does not make us deny that the steam-engine and microscope owe their development to design.  If each step of the road was designed, the whole journey was designed, though the particular end was not designed when the journey was begun.  And so is it, according to the older view of evolution, with the development of those living organs, or machines, that are born with us, as part of the perambulating carpenter’s chest we call our bodies.  The older view gives us our design, and gives us our evolution too.  If it refuses to see a quasi-anthropomorphic God modelling each species from without as a potter models clay, it gives us God as vivifying and indwelling in all His creatures—­He in them, and they in Him.  If it refuses to see God outside the universe, it equally refuses to see any part of the universe as outside God.  If it makes the universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe.  The question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a personal one.  It not only involves the existence of evolution, but it affects the view we take of life and things in an endless variety of most interesting and important ways.  It is imperative, therefore, on those who take any interest in these matters, to place side by side in the clearest contrast the views of those who refer the evolution of species mainly to accumulation of variations that have no other inception than chance, and of that older school which makes design perceive and develop still further the goods that chance provides.

But over and above this, which would be in itself sufficient, the historical mode of studying any question is the only one which will enable us to comprehend it effectually.  The personal element cannot be eliminated from the consideration of works written by living persons for living persons.  We want to know who is who—­whom we can depend upon to have no other end than the making things clear to himself and his readers, and whom we should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on which he is more intent than on the furthering of our better understanding.  We want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are vested.  There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with himself, and, again, than his style.  A man’s style, as Buffon long since said, is the man himself.  By style, I do not, of course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l’ame.  When we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch.  We often cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we most of us know enough of human nature to be able to tell a good witness from a bad one.