ur impatience with the method that Nature has provided for
influencing human conduct is largely due to our idea of the meaning of
life.

Man has fancied himself in a position in the animal world that facts of
life and nature do not sustain. We seem to feel that man has some high
calling; that he should make something of himself which cannot be
accomplished; that he should form some sort of a perfect order that he
never can reach; in short that man has a purpose and a mission. It is
manifest that all we know is but a mite compared with the unknown, and
it may be that sometime a purpose will be revealed of which man never
dreamed. Still from all that we can see and understand, Nature has but
one desire, and that is the preservation and perpetuation of life. This
is its purpose or, rather, its strongest urge not only with men but with
all animal life. Sometimes to create one fish a million eggs are
spawned. Nature is profligate both in spawning life and compassing its
destruction. In the human species the capacity for life is immeasurably
beyond its fruition. A large portion of those who are born die an early
death. And that human life shall not be extinct, Nature plants the
life-giving desire deep in the constitution of man. The creation of life
comes from an instinct so profound and absorbing that it carries a train
of evils in its wake. Many are overweighted by the sex instinct to their
positive harm. Nature somehow did not trust such a fundamental duty as
the preservation of the race to reason. If intellectual processes were
responsible for life, the world no doubt would soon be bare of animate
things. Neither could the care of the young be trusted to anything but
the deep-seated instinct that causes the mother to forget her own life
in the preservation of the life of her child.

The functions of body, on which life is founded, do not depend upon
reason. The heart begins to beat before birth; it continues to beat
until the end of life. The reason has nothing to do with the heart
performing its function. Man goes to sleep at night confident that it
will still be beating in the morning. The blood circulates in the veins
independent of the thoughts of man. The digestive processes go on
whether he sleeps or is awake. Many of his muscles never rest from birth
to death. Life could not be preserved through the intellectual
processes.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion. These
instincts and emotions ar