INADEQUACY OF NATURAL SELECTION, ETC. 609 



are in poetry and rhetoric, cannot be used without danger in science 

 and philosophy. The title of Mr. Darwin's great work furnishes 

 us with an instance of the misleading effects produced by them. 

 It runs : — The Origin of Species hy means of Natural Selection, or the 

 Preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Here are 

 two figures of speech which conspire to produce an impression 

 more or less erroneous. The expression " natural selection " was 

 chosen as serving to indicate some parallelism with artificial 

 selection — the selection exercised by breeders. Now selection 

 connotes volition, and thus gives to the thoughts of readers a 

 wrong bias. Some increase of this bias is produced by the words in 

 the second title, " favoured races ; " for anything which is favoured 

 implies the existence of some agent conferring a favour. I do 

 not mean that Mr. Darwin himself failed to recognize the mis- 

 leading connotations of his words, or that he did not avoid being 

 misled by them. In chapter iv of the Origin of Species, he says 

 that, considered literally, " natural selection is a false term," and 

 that the personification of Nature is objectionable ; but he thinks 

 that readers, and those who adopt his views, will soon learn to 

 guard themselves against the wrong implications. Here I venture 

 to think that he was mistaken. For thinking this, there is the 

 reason that even his disciple, Mr. Wallace — no, not his disciple, 

 but his co-discoverer, ever to be honoured — has apparently been 

 influenced by them. When, for example, in combating a view 

 of mine, he says that " the very thing said to be impossible by 

 variation and natural selection has been again and again effected 

 by variation and artificial selection," he seems clearly to imply 

 that the processes are analogous, and operate in the same way. 

 Now this is untrue. They are analogous only within certain 

 narrow limits ; and, in the great majority of cases, natural selec- 

 tion is utterly incapable of doing that which artificial selection 

 does. 



To see this it needs only to de-personalise Nature, and to re- 

 member that, as Mr. Darwin says, Nature is " only the aggregate 

 action and product of many natural laws [forces]." Observe its 

 relative shortcomings. Artificial selection can pick out a par- 

 ticular trait, and, regardless of other traits of the individuals 

 displaying it, can increase it by selective breeding in successive 

 generations. For, to the breeder or fancier, it matters little 

 whether such individuals are otherwise well constituted. They 

 may be in this or that way so unfit for carrying on the struggle 

 for life, that were they without human care, they would disappear 

 forthwith. On the other hand, if we regard Nature as that 

 which it is, an assemblage of various forces, inorganic and organic, 

 some favourable to the maintenance of life and many at variance 

 with its maintenance — forces which operate blindly — we see that 



