110 EVOLUTION 



pretentious but inchoate would-be science, has 

 treated this scheme of life as the natural one, 

 and confirmed his public more and more into 

 it as the practical one as well. For your 

 would-be practical man, slave to that wildest, 

 strangest, most impossible of all theories 

 the theory that there are no theories ever 

 falls victim to the surface plausibility of the 

 crudest theory going. 



Whereas the student who has seen crusta- 

 cean larvae in all the activity of their youth, 

 bright-eyed, free-swimming, and thereafter 

 settling down into barnacles upon the rock, 

 or, seeking food and safety at the expense 

 of their larger and stronger active kindred, 

 settling further down into mere blood-bags, 

 mere egg-bags, " sans eyes, sans ears, sans 

 everything," has before him a nature-symbol, 

 one worth thinking about, and that carefully, 

 even furiously also. For here it turns out 

 that the teaching of the economists who have 

 identified comfort with progress have been 

 so far right in unifying them, no doubt; only 

 they have been forgetting that such progress 

 tends to be bought too dearly. Their gospel 

 of "getting on" is not necessarily getting on; 

 and hence their much preached and yet more 

 prayed for " success in life " so often turns 

 out the very reverse of success in living. 



