all the material structure of the animal is present in the spatially
extended form in the initial phase of the system. Just as the adult
animal is a manifoldness of material parts and energies that possess
extension, so also is the undifferentiated embryo and its material
environment an extensive manifoldness. We cannot otherwise conceive
it if we are to retain the mechanistic view of the development of the
individual organism.
Let us think of the process of organic evolution in another way by
comparing it with the mathematical process by which we form the
permutations and combinations of a number of different things.
Individual development is termed the assumption of a mosaic structure,
that is, all the parts of the adult are assumed to be present in
the embryo, but in a sort of “jumbled-up” condition. As development
proceeds, these parts become sorted out and arranged in a pattern which
continually becomes more and more distinct. Much the same process
of arrangement and segregation must be assumed to have occurred
during the process of racial evolution: the parts of the “primitive”
life-substance, with all the parts of the physical environment which
become incorporated with it during its evolution, must have become
segregated and arranged so as to form the existing species of plants
and animals. A permutation, then, of the separate things _a_, _b_,
_c_--_x_, _y_, _z_, is an arrangement of all these things: obviously
there are a very great number of ways in which the letters of the
alphabet may be arranged, 26! in all. But we may take some
of the letters and arrange them in different ways: the selections _a_,
_b_, _c_, _d_, can be arranged in 4! ways _b_, _c_, _d_, _e_, also in
4! ways, and so on. Thus by a process of dissociation and arrangement
of a certain number of elements, a very great number of different
things--things which consist of elements spatially extended--can be
obtained.
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