eration. The idea
they convey seems perfectly intelligible. Natural selection having been
compared with artificial selection, and the analogy pointed out, there
apparently remains no indefiniteness: the inconvenience being, however,
that the definiteness is of a wrong kind. The tacitly implied Nature
which selects, is not an embodied agency analogous to the man who
selects artificially; and the selection is not the picking out of an
individual fixed on, but the overthrowing of many individuals by
agencies which one successfully resists, and hence continues to live and
multiply. Mr. Darwin was conscious of these misleading implications. In
the introduction to his _Animals and Plants under Domestication_ (p. 6)
he says:--

"For brevity sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an
intelligent power; ... I have, also, often personified the word
Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity; but
I mean by nature only the aggregate action and product of many
natural laws,--and by laws only the ascertained sequence of
events."

But while he thus clearly saw, and distinctly asserted, that the factors
of organic evolution are the concrete actions, inner and outer, to which
every organism is subject, Mr. Darwin, by habitually using the
convenient figure of speech, was, I think, prevented from recognizing so
fully as he would otherwise have done, certain fundamental consequences
of these actions.

Though it does not personalize the cause, and does not assimilate its
mode of working to a human mode of working, kindred objections may be
urged against the expression to which I was led when seeking to present
the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms--the
survival of the fittest;[42] for in a vague way the first word, and in a
clear way the second word, calls up an anthropocentric idea. The
thought of survival inevitably suggests the human view of certain sets
of phenomena, rather than that character which they have simply as
groups of changes. If, asking what we really know of a plant, we exclude
all the ideas associated with the words life and death, we find that the
sole facts known to us are that there go on in the plant certain
inter-dependent processes, in presence of certain aiding and hindering
influences outside of it; and that in some cases a difference of
structure or a favourable set of circumstances, allows these
inter-dependent processes to go on