CHARACTER AND POWERS. 13 



order to ensure that the results are an advance in the 

 direction of the truth. A delicately-adjusted balance 

 between the powers of imagination and the powers 

 which hold imagination in check, is essential in the 

 historian who is to provide us with a picture of a 

 past age, which explains the mistaken impression 

 gained by a more or less prejudiced observer who 

 saw but a small part of it from a limited standpoint, 

 and has handed down his impression to us. A poem 

 which sheds new light upon the relation between 

 mind and mind, requires to be tested and controlled 

 by constant and correct observation, like a hypothesis 

 in the domain of the natural sciences. 



It is probable, then, that the secret of Darwin's 

 strength lay in the perfect balance between his powers 

 of imagination and those of accurate observation, the 

 creative efforts of the one being ever subjected to the 

 most relentless criticism by the employment of the 

 other. We shall never know, I have heard Professor 

 Michael Foster say, the countless hypotheses which 

 passed through the mind of Darwin, and which, how- 

 ever wild and improbable, were tested by an appeal 

 to Nature, and were then dismissed for ever. 



Darwin's estimate of his own powers is given 

 with characteristic candour and modesty in the con- 

 cluding paragraph of his " Autobiography " (" Life and 

 Letters," 1887, p. 107) :— 



" Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this 

 may have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can 

 judge, by complex and diversified mental qualities and 



