132 DARWINIANISM. 



many continue to marry his grandmother, or eat shoe- 

 leather ? Suicides, murders, thefts, are conditioned by 

 thousand-fold contingency, absolutely insusceptive of 

 calculation, any uniformity that may be found for them 

 as if on law, is but a uniformity, spurious, fallacious. 

 So far as it is a form; it is no principle, generative, 

 productive, pregnant : it is but a formula, no concrete, 

 an abstract a copy-line. An air of regularity may be 

 given to such cases by numbers ; but such regularity is 

 an abstract, it is alone, connectionless, relation less, and 

 tells nothing. Numbers so applied are but idle counters, 

 arbitrarily in play. Mr. Buckle is particularly grand 

 swells bigger and more prophetically oracular than usual, 

 when he has loftily to perorate on, and judicially to 

 fulminate against, the folly of legislators who would 

 restrain murder and set bounds to suicide even by Act of 

 Parliament. It is only the so far fixed stability of 

 society as it is, that warrants calculation, and so a 

 certain assurance, as to length of life, number of fires, 

 etc. 



Evidently, all that has been said being, it follows that 

 Mr. Darwin, however near the truth in his negative of 

 Mr. Buckle, was, in all probability, not much less far 

 from it in his affirmative. 



As regards Carlyle, when Mr. Darwin speaks of him, 

 with whatever justice so far, he is certainly no less 

 relevantly revelant of his own self than when he speaks 

 of Buckle. That bell-stone that came from Heaven 

 knows where, was but a type of movement, and, as we 

 have seen, movement, stir, without, was Mr. Darwin's 

 call proper to speculation within. No wonder, then, 

 that he could only stare in speechless astonishment at 

 the man who had no interest in the movement even of a 

 glacier. "I never met a man," says Mr. Darwin of 

 Carlyle, " with a mind so ill - adapted for scientific 



