4 ARISTO CRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book i prospects of a life in heaven, but those which 



deal with the possibility of improving our social 



conditions on earth, and which appeal to us 



through our sympathies, not with belief or doubt, 



but with the principles which are broadly contrasted 



under the names of conservative and revolutionary. 



science itself is Such being the case, it is hardly necessary to 



correspo'nding observe that science itself has been undergoing a 



change likewise. The character of the change, 



however, requires to be briefly specified. From 



the time when geologists first startled the orthodox 



by demonstrating that the universe was more than 



six thousand years old, and that something more 



than a week had been occupied in the process of 



its construction, to the time, comparatively recent, 



during which the genius of Darwin and others was 



forcing on the world entirely new ideas with regard 



to the parentage, and presumably the nature of 



man, there was a certain limit a certain scientific 



frontier at which positive science practically 



stopped short. Having sedulously examined the 



its character- materials and structure of the universe, until on the 



the C m\ddieof g one hand it reached atoms and molecules, it examined, 



lo^aTST* 3 on t ^ ie other, the first emergence of organic life, and 



physical and traced its developments till they culminated in the 



physiological / 



evolution. articulate-speaking human being. It brought us, in 

 fact, to man on the threshold of his subsequent 

 history ; and there, till very recently, positive 

 science left him. But now there are signs all 

 round us of a new intellectual movement, analogous 

 to that which accompanied the rise of Darwinism, 



