Natural Selection 99 



it plain beyond all doubt that he was not a Darwinian 

 before Darwin. 



"Thus, lookiug back into the past, it seems to me that my 

 own position of critical expectancy was just and reasonable, 

 and must have been taken up, on the same grounds, by many 

 other persons. If Agassiz had told me that the forms of life 

 which had successively tenanted the globe were the incarna- 

 tions of successive thoughts of the Deity ; and that He had 

 wiped out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geo- 

 logical catastrophe as soon as His ideas took a more advanced 

 shape, I found myself not only unable to admit the accuracy 

 of the deductions from the facts of palteontology, upon which 

 this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to confess 

 my want of means of testing the correctness of his explanation 

 of them. And besides that, I could by no means see what the 

 explanation explained. Neither did it help me to be told by an 

 eminent anatomist that species had succeeded one another in 

 time, in virtue of a ' continuously operative creational law.' 

 That seemed to me to be no more than saying that species had 

 succeeded one another in the form of a vote-catching resolu- 

 tion, with ' law ' to please the man of science and ' creational ' 

 to draw the orthodox. So I took refuge in that thdtige 

 Skepsis which Goethe has so well defined ; and, reversing the 

 apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended 

 the tenability of the received doctrines when I had to do with 

 the transmutationists, and stood up for the possibility of 

 transmutation among the orthodox — thereby, no doubt, in- 

 creasing an already current, but quite undeserved, reputation 

 for needless combativeness." 



What transformed Hiixle3''s views and the views of 

 his contemporaries who accepted Darwinism was not 

 so much the evidence in favour of evolution contained 

 in the Origin, as the illuminating doctrine of natural 

 selection which for the first time supplied naturalists 

 with a reasonable explanation of how evolution might 

 have come about, both in the animal and vegetable 



