wife, the gentle "Aliette." The latter had left him one child, a daughter; and retiring to the country for a few days to visit this child, he learns from an old servant, then on her death-bed, the whole story of the poisoning of his first wife by the woman whom he had made his second. He learned, also, that the thing had been so managed as to make him appear, in the eyes of the dying Aliette, an accomplice in the horrible crime. Conscience-stricken and overwhelmed with remorse, he rushes to Paris and succeeds in banishing the murderess from society and from the country. He himself shortly after dies broken-hearted, but not before he has abandoned his worldly philosophy and embraced the religion of "Aliette"—Roman Catholicism. Such is the narrative as constructed from the inner consciousness of M. Octave Feuillet. The moral is obvious—that the Roman Catholic faith is the only bulwark against immorality and the disintegration of society. Substantially the same lesson is that which Mr. Mallock has been trying to teach, and which Mr. W. S. Lilly enforces in his recent "Fortnightly Review" article on "Materialism and Morality."
Now, it strikes us that all this momentarily fashionable writing is conceived in a very idle strain. What the world wants is not a succession of jeremiads over the effects likely to be produced by the prevalence of certain opinions, but a demonstration of the truth in regard to those opinions. If the theories of Darwin are false, let their falsity be exhibited. If Mr. Spencer's wider scheme of evolution is illusive, let its illusiveness be proved. The press is as free for the opponents of these great thinkers as for their adherents. The platform is open to them; the pulpit as yet is theirs almost exclusively. They can have nothing, therefore, to complain of as to the conditions of the controversy; and yet in all their utterances we may detect a certain note of dissatisfaction, as if, somehow or other, the verdict were unjustly going against them. The verdict, however, will follow the evidence; and the world will not accept as evidence against a scientific theory the mere assertion that its moral effects are injurious. That assertion itself would have to be proved far otherwise than through the easily constructed mechanism of a novel with its puppet figures moving hither and thither at the will of the manipulator. To the earnest mind of the old Roman poet Lucretius the free, untrammeled study of Nature was the chief preservative against evil thoughts and practices; and how easy it would be for a skillful writer, adopting this hypothesis, to write a novel in which all the conditions and consequences of M. Feuillet's narrative would be reversed! No, there is no argument in this kind of thing. Evolution, as a system of thought, has not gained ground by the aid of the novelist, and it is not going to succumb to a novelist's attacks. It has gained ground because it has explained many things previously inexplicable and has shed light into every department of Nature and of thought. It can not, therefore, be dispossessed of the ground it has gained till a stronger than it appears, some view or theory that will explain more things than it can explain, and shed more light upon the problems of existence than it can shed. The whole question lies here in a nutshell. The thinking world is not fatally or irrevocably bound to the formulæ of Darwin and Spencer it adheres to them only for the service they render, and is prepared to lay them aside so soon as any superior generalizations are brought forward.
Supposing, however, that we admit that the moral results of the introduction of the new philosophy are not satisfactory; supposing it to be true that men, in their new-found liberty from certain external sanctions, are showing a great want of self-control and an indifference to all moral aims—what are
