REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSION. 407 



M. Brunetiere's study is pretty much in the same 

 strain as Lord Salisbury's much-discussed address 

 at Oxford, before the British Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science. And has not Huxley, one of 

 the most applauded representatives of science, and 

 one of the staunchest defenders of Evolution, been 

 forced to admit, in his celebrated Romanes Lecture, 

 that science and Evolution have limitations which 

 he would have been loath to acknowledge but a few 

 years before he made the confession that so startled 

 many of his scientific friends? The conclusion of 

 this studied effort of the noted evolutionist is, briefly 

 stated, that the cosmic process, or Evolution, is ut- 

 terly incompatible with ethical progress, or rather, 

 the two are ever and essentially antagonistic. 1 



And Herbert Spencer, too, the great philosopher 

 of Evolution, who sees the working of Evolution in 

 everything ; in the development of society, language, 

 government, of worlds and systems of worlds, was 

 obliged not long since to admit, not without reluc- 

 tance we may be sure, that Evolution is not operat- 

 ing so rapidly as he expected it would, and is not 

 fulfilling all the fond hopes he entertained regard- 

 ing it as a factor of human progress. " My faith in 

 free institutions," says he, " originally strong, though 

 always formed with the belief that the maintenance 

 and success of them is a question of popular charac- 



1 " Social progress," he tells us, "means a checking of the 

 cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, 

 which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not 

 the survival of who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of 

 the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are 

 ethically the best." 



