THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT 
AND DARWINISM. 
I. 
Introduction—Summary of the Results of Linguistic Inquiry—Positive Know- 
ledge preliminary to the Doctrine of Descent—Belief in Miracle—The 
Limits of the Investigation of Nature, 
A CRAVING to understand existence pervades mankind, 
and the life of every self-conscious individual. Every 
system of philosophy has endeavoured to penetrate into 
the nature of things, and has originated in the attempt 
to apprehend the coherency of those great series of 
material and spiritual phenomena, of which man flat- 
ters himself that he is the centre or the end. 
Some quiet themselves by emphasizing the contrast 
between mind and body, idea and phenomenon ; others, 
by the catchword of identity ; ; some have deemed them- 
selves and the world in the most beautiful harmony ; 
others, from the times of the Buddhists, in the 6th cen- 
tury B.C. to the eccentric saints of the present day, the 
followers and reformers of Schopenhauer’s system, re- 
gard the world as a mere accumulation of discomfort 
and conflict, from which the sage may escape by a 
