3 7 2 Problems of Organic Adaptation 



environment are chemically and physically the best possible 

 for life phenomena. In particular, water, carbonic acid and 

 the compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen possess 

 many unique properties which are necessary to life, and these 

 substances are better fitted to the life processes than any 

 other known substances. He concludes, "Therefore the fit- 

 ness of the environment is both real and unique." The origin 

 of this fitness of the environment for life "lies at least as far 

 back as the phenomena of the periodic system, at least as 

 far back as the evolution of the elements, if they were ever 

 evolved." And yet he holds that it "is conclusively proven 

 that the whole process of cosmic evolution from its earliest 

 conceivable state to the present is pure mechanism." In ex- 

 planation of this fitness which runs through the whole of 

 nature, he concludes that it is conceivable that a teleological 

 "tendency would work parallel with mechanism without in- 

 terfering with it. The effect of such a tendency working 

 steadily through the whole process of evolution is also at 

 least conceivable, however small its bearing upon science, 

 provided, like time itself, it be a perfectly independent vari- 

 able, making up therefore, with time the constant environ- 

 ment, so to speak, of the evolutionary process. This ten- 

 dency must not be demonstrable either by weighing or by 

 measuring, else it would amount to an interference with the 

 mechanistic process, and it must not itself be liable to any 

 kind of variation whose detection would directly reveal it. 

 Where, then, can the origin of such a tendency be located? 

 Why, clearly, if we accept the induction in favor of mechan- 

 ism, only where Bergson 1 has shrewdly placed his vital im- 

 pulse, at the very origin of things, just before mechanism 

 begins to act. In short, our 'new teleology cannot have 



1 Bergson places his vital impulse not at the origin of the universe but 

 only at the beginnings of life. It is a form of vitalism rather than of general 

 teleology. 



