Every day, however, in spite of such half-ignorant adherents, the
effects of true Darwinism are widening and deepening. One group of
earnest workers is using it now as a guide to physiological,
embryological, and anatomical researches. Another is employing it with
zeal and skill in the field of classificatory and physiological botany.
Yet others are working out its psychological implications, enquiring
into instinct and animal intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruse
problems of the human mind and the human emotions. One philosopher has
brought it to bear on questions of ethics, another on questions of
social and political economy. Its principles have been applied in one
place to æsthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place to the
origin and growth of religion. The study of language has derived new
lights from the great central Darwinian luminary. The art of education
is beginning to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian impulse.
In fact, there is hardly a single original worker in any department of
thought or science who has not been more or less profoundly affected,
whether he knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast spreading
and circling wave of the Darwinian conceptions. All our ideas have been
revolutionised and evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in the
world, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal power the dry
bones of all the sciences, all the arts, and all the philosophies.
And evolutionism is gradually though slowly filtering downward. It is
permeating the daily press of the nations, and gaining for its
vocabulary a recognised place in the phraseology of the unlearned
vulgar. Such expressions as 'natural selection,' 'survival of the
fittest,' 'struggle for existence,' 'adaptation to the environment,' and
all the rest of it, are becoming as household words upon the lips of
thousands who only know the name of Darwin as a butt for the petty empty
jibes of infinitesimal cheap witlings. And Darwinism will trickle down
still through a thousand channels, by definite popularisation, and still
more by indefinite absorption into the common thought of universal
humanity, till it becomes part and parcel of the general inheritance,
bred in our bone and burnt into our blood, an heir-loom of our race to
all time and in all countries. Great thoughts like his do not readily
die: they expand and grow in ten thousand bosoms, till they transform
the world at last into their own likeness, and adapt it to the
environment they have themselves created by their informing power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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