282 EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 
throughout most of the nineteenth in nearly all civil- 
ized countries. One result of this state of mind was 
Comte’s Philosophy of Positivism, which aimed at or- 
ganizing scientific truths without reference to any ulte- 
rior implications, which was like the ostrich burying its 
head in the sand and asseverating, “ There is no world 
save that which I see.” Another form which it took 
was agnosticism, or the simple, weary refusal to deal 
with subjects inaccessible to the ordinary methods of 
scientific proof. Out of this mental attitude came 
a disposition which reached its height toward the mid- 
dle of the century, to deal with sciences merely as 
groups of disconnected facts which men might gather 
and tabulate very much as boys and girls collect post- 
age stamps. The acme of glory in science would be 
thus attained when you had described some weed 
or insect hitherto unknown or undistinguished, and 
were entitled to apply to it some Greek name at which 
Aristotle would have shuddered, with your own family 
name attached, in the Latin genitive case. It was 
this feeling which led the French Academy of Sciences 
some thirty years ago to elect for a new member some 
Scandinavian naturalist, whose name I forget, instead 
of Charles Darwin, inasmuch as the former had 
described three or four new bugs while the latter 
was only a constructor of theories. In the same 
mood I remember a discussion in a certain learned 
historical society as to whether the late John Richard 
Green could properly be called a historian, inasmuch 
as he had apparently neither discovered nor edited any 
new documents, but had only described the life of a 
great people. 
Now one result of the unification of nature of which 
