THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
PRESENTED BY
PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND
MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID
ORGANIC EVOLUTION
ORGANIC EVOLUTION
CROSS-EXAMINED
OR SOME SUGGESTIONS ON THE
GREAT SECRET OF BIOLOGY
BY THE
DUKE OF ARGYLL
K.G., ETC.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN AND CO.
1898
PREFACE
THE three Chapters in this work little
altered were all originally contribu-
tions to the Nineteenth Century, which
by the kind permission of the Editor,
Mr. Knowles, I now republish in a
separate and connected form.
Mr. Spencer, in the May 1897
number of the same Review, has
ascribed to me, in these papers, several
misconceptions as to his contentions
and position. These, however, are all
open to argument except one. In
this one Mr. Spencer thinks I have
3771
vi PREFACE
represented him as accepting a com-
paratively short period for the duration
of the living world whereas he merely
argued that even assuming the shorter
period, it might be quite long enough
for the evolutions of Biology. I quite
understood this, and have altered a few
words to make the meaning clearer.
In my reasoning, and in his former
reasoning, everything turns not on the
actual time, but on the supposed neces-
sity for some enormous time. This is
abandoned in Mr. Spencer's new argu-
ment, and the change is one having all
the significance that I attach to it.
ARGYLL.
CHAPTER I
A GREAT CONFESSION
AMONG the many distinguished men who
have contributed to the world's plebiscite
in favour of the Darwinian hypothesis
on the origin of species, there is no
one so distinguished as Mr. Herbert
Spencer. He alone has dealt with
it systematically. He has pursued the
idea of development with wonderful
ingenuity through not a few of its
thousand ramifications. He has carried
it into philosophy and metaphysics. He
has clothed it in numerous and subtle
forms of speech, appealing to various
faculties, and offering to each its appro-
2 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
priate objects of recognition. He is the
author of that other phrase, " the survival
of the fittest," which has almost super-
seded Darwin's own original phrase of
"natural selection." Nothing could be
happier than this invention for the
purpose of giving vogue to whatever it
might be supposed to mean. There is
a roundness, neatness, and compactness
about it, which imparts to it all the
qualities of a projectile with immense
penetrating power. It is a signal
illustration of itself. It is the fittest of
all phrases to survive. There is a sense
of self-evident truth about it which fills
us with satisfaction. It may perhaps be
suspected sometimes of being a perfect
specimen of the knowledge that puffeth
up, because there is a suggestion about
it not easily dismissed that it is tauto-
logical. The survival of the fittest may
be translated into the survival of that
i AN IMPOSING PHRASE 3
which does actually survive. But the
special power of it lies in this, that it
sounds as if it expressed a true physical
cause. It gets rid of that detestable refer-
ence to the analogies of mind which are
inseparably associated with the phrase of
natural selection. It is the great object
of all true science as some think to
eliminate these analogies, and if possible
to abolish them. Survival of the fittest
seems to tell us not only of that which is,
but of that which must be. It breathes
the very air of necessity and of demon-
stration. Among the influences which
have tended to popularise the Darwinian
hypothesis, and to give it the imposing
air of a complete and satisfactory ex-
planation of all phenomena, it may well be
doubted whether anything has been more
powerful than the wide acceptance of
this simple formula of expression.
Such is the authority who some
4 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
years ago contributed to the Nineteenth
Century Review two papers upon " The
Factors in Organic Evolution." The
plural title is significant. The sur-
vival of the fittest is a cause which
after all does not stand alone. It is
not so complete as it has been assumed
to be. There are in organic evolution
more elements than one. There is con-
cerned in it not one cause but a plurality
of causes. A "factor" is specially a
doer. It is that which works and does.
It is a word appropriated to the con-
ception of an immediate, an efficient
cause. And of these causes there are
more than one. Neither natural selection
nor survival of the fittest is of itself a
sufficient explanation. They must be
supplemented. There are other factors
which must be admitted and confessed.
This is the first and most notable
feature of Mr. Spencer's articles. But
i POPULAR DECEPTIONS 5
there is another closely connected with
it, and that is the emphatic testimony he
bears to the fact that the existing popular
conception is unconscious of any defect
or failing in the all -sufficiency of the
Darwinian hypothesis. He speaks of
the process brought into clear view by
Mr. Darwin, and of those with whom he
is about to argue, as men " who conclude
that taken alone it accounts for organic
evolution." 1 In order to make his own
coming contention clearer, he devises
new forms of expression for defining
accurately the hypothesis of Darwin.
He calls it "the natural selection of
favourable variations." Again and again
he emphasises the fact that these varia-
tions, according to the theory, were
" spontaneous," and that their utility was
only " fortunate," or, in other words,
accidental. He speaks of them as
1 P. 570.
6 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
" fortuitously arising " ; x and it is of this
theory, so defined and rendered precise,
that he admits it to be now commonly
supposed to have been " the sole factor "
in the origin of species.
It is surely worth considering for a
moment the wonderful state of mind
which this declaration discloses. When
Mr. Herbert Spencer here speaks of the
" popular " belief, he is not speaking
of the mob. He is not referring to
any mere superstition of the illiterate
multitude. He is speaking of all ranks
in the world of science. He is speaking
of some overwhelming majority of those
who are investigators of Nature in some
one or other of her departments, and
who are supposed generally to recognise,
as a cardinal principle in science, that
the reign of law is universal there that
nothing is fortuitous that nothing is the
1 P. 575-
i FORTUITY NO EXPLANATION 7
result of accident. Yet Mr. Herbert
Spencer represents this great mass and
variety of men as believing in the pre-
servation of accidental variations as " the
sole factor," and as the one adequate ex-
planation in all the wonders of organic life.
Nor can there be any better proof of
the strength of his impression upon this
subject than to observe his own tone
when he ventures to dissent. He speaks,
if not literally with bated breath, yet at
least with a deferential reverence for the
popular dogma, which is really a curious
phenomenon in the history of thought.
"We may fitly ask," he says, whether it
" accounts for " organic evolution. " On
critically examining the evidence," he
proceeds, "we shall find reason to think
that it by no means explains all that has
to be explained." And then follows an
allusion of curious significance. " Omit-
ting," says Mr. Spencer, "for the present
8 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
any consideration of a factor which may
be distinguished as primordial " l Here
we have the mind of this distinguished
philosopher confessing to itself as it
were in a whisper and aside that
Darwin's ultimate conception of some
primordial " breathing of the breath of
life " is a conception which can only be
omitted "for the present." Meanwhile
he goes on with a special, and it must
be confessed a most modest, suggestion
of one other " factor" in addition to
natural selection, which he thinks will
remove many difficulties that remain
unsolved when natural selection is taken
by itself. But whilst great interest at-
taches to the fact that Mr. Herbert
Spencer does not hold natural selection
to be the sole factor in organic evolution,
it is more than doubtful whether any
value attaches to the new factor with
1 P. 570.
i USE AND DISUSE 9
which he desires to supplement it. It
seems unaccountable indeed that Mr.
Herbert Spencer should make so great
a fuss about so small a matter as the
effect of use and disuse of particular
organs as a separate and a newly re-
cognised factor in the development of
varieties. That persistent disuse of any
organ will occasion atrophy of the parts
concerned is surely one of the best
established of physiological facts. That
organs thus enfeebled are transmitted
by inheritance to offspring in a like con-
dition of functional and structural decline
is a correlated physiological doctrine not
generally disputed. The converse case
of increased strength and development
arising out of the habitual and healthy
use of special organs, and of the trans-
mission of these to offspring is a case
illustrated by many examples in the
breeding of domestic animals. I do not
io A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
know to what else we can attribute the
long slender legs and bodies of grey-
hounds so manifestly adapted to speed
of foot, or the delicate powers of smell
in pointers and setters, or a dozen other
cases of modified structure effected by
artificial selection.
But the most remarkable feature in
the elaborate argument of Mr. Spencer
on this subject is its complete irrelevancy.
Natural selection is an elastic formula
under which this new "factor" may be
easily comprehended. In truth the
whole argument raised in favour of
structural modification arising out of
functional use and disuse, is an argument
which implies that Mr. Spencer has not
himself entirely shaken off that interpre-
tation of natural selection which he is
disputing. He treats it as if it were the
definite expression of some true physical
and efficient cause, to which he only
i HEREDITY n
claims to add some subsidiary help from
another physical cause which is wholly
separate. But if natural selection is a
mere phrase, vague enough and wide
enough to cover any number of the
physical causes concerned in ordinary
generation, then the whole of Mr.
Spencer's laborious argument in favour
of his " other factor " becomes an argu-
ment worse than superfluous. It is
wholly fallacious in assuming that this
" factor " and " natural selection " are at
all exclusive of, or even separate from,
each other. The factor thus assumed
to be new is simply one of the sub-
ordinate cases of heredity. But heredity
is the central idea of natural selection.
Therefore natural selection includes and
covers all the causes which can possibly
operate through inheritance. There is
thus no difficulty whatever in referring
it to the same one factor whose solitary
12 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
dominion Mr. Spencer has plucked up
courage to dispute. He will never suc-
ceed in shaking its dictatorship by such
a small rebellion. His little contention
is like some bit of Bumbledom setting
up for Home Rule some parochial
vestry claiming independence of a uni-
versal empire. It pretends to set up for
itself in some fragment of an idea. But
here is not even a fragment to boast of
or to stand up for. His new factor in
organic evolution has neither independ-
ence nor novelty. Mr. Spencer is able
to quote himself as having mentioned it
in his Principles of Biology published
some twenty years ago ; and by a careful
ransacking of Darwin he shows that the
idea was familiar to and admitted by him
at least in his last edition of the Origin
of Species. Mr. Spencer insists that this
fact is evidence of a " reaction" in Dar-
win's mind against the sole factorship of
i DARWIN'S FORTUITY 13
natural selection. Darwin was a man
so much wiser than all his followers, and
there are in his book so many indications
of his sense of our great ignorance, that
most probably he did grow in the con-
sciousness of the necessary incomplete-
ness and shortcomings of his own
explanations. But there was nothing
whatever to startle him in the idea of
heredity propagating structural change,
through functional use and disuse. This
idea was not incongruous with his own
more general conception. On the con-
trary, it was strictly congruous and
harmoniously subordinate. He did not
profess to account for all the varieties
which emerge in organic forms. Provi-
sionally, and merely for the convenience
of leaving that subject open, he spoke of
them as fortuitous. But to assume the
really fortuitous or accidental character
of variation to be an essential part of
14 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
this theory is merely one of the many
follies and fanaticisms of his followers.
Although, therefore, the particular
case chosen by Mr. Herbert Spencer to
illustrate the incompetency of natural
selection, taken alone, to explain all the
facts of organic evolution is a case of
little or no value for the purpose, yet
the attitude of mind into which he is
thrown in the conduct of his argument
leads him to results which are eminently
instructive. The impulse " critically to
examine" such a phrase as " natural
selection " is in itself an impulse quite
certain to be fruitful. The very origin
of that impulse gives it of necessity right
direction. Antagonism to a prevalent
dogma so unreasoning as to set up such
a mere phrase as the embodiment of a
complete philosophy is an antagonism
thoroughly wholesome. Once implanted
in Mr. Herbert Spencer's mind, it is
i BLINDNESS IN DARWINIANS 15
curious to observe how admirably it
illustrates the idea of development.
Having first sought some shelter of
authority under words of the great pro-
phet himself, he becomes more and more
aggressive against the pretenders to his
authority. His grumbles against them
become loud and louder as he proceeds.
He speaks of " those who have committed
themselves to the current exclusive inter-
pretation. " l He observes upon ' ' inatten-
tion and reluctant attention " as leading
to the ignoring of facts. He speaks ot
" alienation from a belief" as "causing
naturalists to slight the evidence which
supports that belief, and refuse to occupy
themselves in seeking further evidence."
He compares their blindness now re-
specting the insufficiency of natural se-
lection with the blindness of naturalists
to the facts of evolution before Darwin's
1 P. 581.
1 6 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
book appeared. He marshals and reiter-
ates the obvious considerations which
prove that the development of animal
forms must necessarily depend on an
immense number and variety of adjusted
changes in many different organs, all
co-operating with each other, and all
nicely adjusted to the improved func-
tional actions in which they must all par-
take. He reduces to a numerical com-
putation the practical impossibility of
such changes occurring as the result of
accident. He tells his opponents that
the chances against any adequate re-
adjustments fortuitously arising "must
be infinity to one." 1 But more than this :
he not only repels the Darwinian factor
as adequate by itself, but, advancing in
his conclusions, he declares that it must
be eliminated altogether. On further
consideration he tells us that in his
1 P. 57i.
i FANATICAL DARWINIANS 17
opinion it can have neither part nor lot
in this matter. He insists that the corre-
lated changes are so numerous and so
remote that the greater part of them
cannot be ascribed (even) in any degree
to the mere selection of favourable varia-
tions. 1 Then facing the opponents
whose mingled credulities and increduli-
ties he has so offended, he rebukes their
fanaticisms according to a well-known
formula: " Nowadays," he says, "most
naturalists are more Darwinian than Mr.
Darwin himself." 2
This is most true ; and Mr. Herbert
Spencer need not be the least sur-
prised. All this happens according
to a law. When a great man dies,
leaving behind him some new idea
new either in itself or in the use he
makes of it it is almost invariably seized
upon and ridden to the death by the
1 P. 574- 2 P. 584.
1 8 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
shouting multitudes who think they
follow him. Mr. Herbert Spencer here
directs upon their confusions the search-
ing light of his analysis. He most
truly distinguishes Darwin's hypothesis
in itself, first from the theory of " organic
evolution in general," and secondly from
" the theory of evolution at large. " This
analysis roughly corresponds with the
distinctions I have pointed out in the
preceding paper; and when he points
to the confounding of these distinctions
under one phrase as the secret of wide
delusions, he has got hold of a clue by
which much further unravelling may be
done. Guided by this clue, and in the
light of this analysis, he brings down
Darwin's theory to a place and a rank in
science which must be still further offen-
sive to those whom he designates as the
" mass of readers." He speaks of it as
" a great contribution to the theory of
i A CONTRIBUTION ONLY 19
organic evolution." It is in his view a
"contribution," and nothing more a step
in the investigation of a subject of enor-
mous complexity and extent, but by no
means a complete or satisfactory solution
of even the most obvious difficulties pre-
sented by what we know of the structure
and the history of organic forms.
It is no part of my object here
to criticise in detail the value of that
special conception with which Mr.
Herbert Spencer now supplements the
deficiencies of the Darwinian theory.
He calls it "inheritance of functionally
produced modifications," and he makes
a tremendous claim on its behalf. He
evidently thinks that it supplies not only
a new and wholly separate factor, but
that it goes a long way towards solving
many of the difficulties of organic evolu-
tion. Nothing could indicate more
strongly the immense proportions which
20 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
this idea has assumed in his mind than
the question which he propounds towards
the conclusion of his paper. Supposing
the new factor to be admitted, " do there
remain," he asks, " no classes of organic
phenomena unaccounted for? " Wonder-
ful question, indeed ! But at least it is
satisfactory to find that his reply is more
rational than his inquiry : " to this ques-
tion, I think it must be replied that there
do remain classes of organic phenomena
unaccounted for. It may, I believe, be
shown that certain cardinal traits of
animals and plants at large are still un-
explained " ; and so he proceeds to the
second paper, in which the still refractory
residuum is to be reduced.
Whatever other value may attach to
an attempt so ambitious, it is at least
attended with this advantage, that it
leads Mr. Herbert Spencer to follow up
the path of " further consideration " into
i CONFOUNDING OF DISTINCTIONS 21
the phrases and formulae of the Dar-
winian hypothesis. And he does so
with memorable results. What he him-
self always aims at is to obliterate the
separating lines between the organic and
the inorganic, and to reduce all the
phenomena of life to the terms of
such purely physical agencies as the
mechanical forces, light, heat, and
chemical affinity, etc. In this quest he
finds the Darwinian phrases in his way.
Accordingly, although himself the author
and inventor of the most popular among
them, he turns upon them a fire of most
destructive criticism. He allows them
to be, or to have been, " convenient and
indeed needful " l in the conduct of dis-
cussion, but he condemns them as
11 liable to mislead us by veiling the
actual agencies " in organic evolution.
That very objection which has always
1 P. 749-
22 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
been made against all phrases involving
the idea of creation that they are meta-
phorical is now unsparingly applied to
Darwin's own phrase "natural selection."
Its "implications" are pronounced to
be "misleading." The analogies it
points at are indeed definite enough, but
unfortunately the " definiteness is of
a wrong kind." "The tacitly implied
* nature' which selects is not an embodied
agency analogous to the man who selects
artificially." This objection cuts down
to the very root of the famous formula,
and to that very element in it which has
most widely commended it to popular
recognition and acceptance. But this is
not all. Mr. Herbert Spencer goes, if
possible, still deeper down, and digs up
the last vestige of foundation for the
vast but rambling edifice which has
been erected on a phrase. The special
boast of its worshippers has always been
i A MERE FIGURE OF SPEECH 23
that it represented and embodied that
great reform which removed the pro-
cesses of organic evolution once and for
ever from the dominion of deceptive
metaphor, and founded them for the
first time on true physical causation.
But Mr. Herbert Spencer will have
none of this. The whole of this preten-
sion goes by the board. He pro-
nounces upon it this most true and
emphatic condemnation, "The words
natural selection do not express a
cause in the physical sense." 1 It is a
mere " convenient figure of speech." 2
But even this is not enough to satisfy
Mr. Spencer in his destructive criticism.
He goes himself into the confessional.
He had done what he could to amend
Darwin's phrase. He had "sought to
present the phenomena in literal terms
rather than metaphorical terms," and in
1 P. 749- 2 P- 750.
24 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
this search he was led to " survival of
the fittest." But he frankly admits that
" kindred objections may be urged
against the expression " to which this
leading led him. The first of these
words in a vague way, and the second
word in a clear way, calls up an idea
which he must admit to be "anthropo-
centric." What an embarrassment it is
that the human mind cannot wholly turn
the back upon itself. Self-evisceration,
the happy despatch of the Japanese, is
not impossible or even difficult, although
when it is done the man does not expect
to continue in life. But self-evisceration
by the intellectual faculties is a much
more arduous operation, especially when
we expect to go on thinking and defin-
ing as before. It is conceivable that a
man might live at least for a time with-
out his viscera, but it is not conceivable
that a mind should reason with only
i " ANTHROPOCENTRIC " 25
some bit or fragment of his brain. In
the mysterious convolutions of that
mysterious substance there are, as it
were, a thousand retinae each set to
receive its own special impressions from
the external world. They are all
needed ; but they are not all of equal
dignity. Some catch the lesser and
others catch the higher lights of nature ;
some reflect mere numerical order or
mechanical arrangement, whilst others
are occupied with the causes and the
reasons, and the purposes of these.
Some philosophers make it their busi-
ness to blindfold the facets which are
sensitive to such higher things, and to
open those only which are adapted to
see the lower. And yet these very men
generally admit that the faculties of
vision which see the higher relations
are peculiarly human. They are so
identified with the human intellect that
26 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
they can hardly be separated. And
hence they are called anthropomorphic,
or, as Mr. Spencer prefers to call them,
"anthropocentric." This close associa-
tion this characteristic union is the
very thing which Mr. Spencer dislikes.
Yet the earnest endeavours of Mr.
Spencer to get out of himself to elimi-
nate every conception which is " anthro-
pocentric" have very naturally come
to grief. " Survival " ? Does not this
word derive its meaning from our own
conceptions of life and death ? Away
with it, then. What has a true philo-
sopher to do with such conceptions?
Why will they intrude their noxious
presence into the purified ideas of a
mind seeking to be freed from all
anthropocentric contamination ? And
then that other word "fittest," does it
not still more clearly belong to the
rejected concepts ? Does it not smell
i ADJUSTMENTS DENIED 27
of the analogies derived from the morti-
fied and discarded members of intelli-
gence and of will ? Does it not suggest
such notions as a key fitting a lock, or a
glove fitting a hand, and is it worthy of
the glorified vision we may enjoy of
Nature to think of her correlations as
having any analogy with adjustments
such as these ? In the face of the
innumerable and complicated adjust-
ments of a purely mechanical kind which
are conspicuous in organic life, Mr.
Spencer has the courage to declare that
"no approach" to this kind of fitness
" presentable to the senses " is to be
found in organisms which continue to
live in virtue of special conditions.
Where materials are so abundant it is
hard to specify. But I am tempted to
ask whether Mr. Spencer has ever heard
of the ears, the teeth, above all the
finger of the Aye -aye, the wonderful
28 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
beast that lives in the forests of Mada-
gascar, and is very nicely fitted indeed
to prey upon certain larvae which burrow
up the pith of certain trees ? Here we
see examples of fitting in a sense as
purely mechanical as he could possibly
select from human mechanism. The
enormous ears are fitted to hear the
internal and smothered raspings of the
grub. The teeth are fitted for the work
of cutting-chisels, whilst one finger is
reduced to the dimension of a mere
probe, armed with a hooked claw to
extract the larvae. The fitting of this
finger-probe into the pith-tube of the
forest bough is precisely like the fitting
of a finger into a glove. It is strange
indeed that Mr. Spencer should deny
the applicability of the word fitness, in
its strictest " glove " sense, to adapta-
tions such as these. Yet he does
deny it in words emphatic and precise.
i SPENCER'S CONFESSION 29
Neither the organic structures them-
selves he proceeds to say nor their
individual movements are related in any
analogous way to the things and actions
in the midst of which they live. Having
made this marvellous denial, he reiterates
in another form his great confession
his gran rifiuto that his own famous
phrase, although carefully designed to
express self-acting and automatic physical
operations, is, after all, a failure. And
this result he admits not only as proved,
but as obviously true. His confession
is a humble one. " Evidently," he says,
" the word fittest as thus used is a figure
of speech." 1
This elaborate dissection and con-
demnation by Mr. Herbert Spencer of
both the two famous phrases which have
been so long established in the world
as expressing the Darwinian hypothesis
1 P. 751-
30 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
his emphatic rejection of the claim of
either of them to represent true physical
causation his sentence upon both of
them that they are mere figures of
speech is, in my judgment, a memorable
fact. As regards Mr. Spencer himself,
it is a creditable performance and an
honourable admission. It is one of the
high prerogatives of the human mind to
be able to turn upon its own arguments,
and its own imaginings, the great
weapon of analysis. There are in all of
us, not only two voices, but many voices,
and splendid work is done when the
higher faculties call upon the lower to
give an account of what they have said
and argued. Often and often, as the
result of such a call, we should catch the
accents of confession saying, " We have
been shutting our eyes to the deepest
truth, keeping them open only to others
which were comparatively superficial.
i BAD INTROSPECTION 31
We have been trying to conceal this
by the invention of misleading phrases
full of loose analogies, of vague and
deceptive generalities."
Most unfortunately, however, the
special peculiarity of Mr. Spencer's intro-
spection appears to be that it is the
lower intellectual faculties which are
calling the higher to account. The
merit of Darwin's phrase lay in its
elasticity in its large elements of
metaphor taken from the phenomena of
mind. Mr. Spencer's phrase had been
carefully framed, he tells us, to get rid of
these. His great endeavour was to
employ in the interpretation of nature
only those faculties which see material
things and the physical forces. Those
other faculties which see the adjustments
of these forces to purpose to the building
up of structures yet being imperfect, and
to the discharge of functions yet lying in
32 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
the future it was his desire to exclude
or silence. This was his aim, but he
now sees that he has failed. In spite of
him the higher intellectual perceptions
have claimed admittance, and have
actually entered. He now calls on the
humbler faculties to challenge this
intrusion, and to assert their exclusive
right to occupy the field. The " survival
of the fittest" had been constructed to
be their fortress. But the very stones of
which it is built the very words by
which the structure is composed are
themselves permeated with the insidious
elements which they were intended to
resist. The " survival of the fittest " is a
mere redoubt open at the back, or a fort
which can be entered at all points from
an access underground. And so, like a
skilful general, Mr. Spencer has ordered
a complete evacuation of the works.
But in giving up this famous phrase
i EXCLUSIVELY PHYSICAL 33
Mr. Spencer does not give up his purpose
which, indeed, is one of the main
purposes of his philosophy namely, to
build up sentences and wordy structures
which shall eliminate, as far as it is
possible to do so, all those aspects of
natural phenomena which are human,
that is to say, those aspects which reflect
at all an intellectual order analogous with,
or related to, our own. " I have elabor-
ated this criticism," he says, "with the
intention of emphasising the need for
studying the changes which have gone
on, and are ever going on, in organic
bodies from an exclusively physical point
of view." l And so, new formulae are
constructed to explain and to illustrate
how this is to be done. "Survival"
suggesting the " human view " of life
and death must be dismissed. How,
then, are they to be described? They
1 P. 751-
D
34 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
are " certain sets of phenomena." Their
true physical character is " simply
groups of changes." In thinking of a
plant, for example, we must cease to
speak of its living or dying. " We must
exclude all the ideas associated with the
words life or death." 1 What we do
know, physically, is thus defined : " That
there go on in the plant certain inter-
dependent processes in presence of
certain aiding or hindering influences
outside of it ; and that in some cases a
difference of structure or a favourable
set of circumstances allows these inter-
dependent processes to go on for longer
periods than in other cases."
How luminous ! Milton spoke of his
own blindness as " knowledge at one
entrance quite shut out." But here we
have a specimen of the verbal devices by
which knowledge at all entrances may
1 P. 751-
i BAD DEFINITIONS 35
be carefully excluded. Life is certain
"interdependent processes." Yes, cer-
tainly. But so is death. And so is
everything else that we know of or
can conceive. The words devised by
Mr. Herbert Spencer to represent the
" purely physical " view of life and death
are words which present no view at all.
They are simply a thick fog in which
nothing can be seen. Except in virtue
of this character of general opacity, they
are wholly useless for Mr. Spencer's
own purpose as well as for every other.
He seeks to exclude mind. But he fails
to do so. He seems to think that when
he has found a collocation of words
which do not expressly convey some
particular idea, he has therein found
words in which that idea is excluded.
This is not so. Words may be so vague
and abstract as to signify anything or
nothing. If under the word "fitness"
36 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
human ideas of adjustment and design
are apt to insinuate themselves, assuredly
the same ideas not only may, but must
be comprehended under such a phrase
as "interdependent processes." Paint-
ing, for example, is an interdependent
process, and both in its execution and
results its interdependence lies in purely
physical combinations of visible and
touchable materials. Yet Sir Thomas
Lawrence spoke with literal truth when
he snubbed a questioner as to the
mechanics of his art by telling him
that he mixed his colours with brains.
The whole of chemical science consists
in the knowledge of interdependent
processes which are (what we call) purely
physical, whilst the whole science of
applied chemistry involves those other
interdependent processes which involve
the co-operation of the human mind and
will.
i ARTIFICIAL PHRASES 37
We have, then, in this new phrase a
perfect specimen of one favourite method
of Mr. Herbert Spencer in his dealing
with such subjects ; and the weapon of
analysis which he turns so successfully
against his own old phrase when he
wishes to abandon it, can be turned with
equal success not only against all sub-
stitutes for it, but against the whole
method of reasoning of which it was
an example. The verbal structures of
definition which abound in his writings
always remind me of certain cloud-forms
which may sometimes be seen in the
western sky, especially over horizons of
the sea. They are often most glorious
and imposing. Great lines of towers
and of far-reaching battlements give the
impression at moments of mountainous
solidity and strength. But as we gaze
upon them with wonder, and as we fix
upon them a closely attentive eye, the
38 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
edges are seen to be as unsteady as at
first they appeared to be enduring. If
we attempt to draw them we find that
they melt into each other, and that not a
single outline is steady for a second. In
a few minutes whole masses which had
filled the eye with their majesty, and
with impressions as of the everlasting
hills, dissolve themselves into vapour
and melt away.
Such are the cloud-castles which
mount upon the intellectual horizon as
we scan it in the representations of the
mechanical philosophy. Nothing can be
more fallacious than the habit of building
up definitions out of words so vague and
abstract that they may signify any one
of a dozen different things, and the
whole plausibility of which consists in
the ambiguity of their meanings. It is
a habit too which finds exercise in the
alternate amusement of wiping out of
i POWER OF WORDS 39
words which have a definite and familiar
sense everything that constitutes their
force and power. Let us take for
example the word " function." There is
no word, perhaps, applicable to our
intellectual apprehensions of the organic
world, which is more full of meaning,
or of meaning which satisfies more
thoroughly the many faculties concerned
in the vision and description of its facts.
The very idea of an organ is that of an
apparatus for the doing of some definite
work, which is its function. For the
very reason of this richness and fulness
of meaning, in this word conjoined with
great precision, it is unfitted for use in
the vapoury cloud-castles of definition
which are the boasted fortresses of ideas
purely physical. And yet function is a
word which it is most difficult to dis-
pense with. The only alternative is to
reduce it to some definition which wipes
40 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
out all its special signification. Accord-
ingly, Mr. Herbert Spencer has defined
function as a word equivalent to the
phrase "transformations of motion" 1
a phrase perfectly vague, abstract, and
equally applicable to function or to the
destruction of it, to the processes of
death or the processes of life, to the
phenomena of heat, of light, or electricity,
and completely denuded of all the
special meanings which respond to our
perception of a whole class of special facts.
Of course the attempt breaks down
completely to describe the facts of nature
in words too vague for the purpose,
or in words rendered sterile by artificial
eliminations. It is not Darwin only,
who had at least no dogma on this
subject to bind him it is Mr. Spencer
himself who continually breaks down in
the attempt, far more completely than he
1 Principles of Biology ', vol. i. p. 4.
i FITTINGNESS FOR PURPOSE 41
now admits he failed in the " survival of
the fittest." The human element involved
or suggested in the idea of fitness
is nothing to the anthropomorphism, or
" anthropocentricity," of the expressions
into which he slips, perhaps unawares,
when he is face to face with those
requisites of language which arise out of
the facts of observation, and out of the
necessities of thought. Thus in the
midst of an elaborate attempt to explain
in purely chemical and physical aspects
the composition and attributes of protein,
or protoplasm assumed to be the funda-
mental substance of all organisms he
breaks out into the following sentence,
charged with teleological phraseology :
" So that while the composite atoms
of which organic tissues are built up
possess that low molecular mobility
fitting them for plastic purposes, it
results from the extreme molecular
42 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
mobilities of their ultimate constituents
that the waste products of vital activity
escape as fast as they are formed." :
Now, what is the value of sentences
such as this ? As an explanation, or
anything approaching to an explanation,
of the wondrous alchemies of organic
life, and especially of the digestive pro-
cesses of the appropriation, assimila-
tion, and elimination of external matter
this sentence is poor and thin indeed.
But whatever strength it has is entirely
due to its recognition of the fact that not
only the organism as a whole, but the
very materials of which it is "built up,"
are all essentially adaptations which are
in the nature of " purposes," being indeed
contrivances of the most complicated
kinds for the discharge of functions of a
very special character.
What, then, is the great reform which
1 Principles of Biology, vol. i. p. 24.
i SELF-MUTILATION 43
these new verbal forms are intended to
effect in our conception of the factors
in organic evolution? The popular
and accepted idea of them has been
largely founded on the language of
Darwin and of Mr. Spencer himself.
But that language has been deceptive.
The needed reform consists in the more
complete expulsion of every element
that is "anthropocentric." In order to
interpret Nature we must stand outside
ourselves. The eye with which we look
upon her phenomena must be cut off, as
it were, from the brain behind it. The
correspondences which we see, or think
we see, between the system of things
outside of us and that system of things
inside of us which is the structure of
our own intelligence, are to be discarded.
This is the luminous conception of the
new philosophy. Science has hitherto
been conceived to be the reduction of
44 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
natural phenomena to an intelligible
order. But the reformed idea is now to
be that our own intelligence is the one
abounding fountain of error and decep-
tion. It is not merely to be disciplined
and corrected, but it is to be eliminated
altogether. It is to be hounded off and
shouted down.
It is very clear what all this must end
in. The demand made upon us in its
literal fulness is a demand impossible and
absurd. We cannot stand outside our-
selves. We cannot look with eyes other
than our own. We cannot think except
with the faculties of our own intellectual
nature. It is impossible, and if it were
possible, it would be absurd. We are
ourselves a part of nature born in it,
and born of it. The analogies which
the disciplined intellect sees in external
nature are therefore not presumably
false, but presumably true, or at the
i DEGRADATION OF PHILOSOPHY 45
least substantially representative of the
truth.
But the new veto on anthropocentric
thought, although helpless to expel it, is
quite competent to cripple and degrade
it. It cannot exclude our own faculties,
but it may select and favour the lowest,
the humblest, the most elementary, the
most blunt, the least perceptive. It
may silence the highest, the acutest, the
most penetrating, the most intuitive,
those most in harmony with the highest
energies in the world around us. All
this the new doctrine may do, and does.
Accordingly the very first instance
given to us of the new philosophy is a
striking illustration of its effects. It
fixes the attention on mere outward and
external things. It seeks for the first
and best explanation of organic beings
in the mere mechanical effects of their
surroundings. The physical forces
46 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
which act upon them from outside the
water or the air that bathes them the
impacts of etherial undulations in the
form of light the vibrations of matter in
contact with them in the form of heat
these are conceived of as the agencies
principally concerned. The analogies
suggested are of the rudest kind. Old
cannon-balls rust in concentric flakes.
Rocks weather into such forms as rock-
ing-stones. 1 But the grand illustration
is taken from the pebbles of the Chesil
beach. 2 These are to introduce us to
the true physical conception of the
wonderful phenomena of organic life.
May not the unity of the vertebrate
skeleton, through an immense variety of
creatures, be typified by the roundness
and smoothness common to the stones
rolled along the southern beaches of
England from Devonshire to Weymouth?
1 P. 755- 2 P. 752.
i OUTSIDES AND INSIDES 47
The diversities of those creatures, again,
however multitudinous in character, may
they not all be pictured as analogous
with the varying sizes into which water
sifts and sorts the sizes of rolled stones ?
But presently we see in another form
the work of " natural selection" by a
mind deliberately divesting itself of its
own higher faculties, and choosing in
consequence to exert only those which
are simple and almost infantile. The
question naturally arises what is the
most universal peculiarity and distinction
of organic forms ? When we get rid of
ourselves, when we stand outside of our
own anthropocentric position and consult
only the faculties which are most purely
physical, we shall be compelled to reply
that the great speciality of organic forms
is the "differentiation of their outside
from their inside." 1 They have all an
1 P. 755-
48 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
outside and an inside, and these are
different. They begin with a cell, and
a cell is a blob of jelly with a pellicle or
thin membrane on the outside. Do we
not see in this the mechanical action of the
surrounding medium? The membrane
may come from a chill on the outside,
or the pressure of the medium. Does
not a little oil form itself into a sphere
in water, or a little water into a drop in
air ? And so from one step to another,
cannot we conceive how particles of
protein become cells, and how one cell
gets stuck to another, and the groups to
groups all with insides and outsides
" differentiated" from each other, and
so they can all be pressed and compacted
and squeezed together until the organism
is completed ? J
Such or such like are the images
presented to enable us to conceive the
1 PP. 756-758.
i SKINS THE GREAT SECRET 49
purely physical view of the beginnings
of life. Their own genesis is obvious.
It is true that all or nearly all organisms
have a skin. Most if not all of them
begin, so far as seen by us, in a
nucleated cell. The external wall of
these cells is often a mere pellicle. It
is true also that one essential idea of
life is separation or segregation from
all other things. This is an essential
part of our ideas of individuality and
of personality. If a pellicle or skin
round a bit of protein be taken as the
symbol of all that is involved in this
idea of life, then " outness " and " inness "
may be tolerated as a very rude image
of one of the great peculiarities of all
organic life. It may even be regarded
as a symbol of the thoughts expressed
in the solemn lines
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside.
E
50 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
But if "outer" and "inner" are used
to express the idea of some essential
mechanical separation between different
parts of the same organism, so that one
part may be represented as more the
result of surrounding forces than another
then this rude and mechanical illustra-
tion is not only empty, but profoundly
erroneous. The forces which work in
and upon organic life know nothing of
outness and inness. They shine through
the materials which they build up and
mould, as light shines through the
clearest glass. Even the most purely
physical of those concerned are inde-
pendent of such relations. Gravitation
knows nothing of inness and outness.
The very air, which seems so external
to us, does not merely bathe or lave
the skin, but permeates the blood, and
its elements are the very breath of life
in every tissue of the body. The more
i DEFECTS IN SKIN THEORY 51
secret forces of vitality deal at their will
with outness and inness. The external
surfaces of one stage are folded in and
become most secret recesses at another.
Organs which are outside in one animal,
and are conspicuously flourished in the
face of day with exquisite ornament of
colour and of structure, 1 are in another
animal hid away and carefully covered
up. Nay, there are many cases in
which all these changes are conducted
in the same animal at different periods
of life, and during conscious and uncon-
scious intervals the whole creature is
re-formed to fit it for new surroundings,
for new media, and with new apparatuses
adapted to them.
If Mr. Spencer wishes to cast any
fresh light upon those factors of organic
evolution respecting which he now con-
fesses that Darwin's language and his
1 As in the nudibranchiate mollusca.
52 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
own have been alike defective, he must
fix our attention on something deeper
than the differences between every
organism and its own skin. His selec-
tion of this most superficial kind of
difference as the first to dwell upon, is
not merely wanting it is erroneous.
It hides and leads us off the scent of
another kind of outsidedness and in-
sidedness which is really and truly
fundamental ; namely, the insidedness,
the self-containedness, of every organism
as a whole with reference to all external
forces. Nobody has pointed this out
more clearly in former years than Mr.
Spencer himself. The grand distinction
between the organic and the inorganic
lies in this that the organic is not
passive under the touch or impact of
external force, but responds, if it re-
sponds at all, with the play of counter-
forces which are essentially its own.
i ORGANIC AND INORGANIC 53
Organic bodies are not simply moved.
They move themselves. They have
1 'self -mobility." 1 They are so consti-
tuted that even when an external force
acts as an excitement or a stimulus, the
organic forces which emerge and act are
much more complex and important so
much so that as compared with the
results produced by these organic forces
the direct results of the incident forces
are "quite obscured." 2 Mr. Spencer
even confesses that these two kinds of
action are so different in their own
nature that in strictness they " should
not be dealt with together." But he
adds that "the impossibility of separat-
ing them compels us to disregard the
distinction between them." This is a
most lame excuse for the careless and
a still worse excuse for the studied use
1 P. 757-
2 Principles of Biology, vol. i. p. 43.
54 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
of ambiguous language which confounds
the deepest distinctions in nature. It
cannot be admitted. All reasonings on
nature would be hopeless unless we
could separate in thought many things
which are always conjoined in action ;
and this excuse is all the more to be
rejected when the alleged impossibility
of separation is used to cover an almost
exclusive stress upon that one of the two
kinds of action which is confessedly by
far the feeblest, and of least account in
the resulting work.
It seems to me, further, that there is
another fatal fault in this attempt of Mr.
Spencer to reform the language, and
clear up the ideas of biological science.
Besides the method of habitually using
words so abstract as to be of necessity
ambiguous besides the further method
of habitually expelling from definite
words the only senses which give them
i VERBAL PROPOSITIONS 55
value Mr. Spencer often resorts, and
does so conspicuously in this paper, to
the scholastic plan of laying down purely
verbal propositions and then arguing
deductively from them as if they repre-
sented axiomatic truth. By the school-
men this method was often legitimately
applied to subjects which in their own
nature admitted of its use, because those
subjects were not physical but purely
moral or religious, and in which conse-
quently much depended on the clear
expression of admitted principles of
abstract truth. I will not venture to say
that such verbal propositions embody-
ing abstract ideas can have absolutely
no place in physical science. We know
as a matter of fact that they have led
some great men to the first conception
of a good many physical truths ; and it
is a curious fact that Dr. Joule, who in
our own day has been the first to establish
56 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
the idea of the doctrine of the Conserva-
tion of Energy by proving through
rigorous experiment the mechanical
equivalent of heat, has said that " we
might reason a priori that the absolute
destruction of living force cannot possibly
take place because it is manifestly absurd
to suppose that the powers with which
God has endowed matter can be de-
stroyed, any more than they can be
created, by man's agency. " 1
Believing as I do in the inseparable
unity which binds us to all the verities
of nature, I should be the last to pro-
scribe the careful use of our own abstract
conceptions. But it is quite certain and
is now universally admitted that the
methods of Thomas Aquinas in his
Summa are full of danger when they are
1 In a lecture delivered at Manchester, April 28,
1847. See Strictures on the Sermon, etc., by B. St.
J. B. Joule, J.P., a pamphlet published 1887 (J-
Heywood, Manchester).
i SCHOLASTIC DOGMAS 57
used in physical investigation. Yet as
regards at least the tone of dogma and
authority, and also as regards the method
of reasoning, we have from Mr. Spencer
in this paper the following wonderful
specimen of scholastic teaching on the
profoundest questions of organic struc-
ture : " At first protoplasm could have no
proclivities to one or other arrangement
of parts ; unless indeed a purely mechani-
cal proclivity towards a spherical form
when suspended in a liquid. At the
outset it must have been passive. In
respect of its passivity, primitive organic
matter must have been like inorganic
matter. No such thing as spontaneous
variation could have occurred in it ; for
variation implies some habitual course
of change from which it is a divergence,
and is therefore excluded where there is
no habitual course of change." What
possible knowledge can Mr. Spencer
58 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
possess of " primitive organic matter " ?
What possible grounds can he have for
assertions as to what it must have been,
and what it must have done? Surely
this is scholasticism with a vengeance.
Its words, its assumptions, and its claims
of logical necessity are all equally hazy,
inconclusive, and absolutely antagonistic
to the spirit of true physical science.
There is a passing sentence in one of
Darwin's works 1 which will often recur
to the memory of those who have
observed it. Speaking of the teleo-
logical or theological methods of de-
scribing nature, he says that these can
be made to explain anything. At first
sight this may seem a strange objection
to any intelligible method that it is
too widely applicable. But Darwin's
meaning is in its own sphere as true as
1 I have mislaid the reference, and quote from
memory.
i NUGATORY EXPLANATIONS 59
it is important. An explanation which
is good for everything in general, is good
for nothing in particular. Explanations
which are indiscriminate can hardly be
also special and distinguishing. In their
very generality they may be true, but
the truth must be as general as the terms
in which it is expressed. Thus the
common phrase which we are in the
habit of applying to the wonderful adapt-
ations of organic life when we call them
" provisions of nature" is a phrase of this
kind. It satisfies certain faculties of the
mind, and these the highest, but it
affords no satisfaction at all to those
other faculties which ask not why but
how these adaptations are affected. It
is an explanation applicable to all adapt-
ations equally, and to no one of them
specially. It takes no notice whatever
of the question, How ? It does not
concern itself at all with physical causes.
60 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
Darwin saw this clearly of such
methods of explanation. But he did
not see that precisely the same objection
lies against his own. The great group
of ideas metaphorically involved in his
phrase of natural selection, and not suc-
cessfully eliminated in the summary of
it survival of the fittest is a group of
the widest generality. It may be used
to account for anything. The successful
application of it to any organic adapt-
ation, however special and peculiar, is so
easy as to become a mere trick. We
have only to assume the introduction of
some primordial organisms one or more
already formed with all the special
powers and functions of organic life ; we
have only to assume the inscrutable
action of heredity ; we have only to
assume, further, that it originates differ-
ence as well as transmits likeness ; we
have only to assume, still further, that
i STRING OF ASSUMPTIONS 61
the variations so originated are almost
infinite in variety, and that some of them
are almost sure, at some time or another,
to "turn up trumps," or in other words
to be accidentally in a useful direction ;
we have only to assume, again, that
these will be somehow continued and
developed through embryotic stages
until they are fit for service ; we have
only to assume, again, that there are
adjustments by which serviceability,
when transmuted into actual use, has
power still further to improve all
adaptations by some process of self-
edification ; then, making all these
assumptions, we may explain anything
and everything in the organic world.
But in such a series of assumptions
we do not speak the language of
true physical causation. This is what
Mr. Spencer now confesses. " Natural
selection," he says, " could operate
62 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
only under subjection." 1 This is a
prolific truth. It might have been dis-
covered sooner. Natural selection could
only select among things prepared for
and presented to its choice. How
from what physical causes did these
come ? Mr. Spencer's reply is, historic-
ally speaking, retrograde. He goes back
to Lamarck, he reverts to "use and dis-
use," to "environment" to surround-
ings to the " medium and its contents." 2
These again are mere phrases to cover
the nakedness of our own ignorance.
But I for one am thankful for the con-
clusion arrived at by a mind so acute
and so analytical as that of Mr. Spencer,
that "among biologists the beliefs
concerning the origin of species have
assumed too much the character of a
creed, and that while becoming settled
they have been narrowed. So far from
1 P. 768. 2 Ibid.
i DARWINIANS RETROGRADE 63
further broadening that broader view
which Darwin reached as he grew older,
his followers appear to have retrograded
towards a more restricted view than he
ever expressed." The evil must have
gone far indeed when this great apostle
of Evolution has to plead so laboriously
and so humbly "that it is yet far too
soon to close the inquiry concerning the
causes of organic evolution." Too soon
indeed ! That such an assumption
should have been possible, and that it is
virtually made, is part of the Great
Confession to which I have desired to
direct attention. I hope it will tend to
redeem the work of the greatest natural
observer who has ever lived from the
great misuse which has been often made
of it. There is no real disparagement
of that work in saying that the phrase
which embalmed it is metaphorical.
The very highest truths are conveyed in
64 A GREAT CONFESSION CHAP.
metaphor. The confession of Mr.
Spencer is fatal only to claims which
never ought to have been made. Natural
selection represents no physical causa-
tion whatever except that connected
with heredity. Physically it explains the
origin of nothing. But the metaphorical
elements which Mr. Spencer wishes to
eliminate are of the highest value.
They refer us directly to those supreme
causes to which the physical forces are
"under subjection." They express in
some small degree that inexhaustible
wealth of primordial inception, of subse-
quent development, and of continuous
adjustment, upon which alone selection
can begin to operate. These are the
supreme facts in nature. When this
is clearly seen and thoroughly under-
stood, Darwin's researches and specu-
lations will no longer act as a barrier
to further inquiry, as Mr. Spencer
i VALUE OF METAPHOR 65
complains they now do. They will,
on the contrary, be the most powerful
stimulus to deeper inquiry, and to more
healthy reasoning.
CHAPTER II
DISCRIMINATIONS
MR. HERBERT SPENCER contributed to
The Nineteenth Century in November
1895 an article entitled "Lord Salisbury
on Evolution." The occasion of it
arose out of the brief but significant
comments on the Darwinian theory
which formed part of Lord Salisbury's
Presidential Address to the British
Association at Oxford in 1894. In so
far as that article is merely a reply to
Lord Salisbury, it does not concern
us here. But, like everything from
Mr. Spencer's pen, it is full of highly
instructive matter on the whole subject
CH. ii NEED OF DEFINITIONS 67
to which it relates. It takes a much
larger view of the problems of Biology
than is generally taken, and it deals
with them by a method which is ex-
cellent, so far as he carries it, and which
we can all take up and follow farther
than the point at which he stops. That
method is to insist on a clear definition
of the words and phrases used in our
biological data and speculations. No
method could be more admirable than
this. It is one for which I have myself
a great predilection, and have continu-
ally used in all difficult subjects of
inquiry. Such, pre-eminently, are the
problems presented by the nature and
history of organic life. I propose, there-
fore, in these pages to accept Mr.
Spencer's method, and to examine what
light can come from it on this most
intricate of all subjects.
The leading idea of Mr. Spencer's
68 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
article is to assert and insist upon a
wide distinction between the " natural
selection " theory of Darwin and the
general theory of what Mr. Spencer
calls " organic evolution." He insists
and reiterates that even if Darwin's
special theory of natural selection were
disproved and abandoned, the more
general doctrine of organic evolution
would remain unshaken. I entirely
agree in this discrimination between
two quite separate conceptions. But I
must demand a farther advance on the
same lines an advance which Mr.
Spencer has not made, and which does
not appear to have occurred to him as
required. Not only is Darwin's special
theory of natural selection quite separ-
able from the more general theory of
organic evolution, but also Mr. Spencer's
own special version and understanding
of organic evolution is quite separable
ii WHAT REMAINS 69
from the general doctrine of develop-
ment, with which, nevertheless, it is
habitually confounded. It is quite as
true that even if Mr. Spencer's theory
of organic evolution were disproved
and abandoned, the general doctrine
of development would remain unshaken,
as it is true that organic evolution would
survive the demolition of the Darwinian
theory of Natural Selection.
The great importance of these dis-
criminations lies in this that both the
narrow theory of Darwin, and also the
wider idea of organic evolution, have
derived an adventitious strength and
popularity from elements of conception
which are not their own elements of
conception, that is to say, which are
not peculiar to them, but common to
them and to a much larger idea a far
wider doctrine which has a much more
indisputable place and rank in the facts
70 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
of nature, and in the universal recognition
of the human mind.
Let us, therefore, unravel this en-
tanglement of separable ideas much
more completely than Mr. Spencer has
done. And for this purpose let us
begin at the bottom with the one
fundamental conception which underlies
all the theories and speculations that
litter the ground before us. That
conception is simply represented by the
old familiar word, and the old familiar
idea of growth or development. It is
the conception of the whole world, in
us and around us, being a world full of
changes, which to-day leave nothing
exactly as it was yesterday, and which
will not allow to-morrow to be exactly
as to-day. It is the conception of some
things always coming to be, and of other
things always ceasing to be in endless
sequences of cause and of effect. It
ii DEVELOPMENT A FACT 71
has this great advantage that it is not
a mere doctrine or a mere theory, nor an
hypothesis, but a visible and undoubted
fact. Nobody can deny or dispute it.
Nowhere has it been more profoundly
expressed and described, in its deepest
meanings and significance, than in the
words of that great metaphysician
whoever he may be who wrote the
Epistle to the Hebrews, when he
describes the Universe as a system in
which " the things which we see were
not made of things that do appear."
That is to say, that all its phenomena
are due to causes which lie behind
them, and which belong to the Invisible.
Nor can we even conceive of its being
otherwise. The causes of things
whatever these may be are the sources
out of which all things come, or are
developed. What these causes are has
been the Great Quest, and the great
72 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
incentive to inquiry, since human
thought began. But there never has
been any doubt, or any failure, on the
part of man to grasp the universal fact
that there is a natural sequence among
all things, leading from what has been
to what is, and to what is to be
Whether he could apprehend or not the
processes out of which these changes
arise, he has always recognised the
existence of such processes as a fact.
One might almost suppose from much
of the talk we have had during the last
thirty years about development, that no-
body had ever known or dwelt upon this
universal fact until Lamarck and Darwin
had discovered it. But this is far from
being true. The recognition of the fact
has been an element in all philosophies
since philosophy began. All the new
theories, and, indeed, all possible theories
which may supplant or supplement them,
ii CAUSATION CONTINUOUS 73
are nothing but guesses at the details of
the processes through which causation
has long been recognised as working its
way from innumerable small beginnings
to innumerable great and complicated
results. Every one of these guesses
may be wrong in whole, or in essential
parts, but the universal facts of growth
and development in Nature remain as
certain and as obvious as before.
It is a bad thing, at least for a time,
when the undoubtedness of a great
general conception such as this of the
continuity of causation and of the
gradual accumulation of its effects
gets hooked on (as it were) in the minds
of theorists to their own little fragment-
ary fancies as to particular modes of
operation. But it is a worse thing
still when this spurious and accidental
affiliation becomes so established in the
popular mind that men are afraid not to
74 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
accept the fancies lest they should be
thought to impugn the facts or to deny
admitted and authoritative truths. Yet
this is exactly what has happened with
the Darwinian theory. The very word
"development" was captured by the
Darwinian school as if it belonged to
them alone, and the old familiar idea was
identified with theories with which it
had no necessary connection whatever.
Development is nowhere more con-
spicuous than in the history of human
inventions; the gun, the watch, the steam-
engine, and our new electric machines
have all passed through many stages
of development, every step in which
is historically known. So it is with
human social and political institutions,
when they are at all advanced. But
this kind and conception of develop-
ment has nothing whatever to do with
the purely physical conceptions involved
ii DEVELOPMENT IN MIND 75
in the Darwinian theory. The idea, for
example, of one suggestion arising out
of another in the constructive mind of
man, is a kind of development absolutely
different from the idea of one specific kind
of organic structure being born by ordi-
nary and physical generation of quite
different parents without the directing
agency of any mind at all. Our full per-
suasion of the perfect continuity of causa-
tion does not compel us to accept, even
for a moment, the idea of any particular
cause which may be obviously incom-
petent, far less such as may be con-
spicuously fantastic. Nor and this is
often forgotten does the most perfect
continuity of causes involve, as a neces-
sary consequence, any similar continuity
in their visible effects. These effects may
be sudden and violent, although the pre-
vious working has been slow and even
infmitesimally gradual. In short, the
76 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
general idea of development is a concep-
tion which remains untouched whether
we believe, or do not believe, in any par-
ticular hypotheses which may profess to
explain its steps.
Mr. Spencer, then, adopts an excel-
lent method when he insists upon dis-
criminations such as these between
very different things jumbled together
and concealed under loose popular
phrases. But, unfortunately, he fails
to pursue this method far enough.
There is great need of the farther
application of it to his own language.
He tells us that Darwinism is to be
carefully distinguished from what he
calls " organic evolution." Darwinism
he defines in the phrases of its author.
But organic evolution he does not
define so as to bring out the special
sense in which he himself always uses
it. On the contrary, he employs words
ii THE WORD EVOLUTION 77
to define organic evolution which sys-
tematically confound it with the general
idea of development, whilst concealing
this confusion under a change of name.
The substitution of the word " evolution "
for the simpler word " development " has,
in this point of view, an unmistakable
significance. I do not know of any real
difference between the two words, except
that the word " development " is older
and more familiar, whilst " evolution " is
more modern, and has been more com-
pletely captured and appropriated by a
particular school. But Darwin's theory
is quite as distinctly and as definitely a
theory of organic evolution as the theory
of which Mr. Spencer boasts that it will
remain secure even if Darwinism should
be abandoned. Both these theories are
equally hypotheses as to the particular
processes through which development
has held its way in that department of
78 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
Nature which we know as organic life.
But it is quite possible to hold, and
even to be certain, that development
has taken place in organic forms, with-
out accepting either Darwin's or Mr.
Spencer's explanation of the process.
They both rest as we shall see upon
one and the same fundamental assump-
tion ; and they are both open to one
and the same fundamental objection
viz. the incompetence of them both to
account for, or to explain, all the facts,
or more even than a fraction of the
facts, with which they profess to deal.
In order to make this plain we have
only to look closely to the peculiarities
of the Darwinian theory, and ascertain
exactly how much of it, or how little
of it, is common to the theory which
Mr. Spencer distinguishes by the more
general title of organic evolution. Dar-
win's theory can be put into a few very
ii DARWIN'S THEORY 79
simple propositions such as these : All
organisms have offspring. These off-
spring have an innate and universal
tendency to variation from the parent
form. These variations are indeter-
minate taking place in all directions.
Among the offspring thus varying, and
between them and other contemporary
organisms, there is a perpetual competi-
tion and struggle for existence. The
variations which happen to be advan-
tageous in this struggle from some
accidental better fitting into surrounding
conditions will have the benefit of that
advantage in the struggle. They will con-
quer and prevail ; whilst other variations,
less advantageous, will be shouldered out
will die and disappear. Thus step by
step, Darwin imagined, more and more
advantageous varieties would be acci-
dentally but continually produced, and
would be perpetuated by hereditary
8o DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP
transmission. By this process, pro-
longed through ages of unknown dura-
tion, he thought it was possible to
account for the origin of the millions
of different specific forms which now
constitute the organic world. For this
theory, as we all know, Darwin adopted
the phrase Natural Selection. It was
an admirable phrase for giving a certain
plausibility and vogue to a theory full
of weaknesses not readily detected. It
spread over the confused and disjointed
bones of a loose conception the ample
folds of a metaphor taken from wholly
different and even alien spheres of ex-
perience and of thought. It resorted
to the old, old Lucretian expedient of
personifying Nature, and lending the
glamour of that Personification to the
agency of bare mechanical necessity,
and to the coincidences of mere fortuity.
Selection means choice by a living
ii THE SKILL OF BREEDERS 81
agent out of some pre-existing things.
The skilful breeders of doves and dogs
and horses were, in this phrase, taken
as the type of Nature in her production
and in her guidance of varieties in
organic structure. Darwin did not
consciously choose this phrase because
of these tacit implications of Mind and
Will. He was in all ways simple and
sincere, and he no more meant to
impose upon others than on himself
when he likened the operations of
Nature in producing new species to the
foreseeing skill of the breeder in pro-
ducing new and more excellent varieties
in domestic animals. Nevertheless, as
a fact, this implication is indelible in
the phrase, and has always lent to it
more than half its strength, and all its
plausibility. Darwin was led to it by
an intellectual instinct which is insuper-
able viz. the instinct which sees the
G
82 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
highest explanations of Nature in the
analogies of mental purpose and direc-
tion. The choice by Darwin of the
phrase Natural Selection was in itself an
excellent example of its only legitimate
meaning. He did not invent either
the idea or the phrase of Selection.
He found it existing and familiar. He
took it from the literature of the farm-
yard, of the kennel, and of the stable.
He told Lyell that it was constantly
used in all books of breeding. It was
his own intellectual nature that made the
choice, selecting it out of old materials.
These materials were gathered out of
the experience of human life, and out
of the nearest analogies of that natural
system of which Man is the highest
visible exponent. But Darwin neither
saw nor admitted its implications. The
great bulk of his admirers have not been
exactly in the same condition of mind, for
IT MECHANICAL NECESSITY 83
they have rejoiced in his theory for the
very reason that it rested mainly on the
idea of fortuity, or of mechanical neces-
sity, and excluded altogether the compet-
ing idea of mental direction and design.
In this they were more Darwinian than
Darwin himself. He assumed, indeed,
that variations were promiscuous and
accidental ; but he did so avowedly only
because he did not know any law direct-
ing and governing their occurrence.
His fanatical followers went farther.
They have assumed that on this ques-
tion there is nothing to be known,
and that the rule of accident and of
mechanical necessity had for ever ex-
cluded the agency of Mind.
Let us now ask of ourselves the
question, Which of those two elements
in Darwin's theory the element of
accident and of mechanical necessity, or
the element of a directing agency in the
84 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
path of variation has better stood the
test of thirty years' discussion, and
thirty years of closer observation ? Can
there be any doubt on this ? Year
after year, and decade after decade,
have passed away, and as the reign of
terror which is always established for
a time to protect opinions which have
become a fashion, has gradually abated,
it has become more and more clear that
mere accidental variations, and the mere
accidental fitting of these into external
conditions, can never account for the
definite progress of correlated adjust-
ments and of elaborate adaptations,
along certain lines, which are the most
prominent of all the characteristics of
organic development. It would be as
rational to account for the poem of the
Iliad, or for the play of Hamlet, by
supposing that the words and letters
were adjusted to the conceptions by
ii SELECTION CAN'T ORIGINATE 85
some process of "natural selection" as
to account, by the same formula, for the
intricate and glorious harmonies between
structure and functions in organic life.
It has been seen, moreover, more
and more clearly, that whilst that branch
of his theory which rested on fortuity
was obviously incompetent, that other
branch of it which claimed affiliation
with the directing agency of mind and
choice was as incompetent as its strange
ally. Selection, as we know it, cannot
make things ; it can only choose among
materials already made and open to the
exercise of choice. Therefore selection,
whether by man or by what men are
pleased to call Nature, can never
account for the origin of anything.
Then, other flaws, equally damaging to
the theory, have been, one after another,
detected and exposed. There are a
multitude of structures in which no
86 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
utility can be detected, but in which,
nevertheless, development has certainly
held its way, steadily and often with
marvellous results. Nor is it less
certain that there are some character-
istics of many organisms which can be
of no use whatever to themselves, but
are of immense use to other organisms
which find them nutritive and delicious
to devour or valuable to domesticate
and enslave. In short, men have been
more and more coming to perceive that,
as Agassiz once wrote to me in a
private letter, " the phenomena of
organic life have all the wealth and
intricacy of the highest mental mani-
festations, and none of the simplicity of
purely mechanical laws."
What, then, is Mr. Spencer's own
verdict on the Darwinian theory of
Natural Selection? He confesses at
once that it gives no explanation of
ii A USELESS ADMISSION 87
some of the phenomena of organic life.
But he specifies one example which
makes us doubt whether in his mouth
the admission is of any value. The
effects of use and disuse on organs are,
he says, not accounted for. 1 The
example is surely a bad one as any
measure, or even as any indication, of
the quality and variety of biological
facts which altogether outrun the ken of
Darwinism. In my opinion, it is no
example at all because the phrase
Natural Selection is so vague and
metaphorical in its implications that it
may be made to cover and include quite
as good an explanation of the effects
of disuse as of a thousand other familiar
facts. Organs, when fit and ready for
use, are strengthened by healthy exer-
cise. Organs, on the other hand, of
the same kind, are weakened and
i p. 740.
88 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
atrophied by long - continued disuse.
This is a familiar fact. What can be
more easy than to translate this general
fact into Darwinese phraseology ?
Nature has a special favour for organs
put to use. She strengthens them
more and more by a process falling
well under the idea of Natural Selection.
In like manner, Nature deals unfavour-
ably with organs which are allowed to be
idle and inactive. She places them at
a disadvantage, and they tend to perish.
The truth is, that the phrase Natural
Selection and the group of ideas which
hide under it is so elastic that there is
nothing in heaven or on earth that by
a little ingenuity may not be brought
under its pretended explanation. Darwin
in 1859-60 wondered " how variously"
his phrase had been "misunderstood."
The explanation is simple : it was because
of those vague and loose analogies which
ii SELECTION NOT A DEITY 89
are so often captivating. It is the same
now, after thirty -six years of copious
argument and exposition. Darwin ridi-
culed the idea which some entertained
that Natural Selection "was set up as
an active power or deity " ; yet this is
the very conception of it which is at this
moment set up by one of the most faith-
ful worshippers in the Darwinian Cult.
Professor Poulton of Oxford gives to
Natural Selection the title of "a motive
power" first discovered by Darwin.
This development is perfectly intelligible.
Nature is the old traditional refuge for
all who will not see the work of creative
mind. Everything that is everything
that happens is and happens naturally.
Nature personified does, and is, our all
in all. She is the universal agent, and
at the same time the universal product.
What she does she may easily be con-
ceived as choosing to do, or selecting to
9 o DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
be done, out of countless alternatives
before her. Then we have only to shut
our eyes, blindly or conveniently, to the
absolute difference between the idea of
merely selecting out of already existing
things, and of selecting by prevision out of
conceivable things yet to be we have
only to cherish or even to tolerate this
gross confusion of thought and then we
can cram into our theories of Natural
Selection the very highest exercises of
Mind and Will. Let us carry out con-
sistently the analogy of thought involved
in the agency of a human breeder ; let
us emancipate this conception from the
narrow limits of operation within which
we know it to be humanly confined ; let
us conceive a strictly homologous agency
in Nature which has power not merely to
select among organs already so developed
as to be fit for use, but to select and
direct beforehand the development of
ii SOME DIRECTING POWER 91
organs through many embryotic stages
of existence during which no use is
possible ; let us conceive, in short, an
agency in Nature which keeps, as it
were, a book in which "all our members
are written, which in continuance are
fashioned, when as yet there are none of
them," 1 then the phrase and the theory
of Natural Selection may be accepted as
at least something of an approach to an
explanation of the wonderful facts of
biological development.
But this is precisely the aspect of the
Darwinian theory which Mr. Spencer
dislikes the most. It is the aspect most
adverse to his own philosophy. And as
" natural rejection " is a necessary cor-
relative of all conceptions of Natural
Selection, so Mr. Spencer's intellectual
instincts perceive this necessary antago-
nism, and lead him to dissent from
1 Ps. cxxxix. 1 6.
92 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
Darwin's theory on account of that very
element on which much of its popular
success has undoubtedly depended. Mr.
Spencer dismisses with something like
contempt the ideas connected with the
agency of a human breeder. He has,
therefore, always condemned the phrase
under which this idea is implied. He
will have nothing to do with the con-
ception of mind guiding and directing
the course of development. Therefore,
he has long suggested the adoption of
an alternative phrase for the Darwin
theory, which phrase is the " survival of
the fittest." It has always seemed to
me that the insuperable objection to this
phrase is that it means nothing but a
mere truism. If we eliminate from
Darwin's theory the mental element of
selection, and if we eliminate also, as we
must do, the element of pure chance,
which, of course, is nothing but a
ii TAUTOLOGY 93
confession of ignorance, what is there
remaining ? Mr. Spencer's answer to
this question is that the " survival of the
fittest " remains. Yes, but this is a mere
restatement of certain facts under an
altered form of words which pretends to
explain them, whilst in reality it contains
no explanatory element whatever. The
survival of the fittest? Fittest for what?
For surviving. So that the phrase
means no more than this, that the sur-
vivor does survive. It surely did not
need the united exertions of the greatest
natural observer of modern times and the
reasonings of one of the most ingenious
of modern philosophers to assure us of
the truth of this identical proposition.
Yet, in the article now under review, it
is at least a comfort to find that Mr.
Spencer confesses to the empty certitude
which his phrase contains. He says it
is a self-evident proposition like an axiom
94 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
in mathematics. 1 The negation of it, he
says, is inconceivable. But if so, it tells
us nothing. If we do enter at all on the
field of speculation on the origin and
development of organic things, we do
not need to be assured that the fittest
things for surviving do, accordingly, and
necessarily, survive. What we want to
know or at least to have some glimpse
of is the processes of development,
through which fitness has been attained
for creatures moving along innumerable
divergent paths of energy and of enjoy-
ment. A theory which, in answer to our
inquiries on this high theme, tells us
confessedly nothing but the self-evident
proposition that the creatures fittest to
survive do actually survive, is mani-
festly nothing but a mockery and a
snare.
But Mr. Spencer has a substitute for
1 Pp. 748, 749.
ii ORGANIC EVOLUTION 95
the Darwinian theory thus reduced to
emptiness something which, he says,
lies behind and above it, and which only
emerges with all the greater certainty
when the ruins of that theory have been
cleared away. This substitute is the
generalised term "organic evolution."
But what is this ? Is it anything more
than the general idea of development in
its special application to organic life ?
No, it is nothing more. It is again the
mere assertion of a self-evident proposi-
tion that organic forms have been de-
veloped somehow. We know it in the
case of our own bodies and in the case
of all contemporary living things. Mr.
Spencer gives us no short and clear
definition of what he means by organic
evolution either in itself or as dis-
tinguished from the form of it taken in
the Darwinian theory of natural selection.
He refers to some of the characteristic
96 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
features of all development, which are
really sufficiently well known to all of us.
Nothing that we see, or know, nothing
that we can even conceive, is produced
at once as a finished article, ready-made
without any previous processes of growth.
All this is no theory. It is a fact. Mr.
Spencer laboriously counts up four or
five great heads of evidence upon this
subject, as if any one does or could dis-
pute it. First conies Geology, with its
long record of organic forms, showing,
despite many gaps and breaks, on the
whole an orderly procession from the
more simple to the most complex
structures. Secondly comes the science
of Classification, the whole principle of
which is founded on the possibility of
arranging animal forms according to
definite likenesses and affinities in struc-
ture. Thirdly comes the distribution
of species showing special likenesses
ii HEADS OF EVIDENCE 97
between the living fauna and the extinct
fauna of the great continents and islands
of the globe, which are most widely
separate from others, and suggesting
that, as the likeness has been continuous,
so it must be due to local continuities of
growth. Fourthly there are the wonder-
ful facts of Embryology, which are full
of suggestions to a like effect. Then
there is another head of evidence, making
a fifth, which Mr. Spencer is disposed to
add to the other four a head of evidence
which I venture to regard as even more
interesting and significant than any other
that, namely, which rests on the occur-
rence of what are called Rudimentary
Organs in many animal frames that is
to say, organs, or bits of structure, which,
in those particular creatures, are almost
or entirely devoid of any functional use,
but which correspond, more or less, with
similar organs in other animals where
H
98 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
they are in full, and all -important,
functional activity.
I accept all these five lines of evidence
as each and all confirmatory of the
leading idea of development an idea
which I hold to be indisputably appli-
cable to everything, and especially to
organic life. But Mr. Spencer is dream-
ing if he assumes that any, or all, of
these evidences prove either that par-
ticular theory of evolution which was
Darwin's, or that modification of it
which is his own. He seems to think,
and indeed expressly assumes, that the
only alternative to that theory is what he
calls the theory of " Special Creation."
But I do not know of any human being
who holds that theory in the sense in
which Mr. Spencer understands it. He
deals with what he calls Special Creation
very much as the late Professor Huxley
used to deal with the idea of a Deluge.
ii ABSURD ALTERNATIVE 99
That is to say, he puts that idea into
an absurd form, and then ascribes that
absurdity to his opponents. Huxley
used to picture a deluge as involving the
idea of a mass of water, thousands of
feet deep, holding its place at one time
and over the whole globe, in defiance of
the laws of gravitation, and especially of
hydrostatics. It is a pity that Huxley
did not live to see the venerable Sir
Joseph Prestwich the greatest authority
on quaternary geology avow his con-
viction that during that period of the
earth's history there is a clear geological
evidence that there must have been
at least over the whole Northern Hemi-
sphere some great submergence which
was very wide, sudden, transitory, and
extensively destructive to terrestrial life.
In like manner Mr. Spencer insists
that those who have believed in Special
Creation must believe that the bodies of
ioo DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
all animals appeared suddenly, ready-
made, complete in all their parts, out of
the dust of the ground and the elements
of the atmosphere. This, indeed, may
have been the crude idea of many men in
former times, in so far (which was very
little) as they gave themselves any time
to think, or to form any definite concep-
tions, on the meaning of the words they
used. But the late Mr. Aubrey Moore,
in an interesting essay, 1 has reminded us
that it was the extravagant literalism of
Puritan theology which first embodied
in popular form this coarser view of
Creation, in a famous passage of Para-
dise Lost? Yet this is a passage which
probably no man can now read, notwith-
standing the splendid diction of the poet,
without feeling the picture it presents to
1 Science and Faith, 1889, "Darwinism and the
Christian Faith."
2 Book vii.
ii IMMUTABILITY OF SPECIES 101
be childish and grotesque. Mr. Moore
has reminded us, too, that both among
the Fathers and the Schoolmen of the
Christian Church there was no antipathy
to the idea that animals were, somehow,
genetically related to each other. I
doubt whether there is now any man
of common education who believes, for
example, that each of the many kinds of
wild pigeons which are spread over the
globe, and which are all so closely related
to each other by conspicuous similarities
of form, were all separately and individu-
ally created out of the raw materials of
nature.
Lord Salisbury in his Address says
that one thing Darwin has done has been
to destroy the doctrine of the immuta-
bility of species. This may be true of
absolute immutability, which can be
asserted of nothing that exists in this
world. Yet it does not follow that the
102 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
converse is true, namely, what may be
called the fluidity, or perpetual instability,
of species. There is at least one possible,
and even probable, alternative between
these two extreme alternatives. It is
surely a curious fact that the two
greatest naturalists of the modern world,
Cuvier and Linnaeus, whose minds were
brought by their special pursuits into the
closest possible contact with the only
facts in Nature that have a direct bear-
ing on this question, were both of them
not only convinced of the stability of
species, but recognised it as the essential
foundation of all their work. Stability,
however, was the word they used, not
immutability. Classification was their
special work, and the whole principle of
classification, as Mr. Spencer truly says,
rests on the idea, and on the fact, that
all living creatures can be arranged in
groups by endless cycles of definite
ii STABILITY OF SPECIES 103
affinity and of definite divergence.
Linnaeus applied this principle to the
living world as it exists now, and his
famous Binomial system, which survives
to the present day, assumes, as a fact,
that in that world genera and species are
practically stable. Cuvier, on the other
hand, was largely concerned with the
extinct forms of life, and his classification
of them, and his identification of their
relations with living forms, would have
been impossible if the peculiarities of the
structure in all living things had not
maintained through unknown ages the
same persistent character. He therefore
declared, with truth, that the very
possibility of establishing a science of
natural history absolutely depends on
the stability of species.
If, then, we give up the idea that
species have been permanently immut-
able, we must beware of rushing off to
104 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
antithetical conclusions which are at
variance with at least all contemporary
facts in the living world, and which, as
regards the past, rest mainly on our
impossibilities of conception in a matter
on which we are profoundly ignorant.
Species, if not absolutely immutable,
have now undoubtedly, and always have
had, a very high degree of stability and
endurance. If mutations have occurred,
it must have been under some conditions,
and under some law, of which we have
no example and can form no conception.
It is at this point that the theory of
organic evolution, when understood in
what may be called the party sense,
breaks down as an easy explanation
of the facts. It may be true that the
idea of separate creations continually
repeated is an idea which represents an
escape from thought, rather than an
exercise of reasonable speculation on
ii STABILITY IN THE PAST 105
the processes through which develop-
ment has been conducted. But exactly
the same may be said of the idea of
species being so unstable that they were
constantly passing into each other by
nothing but fortuitous and infinitesimal
variations.
This, indeed, may be an easier and
lazier conception than any other. But
it is easier only because it takes no notice
of insuperable difficulties and disagree-
ments with the facts. Species have
been quite as stable throughout all the
geological ages as they are at present.
Linnseus's Binomial system of classifica-
tion is as applicable to, and fits as well
into, the Trilobites of the Palaeozoic rocks
the Brachyopods and the Cephalopods
of the Secondary ages the Mammalia
of the Tertiary epoch, as it fits into all
the species now alive or only recently
extinct. Each species has its own dis-
io6 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
tinctive characters, down to the minutest
ornamentation on a scale or on an
osseous scute, or to the peculiar varieties
of pattern on the convolutions of an
Ammonite. These species continue till
they die, and then they are often suddenly
replaced by new forms and new patterns,
all as definite and as persistent as before.
How this takes place no man as yet can
tell.
I recollect one striking illustration.
Some thirty-five years ago I visited the
distinguished French geologist Barrande,
who devoted himself for years to the life-
history of the Trilobites in the Silurian
rocks of Bohemia. He had a magnifi-
cent collection of those curious crusta-
ceans in his house in Prague. Nothing
was more remarkable than the stability
of the forms which he identified. This
stability extended to the immature or
larval forms of each species. He had
ii BARRANDE ON TRILOBITES 107
specimens in every stage of growth.
He was good enough to drive with me
to the beds of rock which contained
them. They were the rocks forming in
low but steep hills the containing walls
of the Valley of the Moldau. They
consisted of a highly fissile slaty rock,
the planes of which were often charged
with the fossils. They seemed to me to
be singularly regular and unbroken by
clefts or chasms ; yet in the middle of
these regular and consecutive beds there
were members of the series which sud-
denly displayed new species. Barrande
was puzzled by the phenomenon. Where
could these new species come from ? It
never occurred to him that possibly they
might be born suddenly on the spot.
So, to meet the difficulty, he invented
the theory of " colonies " emigrants
from some other centre which had
migrated and settled there. Of course,
io8 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
this is no solution, but only a banish-
ment of the difficulty to some other
place. The more common bolt-hole for
escaping from this difficulty is to plead
the " imperfection of the record." But
this does not really avail us much. As
regards terrestrial forms of life, indeed,
it is true that the record is very imper-
fect, because the conditions are rare and
partial under which land animals can be
preserved in aqueous deposits. Conse-
quently, as regards them, we never get
a complete series. But there are many
great rock -formations of marine origin,
which were continuous deposits for ages,
at least long enough to embrace the
first appearance of many new species.
Yet these new species never seem to
be mere haphazard variations from pre-
existing forms. They never have the
least appearance of the lawless mixtures
of hybridism. On the contrary, the
ii LIMITS ON VARIATION 109
new forms are always as sharply defined
as the old, differing from them by char-
acters which are as well marked and as
constant as all their predecessors in the
wonderful processions of organic life. It
helps us very little to remember that in
the existing world some varieties do
occur in certain species varieties which
are sometimes sufficiently well marked
to raise the question among classifiers
whether they are, or are not, sufficiently
constant to deserve the name of separate
species. But this does not help us
much, because such varieties are very
limited in extent, and are almost always
confined to such superficial features as
the colour of hair or of feathers. They
never, so far as I know, affect organic
structure, and no accumulation of them
would account for the very different
kinds of variation which are conspicuous
in the successions of organic life.
1 1 o DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
These, however, are not the only
difficulties which beset any intelligent
acceptance of the theory of purely me-
chanical and mindless evolution through
changes infinitesimal and fortuitous.
There is another difficulty much more
fundamental. That theory, in all its
forms, involves always one assumption,
which, so far as I have observed, is
never expressly stated. It is the assump-
tion that organic life never could have
been introduced, or multiplied, except by
the processes of parental reproduction or
of ordinary generation, such as we see
them now. Yet if we only think of it
this is an assumption which not only
may be wrong, but which cannot pos-
sibly be true. We know as certainly
as we know anything in the physical
sciences, that organic life must have had
a definite beginning, in time, upon this
globe of ours. If so, then of course that
ii LIFE HAD BEGINNING in
beginning cannot possibly have been by
way of common parentage or ordinary
generation. Some other process must
have been employed, however little we
are able to conceive what that process
was. All our desperate attempts, there-
fore, to get rid of the idea of creation, as
distinguished from mere procreation, are
self-condemned as futile. The facts of
Nature, and the necessities of thought,
compel us to entertain the conception of
an absolute beginning of organic life,
when as yet there were no parent forms
to breed and multiply.
Darwin, as is well known, recognised
this ultimate necessity. He clothed the
conception of it in words derived from
the old and time-honoured language of
Genesis. He spoke of the Creator first
breathing the breath of life into a few,
perhaps only into one single organic
form. His followers generally seem to
1 1 2 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
regard this as a weak concession on the
part of their great master. Darwin
himself, in a letter to Sir J. Hooker, was
weak enough to express his own regret.
And yet he went on publishing edition
after edition without changing his words
or withdrawing them, or offering any
explanation, or suggesting any alterna-
tive conception. And why ? Because
he had none to suggest. His followers
are generally silent on the significance
of this passage in their master's intellec-
tual experience. His instinct that life
must have had a beginning, as subversive
of the fundamental assumption of his
theory, they pass over in silence. They
never dwell on it. They never realise
that without it, or without some substi-
tute for it, the whole structure of what
they call organic evolution is without a
basis that it represents a chain hanging
in mid air, having no point of attachment
ii SOMETHING NEW DONE 113
in the heavens or on earth. It is as
certain as anything in human thought
that, when organic life was first intro-
duced into the world, something was
done some process was employed
differing from that by which those forms
do now simply reproduce and repeat
themselves.
But the moment this concession has
been fully, frankly, and intelligently
made, another concession necessarily
follows, namely this, that we cannot
safely conclude that the first, and more
strictly creative, process has never been
repeated. Yet this is the assumption
tacitly involved in all the current
materialistic theories of evolution. They
all absolutely depend upon it, although
it is seldom if ever avowed. It is an
assumption, nevertheless, in favour of
which there is assuredly no antecedent
probability. On the contrary, the true
1 1 4 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
presumption is that, as solitary excep-
tions are really unknown in Nature, the
same processes may very well have been
often repeated from time to time. Or
perhaps even it may be true that such
processes are involved in, and form an
essential part of, the infinite mysteries of
what we call, and think of so carelessly,
as ordinary generation. This is an idea
which opens very wide indeed our intel-
lectual eyes, and gives them much to do
in watching and interpreting the fathom-
less wonder of familiar things.
Let us, however, provisionally at least,
accept the belief that organic life was first
called into existence in the form of some
three, or four, or five germs each being
the progenitor of one of the great lead-
ing types of the animal creation in
respect to peculiarities of structure one
for the Vertebrata, one for the Mollusca,
one for the Crustacea, one for the
ii POTENTIALITY IN GERMS 115
Radiata, and one for the Insecta. Let
us assume, farther, on the same footing,
that from each of these germs all the
modifications belonging to each class
have been developed by what we call
the processes of ordinary generation.
Then it follows that, as all these modifi-
cations have undoubtedly taken definite
directions from invisible beginnings to
the latest results and complexities of
structure, the original germs must have
been so constituted as to contain these
complexities, potentially, within them-
selves. This conclusion is not in the
least affected by any influence we may
attribute to external surroundings. The
Darwinian school in all its branches in-
variably dwell on external conditions as
physical causes. But it is obvious that
these can never act upon an organic
mechanism except through, and by means
of, a responsive power in that mechanism
n6 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
itself to follow the direction given to it,
whether from what we call inside or out-
side things.
This is no transcendental imagina-
tion, as some might think it. It is a
conclusion securely founded on the most
certain facts of embryology. It is the
great peculiarity of organic development
or growth that it always follows a deter-
minate course to an equally determinate
end. Each separate organ begins to
appear before it can be actually used.
It is always built up gradually for the
discharge of functions which are yet
lying in the future. In all organic
growths the future dominates the pre-
sent. All that goes on at any given
time in such growths has exclusive refer-
ence to something else that has yet to be
done, in some other time which is yet to
come. On this cardinal fact, or law, in
biology there ought to be no dispute
ii A FUTURE GOVERNS GERMS 117
with Mr. Spencer. Numberless writers
before him have indeed implied it in
their descriptions of embryological phe-
nomena, and of the later growth of
adapted organs. But, so far as I know,
no writer before Mr. Spencer has per-
ceived so clearly its universal truth, or
has raised it to the rank of a funda-
mental principle of philosophy. This he
has done in his Principles of Biology,
pointing out that it constitutes the main
difference between the organic and the
inorganic world. Crystals grow, but
when they have been formed there is an
end of the operation. They have no
future. But the growth of a living
organ is always premonitory of, and pre-
parative for, the future discharge of some
functional activity. As Mr. Spencer
expresses it, " changes in inorganic
things have no apparent relations to
future external events which are sure,
n8 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
or likely, to take place. In vital changes,
however, such relations are manifest." 1
This is an excellent generalisation. It
only needs that the word " relations" be
translated from the abstract into the con-
crete. The kind of relation which is
"manifest" is the relation of a previous
preparation for an intended use. Unfor-
tunately, Mr. Spencer is perpetually
escaping or departing from the conse-
quences of his own " manifest relations."
In a subsequent passage of the same
work 2 he says, "Everywhere structures
in great measure determine functions."
This is exactly the reverse of the mani-
fest truth that the future functions
determine the antecedent growth of
structure. This escape from his own
doctrine on the fundamental distinction
between the organic and the inorganic
1 Spencer's Principles of Biology ^ vol. i. ch. v. p. 73.
2 Ibid. vol. ii. ch. i. p. 4.
ii POTENCY OF GERMS 119
world is an escape entirely governed by
his avowed aim to avoid language having
teleological implications. But surely it
is bad philosophy to avoid any fitting
words because of implications which are
manifestly true, and are an essential part
of their descriptive power.
If, therefore, we are to accept the
hypothesis that all vertebrate animals,
whether living or extinct, have been
the offspring, by ordinary generation, of
one single germ, originally created, then
that original germ must have contained
within itself certain innate properties
of development along definite lines of
growth, the issues of which have been
forearranged and predetermined from
the first. I have elsewhere 1 shown
how this conception permeates, involun-
tarily, all the language of descriptive
science when specialists take it in hand
1 Philosophy of Belief, ch. iii.
120 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
to express and explain the facts of
Biology to others. Huxley habitually
uses the word "plan" as applicable to
the mechanism of all organic frames.
This is a theory of creation by
whatever other name men may choose
to deceive themselves by calling it. It is
a theory of development too, of course,
but of the development of a purpose. 1 1 is
a theory of evolution also but of evolu-
tion in its relation to an involution first.
Nothing can come out that has not first
been put in. It is not less a theory of
creation which, whether true or not, gets
rid absolutely of the elements of chance
so valued by Darwin's more fanatical
followers, and of the mere mechanical
necessity which seems to be favoured
by Mr. Spencer.
It must be obvious, however, that
the burden of this conception would be
greatly lightened if we give up the un-
ii NEW GERMS 121
justifiable, and indeed irrational, assump-
tion that what must confessedly have
happened once can never possibly have
happened again, namely, the introduc-
tion of new germs with their own special
potentialities of development. There
are natural divisions in the animal king-
dom which seem to suggest the idea of
a fresh start on new lines of evolution.
The Mammalia may well have been
thus begun as a great advance on the
hideous Reptiles, which once dominated
the world both by land and sea. Fishes
may well have had another separate
ancestral germ and so with all the
lower orders of creation, some of which
are very deeply divided from each other.
I know of no natural or rational limita-
tion on the possibilities of this sugges-
tion. On the contrary, the general law
of the continuity of Nature is favourable
to repetition of any and every precedent
122 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
which has once been set in the processes
of creation. There is an antecedent prob-
ability that anything done once has been
done again and again that, in fact, it is
part of a system, and in fulfilment of a law.
The conceivableness of this process
would be indefinitely increased if we
invoke the help of another principle,
and of another analogy in the actual
phenomena of organic life and that is
the great rapidity with which organic
germs can sometimes evolve their in-
volutions and develop their predestined
and prearranged adaptitudes. The Dar-
winian idea has persistently been that
the steps of development have been
always infinitesimally small, and that
only by the accumulation of these,
during immeasurable ages, could new
forms have been established. It has
long occurred to me that this assump-
tion is against the analogies of Nature,
ii TIME AS A FACTOR 123
seeing that in all cases of ordinary
generation, and conspicuously in a thou-
sand cases of metamorphoses among
the lower creatures, the full develop-
ment of germs takes a very short time
indeed. In the case of some birds, a
fortnight or three weeks at the outside
is sometimes enough of time wherein to
develop, from an egg, a complete fowl
with legs, and wings, and instincts, all
ready-made to lead an adult and inde-
pendent life. In frogs and toads the
time of hatching varies from three days
to three weeks. In some insects a few
hours is enough to produce a creature
very highly organised, with many special
adaptations. In other numberless cases,
a living creature, already leading a separ-
ate life, is put to sleep within an external
case or shell, and, in that state of sleep,
is radically transformed in all its organs,
and comes out in a few days an entirely
i2 4 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
new animal form, with new powers, fitted
for new spheres of activity and of enjoy-
ment. All these incomprehensible facts
in which nothing but the blinding effects
of familiarity conceals from us the really
creative processes involved demon-
strate the absurdity of supposing that new
species could not be evolved from germs
except by steps infinitesimally slow, and
accumulated through unnumbered ages.
This powerful argument, securely
founded on the most notorious facts of
the living world, has for many years
entirely relieved my mind from the
supposed difficulty of reconciling all that
is essential in the idea of creation with
the pretended competing idea of evolu-
tion or development. I have not, how-
ever, hitherto used it publicly, not having
had a fitting opportunity of so doing.
But I do not recollect having seen it
used by others. It is, therefore, with
ii SPENCER'S CHARGE 125
no small surprise that, in Mr. Spencer's
article, I find it taken up and used for
a wholly different contention. His adop-
tion of it is a good example of the uses
of controversy. Thirty -two years ago
he would not have used it. We have
good evidence of this in a vigorous
letter published in the Appendix to vol. i.
of his Principles of Biology, 1864. In
that letter he makes "enormous time"
an essential condition of even the very
lowest steps in organic evolution. And
for a good reason, which, with his usual
candour, he frankly explains. The
sudden or very rapid evolution of even
the lowest organic forms, from some
primordial germs, he sees plainly, would
be a very dangerous admission. "If,"
he says, " there can suddenly be imposed
on simple protoplasm the organisation
which constitutes it a Paramcecium, I
see no reason why animals of greater
126 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
complexity, or indeed of any complexity,
may not be constituted after the same
manner." Neither do I. Therefore, to
escape from an idea so perilous to his
philosophy, he asserts his conviction
that "to reach by this process (organic
evolution) the comparatively well-special-
ised forms of ordinary Infusoria must
have taken an enormous period of time." 1
To find, therefore, Mr. Herbert Spencer
now insisting on the actual rapidity, and
the still greater conceivable rapidity,
of evolution in organisms, is a very
instructive change of front. It is for
the sake of argument that he takes
up this new attitude on an all-import-
ant point. Lord Salisbury in his Ad-
dress had dwelt on the immensities of
time which, on the Darwinian theory,
must have been needed to develop
"a jelly -sh into a man"; and he had
1 P. 481.
ii LIMIT OF TIME 127
confronted this demand on time with
the calculations of physicists, which limit
the number of years since the globe
must have been too hot for organic life.
I have never myself dwelt on this objec-
tion to Darwinism, because I never felt
absolute confidence in the calculations
of decreasing heat which vary from tens
of millions to hundreds of millions of
years. Recently, however, Lord Kelvin
has placed it on strong grounds of cal-
culable certainty that the demands of
many geologists on time have been
extravagant and impossible. Still, when
we get into such high numbers as even
twenty millions of years, and such enor-
mous margins for possible error, I always
feel that we are handling weapons which
have no certain edge. But Mr. Spencer
now avails himself of the safer alterna-
tive when he escapes from the difficulty
by throwing overboard altogether the
128 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP.
doctrine that changes in animal structure
can only have been very minute and very
slow. He, therefore, takes up the same
idea that has often occurred to me that
all the phenomena, even of ordinary
generation, point to the possibility of
great transmutations having been accom-
plished in very short periods of time.
It seems he had foreshadowed this line
of argument in 1852, before Darwin's
book was published. But he now works
it out in more detail, and revels in the
calculations which prove what great
things are now being very summarily
done by ordinary generation in develop-
ing the most complex organic forms
from a simple cell. The nine months
which are enough to develop the human
ovum into the very complex structure of
a new-born infant are divisible, he calcu-
lates, into 403,200 minutes. If only one
hundred millions of years were allowed
ii LESSONS FROM METAMORPHOSES 129
since the globe was cool enough to
allow of life, then, he argues, no less
than 250 years would be available out
of each minute of man's development
for those analogous changes which have
raised some Protozoon into Man. Mr.
Spencer makes no mention of the con-
spicuous wonders effected in insect and
crustacean metamorphoses during periods
relatively much shorter. He makes no
allusion to the fact that specialists often
speak of embryonic stages, common in
some genera, being "hurried over" in
the case of others, so that the final
stages are more quickly reached. An
idea so suggestive of a directing and
creative energy thus visibly subordinat-
ing the machinery of generation to
special ends, is an idea which goes far
beyond Mr. Spencer's new argument
deprecating the over-importance hitherto
attached by thoughtless evolutionists to
K
130 DISCRIMINATIONS CHAP, n
countless ages of infinitesimal change.
He may well say that if this be true,
no reason can be seen why animals
of any degree of complexity may not
be developed as quickly and after the
same manner. Neither, of course, does
Mr. Spencer push his argument to the
obvious conclusion which is adverse to
his philosophy the conclusion, namely,
that if the first creation of germs has
ever been repeated, still more if it may
have been frequently repeated, then
the whole processes of a creative de-
velopment may have been indefinitely
hastened, and the element of time be-
comes of quite subordinate importance.
CHAPTER III
CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS
MR. HERBERT SPENCER'S rejection of any
necessity for the " enormous" time which
evolutionists have hitherto demanded,
and to which Lord Salisbury only
alluded as a well-known characteristic
of their theories, marks a new stage in
the whole controversy. Nobody had
made the demand more emphatically
than Mr. Spencer himself only a few
years ago. His confession now, and
his even elaborate defence of the idea
that the work of evolution may be a
work of great rapidity, goes some way
to bridge the space which divides the
i 3 2 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
conception of creation, and the concep-
tion of evolution as merely one of the
creative methods. But Mr. Spencer
must make further concessions. It is not
the element of time, however long, nor
is it the mere idea of a process, however
purely physical, which we object to
we who have never been able to accept
any of the recent theories of evolution
as giving a true or adequate explanation
of the facts of organic life. The two
elements in all those theories which we
reject as essentially erroneous, are the
elements of mere fortuity on the one
hand, and of mere mechanical necessity
on the other. If the processes of
ordinary generation have never been
reinvigorated by a repetition of that
other process whatever it may have
been in which ordinary generation was
first started on its wonderful and
mysterious course, then all the more
in DIRECTION DEFINITE 133
certainly must the whole of that course
have been foreseen and prearranged.
It has certainly not been a haphazard
course. It has been a magnificent and
orderly procession. It has been a
course of continually fresh adapta-
tions to new spheres of functional
activity. We deceive ourselves when
we think or talk, as the Darwinian
school perpetually does, of organs being
made or fitted by use. The idea is,
strictly speaking, nonsense. They must
have been made for use, not by use,
because they have always existed in
embryo before the use was possible,
and, generally, there are many stages of
growth before they can be put to use.
It is, therefore, a fact not a theory
that during all these stages the lines of
development were strictly governed by
the end to be attained that is to say,
by the purpose to be fulfilled.
134 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
This, indeed, is evolution ; but it is
the evolution of mind and will ; of
purpose and intention. We are not to
be scared by the application to this
indisputable logic of that most meaning-
less of all words the supernatural.
For myself I can only say that I do
not believe in the supernatural that
is to say, I do not believe in anything
outside of what men call Nature, which
is not also inside of it, and manifest
throughout its whole domain. I cannot
accept, or even respect, the opinion of
men who, in describing the facts of
Nature, and especially the growing
adaptations of organic structures, use
perpetually the language of intention
as essential to the understanding of
them, and then repudiate the implica-
tions of that language when they talk
what they call science or philosophy.
When evolutionists do defend their
in A WRONG PRESUMPTION 135
inconsistencies in this matter, they use
arguments which we cannot accept as
resting on any solid basis. Thus Mr.
Spencer argues in his article that if the
Creator had willed to form all those
creatures, He surely would have led
them along lines of direct growth from
the germ to the finished form, and would
not have led them through so many
stages of metamorphoses. 1 We have
no antecedent knowledge of the Creator
which can possibly entitle us to form
any such presumption as to His methods
of operation. This is one answer. But
there is another. The method which is
supposed by Mr. Spencer to be incon-
sistent with the operations of a mind
and will is the same method which is
our own, and which is universally pre-
valent in the Universe. Everything is
done by the use of means ; everything
1 P. 745-
136 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
is accomplished by steps, generally
visible, but often also concealed from
our view. There is, therefore, either
no mind guiding the order of that uni-
verse, or else this method is compatible
with intellectual direction. We must
take Nature as we find it. We have
nothing to do with what Mr. Spencer
calls " Special Creation." Special evolu-
tion will do very well for our contention.
That contention is that in organic
structures purposive adaptations have
had the controlling power. This is not
an argument ; it is a fact. In Biology
our perception of the relation between
organic structures and the purposes they
are made to serve which are the
functions they are constructed to dis-
charge is a perception as clear, dis-
tinct, and certain as our perception
of their relations to each other, or
to time, or to form, or to space, or
in EVOLUTION OF MACHINES 137
to any other of the categories of our
knowledge.
Mr. Spencer is under a complete
delusion if he supposes that the four or
five great heads of evidence, which he
specifies as all telling the same tale of
evolution, could not be equally applicable
to the facts if all the steps of evolution
were visibly and admittedly under the
ordering and guidance of a will. For
example, the argument founded on the
possibilities of Classification applies to
the evolution of human machines as well
as to the organic mechanisms of Nature.
A row of models of the steam-engine,
from " Papin's Digester " to the wonder-
ful machines which now drive express
trains at sixty or seventy miles an hour,
would show a consecutive series of de-
velopments in every way comparable
except in length and complexity with
the series of the Mammalian skeleton.
138 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
Yet nobody would be tempted to guess
on this account, except in a metaphorical
sense, that steam-engines have all been
begotten by each other. The metaphor
from organic births, however, is so
apposite and perfect in its analogy that
it is often actually used, and the beget-
ting of ideas, or of the application of
ideas to mechanical or chemical work,
is a recognised branch of the history of
mechanics.
The truth is that the argument de-
rived from the principle on which all
natural classifications rest, is a very
dangerous argument for Darwinians.
It cuts two ways, and one of the ways
is very undermining to the assumption
that there has been some continual flux
of specific characters. It is true that in
all living structures common features, so
numerous, do indicate some common
cause and source. But it is not less
in DARWIN'S CONFESSION 139
true that specific differences, so constant
and so definite through enormous periods
of time, are incompatible with perpetual
instability. Darwin himself spoke of
"fixity" as an essential characteristic of
true species. He admitted that this
fixity is never attained by the human
breeder ; and he even admitted that it
could only be obtained by "selection
with a definite object." 1 This is a most
remarkable declaration. Just as we
have seen Mr. Spencer, under the in-
ducements of controversy, throwing
overboard his old demand for enormous
periods of time, so now we find Darwin
throwing overboard the idea of variations
being either constant, or indiscriminate,
or accidental, and even insisting that
" fixity" in organic forms is an aim in
Nature, and can only be secured through
1 Quoted by Professor Poulton, Charles Darwin^
etc., p. 201.
i4o CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
an agency having a definite object, and
pursuing that object with a persistency
impossible to man as a mere breeder
of temporary varieties. This is an
argument which gives a very high rank
to species in the history of life. It is
because of it that Cuvier declared that
no science of Natural History is possible
if species be not stable. If, then, it be
true that one species has always given
birth to others, it must have been by
a process of which, as yet, we know
nothing.
And then it must be remembered
that there are some fundamental features
in all living organisms involving corre-
sponding likenesses which can have no
other than a mental explanation. One
great principle governs the whole of
them, namely this, that in order to take
advantage of special laws, physical,
mechanical, chemical, and vital, certain
in APPARATUSES SUPPLIED 141
corresponding conditions must be sub-
mitted to, and certain apparatuses must
be devised, and provided, for the meet-
ing of these necessities. But the bond
the nexus between the existence of
a need and the actual meeting of that
need, in the supply of an apparatus, can
be nothing but a perceiving mind and
will. I quite agree with Mr. Spencer
that most men when they talk of separate
or special Creation do not realise, or
"visualise," what they mean by it. But
exactly the same criticism applies to the
language of those who are perpetually
explaining organic structures as develop-
ments governed by the absolute neces-
sities of external adaptations. They do
not really see the necessary implications
of their own language. If the organism
is to live at all, they frequently tell us,
such and such developments must arise.
Quite so but who is it, or what is it,
142 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
that determines that the organism shall
live, and shall not rather die? The
needed development will not appear of
its own accord. The needed perception
of its necessity must exist somewhere ;
and the needed power of meeting that
necessity must exist somewhere also.
Moreover, the two must act in concert.
Those, therefore, who talk about that
combined perception and power existing
in Nature are using words with no
meaning, unless by Nature they mean a
conceiving and a perceiving agency. It
is on this principle alone that we can
explain very clearly why certain lines of
structure and certain special apparatuses
are common to all living things. The
assimilation of food, the support of
weight, some fulcrum for the attach-
ment of muscle, some circulatory fluid,
some vessels for the circulating fluids to
find a channel, some apparatus for the
in A MENTAL WORK 143
supply of oxygen, and for its absorption,
some nervous system for the genera-
tion of the highest energies of life,
some optical arrangement for the pur-
poses of sight all of these, and many
more, involve, of necessity, likenesses
and correspondences between all living
things in the animal kingdom. These
correspondences hang together by a
purely mental and rational chain of
common necessities which have been
seen and have been accordingly provided
for. These mental relations between
needs and their supply are entirely in-
dependent of the methods employed,
and, as a fact, the methods employed do
very considerably vary. The argument
would be exactly the same if the methods
of supply were much more various than
they actually are. If the one method
employed has never been anything but
ordinary generation, with the single
i 4 4 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
exception of the first, or the few first, of
the whole series, then it would follow
that the amount and the definiteness of
the prevision involved in the first germs
must have been all the more wonderful,
and the more completely answering to
all that can be intelligible as creation.
There is surely something suspicious
improbable at variance with all the
analogies of Nature in the doctrine
which the mechanical evolutionists would
force upon us that the life - giving
energy, by whatever name we may call
it, which started organic life upon its
way in the form of some four or five
primordial germs has been doing
nothing ever since. No doubt it mag-
nifies the richness and fertility of the
original operation seeing as we do the
almost infinite varieties which it included
in its predetermined lines of change.
But if this has been the course of creation,
in ORDINARY GENERATION 145
we are driven to another conception
without which the theory would not at
all correspond to the facts of life. If
ordinary generation has been the sole
agent in producing all but the few
original germs, then ordinary generation
must have been sometimes made to do
some very extraordinary things. Mr.
Spencer very fairly admits that man has
never yet seen a new species born by
ordinary generation. This may be
theoretically accounted for by the short-
ness of man's life as yet upon the globe.
But, unfortunately for the theory, the
long ages of Palaeontology give no clue
it
to the immediate parentage of any new
species. There are, indeed, intermediate
forms, and these are called links. But
somehow the links never seem to touch.
The new forms always appear suddenly
from no known source and generally,
if of a new type, exhibiting that type in
146 - CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
great strength as to numbers, and in
great perfection as regards organisation.
The usual way of evading this great
difficulty in the facts of Geology is to
plead what is called the imperfection of
the Record. But this plea will not avail
us here. There are some tracts of time
respecting which our records are almost
as complete as we could desire. In the
Jurassic rocks we have a continuous and
undisturbed series of long and tranquil
deposits containing a complete record
of all the new forms of life which were
introduced during these ages of oceanic
life. And those ages were, as a fact,
long enough to see not only a thick
(1300 feet) mass of deposit, but the firs't
appearance of hundreds of new species.
These are all as definite and distinct from
each other as existing species. No less
than 1850 new species have been counted
all of them suddenly born all of them
in STABILITY OF FORMS 147
lasting only for a time, and all of them
in their turn superseded by still newer
forms. There is no sign of mixture, or
of confusion or of infinitesimal or of in-
determinate variations. These " Medals
of Creation " are all, each of them, struck
by a new die which never failed to im-
press itself on the plastic materials of this
truly creative work. There is nothing
more instructive than to place a series
of these new species, such as the Ammon-
ites, on a table side by side. The perfect
regularity and beauty of each new
pattern of shell, and the fixity of it so
long as it existed at all, are features as
striking as they are obvious.
There is one suggestion which has
been made in order to meet these strange
phenomena, which has always seemed
to me to be more plausible than any
other, and to come much nearer than
any other to the historic facts. It was
148 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
the suggestion of a very eminent and
most ingenious man Babbage, the in-
ventor of the Calculating machine. His
mind was full of the resources of
mechanical invention. He conceived
the idea that as such a machine as his
own could be made to evolve its results
according to a certain numerical law
during a given time, and then suddenly,
for another time, to follow a different
law with the same accuracy and per-
fection of results, so it is conceivable
that species might be really as constant
and invariable as we actually find them
to be, for some long periods of time
embracing perhaps centuries or even
millenniums and then suddenly, all at
once, evolve a new form which should
be equally constant, for another definite
time to follow.
This notion would account for many
facts, and it is, of course, consistent
in B ABB AGE'S SUGGESTION 149
with the assumption that what we call
ordinary generation has since in the
first creations it was originally started on
its way been the only and the invari-
able instrumentality employed in the
development of species. And not
only would this idea square with the
apparently sudden appearance of new
species, repeated over and over again
throughout the geological ages, but,
more important still, it would harmonise
with those intellectual instincts and con-
ceptions of our mental nature to which
the idea of chance is abhorrent, and
which demand for an orderly progression
in events some regulating cause as con-
tinuous and as intelligible as itself.
Mr. Spencer refers, as others now
continually do, to the recent discoveries
in America which have revealed a re-
markably continuous series of specific
forms leading up to that highly special-
150 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
ised animal the Horse. That series of
forms, although then less continuous, was
noticed long before the days of Darwin.
It attracted the attention of Cuvier, and
I heard Owen lecture upon it as indica-
tive of the origin of the Horse two years
before the Origin of Species had been
published. The later more near approach
to completion in that series of American
fossils is said by Mr. Spencer to have
finally convinced Professor Huxley of
conclusions on which he had before
maintained a certain reserve. They are,
indeed, most significant, but I am not
sure that their significance has been well
interpreted. They do indeed seem to
indicate the development of a plan of
animal structure worked out, somehow,
through the processes of ordinary genera-
tion. But they do not indicate any
fortuity, or any confusion, or any blind
haphazard variations in all possible
in EVOLUTION OF HORSES 151
directions. Neither do they indicate
steps of infinitesimal minuteness. On
the contrary, they indicate a steady pro-
gress in one determinate line of develop-
ment, a progress so rapid that sometimes
the new species seem to have been
actually living as contemporaries with
the older species ; and alongside of the
anterior forms which were, as it were,
going out of fashion, and are now assumed
to have been their own progenitors.
The number, too, of the forms through
which the line of modifications can be
traced during a geological period of
apparently no long duration, indicates at
that time an activity in the production of
new specific characters which is highly
suggestive of comparatively rapid changes
in the processes and in the products of
ordinary generation. Sedimentary beds
not exceeding 180 feet in total thickness,
and thus indicative of no very long time
152 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
in the geological scale, are now found to
contain several of the divergent forms
which lead up to the fully developed
Horse. 1 It is as if the creative energy,
which on every theory must have begun
the series in the creation of the original
germs, had been then calling out their
included potentialities into manifestations
unusually rapid. These manifestations
were all pointing steadily in one direction,
namely, the establishment on a con-
tinent ceasing to be marshy of a species
of quadruped, organised for a singular
combination of strength, and fleetness,
and endurance in the machinery of loco-
motion upon drier land.
This example of the correlations of
growth effected in all probability through
1 I have taken these facts from a very remarkable
paper in the Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Society for August 1 896, " On the Osteology
of the White River Horses," by Marcus S. Farr, pp.
I47-I75-
in DOMESTICABLE MAMMALIA 153
the machinery of ordinary generation,
but under a definite guidance along
certain lines to an extraordinary but
determinate result, is all the more strik-
ing because it does not stand alone. All
the great domesticable Mammalia which
serve such important purposes in the life
of Man, and without which that life
would have been far less favourably con-
ditioned than it is, were all the contem-
poraneous product of that very recent,
but most pregnant, Pliocene age in which
the Horse was, at some appointed time,
evolved out of ancestral forms, which
would have been as useless to Man as
the survivors of them now are, such as
the Rhinoceros or the Tapir.
Among the conceptions to which the
Darwinian theory of development has
most frequently resorted, has been the
conception that the development of all
individual things from germs is an
154 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
epitome and an analogue of the kindred,
but far slower and longer, processes
which have given birth to species in the
course of ages. It is the best of all their
conceptions that which most facilitates
the imagination in picturing a possible
method of creation because it rests on
at least a plausible analogy of Nature.
But, unfortunately, the mechanical school
of evolutionists do not seem to under-
stand one of the most certain character-
istics of the processes of ordinary genera-
tion. If the germs first created had all
the essential qualities of the procreated
germs, then chance, or miscellaneous
and unguided growths, can have had no
place in the development of species.
Nothing can be more certain that every
procreated germ runs its own peculiar
course to its own peculiar goal, with a
regularity that implies a directing force.
Mr. Spencer himself reminds us that all
in DIRECTING AGENCY 155
procreated germs are so like each other
in the earliest stages, that neither the
microscopist, nor the chemist, could tell
whether any germ is to develop into
any of the lowest animals or into a man.
Yet the line of growth, in each, is pre-
determined, and the adult form is as
certain and as definite as if the completed
animal had been a separate creation from
the inorganic elements of Nature. If,
therefore, the mechanical evolutionists
appeal to the processes of ordinary
generation, they must take all the con-
sequences of that appeal. They must
not reject or gloss over a feature of it
which is most fundamental and conspicu-
ous, namely, the internal directing agency
or force, which always pursues a definite
line of growth, so that all the demands
of the completed structure must have
been present from the beginning, and
must have been always ready to appear
156 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
in strength when the set time had come,
and very probably to appear in embryo
even sooner.
It has always appeared to me that
this is a conception of such strength, and
even of such certainty, that it casts a
new and a very clear light on one of the
most curious and puzzling groups of fact
which the science of Biology reveals
I allude to the frequent occurrence in
animal structures of what are called
rudimentary organs that is to say, the
occurrence of bits of organic mechanism
which are never to be used in that
particular creature, but which, in other
creatures widely different, grow up into
functional activity, and may even be the
most essential organs of its life. A great
number of instances have been cited by
comparative anatomists some of them,
perhaps, more fanciful than real as, for
example, when the five or six vertebrae
in RUDIMENTARY STRUCTURES 157
which constitute a real, though an in-
visible, tail in Man, are quoted as a case
of a rudimentary organ. The truth is
that this very short tail in men is far
more clearly functional than many very
long tails in other animals. It is
absolutely needed for the support of the
whole frame when it is subjected to the
strain of its own weight for long periods
of time in the sitting posture, a posture
which is peculiar to Man and, in a less
degree, to Monkeys. It is not clear that
there is any functional use in the long
tails of dogs, of cats, and of many other
animals. They are, indeed, very ex-
pressive of the emotions, and this, no
doubt, is of itself a use. Perhaps more
really belonging to the category of rudi-
mental organs may be the traces which
are said to exist in the human head of
the special muscles which move the ears
in lower animals. If such exist, although
158 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
a certain very limited power of move-
ment of the scalp is observable in a few
individuals, such muscles seem to be
divorced in man from their appropriate
use.
But it is needless to dwell on cases
which can only be verified by specialists
in anatomy, when we have in Nature
conspicuous cases which, when seen,
confront us with perpetual but baffled
curiosity and astonishment. The most
extreme case is the best for illustration,
and is naturally the most often quoted.
It is the case of the Whale. This hugest
of all the living vertebrata is so exclu-
sively adapted to life in the ocean that if
by accident it is stranded on the shore
it is speedily suffocated by the crushing
of all its internal organs under its own
enormous weight. Yet this creature, so
utterly destitute of any osseous structure
capable even for a moment of sustaining
in CASE OF WHALES 159
that weight, does, nevertheless, exhibit
in its skeleton all the bones which con-
stitute the fore limbs of quadrupeds, and
has even a bony rudiment which repre-
sents the elaborate structure which, in
them, constitutes the pelvis. This is
the solid fulcrum upon which, in them,
the posterior pair of limbs are hinged,
and on which, in the case of Man, the
power of progression on land is absolutely
dependent. The Whale, too at least
that species of whale called the Right
Whale, which is the species we know
best, from its great commercial value
presents in its life -history another ex-
ample of rudimentary organs. The new-
born whale is provided with teeth, which
are utterly without functional use either
in the young or in the adult, and are
soon absorbed and lost as the young
advance to maturity.
There is no doubt that the class of
160 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
facts to which these belong are guide-
posts in the science of Biology. They
must have an historical origin, and a
meaning, which is not yet thoroughly
understood. Let us look at some con-
siderations which seem to throw an
important light upon them.
In the first place, it is evident that
organic structures, or bits of organic
structure, which have no apparent use
at all to some individual creatures pos-
sessing them, are closely connected with
that other case which is much more
common the case, namely, of the same
organic structures existing in different
animals, but which are in them put to
entirely different uses. Owen says that
even the cetacean pelvis is used, in the
meantime, for the attachment of some
muscles connected with the generative
organs. The five digits of a man's
hand, again, are identical in number and
in SIMPLE EXPLANATION 161
position with the five slender bones of a
Bat's wing. In that animal they are
used as the supporting framework of a
flying membrane, and are wholly useless
for any purposes of prehension. The
digit which we call our thumb, and
which in Man has such essential uses
that the hand would hardly be a hand
without it, is in the Bat not altogether
abolished, but is dwarfed and converted
into a mere hook by which the creature
catches hold of the surfaces to which,
when at rest, it clings. The whole
vertebrate creation is full of such ex-
amples. Rudimentary organs, therefore,
are nothing but a natural and harmonious
part of a general principle which is
applied in different degrees throughout
the animal world. The explanation
is, in one sense, very simple. It is
that the vertebrate skeleton, with all its
related tissues, has been what Huxley
M
1 62 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
always called it a Plan, laid down from
its beginning, in its originating germs,
with a prevision of all its complexities
of adaptability to immense varieties of
use. There must have been a provision
for these uses in certain elements and
rudiments of structure, and in certain
inherent tendencies of growth, which
were to commence, from time to time,
the new and specially adapted structures.
This is the indisputable fact in every
case of ordinary generation, and if that
process has been the only method em-
ployed since the first few germs were
otherwise created, then both the cause
and the reason of rudimentary organs
in many creatures become intelligible
enough.
There ' is nothing in this explanation
which can be rationally objected to by
evolutionists. Indeed, if Darwin's par-
ticular theory of development be at all
in A NECESSITY OF THOUGHT 163
true, it becomes an absolute necessity of
thought that there must have been, in
the history of organic life, a whole series
of special organs appearing from time to
time as rudiments, and then, after a
period of functional activity, disappear-
ing again as vestiges. The course of
organic life has certainly been, on the
whole, one of progress from lower to
higher organisations, and if it be true
that all these changes have come about
with infinitesimal slowness or even if
they have been occasionally rapid there
must have been always as many structures
in course of preparation for future use,
as there were other structures in course
of extinction because they were ceasing
to be of any use whatever.
It is curious to observe that Dar-
winians, generally, never seem to per-
ceive this necessity at all. When they
see a rudimentary organ in any animal
1 64 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
frame they always insist that it must be
the vestige of an organ which was once
in full activity in some actual progenitor.
They never allow that it may possibly
represent a contemplated future. Accord-
ing to them it must, and can, only repre-
sent an accomplished and concluded past.
Why is this ? Of course it involves a
complete abandonment of the attempt to
give any account of the origin of any
organic structure. It implicitly assumes
that they were created suddenly, and in
a state so perfect as to be capable of
functional activity from the moment of
their first appearance. If not, then there
is no puzzle in rudimentary organs.
They are the normal and necessary
results of gradual evolution by gradual
variations.
The assumption, therefore, that such
organs must always be the remnants
of structures formerly complete, is so
in PREDESTINED USES 165
entirely at variance with the whole
theory of the mechanical evolutionists
that there must be some explanation
of their running their heads against it.
The explanation is very simple. It
is one of the infirmities of the human
mind that, when it is thoroughly
possessed by one idea, it not only sees
everything in the light of that idea, but
can see nothing that does not lend
itself to support the dominant con-
ception. There is nothing that a mind
in this condition dislikes so much as an
incongruous fact. Its instincts, too, are
amazingly acute in scenting, even from
afar, the tainted atmosphere of phe-
nomena which have dangerous implica-
tions. This is the secret of the aversion
felt by the Darwinian School to the
immense variety of biological facts which
point to the steady growth of organs for
a predestined use, and consequently to
1 66 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
their inevitable first appearance in rudi-
mentary conditions in which as yet they
can have no actual functional activity.
For this is an idea profoundly at variance
with materialistic and purely mechanical
explanations. It is easy by such ex-
planations at least superficially it seems
to be easy to explain the atrophy and
ultimate disappearance of organs which,
after completion, fall into disuse. But it
is impossible to account, on the same
mechanical principles, for the slow but
steady building up of elaborate structures,
the functional use of which lies wholly in
the future.
The universal instincts of the human
mind are conscious that this concep-
tion is inseparable from that kind of
guidance and direction which we know
as mind. No other is conceivable.
And this particular kind of agency is as
much an object of direct perception
in IN EMBRYOLOGY 167
when we see an elaborate apparatus
growing up through many rudimentary
stages to an accomplished end as the
relations of the same apparatus to the
chemical and vital processes which are
subordinate agencies in the result. But
it is a cardinal dogma of the mechanical
school that in Nature there is no mental
agency except our own ; or that, if there
be, it is to us as nothing, and any refer-
ence to it must be banished from what
they define as science. This is all the
stranger since the existence of rudiment-
ary organs, on the way to some pre-
destined end in various functional
activities, is the universal fact governing
the whole phenomena of embryology
in the course of ordinary generation.
Moreover, it is the very men who insist
on embryology as a confirmation of
their special theory, who object most
vehemently to its principles being con-
1 68 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
sistently applied to the explanation of
kindred facts in the structure of animals
in the past.
So hostile have Darwinians generally
been to this interpretation of rudimentary
organs in adult animals, that some years
ago, when, in controversy with the late
Dr. George Romanes, I spoke of rudi-
mentary organs being interpretable some-
times " in the light of prophecy " rather
than in the light of history, he challenged
me to specify any one organ in any
creature which must certainly have been
developed long before it could have been
of use. I at once cited the case of the
electric organs of the Torpedo and of
some other fishes. The very high
specialisation of these organs, and the
immense complexity of their structure,
demonstrate that they must have passed
through many processes of organic de-
velopment before they could be used for
in PLEA OF ROMANES 169
the wonderful purpose to which, in that
creature, they are actually applied.
Romanes was too honest not to admit
the force of the illustration when it was
put before him. He took refuge in the
plea that it is a solitary exception, and
he declared that if there were many such
structures in Nature he would " at once
allow that the theory of Natural Selection
would have to be discarded." x
Of course this plea of absolute
singularity is negatived by the very
first principles of biological science.
There is not such a thing existing as
an organ standing absolutely alone in
organic nature. There are multitudes
of organs very highly specialised ;
but there is no one which, either in
respect to materials or in respect to
laws of growth, is wholly separate from
all others. What may seem to be
1 Darwin and after Darwin^ vol. i. p. 373.
i;o CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
singular cases are nothing but extra-
ordinary developments of the ordinary
but exhaustless resources stored in the
original germs of all living structures.
Very special, very wonderful, and very
rare as electric organs undoubtedly are,
they do not stand alone in any one
species. They exist in fishes of widely
separated genera. Moreover, it has only
been lately discovered that they exist in
a rudimentary condition, quite divorced
as yet from functional activity, in many
species of the Rays, our own common
Skates being included in the list. Nay,
farther, it has long been known that in
all muscular action there is an electrical
discharge, so that the concentration of
the agency in a specially adapted organ,
of which we have actual examples in
every stage of preparation, is almost
certainly nothing but the development,
or the turning to special account, of an
in MENTAL AGENCY 171
agency which is present in all organic
forms.
But this plea of Romanes, though
futile as an argument for the purpose for
which he used it, is at least a striking
testimony to the fact that those who
have been most possessed by the
Darwinian hypothesis, do consider any
appeal to the agency of mind as hostile
to their creed. Yet nothing can be
more certain than that it is not hostile
to the general idea of development, nor
to the general idea of what Mr. Spencer
calls organic evolution. Provided these
conceptions are so widened as to include
that Agency of which all Nature is full,
and without perpetual reference to which
the common language of descriptive
science would at once be reduced to an
unintelligible jargon provided the de-
velopment, or evolution, of previsions of
the future, and of provisions for it, are
172 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
fully admitted there is no antagonism
whatever between these general concep-
tions and the facts of Nature.
The result of all these considerations
seems to be that when we meet with
structures in living animals, or bits of
structure, which have no function, we
never can be sure whether these repre-
sent organs which have degenerated or
organs which are waiting to be completed.
All that is certain is that they are parts
of the vertebrate Plan. That plan has
always implicitly contained, at every
stage in the history of organic life,
elements and tendencies of growth which
must have included both true rudiments
of the future, and also real vestiges of
the past. There is, indeed, one sup-
position which would put an end to our
search for organs on the way to use for
some future species and that is the
supposition that the development of new
in IS EVOLUTION STOPPED? 173
specific forms has, on this globe at least,
been closed for ever. I have often been
amused by the smile of incredulity which
comes over Darwinian faces when the
very idea of the possibility of new
species being yet to come, is put before
them. Yet if we had been living in
the Pliocene Age an age, comparatively
speaking, very recent and of no great
duration we should undoubtedly have
seen the processes in full operation by
which the highest of our Mammalian
forms were perfected and established.
Nevertheless, the half-unconscious con-
viction may be true, that nothing of the
same kind is going on now, and that not
only has the creation of new germs been
stopped, but that procreation has also
been arrested in its evolutionary work.
It is curious how well this instinctive
impression, which, although never ex-
pressly stated, is always silently assumed
174 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
by the current assumptions of biological
science, fits into the language of those
" old nomadic tribes " who wrote on
creation 3000 years ago, and of whose
qualifications for doing so Mr. Spencer
seems to speak with such complete con-
tempt. They knew nothing of what is
now technically called science. But,
somehow, they had strange intuitions
which have anticipated not a few of its
conclusions, and some of which have
a mysterious verisimilitude with sug-
gestions which come to us from many
quarters. Their idea was that with the
advent of Man there has come a day of
" rest " in the creative work. It does
look very like it. But this supposition
or assumption does not in the least affect
the possible interpretation to be put
upon certain rudimentary structures in
existing organisms. That interpretation
simply is, that the old Plan has been
in RUDIMENTS INTERPRETED 175
followed to the last; that all the
marvellous implications and infoldings
which lay hid in the original germs have
kept on unfolding themselves till Man
appeared. In this case, the arrested
structures would naturally exhibit traces
of the processes which had been going
on for millions of years, although they
were now to be pursued no farther.
Thus the mere existence of a rudiment-
ary organ, apart from other evidence,
would not of necessity imply that the
creature in which it appears is the off-
spring of other creatures which had that
same organ in perfection. The alter-
native interpretation is easy, natural, and
may well be true that such a rudiment
neither has ever been, nor is yet ever to
be, developed into functional activity.
It may be where it is simply because it
indicates an original direction of growth,
or of development, which was made part
176 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
of the vertebrate Plan from the beginning
of the series, for the very reason of its
potential adaptability to an immense
variety of purposes. Moreover, the
arrest of such tendencies of growth, at a
given point in the series, may well have
been part of the same Plan from the
beginning. But the survival of their
effects the traces of this method of
operation would thus be a perfectly
intelligible fact.
As already said, the case which pre-
sents all these problems in the most
striking form is the case of the Whales,
and especially the case of that species
which, from the commercial products of
its organism, is most widely known.
Both the organs which in this creature
are present as rudiments alone, and those
which, on the contrary, are very highly
developed and most wonderfully special-
ised, are equally significant. Constructed
in ANCESTORS OF WHALES 177
exclusively for oceanic life, it yet pos-
sesses in a rudimentary form some of the
most characteristic bones of the terrestrial
Mammalia. Upon the assumption that
no organic structure can possibly have
any other origin than ordinary generation,
and that they can never have been origin-
ated except by actual use, nor be found
incomplete except as the consequences
of disuse, then of course the conclusion
seems unavoidable that the Whale is the
lineal descendant, by ordinary generation,
of some animal that once walked upon
the land. Accordingly, I have heard a
very high authority on Biological science
declare that not only did he accept this
conclusion, but that he could conceive
no other solution of the problem pre-
sented by the facts.
Yet it is evident that it rests entirely
on the two preliminary assumptions above
specified. Of the first of these two as-
N
1 78 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
sumptions that no organic structure
has ever come into existence except by
ordinary generation we cannot even
conceive it to be true. But putting this
aside, of the second of these two assump-
tions, namely, that organic structures
can never have been developed except
by actual use, it may be confidently said
that it is certainly unfounded. We can-
not be sure that the calling into existence
of new germs a process in which the
whole animal world must confessedly
have begun is a process which was
adopted only once, and has never been
repeated in the whole course of time.
We cannot, therefore, be certain that
the Cetacea, which constitute a very
distinct division in the animal kingdom,
have not been thus begun, with pre-
determined lines and laws of growth
which stand in close relation to the
development of all the terrestrial Mam-
in PREPARATIONS FOR FUNCTION 179
malia. But, even if we adopt the
assumption that this alternative is im-
possible or inconceivable, the second
assumption is certainly unjustifiable
that by the methods of ordinary genera-
tion rudimentary organs can never have
arisen except by actual use, nor can have
been atrophied except by subsequent
disuse. The whole course of organic
nature contradicts this assumption ab-
solutely. All organs pass through rudi-
mentary stages on their way to functional
activity. And if ordinary generation has
been made to do the work of forming
new species, the original germs in which
the process began must presumably have
passed through the same characteristic
steps.
The facts of Palaeontology seem to
indicate that the vertebrate series began
with the Fish. Out of them, therefore,
on the Darwinian theory of Develop-
i8o CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
ment, the Mammalia must have come,
and if so it is not wonderful, but quite
natural, that we should find one branch
of the Mammalian type to be organisms
pisciform in shape, and otherwise speci-
ally adapted to a marine life. One
fundamental difference between the
Fishes and the Mammalia is in the
method and machinery for breathing, or,
in other words, for the oxygenation of
the blood. But comparative anatomists
tell us that in Fishes the homologue of
the Mammalian lung is the membranous
sac which is called the air-bladder. If
ordinary generation, doing nothing ex-
cept what we always see it doing now,
has given birth to all creatures, it must
have done much greater marvels than
converting a mere bladder of air into a
vascular organ for mixing that air with
a circulating current of blood. The
existence of rudiments of legs, and of a
in EMBRYOTIC INDICATIONS 181
pelvis for the support of legs, is amply
accounted for if we suppose that the
elements of the whole vertebrate Plan
were present, potentially, from the begin-
ning of the type, with an innate tendency
to appear in embryotic indications from
time to time. Both Owen and Mr.
Spencer, representing very different
schools of thought, have likened this
idea to that of the growth of crystals
along determinate lines, and bounded
by determinate angles. 1 Owen goes so
far as to call the imagined initial struc-
tures by the name of " organic crystal-
lisation." Although there is a danger
in passing, without great caution, from
the inorganic to the organic world, yet
this is a general analogy which is a real
help to thought. The almost infinite
complication of even the simplest organic
1 Principles of Biology^ vol. ii. p.
Physiology, vol. iii. p. 8 1 8.
1 82 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
structure when compared with the mere
aggregations characteristic of crystalline
forms, does, indeed, make it impossible
to conceive that organic growths can be,
in fundamental principle, like that of a
crystal. But in the one circumstance,
or condition of determinatedness in the
direction of growth, a common feature
may undoubtedly be recognised. It is
quite conceivable that the " physiological
units " of all organic structures should be
under the control of a force which de-
termines their unknown movements and
mutual arrangements, so as to build up,
and form, the most complex structures
needed for future functions in distances
of time however far away. The truth
is that this conception is nothing more
than a bare description of the facts. It
supplies us with a far more simple and
conceivable explanation of the Cetacean
pelvis than the alternative suggestion
in EXTREME SPECIALISATION 183
that a fully -formed land animal, with
limbs completed for walking on the land,
has given birth to offspring which aban-
doned the use of them, and acquired, by
nothing but ordinary generation, all the
purely marine adaptations of the Whale.
There is, perhaps, no creature so
highly specialised. The baleen in the
mouth is one of the most wonderful cases
of an organic apparatus expressly made
for one definite and very peculiar work
namely, that of forming a net or sieve
for entangling and catching the millions
of minute crustaceans and other organ-
isms which swarm in the Arctic seas. It
is one of the structures which classifiers
call aberrant cases in which the direc-
tive agency so evidently supreme in all
organic development has pursued a
certain line of adaptation into the rarest
and most extreme conditions determined
by a very peculiar food. In the pursuit
1 84 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
of that line of adaptation it is really not
much of a puzzle that one particular
element in the vertebrate skeleton should
be passed over and left, as it were, aside,
because it is a part of the original plan
which could be of no service here.
There is no rational ground for suppos-
ing that this particular bit of internal
structure must necessarily have been
developed into functional use in some
former terrestrial progenitor. Organic
beings are full of structures which are
variously used, and of others which are
so embryonic that they can never have
been of any use at all. On the other
hand, it is a very violent supposition that
the external structure of the Whale can
ever have been inherited from a terres-
trial beast by the normal processes of
ordinary generation. The changes are
not only too enormous in amount, but
too complicated in direction, to lend
in SPECIAL ADAPTATIONS 185
themselves to such an explanation. The
fish-like form of the whole creature the
provision of an enormous mass of oily
fat, called blubber, completely enveloping
the internal organs, for the double pur-
pose of protecting from cold those organs
which are dependent on a warm Mam-
malian blood, and of so adjusting the
specific gravity of the whole creature as
to facilitate flotation on the surface of
the ocean, where alone respiration can
be effected by the Mammalian lung the
development of a caudal appendage which
does not represent the Mammalian tail,
but is constructed on an entirely different
type the assigning to that tail a function
which it never serves in the Mammalia
that of propulsion in the medium which
is its habitat all these, together with
the baleen in the mouth, constitute an
assemblage of characters departing so
widely from the whole Mammalian class,
1 86 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
that if the creature possessing them has
acquired them through no other process
than ordinary descent from parents which
were terrestrial beasts, then we are
attributing to ordinary generation every-
thing which is intelligible to us as a truly
creative power. The stages through
which such an enormous metamorphosis
could only have been conducted, if they
were sudden and rapid, would have been
visibly a creative work ; and if they
were slow and gradual they must have
followed certain lines of growth as
steadily, as surely, and with as much
prevision, as we can conceive in any
intellectual purpose of our own. No-
thing, therefore, is gained by those who
dislike the idea of rudimentary organs
being regarded as provisions for a future
in some one original Plan, when they try
to escape from that idea by supposing
that this rudimentary condition can be
in PREVISION AND PROVISION 187
due to nothing but degeneration. That
element of prevision of, and provision
for, the future, which they choose to call
the supernatural, pursues them through
every step of their substituted fancies
and that, too, in the case of the Whales
in a more immanent degree.
Mr. Spencer's tone, then, of remon-
strance against the hardness of our hearts
in being so slow to accept completely
the teachings of the Darwinian School
as an adequate explanation of the facts
of Nature, shows that he has not grasped
the difficulties which we feel to be in-
superable. He is quite right in saying
that even if the special theory of Darwin
be abandoned, there would still remain
to be dealt with what he calls the theory
of organic evolution. Yes, and if the
particular theory which he so calls be
given up, there will still remain another
theory which is equally entitled, and, we
1 88 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
think, better entitled, to the name. Let
him exhaust the meaning of his own
language. An organ is an apparatus
for the discharge of some definite vital
function. That is its only meaning. It
is a means to an end. But the existence
of a future need, and the preparation for
the supply of it, have no necessary or
merely mechanical connection. A steam-
engine must have a boiler, and a piston,
and a condenser, and gearing to convert
rectilinear into rotatory motions. These
are all needs if the apparatus is to do
its work. But this is a great " if." For
it implies that there is some agency
which has willed and determined that
the work must and shall be done. It
implies that the mechanical needs for the
doing of it will not be supplied without
an agency which both sees them and is
able to provide for them. All vital
organs are, therefore, in the strictest
in CREATION BY METHOD 189
senses of the word, apparatuses, and
as such are essentially purposive. The
evolution of them can only mean the un-
folding of elements contained in the pre-
sent, but conceived and originated in the
past
We believe in organic evolution in
this deepest of all senses. We do not
believe, any more than Mr. Spencer, in
creation without a method in creation
without a process. We accept the
general idea of development as com-
pletely as Mr. Spencer does. We accept,
too, the facts of organic evolution, so far
as they have yet been very imperfectly
discovered. Only, we insist upon it, that
the whole phenomena are inexplicable
except in the light of mind that pre-
vision of the future, and elaborate plans
of structure for the fulfilment of ultimate
purposes in that future, govern the whole
of those phenomena from the first to the
190 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
last. We insist upon it that the naked
formula now confessed to be tautologi-
cal of "survival of the fittest," is an
empty phrase, explaining nothing, and
only filling our mouths with the east wind.
Mr. Spencer does, indeed, towards
the close of his article, use some language
which may mean all that we desire to be
included in the stereotyped phrase
organic evolution. He says that all the
vast varieties of organic life are " parts
of one vast transformation," displaying
" one law and one cause," namely this,
" that the Infinite and Eternal Energy
has manifested itself everywhere, and
always in modes ever unlike in results,
but ever like in principle." But every-
thing in this language rests on the sense
in which the word Energy is here used.
Etymologically, indeed, it is a splendid
word, capable of the sublimest applica-
tions. We do habitually, in common
in ENERGY AND WORK 191
speech, apply it to the phenomena of
mind, and if we think of it in that appli-
cation as a name for the one source
from which all " work " ultimately comes
if we think of it as that which "works"
inwardly everywhere as the cause and
source of all phenomena then, indeed,
Mr. Spencer is making use of ideas which,
in more definite and more appropriate
language, are familiar to us all. But,
unfortunately, the word Energy has been
of late years very largely monopolised by
the physical sciences, in which it is used
to designate an ultimate and abstract
conception of the purely physical forces.
We talk of the energy of a cannon-ball,
of the energy of an explosive mixture, of
the energy of a head of water. We even
erect it into an abstract conception repre-
senting the total of Matter and of all
its forces, alleging that there is only a
definite sum of energy in the Universe
1 92 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
which can never be either increased or
diminished, but can only be redistri-
buted. If this be the purely physical
sense in which Mr. Spencer uses the
word "energy" even although he
prints it in capitals, and although he
adds the glorifying qualifications of " In-
finite" and " Eternal" then we must
part company with him altogether. The
words "infinite" and "eternal" do not
of themselves redeem the materialism of
his conception. The force of gravita-
tion may be, for aught we know, infinite
in space, and eternal in duration. But
neither this form of energy, nor any
other which belongs to the same cate-
gory of the physical forces, affords the
least analogy to the kind of causation
which is conspicuous in the preconceived
Plan, in the corresponding initial struc-
ture, and in the directed development of
vital organs as apparatuses prepared
in MIND AND WORK 193
beforehand for definite functions. The
force of chemical affinity is one of the
most powerful of the physical energies
in Nature. It is one great agent even
the main agent in digestion. But it
could neither devise nor make a stomach.
Substitute for the word " energy" that
other word which evidently fits better
into Mr. Spencer's real thought viz.
the word " mind " and then we can be
well agreed. Then Mr. Spencer's fine
sentence is but a dim and confused echo
of the conception conveyed in the line so
well known to most of us "And God
fulfils Himself in many ways."
Since these pages were written it
has been announced that Mr. Herbert
Spencer has completed the really Her-
culean labour of building up his " Syn-
thetic System of Philosophy." It does
not need to be one of his disciples to
194 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
join in the well-earned congratulations
which men of the most various schools
of opinion have lately addressed to a
thinker so distinguished. The attempt
to string all the beads of human know-
ledge on one loose -fibred thread of
thought called Evolution has been, I
think, a failure. But the beads remain,
ready for a truer arrangement, and a
better setting, in the years to come. We
must all admire the immense wealth of
learning and the immense intellectual
resources, as well as the untiring perse-
verance, which have been devoted to
this attempt. Mr. Spencer has vehe-
mently denied that his philosophy is
materialistic. But he has denied it on
the ground that, as between Materialism
and Spiritualism, his system is neither
the one nor the other. He says ex-
pressly of his own reasonings that " their
implications are no more materialistic
in NEUTRALITY DENIED 195
than they are spiritualistic, and no more
spiritualistic than they are materialistic.
Any argument which is apparently fur-
nished to either hypothesis is neutralised
by as good an argument furnished to the
other." This may be true of the results
in his own very subtle mind, but it is
certainly not true of the effect of his
presentations on the minds of others.
Nor is it true in the natural and only
legitimate interpretation of a thousand
passages.
Even in close contiguity with the
above declaration of neutrality we find
him asserting that "what exists in
consciousness in the form of feeling is
transformable into an equivalent of
mechanical motion." 1 I believe this to
be an entirely erroneous assertion. No
calculable quantitative relation whatever
has been discovered between any form
1 Principles of Biology ', vol. i. p. 492.
O 2
196 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
of mechanical motion and any of the
phenomena of sensation or of thought.
But whether this assertion be erroneous
or not, it is certainly not easily to be
reconciled with the claim of neutrality.
An assertion that all feeling may be cor-
related with certain organic motions in
the brain or nervous system may be
true. But that all " feeling" is " trans-
formable into " mere mechanical motion
is an assertion of the most pronounced
materialism. The truth is, that so pro-
foundly hostile is Mr. Herbert Spencer
to all readings of mental agency in
natural phenomena that when his own
favourite doctrine that of evolution
gives a clear testimony in favour of such
readings he not only rejects its testi-
mony, but tries all he can to silence its
very voice.
I know of no subject in which the
pure idea and the pure facts of evolu-
HI EVOLUTION IN SPEECH 197
tion open up so wide and straight
an avenue into the very heart of truth
as in the subject of human thought
automatically evolved in the structure
of human speech. Words are not
made; they grow. They are uncon-
sciously evolved. And that out of which
the evolution takes place is the functional
activity of the mental consciousness of
Man in its contact with the phenomena
of the Universe. What that conscious-
ness sees it faithfully records in speech.
It is like the highly -sensitised plates
which are now exposed to the starry
heavens, and which repeat, with absolute
fidelity, the luminous phenomena of
Space. What should we think of an
astronomer who thought himself entitled
to manipulate this evidence at his
pleasure to strike out appearances,
however clear, which conflict with some
cosmic theories of his own? Yet this
198 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
is precisely the course taken by Mr.
Herbert Spencer when he encounters a
word which is inconsistent with his
materialistic preconceptions. Although
the purest processes of evolution have
certainly made that word, he rules it out
of court, and sets himself to devise a sub-
stitute which shall replace the mental by
some purely physical image. Thus, for
example, the word "adaptation" is in-
dispensable in descriptive science. Mr.
Spencer translates it, because of its im-
plications, into the mechanical word
"equilibration." 1 Thus the tearing
teeth of the carnivora are to be con-
ceived as " equilibrated " with the flesh
they tear. It is curious to find Mr.
Spencer thus indulging in an operation
which excites all his scorn when it is
resorted to by others. Adaptation is a
word born of evolution. Equilibration
1 Principles of Biology ', vol. i. p. 466.
in EQUILIBRATION NONSENSE 199
is a "special creation" of his own, and
a very bad creation it is. Laboriously
classic in its form, it is as laboriously
barbarous and incompetent in its mean-
ing. No two ideas could be more
absolutely contrasted than the two which
Mr. Spencer seeks to identify and con-
found under the cover of this hideous
creation. The conception of a statical
" equilibrium " or balance between oppo-
site physical forces, and the conception
of the activities of function so adjusted
as to subordinate the physical forces to
their own specific and often glorious
work these are conceptions wide as the
poles asunder. Nothing but a system-
atic desire to wipe out of Nature, and
out of language which is her child and
her reflected image all her innumer-
able " teleological implications," can
account for Mr. Spencer's continual,
though futile, efforts to silence those
200 CLUES AND SUGGESTIONS CHAP.
spiritualistic readings of the world,
which have been evolved in the struc-
ture of human speech.
But even if it were true that Mr.
Spencer's writings are as neutral as he
asserts them to be, nothing in favour of
their reasonings would be gained. A
philosophy which is avowedly indifferent
on the most fundamental of all questions
respecting the interpretation of the
Universe, cannot properly be said to be
a philosophy at all. Still less can it
claim to be pre-eminently " synthetic."
It may have made some and even large
contributions to philosophy. But the
contributions are very far indeed from
having been harmonised into any con-
sistent system. On the contrary, very
often any close analysis of its language
and of its highly artificial phraseology
will be found to break it up into in-
coherent fragments. Such at least has
in SPENCER'S FAILURE 201
been my own experience ; and I am glad
to think that in a line of interpretation
which leads up to no conclusion, and
to no verdict, on the one question of
deepest interest in science and philo-
sophy namely, whether the Physical
Forces are the masters or the servants
of that House in which we live no
man is ever likely to succeed where
Mr. Herbert Spencer has broken
down.
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