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"I believe so," said the old gentleman; "at any rate you were asking me why Darwin, with his single contribution to the theory of transformism, and that a doubtful one or, to be accurate, an exploded one should be associated in the popular mind with the invention of so ancient a theory as that of evolution.
It is not rigorously demonstrable; but, failing the certainty of theoretical or experimental demonstration, there is a probability which is continually growing, due to evidence which, while coming short of direct proof, seems to point persistently in its direction: such is the kind of probability that the theory of transformism offers. Let us admit, however, that transformism may be wrong.
He is not able to do so because he does not think of it; he does not think of it because he is devoid of the faculty attributed to him, in order to support its thesis, by the dangerous prodigality of transformism. Divine reason, sun of the intellect, what a clumsy slap in thy august countenance, when the glorifiers of the animal degrade thee with such dullness!
And hence, an evolution somewhere would still have to be supposed, whether in a creative Thought in which the ideas of the different species are generated by each other exactly as transformism holds that species themselves are generated on the earth; or in a plan of vital organization immanent in nature, which gradually works itself out, in which the relations of logical and chronological affiliation between pure forms are just those which transformism presents as relations of real affiliation between living individuals; or, finally, in some unknown cause of life, which develops its effects as if they generated one another.
Paleontology, in spite of the insufficiency of its evidence, invites us to believe it has; for, where it makes out the order of succession of species with any precision, this order is just what considerations drawn from embryogeny and comparative anatomy would lead any one to suppose, and each new paleontological discovery brings transformism a new confirmation.
For this reason we think the language of transformism forces itself now upon all philosophy, as the dogmatic affirmation of transformism forces itself upon science. But then, we must no longer speak of life in general as an abstraction, or as a mere heading under which all living beings are inscribed.
TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION. The great philosophic invention of the English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. Nothing of the kind.
We wish only to explain in a word or two why we shall accept it, in the present work, as a sufficiently exact and precise expression of the facts actually known. The idea of transformism is already in germ in the natural classification of organized beings.
Darwin, he assured me, had brought forward no new discovery, but only a new hypothesis, and that only a small and particular hypothesis, whereby to explain the general theory of transformism.
In certain cases, the animal must have had to change its diet, to pass from live prey to vegetarian fare, which would entirely subvert its most essential characteristics. What should we say to the Wolf giving up mutton and browsing on grass, in obedience to the dictates of idleness? The boldest would shrink from such an absurd assumption. And yet transformism leads us straight to it.
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