DISHARMONIES AND OTHER SHADOWS 595 



of this everyday multiplication which is so different from 

 anything in the inorganic world. Only a fraction of these 

 larvae come to anything, but since they form the sustenance 

 of finer expressions of life, we see no reason to speak of 

 wastefulness. The scheme of Animate Nature is in part a 

 cycle of incarnations; we may not approve of the scheme, 

 but it is not a wasteful one. In this connection it mav be 

 observed that it is a misrepresentation to speak, as Professor 

 Hobhouse does, of the result of evolution being that '' Species 

 should learn to destroy each other more efficiently ", for 

 this disguises two facts, — (1) that huge numbers of an- 

 imals live on detritus, which is often produced by physical 

 agencies; and (2) that what very frequently happens is 

 the establishment of a modus vivendi which lives and lets 

 live. But our general point is this, that a certain security 

 as regards the means of subsistence is a condition of econo- 

 mising reproductivity in higher animals, which means the 

 recognition and development of personality. Is wasteful the 

 term to apply to the existence of that teeming organic \n'o- 

 letariat which is one of the primary conditions of personal- 

 ities ? 



The view that there is a deep incongruity between the 

 facts of the case and the possibility of religious interpreta- 

 tion has been forcibly stated by Professor Lovejoy, who does 

 not, however, accept the conclusion. '' Darwinism or the doc- 

 trine of natural selection declares these three unlovely aspects 

 of the world— its wastefulness, its disharmony, and its 

 cruelty— to be not simply casual details of the picture, but 

 the very essence of that whole evolutional process which, re- 

 garded in its results and not in its methods, had seemed so 

 admirable and so edifying to contemplate " (Lovejoy, 1000, p. 

 93). Whether the seamy aspects of Nature which the theory 



