A second branch of my reply suggests that Mr. Darwin _misinterprets this law of nature_, viz. perpetual variation from parent to offspring. It is doubtless a law, but Darwin has quite missed its divinely ordained purpose――which is to indicate the relationship between parent and child on the one hand, and yet maintain individual identity on the other. The resemblances answer the former purpose; the differences, the latter. Beings constituted to bear personal responsibilities so momentous as those of man must be so organized that every one can identify his own individuality, lest one man be hung for some other man’s crime.
2. His second argument comes from the law of “natural selection”――“the survival of the fittest”――with which it is convenient to couple the precisely similar law of “sexual selection”――the ascendency of the smartest over their inferiors, to perpetuate the race. Here a specific case will suffice both to illustrate and to refute. The principle of “natural selection” has a fair chance for itself in the spawn of the shad. It is no doubt true that none but the smartest out of the many thousand spawned at once survive so as to become parents in their turn. Yet who believes that these smartest shad are becoming sturgeon or sharks or whales by this law of progress? Are they actually found to be any thing but shad after never so many hundred generations? It may seem superfluous to push the still more pertinent question――Are these smartest and most ambitious shad really found to be working up out of their watery element, I _i. e._ working up into ducks or geese, or into blackbirds and crows? For just this is Mr. Darwin’s theory――the line of ascent running up from fish to fowl; from fowl to mammal and so on up to man. The questions here suggested are therefore only the fair and scientific test and touchstone of his argument. A law which has not made its results even perceptible since the birth of the first shad known to human history must be regarded as scientifically worthless.
My second remark here is that Darwin errs not in finding these to be laws of nature――“natural selection,” “sexual selection”――but in interpreting them, I _i. e._ in detecting their divinely ordained design and their actual working and product. I suggest that these laws, apparently made for the improvement of races, may be requisite to enable them to hold their own against the ever present tendency to degeneracy. Life is a perpetual struggle against death. The life-principle finds an antagonist force in chemical law which is evermore hurrying organized matter back to its inorganic state. Still further, be it considered, races excessively prolific would rapidly lose vitality but for these laws of natural and sexual selection. We may therefore rationally assume that these laws are simply forms of the general principle of _self-preservation_, and not a purposed provision for lifting a lower race up to the plane of a higher.