u6 CHARLES DARWIN 



followed respectfully to the grave with frank and noble 

 inconsistency the honoured remains of the very teacher 

 whom less than a quarter of a century earlier they had 

 naturally dreaded as loosening the traditional foundations 

 of all accepted religion and morality. 



But if the attack was fierce and bitter, the defence 

 was assisted by a sudden access of powerful forces from 

 friendly quarters. A few of the elder generation of 

 naturalists held out, indeed, for various shorter or longer 

 periods ; some of them never came into the camp at all, 

 but lingered on, left behind, like stragglers from the 

 onward march, by the younger biologists, in isolated non- 

 conformity on the lonely heights of austere officialism. 

 Their business was to ticket and docket and pigeon-hole, 

 not to venture abroad on untried wings into the airy 

 regions of philosophical speculation. The elder men, 

 in fact, had many of them lost that elasticity and niodi- 

 fiability of intellect which is necessary for the reception 

 of new and revolutionary fundamental concepts. A mind 

 that has hardened down into the last stage of extreme 

 maturity may assimilate fresh facts and fresh minor 

 principles, but it cannot assimilate fresh synthetic sys- 

 tems of the entire cosmos. Moreover, some of the elder 

 thinkers were committed beforehand to opposing views, 

 with which they lacked either the courage or the in- 

 tellectual power to break ; while others were entangled 

 by religious restrictions, and unable to free themselves 

 from the cramping fetters of a narrow orthodoxy. 

 But even among his own contemporaries and seniors 

 Darwin found not a few whose minds were thoroughly 

 prepared beforehand for the reception of his lucid 

 and luminous hypothesis; while the younger natural- 



