This same position gave
to the lungs, trachea, larynx, and mouth an aptness for the production
of articulate speech, and speech is intelligence. Moreover, this
position, causing the head to weigh vertically upon the trunk,
facilitated its development and increase of weight, and the head is the
seat of the mind. But as this necessitated greater strength and
resistance in the bones of the pelvis than in those of species whose
head and trunk rest upon all four extremities, the burden fell upon
woman, the author of the Fall according to Genesis, of bringing forth
larger-headed offspring through a harder framework of bone. And Jahwe
condemned her, for having sinned, to bring forth her children in sorrow.
The gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and their kind, must look
upon man as a feeble and infirm animal, whose strange custom it is to
store up his dead. Wherefore?
And this primary disease and all subsequent diseases--are they not
perhaps the capital element of progress? Arthritis, for example, infects
the blood and introduces into it scoriae, a kind of refuse, of an
imperfect organic combustion; but may not this very impurity happen to
make the blood more stimulative? May not this impure blood promote a
more active cerebration precisely because it is impure? Water that is
chemically pure is undrinkable. And may not also blood that is
physiologically pure be unfit for the brain of the vertical mammal that
has to live by thought?
The history of medicine, moreover, teaches us that progress consists
not so much in expelling the germs of disease, or rather diseases
themselves, as in accommodating them to our organism and so perhaps
enriching it, in dissolving them in our blood.
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