THE PAGAN ETHIC 79 



and he afterwards accepted the Chair of Eugenics 

 founded at the University. Karl Pearson had been 

 one of the ablest of the group of contemporary 

 evolutionists. To me he had hitherto appeared 

 to have applied the Darwinian hypothesis to carry 

 him to horizons in thought far wider than almost 

 any one of his contemporaries had reached in 

 England. When I arrived home it was with new 

 interest, therefore, that I took down from its shelf 

 his Ethic of Free Thought, the book in which most 

 of his boldest ideas had been clothed in the language 

 of science and philosophy. 



In the light of Galton's proposals the essays of 

 the book now presented a most remarkable study. 

 I followed the mind of the author through the 

 essays as it rose against the leaders of the great 

 wars of religion of the West, against the spirit of 

 " the seething mass of fanaticism " that the epochs 

 of the past presented to him, against the prejudices, 

 the beliefs, the creeds, the tortures, the butcheries, 

 the blood bath3 which represented the long struggle 

 of the mind of the terrible pagan West, as it en- 

 countered in the integration of the universal world 

 something greater than itself which it understood 

 not. How the author in the name of the intellect 

 stooped over the record, now in sorrow, anon in 

 shame, ever in remote superiority. Yet what 



