to facts, can never rise into the region of principles; and
they are sometimes intolerant of those that can. They are formed to plod
meritoriously on in the lower levels of thought; unpossessed of the
pinions necessary to reach the heights, they cannot realise the mental
act--the act of inspiration it might well be called--by which a man of
genius, after long pondering and proving, reaches a theoretic conception
which unravels and illuminates the tangle of centuries of observation and
experiment. There are minds, it may be said in passing, who, at the
present moment, stand in this relation to Mr. Darwin."

The more rhapsodical parts of the above must go for what they are worth,
but I should be sorry to think that what remains conveyed a censure which
might fall justly on myself. As I read the earlier part of the passage I
confess that I imagined the conclusion was going to be very different
from what it proved to be. Fresh from the study of the older men and
also of Mr. Darwin himself, I failed to see that Mr. Darwin had
"unravelled and illuminated" a tangled skein, but believed him, on the
contrary, to have tangled and obscured what his predecessors had made in
great part, if not wholly, plain. With the older writers, I had felt as
though in the hands of men who wished to understand themselves and to
make their reader understand them with the smallest possible exertion.
The older men, if not in full daylight, at any rate saw in what quarter
of the sky the dawn was breaking, and were looking steadily towards it.
It is not they who have put their hands over their own eyes and ours, and
who are crying out that there is no light, but chance and blindness
everywhere.

THE TELEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF ORGANISM. (CHAPTER V. OF EVOLUTION, OLD
AND NEW.)

I have stated the foregoing in what I take to be an extreme logical
development, in order that the reader may more easily perceive the
consequences of those premises which I am endeavouring to re-establish.
But it must not be supposed that an animal or plant has ever conceived
the idea of some organ widely different from any it was yet possessed of,
and has set itself to design it in detail and grow towards it.

The small jelly-speck, which we call the amoeba, has no organs save what
it can extemporise as occasion arises. If it wants to get at anything,
it thrusts out part of its jelly, which thus serves it as an arm or hand:
when the arm has served its purpose, i