hourly undergoing Protean transformations, and have
still been throwing out pseudopodia like the amoeba. True, we might have
come to like this fashion of living as well as our more steady-going
system if we had taken to it many millions of ages ago when we were
yet young; but we have contracted other habits which have become so
confirmed that we cannot break with them. We therefore now hate that
which we should perhaps have loved if we had practised [sic] it. This,
however, does not affect the argument, for our concern is with our likes
and dislikes, not with the manner in which those likes and dislikes have
come about. The discovery that organism is capable of modification
at all has occasioned so much astonishment that it has taken the most
enlightened part of the world more than a hundred years to leave off
expressing its contempt for such a crude, shallow, and preposterous
conception. Perhaps in another hundred years we shall learn to admire
the good sense, endurance, and thorough Englishness of organism in
having been so averse to change, even more than its versatility in
having been willing to change so much.

Nevertheless, however conservative we may be, and however much alive to
the folly and wickedness of tampering with settled convictions-no matter
what they are-without sufficient cause, there is yet such a constant
though gradual change in our surroundings as necessitates corresponding
modification in our ideas, desires, and actions. We may think that we
should like to find ourselves always in the same surroundings as our
ancestors, so that we might be guided at every touch and turn by
the experience of our race, and be saved from all self-communing or
interpretation of oracular responses uttered by the facts around us.
Yet the facts will change their utterances in spite of us; and we, too,
change with age and ages in spite of ourselves, so as to see the facts
around us as perhaps even more changed than they actually are. It has
been said, "Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis." The passage would
have been no less true if it had stood, "Nos mutamur et tempora mutantur
in nobis." Whether the organism or the surroundings began changing first
is a matter of such small moment that the two may be left to fight it
out between themselves; but, whichever view is taken, the fact will
remain that whenever the relations between the organism and its
surroundings have been changed, the organism must either succeed in