1866. | Darwin and his Teachings. 175 
the other hand, we can hardly believe that he assumes so much for 
his favourite theory, for elsewhere he says, “I do not pretend that 
the facts given in this chapter strengthen in any great degree my 
theory, but none of the cases of. difficulty to the best of my judg- 
ment annihilate it.” * That visible nature, in some cases, limits and 
retards, in others stimulates the physical as well as the bodily 
activity of living beings, no one will deny, and that such an in- 
fluence is as applicable to Man as to the lower animals, is just as 
obvious ; but that nature has been, or is, a power, in the well-under- 
stood acceptation of the term, acting upon the mind of animals, or 
of man, or anything but an unconscious agent, very few will admit, 
and we can hardly believe that the illustrious naturalist himself 
holds such a creed. 
Sometimes, indeed, the “conditions of existence” are all-power- 
ful in evoking the nobler qualities of animals and men. For 
Man these “conditions” may be a forest glade, a range of towering 
peaks, a well-stocked library, a few tuneful sentences ; any of these 
may fan the latent spark of genius, which has lain smouldering for 
years, and cause the flame to burst forth suddenly. But there 
are cases where, notwithstanding that the “conditions of existence” 
may have a repressive tendency, the “instincts’—or in Man the 
soul—will assert its supremacy, and will mock all Darwin’s laws and 
theories. See, for example, the ungainly peasant, who, under the 
law of the “hereditary transmission of peculiarities,’ should have 
pared his turnips, chewed his bacon, and guided his plough, as did his 
ancestors before him—how he, encircled by the same “conditiéns 
of existence” as surrounded them, spurns their grovelling pursuits, 
dives down into the depths of physical truth and brings up some 
pearl of inestimable price, which his “ highly educated ” fellow-men 
have in vain been seeking on the surface; or soars upwards to the 
sky, and descends again with other truths, less pleasing to the 
sense, perhaps, but serving as another link in the bright golden 
chain uniting Earth and Heaven. 
In this review of some of Darwin’s labours, we have been led 
into many digressions, for which the eminent author is to some 
extent responsible, for a more suggestive series of works than his 
has rarely been published ; and this we conceive to be one of their 
most valuable elements. The objection to his theory of ‘ natural 
selection” —and it is a grave one for the reason already assigned—is, 
that he refers all the perfect operations of Nature to an imperfect 
law. Then we may be asked, Why should such a law be regarded ? 
Simply, because it is the best extant. Why, we would ask, is 
society ruled by imperfect laws? Why is honesty in trade, to a 
large extent, maintained by clumsy and defective mercantile codes ? 
* * Origin of Species,’ p. 265, par. 2. 
