XIV 
LIFE THE TRAVELER 
I 
HEN I was a boy and studied astronomy 
at school I thought of Kepler’s radius vector 
as a real thing that played an important part in 
celestial mechanics. Later, in following Darwin’s 
theory of animal evolution, I found the same tend- 
ency in myself and in others to objectify natural 
selection and regard it as a positive agent or prin- 
ciple that controlled and determined the origin of 
species. 
Darwinians are prone to imply that Nature se- 
lects as man selects, by positive interference. Even 
so great a natural philosopher as Weismann speaks 
of natural selection as a positive force. He says in so 
many words that it “is the cause of a great part of 
the physical evolution of organisms on the earth — 
the guiding factor of evolution which creates what 
is new out of the transmissible variations, by order- 
ing and arranging them, selecting them in relation 
to their number and size, as the architect does his 
building stone, so that a particular style may result’’! 
(The italics are mine.) Natural selection, then, ac- 
cording to this ultra-Darwinian, is something that 
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