“Someone will discover some day that Darwin’s conclusions were wrong, that he left out some little near obvious thing with big results, and his theory, which has worried thousands of people nearly to death, will turn out to be one of those everlasting mannish explanations of everything which explain nothing. I know what you are going to say; a subsequent reversal of a doctrine does not invalidate scientific method. I know. But these everlasting theories, and men are so ‘eminent’ and important about them, are appalling; in medicine, it is simply _appalling_, and people are just as ill as ever; and when they know Darwin was mistaken, there will be an end of Herbert Spencer. There’s my father, really an intelligent man, he has done scientific research himself and knew Faraday, and he thinks First Principles the greatest book that was ever written. I have argued and argued but he says he is too old to change his cosmos. It makes me simply ill to think of him living in a cosmos made by Herbert Spencer.” “_Wait._ Excuse me but that is all too easy. In matter of science the conclusions of Darwin will _never_ be displaced. It is as the alphabet of biology, as Galilei is of Astronomy. More. These researches even need not be made again. They are for all time verified. Herbert Spencer I agree has carried too far in too wholesale a manner conclusions based on Darwin’s discoveries; conclusions may lead to many inapplicable theories, that is immaterial; but Darwin himself made no such theories. There is no question of _opinion_ as to his discoveries; he supplies simply unanswerable _facts_.” “I think it’s Huxley who makes me angry with Darwinism. He didn’t find it out, and he went swaggering about using it as a weapon; _frightfully_ conceited about it. That Thomas Henry Huxley should come off best in an argument was quite as important to him as spreading the Darwinian theory. I _never_ read anything like his accounts of his victories in his letters.” “That is most certainly not the spirit of Darwin, who was a most gentle creature...... But you really surprise me in your attitude towards the profession of law.” “I don’t know anything whatever about laws; but I have met lawyers, barristers and solicitors, and I think they are the most ignorant, pig-headed people in the world. They have no minds at all. They don’t affect _me_. But if I were ever before a judge I should shoot him. They use cases to show off their silly wit, sitting thinking of puns; and people are put to death.”