cannot do in person. It is not improb

From The Nineteenth Century.

able, indeed, that almost all the nitrog- MR, HERBERT SPENCER AND LORD SALIS

eous matter in the bodies of all existing plants and animals has been slowly purveyed for us through innumerable ages by successive generations of these invisible workers, or their analogues in earlier periods.

Earth, ocean, and the lower layers of the air are thus seen to consist of one vast stratum of actual or potential life -of living plants and animals, or of the germs, spores, seeds, and eggs which produce them. We must think of the atmosphere as filled with numberless floating organisms; we must think of the soil as a vast vitalized magma of all sorts of life-roots, stocks, and tubers; interlacing threads of moulds and fungi; worms and larvæ; shrews, moles, and beetles; creeping insects, crustaceans, and minute root-parasites; decaying leaves and bodies of small deer; each of which is in turn a pullulating mother of plants and animals. A mighty belt of life surrounds our planet like a robe; it spreads in a thick zone over plain and valley, over hill and mountain, through the depths of the sea, among the layers of the atmosphere. And every part of it falls in with every other element of life, not indeed in the sense that no conflict occurs (for "nature is one with rapine"), but in the sense with which Darwinism has made us familiar-that each must accommodate itself in the long run to the general mass around it. The whole is thus one vast "happy family." Portions of our earth are almost unfitted for life-the poles the snowy mountains, the desert sands; though even there life is present in diminished numbers; but wherever a living is to be picked up by hook or. crook, there somebody is picking it; and all work together as one boundless community, mutually unregarding, often mutually hostile, yet mutually helpful in a certain wider and deeper sense, which neglects the individual and embraces only the continued possibilities of the complex totality.

GRANT ALLEN.

BURY ON EVOLUTION.

PART II.

Mr. Herbert Spencer's rebellion against the "enormous" time which evolutionists have hitherto demanded, and to which Lord Salisbury only alluded as a well-known characteristic of their theories, marks a new stage in the whole controversy. Nobody had made the demand more emphatically than Mr. Spencer himself only a few years ago. His confession now, and his even elaborate defence of the idea that the work of evolution may be a work of great rapidity, goes some way to bridge the space which divides the conception of creation, and the conception of evolution as merely one of its methods. But Mr. Spencer must make further concessions. It is not the element of time, however long, nor is it the element of process, however purely physical, which we object to-we who have never been able to accept any of the recent theories which we reject as essentially erroneous, are the elements of mere fortuity on the one hand, and of mere mechanical necessity on the other. If the processes of ordinary generation have never been reinvig orated by a repetition of that other process-whatever it may have been, in which ordinary generation was first started on its wonderful and mysterious course-then, all the more certainly must the whole of that course have been foreseen and pre-arranged. has certainly not been a haphazard course. It has been a magnificent and orderly procession. It has been a course of continually fresh adaptations to new spheres of functional activity. We deceive ourselves when we think or talk, as the Darwinian school perpetually does, of organs being made or fitted by use. The idea is, strictly speaking, nonsense. They were made for use, not by use. They have always existed in embryo before the use was possible, and, generally, there are many stages of growth before they can be put to use. During all these stages the lines of development were strictly

It

governed by the end to be attained, ture as we find it. that is to say, by the purpose to be fulfilled.

governed by the end to be attained. ture as we find it.
that is to say, by the purpose to be ful-
filled.

This, indeed, is evolution; but it is the evolution of mind and will; of purpose and intention. We are not to be scared by the application to this indisputable logic of that most meaningless of all words-the supernatural. For myself I can only say that I do not believe in the supernatural-that is to say, I do not believe in anything outside of what men call nature, which is not also inside of it, and manifest throughout its whole domain. I cannot accept, or even respect, the opinion of men who, in describing the facts of nature, and especially the growing adaptations of organic structures, use perpetually the language of intention as essential to the understanding of them, and then repudiate the implications of that language when they talk what they call science of philosophy. When evolutionists do defend their inconsistencies in this matter, they use arguments which we cannot accept as resting on any solid basis. Thus Mr. Spencer argues in the article under review that if the Creator had willed to form all those creatures he surely would have led them along lines of direct growth from the germ to the finished form, and would not have led them through so many stages of metamorphoses.' We have no antecedent knowledge of the Creator which can possibly entitle us to form any such presumption as to his methods of operation. This is one answer. But there is another. The method which is supposed by Mr. Spencer to be inconsistent with the operations of a mind and will is the same method which is our own, and which is universally prevalent in the universe. Everything is done by the use of means; everything is accomplished by steps, generally visible, but often also concealed from our view. There is, therefore, either no mind guiding the order of that universe, or else this method is compatible with intellectual direction. We must take na

1 P. 745.

We have nothing to do with what Mr. Spencer calls "special creation." Special evolution will do very well for our contention. That contention is that in organic structures purposive adaptations have had the controlling power. This is not an argument; it is a fact. In biology our perception of the relation between organic structures and the purposes they are made to serve-which are the functions they are constructed to discharge is a perception as clear, distinct, and certain as our perception of their relations to each other, or to time, or to form, or to space, or to any other of the categories of our knowledge.

Mr. Spencer is under a complete celusion if he supposes that the four or five great heads of evidence, which he specifies as all telling the same tale of evolution, could not be equally applicable to the facts if all the steps of evolution were visibly and admittedly under the ordering and guidance of a will. For example, the argument founded on the possibilities of classification applies to the evolution of human machines as well as to the organic mechanisms of nature. A row of models of the steam engine, from "Papin's Digester" to the wonderful machines which now drive express trains at sixty or seventy miles an hour, would show a consecutive series of developments in every way comparable—except in length and complexity—with the series of the Mammalian skeleton. Yet nobody would be tempted to guess on this account, except in a metaphorical sense, that steam-engines have all been begotten by each other. The metaphor from organic births, however, is so apposite and perfect in its analogy that it is often actually used, and the begetting of ideas, or of the application of ideas to mechanical or chemical work, is a recognized branch of the history of mechanics.

The truth is that the argument derived from the principle on which all natural classifications rest, is a very dangerous argument for Darwinians. It cuts two ways, and one of the ways is very undermining to the assumption

I

that there has been some continual flux tween the existence of a need and the of specific characters. It is true that actual meeting of that need, in the supin all living structures common fea- ply of an apparatus, can be nothing tures. so numerous, do indicate some but a perceiving mind and will. common cause and source. But it is quite agree with Mr. Spencer that most not less true that specific differences, men when they talk of separate or speso constant and so definite through cial creation do not realize, or "visualenormous periods of time, are incom- ize." what they mean by it. But expatible with perpetual instability. actly the same criticism applies to the Darwin himself spoke of "fixity" as an language of those who are perpetually essential characteristic of true species. explaining organic structures as develHe admitted that this fixity is never opments governed by the absolute neattained by the human breeder; and he cessities of external adaptations. They even admitted that it could only be ob- do not really see the necessary implitained by "selection with a definite ob- cations of their own language. If the ject." This is a most remarkable dec- organism is to live at all, they frelaration. Just as we have seen Mr. quently tell us, such and such developSpencer, under the inducements of con- ments must arise. Quite so-but who troversy, throwing overboard his old is it, or what is it, that determines that demand for enormous periods of the organism shall live, and shall not time, so now we find Darwin throwing rather die? The needed development overboard the idea of variations being will not appear of its own accord. The either constant, or indiscriminate, or needed perception of its necessity must accidental, and even insisting that exist somewhere; and the needed "fixity" in organic forms is an aim in power of meeting that necessity must nature, and can only be secured exist somewhere also. Moreover the through an agency having a definite two must act in concert. Those, thereobject, and pursuing that object with a fore, who talk about that combined persistency impossible to man as a perception and power existing in namere breeder of temporary varieties. ture are using words with no meaning, This is an argument which gives a unless by nature they mean a conceiv very high rank to species in the history ing and a perceiving agency. It is on of life. It is because of it that Cuvier this principle alone that we can exdeclared that no science of natural his- plain very clearly why some apparatory is possible if species be not stable. tuses are common to all living things. If, then, it be true that one species has The assimilation of food, the support always given birth to others, it must of weight, some fulcrum for the athave been by a process of which, as tachment of muscle, some circulatory yet, we know nothing. fluid, some vessels for the circulating fluids to find a channel, some apparatus for the supply of oxygen, and for its absorption, some nervous system for the generation of the highest energies of life, some optical arrangement for the purposes of sight; all of these involve, of necessity, likenesses and correspondences between all living things in the animal kingdom which hang together by a purely mental and rational chain of common necessities which have been seen and provided for.

And then it must be remembered that there are some fundamental features in all living organisms-involving corresponding likenesses-which can have no other than a mental explanation. One great principle governs the whole of them, namely this, that in order to take advantage of special laws, physical, mechanical, chemical, and vital, certain corresponding conditions must be submitted to, and certain apparatuses must be devised, and provided, for the meeting of these necessities. But the bond-the nexus-be

1 Quoted by Professor Poulton, "Charles Dar win," etc, p. 201.

These mental relations between needs and their supply are entirely independent of the methods employed, and, as a fact, the methods employed