CONTROVERTED QUESTIONS 229 



written " (Life, ii, p, 298). It is reprinted in the Collected 

 Essays (v, p. i). 



The Prologue is designed to show that the essays it 

 precedes, though apparently disconnected, are : — 



"... concerned only with different aspects of a single 

 problem, with which thinking men have been occupied, ever since 

 they began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in 

 which their lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance 

 among its intricacies. . . . 



" Men are growing to be seriously alive to the fact that the 

 historical evolution of humanity, which is generally, and I venture 

 to think not unreasonably, regarded as progress, has been, and is 

 being, accompanied by a co-ordinate elimination of the super- 

 natural from its originally large occupation of men's thoughts. 

 The question — How far is this process to go ? — is, in my appre- 

 hension, the Controverted Question of our time." 



The stages in the gradual escape of thinking humanity 

 from the trammels of authority and dogma are then briefly 

 traced, and the scientific Naturalism which marks the 

 close of the last century is shown to be constructive as 

 well as destructive : — 



" But the present incarnation of the spirit of the Renascence 

 differs from its predecessor in the eighteenth century, in that it 

 builds up, as well as pulls down. . . . 



♦• That of which it has laid the foundation, of which it is 

 already raising the superstructure, is the doctrine of evolution." 



Next follows a condensed statement of the great evolu- 

 tionary truths, to which "all future philosophical and 

 theological speculations will have to accommodate them- 

 selves," and the Prologue ends with an appreciation of 

 the Bible, regarded as a collection of historical and literary 

 documents : — 



" It appears to me that if there is anybody more objectionable 

 than the orthodox Bibliolater, it is the heterodox Philistine, who 



