232 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
because it is the chief and most comprehensive among them. 
It may be briefly explained in the following proposition : 
“ All organic individuals become unequal to one another in 
the course of their life by adaptation to different conditions 
of life, although the individuals of one and the same species 
remain mostly very much alike.” A certain inequality of 
organic individuals, as we have seen, was already to be 
assumed in virtue of the law of individual (indirect) adapt- 
ation. But, beyond this, the original inequality of indivi- 
duals is afterwards increased by the fact that every individual, 
during its own independent life, subjects and adapts itself 
to its own peculiar conditions of existence. All different 
individuals of every species, however like they may be in 
their first stages of life, become in the further course of 
their existence less like to one another. They deviate 
from one another in more or less important peculiari- 
ties, and this is a natural consequence of the different condi- 
tions under which the individuals live. There are no two 
single individuals of any species which can complete their 
life under exactly the same external circumstances. The ~ 
vital conditions of nutrition, of moisture, air, light ; further, 
the vital conditions of society, the inter-relations with 
surrounding individuals of the same or other species, are 
different in every individual being; and this difference 
first affects the functions, and later changes the form of 
every individual organism. If the children of a human 
family show, even at the beginning, certain individual 
inequalities which we may consider as the consequence 
of individual (indirect) adaptation, they will appear 
still more different at a later period of life, when each 
child has passed through different experiences, and has 
