determined not to write down 'even
the briefest sketch' of this hypothesis, that had so suddenly presented
itself to his mind. His habit of thought was always to give the fullest
consideration and weight to any possible objection that presented itself
to his own mind or could be suggested to him by others. Though he was
satisfied as to the truth and importance of the principle of natural
selection, there is evidence that for some years he was oppressed by
difficulties, which I think would have seemed greater to him than to
anyone else. In my conversations with Darwin, in after years, it always
struck me that he attached an exaggerated importance to the merest
suggestion of a view opposed to that he was himself inclined to adopt;
indeed I sometimes almost feared to indicate a _possible_ different
point of view to his own, for fear of receiving such an answer as 'What
a very striking objection, how stupid of me not to see it before, I must
really reconsider the whole subject.'

While a divinity student at Cambridge, Darwin had been much struck with
the logical form of the works both of Euclid and of Paley. The rooms of
the latter he seems to have actually occupied at Christ's College and
the works of the great divine were so diligently studied that their deep
influence remained with him in after life[109].

I think it must have been the remembrance of the arguments of Paley on
the 'proofs of design' in Nature, that seem in after life to have
haunted Darwin so that for long he failed to recognise fully that the
principle of natural selection accounted not only for the _adaptation_
of an organism to its environment, but at the same time explains that
_divergence_, which must have taken place in species in order to give
rise to their wonderfully varied characters.

It was not till long after he came to Down in 1842, he tells us in his
autobiography, that his mind freed itself from this objection. He
says:--

'I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my
carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me,'

and he compares the relief to his mind as resembling the effect produced
by 'Columbus and his egg[110].' Some may think the 'solution' of
Columbus was itself not a very satisfactory one; and I am inclined to
regard the difficulties of which Darwin records so sudden and dramatic a
removal as more imaginary than real!

There can be no doubt that, as pointed out by the late Professor Alfred
Newton[