propose that can be accepted by any cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no
answer ready, and I do not think that anyone else had. A year later we
reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed with such an
inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central
idea of the "Origin" was, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of
that!" I suppose that Columbus' companions said much the same when he
made the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle for
existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none
of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem
lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and
the beacon-fire of the "Origin" guided the benighted.

Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of Evolution, as applied
to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands, would prove to be final or
not, was to me a matter of indifference. In my earliest criticisms of
the "Origin" I ventured to point out that its logical foundation was
insecure so long as experiments in selective breeding had not produced
varieties which were more or less infertile; and that insecurity remains
up to the present time. But, with any and every critical doubt which my
sceptical ingenuity could suggest, the Darwinian hypothesis remained
incomparably more probable than the creation hypothesis. And if we had
none of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some of
the most patent and notorious of natural facts, until they were, so to
speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the
dilemma--creation or nothing? It was obvious that hereafter the
probability would be immensely greater, that the links of natural
causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural
causation should be incompetent to produce all the phenomena of nature.
The only rational course for those who had no other object than the
attainment of truth was to accept "Darwinism" as a working hypothesis