WCP7241

[1] [p. 248]

Princeton, N. J., Nov. 9, 1902.

Alfred R. Wallace, Esq.,

My dear Sir:

I received with great pleasure your note of response to my sending of my book on Development and Evolution. I note your citations of your views in regard to the important place of mind in evolution and I regret not having been prepared to cite them in the book. My own position — as you may have noticed — gives consciousness a place even in the lower forms, inasmuch as it considers consciousness as a great "accommodation" (or adaptation) agent which has its great importance in the principal of organic selection, i. e., as supplementary and screening inadequate and useless congenital variations. This, I suppose, you had not suggested.

This brings up the general question of utility as attaching to variations purely congenital, and in this I think I am obliged to differ from your position as I understand it. I think that no congenital variations mature without a certain degree or amount of modification and accommodation (which is more or less alternative or optional in its working out in different environments). Utility, in almost all cases, attaches to the joint production of variation and modification: hence you and others are wrong in supposing that minute variation with selection is a sufficient theory. Minute variation must be developed and matured in this or that direction before the incidence [2] [p. 249] of the selection. So the supplementing process of individual accommodation must be recognized especially when, working in the same direction for successive generations, it gives a trend or direction to the evolution, which the mere fact of fortuitous variation (considered apart from individual accommodation) would not have produced. This seems to me to be an extension of selectionist principles and a new resource against vitalism (determinate variations, etc.,) and Lamarckism, and I should have thought it would appear valuable to you. For example, it gives a mode of operation of consciousness and intelligence, as using and rendering useful minute variations; and mind thus becomes an intrinsic factor of a directive sort. How do you, otherwise, bring consciousness into the working of the process of evolution? Besides the direct selection of variations in mental endowment, I find mental endowment critical as supplementing all sorts of physical characters.

Believe me with the highest personal respect and regard

Sincerely yours,

J. Mark Baldwin.