252 Charles Darwin. 



drift of action and reaction will continue, the out- 

 come will still be good. As Carlyle has said, " A 

 noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not en- 

 grave truth on his watch-seal ; no, but he stands by 

 truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it." 



But not as a fact gatherer do we find him greatest. 

 Many others, have struggled with ant-like toil to 

 amass piles of facts which, like the ant-heap, remain- 

 but sand after all. Darwin brings to his work an in- 

 forming spirit, the genius of scientific hypothesis. 

 Breathed upon by this spirit, the dry bones of fact 

 come together " bone to his bone," the sinews and 

 the flesh come upon them, they become alive and 

 stand upon their feet "an exceeding great army." 

 He searches always for the principles which underlie 

 the facts and make them possible, realising that the 

 phenomena, the things which are seen, are temporal 

 and transitory ; the things which are not seen, the 

 cosmical forces which govern and control, are eternal. 



In his examination of the expression of the emo- 

 tions he found that both in man and animals they 

 can be referred to three general principles which may 

 be termed habit, antithesis, and nervous overflow. 

 By habit, or repetition, serviceable movements be- 

 come fixed involuntary, or semi-voluntary. By 

 antithesis, opposite frames of mind are expressed by 

 opposite actions, even though those actions may not 

 be serviceable. The theory of nervous overflow is 

 that unusual quantities of force generated by the 

 cerebro-spinal system are discharged by unusual 

 channels of expression when the ordinary channels 

 are insufficient. 



