BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 157 



port. It will be convenient to consider them as a 

 whole under the above heading. 



The directive influence of an old and well estab- 

 lished business on the partners to it increases with its 

 organized momentum and that of the social system in 

 which it has developed. He who holds an inherited 

 position in that business is thereby subject to certain 

 negative restrictions and positive compulsions, and en- 

 dowed, perforce, with a part of the constructive right- 

 ness of both systems which he and his forbears helped 

 to create. 



So also it is with the momentous creative business of 

 nature. Every individual endowment, or addition to 

 that system, is subject to its directive influence; and 

 the endowment itself carries with itself its own restric- 

 tions and compulsions to constructive action. 



i. Cosmic Discipline. In this sense the cosmic 

 system imposes its corrective discipline on life at large, 

 and from the very outset rigidly defines the limits of 

 its habitat, and the scope of its activities. Within 

 these broad restrictions and compulsions, physical and 

 chemical, provincial and climatic, life is free to grow 

 as best it may, subject only to those ever narrowing 

 limitations which life itself imposes on itself with in- 

 creasing precision. But otherwise the cosmic environ- 

 ment is a blunt tool that has little or no power to di- 

 rect the internal structural plans of life, or to inter- 

 fere with the detail of its domestic economy; for plants 

 and animals, when subject, for age-long periods, to 

 either essentially the same, or even to widely different 

 provincial conditions, still preserve the same wealth of 

 variety in structural details, as well as the construc- 

 tive peculiarities of their class and order. 



