METHOD IN SCIENCE 21 



nature of the bodily disorders we know as developmental. 

 For all such disorders are either failures of growth or over- 

 growth, and at the back of them is the hierarchy of the 

 glandular system, each member of which is like a State 

 department claiming so much energy, money, and men, as a 

 contribution towards the active production of the necessary 

 organs, or tools, by which a nation meets the stresses of 

 the environment by increased growth on one line or new 

 growth on another. The functions of stress, failure, and 

 repair, which are as relevant to societies as to animals, 

 are considered in another part of this book. 



Thinking upon such lines, and bearing in mind the fact 

 that during abnormal stress there is a tendency to reju- 

 venescence, marked by the jettison of old ideas, old men, 

 and even of the most sacred customs, since by such a jetti- 

 son the activity of a cell's or State's protoplasm is thereby 

 increased — just as it is hindered by the reverse process — 

 we reach the conception that such a process can be over- 

 done, and a state of protoplasmic activity attained which is 

 embryonic, or anarchic. No observer of war phenomena 

 can have failed to observe the tendency to weakness in 

 central control, accompanied, and indeed measured, as it 

 was by the increased and violent activity of various depart- 

 ments of State responding according to the nature of the 

 stresses laid upon them. If central (or shall I say glan- 

 dular ?) control by inhibition had broken down, we should 

 have seen phenomena on a parallel with those of malignant 

 tissues. Perpetual stimulation or irritation by itself tends 

 to overgrowth of the bodily or social tissue or organ in- 

 volved ; but when such a tendency is not controlled by other 

 tissues or organs, there is a tendency to invasiveness or 

 destructive parasitism. Such observations seem to show 

 that carcinomas and allied phenomena have their analogues 



