Luck or Cunning as the Main Means of Organic Modification | Page 6

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 understand it as regards design; an inexorable
"Thus far shalt thou go and no farther" barred them from fruition of the
harvest they should have been the first to reap. The very men who most
insisted that specific difference was the accumulation of differences so
minute as to be often hardly, if at all, perceptible, could not see that the
striking and baffling phenomena of design in connection with organism
admitted of exactly the same solution as the riddle of organic
development, and should be seen not as a result reached per saltum, but
as an accumulation of small steps or leaps in a given direction. It was
as though those who had insisted on the derivation of all forms of the
steam- engine from the common kettle, and who saw that this stands in
much the same relations to the engines, we will say, of the Great
Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great
Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in
the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and
were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design
is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more
truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy,
however bold and even at times successful.
From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin--better men
both of them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself
been treated by those who have come after him--and found that the
system of these three writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary
that heredity is only a mode of memory were added, would get us out
of our dilemma as regards descent and design, and enable us to keep
both. We could do this by making the design manifested in organism
more like the only design of which we know anything, and therefore
the only design of which we ought to speak--I mean our own.

Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-foreseeing nor very
retrospective; it is a little of both, but much of neither; it is like a comet
with a little light in front of the nucleus and a good deal more behind it,
which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness; it is of a kind
that, though a little wise before the event, is apt to be much wiser after
it, and to profit even by mischance so long as the disaster is not an
overwhelming one; nevertheless, though it is so interwoven with luck,
there is no doubt about its being design; why, then, should the design
which must have attended organic development be other than this? If
the thing that has been is the thing that also shall be, must not the thing
which is be that which also has been? Was there anything in the
phenomena of organic life to militate against such a view of design as
this? Not only was there nothing, but this view made things plain, as
the connecting of heredity and memory had already done, which till
now had been without explanation. Rudimentary organs were no longer
a hindrance to our acceptance of design, they became weighty
arguments in its favour.
I therefore wrote "Evolution Old and New," with the object partly of
backing up "Life and Habit," and showing the easy rider it admitted,
partly to show how superior the old view of descent had been to Mr.
Darwin's, and partly to reintroduce design into organism. I wrote "Life
and Habit" to show that our mental and bodily acquisitions were mainly
stores of memory: I wrote "Evolution Old and New" to add that the
memory must be a mindful and designing memory.
I followed up these two books with "Unconscious Memory," the main
object of which was to show how Professor Hering of Prague had
treated the connection between memory and heredity; to show, again,
how substantial was the difference between Von Hartmann and myself
in spite of some little superficial resemblance; to put forward a
suggestion as regards the physics of memory, and to meet the most
plausible objection which I have yet seen brought against "Life and
Habit."
Since writing these three books I have published nothing on the
connection between heredity and memory, except a few pages of

remarks on Mr. Romanes' "Mental Evolution in Animals" in my book,
{23a} from which I will draw whatever seems to be more properly
placed here. I have collected many facts