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The objects of philosophy, art, and religion, all these are parts of the environment of civilised man, and yet his self-adaptation to them has no direct effect whatever upon his continuance on the earth as an animal organism.
Let us therefore not separate the will from the intelligence, let us incarnate them one in the other; and, instead of representing the function of the mind as having for its aim knowledge, foresight, the combination of means, and self-adaptation, we shall be much nearer the truth in representing to ourselves a being who wills to know, wills to foresee, and wills to adapt himself, for, after all, he wills to live.
The capacity of self-adaptation, which is characteristic of the Russian people generally, is possessed by them in the highest degree. When placed on some distant Asiatic frontier they can at once transform themselves into squatters building their own houses, raising crops of grain, and living as colonists without neglecting their military duties.
"I cannot tell," he answered; "but if she had not the studied perfection of Rachel, which was always the same and could not be altered without harm, she had at least a capacity of impulsive self-adaptation about her which made her for the time the character she personated, not always the same, but such as the woman she represented might have been in the shifting phases of the passion that possessed her.
The mobility of labour is of course always determined within certain limits, but much may and could be done by pursuing from the beginning a right method in educating the child to develop its power of self-adaptation to the needs of a changing environment.
Tylor was not the discoverer of the protoplasmic continuity that exists in plants, but he was among the very first to welcome this discovery, and his experiments at Carshalton in the years 1883 and 1884 demonstrated that, whether there was protoplasmic continuity in plants or no, they were at any rate endowed with some measure of reason, forethought, and power of self-adaptation to varying surroundings.
The whole trend of circumstance is to substitute science for mere rote skill in him, to demand initiative and an intelligent self-adaptation to new discoveries and new methods, to make him a professional man and a job and pieceworker after the fashion of the great majority of professional men. Against all these things the serf element in him fights.
He was an ordinary brown-haired, blue-eyed young man, not, perhaps, ordinary, for that combination is rather rare, and there were some people who said that something in his eye betrayed what they called insincerity; indeed there was generally about him an agreeableness, a ready self-adaptation to everybody's way of thinking, a desire to recommend himself, which is always open to censure. Mrs.
Instead of passive and essentially unintelligent “adaptation” through the sieve of selection, we have here direct self-adaptation of organisms to the conditions of their existence, through their own continual restless activity and exertion, an ascent of their own accord to ever greater heights and perfections. A theory of this kind might easily form part of a religious conception of the world.
Hilaire transcends—notwithstanding the protests of Eimer to the contrary—the categories of the mechanical theory of life, and this chapter does so in particular. The array of facts here marshalled as to the spontaneous self-adaptation of organisms to their environment—in relation to colour mainly—forms the most thoroughgoing refutation of Darwinism that it is possible to imagine.
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