"Enfin l'ouvrage de M. Darwin a paru. On ne peut qu'etre frappe du
talent de l'auteur. Mais que d'idees obscures, que d'idees fausses! Quel
jargon metaphysique jete mal a propos dans l'histoire naturelle, qui
tombe dans le galimatias des qu'elle sort des idees claires, des idees
justes! Quel langage pretentieux et vide! Quelles personifications
pueriles et surannees! O lucidite! O solidite de l'esprit Francais, 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
selection (pouvoir d'elire) 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 fonde dans ce
qu'on nomme 'election naturelle'.
"'L'election naturelle' n'est sous un autre nom que la nature. Pour un
etre organise, 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'election naturelle' est
cette 'forme substantielle' dont on jouait autrefois avec tant de
facilite. Aristote disait que 'Si l'art de batir etait dans le bois, cet
art agirait comme la nature.' A la place de 'l'art de batir' M. Darwin
met 'l'election naturelle', et c'est tout un: l'un n'est pas plus
chimerique 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 organized being, Nature is only
organization, neither more nor less."
Organized 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 "organization chooses and selects
organization."
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 'election naturelle' que, pour plus de menagement, on me
dit etre 'inconsciente', sans s'apercevoir que le contre-sens litteral
est precisement la: 'election inconsciente'." (P. 52.)
"J'ai deja dit ce qu'il faut penser de 'l'election naturelle'. Ou
'l'election naturelle' n'est rien, ou c'est la nature: mais la nature
douee 'd'election', mais la nature personnifiee: derniere erreur du
dernier siecle: Le xixe 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 M. 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 "derniere erreur du dernier siecle"--a personification of
Nature--leads us indeed to cry with him: "O lucidite! O solidite de
l'esprit Francais, 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 Palaeontology; Darwinism a
'rifacciamento' of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a
commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, etc. etc.
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 Preexistence des Germes et de
l'Epigenese," which opens thus:--
"Spontaneous generation is only a chimera. 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,
a priori, repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of progressive
modification of living beings. He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an
acquaintance with the phenomena 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 primeval hill-side. 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.
End of Criticisms on "The Origin of Species".