The belief in organic evolution had taken deep root (in my mind), and drawn to itself a large amount of evidence—evidence not derived from numerous special instances, but derived from the general aspects of organic nature and from the necessity of accepting the hypothesis of evolution when the hypothesis of special creation had been rejected. The special creation belief had dropped out of my mind many years before, and I could not remain in a suspended state: acceptance of the only possible alternative was imperative.[41] Footnote 41: Duncan, _Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer_, 1898, II., 317. This suspended state, the _tätige Skepsis_ of Goethe, was just what Huxley was enjoying; in his own words, “Reversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually defended the tenability of received doctrines, when I had to do with the transmutationists; and stood up for the possibility of transmutation among the orthodox.” Thus, up to the date of the publication of the _Origin of Species_, scientific opinion was roughly divided into two opposing camps: on one side were the classic, orthodox, catastrophic, or creationist party, who believed in the fixity of species, and that each species was the result of special miraculous creation; on the other, the evolutionists or transmutationists, who rejected special creation, and held that all species were derived from other species, by some unknown law. It was the formulation of this unknown law that makes 1859 an epoch in the history of Anthropology. [Sidenote: =Charles Darwin.=] Darwin’s work may best be summed up in the words of his loyal and self-effacing co-worker, Alfred Russel Wallace:— Before Darwin’s work appeared the great majority of naturalists, and almost without exception the whole literary and scientific world, held firmly to the belief that species were realities, and had not been derived from other species by any process accessible to us ... [but] by some totally unknown process so far removed from ordinary reproduction that it was usually spoken of as “special creation.”... But now all this is changed. The whole scientific and literary world, even the whole educated public, accepts, as a matter of common knowledge, the origin of species from other allied species by the ordinary process of natural birth. The idea of special creation or any altogether exceptional mode of production is absolutely extinct.... And this vast, this totally unprecedented, change in public opinion has been the result of the work of one man, and was brought about in the short space of twenty years.