I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their extreme development; but they both admit abatements which bring them somewhat nearer to one another.  Design, as even its most strenuous upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like all our ideas, substantial enough until we try to grasp it—­and then, like all our ideas, it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or death—­a rope of many strands; there is design within design, and design within undesign; there is undesign within design (as when a man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design in their arrangement), and undesign within undesign; when we speak of cunning or design in connection with organism we do not mean cunning, all cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no place for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of accidents.

So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny design and effort to have been the main purveyors of the variations whose accumulation results in specific difference, they do not entirely exclude the action of use and disuse—­and this at once opens the door for cunning; nevertheless, according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the human eye and the long neck of the giraffe are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are mainly functional, and hence practical; according to Charles Darwin they are alike due to the accumulation of variations that are accidental, fortuitous, spontaneous, that is to say, mainly cannot be reduced to any known general principle.  According to Charles Darwin “the preservation of favoured,” or lucky, “races” is by far the most important means of modification; according to Erasmus Darwin effort non sibi res sed se rebus subjungere is unquestionably the most potent means; roughly, therefore, there is no better or fairer way of putting the matter, than to say that Charles Darwin is the apostle of luck, and his grandfather, and Lamarck, of cunning.

It should be observed also that the distinction between the organism and its surroundings—­on which both systems are founded—­is one that cannot be so universally drawn as we find it convenient to allege.  There is a debatable ground of considerable extent on which res and me, ego and non ego, luck and cunning, necessity and freewill, meet and pass into one another as night and day, or life and death.  No one can draw a sharp line between ego and non ego, nor indeed any sharp line between any classes of phenomena.  Every part of the ego is non ego qua organ or tool in use, and much of the non ego runs up into the ego and is inseparably united with it; still there is enough that it is obviously most convenient to call ego, and enough that it is no less obviously most convenient to call non ego, as there is enough obvious day and obvious night, or obvious luck and obvious cunning, to make us think it advisable to keep separate accounts for each.