APPENDIX 5 39 



and for mode of motion. From this confusion of the perceptual and 

 the conceptual are drawn arguments for spiritism, exactly as Aristotle, 

 the Stoics, and Martineau have drawn them for animism (pp. 88 

 and 1 2 1 ). The chief difference between Mr. Wallace and his pre- 

 decessors lies in the fact that he has polytheistic rather than mono- 

 theistic sympathies. 



NOTE VI 



On the Si(jfficie7icy of Natural Selectio7i to account for the History of 



Civilised Man (p. 363) 



It is not only literary historians but even naturalists who deny that 

 natural selection is a sufficiently powerful factor to describe the 

 development of civilised man. The most noteworthy scientist who 

 takes this view is Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace. He considers that (i.; 

 the large brain of man, (ii.) his naked skin, (iii.) his voice, hands, 

 and feet, (iv.) his moral sense, could never have been produced by 

 natural selection. He holds that all these characteristics are more 

 fully developed in the savage than are necessary for his needs. He 

 believes, however, that they have been developed in man by selection, 

 as man himself has developed other characteristics in the Guernsey 

 milch cow. In other words, he asserts that they are the outcome of 

 the artificial selection of some intelligent power and not of blind 

 natural selection. This theory of Dr. Wallace's has been well 

 described by the phrase "man as God's domestic animal." Dr. 

 Wallace, however, being polytheistic in conviction, has objected to 

 the capital G in this phrase, and appears to hold that man is the 

 domestic animal of the modern equivalents of angels and demons. 

 According to him, therefore, " marriages are made in heaven," but 

 by the lesser luminaries of the spirit hierarchy. No arguments in 

 favour of the interference of this spirit hierarchy are produced except 

 the supposed insufficiency of natural selection. The difficulties 

 Dr. Wallace finds in natural selection do not appear of a very for- 

 midable character,! but surely if they were important enough to leave 

 us in doubt as to whether we had found a sufficiently wide-embracing 

 formula in natural selection, then the true scientific method is to 

 remain agnostic, until it has been shown that no other sufficient 

 perceptual formula can be found ? Dr. Wallace rushes with such 

 haste to his spirit hierarchy, that his pages read as if he had invented 

 his difficulties in order to justify his beliefs, and not reached his 

 "angel-made marriages " by a process of elimination, which left no 

 other formula possible. 



I have added this Note that the reader may not think that I have 



^ His whole argument, for example, with regard to the brain turns upon its 

 size, whereas it appears that it is the complexity of its convolutions and the 

 variety and efficiency of its commissures rather than its actual size, which we 

 should psychologically expect to have grown with man's civilisation. 



