as that of evolution. The reason is, I think, no more than that he came
at a particular moment when any man doing great quantities of detailed
work in this field was bound to stand out exaggeratedly. The society in
which he appeared had, until just before his day, accepted a narrow
cosmogony, quite unknown to its ancestors. Darwin's book certainly
exploded that, and the mind of his time--ignorant as it was of the
past--was ready to accept the shattering of its father's idols as a new
revelation."

"But you were saying," said I, when he had thus dealt harshly with a
great name, "that not the material but the moral changes of your time
seemed to you the greatest. Which did you mean?"

"Why, in the first place," said the old man thoughtfully and with some
hesitation, "the curiously rapid decline of intelligence, or if you will
have it differently, the clouding of thought that has marked the last
thirty years. Men in my youth knew what they held and what they did not
hold. They knew why they held it or why they did not hold it; but the
attempt to enjoy the advantages of two contradictory systems at the same
time, and, what is worse, the consulting of a man as an authority upon
subjects he had never professed to know, are intellectual phenomena
quite peculiar to the later years of my life."

I said we of the younger generation had all noticed it, as, for
instance, when an honest but imperfectly intelligent chemist was
listened to in his exposition of the nature of the soul, or a well-paid
religious official was content to expound the consolations of
Christianity while denying that Christianity was true.

"But," I continued, "we are usually told that this unfortunate decline