It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select. The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water. Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually get an accumulation of variation, and widely different types will come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur with sufficient steadiness for accumulation to be possible. In the body of Mr. Darwin’s book the variations are supposed to be mainly due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection, therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the peroration the position is reversed _in toto_; the selection is now made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function; here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning. We are such slaves of words that, seeing the words “natural selection” employed—and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words “natural selection”—it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.
And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not perfectly well know what he had done. Mr. Darwin edited and re-edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words “by the Creator,” which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain. Even if in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long before he revised the “Origin of Species” for the last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.