THE CRITERIA OF LIVINGNESS 09 



ment ' be inadmissible, some other will serve. We refer 

 to the permutations and combinations, the adjustments and 

 compromises, the subtractions and additions that seem to 

 occur in the history of the germ-cells. 



As W. K. Clifford said, '' It is the peculiarity of living 

 things not merely that they change under the influence 

 of surrounding circumstances, but that any change which 

 takes place in them is not lost, but retained, and, as it 

 were, built into the organism to serve as the foundation 

 for future actions." As Bergson puts it, ^^ Its past, in 

 its entirety, is prolonged into its present, and abides there, 

 actual and acting." As Jennings says, from the physiologi- 

 cal point of view, in discussing the behaviour of the brainless 

 starfish, " The precise way each part shall act under the 

 influence of the stimulus must be determined by the past 

 history of that part ; by the stimuli that have acted upon 

 it, by the reactions which it has given, by the results which 

 these reactions have produced (as well as by the present 

 relations of this part to other parts, and by the immediate 

 effects of its present action). We know as solidly as we 

 know anything in physiology that the history of an organism 

 does modify it and its actions — in ways not yet thoroughly 

 understood, doubtless, yet none the less real." 



(c) The crowning attribute of life — and the most elusive 

 — is variability, the organism's power of producing something 

 distinctively new. At present we must take it as ' given \ 

 The capacity most like it is Man's power of mental experi- 

 ment, the secret of the artist, the musician, the poet, the 

 inventor, the thinker, and the true statesman. 



A discussion of this innermost secret of life must be post- 

 poned till we come to consider the factors in evolution, but 

 two points may be noticed in the meantime. There is varia- 



