THE INTERPRETER IO5 



The oldest of all philosophies was bound hand 

 and foot, and cast into utter darkness, during the 

 millennium of theological scholasticism. But Dar- 

 win poured new life-blood into the ancient frame ; 

 the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 

 Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate ex- 

 pression of the universal order of things than any of 

 the schemes which have been accepted by the credu- 

 lity, and welcomed by the superstition, of seventy later 

 generations of men. 



To any one who studies the signs of the times, the 

 emergence of the philosophy of Evolution, in the at- 

 titude of claimant to the throne of the world of 

 thought, from the limbo of hatred, and, as many 

 hoped, forgotten things, is the most portentous event 

 of the nineteenth century. But the most effective 

 weapons of the modern champions of Evolution 

 were fabricated by Darwin ; and the Origin of Species 

 has enlisted a formidable body of combatants, trained 

 in the severe school of Physical Science, whose ears 

 might have long remained deaf to the speculations of 

 a priori philosophers. 1 



In this same chapter Huxley makes a short refer- 

 ence, as to a storm whose tumult has long been 

 stilled, leaving only a ground-swell, to the " years 

 which had to pass away before misrepresentation,, 

 ridicule, and denunciation ceased to be the most 

 notable constituents of the majority of the multi- 

 tudinous criticisms of the Origin of Species." What 

 he touches upon with brevity need not be amplified 



1 II. p. 180; and cf. Coll. Essays, i. p. 43; ix. p. 104. "Clas- 

 sical history is a part of modern history : it is medieval history 

 which is ancient." — Bagehot's Physics and Politics, p. 169. 



