It is because biological evolution is essentially an historical doctrine that its votaries should not be too eager to apply it directly to ethics.  It has accomplished much if able to tell us how things have happened in the past, without also dictating how they ought to take place now.  It is specially absurd to say that earlier methods must govern later developments.  That is what is done when we are asked to take as our guide in voluntary choice a principle which ignores volition.  The whole progress from animal to man and from savage to civilised man shows a gradual supersession of the principle of natural selection by a principle of subjective selection which steadily grows in purposiveness and in intelligence.  To say that intelligence should take nature as its guide is to ask civilised man to put off both his civilisation and his manhood.

The course of evolution may describe the working of different principles; but it cannot of itself supply a test of their value.  How then is such a test to be got?  Can Metaphysics help us?  I have pointed out that the evolutionist ethics is relative—­implying always a relation between organism and environment—­but this relativity is qualified by its objective character.  It does do something for morals:  it brings man’s conduct into relation with the world as a whole.  No doubt the environment which more immediately surrounds man is a succession of changing phenomena, so that although the basis we get is objective, nevertheless it is unable to give us a permanent standard of reference.  At the same time we may trace in this theory some advance on the older types of ethical thinking spoken of in last lecture.  Subjectivity adhered even to the Utilitarian type of thought:  for what can be more subjective than the pleasant feeling upon which morality is made by it to depend?  There was also a certain subjectivity attaching to the Intuitional type of thought, because the Intuitionists simply referred their judgments to conscience, the law in man, and did not connect conscience with a wider or more objective view of the universe.

The suggestion remains that we may get a basis for morality which is both objective and permanent from that more complete view of the universe which is given or which is sought by metaphysics.  Metaphysics aims at completeness.  That is, indeed, its predominant characteristic as a body of knowledge.  It may begin with the part, if you like, with the ‘flower in the crannied wall’; but when that is seen in all its relations to the rest of the world, then you will ’know what God and man is,’ If the universe is a whole, then, beginning at any point, with any detail, if you only push the enquiry far enough, you are bound to become metaphysical:  for you are attempting to understand reality as a whole.

In this Metaphysics resembles Religion.  Both seek the ultimate, the final, the whole.  But Metaphysics is distinguished from Religion in seeking the whole only by way of knowledge.  So far it is like any other science.  It is a process or the result of a process of knowledge.  It seeks to know reality as a whole, and in knowing a part to know it in its relations to the whole.  Religion also considers everything in its relation to the whole.  But in religion knowledge is not the fundamental thing:  its object is to relate man to God, in his consciousness, and in his life as a whole.