But over and above this, which would be in itself sufficient, the historical mode of studying any question is the only one which will enable us to comprehend it effectually. The personal element cannot be eliminated from the consideration of works written by living persons for living persons. We want to know who is who—whom we can depend upon to have no other end than the making things clear to himself and his readers, and whom we should mistrust as having an ulterior aim on which he is more intent than on the furthering of our better understanding. We want to know who is doing his best to help us, and who is only trying to make us help him, or to bolster up the system in which his interests are vested. There is nothing that will throw more light upon these points than the way in which a man behaves towards those who have worked in the same field with himself, and, again, than his style. A man’s style, as Buffon long since said, is the man himself. By style, I do not, of course, mean grammar or rhetoric, but that style of which Buffon again said that it is like happiness, and vient de la douceur de l’âme. When we find a man concealing worse than nullity of meaning under sentences that sound plausibly enough, we should distrust him much as we should a fellow-traveller whom we caught trying to steal our watch. We often cannot judge of the truth or falsehood of facts for ourselves, but we most of us know enough of human nature to be able to tell a good witness from a bad one.
However this may be, and whatever we may think of judging systems by the directness or indirectness of those who advance them, biologists, having committed themselves too rashly, would have been more than human if they had not shown some pique towards those who dared to say, first, that the theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace was unworkable; and secondly, that even though it were workable it would not justify either of them in claiming evolution. When biologists show pique at all they generally show a good deal of pique, but pique or no pique, they shunned Mr. Spencer’s objection above referred to with a persistency more unanimous and obstinate than I ever remember to have seen displayed even by professional truth-seekers. I find no rejoinder to it from Mr. Darwin himself, between 1865 when it was first put forward, and 1882 when Mr. Darwin died. It has been similarly “ostrichised” by all the leading apologists of Darwinism, so far at least as I have been able to observe, and I have followed the matter closely for many years. Mr. Spencer has repeated and amplified it in his recent work, “The Factors of Organic Evolution,” but it still remains without so much as an attempt at serious answer, for the perfunctory and illusory remarks of Mr. Wallace at the end of his “Darwinism” cannot be counted as such. The best proof of its irresistible weight is that Mr. Darwin, though maintaining silence in respect to it, retreated from his original position in the direction that would most obviate Mr. Spencer’s objection.
Yet this objection has been repeatedly urged by the more prominent anti-Charles-Darwinian authorities, and there is no sign that the British public is becoming less rigorous in requiring people either to reply to objections repeatedly urged by men of even moderate weight, or to let judgment go by default. As regards Mr. Darwin’s claim to the theory of evolution generally, Darwinians are beginning now to perceive that this cannot be admitted, and either say with some hardihood that Mr. Darwin never claimed it, or after a few saving clauses to the effect that this theory refers only to the particular means by which evolution has been brought about, imply forthwith thereafter none the less that evolution is Mr. Darwin’s theory. Mr. Wallace has done this repeatedly in his recent “Darwinism.” Indeed, I should be by no means sure that on the first page of his preface, in the passage about “Darwin’s theory,” which I have already somewhat severely criticised, he was not intending evolution by “Darwin’s theory,” if in his preceding paragraph he had not so clearly shown that he knew evolution to be a theory of greatly older date than Mr. Darwin’s.
The history of science—well exemplified by that of the development theory—is the history of eminent men who have fought against light and have been worsted. The tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their accumulation of fortuitous variations is on a par with the like tenacity shown by the illustrious Cuvier, who did his best to crush evolution altogether. It always has been thus, and always will be; nor is it desirable in the interests of Truth herself that it should be otherwise. Truth is like money—lightly come, lightly go; and if she cannot hold her own against even gross misrepresentation, she is herself not worth holding. Misrepresentation in the long run makes Truth as much as it mars her; hence our law courts do not think it desirable that pleaders should speak their bonâ fide opinions, much less that they should profess to do so. Rather let each side hoodwink judge and jury as best it can, and let truth flash out from collision of defence and accusation. When either side will not collide, it is an axiom of controversy that it desires to prevent the truth from being elicited.
Let us now note the courses forced upon biologists by the difficulties of Mr. Darwin’s distinctive feature. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, as is well known, brought the feature forward simultaneously and independently of one another, but Mr. Wallace always believed in it more firmly than Mr. Darwin did. Mr. Darwin as a young man did not believe in it. He wrote before 1889, “Nature, by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country,” [21] a sentence than which nothing can coincide more fully with the older view that use and disuse were the main purveyors of variations, or conflict more fatally with his own subsequent distinctive feature. Moreover, as I showed in my last work on evolution, [22] in the peroration to his “Origin of Species,” he discarded his accidental variations altogether, and fell back on the older theory, so that the body of the “Origin of Species” supports one theory, and the peroration another that differs from it toto cœlo. Finally, in his later editions, he retreated indefinitely from his original position, edging always more and more continually towards the theory of his grandfather and Lamarck. These facts convince me that he was at no time a thorough-going Darwinian, but was throughout an unconscious Lamarckian, though ever anxious to conceal the fact alike from himself and from his readers.
Not so with Mr. Wallace, who was both more outspoken in the first instance, and who has persevered along the path of Wallaceism just as Mr. Darwin with greater sagacity was ever on the retreat from Darwinism. Mr. Wallace’s profounder faith led him in the outset to place his theory in fuller daylight than Mr. Darwin was inclined to do. Mr. Darwin just waved Lamarck aside, and said as little about him as he could, while in his earlier editions Erasmus Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named. Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and declared it exorcised. He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was “quite unnecessary.” The giraffe did not “acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were thus enabled to outlive them.” [23]
“Which occurred” is evidently “which happened to occur” by some chance or accident unconnected with use and disuse. The word “accident” is never used, but Mr. Wallace must be credited with this instance of a desire to give his readers a chance of perceiving that according to his distinctive feature evolution is an affair of luck, rather than of cunning. Whether his readers actually did understand this as clearly as Mr. Wallace doubtless desired that they should, and whether greater development at this point would not have helped them to fuller apprehension, we need not now inquire. What was gained in distinctness might have been lost in distinctiveness, and after all he did technically put us upon our guard.
Nevertheless he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism. In relation to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and other flat-fish travel round the head so as to become in the end unsymmetrically placed, he says:—
“The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both eyes may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any use. . . . Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is completed in a few days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands of generations during the development of these fish, those usually surviving whose eyes retained more and more of the position into which the young fish tried to twist them [italics mine], the change becomes intelligible.” [24] When it was said by Professor Ray Lankester—who knows as well as most people what Lamarck taught—that this was “flat Lamarckism,” Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was the survival of the modified individuals that did it all, not the efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the transmission to descendants of the effects of those efforts. But this, as I said in my book, “Evolution, Old and New,” [25] is like saying that horses are swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they were, that occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary towards ever greater and greater swiftness, but because their more slow-going uncles and aunts go away. Plain people will prefer to say that the main cause of any accumulation of favourable modifications consists rather in that which brings about the initial variations, and in the fact that these can be inherited at all, than in the fact that the unmodified individuals were not successful. People do not become rich because the poor in large numbers go away, but because they have been lucky, or provident, or more commonly both. If they would keep their wealth when they have made it they must exclude luck thenceforth to the utmost of their power, and their children must follow their example, or they will soon lose their money. The fact that the weaker go to the wall does not bring about the greater strength of the stronger; it is the consequence of this last and not the cause—unless, indeed, it be contended that a knowledge that the weak go to the wall stimulates the strong to exertions which they would not otherwise so make, and that these exertions produce inheritable modifications. Even in this case, however, it would be the exertions, or use and disuse, that would be the main agents in the modification. But it is not often that Mr. Wallace thus backslides. His present position is that acquired (as distinguished from congenital) modifications are not inherited at all. He does not indeed put his faith prominently forward and pin himself to it as plainly as could be wished, but under the heading, “The Non-Heredity of Acquired Characters,” he writes as follows on p. 440 of his recent work in reference to Professor Weismann’s Theory of Heredity:—
“Certain observations on the embryology of the lower animals are held to afford direct proof of this theory of heredity, but they are too technical to be made clear to ordinary readers. A logical result of the theory is the impossibility of the transmission of acquired characters, since the molecular structure of the germ-plasm is already determined within the embryo; and Weismann holds that there are no facts which really prove that acquired characters can be inherited, although their inheritance has, by most writers, been considered so probable as hardly to stand in need of direct proof.