40 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



vfith this exception it had never been stated at all. 

 It is not too much to say that "Life and Habit," 

 when it first came out, was considered so startling a 

 paradox that people would not believe in my desire to 

 be taken seriously, or at any rate were able to pretend 

 that they thought I was not writing seriously. 



Mr. Eomanes knows this just as well as all must 

 do who keep an eye on what is said about evolution ; 

 he himself, indeed, had said {Nature, Jan. 27, 1881) 

 that so long as I "aimed only at entertaining" my 

 " readers by such works as ' Erewhon ' and ' Life and 

 Habit'" (as though these books were of kindred 

 character) I was in my proper sphere. It would be 

 doing too little credit to Mr. Eomanes' intelligence to 

 suppose him not to have known when he said this 

 that " Life and Habit " was written as seriously as my 

 subsequent books on evolution, but it suited him at 

 the moment to join those who professed to consider 

 it another book of paradoxes such as, I suppose, 

 " Erewhon " had been, so he classed the two together. 

 He could not have done this unless enough people 

 thought, or said they thought, the books akin, to give 

 colour to his doing so. 



One alone of all my reviewers has, to my know- 

 ledge, brought Mr. Spencer against me. This was a 

 writer in the St. Jaine^s Gazette, (Dec. 2, 1880). I 

 challenged him in a letter which appeared (Dec. 8, 

 1880), and said, "I would ask your reviewer to be 

 kind enough to refer your readers to those passages 

 of Mr. Spencer's " Principles of Psychology " which 

 in any direct intelligible way refer the phenomena of 



