The *contingency* of the typical organic form is maintained by Darwinism as well as by Lamarckism: both theories, therefore, break down for almost the same reasons. The term “contingency” can signify very different relations, having but little in common; but it is sufficient for our present purpose to observe that there may be distinguished roughly two main classes of contingencies, which may provisionally be called the “contingency of being,” and the “contingency of occurring.” It is with the contingency of being that criticism of Darwinism and Lamarckism of the dogmatic type has to deal. Darwinism dealt with variations occurring at random; the organic form was the result of a fixation of only one kind of such variations, all others being extinguished by selection. In other terms, the specific organised form, as understood by Darwinism, was a unit only to the extent that all its properties related to one and the same body, but for the rest it was a mere aggregation or summation. It may be objected to this statement, that by being inherited in its specificity the Darwinian form proved to be a unit in a higher sense of the word, even in the opinion of dogmatic Darwinians; and this objection, perhaps, holds good as far as inheritance is concerned. But on the other hand, it must never be forgotten that the word “unit” had quite a vague and empty meaning even then, as indeed everything the organism is made up of is regarded as being in itself due to a contingent primary process, which has no relation to its fellow-processes. “Unit,” indeed, in spite of inheritance--which, by the way, is alleged also to be a merely materialistic event--means to Darwinians no more when applied to the organism than it does when applied to mountains or islands, where of course a sort of “unit” also exists in some sense, as far as one and the same body comes into account, but where every single character of this unit, in every single feature of form or of quality, is the result of factors or agents each of which is independent of every other. To this sort of contingency of being, as maintained by Darwinians, criticism has objected, as we know, that it is quite an impossible basis of a theory of descent, since it would explain neither the first origin of an organ, nor any sort of harmony among parts or among whole individuals, nor any sort of restitution processes. Now Lamarckism of the dogmatic kind, as will easily be seen, only differs from Darwinism in this respect, that what according to the latter happens to the organism passively by means of selection, is according to the former performed actively by the organism, by means of a “judgment”--by the retention and handing down of chance variations. The specificity of the form as a whole is contingent also according to Lamarckism. And, indeed, criticism must reject this contingency of being in exactly the same way as it rejected the contingency of form maintained by Darwinians.