Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/845

Rh or, as Mr. Spencer himself afterward called it, survival of the fittest. Only, it is limited to the human race; and it is not recognized as an efficient cause of specific differentiation. As Mr. Spencer himself remarks, the passage "shows how near one may be to a great generalization without seeing it." Moreover, Mr. Spencer here overlooks the important factor of spontaneous variation, which forms the corner-stone of Darwin's discovery, and which was also clearly perceived by Mr. Wallace. In short, in Mr. Spencer's own words, the paragraph "contains merely a passing recognition of the selective process, and indicates no suspicion of the enormous range of its effects, or of the conditions under which a large part of its effects are produced."

It is thus obvious not only that Mr. Spencer was a believer in organic evolution long before the publication of Darwin's first utterance on the subject, but also that he almost succeeded, like Wallace, Wells, and Patrick Matthews, in anticipating the discovery of natural selection.

But, besides the misconception about Mr. Spencer's relation to Darwin as regards organic evolution, there remains the far deeper and more fatal misconception about his relation to Darwin as regards evolution in general, viewed as a cosmical process. Most people imagine, I gather, that Mr. Spencer is a philosopher who has put into a higher and more abstract form Darwin's discoveries and theories. In short, they regard him as a disciple of Darwin. And this brings me to the second of the two rectifications of public opinion which I promised above to attempt. Nothing could be more absurdly untrue than to regard Mr. Spencer as in any way or in either department a disciple of Darwin's. In the first place, as regards organic evolution, he was an avowed evolutionist long before the publication of Darwin's first hint on the subject. He continued an evolutionist, in the main on the same lines, after Darwin had brought out The Origin of Species and its ancillary volumes. He adopted, it is true, the theory of natural selection, as did every other evolutionist of his time (except Mr. Samuel Butler), but he adopted it merely as one among the factors of organic evolution, and, while valuing it highly, he never attributed to it the same almost exclusive importance as did Darwin himself—certainly not the same quite exclusive importance as has since been attached to it by the doctrinaire school of Neo-Darwinians, who employ it as the sole key which unlocks, in their opinion, all the problems of biology. On the contrary, he has always steadily maintained the existence and importance of other factors in organic evolution, and has combated with extraordinary vigor and acuteness the essentially Neo-Darwinian views of Weismann which make natural selection alone into the deus ex machina of organic development.