HUMAN LIFE 



ment of the extraordinarily complicated 

 life history of one of those internal 

 parasitic worms which demand successive 

 entrance into the bodies of two or more 

 hosts to complete its development? This 

 unconscious waste of Nature is no less 

 preposterous, incredible to me, he says, 

 than that every now and then, consciously 

 flying in the face of what seems to be all 

 self-interest, all enjoyment of life, all 

 reason, millions of men swarm out of 

 their homes, to use all their energy, 

 all their native cunning, all their hard-won 

 scientific knowledge, to kill each other, 

 to bring intense suffering to their wives 

 and children, to destroy their accumu- 

 lated material possessions, to burn the 

 created glories of their artist geniuses, to 

 work, in a word, all the waste and misery 

 that are the inevitable accompaniments 

 of war. Is this less incredible, he asks, 

 than that nature should tolerate the ex- 

 tinguishing after a period of functioning 

 of the complex of elaborately built up 

 machines which is the human body? 

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