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 " Cosmic Philoso- 

 phy," 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 " The Physical Basis of Life," Lay Sermons, p. 160. 



