Darwin declared himself an agnostic, not only because he could not harmonise the large amount of suffering in the world with the idea of a God as its first cause, but also because he "was aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and how it arose."[216] He saw, as Kant had seen before him and expressed in his Kritik der Urtheilskraft, that we cannot accept either of the only two possibilities which we are able to conceive: chance (or brute force) and design. Neither mechanism nor teleology can give an absolute answer to ultimate questions. The universe, and especially the organic life in it, can neither be explained as a mere combination of absolute elements nor as the effect of a constructing thought. Darwin concluded, as Kant, and before him Spinoza, that the oppositions and distinctions which our experience presents, cannot safely be regarded as valid for existence in itself. And, with Kant and Fichte, he found his stronghold in the conviction that man has something to do, even if he cannot solve all enigmas. "The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty."[217]
Is this the last word of human thought? Does not the possibility, that man can do his duty, suppose that the conditions of life allow of continuous ethical striving, so that there is a certain harmony between cosmic order and human ideals? Darwin himself has shown how the consciousness of duty can arise as a natural result of evolution. Moreover there are lines of evolution which have their end in ethical idealism, in a kingdom of values, which must struggle for life as all things in the world must do, but a kingdom which has its firm foundation in reality.
FOOTNOTES:
[195] Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. i. p. 8.
[196] Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (4th edit.), Berlin, 1845, § 249.
[197] Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, Jena, 1809.
[198] Ueber den Willen in der Natur (2nd edit.), Frankfurt a. M., 1854, pp. 41-43.
[199] Spencer, Autobiography, Vol. ii. p. 50, London and New York, 1904.
[200] Autobiography, Vol. ii. p. 100.
[201] Cf. my letter to him 1876, now printed in Duncan's Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, p. 178. London, 1908.