GREAT STEPS IN EVOLUTION 109 



everything," has before him a nature- 

 symbol, one worth thinking about, and 

 that carefully, even furiously also. For here 

 it turns out that the teaching of the econo- 

 mists who have identified comfort with 

 progress have been so far right in unifying 

 them, no doubt; only they have been for- 

 getting that such progress tends to be 

 bought too dearly. Their gospel of :< getting 

 on' is not necessarily getting on; and 

 hence their much preached and yet more 

 prayed for 'success in life' so often turns 

 out the very reverse of success in living. 



Contrariwise, our bio-sociology tends to 

 justify the so-called 'unpractical.' 3 It is 

 essentially the free-living and self-supporting 

 creatures that really get on, that evolve in 

 the best sense. So the idealist adventurer 

 who loves to meet the 'bright eyes of 

 danger," who goes out to seek love and face 

 death, has true success in life, brief though 

 it be; and this not merely from the 'ro- 

 mantic' 1 point of view the philistines fancy 

 confined to novels, but from that rising 

 standpoint of evolutionist realism of which 

 morals in one age, religion in another, and 

 now art in our own, have each been the 

 presage. Thus in facing the ugliest facts of 

 lowest life we see them give way to the 

 noblest hopes of our own evolution. In 



