"The patch was cut off from the rest by a wall; within the area thus protected the native vegetation was, as far as possible, extirpated, while a colony of strange plants was imported and set down in its place. In short, it was made into a garden. This artificially treated area presents an aspect extraordinarily different from that of so much of the land as still remains in the state of nature outside the wall. Trees, shrubs and herbs, many of them appertaining to the state of nature in remote parts of the globe, abound and flourish. Moreover, considerable quantities of vegetables, fruit, and flowers are produced, of kinds which neither now exist nor have ever existed except under conditions such as obtain in the garden and which therefore are as much works of the art of man as the frames and glass-houses in which some of them are raised. That the 'state of art' thus created in the state of nature by man, is sustained by and dependent on him, would at once become apparent if the watchful supervision of the gardener were withdrawn, and the antagonistic influences of the general cosmic process were no longer sedulously warded off, or counteracted."
He proceeds to describe how, under such circumstances, the artificial barriers would decay, and the delicate inhabitants of the garden would perish under the assaults of animal and vegetable foes. External forces would reassert themselves and wild nature would resume its sway. While, in a sense, he had strenuously advocated the unity of all nature, he found in it two rivals: the artificial products of sentient man and the forces and products of wild nature. These two he believed to be in inevitable opposition and to represent the good and the evil forces of the world.
In the dim ages of the past, the forces that have gone to the making of man have been part of the cosmic process. In the endless and wonderful series of kaleidoscopic changes by which, under the operation of natural laws, the body, habits, and the character of man have been elaborated slowly from the natal dust, there is the widest field for the operation of the most acute intelligence to study and trace the stages in the process. But if intellectual delight in studying the process be left out of account, a serious question at once appears. In the higher stages of evolution the cosmic forces, ceasing to act merely on insentient matter, have operated on sentient beings, and in so doing have given rise to the mystery of pain and suffering. When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence. But "pain, the baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity and in intensity with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its highest level in man." And so it comes about that the cosmic process produces evil, sorrow, and suffering. Consideration of the cosmic process leads up against the mystery of evil.
Huxley argued that the various philosophies and civilisations of the past had led by different paths to a similar conclusion. The primitive ethical codes of man were not unlike the compacts of a wolf-pack, the understanding to refrain from mutual attack during the chase of a common prey. Conceptions of this kind became arranged in codes and invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike, material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes, produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With these came the "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and who dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." The doubting intellect, acting on the codes, produced the conception of justice-in-itself, of merit as divorced from the effect of action on others, the abstract idea of goodness.
The old philosopher, turning from this new conception to the Cosmos, found that incompatible with goodness. Suffering and sorrow, sunshine and rain, were distributed independently of merit. With Greek and Semite and Indian the conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature. Instead of bringing in a verdict of guilty, they attempted reconciliation in various ways. Indian speculation invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the Karma or soul-character passed from individual to individual, the algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to merit. The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent First Cause. Evil was incompatible with this, and so they held, against experience, that either it did not exist, or that it was inflicted for our benefit or due to our fault. In one fashion or another, all the great systems of thought had recognised the antagonism and had attempted some explanation of it. Huxley's view was that the modern world with its new philosophy was only retreading the toil-worn paths of the old. Scientific optimism was being replaced by a frank pessimism. Cosmic evolution might be accountable for both good and evil, but knowledge of it provided no better reason for choice of the good than did earlier speculation. The cosmic process was not only non-moral but immoral; goodness did not lead to success in it, and laws and moral precepts could only be addressed to the curbing of it.
In a sense these conclusions of Huxley seemed to lead to absolute pessimism, but he offered some mitigating considerations. Society remains subject to the cosmic process, but the less as civilisation advances and ethical man is the more ready to combat it. The history of civilisation shows that we have some hope of this, for "when physiology, psychology, ethics, and political science, now befogged by crude anticipations and futile analogies, have emerged from their childhood, they may work as much change on human affairs as the earlier-ripened physical sciences wrought on material progress." And so, remembering that the evil cosmic nature in us has the foothold of millions of years, and never hoping to abandon sorrow and pain, we may yet, in the manhood of our race, accept our destiny, and, with clear and steady eyes, address ourselves to the task of living, that we and others may live better.
These gloomy views come from Huxley with such weight and authority that even in a sketch of his life and opinions it may be noticed that they do not seem necessary deductions from the evolutionary conception of the world. The first count adduced against the cosmic process is its connection with suffering. It may be doubted, so far as the animal world is concerned, if Huxley has not exaggerated the gravity of this. The two greatest contributors to the modern conception of evolution are not in agreement with him. Alfred Russel Wallace wrote:
"On the whole, then, we conclude that the popular idea of the struggle for existence entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment of life with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of death and reproduction—and without those there could have been no progressive development of the animal world—and it is difficult even to imagine a system by which a greater balance of happiness could have been secured."
This view was evidently that also of Darwin himself, who thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence: "When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." As for man himself, though it be true that in him the consummation of pain is reached, still this is no isolated fact of far-reaching ethical importance. It is in direct dependence on the increased physical and mental development of man, and these are equally necessary for and equally susceptible to increased pleasure and increased happiness. It is not necessary to regard the cosmic process as evil. Even when man, in various ages, had elaborated the conception of abstract goodness, and had endeavoured to make his justice a doling out of reward and punishment according to merit, it was not inevitable to bring in a verdict of guilty against the Cosmos. It is quite true that, in all the ages, man has seen the sun shine on the unjust as on the just. But it is an easy reflection that the world could not turn round on individual merit, and if few are so guilty as to deserve the agonies of grief that may come to all, still fewer deserve some of the simpler and more common joys of life. The conception that was implicit in the disciplines of the older philosophies is still open to the philosophy of evolution. Behind it, as behind the "self-hypnotised catalepsy of the devotee of Brahma," the Buddhist aspirations to Nirvana, the apatheia of the Stoics, there may lie a recognition of the worthlessness of the individual: an equable acceptation of one's self as part of a process: a triumph of intelligence over selfishness. Finally, behind the sharp division made between man and the Cosmos, there still lurks one of the oldest and most enduring fallacies of the world, a fallacy that Huxley himself spent a great part of his intellectual life in discovering and routing. The fallacy is the conception of the Cosmos as something separate and apart from man, as something through which he, however briefly, passes. Thus Omar sang:
"Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door where in I went.