LIFE AND CHANCE 



without that which hampers and holds it would not 

 be life; it would have no reality, no expression. The 

 struggle and the antagonism give it body and power. 

 It also opens the door to chance, or fortune, as the 

 ancients called it. 



The living has to adapt itself to the non-living. 

 The latter is uncompromising; it goes its own way if 

 all life perishes. But life is plastic, inventive, com- 

 promising; it takes what it can get; under the pres- 

 sure of outward conditions it is perpetually chang- 

 ing; it flows on like a stream, taking the form that 

 external conditions impose upon it, but ever flow- 

 ing. It would not be life without this inherent 

 movement. 



All life asks is opportunity; it takes its chances in 

 the clash of opposing forces; it loses at one point and 

 gains at another; the hazards of time and change 

 modify it, hindering or helping it, but do not ex- 

 tinguish it. 



Forms grow old, but the life-impulse does not grow 

 old. The animal brain suddenly began to increase 

 in size in Tertiary times. Why? To account for evo- 

 lution, as I see it, I have to substitute something like 

 the creative impulse of Bergson for the mechanical 

 and fortuitous selection of Darwin. The process of 

 evolution would have stopped, or never have begun, 

 had there not been the inherent tendency of life to 

 struggle up to higher and more complex forms. 

 Mechanical forces seek rest; life forces seek action 

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