286 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



which are clue to the active faculty of adaptation possessed 

 by the organism, bearing a vitalistic aspect throughout 

 hardly anything could be said against Larnarckism, except 

 that inheritance of acquired characters is still an hypothesis 

 of small and doubtful value at present. But that specific 

 organisation proper is due to contingent variations, which 

 accidentally have been found to satisfy some needs of the 

 individual and therefore have been maintained and handed 

 down, this reasoning is quite an impossibility of exactly 

 the same kind as the argument of Darwinism. 



The process of restitution, perfect the very first time 

 it occurs, if it occurs at all, is again the classical instance 

 against this new sort of contingency, which is assumed to 

 be the basis of transformism. Here we see with our eyes 

 that the organism can do more than simply perpetuate 

 variations that have occurred at random and bear in them- 

 selves no relation whatever to any sort of unit or totality. 

 There exists a faculty of a certain higher degree in the 

 organism, and this faculty cannot possibly have originated 

 by the process which Lamarckians a assume. But if their 

 principle fails in one instance, it fails as a general theory 

 altogether. And now, on the other hand, as we actually 



1 I repeat once more that we are dealing here with dogmatic " Neo-" 

 Lamarckism exclusively. This theory indeed claims to explain all features 

 and properties of organic bodies on the basis of the feeling of needs and 

 storing of contingent fulfilments and on this basis alone, just as dogmatic 

 " Neo "-Darwinism claims to account for all those phenomena on the 

 ground of contingent variations and natural selection. Darwin himself, as 

 we have seen, intentionally left unexplained certain primary features of life 

 and therefore cannot be blamed for having failed to explain them, though 

 even then his theory remains wrong. Lamarck personally considered a 

 real primary orgauisatory law of phylogeny as being of fundamental im- 

 portance, and therefore he is not in the least responsible if" Neo-Lamarckism " 

 fails as a universal theory. 



