sanction immediately follows. Man depends on things for his experience,
yet by automatic action he changes these very things so that it becomes
possible that by his action he should promote his welfare. He may, of
course, no less readily precipitate his ruin. The animal is more subject
to vicissitudes than the plant, which makes no effort to escape them or
to give chase to what it feeds upon. The greater perils of action,
however, are in animals covered partly by fertility, partly by
adaptability, partly by success. The mere possibility of success, in a
world governed by natural selection, is an earnest of progress.
Sometimes, in impressing the environment, a man will improve it: which
is merely to say that a change may sometimes fortify the impulse which
brought it about. As soon as this retroaction is perceived and the act
is done with knowledge of its ensuing benefits, plastic impulse becomes
art, and the world begins actually to change in obedience to reason.

One respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for the
aesthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of the
hand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it more
interesting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiated
himself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation may
follow, and whenever the new form given to the object improves
it--_i.e._, increases its interest for the eye--the experimenter will
triumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland so
arranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight and
reason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which they
are sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that they
should be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into nature
will follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary that
nature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmony
with his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chance
arrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewn
it with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it will
be accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results.
Self-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrasting
itself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify the
next performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel,
physical proficiency and