re is a man devoid of judgment!'"

* * * * *

The main consideration which this chapter aims to present, that of the
responsibility of all men, be they great or be they small, to the same
standards of social judgment, and to the same philosophical treatment,
is illustrated in the very man to whose genius we owe the principle
upon which my remarks are based--Charles Darwin; and it is singularly
appropriate that we should also find the history of this very
principle, that of variations with the correlative principle of
natural selection, furnishing a capital illustration of our
inferences. Darwin was, with the single exception of Aristotle,
possibly the man with the sanest judgment that the human mind has ever
brought to the investigation of nature. He represented, in an
exceedingly adequate way, the progress of scientific method up to his
day. He was disciplined in all the natural science of his
predecessors. His judgment was an epitome of the scientific insight of
the ages which culminated then. The time was ripe for just such a
great constructive thought as his--ripe, that is, so far as the
accumulation of scientific data was concerned. His judgment differed
then from the judgment of his scientific contemporaries mainly in that
it was sounder and safer than theirs. And with it Darwin was a great
constructive thinker. He had the intellectual strength which put the
judgment of his time to the strain--everybody's but his own. This is
seen in the fact that Darwin was not the first to speculate in the
line of his great discovery, nor to reach formulas; but with the
others guessing took the place of induction. The formula was an
uncriticised thought. The unwillingness of society to embrace the
hypothesis was justified by the same lack of evidence which prevented
the thinkers themselves from giving it proof. And if no Darwin had
appeared, the problem of evolution would have been left about where it
had been left by the speculations of the Greek mind. Darwin reached
his conclusion by what that other great scientific genius in England,
Newton, described as the essential of discovery, "patient thought";
and having reached it, he had no alternative but to judge it true and
pronounce it to the world.

But the principle of variations with natural selection had the
reception which shows that good judgment may rise higher than the
level of its own social origin. Even yet the principle of Darwin is
b