CHAP, xv.] THE PJEDIGBEE AND ORIGIN OP THE CAT. 



525 



changes, and by phenomena without order, and apparently subject 

 to no law ? Surely it is the very reverse ! The transformations, 

 the successive embodiments of new ideas of all ranks and degrees, 

 which are daily taking place in countless myriads on all sides of us, take 

 place harmoniously and in due order. However singular or surprising 

 may be the process of evolution in certain cases, however round- 

 about its course, or unexpected its intermediate stages and ultimate 

 outcome, it is in each and every case a process carried on according 

 to definite internal laws to fulfil a precise * and predetermined end. 



What we find to be the case now, we ought, if we are to take 

 experience as our guide, to regard as having been the case ante- 

 cedently. Thus the process of specific evolution in the past will 

 have been no process effected by a fortuitous concourse of influences, 

 or by minute haphazard variations in all directions, but by a definite 

 system of internal law, aided and influenced in the past as it is 

 aided and influenced now, by the action of incident forces, also 

 operating according to law, and resulting in due and orderly "specific 

 genesis" 



15. The idea of an INTERNAL FORCE is a conception which we 

 cannot escape if we would adhere to the teaching of Nature. If, in 

 order to escape it, we were to consent to regard the instincts of 

 animals as exclusively due to the conjoint action of their environ- 

 ment and their physical needs, to what should we attribute the 

 origin of their physical needs their desire for food and safety, and 

 their sexual instincts ? If, for argument's sake, we were to grant 

 that these needs were the mere result of the active powers of the 

 cells which compose their tissues, the question but returns whence 

 had these cells their active \ powers, their aptitudes and needs ? 

 And if, by a still more absurd concession, we should grant that these 

 needs and aptitudes are the mere outcome of the physical properties 

 of their ultimate material constituents, the question still again 

 returns, and with redoubled force. That the actual world we see 

 about us should ever have been possible, its very first elements 

 must have possessed those definite, essential natures, and have had 

 implanted in them those internal laws and innate powers which 

 reason declares to be necessary to account for the subsequent out- 

 come. We must then, after all, concede at the end as much as we 

 need have conceded at the outset of the inquiry. 



Potent amongst the agents operating in the process of specific 

 evolution must be that internal, individual, psychical force that soul 

 or psyche which we have seen reason postulates as the most 

 important, though invisible, constituent of every concrete living whole. 

 It must play this predominant part, because it is by its action that 

 the whole multitudinous and diverse processes of life are co-ordinated 



* Some persons may think that the 

 occurrence of monstrous births, &c., con- 

 stitutes an objection to the above state- 

 ment. No one however imagines that 

 the fact of a man becoming lame through 



some accident is in contradiction with 

 the harmony of Nature's laws. But an 

 accident occurring before birth is no 

 more in contradiction with such harmony 

 than is an accident to an adult. 



