The Russian zoologist of the Pasteur Institute surveys what religions and philosophies have taught about human nature, then sets out his own case from biology. He traces the harmonies and disharmonies of living things, man’s descent from the apes, and the flaws in human organisation behind disease and decline, proposing that science may one day secure a full life and a natural death. Some of his medical hopes are now outdated.
A key book from the 1908 Nobel laureate, important in the history of ideas about ageing. Download the free EPUB.