DARWIN 



which have never been answered. Probably, for the 

 only time in his life, Darwin was willing to have an 

 adversary beaten by an unworthy trick, and he wrote 

 a joyful letter to Huxley who had rushed on Mivart, 

 a Catholic, and had turned his flank by unearthing 

 and controverting an illustration from the Jesuitj 

 Suarez, injecting the odium theologicum into Mivart's 

 thoroughly scientific work/ This vacillation was at- 

 tributed to modesty and was made a virtue, but such 

 diffidence is not a virtue in a man of Darwin's power 

 and reputation who was engaged in changing our 

 whole idea of God and nature. And that it was a real 

 inability to attain his end is made certain by the as- 

 surance with which he maintained the correctness of 

 his true scientific work dealing with his experimenta- 

 tion. 



Darwin was, by nature, unable to deal with theo- 

 retical and philosophical questions, to maintain an 

 extended argument, or to see the larger conclusions to 

 which it pointed. He was truly by nature an inductive 

 and experimental scientist and he writes of himself: 

 "I worked on true Baconian principles, and without 

 any theory collected facts on a wholesale scale 



554 



^ Life and Letters, vol. II, p. 328. Darwin writes to Huxley: "How 

 you do smash Mivart's theology. ... I have been preeminently 

 glad to read your discussion on metaphysics, especially about rea- 

 son and his definition of it. I felt sure he was wrong, but having 

 only common observation and sense to trust to, I did not know 

 what to say in my second edition of my Descent. Now a foot-note 

 and a reference to you will do the work." 

 *Ibid.. vol. I, p. 68. 



I 193 3 



