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 with the idea of
a God as its first cause, but also because he "was aware that if we
admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came and
how it arose."[216] He saw, as Kant had seen before him and expressed
in his _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_, that we cannot accept either of the
only two possibilities which we are able to conceive: chance (or brute
force) and design. Neither mechanism nor teleology can give an
absolute answer to ultimate questions. The universe, and especially
the organic life in it, can neither be explained as a mere
combination of absolute elements nor as the effect of a constructing
thought. Darwin concluded, as Kant, and before him Spinoza, that the
oppositions and distinctions which our experience presents, cannot
safely be regarded as valid for existence in itself. And, with Kant
and Fichte, he found his stronghold in the conviction that man has
something to do, even if he cannot solve all enigmas. "The safest
conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of
man's intellect; but man can do his duty."[217]

Is this the last word of human thought? Does not the possibility, that
man can do his duty, suppose that the conditions of life allow of
continuous ethical striving, so that there is a certain harmony
be