205 conservation is not enough 



no others have a right to hve unless they contribute di- 

 rectly to his material welfare. 



The now popular saying, "No man is an island," means 

 more than it is commonly taken to mean. Not only men 

 but all living things stand or fall together. Or rather man 

 is of all such creatures one of those least able to stand 

 alone. If we think only in terms of our own welfare we 

 are likely to find that we are losing it. 



But how can man learn to accept such a situation, to be- 

 lieve that it is right and proper when the whole tendency 

 of his thought and his interest carries him in a contrary 

 direction? How can he learn to value and dehght in a nat- 

 ural order larger than his own order? How can he come to 

 accept, not sullenly but gladly, the necessity of sharing the 

 earth? 



As long ago as the seventeenth century, as long ago, that 

 is, as the very time when the ambition to "control nature'* 

 in any large ambitious way was first coming to be formu- 

 lated and embraced, a sort of answer to these questions 

 was being given in theological terms. John Ray, one of the 

 first great English biologists, formulated them in a book 

 which was read for a hundred years, and what Ray had to 

 say cuts two ways because it was directed against the ego- 

 tism of man as expressed both by the old-fashioned the- 

 ologians who thought that everything had been mude for 

 man's use and by the Baconians who assumed that he 

 could at least turn it to that use. 



"It is," Ray wrote, "a general received opinion, that aU 

 this visible world was created for Man; that Man is the 



