THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



tion and of having accepted some form of what they 

 call the mutative hypothesis. As a scientific theory it 

 is purely nugatory as, at bottom, it merely holds that 

 some individuals in a species may and do differ to an 

 unknown extent from the typical form. If these indi- 

 viduals breed true to their new characters, and if these 

 characters are capable of fitting in with the environ- 

 ment, we then have a new species or the potentiality 

 of a new species. It is evident that if the variation 

 into new species depends on what are to us unknown 

 and freakish variations in individuals, there is no 

 such thing in mutations as a scientific law of contin- 

 uity or order. As I extravagantly remarked, a reptile 

 might give birth to a feathered bird, or a giraffe with 

 his great length of neck might be produced in a gen- 

 eration or two. 



As time passes, separating us further and further 

 from the innumerable cross-currents of the nineteenth 

 century, we realize more and more clearly that the 

 supreme effort of the Victorian age, as the English are 

 accustomed to call it, was to establish a rational mo- 

 nistic philosophy which would embrace the whole 

 universe in a single science. What Newton accom- 

 plished, by finding the universal force of gravitation, 

 towards unifying the physical sciences and preparing 

 for the nebular hypothesis, had been extended by 

 Spencer and Darwin until a universal evolutionary 

 hypothesis embraced all phenomena, both of the or- 



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