ed, one can detect something of that sort of mystic
confidence in forces spontaneously directing life, which forms the very
essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations were precisely
calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first people may have
failed to see this; and we call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourens
when he objected to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to
nature a power of free choice. "Nature endowed with will! That was the
final error of last century; but the nineteenth no longer deals in
personifications."[246] In fact Darwin himself put his readers on their
guard against the metaphors he was obliged to use. The processes by which
he explains the survival of the fittest are far from affording any
indication of the design of some transcendent breeder. Nor, if we look
closely, do they even imply immanent effort in the animal; the sorting out
can be brought about mechanically, simply by the action of the environment.
In this connection Huxley could with good reason maintain that Darwin's
originality consisted in showing how harmonies which hitherto had been
taken to imply the agency of intelligence and will could be explained
without any such intervention. So, when later on, objective sociology
declares that, even when social phenomena are in question, all finalist
preconceptions must be distrusted if a science is to be constituted, it is
to Darwin that its thanks are due; he had long been clearing paths for it
which lay well away from the old familiar road trodden by so many theories
of evolution.

This anti-finalist doctrine, when fully worked out, was, moreover,
calculated to aid in the needful dissociation of two notions: that of
evolution and that of progress. In application to society these had
long been confounded; and, as a consequence, the general idea seemed
to be that only one type of evolution was here possible. Do we not
detect such a view in Comte's sociology, and perhaps even in Herbert
Spencer's? Whoever, indeed, assumes an end for evolution is naturally
inclined to think that only one road leads to that end. But those
whose minds the Darwinian theory has enlightened are aware that the
transformations of living beings depend primarily upon their
conditions, and that it is these conditions which are the agents of
selection from among individual variations. Hence, it immediately
follows that transformations are not necessarily improvements. Here,
Darwi