it. He was a nature-loving, country-dwelling English gentleman of the best type—not a gentleman in the political and social sense, but in the manly sense. Further, he was to the very marrow of his bones an English naturalist as well as an English gentleman. He inherited the instincts of the naturalist and likewise the worldly wherewithal that enabled him to follow his bent without let or hindrance. So it was that the naturalist's standpoint was literally both first and second nature to him. Rarely is it the fortune of a scientific career to run through from beginning to end so strictly along the lines of instinctive choice and least resistance, as Darwin's ran. It is not too much to say that Darwin knew nothing of that sort of discipline that comes from compelling one's self to do things which initially he does not like. It is well known that even in biology, the realm of science to which by nature he so clearly belonged, he as a youth dodged those of its disciplines that he did not like, however basal they might be. For example, when trying himself out as a medical student, he did not like anatomy, so anatomy he did not study in any serious way.
Comprehensive and well balanced as became his scientific efforts and knowledge, these were always so within the bounds of predilection rather than of logical and philosophical compulsion. This I believe to be the weightiest of several reasons why Darwin saw so imperfectly the direction in which the struggle-selection principle must lead those who misunderstand and exaggerate it.
Had he grounded himself in mathematics, psychology and ethics, not necessarily as fully but as sympathetically as he did in natural history, he might have anticipated, at least in outline, what has actually happened. He might have foreseen the fate of his friend Huxley, who found himself driven to attempt the rehabilitation under an altered nomenclature of the old, old conception of the world as a battle ground, with man the chief prize, where an infinite, beneficent God is field-marshal on one side, and an infinite, malevolent devil leads the hosts on the other; and of his friend Wallace who landed finally in the shadow-realms of disembodied spirits and ghosts; and of such strong-timbered, though loosely-framed minds as that of Friedrich Nietzsche,[1] for whom
- ↑ This does not necessarily mean that I take sides in the controversy as to the extent of Darwin's direct influence on Nietzsche. From my standpoint it matters little, if it be true, that Nietzsche never understood natural selection. The case has to be viewed in a much broader way. Nietzsche's ethics is one precipitate, so to speak, out of the same solution that Darwin's famous hypothesis came from. This solution filled the atmosphere of the whole western world for at least a half century before these two precipitates were thrown down. The essence of this solution was not so much an exaggerated individualism as it was an individualism waging its warfare within itself, i. e., with no supreme outside judge and power to guide and check, to approve fair fighting and punish unfair, and to direct the whole to some glorious end. Whatever Nietzsche's
