term may stand alone.

I could not venture to propose to any other person so great an
alteration of terms, but you, I am sure, will give it an impartial
consideration, and if you really think the change will produce a better
understanding of your work, will not hesitate to adopt it.

It is evidently also necessary not to personify "Nature" too
much--though I am very apt to do it myself--since people will not
understand that all such phrases are metaphors. Natural Selection is,
when understood, so necessary and self-evident a principle, that it is a
pity it should be in any way obscured; and it therefore seems to me
that the free use of "survival of the fittest," which is a compact and
accurate definition of it, would tend much to its being more widely
accepted, and prevent it being so much misrepresented and misunderstood.

There is another objection made by Janet which is also a very common
one. It is that the chances are almost infinite against the particular
kind of variation required being coincident with each change of external
conditions, to enable an animal to become modified by Natural Selection
in harmony with such changed conditions; especially when we consider
that, to have produced the almost infinite modifications of organic
beings, this coincidence must have taken place an almost infinite number
of times.

Now, it seems to me that you have yourself led to this objection being
made, by so often stating the case too strongly against yourself. For
example, at the commencement of Chapter IV. you ask if it is "improbable
that useful variations should sometimes occur in the course of thousands
of generations"; and a little further on you say, "unless profitable
variations do occur, Natural Selection can do nothing." Now, such
expressions have given your opponents the advantage of assuming that
favourable variations are rare accidents, or may even for long periods
never occur at all, and thus Janet's argument would appear to many to
have great force. I think it would be better to do away with all such
qualifying expressions, and constantly maintain (what I certainly
believe to be the fact) that variations of every kind are always
occurring in every part of every species, and therefore that favourable
variations are always ready when wanted. You have, I am sure, abundant
materials to prove this; and it is, I believe, the grand fact that
renders modification and adaptation to conditions almost always
possible.