eath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by
Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and
hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with
progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent
in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century,
when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world
that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has
nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be
those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities.
The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to
tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that
circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive
under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render
it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances
have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the
popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby
introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking
indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be,
and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the
guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their
political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us
when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes
said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and
the Stoics that one should fill one's appointed place in nature, because
such was the practice of clouds and rivers.

[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]

Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men's attitudes and
opinions; he had no need of Darwin's facts to convince him that in moral
life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture
of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His
early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that
opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed
everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be
identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and
they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel
was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist s