404 



THE BVOI,UTION OF LIFE. 



of more perfect structures. The last to re-enun' 



ciate this doctrine has been Prof. Owen ; who asserts " the 

 axiom of the continuous operation of creative power, or of 

 the ordaiaed becoming of living things." Though these 

 liighly-general expressions do not suggest any very definite 

 idea, yet they imply the beKef that organic progress is a 

 result of some in-dwelling tendency to develop, supernatur- 

 ally impressed on Kving matter at the outset — some ever- 

 acting constructive force, which, independently of other 

 forces, moulds organisms into higher and higher forms. 



In whatever way it is formidated, or b}' whatever language 

 it is obscured, this ascription of organic evolution to some 

 aptitude naturally possessed by organisms, or miraculously 

 imposed on them, is unphUosophical. It is one of those ex- 

 planations which explains nothing — a shaping of ignorance 

 into the semblance of knowledge. The cause assigned is not 

 a true cause — not a cause assimilable to known causes — ^not 

 a cause that can be anywhere shown to produce analogous 

 effects. It is a cause unrepresentable in thought : one of 

 those illegitimate s^rmbolic conceptions which cannot by any 

 mental process be elaborated into a real conception. In 

 brief, this assimiption of a persistent formative power, in- 

 herent in organisms, and making them unfold into higher 

 forms, is an assumption no more tenable than the assump- 

 tion of special creations : of which, indeed, it is but a modi- 

 fication ; differing only by the fusion of separate unknown 

 processes into a continuous unknown process. 



§ 145. Along with this intrinsic tendency to progress, 

 supposed to be primordially impressed on them, Dr Darwin 

 held that animals have a capacity for being modified by pro- 

 cesses which their own desires initiate. He speaks of 

 powers as " excited into action by the necessities of the 

 creatures which possess them, and on which their existence 

 depends ; " and more specifically he says that " from, their 

 first rudiment or primordium, to the termination of their 



