2o6 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



with, they are so small that it is difficult to understand that 

 they have any survival value at all. Take an organ which 

 is being differentiated from the rest of the body-cells. At the 

 beginning any variation must be utterly insignificant and 

 practically valueless in the struggle for life, and Natural 

 Selection has really nothing to work on. How then could 

 an animal with such a minute variation be selected as being 

 more adapted to its environment? It is this awkward ques- 

 tion which has led to the h3rpothesis that very marked 

 varieties or mutations alone are selected. Various more or 

 less ingenious attempts have been made to answer this ques- 

 tion, but to my mind they are all more or less unsatisfactory. 

 The result is that we cannot understand how the Darwinian 

 machinery of Natural Selection is set in motion in any 

 particular case. Once individuals with marked specific or 

 varietal differences exist in superabundance, we can under- 

 stand why the struggle for existence between them will 

 take place and Natural Selection become operative. But 

 on Darwinian principles as ordinarily understood these 

 marked differences between individuals can arise only from 

 a prior selection as between variations so minute that there 

 is apparently nothing sufficiently substantive for Natural 

 Selection to work on. In other words, Natural Selection 

 will move all right when once set in motion, but Darwinism 

 fails to set it in motion. 



In my view the difficulty can be satisfactorily removed 

 only by the principle of Holism, as I shall just now proceed 

 to explain. In the meantime, however, I wish to point out 

 how my suggestion that the modifications influence the 

 field of germ-cells and prepare the way for variations can 

 prove helpful to Darwinism in its plight. According to that 

 suggestion the small initial variation does not stand by itself, 

 and on its own merits, so to speak. It appears powerfully 

 supported in the struggle for existence. Individual use and 

 practice for very many generations are on its side. It does 

 not appear as a stray, helpless infant in a hostile world. It 

 appears in a friendly, one might say, in a prepared universe. 

 It has a stalwart nurse in the use and routine of the indi- 



