agic, and it will fail out of sheer necessity."

"Tell me what I have done."

"You have artificially produced a condition of life many ages before
humanity is ready to receive it. The body of desire is being worked up
by endless labour into something more delicate and sensitive--into a
transmutation that we can only dimly understand. At present the whole
plot of life is based on the principle of desire and in this way people
are kept busy, constantly spurred on to thought and activity by
essentially selfish motives. It is only in abstract thought that the
selfless ideal has a real place as yet, but the very fact that it is
there shows what lies at the top of the ladder that humanity is so
painfully climbing. As long as desire is the plot of life, death is
necessary, for its terrible shadow sharpens desire and makes the prizes
more alluring and the struggle more desperate. And so man goes on,
ceaselessly active and striving, for without activity and striving there
is no perfecting of the instrument. You can't have upward progress in
conditions of stagnation. All that strange incredible side of life,
called the Devil, is the inner plot of life that makes the wheels go
round and evolution possible. It is vitally necessary to keep the vast
machinery running at the present level of evolution. Desire is the
furnace in the engine-house. The wheels go round and the fabric is
slowly and intricately spun and only pessimists and bigots fail to see
evidence of any purpose in it all. Now what has your Blue Disease done?
It has taken the whole plot out of life at its present stage of
development at one fell swoop. It has killed Desire--put out the furnace
before the pattern in the fabric is nearly complete."

"But I never could see that, Thornduck. How could I foresee that?"

"If you had had a grain of vision you would have known that you couldn't
give humanity the gift of immortality without some compensatory loss.
The law of compensation is as sure as the law of gravity--you ought to
know that."

"I had dim feelings--I knew Sarakoff was wrong, with his dream of
physical bliss--but how could I foresee that desire would go?"

"As a mere scientist, test-tube in hand, you couldn't. But you're
better than that. You've got a glimmering of moral imagination in you."

He fell into a reverie.

"You are keeping something back. Tell me plainly what you mean," I
asked.

"Don't you see that if the germ lasts any length of time," he sa