which takes place in
them is not lost but retained, and as it were built into the organism
to serve as the foundation for future actions. If you cause any
distortion in the growth of a tree and make it crooked, whatever you
may do afterwards to make the tree straight the mark of your {231}
distortion is there; it is absolutely indelible; it has become part of
the tree's nature.... Suppose, however, that you take a lump of gold,
melt it, and let it cool.... No one can tell by examining a piece of
gold how often it has been melted and cooled in geologic ages, or even
in the last year by the hand of man. Any one who cuts down an oak can
tell by the rings in its trunk how many times winter has frozen it into
widowhood, and how many times summer has warmed it into life. A living
being must always contain within itself the history, not merely of its
own existence, but of all its ancestors."

Every painter can tell us how each added line deflects his picture in a
certain sense. Whatever lines follow must be built on those first laid
down. Every author who starts to rewrite a piece of work knows how
impossible it becomes to use any of the first-written pages again. The
new beginning has already excluded the possibility of those earlier
phrases and transitions, while it has at the same time created the
possibility of an indefinite set of new ones, no one of which, however,
is completely determined in advance. Just so the social surroundings
of the past and present hour exclude the possibility of accepting
certain contributions from individuals; but they do not positively
define what contributions shall be accepted, for in themselves they are
powerless to fix what the nature of the individual offerings shall
be.[6]

{232}

Thus social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly
distinct factors,--the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the
play of physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the
power of initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the
social environment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him
and his gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community
stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away
without the sympathy of the community.

All this seems nothing more than common-sense. All who wish to see it
developed by a man of genius should read that golden little work,
Bagehot's Physics and Politics, in which (i