And in 1869, “Further, we must suppose that there is a power represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest always intently watching each slight alteration,” &c. { 94a}
The hesitating feeble gait of one who fears a pitfall at every step, so easily recognisable in the “numerous, successive, slight alterations” in the foregoing passage, may be traced in many another page of the “Origin of Species” by those who will be at the trouble of comparing the several editions. It is only when this is done, and the working of Mr. Darwin’s mind can be seen as though it were the twitchings of a dog’s nose, that any idea can be formed of the difficulty in which he found himself involved by his initial blunder of thinking he had got a distinctive feature which entitled him to claim the theory of evolution as an original idea of his own. He found his natural selection hang round his neck like a millstone. There is hardly a page in the “Origin of Species” in which traces of the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin’s mind are not discernible, with a result alike exasperating and pitiable. I can only repeat what I said in “Evolution Old and New,” namely, that I find the task of extracting a well-defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin’s words comparable only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer who has obscured the main issue as much as he can, and whose chief aim has been to leave as many loopholes as possible for himself to escape by, if things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that of one who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was originally drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of confusion and contradiction.
The more Mr. Darwin’s work is studied, and more especially the more his different editions are compared, the more impossible is it to avoid a suspicion of _arrière pensée_ as pervading it whenever the “distinctive feature” is on the _tapis_. It is right to say, however, that no such suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. Wallace, Mr. Darwin’s fellow discoverer of natural selection. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Wallace believed he had made a real and important improvement upon the Lamarckian system, and, as a natural consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by telling us what Lamarck had said. He did not, I admit, say quite all that I should have been glad to have seen him say, nor use exactly the words I should myself have chosen, but he said enough to make it impossible to doubt his good faith, and his desire that we should understand that with him, as with Mr. Darwin, variations are mainly accidental, not functional. Thus, in his memorable paper communicated to the Linnean Society in 1858 he said, in a passage which I have quoted in “Unconscious Memory”: