The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 7

of his existence, we
are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature,
differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he
will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and
allow him to play out his existence in cage cities.
The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to
us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst in the
desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the gray-and-dreary
lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like God, it may be but

a large, vague idea toward which we grope to snuggle up against. It
seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution. But how do we know that
in man the spiral of life has not reached its apex, and that now, even
now, the vortices of its descent are not beginning? How do we know
that the From-man is to be a Superman and not a Subman? How can we
dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to give birth to an heir, fine
and free and superior?
We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the
most oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in,
while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering to
the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between its
organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive the
higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the suicide of
the whole.
As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the
germs of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The
probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic deduction,
that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands of years of
pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon a comet or
gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing cold, become
babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed in the
discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs containing
the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others! What
influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand times
and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring forth, of
which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting at long
distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory, is presaged
in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an inner necessity,
its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure and machinery of its
being, seems caught into the entanglements of an inescapable net, an
eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee and remake itself into the
immortal image that is its God.
And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable
optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop of
comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest prospect
of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future and
destiny, there are others. Man, after all, may be simply a bad habit Life

will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can afford to be
anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all living things to
which we are blood-related. There are other species or latent species to
take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens and ascend the heights.
The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain lines that would make
them the masters of the universe.
But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the
struggle for survival and power, the implications of the qualities
necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate pieces of
protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begotten of life. That is
why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a phrase. It is impossible to
conceive of something alive, possessed of the property of remembering,
that is not possessed of a store of past experiences. You can no more
think of getting rid of these unconscious memories of protoplasm than
you can think of getting rid of the wetness of water. They are imbedded
in the most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba as well as in our
most complex tissues.
The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory carnivor who
were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the
ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the
instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia, even when
evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the self-and-species
murdering inventions and discoveries that are apparently destined to
slay us. The powers of unconscious memory