exhibits, some further relation parallel to a further relation in the environment. And the greater correspondence thus established, must, other things equal, show itself both in greater complexity of life, and greater length of life: a truth which will be fully perceived on remembering the enormous mortality which prevails among lowly-organized creatures, and the gradual increase of longevity and diminution of fertility which we meet with on ascending to creatures of higher and higher developments.
It must be remarked, however, that while length and complexity of life are, to a great extent, associated – while a more extended correspondence in the successive changes commonly implies increased correspondence in the simultaneous changes; yet it is not uniformly so. Between the two great divisions of life – animal and vegetal – this contrast by no means holds. A tree may live a thousand years, though the simultaneous changes going on in it answer only to the few chemical affinities in the air and the earth, and though its serial changes answer only to those of day and night, of the weather and the seasons. A tortoise, which exhibits in a given time nothing like the number of internal actions adjusted to external ones that are exhibited by a dog, yet lives far longer. The tree by its massive trunk and the tortoise by its hard carapace, are saved the necessity of responding to those many surrounding mechanical actions which organisms not thus protected must respond to or die; or rather – the tree and the tortoise display in their structures, certain simple statical relations adapted to meet countless dynamical relations external to them. But notwithstanding the qualifications suggested by such cases, it needs but to compare a microscopic fungus with an oak, an animalcule with a shark, a mouse with a man, to recognize the fact that this increasing correspondence of its changes with those of the environment which characterizes progressing life, habitually shows itself at the same time in continuity and in complication.
Even were not the connexion between length of life and complexity of life thus conspicuous, it would still be true that the life is great in proportion as the correspondence is great. For if the lengthened existence of a tree be looked upon as tantamount to a considerable amount of life; then it must be admitted that its lengthened display of correspondence is tantamount to a considerable amount of correspondence. If, otherwise, it be held that notwithstanding its much shorter existence, a dog must rank above a tortoise in degree of life because of its superior activity; then it is implied that its life is higher because its simultaneous and successive changes are more complex and more rapid – because the correspondence is greater. And since we regard as the highest life that which, like our own, shows great complexity in the correspondences, great rapidity in the succession of them, and great length in the series of them; the equivalence between degree of life and degree of correspondence is unquestionable.
§ 33. In further elucidation of this general truth, and especially in explanation of the irregularities just referred to, it must be pointed out that as the life becomes higher the environment itself becomes more complex. Though, literally, the environment means all surrounding space with the co-existences and sequences contained in it: yet, practically, it often means but a small part of this. The environment of an entozoon can scarcely be said to extend beyond the body of the animal in which the entozoon lives. That of a freshwater alga is virtually limited to the ditch inhabited by the alga. And, understanding the term in this restricted sense, we shall see that the superior organisms inhabit the more complicated environments.
Thus, contrasted with the life found on land, the lower life is that found in the sea; and it has the simpler environment. Marine creatures are affected by fewer co-existences and sequences than terrestrial ones. Being very nearly of the same specific gravity as the surrounding medium, they have to contend with less various mechanical actions. The sea-anemone fixed to a stone, and the acalephe borne along in the current, need to undergo no internal changes such as those by which the caterpillar meets the varying effects of gravitation, while creeping over and under the leaves. Again, the sea is liable to none of those extreme and rapid alterations of temperature which the air suffers. Night and day produce no appreciable modifications in it; and it is comparatively little affected by the seasons. Thus its contained fauna show no marked correspondences similar to those by which air-breathing creatures counterbalance thermal changes. Further, in respect to the supply of nutriment, the conditions are more simple. The lower tribes of animals inhabiting the water, like the plants inhabiting the air, have their food brought to them. The same current which brings oxygen to the oyster, also brings it the microscopic organisms on which it lives: the disintegrating matter and the matter to be integrated, co-exist under the simplest relation. It is otherwise with land animals. The oxygen is everywhere, but the sustenance is not everywhere: it has to be sought; and the conditions under which it is to be obtained are more or less complex. So too with that liquid by the agency of which the vital processes are carried on. To marine creatures water is ever present, and by the lowest is passively absorbed; but to most creatures living on the earth and in the air, it is made available only through those nervous changes constituting perception, and those muscular ones by which drinking is effected. Similarly, after tracing upwards from the Amphibia the widening extent and complexity which the environment, as practically considered, assumes – after observing further how increasing heterogeneity in the flora and fauna of the globe, itself progressively complicates the environment of each species of organism – it might finally be shown that the same general truth is displayed in the history of mankind, who, in the course of their progress, have been adding to their physical environment a social environment that has been growing ever more involved. Thus, speaking generally, it is clear that those relations in the environment to which relations in the organism must correspond, themselves increase in number and intricacy as the life assumes a higher form.
§ 34. To make yet more manifest the fact that the degree of life varies as the degree of correspondence, let me here point out, that those other distinctions successively noted when contrasting vital changes with non-vital changes, are all implied in this last distinction – their correspondence with external co-existences and sequences; and further, that the increasing fulfilment of those other distinctions which we found to accompany increasing life, is involved in the increasing fulfilment of this last distinction. We saw that living organisms are characterized by successive changes, and that as the life becomes higher, the successive changes become more numerous. Well, the environment is full of successive changes, and the greater the correspondence, the greater must be the number of successive changes in the organism. We saw that life presents simultaneous changes, and that the more elevated it is, the more marked the multiplicity of them. Well, besides countless co-existences in the environment, there are often many changes occurring in it at the same moment; and hence increased correspondence with it implies in the organism an increased display of simultaneous changes. Similarly with the heterogeneity of the changes. In the environment the relations are very varied in their kinds, and hence, as the organic actions come more and more into correspondence with them, they too must become very varied in their kinds. So again is it even with definiteness of combination. As the most important surrounding changes with which each animal has to deal, are the definitely-combined changes exhibited by other animals, whether prey or enemies, it results that definiteness of combination must be a general characteristic of the internal ones which have to correspond with them. So that throughout, the correspondence of the internal relations with the external ones is the essential thing; and all the special characteristics of the internal relations, are but the collateral results of this correspondence.
§§ 35, 36. Before closing the chapter, it will be useful to compare the definition of Life here set forth, with the definition of Evolution set forth in First Principles. Living bodies being bodies which display in the highest degree the structural changes constituting Evolution; and Life being made up of the functional changes accompanying these structural changes; we ought to find a certain harmony between the definitions of Evolution and of Life. Such a harmony is not wanting.
The first distinction we noted between the kind of change shown in Life, and other kinds of change, was its serial character. We saw that vital change is substantially unlike non-vital change, in being made up of successive changes. Now since organic bodies display so much more than inorganic bodies those continuous differentiations and integrations which constitute Evolution; and since the re-distributions of matter thus carried so far in a comparatively
