478 Darwinism and Religious Thought 
It must further be remembered that the earlier discussion now, as 
I hope to show, producing favourable results, created also for a time 
grave damage, not only in the disturbance of faith and the loss of 
men—a loss not repaired by a change in the currents of debate—but 
in what I believe to be a still more serious respect. I mean the 
introduction of a habit of facile and untested hypothesis in religious 
as in other departments of thought. 
Darwin is not responsible for this, but he is in part the cause of 
it. Great ideas are dangerous guests in narrow minds; and thus it 
has happened that Darwin—the most patient of scientific workers, in 
whom hypothesis waited upon research, or if it provisionally out- 
stepped it did so only with the most scrupulously careful acknowledg- 
ment—has led smaller and less conscientious men in natural science, 
in history, and in theology to an over-eager confidence in probable 
conjecture and a loose grip upon the facts of experience. It is not 
too much to say that in many quarters the age of materialism was 
the least matter-of-fact age conceivable, and the age of science the 
age which showed least of the patient temper of inquiry. 
I have indicated, as shortly as I could, some losses and dangers 
which in a balanced account of Darwin’s influence would be discussed 
at length. 
One other loss must be mentioned. It is a defect in our thought 
which, in some quarters, has by itself almost cancelled all the advan- 
tages secured. I mean the exaggerated emphasis on uniformity or 
continuity ; the unwillingness to rest any part of faith or of our 
practical expectation upon anything that from any point of view 
can be called exceptional. The high degree of success reached by 
naturalists in tracing, or reasonably conjecturing, the small begin- 
nings of great differences, has led the inconsiderate to believe that 
anything may in time become anything else. 
It is true that this exaggeration of the belief in uniformity has 
produced in turn its own perilous reaction. From refusing to believe 
whatever can be called exceptional, some have come to believe 
whatever can be called wonderful. 
But, on the whole, the discontinuous or highly various character 
of experience received for many years too little deliberate attention. 
The conception of uniformity which is a necessity of scientific de- 
scription has been taken for the substance of history. We have 
accepted a postulate of scientific method as if it were a conclusion 
of scientific demonstration. In the name of a generalisation which 
however just on the lines of a particular method, is the prize of a 
difficult exploit of reflexion, we have discarded the direct impressions 
of experience ; or, perhaps it is more true to say, we have used for 
the criticism of alleged experiences a doctrine of uniformity which 
