2 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



stupidity and of predatory strength enslaving the weakling intel- 

 lect. Until finally are evoked reactions and consequences that 

 overtake in catastrophe and catacylsm preyer and preyed upon 

 alike. 



Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast 

 nature. Man is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell 

 memories with his brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and 

 the fields. The beast is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his 

 own ego alone, and the satisfaction of his own instincts only. 

 Thus he struggles to a sort of freedom which makes him the 

 Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand against him, as his own 

 hand is against everyone. 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. And 

 so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out 

 to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries. 



Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the 

 nature of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, 

 is but the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, 

 laws, institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, 

 systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, stand- 

 ardized, established until scrapped in everlasting search for more 

 and more perfect means of freeing body and soul from their 

 congenital thralldom to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, 

 the history of all life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, 

 orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching for 

 freedom. 



Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How com- 

 pletely has it dominated the life history of every creature that 

 ever crawled upon the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend 

 our family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the 

 craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the 

 lowest, buried in darkness and slime. When the first clever bit 

 of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba, protruded a bit of 

 itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom. For, accident- 

 ally or deliberately, it created for itself a new power — the ability 

 to go directly for food in its environment, instead of waiting, 

 patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just happen 

 along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist 

 pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, 

 a new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist. 



That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba — a 



