DARWIN'S PLACE IN FUTURE BIOLOGY 47 



it. He was a nature-loving, country-dwelling English gentleman of 

 the best type — not a gentleman in the political and social sense, but in 

 the manly sense. Further, he was to the very marrow of his bones an 

 English naturalist as well as an English gentleman. He inherited the 

 instincts of the naturalist and likewise the worldly wherewithal that 

 enabled him to follow his bent without let or hindrance. So it was that 

 the naturalist's standpoint was literally both first and second nature to 

 him. Rarely is it the fortune of a scientific career to run through from 

 beginning to end so strictly along the lines of instinctive choice and 

 least resistance, as Darwin's ran. It is not too much to say that Dar- 

 win knew nothing of that sort of discipline that comes from compelling 

 one's self to do things which initially he does not like. It is well known 

 that even in biology, the realm of science to which by nature he so 

 clearly belonged, he as a youth dodged those of its disciplines that he 

 did not like, however basal they might be. For example, when trying 

 himself out as a medical student, he did not like anatomy, so anatomy 

 he did not study in any serious way. 



Comprehensive and well balanced as became his scientific efforts 

 and knowledge, these were always so within the bounds of predi- 

 lection rather than of logical and philosophical compulsion. This I 

 believe to be the weightiest of several reasons why Darwin saw so im- 

 perfectly the direction in which the struggle-selection principle must 

 lead those who misunderstand and exaggerate it. 



Had he grounded himself in mathematics, psychology and ethics, not 

 necessarily as fully but as sympathetically as he did in natural history, 

 he might have anticipated, at least in outline, what has actually hap- 

 pened. He might have foreseen the fate of his friend Huxley, who 

 found himself driven to attempt the rehabilitation under an altered 

 nomenclature of the old, old conception of the world as a battle ground, 

 with man the chief prize, where an infinite, beneficent God is field-mar- 

 shal on one side, and an infinite, malevolent devil leads the hosts on the 

 other; and of his friend Wallace who landed finally in the shadow- 

 realms of disembodied spirits and ghosts; and of such strong-timbered, 

 though loosely-framed minds as that of Friedrich Nietzsche, 11 for whom 



11 This does not necessarily mean that I take sides in the controversy as to 

 the extent of Darwin's direct influence on Nietzsche. From my standpoint it 

 matters little, if it be true, that Nietzsche never understood natural selection. 

 The case has to be viewed in a much broader way. Nietzsche's ethics is one 

 precipitate, so to speak, out of the same solution that Darwin's famous hypoth- 

 esis came from. This solution filled the atmosphere of the whole western world 

 for at least a half century before these two precipitates were thrown down. 

 The essence of this solution was not so much an exaggerated individualism as it 

 was an individualism waging its warfare within itself, i. e., with no supreme 

 outside judge and power to guide and check, to approve fair fighting and punish 

 unfair, and to direct the whole to some glorious end. Whatever Nietzsche's 



