Problems of Life and Mind. Second series by George Henry Lewes (best contemporary novels TXT) 📕

99. That organized substance has the property of nourishing itself by assimilating from its internal medium substances there present in an unorganized state, and that this is followed by a development or differentiation of structure, is familiar to every inquirer.

Every one who has pursued embryological researches, and in a lesser degree every one who has merely read about them, must have been impressed by this marvel of marvels: an exceedingly minute portion of living matter, so simple in aspect that a line will define it, passes by successive modifications into an organism so complex that a treatise is needed to describe it; not only do the cells in which the ovum and the spermatozoon originate, pass into a complex organism, reproducing the forms and features of the parents, and with these the constitutional peculiarities of the parents (their longevity, their diseases, their mental dispositions, nay, their very tricks and habits), but they may reproduce the form and features, the dispositions and diseases, of a grandfather or great-grandfather, which had lain dormant in the father or mother. Consider for an instant what this implies. A microscopic cell of albuminous compounds, wholly without trace of organs, not appreciably distinguishable from millions of other cells, does nevertheless contain within it the “possibilities” of an organism so complex and so special as that of a Newton or a Napoleon. If ever there was a case when the famous Aristotelian notion of a “potential existence” seemed justified, assuredly it is this. And although we can only by a fallacy maintain the oak to be contained in the acorn, or the animal contained in the ovum, the fallacy is so natural, and indeed so difficult of escape, that there is no ground for surprise when physiologists, on first learning something of development, were found maintaining that the perfect organism existed already in the ovum, having all its lineaments in miniature, and only growing into visible dimensions through the successive stages of evolution.44 The preformation of the organism seemed an inevitable deduction from the opinions once universal. It led to many strange, and some absurd conclusions; among them, to the assertion that the original germ of every species contained within it all the countless individuals which in process of time might issue from it; and this in no metaphysical “potential” guise, but as actual boxed-up existences (emboîtés); so that Adam and Eve were in the most literal sense progenitors of the whole human race, and contained their progeny already shaped within them, awaiting the great accoucheur, time.

100. This was the celebrated “emboîtement” theory. In spite of obvious objections it gained scientific acceptance, because physiologists could not bring themselves to believe that so marvellous a structure as that of a human organism arose by a series of successive modifications, or because they could not comprehend how it was built up, part by part, into forms so closely resembling the parent-forms. That many and plausible reasons pleaded in favor of this opinion is evident in the fact that illustrious men like Haller, Bonnet, Vallisneri, Swammerdamm, Réaumur, and Cuvier, were its advocates; and if there is not a sigle physiologist of our day who accepts it, or who finds any peculiar difficulty in following the demonstrations of embryologists, how from the common starting-point of a self-multiplying epithelial cell parts so diverse as hairs, nails, hoofs, scales, feathers, crystalline lens, and secreting glands may be evolved, or how from the homogeneous germinal membrane the complex organism will arise, there are very few among the scorners of the dead hypothesis who seem capable of generalizing the principles which have destroyed it, or can conceive that the laws of Evolution apply as rigorously to the animal and vegetable kingdoms as to the individual organisms. The illustrious names of those who advocated the preformation hypothesis may serve to check our servile submission to the authorities so loudly proclaimed as advocates of the fixity of species. The more because the two doctrines have a common parentage. The one falls with the other, and no array of authorities can arrest the fall. That the manifold differentiations noticeable in a complex organism should have been evolved from a membrane wholly destitute of differences is a marvel, but a marvel which Science has made intelligible. Yet the majority of those to whom this has been made intelligible still find an impossibility in admitting that the manifold forms of plant and animal were successively evolved from equally simple origins. They relinquish the hypothesis of preformation in the one case, and cling to it in the other. Evolution, demonstrable in the individual history, seems preposterous in the history of the class. And thus is presented the instructive spectacle of philosophers laughing at the absurdities of “preformation,” and yet exerting all their logic and rhetoric in defence of “creative fiats”—which is simply the preformation hypothesis “writ large.”

101. It would not be difficult to show that the doctrine of Epigenesis, with which Wolff forever displaced the doctrine of Preformation, leads by an inevitable logic to the doctrine of universal Evolution; and that we can no more understand the appearance of a new organism which is not the modification of some already existing organism, than we can understand the sudden appearance of a new organ which is not the modification of some existing structure. In the one case as in the other we may disguise the process under such terms as creative fiat and preformation; but these terms