Lamarckism

“ Packard has now written the book which was wanted, and will for long remain the only biography of Lamarck, and the best defence of Lamarckism. We will conclude with the words of the author: "We are all of us evolutionists, though we may differ as to the nature of the efficient causes." And may we not add that Lamarck preceded Darwin, as Erasmus did Luther? ”

“ Lamarckism is generally regarded as reducing all organic diversities to differences in the needs of individual life, but Lamarck himself, as must be emphasised from the very beginning, did not at all maintain the opinion that the great characteristics of the types were only due to such accidental factors. He supposed a sort of law of organisation to be at the root of systematics, as developed in history, and the needs of life were only responsible, according to him, for splitting the given types of organisation into their ultimate branches. ”

“ In the second group of the foundations of Lamarckism we know absolutely nothing; accidental variations of form are supposed to occur, and the organism is said to possess the faculty of keeping and storing these variations and of handing them down to the next generation, if they happen to satisfy any of its needs. ”

“ His life was also notable for the fact that after his fiftieth year he took up and mastered a new science; and at a period when many students of literature and science cease to be productive and rest from their labors, he accomplished the best work of his life—work which has given him lasting fame as a systematist and as a philosophic biologist. Moreover, Lamarckism comprises the fundamental principles of evolution, and will always have to be taken into consideration in accounting for the origin, not only of species, but especially of the higher groups, such as orders, classes, and phyla. ”

“ Those who still hold a belief in it (and it is fair to say that some men of real ability are among that number) too often do so, it is to be feared, because it is necessary for the support of some theoretical doctrine which they have formulated. Certainly there are few men who can say that they have carefully examined the evidence in the case, and accept Lamarckism because the evidence forces them to do so. ”

“ The Lamarckian doctrine is now held mainly by persons who have either lacked training in the evaluation of evidence, or have never examined critically the assumptions on which they proceed. Medical men and breeders of plants or animals are to a large extent believers in Lamarckism, but the evidence (if any) on which they rely is always susceptible of explanation in a more reasonable way. It must not be forgotten that some of the ablest intellects in the world have been assidously engaged in getting at the truth in the case, during the last half-century ”

“ This acceptance of the congenital character of the individual as the determining factor in his destiny had been reinforced by the Lamarckian view of Evolution. If the giraffe can develop his neck by wanting and trying, a man can develop his character in the same way. The old saying, 'Where there is a will, there is a way,' condenses Lamarck's theory of functional adaptation into a proverb. This felt bracingly moral to strong minds, and reassuringly pious to feeble ones. There was no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform himself before he pretends to reform society. ”

“ It is well known that the vast labours of Lamarck were divided between botany and physical science in the eighteenth century, and between zoology and natural philosophy in the nineteenth; it is, however, less generally known that Lamarck was long a partisan of the immutability of species. It was not till 1801, when he was already old, that he freed himself from the ideas then generally prevailing. But Lamarck, having once made up his mind, never changed it; in his ripe age he exhibits all the ardour of youth in propagating and defending his new convictions. ”

“ With opinions having such a decided tendency to materialism, it is not surprising that Lamarck seldom makes allusion to a Deity, and when he does so, he nearly confines himself to the bare acknowledgment of his existence. In his earlier works, there is no mention made of a Supreme Being whatever; and even when his existence is admitted, He is divested of the attributes which belong to him. The glory of forming the works of creation, in which His beneficence and power are so signally manifested, is ascribed to nature, or a certain order of things. ”

“ In the intellectual evolution of the human mind perhaps no advance has been more important than that of Lamarck—the conquest of the domain of life by human intelligence. In conformity with the true scientific method, he founds his doctrine on the facts and phenomena of nature. "I confine myself," he says, "within the bounds of a simple contemplation {161}of nature." It was this observation of the gradual perfecting of living organisms from the simplest to the most complicated that inspired Lamarck with the idea of evolution and transformation. ”

“ Lamarck's statement is that animals have wants, and contract, to satisfy them, habits which transform themselves gradually into so many propensities which they can neither resist nor change. These propensities, once acquired, propagate themselves by way of transmission to the young, so that they come to exist in new individuals, anteriorly to all exercise. Thus are the same emotions, the same habits, the same instincts, perpetuated without variation from one generation to another, so long as the outward conditions of existence remain the same. ”

“ Where they abound, originality is not needed and is not found; but where they are in defect, spontaneity is set free. Thus, the first 283step in the Lamarckian evolution of mind is the putting of sundry thoughts into situations in which they are free to play. As to growth by exercise, I have already shown, in discussing Man’s Glassy Essence, in last October’s Monist, what its modus operandi must be conceived to be, at least, until a second equally definite hypothesis shall have been offered. Namely, it consists of the flying asunder of molecules, and the reparation of the parts by new matter. ”

“ With keen insight he realised that conscious intelligence counts for little in evolution, and focussed attention upon the unconscious but obscurely psychical processes of instinct and morphogenesis.
Not without reason have the later schools of evolutionary thought, who developed the psychological and vitalistic side of his doctrine, called themselves Neo-Lamarckians.
We shall say then that Lamarck, in spite of his materialism, was the founder of the "psychological" theory of evolution. ”

“ He would not accept the boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble British Philister—'we know we're free and there's an end on it!' He prefers Lamarck's, 'The will is, in truth, never free.' He believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Nature's great progression; a result of the interaction of organism and environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere product of organization ”

“ At a time when the miraculous origin of every living being was regarded as an unchangeable verity, and was defended like a sacred dogma, Lamarck boldly formulated his theory of evolution, with all its attendent consequences, from spontaneous generation to the genealogy of man. ”

“ And no one can look at the progress of the Lamarckian hypothesis, with reference to the dates when, and the men by whom, it was promulgated, without recognizing in it one of perhaps the most striking embodiments of the Frenchman’s principle which the world ever saw. It is not the illiberal religionist that rejects and casts it off,—it is the inductive philosopher. Science addresses its assertors in the language of the possessed to the sons of Sceva the Jew;—“The astronomer I know, and the geologist I know ”

“ De Maillet and Robinet had already outlined part of the Lamarckian doctrine.
Lamarck. Lamarck (1744-1829) believed that species were not fixed, but that the more complex were developed from pre-existent simpler forms. He attributed the change of species mainly to physical conditions of life, to crossing, and especially to use or disuse of organs, which not only resulted in the modification, growth, or atrophy of some, but, under the stress of necessity, led to the formation of new ones. “La fonction fait l’organe.” ”

“ For if this sort of selection could turn an antelope into a giraffe, it could conceivably turn a pond full of amoebas into the French Academy. Though Lamarck's way, the way of life, will, aspiration, and achievement, remained still possible, this newly shewn way of hunger, death, stupidity, delusion, chance, and bare survival was also possible: was indeed most certainly the way in which many apparently intelligently designed transformations had actually come to pass. ”

“ These bourgeois idealists edge their way in everywhere; after the Revolution of 1789 they rebuked the scientists for their hypotheses and their theories; according to them science should have stopped with the study of facts in themselves without dreaming of uniting them into a general system. "What is the use of cutting stones without putting up a building," replied Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, the genial disciple of Lamarck, who lived to see the extinction of his [Pg 143] theory on the continuity of species, which, only thirty years after his death, was to take on a new birth with Darwin. ”

“ Whatever may be the general conclusion as to the claim of Lamarck being "the founder of evolution," there can be no possible doubt as to his life being the "old, old story of a man of genius who lived far in advance of his age, and who died comparatively unappreciated and neglected." ”

“ Either the sentiment intérieur is a psychological faculty, or it is nothing.
There is no doubt that, as expressed by Lamarck, the conception conceals a radical confusion of thought. It is not possible to be a thorough-going materialist, and at the 226same time to believe that new organs are formed in direct response to needs felt by the organism. Lamarck could never resolve this antinomy, and his speculations were thrown into confusion by it. ”

“ And, for that matter, the leaders of the scientific world were equally antagonistic to the Lamarckian hypothesis. Cuvier in particular, once the pupil of Lamarck, but now his colleague, and in authority more than his peer, stood out against the transmutation doctrine with all his force. He argued for the absolute fixity of species, bringing to bear the resources of a mind which, as a mere repository of facts, perhaps never was excelled. ”

“ It would require generations of men to prove this negative, if it were probable, and his case rests mainly on the assumed weakness of his opponents. So what is needed and demanded from the neo-Lamarckians is the produc­tion of a few well-attested and verified facts, and, as he admits himself, then it must follow as the night the day that his followers will surrender his characteristic dogma. ”

“ Lamarck was at least a natural philosopher far before his time, with the accidents of wealth, leisure, and powerful support absent from his career, which was pursued among many carping cares—an evolutionary Milton, with the last ten years of his life passed in darkness. ”

“ C. Lloyd Morgan, has expressed the opinion that the Lamarckian principle must at least be admitted as a working hypothesis. But with this I cannot agree, at least as things stand at present. A working hypothesis may be false, and yet lead to further progress; that is, it may constitute an advance to the extent of being useful in formulating the problem and in illuminating paths that are likely to lead to results. But it seems to me that a hypothesis of this kind has performed its services and must be discarded the moment it is found to be at hopeless variance with the facts. ”

“ But if the reader will now kindly give himself the trouble of turning back a page or two, he will see that this account of Lamarckian evolution coincides with the general description of the action of love, to which, I suppose, he yielded his assent.
282Remembering that all matter is really mind, remembering, too, the continuity of mind, let us ask what aspect Lamarckian evolution takes on within the domain of consciousness. Direct endeavor can achieve almost nothing. ”

“ Lamarck was the first to give a theory of evolution that has retained a place in the intellectual world up to the present time, and he may justly be regarded as the founder of that doctrine in the modern sense. ”

“ Lamarck had worked out a theory of descent in the fullest detail, and regarded it as the foundation of the whole science of biology. He taught that the beginning of life consisted only of the simplest and lowest plants and animals; that the more complex animals and plants arose from these, and that even man himself had come from ape-like mammals. He held that the course of development of the earth and of all the creatures upon it was a slow and continuous change, uninterrupted by violent revolutions. He summed up the causes of organic evolution in the following propositions [D] ”

“ But anyway, all of you people make the mistake of dividing people into types, classes and creeds. 'Nature recognizes neither kingdoms nor classes, no orders, no genera, no sub-genera, nature recognizes nothing but individuals.' That's Lamarck. ”

“ In short, in these revolutions, as the Socialist-Democratic philosophy further teaches, "we recognize an ever self-perfecting origination and formation of things in the universe": so much we learn from Kant and Laplace. Then came Lamarck with the "doctrine of the continuous and successive development of organic beings on the earth," but for half a century he failed to obtain a hearing till Darwin procured for the doctrine full acceptance. ”