DEPENDENCE ON CONDITIONS. The discovery of natural selection has destroyed all ground for the belief that we. or any living beings, ever do anything that exhaustive knowledge of their material structure and its history may not some slay lead us to expect. This is often held to be proof that all things in nature are fixed and in evitable and predetermined, and that our own belief that we control or direct our own conduct, or anything else, is a mere illusion. If we have no reason to believe that we ever do anything that exhaustive knowledge of our bodily frame and its history would not have led us to expect, we are told that our ancestry is our fate. Every thing that we feel or think or do is contingent upon our structure: and if this were indeed in evitable and predetermined, we might with good reason declare that we are in the hands of fate, and can never hope to make or mar, to help or hinder. But what reason is there for thinking that .proof that a thing is no more than we might have expected would show that it IS fixed or fated? The writer is not so vain as to think that his opinion upon this difficult subject will have any weight. He knows well that he will he told that he has failed to grasp the real diffi culty, or to understand what it is that has so long perplexed the thoughtful; for he fails to find any antagonism between mechanical inter pretations of biological facts and freedom and responsibility. He cannot see, for example, how proof that he does nothing which might not have been expected from him can show that he has no true liberty. Should not he who tries to be a reasonable creature. and to do all that can be expected from him in reason, be utterly unable to see how his success can show that he has failed? How can proof that living beings never do anything that exhaustive knowledge of their structure would not give us gond reason to ex pect show that their actions are predestined or inevitable? l'roof that we are part and parcel of the cosmic process cannot tell us who or what has made us so, or that we are helpless, for there is no power, causality, or agency in a process. Processes—evolutionary or otherwise— are matters of fact. There is nothing of agency included in them. If there is agency anywhere,
it is not in the selective process. nor in the evo lutionary process, nor in the cosmic process. but behind them, and, logically, at least, antecedent to them and independent of them. Is it not clear that if we never discover any agency in processes, neither can we find in them any neces sity or any antagonism between them and lib erty? While the progress of biology leaves no logical standing-place for him who believes a living be ing ever does anything that exhaustive knowl edge of its machinery would not lead us to expect under given conditions, it also tells us we should not have reason to expect anything to be as it is if these conditions had not been as they were. It is by finding out, through sci entific discovery, what these conditions are that we learn how to direct and modify the course of nature.
They who fear that the extension of mechan ical conceptions of biology may some time de stroy their conviction that they are reasonable and rational beings, able to act wisely and fool Wily. and to do right and wrong, should ask themselves, in all seriousness, whether anything could afford clearer proof that there is no dis coverable limit to our ability to influence and modify the cosmic process than the artificial pro duction of a living being would afford. If this were to he accomplished, would it not be tangi ble proof that they who complain that their in herited organization is their fete, mistake the bonds of ignorance for the bonds of fate? In stead of showing that our knowledge and our conduct are the necessary and inevitable effects of our structure, would it not rather show that we may hope to control and modify our struc ture through knowledge, when we only know enough about nature? For the blindness of ig norance science gives us a remedy; for the blindness of fate there could be none.
See ANIMAL; BROOKS, W. li.; CLASSIFICA TION OF ANIMALS; DARWIN; EMBRYOLOGY; Evo LUTION; IIEREDITY; DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS; LAMARCK: NATURAL SELECTION, and other titles in the domains of botany, paleontology, and zoology, under which will be found references to the literature of the various phases of biology. Consult, also, Brooks, Foundations of Zoology (New York, 1900).