A Brainless and Heartless Subject. 163 



despatched it sufficiently, by making it the subject 

 of a precisely contradictory theory. 



179. Really, the brainless thing has been happier 

 than those who put it forward: for it certainly was 

 innocent of any thought or ambition this A Brainless 

 way. Happier too is it than the luck- and Heartless 

 less children who have this unconscion- Sub J* ect * 

 able stuff put into their brains as " science," done 

 up for them in their common school books. I know 

 it is not politic for us to say so, at least within 

 hearing of Dr. Buchner's school. To us who 

 think that dosing a juvenile humanity with the 

 bestial in thought, will probably elicit the bestial in 

 action from the same humanity grown up — be- 

 nighted as we are and stone-blind amid all this il- 

 lumination of the mental doctrine as well as the 

 moral process of the school — a man like Dr. Buch- 

 ner flings back the word of utter contempt: "A 

 howling pack of mental slaves, who deny that as 

 the holothuria produced the snail, an ape or any 

 other animal may have given birth to a man!" 

 Exactly so! He says this in the preface to his 

 Kraft und Stoff. Nothing truer! If you let your- 

 self be spirited over one gap, there is no reason 

 why you should not be spirited everywhere, up to 

 man, or down to " the polar tensions of chemistry." 

 In either case, having dispensed with reason in the 

 process of logic, you are emancipated from moral- 

 ity in the conduct of life; and that as well by the 

 terms of your origin, as by the meaning of your 



