ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE 13 



syllogistic deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hun- 

 dreds of thousands of years of pain upon earth. In the face of 

 that, speculations upon a comet or gaseous emanations hitting 

 the planet, or the sun growing cold, become babyish fancies. How 

 clearly the possibility is pointed in the discussions about the use 

 in the next War of bacterial bombs containing the bacilli of 

 cholera, plague, dysentery and many others! What influenza did 

 in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand times and ten 

 thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring forth, of 

 which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting at 

 long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory, 

 is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by 

 an inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very struc- 

 ture and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entangle- 

 ments of an inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can 

 never rip, to flee and remake itself into the immortal image that 

 is its God. 



And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those un- 

 beatable optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at 

 least the drop of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with 

 not the slightest prospect of a continuing immortality, not to 

 mention a glorious future and destiny, there are others. Man, 

 after all, may be simply a bad habit Life will succeed in shaking 

 off. No philosophy or religion can afford to be anthropocentric 

 merely. It must include all life and all living things to which we 

 are blood-related. There are other species or latent species to 

 take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens and ascend the 

 heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain lines 

 that would make them the masters of the universe. 



But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in 

 the struggle for survival and power, the implications of the 

 qualities necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate 

 pieces of protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begot- 

 ten of life. That is why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a 

 phrase. It is impossible to conceive of something alive, possessed 

 of the property of remembering, that is not possessed of a store 

 of past experiences. You can no more think of getting rid of 

 these unconscious memories of protoplasm than you can think 

 of getting rid of the wetness of water. They are imbedded in the 

 most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba as well as in our 

 most complex tissues. 



The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory car- 



