in those fields.  We have emerged only partially from the age of the schoolmen In these directions we have not emerged at all.  It is quite possible that in university lecture rooms and forbidding volumes of metaphysical discussion a new emancipation of the human intellect and will is even now going on.  Presently men may be attacking the problems of the self-control of human life and of human destiny in new phrases and an altogether novel spirit.

Guesses at the undiscovered must necessarily be vague, but my anticipations fall into two groups, and first I am disposed to expect a great systematic increment in individual human power.  We probably have no suspicion as yet of what may be done with the human body and mind by way of enhancing its effectiveness I remember talking to the late Sir Michael Foster upon the possibilities of modern surgery, and how he confessed that he did not dare for his reputation’s sake tell ordinary people the things he believed would some day become matter-of-fact operations.  In that respect I think he spoke for very many of his colleagues.  It is already possible to remove almost any portion of the human body, including, if needful, large sections of the brain; it is possible to graft living flesh on living flesh, make new connections, mould, displace, and rearrange.  It is also not impossible to provoke local hypertrophy, and not only by knife and physical treatment but by the subtler methods of hypnotism, profound changes can be wrought in the essential structure of a human being.  If only our knowledge of function and value were at all adequate, we could correct and develop ourselves in the most extraordinary way.  Our knowledge is not adequate, but it may not always remain inadequate.

We have already had some very astonishing suggestions in this direction from Doctor Metchnikoff.  He regards the human stomach and large intestine as not only vestigial and superfluous in the human economy, but as positively dangerous on account of the harbour they afford for those bacteria that accelerate the decay of age.  He proposes that these viscera should be removed.  To a layman like myself this is an altogether astounding and horrifying idea, but Doctor Metchnikoff is a man of the very greatest scientific reputation, and it does not give him any qualm of horror or absurdity to advance it.  I am quite sure that if a gentleman called upon me “done up” in the way I am dimly suggesting, with most of the contents of his abdomen excavated, his lungs and heart probably enlarged and improved, parts of his brain removed to eliminate harmful tendencies and make room for the expansion of the remainder, his mind and sensibilities increased, and his liability to fatigue and the need of sleep abolished, I should conceal with the utmost difficulty my inexpressible disgust and terror.  But, then, if M. Bleriot, with his flying machine, ear-flaps and goggles, had soared down in the year 54 B.C., let us say, upon my woad-adorned ancestors—­every family man in Britain was my ancestor in those days—­at Dover, they would have had entirely similar emotions.  And at present I am not discussing what is beautiful in humanity, but what is possible—­and what, being possible, is likely to be attempted.