Whether we can believe in this added something or not is a point I have in no way argued. I have not sought to prove that life has no meaning, but merely that it has none discoverable by the methods of modern science. I will not even say that men of science themselves are not certain of its existence, and may not live by this certainty; but only that, if so, they are unaware whence this certainty comes, and that though their inner convictions may claim our most sincere respect, their own analysis of them deserves our most contemptuous ridicule.

If there is a soul in man, and if there is a God who has given this soul, the instinct of religion can never die; but if there is any authentic explanation of the relations between the soul and God, and for some reason or other men in any way cease to accept this, their own explanations may well, by a gradual process, resolve themselves into a denial of the theory they seek to explain. And such, according to our men of science themselves, has been the case with the orthodox Christian faith, when once it began to be disintegrated by the solvent of Protestantism. The process is forcibly alluded to by Mr. Harrison. Traditional Protestantism dissolved into the nebulous tenets of the Broad Churchmen; the tenets of the Broad Churchmen dissolved into Deism, Deism into Pantheism and the cultus of the Unknowable, and the last into Optimism. Mr. Harrison fails to read the lesson of history further, and to see that Optimism in its turn must yield to the solvent of criticism, and leave the religious instinct, or what is the same thing, a sense of a meaning in life, as a forlorn and bewildered emotion without any explanation of itself at all. What Optimism is at present must be abundantly evident. It is the last attempt to discover a peg on which to hang the fallen clothes of Christianity. As Mr. Harrison tells us, most of our scientific Optimists have been brought up with all the emotions of that faith. They have got rid of the faith, but the emotions have been left on their hands. They long for some object on which to lavish them, just as Don Quixote longed to find a ladylove; and if we may judge from certain phrases of Mr. Harrison, they have modestly contented themselves with asking not that

the object should be a truth, but merely that it should not, on the face of it, be a falsehood. He does not ask how well Humanity deserves to be thought of, but how well he and his friends will be able to think of it. Once more let us say that this emotion which they call the love of Humanity is not an emotion I would ridicule. I only ridicule their bestowal of it. The love of Humanity, with no faith to enlighten it, and nothing to justify it beyond what science can show, is as absurd as the love of Titania lavished on Bottom; and the high priests of Humanity, with their solemn and pompous gravity, are like nothing so much as the Bumbles of a squabbling parish. We all know what Hobbes said to Catholicism, that it was the ghost of the dead Roman Empire, sitting enthroned on the ashes of it. Optimism, in the same way, is the ghost of Protestantism sitting on its ashes, not enthroned but gibbering.

I hope that before long I may again return to this subject, to touch on many points which I have been unable to glance at now. On former occasions I have been asked by certain critics what possible use, even suppose life is not worth much, I could hope to find in laying the fact bare. To the Optimists as men of science no explanation is needed. Every attempt to establish any truth, or even to establish any doubt, according to their principles is not only justifiable, but is a duty. To others, an explanation will not be very far to seek. If there is a meaning in life, we shall never understand it rightly till we have ceased to amuse ourselves with understanding it wrongly. Humanity, if there is any salvation for it, will never be saved till it sees that it cannot save itself, and asks in humility, seeking some greater power, Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? But as matters stand, it will never see this or ask this, till it has seen face to face the whole of its ghastly helplessness, and tasted at least intellectually the dregs of its degradation. When we have filled our bellies with the husks that swine eat, it may be that we shall arise and go.

VIII

DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

[The present essay by Huxley, published in the Westminster Review in April, 1860, was one of the earliest reviews of Darwin's epoch-making work, The Origin of Species. Darwin's book is so stupendous an accumulation of scientific data that it needed at the time, and needs now for the casual student, an interpreter. Huxley fulfilled this function with great success for many years. This article, in fact, is only one of a large number of essays and addresses by Huxley which present the substance of Darwin's investigations in a popular, readily comprehensible light. Huxley's opposition to the advocates of the theory of special creation, who represented then in the main the conservative religious element, may seem unnecessarily harsh; but it must be remembered that in that day the "battle-ground of religion and science" was emphatically real. Dogmatic churchmen of Huxley's time conceived science as nursing an antagonism that could be appeased only by the utter destruction of religious sentiment. That Huxley was mistakenly held to be an arch enemy of religion may be seen in his numerous temperate and openminded writings on the relations of scientific and spiritual beliefs.

This essay is a competent discussion of the principal points of the Darwinian theory, although these points are presented with Huxley's characteristic caution. The fact is here emphasized that Darwin's hypothesis, like ali hypotheses, can be accepted only tentatively, until supported by a convincing mass of corroborative evidence. The scientific attitude of our day, however, holds, as Professor E. B. Wilson expresses it, that "biological investigators have long since ceased to regard the fact of organic evolution as open to serious discussion."]

MR. DARWIN's long-standing and well-earned scientific eminence probably renders him indifferent to that social notoriety which passes by the name of success; but if the calm spirit of the philosopher have not yet wholly superseded the ambition and the vanity of the carnal man within him, he must be well satisfied with the results of his venture in publishing the Origin of

Species. Overflowing the narrow bounds of purely scientific circles, the "species question" divides with Italy and the Volunteers the attention of general society. Everybody has read Mr. Darwin's book, or, at least, has given an opinion upon its merits or demerits; pietists, whether lay or ecclesiastic, decry it with the mild railing which sounds so charitable; bigots denounce it with ignorant invective; old ladies, of both sexes, consider it a decidedly dangerous book, and even savants, who have no better mud to throw, quote antiquated writers to show that its author is no better than an ape himself; while every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of liberalism; and all competent naturalists and physiologists, whatever their opinions as to the ultimate fate of the doctrines put forth, acknowledge that the work in which they are embodied is a solid contribution to knowledge and inaugurates a new epoch in natural history.

Nor has the discussion of the subject been restrained within the limits of conversation. When the public is eager and interested, reviewers must minister to its wants; and the genuine littérateur is too much in the habit of acquiring his knowledge from the book he judges as the Abyssinian is said to provide himself with steaks from the ox which carries him to be withheld from criticism of a profound scientific work by the mere want of the requisite preliminary scientific acquirement; while, on the other hand, the men of science who wish well to the new views, no less than those who dispute their validity, have naturally sought opportunities of expressing their opinions. Hence it is not surprising that almost all the critical journals have noticed Mr. Darwin's work at greater or less length; and so many disquisitions, of every degree of excellence, from the poor product of ignorance, too often stimulated by prejudice, to the fair and thoughtful essay of the candid student of nature, have appeared, that it seems an almost hopeless task to attempt to say anything new upon the question.

But it may be doubted if the knowledge and acumen of prejudged scientific opponents, or the subtlety of orthodox special

pleaders, have yet exerted their full force in mystifying the real issues of the great controversy which has been set afoot, and whose end is hardly likely to be seen by this generation; so that at this eleventh hour, and even failing anything new, it may be useful to state afresh that which is true, and to put the fundamental positions advocated by Mr. Darwin in such a form that they may be grasped by those whose special studies lie in other directions. And the adoption of this course may be the more advisable, because notwithstanding its great deserts, and indeed partly on account of them, the Origin of Species is by no means an easy book to read - if by reading is implied the full comprehension of an author's meaning.

We do not speak jestingly in saying that it is Mr. Darwin's misfortune to know more about the question he has taken up than any man living. Personally and practically exercised in zoölogy, in minute anatomy, in geology; a student of geographical distribution, not on maps and in museums only, but by long voyages and laborious collection; having largely advanced each of these branches of science, and having spent many years in gathering and sifting materials for his present work, the store of accurately registered facts upon which the author of the Origin of Species is able to draw at will is prodigious.

But this very superabundance of matter must have been embarrassing to a writer who, for the present, can only put forward an abstract of his views; and thence it arises, perhaps, that notwithstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly to digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican

a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of an obvious logical bond: due attention will, without doubt, discover this bond, but it is often hard to find.

Again, from sheer want of room, much has to be taken for granted which might readily enough be proved; and hence, while the adept, who can supply the missing links in the evidence from his own knowledge, discovers fresh proof of the singular thoroughness with which all difficulties have been considered and all