Meantime, it is interesting to consider how many of the great spirits of the last generation, and especially of those most intellectually influential, were profoundly moved by Darwinism and felt more or less its haunting gloom of destruction and its far-reaching effect. In Ibsen the struggle for existence shows itself in the intense assertion of the individual and his passionate emphasis of the right to live and develop himself, and the same tendency in Nietzsche grew into the cloudy and colossal phantom of the Superman. With Tolstoi the obsession of Darwinistic conflict and survival appears in the earlier novels, ‘Anna’ and ‘War and Peace,’ but in the end, like Zola or John Fiske, he found the pressure too great and too horrible, and endeavored to establish an antidote for human misery in human love. In Renan the subtle, delicate, enchanting irony serves only to make the fundamental, dissolving nihilism more deep and ruinous. As he expressed it, through the dramatic characters who are merely his mouthpiece: ‘Uncertain as we are about human destiny, the wisest course is to see to it that in making all sorts of hypotheses, one at least avoids being too absurd’;[192] again: ‘Though the universe should prove not serious, science might be serious still. Vast sums of virtue have been expended on chimæras. It is better to take the more virtuous course, even though one may not be sure that virtue is more than a word.’[193] Or our own American Henry Adams asks evolution to educate him, and asks in vain. All it can teach him is that _terebratula_ can remain unchanged in its insignificance for centuries, while man evolves, yet in the end proves to be no whit more significant than _terebratula_. And Adams goes out, like a spent torch, uneducated, in the huge, unmeaning, whirling acceleration of theories and discoveries and plain sufferings and questions that must remain forever unanswered. Yet perhaps Adams was quite as adequate to the universe as Dr. Cadman.