The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 8

and unlearnable technique
of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus prove the great gift and
the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it possible for it to be and
become what it is and has, they have also made it forever impossible
for it to be or become its own contradiction.
Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for worse,
the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living thing, as
against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a peregrinating,
finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from all other living beings
by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to contact with them by a
fundamental impulse to assimilate them into itself, and make them part
of itself. That assimilatory urge is present in every activity from coarse
ingestion as food to the moral metabolism of the hermit-saint who
would influence others to do as he.

FATE AND ANTI-FATE
In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the smallest
things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great suns and
stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in the primeval
ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities, empires, elements of
an increasing complexity, through stages of a relative stability, like lead
or gold. Until it reaches the stage of integration which wills its own
disintegration, that we have been taught to look upon with proper awe
and reverence as radium. And we are told that nebulae wander until
they collide and give birth to stars, stars wander and collide and give
birth to nebulae. Life begins as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to
build a brain, which automatically refines itself to the point of
discovering and using the most efficient methods of destroying others,
and by a boomerang effect, itself. Fate!
The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for
tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect
within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken, or
power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given the
credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which, at first
slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and bleeding
among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives, presently goes
on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step, to emerge into
the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That idea-process, this
Anti-Fate is Science.
Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who
revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics
concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the
priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know
anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the
Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation
of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research and
critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the
essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of
Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life,
undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain
cells.
Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by men

with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated data,
something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient
sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena, were
their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of
master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any rate,
the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil of a great
generalization or classification or explanation with no fanfare of
trumpets.
First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then protected
and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage as
societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing them
to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really totally
inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like coral
makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no sustained
vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the shopkeepers
and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers and sailors,
the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized in
maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this futile
devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd
weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands
and dangers of public life.
But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery of
the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for
industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most
marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became
not the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole
nations