Januaky 30, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



99 



better nuts. Not even a " nut " could reason- 

 ably object to tbat. On the other hand, the 

 cat is an efficient educator. It teaches the 

 mouse to confine its attention to its own 

 affairs, and both teacher and pupil are the 

 better for that. 



And when the mouse is about to die, and is 

 brought to earth, it does not wholly go to 

 waste. A percentage of him goes to make an- 

 other nut, and a percentage helps to make 

 another cat, which without the one and the 

 other could not exist. And finally nature 

 levies a tax upon the cat, and in due season 

 the cat pays his taxes. 



By virtue of this rigorous nature discipline, 

 which prescribes when, and how, and where, 

 the nut, the mouse, and the cat may act, and 

 what they must, and must not do, each in its 

 own way makes a living, as many others like 

 them have done in similar ways before, a suffi- 

 cient testimonial to the constructive and 

 saving virtue of the system. 



But this is only one part of this system 

 of give and take. The plant, the mouse, or 

 the cat, as an individual, not only gets, or 

 receives enough income from all sources to 

 pay his personal running expenses, but on the 

 whole, each in his own way, makes a profit. 

 Part goes into alterations, repairs and addi- 

 tions, or into what we call growth. But 

 there is always a definite limit to individual 

 holdings, or to the growth of every individual 

 system, which is peculiar to itself. When 

 that limit of cohesion is reached, or ap- 

 proached, the surplus overflows into other in- 

 dividualities and becomes their possession. 



Much of this surplus of the profiteer, which 

 for him is imusable, is scattered right and 

 left with astounding prodigality, and this un- 

 willing altruism on his part becomes one of 

 the chief sources of income to life at large. 

 But an adequate percentage becomes a special 

 entailed endowment to a new individual, sim- 

 ilar to the first, thus setting up a substitute, 

 or a direct lineal descendant in the business oi 

 life, giving him a fixed capital in germinal 

 materials, quick assets in germinal food-stuffs, 

 with containers and protective envelopes, all 

 rightly constructed and arranged, and the 

 whole package so located in time and space 



by the administrators of these estates as to 

 insure for it, in the long run, a new life of 

 adventure among the hazards and inviting 

 opportunities of the outer world. 



Thus in this larger spongeoplasmic fabric 

 of nature-life, visible only to the more com- 

 prehensive instruments of the mind, kingdoms 

 and classes, races and species, young and old, 

 the physical and organic entities of the living 

 and the dead, are unconscious partners in a 

 common system of cooperative action. In this 

 social metabolism across the larger reaches of 

 time and space, each unit, in the reciprocal 

 egoism and altruism of life and death, plays 

 its respective anabolic and eatabolic func- 

 tions, and thereby gives the system, as a 

 whole, its self-sustaining, vital power. 



Through the shifting patterns of this grow- 

 ing fabric, we most clearly see the converging 

 threads of genetic lineage, the long, gradient 

 lines of alternating youthful egoism and 

 parental altruism, on the one hand vanishing 

 in the primordial life that has its issue in the 

 terrestrial loom, and on the other, radiating 

 into the abyss of future possibilities. Every- 

 where shot through and across these more 

 rigid hereditary lines are those which mark 

 the sinuous course of predatory action, and 

 other actions less discriminating. Thus the 

 whole system is woven into that variegated 

 plexus of success and failure, tragedy and 

 comedy, joys and sorrows, good and evil, 

 which makes up the cooperation functions of 

 life and give it creative unity. 



And then man, a new nature-anarchist, the 

 most modern pattern in this moving-picture 

 fabric, makes his appearance on the screen, 

 and surrounded by his satellites of cultural 

 instrimients, and with both positive and nega- 

 tive poles of his very material self flaming 

 with the auroras of intelligence, attempts to 

 set this system which gave him birth to rights. 



He is little conscious of the source of his 

 own endowments, or that his ethics and 

 morality, as manifest in his sporadic out- 

 bursts of social philanthropy and benevolence, 

 are not his own institutions, but the compul- 

 sory application of world-old constructive 

 principles to his own peculiar affairs. ISTor is 



