APPENDICES 1463 



characters", so scant of evidence, and dubious at best — was an essen- 

 tially psychological interpretation of organic need and urge, besoin 

 et desir, and hence readily revived, as elan vital, or again as 

 libido, horme, and the like, all viewed as of origins more or less 

 subconscious and organic, amending the too anthropomorphic 

 and even economic associations of Lamarck's phrasing, especially 

 when translated as "need and desire", of which the customary use 

 is so conscious in ourselves. 



But next, how came Lamarck to this doctrine? From his fruitful 

 study of the Invertebrates, we are told, and as he largely thought 

 himself. But in that extraordinarily speculative mind, with its 

 exceptionally wide range — as from the foundations of chemistry to 

 the initiative of modern weather-prediction — there may well have 

 been other scientific factors as weU. Yet beyond these again — ^just 

 as Darwin profited consciously by Malthus as economist, as well as 

 less consciously from the British industrial revolution with its 

 mechanical progress — ^we cannot but see in Lamarck one of the most 

 representative minds aroused by the intellectual life which preceded 

 the French social and political revolution, and accompanied and 

 followed it also. Recall the doctrines of Rousseau (himself at first 

 an effective writer in botany), as leading prophet of his age, with 

 his rights of man, his sanguine enthusiasm, faith, and hope in 

 education, in progress and perfectibility, through liberty, equality, 

 and fraternity. All this seemed in Lamarck's youth a veritable 

 evangel; and even in disillusioned or coldest retrospect, who can 

 refuse such doctrines of progress the credit of forerunning — in 

 however naively emotionalised and abstract terms, so with little of 

 science — our general conception of Evolution? Like other radical 

 aristocrats, the Chevalier de Lamarck willingly dropped his title 

 and heraldic status for plain citizenship; hence in every way he was 

 prepared courageously to think out his theory of organic evolution, 

 and appropriately in terms thoroughly congruent with "the career 

 open to talents", and of "the soldier carrying his marshal's baton 

 in his knapsack"— phrases which Napoleon, despite all elements 

 of reaction in his career, so convincingly expressed and even largely 

 realised in his day, when Lamarck's thought was ripening. In 

 short, then, his evolution theory — whether we share or reject it 

 here matters not — is also a characteristic product of his social 

 environment and times, and outlook in them, as all thought more 

 or less must be. 



Had we space to outline the history of biology, we might cite 

 many other instances of social influences on its thought, however 

 unconscious. Thus what of Bonnet's Echelle des itres, his simple and 

 non-evolutionary classification of animal life, which assumed an 

 orderly and practically linear series of forms from simplest to 

 highest, from animalcule to mammal; and which one finds practically 



