, by the way, is in no way the case.

Sec. 2. SCIENCE AS A RULE OF LIFE

Saint or sinner, some rule of life we must have, even if we are wholly
unconscious of the fact. A spiritual director will help us to map out a
course of action which will assist us to shake off some little of the
dust of this dusty world; and a doctor will lay down for us a dietary
which will help us to elude, for a time at least, the insidious onsets
of the gout. Even if we take no formal steps, spiritual or corporeal,
some rule of life we must achieve for ourselves. We must, for example,
make up our minds whether we are to open our ears and our purse to tales
of misery, or are to join ourselves with those whose rule of life it is
to keep that which they have for themselves. What is true of each of us
is none the less true of each and every race--even more true; for each
race must make up its mind definitely as to which rule it will follow.
And at the moment there is still doubt and indecision in this matter.

"The moral problem that confronts Europe to-day is: What sort of
righteousness are we, individually and collectively, to pursue? Is the
new righteousness to be realised in a return to the old brutality? Shall
the last values be as the first? Must ethical process conform to natural
process as exemplified by the life of any animal that secures dominancy
at the expense of the weaker members of its kind?"[13] Such are the
questions raised by a man of science occupying the Presidential Chair of
an important society and speaking to that society as its President.

As to the Christian ideals little need be said, since we know very well
what they are, and know this most especially, that practically all of
them are in direct opposition to what we may call the ideals of Nature,
and exercise all their influence in frustrating such laws as that of
Natural Selection. "Nature's Insurgent Son," as Sir Ray Lankester calls
him,[14] is at constant war with Nature, and when we come to consider
the matter carefully, in that respect most fully differentiates himself
from all other living things, none of which make any attempt to control
the forces of Nature for their own advantage. "Nature's inexorable
discipline of death to those who do not rise to her standard--survival
and parentage for those alone who do--has been from the earliest times
more and more definitely resisted by the will of man. If we may for the
purpose of analysis, as it were, extract man fr