Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/394

390 the successive volumes of Hegel's masterpiece. All things considered, the physical sciences as we know them now—astronomy, geology, physics and chemistry, as well as mathematics in large part—had hardly begun their latest growth; the biological sciences, in their splendid structure of to-day, were still ahead; while the entire group of human sciences, created mainly by the impetus lent by Hegel himself, in the nature of the case, had not entered upon significant formulation. In a word, the idea of development saturated the intellectual atmosphere; nevertheless, the elaborate and toilsome labor of thinking it through piecemeal for the endless realms of nature, and for the subtlest manifestations of consciousness, lay in the future. Here Darwin, like many another, found his opportunity.

In the second place, he was favored by the situation dominant in the field of science as a whole, no less than by his own preeminently cautious and "concrete" mind. With regard to the latter, we have a characteristic statement from his pen, in the form of a letter to Herbert Spencer, acknowledging a copy of the "Essays." Recall that, not long before, Spencer had been writing to Huxley on the subject of Owen, who was to damn Darwin with faint praise eighteen months after, and had expressed himself as follows:

From one point of view, this is still the nineteenth century against the eighteenth. Darwin's letter, dated 25th November, 1858—one year precisely before the "Origin of Species"—runs thus:

If Hegel evinced intuitive grasp upon the general framework of development, Darwin's cautious genius led him to exercise superlative perseverance in conquering difficult provinces of the detailed phenomena incidental to evolution.

At the same time, Darwin valued the aid of generalization and