The Progress of the Race 
leads us higher than the leaps made by our 
errors. In point of fact, we owe the little 
we have learned to hypotheses that were 
always hazardous and often absurd, and, as 
a general rule, less discreet than they are 
to-day. They were unwise, perhaps, but 
they kept alive the ardour for research. To 
the traveller, shivering with cold, who 
reaches the human Hiostelry, it matters 
little whether he by whose side he seats 
himself, he who has guarded the hearth, 
be blind or very old. So long as the fire 
still burn that he has been watching, he has 
done as much as the best could have done. 
Well for us if we can transmit this ardour, 
not as we received it, but added to by our- 
selves; and nothing will add to it more than 
this hypothesis of evolution, which goads us 
to question with an ever severer method and 
ever increasing zeal all that exists on the 
earth’s surface and in its entrails, in the 
depths of the sea and expanse of the sky. 
Reject it, and what can we set up against it, 
what can we put in its place? There is but 
the grand confession of scientific ignorance, 
aware of its knowing nothing—but this is 
315 
