328 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
The great names to which the steady inductive advance of zoology has been
due during these periods, have kept aloof from any hypothesis on the origin
of species. One only, in connection with his paleontological discoveries,
with his development of the law of irrelative repetition and of homologies,
including the relation of the latter to an archetype, has pronounced in favor
of the view of the origin of species by continuously operative creational
law; but he, at the same time, has set forth some of the strongest objections
or exceptions to the hypothesis of the nature of that law as a progressively
and gradually transmutational one (Owen, 1860, in Hull, 1973, p. 184).Lest the term "creational law" still seem ambiguous, and lest anyone put the
wrong name to the description, Owen later became more explicit. (In the jargon of
Owen's day, a secondary cause operated under natural law, thus representing the
subject matter of science. God, as "first cause," may have established natural laws,
and therefore secondary causes, at the beginning of time, but nature then unfolds
under these invariable laws, thus defining the domain of science): "Owen has long
since stated his belief that some preordained law or secondary cause is operative in
bringing about the change" (Owen, 1860, in Hull, 1973, p. 210).
I acknowledge Owen's opacity and shiftiness, but I also think that we should
take him at face value here, for his claim follows his earlier writings, and also
accords with the standard view of most formalist thinkers, especially Geoffroy. I
believe that Owen had, for more than a decade before the Origin appeared,
accepted a limited form of evolution—within archetypes, and along channels
preordained by archetypal constraints. He never accepted global transmutation, for
his brand of limited evolution could not generate the archetypes themselves (which
stand as primitive terms, or "givens" in his system), but could only produce variety
within their permitted channels. I don't know how to read the famous last lines of
the Nature of Limbs (see p. 322), except as a genuine statement of the usual
formalist commitment to evolution in this admittedly restricted but entirely
legitimate sense: "To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession
and progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed we are as
yet ignorant. ... But if, without derogation of the Divine power, we may conceive
the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term 'Nature' ..." (1849,
p. 86).
If we thus accept Owen as at least a halfhearted evolutionist long before the
Origin, then the basis of his unhappiness with Darwin becomes easier to grasp.
Darwin mocked Owen's caution, consumed his precious archetype, made evolution
global, and then proposed a central mechanism of change (natural selection) in the
functionalist mode, diametrically opposed to Owen's formalist inclinations. Owen
despised the extent and character of Darwin's evolutionism, but not the idea of
evolution itself. All ideologists know that the enemy within provokes more
intellectual danger and emotional distress than the enemy without.