UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



environmental influences, natural selection would 

 have nothing to go upon. It is the conflict between 

 the push of life and the obstacles which it encounters 

 that results in the survival of the fittest. The prime 

 factor in the origin of species is this aboriginal push 

 or organizing tendency, the modifying factor is the 

 stress of the environment. Are we not compelled 

 to look upon organic nature as a whole, and to say 

 that it knows from the first what it wants, and the 

 means to obtain it? Could any struggle for life of 

 the lower organisms have resulted in the higher 

 forms had not these forms been in some way predi- 

 cated in the lower? The German biologist and phi- 

 losopher makes this struggle creative. It does not 

 merely bring out inherent capabilities, it begets 

 those capabilities de novo. Natural selection is all- 

 potent. "No leaves or flowers," he says, "no diges- 

 tion or system, no lungs, legs, wings, bones, or 

 muscles were present in the primitive forms, and all 

 these must have arisen from them according to the 

 principle of natural selection." Natural selection 

 invented and perfected the wonderful piece of mech- 

 anism we know as the human body. The kidneys, 

 the liver, the lungs, the heart, the brain, the eye, the 

 hand, the double circulation, all the result of 

 chance, or the hit-and-miss method of the blind, 

 irrational physical and chemical forces ! 



Why these forces left some forms so low down in 

 the animal scale, and carried others so much higher 

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