In a world of creatures where the interests of each kind are focused on the preservation of the species, and each individual's attention and powers are in the main concentrated on the pressing need for reproduction, and for food and shelter to maintain life in itself and its young progeny, conflict must ensue, a conflict of both ends and means. Because, too, in these creatures the way of life is not open, as in man, habit-memories may be taken as being the chief agents for ensuring both species-life and individual life, and as dominating both their history and their character. Indeed the contracted world and the completed character of such creatures with rare exceptions shuts out the interests of other species. Hence the struggle for existence. Hence a nature 'red in tooth and claw,' despite the general signs of a love that of itself is ample prophecy of an enlargement beyond the bounds of such restricted interests; despite also a general and very obvious enjoyment of life for life's own sake. We must not exaggerate either pain or its significance in creatures who have neither our sensitive nervous system, nor our ability not only to look forward and see consequences and imagine our pain prolonged and growing, but to increase that very pain by dwelling on it and exercising in regard to it, more than it deserves, the magical power of attention. Yet if we do not exaggerate, neither must we ignore. Suffering, conflict, death are there and must be reckoned with.

That the biologists of the latter part of the last century should magnify beyond due measure the place of natural selection in one regard, that of the origin of species, was to be expected. It was a great discovery; it filled men's minds. That they minimized, where they did not deny, the importance of the selective, determining and creative power of life itself was also to be expected. All this last was for the time obscured for want of evidence. Few men indeed, and those not biologists, then kept a level head. It is for this century to bring about a much needed balance in reckoning and in esteem.

Natural selection means for the most part a struggle ensuring the death of the weak and the 'unfit.' The survival of the fittest means that those creatures survive who are best adapted to all their circumstances, whether these are favourable or unfavourable to the maintenance of a high standard of living. That 'nature' may carry out selection it is necessary that there shall be no outside interference, say of man, able to stave off death, whether of the individual or of the race. Death, you see, is the protagonist in this biological play, or rather the mainspring of the machine. And, undoubtedly, death is not only conspicuous in nature but is of profound significance for life. Is it or is it not also of value in a sense surpassing that which the biologist acknowledges? Ought we to look upon it as the enemy or as the friend of life?

One thing is plain. Those men of science who saw it as protagonist were right in thinking that by the death, that is, by the natural selection, of the unfit from among the fit, the survival of useful variations may be assisted. Death, of course, cannot have anything to do directly with the originating of better lives (that is of better accommodated lives), but once they have come into being it can help to keep them in the ascendant as begetters of their kind. Natural selection has its use—shall we say its value?—for the advance of life.

Need we be surprised at this, we who have a more than scientific sense of values and have discovered purpose? Need we be surprised to find death a friend to life, seeing it everywhere? Matter is life's friend as well as means and hindrance. So too is death.

Let us consider the beginning of death on the earth; that is, of natural, not of merely accidental death. For it had a beginning, not coeval with the coming of life. There are living creatures now who normally escape it, who die only by accident, are, in fact, if they die, always killed. There are creatures alive now whose years are to be numbered by thousands upon thousands upon thousands, yet who have never grown old. The Pyramids of Egypt are of yesterday compared with the amoeba in the nearest pond.

The manner of life of a one-celled creature is this: it grows, and when it has grown to a size presumably inconvenient it divides into two creatures, both of which, obviously, are the same age. The creature itself becomes two instead of remaining one. The two creatures who were one repeat the process and become four. The four become eight and so on to the end of the earth. None die naturally, and when or if the end of the earth and of themselves is reached they will all be killed and every one of them will be of the same age; but none will be aged. They will be cut off, these naturally immortal creatures, in unimpaired maturity and the perfection of their structure and functions. But, you observe, if life on earth had not passed beyond the one-celled condition it would never, to our minds (if our minds could have been arrived at in some other sphere), have been worth living. All the potency and promise of life which have slowly been revealed through the improvement of its creaturely medium would have remained hidden behind the screen of those immortal jellies. Life began to create a new engine of advance when cell and cell were built up together, and the many-celled creatures started on their mortal and masterful career. For, note, the aggregation of cells in an organized body precludes their individual immortality. They become differentiated and associated for special purposes and they lose the opportunity of preserving life by continuous division. They are mutually imprisoning, they grow old, in time they die—they must die. Life, in beginning this advance, embraced inevitable death. Death, if you like, is the price—if indeed it should be counted a price and not a boon—that we pay for freedom to live as what we are and to become what we shall be. The immortal amoeba is after all a slave. It is this creature that manifestly pays a price, one at which no man of us would buy immunity from death.

There are many values and orders to be considered; and for the highest values and order of living, for the magnificent possibilities open to spiritual attainment, who would not barter an earthly immortality which should erect a barrier that spirit could not pass? But then we come to another consideration. Is death itself a barrier spirit cannot pass? All that I have written hitherto in these pages is directed towards an answer to that question. What should make us change the cumulative 'No' which our study of the processes and character of life forces to our lips? Already we human creatures, incomplete though we are, reveal life as an impulsive, enriching and creative power given in us and become ourselves—a power by which we may continue the line of a direct advance and pass on in a creative evolution which reasonably should have no end. What wonders may we not reveal, what wonders may we not discover thus, in that advance? But only if for the true life that is ourselves, the life which as ours is manifest in its use of body and brain and of the inheritance they bring, there is a triumph over the last of the many obstacles it encounters upon earth. For, let there be no mistake, the immortality of the race upon earth, even if it be possible, is not enough to satisfy reason and accord with the promise of every individual man as what he is for himself, and in his own special relation and contribution to the well-being of the whole. Each man becoming as he should become has his own peculiar value, each his own spontaneity and continuous creative power. If he is lost all this comes to an end, and the world of men is the poorer for want of what he might have given. There is no shifting of our reasonable demand for the conquest of death from the individual man to his race, even if (as is not so much as probable) his race does not die in the cooling or drying or heating of his earth.

After all, what is 'this body of death' from which every man must part? It is, we declare, his medium of transmission and the motor and sensory instrument and condition by means of which he had both inherited a foundation upon which to build his own life, and entered into relations with an outside world of things and persons. Chemically and physically it is a stream of particles always passing away, always being renewed, at one rate or another. The few particles unchanged during his life are not actively sharing his life; they are only its physical supports. Whatever shares his life changes. This stream that his food and the air and the water make, he takes up, transforms, uses and dismisses. All his life long he is dying bodily, and is growing, or should be growing, spiritually. Death is for him the finishing of a process in his body that has always gone on, the final casting away of material elements he has always cast away when he had done with them. And meanwhile, in the spiritual duration of his life, its minister the body has consolidated his self-conscious unity, so that he dies, or should die, a true owner of his real and true and valuable self. For this end earthly life seems to the eye of reason ever to have been striving. Is its striving to be finally in vain? Everything that we have considered in these pages declares the unlikeliness of that.

Is a man then to pass from this world bodiless, as some of the ancients thought? To be able to offer a tentative answer to this question we must go back to one of our earlier chapters and remind ourselves of the ether which, the physicist says, interpenetrates all the molecules of our body now, and is the medium of communication everywhere through the systems of the worlds. May I think of the ether, then, as being in my body the medium of communication between me, as spiritual life and consciousness, and the material elements and structures of my body? If the comparatively coarse granular matter of the chemist's colloids and the protoplasmic speck shows such a congruity with my life as makes it fit to live in me and be the bearer to me of ancestral habits, may I not think that a still closer congruity exists between this ether and my life? And, again, is it not possible, or even likely, that it is through the ether of my body that I influence its matter and its matter influences me? If these things are so, then my ether-body is more fully mine and more closely bound to me than is my matter-body. I think of myself passing at death into, or discovering myself in, an ethereal country where my ethereal body shall serve me even better than my matter-body serves me in this matter-country. And if this thought seems the plain man's plain thought about the physicist's hypothesis and is condemned for that, I retort that the plain man through his rejection of constraint by specialism, and by ideal or abstract schemes which flout the wholeness of experience, is coming now into his own in science, in philosophy and in religion. He has his rights and is taking possession of them in a new fashion and with new significance.

One thing more I think of. The physicist says that what he calls 'bound ether,' that is ether within the spaces of a material thing, differs in its character from the free ether of the interstellar spaces. He has been able to prove this, he says, by experiments on the transmission of light through ether 'bound' in water.

What more do I want? The ether changes in character from association with matter in a body. I see it in my mind's eye changed by constant association with my brain and limbs and with my active consciousness as it could never be changed in water. Am I right, I wonder? Shall I see some day how it has been changed? Shall I see my more intimate body revealed and know it and myself raised to high estate?

However this may be, the life that made for itself body after body on earth, conquering the habits and reluctances of matter that it might use it for a spiritual purpose, is possessed of a creative and organizing power to which no man should dare to set bounds, and which by me at least shall be trusted to the end. That which builds from the egg the chicken, and from the first jelly-specks all the races of the globe, must still be capable of looking after me—if I am worth it.... I am bold enough and plain man enough to say with the poet,—