Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/83

Rh 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 adaptation, 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 difference as well as. transmits likeness; we have only to assume, still further, that 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 only under subjection." This is a prolific truth. It might have been discovered 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, historically speaking, retrograde. He goes back to Lamarck, he reverts to "use and disuse," to "environment"—to surroundings—to the "medium and its contents." These again are mere phrases to cover the nakedness of our own ignorance. But I for one am thankful for the conclusion 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 further broadening that broader view which Darwin reached as he grew older, his followers appear to have retrograded toward 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