I have often wondered that the poem of Hyperion, by Keats—that magnificent torso of an incompleted work—has not been placed in the very forefront of past speculations on evolution. Keats is so thorough that he makes the very Divinities to be its product. The earliest gods such as Coelus, born out of Chaos, are vague entities, they engender Saturn, Oceanus, Hyperion, and the Titan brood, who supersede them. These in their turn are ousted from dominion by their own issue, the Olympian Gods. A notable advance occurs at each successive stage in the quality of the Divinities. When Hyperion, newly terrified by signs of impending overthrow, lies prostrate on the earth ‘his ancient mother, for some comfort yet,’ the voice of Coelus from the universal space, thus ‘whispered low and solemn in his ear ... yet do thou strive, for thou art capable ... my life is but the life of winds and tides, no more than winds and tides can I prevail, but thou canst.’ I have quoted only disjointed fragments of this wonderful poem, enough to serve as a reminder to those who know it, but will add ten consecutive lines from the speech of the fallen Oceanus to his comrades, which give a summary of evolution as here described:
He ends with ‘this is the truth, and let it be your balm.’ The poem is a noble conception, founded on the crude cosmogony of the ancient Greeks.
The ideas have long held my fancy that we men may be the chief, and perhaps the only executives on earth. That we are detached on active service with, it may be only illusory, powers of free-will. Also that we are in some way accountable for our success or failure to further certain obscure ends, to be guessed as best we can. That though our instructions are obscure they are sufficiently clear to justify our interference with the pitiless course of Nature, whenever it seems possible to attain the goal towards which it moves, by gentler and kindlier ways. I expressed these views as forcibly as I then could in the above-mentioned book, with especial reference to improving the racial qualities of mankind, where the