DARWIN AND NATURAL SELECTION 35 



the Haeckelian horn, it may be well to listen to 

 the words on the same subject of another man of 

 science, Professor Dwight : " We have now the 

 remarkable spectacle that, just when many 

 scientific men are of accord that there is no part 

 of the Darwinian system that is of any very great 

 influence, and that as a whole the theory is not 

 only unproved but impossible, the ignorant, half- 

 educated masses have acquired the idea that it is 

 to be accepted as a fundamental fact. Moreover, 

 it is not to them an academic question of biology, 

 but, as the matter has been presented to them, it 

 is a system : to wit, the monistic system, of phil- 

 osophy. Thus presented it undeniably is fatal, 

 not only to all revealed religion, but to any system 

 of morals founded on a supernatural basis." * It 

 is perhaps worth while noting that Darwin himself 

 never claimed the position of a " monistic phil- 

 osopher." No doubt he grew more agnostic as the 

 years of his life rolled by, but to the end of that 

 life he never expunged from its pages the well- 

 known passage with which the Origin of Species 

 terminates, though he modified that passage in 

 his first draft, and again, in a very remarkable 

 manner, in the second edition. Here is the passage 

 itself : " There is grandeur in this view of life, 

 with its several powers, having been originally 

 created by the Creator into a few forms or into 

 one ; and that, whilst this planet had gone cycling 

 on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so 

 simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful 



* Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist, p. 6. By Thomas Dwight, 

 M.D., LL.D., Parkman Professor of Anatomy at Harvard. 



