404 



THE EVOLUTION 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 ordained becoming of living things." Though these 

 liighly- general expressions do not suggest any very definite 

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

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

 ally impressed on living 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 formulated, or by whatever language 

 it is obscured, this ascription of organic evolution to some 

 aptitude naturally possessed by organisms, or miracidously 

 imposed on them, is unphilosophical. 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 symbolic conceptions which cannot by any 

 mental process be elaborated into a real conception. In 

 brief, this assumption 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 



