The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 2

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,
accidentally 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 miracle that
freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation. But latent in that
move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the alligator, the
wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and plant, parasitism and
slavery. The device that enabled the ameba to change its position in
space of its own will, and so increased its freedom immeasureably,
meant the generation of infinite evil, pain, suffering and degradation for
billions in the womb of time.
THE BREEDING OF INFERIORITY
Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of
similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example,
furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of
leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and
immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in
miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child
lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their
beds at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven
at night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of every
living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world, from
ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their by-products,
physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after effects of the
more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and free. The origins of
slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the infectious diseases which
kill man. The change from parasitism to slavery was an inevitable step
of creative intelligence. In the transition evolution made one of those

breaks which it indulges in periodically as its mode of progress.
The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of
individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has tended
to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which would make
them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which would increase
their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery infallibly entail the
degradation of certain structures and an overgrowth of others by the
law of use and disuse. The type of organ which would function
normally, were not its possessor parasitic in that function, invariably
degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects lose their wings. An entire
anatomical system may even be lost. So the tapeworm, which feeds
upon the digested food present in the intestines of its host, has no
alimentary canal of its own because it needs none. On the other hand,
the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant use into the most
remarkable of efficient weapons.
In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature,
the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature
evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with
countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made Man
what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has constructed
its institutions upon empirical observations and assumptions agreeing
with this principle. The deductions concerning human nature and
human traits that an interplanetary visitor would draw from a study of
our common law would be at least slightly humiliating to our
incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil contract and criminal
procedure, the systems of subordination in armies and navies, castes
and classes, men and women, employers and employees, teachers and
pupils, parents and children, are based upon the fundamental, the
conservative axiom that man, especially the common plain man
(Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy, stupid, dishonest, muddled,
cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with a low cunning and a selfish
callousness and insensibility to the sufferings of his fellow creatures,
animal and human.
Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the image
of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a Christ, a
Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so described,
not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and Mark