The world was never as full as it is just now of what pleases to consider itself “advanced thinking.” Some of it is advanced, and a little of it is thinking; but most of it, all unknown to those who spout it, has been exploded over and over again. As a mass, its quality is such that one sometimes (but very rarely, it is to be feared) feels a half-humorous self-distrust in propounding the share of it that one believes in most. The risk has to be taken, however, and we venture to state what seem to us some of the profoundest and most important of our present views of the universe and man’s relation to it, which, based very largely on the discoveries of Darwin and Spencer, especially of Spencer, Fiske, on the testimony of Darwin and Spencer themselves, did more than any other man had then done, or we think has yet done, to develop and disseminate. To extract them from his voluminous writings and state them in his own language, with the brevity required here, would be impossible. We have already said that he was not a maker of epigrams: the sweep of his mind was too broad and slow. When he gave you anything, he gave you the whole of it, because, strangely often, he knew the whole of it, so far as anybody did; but he gave only its essentials: he was never a bore.
The Law of Evolution contains nothing counter to the Moral Law: it only changes the old sanctions of it. In the control of the universe, it substitutes for an anthropomorphic, tinkering, and even “jealous” God, a Law that varies not, and, despite terrible apparent exceptions, on the whole makes for righteousness and for happiness. Even now, while most of the world is steeped more than ever before in anxiety and grief, and while scores of miles are covered with slaughter, the vast preponderance of the earth’s surface is covered with beauty, and the vast majority of human beings are smiling. Moreover, the Law of Evolution indicates that the favorable conditions are to increase for a period longer than we can conceive, and then gradually and painlessly disappear, to be revived in a new evolution.
The discovery of the Law of Evolution has already done much to solve the mystery of evil. Catastrophism is a corollary of it: if there were no imperfection there could be no advance. Evil comes from a lack of balance between forces. When balance is disturbed—by anything from indigestion in a protozoon up to a storm on the ocean where he lives, there is a catastrophe. Evil is not a positive thing, but merely lack of the good, or lack of proportion in the good—inadequacy or excess, the excess being when a force or a passion good in itself exceeds the forces that usually keep it within bounds—when one force of those that hold the earth’s crust in equilibrium becomes excessive, and there is earthquake; when love of country seeks to expand it, at the expense of other countries, and there is war; when the appetite that creates and conserves property exceeds the respect for the rights of others, and there is theft or robbery or even murder; when the passion that perpetuates the race grows to excess, and its rightful result in the family is prevented or destroyed, often with attendant deceit, violence, murder.
When Rochefoucauld said: “Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised,” he said an impossible thing, and spoke, as most proverb makers do, from mere habit of paradox and love of it. He would have told a fundamental truth, however, if he had said: Our vices are most frequently but virtues disguised—by inflation.
But deeper in the individual soul than any of these problems, is one that Evolution has as yet directly done little to clarify. In substituting for Providence, a wisdom that (so far as our poor wits can state the conditions) provided for the exigencies beforehand by Law, instead of constantly handling them as they arise, Evolution raises the question: How far down into the details of our lives does the law go? Of all questions bearing upon our lives, there is but one deeper and more anxious: Does the law work out for good as far as it goes? Perhaps the answer can be settled only by experience, and judgment depends largely on temperament. And yet experience has provided all thinking peoples with expressions that assert a favorable solution. Job was not the first to say: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” All literatures abound in such expressions, as Pope’s
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.