GERMINAL SELECTION. 



Numerous and varied are the objections that have 

 been advanced against the theory of selection since it 

 was first enunciated by Darwin and Wallace from 

 the unreasoning strictures of Richard Owen and the 

 acute and thoughtful criticisms of Albert Wigand and 

 Nageli to the opposition of our own day, which con- 

 tends that selection cannot create but only reject, and 

 which fails to see that precisely through this rejection 

 its creative efficacy is asserted. The champions of this 

 view are for discovering the motive forces of evolution 

 in the laws that govern organisms as if the norm 

 according to which an event happens were the event 

 itself, as if the rails which determine the direction 

 of a train could supplant the locomotive. Of course, 

 from every form of life there proceeds only a definite, 

 though extremely large, number of tracks, the possi- 

 ble variations, whilst between them lie stretches with- 

 out tracks, the impossible variations, on which locomo- 

 tion is impossible. But the actual travelling of a track 

 is not performed by the track, but by the locomotive, 

 and on the other hand, the choice of a track, the 

 decision whether the destination of the train shall be 

 Berlin or Paris, is not made by the locomotive, the 

 cause of the variation, but by the driver of the loco- 

 motive, who directs the engine on the right track. In 

 the theory of selection the engine-driver is repre- 

 sented by utility, for with utility rests the decision 



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