THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 45 



III. The Increment of Mutual Service and Rightness 



in Evolution 



The supreme attribute of nature, therefore, is per- 

 petual growth, or the creation and organization of new 1 J \ 

 individualities on an ever larger and more enduring 1 

 scale. To that end she is ever building in advance 

 the foundations of her enterprises; sowing abroad the 

 ambassadors of her secret purpose; ever creating and 

 destroying, but never falling back to quite the old 

 levels, nor failing to surmount the new. 



But wherein then is the gain? What is it which 

 grows, and wherein is the profit? How can we express 

 the idea of creation without running counter to that 

 inexorable law of conservation, the bed rock of science 

 and experience, which declares that the total content 

 of those indefinable things called matter and energy is 

 constant, and can neither be created nor destroyed? 

 Even so, is not the creative power of nature equally 

 manifest in the overwhelming fact of evolution and 

 organization? Does not better "organization," which 

 is the physical expression of better cooperative action, 

 always create something new, some architectural in- 

 dividuality, which could not have existed without it, 

 and which did not previously exist in the cooperating 

 agents? Gain, then, there is, if life and organization 

 and architecture is an advance over chaos. 



But the gain which springs from the organization 

 of materials and forces, which otherwise were mere 

 aggregations, is due primarily to some "improvement" 

 in their relative distribution, resulting in what we can 

 only designate as the "right" 1 distribution for creating 



1 See Rita, (Hindoo) way of the world, and Too, a Chinese equivalent. 



