THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE 



origin of species through natural selection work- 

 ing upon fortuitous variations, and his statement, 

 made in his old age, that he could not look upon 

 man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of 

 mere chance. The result of chance man certainly 

 is — is he not? — as are all other forms of life, if 

 evolution is a mere mechanical process set going and 

 kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the en- 

 vironment upon the organism, or by the struggle for 

 existence. If evolution involves no intelligence in 

 nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is 

 not man an accidental outcome of the blind clash- 

 ing and jolting of the material forces, as much so as 

 the great stone face in the rocks which Hawthorne 

 used so suggestively in one of his stories? 



I have wondered if Huxley was aware that both 

 ends of his argument did not quite meet when he 

 contended for the truth of determinism — that there 

 is and can be no free or spontaneous volition; and 

 at the same time set man apart from the cosmic 

 order, and represented him as working his will upon 

 it, crossing and reversing its processes. In one of 

 his earlier essays, Huxley said that to the student of 

 living things, as contrasted with the student of inert 

 matter, the aspect of nature is reversed. "In living 

 matter, incessant, and so far as we know, spontane- 

 ous, change is the rule, rest the exception, the 

 anomaly, to be accounted for. Living things have 

 no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium," except the 



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