no NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



Darwin so sigually failed to discover Nature's evolu- 

 tional method, I must express my opinion that it was 

 due to the fact that he was not eminently endowed 

 with true insight, and therefore deserted the legitimate 

 paths of scientific inquiry, and that, ignoring the 

 results of observation and experience, he trusted to his 

 imaginative or intuitional faculty to furnish him with 

 hypothetical explanations of Nature's developmental 

 action. His theory was no sooner conceived than it 

 took possession of his enthusiastic mind, and dominated 

 his whole being, so that henceforth he interpreted 

 Nature and her phenomena as seen through the medium 

 of Natural Selection. It was no proof of intelligence 

 or of insight that when he was casting about to find 

 a satisfactory starting-point for a theory explanatory 

 of Nature's evolutional action, and when in the course 

 of his search he happened to read the Essay of 

 Malthus on Population, he at once adopted its con- 

 clusions, extending them from human life to the 

 whole world of organic existence, including both the 

 animal and vegetable kingdoms. It did not occur to 

 him to reject the principle of Malthus as inconsistent 

 with the concept of a moral and beneficent Deity. 

 On the contrary, it recommended itself to his mind 

 on that account. The day has not yet come, which 

 I am assured shall come, when science will make the 

 discovery that the farther it departs from the con- 

 ception of a moral order pervading and informing the 

 universe, and from the acknowledgment of a Creative 

 Mind supreme in beneficence as in power, the farther 



