TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 661 
at a time when belief in degeneration has seized upon the public imagination and 
the air is full of misgivings about our physical, not to say mental and spiritual, 
future is, I believe, a primary duty of physiologists and biologists, and of every 
one of us who has not lost faith in our ultimate recovery from the prevailing 
nervous attack. As from the renewed life of individual cells is built up the life 
of tissue and organism, so from the rejuvenated life of the whole social organism 
the racial life is renewed. Life, more life and ever persistent, is the keynote 
of the philosophy which is sounding the knell of nineteenth-century materialism, 
and even of the transfigured realism of Herbert Spencer. The old conception of 
vitalism which sought to account for vital phenomena, which is the ultimate aim 
of physiology, by ‘vital force or spirit’ is being revived, albeit in a new 
incarnation. Creative vitalism (which must assume the physiological basis of 
life to be persistent) is the thought at the basis of eugenics, which just row is 
happily concentrating upon the few patent facts of heredity, and urging the 
legislature to protect the race from the perpetuation of demonstrably doomed 
lives. 
The apparent Irishism that life tends to live, that degeneration may be over- 
taken and overcome by regeneration, needs to be re-emphasised as a vital truth of 
science. The whole advance of medicine means this conquest or it means worse 
than nothing. The causes of the vital phenomena of life, although still very far 
from being even approximately understood, are slowly revealing themselves, 
perhaps through the very facts of physical deterioration (a truer word to use in 
this connection than degeneration). The struggle for existence (rightly miti- 
gated, let it be said, against the callous and callously expressed desire of some 
persons to let the struggle do its cruel work of weeding in its own bloody way by 
war and disease) is probably bringing to the surface defects created by modern 
industrial conditions. But these defects—which charity seemeth to shelter and 
perpetuate, but which in the end cannot be saved by any philanthropy— 
whether of brain or muscle or stature, have not touched the foundations of 
fertility. Quantitative human life, as shown by the falling birth-rate in some 
Western countries, whether the immediate causes be voluntary or not, may seem 
to be failing; but may it not be only a seeming? What new physiological fact 
of the reduction of essential fertility has come to light since 1875, when the 
hirth-rate began to fall? Or has any inherent tendency towards a progressive 
decline in the standard of physique been disclosed? Is it not still true that 
nearly 90 per cent. are born healthy? And that many of the defects in adults 
and in school children are due to ignorance and avoidable social conditions? 
Yea, is it not plain that qualitative life (which after all is in fact the only true 
way of measuring life) is advancing. Look around—east, west, north, south— 
the general quality and level of life and the possibilities of life are improving. 
That is a sociological fact, but is not its foundation, whether seen or unseen, 
physical? May not the full explanation of evolution demand constant regenera- 
tion of life? The evolution of society is founded upon it. Philosophy is mere 
chaff without it. Physiology is concerned with the processes and functions of 
vital—i.e., re-generating—organisms. Religion preaches regeneration unceasingly 
—apart from it her faith and mission would be mockery. 
The cry of regeneration, whether of Nordau in France or less enlightened 
copyists in England, may serve the useful purpose of warning (and no one 
doubts, least of all the writer, that there is grave need to be warned of certain 
disturbing features of this age) and of concentrating remedies upon the active 
symptoms of deterioration. But the writer pleads that the time has come to 
turn public attention and popular faith to the more assured belief in regeneration, 
and to throw the potent influences of science, sociology, and religion into this 
scale. Put men into good physical surroundings, with opportunity to encourage 
healthy mental, moral, and spiritual development, make them less introspective 
and self-centred, and we shall soon have regeneration. 
