THE CHAIN OF SPECIES, 315 



often discovered in circumstantial evidence, " "We only have to get 

 hold of the right end to be able to unwind the mystery as you would 

 a skein of thread." Nor is the narrow fear of conservative religionists 

 to be too harshly blamed for this misapplied and unnecessary warfare. 

 The windmills are certainly there, although they are not giants. 



Filled with natural vanity at the discovery of some new fact of this 

 wondrous life, or arrived at some new aspect of it, some new view of 

 Nature, such pride as stirred the soul of Nunez de Balboa when, first 

 of civilized men, from the Cordillera of Panama, he caught sight of 

 the great South Sea, is not unbecoming the pioneers of thought and 

 knowledge. The danger to be guarded against is the common one of 

 all vanity, that of mistaking partial attainment for complete victory, 

 the achievement of a stand-point in advance assumed as the only pos- 

 sible one. The error is that of forgetting, like that same first beholder 

 of the Pacific, that the apparent trend of coast depends upon the sim- 

 ple fact of position, the stand-point. And like him, also, it is natural, 

 easy, and common, to conclude that the opening of some petty gulf 

 before us is the grand expanse of the boundless ocean. 



Coming in plain terms to the point before us : When a naturalist, 

 confining himself properly to reason and the laws of Nature, specu- 

 lates on the origin of species, and attempts to show the correlation of 

 form to form, the evolution of one from another, or the development 

 of many distinct species from a common stock, the reverence of cer- 

 tain minds, which have long run in a certain groove that connects 

 these obscure mysteries of Nature with some imagined interference of 

 Omnipotence, is seriously shocked. These, looking only to primary 

 and final causes, feel contempt for the laborer who is working, for 

 his penny a day, for the sight of the next step in that endless chain of 

 secondary, efiicient causes, which is the revelation of Nature to the 

 rational faculty. 



On the other hand, the proper conservatism of religious minds iS 

 often insulted by the exclusive cultivator of mere natural science, as 

 the reserve and resistance of ignorance and fanaticism. Vainglorious 

 in the light of some new discovery, he sees all the rest of the world in 

 apparent darkness. If each — the worshiper according to the old faith, 

 and the cultivator of the new science — understood the domain of the 

 other better, the conclusions of both would be difierent. 



Nor is it a few tyros in science who thus forget their true voca- 

 tion, and invade a province they do not understand. When we find a 

 Spencer and a Huxley leveling their wrath, like ordinary zealots, 

 against what they style anthropomorphism, and issuing bulls of ex- 

 communication from their self-constituted Church of Common-Sense, 

 against all who differ with them, against all who dare to believe in 

 what they call the " dogma of special creations " — and even Charles 

 Darwin, most moderate and dignified as he is of all scientists, acknowl- 

 edges that " the object of his earliest work was, to combat this same 



