And the Darwinians went far beyond denying consciousness to trees.  Weismann insisted that the chick breaks out of its eggshell automatically; that the butterfly, springing into the air to avoid the pounce of the lizard, ’does not wish to avoid death; knows nothing about death,’ what has happened being simply that a flight instinct evolved by Circumstantial Selection reacts promptly to a visual impression produced by the lizard’s movement.  His proof is that the butterfly immediately settles again on the flower, and repeats the performance every time the lizard springs, thus shewing that it learns nothing from experience, and—­Weismann concludes—­is not conscious of what it does.

It should hardly have escaped so curious an observer that when the cat jumps up on the dinner table, and you put it down, it instantly jumps up again, and finally establishes its right to a place on the cloth by convincing you that if you put it down a hundred times it will jump up a hundred and one times; so that if you desire its company at dinner you can have it only on its own terms.  If Weismann really thought that cats act thus without any consciousness or any purpose, immediate or ulterior, he must have known very little about cats.  But a thoroughgoing Weismannite, if any such still survive from those mad days, would contend that I am not at present necessarily conscious of what I am doing; that my writing of these lines, and your reading of them, are effects of Circumstantial Selection; that I heed know no more about Darwinism than a butterfly knows of a lizard’s appetite; and that the proof that I actually am doing it unconsciously is that as I have spent forty years in writing in this fashion without, as far as I can see, producing any visible effect on public opinion, I must be incapable of learning from experience, and am therefore a mere automaton.  And the Weismannite demonstration of this would of course be an equally unconscious effect of Circumstantial Selection.

DARWINISM NOT FINALLY REFUTABLE

Do not too hastily say that this is inconceivable.  To Circumstantial Selection all mechanical and chemical reactions are possible, provided you accept the geologists’ estimates of the great age of the earth, and therefore allow time enough for the circumstances to operate.  It is true that mere survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence plus sexual selection fail as hopelessly to account for Darwin’s own life work as for my conquest of the bicycle; but who can prove that there are not other soulless factors, unnoticed or undiscovered, which only require imagination enough to fit them to the evolution of an automatic Jesus or Shakespear?  When a man tells you that you are a product of Circumstantial Selection solely, you cannot finally disprove it.  You can only tell him out of the depths of your inner conviction that he is a fool and a liar.  But as this, though British, is uncivil, it is wiser to offer him the