That he is right Mr. Romanes seems to me to admit, though in a very unsatisfactory way.

What, for example, can be more unsatisfactory than the following?— Mr. Romanes says that the most fundamental principle of mental operation is that of memory, and that this "is the conditio sine qua non of all mental life" (page 35).

I do not understand Mr. Romanes to hold that there is any living being which has no mind at all, and I do understand him to admit that development of body and mind are closely interdependent.

If, then, "the most fundamental principle" of mind is memory, it follows that memory enters also as a fundamental principle into development of body. For mind and body are so closely connected that nothing can enter largely into the one without correspondingly affecting the other.

On a later page Mr. Romanes speaks point-blank of the new-born child as "EMBODYING the results of a great mass of HEREDITARY EXPERIENCE" (p. 77), so that what he is driving at can be collected by those who take trouble, but is not seen until we call up from our own knowledge matter whose relevancy does not appear on the face of it, and until we connect passages many pages asunder, the first of which may easily be forgotten before we reach the second. There can be no doubt, however, that Mr. Romanes does in reality, like Professor Hering and myself, regard development, whether of mind or body, as due to memory, for it is now pretty generally seen to be nonsense to talk about "hereditary experience" or "hereditary memory" if anything else is intended.

I have said above that on page 113 of his recent work Mr. Romanes declares the analogies between the memory with which we are familiar in daily life, and hereditary memory, to be "so numerous and precise" as to justify us in considering them as of one and the same kind.

This is certainly his meaning, but, with the exception of the words within inverted commas, it is not his language. His own words are these:-

"Profound, however, as our ignorance unquestionably is concerning the physical substratum of memory, I think we are at least justified in regarding this substratum as the same both in ganglionic or organic, and in the conscious or psychological memory, seeing that the analogies between them are so numerous and precise. Consciousness is but an adjunct which arises when the physical processes, owing to infrequency of repetition, complexity of operation, or other causes, involve what I have before called ganglionic friction."

I submit that I have correctly translated Mr. Romanes' meaning, and also that we have a right to complain of his not saying what he has to say in words which will involve less "ganglionic friction" on the part of the reader.

Another example may be found on p. 43 of Mr. Romanes' book. "Lastly," he writes, "just as innumerable special mechanisms of muscular co-ordinations are found to be inherited, innumerable special associations of ideas are found to be the same, and in one case as in the other the strength of the organically imposed connection is found to bear a direct proportion to the frequency with which in the history of the species it has occurred."

Mr. Romanes is here intending what the reader will find insisted on on p. 51 of "Life and Habit;" but how difficult he has made what could have been said intelligibly enough, if there had been nothing but the reader's comfort to be considered. Unfortunately that seems to have been by no means the only thing of which Mr. Romanes was thinking, or why, after implying and even saying over and over again that instinct is inherited habit due to inherited memory, should he turn sharply round on p. 297 and praise Mr. Darwin for trying to snuff out "the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck"? The answer is not far to seek. It is because Mr. Romanes did not merely want to tell us all about instinct, but wanted also, if I may use a homely metaphor, to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at one and the same time.

I remember saying that if the late Mr. Darwin "had told us what the earlier evolutionists said, why they said it, wherein he differed from them, and in what way he proposed to set them straight, he would have taken a course at once more agreeable with usual practice, and more likely to remove misconception from his own mind and from those of his readers." {59a} This I have no doubt was one of the passages which made Mr. Romanes so angry with me. I can find no better words to apply to Mr. Romanes himself. He knows perfectly well what others have written about the connection between heredity and memory, and he knows no less well that so far as he is intelligible at all he is taking the same view that they have taken. If he had begun by saying what they had said, and had then improved on it, I for one should have been only too glad to be improved upon.

Mr. Romanes has spoiled his book just because this plain old- fashioned method of procedure was not good enough for him. One-half the obscurity which makes his meaning so hard to apprehend is due to exactly the same cause as that which has ruined so much of the late Mr. Darwin's work—I mean to a desire to appear to be differing altogether from others with whom he knew himself after all to be in substantial agreement. He adopts, but (probably quite unconsciously) in his anxiety to avoid appearing to adopt, he obscures what he is adopting.

Here, for example, is Mr. Romanes' definition of instinct:-

"Instinct is reflex action into which there is imported the element of consciousness. The term is therefore a generic one, comprising all those faculties of mind which are concerned in conscious and adaptive action, antecedent to individual experience, without necessary knowledge of the relation between means employed and ends attained, but similarly performed under similar and frequently recurring circumstances by all the individuals of the same species." {60a}

If Mr. Romanes would have been content to build frankly upon Professor Hering's foundation, the soundness of which he has elsewhere abundantly admitted, he might have said -

"Instinct is knowledge or habit acquired in past generations—the new generation remembering what happened to it before it parted company with the old. More briefly, Instinct is inherited memory." Then he might have added a rider -

"If a habit is acquired as a new one, during any given lifetime, it is not an instinct. If having been acquired in one lifetime it is transmitted to offspring, it is an instinct in the offspring, though it was not an instinct in the parent. If the habit is transmitted partially, it must be considered as partly instinctive and partly acquired."

This is easy; it tells people how they may test any action so as to know what they ought to call it; it leaves well alone by avoiding all such debatable matters as reflex action, consciousness, intelligence, purpose, knowledge of purpose. &c.; it both introduces the feature of inheritance which is the one mainly distinguishing instinctive from so-called intelligent actions, and shows the manner in which these last pass into the first, that is to say, by way of memory and habitual repetition; finally it points the fact that the new generation is not to be looked upon as a new thing, but (as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since said {61a}) as "a branch or elongation" of the one immediately preceding it.

In Mr. Darwin's case it is hardly possible to exaggerate the waste of time, money and trouble that has been caused, by his not having been content to appear as descending with modification like other people from those who went before him. It will take years to get the evolution theory out of the mess in which Mr. Darwin has left it. He was heir to a discredited truth; he left behind him an accredited fallacy. Mr. Romanes, if he is not stopped in time, will get the theory connecting heredity and memory into just such another muddle as Mr. Darwin has got evolution, for surely the writer who can talk about "HEREDITY BEING ABLE TO WORK UP the faculty of homing into the instinct of migration," {61b} or of "the principle of (natural) selection combining with that of lapsing intelligence to the formation of a joint result," {61c} is little likely to depart from the usual methods of scientific procedure with advantage either to himself or any one else. Fortunately Mr. Romanes is not Mr. Darwin, and though he has certainly got Mr. Darwin's mantle, and got it very much too, it will not on Mr. Romanes' shoulders hide a good deal that people were not going to observe too closely while Mr. Darwin wore it.

I ought to say that the late Mr. Darwin appears himself eventually to have admitted the soundness of the theory connecting heredity and memory. Mr. Romanes quotes a letter written by Mr. Darwin in the last year of his life, in which he speaks of an intelligent action gradually becoming "INSTINCTIVE, I.E., MEMORY TRANSMITTED FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER." {62a}

Briefly, the stages of Mr. Darwin's opinion upon the subject of hereditary memory are as follows:-

1859. "It would be THE MOST SERIOUS ERROR to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation and transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations." {62b} And this more especially applies to the instincts of many ants.

1876. "It would be a SERIOUS ERROR to suppose," &c., as before. {62c}

1881. "We should remember WHAT A MASS OF INHERITED KNOWLEDGE is crowded into the minute brain of a worker ant." {62d}

1881 or 1882. Speaking of a given habitual action Mr. Darwin writes: "It does not seem to me at all incredible that this action [and why this more than any other habitual action?] should then become instinctive:" i.e., MEMORY TRANSMITTED FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER. {62e}

And yet in 1839, or thereabouts, Mr. Darwin had pretty nearly grasped the conception from which until the last year or two of his life he so fatally strayed; for in his contribution to the volumes giving an account of the voyages of the Adventure and Beagle, he wrote: "Nature by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country" (p. 237).

What is the secret of the long departure from the simple common- sense view of the matter which he took when he was a young man? I imagine simply what I have referred to in the preceding chapter, over-anxiety to appear to be differing from his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck.

I believe I may say that Mr. Darwin before he died not only admitted the connection between memory and heredity, but came also to see that he must readmit that design in organism which he had so many years opposed. For in the preface to Hermann Muller's "Fertilisation of Flowers," {63a} which bears a date only a very few weeks prior to Mr. Darwin's death, I find him saying:- "Design in nature has for a long time deeply interested many men, and though the subject must now be looked at from a somewhat different point of view from what was formerly the case, it is not on that account rendered less interesting." This is mused forth as a general gnome, and may mean anything or nothing: the writer of the letterpress under the hieroglyph in Old Moore's Almanac could not be more guarded; but I think I know what it does mean.

I cannot, of course, be sure; Mr. Darwin did not probably intend that I should; but I assume with confidence that whether there is design in organism or no, there is at any rate design in this passage of Mr. Darwin's. This, we may be sure, is not a fortuitous variation; and, moreover, it is introduced for some reason which made Mr. Darwin think it worth while to go out of his way to introduce it. It has no fitness in its connection with Hermann Muller's book, for what little Hermann Muller says about teleology at all is to condemn it; why, then, should Mr. Darwin muse here of all places in the world about the interest attaching to design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the rest of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even here Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which could be disputed.

The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge. He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar's jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in "Evolution Old and New," and "Unconscious Memory," it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as "was formerly the case," it was not on that account any the less—design, as well as interesting.

I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin's manner.

In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin's manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor Weismann's "Studies in the Theory of Descent," published in 1881.

"Several distinguished naturalists," says Mr. Darwin, "maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility"—or towards BEING ABLE TO BE PERFECTED.

I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor Weismann's book. There was a little something here and there, but not much.

It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes' latest contribution to biology—I mean his theory of physiological selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in Nature just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written. I admit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes' theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree with the Times, which says that "Mr. George Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended" (August 16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively attracted.

The Times continues—"The position which Mr. Romanes takes up is the result of his perception shared by many evolutionists, that the theory of natural selection is not really a theory of the origin of species. . . ." What, then, becomes of Mr. Darwin's most famous work, which was written expressly to establish natural selection as the main means of organic modification? "The new factor which Mr. Romanes suggests," continues the Times, "is that at a certain stage of development of varieties in a state of nature a change takes place in their reproductive systems, rendering those which differ in some particulars mutually infertile, and thus the formation of new permanent species takes place without the swamping effect of free intercrossing. . . . How his theory can be properly termed one of selection he fails to make clear. If correct, it is a law or principle of operation rather than a process of selection. It has been objected to Mr. Romanes' theory that it is the re-statement of a fact. This objection is less important than the lack of facts in support of the theory." The Times, however, implies it as its opinion that the required facts will be forthcoming by and by, and that when they have been found Mr. Romanes' suggestion will constitute "the most important addition to the theory of evolution since the publication of the 'Origin of Species.'" Considering that the Times has just implied the main thesis of the "Origin of Species" to be one which does not stand examination, this is rather a doubtful compliment.

Neither Mr. Romanes nor the writer in the Times appears to perceive that the results which may or may not be supposed to ensue on choice depend upon what it is that is supposed to be chosen from; they do not appear to see that though the expression natural selection must be always more or less objectionable, as too highly charged with metaphor for purposes of science, there is nevertheless a natural selection which is open to no other objection than this, and which, when its metaphorical character is borne well in mind, may be used without serious risk of error, whereas natural selection from variations that are mainly fortuitous is chimerical as well as metaphorical. Both writers speak of natural selection as though there could not possibly be any selection in the course of nature, or natural survival, of any but accidental variations. Thus Mr. Romanes says: {66a} "The swamping effect of free inter-crossing upon an individual variation constitutes perhaps the most formidable difficulty with which THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION is beset." And the writer of the article in the Times above referred to says: "In truth THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION presents many facts and results which increase rather than diminish the difficulty of accounting for the existence of species." The assertion made in each case is true if the Charles-Darwinian selection from fortuitous variations is intended, but it does not hold good if the selection is supposed to be made from variations under which there lies a general principle of wide and abiding application. It is not likely that a man of Mr. Romanes' antecedents should not be perfectly awake to considerations so obvious as the foregoing, and I am afraid I am inclined to consider his whole suggestion as only an attempt upon the part of the wearer of Mr. Darwin's mantle to carry on Mr. Darwin's work in Mr. Darwin's spirit.

I have seen Professor Hering's theory adopted recently more unreservedly by Dr. Creighton in his "Illustrations of Unconscious Memory in Disease." {67a} Dr. Creighton avowedly bases his system on Professor Hering's address, and endorses it; it is with much pleasure that I have seen him lend the weight of his authority to the theory that each cell and organ has an individual memory. In "Life and Habit" I expressed a hope that the opinions it upheld would be found useful by medical men, and am therefore the more glad to see that this has proved to be the case. I may perhaps be pardoned if I quote the passage in" Life and Habit" to which I am referring. It runs:-

"Mutatis mutandis, the above would seem to hold as truly about medicine as about politics. We cannot reason with our cells, for they know so much more" (of course I mean "about their own business") "than we do, that they cannot understand us;—but though we cannot reason with them, we can find out what they have been most accustomed to, and what, therefore, they are most likely to expect; we can see that they get this as far as it is in our power to give it them, and may then generally leave the rest to them, only bearing in mind that they will rebel equally against too sudden a change of treatment and no change at all" (p. 305).

Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of change, which— though I did not notice his saying so—he would doubtless see as a mode of cross-fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions against abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, deny that there could be no fertility of good results if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may claim the weight of his authority as supporting both the theory of an unconscious memory in general, and the particular application of it to medicine which I had ventured to suggest.

"Has the word 'memory,'" he asks, "a real application to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech?"

"If I had thought," he continues later, "that unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the detailed application of it to these various forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not unprofitable to represent a somewhat hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly any force or power in nature which every one knows so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over-mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons with things that we all understand.

"For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a single undivided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious; and I claim the description of a certain class of maladies according to the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description and not a figurative." (p. 2.)

As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards "alterative action" as "habit-breaking action."

As regards the organism's being guided throughout its development to maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that "Professor Bain calls reproduction the acme of organic complication." "I should prefer to say," he adds, "the acme of organic implication; for the reason that the sperm and germ elements are perfectly simple, having nothing in their form or structure to show for the marvellous potentialities within them.

"I now come to the application of these considerations to the doctrine of unconscious memory. If generation is the acme of organic implicitness, what is its correlative in nature, what is the acme of organic explicitness? Obviously the fine flower of consciousness. Generation is implicit memory, consciousness is explicit memory; generation is potential memory, consciousness is actual memory."

I am not sure that I understand the preceding paragraph as clearly as I should wish, but having quoted enough to perhaps induce the reader to turn to Dr. Creighton's book, I will proceed to the subject indicated in my title.



CHAPTER V—Statement of the Question at Issue



Of the two points referred to in the opening sentence of this book— I mean the connection between heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design into organic modification—the second is both the more important and the one which stands most in need of support. The substantial identity between heredity and memory is becoming generally admitted; as regards my second point, however, I cannot flatter myself that I have made much way against the formidable array of writers on the neo-Darwinian side; I shall therefore devote the rest of my book as far as possible to this subject only. Natural selection (meaning by these words the preservation in the ordinary course of nature of favourable variations that are supposed to be mainly matters of pure good luck and in no way arising out of function) has been, to use an Americanism than which I can find nothing apter, the biggest biological boom of the last quarter of a century; it is not, therefore, to be wondered at that Professor Ray Lankester, Mr. Romanes, Mr. Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Grant Allen {70a} and Professor Ray Lankester {70b} in England, and Dr. Ernst Krause {70c} in Germany, have spoken and written warmly in support of the theory of natural selection, and in opposition to the views taken by myself; if they are not to be left in possession of the field the sooner they are met the better.

Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning. They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation—within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—and persistent effort to turn it to account. They made this the soul of all development whether of mind or body.

And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and savoir faire than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as wells.

The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by "striking oil," and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation, no commerce; "nothing venture, nothing have," is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under the name of "sports;" but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations. Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even "sports" prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness. Festina, but festina lente—perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto they would assign to organism, and Chi va piano va lontano, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amoeba.

To repeat in other words. All enduring forms establish a modus vivendi with their surroundings. They can do this because both they and the surroundings are plastic within certain undefined but somewhat narrow limits. They are plastic because they can to some extent change their habits, and changed habit, if persisted in, involves corresponding change, however slight, in the organs employed; but their plasticity depends in great measure upon their failure to perceive that they are moulding themselves. If a change is so great that they are seriously incommoded by its novelty, they are not likely to acquiesce in it kindly enough to grow to it, but they will make no difficulty about the miracle involved in accommodating themselves to a difference of only two or three per cent. {72a}

As long as no change exceeds this percentage, and as long, also, as fresh change does not supervene till the preceding one is well established, there seems no limit to the amount of modification which may be accumulated in the course of generations—provided, of course, always, that the modification continues to be in conformity with the instinctive habits and physical development of the organism in their collective capacity. Where the change is too great, or where an organ has been modified cumulatively in some one direction, until it has reached a development too seriously out of harmony with the habits of the organism taken collectively, then the organism holds itself excused from further effort, throws up the whole concern, and takes refuge in the liquidation and reconstruction of death. It is only on the relinquishing of further effort that this death ensues; as long as effort endures, organisms go on from change to change, altering and being altered—that is to say, either killing themselves piecemeal in deference to the surroundings or killing the surroundings piecemeal to suit themselves. There is a ceaseless higgling and haggling, or rather a life-and-death struggle between these two things as long as life lasts, and one or other or both have in no small part to re-enter into the womb from whence they came and be born again in some form which shall give greater satisfaction.

All change is pro tanto death or pro tanto birth. Change is the common substratum which underlies both life and death; life and death are not two distinct things absolutely antagonistic to one another; in the highest life there is still much death, and in the most complete death there is still not a little life. La vie, says Claud Bernard, {73a} c'est la mort: he might have added, and perhaps did, et la mort ce n'est que la vie transformee. Life and death are the extreme modes of something which is partly both and wholly neither; this something is common, ordinary change; solve any change and the mystery of life and death will be revealed; show why and how anything becomes ever anything other in any respect than what it is at any given moment, and there will be little secret left in any other change. One is not in its ultimate essence more miraculous that another; it may be more striking—a greater congeries of shocks, it may be more credible or more incredible, but not more miraculous; all change is qua us absolutely incomprehensible and miraculous; the smallest change baffles the greatest intellect if its essence, as apart from its phenomena, be inquired into.

But however this may be, all organic change is either a growth or a dissolution, or a combination of the two. Growth is the coming together of elements with quasi similar characteristics. I understand it is believed to be the coming together of matter in certain states of motion with other matter in states so nearly similar that the rhythms of the one coalesce with and hence reinforce the rhythms pre-existing in the other—making, rather than marring and undoing them. Life and growth are an attuning, death and decay are an untuning; both involve a succession of greater or smaller attunings and untunings; organic life is "the diapason closing full in man"; it is the fulness of a tone that varies in pitch, quality, and in the harmonics to which it gives rise; it ranges through every degree of complexity from the endless combinations of life-and-death within life-and-death which we find in the mammalia, to the comparative simplicity of the amoeba. Death, again, like life, ranges through every degree of complexity. All pleasant changes are recreative; they are pro tanto births; all unpleasant changes are wearing, and, as such, pro tanto deaths, but we can no more exhaust either wholly of the other, than we can exhaust all the air out of a receiver; pleasure and pain lurk within one another, as life in death, and death in life, or as rest and unrest in one another.

There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two and two. Solve either, and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will tell about itself. If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal f??a, or going to and fro and heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so. Non omnis moriar, says Horace, and "I die daily," says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became "he" at all? When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer. If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of persons.

Consciousness and change, so far as we can watch them, are as functionally interdependent as mind and matter, or condition and substance, are—for the condition of every substance may be considered as the expression and outcome of its mind. Where there is consciousness there is change; where there is no change there is no consciousness; may we not suspect that there is no change without a pro tanto consciousness however simple and unspecialised? Change and motion are one, so that we have substance, feeling, change (or motion), as the ultimate three-in-one of our thoughts, and may suspect all change, and all feeling, attendant or consequent, however limited, to be the interaction of those states which for want of better terms we call mind and matter. Action may be regarded as a kind of middle term between mind and matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the quivering clash and union of body and soul; commonplace enough in practice; miraculous, as violating every canon on which thought and reason are founded, if we theorise about it, put it under the microscope, and vivisect it. It is here, if anywhere, that body or substance is guilty of the contradiction in terms of combining with that which is without material substance and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as passing in and out with matter, till the two become a body ensouled and a soul embodied.

All body is more or less ensouled. As it gets farther and farther from ourselves, indeed, we sympathise less with it; nothing, we say to ourselves, can have intelligence unless we understand all about it—as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant the power of being understood rather than of understanding. We are intelligent, and no intelligence, so different from our own as to baffle our powers of comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at all. The more a thing resembles ourselves, the more it thinks as we do—and thus by implication tells us that we are right, the more intelligent we think it; and the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must be; if a substance does not succeed in making it clear that it understands our business, we conclude that it cannot have any business of its own, much less understand it, or indeed understand anything at all. But letting this pass, so far as we are concerned, [Greek text]; we are body ensouled, and soul embodied, ourselves, nor is it possible for us to think seriously of anything so unlike ourselves as to consist either of soul without body, or body without soul. Unmattered condition, therefore, is as inconceivable by us as unconditioned matter; and we must hold that all body with which we can be conceivably concerned is more or less ensouled, and all soul, in like manner, more or less embodied. Strike either body or soul— that is to say, effect either a physical or a mental change, and the harmonics of the other sound. So long as body is minded in a certain way—so long, that is to say, as it feels, knows, remembers, concludes, and forecasts one set of things—it will be in one form; if it assumes a new one, otherwise than by external violence, no matter how slight the change may be, it is only through having changed its mind, through having forgotten and died to some trains of thought, and having been correspondingly born anew by the adoption of new ones. What it will adopt depends upon which of the various courses open to it it considers most to its advantage.

What it will think to its advantage depends mainly on the past habits of its race. Its past and now invisible lives will influence its desires more powerfully than anything it may itself be able to add to the sum of its likes and dislikes; nevertheless, over and above preconceived opinion and the habits to which all are slaves, there is a small salary, or, as it were, agency commission, which each may have for himself, and spend according to his fancy; from this, indeed, income-tax must be deducted; still there remains a little margin of individual taste, and here, high up on this narrow, inaccessible ledge of our souls, from year to year a breed of not unprolific variations build where reason cannot reach them to despoil them; for de gustibus non est disputandum.

Here we are as far as we can go. Fancy, which sometimes sways so much and is swayed by so little, and which sometimes, again, is so hard to sway, and moves so little when it is swayed; whose ways have a method of their own, but are not as our ways—fancy, lies on the extreme borderland of the realm within which the writs of our thoughts run, and extends into that unseen world wherein they have no jurisdiction. Fancy is as the mist upon the horizon which blends earth and sky; where, however, it approaches nearest to the earth and can be reckoned with, it is seen as melting into desire, and this as giving birth to design and effort. As the net result and outcome of these last, living forms grow gradually but persistently into physical conformity with their own intentions, and become outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual faiths, or wants of faith, that have been most within them. They thus very gradually, but none the less effectually, design themselves.

In effect, therefore, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck introduce uniformity into the moral and spiritual worlds as it was already beginning to be introduced into the physical. According to both these writers development has ever been a matter of the same energy, effort, good sense, and perseverance, as tend to advancement of life now among ourselves. In essence it is neither more nor less than this, as the rain-drop which denuded an ancient formation is of the same kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced already. As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out, not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart, and at times in fear and trembling. I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now; what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their system.



CHAPTER VI—Statement of the Question at Issue (continued)



So much for the older view; and now for the more modern opinion. According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the view taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an accumulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an accumulated outcome of good luck.

Let us take the eye as a somewhat crucial example. It is a seeing- machine, or thing to see with. So is a telescope; the telescope in its highest development is a secular accumulation of cunning, sometimes small, sometimes great; sometimes applied to this detail of the instrument, and sometimes to that. It is an admirable example of design; nevertheless, as I said in "Evolution Old and New," he who made the first rude telescope had probably no idea of any more perfect form of the instrument than the one he had himself invented. Indeed, if he had, he would have carried his idea out in practice. He would have been unable to conceive such an instrument as Lord Rosse's; the design, therefore, at present evidenced by the telescope was not design all on the part of one and the same person. Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail has been doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith seized and made the best of. Luck there always has been and always will be, until all brains are opened, and all connections made known, but luck turned to account becomes design; there is, indeed, if things are driven home, little other design than this. The telescope, therefore, is an instrument designed in all its parts for the purpose of seeing, and, take it all round, designed with singular skill.

Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that it must be the telescope over again, only more so; we are tempted to see it as something which has grown up little by little from small beginnings, as the result of effort well applied and handed down from generation to generation, till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has been developing as compared with the telescope, a vastly more astonishing result has been arrived at. We may indeed be tempted to think this, but, according to Mr. Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main means of developing the eye was, according to Mr. Darwin, not use as varying circumstances might direct with consequent slow increase of power and an occasional happy flight of genius, but natural selection. Natural selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still the most important means of its development and modification. {81a} What, then, is natural selection?

Mr. Darwin has told us this on the title-page of the "Origin of Species." He there defines it as "The Preservation of Favoured Races;" "Favoured" is "Fortunate," and "Fortunate" "Lucky;" it is plain, therefore, that with Mr. Darwin natural selection comes to "The Preservation of Lucky Races," and that he regarded luck as the most important feature in connection with the development even of so apparently purposive an organ as the eye, and as the one, therefore, on which it was most proper to insist. And what is luck but absence of intention or design? What, then, can Mr. Darwin's title-page amount to when written out plainly, but to an assertion that the main means of modification has been the preservation of races whose variations have been unintentional, that is to say, not connected with effort or intention, devoid of mind or meaning, fortuitous, spontaneous, accidental, or whatever kindred word is least disagreeable to the reader? It is impossible to conceive any more complete denial of mind as having had anything to do with organic development, than is involved in the title-page of the "Origin of Species" when its doubtless carefully considered words are studied— nor, let me add, is it possible to conceive a title-page more likely to make the reader's attention rest much on the main doctrine of evolution, and little, to use the words now most in vogue concerning it, on Mr. Darwin's own "distinctive feature."

It should be remembered that the full title of the "Origin of Species" is, "On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life." The significance of the expansion of the title escaped the greater number of Mr. Darwin's readers. Perhaps it ought not to have done so, but we certainly failed to catch it. The very words themselves escaped us—and yet there they were all the time if we had only chosen to look. We thought the book was called "On the Origin of Species," and so it was on the outside; so it was also on the inside fly-leaf; so it was on the title-page itself as long as the most prominent type was used; the expanded title was only given once, and then in smaller type; so the three big "Origins of Species" carried us with them to the exclusion of the rest.

The short and working title, "On the Origin of Species," in effect claims descent with modification generally; the expanded and technically true title only claims the discovery that luck is the main means of organic modification, and this is a very different matter. The book ought to have been entitled, "On Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, as the main means of the origin of species;" this should have been the expanded title, and the short title should have been "On Natural Selection." The title would not then have involved an important difference between its working and its technical forms, and it would have better fulfilled the object of a title, which is, of course, to give, as far as may be, the essence of a book in a nutshell. We learn on the authority of Mr. Darwin himself {83a} that the "Origin of Species" was originally intended to bear the title "Natural Selection;" nor is it easy to see why the change should have been made if an accurate expression of the contents of the book was the only thing which Mr. Darwin was considering. It is curious that, writing the later chapters of "Life and Habit" in great haste, I should have accidentally referred to the "Origin of Species" as "Natural Selection;" it seems hard to believe that there was no intention in my thus unconsciously reverting to Mr. Darwin's own original title, but there certainly was none, and I did not then know what the original title had been.

If we had scrutinised Mr. Darwin's title-page as closely as we should certainly scrutinise anything written by Mr. Darwin now, we should have seen that the title did not technically claim the theory of descent; practically, however, it so turned out that we unhesitatingly gave that theory to the author, being, as I have said, carried away by the three large "Origins of Species" (which we understood as much the same thing as descent with modification), and finding, as I shall show in a later chapter, that descent was ubiquitously claimed throughout the work, either expressly or by implication, as Mr. Darwin's theory. It is not easy to see how any one with ordinary instincts could hesitate to believe that Mr. Darwin was entitled to claim what he claimed with so much insistance. If ars est celare artem Mr. Darwin must be allowed to have been a consummate artist, for it took us years to understand the ins and outs of what had been done.

I may say in passing that we never see the "Origin of Species" spoken of as "On the Origin of Species, &c.," or as "The Origin of Species, &c." (the word "on" being dropped in the latest editions). The distinctive feature of the book lies, according to its admirers, in the "&c.," but they never give it. To avoid pedantry I shall continue to speak of the "Origin of Species."

At any rate it will be admitted that Mr. Darwin did not make his title-page express his meaning so clearly that his readers could readily catch the point of difference between himself and his grandfather and Lamarck; nevertheless the point just touched upon involves the only essential difference between the systems of Mr. Charles Darwin and those of his three most important predecessors. All four writers agree that animals and plants descend with modification; all agree that the fittest alone survive; all agree about the important consequences of the geometrical ratio of increase; Mr. Charles Darwin has said more about these last two points than his predecessors did, but all three were alike cognisant of the facts and attached the same importance to them, and would have been astonished at its being supposed possible that they disputed them. The fittest alone survive; yes—but the fittest from among what? Here comes the point of divergence; the fittest from among organisms whose variations arise mainly through use and disuse? In other words, from variations that are mainly functional? Or from among organisms whose variations are in the main matters of luck? From variations into which a moral and intellectual system of payment according to results has largely entered? Or from variations which have been thrown for with dice? From variations among which, though cards tell, yet play tells as much or more? Or from those in which cards are everything and play goes for so little as to be not worth taking into account? Is "the survival of the fittest" to be taken as meaning "the survival of the luckiest" or "the survival of those who know best how to turn fortune to account"? Is luck the only element of fitness, or is not cunning even more indispensable?

Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, from the framers of our collects, of every now and then adding the words "through natural selection," as though this squared everything, and descent with modification thus became his theory at once. This is not the case. Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in natural selection to the full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles Darwin can do. They did not use the actual words, but the idea underlying them is the essence of their system. Mr. Patrick Matthew epitomised their doctrine more tersely, perhaps, than was done by any other of the pre-Charles-Darwinian evolutionists, in the following passage which appeared in 1831, and which I have already quoted in "Evolution Old and New" (pp. 320, 323). The passage runs:-

"The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurely destroyed. This principle is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances—in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from THE STRICT ORDEAL BY WHICH NATURE TESTS THEIR ADAPTATION TO HER STANDARD OF PERFECTION and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction." {86a} A little lower down Mr. Matthew speaks of animals under domestication "NOT HAVING UNDERGONE SELECTION BY THE LAW OF NATURE, OF WHICH WE HAVE SPOKEN, and hence being unable to maintain their ground without culture and protection."

The distinction between Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism is generally believed to lie in the adoption of a theory of natural selection by the younger Darwin and its non-adoption by the elder. This is true in so far as that the elder Darwin does not use the words "natural selection," while the younger does, but it is not true otherwise. Both writers agree that offspring tends to inherit modifications that have been effected, from whatever cause, in parents; both hold that the best adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; both, therefore, hold that favourable modifications will tend to be preserved and intensified in the course of many generations, and that this leads to divergence of type; but these opinions involve a theory of natural selection or quasi-selection, whether the words "natural selection" are used or not; indeed it is impossible to include wild species in any theory of descent with modification without implying a quasi-selective power on the part of nature; but even with Mr. Charles Darwin the power is only quasi- selective; there is no conscious choice, and hence there is nothing that can in strictness be called selection.

It is indeed true that the younger Darwin gave the words "natural selection" the importance which of late years they have assumed; he probably adopted them unconsciously from the passage of Mr. Matthew's quoted above, but he ultimately said, {87a} "In the literal sense of the word (sic) no doubt natural selection is a false term," as personifying a fact, making it exercise the conscious choice without which there can be no selection, and generally crediting it with the discharge of functions which can only be ascribed legitimately to living and reasoning beings. Granted, however, that while Mr. Charles Darwin adopted the expression natural selection and admitted it to be a bad one, his grandfather did not use it at all; still Mr. Darwin did not mean the natural selection which Mr. Matthew and those whose opinions he was epitomising meant. Mr. Darwin meant the selection to be made from variations into which purpose enters to only a small extent comparatively. The difference, therefore, between the older evolutionists and their successor does not lie in the acceptance by the more recent writer of a quasi-selective power in nature which his predecessors denied, but in the background—hidden behind the words natural selection, which have served to cloak it—in the views which the old and the new writers severally took of the variations from among which they are alike agreed that a selection or quasi- selection is made.

It now appears that there is not one natural selection, and one survival of the fittest only, but two natural selections, and two survivals of the fittest, the one of which may be objected to as an expression more fit for religious and general literature than for science, but may still be admitted as sound in intention, while the other, inasmuch as it supposes accident to be the main purveyor of variations, has no correspondence with the actual course of things; for if the variations are matters of chance or hazard unconnected with any principle of constant application, they will not occur steadily enough, throughout a sufficient number of successive generations, nor to a sufficient number of individuals for many generations together at the same time and place, to admit of the fixing and permanency of modification at all. The one theory of natural selection, therefore, may, and indeed will, explain the facts that surround us, whereas the other will not. Mr. Charles Darwin's contribution to the theory of evolution was not, as is commonly supposed, "natural selection," but the hypothesis that natural selection from variations that are in the main fortuitous could accumulate and result in specific and generic differences.

In the foregoing paragraph I have given the point of difference between Mr. Charles Darwin and his predecessors. Why, I wonder, have neither he nor any of his exponents put this difference before us in such plain words that we should readily apprehend it? Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck were understood by all who wished to understand them; why is it that the misunderstanding of Mr. Darwin's "distinctive feature" should have been so long and obstinate? Why is it that, no matter how much writers like Mr. Grant Allen and Professor Ray Lankester may say about "Mr. Darwin's master-key," nor how many more like hyperboles they brandish, they never put a succinct resume of Mr. Darwin's theory side by side with a similar resume of his grandfather's and Lamarck's? Neither Mr. Darwin himself, not any of those to whose advocacy his reputation is mainly due, have done this. Professor Huxley is the man of all others who foisted Mr. Darwin most upon us, but in his famous lecture on the coming of age of the "Origin of Species" he did not explain to his hearers wherein the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution differed from the old; and why not? Surely, because no sooner is this made clear than we perceive that the idea underlying the old evolutionists is more in accord with instinctive feelings that we have cherished too long to be able now to disregard them than the central idea which underlies the "Origin of Species."

What should we think of one who maintained that the steam-engine and telescope were not developed mainly through design and effort (letting the indisputably existing element of luck go without saying), but to the fact that if any telescope or steam-engine "happened to be made ever such a little more conveniently for man's purposes than another," &c., &c.?

Let us suppose a notorious burglar found in possession of a jemmy; it is admitted on all hands that he will use it as soon as he gets a chance; there is no doubt about this; how perverted should we not consider the ingenuity of one who tried to persuade us we were wrong in thinking that the burglar compassed the possession of the jemmy by means involving ideas, however vague in the first instance, of applying it to its subsequent function.

If any one could be found so blind to obvious inferences as to accept natural selection, "or the preservation of favoured machines," as the main means of mechanical modification, we might suppose him to argue much as follows:- "I can quite understand," he would exclaim, "how any one who reflects upon the originally simple form of the earliest jemmies, and observes the developments they have since attained in the hands of our most accomplished housebreakers, might at first be tempted to believe that the present form of the instrument has been arrived at by long-continued improvement in the hands of an almost infinite succession of thieves; but may not this inference be somewhat too hastily drawn? Have we any right to assume that burglars work by means analogous to those employed by other people? If any thief happened to pick up any crowbar which happened to be ever such a little better suited to his purpose than the one he had been in the habit of using hitherto, he would at once seize and carefully preserve it. If it got worn out or broken he would begin searching for a crowbar as like as possible to the one that he had lost; and when, with advancing skill, and in default of being able to find the exact thing he wanted, he took at length to making a jemmy for himself, he would imitate the latest and most perfect adaptation, which would thus be most likely to be preserved in the struggle of competitive forms. Let this process go on for countless generations, among countless burglars of all nations, and may we not suppose that a jemmy would be in time arrived at, as superior to any that could have been designed as the effect of the Niagara Falls is superior to the puny efforts of the landscape gardener?"

For the moment I will pass over the obvious retort that there is no sufficient parallelism between bodily organs and mechanical inventions to make a denial of design in the one involve in equity a denial of it in the other also, and that therefore the preceding paragraph has no force. A man is not bound to deny design in machines wherein it can be clearly seen because he denies it in living organs where at best it is a matter of inference. This retort is plausible, but in the course of the two next following chapters but one it will be shown to be without force; for the moment, however, beyond thus calling attention to it, I must pass it by.

I do not mean to say that Mr. Darwin ever wrote anything which made the utility of his contention as apparent as it is made by what I have above put into the mouth of his supposed follower. Mr. Darwin was the Gladstone of biology, and so old a scientific hand was not going to make things unnecessarily clear unless it suited his convenience. Then, indeed, he was like the man in "The Hunting of the Snark," who said, "I told you once, I told you twice, what I tell you three times is true." That what I have supposed said, however, above about the jemmy is no exaggeration of Mr. Darwin's attitude as regards design in organism will appear from the passage about the eye already referred to, which it may perhaps be as well to quote in full. Mr. Darwin says:-

"It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long- continued efforts of the highest human intellects, and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of men? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers, and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million, and each to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. In living bodies variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years, and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?" {92a}

Mr. Darwin does not in this passage deny design, or cunning, point blank; he was not given to denying things point blank, nor is it immediately apparent that he is denying design at all, for he does not emphasize and call attention to the fact that the VARIATIONS on whose accumulation he relies for his ultimate specific difference are accidental, and, to use his own words, in the passage last quoted, caused by VARIATION. He does, indeed, in his earlier editions, call the variations "accidental," and accidental they remained for ten years, but in 1869 the word "accidental" was taken out. Mr. Darwin probably felt that the variations had been accidental as long as was desirable; and though they would, of course, in reality remain as accidental as ever, still, there could be no use in crying "accidental variations" further. If the reader wants to know whether they were accidental or no, he had better find out for himself. Mr. Darwin was a master of what may be called scientific chiaroscuro, and owes his reputation in no small measure to the judgment with which he kept his meaning dark when a less practised hand would have thrown light upon it. There can, however, be no question that Mr. Darwin, though not denying purposiveness point blank, was trying to refer the development of the eye to the accumulation of small accidental improvements, which were not as a rule due to effort and design in any way analogous to those attendant on the development of the telescope.

Though Mr. Darwin, if he was to have any point of difference from his grandfather, was bound to make his variations accidental, yet, to do him justice, he did not like it. Even in the earlier editions of the "Origin of Species," where the "alterations" in the passage last quoted are called "accidental" in express terms, the word does not fall, so to speak, on a strong beat of the bar, and is apt to pass unnoticed. Besides, Mr. Darwin does not say point blank "we may believe," or "we ought to believe;" he only says "may we not believe?" The reader should always be on his guard when Mr. Darwin asks one of these bland and child-like questions, and he is fond of asking them; but, however this may be, it is plain, as I pointed out in "Evolution Old and New" {93a} that the only "skill," that is to say the only thing that can possibly involve design, is "the unerring skill" of natural selection.

In the same paragraph Mr. Darwin has already said: "Further, we must suppose that there is a power represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest always intently watching each slight alteration, &c." Mr. Darwin probably said "a power represented by natural selection" instead of "natural selection" only, because he saw that to talk too frequently about the fact that the most lucky live longest as "intently watching" something was greater nonsense than it would be prudent even for him to write, so he fogged it by making the intent watching done by "a power represented by" a fact, instead of by the fact itself. As the sentence stands it is just as great nonsense as it would have been if "the survival of the fittest" had been allowed to do the watching instead of "the power represented by" the survival of the fittest, but the nonsense is harder to dig up, and the reader is more likely to pass it over.

This passage gave Mr. Darwin no less trouble than it must have given to many of his readers. In the original edition of the "Origin of Species" it stood, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental variation." I suppose it was felt that if this was allowed to stand, it might be fairly asked what natural selection was doing all this time? If the power was able to do everything that was necessary now, why not always? and why any natural selection at all? This clearly would not do, so in 1861 the power was allowed, by the help of brackets, actually to become natural selection, and remained so till 1869, when Mr. Darwin could stand it no longer, and, doubtless for the reason given above, altered the passage to "a power represented by natural selection," at the same time cutting out the word "accidental."

It may perhaps make the workings of Mr. Darwin's mind clearer to the reader if I give the various readings of this passage as taken from the three most important editions of the "Origin of Species."

In 1859 it stood, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration," &c.

In 1861 it stood, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power (natural selection) always intently watching each slight accidental alteration," &c.

And in 1869, "Further, we must suppose that there is a power represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest always intently watching each slight alteration," &c. {94a}

The hesitating feeble gait of one who fears a pitfall at every step, so easily recognisable in the "numerous, successive, slight alterations" in the foregoing passage, may be traced in many another page of the "Origin of Species" by those who will be at the trouble of comparing the several editions. It is only when this is done, and the working of Mr. Darwin's mind can be seen as though it were the twitchings of a dog's nose, that any idea can be formed of the difficulty in which he found himself involved by his initial blunder of thinking he had got a distinctive feature which entitled him to claim the theory of evolution as an original idea of his own. He found his natural selection hang round his neck like a millstone. There is hardly a page in the "Origin of Species" in which traces of the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin's mind are not discernible, with a result alike exasperating and pitiable. I can only repeat what I said in "Evolution Old and New," namely, that I find the task of extracting a well-defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin's words comparable only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer who has obscured the main issue as much as he can, and whose chief aim has been to leave as many loopholes as possible for himself to escape by, if things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that of one who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was originally drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of confusion and contradiction.

The more Mr. Darwin's work is studied, and more especially the more his different editions are compared, the more impossible is it to avoid a suspicion of arriere pensee as pervading it whenever the "distinctive feature" is on the tapis. It is right to say, however, that no such suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. Wallace, Mr. Darwin's fellow discoverer of natural selection. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Wallace believed he had made a real and important improvement upon the Lamarckian system, and, as a natural consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by telling us what Lamarck had said. He did not, I admit, say quite all that I should have been glad to have seen him say, nor use exactly the words I should myself have chosen, but he said enough to make it impossible to doubt his good faith, and his desire that we should understand that with him, as with Mr. Darwin, variations are mainly accidental, not functional. Thus, in his memorable paper communicated to the Linnean Society in 1858 he said, in a passage which I have quoted in "Unconscious Memory":

"The hypothesis of Lamarck—that progressive changes in species have been produced by the attempts of the animals to increase the development of their own organs, and thus modify their structures and habits—has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species; . . . but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . . The powerful retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual AT ONCE SECURED A FRESH RANGE OF PASTURE OVER THE SAME GROUND AS THEIR SHORTER-NECKED COMPANIONS, AND ON THE FIRST SCARCITY OF FOOD WERE THUS ENABLED TO OUTLIVE THEM" (italics in original). {96a}

"Which occurred" is obviously "which happened to occur, by some chance or accident entirely unconnected with use and disuse;" and though the word "accidental" is never used, there can be no doubt about Mr. Wallace's desire to make the reader catch the fact that with him accident, and not, as with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, sustained effort, is the main purveyor of the variations whose accumulation amounts ultimately to specific difference. It is a pity, however, that instead of contenting himself like a theologian with saying that his opponent had been refuted over and over again, he did not refer to any particular and tolerably successful attempt to refute the theory that modifications in organic structure are mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted with the literature of evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. But let this pass; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. Wallace, and so indeed with all who accept Mr. Charles Darwin's natural selection as the main means of modification, the central idea is luck, while the central idea of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning.

I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their extreme development; but they both admit abatements which bring them somewhat nearer to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like all our ideas, substantial enough until we try to grasp it—and then, like all our ideas, it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or death—a rope of many strands; there is design within design, and design within undesign; there is undesign within design (as when a man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design in their arrangement), and undesign within undesign; when we speak of cunning or design in connection with organism we do not mean cunning, all cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no place for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of accidents.

So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny design and effort to have been the main purveyors of the variations whose accumulation results in specific difference, they do not entirely exclude the action of use and disuse—and this at once opens the door for cunning; nevertheless, according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the human eye and the long neck of the giraffe are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are mainly functional, and hence practical; according to Charles Darwin they are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are accidental, fortuitous, spontaneous, that is to say, mainly cannot be reduced to any known general principle. According to Charles Darwin "the preservation of favoured," or lucky, "races" is by far the most important means of modification; according to Erasmus Darwin effort non sibi res sed se rebus subjungere is unquestionably the most potent means; roughly, therefore, there is no better or fairer way of putting the matter, than to say that Charles Darwin is the apostle of luck, and his grandfather, and Lamarck, of cunning.

It should be observed also that the distinction between the organism and its surroundings—on which both systems are founded—is one that cannot be so universally drawn as we find it convenient to allege. There is a debatable ground of considerable extent on which RES and ME, ego and non ego, luck and cunning, necessity and freewill, meet and pass into one another as night and day, or life and death. No one can draw a sharp line between ego and non ego, nor indeed any sharp line between any classes of phenomena. Every part of the ego is non ego qua organ or tool in use, and much of the non ego runs up into the ego and is inseparably united with it; still there is enough that it is obviously most convenient to call ego, and enough that it is no less obviously most convenient to call non ego, as there is enough obvious day and obvious night, or obvious luck and obvious cunning, to make us think it advisable to keep separate accounts for each.

I will say more on this head in a following chapter; in this present one my business should be confined to pointing out as clearly and succinctly as I can the issue between the two great main contending opinions concerning organic development that obtain among those who accept the theory of descent at all; nor do I believe that this can be done more effectually and accurately than by saying, as above, that Mr. Charles Darwin (whose name, by the way, was "Charles Robert," and not, as would appear from the title-pages of his books, "Charles" only), Mr. A. R. Wallace, and their supporters are the apostles of luck, while Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, followed, more or less timidly, by the Geoffroys and by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and very timidly indeed by the Duke of Argyll, preach cunning as the most important means of organic modification.

NOTE.—It appears from "Samuel Butler: A Memoir" (II, 29) that Butler wrote to his father (Dec. 1885) about a passage in Horace (near the beginning of the First Epistle of the First Book) -

Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor, Et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor.

On the preceding page he is adapting the second of these two verses to his own purposes.—H. F. J.



CHAPTER VII—(Intercalated) Mr. Spencer's "The Factors of Organic Evolution"



Since the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more widely understood by his articles "The Factors of Organic Evolution" which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886. The present appears the fittest place in which to intercalate remarks concerning them.

Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to account for organic evolution.

"On critically examining the evidence" (modern writers never examine evidence, they always "critically," or "carefully," or "patiently," examine it), he writes, we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the present any consideration of a factor which may be considered primordial, it may be contended that one of the factors alleged by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator. Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity, and that decrease of it resulting from inactivity, are transmissible to descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic evolution. UTTERLY INADEQUATE TO EXPLAIN THE MAJOR PART OF THE FACTS AS IS THE HYPOTHESIS OF THE INHERITANCE OF FUNCTIONALLY PRODUCED MODIFICATIONS, yet there is a minor part of the facts very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause." (Italics mine.)

Mr. Spencer does not here say expressly that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck considered inheritance of functionally produced modifications to be the sole explanation of the facts of organic life; modern writers on evolution for the most part avoid saying anything expressly; this nevertheless is the conclusion which the reader naturally draws—and was doubtless intended to draw—from Mr. Spencer's words. He gathers that these writers put forward an "utterly inadequate" theory, which cannot for a moment be entertained in the form in which they left it, but which, nevertheless, contains contributions to the formation of a just opinion which of late years have been too much neglected.

This inference would be, as Mr. Spencer ought to know, a mistaken one. Erasmus Darwin, who was the first to depend mainly on functionally produced modifications, attributes, if not as much importance to variations induced either by what we must call chance, or by causes having no connection with use and disuse, as Mr. Spencer does, still so nearly as much that there is little to choose between them. Mr. Spencer's words show that he attributes, if not half, still not far off half the modification that has actually been produced, to use and disuse. Erasmus Darwin does not say whether he considers use and disuse to have brought about more than half or less than half; he only says that animal and vegetable modification is "in part produced" by the exertions of the animals and vegetables themselves; the impression I have derived is, that just as Mr. Spencer considers rather less than half to be due to use and disuse, so Erasmus Darwin considers decidedly more than half—so much more, in fact, than half as to make function unquestionably the factor most proper to be insisted on if only one can be given. Further than this he did not go. I will quote enough of Dr. Erasmus Darwin's own words to put his position beyond doubt. He writes:-

"Thirdly, when we enumerate the great changes produced in the species of animals before their nativity, as, for example, when the offspring reproduces the effects produced upon the parent by accident or culture, or the changes produced by the mixture of species, as in mules; or the changes produced probably by exuberance of nourishment supplied to the foetus, as in monstrous births with additional limbs; many of these enormities are propagated and continued as a variety at least, if not as a new species of animal. I have seen a breed of cats with an additional claw on every foot; of poultry also with an additional claw and with wings to their feet; and of others without rumps. Mr. Buffon" (who, by the way, surely, was no more "Mr. Buffon" than Lord Salisbury is "Mr. Salisbury") "mentions a breed of dogs without tails which are common at Rome and Naples—which he supposes to have been produced by a custom long established of cutting their tails close off." {102a}

Here not one of the causes of variation adduced is connected with use and disuse, or effort, volition, and purpose; the manner, moreover, in which they are brought forward is not that of one who shows signs of recalcitrancy about admitting other causes of modification as well as use and disuse; indeed, a little lower down he almost appears to assign the subordinate place to functionally produced modifications, for he says—"Fifthly, from their first rudiments or primordium to the termination of their lives, all animals undergo perpetual transformations; WHICH ARE IN PART PRODUCED by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritations or of associations; and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."

I have quoted enough to show that Dr. Erasmus Darwin would have protested against the supposition that functionally produced modifications were an adequate explanation of all the phenomena of organic modification. He declares accident and the chances and changes of this mortal life to be potent and frequent causes of variations, which, being not infrequently inherited, result in the formation of varieties and even species, but considers these causes if taken alone as no less insufficient to account for observable facts than the theory of functionally produced modifications would be if not supplemented by inheritance of so-called fortuitous, or spontaneous variations. The difference between Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Mr. Spencer does not consist in the denial by the first, that a variety which happens, no matter how accidentally, to have varied in a way that enables it to comply more fully and readily with the conditions of its existence, is likely to live longer and leave more offspring than one less favoured; nor in the denial by the second of the inheritance and accumulation of functionally produced modifications; but in the amount of stress which they respectively lay on the relative importance of the two great factors of organic evolution, the existence of which they are alike ready to admit.

With Erasmus Darwin there is indeed luck, and luck has had a great deal to do with organic modification, but no amount of luck would have done unless cunning had known how to take advantage of it; whereas if cunning be given, a very little luck at a time will accumulate in the course of ages and become a mighty heap. Cunning, therefore, is the factor on which, having regard to the usage of language and the necessity for simplifying facts, he thinks it most proper to insist. Surely this is as near as may be the opinion which common consent ascribes to Mr. Spencer himself. It is certainly the one which, in supporting Erasmus Darwin's system as against his grandson's, I have always intended to support. With Charles Darwin, on the other hand, there is indeed cunning, effort, and consequent use and disuse; nor does he deny that these have produced some, and sometimes even an important, effect in modifying species, but he assigns by far the most important role in the whole scheme to natural selection, which, as I have already shown, must, with him, be regarded as a synonym for luck pure and simple. This, for reasons well shown by Mr. Spencer in the articles under consideration, is so untenable that it seems only possible to account for its having been advanced at all by supposing Mr. Darwin's judgment to have been perverted by some one or more of the many causes that might tend to warp them. What the chief of those causes may have been I shall presently point out.

Buffon erred rather on the side of ignoring functionally produced modifications than of insisting on them. The main agency with him is the direct action of the environment upon the organism. This, no doubt, is a flaw in Buffon's immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him. Buffon did infinitely more in the way of discovering and establishing the theory of descent with modification than any one has ever done either before or since. He was too much occupied with proving the fact of evolution at all, to dwell as fully as might have been wished upon the details of the process whereby the amoeba had become man, but we have already seen that he regarded inherited mutilation as the cause of establishing a new breed of dogs, and this is at any rate not laying much stress on functionally produced modifications. Again, when writing of the dog, he speaks of variations arising "BY SOME CHANCE common enough with nature," {104a} and clearly does not contemplate function as the sole cause of modification. Practically, though I grant I should be less able to quote passages in support of my opinion than I quite like, I do not doubt that his position was much the same as that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on the score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance, but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one. He saw that the cunning or functional side had been too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. "Let us suppose," he says, "that a grass growing in a low-lying meadow, gets carried BY SOME ACCIDENT to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where the soil is still damp enough for the plant to be able to exist." {105a} Or again—"With sufficient time, favourable conditions of life, successive changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living bodies, all animal and vegetable forms have been imperceptibly rendered such as we now see them." {105b} Who can doubt that accident is here regarded as a potent factor of evolution, as well as the design that is involved in the supposition that modification is, in the main, functionally induced? Again he writes, "As regards the circumstances that give rise to variation, the principal are climatic changes, different temperatures of any of a creature's environments, differences of abode, of habit, of the most frequent actions, and lastly of the means of obtaining food, self-defence, reproduction," &c. {105c} I will not dwell on the small inconsistencies which may be found in the passages quoted above; the reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless see that in spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, while believing modification to be effected mainly by the survival in the struggle for existence of modifications which had been induced functionally, would not have hesitated to admit the survival of favourable variations due to mere accident as also a potent factor in inducing the results we see around us.

For the rest, Mr. Spencer's articles have relieved me from the necessity of going into the evidence which proves that such structures as a giraffe's neck, for example, cannot possibly have been produced by the accumulation of variations which had their origin mainly in accident. There is no occasion to add anything to what Mr. Spencer has said on this score, and I am satisfied that those who do not find his argument convince them would not be convinced by anything I might say; I shall, therefore, omit what I had written on this subject, and confine myself to giving the substance of Mr. Spencer's most telling argument against Mr. Darwin's theory that accidental variations, if favourable, would accumulate and result in seemingly adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer well shows that luck or chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or helm, of evolution; but luck is only absence of design; if, then, absence of design is found to fail, it follows that there must have been design somewhere, nor can the design be more conveniently placed than in association with function.

Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to consist practically in the discharge of only one function, or where circumstances are such that some one function is supremely important (a state of things, by the way, more easily found in hypothesis than in nature—at least as continuing without modification for many successive seasons), then accidental variations, if favourable, would indeed accumulate and result in modification, without the aid of the transmission of functionally produced modification. This is true; it is also true, however, that only a very small number of species in comparison with those we see around us could thus arise, and that we should never have got plants and animals as embodiments of the two great fundamental principles on which it is alone possible that life can be conducted, {107a} and species of plants and animals as embodiments of the details involved in carrying out these two main principles.