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exercise the
new power unconsciously. Although you are adapting your front wheel
to your balance so elaborately and actively that the accidental locking
of your handle bars for a second will throw you off; though five
minutes before you could not do it at all, yet now you do it as
unconsciously as you grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty,
and must have created some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you
have done it solely by willing. For here there can be no question of
Circumstantial Selection, or the survival of the fittest. The man who is
learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in
the struggle for existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new
habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and
kept trying until it was added unto him.
HOW ACQUIREMENTS ARE INHERITED
But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not pick
up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born six
feet high with a beard and a tall hat. The set-back that occurred
between your lessons occurs again. The race learns exactly as the
individual learns. Your son relapses, not to the very beginning, but to a

point which no mortal method of measurement can distinguish from the
beginning. Now this is odd; for certain other habits of yours, equally
acquired (to the Evolutionist, of course, all habits are acquired), equally
unconscious, equally automatic, are transmitted without any perceptible
relapse. For instance, the very first act of your son when he enters the
world as a separate individual is to yell with indignation: that yell
which Shakespear thought the most tragic and piteous of all sounds. In
the act of yelling he begins to breathe: another habit, and not even a
necessary one, as the object of breathing can be achieved in other ways,
as by deep sea fishes. He circulates his blood by pumping it with his
heart. He demands a meal, and proceeds at once to perform the most
elaborate chemical operations on the food he swallows. He
manufactures teeth; discards them; and replaces them with fresh ones.
Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright, and
bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through the
wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas in the
other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does not
consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously objects
very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would he do
that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and
eliminating himself by death--equally an acquired habit,
remember--how he abhors it! Yet the habit has become so rooted, so
automatic, that he must do it in spite of himself, even to his own
destruction.
We have here a routine which, given time enough for it to operate, will
finally produce the most elaborate forms of organized life on
Lamarckian lines without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection
at all. If you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a
pianist or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection,
you can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without
it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that
if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development
but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.
Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You
are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of

consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional
organs, or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional
habits. You get them because you want them badly enough to keep
trying for them until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows
why: all we know is that the thing actually takes place. We relapse
miserably from effort to effort until the old organ is modified or the
new one created, when suddenly the impossible becomes possible and
the habit is formed. The moment we form it we want to get rid of the
consciousness of it so as to economize our consciousness for fresh
conquests of life; as all consciousness means preoccupation and
obstruction. If we had to think about breathing or digesting or
circulating our blood we should have no attention to spare for anything
else, as we find to our cost when anything goes wrong with these
operations. We want to be unconscious of them just as we wanted to
acquire them; and we finally win what we want. But we win
unconsciousness of our habits at the cost of losing our control of