history have alike been restated. He had no thought at all
that what he was doing would reach so far or change so much. He simply
supposed himself, through patient and exhaustive study, to have
accounted for the rich variety of life without the supposition of a
special creation for each form. But the time was ripe and longing for
what he supplied and his hypothesis was quickly taken and applied in
almost every field of thought. Nor does it greatly matter that Darwinism
has been and may be still greatly modified. We have come under the spell
of evolution. Our universe is no longer a static thing; it is growing
and changing. Our imaginations are impressed by long sequences of
change, each one of them minute in itself but in the mass capable of
accounting for immense transformations. Darwin's initiative released the
scientific temper which has been the outstanding characteristic of our
own age. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist re-related their
discoveries in the light of his governing principle and supplied an
immense body of fact for further consideration. Geology was reborn, the
records of the rocks came to have a new meaning, every broken fossil
form became a word, maybe a paragraph, for the retelling of the past of
the earth.

Astronomy supplied cosmic backgrounds for terrestrial evolution and
Physics became a kind of court of appeal for both. The physicist
proclaimed the conservation of energy, reduced seeming solidities to
underlying force and resolved force itself into ultimate and tenuous
unities. The processes thus discovered and related seemed to be
self-sufficient. No need to bring in anything from the outside; unbroken
law, unfailing sequence were everywhere in evidence. Where knowledge
failed speculation bridged the gap. One might begin with a nebula and go
on in unbroken sequence to Plato or Shakespeare without asking for
either material, law or force which was not in the nebula to begin with.
Man himself took his own place in the majestic procession; he, too, was
simply the culmination of a long ascent, with the roots of his being
more deeply in the dust than he had ever dreamed and compelled to
confess himself akin to what he had aforetime scorned.

_The Reaction of Evolution Upon Religion_

All our old chronologies became incidental in a range of time before
which even imagination grew dizzy. We found fragments of the skulls of
our ancestors in ancient glacial drifts and the traditional 6,