70 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nothing of outness and inness. They shine through the ma- 

 terials which they build up and mold, as light shines through 

 the clearest glass. Even the most purely physical of those con- 

 cerned are independent of such relations. Gravitation knows 

 nothing of inness and outness. The very air, which seems so 

 external to us, does not merely bathe or lave the skin, but per- 

 meates the blood, and its elements are the very breath of life 

 in every tissue of the body. The more secret forces of vitality 

 deal at their will with outness and inness. The external sur- 

 faces of one stage are folded in and become most secret recesses 

 at another. Organs which are outside in one animal, and are 

 conspicuously flourished in the face of day with exquisite orna- 

 ment of color and of structure,* are in another animal hid away 

 and carefully covered up. Nay, there are many cases in which 

 all these changes are conducted in the same animal at different 

 periods of life, and during conscious and unconscious intervals 

 the whole creature is reformed to fit it for new surroundings, 

 for new media, and with new apparatuses adapted to them. 



If Mr. Spencer wishes to cast any fresh light upon those 

 factors of organic evolution respecting which he now confesses 

 that Darwin's language and his own have been alike defective, 

 he must fix our attention on something deeper than the differ- 

 ences between every organism and its own skin. His selection 

 of this most superficial kind of difference as the first to dwell 

 upon, is not merely wanting — it is erroneous. It hides and leads 

 us off the scent of another kind of outsidedness and insidedness 

 which is really and truly fundamental ; namely, the insided- 

 ness, the self-containedness, of every organism as a whole with 

 reference to all external forces. Nobody has pointed this out 

 more clearly in former years than Mr. Spencer himself. The 

 grand distinction between the organic and the inorganic lies in 

 this — that the organic is not passive under the touch or impact 

 of external force, but responds, if it responds at all, with the 

 play of counter-forces which are essentially its own. Organic 

 bodies are not simply moved. They move themselves. They 

 have " self-mobility." f They are so constituted that even when 

 an external force acts as an excitement or a stimulus, the or- 

 ganic forces which emerge and act are much more complex and 

 important — so much so that as compared with the results pro- 

 duced by these organic forces the direct results of the incident 

 forces are " quite obscured." J Mr. Spencer even confesses that 

 these two kinds of action are so different in their own nature 

 that in strictness they " should not be dealt with together." 



* As in the nudibranchiate moUusca. 



f Page 757. (" Popular Science Monthly," vol. xxix, p. 62.) 



X " Principles of Biology," vol. i, p. 43. 



