UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



every game in life, and only life itself seeming supe- 

 rior to the clash of conflicting forces. 



We have at once to look upon the organic and the 

 inorganic as occupying two different planes. In the 

 world of inert matter one sees only the operation of 

 fixed laws: things cannot be otherwise than as they 

 are; fate rules; the balance of forces is fatefuUy kept. 

 But when we reach the world of living things all this 

 is changed: the books are never balanced; there is 

 purpose, flexibility, indeterminateness, a shaping of 

 means to an end, an ever-changing fixity, movement 

 which perpetually defeats the tendency in matter to 

 a dead equilibrium. In life matter takes on a new 

 behavior, enters into new combinations, builds up 

 new forms, and in a measure escapes from the law 

 of necessity that rules inanimate bodies. 



Life is like those figures which the sculptor some- 

 times carves when he shows us the form of a youth 

 or a maiden partly freed from the shapeless block of 

 marble — the fiowing and delicate lines of life are 

 quickly lost in the ragged and broken lines of the 

 insensate stone. Life is hampered and bound by the 

 fatality of matter in the same way; the organic is 

 still in bonds to the inorganic; it is half one and half 

 the other, and is constantly struggling for mere free- 

 dom. This struggle is the drama of evolution, and 

 the drama and tragedy of human history. Its very 

 condition is the union of two opposing elements — 

 fate and freedom wedded in one movement. Life 



244 



