DARWIN; and the origin of species 21 r 



more than to make manifest what was latent or potential. When 

 pressed for a definition of latent potency, can he do more than to 

 assert that activity is latent in a body if, while this body does what 

 he expects under certain conditions, knowledge of these conditions 

 does not tell him why it should ? He asks, furthermore, whether 

 it is conceivable that one cubit can be added to his stature by 

 taking thought, either for one lifetime or for a million ; although 

 he admits that no one could expect to attain to his normal or 

 natural stature without the stimulus of healthy muscular and 

 nervous activity. He also asks whether the improvement of our 

 faculties by use is anything more than the correction of our 

 natural responses, and their reduction to exactness, by the suppres- 

 sion of those that are confused and perplexed, and the survival 

 of those that are definite and distinct ; and, ultimately, by the 

 extinction of the deluded minds and the survival of those that 

 are sane ; and whether the history of individual life is anything 

 more than the continuance of the process of natural selection. 



Some hold that our race has, by its intelligence, emancipated 

 itself from natural selection, and escaped from its domain into the 

 realm of reason ; but if we agree with Berkeley that the work 

 of experience " is to unravel our prejudices and mistakes, grad- 

 ually correcting our judgment and reducing it to a philosophical 

 exactness," may we not ask whether knowledge itself is anything 

 more than conscious apprehension of the unceasing activity of 

 the selective process .-' 



Darwin points out, even in the first edition of the " Origin,'* 

 many difficulties which he is not able to solve. Some of them 

 have been ably treated by later writers. Some are still unex- 

 plained, and in the next lecture I shall try to throw new light 

 upon one of them. 



