discover or to introduce the absolutely best order known only to God. He is
quite correct in saying that if there be really an absolutely best order,
God alone knows it; but since it cannot be the office of science to wait
upon Divine revelation, and since such an absolutely best order could be
introduced by God alone and not by men, and therefore the revelation of the
Divine will would not help us in the least, so it must logically follow,
from the admission that the knowing and the willing of the absolutely good
appertain to God, that man has not to strive after this absolutely good,
but after the _relatively best_, which alone is intelligible to and
attainable by him.

And thus it is in fact. The solution of the social problem is not to be
sought in the discovery of an _absolutely good_ order of society, but in
that of the _relatively best_--that is, of such an order of human
institutions as best corresponds to the contemporary conditions of human
existence. The existing arrangements of society call for improvement, not
because they are out of harmony with our longing for an absolutely good
state of things, but because it can be shown to be possible to replace them
by others more in accordance with the contemporary conditions of human
existence. Darwin's law of evolution in nature teaches us that when the
actual social arrangements have ceased to be the relatively best--that is,
those which best correspond to the contemporary conditions of human
existence--their abandonment is not only possible but simply inevitable.
For in the struggle for existence that which is out of date not only _may_
but _must_ give place to that which is more in harmony with the actual
conditions. And this law also teaches us that all the characters of any
organic being whatever are the results of that being's struggle for
existence in the conditions in which it finds itself. If, now, we bring
together these various hints offered us by the doctrine of evolution, we
see the following to be the only path along which the investigation of the