Conduct in Evolution 279 



bility so long as they remain the best suited. It is the con- 

 tinued activity of a principle by which living matter, in its 

 organization, preserves always the beneficial results of its 

 past experience; and, starting from these as a base, adapts 

 itself to new conditions by adding new abilities to the old. 

 By its operation a creature at any time is always the product 

 of its original self and all the succession of its former selves, 

 and of its present environment. It must be perceived that 

 the environment alone does not evolve the creature. Were 

 it so all would be alike in like environment. What makes 

 the new creature is the environment plus all the previous ex- 

 periences of the life in question, plus the life itself. Thus, 

 in the same environment, many different creatures arise 

 because they stand in it with many different pasts. One, 

 with a long successful past plus the present, is a very differ- 

 ent creature from another, with a barely surviving past, plus 

 the same present. Evolution is thus cumulative in effect, 

 and in this fact lies its power of progress and inspiration. 

 By it progress is addition and not substraction, and is, 

 normally, from lower to higher forms and capacities. A 

 creature in evolution is potential for future conditions, with- 

 out being committed or destined to any of them. In this 

 last quality evolution is entirely different from the develop- 

 ment which is the execution of a previous plan; as when a 

 plant arises from a seed; or when a colony of old type rises 

 from an individual of that type. In these cases the process 

 of development is along foreordained lines, and is nature's 

 repetition of a previous operation, because the new condi- 

 tions are sufficiently similar to the old to promise success 

 of former acts. This is not evolution in the special sense. 



