320 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

Denique si vocem Rerum Natura repente

mittat et hoc alicui nostrum sic increpet ipsa

'quid tibi tanto operest, mortalis, quod nimis aegris

luctibus indulges ? quid mortem congemis ac fles ? . . .'

iure, ut opinor, agat, iure increpet inciletque.

cedit enim rerum noyitate extrusa vetustas

semper, et ex aliis aliud reparare necessest . . .

materies opus est ut crescant postera saecla,

quae tamen omnia te vita perfuncta sequentur;

nee minus ergo ante haec quam tu cecidere, cadentque.

sic alid ex alio numquam desistet oriri,

vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu.1

The ordeal of Death, which was so tragic a catastrophe for each indi-
vidual living creature, was evidently an indispensable contrivance for
an ambitious Natura Creatrix if she was ever to break out of the blind
alley of a deathless and therefore static unicellular organism into the
infinite variety of multicellular organic life. Nature's endowment of her
new creation with the gift of multiplicity-in-unity at the price of mortality
insured her against being committed to more than a limited liability
towards any single specimen or single species of her brood. It gave her a
perpetually recurrent opportunity to liquidate her proven miscarriages
and to follow up her more promising experiments. In fact, the epiphany
of Death in the history of Life on Earth, so far from convicting Nature of
ineptitude or impotence, was evidence that she had been successful in
retaining an initiative that was a synonym for creativity itself; for the
mortality of the creature was merely the obverse of Nature's unforfeited
freedom to carry on her work of creation by varying at will the ratio
between racial change and racial stability in the ever flowing series of her
offspring.

If this 'concede: necessest'2 were the whole story of Death's role in
Nature's dealings with her creature Man, we might have ruefully to con-
clude that, in the working of the Generation Cycle, a rhythm in the flow
of Physical Life had in truth imposed its dominion on the Spirit of Man.
Before we accept this conclusion, however, we may recall that, in the
life of those higher living creatures, culminating in Man, which pro-
create and die, there are two alternative methods of transmitting, from
one generation to another, behaviour approved as valuable for future
representatives of the species. There can be a transmission of a racial
heritage of instincts and aptitudes through the physiological process of
procreation; and there can be a transmission of a social heritage of habits
and knowledge through the spiritual process of moral and intellectual
education in the broad unprofessional meaning of this word.3 The second
of these methods of transmission, which was the younger of the two, had
been employed, as a second string to the older physiological device, by

i Lucretius, De Rerum Naturd, Book III, II. 931-4, 963-5, and 967-71.

z Lucretius, op. cit., Book III, 1. 962.

s 'Just as biological evolution was rendered both possible and inevitable when material
organisation became self-reproducing, so conscious evolution was rendered both possible
and inevitable when social organisation became self-reproducing* (Huxley, Julian:
Evolutionary Ethics, the Romanes Lecture 1943, reprinted in Huxley, T. H. and J.:
Evolution and Ethics, 1853-1943 (London 1947, Pilot Press), p, xaa).