DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 11 



This philosophy remained, in spite of sceptical 

 and polemic outbursts, the official and the regnant 

 philosophy of Europe for over two thousand years. 

 The expulsion of fixed first and final causes from 

 , astronomy, physics, and chemistry had indeed given 

 the doctrine something of a shock. But, on the 

 other hand, increased acquaintance with the de 

 tails of plant and animal life operated as a coun 

 terbalance and perhaps even strengthened the 

 argument from design. The marvelous adapta 

 tions of organisms to their environment, of organs 

 to the organism, of unlike parts of a complex 

 organ like the eye to the organ itself ; the fore 

 shadowing by lower forms of the higher; the 

 preparation in earlier stages of growth for or 

 gans that only later had their functioning these 

 things were increasingly recognized with the prog 

 ress of botany, zoology, paleontology, and embry 

 ology- Together, they added such prestige to the 

 design argument that by the late eighteenth cen 

 tury it was, as approved by the sciences of or 

 ganic life, the central point of theistic and ideal- 

 is tic philosophy. 



The Darwinian principle of natural selection 

 cut straight under this philosophy. If all organic 

 adaptations are due simply to constant variation 

 and the elimination of those variations which are 

 harmful in the struggle for existence that is 



brought atout by excessive reproduction, there 



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