A THEORY OF LIFE 173 



in a sense, is a " wonderful little laboratory " in 

 which manifestations of energy are constantly 

 taking place. The watchmaker constructed the 

 watch for that purpose ; who or what constructed 

 the organism ? Darwin and the Darwinians 

 would have said Natural Selection. In fact, 

 Darwin rather lamented that " the old argument 

 from design in nature, as given by Paley, which 

 formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails 

 now that the law of Natural Selection has been 

 discovered. We can no longer argue that, for 

 instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell 

 must have been made by an intelligent being, 

 like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to 

 be no more design in the variability of organic 

 beings, and in the action of Natural Selection, 

 than in the course which the wind blows." 

 There again Darwin fell into a mistake, because 

 he confused an intermediate with a final cause. 

 Even if Natural Selection were all that the most 

 ultra-Darwinian could claim it to be, it could not, 

 as Driesch and others have shown, exhaust the 

 explanation of the organism. 



As a matter of fact the world of science is very 

 far from thinking of Natural Selection as any- 

 thing more than a factor, perhaps even a minor 

 factor, in evolution. The author of the work 

 with which we are dealing tells us that " Darwin's 

 law of selection as a natural explanation of the 

 origin of all fitness in form and function has lost 

 its prestige at the present time, and all of Dar- 

 winism which now meets with universal accept- 

 ance is the law of the survival of the fittest , a limited 



