FOOTNOTES:
[21] An excellent example may be found in Butler's own career. Destined for the ministry of the Church of England (with his own full consent), he was set to teach a class in a Sunday school. Finding that some of his pupils were unbaptized, yet no worse-behaved than the others, and obviously quite ignorant of what baptism meant, he abandoned all belief. His biographer, equally ignorant, in narrating, with approval, this change of opinion, says, "Paley had produced evidence of Christianity, but none so unmistakable as this to the contrary."
[22] Dr. Johnson once remarked that "to find a substitution for violated morality was the leading feature in all perversions of religion."
III. WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE SYSTEM
Exclusive and long-continued devotion to any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the æsthetic tastes he once possessed. Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing satire in The New Republic has, perhaps, lost some of its tang now that the prototype of its Professor of History is almost forgotten, but it has not lost its point. Lady Ambrose tells the tale: "He said to me in a very solemn voice, 'What a terrible defeat that was which we had at Bouvines!' I answered timidly—not thinking we were at war with anyone—that I had seen nothing about it in the papers. 'H'm!' he said, giving a sort of grunt that made me feel dreadfully ignorant, 'why, I had an excursus on it myself in the Archæological Gazette only last week.' And, do you know, it turned out that the Battle of Bouvines was fought in the Thirteenth Century, and had, as far as I could make out, something to do with Magna Charta."
It is, however, among writers on biological subjects that we find the most salient instances of this contraction. With extraordinary self-abnegation they seem, in the contemplation of the problem with which they are concerned, to forget that they themselves are living things, and, more than that, the living things of whom they ought to know and could know most, however little that most may be. When the biologist begins to philosophise as, after the manner of his kind, he often does, he should leave his microscope and look around him; whereas he often forgets even to change the high for the low power. Thus he limits his field of vision and forgets, when attempting his explanation, that it is only within a system that he is working. Professor Ward, in Naturalism and Agnosticism, says: