The Power That Preserves | My Web Site Page 011 Chapter 01 Page 01

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I still regard this idea as correct, but I attribute less importance to "organic selection" than I did at that time, in so far that I do not believe that it _alone_ could effect complex harmonious adaptations. Germinal selection now seems to me to play the chief part in bringing about such adaptations. Something the same is true of the principle I have called _Panmixia_. As I became more and more convinced, in the course of years, that the _Lamarckian principle_ ought not to be called in to explain the dwindling of disused parts, I believed that this process might be simply explained as due to the cessation of the conservative effect of natural selection. I said to myself that, from the moment in which a part ceases to be of use, natural selection withdraws its hand from it, and then it must inevitably fall from the height of its adaptiveness, because inferior variants would have as good a chance of persisting as better ones, since all grades of fitness of the part in question would be mingled with one another indiscriminately. This is undoubtedly true, as Romanes pointed out ten years before I did, and this mingling of the bad with the good probably does bring about a deterioration of the part concerned. But it cannot account for the steady diminution, which always occurs when a part is in process of becoming rudimentary, and which goes on until it ultimately disappears altogether. The process of dwindling cannot therefore be explained as due to panmixia alone: we can only find a sufficient explanation in germinal selection.

And thus the mystery of life is again repeated. The union of the living, microscopic bodies of the fertilizing principle with the new laid egg is followed by the growth of the two elements into a living creature, able to eat, to breathe, to see, to feel. In some unknown way the atom of fertilizing principle seems to have contained the whole life of the father-frog, for it can give to his sons and daughters any of his peculiarities, either of color, form, motion, or disposition; and the tiny egg seems to have contained the whole life of the mother-frog, and can give to her sons and daughters any of her peculiarities; though, as is true of all inheritance, the tadpoles, as the young frogs are called, share the natures of both parents, inheriting some peculiarities from the father and others from the mother.

Unconsciousness is no bar to livingness. Our conscious actions are a drop in the sea as compared with our unconscious ones. Could we know all the life that is in us by way of circulation, nutrition, breathing, waste and repair, we should learn what an infinitesimally small part consciousness plays in our present existence; yet our unconscious life is as truly life as our conscious life, and though it is unconscious to itself it emerges into an indirect and vicarious consciousness in our other and conscious self, which exists but in virtue of our unconscious self. So we have also a vicarious consciousness in others. The unconscious life of those that have gone before us has in great part moulded us into such men and women as we are, and our own unconscious lives will in like manner have a vicarious consciousness in others, though we be dead enough to it in ourselves.

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