II.] Mr. Mivart on Darwinism. 35 



should be self-evident. Yet so far is Mr. Mivart from 

 recognising anything of the sort that he cites Mr. 

 Darwin's scrupulous self-corrections as evidence of 

 his utter untrustworthiness ! "What confidence can 

 we place, he asks, in a thinker who makes so many- 

 hasty inferences } overlooking the fact that, in daily 

 experience, those who are the most rash in forming 

 their opinions are apt to be likewise the most indis- 

 posed to reconsider them. If Mr. Mivart had any 

 genuine sympathy with the scientific temper of mind, 

 this particular kind of misrepresentation would never 

 have occurred to him. 



Along with this inability to appreciate disinter- 

 ested thinking, Mr. Mivart has one or two other 

 peculiarities which, taken together, give him a real 

 genius for twisting things. He is characterised by a 

 sort of cantankerousness which prompts him to put 

 a controversial aspect on points which properly re- 

 quire only a judicial estimate of the bearings of cir- 

 cumstances. On the question as to just how much 

 efifectiveness is to be allowed to the principle of 

 natural selection, he approaches Mr. Darwin with the 

 air of a lawyer browbeating a witness ; and when 

 Mr. Darwin admits that formerly his attention was 

 somewhat too exclusively directed toward this cause 

 of the modification of species, his belligerent critic 



D 2 



