THE LIVING SUBSTANCE. 127 



[120] Though finally inexplicable, the phenomena may be 

 formulated in a way which at least unifies the difficulties and 

 places the problem in a form more easily grasped and handled, 

 when it, like all the radical questions already presented, is seen 

 to be a question that pertains to the substance as such. Like 

 them, it is but writ large in the organism ; like them, it may 

 also be tracked to the ultimate visible subdivisions of the sub- 

 stance and found to exist there unchanged in its nature. It 

 may be called tJie selective power of the living substance with 

 regard to its own environmejit, both general and specific. 



Turn where we will in the kingdom of living things, the 

 substance in all its complex phenomena, in all its manifold 

 forms and phases is still seen to be in act of either pursuing, 

 securing, disposing of, transmuting, or using as stimuli, its 

 peculiar internal environmental conditions, — the latter phe- 

 nomena being but varied aspects of the former. From the 

 amoeba to man, it is certain that the substance as organism 

 selects from the sum total of environmental opportunities what 

 it needs for its own specific internal environment, that is, the 

 environment for the substance as such in all its subdivisions. 



The most obvious form of this selection is seen in ingestion. 

 The cow eats plants, the tiger eats flesh, man eats both flesh 

 and plants and a thousand things besides, the creation of his 

 fancy; — but all eat as living substance seeking its own en- 

 vironment, for these acts of the substance as organism are 

 followed by kindred activities of the substance as such through- 

 out its most minute extensions, the inter- and intra-alveolar 

 filose activities being doubtless instrumental in attaining these 

 ends, — and osmosis as a means is largely provided for by the 

 physical form of the substance. (See above, New Structural 

 Formula.) 



[121] From a heterogeneous environment, common to all, 

 each substance self takes, then, what will preserve, or create, for 

 it its own special, internal, environmental conditions. Where 

 the initial selection is made broadly, roughly, with seeming 

 carelessness, or even wrongly by the substance as organism, 

 the substance as such makes choice again within its safe pre- 

 cincts, and again within its more secret haunts where we can 



