The Philosophy of Evolution. 3.55 



over so many desperate battle-fields where nothing was won 

 but wounds and death. The Napoleon of a new era, it can- 

 not usefully mix its fresh blood with the outworn royal 

 Austrian of ignorant days. 



And truly, that the evolutionary philosophy is material- 

 istic is, to my mind, nothing against it. Nor is it that I 

 have any special antipathy toward the opposing idealistic 

 or spiritualistic hypothesis. The only interest I have in 

 either depends simply upon their truth and usefulness, but 

 especially upon their usefulness. I am willing to receive 

 any benefits from any source, and if spiritual or idealistic 

 philosophies have anything to give, I am glad to avail my- 

 self of their help. But they have held sway over man for 

 ages without adding serious advantages to him. They pre- 

 vailed in Christian countries to the exclusion of all mate- 

 rialism up to the beginning of this century, and seem to 

 have misused this time greatly. They did not arrest war, 

 nor banish slavery, nor diminish intemperance, nor check 

 bigotry, nor abate superstition, nor prevent persecution or 

 tyranny. In fact, while they were prevailing the world 

 dragged on, weltering in miseries, the prey of plague, pesti- 

 lence and famine, a coward before ghosts and fairies, the 

 easy victim of every natural accident, servile to kings, 

 priests and sorcerers, and devastated by perpetual fears. 

 There was small progress in thought, slow advance in knowl- 

 edge, fanciful standards of proof, little stability in propo- 

 sitions, slight discoveries in the methods of Nature. One 

 reads the records of those bewildered and disputatious ages 

 with astonishment that men could ever have been content 

 with such futilities and barrenness. Spiritualistic theories 

 were lifting their heads on all sides like a ring of serpents, 

 each hissing its contradictions and anathemas at the others. 

 There was little enough in the results of this devotion to 

 idealistic fantasies to make one desire a restoration of its 

 reign. 



How much thinking, — how little welfare ! Would it- 

 have added any great benefit to the world if most of the 

 questions respecting the Trinity, the nature of the soul, 

 the nature of duty, the exact authority of conscience, the 

 nature of space and time, or the like, had ever been satis- 

 factorily settled ? Scarcely ! for it is of these questions, 

 pre-eminently, that Lessing's remark is true, that the pur- 

 suit of truth is better than the attainment of it. There 



