<ME. DARWIN'S CRITICS' 129 



and adding that he was reading up Suarez and the Jesuit 

 Fathers and found that Mivart either misquoted or mis- 

 understood him, and he (H.) proposed to vindicate the 

 Catholic Fathers ! What an irony his life is becoming. I 

 call him a * Polemician.' 



To T. H. Huxley 



Kew : September 17, 1871. 



DEAR H. There is an irony in your going in for Suarez 

 in Scotland were not his works burnt in public by James I ? 

 I have just glanced again at Mivart's last chapter ; it is 

 curious for the illustrations it introduces pro and con his 

 views, which seem to have been sought with zeal and pro- 

 duced without discretion. The pages on the attributes of 

 an Almighty God are hopelessly vague and commonplace, 

 and I never had much respect for the God who originates 

 derivatively. His ' God inscrutable ' is no better or worse for 

 me than Spencer's ' God unknowable ' whom he won't have ! 

 Given a God who can be in two places at once and it 

 is mighty little odds whether you call him inscrutable or 

 unknowable in reference either to his disposal of events, or 

 to our consideration of him or his attributes ! 



The whole scheme of ' Derivative Creation ' in its religious 

 aspect always seemed to me a poor makeshift a sweet to 

 the physic of evolution ; and I should indeed be astonished 

 if the Jesuit Fathers' conceptions of creation squared with 

 this. All they contended for, I assume, was that God made 

 beasts and birds, &c. out of solids, and not out of vacuum. 



I see that as far as possible Mivart gives Providence a wide 

 berth well for him. If I understand him aright, he believes 

 in an original creation of Soul in every man (not a derivative 

 one) it is a pity that he had not expounded that idea ; he 

 could scarce have escaped the pitfall of Heredity in reference 

 to the attributes of the Soul, i.e. of all we know of what we 

 call Soul which I take it is simply a mixed idea. 



I shall be most curious to read your paper. 



To Charles Darwin 



Kew : Monday (November ? 1871). 



DEAR DARWIN, I return Huxley's article [' Mr. Darwin's 

 Critics ' : Contemporary Review, Nov. 17] which I have read 



