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