Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (Volume 4); Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philosophy (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XXII GENESIS OF MAN, MORALLY THERE are two things, said Kant, which fill me with awe because of their sublimity, ? the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us. From the modern point of view there is interest as well as instruction to be found in the implied antithesis. While in the study of the stellar universe we contemplate the process of evolution on a scale so vast that reason and imagination are alike baffled in the effort to trace out its real significance, and we are overpowered by the sense of the infinity that surrounds us; on the other hand, in the study of the moral sense we contemplate the last and noblest product of evolution which we can ever know, ? the attribute latest to be unfolded in the development of psychical life, and by the possession of which we have indeed become as gods, knowing the good and the evil. The theorems of astronomy and the theorems of ethics present to us the process of evolution in its extremes of extension and of intension respectively. For although upon other worlds far out in space there may be modes of existence immeasurably transcending Humanity, yet these must remain unknowable by us. And while this possibility should be allowed its due weight in restraining us from the vain endeavour to formulate the infinite and eternal Sustainer of the universe in terms of our own human nature, as if the highest symbols intelligible to us were in reality the highest symbols, nevertheless it can in no way influence or modify our science. To us the development of the noblest of human attributes must ever remain the last term in the stupendous series of cosmic changes, of which the development of planetary systems is the first term. And our special synthesis of the phenomena of cosmic evolution, which began by seeking to explai...