Note 156 — SYSTEMATICS AND HISTORY

I repeat once more that we are dealing here with dogmatic “Neo-”Lamarckism exclusively. This theory indeed claims to explain all features and properties of organic bodies on the basis of the feeling of needs and storing of contingent fulfilments and on this basis alone, just as dogmatic “Neo”-Darwinism claims to account for all those phenomena on the ground of contingent variations and natural selection. Darwin himself, as we have seen, intentionally left unexplained certain primary features of life and therefore cannot be blamed for having failed to explain them, though even then his theory remains wrong. Lamarck personally considered a real primary organisatory law of phylogeny as being of fundamental importance, and therefore he is not in the least responsible if “Neo-Lamarckism” fails as a universal theory.