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.
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