In these words of Haeckel’s we have a clear indication of the optimistic temper of Darwinism at the time. They touch a question of fundamental importance for the value of the new theory: the question whether, in spite of all it destroyed, in spite of its disseverance from the idea of God, it brought with it a new ground of conciliation, a conviction of the ever-advancing growth of the world and ever greater achievements? God was replaced by natural law. There was no longer any “design” beyond the simple and unchanging course of natural laws. Well, what were these natural laws going to do for us? Were they giving us a world that would become more and more harmonious, that was on the whole an advancing organism, that would be an increasing embodiment of God—the God within nature, not without, God at the end of things, after æons of worlds that seemed to break up like the individual in the struggle for existence, yet were eternal in the mighty essence that was tossed on from world to world like a grain of dust and was made the starting-point of infinitely new and more complex movements? Or—was the work of these natural laws but a ceaseless poking and thrusting and bubble-blowing without any inner meaning? Was it the play of waves that rise and fall, and rise and fall again, in the ocean, an eternal melting into smoke and nothingness? Was the whole of “evolution” an absolutely meaningless play of innumerable tendencies, not one of which would ever come to anything? This note also was found in the first melody. Something would have been lacking if it had not been struck. Here again there could be a parting of ways, not only in the crowd, but amongst the thoughtful. The whole struggle of optimism and pessimism might be dragged in. At all events, the problem was bound to be pointed out from the start.