of the garden would
perish under the assaults of animal and vegetable foes. External
forces would reassert themselves and wild nature would resume its
sway. While, in a sense, he had strenuously advocated the unity of all
nature, he found in it two rivals: the artificial products of sentient
man and the forces and products of wild nature. These two he believed
to be in inevitable opposition and to represent the good and the evil
forces of the world.

In the dim ages of the past, the forces that have gone to the making
of man have been part of the cosmic process. In the endless and
wonderful series of kaleidoscopic changes by which, under the
operation of natural laws, the body, habits, and the character of man
have been elaborated slowly from the natal dust, there is the widest
field for the operation of the most acute intelligence to study and
trace the stages in the process. But if intellectual delight in
studying the process be left out of account, a serious question at
once appears. In the higher stages of evolution the cosmic forces,
ceasing to act merely on insentient matter, have operated on sentient
beings, and in so doing have given rise to the mystery of pain and
suffering. When the less fit of chemical combinations or even of the
lower forms of life perished in the struggle, we may regard the
process with the unemotional eye of pure intelligence. But "pain, the
baleful product of evolution, increases in quantity and in intensity
with advancing stages of animal organisation, until it attains its
highest level in man." And so it comes about that the cosmic process
produces evil, sorrow, and suffering. Consideration of the cosmic
process leads up against the mystery of evil.

Huxley argued that the various philosophies and civilisations of the
past had led by different paths to a similar conclusion. The primitive
ethical codes of man were not unlike the compacts of a wolf-pack, the
understanding to refrain from mutual attack during the chase of a
common prey. Conceptions of this kind became arranged in codes and
invested with supernatural sanction. But in Hindustan and Ionia alike,
material prosperity, no doubt partly the result of the accepted codes,
produced culture of the intellect and culture of the pleasures. With
these came the "beneficent demon, doubt, whose name is legion and who
dwells amongst the tombs of old faiths." The doubting intellect,
acting on the codes, produced the conception of justice-in