60 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



upon us. I mean the unity of phenomena — not 

 merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all 

 time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the 

 most important, but the unity of living and non- 

 living, demanding a monistic conception of the uni- 

 verse. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, 

 as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not 

 in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, 

 floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in 

 a Mediterranean bay) — the stars seem alien from 

 our life, alien or at best neutral. All that links us 

 to them is that we are built of the same stuff, the 

 same elements. 



But the last half-century has at least enlarged our 

 view so that we can perceive that we, as living 

 things, are not alien to the rest of life — that we 

 march in the same direction, and that our hostility 

 to and struggles with other organisms are in part 

 but the continuation of the old struggle, in part the 

 expression of the fact that we have acquired new 

 methods for dealing with the problems of existence. 



The origin of life itself, and its movement in time 

 — both these are found to face in the same direction 

 as ourselves. St. Paul wrote that all things work 

 together for good. That is an exaggeration: but 

 they work together so that the average level of the 

 good is raised, the potentialities of life are bettered. 

 In every time and every country, men have obscurely 

 felt that, although so much of the world, taken 

 singly, was evil, yet the clash of thing with thing. 



