LIFE THE TRAVELER 
protect the weak.’ Rather, I should say, Nature 
has a thousand contrivances to protect the weak 
and defenseless. 
Henri Bergson’s conception of the creative 
energy as struggling with matter, hampered and 
delayed, and often defeated by it, subject to what 
we call chance or contingency, like us mortals, 
taking half a loaf when it cannot get a whole one, 
seems to be a fruitful conception in explaining the 
condition of life as we see it, past and present, on 
this planet. There has been a steady struggle and 
progression toward higher forms from the first. 
The creative energy shows itself to be very human, 
very fallible, often vacillating and short-sighted. 
Indeed, man is the image of his maker in this re- 
spect. God has gone on with his work very much 
as man goes on with his— blundering, experiment- 
ing, but doing the best he could. I spent an hour in 
a medical museum recently and was nearly made 
sick by what I saw there — such failures, such mon- 
strosities, such miscarriages of life, such deformities, 
such evidence of pain and agony, men no more 
exempt in this respect than pigs or monkeys, chil- 
dren impotent to be born, or brainless, or with only 
one eye. What did it all mean? It meant, if it meant 
anything, that the life-impulse, or life-energy, was 
subject to the accidents and uncertainties of time 
and chance, before birth as after, and that we are 
part of a system of things that seems struggling to 
281 
