294 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



order, in its own way, providing the means to profitable 

 exchange, or growth. 



The plant in the main lives in, and on the larger cir- 

 culation of inanimate nature, and the chief materials 

 and forces essential to its being are carried to its very 

 doors by a benevolent, cosmic circulation of light, and 

 air, and water, and soil. The continuity of the rela- 

 tively simple life of the plant is assured by the wide 

 distribution and inexhaustible abundance of these sup- 

 plies and by the stability of their sources. 



In the animal, these larger, more fundamental 

 methods of the plant are supplemented by individual 

 freedom of movement. By means of its adaptive neuro- 

 muscular responses, and by means of its complex in- 

 ternal system of transmission and exchange, the animal 

 may move bodily toward more specialized sources of 

 supplies and thread its way between more particu- 

 larized sources of danger. With ever increasing profit, 

 it is conveyed along the more localized food lines to 

 their source and along the more localized danger lines, 

 away from their source, uniting with what is good for 

 it and avoiding what is evil. The progress and con- 

 tinuity of this more subtle life is automatically insured! 

 by a more and more elaborate organic cooperation 

 within, and by better bodily conduct in reference to the 

 outer world, which constantly tend to reduce the per- 

 centage of errors, to substitute certainties for probabili- 

 ties, to increase the rate and the volume of cooperation 

 and exchange. 



In man, the chief mechanisms of plant and animal 

 life are still utilized, but they are heavily reinforced 

 by his new instrument, the imagination, the eyes and 

 legs of his spiritual body, the real seven-league boots 



