The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.

As long as mankind is made up of independent individuals with free will, there cannot be any social status quo. Men will develop new urges, and these will give rise to new problems, which will require ever new solutions. Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.

But too often the goal of the planners is a universal gray state of health corresponding to absence of disease rather than to a positive attribute conducive to joyful and creative living. This kind of health will not rule out and may even generate another form of ill, the boredom which is the penalty of a formula of life where nothing is left unforeseen.

Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o'-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.

Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!

Pathological states are the consequence of several determinate factors acting simultaneously...The manifestations of any given agent differ profoundly from one person to another. ...Each noxious agent can express itself by a great variety of different pathological states. ...Different agents can elicit similar reactions. ...The total environment and the (interior medium) constitute a multifactorial system.

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence.