194 FROM. COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART ill 



Such is the view of Darwinism which I suggest. 

 Those who entirely reject natural selection, even as a 

 biological hypothesis, may insist with a good deal of 

 force that organic life that curious half-way house 

 between nature and spirit or may insist that animal 

 life, so far as psychical, already shares largely the 

 nature of spirit ; that therefore we are guilty of folly 

 in treating it on physical or mechanical lines. If in 

 an organism the whole is prior to the parts, can we 

 explain the genesis of organic species by the co-exist- 

 ence and interaction of [things which we treat as] 

 distinct parts ? The objection is forcible. Does it 

 not amount to saying that a science of biology is 

 impossible ? That philosophy must annex to its own 

 department all treatment of the problems of life ? I 

 think such a view extreme. 



Let us see how the doctrine of chance or of 

 mechanism works out in sundry particulars of the 

 Darwinian hypothesis. 



Organism and Environment. Darwin assumes 

 elementary living forms (else he has nothing to make 

 species out of), and plenty of them (else there will be 

 no struggle). He takes them for granted: they have 

 a suitable environment; they live and are able (some 

 of them) to survive. It is not his affair to ask 

 whether organism and environment have any mystic 

 connection. He takes them as given. They are 

 facts just facts. 



Yes; but it is a very long step indeed from this 

 point of view to the denial of teleology, to the assertion 

 that organic fitness itself arose through natural selec- 

 tion by the weeding out of unfit forms. The ignoring 

 of the problem of necessary relation between organ- 



