e; much more
should we do so on the score of the retention of the expression when a
more accurate one had been found.

If the "survival of the fittest" had been used, to the total excision of
"natural selection" from every page in Mr. Darwin's book--it would have
been easily seen that "the survival of the fittest" is no more a cause
of modification, and hence can give no more explanation concerning the
origin of species, than the fact of a number of competitors in a race
failing to run the whole course, or to run it as quickly as the winner,
can explain how the winner came to have good legs and lungs. According
to Lamarck, the winner will have got these by means of sense of need,
and consequent practice and training, on his own part, and on that of
his forefathers; according to Mr. Darwin, the "most important means" of
his getting them is his "happening" to be born with them, coupled, with
the fact that his uncles and aunts for many generations could not run
so well as his ancestors in the direct line. But can the fact of his
uncles and aunts running less well than his fathers and mothers be a
means of his fathers and mothers coming to run _better than they used to
run_?

If the reader will bear in mind the idea of the runners in a race, it
will help him to see the point at issue between Mr. Darwin and Lamarck.
Perhaps also the double meaning of the word race, as expressing equally
a breed and a competition, may not be wholly without significance. What
we want to be told is, not that a runner will win the prize if he can
run "ever such a little" faster than his fellows--we know this--but by
what process he comes to be able to run ever such a little faster.

"So, again," continues Mr. Darwin, "it is difficult to avoid
personifying nature, but I mean by nature only the aggregate action and
product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as
ascertained by us."

This, again, is raising up a dead man in order to knock him down. Nature
has been personified for more than two thousand years, and every one
understands that nature is no more really a woman than hope or justice,
or than God is like the pictures of the mediaeval painters; no one whose
objection was worth notice could have objected to the personification of
nature.

Mr. Darwin concludes:--

"With a little familiarity, such superficial objections will be
forgotten."[367]

As a matter of fact, I do not see any greater tendency to acquiesce in