und it. It is this trait which leads
the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment
when its fitness is a foregone conclusion. Shall we praise the fitness
of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds
for filling our sails? If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking
from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the
evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the
struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe
and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula
itself.

XII

THE NATURALIST'S VIEW OF LIFE

I

William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to
contradict other philosophers. I may add in the same spirit that one of
the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict
themselves. I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I
have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show
that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble
to make both ends of his philosophy meet. Any man who seeks to compass
any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind,
is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet. The man of
science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows
what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it. But the philosopher
works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if
he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.

I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as
a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory
of the origin of species through natural selection working upon
fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he
could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of
mere chance. The result of chance man certainly is--is he not?--as are
all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set
going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon
the organism, or by the struggle for existence. If evolution involves no
intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not
man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the
material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which
Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his storie