NATURAL SELECTION CRITICISED. 287 



shall take place. An organism may remain true to itself 

 for incalculable ages, till suddenly, some fine day, nobody 

 can ^say how or why, there " chances " to take place a 

 variation " in the right direction " in the right direction, 

 that is, for selection to take a hold of it and turn it to use. 

 But there is no law in this. There is no more law in it 

 than in the wind that blows. In the wind that blows, 

 if it is a physical necessity, a mechanical fatalism, that is 

 alone determinative ; so it is in all that concerns organisa- 

 tion and life. Mr. Darwin's whole purpose would be 

 defeated if you were to interpolate into the physical 

 fortunes, the mechanical haps of bare externality, any 

 concert or rationale as of a law that involved progression 

 in it. That would be more than a mechanical law 

 such progression in organisation and life would be 

 development, development with a purpose and a prin- 

 ciple in it. Now Mr. Darwin speculated only the 

 extension of life and organisation into physics the con- 

 summation, the canonisation, the apotheosis of material 

 mechanism under the single necessity law, as named law 

 of gravitation. Any law, as of proper and peculiar 

 progression design would thwart Mr. Darwin's entire 

 conception and intention. Like Strato of Lampsacus, he 

 drew to no conclusion but that " whatever exists and 

 whatever is done, is caused or has been caused, by natural 

 weights and motions." 



And yet the day was when Mr. Darwin thought very 

 differently. As we said (Journal, p. 94), he once admired 

 a grand unity of scheme in the creation of organised 

 beings; and even in 1849 he exclaimed to Lyell, 

 " Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimit- 

 able." And to think that, as he tells us himself, all 

 this vast change in the attitude of his mind was due to 

 this, that in view of the affinities of organisms, the 

 family bee stung him with the idea that ordinary 



