Читать книгу The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman - Страница 14

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.