The influence of his doctrine of evolution is especially apparent in Tennyson's poetry, in George Eliot's fiction, in religious thought, and in the change in viewing social problems. In his Synthetic Philosophy, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), philosopher and metaphysician, applied the doctrine of evolution not only to plants and animals but also to society, morality, and religion.
Two eminent scientists, John Tyndall (1820-1893) and Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), did much to popularize science and to cause the age to seek a broader education. Tyndall's Fragments of Science (1871) contains a fine lecture on the Scientific Use of the Imagination, in which he becomes almost poetic in his imaginative conception of evolution:—
"Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind itself,—emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena,—were once latent in a fiery cloud… All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our science, and all our art,—Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael,—are potential in the fires of the sun."
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL.]
Unlike Keats in his Lamia, Tyndall is firm in his belief that science will not clip the wings of imagination. In the same lecture he says:—
"How are we to lay hold of the physical basis of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without the domain of the senses? We are gifted with the power of imagination and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses… Bounded and conditioned by coöperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was at the outset a leap of the imagination."
Huxley was even a more brilliant interpreter of science to popular audiences. His so-called Lay Sermons (1870) are invigorating presentations of scientific and educational subjects. He awakened many to a sense of the importance of "knowing the laws of the physical world" and "the relations of cause and effect therein." Nowhere is he more impressive than where he forces us to admit that we must all play the chess game of life against an opponent that never makes an error and never fails to count our mistakes against us.
[Illustration: THOMAS HUXLEY. From the painting by Collier,
National Portrait Gallery.]
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong man shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated—without haste, but without remorse. * * * * * "Well, what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."[1]
We find the influence of science manifest in much of the general literature of the age, as well as in the special writings of the scientists. Science introduced to literature a new interest in humanity and impressed on writers what is known as the "growth idea." Preceding literature, with the conspicuous exception of Shakespeare's work, had for the most part presented individuals whose character was already fixed. This age loved to show the growth of souls. George Eliot's novels are frequently Darwinian demonstrations of the various steps in the moral growth or the perversion of the individual. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, Browning thus expresses this new idea of the working of the Divine Power:—