CHAPTER I 

 CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 



WE look out on the world with human eyes, and see with little 

 wonder whatsoever is like ourselves. We are born, small and 

 helpless, yet visibly stamped with humanity ; day by day we 

 change, but move with certainty in one direction. A few years 

 pass, and from childhood we attain youth, a few more and we 

 reach maturity. The changes affect size and structure, character 

 and disposition, but are so orderly and familiar that we accept 

 them without surprise, and demand for them no explanation. Man 

 is only one of many hundreds of thousands of living species, and 

 living beings are only a small part of the world around us. Is the 

 mode by which man attains manhood universal in the living world, 

 and does the living world differ in this respect from things that are 

 not alive ? 



The universe throbs with restless change. Our sun with its system 

 of revolving planets is rushing into the recesses of starry space on 

 some errand at which we cannot guess. The little planet that is the 

 home of the only life we know is impermanent in its masses and 

 in its details. The oceans shift on their uneasy beds ; continents 

 and islands rise and fall. Mountains and plains are carved and 

 fretted by air and wind and water, blistered by heat, riven by 

 frost, and smoothed over by vegetation. The chemical elements of 

 which we used to think as eternal counters, passing unchanged 

 through mazes of combination and disintegration, are, some of them 

 at least, in a process of making or unmaking. Everything that 

 we know is becoming rather than being. None the less there are 

 degrees and differences in change itself. The swift and inevitable 

 routine of life stands in sharp contrast with the vaguer and more 

 capricious rhythms of things that are not alive. All living creatures 

 are born into the world from seeds or eggs or directly from the 

 bodies of their parents, and unless they meet death by the way, meet 

 it at the end, after passing through childhood and youth, maturity 

 and old age. This orderly progress from the beginning to the end is 



C.A. A 



