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That is to say that neo-Lamarckism is no more able than any other form of evolutionism to solve the problem. In thus submitting the various present forms of evolutionism to a common test, in showing that they all strike against the same insurmountable difficulty, we have in no wise the intention of rejecting them altogether.
Certain neo-Lamarckians do indeed resort to a cause of a psychological nature. There, to our thinking, is one of the most solid positions of neo-Lamarckism. But if this cause is nothing but the conscious effort of the individual, it cannot operate in more than a restricted number of cases at most in the animal world, and not at all in the vegetable kingdom.
So we come to the only one of the present forms of evolution which remains for us to mention, viz., neo-Lamarckism. It is well known that Lamarck attributed to the living being the power of varying by use or disuse of its organs, and also of passing on the variation so acquired to its descendants. A certain number of biologists hold a doctrine of this kind to-day.
As this is true of Fleischmann’s whole book, it is therefore unsatisfactory. It leaves everything in the mist, and puts nothing in place of what it attempts to demolish. But attempts are being made in other quarters, especially among the Lamarckians, to build up an opposition theory. Lamarckism and Neo-Lamarckism.
Neo-Lamarckism is therefore, of all the later forms of evolutionism, the only one capable of admitting an internal and psychological principle of development, although it is not bound to do so. And it is also the only evolutionism that seems to us to account for the building up of identical complex organs on independent lines of development.
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