30 DARWINISM AND HUMAN LIFE 



of Species/' Sir Francis Galton has told us that 

 his dominant feeling was one of freedom. 



For one must remember that Darwin attacked 

 a whole series of problems which, for most of 

 his contemporaries, were either insoluble mysteries 

 or a preserve for transcendental interpretation. 

 " Evolution," Prof. Bateson says, " is a process 

 of variation and heredity. The older writers, 

 though they had some vague idea that it must 

 be so, did not study variation and heredity. 

 Darwin did, and so begat, not a theory, but a 

 science." * He showed that the deeper mysteries 

 of life were in a measure accessible to the scientific 

 method. He won freedom for the application of 

 the evolution formula to man as well as to other 

 creatures, and not only to his body, but to his 

 emotions and behaviour. He was one of the 

 founders of genetic psychology, which, though 

 still hardly above the ground, is destined to 

 make for the growing freedom of the human 

 spirit. We mean not merely intellectual freedom 

 from obscurity, but a practical freedom as well; 

 for in regard to the mind, as well as the body, 

 Darwin set a-going a kind of inquiry into individual 

 development and racial evolution, into variation 

 and heredity, which promises to give us a firmer 

 control of life. We are only beginning to realise 

 that the truth which is in Darwinism shares with 

 all truth the power of making us free. 



Darwin gave men confidence in the interpre- 

 tative value of the evolution formula, which 

 makes the present less obscure by throwing on 

 it the light of the past, and every one knows how 

 the interpretation has been applied to mind, 



1 " Darwin and Modern Science," (1909), p. 88. 



