When Huxley spoke,
the heat which had been kindled by the first announcement of the theory
of evolution in Darwin's "Origin of Species" was still blazing; and
there were many church people who held that the theory was subversive of
religion, without giving themselves the trouble to understand it. This
timid frame of mind explains Hurley's mode of approach to the subject.
We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and
perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest
interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the
constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to
this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point:
in duration but a fleeting shadow: he is a mere reed shaken in the winds
of force. But, as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is
a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he
has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the
universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a
picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart
for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of
toilsome and often fruitless labor to enable man to look steadily at the
shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed
among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent
irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few
centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite
course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged.
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