226 The Unity of the Organism 



it. A matter deserving special notice is that the truly for- 

 ward, the creative step came after, and was conditioned 

 upon, a period of dissatisfaction with the prevalent teaching 

 on the subject. Then the considerable time of semi-con- 

 structive observation and thinking and feeling under guid- 

 ance of the general surmise that species arise naturally and 

 not supernaturally, as all his earlier experiences — "contents 

 of consciousness" — had taken for granted. And at last the 

 final, for him, great conception, the hypothesis of the "strug- 

 gle for existence" and "survival of the fittest" as a cause of 

 the transformation of species. The suddenness and spon- 

 taneousness with which this idea emerged into consciousness 

 should be specially noticed. Once the merest suggestion of 

 it hove in sight, the whole hypothesis formed itself, organ- 

 ized itself, rapidly and completely. 



The sense in which the process may justly be called spon- 

 taneous is important. Although we well know that the 

 famous hypothesis was suggested by the reading of Malthus' 

 work on population, we know equally well that the most es- 

 sential features of the hypothesis were not contained in the 

 teachings of Malthus. There was something genuinely new 

 in the hypothesis. Out of the former total of experiences 

 came that which did not actually exist in those experiences. 

 Although the hypothesis was clearly a product of something 

 which went before, it was a synthetic product in the strictest 

 sense, in essentially the sense that a chemical compound is a 

 synthetic product of its interacting elements, the sense that 

 the most distinctive attributes of the compound can not be 

 found in the elements taken separately, but only after the 

 interaction has actually occurred. 



We must not fail to consider the long period of Darwin's 

 strict "self-activity" in collecting evidence, pro and con, 

 bearing on his hypothesis ; and the activity designed, notice, 

 to ascertain whether or not there is a process going on in 

 the outer world of plants and animals corresponding to the 



