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Its service being to defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to have nothing but anti-social elements in it.
He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forwent these advantages.
In admitting use and disuse as freely as he did, he gave Lamarckians leverage for the overthrow of a system based ostensibly on the accumulation of fortunate accidents.
Only two notes of the harpsichord were dumb from disuse when the Bird Waltz again warbled and trilled in the crooked drawing-room: only one slip of geranium fell a victim to imperfect nursing, before she was gardening at her green baskets again, regularly every morning; the powdered-headed ancestor had not been under a cloud for more than six weeks, when Miss Tox breathed on his benignant visage, and polished him up with a piece of wash-leather.
The trunk of the elephant, the fin of the fish, the wing of the bird, the cunning hand of man and his complicated brain and, in short, all organs and faculties whatsoever can only have been moulded and developed by use by usefulness and by using but not necessarily by use-inheritance, not necessarily by directly inherited effects of use or disuse of parts in the individual.
If natural selection were not supreme in such cases, how could we account for the effects of pressure resulting in hard hoofs in some cases and only soft pads in others? Of course in a certain sense this thickening of the sole has resulted from use. In one sense or other, most or perhaps all of the results of natural selection are inherited effects of use or disuse.
The effects of the long- continued use or disuse of parts. The cohesion of homologous parts. The variability of multiple parts. Compensation of growth; but of this law I have found no good instance in the case of man. The effects of the mechanical pressure of one part on another; as of the pelvis on the cranium of the infant in the womb.
As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse.
On the other hand, young chickens have lost, wholly by habit, that fear of the dog and cat which no doubt was originally instinctive in them, in the same way as it is so plainly instinctive in young pheasants, though reared under a hen. But this instinct retained by our chickens has become useless under domestication, for the mother-hen has almost lost by disuse the power of flight.
It should also be borne in mind that Nature's shoulder-braces improve by use, while the artificial ones not only soon fail, but their very use generally impairs the healthy action of the natural ones; for these, like all other muscles, improve by use and become enfeebled by disuse.
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