I have not undertaken to make my outline sketch of the genesis of Humanity approach to completeness, but only to present enough salient points to make a closely connected argument 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 genesis of Religion. One of the most interesting, 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 to be added the possession of religious sentiment 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 epitomize the whole of human experience as recorded in history, art, and literature. Along with the rise from gregariousness to incipient sociality, along with the first stammerings 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 phenomena. There are philosophers who maintain that with the further progress of enlightenment this close relation will cease 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 primitive savagery, a vain and idle reaching out toward a world of mere phantoms. I mention this opinion merely to express unqualified 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 entering upon so vast a subject. Let this reference 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 ethical process itself, which we have found to be—as Huxley truly says in his footnote—part and parcel of the general process 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 tendency was towards singling out one creature and exalting his intelligence.
Now we have seen that this increase of intelligence 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 independent history. The essential solidarity 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 Humanity 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 can begin to see why misery and wrongdoing 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? According 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 human character? This form of statement contains far more than the other. Consummation of happiness is a natural outcome of the perfecting of character, but that perfecting can be achieved only through struggle, through discipline, through resistance. It is for him that overcometh that the crown of life is reserved. The consummate 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 efflorescence 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 perfecting of the spiritual Man in the likeness of his Heavenly Father.
These points will receive further indirect 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 impulses must coöperate. 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
