122 Thomas Henry Huxley 



by a series of essa5S, addresses, and investigations, con- 

 tinued almost to the end of his life, tried to convince, 

 and succeeded in convincing, the intellectual world. At 

 the risk of vvearj'ing by repetition we shall again insist 

 upon the side of Darwinism that Huxley fought for and 

 triumphed for. 



Long before the time of Darwin and Huxley, almost 

 at the beginning of recorded thought, philosophers 

 busied themselves with the wonderful diversitj- of the 

 living world and with speculations as to how it had as- 

 sumed its present form. From the earliest times to this 

 century, theories as to the living world fell into one or 

 other of two main groups. The key-note of one group 

 was the fixitj' of species : the belief that from their first 

 appearance species were separate, independent entities, 

 one never springing from another, new species never 

 arising by the modification in different directions of 

 descendants of already existing species. The key-note 

 of the other group of theories was the idea of progress- 

 ive change : that animals and plants as they passed 

 along the stream of time were continually being moulded 

 by the forces surrounding them, and that the farther 

 back the mind could go in imagination the fewer and 

 simpler species would be ; until, in the first beginning, 

 all the existing diverse kinds of living creatures would 

 converge to a single point. It may be that, on the 

 whole, the idea of fixity prev^ailed more among thinkers 

 with a religious bias; but for the most part the theories 

 were debated independently of the tenets of any faith. 

 Christian or other. There were sceptical defenders of 

 fixity and religious upholders of evolution. However, 

 in Christian countries, from the time of the Reformation 

 onwards, a change in this neutrality of religion to 

 theories of the living world took place. As Pascal 



