956 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Western minds, all this long seemed mere fantasy: so when thus, in 

 her twofold shape, she appeared to Darwin, he, not knowing her old 

 name, could but caU her "Natural Selection"; and his Western 

 readers thought her new. So, too, with Lamarck's, Schopenhauer's, 

 and Bergson's successive renewings from the breath of Brahma: 

 which they also could but call in their own tongues besoin et desir, or 

 Wille zum Leben, or elan vital. But now, in our modem mytho-poesy 

 of science, developing in its turn towards a corresponding cosmogony, 

 yet now of cosmogony as evolution, we again find room and reason 

 for all these visions of life ; and why not yet more beyond ? So are we 

 not here retaining the essential values alike of the Darwinian and neo- 

 Darwinian doctrines and of the Lamarckian and neo-Lamarckian 

 ones; since here reaching a stage deeper, into the essential life- 

 processes of self-maintaining and species-continuing, not only as 

 successive, but as interacting, and even as capable of re-alternat- 

 ing in their rhythm? Luck-situations are not, of course, excluded; 

 these may and do constantly arise, and with vital or mortal results: 

 so here is no rejection of the importance of natural selection ; though 

 decidedly of its "All-sufficiency". Yet with no claim of all-sufhciency 

 for such internal variations either, nor denial that here also there is 

 ample scope for the varied chances of fertilisation, and for other 

 factors so well expounded by Mendelians and neo-Mendelians : 

 enough if the preceding scanty outline suffice to persuade open- 

 minded representatives of each and all these schools to consider 

 whether such cases of what we cannot but call main and definite 

 lines and rhythms of variation have not also their substantial signi- 

 ficance in the evolutionary process; and this sufficient to justify 

 our further interpretations, even of Darwin's classic studies, as of 

 primroses and orchids, of wind and insect fertilisation, of plants 

 (and animals) under domestication, and so on for other and later 

 Darwinian, post-Darwinian, and De Vriesian and other contributions. 

 Each and all valuable though these are, it is of the very nature of 

 investigation in general, and of physiology in particular, to look 

 more fully into the protean world of variations, and see this as no 

 mere indefinite chance-medley, but as an orderly, yet intelligibly 

 varying, rhythm of life-dance. 



Life has all the nine Muses in its very being, since these are but 

 high aspects of its interplay of organism and environment, discerned 

 in another of the highest moments of past evolution: so their 

 rhj^hms and dances needs must range to lightest comedy and to 

 deepest tragedy, with all other life-developments before these and 

 between. All these are ever traceable in the movement of human 

 life — ^witness alike our histories and biographies ; our tales, romances, 

 and novels; our sciences, philosophies, and wisdoms; our poesies, 

 lyric, epic, dramatic; our creations of arts and music as well. All 

 such are modes and moods of the human spirit ; for this, albeit seem- 



