MODERN EVOLUTION. 2 6$ 



it, Huxley protests against the idea that the teaching 

 of science is wholly negative. 



I venture, he says, to count it an improbable suggestion 

 that any one who has graduated in all the faculties of human 

 relationships ; who has taken his share in all the deep joys 

 and deeper anxieties which cling about them, who has felt the 

 burden of young lives entrusted to his care, and has stood 

 alone with his dead before the abyss of the Eternal has never 

 had a thought beyond negative criticism. 



That is the Agnostic position as he defined it; 

 an attitude, not a creed; and if he refused to affirm, 

 he equally refused to deny. 



Thus have the Pioneers of Evolution, clear- 

 sighted and sure-footed, led us by ways undreamed- 

 of at the start to a goal undreamed-of by the earliest 

 among them. To have halted on the route when the 

 graver difficulties of the road began would have made 

 the journey futile, and have left their followers in 

 the wilds. Evolution, applied to everything up to 

 man, but stopping at the stage when he appears, 

 would have remained a fascinating study, but would 

 not have become a guiding philosophy of life. It 

 is in the extension of its processes as explanation of 

 all that appertains to mankind that its abiding value 

 consists. That extension was inevitable. The old 

 theologies of civilized races, useful in their day, be- 

 cause answering, however imperfectly, to permanent 

 needs of human nature, no longer suffice. Their 

 dogmas are traced as the lineal descendants of bar- 

 baric conceptions; their ritual is becoming an archae- 



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