Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 4

and doubt that all, both animals and plants, were descended from
a common source. On the other, there was design; we could not read
Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelligence, adaptation of means
to ends, must have had a large share in the development of the life we
saw around us; it seemed indisputable that the minds and bodies of all
living beings must have come to be what they are through a wise
ordering and administering of their estates. We could not, therefore,
dispense either with descent or with design, and yet it seemed
impossible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck to it
that we could have no design, and those, again, who spoke so wisely
and so well about design would not for a moment hear of descent with
modification.
Each, moreover, had a strong case. Who could reflect upon rudimentary
organs, and grant Paley the kind of design that alone would content him?
And yet who could examine the foot or the eye, and grant Mr. Darwin
his denial of forethought and plan?
For that Mr. Darwin did deny skill and contrivance in connection with
the greatly preponderating part of organic developments cannot be and
is not now disputed. In the first chapter of "Evolution Old and New" I
brought forward passages to show how completely he and his followers
deny design, but will here quote one of the latest of the many that have
appeared to the same effect since "Evolution Old and New" was
published; it is by Mr. Romanes, and runs as follows:-
"It is the VERY ESSENCE of the Darwinian hypothesis that it only
seeks to explain the APPARENTLY purposive variations, or variations
of an adaptive kind." {17a}
The words "apparently purposive" show that those organs in animals
and plants which at first sight seem to have been designed with a view

to the work they have to do--that is to say, with a view to future
function--had not, according to Mr. Darwin, in reality any connection
with, or inception in, effort; effort involves purpose and design; they
had therefore no inception in design, however much they might present
the appearance of being designed; the appearance was delusive; Mr.
Romanes correctly declares it to be "the very essence" of Mr. Darwin's
system to attempt an explanation of these seemingly purposive
variations which shall be compatible with their having arisen without
being in any way connected with intelligence or design.
As it is indisputable that Mr. Darwin denied design, so neither can it be
doubted that Paley denied descent with modification. What, then, were
the wrong entries in these two sets of accounts, on the detection and
removal of which they would be found to balance as they ought?
Paley's weakest place, as already implied, is in the matter of
rudimentary organs; the almost universal presence in the higher
organisms of useless, and sometimes even troublesome, organs is fatal
to the kind of design he is trying to uphold; granted that there is design,
still it cannot be so final and far-foreseeing as he wishes to make it out.
Mr. Darwin's weak place, on the other hand, lies, firstly, in the
supposition that because rudimentary organs imply no purpose now,
they could never in time past have done so--that because they had
clearly not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time,
they never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time
or any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that "accidental,"
"fortuitous," "spontaneous" variations could be accumulated at all
except under conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never
will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it
comes to this) that there can be sustained accumulation of bodily
wealth, more than of wealth of any other kind, unless sustained
experience, watchfulness, and good sense preside over the
accumulation. In "Life and Habit," following Mr. Mivart, and, as I now
find, Mr. Herbert Spencer, I showed (pp. 279-281) how impossible it
was for variations to accumulate unless they were for the most part
underlain by a sustained general principle; but this subject will be
touched upon more fully later on.

The accumulation of accidental variations which owed nothing to mind
either in their inception, or their accumulation, the pitchforking, in fact,
of mind out of the universe, or at any rate its exclusion from all share
worth talking about in the process of organic development, this was the
pill Mr. Darwin had given us to swallow; but so thickly had he gilded it
with descent with modification, that we did as we were told, swallowed
it without a murmur, were lavish in our expressions of gratitude, and,
for some twenty years or so, through the mouths of our