52 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 



IX 



We run a great risk when we attempt to break new ground 

 in criticism : and I am conscious that the views I have 

 expressed in this essay lie open to the charge of paradox. 

 * With all your pains, you have only succeeded in discovering 

 a mare's nest.' ' Instead of the pole-star you have been 

 following some will-o'-the-wisp.' Such are judgments which 

 may be passed, and in the present state of knowledge may 

 be fairly passed, upon the theory I have been expounding. 

 And yet, when it comes to be investigated, I believe that any 

 endeavour to bring criticism into vital accord with the leading 

 conceptions of our age will be found to rest on firm founda- 

 tions. ' Creatures of a day ; what is a man, and what is 

 not a man ? ' cried Pindar, long ago. We have not advanced 

 far beyond this proposition and this question. But our views 

 about the world and man's place in it have so materially 

 changed, that it is no longer possible to approach the study 

 of human energy in any one of its great manifestations 

 religion, the state, art, philosophy without adjusting this 

 to the main current and keynote of thought. If we believe, 

 as we are now constrained to believe, that all things in 

 nature, including the sidereal systems, the multitudinous 

 species of animals and plants upon our planet, and man 

 himself, are products of an evolutionary process, we must 

 logically apply the rules of that process to things which 

 humanity not this person or that person, but the collective 

 personality of races first, and afterwards the larger collective 

 personality of races in conjunction has brought forth. The 

 conception is not new. It has long been latent in the higher 

 thought of Europe. In Hegel's magnificent attempt to 

 organise the world ideally by gazing on the mirror of our 

 mind, it clothed itself with specious splendour. I have 

 suggested that something fruitful for criticism as a branch 

 of science may be adduced if we abandon the old paths of 

 caprice and predilection, abandon the ambitious flight of ideal 

 construction, and confine ourselves for this while to the 

 investigation of points in which the evolution of the spirit 

 seems to resemble the evolution of nature. 





