Unfortunately for the philosophy which maintains this view, it happens that, just when the authority of justice is admitted by the conscience of civilisation to be paramount, justice as an ideal is recognised to be neither capable of realisation nor absolutely desirable. It is obvious that in the best-regulated even of free communities the amount of justice which can be secured by the action of the law and the intervention of the State falls very far short of the ideal; and the multiplication of laws and State inquisitors, which would be necessary if every form of injustice and wrong-doing were to be punished by the State, would be a remedy, if indeed it were a remedy, worse than the disease. It is impossible to pretend to believe that wealth is distributed according to merit in any existing community, or that any governmental system, even if designed solely with that end in view, could ever determine what a man's merits were, or what his reward should be. Nor is the ill distribution of wealth the only factor of injustice, though it is the only factor with which the State could make pretence to deal: sickness and sorrow, grief and pain—nay, the very capacity for suffering and for joy—are dealt to different men in very different measure. It is plain matter of fact that earthly goods and pleasures are not distributed according to merit; and it is just when man's conquest of Nature has become most complete, when society is no longer struggling for a bare subsistence, when the demand for justice is most fully and unreservedly admitted, that the impossibility of meeting the demand and the danger of failing to meet it become most manifest. The poverty which accompanies progress may in one generation be less than it was in the previous generation, but the extremes of poverty and wealth grow daily wider apart, and the number of those who are poor increases in a growing population much more rapidly than the number of the rich. The danger which this rent in the social fabric threatens to the whole structure of society may be exaggerated, but cannot be denied. The mere justice of individualism which has hitherto sufficed to hold society together, suffices now no longer. The justice which limits itself to the fulfilment of those actions to the non-performance of which a legal penalty is attached, is not the one and only thing needful, nor does its force remedy the numerous cases of undeserved misfortune and suffering which the working of our social and industrial system entails. What heals the suffering and saves it from becoming a festering sore that might prove fatal to society, is that love of man for his fellow-man, which is manifested to the poor by the rich to some extent, but chiefly by the poor. The State can only prescribe and enforce external acts of justice; and the external acts which it prescribes are not the bond which holds or can hold society together. The State, in its attempts to modify society through the individual, is as clumsy as the breeder or the gardener in dealing with animals and plants, and must fain be content if it can modify some of the more prominent external characteristics. Nature is much more searching, and, if slower, much more thorough: the real nature of her work, the true character of the force on which she has made the cohesion of society to depend, becomes obvious at the time when the insufficiency of mere justice for the purpose becomes apparent. Imperfect though man's obedience has been to the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," it is to his obedience that society owes its maintenance.
As a matter of fact, then, strict justice is not and cannot be realised in this world. Even the forces of the social environment which are, to a large extent, under man's own control are not and cannot be so directed by him as to secure rewards and punishments in exact proportion to merit and demerit; while the action of those natural forces which distribute fortune and misfortune, pain and the susceptibility to pain, pleasure and the capacity of enjoyment, is still less under his control and, as far as we can see, is still less proportionate to desert. The fields of the unjust benefit as much as those of the just by the rain from heaven; the labourers who enter the vineyard of civilisation at a late hour receive as great a reward as their predecessors who bore the heat and burden of the day, or even greater; when a tower in our social fabric falls, it is not the guilty who are alone or even specially involved in its ruin. From the time of Theognis, at least, men have inquired with despair how the gods could expect worship when they suffered these things to be; and as long as we look upon life as though we were detached spectators, with no care for it save a disinterested desire to see justice done, it is easy for us to declaim upon the absolute indifference of the cosmic process to man and his deserts. But this detached attitude is purely artificial, and we could not make even the semblance of long maintaining it, did we not unconsciously glide into the more natural, but less warrantable, position of tacitly assuming that our own personal lot would be improved if strict justice were done. But is not our resentment against the injustice of the world partly premature and somewhat shallow and short-sighted? Are we sure we want strict justice? Are we so anxious to have our merits weighed? are they so imposing? Can we pray that we may be rewarded after our iniquities? If society could by some supernatural power deal strict justice to all its members, who would, who could live in it? As a matter of fact—to say it once more—it is not by law alone that society lives, but by love, by the long-patient love of father or mother, of wife or husband, of friend or neighbour, which every one of us has accepted and none has fully requited. Our very hospitals are open to all who need them, to those whose suffering is due to their own negligence, or even crime, and not merely to those whose pain is undeserved. A palpable injustice, worthy of the cosmic process itself! And what excuse, if justice, absolute and relentless, be our highest and worthiest aspiration, can there be for appropriating the reward of honest toil to the often fruitless task of offering to those, who have by their own vice sunk into the depths, one last chance of life and of redemption? The mercy which falleth, like the gentle rain from heaven, alike upon the unjust and the just, must be judged by the same standard that we apply to the cosmic process. We may, like the elder brother of the prodigal son, refuse to see anything in man or Nature but a world given up to gross injustice—persons so superior as to stand in no need of forgiveness and no fear of judgment are able doubtless to judge the world and their fellow-man. But the prodigal himself may, perchance, better understand some of the workings of his father's heart, and trust he sees in the apparent injustice of Nature more instances of that mercy which would not have showed itself to him had justice measured love.
It seems, then, that the "ethical process" and the "cosmic process" are not so absolutely opposed to one another as Professor Huxley endeavoured to make out. Both at times act with a calm disregard of justice. In the one case we know that it is a higher principle which takes the place of justice; and it is a reasonable conjecture that the ethical process, which is one outcome or manifestation of the cosmic process, does but reproduce, in this case as in others, the action of the cosmic force which operates through the heart of man as well as through the rest of the universe. It is at any rate inconsistent to condemn the cosmos for exhibiting that quality of mercy which we rank highest amongst the attributes of man: if we take credit to our fellow-men for that quality, in fairness let us give the cosmos the same credit when it displays the same quality. If, as we assume in this chapter, there is purpose in evolution, let us admit that there is some presumption that it is a purpose of love and of mercy.
As it is by faith in science that men of science succeed in solving problems which, for a time, seem beyond the powers of science to deal with, so it is on faith in religion that the religious explanation of the universe depends for its slow but sure extension. With that faith we may succeed in seeing, to some slight extent, that the unequal distribution of pain, as well as of earthly prosperity, is not incompatible with a Divine purpose in evolution. For that faith we must believe that the suffering and sorrow from which none of us is exempt are not evil, unless we choose to make them so, but opportunities for good. Indeed, without that faith we seem forced upon the same conclusion: the man who devotes himself, his soul, his life to the relief of the needy and the suffering cannot make earthly prosperity his chief good, though, as Professor Huxley has said, he may attain something much better. But if we hold that there is something better than earthly prosperity, can we consistently declaim against sickness and sorrow as the worst of evils, or indict a universe because they are not unknown in it? The Stoicism which lent Professor Huxley the strength to teach that man must to the end declare defiance and resistance to the cosmos—resistance unavailing and defiance doomed to certain failure in the end—might also have taught him that the evil which he calls on us to war against is not in the cosmos; that the enemy of the ethical process has his headquarters not in Nature, but in the heart of man. Pain and sorrow are evil to the sufferer who allows them to make him selfish, and to the spectator who chooses to be callous to his suffering. If our volitions do count for something in the course of things, if we are so far free that we can, in response to Professor Huxley's call, doggedly and repeatedly resist the cosmic process, then it is of our own free will, also, that we do evil when the opportunity of good is offered us. Yet we charge the evil upon the cosmos.
ὦ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς Βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται
ἕξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ' ἔμμεναι· οἱ δὴ καὶ αὐτοὶ
σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπέρμορον ἄλγε' ἔχουσιν.
APPENDIX
ON BISHOP BERKELEY'S IDEALISM
When one asserts that a writer is wrong in one of the arguments which he uses, it is well to begin by making sure that he really does use the argument in question. For this purpose it is useful to quote the passages in which the writer uses the argument, and such passages, for my own satisfaction, I will speedily cite from Bishop Berkeley. But first, in order that the reader may know that the interpretation which I put on these extracts is not one peculiar to myself, but is in harmony with the general tenor of Berkeley's metaphysical writings, I will quote from Professor Fraser, who, in his preface to the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, states Berkeley's argument to be as follows: "As the common reason of men, tested by their actions, demands the permanence of sensible things, even though they are not permanently present to the senses of any one embodied mind, it follows that the very existence of the things of sense (apart from any 'marks of design' in their collocations) implies the permanent existence of Supreme Mind, by whom all real objects are perpetually conceived, and in whom their orderly appearances, disappearances, and reappearances in finite minds may be said to exist potentially."