ABSTRACT
The critic remarks that some people will view the Origin with alarm, thinking that, like Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation, it tends to “dispense with the agency of an intelligent Creator in the work of creation.” The revolutionary developments of science and theology to the simple facts of Thomas Hardy’s life from 1860 to 1865—the years in which these revolutionary developments culminated—it is at first difficult to see the ferment that must have been going on in his mind. The evolutionary hypothesis always remained fundamental in his philosophy. The intervening years Hardy read Essays and Reviews, sufficient cause for the abandonment of his orthodox convictions. His reading of the Origin of Species during the same period gave him plentiful grounds for believing that the world, if it is the work of a magnipotent Being, is not the work of a beneficent Creator who cares for man and his values.
