"Enfin l'ouvrage de M. Darwin a paru. On ne peut qu'être frappé du talent de l'auteur. Mais quo d'idées obscures, que d'idées fausses! Quel jargon métaphysique jeté mal à propos dans l'histoire naturelle, qui tombe dans le galimatias dès qu'elle sort des idées claires, des idées justes! Quel langage prétentieux et vide! Quelles personnifications puériles et surannées! O lucidité! 0 solidité de l'esprit Français, que devenez-vous?"
"Obscure ideas," "metaphysical jargon," "pretentious and empty language," "puerile and superannuated personifications." Mr. Darwin has many and hot opponents on this side of the Channel and in Germany, but we do not recollect to have found precisely these sins in the long catalogue of those hitherto laid to his charge. It is worth while, therefore, to examine into these discoveries effected solely by the aid of the "lucidity and solidity" of the mind of M. Flourens.
According to M. Flourens, Mr. Darwin's great error is that he has personified Nature (p. 10), and further that he has
"imagined a natural selection: he imagines afterwards that this power of selecting (pouvoir d'élire) which he gives to Nature is similar to the power of man. These two suppositions admitted, nothing stops him: he plays with Nature as he likes, and makes her do all he pleases." (P. 6.)
And this is the way M. Flourens extinguishes natural selection:
"Voyons donc encore une fois, ce qu'il peut y avoir de fondé dans ce qu'on nomme élection naturelle.
"L'élection naturelle n'est sous un autre nom que la nature. Pour un être organisé, la nature n'est que l'organisation, ni plus ni moins.
"Il faudra donc aussi personnifier l'organisation, et dire que l'organisation choisit l'organisation. L'élection naturelle est cette forme substantielle dont on jouait autrefois avec tant de facilité. Aristote disait que 'Si l'art de bâtir était dans le bois, cet art agirait comme la nature.' A la place de l'art de bâtir M. Darwin met l'élection naturelle, et c'est tout un: l'un n'est pas plus chimérique que l'autre." (P. 31.)
And this is really all that M. Flourens can make of Natural Selection. We have given the original, in fear lest a translation should be regarded as a travesty; but with the original before the reader, we may try to analyse the passage. "For an organised being, Nature is only organisation, neither more nor less."
Organised beings then have absolutely no relation to inorganic nature: a plant does not depend on soil or sunshine, climate, depth in the ocean, height above it; the quantity of saline matters in water have no influence upon animal life; the substitution of carbonic acid for oxygen in our atmosphere would hurt nobody! That these are absurdities no one should know better than M. Flourens; but they are logical deductions from the assertion just quoted, and from the further statement that natural selection means only that "organisation chooses and selects organisation."