EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. 19 



surface of the soil, rapidly increases in size, and at the same time 

 undergoes a series of metamorphoses which do not excite our 

 wonder as much as those which meet us in legendary history, 

 merely because they are to be seen every day, and all day long. 



By insensible steps the plant builds itself up into a large and 

 various fabric of root, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruit, every one 

 molded, within and without, in accordance with an extremely 

 complex, but at the same time minutely denned, pattern. In each 

 of these complicated structures, as in their smallest constituents, 

 there is an immanent energy which, in harmony with that resi- 

 dent in all the others, incessantly works toward the maintenance 

 of the whole and the efficient performance of the part which it 

 has to play in the economy of Nature. But no sooner has the 

 edifice, reared with such exact elaboration, attained completeness 

 than it begins to crumble. By degrees the plant withers and dis- 

 appears from view, leaving behind more or fewer apparently 

 inert and simple bodies, just like the bean from which it sprang, 

 and, like it, endowed with the potentiality of giving rise to a 

 similar cycle of manifestations. 



Neither the poetic nor the scientific imagination is put to 

 much strain in the search after analogies with this process of 

 going forth and, as it were, returning to the starting point. It 

 may be likened to the ascent and descent of a slung stone, or to 

 the course of an arrow along its trajectory. Or we may say that 

 the living energy takes first an upward and then a downward 

 road. Or it may seem preferable to compare the expansion of 

 the germ into the full-grown plant to the unfolding of a fan, or 

 to the rolling forth and widening of a stream, and thus arrive at 

 the conception of " development," or " evolution." Here, as else- 

 where, names are " noise and smoke " ; the important point is to 

 have a clear and adequate conception of the fact signified by a 

 name. And in this case the fact is the Sisyphsean process, in the 

 course of which the living and growing plant passes from the 

 relative simplicity and latent potentiality of the seed to the full 

 epiphany of a highly differentiated type, thence to fall back to 

 simplicity and potentiality. 



The value of a strong intellectual grasp of the nature of this 

 process lies in the circumstance that what is true of the bean is 

 true of living things in general. From very low forms up to the 

 highest in the animal no less than in the vegetable kingdom 

 the process of life presents the sajne appearance * of cyclical evo- 



* I have been careful to speak of the " appearance " of cyclical evolution presented by 

 living things ; for, on critical examination, it will be found that the course of vegetable and 

 of animal life is not exactly represented by the figure of a cycle which returns into itself . 

 What actually happens, in all but the lowest organisms, is that one part of the growing 



