The Origin of Species (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Charles Darwin [253]
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CHARLES HODGE
Great confusion and diversity of opinion prevail as to the real views of the man whose writings have agitated the whole world, scientific and religious. If a man says he is a Darwinian, many understand him to avow himself virtually an atheist; while another understands him as saying that he adopts some harmless form of the doctrine of evolution. This is a great evil.
It is obviously useless to discuss any theory until we are agreed as to what that theory is. The question, therefore, What is Darwinism? must take precedence of all discussion of its merits.
—What Is Darwinism? ( 1874)
ASA GRAY
Who, upon a single perusal, shall pass judgment upon a work like this, to which twenty of the best years of the life of a most able naturalist have been devoted? And who among those naturalists who hold a position that entitles them to pronounce summarily upon the subject, can be expected to divest himself for the nonce of the influence of received and favorite systems? In fact, the controversy now opened is not likely to be settled in an offhand way, nor is it desirable that it should be. A spirited conflict among opinions of every grade must ensue, which—to borrow an illustration from the doctrine of the book before us—may be likened to the conflict in Nature among races in the struggle for life, which Mr. Darwin describes; through which the views most favored by facts will be developed and tested by “Natural Selection,” the weaker ones be destroyed in the process, and the strongest in the long-run alone survive.
—American Journal of Science and Arts (March 1860)
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
“The Origin of Species” made an epoch. The product of an immense series of tentative gropings, it formed the turning-point of an entirely new series: concentrating as in a focus the many isolated rays emitted by speculative ingenuity to illuminate the diversified community of organic life, it propounded an hypothesis surpassing all its predecessors in its congruity with verifiable facts, and in its wide-reaching embrace. Because it was the product of long-continued though baffled research, and thereby gave articulate expression to the thought which had been inarticulate in many minds, its influence rapidly became European; because it was both old in purpose and novel in conception, it agitated the schools with a revolutionary ferment. No work of our time has been so general in its influence. This extent of influence is less due to the fact of its being a masterly work, enriching Science with a great discovery, than to the fact of its being a work which at once clashed against and chimed with the two great conceptions of the world that have long ruled, and still rule, the minds of Europe. One side recognised a powerful enemy, the other a mighty champion.
—Fortnightly Review (April 1, 1868)
HERBERT SPENCER
Two suppositions only are open to us; the one that the feeling which responds to religious ideas resulted, along with all other human faculties, from an act of special creation; the other that it, in common with the rest, arose by a process of evolution. If we adopt the first of these alternatives, universally accepted by our ancestors and by the immense majority of our contemporaries, the matter is at once settled: man is directly endowed with the religious feeling by a creator; and to that creator it designedly responds. If we adopt the second alternative, then we are met by the questions—What are the circumstances to which the genesis of the religious feeling is due? and—What is its office? Considering, as we must on this supposition,