THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



This is true of all his work except his hypotheses of 

 natural selection and pangenesis, and it explains why 

 his botanical and zoological work has stood the test 

 of time and why his hypotheses are crumbling. He 

 and his followers never saw the humour of this state- 

 ment when it was applied to his life work on evolu- 

 tion. He had collected facts about evolution on a 

 wholesale scale during twenty years, but instead of 

 the theory of natural selection following this work, 

 he had adopted it at the age of twenty-nine, and it had 

 been in his mind as a fixed principle, unconsciously 

 guiding his observations and experiments during the 

 entire twenty years. Bacon would have prayed to be 

 spared such a perversion of his principles. 



Unfortunately for Darwin's future reputation, his 

 life was spent on the problem of evolution which is 

 deductive by nature. The enormous and complicated 

 phenomena of life do not admit of solution by induc- 

 tive reasoning; it is absurd to expect that many facts 

 will not always be irreconcilable with any theory of 

 evolution and, today, every one of his arguments is 

 contradicted by facts. Our acceptance of any such 

 theory must be, in the end, because of a slight pre- 

 ponderance in the balance of facts for and against it. 

 It is a pathetic fact in his life, that after all his enor- 

 mous labour to prove his theory he, himself, occasion- 

 ally realized that it had not been accomplished. Four 

 years after the publication of the Origin^ he wrote to 



C 194 3 



