1897] SCHILLER ON DARWINISM AND DESIGN 411 



their chance of life. But, to Professor Schiller's argument, it is 

 essential to show (1) that structural adaptations can be, and are, 

 thus brought about; and (2) that such adaptations are inherited. 

 This Professor Schiller does not even attempt to prove ; but it is 

 the crux of the entire argument. If Professor Schiller can prove 

 that individual intelligence is capable of producing direct structural 

 modifications — i.e., modifications at which it has directly 

 aimed — and if he can farther show that such modifications are in- 

 herited, he will certainly have made out the former part of his hypo- 

 thesis, viz., that "intelligence, i.e., action directed to a purpose, has been 

 at work." This proof, however, he does not even attempt; but contents 

 himself with asserting of ' adaptations ' what is true, so far as we 

 know, only of individual functional adaptations; and by thus using the 

 word ' adaptations,' simply and without any expressed qualifications, 

 he obtains a fictitious appearance of a demonstration ; for the term 

 ' adaptation,' when used in such arguments by evolutionists, is used in 

 the sense of ' inherited structural adaptations ' — as Professor Schiller 

 ought to know perfectly well. It is simply the old metaphysical 

 sophism of using one and the same word in two distinct senses, and 

 crediting to the one sense of it what is readily granted to the other ; 

 and to perceive the fallacy involved in his use of the word ' adap- 

 tations ' is to knock a pretty considerable hole in the bottom of Pro- 

 fessor Schiller's argument. Can our author see no difference in kind 

 between the functional adaptations of an individual man to a mari 

 time life or a desert life and the structural adaptations of a whale 

 and a camel to these respective modes of life ? We all know that 

 individual men, by varying their food and clothing, can thus in- 

 telligently adapt themselves to very different conditions of life ; but 

 how does this fact create any presumption that even the camel's 

 stomach or the whale's form is the result of intelligent action 

 directed to a purpose, and still less that the countless wonderful 

 adaptations of which no man even is conscious until he studies 

 anatomy, and over which even then he is powerless to exert any 

 intelligent control, and which work best when he is unconscious 

 — such adaptations, I mean, as the valves of the heart and countless 

 •others — are the outcome of intelligent action directed to a purpose ? 

 It does not indeed seem clear that even Lamarckian factors would 

 avail Professor Schiller here, unless, possibly, the proverbial mouse 

 ■could be shown to have acquired a neck a yard long by intelligently 

 and purposefully directing its gaze to the unattainable cheese above it; 

 for it were one thing to admit that the effects of use were inherited, 

 but quite another to assert that any evolution has been due to the 

 intelligent action of animals directed to the purpose of adapting 

 themselves to their surroundings. Even were Mr Spencer's argu- 

 ment concerning the giraffe conceded by his opponents, I scarcely see 



