144 Luck, or Cunning ? 
profit not of the mechanism, with which, for some reason 
or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and 
design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful 
to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but 
in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of 
an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along 
which they were travelling would never lead them to it. 
They were driving life up into a corner, but they were 
not eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of 
their thinking they had hedged it in and could throw their 
salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and perched 
upon the place of all others where they were most scandal- 
ised to see it—I mean upon machines in use. So they retired 
sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed. 
Some months subsequent to the completion of the fore- 
going chapter, and indeed just as this book is on the point 
of leaving my hands, there appears in Nature* a letter 
from the Duke of Argyll, which shows that he too is im- 
pressed with the conviction expressed above—I mean that 
the real object our men of science have lately had in view 
has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes of 
evolution. The Duke says :— 
“The violence with which false interpretations were 
put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function 
was assigned to it which it could never fulfil, will some day 
be recognised as one of the least creditable episodes in the 
history of science. With a curious perversity it was the 
weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as 
the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind 
chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued 
not for its scientific truth,—for it could pretend to none,— 
but because of its assumed bearing upon another field of 
* August 12, 1886. 
