so that we might be guided at every touch and turn by the
experience of our race, and be saved from all self-communing or
interpretation of oracular responses uttered by the facts around
us. Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of us;
and we, too, change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so
as to see the facts around us as perhaps even more changed than
they actually are. It has been said, "Tempora mutantur nos et
mutamur in illis." The passage would have been no less true
if it had stood, "Nos mutamur et tempora mutantur in
nobis." Whether the organism or the surroundings began
changing first is a matter of such small moment that the two may
be left to fight it out between themselves; but, whichever view
is taken, the fact will remain that whenever the relations
between the organism and its surroundings have been changed, the
organism must either succeed in putting the surroundings into
harmony with itself, or itself into harmony with the
surroundings; or must be made so uncomfortable as to be unable to
remember itself as subjected to any such difficulties, and there
fore to die through inability to recognise [sic] its own identity
further.

Under these circumstances, organism must act in one or other of
these two ways: it must either change slowly and continuously
with the surroundings, paying cash for everything, meeting the
smallest change with a corresponding modification so far as is
found convenient; or it must put off change as long as possible,
and then make larger and more sweeping changes.

Both these courses are the same in principle, the difference
being only one of scale, and the one being a miniature of the