Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 5

having hoodwinked us so much to our satisfaction.
Happily the old saying, Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret, still holds true, and the reaction that has been gaining force for some time will doubtless ere long brush aside the cobwebs with which those who have a vested interest in Mr. Darwin's reputation as a philosopher still try to fog our outlook. Professor Mivart was, as I have said, among the first to awaken us to Mr. Darwin's denial of design, and to the absurdity involved therein. He well showed how incredible Mr Darwin's system was found to be, as soon as it was fully realised, but there he rather left us. He seemed to say that we must have our descent and our design too, but he did not show how we were to manage this with rudimentary organs still staring us in the face. His work rather led up to the clearer statement of the difficulty than either put it before us in so many words, or tried to remove it. Nevertheless there can be no doubt that the "Genesis of Species" gave Natural Selection what will prove sooner or later to be its death-blow, in spite of the persistence with which many still declare that it has received no hurt, and the sixth edition of the" Origin of Species," published in the following year, bore abundant traces of the fray. Moreover, though Mr. Mivart gave us no overt aid, he pointed to the source from which help might come, by expressly saying that his most important objection to Neo- Darwinism had no force against Lamarck.
To Lamarck, therefore, I naturally turned, and soon saw that the theory on which I had been insisting in" Life and Habit" was in reality an easy corollary on his system, though one which he does not appear to have caught sight of. I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality teleological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy's words, it makes the organism design itself. In making variations depend on changed actions, and these, again, on changed views of life, efforts, and designs, in consequence of changed conditions of life, he in effect makes effort, intention, will, all of which involve design (or at any rate which taken together involve it), underlie progress in organic development. True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he was none the less a teleologist for this. He was an unconscious teleologist, and as such perhaps more absolutely an upholder of teleology than Paley himself; but this is neither here nor there; our concern is not with what people think about themselves, but with what their reasoning makes it evident that they really hold.
How strange the irony that hides us from ourselves! When Isidore Geoffroy said that according to Lamarck organisms designed themselves, {20a} and endorsed this, as to a great extent he did, he still does not appear to have seen that either he or Lamarck were in reality reintroducing design into organism; he does not appear to have seen this more than Lamarck himself had seen it, but, on the contrary, like Lamarck, remained under the impression that he was opposing teleology or purposiveness.
Of course in one sense he did oppose it; so do we all, if the word design be taken to intend a very far-foreseeing of minute details, a riding out to meet trouble long before it comes, a provision on academic principles for contingencies that are little likely to arise. We can see no evidence of any such design as this in nature, and much everywhere that makes against it. There is no such improvidence as over providence, and whatever theories we may form about the origin and development of the universe, we may be sure that it is not the work of one who is unable to understand how anything can possibly go right unless he sees to it himself. Nature works departmentally and by way of leaving details to subordinates. But though those who see nature thus do indeed deny design of the prescient-from-all-eternity order, they in no way impugn a method which is far more in accord with all that we commonly think of as design. A design which is as incredible as that a ewe should give birth to a lion becomes of a piece with all that we observe most frequently if it be regarded rather as an aggregation of many small steps than as a single large one. This principle is very simple, but it seems rather difficult to understand. It has taken several generations before people would admit it as regards organism even after it was pointed out to them, and those who saw it as regards organism still failed to