XI PHENOMENA OF ORGANIC NATURE 449 



farious, and, not unfrequently, ignorant attacks 

 which have been made upon the " Origin of 

 Species," there is nothing which has been more 

 speciously criticised than this particular limitation. 

 If people have nothing else to urge against the 

 book, they say " Well, after all, you see Mr. 

 Darwin's explanation of the ' Origin of Species ' 

 is not good for much, because, in the long run, he 

 admits that he does not know how organic matter 

 began to exist. But if you admit any special 

 creation for the first particle of organic matter 

 you may just as well admit it for all the rest ; five . 

 hundred or five thousand distinct creations are 

 just as intelligible, and just as little difficult to 

 understand, as one." The answer to these cavils 

 is two -fold. In the first place, all human inquiry 

 must stop somewhere ; all our knowledge and all 

 our investigation cannot take us beyond the limits 

 set by the finite and restricted character of our 

 faculties, or destroy the endless unknown, which 

 accompanies, like its shadow, the endless procession 

 of phenomena. So far as I can venture to offer 

 an opinion on such a matter, the purpose of our 

 being in existence, the highest object that human 

 beings can set before themselves, is not the pursuit 

 of any such chimera as the annihilation of the 

 unknown ; but it is simply the unwearied endeav- 

 our to remove its boundaries a little further from 

 our little sphere of action. 



I wonder if any historian would for a moment 



