AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 113 



between high and low, the new and the old, the living 

 and the dead. 



Since growth always tends to outrun its administra- 

 tive inventions, every growing system ultimately 

 reaches the 'limit of its capacity for conveyance and 

 self-maintenance. When that point is approached, 

 the growing system hesitates in its career, and with 

 diminishing power and increasing disorders, declines, 

 through senility, into that more complete fragmentation 

 we call death or dissolution. But since the basic power 

 of growth is in no wise destroyed by death, and because 

 the profits of individual life are in some measure con- 

 served after death, life still maintains its continuous 

 rhythmic progression; an alternation of partial death 

 and complete regeneration and, it may be, the surpass- 

 ing of all previous records of achievement. For every 

 new life, as a rule, starts on a little higher level than 

 its predecessors, and with greater resources at its com- 

 mand. 



