DARWIN AND DARWINISM 8 1' 



feel that I have thought deeply enough to justify 

 such publicity." 8 



His attention, like that of many another scien- 

 tist, had been restricted to purely material facts. 

 However accurate these studies may have been, 

 his deductions from them, even in the purely nat- 

 ural order, were not necessarily reliable, and at 

 times were decidedly unwarranted upon the evi- 

 dence he had gathered. But his labors could not 

 furnish him with the slightest reason for dog- 

 matizing upon religious matters. Would that all 

 scientists, under similar conditions, had confined 

 themselves to the confession made by him when 

 he wrote : "I cannot pretend to throw the least 

 light on such abstruse problems." 9 But again, 

 it did not follow that because he himself failed 

 to attain to an unshaken certainty regarding the 

 existence of God, owing, we may presume, to his 

 own want of effort and proper disposition, that 

 therefore "the mystery of the beginning of all 

 things is insoluble to us." It is insoluble merely 

 to unaided science. Yet the intellect of Darwin, 

 no more than that of any other normal human 

 being, could be permanently blinded to the great 

 truth of a Creator. Never in fact, even to its 

 latest edition, did he eliminate from his best- 

 known work, "The Origin of Species," those con- 

 cluding words: 



8 Ibid., p. 275. 

 'Ibid., p. 282. 



