference to a standard out- 
 side of self, they did so as the result of 
 meditation, or with any realizing sense of 
 what they were doing. That has never 
 been the method of evolution. Its results 
 steal upon the world noiselessly and unob- 
 served, and only after they have long been 
 with us does reason employ itself upon 
 them. The wolf does not eat the lamb be- 
 cause he regards a flesh diet as necessary 
 to his health and activity, but because he is 
 hungry, and, like Mr. Harold Skimpole, he 
 likes lamb. It was no intellectual 'percep- 
 tion of needs and consequences that length- 
 ened the maternal instinct with primeval 
 mothers as the period of infancy length- 
 ened. Nor was it any such intellectual 
 perception that began to enthrone " I 
 ought" in the place of "I wish." If in 
 the world's recurrent crises Nature had 
 waited to be served by the flickering lamp 
 of reason, the story would not have been 
 what it is. Her method has been, with the 
 advent of a new situation, to modify the
 
 io8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 existing group of instincts ; and his work 
 she will not let be slighted; in her train 
 follows the lictor with the symbols of death, 
 and there is neither pity nor relenting. In 
 the primeval warfare between clans, those 
 in which the instincts were not so modified 
 as to shift the standard of conduct outside 
 of the individual's self must inevitably have 
 succumbed and perished under the pressure 
 of those in which the instincts had begun 
 to experience such modification. The 
 moral law grew up in the world not because 
 anybody asked for it, but because it was 
 needed for the world's work. If it is not a 
 product of the cosmic process, it would be 
 hard to find anything that could be so 
 called.
 
 The Cosmic Process exists purely for the Sake 
 of Moral Ends 
 
 HAVE not undertaken to make 
 my outline sketch of the genesis of 
 Humanity approach to complete- 
 ness, but only to present enough salient 
 points to make a closely connected argu- 
 ment in showing how morality is evolved in 
 the cosmic process and sanctioned by it. 
 In a more complete sketch it would be 
 necessary to say something about the gen- 
 esis of Religion. One of the most inter- 
 esting, and in my opinion one of the most 
 profoundly significant, facts in the whole 
 process of evolution is the first appearance 
 of religious sentiment at very nearly the 
 same stage at which the moral law began to 
 grow up. To the differential attributes of 
 Humanity already considered there needs
 
 no Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 to be added the possession of religious sen- 
 timent and religious ideas. We may safely 
 say that this is the most important of all 
 the distinctions between Man and other 
 animals ; for to say so is simply to epito- 
 mize the whole of human experience as re- 
 corded in history, art, and literature. Along 
 with the rise from gregariousness to incipi- 
 ent sociality, along with the first stammer- 
 ings of articulate speech, along with the 
 dawning discrimination between right and 
 wrong, came the earliest feeble groping 
 toward a world beyond that which greets 
 the senses, the first dim recognition of the 
 Spiritual Power that is revealed in and 
 through the visible and palpable realm of 
 nature. And universally since that time 
 the notion of Ethics has been inseparably, 
 associated with the notion of Religion, and 
 the sanction for Ethics has been held to be 
 closely related with the world beyond phe* 
 nomena. There are philosophers who 
 maintain that with the further progress of 
 enlightenment this close relation will cease
 
 Low and Self-Sacrifice in 
 
 to be asserted, that Ethics will be divorced 
 from Religion, and that the groping of the 
 Human Soul after its God will be condemned 
 as a mere survival from the errors of primi- 
 tive savagery, a vain and idle reaching out 
 toward a world of mere phantoms. I men- 
 tion this opinion merely to express unquali- 
 fied and total dissent from it. I believe it 
 can be shown that one of the strongest 
 implications of the doctrine of evolution is 
 the Everlasting Reality of Religion. 
 
 But we have not time at present for enter- 
 ing upon so vast a subject. Let this refer- 
 ence suffice to show that it has not been 
 passed over or forgotten in my theory of 
 the genesis of Humanity. In an account 
 of the evolution of the religious sentiment, 
 its first appearance as coeval, or nearly so, 
 with the beginnings of the ethical process 
 would assume great importance. We have 
 here been concerned purely with the ethi- 
 cal process itself, which we have found to 
 be as Huxley truly says in his footnote 
 part and parcel of the general process
 
 112 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 of evolution. Our historical survey of the 
 genesis of Humanity seems to show very 
 forcibly that a society of Human Souls 
 living in conformity to a perfect Moral Law 
 is the end toward which, ever since the 
 time when our solar system was a patch of 
 nebulous vapour, the cosmic process has 
 been aiming. After our cooling planet had 
 become the seat of organic life, the process 
 of natural selection went on for long ages 
 seemingly, but not really at random ; for 
 our retrospect shows that its ultimate ten- 
 dency was towards singling out one crea- 
 ture and exalting his intelligence. 
 
 Now we have seen that this increase of in- 
 telligence itself, by entailing upon Man the 
 helplessness of infancy, led directly to the 
 production of those social conditions that 
 called the ethical process into play and set 
 it actively to work. Thus we may see the 
 absurdity of trying to separate the moral 
 nature of Man from the rest of his nature, 
 and to assign for it a separate and inde- 
 pendent history. The essential solidarity
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 in the cosmic process will admit of no 
 such fanciful detachment of one part from 
 another. All parts are involved one in 
 another. Again, the ethical process is not 
 only part and parcel of the cosmic process, 
 but it is its crown and consummation. 
 Toward the spiritual perfection of Hu- 
 manity the stupendous momentum of the 
 cosmic process has all along been .tending. 
 That spiritual perfection is the true goal of 
 evolution, the divine end that was involved 
 in the beginning. When Huxley asks us to 
 believe that "the cosmic process has no 
 sort of relation to moral ends," I feel like 
 replying with the question, " Does not the 
 cosmic process exist purely for the sake of 
 moral ends ? " Subtract from the universe 
 its ethical meaning, and nothing remains 
 but an unreal phantom, the figment of false 
 metaphysics. . 
 
 We have now arrived at a position from 
 which a glimmer of light is thrown upon 
 some of the dark problems connected with 
 the moral government of the world. We
 
 Low and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 can begin to see why misery and wrong- 
 doing are permitted to exist, and why the 
 creative energy advances by such slow and 
 tortuous methods toward the fulfilment of 
 its divine purpose. In order to understand 
 these things, we must ask, What is the 
 ultimate goal of the ethical process ? Ac- 
 cording to the utilitarian philosophy that 
 goal is the completion of human happiness. 
 But this interpretation soon refutes itself. 
 A world of completed happiness might well 
 be a world of quiescence, of stagnation, of 
 automatism, of blankness ; the dynamics of 
 evolution would have no place in it. But 
 suppose we say that the ultimate goal of 
 the ethical process is the perfecting of hu- 
 man character? This form of statement 
 contains far more than the other. Con- 
 summation of happiness is a natural out- 
 come of the perfecting of character, but 
 that perfecting can be achieved only through 
 struggle, through discipline, through resist- 
 ance. It is for him that overcometh that 
 the crown of life is reserved. The con-
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 7/5 
 
 summate product of a world of evolution is 
 the character that creates happiness, that is 
 replete with dynamic possibilities of fresh 
 life and activity in directions forever new. 
 Such a character is the reflected image of 
 God, and in it are contained the promise 
 and potency of life everlasting. 
 
 No such character could be produced by 
 any act of special creation in a garden of 
 Eden. It must be the consummate efflores- 
 cence of long ages of evolution, and a world 
 of evolution is necessarily characterized by 
 slow processes, many of which to a looker- 
 on seem like tentative experiments, with an 
 enormous sacrifice of ephemeral forms of 
 life. Thus while the Earth Spirit goes on, 
 unhasting, yet unresting, weaving in the 
 loom of Time the visible garment of God, 
 we begin to see that even what look like 
 failures and blemishes have been from the 
 outset involved in the accomplishment of 
 the all-wise and all-holy purpose, the per- 
 fecting of the spiritual Man in the likeness 
 of his Heavenly Father.
 
 / 1 6 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 These points will receive further indi- 
 rect illustration as we complete our outline 
 sketch of the cosmic process in the past. It 
 is self-evident that in the production of an 
 ethical character, altruistic feelings and im- 
 pulses must cooperate. Let us look, then, 
 for some of the beginnings of altruism in 
 the course of the evolution of life.
 
 XI 
 
 Maternity and the Evolution of Altruism 
 
 ROM an early period of the life- 
 history of our planet, the preserva- 
 tion of the species had obviously 
 become quite as imperative an end as the 
 preservation of individuals ; one is at first 
 inclined to say more imperative, but if we 
 pause long enough to remember that total 
 failure to preserve individuals would be 
 equivalent to immediate extinction of the 
 species, we see that the one requirement is 
 as indispensable as the other. Individuals 
 must be preserved, and the struggle for 
 life is between them ; species must be pre- 
 served, and in the rivalry those have the 
 best chance in which the offspring are 
 either most redundant in numbers or are 
 best cared for. In plants and animals of all 
 but the higher types, the offspring are spores
 
 / 1 8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 or seeds, larvae or spawn, or self-maturing 
 eggs. In the absence of parental care the 
 persistence of the species is ensured by the 
 enormous number of such offspring. A 
 single codfish, in a single season, will lay 
 six million eggs, nearly all of which perish, 
 of course, or else in a few years the ocean 
 could not hold all the codfishes. But the 
 prir/cess in the Arabian tale, who fought 
 with the malignant Jinni, could not for her 
 life pick up all the scattered seeds of the 
 pomegranate ; and in like manner of the 
 codfish eggs, one in a million or so escapes 
 and the species is maintained. But in 
 the highest types of animal life in birds 
 and mammals with their four-chambered 
 hearts, completely arterialized blood, and 
 enhanced consciousness parental care be- 
 comes effective in protecting the offspring, 
 and the excessive production diminishes. 
 With birds, the necessity of maintaining a 
 high temperature for the eggs leads to the 
 building of nests, to a division of labour in 
 the securing of food, to the development of
 
 Lime and Self-Sacrifice ng 
 
 a temporary maternal instinct, and to con- 
 jugal alliances which in some birds last for 
 a lifetime. As the eggs become effectively 
 guarded the number diminishes, till instead 
 of millions there are half a dozen. When 
 it comes to her more valuable products, 
 Nature is not such a reckless squanderer 
 after all. So with mammals, for the most 
 part the young are in litters of half a dozen 
 or so ; but in Man, with his prolonged and 
 costly infancy parental care reaches its 
 highest development and concentration in 
 rearing children one by one. 
 
 From the dawn of life, I need hardly say, 
 all the instincts that have contributed to 
 the preservation of offspring must have 
 been favoured and cultivated by natural 
 selection, and in many cases even in types 
 of life very remote from Humanity, such 
 instincts have prompted to very different 
 actions from such as would flow from the 
 mere instinct of self-preservation. If you 
 thrust your walking-stick into an ant-heap, 
 and watch the wild hurry and confusion that
 
 12O Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 ensues when part of the interior is laid 
 bare, you will see that all the workers are 
 busy in moving the larvae into places of 
 safety. It is not exactly a maternal in- 
 stinct, for the workers are not mothers, but 
 it is an altruistic instinct involving acts of 
 self-devotion. So in the case of fish that 
 ascend rivers or bays at spawning time, the 
 actions of the whole shoal are determined 
 by a temporarily predominant instinct that 
 tends towards an altruistic result. In these 
 and lower grades of life there is already 
 something at work besides the mere strug- 
 gle for life between individuals ; there is 
 something more than mere contention and 
 slaughter ; there is the effort towards cher- 
 ishing another life than one's own. In 
 these regions of animate existence we 
 catch glimpses of the cosmic roots of love 
 and self-sacrifice. For the simplest and 
 rudest productions of Nature mere egoism 
 might* suffice, but to the achievement of 
 any higher aim some adumbration of altru- 
 ism was indispensable.
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 121 
 
 Before such divine things as love and 
 self -sacrifice could spring up from their 
 cosmic roots and put forth their efflores- 
 cence, it was necessary that conscious per- 
 sonal relations should become established 
 between mother and infant. We have al- 
 ready observed the critical importance of 
 these relations in the earliest stages of 
 the evolution of human society. We may 
 now add that the relation between mother 
 and child must have furnished the first 
 occasion for the sustained and regular de- 
 velopment of the altruistic feelings. The 
 capacity for unselfish devotion called forth 
 in that relation could afterward be utilized 
 in the conduct of individuals not thus re- 
 lated to one another. 
 
 Of all kinds of altruism the mother's was 
 no doubt the earliest ; it was the derivative 
 source from which all other kinds were by 
 slow degrees developed. In the evolution 
 of these altruistic feelings, therefore, 
 feelings which are an absolutely indispen- 
 sable constituent in the process of ethical
 
 /22 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 development, the first appearance of real 
 maternity was an epoch of most profound 
 interest and importance in the history of 
 life upon the earth. 
 
 Now maternity, in the true and full sense 
 of the word, is something which was not 
 realized until a comparatively recent stage of 
 the earth's history. God's highest work is 
 never perfected save in the fulness of time. 
 For countless ages there were parents and 
 offspring before the slow but never aimless 
 or wanton cosmic process had brought into 
 existence the conscious personal relation- 
 ship between mother and child. Protection 
 of eggs and larvae scarcely suffices for the 
 evolution of true maternity ; the relation 
 of moth to caterpillar is certainly very far 
 from being a prototype of it. What spec- 
 tacle could be more dreary than that of 
 the Jurassic period, with its lords of crea- 
 tion, the oviparous dinosaurs, crawling or 
 bounding over the land, splashing amid the 
 mighty waters, whizzing bat-like through 
 the air, horrible brutes innumerable, with
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 123 
 
 bulky bodies and tiny brains, clumsy, coarse 
 in fibre, and cold-blooded. 
 
 " Dragons of the prime, 
 That tare each other in their slime." 
 
 The remnants of that far-off dismal age 
 have been left behind in great abundance, 
 and from them we can easily reconstruct 
 the loathsome picture of a world of domi- 
 nating egoism, whose redemption through 
 the evolution of true maternity had not 
 yet effectively begun. For such a world 
 might Caliban's theology indeed seem fitted. 
 Nearly nine tenths of our planet's past life- 
 history, measured in duration, had passed 
 away without achieving any higher result 
 than this, a fact which for impatient re- 
 formers may have in it some crumbs of 
 consolation. 
 
 For, though the mills of God grind slowly, 
 the cosmic process was aiming at something 
 better than egoism and dinosaurs, and at 
 some time during the long period of the 
 Chalk deposits there began the tremendous 
 world-wide rivalry between these dragons
 
 124 Love and Self -Sacrifice 
 
 and the rising class of warm-blooded vivip- 
 arous mammals which had hitherto played 
 an insignificant part in the world. The 
 very name of this class of animals is taken 
 from the function of motherhood. The off- 
 spring of these "mammas" come into the 
 world as recognizable personalities, so far 
 developed that the relation between mother 
 and child begins as a relation of personal 
 affection. The new-born mammal is not 
 an egg nor a caterpillar, but a baby, and 
 the baby's dawning consciousness opens up 
 a narrow horizon of sympathy and tender- 
 ness, a horizon of which the expansion shall 
 in due course of ages reveal a new heaven 
 and a new earth. At first the nascent al- 
 truism was crude enough, but it must have 
 sufficed to make mutual understanding and 
 cooperation more possible than before ; it 
 thus contributed to the advancement of 
 mammalian intelligence, and prepared the 
 way for gregariousness, by and by to cul- 
 minate in sociality, as already described. 
 In the history of creation the mammals
 
 Love and Self -Sacrifice 125 
 
 were moderns, equipped with more effec- 
 tive means of ensuring survival than their 
 oviparous antagonists. The development of 
 complete mammality was no sudden thing. 
 Some of the dinosaurs may have been ovo- 
 viviparous, like some modern serpents. 
 The Australian duck-bill, a relic of the 
 most ancient incipient mammality, is still 
 oviparous ; the opossum and kangaroo pre- 
 serve the record of a stage when vivipa- 
 rousness was but partially achieved ; but 
 with the advent of the placental mammals 
 the break with the old order of things was 
 complete. 
 
 The results of the struggle are registered 
 in the Eocene rocks. The ancient world 
 had found its Waterloo. Gone were the 
 dragons whp so long had lorded it over 
 both hemispheres, brontosaurs, iguano- 
 dons, plesiosaurs, laelaps, pterodactyls, 
 all gone; their uncouth brood quite van- 
 ished from the earth, and nothing left alive 
 as a reminder, save a few degenerate col- 
 lateral kin, such as snakes and crocodiles,
 
 / 2<5 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 objects of dread and loathing to higher 
 creatures. Never in the history of our 
 planet has there been a more sweeping 
 victory than that of the mammals, nor has 
 Nature had any further occasion for vic- 
 tories of that sort. The mammal remains 
 the highest type of animal existence, and 
 subsequent progress has been shown in 
 the perfecting of that type where most per- 
 fectible.
 
 XII 
 
 The Omnipresent Ethical Trend 
 
 ITH the evolution of true maternity 
 Nature was ready to proceed to her 
 highest grades of work. Intelli- 
 gence was next to be lifted to higher levels, 
 and the order of mammals with greatest 
 prehensile capacities, the primates with 
 their incipient hands, were the most favour- 
 able subjects in which to carry on this pro- 
 cess. The later stages of the marvellous 
 story we have already passed in review. 
 We have seen the accumulating intelligence 
 lengthen the period of infancy, and thus 
 prolong the relations of loving sympathy 
 between mother and child ; we have seen 
 the human family and human society thus 
 brought into existence ; and along therewith 
 we have recognized the necessity laid upon 
 each individual for conforming his conduct
 
 12.8 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 to a standard external to himself. At this 
 point, without encountering any breach of 
 continuity in the cosmic process, we crossed 
 the threshold of the ethical world, and en- 
 tered a region where civilization, or the 
 gradual perfecting of the spiritual qualities, 
 is henceforth Nature's paramount aim. To 
 penetrate further into this region would be 
 to follow the progress of civilization, while 
 the primitive canoe develops into the Cunard 
 steamship, the hieroglyphic battle-sketch 
 into epics and dramas, sun-catcher myths 
 into the Newtonian astronomy, wandering 
 tribes into mighty nations, the ethics of the 
 clan into the moral law for all men. The 
 story shows us Man becoming more and 
 more clearly the image of God, exercising 
 creative attributes, transforming his physi- 
 cal environment, incarnating his thoughts 
 in visible and tangible shapes all over the 
 world, and extorting from the abysses of 
 space the secrets of vanished ages. From 
 lowly beginnings, without breach of contin- 
 uity, and through the cumulative action of
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 129 
 
 minute and inconspicuous causes, the resist- 
 less momentum of cosmic events has tended 
 toward such kind of consummation ; and 
 part and parcel of the whole process, in- 
 separably wrapped up with every other part, 
 has been the evolution of the sentiments 
 which tend to subordinate mere egoism to 
 unselfish and moral ends. 
 
 A narrow or partial survey might fail to 
 make clear the solidarity of the cosmic pro- 
 cess. But the history of creation, when 
 broadly and patiently considered, brings 
 home to us with fresh emphasis the pro- 
 found truth of what Emerson once said, that 
 " the lesson of life ... is to believe what 
 the years and the centuries say against the 
 hours ; to resist the usurpation of partic- 
 ulars ; to penetrate to their catholic sense." 
 When we have learned this lesson, our mis- 
 givings vanish, and we breathe a clear atmo- 
 sphere of faith. Though in many ways God's 
 work is above our comprehension, yet those 
 parts of the world's story that we can de- 
 cipher well warrant the belief that while in
 
 Love and Self-Sacrifice 
 
 Nature there may be divine irony, there can 
 be no such thing as wanton mockery, for 
 profoundly underlying the surface entangle- 
 ment of her actions we may discern the 
 omnipresent ethical trend. The moral sen- 
 timents, the moral law, devotion to unself- 
 ish ends, disinterested love, nobility of 
 soul, these are Nature's most highly 
 wrought products, latest in coming to ma- 
 turity ; they are the consummation, toward 
 which all earlier prophecy has pointed. 
 We are right, then, in greeting the rejuve- 
 nescent summer with devout faith and hope. 
 Below the surface din and clashing of the 
 struggle for life we hear the undertone of 
 the deep ethical purpose, as it rolls in 
 solemn music through the ages, its volume 
 swelled by every victory, great or small, of 
 right over wrong, till in the fulness of time, 
 in God's own time, it shall burst forth in 
 the triumphant chorus of Humanity purified 
 and redeemed.
 
 THE EVERLASTING REALITY 
 OF RELIGION 
 
 Here sits he shaping wings to fly ; 
 His heart forebodes a mystery : 
 He names the name Eternity. 
 
 That type of Perfect in his mind 
 In Nature can he nowhere find, 
 He sows himself on every wind. 
 
 He seems to hear a Heavenly Friend, 
 And through thick veils to apprehend 
 A labour working to an end. 
 
 TENNYSON, The Two Voices.
 
 Deo erexit Voltaire" 
 
 HE visitor to Geneva whose studies 
 have made him duly acquainted 
 with the most interesting human 
 personality of all that are associated with 
 that historic city will never leave the place 
 without making a pilgrimage to the chateau 
 of Ferney. In that refined and quiet rural 
 homestead things still remain very much as 
 
 on the day when the aged Voltaire left it 
 
 i 
 
 for the last visit to Paris, where his long 
 life was worthily ended amid words and 
 deeds of affectionate homage. One may 
 sit down at the table where was written the 
 most perfect prose, perhaps, that ever flowed 
 from pen, and look about the little room 
 with its evidences of plain living and high 
 thinking, until one seems to recall the eccen- 
 tric figure of the vanished Master, with his
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 flashes of shrewd wisdom and caustic wit, 
 his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his con- 
 suming hatred of bigotry and oppression, 
 his merciless contempt for shams, his bound- 
 less enthusiasm of humanity. As we stroll 
 in the park, that quaint presence goes along 
 with us till all at once in a shady walk we 
 come upon something highly significant and 
 characteristic, the little parish church with 
 its Latin inscription over the portal, Deo 
 erexit Voltaire, i. e. "Voltaire built it for 
 God," and as we muse upon it, the piercing 
 eyes and sardonic but not unkindly smile 
 seem still to follow us. What meant this 
 eccentric inscription ? 
 
 When Voltaire became possessor of the 
 manor of Ferney, the church was badly out 
 of repair, and stood where it obstructed the 
 view from certain windows of the chateau. 
 So he had it cleared away, and built in a 
 better spot the new church that is still 
 there. It was duly consecrated, and the 
 Pope further hallowed it with some relics 
 of ancient saints, and there for many a
 
 Reality of Religion 135 
 
 year the tenants and dependents of the 
 manor assembled for divine service. No- 
 where in France had Voltaire ever seen a 
 church dedicated simply to God ; it was 
 always to Our Lady of This or Saint So- 
 and-so of That ; always there was some in- 
 termediary between the devout soul and the 
 God of its worship. Not thus should it be 
 with Voltaire's church, built upon his own 
 estate to minister to the spiritual needs of 
 his people. It should be dedicated simply 
 and without further qualification to the wor- 
 ship and service of God. Furthermore, it 
 was built and dedicated, not by any ecclesi- 
 astical or corporate body, but by the lord of 
 that manor, the individual layman, Voltaire. 
 This, I say, was highly characteristic and 
 significant. It gave terse and pointed ex- 
 pression to Voltaire's way of looking at 
 such things. Church and theology were 
 ignored, and the individual soul was left 
 alone with its God. The Protestant re- 
 formers and other freethinkers had stopped 
 far short of this. In place of an infallible
 
 / 36 Reality of Religion 
 
 Church they had left an infallible Book ; if 
 they rejected transubstantiation, they re- 
 tained as obligatory such doctrines as those 
 of the incarnation and atonement ; if they 
 laughed at the miracles of mediaeval saints, 
 they would allow no discredit to be thrown 
 upon those of the apostolic age ; in short, 
 they left standing a large part, if not the 
 larger part, of the supernatural edifice 
 within which the religious mind of Europe 
 had so long been sheltered. But Voltaire 
 regarded that whole supernatural edifice as 
 so much rubbish which was impeding the 
 free development of the human mind, and 
 ought as quickly as possible to be torn to 
 pieces and cleared away. His emotions as 
 well as his reason were concerned in this 
 conclusion. Organized Christianity, as it 
 then existed in France, was responsible for 
 much atrocious injustice, and in neighbour- 
 ing lands the Inquisition still existed. Ec- 
 clesiastical bigotry, the prejudice of igno- 
 rance, whatever tended to hold people in 
 darkness and restrain them from the free
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 and natural use of their faculties, Voltaire 
 hated with all the intensity of which he 
 was capable. He summed it all up in one 
 abstract term and personified it as " The 
 Infamous," and the watchword of that life 
 of tireless vigilance was " Crush the In- 
 famous ! " Supernatural theology had been 
 too often pressed into the service of " The 
 Infamous," and for supernatural theology 
 Voltaire could find no place in his scheme 
 of things. He lost no chance of assailing 
 it with mockery and sarcasm made terrible 
 by the earnestness of his purpose, until he 
 came in many quarters to be regarded as 
 the most inveterate antagonist the Church 
 had ever known. 
 
 Yet among the great men of letters in 
 France contemporary with Voltaire, the 
 most part went immeasurably farther than 
 he, and went in a different direction withal, 
 for they denied the reality of Religion. 
 Few of them, indeed, believed in the exist- 
 ence of God, or would have had anything 
 to do with building a house of worship.
 
 138 Reality of Religion 
 
 It is related of David Hume that when din- 
 ing once in a party of eighteen at the house 
 of Baron d'Holbach, he expressed a doubt 
 as to whether any person could anywhere 
 be found to avow himself dogmatically an 
 atheist. " Indeed, my dear sir," quoth the 
 host, " you are this moment sitting at table 
 with seventeen such persons." Among 
 that group of philosophers were men of 
 great intelligence and lofty purpose, such 
 as D'Alembert, Diderot, Helv^tius, Con- 
 dorcet, Buffon, men with more of the real 
 spirit of Christianity in their natures than 
 could be found in half the churches of 
 Christendom. The roots of their atheism 
 were emotional rather than philosophical. 
 It was part of the generous but rash and 
 superficial impatience with which they dis- 
 owned all connection whatever with a 
 Church that had become subservient to so 
 much that was bad. Their atheism was 
 one of the fruits of the vicious policy which 
 had suppressed Huguenotism in France ; it 
 was an early instance of what has since
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 been 'often observed, that materialism and 
 atheism are much more apt to flourish in 
 Romanist than in Protestant countries. 
 The form of religion which is already to 
 some extent purified and rationalized awak- 
 ens no such violent revulsion in free-think- 
 ing minds as the form that is more heavily 
 encumbered with remnants of obsolete 
 primitive thought. Moreover, the ration- 
 alizing religion of Protestant countries is 
 commonly found in alliance with political 
 freedom. In France under the Old Regime, 
 the Catholic religion was stigmatized as an 
 ally of despotism, as well as a congeries of 
 absurd doctrines and ceremonies. The best 
 minds felt their common sense shocked 
 by it no less than their reason. No very 
 deep thinking was done on the subject ; 
 their treatment of it was in general ex- 
 tremely shallow. 
 
 The forms which religious sentiment had 
 assumed in the Middle Ages had become 
 unintelligible; the most highly endowed 
 minds were dead to the sublimity of Gothic
 
 140 Reality of Religion 
 
 architecture, and saw nothing but grotesque 
 folly in Dante's poetry. They seriously 
 believed that religious doctrines and eccle- 
 siastical government were originally elabo- 
 rate systems of fraud, devised by sagacious 
 and crafty tyrants for the sole purpose of 
 enslaving the multitude of mankind. No 
 discrimination was shown. They were as 
 ready to throw away belief in God as in the 
 miracles of St. Columba, and to scout at 
 the notion of a future life in the same 
 terms as those in which they denounced the 
 forged donation of Constantine. The flip- 
 pant ease with which they disposed of the 
 greatest questions, in crass ignorance of the 
 very nature of the problem to be solved, 
 was well illustrated in the remark of the 
 astronomer Lalande, that he had swept the 
 entire heavens with his telescope and found 
 no God there. A similar instance of missing 
 the point was furnished about fifty years 
 ago by the eminent physiologist Moleschott, 
 when he exclaimed, "No thought without 
 phosphorus," and congratulated himself that
 
 Reality of Religion 141 
 
 he had forever disposed of the human soul. 
 I am inclined to think that those are the 
 two remarks most colossal in their silliness 
 that ever appeared in print. 
 
 Very different in spirit was the acute 
 reply of Laplace when reminded by Napo- 
 leon that his great treatise on the dynam- 
 ics of the solar system contained no 
 allusion to God. " Sire," said Laplace, " I 
 had no need of that hypothesis." This 
 remark was profound in its truth, for it 
 meant that in order to give a specific ex- 
 planation of any single group of phenomena, 
 it will not do to appeal to divine action, 
 which is equally the source of all pheno- 
 mena. Science can deal only with secon- 
 dary causes. In the eighteenth century 
 men of science were learning that such is 
 the case ; men like Diderot and D'Alembert 
 had come to realize it, and they believed 
 that the logical result was atheism. This 
 was because the only idea of God which 
 they had ever been taught to entertain was 
 the Latin idea of a God remote from the
 
 142 Reality of Religion 
 
 world and manifested only through occa- 
 sional interferences with the order of na- 
 ture. When they dismissed this idea they 
 declared themselves atheists. If they had 
 been familiar with the Greek idea of God 
 as immanent in the world and manifested 
 at every moment through the orderly se- 
 quence of its phenomena, their conclusions 
 would doubtless have been very different. 
 
 To these philosophers Voltaire's un- 
 shaken theism seemed a mere bit of eccen- 
 tric conservatism. But along with that 
 queer and intensely independent personal- 
 ity there went a stronger intellectual grasp 
 and a more calm intellectual vision than 
 belonged to any other Frenchman of the 
 eighteenth century. In the facts of Na- 
 ture, despite the lifeless piecemeal fashion 
 in which they were then studied, Voltaire 
 saw a rational principle at work which athe- 
 ism could in nowise account for. To him 
 the universe seemed full of evidences of 
 beneficent purpose, and more than once 
 he set forth with eloquence and power the
 
 Reality of Religion 143 
 
 famous argument from design, which is as 
 old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and which 
 received its fullest development at the 
 hands of Paley and the authors of the 
 Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet 
 another significance added to the little 
 church at Ferney. Not only was it the sole 
 church in France dedicated simply to God, 
 and not only was its builder a layman hos- 
 tile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, 
 but he was almost alone among the emi- 
 nent freethinkers of his age and country 
 in believing in God and asserting the ever- 
 lasting reality of religion. 
 
 It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire 
 as a kind of text for the present discourse ; 
 for it is my purpose to show that, apart 
 from all questions of revelation, the light 
 of nature affords us sufficient ground for 
 maintaining that religion is fundamentally 
 true and must endure forever. It appears 
 to me, moreover, that the materialism of 
 the present day is merely a tradition handed 
 down from the French writers whom Vol-
 
 144 Reality of Religion 
 
 taire combated. When Moleschott made 
 his silly remark about phosphorus, it was 
 simply an inheritance of silliness from La- 
 lande. When Haeckel tells us that the 
 doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe 
 in a future life, it is not because he has 
 rationally deduced such a conclusion from 
 the doctrine, but because he takes his opin- 
 ions on such matters ready-made from Lud- 
 wig Biichner, who is simply an echo of the 
 eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We 
 shall see that the doctrine of evolution 
 has implications very different from what 
 Haeckel supposes. 
 
 But first let me observe in passing that 
 in the English-speaking world there has 
 never been any such divorce between ra- 
 tionalism and religion as in France, and 
 among the glories of English literature are 
 such deeply reverent and profoundly philo- 
 sophical writings as those of Hooker and 
 Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jona- 
 than Edwards, and in our own time of Dr. 
 Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps,
 
 Reality of Religion 145 
 
 have faith and reason been more harmo- 
 niously wedded together than in the his- 
 tory of English Protestantism. But the 
 disturbance that affected France in the age 
 of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian 
 world, and every question connected with 
 religion has been probed to depths of which 
 the existence was scarcely suspected a cen- 
 tury ago. One seldom, indeed, hears the 
 frivolous mockery in which the old French 
 writers dealt so freely ; that was an ebulli- 
 tion of temper called forth by a tyranny 
 that had come to be a social nuisance. 
 The scepticism of our day is rather sad 
 than frivolous ; it drags people from long 
 cherished notions in spite of themselves ; it 
 spares but few that are active-minded ; it 
 invades the church, and does not stop in 
 the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit 
 and preaches. There is no refuge any- 
 where from this doubting and testing spirit 
 of the age. In the attitude of civilized men 
 towards the world in which we live, the 
 change of front has been stupendous ; the
 
 146 Reality of Religion 
 
 old cosmology has been overthrown in head- 
 long ruin, attacks upon doctrines have mul- 
 tiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures 
 are overhauled and criticised, until a young 
 generation grows up knowing nothing of 
 the sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by 
 hearsay ; for it sees everything in heaven 
 and earth called upon to show its creden- 
 tials.
 
 II 
 
 The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God 
 
 HE general effect of this intellect- 
 ual movement has been to discredit 
 more than ever before the Latin 
 idea of God as a power outside of the course 
 of nature and occasionally interfering with 
 it. In all directions the process of evolu- 
 tion has been discovered, working after 
 similar methods, and this has forced upon 
 us the belief in the Unity of Nature. We 
 are thus driven to the Greek conception of 
 God as the power working in and through 
 nature, without interference or infraction of 
 law. The element of chance, which some 
 atheists formerly admitted into their scheme 
 of things, is expelled. Nobody would now 
 waste his time in theorizing about a for- 
 tuitous concourse of atoms. We have so 
 far spelled out the history of creation as to
 
 148 Reality of Religion 
 
 see that all has been done in strict accord- 
 ance with law. The method has been the 
 method of evolution, and the more we study 
 it the more do we discern in it intelligible 
 coherence. One part of the story never 
 gives the lie to another part. 
 
 So beautiful is all this orderly coherence, 
 so satisfying to some of our intellectual 
 needs, that many minds are inclined to 
 doubt if anything more can be said of the 
 universe than that it is a Reign of Law, 
 an endless aggregate of coexistences and 
 sequences. When we say that one star 
 attracts another star, we do not really know 
 that there is any pulling in the case ; all we 
 know is that a piece of cosmical matter in 
 the presence of another piece of matter 
 alters its space-relations in a certain speci- 
 fied way. Among the coexistences and 
 sequences there is an order which we can 
 detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to 
 maintain that this is the whole story. Such 
 a state of mind, which rests satisfied with 
 the mere content of observed facts, without
 
 Reality of Religion 149 
 
 seeking to trace their ultimate implications, 
 is the characteristic of what Auguste Comte 
 called Positivism. It is a more refined 
 phase of atheism than that of the guests at 
 Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are 
 few ; for the impetus of modern scientific 
 thought tends with overwhelming force 
 towards the conception of a single First 
 Cause, or Prime Mover, perpetually mani- 
 fested from moment to moment in all the 
 Protean changes that make up the universe. 
 As I have elsewhere sought to show, this 
 is practically identical with the Athanasian 
 conception of the immanent Deity. 1 Mod- 
 ern men of science often call this view of 
 things Monism, but if questioned narrowly 
 concerning the immanent First Cause, they 
 reply with a general disclaimer of know- 
 ledge, and thus entitle themselves to 
 be called by Huxley's term " Agnostics." 
 Thirty-five years ago Spencer, taking a hint 
 from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase 
 
 1 The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge, 
 Boston, 1885.
 
 750 Reality of Religion 
 
 "The Unknowable" as an equivalent for 
 the immanent Deity considered per se ; but 
 I always avoid that phrase, for in practice 
 it invariably leads to wrong conceptions, 
 and naturally, since it only expresses one 
 side of the truth. If on the one hand it is 
 impossible for the finite Mind to fathom 
 the Infinite, on the other hand it is prac- 
 tically misleading to apply the term Un- 
 knowable to the Deity that is revealed in 
 every pulsation of the wondrously rich and 
 beautiful life of the Universe. For most 
 persons no amount of explanation will pre- 
 vent the use of the word Unknowable from 
 seeming to remove Deity to an unapproach- 
 able distance, whereas the Deity revealed 
 in the process of evolution is the ever-pre- 
 sent God without whom not a sparrow falls 
 to the ground, and whose voice is heard in 
 each whisper of conscience, even while his 
 splendour dwells in the white ray from yon- 
 der star that began its earthward flight 
 while Abraham's shepherds watched their 
 flocks. It is clear that many persons have
 
 Reality of Religion 151 
 
 derived from Spencer's use of the word 
 Unknowable an impression that he intends 
 by means of metaphysics to refine God 
 away into nothing; whereas he no more 
 cherishes any such intention than did St. 
 Paul, when he asked, "Who hath known 
 the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his 
 counsellor?" no more than Isaiah did 
 when he declared that even as the heavens 
 are higher than the earth, so are Jehovah's 
 ways higher than our ways and his thoughts 
 than our thoughts.
 
 Ill 
 
 Weakness of Materialism 
 
 UST here comes along the materi- 
 alist and asks us some questions, 
 tries to serve on us a kind of meta- 
 physical writ of quo warranto. If modern 
 physics leads us inevitably to the concep- 
 tion of a single infinite Power manifested 
 in all the phenomena of the knowable Uni- 
 verse, by what authority do we identify that 
 Power with the indwelling Deity as con- 
 ceived by St. Athanasius ? The Athanasian 
 Deity is to some extent fashioned in Man's 
 image ; he is, to say the least, like the 
 psychical part of ourselves. After making 
 all possible allowances for the gulf which 
 separates that which is Infinite and Abso- 
 lute from that which is Finite and Relative, 
 an essential kinship is asserted between 
 God and the Human Soul. By what au-
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 thority, our materialist will ask, do we as- 
 sert any such kinship between the Human 
 Soul and the Power which modern physics 
 reveals as active throughout the universe ? 
 Is it not going far beyond our knowledge 
 to assert any such kinship ? And would it 
 not be more modest and becoming in us to 
 simply designate this ever active universal 
 Power by some purely scientific term, such 
 as Force ? 
 
 This argument is to-day a very familiar 
 one, and it wears a plausible aspect ; it is 
 couched in a spirit of scientific reserve, 
 which wins for it respectful consideration. 
 The modest and cautious spirit of science 
 has done so much for us, that it is always 
 wise to give due heed to its warnings. Let 
 us beware of going beyond our knowledge, 
 says the materialist. We know nothing 
 but phenomena as manifestations of an in- 
 dwelling force ; nor have we any ground 
 for supposing that there is anything psychi- 
 cal, or even quasi-psychical, in the universe 
 outside of the individual minds of men and
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 other animals. Moreover, continues the 
 materialist, the psychical phenomena of 
 which we are conscious reason, memory, 
 emotion, volition are but peculiarly con- 
 ditioned manifestations of the same indwell- 
 ing force which under other conditions ap- 
 pears as light or heat or electricity. All 
 such manifestations are fleeting, and be- 
 yond this world of fleeting phenomena we 
 have no warrant, either in science or in 
 common sense, for supposing that anything 
 whatever exists. This world that is cogni- 
 zable through the senses is all that there 
 is, and the story of it that we can decipher 
 by the aid of terrestrial experience is the 
 whole story ; the Unseen World is a mere 
 figment inherited from the untutored fancy 
 of primeval man. Such is the general view 
 of things which Materialism urges upon 
 us with the plea of scientific sobriety and 
 caution ; and to many minds, as already 
 observed, it wears a plausible aspect. 
 
 Nevertheless, when subjected to criti- 
 cism, this theory of things soon loses its
 
 Reality of Religion 755 
 
 sober and plausible appearance and is seen 
 to be eminently rash and shallow. In the 
 first place, there is no such correlation or 
 equivalence as is alleged between physical 
 forces and the phenomena of consciousness. 
 The correlations between different modes 
 of motion have been proved by actual quan- 
 titative measurement, and never could have 
 been proved in any other way. We know, 
 for example, that heat is a mode of motion ; 
 the heat that will raise the temperature of 
 a pound of water by one degree of Fahren- 
 heit is exactly equivalent to the motion of 
 772 pounds falling through a distance of 
 one foot. In similar wise we know that 
 light, electricity, and magnetism are modes 
 of motion, transferable one into another; 
 and, although precise measurements have 
 not been accomplished, there is no reason 
 for doubting that the changes in brain tis- 
 sue, which accompany each thought and 
 feeling, are also modes of motion, trans- 
 ferable into the other physical modes. But 
 thought and feeling themselves, which can
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 neither be weighed nor measured, do not 
 admit of being resolved into modes of mo- 
 tion. They do not enter into the closed 
 circuit of physical transformations, but 
 stand forever outside of it, and concentric 
 with that segment of the circuit which 
 passes through the brain. It may be that 
 thought and feeling could not continue to 
 exist if that physical segment of the circuit 
 were taken away. It may be that they 
 could. To assume that they could not is 
 surely the height of rash presumption. 
 The correlation of forces exhibits Mind as 
 in nowise a product of Matter, but as some- 
 thing in its growth and manifestations out- 
 side and parallel. It is incompatible with 
 the theory that the relation of the human 
 soul to the body is like that of music to the 
 harp ; but it is quite compatible with the 
 time-honoured theory of the human soul as 
 indwelling in the body and escaping from 
 it at death. 
 
 In the second place, when we come to 
 the denial of all kinship between the hu-
 
 Reality of Religion 757 
 
 man soul and the Infinite Power that is 
 revealed in all phenomena, the materialistic 
 theory raises difficulties as great as those 
 which it seeks to avoid. The difficulties 
 which it wishes to avoid are those which in- 
 evitably encumber the attempt to conceive 
 of Deity as Personality exerting volition 
 and cherishing intelligent purpose. Such 
 difficulties are undeniably great ; nay, they 
 are insuperable. When we speak of Intel- 
 ligence and Will and Personality, we must 
 use these words with the meanings in which 
 experience has clothed them, or we shall 
 soon find ourselves talking nonsense. The 
 only intelligence we know is strictly serial 
 in its nature, and is limited by the exist- 
 ence of independent objects of cognition. 
 What flight of analogy can bear us across 
 the gulf that divides such finite intelligence 
 from that unlimited Knowledge to which 
 all things past and future are ever present ? 
 Volition, as we know it, implies alternative 
 courses of action, antecedent motives, and 
 resulting effort. Like intelligence, its op-
 
 / 58 Reality of Religion 
 
 erations are serial. What, then, do we 
 really mean, if we speak of omnipresent 
 Volition achieving at one and the same mo- 
 ment an infinite variety of ends ? So, too, 
 with Personality : when we speak of per- 
 sonality that is not circumscribed by limits, 
 are we not using language from which all 
 the meaning has evaporated ? 
 
 Such difficulties are insurmountable. 
 Words which have gained their meanings 
 from finite experience of finite objects of 
 thought must inevitably falter and fail 
 when we seek to apply them to that which 
 is Infinite. But we do not mend matters 
 by employing terms taken from the inor- 
 ganic world rather than from human per- 
 sonality. To designate the universal Power 
 by some scientific term, such as Force, does 
 not help us in the least. All our experi- 
 ence of force is an experience of finite 
 forces antagonized by other forces. We 
 can frame no conception whatever of Infi- 
 nite Force comprising within itself all the 
 myriad antagonistic attractions and repul-
 
 Reality of Religion 759 
 
 sions in which the dynamic universe con- 
 sists. We go beyond our knowledge when 
 we speak of Infinite Force quite as much 
 as we do when we speak of Infinite Person- 
 ality. Indeed, no word or phrase which we 
 seek to apply to Deity can be other than 
 an extremely inadequate and unsatisfactory 
 symbol. From the very nature of the case 
 it must always be so, and if we once under- 
 stand the reason why, it need not vex or 
 puzzle us. 
 
 It is not only when we try to speculate 
 about Deity that we find ourselves encom- 
 passed with difficulties and are made to 
 realize how very short is our mental tether 
 in some directions. This world, in its com- 
 monest aspects, presents many baffling pro- 
 blems, of which it is sometimes wholesome 
 that we should be reminded. If you look 
 at a piece of iron, it seems solid ; it looks 
 as if its particles must be everywhere in 
 contact with one another. And yet, by 
 hammering, or by great pressure, or by in- 
 tense cold, the piece of iron may be com-
 
 160 Reality of Religion 
 
 pressed, so that it will occupy less space 
 than before. Evidently, then, its particles 
 are not in contact, but are separated from 
 one another by unoccupied tracts of envel- 
 oping space. In point of fact, these parti- 
 cles are atoms arranged after a complicated 
 fashion in clusters known as molecules. 
 The word atom means something that can- 
 not be cut. Now, are these iron atoms di- 
 visible or indivisible ? If they are divisible, 
 then what of the parts into which each one 
 can be divided ; are they also divisible ? 
 and so on forever. But if these iron atoms 
 are indivisible, how can we conceive such a 
 thing ? -Can we imagine two sides so close 
 together that no plane of cleavage could 
 pass between them ? Can we imagine co- 
 hesive tenacity too great to be overcome 
 by any assignable disruptive force, and 
 therefore infinite ? Suppose, now, we heat 
 this piece of iron to a white heat. Scien- 
 tific inquiry has revealed the fact that its 
 atom-clusters are floating in an ocean of 
 ether, in which are also floating the atom-
 
 Reality of Religion 161 
 
 clusters of other bodies and of the air about 
 us. The heating is the increase of wave 
 motion in this ether, until presently a sec- 
 ondary series of intensely rapid waves ap- 
 pear as white light. Now this ether would 
 seem to be of infinite rarity, since it does 
 not affect the weight of bodies, and yet its 
 wave-motions imply an elasticity far greater 
 than that of coiled steel. How can we im- 
 agine such powerful resilience combined 
 with such extreme tenacity ? 
 
 These are a few of the difficulties of con- 
 ception in which the study of physical sci- 
 ence abounds, and I cite them because it is 
 wholesome for us to bear in mind that such 
 difficulties are not confined to theological 
 subjects. They serve to show how our 
 powers of conceiving ideas are strictly lim- 
 ited by the nature of our experience. The 
 illustration just cited from the luminiferous 
 ether simply shows how during the past 
 century the study of radiant forces has in- 
 troduced us to a mode of material exist- 
 ence quite different from anything that had
 
 1 62 Reality of Religion 
 
 formerly been known or suspected. In this 
 mode of matter we find attributes united 
 which all previous experience had taught 
 us to regard as contradictory and incom- 
 patible. Yet the facts cannot be denied ; 
 hard as we may find it to frame the con- 
 ception, this light-bearing substance is at 
 the same time almost infinitely rare and al- 
 most infinitely resilient. If such difficulties 
 confront us upon the occasion of a fresh 
 extension of our knowledge of the physical 
 world, what must we expect when we come 
 to speculate upon the nature and modes of 
 existence of God ? Bearing this in mind, 
 let us proceed to consider the assumption 
 that the Infinite Power which is manifested 
 in the universe is essentially psychical in its 
 nature ; in other words, that between God 
 and the Human Soul there is real kinship, 
 although we may be unable to render any 
 scientific account of it. Let us consider 
 this assumption historically, and in the light 
 of our general knowledge of Evolution.
 
 IV 
 
 Religion's First Postulate : the Quasi-Human 
 God 
 
 T is with purpose that I use the 
 word assumption. As a matter of 
 history, the existence of a quasi- 
 human God has always been an assumption 
 or postulate. It is something which men 
 have all along taken for granted. It prob- 
 ably never occurred to anybody to try to 
 prove the existence of such a God until it 
 was doubted, and doubts on that subject 
 are very modern. Omitting from the ac- 
 count a few score of ingenious philosophers, 
 it may be said that all mankind, the wisest 
 and the simplest, have taken for granted 
 the existence of a Deity, or deities, of a 
 psychical nature more or less similar to 
 that of Humanity. Such a postulate has 
 formed a part of all human thinking from
 
 164 Reality of Religion 
 
 primitive ages down to the present time. 
 The forms in which it has appeared have 
 been myriad in number, but all have been 
 included in this same fundamental assump- 
 tion. The earliest forms were those which 
 we call fetishism and animism. In fetish- 
 ism the wind that blows a tree down is 
 endowed with personality and supposed to 
 exert conscious effort ; in animism some 
 ghost of a dead man is animating that gust 
 of wind. In either case a conscious voli- 
 tion similar to our own, but outside of us, 
 is supposed to be at work. There has been 
 some discussion as to whether fetishism or 
 animism is the more primitive, and some 
 writers would regard fetishism as a special 
 case of animism ; but it is not necessary 
 to my present purpose that such questions 
 should be settled. The main point is this, 
 that in the earliest phases of theism each 
 operation of Nature was supposed to have 
 some quasi-human personality behind it. 
 Such phases we find among contemporary 
 savages, and there is abundant evidence of
 
 Reality of Religion 165 
 
 their former existence among peoples now 
 civilized. In the course of ages there was 
 a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon 
 could shake the land and preside over the 
 sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows tipped 
 with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could 
 play pranks in the summer breezes, while 
 as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful 
 sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olym- 
 pus, gathering the rain-clouds and wielding 
 the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing 
 knowledge of nature was needed to convert 
 such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into 
 the strict Monotheism of our own time, in 
 which the whole universe is the multiform 
 manifestation of a single Deity that is still 
 regarded as in some real and true sense 
 quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has 
 thus been gradually generalized, from a 
 thousand local gods to one omnipresent 
 God, it has been gradually stripped of its 
 grosser anthropomorphic vestments. The 
 tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed 
 to share with his devout worshippers in the
 
 1 66 Reality of Religion 
 
 cannibal banquet ; the Gods of Olympus 
 made war and love, and were moved to fits 
 of inextinguishable laughter. From our 
 modern Monotheism such accidents of hu- 
 manity are eliminated, but the notion of a 
 kinship between God and man remains, and 
 is rightly felt to be essential to theism. 
 Take away from our notion of God the hu- 
 man element, and the theism instantly van- 
 ishes ; it ceases to be a notion of God. We 
 may retain an abstract symbol to which 
 we apply some such epithet as Force, or 
 Energy, or Power, but there is nothing the- 
 istic in this. Some ingenious philosopher 
 may try to persuade us to the contrary, but 
 the Human Soul knows better; it knows 
 at least what it wants ; it has asked for 
 Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents 
 all such attempts to palm off upon it stones 
 for bread. 
 
 Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up 
 his hands in dismay and cry, " Hold ! what 
 matters it what the Human Soul wants ? 
 Are cravings, forsooth, to be made to do
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 duty as reasons ? " It is proper to reply 
 that we are trying to deal with this whole 
 subject after the manner of the naturalist, 
 which is to describe things as they exist 
 and account for them as best we may. I 
 say, then, that mankind have framed, and 
 for long ages maintained, a notion of God 
 into which there enters a human element. 
 Now if it should ever be possible to abolish 
 that human element, it would not be pos- 
 sible to cheat mankind into accepting the 
 non-human remnant of the notion as an 
 equivalent of the full notion of which they 
 had been deprived. Take away from our 
 symbolic conception of God the human ele- 
 ment, and that aspect of theism which has 
 from the outset chiefly interested mankind 
 is gone.
 
 Religion's Second Postulate : the undying Hu- 
 man Soul 
 
 HAT supremely interesting aspect 
 of theism belongs to it as part and 
 parcel of the general belief in an 
 Unseen World, in which human beings 
 have an interest. The belief in the per- 
 sonal continuance of the individual human 
 soul after death is a very ancient one. The 
 savage custom of burying utensils and 
 trinkets for the use of the deceased enables 
 us to trace it back into the Glacial Period. 
 We may safely say that for much more 
 than a hundred thousand years mankind 
 have regarded themselves as personally in- 
 terested in two worlds, the physical world 
 which daily greets our waking senses, 
 and another world, comparatively dim and 
 vaguely outlined, with which the psychical
 
 Reality of Religion 169 
 
 side of humanity is more closely connected. 
 The belief in the Unseen World seems to 
 be coextensive with theism ; the animism 
 of the lowest savages includes both. No 
 race or tribe of men has ever been found 
 destitute of the belief in a ghost-world. 
 Now, a ghost-world implies the personal 
 continuance of human beings after death, 
 and it also implies identity of nature be- 
 tween the ghosts of man and the indwell- 
 ing spirits of sun, wind, and flood. It is 
 chiefly because these ideas are so closely 
 interwoven in savage thought that it is 
 often so difficult to discriminate between 
 fetishism and animism. These savage ideas 
 are of course extremely crude in their sym- 
 bolism. With the gradual civilization of 
 human thinking, the refinement in the con- 
 ception of the Deity is paralleled by the 
 refinement in the conception of the Other 
 World. From Valhalla to Dante's Para- 
 dise, what an immeasurable distance the 
 human mind has travelled ! In our modern 
 Monotheism the assumption of kinship be-
 
 i "jo Reality of Religion 
 
 tween God and the Human Soul is the as- 
 sumption that there is in Man a psychical 
 element identical in nature with that which 
 is eternal. Belief in a quasi-human God 
 and belief in the Soul's immortality thus 
 appear in their origin and development, as 
 in their ultimate significance, to be insepa- 
 rably connected. They are part and parcel 
 of one and the same efflorescence of the 
 human mind. Mankind has always enter- 
 tained them in common, and so entertains 
 them now ; and were it possible (which it 
 is not) for science to disprove the Soul's 
 immortality, a theism deprived of this ele- 
 ment would surely never be accepted as 
 an equivalent for the theism entertained 
 before. The Positivist argument that the 
 only worthy immortality is survival in the 
 grateful remembrance of one's fellow crea- 
 tures would hardly be regarded as anything 
 but a travesty and trick. If the world's 
 long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's 
 name let them fall, but save us from the 
 intellectual hypocrisy that goes about pre- 
 tending we are none the poorer !
 
 VI 
 
 Religion's Third Postulate : the Ethical Sig- 
 nificance of the Unseen World 
 
 UR account of the rise and progress 
 of the general belief in an Unseen 
 World is, however, not yet com- 
 plete. No mention has been made of an 
 element which apparently has always been 
 present in the belief. I mean the ethical 
 element. The savage's primeval ghost- 
 world is always mixed up with his childlike 
 notions of what he ought to do and what 
 he ought not to do. The native of Tierra 
 del Fuego, who foreboded a snowstorm 
 because one of Mr. Darwin's party killed 
 some birds for specimens, furnishes an 
 excellent illustration. In a tribe living 
 always on the brink of starvation, any wan- 
 ton sacrifice of meat must awaken the 
 wrath of the tutelar ancestral ghost-deities
 
 ij2 Reality of Religion 
 
 who control the weather. Notions of a simi- 
 lar sort are connected with the direful host 
 of omens that dog the savage's footsteps 
 through the world. Whatever conduct the 
 necessities of clan or tribe have prohibited 
 soon comes to wear the aspect of sacrilege. 
 Thus inextricably intertwined from the 
 moment of their first dim dawning upon the 
 consciousness of nascent Humanity, have 
 been the notion of Deity, the notion of an 
 Unseen World, and the notions of Right 
 and Wrong. In their beginnings theology 
 and ethics were inseparable ; in all the vast 
 historic development of religion they have 
 remained inseparable. The grotesque con- 
 ceptions of primitive men have given place 
 to conceptions framed after wider and 
 deeper experience, but the union of ethics 
 with theology remains undisturbed even 
 in that most refined religious philosophy 
 which ventures no opinion concerning the 
 happiness or misery of a future life, except 
 that the seed sown here will naturally de- 
 termine the fruit to be gathered hereafter.
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 All the analogies that modern knowledge 
 can bring to bear upon the theory of a 
 future life point to the opinion that the 
 breach of physical continuity is not accom- 
 panied by any breach of ethical continuity. 
 Such an opinion relating to matters be- 
 yond experience cannot of course be called 
 scientific, but whether it be justifiable or 
 not, my point is that neither in the crude 
 fancies of primitive men nor in the most 
 refined modern philosophy can theology 
 divorce itself from ethics. Take away the 
 ethical significance from our conceptions of 
 the Unseen World and the quasi-human 
 God, and no element of significance re- 
 mains. All that was vital in theism is 
 gone.
 
 VII 
 
 Is the Substance of Religion a Phantom, or an 
 Eternal Reality ? 
 
 E are now prepared to see what is 
 involved in the Reality of Reli- 
 gion. Speaking historically, it may 
 be said that Religion has always had two 
 sides : on the one side it has consisted of a 
 theory, more or less elaborate, and on the 
 other side it has consisted of a group of 
 sentiments conformable to the theory. 
 Now in all ages and in every form of Reli- 
 gion, the theory has comprised three essen- 
 tial elements : first, belief in Deity, as 
 quasi-human ; secondly, belief in an Un- 
 seen World in which human beings con- 
 tinue to exist after death ; thirdly, recogni- 
 tion of the ethical aspects of human life as 
 related in a special and intimate sense to 
 this Unseen World. These three elements
 
 Reality of Religion 775 
 
 are alike indispensable. If any one of the 
 three be taken away, the remnant cannot 
 properly be called Religion. Is then the 
 subject-matter of Religion something real 
 and substantial, or is it a mere figment of 
 the imagination ? Has Religion through 
 all these weary centuries been dealing with 
 an eternal verity, or has it been blindly 
 groping after a phantom ? Can that his- 
 tory of the universe which we call the Doc- 
 trine of Evolution be made to furnish any 
 lesson that will prove helpful in answering 
 this question ? We shall find, I think, that 
 it does furnish such a lesson. 
 
 But first let us remember that along with 
 the three indispensable elements here spe- 
 cified, every historic Religion has also con- 
 tained a quantity of cosmological specula- 
 tions, metaphysical doctrines, priestly rites 
 and ceremonies and injunctions, and a very 
 considerable part of this structure has been 
 demolished by modern criticism. The de- 
 struction of beliefs has been so great that 
 we can hardly think it strange if some
 
 /7<5 Reality of Religion 
 
 critics have taken it into their heads that 
 nothing can be rescued. But let us see 
 what the doctrine of evolution has to say. 
 Our inquiry may seem to take us very far 
 afield, but that we need not mind if we 
 find the answer by and by directing us 
 homeward.
 
 VIII 
 
 The Fundamental Aspect of Life 
 
 OFTEN think, when working over 
 my plants, of what Linnaeus once 
 said of the unfolding of a blossom : 
 " I saw God in His glory passing near me, 
 and bowed my head in worship." The sci- 
 entific aspect of the same thought has been 
 put into words by Tennyson : 
 
 " Flower in the crannied wall, 
 I pluck you out of the crannies, 
 I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
 Little flower, but if I could understand 
 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
 I should know what God and man is.' 7 
 
 No deeper thought was ever uttered by 
 poet. For in this world of plants, which 
 with its magician chlorophyll conjuring 
 with sunbeams is ceaselessly at work bring- 
 ing life out of death, in this quiet vege- 
 table world we may find the elementary
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 principles of all life in almost visible opera- 
 tion. It is one of these elementary princi- 
 ples a very simple and broad one that 
 here concerns us. 
 
 One of the greatest contributions ever 
 made to scientific knowledge is Herbert 
 Spencer's profound and luminous exposi- 
 tion of Life as the continuous adjustment 
 of inner relations to outer relations. The 
 extreme simplicity of the subject in its 
 earliest illustrations is such that the stu- 
 dent at first hardly suspects the wealth of 
 knowledge toward which it is pointing the 
 way. The most fundamental characteristic 
 of living things is their response to external 
 stimuli If you come upon a dog lying by 
 the roadside and are in doubt whether he 
 is alive or dead, you poke him with a stick ; 
 if you get no response you presently con- 
 clude that it is a dead dog. So if the tree 
 fails to put forth leaves in response to the 
 rising vernal temperature, it is an indication 
 of death. Pour water on a drooping plant, 
 and it shows its life by rearing its head.
 
 Reality of Religion \jg 
 
 The growth of a plant is in its ultimate 
 analysis a group of motions put forth in 
 adjustment to a group of physical and 
 chemical conditions in the soil and atmos- 
 phere. A fine illustration is the spiral dis- 
 tribution of leaves about the stem, at dif- 
 ferent angular intervals in different kinds of 
 plants, but always so arranged as to ensure 
 the most complete exposure of the chlo- 
 rophyll to the sunbeams. Every feature 
 of the plant is explicable on similar prin- 
 ciples. It is the result of a continuous 
 adjustment of relations within the plant to 
 relations existing outside of it. It is im- 
 portant that we should form a clear concep- 
 tion of this, and a contrasted instance will 
 help us. Take one of those storm-glasses 
 in which the approach of atmospheric dis- 
 turbance sets up a feathery crystallization 
 that changes in shape and distribution as 
 the state of the air outside changes. Here 
 is something that simulates vegetable life, 
 but there is a profound difference. In 
 every one of these changes the liquid in
 
 180 Reality of Religion 
 
 the storm-glass is passive ; it is changed and 
 waits until it is changed again. But in the 
 case of a tree, when the increased supply 
 of solar radiance in spring causes those in- 
 ternal motions which result in the putting 
 forth of leaves, it is quite another affair. 
 Here the external change sets up an in- 
 ternal change which leads to a second in- 
 ternal change that anticipates a second 
 external change. It is this active response 
 that is the mark of life. 
 
 All life upon the globe, whether physical 
 or psychical, represents the continuous ad- 
 justment of inner to outer relations. The 
 degree of life is low or high, according as 
 the correspondence between internal and 
 external relations is simple or complex, 
 limited or extensive, partial or complete, 
 perfect or imperfect. The relations estab- 
 lished within a plant answer only to the 
 presence or absence of a certain quantity 
 of light and heat, and to sundry chemical 
 and physical relations in atmosphere and 
 soil. In a polyp, besides general relations
 
 Reality of Religion 181 
 
 similar to these, certain more special rela- 
 tions are established in correspondence 
 with the eternal existence of mechanical 
 irritants ; as when its tentacles contract oh 
 being touched. The increase of extension 
 acquired by the correspondences as we 
 ascend the animal scale may be seen by 
 contrasting the polyp, which can simply 
 distinguish between soluble and insoluble 
 matter, or between opacity and translu- 
 cence in its environment, with the keen- 
 scented bloodhound and the far-sighted 
 vulture. And the increase of complexity 
 may be appreciated by comparing the mo- 
 tions respectively gone through by the 
 polyp on the one hand, and by the dog and 
 vulture on the other, while securing and 
 disposing of their prey. The more specific 
 and accurate, the more complex and exten- 
 sive, is the response to environing relations, 
 the higher and richer, we say, is the life.
 
 IX 
 
 How the Evolution of Senses expands the 
 World 
 
 HE whole progression of life upon 
 the globe, in so far as it has been 
 achieved through natural selection, 
 has consisted in the preservation and the 
 propagation of those living creatures in 
 whom the adjustment of inner relations to 
 outer relations is most successful. This is 
 only a more detailed and descriptive way of 
 saying that natural selection is equivalent 
 to survival of the fittest. The shapes of 
 animals, as well as their capacities, have 
 been evolved through almost infinitely slow 
 increments of adjustment upon adjustment. 
 In this way, for instance, has been evolved 
 the vertebrate skeleton, through a process 
 of which Spencer's wonderful analysis is 
 as thrilling as a poem. Or consider the
 
 Reality of Religion 183 
 
 development of the special organs of sense. 
 Among the most startling disclosures of 
 embryology are those which relate to this 
 subject. The most perfect organs of touch 
 are the vibrissce or whiskers of the cat, 
 which act as long levers in communicating 
 impulses to the nerve-fibres that terminate 
 in clusters about the dermal sacs in which 
 they are inserted. These cat-whiskers are 
 merely specialized forms of such hairs as 
 those which cover the bodies of most mam- 
 mals, and which remain in evanescent shape 
 upon the human skin imbedded in minute 
 sacs. Now in their origin the eye and ear 
 are identical with vibrissce. In the early 
 stages of vertebrate life, while the differen- 
 tiations of dermal tissue went mostly to 
 the production of hairs or feathers or 
 scales, sundry special differentiations went 
 to the production of ears and eyes. Em- 
 bryology shows that in mammals the bulb 
 of the eye and the auditory chamber are ex- 
 tremely metamorphosed hair-sacs, the crys- 
 talline lens is a differentiated hair, and the
 
 184 Reality of Religion 
 
 aqueous and vitreous humours are liquefied 
 dermal tissue ! The implication of these 
 wonderful facts is that sight and hearing 
 were slowly differentiated from the sense 
 of touch. One can seem to discern how in 
 the history of the eye there was at first a 
 concentration of pigment grains in a par- 
 ticular dermal sac, making that spot excep- 
 tionally sensitive to light; then came by 
 slow degrees the heightened translucence, 
 the convexity of surface, the refracting 
 humours, and the multiplication of nerve- 
 vesicles arranging themselves as retinal 
 rods. And what was the result of all this 
 for the creature in whom organs of vision 
 were thus developed ? There was an im- 
 mense extension of the range, complexity, 
 and definiteness of the adjustment of inner 
 relations to outer relations ; in other words, 
 there was an immense increase of life. 
 There came into existence, moreover, for 
 those with eyes to see it, a mighty visible 
 world that for sightless creatures had been 
 virtually non-existent.
 
 Reality of Religion 185 
 
 With the further progress of organic life, 
 the high development of the senses was 
 attended or followed by increase of brain 
 development and the correlative intelli- 
 gence, immeasurably enlarging the scope 
 of the correspondences between the living 
 creature and the outer world. In the case 
 of Man, the adjustments by which we meet 
 the exigencies of life from day to day are 
 largely psychical, achieved by the aid of 
 ideal representations of environing circum- 
 stances. Our actions are guided by our 
 theory of the situation, and it needs no 
 illustration to show us that a true theory is 
 an adjustment of one's ideas to the external 
 facts, and that such adjustments are helps 
 to successful living. The whole worth of 
 education is directed toward cultivating the 
 capacity of framing associations of ideas 
 that conform to objective facts. It is thus 
 that life is guided.
 
 X 
 
 Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 O as we look back over the marvel- 
 lous life-history of our planet, even 
 from the dull time when there was 
 no life more exalted than that of conferva 
 scum on the surface of a pool, through 
 ages innumerable until the present time 
 when Man is learning how to decipher Na- 
 ture's secrets, we look back over an infi- 
 nitely slow series of minute adjustments, 
 gradually and laboriously increasing the 
 points of contact between the inner Life 
 and the World environing. Step by step 
 in the upward advance toward Humanity 
 the environment has enlarged. The world 
 of the fresh-water alga was its tiny pool 
 during its brief term of existence ; the 
 world of civilized man comprehends the
 
 Reality of Religion i8j 
 
 stellar universe during countless aeons of 
 time. Every stage of enlargement has had 
 reference to actual existences outside. The 
 eye was developed in response to the out- 
 ward existence of radiant light, the ear in 
 response to the outward existence of acous- 
 tic vibrations, the mother's love came in 
 response to the infant's needs, fidelity and 
 honour were slowly developed as the nas- 
 cent social life required them ; everywhere 
 the internal adjustment has been brought 
 about so as to harmonize with some actually 
 existing external fact. Such has been Na- 
 ture's method, such is the deepest law of 
 life that science has been able to detect. 
 
 Now there was a critical moment in the 
 history of our planet, when love was begin- 
 ning to play a part hitherto unknown, when 
 notions of right and wrong were germinat- 
 ing in the nascent Human Soul, when the 
 family was coming into existence, % when 
 social ties were beginning to be knit, when 
 winged words first took their flight through 
 the air. It was the moment when the pro-
 
 1 88 Reality of Religion 
 
 cess of evolution was being shifted to a 
 higher plane, when civilization was to be 
 superadded to organic evolution, when the 
 last and highest of creatures was coming 
 upon the scene, when the dramatic purpose 
 of creation was approaching fulfilment. 
 At that critical moment we see the nascent 
 Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward 
 something akin to itself not in the realm 
 of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal 
 Presence beyond. An internal adjustment 
 of ideas was achieved in correspondence 
 with an Unseen World. That the ideas 
 were very crude and childlike, that they 
 were put together with all manner of gro- 
 tesqueness, is what might be expected. 
 The cardinal fact is that the crude child- 
 like mind was groping to put itself into 
 relation with an ethical world not visible to 
 the senses. And one aspect of this fact, 
 not to, be lightly passed over, is the fact 
 that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene 
 coeval with the birth of Humanity, has 
 played such a dominant part in the subse-
 
 Reality of Religion 189 
 
 quent evolution of human society that what 
 history would be without it is quite beyond 
 imagination. As to the dimensions of this 
 cardinal fact there can thus be no question. 
 None can deny that it is the largest and 
 most ubiquitous fact connected with the 
 existence of mankind upon the earth. 
 
 Now if the relation thus established in 
 the morning twilight of Man's existence 
 between the Human Soul and a world in- 
 visible and immaterial is a relation of which 
 only the subjective term is real and the ob- 
 jective term is non-existent, then, I say, it 
 is something utterly without precedent in 
 the whole history of creation. All the ana- 
 logies of Evolution, so far as we have yet 
 been able to decipher it, are overwhelming 
 against any such supposition. To suppose 
 that during countless ages, from the sea- 
 weed up to Man, the progress of life was 
 achieved through adjustments to external 
 realities, but that then the method was all 
 at once changed and throughout a vast 
 province of evolution the end was secured
 
 /po Reality of Religion 
 
 through adjustments to external non-reali- 
 ties, is to do sheer violence to logic and to 
 common sense. Or, to vary the form of 
 statement, since every adjustment whereby 
 any creature sustains life may be called a 
 true step, and every maladjustment whereby 
 life is wrecked may be called a false step ; 
 if we are asked to believe that Nature, after 
 having throughout the whole round of her 
 inferior products achieved results through 
 the accumulation of all true steps and piti- 
 less rejection of all false steps, suddenly 
 changed her method and in the case of 
 her highest product began achieving results 
 through the accumulation of false steps ; I 
 say we are entitled to resent such a sug- 
 gestion as an insult to our understandings. 
 All the analogies of Nature fairly shout 
 against the assumption of such a breach of 
 continuity between the evolution of Man 
 and all previous evolution. So far as our 
 knowledge of Nature goes the whole mo- 
 mentum of it carries us onward to the 
 conclusion that the Unseen World, as the
 
 Reality of Religion igi 
 
 objective term in a relation of fundamental 
 importance that has coexisted with the 
 whole career of Mankind, has a real exist- 
 ence ; and it is but following out the ana- 
 logy to regard that Unseen World as the 
 theatre where the ethical process is destined 
 to reach its full consummation. The les- 
 son of evolution is that through all these 
 weary ages the Human Soul has not been 
 cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, 
 but in spite of seemingly endless groping 
 and stumbling it has been rising to the 
 recognition of its essential kinship with the 
 ever-living God. Of all the implications 
 of the doctrine of evolution with regard to 
 Man, I believe the veiy deepest and strong- 
 est to be that which asserts the Everlasting 
 Reality of Religion. 
 
 So far as I am aware, the foregoing argu- 
 ment is here advanced for the first time. It 
 does not pretend to meet the requirements 
 of scientific demonstration. One must not 
 look for scientific demonstration in pro- 
 blems that contain so many factors tran-
 
 Reality of Religion 
 
 scending our direct experience. But as an 
 appeal to our common sense, the argument 
 here brought forward surely has tremen- 
 dous weight. It seems to me far more 
 convincing than any chain of subtle meta- 
 physical reasoning can ever be ; for such 
 chains, however, invincible in appearance, 
 are no stronger than the weakest of their 
 links, and in metaphysics one is always un- 
 easily suspecting some undetected flaw. 
 My argument represents the impression 
 that is irresistibly forced upon one by a 
 broad general familiarity with Nature's pro- 
 cesses and methods ; it therefore belongs 
 to the class of arguments that survive. 
 
 Observe, too, that it is far from being a 
 modified repetition of the old argument 
 that beliefs universally accepted must be 
 true. Upon the view here presented, every 
 specific opinion ever entertained by man 
 respecting religious things may be wrong, 
 and in all probability is exceedingly crude, 
 and yet the Everlasting Reality of Reli- 
 gion, in its three indispensable elements as
 
 Reality of Religion 193 
 
 here set forth, remains unassailable. Our 
 common-sense argument puts the scientific 
 presumption entirely and decisively on the 
 side of religion and against all atheistic and 
 materialistic explanations of the universe. 
 It establishes harmony between our highest 
 knowledge and our highest aspirations by 
 showing that the latter no less than the 
 former are a normal result of the universal 
 cosmic process. It has nothing to fear 
 from the advance of scientific discovery, for 
 as these things come to be better under- 
 stood, it is going to be realized that the 
 days of the antagonism between Science 
 and Religion must by and by come to an 
 end. That antagonism has been chiefly 
 due to the fact that religious ideas were 
 until lately allied with the doctrine of spe- 
 cial creations. They have therefore needed 
 to be remodelled and considered from new 
 points of view. But we have at length 
 reached a stage where it is becoming daily 
 more and more apparent that with the 
 deeper study of Nature the old strife be-
 
 / 94 Reality of Religion 
 
 tween faith and knowledge is drawing to a 
 close ; and disentangled at last from that 
 ancient slough of despond the Human 
 Mind will breathe a freer air and enjoy a 
 vastly extended horizon.
 
 L'ENVOI 
 
 Yesterday, when weary with writing, and my mind quite 
 dusty with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and 
 a salad I had asked for was set before me. " It seems, then," 
 said I aloud, " that if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of 
 salt, drops of vinegar and oil, and slices of eggs, had been float- 
 ing about in the air from all eternity, it might at last happen 
 by chance that there would come a salad." " Yes," says my 
 wife, " but not so nice and well-dressed as this of mine is ! " 
 KEPLER, afud Tait and Stewart, Paradoxical Philosophy.
 
 BLECTROTYPED AND PRINTED 
 BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO. 
 
 fiitaegfltie 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.
 
 THE WRITINGS OF 
 JOHN FISKE. 
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 
 
 With some Account of Ancient America and the Spanish 
 
 Conquest. With a Steel Portrait of Mr. Fiske, many 
 
 Maps, Facsimiles, etc. 2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. 
 
 Those who care for geography and for primitive culture will 
 
 doubtless find this " Discovery of America," as we have found it, 
 
 one of the most agreeable and instructive books on both those topics 
 
 that have appeared in a good many years. . . . The book brings 
 
 together a great deal of information hitherto accessible only in 
 
 special treatises, and elucidates with care and judgment some of the 
 
 most perplexing problems in the history of discovery. The Speaker 
 
 (London). 
 
 OLD VIRGINIA AND HER 
 NEIGHBOURS. 
 
 With 6 Maps. 2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. 
 
 Mr. Fiske's " Old Virginia and Her Neighbours " adds another 
 to those valuable and delightful studies of our early history which 
 are fast approaching the completeness and adequacy of a compre- 
 hensive history of the beginnings of the American people. History 
 has rarely been invested with such interest and charm as in these 
 volumes. Tlie Outlook (New York.) 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW 
 ENGLAND ; 
 
 Or, The Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and 
 Religious Liberty. Crown 8vo, $2.00. Illustrated 
 Edition. Containing Portraits, Maps, Facsimiles, Con- 
 temporary Views, Prints, and other Historic Material. 
 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. 
 
 Having in the first chapters strikingly and convincingly shown 
 that New England's history was the birth of centuries of travail, 
 and having prepared his readers to estimate at their true importance 
 the events of our early colonial life, Mr. Fiske is ready to take up 
 his task as the historian of the New England of the Puritans. . . . 
 The last chapters give a broad and fair account of the history of the 
 time, but it is easy to see that in his choice of facts the author has 
 exercised a large power of selection, a selection which we may note 
 is wonderful in its unfailing accuracy of estimate. As he is busy 
 with the progress toward civil and religious liberty which culminated 
 in the Revolution, his facts are chosen to illustrate that progress. 
 Boston Daily A dvertiser.
 
 THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 
 
 With Plans of Battles, and a Steel Portrait of Washing- 
 ton. 2 vols. crown 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. Illustrated 
 Edition. Containing about joo Illustrations. 2 vols. 
 8vo, gilt top, $8.00. 
 
 The reader may turn to these volumes with full assurance of faith 
 for a fresh rehearsal of the old facts, which no time can stale, and for 
 new views of those old facts, according to the larger framework of 
 ideas in which they can now be set by the master of a captivating style 
 and an expert in historical philosophy. New York Evening Post. 
 
 THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 In Riverside Library for Young People. With Maps. 
 
 idmo, 7J" cents. 
 
 John Fiske's " War of Independence " is a miracle. ... A book 
 brilliant and effective beyond measure. ... It is a statement that 
 every child can comprehend, but that only a man of consummate 
 genius could have written. MRS. CAROLINE H. DALL, in the 
 Sf>ringjield Republican. 
 
 THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF 
 AMERICAN HISTORY, 1783-1789. 
 
 With Map, Notes, etc. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00. Illus- 
 trated Edition. Containing abottt 170 Illustrations. 
 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. 
 The author combines in an unusual degree the impartiality of the 
 
 trained scholar with the fervor of the interested narrator. . . . The 
 
 volume should be in every library in the land. The Congregatinn- 
 
 alist (Boston). 
 
 An admirable book. . . . Mr. Fiske has a great talent for making 
 
 history interesting to the general reader. New York Times. 
 
 A HISTORY OF THE UNITED 
 STATES FOR SCHOOLS. 
 
 With Topical Analysis, Suggestive Questions, and Direc- 
 tions for Teachers, by F. A. Hill, and Illustrations 
 and Maps. Crown 8vo, $7.00, net. 
 
 It is doubtful if Mr. Fiske has done anything better for his gen- 
 eration than the preparation of this text-book, which combines in a 
 rare degree accuracy, intelligent condensation, historical discrimina- 
 tion, and an attractive style. The Outlook (New York). 
 
 CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN THE 
 UNITED STATES. 
 
 Considered with some Reference to its Origins. With 
 Questions on the Text by Frank A. Hill, and Biblio- 
 graphical Notes by Mr. Fiskc. Crown 8vo, $1.00, net.
 
 It is most admirable, alike in plan and execution, and will do a 
 vast amount of good in teaching our people the principles and forms 
 of our civil institutions. MOSES COIT TYLER, Professor of Amer- 
 ican Constitutional History and Law, Cornell University. 
 
 OUTLINES OF COSMIC 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on 
 the Positive Philosophy. In two volumes. 8vo, $6.00. 
 
 You must allow me to thank you for the very great interest with 
 which I have at last slowly read the whole of your work. ... I 
 never in my life read so lucid an expositor (and therefore thinker) as 
 you are ; and I think that I understand nearly the whole, though 
 perhaps less clearly about cosmic theism and causation than other 
 parts. CHARLES DARWIN." 
 
 This work of Mr. Fiske's may be not unfairly designated the most 
 important contribution yet made by America to philosophical litera- 
 ture. The Academy (London). 
 
 DARWINISM, AND OTHER 
 ESSAYS. 
 
 Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 
 If ever there was a spirit thoroughly invigorated by the " joy of 
 right understanding," it is that of the author of these pieces. . . . 
 No less confident and serene than his acceptance of the utmost 
 logical results of recent scientific discovery is Mr. Fiske's assurance 
 that the foundations of spiritual truths, so called, cannot possibly be 
 shaken thereby. The Atlantic Monthly (Boston). 
 
 THE UNSEEN WORLD, 
 
 And Other Essays. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 To each study the writer seems to have brought, besides an ex- 
 cellent quality of discriminating judgment, full and fresh special 
 knowledge, that enables him to supply much information on the sub- 
 ject, whatever it may be, that is not to be found in the volume he is 
 noticing. Boston Advertiser. 
 
 EXCURSIONS OF AN 
 EVOLUTIONIST. 
 
 Crmun 8vo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 
 Among our thoughtful essayists there are none more brilliant than 
 Mr. John Fiske. His pure style suits his clear thought. He does 
 not write unless he has something to say ; and when he does write, 
 he shows not only that he has thoroughly acquainted himself with 
 the subject, but that he has to a rare degree the art of so massing 
 his matter as to bring out the true value of the leading points in 
 artistic relief. . . . The same qualities appear to good advantage in 
 his new volume, which contains his later essays on his favorite sub- 
 ject of evolution. The Nation (New York).
 
 MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS. 
 
 Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative 
 Mythology. Crown 8vo, gilt top, $2.00. 
 
 Mr. Fiske has given us a book which is at once sensible and at- 
 tractive, on a subject about which much is written that is crotchety 
 or tedious. W. R. S. RALSTON, in the Atkeneettm (London). 
 
 THE DESTINY OF MAN, 
 
 Viewed in the Light of his Origin, idtno, gilt top, $f.oo. 
 
 One is charmed by the directness and clearness of his style, his 
 simple and pure English, and his evident knowledge of his subject. 
 . . . Of one thing we maybe sure: that none are leading us more 
 surely or rapidly to the full truth than men like the author of this 
 little book, who reverently study the works of God for the lessons 
 which he would teach his children. Christian Union (New York). 
 
 THE IDEA OF GOD, 
 
 As Affected by Modern Knowledge. i6mo, gilt top, $1.00. 
 
 The vigor, the earnestness, the honesty, and the freedom from 
 cant and subtlety in his writings are exceedingly refreshing. He 
 is a scholar, a critic, and a thinker of the first order. Christian 
 Register (Boston). 
 
 THROUGH NATURE TO GOD. 
 
 idmo, gilt top, %i.oo. 
 
 CONTENTS : The Mystery of Evil : The Cosmic Roots 
 of Love and Self-Sacrifice ; The Everlasting Reality of 
 Religion. 
 
 tde 
 
 *** For sale by all Booksellers. Sent by mail, postpaid, 
 on receipt of price by the Publishers, 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO., 
 
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