NOTE.—It appears from “Samuel Butler: A Memoir” (II, 29) that Butler wrote to his father (Dec. 1885) about a passage in Horace (near the beginning of the First Epistle of the First Book)—
Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor, Et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor.
On the preceding page he is adapting the second of these two verses to his own purposes.—H. F. J.
Chapter VII (_Intercalated_) Mr. Spencer’s “The Factors of Organic Evolution”
SINCE the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more widely understood by his articles “The Factors of Organic Evolution” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for April and May, 1886. The present appears the fittest place in which to intercalate remarks concerning them.
Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to account for organic evolution.
“On critically examining the evidence” (modern writers never examine evidence, they always “critically,” or “carefully,” or “patiently,” examine it), he writes, “we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained. Omitting for the present any consideration of a factor which may be considered primordial, it may be contended that one of the factors alleged by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator. Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity, and that decrease of it resulting from inactivity, are transmissible to descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic evolution. _Utterly inadequate to explain the major part of the facts as is the hypothesis of the inheritance of functionally produced modifications_, yet there is a minor part of the facts very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause.” (Italics mine.)
Mr. Spencer does not here say expressly that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck considered inheritance of functionally produced modifications to be the sole explanation of the facts of organic life; modern writers on evolution for the most part avoid saying anything expressly; this nevertheless is the conclusion which the reader naturally draws—and was doubtless intended to draw—from Mr. Spencer’s words. He gathers that these writers put forward an “utterly inadequate” theory, which cannot for a moment be entertained in the form in which they left it, but which, nevertheless, contains contributions to the formation of a just opinion which of late years have been too much neglected.