Pasteur had announced in 1864, “Life is a germ and a germ is Life,” but this was the life that ended in disease and death.136 Five years later young Friedrich Miescher had discovered that curious nucleic acid which, as DNA, is today hailed as the veritable stuff of life; but the man revealed through Christ was certainly not the product or the victim of a genetic code. To this basic distinction Mrs. Glover came back again and again. In a thousand different ways she emphasized the need for bringing to light the “true” man in place of the caricature presented by the senses.
This did not make for easy reading. In the preface to her book she wrote that owing to her explanations’ “constantly vibrating between the same points” there must necessarily be “an irksome repetition of words,” and that beauty of language must give place “to close analysis, and unembellished thought.”137 The book made strong demands on the reader’s seriousness of purpose.
At the end of Democratic Vistas Whitman had recently set forth what he called a new theory of literary composition:
Books are to be called for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or framework. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained, intuitive.138
Mrs. Glover apparently expected few such readers to begin with, and she commented realistically that “little justice is done metaphysics by a utilitarian people where the race is to the swift.”139
136 [“. . . la vie c’est le germe et le germe c’est la vie.” Louis Pasteur, “Des générations spontanées,” Revue Scientifique de la France et de L’Étranger, 23 April 1864, p. 263. See also René Vallery-Radot, The Life of Pasteur, trans. R. L. Devonshire (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1902), pp. 139, 142.]
137 [Glover, Science and Health, 1st ed., p. 5.]
138 [Whitman, Democratic Vistas, p. 76.]
139 [Glover, Science and Health, 1st ed., p. 275.]