COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



produce a system of organs capable of work- 

 ing in concert. And if differentiation goes on, 

 unattended by integration, in any part of the 

 body, disease, and often death, is the result. 

 Cancers and malignant tumours are merely in- 

 definite results of differentiation, which, never 

 becoming integrated into harmony with the 

 rest of the organism, end by maiming and 

 finally destroying it. As Dr. Beale has shown, 

 a cancer is a new variety of cellular tissue, fun- 

 goid in character, which grows at the expense 

 of the organism, and eats it up as effectually as 

 a carnivorous enemy could eat it. To -employ 

 an instructive metaphor, a cancer is a rebellion 

 within the organism, — a setting up of an inde- 

 pendent centre of government, — a fatal inter- 

 ference with the subordination of the parts to 

 the whole. Yet the organism in which a cancer 

 has begun to grow is more heterogeneous than 

 the healthy organism. In like manner the first 

 stages of decomposition increase the heteroge- 

 neity of the organism as a whole ; but because 

 each new retrograde product follows henceforth 

 a career of its own, free from the control of the 

 organic aggregate, the result is not evolution, 

 but dissolution. The differentiations which occur 

 during the normal growth of the germ differ 

 from those which constitute cancer and gan- 

 grene, alike in their common subordination to 

 the primary process of growth, and in the defi- 

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