Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/38

 Rh theory which is generally known as Lamarck's version of the theory of the transmission of acquired characters. In fact, he carried his ideas much farther than did Lamarck, attributing to plants the attribute of sendibility, and supposed their evolution to be due to their own efforts toward the development of certain characters. Adaptations, which Aristotle had believed to be caused by a definite plan, Dr. Darwin interpreted in a purely naturalistic manner. The Creator had, at the beginning, endowed organisms with the power to change and develop, and that power was handed down from one generation to another until it was possessed by every animal and plant. This power was the cause of all variation, adaptation, and evolution, and there was no further divine interference. Dr. Darwin did not see any great, all-encompassing plan of improvement, such as is postulated by the teleologists of today; to him everything was the logical and necessary outcome of the original powers of living things. In this, as we shall see, he believed essentially as do modern evolutionists who do not see in the laws of the universe any necessity for abandoning religion, but who at the same time do not believe in a highly personal god who, as one theologian expressed it recently, "works out His divine will through the processes of evolution."

Dr. Darwin was author of two other distinctly modern ideas, among the most important of his entire work. The first of these is that all living things are descended from a single original living mass, or "filament"—that every liv-