ETHICAL EVOLUTION OF THE NINETEETH CENTURY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11771, 28 September 1901, Page 6 (Supplement)

ETHICAL EVOLUTION OF THE NINETEETH CENTURY.

The Edinburgh Review devotes no less than forty pages to a very elaborate essay on the "Time Spirit of the Nineteenth Century.' The reviewer takes as his text Mr. Balfour's Cambridge address on the " Nineteenth Century " He discusses chiefly the question suggested bv Mr. Balfour's address, namely, ■whether there is one great addition to our knowledge or fresh key to knowledge which belongs to the time spirit of the century which has just expired which really characterises its'genius, and is something beyond the more or less mechanical development of past discoveries, or even their improvement in the hands of men of special insight. Did the centurv give us a conception destined to revolutionise the intellectual life of the world? The reviewer thinks that the diverse characteristic activities of the centurv in specialism and hvpothesis, in science and criticism, are parts of one process which has led to the* first systematic attempt to analyse the complex development of every department of life, and applies to every such department a scientific method of observation, induction, hypothesis, deduction, and verification. The reviewer says: — Evolution is in the view of most of its exponents essentially optimistic. Reversion it recognises, but as temporary— the receding wave in a flowing tide. It may be pessimistic for the time. For the wave may recede during a generation or a century. But the world-spirit on the whole advances. Hope and Faith are justified and substantiated bv a process which had achieved s> much. And this very finality tends towards the realisation of Mr. Balfour s prophecy. For ethical evolution can only_ attain its highest conceivable limit in religion. The Christian ideal, and the relations of the human spirit with God, Hegel's moral .goal—self-realisation through self-denial-may well be regarded as completing the evolutionary scheme rather than as clashing with it. For Comte the highest in man sums up the best that has been achieved in the whole course of evolution. For Herbert Spencer the Unknowable is the underlying Power behind evolution to which this achievement is due. Comte, under the symbol of Humanity, wou'd worship the best we know. Spencer would worship the Unknown cause. Professor Caird truly says that each sees half the truth. The two halves may well be combined—as Hegel proposed to combine them—in the Christian faith which, in Caird's words, "finds God in man, and man in God: which makes us regard the Absolute Being—as finding His best name and definition in what we most revere and love, or, what is the same thing, makes us see in that growing idea of moral perfection— is the highest result of human developmentthe interpretation or revelation of the Absolute."

He concludes his very interesting essay by a cheery note of hope. We are threatened with a paralysis of the thinking powers in the ordinary daily life of an over-civilised time. As the crowd of material oppresses the student, so the dazzling multiplicity of events, places, and writings, brought before •lis by modern press and modern appliances, confuses the average mind. Nevertheless the reviewer complacently concludes: — Further specialisation will tend to make the historian bring back a more comprehensive method into his own sphere. The impressionableness of English society will, we believe, be again replaced by the sturdier qualities of John Bull—who was a very good, sound thinker in his own way. Ideas will resume their lawful function among the intellectual, sound, active, independent thought among the mass.