UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
evolutionary impulse. It is natural rejection as 
well. It is not an arbitrary interference with the 
course of nature, like artificial selection. It is not 
the name of a force or of an active principle, as 
seems so often implied, but an explanation of the 
survival of the fittest, or the best equipped, for the 
natural competitions of life. Artificial selection is 
man at the helm guiding the vessel; natural selec- 
tion, on Darwin’s own theory of fortuitous varia- 
tion, is like a fleet of vessels unequally equipped, all 
drifting with the wind and tide, and only the most 
stanch and seaworthy ones by good luck reaching 
some port. 
When Darwin declares that “if organic beings 
had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, 
man could have done nothing” in modifying species 
or in developing new ones, he unwittingly takes 
the process of evolution out of the mechanical or 
automatic series, and places it in another and higher 
order; he recognizes the original push of life which 
is the central thought of Bergson’s “Creative Evo- 
lution.” Variability is certainly a characteristic of 
living bodies to an extent and in a sense that it 
is not characteristic of non-living. Creative evolu- 
tion is only the principle of growth illustrated by 
the whole biological series; there is the inherent 
tendency to grow, to develop, which is character- 
istic of all life. It may be true that the initial varia- 
tion is caused by slight changes in the conditions 
272 
