PRESENT CRISIS IN EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT 11 



ordinate factor in evolution. Darwin had considered it "the 

 most important means of modification," but it is safe to say 

 that no modern biologist attaches very much importance to 

 natural selection as a means of accounting for the differences 

 which mark off one species from another. In fact, if natural 

 selection has enjoyed, or still continues to enjoy, any vogue 

 at all, it is not due to its value in natural science (which, for all 

 practical intents and purposes, is nil), but solely to its appeal 

 as "mechanistic solution"; for nothing further is needed to 

 commend it to modern thinkers infected with what Wasmann 

 calls Theophobia. Natural selection, in making the organism 

 a product of the concurrence of blind forces unguided by 

 Divine intelligence, a mere fortuitous result, and not the reali- 

 zation of purpose, has furnished the agnostic with a miserable 

 pretext for omitting God from his attempted explanation of 

 the universe. "Here is the knot," exclaims Du Bois-Reymond, 

 "here the great difficulty that tortures the intellect which 

 would understand the world. Whoever does not place all 

 activity wholesale under the sway of Epicurean chance, who- 

 ever gives only his little finger to teleology, will inevitably 

 arrive at Paley's discarded 'Natural Theology,' and so much 

 the more necessarily, the more clearly he thinks and the more 

 independent his judgment. . . . The possibility, ever so dis- 

 tant, of banishing from nature its seeming purpose, and put- 

 ting a blind necessity everywhere in the place of final causes, 

 appears, therefore, as one of the greatest advances in the world 

 of thought, from which a new era will be dated in the treat- 

 ment of these problems. To have.somewhat eased the torture 

 of the intellect which ponders over the world-problem will, as 

 long as philosophical naturalists exist, be Charles Darwin's 

 greatest title to glory." [Darwin versus Galiani, "Reden," 

 Vol. I, p. 211.) 



But however indispensable the selection principle may be to 

 a philosophy which proposes to banish the Creator from crea- 

 tion, its scientific insolvency has become so painfully apparent 

 that biologists have lost all confidence in its power to solve 



