ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE 11 



Why does the slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society 

 with its black fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the 

 toy of an orator to the majority, a distant star in the night to a 

 helpless minority? Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for 

 freedom, flickers through the centuries as a fitful flame, though 

 snuffed out by every gust of class passion, every wind of mob 

 resentment, and every storm of national jealousy. Though the 

 inferior subnormals multiply into great sheep majorities, and 

 the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid variants, involve millions 

 in their disease, the idea of freedom persists obstinately. Have 

 we any reason for regarding it as other than an illusion? 



If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. 

 And no Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy 

 of the scene as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new 

 gods. For what other social methods are there left to us? In the 

 struggle against nature's barriers upon human aspiration for per- 

 fect satisfactions, it looks as though every other method has 

 failed us. 



In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms 

 have failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and 

 as we are sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their 

 inferiority has thrown them on the scrap heap. As for our present 

 ways of government as a permanent method, the storage of power 

 in the hands of the Clever Few, War burns in the lesson of how 

 little the careerist regards either the subnormal or supernormal. 

 He condemns them all sooner or later to wholesale slavery and 

 carnage. 



Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are 

 we to surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle 

 of a miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruc- 

 tion? We thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and 

 beauty, lured by the mysteries of color and the magic of design 

 and the might of the intellect and its words, that have trans- 

 figured life into the greatest adventure ever attempted in time 

 and space. But we find ourselves merely another experiment, 

 intricate and rather long drawn out, to be sure, with marvelous 

 pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there, but bound to 

 eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the museums of the 

 real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are condemned to 

 be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming dis- 

 coverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let 

 us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of 



