Page:Why I am an infidel.pdf/8

 we usually call life from destruction by the ever encroaching outside forces of destruction. Life is heredity plus environment. At birth of a plant, animal or man, heredity has already been fixed. Environment may now call into action only those tendencies which have been experienced in the age long past, yet may recombine and intensify them in a most surprising way. Such a modification is limited, generally, to the individual, but may, if repeated generation after generation, by slow increments at last become fixed and available in the species.

Assimilation and reproduction are, and, of course, must be fundamental and universal. The power of adaptation to various conditions which beset all life may also be considered as fundamental for the continuation of any species. All these various powers of adaptation have to be acquired individually and repeated indefinitely until so fixed in the life stream that they are reproduced. Repetition is the means of impressing any quality or character in animal life or in man and by just the same means plants are impressed, and their qualities and habits changed as we desire. All life depends upon a series of selections and repetitions.

The first faint glimmerings of choice may be seen in the polarity of the magnet, next we see it perhaps in plants and the more primitive forms of life, and as we mount higher and higher in the scale of life there is more and more freedom of choice and less dependence upon heredity.