12 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



the stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of 

 the gods, let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but 

 irretrievably willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us 

 except to beat our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it? 



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 chame- 

 leon 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 miser- 

 able, 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 blun- 

 dered 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 



