88 A SCIENTIFIC CREED OUTWORN.. 
The revolt against ‘Natural Selection’ came some 
forty years ago. It was announced in two famous dec- 
larations by Spencer and Huxley. This constitutes one 
of the most remarkable and important, as well as one of 
the most significant episodes, in the history of evolution. 
In two of the most remarkable essays which ever appeared 
in the “Nineteenth Century” magazine, now over thirty 
years ago, Herbert Spencer stepped on to the stool of 
repentance and read his recantation and renunciation of 
the doctrine of natural selection and the survival of the 
fittest ; first doing vicarious penance (unauthorized, how- 
ever) for Darwin, and then, in no uncertain terms, for 
himself. There was no mistaking Spencer’s meaning. 
His language was explicit. “The phrases (natural se- 
lection and survival of the fittest) employed in discussing 
organic evolution,” he told his readers, “though conven- 
ient and needful, are liable to mislead by veiling the actual 
agencies.” “The words ‘natural selection,’ do not express 
a cause in the physical sense.” “Kindred objections,” he 
continues, “may be urged against the expression into 
which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in 
literal terms rather than metaphorical terms—‘the survi- 
val of the fittest.’ In the working together of those many 
actions, internal and external, which determine the lives 
and deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the 
words ‘fitness’ and ‘unfitness’ are applicable in the physi- 
cal sense.’ And he continues: “Evidently, the word 
‘fittest’ as thus used 1s a figure of speech.” Had the sun 
fallen from the heavens the shock to the followers of 
Darwin could not have been more stunning than this 
open apostasy from the Darwinian faith. 
Nor was this all. New surprises were still in store 
for the faithful who still clung to the cherished dogma. 
Now they find their faith itself assailed, and this, too, by 
these very selfsame leaders, who had been at such pains 
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