cian such circumspect and impartial consideration,
such thorough historical training and powers of critical comparison,
that he will not venture to make such an application of a "natural
law" to the practice of civilised life, but with the greatest caution
and reserve. How, then, is it possible that Virchow, the experienced
and skilled politician, who, above all things, preaches caution and
reserve in theory, suddenly makes just such an application of
transformation and Darwinism--an application so radically perverse
that it actually flies in the face of the fundamental ideas of these
doctrines? I myself am nothing less than a politician. In direct
contrast with Virchow, I lack alike the gift and the training for it,
as well as taste and vocation. Hence I neither shall play any
political part in the future, nor have I hitherto made any attempt of
the kind. Though here and there I have occasionally uttered a
political opinion, or have made a political application of some theory
of natural science, these subjective opinions have no objective value.
In point of fact I have by so doing overstepped the limits of my
competence, just as Virchow has by going into questions of zoology and
particularly that of the transformation of apes: I am a layman in
political practice, as Virchow is in the province of zoological
hypothesis. Moreover, such success as Virchow has attained during the
twenty years of his painful, wearisome, and exhausting activity as a
politician does not, in truth, make me pine for such laurels.

But this at least I, as a theoretical naturalist, may demand of
practical politicians, that in utilising our theories for political
ends they should first make themselves exactly acquainted with them;
they then, for the future, would forbear drawing conclusions from
them, the very opposite to those which ought reasonably to be
inferred. Misunderstandings would never thus be wholly avoided,
it is true, but what doctrine is universally secure against
misunderstanding? And from what theory, however sound and true, may
not the most unsound and frantic inferences be drawn?

Nothing, perhaps, shows so plainly as the history of Christianity how
little theory and practice harmonise in human life; how little pains
are taken, even by those whose calling it is to uphold established
doctrines, to apply their natural consequences to practical life. The
Christian religion, no doubt, as well as the Buddhist, when stripped
of all do