tor nor its mode of operation, we can say, nevertheless, that co-ordinators and coordination are the characteristic attributes of the activity of each living molecule, each fundamental unit of life. This obviously is also the characteristic attribute of the activity of each cell as a whole; because it grows and multiplies in a perfectly orderly fashion at the expense of caloric and chemical energies. Each cell, therefore, is a microcosm consisting of a vast number of tiny units of life, all working alongside of each other like peaceful and disciplined toilers having a definite and common end in view. That end is the creation of new cells, performing definite functions. The structure of the new cells, the daughter cells, resembles that of the mother cells, but it is carefully adjusted with reference to the functions which the cells are destined to perform in the organic body. This is co-ordination according to our definition, because it is a transformation of a chaos, caloric and chemical, into orderly structures and orderly functions.

Finally, each autonomous organic structure, the organic body, is a macrocosm, an aggregation of a vast number of cellular microcosms; it displays the same co-ordinated activity as each of its fundamental units. Co-ordinators and coordination, in the sense in which these concepts have been defined here are, therefore, the most characteristic strokes of the brush which paints our mental pictures of the organic as well as of the inorganic universe. The two pictures exhibit a striking resemblance to each other. But in the inorganic universe we know the structure of the co-ordinators and many details of their co-ordinating functions; in the organic, however, we do not know them. We know the results of their operations, but we do not know the various co-ordinating steps which lead to this result, not even in so simple a process as fermentation. We cannot say to-day that these steps are of a purely mechanistic nature, as in the case of the inorganic universe, nor can science deny it. Suppose, however, that some day we do succeed in demonstrating that the coordinators in the molecules of life and in their cellular microcosms are physical structures similar to and operating in a similar way to those in the inorganic uni

verse, that will not mean a victory for the mechanistic view of life. There will still remain the mystery of the living soul and of its internal world, particularly that of the living soul of man. Can the language of science describe the creative process which brings this internal world into existence without employing the vocabulary of speculative philosophy? An answer to this question is suggested by the thoughts concerning cosmic coordination discussed here.

VII

THE human body is certainly a physical co-ordinator of marvellous complexity. Every one of its physical functions indicates that co-ordinating bonds unite its countless units of life with the central brain. That in itself gives to the human body, and to other organic bodies resembling it, a pre-eminent position in the scale of creation. When, however, we consider the intellectual, æsthetic, and spiritual activities of the human soul, then the life of man rises far superior to anything ever observed in the starry vault of heaven. Let me illustrate. Recalling to memory the winter evenings spent in front of the fireplace of my peaceful farmhouse, I still remember the genial warmth of the burning logs, and the beauty of the color and of the ever-changing sequence of light and shade of their ethereal flame. They were then, when first observed, and their memory is still to-day, a joy in the world of my consciousness. I know indirectly that all that beauty of heat and light has its physical origin in the chaotic activity of the molecules, atoms, and electrons of the oxygen and carbon which were rejoicing in their reunion in my fireplace after a separation of many years. But no chaos of light and heat was recorded in my consciousness on these occasions nor in my present recollection of them; in its passage from the burning logs to the internal world of my consciousness it is transformed into a cosmos of genial warmth and of ethereal beauty of the gentle flame. This cosmos is the same as that which in my boyhood days I felt while basking in the sunshine of the early spring, and which I saw while watching the evening fires of cold September days in my father's vineyard. Increased knowledge has not changed essen

tially the co-ordinators of my boyhood emotions. They operate to-day just as they operated when I began to understand the world around me. They are a part of my existence. Whenever I drop today a granule of incense into the gentle flame of the burning logs the unchained chaos of its molecules immediately recalls to memory the picture of the little church of my native village, and I hear the schoolmates of my boyhood days chanting "Gospodi pomiluy"-"God have mercy with us." I listen and I worship, worship the Creator who endowed me with life which means a godlike power of creating that beautiful internal world of my consciousness. That power I call my soul, and I feel that it is the divine bond between my creative consciousness and its Creator. It is the co-ordinator which transforms the chaos of the primordial energies which surrounds me into the cosmos, the harmony, of my internal world. Is not this the harmony of which Socrates and Plato dreamed?

Our mother earth is a tiny dust speck in the material universe, but as the home of the creative soul of man it becomes the crown of creation. The life of man is, as far as we know, the noblest product of creation, and it is the most precious gift of heaven. Its broadest aspect is co-ordination which eliminates the chaos from the activities of its countless living molecules, and constructs the cosmos, the presence of which we feel in the internal world of our creative soul; in the language of science it may be described as the climax of "cosmic co-ordination." Its cosmos is probably the ideal cosmos which the poets of ancient Greece had in mind when they represented it as the creation of the Olympian gods. This is the cosmos which gave birth to our belief in the existence of the Creator and makes that belief the source of our highest hopes.

VIII

JUST as the inventor of the steam-engine imitated our central star, the sun, by his ingenious transformation of the caloric chaos into a cosmos of co-ordinated motion and service to man, so the structure of our social organism has endeavored, from time immemorial, to imitate the coordinating marvels of the human body and of the human soul. These endeavors

mark the mile-posts in the progress of human civilization. The structure of human society, like the structure of the human body, and the structure of every part of the inorganic and organic universe, consists of millions of autonomous units; there would be a social chaos if the guidance of social co-ordinators did not control the tendency of the numerous individual units to have a way of their own, free from all outside interference. It is the existence of these co-ordinators which builds the social organism, whose very name implies that its mission is to create a social cosmos by guiding the activity of each individual toward a common end. This guidance implies, of course, outside interference with the activity of the individual, but an interference which is the guiding principle in the evolution of the universe; without it there can be no co-ordination and no social cosmos, and no true individual liberty which only a social cosmos can guarantee.

I shall mention the two most important social co-ordinators. The machinery of government is one of them, the church is the other. They co-ordinate the political, the material, and the spiritual activities of human society. The physical structure of these co-ordinators, and of all co-ordinators designed by mortal man, reminds one forcibly that they are imperfect human imitations of the co-ordinating organic structures, which are the creations of God. Their evolution is certainly progressing, and it will lead to higher levels of perfection if the soul residing in these structures is right. The soul residing in the structure of our government is the soul of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and drafted the American Constitution. Political and economic co-ordination in the life of our nation was their patriotic aim. These two documents exhibit the operation of a beautiful soul, which guides the co-ordinating body, the government of the United States. The guidance of such a soul inspires a confident hope for a great future.

The soul residing in the co-ordinating body which we call the Christian church is the soul of Christ. Spiritual co-ordination is His gospel of salvation, and it is summed up beautifully in His divine words:

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God

crete about three years ago when a great pediatrician gave a course on the proper feeding of children. Groping mothers came together then, and we have never entirely disbanded. Like thirsty drunkards at a free tavern we have imbibed from scores of sources too diverse for mixing. With an earnest fickleness unrelieved by a sense of humor, which many of us should be capable of applying, we have embraced one so-called authority after another only to reject the teachings a month later in favor of those diametrically opposed; or, what has proved equally disastrous, we have caught portions of truths which we have wholly misinterpreted.

For instance, because we did not have the background to receive the specialist's course, the results were quite devastating. Most of our children were found to be underweight. Since they came of a class soon separated from diseased tonsils and adenoids and bad spots even in the first little teeth, no physical defect lay at the basis of malnutrition. Therefore we were failing to enforce enough food and enough sleep.

"How much should a child of three eat in a day?" quavered one little woman.

"Two thousand calories," the great man replied. "Five hundred for breakfast

"Oh!" interrupted the poor mother. "My baby would never eat five hundred calories for breakfast."

The physician's smile was patient. "Simple enough," he reassured. "A cooked cereal with butter, sugar, and cream-an egg size of butter and thick cream-is four hundred."

"But my baby won't eat cooked cereals," came the valiant rejoinder.

Whereupon the physician's composure all but deserted him. Horror was written upon his scholarly face. He raised his slender hands and shook his head in mute condemnation. When at last he replied, his voice sounded to our consciencestricken souls like the pronouncement of well-deserved judgment.

"It is not for mothers to say what their children will or will not do," he said severely. "It is for you to make your children do what is good for them. For such uses were mothers created."

Abashed we went our several ways,

praying for forgiveness and for strength to fulfil the high purpose of our existence. That day marked the beginning of an antifood fixation among the young of our city. For six months at teas, bridgeparties, dinners, meetings, or indeed whenever two or three were gathered together, conversation was entirely caloric. Nutrition classes were organized in all the schools; charts were installed in the homes; children discussed their weights as glibly and unpleasantly as their mothers had in the past discussed the servant problem. Singularly unanimous were the youngsters in their repudiation of all solid diet. Husbands were seen more frequently at the clubs, and several were known to hold consolation meetings that had to do with the rift that was threatening asunder all domestic harmony. Mothers, having counted, balanced, veighed, and measured all food served to children, turned meals into orgies of entreaties and punishments.

Determined, though exhausted, we waged our relentless battle against the starving children, and the impregnable bulwarks of their natures; until one day the group, now cemented by common suffering, brought to our city another speaker-a woman to offset the harm a man had done.

As should have been foreseen, speaker number two left new problems; but, quite more important at the time, she suggested a way out of the situation created by her predecessor. For some of us her coming was not too late. To your children be indifferent outwardly, of course was the beginning, middle, and end of her theme. Children are fundamentally histrionic. They must occupy the centre of the stage even if the scene being enacted has the appearances of tragedy. The little actors, who by their refusal of food precipitate a family riot, have as their reward an immense amount of egotistic satisfaction. Put before your child what he should have, admonished the psychologist, and then, impervious to the young star's antics, concern yourself with up-stage business. When meals are no longer high drama, the hungry star will descend from the firmament in which you have placed him. Nothing new in the method, you see: just age-old common sense. Though our grandmothers, with their dozen chil

dren and their hundred duties, were wholly innocent of theories, they were practical exponents of the new psychology. At last, by dovetailing the teachings of the pediatrician with those of the psychologist, on one point at least we expanded our little learning to meet an exigency.

But the second lecturer uprooted the very foundations of the only disciplinary method we knew anything about.

"Obedience is excellent for the comfort of parents and for the training of German soldiers," she declared. "Are you, however, rearing followers or leaders, discriminating human beings or automata? Obedience breeds mediocrity, dwarfs potentialities, crushes genius."

A wistful little woman at my side sobbed aloud. Her tears were the expression of our common grief. All of us knew that our children were geniuses in embryo and were aghast at the possibility of having muted a Milton or consigned a Cromwell to oblivion. Far better a country bereft of its soldiers and mothers robbed of their comfort!

So again a departing speaker left a heritage of domestic bedlam, rendered unbearable by comfort-loving male parents who held to the antiquated belief that children should "mind"-to hell with the consequences. Again we were sacrificed to the false god of a little knowledge. We had not been told how to transmute obedience into intelligent conformance to law; and, if we had been, we should probably have lacked ability to carry out instructions.

Rather too soon thereafter a zealous young psychiatrist with red hair and a fine aggressiveness hurled us into the swirling waters of Freudian controversy. We who had been taught to suppress certain subjects as quite indecent found ourselves watching for sex manifestations in our children, discussing the ancient taboo, and brooding upon it ad nauseam. Our daughters' preferences for their fathers and our sons' for us were viewed as throwbacks to the days when incest was the savage's greatest dread.

"What would you have me do?" one practical husband inquired with baffling directness. "Safeguard this dangerous tendency by being cruel to my little girl?" The story goes that his distracted wife

wept on his shoulder. She didn't want that, of course, but she couldn't for the life of her say what she did want. We were all for the first time facing life's most intricate problem, and most of us hadn't the slightest idea that there was such a thing as sublimation.

Relief soon came, however, in the person of a great teacher and philosopher whose optimism and vision overrode all limitations imposed by facts. For a week she lectured beautifully and hopefully while peace was restored to our troubled minds.

"Has any one in this group been infected by Freud?" she asked, using the great man's name as a monk of the Middle Ages might have referred to Lucifer himself.

Infected-infected!

The word was well-chosen. Just precisely that had happened to us. We hung our heads in shamed confession.

"He is a vile monster," the speaker continued. "I wrote a book once disproving everything he said."

Profound was our gratitude. We abandoned Freud-for a year at any rateor until another speaker came to reinstate him.

The anti-Freudian lecturer turned out to be rather more feminist than psychologist. Mothers should be persons, she said, not merely relative beings. The solution of our problems could be found only through woman's economic independence. Then would we follow our natural bents. From babyhood through adolescence children should be handled in groups, not by an overworked, undertrained mother, but by adequately paid professionals. Hoping that we had found the balm of Gilead, we thrust even our three-year-olds into private kindergartens. To meet the need of the wee tots, a few short-lived baby-gardens sprang into being. But in the course of not so great a period of time another series of lectures given by a supposedly practical educator reversed the tenets of the speaker we had so recently espoused.

"Motherhood is so wonderful a blessing," the new prophet expounded, "that every woman should experience it not once but over and over. Twelve children are not too many, and lack of money should not be an obstacle to large families.