vin DARWINISM AND HOLISM 187 



often been quoted, but will bear re-quotation here, and 

 for all time: 



" It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, 

 clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds 

 singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting 

 about, and with worms crawling through the damp 

 earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed 

 forms, so different from each other, and dependent 

 upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been 

 produced by laws acting around us. These laws, 

 taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Repro- 

 duction; Inheritance which is almost implied by 

 reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct 

 action of the conditions of life, and from use and 

 disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a 

 struggle for life, and as a consequence to Natural 

 Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the 

 extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the 

 war of Nature, from famine and death, the most exalted 

 object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, 

 the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 

 There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several 

 powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 

 into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this 

 planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law 

 of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms 

 most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are 

 being evolved." 



I am free to confess that there are few passages in the 

 great literature of the world which affect me more deeply 

 than these concluding words of Darwin's great book. They 

 have a force and a beauty out of all proportion to their 

 simple unadorned phrasing. They are the expression of 

 a great selfless soul, who sought truth utterly and fearlessly, 

 and was in the end vouchsafed a vision of the truth which 

 perhaps has never been surpassed in its fullness and 

 grandeur. 



