122 ANDREWS. 



antagonism of the individual to that truth is merely a useful 

 factor in the fact. (See Fosterhood and Heredity.) 



[113] Degeneration, or simplification of form and structure, 

 are often as useful to the substance as increased complexity or 

 emphasis of function. Its business is to use or to evade its 

 environmental conditions. Nature busies herself ceaselessly 

 with and for the living substance as such. Transplanting, 

 grafting, pruning, and fostering she still keeps it fresh, young 

 and unwearied. The separation of one portion of it from 

 another in those masses which we call individuals means some- 

 thing quite different to her. To her the living substance is 

 everywhere continuous. The strange, inseparable, duplex or 

 triplex relation of parent and offspring substance is but a 

 single though strong hint of her attitude in this respect. 

 (See Fosterhood.) 



[114] Only when the biologist knows his substance directly 

 in living states can he learn it argumentatively from preserved 

 material in cases where the living states are perforce hidden 

 from him. He must choose to know it as a living substance 

 rather than as dead coral reefs of structure. He must study it 

 as activity rather than as product ; — as a ceaseless becoming, 

 rather than as an achieved and rigid fact. Chief of all that 

 these researches hope to accomplish is to tempt the biologist 

 from the artificial, the dogmatic, the systematic, mode of 

 study; to tempt him to observe the living substance in its 

 haunts of structure, in the same way that a naturalist watches 

 the habit of the organism as such; to tempt him to a pursuit 

 of substance life, substance structure, and above all substance 

 habit. These he will surely find so absorbing that his micro- 

 tome and parafRne bath will rust to uselessness on his shelf 

 before he next turns to take them down, — after such patient 

 devotion of seeing what is to be seen without them, that 

 he will to some extent know what he is looking for by their 

 aid. 



If the biologist, in such a naturalist-like pursuit of the phe- 

 nomena of the substance will cultivate the naive rather than the 

 learned standpoint ; if he will isolate and perfect so far as pos- 

 sible his animal faculties and perceptions, such as wild animals 



