If another example is required, here is the following from an article than which I have seen few with which I more completely agree, or which have given me greater pleasure. If our men of science would take to writing in this way, we should be glad enough to follow them. The passage I refer to runs thus:—
“Professor Huxley speaks of a ‘verbal fog by which the question at issue may be hidden;’ is there no verbal fog in the statement that the ætiology of crayfishes resolves itself into a gradual evolution in the course of the mesozoic and subsequent epochs of the world’s history of these animals from a primitive astacomorphous form? Would it be fog or light that would envelop the history of man if we say that the existence of man was explained by the hypothesis of his gradual evolution from a primitive anthropomorphous form? I should call this fog, not light.” [220c]
Especially let him mistrust those who are holding forth about protoplasm, and maintaining that this is the only living substance. Protoplasm may be, and perhaps is, the most living part of an organism, as the most capable of retaining vibrations, of a certain character, but this is the utmost that can be claimed for it. I have noticed, however, that protoplasm has not been buoyant lately in the scientific market.
Having mentioned protoplasm, I may ask the reader to note the breakdown of that school of philosophy
which divided the ego from the non ego. The protoplasmists, on the one hand, are whittling away at ego, till they have reduced it to a little jelly in certain parts of the body, and they will whittle away this too presently, if they go on as they are doing now.
Others, again, are so unifying the ego and the non ego, that with them there will soon be as little of the non ego left as there is of the ego with their opponents. Both, however, are so far agreed as that we know not where to draw the line between the two, and this renders nugatory any system which is founded upon a distinction between them.
The truth is, that all classification whatever, when we examine its raison d’être closely, is found to be arbitrary—to depend on our sense of our own convenience, and not on any inherent distinction in the nature of the things themselves. Strictly speaking, there is only one thing and one action. The universe, or God, and the action of the universe as a whole.
Lastly, I may predict with some certainty that before long we shall find the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus Darwin (with an infusion of Professor Hering into the bargain) generally accepted instead of the neo-Darwinism of to-day, and that the variations whose accumulation results in species will be recognised as due to the wants and endeavours of the living forms in which they appear, instead of being ascribed to chance, or, in other words, to unknown causes, as by Mr. Charles Darwin’s system. We shall have some idyllic young naturalists bringing up Dr. Erasmus Darwin’s note on Trapa natans [221] and Lamarck’s kindred passage on the descent of Ranunculus hederaceus from
Ranunculus aquatilis [222a] as fresh discoveries, and be told with much happy simplicity, that those animals and plants which have felt the need of such a structure have developed it, while those which have not wanted it have gone without it. Thus it will be declared, every leaf we see around us, every structure of the minutest insect, will bear witness to the truth of the “great guess” of the greatest of naturalists concerning the memory of living matter. [222b]
I dare say the public will not object to this, and am very sure that none of the admirers of Mr. Charles Darwin or Mr. Wallace will protest against it; but it may be as well to point out that this was not the view of the matter taken by Mr. Wallace in 1858 when he and Mr. Darwin first came forward as preachers of natural selection. At that time Mr. Wallace saw clearly enough the difference between the theory of “natural selection” and that of Lamarck. He wrote:—