Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does
survive.
‘Fitness’ then, is only another name for ‘survival.’”
Finding no Guiteau or Troppmann here, I let the pages slide under my
fingers and stopped at this:
“My own pseudo-conclusion:
That we’ve been damned by giants sound asleep, or by great
scientific principles and abstractions that cannot realize
themselves: that little harlots have visited their caprices upon us;
that clowns, with buckets of water from which they pretend to cast
thousands of good-sized fishes have anathemized us for laughing
disrespectfully, because, as with all clowns, underlying buffoonery
is the desire to be taken seriously; that pale ignorances, presiding
over microscopes by which they cannot distinguish flesh from nostoc
or fishes’ spawn or frogs’ spawn, have visited upon us their wan
solemnities. We’ve been damned by corpses and skeletons and mummies,
which twitch and totter with pseudo-life derived from conveniences.”
With some astonishment, I continued to dip into the book, sounding it
here and there, but did not bring up even so well-damned a sample of the
bottom as Benedict Arnold. Instead I got these:
“An object from which nets were suspended—