LIFE THE TRAVELER 



protect the weak." Rather, I should say, Nature 

 has a thousand contrivances to protect the weak 

 and defenseless. 



Henri Bergson's conception of the creative 

 energy as struggling with matter, hampered and 

 delayed, and often defeated by it, subject to what 

 we call chance or contingency, like us mortals, 

 taking half a loaf when it cannot get a whole one, 

 seems to be a fruitful conception in explaining the 

 condition of life as we see it, past and present, on 

 this planet. There has been a steady struggle and 

 progression toward higher forms from the first. 

 The creative energy shows itself to be very human, 

 very fallible, often vacillating and short-sighted. 

 Indeed, man is the image of his maker in this re- 

 spect. God has gone on with his work very much 

 as man goes on with his blundering, experiment- 

 ing, but doing the best he could. I spent an hour in 

 a medical museum recently and was nearly made 

 sick by what I saw there such failures, such mon- 

 strosities, such miscarriages of life, such deformities, 

 such evidence of pain and agony, men no more 

 exempt in this respect than pigs or monkeys, chil- 

 dren impotent to be born, or brainless, or with only 

 one eye. What did it all mean? It meant, if it meant 

 anything, that the life-impulse, or life-energy, was 

 subject to the accidents and uncertainties of time 

 and chance, before birth as after, and that we are 

 part of a system of things that seems struggling to 

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