412 THE WORLD OY LIFE 



A Recent Illustration of the Necessity of Pain 



Within the last few years we have had remarkable proofs 

 of the beneficence of pain as a life-saver by the sad results of 

 its absence. The recently discovered X-rays, so much used 

 now for localising internal injuries, and of bullets or other 

 foreign objects in any part of the body, have the property also 

 of setting up a special internal disorganisation unaccompanied 

 at the time by pain. The result has been loss of limbs or loss of 

 life to some of the earlier investigators, and perhaps some in- 

 jury even to the patients for whose benefit it has been applied. 

 It seems probable, therefore, that if these rays had been asso- 

 ciated in any perceptible degTce with the heat and light we re- 

 ceive from the sun, either the course of evolution would have 

 been very different from what it has been, or the development of 

 life have been rendered impossible. Pain has not accompanied 

 the incidence of these rays on the body, because living organ- 

 isms have never hitherto been exposed to their injurious effects. 



Microbes and Parasites: their Purpose in the Life-World 



Much light is thrown on the analogous problem of those 

 human diseases which are supposed to be caused by germs, 

 microbes, or 2:)arasites, by the application of the more extended 

 views of evolution I have advocated in the present volume. 

 The medical profession aj^pear to hold the view that pathogenic 

 or disease-producing microbes exist for the purpose of causing 

 disease in otherwise healthy bodies to which they gain access 

 — that they are, in fact, wholly evil. It is also claimed that 

 the only safeguard against them is some kind of ^' anti-toxin " 

 with which everv one must be inoculated to be saved from the 

 danger of attack by some or all of the large number of such 

 diseases which affect almost every organ and function of the 

 body. This view seems to me to be fundamentally wrong, be- 

 cause it does not show us any use for such microbes in the 

 scheme of life, and also because it does not recognise that a 

 condition nf health is the one and only protection we require 



