Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/170

158 Here I must break off, after dealing with a page and a half of the Duke of Argyll's article. A state of health which has prevented me from publishing anything since The Factors of Organic Evolution, now nearly two years ago, prevents me from carrying the matter further. Could I have pursued the argument it would, I believe, have been practicable to show that various other positions taken up by the Duke of Argyll do not admit of effectual defence. But whether or not this is. probable, the reader must be left to judge for himself. On one further point only will I say a word; and this chiefly because, if I pass it by, a mistaken impression of a serious kind may be diffused. The Duke of Argyll represents me as "giving up" the "famous phrase" "survival of the fittest," and wishing "to abandon it." He does this because I have pointed out that its words have connotations against which we must be on our guard, if we would avoid certain distortions of thought. With equal propriety he might say that an astronomer abandons the statement that the planets move in elliptic orbits, because he warns his readers that in the heavens there exist no such things as orbits, but that the planets sweep on through a pathless void, in directions perpetually changed by gravitation.

I regret that I should have had thus to dissent so entirely from various of the statements made and conclusions drawn by the Duke of Argyll, because, as I have already implied, I think he has done good service by raising afresh the question he has dealt with. Though the advantages which he hopes may result from the discussion are widely unlike the advantages which I hope may result from it, yet we agree in the belief that advantages may be looked for. How profound and wide-spreading are the consequences which may follow from the answer given to the question—"Are acquired characters hereditary?" I have pointed out in the preface to The Factors of Organic Evolution in its republished form; and perhaps I may be excused if I here reproduce the essential passages for the purpose of giving to them a wider diffusion:

"Though mental phenomena of many kinds, and especially of the simpler kinds, are explicable only as resulting from the natural selection of favorable variations; yet there are, I believe, still more numerous mental phenomena, including all those of any considerable complexity, which cannot be explained otherwise than as results of the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications. . ..

"Of course there are involved the conceptions we form of the genesis and nature of our higher emotions; and, by implication, the conceptions we form of our moral intuitions. . . . "That our sociological beliefs must also be profoundly affected