reluctance, if there were no friction and vis inertae to
be encountered even after a theoretical equilibrium had been
upset, we should have had no fixed organs nor settled
proclivities, but should have been daily and hourly undergoing
Protean transformations, and have still been throwing out
pseudopodia like the amoeba. True, we might have come to like
this fashion of living as well as our more steady-going system if
we had taken to it many millions of ages ago when we were yet
young; but we have contracted other habits which have become so
confirmed that we cannot break with them. We therefore now hate
that which we should perhaps have loved if we had practised [sic]
it. This, however, does not affect the argument, for our concern
is with our likes and dislikes, not with the manner in which
those likes and dislikes have come about. The discovery that
organism is capable of modification at all has occasioned so much
astonishment that it has taken the most enlightened part of the
world more than a hundred years to leave off expressing its
contempt for such a crude, shallow, and preposterous conception.
Perhaps in another hundred years we shall learn to admire the
good sense, endurance, and thorough Englishness of organism in
having been so averse to change, even more than its versatility
in having been willing to change so much.

Nevertheless, however conservative we may be, and however much
alive to the folly and wickedness of tampering with settled
convictions-no matter what they are-without sufficient cause,
there is yet such a constant though gradual change in our
surroundings as necessitates corresponding modification in our
ideas, desires, and actions. We may think that we should like to
find ourselves always in the same surroundings as our ancestors,