to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement
can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the
statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other
equally senseless accident.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the
impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the
simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain
pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and
organize new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no
means played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus
of an athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable
to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put
up a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution
shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing
the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at
all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the
sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the
fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of
any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our
resources.

VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY

Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of
individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who
was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that death
is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to
provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now Circumstantial
Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts only for the
survival of species in which the individuals have sense enough to decay
and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to have calculated
very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot should live ten times
as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal. In the case of man,
the operation has overshot its mark: men do not live long enough: they
are, for all the purposes of high civilization, mere children when they
die; and our Prime Ministers, though rated as mature, divide their
time between the golf course and the Treasury Bench in parliament.
Presumably, however, the same power that made this mistake can remedy
it. If on opportunist grounds Man now fixes the term of his life