concerned with but one or a few of the many aspects of their problem.
When the student in a cool hour attempts to bring order into this chaos of fragmentary conceptions, it becomes evident that in the course of the half century the issues at stake have repeatedly changed, but that in general some four or five tolerably distinct levels or stages have been occupied. In the first three stages, it is more particularly the bearing upon ethics of organic evolution that is considered; in a further stage, it is the importance of social evolution that is weighed; and this latter question gradually reduces to an inquiry into the importance for ethics of the study of the specifically moral evolution; whereupon questions of method press to the fore.
Needless to say, these various levels or stages have not had definite temporal boundaries. They have all been more or less occupied during the whole period; and to this day not even the most primitive of them has been wholly transcended. It is rather the case, that, as the views of ethical specialists have advanced to higher and higher levels, the lower levels have been occupied by popular and semi-scientific speculation.
In the first place, then, the question arose: Is the theory of evolution destructive of ethics? An affirmative answer to this question constituted one of the first objections to be urged against the Darwinian theory; and since the fact of evolution has been established and generally acknowledged, the same proposition has been urged in turn against the traditional morality. The grounds of this supposed antagonism have variously shifted; but, for the most part, the metaphysical presuppositions of certain ethical systems, as well as of popular morality, have been thought to be endangered, namely, the doctrines of human freedom and immortality, and of the existence of God.
The opposition of evolution to theism was founded upon its relation to the mechanical theory. The phenomena of organic nature could now for the first time be explained without open resort to teleological principles; and thus was completed the ideal framework of a mechanical science which should embrace the universe. The larger metaphysical questions thus involved
