about conduct, regarding both
the reality of morals and the rule of right action for individuals and
societies. And these problems, still far from solution, may also be
traced to the influence of Darwin. For they arise from the renewed
attention to heredity, brought about by the search for the causes of
variation, without which the study of the selection of variations has no
sufficient basis.

Even the existing understanding about origins is very far from
universal. On these points there were always thoughtful men who denied
the necessity of conflict, and there are still thoughtful men who deny
the possibility of a truce.

It must further be remembered that the earlier discussion now, as I hope
to show, producing favourable results, created also for a time grave
damage, not only in the disturbance of faith and the loss of men--a
loss not repaired by a change in the currents of debate--but in what I
believe to be a still more serious respect. I mean the introduction of
a habit of facile and untested hypothesis in religious as in other
departments of thought.

Darwin is not responsible for this, but he is in part the cause of
it. Great ideas are dangerous guests in narrow minds; and thus it has
happened that Darwin--the most patient of scientific workers, in whom
hypothesis waited upon research, or if it provisionally outstepped it
did so only with the most scrupulously careful acknowledgment--has led
smaller and less conscientious men in natural science, in history, and
in theology to an over-eager confidence in probable conjecture and a
loose grip upon the facts of experience. It is not too much to say that
in many quarters the age of materialism was the least matter-of-fact age
conceivable, and the age of science the age which showed least of the
patient temper of inquiry.

I have indicated, as shortly as I could, some losses and dangers which
in a balanced account of Darwin's influence would be discussed at
length.

One other loss must be mentioned. It is a defect in our thought which,
in some quarters, has by itself almost cancelled all the advantages
secured. I mean the exaggerated emphasis on uniformity or continuity;
the unwillingness to rest any part of faith or of our practical
expectation upon anything that from any point of view can be called
exceptional. The high degree of success reached by naturalists in
tracing, or reasonably conjecturing, the small beginnings of great
differences, has led the inco