THE NET RESULT 201 



will trickle clown still through a thousand channels, by 

 definite popularisation, and still more by indefinite 

 absorption into the common thought of universal 

 humanity, till it becomes part and parcel of the general 

 inheritance, bred in our bone and burnt into our blood, 

 an heir-loom of our race to all time and in all countries. 

 Great thoughts like his do not readily die : they expand 

 and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transform the 

 world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to 

 the environment they have themselves created by their 

 informing power. 



Happy above ordinary human happiness, Charles 

 Darwin lived himself to see the prosperous beginning of 

 this great silent philosophical revolution. Harvey's grand 

 discovery, it has been well said, was scoffed at for nearly 

 a whole generation. Newton's marvellous law of gravi- 

 tation was coldly received even by the gigantic intellect 

 of Leibnitz himself. Francis Bacon, in disgrace and 

 humiliation, could only commend his name and memory 

 1 to foreign nations and to the next age.' It is too often 

 so with thinkers of the first and highest order : it was 

 not so, happily, with the gentle soul of Charles Darwin. 

 Alone among the prophets and teachers of triumphant 

 creeds, he saw with his own eyes the adoption of the 

 faith he had been the first to promulgate in all its fulness 

 by every fresh and powerful mind of the younger race 

 that grew up around him. The Nestor of evolutionism, 

 he had lived among two successive generations of 

 thinkers, and over the third he ruled as king. With 

 that crowning joy of a great, a noble, and a happy life, 

 let us leave him here alone in his glory. 



