entire fabric has its soft parts and its hard, its rigid and its flexible parts; but until we disrupt and dismember its bony, gristly and fibrous parts, one from another, it exists simply as a ãskeleton,ã as one integral and individual whole.
A bridge was once upon a time a loose heap of pillars and rods and rivets of steel. But the identity of these is lost, just as if they were fused into a solid mass, when once the bridge is built; their separate functions are only to be recognised and analysed in so far as we can analyse the stresses, the tensions and the pressures, which affect this part of the structure or that; and these forces are not themselves separate entities, but are the resultants of an analysis of the whole field of force. Moreover when the bridge is broken it is no longer a bridge, and all its strength is gone. So is it precisely with the skeleton. In it is reflected a field of force: and keeping pace, as it were, in action and interaction with this field of force, the whole skeleton and every part thereof, down to the minute intrinsic structure of the bones themselves, is related in form and in position to the lines of force, to the resistances it has to encounter; for by one of the mysteries of biology, resistance begets resistance, and where pressure falls there growth springs up in strength to meet it. And, pursuing the same train of thought, we see that all this is true not of the skeleton alone but of the whole fabric of the body. Muscle and bone, for instance, are inseparably associated and connected; they are moulded one with another; they come into being together, and act and react together27. We may study them apart, but it is as a concession to our weakness and to the narrow outlook of our minds. We see, dimly perhaps, but yet with all the assurance of conviction, that between muscle and bone there can be no change in the one but it is correlated with changes in the other; that through and through they are linked in indissoluble association; that they are only separate entities {714} in this limited and subordinate sense, that they are parts of a whole which, when it loses its composite integrity, ceases to exist.