486 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
when at Christ’s, the other the considered judgment of one who knew and 
loved and fought for Darwin in later life. 
Mr. Herbert says :— 
‘It would be idle for me to speak of his vast intellectual powers. . . 
but I cannot end this cursory and rambling sketch without testifying, and 
I doubt not all his surviving college friends would concur with me, that 
he was the most genial, warm-hearted, generous, and affectionate of 
friends; that his sympathies were with all that was good and true; and 
that he had a cordial hatred for everything false, or vile, or cruel, or 
mean, or dishonourable. He was not only great, but pre-eminently good, 
and just, and lovable.’ 
Professor Huxley, speaking of his name, says :— 
‘They think of him who bore it as a rare combination of genius, 
industry, and unswerving veracity, who earned his place among the most 
famous men of the age by sheer native power, in the teeth of a gale of 
popular prejudice, and uncheered by a sign of favour or appreciation 
from the official fountains of honour; as one who, in spite of an acute 
sensitiveness to praise and blame, and notwithstanding provocations which 
might have excused any outbreak, kept himself clear of all envy, hatred, 
malice, nor dealt otherwise than fairly and justly with the unfairness 
and injustice which was showered upon him; while, to the end of his 
days, he was ready to listen with patience and respect to the most insig- 
nificant of reasonable objectors.’ * 
It has been somewhat shallowly said—said, in fact, on the day of the 
centenary of Darwin’s birth—that ‘we are upon very unsafe ground when 
we speculate upon the manner in which organic evolution has proceeded 
without knowing in the least what was the variable organic basis from 
which the whole process started.’ Such statements show a certain miscon- 
ception, not confined to the layman, as to the scope and limitations of 
scientific theories in general, and to the theory of organic evolution in 
particular. The idea that it is fruitless to speculate about the evolution 
of species without determining the origin of life is based on an erroneous 
conception of the true nature of scientific thought and of the methods of 
scientific procedure. For science the world of natural phenomena is a 
complex of procedure going on in time, and the sole function of natural 
science is to construct systematic schemes forming conceptual descriptions 
of actually observed processes. Of ultimate origins natural science has no 
knowledge and can give no account. The question whether living matter 
is continuous or not with what we call non-living matter is certainly one 
to which an attempted answer falls within the scope of scientific method. 
If, however, the final answer should be in the affirmative, we should then 
know that all matter is living; but we should be no nearer to the attain- 
ment of a notion of the origin of life. No body of scientific doctrine suc- 
ceeds in describing in terms of laws of succession more than some limited 
set of stages of a natural process; the whole process—if, indeed, it can 
be regarded as a whole—must for ever be beyond the reach of scientific 
grasp. The earliest stage to which science has succeeded in tracing back 
any part of a sequence of phenomena constitutes a new problem for science, 
and that without end. There is always an earlier stage and to an earliest 
we can never attain. The questions of origins concern the theologian, the 
metaphysician, perhaps the poet. The fact that Darwin did not concern 
himself with questions as to the origin of life nor with the apparent 
1 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. ii. 1887, p. 179. 
