What is called Darwinism is entirely an anthropomorphic view of
Nature--Nature humanized and doing as man does. What is called Natural
Selection is man's selection read into animate nature. We see in
nature what we have to call intelligence--the adaptation of means to
ends. We see purpose in all living things, but not in the same sense
in non-living things. The purpose is not in the light, but in the eye;
in the ear, but not in the sound; in the lungs, and not in the air; in
the stomach, and not in the food; in the various organs of the body,
and not in the forces that surround and act upon it. We cannot say
that the purpose of the clouds is to bring rain, or of the sun to give
light and warmth, in the sense that we can say it is the purpose of
the eyelid to protect the eye, of the teeth to masticate the food, or
of the varnish upon the leaves to protect the leaves.
The world was not made for us, but we are here because the world was
made as it is. We are the secondary fact and not the primary. Nature
is non-human, non-moral, non-religious, non-scientific, though it is
from her that we get our ideas of all these things. All parts and
organs of living bodies have, or have had, a purpose. Nature is blind,
but she knows what she wants and she gets it. She is blind, I say,
because she is all eyes, and sees through the buds of her trees and
the rootlets of her plants as well as by the optic nerves in her
animals. And, though I believe that the accumulation of variations is
the key to new species, yet this accumulation is not based upon
outward utility but upon an innate tendency to development--the push
of life, or creative evolution, as Bergson names it; not primarily
because the variations are advantages, but because the formation of a
new species is such a slow process, stretches over such a period of
geologic time, that the slight variations from generation to
generation could have no survival value. The primary factor is the
inherent tendency to development. The origin of species is on a scale
of time of enormous magnitude. What takes place among our domestic
animals of a summer day is by no means a safe guide as to what befell
their ancestors in the abysses of geologic time. It is true that
Nature may be read in the little as well as in the big,--_Natura in
minimis existat_,--in the gnat as well as in the elephant; but she
cannot be read in our yearly calendars as she can in the calendars of
the geologic strata. Species go out and species come in; the book of
natural revelation opens and closes at chance places, and rarely do we
get a continuous record--in no other case more clearly than in that of
the horse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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