hich separates life and
hope from death and despair. We were intellectually intoxicated with the
idea that the world could make itself without design, purpose, skill,
or intelligence: in short, without life. We completely overlooked the
difference between the modification of species by adaptation to their
environment and the appearance of new species: we just threw in the word
'variations' or the word 'sports' (fancy a man of science talking of
an unknown factor as a sport instead of as _x_!) and left them to
'accumulate' and account for the difference between a cockatoo and a
hippopotamus. Such phrases set us free to revel in demonstrating to the
Vitalists and Bible worshippers that if we once admit the existence of
any kind of force, however unintelligent, and stretch out the past to
unlimited time for such force to operate accidentally in, that force may
conceivably, by the action of Circumstantial Selection, produce a world
in which every function has an organ perfectly adapted to perform it,
and therefore presents every appearance of having been designed, like
Paley's watch, by a conscious and intelligent artificer for the purpose.
We took a perverse pleasure in arguing, without the least suspicion
that we were reducing ourselves to absurdity, that all the books in the
British Museum library might have been written word for word as they
stand on the shelves if no human being had ever been conscious, just
as the trees stand in the forest doing wonderful things without
consciousness.

And the Darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees.
Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its eggshell
automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid the
pounce of the lizard, 'does not wish to avoid death; knows nothing about
death,' what has happened being simply that a flight instinct evolved by
Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a visual impression produced
by the lizard's movement. His proof is that the butterfly immediately
settles again on the flower, and repeats the performance every time the
lizard springs, thus shewing that it learns nothing from experience,
and--Weismann concludes--is not conscious of what it does.

It should hardly have escaped so curious an observer that when the cat
jumps up on the dinner table, and you put it down, it instantly jumps
up again, and finally establishes its right to a place on the cloth by
convincing you that if you put it down a hundred