158 THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN 



If you wish to climb the Matterhorn many paths 

 lead up the lower slopes, and a stumble here may 

 cost you only a sprain. And I suppose that several 

 paths lead to the base of the cone. But thence to the 

 summit there is but one path, and a misstep means 

 death. Pardon these quotations and illustrations. 

 They are my only means of at all adequately present- 

 ing to you a scientific man's conception of the meaning 

 of the struggle for liife. The laws of evolution are 

 written in blood and bear the death penalty. For 



"Life is not as idle ore, 

 But iron dug from central gloom, 

 And heated hot with burning fears. 

 And dipt in baths of hissing tears. 

 And battered with the shocks of doom 

 To shape and use." 



There would seem therefore to be going on a process 

 of natural selection. Natural selection seems to select 

 more unsparingly and the struggle for life — or even 

 existence — to grow fiercer as we advance from lower 

 forms to higher in the animal kingdom. 



But the theory which we have agreed to accept 

 teaches us that these survivors are those which or who 

 have conformed to their environment and that they 

 have survived because of their conformity. And what 

 do we mean by environment? And does not man 

 modify his environment ? Certainly he changes by 

 irrigation a desert into a garden. He carries water 

 against its tendency to the hill-top. But he has learned 

 to do this only by studying the laws which govern the 

 motions of fluids and rigorously obeying them. He 

 must carry his water in strong pipes and take it from 



