There is the theory of “Natural Selection” in its broadest outline. It was excellently adapted to the generation for which it was produced. It looked as simple as the old theory of Free Trade did in economics, or the old theory of Universal Suffrage in politics, or any other of the old crude mechanical conceptions born of the denial of mystery. It accounted for everything straightforwardly and at a blow. If you used its loose phraseology repeatedly, without ever gripping the full implication of the terms, without the capacity for holding a theory down hard and examining it closely, it seemed perfectly sufficient—and the old riddle was solved. “Natural Selection,” “the Survival of the Fittest,” the very gradual and quite blind, purposeless, undesigned forcing of the living organism into correspondence with its material environment, the formation of the living thing by the pressure of the nonliving—of death—was sufficiently proved. All the old ideas of Design, the looking for mysterious forces at work in the world, and for a Mind behind it all in order to explain the suitability of each organ to its function, could be scrapped. There was no creative God required. Those who wanted to be rid of Him could (and did) say that men had only imagined such a Being from an ignorant projection of themselves on to the Universe. It was not life that transformed itself to meet and master matter, but (as Delage admirably put it in his refutation of Darwinism) matter which, through death, ordered life. Such was the theory of Natural Selection. Now, as we are about to examine why this theory of Natural Selection is untenable, and to discover why it burst after so very short a fashionable run, we must, by way of preliminary, clearly understand its implications. We must understand—what its original promoters did not—the things which, whether you know it or not, you are accepting when you accept Natural Selection. After that we can understand the arguments which have destroyed it. Put as I have just put it, and as it used to be put in all the old-fashioned textbooks of Mr. Wells’s youth, it sounds not only simple, but convincing It is when one looks into what it implies that the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection gets shaky. THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATURAL SELECTION (1) In the first place, note that, according to this theory, _there can be no stable type; there can be no fixity of species_. All is in flux. Environment is never exactly the same, even for two days at a time, let alone for two successive thousand years. Very long slow changes in climate, or any other factor of environment, would necessarily involve long, unceasing, slight transformation, never halting. The theory _necessarily_ demands a living world in a state of slow but _incessant_ transformation, with no fixed mature results at the end of development.