12 ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 



obvious of evidence, of the primitive divergence of the two 

 great subkingdoms of life, lays elemental emphasis on the 

 distinction between normal independent living and abnor- 

 mal dependent living; between what we may with perfect 

 propriety term, in biological sense, right living and wrong 

 living. Out of the first of these groups have come all the 

 great triumphs of life ; the races of life which, by keeping in- 

 dividual and racial independence, have persistently climbed 

 upward. The second group has been hampered and rooted 

 from the beginning, hopeless of ever throwing off its chains 

 or of arriving at any end beyond a certain refined functional 

 specialization within its own limitations. The giants of the 

 redwood forests are the hoary and venerable obelisks of 

 power shackled beyond redemption ; the gardens of flowers 

 are blossoms of a hope never to be attained. In any sound 

 philosophy of nature this great fact, even though its in- 

 ceptive cause is still veiled to us, must lie close to the base 

 of all deductive reasoning. Lest these sentences be sus- 

 pected of a teleological taint, let me express the conviction 

 that, in any interpretation of such phenomena as those here 

 considered, the materialistic formulas of adaptation and 

 subjection to environment give way to recognition of pur- 

 poseful activity which can be interpreted only in terms of 

 psychology. 



As there are evidences of limited freedom in the plant 

 world (as in the amoeboid movements in the Slime-fungi, 

 the Flagellates and many Bacteria) so, by contrast, the ani- 

 mal world is shot through with races of dependent crea- 

 tures, and in so vast degree that it may safely be said the 

 foundation races of animal life, the invertebrates, have in 

 greater or less measure fallen by the wayside in the course 

 of their journey through the ages ; few indeed have kept 

 to their charted course and to these few, linked together 

 in the successive ages of the world, following one upon the 

 heel of another, we owe all the enduring progress and at- 

 tainment which our present life has reached. 



