6 THE DARWINIAN THEORY [ch. i 



evolution. Every man felt, as Mrs Arber has said, that he was 

 one of those picked out by it, and so he felt it his duty to support 

 the theory. Though Darwin's immortal service was really the 

 establishment of evolution, the name Darwinism became 

 attached rather to the theory of natural selection, which became 

 a cult, and which now exercises enormous influence in the world 

 at large, even national policies being in some instances largely 

 tinged with it. This is another instance of the influence of the 

 dead hand, so well brought out by Woolf in After the Deluge, 

 chap. I. 



Evolution itself is now so well established that it has no longer 

 any need whatever for any assistance or support from the hypo- 

 thesis of natural selection, and whether the latter be true or not 

 matters little or nothing. What we have to do is to follow up the 

 theory of evolution, and find out something more about its 

 working. 



Natural selection was a new theory that was a complete 

 reversal of the old. Instead of being created suddenly, so that 

 at once thev showed all their differences, which are often con- 

 siderable, and usually more or less discontinuous, living beings 

 were formed gradually by the selection and accumulation of small 

 diff'erences that gave some advantage to their possessors in the 

 struggle for existence that was a daily commonplace of life. 

 Creation in its usual sense was replaced by evolution, and the 

 appearance of larger differences by the accumulation of smaller. 

 The family resemblances that were mentioned above were now 

 explained, thus removing to a period immensely farther back the 

 conception that the phenomena of the life of animals and plants 

 were pre-ordained, and throwing open to research a vast field of 

 knowledge. 



With natural selection itself, time has dealt less kindly. It 

 acquired an immense prestige by its success in establishing 

 evolution, but has not proved so useful in the further advance of 

 science as was expected. It contains too many assumptions, and 

 has required too many supplementary hypotheses to enable it to 

 offer sure ground upon which to build, and is ceasing to be in- 

 voked as it used to be. It was at one time known as the doctrine 

 of "nature red in tooth and claw", and as such has become 

 largely incorporated into the theory of life that underlies the 

 general policies of the world. 



At the time of its greatest success, a rival, pre-Darwinian, 

 system of evolution, known by the name of Differentiation, was 



