666 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



intuition of Lamarck; who was long too belittled by the predomin- 

 antly mechanistic attitude impressed upon later thinkers by the 

 industrial age, and its corresponding advances in the physical 

 sciences, preliminary to biology, and still too often claiming practi- 

 cally to supersede it; albeit with fruitful results of their own. The 

 famiUar criticisms, of his too simple faith in the heredity of the 

 blacksmith's potent biceps, or of his too naive presentment of the 

 giraife lengthening his neck, were of course needed: yet what he 

 was really striving to express for evolutionary change is nowadays 

 being restated, in terms of the subconscious urge of life, its horm6, 

 its Ubido, or whatever else we may come to call this. In a word, 

 Bergson (with many more concrete naturalists) is essentially neo- 

 Lamarckian. 



That the mechanistic physiologists, the neo-Darwinian naturalists, 

 usually remain of their traditional way of thinking is not, of course, 

 denied. Weismann's "all-sufficiency of Natural selection" has still 

 its sturdy supporters, and these often doing excellent work upon 

 those lines; as notably in their criticisms of the too long per- 

 sistent interpretation of animal ways by the earlier ecologists 

 in terms of the older psychology of their times. But do they not 

 also too much leave out of consideration this later psychology, and 

 even thus offer us a one-sided account of life, mechanistically 

 physiological, and thus practically without adequate psychological 

 aspect or content at all? Hence it is surely reasonable to invite their 

 consideration and criticism of such endeavours towards reconcilia- 

 tion as Haldane's, Russell's above outlined, or our own in these 

 pages. 



