FOOTNOTES:
[1] Written before the war.
[2] As I shall often have to mention “selection” in the course of these lectures, I must observe that it is no part of my business to weigh the comparative merits of competing evolutionary theories. It may be that the hypothesis of small random variations accumulated or eliminated according as they help or hinder survival, is, in the light of recent research, insufficient and unsatisfactory. From my point of view this is immaterial. I use the word “selection” as a convenient name for any non-rational process, acting through heredity, which successfully imitates contrivance. Darwin’s theory, be it true or false, still provides, I suppose, the only suggestion as to how this feat may be accomplished, and his terminology may be used without danger of misunderstanding.
[3] I greatly regret having to stretch the ordinary meaning of the word “æsthetic” to the extent required by the argument of this chapter. I got into trouble in a previous work by the extension I gave to the word “Authority.” And as, in that case, no explanation seemed sufficient to avoid misconception, so I am afraid it will be in the present case.
But what better course is open to me? I require a word to express a concept which is vital to the doctrines I am preaching. Where am I to get it? If there is no such word in ordinary use, I must either invent a new word, or I must modify the familiar meaning of an old word. There are objections to both courses; yet one of them must be taken. I have chosen the second; and can do no more than ask for the indulgence of those readers who think I should have chosen the first.
[4] Cf. Plato in the “Phædrus.”
[5] It is perhaps to this tendency we may (in part) attribute the eagerness with which poetry and fine art have used and abused the personifications of natural objects provided for them by primitive superstition. If not, it is curious that these tedious mythologies should have been cherished by poets long after they were abandoned by everybody else; and that we still use every expedient for endowing material nature with fictitious sympathies and powers. But it is, I think, an error to see nothing in such metaphors but a trick of style. They represent the same deep-rooted tendency which finds significance in such phrases as “Mother Earth,” which has suggested certain poetic forms of Pantheism; or which gathers a vague, semi-spiritual consolation from the thought that, when we die, our bodies, resolved into their elements, may still share in the new manifestations of life which Nature (half personified) pours out in exhaustless profusion.
[6] Written in 1913.
[7] Doubtless under such circumstances ideal virtue might also have survival value in the biological sense.
[8] Indirectly, no doubt, sanctions may perform a most important educational work in stimulating and guiding the higher loyalties. The approval or disapproval of our fellows, the “terrors of the law,” the belief in future rewards and punishments, though their immediate appeal is only to self-interest, may powerfully aid in the creation of moral judgments sufficiently free from any “empirical elements of desire” to have satisfied Kant himself.
[9] Although, as a matter of fact, I do speak of it in the next lecture.
[10] Maxwell, as all who interest themselves in physics are aware, arrived at very interesting conclusions by considering what would happen if little demons interfered with the random motions of the molecules constituting a gas.
[11] Extract from Morgan’s “Habit and Instinct,” page 40. “A young chick two days old, for example, had learnt to pick out pieces of yolk from others of white of egg. I cut little bits of orange-peel of about the same size as the pieces of yolk, and one of these was soon seized, but at once relinquished, the chick shaking his head. Seizing another, he held it for a moment in the bill, but then dropped it and scratched at the base of his beak. That was enough; he could not again be induced to seize a piece of orange-peel. The obnoxious material was now removed, and pieces of yolk of egg substituted, but they were left untouched, being probably taken for orange-peel. Subsequently, he looked at the yolk with hesitation, but presently pecked doubtfully, not seizing, but merely touching. Then he pecked again, seized, and swallowed.”
[12] See Lecture VI.
[13] See note at the end of the Lecture.
[14] I got this view of Boyle’s relation to modern chemistry from Ostwald’s work.
[15] In this chapter, especially in that part of it which deals with beliefs of conservation, I am greatly indebted to Meyerson’s “Identité et Réalité.” This acute and learned work is not written from the same point of view as that which I have adopted; but this in no way diminishes the amount of my obligation to its author.
[16] Let me here parenthetically remind you that again (as I observed in an earlier lecture) the Naturalism of which I speak is Naturalism in what, from our present point of view, must be regarded as its most plausible shape. Those who have followed, even at a distance, the trend of biological thought are aware that many naturalists of the highest authority are shaken in their allegiance to natural selection. They do not, indeed, exclude it from the evolutionary drama, but they reduce its rôle to insignificance. Why then, you may ask, do these lectures so constantly refer to selection, but say never a word about other theories of organic evolution?
The answer is that selection, and only selection, really imitates contrivance. Other theories may deal, and do deal, with variation and heredity. But selection alone can explain adjustment; whence it follows that selection alone can imitate design.