How Theories are Manufactured 81 



This is undoubtedly the case; or else how are we to 

 account for the position claimed for Mr. Darwin, as the 

 Newton of organic science? Darwin did not originate 

 the doctrine of evolution. Lamarck and others had 

 championed it as stoutly as he. What he did was to 

 offer explanation of a means by which evolution might 

 have been governed and effected ; to present what 

 seemed a workable hypothesis to explain the process ; 

 and to state certain arguments in its favour. In other 

 words, he professed to find the force responsible for the 

 facts, and this force was Natural Selection. This it was 

 that brought him into such prominence, for in this de- 

 partment preceding evolutionists had obviously failed to 

 satisfy the laws of probability; while his inexhaustible 

 patience in research, and his ingenuity in linking con- 

 ditions and consequences, enabled him to present a 

 sketch of Nature's method of procedure, which, within 

 certain limits, might well be correct. It is true that it 

 was only within certain limits, and that at best those 

 limits were not wide. On the origin of life he could 

 throw no light; while his very theory postulated a 

 tendency in organic beings to reproduce their own 

 likeness, with yet a certain tendency to variation, and 

 variation in directions capable of advantageous develop- 

 ment, and moreover of development towards a "higher" 

 type. Given life, however, to start with, and such 

 tendency to work upon, and it was hard to say, on first 

 sight at any rate, that his system would not work ; and it 

 was speedily adopted as doing a great deal more. The 

 limitations above indicated being tacitly ignored, it was 

 speedily assumed that we had now, not as hypothesis, 

 but as undoubted truth, the whole .philosophy of the 

 world of life, and that evolution was at last proved, 

 because Natural Selection would explain it. 



But what is the case now? Evolution continues to 

 sail under Darwinian colours, and to trade upon the 

 approval which Darwin's great work gained for it, while 

 meanwhile the vital principle of that work may be said 

 to be already dead; for the explanation so ingeniously 



