334 Darwin, and after Darwin. 



it was little less than puerile in him to see no more 

 in the theory of natural selection than such a mere 

 figure of speech. To say that the liver selects the 

 elements of bile, or that nature selects specific types, 

 may both be equally unmeaning re-statements of facts ; 

 but when it is explained that the term natural selec- 

 tion, unlike that of " hepatic sensation," is used as 

 a shorthand expression for a whole group of well- 

 known natural causes struggle, variation, survival, 

 heredity, then it becomes evidence of an almost 

 childish want of thought to affirm that the expression 

 is figurative and nothing more. The doctrine of 

 natural selection may be a huge mistake ; but, if so, 

 this is not because it consists of any unmeaning 

 metaphor : it can only be because the combination of 

 natural causes which it suggests is not of the same 

 adequacy in fact as it is taken to be in theory. * 



Owen further objected that the struggle for existence 

 could only act as a cause of the extinction of species, 

 not of their origination a view of the case which again 

 shows on his part a complete failure to grasp the 

 conception of Darwinism. Acting alone, the struggle 

 for existence could only cause extermination ; but 

 acting together with variation, survival, and heredity, 

 it may very well for anything that Owen, or others 

 who followed in this line of criticism, show to the 

 contrary have produced every species of plant and 

 animal that has ever appeared upon the face of the 

 earth. 



Another and closely allied objection is, that the 

 theory of natural selection " personifies an abstrac- 

 tion." Or, as the Duke of Argyll states it, the theory 

 is " essentially the image of mechanical necessity 



