244 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XIII 



would be a vastly greater " catastrophe " than any of 

 those which Lyell successfully eliminated from sober 

 geological speculation. 



Thus, looking back into the past, it seems to me that 

 my own position of critical expectancy was just and 

 reasonable, and must have been taken up, on the same 

 grounds, by many other persons. If Agassiz told me that 

 the forms of life which have successively tenanted the 

 globe were the incarnations of successive thoughts of the 

 Deity, and that He had wiped out one set of these 

 embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe as 

 soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found 

 myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the 

 deductions from the facts of paleontology, upon which 

 this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to 

 confess my want of any means of testing the correctness 

 of his explanation of them. And besides that, I could 

 by no means see what the explanation explained. 

 Neither did it help me to be told by an eminent 

 anatomist that species had succeeded one another in time, 

 in virtue of "a continuously operative creational law." 

 That seemed to me to be no more than saying that 

 species had succeeded one another in the form of a vote- 

 catching resolution, with "law" to catch the man of 

 science, and " creational " to draw the orthodox. So I 

 took refuge in that " thatige Skepsis " which Goethe has 

 so well defined ; and, reversing the apostolic precept to 

 be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability 

 of the received doctrines when I had to do with the 

 transmutationists ; and stood up for the possibility of 

 transmutation among the orthodox thereby, no doubt, 

 increasing an already current, but quite undeserved, 

 reputation for needless combativeness. 



I remember, in the course of my first interview with 

 Mr. Darwin, expressing my belief in the sharpness of the 

 lines of demarcation between natural groups and in the 

 absence of transitional forms, with all the confidence of 



