THE FACTORS OP ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 41 



mode of co-operation. The idea they convey seems perfectly 

 intelligible. Natural selection having been compared with 

 artificial selection, and the analogy pointed out,, there 

 apparently remains no indefmiteness : the inconvenience 

 being, however, that the definiteness is of a wrong kind. 

 The tacitly implied Nature which selects, is not an em 

 bodied agency analogous to the man who selects artificially ; 

 and the selection is not the picking out of an individual 

 fixed on, but the overthrowing of many individuals by 

 agencies which one successfully resists, and hence con 

 tinues to live and multiply. Mr. Darwin was conscious 

 of these misleading implications. In the introduction to his 

 Animals and Plants under Domestication (p. 6) he says : 

 &quot; For brevity sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an intelligent 

 power ; . . . I have, also, often personified the word Nature ; for I have 

 found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity ; but I mean by nature only the 

 aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws only the 

 ascertained sequence of events.&quot; 



But while he thus clearly saw, and distinctly asserted, 

 that the factors of organic evolution are the concrete 

 actions, inner and outer, to which every organism is 

 subject, Mr. Darwin, by habitually using the convenient 

 figure of speech, was, I think, prevented from recognizing 

 so fully as he would otherwise have done, certain funda 

 mental consequences of these actions. 



Though it does not personalize the cause, and does not 

 assimilate its mode of working to a human mode of w r ork- 

 ing, kindred objections may be urged against the expression 

 to which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena 

 in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms the sur- 

 vival of the fittest;* for in a vague way the first word, 

 and in a clear way the second word, calls up an anthro- 



* Though Mr. Darwin approved of this expression and occasionally 

 employed it, he did not adopt it for general use ; contending, very truly, 

 that the expression Natural Selection is in some cases more convenient. 

 See Animals and Plants under Domestication (first edition) Vol. i, p. G ; and 

 Origin of Species (sixth edition) p. 49. 



