he phrase "Vertebre pensante."[232]

In fact, however, it is a real explanation of how a man lives to say that
he lives independently, on his own income, instead of being supported by
his relatives and friends. In the same way, there is fully as real a
distinction between the production of new specific manifestations entirely
_ab externo_, and by the production of the same through an innate force and
tendency, the determination of which into action is occasioned by {231}
external circumstances.

To say that organisms possess this innate power, and that by it new species
are from time to time produced, is by no means a mere assertion that they
_are_ produced, and in an unknown mode. It is the negation of that view
which deems external forces alone sufficient, and at the same time the
assertion of something positive, to be arrived at by the process of
_reductio ad absurdum_.

All physical explanations result ultimately in such conceptions of innate
power, or else in that of will force. The far-famed explanation of the
celestial motions ends in the conception that every particle of matter has
the innate power of attracting every other particle directly as the mass,
and inversely as the square of the distance.

We are logically driven to this positive conception if we do not accept the
view that there is no force but volition, and that all phenomena whatever
are the immediate results of the action of intelligent and self-conscious
will.

We have seen that the notion of sudden changes--saltatory actions in
nature--has received countenance from Professor Huxley.[233] We must
conceive that these jumps are orderly, and according to law, inasmuch as
the whole cosmos is such. Such orderly evolution harmonizes with a
teleology derived, not indeed from external nature directly, but from the
mind of man. On this point, however, more will be said in the next chapter.
But, once more, if new species are not manifested by the action of external
conditions upon minute indefinite individual differences, in what precise
way may we conceive that manifestation to have taken place?

Are new species now evolving, as they have been from time to time evolved?
If so, in what way and by what conceivable means?

{232}
In the first place, they must be produced by natural action in pre-existing
material, or by supernatural action.

For reasons to be given in the next ch