ABSTRACT

Easily the most celebrated date in the history of the theory of evolution is 1859, because it was in that year that Darwin published The Origin of Species. That event fully deserves the celebrity which has been bestowed on it, and hence on the year 1859. There were three things which made Darwin's fellow naturalists reluctant to admit the fact of evolution. One of them is well known: it was religion. A second thing which made Darwin's fellow-naturalists reluctant to admit the fact of evolution is one which, unlike religion, has been almost entirely forgotten. It was a moral objection, and a well-founded one. The third reason why most naturalists around 1835 were slow to admit the fact of evolution was neither a religious nor a moral objection. It was a purely intellectual one. Darwin, being a rational man, naturally felt the force of this objection, just as strongly as did his fellow naturalists who were not evolutionists.