130 CHARLES DARWIN 



thoroughly logical mind, a mind of the very highest 

 order, would have said even before Darwin, ' Creation 

 can have no possible place in the physical series of 

 things at all. How organisms came to be I do not yet 

 exactly see ; but I am sure they must have come to be 

 by some merely physical process, if we could only find 

 it out.' And such minds were all actually evolutionary 

 even before Darwin had made the modus operandi of 

 evolution intelligible. But most people are not so clear- 

 sighted. They require to have everything proved to 

 them by the strictest collocation of actual instances. 

 They will not believe unless one rise from the dead. 

 There are men who rejected the raw doctrine of special 

 creation on evidence adduced ; and there are men who 

 never even for a moment entertained it as conceivable. 

 The former compose the mass of the scientific world, and 

 it was for their conversion that the Darwinian hypothesis 

 was so highly salutary. As Professor Fiske rightly 

 remarks, ' The truth is that before the publication of 

 the " Origin of Species " there was no opinion whatever 

 current respecting the subject that deserved to be called 

 a scientific hypothesis. That the more complex forms 

 of life must have come into existence through some 

 process of development from simpler forms was no doubt 

 the only sensible and rational view to take of the subject; 

 but in a vague and general opinion of this sort there is 

 nothing that is properly scientific. A scientific hypo- 

 thesis must connect the phenomena with which it 

 deals by alleging a "true cause;" and before 1859 no 

 one had suggested a " true cause " for the origination of 

 new species, although the problem was one over which 

 every philosophical naturalist had puzzled since the 



