54 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
to build this mortal life in. such fashion that only honesty and
virtue shall prevail. Witness, then, the significant manner in
which it has fashioned the black grouper. . . .
Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is
as fine an illustration of the constructive genius of nature,
which is not beatific, as any which the mind of man may dis-
cover. Its great superiority lies in an almost unbelievable
power of simulation . . . You cannot look at it long without
feeling that you are witnessing something spectral and un-
natural, so brilliant is its power to deceive. . . .
What would you say was the intention of the overruling,
intelligent, constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca
this ability? To fit it to be Uuthful? To permit it to present an
unvarying appearance which all honest life-seeking fish may
know? Or would you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery,
were here at work? An implement of illusion one might readily
suspect it to be, a Bving lie, a creature whose business
it is to appear what it is not, to simulate that with which it
has nothing in common, to get its living by great subtlety, the
power of its enemies to forefend against which is little. The
indictment is fair.
∖ Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, benef-
icent creative, overruling power never wills that which is
either tricky or deceptive? Or would you say that this ma-
terial seeming in which we dwell is itself an illusion? If not,
whence then the Ten Commandments and the illusion of
Justice? Why were the Beatitudes dreamed of and how do
they avail? (pp. 501-502)
This passage offers one of the most useful guides to
Dreiser’s curiously supernatural naturalism,1 and thereby
to his conception of evolution. Like many or most of the crea-
tive writers of the preceding half or three-quarters century,
he takes for granted a teleological, vitalistic explanation of
the evolutionary process, but he forges his special interpre-
tations upon the anvil of his own mind. For Tennyson, the
horror of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is compensated
by the promise of immortality for the individual, and for the
race by the vision of an era “a hunded thousand, a million
summers away” when men shall “lay/The Ghost of the Brute
that is walking and haunting us yet.”2 Browning agrees that