Evolution. F. B. Jevons

but they ought to be. What is has nothing to do with what ought to be. But what ought to be may make a good deal of difference to what is.

      The ethical process, in its conflict with the cosmic process, may not in the end prove victorious; but that makes no difference to the fact that it ought to be victorious. It is this deep-seated conviction which made Mr. Huxley say that we must declare war to the last against cosmic nature, the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The victory of the enemy may be certain, but it will none the less be wrong; it may be permanent, but as long as it lasts it will be wrong. If matter and motion are eternal and indestructible, morality is equally everlasting and immutable. Unless this is so, unless the triumph of the cosmic process is wrong, once and always, why are we called upon to endure sorrow and pain and suffering rather than submit to it? Our judgment that it is wrong is as independent of time as is our judgment that particles of matter gravitate towards one another. We have no reason for believing that the latter will continue to be true for a longer time than the former. Indeed, if matter and motion, having achieved their victory over the ethical process, were then and there to be annihilated, their victory would continue to be wrong, though they had ceased to be. Right may triumph or wrong may triumph, but right is right and wrong is wrong for evermore. It is vain to tell us in the same breath that we must stake our all upon our moral judgments and that our moral judgments are not to be relied on. Every impeachment of their validity is an invitation to us to give up the struggle against the enemy of ethical nature. And if we are really resolved to fight the good fight and quit ourselves like men, we thereby affirm that our moral judgments are at least as valid as our judgments on matters of fact, and that, if our knowledge of what is is true objectively, our knowledge of what ought to be has in it at least an equal element of objective truth.

      If, then, the cosmic process is real and objective, in so far as it is a perpetual manifestation of the Unknown Reality which underlies all things, then the ethical process, having the same reality and objectivity, is also a manifestation of the Unknowable. The perpetual redistribution of matter and motion is not the only way in which the Unknowable manifests itself to men: it also gives a shape to itself in the form of the highest and purest aspirations of which man is conscious within himself. It might seem, therefore, at first sight as though a mere dispassionate consideration of the actual facts of life, quite apart from any religious presuppositions or presumptions, forced us at last into the presence of a God, the source and author of all goodness. But, in the first place, those who hold to the dogma of Agnosticism, that what underlies things as they are known to us is the Unknowable, cannot admit that we know or can find out whether the Unknowable is good or bad. Induction, the logical method to which science owes so many of its discoveries, and by which we proceed from the known to the unknown, does not avail us here. No logical method could discover what is not merely unknown, but absolutely unknowable.

      In the next place it is reasonable enough that those who begin by believing in a Divine Providence should also believe that right will triumph in the end, if not in the world as it is manifested to us now and here, in space and time, then in that real world, that kingdom of heaven, of which this world is but an imperfect manifestation, or to which it is but a distant and slowly moving approximation. For those, however, who refuse to assume the reality of a Divine Providence the case is different. They base themselves on facts of experience: they observe that to some small extent what ought to be tends to substitute itself for what is, thanks to the action of man exclusively, and not to any inherent tendency to good in cosmic nature, but rather in spite of the resistance to good caused by the necessary action of the mechanical laws of nature. From their observation of the conditions under which man has succeeded in modifying what is into what ought to be, they forecast the extent to which that process may be carried in the future; and their conclusion is that the process is doomed to eventual failure, is doomed not merely to cease, but to give way to a process in the opposite direction, by which what ought to be will be displaced by what ought not, by which ethical nature will succumb to cosmic nature.

      Now, if there be no God, or if being Unknowable He must be eliminated from our words, thoughts, and deeds as a negligible and useless quantity for rational purposes, it is a natural enough conclusion that right must eventually succumb to wrong. It is but a reassertion of the familiar thesis that without religion morality cannot permanently be maintained. On this occasion, however, the thesis is advanced not as a piece of religious prejudice or theological insolence, but as the teaching of science and the inevitable outcome of evolution.

      FOOTNOTES:

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      [1] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.

      [2] Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 44.

[3] Evolution and Ethics, pp. 31, 45, 83.

IV.

       IDEALISM

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      The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice—miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect—that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.

      These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.

      In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite