The name is absent

66 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

forever balance thus between good and evil. When this jangle
of free-will and instinct shall have been adjusted, when per-
fect understanding has given the former the power to re-
place the latter entirely, man will no longer vary. The
needle of understanding will yet point steadfast and un-
wavering to the distant pole of truth.             (pp. 83-84)

Eugene Witla, on the contrary, “once stood in a morgue
and saw human bodies apparently dissolving into a kind of
chemical mush, and he had said to himself then how ridicu-
lous it was to assume that Bfe meant anything much to the
forces which were doing these things. Great chemical and
physical forces were at work, which permitted, accidentally,
perhaps, some little shadow-play, which would soon pass.
But, oh, its presence—how sweet it was!” (The “Genius,”
pp. 681-682.) Though less “metaphysically inclined” than
Witla, Lester Kane arrived at much the same conclusion:

In distant ages a queer thing had come to pass. There had
started on its way in the form of evolution a minute cellular
organism which had apparently reproduced itself by divi-
sion, had early learned to combine itself with others, to
organize itself into bodies, strange forms of fish, animals, and
birds, and had finally learned to organize itself into man.
Man, on his part, composed as he was of self-organizing
cells, was pushing himself forward into comfort and different
aspects of existence by means of union and organization with
with other men. Why? Heaven only knew. . . . Why should
he complain, why worry, why speculate?—the world was
going steadily forward of its own volition, whether he would
or no. Truly it was. And was there any need for him to dis-
turb himself about it? There was not. He fancied at times
that it might as well never have been started at all. “The one
divine, far-off event” of the poet did not appeal to him as
having any basis in fact. (Jennie Gerhardt, pp. 404-405)

As the preceding quotation makes evident, Dreiser’s mind
passed easily from physical to social evolution; apparently,
he had no sense of a theoretical division or even distinction
between the two. In a meditation upon the evolution of hu-
man marriage, Eugene Witla traces the institution to the rais-

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