He assured me that views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a
thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to
dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I
asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where
there was a similar dogma of Free Trade: not abroad.
When I asked him why Mendel's published experiments and the theory based
upon them had so much impressed him, he said because it was almost the
first attempt to apply to the speculative dogmas of biology some
standard demonstrably true; and here he wandered off to explain to me
why the commonly accepted views upon biology, which had so changed
thought in the latter part of his life, were associated with the name of
Darwin. Darwin, he assured me, had brought forward no new discovery, but
only a new hypothesis, and that only a small and particular hypothesis,
whereby to explain the general theory of transformism. This theory, he
told me--the unbroken descent of living organisms and their physical
connection with one another and with common parents--had been a
favourite idea from the beginning of history with many great thinkers,
from Lucretius to Buffon and from Augustus of Hippo to Lamarck.
Darwin's, the old gentleman assured me, which he had defended with
infinite toil, was that the method in which this continuity of descent
proceeded was by an infinitely slow process of very small changes
differentiating each minute step from the one before and the one after
it, and these small changes Darwin's hypothesis referred to a natural
selection.
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