THE THEORY OF DESCENT 285 



then, as indeed everything the organism is made up of is 

 regarded as being in itself due to a contingent primary 

 process, which has no relation to its fellow -processes. 

 " Unit," indeed, in spite of inheritance which, by the way, 

 is alleged also to be a merely materialistic event means 

 to Darwinians no more when applied to the organism than 

 it does when applied to mountains or islands, where of 

 course a sort of " unit " also exists in some sense, as far as 

 one and the same body comes into account, but where 

 every single character of this unit, in every single feature 

 of form or of quality, is the result of factors or agents each 

 of which is independent of every other. 



To this sort of contingency of being, as maintained by 

 Darwinians, criticism has objected, as we know, that it is 

 quite an impossible basis of a theory of descent, since it 

 would explain neither the first origin of an organ, nor any 

 sort of harmony among parts or among whole individuals, 

 nor any sort of restitution processes. 



Now Lamarckism of the dogmatic kind, as will easily 

 be seen, only differs from Darwinism in this respect, that 

 what according to the latter happens to the organism 

 passively by means of selection, is according to the former 

 performed actively by the organism, by means of a 

 " judgment " by the retention and handing down of chance 

 variations. The specificity of the form as a whole is 

 contingent also according to Lamarckism. And, indeed, 

 criticism must reject this contingency of being in exactly 

 the same way as it rejected the contingency of form 

 maintained by Darwinians. 



As far as the inheritance of truly adaptive characters 

 comes into account that is, the inheritance of characters 



