tilising an old one,
had attached a penalty to every successful attempt to rise above a
certain level. If man will walk upright she sees to it that his doing so
shall involve a great liability to hernia. If he will live in cities,
she has ready the ravage of consumption. If he will use clothing she
makes him carry round a coating of useless hair as a method of trapping
disease microbes. So soon as one disease is conquered another is
discovered. Pleasures have their reverse side in pains, and to some
pains the pleasures bear a small relation, being chiefly of the
character of the pains being absent. As a social animal man is only
imperfectly adapted to the state, there going on a constant warfare
between his egoistic and altruistic impulses. In fact, it would
certainly be an arguable proposition, if we allow intention in nature,
to say that man was intended to remain at the animal level, and that,
having so far defeated nature's intention, he is dogged by a
disappointed creator, and made to pay the fullest price that can be
exacted for every step of progress achieved.

Of course, of proof of design in nature there is positively none.
Design, as I have said, is not a natural fact, but a purely human
construction. But, if admitted, it is a two edged weapon. For, if
assumed anywhere, it must be assumed to exist everywhere. And designing
intelligence must be made responsible for the whole scheme. But this the
most extravagant piety refuses to do. Either we have the primitive
theory of a devil who divides with God the responsibility for the state
of the world, or we have the plea that evil may be only good disguised,
or good in the making, or it is argued that we have to contemplate the
"plan" as a whole, and must wait for some future state to pass judgment.
And whichever view we take, there is the implied admission that the plan
of creation as we know it cannot be harmonised with the theory of God
that modern theism places before us. And instead of man being the
miracle of perfection that an earlier generation saw in his structure,
we know that the human structure is such that, given the power to
create, science could really fashion, in the light of its present
knowledge, a better organism.

Finally, disharmony is implied in and necessitated by the very fact of
progress. Progress means a better adjustment, and the discomfort of
maladjustment is the spur to improvement. A perfect equilibrium is as
impossible as perpetual mo