CHAPTER X - EVOLUTION AND ETHICS

Summary

WITH the advent of a self-conscious being into the world, the world has taken on a new meaning. Here is a being who can stand over against the world, oppose himself to it, who can, say “I,” and distinguish himself from everything else. The change thus made in the universe is of unspeakable importance; for here is a being who can, in course of time, become the greatest factor in the cosmos, can read the process of its becoming, and forecast in a measure its final outcome. He is part of the process; but in so far as he can oppose himself to it he is greater than it, and can in a measure control it. So far as we can limit our view of man to the intellectual side, and regard him mainly as a rational, self-conscious being, we are able to say that he is an immeasurable advance on all that has gone before. All the intelligence formally manifested in the cosmos, so far as consciousness has gone, is only rudimentary. It is when we come to look at the moral and social life of man that the strangest phenomena appear. It is not our purpose here to trace the history of the phenomena of ethics, or to criticise the attempts that have been made to bring them into line with the theory of evolution.