594 DISHARMONIES AND OTHER SHADOWS 



that is also adaptive. This idea must be gently transferred to 

 human life. Apart from multiplication altogether, apart 

 also from senility, which is often avoided with masterly suc- 

 cess, it seems in Man's case very doubtful that it is for the 

 good of the race that longevity should become too pronounced 

 a habit. There is profound wisdom in Goethe's saying that 

 Death is Nature's expert device for securing abundance of 

 life. 



8. Apparent Wastefulness. 



Another shadow is the apparent wastefulness. " So care- 

 ful of the type she seems, so careless of the single life." 

 The abundance of life has its correlate in the abundance of 

 death. " What a book," Darwin wrote, a " a devil's chaplain 

 might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and 

 horribly cruel works of nature ! ' (More Letters, Vol. I., p. 

 94, 1856). But we doubt whether he would have written 

 this a quarter of a century afterwards, when his insight into 

 the economy of Nature had grown clearer. We need not 

 doubt, for in 1881 he wrote: " If we consider the whole uni- 

 verse, the mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of chance 

 that is, without design or purpose ' (More Letters, Vol. 

 L, p. 395, 1881). 



Wastefulness is rather a question-begging epithet. The 

 abundance of small fry has made the life of higher creatures 

 possible. We do not say that the purpose of water-fleas is 

 to feed fishes, any more than we say that the purpose of 

 certain fishes is to feed man. What we say is that the extraor- 

 dinarily prolific multiplication of humble organisms affords 

 a stable foundation on which a higher life has been built. 

 The number of free-swimming larvae in the waters is beyond 

 our powers of picturing, and we think too little of the wonder 



