290 THE ISSUES OF LIFE 



pronouncement, have deprecated further inquiry, reminding 

 one of people who are nervous as to the manners of their 

 poor relations. The inquiry is interesting, for if we have 

 made the great assumption that the system of lives which 

 we call Animate Nature is an expression of something more 

 spiritual and abiding than itself a difficulty will arise if 

 the tactics are those of " a dismal cockpit ". 



Those who believe that Nature is (as Prof. William James 

 phrased it) " the external staging of a many-storied universe, 

 in which spiritual forces have the last word ", will have 

 to face a great difficulty if what is often reported about 

 Nature be even approximately true, that her only word to 

 man is " Each for himself, and extinction take the hind- 

 most ". We turn again therefore to our task of justifying 

 the ways of Nature to man by the method of accurate de- 

 scription. 



In inquiring into the general tactics of Animate Nature, 

 which we have seen to be pervaded with vitality, with men- 

 tality, and with beauty, we must avoid two extremes. The 

 one focusses attention on Move', the other on ' hunger'; 

 the one emphasises race-preserving, the other self -preserving 

 activities. On the one hand, there is a wealth of illustrations 

 of parental care, of conjugal devotion, of mutual aid, of 

 loyalty to kin, of subordination of the individual to the 

 life of the herd or hive, in short, of ' altruistic behaviour ', 

 if we can use the term in inverted commas to indicate that 

 it is below the level of strictly ethical conduct. 



The other extreme is appalled by the daemonic element in 

 Nature, the non-moral callousness, the wastefulness, the ruth- 

 lessness, the egoism, the mere 'weather'. It is well ex- 

 pressed in William James's famous essay Is Life Worth Liv- 

 ing? "Visible nature," he says, "is all plasticity and 



