it takes to protect itself against microbes, by the antitoxins that it
forms. Indeed, if we knew all that our bodies know, what mysteries would
be revealed to us!
IV
Life goes up-stream--goes against the tendency to a static equilibrium
in matter; decay and death go down. What is it in the body that
struggles against poisons and seeks to neutralize their effects? What is
it that protects the body against a second attack of certain diseases,
making it immune? Chemical changes, undoubtedly, but what brings about
the chemical changes? The body is a _colony_ of living units called
cells, that behaves much like a colony of insects when it takes measures
to protect itself against its enemies. The body forms anti-toxins when
it has to. It knows how to do it as well as bees know how to ventilate
the hive, or how to seal up or entomb the grub of an invading moth.
Indeed, how much the act of the body, in encysting a bullet in its
tissues, is like the act of the bees in encasing with wax a worm in the
combs!
What is that in the body which at great altitudes increases the number
of red corpuscles in the blood, those oxygen-bearers, so as to make up
for the lessened amount of oxygen breathed by reason of the rarity of
the air? Under such conditions, the amount of haemoglobin is almost
doubled. I do not call this thing a force; I call it an
intelligence--the intelligence that pervades the body and all animate
nature, and does the right thing at the right time. We, no doubt, speak
too loosely of it when we say that it prompts or causes the body to do
this, or to do that; it _is_ the body; the relation of the two has no
human analogy; the two are one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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