Of all the time-honoured fatuities that men repeat and repeat, and
comfort themselves mysteriously by repeating, none surely are more
patently absurd than those which assert the unchangeableness of human
life. “Human nature” never alters, we are assured; man in the Stone
Age, any Stone Age, was exactly what he is now, or rather more so;
he felt the same things; he imagined the same things; he travelled
the same round; his fears, his hopes were identical. Save for a few
superficialities, human life has always been the same and will always
be the same, and neither the past nor the future can be allowed to cast
a reflection by difference upon our satisfaction with the lives we
lead to-day. Life as we know it is, in fact, the cream and the whole
of existence. There was nothing very different behind us and there is
nothing better ahead.
Quite similarly we protect our self-esteem by the persuasion that
life under all sorts of circumstances and in all social positions is
very much of a muchness. It gratifies our inherent grudgingness to
think that life in a palace differs in no essential quality from life
in our own cottage, that all the grapes above our heads are sour, and
it eases our social conscience to reflect over the fire in the evening
that the miner cramped in his seam or the out-of-work on tramp is so
attuned to his level of existence that for all practical purposes he
has just as much fun and contentment in life as we do. There is no real
inequality, we assure ourselves, just as there is no progress. Our
lives are as good as any lives can be. “Riches,” we all say, “cannot
buy happiness,” and it seems hardly to touch that statement that there
are hundreds of thousands of people in the completest enjoyment of
existence who would be cripples or dead if they had not been able to
command the services of expensive surgeons, undergo costly treatments
or take imperative holidays at this or that crisis in their careers. In
any other age, under any available conditions, they would be cripples
or dead. But it makes us happier to deny that, just as it makes us
happier to think that the life of our times will always be regarded
with respect by posterity. Our heroes will always be the most heroic of
heroes; the great men we have made our symbols will shine as stars of
the first magnitude for ever; the art, the literature that delight us
will last for “all time.” Our Newton is for ever; our Shakespeare is
for ever; Alexander and Cæsar and Napoleon are for ever; it is almost
as if _we_ were for ever.
This sort of consolation is so natural to most of us, so near to being
a necessity, that to run over a few of the facts that make it absurd
can rob hardly a soul of the pleasure of it. For everyday purposes
we believe what we want to believe, and if we do not want to believe
the truth, we do generally contrive to dispose of it as a sort of
extravaganza. In that spirit most of us contemplate the fact that
human life, the tune, the quality, the elements, are changing visibly
before our eyes. Human life, as a matter of fact and not as a matter
of sentiment, is different from what it has ever been before, and it
is rapidly becoming more different. The scope of it and the feel of
it and the spirit of it change. Perhaps never in the whole history of
life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected
to so fiercely urgent, many-sided, and comprehensive a process of
change as ours to-day. None at least that has survived. Transformation
or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a
species in an intense phase of transition.
These papers, of which this is the first, will all consider some
aspect or other of this great change that is going on. In them we will
release our imaginations to the truth that we are things that pass,
and do not leave our like, and that the ways and experiences of our
children and our children’s children promise to be profoundly different
from the life we lead at the present time. We will give a rest to our
practical working belief in the security of things as they are. We will
take the rest and refreshment of a few glances at the longer realities.
Man has always been a changing animal. The earliest human remains of a
few score thousand years ago are of creatures so different that they
are now regarded as a distinct species of _Homo_. Only within twenty or
thirty thousand years does man seem to have been truly man. There is a
disposition in some quarters to exaggerate the resemblance of the later
Stone Age men to modern types, and to minimize the changes that have
occurred since the onset of civilization. What is called the Cro-Magnon
race was a race of big individuals, and, as in the case of their
brutish predecessors, the Neanderthalers _(Homo Neanderthalensis)_,
that bigness extended to the brain case--in quantity at least their
brains were above our present average--but they were beings of a
coarser texture than the average modern, and there has been the most
preposterous nonsense written about their artistic gifts and their
general intelligence. They drew and carved--about as well as recent
Bushmen have drawn and carved. They were so far “modern” in their art
that at times it was strikingly obscene.
A brain is known by its fruits, and the total product of this
Cro-Magnon brain, of which certain excited anthropologists have made a
marvel, was the precarious life of painted, wandering savages. In build
and skull type and general character this Cro-Magnon people differed
from any race now flourishing in this world. Industrious search may
find odd individuals here and there, in Central France and the Canary
Isles, for example, rather after the Cro-Magnon type. They are rarely
eminent individuals.
Throughout the whole historical period the races of men have been
changing. In a recent lecture Sir Arthur Keith noted some of the
differences between the average Briton of to-day and his predecessor
of only a few centuries ago. The former has, for instance, a “scissor
bite” of the teeth instead of an edge-to-edge bite; his face is
finer and longer and his palate narrower; his nose is thinner and
more prominent. These are the modifications wrought upon him by the
comparatively slow and slight alterations in his circumstances,
extended and altered dietary, increased clothing, and the like,
that went on during the Middle Ages and the subsequent two or three
centuries. They are unimportant in comparison with the modifications
that are being pressed upon him by the changing circumstances of to-day.
Very few of us realize the enormous distortions that are now going on
in the life cycle of the human animal. There is a biological revolution
in progress--of far profounder moment than any French or Russian
revolution that ever happened. The facts come dripping in to us, here
a paragraph in a newspaper, there a book, now a chance remark; we are
busy about our personal affairs and rarely find time to sit back and
consider the immense significance of the whole continuing process. We
forget this before we hear of that, and do not put two and two together.
Here, to begin with, is a specimen of the kind of quiet-looking fact
that gets by most of us without betraying a shadow of its enormous
implications. I find it mentioned casually in “Rejuvenation,” a book
by Dr. Norman Haire, which I chance to be consulting upon a point I
shall deal with later. It is that _since the opening of the present
century_ insurance statistics, presumably British--Dr. Haire does not
say--show that the average length of human life within the scope of
these statistics has been increased by twelve years. This, when we
make the necessary inquiries, does not mean that people are living on
to two-and-eighty instead of the traditional three score and ten, but
that the hope of survival for every infant born in Britain has been
increased in a brief quarter-century by about a third. It may expect
to live four years for every three it could have hoped for if it had
been born in 1900. That is the latest step in a series of changes that
have been going on for a much longer period. It points forward to a
time when nearly every child born into a civilized community will
live to maturity. Because of late marriages and other more disputable
causes, there are in every thousand individuals of a modern Atlantic
population twenty or less infants of under one year, and upon that
such populations can and do increase. This marks a quite novel rarity
of children in the new world. To judge by Oriental cities in which
medieval conditions still prevail and the tombstones in old English
churches, something like fifty out of the thousand of our ancestral
populations, before the day of our great-great-grandmothers, were
infants under one year, _of which thirty or more were doomed to die_ in
childhood or adolescence. A lot of that thirty died in the first year;
a lot of the survivors from the previous year were, at the same time,
dying in their second year, and so on. Proportionately there were more
ailing children in that vanished state of affairs among our populations
than all the children in our community to-day. Upwards of half the
human beings then alive lived what we should now regard as tragically
foreshortened existences. And the rest of the population, the moiety
that contrived to grow up, must have been mainly occupied in mothering,
fathering, and nursing this superfluity of offspring.
As we examine the dry-looking figures of birth-rates and death-rates
in the vital statistics that have become available in the past hundred
years, and touch them with imaginative understanding, we begin to
realize that the life of man so far, up to our own times--and of
women far more so--has been almost wholly a sexual one; that--with
the exception of a few priests, nuns, eccentrics, and unattractive
women--the full round of life for every one who could achieve it, who
wasn’t killed too soon, that is, was to grow up, to pair, to produce
and sustain a large family, burying most of it, and so to decay and age
and die. The whole adult life was consumed by sex and its consequences;
the business of the family, of making it and of toiling for it, of
weeping over the dead and beginning again, was the complete circle
of life. Man was almost as sexual as a cat with its ever-recurring
kittens. In the past the normal existence fell wholly into the frame of
the family. Man was a family animal. Now this is no longer the case.
Now family life becomes merely a phase in an ampler experience. Human
life escapes beyond it.
Human life, which was formerly almost completely filled by that
reproductive business, the family, has come very suddenly upon
conditions under which the necessity for sexual preoccupations has
enormously diminished. That means a biological revolution of quite
primary quality. Women and men can no longer use themselves up, even
if they would, in that immemorial round. The release of women--if we
may regard it as a release and not as a deprivation--is conspicuously
immense. _Homo Sapiens_, departing from the usual practice of the
animal kingdom, is beginning to breed much later than his physical
adolescence, to conserve all his offspring, and so to free and render
available, for good or evil, an amount of individual time and energy
unprecedented in the history of life. He has changed these cardinal
points in his biological process in the last hundred years almost
unawares. So far he is already a different sort of animal from his
ancestors, or, indeed, from any species of vertebrated creature that
has ever lived upon earth.
The change in conditions is all too recent to appear in any inherent
quality. Adaptation to the new conditions has to be individual, just
as education to the old conditions had to be. If the new conditions
last long enough, a specific modification facilitating adaptation will
go on, as Professor Mark Baldwin showed a decade or so ago, in his far
too much neglected discussion of the evolutionary process, “Development
and Evolution.” That will be an affair of many generations, but it
will come. And no doubt it will be made evident by visible physical
differences as well as physiological alterations.
But these current changes in the natural history of mankind during the
last few decades, great as they are, pale before certain others that
are now promising to alter the whole tenor of the life experience in
quite another direction. A series of possibilities and practicabilities
are being opened to us by recent research that amount in effect to
a huge artificial extension of the fully adult stage of life. _Homo
Sapiens_ in the past was a creature who normally went to work at the
end of childhood, became adult, married, had a large, distressful,
onerous family, lost his teeth, lost the power of accommodating his
eyes to distance, and came to an end. It is within quite a short period
that man has eked out his failing powers with glasses and false teeth.
“Nature,” says Sir Arthur Keith, “has worked out the evolution of
the human family on a mean life tenure of forty-five years; she has
hitherto run the human army on a short service system.” In the near
future, on the contrary, man will not work until he is adult; he will
marry much later; he will have a small, successful family; he will then
go on for some score of years, it may be, before he exhibits any of the
characteristic decadence of age. Instead of breaking down and being
left by the way, the oculist, the dentist, the surgeon, will perform
the necessary roadside repairs, and carry him on through a prolongation
of his efficiency. But that is not all; something more than patching
and carrying on is possible; his essential vitality can be, and will
be, prolonged.
The researches on which our belief in the last and most hopeful of
these possibilities is based--that is, the suspension of senility--are
recent; the great bulk of them have been published since this
century began, but they amount now to a substantial mass of entirely
confirmatory evidence. Metchnikoff was one of the earliest to make
the attack upon senile decay, and his dietetic suggestions and his
schemes for a sort of hygienic evisceration have not proved of any
great value, but since his time an increasing number of investigators,
working chiefly upon the internal secretions of the animal body, have
shown more and more convincingly that by simple and easy treatment
it is possible to sustain a human being in a state of adult vigour
far beyond Shakespeare’s sixth and seventh ages. Haire gives the
results of a score of able workers in Germany, Britain, America, and
other countries, Steinach, Lichtenstern, Voronoff, and their pupils,
associates, and rivals, who have gradually built up certainties out
of speculations and experiments. In the last month or so Professor
Cavazzi, of Bologna, has published claims that greatly reinforce and
extend these assurances. Adult vigour _can_ be restored, and it can
be kept up to at least the end of the normal life. It can probably be
maintained for many years beyond that limit. At first it may be only a
few prosperous and enterprising individuals, with access to the best
and most skilful advice, who will extend the span of their activity
in this way, but it is unlikely that “prolongation” will be allowed
to remain the privilege of a small class. The average active human
life, we may conclude, in the quite near future, will be not only
unencumbered but prolonged, in comparison with any but exceptionally
sturdy and lucky lives in the past.
We seem to be passing on now towards a state of human society in which
there will be no children but hopeful and active children, and though
many people will be full of years, none will be “aged”; a state of
society, in fact, in which the average man and woman will be of riper
years, far maturer in outlook and far less deeply immersed in sexual
and family affairs. It will be a community of grown-up people to an
extent quite beyond our present community. In most of our forecasts and
imaginings of times to come, we are apt to disregard this biological
revolution which is in progress, and the mental and social consequences
that must follow upon it. It seems to indicate the possibility of a
world with a different and probably a graver emotional tone, with
an art and a literature much less obsessed by the love story and
the elementary adventures of life, and with a political and social
life less passionate and impatient and more circumspect. It is not a
metaphor, it is a statement of material fact that mankind is growing
up, and that we are passing towards a more distinctly adult life as the
main stretch of existence, in comparison with the feverishly youthful
and transitory life of the past.
The development of the speculations that arise out of this statement
would carry us far beyond the scope of the present article. Later I
hope to return to some of the most striking of them. But the great mass
of current discussion about moral codes and standards of conduct, about
the ethics and sentiment of married and business and religious life and
the like, this searching and probing into fundamental things which make
our contemporary literature and journalism so different from that of
the last century, arises, I believe, very largely out of a need, felt
rather than recognized, of altering and adjusting our working habits
and traditional methods to this very imperfectly apprehended change
in human biology, this shifting of the centre point of life from the
twenties up towards the fifties, this rapid and disconcerting change,
in the course of a generation or so, of _Homo Sapiens_ into a more
completely developed, longer living, and more persistently vital animal.
_9 January, 1927._