Every day, however, in spite of such half-ignorant adherents, the
effects of true Darwinism are widening and deepening. One group of
earnest workers is using it now as a guide to physiological,
embryological, and anatomical researches. Another is employing it with
zeal and skill in the field of classificatory and physiological botany.
Yet others are working out its psychological implications, enquiring
into instinct and animal intelligence, and solving by its aid abstruse
problems of the human mind and the human emotions. One philosopher has
brought it to bear on questions of ethics, another on questions of
social and political economy. Its principles have been applied in one
place to aesthetics, in another place to logic, in a third place to the
origin and growth of religion. The study of language has derived new
lights from the great central Darwinian luminary. The art of education
is beginning to feel the progressive influence of the Darwinian impulse.
In fact, there is hardly a single original worker in any department of
thought or science who has not been more or less profoundly affected,
whether he knows it or whether he knows it not, by the vast spreading
and circling wave of the Darwinian conceptions. All our ideas have been
revolutionised and evolutionised. The new notions are abroad in the
world, quickening with their fresh and vigorous germinal power the dry
bones of all the sciences, all the arts, and all the philosophies.