10 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



favors bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when 

 he does not throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of 

 family habit, sectional inertia, or race prejudice. 



Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for 

 us to be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal 

 thought and desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the 

 calf is limited in its wanderings to the radius of the rope by 

 which it is tethered. The servile soul will always be submissive 

 and docile, greedy and stupid. What else could you expect from 

 the descendant of the solitary beast who once lived for thousands 

 of years in caves? Without servility of the soul, without chains 

 for the spirit of the wild animal against the world, men could 

 never have been driven to live together for twenty-four hours in 

 communities. 



The conception of human quality out of which all social 

 machinery has been devised and built is a conception of slave- 

 quality and careerist quality. As we are all caught in the net, 

 as the unconscious memories of our slave and careerist ancestors 

 flow in our blood and echo in our cells, all we can do is accept 

 it and work with it. Human nature is an incurable disease. Like 

 Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has been, and ever will 

 be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever the same, 

 there is no way out. 



Poor Human Nature 



All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly 

 delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every 

 outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity, in- 

 competency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of super- 

 criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal sin, 

 human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats 

 who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming 

 for years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as Ger- 

 man, American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal 

 negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report 

 and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of 

 omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was 

 all due to human nature, and that what can be blamed on 

 human nature in general can be blamed on no one in particular. 



Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we 

 to do with it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? 



