If existence in that sense, be the force or principle whose persistence and self-assertion is the cause of all evolution, it is impossible to conceive how primordial atoms, which are assumed to be indestructible and constant in quantity, should trouble themselves to struggle at all; since the amount of that kind of existence can neither be lessened nor increased. And as motion is also assumed to be a constant quantity, it is plain that what struggles to be and to multiply, must be some special collocation and grouping of atoms with some correspondingly particular determination of motion, called "life;" but what "life" is, apart from the means it is supposed to have selected for itself, does not appear. Another difficulty attendant on this false simplification is the complete subversion of that scale of dignity or excellence upon which we range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the top--not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which, without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable, judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness; mind than mere sensation; and in general, what includes and surpasses, than what is included and surpassed. We see that the organic world presupposes the ministry of the inorganic; and the animal world, that of the plant world; and that the human world depends on the ministry of all three; and our whole conception of this world as "cosmos" is simply the filling in of this hierarchic framework. Yet this old structure falls to pieces under the new simplification. If "life" (as vaguely conceived) be the first beginning and the last end (or rather result) of the whole process of evolution, if it be the _summum bonum_, then the "highest" creature means, the most life-producing. Now if we put "money" instead of "life," and begin to classify men by this standard, we see how it inverts the old-world ideas of social hierarchy. True it is, the man of letters or of high artistic gifts can produce a certain amount of money, but has little chance against the inventor of a new soap or a patent pill. Honesty at once becomes the worst policy, and a thousand other maxims have to be reformed. Yet this is a trifling _boule-versement_ compared with that which would have to be introduced into our scientific classification were "life-productivity" (in the vague) taken as the criterion of excellence. For we cannot any longer determine the rank of an animal by its organic complexity, since, _ceteris paribus_, this is a defect rather than otherwise.