392 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



or to deny his heritage from predecessors. Just as the Neapolitan 

 philosopher- jurist, Vico (1668-1744), foresaw some of the transitive 

 ideas that thinkers from Herder to Hegel, and philologists from F. A. 

 "Wolf and Niebuhr, were to clarify, so, too, Goethe and Erasmus Darwin, 

 Lamarck and Chambers, had substituted evolution for spontaneous gen- 

 eration and special creation ere Darwin's day. But two tasks remained, 

 for whose accomplishment Darwin's endowments of mind and char- 

 acter were to the manner born. First, an enormous accumulation of 

 evidence stood in need. This Darwin furnished on a scale still unpar- 

 alleled by any single investigator. Second, it was necessary to experi- 

 ment with tentative and candid applications of the evolution hypothesis, 

 apart altogether from flamboyant allegations that the key to every 

 mystery had been grasped at length. Darwin's scientific conscience, 

 and his eminently sane, self-effacing character, equipped him rarely for 

 these essential services. And, with him, evolution may be said to have 

 attained a poise lost somewhat since, I fear, amid the clash of new 

 theories and rival schools, even nations. After long years devoted to 

 excursions in many fields of intellectual activity, I, at least, have met 

 no one who, with such a heady prospect in plain sight, knew how to 

 hold the balance so true as the author of the " Origin of Species." 

 One might almost go so far as to call him the proof, in propria persona, 

 of Hegel's profound deliverance : " Not only must philosophy be in har- 

 mony with experience, but empirical natural science is the presuppo- 

 sition and condition of the rise and formation of the philosophical 

 science of nature."^*' 



And this leads, naturally, to a few words concerning Darwin's cir- 

 cumstances, and his character as a man. 



Taken on the whole, his achievement happens to be thoroughly 

 typical of English science, in contrast with German, French, or even 

 Scottish, not to say American, methods. He wrought in an independ- 

 ence of others that amounted almost to loneliness. He seems to have 

 gained no inspiration from his teachers at Edinburgh and at Cambridge 

 from none except Henslow, through whose instrumentality he under- 

 took the famous voyage on the Beagle. In 1842, while yet a young 

 man, he retired to Down, in Kent, there to mature his epoch-making 

 investigations "far from the madding crowd," but, nevertheless, to 

 show his age its own express image. 



As with so many Englishmen of foremost rank in science, he stood 

 apart from that organization of Wissenschaft provided by the institute 

 and academies of France, by the university system in Germany and 

 Scotland. We must think of him, in the main, as we think of Young, 

 who presented his fundamental discoveries on the undulatory theory of 

 light in such obscure ways and channels that they never received due 



" " Naturphil.," p. 11. 



