The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And no
Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene
as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other
social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's
barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as
though every other method has failed us.
In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have
failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are
sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown
them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a
permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few.
War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either
the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to
wholesale slavery and carnage.
Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to
surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a
miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We
thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by
the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the
intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest
adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves
merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be
sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there,
but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the
museums of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are
condemned to be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming
discoverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let
us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the
stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of the gods,
let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but irretrievably
willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us except to beat
our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it?
MAN AS A TRANSIENT
Yet, true as it is that the human animal has achieved no advance
beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his
bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out
anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the
thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves,
Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static
sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from
something whose bones alone remain as reminders 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 and
unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus
prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it
possible for it to be and become what it is and has, they have
also made it forever impossible for it to be or become its own
contradiction.
Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for
worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living
thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a
peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from
all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to
contact with them by a fundamental impulse to assimilate them into
itself, and make them part of itself. That assimilatory urge is
present in every activity from coarse ingestion as food to the moral
metabolism of the hermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.
FATE AND ANTI-FATE
In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the
smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great
suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in
the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities,
empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through stages of a
relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches the stage of
integration which wills its own disintegration, that we have been
taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence as radium. And we
are told that nebulae wander until they collide and give birth to
stars, stars wander and collide and give birth to nebulae. Life begins
as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to build a brain, which
automatically refines itself to the point of discovering and using
the most efficient methods of destroying others, and by a boomerang
effect, itself. Fate!
The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for
tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect
within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken,
or power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given
the credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which,
at first slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and
bleeding among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives,
presently goes on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step,
to emerge into the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That
idea-process, this Anti-Fate is Science.
Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who
revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics
concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the
priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know
anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the
Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation
of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research
and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the
essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of
Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life,
undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain
cells.
Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by
men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated
data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient
sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena,
were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of
master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any
rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil
of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no
fanfare of trumpets.
First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then
protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage
as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing
them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really
totally inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like
coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no
sustained vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the
shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers
and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized
in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this
futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd
weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands
and dangers of public life.
But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery
of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for
industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most
marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not
the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations
at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were
raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science
acquired prestige.
Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the
overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the
factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par
excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors
of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the
conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of
the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the
inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into
the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville
show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy
scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and
licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.
The future of science has become the future of the race. So much of
an inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated. That is
ordinarily taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man
became the New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental
discoveries and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go
on, providing a succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist
and his retinue. Not only is he to be entertained and served by them,
but any commercial value will also be exploited by him. The natural
wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural
absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of
the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the
physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments
in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published
daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science.
THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE
Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a
substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept
them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.
The wonder-maker may have forced upon him, may welcome, the honors
of the priest, though he pose as the humble slave of Nature and her
secrets. Presently the foundations and institutes, which coexist with
the cathedrals and churches, just as once the new Christian chapels
and congregations stood side by side with pagan temples and heathen
shrines, may oust their rivals, and assume the monopoly of ritual.
Should its spirit remain fine and clear, should it maintain the
glorious promise of its dawn, should its high priests realize the
perpetually widening intimations of its universal triumph, and escape
the ossification that has overtaken all young and hopeful things and
institutions, the real foundation for a future of the species would be
laid, and so its ultimate suicide prevented.
The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the
redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words.
There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has
often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of
words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a
psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way
of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James,
in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty
definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is
wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits
and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common
merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at
all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual
powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play
the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of
torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along
which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.
SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE
Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can
science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave
origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its
texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be
certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general
stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An
abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and
breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of
course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate
and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric
superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our
social systems.
But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices
and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities,
jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases?
Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they
represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps,
the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas
Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What
future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not
the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of
other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to
which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us:
that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no
future?
That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent
question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen
angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for
eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always
will be the same." "As a man is built." "Bred in the bone." These are
the axioms of our social and economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming
that his nature is as uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has
limited his research into the substance of freedom to a groping for an
understanding of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he
set himself another of the insoluble problems he seems to delight
in by neglecting the most important factor in the equation. Yet the
invisible soul of man, ignored, as a variable, varying quantity, has
upset all societies and constitutions, and all schemes of bondage as
well as of freedom.
For freedom, it becomes obvious as soon as it is clearly stated, is
sheer impossibility until the internal conditions of his nature
are ascertained, and the way paved for their control. A simple
illustration of the working of this principle is supplied by our
democracies, grossly pretenders. How can a democracy be possible
without a knowledge of the control of the individually and socially
subnormal, who, since they offer themselves to exploitation by
the careerists, prove themselves the weak links in the chain of
co-operation with an equal opportunity for all, that is the democratic
ideal? In what does the equality or inequality of men consist? Just
what are the qualities necessary for successful competition, or if you
will, co-living, of man with his fellow-men, and how and why do they
operate? No freedom, independent of the servile repetitions of
history and heredity, is conceivable until these inquiries have been
elaborately carried out toward a certain working finality.
THE PROMISES OF EUGENICS
There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative
achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They are
invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue
born of necessity. Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the "Bible
of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares: "There is
nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of
evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed
who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern
European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races."
High hopes beat in this declaration. But Galton could not have
foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern
Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a
pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but
envy as a masterpiece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy
for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had
climbed from the African level.
The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the
best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best,
and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not
inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the
day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. Besides,
this is a strange world of choices. Nobody is to be considered worthy
of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly. Nobody who would
permit an outsider's decision as to when he was properly in love would
be worth thirty cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma
of the eugenist--the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a
control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.
NEW PSYCHOLOGY
There are the claims and outcries and promises of the
psychologists--the specialists in the probing of the human soul and
human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of
process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them
into two schools--the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious,
the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the
Freudians. A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their
differences are those of horizon merely. For the McDougallians look
upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad--the Freudians
see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they
behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope.
But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of
the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the disciples
of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its
Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that
Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature
of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is
self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the
habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old,
very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent
ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex,
fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of
civilization. It is the bubble of education all over again. What in
our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our
blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are
respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must
remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental
barracks.
Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe.
They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. Layer upon layer,
cross-section upon cross-section have been piled before us. And what
a melodramatic cinema of thrills and shivers, villains and heroes,
heroines and adventuresses have they not unfolded. Each motive, as
the stiff psychologist of the nineteenth century, with his
plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeon holes and classifications,
labelled the teeming creatures of the mind, becomes anon a strutting
actor upon a multitudinous stage, and an audience in a crowded
playhouse. Scenes are enacted the febrile fancy of a Poe or a de
Maupassant never could have conjured. The complex, the neurosis, the
compulsion, the obsession, the slip of speech, the trick of manner,
the devotion of a life-time, the culture of a nation all furnish bits
for the Freudian mosaic. Attractions and inhibitions, repulsions and
suppressions are held up as the ultimate pulling and pushing forces of
human nature.
But is the problem solved? Is not human nature primarily animal
nature? And do we so thoroughly understand this animal nature? Does
not all this material of Freudianism consist of variations upon social
burdens imposed on the original human nature? To be sure, at every
moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the
clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and
defeat for the others. But the Freudian material per se--the sex
material--is it not merely the by-product of a certain state of
society? A sane society would eliminate nearly all of Freudian
disease, but still have original human nature upon its hands. Why is
it that of two individuals exposed to the same situation, one will
develop a complex, the other will remain immune? The only soil we know
of, the real foundation stones of our being and living, are the cells
we are made of. Tell me the cellular basis of a complex, and I will
grant that you have arrived at some real knowledge.