associates with Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, but more especially (and on the whole I suppose justly) with Lamarck.
“I venture to think,” continues Mr. Allen, “that the first way [Mr. Darwin’s], if we look it clearly in the face, will be seen to be practically unthinkable; and that we have therefore no alternative but to accept the second.”
These writers go round so quickly and so completely that there is no keeping pace with them. “As to Materialism,” he writes presently, “surely it is more profoundly materialistic to suppose that mere physical causes operating on the germ can determine minute physical and material changes in the brain, which will in turn make the individuality what it is to be, than to suppose that all brains are what they are in virtue of antecedent function. The one creed makes the man depend mainly upon the accidents of molecular physics in a colliding germ cell and sperm cell; the other makes him depend mainly upon the doings and gains of his ancestors as modified and altered by himself.”
Here is a sentence taken almost at random from the body of the article:—
“We are always seeing something which adds to our total stock of memories; we are always learning and doing something new. The vast majority of these experiences are similar in kind to those already passed through by our ancestors: they add nothing to the inheritance of the race. . . . Though they leave physical traces on the individual, they do not so far affect the underlying organisation of the brain as to make the development of after-brains somewhat different from previous ones. But there are certain functional activities which do tend so to alter the development of after-brains; certain novel or sustained activities which apparently result in the production of new correlated brain elements or brain connections hereditarily transmissible as increased potentialities of similar activity in the offspring.”
Of Natural Selection Mr. Allen writes much, as Professor Mivart and others have been writing for many years past.
“It seems to me,” he says, “easy to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress starting from such functionally produced gains, but impossible to understand how it could result in progress if it had to start in mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation alone.” [252a]
Mr. Allen may say this now, but until lately he has been among the first to scold any one else who said so.
And this is how the article concludes:—
“The first hypothesis (Mr Darwin’s) is one that throws no light upon any of the facts. The second hypothesis (which Mr. Allen is pleased to call Mr. Herbert Spencer’s) is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity.” [252b]