18 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



fresh experiences, and breath-bereaving devices that will thrill 

 or heal, will follow of course in their wake. The religion of 

 science will infiltrate and penetrate and permeate by its capillary 

 action the barbaric superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the un- 

 sanitary insanities of our social systems. 



But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent 

 vices and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobili- 

 ties, jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and 

 diseases? Can science change the texture of the slave and 

 careerist, if they represent the subnormal and the abnormal? 

 What about the Becky Sharps, the Mark Tapleys, and Tom 

 Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas Nicklebys and the Hamlets, 

 the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What future have they as 

 they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not the very fact of 

 their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of other types 

 and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to which 

 the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us: 

 that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has 

 no future? 



That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incom- 

 petent question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, 

 as fallen angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself 

 as fixed for eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is 

 everywhere and always will be the same." "As a man is built." 

 "Bred in the bone." These are the axioms of our social and 

 economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming that his nature is as 

 uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has limited his research 

 into the substance of freedom to a groping for an understanding 

 of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he set 

 himself another of the insoluble problems he seems to delight in 

 by neglecting the most important factor in the equation. Yet 

 the invisible soul of man, ignored, as a variable, varying quantity, 

 has upset all societies and constitutions, and all schemes of bond- 

 age as well as of freedom. 



For freedom, it becomes obvious as soon as it is clearly stated, 

 is sheer impossibility until the internal conditions of his nature 

 are ascertained, and the way paved for their control. A simple 

 illustration of the working of this principle is supplied by our 

 democracies, grossly pretenders. How can a democracy be pos- 

 sible without a knowledge of the control of the individually and 

 socially subnormal, who, since they offer themselves to exploita- 



