R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

230 R. W. Macancomplexion are greatly changed. A brilliant symptom ofits vitality in those earlier days was noted, when a youngTutor of Merton, William Wallace—who was destined tosucceed to Green's Chair in 1882, and to vacate it by afatal accident fifteen years later—announced, in 1873, acourse of lectures on the Logic of Hegel, which was wellattended, chiefly by still younger graduates, and issuedin a substantial volume from the Clarendon Press in 1874.Significantly enough Wallace warned his readers thatHegel's work had all been accomplished at a time, nearlyhalf-a-century before, 'when modern science and InductiveLogic had yet to win their laurels, and when theworld was in many ways different from what it is now'.A detached mind might surmise that, from such beginnings,philosophy in Oxford would have had an evenricher and more rapid harvest, had it been more closelyrelated to the new School of Natural Science, and delivered,if not from its preoccupation with Greek literature,at least from its liaison with Ancient History (Greekand Roman). I confess, as a graduate of the 'seventies inLiterae Humaniores, that I cannot remember to haveheard the name of Darwin, or the term Evolution, inother than an Hegelian sense, from any of the philosophicpundits of the time: though I may add that I returnedfrom Germany to Oxford, half-way through the decade,to find Ray Lankester translating Hackel's Schopfungsgeschichtefor the British public, a work, the substanceof which I had been hearing and seeing (for Hackel wasa masterly draughtsman) in the shape of professorialVortrdge in the Museum at Jena. My private conclusionthen was that not until philosophers became ' scientists',or scientists became philosophers, should we obtain aworld-wisdom quite worthy of the time and place. Thenotion that Natural Science had any quarrel with Literature,sometimes heard in those days, was as superficial