Like electricity, the cholera
germ, woman's rights, the great mining boom, and the Eastern Question,
it is 'in the air.' It pervades society everywhere with its subtle
essence; it infects small-talk with its familiar catchwords and its
slang phrases; it even permeates that last stronghold of rampant
Philistinism, the third leader in the penny papers. Everybody believes
he knows all about it, and discusses it as glibly in his everyday
conversation as he discusses the points of racehorses he has never seen,
the charms of peeresses he has never spoken to, and the demerits of
authors he has never read. Everybody is aware, in a dim and nebulous
semi-conscious fashion, that it was all invented by the late Mr. Darwin,
and reduced to a system by Mr. Herbert Spencer--don't you know?--and a
lot more of those scientific fellows. It is generally understood in the
best-informed circles that evolutionism consists for the most part in a
belief about nature at large essentially similar to that applied by
Topsy to her own origin and early history. It is conceived, in short,
that most things 'growed.' Especially is it known that in the opinion of
the evolutionists as a body we are all of us ultimately descended from
men with tails, who were the final offspring and improved edition of the
common gorilla. That, very briefly put, is the popular conception of the
various points in the great modern evolutionary programme.
It is scarcely necessary to inform the intelligent reader, who of course
differs fundamentally from that inferior class of human beings known to
all of us in our own minds as 'other people,' that almost every point in
the catalogue thus briefly enumerated is a popular fallacy of the
wildest description.
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