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rulers are all defectives; and there is nothing worse than
government by defectives who wield irresistible powers of physical
coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and compel the rest
to submit, because they have been taught to do so as an article of
religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural enlightenment has
reacted against artificial education submit because they are compelled;
but they would resist, and finally resist effectively, if they were not
cowards. And they are cowards because they have neither an officially
accredited and established religion nor a generally recognized point of
honor, and are all at sixes and sevens with their various private
speculations, sending their children perforce to the schools where they
will be corrupted for want of any other schools. The rulers are equally
intimidated by the immense extension and cheapening of the means of
slaughter and destruction. The British Government is more afraid of
Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and poison gas are cheap and
easily made than it was of the German Empire before the war;
consequently the old British custom which maintained a balance of
power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror that sees
security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the entire

globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible in detail to
soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.
FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION
This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result
of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the
secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying 'Let
us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,' and the poor, 'How long, O
Lord, how long?' But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those who
help themselves. This does not mean that if Man cannot find the
remedy no remedy will be found. The power that produced Man when
the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than
Man if Man does not come up to the mark. What it means is that if Man
is to be saved, Man must save himself. There seems no compelling
reason why he should be saved. He is by no means an ideal creature. At
his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are
unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to
pretend that pain is often a good. Nature holds no brief for the human
experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve,
Nature will try another experiment.
What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the
Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because
improvement can come only through some senseless accident which
must, on the statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by
some other equally senseless accident.
CREATIVE EVOLUTION
But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the
impulse that produces evolution is creative. They have observed the
simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch
of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize
new tissue to do it with. To them therefore mankind is by no means
played out yet. If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an
athletic competition, can 'put up a muscle,' it seems reasonable to
believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could 'put up

a brain.' Both are directions of vitality to a certain end. Evolution shews
us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things: providing the
centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at all;
building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the sea;
enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the fowl
to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of any
sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our
resources.
VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY
Among other matters apparently changeable at will is the duration of
individual life. Weismann, a very clever and suggestive biologist who
was unhappily reduced to idiocy by Neo-Darwinism, pointed out that
death is not an eternal condition of life, but an expedient introduced to
provide for continual renewal without overcrowding. Now
Circumstantial Selection does not account for natural death: it accounts
only for the survival of species in which the individuals have sense
enough to decay and die on purpose. But the individuals do not seem to
have calculated very reasonably: nobody can explain why a parrot
should live ten times as long as a dog, and a turtle be almost immortal.
In the case of man, the operation has overshot its mark: men do