THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION 289 



dominance on the planet to a greater all-around concentration in 

 his blood of the omnipotent hormones. While the Negro is rela- 

 tively subadrenal, the Mongol is relatively subthyroid. Their 

 relative deficiency in internal secretions constitutes the essence 

 of the White Man's Burden. 



Man's Attitude Toward Himself 



A last, but by no means least, application we may consider of 

 the developing knowledge of the internal secretions in relation to 

 human evolution is its effect upon Man's attitude toward himself 

 and so toward his fellow men. Whatever else he is, man is a land 

 animal with ideas. That makes him a thought-adventurer among 

 materials. In a word, he is the last word of mind working upon 

 matter. But persistently he has refused to recognize himself as 

 matter and as subject to the laws, to the physics and chemistry 

 of matter. 



History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of 

 the interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of 

 man in time and space. Materials and ideas have reacted, the 

 record shows; materials come upon have begotten strange fanta- 

 sies. Ideas that flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have 

 transformed utterly the face of the earth. The herd-brute, agglu- 

 tinated with his fellows by a magnetism beyond his ken, could be 

 infected with thought, and so cast in the heroic mould. The possi- 

 bility of communion, — that possibility of possibilities, for without 

 it none other could be possible — has rendered man the heir of a 

 divine destiny. For the progressive education of the race, a single 

 discoverer here, an inventor there, and thinkers everywhere have 

 been inspired. In due time their inspiration becomes the posses- 

 sion of even the lowest brain but capable of grasping it. 



Man's attitude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his 

 attitude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and 

 evolved with his education about himself. According to the 

 theory he formulated concerning his being, his why and where- 

 fore, he directed and governed, punished and mutilated himself 

 and them. But the pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable 

 quality of the truth would not let him stand still. The poetic 

 genius within him, as Blake called it, struggled on from one 

 dogma concerning his nature to another. Behaviour malignant 

 or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy and pitiable in its comedy, 

 flowed inevitably on. Witchcraft trials and the tortures of the 

 Spanish Inquisition belong among the more mentionable con- 



