An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
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.