Darwin might be called the grand master of the art of biological chess. Nothing was further from his mind--originally at least--than turning the game to earnest; from the fact that a biological game is in progress, to seek to deduce an answer to the question as to _how_ such a thing could ever have come about. That would only mean spoiling the whole game. And as a matter of fact, by none has it been more completely spoiled for him than by his own followers. To them it is that Bunge’s words are directed: “The Darwinians teach that everything is cleared up, that only the riddle of heredity yet remains to be solved. But it is precisely this riddle of heredity which makes up the riddle the Darwinians imagine they have explained. What, then, is inherited? In the case of man there is inherited the capacity to evolve a man out of a cell. For as long as one remains unable to solve this riddle--the riddle of ontogeny--one remains still less able to solve the riddle of phylogeny.”[27] Darwin himself so chose his position that at all times he could look his God in the face. The unalleviated insipidity of his position is precisely the proof of the exact scientific form in which he--the first to do so--laid hold of the biological problem. But in this mode of laying hold of it, the fundamental biogenetic law with its various perspectives has no place whatever. But neither do the rudimentary formations admit of being read by the Darwinian formula. They must have arisen through persistent disuse. In the mechanistic world-view, however, an arising through disuse is a sheer contradiction. Every disuse implies the presence of an arbitrary impulsion. In the strictly mechanistic apprehension of things, the whole universe in each of its impulsions is to be apprehended as the relapse of some other impulsion, that is, as process of compensation; and every deficiency of activity in this never-resting process of compensation, practically as well as theoretically, would be a miracle. As in the mechanical cosmogony of the physicist, so also in the Darwinian cosmogony, the single active impulsion in the whole mechanism remains the diversity given with the various forms of life; and as above the physical, so also here the biological event becomes simply the compensation of these countless single diversities. Hence every theory of disuse is synonymous with the introduction of a foreign, non-mechanical impulsion. The Darwinian formula lays hold of the phenomena of life only in a certain medial tract. Somewhat as a scale of temperature-measurement lays hold of the phenomena of heat only in a certain medial tract, and above and below that tract is of no service, so the theory of natural selection is of no service as regards the fundamental biogenetic law on the one hand, and the rudimentary formations on the other.