et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 53 



day, that under a surface of excessive humi- 

 lity, it really consisted of the most arrogant, 

 shallow, and uneducated dogmatism. Loudly 

 professing to follow Nature, it really pre- 

 scribed to her a priori the law that she was 

 to follow, on pain of being denied and 

 abused. A large number of savoury scien- 

 tific professors, including some of the very 

 highest eminence, went, and still go, to 

 Nature, with a dogma. They said to her : 

 You shall be nothing, if not mechanical : 

 only a purely mechanical is a natural ex- 

 planation. Nature is mechanics, and all else 

 is miracle. Hence they strove to reduce 

 everything in Nature to mechanical prin- 

 ciples, because those they thought they could 

 exhaustively understand. Hence all the lu- 

 dicrous efforts constantly made to reduce 

 forces, and especially that of gravitation, 

 to impact. To philosophers of this kind, 

 there are a larger number of natural facts 



