282 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



and if our creed is a humble confession that while we do not know 

 whether life is independent of matter or not ; that while we do not 

 know what the relation between mind and matter is ; we should 

 like to find out ; we need fear no attack by anything in the universe 

 or outside it. 



This being the case, the discovery of natural selection may 

 seem to some to have no bearing, either positively or negatively, 

 upon the argument from contrivance ; since the words " survival of 

 the fittest " are meaningless unless the being which remains fit after 

 the selective process has acted is the same as the one on which it 

 acted. 



I am not able to share this opinion ; for while natural selection, 

 inasmuch as it presupposes personal identity, may be only an im- 

 perfect explanation of life, it still remains a strictly scientific ex- 

 planation of one great biological problem, the origin of species, 

 revealing to us the " physical causation " of the division of the 

 living world into more or less isolated species, characterized by 

 fitness for that part of the order of nature which makes up the 

 environment of each. 



Aristotle believed that all living things, man included, are 

 generated out of dead matter ; and it seems clear that, before 

 natural selection was discovered, we should have been warranted 

 in demanding proof of Aristotle's view before admitting that living 

 beings are inorganic in origin; but, nowadays, no one can logically 

 demand that some one shall make out of dead matter a living human 

 being, with a human mind, like the golden statues which Homer 

 attributes to the skill of Vulcan, before he will make this admission. 



Whether the production of a living man by physico-chemical 

 methods be absolutely impossible or not, all admit that it is practi- 

 cally impossible ; although few will assert with the same confi- 

 dence that it is impossible to make in this way a being sufficiently 

 like some living things to create a reasonable expectation that 

 its history will be, in all essential particulars, like the history of 

 life as we actually know it. If any are bold enough to make this 

 assertion, their frame of mind seems to me to be highly injudicious 

 in the present condition and present prospects of science ; for 

 the progress of knowledge may at any time compel them to 

 abandon it. 



