he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by
the action and interaction of these principles alone.

In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operation
of blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, its
relation to the whole, is a matter of indifference. The rocks, the
hills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do as
well. But in the organic world we strike another order--an order where
the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of
human existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that
the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is to
confuse terms.

Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression;
as much so as the growth and development of a tree. If the evolutionary
impulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, it
experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last
attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle
of chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is a
man lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. If
evolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be
wandering in the wilderness of the chaotic nebulæ?


III

A vastly different and much more stimulating view of life is given by
Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." Though based upon biological
science, it is a philosophical rather than a scientific view, and
appeals to our intuitional and imaginative nature more than to our