"Enfin l'ouvrage de M. Darwin a paru. On ne peut qu'être frappé du talent
de l'auteur. Mais quo d'idées obscures, que d'idées fausses! Quel jargon
métaphysique jeté mal à propos dans l'histoire naturelle, qui tombe dans le
galimatias dès qu'elle sort des idées claires, des idées justes! Quel
langage prétentieux et vide! Quelles personnifications puériles et
surannées! O lucidité! 0 solidité de l'esprit Français, que devenez-vous?"
"Obscure ideas," "metaphysical jargon," "pretentious and empty language,"
"puerile and superannuated personifications." Mr. Darwin has many and hot
opponents on this side of the Channel and in Germany, but we do not
recollect to have found precisely these sins in the long catalogue of those
hitherto laid to his charge. It is worth while, therefore, to examine into
these discoveries effected solely by the aid of the "lucidity and solidity"
of the mind of M. Flourens.
According to M. Flourens, Mr. Darwin's great error is that he has
personified Nature (p. 10), and further that he has
"imagined a natural selection: he imagines afterwards that this power of
selecting (_pouvoir d'élire_) which he gives to Nature is similar to
the power of man. These two suppositions admitted, nothing stops him: he
plays with Nature as he likes, and makes her do all he pleases." (P. 6.)
And this is the way M. Flourens extinguishes natural selection:
"Voyons donc encore une fois, ce qu'il peut y avoir de fondé dans ce qu'on
nomme _élection naturelle_.
"_L'élection naturelle_ n'est sous un autre nom que la nature. Pour un
être organisé, la nature n'est que l'organisation, ni plus ni moins.
"Il faudra donc aussi personnifier _l'organisation,_ et dire que
_l'organisation_ choisit _l'organisation. L'élection naturelle_
est cette _forme substantielle_ dont on jouait autrefois avec tant de
facilité. Aristote disait que 'Si l'art de bâtir était dans le bois, cet
art agirait comme la nature.' A la place de _l'art de bâtir_ M. Darwin
met _l'élection naturelle,_ et c'est tout un: l'un n'est pas plus
chimérique que l'autre." (P. 31.)
And this is really all that M. Flourens can make of Natural Selection. We
have given the original, in fear lest a translation should be regarded as a
travesty; but with the original before the reader, we may try to analyse
the passage. "For an organised being, Nature is only organisation, neither
more nor less."
Organised beings then have absolutely no relation to inorganic nature: a
plant does not depend on soil or sunshine, climate, depth in the ocean,
height above it; the quantity of saline matters in water have no influence
upon animal life; the substitution of carbonic acid for oxygen in our
atmosphere would hurt nobody! That these are absurdities no one should know
better than M. Flourens; but they are logical deductions from the assertion
just quoted, and from the further statement that natural selection means
only that "organisation chooses and selects organisation."
For if it be once admitted (what no sane man denies) that the chances of
life of any given organism are increased by certain conditions (A) and
diminished by their opposites (B), then it is mathematically certain that
any change of conditions in the direction of (A) will exercise a selective
influence in favour of that organism, tending to its increase and
multiplication, while any change in the direction of (B) will exercise a
selective influence against that organism, tending to its decrease and
extinction.
Or, on the other hand, conditions remaining the same, let a given organism
vary (and no one doubts that they do vary) in two directions: into one form
(_a_) better fitted to cope with these conditions than the original
stock, and a second (_b_) less well adapted to them. Then it is no
less certain that the conditions in question must exercise a selective
influence in favour of (_a_) and against (_b_), so that
(_a_) will tend to predominance, and (_b_) to extirpation.
That M. Flourens should be unable to perceive the logical necessity of
these simple arguments, which lie at the foundation of all Mr. Darwin's
reasoning; that he should confound an irrefragable deduction from the
observed relations of organisms to the conditions which lie around them,
with a metaphysical "forme substantielle," or a chimerical personification
of the powers of Nature, would be incredible, were it not that other
passages of his work leave no room for doubt upon the subject.
"On imagine une _élection naturelle_ que, pour plus de ménagement, on
me dit être _inconsciente_, sans s'apercevoir que le contresens
littéral est précisément là: _élection inconsciente_." (P. 52.)
"J'ai déjà dit ce qu'il faut penser de _l'élection naturelle_. Ou
_l'élection naturelle_ n'est rien, ou c'est la nature: mais la nature
douée _d'élection_, mais la nature personnifiée: dernière erreur du
dernier siècle: Le XIXe ne fait plus de personnifications." (P. 53.)
M. Flourens cannot imagine an unconscious selection--it is for him a
contradiction in terms. Did M. Flourens ever visit one of the prettiest
watering-places of "la belle France," the Baie d'Arcachon? If so, he will
probably have passed through the district of the Landes, and will have had
an opportunity of observing the formation of "dunes" on a grand scale. What
are these "dunes"? The winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay have not much
consciousness, and yet they have with great care "selected," from among an
infinity of masses of silex of all shapes and sizes, which have been
submitted to their action, all the grains of sand below a certain size, and
have heaped them by themselves over a great area. This sand has been
"unconsciously selected" from amidst the gravel in which it first lay with
as much precision as if man had "consciously selected" it by the aid of a
sieve. Physical Geology is full of such selections--of the picking out of
the soft from the hard, of the soluble from the insoluble, of the fusible
from the infusible, by natural agencies to which we are certainly not in
the habit of ascribing consciousness.
But that which wind and sea are to a sandy beach, the sum of influences,
which we term the "conditions of existence," is to living organisms. The
weak are sifted out from the strong. A frosty night "selects" the hardy
plants in a plantation from among the tender ones as effectually as if it
were the wind, and they, the sand and pebbles, of our illustration; or, on
the other hand, as if the intelligence of a gardener had been operative in
cutting the weaker organisms down. The thistle, which has spread over the
Pampas, to the destruction of native plants, has been more effectually
"selected" by the unconscious operation of natural conditions than if a
thousand agriculturists had spent their time in sowing it.
It is one of Mr. Darwin's many great services to Biological science that he
has demonstrated the significance of these facts. He has shown that given
variation and given change of conditions the inevitable result is the
exercise of such an influence upon organisms that one is helped and another
is impeded; one tends to predominate, another to disappear; and thus the
living world bears within itself, and is surrounded by, impulses towards
incessant change.
But the truths just stated are as certain as any other physical laws, quite
independently of the truth, or falsehood, of the hypothesis which Mr.
Darwin has based upon them; and that Mr. Flourens, missing the substance
and grasping at a shadow, should be blind to the admirable exposition of
them, which Mr. Darwin has given, and see nothing there but a "dernière
erreur du dernier siècle"--a personification of Nature--leads us indeed to
cry with him: "O lucidité! O solidité de l'esprit Français, que
devenez-vous?"
M. Flourens has, in fact, utterly failed to comprehend the first principles
of the doctrine which he assails so rudely. His objections to details are
of the old sort, so battered and hackneyed on this side of the Channel,
that not even a Quarterly Reviewer could be induced to pick them up for the
purpose of pelting Mr. Darwin over again. We have Cuvier and the mummies;
M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties
presented by hybridism and by Palæontology; Darwinism a
_rifacciamento_ of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without
a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, &c. &c. How
one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65--
"Je laisse M. Darwin!"
But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to
his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Préexistence des Germes et de
l'Epigénèse," which opens thus:--
"Spontaneous generation is only a chimaera. This point established, two
hypotheses remain: that of _pre-existence_ and that of
_epigenesis_. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as
the other." (p. 163.)
"The doctrine of _epigenesis_ is derived from Harvey: following by
ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does, he
saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of
_appearance_ for the moment of _formation_ he imagined
_epigenesis_." (p. 165.)
On the contrary, says M. Flourens (p. 167),
"The new being is formed at a stroke (_tout d'un coup_), as a whole,
instantaneously; it is not formed part by part, and at different times. It
is formed at once at the single _individual_ moment at which the
conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."
It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be
mistaken. For him, the labours of Von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and their
contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England, are
non-existent: and, as Darwin "_imagina_" natural selection, so Harvey
"_imagina_" that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the
veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the circulation
of the blood.
Language such as that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so
utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the
best established facts, that we should have passed it over in silence had
it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens' unhesitating, _ à
priori_, repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of progressive
modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an
acquaintance with the phænomena of development, must indeed lack one of the
chief motives towards the endeavour to trace a genetic relation between the
different existing forms of life. Those who are ignorant of Geology, find
no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the
shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds
which indicate the site of a Roman camp as aught but part and parcel of the
primæval hillside. So M. Flourens, who believes that embryos are formed
"tout d'un coup," naturally finds no difficulty in conceiving that species
came into existence in the same way.