Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/65

4

One or the other of these philosophies now claims the right to supplant the venerable forms of old religion, and seems almost on the verge of effecting its desire. The science of our century, stimulated to unprecedented discovery by ideas derived from the philosophy that ushered the century in, comes at the century’s close to the support of these ideas with its vast accumulations; and the new consensus of our time appears to gain its proper utterance, now in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and now in that Neo-Hegelianism regarding which the current question is, whether it can get its best expression by being read as Hegel darwinised, or as Darwin hegelised. The change that seems imminent, in whichever way interpreted, would be profound indeed, — far profounder than appears on the surface. Its revolutionary character is so little comprehended by the mass of the intelligent that many of the official teachers of Christianity, to say nothing of its less critical laity, not only dally with the new views, chiefly with Cosmic Theism, but openly embrace them, with no apparent suspicion of their hostility to the principles that are fundamental to the Faith. Yet the hostility is real; and it is not from any caprice of his merely private way of thinking, but from a genuine, even if obscure, apprehension of the things indispensable to this Faith, that Mr. Balfour in his Foundations of Belief assails both forms of the new philosophy, which he