1460 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



anticipation of our human lyrics of love and family and home; so 

 thence his wisdom culminates in a theory which for each species 

 hopefully interprets life's tragedies of individual struggles and 

 imperfections overpowered by hard fates, yet also insists above all 

 on the far more than individual significance of survival, to its happy 

 climax, that of race-continuing and family-founding, open to 

 further achievement. Hence, despite his usually quiet and homely 

 style of exposition, his work had in it more gifts from the Muses 

 than he realised; so that his masterpiece could not but terminate 

 with a synthetic passage of true and widely convincing eloquence, a 

 veritable climax for his own evolution, fitly part of that of Nature. 



BIOLOGICAL CONCEPTIONS SOCIALLY INFLUENCED.— 



Now though in our summer school (explained pp. 1384-9) biological 

 surveys and interpretations daily accompanied the social, it was 

 also evident that for most auditors, the social view, as the one 

 humanly familiar, helped greatly to throw light on the biological 

 ones; while even the lecturers, albeit more familiar with Nature, 

 could not but sometimes feel of the same way of thinking too. The 

 popular belief as to naturalists, and which they naturally share, is 

 that each leaves his city and his social life in it, and goes out open- 

 mindedly into Nature, thus perfectly set free to make such observa- 

 tions and interpretations as that environment can yield, and thence 

 bring them back to his fellow-citizens; and these too are assumed 

 as no less open-mindedly ready to receive, and discuss and adopt 

 them as new truths. All so far true, good, and well. But "the eye 

 only sees what it brings the means of seeing" — so, too, the 

 naturalist, what he was prepared by his previous social as well as 

 naturalistic life to see. Take, for instance, the Darwinian doctrine 

 of natural selection. Among the greatest naturalists, we cannot 

 think of better observers than Darwin and Wallace, nor of finer and 

 fuller nature-experience than was theirs; nor yet can we imagine 

 more open, truthful, and honest reflective minds as well; so when 

 such men bring back their great collections of new wonders of life, 

 new observations on them also, we accept them as true novelties. 

 And the like for their fresh interpretations as well, their separately 

 reached and confirmed doctrine of natural selection above aU. Yet 

 in their very rebound from social constraints, their conventional 

 education especially, they were fruitfully striving towards the 

 enrichment of these, and thus true educational and social pioneers, 

 since whom nature-studies have been more seriously considered. 

 Their theory seemed to all, as to themselves, also derived directly 

 from Nature. Yet when we once asked Wallace, "How did you come 

 to the theory of natural selection?" he replied, "Oh, just like 

 Darwin, from reading Malthus!" So it was thanks to Malthus, as 

 political economist, raising the question of human population, and 



