THE COMING OF EVOLUTION 219 



mystic again come to their own, and, in new language, 

 and from a higher ground of vantage, proclaim their 

 message to mankind. 



Now, speaking broadly, this recurrent phenomenon 

 of a wave of mechanical philosophy was the first main 

 result of Darwin's success. Quite legitimately and 

 without exaggeration, the establishment of the prin- 

 ciple of evolution strengthened greatly the feeling of 

 continuity in nature, and gave new confidence to those 

 who based their view of life on scientific ground. It 

 was the complement on the biological side of the 

 contemporary tendencies in physics we have traced 

 in the last chapter tendencies which pointed to a 

 complete account of the inorganic world in terms of 

 eternal, unchanging matter, and a limited and strictly 

 constant amount of energy. These conceptions seemed 

 to destroy the need for an overseeing Providence 

 or for any act of creation, or at the least implied 

 that the Author might well be supposed to have 

 turned away, and left the great machine to spin on 

 unheeded, unwatched, down the ringing grooves of 

 change. The application to living beings of the 

 principle of the conservation of energy, led to the 

 exaggerated belief that all the various activities, 

 physical, biological and psychological, of the existing 

 organism would soon be explained as mere modes of 

 motion of molecules, and manifestations of mechani- 

 cal or chemical energy. The acceptance of the theory 

 of evolution produced the illusion that an insight into 

 the method by which the result had been obtained 

 had given a complete solution of the problem, and 

 that a knowledge of his origin and history had laid 

 bare the construction of the inward spirit of man as 



