34 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



true, and if it be applicable to human as well as to animal 

 progress, it is a statement fraught with moral consequences of 

 the highest importance. 



I cannot do better here than quote the concluding passage 

 from Darwin's Origin of Species (he is speaking of the 

 contemplation of a tangled bank, with all its variety of plant 

 and animal life) : 



' These elaborately constructed forms, so different from 

 each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a 

 manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. 

 These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with 

 Reproduction ; Inheritance which is almost implied by Repro- 

 duction ; Variability from the indirect and direct action of 

 the conditions of life, and from use and disuse ; a Ratio of 

 Increase so high as to lead to a struggle for Life, and as a 

 consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of 

 Character and the extinction of less improved forms. Thus 

 from the War of Nature, from famine and death, the most 

 exalted product which we are capable of conceiving, namely 

 the production of the higher animals, directly follows." 



It would be difficult to maintain that this passage is not 

 a justification of the German point of view. 



The chief criticism of this passage, which was meant to be 

 and is a summary of Darwin's doctrine, must be directed 

 against the application, at the time when the words were 

 written, of the term " laws " to Reproduction, Inheritance 

 and Variability. The truth is that these so-called laws are 

 only phenomena, and that neither Darwin nor his contem- 

 poraries knew much about the laws governing any of them. 



It is true that Darwin collected and published, in his 

 Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, a large 

 number of facts bearing on Variation and Heredity, some of 

 which were the outcome of his own elaborate breeding experi- 

 ments, and he essayed to give an explanation of them in his 

 provisional hypothesis of Pangenesis. So (in point of time 

 rather before him) had Herbert Spencer. And it would be 

 easy, beginning with Aristotle, to cite the names of a large 

 number of philosophers and naturalists Harvey, Leibnitz, 



