But the result in any case, if God is left in His universe at all, is to remove Him very, very far away, and completely to demolish all sense of His intervention in the little daily actions and experiences of common life and all intimate communion and conference with Him in regard to those actions. When ‘The Descent of Man’ is published, Mrs. Darwin writes to her daughter, quite simply: ‘I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off.’[173] For others besides Mrs. Darwin it reduced Him quite to the vanishing point. But if Darwin himself was contented to let God alone, so far as possible, the more ardent and zealous of Darwin’s followers were inclined to hustle the Creator out of the universe altogether. This was especially true of the aggressive Darwinians in Germany. They extended the deductions of evolution to all the practical workings of human life in a fashion which Darwin distinctly disapproved: ‘What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany,’ he writes, ‘on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.’[174] To Darwin’s energetic disciple, Weisman, the evolutionary theory seemed as solidly established as that of gravitation: ‘We know just as surely as that the earth goes round the sun, that the living world upon our earth was not created all at once and in the state in which we know it, but that it has gradually evolved through what, to our human estimate, seem enormously long periods of time.’[175] And in Weisman’s opinion, evolution would go on creating adequate moral ideals, as it has done in the past: ‘The number of those who act in accordance with the ideals of purer, higher humanity, in whom the care for others and for the whole will limit care for self, will, it is my belief, increase with time and lead to higher ethical conceptions, as it has already done within the period of human existence known to us.’[176] Häckel substituted an exuberant, triumphant materialistic atheism for the crawling superstitions of an earlier day.