Recent developments in the realm of science,—­in psychology, in physiology, in chemistry and physics—­all tend to emphasize the immediate necessity for human control over the great forces of nature.  The new ideas published by contemporary science are of the utmost fascination and illumination even to the layman.  They perform the invaluable task of making us look at life in a new light, of searching close at hand for the solution to heretofore closed mysteries of life.  In this brief chapter, I can touch these ideas only as they have proved valuable to me.  Professor Soddy’s “Science and Life” is one of the most inspiring of recent publications in this field; for this great authority shows us how closely bound up is science with the whole of Society, how science must help to solve the great and disastrous unbalance in human society.

As an example:  a whole literature has sprung into being around the glands, the most striking being “The Sex Complex” by Blair Bell.  This author advances the idea of the glandular system as an integral whole, the glands forming a unity which might be termed the generative system.  Thus is reasserted the radical importance of sexual health to every individual.  The whole tendency of modern physiology and psychology, in a word, seems gradually coming to the truth that seemed intuitively to be revealed to that great woman, Olive Schreiner, who, in “Woman and Labor” wrote:  “...  Noble is the function of physical reproduction of humanity by the union of man and woman.  Rightly viewed, that union has in it latent, other and even higher forms of creative energy and life-dispensing power, and... its history on earth has only begun; as the first wild rose when it hung from its stem with its center of stamens and pistils and its single whorl of pale petals had only begun its course, and was destined, as the ages passed, to develop stamen upon stamen and petal upon petal, till it assumed a hundred forms of joy and beauty.

“And it would indeed almost seem, that, on the path toward the higher development of sexual life on earth, as man has so often had to lead in other paths, that here it is perhaps woman, by reason of those very sexual conditions which in the past have crushed and trammeled her, who is bound to lead the way and man to follow.  So that it may be at last that sexual love—­that tired angel who through the ages has presided over the march of humanity, with distraught eyes, and feather-shafts broken and wings drabbled in the mires of lust and greed, and golden locks caked over with the dust of injustice and oppression—­till those looking at him have sometimes cried in terror, `He is the Evil and not the Good of life’:  and have sought if it were not possible, to exterminate him—­shall yet, at last, bathed from the mire and dust of ages in the streams of friendship and freedom, leap upwards, with white wings spread, resplendent in the sunshine of a distant future—­the essentially Good and Beautiful of human existence.”