How Theories are Manufactured 83 



cannot bring themselves to discard the weapon with 

 which it seems to furnish them in their endeavour to 

 demonstrate that the world is a clock which needs no 

 winding, and that the potencies of matter are all-sufficient 

 to explain the phenomena of life. Writers of this stamp 

 are always ready to tell us all about it: to point a 

 moral and adorn a tale from any object they meet in 

 nature ; the tale being the old one of development by 

 Natural Selection, and the moral, that there is no Mind 

 at work in the ordering of the world, and no controlling 

 force except that Juggernaut-like engine, the struggle for 

 existence, ever securing that the fittest only should sur- 

 vive while the weakliest go to the wall. It would be 

 hard to match the calm assumption and serene self- 

 confidence of some of these writers, undertaking to 

 unlock the secrets of nature, while in blank unconscious- 

 ness of the very existence of problems that stare them 

 in the face. But even more than the mental attitude 

 of individuals, a study of their productions illustrates the 

 fatal facility with which fact and theory may be made to 

 tally. It is with the common objects around us that 

 such writers as Mr. Grant Allen to take once more a 

 conspicuous example are wont to deal; and what 

 I now propose is to observe in a few instances the 

 method in which the work is done, and to ask a few 

 questions as to the soundness of the result. 



To come back to our birds, which I may seem in 

 danger of forgetting. They, we are told, have acquired 

 their present form, their plumage, and their habits, 

 because these have partly helped to find their ancestors 

 food, and partly to find them mates; and because, by 

 the principle of heredity, the qualities, which have helped 

 one generation to survive, have been perpetuated and 

 made habitual in their descendants. Shape of beak and 

 claw, development of muscle and of nerve, have served 

 the one purpose ; beauty of form and feather, sweetness 

 of voice, and other aesthetic qualities, have served the 

 other. But here at the first step a difficulty must needs 

 crop up. Of what avail is external beauty of any sort, 



