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“For brevity sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an intelligent power; … I have, also, often personified the word Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity; but I mean by nature only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws,–and by laws only the ascertained sequence of events.”

But while he thus clearly saw, and distinctly asserted, that the factors of organic evolution are the concrete actions, inner and outer, to which every organism is subject, Mr. Darwin, by habitually using the convenient figure of speech, was, I think, prevented from recognizing so fully as he would otherwise have done, certain fundamental consequences of these actions.

Though it does not personalize the cause, and does not assimilate its mode of working to a human mode of working, kindred objections may be urged against the expression to which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms–the survival of the fittest;[42] for in a vague way the first word, and in a clear way the second word, calls up an anthropocentric idea. The thought of survival inevitably suggests the human view of certain sets of phenomena, rather than that character which they have simply as groups of changes. If, asking what we really know of a plant, we exclude all the ideas associated with the words life and death, we find that the sole facts known to us are that there go on in the plant certain inter-dependent processes, in presence of certain aiding and hindering influences outside of it; and that in some cases a difference of structure or a favourable set of circumstances, allows these inter-dependent processes to go on for longer periods than in other cases. Again, in the working together of those many actions, internal and external, which determine the lives or deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the words fitness and unfitness are applicable in the physical sense. If a key fits a lock, or a glove a hand, the relation of the things to one another is presentable to the perceptions. No approach to fitness of this kind is made by an organism which continues to live under certain conditions. Neither the organic structures themselves, nor their individual movements, nor those combined movements of certain among them which constitute conduct, are related in any analogous way to the things and actions in the environment. Evidently the word fittest, as thus used, is a figure of speech; suggesting the fact that amid surrounding actions, an organism characterized by the word has either a greater ability than others of its kind to maintain the equilibrium of its vital activities, or else has so much greater a power of multiplication that though not longer lived than they, it continues to live in posterity more persistently. And indeed, as we here see, the word fittest has to cover cases in which there may be less ability than usual to survive individually, but in which the defect is more than made good by higher degrees of fertility.

I have elaborated this criticism with the intention of emphasizing the need for studying the changes which have gone on, and are ever going on, in organic bodies, from an exclusively physical point of view. On contemplating the facts from this point of view, we become aware that, besides those special effects of the co-operating forces which eventuate in the longer survival of one individual than of others, and in the consequent increase through generations, of some trait which furthered its survival, many other effects are being wrought on each and all of the individuals. Bodies of every class and quality, inorganic as well as organic, are from instant to instant subject to the influences in their environments; are from instant to instant being changed by these in ways that are mostly inconspicuous; and are in course of time changed by them in conspicuous ways. Living things in common with dead things, are, I say, being thus perpetually acted upon and modified; and the changes hence resulting, constitute an all-important part of those undergone in the course of organic evolution. I do not mean to imply that changes of this class pass entirely unrecognized; for, as we shall see, Mr. Darwin takes cognizance of certain secondary and special ones. But the effects which are not taken into account, are those primary and universal effects which give certain fundamental characters to all organisms. Contemplation of an analogy will best prepare the way for appreciation of them, and of the relation they bear to those which at present monopolize attention.