“The modern spirit,” Matthew Arnold observed in 1865, “is now awake.” In 1859 Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Historians, philosophers, and scientists were all beginning to apply the idea of evolution to new areas of study of the human experience. Traditional conceptions of man’s nature and place in the world were, as a consequence, under threat. Walter Pater summed up the process, in 1866, by stating that “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ ” The economic crisis of the ...(100 of 55503 words)