THE SHARK'S TEETH 



weakness and our insignificance, but also our inability 

 to escape the necessity of applying our productions 

 to their use. Since we feel this necessity so keenly, 

 we yield to it whole-heartedly and then imagine that 

 it must be so with Nature, despite Nature's greater 

 vastness and multiplicity. And when we do this, we 

 bring Nature down to our own level, whereas real 

 thought ought to consist in raising us up to hers, and 

 in trying to understand her as best we can. 



This is all metaphysics, I shall be told, this trying 

 to go beyond the everyday realm of patent facts, in 

 an attempt to find a new realm, a more general order, 

 in which we may see the relation of things more com- 

 pletely. These appeals to the indiscernible, I shall 

 be told further, have a certain praiseworthy merit, but 

 they are also dangerous, as is proved by the number 

 of odd and antiquated theories with which the history 

 of the natural sciences is filled. This is true. Never- 

 theless a certain qualification must be made to this 

 judgment. We are not dealing in metaphysical con- 

 cepts simply because we admit the presence in living 

 matter of a constructive power, always effective, which 

 is capable of ceaselessly producing new arrangements, 

 so that creation, instead of being considered as finished, 

 may be regarded as still going on. This creating 

 principle, this property of forma formans inherent 

 in substances endowed with life, is their main attribute, 

 their special kind of energy. We see it at work. To 

 discover its existence and to make it known is not to 

 go beyond the confines of legitimate thought. 



We seem to be a long way from our shark's teeth, 

 but they are still pertinent. They have supplied the 

 basis for this generalisation, which continues and com- 

 pletes that of the scale, recommending us, if we wish 

 to get at the truth, to overturn valuations which are 

 only too often arrived at without sufficient reflection. 

 As a matter of fact, there is no such thing as creation 

 by use, nor making perfect by using, nor the dwindling 

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