from Doctor Metchnikoff. He regards the human stomach and large
intestine as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy,
but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford for
those bacteria that accelerate the decay of age. He proposes that these
viscera should be removed. To a layman like myself this is an altogether
astounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of the
very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualm
of horror or absurdity to advance it. I am quite sure that if a
gentleman called upon me “done up” in the way I am dimly suggesting,
with most of the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heart
probably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminate
harmful tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, his
mind and sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the
need of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty my
inexpressible disgust and terror. But, then, if M. Blériot, with his
flying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54
B.C., let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors—every family man in
Britain was my ancestor in those days—at Dover, they would have had
entirely similar emotions. And at present I am not discussing what is
beautiful in humanity, but what is possible—and what, being possible, is
likely to be attempted.
It does not follow that because men will some day have this enormous
power over themselves, physically and mentally, they will necessarily
make themselves horrible—even by our present standards quite a lot of
us would be all the slenderer and more active and graceful for
“Metchnikoffing”—nor does surgery exhaust the available methods. We
are still in the barbaric age, so far as our use of food and drugs is
concerned. We stuff all sorts of substances into our unfortunate
interiors and blunder upon the most various consequences. Few people
of threescore and ten but have spent in the aggregate the best part of
a year in a state of indigestion, stupid, angry or painful indigestion
as the case may be. No one would be so careless and ignorant about the
fuel he burnt in his motor-car as most of us are about the fuel we
burn in our bodies. And there are all sort of stimulating and
exhilarating things, digesting things, fatigue-suppressing things,
exercise-economising things, we dare not use because we are afraid of
our ignorance of their precise working. There seems no reason to
suppose that human life, properly understood and controlled, could not
be a constant succession of delightful and for the most part active
bodily and mental phases. It is sheer ignorance and bad management
that keeps the majority of people in that disagreeable system of
states which we indicate by saying we are “a bit off colour” or a
little “out of training.” It may seem madly Utopian now to suggest
that practically everyone in the community might be clean, beautiful,
incessantly active, “fit,” and long-lived, with the marks of all the
surgery they have undergone quite healed and hidden, but not more
madly Utopian than it would have seemed to King Alfred the Great if
one had said that practically everyone in this country, down to the
very swineherds, should be able to read and write.
Metchnikoff has speculated upon the possibility of delaying old age, and
I do not see why his method should not be applied to the diurnal need of
sleep. No vital process seems to be absolutely fated in itself; it is a
thing conditioned and capable of modification. If Metchnikoff is
right—and to a certain extent he must be right—the decay of age is due
to changing organic processes that may be checked and delayed and
modified by suitable food and regimen. He holds out hope of a new phase
in the human cycle, after the phase of struggle and passion, a phase of
serene intellectual activity, old age with all its experience and none
of its infirmities. Still more are fatigue and the need for repose
dependent upon chemical changes in the body. It would seem we are unable
to maintain exertion, partly through the exhaustion of our tissues, but
far more by the loading of our blood with fatigue products—a
recuperative interlude must ensue. But there is no reason to suppose
that the usual food of to-day is the most rapidly assimilable nurture
possible, that a rapidly digestible or injectable substance is not
conceivable that would vastly accelerate repair, nor that the
elimination and neutralisation of fatigue products might not also be
enormously hastened. There is no inherent impossibility in the idea not
only of various glands being induced to function in a modified manner,
but even in the insertion upon the circulation of interceptors and
artificial glandular structures. No doubt that may strike even an
adventurous surgeon as chimerical, but consider what people, even
authoritative people, were saying of flying and electric traction twenty
years ago. At present a man probably does not get more than three or
four hours of maximum mental and physical efficiency in the day. Few men
can keep at their best in either physical or intellectual work for so
long as that. The rest of the time goes in feeding, digesting, sleeping,
sitting about, relaxation of various kinds. It is quite possible that
science may set itself presently to extend systematically that
proportion of efficient time. The area of maximum efficiency may invade
the periods now demanded by digestion, sleep, exercise, so that at last
nearly the whole of a man’s twenty-four hours will be concentrated on
his primary interests instead of dispersed among these secondary
necessary matters.
Please understand I do not consider this concentration of activity and
these vast “artificialisations” of the human body as attractive or
desirable things. At the first proposal much of this tampering with the
natural stuff of life will strike anyone, I think, as ugly and horrible,
just as seeing a little child, green-white and still under an
anæsthetic, gripped my heart much more dreadfully than the sight of the
same child actively bawling with pain. But the business of this paper is
to discuss things that may happen, and not to evolve dreams of
loveliness. Perhaps things of this kind will be manageable without
dreadfulness. Perhaps man will come to such wisdom that neither the
knife nor the drugs nor any of the powers which science thrusts into his
hand will slay the beauty of life for him. Suppose we assume that he is
not such a fool as to let that happen, and that ultimately he will
emerge triumphant with all these powers utilised and controlled.
It is not only that an amplifying science may give mankind happier
bodies and far more active and eventful lives, but that psychology and
educational and social science, reinforcing literature and working
through literature and art, may dare to establish serenities in his
soul. For surely no one who has lived, no one who has watched sin and
crime and punishment, but must have come to realise the enormous amount
of misbehaviour that is mere ignorance and want of mental scope. For my
own part I have never believed in the devil. And it may be a greater
undertaking but no more impossible to make ways to goodwill and a good
heart in men than it is to tunnel mountains and dyke back the sea. The
way that led from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is the
way that will lead to light in the souls of men, that is to say the way
of free and fearless thinking, free and fearless experiment, organised
exchange of thoughts and results, and patience and persistence and a
sort of intellectual civility.
And with the development of philosophical and scientific method that
will go on with this great increase in man’s control over himself,
another issue that is now a mere pious aspiration above abysses of
ignorance and difficulty, will come to be a manageable matter. It has
been the perpetual wonder of philosophers from Plato onward that men
have bred their dogs and horses and left any man or woman, however vile,
free to bear offspring in the next generation of men. Still that goes
on. Beautiful and wonderful people die childless and bury their treasure
in the grave, and we rest content with a system of matrimony that seems
designed to perpetuate mediocrity. A day will come when men will be in
possession of knowledge and opportunity that will enable them to master
this position, and then certainly will it be assured that every
generation shall be born better than was the one before it. And with
that the history of humanity will enter upon a new phase, a phase which
will be to our lives as daylight is to the dreaming of a child as yet
unborn.
THE HUMAN ADVENTURE
Alone among all the living things this globe has borne, man reckons with
destiny. All other living things obey the forces that created them; and
when the mood of the power changes, submit themselves passively to
extinction. Man only looks upon those forces in the face, anticipates
the exhaustion of Nature’s kindliness, seeks weapons to defend himself.
Last of the children of Saturn, he escapes their general doom. He
dispossesses his begetter of all possibility of replacement, and grasps
the sceptre of the world. Before man the great and prevalent creatures
followed one another processionally to extinction; the early monsters of
the ancient seas, the clumsy amphibians struggling breathless to the
land, the reptiles, the theriomorpha and the dinosaurs, the bat-winged
reptiles of the Mesozoic forests, the colossal grotesque first mammals,
the giant sloths, the mastodons and mammoths; it is as if some idle
dreamer moulded them and broke them and cast them aside, until at last
comes man and seizes the creative wrist that would wipe him out of being
again.
There is nothing else in all the world that so turns against the powers
that have made it, unless it be man’s follower fire. But fire is
witless; a little stream, a changing breeze can stop it. Man
circumvents. If fire were human it would build boats across the rivers
and outmanœuvre the wind. It would lie in wait in sheltered places,
smouldering, husbanding its fuel until the grass was yellow and the
forests sere. But fire is a mere creature of man’s; our world before his
coming knew nothing of it in any of its habitable places, never saw it
except in the lightning flash or remotely on some volcanic coronet. Man
brought it into the commerce of life, a shining, resentful slave, to
hound off the startled beasts from his sleeping-place and serve him like
a dog.
Suppose that some enduring intelligence watched through the ages the
successions of life upon this planet, marked the spreading first of this
species and then that, the conflicts, the adaptations, the
predominances, the dyings away, and conceive how it would have witnessed
this strange dramatic emergence of a rare great ape to manhood. To such
a mind the creature would have seemed at first no more than one of
several varieties of clambering frugivorous mammals, a little
distinguished by a disposition to help his clumsy walking with a stake
and reinforce his fist with a stone. The foreground of the picture would
have been filled by the rhinoceros and mammoth, the great herds of
ruminants, the sabre-toothed lion and the big bears. Then presently the
observer would have noted a peculiar increasing handiness about the
obscurer type, an unwonted intelligence growing behind its eyes. He
would have perceived a disposition in this creature no beast had shown
before, a disposition to make itself independent of the conditions of
climate and the chances of the seasons. Did shelter fail among the trees
and rocks, this curious new thing began to make itself harbours of its
own; was food irregular, it multiplied food. It began to spread out from
its original circumstances, fitting itself to novel needs, leaving the
forests, invading the plains, following the watercourses upward and
downward, presently carrying the smoke of its fires like a banner of
conquest into wintry desolations and the high places of the earth.
The first onset of man must have been comparatively slow, the first
advances needed long ages. By small degrees it gathered pace. The stride
from the scattered savagery of the earlier stone period to the first
cities, historically a vast interval, would have seemed to that still
watcher, measuring by the standards of astronomy and the rise and
decline of races and genera and orders, a step almost abrupt. It took,
perhaps, a thousand generations or so to make it. In that interval man
passed from an animallike obedience to the climate and the weather and
his own instincts, from living in small family parties of a score or so
over restricted areas of indulgent country, to permanent settlements, to
the life of tribal and national communities and the beginnings of
cities. He had spread in that fragment of time over great areas of the
earth’s surface, and now he was adapting himself to the Arctic circle on
the one hand and to the life of the tropics on the other; he had
invented the plough and the ship, and subjugated most of the domestic
animals; he was beginning to think of the origin of the world and the
mysteries of being. Writing had added its enduring records to oral
tradition, and he was already making roads. Another five or six hundred
generations at most bring him to ourselves. We sweep into the field of
that looker-on, the momentary incarnations of this sempiternal being,
Man. And after us there comes—
A curtain falls.
The time in which we, whose minds meet here in this writing, were born
and live and die, would be to that imagined observer a mere instant’s
phase in the swarming liberation of our kind from ancient imperatives.
It would seem to him a phase of unprecedented swift change and expansion
and achievement. In this last handful of years, electricity has ceased
to be a curious toy, and now carries half mankind upon their daily
journeys, it lights our cities till they outshine the moon and stars,
and reduces to our service a score of hitherto unsuspected metals; we
clamber to the pole of our globe, scale every mountain, soar into the
air, learn how to overcome the malaria that barred our white races from
the tropics, and how to draw the sting from a hundred such agents of
death. Our old cities are being rebuilt in towering marble; great new
cities rise to vie with them. Never, it would seem, has man been so
various and busy and persistent, and there is no intimation of any check
to the expansion of his energies.
And all this continually accelerated advance has come through the
quickening and increase of man’s intelligence and its reinforcement
through speech and writing. All this has come in spite of fierce
instincts that make him the most combatant and destructive of animals,
and in spite of the revenge Nature has attempted time after time for his
rebellion against her routines, in the form of strange diseases and
nearly universal pestilences. All this has come as a necessary
consequence of the first obscure gleaming of deliberate thought and
reason through the veil of his animal being. To begin with, he did not
know what he was doing. He sought his more immediate satisfaction and
safety and security. He still apprehends imperfectly the change that
comes upon him. The illusion of separation that makes animal life, that
is to say, passionate competing and breeding and dying, possible, the
blinkers Nature has put upon us that we may clash against and sharpen
one another, still darken our eyes. We live not life as yet, but in
millions of separated lives, still unaware except in rare moods of
illumination that we are more than those fellow beasts of ours who drop
off from the tree of life and perish alone. It is only in the last three
or four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods of
expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and with
incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has felt
its way towards its undying being in the race. Man still goes to war
against himself, prepares fleets and armies and fortresses, like a
sleep-walker who wounds himself, like some infatuated barbarian who
hacks his own limbs with a knife.
But he awakens. The nightmares of empire and racial conflict and war,
the grotesques of trade jealousy and tariffs, the primordial dream-stuff
of lewdness and jealousy and cruelty, pale before the daylight which
filters between his eyelids. In a little while we individuals will know
ourselves surely for corpuscles in his being, for thoughts that come
together out of strange wanderings into the coherence of a waking mind.
A few score generations ago all living things were in our ancestry. A
few score generations ahead, and all mankind will be in sober fact
descendants from our blood. In physical as in mental fact we separate
persons, with all our difference and individuality, are but fragments,
set apart for a little while in order that we may return to the general
life again with fresh experiences and fresh acquirements, as bees return
with pollen and nourishment to the fellowship of the hive.
And this Man, this wonderful child of old earth, who is ourselves in the
measure of our hearts and minds, does but begin his adventure now.
Through all time henceforth he does but begin his adventure. This planet
and its subjugation is but the dawn of his existence. In a little while
he will reach out to the other planets, and take that greater fire, the
sun, into his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bear
upon the riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy and
every passion, control his own increase, select and breed for his
embodiment a continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of
us can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will think
and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with that
greater life. There come moments when the thing shines out upon our
thoughts. Sometimes in the dark sleepless solitudes of night, one ceases
to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one’s
quarrels and vanities, forgives and understands one’s enemies and
oneself, as one forgives and understands the quarrels of little
children, knowing oneself indeed to be a being greater than one’s
personal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying
swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.
THE END
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
3. Footnotes were re-indexed using numbers.
4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.