410 CORRELATION OF PHYSICAL AND VITAL FORCES. 



dividual selects a special mode of activity for himself, and 

 aims at improvement in that specialty, he finds himself attain- 

 ing a higher and still higher degree of aptitude for it ; and 

 this specialization tends to increase as opportunities arise for 

 new modes of activity, until that complex fabric is evolved 

 which constitutes the most developed form of the Social State 

 wherein every individual finds the work mental or bodily 

 for which he is best fitted, and in which he may reach the 

 highest attainable perfection ; while the mutual dependence 

 of the whole (which is the necessary result of this specializa- 

 tion of parts) is such that every individual works for the 

 benefit of all his fellows, as well as for his own. As it is 

 only in such a state of society that the greatest triumphs of 

 human ability become possible, so is it only in the most dif- 

 ferentiated types of Organization that Vital Activity can pre- 

 sent its highest manifestations. In the one case, as in the 

 other, does the result depend upon a process of gradual devel- 

 opment, in which, under the influence of agencies whose na- 

 ture constitutes a proper object of scientific inquiry, that most 

 general form in which the fabric whether corporeal or social 

 originates, evolves itself into that most special in which its 

 development culminates. 



But notwithstanding the wonderful diversity of structure 

 and of endowments which we meet with in the study of any 

 complex Organism, we encounter a harmonious unity or coor- 

 dination in its entire aggregate of actions, which is yet more 

 wonderful. It is in this harmony or coordination, whose ten- 

 dency is to the conservation of the organism, that the state of 

 Health or Normal life essentially consists. And the more 

 profound our investigations of its conditions, the more definite 

 becomes the conclusion to which we are led by the study of 

 them that it is fundamentally based on the common origin 

 of all these diversified parts in the same germ, the vital en- 

 dowments of which, equally diffused throughout the entire 

 fabric in those lowest forms of organization in which every 



