BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 149 



terials and strictly parental functions, have their con- 

 structive value and find their altruistic outlets as social 

 assets. But even in the highest forms of animal life 

 there is no formally organized machinery for extending 

 this altruistic action beyond the immediate offspring 

 into the social phases of life at large. 



2. The Unity and Cooperative Duality of Plant 

 and Animal Life. Something of this kind, on a very 

 large scale of time and space, is accomplished by the 

 familiar commerce between plant life and animal life. 

 It will serve to illustrate what we have in mind when 

 we speak of the larger creative value of dual functional 

 divergence. 



The functional unity of these two great divisions 

 of the organic world is based on the mutually profit- 

 able exchange of their characteristic products. 



The conservation of organic power in starch, sugars, 

 wood, coal, and oil, and the peculiar nutritive, respira- 

 tory, medicinal, and constructive properties of many 

 other products of plant life, are indispensable to ani- 

 mal life. On their part, many plants, especially the 

 higher ones, are largely dependent on animal life for 

 their nutrition, distribution, or fertilization. In this 

 dual functioning, there is a prevailing tendency mutu- 

 ally to strengthen and accentuate the characteristics of 

 each other, and thereby to make each one more de- 

 pendent on the other. In these respects, the peculiar 

 attributes of immobility and conservability in the plant 

 kingdom, and of instability, locomotion, and explora- 

 tion in the animal kingdom, have the same divergent, 

 complementary, and cooperative relations to each other 

 as the male and female attributes in sexual cooperation. 



On this more general exchange of plant and animal 



