106 HUXLEY 



here. It would fail to interest an age which, lightly 

 valuing the intellectual freedom won for it, but not 

 by it, is without enthusiasm, without aspiration, save 

 as these are moved by ignoble lust of empire or by 

 enervating craving after luxury ; an age in which 

 " the coarsest political standard is undoubtingly and 

 finally applied over the whole realm of human 

 thought, ... in which the souls of men have 

 become void, while into the void have entered in 

 triumph the seven devils of Secularity." * 



But the remnant who care to know through what 

 tribulation the fighters in the sixties entered the king- 

 dom of the free may be told that the battle was the 

 fiercer by reason of divisions in the camp of science, 

 whereas the theologians were a solid phalanx. True 

 it is that one of the earliest converts to Darwinism 

 was a clerical ornithologist, Canon Tristram (still 

 with us), who applied the theory of natural selection 

 to explanation of the colours of birds of the Sahara. 

 Charles Kingsley, too, was sympathetic; but these 

 were as men " born out of due time." Owen's 

 malignant attitude has had reference; Sir John 

 Herschel said that natural selection was " the law of 

 higgledy-piggledy," the exact meaning of which, 

 Darwin confessed, puzzled him, as well it might; 

 Adam Sedgwick read parts of the book with " abso- 



1 On Co?npromise, by John Morley, pp. 14, 37. 



