Natural Selection works.


A SAMPLE OF LAMARCKO-SHAVIAN INVECTIVE

The Vitalist philosophers made no such mistakes. Nietzsche, for example,
thinking out the great central truth of the Will to Power instead of
cutting off mouse-tails, had no difficulty in concluding that the final
objective of this Will was power over self, and that the seekers after
power over others and material possessions were on a false scent.

The stultification naturally became much worse as the first Darwinians
died out. The prestige of these pioneers, who had the older evolutionary
culture to build on, and were in fact no more Darwinian in the modern
sense than Darwin himself, ceased to dazzle us when Huxley and Tyndall
and Spencer and Darwin passed away, and we were left with the smaller
people who began with Darwin and took in nothing else. Accordingly, I
find that in the year 1906 I indulged my temper by hurling invectives at
the Neo-Darwinians in the following terms.

'I really do not wish to be abusive; but when I think of these poor
little dullards, with their precarious hold of just that corner of
evolution that a blackbeetle can understand--with their retinue of
twopenny-halfpenny Torquemadas wallowing in the infamies of the
vivisector's laboratory, and solemnly offering us as epoch-making
discoveries their demonstrations that dogs get weaker and die if you
give them no food; that intense pain makes mice sweat; and that if you
cut off a dog's leg the three-legged dog will have a four-legged puppy,
I ask myself what spell has fallen on intelligent and humane men
that they allow themselves to be imposed on by this rabble of dolts,