108 Luck, or Cunning ? 
organism, is there anything to ensure either that, even if 
ground be lost for a season or two in any one direction, it 
shall be recovered presently on resumption by the organism 
of the habits that called it into existence, or thatit shall 
appear synchronously in a sufficient number of individuals 
to ensure its not being soon lost through gamogenesis. 
How is progress ever to be made if races keep reversing, 
Penelope-like, in one generation all that they have been 
achieving in the preceding ? And how, on Mr. Darwin’s 
system, of which the accumulation of strokes of luck is the 
greatly preponderating feature, is a hoard ever to be got 
together and conserved, no matter how often luck may have 
thrown good things in an organism’s way? Luck, or 
absence of design, may be sometimes almost said to throw 
good things in our way, or at any rate we may occasionally 
get more through having made no design than any design 
we should have been likely to have formed would have 
given us ; but luck does not hoard these good things for our 
use and make our wills for us, nor does it keep providing 
us with the same good gifts again and again, and no matter 
how often we reject them. 
I had better, perhaps, give Mr. Spencer’s own words as 
quoted by himself in his article in the Nineteenth Century 
for April, 1886. He there wrote as follows, quoting from 
§166 of his “ Principles of Biology,” which appeared in 
1864 :— 
“Where the life is comparatively simple, or where 
surrounding circumstances render some one function 
supremely important, the survival of the fittest ’’ (which 
means here the survival of the luckiest) ‘‘ may readily 
bring about the appropriate structural change, without 
any aid from the transmission of functionally-acquired 
modifications ” (into which effort and design have entered). 
“ But in proportion as the life grows complex—in propor- 
tion as a healthy existence cannot be secured by a large 
endowment of some one power, but demands many powers ; 
