Darwin."
The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for what they are worth,
but I should be sorry to think that what remains conveyed a censure which
might fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the passage I
confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different
from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and
also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had
"unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the
contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in
great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as
though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to
make their reader understand them with the smallest possible exertion.
The older men, if not in full daylight, at any rate saw in what quarter
of the sky the dawn was breaking, and were looking steadily towards it.
It is not they who have put their hands over their own eyes and ours, and
who are crying out that there is no light, but chance and blindness
everywhere.
THE TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. (CHAPTER V. OF EVOLUTION, OLD
AND NEW.)
I have stated the foregoing in what I take to be an extreme logical
development, in order that the reader may more easily perceive the
consequences of those premises which I am endeavouring to re-establish.
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