Returning to the point raised in my title, is luck, I would ask, or cunning, the more fitting matter to be insisted upon in connection with organic modification?  Do animals and plants grow into conformity with their surroundings because they and their fathers and mothers take pains, or because their uncles and aunts go away?  For the survival of the fittest is only the non-survival or going away of the unfittest—­in whose direct line the race is not continued, and who are therefore only uncles and aunts of the survivors.  I can quite understand its being a good thing for any race that its uncles and aunts should go away, but I do not believe the accumulation of lucky accidents could result in an eye, no matter how many uncles and aunts may have gone away during how many generations.

I would ask the reader to bear in mind the views concerning life and death expressed in an early chapter.  They seem to me not, indeed, to take away any very considerable part of the sting from death; this should not be attempted or desired, for with the sting of death the sweets of life are inseparably bound up so that neither can be weakened without damaging the other.  Weaken the fear of death, and the love of life would be weakened.  Strengthen it, and we should cling to life even more tenaciously than we do.  But though death must always remain as a shock and change of habits from which we must naturally shrink—­still it is not the utter end of our being, which, until lately, it must have seemed to those who have been unable to accept the grosser view of the resurrection with which we were familiarised in childhood.  We too now know that though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh shall we so far see God as to be still in Him and of Him—­biding our time for a resurrection in a new and more glorious body; and, moreover, that we shall be to the full as conscious of this as we are at present of much that concerns us as closely as anything can concern us.

The thread of life cannot be shorn between successive generations, except upon grounds which will in equity involve its being shorn between consecutive seconds, and fractions of seconds.  On the other hand, it cannot be left unshorn between consecutive seconds without necessitating that it should be left unshorn also beyond the grave, as well as in successive generations.  Death is as salient a feature in what we call our life as birth was, but it is no more than this.  As a salient feature, it is a convenient epoch for the drawing of a defining line, by the help of which we may better grasp the conception of life, and think it more effectually, but it is a facon de parler only; it is, as I said in “Life and Habit,” {264a} “the most inexorable of all conventions,” but our idea of it has no correspondence with eternal underlying realities.