46 LDCK, OR CUNNING? 



It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to 

 see whether he even now assigns to continued person- 

 ality and memory the place assigned to it by Professor 

 Hering and myself. I will therefore give the concluding 

 words of the letter to the Athenceum already referred 

 to, in which he tells us to stand aside. He writes : — ■ 



"I still hold that inheritance of functionally pro- 

 duced modifications is the chief factor throughout the 

 higher stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as 

 mental (see 'Principles of Biology,' i. i66), while I 

 recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages 

 survival of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the 

 lowest the almost exclusive factor." 



This is the same confused and confusing utterance 

 which Mr. Spencer has been giving us any time this 

 thirty years. According to him the fact that varia- 

 tions can be inherited and accumulated has less to do 

 with the first developments of organic life, than the 

 fact that if a square organism happens to . get into 

 a square hole, it will live longer and more happily 

 than a square organism which happens to get into 

 a round one ; he declares " the survival of the fittest " 

 — and this is nothing but the fact that those who 

 "fit" best into their surroundings will live longest 

 and most comfortably — to have more to do with 

 the development of the amoeba into, we wiU say, 

 a mollusc than heredity itself. True, " inheritance of 

 functionally produced modifications " is allowed to be 

 the chief factor throughout the "higher stages of 

 organic evolution," but it has very little to do in the 

 lower; in these "the almost exclu&ive factor" is 



