26 THE KINGDOM OF MAN 



development has proceeded. What we call the will or 

 volition of Man a discussion of the nature and limita- 

 tion of which would be impossible in these pages and 

 is happily not necessary for my present purpose has 

 become a power in Nature, an imperium in imperio, which 

 has profoundly modified not only man's own history but 

 that of the whole living world and the face of the planet 

 on which he exists. Nature's inexorable discipline of 

 death to those who do not rise to her standard survival 

 and parentage for those alone who do has been from 

 the earliest times more and more definitely resisted by 

 the will of Man. If we may for the purpose of analysis, 

 as it were, extract Man from the rest of Nature of which 

 he is truly a product and part, then we may say that 

 Man is Nature's rebel. Where Nature says ' Die ! ' Man 

 says ' I will live.' According to the law previously in 

 universal operation, Man should have been limited in 

 geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or of heat, 

 subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unob- 

 tainable, and should have been unable to increase and 

 multiply, just as are his animal relatives, without losing 

 his specific structure and acquiring new physical charac- 

 ters according to the requirements of the new conditions 

 into which he strayed should have perished except on 

 the condition of becoming a new morphological * species.' 

 But Man's wits and his will have enabled him to cross 

 rivers and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself 

 against cold, to shelter himself from heat and rain, to 

 prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and to 

 ' increase and multiply ' as no other animal without 

 change of form, without submitting to the terrible axe 

 of selection wielded by ruthless Nature over all other 

 living things on this globe. And as he has more and 

 more obtained this control over his surroundings, he has 



