Mr. Belloc’s Mental Indigestion
I fancy this stuff he has written here is an outcome of an indigestion of Samuel Butler by Mr. Belloc. I should not have thought Mr. Belloc had read Samuel Butler, and I doubt if he has read him much. But there is a decided echo of Luck or Cunning in the one indistinct paragraph in which, without committing himself too deeply, Mr. Belloc seems to convey his own attitude towards the procedure of Evolution. “Design,” whatever that is, is at work, and Natural Selection is not. “There is an innate power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation.” It is quite a delusion apparently that rabbits that cannot run or sparrows that are not quick on the wing are killed off more frequently than the smarter fellows. That never happens, though to the atheistically minded it may seem to happen. If it happens, it would “get rid of a God.” But there are rabbits which, unlike Mrs. Micawber, do make an effort. You must understand that all creation, inspired by design, is striving. The good fungus says to itself, “Redder and more spots will benefit me greatly,” and tries and tries, and presently there are redder hues and more spots. Or a happily inspired fish says: “There is a lot of food on land and the life is more genteel there, so let me get lungs.” And presently it gets lungs. Some day Mr. Belloc must take a holiday in Sussex and flap about a bit and get himself some wings and demonstrate all this. But perhaps this is caricature, and Mr. Belloc when he talks about that “innate disposition” just means nothing very much—just an attempt or something. I will not pretend to understand Mr. Belloc fully upon this point.