The Humour of Homer and Other Essays eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 323 pages of information about The Humour of Homer and Other Essays.

The Humour of Homer and Other Essays eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 323 pages of information about The Humour of Homer and Other Essays.

The history of science—­well exemplified by that of the development theory—­is the history of eminent men who have fought against light and have been worsted.  The tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their accumulation of fortuitous variations is on a par with the like tenacity shown by the illustrious Cuvier, who did his best to crush evolution altogether.  It always has been thus, and always will be; nor is it desirable in the interests of Truth herself that it should be otherwise.  Truth is like money—­lightly come, lightly go; and if she cannot hold her own against even gross misrepresentation, she is herself not worth holding.  Misrepresentation in the long run makes Truth as much as it mars her; hence our law courts do not think it desirable that pleaders should speak their bona fide opinions, much less that they should profess to do so.  Rather let each side hoodwink judge and jury as best it can, and let truth flash out from collision of defence and accusation.  When either side will not collide, it is an axiom of controversy that it desires to prevent the truth from being elicited.

Let us now note the courses forced upon biologists by the difficulties of Mr. Darwin’s distinctive feature.  Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace, as is well known, brought the feature forward simultaneously and independently of one another, but Mr. Wallace always believed in it more firmly than Mr. Darwin did.  Mr. Darwin as a young man did not believe in it.  He wrote before 1839, “Nature, by making habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and productions of his country,” {259a} a sentence than which nothing can coincide more fully with the older view that use and disuse were the main purveyors of variations, or conflict more fatally with his own subsequent distinctive feature.  Moreover, as I showed in my last work on evolution, {259b} in the peroration to his Origin of Species, he discarded his accidental variations altogether, and fell back on the older theory, so that the body of the Origin of Species supports one theory, and the peroration another that differs from it toto coelo.  Finally, in his later editions, he retreated indefinitely from his original position, edging always more and more continually towards the theory of his grandfather and Lamarck.  These facts convince me that he was at no time a thoroughgoing Darwinian, but was throughout an unconscious Lamarckian, though ever anxious to conceal the fact alike from himself and from his readers.

Not so with Mr. Wallace, who was both more outspoken in the first instance, and who has persevered along the path of Wallaceism just as Mr. Darwin with greater sagacity was ever on the retreat from Darwinism.  Mr. Wallace’s profounder faith led him in the outset to place his theory in fuller daylight than Mr. Darwin was inclined to do.  Mr. Darwin just waved Lamarck aside, and said as little about him as he could, while in his earlier editions Erasmus

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The Humour of Homer and Other Essays from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.