93 ^^^ moth and the candle 



intelligently a new situation, then it was not a machine 

 "wound up like a watch." It was not merely something to 

 which things happen. It was also capable of playing an 

 active not merely a passive role in "adjusting to circum- 

 stances." And i£ Pronuba, admittedly now a creature far 

 less bright than a wasp, has or ever did have any similar 

 capacities, then her working agreement with the yucca 

 need not have been wholly the result of chance. She may 

 have taken advantage of a situation which presented itself 

 and, however feebly, played her part as an individual in 

 the course of evolution. 



To admit that is to make a thousand times less incredible 

 the fact that every spring thousands of moths perform the 

 actions without which neither the yucca nor the moth 

 could produce another generation. But that is not all. It 

 relieves us from the necessity of assuming that the universe 

 has been, at least up to the appearance of man, as will-less, 

 as purposeless, as meaningless — one must almost say as 

 dead — as the orthodox view tends to assume. 



Some of the reasons why this commonly is assumed are 

 sound enough, at least as far as they go, but some of them 

 are merely the result of a human weakness which scientists 

 share with the rest of mankind. Mechanisms are much 

 easier to study than intelligence or purpose are. A great 

 deal of progress has been made during the last hundred 

 years in understanding them and the scientists are prob- 

 ably right in saying that such progress would not have 

 been made if they had permitted their determination to 

 discover these mechanisms to be weakened by too ready a 

 willingness to say, when faced with a problem, merely "in- 

 telligence," "purpose," etc. If we may be peimitted the 

 military terms with which recent years have made us all 



