Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/152

Rh as certified only to date, with a reservation, at best, of “tentative expectancy” for hope of continuance; (4) that “natural selection,” as empirically verified, is a process of cancellation, in the end a selection only to death; and (5) that the Whole alone has the possibility of final survival. The “tentative expectation” founded on the entire sweep of the observed facts, and not extended beyond it, would be that the latest observed survivor — man — is destined like his predecessors to pass away, supplanted by some new variation of the Whole, of a higher fitness to it. And so on, endlessly.

This clear pointing toward the One-and-All that devours all, seems but to gain still further clearness when the principles of conservation and of evolution are considered, as they must be, in their inseparable connexion and interaction. They work in and through each other. Conservation and correlation of energy, and their “rider” of dissipation, are the secret of the mechanism in the process of natural selection, with its deaths and its survivals. Evolution is the field, and its resulting forms of existence, more and more complex, are the outcome, of the operations of the correlated, conserved, and dissipated energies. Evolution, in its turn, by its principle of struggle and survival, works in the very process of the correlation, dissipation, and conservation of energy. It therefore seems