HISTORICAL SPECULATIONS 9 



if ever furnish combinations, as he supposed, that 

 are capable of Hving. On the contrary, they lead 

 rather to the final catastrophe of the organism. And 

 lastly, St. Hilaire's appeal to sudden and great 

 transformations, such as crocodile's egg hatching 

 into a bird, has exposed his view to too easy ridicule. 



But when all is said, St. Hilaire's conception of 

 evolution contains elements that form the back- 

 ground of our thinking today, for taken broadly, 

 the interaction between the organism and its envi- 

 ronment was a mechanistic conception of evolution 

 even though the details of the theory were inade- 

 quate to establish his contention. 



In our own time the French metaphysician Berg- 

 son in his Evolution Cr^eat^iee has proposed in mys- 

 tical form a thought that has at least a superficial 

 resemblance to St. Hilaire's conception. The re- 

 sponse of living things is precise, exact, yet not 

 mechanical in the sense at least in which we usually 

 employ the word mechanical. For Bergson claims 

 that the one chief feature of living material is that 

 it responds favorably to the situation in which it 

 finds itself, at least so far as lies within the possible 

 physical limitations of its organization. Evolution 

 has followed no preordained plan; it has had no 

 creator; it has brought about its own creation by 

 responding adaptively to each situation as it arose. 



But note: the man of science believes that the 

 organism responds today as it does, because at pres- 



