50 Luck, or Cunning ? 
It may be interesting, before we leave Mr. Spencer, to 
see whether he even now assigns to continued personality 
and memory the place assigned to it by Professor Hering 
and myself. I will therefore give the concluding words of 
the letter to the Atheneum already referred to, in which he 
tells us to stand aside. He writes :— 
“T still hold that inheritance of functionally produced 
modifications is the chief factor throughout the higher 
stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as mental (see 
‘ Principles of Biology,’ i. 166), 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 variations can be inherited 
and accumulated has less to do with the first development 
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 amceba into, we will say, a mollusc than heredity 
itself. True, ‘‘ inheritance of functionally produced modi- 
fications ’’ 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 exclusive 
factor ” is not heredity, or inheritance, but ‘‘ survival of the 
fittest.” 
Of course we know that Mr. Spencer does not believe 
this ; of course, also, all who are fairly well up in the history 
of the development theory will see why Mr. Spencer has 
attempted to draw this distinction between the “ factors ” 
of the development of the higher and lower forms of life ; 
