2OO CHARLES DARWIN 



logical botany. Yet others are working out its psycho- 

 logical implications, enquiring into instinct and animal 

 intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruse problems 

 of the human mind and the human emotions. One 

 philosopher has brought it to bear on questions of 

 ethics, another on questions of social and political 

 economy. Its principles have been applied in one place 

 to aesthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place 

 to the origin and growth of religion. The study of 

 language has derived new lights from the great central 

 Darwinian luminary. The art of education is beginning 

 to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian im- 

 pulse. In fact, there is hardly a single original worker 

 in any department of thought or science who has not 

 been more or less profoundly affected, whether he 

 knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast 

 spreading and circling wave of the Darwinian concep- 

 tions. All our ideas have been revolutionised and 

 evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in the 

 world, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal 

 power the dry bones of all the sciences, all the arts, and 

 all the philosophies. 



And evolutionism is gradually though slowly falter- 

 ing downward. It is permeating the daily press of the 

 nations, and gaining for its vocabulary a recognised 

 place in. the phraseology of the unlearned vulgar. Such 

 expressions as l natural selection,' l survival of the 

 fittest,' ' struggle for existence,' ' adaptation to the 

 environment,' and all the rest of it, are becoming as 

 household words upon the lips of thousands who only 

 know the name of Darwin as a butt for the petty empty 

 jibes of infinitesimal cheap witlings. And Darwinism 



