188 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
vaguely denoted by the term environment. The adjustment 
with one’s self differs greatly, in phenomena of every sort, from 
the adjustment with others, just as self-repetition (habit) differs 
from the repetition of others (heredity or imitation), and as self- 
opposition (hesitation and doubt) differs from opposition to 
others (strife or competition).”! As to whether or not there is a 
cosmic adaptation or ‘‘teleology,” Tarde says, ‘‘Henceforth the 
religious mind need turn no longer far away to the vast vault 
of heaven, there to find and worship the fathomless wisdom that 
moves the universe; rather, it must gaze into the chemist’s 
crucible, and there discern the mystery of those physical harmonies 
that are surely the most exact and marvelous of all,—far more 
wonderful even than the scattered disorder of the stars: I mean 
the chemical combinations.” ? 
Though man has had to give up anthropocentric cosmology he 
finds scope for teleological conceptions in the marvelous adapta- 
tion in the details of each organism. ‘“‘ There is no single end 
in nature,” Tarde says, ‘‘no end in relation to which all others are 
means; but there is an infinite number of ends which are seeking 
to utilize one another. Every organism, and in every organism 
every cell, and in every cell, perhaps, every cellular element, has 
its own particular providence, for itself and in itself. Here, then, 
as before, we are led to consider the harmonizing force . . . not 
as something unique, external and superior, but as indefinitely 
repeated, infinitesimal, and internal. In reality, the source of all 
these harmonies of life, which become less striking the farther we 
get from the starting point and the wider the field we embrace, 
is the fertilized germ; this last is a living representation of the 
intersecting lines that meet in it, forming often a felicitous cross- 
breed; it is the germ of new talents, which are destined to spread 
broadcast and propagate themselves in turn, thanks to the 
survival of the fittest, or the elimination of the least fit.” 8 
The same is true of society, he holds: — 
The final outcome . . . of this final preponderance of a single line of social 
evolution . . . is the series of scientific discoveries and industrial inventions 
that have gone on ceaselessly accumulating and making use of one another; 
1 Laws of Imitation, pp. 148 f. 2 Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 157. 
