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If the words of the letter had been seared across eternity with the red-hot iron of fate they could not have been more indestructible. Besides the letter, Madeira always had on the desk maps, geological surveys, time estimates. Von Moltke never figured half so carefully nor on half so many shaky hypotheses as did Madeira in his office during these nights.
It was this instinct which made him so cautious and therefore so sure in the statement of his hypotheses: after the idea of natural selection as an explanation of the origin of the species of the natural world had occurred to him, he spent twenty years collecting further facts and verifying observations to test the theory before he gave it to the world.
To draw therefrom any notion on material objects, it would have to be supposed that, by some mysterious action, the mental which we know resembles the physical which we do not know, that it retains the reflection of it, or even that it allows its colour and form to pass, like a transparent pellicle applied on the contour of bodies. Here are hypotheses very odd in their realism.
We are not discussing the above-mentioned assertions regarding the immaterial unity of the soul and the existence of a Supreme Being as dogmata, which certain philosophers profess to demonstrate a priori, but purely as hypotheses. In the former case, the dogmatist must take care that his arguments possess the apodeictic certainty of a demonstration.
Nobody can say what would have happened if the Carthagenians had conquered the Romans or if victory had remained with Mithridates. Hypotheses are of but slight interest when truth follows another direction. Nevertheless we cannot but repeat that it was a great fortune for Europe that victory was not decided by Russia, and that the decisive factor proved the United States.
Before going further, it will be well to give illustrations of different classes of mnemic phenomena. A cat which is put into a cage of which it has had experience behaves differently from the way in which it behaved at first. We can easily invent hypotheses, which are quite likely to be true, as to connections in the brain caused by past experience, and themselves causing the different response.
Many others have had hypotheses or systems named after them, but no one else that we know of a department of bibliography. The nature of his latest researches accounts for most of the difference, but not for all, The Origin of Species is a fascinating topic, having interests and connections with every branch of science, natural and moral.
The great astronomers of to-day still hold to Sir Isaac Newton's declaration, "Hypotheses non fingo." Each one may have his suspicions of a theory to guide him in a course of observation, and may call it a working hypothesis.
But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Préexistence des Germes et de l'Epigénèse," which opens thus: "Spontaneous generation is only a chimæra. This point established, two hypotheses remain: that of pre-existence and that of epigenesis. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other."
His mind was full of hopes and hypotheses, but he always brought them to an experimental test. The record of his planned and executed experiments would, I doubt not, show a high ratio of hopes disappointed to hopes fulfilled; but every case of fulfilment abolished all memory of defeat; disappointment was swallowed up in victory.
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