72 CHARLES DARWIN 



most ridiculous surmises as to its anonymous origin 

 were everywhere afloat. Some attributed it to Thackeray, 

 and some to Prince Albert, some to Lyell, some to Sir 

 John Herschel, and some to Charles Darwin himself. 

 Obscurantists thought it a wicked book ; ' intellectual ' 

 people thought it an advanced book. As a matter of 

 fact it was neither the one nor the other. It was just 

 a pale and colourless transcript of the old familiar 

 teleological Lamarckism. Yet it did good in its 

 generation. The public at large were induced by its 

 ephemeral vogue to interest themselves in a question to 

 which they had never previously given even a passing 

 thought, though more practised biologists of evolutionary 

 tendencies were grieved at heart that evolution should 

 first have been popularly presented to the English 

 world under so unscientific, garbled, and mutilated a 

 form. From the philosophic side, Herbert Spencer 

 found 'this ascription of organic evolution to some 

 aptitude naturally possessed by organisms or miracu- 

 lously imposed upon them ' to be ' one of those explana- 

 tions which explain nothing a shaping of ignorance 

 into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned,' 

 he says, ' is not a true cause not a cause assimilable 

 to known causes not a cause that can be anywhere 

 shown to produce analogous effects. It is a cause un- 

 representable in thought: one of those illegitimate 

 symbolic conceptions which cannot by any mental pro- 

 cess be elaborated into a real conception.' From the 

 scientific side, on the other hand, Darwin felt sadly the 

 inaccuracy and want of profound technical knowledge 

 everywhere displayed by the anonymous author. These 

 things might naturally cause the enemy to blaspheme. 



