“I cannot follow all this. But what is indisputable is, that in every case of religious authority, secular development has been held back. Buckle has completely demonstrated this in a most masterly exhaustive consideration of the civilisations of Europe. Ah it is marvellous, this book, one of your finest decorations; and without any smallest touch of fanaticism; he is indeed perhaps one of your greatest minds of the best English type, full of sensibility and fine gentleness.”
Miriam was back, as she listened, in the Chiswick villa, in bed in the yellow lamplight with a cold, the pages of the Apologia reading themselves without effort into her molten mind, as untroubled beauty and happiness, making what Newman sought seem to be at home in herself, revealing deep inside life a whole new strange place of existence that was yet familiar, so that the gradual awful gathering of his trouble was a personal experience, and the moment of conviction that schism was a deliberate death, a personal conviction. She wondered why she always forgot that the problem had been solved. Glancing beyond the curve of her umbrella she caught, with his last words, the sudden confident grateful shining of Mr. Shatov’s lifted face and listened eagerly.
“It is this one thing,” she lifted the umbrella his way in sudden contrition, shifting it so that it sheltered neither of them; “Thank you I am quite well. It is hardly now raining” he muttered at his utmost distance of foreign intonation and bearing. She peered out into the air, shutting her umbrella. They had come out of their way, away from the streets into a quietness. It must be the Inner Circle. They would have to walk right round it.
“It is this one thing” again it was as if her own voice were speaking, “this thesis of the conditions of the development of peoples,” Anglican priests married; but not the highest high-Anglican. But they were always going over to Rome ... “that has made your Buckle so precious to the Russian intelligentsia. In England he is scarcely now read, though I have seen by the way his works in this splendid little edition of World Classics, the same as your Emerson, why did you take only Emerson? There is a whole row, the most fascinating things.”
“My Emerson was given to me. I didn’t know it came from anywhere in particular.”
“This Richards must be a most enlightened publisher. I should wish to possess all those volumes. The Buckle I will certainly take at once and you shall see. He is of course out of date in the matter of exact science and this is no doubt part reason why in England he is no more read. It is a great pity. His mind is perhaps greater than even your Darwin, certainly with a far wider philosophical range, and of far greater originality. What is wonderful is his actual anticipation, in idea, without researches, of a large part of what Darwin discovered more accidentally, as a result of his immense naturalistic researches.”
“Someone will discover some day that Darwin’s conclusions were wrong, that he left out some little near obvious thing with big results, and his theory, which has worried thousands of people nearly to death, will turn out to be one of those everlasting mannish explanations of everything which explain nothing. I know what you are going to say; a subsequent reversal of a doctrine does not invalidate scientific method. I know. But these everlasting theories, and men are so ‘eminent’ and important about them, are appalling; in medicine, it is simply appalling, and people are just as ill as ever; and when they know Darwin was mistaken, there will be an end of Herbert Spencer. There’s my father, really an intelligent man, he has done scientific research himself and knew Faraday, and he thinks First Principles the greatest book that was ever written. I have argued and argued but he says he is too old to change his cosmos. It makes me simply ill to think of him living in a cosmos made by Herbert Spencer.”
“Wait. Excuse me but that is all too easy. In matter of science the conclusions of Darwin will never be displaced. It is as the alphabet of biology, as Galilei is of Astronomy. More. These researches even need not be made again. They are for all time verified. Herbert Spencer I agree has carried too far in too wholesale a manner conclusions based on Darwin’s discoveries; conclusions may lead to many inapplicable theories, that is immaterial; but Darwin himself made no such theories. There is no question of opinion as to his discoveries; he supplies simply unanswerable facts.”
“I think it’s Huxley who makes me angry with Darwinism. He didn’t find it out, and he went swaggering about using it as a weapon; frightfully conceited about it. That Thomas Henry Huxley should come off best in an argument was quite as important to him as spreading the Darwinian theory. I never read anything like his accounts of his victories in his letters.”
“That is most certainly not the spirit of Darwin, who was a most gentle creature...... But you really surprise me in your attitude towards the profession of law.”