440 Living in a World of Change 



gressive. Is it not these very processes that have cuhninated 

 in the emergence not only of the human species, but of those 

 mental phenomena that are distinctive of man? And with 

 the rise of consciousness evolution takes on a new direction 

 that may well be " progressive " in the sense of forward- 

 moving, improving, ascending. 



Change without Progress 



Many grasp at *' evolution " as a philosophy of change 

 because from their experience and reflection they are made 

 to feel that every change cannot but be an improvement. 

 But as a scientific doctrine evolution is here rather cold- 

 blooded. Concretely, there remain first of all evidences of 

 primitive forms of plants and animals that have survived 

 through the ages in the same primitive stages. At every 

 stage of increasing complexity there remain such relics living 

 side by side with much more complex forms. And this is 

 just what we should expect. The observed facts regarding 

 the intricate interrelations of living forms suggest the mani- 

 fold expansion of living things in all directions and their in- 

 trusion into all the inter-spaces left by the others. This 

 means that, from the nature of living matter as an auto- 

 matically expanding system, there will be large organisms and 

 small ones, fast ones and slow ones, those that thrive in the 

 light and those that thrive in darkness, and so on. Now some 

 forms will necessarily diverge more from their ancestral 

 types than others, and from various stages already attained 

 departures will occur in many new directions — some of them 

 " downward," from a human point of view. 



There results from all this, in the second place, an adapta- 

 tion of living things to a great variety of conditions, some 

 demanding more specialized structures and functions than 

 others. In all of these situations, however, the living things 

 are equally well adapted. The pond snail need not be dis- 

 paraged because it has not attained the speed of the octopus, 

 or the oyster because in the adult stage it has no speed at all. 



