The general result of all these influences was, then, to discredit philosophy and exalt science, so far as might be, into its place. Either the abstract methods of the physical sciences were proclaimed as adequate for the discovery of all truth, or, if this was seen to be impossible, agnosticism was professed in regard to all subjects to which these methods could not be applied. Even the phenomena of life were supposed to be capable of explanation by the action and reaction of the parts or elements of the physical organism, and Huxley looked forward to the time when man with all his spiritual endowments should be shown to be only the “cunningest of nature’s clocks.” The new science of psychophysics, which arose in Germany and has been cultivated with so much zeal by Wundt and others in all civilized countries, seemed to carry the method of physics into the investigation of mind, and some of its students were ready to maintain that it was the only psychology that deserved the name of science. Darwin’s great work on the _Origin of Species_, in so far as it set aside the idea of special creation and referred the “purposiveness” of organic structures to a process in which the external environment, and not any inward power of self-adaptation, was the controlling factor, seemed to bring a new reinforcement to the same way of thinking. And he and his followers were not slow to apply the theory of natural selection to the life of man, as well as to that of plants and animals. Finally, the historical studies, which were now cultivated with an energy to an extent hitherto unexampled, and immensely extended the knowledge of the process whereby the present has grown out of the past, were invaded by a similar spirit; and the historical method was maintained to be a solvent which could disintegrate all metaphysical conceptions of ethics or politics or even of theology. The account of the genesis of any idea was regarded as reducing its claims to the level of the elements or rudiments out of which it had sprung, and thus as enabling the scientific historian to explain, or explain away, the spiritual by the natural in all human life and experience. All things appeared again to be pointing towards a system of thought which would resolve ethics and psychology into physiology, and physiology into chemistry and physics.