Darwin, as the great force behind a new and varied development of science, has had the fate to be, in some sense, a factor in the moods and the new habits of life that led toward the final issue in the great war. It is not so much that his principle, misapplied, or applied uncritically may become a justification of war or even its basic principle that has made him so great an influence, but precisely because his thought, by becoming one of the great coordinating principles of all the natural sciences has given power to a movement which has had various practical consequences, not all of them good, or at least not all yielding fruit for our own age. Darwin's great influence as a force turning scholarly interest toward naturalism and away from classicism, as a factor in modern materialism and even pessimism, as a background, if no more, for the Haeckels and Ostwalds of science is no inconsiderable factor in the scientific and objective spirit of the day.
Facts must be faced. It is not such influences as that of Schopenhauer, who expresses a logical or at least an abstract and we might add literary form of pessimism, that in the generations just past have transformed most of the conceptions of religion, with all the effects upon the practical life that have followed, but the force of our modern science combining with tendencies which it fosters but perhaps does not create, giving momentum to industrialism and specialization,--it is this change in the ideas of men that we must suspect of being implicated in the present catastrophe of the world, if any influence from the rational life is to be counted at all. Hegel and Kant hover in the background. The author of the plan for universal peace provides us with a subjective principle of morality which can be distorted into a philosophy of moral independence and even of independence from morality, and Hegel must have helped to establish the German theory of the State, although with Treitschke and with the practical state-makers like Frederick the Great and his followers, we can hardly believe Hegel indispensable. The causes of war are too general, too old and too fundamental to be greatly added to or detracted from as yet by philosophy. Philosophy is the hope of the world, it may be, and by no means a forlorn hope, but it is not yet one of the great powers. When philosophy is a mere endorsement by reason of some motive that has arisen in the practical life, or is a literary expression of views about life, it may give the appearance of being a profound force in the world. But this is not real philosophy, in any case. Philosophy has not as yet shown itself highly creative even in the calm fields of education and the moral life.