PATTEN— COOPERATION AS A FACTOR IN EVOLUTION. 511 



species. These apparent gaps would still be present, even though the 

 records were complete, 



i6. Growth follows the easiest and most profitable lines of con- 

 veyance, and its products accumulate along the lines of least resist- 

 ance. Thus the form and structure, or morphology, of a given 

 organism is the physical machinery of life and the outward expres- 

 sion of its internal methods of cooperative action. Life (physiol- 

 ogy) is the act of creating that machinery. 



The rapid rate, the certainty, and the precision of embryonic 

 growth reveal the efficiency of the initial, established methods of 

 organic cooperation. The universal onset of individual senility and 

 death — the one the accumulation, the other the culmination of un- 

 coordinated growth — reveals the present imperfections in the methods 

 of organic cooperation. But the perpetual renewal and reinforce- 

 ment of individual life, to which evolution testifies, reveal the larger 

 process, and are an assurance of the immortality and perpetual prog- 

 ress of organized nature. 



17. Cooperation in the inner life of the individual is a pre- 

 requisite to cooperation in the outer life. It is the means by which 

 it attains greater power and that larger physical volume that inevi- 

 tably goes with larger power; and this larger organic power of the 

 individual is the instrument by which it finds the larger sources of 

 supplies, and the better ways of cosmic and social cooperation ; it is 

 the instrument by which it attains that which is good for itself, and 

 avoids that which is evil. 



And the demands of its larger volume is an added obligation for 

 better internal and external cooperation in self-preservation. 



18. The same laws which prevail in the inner and outer life of 

 animals and plants prevail in the social life of man. Man's social 

 progress is measured by the degree to which he has extended the 

 mutually profitable give and take of cooperative action beyond him- 

 self, into the family, tribe, and state, and into the world of life at 

 large. The chief agents of civilization — language, commerce, sci- 

 ence, literature, art, and religion — are the larger and more enduring 

 instruments of conveyance which better enable the part and the 

 whole to avoid that which is evil and to find that which is good, and 

 which yield a larger surplus for freedom. 



