Lamarck had little if any perception of any one of the four. When,
however, they are firmly seized and brought into their due bearings one
upon another, the facts of heredity become as simple as those of a man
making a tobacco pipe, and rudimentary organs are seen to be essentially
of the same character as the little rudimentary protuberance at the
bottom of the pipe to which I referred in 'Erewhon.' {141}
These organs are now no longer useful, but they once were so, and were
therefore once purposive, though not so now. They are the expressions of
a bygone usefulness; sayings, as it were, about which there was at one
time infinite wrangling, as to what both the meaning and the expression
should best be, so that they then had living significance in the mouths
of those who used them, though they have become such mere shibboleths and
cant formulae to ourselves that we think no more of their meaning than we
do of Julius Caesar in the month of July. They continue to be reproduced
through the force of habit, and through indisposition to get out of any
familiar groove of action until it becomes too unpleasant for us to
remain in it any longer. It has long been felt that embryology and
rudimentary structures indicated community of descent. Dr. Darwin and
Lamarck insisted on this, as have all subsequent writers on evolution;
but the explanation why and how the structures come to be
repeated--namely, that they are simply examples of the force of habit--can
only be perceived intelligently by those who admit such unity between
parents and offspring as that the self-development of the latter can be
properly called habitual (as being a repetition of an act by one and the
same individual), and can only be fully sympathised with by those who
recognise that if habit be admitted as the key to the fact at all, the
unconscious manner in which the habit comes to be repeated is only of a
piece with all our other observations concerning habit.
Pages:
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169