58 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



if it were the definite expression of some true physical and effi- 

 cient cause, to which he only claims to add some subsidiary help 

 from another physical cause which is wholly separate. But if 

 natural selection is a mere phrase, vague enough and wide 

 enough to cover any number of the physical causes concerned 

 in ordinary generation, then the whole of Mr. Spencer's labo- 

 rious argument in favor of his "other factor" becomes an 

 argument worse than superfluous. It is wholly fallacious in 

 assuming that this " factor " and " natural selection " are at all 

 exclusive of, or even separate from, each other. The factor thus 

 assumed to be new is simply one of the subordinate cases of 

 heredity. But heredity is the central idea of natural selection. 

 Therefore natural selection includes and covers all the causes 

 which can possibly operate through inheritance. There is thus 

 no difficulty whatever in referring it to the same one factor 

 whose solitary dominion Mr. Spencer has plucked up courage to 

 dispute. He will never succeed in shaking its dictatorship by 

 such a small rebellion. His little contention is like some bit of 

 Bumbledom setting up for Home Rule— some parochial vestry 

 claiming independence of a universal empire. It pretends to set 

 up for itself in some fragment of an idea. But here is not even 

 a fragment to boast of or to stand up for. His new factor in or- 

 ganic evolution has neither independence nor novelty. Mr. Spen- 

 cer is able to quote himself as having mentioned it in his " Prin- 

 ciples of Biology " published some twenty years ago ; and by a 

 careful ransacking of Darwin he shows that the idea was familiar 

 to and admitted by him at least in his last edition of the " Origin 

 of Species." Mr. Spencer insists that this fact is evidence of a 

 " reaction " in Darwin's mind against the sole factorship of natu- 

 ral selection. Darwin was a man so much wiser than all his fol- 

 lowers, and there are in his book so many indications of his 

 sense of our great ignorance, that most probably he did grow in 

 the consciousness of the necessary incompleteness and shortcom- 

 ings of his own explanations. But there was nothing whatever 

 to startle him in the idea of heredity propagating structural 

 change, through functional use and disuse. This idea was not 

 incongruous with his own more general conception. On the 

 contrary, it was strictly congruous and harmoniously subordi- 

 nate. He did not profess to account for all the varieties which 

 emerge in organic forms. Provisionally, and merely for the 

 convenience of leaving that subject open, he spoke of them as 

 fortuitous. But to assume the really fortuitous or accidental 

 character of variation to be an essential part of this theory, is 

 merely one of the many follies and fanaticisms of his followers. 



Although, therefore, the particular case chosen by Mr. Her- 

 bert Spencer to illustrate the incompetency of natural selection. 



