Organic Nature s Riddle 347 



I We may compare the production of a new species to the 

 duction of a statue. We have (1) the marble material 

 responding to the matter of the organism ; (2) the intelli- 

 gent active force of the sculptor, directing his arm, 

 responding to the psychic nature of the organism, which 

 reacts according to law as surely as in the case of reflex 

 action in healing, or in any other vital action; (3) the 

 various conceptions of the artist, which stimulate him to 

 model, responding to the environing agencies which evoke 

 variation ; and (4) the blows of the smiting chisel, correspond- 

 ing to the action of natural selection. No one would call the 

 mere blows of the chisel — apart from both the active force 

 of the artist and the ideal conceptions which direct that 

 force — the cause of the production of the statue.- They are 

 a cause — they help to produce it, and are absolutely neces- 

 sary for its production. They are a mfiaterial cause, but 

 not the primary cause. This distinction runs through all 

 spheres of activity. Thus the inadequacy of ' natural 

 selection' to explain the origin of species runs parallel 

 with its inadequacy to explain the origin of instinct, as 

 before pointed out. 



The formal discoverer of a new fossil is the naturalist 

 who first sees it with an instructed eye, appreciates and 

 describes it, not the labourer who accidentally uncovers 

 but ignores it, and who cannot be accounted to be, any 

 more than the spade he handles, other than a mere material 

 cause of its discovery. So we must regard the sum of the 

 destructive agencies of nature as a material cause of the 

 origin of new species, their formal cause being the reaction 

 of the nature of their parent organisms upon the sum of 

 the multitudinous influences of their environment. This 

 kind of action of ' the organism ' — this formal cause — has 

 been compared by Mr. Alfred Wallace, and by me, with the 

 action of the organism in its embryonic development; and 



