198 CHARLES DARWIN 



before the advent of the Darwinian conception. In 

 nothing is this fact more conspicuously seen than in the 

 immediate obsolescence (if one may so speak) of all the 

 statical pre-Darwinian philosophies which ignored de- 

 velopment, as soon as ever the new progressive evolu- 

 tionary theories had fairly burst upon an astonished 

 world. Dogmatic Comte was left forthwith to his little 

 band of devoted adherents ; shadowy Hegel was rele- 

 gated with a bow to the cool shades of the common- 

 rooms of Oxford ; Buckle was exploded like an inflated 

 wind-bag; even Mill himself magnum et venerabile 

 nomen with all his mighty steam-hammer force of 

 logical directness, was felt instinctively to be lacking in 

 full appreciation of the dynamic and kinetic element in 

 universal nature. Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel 

 and Clifford, had the field to themselves for the establish- 

 ment of their essentially evolutionary systems. Great 

 thinkers of the elder generation, like Bain and Lyell, 

 felt bound to remodel their earlier conceptions by the 

 light of the new Darwinian hypotheses. Those who 

 failed by congenital constitution to do so, like Carlyle and 

 Carpenter, were, philosophically speaking, left hopelessly 

 behind and utterly extinguished. Those who only half 

 succeeded in thus reading themselves into the new 

 ideas, like Lewes and Max Miiller, lost ground imme- 

 diately before the eager onslaught of their younger 

 competitors. 'The world is to the young,' says the 

 eastern proverb ; and in a world peopled throughout in 

 the high places of thought by men almost without 

 .exception evolutionists, there was little or no place for 

 the timid group of stranded Girondins, who still stood 

 aloof in sullen antique scientific orthodoxy from what 



