108 THE COMING [OH. 



his mind. His habit of thought was always to give 

 the fullest consideration and weight to any possible 

 objection that presented itself to his own mind or 

 could be suggested to him by others. Though he was 

 satisfied as to the truth and importance of the principle 

 of natural selection, there is evidence that for some 

 years he was oppressed by difficulties, which I think 

 would have seemed greater to him than to anyone 

 else. In my conversations with Darwin, in after 

 years, it always struck me that he attached an 

 exaggerated importance to the merest suggestion of 

 a view opposed to that he was himself inclined to 

 adopt ; indeed I sometimes almost feared to indicate 

 a possible different point of view to his own, for fear 

 of receiving such an answer as ' What a very striking 

 objection, how stupid of me not to see it before, I 

 must really reconsider the whole subject.' 



While a divinity student at Cambridge, Darwin 

 had been much struck with the logical form of the 

 works both of Euclid and of Paley. The rooms of 

 the latter he seems to have actually occupied at 

 Christ's College and the works of the great divine 

 were so diligently studied that their deep influence 

 remained with him in after life 109 . 



I think it must have been the remembrance of 

 the arguments of Paley on the ' proofs of design ' in 

 Nature, that seem in after life to have haunted 

 Darwin, so that for long he failed to recognise fully 



