Butler revelled in Darwinism for six weeks and
then, grasping the whole scope and the whole
horror of it, warned us (we did not listen until
we had revelled for half a century) that Darwin
had ''banished mind from the universe," mean-
ing from Evolution. Ibsen, belonging to an
earlier generation, and intellectually nursed on
northern romance and mysticism rather than on
the merely industrious and prosaic science of the
interval between the discovery of Evolution at
the end of the eighteenth century and the dis-
covery and overrating of Natural Selection as a
method of evolution in the middle of the nine-



The Plays 67

teenth, was, when Darwin arrived, past the age
at which Natural Selection could have swept him
away as it swept Butler and his contemporaries.
