orld never again appeared to him quite the same as it had
appeared before.

It is a noteworthy fact that, though the mid-Victorian scientists and
philosophers were in the zenith of their influence when Hearn was in
London, twenty years before these New Orleans days, he never seems to
have taken an interest in their speculations or theories. We, of the
present generation, can hardly realise the excitement created by the new
survey of the Cosmos put forth by Darwin and his adherents. Old forms of
thought crumbled; the continuity of life was declared to have been
proved; lower forms were raised and their kinship with the higher
demonstrated; man was deposed and put back into the sequence of nature.
Hardly a decade elapsed before the enthusiasm began to wane. Some of
Darwin's adherents endeavoured to initiate what they called a scientific
philosophy, attempting to prove more than he did. Herbert Spencer, in
his "Principles of Ethics," when dealing with the inception of moral
consciousness, appealed to the "Time Process," to the enormous passage
of the years, to explain the generation of sentiency, and ultimately,
moral consciousness. "Out of the units of single sensations, older than
we by millions of years, have been built up all the emotions and
faculties of man," echoes his disciple, Lafcadio Hearn. Spencer also put
forward the view, from which he ultimately withdrew, that natural
selection tended towards higher conditions, or, as he termed it,
"Equilibration,"--a state in which all struggle had ceased, and from
which all disturbing influences, passion, love, happiness and fear were
eliminated.

These statements were contested by Darwin and Huxley, both declaring
that evolution manifested a sublime indifference to the pains or
pleasures of man; evil was as natural as good and had been as
efficacious a factor in helping forward the progress of the world.

In his celebrated Romanes lecture of 1893 on the subject of "Nature and
Evolution," Huxley turned the searchlight of his analytical intellect on
Buddha's theories with regard to Karma and the ultimate progress of man
towards the perfect life, and effectually, so far as his opinion was
concerned, demolished any possible reconciliation between Buddhism and
science. "The end of life's dream is Nirvana. What Nirvana is, the
learned do not agree, but since the best original authorities tell us
there is neither desire, nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal
re-appe