^3 2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" But, mother, the very nature of such imaginations ! " 



" What are such ' imaginations ' ? " Madame Guillaume went 

 on, interrupting her daughter again. " Fine ones are his, my 

 word! What possesses a man, that all on a sudden, without 

 consulting a doctor, he takes it into his head to eat nothing but 

 vegetables ? There, get along ! if he were not so grossly immoral, 

 he would be fit to shut up in a lunatic asylum." 



" O mother, can you believe ? " 



"Yes, I do believe. I met him in the Champs-Elyse'es. He 

 was on horseback. Well, at one minute he was galloping as hard 

 as he could tear, and then pulled up to a walk. I said to myself 

 at that moment, ' There is a man devoid of judgment ! ' " 



The main consideration which this paper aims to present, that 

 of the responsibility of all men, be they great or be they small, 

 to the same standards of social judgment, and to the same philo- 

 sophical treatment, is illustrated in the very man to whose genius 

 we owe the principle upon which my remarks are based Charles 

 Darwin ; and it is singularly appropriate that we should also find 

 the history of this very principle, that of variations with the cor- 

 relative principle of selection, furnishing a capital illustration of 

 my inferences. Darwin was, with the single possible exception 

 of Aristotle, the man with the sanest judgment that the human 

 mind has ever brought to the investigation of Nature. He repre- 

 sented, in an exceedingly adequate way, the progress of scientific 

 method up to his day. He was disciplined in all the natural sci- 

 ence of his predecessors. His judgment was an epitome of the 

 scientific insight of the ages which culminated then. The time 

 was ripe for just such a great constructive thought as his ripe, 

 that is, as far as the accumulation of scientific data was con- 

 cerned. His judgment differed then from the judgment of his 

 scientific contemporaries mainly in that it was sounder and 

 safer than theirs. And with it Darwin was a great constructive 

 thinker. He had the intellectual strength which put the judg- 

 ment of his time to the strain everybody's but his own. This 

 is seen in the fact that Darwin was not the first to speculate in 

 the line of his great discovery, nor to reach formulas ; but with 

 the others guessing took the place of induction. The formula 

 was an uncriticised thought. The unwillingness of society to 

 embrace the hypothesis was justified by the same lack of evi- 

 dence which prevented the thinkers themselves from giving it 

 proof. And if no Darwin had appeared, the problem of biologi- 

 cal development would have been left about where it had been 

 left by the speculation of the Greek mind. Darwin reached his 

 conclusion by what that other great scientific genius in Eng- 

 land, Newton, described as the essential of discovery, " patient 



