476 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



they should have a happy ending; he paid but little attention to literary 

 faults. And his religious interests went the same way as the literary; the 

 Christian faith of his youth had undoubtedly been traditional from the very 

 beginning, without any feelings of personal experience; his faith died grad- 

 ually and without any crisis, leaving behind a peaceful and untroubled res- 

 ignation in face of the ultimate problems of existence, a resignation which 

 was never disturbed by anything except the innumerable senseless and irra- 

 tional inquiries he received on the subject and to which he invariably replied 

 conscientiously. It is worth quoting the following out of one of these re- 

 plies as a final touch to the description of his character: "The safest con- 

 clusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's 

 intellect; but man can do his duty." 



Judgments on Darwin 

 Very different judgments have been passed on Darwin. Even on his first 

 appearance he was either extolled as one of the greatest geniuses in the 

 world or abused as an ignorant and unreliable dilettante, according to the 

 different points of view. Nor have subsequent generations been any more 

 unanimous; especially since the theory of selection has been condemned — 

 at least in its original form — hard words have not been spared against its 

 creator — as a matter of fact, a natural reaction against the adoration meted 

 out to him towards the close of his life, which received confirmation in his 

 being buried beside the grave of Newton. Was this apotheosis justified or 

 not? This question has been answered and can still be answered either way. 

 To raise the theory of selection, as has often been done, to the rank of a 

 "natural law" comparable in value with the law of gravity established by 

 Newton is, of course, quite irrational, as time has already shown; Darwin's 

 theory of the origin of species was long ago abandoned. Other facts estab- 

 lished by Darwin are all of second-rate value. But if we measure him by his 

 influence on the general cultural development of humanity, then the prox- 

 imity of his grave to Newton's is fully justified. It is certain that since the 

 days of the latter no scientist has so deeply influenced man's general concep- 

 tion of life as Darwin has done; it is his theory of evolution that has taken 

 the place of the idealistic theory of romanticism and made the common de- 

 scent the connecting link in existence instead of ideas and archetypes. In 

 all spheres of knowledge the development from earlier to later stages has 

 been the one clue for research; history, which had previously sought for 

 "guiding ideas," is now an evolutionary science, just as is philology, and 

 even philosophy has at least one school that has followed the same prin- 

 ciple. Everyone knows the important role played by the idea of evolution 

 in naturalistic literature. The influence of Darwinism on biology will be 

 described in the next chapter. Of its weaknesses a certain number have al- 

 ready been referred to above; it shared with all new ideas the illusion that 

 it could do too much; this was so with Darwin himself, modest though he 

 personally was, and still more so with his admiring successors. We shall 

 now proceed to describe the differences of opinion caused by the new doctrine. 



