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I am sure the Duke of Argyll will be glad to hear that the anxiety he created was of extremely short duration. It is my privilege to have access to the best sources of information, and nobody in the scientific world can tell me anything about either the “Reign of Terror” or “the Revolt.” In fact, the scientific world laughs most indecorously at the notion of the existence of either; and some are so lost to the sense of the scientific dignity, that they descend to the use of transatlantic slang, and call it a “bogus scare.” As to my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer, I have every reason to know that, in the “Factors of Organic Evolution,” he has said exactly what was in his mind, without any particular deference to the opinions of the person whom he is pleased to regard as his most dangerous critic and Devil’s Advocate-General, and still less of any one else.

I do not know whether the Duke of Argyll pictures himself as the Tallien of this imaginary revolt against a no less imaginary Reign of Terror. But if so, I most respectfully but firmly decline to join his forces. It is only a few weeks since I happened to read over again the first article which I ever wrote (now twenty-seven years ago) on the “Origin of Species,” and I found nothing that I wished to modify in the opinions that are there expressed, though the subsequent vast accumulation of evidence in favour of Mr. Darwin’s views would give me much to add. As is the case with all new doctrines, so with that of Evolution, the enthusiasm of advocates has sometimes tended to degenerate into fanaticism; and mere speculation has, at times, threatened to shoot beyond its legitimate bounds. I have occasionally thought it wise to warn the more adventurous spirits among us against these dangers, in sufficiently plain language; and I have sometimes jestingly said that I expected, if I lived long enough, to be looked on as a reactionary by some of my more ardent friends. But nothing short of midsummer madness can account for the fiction that I am waiting till it is safe to join openly a revolt, hatched by some person or persons unknown, against an intellectual movement with which I am in the most entire and hearty sympathy. It is a great many years since, at the outset of my career, I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good, for me, was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction, and have availed myself of the “rara temporum felicitas ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet,” which is now enjoyable, to the best of my ability; and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.

My career is at an end. I have

Warmed both hands before the fire of life;

and nothing is left me, before I depart, but to help, or at any rate to abstain from hindering, the younger generation of men of science in doing better service to the cause we have at heart than I have been able to render.

And yet, forsooth, I am supposed to be waiting for the signal of “revolt,” which some fiery spirits among these young men are to raise before I dare express my real opinions concerning questions about which we older men had to fight, in the teeth of fierce public opposition and obloquy–of something which might almost justify even the grandiloquent epithet of a Reign of Terror–before our excellent successors had left school.

It would appear that the spirit of pseudo-science has impregnated even the imagination of the Duke of Argyll. The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.