626 THE CONTROL OF LIFE: 



prisoner and onlooker at Old Bailey. We call it typhus-fever 

 now, and it is rare in Britain, thanks to the enthusiasm of 

 the early nineteenth-century hygienists. It is a dirt disease, 

 it can be controlled by care and cleanliness. It is due to a 

 microbe, not yet isolated, which is transferred from man 

 to man by infected lice. As Sir Ray Lankester says, the 

 Angel of Death they spoke of a hundred years ago is the 

 clothes' louse, which can be readily exterminated by the 

 use of benzine. We cannot but feel that it was almost con- 

 temptible to have submitted for centuries to a tyranny of 

 dirt ; but the point is that we are continuing to submit to 

 similar things. We are slow to gird up our loins. We are 

 slow to learn the lesson of the Control of Life. 



(2) It has been said that there are two views of this world, 

 that which regards it as a swamp to be crossed as quickly 

 as possible, and that which regards it as a marsh to be 

 drained. The view to which our study of Animate Nature 

 points is emphatically the latter. Man must continue the 

 struggle against inhibitants, the campaign in which living 

 creatures have been engaged for millions of years, the 

 endeavour to bring the inorganic into the service of the 

 organic, to bring the body-mind into subordination to the 

 mind-body, to eliminate the disorderly, the inharmonious, 

 the involutionary. For we adhere to the thesis that evolution 

 is on the whole integrative, not disintegrative. 



(3) To put the same thing in a third way, which is more 

 generalised, we are in profound agreement with the view 

 well expressed by a contemporary philosopher, that it is 

 Man's part to build up, as he is doing, a scientific systemati- 

 sation of knowledge which will form the basis of an in- 

 creasing control of life. The mundane goal of the evolution- 

 ary movement is " the mastery by the human mind of the 



