DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 



549 



through this time-killing process in its 

 own mother's bosom, and that telepathy 

 is, therefore, particularly a feminine sci- 

 ence, as it is only a woman who can 

 write history based on original facts at 

 the rate of 40,000,000 years in nine 

 months. When the world has been 

 brought to respect the true literary 

 function of woman, then she will recog- 

 nize her duty to rescue history by prop- 

 erly editing her historical productions 

 on the part consecrated by immemorial 

 usage to that purpose, and not till then. 



Now, I must say that I think all 

 this fault-finding about instrumentation 

 is just too silly for anything; but I 

 don't think Mr. Starr Jordan is as bad 

 as some other people I know. It al- 

 ways seemed to me that some of these 

 men, perhaps even the married ones who 

 live in a far, far away State, are just 

 put out because so many pretty girls, 

 and as many ugly ones as could ring 

 in, crowd around the telepathic savant 

 and never go near them. But I am not 

 speaking of the vanity of men, which is 

 simply immense; for, as in the Dark 

 Ages, devoted women fled from the bru- 

 tality of the world and vowed their 

 maidenhood to Heaven in a nunnery, so 

 I have vowed myself to science in the 

 Division of Karyokinesis. 



Men have their principia as a start- 

 ing point in their 'science of brains,' 

 as I suppose they would call it, and it 

 winds up in the 'conservation of en- 

 ergy'; and now they are trying to find 

 out the meaning of a star's childhood 

 which it passes in the Milky Way, just 

 as though that wasn't the proper place 

 for an orphan to be born in. Women 

 have their Karyokinesis for a starting 

 point and wind up in telepathy. Where 

 is the difference? Our science is older 

 than theirs as a philosophy. What is 

 the meaning of chivalry but adoration 

 of Karyokinesis? What is the cell 

 theory but chivalry materialized? Well 

 might the genus beautifully symbolized 

 as the slave of the lamp in Aladdin's 

 Wonderful Lamp kick up such a row 

 when Aladdin wanted an egg put under 

 the skylight of his palace. 



The feminine in science acknowledges 

 no master save caprice — whim and an 

 Uebermensch. Yet, while on the sur- 

 face it is Uebermensch enthroned, be- 

 neath all is an unstable equilibrium 

 caused by would-be Uebermenschen who 

 are exploiting the wide interval between 

 the reigning Uebermensch's promises 

 and his performances. This is the basis 

 of Karyokinetic sociology. Pious wishes, 

 not natural laws, is its normal motto, 

 and each for himself and the devil take 

 the hindmost is its only possible prin- 

 ciple of action. The 'psychology of the 

 mob' thus is lifted from a subordinate 

 to a primary social fact, and comes 

 to mean the same as though it read 

 'the psychology of fashions,' which are 

 supposed to be made in Paris. It is 

 very absurd to hear the man intellect 

 vaporing about the great social axioms 

 which a self-perpetuating society must 

 obey, and the rule of action which a 

 manly and only possibly true non-im- 

 perialistic people must try to follow out 

 if it wishes to stamp out imperialism, 

 and the so-called 'laws' which your 

 stick-in-the-mud scientists are formulat- 

 ing at a snail's pace — laws which 'prove' 

 the accuracy of these 'majestic' general- 

 izations of Moses and of Jesus. No, the 

 feminine in science demands immediate, 

 up-to-date facts, or, if it will afford Mr. 

 Starr Jordan any satisfaction, hysterical 

 theories for its inductions, and these are 

 furnished by telepathy, which, like 

 every dramatic science, requires scenery 

 and stage furniture, so as to be able 

 to tell the past by the actual me, the 

 cogito ergo sum automaton, not by the 

 interrogation of invaluable sequence and 

 stuff. 



Seated upon his stage, surrounded by 

 a painted vale of Italian softness and 

 bathed in an atmosphere of amorous 

 music and perfumes, with soft couches 

 that invite the drowsy indolence that 

 crawls upon the intellect, the telepathic 

 physiological psychologist or Ueber- 

 mensch can not, it is true, get ahead of 

 the future; but he can get behind the 

 past; he can annihilate time, he can an- 

 nihilate space, for by the magic power 



