1
_The Life of Man_
The old anthropomorphic notion that the life of the whole universe
centers in the life of man—that human existence is the supreme
expression of the cosmic process—this notion seems to be on its way
toward the Sheol of exploded delusions. The fact is that the life of
man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology,
appears to be more and more empty of significance. Once apparently the
chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins
to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast,
inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. A blacksmith making a
horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious—the
shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the
sparks, but on the horse-shoe. The sparks, indeed, constitute a sort
of disease of the horse-shoe; their existence depends upon a wasting
of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of
the cosmos—a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are,
of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different
grades of men. No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an
infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the
doctor. But a cosmos infested by prohibitionists, Socialists, Scotsmen
and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and
the moon is so diabetically green!
2
_The Anthropomorphic Delusion_
As I say, the anthropomorphic theory of the world is made absurd by
modern biology—but that is not saying, of course, that it will ever
be abandoned by the generality of men. To the contrary, they will
cherish it in proportion as it becomes more and more dubious. To-day,
indeed, it is cherished as it was never cherished in the Ages of Faith,
when the doctrine that man was god-like was at least ameliorated
by the doctrine that woman was vile. What else is behind charity,
philanthropy, pacifism, Socialism, the uplift, all the rest of the
current sentimentalities? One and all, these sentimentalities are based
upon the notion that man is a glorious and ineffable animal, and
that his continued existence in the world ought to be facilitated and
insured. But this notion is obviously full of fatuity. As animals go,
even in so limited a space as our world, man is botched and ridiculous.
Few other brutes are so stupid or so cowardly. The commonest yellow dog
has far sharper senses and is infinitely more courageous, not to say
more honest and dependable. The ants and the bees are, in many ways,
far more intelligent and ingenious; they manage their government with
vastly less quarreling, wastefulness and imbecility. The lion is more
beautiful, more dignified, more majestic. The antelope is swifter and
more graceful. The ordinary house-cat is cleaner. The horse, foamed
by labor, has a better smell. The gorilla is kinder to his children
and more faithful to his wife. The ox and the ass are more industrious
and serene. But most of all, man is deficient in courage, perhaps the
noblest quality of them all. He is not only mortally afraid of all
other animals of his own weight or half his weight—save a few that he
has debased by artificial inbreeding—; he is even mortally afraid of
his own kind—and not only of their fists and hooves, but even of their
sniggers.
No other animal is so defectively adapted to its environment. The
human infant, as it comes into the world, is so puny that if it were
neglected for two days running it would infallibly perish, and this
congenital infirmity, though more or less concealed later on, persists
until death. Man is ill far more than any other animal, both in his
savage state and under civilization. He has more different diseases and
he suffers from them oftener. He is easier exhausted and injured. He
dies more horribly and usually sooner. Practically all the other higher
vertebrates, at least in their wild state, live longer and retain their
faculties to a greater age. Here even the anthropoid apes are far
beyond their human cousins. An orang-outang marries at the age of seven
or eight, raises a family of seventy or eighty children, and is still
as hale and hearty at eighty as a European at forty-five.
All the errors and incompetencies of the Creator reach their climax
in man. As a piece of mechanism he is the worst of them all; put
beside him, even a salmon or a staphylococcus is a sound and efficient
machine. He has the worst kidneys known to comparative zoology, and
the worst lungs, and the worst heart. His eye, considering the work it
is called upon to do, is less efficient than the eye of an earth-worm;
an optical instrument maker who made an instrument so clumsy would be
mobbed by his customers. Alone of all animals, terrestrial, celestial
or marine, man is unfit by nature to go abroad in the world he
inhabits. He must clothe himself, protect himself, swathe himself,
armor himself. He is eternally in the position of a turtle born without
a shell, a dog without hair, a fish without fins. Lacking his heavy and
cumbersome trappings, he is defenseless even against flies. As God made
him he hasn’t even a tail to switch them off.
I now come to man’s one point of unquestionable natural superiority:
he has a soul. This is what sets him off from all other animals, and
makes him, in a way, their master. The exact nature of that soul has
been in dispute for thousands of years, but regarding its function it
is possible to speak with some authority. That function is to bring
man into direct contact with God, to make him aware of God, above
all, to make him resemble God. Well, consider the colossal failure of
the device! If we assume that man actually does resemble God, then we
are forced into the impossible theory that God is a coward, an idiot
and a bounder. And if we assume that man, after all these years, does
_not_ resemble God, then it appears at once that the human soul is as
inefficient a machine as the human liver or tonsil, and that man would
probably be better off, as the chimpanzee undoubtedly _is_ better off,
without it.
Such, indeed, is the case. The only practical effect of having a
soul is that it fills man with anthropomorphic and anthropocentric
vanities—in brief with cocky and preposterous superstitions. He
struts and plumes himself because he has this soul—and overlooks the
fact that it doesn’t work. Thus he is the supreme clown of creation,
the _reductio ad absurdum_ of animated nature. He is like a cow who
believed that she could jump over the moon, and ordered her whole life
upon that theory. He is like a bullfrog boasting eternally of fighting
lions, of flying over the Matterhorn, and of swimming the Hellespont.
And yet this is the poor brute we are asked to venerate as a gem in
the forehead of the cosmos! This is the worm we are asked to defend
as God’s favorite on earth, with all its millions of braver, nobler,
decenter quadrupeds—its superb lions, its lithe and gallant leopards,
its imperial elephants, its honest dogs, its courageous rats! This is
the insect we are besought, at infinite trouble, labor and expense, to
reproduce!
3
_Meditation on Meditation._
Man’s capacity for abstract thought, which most other mammals seem
to lack, has undoubtedly given him his present mastery of the land
surface of the earth—a mastery disputed only by several hundred
species of microscopic organisms. It is responsible for his feeling
of superiority, and under that feeling there is undoubtedly a certain
measure of reality, at least within narrow limits. But what is too
often overlooked is that the capacity to perform an act is by no means
synonymous with its salubrious exercise. The simple fact is that most
of man’s thinking is stupid, pointless, and injurious to him. Of all
animals, indeed, he seems the least capable of arriving at accurate
judgments in the matters that most desperately affect his welfare.
Try to imagine a rat, in the realm of rat ideas, arriving at a notion
as violently in contempt of plausibility as the notion, say, of
Swedenborgianism, or that of homeopathy, or that of infant damnation,
or that of mental telepathy. Try to think of a congregation of educated
rats gravely listening to such disgusting intellectual rubbish as was
in the public bulls of Dr. Woodrow Wilson. Man’s natural instinct, in
fact, is never toward what is sound and true; it is toward what is
specious and false. Let any great nation of modern times be confronted
by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost
probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring
error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter. It is so
in politics, which consists wholly of a succession of unintelligent
crazes, many of them so idiotic that they exist only as battle-cries
and shibboleths and are not reducible to logical statement at all. It
is so in religion, which, like poetry, is simply a concerted effort
to deny the most obvious realities. It is so in nearly every field
of thought. The ideas that conquer the race most rapidly and arouse
the wildest enthusiasm and are held most tenaciously are precisely
the ideas that are most insane. This has been true since the first
“advanced” gorilla put on underwear, cultivated a frown and began his
first lecture tour in the first chautauqua, and it will be so until the
high gods, tired of the farce at last, obliterate the race with one
great, final blast of fire, mustard gas and streptococci.
No doubt the imagination of man is to blame for this singular weakness.
That imagination, I daresay, is what gave him his first lift above his
fellow primates. It enabled him to visualize a condition of existence
better than that he was experiencing, and bit by bit he was able to
give the picture a certain crude reality. Even to-day he keeps on going
ahead in the same manner. That is, he thinks of something that he would
like to be or to get, something appreciably better than what he is or
has, and then, by the laborious, costly method of trial and error, he
gradually moves toward it. In the process he is often severely punished
for his discontent with God’s ordinances. He mashes his thumb, he skins
his shin; he stumbles and falls; the prize he reaches out for blows
up in his hands. But bit by bit he moves on, or, at all events, his
heirs and assigns move on. Bit by bit he smooths the path beneath his
remaining leg, and achieves pretty toys for his remaining hand to play
with, and accumulates delights for his remaining ear and eye.
Alas, he is not content with this slow and sanguinary progress! Always
he looks further and further ahead. Always he imagines things just
over the sky-line. This body of imaginings constitutes his stock of
sweet beliefs, his corpus of high faiths and confidences—in brief, his
burden of errors. And that burden of errors is what distinguishes man,
even above his capacity for tears, his talents as a liar, his excessive
hypocrisy and poltroonery, from all the other orders of mammalia. Man
is the yokel _par excellence_, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of
the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the
other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and
more particularly by himself—by his incomparable talent for searching
out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what
is true.
The capacity for discerning the essential truth, in fact, is as rare
among men as it is common among crows, bullfrogs and mackerel. The
man who shows it is a man of quite extraordinary quality—perhaps
even a man downright diseased. Exhibit a new truth of any natural
plausibility before the great masses of men, and not one in ten thousand
will suspect its existence, and not one in a hundred thousand will
embrace it without a ferocious resistance. All the durable truths
that have come into the world within historic times have been opposed
as bitterly as if they were so many waves of smallpox, and every
individual who has welcomed and advocated them, absolutely without
exception, has been denounced and punished as an enemy of the race.
Perhaps “absolutely without exception” goes too far. I substitute “with
five or six exceptions.” But who were the five or six exceptions? I
leave you to think of them; myself, I can’t.... But I think at once
of Charles Darwin and his associates, and of how they were reviled
in their time. This reviling, of course, is less vociferous than it
used to be, chiefly because later victims are in the arena, but the
underlying hostility remains. Within the past two years the principal
Great Thinker of Britain, George Bernard Shaw, has denounced the
hypothesis of natural selection to great applause, and a three-times
candidate for the American Presidency, William Jennings Bryan, has
publicly advocated prohibiting the teaching of it by law. The great
majority of Christian ecclesiastics in both English-speaking countries,
and with them the great majority of their catachumens, are still
committed to the doctrine that Darwin was a scoundrel, and Herbert
Spencer another, and Huxley a third—and that Nietzsche is to the three
of them what Beelzebub himself is to a trio of bad boys. This is the
reaction of the main body of respectable folk in two puissant and
idealistic Christian nations to the men who will live in history as the
intellectual leaders of the Nineteenth Century. This is the immemorial
attitude of men in the mass, and of their chosen prophets, to whatever
is honest, and important, and most probably true.
But if truth thus has hard sledding, error is given a loving welcome.
The man who invents a new imbecility is hailed gladly, and bidden to
make himself at home; he is, to the great masses of men, the _beau
ideal_ of mankind. Go back through the history of the past thousand
years and you will find that ninetenths of the popular idols of the
world—not the heroes of small sects, but the heroes of mankind in
the mass—have been merchants of palpable nonsense. It has been so in
politics, it has been so in religion, and it has been so in every other
department of human thought. Every such hawker of the not-true has been
opposed, in his time, by critics who denounced and refuted him; his
contention has been disposed of immediately it was uttered. But on the
side of every one there has been the titanic force of human credulity,
and it has sufficed in every case to destroy his foes and establish his
immortality.
4
_Man and His Soul_
Of all the unsound ideas thus preached by great heroes and accepted by
hundreds of millions of their eager dupes, probably the most patently
unsound is the one that is most widely held, to wit, the idea that man
has an immortal soul—that there is a part of him too ethereal and
too exquisite to die. Absolutely the only evidence supporting this
astounding notion lies in the hope that it is true—which is precisely
the evidence underlying the late theory that the Great War would put
an end to war, and bring in an era of democracy, freedom, and peace.
But even archbishops, of course, are too intelligent to be satisfied
permanently by evidence so unescapably dubious; in consequence, there
have been efforts in all ages to give it logical and evidential
support. Well, all I ask is that you give some of that corroboration
your careful scrutiny. Examine, for example, the proofs amassed by
five typical witnesses in five widely separated ages: St. John, St.
Augustine, Martin Luther, Emanuel Swedenborg and Sir Oliver Lodge.
Approach these proofs prayerfully, and study them well. Weigh them in
the light of the probabilities, the ordinary intellectual decencies.
And then ask yourself if you could imagine a mud-turtle accepting them
gravely.
5
_Coda_
To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000
revolutions a minute.