THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN 3 



No man who ever lived would more cordially 

 have recognised these two alternative aspects of the 

 great worker's predetermining causes than Charles 

 Darwin. He knew well that the individual is the 

 direct cumulative product of his physical predecessors, 

 and that he works and is worked upon in innumerable 

 ways by the particular environment into whose midst 

 he is born. Let us see, then, in his own case what 

 were these two main sets of conditioning circumstances 

 which finally led up to the joint production of Charles 

 Darwin, the man and the philosopher, the thinking 

 brain and the moving energy. In other words, what 

 was the state of the science of life at the time when he 

 first began to observe and to speculate ; and what was 

 the ancestry which made him be born a person capable 

 of helping it forward at a single bound over its great 

 restricting dogmatic barrier of the fixity of species ? 



Let us begin, in the first place, by clearing the 

 path beforehand of a popular misconception, so extremely 

 general and almost universal that, unless it be got rid 

 of at the very outset of our sketch, much of the real 

 scope and purport of Darwin's life and work must, of 

 necessity, remain entirely misunderstood by the vast 

 mass of English readers. In the public mind Darwin 

 is, perhaps, most commonly regarded as the discoverer 

 and founder of the evolution hypothesis. Two ideas 

 are usually associated with his name and memory. It 

 is believed that he was the first propounder of the 

 theory which supposes all plant and animal forms 

 to be the result, not of special creation, but of slow 

 modification in pre-existent organisms. It is further 

 and more particularly believed that he was the first 



