There are no accidents in pathology and biogony any more than crops are accidents when the soil is well tilled and seeded. Only lack of understanding can declare illness to be an accident. The foundation for man's ills is self-laid by wrong habits of living. Overeating, improper eating, excessive venery, lascivious thoughts, no exercise, avarice, lack of self control, and lack of poise build and accumulate toxins in his body.

Almost all of man's illnesses originate within himself and result from reduced energy from unwise expenditures until he is no longer able to meet outside influences with equal resistance. Tilden has it that instead of sickness being "a dispensation of divine wrath, it is a dispensation of damned ignorance."

Bad habits of mind and body are the most universal causes of pathology. Almost every one in civilized life has his daily dozen of bad habits that are killing him on his feet. There is no person who has only one bad habit. The average smoker, takes a cocktail now and then, eats too much, drinks tea and coffee, many of them are quite sensual, and they suffer much and die early. Habits, like birds, flock with their kind; or, as Darwin puts it: "Habits easily become associated with other habits." One bad habit easily leads to another.

The food and reproductive urges and the desire for wealth have mankind so enthralled that ideal health is practically non-existent. The belief in cures is a most potent ally of gluttony and venery; for, those who believe that cures can be made without removing causes, cannot be educated out of their bad habits. Few individuals--ever ask why they "cannot eat their cake and keep it." Long ago Pythagoras said: "Since man's appetite has no ears you cannot argue with it."

Modern biology, having renounced good and evil, and destroyed all values, has enthroned irresponsibility and refuses to recognize the office of bad habits in producing pathology. But there is no evidence that our preachers and priests know anything at all about law and order. These are commonly as gluttonous and sensuous as the herd and close [their eyes to the fact that when law and order are riot broken there can be no "disease." Spiritual and mental healers should know that they are not "in tune with the Infinite" so long as they are regularly transgressing the laws of life. The "healing" professions have a vested interest in suffering and do not want to know the truth.

Thus we find ourselves without a true standard of health and fitness and without a knowledge of the basis of health. Health and its requirements have been sadly neglected outside the Hygienic school.

Man should know that, if he overworks, overenjoys, overeats and is careless in giving his body proper attention, he cannot be well. For the simple truth is that no one is healthy who practices even one bad habit. He should know that all stimulants exhaust nerve energy and that he has but a limited amount of energy to expend. If he does everything to excess, he becomes enervated. This means that his health standard is low, and from this point on he is liable to be made sick by any and all unusual influences.

The man of full nerve force--possessed of full resistance--will, apparently make a success of overeating, smoking, drinking and overindulging, until these have enervated him; then he will be able to do it no longer. Then, if he goes to a "qualified" physician--one who knows that his troubles are due to the unfortunate picking up of germs and not to his style of living--he will be told to continue the very habits which have broken him down. He should smoke "good" cigars moderately; he should "eat plenty of good nourishing food to keep up his strength." The serum, the drug, the operation will cancel his debts against law and order.

There are no iron constitutions, no copper lined stomachs. A strong constitution will stand a lot of abuses before their effects finally make themselves apparent, but the strongest constitution cannot be abused with impunity. Dr. Page expresses it thus: " 'Nothing hurts me --I eat everything.' (Next Year) ; 'Nothing agrees with my stomach--I can't eat anything.' Thus the dyspeptic's ranks are kept full with recruits from those who don't want any advice about diet," or about living.

Almost every invalid, semi-invalid and has-been-perfect-physically man or woman now living, once said: "Nothing hurts me--I eat everything." All those who will recruit the great army of invalids as the present ones die off, are, today, following this same delusive idea. They are able to digest pig-iron and are fools enough to try it.

Every day the doctor listens to this lament. "Doctor, I cannot do the things I once did. Once I could digest nails, now I have to eat baby foods; once I could go all day and night without fatigue, but now I tire in a few minutes or hours. I cannot indulge as I once did without suffering." They thought they had cast iron constitutions and copper-lined stomachs; they found they were made of flesh, blood and bones. They tried to see how much they could get away with instead of trying to live in the highest sense. They only got away with their health, strength, usefulness and life.

Once they were healthy, now they are sick. Present health is no guarantee of future health, is no proof of the healthfulness of the mode of living. Protracted apparent impunity tempts "sinners" to believe in the innocence of their habits. But they may be sure their "sins" will find them out.

In spite of our worst habits--our greatest endeavors to break life's laws--the subtle powers of life are beating back pathogenic and lethal influences every second of time. For years the infinite patience of nature labors every night to repair the waste and undo the mischief of every day, and before morning the wasted organs again report ready for duty. But by habitually working beyond the recuperative capacity of the body, or by keeping the body lashed with stimulation, or by habitual failure to secure sufficient rest and sleep, the energy of the body is depleted and exhausted.

As the constant dropping of water wears away even the hardest stone, so do faulty habits, observed or not, weaken the powers of life, undermine the general health, and lay the foundation for the development of the most extensive and the most difficult to remove pathology. The causes of pathology are unobserved and neglected, the pathological conditions are so minute in their beginnings and so insidious, though certain, in their progressive development, that it is only by understanding the aggregate power of these causes that we begin to appreciate the necessity of correcting them instead of merely attempting to remove their effects, while these causes are suffered to continue in unabated force.

Only those who can see in wrong living the cause for man's discomforts and misery, and in the correction of his mode of life the proper remedy for these ills, are in line for a rational solution of the problems of health and illness. Drugs, serums, vaccines and operations do not strike at the roots of pathology; they fail to repair the general health, fail to restore integrity. There is but one cure for illness--correct, or quit, the habits that produce it.

It is not the sudden and transient, but the prolonged and cumulative, the habitual adverse influences, that produce and sustain chronic pathology. It is the slow and insidious causes that mainly impair health. All of us tend to shun those things that cause immediate and repeated suffering.

Integrity of behavior is as essential as integrity of structure if maximal physiological efficiency is to be maintained. It is essential to know that unless energy is conserved function lags. In time all abuses bring on enervation and not only lower physical efficiency, but greatly handicap the mind, and veil the eyes of duty, and drive manhood down and out. Full efficiency cannot be hoped for so long as a man has any habit that lowers his vital powers. Sickness and death before old age, mean lowered efficiency from excessive expenditure--from had habits. Few adults there are who are not forced to pay for earlier indiscretions.

Habits fasten themselves upon us slowly and insidiously. To smoke one cigarette or take one drink of alcohol or one cup of coffee does not constitute the tobacco, alcohol or coffee habit. Eating one huge meal does not constitute gluttony. One masturbation does not constitute auto-eroticism. If these are practiced until they become an established habit-- addiction--changes occur in the nervous system resulting in a neurosis-habit neurosis--that grows upon the habit that produced it. Once a practice becomes ingrained in the nervous system it continues to cry for expression. The individual now finds that his habits are master, he is slave.

Man is a fashion-following animal. In his ignorance, he tends to acquire the habits of his family, friends and community. Dr. Weger says: "He is early set adrift on the calm surface of a sea of sameness of thought, similarity of taste and habit, and identical experience. Is it any wonder that there is a lack of early realization of individuality, or of individual responsibility? Or is it surprising that in many many cases this forced and unnatural growth in conformity to a uniform standard is the beginning of broken health? "

The cause of pathology may be appropriately compared to a mighty river fed by many tributaries. The mighty river of cause is our manner of living and its many tributaries are our many and varied unphysiological and unwholesome habits and practices--our food deficiencies and dietary excesses, our indulgencies and excesses, our poison habits, our lack of emotional poise and our various faults of omission.

Every so-called "disease", however simple it may appear, is the complex effect of many antecedents; is the summation of a legion of correlated factor-elements. It is obviously wrong to single out one of the correlates and attribute to it all the responsibility for the pathology present. Everything is important.

We cannot understand pathology except as viewed against the background of toxemia and the nature of living which developed it. For the real beginnings of pathology we must go to the beginnings of toxemia-- to enervation and its causes. The evolution of pathology is only a larger generalization of facts and permits us to survey pathology by a larger sweep of time and space.

Holding this view, we can have no patience with any plan of care which amounts merely to an effort to drain the river ("cure" the "disease") by destroying only one of its tributaries (causal elements) ; or, which is still worse, attempts to dry up the river by relieving it of some of the debris that floats on its surface, or by throwing more water into it from another source. Tilden correctly says that "a multiple causation must be met by an opposing treatment co-equal in elemental constituents." Preventive measures, also, that seek to immunize one against a multiplicity of causes by opposing them with a unitary entity, must of necessity prove disappointing.