Enough has perhaps already been said to make the reader feel that the
question wants reopening; I shall, therefore, here only remark that we
may assume no fundamental difference as regards intelligence, memory, and
sense of needs to exist between man and the lowest animals, and that in
man we do distinctly see a tendency towards progressive development,
operating through his power of profiting by and transmitting his
experience, but operating in directions which man cannot foresee for any
long distance. We also see this in many of the higher animals under
domestication, as with horses which have learnt to canter and dogs which
point; more especially we observe it along the line of latest
development, where equilibrium of settled convictions has not yet been
fully attained. One neither finds nor expects much _a priori_ knowledge,
whether in man or beast; but one does find some little in the beginnings
of, and throughout the development of, every habit, at the commencement
of which, and on every successive improvement in which, deductive and
inductive methods are, as it were, fused. Thus the effect, where we can
best watch its causes, seems mainly produced by a desire for a definite
object—in some cases a serious and sensible desire, in others an idle
one, in others, again, a mistaken one; and sometimes by a blunder which,
in the hands of an otherwise able creature, has turned up trumps. In
wild animals and plants the divergences have been accumulated, if they
answered to the prolonged desires of the creature itself, and if these
desires were to its true ultimate good; with plants or animals under
domestication they have been accumulated if they answered a little to the
original wishes of the creature, and much, to the wishes of man. As long
as man continued to like them, they would be advantageous to the
creature; when he tired of them, they would be disadvantageous to it, and
would accumulate no longer. Surely the results produced in the
adaptation of structure to need among many plants and insects are better
accounted for on this, which I suppose to be Lamarck’s view, namely, by
supposing that what goes on amongst ourselves has gone on amongst all
creatures, than by supposing that these adaptations are the results of
perfectly blind and unintelligent variations.
Let me give two examples of such adaptations, taken from Mr. St. George
Mivart’s “Genesis of Species,” to which work I would wish particularly to
call the reader’s attention. He should also read Mr. Darwin’s answers to
Mr. Mivart (p. 176, “Natural Selection,” ed. 1876, and onwards).
Mr. Mivart writes:—
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