14 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



nivor who were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. 

 The bee and the ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof 

 of their cells the instincts that sooner or later would send their 

 brain ganglia, even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to 

 elaborating the self-and-species murdering inventions and dis- 

 coveries that are apparently destined to slay us. The powers of 

 unconscious memory and unlearnable technique of reaction to 

 experience, once grooved, thus prove the great gift and the 

 eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it possible for it to be and 

 become what it is and has, they have also made it forever impos- 

 sible for it to be or become its own contradiction. 



Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, 

 for worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every 

 living thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. 

 As a peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated 

 from all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet 

 driven to contact with them by a fundamental impulse to as- 

 similate them into itself, and make them part of itself. That as- 

 similatory urge is present in every activity from coarse ingestion 

 as food to the moral metabolism of the hermit-saint who would 

 influence others to do as he. 



Fate and Anti-Fate 



In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the 

 smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the 

 great suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a 

 swirl in the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, 

 cities, empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through 

 stages of a relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches 

 the stage of integration which wills its own disintegration, that 

 we have been taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence 

 as radium. And we are told that nebulae wander until they 

 collide and give birth to stars, stars wander and collide and give 

 birth to nebulae. Life begins as a quivering colloid, goes on 

 painfully to build a brain, which automatically refines itself to 

 jthe point of discovering and using the most efficient methods of 

 destroying others, and by a boomerang effect, itself. Fate I 



The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula 

 for tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and 

 effect within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp 

 and ken, or power to modify, originated with them. But they 



