Life has laws, which it is possible to ascertain; and with each
bit of knowledge acquired, the environment is changed, the life
becomes a new thing. Consider, for example, what a different
place the world became to the man who discovered that the force
which laid the forest in ashes could be tamed and made to warm a
cave and make wild grains nutritious! In other words, man can
create life, he can make the world and himself into that which
his reason decides it ought to be. The means by which he does
this is the most magical of all the tools he has invented since
his arboreal ancestor made the first club; the tool of
experimental science--and when one considers that this weapon has
been understood and deliberately employed for but two or three
centuries, he realizes that we are indeed only at the beginning
of human evolution.
To take command of life, to replace instincts by reasoned and
deliberate acts, to make the world a conscious and ordered
product--that is the task of man. Sir Ray Lankester has set this
forth with beautiful precision in his book, "The Kingdom of Man".
We are, at this time, in an uncomfortable and dangerous
transition stage, as a child playing with explosives. This child
has found out how to alter his environment in many startling
ways, but he does not yet know why he wishes to alter it, nor to
what purpose. He finds that certain things are uncomfortable, and
these he proceeds immediately to change. Discovering that grain
fermented dispels boredom, he creates a race of drunkards;
discovering that foods can be produced in profusion, and prepared
in alluring combinations, he makes himself so many diseases that
it takes an encyclopedia to tell about them. Discovering that
captives taken in war can be made to work, he makes a procession
of empires, which are eaten through with luxury and corruption,
and fall into ruins again.
This is Nature's way; she produces without limit, groping
blindly, experimenting ceaselessly, eliminating ruthlessly. It
takes a million eggs to produce one salmon; it has taken a
million million men to produce one idea--algebra, or the bow and
arrow, or democracy. Nature's present impulse appears as a
rebellion against her own methods; man, her creature, will
emancipate himself from her law, will save himself from her
blindness and her ruthlessness. He is "Nature's insurgent son";
but, being the child of his mother, goes at the task in her old
blundering way. Some men are scheduled to elimination because of
defective eyesight; they are furnished with glasses, and the
breeding of defective eyes begins. The sickly or imbecile child
would perish at once in the course of Nature; it is saved in the
name of charity, and a new line of degenerates is started.
What shall we do? Return to the method of the Spartans, exposing
our sickly infants? We do not have to do anything so wasteful,
because we can replace the killing of the unfit by a scientific
breeding which will prevent the unfit from getting a chance at
life. We can replace instinct by self-discipline. We can
substitute for the regime of "Nature red in tooth and claw with
ravin" the regime of man the creator, knowing what he wishes to
be and how to set about to be it. Whether this can happen,
whether the thing which we call civilization is to be the great
triumph of the ages, or whether the human race is to go back into
the melting pot, is a question being determined by an infinitude
of contests between enlightenment and ignorance: precisely such a
contest as occurs now, when you, the reader, encounter a man who
has thought his way out to the light, and comes to urge you to
perform the act of self-emancipation, to take up the marvellous
new tools of science, and to make yourself, by means of exact
knowledge, the creator of your own life and in part of the life
of the race.