HIT-AND-MISS METHOD OF NATURE 



failure, circuitous, fortuitous, ambiguous, traversing 

 the desert and the wilderness without chart or com- 

 pass, beset by geologic, biologic, and cosmic catas- 

 trophes and delays, yet the great procession of the 

 life of the globe, with man at its head, has arrived 

 and entered into full possession of the inheritance 

 prepared for it. 



How diflBcult to think of it all as brought about by 

 the random method of Nature which I have been 

 discussing — a score of failures to one success, a 

 hundred bullets astray to one that goes to the mark; 

 and yet apparently such is the fact. 



The course of evolution has been a wayward, 

 blundering course.^ The creative energy has felt its 

 way from form to form, as an inventor feels his way 

 in working out his ideas — failing, discarding, 

 changing, but improving, advancing; and life is 

 what it is because it had an onward and upward 

 trend to begin with, and this inherent aspiration has 

 never gone out. Life cannot stand still ; it is its 

 nature to develop, expand, increase. The sum of 

 matter and the sum of force in the universe cannot 

 be increased, but the sum of life has been increasing 



1 These and oljier remarks on life and evolution in this volume 

 might have been borrowed from Henri Bergson's great work, 

 "Creative Evolution," but they were not; they were all written 

 long before I had ever heard Bergson's name. Readers of Kant 

 and Goethe and our own Emerson got their minds fertiUzed by 

 the non-mechanical (Bergsoniau) idea of creation long before 

 the advent of that philosopher. 

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