Ch. 4 - The Break-up of the Compromise - Page 2

merely one particular hypothesis about how animal variety might have
arisen; and that particular hypothesis, though it will always be
interesting, is now very much the reverse of secure. But it is only in
the strictly scientific world and among strictly scientific men that
Darwin's detailed suggestion has largely broken down. The general public
impression that he had entirely proved his case (whatever it was) was
early arrived at, and still remains. It was and is hazily associated
with the negation of religion. But (and this is the important point) it
was also associated with the negation of democracy. The same
Mid-Victorian muddle-headedness that made people think that "evolution"
meant that we need not admit the supremacy of God, also made them think
that "survival" meant that we must admit the supremacy of men. Huxley
had no hand in spreading these fallacies; he was a fair fighter; and he
told his own followers, who spoke thus, most emphatically not to play
the fool. He said most strongly that his or any theory of evolution left
the old philosophical arguments for a creator, right or wrong, exactly
where they were before. He also said most emphatically that any one who
used the argument of Nature against the ideal of justice or an equal
law, was as senseless as a gardener who should fight on the side of the
ill weeds merely because they grew apace. I wish, indeed, that in such a
rude summary as this, I had space to do justice to Huxley as a literary
man and a moralist. He had a live taste and talent for the English
tongue, which he devoted to the task of keeping Victorian rationalism
rational. He did not succeed. As so often happens when a rather
unhealthy doubt is in the atmosphere, the strongest words of their great
captain could not keep the growing crowds of agnostics back from the
most hopeless and inhuman extremes of destructive thought. Nonsense not
yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began
to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of
"advanced thought" are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism
as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition
ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the
ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of
Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful
faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air
of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had
redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay--all that seemed slowly and
sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in
the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was