erious 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 inconsiderate to believe that anything may in
time become anything else.

It is true that this exaggeration of the belief in uniformity has
produced in turn its own perilous reaction. From refusing to believe
whatever can be called exceptional, some have come to believe whatever
can be called wonderful.

But, on the whole, the discontinuous or highly various character of
experience received for many years too little deliberate attention.
The conception of uniformity which is a necessity of scientific
description has been taken for the substance of history. We have
accepted a postulate of scientific method as if it were a conclusion
of scientific demonstration. In the name of a generalisation which,
however just on the lines of a particular method, is the prize of a
difficult exploit of reflexion, we have discarded the direct
impressions of experience; or, perhaps it is more true to say, we have
used for the criticism of alleged exp