Chapter IX: Part 9

When there is inharmony, schism, and in consequence bitter contention. I recommend this question, first, to the religious dogmatists of all creeds; second, to the anarchists, socialists and economic thinkers generally. They represent purely individual, and to them justifiable, points of view. Hence the world’s collection of dogmatic and radical literature.

VI

_What is the key to making marriage do its work in the world?_

???? Unchanging love possibly, or an ingrowing and harmonious sense of duty. Without Napoleonic skill or tact, however, I fear me much even then, and so would end with----

???????

P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a _new_ non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable, mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.

But the great fact, not to be lost sight of, is that love, complete chemical responsiveness to the universe, is only attained in the reunion of the separated chemical constituents of the original asexual individual, and without love or this union there is no full chemical-spiritual responsiveness to the universe. Man does not soar emotionally into the empyrean except in love, and by “in love” I mean when stirred by the sex impulse which makes for mate-seeking and union. It does not follow that there need ever be physical satiation to complete this union. Spiritual pollination can spring from the merest accidental contact for a moment with a mate. But the fact remains that the greatest, most complete spiritual and physical responsiveness to the universe (which after all is a mere matter of chemical reaction) springs from this responsiveness, which springs from love, and as such our so-called love (desire, passionate chemical response, physical and spiritual) becomes the most significant fact in the universe as we now understand it. For what is the universe without intellectual perception on our part, the beholding of it with the eye, the perception of it with the senses, the responsiveness to it through the emotions?

MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY

In my youth no country was so significant to me as the United States, of course, so wonderful, so fully representative of the natural spirit of aspiration in man, his dreams, hopes, superior and constructive possibilities. All that America did, could do, had done, was in line with the noblest and best principles in Nature, as I then understood Nature. And I still believe that this nation might be one of tremendous significance in connection with intellectual development, but some marked changes will need to come about.

Plainly, in a material and (socially speaking) internal organic way, it has accomplished much, even if thus far its intellectual stature has not proved so tremendous. We are, as I see it now, a deeply-illusioned people, concerned solely with material things when they are really no longer very important--certainly not as much so as when the land was new and without material means--and yet we remain almost entirely interested in such things when our minds should be beginning to grasp the wider possibilities of life--still fighting over beef and coal trusts and railroads and cables, the mere money return involved--who is to have the control of them--when we ought to be intensely concerned with the mysteries of chemistry and physics and a more pliable form of government.

Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde, and that speedily, and give place to newer lands--newer in spirit, I mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped. Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here. Our science--well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel? Tesla? Bell? All foreigners.

In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we flourish, we have done better--yes, and in anything and everything which relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land have had as much--more, in fact--to do with this than anything else. We have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and other financiers--their trade geniuses--have done quite as well if not better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell, the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc.

Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from it. Those great prime movers--for instance, the steam engine, the electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the automobile)--came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad, radium, X-ray photography and--what is most remarkable, considering that the ironclad came from here--every step in steel manufacture. The telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he became an emigrant to our country.

Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught--Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland--in times past and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral well-being of man--his intellectual and therefore his mental and social happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the United States, was enjoying--a vast and fertile soil, an equable climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not achievement, among other things.

Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but oared boats--not even the trireme at first--no compass, no machinery, no implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen, Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho, its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers--the greatest in all the world--Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or they are not.

America at the present moment, these United States, suggests nothing so much as the trading Carthaginians and Phœnicians. We have, apparently, no soul for really great things intellectually, and yet we have done a few things, too--fought wars for our own integrity, invented a number of very useful machines--the cotton gin, sewing-machine, flying-machine and U-boat--grown rich and great in size, freed the slaves (which England did in her realm without a war), liberated Cuba (no exploitation since?), struggled with the Philippine problem, the Mexican problem, and some others, but to no definite end as yet, however. And yet our deeds are plainly so incommensurate to our power. For we still have with us the Negroes, the clash and plotting of various rival sectarians, easily allayed by a truly educated race, the growth and almost complete independence of various private interests and individuals--puritanism run all but mad and to the death of genuine intellectuality, artistic or otherwise, etc. And yet to the average American it remains a belief or fact that within our borders, safe under the control and guidance of a human and helpful Constitution or form of government, are all the social, commercial and mental opportunities to which an ambitious citizen of the world may logically aspire--freedom to think, to grow mentally and in every other way, to acquire tremendous wealth and be a person in whom the inventive and constructive processes of Nature can take the liveliest interest. Indeed, whatever may have befallen him socially or economically in recent years, he is still convinced that he is absolutely free--freer than the constituent individuals of any other nation, that he is a great thinker and leader in things intellectual and that America is the best and most carefully administered country in the world, administered entirely, or nearly so, on his behalf.

Well, I have no very great quarrel with that as a theory, a method of expressing one’s private vital force, but is it true? In my personal judgment, America as yet certainly is neither a social nor a democratic success. Its original democratic theory does not work, or has not, and a trust-and a law-frightened people, to say nothing of a cowardly or suborned and in any case helpless press, prove it. Where in any country not dominated by an autocracy has ever a people more pathetically and ridiculously slipped about afraid to voice its views on war, on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the trusts, religion--indeed any honest private conviction that it has? In what country even less free can a man be more thoroughly browbeaten, arrested without trial, denied the privilege of a hearing and held against the written words of the nation’s own Constitution guaranteeing its citizens freedom of speech, of public gathering, of writing and publishing what they honestly feel? In what other lands less free are whole elements held in a caste condition--the Negro, the foreign-born, the Indian?

When one considers the history of American commercial development, the growth of private wealth, of its private leaders--the Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Goulds, Ryans, et al., indeed all the railroad, street-car, land and other lords--a, until the war, practically stationary wage-rate, an ever-increasing rising cost of living, cold legislative conniving and robbery before which the people are absolutely helpless, Tammany Hall, the New York Street Car Monopoly, seven hundred and fifty-three different kinds of trusts that tax people as efficiently and ardently as ever any monarchy or tyranny dreamed of doing--I should really like to know on what authority we base our plea for the transcendent merits of democracy, and I am as good a democrat as most Americans, if not more so.

Government everywhere, in monarchies and republics, as well as tyrannies and despotisms, has, other things being equal, always kept step with the natural development of the intelligence of the mass, a thing which has been as much developed by the goads of tyrannies as by the petting of republics. But could you ever convince a full-fledged American, raised on Fourth of July orations and the wonders and generosities of the American Constitution, of this? For him, of course, liberty began in 1776 at Bunker Hill or somewhere near it. Before that was no light anywhere. Since then we have gone on--doing better and better, making all men richer happier, kinder, wiser.

But have we? Is our land and its progress so absolutely flawless? Aside from love of country and individual vanity which might make us want to think so, have we not developed as many flaws, anachronisms, social and governmental irritations and oppressions as any other country? I call attention to the deliberation and ease with which the trusts organize our legislatures, dictate to the jurists of the land, deny even the permanence or sacredness of contract when it concerns them; rob, pillage and tax to their hearts’ content while a pitiful mass at the bottom march to and fro wondering where or to whom to turn for relief. And, on the other hand, life here, as much as elsewhere--the struggling mass--is as savagely pushed by necessity as any mass anywhere. Our labor unrest is as great, our poverty as keen; five per cent, or so it is alleged, of the population controlling ninety-five per cent of the wealth; thirteen per cent of the population illiterate; at the top gorgons of financiers as fat and comfortable and dictatorial as any the world has ever seen and as unpatriotic and un-American, in so far as its original theory goes, as may be. Worse yet, it is absolutely true that ours is, or was, materially at least, a rich land, boundless in its opportunities at first, which latter fact has contributed greatly to our optimism but not to our comfort. More rapidly here than anywhere in the world the rich have divided themselves from the poor, and now here as elsewhere necessity and pain are and will remain no doubt the goads to comparative ease. Yet the tramping American when he utters the marvelous word democracy believes that he has it, and when he is not complaining and the newspapers tell him so, believes that he is perfectly happy.

At the same time, considering our aggressive and progressive financial leaders--and heaven forbid (on humanitarian grounds, at least) that I should defend them, for a more selfish, cruel and undemocratic pack never lived (consider the packers, the street-car corporations, the railroads alone, not to mention a thousand others)--there is this to be said, that although nearly every crime in the decalogue may be charged to them, bribery, perjury, murder, even a total indifference to individual welfare (twelve and a half cents an hour, for instance, up to six years ago for hard, grinding day labor on a railroad or in a canning factory), as well as greed, love of power, and lust after it--still much if not all of America’s boasted financial supremacy is due to them and to none other. We jeer at John D. Rockefeller at home perhaps, or Morgan, but when abroad among envious strangers who is first to thrust out his chest and boast of what America has done--its financial leaders, no less? Who? The average American? You know so. Such being the case one often wonders what is to be done with a country or a people that can so readily blow hot and cold out of the same mouth. Can it be made to follow an austere democratic program--the sharp, taut socialization of everything--or will it succumb to autocratic or to financial domination, and if so, which? At the present moment the air hums with the rival theories. To me the chief problem in connection with America, if it has one, and as I see it, is that of finding itself mentally as well as finding a formula that will allow and encourage leadership without submitting to the abuses which in the past and even the present the latter tends to give rise. For here as much as anywhere else the average small American is as much a petty tyrant as may be found. Consider only the food profiteer, the small dealers, jobbers and wholesalers. And here, as elsewhere, are all the petty tyrannies of small and large enterprises in regard to wage-earners, the scorns, the brutalities, the exactions. Can these be outrivaled if readily duplicated in any autocracy or democracy ruled by a dictator anywhere? At the same time, is it not true that, if the country is to succeed or at least progress materially, a place must be made for the selfish, self-aggrandizing individual either as leader politically or as creator? Will life go forward without some such process or opportunities for immense rewards or honors to the individual--the right to satisfy his feverish if ridiculous ambition for supremacy? Will patriotism, love of country, alone do it? Can it be discovered?

What made Rome great? _Senatus populusque Romanus._ The Senate supplied the leadership, the people the impulse and force, which spread the dominion of the shepherds of the Seven Hills until it ruled the world from Scotland to the Nubian Desert and the confines of India. What is the secret of the Roman church’s preëminence? Leadership? Autocracy? In the early Christian church these were lacking. Think or say what you will of its results, but consider it. In so far as the early Christians were concerned they were all “brethren,” like the Russians of to-day and the citizens of the French Revolution. Each early Christian community elected its deacons; the deacons elected the priests; the priests elected the bishops; the bishops elected the cardinals; and the cardinals the pope. Before the Catholic church began to attain to its strength, however, the process was reversed: the pope appointed the cardinal, he the bishop, the bishop the priest. Then the deacons were selected by the priest, in certain cases some deacons were elective, but then the priest and deacon, appointed by the bishop, constituted the majority of the board. It was then, and then only, that the Roman church began to flourish truly. The ambition of man had full scope, his vanity. Apparently the world hitherto has not been able to do or live without it. On the authorization basis of leadership the Roman church, the most impressive organization in human history, has stood for seventeen centuries.

But take our own Standard Oil Company. Who built it? Who used to caution all his lieutenants never to talk, to keep everything a secret, particularly its prosperity? And has not the blessing of cheap oil been extended to all the world? Who selected strong, ambitious men and set them to planning the monopoly of oil for their personal and private benefit, dickered with the railroads and cut the throats of his rivals via the rebate? Does his name have to be written here? Call him a scoundrel, scoff at autocracy and high and mighty plutocrats. After all, can a man or a woman become a safe or dictatorial plutocrat without having something to offer which makes his plutocracy and his dictatorship bearable? Have mere dull tyrants anywhere ever lasted long? Have they ever had brains enough? Most of Rome’s worst emperors were slain in anywhere from three to five years. The tyrants of Asia and Africa last, if they do, because the people are as dull as themselves, or their rule is agreeable to them.

Every great business corporation, as we know, is built about the personality, the leadership, the autocracy, of one man. We hear of love of country, of putting the needs of the mass, one’s country--all countries--above that of one’s personal or private needs. There are noble examples no doubt (off-hand few occur to me) of unselfish public sacrifice of many, many private lives, but are they the rule or the exception? Does not the average individual now as heretofore consult his own interest, his advantage, his purse, his survival, his fame? Once one is large and secure, easy in the possession of fame, money, love even, it is possible, of course--and even with a grandiose air--to do generously, to give freely, to seek the advantage of the mass. Scarcely any other avenue of personal satisfaction remains open. I am not sneering; I am contemplating a possibly chemic, physic or psychic law. Who knows?

Taking the average individual, with life (necessity, hunger, drouths of one kind and another) pressing upon him as fiercely as it does, and contemplating America as it is and the world as it is, is it not fair to ask whether it is possible to make over man--his ambitions, his soul, into the likeness of what is suggested by the average modern democratic or republican or socialistic program? Can he be adjusted to it? Haven’t we just had two thousand years of an attempt in one form? Possibly he can, but is it wise that he should? Are not striking, centralizing figures more important and, save during extremely patriotic moments, when some danger, say, threatens the national organism as a whole, is it not extremely difficult to cause the average individual to enthuse over a crowd or the needs of a crowd? And on the contrary, is it not most pathetically easy to cause him to enthuse over a man or a woman--to cause any of us so to do? It would almost look as though it were Nature’s way, would it not--the love of the mass for leaders, for grandiose, grandiloquent figures? Is not life, in the main, personal, individual? Think how we insist on identifying God as an individual. Will not such leadership as was offered by Alexander, Hannibal, Mohammed, Napoleon, Washington, Lincoln, always be popular? The leadership of lesser or more self-aggrandizing individuals--such as, for instance, that of the late James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railway; E. H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific; Cornelius Vanderbilt, of the New York Central; Jay Gould, of the Missouri Pacific; Jay Cooke, of Civil War Finance; Armour, Field, Leiter, Morgan, or, to come down to the present moment, John H. Patterson, of the National Cash Register; Henry Ford, of the jitney; F. W. Woolworth, of the five-and-ten-cent store--if never popular, still does it not remain necessary? Must not some one lead even in the home and all forms of private commercial adventure? It may not be an absolutely invariable rule, but is it not near enough to make it seem so? I am not quarreling with the possibilities of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, public and private. We all hope for them, do we not? In various minor ways at least, and even in some public and large ways, they exist. But how about self-interest, cold, savage and yet constructive if feverish self-interest? Has that been abrogated?

Indeed, ought not we Americans, of all people, learn, and learn quickly, that autocracy in whatever form you find it--absolute or otherwise--is never real autocracy, not absolute, and that on the other hand so-called democracy is never real democracy but always something tempered by private autocracy in a thousand--nay, in a million--forms? For after all, who tells such people as Rockefeller and Woolworth, to say nothing of kings and emperors--fallible and seeking souls, all--how, what, why, they must do?--how far they may go? What to interest themselves in? Consider the fall of the French kings, Charles I., the late Czar. They deal with the mass, and therefore to a certain extent they must respect it. They cannot escape it. It is their fate. At the same time, in attempting so to do, to whom do they not listen really for sound advice?--often to the least of their subjects or hirelings. The stockholders in any modern corporation--are they any more as to voice and weight in that which their money makes possible than the people out in the street of a republic or a kingdom with their ultimate veto power? They elect a board of directors as we elect a senate, or a monarchy, a legislature. And this leadership perpetuates itself, or at any rate holds things together, as does officialdom at Washington, until a leader appears. A weak king or emperor is run by strong men, a weak President is dictated to by a strong Senate or House. When the Roman Senate was strong the dictators were weak, and vice versa. In calm, peaceful days leadership is not necessary. It is or may be a disturbing factor. But when changes are coming, when Nature is brewing a storm--then. So life, with its endless brewing of storms and leaders, ought to give a hint to republics or democracies or corporate organizations.

And, having said so much, is it not plain that room must be made always for the leader, the passing autocrat, if you will? Must he not be given--if he have brains--the right of initiative and power, for after all is he not also a slave to life, chance, labor, the time-spirit? It is to be assumed, of course, that men shall demand first that he command their admiration and loyalty, as he certainly will if he is a real leader. Rome admired her Cæsar, France her Napoleon; Germany evidently liked her Kaiser, France her Clemenceau, England her Lloyd George. They thought them, apparently, necessary and great leaders. In our contest with Germany we perhaps, for one nation, were fighting to make her dislike something which she craved and needed, could not probably very well do without.

The trouble, as I see it, is that too often, in spite of all the current palaver and enthusiasm of some for special individuals, we have too little real or popular leadership. Middleweight idealists and theorists are too often at the steering-gear here as well as elsewhere. In this country we have the crowd, the extraordinarily well-educated (or we think so) and disciplined crowd, willing and eager for leadership. But what leadership? As it stands, all democracies are organized with elaborate systems of checks--legislative, executive--which are intended to and do tie the hands of all possible leaders, until a very, very great emergency arises. In the ordinary run of days and events only the ordinary politician or parlor-diplomat need apply. But when an extreme necessity calls, these minors must give way, but does the true leader always appear in time? Will he? Did the Allies have a truly able anti-Teutonic leader in the recent great struggle? Joffre? Asquith? Lloyd George? Kerensky? Wilson? Nicholas Romanoff?

Our Federal Constitution, theoretically at least, gives us a crowd government; only, owing to the wholly undemocratic character of the American people, this has long since been replaced by money or trust government, the rule of the wealthy by right of subornation. And our state and municipal governments, modeled on that of the nation, have gone the same way. Even such little individuality and leadership for the mass as might possibly exist under these conditions is lost or discarded nearly every two or four years in the regular and money-controlled changes of administration. The old and experienced are replaced with the new and untried. Perhaps under conditions as they are this is best. I am not sure. But for efficiency, after the manner of the great successful private corporations, is it? Personally, I think not--not yet, at any rate. As yet democracy does not take sufficient interest in itself, is too indifferent to its real interests and needs. It is too easy-going, not sufficiently self compelling. Every one wants to be his own boss and to be a great, undemocratic, individual success, hence there is very little true effective organization outside private institutions and what they compel in a public way. We make no provision for the continuation of leadership even under emergency.

Personally, I think the defect cannot forever go on unremedied. Democracy must do at least as well as autocracy, or it ought to shut up shop. And if it cannot obtain the efficiency exemplified by the private corporation it will, and it will deserve to. Perhaps our recent sad experiences in meeting the expanded demands on governmental efficiency should show us how to lay a new basis for that efficiency in modifications of our governmental structure. But will they? What I think is that more autocracy, behind which should be a livelier sense of power and control on the part of the people, should come into our democracy, or our democracy will really cease to be. The present drift toward money control cannot go unchecked. Our leaders will either become much more forceful, and the mass more watchful and jealous, as it should be, or we will have no democracy of any kind. There is scarcely any now. Congress should be used more against the President and the Supreme Court, and the latter against both, only the judges should be plainly responsible to the people, closely and fearsomely beholden to them--as much so, at any rate, as they now are to the corporations and wealth. Both the leaders and their weapons--the laws--should become more vigorous. Democracy will have to step up, and step lively. Then will it be any more of a democracy than some of the older and more historic autocracies and monarchies? Will it?

THE ESSENTIAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE

The Serpent to Eve, Genesis iii, 3:5: “_For God doth know that in
the day ye eat thereof_” (the Tree of Knowledge) “_then your eyes
shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil_.”

Jehovah to the Serpent, Genesis iii, 14;15: “_Because thou hast
done this_” (urged Eve to seek wisdom by eating of the Fruit of the
Tree of Knowledge) “_thou art cursed above all cattle, and every
beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life; and I will put enmity between
thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel_.”

Jehovah to Eve, for attempting to obtain wisdom via eating the
Fruit of the Tree, Genesis iv, 16: “_I will greatly multiply thy
sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth
children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule
over thee_.”

Jehovah to Adam, because of his following the advice of Eve:
“_Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast
eaten of the Tree, cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow
shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns and thistles
shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the
field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou
return unto the ground._”

“_Prometheus (forethought), son of the Titan Iapetus and Clymene,
and brother of Atlas, Menœtius and Epimetheus (after-thought), is
represented as the creator of man, out of earth and water, and his
great benefactor, having given him, in spite of Zeus who was
apparently opposed to it all, a portion of all the qualities
possessed by the other animals. He also stole fire from heaven in a
hollow tube, and taught mortals all useful arts. In order to punish
Prometheus for this, Zeus gave Pandora to Epimetheus, his brother,
in consequence of which diseases and sufferings of every kind
befell mortals. He also chained Prometheus to a rock on Mount
Caucasus, where during the daytime an eagle consumed his liver,
which was restored each succeeding night. Prometheus was thus
exposed to perpetual torture; but Hercules (strength) killed the
eagle and with the consent of Zeus, who in this way had an
opportunity of allowing his son to gain immortal fame, delivered
the sufferer._”

_Smaller Classical Dictionary._

The significance of these several references to and quotations from the supposed creative power of the elder pagan world is, if anything, that man is a waif and an interloper in Nature (or things celestial or intelligent), a machine or toy, created by something which desires to use him or work through him in some way, with no essential power to make his own way and no “right” to seek either knowledge or wisdom, lest, in the words attributed to Jehovah, his Creator, in Genesis, he becomes “as one of us,” a minor god, for instance, as the Creator via this phrase writes himself down to be; not the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, by any means. And in this phrase (“one of us”) is contained a hint of a possible condition or order in the universe which, since the Christian era, has been put aside as untrue, namely, that the Creator of man, our two billion two-legged citizens stalking this earth, may be but (to use a very crude and yet for that reason understandable description) a “side-line” manufacturer, as it were, or a lower-level competitor for life and pleasure, along with many others of his kind--Creators or “Gods” or avatars of, let us say, mosquitos, flies, bulls, cats, dogs; in other words the specific and singular Creator of some one thing as opposed to other Gods or powers who might well be creators of other things of equal rank. And these “Gods,” in turn, should one choose to follow the thought, might well be the special product of some greater “God” or manufacturer or Creator who is finding a rather peculiar expression through them and their creations in turn; also the various rivalries which exist between man and the lower animals for the possession of the earth might thereby be explained or have something to do with that.

The thought is not new. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin, Lamarck and Spencer of the theory of evolution, has pointed out that “the organizing mind which actually carries out the development of the life world need not be infinite, need not be what is usually meant by the term God or Deity. The main cause of the antagonism between religion and science seems to me to be the assumption by both that there are no existences capable of taking part in the work of creation other than blind forces on the one hand and the infinite, eternal, omnipotent God on the other. The apparently gratuitous creation by theologians of a hierarchy of angels and archangels, with no defined duties but those of attendants and messengers of the Deity, perhaps increases this antagonism.” He then proceeds to develop a theory of his own in which (I quote) “the vast, the infinite chasm between ourselves and the Deity is to some extent occupied by an almost infinite series of grades of beings, each successive grade having higher and higher powers in regard to the origination, the development and the control of the universe.” He goes on to show how this might be done by them--all to the one end: namely, the creation and preparation of man via experiences here, presumably for a higher place in the control of the universe at large, always under the Supreme Ruler of course and his lesser, yet in so far as man is concerned greater, agents. In other words, under these sub-Gods.

The idea is interesting only it does not, although it may be too much to say that it cannot, explain the endless bickering and chaffering in the universe at large, the utter failure of various movements and types here on earth and apparently elsewhere, the astonishing selection of so minute a mote in the material universe as this particular planet for the purpose of working out a higher type of assistant or worshiper of God Himself. It may be true, but the idea is a little fantastic and suggests the labors of an ignorant and yet hopeful being endeavoring to account for himself, his presence, in the best way he can.

To my humble way of thinking, the ancient Greeks and the various theogonies of the ancient pagan world (Egyptian, Chaldean, Hindu) were at least as plausible in their apprehension of a troublesome disorder. The Old Testament and all other forms of ancient pagan literature suggest the general and very natural conception, based on the evidence of life itself, that various gods were or are contending via various forms of life (animal, vegetable and mineral) for some form of expression here on earth, and that the various things which they make (or the one thing which each makes, its image and likeness perhaps) is opposed to all others here. Pagan thought reeked with the feeling of contests between gods or creators or controllers of this, that and the other, and in the Sinaitic interpretation of life just quoted we see something of the same thing; also in what small consideration man was held by his alleged special Creator. Evidently the conclusion reached by the thinking elders of the pagan world was that man, in so far as his own special Creator was concerned, was viewed with sinister opposition by the power which made him. It did not want him to amount to anything. Indeed he was very, very plainly conscious of the inimical attitude of Nature, or rather man’s especial God or Creator, toward him. He was not as yet deluded by the Christian phantasm that man is made in the image and likeness of his Creator, who is highly considerate of him, and that the world was made for man, or that because of faith, good deeds, special forms of self-abnegation and self-effacement he is to be reserved to eternal bliss hereafter although there is no especial reward for him here and now. And this is excellent indeed as illustrating a force or forces of a creative turn which might wish to use man as man uses any other minor implement for the accomplishment of any purpose he may have, but not very complimentary to him as an illustration of his own free and creative powers.

And, curiously, modern chemistry with its various tropisms--helio, magnetic, stereo and chemo--together with its legal part, physics, does little better by him. Already they tend to show that he is merely--and, what is worse, accidentally so--an evoluted arrangement of attractions and repulsions, arranged by chemicals and forces which desire or cannot escape whorls or epitomes of complicated motions and emotions or attractions which take the odd forms presented by men and animals.

But aside from this the most effective illustration of the essential nothingness of man is his plain _individual_ weakness here and now as contrasted with his mass ideals and the huge vanity or tendency toward romance which causes him to wish to seem to be more than he really is or can ever hope to be. For plainly every life, in the last analysis, however useful to an assumed and carefully directing Creator, or however successful from a momentary analysis it may appear, is a failure. We hear of that curious thing, “a successful life.” It is in the main a myth, a self-delusion. How could there possibly be success for a watery, bulbous, highly limited and specially functioned creature, lacking (in the case of man, for instance) many of the superior attributes of other animals--wings, a sense of direction, foreknowledge and the like--and manufactured every forty years by hundreds of millions, century in and century out, made apparently not in the image and likeness of anything superior to himself but in that of an accidentally compelled pattern, due to an accidental arrangement of chemicals, his every move and aspiration anticipated and accounted for by a formula and an accidentally evolved system long before he arrives, and he himself born puling, compact of vain illusions in regard to himself, his “mission,” his dominant relation to the enormous schemes of Nature, and ending, if “life” endures so long, in toothless senility and watery decay, dissolution. And in addition some have scientifically placed the creative as well as the generative period of man between his twentieth and fortieth years--twenty years! Others generously extend it to fifty and even sixty. Few venture to carry it beyond that. At seventy old Nestor drools and repeats his fables of his few years and many troubles. At fifty, even forty-five, most men are busy recounting the deeds, adventures and creations of their earlier years!

To me the most astonishing thing in connection with man is this same vanity or power of romanticising everything relating to himself, so that whereas in reality he is what he is, a structure of brief import and minute social or any other form of energy, left by his loving Creator to contest in the most drastic and often fatal way with thousands, one might almost say millions of inimical powers and only significant really in so far as he or it is interlocked with others in some larger unity, either (for illustration) as a soldier in an army or its delegated commander or as a delegated or acknowledged representative of some moving or mass or race impulse, still he has this astonishing power of viewing himself as a tremendous force in himself, a god, a hero, an enduring and undying figure of glory and beauty--as significant almost as the Creator Himself, in whose image and likeness he is supposed to be made!

The wonder! The beauty even!

Sometimes I think all this is the almost inevitable result of something inherently weak but with one clear power: that of visualizing or perceiving strength in other things and so, by contrast, its own weakness; and, by reflex action merely, attempting to salve itself against its own ineffectiveness by imagining itself to be that which it may never be: a victor, a Colossus bestriding the world, an undying potentate, ruling forever, and so gaining strength to go on. For individuals are never masters in any remarkable way. They merely and at best borrow or direct the energies of many, and in the main to no important result to themselves. A Napoleon slaves and starves to the end that he may die on St. Helena and bring considerable profit to many who never heard of him and care not at all. A Cæsar toils endlessly at organization and the development and preservation of Rome, only to be stabbed to death in his fifty-sixth year, practically unrewarded. A Hannibal slaves for Carthage, enduring endless hardships, only to die by his own hand. The category might be extended indefinitely. And yet the world is full of laudations of the powers of men, their satisfactions, their vast, vast rewards and glories; while so many decayed steles and temple doorways, and data unending, bear testimony to their utter material and subsequent spiritual futility.

And when I say this I wish to make it perfectly clear that I am by no means confusing the race with the individual, or vice versa. What a race may do, and what man may, are two very different things. The race, representing the totality of active creations and pushed on by dynamic forces from below, may be, and in so far as one can guess is, a huge success. The God or force or forces using man in various aspects here and now (two billion men at the present moment) may be and no doubt is finding self-expression through and in him and may well be tremendously satisfied with the result. But in what way does that, or can it, add to the comfort or bliss of the particular individual? Endlessly repeated, an oyster-like copy of every other man that has ever been, a mere minute portion of something the significance or import of which he can not even surmise. And within the race itself one need only think of the various types--preacher, actor, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, writer, poetic, artist, prize-fighter, all very much alike and all repeated and repeated ad infinitum--to see how impossible the idea of individuality is. The very idea of extreme individuality, even under the most special and favored circumstances, is seen to be all but an impossibility. We are at best, even in our arts and highest forms of special adaptations, copies of things which are and have been as common as pig-tracks--generals, philosophers, statesmen, society grande dames and the like not excepted. Over and over and over we appear, one and all, even our exact gestures, smiles, glances. Who has not seen it in so short a space as three generations? And we speak of individuality, of special destinies!

Herein lies the pathos, and this is the outstanding fact, that man is essentially a creation or mechanism, accidental or not as you wish, of a force or forces which in so far as any one can determine is or are, far more than he in his wildest flights of fancy suspects, the thing which he most craves to be, individual, enduring, but of which he is only a part and of which he is constantly seeking more--_life_. The thing which makes and repeats over and over ad infinitum and _is_ two billions of men, or anything else into which it chooses to form itself, may be thought of as having life, personality, success and the like, but as for individual man or any of its minute atoms! Indeed man might as well think of the minute atoms of his internal mechanism as having success, fame, a great life or future, as himself. His day, like theirs, is measured by a minute fraction of time and labor and energy, and so is nothing. Quite obviously there is something which is to man what man in his entirety as an individual is to the least ion or molecule of his inner cosmos: a thing of so vast a magnitude comparatively as to be as far outside his reckoning as must he be to the ion of his inner body. And as for size or force and import, that which creates him is as far above him as he is above the ion. Indeed, although man, in his capacity or proportion as an individual and as contrasted with the least of the electrons of his being, is beyond computation for size, yet viewed again in contrast with his external world he sinks into a mere fumbling, briefly-ended mote and tool. Like the ion of his inner cosmos, in this vast etheric or ionic something which is outside of him and which we see blazing as worlds or suns or existing as immeasurable space, he is too minute and too brief to be discussed. Even the great earth which he treads with so much pride is to this external thing quite as minute as man’s electron is to him; and yet his relationship even to this is almost as nothing. For on this so minute thing which, sidereally speaking, is as nothing, he appears nevertheless, insect-wise, by the billion every forty (or whatever the average life of man may be) years, to say nothing of innumerable other forms which have the ion or the molecule as the base of their material presence or structure. Still he permits himself to believe that he is something, and in facing all has the stupendous or fortunate ignorance to write himself down as Lord, Master, Great Guider of Things Terrestrial!

One of the things which might modify this supreme romantic estimate of himself, if such a thing were either desirable or possible, would be an even slightly technical examination of the process by which he arrives, as well as the extreme simplicity of the mechanical and chemical formula by which, throughout endless ages, he and all his fellows have been created. There is no longer any vast mystery about it; we are even getting relatively close to the secret, or could if we were permitted to go on undisturbed for a period by wars, let us say, or religious and educational illusions and furies (put forward by what? How brought about?), a persistent inherent mass opposition to thought and change in man himself. What subtle force ever invented that as a race quieter?

As biologists and anthropologists present man and his allied species, the original type structure on which all are more or less modeled is not so wonderful: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, two feet and two hands or four feet, two of them antecedents of the present hands; or two feet and two wings, the latter successors of former feet; a lung or air-breathing system, not unlike that of any tree or plant; a root or arterial system, modified to meet various conditions and situations as in birds, fishes, moles; a nervous or sensory system of an allied character--no marked diversity in anything indeed, and all brought about by the inescapable chemical and physical reactions and compulsions of seemingly blind forces, as Crile and Loeb have shown. Even now chemists and physicists are at work upon the balances and equations involved in the mechanical and chemical construction of man, the leverage by which he moves, the combinations which control his form or aspect, as well as the chemical combinations which can induce motion or self-propulsion. Even as to his so-called thought how close are the Behaviorists to the material mechanics which produce it? His thoughts also are apparently little more than compelled reactions of one chemical upon another which he can no more escape than can he his form or motions. The one unsolved mystery apparently is why a machine so easily made and controlled should be able to speculate as to the reason for his being or to worry over it.

And yet just here another interesting fact stands out, and that is that whether or not he is a machine, Nature, or his Creator, appears to be quite definitely opposed to his finding out about himself or even to his delving into the matter, and throughout recorded science there is no evidence of the least willingness on the part of Nature or the life constructing forces to yield a single fact of any kind without a struggle. Man has fumbled and stumbled, dying by billions in one erroneous way, or another, until at last, by mere chance apparently, he has stumbled upon one helpful fact or another. It is as if the fable of Prometheus or that other of Adam and Eve were true. The seekers after knowledge of any kind have almost invariably been fought or their work brought to nothing, and even where man has apparently proven victorious or where he has seemingly been aided only that has been yielded which has tended to further him as an ignorant and yet useful machine, never as a thinker. No one who has tended to throw a clear light on the internecine struggles of Nature Herself, Her cruelties and brutalities, has prospered. If one doubts this he has only to consider the fumbling, haphazard progress of man, his warring notions as to his source and import, his strange aberrant evolution and the persistent and discouraging hindrances cast in the way of his intellectual evolution; i. e., the rise of impossible and even ridiculous leaders and religious theories--Christianity, Shintoism, Mohammedism--and the arrival of such dark figures as Attila (self-styled “the scourge of God”), Alaric, and Mohammed with his houris’ dream, upon the scene of fairly acceptable intellectual conditions. The deaths of endless prying inventors, their pursuit by the religionists in darker ages, the periodic rise of-isms and world-sweeping folderol, political and other notions, all seem to point to but one thing: Nature’s indifference if not opposition to man’s tendency to develop intelligence and desire to know--if such a thing can be assumed, for it cannot be proved. For since when has the dulness of the mass, or man, his ignorance or indifference, apparently calculated and conditional, not stood their ground against the overtures of intelligence, science, the arts, philosophy? Nothing flourishes on earth so well as vain theory. Energetic thought is all but taboo. False dreams and false hopes are invariably encouraged by apparently some chemical or mechanical condition in the so-called brain of man himself. It is scarcely so much that he dare not as that he cannot.