SYMBIOSIS AND THE BIOLOGY OF FOOD 273 



accordance with the requirements of selfish efficiency, which 

 is productive of lop-sided developments — such, for instance, as 

 disproportionately long fangs, which may require such extrava- 

 gant supplies of blood for their maintenance as to inhibit 

 valuable supplies from reaching the brain, as they otherwise 

 might have done. The very limitation of symbiotic organisms, 

 and especially their indispensable discrimination as regards 

 food, in the end make for psychical progress. The evolution of 

 the moral sentiments required sympathy, and this in turn 

 implied the concomitant of gregariousness. Sympathy and 

 gregariousness have all along increased by ** mutual aid," 

 which may be considered as a form and extension of symbiotic 

 aid. Gregariousness, moreover, as is well known, requires 

 kinds of food and supplies of food that permit association. 

 We can trust to no other regime in the world but the symbiotic 

 for adequate supplies of food. By maintaining a tolerably 

 symbiotic relation to the " environment," the organism 

 maintains a partner as food supplier and obviates recourse to 

 depredation — the dire necessity of non-symbiotic organisms. 

 Symbiotic suppliers are workers par excellence, who know by 

 long and adequate training, and also, we may suppose, by 

 " sympathy " the exact needs of their biological partners. 

 Food supplied under Symbiosis, therefore, is eminently sanc- 

 tioned by nature, being concordant in character with the most 

 fundamental and the most far-reaching principle of organic 

 association, namely, " live and let live." Such food represents 

 exchange, or surplus capital — to be duly redeemed in one way 

 or another by the organism supplied, who is thus stimulated 

 to work, the exercise of which enriches both himself and the 

 supplier. Such food represents spare capital, the parting with 

 which does not leave the supplier poorer in the end. 



A general survey of food habits amongst animals which 

 live exclusively on plant products shows that, as the norm of 

 life, the animal is content with special parts of the plant, and 

 that there is no inherent need for the animal to be actually 

 destructive vis-d-vis the plant, the prevailing relation, on the 

 contrary, being one of " live and let live." 



The symbiotic relation with its needs of industrious habits 

 rivets the attention of the mind upon reciprocal activities, and 

 thereby tends to fix a corresponding state of mind — a socialised 

 mind, as it were, which is the sine qua non of psychic progress. 

 It may justly be claimed that the symbiotic relation provides 

 the best physiological and sociological groundwork for 

 psychic progress, for refinement and elevation of psychical 

 powers. 



Darwin anticipated some such principle as Symbiogenesis, 

 as is evident from his constant emphasis of " division of labour " 



