The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9g

But in the mystical teaching he loses himself in the Deity, and in the scientific interpretation of life he forgets himself as ‘Tom, Dick, or Harry, and discovers himself as Man. The Buddhist treatment of the same necessity is to teach that the individual life is a painful delusion from which men escape by the conquest of individual desire. Western Mystic and Eastern Sage find a strong effect of endorsement in modern science and in the everyday teaching of practical morality. Both teach that self must be subordinated ; that self is a method and not an end.

We have already, if this account of mental _ processes is sound, the gradual appearance of what we may call synthetic super-minds in the species Homo sapiens, into which individual consciousnesses tend to merge themselves. These super-individual organizations have taken the form of creeds, communities, cultures, churches, states, classes, and suchlike accumulations of mentality. They have grown and interacted in the history of the species very like the complexes of an individual human mind. They seem to have now under current conditions a ruling disposition to coalesce. ‘They seem to be heading towards an ultimate unification into a collective human organism, whose knowledge and memory will be all science and all history, which will synthesize the pervading will to live and reproduce into a collective purpose of continuation and growth. Upon that creative organization of thought and will the continuing succession of conscious individual lives, drawing upon and adding to its resources, will go on. At the end of our vista of the progressive mental development of mankind stands the promise of Man, consciously controlling his own destinies and the destinies of all life upon this planet.

But note these words we are using, ‘‘ seem ”” and “ promise.” ‘This is no assured destiny for our kind. The great imperfect conflicting collectivities of to-day, swiftly as they have developed and wonderful as they are in comparison with all other animal life, may never become a unity. Man may prove unable to rid himself of the overdevelopment of war; he may be hindered too long by the dull, the egoistic and the unimaginative, by the stupid, timid, and tradition-swayed majority, ever to achieve an effective unity. The dead weight of inferior population may overpower the constructive few. Or the incalculable run of climatic changes may turn harshly against him. Strange epidemics may arise too swift and deadly for his still very imperfect medical science to save him from extirpation.

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THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

GHAPTER 2

There is no certain assurance that rats and mice, dogs gone wild again, prowling cats, flies, and a multitudinous vermin may not presently bolt, hide, and swarm amidst the decaying ruins of his cities. Shoals of fish may dart in the shadowy encrusted wreckage of his last lost ships. We have no assurance that so Homo sapiens may not end. But such an end is hard to believe possible.

§ 8 Life Under Control

On the whole we believe that our species will survive and triumph over its present perplexities. ‘There is much in life that may make intelligent men impatient, but it is not reasonable to let impatience degenerate into pessimism. Vulgar fashions, false interpretations and decaying traditions make a vast show and noise in the world; the crowd is always about us; but we forget that these things are divergent and inconsecutive and accumulate no force, while scientific work and lucid thought are persistent and cumulative. They remain and reappear when the shouting dies away. ‘The progressive development of the scientific mind may survive all the blundering wars, social disorganization, misconceptions and suppressions that still seem to lie before mankind. Until in due course the heir comes to full strength and takes possession. But he will survive only on one condition, and that is that he must take control not only of his own destinies but of the whole of life.

By that time the body of modern science will be enormously greater and more closely knit than it is to-day, and at the most we can only point out the drift of constructive thought and power as it manifests itself at present. We are almost driven io believe, from a brief contemplation of the advances made in the past third of a century, that scores of unsuspected fundamental new possibilities and hundreds of short-cuts to now almost inaccessible ends are bound to present themselves as the work goes on. The immense possibilities of mechanical reconstruction that open out to man are outside the scope of such a work as this, except in so far as they involve changes in environmental conditions. Such well-informed and ingenious writers as Mr. J. L. Hodgson (The Time Journey of Dr. Barton), or many of the little volumes in the To-day and To-morrow series, will supply the reader with plentiful food for his imagination in these matters.