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