Lectures and Essays | Page 2

any important error in a matter of fact."
***
ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSES OF THE PHENOMENA
OF ORGANIC NATURE:
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF ORGANIC NATURE.

When it was my duty to consider what subject I would select for the six
lectures* ([Footnote] *To Working Men, at the Museum of Practical
Geology, 1863.) which I shall now have the pleasure of delivering to
you, it occurred to me that I could not do better than endeavour to put
before you in a true light, or in what I might perhaps with more
modesty call, that which I conceive myself to be the true light, the
position of a book which has been more praised and more abused,
perhaps, than any book which has appeared for some years;--I mean Mr.
Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species". That work, I doubt not,
many of you have read; for I know the inquiring spirit which is rife
among you. At any rate, all of you will have heard of it,--some by one
kind of report and some by another kind of report; the attention of all
and the curiosity of all have been probably more or less excited on the
subject of that work. All I can do, and all I shall attempt to do, is to put
before you that kind of judgment which has been formed by a man,
who, of course, is liable to judge erroneously; but, at any rate, of one
whose business and profession it is to form judgments upon questions
of this nature.
And here, as it will always happen when dealing with an extensive
subject, the greater part of my course--if, indeed, so small a number of
lectures can be properly called a course--must be devoted to
preliminary matters, or rather to a statement of those facts and of those
principles which the work itself dwells upon, and brings more or less
directly before us. I have no right to suppose that all or any of you are
naturalists; and even if you were, the misconceptions and
misunderstandings prevalent even among naturalists on these matters
would make it desirable that I should take the course I now propose to
take,--that I should start from the beginning,--that I should endeavour
to point out what is the existing state of the organic world,--that I
should point out its past condition,--that I should state what is the
precise nature of the undertaking which Mr. Darwin has taken in hand;
that I should endeavour to show you what are the only methods by
which that undertaking can be brought to an issue, and to point out to
you how far the author of the work in question has satisfied those
conditions, how far he has not satisfied them, how far they are
satisfiable by man, and how far they are not satisfiable by man.
To-night, in taking up the first part of this question, I shall endeavour to

put before you a sort of broad notion of our knowledge of the condition
of the living world. There are many ways of doing this. I might deal
with it pictorially and graphically. Following the example of Humboldt
in his "Aspects of Nature", I might endeavour to point out the infinite
variety of organic life in every mode of its existence, with reference to
the variations of climate and the like; and such an attempt would be
fraught with interest to us all; but considering the subject before us,
such a course would not be that best calculated to assist us. In an
argument of this kind we must go further and dig deeper into the matter;
we must endeavour to look into the foundations of living Nature, if I
may so say, and discover the principles involved in some of her most
secret operations. I propose, therefore, in the first place, to take some
ordinary animal with which you are all familiar, and, by easily
comprehensible and obvious examples drawn from it, to show what are
the kind of problems which living beings in general lay before us; and I
shall then show you that the same problems are laid open to us by all
kinds of living beings. But first, let me say in what sense I have used
the words "organic nature." In speaking of the causes which lead to our
present knowledge of organic nature, I have used it almost as an
equivalent of the word "living," and for this reason,--that in almost all
living beings you can distinguish several distinct portions set apart to
do particular things and work in a particular way. These are termed
"organs," and the whole together is called "organic." And as it is
universally characteristic of them, this term "organic" has been very
conveniently employed to denote the whole of living nature,--the