14 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT 



of all kinds in the biological world which followed 

 upon the publication of Darwin's theory, should 

 have got a little into men's heads. Every great 

 fact, and every potent theory, has this wonderful 

 thing about it, that it engenders discovery, and 

 Darwin's theory, even as a working hypothesis, 

 has been the direct cause of an extraordinary 

 advance in knowledge during the past fifty years. 

 And as it was ignorantly assumed by some, though 

 not by Darwin nor by Huxley, to have dispensed 

 with any need for a God, that idea was temporarily 

 at any rate overshadowed in, or obliterated from, 

 the minds of men. 



There are, perhaps I should say there were, 

 excellent people who really believe that if the 

 Sacred Scriptures in his own tongue were placed 

 in the hands of a heathen who could read, he must 

 ipso facto become a Christian. In quite the same 

 way the tendency of the mid-Victorian age was 

 to suppose, that a careful perusal of Darwin's 

 works was enough to shatter the faith of the 

 stoutest. There is a somewhat remarkable novel 

 by a very remarkable, if under-estimated writer, 

 Samuel Butler, called The Way of All Flesh. 

 Butler was a real student of the Darwinian con- 

 troversy, and contributed some pungent writings 

 to it. And no one who was familiar with the mid- 

 Victorian parsonage will dispute the accuracy of 

 many of his pictures of that household. For the 

 rest the figures are somewhat wooden, and in many 

 respects unconvincing. The real point of interest 

 is the faithful representation of the ethos of the 

 period, the cocksure attitude which believed that 



