science notably Professors Huxley, Tyndall, and Clifford spoke of what science was going to do for the spiritual life when the older theological trammels had been removed. What they promised George Eliot was currently supposed to have attained, and her words were scanned for the secret message. She was to all of us what she seemed to Mr. F. W. Myers in that fine description of his interview with her in the Fellows' Garden at Trinity; she was 'a Sibyl in the gloom.' She alone, we thought, possessed the message of the New Spirit that Darwinism was to breathe into the inner life of man.
Well, Darwinism has come, and has conquered, and, as a vital influence in the spiritual life, has gone. Instead of solving all the problems, it has raised only too many fresh ones. It has thrown light on origins, or to speak more accurately, it has set us on the search for origins. But the undeveloped germ which we call origin has in it ex hypothesi all the problems which the developed product offers, and presents these in more concentrated form. And the something that develops is obviously different from its own development, which is all that Darwinism even professes to explain. To put it technically, origins are not essences, and it is the essence of the matter, the thing as in itself it really is, that we seek for. Hence Darwinism, which merely touches origins and
