ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 111 



plant world ; a division which cuts so deep it has never been 

 bridged nor can be. Independence and dependence were 

 established as the elemental and essential partition of the 

 kingdom of life. 



8. Individual and locomotive independence then, it would 

 seem, has been the major function and prime determining 

 factor in the progress of life. We find even in the plant 

 world, fettered as it is, the effort to get free or to develop 

 along the lines of the animals as shown in the development 

 of specialized functions to which w r e have referred. But 

 the plants never have got free. Their dependence is incur- 

 able under Nature's codex. All progress in life, as 

 reckoned in terms of man, has come through independence 

 and through those lines of animal life in which independ- 

 ence has been maintained at any cost. It is safe to say that 

 none of the physical ancestors of man, however remote the 

 direct line may have run, have ever surrendered their phys- 

 ical independence or suffered essential modification through 

 perturbation of their normal activities. 



9. Disease, then, in its broadest sense, so far as it means 

 a disturbance of normal living, is a synonym of abnormal 

 living ; that is, of any life that has departed from the primi- 

 tive impulse to a consistent, coordinated and fully com- 

 petent physiology. 



10. If dependence has affected and sealed the fate of one 

 great division of the Kingdom of Life, so that it is and 

 must remain subsidiary to the larger purposes of nature, 

 dependence also has entered upon, invaded and degenerated 

 a very large part, indeed, probably the major part of 

 the other, the animal world. Here it seems to us that 

 the dependent condition thus enforced is of a different or- 

 der of quality than the aboriginal dependence of the plant 

 world. Dependent races of animals have sought or accepted 

 dependence as an easier mode of living, either waiting upon 

 the unconscious forces of Nature, waves and winds, or on 

 the normal activities of other animals. Such dependence 



