i82 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART HI 



cident things. Scientific logic may incline students of 

 science to do this, but a wholesome sense of biological 

 realities will keep them in check. Where Darwin is 

 open to question in this region is in his doctrine of 

 variability. Is variation related in any intelligible 

 fashion to heredity ? Or is it purely "casual" ? Per- 

 haps we shall find that Darwin emphasises the mechanical 

 blending of distinct heredities that "heredity and 

 heredity " are pitted against each other in his thinking, 

 quite in the spirit of the logic of chance. 



The question is so important, and at the same time 

 so complex and obscure, that we had better make a 

 fresh heading for it. 



II 



We have to ask then whether there is a special appeal 

 to chance by Darwin in his doctrine of variations ? 



Darwin largely treated these as casual, almost as if 

 uncaused. But it was not, for the moment, his affair to 

 say how variations arose; he was to show how they 

 worked out. He never thought of asserting deliberately 

 that variations are uncaused ; his followers explicitly 

 deny and repudiate any such view. 



What Darwin has done is to assume that variations 

 are casual in reference to the purpose of the species; 

 that the individual variations arising in nature, so long 

 as they are unweeded by struggle, do not directly tend 

 to fitness. In this sense Darwin affirms, or rather 

 implies, chance chance in contrast with purpose, but 

 yet with a distinct shade of meaning from either of the 

 senses of chance as against purpose which we noted 

 above. Not (l) partial failure of purpose is implied, 

 as when men fall into accidents. Nor yet (2) entire 

 absence of (proved) purpose, as when Darwinism is said 



