LIFE AND CHANCE 
ditions. Environment is either a check or a stimu- 
lant. 
The origin of life and the many forms it has taken 
were probably a matter of chance in the same sense 
that the origin of springs and streams and the for- 
mation of rivers were matters of chance. Given our 
weather-system, and the unequal elevation of land 
above the sea, and fountains and streams are bound 
to appear, but they will all be modified and shaped 
by the chance conditions they encounter. Water 
will flow, and the tendency of life to push out and 
on, and organize itself into new forms, is equally 
inherent. It seems to me we have to take into ac- 
count this innate expansive or evolutionary force in 
living matter. To ask whence it comes, how it is 
related to the matter which it animates, as mankind 
so long have asked, is at once to get beyond sound- 
ing. All forms of life bear the stamp of the environ- 
ment. Life must adapt itself to its material con- 
ditions. And this living adaptation of life to its 
environment is radically different from a mechanical 
adjustment. Inanimate bodies adjust themselves, 
animate bodies adapt themselves. It is this power 
of adaptation which makes all purely mechanistic 
conceptions of life so inadequate. The only machine 
that can fit itself to the medium in which it moves is 
the living machine. To inquire into the fitness of 
the environment is to reverse the problem, and leads 
to confusion; since the environment is uncompro- 
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