Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/521

 520 S. ALEXANDER I would be explained as due to the accidentally of the genus as existing in nature. How insufficient such an explanation at present is, has been already indicated. But in the second place there would be a reason assigned for the sur- vival of the fittest : a variety would survive and drive all its competitors from the field, because it was the vehicle of the animal type. Because of its future it would be able to enter into that reciprocal action of organism and environ- ment, called adaptation, which is as much a selection by the former of the conditions under which it can develop, as the dictate of the latter which organisms it will suffer to develop. A remark which Hegel makes in another connexion might be useful to some forms of the theory of evolution in the way of a caution. Hegel, in explaining his own conception of nature as that of a series of stages, adds that these stages are conceptions, and the progress is not therefore supposed to have occurred in nature in the actual history of development : because one animal has one chamber and its descendant two chambers in the heart, it is not to be supposed that the former actually acquired an extra chamber in addition to its original one (p. 34). What Hegel means by this is that a new idea or new realisation of an idea is a new fact, and it is not necessary that nature should go through the tedious process of gradual deviation from the older and approxima- tion to the newer type, any more than it follows, because the larger idea of freedom under which we live in England is the outcome of the Greek idea of freedom, that the Greeks actually turned into Englishmen. This may or may not be true as a fact of natural history ; but the habit of turning a logical category into a fact of existence seems to be the defect of that form of evolution which ^maintains that the surviving variation was that lucky guess out of a number of other varieties which happened to suit its surroundings. Why should the lucky survivor have been among the guesses of nature at all ? Can we believe that if it had not been so some other stronger member would have survived and the new species changed its character : or must wo suppose that the varieties would have exterminated each other in internecine struggle until a fresh set of varieties could be tried? Finally, what guarantee have we that all possible varieties have been tried ? The fact before our view is that a species has been modified in some particular way, the rock pigeon into our domestic pigeon. Two inter- pretations of this fact are possible : we may describe the process as above (and doubtless we shall find in many cases that the struggle actually has taken place) ; or we may say