l this," he
adds, "seems to me quite compatible with certain forms fitted for simple
conditions, remaining unaltered, or being degraded." (Ibid. Vol. II.
page 177.) But the great question is, if the conditions of life will in
the long run favour "improvement" in the sense of differentiation
(or harmony of differentiation and integration). Many beings are best
adapted to their conditions of life if they have few organs and few
necessities. Pessimism would not only be the consequence, if suffering
outweighed happiness, but also if the most elementary forms of happiness
were predominant, or if there were a tendency to reduce the standard
of life to the simplest possible, the contentment of inertia or stable
equilibrium. There are animals which are very highly differentiated and
active in their young state, but later lose their complex organisation
and concentrate themselves on the one function of nutrition. In the
human world analogies to this sort of adaptation are not wanting. Young
"idealists" very often end as old "Philistines." Adaptation and progress
are not the same.

Another question of great importance in respect to human evolution
is, whether there will be always a possibility for the existence of
an impulse to progress, an impulse to make great claims on life, to be
active and to alter the conditions of life instead of adapting to them
in a passive manner. Many people do not develop because they have
too few necessities, and because they have no power to imagine other
conditions of life than those under which they live. In his remarks
on "the pleasure from exertion" Darwin has a point of contact with
the practical idealism of former times--with the ideas of Lessing and
Goethe, of Condorcet and Fichte. The continual striving which was
the condition of salvation to Faust's soul, is also the condition
of salvation to mankind. There is a holy fire which we ought to keep
burning, if adaptation is really to be improvement. If, as I have
tried to show in my "Philosophy of Religion", the innermost core of all
religion is faith in the persistence of value in the world, and if
the highest values express themselves in the cry "Excelsior!" then the
capital point is, that this cry should always be heard and followed. We
have here a corollary of the theory of evolution in its application to
human life.

Darwin declared himself an agnostic, not only because he could not
harmonise the large amount of suffering in the world wi