another and not less to those around it; that is to say, it must be more
or less in harmony with its environment. There are the problems of
germ-plasm, and its transmission; the effect on it, if any, of the body,
and the reaction of the body to its environment. There are also the
catalysers of which we have spoken, with many problems associated with
them, and throwing a possible and unexpected light on the vexed question
of Vitalism and the Conservation of Energy. There are all these things,
manifestations of energy; there is the watch, and it is going. But, as
we remarked elsewhere, the fact that we have learned that the resiliency
of the spring in the watch makes it "go" does not exhaust the
explanation of the watch any more than the fact that we know something
of the actions and reactions of energy in the organism exhausts its
explanation. The watch is "going"; so is the organism. Each of them, in
a sense, is a "wonderful little laboratory" in which manifestations of
energy are constantly taking place. The watchmaker constructed the watch
for that purpose; who or what constructed the organism? Darwin and the
Darwinians would have said--Natural Selection. In fact, Darwin rather
lamented that "the old argument from design in nature, as given by
Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails now that
the law of Natural Selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue
that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have
been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.
There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings,
and in the action of Natural Selection, than in the course which the
wind blows." There again Darwin fell into a mistake, because he confused
an intermediate with a final cause. Even if Natural Selection were all
that the most ultra-Darwinian could claim it to be, it could not, as
Driesch and others have shown, exhaust the explanation of the organism.

As a matter of fact the world of science is very far from thinking of
Natural Selection as anything more than a factor, perhaps even a minor
factor, in evolution. The author of the work with which we are dealing
tells us that "Darwin's law of selection as a natural explanation of the
origin of _all_ fitness in form and function has lost its prestige at
the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets with universal
acceptance is the _law of the survival of the fittest_, a limited