DARWIN. ies 



that man may know what his duty is ahd very many 

 noble spirits besides Darwin have not found it possible 

 to advance with certainty beyond this point. 



As to Darwin's place in literature, that is due super- 

 eminently to his thoughts. In his expression of them 

 he had the saving quality of directness, and usually wrote 

 with simplicity. Incisive he was not ordinarily ; caution 

 of his type harmonises ill with incisiveness. But what 

 he lost thereby he gained in solidity and in permanence. 

 Sometimes, as we have pointed out, his imagination 

 carried him beyond his usual sober vein, and then he 

 showed himself aglow with feeling or with sympathetic 

 perception. 



But when we speak of his imagination we pass at once 

 to the other side of his mind if indeed any such patient 

 inquiry as his could have been maintained except for the 

 imaginative side of him. This lit up his path, buoyed 

 him in difficulties and failures, suggested new expedients, 

 experiments, and combinations. The use of imagination 

 in science has never been more aptly illustrated nor 

 more beneficial than in his case. Darwin, more than 

 any other man perhaps, showed the value, if not the 

 essentiality, of " working hypotheses " ; and if any man 

 now wants to progress in biology, he will be foolish if he 

 does not seek such and use them freely, and abandon 

 them readily if disproved. 



Darwin imagined grandly, and verified his imaginings 

 as far as one man's life suffices ; and no man can do more. 

 And Darwin won, as far as a man can win, success during 

 his lifetime. As Professor Huxley said, in lecturing on 

 " The Coming of Age of ' The Origin of Species,' " " the 



