INTRODUCTION 



Lamarck, of Darwin, of Weissmann figure promi- 

 nently as leaders of different schools of opinion; 

 while there are others, like myself, who for various 

 reasons belong to no school, and are as agnostic about 

 Lamarckism as they are about Darwinism or Weiss- 

 mannism, or the more recent form of Darwinism termed 

 Mutation by DeVries."^^ And he is willing to go even 

 further by confessing: "We have no scientific ex- 

 planation for those processes of development from 

 within, which Bergson has termed devolution crea- 

 trice^ and for which Driesch has abandoned a natural 

 explanation and assumed the existence of an entel- 

 echy, that is, an internal perfecting influence."^" And 

 is it come to this, the agnosticism towards religion or 

 philosophy, call it which you will, of the Darwinians 

 now embraces the truths of their science also^ Yet 

 even this confession does not make Professor Osborn 

 understand that belief in evolution does not make a 

 science unless we can also agree equally on some 

 method of variation. To know that organic beings 

 have varied, but not to know how they will vary in 

 the future is about as useful as to know that a ball 

 will move and not to know the path and distance of 

 the motion. His solution is to propose a new mechan- 

 istic theory of variation based on mechanical energy 

 of a type unknown to physicists. 



The last illustration I shall give is from an ad- 



11 Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, p. ix. 

 1- Ibid., p. X. 



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