et Imbecillitate Danviniana. 71 



Mill r , Darwin was not aware, that to ex- 

 plain Nature it is not sufficient to be al- 

 ways accumulating her facts : you must, 

 above all, make a thorough preliminary 

 analysis of the causes and principles to 

 which you propose to refer them. You 

 must thoroughly comprehend her back- 

 ground, before you can satisfactorily inves- 

 tigate her particulars. But this is ' meta- 

 physics ' : and therefore, though it is a scien- 

 tific sine qua non, though science cannot 

 exist without it, it is tabooed by ' scientific ' 

 men, mutually applauding each other, and 

 never perceiving how much they are doing 

 to discredit their own cause. For nothing 



r I consider the authority of J. S. Mill, and the fact 

 that his Logic and Political Economy were and still are 

 text-books in the University of Oxford, to be a national 

 disaster, and almost equivalent to destroying English in- 

 telligence in the germ. A generation which learned its 

 logic from Mill was well prepared to receive Darwin's 

 speculative guessing as a new revelation. 



