442 The Doctrine of Evolution. 



first scout it as ridiculous or frown upon it as impious, but 

 afterward, when it is no longer possible to gainsay it, they 

 suddenly find that everybody knew all about it long ago. 

 This habit is probably due to an exaggerated regard for con- 

 sistency and a failure to realize that the thoughts of men 

 are, and ought to be, widened with the process of the suns. 

 About the origin and history of the doctrine of evolution 

 there is in the popular mind a great confusion of ideas ; and 

 this, as we now begin to see, is because the conception of 

 evolution is itself something which has grown up gradually. 

 It is an end toward which the whole momentum of scientific 

 thought since Newton's day has been tending, yet which has 

 been clearly and fully recognized only of late years. As re- 

 gards Mr. Darwin's contribution to the general result, it ad- 

 mits of precise definition. The doctrine of natural selection, 

 which Mr. Spencer afterward called "the survival of the 

 fittest," belongs to Mr. Darwin and to Mr. Wallace as much 

 as the differential calculus belongs to Newton and Leibnitz. 

 The same problem was solved in the same way, first by Mr. 

 Darwin, and then a dozen years later by Mr. Wallace in com- 

 plete ignorance of what Mr. Darwin had done. " Darwin- 

 ism " is the doctrine which maintains that many different 

 forms of animal and vegetable life have a common ancestry, 

 and which defines and describes natural selection as the 

 chief agent in bringing about divergencies. Its distinctive 

 feature that which constitutes its value and its grandeur 

 as a scientific doctrine is the discovery and demonstration 

 of the agency of natural selection. No one anticipated Mr. 

 Darwin in that. 



But the doctrine of natural selection is one thing, and 

 the doctrine of evolution is quite another thing. It covers 

 much more ground, and a good deal of it is ground with 

 which Mr. Darwin had little or nothing to do. Vague 

 notions of evolution were in the air long before Darwin. 

 When Emerson speaks of the worm mounting through the 

 various spires of form, we are sometimes told that in this 

 and other similar remarks he anticipated Darwin. But 

 such language is misleading. Great writers might have 

 gone on until the present moment expressing a conviction 

 that higher forms of life have been evolved from lower forms, 

 but all that would have been of small avail as scientific doc- 

 trine until somebody could show how it has been done. The 

 belief in an evolution of higher from lower organisms was 

 held by a few eminent men of science for a great part of 



