LIFE THE TRAVELER 
aware that this form of words throws no light upon 
the mystery. 
The water from the fountain seeks the easiest 
course to the lake or the river; the river seeks the 
easiest course to the sea; but the prime cause of 
its seeking, of its flowing, is the mystery we call 
gravity. Is there anything in the constitution of 
water, or in the laws of hydrostatics, from which 
we could predict or infer the tides, did we not look 
beyond the tides and beyond the earth itself? 
Running water selects the sand, the silt, the gravel, 
from the soil, and deposits each in separate places, 
but here again the result is the working of the law 
of gravity. This is natural selection without strug- 
gle or competition. Only living things struggle. 
The living world is always pitted against the non- 
living, and it is this conflict that constitutes the 
drama of evolution; the one is flexible, adaptive, 
compromising; the other is rigid, stereotyped, re- 
morseless. Only in so far as life overcomes and uses 
the obduracy of matter is it life, and on the road to 
development. We are thus compelled to speak of 
life as an entity, as we do of gravity and chemical 
affinity, when in the one case as in the other we 
can only mean a specific activity or tendency in 
matter. Science with its rigid methods cuts the 
ground from under our feet and we have recourse to 
philosophy to save ourselves from falling into the 
bottomless abyss. 
269 
