compelled to seek its victims
only through the channel of accidents, against which forecast will
not, and science has no opportunity to guard. What I mean to say is,
that I do not KNOW that just such results are beyond the capabilities
of human progress. Measuring the future by the past, I cannot
demonstrate that such results may not one day be attained."

"The good time of which you speak," said the Doctor, "when there shall
be no more infirmity of age, no growing old, save in years; when there
shall be no wasting by disease, through the perfectability of the
curative science, or the discovery of some recuperative agency,
stronger than the law of decay, will never come. When it is granted,
as an abstract proposition, that the capabilities of science are
sufficient to counteract the mere wasting influence of time upon the
human system, you are met by a great practical fact which will
overturn your theory. The excesses of the world are a much more
fruitful source of disease and death than the attritions of age. There
is a constant struggle on the part of nature to build up and beautify,
to strengthen and recuperate, against the results of human excesses.
Not one in a million of those who pass away every year, die from the
effects of age, as a primary cause. Hence, you must not only perfect
science, but you must perfect the morals and the habits of the human
family, before you can exempt them from decay and death. The instincts
of men, the appetencies which they possess in common with the whole
animal creation, are each made the source of disease, and premature
decay. Some men eat too much; some drink too much; some sleep too
much; some waste their vital energies in sensual indulgence, while all
have some vicious habit (I mean with reference to the preservation of
life), known or unknown to the world, which, sooner or later,
undermines the constitution, and helps on the work of dilapidation.
These excesses will always exist; they are inherent in the human
constitution, resulting from the very nature of man; they are an
inevitable sequence of his physical structure, and his intellectual
life. To avoid them implies absolute perfectability in every
attribute, and that makes him a god. Until man shall have become
infinite in wisdom, as well as immaculate in purity, he will continue
to indulge, to a greater or less extent, in excesses of some sort, and
those excesses will always be an overmatch, when superadded to the
natural