beegson's philosophy of the organism. 27 



slight variations from the normal confer on some of the 

 individuals of a population a greater mastery over the 

 environment and these variations become transmitted, 

 and being repeated in the progeny of the individuals 

 displaying them, they become accumulated. A species 

 is the accumulation of these variations. It is the effect 

 and the variations are the causes, or putting it more 

 precisely the species is a function of certain independent 

 variables : a way of stating the thesis which brings it into 

 line with the physical concept of causality. If, on the 

 other hand, we chose to regard lamarckism as a working 

 hypothesis of transformism we have a description which 

 is just as clearly mechanistic. Changes produced in the 

 somatic tissues of the animal during its lifetime and by 

 its environment produce changes in the germinal tissue, 

 and these germinal changes lead to the variation of the 

 progeny from the form possessed by the parent. Now a 

 thinker, following up the notion of a factor in life other 

 than that of mechanism, will naturally hesitate to accept 

 either natural selection or lamarckism as a competent 

 cause of transformism. Bergson, impressed by the 

 dogmatism of modern biology, refuses to accept the 

 evidence of lamarckian inheritance ; and reasoning from 

 the occurrence of convergent characters in independent 

 lines of descent, refuses to accept natural selection, or at 

 least refuses to accept either hypothesis as in itself 

 competent to produce transformism. I do not propose to 

 examine this argument against natural selection, which 

 appears to be the part of Bergsonism with which most 

 biologists are familiar : it can easily be shown to be 

 erroneous. Nor need we examine the argument against 

 lamarckism : it, too, is familiar. The idea of natural 

 selection is so admirably clear and simple that we 

 cannot willingly abandon it, while the very persistence 

 with which lamarckian hypotheses arise, and the 



