THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION.^ 



It has become a commonplace, that in the think- 

 ing of the nineteenth century the characteristic and 

 epochal fact is the conception of Evolution. This 

 conception has at length been carried out into every 

 province of human experience even, is now in some 

 loose sense a general habit of thought, and seems on 

 the eve of becoming all-dominant. Its raptest devo- 

 tees have for some years demanded that the mind 

 of man itself, in which the conception has its very 

 origin and basis, shall confess its own subjection to 

 the universal law, shall henceforth acknowledge 

 itself to be simply a result of development from 

 what is not mind, and shall regard all that it has 

 been accustomed to call its highest attributes — its 

 ideality, its sense of duty, its religion — as tracing 

 their origin back to the unideal, the conscienceless, 

 the unreligious, and as thus in some sense depending 

 for their being on what has well been termed " the 

 physical basis of life." 



1 A lecture delivered at Stanford University, October, 1895. l"irst 

 printed in the New World, June, 1896. 

 B I 



