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.