THE PURPOSE OF LIFE 179 



arrests of progress in one direction when the stream 

 of life appears to turn into other channels and to 

 forsake the territories that previously it had favoured so 

 liberally ? How far are these variations, these lost 

 opportunities, due to the action of men themselves, 

 who, acting individually, yet with corporate effect, refuse 

 to undertake further responsibilities, and decline, on 

 behalf of their posterity, to accept greater risks and 

 undergo more strenuous conditions, with the chance 

 of reaching vaster heights and acquiring a higher 

 development of mind and body ? Is it the material 

 on which the impulse has to work that becomes recal- 

 citrant and unwilling, when pressed beyond a certain 

 stage ? Is it the impulse that suffers from some sort 

 of secular decay or tidal ebb or flow ? Are we, in 

 fact, masters or at least participators in the moulding 

 of our fate, or tools in the hand of some force which, 

 careless of mankind, is acting without regard to the 

 interests we believe ourselves to have at stake ? All 

 these questions, like many of the problems suggested 

 in the body of the book, must be left unsolved, if not 

 undefined, for the present. Yet to those persons who 

 are following the trend of contemporary thought it is 

 clear that a new method of attack is being devised, and 

 that a generation has arisen whose members will not 

 be satisfied until they have made the facts of life more 

 intelligible. 



Of all the hard facts of life, the one that we find 

 most difficult to reconcile with our modern outlook is 

 the amount of suffering and misery that natural selec- 

 tion, while bringing the action of heredity to a successful 



