THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



tie with the churchmen and with the humanists, and 

 his logic routed them in one pitched battle after an- 

 other. With an increasing popular approval behind 

 him, Huxley finally drew clergy and laymen to his 

 faith of agnosticism, or at least left them with the 

 scientific virus in their veins. Spencer, who had been 

 groping to find some law which would animate his 

 doctrine that society was an organism, turned with a 

 sigh of relief to natural selection. In his hands, so- 

 ciety evolved by natural selection and contained 

 within it a force which swept it along indifferent to 

 the vagaries of the individual. His system penetrated 

 to the people through such popular expositors as Kidd 

 and Mallock. Tennyson and Fiske embraced natural 

 selection and added to it a sentimental side by replac- 

 ing a Calvinistic God with a divine tendency in the 

 human race which carries it on to perfection; — the 

 ideal of a hazy divinity who watches in complacent 

 leisure the amoeba rising to man, and man approach- 

 ing a state of perfect justice and virtue by the sur- 

 vival of the fittest, — the fittest to them no longer 

 meaning, as it did with Darwin and Spencer, those 

 capable by good or evil means of surviving, but those 

 nearest to their own preconceived ideal of the good, 

 the true, and the beautiful. 



But the nineteenth century, while preaching justice 

 and brotherly love, not because the individual should 

 purify himself from sin but because the individual 



C 103 



