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-itself, of merit as divorced from the effect of action on others, the abstract idea of goodness.

The old philosopher, turning from this new conception to the Cosmos, found that incompatible with goodness.  Suffering and sorrow, sunshine and rain, were distributed independently of merit.  With Greek and Semite and Indian the conscience of man revolted against the moral indifference of nature.  Instead of bringing in a verdict of guilty, they attempted reconciliation in various ways.  Indian speculation invented or elaborated the theory of transmigration, in which the Karma or soul-character passed from individual to individual, the algebraic sums of happiness in the whole chain being proportional to merit.  The Stoics were metaphysicians and imagined an immanent, omnipotent, and infinitely beneficent First Cause.  Evil was incompatible with this, and so they held, against experience, that either it did not exist, or that it was inflicted for our benefit or due to our fault.  In one fashion or another, all the great systems of thought had recognised the antagonism and had attempted some explanation of it.  Huxley’s view was that the modern world with its new philosophy was only retreading the toil-worn paths of the old.  Scientific optimism was being replaced by a frank pessimism.  Cosmic evolution might be accountable for both good and evil, but knowledge of it provided no better reason for choice of the good than did earlier speculation.  The cosmic process was not only non-moral but immoral; goodness did not lead to success in it, and laws and moral precepts could only be addressed to the curbing of it.

In a sense these conclusions of Huxley seemed to lead to absolute pessimism, but he offered some mitigating considerations.  Society remains subject to the cosmic process, but the less as civilisation advances and ethical man is the more ready to combat it.  The history of civilisation shows that we have some hope of this, for “when physiology, psychology, ethics, and political science, now befogged by crude anticipations and futile analogies, have emerged from their childhood, they may work as much change on human affairs as the earlier-ripened physical sciences wrought on material progress.”  And so, remembering that the evil cosmic nature in us has the foothold of millions of years, and never hoping to abandon sorrow and pain, we may yet, in the manhood of our race, accept our destiny, and, with clear and steady eyes, address ourselves to the task of living, that we and others may live better.