Note 67 — Chapter XIII · HUMAN POPULATION IN THE FUTURE.

A good deal of this chapter retains its original form; and the above paragraph is reprinted verbatim from the Westminster Review for April, 1852, in which the views developed in the foregoing hundred pages were first sketched out. This paragraph shows how near one may be to a great generalization without seeing it. Though the struggle for life is the alleged motive force; though the process of natural selection is recognized; and though to it is ascribed a share in the evolution of a higher type; yet the conception is not that which Mr. Darwin has worked out with such wonderful skill and knowledge. In the first place, natural selection is here described only as furthering direct adaptation—only as aiding progress by the preservation of individuals in whom functionally-produced modifications have gone on most favourably. In the second place, there is no trace of the idea that natural selection may by co-operation with the cause assigned, or with other causes, produce divergences of structure; and of course, in the absence of this idea, there is no implication that natural selection has anything to do with the origin of species. And in the third place, the all-important factor of variation—“spontaneous,” or incidental as we may otherwise call it—is wholly ignored. Though use and disuse are, I think, much more potent causes of organic modification than Mr. Darwin supposes—though, while pursuing the inquiry in detail, I have been led to believe that direct equilibration has played a more active part even than I had myself at one time thought; yet I hold Mr. Darwin to have shown beyond question, that a great part of the facts—perhaps the greater part—are explicable only as resulting from the survival of individuals which have deviated in some indirectly-caused way from the ancestral type. Thus, the above paragraph contains merely a passing recognition of the selective process; and indicates no suspicion of the enormous range of its effects, or of the conditions under which a large part of its effects are produced.