and, above all, an allegiance to facts, just as facts, which was most pathetic to me; it was so instinctive, determined, even desperate, a sort of belief in its way, an English belief, that the facts must lead you right if you only followed them honestly, a poor, groping, blind faith—all that seems possible to us in these days of flatulent unbelief and piggish unconcern for everything except swill and straw."[1]
We need not, like Carlyle, abuse this "allegiance to facts"; it is the foundation-stone of all reliable scientific work, and the scientist who abandons it is sure to bring disaster to himself and his work. And yet, to maintain that fact-hunting is, of necessity, a mark of genius is absurd.
It is largely the qualities that prevent us from ranking Darwin as a genius that establish his eminence as a research scientist. He is great not for his ideas, for they had been worked out before him, but for the clearness with which he stated his conclusions, and the wealth of proof which he brought to their defence. The earliest evolutionists tried to solve their problems by deduction, making the theory first, and searching for the facts afterward. Darwin's method was just the opposite. As he himself says, he searched for fact after fact, at the same time straining to keep all thought of theory from his mind. Finally, when he had ascertained how things actually were, and had arranged his information, he set forth to formulate a theory that might accord fully with
- ↑ "Contemporary Portraits," pp. 12–13.
