as artists may feel inclined to take.

If what the biologists tell us is true, it will be needful to get rid
of our erroneous conceptions of man, and of his place in nature, and to
substitute right ones for them. But it is impossible to form any
judgment as to whether the biologists are right or wrong, unless we are
able to appreciate the nature of the arguments which they have to
offer.

One would almost think this to be a self-evident proposition. I wonder
what a scholar would say to the man who should undertake to criticise a
difficult passage in a Greek play, but who obviously had not acquainted
himself with the rudiments of Greek grammar. And yet, before giving
positive opinions about these high questions of Biology, people not
only do not seem to think it necessary to be acquainted with the
grammar of the subject, but they have not even mastered the alphabet.
You find criticism and denunciation showered about by persons who not
only have not attempted to go through the discipline necessary to
enable them to be judges, but who have not even reached that stage of
emergence from ignorance in which the knowledge that such a discipline
is necessary dawns upon the mind. I have had to watch with some
attention--in fact I have been favoured with a good deal of it
myself--the sort of criticism with which biologists and biological
teachings are visited. I am told every now and then that there is a
"brilliant article" [5] in so-and-so, in which we are all demolished. I
used to read these things once, but I am getting old now, and I have
ceased to attend very much to this cry of "wolf." When one does read
any of these productions, what one finds generally, on the face of it
is, that the brilliant critic is devoid of even the elements of
biological knowledge, and that his brilliancy is like the light given