CHAP, xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 23! 



Dr. Stirling, on the other hand, finds the individual 

 too poor for the work required of it in Darwinism. 

 So far as I understand his position, it has two ele- 

 ments. It nails Darwinism to the assertion that 

 variation is casual (as it were causeless). And while 

 repudiating such " casual " difference as a source of 

 progress or as a possible beginning of specific types, 

 it alleges the existence of the casual element under 

 the name of " individual difference," which seems to 

 be in Dr. Stirling's 1 view all but aimless and all but 

 causeless. 



Perhaps the meaning is this. Every individual 

 differs from every other member of the species. The 

 difference does not affect the specific type or pattern ; 

 it neither augments nor lessens efficiency. Each is a 

 man, a fish, a frog ; yet each has its own peculiarity, 

 its, so to say, casual peculiarity, indifferent to the 

 specific type. To get species law rational sys- 

 tem out of this most casual, most non-systematic of 

 all things in the cosmos that is the alchemy of 

 Darwinism ; out of a brew of chance, to distil pure 

 reason ! The casual difference is just the drop of 

 unreason, of brute matter, dropped into the specific 

 type in order to make it down into a new individual. 

 This, so far as I can conjecture, is Dr. Stirling's 

 meaning. No summation of individual peculiarities 

 can ever amount to a specific difference. The things 

 are heterogeneous in their very essence. 



1 1 am thinking of As Regards Protoplasm and Darivinianism, but 

 mainly of Dr. Stirling's Gifford Lectures. The very acute mind of Dr. 

 Stirling suggests innumerable objections to Darwinism. We have only 

 dealt with what seems to be the central point the denial that the 

 alleged process is reasonably thinkable. 



