ORTHOGENESIS 347 



examples, to those who reflect without prejudice, that animals reason ; 

 and that in animals actions founded on reason become automatic and 

 are inherited. I have already pointed out in my Freiburg address. 



I describe as automatic actions those which, originally performed 

 consciously and voluntarily, in consequence of frequent practice, come 

 to be performed unconsciously and involuntarily. Herein I differ from 

 those who uee the term automatic as synonymous with reflex. 



I append these statements because they seem to square 

 with the symbiogenetic view of adaptation as here presented. 

 We have seen that organisms normally understand their own 

 business of life, though their understanding may be quite 

 different from what ours would have been, arrived at from the 

 human point of view. There is at least one sense in which man 

 is not the measure of all things. We have indeed seen that 

 organisms perform their part in life so well and this is what 

 matters most that they quite efficiently, if unconsciously, 

 fulfil those wider and onerous bio-economic duties on the 

 proper discharge of which all higher evolutionary develop- 

 ments depend. 



Xay, there is no reason why they should not excel in their 

 manifold ways of adapting themselves to their environment, 

 which after all is so much simpler than our own, and allows 

 of the whole undistracted attention of the organism being 

 accorded to this one matter of adaptation to a relatively 

 simpler and uniform environment. We are apt to forget that 

 organisms lead the simple life, and that this just because it 

 does not distract attention from, but rather concentrates it on 

 essentials has the effect of sharpening the senses, whilst in a 

 highly complex and pampered civilisation other things engage 

 most attention and these vital senses are allowed to lose their 

 acuteness. However puzzling, therefore, the adaptation of 

 many organisms appear, there is no reason to think that it is 

 so inexplicable in its very perfection as it seems to us, but we 

 may explain it as gradually acquired "experience" trans- 

 mitted and increased from generation to generation. 



" Chance never helps the men who nothing do." 



