66 A Century of Science 



bert Spencer s mighty work when it came, and it 

 was for that reason that it was so quickly trium 

 phant over the old order of thought. The victory 

 has been so thorough, swift, and decisive that it 

 will take another generation to narrate the story 

 of it so as to do it full justice. Meanwhile, peo 

 ple s minds are apt to be somewhat dazed with the 

 rapidity and wholesale character of the change ; 

 and nothing is more common than to see them 

 adopting Mr. Spencer s ideas without recognizing 

 them as his or knowing whence they got them. 

 As fast as Mr. Spencer could set forth his general 

 izations they were taken hold of here and there by 

 special workers, each in his own department, and 

 utilized therein. His general system was at once 

 seized, assimilated, and set forth with new illustra 

 tions by serious thinkers who were already grop 

 ing in the regions of abstruse thought which the 

 master s vision pierced so clearly. And thus the 

 doctrine of evolution has come to be inseparably 

 interfused with the whole mass of thinking in our 

 day and generation. I do not mean to imply that 

 people commonly entertain very clear ideas about 

 it, for clear ideas are not altogether common. I 

 suspect that a good many people would hesitate 

 if asked to state exactly what Newton s law of grav 

 itation is. 



