PATHOLOGY. 



163 



unseen in the Little World and deal with it, 

 as Leverrier through his mathematics dis- 

 covered the unseen planet in the Large World 

 and designated its locality. 



Accordingly Biology in its true conception 

 as the Science of Life must include its own 

 negative, or Life destroying Life. The bacil- 

 lus is a living thing, yet its function is to 

 assail a living thing. Indeed one of the most 

 striking manifestations of Life as whole is 

 its bent toward annihilating Life, that is, 

 itself. Micro-organisms prey on micro- 

 organisms, as well as on macro-organ- 

 isms, as the latter prey on one another. 

 Man's food is the living thing, vegetal or ani- 

 mal; he lives by swallowing Life daily. Pie 

 cannot take the Inorganic for his diet; the 

 plant alone can do that. The invisible cell- 

 war thus rises to an ever-present visible life- 

 war, to which there is no truce. Life in its 

 totality has this deeply negative strand ; yea 

 it is self-negative, perpetually it undoes itself. 

 Yet the other side must be noted: through 

 this self-undoing, it is always being re-born. 

 Strangely Life lives off itself in a large meas- 

 ure; Life as whole, the Earth-Life, endures 

 through death. Fiercely destructive, yea self- 

 destructive, it destroys its own destruction. 

 This is the point where we may see the dialec- 

 tic of Life ; inherently negative it is indeed ; 



