ue of its
own onward force, checked and determined by the nature of the obstacles
it has to encounter. Every organism is related to life as the
candlestick to the candle; it is simply a device for supporting and
spreading as much life as is possible with the surrounding conditions.
Often, when conditions are favourable, the simplest contrivance will be
more effectual, more life-producing than the most complex in less
favourable conditions. Where food is not present the animal that can
move about in search of it will survive, and the stationary animal
perish; and likewise those that can escape their foes will live down
those rooted in one spot. And if to motion we add perception and
intelligence, and associative instincts and the rest, we increase the
appliances for dealing with difficulties; and therewith the means of
survival when such difficulties exist. Still, in the hypothesis we are
dealing with, all these contrivances--movement, consciousness,
intelligence, will, society--are distinct from life and ministerial to
it; they are instruments by which it is preserved, increased, and
multiplied--like those contrivances by which heat or electricity is
generated, sustained, and transmitted; with this difference, that no one
has designed these life-machines, but they are simply the result of
life's innate tendency to struggle and spread. A great deal of the form
and movement of the inorganic world is due simply to the stress of
gravitation and not to design, and so we are asked to believe that the
human and every other organism has been shaped and quickened by the
action of as blind a power; that it is in some sense a casual result.

Now if seeing and hearing and thinking do not constitute life, but are
only chance discoveries helpful to life; if we do not live in order to
eat and to see and to think, but only think, see, and eat in order to
live, we ask ourselves, what then is this life which is none of these
things and to which they are all subordinate? And when once we begin
subtracting those functions which minister to life and which life has
selected for its own service, we find there is absolutely nothing left
to serve. Taking the very earliest forms, if we subtract movement,
nutrition, growth, generation, we find there is nothing over called
"life" distinct from these. This is the first and fundamental
incoherence of the theory; life has simply no meaning apart from those
functions which we speak of as ministering t