"One wants Tom to acknowledge that, without bitterness, and at the same time to understand that, but for _him_, his honest work, his clean life, the world couldn't go on at all.

If Tom _feels_ that, he is a religious man." "Ah! I take your point.

But, Dyce, I find as a painful matter of fact that Tom Bullock is by no means a religious man.

Tom, I have learnt, privately calls himself 'a hagnostic,' and is obliging enough to say among his intimates that, if the truth were told, I myself am the same.
Tom has got hold of evolutionary notions, which he illustrates in his daily work.

He knows all about natural selection, and the survival of the fittest.