ABSTRACT
To cite the evolution of opinion without regard to the facts out of which it arose is the most sterile kind of history. There is no idealism so transcendental as to be really independent of the time and place of its birth; and all philosophies, though their authors may not realize it, are somewhere marked with the stain of circumstance. If, indeed, these gifts were as purely celestial as they seem to innocent eyes, they would have little effect upon the minds of ordinary men. For desire is the great digestive, in mind or body; and philosophies, like grosser goods, are subject to a law of supply and demand. The dumb, groping self-interests of a generation accumulate. They demand intellectual expression—and a David Ricardo or a Karl Marx appears. They demand political expression—and a Liberal bench faces a Tory bench, while a Labour leadership gathers sullenly outside. They may demand religious expression; and new conflicts of Church and Chapel, Kingsleys and Newmans, Maurices and Puseys, will arise. Literature will respond still more readily and finely; and you will get, in Scott, Coleridge, Shelley, Hazlitt, and then in Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris, a picture-gallery reflecting the hopes and hungers, the ideals and anxieties of an epoch. Lastly, science will feel the current of demand; a Darwin will find his keynote in an essay by a country parson, which he took up to read “for amusement,” and a Huxley will give back to economics what his master took therefrom.
