A GREAT CONFESSION. 63 



ments of a purely mechanical kind which are conspicnous in 

 organic life, Mr, Spencer has the courage to declare that " no 

 approach " to this kind of fitness " presentable to the senses " is 

 to be found in organisms which continue to live in virtue of 

 special conditions. Where materials are so abundant it is hard 

 to specify. But I am tempted to ask whether Mr. Spencer has 

 ever heard of the ears, the teeth, above all the finger of the 

 aye-aye, the wonderful beast that lives in the forest of Mada- 

 gascar, and is very nicely fitted indeed to prey upon certain 

 larvae which burrow up the pith of certain trees ? Here we see 

 examples of fitting in a sense as purely mechanical as he could 

 possibly select from human mechanism. The enormous ears 

 are fitted to hear the internal and smothered raspings of the 

 grub. The teeth are fitted for the work of cutting-chisels, while 

 one finger is reduced to the dimension of a mere probe, armed 

 with a hooked claw to extract the larvse. The fitting of this 

 finger-probe into the pith-tube of the forest bough is precisely 

 like the fitting of a finger into a glove. It is strange indeed that 

 Mr. Spencer should deny the applicability of the word fitness, 

 in its strictest " glove " sense, to adaptations such as these. Yet 

 he does deny it in words emphatic and precise. Neither the 

 organic structures themselves — he proceeds to say — nor their 

 individual movements are related in any analogous way to the 

 things and actions in the midst of which they live. Having 

 made this marvelous denial, he reiterates in another form his 

 great confession — his gran rifiuto — that his own famous phrase, 

 although carefully designed to express self-acting and automatic 

 physical operations, is, after all, a failure. And this result he 

 admits not only as proved, but as obviously true. His confes- 

 sion is a humble one. " Evidently," he says, " the word fittest as 

 thus used is a figure of speech." * 



This elaborate dissection and condemnation by ,Mr. Herbert 

 Spencer of both the two famous phrases which have been so long 

 established in the world as expressing the Darwinian hypothesis 

 — his emphatic rejection of the claim of either of them to repre- 

 sent true physical causation — his sentence upon both of them 

 that they are mere figures of speech — is, in my judgment, a 

 memorable event. As regards Mr. Spencer himself, it is a cred- 

 itable performance and an honorable admission. It is one of the 

 high prerogatives of the human mind to be able to turn upon its 

 own arguments, and its own imaginings, the great weapon of 

 analysis. There are in all of us, not only two voices, but many 

 voices, and splendid work is done when the higher faculties call 

 upon the lower to give an account of what they have said and 

 argued. Often and often, as the result of such a call, we should 



* Page 751. (" Popular Science Monthl7," vol. xxix, p. 56.) 



