62 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



would not be thrown away. It is true that some 

 thing has already been said upon this point 

 enough, one would think, to obviate the necessity 

 of turning back to slay the resuscitated ghosts of 

 thrice-slaughtered misconceptions. On the char 

 acter of materialism as a philosophical hypothesis, 

 Mr. Spencer has been tolerably explicit. Pro 

 fessor Huxley has summed up the case with his 

 customary felicity, at the close of that famous 

 Edinburgh lecture which everybody is supposed 

 to have read. 1 In my work on &quot; Cosmic Philoso 

 phy,&quot; I have devoted a very plain-spoken chapter 

 to the subject. Nevertheless, as Mr. Freeman 

 says, it is not a bad plan, when you have once got 

 hold of a truth, to keep hammering it into peo 

 ple s heads on all occasions, even at the risk of 

 being voted a tedious bore or a victim of crotch 

 ets. We live in a hurried and not over-intelli 

 gent world, wherein the wariest of us do not 

 always pay due heed to what we are told, and 

 the keenest do not always divine its sense ; but, 

 after we have heard it repeated fifty times that 

 Alfred was an Englishman, and Charles the Great 

 was not a Frenchman, we may perhaps succeed 

 in waking up to the historical import of such 

 statements. In this pithy though somewhat cyn- 



1 &quot;The Physical Basis of Life,&quot; Lay Strmons, p. 160. 



