314 THE EVOLUTION OF SEX. 



however, is more frequently a retarding force than an accel- 

 erant of evolution. The problem of organic progress is thus 

 to be interpreted not merely as on conventional lines, by help of 

 an analogy derived from an age of mechanical progress which 

 gives us the watch, or sewing-machine, or tricycle, — by the 

 cumulative patenting, as it were, of useful improvements in 

 detail. The essential problem is not one of mechanism but 

 of character, to which incident is accessory but not fundamen- 

 tal, — not of details put together, but of aggregate organic life or 

 temperament. The life of the individual or the species is 

 essentially a unity, of which the specific characters are but 

 the symptoms, be their subsequent measure of importance 

 and utility in adaptation, their modification by environment, 

 their enhancement or diminution by natural selection, what it 

 may. Our special study of the reproductive process has thus 

 fairly brought us to the threshold of a larger inquiry, the 

 primary one of the organic sciences, that of the factors of 

 organic evolution. For it is in nature, as Schiller saw long ago 

 in the human life, which this foreshadows: "While philosophers 

 are disputing about the government of the world, Hunger and 

 Love are performing the task." 



