ii.l DEVELOPMENT OF ANIMAL LIFE 127 



the whole of the living world as a construction, and a 

 construction analogous to a human work. All the pieces 

 have been arranged with a view to the best possible func- 

 tioning of the machine. Each species has its reason for 

 existence, its part to play, its allotted place; and all join 

 together, as it were, in a musical concert, wherein the 

 seeming discords are really meant to bring out a funda- 

 mental harmony. In short, all goes on in nature as in 

 the works of human genius, where, though the result 

 may be trifling, there is at least perfect adequacy between 

 the object made and the work of making it. 



Nothing of the kind in the evolution of life. There, 

 the disproportion is striking between the work and the 

 result. From the bottom to the top of the organized 

 world we do indeed find one great effort; but most often 

 this effort turns short, sometimes paralyzed by contrary 

 forces, sometimes diverted from what it should do by 

 what it does, absorbed by the form it is engaged in tak- 

 ing, hypnotized by it as by a mirror. Even in its most 

 perfect works, though it seems to have triumphed over 

 external resistances and also over its own, it is at the 

 mercy of the materiality which it has had to assume. 

 It is what each of us may experience in himself. Our 

 freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, 

 creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to 

 renew itself by a constant effort : it is dogged by automa- 

 tism. The most living thought becomes frigid in the for- 

 mula that expresses it. The word turns against the 

 idea. 



The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusi- 

 asm, as soon as it is externalized into action, is so naturally 

 congealed into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, 

 the one takes so easily the shape of the other, that we 

 might confuse them together, doubt our own sincerity, 



