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

leading
biologists, ordered design peremptorily out of court, if she so much as
dared to show herself. Indeed, we have even given life pensions to
some of the most notable of these biologists, I suppose in order to
reward them for 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