of human genius battling with infinite power, you have but to follow Darwin’s endeavours to unravel the strange, incoherent, inconceivably mysterious laws of the sterility and fecundity of hybrids, or of the variations of specific and generic characters.  Scarcely has he formulated a principle when numberless exceptions assail him; and this very principle, soon completely overwhelmed, is glad to find refuge in some corner, and preserve a shred of existence there under the title of an exception.

For the fact is that in hybridity, in variability (notably in the simultaneous variations known as correlations of growth), in instinct, in the processes of vital competition, in geologic succession and the geographic distribution of organised beings, in mutual affinities, as indeed in every other direction, the idea of nature reveals itself, in one and the same phenomenon and at the very same time, as circumspect and shiftless, niggard and prodigal, prudent and careless, fickle and stable, agitated and immovable, one and innumerable, magnificent and squalid.  There lay open before her the immense and virgin fields of simplicity; she chose to people them with trivial errors, with petty contradictory laws that stray through existence like a flock of blind sheep.  It is true that our eye, before which these things happen, can only reflect a reality proportionate to our needs and our stature; nor have we any warrant for believing that nature ever loses sight of her wandering results and causes.

In any event she will rarely permit them to stray too far, or approach illogical or dangerous regions.  She disposes of two forces that never can err; and when the phenomenon shall have trespassed beyond certain limits, she will beckon to life or to death—­which arrives, re-establishes order, and unconcernedly marks out the path afresh.

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She eludes us on every side; she repudiates most of our rules and breaks our standards to pieces.  On our right she sinks far beneath the level of our thoughts, on our left she towers mountain-high above them.  She appears to be constantly blundering, no less in the world of her first experiments than in that of her last, of man.  There she invests with her sanction the instincts of the obscure mass, the unconscious injustice of the multitude, the defeat of intelligence and virtue, the uninspired morality which urges on the great wave of the race, though manifestly inferior to the morality that could be conceived or desired by the minds composing the small and the clearer wave that ascends the other.  And yet, can such a mind be wrong if it ask itself whether the whole truth—­moral truths, therefore, as well as non-moral—­had not better be sought in this chaos than in itself, where these truths would seem comparatively clear and precise?