More infirm, more frail, more doubting tempers may not take it so. There is the weary horror of endless multiplicity, sweeping from eternity to eternity. There is the embodiment of the universe in one individual, and yet the sense that that individual is more fragile than the universe itself, the sense that reduces all life and all one is to a mere shifting maze and complication of fleeting sensations, held together by the vaguest gauze of memory, and liable to be scattered and disseminated at any moment by the slightest shock. No doubt the corrective for such a dissolving terror is to live intensely in one’s own personality, without thinking of it, to emphasize every moment _instinctively_ the huge importance of one’s ego, which if it has its way is at all times adequate to fill the endless spaces of the universe and crowd out the major stars. But for some of us such emphasis is difficult to accomplish, and instead, when one is thoroughly penetrated by the evolutionary attitude, one is too apt to find oneself more insignificant than _terebratula_, because one is conscious of one’s own insignificance and _terebratula_ is not. And it was Darwin, the gentle, the kindly, the human, who could not bear the sight of blood, who raged against the cruelty of vivisection and slavery, who detested suffering in men or animals, it was Darwin who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked the universe for me and for millions of others. CHAPTER VII DARWIN: THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT I Independently of his actual scientific work and discoveries, Darwin is in so many respects one of the finest types of the scientific spirit, that it seems natural to conclude a study of him with a summary of the most important elements of that spirit, its admirable and broadly valuable qualities and its limitations, as illustrated in Darwin himself and in others as compared with him. [Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN About 1854] The basis and fundamental motive of the scientific spirit is simply and naturally curiosity, the endless and often merely wayward desire to know and to find out facts, of all sorts. When the mind begins to shake itself clear of the immediate, engrossing pressure of mere subsistence, its first impulse is to learn something about the surrounding universe and about itself. And this impulse is not solely for utility, for the immense practical advantage which such knowledge evidently brings with it. There is the instinct of occupation and distraction, the effort to escape ennui and idleness and to fill one’s thoughts with outward diversity that they may not be dragged and weighed down by one’s own particular cares and troubles. There is the instinct of emulation, the desire to excel others in knowledge, if one cannot in wealth, or in success of practical achievement.