A certain order and reasonableness emerges from the chaos and cross-purposes.  There are harmony and cooeperation among the elemental forces, as well as strife and antagonism.  Life gets on, for all groping and blundering.  There is the inherent variability of living forms to begin with—­the primordial push toward the development from within which, so far as we can see, is not fortuitous, but predestined; and there is the stream of influences from without, constantly playing upon and modifying the organism and taken advantage of by it.

The essence of life is in adaptability; it goes into partnership with the forces and conditions that surround it.  It is this trait which leads the teleological philosopher to celebrate the fitness of the environment when its fitness is a foregone conclusion.  Shall we praise the fitness of the air for breathing, or of the water for drinking, or of the winds for filling our sails?  If we cannot say explicitly, without speaking from our anthropomorphism, that there is a guiding intelligence in the evolution of living forms, we can at least say, I think, that the struggle for life is favored by the very constitution of the universe and that man in some inscrutable way was potential in the fiery nebula itself.

XII

THE NATURALIST’S VIEW OF LIFE

I

William James said that one of the privileges of a philosopher was to contradict other philosophers.  I may add in the same spirit that one of the fatalities of many philosophers is, sooner or later, to contradict themselves.  I do not know that James ever contradicted himself, but I have little doubt that a critical examination of his works would show that he sometimes did so; I remember that he said he often had trouble to make both ends of his philosophy meet.  Any man who seeks to compass any of the fundamental problems with the little span of his finite mind, is bound at times to have trouble to make both ends meet.  The man of science seldom has any such trouble with his problems; he usually knows what is the matter and forthwith seeks to remedy it.  But the philosopher works with a much more intangible and elusive material, and is lucky if he is ever aware when both ends fail to meet.

I have often wondered if Darwin, who was a great philosopher as well as a great man of science, saw or felt the contradiction between his theory of the origin of species through natural selection working upon fortuitous variations, and his statement, made in his old age, that he could not look upon man, with all his wonderful powers, as the result of mere chance.  The result of chance man certainly is—­is he not?—­as are all other forms of life, if evolution is a mere mechanical process set going and kept going by the hit-and-miss action of the environment upon the organism, or by the struggle for existence.  If evolution involves no intelligence in nature, no guiding or animating principle, then is not man an accidental outcome of the blind clashing and jolting of the material forces, as much so as the great stone face in the rocks which Hawthorne used so suggestively in one of his stories?