Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/839

Rh according to the use made of it, are all explicable on this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic Nature there is at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign as the cause of these specific differences, an influence which, though slow in its action, does, in time, if the circumstances demand it, produce marked changes; an influence which, to all appearance, would produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of change."

Now, by most readers at the present day, this passage would undoubtedly be at once set down as "Darwinian." But when was it written? "Would you be surprised to learn" that it was published by Herbert Spencer in the Leader newspaper no less than seven years before the appearance of The Origin of Species? The essay which contains it was first printed in 1853; The Origin of Species was published in 1859. As I have already remarked in my Charles Darwin, "This admirable passage . . . contains explicitly almost every idea that ordinary people, not specially biological in their interests, now associate with the name of Darwin. That is to say, it contains, in a very philosophical and abstract form, the theory of descent with modification, without the distinctive Darwinian adjunct of natural selection, or survival of the fittest." To put it briefly, most people at the present day, now that evolutionism has practically triumphed, now that the evolutionary method is being applied to almost every form of scientific subject-matter, go doubly wrong as to the origin of that method. In the first place, they attribute mainly or exclusively to Darwin ideas which were current long before Darwin wrote; in the second place, they also attribute to Darwin ideas which were promulgated, in some cases before, and in other cases after Darwin, by independent thinkers who accepted his theories as part only of their own systems. Mr. Spencer has been by far the greatest sufferer from this curious human habit of finding an ostensible figurehead for every great movement, and then attaching everything in the movement to that figurehead alone—Luther for the Protestant Reformation, Rousseau or Robespierre for the French Revolution, Pusey for the Anglo-Catholic revival, and so forth. I am glad that Mr. Clodd has undertaken definitely to combat this doubly erroneous view, and that his book has allowed me the opportunity of adding my mite to this question of ascription.

At the same time, I should like to premise that I write this article in a spirit of the profoundest loyalty to Darwin's memory and opinions. No man could have a deeper respect than I have for the character and the life work of that great man of science. But loyalty, as I understand the term, consists in giving your