28 g THE EVOLUTION OE SEX. 



becomes fixed in coral or ctenophore as a racial temperament. This 

 preponderance of passivity or activity (which we can read throughout, 

 in barnacle and insect, as well as in tortoise and swallow) once set up, 

 goes on accumulating till it meets reversal through environment or 

 other causes, and limitation or extinction through the agency of natural 

 selection, which, however, is more frequently a retarding force than an 

 accelerant of evolution. The problem of organic progress is thus to 

 be interpreted not merely as on conventional lines, by help of an 

 analogy derived from an age of mechanical progress which gives us 

 the watch, or sewing-machine, or tricycle. — by the cumulative patent- 

 ing, as it were, of useful improvements in detail. The essential 

 problem is not one of mechanism but of character, to which 

 incident is accessory but not fundamental, — not of details put 

 together, but of aggregate organic life or temperament. The life of 

 the individual or the species is essentially a unity, of which the specific 

 characters are but the symptoms, be their subsequent measure of 

 importance and utility in adaptation, their modification by environ- 

 ment, their enhancement or diminution by natural selection, what it 

 may. Our special study of the reproductive process has thus brought 

 us to the threshhold of a larger inquiry, the primary one of the organic 

 sciences, that of the factors of organic evolution. For it is in Nature, 

 as Schiller saw long ago in the human life, which this foreshadows: 

 ' ' While philosophers are disputing about the government of the 

 world, Hunger and Love are performing the task." 



