Natural Salvation. The Message of Science C. A, STEPHENS, M. D. Edition of 1906 The Intimate Causes of Old Age and Organic Death Cornell Mniversity Library THE GIFT OF DY. NBvaace si. Kenn an wii Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924024753471 Natural Salvation The Message of Science OUTLINING THE FIRST PRINCIPI ES OF IMMORTAL LIFE ON THE EARTH BY C. A. STEPHENS, M. D. Se THE LABORATORY NORWAY LAKE, MAINE 1906 D CopyricuT, 1906 BY C. A. STEPHENS, M. D. THE BARTA PRESS Boston, Mass DEDICATION. Natural Salvation ‘is addressed to all earnest students of Life and dedicated to that greater new era of Humanity which Science ushers in. PREFATORY NOTE. The researches made at this laboratory and its publica- tions embrace, Living MATTER; Jts Cycle of Growth and Decline in Animal Oryanisms. 1888. PLURICELLTLAR Man 3’ Whence and What is the Soul ? 1892. Lone Lire; An Investigation of the Intimate Causes of Old-Aging and Organic Death, with a View to their Alleviation and Removal 1896. NATURAL SALVATION ; The Message of Science; Out- lining the First Principles of Immortal Life on the Earth. 19038. CONTENTS. I. Natura SaLvatTion: The Message of Science. II. Ar tae Darkest Hour: The Hour before the Dawn. III. Brain: A Still Progressive Tissue of the Human Organism. IV. THe Human PeErsonaity; Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. V. THe INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE AND OR- GANIC DEATH; Examined with a View to their Alleviation and Removal. COMMENT AND DISCUSSION. INCE the first editions of Natural Salvation were published, a number of reviewers and critics have described it as ‘an attempt at a new religion,” “a new cult of Nature,” and, generally, as something newly devised. It would have been better described as the oldest of all religions, the religion of cell life, the instinct-effort of the protozoon to save itself. Compared with this natural effort at salvation, on the part of the unicells of the ancient earth, the World’s five Creeds are as novelties of yesterday. A hundred millions of years ago, natural sal- vation was operative and prevalent; it is coeval with the earliest metazoons; the first cult of unicellular life; the “golden rule’’ of the'cell. The golden rule of Chris- tianity, indeed, is reflected upward from it, upward from this lowly sentiment for union and cooperation on the part of the component cell life of the body. «An opponent,” thus styling, himself, asks, with a flavor of derision, “ Do you actually believe that the pro- tozoa, the unicellular life on the ancient sea beaches, i ii Natural Salvation. united of their own accord, as sentient creatures, to form the metazoa, and that the human organism, the human brain, has resulted from a plan:or design on their part to better themselves and rise in the scale of exis- tence, looking to cell immortality ?” The answer is, no; nor has any such position been taken in Natural Salvation. We do not know how or why cells combined, whether by accidental cohering, or because they derived some immediate advantage of safety or food by keeping together. We have no more sup- posed that the combining unicells had a far-reaching de- sign, or foresaw the results of their unions, than that the individual locusts of a swarm foresee the famine that may follow its flight; or that the individual hoplite under Xenophon, who marched with Cyrus the Younger, foresaw that this immortal expedition would open the way to the victories of Alexander and the third great empire of antiquity. a We do not suppose that the unicell. of the Silurian beach foresaw its apotheosis in the brain neuron of a Webster, a Washington, or a Lincoln. The cell but chose to do what felt best for itself; or it may even have been coerced to what it did by the merest accident of its environment. It would neither add nor detract from our present esti- mate of the impersonality of cosmos, were we to learn that all the metazoons, including mankind, started from Comment and Discussion. ili the accident of a few grains of sand falling foul of a cell, a hundred millions of years ago. We have given up the idea of design in Nature to that extent. Nature neither lets nor hinders; the liberty of cosmos can in no other way be conserved. Why speak of design? Nature needs not design. With greater justice one of the associate editors of the American Journal of Science calls attention to the fact that the cells of polyzoa — bristadella mucedo, for example, cited on page 28 — are more fully organized than I have seemed to describe them. : This is a deserved criticism, and I am glad to record it here. At this late age of the earth’s vital history, it is not easy to find illustrations of early metazoons. None the less, we would be slow to believe with the elder Agassiz, that all the present metazoons were ‘“ created ” as we behold them. SBristadella mucedo was cited in this connection, not as being one of the early simple unions of unicellular life, but merely as resembling externally, per- haps, what these early unions might have been like. The point really at issue here is whether the metazoons developed from unicells, or that the tissue cells of the animal organism form, multitudinously, in this same organism after it was otherwise created. The former posi- tion is the one held in Natural Salvation. A reviewing editor writes to ask, “Is this natural sal- iv Natural Salvation. vation idea of yours the same thing that Metchnikoff and Loeb are working on?” Professor Metchnikoff, of the French Institute, believes that by means of reagents of the nature .of serums, so called, the tissue cells of the body may be so reinforced, that human life can be greatly prolonged. He holds that “old age” is accelerated by the abnormal activity (phagocitosis) of the white corpuscles of the blood, which, after a manner, devour the cells of bone, muscle, brain, and other tissues. Experiments are now in progress at many European laboratories, bearing directly or indirectly on these theories. Facts of great interest have already been brought out. Professor Loeb, of Berkeley, Calif., holds the theory that life can be initiated artificially by chemical agencies; he claims that fertilization of the ovum can be thus accom- plished chemically in the case of the sea-urchin, without sexual union. If fully established, this fact will be of the highest importance. The present writer does not know what Professor Metchnikoff’s or Professor Loeb’s views or beliefs are, touching immortal life for human beings, nor whether they believe their discoveries have any bearing on the subject. Another critic, a venerable teacher of theology, writes in pained surprise : — “ Natural salvation! How can sal- vation be natural? Nature dies. Salvation is from God Comment and Discussion. Vv and his Son. Salvation is above nature. It is super- natural. Natural salvation is a contradiction in terms — a self contradiction !” What a picture do these words portray of the indoctri- nated, dogmatized condition of this man’s mind! Salva- tion a supernatural rescue at the hands of a supernatural being. Otherwise incomprehensible. This, indeed, is the conventional, church attitude of mind, the attitude which regards the “soul” of man as a ‘spirit,’’ detachable from the human body at death, or, indeed, in trance, or catalepsy; a spirit to be saved by Divine favor or grace, divested of the body and unincorporate. It is this conception of life which the growth of scientific knowledge invalidates; and to me it seems only logical that theologian, priest, and sectary should oppose scientific progress generally. Science wastes creeds as the warm spring torrents melt the ice of winter. There is no way of chaining humanity to a creed, except by arresting its mental growth. This latter is what Catholicism in America seeks to accomplish. Its sustained struggle against popular education and the growth of knowledge here is one of the most instructive spectacles which the times present. There is, indeed, no other way of per- petuating creed and its establishments, except by laying the spell of church authority on the brain, and effecting a semi-paralysis of this troublesome organ of progress. vi Natural Salvation. This is the long-existent condition in Mohammedan countries. This is what the Christianity of Rome and of. Constantinople have at times accomplished in Spain, in France, in Ireland, in Russia. , It is quite impossible to harmonize Judaism, Moham- medanism, Catholicism, or Protestant sectarianism, with the growth of human’ knowledge and the progress of scientific discovery. The obstacle is something more than the mere fact that science invalidates certain dog- mas of the church. It is rather that the mind of the scientific student outgrows the crudeness and the in- justice of the creeds. Normally, naturally, the world grows away from then. Moreover, betweem church _ doctrines and the science of our times, there is an issue raised, a crucial question, this: — Is the human personality, the ego of a human life, detachable from the organism, capable of living on in the absence of. that organism, or not? Church authority says yes, the growth of scientific. knowledge, no. A grave question of veracity is thus raised. One or the other is radically wrong. It is the realization of this impasse which accounts for the present attitude of the scientific world toward the church; the attitude of quiet tolerance, with a disinclina- tion to discuss the matter ; the realization that the church has its uses and is endeared to a large class of the popula- tion ; the further realization that the regimen it prescribes, Comment and Discussion. Vil is perhaps best for that class; and, finally, the thankless nature of the task of teaching truths which would be cer- tain to be unpopular. Briefly, the biologist of to-day is shirking his duty as a teacher rather than incur odium and resentment. “Your contention is unique to say the least of it,’ another critic writes. ‘So far as I am able to follow your reasoning, you fail wholly to distinguish between physical and psychic powers. You treat them as if of common origin, as if there were no essential difference between them. This to me is chaotic and would subvert psychology. You confound sentience with the insentient forces of matter. You make neither distinction, nor difference, between them.” There is no difference, that is to say, none as to their ultimate source or origin. There are no “insentient forces of matter.” Matter lives, that is, feels, and moves, because it feels. Indeed, there is no such thing as matter, in the former sense in which the word was used. Matter is energy and is sentient to us when it is embraced within the symbiotic cordon of our organic being, or self. It is then ws, that is, personal to us. Outside that cordon, all energy appears to each one of us to be insentient. Sentience and insentience are merely other terms for sub- jectivity and objectivity, personality, and impersonality. vill Natural Salvation. Every last ion and corpuscle of matter is alive, in the sense that it may take its place and contribute its life to culminate with others in the life of a tree, or an animal. Each minute corpuscle is to itself, a living, personal particle. There are, therefore, no insentient forces; the universe moves because it lives, not lives because it moves in- sentiently. This latter doctrine had its day in a cumbrous philosophy and has passed to its bourne. It is already apparent that the “atom,” so called, is a highly organized life. All these “atoms” and “mole- cules” of our old-time chemistry are living creatures, often comparatively long-lived, even to a degree of im mortality, yet still mortal and dissoluble under certain stress and duress of environment. The point of this newer, better conception of nature ‘is, that every corpuscle, ion, “atom,” or “molecule” is in a lowly sense, a living thing, having what is to itself a sentient, personal life, and’ moving in space under the impulse of that life. A busy New York lawyer who still finds time to con- sider res ultima, writes in a friendly spirit, to criticize what he deems a misuse of the terms nature and natural. His conception is still another instance of the hold which supernaturalism has even on the legal mind. “I do not Comment and Discussion. ix regard science,” he says, ‘‘meaning astronomy, geology, biology, etc., as being properly natural or in the order of nature. I regard science as distinct from and extrinsic to nature. Hence natural salvation, to be attained in the progress of science, is to me a confusion of terms, a misnomer.” In other words, the growth of Human knowledge is not in the order of nature, but supernatural, or preternatural ; nota part of the natural evolution of life on the earth, but something superadded to it, presumably from a supernatural source. Another critic of more sectarian bias carries the same conception to greater length. ‘ But for Christianity,” he says, ‘ which is a supernatural revelation from God to man, associated with a divine effort to save mankind, there would be no scienee. It is the elevation and enlighten- ment of the minds of men that come to us through Jesus Christ, which makes modern science possible.” This writer appears not to remember that science and the sciences were well advanced in India, Egypt, and Greece many centuries before the era of Jesus. A teacher of biology writes : — «You speak of the ‘ personal axis’ of life, — the axis of self-consciousness in a cell, or in the human brain. What is meant by the term?” x Natural Salvation. To answer this question fully, would require a careful presentation of the later discoveries touching the nature of “matter.” It will, therefore, be better to reserve it for a paper which is to appear in the next edition of Natural Salvation, for 1907. Critics are of many types and tempers. Not a few con- demn what their fellows approve. “ Who would want to live for centuries in a world like this!’ writes “one who dissents.” «Three score years and ten is quite enough of it. Too much. Think of the horrible monotony of a thousand years of human life. It is a frightful picture. The Lord deliver us from such as you! So far from encouraging an effort like yours, it should be summarily stopped, if not by an indignant pub- lic sentiment, then by government interference; that is, if there were the slightest danger of your bringing about such a calamity. I am happy to think there is not. Human life will never be much prolonged, for the very good reason that it ought not to be. It is not worth it; and nature will probably look out for that. So I do not fear you. Death is as much a part of the great scheme of things as Life. It is the other part of the great Plan. But: lo and behold, a little dying mortal now thinks that he is going to change it all! It is enough to make the angels weep, and the devils laugh!” Comment and Discussion. xi We will allow this to stand, and pass to another of similar purport, but bearing the impress of a less passion- ate mind. “JT should fear such a gift as you seek to confer on human beings. It does not seem to me that earthly life could be made of sufficient interest to give us continual enjoyment for long periods-of time. The Wandering Jew was but a.fiction, yet I believe it embodies the truth con- cerning human life on the earth. It does not seem to me that the earth offers, or can ever offer, a proper theater or arena for immortal life. Iam therefore inclined to con- sider death as a blessing instead of an evil, and that your proposed effort to ‘achieve’ immortal life on the earth by applied science is a mistaken one.” The above is a thoughtful statement of a widely preva- lent view of human life. It deserves an equally thought- ful reply. It is conceded at the outset that life as the majority of our race now live, is not worth prolonging far beyond the pleasures of youth. Immortalizing such lives, subject to all their present ills, hardships, and discouragements, would be of the nature of a penalty, instead of a reward. If a greater experience which came from longer life did not enable them to attain a better mode of life, with fewer pains and ills, immortality on the earth would be inadvis- able for them. ss The earth is what we make it. The reason why the xii Natural Salvation. majority of mankind are miserable on the earth instead of happy, is to be found in them, in their ignorance and per- verted minds, rather than that the earth does not afford an “arena” for happy life. Some are happy here, others not; the cause is largely subjective. Considered physically, the terrestrial globe which we inhabit is not, under nature, a comfortable abode for man. But it has vast capabilities, enormous resources for im- provement. It is capable of being made a paradise, a true Eden in the universe. Unlimited power falls on its sur- face from the solar sphere, power which can be bent to human uses. Its climate can be controlled and made whatever we desire it, its temperature regulated to the needs of life. It is not the earth in its present condition which we contemplate as the future abode of immortal man, but the earth improved and made “heaven.” The paradisation of the earth presents merely physical prob- lems, many of which are already being undertaken suc- cessfully. The earth, made heaven, is one of the condi- tions which will come with the achievement of immortal life. The dawn of this grand future for the sons of men is already breaking on the horizon of science; and what we have now most need of is faith and courage to work for it; to cast aside our slavish fears of the supernatural, and work to save ourselves from the ills of life; to cease from idle prayers to be saved by supernatural agencies, and devote our energies to self-salvation. Comment and Discussion. xiii Again, life on earth is not desirable for those on whom old age has set its insignia of infirmity and deformity with all the attendant daily pains and aches. A natural re- vulsion from life ensues from the senescent condition of the organism. Life grows less and less desirable, until often the aged one longs for release from it. This mental attitude touching life is purely the result of the decline of the associate cell life of which the human body is composed. It is to the regeneration of the com- ponent cell life of the organism that our present researches are directed. The object of them is to renovate the tis- sues, renew the cells, and maintain the human body in the adolescent condition: the muscles and digestive organs in ‘a state of normal bealth and efficiency, the brain in a con- dition of mental power, hopefulness, and ambition. It is not likely that such a person would desire to die, at least, not on an improved and beautified earth where the growth of knowledge and the rapid advances of scien- tific discovery gave opportunity for continuous mental growth. But, reverting to our passionate critic, it may be said that Natural Salvation would by no means sentence a man to life. It merely enlarges his freedom to live or not. He does not have to live. In the phrase of firm old Marcus Aurelius, “the open door” is always there, under his hand, with liberty to issue forth to the un- known gods. XiV Natural Salvation. One who terms herself “a believer in Natural Salva- tion” has written to ask, “How can these truths be dis- seminated ? How can this better faith be propagated?” Desirable as such propagation would be, it is the author’s opinion that this will not be best accomplished by direct efforts at proseliting, or propaganda. The capacity to receive truth comes from mental growth and the acquisition of knowledge. These truths will be apprehended and accepted as mental evolution in America proceeds. It is the growth of knowledge and the develop- ment of brain, which will prepare the way to accept Natural Salvation. Unformed, undeveloped mind is the stronghold of the old creeds. Further education is the only remedy. NATURAL SALVATION. THE MESSAGE OF SCIENCE. Tis a part of the unwritten code of science that the investigator shall avoid a priori conclusions, look coldly upon theory, and be wary of hypothesis. In a word, that he shall devote himself patiently to the acquisi- tion of data, be content to collect facts, and live abstinent of the ever-present human weakness to play the rolé of prophet. Nothing, indeed, so surely distinguishes the man of science from the charlatan as his attitude toward theory and his caution in presenting conclusions. A single page, often a single paragraph, of the article, or the book of a writer on scientific subjects, enables us to judge all too accurately of the value, or lack of value, of his entire effort; and, generally speaking, the verdict turns on the care with which he draws conclusions from data. Science has endured so much of premature vaticination that its best friends and exponents have come to regard all that sort of thing with marked hostility, as detrimental to true progress. There is a disposition to put injudicious 7 8 Natural Salvation. enthusiasts outside the pale. A certain regimen has come to prevail; immature publication is held to be bad form as well as futile. Humility and an educated conservatism characterize the truly scientific mind: the attitude of Newton at the end of his grand discoveries. With all that biology has of late demonstrated, we know too little still to say much of ultimate things. The time has not yet come when the creed of science can be written in full for general acceptance and signature. It is in the nature and constitution of the human mind, however, to believe something. The history of mankind shows that those tribes, nations, and races which have gone forward with the greatest energy, have been actuated and incited by confident beliefs as to the origin and destiny of human beings. In like manner the scientist has often found hypothesis an adjuvant; for an hypothesis is of the nature of a belief. Some of the most signal discoveries in astronomy, chem- istry and biology have been elicited under guidance of provisional theories. There is a use as well as abuse of hypothesis; and, moreover, the theories of science are often bona fide glimpses of truth. So at present, when the old faiths are fading’ out, like ghosts at dawn, when venerable “soul doctrines” are falling into desuetude and discredit, glimpses of the truth come and will serve to light us forward in the great outer darkness of the universe. The Message of Science. 9 As such and such only are the present outlines of a greater gospel put forward: a provisional belief to be used as a scientist uses an hypothesis; probably true, better certainly than the existent babel of doctrines. As regards Christianity, biological science now goes far to substantiate and confirm the original scheme of life and salvation, as conceived and taught by the Founder, but will purge it and separate it from those adventitious doctrines which Church Fathers, Bishops and Synods engrafted upon the new religion during the first three centuries of its existence. These doctrines were never essentially Christian, nor even Jewish, but of the nature of ingrowths from Persian, Greek, and Egyptian systems of philosophy. Christianity, however, can hardly be said to be more than one of: the religious beliefs of America. Allah, Brahma, Joss, and Mormon, as well as the Hebrew Jehovah, are now worshiped among us. Asia and Africa, as well as Europe, have contributed to the amazing mélange of tenets which stand for religion in the United States. Never in the world’s history has such diversity of belief been exhibited in one country ; yet each of these hundred and ten different cults is endeared to thousands of im- migrant devotees by ancestral ties and traditions. If by some megaphonic device we were able to hear, at one time and in one place, the amazing outcry of doctrines which goes up in thousands of churches, temples, Io Natural Salvation. and other places of religious worship, the confusion would out-jargon that on the Plain of Shinar. Such multiples of contradictory doctrines mutually dis- credit each other. It has followed naturally that the younger generation, born in America and educated in the public schools where general scientific knowledge is im- parted, is quite without a faith, in the old-time meaning of that word, and looks to science for its real tenets. Nor looks in vain. Even now, already, science is able to outline a new and greater faith ; and no prophetic gift is required to assure us that this new faith will be the religion of future America. For a new hope has come to the human heart, the hope of salvation from “sin” and death by natural means: Natural salvation, contra-distinguished from supernatural salvation. Supernaturalism has been. the burden of all previous religious systems. In all the past, human hopes have founded on rite, sacrifice, and supernatural rescue. But the keynote and initiative of the message of science is natural salvation: salvation under nature, accomplished by the growth and conservation of human knowledge. Tn all the past man has turned to the skies and prayed to powers beyond the earth for salvation; but now, at the dawn of the twentieth century, he turns to himself and gravely, hopefully estimates the problem of self-salvation. Moreover, self-salvation, when regarded in the light of our present greater knowledge, is seen not to be new at The Message of Science. II all, but to have been in progress ever since life first found foothold on the earth’s surface! Apparently it has been in the natural order of things from the beginning. We shall be able to show that natural salvation has been the tendency and trend of the evolution of life on the earth; that from the Silurian ages upward, life has put forth and developed toward a naturally attained freedom from evil conditions, “sin” and death; and moreover that the prospect for this is good. There is so much doubt, disheartenment and pessimism in the world that a plain statement of the human situation from the biological point of view cannot be otherwise than morally healthy. The progress of this great life movement on the surface of the globe constitutes a drama of surpassing interest, the grandest spectacle in nature. As to the origin of life on the earth, we have no certain knowledge as yet, whether it’came here from some other world in space, or originated here from a capacity to live inherent in matter. The former supposition puts the question of origin one step farther away; the latter is the one to which all intermediary theories must ultimately lead ; for life is the subjective side of matter, its personal attribute: that property which renders the “ion” a ‘*psychon.” . It is not difficult to believe that there are other plane- tary globes where life develops more easily and with less travail and duress than on our earth. It is not incredible 12 Natural Salvation. that the first cell, spore, or perhaps still more rudimentary germ of life, arrived here from some other world. It has been held that the “molecule of protoplasm,” so called, could not have originated on the earth. Cell life does not now come into existence spontaneously; and the inference is easy that the first unicellular life of the globe was from an implantation. This conjecture once admitted, the next surmise might be that the earth was life-seeded by design, or from per- sonal motives, on the part of intelligent beings inhabit- ing a more life-fertile globe in space. And it is more reassuring to think that such vital implantation was from beneficent design and to conceive of it as Divine. It isa moral contradiction that beings more intelligent than man should be malevolent.. On this earth, at least, intellectual development does not tend to, or eventuate in, malevolence and cruelty, but rather in a desire to give happiness. By human standards, an omniscient mind could not be a “Satan”’; yet we do not know what exists afar. To the normal mind there is not much in the present life struggle on the earth that indicates mercy, kindness, or beneficence. There is no biological evidence, pro or con. The atti- tude of the universe toward life on the earth seems to be impersonal and neutral. Animal and vegetable life grows, bears seed and dies, unwatered, uncherished, un- harvested. And while at first, owing to long indoctrina- tion, this thought of uncherished neglect pains many The Message of Science. 13 minds, it must on reflection come to be regarded as a glorious heritage of liberty —the liberty of the universe. As nearly as can be estimated there is on the surface of the earth, at present, “‘ protoplasm ” (meaning matter tem- porarily in that condition of reciprocal activity which we term “living matter”) to the amount of 5,500,460,500,000 tons. . Temporarily in the living condition, we say. For a significant almost startling phase of it is, that this vast quantity of matter is constantly passing out of the living into the non-living condition. As often as once in six hours, probably, once in twelve certainly on an average, the entire five or six trillions of tons of protoplasmic mat- ter falls out of the living into the non-living condition; and pari passu an equally vast weight of non-living mat- ter is raised up to the living condition. It is believed that all, or the most part, of the matter which makes up the outer strata of the earth to the depth of many miles, has at some time or other been in the living state, and not once or twice only, but many times. We may, indeed, go much farther and not exceed what is probable in supposing that in the great past history of the universe —a history of successive series of solar and planetary formations — matter has lived in an infinite number of forms and types of life from eternity, intermittently and alternately. 14 Natural Salvation. For here it is significant to note the reversion of scientific opinion from the extremes of the dynamic hypothesis of pure force, toward the Newtonian idea. Light and also heat and electricity are not only dynamic, but material. Force, so far as we know it, is always associated with an efflux of matter. The method by which this continuous passage of non- living into living matter is effected, is association and contact with previously existing living matter. The non-living must be infused into the living matter ere the non-living can be re-vitalized. The intimate impulse which accomplishes this vast transfiguration seems to be a subjective one, resident in the ’ itself, or, in other words, in the matter “ protoplasm’ which is, for the passing hour, in the living condition, and which sinks down from that living condition, while in the act of raising up non-living matter to its own level. The impulse, or working energy, is apparently a trans- gression of subjective sentience into matter-moving power or motion, effected at a great depth of atomicity, on that low plane where particles are able to move in response to a primarily sentient property which they universally possess. It is from this low plane, or condition of tenuity, that “protoplasm ” is built up, and sets forth in its wonderful career. On the earth as we now inhabit it, life struggles upward from this deep-lying, sentient plane of matter in The Message of Science. 15 the teeth of a gigantic resistance. The energy in proto- plasm is largely expended in overcoming this molar resistance; the bulk of our living substance has neces- sarily been impressed into mechanical service, — bone, teeth, hair, cuticle, muscle, tendon, in order to make way and obtain food. This, in fact, is life on earth, as man has thus far led it; but it is possible to improve the earth as a theater of life, and by the control and regulation of its “natural forces” to lessen the resistance. Growth is a law of living matter; and on the earth’s surface protoplasm is capable, under ordinarily favorable circumstances, of increasing its bulk much more rapidly than it wastes, or dies. It is able to conserve energy. A cell is capable of raising up a greater amount of non-living matter into the living condition than it loses from the living condition by the act of so doing. The only limit to such growth is the capacity of the earth as a field for life; it constantly sustains as much matter in the living condition as it has room for. The , various genera and species of living things, moreover, mutually limit and restrict each other. But for animals, plants would probably overrun the earth to the full ex- tent of its standing room; but for some species of animals, others would increase inordinately. Bacteria, in a favor- able medium, propagate at a rate of which no conception can be given in figures. 16 Natural Salvation. The point of interest concerning this is that, given favorable conditions, with no checks to its growth, the tiniest dot of protoplasm might convert all the available matter of the universe into protoplasm! or, in other words, when once a modicum of matter, ever so small, has entered the living condition, it has the power to draw an infinite quantity of contiguous matter into the same life-expressing combination, and continue the process in- definitely. It is as if the universe of matter were com- bustible and the dot of protoplasm, introduced into it, were a spark of fire, —with this important difference, however, that growth of living matter implies the raising up of matter to higher degrees of complexity, or the storing up of potential energy in matter, the reverse of igneous combustion. While we cannot affirm that growth of protoplasm is creative of energy, it is certainly con- servative of energy in a manner elsewhere. and otherwise unknown. In protoplasm, a higher or more primary attribute of matter, to wit, sentience, appears to make heat, light, and kindred modes of energy its servants and to success- fully stem the ordinary effects of katabolism. In past ages of the world, noticeably the carboniferous, a far greater quantity of matter has been in the living condition at one and the same time than at present; the indications are that there have been periods when the continents sustained twenty times more vegetable proto- The Message of Science. 17 plasm, year by year, than during the present era. From age to age the quantity has varied in accord with the terrestrial conditions. As yet we know no method of transmuting non-living into living matter apart from the agency of previously existent living matter. But no more can we at present make feldspar, or mica, or gold, or silver, or lead. It is as likely that we shall discover a method of producing living matter, as that we shall learn to produce any of these substances. The task waits a deeper knowledge of matter, but is impossible only for the present. One reason for believing that new protoplasm and new protozoa no longer come into existence spontaneously, is that many or all of the micro-organisms which we study under the microscope are new only in the sense of being newly discovered by us. Many of the disease-bacteria were at least operative and produced the same poisons _three thousand years ago. The diatomacee of to-day ex- hibit the same characteristics and the same silicious enve- lope as those taken from fossiliferous strata laid down in the seas of the tertiary epoch. In fact, many of the gen- era of micro-organisms are the most venerable and change- less of any upon the earth. Nor can we wholly agree with those who regard these minute creatures as the most rudi- mentary of living forms. It by no means follows that be- cause a living creature is small, that it is hence exceedingly simple and recent in the sense of ancestry and heredity. 18 Natural Salvation. Another feature of this vast body of terrestrial living matter, the most remarkable, characteristic, and important feature indeed, is the singular mode in which it exists or lives, from moment to moment. Although of such vast bulk and weight when considered in the aggregate; it is never found in continuous bulk, but always exists as mi- nute modica, or little measures, isolated one from another, scattered throughout and embedded in non-living matter. On an average, these minute modica of living matter or protoplasm are not much more than the three-thousandth of an inch in diameter, but occasionally reach the one two- hundredth and larger; and their true or typical form is manifestly spherical. From the center of these small spherules life is exhibited. In consistency, the living substance is semi-fluid ; it is so nearly transparent as to be deemed colorless; and it does not give off odorous par- ticles. As above remarked, it is ordinary matter, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., and the cause of its pecu- liar behavior, in the living condition, is in all probability the manner in which the particles are combined, and their arrangement and relations one with another. More profoundly, when we seek to know why living matter always assumes the form of and exists always in the small spherical integers, termed ‘cells,” we are brought to contemplate a new law of matter which appar- ently acts counter to gravitation, or, as is more likely, prevails upon an interior plane of matter within that on The Message of Science. 19 which gravitation acts. It is the sway and prevalence of gravitation over ordinary matter which causes the world of matter, as we see it, to appear lifeless and inert. But in protoplasm, pure and unalloyed, we behold a law of matter, find expression, subversive of gravity, prevalent over it and transfiguring ordinary matter to living matter in spite of gravity, so to speak. This may seem a bold statement. Life, indeed, has been held by many biologists to be a corelative of gravitation, a cognate and derivative mode of the universal energy of matter. Cognate, indeed, it no doubt is ; derivative also in the loose sense of being aided and facilitated by it in all the larger forms of ter- restrial life; for it is assuredly not the intention here to convey the idea that the ordinary functions of animals are carried on contrary to gravity or chemism. The writer ventures, however, to set forth the conception that within a normal “cell” of living matter there is an expression of energy not derived from gravitation, but superior to it; as if emanating from an inner seat of energy, as if acting upon matter at a different angle or point - @appui. Such an opinion by no means conflicts with the monistic conception of energy. It is meant merely to set forth that life is not the immediate derivative of gravitation, or chemism, which many physical philosophers have been inclined to consider it, but rather a static prop- erty of matter which antedates gravity, and, in the inti- mate composition of matter, outranks it. 20 Natural Salvation. Indeed, the truer view of this great question is probably that life finds but an irregular, erratic expression in the superficies of the terrestrial globe, where gravity and the grosser modes of universal energy prevail as a rule. Yet the conception will be found to grow in the mind of the student of living matter, that this wonderful static property is a very universal property; in a word, that. all matter is sentient at bottom; and that its apparent insen- tience, or lifelessness and inertia, as seen on the earth, is less a natural than an unnatural and fortuitous condition into which it has fallen from the peculiar recoils incident to planetary formation. This view need not incline the student to entertain pantheistic conceptions of matter, or drift away to extreme opinions as to a universal mind inherent in nature: an ocean of omniscient intellect, from which our “souls” are stray driblets. On the contrary, the entire trend and drift of biological science are to the effect that the primary static property of matter is sentience only in the sense that the raw flax is damask, that the crude ore is a steel warship, and that in the great tracts of universal matter there is nothing more intelligent than the elements of intelligence; even as in “protoplasm” of lowly grade there is little save the capacity to feel. Be it remem- bered, too, that there is now, probably, no “ protoplasm ” existent on the earth’s surface of such lowly grade, such archaic simplicity upon the scale of intelligence, as The Message of Science. 21 that which first stirred on the early shores of the azoic oceans. As the student examines those wonderful little integers, the “cells,” day by day, the inquiry constantly presents itself, Why does the living matter adopt this form? Why does it live in these little globules of uniform size ? — for although the size of cells differs considerably relatively to each other in different tissues and situations, the difference is mainly within certain definite limits; and the general type and form are unmistakable and apparently un- changeable. Why does protoplasm exist in such small measures of substance, each scarcely more than a pin’s point? Why do its “cells” fail, since they are constantly growing, to attain larger size, aninch or more in diameter? Why do they not coalesce in the tissues into one sentient working mass? And why, on the contrary, do they constantly divide, when these small dimensions are reached, and be- come dormant, die even, rather than transgress them? These are inquiries which the student will find often re- curring as he observes cell life. The idea conveyed from the totality of such questionings is one of a certain ever- present barrier to protoplasmic life, or a constantly re- stricting law which makes life on the earth possible only in this small form, or type. Some stress of terrestrial matter appears to confine life to this minute expression. This little cell is the only way in which life upwells 22 Natural Salvation. from the profound depths of matter. For it is apparent that the cell is but the form, the tiny thread-like channel from a deep-lying stratum, through which some very eso- teric or final property of matter flickers up. So great confusion of thought has often been exhibited on this subject of cell consentience that it is important to set the matter in a clear light. In the cell-of-life we have presented the spectacle of a thousandth of a grain of mat- ter — oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus — which has set itself to ive, set up for itself as against the rest of the universe, stepped out from its former relation- ship and allegiance to other matter, and started a new little world of its own. For that is what a living cell really is: a minute portion of universal matter which has withdrawn from the rest and set up autonomy. The laws of matter no longer control this thousandth of a grain of matter as formerly. In every animal and in every cell there is always matter, a large per cent. of its bulk, which is not living, and hence inert; but the really living portion of the cell carries it- self in defiance of gravitation. True, it is borne on by the earth on its orbit and revolves with it; none the less it is able to direct chemical action for its own behoof and combine forces to overcome gravity when it wishes to climb hills or trees. In a word, it fights gravitation to do as it pleases, and succeeds. So long as it lives and is not crushed out, it is to a degree independent and self-directive. The Message of Science. 23 The present development of life on the earth began in the age which geologists term the Silurian; but the presence of graphite in the Laurentian, or ‘azoic ” rocks renders it not incredible that there was a previous life development which terminated, or was followed by a period of high temperature. But to return to what is known, keeping it separate from conjecture, we find that low forms of unicellular life were existing on the earth many millions of years ago. Geology affords the evidence of this, though the exact number of millions of years is still debatable. That is not material to our purpose, however; it was a very long time ago. Fire, water, and unicellular life have wrought together to make the earth’s surface what we find it to-day. But geologists are agreed that there was an azoic, or lifeless age, followed by an epoch when protozoons — vegetable and animal cells of life, the monera, protameebide, diatoms, alge, myxopods, rhizo- pods, ciliata, flagellata, et al, —had appeared; unicellular creatures from one ten-thousandth to a hundredth of an inch in diameter. For millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, certain of these protozoons were the sole inhabitants of the earth which was fit for no higher form of life; or, if fit, no higher form had developed. Nothing more graphically illustrates the wealth of time at Nature’s disposal, or the fact that the course of nature cannot be judged by human 24 Natural Salvation. standards. Metazoons, creatures of higher, more complex organization, were to appear on the earth; yet through all these millions of years no sign or semblance of them was visible. Were three million centuries of unicellular life necessary to prepare the earth’s surface for metazoons? The question is idle. Every measure of our estimation of nature breaks down on extended application. We have no code of morals for nature and can have none, for nature is eternal, and man a being of yesterdays and to-morrows. The point to make here pertains merely to the fact that for ages and epochs, to which all subsequent time is but as an hour to a day, a lowly unicellular life was all that the earth bore. Observers from afar, if such there were, might well have concluded that there would be no further develop- ment; thus other planets appear to our terrestrial astron- omers; the epoch of life, or of the higher life-forms, has not yet arrived, or has passed. Then occurred a new departure in terrestrial life, an innovation, but when, how early, or how late in that first long epoch of unicellular life we do not know. Some time during those millions of the earth’s unhistoric revolutions an innovation on unicellular life began. From accident of the environvent, or, perchance, from The Message of Science. 25 malformation, two or more cells began to live united together, and to act in unison — the earliest metazoon! Or, as some biologists conjecture, an unusually tough cell wall, or membrane, may have restricted the ordinary course of multiplication by fission. The offspring or increase of a certain protozoon may have been unable to separate from the parent cell, to lead an individual life apart, as formerly, and thus two or more protozoa may have come to live together, in sentient, protoplasmic contact as one life, and to act for a common interest. It is not essential to our argument to show how meta- zoons began. The point made is, that they came into exist- ence and, beyond doubt, originated from the unicellular life which antedated them. In some way two or more cells contrived to merge their hitherto separate lives in one. Their separate sentiences were pooled, so to speak, in one consentient life. This was accomplished by means of close protoplasmic contact, when the two hitherto separate cell lives coalesced, like two drops of 'water on a window-pane. For it is possible for two cells to live as one and form a single life or self-conscious existence, if there is close protoplasmic connection between the two, that is to say, if they touch each other, or are joined together by one or more threads of the sentient living matter. When this occurs, the two cells may have one common life, or soul, in place of the two lives previous to the union. One common life may 26 Natural Salvation. take the place of two; and yet the two cell substances do not become confluent or coalesce; they merely touch and remain separate seats, or fountains of sentience ; it is the two sentiences only which unite; as when twa springs which issue at points near together combine their waters in one rill. The two cell lives combine in one stream, but the cells themselves remain distinct, separate founts of life. The tremendous significance of this fact is little recognized or understood as yet. It subverts the present theological: doctrine of the human soul. It demonstrates that the intellect of man, the human personality, is com- posite and dissoluble. . At the outset, however, certain hasty conclusions which have sometimes misled investigators should be avoided. The bodies of the higher animals are something more than confederations of unicellular life; that is to say, they have not come directly from a banding together of cells that once lived separately. The animal organism develops from a single cell in the egg. All the millions of cells in the various tissues issue forth, seriatim, from this one re- productive cell, which seems to contain representative particles, reproductive molecules, or “biophors,” and “ determinants,” corresponding to every tissue cell of the parent organism. We have by no means sounded the depths of this latter problem, as yet. One conjecture is, that the entire animal organism, in corelation with its generative tissue, fructifies in a species of sub-unicellular The Message of Science. 27 life; a germ life as far below the tissue cell life in size and bulk as the cell is smaller than the whole animal organism. The cell would thus appear to extrude a species of minute offspring which are assembled, as a colony, in the oyum. Animals are grand communities of cells and something more, the result of long organization and new methods of cell life. But this distinction does not essentially detract from the importance which attaches to the phenomenon disclosed to us when two cells combine to live one life. I have termed this a new departure, yet must not be under- stood to assert that it took place suddenly, as being the beginning or end of an epoch, or as indicating a ‘‘creative act,” that mental lapse to which certain venerable savants are so prone. Here, too, it will be well to enlarge the common con- ception of a “cell.” We are apt to think of unicellular life as being very low and simple, far down toward the primary molecules and “atoms” of matter Whereas the truth appears to be that the ‘cell’ is a relatively huge and vastly complex organism; and that the unicellular life of the globe is an evolution of a most hoary antiquity ; herewith also this other fact should be associated and kept in mind, namely, that in the bodies of metazoons, in plants and trees, the unicellular type of life, this ancient life of the Silurian ages, still persists. In fact, it will hardly be too much to say that the unicellular is the 28 Natural Salvation. only real, distinct type of life which exists, or has ever existed on the earth’s surface. Since all the metazoons are but more or less well-organized and well-perfected confraternities of cell life, where the individual lives of millions of cells are unified in a single, larger personality. Many of the polyzoa are suggestive of the manner in which multicellular organisms started. In paludicella we find cells joined together, as joints or sections of the branches of a minute tree-like growth, attached to stones in streams. It is a tree in miniature; the cells grow forth, one beyond another, offspring above parent cell, but otherwise have little connection one with another. It is simply an arboriform colony, or zoartum. Other polyzoa, like mucronella, form mat-like disks on stones in water, the cells lying in contact merely. In certain of the zoaria of polyzoa, however, a con- siderable degree of individualization is exhibited with division of labor among the cells. In christatella mucedo the cells not only adhere, but the whole colony crawls with considerable facility from one water weed to another. Kinetoskias is another zoarium where the colony has arrived at the point of differentiation of function. Adeona presents an equally interesting example of a simple colony of unicells on its way toward a many-celled organism. Among the hydrozoa, siphonophora affords an example where a floating colony of unicells has taken definite form and organized its individual cells to work for the common The Message of Science. 29 good. In siphonophora, as, indeed, in hundreds of other instances, the beginnings of multicellular mind are appar- ent. That is to say, there is present not only the cell intelligence — that which pertains to all cells — but that larger intelligence which comes into existence from the consentience of the entire colony — the pooling of the separate cell sentiences in one larger intelligence. This habit among protozoons of colonizing — however it originated — opened the way to metazoons. Often the colony grows up around one mother cell, whose offspring instead of dispersing remain loosely attached together. Of such agglomerations anthrophysa vegetans is a good instance. In other instances the envelope, or cuticle, of the mother cell expands and enlarges, forming a sac which contains the entire colony for a considerable time, till the reproductive power of the parent cell is exhausted. Eventually the sac bursts and the group disperses. Many of the flagellates exhibit this phenomenon, the parent organism continuing to move about after becoming a colony instead of a single cell. In gonium pectorale, a volvocine of stagnant fresh waters, a Golony of sixteen offspring cells adhere laterally to each other, in the form of a minute, rectangular plaque of a light green color. Pandorina, on the other hand, gives birth to either sixteen or thirty-two offspring, which live for a time in a species of globular colony, inside a thin 30 Natural Salvation. envelope, through which each cell thrusts out two flagella. While living as a colony, these sixteen or thirty-two cells act together, as if actuated by a common impulse, moving their flagella in unison to propel the colony. It changes direction, tacks suddenly, and otherwise affords evidence that all the cells are acting together as one. Either there is a sentient contact which serves to enable the sixteen separate cells to act as one, or else a temporary species of nervous system, consisting of filamentous processes thrust forth from cell to cell. In the oft-cited instance of volvox globator, the colony is of nore complicated structure and forms a large green ball, to the surface of which the individual cells adhere in great numbers, as many as twelve thousands to a ball having been counted. In this case they appear .to touch each other and are each provided with two flagella which project through the membrane. Here each cell appears to be a free agent within its own envelope, but projects pro- toplasmic threads or filaments, like telephonic wires, into its neighbors, by means of which a network of consentient communication is established. At an internal signal all the thousands of flagella swing in harmony like oars, and the ball moves from point to point. It is clear that some- thing analogous to a nervous system is here present, even though of an ephemeral nature, consisting of filaments which can be thrust out and withdrawn at will. In the diccian volvox the male colony remains apart The Message of Science. 31 from the female cellules, except at time of fecundation, when both colonies break up, scatter, and presently conju- gate in pairs and groups. Colonies of protozoons which come from a single parent cell present some analogy with a multicellular animal organism, which also develops from a single egg-cell. The way, however, from a colony of protista to the organ- ism of a vertebrate animal is long and, in its etiology, but little understood. The first metazoons were clearly temporary makeshifts, owing to stress of accidental conditions. It is likely, indeed, that they had often occurred for millions of years, occurred thousands of times, but had died out, or pro- gressed no further than the polyzoa we see at present time, owing to unvarying conditions, flood and drought, heat and cold. But at some time one or more of these unions of cells chanced to survive longer and took more permanent form, sufficient permanence to carry it on and set up a new mode of life by organization — that organiza- tion and differentiation of cell function which was to play so grand a part in the future. Space and a desire to make the argument continuous prevent more extended enumeration of such primitive unions of unicellular life. But one has only to look abroad on the face of nature to see conclusive proof of the posi- tion here taken. Jn every tree, shrub, and plant, in every animal that walks, every bird and insect that flies, we 32 Natural Salvation. behold an agglomerated organized mass, or congeries, of cells, each filling its place and doing its appropriate part in a cell commonwealth. There may be thousands of cells in the plant or insect, gr there may be millions in the tree or the animal. The proof, we say, is on all. sides.. Tree, animal, insect, alike, are examples of this principle of e pluribus unum, for the common good of all. We wish here merely to show the manner in which the metazoons started, and the significance of the act when two or more protozoons unite to live one life and become one larger self. No claim is set up here, that we know at present, from what colonies or unions of primitive unicells the verte- brata were developed. Nature, indeed, appears to have performed many strange experiments in multicellular or- ganisms, long-extended and horrible experiments, which go far to convince us that we must not deify or even personify nature. For nature is elemental and imper- sonal. The unicells first organized in uncouth and savage forms, - ‘Dragons of the prime that tare each other in their slime.” Dinosaur, megatherium, and mastodon roared and battled through ages that to man are incomprehensible. ‘“‘ A monstrous eft was at one time lord and master of earth, For him the bright sun shone and his river billowing ran.” The Message of Science. 33 Man’s hundred thousand years are but as a span to the era of vertebrate monsters and monstrosities, while earth’s young unicells were making their first tremendous efforts at organization. . But when two or more cells unite to live together as one, each has first to surrender, either temporarily or per- manently, its own self-conscious personality ; and then as a merger of all these surrendered personalities there ensues a larger, grander self about a new axis of self- consciousness. The most perfect example of this self-surrender and resultant, grand consentience is exhibited in the brain of man. Here temporarily during the day some sixty mil- lions of “cells”? extend filamentous processes and, all taking hold of hands, so to speak, surrender each its self- consciousness and autonomy to form the human intellect. From this grand surrender, and at the instant it is made, there flashes forth the consentient human person- ality, the “soul of man.” It is done as if by electric contact. This intellect or “soul” is the union of these sixty millions of brain cell lives ; they surrender self to live as one. But in the brain this is but a temporary self-surrender. Owing probably to the severe vital draught which the consentience makes on the individual cell the human intellect cannot remain constant or continuous. There 34 Natural Salvation. must be respite and recuperation for the constituent cells. Accordingly we find that after ten or fifteen hours the consentient strain is relieved; the union is disrupted. Sleep ensues. Suddenly, as suddenly as it began, the brain cells let go hands. The filaments are retracted. Contact is broken. Each cell resumes its individual life, becomes itself again, self-conscious, and attends to its own personal affairs — nutrition, elimination of waste products, rest, growth. But the instant the cells resume self-life, the human intellect has ceased, as when electric contact is broken, unconsciousness supervenes. Why, it may be asked, why and how did the first two or more protozoons come to unite their self-lives in one larger self? From what seems accident of: the environ- ment, on the objective side; and for greater comfort, ease, and safety, on the subjective side; or rather when accident, or “the law of chance,” had initiated the innovation, the subjective comfort which resulted from it led to a volun- tary and wilful continuance of the new mode of living. For by thus uniting, a division of the hard labor of living was possible; the single cell was no longer com- pelled to face the world alone and perform all the various kinds of labor which the act of living necessitated. After combining, one cell could do one kind of work and con- fine itself to that, and another, another kind. One cell, or group of cells, could attend to locomotion, as in volvoz, The Message of Science. 35 another to securing food, and still another to digestion and assimilation of the food. Seon, indeed, one cell, or group of cells, in the union, took upon itself the office of spying out food, or sighting danger and notifying the motive group to move forward swiftly, or to beat a hasty retreat. This spy cell, or group of cells, soon assumed the leadership. In time, complete differentiation of labor-function was effected. The loco- motive or muscle group not only performed no other kind of labor, but became unable to perform other. Its internal organization conformed to this want of the union. So of the group which seized, or digested food, and preemi- nently so of the spy cell group which erelong devoted itself exclusively to discernment, intelligent decisions and a general directorate and protectorate of the other groups. This apparent development of metazoons from proto- zoons, of so great significance in the terrestrial scheme of life, was set forth by this author some years since a little more in detail. “Very soon after creatures composed of many cells (metazoons) were developed from groups of unicellular life, the necessities of locomotion in the struggle for food led to the differentiation of certain tracts of cells as bone and muscle, and finally to the development of the entire apparatus for mechanical movements. « Simultaneously, too, another peculiar species of dif- ferentiation began to be necessary, namely, a special tis- 36 Natural Salvation. sue, whose office should be that of intercommunication between the different associated cells and tracts of cells which were thus assuming mdére and more diverse offices, and becoming somewhat different in character, one from another. It was thus and for this reason that a nervous system began to be needed and hence to develop; for the plastic, living substance has always shown a faculty of adapting itself to widely variant functions and modes of living. “ Certain cells began to take up the business of receiv- ing sensory influences from outlying cells which were hard: pressed or in want of food, and of transmitting such sensory influences to contiguous cells. In short, certain lines of internal cells began to take upon themselves the task of conveying the sensations of others from one tract of the cellular mass to another tract, and of interpreting the sensation received from one tract to the comprehen- sion of the sentience of another tract, so that action, within its sphere of action, would ensue in the second tract. In addition to their own sentient economy, these lines of cells in the incipient nervous system took up the function of common carriers of sense, and also the office of interpreters of the sensory language of one order of cells —if I may borrow the figure—to the different language of another order. “Thus, humbly, as we conclude from observation of low forms of life, did the nervous system, or tissue of in- N The Message of Science. 37 telligence, begin to develop. Primarily there was but one or two simple thread-like lines of cells attempting the office of transmitting feeling, and succeeding indifferently at first; but as animals increased in size, the business of telegraphing sensation grew, and a net-work of lines was developed. Sensation was going both ways, and soon the necessity of a common center to which sensory influences could be brought, and thence distributed to their proper destination, was forced upon the nascent, sense-conveying cells, and a ganglion, or little brain, came into existence. The confusion, too, ‘resulting from counter-currents of feeling soon led to the formation of double lines, one for transmitting sensation inward, the other for transmission outward; and thus the divisions of sensory and motor nerves were inaugurated to and from the little brain center, which presently assumed the function of deciding upon the merits of transmitted sensations, and responding to them by a message from its own sensibility. “Nerve ganglia multiplied as animals increased in bulk and attempted larger movements; and in time, to avoid confusion and get the organic business done, one ganglion was obliged to take the lead and keep order among the other ganglia, to decide between them when they got at variance, and generally to take the office of head ganglion. «Thus, in time, a larger and capitally important gan- glion was raised up into prominence to perform the func- tion of oyer and terminer, a cerebellum, and finally a 38 Natural Salvation. cerebrum, —a mass of highly organized cells which have from long use and inherited development the capacity for intelligent perception and thought.” Without any attempt to present a consecutive line of examples to illustrate the progressive development of the cerebro-spinal system, the above outline indicates the prin- ciple upon which this group of cells has come forward to occupy its present grand prominence as exponents of intelligence. In treating of the cells of the brain as individual, living creatures, it may be well to set forth more explicitly what their status of intelligence probably is, and explain how far they may be regarded as sentient. It is not claimed for any unicellular creature that it possesses rational powers to such extent as is evinced by an organized tract of cells like that of the human brain. For in the human brain we find a great number of cells of four or more varieties, devoted some to memory, some to reason or the comparison of experiences, some to vision, some to hearing, and some to the estimation of the odors and flavors; and it is the sentience and experience of them all which is combined in the human intellect. Yet from observations of unicellular life we find, as in the case of ciliates, that it is quite possible for a single cell, no larger than many of the brain cells, to possess not only sentience, but to acquire the data of memory, and to act from its previous experi- ence. Many forms of unicellular life, indeed, behave The Message of Science. 39 rationally ; nor is there reason to suppose that the cells of the brain are less capable of perception and of memory. In the brain, however, cells of different tracts are con- cerned with experiences of particular kinds, some record- ing the data of vision, others the data of hearing, and still others collating and comparing such data. It is probable that a cell of the tract or group in the area of vision, for example, is largely occupied with depiction of visual imagery, and becomes a kind of living, sentient specialist, or expert in colors and scenery. None the less it is a sentient creature, with its own in- ternal economy of nutrition and growth. In a word, it is a sentient self. It perceives, lives and acts from its own personal point of view, for its own behoof and welfare. This much is quite certain. It is a sentient creature and within its limited sphere has acquired a kind of wisdom of its own. More we cannot predicate of the individual cell. It is a pygmy of a limited degree of intelligence. Nor does our argument claim that the protozoons first banded together from intelligent foresight as to the result of union. The beginnings of metazoic life were proba- bly accidental per se. But the results of union and divi- sion of labor followed quite the same, and it is from these actual results that our conclusions are drawn. By union of their hitherto separate sentiences the cells evolved a higher kind of sentience, a nous, a soul, developed to a 40 Natural Salvation. higher degree of intelligence, from the exercise of which each cell of the organic union was grandly benefited in the matter of food and protection, and is enabled to. become a participator and beneficiary of mind. It may be added that the later physiology portrays the connection and intercommunication of cells in metazoons as based on and maintained by currents of “ions,” liberated and set in motion by the vital processes, and de- picts life itself as arising from the reciprocal action of these biogenetic units of matter. . The passage from the unicellular to organized multi- cellular forms of life, from protozoa to metazoa, was pri- marily effected by simple combinations of cells and varying of their functions. It was thus that the animal organism originated. The question of importance next to be asked is, What was gained by it? Of what use was it? What advantage accrued from it to the cells themselves which, from the strict biological point of view, are not only the first, but the only type of life that has ever ap- peared on the earth; since all life, organic as well as unicellular, goes on by virtue and instrumentality of the “cell” mode. What advantage therefore has accrued to the cell, and how far has it by this means advanced toward that natural salvation which is the goal of al] life? A survey of the whole field shows clearly that the single cell made a great personal gain by uniting its life The Message of Science. 41 with its fellows. This is apparent even in the primitive colony of ciliates, more evident still in volvox, and grandly demonstrated in the animal organism. The cell in the colony lived longer and more comfortably than when struggling for life, alone; and at the acme of organization, -in the vertebrate organism, we find cells which have attained to what is, for a cell, immortality. In unorgan- ized unicellular life, the average life-time of a cell may have been less than two days, not much longer. In or- ganized metazoic life, we find the neurons of the cerebral cortex of an elephant, or a whale, for example, living two centuries. By combining with their fellows, these cells, or their descendants, have increased their span of life thirty thousand times ! In man these brain cells often survive for a century. Human beings, with life-times correspondingly prolonged, would live to the age of eighteen thousand years. It is apparent, moreover, that these groups of brain cells would live longer (for they give little evidence of having exhausted their capacity for living on) but for the fact that they are dragged down to death by the fate of the " organism, é. e., the failure of coordihation among the other tissue groups of cells. This is profoundly interesting as showing what cell life, under favorable conditions, may accomplish in the way of a vast longevity, —from successful combinations, and organization generally. There appear to be cells of the 42 Natural Salvation. brain which would live on indefinitely were it not for acet- dents to other parts of the organism. Generally speaking, longevity is the proof of correct living. That cell, or union of cells, lives long that is well nourished and well protected. No animal organism is as yet perfect, even approximately so. All the groups of tissue cells have not been equally advantaged by organic union, but taken together a great gain has re- sulted, chiefly in the matter of food and protection. The brain and muscle cells of the animal organism, for ex- ample, have their food specially prepared for them along the intestinal tract and brought to them in the arterial conduits, and they are housed and shielded from the mordant action of oxygen and the attacks of hostile bacteria by the integument and bony walls. All the physiological cells are alike benefited in that prime requisite, food; and this fact must be kept in view when the higher social organization of the metazoons is considered. Food specially prepared and refined by groups of cells which have made this office their business, has largely conduced to the longevity of the physiological cell and made brain possible. Without a specially pre- pared food the organic cell could not survive for a day. Improved food, protection from enemies and, subjectively, that greater guiding intelligence that comes from organic life are the factors which have so improved the cell (the protozoon developed to a neuron) that it lives for a The Message of Science. 43 century in man, and in the whale, the carp and the elephant for two centuries. In plant life as we now view it, banding together has not been as advantageous for the saprophytic cell. We have trees two thousand years old; but so far as we at present understand the arboreal economy, the vegetable cellules are not long-lived. This would follow, a priori, from the far less perfect organization of plants, the more crude food supplied to the cells, imperfect protection and the apparently inferior sentience of the cells themselves. The contrast but emphasizes the deduction made for the physiological cell, namely, that it has attained its pre- eminence by perfecting the organic union of which it is a unit. And the inference has sometimes been drawn that could the metazoon as seen in the animal organism be given a more perfect development, the component cells would reach that acme of natural salvation for which they have striven for two millions of centuries and would become, in very truth, deathless cells-of-life. There is no more wonderful and grandly instructive spectacle in nature than this widespread and long-extended effort of the globe’s unicellular life to save and preserve itself from hardship, accident, “disease,” and death. Nor has the effort been ‘instinctive ”’ in any other sense than all sentience is instinctive. From the subjective side of life, the primitive unicells of the ancient earth began to live together for mutual comfort, aid, and pro- 44 Natural Salvation. tection, and continued these unions till by division of labor and differentiation of function the simple colony developed into the vertebrate animal organism, with its thirty specialized genera of cells, all acting together for the common weal. Man must still turn to the unicells for grand examples of social organization and progress by means of organiza- tion. Vastly and grandly more than is yet exhibited in human civilizations have the protozoons united and com- bined for mutual betterment. In this maple, towering in leafy beauty, we may find two billions of arboreal cells, organized, apportioned for diverse labors, trained to special work, devoted and artisaned to the production of fiber, bark, sugar, .and chlorophyl, and all in an orderly sequence of effects and a consecration of each cell self to its appointed task, and with an apparent content and faith in the outcome, when each does his share, such as the human world has never yet seen nor understood. In that horse dashing along the track we behold several billions of cells, each a living creature, an individual life, banded, united, and organized in such multicellular com- plexity that it is the glory of anatomy and histology even to have demonstrated'and described it. And in the mat- ter of locomotion—since speed is the criterion in the horse —we may behold this entire body of cells moving ata speed a million times greater than that at which it would be possible for these cells to move if living isolated The Message of Science. 45 and solitary, as did the ancestral protozoon on the beach of the Cambrian Ocean. We should not here be understood as denying or leay- ing out of the account the influence which the metazoic mind exerts for longevity. It is by reason of this supe- rior intelligence, obtained by banding the small wits of the cells together, that those better conditions were gained which make cell longevity possible. Nor yet would we appear to assert that the animal organism lives for the benefit, or at the behoof of the component cells. In the animal brain the cells live to themselves only during the eight or ten hours of sleep daily. During waking hours the lives of all these cells are consentient, having banded and blended together to form the self-conscious mind of the animal,-which devotes its energies to supplying the animal wants. Without this consentient union for men- tation, locomotion, and general muscular activity, the animal could not have developed. The component cells improved, each its individual condition, by forming a con- sentient partnership. This point might readily be given. fuller illustration, and a thousand examples of metazoic life cited in evidence of the principle, rationale, and intent of the passage from uni- cellular to multicellular life; but the idea has been con- veyed; and this is enough for our present purpose. The genuineness of the deduction can hardly be controverted. By banding together and by organization, with division of 4 46 Natural Salvation. labor for the common good of the union, the cell-of-life, as first seen in the protozoon, has come to live two centuries, instead of two days, with a legitimate inference that it is practically deathless under improved organic conditions. That is to say, there is nothing in the constitution of the cell, no biogenetic law, that prevents it from living in- definitely. Revolutionary as this deduction may appear to those who teach and believe that death is a final law of nature, the reverse of that doctrine can now be confidently maintained. It need scarcely be added that. this conclu- sion is of the greatest significance, as affecting our beliefs concerning human life and the future of life on the earth. And now after metazoons, what? After cell unions and cell organization in the animal organism, what next? After an organized development which has resulted in the advancement of the cell, the brain cell, to a high degree of intelligence and a grand longevity, what next in the line of its progress? Bearing in mind that the cell is the original and, strictly speaking, the only type or mode of life which has thus far appeared on the earth, what means will be adopted to still further improve and better its lot? Will it of its own initiative inaugurate anything better or greater than the animal organism as we see it about the cerebro-spinal axis in vertebrates ? The Message of Science. 47 The answer would seem to be no, as regards the in- dividual cell, and yes, as regards the consentient union of cells as displayed in the brain and mind of animals and man. And if yes, what has already been accomplished in this larger corporate capacity? Union and organization are manifestly the order and method of all life on the earth. Since the cell banded in the metazoons and made a grand gain for itself in so doing, we might naturally look for unions of metazoons for mutual benefit and prog- ress. But here, as against such actual unions by contact, the physical laws of the globe of matter on which we live interpose obstacles. We cannot have sixty millions of men, or monkeys, or elephants living in a ball, like volvoz. Contact-union for mutual aid, defense, protection, com- fort, and improved food is limited. If we attempted to unite or blend a uation of people as a metazoon, or even make it resemble one in the matter of consentience, as, for example, the eighty or more millions in the United States, or the forty millions of Great Britain, every person, or citizen, would need to be represented as almost wholly de- prived of locomotion, and seated, as if at a desk or table, in one place, where food and the material for his work were brought to him in ducts and tubes. Still further, it would be necessary to conceive of them all as built in and encased by the substances which they manufacture. Further still, and most essential of all to the truth and pertinence of the simile, we should need to depict every 48 Natural Salvation. citizen as connected with his neighbors and through them with every other citizen, by cables, bands, or cords of sen- tient, living matter continuous with his own living sub- stance. We must picture, too, the more prominent class of citizens as having thrust forth immensely long tentacles, forming nets of this same sentient matter, extending long distances from their bodies, and lying in close contact with similar tentacles belonging to hundreds of their fellows, in order that they may feel and literally sense all that they do or think. If this condition of things existed throughout the nation, we should undoubtedly find the individual citizens living as one enormous National Person. In place of eighty millions of individual men and women, we should see them unified in a self-conscious national life. Such a nation would act and conduct itself among other nations as a Personal Being. Upon a lower plane of inorganic relationship of particle to particle and ion to ion, in the atomic sense, it is possible that such a unified personality possesses the universe, an- swering to the indefinite conception of deity. Gravitation has been held to be the lowly organized personality of cosmos, expressing itself in natural phenomena. Von Hartmann, in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” appears to have grasped some such conception, which, however, he immediately perverted to the exigencies of an immoral philosophy. The Message of Science. 49 Since meta-metazoons, as of vertabrates, are physical impossibilities, the advantages which come from union and organization have to be secured in a different way, by other methods of obtaining the necessary consentience. In hymenoptera (insect metazoons) the bees and ants offer suggestive examples of social and economic unions. In the swarm and apiary we find that differentiation of function and division of labor have proceeded far, and taken their place in heredity; and in the case of the queen bee the social organization has operated to greatly prolong her life. Swarm life also serves to afford general protection from enemies, equalize the food supply, and defend the union against the rigors of climate. Tn the termite ants we find not only all these advan- tages gained from swarm organization, but others that come from the war-like operations which organized union ren- ders possible. In bird life, crows, pigeons, geese, penguins, and many other species have attained advantages from rude organiza- tion; and in mammalian life there are many humble ex- amples of flocking, herding and banding together for mutual benefit, to gain protection from enemies and to secure food. The wild horse, bison and caribou herd for protection ; wolves pack to pull down larger animals for food; baboons, monkeys and savage humans band, tribe and horde for protection, better food and companionship. The lower vertebrate orders and primitive man have 50 Natural Salvation. thus set us examples, so to speak, pioneered the way and initiated that larger organization by virtue of which “civilization”’ has arisen. The early and wild mutations of men furnish complicated yet fairly clear studies of the development of the nation from the tribe and the clan. No different principle is involved than that seen to be operative in the flock and horde, and also in the ant-hill and hive. It is the “instinctive” sentient effort and push of the cell-of-life to obtain better conditions. It is not the intention here to enter upon the political history of mankind, the rise of nations and empires, or the causes of their decline. Nor yet to trace the beginnings of commerce, or the rise of the arts and sciences; or re- count the history of war and the constant world-wide struggle for freedom from oppression. It is all a part of that process of union and organization of humanity, to se- cure higher advantages. Something analogous to it has taken place among the tissue cells in the development of the animal organism: the natural. clash of conflicting in- terests, the fight of self against self-surrender for the com- mon good, that self-surrender which comes so hard, yet always redounds subsequently to the individual good and ennoblement. For fifty thousand years the effort at human organiza- tion has ebbed and flowed, operating blindly, misled by a thousand false ideals and “revelations.” Religion has fought against religion, cult against cult, and “god” The Message of Science. 51 against “god.” For the true law of human progress was not yet perceived. The ideal of human confraternity was not yet recognized ; that ideal which the convexed surface of the globe so strongly suggests, and which the greater history of cell life so convincingly teaches. For it is the inestimable privilege of our science to narrate the rise of the cell-of-life and demonstrate the method and law of its progress; to found natural salvation and uphold a new ideal; to confirm the doctrine of human brotherhood as taught by the Founder of the Christian religion and, inci- dentally, to show why that sublime doctrine has for nine- teen centuries appealed so strongly to the human heart; because it is a law of terrestrial life and a necessity to further human progress. The advisability of peace and good-will among men had been taught before the Christian era, and the advantages of harmonious action set forth by others ; but the person- age who appears in history as Joshua, or Jesus, was the first who profoundly felt and lived it, and gave his life for it. In his mind glowed that divine ideal of a «kingdom of God ” arising from brotherly love and that mutual co- operation and union of all humanity which alone can insure salvation under nature. Biology endorses with a cordial reverence the tremendous efficacy of that ideal and shows it to be in line with the whole progress of life on the earth. Science now labors for the realization of that ideal. Every other doctrine of the Christian faith 52 Natural Salvation. will fall, its eschatology fade away. That alone will remain; for it is, indeed, millions of years old; it has been operative for two millions of centuries. Thousands of years before our era, unhistoric Christs had announced it in horde and conclave and died for it; but Jesus put it in the form of a world-faith for this latter epoch ; and his service of love must ever command our reverent affection. He identified himself with that universal law of life by virtue of which ion and primeval psychon surrender their self-lives to form the cell life, the cell the human intellect, and by virtue of which still the human life will hereafter live in the grander life of a deathless humanity. For the psychon is not self-lost in the cell, nor the cell in the organism, but from its self-surrender lives a better and longer life; and in the future grand sodality of human life the individuals will become immortal, even as the cell has prolonged its life in the brain. The vital unit is not lost in the union. What it gives of self to the organiza- _tion returns to it again with compensaticns; and he who casts his life into the consentient human effort, takes it _again, ennobled by self-sacrifice ; it returns to him, christ- ened and imbued by the larger life of which for a time it has formed a part. The brain cell could never have attained its present estate but for the greater personal life of the organism in which, for a part of the time, it blends itself. For the point to be kept steadily in view is, that cell The Message of Science. 53 life, perfect enough not to die, but live on continuously, is a question and merely a question of excellent food, protection from injury and germinal renewal, and not that death is a final “law of nature,” as a false eschatology has hitherto taught mankind. If the science of biology teaches anything, it teaches this truth of the possible deathlessness of cell life on the earth ; and this truth is to the last degree important and revolutionary. The doctrine that death is a final «law of nature’ has been made the cornerstone of that other cardinal doctrine, namely, the “ disembodied spirit” myth. With the refutation of the doctrine that death is a “law of nature ”’ will fall this latter doctrine of disembodied souls. For it will no longer havea raison d’étre. In its place will come that grander gospel that life is the “law of nature,” not death, and the demonstration, long overshadowed by errors of theology, that the « kingdom of God” is a natural development of life on the earth. Two millions of centuries have struggled forward in pain and travail to make the human brain capable of the human intellect. It is a priceless heritage, the great an- cestral estate of humanity. It is not destined forever, nor much longer, to be lost in death ; we shall carry it through to a greater destiny. The true scope and intent of life is now just dawning in the minds of men. We are waking, — after idle dreams,— waking to what we can do and be, waking to the great possibilities of science, wak- 54 Natural Salvation. ing to live, instead of resigning ourselves to death and mythical promises of ghost life. But how? How will this be accomplished? Granted that the cells of the human brain may live for a century, the entire human organism still-dies and the cells perish with it. How will this fate be altered or averted ? The answer is plain. It is already outlined and indi- cated in the manner and the means by which the cell has prolonged its lifetime from a few days to a century. We have but to study the rise and progress of the physiologi- cal cell. Its life history is set before our eyes in the animal organism. By union, organization, differentiation of function and division of labor for the common weal, this long-perfected animal organism has been developed. But now, to carry its development forward .and im- mortalize the component cells, an onward step in organi- zation is necessary. The human individual must be made the unit of a greater system, even as the cell has been the unit of the animal body. And this greater system of union, organization and division of labor has already been initiated, unconsciously, it may be said, on the part of mankind. For thousands of years human beings have been banding together to this very end, unconscious of the real purport of their effort ! The personal ends which, individually, men have had in view, as the motive of their labor, eventuate in a greater The Message of Science. 55 achievement than they wot of. For it does not follow that the human intellect, composed of cell sentiences, can always comprehend the outcome of its acts. The intel- lect is not yet sufficiently consentient to perceive and understand the deeper instinct of the component cells. Instinct, of which we have heard so much, is the dimly perceived motive and will of the cells. But, as has been said, an organization by consentient or ‘‘ protoplasmic ” contact, human being to human being, is impracticable under the laws of terrestrial matter and un- desirable for ideal and economic reasons. We therefore resort to a better kind of union and organization — better because it affords greater individual liberty, based on intercommunication by the use of abstract signs and sym- bols, and also impress the more ethereal states or modes of matter into our service to accomplish intercourse ; so that personal feeling and thought (which is the feeling of the brain-cells) can be freely communicated from individual to individual, as freely and intelligibly as if by contact of protoplasmic filaments. Protozoons, indeed, might never have united to form metazoons had they possessed any- thing like human facilities for intercommunication. They were dependent wholly on touch and feeling, and on this sentient basis the animal organism, which we inherit, grew up. The extent to which this humanly developed system of intercommunication has progressed need not here be de- 56 Natural Salvation. scribed. Language, commerce, education, the industries, arts, sciences, law, religion, medicine and the entire social order have come forth and grown up from it. Mails, transportation, telegraphy and telephones are adap- tations and inventions to effect a larger intercourse. In fact, the means and facilities for communication are now ample. It is not lack of these which delays the progress of humanity. A most rapid advance is possible. The obstacle to progress is the lack of the spirit of cooperation, lack of confidence_and—good-will,. lack. of understanding of the real situation. Instead of this essential good-will ag a ees there is suspicion, envy and hatred, which pave the way to violent acts, war and GeatrieHon of the hard-earned fruits of labor. It is the same ancient dislike of self-sacrifice seen in the protozoon, which so long delayed metazoic life; the same unbelief that the merging of self in the community will redound to the benefit of the individual; the same reluctance to work for the common weal; the same self- love that makes so many millions of our fellows unwilling to share and share alike with others, blinded to the fact that their greater happiness lies in just that act of self- surrender! Blind, too, to that other greater fact, that alon this li self-sacrifice and Be eel a alone lies Just as the cells unite their i and work ‘oeetics tor the common good, so must the citizens of a nation or The Message of Science. 57 country devise methods and form habits of united effort, to accomplish great ends. The first step to this is good- fellowship, good will one to another,-mutual_confidence, _and_a determination to cooperate. There is no other way. Selfishness is retrogression. The way to enduring life is through consecration of selfto.the common good. This is the lesson “Frava t the cells. This is the method of nature. By following this method, for example, multicellular man may live eighteen thousand years. He may live forever. “In unicellular life, no separate single cell, by any de- vice, or husbandry of its life, could have lived a century, or a year. It is only by union and self-consecration that, the long-lived organism has been developed. and the neuron become a partaker i in its longer. life. And even so in organized, per! erfected humanity the component individ- uals will become macro-biotic. By united effort all are raised up to a higher plane of life. Faulty and imperfect as it is, human civilization has doubled the years of man. Twelve _ centuries ago the average length of a human life in Europe was evidently _less than eighteen years. But compared with what science could do with its present resources of knowledge, existent civilization is but the most rudimentary of organizations. The effort at an advanced civilization is barely inaugu- rated, ‘as yet. Be ron esl ts ei to geome The-only obstacle is ignorance : ignorant distrust, igno- rant hatreds for ‘creed’s sake, or for race’s sake ; fatuous hacen we ene ne —_ 58 Natural Salvation. reckless of the refluent wave that will sweep it away in. blood and loss. The priests and preachers of Christianity have made but a feeble progress in convincing the world of the truth and utility of this great doctrine of Jesus, because they have not comprehended it themselves. They have under- stood neither its scope nor significance. The great doc- trine of brotherly love and human equality has been preached rather as a sentimental tenet, a species of Sab- bath-day duty, a symbol of allegiance_to the church, a kind discipline for the soul, to prepare it for “an- other world.” They have missed ost and sacrificed the_ eeeeeaeece nee _power- of thegolden rule as a nt for controlling and_ “elevating mankind, because they have made it a shibbo- eth of church membership rather than a prime requisite ‘of human progress. The real significance of this doctrine has yet to be made plain to human eyes; its real strength has yet to be manifested. Then, not till then, will the human race accept it and act on it. This deeper-lying truth of life has yet to be instilled in the mind of hu- manity. Church Christianity has never evinced an un- derstanding of it, perhaps never can have an adequate comprehension of it, as long as the “ kingdom of God ” is believed to be an immaterial realm of disembodied spirits The Message of. Science. 59 re in some unknown quarter of the universe. The Son of David distinctly and repeatedly claimed to be the Hebrew Messiah, the realization of the prophet-promise of Jeho- vah to the patriarchs. He is a rash commentator who asserts that the Beni-Israel ever believed this promised Messiah to be other than a terrestrial one, the founder of a kingdom of God and of Israel on the earth. There has been a fatal break in the facts of Scripture here, an in- sincere compromise with Zend-Avestan spirit myths, which has always weakened Christianity as a world faith, and from which science will now shortly compel it to purge itself or fall. The golden rule is no sentimental phantasy of an exalted dreamer, but a matter of human utility and neces- sity. This is the Way, and until it is adopted, nationally and internationally, mankind will stick and pause in its onward career. It is a prime requisite to the farther progress of human life, and as such must be recognized by civilized man everywhere. It is that greater Christianity which is yet to come. The difficulty of initiating an era of good-will and mutual cooperation lies not so much in the perversity of men, individually, or their inherent unwillingness to make those needful sacrifices, as in our present inability to bring about a world-wide understanding and to secure 60 Natural Salvation. common consent of all parties and peoples. Thousands, yes, millions of the dominant race, are convinced that the highest good of all lies in an unselfish federation and or- ganization of all terrestrial interests. But there are the. alien races, speaking other tongues and intensely jealous | of the dominant race; and even worse, there_are. the eee religions systems, | each claiming to hold all the eae es own, and dbtionthsing ‘the votaries pes all other systems as enemies of Good and, emissaries of Strangely enough — where the converse should hold — it is religion—whieh—will_longest_bar_the-coming of « the kingdom of God!” Sadly enough, too, it is not those . tenets that pertain to life on the earth which have set sectaries so inveterately apart, but doctrines concerning — future-paradises and gehennas:— . ‘The saddest spectacle which the earth:presents is that. . of the zealot millions ready to carry war and devastation, from. continent _ to continent, in the name of Allah or Jehovah=If_the biologist ever utters a prayer it is for human deliverance from religion in the fossil.state. If one world-task looks harder than another, it is to redeem .the human brain from the incubus of religious indoctrina- tion, and ks it natural ae cepa oreo Taek of_a blanched at that labor. The Message of Science. 61 For the brain is “formed ” and the courses of thought molded to doctrinal ideas, taught by church authority. When these doctrines have been inculcated for centuries, and then found to be wrong, the task of rectification is a most disheartening one. Considered in gross, the entire brain of humanity, at present, is under the spell of erroneous creeds, and does its thinking along perverted channels of mentation. The belief that this earth is merely a place of probation for heaven after the death of “the body is the worst possible initiative for the achieve- ment of that natural salvation which i is, and has ever been, “the ‘real “goal of life. Mankind cannot rise in opposition to its own faith, nor will the effort to attain a natural salvation begin in earnest until the truth and the facts concerning the soul of man are understood and accepted. The inference and argument for natural salvation have brought us, step by step, from the protozoon to that wonderful congeries and federation of cells, grouped about the cerebro-spinal axis of man; in other words, to man in his present imperfect social organization ; his blindly sel- fish attitude to his fellow-beings ; his weapons and engines of destruction ; his standing armies and navies; his wars and his antagonistic creeds. That confident cooperation and good-will to his fellows, necessary to organize humanity for its crowning achievement — the achieve- 62 Natural Salvation. ment of immortal life —have yét to be inspired in the hearts of men; and the point to be kept in view is, that this is the inspiration imperatively necessary to future progress, the sine qua non of the human situation. No gift of prophecy, no skill of divination, is required to forecast what might be done on our planet in half a century of good-will and cordial cooperation among men. When the billions of hard-carned—wealth,-now-wasted_in war and warlike. equipment, are applied to_research, dis- covery, invention and the general application of knowl. edge to the amelioration o of human life, then will begin an_ era of human advancement to which_all previous. progress is asa f fitful ‘starbeam. to the glory of the rising sun! Dull is the mental vision of him who cannot discern this promise of our incipient sciences. It will surely come; but it might come speedily, before the year 2000. It will come from the combining of all human knowledge, the joining of brain to brain. by. mutual incentive, like cells of an 1 electric battery joined to raise strength of current, to— ‘secure that consentient elevation of intelligence which will carry achievement to an ecstasy of enthusiasm and great hope. There is inventive talent enough in the general brain of mankind, now lying inactive, unemployed, or perverted, to obviate most of human ills, could this talent and genius be given opportunity and incentive, and be organized for work. The Message of Science. 63 Fifty years of such organized effort would usher in achievements even to predict which would now be thought visionary. Fifty years of confraternal endeavor would so perfect locomotion and transportation that journeying to any portion of the globe could be accomplished in from three to five days, accomplished in ease and comfort, and with a fair degree of safety. This of itself would be the first and best step to effac- ing the ancient antipathies of race and religion. The formula for introducing the Golden Rule among men is intercommunication versus ancient isolation. Within fifty years, perhaps much less, we might come to understand the internal economy of the cell-of-life, and might master the problems of its reproduction. These problems are already outlined; but we are still ignorant why the somatic cells wax and wane, from youth to age; or more explicitly, what charge of ions, “ biophors,” or “gemmules” is concentrated in the cells of the germ- plasm ; how this marvelous recharging of life from genera- tion to generation is accomplished ; why the commingling of cells from the two sexes is advantageous, or requisite; and, in general, the nature, chemical composition and mode of production of these minute germ elements of the organic tissues. Thesé are: studies and discoveries which urgently wait the scrutiny of earnest, well-equipped students of our sci- ence. That they are beyond human discovery might have 64 Natural Salvation. been believed once, but will hardly obtain credit in our. times. In fact, we are on the brink of such dis- coveries. : ; We need to know the composition of the animal ovum, of what the germinal matter consists, how and whence it arrives there, and how it may be produced artificially. We have to discover what selected components — ions, electrons, psychons, or biophors — this animal ovum is com- posed, to the end that the various tracts of somatic cells issue from it and coordinate in the tissues of the organism. We have to learn on what actual physical basis old-aging proceeds: whether as animal life goes on, the tissue cell is slowly depleted of its initial complement of germinal mat- ter; whether the original «charge ” of ancestral life-germs is gradually exhausted in numbers or potency ; or whether the contents of this body cell are homogeneous, and old- aging ensues from imperfect foods and the ravages and deleterious products of bacteria. In short, we have to learn whether the somatic cell runs down, like a water spring, from expenditure of its con- centrated biophors, or whether it is simply smothered, poisoned, slowly encysted and suffocated by the weather- ing, infiltration, and induration of the tissues in, which it lies embedded. Whether old-aging is a slow form of starvation from the contraction and hardening of the capil- lary walls and the thickening of the lung membranes. Or yet, whether all these causes operate together. The Message of Science. 65 namely, slow starvation and suffocation, combined with depletion of the inherited germinal matter. For exhaustion or expenditure of the vivitic units of the somatic cells, some process of inoculation, kataphoresis, or inward radiation of ions may be devised; for the pro- gressive suffocation, poisoning-out and starvation of the cells, an amelioration of all the conditions of life as we now live it, must be accomplished, viz., the extermination of bacteria, purification of the atmosphere and the use of foods adapted to protoplasmic renewal; all purely physical problems and properly the subjects of scientific research ; and all in line and continuation of that natural salvation of the cell-of-life from accident, disease and death, which has been in progress since life began on the earth. Parent and child, through a hundred generations, con- stitute but one human personality, pressing forward, in time, to become something better, wiser, more powerful and happier. The parent dies and the child succeeds, but at a vast loss of knowledge and of time, not because death and birth are the ideal or ultimate laws of life, but merely because we have not yet acquired sufficient knowl- edge and power to escape death. The human personality, incarnate, living on from century to century, ¢ conserving recteiee, able to renew itself and resist all the vulgar ‘agencies of decay and death, is ‘the ideal h human being, not a chain.of parents and children. _ - But life, as we now live, is one long contention with 66 Natural Salvation. accidents, bacteria, improper food, duress of climate and hostile fellow-creatures. First the cell was driven to a mode of reproduction, to escape extinction; multicellular creatures developed from cells and may be said to have inherited the reproductive mode of life. Humanity has arisen from its lower ancestry to its present estate, by vir- tue of the reproductive, alternate mode of life. Hence, to die appears to many persons to be as natural a fate as to be born; yet when more closely examined, death is seen to be an unnatural event, a result of hardship and distress, a fate repugnant to life everywhere and a catas- trophe to be escaped. The Weismann hypothesis of life, death and heredity is so well known and so generally accepted, in part, among English and American biologists, that an extended state- ment of it is unnecessary here. It has taken its place in our science; and the two important modifications to which it must be subjected are now fairly well outlined. Pro- fessor Weismann has been termed the Darwin of cell devel- opment; to the present writer it seems that he might better be called the Lamarck, and that the Darwin of the animal cell has yet to appear. Weismann’s positions are (1) that death is not an in- herent necessity of unicellular life. The unicells do not die, but divide, giving rise to offspring by fission. « No The Message of Science. 67 _amceba has ever lost an ancestor by death.” Weismann de- fines death as “a definite arrest of life. The proof of death is that the organized substance which. previously gave rise to the phenomena of life forey er ceases_to_origi- nate such phenomena.” Death implies the presence of something dead. An ameba, for example, produces off- spring by dividing into two amebe. By this act of fission the parent disappears in the two children, but has not died. Hence arises Weismann’s conception of the natural immortality of the protozoons. The--protozoons_ die only 1 from accidents.of heat, cold, or_violence. This view, however, has now of necessity to be modified. (2) These deductions apply not only to protozoons, but essentially to all living creatures which produce offspring by fission ; and it is on this basis that Weismann has built, up his’ theory of the origin of death, briefly this: Since amcebe and other unicells which reproduce by fission are naturally immortal, death must be regarded as peculiar to multicellular organisms (metazoa). In the metazoa where the cells are organized with differentiation of function, there are two distinct classes or groups, those which develop to form the animal body (soma), and the repro- ductive cells, confined to the generative tract. The former (somatic cells) grow till the organic limits are reached, live for a time and fall into senescence ; the lat- ter (the reproductive.cells) are the units from which the next generation will be developed. The somatic cells are 68 Natural Salvation. concerned only with the life and welfare of the individual, the reproductive cells with the continuance of the species. Of the two classes of cells ithe reproductive live on from, $2 eer Ca generation — to generation, never die in fact: the somatic cells alone are subject to death. ‘The Seo ie are immortal, as the amceba is immortal; they die only by the — to them accident of the death of the body. (8) It is an error to regard the animal or human organ- ism (soma) as the essential or important part. The re- productive tissue (germ-plasm) alone is of importance. The soma is subordinate and exists for the purpose of carrying forward the germ-plasm. It is its vehicle of life, exists for no other object, and has no other raison d’étre. In the opinion of Professor Weismann, the human brain exists solely for. for the purpose of nourishing, protecting, and bearing forward the group of cells lodged in the organs of generation. —_ (4) He further holds that the origin of death is found in the consideration, that it is advantageous to the species that the individual animals, or humans, shall die. “If for a moment we imagine that one of the higher animals were to become immortal, it is perfectly obvious that it would cease to be of value to the species to which it belongs. On one hand, there is the necessity of reproduction, on the other, the utility of death.” He argues that the dura- tion of individual life is, in all cases, that which is best for the species. For example, the May-fly lives but a few The Message of Science. 69 hours, because no more time is needed for depositing her eggs. With mammals, on the other hand, years are re- quired for the rearing of offspring sufficient to make good their places in nature. (5) With regard to the proximate causes of death, Weismann holds it to be due to the somatic cells losing the power of growth and multiplication after a certain length of time, or a certain number of cell'generations. Length of life in the individual is dependent upon the number of generations of somatic cells, which are able to succeed each other from the original endowment in the ovum.” . (6) As regards heredity and inheritance, Professor Weismann discredits the common opinion that the per- sonal lives, habits and efforts of parents affect the character of their offspring. His theory of a distinct germ-plasm controverts the concept of Darwin that “ gem- mules ” from all the somatic cells are garnered up in the reproductive cells, and thus reduplicate the parents in their offspring. Nothing of this, from the soma, is con- veyed to the germ-plasm, or affects, save in extreme contingencies, the reproductive cells. Like Herbert Spencer, Weismann conceives that life on its lowest plane, unmodified by environment and unor- ganized, exists through or by virtue of “physiological units,” which he, however, terms biophors (life-bearers), a conception not unlike that of the plasomes of Briicke,. or the plastidules of Haeckel. In the lowest forms of 70 Natural Salvation. life, the biophors are little organized ; but, under the in- fluence of the environment, as evolution proceeded, the biophors assumed certain persistent relationships to each other and formed themselves in fixed groups. Such groups determined the character of the cell, and to these Professor Weismann has given the name of cell-determinants. Numbers of determinants are associated in larger groups, termed ids, and ids again as idants : relationships of biophors which form parts of the centrosome and chromosome of the cell. (7) It is Professor Weismann’s conception that death —touching its origin —is intimately connected with sexual reproduction. That the protozoons are naturally immortal and that death is confined to the metazoons has been refuted since Professor Weismann put forth his hypothesis in 1881. Maupas has shown that certain protozoons exhibit the phenomena of senescence and die out from intracellular causes; also that protozoons conjugate sexually and are thereby restored. The hardship of the terrestrial habitat affects even the lowest, simplest forms of life, perhaps even the “biophors” themselves. The latest advances in physics indicate that “atoms” tend to waste away, and future researches may prove that the ions and electrons are not stable units. Avoiding death is less a question of ultimate, incorruptible atoms than of making scientific repair excel natural waste. The Message of Science. WI That many groups of the somatic cells tend to senes- cence and exhaustion, in time, is apparently true, but this tendency should not be looked upon from the standpoint of the fatalist. Beyond doubt it is a tendency and a condi- tion which can be remedied. The science which discovers the condition, will erelong discover the remedy. The brain group of cells tends least to senescence. It is but natural that having brought forward his hy- pothesis of the germ-plasm, Professor Weismann should attribute a leading réle to this group of cells and give it marked prominence. This is seen in his unqualified assertion that the individual exists solely for the purpose of bearing forward the germ-plasm from generation to generation. This deduction is true in a sense, but hardly in that sense of finality which Professor Weismann is in- clined to ascribe. Beyond doubt it is difficult to say why life exists at all. The purposes and intents of creation are not as clear to the biologist as to the theologian. Professor Weismann holds that the individual animal, or human, lives as long as is necessary to bring forth and foster’ offspring, no longer, then dies because its death is necessary for the good of the species, or, strictly speaking, the good of the germ-plasm. If this assertion, with its incident fatalism, were restricted to evolution in the past and cast no black shadow on the future of evolution, it would be more rational, less repugnant to the bond “individual,” who is made to play the réle of a hopeless 42 Natural Salvation. serf of death. We cannot resist the conviction that ulti- mately, at least, the germ-plasm exists or will exist for the good of the individual, not the individual for the germ-plasm; that the brain group of cells is of greater consequence than the generative group. But again we admit that it is rash to say that anything exists for any purpose whatever. Purpose, conscious purpose, does not come in until there is brain. There is apparently no pur- pose in lower nature, or if a purpose it appears to be an unconscious one. According to the Weismann hypothesis, the reproduc- tive cells give rise to offspring by virtue of the permuta- tions and combinations of their own constituent biophors ; the somatic cells do not contribute to the germ-plasm either from their substance, nor otherwise. The soma, indeed, grows from germinal matter in the reproductive cells, but exerts little or no influence upon that tract. The germ-plasm lives apart and to itself, and is sufficient in itself for all which we know as heredity, unaffected by the life or culture of the soma. But when we consider the intimate relation in which the reproductive organs stand to the whole organism, when we contemplate the close nervous connection and sentient sympathy between this group of cells and the brain, when we consider the constant streams of electrons which are poured to these cells from the brain and other organs of the soma, when we picture the steady circulation The Message of Science. 73 or ions from the brain cells through these cells —it seems well-nigh marvelous that this group (the germ-plasm) should be so little affected, so little modified as Professor Weismann would have us believe. Later researches afford indications that the intimate causes of old-aging are resident, primarily, in the cell nucleus. It has even been held by one observer that the cell nucleus lives, individual and apart from its cell host, originally intrusive and parasitic. But if so, it has be- come so well domesticated as to participate naturally in the life of the cell. The nucleus is found to be made up of a series of gran- ules, composed of a substance chemically rich in phospho- rus, to which the name of nuclein is given. These gran- ules take aniline stains very readily, and are thus seen to be connected one to another by the substance liénine, which is not colored by the same dyes. Thus examined in old and young cells, the quantity of nuclein in the latter is found to be so uniformly greater in many instances that the deduction is made that there is a progressive diminu- tion of nuclein granules from youth to age, as the nucleus divides, giving birth to new generations. As the nuclear granules diminish, the somatic cell falls into senescence, sinking to a condition where fission ceases. For a long time it rallies and divides again, but produces an enfeebled 74 Natural Salvation. offspring, till finally it encysts itself and forever ceases to be parturient. The present theory is that no new nuclear granules are engendered in the somatic cell. Like the worker-bee in the apiary, it is differentiated and special- ized beyond the. power to produce offspring. In like manner isolated ciliates lose the power of reproduction, unless opportunity is given them for conjugation with other individuals. Brown-Sequard conceived the idea of reaching and restoring the somatic cell by injecting triturations of reproductive glands, as medicines ; and beyond doubt methods of restoration by inoculation, or vivific foods, will be discovered. The rapidity with which the remotest tracts of cells in the organism are influenced and permanently affected by the introduction of minute quantities of remedial sub- stances into the blood-circulatory is now well known to the medical profession. Such inoculation affords more direct access to the cellular seats of life than the alimen- tary tract with its modifying acids. The blood is in im- mediate relations and actual close contact with the cells which, in all cases, must be reached before remedial effects are produced. Nothing acts in the animal organism until the cell is reached and its sentient economy affected. Many eminent physicians are, therefore, of the opinion that injection into the circulation offers the best method of administering certain medicines. The Message of Science. 75 Tnoculation to produce immunity from diphtheria, small- pox, hydrophobia, et al., has been successfully practised for many years, as also by veterinaries as tests for tuber- culosis. The procedure is in its infancy, as yet, but is one of great promise, since it is the cell which must be acted upon, and the rapidly propelled blood, reaching it almost instantly, comes in touch with its sentient surfaces. As soon, therefore, as we can discover and compose regenerat- ing substances, or those which will stimulate regeneration, the blood-circulatory affords an efficient route to every cell in the body. What these substances are, we do not yet know, whether artificially propagated nuclein, or reagents which stimu- late its growth in situ. But if anatomy and _ histology offer us one hint more significantly than another, it is that the blood may be made a breeding-ground for the regenera- tion of the somatic cell. Five thousand well-equipped in- vestigators, starting off with enthusiasm and rivalry to study this problem, would hardly fail in twenty years to set us far on the way to the control of all life. What our rich men spend yearly in their vacuous craze for horse-racing alone would more than equip and main- tain these researches. Such inane squander and mis- direction of the world’s hard-earned money cries down Heaven’s condemnation. But they know not what they do! Misled and bewildered by erroneous creeds and futile ideals, they know not how otherwise to 46 Natural Salvation. spend the millions which they even believe belong to them. A hopeless phase of thought has conie to many biolo- gists from regarding the ordinary course of nature as final for the human race. Whereas, nothing is more probable than that we shall come to direct and control the proc- esses of nature in the cell. What takes place in the nucleus and the causes of nuclear exhaustion will yet be found a very simple chemical problem. The control of life in matter is unquestionably before us ;. the entire prog- ress and trend of research look to such achievements. But for this outlook of hope, we might well accept the dictum of Bichat, that « from infancy we die, day by day.” The cells of the soma develop in a certain way and to a certain end; nor is there the least likelihood that the human organism of its present physiological bent would ever reach great length of life. We mean that the somatic cells, unaided by the human intellect, would continue to produce an organism, subject to growth and decline. The ancestry and nuclear endow- ment of the cell carry it to a termination of its activities. This is more apparent in the dark-skinned races of man- kind than in the dominant race, and still more evident in the lower animal orders. Lower unassisted nature would live and die in alternate generations as long as the earth offered a foothold for life. The chemical affinities and electric tension of terrestrial ‘ The Message of Science. 44 matter foster this method of vital expression. There would be little hope of anything much better or longer- lived. The earth is not, in its present condition, a habitat for deathless life. Its inclemency, its extremes of heat and cold, furious winds, hours of darkness, variant elec- trical condition and, more inimical still, its hordes of hostile bacteria, — all are against enduring life-forms. We see, therefore, that in a manner the primary instinct of the early races of man is right; this earth, unregen- erate, is not the place for immortal life. Some improved condition is to be sought for that, some promised land, some realm of godhood. Not till.this century has the vision of all these human ages begun to be interpreted. Alchemists had dreamed of a sporadic immortality by magic potations ; but not till now have men come to see that vastly pro- longed life is to be the outcome of brain evolution. We look up to the disk of the earth’s older sister planet and see its surface spangled with a strangely familiar geometry: parallel “canals,” or belts of vegetation, and at the intersection of these canals “ oases” which may be the Martian realization of ‘*heaven,” from which the germs of disease have been excluded. What interplane- tary rivalry in good works do those “oases” suggest! Will our earth ever turn its face to the gaze of the universe, seamed by such giant engineering ? ¥ 78 Natural Salvation. When we ask the question broadly — Why does the hu- man body grow old and at length cease from function ?— putting the inquiry in the bio-physical sense, the answer seems to be that the personal life embodied in the organism is at length overcome and overmatched by the totality of the resistance to life which it encounters, from the embryonic stage onward ; more specifically, to the general telluric resistance, physical, chemical, molar, molecular, which the protoplasmic molecules of the organism meet with, as long as they maintain the personal life. After adult age is reached, they lose ground in the struggle and at last suc- cumb. The downward curve of the somatic cell has begun. But there is a period, during adolescence, when the cells gain ground, when they make head against the terrestrial resistance to life and prevail joyously, with a sense of victory ; when the inherent energy of the personal life is more than sufficient to breast the opposition. We have, therefore, to picture this personal life of the cell as an impulse which for a time rises superior to the resistance, then slackens and falls away to cessation. Yet its source in matter is apparently a constant in nature, inseparable from the material ion, and persistent in matter at a uniform tension. Why then, in the human organism, is it exhibited thus intermittently, as “ wave motion”; in adolescence and senescence; in youth and old age? The answer is that human life, even as waves on the The Message of Science. 19 ocean, or sound waves in the air, has fallen into the rhythmic, wave mode of life, as a general result of the ter- restrial resistance to life; and that the cessation of vital energy, seen in aging organisms, is apparent rather than real, marking a transfer of life from one generation to another. The transfer of life by means of the reproductive ele- ments, and the subsequent death of the parent organism, is a mode of life into which all animal orders fell far back among the earliest metazoons, if not in unicellular life itself. It is manifest, too, that this tendency or life habit of humanity is very deeply rooted in the cellular elements of our being. The cell determinants are cast for growth and decline. Sterilization of the reproductive tissue in the individual, removal of these tissues, or the most rigidly enforced continence have little or no effect as regards the aging and death of the organism. The tendency of the body to follow its inherited cycle of growth and decline is inveterate, and not to be changed by the exercise of the will. Something, indeed, this will-power of the personal life may effect, but not that radical transformation of being which the perpetuation of the individual implies. It is to our science that we must look for prolonged life. Procreative desire rapidly slackens in individuals to whom life offers sufficient attractions to live on for life’s higher, more refined pleasures; and in this circumstance 80 Natural Salvation. we have a certain earnest of evidence that the higher in- tellectual life of the future will physiologically redound to a prolongation of individual life. Decline of the pro- creative instinct follows naturally when the individual has hopes of surviving ; and such decline and self-continence react to prolong life; yet centuries would scarcely suffice to alter the deep-seated trend and course of our ancestry. It is to our sciences — the superior intelligence of brain — that we look for aid in prolonging our lives. Man has already passed the point where he relies for his progress on the tedious course of terrestrial nature unassisted. He reaches forth a Promethean arm and, in the light of his stores of knowledge, bends lower nature to his wishes. We ex- pect to bring our sciences to act upon the cellular basis of our lives and accomplish its regeneration. Under low nature, man would never surpass the purely animal cycle of organic growth and decline; of adoles- cence, maturity, and old age. Itis only by rising superior to the lower course of nature that man has become some- thing more than an animal order of life, recording experi- ence in written language, kindling fire, smelting the metals, impressing the lower animal orders into his serv- ice, and even dominating the forces of nature, in order to travel by steam and speak around the globe by electric- ity. He has put lower nature in harness and now directs natural law., : In view of these grand victories, why should he despair The Message of Science. 81 of altering the lower course of nature in his organism and of directing the life of the cells of which his tissues are composed? The question is a novel one, in this sense. Hitherto, biologists have assured us that we must be con- tent to be what inheritance would make us. That is the old cell doctrine in a nutshell. Weismann and, in gen- eral, the German, English and many American histologists base their theories of life on this assumption, namely, that the ordinary course of nature must be final as to man’s future. Nature is fate. But brain is higher nature, the acme, at present, of natural development. Everything which makes man a civilized and enlightened being has been obtained by brain mastery of lower nature and the diversion of her ordinary courses to his advantage. Why should we not expect to thus arbitrarily change and facilitate the nutrition and life of the cell? In point of fact, that is what has been done and is being done constantly in a hundred ways already. The position of not a few biologists on this “question to-day is much as those who would argue that since a man can walk but fifty miles in a day, afoot, by his natural means of locomotion, or swim but twenty miles, he can never go to San Francisco in less than sixty days, or reach Liverpool in less than five months. Three hundred miles per day are as natural to brain as twenty miles to muscle. It is to science that we look for the control of cell life. 82 Natural Salvation. Biological science, it is true, is still in its infancy, but it is a very hopeful infancy ; and it is the opinion of many of its best exponents that within another quarter of a cen- tury we shall have penetrated the secret of cell nutrition and growth, and opened the way to a scientific renovation of the tissues. But faith has to be engendered as well as discoveries made. Enlightened man, indeed, is but just awakening to the idea that he may possibly escape death by setting his wits to work to this end; and, as ever, there is the olden outcry of impiety raised against the conception, as if it were wrong to try to live! As if it were not natural to live on! But greatly prolonged life implies an amelioration of all the conditions of the terrestrial habitat, and within fifty years well-nigh complete control of the aerial currents and rainfall might be attained, if only a modicum of the intellect of the race could be concentrated upon these problems. This achievement will go far to bring about that physical paradisation of the earth, needful to redeem it from the imputation which it has so long endured, of being “a dreary bourne” and a place of exile to homesick souls who long to flee away to some better land. The earth will yet be made one of “the garden spots”’ of the universe. It is a purely physical problem, and not a little of the data for its solution is already in our hands. Fore- telling the weather is the first step to controlling the The Message of Science 83 weather. It is a question of the electrical distribution and regulation of the solar heat which falls on the earth’s surface, and the direction of the “trade” or retro-rotary winds due to rarefaction and the earth’s axial motion. The electrical distribution of the earth’s share of the sun’s radiation will make it possible, not only to regulate the rainfall, but gage vaporization from the ocean and lakes. Droughts and freshets, tornadoes and frosts, might soon become disasters of a past age, if the resources of control which are already coming within our grasp can be applied. What is expended in national preparation for war, in a single year, would suffice to initiate the prelimi- nary plants and stations for experimentation in heat distribution. Climate is as much a terrestrial condition to be con- trolled as a city’s water-supply. A bad climate will be quite unnecessary in the year 2000. The problem of irrigation is properly one of a regulated rainfall rather than of dams, canals, or artesian wells. Vaporization and rainfall are the factors to be controlled. An equable dis- tribution of solar heat and a regulated electrical tension are the agencies to be used to this end. The whole problem of climate-control is already outlined in physics, as to its methods. We need but the wasted war appropria- tions and the labor of idle soldiers to put it in operation. Such a half century of rational cooperation would see even more revolutionary advances in our methods of 84 Natural Salvation. communication, now effected by mails, telegraphs, and telephones. Not only will messages and general news be transmitted, electrically, but be accompanied by photo- graphic and phonographic representation of passing events. But of far greater significance to life, its prolongation and improvement, will be the conquest and extirpation of those teeming hordes of bacteria which infest the animal organism and render all organic life abnormal and pre- carious. Human life in the future is to be liberated not only from known “germs of disease,” but those swarms of less deadly, but yet deleterious micro-organisms of which the human body is the host and which, by their presence and products, enfeeble life and maintain diseased conditions. The human body must be regarded not only as living amidst and externally exposed to microscopic life of a hostile and noxious character, but as being in- fested by such life which entering the blood-circulatory: either with food, water, or air, penetrate to every tissue and organ. Ninety per cent. of all human casualties are either directly from the presence of micro-organisms, or induced by the more or less remote effects of their activity. The extirpation of bacteria will be a long step toward the achievement of vastly prolonged life. Like all the others, it is a purely physical problem and only waits combined action on a great scale on the part of mankind. The habitat of man has to be purged and cleansed from these The Message of Science. 85. now well-known causes of death. The task is too great to be undertaken by individuals, and remains over for the organized effort of nations and races. All life which is really living and worth living is progress; and an interesting feature of the next fifty years will be presented by improved human habitations. A new type of dwelling has already appeared in the larger communities — a communal house — admirable in its sanitary arrangements, ventilation, heating and light- ing, with a common kitchen, relieving the individual heads of families from the costly and unnecessary drudgery of so many small, isolated cooking-places. The lofty steel and brick city apartment house, however, bids fair to be replaced for much of the year by a country habita- tion, located apart, amidst rural surroundings, and of no greater altitude than three stories, but of large ground area. Such communal dwellings, for four, six, or eight families, will have all the perfected equipment of the larger city apartment house, and, in addition, private gardens, groves, orchards, and rural scenery. The kitchen will be a joint or cooperative effort, but attended by difficulties and trouble. For it is the ques- tion of improved food which will longest baffle the genius of the chemist and biologist. Nor need this be a matter for surprise. Nutrition is the problem of the coming age, par excellence. 86 Natural Salvation. Food, as we at present view it, seems a simple matter. The lower animals and plants afford it. It has but to be herded, cultivated, harvested, and cooked. What more simple? But of all future inventions and discoveries, some of the greatest, the most important, will pertain to food. At present we ingest the errata of plant and animal life. «The dead, alas, are in us,” and “death is in the pot”; but less that our foodstuffs contain poisons than from lack of organic energy to maintain the complicated apparatuses requisite to reduce and make it ready for assimilation by the tissue cells. It is our food which renders greatly prolonged life impossible, at present. Nor is it probable that the human organism ever was, or ever could be, bred or trained to live forever on food such as human beings now eat. The physiological processes by which food is reduced, comminuted, corrected’ as to its chemical constituents, peptonized, hepatized, oxygenated, and, in a word, carried forward to higher and higher stages of chemical instability, fit for assimilation by the tissue cells —all these processes set up a heavy draught on the col- lective, organic life of the animal body, and necessitate - the putting forth of energies, on the part of all the cells, which cause an ever-increasing deficit of potential, a growing debt from overwork, a chronic accumulation of the effects of fatigue, which, under present conditions, must sooner or later lead to a running down of the cells. The Message of Science. 87 Under favorable conditions, a cell may gain potential ; but the severe, steady draught on cellular energy, neces- sary to maintain organic nutrition, even on the best food at present procurable, bankrupts the collective energies of the cells within a century. The horse, ox, and other ruminants that have to do even more hard grinding and furnish more energy, rela- tively, to maintain nutrition, succumb much sooner than man. In one sense, therefore, it is our food which brings us to death’s door, that is to say, the exhausting physiologi- cal processes, necessary to prepare it for cell nutrition, will in the end work the most perfect existent animal organism to death. It is only when the organism is young, the lungs pervious and the tissue cells little encysted as yet, that a gain in cell potential, for fifteen or twenty years, can be made over the draught on vital energy, requisite for nutrition. We may properly attach great significance to these facts, since the general opinion is, that food, once eaten and drunk, reaches its proper destination in the body, without much expenditure of energy. Yet sudden death not infrequently follows over-feeding, purely and solely from organic inability to summon sufficient power to initiate the process of food reduction. It is along the line of improved food, as well as re- 88 N atural ‘Salvation. generation of the somatic cell, that we ‘must look for happier and longer life. Is such a food possible ? Beyond doubt. But at present we lack the data of nutrition. We do not as yet understand how a cell nourishes itself, nor how it might best be nourished. The cell absorbs particles from the blood plasma, and we have a general knowledge as to what those particles are ; but of the modes and processes of intra-cellular digestion and nutrition we are ignorant. We do not know how much of that food is actually assimilated in the cell, nor how much is rejected. Beyond doubt the blood is a comparatively dirty stream, and it is probable that the cells suffer constant injury from the dirt which they ingest. The intestinal tract, or passage along which the ingredients of the blood are prepared for the villi to en- gorge, is literally a howling wilderness of disgusting para- sites and bacteria, many of which are hostile and destroy the life of the host if they multiply beyond certain bounds to which the vis medicatrix of a healthy organism keeps them down. As a first step in the study of improved food for the future we have need to see what the primitive cell — the protozoon — has done in this line. For better food has been the object of long effort, since the first micro-organ- ism appeared on the shores of the primeval sea. Proto- zoons like the rhizopods, encysted food particles which, The Message of Science. 89 laboriously, with an exertion of all their powers, they con- trived to reduce, digest, and in part assimilate. It was a hard life into which they put all their energies; and to their humble efforts we owe a debt of far-off sympathy. One can but think softly of those first toilers in the archaic marshes — so much depended on them. The protozoon had his small stomach, an improvised colon, and maybe a unicellular liver; and beyond doubt our ancestral rhizopod had his colics and his jaundices, and was often in mortal agony from terrific peritonitises. It could hardly be otherwise, considering what awful food chunks his hunger drove him to surround. But he strug- gled through, by hook or crook, and finally drifted into metazoic cooperation ; and thus took life a little easier. For after locomotion, better food was the first problem which multicellular creatures undertook. The animal organism, with its blood-circulatory, blood-corpuscles, blood plasma, cardiac apparatus for propulsion, and lung tissue for eration, offers a most interesting and suggestive study of the way the protozoon, in its later réle of physio- logical cell, has handled the food question. It is the object lesson of the protozoon to the human metazoon. To secure better assimilable food for brain and muscle the confraternities of metazoic cells, very early in the division of labor, constrained a certain number or tract of cells to act at first hand on food substances and make that their peculiar business, so as to get it in more available form; these go Natural Salvation. were the cells lining the food pocket or future stomach. The labor being arduous, the metazoic cousentience soon detailed certain other groups, or tracts of cells, to aid those of the stomach-sac ; and these afterwards developed vari- ously as liver, pancreas, and other glands, great and small. Still others took up the work of passing the liquefied pabulum to those other tracts or groups whose business was locomotion or intelligent direction of the whole union of cells; and these in time developed as arteries, heart and veins. But to be transformable to energy and carry.on the physical business of the co-partnership, oxygen was needed ; the liquid food must be charged with oxygen; and another cell group took up-the business of admitting external air and infiltering oxygen. From this group has developed pulmonary tissue. But nerve, brain and muscle cells ex- crete waste products of the nature of. poisonous refuse, to such deleterious extent that another cell group assumed the duty of extracting it from the circulation and washing it away; and from this tract a cells we have the renal organs. Still there was complaint that the food was not good enough, and another cell group, entering the sanguineous current, undertook the task of still further refining and vitalizing the plasma, now on its way to brain and mus- cle; and from these laborers for the common weal have come the white and red blood-corpuscles. The Message of Science. gI It is at the price of all this auxiliary labor and only by virtue of it that the brain and muscle cells are nourished and are able to live so long and do so much in the way of locomotion and intelligence. Mind would be impossible on a poorer food for the brain cells. And what is the lesson from this? Locomotion, intel- lect and a lifetime of a century have been attained by the metazoic cell from a food as good as that which now comes to them in the blood plasma. Yet that plasma still contains noxious particles, despite the efforts of the living organs which labor to refine and improve it. The infer- ence is easy. Science must come to the aid of the organic apparatus and furnish a food clean, pure and easier of assimilation. This brings us to the fundamental question, What is food ?— a question which has been variously answered. Nor can it be answered at present. Food is that which renews the cells; and the cells absorb it from the plasma of the blood; but exactly what portion they absorb, or how much of what they absorb is necessary or best for this renewal, is not known. There is doubt whether the tissue cells are renewed as to their intimate structure or that nutrition, at bottom, adds ponderable matter to the cell, or is more than a replenishing of ions. We do not know that cell food is, or need be, anything more gross than ions or electrons. That is to say, the idea has be- gun to prevail, that nutrition as we now know it is an g2 Natural Salvation. immensely cumbersofne and arduous process, attended by great strain and duress of the human organism, all of which science may obviate by presenting a food which will not require such hard physiological labor. The ex- cretion of urea has been held to prove that there is structural waste and replenishment of cell substance. As nutrition is at present accomplished, this appears to be true, the result of a species of internal combustion from oxidation in the cell. Indeed, it is evident that the proc- ess of nutrition within each cell of the organism is, on a small scale, strictly analogous to what takes place in the stomach and intestinal tract of the larger multicellular organism ; that is, that there is intracellular ingestion, ex- cretion, and assimilation of an esoteric plasma which renews the cell. That is, what appears to occur; but our question is, Need it occur? Is it anything more or better than a laborious, destructive process which may be obviated altogether by inventing a more ethereal cell food? : It has come to be doubted even whether a cell, after it has developed and grown to its full size in the adolescent organism, is ever normally destroyed or renewed so far as implying change of structure. The cell structure probably stands during the lifetime of the animal. The cell is no more wasted as to its organella than is the greater animal organism of which it is the vital unit. The physiological cell, indeed, is a minute organism, hav- The Message of Science. 93 ing, in many tissues, a life term contemporary with that of the greater metazoic organism. What, then, is the actual cell food ? —and the cell food is equally the food of the metazoic organism. Keeping in mind that much of what the cells take as food from the blood plasma is food in a gross.condition, which necessitates intracellular conflagrations before it is reduced, smelted down, so to speak, and sublimated, fit for actual cell food, and at best leaving a portentous residue or slag that has to be gotten rid of, — keeping in mind this fact, I say, What is the real food of the cells? What is this last product of intracellular digestion which goes to cell maintenance. , Beyond doubt it is something refined, “ambrosial,” ethereal, perhaps the ion itself, the electron. We know not as yet whether there is a decomposition of the atom of carbon, or of the other elements present in “ protoplasm.” Is the life of the cell dependent on the restoration of the component atoms by an intake of fresh ions, set free from the incoming food-stream? And if something of this nature is found to be true, is it not quite possible that a dynamic food which may be administered directly to the cells, without combustion, waste and residue is the de- sideratum of life on the earth? Why are 98°-+ Fahr. of organic heat requisite to human life? Clearly because of this food combustion rather than because the cell-of-life cannot live at a lower 94 Natural Salvation. temperature ; life is possible below the freezing point; the cold-blooded organisms do not require so high a temperature. High temperature in mammals and birds appears to be a concomitant of nutrition rather than a ‘biogenetic necessity to life itself. Not that animal intel- ligence would be heightened by a reversion to reptilian temperatures! But other methods of keeping the human ‘organism warm could be found, methods less destructive to the component cells than by extra- and intracellular oxidation. We are as yet, of course, at the first outer confines of this great question of cell food. But even now it begins to be evident how much depends on a better understand- ing of nutrition, and the great desirability of directing re- search in this direction, backed by the, resources of the civilized world. Immortal life is the stake which science is playing for along this line of investigation. It is a true world-problem, one of those more than Herculean labors of the coming century which call for the united efforts of mankind. At all this my scientific friends will smile and say, ‘Idle dreams, Utopian fancies! Mankind gives no token of such united action. Mad Mullahs, Mahdis, and War- lords bid fair to rant and run riot up and down the earth for centuries to come. Men have not sufficient knowledge The Message of Science. 95 as yet to perceive the tremendous advantages of coopera- tion. Personal selfishness still outweighs the larger view. The inherent immorality of a short life prompts to snatch at personal pleasure and let the next generation take care of itself. It is all a part of this horrible immorality of certain death and cannot be ameliorated as long as human life is so perilously insecure and brief. With death but a few years ahead at best, human beings will work for those few years and continue indifferent to larger interests.” All of which is but too true. And yet there is always a measure of altruism in the human heart, a balance of philanthropic good-will and a strain of generous heroism, prompting individuals to deeds of self-sacrifice for the common weal. It is to these saving traits in us that posterity, yet unborn, makes appeal. Personally, too, we would all of us be willing to do more than we do for the common good, and cooperate in mutual undertakings more than we do, but for the impracticability of such efforts, the diffi- culty of initiating united action, the inertia of existent social, political and economic methods. It is this inertia of olden forms, customs, race antipathies, creeds and na- tional prejudices among the billion and a ‘half of the earth’s inhabitants which so baffles and withstands rational progress. All of which brings us to a practical question of what can first and best be done, under the circum- 96 Natural Salvation. stances, to unite the world’s resources, combine human in- telligence and render it effective to combat the causes of disease and death? What is the first practical step to this end? Can any plan be adopted by which intelligent persons of this generation can really get to work and bring their personal efforts to bear on the problem? At first it appeared possible to the present writer that something could be done on a world-wide scale, and that the best method of beginning would be a world-league of science and of educated people generally, in every civil- ized country, irrespective of race or nation; for science is a common nation, a common country. And since there are many spoken languages and the Latin is the lingua franca of science, it seemed proper to call such a league, Gens Scientie et Pacis, The World-Nation of Science and Peace. ' Jt seemed possible that scientific men and educated people, the world over, might thus organize to promote research on a grand scale, with greatly prolonged life in view. It was at once recognized that membership must not be construed as inimical to existent citizenship and allegiance to one’s own country, but only as pledging members, individually, to use their best efforts to promote such researches, and in case of impending war, to avert it, by referring the matters in dispute to the already organ- ized peace tribunals. Also in case of nationally selfish legislation, to defeat it in favor of a policy more inter- The Message of Science. 97 nationally just; and in general, to promote a sentiment of universal good-will and confraternity, having clearly in view the union and concentration of the entire strength of mankind, to accelerate researches into the causes of disease, old age and death. * It appeared possible that such a world-league, having its headquarters in the United States and an extensive mem- bership in every country of the globe, might come to ex- ercise: a controlling influence in mundane affairs. An international peace society we already have, which has opened the way to a peace tribunal ; but the Gens Scientic et Pacis would be of wider scope, uniting persons of scientific attainments everywhere, and having a definite aim: the union of mankind for the application of all science and all the world’s resources in the coming great struggle to reach the acme of Natural Salvation ; to protect and rescue the human organism from its present hard fate. It was not believed that the suggested league would make much progress with the alien races, save in cases of educated individuals. The burden of all progress and all achievement will long rest with the dominant race. The lower races, like the lower animals, will of necessity be coerced for the general good and their own good. The “rights of man” are sacred only when the man is dis- posed to make good use of them, and is intelligent enough to do so. The right to make the world better is a divine right, the natural prerogative and duty of superior knowl- 98 Natural Salvation. edge. An ignorant, ill-disposed race or nation, bent on selfish and aggressive courses, may properly be constrained to do right, even within their own ancestral territory. Men or races have no natural right to do wrong, even if never so sincere, never so self-holy. _ With the Indo-European rests not only the responsi- bility to do right for the world, but the duty of seeing to it that others do right. This is, in very truth, «the white man’s burden,” the gravest of all responsibility. In nearly all civilized countries there are now scientific associations, or what corresponds to this, which might on proper representation be united for promoting public enterprises of a scientific character. These societies and associations would serve as the national units of the pro- posed international Gens. Science, which is the main- spring of all present progress, is thus far deficient in methods of working on a world-wide scale, or even of acquainting, save by hearsay of the press, scientific men of one country with the aims and purposes of those in another. In many cases, it is not until published papers appear, that scientists in other lands gain an inkling of what cotemporary investigators are doing. Nothing like an economic division of labor in scientific research, or in the way of mutual aid, has as yet been attempted. This isolation, too, has bred a kind cf jealousy and small secrecy concerning research, which obstructs rather than facilitates progress. The Message of Science. 99 Perhaps nothing less than an engrossing common motive, like that of the achievement of greatly prolonged life, will suffice to unite and bind together the scattered scientists of different countries. That motive, at least, will prove the greatest incentive to united action. The sublimity of the object and the personal stake of each and all in the success of the endeavor would quite overshadow the baser sentiment of jealousy between investigators. The biological science of the twentieth century will be, indeed, working for life’s sake. This interest will become universal and intense. Each fresh discovery, each new application of remedial skill, will be flashed from conti- nent to continent and be hailed with an ever growing enthusiasm. When once the idea has gone world-wide that science has good hopes not only of removing the causes of death, but of so facilitating and perfecting nutrition by improved food, that the struggle and stress of living will be lifted, then will be exhibited an ardent desire to live, such as the world has never known. No longer to pant for breath, or writhe beneath the torture of encroaching bacteria, will ennoble life and endow it with a new and passionate desire to live. We grow weary of living and resign our- selves to death only because of the pain and hopelessness of the struggle to breathe longer, —a struggle which will cease in vital calm and rest when research teaches us how nutrition takes place and what chemical substances are Too Natural Salvation. the proper food of the cells, without the present hard labor of preparation. No lengthy preamble or constitution for the proposed gens was thought necessary. Its strength was in its high purpose and intent. Indeed, the name itself was thought to be sufficient as constitution. And to all who are dis- tinctly Christian, it was believed that the idea would appeal strongly as an efficient means of bringing the world in harmony with the central doctrine of the faith. To summarize the doctrine of Natural Salvation as out- lined on the previous pages, we have first of all to record and emphasize the later, better conception of matter. That. protean mystery of the visible universe is not the dead, passive clay of a Supernatural Potter, wrought, moulded, and formed only beneath his hand, but is itself the Potter, both potter and clay: the basic substance of a self-created, self-moving cosmos, and infinite and eternal entity. This sublime conception alone comports and corresponds with the evolution of mind, its desire of infinite opportu- nity, its tendency to unlimited growth and its hopes of im- mortal life. The universe is endless, the field which it offers life boundless. On the infinite breadth of Void lies outspread this inscrutable mystery which the physicist now terms matter, but whose real name mortal lips have The Message of Science. IOI never yet spoken, perhaps never will, never can; since to define it is to rob it of its most sublime attribute. Whence it came, or whitherward it moves, none can answer. Itis the unknown. We feel, see and study cer- tain of its phases, but of its origin, or destiny, we know nothing as yet. Even our present scanty knowledge of matter enables us to perceive that such are its attributes; and ever as the horizon of our science broadens and the clouds of our ignorance lift, we are led to regard matter with new awe and greater reverence. Fresh from the mutations and destructive catastrophes of a thousand world-deaths, it emerges ‘ever new, with the same omnipotent power to create afresh. Yesterday, to-day, forever, it is the same exhaustless well-spring of motion, beauty, feeling and life. One of the attributes of matter as observed in nature — its primal attribute, probably — is a sentient property by virtue of which it displays the phenomena which we term life. Matter lives. The first manifestation of life of which we have knowl- edge is in the cell, as observed in unicellular life. Be- yond doubt chemism everywhere is attended and, indeed, initiated by a low degree of elemental feeling, yet this property is at a great depth below what we designate as life in the cell. Cell life is the result and product of an extended organization of the lowly-sentient atoms, ions, 102 Natural Salvation. or psychons, if these terms may be used as names for the most minute particles of matter of which we have knowl- edge. In the cell we have several billions of ions — each from its behavior a sentient particle — extensively organ- ized to accomplish nutrition and reproduction. Incident to the sentient property of the ions, there is a lowly degree of selfhood, or incipient personality; and when the ions, or psychons, are organized in the cell, we find, pari passu with the cell organization, a corresponding bund of selfhood, evinced in the cell personality. It is from studies of the cell organization that we have come at length to grasp the principle and raison d'etre of all natural organization, namely to accomplish elevation of the lowly sentience of unorganized matter to higher degrees of sentience, having apparently as its ultimate object and end, animal intelligence and those still higher degrees of intellect displayed in the human brain. Nowhere do we find intelligence without organization of the basic substance. The small mind of the cell exists only by virtue of an orderly arrangement of its proto- plasmic contents. This small self-conscious life presup- poses organization. Only by means of organization is the low basic sentience of unconditioned matter, the untrained instinct-force of chaos, raised up to intelligence. Here is our master key to Nature: organization and intelligence, rising hand in hand from elemental matter, each dependent on the other, neither able to exist without The Message of Science. 103 the other. Mind no more able to exist without its organized body and brain, than body and brain can go on existing in the absence of the conscious and subconscious mind. The one is the corelative and component of the other. They can no more be separated, or exist apart from each other, than the elemental ion can be sundered from its primary sentient property. Sundered, were that possible, matter would no longer be matter; the universe would vanish on the breadth of Void. This, then, is the principle which the future psycholo- gist and theologian must grasp and incorporate, or find their doctrines as a house built upon the sands. On the earth thus far there has appeared only the cell type of organized life, supplemented by more or less well- perfected combinations of this type. From this vast sub- stratum of unicellular life has developed a complexity of cell unions, organized as plants and animals. By virtue of this extended organization, the estate and condition of all the cooperative cells have been greatly improved, their tenure on life enormously lengthened, their psychic power as enormously enhanced. From the Silurian ages there has been a continuous progress, extending upward through plant and animal life to human life in civilized communities, until as a result of the whole grand scheme of organization, we have in the brain of man the highest type of united cell life and uni- fied cell intelligence, where the cell (neuron) now lives a 104 Natural Salvation. hundred years, and by further progress may become immortal. And it is to this entire cooperative effort of life-on- earth to improve its condition and preserve itself that we have given the high yet humble designation of Natural Salvation. At the Darkest Hour The Hour Before the Dawn AT THE DARKEST HOUR. THE HOUR BEFORE THE DAWN. ROM many points of view the opening of the twenti- eth century is humanity’s brightest hour; the bright- est, the most hopeful since life first took root on the earth. Scientific discoveries are multiplying and open vistas of promise that even while they startle encourage us to hope great things. And other grander discoveries are, beyond doubt, at the threshold. There is a thrill of expectancy in the air of these opening years of the new century; a new faith that all which has preceded will soon be surpassed. : Inventions have prodigiously increased the powers of men to contend with nature and deal with material sub- stances. Foodstuffs have been improved in quality and variety. Civil liberty to live has become better assured ; transportation made easy, rapid and cheap. Throughout the length and breadth of the earth, the press, telegraph and telephone diffuse intelligence swiftly, and also enable public sentiment to find expression. The industries are organized and systemized as gigantic agencies for human 107 108 At the Darkest Hour. advancement. Wealth, too, is wonderfully increased and, despite all complaints and forebodings, was never before so evenly and justly distributed to all men. Never even in the fabled Golden Age have all men, irrespective of rank or birth, shared the advantages which wealth confers so equally. Not that such distribution is yet ideal or com- plete; far from it; but the present complaints, forebod- ings and emeutes are themselves the signs of a progress in equalization. In no former age and at no previous time has the so-called “poor man ”’ enjoyed so generous a share of the world’s wealth. The laborer at two dollars wages per diem reads the same newspaper, rides in the same car, attends the same amusements and eats much the same food as his wealthier fellow and, if he pleases, may live in a house equally sanitary, if not so large, and lie down to sleep on an equally soft spring mattress. The mere possession of a great fortune, indeed, now gives the pos- sessor more care, but little advantage over his less opulent brother-man. Curiously enough wealth comes of itself to be the instrument for making all men equal. When we consider the humble beginnings of organic life on the éarth — developing as it has done from the primitive unicellular life—the spectacle presented by humanity at this epoch is one of reasonable promise. From — the protozoa multicellular organisms have developed; and from these lower animal forms, man has arisen. It has been the slow work of millions of years ; but it has been done The Hour Before the Dawn. 109 so surely and the progress has, on the whole, been so uni- form and so well defined, that it appears highly improbable that this great evolutionary effort is to end in mortal man, incomplete as he is, with his many capacities for further progress undeveloped. Such stupendous balks in the order of nature occur only along the line of catastrophism ; a cosmic catastrophe involving the solar system might suddenly or slowly, end all things terrestrial. Otherwise a reasonable expectation obtains that humanity will make progress in the future as in the past. What inclines many students of history to take hopeless views of man’s future on earth is the contemplation of races, peoples and nations that have risen to a degree of greatness and power, and then declined. At short range observation the Seres and Hindus, for example, seem to furnish evidence that man can move through but a circum- scribed are of progress ; that the Cambodia and China of to-day inevitably succeed every upward saltus of mankind. Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Greece, Rome, Baghdad, all pre- sent similar instances of rise and fall. If the student re- stricts his view to the history of any one nation in the past, he may be led to form a similarly hopeless opinion. The progress of humanity cannot be estimated by what takes place in any one quarter of the world, during any one century, or thousand years. Contrasted with what the world was in the days of Pericles and Augustus, who could have seen any hope for humanity in the year 700 IIo At the Darkest Hour. A.D.? Yet the greater era of the Anglo-Saxon has suc- ceeded, in due time. In the large, mankind has developed by rhythmic ad- vances and pauses. Collapse has followed each upward career; but always something grander succeeds. Ten thousand years is the briefest time period by which the progress and probabilities of the genus homo can be cor- rectly measured. Ten thousand years, indeed, is but a yesterday in life’s great curriculum on this planet. Regarded in this larger light, and from the standpoint of progress in the physical sciences, art, and invention, humanity is at its brightest hour. Grand, hopeful, and benign as is this progress, so pro- phetic of a mighty future for humanity, it is none the less tinged with an ever-deepening sadness for each and all of us, personally. A magnificent future is dawning, but we shall not see it. A few months, a few years more at most, and personally we must close our eyes in death, and drop back into the insentient void. In truth, it is this very awakening of the intellect, this latter-day vision of the future, which renders death so grievous, so inopportune. It was not so with our ancestors. Life was a struggle too hard, too grim, to be greatly prized per se; the ills of life were numerous; they suffered from heat, cold, famine and the malignity of foes. The pleasures of life, too, were chiefly sensory and fleeting; hence their mental The Hour Before the Dawn. IIt attitude toward death was one of comparative indifference ; continued life offered too little to be very earnestly de- sired. This sentiment concerning death prevails largely to-day in the Orient and among savage tribes. Life is not wholly desirable, often the reverse, it holds so little of real enjoyment, so much of pain, fear and general " misery. The case of the well-to-do, well-lodged, and happily en- vironed American of our own times is wholly different. Every day may be a pleasure, devoted to fresh achieve- ments. The youth of to-day, moreover, has need of vastly more time to realize his expanding ideals. Hitherto it was a hut, food and a wife that formed the sum of a young man’s ambitions, the goal toward which his life developed : all obtained during twenty years of youthful effort. The aspirations of men have vastly enlarged. Fifty years scarcely suffices to realize the plans necessary to success in life. Formerly when the pleasures of life most sought were sensory, the realization was not far to seek, and when attained the vital vis viva slackened. But the pleasures most prized by the educated young man of our times re- quire a longer initiative, three or four decades of patient study and sustained exertion. Life and the purposes of life are laid on wider lines for a loftier superstructure — the kind of living that outgrows the brief lifetime of our forebears. II2 At the Darkest Hour. Our ancestors, too, were solaced by pleasing illusict.s concerning a mythic life-after-death. The “soul of man” was believed to live on, disembodied and self-conscious, after the body died. The founders of religious cults ‘made skilful use of this illusion and framed vast systems of ritual and dogma, in confident reliance on which millions lived and died, and even rushed to death, reck- lessly, battling for creed’s sake. The second of the great ‘religious systems of our era was successfully propagated and has been maintained by promises of paradise to those who fall fighting for the faith. The devout Christian regulates his life with reference to “heaven,” and dies in the hope of going thither immediately after death, — and this although the Founder of Christianity apparently taught that the kingdom of God was the earth. The point here made, however, is in effect that in past centuries, so far as human beings have aspired to longer life and desired continued existencé, the aspiration has been satisfied by a partial faith in « soul” life. Such be- lief has sufficed considerably to assuage the pang of dying, and incidentally has led the devotee to despise corporeal life and disdain the earth as an abiding place. This, indeed, is the spirit and morale of Christian and Mohammedan life. Terrestrial life is subordinate and: de- sirable only as a period of preparation and a point of departure for a paradise beyond the grave. This has been the consolation and the mental attitude of our fore- The Hour Before the Dawn. 113 fathers. We are not here discussing either the truth or the reasonableness of this faith. It is enough to say that the consensus of scientific knowledge precludes it and robs us of such consolation. If the doctrine of evolution and all that we know of life and living matter teach any- thing whatever, it is that the dissolution of the brain and spinal cord is the end of the conscious’ and subconscious life that subsisted there. Our efforts to preserve a sem- blance of faith to the contrary but embarrass and delay the growth of knowledge. The biologist of to-day faces the fact that death is the end of personal life. It is no longer the ladder to heaven, but the brink of uncon- sciousness. Psychical research has accomplished nothing to alter or relieve this fact, nor is there the slightest reason to believe that it will or can do more than emphasize this “ hard condition of our birth.” We of this generation share all of primitive man’s instinctive shrinking from death — the natural abhorrence of death which all life exhibits — and, in addition to this grief, we foresee the grand future of man on earth and perceive that for us, like the Hebrew lawgiver, there is nothing but this early glimpse from a mountain top afar. We live too early to enter the land of the great achievement. We shall not quite pass from death unto life. For us death will still be an irremedi- able evil. But death is not an evil, many thoughtful persons will 114 At the Darkest Hour. rejoin, or, if an evil, it is, at least, a necessary one. What greater calamity could befall humanity, as human society and human civilization are at present established, than to have the passing generation not pass off, but remain on the crowded stage of human life? Even war and the slaughter of thousands is, by not a few political econo- mists, regarded as a beneficial event for relieving the social congestion of overpopulated countries. If immor- tality were achieved, starvation, suicide on a national scale, infanticide, or the execution of aged persons would ensue from a necessity. These are views which are fairly pertinent, although, properly administered, the natural resources of the earth are undoubtedly adequate to the sustenance of six billions of inhabitants, without crowding or poverty, in the place of the billion and a half who now dwell on it. This latter reflection does not meet the objection of overpopu- lation, however. Nor is it necessary to meet it, in the sense of providing field for a vast population, since Nature herself has already met it in her plan of vital evolution. The procreative instinct is intensified or diminished in ratio with the duress which human life encounters in the struggle for existence. With the hard-worked and short- lived, children multiply rapidly. Where all the conditions of life are hard and evil, procreation is active. On the other hand, education, refinement, ease, leisure and the prospect of a long, happy lifetime redound not to The Hour Before the Dawn. II5 increase of population, but rather to diminution. So markedly, indeed, has this been found to be true, that the inference is a fair one, that were enlightened persons, men and women, freed from the fear of death, the cruder pleasures of procreation would be foregone, from choice, for greater and purer joys in a life of a higher type. We may, at least, reply confidently that those who are able to achieve greatly prolonged life for themselves will not overpopulate the earth. More specifically death often is not an evil, but a bless- ing to the hopelessly diseased, infirm, and decrepit. Death may even be voluntarily and logically sought by the hope- less sufferer. There are grave doubts whether, if nothing better were to be hoped for in the future by humanity than life as the majority of our fellow-creatures hold it at present, — grave doubts whether unconsciousness were not better than the burden and pain of their lives. These phases and negations but prove the converse of the question, however. The primary instinct of life is to live. Nature, ab initio, makes oath that to be is better than not to be ; nor have all the consolatory sophistries of creeds ever ‘really convinced a human being of normal in- tellect that he will live on personally conscious, remem- bering and seeing, after the death and dissolution of his body. Such « faith” may assist a little to mitigate the bitter pang of dying, but never fully reassures; the com- mon sense still perceives the real situation, and cannot, t 116 At the Darkest Hour. even in its ignorance and weakness, wholly believe the kindly meant promissory. At best we resign ourselves to lapse from life with a shudder and a sense of awful heart- break, and on the brink of the great darkness shrink back, and, feebly struggling to breathe again, turn our dim eyes to the beautiful light. Man has literally fought his way upward ; he has bat- tled for life and supremacy, first, with the fiercer orders of the carnivora, the cave-bear, the machairodus, then with his fellow-man for political and moral freedom. His last grim foe is death. “The last enemy that shall be de- stroyed is death.” But as yet — ‘Death reigns. Dust unto dust must go. The nations wail-of their dread foe. The bitter waters of that Wormwood star Which burns malign, from pole to pole, Are to be drunk. Who may console Their mortal woe? Outwelling from afar The grief of worlds bewails its dying pains, A cosmic dirge, moaning it comes, Death reigns.” To all normal, healthy life, death is unquestionably an evil. Nature has nothing in common with those theorists who, making a virtue of temporal misfortune, seek to per- suade man that death is a blessing. Scant must be their souls. Man has developed to live, not to die; and time and space given, man is omnipotent. How much of literature is a dirge, a cry of mortal The Hour Before the Dawn. 117 anguish for friends departed, for self departing from the joys of life! Dread of death is the spur which will drive men to the achievement of prolonged life. : Over all the past and the present hangs a pall, shot only by the bright intuitive hope that death is not a final law. With the Romans Mors was a goddess in black robes, with ravenous teeth, hovering on sable wings over the whole theater of life, darting hither and thither, snatching its prey. The imagery comports with the Roman character. With the Greeks Thanatos was a god whose reign men mourn, whose mission is to nip the joy of life and blast the well-springs of hope. At his approach they shrank and cried, ‘‘«Eheu! Eheu!” The conception is charac- teristic of beauty-loving Hellas. Her children ever shrank from that cold, dark realm where there was no sun. The despairing cry of Electra utters the Hellenic sentiment touching death. Burdened as was their faith with the tenets of Egypt, death was still to them the end of pleas- ure, the tomb of joy. The Greek poets sometimes sym- bolized Death and Sleep as brothers, twin boys, lying asleep in the arms of their mother, Night; and again Death as a winged boy with sad, white brow and inverted torch; at his feet a butterfly. These last were poetic fancies rather than popular conceptions. The Hebraic portraiture of death was a solemn and august angel, flying forth from God, armed with a sharp 118 At the Darkest Hour. sword to slay the children of men who had sinned. Hence, the strange description of death in the Apocalypse. To the Hindu death was personified by the soul of Yarma (Adam), the first man who died (according to their tradition), and who thus became the monarch of the dead. Our old Norse ancestors thought of death as a cold, misty presence, rolling darkly on, like the whirlwind storms of their own northland, wintrily enveloping its victims and sweeping them away, enwrapped and _ lost from sight forever. With them death was associated with the bleak, elemental forces of the air, the sea, and the night, caught in the strife of which they so often perished. In our times and in all time the vulgar imagery of death is askeleton. Death makes a skeleton of man, hence man makes death a skeleton. In such grisly representation he foresees his fate. It was reserved for the grandeur-loving genius of Milton to draw death at once awful and truculent : — ‘¢ The shape, If shape it might be call’d that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb ; Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d For each seem’d either, — black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, ‘terrible as hell, And shook a dreadful dart ; what seem’d his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on.” It is a curious fact that death, which is a nonentity, has always been typified by substantive imagery. In a word, The Hour Before the Dawn. 119 the utter absence of energy, or force, has been idealized as a monster of the most forceful character. Fancy has run away with fact. Death is nothing in itself, the synonym of nothingness, and has never been better defined than as the absence of life. Matter is inherently endowed with that which may become sentient. The human intellect, with this element of immortality within its grasp, shud- ders and sighs to cease. When the real situation shall become -evident to human vision, a new era of mental activity will dawn. No longer vainly praying for miracu- lous redemption, man will arise to work out his own sal- vation, and labor for an immortality which will have no uncertain hold on his faith. The task is mighty; but a grand idea never yet perished for want of soldiers. Man, at least, has this record for his encouragement. Men would not be worthy of immortal life, would not be fit for it, if they cannot achieve it for themselves. When- ever in the past man has risen superior either to brute beasts or brute passions, it has been by his own unaided exertions. However piously he may have prayed and trusted, the fight has always been his own. Overmatched, the good and the bad have always been crushed alike. God is not on the hither side of matter. What is on its far side we know not. Yet Right, in the long run, appears to be a better soldier than Wrong. We may, if we please, fancy that God put this ingredient in mat- ter and, having done that, retired to Olympus. 120 At the Darkest Hour. But during twelve hundred years the average of human life has not been raised more than twenty years, at most, what hope, then, of greatly prolonging life in ages to come ? The reply is that the outlook cannot be correctly esti- mated by this past slow gain on death. Through what unwritten ages did man wander over prehistoric conti- nents, a wretched, fireless troglodyte, a feeder on acorns and berries, yet in one brief moment the first spark of fire was struck, — fire which made him the rich owner of all the metals, which opened a new realm of comfort, warmth, and food and spread the race over vast regions hitherto uninhabitable. In that single moment man rose to a higher plane of existence. Within historic times, but four centuries ago, human progress was vastly accelerated by a single discovery, which was little more than a lucky accident. Up to the times of Gutenberg, what progress had been made for three thousand years in the art of book-making? Till then, books had been laboriously copied with stile and pen and so far as any one could then have foreseen, bade fair al- ways to be thus tediously reproduced. A copy of the Scriptures cost from two to three thousand dollars, equiva- lent to six or nine thousands in this century ; but a single decade saw the art of printing born. Dogmatic unbelief may be as greatly mistaken as dog- matic faith. The times are ripe for great discoveries The Hour Before the Dawn. I2I touching life and its co-relative modes of energy. The epoch — and it will be the grandest of human epochs — when the protoplasmic molecule shall render up its secret to human scrutiny is near at hand. Man will then be no longer the abject serf of death, but a belligerent, contend- ing for his freedom, with the prize of unlimited life before his eyes. There are, it.is true, degenerates who aver that all life is an evil. There are clubs that seek out, ponder, and discuss modes of euthanasia. They should be wished success. Such pessimism is an evil diathesis, a mental mal- formation of which the world would be well rid, by the shortest method. But we are speaking of normal men, not of posers, perverts, drug-bemused manikins and alcoholics. For the normal man of science a new and sterner gospel is requisite. The awakening from dreams of para- dise has come, and in very truth we have little enough to requite us. The devotee has much the more of solace, and many there are who will prefer the sacerdotal promise to the grim reality. It is so much easier to accept the gilded promissory of the established church than grapple with the real problems of life! Confessing one’s sins is so much simpler than actual reformation! What wonder that the earth groans beneath a weight of mosques and cathedrals, or that four continents glisten with church vanes! Devotee and priest have this advantage: they 122 At the Darkest Hour. die with great hopes and will never learn their mistake ; whereas the man of science dies with the certainty that his course is run. Science, alas, has added a pang to death for all her children. It has dissipated the beautiful mirage of dying men. ‘Let the grand future pity those whose weakness Had to be fostered by a foolish hope; Perhaps without it man had died, the Earth Gone fallow to its dead-orb, lunar age.” Without it, perhaps, men could not have been led or driven to work and fight. Temple and pyramid would not have been reared, nor needful experience in architec- ture been gained. Greek and Trojan would not have sailed the Mediterranean, nor the Hebrew slave fled from bondage to seek his Promised Land. As soon as man rose a little above his brutal ancestry, as soon as he began to think, to ponder what he saw, he was aghast at death. He would not face the hard fact. and persuaded himself that by prayer, burnt offerings, pilgrimages and self-denial, he might escape extinction. The mirage of his hope rose and loomed before his life- thirsty eyes. Erelong, then, as might be predicted, cer- tain guilds took up the business of exploiting the mirage. That the guild itself was often sincere and benevolent does not materially alter the facts of its origin or its tendencies. For guaranteeing the mirage to be genuine Celestial landscape, priest and Levite have been the The Hour Before the Dawn. 123 great ones of earth. Humanity i is still in its childhood, _but_now approaches adolescent years, ars, the : age when youth becomes incredulous of fairy tale es. And, lo, in place of this illusion of the world’s infancy, we are opening our eyes to the greater, grander gospel of manly endeavor and achievement. If in these papers the writer appears to play the part of an iconoclast, a ruthless breaker of the sacred images of human faith and religion, it is not from any joy that he has felt in the task. Rather pain. It is impossible to speak without emotion of that fond Hope of dying men which it is the thankless office of our science to pronounce baseless. So much of solace has centered in it, so much of consolation for the pangs of death; such sweet anticipation of future reunions with dear ones dead have grown up about it, such halos of comfort in adversity, such visions of redemption by Grace, such long ladders of creed, ascending by which we have hoped to scale Heaven and Immortality. Creeds so venerable to the human heart, so firmly implanted in the woof of brain, that the uprooting of them can but cause widespread confusion and consternation. Such consternation and pain, indeed, that not a few will deem it illy done, if true. It has even been held that humanity would not survive deprivation of this its fond hope of “spirit”’ life, but like a flower deprived of moisture, would wither on a desiccant earth; that man- ) 124 At the Darkest Hour. kind, thus bereft, would shrink in a premature involution to its origins; that the genus homo, shriven of this tenet, would decline to some beastial Ape-type, some senescent, frustrate Order of the Earth-born. But take heart, ye of little faith. It is but the natural growth of knowledge. The coasts of our Race-life are strewn with the wrecks of great Religions, the old hulks of once mighty creeds, the jetsom of a thousand once fondly cherished tenets which buoyed millions in life and consoled them in death. They were, but they are not; and this is but one illusion more. Ra and Osiris, Baal and Zeus, Og and Duiron; Tau and Brahm, Odin and Thor; and more remote in the vasty past, glimpses of a hundred ancient cults, once very precious to man, now but vanished superstitions. Once they rang all true to the human mind, and gorgeous the pageant, sonorous the ritual ; for a “superstition” is but a religion outgrown s and the great plains of the past are covered with their white bones. The Ararats of philology are overstranded with the quaint-carven timbers of these old arks of re- ligious safety, arks which once carried the world’s salva- tion, but which now lie high and dry, deserted by man and beast. For if priest and devotee could only think so, that is the best thing about religions — they are left behind when the crisis or era that had need of them is past. There were darker aspects. It has been characteristic The Hour Before the Dawn. 125 of each and every great religion in turn that it arrogated to itself all the truth in the Universe, denounced every other as wicked and kindled fires of relentless persecution. Each in turn was the one and only revelation from the true God, the others devil-born. That, indeed, is the hardest thing about them all to forgive, or to have charity for: their horrible intolerance of each other, their ridiculous bigotry, their disgusting self-righteousness. Each in turn, Christian, pagan alike, no sooner acquired power than it reddened the earth with blood, the sky with torture-fires. Sincerity there may have been, but a sincerity merciless, murderous, abominable. ‘©O ye who walk the Narrow Way, By Tophet flare to Judgment Day, Be gentle when the heathen pray.” But gentleness there was none. From the Stone Age to Mecca and Rome, innocent blood cries to heaven against them all. It is these dark pages of man’s religious history which oftenest make us despair of his future, and which some- times lead even the optimist to doubt whether the great brain-ape is really worthy of preservation in the universe. ‘* So many sects, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, When just the art of being kind Is all this sad world needs.” 126 At the Darkest Hour. It was this terribly difficult “art of being kind” that Siddhartha sought to inculcate, yet no sooner had Buddhism become an established religion than it in- augurated saturnalias of persecution. It was the gospel of brotherly love, mercy, and coopera- tion that Jesus taught, as the corner stone of his « King- dom of God” on earth. “Love one another” and “ resist not evil.” The early Christians were thrown to the lions, unresistant, and dying, prevailed marvelously over the’ whole world; yet no sooner was Christianity formulated as an established religion, than Christian Rome exceeded the cruelties of Pagan Rome, and taxed all human ingenu- ity in search of devices for torturing. So it is well that religious systems pass. No calamity is so great as their survival over time. Buddhism, Mo- hammedanism, and the Christianity of Constantinople and Rome are now among the greatest obstacles to human prog- ress. Help them to pass, not to be perpetuated. It is, in very truth, a sterner gospel into which we of this generation have to be baptized. We have partaken of the tree of knowledge. The pleasant illusions of man’s early creeds have been brushed ruthlessly away. We face Nature’s hard law with no fairy tale to disguise its inclemency. Immortal life will be achieved by the aid of applied science; it is what the whole scheme of evolution The Hour Before the Dawn. 127 moves forward to; it is the dream of all the long-suffer- ing ages of man; it will be initiated on earth within three centuries, perhaps within two, so rapid is the growth of knowledge, so accelerated the march of discovery. But we who have to initiate the great effort will not look upon the dawn of the achievement, nor be among the first of the sons of men who rise superior to death. We can but feel, therefore, that we live at humanity’s darkest hour —the hour before the dawn. We live too. late to be buoyed and comforted by the illusions of religion, too soon to reach the goal and snatch our lives from the grasp of death. Have we the strength to work on, quite the same, and bravely round the curve for the sake of those more fortu- nate who shall come after us? Have we the devotion to face the inevitable, turn in our best work and die, uncom- plainingly? Shall we demonstrate the spirit, intent and real meaning of the doctrines of Jesus Christ, or see these grand doctrines lapse to a vacuous ritual ? A thousand centuries of life’s hard struggle on the earth cry out to speak through us, and bid us win the promise of evolution. We are born to this post of honor and duty. Untold labor and pain have confided it to us. Are we worthy? Or shall we quit the task, malinger, turn sensuous, skulk back to cover of illusion and cease to be progressive ? If stronger beings on other spheres of space are 128 At the Darkest Hour. watching us from afar at this dark hour of our planet’s evolution, may they infuse patience and courage into our hearts. We have need of them. To minds normal and unperverted, Natural Salvation is the most natural thing in the world, the outcome of life which would be expected. But it is a curious com- mentary on the mental condition of people that the idea of being saved from death by natural means often appears to them strange and unnatural! Not unfrequently as something portentous and “ wicked”! That higher life, which can only be attained by the loftiest culture of the human intellect, is feared to be impious! The fetters of old creeds are still firmly riveted. A few, indeed, and those of the best, recognize the truth ; but a majority still cling to the fetish of ghost life, and incline to the belief that humanity will run through a cycle of evolution, decline toward the lower animal orders and, in the end, perish from off the earth. They fail to see the signifi- cance which attaches to the steady growth of the human brain, a growth which separates and distinguishes man- kind from all previous animal orders; and they ignore or depreciate the grand fact that scientific knowledge, ac- cumulating from generation to generation, is changing the entire course of lower nature in man. That lower course of nature is still their criterion for the future. The Hour Before the Dawn. 129 The idea of Natural Salvation as the result and outcome of the evolution of life on the earth is still too novel, too startling, to be accepted without a period of mental incu- bation. It is too subversive of old beliefs to be enter- tained without a struggle against it; or, at best, the new belief must have time to be born and grow up. And there must be further demonstration and a long balancing of the evidence. The incubus of indoctrination is still heavy ; nor will the effort to attain Natural Salvation be- gin in earnest, until the truth and the facts concerning the “soul” of man are understood and accepted; perhaps not until children are taught the simple facts concerning the course and promise of life on the earth. The effect of two generations of such instruction would be decisive and marvelous. Little can be done till the brains of children are liberated and saved from the prevalent theo- logical untruth as to supernaturalism. As fast as begotten and born the brain of successive generations is now handed over to this bondage of the unnatural, these fantasies of the Orient. No child among us is permitted to see life in the light of nature. ( The young cells of their tender -brains are indoctrinated in the cradle. T the uniy in i r kno ife really is or signifies, but i of years in a ' species of doctrinal tr: hat genius among educators will rise to deliver unborn brain! In very truth he will be another of the Christs of men. 130 At the Darkest Hour. And so slowly and at such sad disadvantage we must seek to instil the truth with patience against the inertia of old creeds. Brain: Al Still Progressive Tissue of the Human Organism BRAIN: A STILL PROGRESSIVE TISSUE OF THE HUMAN ORGANISM. bemoan a higher type of life will enventually develop from humanity, whether, indeed, the human organism is capable of being greatly improved, was one of those questions which early suggested themselves to biologists of the Darwin era. The argument and the inference from evolution was, in a word, that man as found on the earth is the long- descended heir of the developmental effort, — the effort of living matter in the cell mode of existence to improve its condition and rise to the highest possible degree of intelli- gence and happiness. On a priort grounds, there would seem to be no good reason to infer that a struggle extend- ing through millions of years, and involving so much of individual sacrifice, may not eventuate in a correspond- ingly grand future achievement. Evolution, in fact, naturally ushers in a moral and a creed concerning man’s past and his future. As to the further progress of the human organism, how- ever, there are many indications which appear to contro- 133 134 Brain: vert the affirmative view. Nota few of those whom we know to be best equipped for forming an opinion on this subject, appear to hold negative views, to wit, that the human organism has long ago reached its type limits, limits which under the most favorable conditions it could not escape; in short, that the human type, anatomically and physiologically, is now “fixed”; that improved con- ditions will but cause it to vary within certain unsurpass- able bounds; that man will remain a man henceforward, under whatever stress of evolution, continued even for many thousands of years, or forever. When we examine the subject historically, there is much to confirm the above view. Apparently the human organism was as perfect four thousand years ago as at present, and differed in no typical features or essentials. There seems to have been no change to indicate physical evolution within the historic period. From a histological point of view, too, there is little to indicate even the most slowly-progressive development in most of the tissues of the body; for example, the osseous, muscular, connective, cartilagenous, and epithelial tissues. The cells of these tissues pass through a well-defined cycle of growth, and give rise to a series of growth products which vary, indeed, from youth to age, but show no secular change from generation to generation. Moreover, the bone, muscle, cartilage, and other tissue cells of man resemble very closely those of the lower grade A Still Progressive Tissue. 135 mammals, the types of which are even more clearly seen to be permanent and unprogressive. Cataclysmic changes of the earth’s surface, giving rise to new geodetic, climatic, and atmospheric conditions, might, indeed, if not too suddenly destructive, compel certain skeletal alterations and changes of form, both in man and other mammals, although there is the greater probability that such catastrophism would prove fatal to all well-established types of life; in brief, that the genus homo, or the genus 60s, would perish off the earth sooner than develop into anything else. There is little likelihood, however, that further evolu- tion will be fostered by such means, the earth itself having reached an age and a permanence of planetary type, so to speak, when surface mutations of such revolutionary char- acter are not to be looked for. The very permanence of his terrestrial habitat, in fact, is against the further evolution of the human organism, or the development of anything -superior in the way of organic apparatus from such causes. The widest view of this subject of organism and evolu- tion which we can take is so conclusive to this effect that the theory of a higher type of being than man, hereafter to come from terrestrial evolution, has been practically abandoned, even although it is apparent and can be shown on good evidence that man in his mind, his intellect, and his brain is still progressive and manifestly capable of much future progress. 136 Brain: The general conclusion has obtained that evolution in the ordinary sense has terminated in man, and that he is not only the latest but in all probability the last of the mammalia. A great deal in human creed, mythic, classic, and Christian, has originated here, namely, on the hope- lessness of doing much better on the earth; and hence the prayerful appeal for a more favorable theatre for life else- where. The apparent cessation of evolution on the earth has long been felt to be disheartening ; literature is burdened with it and aspiration concerning some other better state of existence has grown out of it. But has evolution ceased? The question, which the anatomist and biologist have been not a little inclined to answer in the affirmative, is exceedingly important to the morals of humanity. Has the anatomist, the biologist or the physiologist overlooked any point, any particular, or any capacity by virtue of which man may still demonstrate himself progressive and take heart for himself and his race ? It is the purpose of this brief paper to call attention to one important tissue of the human organism which can be shown to have been steadily progressive, and which gives no evidence of reaching, or of tending to reach, type limits. I shall show furthermore that it is by virtue of the steady growth and development of this part of the body A Still Progressive Tissue. 137 that man has so prodigiously surpassed all other species of mammals, made them subject to him, and overrun and dominated the whole earth. In the physical sense, the evolution of this tissue has been strangely overlooked by many, in fact most, biologists, or, if touched upon, has not been held to determine the question of man’s true position as a progressive mammal, compared with other species which are either unprogressive or retrogressive. For while all have abundantly recognized man’s mental superiority to the lower animals, and connected it vaguely with his larger brain, this superiority of intellect has been attributed to a certain adventitious endowment of the nature of “soul,” not a natural part of the organism, but an implantation from an extraneous source. Nor have biologists clearly pointed out as yet the relative truth of the matter in connection with man’s rise from brute life to the estate of a world-dominant being. The human organism, from the latest standpoint of science, is a compact, federal union of thirty or more differentiations of cell life. Every one of these thousands and millions of cells of which each tissue is composed, is a more or less independent creature, possessing to some considerable extent individuality and self-direction. They are banded together, however, indissolubly, and in certain situations are in protoplasmic contact by means of living filaments, so sentiently that all live and feel as one. These orders of cell life thus confederated have, in the 138 Brain: progress of organic development in the past, become mutually dependent and inter-dependent one upon another -until -one order cannot live without the presence and function of the others. Such are the bone cells, the muscle cells, the connective tissue cells, the hepatic, pulmonic, splenic, intestinal, spermatic, epithelial, capil- lary and glandular cells; an extensive congeries of diverse tissues, each containing millions of individuals and all mutually dependent on the general well-being and safety of the organism. So far as can be judged by a comparison of man to-day with man in earliest historic times and man with the lower unprogressive mammals, all these above-mentioned cells, or differentiations of cells, are no longer progressive. Even their abnormalities are unprogressive. For the good reason that there is nothing in the terrestrial environment which now calls for a re-adaptation; nor has there been for thousands of years. The type of cell has assumed permanence. There is, however, a tissue of the organism, an order, or differentiation of cells, which we have not yet men- tioned, namely, the nerve and brain order. In brain and nerve we contemplate a colony or order of cells, incorpo- rated within the organism, living at the expense of the other orders, devoted to the acquisition of knowledge: a function diverse from all others, nobler than all others. In a sense, it is as if this brain order were a superior parasite 4 A Still Progressive Tissue. 139 which had entered the multicellular organism and lived on it, but repaid for its protected situation and its refined food by doing the thinking, planning, and caring for its host. So greatly has the function of acquiring knowl- edge ennobled the brain group of cells, raising it to such divine eminence over all others, that in man it has come to stand for the personality of the organism, the self, the ego, the soul of the human body. Nerve and brain are not found in unicellular life; at least, not in the organic sense of these terms. From as close a study as can be made of certain simple forms of multicellular creatures, which are doubtless quite similar to those from which the higher multicellular forms were originally developed, the first rudimentary attempt to establish a nervous system consisted of a living proto- plasmic thread, thrust out from one cell to another. At tirst this would appear to have been a mere “ feeler,” but in time it came to remain constantly extended, no longer as a transient feeler, but as a permanent means of sensory intercommunication between cell and cell. But, as multicellular creatures waxed larger, and dif- ferentiation of the component cell orders began, simple filaments of protoplasm, modified pseudopodia, were no longer sufficient for transmitting sensation from tract to tract ; whole rows or lines of cells were involved in the strong currents of sensation that passed to and fro, and, in time, these cells became devoted wholly to the business of 140 Brain: receiving, interpreting, and transmitting the aggregated sensations of all the millions of individual cells of which an animal organism is composed. I need not here review the evidences and the argument by which it is now shown that sensory ganglia for per- ception and reflex perception, grew up at the intersection of the primary nerve filaments; how the special sense organs took form; how at length the cerebellum came to be lodged in the forward end of the pluricellular animal, and how the ever-increasing need of greater capacity for the sensory business of a world-roaming organism led to that enormous superaddition to the cerebellum, known as the cerebrum. What is designed here to point out is the fact that the nervous system of the human organism, particularly the cerebral portion of it, or, in other words, the tissue of mind and intellect, has always been in the past and is to- day a progressive tissue. It came into existence, as brain, in response to a necessity on the part of the organism for greater protoplasmic capacity, for the reception and util- ization of intelligence. That necessity and that stimulus still exist and grow constantly more urgent. Bone and muscle cells have developed to the extent of the necessity which led to their differentiation; the in- centives to locomotion and organic support remain the same, unchanged in character; hence, bone and muscle cells long ago reached the acme of their development. A Still Progressive Tissue. 141 The same is true, or true in large part, of every other tissue of the body, save the encephalon. The brain is still forced to develop and grow larger in response to con- stantly changing conditions incident to the world’s growth in knowledge. Certain tribes, races and peoples, it is true, adhere to habits and modes of life largely unpro- gressive, and, as a result, show little brain change from generation to generation. It is not so, however, with the westward-moving peoples of the dominant races, — the nations who think and invent. Science is the agent of brain growth. To think, in the true sense of the word, signifies brain development. New inventions stand for cerebral evolution. The changed sensory experiences, too, which result from new inventions, tend to alter the protoplasmic arrangement of the brain, and add to its capacity for growth. In America, to-day, we see heads of varying sizes and shapes, not only the types emigrant from Europe, Asia, and Africa, but types and sizes un- known before in any country. There is actual brain growth among us. A new variety of intellect is being developed. A comparison of the earliest human skulls, found in an- cient caves, tombs, and mounds, with those of individuals of the present age, shows that on the whole there has been growth of brain as well as a perceptible alteration in shape in favor of greater intellectuality. Brain has grown greatly in size and improved in form during the last eight or ten 142 Brain: thousand years, — a period of time relatively brief when considered in comparison with the developmental epoch of mammals. Prehistoric skulls are smaller and less prominently de- veloped, frontally, than those of our own epoch. The same general truth is exemplified when the skulls of ex- istent savage tribes are compared with those of individuals from the highly civilized and progressive nations ; there is less of that higher frontal development in savages, which we always find associated with the growth of intellect, and this even in instances of large individuals, where the skull is very massive and capacious. Acquired knowledge and the sciences tend constantly to increase the bulk of the brain and modify its form; in a word, to render it a pro- gressive tissue. This proposition is still more grandly exemplified when the evolution of life on the earth is contemplated as a whole. In early metazoic life, brain was scarcely more than initiated. The lower vertebrates have small brains. But in the quadrumana the human brain is found to be outlined in type and form. From this order of mammals the progress of the human brain can be readily traced. Nor can it be doubted, even although our microscopes fail to show the fact, that the brain tissue is receiving a progressive, internal development, corresponding to the intellectual growth of humanity. For the human brain to-day is the protoplasmic corela- A Still Progressive Tissue. 143 tive, the material counterpart of the entirety of human knowledge; and in future as science increases its range and its acquisitions, there cannot fail to be greater and greater stimulus to brain growth and increased cerebral capacity. It may not be wholly irrelevant here to allude to cer- tain recent attempts in the province of surgery to open the sutures of the skull for the purpose of giving the brain greater room therein. These first rude efforts may be prophetic of measures which will be resorted to as time goes on to facilitate cerebral development, since it is al- ready known to many specialists in brain disorders that congenital lack of room for the brain inside the skull is a serious incident in the lives of many persons, particularly where for several generations there has been a tendency to intellectual pursuits. So surely as there are new things to learn in the great universe around us, just so surely will the brain of man go on growing and developing greater capacity for the recep- tion of knowledge. It is in this respect and in this tissue that man has not reached the acme of his powers, and that evolution has not ceased. And this aspect of his future brings us more clearly to a contemplation of his anomalous position on the earth to- day. From some reason —either a hint dropped in his earlier ear by beings from some outer orb of space, or in the natural order of his terrestrial development — man 144 Brain: left the rank of his brutal mammalian congeners and be- gan to use his brain. As a result, his brain grew and has entered upon an era of development the limits of which no one can foresee. In consequence we find this tissue to be still progressive, but associated in the organism with a score of other unprogressive tissues which tend but to pass through a fixed cycle of growth and decline. It is this condition which affords the key-note and the explanation to his strange creeds, aspirations, superstitions, hopes, and fears; his optimisms and his pessimisms; his gods, his christs, and his satans. And this is that riddle of the Sphinx, that fateful inter- rogation of the Ages which he has to answer: Will the progressive, still developing brain acquire such knowledge and obtain such mastery and such control over the forces of nature as to “redeem,” regenerate, and renew at will the other unprogressive tissues with which brain is yoked in the organism, and which at present condemn it to a brief lifetime with them? Can the progressive tissue re- deem and save the unprogressive tissues? We have now good hopes that it can. Human Personality Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature HUMAN PERSONALITY. ITS COMPOSITE AND DISSOLUBLE NATURE. IOLOGICAL science places the long-debated problem of human personality under new lights. We are now able to demonstrate how one particular group of cells in the human organism — cells such as were originally, in the earlier ages of the earth, separate unicells — combined, became modified and finally united to form one larger, organized life, in conformity with the law of vital prog- ress, through organization, pointed out in the first paper of this volume. The human brain, indeed, is the grandest terrestrial instance of this symbiotic progress. It will not be necessary here to enter upon an exposi- tion of the “cell doctrine,” or point out that the human body is an organized union of physiological cells, nor iterate the evidences of the evolution of life. It may be taken for granted that readers are familiar with these facts and accept them each in his own way. We begin, therefore, with the general statement, that the human organism as we inherit it from our ancestors, is an association of cell life, each cell a small organism by 147 148 Human Personality. itself and a descendant, far back, of a protozoon that once lived apart from its fellows and was’ capable of making its way alone in the world, having matter-moving powers and guided by a lowly intelligence which stood to it as mind. The present functions of the tissue cell of the animal body, of muscle, bone, cartilage, gland, as we observe them, do not imply a notable individual exercise or dis- play of cell intelligence; such exercise of intelligence is potential in every cell, was once displayed by the an- cestry of that cell, and might again be called into use, if the conditions of its environment were altered and demanded it. In brief, the tissue cell is like an artizan who has so learned his trade and has worked so long in the same fac- tory, making the same kind of goods, that he now works with little mental effort, because it is not required; yet the capacity for other lines of work and thought still sur- vives in him in some degree, although he would very likely starve, or perish, if cast suddenly forth into the wilderness. If the transition from his factory and his habitual food and labor were made gradual, he would adapt himself to the changed conditions. The capacity to do so is latent in him still ;—~and that is much the status of the tissue cell of the human body as compared with its ancestral unicell of the ancient earth. We are speaking now of muscle, bone, or gland cells, in short, of any and all of the thirty orders of tissue cells, Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 149 save one. The intelligence of that one has not been as much restricted by its appointed task. We refer, of course, to that order, or genus of cells which appear as brain and spinal cord, or the nervous system as a whole. While the remote ancestry of the neurons was the same as the muscle, bone, or gland cell, its differentiation and training has been distinct; for the neuron has been the cell whose task compelled it to extend its primary quotum of intelligence and develop its lowly wits. It is with this wonderful group of cells, the neurons, that we have to deal in the vexed question of human per- sonality (personal identity, self-consciousness, “soul”’), and incidentally to inquire whether this human personal- ity is detachable from the organism or not. Whether the human intellect can exist and does exist apart from the human body, after the latter is dead, or not. We are not ere understood as affirming that the cells of the nervous system are the only cells of the organism concerned in human personality, not even when this group is extended to include the sympathetic system. Every group of cells in the animal body is faintly and in some minor degree apparent in the sub-conscious human intelli- gence. All enter into and contribute to that great sea of feeling which we term the sub-conscious mind. Physiologists have even described a sixth sense which they term the muscular sense —the indistinct sensory representation of the vast group of muscle cells in the 150 Human Personality. personality. A glance at the organic mechanism is suffi- cient to show that these cells and groups of cells can have but a secondary, or reflex representation; a faint twice-reflected sense, like earth-shine on the unlighted segment of the moon. For muscle and gland cells form groups by themselves, not interlaced with the neurons and having no interlacing processes, being only reported, if we may use that word in this sense, to the neuron group by means of immensely long filaments which the latter have sent forth. In fact, all those vast groups of cells in muscle, bone, and gland are, so far as the human person- ality is concerned, but so many outlying, alien provinces of an empire, controlled and stimulated to action from the central capital, but only reflexly and faintly symbiotic with it. ; The manner in which personality — intellect and mind — fell to the lot and became the task of the neuron group, is now apparent and can be demonstrated. A trace of it appears even in the zoaria of polyzoa. Something like an incipient nervous system exists in christatella mucedo and in kinetoskias where a colony of unicells is seen to act as an individual, by transmission of impulses from cell to cell to insure simultaneous action to a certain end on the part of all the cells. The same is observed in the volvo- cine colonies. This is the first step to a nervous system, — the transmission of a directive impulse from cell to cell. At this early stage of differentiation of function, any Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. I51 cell of the colony may act as a brain or nerve cell. The capacity is inherent in all cells at the outset of multi- cellular life. The protozoan unicell exhibits functions of muscle, brain, and gland. One cell, living alone, may do all that any multicellular organism can do, on a small scale. But in a colony of unicells —from which multi- cellular creatures originated — and particularly in a large colony, certain cells, on account of their outer or inner location in the colony, come habitually to do certain things and assume certain functions. Those on the outside unite to propel the colony onward toward food; those on the inside deal with the food after it is seized and ingested ; and there come to be those which take it upon themselves to spy food, or to scent it at a distance, in a word, to act as eyes, ears, and nose for the colony. But to convey what these cells saw, or scented, for the benefit of the colony, to other cells, those for example which propel the colony, it was necessary that certain intermediate cells, or lines of cells, should act’as carriers of this intelligence and pass it on from cell to cell, and here we have the origin of a nerve —a line of cells pass- ing intelligence to the other cells, those which propel the colony. In this necessity of the many-celled colony we find the beginning of the function of nerve and, ultimately, of brain. For very soon the need of a common center to which the conveyed intelligence from without could be brought, would make itself felt. Certain cells would be 152 Human Personality. impelled by the common want to take up the function of estimating these conveyed impulses, whether faint or in- tense and imperative, of estimating and responding to them. Thus somewhere along the incipient nerve line a nerve ganglion would be developed from cells which, under other circumstances of the colony’s needs, might have be- come locomotive cells or gland cells. For it is the many common wants of the cell union which have forced the assumption of different functions upon different tracts of cells. | There seems to be nothing very wonderful in the process by which the virgin sensibility of the unicell has been raised to the condition of: intellect. We observe,-first, a condition in which a cell is compelled to feel the feeling of another cell. The medium or agency of transmitting feeling in this case is probably an actual current of ions; an “ether,’’ let us say, for the sake of a familiar word. Excited to action by this received sensation, the inter- mediate cell transmits the sensation to another contiguous cell; this latter in turn transmits it to a third, and so on. But sensation thus conveyed onward, from cell to cell, requires referendum somewhere. Moreover, different lines of cells thus acting as incipient nerves would cross each other, as such lines multiplied, and cause distraction and confusion. A new necessity arose, the necessity that certain cells along an embryo nerve line, or at the crossings of such lines, Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 153 should assume a higher function of intelligence, the func- tion of determining the relative strength and value of the conveyed impulses which pass through them, and of acting for the common good by judging of them, neutralizing some of the least important, or intensifying others, and, in general, regulating and administering for all. And in these cells at the crossings, or midway the incipient nerve, we find a nerve ganglion developed, that is to say, a little brain for that tract of cells and nerve lines. These cells of ganglia have the magisterial office thrust upon them by the importunity of their fellow cells in the multicellular union. They find themselves the recipients of confided feeling from the others, on all sides; they are stimulated by it and led to respond as judges of such feeling. From their situation and the necessity incident to it, the faculty of discrimination and of judgment as to the nature, char- acter and motive of these incoming currents of sensation is in time developed. The neurons of the brain have thus been made the repositories and agents for the estimation of a thousand simultaneous currents of these partly-interpreted sensa- tions, transmitted to it from all portions of the organism, and particularly from the organs of special sense, the eye, the ear, the olfactory and the gustatory tracts. Thus impressed into the service of the organism, the neurons have developed in numbers adequate to that service. Instead of a tiny ganglion for the receipt of 154 Human Personality. simple sensation, we have in the human brain a grand mass of cells capable of receiving and estimating the per- ceptions of a hundred inferior ganglia, of comparing these perceptions with other previously recorded perceptions from the same organs of the body and with those from other organs; of deciding as to the relative importance of all these and of responding through the motor system of nerves, in accordance with conclusions which are arrived at after a final estimate of the grand total of perception, reflex perception, and the thousandfold perception of per- ceptions which make up the complicated process which we commonly call thinking. It is of interest to examine the minute anatomy of the neurons, and study the physiological mechanism by means of which they join themselves together and unite their. lives to form the human intellect. Q£ interest, because this mechanism is the most wonderful thing in the world. Throughout the length and breadth of our earth there is nothing to compare with this sentient combine of brain cells and the marvelous networks of living matter which they put forth to sustain human self-consciousness. Under the microscope, as we are now able to use it, the entire scheme of the soul’s origin and maintenance is dis- played. We see and are able to map out the mode of its growth and discern how its manifold virtues, aspirations, instincts, traits, and beliefs have come into existence and stand linked together in a composite whole. Here is re- Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 155 vealed as on a chart the physical basis of psychology — the new scientific psychology of the 20th Century ;— and it were better if the old, erratic, creed-attainted treatises were burned, and the site cleared for the truth. For when free of the taint and bias of religious in- octrination, the new science of the soul can be made so ear, so simple to the understanding, that the average. boy or girl of ten will learn it in a few easy lessons. boy or g msc The means by which the neurons are united in the brain has long been known to minute anatomists; and during the last fifteen years numerous investigators have described the amazing networks which they form in the cortex of the cerebrum. Whether or not the microscopic fibrils coalesce end by end and become continuous from cell to cell, has been a subject of controversy backed by what has seemed evidence on both sides. The contention that the neurons are directly united by their filaments, has not been demonstrated beyond question, the facts going to show that these extended, delicate processes of the cells very closely approach each other and, during the elate, erectile condition of diurnal wakefulness, actually touch; and that in sleep this contact is broken, a condi- tion of non-contiguity, brought about in part by the shrinking away of the blood capillary system in the cortex during somnolence. 156 Human Personality. Until very recently, however, no observer appears to have fully comprehended the profound psychic significance of this extraordinary web of living fibrils. Gehuchten, Obersteiner and His called attention to the extraordinary length of the protoplasmic branches of brain cells, and to the extended and intricate networks which they form. Conjecture was attracted to them; but it was not until the growth of our knowledge had embraced. other discoveries that these marvelous networks of senti- ent, protoplasmic threads were identified not only as a means of association of cell with cell, but as the con- sentient web of living matter by means of which self- consciousness and personal identity exist and are possible. In a word, that it is by means of this vast network of interactive fibers, fibrils and filaments that the many millions of cells of the brain are able to live as one self-conscious entity and give rise to a personal intellect. Histologically, as the abode of the genus of intellectual cells, the human’ brain must be conceived of as a vast skein or congeries of nerve fibers, on the outer surface of which, carefully roofed over by the cranium and tough membranes, lie the most important groups of cells. It is of these cell groups of the convoluted, outer sur- face or cortex of the brain that we shall here speak almost exclusively, scarcely more than referring to the great nether group or groups, commonly described as the nuclear and fusiform cells; for it is in the cortex that Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 1547 the ramifications of the cell processes which we are now to study, are best exemplified. These -cell groups of the cortex, of the cerebrum, and of the superficial gray matter of the cerebellum, are won- derfully well situated for nutrition, supported at ease, so to speak, by the fibrils of servant cells of inferior grade (neuroglia), lodged in fluid beds, and guarded by protect- ive or repair cells. Great advantages are theirs, and great things in the line of intelligence are accomplished by them. Not even our best methods of preparation and staining have yet enabled us to trace all the delicate branches, fibrils and processes which they thrust forth and maintain extended, in order to touch and to lie in sentient contact with those of other cells, thus enabling hundreds of them to live in close perception and sentient communion one with another. The cells of this class, or species, from the human cere- bellum, or lesser brain, differ considerably in size and general appearance, from those of the cerebrum, and also from those of the spinal cord; but from their position and connections, their psychic role is believed to be similar, since they are held to preside over and inaugurate the passage of subjective sentience into molecular motion. ' The protoplasmic processes of the large Purkinje cells from the folia of the human cerebellum interlace some- what as sketched with a pen in the accompanying drawing. But neither in this sketch, nor the merely diagramatic one 158 Human Personality. of pyramidal cells from the cortex cerebri, which follows it, can the amazing networks which the branches and fila- ments form, be fully depicted, since as seen on “slides,” AA BODIES OF LARGE CEREBELLAR CELLS. C BB PROTOPLASMIC BRANCHES AND FILAMENTS. c CC AXIS CYLINDER PROCESSES. after microtome section, the filaments are often broken, or cut asunder. ; The Purkinje cells, so called, are from .03 to .04 ofa millimeter in length; but the branched processes and fibers which emanate from them are of far greater extent. Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 159 These cells are collocated in a layer at a depth of less than a millimeter in the outer stratum of the foliated cere- bellar surface, and are nourished from a rich capillary plexus. They are supported, that is to say, held up otherwise than by their own consistency and firmness, by a system of adjuvant cells called neuroglia and formerly known as “spider cells,” or “basket cells,” which some observers have been inclined to classify as semi-nerve cells. In some tracts of the brain these spider or basket cells have been discerned as forming a net of supporting fibers about the body of the larger nerve cell. From what may be designated as the base of the nerve cell, there emerges a process, or protoplasmic branch, termed the “axis-cylinder process,” which dips downward into a layer of smaller nuclear cells and enters the great skein of nerve fibers which forms the central parts of the brain. How far this axis-cylinder process or fiber pro- ceeds has never yet been fully demonstrated, but it is believed to proceed to, or become continuous with a fiber which does proceed to, other tracts of the opposite hemis- phere of the brain, and even to pass down the spinal cord and extend to distant tissues of the body. Reverting again to the body of the cell, we find issuing from the other side, the side opposite the base and hence the part directed toward the outer surface, one and fre- quently two large branching processes, which often extend a relatively great distance toward the extreme outer sur- 160 Human Personality. face of the cortex and branch, like a tree top, into smaller and smaller processes and fibrils, till the best methods of preparation fail to trace them farther. In this outer layer of the cortex of the cerebellum (which has been inappropriately termed the molecular layer), the extended,.constantly branching processes of many cells lie side by side, contiguous, and in contact; and as these processes and fibrils are protoplasmic and sentient, we can scarcely doubt that they perceive each other from such contact, and communicate one with another. In a word, there is the strongest probability, short of certainty, that the business of willing movement outward to the mus- cles is dependent upon the concerted action of these cells. Besides the fibrils of the large Purkinje cells there are also in this outer “molecular” layer, minute fibrillar pro- cesses from great numbers of smaller cells which lie em- bedded in it; also nervous fibrils which, so far as . discovered, are not processes of cells, but seem to be of the nature of separate growths, analagous in some degree to the fibers of muscular tissue, which are not pure proto- plasm but of the nature of protoplasmic alloys. These latter minute fibers’ also lie in contact with the diffused fibrils of the Purkinje cells, and apparently bear sentient impulses from them downward into the vast hank of central fibers. Beneath this layer of large-branched cells, there is another class or variety of smaller nuclear cells, the bodies Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 161 of which have scarcely one-fourth the diameter of their superior neighbors. Many of these have small fibrillar processes, one of which is sometimes seen to rise toward the “ molecular” layer, while the other dips downward amidst the white fasces of fibers. The function of these smaller nuclear cells'is not easily divined. In the medulla oblongata and in the gray columns of the spinal cord are also found large cells with branched protoplasmic processes, somewhat resembling those of the cerebellum, with small nuclear cells and fusiform or spindle-shaped cells, in connection with the same mazy hanks and bundles of communicating fibers. And in the great hemispheres of the cerebrum, or grander brain, is found an arrangement of superior cells and inferior cells, with enormous hanks of fibers ‘similar to that observed in the cerebellum, but on a vaster scale. The superior and larger cells of the cerebral cortex differ in form from the Purkinje celis, and from their triangular outline have received the name of pyramidal cells. They are found in great numbers and at varying depths in the *“‘molecular”’ gray cortex of the cerebrum. The body of a large pyramidal cell averages about .04 mm. in length by .02 mm. in width. It occupies a free space, is surrounded by blood capillaries which supply. it with nutriment, and rests easily in lymph fluid, with a number of protective cells and repair cells in close attend- ance upon it. It is further supported by the nets of, 162 “Human Personality. “basket” cells (neuroglia), and altogether is placed in a position of ease, as if for intellectual labor. The large cell body contains granular protoplasm ; and within it are to be seen the essential cell nucleus, occasional vacuoles, and very frequently a few grains of pigment. The base of a pyramidal cell is directed toward the axis of the brain convolution, 7. ¢., toward the mass of white medulated nerve fibers of the interior. At the base, the protoplasmic cell-substance is prolonged downward in a number of branched filamentous processes; and ordinarily, about midway, one of these assumes the character of an axis- cylinder process, which, entering the mass of sheathed fibers, becomes one of them, extending eventually to some distant quarter of the brain or of the body. The other processes from the base, especially those from the outer corners, branch out in finer fibrils, which intermingle with those of other cells and with the minute fibers which cer- tain cells appear to produce and cast forth from their cell bodies. A still more remarkable process, however, rises from the apex or top of the cell. This apical process is directed upward or outward into the cortex, branching at intervals and extending to a comparatively great height into the “molecular” or outer layer of the cortex, where its fibrils lie in contact with those of numerous other cells. In certain situations, noticeably at the summit of the convolutions, some of the pyramidal cells attain great size, Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 163 comparatively, and are found to have bodies .12 mm. in length by .05 mm. in width; but, in far greater numbers, there is associated with them a class of small pyramidal cells, much like those described above as regards form and processes, but smaller, having bodies no more than .01 B B , B AAA LARGE PYRAMIDAL CELLS OF THE CORTEX CEREBRI. CCC SMALL PYRAMIDAL CELLS. BBB AXIS CYLINDER PROCESSES. DDD APICAL PROCESSES AND PROTOPLASMIC BRANCHINGS. mm. in length by .005 mm. in width. It is not impossible that: these small pyramidal cells are a reserve in slow process of development to the larger class, or would so develop under stimulus. 164 Human Personality. Beneath the layer of pyramidal cells there is also found in the cerebral cortex a “nuclear ’’ layer of small rounded cells, some of which have protoplasmic processes as seen in the cerebellum ; and there is also a fusiform group. We find that the entire surface of the cortex cerebri is composed mainly of these marvelous networks, associated with the plexuses of blood capillaries and the adjuvant neuroglia required for their physical support and mainte- nance. The superficies of the cortex, indeed, is by far the most remarkable structure of which minute anatomy has knowledge. The extent and intricacy of the fibrillar threads, loops, and twigs, formed by the mutual interlac- ing and interlooping of the thousands of tree-like branches which the cells send upward into it, are quite incomparable. In this respect the cortex of the brain is a hundred times more dense and more involved than are the tops of the trees in a dense forest. The branches, in their amazing ramifications, not unfrequently extend to a distance of twenty times the length of the cell body. It is as if each tree of a thick forest sent forth vines for- branches, which climbed to a distance of several hundred yards, dividing as they proceeded into a thousand vinelets and tendrils, which enwrapped and entwined everything in their course. ‘Such a jungle, growing to a height of several hundred feet, would no more than illustrate this astonishing lace- work of the protoplasmic fibrils of the cortical cells. Histologists were early led to inquire with wonder as to Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 165 the significance and use of this mazy output of living filaments. It cannot be wholly or largely for the purpose of ac- complishing cell nutrition, for these cells are nourished by the saprophytic or absorptive method, and not by the pre- hension of food particles. It is not to accomplish locomotion, for these cells rest nearly stationary in fluid beds, sustained by the nets of neuroglia. , The conclusion is reached, of necessity, that these far- branching processes are thrust forth for the purpose of mutual perception and communication, cell with cell. The sentient, protoplasmic fibrils touch, or so nearly touch that what one cell feels and knows is known and felt by its neighbor cell. It would follow that an impulse or a sensation which comes to one through its afferent fiber from the outer world is felt and known by all its mates throughout that entire convolution or tract of cells, and not only in that one convolution, but — so complete is the protoplasmic connection — throughout the whole brain, which is thus made to take cognizance of sensation as a unit, as a personal, self-conscious individual. For all this mazy web is demonstrated by the reactive agents of our staining fluids to be pure protoplasm ; sentient, living matter, capable of feeling, and able to convey sen- sation. When, therefore, a sensation, received either through the eye, the ear, the organs of taste and smell, or 166 Human Personality. through the thousand sensory nerves extending to the surfaces of the body, is transmitted along a sheathed nerve fiber and reaches one or more of these large cells of the cortex, intelligence of such a sensation is at once distrib- uted by means of the sentient network to a hundred neighbor cells, and from them is diffused over the entire brain, which thus receives tidings as if it were a single huge cell, instead of an aggregation of two hundred mil- lions of cells, each a distinct living creature. By means of this sentient bond of cell to cell, afforded by the protoplasmic networks, many millions of cell lives are blended in one common life, having one common sense. By means of this bond, too, a higher life of greater compass than that of the single cell is rendered possible. For by it thought, which is the business of comparing. what one cell or tract of cells knows with what aHBEE inexperience. Seicaran up; Serene es possible ; ; and, in the end, =F SEN e-dessloped. the human-intellect is is of no , Righier diavsatee ‘Shan the sentiéned..of a Brain edi: __By means of of E this extended: organization of cells, too, something more re than ‘a quantita ‘tive and-cumulative result is attained: “Human intelli- gence differs, not only in quantity but ac duprees fee gree, from Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 167 cell intelligence. By specialization and organization, a higher plane of intelligence is reached. Biological synthesis would lead us to infer that by means of organi- zation, higher and higher planes of sentience and intelli- gence have been successively attained —a long series of such ascending steps —since first the simple elements of life began to seek expression in terrestrial matter. Ex- tended organization and the specialization of parts to_ distinct uses have led to-those_more complicated actions— and-—reactious in the plastic, protoplasmic substance, the entirety of which issue-i igher kind of intelligience; higher because vastly more of form and of experience is included in the brain as a whole than in the cell. Briefly, we wish to convey the idea that, according to the present biological conception, the human intellect is something more than the associated sentiences of the two hundred millions, or more, of cells contained in the brain ; that it is an extended development of those sentiences to a higher grade of intelligence, rendered possible by the interaction and intercommunication of the cells. This association and this organization have been largely due to the wealth of protoplasmic branches and fibrils which the brain cells have thrown out, in order to come into touch and sentient contact ‘with each other. Once touching, by whatever agency contact is brought about, something of the nature of “current” from cell to cell throughout the whole brain appears to be set up and 168 Human Personality. maintained at a considerable tension during self-conscious- ness, 7. ¢., during wakefulness. To generate current for maintaining the consentience of the brain as a whole, an increased blood supply is requisite; work is done and energy absorbed. The condition, moreover, gives rise to waste products and leads to exhaustion of the cell, rendering a period of recuperation and rest necessary. The consentient circuit must needs be broken. In sleep, the brain cell ceases to live in its corporate or social capacity and reverts to its old-time, unicellular mode of life. Independent again, it nourishes itself and gains strength and substance afresh. Wonderful as are the protoplasmic processes which the neurons put forth, to secure consentience throughout the brain, they are not without their analogue in unicellular life. Amaba radiosa projects long linear rays, as it floats, to enable it to perceive and draw in food particles. Gremia terricola projects a net of filamentous rays and snares. Raphidiophrys elegans emits long, lance-like rays, or darts of exceeding tenuity, more minute than the finest fiber of silk. In the case of unicells these filaments are temporary, befitting. the wants and necessities of single cell life. In the case of the neurons the necessity is for filaments continuously extended. Revert for a moment and grasp the underlying principle of this vast development of the human per- sonality by the neurons. Ad initio, it founds on that Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 169 esoteric property. or primal ingredient, of living matter by virtue of which the sentient ions combine in the “atom,” the atoms in the self-mobile molecule of proto- plasm. For that great mystery, matter, is not a dead fabric, but an ever-living, sentient, self-moving substance. Out of this ever-living substance the physiological cell, as we find it in the human organism, has developed by a complexity of evolution which, if we could see it micro- scopically unfolded, would rival even that congeries of interlacing neurons in the human cerebrum. Yet we now make this neuron the unit of brain architecture. The infinitesimally minute fibrils by which ion established sentient relationship with ion, to form protoplasmic mole- cules and set up the personality of a cell, are invisible, as yet, merely a matter of conjecture. But the wonderful mechanism of filaments by means of which the brain cells establish sentient contact to form the human personality, is now visible. By means of this elate, retractile mechanism, this vast network of feelers, each cell of the brain is able to pool its self-life in the grand merger of brain life, but resumes that self-life again when, by shrinkage or retraction of the network of filaments, sentient contact with other cells is broken. From such sentient contact, thus induced and brought about, the larger personality ensues. Yet we merély see here on a large scale with millions of cells, what occurs when two, or three, or a hundred unicells 170 Human Personality. join and set up a communal life. By sentient contact with each other a new, larger personality comes into ex- istence, as if around a new axis of consciousness. Several cell lives are thrown into one. The tonie relationship, or reciprocity, suddenly, instantaneously changes. A new sentient polarity is struck; as if earth and moon came in contact and a new center of gravity were set up in the contiguous masses. Personality is not resident in any one prominent neuron, or monarch cell, but in all the cells, consentient together. There is no “king cell”’ ruling the others, in which per- sonal identity centers, no sovereign “ monad.” This view had its day and has been wholly discredited. No more is the human intellect located at any one portion or particu- lar tract of the brain, as for example, the corpus striatum ; this notion, too, had its day and passed to the limbo of similar contentions, made before the ‘consentience of the neurons was understood. Personality isa coherent blende of the lives of all the neurons, dissoluble and terminable in sleep, or from shock, or at death of the organism. This faculty or ability of the cell to unite its life with other cells, surrendering that life to become, for the time, part of a life greater than its own, has never received much recognition, as yet. None the less, it is the key- note of human personality; and no adequate conception of that personality, or soul, can be formed until it is comprehended. Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 171 In truth, it is time to cease speaking of the human intellect as a psychig integer, an indissoluble unit of in- telligence. Never was there a doctrine more at variance with the facts, or founding in greater ignorance of the human brain. A Society for Psychical Research which bases its investigations on the assumption of a detachable psyche, goes wrong at the outset, and from the very nature of things will wander in darkness and meet with little success in its quest. Human personality can now be resolved into its sepa- rate cell sentiences, each a cell personality. We are able to show how the cells (neurons) unite, by what means the greater personality (soul) is brought into being and maintained from moment to moment and from year to year, and also what physical steps and events are asso- ciated with either the temporary, or the eternal cessation of that personality. There is no longer excuse for ignor- ing these facts, or for teaching or assuming that self-con- sciousness is an infrangible unit, that lives “ unscathed amidst the crash of worlds, untouched by the death of matter itself.” Such «long bow” may do for sermons to hopelessly indoctrined sectaries, but has no place in mod- ern physiology. Not “the crash of worlds,” merely the impact of a cobble on the human cranium will cause the sentient neurons to retract their interlaced filaments, for a few moments it may be, or for hours, or forever. Self- 172 Human Personality. consciousness ceases until they resume contact. If the blow was heavy, it is never resumed. So ephemeral a thing is this self-conscious personality, this soul of man. And at best it is intermittent, with the alternate lighting and darkening of the terrestrial hemis- pheres. Once in twelve hours it must stop in order that the neurons may rest from the stress caused by their uni- fication as mind. The self-conscious personality is as much lost in sound sleep, as in organic death, only in the one case sentient contact is resumed, in the other not. Moreover, this personality varies in degree according as the brain cells come fully into sentient relationship, or but partially. In certain degrees of somnolence, a part of the brain cells appear to join contact, giving rise to dieams. A dream implies a minor degree of self-con- sciousness ; a part of the neurons are in contact; but the more complete personality of waking hours is not estab- lished. To be fully self-conscious, all the lobes, convolu- ‘tions, and tracts of cells must be involved. This is best accomplished after the cells have rested, after sleep, when each cell has for a time been withdrawn from the consen- tient bund and has had time to attend to its personal wants, nutrition and the expulsion of waste products which accumulate while the cells are consecrating their energies and merging their self-lives in the greater life of the organ- ism. The sentient contact is less perfect toward the end of the day, when the neurons are fatigued. The personality Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 173 is then much affected. We grow heedless and do work badly; the morale runs down to lower degrees; We are less hopeful, less ambitious, and yield more readily to temptation to evil courses; and this because the personality is weakened from less perfect sentient contact of the cells. If the brain of the criminal classes could be inspected and examined with this end in view, it would be found below normal in these particulars of the formation and maintenance of the personality. When one hemisphere of the brain is damaged, or paralyzed by pressure of clots from ruptured blood vessels, so that cerebration is limited mainly to the other hemi- sphere, we have the phenomena of a diminished personality, an intellect abated in volume and power. The axis of self-consciousness appears to have shifted. Personal identity continues; yet the patient remarks that he is a little strange to himself, and has the feeling that he is not quite the same. To his friends it is evident that he is not what he was before the seizure. In extreme old age, when the progressive enfeeblement of the neurons has become marked, at ninety or a hundred years, the personality dwindles to so feeble a flicker as scarcely to enable the person to be self-recognizant, or per- form the most habitual acts. It can hardly be termed personality, since there are constantly recurrent lapses to self-forgetfulness. Part passu with the cell exhaustion, personality slackens and deliquesces to the vanishing point, 174 Human Personality. giving that surest of physiological evidence that intellect has its source in the cells, shines forth from them, and disappears as these founts of life grow dry. From out the well-nigh infinite atomicity of matter, swift tides of ions, or electrons flash and flow through the combined mass of the neurons; and it is conjectured that this etheric medium forms the base of mentation. This is not yet science, but surmise, not: yet demonstrable. There is reason to theorize, however, as to such a * spiritual body ” within the “ natural body ’’ of the human organism ; a subliminal emanation or etheric eddy in which the neurons and other cells lie saturated or surcharged. There are many evidences, physical, electro-magnetic, actinic, that go to render the surmise a probable one. It falls in line with what we know otherwise of the marvelous attenua- tion of matter, its fluidity and almost inconceivably rapid motions. Something of this sort must exist, just what it is biological science does not yet undertake to prove; whether the residual ions and electrons of the universe form the *‘ luminiferous ether” of the older physicists; or whether, as is most probable, there are particles of lesser mass, having far more subtle and approximately instan- taneous motions; a descending series of such. particles dropping into profound depths of atomicity which the human plummet has not yet sounded, and where science, perhaps, never will find bottom. For matter is the one great mystery of the universe. Its Composite. and Dissoluble Nature. 175 It is in the amazing flux of these tides of etheric matter, that all “spirit”? phenomena, past and present, found and hold their place in popular credulity. The point always lost sight of by priest and devotee, charlatan and dupe, alike, is that it is only by virtue of long-perfected organi- zation that a “soul” is raised up to self-consciousness ; that the human personality requires and presupposes an organized brain which only the entire evolution of the human race has brought into existence; that intellect and mind result from organized union of the millions of neurons which form the brain and nervous system; that personal identity exists only by virtue of the coalition of these cells, and no longer than they coalesce ; that self-consciousness depends on that perfected mechanism of sentient filaments by means of which the neurons pool their self-lives to be- come consentient ; and that when this mechanism of union is impaired or destroyed, personality ceases, being resolved first to the inferior intelligences of the cells and ultimately to the lowly sentience of elementary matter— when the cells themselves die and are reduced to their component molecules and atoms. It is this point of the long-descended organization of living matter, which the biologist has ever to keep in mind; for if our science teaches one truth more conclu- sively than another it is that intellect and mind are never seen to exist in the absence of a delicately organized union of cells. 176 Human Personality. At the present stage of. popular credulity concerning disembodied spirit-life, the ground is taken by many, many even who lay pretention to scientific attainments, that as ion and electron appéar to possess a pyschic property they may be aggregated in a “spiritual body” which is liber- ated at the death of the organism, to fly, or float away, still continent, with personal faculties intact; that this sub- liminal self coheres and remains individual; that it still sees without eyes, hears without ears, smells without ol- factory tract, and tastes without gustatory follicles; that it still reasons without the interlaced pyramidals and moves without sensory ganglia and motor nerve fibers. According to this loose conception, indeed, the physical apparatus is really not at all necessary, being a kind of superimposed clog on “soul life” which sojourns in the animal organism rather than forms an essential inseparable component of it, the point being that at death, it. some- how frees itself, gets away, and preserves the much de- siderated self-consciousness. The argument is never very clear as to ways and means but takes such jumps as are necessary to gain the object sought. And grave professors of psychology announce with dignified aplomb, that they “see nothing inconsistent in this view.” | What volumes do such naive admissions speak for the present dense ignorance of this same self-exalted psychology! What utter lack of comprehension of the Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 1977 first principles on which nature acts for the production of the human personality ! The human soul is not a nebula of confluent ions, not an undeveloped gas of sentient atoms, not the raw dif- fused base of sentience, but a fabric long developed from this sentient base. Jon has combined with ion, “atom” with “atom,” and molecule with molecule in long-per- fected, orderly union to give utterance to the lowly intel- ligence of the cell —the protozoon. That lowly intelli- gence is the cell’s soul. It exists in such degree and at such a height of intelligence only by virtue of an intricate arrangement .of its component molecules and reciprocal action between them. To give utterance to the cell soul the sentient particles of which cell and nucleus are com- posed have to bear certain relations to each other, occupy certain positions one to another, and exert on each other a series of impulses, to and fro, direct and reflex. More- over, they have to preserve these relations and keep these positions one to another, in order that the personal identity of, the cell may be preserved from hour to hour and day to day. The cell soul depends on the stability of this form —to use the word in a German sense. There is a pro- ‘gressive development of the sentient substance to some- thing which is reciprocally very mazy and complex, before we get the cell soul; and while that cell soul continues to exist, the form must be preserved intact. Crush the cell, scatter, those sentient ions, atoms, and 178 Human Personality. molecules, and you have indubitably lost your cell soul ; it has sunk back to the basic sentience of universal matter. That the ghost of it goes floating about the universe is contrary to everything we know of, nature; for nature produces degrees of intelligence only by complex com- binations. The human organism differs from the cell only in being larger and more varied; since it is composed of cells organized, cooperative, and consentient. Ina general way, the human organism is to the cell what the city or the nation is to the individual citizen. In the organism we have a more voluminous life than that of the cell, but life of the same character and quality. The cell is an epitome of the human body, the body an organized multiple of the cell; the cell sentience is the essential unit of the human life, and, indeed, of all terrestrial life. A human life is, therefore, the consentient product of the cell lives of which the organism is made up. In the course of these long organizations of cell life, sense organs and apparatuses have developed which put the consentient colony or mass of brain cells in wide, extended communication with the external world, in touch largely with the universe, with the result that this person- alized mass of living matter becomes the recipient and repository of sensations and impressions of all sorts from all quarters. In a word, it is made the repository of knowledge, and while thus receiving and recording, be- Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 179 comes what we term educated, cultivated, refined, by a continuous process from infancy to old age. The cells of the brain not only interlace, but act recip- rocally one to another and reflexly, setting up a well-nigh inconceivably delicate form which remains in situ during the individual life, or is but slowly modified by fresh acces- sions of knowledge from without. Each cell neuron of the colony-blende is thus enabled to profit by the expe- rience of the whole and is formed, moulded, modified by the greater life and attainments of the whole organism. High degrees of intelligence are thus reached, the intel- lects of great thinkers, our Darwins, Weissmanns, Hux- leys, Haeckels, Gladstones, Spencers. In each we have an inherited mass or colony of neurons of exceptionally good quality and then, personally, a continuous develop- ment which, could it be displayed microscopically, would exhibit organization of such delicacy and complex arrange- ment, and yet such permanence through life, as would go far to set psychology on a new basis, and prove nothing less than a revelation of Nature’s method of producing a human soul! ae Upon this whole delicate organization and upon nothing less, personality depends from moment to moment, and from year to year. It is only by virtue of this mazy organization of living matter that intellect exists or can go on existing. What happens at death ? 180 Human Personality. First, the interlacing neurons let go their hold on each other — and self-consciousness of the person vanishes. It goes out, as flame vanishes when atoms of carbon and oxygen no longer combine. What next? The heart no longer propels the life tide of refined food in the blood to the brain — as in sleep — and after a few minutes the neurons themselves die from suffocation and starvation. All those thousands of little individual lives vanish, as did the larger self-consciousness of the person; for in each the consentient bond of living molecules, atoms, and ions is disrupted. What next? The dissipation of the brain as cadaver is a somewhat slower, more heterogeneous process, involving invasions of bacteria, disintegration, and reduction to more stable com- pounds, but tending ultimately to a return from the highly complex living substance, with all its maze of organization, to the abysmal base of the primeval ions and their lowly endowment of life-potential. What was once the soul has been resolved back to this elemental life-potential of unorganized, unconditioned matter. To think of it or represent it as self-conscious is to deny the first principles of Nature. Human self- consciousness is the long-derived result of evolution by organization of cell life. Intellect is the outcome of a million years of brain. The human soul is the flower of Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 181 terrestrial life, and at present, alas, almost as evanescent as a flower. What the scientific world has most need to apprehend is the principle by which Nature works to form a soul. The theological penchant for conceiving of the soul as an irrefrangible unit or entity, leads constantly to errone- ous conclusions concerning it and concerning its fate after the death of the organism. Even introspection shows us that self-consciousness is but a play of the primary sentience of matter over an organized fabric. of brain; that we are ,intelligent as far as the ex- perience of life has impressed itself on that brain fabric and no farther; that obliterate this recorded experience of life, ancestral and personally acquired, and naught remains to us of personality; naught save impersonal feeling. Individuality, personality, soul, comes only after an axis of self-consciousness has been set up in living matter; it grows up about such a life-axis by virtue of organization of the living substance. Under certain favorable conditions the low-sentient property of un- organized matter appears able to inaugurate unicellular life. The conception of an unorganized “ spirit” personality afloat in space, coming and going, formed and unformed from time to time, is an anomally which presents itself with growing absurdity as one’s knowledge of Nature increases. 182 Human Personality. In the case of a colony of unicells, combining for a com- mon life, the resultant consensus of cell lives is a simple one, differing little, save in volume, from that of any one of the component cells. In the human personality — not differing in. principle — we have the consensus of cell lives extensively developed. The cells of the optical tract, for example, are stored with scenic impressions that come to them through the apparatus of the.eye; yet do these stand connected, sentient and perceptive, with every other cell of the brain, and flash to each their pictures of the external world. In like manner the cells of the auditory, olfactory, and gustatory tracts transmit to the entire aggregate of cells with which they are in touch, sensations of sounds, flavors, and odors of which they are the recipi- ents. From the sympathetic system, from the heart, the -lungs, and the other organic apparatuses, as also from the peripheral nerve cells, come constant tides of sensation which impress every cell in the brain. So extended and perfect is the mechanism of contact that each distinct im- pression from the external world, or from the different organs of the body, is flashed to, and pervades the whole unified group of neurons. In greater or less degree they all take part, although the organized division of labor has delegated to the motor neurons the function of response. To trace the education of brain and describe the de- velopment of intellect from the interaction between the sentient fabric of cells within the cranium, and the external f Its Composite and Dissoluble Nature. 183 world, would exceed the purpose of this paper. The pic- ture presented is one of manifold sensation, impression, record and adaptive growth, from birth to adult life. The coherent mass of neurons stands all-cognizant about a common axis of self-consciousness ; for sentience like the ' other attributes of universal matter, displays polarity. A more detailed account of how personality develops, grows to its zenith prime, and wanes in “old age” toward the dark nadir of extinction, is reserved for the future. In extreme “old age” there is in truth little left of the “soul” to save, either by divine intervention, or human achievement. Personality has indeed become but a “shade” of its former self, a feeble, lambent corpse-light, flickering to its cessation. It is the cell-neurons which need a reincarnation; personality would then up-brighten again as when oil is renewed in a burned-out lamp. The cell-neurons of the great highly developed brain- colony will continue to shrink in senescence and lose the power to maintain personality, until such time as we dis- cover how to regenerate them in situ. Such is the present human situation. Is it not bettér to face this situation bravely, and start afresh in our quest for immortal life on the firm ground of natural salvation ? And are we really worthy of immortal life, would it be best for us, until we can achieve it for ourselves ? Nor is the achievement superhuman. In the next an- nual edition of this publication (1906) we shall attempt 184 Human Personality. to point out what has. to be done to regenerate the physio- logical cell, and along what lines research must be pushed to this end. The Intimate Causes of Old Age and Organic Death Examined with a view to their alleviation and ultimate removal THE INTIMATE CAUSES OF OLD AGE AND ORGANIC DEATH. EXAMINED WITH A VIEW TO THEIR ALLEVIATION AND ULTIMATE REMOVAL. LASSIC fable records the catastrophe of the Earth- born who, rashly importunate, strove to scale Heaven; and Hindu sages have taught that the Lords of Life and Death have jealously delimited their realms and shut the doors, lest mortals pass the forbidden thresholds ; that in the present orbited order of matter and the cosmos, death must follow fast on life, till the order ends; till orbital motion unlooses its swift arcs and the bright, huge- grown orbs rarify in the fire-dust of another universal nebula. Not till then may the Lords of Life and Death loose our mortal bonds. Yet even in most ancient days there lived a Prome- theus, an sculapius, an Epicurus. “Him neither fear of the Gods, nor thunder-bolts, in- timidated, nor portents in the skies, but rather roused the innate courage of his soul, that he should be the first to break down the jealously guarded portals.” What man has dared, man will dare again and more. 187 188 Natural Salvation. “The bold breed of Japetus presses on, unabashed, with face set to the dangers of an unknown future.” Across | the gulf of more than two millenniums, the hardy cour- age, the bold initiative, of these great-hearted ones of old, lends inspiration. The breed survives, the breed that brought down fire from the emperean, that raised the dead. | That is ever the scientific spirit, the spirit that came from partaking of the Tree of Knowledge, the spirit that will accept nothing less than an untrammeled liberty to és seek knowledge and use it. To-day, in these opening years of the 20th century, we face the greatest, the gravest problem which has ever en- gaged the attention of men, the problem of controlling and prolonging our lives at will. Medicine, all medical practice, is an effort to prolong life, or postpone the immediate dissolution of the human body. From the 18th to the 18th centuries, too, while chemistry was still nascent, there were mystic alchemists and alleged Rosicrucians who sought to grasp a sporadic immortality by elixirs and strange decoctions. But not until this last quarter of a century has the grander idea been grasped, that prolonged life, looking toward immortal life, will be the natural outcome of the evolution of life on the earth. The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 189 It was an idea that could hardly have found place until the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man were written, since it is the logical comp!ement, the sequence of these doctrines of nature. It could hardly have come be- fore, save, perhaps, as visional in the brain of a philosopher. But following the epoch of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall in England ; of Humboldt, Goethe, Helmholtz, Haeckel, Weissmann in Germany, and their biological contempora- ries in France, America, and other lands, the achievement of immortal life follows as the keystone of the arch, the climax, the perfected fruit and flower of the evolution of life on the earth. Follows from the natural growth of knowledge in the human brain, presenting itself in the light of a great achievement. For, with the dawn of this new century, we have wakened to the hard fact that whatever we have here on the earth we must achieve for ourselves. More life, longer, happier, personal life, idealized as immortal life, has been the dream of all the human ages. It is the voice of nature — nature that everywhere makes oath that to live is better than to die; and that life even under hard conditions is worth preserving. This is the “instinct” of the cell-of-life, both as a protozoon and when united and organized in the metazoon; it is the voice of the cell, heard crying up from its lowly depths in the tissues of the organism. It is the faith of the sub- conscious life in us. 190 Natural Salvation. Ever since neolithic days there are evidences that human beings have regarded death with repugnance and fear and have made rude efforts looking to salvation. The primitive religious cults all breathed this grief at death, this desire for more life. But for the last ten thousand years human beings gen- erally have despaired of escape from death by self-effort, and made their appeal for salvation to supernatural powers. In their ignorance of nature and the causes of natural phenomena, a vagrant belief in disembodied spirit life took form: the “shadow,” the shade, the psyche, the umbra, the manes, the wraith, the ghost. Full of doubt and of fear as the belief was, it yet proved a species of solace, solace for the hard fate of individual life. The hope of more life has never been given up, never can be given up, since otherwise life would not be life; but as death appeared inevitable, our far human an- cestors comforted themselves with this quasi belief in “soul” life after death. The comfort was always hazy ; the hope had always to struggle against common sense, and faith was ever infirm; yet, after a manner, the sick and dying found a nebulous solace in it; death was a little easier. Sacerdos entered, put on his robe and took charge of the vagrant belief in ghost life. What had been merely a fitful belief was exploited in a creed, with doctrines. Rite and ritual were prescribed, sacrifices enjoined, and The Intimate Causes of Old Age. IgI tithes collected. Reason and conscience were borne down by the voice of sacerdotal authority, nether worlds for torture were invented, and blind faith exacted under ban and penalty. Fane, shrine, temple, mosque, and cathe- dral were reared, and vast guilds of insolent priesthood organized. «Religion reared her proud head in the skies ; human life groveled foully in the dust.” That was the price, the penalty, which humanity paid for longing after more life, for believing that somehow there would be immortal life somewheres. We should fix our attention, not on the errata of creed and religion, but on the nature of this great Hope of the human heart, the Hope that inspired it all. For, if human beings had all along been persuaded with certainty that this earthly life of three score~and ten years were all to which they could attain, there would have been no religion, no priest. It was the longing for more life which made religion possible in human history. Sacerdos proved the greatest of hypnotists. Humanity passed into the sleep of the creeds, the long-night incubus of faith in the supernatural, with its phantasmagoria of gods and devils, nether-worlds and upper-worlds, limboes, - purgatories, torture-hells, and gaudy-golden heavens ! A long, wild, troubled night of the human brain. Ten thousand years of supernatural religion. It is from this nightmare of indoctrination, this trance of dogmatism, this long-woven spell of sacerdotal authority, 192 Natural Salvation. that we are now waking, waking in the clearer light of our growing knowledge of nature. Passing over the old-time theories and beliefs as to old age and death — beliefs connected with the religions — it will be worth while first to make a resumé of existent knowledge and views on the subject. So few persons actually die of “old age,” it has often been denied that such cause of death really exists. More than seventy per cent. of all deaths is from acute or chronic invasions of the disease producing bacteria, either sudden, sharp attacks, or prolonged sieges. From birth to advanced age, the human organism is continuously invaded, assaulted, and preyed upon by noxious unicellular life. In time, these multiplied assaults, and the damage resultant from them, inaugurate very complex, far-reaching complications, difficult. to trace and estimate. For an organ, or tissue, enfeebled by microbic attacks, gives forth an altered, inferior product which in turn embarrasses and lowers the vital tone of other organs and tissues. Thus the entire organism is progressively impaired and depressed from normal function. In this condition it is less resistant to the never-ceasing attack from without; for a high vital tonicity is the organisin’s natural defence. As years pass it becomes impossible to calculate from cause to effect the damage done by bacteria. We are able only to draw a The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 193 general conclusion that the vital coefficient of the organic life, which in theory should be biostatic, is thus slowly diminished to a point where the personal life succumbs to almost any fresh attack from without, or new insurrection within. For certain disease germs become intrenched in the tissues, so to speak, and there bide their time to deliver further assaults, and go on forays up and down the blood circulatory. Moreover, the roaming white cells or cor- puscles of the blood sometimes assume the-role of intra- organic assailants ; and this brings us to consider one of the latest theories of old-aging, that of Prof. Elie Metch- nikoff, of the French Institute, namely, that after middle age, these leucocytes, now known as phagocytes, begin to prey on the more highly differentiated cells of the stable tissues, bone, muscle, skin, etc., and even on the neurons of the brain and cord, to the extent that a gradual wasting away ensues, with the consequent phenomena of old age. Professor Metchnikoff distinguishes two classes of phagocytes, the macrophages and microphages, the latter smaller than the former, having extensible nuclei which permit them to pass freely through all the tissues. It is to the more voracious macrophages, however, which are essentially minute animals, that the damage to the organic tissues in advanced life is chiefly due: they turn cannibals, so to speak, and devour the cells of the associated tissues ; and the cause of this unnatural perversion of appetite, or morale, is attributed to poisons of the nature of ptomaines, 194 Natural Salvation. produced by several orders of putrefactive bacteria which, as life advances, find lodgment all along the alimentary tract, becoming “ naturalized ” there in immense numbers. Professor Metchnikoff sees reasén to hope that these invasions of putrefactive bacteria may be combatted by ingestion of the kefir microbe, found in specially soured milk, and himself makes use of it. He also believes that the cells of all the tissues may be “reinforced” by sub- stances of the nature of serwms, obtained by the now familiar methods of inoculation of the horse and other animals. As a result of all his studies and discoveries, Professor Metchnikoff announces his belief that the present “span of human life” may be prolonged by from sixty to eighty years; that the healthy working period of middle age may extend considerably past a century, thus placing himself in harmony with Buffon, who believed that the natural lifetime of man was not less than one hundred and twenty years. Professor Metchnikoff’s idea of human longevity is similar, his view being that although diseases and improper modes of living now hold human life down to seventy or eighty years, these evils and bad conditions may be so far ameliorated, that old age will come three score years later. We do not understand Professor Metchnikoff to teach that greatly prolonged life, looking to immortal life, can be attained by applied science. His position is, that “old age” may be deferred, not remedied; that it is in the end The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 195, an unavoidable sequence to all organic life. The concep- tion that sentience in matter is a constant, a deathless property or attribute of the ultimate ion and corpuscle, and hence that, founding on this constant, immortal life is potentially attainable and logically possible in organisms, perfected by applied science, is an essentially New World idea, a concept of the American brain, which is not as yet much recognized in Europe. It is one of those great dominant ideas of the human brain which unfold only as the westward-moving Aryan makes his new departures from continent to continent. «This sentient property of matter is a constant like its corelative, gravitation, and indestructable as matter itself. It is the eternal well-spring of Nature. «Here, on this eternal constant, the intimate life of matter, itself, founds the hope of a possible immortality for man. No vicissitude of earth has yet been observed to deteriorate its quality. Everlasting as the stars, it shines from the core of each ultimate particle of matter. « Death comes to us, then, not from a law of nature. The law of nature is life, not death. Universal matter lives from eternity. It never dies, not even the least particle of it, but lives immortally. Life is the grand law of the universe from eternity to eternity. “Our problem is to make a certain definite mass and form of living matter — an organism — live on this earth as long as the organism shall will so to do. 196 Natural Salvation. ‘Each and every one of the causes of old age and death is of the nature of an ordinary physical cause, fairly within human power to avoid or remedy, and many of which in fact we are every day avoiding and remedying. It is the sum total of these causes which has rendered death a seemingly inevitable sequence to life. Yet not one of them but can singly be warded off by human science and foresight, and if one, why not all? It is a question of greater knowledge with us, not that we die from any immutable law of nature as heretofore held and taught. “At length, after centuries of dogma, erratic faith, and equally erratic doubt, we are in possession of facts from which a creed may be rationally forecast. Those facts demonstrate the continuous evolution of life, under nature, from lowliest forms to man: a long, weary, and unaided struggle upward through organization, from the elemental sentience of matter to the human intellect. But is all this grand effort to terminate in the semi-brutal, half-developed creature, man, with his ideas unrealized ? Has evolution ceased? On the contrary, it is our faith that we have as yet seen but the nether limb of evolu- tion. Its grand complement has still to be disclosed in the perfecting of the human organism and the removal of the causes of disease, old-agirfg, and death; in a word, the achievement of immortality. Immortal life will be won by applied knowledge. Man will save his own soul. The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 197 Earth is to be made heaven. ‘Salvation’ is to come from knowledge and the apotheosis of the race. This is what evolution means. This is what life on the earth is struggling upward to win: Immortality, Happiness, Heaven ; ideals to be realized by human effort. The tenets of all the great religious systems foreshadow it. It is time to understand this. It is time to realize our true situation on the earth, and cease from chasing mirage. We have now sufficient knowledge to begin to save our own souls. As well face the facts of our mortal condition to-day as spend another thousand years doting on fond illusions. If we would live, we must save ourselves. This is the religion of life; the religion of self-sal vation. It is not ‘atheism’; not ‘materialism,’ in the old crass sense. Not ‘infidelity’; rather fidelity to the best and the essential doctrines of all religions. Not ‘skepticism,’ but Hope and Faith in Life. Not the ‘idle, new dream’ of ‘Scientific Materialism,’ but the Dream of all the Ages, the grand scheme of Nature, maturing and going into effect since first our earth became the theater of life.’’ * But aside from these alleged ravages of phagocytes, there are functional causes of organic decline which come from lack of coordination and cooperation in the ensemble of organs and apparatuses of the body. * Living Matter, 1888. 198 Natural Salvation. To make this quite plain we must conceive of the organism as made up of thirty or more groups or differenti- ations of cells: bone cells, muscle cells, liver cells, lung cells, renal cells, epithelial cells, blood cells, nerve and brain cells; in a word, all the diversely specialized tracts and groups of tissue cells which together form the animal body and are necessary to that grand cooperative effort exhibited in a human life. There must be a stomach, a liver, a pancreas, etc., for digestion; lungs for oxygenation; kidneys for elimina- tion ; and blood for tlie further transformation and trans- portation of the food to all the various groups of cells. All must be fed every second. Each organ and apparatus produces a different product; and all must labor together in a kind of organic rythm, balance, and counterbalance. And this rythm and counterbalance are very nicely and delicately adjusted, so much so, that the least aberration or dereliction from duty and function, disorders the entire organism. So much so, that it is the highest art of ‘physiology to watch over the organic entity and preserve the balance of organic interaction. But as years pass, one organ, or another, or many, tend from the wear and tear of life as we lead it, to become impaired and disabled. There are deposits of “formed matter,’? diminution of the numbers of cells from inflammations and poisonous ingestions. One organ or another thus fails to do its part, the balance is lost, The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 199 a vicarious action begins; what we term “constitution ” is broken up and discordant action ensues. Most persons die of this organic discord. A number of years ago, the startling statement was put forward, that organic decline, ending in death, comes from a progressive asphyxiation of the tissue cells; that after adult life, we slowly suffocate, from a thickening and hardening of the membranes of the alveolar sacs of the lungs, oxygen no longer passing freely in, nor carbon dioxide out. The hardening of the alveolar membrane is aggravated from impregnation by minute dirt particles in respired air; it being a avell-established fact that the lungs are progressively discolored from infancy to old age; and that the lungs of certain craftsmen, stone-workers, dry grinders, and others, are very palpably thus impregnated. As a proximate cause of organic decline, there must be something in this hypothesis, which will have to be reckoned with in any future effort to alleviate the causes of old age. But it can scarcely be said to go to the root of the matter, and we are still left to inquire why other- wise than by impregnation with visible particles of dirt, the alveoli become hardened, lifeless sacs, impervious to gases, instead of the living, pervious membrane of childhood. And this leads to casual mention of a theory of old-aging, suggested from this Laboratory in 1896, namely, the 200 . Natural Salvation. theory that the cells of all the tissues are slowly im- pregnated, embarrassed, and killed out by invisible dirt particles which are ingested with our food, enter the blood plasma, and finally reach the cell by absorption. Dirt, which has been well defined as “ matter in the wrong place,” is commonly supposed to be a molar condi- tion of terrestrial matter which does not prevail nor exist in the molecular realm. Hence, by virtue of this molec- ular exclusion and the elective power of living matter to choose and select such particles as it pleases for its nutri- tion, the protoplasmic cell has been presumed to be’ in the “chemically pure” state. There is reason to fear, how- ever, that such an assumption is gratuitous and far from accurate. Only a microscopist knows the full bitterness of the life struggle with dirt. It is doubtful whether even a gas can be, or at least has been, generated chemically pure, so omnipresent is dirt. Dirt is Nature’s heterodoxy. The animal organism is a great destroyer of dirt; that is to say, the various ferments and « juices,” which it is the life work of many groups of the somatic cells to se- crete, act chemically on dirt as well as on true food, on innutritious as well as nutritious substances, to break them down to the elemental condition. Having passed the digestive tract, too, and entered the blood plasma, still further reduction and elimination take place, before the The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 201 highly rectified particles go to the cells of the nobler tis- sues and organs. In an adolescent organism, normal, healthy, and strong, this eliminative process is practically allequate. Adventi- tious substances are expelled or broken down and resolved chemically. But in older organisms, during periods of weakened action, the process of resolution is less complete; micro- scopic dirt may accumulate in enfeebled cells. If not dirt, what is that darker-tinted residuum in old proto- plasm ? Ts there dirt-in the blood? Or rather, to how great an extent is the blood a dirty liquid? In other words, is dirt taken up, associated with nutritious particles, by the absorbents and lacteals? We know that the fine particles of inorganic substances, administered as medicines and poisons, pass readily into the blood, and speedily enter the protoplasm of brain and muscle cells. In the examination of old amoebex, which are nourished in dirty water, we see a great deal of this. Under high power the same is discernible in a culture of bacteria which can be killed out by an admixture of dirt in the fluid. It is not of the chemical action of inorganic particles in the protoplasm of the cells that we are here treating, how- ever, but of their merely negative behavior, or presence as dirt. A particle of arsenic, antimony, or iron may ex- 202 Natural Salvation. cite protoplasmic action which may speedily result in its expulsion, resolution, or encystment, where a merely re- actionless particle of silica, or lime, might remain as an obstruction. Is the somewhat discolored, more rigid, less elate condition of the fibrils of a brain cell, in an aged organism, due to infiltered, accumulated dirt ? The question here raised, as regards dirt, is whether minute particles of inorganic matter, or obdurate organic matter, entering the plasma of the blood, find ultimate lodgment in the cells, and remaining there undissolved, chemically unassimilated, or unexpelled, give rise to those aspects which distinguish aged from young cells. Are accumulations of microscopic dirt in the cells one charac- teristic of old age? Is all organic life from infancy to old age and death a hapless struggle with dirt ? Since 1896, however, we have seen reason to believe, that while the dirt hypothesis of old age contains scintilla of truth, it must, like the foregoing, be ranked with proxi- mate rather than with primary causes of old aging. Dr. De Lacy Evans also believed that old-aging re- sulted from accumulations of ‘earthy salts,” largely phosphate of calcium and silica, in the tissues, and the unregulated wasting of the cell protoplasm by oxygen. This opinion has gone the rounds of both medical and popular journals, with variations. We now know that The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 203 such earthy salts, to some extent and in some tissues, at certain stages of life, do accumulate in a way to embar- rass the cell life and to weaken the tissue. But this con- dition is far from being constant, or continuous, or secularly progressive. It is incidental and often associated with microbic invasions. As to the undue wasting of the cellular protoplasm by oxygen, that is largely a myth; a far greater difficulty in old organisms is to get oxygen to the cells at all; they smother for want of it. An hypoth- esis of the old-aging of the nervous system and cerebral tissue of man has also been advanced from the progressive effects of continuous or oft-repeated mnemonic_and sensory impressions in the protoplasmic substance of the brain and minor nerve centers. Memory, experience, and the growth of the intellect depend on impressions from the external world which come to the brain through the organs of special sense and the general sensibility, and remain there as pictures. Such impressions, or pictures, are believed to be physically in- wrought in the sentient substance by something akin to dynamic action, and, as is well known, will remain there, mentally recognizable, for many decades. From such portraiture of the external world, physically impressed in the material substance of the brain, we have what is com- monly termed, experience. This experience, however, is something more than an accumulation of impressions or pictures; for it is accompanied by the formation of 204 Natural Salvation. opinions and intellectual growth. There is assimilation of the collected data as well as mere accumulation ; growth of the garner itself into an organic sentient whole, its substance being arranged, moulded, or impressed in such a degree, that a recent writer has not hesitated to define the “soul” as “the form of the organism.” It is a well-known fact, moreover, that the frequent repetition of the same impressions, as of sensory expe- riences, scenes, and sounds, has a marked tendency to dull our sensibility to them. Equally well observed, too, is the loss and confusion of memory in advancing life. Hence, the inference that the constant repetition of im- pressions and the continuous bepicturing of the brain sub- stance with mnemonic imagery has its natural, physical limits which cannot be long outrun without utter confu- sion and blurring of the material medium, as when one picture‘ is printed upon and over another. And the conclusion derived, touching long life, has been that a lifetime greatly exceeding seventy-five years must, of necessity, result in mental dullness and confusion of thought. . ‘Thomas Parr, however, at the age of one hundred and fifty-two, is alleged to have been ‘“ bright” and normal as to “all his faculties.” Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, England, «distinctly remembered” the battle of Flodden Field, fought one hundred and fifty-seven years previously. Robert Evans, of Spitalfields, “clearly recollected” the The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 205 execution of Charles I., one hundred and thirty-two years before. What is known as to this subject goes to show that if the data of experience are normally assimilated with one’s existent knowledge and incorporated as such knowledge in the mind, no confusion will result from their progress- ive accumulation. In the aged, too, recollections of youthful years often appear to be revived and to grow vivid, although it is a matter of common experience that our memory of past events fades with the lapse of time. Closely associated with the above theory of old-aging is the psychic theory, namely, that we age and die because after the purely animal or sensory cycle of brain develop- ment is accomplished in mating and procreation, there fol- lows a period or condition of non-development. A new, higher cycle of mind growth is not initiated, and does not begin, with its new interests, new ambitions and fresh in- centives to live and act. The brain neurons do not take a fresh start to live, and hence the stasis of advanced age ensues, with its common conviction that life has been lived, and that naught remains but to exist for a few years more and die. According to this view, if it were the fixed belief of human beings, the current faith, that after the age of forty-five, a new-cycle of life was to begin, a new, later course of study aud preparation for another life effort 206 Natural Salvation. would be inaugurated; and if the world and the social system offered a field for this (as in future it will do), then the stasis of advanced life would not set in; human beings at fifty would be seen brightening up for a higher, stronger life, with better, loftier ideals. The chief obstacle to this at present, is not that these new cycles of brain development cannot be initiated, but that the world and society offer no field for it; the hostile presence of the younger generation pushes the adult gen- eration off the stage of life. What is needed for pro- longed life of the individual is field for him to live and develop. : We have abundant evidence in numerous observed instances, that, at the age of fifty, sixty, or eighty, the human brain may enter on a new curriculum of study, growth, and achievement; and that, part passu, with this new effort, the cell life of the whole organism has been notably quickened and strengthened. For it is ever the brain life which quickens, sustains, and maintains the life of the other organs and apparatuses of the animal organism. A provisional importance must therefore be attributed to the argument for the psychic cause of old age. To the writer it is at least apparent that the first step toward the achievement of deathless life will be from the psychic side. The assumption that the brain, progressively, is dulled by multiplex mnemonic impression founds on the idea The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 207 that the brain is like a photographic plate or film. Whereas, what we know of the brain neurons leads us to conclude that there is little or no analogy of this kind ; that the building up of a personal intellect bears no resemblance to photography. A human intellect, with memory, implies a corelated, cooperative effort on the part of many millions of cells, acting together, pooling their cell lives about a personal axis. Each cell is thus stimu- lated to live in a certain way, rather than stamped by a photographic picture from without. The cell contents, or sentient substance of each cell, is in a state of constant flux and mutation, replaced every second by fresh particles, not “ fixed” as in a photograph. An intellect is, therefore, a certain manner or mode of cell life relatively to the other cells of the entire brain, not a series of photographic plates packed away in the brain. The instances of double personality, double consciousness, and recurrent personality, indicate that when, from any cause the first or former personality ceases, a second personality may be- gin, as if about a new personal axis, and go on to develop another intellect of the brain cells, quite as if the first had never existed. It is, therefore, fair to infer that if at the age of fifty or sixty, it was the custom of, human beings to enter on a new cycle of brain life, and there were opportunity and social field for it, a new axis of personality would slowly take the place of the old, and that the cell life of the brain would 208 Natural Salvation. arrange itself about it, quite as readily as if no former de- velopment had taken place. The problem of such pro- longed brain life would lie in giving the brain cells a pure, normal food, through an uninjured blood circulatory, and preserving them from the ills.that come from associa- tion with other impaired cell groups of the organism. The brain appears to be a colony of cells destined to live forever and capable of doing so, but for the weakness, diseases, and frailities of the organism in which it has developed. On the one hand, it is the organism, by means of which, it has come forward and arisen to its present high estate of intellectual puissance ; and, on the other hand, it is this same organism which now drags it down to death. The “cometh up like a flower” theory of old age has long been a popular one. When we regard the-growth, blooming, and death of a summer flower, the shooting upward of the flower stalk of a poppy, for example, with its blossom, its seeding, and its suddenly ensuing juicelessness and dead rigidity, we con- template phenomena not wholly unlike what takes place in the human organism, when regarded in the large, pass- ing from infancy to maturity and old age. What has taken place in the poppy stalk? One class of plant cells has developed, multiplied, and The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 209 from the products which have issued from them has pro- duced the stalk proper and leaves. Immediately another class has, in like manner, given rise first to the bud, then to the gorgeous blossom with its stamens and pistils. Fertilization follows in-its timed order ; and later another class of cells matures as seed. It has been held that these latter cells in some manner sap and eviscerate, so to speak, the cells of every other tissue of the plant, and thus sapping them of their life elements, or germs, condense these latter in the seed, where it may long lie dormant, yet capable of producing another plant ; and that the parent plant, thus sapped and eviscerated, dies naturally, its life being virtually taken away and carried forward to the seed for another year. The observed fact that the stalk and lower leaves of the poppy remain green until late in the season, if the flower stalk is nipped, has been regarded as evidence of this view; namely, that the phenomena of its growth, maturity, and dry death stand for a development, successively, of one class of cells after another, from the seed around to the seed again; that the plant dies when the germs of life have left the stalk and leaf and passed upward to their ‘final lodgment in the seed. It is an easy theory, easily derived, easily argued, and falls in superficially well with certain aspects of the cell doctrine and with current theology. But it carries a great and vicious untruth; vicious in 210 Natural Salvation. that it would indicate that the primary and ultimate object of all plant life is to bear seed; of all animal life, to bring forth offspring. . Per contra, we believe that the object of all life, vege- table and animal, is to live and feel the joys of living; and that seed and offspring are produced because, under the hard conditions of the earthly habitat, we are unable to live on continuously. That is to say, if the earth had always been an easy habitat for life, there would have been no seed, no offspring, no death. Offspring and seed result originally from hardships and prospective death to the parent cell, and are not the object of living, but rather an evasion of death. It seems to me very desirable to have these premises right at the outset as contrasted with the contrary view, and to set off free from a radically wrong theory of life. To return now to our observation of the poppy stalk, whatever of fate, of final tendency to go to seed, there is in it, will be found due to heredity, established by long conformity to climate and other conditions; a habit of living which leads the different classes of cells to develop and produce tissue at a certain time, relatively to each other; and in the manner in which these different tissue growths of the stalk and flower limit and restrict each other. It is now more than doubtful, and is discredited, whether anything of the nature of a migratory germ, or “ biophor,” The Intimate’ Causes of Old Age. 211 ascends from the tissue cells to the seed, and is thus trans- ferred from plant to plant and year to year. Why does the poppy live? It lives to express its life, its personal life, and to take its personal satisfaction from living. It is an organized effort at fruition on the part of sentient matter. Seed is its mode of escaping death. We have radically to change this former conception. But granting the general truth of the doctrine that seed and death result primarily from the hard conditions of terrestrial life, which make it impossible for metazoons to live on continuously and deathlessly, it has been argued that all existent forms of life have fallen irretrievably into this mode of living and dying. Not only do the same conditions of hardship and limitation still prevail which first induced seed and death, but every plant and animal lives by virtue of, and in accord with, a plan or an arrangement of the germinal matter in the seed, which compels it to unfold as did the parent, and inevitably produce seed and die. That is to say, the arrangement of the protoplasmic molecules in the germ, seed, or ovum, is such that the successive growths of tissue must, if the plant or animal is to live at all, succeed each other according to the order of their arrangement or garnering in the germ. In the main, this view must be conceded to be upheld by the facts. Heredity does thus hold all forms of life within its iron clutch. Plants and the lower orders of 212 Natural Salvation. ° animal life tend not to change, and for the most part would perish if suddenly altered conditions compelled great changes ; and it is but to a single tissue, even in the human organism — the cerebral tissue — that we can look with any confidence for a successful contest with the restrictive dominion of heredity. That one tissue is still progressive and capable of self-direction and self-elevation. There is also what may be termed the hypnotic hypoth- esis of old age, the ‘idea that old age ensues from a fixed belief, or mental expectation, that it will occur at a cer- tain age. That from earliest ages this expectation ‘has taken the form of creed and acts, after middle life, as a species of inveterate hipnosis, compelling the person to behave after a senescent fashion, and feel the sensations and even experience the pains of senility. In a word, that we grow “old” because we believe that we shall grow old. It is, therefore, an attitude of mind that causes old age; and the inference is, that if a fixed belief that man is deathless and will never grow old, could be substituted for this, his present belief, greatly prolonged life would follow. In support of this theory, the well-known phy sci effects of innervation are cited. Muscle cells severed from their connection with nerve and brain soon atrophy and die. The same is-true of other tissues. Stimulation The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 213 from the brain and spinal cord is necessary to the life and function of all the associate tracts of cells. These live only from their connection with the brain and are depen- dent on it for motif to live and work. It is this pre- eminent brain colony of cells which not only controls and dominates, but continuously furnishes the stimulus — the tide of corpuscles — that impel the servile tracts of. cells to activity in their appointed ways. Severed from the brain they turn idle, run riot, or lapse into desuetude. Moreover, there is the vast array of observed phenomena where fixed beliefs and the mental state, known as expecta- tion, are seen to have profoundly affected the operations of the human body, even to producing the semblance of virulent diseases and death itself; of scar, stigmata, and all the strange phenomena that ensue from religious exaltation. In fact, the evidence is complete as to the brain’s dominancy over the organism. Of the hypnotic theory, however, it must be observed _ that it fails to account for the old-aging of animals, insects, and plant life. | A celebrated physician was accustomed to say, that “a ” man is as old as his arteries;” and from this dictum, which has its grain of truth, has come what may be termed the blood-circulatory theory of old age. ‘Succinctly, that excluding what may be classed as accidental deaths 214 Natural Salvation. from bursting arteries or veins and from arterio-capillar schlerosis, theré is in aging organisms a slow chemico- mechanical contraction and diminution of the caliber of the capillaries, which results in starvation of the tissue cells, from exclusion of the blood corpuscles and even of the blood plasma. Oxygen and nutrient particles are from this cause slowly excluded from the cell which starves like a captive shut up in a dungeon. The pro- gressive shrinkage and diminution of the capillary-tubes has been ascribed to chemical changes in the “formed inatter”” of which they are composed. In foctal life capillaries grow forward from a terminal cell-bud and are hollowed into channels behind the cell as it advances. It has been argued that after a certain lapse of time, this formed tube deteriorates from chemical instability, irre- spective of the personal life and without reference to it. A quarter of a century ago, when research was younger, many of us fondly believed that we held the key to the vital situation in a discovery — then believed authentic — that unicellular life was naturally immortal; that certain infusoria, bacteria, protozoa, meaning the first simple forms of life, lived and multiplied by fission and division with- out dying; that there was really no such calamity as death in this primary form of terrestrial life. This fact, if fact it had proved, was perceived to be of The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 215 tremendous significance. It opened vistas of great hopes. For it was already recognized that unicellular life was the basis of multicellular organisms. If, therefore, these structural units of our bodies were deathless under nature, the whole question of immortal life for man resolved itself into one of proper care and husbandry, protection and nutrition, of the physiological cell. Systems of such cell husbandry began to be outlined for practical use; and in the minds of many, the “fond dream of all the human ages” seemed to be on the eve of realization. The hope was logical, the deduction legitimate, if these premises concerning the natural deathlessness of the unicells were true. Prof. August Weissmann — whose theories of life and death are now common property throughout the world — made the natural immortality of unicellular life one of the foundation stones of his famous hypothesis; other German histologists: concurred, as also several noted English biologists ; and for ten years we really seemed to be at the bottom of the great problem of life on the earth. It was then more logical to argue that the attacks of disease bacteria, acute and chronic, might be the ultimate cause of old-aging. For we contemplated the human organism — the soma —as composed of cells, not essentially unlike unicells, and originally derived from them; and if these component cells were deathless unless crushed by violence, starved, suffocated, or otherwise killed, the problem of 216 Natural Salvation. prolonging human life indefinitely would be solved when we could ward off cell dangers i in our bodies. With the somatic cell potentially immortal, death was due to organic errata. Our lives rested on a fixed and sure basis of immortality which was in plain view; the neurons of the brain were so many units of eternal life, if only we could guard and protect them. ‘True, Professor Weissmann took the ground that man- _kind continued to die periodically because prolonged human life was not useful to the human species; in a word, that the individual existed solely for the good of the species; that we die after we produce offspring be- cause there is no longer any reason for us to live; and that this must be accepted as the law of human life. It required but a normal exercise of common sense, however, to discern a palpable fallacy in this corollary of the Weissmann theory. Hence, those who hoped for greatly prolonged life, from the growth of knowledge, were not disheartened; for they recognized the fact that the highest interests of the species will be conserved far better by a race of perfected individual organisms which were deathless, than by constant generations of diseased mortals. It was perceived that the only possible reason for thus exalting the species and sacrificing the individual on its altars, must lie in the expectation that ultimately there would be developed from the species a race of more perfect individuals. The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 217 The species, indeed, as conceived of in the Weissmann hypothesis, was merely an abstraction; the individual after all was the desideratum ;— but little points like this sometimes escape the minds of great philosophers. It must be confessed, too, that something equally nebulous attaches to the Weissmann theorem of the Germ- plasm and Heredity. The Germ-plasm of Weissmann is the human repro- ductive tissue, a cell colony which lives on, deathless, from generation to generation ; the soma alone dies; the germ-plasm has survived from the time unicellular life was the only form of life on the earth. Rejecting the theory of Darwin and others, that gemmules from every cell of the organic tissues are garnered in the re- productive tissue, to be extruded as embryonic cells, Weissmann taught that the reproductive cells, by permu- tations and combinations of the germinal substance, are equal to the task of originating new generations of man- kind, unaided, and that the soma has nothing to do with reproduction save the servile task of bearing the germ- plasm forward in the world and supplying it with food. Here, again, common sense could not help thinking that as between these rival theories of reproduction, the truth may lie midway; that the despised soma while not trans- ferring organized “gemmules” to the reproductive cell colony, may yet by virtue of “nervous currents,’”’ which pass to and fro, so influence, mold, and individualize the 218 Natural Salvation. germ-plasm as practically to impress the ancestoron the offspring, and virtually reproduce the parent in the child. This view, at least, had the merit of reconciling opposed theories ; and — saving clause —it is not clearly known as yet in what “nervous currents’? which reciprocate between the reproductive organs and the rest.of the body, consist, or how fully representative of every organ and tissue of the body they may be. A “nervous current ’’ is a great mystery and involves many unknown quantities and qualities of matter; it is a fruitful field for investiga- tion. When we are able to analyze a “ nervous current,” we will know a great deal more about human life than at present. It would not surprise the writer, if a “nervous current’ were found to be capable of transferring the image and character of one cell to another. It may prove a stream of an almost infinitely more minute form or type of “gemmules”” than Darwin dreamed of, or Weissmann repudiated. Then in 1885-86, and for a time, this sense of certitude, this feeling of mastery of the great problem, was given a rude shock, by deductions drawn from the observations of Maupas, confirmed by contemporary biologists. Primi- tive unicellular life was not deathless in any sense, after all. The intimate causes of old-aging were found to be deeper-seated. ‘The unicell was seen to “age” and die, The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 219 even as the multicells. The Weissmann hypothesis asso- ciated death with sexual reproduction in the multicells, and portrayed the causes of death as organic and extra- cellular. We now learned that the causes of death are intracellular. Colonies of unicells congregate to be re- generated by blending and exchange of particles, sexually, not differently in principle from the sexual congress of animals. Unicells increase in number by division of the adult, parturient cell into two smaller “daughter cells,” each of which grows and divides into two others, genera- tion on generation, for a limited length of time, but not indefinitely, as was at one time believed to be true of them. On the contrary, after a certain number of cell genera- tions such unicells must get together sexually. The millions of rhizopods in a stagnant pool, for example, must thus congregate or they will cease to be reproductive and the species will die of old age. As observed by Maupas in 1885-86, and other observers since, sexual conjugation is accompanied by profound changes in the cells. The technique of these changes is of less consequence here than an appreciation of the principle involved. When two of the conjugating cells have paired and come into close contact, the paranucleus, or sex organ, of each suffers a species of dissolution ; it divides and appears to undergo a kind of reorganization ; certain parts of it are rejected altogether and cast forth, 220 Natural Salvation. as if worn out, worthless, or deleterious. The remaining parts of the paranuclei then come together and are differentiated as a male and a female pronucleus. All this seems to take place as if under stimulus of contact, or of sexual desire between the two cells. Having paired, these changes in each begin and proceed as above indi- cated. Immediately then the male pronuclei cross over from cell to cell, the female pronuclei remaining stationary. After passing over, the male pronuclei unite and fuse, each with the resident female pronucleus. A transfer and exchange of germinal matter from one cell to another is thus accomplished. . Following this exchange, a complete reconstruction and reorganization of the entire nucleus of both cells takes place. And now the two unicells, having affected this swap-over of germinal matter, and this profound recon- struction, slowly separate to go each its individual way as before. Each feeds and grows and in due time begins to multiply by fission and division in halves, which form new individuals; and this asexual increase may go on for fifty, a hundred, or even six hundred generations. Maupas’ observations indicated that sexual conjugation did not take place successfully between unicells of the same family, that’ is, between descendants of the same parent cell. The disadvantages and observed enfeeble- ment, which result from inbreeding in animals, and in consanguineous marriages, appear therefore to be deep- The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 221 seated in unicellular life. Sexual conjugation gave best results when the cells were of ‘‘ stranger” parentage. -If sexual conjugation were too long deferred, till the succes- sive generations. had grown very much enfeebled and senescent, it was either unsuccessful or failed to be under- taken. Under natural conditions it took place when the individual generations were at their best. Why individual generations from the same parent fail to conjugate with entire success, is thus far as little understood in unicells as in animals. The proper ele- ments for the sexual reaction appear to be lacking, as if there were too great a sameness, too much identity or similarity in the sexual elements of the paranucleus and pronucleus. To obtain the needful sexual reaction or stimulus between the cells, they should come from another stock and have been nourished in another place, in a different environment. ' Where sexual conjugation did not take place the generations from the same cell parent, as time went on, became smaller and often deformed. After several hun- dred generations the descendants of a single cell parent all die and 'the line becomes extinct. In principle nothing different takes place in multicellu- lar life in animals and man. ‘There are modifications of the same method, due to the extensive organization of the cells, but no departure from the principle of cell renewal by an interblend of the nuclear substance of two cells. 222 Natural Salvation. This point should be kept clearly in mind, since it helps to place the whole subject under better lights. Cells from the reproductive tissue of one parent (spermatozoa) meet a cell from that of another parent, and the same interblending and fusing of nuclear elements takes place, followed by a recast of the blend, and then a new life developing in due course. At first, and for a number of years, the discovery that the unicells age and must have recourse to sexual conju- gation, to escape death, was most disheartening to the eatlier hopes of natural salvation. Death appeared to run far more deeply in the warp and woof of living matter . than had been supposed. For a time we were inclined to acquiesce in the extreme view that this observed decline and aging of the cell-of- _ life was due to an inevitable, irremediable exhaustion of the vivific molecules of the cell nucleus. That even if the number of protoplasmic molecules were restored by adjuvant chemical action, we might yet find that the wear and tear of cell life depletes the large mobile mole- cule, itself; and that the problem of its restoration might be found out of range of the chemical activities and affin- ities of terrestrial matter. In brief, that death reigned irretrievably on our planet, and that life is possible here only in the parent-and-child mode. For it was easy to The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 223 go farther and theorize that molecules, atoms, and even ions and corpuscles are depleted, and have to meet, sexually, for renewal. There have been various fanciful theories as to sex in the most minute particles of which matter is composed. These were years of doubt for the natural salvation — idea. The deduction then made, was that the hard con- ditions of life on the earth, cause the cell to wane, dete- riorate, or “run down,” to the extent that it inevitably dies unless reincarnated by sexual interblending with other cells, that being nature’s only method of getting over the inherent obstacles to terrestrial life: obstacles incident to gravitation, avid chemical activities, and the heterogeneous mixture of matter on the earth’s surface. And this deduction touching unicellular life is a true one. The unicells have found life too hard to live endlessly as individuals. Under the ordinary conditions of shore and pool, they die out unless renewed by sexual regeneration ; — and this is the death of the individual life. It is race life, not individual life, which is perpetuated by sexual renovation; the child may be like the parent, but is not that parent, personally. Those who have observed the profound changes, the commingling and re- grouping of the cell contents, that precede the fission and division of a unicell into two « daughter cells’ — even when not immediately antedated by sexual congress — must needs conclude that the parent does not live on in 224 Natural Salvation. one of these cells, but came to an end, personally and in- dividually, at fission. So that the declaration of Weiss- mann and other biologists of that time, concerning the immortality of the unicells, was erroneous from the start, founded on faulty observation; the fact being that a uni- cell always dies, personally, when it gives birth to off- spring by fission ; the profound break-up and reassembling of the nuclear contents being equivalent to the obliteration of the parent cell as an individual. But in accepting this grim conclusion, touching the mortality of the unicells, those who had hoped that the human organism may be perfected for greatly prolonged life, looking toward immortal life, overlooked for a time a most important fact, and failed to take cognizance of what nature had itself been doing to alleviate these same hard terrestrial conditions which cause death in unicellu- lar life. We failed to perceive that in every organism, animal, or plant, a united, continuous effort is made to render cell life easier and safer, to. provide a better cell food and secure more perfect nutrition, to eliminate poisonous substances, and remove “dirt.” We failed at first to comprehend that while in exposed, unprotected unicellular life the individual could not live for more than a few days or weeks at most, and was obliged soon to resort to reproduction to escape race ex- tinction, cells could be found in multicellular organiza- tions, the brain of a man or an elephant, for example, that The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 225 live for a century, or two centuries. In short, that mul- ticellular life is a long-established, cooperative method on the part of cell life, to live longer and better, looking to complete salvation under nature. At that time we failed to comprehend this larger effort of cell life. Our mental concepts did not then as now embrace the outlines of the Earth’s life scheme. Nor did we then perceive that these grand cooperative unions of differentiated and specialized cell life give rise not only to animal organisms, but to a higher, organized, personal life which redacts strongly to preserve and perpetuate the component cell units, and that the more intelligent that personal life becomes, the stronger grows the effort for self salvation. . To have a human personality, with mind and reason, with memory running back to childhood, binding the entire life experience together and blending it in a co- herent whole, the brain neurons must largely survive throughout the personal life-time, the cell must live on, its individual life must be preserved. This marvelously organized animal body which we in- herit, the origins of which are in the depths of unhistoric time, has come up under nature, self-maintaining, self- repairing, in obedience to an instinct and impulse to live on and not die. It is the embodiment of the cell effort to 226 Natural Salvation. be deathless. It started and developed to that end. The impulse to this comes from the sentience of the cells — the sentient side of matter. It is a self-sentient mech- anism which feels its hurts and possesses the resource of self repair. From perception of injury. issues energy for restoration, as, for example, when a muscle is wounded, or a bone broken. Even the blood circula- tory tubes grow again, and are repaired and reopened, round and about, as the wants of the tissues make ur- gency. Wherever a sense of loss, damage and danger is felt, this current of zs viva stimulates the phagocytes to act and sets the cells of the injured organ in extraordinary activity to produce new tissue. Something more and in addition to chemical action is displayed here; it is chemi- cal action, prompted and initiated by sentience, by a swift current of minute corpuscles, out-flowing at the command of self-consciousness, bearing its will to the cells. It is the nature of this current, this stimulus from the neurons, that we have great need to study and con- trol; to learn how it may be generated, artificially perhaps, and how it may be used to stimulate repairs throughout the organism. We have a working hypothesis as to how currents of negative-electric corpuscles are derived in the cells to issue forth as the vehicle of their will. Apparently it comes from decomposition of the atoms in the protoplas- mic molecule; a decomposition initiated by the cell’s self- The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 2297 sentience. It starts from the sentient side of matter, and involves a great law of nature and the cosmos ; — but the scientific evidence in proof of this is not yet in form for statement. The growth of biological knowledge, during the decade, has greatly enlarged our conceptions of what the cell-of- life is capable of doing and becoming. We are recogniz- ing more fully than ever before its inherent plasticity and marvelous adaptability to every form and use in organized life. And when we contemplate these astounding meta- morphoses as seen in the intricacies of insect mechanism, the beauty of flowers, the texture of ivory, bone and shell, the coining of spore and germ, the achieved resistance to cold and heat, and, in brain, the elevation of simple sen- tience to intellect; when we contemplate these marvelous achievements of the cell, past and present, there seems no good reason to doubt that this same cell may achieve greatly prolonged life —if it sets itself to the task. Pro- longed life would be a feat no greater than others which it has accomplished in the past. Our survey of organ- ized life constantly strengthens this conception of the cell’s plasticity and its possibilities. It may be moulded, bent, and directed to do almost anything, perform almost any function and live briefly, or long, as the greater life or personality of the organism enjoins upon it. It is 228 Natural Salvation. Nature’s Proteus and may be made to live a day, or a millenium. For slowly, over the stumbling-blocks of many errors and misleading hypotheses in the past, we have been drawn to the conclusion, that although the tissue cell is still seen to decline and die with the organism, there is attainable for it an exceptionally well-nourished, well-pro- tected condition where it may live on without time limit. We mean by this that the alleviation of old age is now more largely a question of regulating and controlling the life of the organism — this larger personal life — than of combatting intrinsic obstacles to long life in the cell, itself; that it is the organism rather than its component cells which must be put in trim for longer life. What the cell needs to insure its continuance in function and in life, ts stimulus from the organism as a whole, and that atmosphere, or aura, of vitality, which pervades a healthy, strong animal body; that so long as these stimuli remain constant and strong, and the cells are well nourished, they are not of themselves the initiating factors of old age. It is the whole life of the organism that quickens cell life ; that is to say, the volume or sum total of cell life in the animal body when well blended in a vital aura, seems adequate to stimulate and maintain in healthy function each individual cell of the vast union for much more than acentury. Blended together, these millions of cell lives maintain a stable vital atmosphere, which sustains, invigo- The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 229 rates, and redacts, and but for organic rather than in- tracellular errata, would do so indefinitely, if the cells could be well nourished and protected. Yet, let no misapprehension accompany this deduction. The cell is itself a small organism which does not as yet live so perfectly in the animal body as to be free from the errata of earthly life, and hence is not yet free from the “old age’? tendency. It, too, still suffers a deterioration, probably, even in the best constituted organism, although the ideal and intent of the organic union is to.purvey for the cell a perfect, deathless life. We mean, that owing to imperfect food and imperfect living generally, the component cells of the human organ- ism still suffer a progressive involution which in the course of two centuries, perhaps, would bring the organ- ism to a stand-still, and cause it to die of true cell old age. For there is organic old age and cell old age. Our problem of alleviation concerns both, but at present the former more urgently than the latter, since apparently the deterioration of the somatic cell is self-remediable and may be left to remedy itself under better conditions of nutrition and protection. It is therefore to organic old age that scientific effort can be most advantageously directed at present. Such is the human situation on the earth, a situation which appears to have come about, under nature, without 230 Natural Salvation. let or hindrance from external worlds. It has been an un- aided, and, so far as the scientific evidence goes, an un- watched, unprotected evolution from the lowly, primitive sentience of matter. At what will it finally arrive ? Or, in the light of our growing knowledge, what can we make of it? This, at least, is fairly certain of it, that the continued effort at natural salvation ‘will remain our own, unhelped, unhindered. If we can save ourselves from “sin” and death, well and good. There seems to be liberty to do it —a working chance for it; and the question constantly recurs, what can we do to this end, personally, individu- ally, to forward the grand intent of life to natural salva- tion? What can we accomplish, or illustrate’ by personal effort in our own organisms, in unison and harmony with the cosmic push of life? How shall we best labor and throw the bent of our lives in consonance with it, con- vinced that in thus squaring ourselves with the universal trend and purpose of living matter, ies the only true nirvana for individual life. Without further consideration we may put aside the idea that any one agency, “elixir,” “serum,” or extract from plant, or gland, will prove a cure for old-aging, although these may help. “ Old age” is a condition too The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 251 vastly complicated and dependant on too many diverse causes to be thus singly cured or counteracted. There must come an amelioration of all the causes, from the psychic side as well.as the physical and physiological; by which we mean to say, that prolonged life will not come till prolonged life is personally felt to be worth living , until the basis for enjoyment of it is established in the brain; until our lives are measurably lifted above the pres- ent fleeting sensory ideals. Amelioration and removal of all the causes will be ultimately required. One of the first, most practical steps to this end is the subjugation and extirpation of the disease-producing bac- teria. This great campaign, along the well-known lines of sanitation, sterilization, and immunization, is now fairly inaugurated ; its progress is a matter of daily news. The second step in order of importance and timely need, is an extended study of nutrition — the nutrition of the somatic cell — with the acquisition of accurate knowl- edge how the cell assimilates and of what its proper food consists, with a view to supplying that food, or form of nutriment, to the cells and relieving wholly or in part the present hard, exhaustive processes of digestion, peptoniza- tion and rectification, which set up so heavy a drain on the powers of the whole organism, and now devote the human body largely to animal and vegetative functions. An invented, rectified cell food, raised to a high degree of molecular instability, decomposing easily and giving off 232 Natural Salvation. its corpuscular elements freely, is the next discovery most needed in our quest for deathless life. Work along these two great lines is indicated with certainty and is urgently demanded. The third most promising line of effort lies in the husbandry of the nervous system, per se, the intelligent cultivation of the brain colony of cells. | This is a wholly new line of effort, to which little or no attention, in this sense, and from this point of view, has ever been given. Education as we now obtain it is an exhaustive process, pursued without regard to the life of the brain cell, and, in truth, without recognition of its existence. In organic and in cellular old age, the cells of the brain and spinal cord share at length and are borne down to death, but as a rule, are the last to give up the struggle. Soft and easily dissoluble as brain appears to be, it is yet the most vitally resistant of tissues, perhaps because the best protected and best nourished. Brain cells secure nutriment from the blood-stream, while muscle cells, bone cells, and gland cells starve. Intellect confers strength and endurance. Here, as throughout nature, knowledge brings an endowment of power. The brain colony is the most enduring of cell unions. To begin with conditions easily recognized, it may be stated, without metaphor, that after the age of thirty-five, most persons, especially Americans of this generation, die The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 233 because they are literally tired to death. After educa- tion begins, the brain cells are rarely or never sufficiently rested from day to day, and there follows what may be termed cumulative fatigue. Improper food taken at bad hours, with abnormal excitements aud untimely stimula- tion play their part, with the general result that there is as an increment of unrelieved fatigue going over from week to week and month to month, until an abnormal condition is reached where restful sleep is no longer possible. In typical American cases, these cumulative effects of unrelieved fatigue begin in youth and set up a series of changes in the brain cells which result either in the popu- lar “nervous prostration,” or more frequently, in an abnormal shrinkage of the mental life, a diminution of personality, accompanied by sub-innervation and lowered vitality. In this latter condition the organism is dangerously subject to invasions of the disease bacteria. This lowered vitality from insufficient or faulty innervation — the result of chronic brain fatigue —is primarily the cause of many prevalent diseases, since the germs of these diseases are always quite constantly present, and whether they are resisted by the nervous aura and destroyed by phagocitosis or not, is largely a question of normal as against sub- normal innervation. This condition is often set up in children at school, 234 Natural Salvation. under improper conditions of study, faulty nutrition, or eye strain, in some cases going on rapidly to complete nervous break-down before the age of twenty is reached, but in most instances impairing clear mentation and induc- ing various phases of ill health before middle age. A lamentable number of cases also occur in adults, as middle life is reached, among ambitious, hard-worked business men who may have passed school and college with nervous systems not- greatly impaired, but encoun- tering the cares and exigencies of business life, find them- selves unrested from day to day, nervously depleted and victims of insomnia. In these cases the kidneys immedi- ately suffer. Several of our physiologists, Professor Hodge among the first, have demonstrated the visible, physical effects of fatigue in the nerve cell, the shrinkage in substance and the lack of functional power; also the direct results of rest and food for the restoration of a tired cell to its normal sizé and condition of dynamic efficiency. Sleep, with the diurnal darkening of the hemispheres, is the time when all the millions of brain neurons cease acting in their united, corporate capacity and revert each to its own personal, unicellular life. Through the hours of daylight they act together, as a whole, for the good of the entire organism. But now, when sleep supervenes, the cells let go hands, so to speak, continuity is broken, the resultant self-consciousness stops short, the personality ceases, and The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 235 each individual cell attends to its own personal affairs, namely, nutrition, expulsion of waste products, self- adjustment, and rest. Sleep is the time when the brain cell is again living the original unicellular life of its remote ancestry, resting, restoring its powers. So exhausting is the daily, corporate life, the main- tenance of the intellect, that this succeeding period of unicellular life is necessary to the neuron’s restoration. It must have time to attend to its unicellular wants and necessities before again devoting itself to the united brain life of another day. It is not difficult, therefore, to understand what takes place when from any cause, the cell is prevented from properly attending to this its necessary individual life, that is, when it does not wholly break continuity with the other cells; when its waste products, accumulating during the day, are not cast forth; and when it is not permitted to pass into a state of cell rest. Disturbed, broken sleep leads to constant interruptions of these necessary pro- cesses of unicellular life. The brain is now like an army of soldiers, harassed by constant night attacks, to the ex- tent that the individual soldier is kept in line, day and night, with no time to eat, sleep, or attend to his personal wants. The brain cells, although still unrested, and but half purged of their waste products, are compelled to resume unification in self-consciousness, when a person wakes. 236 Natural Salvation. In consequence, they enter upon the labor of another day, fageed, unrested —the condition which thousands of our people know so well. In time, these cumulative effects of unrelieved fatigue show themselves in depressed function throughout the organism ; the organic harmony is vitiated; nutrition is permanently impaired; and a shrunken, deranged condi- tion of the neurons becomes chronic. Part passu, the personality slackens, and character sinks to lower levels. In fact, it is not too much to say that humanity at pres- ent is composed largely of the chronicly tired. The pro- cess of cell deterioration begins, and the first downward step is taken, when we rise in the morning with a distinct sense of being not yet rested, and enter on the toils and duties of the day stil] unrefreshed. In America, at present, no other one reform is so urgently demanded for the national well-being, as proper, normal rest for the brain cells of the people. After the age of thirty few among us know what natural sleep and sound rest are, or ever will know again. For many have passed the point of brain damage where sound rest can again come to them. Thousands of these hapless ones take refuge in that dreary land of drugged slumber, where chloral, morphia, and the later host of commercial nostrums hold nightly orgies over “the carcase of murdered sleep.” These are, indeed, “lost souls”’ who, like weary Macbeth, will never sleep properly again. The Intimate Causes of Old Age. 237 All of us who have had a normal childhood and youth, can recall the time when we were wont to wake in the morning feeling rested, with a willingness to rise and resume the business and pleasures of living; when we wakened with a happy sense of having been soundly asleep, so soundly that the world looks almost strange for the moment in its newness. That is the normal time, when the neurons are properly refreshed and renovated ; it is that ideal condition which we should strive to maintain through life. How properly to cultivate, nourish, and guard the brain neurons, in order that they may form a strong per- sonality and generate a protective aura of health — that priceless vis medicatrix nature —is a most important inquiry, so important, indeed, so pertinent to our quest after longer, happier life, that the culture and husbandry of the brain and nervous system will be the subject of our next paper, in the edition for 1907.