New Thought Archives at New Thought Library

but from the relation of these actions to each other and their complete and permanent concurrence in a common end. What, then, are the facts that in each case are expounded by the plastic power termed life ? If we give the term its fullest range, it covers all those peculiar powers and the laws of those powers which belong to living things.

(1) It embraces primarily a controlling tendency to construct a complex specific organism through a series of changes known as growth. This tendency is present as a pervasive idea in every transition, giving it form and direction. This tendency includes many minor homologies, many obscure correlations, many delicate correspondences by which the symmetry and fitness of growth are preserved.

(2) Life covers also a subordinate tendency to watch over this organism in various ways, to institute action corrective of disease and restorative after injury. (3) It embraces a movement of propagation, by which the specific life, in completing one circuit of development, provides the conditions of second circuits, and these in turn of third circuits. Under this tendency of life to renew itself are contained (a) the law of inheritance, by which the special combination of forces which belongs to the parent reappears in the offspring; (b) the law of variation, by which these forces in their passage take on secondary modifications, more usually those of adaptation to new conditions; (c) and the law of atavism by which these modifications are dropped, when the provoking causes disappear.