“So he went in, and was clothed in such garments as they.

   “Then Christian smiled, and said, I think verily I know the
   meaning of this.”—­Bunyan’s, Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 44.

If you wish to climb the Matterhorn many paths lead up the lower slopes, and a stumble here may cost you only a sprain.  And I suppose that several paths lead to the base of the cone.  But thence to the summit there is but one path, and a misstep means death.  Pardon these quotations and illustrations.  They are my only means of at all adequately presenting to you a scientific man’s conception of the meaning of the struggle for life.  The laws of evolution are written in blood and bear the death penalty.  For

              “Life is not as idle ore,
        But iron dug from central gloom,
        And heated hot with burning fears,
        And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
        And battered with the shocks of doom
        To shape and use.”

There would seem therefore to be going on a process of natural selection.  Natural selection seems to select more unsparingly and the struggle for life—­or even existence—­to grow fiercer as we advance from lower forms to higher in the animal kingdom.

But the theory which we have agreed to accept teaches us that these survivors are those which or who have conformed to their environment and that they have survived because of their conformity.  And what do we mean by environment?  And does not man modify his environment?  Certainly he changes by irrigation a desert into a garden.  He carries water against its tendency to the hill-top.  But he has learned to do this only by studying the laws which govern the motions of fluids and rigorously obeying them.  He must carry his water in strong pipes and take it from some higher point, or must use heat or some means to furnish the force to drive it to the higher point.  He cannot change a single iota of the law, and gains control of the elements only by obedience to their laws.  Electricity is man’s best servant as long as he respects its laws, but it kills him who disobeys them.  But does not man make his own surroundings in social life?  He merely enters upon a new mode of life; and if this new mode be in conformity with the eternal forces and laws of environment man prospers in this new mode of life and conforms still more closely.

There is, indeed, but one environment, but the lower animal comes in contact with, and is affected by, but a small portion of its elements.  Form and color were in the world before the animal had developed an eye, but up to this time these could have but little effect on animal life.  Light vibrations were present in ether long before the animal by responding to them made them any part of its own true environment.  There is vastly more in environment than man has yet discovered, and he will discover these elements only by obedience to their laws.