Philosophic Evolution. 175 



synchronous with a wide-spread loss of political liberty 

 to the profit of centralised despotism, while the gradual 

 growth and consolidation of our parliamentary system 

 marks a period of continued architectural decline. Mr. 

 Lecky has, in his " History of Rationalism, admirably 

 demonstrated to us how widespread sentiments and 

 habits of thought simply drop out of fashion, and how 

 beliefs which have never been disproved, and with their 

 evidence still unrefuted, come gradually to be aban- 

 doned and their evidence ignored, till a quite contradic- 

 tory belief is eventually ^accepted. A wave of sentiment, 

 far more than any logical process, repelled from men's 

 minds the doctrine of man's ape origin when it was 

 first mooted. It is the flow of an opposite wave of 

 sentiment which determines its wide-spread acceptance 

 now. Might we not then expect, a priori, that the 

 great advance in natural knowledge of the last three 

 centuries those marvellous discoveries which have more 

 and more directed men's minds to physical observation 

 and experiment should be accompanied by stagnation 

 or retrogression along some other lines of thought ? 



Attention cannot fully be directed to two distinct 

 inquiries simultaneously, and an exhausting pursuit of 

 physics must necessarily starve some other intellectual 

 habit. We should then be little surprised to find for a 

 time a philosophical decline accompanying scientific 

 advance. Moreover, it is ever the wont of men's minds 



