178 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



clusively to conservation or to loss, never to positive acqui- 

 sition in excess of equilibria! exigencies; what it acquires 

 it owes exclusively to the action of external factors. The 

 living unit, on the contrary, strives in its vital operations to 

 acquire something for itself, so that what it gets it owes to 

 itself and not (except in a very general sense) to the action 

 of external factors. All the actions of the living unit, both 

 upon itself and upon external matter, result sooner or later 

 in the acquisition on the part of the agent of a positive per- 

 fection exceeding and transcending the mere exigencies of 

 equilibration. The inorganic agent, on the contrary, when in 

 the state of tension, tends only to return to the equilibrial state 

 by alienation or expenditure of its energy; otherwise, it 

 tends merely to conserve, by virtue of inertia, the state of 

 rest or motion impressed upon it from without. In the 

 chemical changes of inorganic units, the tendency to loss is 

 even more in evidence. Such changes disrupt the integrity of 

 the inorganic unit and dissipate its energy-content, and the 

 unit cannot be reconstructed and recharged, except at the 

 expense of a more richly endowed inorganic unit. The living 

 organism, however, as we see in the case of the paramoecium 

 undergoing endomixis, is capable of counteracting exhaus- 

 tion by recharging itself. 



The difference between transitive and reflexive action is 

 not an accidental difference of degree, but an essential dif- 

 ference of kind. In reflexive actions, the source of the action 

 and the recipient of the effect or modification produced by 

 it are one and the same substantial unit or being. In transi- 

 tive actions, the receptive subject of the positive change is 

 an alien unit distinct from the unit, which puts forth the 

 action. Hence a reflexive action is not an action which is 

 less transitive; it is an action which is not at all transitive, 

 but intransitive. The difference, therefore, between the living 

 organism, which is capable of both reflexive and transitive 

 action, and the inorganic unit, which is only capable of transi- 

 tive action, is radical and essential. This being the case, an 



