104 



THE CRITERIA OF LIVINGNESS 



Thirdly, there is another triad of qualities — (a) effective be- 

 haviour, (b) registration of experiences and experiments, and (c) 

 variabihty. The common note here is agency, self-expression, 

 creativeness. (a) Behaviour, exhibited at many levels and in 

 diverse modes, is an organically determined concatenated series 

 of acts converging towards a definite result. Its common fea- 

 tures are correlation, individuality, and purposiveness. (b) The 

 effectiveness which characterises organic behaviour depends on 

 the organism's power of profiting by experience in the individ- 

 ual lifetime, or on the entailed results of ancestral experiments 

 (chiefly perhaps germinal variations), or, usually, on both, (c) 

 The crowning attribute — and the most elusive — is variability, the 

 organism's power — but, more accurately perhaps, the germ-cell's 

 power — of giving rise to something distinctively new. 



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