Page:Karl Kautsky - The Road to Power - tr. A. M. Simons (1909).pdf/36

 in the less complex organisms, give place in higher organisms to conditions in which many intermediate members step in between the mere will to live and the manifold forms of its expression.

I cannot here undertake to carry this further. But a few suggestions may be given.

The conditions of life of an organism are of a twofold nature—first, those that are continually repeated and that do not change in the course of many generations. A will developed by and adjusted to such conditions is strengthened both by inherited custom and natural selection. It becomes an instinct, an impulse which the individual follows under all circumstances, even under extraordinary conditions where following it does not maintain and sustain life, but injures it, perhaps even leads to death. In spite of all this the basis of this will is still the will to live.

Alongside of those conditions of life that are constantly repeated there are also others that appear only seldom or in changed form. Here instinct fails. Here the maintenance of life depends fundamentally upon the possession of intelligence by the organism which will enable it to recognize a given situation and to adjust itself to it. The more an animal form lives in swiftly changing conditions of life the more its intelligence is developed. This is partly due to the fact that the organ of intelligence has greater demands put upon it and partly because the individuals with weaker intelligence are more quickly eliminated.

Finally, when we come to man, intelligence has grown so great that he is able to construct artificial organs—weapons and tools—with which the better to assert himself under given conditions of life. But at the same time he creates for himself new conditions to which, in turn, he must adapt himself. So it is that technical