INITIAL VARIATIONS AND TOTAL EXPERIENCE 31 



habitat on or in the earth, in various levels of salt or fresh water, 

 in sea, lake, pool and river, and in the branches of trees, from 

 climate, from degrees of light, temperature, moisture and wind, from 

 presence and activity of enemies and rivals, from supplies of food, 

 from geographical and topographical position. Such an enumeration 

 of stimuli might be much extended if it would serve any purpose. 

 But it is enough to say that the number of such stimuli, and the 

 varying degrees in which these are received and responded to, 

 have hardly any limit which we can conceive. It is a very different 

 and harder task to find out the proportion in which such stimuli 

 are advantageous, injurious or indifferent to the organisms, but 

 it may be taken as certain that the vast majority are indifferent 

 in the sense of producing structural change, and, that the advan- 

 tageous stimuli transmit structural effects to offspring, is only a 

 matter of very strong probability. If the above two groups of 

 phenomena are not causally connected they are intertwined with 

 remarkable closeness and perversity. This aspect of the " web 

 of life " has received attention, and deserves more. 



Discontinuous Environments. 



Some reference must be made here to observations of Prof. 

 Bateson in his work on variation. In the first place he makes a 

 most valuable statement that the environment as the directing 

 cause is essential to Lamarck's theory and as the limiting cause is 

 essential to the doctrine of Natural Selection "* (which I venture 

 to place in italics on account of its importance to all who seek the 

 pathway of organic evolution) and points out also that " diversity 

 of environment is thus the measure of diversity of specific form. 

 Here then we meet the difficulty that diverse environments often 

 shade into each other insensibly and form a continuous series/' 2 

 This is clearly true and important to the subjects he is discussing. 

 But in regard to the conception with which I am here concerned, 

 that of total experience of organisms, it must be remembered that 

 there is no such thing as an environment apart from the living 

 beings that it environs, and that from this point of view there is 

 no such thing in the world of nature as a continuous environment. 

 The environment of two amoebae living under a cover-glass is, 

 for them, far from continuous. In their infinitesimal existence the 

 exact position they occupy in the environing drop of fluid, in which 

 the proportion of their humble fare at one side of the cover-glass 



1 Op. cit. p. 6. 



2 p. 5. 



