a controversy as to how this microscope had originated, and that one
party maintained the man had made it little by little because he wanted
it, while the other declared this to be absurd and impossible; I ask,
would this latter party be justified in arguing that microscopes could
never have been perfected by degrees through the preservation of and
accumulation of small successive improvements inasmuch as men could not
have begun to want to use microscopes until they had had a microscope
which should show them that such an instrument would be useful to them,
and that hence there is nothing to account for the _beginning_ of
microscopes, which might indeed make some progress when once originated,
but which could never originate?

It might be pointed out to such a reasoner, firstly, that as regards any
acquired power the various stages in the acquisition of which he might be
supposed able to remember, he would find that logic notwithstanding, the
wish did originate the power, and yet was originated by it, both coming
up gradually out of something which was not recognisable as either power
or wish, and advancing through vain beating of the air, to a vague
effort, and from this to definite effort with failure, and from this to
definite effort with success, and from this to success with little
consciousness of effort, and from this to success with such complete
absence of effort that he now acts unconsciously and without power of
introspection, and that, do what he will, he can rarely or never draw a
sharp dividing line whereat anything shall be said to begin, though none
less certain that there has been a continuity in discontinuity, and a
discontinuity in continuity between it and certain other past things;
moreover, that his opponents postulated so much beginning of the
microscope as that there should be a dew-drop, even as our evolutionists
start with a sense of touch, of which sense all the others are
modifications, so that not one of them, but is resolvable into touch by
more or less easy stages; and secondly, that the question is one of fact
and of the more evident deductions therefrom, and should not be carried
back to those remote beginnings where the nature of the facts is so
purely a matter of conjecture and inference.

No plant or animal, then, according to our view, would be able to
conceive more than a very slight improvement on its organisation at a
given time, so clearly as to make the efforts towards it that