oundation
of all life.

Our professor makes the provisional statement, not in obedience to his
science, but in obedience to his philosophy, that something more than
mechanics and chemistry may have had a hand in shaping the universe,
some primordial tendency impressed upon or working in matter "just
before mechanism begins to act"--"a necessary and preestablished
associate of mechanism." So that if we start with the universe, with
life, and with this tendency, mechanism will do all the rest. But this
is not science, of course, because it is not verifiable; it is
practically the philosophy of Bergson.

The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do pinch the Harvard
professor a bit, and he pads them with a little of the Bergsonian
philosophy. Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the conclusions of
positive science. He sees that we, as human beings, cannot live in this
universe without supplementing our science with some sort of philosophy
that will help us to escape from the fatalism of matter and force into
the freedom of the spiritual life. If we are merely mechanical and
chemical accidents, all the glory of life, all the meaning of our moral
and spiritual natures, go by the board.

Professor Henderson shows us how well this planet, with its oceans and
continents, and its mechanical and chemical forces and elements, is
suited to sustain life, but he brings us no nearer the solution of the
mystery than we were before. His title, to begin with, is rather
bewildering. Has the "fitness of the environment" ever been questioned?
The environment is fit, of course, else living bodies would not be here.
We are used to taking hold of the other end of the problem. In living
nature the foot is made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe the foot. The
environment is the mould in which the living organism is cast. Hence, it
seems to me, that seeking to prove the fitness of the environment is
very much like seeking to prove the fitness of water for fish to swim
in, or the fitness of the air for birds to fly in. The implication seems
to be made that the environment anticipates the organism, or meets it
half way. But the environment is rather uncompromising. Man alone
modifies his environment by the weapon of science; but not radically; in
the end he has to fit himself to it. Life has been able to adjust
itself to the universal forces and so go along with them; otherwise we
should not be here. We may say, humanly speaking, that the