Luck, or Cunning? 
Chapter I 
Introduction 
SHALL perhaps best promote the acceptance of the 
two main points on which I have been insisting for 
some years past, I mean, the substantial identity between 
heredity and memory, and the reintroduction of design 
into organic development, by treating them as if they had 
something of that physical life with which they are so closely 
connected. Ideas are like plants and animals in this 
respect also, as in so many others, that they are more fully 
understood when their relations to other ideas of their 
time, and the history of their development are known and 
borne in mind. By development I do not merely mean 
their growth in the minds of those who first advanced 
them, but that larger development which consists in their 
subsequent good or evil fortunes—in their reception, 
favourable or otherwise, by those to whom they were 
presented. This is to an idea what its surroundings are to 
an organism, and throws much the same light upon it that 
knowledge of the conditions under which an organism lives 
throws upon the organism itself. I shall, therefore, begin 
this new work with a few remarks about its predecessors. 
I am aware that what I may say on this head is likely 
tO prove more interesting to future students of the litera- 
ture of descent than to my immediate public, but any book 
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