to this test. Like Horace's Pindar, Fervet et ruit. He woul carry us away on the flood of his rhetoric. His logic is not com tent to convince, it must surprise and dazzle us; and with it eloquence and richness of allusion persuade us even against ou more sober reason. Darwin's logic, like Hume's, is so severe i its simplicity that it is hardly recognised as logic at all. Wha wonder if the critic is unsympathetic: even carrying his want sympathy to the point of unfamiliarity?

But to speak of imperfect sympathy is greatly to understat the case. M. Bergson's real aim is not so much to criticise as t destroy at a blow.

His fatal hand

No second stroke intends.

Never even from the pulpit has such annihilation threatene Darwin. Others have found fault with his reasoning and rejecte his conclusions. M. Bergson rules him out of court with a strok of the pen. The laborious life was wasted; the genius-I sup pose the most hostile critic will allow the genius-misapplied. E thought he was producing results, but, at any rate as far as h main thesis was concerned, he did and could do nothing; an the world that thought he had achieved something was under delusion. Achievement was indeed impossible, since he wa using the mental instrument, intellect namely, that was th least adapted to his purpose-that was, in fact, totally unadapte If he had applied it to inert, inorganic matter, it would, in Pro Bergson's phrase, have been "at home," and something migh have resulted; but in assuming to throw light on vital phen mena, and in particular on the Origin of Species, he foredoome himself to failure: because here not intellect, but quite anoth faculty of the mind is the appropriate instrument, and finds itse "at home." To the appropriate faculty everything sooner later becomes clear; to the inappropriate nothing, either la

or soon.

I do not mean to say that in set phrase M. Bergson the passes capital sentence on Darwin; he sometimes shows inclination to a more merciful judgment. In sporting phrase, "hedges." He admits that the mechanistic hypothesis, i Darwin's, is "true in its way"; that "certain minor instinc and even some primary ones may be accounted for on it. T

irst concession, however, amounts to very little, only to this, that he agrees that "the causes of variation are differences inherent in the germ," and not due to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. By the second, if he had really studied Darwin, be would see that he gave his whole case away. For what, according to Darwin's hypothesis, is the difference between minor and major, simple and complex, from the point of view of ease or difficulty of evolution? The question is merely one of time; the one will require more time than the other that is all. Darwin's teaching is that the evolution of an adjustment, such, e.g. as an instinct, is effected in time. If it is granted that in a certain time a simple adaptation can be evolved by the addition of accidental variations-for this is what Bergson means here—then, Even more time, given sufficient time, the hypothesis will account for the most complex. The only possible method of refutation is to limit the time. This has been attempted by those who on general grounds have been repelled by Darwin's conclusionsnotably by Lord Kelvin-and with notable want of success. Short of this, minor and major stand on the same ground; and we are putting the best complexion on M. Bergson's case by assuming this admission of his to be due to oversight, or said" for the hardness of our hearts"; but that his real, serious, considered view is that Darwin fails to account for the evolution of any instinct whatever, minor or major, for the good and sufficient reason that he was attacking with the intellect a problem that by its very nature could never yield to intellectual attack. M. Bergson's attempt to distinguish between minor and major convicts him of imperfect apprehension of Darwin's principles.

Besides this universal, this fundamental objection, which, as I say, erases all the theoretical part of Darwin's work with a stroke of the pen, M. Bergson takes the further general objection that, even granting him his standpoint, his method will not account for (1) parallel development in unrelated organisms, as, e.g. similar eyes in a mollusc (the Pecten) and in man; (2) any very complex adaptation, as, e.g. the vertebrate eye itself, or any of the more complicated instincts, especially of insects; (3) the regeneration of a mutilated part, e.g. the crystalline lens in the eye of a Triton (a species of newt). Now, having rightly defined

what he curiously calls the neo-Darwinian* theory (as if it ha not the full authority of Darwin himself!) as accounting for the origin of species by the gradual addition from generation to generation of accidentally recurring variations, he is found making such remarks as these (pp. 178-9): "One type, following the principles of neo-Darwinism, regards instinct as a sum of acci dental differences preserved by selection . . . Now, it is eviden that in most cases instinct could not have perfected itself by simple accretion: each new piece really requires, if all is not to be spoiled, a complete recasting of the whole. No one wil maintain that chance could perform such a miracle: in one form or another we shall appeal to intelligence." All this is absolute condemnation of Darwin. Darwin did not appeal to intelligence

in

any form whatsoever: he did maintain that chance, and that of the purest, could perform the miracle in question, and all the miracles involved in the evolution of species.

In a long-forgotten paper (it is between thirty and forty years ago, so I hope to be forgiven the egoism of what follows) I wrote "if a man wishes to hit a mark, he aims an arrow or bullet at it; and if he aims well, he hits it. Nature's method is altogether different. Nature keeps on throwing up handfuls of sand in all winds, through all time, and sooner or later she hits the mark too: but she cannot be said to aim." Darwin saw this passage and delighted, I may say overwhelmed me, a young man then, by writing to me in these words: "Your illustration of the grains of sand is excellent. You make my own views clearer to me.' (Could anything be more characteristic ?) If I rightly remember, Darwin, in one passage of, the Origin seems to hesitate to use the word chance; but only in the way that we all hesitate-that we all feel that there is no such thing as chance. My quotations show that at any rate he meant chance in the fullest sense in which we ever mean it, or it can be meant, viz., to the absolute exclusion (from view) of intelligence in any form whatever. So that M. Bergson, when he says that no one will maintain that chance could perform such and such miracles, should modify his

* This is one among several criticisms of the neo-Darwinians, all applying in full force to Darwin himself, strongly suggesting that M. Bergson has chiefly studied Darwin at second hand. We shall meet with other signs of unfamiliarity with the original. The references in the text are to the English translation of the Evolution Créatrice, approved by M. Bergson.

expression. Universal negatives are always dangerous. At any rate, there is Darwin to the contrary; and it seems strange that M. Bergson should need the information.

We now come to his concrete instances, the specific cases that he adduces in order to exhibit the failure of Darwin's views. And here, one cannot help remarking, he shows, for a metaysician, a singular want of discretion. Kant, it will be remembered, eschewed the concrete instance. He goes out of his Tay to tell us that originally he illustrated his abstract proposis by examples of the kind, but that, on mature reflection, he Fat through the Critique and cut them all out. He had two reasons for doing this, both curious, and all things considered, hot without a comic side. One was that concrete examples made metaphysics too easy. (If he could have seen Caird on Kant, Caird, who so often confesses failure to understand, and yet probably understood Kant at least as well as he understood himself, be would have known his fears for groundless.) The other, that they seemed to narrow the scope of his generalisations-an effect hat he could not do with at any price. It is indeed amazing how be difficulties vanish, and the dimensions of a metaphysical statement shrink, when brought up against a matter of fact. Prof. B-son has not shown the caution of the older prophet. If he Lad contented himself with telling us that intellect cannot deal th the phenomena of life, because life has to do with real or czcrete time, and real time is continuous, whereas intellect can tae cognisance only of abstract time, which is discontinuous or matographic, it would have been difficult for any one absolutely emphatically to differ from him; because, though might guess, we should not have been quite sure what he meant. Eit when he descends to particulars, and selects, as test cases, tain phenomena of life which he avers that intellect, and its Product science, cannot possibly elucidate for the fundamental and cient reason that they are things of life, and life is outside sphere of intellect, then we have something definite and pable on which to join issue, and are no longer vainly enavouring to "impress the intrenchant air" of metaphysics. It can then possibly be shown that he has, perchance, made mises, and is either unaware of, or has not understood, the exnations that science has given or may give. If this can be

to refute or even

shown, and further, that intellect can deal, and even has dea effectually with phenomena of life, which he says is a thi impossible for it, then consequences may follow that are serio for him and his system. But we need not, for the mome follow that line of thought further.

But here we must enter a caveat. It does not follow becau this one or that, M. Bergson or my modest self, for instance, cann see how a given adjustment of organ or instinct can have aris by the method of natural selection, that therefore it could r have so arisen, and that therefore the hypothesis fails. Perha some one else, possessing more knowledge or gifted with m ingenuity than either of us, will some day show that the ste of its evolution by natural selection are quite easy to concei Considering the marvellous things he has explained in this way, o always feels that one would like to know what Darwin hims would have said to any given objection or difficulty of this ki M. Bergson thinks that he absolutely succeeds by this line argument. In the very logic of the case that is impossib When he says that natural selection is essentially incapal of explaining a complicated instinct, his logic is at fault. T most he can say, logically, is that he himself cannot conceive t possibility-but there are two ways of accounting for that.

We now come to the discussion of Prof. Bergson's instance and I will take first the structure of the vertebrate eye. I qu from the Origin of Species: "It has been objected to t foregoing view of the origin of instincts that the variations structure and of instinct must have been simultaneous a accurately adjusted to each other, as a modification in the c without an immediate corresponding change in the other wo have been fatal." Almost in the same words Prof. Bergs applies the objection to the far easier case of the structure the eye, apparently unaware that it had been made fifty yea and answered by Darwin forty years, before.* Prof. Bergs then, having brought forward this as a new and original obj tion, tells us, with regard to the complicated structure of 1 eye, that a change in the one part without corresponding chan in the other parts would be fatal and "spoil all." Now, to nothing of science, this does not seem even common sense. Ev

* Origin of Species, 1869, p. 288.