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 _résumé_ of Mr. Darwin’s theory side by side with a
similar _résumé_ 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 _arrière pensée_ 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 _quâ_ 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.