time: the refreshing river 



they have been there from the beginning; and now they are 

 engaged upon the enemy so hotly and so openly that we can 

 discover what some of them are. The first is one which has 

 begun to mine the struggle for life at its roots. Essentially, as we 

 have seen, this struggle is the attempt to solve the fundamental 

 problem of all life — Nutrition. If that could be solved apart 

 from the struggle for life, its occupation would be gone. That 

 problem will be solved by science. At the present moment 

 chemistry is devoting itself to the experiment of manufacturing 

 nutrition^ and with an enthusiasm which only immediate hope 

 begets. . . . 'The time is not far distant ^en the artificial pre- 

 paration of articles of food will be accomplished. . . .' 



But there is a higher hope. As there comes a time in a child's 

 life when coercion gives place to free and conscious choice, the 

 day comes to the world when the aspirations of the spirit begin 

 to compete with, to neutralise, and to supplant, the compulsions 

 of the body. Against that day, in the heart of humanity, nature 

 had made full provision. For there, prepared by a profounder 

 chemistry than that which was to relieve the strain on the 

 physical side, had gathered through the ages a force in whose 

 presence the energies of the animal struggle are as nought. 

 Beside the struggle for the life of others, the struggle for life 

 is but a passing phase. As old, as deeply sunk in nature, this 

 further force was destined from the first to replace the struggle 

 for life, and to build a nobler superstructure on the foundations 

 which it laid."^ 



The passage is interesting for many reasons, of which two may 

 be mentioned. First, Drummond put his finger on the very power 

 which has changed and will change the face of human civilisation, 

 applied science. His thought was exactly parallel with that of Marx 

 and Engels, who some years before had exchanged letters describing 

 their reading of the books of Liebig and the other agricultural chemists, 

 and showing how the rise of nutritional productivity which science was 

 bringing about knocked Malthus into a cocked hat. But secondly 

 though Drummond could recognise reproductive donation and 

 parental care as the origin of social altruism, he could not pass over 

 the threshold crossed by Marx and Engels alone,^. and point with 

 absolute clarity to the working-class movement of his day as the 

 historic force destined to lead the way to the higher forms of social 



1 AOM, pp. 269 ff. 2 AOM, cf. p. 431. 



38 



