He wished to be shown
that changes in form caused evolution in force; that chemical or
mechanical energy had by natural selection and minute changes,
under uniform conditions, converted itself into thought. The
ganoid fish seemed to prove -- to him -- that it had selected
neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right
in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in
intensity only by help of outside force. To him, the ganoid was a
huge perplexity, none the less because neither he nor the ganoid
troubled Darwinians, but the more because it helped to reveal
that Darwinism seemed to survive only in England. In vain he
asked what sort of evolution had taken its place. Almost any
doctrine seemed orthodox. Even sudden conversions due to mere
vital force acting on its own lines quite beyond mechanical
explanation, had cropped up again. A little more, and he would be
driven back on the old independence of species.
What the ontologist thought about it was his own affair, like
the theologist's views on theology, for complexity was nothing to
them; but to the historian who sought only the direction of
thought and had begun as the confident child of Darwin and Lyell
in 1867, the matter of direction seemed vital. Then he had
entered gaily the door of the glacial epoch, and had surveyed a
universe of unities and uniformities.
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