ed back upon as a good by
the soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it creates
the possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is more
than a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made a
sense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend or
previously esteem those formations which are the condition of value or
intention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition;
but when those formations arise they determine estimation, and fix the
direction of preference, so that the evolution which produced them, when
looked back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained, cannot help
seeming to have been directed toward the good now distinguished and
partly attained. For this reason creation is regarded as a work of love,
and the power that brought order out of chaos is called intelligence.

[Sidenote: Living stability.]

These natural formations, tending to generate and realise each its
ideal, are, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, produced no less
mechanically, doubtless, than the onward current, yet seeming to arrest
or to reverse it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series of
phases with a recognisable rhythm; memory reverses it by modifying this
rhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those that
supervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. This stability
is relative, being still a mode of flux, and consists fundamentally in
repetition. Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it
preserves form and disregards time and matter. Inheritance is repetition
on a larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations; while habit and
memory are a sort of heredity within the individual, since here an old
perception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a forward
march. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; much
as a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited
from the preceding notes, which give it a new setting.

[Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress.]

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is
set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as
among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is
frivolous and easily distracted; it miss