276 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 
the nineteenth century would have been that of a 
greater Kepler; as it is, his place is undoubtedly that of 
a greater Newton. The achievement is so stupendous 
that that of Darwin is fairly dwarfed in comparison. 
Now in Spencer’s law of evolution the unification of 
nature is carried to something like completeness. It 
shows us that the truth which began to be discerned 
when Newton’s mind took the first great leap into the 
celestial spaces is a universal truth. It is not to be 
supposed that as yet we have more than crossed the 
threshold of the temple of science. We have hitherto 
simply been finding out the way to get the first peep 
into its mysteries; yet in that first peep we get a 
steady gleam which assures us that all things in the 
universe are parts of a single dramatic scheme, and that 
the agencies concerned everywhere, far and near, are 
interpretable in the same way that we interpret the 
most familiar facts of daily life. Just how far the real- 
ization of this truth has affected the thought and life 
of our age in its details would be difficult to tell. It 
would be entirely incorrect to say that the unification 
of nature in the minds of thinkers of the present day 
is a consequence of Spencer's generalizations. The 
correct way of stating the case would be to say that 
Spencer’s generalizations give us the complete and 
scientific statement of a truth which in more or less 
vague and imperfect shape permeates the intellectual 
atmosphere of our time. 
It isnot from the labours of any one thinker or from 
researches in any one branch of science that we get the 
conception of a unified nature, but it is a result of 
the resistless momentum of scientific inquiry during the 
past two centuries. Such changes in the intellectual 
