No one was more aware than Darwin of these dangers and difficulties of reason, or of the endless possibilities of deception when one gives oneself up to that enchanting and deluding siren. He often emphasizes his distress and almost despair at finding himself making deductions quite different from those which others draw from the same facts. ‘It is really disgusting and humiliating to see directly opposite conclusions drawn from the same facts.’[88] And again: ‘Nothing is so vexatious to me, as so constantly finding myself drawing different conclusions from better judges than myself, from the same facts.’[89] And yet again: ‘I hate beyond all things finding myself in disagreement with any capable judge, when the premises are the same.’[90] These comments make us see clearly what Darwin’s relation to reason was. Few thinkers have been so ready, so fertile, so abundant, so ingenious, yet at the same time so sober, so restrained and controlled. With this analysis of his observation and his thought we are ready to take up the supreme interest of Darwin’s life, the dramatic study of the conception, elaboration, promulgation, and triumph of his evolutionary theory. CHAPTER III DARWIN: THE DISCOVERER I The word ‘evolution’ is so popularly accepted and so generally employed in connection with Darwin’s theories that it will never be displaced; but it is not wholly satisfactory, because it always suggests progress from a lower to a higher and hence involves a difficult and invidious definition of terms. Some such phrase as ‘descent with modification’ would probably be more exact. But whatever the term used, to associate it as a scientific theory or discovery exclusively with Darwin or any other one man would be absurd. The natural hypothesis of earlier thinkers was that divine creative power, in whatever shape, had established the different forms of life on the earth pretty much as they exist to-day. But those who looked more deeply, were inclined to surmise, in view of the close and evident bonds of kinship between all living things, that variety had developed from comparative unity and that the vital impulse, having first appeared in elementary forms, became gradually elaborated into more and more complicated organisms. The vast pains that Darwin took to substantiate this view, together with his particular explanation of how the process came about, have forever bound up the idea of evolution with his name, but he did not originate it nor did he claim to have done so.