Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter, and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands, there appears in _Nature_ {144a} a letter from the Duke of Argyll, which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed above—I mean that the real object our men of science have lately had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes of evolution. The Duke says:— “The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function was assigned to it which it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part assigned to blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific truth,—for it could pretend to none,—but because of its assumed bearing upon another field of thought and the weapon it afforded for expelling mind from the causes of evolution.” The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s two articles in the _Nineteenth Century_ for April and May, 1886, to which I have already called attention, continues:— “In these two articles we have for the first time an avowed and definite declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the mechanical philosophy depends; and yet the caution, and almost timidity, with which a man so eminent approaches the announcement of conclusions of the most self-evident truth is a most curious proof of the reign of terror which has come to be established.”