Therefore the final basis of success in life must be sought in
the inherited constitutions of organic forms.

For the reason that the qualities which preserve an animal's existence are
already congenital, they are already transmissible, as Darwin contended.
Since his time much has been learned about the course of inheritance and
its physical basis, and the new discoveries have confirmed the essential
truth of Darwin's statement that the congenital characters only possess a
real power in the evolution of species.

We must devote some time to the subject of inheritance at a later
juncture, but before leaving the matter an additional point must be
established here; the selective process deals immediately with congenital
results, as the heritable characters that make for success or failure in
life, but by doing this it really selects the group of congenital factors
behind and antecedent to their effects. For example, an ape that survives
because of its superior cunning, does so because it varies congenitally in
an improved direction; and the factors that have made it superior are
indirectly but no less certainly preserved through the survival of their
results in the way of efficiency. Hereditary strains are thus the ultimate
things selected through the organic constitutions that they determine and
produce.

Natural selection, as the whole of this intricate process, is simply trial
and error on a gigantic scale. Nature is such that thousands of varying
individuals are produced in order that a mere handful or only one survivor
may be chosen to bear the burden of carrying on the species for another
generation. The effect of nature's process is judicial, as it were. We may
liken the many and varied conditions of life to as many jurymen, before
which every living thing must appear for judgment as to its fitness or
lack of it. A unanimous verdict of complete or partial approval must be
rendered, or an animal dies, for the failure to meet a single vital
condition results in sure destruction. Of course, we cannot regard
selection as involving anything like a primitive conscious choice. It is
because we individualize all of the complex totality of the world as
"Nature" with a capital N that so many people unconsciously come to think
of it as a human-like personality. He who would go further and hold that
all of nature is actually conscious and the dwelling-place of the
supernatural ultimate, must beware of the logical results of s