evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
could ever be.

Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really
inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power
is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or
life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is
mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,
however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not
afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,
according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;
but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and
credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate
the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary
to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.
In Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute
creator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a