COX ON THE FOUNDER OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY 239 
have been no great competition with other kinds of animals for, as we are 
to suppose that those inhabiting the same region were modified in the same 
way by the same conditions of life, it would seem that they ought all to 
have gotten along equally well. Their struggle for existence was mainly 
against lifeless Nature and not much with living competitors, since La¬ 
marck’s law takes no account of so-called “chance” variations which may 
be availed of when they happen to be advantageous and which thus become 
the objects of natural selection. As I have already said, Lamarckism is, 
in its essence, a philosophy of “determinate evolution.” 
Now, as Professor Huxley has remarked, “for the notion that every 
organism has been created as it is and launched straight at a purpose, 
Mr. Darwin substitutes the conception of something which may fairly be 
termed a method of trial and error.” Darwin, however, always recognized 
a serious difficulty in the matter of estimating the “selection value” of nas¬ 
cent organs, and it was at this point that St. George Mivart made his vigor¬ 
ous attack upon the doctrine of natural selection, which caused Darwin 
great uneasiness. But, having committed himself to the notion that natural 
selection can operate only upon minute or “insensible” gradations, Darwin 
was forced into a rather radical position by Mivart’s somewhat effective as¬ 
sault. On the whole, however, his theory of natural selection was calculated 
to get along better with nascent organs than it seems possible for Lamarck’s 
second law to do, for Darwin’s hypothesis assumes favorable variations to 
begin with, which, it is easy to show, are bound to occur out of an infinite 
diversity of fortuitous changes, while Lamarck’s law presupposes the oc¬ 
currence of external conditions compelling favorable changes in the organism, 
and it is easy to see that there is a better chance of finding a needed form in 
an existing collection of endless variety than of evolving such a form on de¬ 
mand and in a life-and-death emergency. While it is true that Darwin was 
at times disposed to fall into Lamarckian modes of thought and that he 
wavered somewhat concerning the importance of the action of the environ¬ 
ment and the evolutional value of use and disuse, there can be no doubt 
that, in its essential character, Darwin’s philosophy became in the end as 
original and distinctive as it was consistent and convincing,— not wholly in 
its presentation of new points of view, but largely in its rearrangement of 
old points so as to cause new light to fall upon them and to set them forth 
in brilliant relief before the world. 
The times when Darwin relapsed into Lamarckism were those moments 
of intellectual fatigue in which he permitted his mind to entertain the notion 
that natural selection was a cause of variation. On such occasions he real¬ 
ized that at least it could not be the sole cause, and then it was that he 
turned to the influence of the conditions of life and, by a curious transposition 
