492 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE. 



more perfect structures. The last to re-enunciate 



this doctrine has been Prof. Owen ; who asserts " the axiom 

 of the continuous operation of creative power, or of the 

 ordained becoming of living things." Though these words 

 do not suggest a very definite idea, yet they indicate the 

 belief that organic progress is a result of some in-dwelling 

 tendency to develop, supernaturally impressed on living 

 matter at the outset — some ever-acting constructive force 

 which, independently of other forces, moulds organisms into 

 higher and higher forms. 



In whatever way it is formulated, or by whatever language 

 it is obscured, this ascription of organic evolution to some 

 aptitude naturally possessed by organisms, or miraculously 

 imposed on them, is unphilosophical. It is one of those ex- 

 planations which explain nothing — a shaping of ignorance 

 into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned is not 

 a true cause — not a cause assimilable to known causes — not 

 a cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous 

 effects. It is a cause unrepresentable in thought: one of 

 those illegitimate symbolic conceptions which cannot by any 

 mental process be elaborated into a real conception. In 

 brief, this assumption of a persistent formative power in- 

 herent in organisms, and making them unfold into higher 

 types, is an assumption no more tenable than the assump- 

 tion of special creations : of which, indeed, it is but a modi- 

 fication; differing only by the fusion of separate unknown 

 processes into a continuous unknown process. 



§ 145. Besides this intrinsic tendency to progress which 

 Dr. Darwin ascribes to animals, he says they have a capacity 

 for being modified by processes which their own desires 

 initiate. He speaks of powers as " excited into action by 

 the necessities of the creatures which possess them, and on 

 which their existence depends ; " and more specifically he 

 says that " from their first rudiment or primordium, to the 

 termination of their lives, all animals undergo perpetual 



