No. 383.] VARIATION VERSUS HEREDITY. 829 
way to new resources is opened. On the other hand, it is 
reliance upon ancestry, personal inactivity, failure to struggle, 
refusal to put forth the energy possessed, that constitute the 
curses of all organisms; and it is such evils that natural selec- 
tion is constantly eliminating in the struggle for existence and 
the survival of the fittest. The first sign of headship and 
_leadership and fitness to survive is a declaration of independence 
from the bonds of heredity. The place of greatest resistance, 
of hardest struggle, must be overcome before real progress can 
be made, and it is success there which is the first sign of fitness 
to survive and to perpetuate the race. 
The very essence of virility, as of all evolution, consists in 
doing otherwise, — in varying from the past, in transgressing 
tradition, not violating but surpassing the laws of heredity. 
And the measure of success in such struggle is not accumula- 
tion of resources, but increase of productiveness. The most 
successful is the one which gets most result out of the resources 
at hand, and such success survives. But this is the law of 
variation, not heredity. 
Fifthly: In order further to test the correctness of this 
hypothesis, it is important to examine the real meaning of this 
Phenomenon of variability. What is the real fact to which 
attention is called by saying a species or an organism varies ? 
Is there only a rearrangement of unchanging atoms? Is there 
something new originated ? And what is the result of varying? 
` Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, and the various other 
attempts, up to the most elaborate of all, Weismann’s theory 
of germ plasm, which conceive of some sort of physical basis 
for the differences which arise in organic processes, are an — 
indication of a belief that evolution does not originate anything 
new, that it merely seems to do so; and that organisms, like 
inorganic bodies, are substantially immutable. This mechanical 
theory provides for two categories, — things and acts, — into 
which objective phenomena may be distributed: things whose 
chief distinction is that they are posited and extended in space, 
and acts posited and extended in time. We cannot observe 
anything as absolutely inactive, nor can we observe any real 
act separated from some form of thing. But in imagination 
