COSMIC EVOLUTION, AS RELATED TO ETHICS.* BY LEWIS G. JANES. Among the wonders of the beautiful White City by Lake Michigan, whither so many of us have made pilgrimages during these pleasant summer and autumn months, nothing is more instructive or suggestive to the thoughtful mind than the anthropological exhibit, so admirably and systematically arranged under the intelligent supervision of Professor Putnam. "Not things, but men, was the motto of the exhibition in its entirety, and of the Auxiliary Congresses, marshalled so successfully by President Bonney and his able corps of assistants; and here indeed, in the Anthropological Building, was a veritable history of man in the things which he had created. From the rude stone implements of a barbaric age, up to the time of polished stone and copper, and on again to the finest mechanisms of our own wonderful era, as we pass from the building especially dedicated to anthropological science to those larger evidences of human advancement in the vast temples of Agriculture, Machinery and the Liberal Arts, what a picture of evolution, what sublime testimony to man's achievements, what hope and promise for the future millennial expectations of mankind, did our marvelous Columbian Exposition-that great school of anthropology-afford! What wonder that this significant object-lesson embodied in the triumphs of science and art, so effectually demonstrating man's capacity for progress, so completely reversing the old theological dogma of the fall of man from an original state of human perfection, should take voice in the great Parliament of Religions in a pæan * Copyright 1893, by the BROOKLYN ETHICAL ASSOCIATION. of sympathy and human brotherhood transcending the boundaries of sect, overleaping the walls of dogmatic belief, merging Christian and Buddhist and Hindoo, Confucianist and Shintoist, Catholic and Protestant, Orthodox and Liberal into one church universal, of which the Art Institute constituted the Sacred Synagogue, the Columbian Exposition the Holy Temple, and its manifold exhibits the appropriate symbols and sacramental altars. It was my privilege to witness the impressive spectacle at the closing session of the Parliament of Religions, when the Buddhist monk, clothed in the yellow robe of his order, the white robed and turbaned Hindoo and Shinto priests, the intellectual looking and richly clad follower of Confucius, sat side by side on the platform, fraternizing with the Greek bishop, the Roman Catholic doctor of divinity, and the sombre-garbed Protestant divines; while earnest-faced Susan B. Anthony, intellectual and whitehaired Julia Ward Howe, refined and elegant Mrs. Henrotin, representatives of America's noblest womanhood—and, sui generis, Joseph Cook, pompous of person and wrapped in a conceit of infallibility which overshadowed even that of the Roman Catholic potentates, completed the picturesque and cosmopolitan delegation. The enthusiasm of the vast audience when, one after another, the foreign delegates, whom we have been wont to define as "heathens," arose and in cultivated and scholarly phrase uttered their final words of appreciation, counsel and admonition, the interest culminating when the Shinto priest invoked the blessing of the thirty million gods of Japan upon the American people, presented a scene such as the world never beheld before, and into the perfect harmony of which even the "Boston Lectureship," for the nonce, contributed no discordant word. As I felt the thrill of the popular uplift and enthusiasm, it seemed to me that here, in the closing decade of the Nineteenth Century, the ethical and humanitarian sentiment had touched high-water mark; and that the conceit of an exclusive possession of saving truth by any sect, or even by Christianity itself, could never again obtain credence among the people who witnessed the inspir ing scene. Sober second thought, however, suggested the reflection that mere emotional sentiment is always ephemeral in its effects, and must be impotent to furnish a permanent bond of unity for religious and philanthropic effort. There must be some common ground of rational principle to substitute for the dogmatic foundations of sectarian segregation, which shall leave individuals free to formulate their own intellectual creeds while in a larger fellowship of the spirit they become helpers for the world's advancement. Can such a basis be found in ethics, as approached from the side of science and the doctrine of evolution? Can an ethical science be formulated in harmony with cosmic law, sufficiently rational and broad to command the allegiance of all liberal minded people? Can our little Association, with its cosmopolitan membership and free, scientific platform, offer a useful object-lesson in testimony to the utility and practicability of such a basis of spiritual fellowship? Manifestly this problem, which involves the entire question of man's relation to the Universe, and those laws and processes by means of which worlds have grown out of chaos, life out of inanimate nature, consciousness out of life, self-consciousness and moral responsibility out of the lower forms of sentience and conscious apprehension, admits of two modes of superficial interpretation. Ignoring the earlier stages of the evolutionary process and judging exclusively by its final and most exalted manifestations, we may unhesitatingly pronounce all things "very good" and find a possible common basis for ethical sanctions and religious reverence in the Universe itself and the majesty of its eternal order. Or, on the other hand, viewing the "martyrdom of man" at shorter range, as he has mounted with bloody feet to the heights of a civilization yet all too sadly imperfect when judged by the loftiest moral tests, we may question the beneficence of life, condemn the cosmo-poietic energy manifested in the evolution of the Universe as unmoral and careless of human good or ill, and seek for some Nirvana wherein the extinction of desire shall remove all motive for continuing the struggle for existence. If the doctrine of evolution be true, man is a product of the Universe, a child of the great WorldMother. This is true not merely of his physical organism, but of his higher nature as well. Mind and morals equally with muscles and sense-organs have been developed by the interaction of organism with environment throughout the entire period of his ancestral history. The consistent evolutionist can adopt no other view than this. throws us back upon unscientific theories of special Any deviation from it creation and the supernatural intrusion of extra-cosmic forces into Nature's eternal order. the soul as an eternally self-existent monad may seem The doctrine of to furnish the way out of the difficulty, but it is unscientific, unevolutionary, and has no basis save in metaphysical speculation. Such a doctrine may appear plausible to the mere literary student of philosophical systems, but it is totally lacking in scientific credentials, however imposing may be the names of speculative thinkers marshalled in its support. There are certain logical implications in lutionary conception of cosmic and human origins that the evocannot possibly be evaded. atability of matter are The eternity and uncrenow the conceded dicta of physical science; or, speaking more accurately and philosophically, it is conceded that to beings constituted as we are, the Universe would always have presented those properties and qualities which we designate as material. But the logic of evolution affirms no less emphatically, the eternity and uncreatability of mind; for if mind is an ephemeral timeproduct of material conditions, its primary appearance in a hitherto unconscious Universe of purely physical forces would be indicative of a new creation, which is an unscientific and anti-evolutionary conception. A truer psychology recognizes the phenomenal character of both mental and material processes as known to us, and their consequent dependence upon a common, unitary Reality which, in its essential constitution, is unknowable. That we do not recognize the presence of mind in connection with phenomena regarded as purely physical, is therefore no evidence. that mind has no concomitant relation to such phe nomena. The failure to recognize such a relation may be and doubtless is due to the limitations of our knowing faculties. As to the real nature of those energies which constitute essential elements in our conception of matter, we know absolutely nothing. For aught we can say to the contrary, that impulse which compels the coherence of atoms in a bar of iron, or which holds the whirling planets in their orbits, or which causes the union of chemical affinities, is as essentially psychical in its nature as the impulse which binds wife to husband, or mother to child, or holds together seventy millions of people in these United States. Thus that "brave show of things," the visible Universe, as interpreted to us by modern science, seen as an ever shifting, never-resting panorama of atomic changes, blends ultimately with the inner world of thought, becoming not less real, but more real as we recognize its relationship to that which we know best and most intimately in experience, our psychic personality. 'Sweet the genesis of things, Of tendency through endless ages, Of rounded worlds, of space and time, Of the old flood's subsiding slime, Of chemic matter, force and form, Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm; Dissolving all that fixture is Melts things that be to things that seem, Diverse and antithetical, indeed, as are our conceptions of mind and matter, impossible as it is to interpret one in terms of the other, it is equally impossi ble to separate one from the other for independent investigation, analysis and study. Atoms and molecules are necessary hypothetical creations of our rational thought, and have never been revealed to our senses even by the most powerful microscope. They are known to us only as logical necessities for the interpretation of their known effects in combination, |