UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



evolutionary impulse. It is natural rejection as 

 well. It is not an arbitrary interference with the 

 course of nature, like artificial selection. It is not 

 the name of a force or of an active principle, as 

 seems so often implied, but an explanation of the 

 survival of the fittest, or the best equipped, for the 

 natural competitions of life. Artificial selection is 

 man at the helm guiding the vessel; natural selec- 

 tion, on Darwin's own theory of fortuitous varia- 

 tion, is like a fleet of vessels unequally equipped, all 

 drifting with the wind and tide, and only the most 

 stanch and seaworthy ones by good luck reaching 

 some port. 



When Darwin declares that "if organic beings 

 had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, 

 man could have done nothing" in modifying species 

 or in developing new ones, he unwittingly takes 

 the process of evolution out of the mechanical or 

 automatic series, and places it in another and higher 

 order; he recognizes the original push of life which 

 is the central thought of Bergson*s "Creative Evo- 

 lution.*' Variability is certainly a characteristic of 

 living bodies to an extent and in a sense that it 

 is not characteristic of non-living. Creative evolu- 

 tion is only the principle of growth illustrated by 

 the whole biological series; there is the inherent 

 tendency to grow, to develop, which is character- 

 istic of all life. It may be true that the initial varia- 

 tion is caused by slight changes in the conditions 



272 



