SCIENCE AND PROGRESS
Such appear some, at least, of the characteristics of the various
classes of Society to-day in England. In general material condition
there is little to excite foreboding. A proportion of the population
is raised well above the privations of poverty larger than ever before
in history. Extravagance and a longing for pleasure and excitement are
common to all classes. The aggregation of plenty is such as the Old
World has never before seen. The vision, as a whole, is of a laborious
energetic race, deserting the countryside for the cities, and there
heaping up wealth, which is shared, in some degree, by all but the
poorest. If anything is wrong in material conditions it is in the
apparatus, not of accumulation, but of distribution. An altogether
inadequate proportion of this accumulation is the absolute possession
of a tiny class which sits secure upon the summit. In heavy tolls
levied upon labour in the form of royalties and the monopoly rents of
land, in inherited fortune which reaps its interest from remote regions
and foreign kingdoms, in unusual profit of industrial investment
through times of trade “boom,” in financial speculation and all the
various special advantage of business, commerce, and manufacture in
this free market of England, there is being concentrated in few hands
vast and ever-increasing fortune. Security accepted as normal, comfort
more widely spread than ever before, and a standard of extravagance and
display which would have astonished all previous ages, characterise the
heart of the Empire at the height of its material greatness. “Situate
at the entering of the sea,” with a population exceeding Scotland or
Ireland, and the revenues of many European States, the greatest city of
that Empire is taking toll from the industry of all the world. In the
midst of which outward evidence of attainment sounds almost unnoticed
the complaining of a poverty more degraded and intolerable than in many
less successful lands: whose misery is intensified by its conjunction
in adjacent cities with a people evidently given up to the arts of
enjoyment, and finding an ever-increasing plenty inadequate to its
ever-increasing demand.
And always the hope is latent that “something will turn up” which will
solve all the unfortunate social problems, and make every one happy and
content. Sometimes it is to be the advance of mechanical discovery,
sometimes a new spirit of kindliness and patience: sometimes fuller
conquests of trade or commerce or Imperial dominion; but always the
bringing in from outside of a _Deus ex machina_ which will supplement
nobody’s loss with everybody’s gain. The advance in acquisition
during a century of invention has been so astonishing, the progress
of whole classes from a low-grade, comfortless, ignorant life into
a highly-paid, skilled, intelligent working people so remarkable,
that to many the continuance of such a process seems inevitable.
Amelioration is to come as a legitimate child of the forces of change,
and without effort or sacrifice is to reveal a continuous process
of uplifting. Certainly by all material and tangible tests--income,
prices, security, comfort, addition to leisure and wages--the bulk
of the people of this country have advanced so incredibly since the
“Hungry Forties” that the reality of those days would appear to the
present generation but as bad dreams. They cannot believe that these
things were actually enacted upon these islands less than eighty
years ago. The Report of the Royal Commission on Children’s Labour in
the Factories,--the most sensational blue book of the century,--for
example, would seem rather to refer to the Spaniards in the West Indies
or the administration of King Leopold in the Congo than to the solid
ground and pleasant airs of England. And in every kind of material
test--fall of pauperism, fall of the death-rate, decline of infectious
and poverty diseases--or increase of wages, shortening of hours of
labour, fall in prices; or, again, spread of education and of means of
recreation, improvement in houses and in the sanitation of cities, the
offering of opportunities of advancement: in all these the advance has
been so amazing that there would seem to be no place for the pessimist
who would prophesy coming disaster.
It is rather in the region of the spirit that the doubts are still
disturbing. Fulness of bread in the past has been accompanied with
leanness of soul. And the modern prophet is still undecided whether
this enormous increase of life’s comforts and material satisfactions
has revealed an equal and parallel advance in courage and compassion
and kindly understandings. The nations, equipped with ever more
complicated instruments of warfare, face each other as armed camps
across frontiers mined and tortured with the apparatus of destruction.
A scared wealthy and middle class confronts a cosmopolitan uprising
of the “proletariat,” whose discontent it can neither appease nor
forget. The industrious populations which have been swept into masses
and congestions by the new industry has not yet found an existence
serene, and intelligible, and human. No one, to-day, looking out upon
a disturbed and sullen Europe, a disturbed and confident America,
but is conscious of a world in motion: whither, no man knows. “The
people of our Christian world,” so runs the cry of the first of living
prophets--“the people of our Christian world live like animals, guided
in their lives merely by personal interests and by their struggle with
one another: differing from animals only in that the animals, from
time immemorial, have kept the same stomachs, claws, and fangs, while
people move with ever-increasing rapidity from roads to railroads,
from horses to steam, from spoken sermons and letters to printing, to
telegraphs and telephones, and from sailing boats to ocean steamers,
from swords to gunpowder, cannons, quick-firing guns, bombs, and
war aeroplanes. And life, with telegraphs, telephones, electricity,
bombs, and aeroplanes, and with hatred of all for all: directed, not
by some uniting spiritual principle, but, on the contrary, by animal
instincts which divide, and which employ mental powers for their own
satisfaction, becomes even more and more insane and wretched.”[18]
What mechanical invention, what mechanical skill, have any promise to
offer of immediate and large improvement? Will the cunning ingenuity
of men, which embarked on the path of scientific exploration with such
large hopes of service to humanity as well as attainment of truth, be
able, even at this last, through the multiplication of machinery to
eliminate poverty, through the development of the arts of healing to
eliminate pain? Or if this be unattainable and delusive, can we find
through these and other progressive agencies a permanent healing for
the sick soul of humanity? Is the twentieth century to advocate a
scheme of life which will itself provide a consolation in the loss of
the older faiths, and redeem mankind from a mere animal struggle for
the apparatus of material pleasure?
The “Bankruptcy of Science” is a term which has become common to
European literature since M. Brunetiere first scandalised the naive
ingenuous persons who accepted empiricism as a new religion. And, in
a large movement of popular opinion, mankind has turned with some
indignation and some regret from a method which has proved altogether
inadequate to the immense hopes that it once excited amongst its
first admirers. The greatness of the disappointment is proportioned
to the greatness of the promise. The accusation--in its popular
form--is an unfair one. Natural science, as such, makes no claim to
remedy human ills; makes no claim, indeed, to exercise any kind of
influence upon human life at all. It does not reveal, and it does not
profess to reveal, the secret and meaning of the Universe. That is
the function of a metaphysic. It does not labour in aid of religion,
art, economic equality, or social comfort. It does not labour against
them. It leaves them alone. These are outside its province. There is
no possibility through investigations in the higher mathematics, of
solving the problem of the injustices of human fortune. There is no
prospect through examination of the brains of dead animals to discover
or disprove the existence of the human soul. There is no promise, by
however subtle elaboration of mechanical invention, permanently to
better the lot of those poor who in every variation of human society
are always living near the margin of what is humanly endurable. Such
disabilities are no charge against human reason, concentrated upon
investigation of the nature of the material Universe. They are a
charge, if charge at all, against the somewhat too sanguine dreamers
who asserted that through human reason, in investigation of the nature
of the material Universe, mankind would finally achieve secrets
which would make them rivals of the older gods. The large hopes and
dreams of the Early Victorian time have vanished: never, at least in
the immediate future, to return. The science which was to allay all
diseases, the commerce which was to abolish war, and weave all nations
into one human family, the research which was to establish ethics and
religion on a secure and positive foundation, the invention which was
to enable all humanity, with a few hours of not disagreeable work every
day, to live for the remainder of their time in ease and sunshine--all
these have become recognised as remote and fairy visions. One man now
produces--by the aid of machinery--what a thousand could but hardly
produce a century ago. “Argosies of commerce” post over land and ocean
without rest. Not two but two hundred blades of grass grow where one
blade grew before. Factories and furnaces, in never-ceasing activity,
vomit forth ever more elaborate products, clothing, furniture, houses,
implements of brass and steel, by methods which would have excited
wonder and worship in earlier, simpler ages. Yet ten millions,
disinherited, out of a doubtful forty, shiver through their lives on
the verge of hunger: to the bulk of the remainder existence presents no
certain joys, either in a guaranteed prosperity or in any serviceable
and illuminating purpose of being. Civilisation, in the early twentieth
century in England, suffers no illusions as to the control of natural
forces, or the exploration of natural secrets furnishing a cure either
for the diseases from which it suffers in the body, or the more
deep-seated maladies of the soul.
It is making life noisier: is it making life--to the general--a richer,
a better thing: existence more worth the living? Once more, here is no
charge against invention, against the persistent labours of select and
powerful minds to ascertain what knowledge is obtainable by the method
of experiment and observation. They might justly reply that it is not
in their province to make life a richer and better thing: existence
more worth the living. Their function--in so far as it touches human
life at all--is to increase the aggregate control of “mind over
matter”; to release man from the mere impotent cowering before the
brute forces of Chance and Necessity, which can deal with him as a
plaything, or overwhelm him, casually and indifferently, without praise
and without blame. They have no function to determine what distribution
of this increase in human wealth and control will most make for the
happiness and development of the human family, or to adjust whatever
affirmations they may be able to advance with some certitude to
historical religions, moralities, or customary courses of conduct.
“The changing conditions of history,” says a great modern philosopher,
“touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities, and open chances to
us for new ideals. But with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on the old ideal will vanish: and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significance is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.”
As the mechanical discoveries swing forward there will always be
those buoyant persons to whom the newer inventions are most welcome,
contrasted with the more conservative elements who ask for quiet,
and some position secure from the cyclic disturbances of change. In
the next generation, any particular change has become the normal,
and excites neither satisfaction nor disgust. So it has been with
improved locomotion, with telegraphs and telephones, with all the
outward apparatus which has set the unchanged human spirit in a world
of marvel and miracle. The most obvious scientific advance which is
already visible upon the horizon, is the invention of flying: which
may be accepted, almost before these words are in print, as something
no longer so astonishing as to excite enthusiasm or foreboding. It may
exercise the profoundest influence upon the possibilities of war, of
land frontiers, of divisions between contending nations. It has no real
power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy,
or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years,
perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and
adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional
sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending
unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when
mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the
tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. Then
the airship will find itself utilised for military purposes, perhaps
with startling result. Then for locomotion and the transfer of people
and merchandise from place to place above the recognised boundaries of
ocean or territory. Finally, it will appear as a normal factor of man’s
life, transfiguring the world as much as the steamship or the railway;
occupied in the service of the poor as well as of the rich, under
private as well as public control. It may eliminate natural boundaries
which have exercised a dominant influence upon human life since human
life first was. The “precious stone set in a silver sea,” with its
moat defensive “against the envy of less happier lands,” may find
itself suddenly helpless and vulnerable before armies dropping from
the skies. War itself may become impossible or utterly destructive.
Protective barriers disappear, and the ingenuities of the construction
of a scientific tariff melt into thin air. Man, whether he will or
no, is drawn inevitably nearer to man. He must federate, or perish in
homicidal mania and blind impulse of hatred and revenge.
On the other hand, quite apart from the question of national rivalries
or the old impelling causes of the madness of war, there is the
further consideration of the influence of such achievements upon the
delicate fabric of the body and soul of mankind. At best, any large
accomplishment of flying must mean an increased hustling and speeding
up of human life; more hurry, more bustle, more breathlessness,
more triumphant supremacy of material things. In all our mechanical
ingenuities we have constructed masters for us, rather than servants;
being compelled, immediately such ingenuities have found fruit in
invention, to adjust our lives to the new conditions which these, and
not we ourselves, henceforth dictate and impose. We are compelled, for
example, to avail ourselves of the telegraph and the telephone; we are
driven to the express train, the motor omnibus, the various expedients
which are adapted to acceleration, rather than to happiness. If we
do not adjust our lives to such accelerations, we are swept aside or
trodden under by the crowds which press behind; like those who fail in
the daily leap for the Brooklyn cars at New York, and are swept aside
or trodden under almost unheeded. Has all this violence and tumult
made life richer, fairer, more desirable for the children of men? Or
is man losing in the mere blind effort of acceleration some of those
experiences which once transfigured and glorified his little span
of days? “Can you really turn a ray of light by magnetism?” shouted
Carlyle scornfully. “And if you can, what should I care?” Matthew
Arnold complained that the modern Englishman “thinks it the highest
pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried
twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell
to Islington, and when railway trains run between them every quarter
of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from
an illiberal dismal life at Camberwell to an illiberal dismal life
at Islington, and the letters only tell him that such is the life
there.” Airships journeying daily from Paris to Pekin might excite
exultation in a humanity which has emulated the exploits of Icarus,
without exciting, like Icarus, the wrath of the jealous gods. Of what
profit if they be found merely to transfer to Paris an existence which
has become intolerable at Pekin, and to Pekin an existence which has
become intolerable at Paris? It is a remarkable fact in the history
of European development, that all the recent success of scientific
and mechanical invention has been accompanied by an ever profounder
questioning of the advantage of it all; so that to-day, when we seem
on the verge of such discoveries as would have made our ancestors
shout for joy in the mere triumph of creative energy, great writers
are inquiring, with more bitterness and uncertainty than ever before,
whether a verdict of bankruptcy has not been passed upon the whole of
this complicated and baffled society. Mr. Wells has exhibited the old
potato digger, “a greengrocer by trade, a gardener by disposition,”
confronting with a deepening disgust the restlessness of being. “Heaven
had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately, Heaven had not
planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and
incessant change.” He is revealed in his little garden; gas-works and
electric power stations rising up to heaven beside him, mono-rails
running across his head, flocks of balloons and aeroplanes clouding
the horizon; everywhere on earth and sky the impression of a hustling,
distorted, dissatisfied energy, writhing into fresh forms of grotesque
invention. “This here Progress,” is his dull conviction; “it keeps
on. You’d hardly think it _could_ keep on.” It is not only Mr. Tom
Smallways who is bothered with doubts of an uncertain future. The
vision of all poverty and sweat of labour vanishing by the occasional
pressing of a button, while mankind lies at ease on the hillside like
the Olympian gods, has joined the vision of all disease abolished by
scientific ingenuity in the kingdom of the shades. Flying will bring
men together, abolish boundaries, multiply the facilities of exchange,
increase the wealth of a few. Can it offer satisfaction for one of the
necessities of the soul? There will always be those who find a bracing
and tonic in the roar and exultation of riotous life, the mingling of
the machine with the inspiration of the crowd. There will always be
others who will seek satisfaction in quietness and common things--the
untroubled horizon, the secure possession of the heart of humanity.
Between which two extremes the mass of mankind will go forward,
sometimes indifferent, not without courage and patience, towards a life
increasing in complexity, and making ever more difficult demands on
body and soul.
And as with flying, so with all similar advances in mechanical
discovery. Man creates and man consumes; no happier for a provision
which merely feeds a restless, hungry impulse towards change. So many
houses, so many clothes, so many elaborate meals, so many holidays
to-day. The number is doubled to-morrow. The many acquiesce: the
few, on the one extreme, accept and rejoice; the few, on the other,
push aside the banquet untasted, or spurn the feast with bitter gibe
at the futility of it all. “The barrenness and ignobleness of the
labourer’s life,” says a modern philosopher, “consists in the fact
that it is moved by no ideal inner springs.” But the labourer has no
monopoly in such a loss and deficiency. The whole of modern life has
the accusation resting upon it, that it is moved by no ideal inner
springs. Some find satisfaction in political energies, others in
religious ardours; others, again,--in the mere play and triviality of
wealth accumulation,--card games, or ingenious children’s diversions
carried into the larger universe of human affairs. Pursuit of knowledge
claims a tiny “remnant,” with a high intellectual hunger; or enthusiasm
for the future of the race, as they see always, luminous and clear
on the horizon, the shining of the star of a new dawn. But to the
general these “ideal inner springs” are wanting. They feel confused
in a world of confusion. Social unrest affects large masses of them
whose restlessness finds no clear fruit in action. Literature proclaims
a disenchantment. Man wanders unsatisfied in the spacious palaces of
his new material splendour. Many, after a rebellion at the time of
adolescence, settle down into acceptance; into making the “best of
it” in a world hard to understand, but, on the whole, easy to endure.
Others still refuse to relinquish the past for the intangible, elusive
promises of the future. “Enlightened persons,” wrote Châteaubriand,
“cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in
the shadow of what they call ruins. Tell me, for pity’s sake, in the
individual and philosophical society which you offer me, where shall I
find a family and a God?”
* * * * *
In the abolition of poverty by mechanical appliance, in the provision
of ethical and moral satisfactions for the human spirit which desires
richer gifts than material supremacy, this empirical method would
seem hitherto to have failed. They would appear, however, to be on
surer ground who prophesy its success in the war against disease.
Here at least discovery can have none but beneficial results; and the
competition is one of absolute human advantage. Yet the progress of
the modern campaign against diseases, distinguished as it has been
by triumphs which appear almost miraculous, still suffers resistance
which baffle and frustrate its purpose. There appears a kind of
unseen antagonist, who will rally in one region forces which have
been beaten elsewhere, and is determined never to allow mankind the
full fruits of victory. That all diseases will be slain by science,
and all slain speedily, was one of the accepted anticipations of the
earlier nineteenth century. In the great outburst of a triumphant
optimism which inspired the Early Victorian literature, the present,
whose discontents were clearly diagnosed, was sharply contrasted with
a future where such discontents would be no more. Here, on the solid
ground, a new race should arise, whose life, if limited, should be at
least secure. On one side, it may be confessed, there are evidences
of an almost exultant advance. The surest ground for optimism, for
faith in the “beneficent processes of the unseen time,” is provided by
examination of how many human scourges have been rendered innocuous
within living memory. We have eliminated from Europe the menace of
those sweeping cyclones of pestilence, whose terrors brood like a
grey cloud over all the brightness of the Middle Ages. One-third of
Christendom perished in the few months’ agony of the Black Death.
The sound of its lamentation, the madness caused by its apparently
irresistible destruction, still remains revealed in those “Dances of
Death” which absorbed the later medieval time, and in the literature
of protest and despair of a similar age. The Plague still ravages
the East, but science has succeeded, and apparently will succeed, in
protecting Europe against it. Other malignant fevers we seem on a
fair road to stamp out altogether. Smallpox has almost disappeared,
under the combined effects of sanitation and vaccination. Diphtheria
has lost its terrors since the arrival of the antitoxin treatment.
Hydrophobia has become merely a dread memory of the past. Even
tuberculosis, the special and terrible scourge of the northern races,
is likely to become in the future but as an evil memory of old years.
Science again, through the devotion and intelligence of a long roll of
volunteers, has boldly sallied out from the limited abodes of men into
the wild and shaggy regions of Nature, in the determination to strike
its enemy boldly at the centre of its empire. It is not content with
mere preventives and prophylactics, dosing men with drugs or covering
them with veils and protections. It is setting itself to extirpate the
very instruments of the propagation of the disease. Its enemy is the
insect. That extraordinary populous and intelligent kingdom might have
once attained the supremacy of the world, but for some inexplicable
limitations in size which has prevented any of its denizens from
challenging the forces of mankind. Michelet has described the kind of
horror with which the head of an ant inspired him, as first seen under
the microscope; with its vast and complicated eyes, its evidence of
incalculable brain power, but with the utter absence of any of those
human qualities which are revealed even in the vertebrate animals.
Yet those ants can exhibit inexplicable powers of communication, and
a social organisation which has been the envy of many a philosopher,
as he contrasts it with the chaos of human life. Ants charged with
“Boom food,” ant communities of many thousands, all six feet high,
might provide a considerable obstacle to the accepted supremacy of
mankind. But the insect, however tiny, is becoming more and more to
be recognised as one of the enemies of the human race. There is here
no possibility of compromise. We can be sentimental over the horse,
the cat, the dog. If we are sentimental over the insect, we are lost.
“Why should I harm thee, little fly?” was Uncle Toby’s famous inquiry.
“Is there not room enough in the world for me and thee?” Science is
unhesitatingly pronouncing a grim negative to the question. There is
not sufficient room in the world for “me and thee.” This is probably
true of the common house-fly, who more and more is coming to be branded
as a propagator of disease. It is already accepted of his cousin, the
mosquito, against whom the whole of the world is turning with a set
purpose of extermination. The alleged unhealthiness of marshes and
tropical regions, formerly ascribed to heat and noxious vapours, is
now declared to be entirely explicable by the spread of a definite
bacterium through the bites of insects. Where the insects are destroyed
the white man flourishes. Panama, in the early days of the Canal
building, was converted into a visible hell, in which a population
rioted and rotted and died, as they rioted and rotted and died in the
days of the plague. The Americans to-day have descended there with all
scientific resources. They burn the insect, they choke its offspring
with oil, they drain the stagnant pools where it can breed, they
consume it in clouds of evil-smelling smoke. They are rapidly making
Panama a healthier place than New York or Chicago. All down the coast
of South America, yellow fever has decimated mankind for centuries.
To-day it is well on its way to becoming a thing of the past. Six years
ago an international campaign was inaugurated against the _Stegomya
fasciata_, the “white-ribbed mosquito,” which spreads the disease. At
Rio Janeiro, Dr. Cruz, “Cruz the mosquito killer,” has practically
removed its menace. Repairing choked-up gutters, draining stagnant
marshes, fumigating and isolating, scattering oil on the still waters,
he is speedily and relentlessly exterminating this enemy of mankind.
Yellow fever and malarias will become shortly things of the past, as
the warfare, at present of necessity limited to the neighbourhood of
the cities, is extended through all the waste places of the world.
And if the discussion passes from the prevention to the cure, here
also the sanguine dream of our fathers might seem in process of
realisation. We can treat the tortured human body as Brutus wished to
treat the condemned Cæsar--“Carve it as a dish fit for the gods,” and
still preserve life and ensure recovery. First in antiseptic, then
in aseptic surgery, we have discovered a method of safe operation,
under which death would have been inevitable a few years ago. Gambetta
perished in early manhood, because the doctors were afraid of an
operation from which to-day over ninety per cent. of the patients
recover. Opiates and anæsthetics, combined with the agile use of the
knife, have eliminated on the one hand an almost inconceivable burden
of pain, on the other have rendered possible a tearing and lacerating
of the frail physical human body which would have seemed incredible
to our predecessors. Nor can any one imagine that we are anywhere but
in infancy in this particular progress. If, as eminent physiologists
assert, the nerves of pain are distinct from the nerves of sensation
or volition, it may be found possible to compound some subtle drug
which will blockade these particular channels of communication, and
render mankind henceforth completely immune from the pangs of physical
suffering.
But then thought turns to the other side of the picture, and is
immediately faced with a challenge to its optimism. As soon as one
disease is eliminated, another steps into its place to continue the old
tragic function of scourging mankind with pity and terror. Science is
always discovering new maladies, which baffle its exultant energies.
Medical, as distinct from surgical effort, is still largely in the
condition of alchemy: stretching blind hands in the darkness towards a
secret not yet revealed. A great man of science recently asserted that
there were only two medicines whose beneficial effect--in application
to specific disorders--could be guaranteed--quinine and mercury; and
that the operations of both of them were completely mysterious. We
drain our cities, we use our knives and our medicines, we maintain
armies of doctors, huge hospitals, and halls of research. And the
result is that in the factory centres one-fifth of the children born
perish within the year. Consumption, plague, malaria disappear. Their
places are readily assumed by cancer, which is steadily increasing;
by appendicitis, which had not even a name twenty years ago; by
meningitis, which is excited by the ordinary harmless cold in the
head. One woman in every twelve dies of cancer, and the cure still
remains altogether unknown. The human body in increase of prevention,
seems also to lose the power of resistance. Carefully shielded from
the rough forces of the world, it falls a prey to injuries born out of
the very conditions of safety which it has so laboriously constructed.
“He who has ordained all things in measure, number, and weight,” said
Mansel, “has also given to the reason of man, as to his life, its
boundaries, which it cannot pass.” Some unknown Power seems with these
“boundaries” still to defy man’s determination to push them back or
fling them down. In ten thousand years mankind has not added a cubit
to his stature. The Greek vision of bodily perfection has shown no
advance in succeeding time. In the Middle Age, with its outward squalor
and frequent pestilences--so operative in men’s minds that to some
observers the whole appears as a kind of physical delirium--there are
figures of Popes and Emperors taking the field at eighty years of age,
and an ineffaceable impression of an enormous physical vitality. It
would appear that, at least as far as one can look ahead, uncertainty,
sorrow, pain, and longing are to be accepted as companions of the life
of men. From these, indeed, have been born men’s highest achievements.
Metchnikoff still proclaims unfaltering faith in the triumph of human
intelligence, and sees a vision of humanity sustained on a diet of
soured milk, to well beyond a normally secure centenarianism. The cry
of such might still be the cry of Tithonus--“Release me, and restore
me to the ground,” in a desire for the return to the fate of “happy
men that have the power to die.” For, however successful we may find
ourselves in curing the maladies of the body, such efforts are of
little use if there remains unhealed the deeper malady of the soul.