and wanted to find out how Nature would arrange matters if she were let
alone. And they found it out to their cost in the days when Lancashire
used up nine generations of wage slaves in one generation of their
masters. But their masters, becoming richer and richer, were very well
satisfied, and Bastiat proved convincingly that Nature had arranged
Economic Harmonies which would settle social questions far better than
theocracies or aristocracies or mobocracies, the real _deus ex machina_
being unrestrained plutocracy.


THE POETRY AND PURITY OF MATERIALISM

Thus the stars in their courses fought for Darwin. Every faction drew a
moral from him; every catholic hater of faction founded a hope on him;
every blackguard felt justified by him; and every saint felt encouraged
by him. The notion that any harm could come of so splendid an
enlightenment seemed as silly as the notion that the atheists would
steal all our spoons. The physicists went further than the Darwinians.
Tyndall declared that he saw in Matter the promise and potency of all
forms of life, and with his Irish graphic lucidity made a picture of a
world of magnetic atoms, each atom with a positive and a negative pole,
arranging itself by attraction and repulsion in orderly crystalline
structure. Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers
oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer
subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and
magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness
found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the
crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly
vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there
is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest