THE WONDER OF LIFE 633 



the inorganic world. For obviously it would have a human 

 idea and a human purpose inside of it — ^the very essence 

 of its construction. But more than that, the eel has made 

 itself what it is in the course of ages ; it has traded with 

 time ; it has evolved. And again, the hypothetical 

 torpedo does not, in its final explosion, start a crowd of 

 potential torpedoes, which is what the eels do before they 

 die. 



But if the mechanistic account of the eel's migration is 

 unsatisfactory, is the vitalistic one — or, as we prefer to say, 

 the biological one — any better ? What light has biology 

 to throw on the remarkable story ? Only this, that we 

 can relate the particular case of the eel to what we know of 

 organisms in general, that they are historical beings, deter- 

 mined by their past — ^their own past and that of their race. 

 The eel's inheritance is a treasure-store of the ages, a 

 registration of many inventions. Non-living things have 

 no history in this sense ; we cannot say that they have 

 profited by experience. In the organism, as Bergson 

 says, the past is prolonged into the present. Thus we pass 

 on to a new level of explanation or interpretation, which is 

 historical — ^in a sense different from that implied when we 

 give a so-called historical interpretation of the present 

 state of the Alps. As Professor W. K. Clifford put it : — 



' It is the pecuharity of living things not merely that 

 they change under the influence of surrounding circum- 

 stances, but that any change that takes place in them is 

 not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism 

 to serve as the foundation for future actions. ... No 

 one can tell by examining a piece of gold how often it has 

 been melted and cooled in geologic ages. . . . Any one 

 who cuts down an oak can tell by the rings in its trunk 



