356 The Philosophy of Evolution. 



was and is but little in the questions excepting the value of 

 the discussion of them as sharpeners of the intellect, — the 

 same empty-handed benefit which is noisily claimed for 

 the mediaeval college curriculum of to-day, on which our 

 youth are still tediously trained. Were it not better to have 

 done with futilities ? Why go on whipping for trout in 

 streams long since robbed clean of fish ? 



It is therefore with impatience that one hears the reiter- 

 ated lament of public teachers and preachers over the ten- 

 dencies of the age towards Evolution and its materialistic 

 ideas. One would imagine, to listen to these wailers, that 

 there was something blighting in materialism; that its 

 marked increase . during the last thirty years had been at- 

 tended with great injuries to the human race. Whereas, 

 if one will only consider the matter fairly, this last period 

 has seen more advance in human well-being than all the 

 last 2,000 years before it. Materialism has prevailed, and 

 has made a new world out of a sad and worn-out one. The 

 progress has been in material forms, in railroads and tele- 

 graphs, in cotton-gins and steam-driven machineries, in an 

 immense increase of wealth and luxury, in books and news- 

 papers, in applied science and philosophy, which makes 

 man handier, shrewder, more industrious, — averse to war, 

 tyranny, superstition, narrow-mindedness, gloom, disorder 

 and poverty. 



If materialism has so many advantages to confer, why 

 should we be afraid of it ? Why should we not rather be 

 afraid of that spiritual philosophy which spent two thou- 

 sand years in discussing the nature of God and the soul, 

 and human destiny generally, and duty as an abstraction, 

 leaving mankind meanwhile hungry and cold and naked, 

 the prey of disease, and the prisoner of physical and moral 

 ills ? And what insistent and blind folly it is to be warn- 

 ing the age against the dangers of a materialism whose 

 highest word has proved, to have more good sense and clear 

 light in it than ever fell to the lot of the best idealistic 

 discussion that literature records, from Plato down to James 

 Martineau ! Why go on cultivating the profitless sands of 

 Sahara, when the hills and valleys of Materialism already 

 rustle with the corn and vines whose fruits are for the 

 gladdening of the nations ? 



Even from a spiritualist's point of view this material 



