The Organism and its Major Parts 41 



that of the partnership between an alga and a fungus to 

 make a hchen. The kinship between such a speculation as 

 that of Empedocles concerning the origin of the individual 

 and the modern speculation which would have the individual 

 arise symbiotically is unmistakable. The most important 

 likeness between the two conceptions is the fact that both 

 are fundamentally non-evolutionsii. The isolated heads, 

 necks, legs and arms of the ancient Greek, like the germ- 

 cells and germ-buds of the modern Englishman, are just 

 taken because they are necessary for the particular specu- 

 lation. The question of how heads and legs and of how 

 tree germ-cells and germ-buds arose in the first instance is 

 not raised, or if it were it could be answered in accordance 

 with the basal principle involved, only by assuming another 

 and another and another set of elements of the same kind, 

 ad infinitum. In a word, the theory really contains no pro- 

 vision in a truly organic sense for transformation, which is 

 the very essence of the conception of organic evolution. It 

 should be noticed that the principles of Love and Hate ap- 

 pealed to by Empedocles and that of struggle and survival 

 appealed to by neo-Darwinians are held to explain not the 

 origin of the heads, legs, etc., or of the germ-cells and germ- 

 buds, but the origin of actual animals and plants from the 

 respective elements once the elements are at hand. In a 

 word, expressing the limitations on this mode of theorizing 

 in the familiar language of Darwinism proper {not neo- 

 Darwinism), the natural selection hypothesis does not pre- 

 tend to explain the origin of variations and variants, but 

 assumes them. What we are bound to see if we look at the 

 relevant facts squarely is that the doctrine of organic evo- 

 lution involves the conception of ancestry as fundamentally 

 as it does that of progeny. Observation finds organisms 

 produced bi/ parents no less indubitably and inevitably than 

 it finds them giving origin to progeny, so that the effort 

 constantly recurring in recent biology to find ultimate se- 



