80 
wonderful still that the attempt to challenge its assumptions 
and to scrutinize its evidence, especially by philosophers or 
theologians, should have been resented as bigoted and ignorant 
intrusions into the domains of pure science, and have fixed 
the devotees in a more blind and unquestioning faith in the 
extremest conclusions, or have even determined the sympathy 
of some towards the most reckless assertions of principles that 
are grossly inconsistent with religion, morality, and social 
order. 
The doctrine of development in the sphere of life, whether 
vegetable or animal, is familiar to the experiences of the most 
superficial student of natural history. The distinct assertion 
of it in a wider reach and application, after a fixed order or 
plan, when propounded by modern naturalists, had a highly 
poetic and even a religious tinge, such as at first made it sus- 
picious in the judgment of sober analysts. Only devout Theists, 
or mystic Pantheists, or imaginative naturalists, would favour- 
ably regard the theory of germs as containing within them- 
selves the promise and potency of so wondrous a life which 
was waiting to be developed from within, and which, in its 
turn held within itself the capacity to produce germs of still 
greater promise and potency. The extension of development 
to the production of new species required only a larger faith 
and a more extensive observation. It was not till the tendency 
to variation was conceived of as in some sort a mechanical 
force, and capable of approximative mathematical formulization, 
of course without warrant, that the theory gained a hearing 
from the schools. The emphasizing of the influence of environ- 
ment as coacting rigidly and severely with the tendency to 
variation, and the addition of the struggle for existence and 
the survival of the fittest, tended to abate still more of the 
poetical and religious aspects of simple development. Even 
then there was no necessary inconsistency with the belief that 
intelligence originated and controls the operations of life in 
the individual and the species. Indeed, the theory, rightly 
viewed, if you take intelligence and spirit out from its domain, 
supposes a plan and prevision with the amplest resources for 
combination and selection, and is not inconsistent with the 
devoutest Theism. The very word development in the minds 
of most men, and as the unconscious speech of even atheists 
and naturalists, supposes a plan after which phenomena are 
evolved to view. Unluckily when the theory and relations 
were extended across the boundaries of simple life, it was 
taken up by men who believed that life is only a more complex 
form of mechanism, and spirit a more complex form of life, who 
held, moreover, that mechanism rules the universe, and that 
