Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce has taken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species. In the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature of the queer beings about him. As he grows, the research continues, amplifies, broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracy of the data he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature, consciously cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature—every man feels himself entitled to that degree from the university of disillusioning experience. In defense of his claim, only the limitations of his articulate faculty will curb the vehemence of his indictment of his fellows.
For all history provides the material, literature the critique, biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.
The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality, structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that individuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom, law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of man preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of predatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are evoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe and cataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.
Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes. And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.
Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws, institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for freedom.
Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime. When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba, protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom. For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new power—the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just happen along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist.
That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba—a miracle that freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation. But latent in that move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the alligator, the wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and plant, parasitism and slavery. The device that enabled the ameba to change its position in space of its own will, and so increased its freedom immeasureably, meant the generation of infinite evil, pain, suffering and degradation for billions in the womb of time.
Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example, furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of every living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world, from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the infectious diseases which kill man. The change from parasitism to slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence. In the transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in periodically as its mode of progress.
The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has tended to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested food present in the intestines of its host, has no alimentary canal of its own because it needs none. On the other hand, the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant use into the most remarkable of efficient weapons.
In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature, the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy, stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human.
Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong, the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a geometrically increasing proportion.
This might be called the Malthusian law of slavery. For the qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.
Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government, that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience.
But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device upon device, to retain their spoils.
The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at last universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems within grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been hit upon, that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their mutual bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them together. All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected institutions appeared to culminate in the formula that would automatically yield Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added Equality and Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the formula that would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness. That formula is: the democracy of the normals.
To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks the better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be the raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of their faculties and powers.
Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what a democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals—or if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal lives.
Furthermore you then begin to have the entirely novel possibility in the world: some sort of collective effort for a collective purpose, beyond the personal greeds and fears, factions and hatreds. So the state, instead of fulfilling its old function of serving as the tool of certain powerful individuals, latterly known as the Big Men, might be transformed into an instrument toward freedom. With the ideal of a democracy of the normals ever before him, the statesman could go on to construct and modify his social machinery. That would entail the satisfaction not alone of the animal needs, but also the highest aspirations and therefore the provision of the finest conditions of life for the normal: those most favorable, stimulative, and assistant to creative activity. For what else is the content of the idea of freedom?
Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species. A fair fight, a free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto of natural selection. Where civilization shakes hands with natural instinct, what but the happiest of results can be expected?
Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles' heel. Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the bone, the standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that the average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In effect, they are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman is bound to be defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.
No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are doomed to remain forever subnormal.
The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion. The careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity. Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with transition links between. One finds him at every level of society.
Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique, becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist, the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?
But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree. Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and taken by him is a fascinating process.
The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want. These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the respiration business as soon as they are born.
Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him in his ascent.
Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and speculation in intellect which mankind is. To say that he is a wolf in sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part, he carries it off very well.
Slaves and careerists, subnormals and abnormals, are the important elements of the constituency of every modern statesman. The financial and social careerists as business men, professionals, artists, publicists, presidents of countries, politicians, philosophers dominate his outlook, his plans, his horizon. The slaves, the inferiors, the subnormals exist merely to be exploited by them. No one questions the causes of the multiplicity of them. No one asks why there are so many little lives. For a fundamentally minded statesman the control of the production of the careerist, why he is produced, and how he may be prevented, becomes the primary problem of his art.
Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human nature. The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great, wonderful, free community. We are all careerists. In so far as democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life that way than any other way. For himself. And the devil take the others. The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine his politics to this very day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when he does not throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit, sectional inertia, or race prejudice.
Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid. What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast who once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against the world, men could never have been driven to live together for twenty-four hours in communities.
The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has been, and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever the same, there is no way out.
All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity, incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German, American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general can be blamed on no one in particular.
Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority? Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid variants, involve millions in their disease, the idea of freedom persists obstinately. Have we any reason for regarding it as other than an illusion?
If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And no Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as though every other method has failed us.
In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few. War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to wholesale slavery and carnage.
Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there, but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the museums of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are condemned to be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming discoverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of the gods, let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but irretrievably willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us except to beat our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it?
Yet, true as it is that the human animal has achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves, Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature, differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and allow him to play out his existence in cage cities.
The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst in the desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the gray-and-dreary lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution. But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?
We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the most oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in, while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering to the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between its organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive the higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the suicide of the whole.
As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the germs of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands of years of pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon a comet or gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others! What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting at long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory, is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entanglements of an inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee and remake itself into the immortal image that is its God.
And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future and destiny, there are others. Man, after all, may be simply a bad habit Life will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can afford to be anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all living things to which we are blood-related. There are other species or latent species to take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens and ascend the heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain lines that would make them the masters of the universe.
But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the struggle for survival and power, the implications of the qualities necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate pieces of protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begotten of life. That is why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a phrase. It is impossible to conceive of something alive, possessed of the property of remembering, that is not possessed of a store of past experiences. You can no more think of getting rid of these unconscious memories of protoplasm than you can think of getting rid of the wetness of water. They are imbedded in the most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba as well as in our most complex tissues.
The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory carnivor who were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia, even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the self-and-species murdering inventions and discoveries that are apparently destined to slay us. The powers of unconscious memory and unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it possible for it to be and become what it is and has, they have also made it forever impossible for it to be or become its own contradiction.
Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to contact with them by a fundamental impulse to assimilate them into itself, and make them part of itself. That assimilatory urge is present in every activity from coarse ingestion as food to the moral metabolism of the hermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.
In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities, empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through stages of a relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches the stage of integration which wills its own disintegration, that we have been taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence as radium. And we are told that nebulae wander until they collide and give birth to stars, stars wander and collide and give birth to nebulae. Life begins as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to build a brain, which automatically refines itself to the point of discovering and using the most efficient methods of destroying others, and by a boomerang effect, itself. Fate!
The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken, or power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given the credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which, at first slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and bleeding among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives, presently goes on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step, to emerge into the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That idea-process, this Anti-Fate is Science.
Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life, undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain cells.
Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena, were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no fanfare of trumpets.
First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really totally inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no sustained vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands and dangers of public life.
But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science acquired prestige.
Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.
The future of science has become the future of the race. So much of an inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated. That is ordinarily taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man became the New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental discoveries and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go on, providing a succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist and his retinue. Not only is he to be entertained and served by them, but any commercial value will also be exploited by him. The natural wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science.
Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone. The wonder-maker may have forced upon him, may welcome, the honors of the priest, though he pose as the humble slave of Nature and her secrets. Presently the foundations and institutes, which coexist with the cathedrals and churches, just as once the new Christian chapels and congregations stood side by side with pagan temples and heathen shrines, may oust their rivals, and assume the monopoly of ritual. Should its spirit remain fine and clear, should it maintain the glorious promise of its dawn, should its high priests realize the perpetually widening intimations of its universal triumph, and escape the ossification that has overtaken all young and hopeful things and institutions, the real foundation for a future of the species would be laid, and so its ultimate suicide prevented.
The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words. There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.
Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our social systems.
But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities, jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases? Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps, the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us: that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no future?
That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always will be the same." "As a man is built." "Bred in the bone." These are the axioms of our social and economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming that his nature is as uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has limited his research into the substance of freedom to a groping for an understanding of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he set himself another of the insoluble problems he seems to delight in by neglecting the most important factor in the equation. Yet the invisible soul of man, ignored, as a variable, varying quantity, has upset all societies and constitutions, and all schemes of bondage as well as of freedom.
For freedom, it becomes obvious as soon as it is clearly stated, is sheer impossibility until the internal conditions of his nature are ascertained, and the way paved for their control. A simple illustration of the working of this principle is supplied by our democracies, grossly pretenders. How can a democracy be possible without a knowledge of the control of the individually and socially subnormal, who, since they offer themselves to exploitation by the careerists, prove themselves the weak links in the chain of co-operation with an equal opportunity for all, that is the democratic ideal? In what does the equality or inequality of men consist? Just what are the qualities necessary for successful competition, or if you will, co-living, of man with his fellow-men, and how and why do they operate? No freedom, independent of the servile repetitions of history and heredity, is conceivable until these inquiries have been elaborately carried out toward a certain working finality.
There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They are invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue born of necessity. Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the "Bible of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares: "There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races." High hopes beat in this declaration. But Galton could not have foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but envy as a masterpiece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had climbed from the African level.
The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best, and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. Besides, this is a strange world of choices. Nobody is to be considered worthy of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly. Nobody who would permit an outsider's decision as to when he was properly in love would be worth thirty cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma of the eugenist—the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.
There are the claims and outcries and promises of the psychologists—the specialists in the probing of the human soul and human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them into two schools—the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious, the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the Freudians. A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their differences are those of horizon merely. For the McDougallians look upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad—the Freudians see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope.
But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the disciples of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old, very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of civilization. It is the bubble of education all over again. What in our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental barracks.
Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe. They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. Layer upon layer, cross-section upon cross-section have been piled before us. And what a melodramatic cinema of thrills and shivers, villains and heroes, heroines and adventuresses have they not unfolded. Each motive, as the stiff psychologist of the nineteenth century, with his plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeon holes and classifications, labelled the teeming creatures of the mind, becomes anon a strutting actor upon a multitudinous stage, and an audience in a crowded playhouse. Scenes are enacted the febrile fancy of a Poe or a de Maupassant never could have conjured. The complex, the neurosis, the compulsion, the obsession, the slip of speech, the trick of manner, the devotion of a life-time, the culture of a nation all furnish bits for the Freudian mosaic. Attractions and inhibitions, repulsions and suppressions are held up as the ultimate pulling and pushing forces of human nature.