Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/62



has become a commonplace, that in the thinking of the nineteenth century the characteristic and epochal fact is the conception of Evolution. This conception has at length been carried out into every province of human experience even, is now in some loose sense a general habit of thought, and seems on the eve of becoming all-dominant. Its raptest devotees have for some years demanded that the mind of man itself, in which the conception has its very origin and basis, shall confess its own subjection to the universal law, shall henceforth acknowledge itself to be simply a result of development from what is not mind, and shall regard all that it has been accustomed to call its highest attributes — its ideality, its sense of duty, its religion — as tracing their origin back to the unideal, the conscienceless, the unreligious, and as thus in some sense depending for their being on what has well been termed “the physical basis of life.”