Charles Robert Darwin. 4& 



He lifted darkness from the face of time 

 And from the face of nature : we to-day, 

 Seeing with his sight, foretell a song shall rise 



Out of his spirit of truth — a song sublime 

 As the wind 1 s harmony heard far-away 

 Where the sea-surgings seem to meet the skies. 



George Edgar Montgomery. 



ABSTRACT OF THE DISCUSSION. 



Mr. William H. Boughton : — 



Mr. Boughton, in opening the debate, said : that so much had 

 been written and said, and well written and well said, respecting 

 Mr. Darwin's work and the almost ideal beauty of his character, 

 that nothing remained for presentation, comment or eulogy. The 

 use, however, of certain side-lights might bring out some aspects 

 which may not have received due attention, notably in this, that 

 Mr. Darwin's mental greatness rests quite as much upon what he 

 consciously, deliberately refrained from doing as upon that which 

 he did. Consciously, because it is incredible to think that he was 

 not alive to the questions upon which all eyes in his day were 

 centered, such as force, matter, motion, cause, and especially first 

 cause. Deliberately, because he did not yield to the temptation 

 of even discussing these questions. His grand conclusion was 

 Natural Selection. There he stopped, and he did not imperil its 

 grandeur by any such formula as, ' ' Given Natural Selection, there- 

 fore the Unknowable." He must have heard, as the rest of his 

 generation did, all about a First Cause, and its equivalent, a Power 

 from which all things proceed. 



These were burning questions then, glowing with the heat of 

 their formative phases. But Mr. Darwin refused to make his Nat- 

 ural Selection or anything else proceed from Cause or Power. His 

 instinct was too alert, his intellect too keen, not to have noted (1) 

 that all we know of Cause is antecedence, (2) that among the 

 things which we do not know about the Unknowable is that the 

 knowable proceeds from it. Granting that, by reason of the rel- 

 ativity of thought, we are obliged to postulate some unknown 

 force as the correlative of the known force, there is no system of 



