130 DABWINIAN INTEEESTS 



with all the admiration I can express. What a wonderful 

 Essayist he is, and incomparable critic and defender of the 

 faithful. Well, I think you are avenged of your enemy but 

 are not the happier for that though you must be for the 

 spirit and body which the avenger has given to the subject, 

 and above all for the grand use he has made of your own 

 arguments for confuting your enemy. What you must feel, 

 and always feel, is, that peculiar and quite unreasonable 

 bitter sorrowing which a man excites who praises you to 

 your face and abuses you behind your back. Why should 

 this excite anything but contempt at worst, or pity at best ? 

 And yet there is no man with generous emotions but feels 

 more sad and sorry over such treatment than either angry 

 or vindictive. 



The Psychological passages seem to me to be wonder- 

 fully clear and good how tight he clothes a difficult idea in 

 language. I was particularly struck with the paragraphs 

 on Neurosis and Psychosis consciousness and its physical 

 basis but really it is difficult to single out either passages 

 or subjects, all is so good and there is so much power and 

 acumen in the treatment of every branch of his subject you 

 may call it an Essay, a critique, an exposition, a discussion, 

 an enquiry, or what else you wish you may read for one 

 and all of these aims. 



The exposition of Mivart's presumptuous ignorance in 

 citing the Catholic Fathers is delicious that's the last 

 pitfall the poor devil expected to be snared into. The 

 tumbling over Wallace is, however, if not an equal feat, a 

 far, far greater service to Science. 1 



The appeal to conscience in the matter of the clergy 

 and the 6 days is very powerful, and must; make many a 



1 Wallace in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 1870, p. 359, 

 urged that Natural Selection accounted for the evolution of man's bodily frame 

 from the simian stock, but that from this point on some extraneous power had 

 inspired Jiim with his mentality, and with a future purpose in view had provided 

 the mere savage with a brain disproportionate to his requirements, whether 

 compared with civilised man or with the brutes. Thereafter the struggle 

 for existence among men had operated mainly through their mental abilities, 

 with the consequence that the human body retained comparative fixity of type. 



Against the argument adduced Huxley quoted Wallace's own words in 

 Instinct in Men and Animals, describing the vast calls upon the intelligence 

 even in a savage's life, and pointed out that by parity of reasoning wolves like- 

 wise had brains too large for their requirements, and must therefore have been 

 supernaturally bred up to prepare them to become dogs. 



