Principles of western civilisation

38 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

numerable points of view in one of the most strenuous and remarkable intellectual periods in history. Possibly no other single conception of the human mind has produced throughout so many departments of knowledge results at once so profoundly disintegrating and so radically reconstructive. It has, to use the words of Romanes, ‘‘created a revolution in the thought of our time, the magnitude of which, in many of its far-reaching consequences, we are not even yet in a position to appreciate, but the action of which has already wrought a transformation in general philosophy as well as in the more special science of biology that is without a parallel in the history of mankind.”* Whatever may have been thought of the hypothesis in the period of discussion through which it has survived, there are probably few thoughtful minds at the present time who, having once grasped the nature of the evidence by which it is supported, have not received a deep and lasting impression of its relation to actualities, and of the extraordinary significance of the tendencies in knowledge which it has set in motion amongst us.”

So far the attempt has been made to present the Darwinian hypothesis as nearly as possible in its original form. Let us see now if we can bring home to the mind some idea of the character of

1 Darwin, and after Darwin, G. J. Romanes, vol. i. c. vil.

2 Tt is only by long familiarity with the processes of thought which the application of the law of Natural Selection implies that the intellectual reach of the principle is fully perceived. It was not an unfitting tribute which Professor Sayce paid to the conception when, speaking of it at a comparatively early stage of the discussion, he placed it among the class of abstract ideas, the discoursing of which constituted landmarks in the development of the world: ‘fTo have won for the race a single idea like that of Watural Selection is a higher glory than the conquests of a Cxsar” (Zhe Scrence of Language, by A. H. Sayce, vol. i. pp. 102, 103).