Law of Proenvironiiient 207 



the direction, degree, and amount of resultant response called 

 forth could be precisely foretold. The latter is often fortuitu- 

 ous, non-predicable, and adaptive on the moment to temporary 

 conditions of the organism. Proenvironment always antici- 

 pates and is associated with an ultimately expressed energizing 

 polarity of the organism; struggle for existence is often passive 

 or resisting or non-polar in expression. 



As in our treatment of the organic energies, so here we pro- 

 pose to follow the somewhat illogical, but yet highly practical, 

 method of proceeding from the most complex — ^but in many 

 respects best known — to the simplest but as yet obscurely 

 known. 



All who have surveyed Milan Cathedral from its surround- 

 ings — unfortunately however all too constrained — , who have 

 moved alongside the outer walls, who have passed in under 

 the marvelously detailed and finished entrance gateways, 

 who have wandered along the inner walls and aisles, who have 

 ascended the stairways to the galleries, and who finally have 

 explored the carved and elaborately finished nooks and recesses 

 of the outer roof, must surely have asked themselves the ques- 

 tion: Could all this possibly have 'been planned and thought 

 out by a single human brain .^ 



The history of the conception of the cathedral is fairly well 

 known, and in light of such knowledge, and of our knowledge 

 of similar edifices, we may fully accept it that such was truly 

 the case, even though the building itself took centuries for 

 completion, and called forth the energies of many other minds 

 and hands for its construction. 



Similarly when one stands by a modern newspaper printing 

 machine that is receiving, distributing, printing on both sides, 

 drying, folding, and delivering the rolls of i)aper as finished 

 newspapers, that are spread over T\'ith the world's items, one 

 can scarcely conceive on first thought that the complicated 

 interacting machine was planned and worked out in the brain 

 of one man, while as yet no metal nor paper were around. 



But in both cases, and in many like conceptions of the human 

 intellect, we know that both constructions gradually arose 



