104 THE CRITERIA OF LIVINGNESS 



Thirdly, there is another triad of qualities (a) effective be- 

 haviour, (b) registration of experiences and experiments, and (c) 

 variability. The common note here is agency, self-expression, 

 creativeness. (a) Behaviour, exhibited at many levels and in 

 diverse modes, is an organically determined concatenated series 

 of acts converging towards a definite result. Its common fea- 

 tures are correlation, individuality, and purposiveness. (b) The 

 effectiveness which characterises organic behaviour depends on 

 the organism's power of profiting by experience in the individ- 

 ual lifetime, or on the entailed results of ancestral experiments 

 (chiefly perhaps germinal variations), or, usually, on both, (c) 

 The crowning attribute and the most elusive is variability, the 

 organism's power but, more accurately perhaps, the germ-cell's 

 power of giving rise to something distinctively new. 



