Luck, or Cunning, as the Main Means of Organic Modification Part 8

"Against Mr. Lewes's proposition that the movements of living beings are prompted and guided by feeling, I urged that the amount and direction of every nervous discharge must depend solely on physical conditions. And I contended that to see this clearly is to see that when we speak of movement being guided by feeling, we use the language of a less advanced stage of enlightenment. This view has since occupied a good deal of attention. Under the name of automatism it has been advocated by Professor Huxley, and with firmer logic by Professor Clifford. In the minds of our savage ancestors feeling was the source of all movement . . . Using the word feeling in its ordinary sense . . . WE a.s.sERT NOT ONLY THAT NO EVIDENCE CAN BE GIVEN THAT FEELING EVER DOES GUIDE OR PROMPT ACTION, BUT THAT THE PROCESS OF ITS DOING SO IS INCONCEIVABLE. (Italics mine.) How can we picture to ourselves a state of consciousness putting in motion any particle of matter, large or small? Puss, while dozing before the fire, hears a light rustle in the corner, and darts towards the spot. What has happened? Certain sound-waves have reached the ear, a series of physical changes have taken place within the organism, special groups of muscles have been called into play, and the body of the cat has changed its position on the floor.

Is it a.s.serted that this chain of physical changes is not at all points complete and sufficient in itself?"

I have been led to turn to this article of Mr. Spalding's by Mr.

Stewart Duncan, who, in his "Conscious Matter," {142a} quotes the latter part of the foregoing extract. Mr. Duncan goes on to quote pa.s.sages from Professor Tyndall's utterances of about the same date which show that he too took much the same line--namely, that there is no causative connection between mental and physical processes; from this it is obvious he must have supposed that physical processes would go on just as well if there were no accompaniment of feeling and consciousness at all.

I have said enough to show that in the decade, roughly, between 1870 and 1880 the set of opinion among our leading biologists was strongly against mind, as having in any way influenced the development of animal and vegetable life, and it is not likely to be denied that the prominence which the mindless theory of natural selection had a.s.sumed in men's thoughts since 1860 was one of the chief reasons, if not the chief, for the turn opinion was taking.

Our leading biologists had staked so heavily upon natural selection from among fortuitous variations that they would have been more than human if they had not caught at everything that seemed to give it colour and support. It was while this mechanical fit was upon them, and in the closest connection with it, that the protoplasm boom developed. It was doubtless felt that if the public could be got to dislodge life, consciousness, and mind from any considerable part of the body, it would be no hard matter to dislodge it, presently, from the remainder; on this the deceptiveness of mind as a causative agent, and the sufficiency of a purely automatic conception of the universe, as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box, would be proved to demonstration. It would be proved from the side of mind by considerations derivable from automatic and unconscious action where mind ex hypothesi was not, but where action went on as well or better without it than with it; it would be proved from the side of body by what they would doubtless call the "most careful and exhaustive" examination of the body itself by the aid of appliances more ample than had ever before been within the reach of man.

This was all very well, but for its success one thing was a sine qua non--I mean the dislodgment must be thorough; the key must be got clean of even the smallest trace of blood, for unless this could be done all the argument went to the profit not of the mechanism, with which, for some reason or other, they were so much enamoured, but of the soul and design, the ideas which of all others were most distasteful to them. They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead them to it. They were driving life up into a corner, but they were not eliminating it, and, moreover, at the very moment of their thinking they had hedged it in and could throw their salt upon it, it flew mockingly over their heads and perched upon the place of all others where they were most scandalised to see it--I mean upon machines in use. So they retired sulkily to their tents baffled but not ashamed.

Some months subsequent to the completion of the foregoing chapter, and indeed just as this book is on the point of leaving my hands, there appears in Nature {144a} a letter from the Duke of Argyll, which shows that he too is impressed with the conviction expressed above--I mean that the real object our men of science have lately had in view has been the getting rid of mind from among the causes of evolution. The Duke says:-

"The violence with which false interpretations were put upon this theory (natural selection) and a function was a.s.signed to it which it could never fulfil, will some day be recognised as one of the least creditable episodes in the history of science. With a curious perversity it was the weakest elements in the theory which were seized upon as the most valuable, particularly the part a.s.signed to blind chance in the occurrence of variations. This was valued not for its scientific truth,--for it could pretend to none,--but because of its a.s.sumed bearing upon another field of thought and the weapon it afforded for expelling mind from the causes of evolution."

The Duke, speaking of Mr. Herbert Spencer's two articles in the Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886, to which I have already called attention, continues:-

"In these two articles we have for the first time an avowed and definite declaration against some of the leading ideas on which the mechanical philosophy depends; and yet the caution, and almost timidity, with which a man so eminent approaches the announcement of conclusions of the most self-evident truth is a most curious proof of the reign of terror which has come to be established."

Against this I must protest; the Duke cannot seriously maintain that the main scope and purpose of Mr. Herbert Spencer's articles is new.

Their substance has been before us in Mr. Spencer's own writings for some two-and-twenty years, in the course of which Mr. Spencer has been followed by Professor Mivart, the Rev. J. J. Murphy, the Duke of Argyll himself, and many other writers of less note. When the Duke talks about the establishment of a scientific reign of terror, I confess I regard such an exaggeration with something like impatience. Any one who has known his own mind and has had the courage of his opinions has been able to say whatever he wanted to say with as little let or hindrance during the last twenty years, as during any other period in the history of literature. Of course, if a man will keep blurting out unpopular truths without considering whose toes he may or may not be treading on, he will make enemies some of whom will doubtless be able to give effect to their displeasure; but that is part of the game. It is hardly possible for any one to oppose the fallacy involved in the Charles-Darwinian theory of natural selection more persistently and unsparingly than I have done myself from the year 1877 onwards; naturally I have at times been very angrily attacked in consequence, and as a matter of business have made myself as unpleasant as I could in my rejoinders, but I cannot remember anything having been ever attempted against me which could cause fear in any ordinarily const.i.tuted person. If, then, the Duke of Argyll is right in saying that Mr. Spencer has shown a caution almost amounting to timidity in attacking Mr.

Darwin's theory, either Mr. Spencer must be a singularly timid person, or there must be some cause for his timidity which is not immediately obvious. If terror reigns anywhere among scientific men, I should say it reigned among those who have staked imprudently on Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher. I may add that the discovery of the Duke's impression that there exists a scientific reign of terror, explains a good deal in his writings which it has not been easy to understand hitherto.

As regards the theory of natural selection, the Duke says:-

"From the first discussions which arose on this subject, I have ventured to maintain that . . . the phrase 'natural-selection'

represented no true physical cause, still less the complete set of causes requisite to account for the orderly procession of organic forms in Nature; that in so far as it a.s.sumed variations to arise by accident it was not only essentially faulty and incomplete, but fundamentally erroneous; in short, that its only value lay in the convenience with which it groups under one form of words, highly charged with metaphor, an immense variety of causes, some purely mental, some purely vital, and others purely physical or mechanical."

CHAPTER XI--The Way of Escape

To sum up the conclusions. .h.i.therto arrived at. Our philosophers have made the mistake of forgetting that they cannot carry the rough-and-ready language of common sense into precincts within which politeness and philosophy are supreme. Common sense sees life and death as distinct states having nothing in common, and hence in all respects the ant.i.theses of one another; so that with common sense there should be no degrees of livingness, but if a thing is alive at all it is as much alive as the most living of us, and if dead at all it is stone dead in every part of it. Our philosophers have exercised too little consideration in retaining this view of the matter. They say that an amoeba is as much a living being as a man is, and do not allow that a well-grown, highly educated man in robust health is more living than an idiot cripple. They say he differs from the cripple in many important respects, but not in degree of livingness. Yet, as we have seen already, even common sense by using the word "dying" admits degrees of life; that is to say, it admits a more and a less; those, then, for whom the superficial aspects of things are insufficient should surely find no difficulty in admitting that the degrees are more numerous than is dreamed of in the somewhat limited philosophy which common sense alone knows. Livingness depends on range of power, versatility, wealth of body and mind--how often, indeed, do we not see people taking a new lease of life when they have come into money even at an advanced age; it varies as these vary, beginning with things that, though they have mind enough for an outsider to swear by, can hardly be said to have yet found it out themselves, and advancing to those that know their own minds as fully as anything in this world does so. The more a thing knows its own mind the more living it becomes, for life viewed both in the individual and in the general as the outcome of acc.u.mulated developments, is one long process of specialising consciousness and sensation; that is to say, of getting to know one's own mind more and more fully upon a greater and greater variety of subjects. On this I hope to touch more fully in another book; in the meantime I would repeat that the error of our philosophers consists in not having borne in mind that when they quitted the ground on which common sense can claim authority, they should have reconsidered everything that common sense had taught them.

The votaries of common sense make the same mistake as philosophers do, but they make it in another way. Philosophers try to make the language of common sense serve for purposes of philosophy, forgetting that they are in another world, in which another tongue is current; common sense people, on the other hand, every now and then attempt to deal with matters alien to the routine of daily life. The boundaries between the two kingdoms being very badly defined, it is only by giving them a wide berth and being so philosophical as almost to deny that there is any either life or death at all, or else so full of common sense as to refuse to see one part of the body as less living than another, that we can hope to steer clear of doubt, inconsistency, and contradiction in terms in almost every other word we utter. We cannot serve the G.o.d of philosophy and the Mammon of common sense at one and the same time, and yet it would almost seem as though the making the best that can be made of both these worlds were the whole duty of organism.

It is easy to understand how the error of philosophers arose, for, slaves of habit as we all are, we are more especially slaves when the habit is one that has not been found troublesome. There is no denying that it saves trouble to have things either one thing or the other, and indeed for all the common purposes of life if a thing is either alive or dead the small supplementary residue of the opposite state should be neglected as too small to be observable. If it is good to eat we have no difficulty in knowing when it is dead enough to be eaten; if not good to eat, but valuable for its skin, we know when it is dead enough to be skinned with impunity; if it is a man, we know when he has presented enough of the phenomena of death to allow of our burying him and administering his estate; in fact, I cannot call to mind any case in which the decision of the question whether man or beast is alive or dead is frequently found to be perplexing; hence we have become so accustomed to think there can be no admixture of the two states, that we have found it almost impossible to avoid carrying this crude view of life and death into domains of thought in which it has no application. There can be no doubt that when accuracy is required we should see life and death not as fundamentally opposed, but as supplementary to one another, without either's being ever able to exclude the other altogether; thus we should indeed see some things as more living than others, but we should see nothing as either unalloyedly living or unalloyedly non-living. If a thing is living, it is so living that it has one foot in the grave already; if dead, it is dead as a thing that has already re-entered into the womb of Nature. And within the residue of life that is in the dead there is an element of death; and within this there is an element of life, and so ad infinitum-- again, as reflections in two mirrors that face one another.

In brief, there is nothing in life of which there are not germs, and, so to speak, harmonics in death, and nothing in death of which germs and harmonics may not be found in life. Each emphasizes what the other pa.s.ses over most lightly--each carries to its extreme conceivable development that which in the other is only sketched in by a faint suggestion--but neither has any feature rigorously special to itself. Granted that death is a greater new departure in an organism's life, than any since that congeries of births and deaths to which the name embryonic stages is commonly given, still it is a new departure of the same essential character as any other-- that is to say, though there be much new there is much, not to say more, old along with it. We shrink from it as from any other change to the unknown, and also perhaps from an instinctive sense that the fear of death is a sine qua non for physical and moral progress, but the fear is like all else in life, a substantial thing which, if its foundations be dug about, is found to rest on a superst.i.tious basis.

Where, and on what principle, are the dividing lines between living and non-living to be drawn? All attempts to draw them hitherto have ended in deadlock and disaster; of this M. Vianna De Lima, in his "Expose Sommaire des Theories transformistes de Lamarck, Darwin, et Haeckel," {150a} says that all attempts to trace une ligne de demarcation nette et profonde entre la matiere vivante et la matiere inerte have broken down. {150b} Il y a un reste de vie dans le cadavre, says Diderot, {150c} speaking of the more gradual decay of the body after an easy natural death, than after a sudden and violent one; and so Buffon begins his first volume by saying that "we can descend, by almost imperceptible degrees, from the most perfect creature to the most formless matter--from the most highly organised matter to the most entirely inorganic substance." {150d}

Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within the body? If we answer "yes," then, as we have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall off? Are they less living than brain? Answer "yes," and degrees are admitted, which we have already seen prove fatal; answer "no," and we must deny that one part of the body is more vital than another--and this is refusing to go as far even as common sense does; answer that these things are not very important, and we quit the ground of equity and high philosophy on which we have given ourselves such airs, and go back to common sense as unjust judges that will hear those widows only who importune us.

As with the non-living so also with the living. Are we to let it pa.s.s beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary overflow of livingness to ordain as it were machines in use? Then death will fare, if we once let life without the body, as life fares if we once let death within it. It becomes swallowed up in life, just as in the other case life was swallowed up in death. Are we to confine it to the body? If so, to the whole body, or to parts? And if to parts, to what parts, and why? The only way out of the difficulty is to rehabilitate contradiction in terms, and say that everything is both alive and dead at one and the same time--some things being much living and little dead, and others, again, much dead and little living. Having done this we have only got to settle what a thing is--when a thing is a thing pure and simple, and when it is only a congeries of things--and we shall doubtless then live very happily and very philosophically ever afterwards.

But here another difficulty faces us. Common sense does indeed know what is meant by a "thing" or "an individual," but philosophy cannot settle either of these two points. Professor Mivart made the question "What are Living Beings?" the subject of an article in one of our leading magazines only a very few years ago. He asked, but he did not answer. And so Professor Moseley was reported (Times, January 16, 1885) as having said that it was "almost impossible" to say what an individual was. Surely if it is only "almost"

impossible for philosophy to determine this, Professor Moseley should have at any rate tried to do it; if, however, he had tried and failed, which from my own experience I should think most likely, he might have spared his "almost." "Almost" is a very dangerous word. I once heard a man say that an escape he had had from drowning was "almost" providential. The difficulty about defining an individual arises from the fact that we may look at "almost"

everything from two different points of view. If we are in a common-sense humour for simplifying things, treating them broadly, and emphasizing resemblances rather than differences, we can find excellent reasons for ignoring recognised lines of demarcation, calling everything by a new name, and unifying up till we have united the two most distant stars in heaven as meeting and being linked together in the eyes and souls of men; if we are in this humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long, if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole, one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing, till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready kind.

What else, however, can we do? We can only escape the Scylla of calling everything by one name, and recognising no individual existences of any kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a name for everything, or by some piece of intellectual sharp practice like that of the shrewd but unprincipled Ulysses. If we were consistent honourable gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we should go like lambs; every subterfuge by the help of which we escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of cla.s.sification that turns a deaf ear to everything not robust enough to hold its own; nevertheless even the most scrupulous of philosophers pockets his consistency at a pinch, and refuses to let the native hue of resolution be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, nor yet fobbed by the rusty curb of logic. He is right, for a.s.suredly the poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances them, he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground of common sense, and should not therefore hold himself too stiffly in the matter of logic.

As with life and death so with design and absence of design or luck.

So also with union and disunion. There is never either absolute design rigorously pervading every detail, nor yet absolute absence of design pervading any detail rigorously, so, as between substances, there is neither absolute union and h.o.m.ogeneity, not absolute disunion and heterogeneity; there is always a little place left for repentance; that is to say, in theory we should admit that both design and chance, however well defined, each have an aroma, as it were, of the other. Who can think of a case in which his own design--about which he should know more than any other, and from which, indeed, all his ideas of design are derived--was so complete that there was no chance in any part of it? Who, again, can bring forward a case even of the purest chance or good luck into which no element of design had entered directly or indirectly at any juncture? This, nevertheless, does not involve our being unable ever to ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning. In some cases a decided preponderance of the action, whether seen as a whole or looked at in detail, is recognised at once as due to design, purpose, forethought, skill, and effort, and then we properly disregard the undesigned element; in others the details cannot without violence be connected with design, however much the position which rendered the main action possible may involve design--as, for example, there is no design in the way in which individual pieces of coal may hit one another when shot out of a sack, but there may be design in the sack's being brought to the particular place where it is emptied; in others design may be so hard to find that we rightly deny its existence, nevertheless in each case there will be an element of the opposite, and the residuary element would, if seen through a mental microscope, be found to contain a residuary element of ITS opposite, and this again of ITS opposite, and so on ad infinitum, as with mirrors standing face to face. This having been explained, and it being understood that when we speak of design in organism we do so with a mental reserve of exceptis excipiendis, there should be no hesitation in holding the various modifications of plants and animals to be in such preponderating measure due to function, that design, which underlies function, is the fittest idea with which to connect them in our minds.

We will now proceed to inquire how Mr. Darwin came to subst.i.tute, or try to subst.i.tute, the survival of the luckiest fittest, for the survival of the most cunning fittest, as held by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck; or more briefly how he came to subst.i.tute luck for cunning.

CHAPTER XII--Why Darwin's Variations were Accidental

Some may perhaps deny that Mr. Darwin did this, and say he laid so much stress on use and disuse as virtually to make function his main factor of evolution.

If, indeed, we confine ourselves to isolated pa.s.sages, we shall find little difficulty in making out a strong case to this effect.

Certainly most people believe this to be Mr. Darwin's doctrine, and considering how long and fully he had the ear of the public, it is not likely they would think thus if Mr. Darwin had willed otherwise, nor could he have induced them to think as they do if he had not said a good deal that was capable of the construction so commonly put upon it; but it is hardly necessary, when addressing biologists, to insist on the fact that Mr. Darwin's distinctive doctrine is the denial of the comparative importance of function, or use and disuse, as a purveyor of variations,--with some, but not very considerable, exceptions, chiefly in the cases of domesticated animals.

He did not, however, make his distinctive feature as distinct as he should have done. Sometimes he said one thing, and sometimes the directly opposite. Sometimes, for example, the conditions of existence "included natural selection" or the fact that the best adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; {156a} sometimes "the principle of natural selection" "fully embraced" "the expression of conditions of existence." {156b} It would not be easy to find more unsatisfactory writing than this is, nor any more clearly indicating a mind ill at ease with itself.

Sometimes "ants work BY INHERITED INSTINCTS and inherited tools;"

{157a} sometimes, again, it is surprising that the case of ants working by inherited instincts has not been brought as a demonstrative argument "against the well-known doctrine of INHERITED HABIT, as advanced by Lamarck." {157b} Sometimes the winglessness of beetles inhabiting ocean islands is "mainly due to natural selection," {157c} and though we might be tempted to ascribe the rudimentary condition of the wing to disuse, we are on no account to do so--though disuse was probably to some extent "combined with"

natural selection; at other times "it is probable that disuse has been the main means of rendering the wings of beetles living on small exposed islands" rudimentary. {157d} We may remark in pa.s.sing that if disuse, as Mr. Darwin admits on this occasion, is the main agent in rendering an organ rudimentary, use should have been the main agent in rendering it the opposite of rudimentary--that is to say, in bringing about its development. The ostensible raison d'etre, however, of the "Origin of Species" is to maintain that this is not the case.

There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with modification which does not find support in some one pa.s.sage or another of the "Origin of Species." If it were desired to show that there is no substantial difference between the doctrine of Erasmus Darwin and that of his grandson, it would be easy to make out a good case for this, in spite of Mr. Darwin's calling his grandfather's views "erroneous," in the historical sketch prefixed to the later editions of the "Origin of Species." Pa.s.sing over the pa.s.sage already quoted on p. 62 of this book, in which Mr. Darwin declares "habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary"--a sentence, by the way, than which none can be either more unfalteringly Lamarckian or less tainted with the vices of Mr. Darwin's later style--pa.s.sing this over as having been written some twenty years before the "Origin of Species"--the last paragraph of the "Origin of Species"

itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian. It declares the laws in accordance with which organic forms a.s.sumed their present shape to be--"Growth with reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and from use and disuse, &c." {158a} Wherein does this differ from the confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck? Where are the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now? And if they are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where ought they to be made important?

Mr. Darwin immediately goes on: "A ratio of existence so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms;" so that natural selection turns up after all.

Yes--in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in the special sense up to this time attached to it in the "Origin of Species." The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere in Mr. Darwin's book and on his t.i.tle-page the preservation of "favoured" or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties that have come to be varieties through the causes a.s.signed in the preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin's sentence; and these are mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two cla.s.ses of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually get an acc.u.mulation of variation, and widely different types will come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur with sufficient steadiness for acc.u.mulation to be possible. In the body of Mr. Darwin's book the variations are supposed to be mainly due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection, therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the peroration the position is reversed in toto; the selection is now made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function; here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning. We are such slaves of words that, seeing the words "natural selection" employed- -and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words "natural selection"--it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.

And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not perfectly well know what he had done. Mr. Darwin edited and re- edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words "by the Creator," which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain. Even if in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long before he revised the "Origin of Species" for the last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.

It was not Mr. Darwin's manner to put his reader on his guard; we might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put us on our guard about the Irish land bills. Caveat lector seems to have been his motto. Mr.

Spencer, in the articles already referred to, is at pains to show that Mr. Darwin's opinions in later life underwent a change in the direction of laying greater stress on functionally produced modifications, and points out that in the sixth edition of the "Origin of Species" Mr. Darwin says, "I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them;" whereas in his first edition he said, "I think there can be LITTLE doubt" of this. Mr.

Spencer also quotes a pa.s.sage from "The Descent of Man," in which Mr. Darwin said that EVEN IN THE FIRST EDITION of the "Origin of Species" he had attributed great effect to function, as though in the later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was any considerable change of position, it should not have been left to be toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and comparison of pa.s.sages far removed from one another in other books. If his mind had undergone the modification supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin should have said so in a prominent pa.s.sage of some later edition of the "Origin of Species." He should have said--"In my earlier editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose acc.u.mulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific difference, and I laid too much stress on the acc.u.mulation of merely accidental variations;" having said this, he should have summarised the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he had originally written. If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to use our judgments to the best advantage. The public will forgive many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of the "Origin of Species" in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification. How shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in "Life and Habit," p. 260, and in "Evolution, Old and New," p. 359; I need not, therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder to what I then said. Curiously enough the sentence does not bear out Mr. Spencer's contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications, for it runs: {161a}--"In the earlier editions of this work I underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of modifications due," not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to use and disuse, but "to spontaneous variability," by which can only be intended, "to variations in no way connected with use and disuse," as not being a.s.signable to any known cause of general application, and referable as far as we are concerned to accident only; so that he gives the natural survival of the luckiest, which is indeed his distinctive feature, if it deserve to be called a feature at all, greater prominence than ever. Nevertheless there is no change in his concluding paragraph, which still remains an embodiment of the views of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

The other pa.s.sage is on p. 421 of the edition of 1876. It stands:- "I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly" (why "thoroughly"?) "convinced me that species have been modified during a long course of descent. This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously. It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection."

Here, again, it is not use and disuse which Mr. Darwin declares himself to have undervalued, but spontaneous variations. The sentence just given is one of the most confusing I ever read even in the works of Mr Darwin. It is the essence of his theory that the "numerous successive, slight, favourable variations," above referred to, should be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous; it is evident, moreover, that they are intended in this pa.s.sage to be accidental or spontaneous, although neither of these words is employed, inasmuch as use and disuse and the action of the conditions of existence, whether direct or indirect, are mentioned specially as separate causes which purvey only the minor part of the variations from among which nature selects. The words "that is, in relation to adaptive forms" should be omitted, as surplusage that draws the reader's attention from the point at issue; the sentence really amounts to this--that modification has been effected CHIEFLY THROUGH SELECTION in the ordinary course of nature FROM AMONG SPONTANEOUS VARIATIONS, AIDED IN AN UNIMPORTANT MANNER BY VARIATIONS WHICH QUa US ARE SPONTANEOUS. Nevertheless, though these spontaneous variations are still so trifling in effect that they only aid spontaneous variations in an unimportant manner, in his earlier editions Mr.

Darwin thought them still less important than he does now.

This comes of tinkering. We do not know whether we are on our heads or our heels. We catch ourselves repeating "important,"

"unimportant," "unimportant," "important," like the King when addressing the jury in "Alice in Wonderland;" and yet this is the book of which Mr. Grant Allen {163a} says that it is "one of the greatest, and most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crus.h.i.+ng, the most conclusive, that the world has ever seen.

Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to the next. So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of any biological theory." The book and the eulogy are well mated.