Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,More than this could surely not be said for Darwin; and yet how vague and dim is now the knowledge, even among educated men, of precisely what it was that Newton accomplished, compared with the continued knowledge held by every school-boy as to Pope, who wrote the lines just quoted. The mere record of Darwin's own life shows how large a part of man's highest mental action became inert in him. He ceased to care for the spheres of thought in
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
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Of course it is too early for comparison, but it is undoubtedly the belief of many Americans —at any rate, it is one which I venture to entertain—that the place in the history of intellect held a hundred years hence by the two Americans he forgets to mention will be greater than that of the two Englishmen he names.
Greater than Darwin's, from the more lasting quality of literary than of scientific eminence.
Darwin was great, as he was certainly noble and lovable; but he was not greater, or at least held greater, than Newton:—
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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