EVOLUTION THEORIES 21S 



clearly than either thinkers ever dreamed, 

 or than their respective exponents and dis- 

 ciples have realized. 



The wealth of first-hand observation from 

 which Darwin and his successors generalized 

 their conviction of "the all-sufficiency of 

 natural selection " was thus a less simple and 

 child-like discovery of Nature than it seemed; 

 it was a new and modern selection from the 

 wealth of Nature's aspects and interests. 

 For, when all is said and done, "the eye sees 

 only what it brings with it the power of 

 seeing." What are Lamarck's interpreta- 

 tions of the effects of use and disuse, his 

 assured insistence upon the interior freedom 

 of the organism to realize its inmost capaci- 

 ties, but the new step in social progress 

 through abandonment of outworn orders of 

 society, the freedom opening before new ones? 

 "La carriere ouverte aux talents" is pure 

 Lamarckism; so again the splendid over- 

 assurance of the Napoleonic epic, that "every 

 French soldier carries a marshal's baton in 

 his knapsack." But the colder business 

 view so characteristic of English thought 

 came to prevail over such political and mili- 

 tary exaggerations; the ideals of mechanical 

 efficiency and of individual and financial suc- 

 cess rising above the ruins of liberal aspira- 

 tions and of imperial achievements as they 



