76 Contemporary Evolution. 



come of that philosophical system favoured by the London 

 University and so popular in this eminently free country 

 a system which denies all absolute truth and all dis- 

 tinctions of kind between " right " and " pleasure." 



Such a system the monistic philosophy recognising 

 no distinction of kind between God and nature, the 

 natural and the supernatural, man and brute, the good 

 and the pleasant, naturally and logically asserts the 

 absolute right of the state to control all and everything 

 in the life of every individual citizen, and necessarily 

 denies all rights to individuals or minorities. In principle 

 it warrants the performance of acts incomparably more 

 atrocious than the massacre of St. Bartholomew or the 

 burnings of the Spanish Inquisition. 



The perpetrators of those crimes, however bloody their 

 acts, never put forth a theory which denied all rights to 

 their victims. But there is no principle on the view advo- 

 cated by Professor Huxley's school to which a minority 

 might appeal in bar of utter extermination by a majority, 

 if unable to convince the majority that it would injure 

 itself by that minority's destruction. 



Such is the natural political development of the monistic 

 philosophy. It was so in the old pagan days, and it is 

 tending to reappear with the revival of paganism as was 

 before asserted * in the first chapter of this essay. 



* See p. 29. 



