This was due to the fact that believers in the spiritual had
identified with their spirituality a great deal that was unnecessary and
merely casual. If the balloon on which people mount up above the earth
is any such theory as that of the six days' creation, it is easy to see
how when that balloon is pricked the spiritual flight of the time
appears to have ended on the ground.
Of course all that has long passed by. Of late years Haeckel has been
crying out that all his old friends have deserted him and have gone over
to the spiritual side--a cry which reminds one of the familiar juryman
who finds his fellows the eleven most obstinate men he has ever known.
The conception of evolution has long since been taken over by the
idealists, and has become perhaps the most splendidly Christian and
idealistic idea of the new age. When Darwin published his _Origin of
Species_, Hegel cried out in Germany, "Darwin has destroyed design."
To-day Darwin and Hegel stand together as the prophets of the
unconquerable conviction of the reality of spirit. From the days of
Huxley and Haeckel we have passed over to the days of Bergson and Sir
Oliver Lodge.
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