Heredity, Variation and Genius ij 



object of a process of outside natural selection, 

 but itself works on the environment to modify it 

 in some measure to its liking : there is natural 

 election and adaption on its part as well as natural 

 selection by the environment, an inherent struc- 

 tural impulse or vital tension urging it to fulhl 

 its proper being. The good quality finds good in 

 bad surroundings and profits by it, the bad quality 

 chooses bad in good surroundings and feeds its 

 growth thereby. * 



Is the creative growth of an organic variation, 

 after all is said, always a matter only of the slow 

 accumulation of minute additions through im- 

 memorial time ? Is it absolutely true that nature 

 never makes a leap ? May it not perhaps be that 

 the organic impulsion sometimes reaches such a 

 tension in young forming matter plastic to sur- 

 rounding influences as to issue in a sort of evolu- 

 tional explosion, an extraordinary impulse of the 

 organic Mux being then moulded by circumstances 

 into an upleap of life ? An upleap in that case 

 within the bounds of the same species ; perhaps 



* The term natural selection has not perhaps been quite a 

 happy designation seeing that it is apt to be misunderstood and 

 used to signify an all-potent outside agency which arbitrarily 

 selects and fashions, if it do not actually cause the suitable 

 variation ; whereas variation and environment select as well as 

 are selected, interacting as part of a common nature in the pro- 

 duction of an equilibrium, and the variation grows by mutual 

 adaptation and combination. Neither organic cell nor indi- 

 vidual organism could ever exist separate from its environing 

 medium with which it is not in conflict only but in communion. 

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