fact.  Of his own mind it was true that he had come to the doctrine of evolution from the physical side.  He brought to his other subjects a more or less developed method of operating with the conception.  He never fully realised how new subjects would alter the method and transform the conception.  Spencerian evolution is an assertion of the all-sufficiency of natural law.  The authority of conscience is but the experience of law-abiding and dutiful generations flowing in our veins.  The public weal has hold over us, because the happiness and misery of past ages are inherited by us.

It marked a great departure when Huxley began vigorously to dissent from these views.  According to him evolutionary science has done nothing for ethics.  Men become ethical only as they set themselves against the principles embodied in the evolutionary process of the world.  Evolution is the struggle for existence.  It is preposterous to say that man became good by succeeding in the struggle for existence.  Instead of the old single movement, as in Spencer, straight from the nebula to the saint, Huxley has place for suffering.  Suffering is most intense in man precisely under conditions most essential to the evolution of his nobler powers.  The loss of ease or money may be gain in character.  The cosmical process is not only full of pain.  It is full of mercilessness and of wickedness.  Good has been evolved, but so has evil.  The fittest may have survived.  There is no guarantee that they are the best.  The continual struggle against our fellows poisons our higher life.  It will hardly do to say with Huxley that the ethical struggle is the reverse of the cosmical process.  Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting transformation in thought.

These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond’s Ascent of Man, 1894.  Even the title was a happy and suggestive one.  Struggle for life is a fact, but it is not the whole fact.  It is balanced by the struggle for the life of others.  This latter reaches far down into the levels of what we call brute life.  Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the real nature of humanity.  It is the living with men which develops the moral in man.  The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had to do with the development of moral nature.  So only that we hold a sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that reason transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the beast, we need not fear for morality, though it should universally be taught that morality came into being by the slow and gradual fashioning of brute impulse.