ADAPTIVENESS AND PURPOSIVENESS 329 



satisfaction at a contrivance like a linotype printing machine, 

 or a monorail engine with its equilibrating gyroscope, or 

 at a watch (had not Bridge waterism made us tired of it) ; 

 they all show much skill on the part of the artificer — the 

 original artificer at least. If we were told, however, that 

 the contrivance we admire was not made by an artificer 

 at all, but was turned out by an automatic machine, our 

 admiration would simply be shifted to the designer or artif- 

 icer of the original automatic machine, and we should ad- 

 mire all the more if the original device was very simple. 

 So in Biology, the basal fact remains that organisms have 

 had, and still have, the capacity of evolving adaptively. 

 They have it in virtue of certain intrinsic qualities, previ- 

 ously discussed, which are much more striking than ready- 

 made fitnesses. It is because living creatures are irritable, 

 persistent, registrative, variable, and so on, that they have 

 been able to evolve in a consummately adaptive way. This 

 was, of course, what Charles Kingsley had in mind in his 

 immortal child's-story when he put into the mouth of Mother 

 Carey the words : " I make things make themselves." This 

 is a very different view, it must be remarked, from that of 

 an infinite regress of automatic machines, with no original 

 designer at all ; for this does not seem to us to be a clearly 

 conceivable idea. 



Time was when the multitudinous fitnesses of Animate 

 J^ature were the subject of admiring wonder, but this has 

 shrivelled. Surely, however, the loss of wonder is not alto- 

 gether creditable. If an adaptation is wrought out gi-adually 

 by a co-operation of factors, that is just as wonderful as a 

 special creation at the hands of a divine artificer; and 

 it is more intelligible. And even if the process of evolving 

 adaptations should turn out to be more automatic than it 



