The wind had shifted north-east during the night and the drifting ice
had floated down from Aland, when the commissioner took his boat to
make a preparatory investigation of the quality of the sea's bottom
depth of water, sea flora and sea fauna.
A pilot who was with him as oarsman, soon became tired of giving
explanations, when he saw that the commissioner by means of chart,
sounding lead and other different instruments, found out facts that
he had never thought of. Where the shoals lay was known to the pilot,
and he also knew on which shoal the stromling nets should be set, but
the commissioner was not satisfied with this and began to dredge at
different depths, taking up small creatures and vegetable slime on
which he believed the stromling fed. He lowered the lead to the bottom
and drew up samples of clay, sand, mud, mold and gravel, which he
assorted, numbered and placed in small glasses with labels.
Finally he took out a big spyglass which resembled a speaking trumpet,
and looked down into the sea. The pilot had never dreamed that one
could gaze into the water with an instrument and in his astonishment
asked permission to place his eye to the glass and look down into the
mysteries.
The commissioner on the one hand would not play wizard, and on the
other did not desire hastily to solve the problem which time would
clear up, or to inspire too high hopes about the results, he therefore
granted the pilot's entreaty and gave some popular explanation of the
living pictures which were unfolding down in the depths.
"Do you see that seaweed upon the shoal?" began the commissioner, "and
do you see that it is first olive yellow, lower down liver colored and
at the bottom red? That comes from the diminution of light!"
He took a few pulls at the oars, off the shallow, and kept constantly
to lee of the rock so as to keep free from the drifting ice.
"What do you see now?" he asked the man who lay on his stomach.
"Oh Jesus! I think it is stromling, and they are standing close, as
close as cards in a pack."
"Do you see now that the stromling go not on the shallows only, and do
you understand now that one could catch them from the depths, and do
you believe now when I tell you that one ought never to fish them on
the shallows where they only go up to spawn where the eggs are reached
by the sun's heat better than in deep water?"
The commissioner rowed on until he saw the water become greenish gray
on account of the nature of the clay bottom.
"What do you see now?" he continued, meanwhile resting on the oars.
"I believe, on my soul, there are serpents on the sea bottom! there
are real serpents' tails sticking out of the mud--and there are their
heads."
"They are eels, my boy!" informed the commissioner.
The pilot looked incredulous for he had never heard of eels in the
sea, but the commissioner would not give out his best card in advance
or lavish long explanations over intricate things, therefore he left
the oars and, taking his water telescope, leaned over the gunwale for
observation.
He seemed to seek something with uncommon ardor, something that must be
there, on this or that shoal but which he naturally had not seen there
before, never having investigated that water.
They rowed around for two hours as the commissioner indicated,
sometimes letting down his dredge, sometimes the lead line, and after
each haul lying face downwards and looking through the glass into the
water. His pale face contracted from the efforts and the eyes sunk
into his head while the hand which held the tube trembled and the arms
seemed stiff and numb as a stake. The cold, humid wind, which passed
through the pilot's jacket did not seem to bite the frail figure which
was only wrapped in a half-buttoned spring coat. His eyes watered
from the sea wind and the endeavor to look sharply down into the
half-impenetrable element which forms three-quarters of the earth's
surface, about the life of which the other quarter generally knows so
little and guesses so much.
Through the water telescope, which was not of his invention, but one he
had made from what he had heard from bridge builders and laborers in
marine blasting, he saw down into a lower world from which the great
creation above the waters had been evolved. The forest of seaweed which
had just advanced over the border from inorganic to organic life,
swayed in the cold bottom current and resembled whites of eggs just
coagulated, borrowing their shape from the surf and recalling frost
flowers, when water freezes on the window pane. Down in the depths
the kelp spread out like big parks with golden leaves, over which the
inhabitants of the sea bottom dragged themselves on their bellies
seeking cold and obscurity, concealing their shame of being behind
in their long wandering toward the sun and air. Lowest down in the
clay the flounder rests, partly dug into the ooze, lazy, immovable,
without inventive faculty to develop a swim-bladder with which to raise
himself, waiting a happy chance that leads the prey past his nose,
without the impulse of turning the random to his advantage, and from
pure laziness having twisted and stretched himself until his eyes for
convenience' sake have stopped on the right side of the twisted head.
The blenny has already put one pair of oars out forward, but is loaded
down by the stern and reminds one of the first trial at boat building,
showing between the kelp's heraldic foliage his architectonic stone
head with a Croat's mustache, lifting himself a moment from the mud to
sink again immediately into it.
The lump sucker with its seven ridges goes with a keel to the air,
the whole fish one enormous nose, smelling only for food and females,
lighting for a moment the blue-green water with its rose-colored
belly, spreading a faint aurora around him down in the gloom, and
hugging again quickly a stone with his sucker to await the issue of the
millions of years, which shall bring delivery to those left behind in
the endless path of evolution.
The dreadful sea scorpion, that fury incarnate, with malice expressed
in the spines of its face, whose swimming limbs are claws, but more
for torturing than for attack or defense, lying on one side pining for
enjoyment, and caressing his own body with his slimy tail.
Higher up in lighter and warmer water swims the handsome but profound
thinking perch, perhaps the most characteristic fish of the Baltic
Sea, well built and steady but still somewhat clumsy as a Koster boat,
bearing the peculiar blue-green color of the Baltic and a Norseman's
temper, part philosopher part pirate, a sociable hermit, a superficial
creature who likes to seek the depths, and sometimes reaches them, idle
and eccentric. He stands during long leisure moments and stares at the
stones on the beach until awakening he darts off like an arrow, tyrant
against his own but soon tamed, returns willingly to the same place,
and harbors seven intestinal worms.
And then the eagle of the sea, the king of Baltic fishes, the
light-built, cutter-rigged pike, who loves the sun and, as the
strongest, needs not shun the light, who stands with his nose at the
surface of the water, sleeping with the sun in his eyes, dreaming of
the flowery fields and birch pastures yonder, where he can never go,
and of the thin blue cupola which arches over his wet world, where he
would smother, and yet where the birds are swimming lightly with their
feathery pectoral-fins.
The boat had come between floating pieces of ice which cast moving
shadows over the kelp parks on the bottom, like scattered clouds. The
commissioner, who had searched several hours without finding what he
sought, lifted the telescope out of the water, dried it and laid it
aside.
Then he dropped upon the stern sheets and holding his hand before his
eyes as though to rest them from impression, seemed buried in sleep for
some minutes after which he gave the pilot a signal to row on.
The commissioner, who had given his attention the whole forenoon to the
depth seemed now for the first time to observe the grand panorama which
was unfolding on the sea surface. Ultra-marine blue the water segment
extended some distance ahead of the boat, until the drifting ice showed
a perfect arctic landscape. Islands, bays, coves, and sounds marked as
on a map, and where the ice rode up on the reef, mountains had formed,
through one block pressing down another and the following climbing
up on the preceding. Over the rocks the ice had likewise piled up,
made arches, formed caves and built towers, church-ruins, casemates,
bastions. The enchantment in these formations lay in the fact that
they seemed to have been shaped by an enormous human hand, for they
had not the unconscious nature's chance forms, they reminded of human
inventions in past historical periods. There had blocks piled into
Cyclopean walls, arranged themselves in terraces as the Assyrian-greek
temple, here had the waves through repeated impact dug out a Roman
barrel vault, and fretted a round arch, which had sunken to an Arabian
moresque, out of which the sunbeams and the spray from the waves had
hacked out stalactites and bicelles, and here out of an already heaped
wall, the whole wave front had eaten a line of arches of a Roman
aqueduct, there stood the foundation to a mediæval castle, marking the
remains of tumble down lancet arches, flying buttresses and pinnacles.
This fluctuation of thoughts between arctic landscapes and historicized
architecture brought the contemplator into a peculiar frame of mind,
out of which he was drawn by the noisy life which roving flocks of
birds were making all around on floating islands of ice and on the
clear blue waters.
In flocks of hundreds and hundreds floated the eider ducks, which
were resting here, while waiting for open water to Norrland. The
insignificant rust brown females were surrounded by the gorgeous
males, who floated high with their snow white backs, sometimes
rising for a short flight, exposing their soot black breasts. Loons
in small flocks showing their miniver breasts, their reptile necks
and drooping checkered wings. Legions of lively, long-tailed ducks
in black and white, swimming, diving, skimming. The guillemots and
sea parrots in small bands, mournful coal black scoters in marauding
parties, contrasting with goosanders and red-breasted mergansers, a
more brilliant retinue with panaches on their necks, and over the
whole diving and fluttering host of birds that live an amphibious life
hovered the mews and gulls, which had already selected the air for
their element, only using the water for fishing and bathing.
Smuggled into this industrial world of labor, on the point half hidden
sat a solitary crow, his low brow, his doubtful color, his thievish
manner, his criminal type, great shyness for water, and dirty look made
him an object of hatred to the strugglers who knew the nest plunderer,
the egg sucker.
From the whole of this winged world, whose throats could set
atmospheric air in vibration, above the heads of the mutes down in the
water, was heard an accordant sound, from the reptile's first faint
trial to utter wrath by hissing, up to the music from the harmonious
vocal organs of man. There hissed his mate as a viper when the eider
duck would bite her neck and trample her under the water, there quacked
the goosander as a frog, and the terns shrieked and mews cawed, the
gulls emitted childlike cries, the eider ducks cooed as male cats in
rut time, but highest over all and therefore the most charming, sounded
the long-tailed ducks' wonderful music, for as yet it was not a song.
An untuned triad in major, sounding as the herdsman's horn, no matter
how or when it struck in with the three notes of the others making
an incomplete accord, a canon for the hunting horn without end or
beginning, reminiscences from the childhood of the human race, from the
earliest ages of the herdsman and the hunter.
It was not with the poet's dreamy fancy, with gloomy and therefore
disquieting feelings and confused perceptions, that the contemplator
enjoyed the big drama. It was with the calm of the investigator,
the awakened thinker, that he viewed the relations in this seeming
confusion, and it was only through the accumulated vast material of
recollections that he could connect all these objects viewed with
each other. He searched for the causes of the mighty impression of
especially this nature, and when he found answers, he experienced
the immense enjoyment that the most highly developed in the chain of
creation must feel, when the veils are lifted from the occult, the
bliss which has followed every creature on the infinite course toward
light, and which perhaps constitutes the driving power forwards to
knowledge from dreaming, a bliss which must resemble that of a supposed
conscious creator who is cognizant of what he has done.
This landscape took him back to Primeval Ages, when the earth was
covered with water and the tops of the highest mountains were beginning
to rise above the surface. These islands around him still retained
their primeval character with the earliest formed crust of granite up
in daylight.
Down in the water, where the algæ of the period of cooling appeared,
swam the Primary Age fishes and among them their oldest descendant,
the herring, whilst on the islands still grew carboniferous ferns and
lichens. Farther in on the mainland, but first on the largest islets,
the Secondary Age's pines and reptiles would be found, and still
farther in, the deciduous trees and mammals of the Tertiary Age, but
out here in primeval formation whimsical nature seemed to have leaped
over the stratification periods and thrown seals and otters down in
primeval times, casting in the ice period on the morning of this day
in the quarto period, just as soil on primitive rocks, and he himself
was sitting as a representative of the historical times, undisturbed
by the evident confusion, enjoying these living pictures of creation
and raising the enjoyment through feeling himself the highest in this
chain.
The secret of the fascination of the landscape was that it, and only
it offered a historicized creation with exclusions and abbreviations,
where one in a few hours could roam through the series of formations
of the earth and finally stop at oneself; where one could refresh
himself with a resume of perceptions, that led the thoughts back to
the origin, resting in the past stages, relaxing the fatiguing tension
to win higher degrees on the scale of culture, just as to relapse into
a wholesome trance and feel one with nature. It was such moments that
he used as a compensation for the past-away religious enjoyments,
when thoughts of heaven were only an exchanged shape of incentive
forward and the feeling of immortality was disguised uttering of the
foreknowledge of the indestructibility of matter.
How serene to feel oneself at home on this earth, which was delineated
to him in childhood as the valley of lamentation, which was only to
be wandered through on the way to the unknown; how firm and full of
trust to have gained knowledge of what was unknown before, to have been
permitted to have seen into, to have looked through God's hitherto
secret counsel, as it was called, all those events which were regarded
impenetrable, and therefore at that time could not be penetrated.
Now man had reached perspicuity about human origin and purpose, but
instead of becoming weary and going to rest as one cultured nation
after another have done when they have thought until destroyed, the
now living generation had taken its part and acquiesced in finding
themselves to be the highest animals, and exerted themselves in a
judicious way actually realizing the heaven idea here, therefore the
present time was the best and greatest of all times, it has carried
humanity farther forward than centuries before had been able to do.
After these moments of devotional exercise in thoughts of his origin
and destiny, the commissioner let his mind run over his personal
evolution, as far back as he could trace it, just as though to search
for his own self, and in the past stages read his probable fate.
He saw his father, a deceased fortification major of that undecided
type of the beginning of the century, mixed as a conglomerate, and
cemented of fragments from preceding periods, picked at random after
the great eruption at the end of the past century, believing in nothing
because he had seen everything perish, everything taken up anew, all
forms of state tested, greeted with jubilee at reception, worsted
within a few years, brought forth again as new and greeted over again
as a universal discovery, he had at last stopped at the existing state
as the only palpable, it may have come from a leading will, which was
improbable, or from a combination of chances which was tolerably sure,
but dangerous to say. Through study at the university his father had
come into the pantheism of the young-Hegelians, which was a feint at
turning the current which had then reached its height, and individuals
had become the only reality and God became the comprehension of the
personal in humanity. The living idea about the intimate relation of
man to nature, that man himself stood highest in line in the chain of
the world's process, characterized an elite corps of personalities,
who silently despised the repeated attempts of political visionaries
to place themselves above the governing laws of nature, trying in an
artificial way to make new laws for the world through philosophical
systems and congressional decrees. Unobserved they passed on of
no use to either high or low, above they saw mediocrities through
natural selection amassing around a mediocre monarch, below they found
ignorance, credulity and blindness, while between these two classes the
burghers were bent on business interests so positively that those who
were not merchants themselves were unable to work together with them.
As they were qualified, prudent and trustworthy they were occasionally
promoted to positions of influence, but as they could not join with
any party and had no desire to make a useless individual opposition
and were not numerous enough to form a herd, besides as strong
individualists would not follow a bell-cow, they remained pretty quiet
carrying their discontent hidden under big crosses and decorations and
smiled as augurs when they met at the councilor's table or in the house
of noblemen, letting the world pass as it might.
The father belonged to certainly not a very old noble family, but
one which through civil merits in retrieving the mining business and
not: through doubtful exploits of war gained by the help of nature's
chances or an enemy's false step, had been rewarded by a coat of arms
and moderate privileges, such as to wear a nobleman's uniform and
unpaid to participate in one-fourth of the ponderous administration
of the country. He counted himself therefore a meritorious noble and
was conscious of having come from talented ancestors, which acted
as a spur down to their now living representative. Property legally
acquired through the qualities and labors of his ancestors gave him the
opportunity to perfect himself in his calling. He became a prominent
topographer, and had participated in the building of Gota canal and in
the first railroad constructions. This employment at a whole kingdom,
which he had become used to look at from above and to take in at one
glance on the map spread over a writing table, gave his mind gradually
the habit of seeing everything on a grand scale. There he sat with
a rule opening communication lines which would change the whole
physiognomy, of the landscape, leveling old cities and creating new,
changing the prices of products, seeking for new resources. The maps
should change, the old water ways be forgotten and the black straight
lines which indicated the new roads would be the determinative. The
heights should be just as fertile as the valleys, the combat of the
rivers should cease, frontiers between realms and countries should no
more be observed.
There followed a strong feeling of power through this handling of the
fates of lands and peoples, and he could not escape gradual seizures of
the propensity accompanying power, to overestimate himself. Everything
miraged in a bird's-eye-view, countries became maps and human beings
tin soldiers, and when the topographer in a few weeks ordered the
leveling of a height, which would have needed thousands of years to
be denuded by natural agencies, he felt something of the creator in
himself. When he ordered tunnels bored, transferred sand ridges to
lakes, and filled up marshes, he did not fail to perceive that he had
taken in hand a remodeling of the earth ball, throwing the natural
geological formations topsy-turvy, and therewith his personal feelings
swelled incredibly.
Hereto was added his position as officer with numerous subordinates,
whom he only communicated with as one in authority, and who
consequently were considered as service muscles to his big determining
brain.
With a military's physical courage and resolution, the profoundness
of a savant, the full deliberation of a thinker, the calm of one
financially independent, and the dignity and self-esteem of a man
of honor, he exhibited a type of the highest rank, where beauty and
prudence combined to produce a well-measured, harmonious personality.
In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother
having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations,
and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with
books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to
be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of
the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of
life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and
the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood
highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the
creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in
nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature
worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an
acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By
this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear
of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of
his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator
of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ,
which through its perfected form separates the human being from the
beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should
govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up
a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses,
and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the
animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were
localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be
absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest
type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses
but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form.
Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment
and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue.
This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit,
which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of
the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely
worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure
thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had
taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad.
Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured,
just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring
could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability
to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure
sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant
Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future
before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered
because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and
the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time,
does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an
imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment
that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away.
All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the
inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack
of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own
sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and
syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe,
which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of
a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it
had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life
while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who
abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same
time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it
in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just
as the feelings which eventually would be laid aside, like the thyroid
gland, which has come into disuse by human beings but still remains on
its old place.
When the son could not refute these bitter truths with rational
arguments, declaring that his feelings, yes his most sacred feelings,
rose against such a dry tenet, the father declared him to be a hornet
which was still thinking with ganglia, and he warned him against
dissolute fancies, or conclusions on insufficient ground and want of
great material, not to be mistaken for scientific quick-reasoning,
where from seemingly few premises--appearing few because the middle
terms were omitted--new conclusions could be drawn, when, as if by
a chemical union, two older ideas enter each other and form a new
thought. Ontogenism had shown how the human fœtus was developed through
all the earlier stages from the amœba through the frog and up to the
anthropomorphic, how then could the youth question but that the
spirit of a child must pass through the history of man through the
animal and the savage upward, as long as the body was growing and that
consequently man stood far ahead of youth! He warned him especially not
to let the lowest of all our propensities, the sexual impulse cloud
his judgment, for by its power it had so long dazzled sound reason,
that erudite men still bore the superstition that woman was as high
a type as man, yes even higher according to the opinion of some men,
whereas she really is but an intermediate form between man and child,
as is shown by the fœtal development, where the male at a certain
stage is female but the female never male. To warn the young man of
the danger of being over-powered by sexual impulses, was the same as
to cast a shadow on woman, and the son soon commenced to make what the
father called ganglionic conclusions, the bearing of which was that the
Lieutenant-Colonel was a woman hater. And how could he do otherwise,
when always hearing his father narrating how this or that man had
thrown away his future on affairs with women, and how great geniuses
had wasted their talents by procreation, and sacrificed happiness and
position for a wife, who had been faithless and children who died
before of mature age. Propagation was only for the lesser spirits, the
greater ones should live in their works, and so forth.
Under such guidance the son grew up. He was born an unusually delicate
child but with a harmoniously developed body; he had finely organized
senses, quick and sure perception, keen understanding and a nobility
of mind which manifested itself in forbearance and approachableness
to mankind. He understood early how to regulate his life, to suppress
the plant and animal propensities, and when he had accumulated a
vast material of observations and knowledge, he began to work it up.
His brain soon showed its prolific capacity--from a couple of known
quantities to find the wanted unknown, from old thoughts to produce new
ones, in a word the capacity of what is called originality. He was the
coming regenerator and possessed ability to see the inter-relations in
disorder, to discover the invisible force behind the phenomena, and
even the concealed and extremely compound motives in the actions of
men. Therefore his schoolmates looked upon him with suspicion, and the
teachers discerned in him a silent critic of what they communicated as
unalterable facts.
His arrival at the university occurred contemporarily with the great
popular movements which concerned the parliamentary reform. Borg
perceived well the defects of the representation by a four-class
system, while the state consists of at least twenty classes with
different interests and different abilities to judge in so complicated
a problem as that of the government of a people, but on the other hand
he could not consent to revert to the organization of the hord or tribe
where everybody had equally much or equally little to say. He perceived
at once that this simplifying of the method of governing, where the
multitude should do it was not a reform suited to the needs of the
time, moreover he had lately seen the right of universal suffrage
in France produce an Emperor and a sham representation of lawyers,
merchants and army officers, with the exclusion of laborers, farmers,
savants and scientific men, thus only three classes, arbitrarily
selected by the Emperor, were represented. He had calculated that the
most correct would be a perfect class representation with proportional
rights of representation, well balanced according to the interests of
the respective classes and with due consideration given to the highest
interests, or the higher right of the wise to own the preponderance,
as they promote progress more than the ignorant. This, to be sure,
the authors of the two chamber systems had already had in mind, when
they perceived the necessity of referring questions to committees
and disentangling certain questions by special committees, even
by committees of experts. To complete the assembly, so that all
interests would be guarded and all points taken and all information
of the condition of the realm made accessible, each class of people,
from the highest to the lowest, should elect representatives in
proportion partly to their numbers and partly to their importance
for the advancement of the country as a whole. Neglecting the Royal
Court, which together with the monarch ought to be assorted under the
foreign department, to which they properly belong, for the monarch is
only permitted to represent the nation before foreign powers, this
consultative, though not a legislative, class parliament would be
constructed as follows, viz., First class: land owners and renters,
tenants, overseers, foremen on farms and so forth. The second class:
operators of mines and quarries, manufacturers and their laborers.
Third class: merchants, mariners, pilots, hotel owners, porters,
hackmen, and all employed in banks, custom houses, postal service,
railroads and telegraphs. Fourth class: civil and military officers,
clergymen, with servants, janitors and privates. Fifth class:
savants, teachers, literateurs, and artists. Sixth class: physicians,
apothecaries, superintendents of poorhouses. Seventh class: house
owners, capitalists and rentiers.
In what proportion to elect from each class was the question, which
could not be solved off hand, but it was necessary that skillful men
with knowledge in the science of government should probe the new
order of representation, which would therefore only and always be
provisional. Over this consultative assembly should sit a council of
specialists in the science of government, who had been professionally
trained for that difficult calling, so that this most complicated of
all arts would not be pursued by bunglers and enterprising amateurs, as
had hitherto been done, and statesmen's accession to office would be
preceded by a careful investigation of their past life, their private
financial and social situation. This would spur youth to self-education
and heedfulness of what they were doing, and would form a body of
excellent men, while so called irreproachable conduct, or negative
virtue, without talents would not as hitherto be the short cut to
advancement. This would constitute the new nobility which would succeed
the old military and court nobility, and the fact that this nobility
established itself only through a natural selection of the fittest was
a guarantee that the country would be ruled in the best manner. The
Reichstag by only having to vote an opinion, not any decision, would
thus furnish a vast material of investigation, not a legionary army
that could be bribed and wheedled to commit voting outrages.
The young man, however, was too prudent to express his opinions, at
a period, when noblemen were synonymous with the degenerated, left
behind and blasé, and the masses were pushing so blindly forward that
the mechanics were the ones that worked mostly into the hands of their
coming class enemies, the peasants; a prudent man could only smile and
wait. And he waited until he saw the four-chamber system succeeded by a
one-class representation, when the realm was henceforth governed by the
former peasantry alone. These historical events had, however, a very
great influence in directing the young man's thoughts and development.
He had there seen in what terrible confusion the thought mechanism of
the majority was, and when he read the protocols of the Reichstag, and
noticed the speeches of the most influential and brilliant speakers,
he observed that what he called ganglionic reasoning, causing valvular
contraction and congestion of the heart, exerted the greatest influence
on the public opinion. It seemed to him sometimes as though it was not
the question of the fatherland or progress, but only the motionary's
triumph to gain his own will by fallacies, gross blunders in logic and
hideous distortions of facts. In him was aroused, through observation,
the great suspicion that everything was intended as a struggle for
power, for the enjoyment of using the power of the brain for putting
other brains into consonance, of sowing seeds of thought in the brain
bark of others, where they would grow as parasites like the mistletoe,
while the mother tree would proudly lift her shoulders at the thought
that the parasites up in the crown still were nothing but parasites.
This was the foundation of his ambition, to satisfy which required
knowledge and experience through study, travel and conversation with
learned and illustrious men. In the midst of this eternally movable
chaos of contending forces and interests, he sought a place of
anchorage for his being, the center of the sphere which reality threw
around him--in himself. Instead of, like weak Christians assuming an
external support in God, he took the real, palpable in his own self and
sought to create his personality to a perfect type of man whose life
and deeds would not violate anyone's rights, convinced that the fruit
of a well-nursed tree could not fail to be of use and rejoicing to
others. All the confusion and awkwardness that he saw in the struggles
of those who say they are living for others while in reality they only
live on others, on others' gratitude, others' opinion and others'
acknowledgment, he avoided, holding his own straight course convinced
that a single great and strong individual could not help doing more
good than these masses of thoughtless people whose numbers stand in
inverse ratio to their usefulness.
By this setting of his _ego_ he enforced a norm for his life, which
led him to a high degree of morality, for, instead of relinquishing
the final settlement to the uncertain hereafter, he regulated his
deeds so that he had nothing left unsettled, he did not shift the
blame from himself to an innocently suffering Christ, but in conscious
self-responsibility he committed no acts that would awaken the need of
a scapegoat.
Thereby he learned to rely only upon himself and never to take advice,
always reflecting on the probable consequences of an act. This did not
prevent him from suffering with nervousness like his generation, which
was born and brought up during the period of steam and electricity when
the vital activity was increased in speed. How could it be otherwise
considering that he must destroy millions of old brain cells, storages
for antiquated impressions, that every moment when he would form a
judgment, he must carefully sift out superannuated axioms, which tried
to come forward as premises. It was a work of total reconstruction
which caused these disorders in the nervous system which are all
laid to our ancestors' alcoholism and sexual excesses, but which
pathological symptom was an uttering of increased vitality accompanied
by extreme sensibility, like the crawfish when it shifts its shell, or
the bird when molting. It was the regeneration of a genus or at least
a variety of man which appeared to the old as diseased or unsound
because it was in a process of development, something that they were
disinclined to acknowledge as they themselves would be the norm and
called themselves sound, although they were in a state of decomposition.
This nervous sensibility of the growing youth was enhanced by
moderation in eating and drinking, and vigorous disciplining of
the sexual desires. He found it debasing to place oneself into the
ungovernable state of a lunatic or a savage through the use of
fermented drinks, and his soul was far too aristocratic to play a
moment's illicit love with a prostitute. With this, however, followed
an increasing acuteness of the senses and a sensibility to disagreeable
impressions which sometimes brought him disgust where others of a
coarser nature would have found enjoyment.
Thus he felt abased for a few hours when his morning coffee was not
strong enough, and a poorly painted billiard ball or a soiled cue
constrained him to turn away in search of another place. A badly
wiped glass raised his loathing and he felt the smell of human being
on a newspaper which another had read, while he could on others'
furniture see human grease deposited on the polish, and he always
opened the window when the maid had arranged the room. However, if he
was traveling and necessity constrained, then he could shut off, as it
were, all conduits from his organs of perceptions and harden himself
against all disagreeable sensations.
When he had completed his studies at the University, in natural
science, that least dependent of all sciences, because opinion plays
a lesser roll than a collection of material, he received a place as
assistant in the Royal Academy of Science.
He had applied for a situation here for the purpose of obtaining a
view of the kingdoms of nature, collected and classified in one place,
and if possible to read therein and discover the great connection if
there was any, or the universal confusion which probably was there. His
intentions soon became manifest, especially when he could no longer
avoid the danger of their enticing from him, his project to classify
the birds after an entirely different method than the current one. The
professors, who of course did not want to be lowered to collectors of
material for a young man, and were not willing to become obsolete with
their works, took an instinctive aversion to the scrutinizer. The first
obstacle to the intruder was made by placing him to detail work of a
subordinate character which was disgusting to his sense of beauty,
during six months he had to change alcohol in the fish collection;
at first he was retching from the nauseating odor, but after he had
overcome this disagreeable perception he turned furiously to the study
of the fishes, and as he worked rapidly he had inside of the half
year thoroughly studied the great material. He had been standing the
whole winter in a cold, dirty and semi-dark kitchen where he had been
smelling bad alcohol, frozen his hands and contracted a severe chronic
cystitis.
Afterwards he was set to writing labels for the algæ. As he had
received no instructions in calligraphy at the University and by nature
he had a wreak, unsteady hand, all the labels were discarded and he
gained the name of being useless.--He could not even write.--But in
two months, during which time he attended a writing school, and in
the evenings sat at home over writing book and copy, he acquired a
beautiful and legible hand and at the same time gained a more complete
knowledge of the algæ than he had before, while into the bargain he
learned the inestimable art of penmanship. The professors who had
thought he would reject such subordinate work soon saw what kind of
grit he had and that he understood how to use all adversities for his
benefit, increasing his knowledge while turning aside softly from the
leash and warding off the blows.
His improved penmanship was to be a new source of humiliations, for he
was now placed at copying office records and letters, sinking finally,
as they believed, to an ordinary copyist's rôle. Without complaining he
took the occupation and, at the same time learning foreign languages,
he had the opportunity of glancing into the secrets of all these great
men, which they thought would be worthless to him. Thus he saw the
scientific questions of the period, debated through correspondence and
he discovered the ways to the secret meetings of learned societies,
gained knowledge about the subterranean passages to distinction, and
the opportunities to make his investigations fruitful. Thus he was
unassailable, and just as they believed they had crushed him he arose
again.
It was owing to this double quality of nobleman and independent
thinker, that he became isolated. His name did not sound scientific
and his fine and modern way of dressing was taken as a proof of
unscientific sense by those who remembered Berzelius' ragged pants; his
patient and apparent submission was taken as inferiority, and all his
meditations over science, as poetical effusions. Regretting to have
let him come behind the curtain, and in order to press him down again
they now placed him at another work which had been rejected by every
newcomer, and was called the proving stone. There was in the garret a
remnant collection of stones and minerals, which had come together
partly through gifts and legacies and partly through circumnavigations
and explorations, and as most of it had been discarded as duplicates,
at a time when geology was in its infancy, increasing knowledge
demanded that they again be overhauled and assorted. They were placed
in an attic room beneath the rooftiles and lay in a big heap decidedly
covered with dust and cobwebs. Borg who must now stand bent beneath
the heated rooftiles and inhale the dust, was about to give it up,
but when on the second day he found a new mineral which he suspected
to be unknown, he at once applied himself to the work and started
classifying. During this he made observations which shook his already
faint belief in the whole system of the science, and he commenced
seeing that the stones were not classified by nature but it was the
brain that classified the phenomena. Besides, everything might be
classified if one could only decide upon a basis of division, and
he soon saw that the basis employed here was not the most rational
one, the very foundation being an unsettled hypothesis; for instance,
that the primitive rocks had been formed through melting by fire,
contrasting with the stratified rocks which were positively regarded
as deposited in water; but some of the primitive rocks were also
stratified like the younger sedimentary formations; then he found
that all of it was twisted and guessed at and the whole system founded
on guess work. In the meanwhile he had analyzed his mineral and found
that it was hitherto unknown, whereupon he gave it to the professor
who sent it to the Berlin Academy and got his name attached to the
new mineral. Borg received no thanks, no mention, only a few taunting
words from the professor. Irritated thereby he undertook himself to
describe the next mineral which he found to be new and sent it to
Lyell; his paper was read in the Geological Society, of which he was
made a member. Comrades and superiors pretended to be ignorant of his
success, which was in a measure disparaging to the professor who had
overlooked the unknown mineral, and now repugnance grew into hate
which developed to persecution. But he turned aside, made himself
invisible and worked. This collection of minerals being gathered from
all countries in Europe, and as Borg understood how to give to each
discovery a touch of direct usefulness for the science of mining in the
respective countries, he succeeded in two years to gain membership in
most of the learned societies of Europe, and was decorated with badges
of the Italian Crown Order, the French "Instruction publique," the
Austrian Leopold order and the Russian St. Annae order, second class.
But nothing availed among his surroundings, and the laughter increased
at each mark of distinction which was nevertheless merited. When they
could not deny the facts, they underrated their value or pretended to
be ignorant of what had happened, which, however, did not prevent them
from using his trodden path in their own hunt.
When at last after seven years of tormenting service he inherited a
legacy from his father, who had died, and he retired from service
to travel abroad as a private man, he heard alternately that he
had failed in his calling and that it was a pity that he did not
become anything, or that he had been discharged from office. It was
with boundless disdain for human beings that he left his country to
continue his studies abroad. In hotels and pensions all over Europe
he met many, kinds of people with whom he formed acquaintances which
were soon broken by circumstances. But everywhere he saw how people
of the same period expressed the same mind about the same things,
pronounced the opinion of the majority as their own, spoke phrases
in place of thoughts, and he discovered thereby that it really was
the thoughts of a few spirits that were ruminated by the masses. Thus
he found that all geologists spoke Agassiz' and Lyell's ideas from
1830 and '40, all religious free thinkers exhaled Renan and Strauss,
all brisk politicians were living on Mill or Buckle, and all who
spoke up-to-date literature cast up Taine. It was then only a few
main batteries which had an annunciator and which could through the
conducting wires from their talents set all the small bells tinkling.
Through this he soon came to the domain of psychology, visited
spiritualists, hypnotizers and mind readers, saw behind these swindles
some new discoveries which would surely change humanity in its mode of
living thoughtlessly as cattle, perhaps contribute towards adjusting
the thought mechanism, and show that this whole battle about opinions
is only a strife for the power to set other people's brains in motion,
to force the masses to think as I. He had been a witness to scientific
encounters which had resulted in a conquest for the wrong opinion,
only because the victor had sufficient authority and was supported
by a majority. He had seen political and religious combats and in a
legislation directly contrary to sound reason and justice, founded on
approved errors, which were inherited by succeeding generations as
self-evident truths.
Yes, surely it concerned only how to make one's own will valid, and the
whole driving power behind the vindication of opinions were interest
and passion. Interest, it was nothing else than need, a need of food
and love, and to gain these required a certain amount of power. Whoever
did not strive for power was a weak one, whose desire of life was
attenuated, therefore the weak was always heard to demand rights,
the rights of the weak, while there was only a mathematical justice
given, an arithmetical truth, for the calculating of which was required
a strong mind capable of emancipating itself from the delusions of
interest and passions. When he searched his inner self and compared
himself with a great many others, he found that through a strict
self-education he had freed his judgment to a high degree, and that in
him was a specially developed thrift to seek abstract justice, that
truth which consists in the actual conditions, the pith of fact, why
he called himself a friend of truth in the highest sense, although not
prompted thereby to tell all his thoughts abroad nor prevented from
replying to importunate questions, when need be, with a prevarication.
In order to trace more closely the organization of the man-brute he
designed a special study of the mental faculties of all the lower
animals and thus guided himself up to man. He then made a ledger
over all the individuals that came in his way, from relatives,
nurses, maids, to schoolmates, university comrades, society friends
and superiors, in one word all who came within the circle of his
observation. This he completed through a collection of personalia,
baptismal certificates, and the testimonies of their acquaintances; he
wrote down their equation and tried a solution of the problem of their
life. It was an incredible amount of working material. When he had
straightened out the confusion he saw that the human beings could be
divided just as the animals and plants into large classes, orders and
families according to the basis chosen. By taking several bases he came
pretty near to the truth and threw the fullest illumination upon the
object of his observation.
Among other things he made a diagram of the human beings, with three
subdivisions, conscious, self-deceivers and unconscious. The conscious
or initiated stood highest, had discerned the deceit and believed in
nothing and nobody, and were usually called skeptics, feared and hated
by the self-deceivers, but recognized each other at once and usually
parted with the word rascal, and reciprocal accusations of bad motives.
As self-deceivers he counted all religious believers, hypnotic mediums,
prophets, party chiefs, politicians, charity spirits, and the whole
swarm of weak ambitious ones who pretend to live for others. To the
unconscious belonged children, most criminals, most women and some
idiots, all of whom still live on the semi-mammalian plane without the
ability to distinguish between subject and object.
Proceeding from another basis, or by ontogenesis from the fœtus up to
the highest standard of man, he got as the result, children, youths,
women and men.
He also used to search among his countrymen for ancestral race marks,
distinguished the central Swedes from the southern Swedes, could see
the Norwegian in the Vermlanders and Bohus-landers, pointed out the
Finn in some of the Norrlanders, kept record of immigrated Germans,
Wallons, Shemites and gypsies, which often gave him the key to various
traits in otherwise inexplicable characters.
He also had another basis for a division of characters according to
the dominant, as he called it, and he got the nutritive as the lowest
group including epicures, drunkards and the avaricious, the sexualic
or licentious, the affective or sensitive, and the intellectual or
thinkers who stood highest.
This science he developed to a high degree, and after some time
acquired the ability to judge human beings and give their equations. To
verify the truth of his observations he used himself as a psychological
preparation, cut himself up bodily, experimented with himself and
grafted fistulas and fontanelles, subjecting himself to unnatural
and often repulsive spiritual diet, but carefully guarded faults of
observation, and avoided forming a norm for others by his own sayings
and doings.
When he had finally become weary of traveling abroad, and his soul
was longing for its _milieu_, he returned home to seek a sphere of
activity. As it was immaterial to him what his occupation might be he
applied for the position of fish commissioner. As they were not anxious
to have him too near he was appointed as the first man of the inlet to
Stockholm.
* * * * *
Here he awoke from the review of his evolution, from which he used
to regenerate himself by hastily living his life over again, thereby
tracing, as it were, his standpoint and, calculating his resources, he
cleared his course onward to his probable destiny and his prospects of
succeeding in his enterprises.
The pilot, who in the meantime had rowed the boat behind the rocks and
in lee of the ice cakes, had already decided that the Doctor, who was
sitting with introverted, expressionless eyes, was a little freaky,
took the occasion to ask if they should turn toward the harbor, whereto
the commissioner nodded consent.
Once more he glanced at the magnificent panorama yonder, where the ice
floes were driven onward, rent asunder, packed themselves, crowded
together, pushed over each other, turned on edge, changed their
horizontal position to big upheavals and tilting of the strata, forming
mountains, dales and hills. It seemed to him as though he beheld the
earth's crust being born, when on the incandescent sea the first hard
cake was broken to pieces, driven forward, pushed on edge, piled in
heaps to form the primitive mountains, skerries, rocks, islets, which
were but enormous packs of ice, icebergs, although formed from another
mineral than water. Over this repetition of the history of creation
vibrated the primitive, undivided white light of the ice beside the
deep blue of air and water, the first breaking of the darkness, and
here the God of the saga of creation who separated light from darkness,
came forth as a sensible explanation to his investigating mind. Once
again the first attempt at harmonious sounds of the reptiles, now
transformed into birds, rang out over the watery circle, the limitation
of himself, which must be the center wherever he went....
The boat floated into harbor, the smoke was rising from the chimneys,
it was dinner time.