1 62 Life and Love. 



" Natural Selection " is but a way of expressing 

 the result of inharmonious relations. A certain 

 harmony between the organism and its surround- 

 ings is absolutely essential to its existence. But 

 within these physical limits there is opportunity for 

 great variation and great aspiration, — these often- 

 times forming one of the factors in the law of 

 natural selection, the " fittest" sometimes being the 

 most intelligent, the bravest, the most beautiful or 

 the most noble. 



It may, then, be true that the divine benediction, 

 the necessity to go upward, placed upon the sim- 

 ple, potent life-basis, way back when earth condi- 

 tions were such that only it could live, drew it ever 

 upward and upward, until man himself emerged 

 from the apparent chaos to show the meaning 

 of the multitudinous, struggling, half-perfected 

 beings, whose imperfection was the price of his 

 perfection. 



Impressed upon the earliest protoplasm was this 

 upward tendency, by which it departed from its 

 condition of simplicity, became complex and indi- 

 vidual, sexual reproduction being the method em- 

 ployed by the real agent, love. 



In the lowest forms of life there is probably little 

 difference between individuals. One amoeba is 

 very much like every other amoeba. But impressed 

 upon the early protoplasmic forms was the power 

 to vary, the desire to vary, and so life streamed 

 upward, one species after another emerging, each 



