4 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



One or the other of these philosophies now claims the 

 right to supplant the venerable forms of old religion, 

 and seems almost on the verge of effecting its desire. 

 The science of our century, stimulated to unprece- 

 dented discovery by ideas derived from the philosophy 

 that ushered the century in, comes at the century's 

 close to the support of these ideas with its vast accu- 

 mulations ; and the new consensus of our time appears 

 to gain its proper utterance, now in the philosophy of 

 Herbert Spencer, and now in that Neo-Hegelianism 

 regarding which the current question is, whether it 

 can get its best expression by being read as Hegel 

 darwinised, or as Darwin hegelised. The change 

 that seems imminent, in whichever way interpreted, 

 would be profound indeed, — far profounder than ap- 

 pears on the surface. Its revolutionary character 

 is so little comprehended by the mass of the intelli- 

 gent that many of the official teachers of Christian- 

 ity, to say nothing of its less critical laity, not only 

 dally with the new views, chiefly with Cosmic 

 Theism, but openly embrace them, with no apparent 

 suspicion of their hostility to the principles that are 

 fundamental to the Faith. Yet the hostility is real ; 

 and it is not from any caprice of his merely private 

 way of thinking, but from a genuine, even if obscure, 

 apprehension of the things indispensable to this 

 Faith, that Mr. Balfour in his Foimdations of Belief 

 assails both forms of the new jDhilosophy, which he 



