Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/80

70 nothing of outness and inness. They shine through the materials which they build up and mold, as light shines through the clearest glass. Even the most purely physical of those concerned are independent of such relations. Gravitation knows nothing of inness and outness. The very air, which seems so external to us, does not merely bathe or lave the skin, but permeates the blood, and its elements are the very breath of life in every tissue of the body. The more secret forces of vitality deal at their will with outness and inness. The external surfaces of one stage are folded in and become most secret recesses at another. Organs which are outside in one animal, and are conspicuously flourished in the face of day with exquisite ornament of color and of structure, are in another animal hid away and carefully covered up. Nay, there are many cases in which all these changes are conducted in the same animal at different periods of life, and during conscious and unconscious intervals the whole creature is reformed to fit it for new surroundings, for new media, and with new apparatuses adapted to them.

If Mr. Spencer wishes to cast any fresh light upon those factors of organic evolution respecting which he now confesses that Darwin's language and his own have been alike defective, he must fix our attention on something deeper than the differences between every organism and its own skin. His selection of this most superficial kind of difference as the first to dwell upon, is not merely wanting—it is erroneous. It hides and leads us off the scent of another kind of outsidedness and insidedness which is really and truly fundamental; namely, the insidedness, the self-containedness, of every organism as a whole with reference to all external forces. Nobody has pointed this out more clearly in former years than Mr. Spencer himself. The grand distinction between the organic and the inorganic lies in this—that the organic is not passive under the touch or impact of external force, but responds, if it responds at all, with the play of counter-forces which are essentially its own. Organic bodies are not simply moved. They move themselves. They have "self-mobility." They are so constituted that even when an external force acts as an excitement or a stimulus, the organic forces which emerge and act are much more complex and important—so much so that as compared with the results produced by these organic forces the direct results of the incident forces are "quite obscured." Mr. Spencer even confesses that these two kinds of action are so different in their own nature that in strictness they "should not be dealt with together."