THE FACTOKS OP ORGANIC EVOLUTION. 



pocentric idea. The thought of survival inevitably suggests 

 the human view of certain sets of phenomena, rather than 

 that character which they have simply as groups of 

 changes. If, asking what we really know of a plant, we 

 exclude all the ideas associated with the words life and 

 death, we find that the sole facts known to us are that 

 there go on in the plant certain inter-dependent processes, 

 in presence of certain aiding and hindering influences out 

 side of it ; and that in some cases a difference of structure 

 or a favourable set of circumstances, allows these inter 

 dependent processes to go on for longer periods than in 

 other cases. Again, in the working together of those many 

 actions, internal and external, which determine the lives 

 or deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the words 

 fitness and unfitness are applicable in the physical sense. 

 If a key fits a lock, or a glove a hand, the relation of the 

 things to one another is presentable to the perceptions. 

 No approach to fitness of this kind is made by an organism 

 which continues to live under certain conditions. Neither 

 the organic structures themselves, nor their individual 

 movements, nor those combined movements of certain 

 among them which constitute conduct, are related in any 

 analogous way to the things and actions in the environ 

 ment. Evidently the word fittest, as thus used, is a figure 

 of speech; suggesting the fact that amid surrounding 

 actions, an organism characterized by the word has either 

 a greater ability than others of its kind to maintain the 

 equilibrium of its vital activities, or else has so much 

 greater a power of multiplication that though not longer 

 lived than they, it continues to live in posterity more 

 persistently. And indeed, as we here see, the word fittest 

 has to cover cases in which there may be less ability than 

 usual to survive individually, but in which the defect is 

 more than made good by higher degrees of fertility. 



I have elaborated this criticism with the intention of 

 emphasizing the need for studying the gfagflges)which have 



