LIFE THE TRAVELER 



aware that this form of words throws no light upon 

 the mystery. 



The water from the fountain seeks the easiest 

 course to the lake or the river; the river seeks the 

 easiest course to the sea; but the prime cause of 

 its seeking, of its flowing, is the mystery we call 

 gravity. Is there anything in the constitution of 

 water, or in the laws of hydrostatics, from which 

 we could predict or infer the tides, did we not look 

 beyond the tides and beyond the earth itself? 

 Running water selects the sand, the silt, the gravel, 

 from the soil, and deposits each in separate places, 

 but here again the result is the working of the law 

 of gravity. This is natural selection without strug- 

 gle or competition. Only living things struggle. 

 The living world is always pitted against the non- 

 living, and it is this conflict that constitutes the 

 drama of evolution; the one is flexible, adaptive, 

 compromising; the other is rigid, stereotyped, re- 

 morseless. Only in so far as life overcomes and uses 

 the obduracy of matter is it life, and on the road to 

 development. We are thus compelled to speak of 

 life as an entity, as we do of gravity and chemical 

 affinity, when in the one case as in the other we 

 can only mean a specific activity or tendency in 

 matter. Science with its rigid methods cuts the 

 ground from under our feet and we have recourse to 

 philosophy to save ourselves from falling into the 

 bottomless abyss. 



269 



