Against this I must protest; the Duke cannot seriously maintain that the main scope and purpose of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s articles is new. Their substance has been before us in Mr. Spencer’s own writings for some two-and-twenty years, in the course of which Mr. Spencer has been followed by Professor Mivart, the Rev. J. J. Murphy, the Duke of Argyll himself, and many other writers of less note. When the Duke talks about the establishment of a scientific reign of terror, I confess I regard such an exaggeration with something like impatience. Any one who has known his own mind and has had the courage of his opinions has been able to say whatever he wanted to say with as little let or hindrance during the last twenty years, as during any other period in the history of literature. Of course, if a man will keep blurting out unpopular truths without considering whose toes he may or may not be treading on, he will make enemies some of whom will doubtless be able to give effect to their displeasure; but that is part of the game. It is hardly possible for any one to oppose the fallacy involved in the Charles-Darwinian theory of natural selection more persistently and unsparingly than I have done myself from the year 1877 onwards; naturally I have at times been very angrily attacked in consequence, and as a matter of business have made myself as unpleasant as I could in my rejoinders, but I cannot remember anything having been ever attempted against me which could cause fear in any ordinarily constituted person. If, then, the Duke of Argyll is right in saying that Mr. Spencer has shown a caution almost amounting to timidity in attacking Mr. Darwin’s theory, either Mr. Spencer must be a singularly timid person, or there must be some cause for his timidity which is not immediately obvious. If terror reigns anywhere among scientific men, I should say it reigned among those who have staked imprudently on Mr. Darwin’s reputation as a philosopher. I may add that the discovery of the Duke’s impression that there exists a scientific reign of terror, explains a good deal in his writings which it has not been easy to understand hitherto. As regards the theory of natural selection, the Duke says:— “From the first discussions which arose on this subject, I have ventured to maintain that . . . the phrase ‘natural-selection’ represented no true physical cause, still less the complete set of causes requisite to account for the orderly procession of organic forms in Nature; that in so far as it assumed variations to arise by accident it was not only essentially faulty and incomplete, but fundamentally erroneous; in short, that its only value lay in the convenience with which it groups under one form of words, highly charged with metaphor, an immense variety of causes, some purely mental, some purely vital, and others purely physical or mechanical.” Chapter XI The Way of Escape