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. 
