MAN'S PLACE IN THE COSMOS.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON NATURE AND MAN.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S Romanes Lecture on

"Evolution and Ethics" deservedly attracted a large amount of attention on its appearance. That attention was due not only to the importance of the subject handled and the reputation of the lecturer, but quite as much to the breadth and scope of the treatment, to the nobility of tone and the deep human feeling which characterised a singularly impressive utterance. Popular interest was also excited by the nature of the conclusion reached, which, in the mouth of the pioneer and prophet of evolution, had the air of being something like a palinode. Criticisms of the lecture appeared at the time by Mr Leslie Stephen in the Contemporary Review,' and by Mr Herbert

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Spencer in a letter to the Athenæum ';1 and many discussions appeared in theological quarters. But the subject as a whole was perhaps dismissed from public attention before its significance had been exhausted, or indeed properly grasped. Professor Huxley's argument and the criticisms it called forth illuminate most instructively some deep-seated ambiguities of philosophical terminology, and at the same time bring into sharp relief the fundamental difference of standpoint which divides philosophical thinkers. The questions at issue, moreover, are not merely speculative; already they cast their shadow upon literature and life. The opportunity of elucidation is therefore in the best sense timely, and no apology seems needed for an attempt to recall attention to the points in dispute and to accentuate their significance.

The outstanding feature of Professor Huxley's argument is the sharp contrast drawn between nature and ethical man, and the sweeping indictment of "the cosmic process" at the bar of morality. The problem. of suffering and the almost complete absence of any

1 The Romanes Lecture was delivered on the 18th May 1893, and published shortly thereafter. Mr Spencer's letter appeared in the 'Athenæum' of August 5, and Mr Leslie Stephen's article in the 'Contemporary Review' of August 1893. The present paper was published in 'Blackwood's Magazine,' December 1893.

relation between suffering and moral desert is the theme from which he starts, and to which he continually returns. "The dread problem of evil," "the moral indifference of nature," "the unfathomable injustice of the nature of things "-this is the aspect of the world which has burned itself deeply into the writer's soul, and which speaks in moving eloquence from his pages. The Buddhistic and the Stoic attempts to grapple with the problem are considered, and are found to end alike in absolute renunciation. "By the Tiber, as by the Ganges, ethical man admits that the cosmos is too strong for him; and, destroying every bond which ties him to it by ascetic discipline, he seeks salvation in absolute renunciation" (p. 29). Is the antagonism, then, final and hopeless, or can modern science and philosophy offer any better reconciliation of ethical man with the nature to which as an animal he belongs, and to whose vast unconscious forces he lies open on every side? As Professor Huxley puts the question himself in his opening pages-Is there or is there not "a sanction for morality in the ways of the cosmos"? Man has built up an artificial world within the cosmos": has human society its roots and its justification in the underlying nature of the cosmos, or is it in

very truth an "artificial" world, which is at odds. with that nature and must be in perpetual conflict with it? The Stoic rule which places virtue in "following nature" is easily shown to be a phrase of many meanings, and to demand qualification by reference, first, to the specific nature of man, and then to a higher nature or guiding faculty within the mind of man himself. But the modern ethics of evolution apparently claim to have bridged the gulf and to have made the ethical process continuous with the cosmic process of organic nature, they claim, in short, to exhibit the ethical life as only a continuation, on another plane, of the struggle for existence. If this claim is well founded, and the two worlds are really continuous, then the maxim, "Follow nature," will have been proved to be, after all, the sum and substance of virtue.

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It is against this naturalisation of ethics that Professor Huxley protests in the strongest terms. readily allows that the ethical evolutionists may be right in their natural history of the moral sentiments. But as the immoral sentiments have no less been evolved, there is, so far, as much natural sanction for the one as the other. . . Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may