equal expectation of life in the actuarial sense. Without the first
tendency there could be no evolution. Without the second, there would
be no good reason why one variation should disappear and another take
its place; that is to say there would be no selection. Without the [8]
third, the struggle for existence, the agent of the selective process
in the state of nature, would vanish.*

* Collected Essays, vol. ii. passim.

Granting the existence of these tendencies, all the known facts of the
history of plants and of animals may be brought into rational
correlation. And this is more than can be said for any other
hypothesis that I know of. Such hypotheses, for example, as that of
the existence of a primitive, orderless chaos; of a passive and
sluggish eternal matter moulded, with but partial success, by
archetypal ideas; of a brand-new world-stuff suddenly created and
swiftly shaped by a supernatural power; receive no encouragement, but
the contrary, from our present knowledge. That our earth may once have
formed part of a nebulous cosmic magma is certainly possible, indeed
seems highly probable; but there is no reason to doubt that order
reigned there, as completely as amidst what we regard as the most
finished works of nature or of man.** The faith which is born of
knowledge, finds its object in an eternal order, bringing forth
ceaseless change, through endless time, in endless space; the
manifestations of the cosmic energy alternating between phases of
potentiality and phases of explication. It may be that, as Kant
suggests,*** every cosmic [9] magma predestined to evolve into a new
world, has been the no less predestined end of a vanished predecessor.

**Ibid., vol. iv. p. 138; vol. v. pp. 71-73.