492 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE: 



Ontogeny is the making explicit of the germinal organisa- 

 tion, which is what it is because of phylogeny. The way in 

 which an embryo moves towards a goal as if it had its future 

 consciously in view is due to the fact that it is constitu- 

 tionally determined by the past, which lives on in the present 

 in a manner peculiar to and characteristic of living creatures. 

 The ages that have gone have bent the bow in the plane along 

 which the arrow of the individual flies. But ontogeny must 

 not be thought of as the uncoiling of a wound-up spring, 

 or as the unpacking of a marvellous treasure-box, or as a 

 series of metabolisms which start one another in succession 

 and enter into increasingly complex inter-relations; ontogeny 

 is a function of the individuality which is somehow con- 

 densed within the germ-cell. Perhaps it is not, after all, very 

 different from behaviour ! The fundamental fact which we 

 are so far from understanding is that the fertilised ovum 

 is at once the repository of ages of organic inventions 

 and a unified individuality in the one-cell stage of its 

 becoming. 



If we adhere to the conclusion that evolution has been a 

 series of discoveries or inventions of the genuinely new, the 

 further question is how the gains have become enregistered 

 in the germinal organisation, which must be thought of as 

 becoming increasingly complex. There are two ways in 

 which this enregistering may be thought of. (1) On the 

 one hand it is conceivable that the individual acquirements 

 and experiences of the fully developed individual may in 

 some definite way affect the germinal organisation, and thus 

 the progeny. In this way Lamarckians have thought of the 

 germ-cells as being continually enriched by the gains of the 

 individual organism, or reduced by its losses, and that in 

 a quite definite and representative manner. There are very 



