CH. xvn METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 179 



Such is the view of Darwinism which I suggest. 

 Those who entirely reject natural selection, even as a 

 biological hypothesis, may insist with a good deal of 

 force that organic life that curious half-way house 

 between nature and spirit or may insist that animal 

 life, so far as psychical, already shares largely the 

 nature of spirit ; that therefore we are guilty of folly 

 in treating it on physical or mechanical lines. If in 

 an organism the whole is prior to the parts, can we 

 explain the genesis of organic species by the coexist- 

 ence and interaction of [things which we treat as] 

 distinct parts ? The objection is forcible. Does it not 

 amount to saying that a science of biology is impossible? 

 That philosophy must annex to its own department all 

 treatment of the problems of life ? I think such a view 

 extreme. 



Let us see how the doctrine of chance or of 

 mechanism works out in sundry particulars of the 

 Darwinian hypothesis. 



Organism and Environment. Darwin assumes 

 elementary living forms (else he has nothing to make 

 species out of), and plenty of them (else there will be no 

 struggle). He takes them for granted : they have a 

 suitable environment ; they live and are able (some of 

 them) to survive. It is not his affair to ask whether 

 organism and environment have any mystic connection. 

 He takes them as given. They are facts just facts. 



Yes ; but it is a very long step indeed from this 

 point of view to the denial of teleology, to the assertion 

 that organic fitness itself arose through natural selection 

 by the weeding out of unfit forms. The ignoring of the 

 problem of necessary relation between organism and 

 environment is one thing, the denial of such relation 

 is quite a different thing, and nothing in scientific 



