They are mistaken, however. Huxley does not really mean to assert any such breach of continuity as is here suggested. In a footnote to his printed address he makes a qualification which really cancels the group of statements I have quoted. "Of course," says Huxley, "strictly speaking, social life and the ethical process, in virtue of which it advances toward perfection, are part and parcel of the general process of evolution." Of course they are; and of course the general process of evolution is the cosmic process, it is Nature's way of doing things. But when my dear Huxley a moment ago was saying that the "cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends," he was using the phrase in a more restricted sense; he was using it as equivalent to what Darwin called "natural selection," what Spencer called "survival of the fittest," which is only one part of the cosmic process. Now most assuredly survival of the fittest, as such, has no sort of relation to moral ends. Beauty and ugliness, virtue and vice, are all alike to it. Side by side with the exquisite rose flourishes the hideous tarantula, and in too many cases the villain's chances of livelihood are better than the saints. As I said a while ago, if we confine our attention to the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, we are not likely to arrive at conclusions much more satisfactory than Caliban's "As it likes me each time, I do: So He." In such a universe we may look in vain for any sanction for morality, any justification for love and self-sacrifice; we find no hope in it, no consolation; there is not even dignity in it, nothing whatever but resistless all-producing and all-consuming energy. Such a universe, however, is not the one in which we live. In the cosmic process of evolution, whereof our individual lives are part and parcel, there are other agencies at work besides natural selection, and the story of the struggle for existence is far from being the whole story. I have thus far been merely stating difficulties; it is now time to point out the direction in which we are to look for a solution of them. I think it can be shown that the principles of morality have their roots in the deepest foundations of the universe, that the cosmic process is ethical in the profoundest sense, that in that far-off morning of the world, when the stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy, the beauty of self-sacrifice and disinterested love formed the chief burden of the mighty theme. [Illustration] V _First Stages in the Genesis of Man_