APPENDIX 421 



it may be, in time and space, but everywhere intermingled regardless of 

 high or low degree. And the system now assumes the familiar give and 

 take of predatory life and reproduction, where consumer and consumed, 

 parent and offspring, egoism and altruism, perform reciprocal functions in 

 the universal metabolism of nature-life. 



Consider, for example, the nut, the mouse and the cat. 



If the mouse destroyed all the nuts, it would destroy itself. Its interests 

 are best served when nuts are encouraged. If it had intelligence, it would 

 cherish and preserve them. If it had the necessary cultural implements, it 

 might profitably spend its spare time and energy in producing more and 

 better nuts. Not even a "nut" could reasonably object to that. On the 

 other hand, the cat is an efficient educator. It teaches the mouse to confine 

 its attention to its own affairs, and both teacher and pupil are the better 

 for that. 



And when the mouse is about to die, and is brought to earth, it does not 

 wholly go to waste. A percentage of him goes to make another nut, and a 

 percentage helps to make another cat, which without the one and the other 

 could not exist. And finally nature levies a tax upon the cat, and in due 

 season the cat pays his taxes. 



By virtue of this rigorous nature discipline, which prescribes when, 

 and how, and where, the nut, the mouse, and the cat may act, and what 

 they must, and must not do, each in its own way makes a Hving, as many 

 others like them have done in similar ways before, a sufficient testimonial 

 to the constructive and saving virtue of the system. 



But this is only one part of this system of give and take. The plant, 

 the mouse, or the cat, as an individual, not only gets, or receives enough 

 income from all sources to pay his personal running expenses, but on the 

 whole, each in his own way, makes a profit. Part goes into alterations, 

 repairs and additions, or into what we call growth. But there is always a 

 definite limit to individual holdings, or to the growth of every individual 

 system, which is peculiar to itself. When that limit of cohesion is reached, 

 or approached, the surplus overflows into other individualities and becomes 

 their possession. 



Much of this surplus of the profiteer, which for him is unusable, is 

 scattered right and left with astounding prodigality, and this unwilling 

 altruism on his part becomes one of the chief sources of income to life at 

 large. But an adequate percentage becomes a special, entailed endowment 

 to a new individual, similar to the first, thus setting up a substitute, or a 

 direct lineal descendant in the business of life, giving him a fixed capital in 

 germinal materials, quick assets in germinal food-stuffs, with containers 

 and protective envelopes, all rightly constructed and arranged, and the 

 whole package so located in time and space by the administrators of these 

 estates as to insure for it, in the long run, a new life of adventure among 

 the hazards and inviting opportunities of the outer world. 



Thus in this larger spongeoplasmic fabric of nature-life, visible only 

 to the more comprehensive instruments of the mind, kingdoms and classes, 

 races and species, young and old, the physical and organic entities of the 

 living and the dead, are unconscious partners in a common system of co- 

 operative action. In this social metabolism across the larger reaches of 

 time and space, each unit, in the reciprocal egoism and altruism of life 

 and death, plays its respective anabolic and catabolic functions, and thereby 

 gives the system, as a whole, its self-sustaining, vital power. 



Through the shifting patterns of this growing fabric, we most clearly 

 see the converging threads of genetic lineage, the long, gradient lines of 

 alternating youthful egoism and parental altruism, on the one hand vanish- 

 ing in the primordial life that has its issue in the terrestrial loom, and on 

 the other, radiating into the abyss of future possibilities. Everywhere shot 

 through and across these more rigid hereditary lines are those which mark 



