me
time there was something in it, brutally truer to the conditions of
human association than any argument.

I do not remember the various steps by which I came to be discussing
doubts so early in my life. I could not have been much more than
thirteen when that conversation occurred. I am I think perhaps
exceptionally unconscious about myself. I find I can recall the sayings
and even the gestures of other people far more distinctly than the
things I said and did myself. Even my dreams and imaginings are more
active than my positive thoughts and proceedings. But I was no doubt
very much stimulated by the literature lying about my home and the
gleans and echoes of controversies that played like summer lightning
round and about the horizons of my world. Over my head and after I had
gone to bed, my father and Siddons were talking, my cousin was listening
with strained apprehensions, there was a new spirit in my father's
sermons; it was the storm of Huxley-Darwin controversies that had at
last reached Burnmore. I was an intelligent little listener, an eager
reader of anything that came to hand, Mr. Siddons had a disposition to
fight his battles over again in his monologues to me; and after all at
thirteen one isn't a baby. The small boy of the lower classes used in
those days to start life for himself long before then.

How dramatic a phase it was in the history of the human mind when
science suddenly came into the vicarages, into all the studies and quiet
places that had been the fastnesses of conviction and our ideals, and
denied, with all the power of evidence it had been accumulating for so
long, and so obscurely and inaggressively, with fossils and strata, with
embryology and comparative anatomy, the doctrine of the historical Fall
and all the current scheme of orthodoxy that was based on that! What a
quickening shock it must have been in countless thousands of educated
lives! And my father after a toughly honest resistance was won over to
Darwinism, the idea of Evolution got hold of him, the idea that life
itself was intolerant of vain repetitions; and he had had to "consider
his position" in the church. To him as to innumerable other honest,
middle-aged and comfortable men, Darwinism came as a dreadful invitation
to go out into the wilderness. Over my head and just out of range of my
ears he was debating that issue with Siddons as a foil and my cousin as
a horrified antagonist. Slowly he was developing his conception