in fact, which is inherent in the organism,
and which is indifferent to utility or disadvantage, or natural selection,
or anything else, but simply follows its prescribed path in obedience to
innate law. The representatives of this last position differ again among
themselves. Some regard it as true in detail, in regard, for instance, to
the markings of a butterfly's wing, the striping of a caterpillar, the
development of spots on a lizard; while others regard it as governing the
general process of evolution as a whole. Finally, there is the most
important contrast of all. On the one side, subordination, passivity,
complete dependence on the selective or directive factors in evolution,
which alone have any power; on the other, activity, spontaneous power of
adaptation and transformation, the relative freedom of all things living,
and--the deepest answer to the question of the controlling force in
evolution--_the secret of life_. This last contrast goes deeper even than
the one we have already noted, that between the Darwinian and the
Lamarckian principle of explanation; and it leads ultimately from the
special Darwinian problem to quite a new one, to be solved by itself--the
problem of the nature and secret of living matter.

Weismannism.

In regard to almost all the points to which we have referred, the most
consistent and decided champion of Darwinism in its essential principles
is the zoologist of Freiburg, August Weismann.(35) In long chapters on the
protective coloration of animals, on the phenomena of mimicry--that
resemblance to foreign objects (leaves, pieces of wood, bark, and
well-protected animals) by which the mimics secure their own safety from
enemies--on the protective devices in plants, the selective value of "the
useful" is demonstrated. In regard to the marvellous phenomena of
"carnivorous" plants, the still more marvellous instincts of animals,
which cannot be interpreted on Lamarckian lines as "inherited habit," but
only as due to the cumulative influence of selection on inborn tendencies,
as well as in regard to "symbiosis," "the origin of flowers," and so on,
he attempts to show that the heterodox attempts at explanation are
insufficient, and that selection alone really explains. At the same time
the Darwinian principle is carried still further. It is not only among the
individuals, the "persons," that the selective struggle for existence goes
on. Personal selection depends upon a "germinal