THE BREATH OF LIFE 



eye; it is light meeting an indwelling need in the or- 

 ganism, which amounts to an active creative princi- 

 ple, that begets the eye. With fish in underground 

 waters this need does not arise; hence they have no 

 sight. Fins and wings and legs are developed to 

 meet some end of the organism, but if the organism 

 were not charged with an expansive or developing 

 force or impulse, would those needs arise? 



Why should the vertebrate series have risen 

 through the fish, the reptile, the mammal, to man, 

 unless the manward impulse was inherent in the first 

 vertebrate; something that struggled, that pushed 

 on and up from the more simple to the more com- 

 plex forms? Why did not unicellular life always re- 

 main unicellular? Could not the environment have 

 acted upon it endlessly without causing it to change 

 toward higher and more complex forms, had there 

 not been some indwelling aboriginal tendency to- 

 ward these forms? How could natural selection, or 

 any other process of selection, work upon species 

 to modify them, if there were not something in 

 species pushing out and on, seeking new ways, 

 new forms, in fact some active principle that is 

 modifiable? 



Life has risen by stepping-stones of its dead self 

 to higher things. Why has it risen? Why did it 

 not keep on the same level, and go through the 

 cycle of change, as the inorganic does, without at- 

 taining to higher forms? Because, it may be re- 



