THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON NATURAL SELECTION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1315, 13 May 1897, Page 12

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL ON NATURAL SELECTION.

The following is a short extract from a scholarly and exhaustive reply 'to “Mr Spencer on Evolution” in the Nineteenth Century. The March number contains many articles of the greatest importance, and they should be widely read,- for their literary merits and profound thought are worthy of the highest consideration: “The truth is that the phrase Natural Selection and the group of ideas which hide under it, is so elastic that there is nothing in hea.ven or on earth that by a little ingenuity may not be brought under its pretended explanation. Darwin in 1859-60 wondered * how variously ’ his phrase had been ‘ misunderstood.’ The explanation is simple: it was.because of those vague and loose analogies which are so often captivating. It is-the same now, after 36 years of copious argument and exposition. Darwin ridiculed the idea which some entertained that Natural Selection ‘ was set up as an active power or deity’; yet this is the very conception of it which is at this momont set up by tho most faithful high priest in the Darwinian Cult. Professor Poulton of Oxford gives to Natural Selection the til-lc of ‘a motive power ’ first discovered by Darwin. This development is perfectly intelligible. Nature is the old traditional refuge for all who will not see tho work of creative mind. Everything that is—everything that happens —

is, and happens naturally. Nature personified does, and is, our all iu all. She is a universal agent, and at tho same time tho universal product. What she does she may easily be conceived as choosing to do, or selecting to bo done, out of countless alternatives before her. Then wo have only to shut our eyes, blindly or conveniently, to the absolute difference between the idea of merely selecting out of existing things, and of selecting by prevision out of conceivable things yet to be —we have only to cherish or even to tolerate this confusion of thought—and then we can cram into our theories of Natural Selection the very highest exorcises of 1 Mind and Will. Let us carry out consistently the analogy of thought involved in the agency of a human breeder; let us - emancipate this conception from the > narrow limits of operation within which ’ we know it to be confined; let us conceive : a strictly homologous agency in Nature : which ha 3 power not merely to select 3 among organs already so developed as to be • fit for use, but to select and direct before--3 hand tho development of organs through - many embryotic stages of existence when

no use is possible ; let us conceive, m short, an agency in Nature which keeps, as it were, a book in which ‘ all our members are written, which in continuance are fashioned when as yet there are none of them,’ then the phrase and the theory of Natural Selection may bo accepted as at least something of an approach to an [explanation of the wonderful facts of biological development.”