But he did not put it
forward as accounting for the whole of natural history. He included it
under the heading of Evolution, though it was only pseudo-evolution at
best; but he revealed it as _a_ method of evolution, not as _the_ method
of evolution. He did not pretend that it excluded other methods, or
that it was the chief method. Though he demonstrated that many
transformations which had been taken as functional adaptations (the
current phrase for Lamarckian evolution) either certainly were or
conceivably might be due to Circumstantial Selection, he was careful
not to claim that he had superseded Lamarck or disproved Functional
Adaptation. In short, he was not a Darwinian, but an honest naturalist
working away at his job with so little preoccupation with theological
speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic Unitarianism into
which he was born, and remained to the end the engagingly simple and
socially easy-going soul he had been in his boyhood, when his elders
doubted whether he would ever be of much use in the world.
HOW WE RUSHED DOWN A STEEP PLACE
Not so the rest of us intellectuals.
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