Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/867

Rh Health and Preventable Disease"; "Food"; "Air, its Impurities and their Effects on Public Health"; "Ventilation and Warming"; "Examination of Air and Ventilation"; "Water"; "Water Analysis"; "Impure Water, and its Effects on Public Health"; "Dwellings"; "Hospitals"; "Removal of Sewage"; "Purification and Utilization of Sewage"; "The Effects of Improved Drainage and Sewage on Public Health"; "Preventive Measures "(disinfection); "Vital Statistics"; and "The Duties of (English) Medical Officers of Health."

who read that remarkable book, by an anonymous author, entitled "Conflict in Nature and Life: a Study of Antagonism in the Constitution of Things," which was published last year, were so deeply interested in the views presented, and so struck with their possible bearings upon various practical questions, as to indulge the hope that the author would resume his novel discussion, and work out some of the more obvious implications of his doctrine. This he has now done in the book before us, which, while in a certain sense a sequel or supplement to the former work, is still an independent treatise that must stand substantially upon its own merits. The work on "Conflict," as we pointed out at the time of its publication, was devoted to an explication of the dynamic view of Nature, which sees in it the action of forces ever resisted by other forces, so that the conception of conflict becomes the key to its universal operations. The radical ideas of that volume are thus restated in the author's introduction to the present work. He says: "A simple and primary form of antagonism is that of attraction and repulsion, which play so conspicuous a part in the phenomena of physics and chemistry. In biology, antagonism appears in manifold forms, in some instances somewhat obscure, but nevertheless everywhere present. Birth and death, growth and decay, waste and repair, development and degradation, are familiar examples. It appears in the never-ending struggle of individuals with individuals, of species with species, and of persistence of type with divergence of type. It is even exemplified by the rivalry of functions for vital energy from the organic sources in common, in consequence of which the over-activity of one may impoverish another, as when over-exertion of the brain exhausts the body, and early and over reproduction diminishes growth and development. Similar forms of antagonism pass over into the sphere of mind. At the bottom of the mental scale, and at the top, mental action is counteraction. There is no mental conception of properties except by contrast: one feeling antagonizes another; the mind is itself a system of balances, often fluctuating from one extreme to another; and the will is forever the theatre of emotional conflict. And all this antagonism is not incidental and transitory, as usually supposed, but fundamental and ineradicable."

But this policy of conflict is far enough from being confined to the inorganic, the organic, and the sub-human sphere of Nature. Man, with all his activities, is a part of the great unified natural order, and is to be as much studied in the light of this principle as any other divisions of phenomena. On this point the author observes: "Now, if this antagonism prevails in Nature, and is woven into the constitution of man, we should infer that the society which man forms would embody antagonistic elements in manifold forms of combination and interrelation. We should further infer that every attempt to act on human nature and on human society, for their improvement, should take an account of this ineradicable antagonism in the constitution of things in order properly to adapt the means to the end. A prevailing form in which this antagonism appears in life is in the essential coupling of the evil with the good, of a general evil with every general good. Now, in consequence of this union of evil with good, there is no such thing as perfection, and any attempt to bring about perfect results will fail. All that can be done is to effect the greatest possible good with the least possible evil. But reformers usually go to work in defiance of this principle; they have panaceas for every moral disease in the world, and are bound that every wrong