What then shall we put in the place of pure Darwinism? Let us first try a method of explanation which was also adopted occasionally by Darwin himself: let us study that form of transformation theories which is commonly known under the title of Lamarckism.
3. The Principles of Lamarckism.
As the word “Darwinism” does not signify the proper theoretical system of Charles Darwin, so Lamarckism as commonly understood nowadays is a good deal removed from the original views of Jean Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarckism is generally regarded as reducing all organic diversities to differences in the needs of individual life, but Lamarck himself, as must be emphasised from the very beginning, did not at all maintain the opinion that the great characteristics of the types were only due to such accidental factors. He supposed a sort of law of organisation to be at the root of systematics, as developed in history, and the needs of life were only responsible, according to him, for splitting the given types of organisation into their ultimate branches. Thus Lamarck, to a great extent at any rate, belongs to a group of authors that we shall have to study afterwards: authors who regard an unknown law of phylogenetic development as the real basis of transformism. Modern so-called Neo-Lamarckism, on the other hand, has indeed conceded the principle of needs to be the sole principle of transformism. Let us then study Lamarckism in its dogmatic modern form.
ADAPTATION AS THE STARTING-POINT
All facts of morphological adaptations—facts which we have analysed already from a different point of view, as being among the most typical phenomena of organic regulation—form the starting-point of this theory, and it must be granted that they form a very solid foundation, for they are facts. The theory only has to enlarge hypothetically the realm of these facts, or rather the realm of the law that governs them. Indeed, it is assumed by Lamarckism that the organism is endowed with the faculty of responding to any change of the environment which may change its function by a morphologically expressed alteration of its functional state and form, which is adapted to the state of conditions imposed from without. Of course, as stated in this most general form, the assumption is not true, but it is true within certain limits, as we know; and there seems to be no reason why we should not believe that there are many more cases of adaptation than we actually know at present, or that, in former phylogenetic times, the organisms were more capable of active adaptation than they are now. So to a certain extent, at least, Lamarckism can be said to rest upon a causa vera.
It is important to notice that this causa vera would imply vitalistic causality when taken in the wide meaning which Lamarckism allows to it: indeed, the power of active adaptation to indefinite changes would imply a sort of causal connection that is nowhere known except in the organism. Lamarck himself is not very clear about this point, he seems to be afraid of certain types of uncritical vitalism in vogue in his days; but modern writers have most clearly seen what the logical assumptions of pure Lamarckism are. Next to Cope, August Pauly[146] may be said to be the most conscious representative of a sort of so-called psychological vitalism, which indeed Lamarckism as a general and all-embracing theory must have as its basis.
THE ACTIVE STORING OF CONTINGENT VARIATIONS AS A HYPOTHETIC PRINCIPLE
This point will come out more fully, if now we turn to study a certain group of principles, upon which dogmatic Lamarckism rests: I say principles and not facts, for there are no facts but only hypothetic assumptions in this group of statements. We do know a little about adaptations, at least to a certain extent, and it was only about the sphere of the validity of a law, which was known to be at work in certain cases, that hypothetical additions were made. In the second group of the foundations of Lamarckism we know absolutely nothing; accidental variations of form are supposed to occur, and the organism is said to possess the faculty of keeping and storing these variations and of handing them down to the next generation, if they happen to satisfy any of its needs.