to how this microscope had originated, and that
one party maintained the man had made it little by little because he
wanted it, while the other declared this to be absurd and impossible; I
ask, would this latter party be justified in arguing that microscopes
could never have been perfected by degrees through the preservation of
and accumulation of small successive improvements, inasmuch as men
could not have begun to want to use microscopes until they had had a
microscope which should show them that such an instrument would be
useful to them, and that hence there is nothing to account for the
_beginning_ of microscopes, which might indeed make some progress when
once originated, but which could never originate?

It might be pointed out to such a reasoner, firstly, that as regards any
acquired power the various stages in the acquisition of which he might
be supposed able to remember, he would find that, logic notwithstanding,
the wish did originate the power, and yet was originated by it, both
coming up gradually out of something which was not recognisable as
either power or wish, and advancing through vain beating of the air, to
a vague effort, and from this to definite effort with failure, and from
this to definite effort with success, and from this to success with
little consciousness of effort, and from this to success with such
complete absence of effort that he now acts unconsciously and without
power of introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or
never draw a sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to
begin, though none less certain that there has been a continuity in
discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity between it and certain
other past things; moreover, that his opponents postulated so much
beginning of the microscope as that there should be a dew drop, even as
our evolutionists start with a sense of touch, of which sense all the
others are modifications, so that not one of them but is resolvable into
touch by more or less easy stages; and secondly, that the question is
one of fact and of the more evident deductions therefrom, and should not
be carried back to those remote beginnings where the nature of the facts
is so purely a matter of conjecture and inference.

No plant or animal, then, according to our view, would be able to
conceive more than a very slight improvement on its organization at a
given time, so clearly as to make the efforts towards it that would
result i