12 MODERN IDEAS OF EVOLUTION 



Those especially whose studies of philosophy began 

 half a century ago, and who have seen several such 

 systems wax and wane, besides knowing that the 

 same process has been going on ever since the time of 

 Thales of Miletus, have lost confidence in the infal 

 libility of such all-embracing generalisations, and may 

 be pardoned for at least cautioning their younger col 

 leagues against sacrificing science to speculation, and 

 against the tendency to become merely scientific spe 

 cialists without breadth or sympathy for higher things. 

 The example of the great apostle of evolution 

 himself should warn us as to this. Darwin, as he sits 

 in marble on the staircase of the British Museum, 

 represents a noble figure, made in the image of God, 

 and capable of grasping mentally the heaven above 

 as well as the earth beneath. As he appears in his 

 recent biography, we see the same man paralysed by 

 a spiritual atrophy, blinded and shut up in prison and 

 chained to the mill of a materialistic philosophy where, 

 like a captive Samson, he is doomed to grind all that 

 is fair and beautiful in nature into a dry and formless 

 dust. Would that he had lived to pull down the 

 temple of Dagon with his own hands, even if an 

 ephemeral reputation had perished in the ruins, and 

 to avenge himself of the cruel enemies that had put 

 out the eyes of his higher nature ! 



This depth of unscientific and unspiritual degene 

 ration, into which the mind may be thrown by the 

 excessive pursuit of evolutionary ideas, is well shown 



