UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
every game in life, and only life itself seeming supe- 
rior to the clash of conflicting forces. 
We have at once to look upon the organic and the 
inorganic as occupying two different planes. In the 
world of inert matter one sees only the operation of 
fixed laws: things cannot be otherwise than as they 
are; fate rules; the balance of forces is fatefully kept. 
But when we reach the world of living things all this 
is changed: the books are never balanced; there is 
purpose, flexibility, indeterminateness, a shaping of 
means to an end, an ever-changing fixity, movement 
which perpetually defeats the tendency in matter to 
a dead equilibrium. In life matter takes on a new 
behavior, enters into new combinations, builds up 
new forms, and in a measure escapes from the law 
of necessity that rules inanimate bodies. 
Life is like those figures which the sculptor some- 
times carves when he shows us the form of a youth 
or a maiden partly freed from the shapeless block of 
marble — the flowing and delicate lines of life are 
quickly lost in the ragged and broken lines of the 
insensate stone. Life is hampered and bound by the 
fatality of matter in the same way; the organic is 
still in bonds to the inorganic; it is half one and half 
the other, and is constantly struggling for mere free- 
dom. This struggle is the drama of evolution, and 
the drama and tragedy of human history. Its very 
condition is the union of two opposing elements — 
fate and freedom wedded in one movement. Life 
244 
