o life; unless we mean by
life the mere cohering together of the bodily organism--an end more
effectually secured without any such complex apparatus, by a stone or by
an elementary atom.

If existence in that sense, be the force or principle whose persistence
and self-assertion is the cause of all evolution, it is impossible to
conceive how primordial atoms, which are assumed to be indestructible
and constant in quantity, should trouble themselves to struggle at all;
since the amount of that kind of existence can neither be lessened nor
increased. And as motion is also assumed to be a constant quantity, it
is plain that what struggles to be and to multiply, must be some special
collocation and grouping of atoms with some correspondingly particular
determination of motion, called "life;" but what "life" is, apart from
the means it is supposed to have selected for itself, does not appear.

Another difficulty attendant on this false simplification is the
complete subversion of that scale of dignity or excellence upon which we
range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the
top--not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has
hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which,
without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable,
judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness;
mind than mere sensation; and in general, what includes and surpasses,
than what is included and surpassed. We see that the organic world
presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, that of
the plant world; and that the human world depends on the ministry of all
three; and our whole conception of this world as "cosmos" is simply the
filling in of this hierarchic framework. Yet this old structure falls to
pieces under the new simplification. If "life" (as vaguely conceived) be
the first beginning and the last end (or rather result) of the whole
process of evolution, if it be the _summum bonum_, then the "highest"
creature means, the most life-producing.

Now if we put "money" instead of "life," and begin to classify men by
this standard, we see how it inverts the old-world ideas of social
hierarchy. True it is, the man of letters or of high artistic gifts
can produce a certain amount of money, but has little chance against
the inventor of a new soap or a patent pill. Honesty at once becomes
the worst policy, and a thousand other maxims