I searched online dictionaries for the word dare but I don't understand the meaning of sentence below:
As he dared only to hope in that great book, light has been cast upon not just the worlds of plants and animals, but on ourselves and our origins.
Being together "dare" and "only" makes me puzzled. So, Could you please explain it to me?
The fuller text is here:
A century and a half after The Origin, Darwin can be seen to have been triumphantly right about almost everything. Evolution is now no more “just a theory” than is chemistry and, like all other sciences, it provides a logical way of looking at the world. As he dared only to hope in that great book, light has been cast upon not just the worlds of plants and animals, but on ourselves and our origins.
Darwinism makes sense of what was once no more than a jumble of unconnected facts, and in so doing unifies biology. Modern psychology, ecology and more find their birthplace in the pages of his greatest work. A century-and-a-half on, evolution is as central to our understanding of life as gravity is to the study of the universe.