My reason for attempting a treatment of this difficult subject is twofold. First, I am greatly impressed by what seems like a lack of thorough patience and goodwill in the controversy on both sides. A student of philosophy has not the special knowledge possessed either by Mr. Huxley or Professor Haeckel in biology, or by Mr. Karl Pearson in mathematics,1 not to speak of other writers who have entered upon this debatable land perhaps too light-heartedly; but he ought to possess above all things the goodwill and habit of patience which enable him to track out common elements in different phases and processes, and to hold together ideas which the noticeably impatient mind of exact science or semi-political publicism pronounces to be ab initio incompatible. I cannot help it if this implication is considered insolent; in the popular utterances of natural and exact science nothing strikes one so forcibly as their impatience. And secondly, it appears to me that certain classes of facts known to those closely occupied with administration of charity or of Poor Law relief form at least an important contribution to the problem in question, and that, though touched upon from time to time, they have not been treated with adequate knowledge, and their rather ambiguous import has therefore not been rightly read.

I will begin by referring to an observation of Lotze which applies very widely to the attitude of our time.