CH. xvn METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 187 



should pass into life, or how animality should evolve 

 rationality. If for any purpose, or from any point of 

 view, we have to emphasise novelty as novel, then it is 

 unreasonable to speak of the evolutionary process which 

 led to it, even if Darwin's analysis of that process be 

 accepted, by the name of "natural selection." There 

 must have been possibilities in "protoplasm" answering 

 to all the novel results of late evolution. Let the varia- 

 tions come up as they may ; let them point in every 

 direction by turns, quite at random, if you insist upon 

 it; still, apart from the amount or direction of each 

 individual congenital variation, there must be a total 

 possible range of variations, prescribed % the material, 

 and at the very most merely elicited by natural selection. 

 Of the two then, life, not environment, the living creature 

 itself, and not the non-living conditions round about it, 

 explains the acquisition of new qualities and the develop- 

 ment of fresh specific types. Of the two, Darwin has 

 emphasised the wrong one, and has isolated it by assum- 

 ing its merely casual relation to the other. So we 

 might speak, in one-sided opposition to Darwin's graver 

 one-sidedness. But the truly reasonable view to hold is 

 that both together varying organism and selecting en- 

 vironment and both as elements in one orderly process, 

 lead to evolution. 



We do not blame Darwin for speaking in contrac- 

 tions. By the necessity of the case human language is 

 elliptical. The one exception, proving the rule, is fur- 

 nished by the lawyers. They omit nothing ; they recite 

 everything in detail over and over again ; and they are 

 the awful example of verbosity, the drunken helots of 

 human speech. But elliptical nomenclature, however 

 necessary, is full of dangers. If I were driving pigs to 

 market I might reasonably (though elliptically) say that 



