yet in process. The end of evolution is not yet attained: it is to
establish, in some future generation, a perfect humanity. For that end
we must work; to it we may know that, as a matter of scientific
evolution, we are working. On it, we may be satisfied, man will not
enter in our generation.

Now this theory of the evolution of humanity, and of the place religion
takes in that evolution, is in essential harmony with the scientific
treatment of the evolution theory, inasmuch as it treats of the
individual solely as an instrument to something other than himself, as
a means of producing a state of humanity to which he will not belong.
But if the assumption that the individual is always a means and never
an end in himself be false, then a theory of the evolution of man (as
an ethical consciousness) which is based on that wrong assumption will
itself be wrong. If each individual is an end, as valuable and as
important as any other individual; if each counts for one and not less
than any one other,--then his end and his good cannot lie in the
perfection of some future generation. In that case, his end would be
one that _ex hypothesi_ he could never enjoy, a rest into which he
could never enter; {246} and consequently it would be an irrational
end, and could not serve as a basis for a rationalist theory of ethics.
Man's object (to be a rational object) must have reference to a society
of which he may be a member. The realisation of his object, therefore,
cannot be referred to a stage of society yet to come, on earth, after
he is dead,--a society of which he, whether dead or annihilated, could
not be a member. If, then, the individual's object is to be a rational
object, as the humanitarian or rationalist assumes, then that end must
be one in which he can share; and therefore cannot be in this world.
Nor can that end be attained by doing man's will--for man's will may be
evil, and regress as well as progress is a fact in the evolution of
humanity; its attainment, therefore, must be effected by doing God's
will.

The truth that the individual is an end as well as a means is, I
suggest, valuable in considering the dynamics as well as the statics of
society. At least, it saves one from the self-complacency of imagining
that one's ancestors existed with no other end and for no higher
purpose than to produce--me; and if the golden days anticipated by the
theory of humanitarianism ever arrive, it is to be supposed that the