Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/351

Rh of the general end, and because all rearrangements of the organic parts that lead directly to the development of the eye are favored, as against rearrangements tending in any other direction, by the fact that every successive stage of such rearrangements results in a saving of energy in the reaching of maintenance to the organism bringing them about. In a word, the path of structural movement toward the eye is the easiest path, the path of least resistance, while the path away from the eye is the most difficult path, the path of greatest resistance; and what is true of the eye is true of all other organs and organic appliances whatsoever. Given, therefore, the molecular forces which in some way not yet understood impel the organism to display those activities of maintenance which we call life, and there follow, by virtue of those forces, of the character of organic matter, and of the general conditions of existence, not only the intelligent adaptations which make possible and facilitate maintenance, but also the gradual improvement of those adaptations which constitutes organic ascent.

What, finally, is the outcome? In the biological world at the present moment the great question which interests inquirers is that of the meaning of intelligent adaptations. Thinkers in this field no longer question the existence of intelligence in the unconscious form; they seek to discover what that intelligence means. "What we should like to discover," says one of them in a letter to the writer, "is the seat of the so-called unconscious intelligence which brings about those structures which the older teleologists called designed." That natural selection supplies little if any material for an answer to the question is already recognized. It being impossible to trace these structures to an artificer operating outside, our only recourse is to look to the organism itself for the power to which the fashioning of tissues and organs is due. And though we can do nothing toward solving the fundamental problem in biology, the origin of life itself, we need not despair—given the fact of life—taking the powers of living protoplasm for granted, of comprehending something of the process by which intelligent adaptations arise. For, the rest being assumed, we see how from the operation of the law of least resistance all the mechanisms of life result by necessity. Writ minutely in the tissues of the organism the law is inscribed broadly and grandly on all the features of our modern civilization. Not an activity of the busy industrial life around us, whether it be due directly to travail of brain or hand, or find its realization in that wonderful, external side of human life—the life of machinery—but illustrates the universal mode in which all conscious intelligence reaches its end. And so also in the realm of the unconscious we have only to take for granted the powers of living protoplasm, and the simplicity as well as the exceeding beauty of the process by which