THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT 

 AND DARWINISM. 



Introduction— Summary of the Results of Linguistic Inquiry — Positive Know- 

 ledge preliminary to the Doctrine of Descent— Belief in Miracle— The 

 Limits of the Investigation of Nature. 



A CRAVING to understand existence pervades mankind, 

 and the life of every self-conscious individual. Every 

 system of philosophy has endeavoured to penetrate into 

 the nature of things, and has originated in the attempt 

 to apprehend the coherency of those great series of 

 material and spiritual phenomena, of which man flat- 

 ters himself that he is the centre or the end. 



Some quiet themselves by emphasizing the contrast 

 between mind and body, idea and phenomenon ; others, 

 by the catchword of identity ; some have deemed them- 

 selves and the world in the most beautiful harmony ; 

 others, from the times of the Buddhists, in the 6th cen- 

 tury B.C., to the eccentric saints of the present day, the 

 followers and reformers of Schopenhauer's system, re- 

 gard the world as a mere accumulation of discomfort 

 and conflict, from which the sage may escape by a 



B 



