Narrow personal prejudices and feelings quite too often becloud the issue and ultimate defeat is the inevitable result. Life as we see it around us on this planet is usually thought to be confined to man, animals and plants, those organisms which grow and reproduce their kind with more or less precision. Science is proving that the world is not half dead, but that every atom is all life and motion. Life is self-expression, intricate organized polarity. The lure of happiness and the fear of pain are fundamental qualities possessed by all living things and are the two forces which have through untold millenniums kept what we usually call life from destruction by the ever encroaching outside forces of destruction.
Life is heredity plus environment.
At birth of a plant, animal or man, heredity has already been fixed. Environment may now call into action only those tendencies which have been experienced in the age long past, yet may recombine and intensify them in a most surprising way. Such a modification is limited, generally, to the individual, but may, if repeated generation after generation, by slow increments at last become fixed and available in the species. Assimilation and reproduction are, and, of course, must be fundamental and universal. The power of adaptation to various conditions which beset all life may also be considered as fundamental for the continuation of any species.