ty of phthisis revived in him
the wavering faith of the healer, arousing in him the noble and wild
hope of regenerating humanity.

In short, Dr. Pascal had only one belief--the belief in life. Life was
the only divine manifestation. Life was God, the grand motor, the
soul of the universe. And life had no other instrument than heredity;
heredity made the world; so that if its laws could be known and
directed, the world could be made to one's will. In him, to whom
sickness, suffering, and death had been a familiar sight, the militant
pity of the physician awoke. Ah! to have no more sickness, no more
suffering, as little death as possible! His dream ended in this
thought--that universal happiness, the future community of perfection
and of felicity, could be hastened by intervention, by giving health to
all. When all should be healthy, strong, and intelligent, there would
be only a superior race, infinitely wise and happy. In India, was not
a Brahmin developed from a Soudra in seven generations, thus raising,
experimentally, the lowest of beings to the highest type of humanity?
And as in his study of consumption he had arrived at the conclusion that
it was not hereditary, but that every child of a consumptive carried
within him a degenerate soil in which consumption developed with
extraordinary facility at the slightest contagion, he had come to think
only of invigorating this soil impoverished by heredity; to give it
the strength to resist the parasites, or rather the destructive leaven,
which he had suspected to exist in the organism, long before the microbe
theory. To give strength--the whole problem was there; and to give
strength was also to give will, to enlarge the brain by fortifying the
other organs.

About this time the doctor, reading an old medical book of the fifteenth
century, was greatly struck by a method of treating disease called
signature. To cure a diseased organ, it was only necessary to take from
a sheep or an ox the corresponding organ in sound condition, boil it,
and give the soup to the patient to drink. The theory was to cure like
by like, and in diseases of the liver, especially, the old work stated
that the cures were numberless. This set the doctor's vivid imagination
working. Why not make the trial? If he wished to regenerate those
enfeebled by hereditary influences, he had only to give them the normal
and healthy nerve substance. The method of the soup, however, seemed to
him childish, and h