Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/520

 that any person familiar with Nature's conformity to law and the mathematical improbability of inheritance of accidental variation along a favorable line can believe that these marvelous results have been governed only by chance. Surely Nature could never thrive under such a shiftless and haphazard system, and we are therefore justified in searching for the reason why. Not how beautiful birds and fragrant flowers were evolved is the essential question, but why. Yet we can never hope to know the causes until we know perfectly the means, just as we could never have hoped to know the means until we were tolerably familiar with the ends. Darwin could never have formulated his theory if he had not had the vast array of facts on which to base it, and it would never be proved if men were to give up the gathering of the still unrecorded facts. Of course, all this routine work appears in a new and far more glorious light now, and much the greater number of scientific workers are engaged in the collection of such facts as have hitherto been unknown or overlooked. Only a very few are giving the greater part of their time to theorizing on how evolution works, although we all realize the importance of that question. So it will be when we see that the question Why? is the ultimate one, for there can be no solution of this problem until the lesser ones are solved. It is neither probable nor desirable that any change of method will result, for the present historical system is so far ahead of any other that there is no danger of our giving it up; but it is both probable and desirable that investigators should approach the phenomena of Nature in a different spirit.

As we look about for a clew as to how the question Why? may be answered, let us examine more carefully that dogmatic assertion which we threw aside so promptly when we accepted the doctrine of evolution: “The Creator designed them so.” Have we any hint here as to the causes which have governed the evolutionary methods? That depends on some other things which we must examine first. The means by which an end is accomplished we know by experience may be purely impersonal, but causes are always dependent on personality. This may not appear at first sight, so prone are we to confuse how and why, but it will be clearly seen by means of an illustration. We are accustomed to say that we know why it rains, but in reality we only know how it is that it rains—that is, we know the natural processes by which rain is produced. On the other hand, we say we know why we went to a given place at a given time, and in this case we not only know how we went, but we do know the actual reasons or causes which put the means at work. If this be granted, as it seems to me it must be, we are at once presented with the condition that the answer to our question why is dependent on our