What sort of man was this revolutionary thinker? Just what did he do? What do his achievements mean to us and what consequences have they had for our own world? Darwin himself could not anticipate the answer to the last of these three questions. His autobiography is the best single source of answers to the first two. It must be true that no one can adequately judge his own character, but in these pages Darwin, the objective scientist, comes unusually near to a truly dispassionate estimate of himself. - p. 2.