Lamarck had unsuccessfully attempted to explain the modification of organisms that descend from a common form chiefly by the action of habit and the use of organs, though with the aid of heredity. But Darwin’s success was complete when he independently sought to give a mechanical explanation, on a quite new ground, of this modification of plant and animal structures by adaptation and heredity. He was impelled to his theory of selection on the following grounds. He compared the origin of the various kinds of animals and plants which we modify artificially—by the action of artificial selection in horticulture and among domestic animals—with the origin of the species of animals and plants in their natural state. He then found that the agencies which we employ in the modification of forms by artificial selection are also at work in Nature. The chief of these agencies he held to be “the struggle for life.” The gist of this peculiarly Darwinian idea is given in this formula: The struggle for existence produces new species without premeditated design in the life of Nature, in the same way that the will of man consciously selects new races in artificial conditions. The gardener or the farmer selects new forms as he wills for his own profit, by ingeniously using the agency of heredity and adaptation for the modification of structures; so, in the natural state, the struggle for life is always unconsciously modifying the various species of living things. This struggle for life, or competition of organisms in securing the means of subsistence, acts without any conscious design, but it is none the less effective in modifying structures. As heredity and adaptation enter into the closest reciprocal action under its influence, new structures, or alterations of structure, are produced; and these are purposive in the sense that they serve the organism when formed, but they were produced without any pre-conceived aim.
This simple idea is the central thought of Darwinism, or the theory of selection. Darwin conceived this idea at an early date, and then, for more than twenty years, worked at the collection of empirical evidence in support of it before he published his theory. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an able scientist of the older school of natural philosophy, who published a number of natural-philosophic works about the end of the eighteenth century. The most important of them is his _Zoonomia,_ published in 1794, in which he expounds views similar to those of Goethe and Lamarck, without really knowing anything of the work of these contemporaries. However, in the writings of the grandfather the plastic imagination rather outran the judgment, while in Charles Darwin the two were better balanced.