Chapter I: Foreword

Race after race of man has appeared on this earth, lasted but a short span of time, and then met disaster and extinction. Our modern race is of this series. We have reason to believe that it differs in quality from its forerunners chiefly in its cerebral endowment. That its progress from animalhood to civilization is due to this endowment, is not questioned, for its victory over environment, its ascendency over all other animals is plainly due to its superior brain power.

How did this race originate? Like all the other races preceding it? Or by some aberrant, instantaneous freak of creation? How did it acquire its characteristic brain? As the bird its wings, as the elephant its trunk, as the camel its hump, or by a divine act of separate and special creation? Those who maintain the quarrel over man’s origin are not those who have familiarized themselves with the history of the world and its creatures; they are not the astronomers, the geologists, the biologists, the anthropologists or the archeologists. They are clearly those who prefer believing to thinking, the traditionalists, good men mayhap but not necessarily wise. In the earlier days of science (it is only four or five hundred years old), its devoted labourers were persecuted by Church and State. They had to give respectful attention to criticism or else perish by fire and sword. But, as we have advanced slowly from religious persecution and the auto-da-fé to mere intolerant and wordy remonstrance, the scientist has paid but scant attention to these quarrels. He feels that as they are not of his making, neither are they his concern. Perhaps he is not quite right there. To be sure, he is criticized, not wisely but too well, and for the most part not quite fairly. We have criticized him for an assumed lack of reverence, but even more for his obvious indifference to our criticism. This has justice in it for, though his indifference to criticism may be excused, the ignorance upon which this criticism is founded should be his first concern, for the man of science is the teacher and ignorance is his very opportunity. Heretofore, however, he has seen his opportunity too narrowly, for he has been content to teach only the few embryo scientists apprenticed to his own particular field. He has not, until very lately, realized that his hard-won knowledge is far more needed and therefore far more owed to those who are most ignorant of it, in short, to the great mass of men and women outside the scientific world.

“You are irreligious,” said his critics. “You have been weighed and found wanting in that devotional attitude we find essential to humanity. You do not even listen to our reproaches. You are irreverent!”

For the most part, there has been no answer. The men of science have been strangely preoccupied with their own business of finding out all they can of their fellow man, of his nature, his origin, his difficulties, his dangers, and of his predictable future, all in the faith that such knowledge will ultimately benefit mankind.

Now at length one of them has made rejoinder to these protests. He admits that he has been preoccupied, especially so in the past twenty years, with laborious but fascinating research into just these questions so vitally concerning his fellow man. He admits that he had not thought his scientific gleanings would interest any but scientists, but he denies irreverence and insists that neither he nor any other who spends his life in studying man and his place in nature could lack reverence. He cannot find himself entirely in accord with any of the eleven surviving religions which guide the lives of many men to-day. The twelve extinct religions of the past also leave him unsatisfied. Nevertheless he worships devoutly, though in a temple transcending in significance and beauty any wrought by the hand of man. His devotion is no mere lip service expressive of the self-protective instinct, but one that takes form in labour. In spite of disappointment and hardship, he has persevered through years in that labour, with the single object of gaining a deeper understanding of man and his place in nature.

It is now our turn to admit error and ask if we may not share in the fruits of his research--even though our understanding has thus far been alien to his field of labour, even though our path has not led us to his temple, even though we have not been aware of his devotion. We urge him to speak to us, not as to scientists, but as to his fellow creatures, fellow citizens and fellow sufferers. We urge him to speak to us plainly, believing that whatsoever has value in human knowledge may be simply told.

With some hesitation he has consented. He has chosen to speak to us of the brain, as the most direct approach to the comprehension of the nature of man. He points out that this master organ of life holds the secret of human success, that its function is human progress, its neglect human disaster.

The immensity of the retrospect of his story will create in us the wholesome effect called humility. The prospect he pictures is fraught with the terror of what may happen, but it also holds forth inspiration to courage and is golden with hope. No man can follow this account without being inspired by a vision of the dawning of a new era of progress, not an era of greater possessions but of better use of those already possessed; of better relations between peoples and races; and being sobered by a realization that this hope lies in developing still further the efficiency of the master organ of destiny, through training and education.

The scientist speaks. He tells what he has seen and heard and read through the long pilgrimage of years, searching for the truth, and he gives us the fruit of these labours, simply and accurately. But scientific accuracy and matters of fact are only his raw material. They are woven into the fabric of a true story, vibrant with adventure, warmed by the love and reverence of the humanitarian, and illumined by the prophetic imagination of a poet.

This tale of man’s emergence is fascinating, inspiring, stimulating, but when it brings us to the climax of the present it becomes a challenge. We are faced by an awful question. Shall the glorious race of modern man sink into oblivion, as all the preceding races have sunk, or may he save himself from chaotic ruin? If he is to be spared for further progress to greater heights of happiness, he must take heed of his own history, he must value his forebrain as his master organ and set himself diligently to develop its powers more fully than ever before. To this end he must discard the last bit of fundamentalism, and the false security of all superstition; he must learn to depend courageously on his own power to understand and control himself; he must give up superhuman sanctions for evils that his intelligence has long since discarded. Knowledge must replace superstition--else the embattled hosts of the world will again be at their bloody work of extinction, praying to the same god, using the same old prayers. It is only by increasing the scope of his forebrain through self-knowledge, training, and education that man can save himself from the old pitfalls from which neither the old nor the new religions have heretofore saved him. It is only thus, through understanding, that he can ever hope to make full use of the forces of growth and change which we call evolution. But our scientist gives us reason to hope that through intelligence, itself a product of evolution, man may yet not only escape destruction by these forces but may even go far toward gaining a mastery over them which will insure the progress of his race toward planes of usefulness and happiness as yet undreamed of.

It is indeed time that we think of ourselves as men in the making and cease to consider ourselves as gods and the lords of a finished creation.

AUSTEN FOX RIGGS.

Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
October, 1929.

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