ave a very
vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I
am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist? He who sees love
of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and
every quality to which success has assigned the name of "worth," as
having drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past
time, or he who sees nothing in the world of nature but a chapter of
accidents and of forces interacting blindly?

FOOTNOTES:

[24] 'Nat. Theol.,' ch. xxiii.

[25] 'Oiseaux,' vol. i. p. 5.

[26] 'Westminster Review,' vol. xlix. p. 124.

[27] Translation: "The first of these two attempts is a true 'philosophy
of the unconscious,' not Hartmann's unconscious, which influences the
natural evolution of organism from without as though by Providence and
miracle, but of an unconscious, which, as the author shows, our own
experience and the progressive succession of organisms from the monads
and amoebae up to the highest plants and animals, including ourselves,
allows, if it does not compel us to assume [as obtaining] in all organic
beings. This philosophy of the unconscious is new, or at any rate now
for the first time carried out consequentially in detail; its main
features, briefly stated are as follows."

CHAPTER VI.

SCHEME OF THE REMAINDER OF THE WORK. HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE THEORY OF
EVOLUTION.

I have long felt that evolution must stand or fall according as it is
made to rest or not on principles which shall give a definite purpose
and direction to the variations whose accumulation results in specific,
and ultimately in generic differences. In other words, according as it
is made to stand upon the ground first clearly marked out for it by Dr.
Erasmus Darwin and afterwards adopted by Lamarck, or on that taken by
Mr. Charles Darwin.

There is some reason to fear that in consequence of the disfavour into
which modern Darwinism is seen to be falling by those who are more
closely watching the course of opinion upon this subject, evolution
itself may be for a time discredited as something inseparable from the
theory that it has come about mainly through "the means" of natural
selection. If people are shown that the arguments by which a somewhat
startling conclusion has been reached will not legitimately lead to that
conclusion, they are very ready to assume that the conclusion must be
altogether unfounded, especially when, as in the present case, t