CHAP, xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 2O3 



material, and at the very most merely elicited by natu- 

 ral selection. Of the two then, life, not environment, 

 the living creature itself, and not the non-living 

 conditions round about it, explains the acquisi- 

 tion of new qualities and the development of fresh 

 specific types. Of the two, Darwin has emphasised 

 the wrong one, and has isolated it by assuming its 

 merely casual relation to the other. So we might 

 speak, in one-sided opposition to Darwin's graver 

 one-sidedness. But the truly reasonable view to 

 hold is that both together varying organism and 

 selecting environment and both as elements in 

 one orderly process, lead to evolution. 



We do not blame Darwin for speaking in contrac- 

 tions. By the necessity of the case human language 

 is elliptical. The one exception proving the rule is 

 furnished by the lawyers. They omit nothing ; they 

 recite everything in detail over and over again ; and 

 they are the awful example of verbosity, the drunken 

 helots of human speech. But elliptical nomencla- 

 ture, however necessary, is full of dangers. If I 

 were driving pigs to market I might reasonably 

 (though elliptically) say that they got there because I 

 headed them off at all the wrong roads which we had 

 to pass. Yet it would be perilous to affirm that 

 " heading off " was the one cause why they got to 

 market. They got there because they were quad- 

 rupeds, and disliked being hit. (I waive, as possibly 

 not directly relevant, the further consideration that 

 there was some one to drive them.) Yet our modern 

 evolutionists talk as if barricading the wrong roads 

 not only kept pigs from straying, but actually taught 

 them for the first time how to walk. 



