But Darwinism "produces its transformations and differences out of nothing" {114}.
It is true that Darwin, when considering natural selection, leaves out of account the causes which have produced the alterations in separate individuals, and deals in the first place with the way in which such individual deviations gradually become the characteristics of a race, variety or species.
To Darwin it was of less immediate importance to discover these causes -- which up to the present are in part absolutely unknown, and in part can only be stated in quite general terms -- than to find a rational form in which their effects become fixed, acquire permanent significance. It is true that in doing this Darwin attributed to his discovery too wide a field of action, made it the sole agent in the alteration of species and neglected the causes of the repeated individual variations, concentrating rather on the form in which these variations become general; but this is a mistake which he shares with most other people who make any real advance.
Moreover, if Darwin produces his individual transformations out of nothing, and in so doing applies exclusively "the wisdom of the breeder" {125}, the breeder, too, must produce out of nothing his transformations in animal and plant forms which are not merely imaginary but real. But once again, the man who gave the impetus to investigate how exactly these transformations and differences arise is no other than Darwin.
In recent times the idea of natural selection was extended, particularly by Haeckel, and the variation of species conceived as a result of the mutual interaction of adaptation and heredity, in which process adaptation is taken as the factor which produces variations, and heredity as the preserving factor. This is also not regarded as satisfactory by Herr Dühring.
"Real adaptation to conditions of life which are offered or withheld by nature presupposes impulses and actions determined by ideas. Otherwise the adaptation is only apparent, and the causality operative thereupon does not rise above the low grades of the physical, chemical and plant-physiological"{D. Ph. 115}.
Once again it is the name which makes Herr Dühring angry. But whatever name he may give to the process, the question here is whether variations in the species of organisms are produced through such processes or not.
And again Herr Dühring gives no answer.
"If, in growing, a plant takes the path along which it will receive most light, this effect of the stimulus is nothing but a combination of physical forces and chemical agents, and any attempt to describe it as adaptation -- not metaphorically, but in the strict sense of the word --must introduce a spiritistic confusion into the concepts" {115}.
Such is the severity meted out to others by the very man who knows exactly by whose will nature does one thing or another, who speaks of nature's subtlety and even of her will! Spiritistic confusion, yes -- but where, in Haeckel or in Herr Dühring?
And not only spiritistic, but also logical confusion. We saw that Herr Dühring insists with might and main on establishing the validity in nature of the concept of purpose:
"The relation between means and end does not in the least presuppose a conscious intention" {102}.
What, then, is adaptation without conscious intention, without the mediation of ideas, which he so zealously opposes, if not such unconscious purposive activity?
If therefore tree-frogs and leaf-eating insects are green, desert animals sandy-yellow, and animals of the polar regions mainly snow-white in colour, they have certainly not adopted these colours on purpose or in conformity with any ideas; on the contrary, the colours can only be explained on the basis of physical forces and chemical agents. And yet it cannot be denied that these animals, because of those colours, are purposively adapted to the environment in which they live, in that they have become far less visible to their enemies. In just the same way the organs with which certain plants seize and devour insects alighting on them are adapted to this action, and even purposively adapted. Consequently, if Herr Dühring insists that this adaptation must be effected through ideas, he as much as says, only in other words, that purposive activity must also be brought about through ideas, must be conscious and intentional.
And this brings us, as is usually the case in his philosophy of reality, to a purposive creator, to God.
"An explanation of this kind used to be called deism, and was not thought much of" -- Herr Dühring tells us -- "but on this matter, too, views now seem to have been reversed" {111}.
From adaptation we now pass on to heredity. Here likewise, according to Herr Dühring, Darwinism is completely on the wrong track. The whole organic world, Darwin is said to have asserted, descended from one primordial being, is so to speak the progeny of one single being. Dühring states that, in Darwin's view, there is no such thing as the independent parallel lines of homogeneous products of nature unless mediated by common descent;and that therefore Darwin and his retrospectively directed views had perforce to come to an end at the point where the thread of begetting, or other form of propagation, breaks off {111}.
The assertion that Darwin traced all existing organisms back to one primordial being is, to put it politely, a product of Herr Dühring's "own free creation and imagination" {43}. Darwin expressly says on the last page but one of his Origin of species , sixth edition, that he regards "all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings ".
