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.