EVOLUTION THEORIES 213 



clearly than either thinkers ever dreamed, 

 or than their respective exponents and dis- 

 ciples have realized. 



The wealth of first-hand observation from 

 which Darwin and his successors generalized 

 their conviction of 'the all-sufficiency of 

 natural selection'" was thus a less simple and 

 child-like discovery of Nature than it seemed; 

 it was a new and modern selection from the 

 wealth of Nature's aspects and interests. 

 For, when all is said and done, ' ' the eye sees 

 only what it brings with it the power of 

 seeing." What are Lamarck's interpreta- 

 tions of the effects of use and disuse, his 

 assured insistence upon the interior freedom 

 of the organism to realize its inmost capaci- 

 ties, but the new step in social progress 

 through abandonment of outworn orders of 

 society, the freedom opening before new ones? 

 'La carriere ouverte aux talents' is pure 

 Lamarckism; so again the splendid over- 

 assurance of the Napoleonic epic, that "every 

 French soldier carries a marshal's baton in 

 his knapsack." But the colder business 

 view so characteristic of English thought 

 came to prevail over such political and mili- 

 tary exaggerations; the ideals of mechanical 

 efficiency and of individual and financial suc- 

 cess rising above the ruins of liberal aspira- 

 tions and of imperial achievements as they 



