WHAT WE OWE TO DARWIN 35 



than from confusion." Now we inay claim for 

 Darwin the quaUty of definiteness and lucidity. 

 He was convinced of the efficacy of natural 

 selection, and his exposition, though rarely elegant, 

 is always clear. He did not understand how 

 variations in the direction of fitness arose, and 

 he said so. His yea was yea, and his nay, nay. 



Sense of Interrelations. — A fourth charac- 

 teristic of the scientific mood is a sense of the 

 interrelations of things. The reahsation of Nature 

 as a great interconnected system is, iadeed, one 

 of the ends of science ; to be on the outlook for 

 interrelations is diagnostic of the scientific mood. 

 We have seen how Darwin had the vision of the 

 web of life with pre-eminent vividness. 



Darwin's Method of Working. — As to Dar- 

 win's method of working, he tells us himself three 

 things : (1) that he had from his earhest youth 

 a desire to explain things, and that he could not 

 resist forming an hypothesis on every subject; 

 (2) that he accumulated large collections of facts 

 and tried to formulate them in a general law; 

 and (3) that he sought to anticipate all possible 

 objections to his conclusion. In short, he was a 

 deductive-inductive philosopher. 



In speaking of Darwin's services, Romanes 

 said : " A true scientific judgment consists in 

 giving a free rein to speculation on the one 'hand, 

 while holding ready the brake of verification with 

 the other. Now it is just because Darwin did 

 both these things with so admirable a judgment 

 that he gave to the world of natural history so 

 good a lesson as to the most effective way of 

 driving the chariot of science."^ 



1 "Darwin and After Darwin " (1897), vol. i. p. 7. 



