THE NATURAL PROVIDENCE 



degrees, yet we are bound to ask what made it split 

 off at all? — and how it was that the first unicellu- 

 lar life contained the promise and the potency of all 

 the life of to-day? Such questions take us into deep 

 waters where our plummet-line finds no bottom. It 

 suits my reason better to say there is no solution 

 than to accept a solution which itself needs solution, 

 and still leaves us where we began. 



The adjustment of non-living bodies to each 

 other seems a simple matter, but in considering the 

 adaptations of living bodies to one another, and to 

 their environment, we are confronted with a much 

 harder problem. Life is an active principle, not in 

 the sense that gravity and chemical reactions are 

 active principles, but in a quite different sense. 

 Gravity and chemical reactions are always the 

 same, inflexible and uncompromising; but life is 

 ever variable and adaptive; it will take half a loaf if 

 it cannot get a whole one. Gravity answers yea and 

 nay. Life says, "Probably; we will see about it; we 

 will try again to-morrow." The oak-leaf will become 

 an oak-ball to accommodate an insect that wants a 

 cradle and a nursery for its young; it will develop 

 one kind of a nursery for one insect and another 

 kind for a different insect. 



in 

 As far as I have got, or ever hope to get, toward 

 solving the problem of the universe is to see clearly 



97 



