RESULT. 355 



such an enormous consummation as that might seem 

 to him a putting on of the seven-league boots with a 

 vengeance ! Even when he thought of the " warm little 

 pond," with ammonia, etc., he need not have thought of 

 it as only one. If there was one, there might plainly 

 have been several ; and different water, different air, 

 different light, different bottom, different banks, and differ- 

 ent objects on them, might have superinduced upon their 

 respective protoplasms, or insinuated into them, quite a 

 variety of powers, just as we can understand even now 

 that every germ, every indistinguishable particle of proto- 

 plasm, has potentialities always latently its own. Mr. 

 Huxley may have had an idea of that. Nay, the contrary 

 supposition, animals only the one, after the other, out of 

 each other, may have appeared to him coarse. On the 

 whole, then, from all that we see, and from what he him- 

 self writes, it does not appear unfair to regard the religious 

 idea as the main agent in the inducing of Mr. Huxley 

 to profess a general acceptance of Darwinianism. Perhaps 

 we may still wonder that this prejudice of enlightenment 

 should have been allowed by Mr. Huxley to blind so 

 clear an understanding as his to the true import of these 

 moments that constitute the theory. It will not be 

 denied that these moments are variation and the selective 

 application of it. Divergence may be added to these, 

 though rather, in reality, as we have seen, only an illustra- 

 tion. We have already discussed, indeed, all three terms 

 and ideas so fully that any mistake in their regard is not 

 now to be supposed. We saw (p. 273) that when Mr. 

 Darwin expressed himself as unable to doubt that during 

 millions of generations variations would arise and accu- 

 mulate into new species, he might just as well have said, 

 that he was unable to doubt that new species were a 

 spontaneous product of time. " Why cannot he have said 

 at once, I cannot doubt but that in millions of genera- 



