THE FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 55 



must be expressed as effects of agencies definitely conceived mechani- 

 cal forces, light, heat, chemical affinity, &c. 



This general conclusion brings with it the thought that the phrases 

 employed in discussing organic evolution, though convenient and in- 

 deed needful, are liable to mislead us by veiling the actual agencies. 

 That which really goes on in every organism is the working together 

 of component parts in ways conducing to the continuance of their com- 

 bined actions, in presence of things and actions outside ; some of which 

 tend to subserve, and others to destroy, the combination. The matters 

 and forces in these two groups, are the sole causes properly so called. 

 The words "natural selection," do not express a cause in the physical 

 sense. They express a mode of co-operation among causes or rather, 

 to speak strictly, they express an effect of this mode of co-operation. 

 The idea they convey seems perfectly intelligible. Natural selection 

 having been compared with artificial selection, and the analogy pointed 

 out, there apparently remains no indefiniteness : the inconvenience 

 being, however, that the definiteness is of a wrong kind. The tacitly 

 implied Nature which selects, is not an embodied agency analogous 

 to the man who selects artificially ; and the selection is not the picking 

 out of an individual fixed on, but the continuance in an active state of 

 such individual when others have been overthrown. Mr. Darwin was 

 conscious of these misleading implications. In the introduction to his 

 Animals and Plants under Domestication (p. 7) he says : 

 " For brevity sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an intelligent power ; 

 . . . I have, also, often personified the word Nature; for I have found it diffi- 

 cult to avoid this ambiguity ; but I mean by nature only the aggregate action 

 and product of many natural laws, and by laws only the ascertained sequence 

 of events." 



But while he thus clearly saw, and distinctly asserted, that the factors 

 of organic evolution are the concrete actions, inner and outer, to which 

 every organism is subject, Mr. Darwin, by habitually using the con- 

 venient figure of speech, was, I think, prevented from recognizing so 

 fully as he would otherwise have done, certain fundamental conse- 

 quences of these actions. 



Though it does not personalize the cause, and does not assimilate 

 its mode of working to a human mode of working, kindred objections 

 may be urged against the expression to which I was led when seeking 

 to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical 

 terms the survival of the fittest * ; for in a vague way the first word, 

 and in a clear way the second word, calls up an anthropocentric idea. 

 The thought of survival inevitably suggests the human view of certain 

 sets of phenomena, rather than that character which they have simply 

 as groups of changes. If, asking what we really know of a plant, we ex- 



* Though Mr. Darwin approved of this expression and occasionally employed it, he 

 did not adopt it for general use ; contending, very truly, that the expression Natural Se- 

 lection is in some cases more convenient. See Animals and Plants under Domestication 

 (first edition) Vol. I, p. 6 ; and Origin of Species (sixth edition) p. 49. 



