occurs naturally (in Darwin’s sense) too:
that, for instance, a hard winter will kill off a weakly
child as the bucket kills off a weakly puppy.
Then there is the farm laborer. Shakespear’s
Touchstone, a court-bred fool, was shocked to find
in the shepherd a natural philosopher, and opined
that he would be damned for the part he took in the
sexual selection of sheep. As to the production
of new species by the selection of variations, that
is no news to your gardener. Now if you are familiar
with these three processes: the survival of the
fittest, sexual selection, and variation leading to
new kinds, there is nothing to puzzle you in Darwinism.
That was the secret of Darwin’s popularity.
He never puzzled anybody. If very few of us have
read The Origin of Species from end to end, it is
not because it overtaxes our mind, but because we take
in the whole case and are prepared to accept it long
before we have come to the end of the innumerable
instances and illustrations of which the book mainly
consists. Darwin becomes tedious in the manner
of a man who insists on continuing to prove his innocence
after he has been acquitted. You assure him that
there is not a stain on his character, and beg him
to leave the court; but he will not be content with
enough evidence: he will have you listen to all
the evidence that exists in the world. Darwin’s
industry was enormous. His patience, his perseverance,
his conscientiousness reached the human limit.
But he never got deeper beneath or higher above his
facts than an ordinary man could follow him.
He was not conscious of having raised a stupendous
issue, because, though it arose instantly, it was
not his business. He was conscious of having
discovered a process of transformation and modification
which accounted for a great deal of natural history.
But he did not put it forward as accounting for the
whole of natural history. He included it under
the heading of Evolution, though it was only pseudo-evolution
at best; but he revealed it as a method of
evolution, not as the method of evolution.
He did not pretend that it excluded other methods,
or that it was the chief method. Though he demonstrated
that many transformations which had been taken as
functional adaptations (the current phrase for Lamarckian
evolution) either certainly were or conceivably might
be due to Circumstantial Selection, he was careful
not to claim that he had superseded Lamarck or disproved
Functional Adaptation. In short, he was not a
Darwinian, but an honest naturalist working away at
his job with so little preoccupation with theological
speculation that he never quarrelled with the theistic
Unitarianism into which he was born, and remained
to the end the engagingly simple and socially easy-going
soul he had been in his boyhood, when his elders doubted
whether he would ever be of much use in the world.
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