However this may be, and whatever we may think of judging systems by the directness or indirectness of those who advance them, biologists, having committed themselves too rashly, would have been more than human if they had not shown some pique towards those who dared to say, first, that the theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace was unworkable; and secondly, that even though it were workable it would not justify either of them in claiming evolution.  When biologists show pique at all they generally show a good deal of pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned Mr. Spencer’s objection above referred to with a persistency more unanimous and obstinate than I ever remember to have seen displayed even by professional truth-seekers.  I find no rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin himself, between 1865 when it was first put forward, and 1882 when Mr. Darwin died.  It has been similarly “ostrichized” by all the leading apologists of Darwinism, so far at least as I have been able to observe, and I have followed the matter closely for many years.  Mr. Spencer has repeated and amplified it in his recent work The Factors of Organic Evolution, but it still remains without so much as an attempt at serious answer, for the perfunctory and illusory remarks of Mr. Wallace at the end of his Darwinism cannot be counted as such.  The best proof of its irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin, though maintaining silence in respect to it, retreated from his original position in the direction that would most obviate Mr. Spencer’s objection.

Yet this objection has been repeatedly urged by the more prominent anti-Charles-Darwinian authorities, and there is no sign that the British public is becoming less rigorous in requiring people either to reply to objections repeatedly urged by men of even moderate weight, or to let judgment go by default.  As regards Mr. Darwin’s claim to the theory of evolution generally, Darwinians are beginning now to perceive that this cannot be admitted, and either say with some hardihood that Mr. Darwin never claimed it, or after a few saving clauses to the effect that this theory refers only to the particular means by which evolution has been brought about, imply forthwith thereafter none the less that evolution is Mr. Darwin’s theory.  Mr. Wallace has done this repeatedly in his recent Darwinism.  Indeed, I should be by no means sure that on the first page of his preface, in the passage about “Darwin’s theory,” which I have already somewhat severely criticized, he was not intending evolution by “Darwin’s theory,” if in his preceding paragraph he had not so clearly shown that he knew evolution to be a theory of greatly older date than Mr. Darwin’s.