[IZ]Ibid. p. 303.
[JA]Ibid. p. 258.
[JB]Ibid. p. 279.
[JC]Ibid. p. 276.
[JD]"Organic Evolution," p. 298. The late G. H. Lewes held somewhat similar views.
[JE]See Mr. John Hancock, Natural History Transactions, Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-on-Tyne, vol. viii. (1886); and Nature, vol. xxxiii. p. 519.
[JF]Weismann, "On Heredity," p. 91.
[JG]M. Fabre, as interpreted by Sir John Lubbock, "Scientific Lectures," 2nd edit., p. 45.
[JH]In further illustration of the fact that purposiveness and complex adaptation of activities is no criterion of present or past direction by intelligence, we may draw attention to the action of the leucocytes, or white blood-corpuscles. Metchnikoff found that in the water-flea (Daphnia), affected by spores of Monospora bicuspidata, a kind of yeast which passes from the intestinal canal into the body-cavity, the leucocytes attacked and devoured the conidia. If a conidium were too much for one cell, a plasmodium, or compound giant-cell, was formed to repel the invader. The same thing occurs in anthrax, the bacilli being attacked and devoured by the leucocytes. "If we summarize," says Mr. Bland Sutton ("General Pathology," pp. 127, 128), "the story of inflammation as we read it zoologically, it should be likened to a battle. The leucocytes are the defending army, their roads and lines of communication the blood-vessels. Every composite organism maintains a certain proportion of leucocytes as representing its standing army. When the body is invaded by bacilli, bacteria, micrococci, chemical or other irritants, information of the aggression is telegraphed by means of the vaso-motor nerves, and leucocytes rush to the attack; reinforcements and recruits are quickly formed to increase the standing army, sometimes twenty, thirty, or forty times the normal standard. In the conflict, cells die and often are eaten by their companions; frequently the slaughter is so great that the tissue becomes burdened by the dead bodies of the soldiers in the form of pus, the activity of the cell being testified by the fact that its protoplasm often contains bacilli, etc., in various stages of destruction. These dead cells, like the corpses of soldiers who fall in battle, later become hurtful to the organism they were in their lifetime anxious to protect from harm, for they are fertile sources of septicæmia and pyæmia—the pestilence and scourge so much dreaded by operative surgeons." Now, if the leucocytes were separate organisms, whose habits were being described, some might suppose that they were actuated by intelligence, individual or inherited. But in this case the activities are purely physiological. The marshalling of the cells during the growth of tissue (e.g. the antler of a stag before described) is of like import. And Dr. Verworn has shown that when a (presumably weak) electric current is passed through a drop of water containing protozoa, they will, when the current is closed, flock towards the negative pole, and when the current is opened will travel towards the positive pole. The implication of all this is that vital phenomena may be intensely purposive, and yet afford no evidence or indication of the present or ancestral play of intelligence.
[JI]"Origin of Species," p. 230.