36 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



again, an animal looked as if it felt, that is to say, if it 

 moved about pretty quickly or made a noise, it must be 

 held to feel ; if it did neither of these things, it did not 

 look as if it felt and therefore it must be said not to 

 feel. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est 

 lex was one of the chief axioms of their philosophy ; no 

 writers have had a greater horror of mystery or of ideas 

 that have not become so mastered as to be, or to have 

 been, superficial. Lamarck was one of those men of 

 whom I believe it has been said that they have brain 

 upon the brain. He had his theory that an animal 

 could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at 

 least a spinal marrow and that it could not think at 

 all without a brain all his facts, therefore, have to be 

 made to square with this. With Buffon and Dr. Darwin 

 we feel safe that however wrong they may sometimes 

 be, their conclusions have always been arrived at on 

 that fairly superficial view of things in which, as I have 

 elsewhere said, our nature alone permits us to be com- 

 forted. 



To these writers, then, the doctrine of final causes for 

 rudimentary organs was a piece of mystification and an 

 absurdity ; no less fatal to any such doctrine were the 

 processes of embryological development. It was plain 

 that the commonly received teleology must be given 

 up ; but the idea of design or purpose was so associated 

 in their minds with theological design that they avoided 

 it altogether. They seem to have forgotten that an 

 internal teleology is as much teleology as an external 

 one; hence, unfortunately, though their whole theory 

 of development is intensely purposive, it is the fact 



