THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN

THE MODERN MEDICINE MANMedicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called “preventive medicine” which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together. Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to “go and sin no more.”It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls “the psychic or symbolic system” that the modern medicine man takes as his province. In this No Man’s Land he is master of all he surveys, and his sextant comprises the universe in its angle.We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed “paranoiacdelusions of persecution,” a kind ofmanie à deux, accompanied by hallucinations of vision described as “seeing snakes.” Their elder son was afflicted with a “homicidal mania,” while the younger was apparently a case of “constitutional inferiority.” Noah was a well recognized “alcoholic,” Job was subject to severe “depressions,” Nebuchadnezzar exhibited “praecox dilapidations of conduct” and Saul was a pronounced “manic-depressive.” The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said, on the highest authority, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous, Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis, at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and particularly for those orgies and “hang-overs” of the soul, the “manic-depressive psychosis.”This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases, the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a near relation to the “hysteric” refuge of the æsthetic nature from the vulgarities of everyday life, the “præcox” preference for childhood’s happy hour, and the “paranoiac” escape from the banalities of a society composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher nature, the reaction of the superman, thatcreature of light and air, to the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the butterfly.In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to something in the nature of a “cure” for the disease of superevolution, some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.Psychoanalysis appears to be the “indicated” treatment for these adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology, it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly fancied to exist only in young ladies’ boarding schools. Figure to yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your “soul,” and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn, whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one anothers’sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze, the secret springs of their existence.The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating of one’s personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of the coloring, height and contour of one’s first love. As this, in the case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course of the so-called “Oedipus complex.” This is the imposing designation for the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. “The root complex” and “the family romance” are other alluring titles for this parental-filial relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called “affective” life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then daughter, having a “fixation” on him, is, for all time to come, particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of complexion of all the patient’sinamoratiin a manner that recalls the familiar “I see a dark man coming over deep water” of the tea-leaves in the tea-cup stage of one’s experience.After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her poverty-stricken heart history, andafter the incredulous inquisitor has become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told, this chapter is closed, and then begins the régime of dreams and “free association.”The interpreting of one’s dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one’sapologia pro vita sua, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the corner of consciousness during one’s first waking moments, pulling it painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every feature and function at the next matinée performance at which one makes an appearance.The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats, of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive, self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade under some so-called “surrogate” form.My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of “substitute,” thoughwhy the word substitute should not be considered good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily classified as “sexual,” normal filial or parental affection designated as “incestuous,” friendship as “homosexual,” self-respect as “narcissistic” and the life force or will to power as “the libido.” Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of feeling as of degree rather than of kind.The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of “free association.” This may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her consciousness, so that she can concentrateher mind on nothingness, just as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something like the following initiation of the third degree: “What are your associations with the word authority?” You are supposed to respond to this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic emanations, “Government—Washington—the President—Mrs. Wilson—orchids—grandfather’s greenhouse,” and if you are entirely resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the spirit of this child’s play, this is what you finally learn to do, after many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a reasonable self-stultification.If, however, as is likely to be the case, you are a more or less feminine person, instinctively unwilling to exhibit your mind indéshabille, and fatuously intent with a persistency worthy of a better cause on making a good impression on the only person present, you learn to use these opportunities to tell him everything to your credit that you can think of, and by carefully working out, preferably in advance, a chain of passable associations, to present yourself, your character, and your career in the most favorable light. The wide range of possibilities in this process that are open to the designing patient seems to be scarce dreamt of in the philosophy of the gross masculine mind.This brings me by easy and inevitable stages to the important topic of the “transference.” To the unenlightened this may be defined as the mock modest and deceptive designation invented by the psychoanalyst for the more or less ardent affection for himself that he cold-bloodedly sets out to inspire in his victim. The doctor, for the benefit of his patient, temporarily transfers to himself and appropriates the devotion which normally belongs to father, brother, husband, son or lover. To be sure, it is to remembered that as there is no such wordas friendship in the psychoanalytic vocabulary, an attitude of confidence or admiration must be represented in terms of a deeper sentiment.Of course what happens is that the patient mistakes for an attachment of the heart what is in reality only an intimacy of the mind, because such an abandon of reserve is indissolubly associated in the feminine mind with the ties of affection. According to the true Jamesian psychology, she loves because she confides, instead of confiding because she loves. How a poor man patient manages can only be surmised, but there are indications that the knowing of the sex furtively seek the ministrations of a woman analyst.Apparently the theory on which all the varied forms of this treatment are based is that the catharsis of the mind is essential to mental health, the emptying of all that is in it, the expulsion of dead matter. The nausea of the soul is relieved like its physical analogue by freeing it from the undigested matter, the “repressions,” that lie so heavily upon it. The self-contained nature that refrains from spilling over and strives to maintain itself without recourse to the safety valve of confidence must in the end unload its burden.After the destructive process is completed and the ground cleared for the constructive measures that are to rear the temple of the “mens sana in corpore sano,” the heavier half of the work remains to be done; for the gigantic task to which the practitioner of the new prophylaxis sets himself is nothing less than the reconstruction of the character of the patient. Indeed, a recent work on psychoanalysis has for its titleThe Mechanisms of Character Formation. The conversions that the Rev. Mr. Sunday and his less notable peers are wont to accomplish in an hour, these painstaking scientists patiently bring about in from some scores to some thousands of hours of equally strenuous labor. I am informed thatthe cure of the first case of a certain type undertaken by one of these under-studies of the Eternal, actually consumed two thousand hours, and that the cure of the specific disease required the entire reconstruction of the character of the sufferer. Presumably the bill for “professional services” involved in this beatification was $20,000. One wonders whether the character that resulted was worth the price. The consulting room of the psychoanalyst is the new Beauty Parlor where those dissatisfied with their mental and moral physiognomy may have the lines of stress and strain smoothed away, and may gain the roses and lilies of a rejuvenated spiritual complexion. Unhappily I am unable to speak at length and with authority on this phase of the treatment; for I am at present only just entering upon the period of metamorphosis. I see dimly, “as through a glass darkly,” my own apotheosis looming ahead, but the road to that celestial height looks a long and weary and appallingly expensive journey.It is the time element that perhaps most impresses and depresses the student of the new prophylaxis. In a recent paper by a competent psychiatrist the writer refers as follows to the impracticability of studying a group of cases in a public hospital on the plan of getting the patients to understand and explain their own difficulties:At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it would not be possible properly to study in the course of the year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such work are of importance purely for the individual, and no generalization can be drawn therefrom…. Also, no generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work; to study one hundred cases according to this method would require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full time for many months.In the opinion of the faithful, Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, is to psychiatry what Darwin was to biology, but as Darwin’s theory of evolution required more aeons than the geologists were able to oblige himwith, so Freud’s method requires more time than the calendar affords. Darwin’s theory of the variation of species had to be modified by the theory of mutations or sports. Freud’s methods, to be workable, must be adapted in some way to the indisputable fact that there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and only three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who, according to the testimony of a confrère, enters upon his daily endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian—a little group of healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental troubles.One cannot help wondering whether such exhaustive thoroughness is really essential. It seems sometimes to the disillusioned seeker after truth that the relation of the conscious life history, the revelation of the unconscious through dreams, the display of the mental processes through “free association,” are but the hocus-pocus devised for keeping up the conversation between the analystand the analyzed—a crude, clumsy, masculine technique for discovering, by somewhat labyrinthine methods, the essence of the personal quality of an individual. Might not this be obvious in a few hours of ordinary intercourse to a person of intuition, practised in the art of plucking the heart out of a mystery, instead of chopping up the whole anatomy to get at it?The expenditure of time and effort and money required to gain the occult ends of what seems like a blind and blundering process, is certainly colossal. What the patient puts into it is comparatively unimportant. A fool and his money might as well be parted sooner as later, and the time of the patient, especially in the state of depression in which he ordinarily seeks treatment, is worth so little that killing it is as good a use as any to make of it. But think of the physician—a man of parts, of much general and special education, who has added to a large professional equipment the complicated technique of a laborious method that only a German thoroughness gone stark and staring mad, could perpetrate on a makeshift world, which, with all its failings, has not lost its sense of humor or its perception of the relative value of things mundane, and does still discriminate between time and eternity. Think of a first rate mind expending itself for hours on end in the minute scrutiny of some trivial neurotic mentality, probably as like as two peas to thousands of other equally insignificant particles of matter that pass for individual organisms.If indeed the interest in another personality is the essence of the “cure,” one is tempted to ask why these egocentric erotomaniacs should not derive the same and mutual benefit from interesting themselves in one another? Why not pair them off, male and female as originally created, and embark them together on this ark of refuge from the deluge of the common life in which they are drowning? Let them sit by the hour, the day, the week,and talk about their “souls,” relate to each other’s absorbed attention their life history, interpret each other’s dreams, and join in the freest of “free association.” Let the blind lead the blind, the sick heal the sick, the erotic love the erratic, and silly soul mate with silly soul, leaving the authentic souls of the doctors to be saved from stultification, and their talents used for the benefit of human beings who are really and truly suffering.But, alas, there seems to be no such easy panacea for mortal ills: for to attain its ends the process must apparently be presided over by a superior if not superhuman intelligence. And the patient, if scientifically or benevolently minded, can take comfort in the thought that his case is perhaps sufficiently different from any hitherto handled to enable the investigator to benefit almost as much as the patient by the experience. Perhaps the months that the biddable patient who has overcome his “resistances” devotes to coöperating with the scientific explorer, may be reduced to weeks in the treatment of the next like-minded individual who submits himself for treatment by the more practised practitioner. I recall my despairing comment upon a doctor’s tale of the case that it took two thousand hours to cure, and the reassuring response that, now that the technique had been worked out and published, any competent person could turn the trick in from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the time.The psychoanalytic approach to mental prophylaxis is perhaps still, after twenty years of groping progress, in the experimental stage. The few bold spirits who have braved the ridicule of their conservative confrères, and left the main travelled roads, are hardy pioneers blazing trails and treading out paths that will in time be easy traveling. It is inevitable that in the delicate operations by which these spiritual sawbones are mastering the mystery of this new art of the vivisection of the soul, theyshould sometimes cause pain or even cut in the wrong place. But they are inspired by a very human sympathy for their victim-beneficiaries, and are rapidly learning their way about the spiritual anatomy, and discovering the skillful use of mental anæsthetics.The strangest thing about this extraordinary process is that it really does cure the mind diseased. Where and what, one asks, and continues to ask, is the nexus between treatment and cure. Has any patient, however completely recovered, ever found out? Do the practitioners of this occult ritual know themselves, or have they simply hit on a practical technique, without a comprehension of a rational philosophical basis for its major operations? Is this like early groping experiments with “animal magnetism,” or mysterious forms of electricity which brought results long before an understanding of the reason of their success was arrived at? However this may be, it still remains true that, judged by its results, the new method, however dark and devious, must still be acknowledged to have attained a success, not sporadic and accidental, but continuous, consistent and increasing, and apparently, though incomprehensibly, connected as effect to cause with the procedure which has been sketched, or shall I say caricatured, in the foregoing pages.

Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called “preventive medicine” which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together. Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to “go and sin no more.”

It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls “the psychic or symbolic system” that the modern medicine man takes as his province. In this No Man’s Land he is master of all he surveys, and his sextant comprises the universe in its angle.

We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed “paranoiacdelusions of persecution,” a kind ofmanie à deux, accompanied by hallucinations of vision described as “seeing snakes.” Their elder son was afflicted with a “homicidal mania,” while the younger was apparently a case of “constitutional inferiority.” Noah was a well recognized “alcoholic,” Job was subject to severe “depressions,” Nebuchadnezzar exhibited “praecox dilapidations of conduct” and Saul was a pronounced “manic-depressive.” The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said, on the highest authority, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”

It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous, Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis, at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and particularly for those orgies and “hang-overs” of the soul, the “manic-depressive psychosis.”

This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases, the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a near relation to the “hysteric” refuge of the æsthetic nature from the vulgarities of everyday life, the “præcox” preference for childhood’s happy hour, and the “paranoiac” escape from the banalities of a society composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher nature, the reaction of the superman, thatcreature of light and air, to the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the butterfly.

In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to something in the nature of a “cure” for the disease of superevolution, some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.

Psychoanalysis appears to be the “indicated” treatment for these adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.

To assume the greater ease of the first person singular, I should perhaps say in passing, or by way of apology, that if I appear somewhat unduly and indecently personal in my observations on the new psychology, it is a habit fastened upon me by a half year of indulgence in an orgy of such voluble self discussion and analysis as I had previously fondly fancied to exist only in young ladies’ boarding schools. Figure to yourself, if you can, the inevitable result of conversing about your “soul,” and unburdening all its secrets and reserves in tri-weekly sessions with an inquisitive stranger! The process is a throw-back to those unsophisticated days when the Knight of La Mancha and a group of other romantics, met for the first time by accident in a country inn, whiled away the long evening in the unrestrained and interminable narrations of their lives and loves, complacently revealing to one anothers’sympathetic and, one would imagine, sometimes startled gaze, the secret springs of their existence.

The psychoanalytic process begins, I may explain, with such a relating of one’s personal history, occupying many hours, and covering all that one has ever done, said or thought. One starts with reminiscences of the nursery and the kindergarten, and passes on to a detailed description of the coloring, height and contour of one’s first love. As this, in the case of a woman, is supposed to be her father, it is necessary to pause for some time on the aspects of the paternal figure, which affect all her subsequent emotional reactions, according to the well-known course of the so-called “Oedipus complex.” This is the imposing designation for the generally observed preference for each other of mothers and sons and of fathers and daughters, a phenomenon that the new psychologists, who take the common place with a seriousness! deem worthy of the most painstaking examination and erudite elucidation. “The root complex” and “the family romance” are other alluring titles for this parental-filial relation. This sentiment is supposed to modify all the so-called “affective” life. If father happens to be tall and thin and blond, then daughter, having a “fixation” on him, is, for all time to come, particularly susceptible to the attractions of tall, thin, blond men of advanced years. The analyst inquires minutely into the shades of complexion of all the patient’sinamoratiin a manner that recalls the familiar “I see a dark man coming over deep water” of the tea-leaves in the tea-cup stage of one’s experience.

After the patient has sternly and heroically resisted the temptation to invent in the interest of her own self-respect, and also in mitigation of the ill-concealed contempt of the masculine practitioner for the paucity of her experience, a few more numerous and more romantic emotional episodes than have actually been doled out to her by a penurious fate, and has completed the short and simple annals of her poverty-stricken heart history, andafter the incredulous inquisitor has become at last convinced that there is indeed nothing more to be told, this chapter is closed, and then begins the régime of dreams and “free association.”

The interpreting of one’s dreams seems to furnish the doctor with a secret source of amusement that he tries in vain to dissemble, and as one is only too glad to make up to him in some measure for the hours of obvious boredom that he has endured while listening to one’sapologia pro vita sua, one indulges him by forming the careful habit of grasping firmly by the tail every elusive dream as it tries to whisk around the corner of consciousness during one’s first waking moments, pulling it painfully and resistingly back for close and detailed scrutiny, and laboriously committing to memory and subsequently describing its every feature and function at the next matinée performance at which one makes an appearance.

The chastening discovery of the dreamer who relates his dreams to the professional interpreter is that all that has been carefully withheld from revelation in the related autobiography, is disclosed with the most embarrassing crudity, and that secret sins of which one was quite unconscious are displayed with mortifying clarity. The dream is a mechanism for letting the cat out of the bag, all kinds of strange cats, of the existence of which their harborer was often unaware.

Dreams seem to reveal the dreamer as a hypocritical, evasive, self-deluding coward, unable to face the commonest facts of life, or to call a spade anything less innocent than a parasol, or even to confront his own friends and acquaintances, except by forcing them to masquerade under some so-called “surrogate” form.

My previous personal experience had led me to identify a surrogate as some kind of judge, but I soon learned that this narrow and technical meaning must be replaced by the more general signification of “substitute,” thoughwhy the word substitute should not be considered good enough to use in this connection, I never learned. This is but one of the many examples of the perverse preference of the technicians of the new science for strange distortions of words with well recognized and frequently quite different meanings in common parlance. It comes as somewhat of a shock to the beginner to hear all emotion summarily classified as “sexual,” normal filial or parental affection designated as “incestuous,” friendship as “homosexual,” self-respect as “narcissistic” and the life force or will to power as “the libido.” Soon, however, one becomes as resigned to this strong language as to the evolutionary hypothesis, and finds it a no more unpalatable thought that all emotion is derived from sex than that all human beings are descended from an apelike ancestor. That this common use of the exaggerated statement leaves no adequate expression for the more intense emotions fails to disturb a cult that apparently regards all differences of feeling as of degree rather than of kind.

The narration of dreams puts slight work on the dreamer, and sorely taxes the mental resources and the ingenuity of the interpreter, but the real labor, the strenuous and unremitting toil to which the unhappy victim of this ritual is subjected by a pitiless practitioner is in the rigors of what goes by the disingenuous name of “free association.” This may sound like some pleasant if not spicy and highly unconventional pastime, but is in fact and literally a procrustean bed of torture. The helpless patient is forced to remove her bonnet and shawl and recline upon a couch with her eyes closed. Her merciless tormentor retires to a comfortable armchair in a corner of the room. There, because he is out of sight of the patient, he is supposed, according to the workings of the mysterious masculine psychology, to be entirely removed from her consciousness, so that she can concentrateher mind on nothingness, just as if she were alone by the fireside. Then he starts in with something like the following initiation of the third degree: “What are your associations with the word authority?” You are supposed to respond to this irrelevant inquiry with something like the following idiotic emanations, “Government—Washington—the President—Mrs. Wilson—orchids—grandfather’s greenhouse,” and if you are entirely resigned to making a fool of yourself, and can abandon yourself to the spirit of this child’s play, this is what you finally learn to do, after many strenuous efforts to play the game, and the final attainment of a reasonable self-stultification.

If, however, as is likely to be the case, you are a more or less feminine person, instinctively unwilling to exhibit your mind indéshabille, and fatuously intent with a persistency worthy of a better cause on making a good impression on the only person present, you learn to use these opportunities to tell him everything to your credit that you can think of, and by carefully working out, preferably in advance, a chain of passable associations, to present yourself, your character, and your career in the most favorable light. The wide range of possibilities in this process that are open to the designing patient seems to be scarce dreamt of in the philosophy of the gross masculine mind.

This brings me by easy and inevitable stages to the important topic of the “transference.” To the unenlightened this may be defined as the mock modest and deceptive designation invented by the psychoanalyst for the more or less ardent affection for himself that he cold-bloodedly sets out to inspire in his victim. The doctor, for the benefit of his patient, temporarily transfers to himself and appropriates the devotion which normally belongs to father, brother, husband, son or lover. To be sure, it is to remembered that as there is no such wordas friendship in the psychoanalytic vocabulary, an attitude of confidence or admiration must be represented in terms of a deeper sentiment.

Of course what happens is that the patient mistakes for an attachment of the heart what is in reality only an intimacy of the mind, because such an abandon of reserve is indissolubly associated in the feminine mind with the ties of affection. According to the true Jamesian psychology, she loves because she confides, instead of confiding because she loves. How a poor man patient manages can only be surmised, but there are indications that the knowing of the sex furtively seek the ministrations of a woman analyst.

Apparently the theory on which all the varied forms of this treatment are based is that the catharsis of the mind is essential to mental health, the emptying of all that is in it, the expulsion of dead matter. The nausea of the soul is relieved like its physical analogue by freeing it from the undigested matter, the “repressions,” that lie so heavily upon it. The self-contained nature that refrains from spilling over and strives to maintain itself without recourse to the safety valve of confidence must in the end unload its burden.

After the destructive process is completed and the ground cleared for the constructive measures that are to rear the temple of the “mens sana in corpore sano,” the heavier half of the work remains to be done; for the gigantic task to which the practitioner of the new prophylaxis sets himself is nothing less than the reconstruction of the character of the patient. Indeed, a recent work on psychoanalysis has for its titleThe Mechanisms of Character Formation. The conversions that the Rev. Mr. Sunday and his less notable peers are wont to accomplish in an hour, these painstaking scientists patiently bring about in from some scores to some thousands of hours of equally strenuous labor. I am informed thatthe cure of the first case of a certain type undertaken by one of these under-studies of the Eternal, actually consumed two thousand hours, and that the cure of the specific disease required the entire reconstruction of the character of the sufferer. Presumably the bill for “professional services” involved in this beatification was $20,000. One wonders whether the character that resulted was worth the price. The consulting room of the psychoanalyst is the new Beauty Parlor where those dissatisfied with their mental and moral physiognomy may have the lines of stress and strain smoothed away, and may gain the roses and lilies of a rejuvenated spiritual complexion. Unhappily I am unable to speak at length and with authority on this phase of the treatment; for I am at present only just entering upon the period of metamorphosis. I see dimly, “as through a glass darkly,” my own apotheosis looming ahead, but the road to that celestial height looks a long and weary and appallingly expensive journey.

It is the time element that perhaps most impresses and depresses the student of the new prophylaxis. In a recent paper by a competent psychiatrist the writer refers as follows to the impracticability of studying a group of cases in a public hospital on the plan of getting the patients to understand and explain their own difficulties:

At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it would not be possible properly to study in the course of the year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such work are of importance purely for the individual, and no generalization can be drawn therefrom…. Also, no generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work; to study one hundred cases according to this method would require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full time for many months.

At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it would not be possible properly to study in the course of the year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such work are of importance purely for the individual, and no generalization can be drawn therefrom…. Also, no generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work; to study one hundred cases according to this method would require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full time for many months.

In the opinion of the faithful, Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, is to psychiatry what Darwin was to biology, but as Darwin’s theory of evolution required more aeons than the geologists were able to oblige himwith, so Freud’s method requires more time than the calendar affords. Darwin’s theory of the variation of species had to be modified by the theory of mutations or sports. Freud’s methods, to be workable, must be adapted in some way to the indisputable fact that there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and only three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.

A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who, according to the testimony of a confrère, enters upon his daily endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian—a little group of healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental troubles.

One cannot help wondering whether such exhaustive thoroughness is really essential. It seems sometimes to the disillusioned seeker after truth that the relation of the conscious life history, the revelation of the unconscious through dreams, the display of the mental processes through “free association,” are but the hocus-pocus devised for keeping up the conversation between the analystand the analyzed—a crude, clumsy, masculine technique for discovering, by somewhat labyrinthine methods, the essence of the personal quality of an individual. Might not this be obvious in a few hours of ordinary intercourse to a person of intuition, practised in the art of plucking the heart out of a mystery, instead of chopping up the whole anatomy to get at it?

The expenditure of time and effort and money required to gain the occult ends of what seems like a blind and blundering process, is certainly colossal. What the patient puts into it is comparatively unimportant. A fool and his money might as well be parted sooner as later, and the time of the patient, especially in the state of depression in which he ordinarily seeks treatment, is worth so little that killing it is as good a use as any to make of it. But think of the physician—a man of parts, of much general and special education, who has added to a large professional equipment the complicated technique of a laborious method that only a German thoroughness gone stark and staring mad, could perpetrate on a makeshift world, which, with all its failings, has not lost its sense of humor or its perception of the relative value of things mundane, and does still discriminate between time and eternity. Think of a first rate mind expending itself for hours on end in the minute scrutiny of some trivial neurotic mentality, probably as like as two peas to thousands of other equally insignificant particles of matter that pass for individual organisms.

If indeed the interest in another personality is the essence of the “cure,” one is tempted to ask why these egocentric erotomaniacs should not derive the same and mutual benefit from interesting themselves in one another? Why not pair them off, male and female as originally created, and embark them together on this ark of refuge from the deluge of the common life in which they are drowning? Let them sit by the hour, the day, the week,and talk about their “souls,” relate to each other’s absorbed attention their life history, interpret each other’s dreams, and join in the freest of “free association.” Let the blind lead the blind, the sick heal the sick, the erotic love the erratic, and silly soul mate with silly soul, leaving the authentic souls of the doctors to be saved from stultification, and their talents used for the benefit of human beings who are really and truly suffering.

But, alas, there seems to be no such easy panacea for mortal ills: for to attain its ends the process must apparently be presided over by a superior if not superhuman intelligence. And the patient, if scientifically or benevolently minded, can take comfort in the thought that his case is perhaps sufficiently different from any hitherto handled to enable the investigator to benefit almost as much as the patient by the experience. Perhaps the months that the biddable patient who has overcome his “resistances” devotes to coöperating with the scientific explorer, may be reduced to weeks in the treatment of the next like-minded individual who submits himself for treatment by the more practised practitioner. I recall my despairing comment upon a doctor’s tale of the case that it took two thousand hours to cure, and the reassuring response that, now that the technique had been worked out and published, any competent person could turn the trick in from one-tenth to one-twentieth of the time.

The psychoanalytic approach to mental prophylaxis is perhaps still, after twenty years of groping progress, in the experimental stage. The few bold spirits who have braved the ridicule of their conservative confrères, and left the main travelled roads, are hardy pioneers blazing trails and treading out paths that will in time be easy traveling. It is inevitable that in the delicate operations by which these spiritual sawbones are mastering the mystery of this new art of the vivisection of the soul, theyshould sometimes cause pain or even cut in the wrong place. But they are inspired by a very human sympathy for their victim-beneficiaries, and are rapidly learning their way about the spiritual anatomy, and discovering the skillful use of mental anæsthetics.

The strangest thing about this extraordinary process is that it really does cure the mind diseased. Where and what, one asks, and continues to ask, is the nexus between treatment and cure. Has any patient, however completely recovered, ever found out? Do the practitioners of this occult ritual know themselves, or have they simply hit on a practical technique, without a comprehension of a rational philosophical basis for its major operations? Is this like early groping experiments with “animal magnetism,” or mysterious forms of electricity which brought results long before an understanding of the reason of their success was arrived at? However this may be, it still remains true that, judged by its results, the new method, however dark and devious, must still be acknowledged to have attained a success, not sporadic and accidental, but continuous, consistent and increasing, and apparently, though incomprehensibly, connected as effect to cause with the procedure which has been sketched, or shall I say caricatured, in the foregoing pages.

“THE PUREST OF HUMAN PLEASURES”Top-heavycivilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after the “primitive” and the “elemental.” Weary capitalists and professional men play—expensively—at what when all’s said is but a child’s game of ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered, in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep. But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration.To see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope. There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into an indulgence.One of my first discoveries (after the simplest rudiments of the art I essayed to practise) was that of all topics on the lips of men the garden is the most conversable, the most fraternal. Hitherto, observation had led me to suppose children and rheumatism the most universal of interests. Having neither myself, I have been cut off from that fluent intercourse upon first steps and first words, adenoids, preventive dentistry, potatoes carried in the pocket, baths of hot brine, and the proportion of protein in the diet, which makes strangers or friends akin. There was always the weather; but—unless one has a garden, as sensitive as a poet to every nuance of sun or atmosphere—talk of the weather is a mere subterfuge, a symbol of our inarticulateness and awkward shyness masking our human yearning to know our fellows and to wish them well. The garden, as a subject of discourse, combines all the pretext offered by the weather to hint our good will without violating our shyness; all the diversity and perpetual surprise of a child’s development; all the right to condole with misfortune and to be agreeably officious about remedies enjoyed by those who encounter the rheumatic; all the delight of professional note-comparing known to invalids, cooks, and pedagogues. To appear in my garden, equipped with sun-hat and hoe, was, I found, to be hail-fellowed by every condition of men—pickaninnies, delivery-men, professors, elegantsand inelegants, experts and inexperts. My acquaintanceship among my neighbors grew like Jonah’s gourd. “Do you mind my asking what that line of white strips is for?” “To warn the English sparrows off my pea-vines.”—“Would you like some young cabbage-plants?”—“Your corn is lookin’ fine!” Common interests were visible and inexhaustible.Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good deal of “companionship with nature,” and go out fussily to seek it, with camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying nature, and offering her the compliment of man’s society, one sinks into one’s place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot, and whistles, “We-e-ell! Who’d-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?” and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs—we are all part of the same process.With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft “chitter-chitter-chitter.” I realize afresh, as I have often realized in watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands,or children lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the impartial views of the dilettante asking for “companionship with nature” quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has become repulsive to me.A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses. One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable. Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between “dirt” and “soil”! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” It is one thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. “An enemy hath done this!” I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch.All sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence—almost silence—the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft, professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your professional is a thorough classicist; “nothing too much” his motto. Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise for the invalid, “corroborative detail” in the narrative, or sunshine, water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline (’tis consoling, at last to have a use for one’s education);notat et designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque. Sometimes my human instinct to value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my nursery. For the first time in my lifeI understand how the Spartans could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father’s or mother’s blindness to faults and commonplaceness.On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next year’s garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon’s fashion, while one marches on one’s way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science of horticulture.

Top-heavycivilization is always righting itself by a side-reach after the “primitive” and the “elemental.” Weary capitalists and professional men play—expensively—at what when all’s said is but a child’s game of ball enhanced by feats of walking. Science gives us the motor; and slug-a-beds who have hitherto accepted sunrise as an act of faith grow to be connoisseurs in effects of morning haze and chiaroscuro.

Perhaps, then, there are many others who, like myself, have discovered, in this year of the travail of humanity, the sober and healing pleasures of the garden. Of course I had always intended to have a garden sometime, on the same principle by which I hope to see Japan, to read the Old Testament in Hebrew (having first mastered a dozen other languages more immediately relevant to my business), to have my twilight stage of knowledge regarding the material universe dispelled by the blinding light of modern discovery. I had even used the planning of this garden, with its companion brook, grove, and lawn, as a lure for sleep. But that was a paradise for the eye alone; and in my heathen blindness I dreamed that the joy of the garden was in the beholding. Most pityingly I look back upon that time of ignorance. Confess, fellow amateurs, is not the joy in the making? Even harvesting, the end for which the garden was made, yields the gardener himself a crasser pleasure, as compared with the stirring of the earth, laying down seeds in a row like a string of matched stones, and most of all watching the young plants, obedient to his design, prick through the earth and advance from seed-leaf to bushiness or stateliness, from foliage to flower. To gather the fruits of your labor justifies your enterprise, but it is something like receiving royalties for a work of art born in a flash of inspiration.To see the delicate green shoots, perfect in their vague promise, and innocent of the blights, distortions, and frustrations that may overtake them later on, stretching up and unfolding where the other day there was only black earth, is akin to the first vision of some great creative idea, before one meets its penalty in hours of toil and cheated hope. There is even a tinge of guilt in our pleasure; we have digressed, in the name of civic duty, from our lawful callings, considering that we made some sacrifice of time or strength, and our virtue has turned into an indulgence.

One of my first discoveries (after the simplest rudiments of the art I essayed to practise) was that of all topics on the lips of men the garden is the most conversable, the most fraternal. Hitherto, observation had led me to suppose children and rheumatism the most universal of interests. Having neither myself, I have been cut off from that fluent intercourse upon first steps and first words, adenoids, preventive dentistry, potatoes carried in the pocket, baths of hot brine, and the proportion of protein in the diet, which makes strangers or friends akin. There was always the weather; but—unless one has a garden, as sensitive as a poet to every nuance of sun or atmosphere—talk of the weather is a mere subterfuge, a symbol of our inarticulateness and awkward shyness masking our human yearning to know our fellows and to wish them well. The garden, as a subject of discourse, combines all the pretext offered by the weather to hint our good will without violating our shyness; all the diversity and perpetual surprise of a child’s development; all the right to condole with misfortune and to be agreeably officious about remedies enjoyed by those who encounter the rheumatic; all the delight of professional note-comparing known to invalids, cooks, and pedagogues. To appear in my garden, equipped with sun-hat and hoe, was, I found, to be hail-fellowed by every condition of men—pickaninnies, delivery-men, professors, elegantsand inelegants, experts and inexperts. My acquaintanceship among my neighbors grew like Jonah’s gourd. “Do you mind my asking what that line of white strips is for?” “To warn the English sparrows off my pea-vines.”—“Would you like some young cabbage-plants?”—“Your corn is lookin’ fine!” Common interests were visible and inexhaustible.

Other sociabilities also I have found in the garden. We prate a good deal of “companionship with nature,” and go out fussily to seek it, with camera, bird-book, field-glasses, and expensive camping gear. In the garden one loses all this self-consciousness. Instead of personifying nature, and offering her the compliment of man’s society, one sinks into one’s place as a piece of nature. The catbird spluttering joyous music at me, almost forgetting to be afraid; the cardinal that looks down where I stand tossing off a magnificent plume of spray from my watering-pot, and whistles, “We-e-ell! Who’d-have-thought-to-see-you-keeping-at-it?” and I myself, turning to my own uses the perpetual need of life to renew itself, to evolve out of seed and bulb new seeds and bulbs, which shall give birth in time to other seeds and bulbs—we are all part of the same process.

With our Little Brother the Robin I am approaching intimacy. It is pleasant to see him assume, with almost human egotism, that the worms I turn up, the strings I plant by, the stakes I drive, are special providences for himself. Yet I have never quite won his confidence. I have often longed to speak to him, explaining that there are worms enough for us both, and how easy I find it to scatter a few extra strings for his nest-building; I have longed to reassure the wild doves who run about on their pretty pink feet in the long grass near the garden, and at my approach fly away with a protesting soft “chitter-chitter-chitter.” I realize afresh, as I have often realized in watching people coax squirrels to eat from their hands,or children lavishing affection on brainless hens and rabbits, that if there had been no Saint Francis, it behooved mankind to invent him. On the other hand, the gardener, a fighter in the struggle for food, finds the impartial views of the dilettante asking for “companionship with nature” quite unthinkable. The wild rabbit, which only last winter I thought an engaging creature, has not changed the sleekness of his brown coat, his funny little white tuft of tail, or his wavelike movements; but he has become repulsive to me.

A whole new set of values, in fact, takes possession of mind and senses. One comes to like the writhings of the angle worms in the muck, knowing that they do the gardener service. Various sights and contacts, once offensive, being now considered not simply in themselves, but in relation to our purposes, become indifferent or actually pleasurable. Even whiffs of fertilizer, if suggestive merely, give an agreeable sense that the work is going forward. And what an infinite gulf between “dirt” and “soil”! There lies between a whole initiation into secrets chemical and biological. Once I passed by garden tracts with undistinguishing eyes. Now to see them stifled with weeds, or to see the earth stiff and lumpy, affects me like walking in New York slums, or like a hideous grouping of colors; to see the earth mellow and finely tilled is satisfying, like a good chord in music, or like a firm strong drawing.

Digging, planting, transplanting, watching the sky, I have come face to face with the meaning of words I have known all my life, in the dim way we know most things outside our own importunate concerns. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.” It is one thing to understand this saying botanically, and another to see it exemplified when you are breathlessly awaiting the result. “An enemy hath done this!” I cried when the wild rabbit stripped my young bean-plants, or when some great dog made his bed in my onion-patch.All sorts of images, from parable, poem, and story, re-awake in my mind with a morning freshness and brightness. And in my turn I have enacted, or experienced, many a little apologue. For example, I discover that plants grown in over-shaded spots fall victim no less surely to what sun they get, on scorching days, than those quite unprotected. Here are the facts; the moralist may make of them what he will.

What would any art be without its disappointments and anxieties, its hours of depression that measure the worth of the goal striven for? The amateur gardener has his share. I pass over in forgiving silence—almost silence—the haughty fashion in which the masters of the craft, professing to offer information, so give as to withhold. Your professional is a thorough classicist; “nothing too much” his motto. Enough, and not too much, whether it be vanilla in the cookies, exercise for the invalid, “corroborative detail” in the narrative, or sunshine, water, fertilizer, depth of earth, mulching for your plants. And this all-important but inscrutable rule is the despair of every amateur. A grievance perhaps more personal to myself has been the unnatural behavior enjoined on me toward seedlings of my own sowing, my own cosseting. In a sense, I had brought them into the world, and now I was told some of them must be done away with, that the rest might thrive! As I edged along the rows, unhappily choosing, among all the pretty youngsters, the victims for the sacrifice, I reminded myself of Catiline (’tis consoling, at last to have a use for one’s education);notat et designat oculis ad caedem unumquemque. Sometimes my human instinct to value every individual and to lavish care on the weak has got the better of me. I do not dwell on the experiments to which I have resorted; but some of them, in spite of the doctrinaires, were triumphs! On the other hand, I have bitterly resented deformities and discolorations in my nursery. For the first time in my lifeI understand how the Spartans could expose for death infants blemished in mind or body. I understand what fierce parental pride is at the bottom of many a father’s or mother’s blindness to faults and commonplaceness.

On every side I hear from fellow-enthusiasts detailed schemes for next year’s garden, vows of perpetual gardendom. I do not echo them. I have been initiated; a certain bond with my kind is mine henceforth. But the purest of human pleasures, as Bacon called it, is likewise the most tyrannous. Other joys may be caught up in Gideon’s fashion, while one marches on one’s way. Once the garden possesses you, it leaves no room for anything beside. The garden-seat of Adam and Eve has been universally regretted. But what had they to do except name the creatures, dig, sow, and reap? They did not have to pay their way with money, nor answer letters, nor read the newspapers, nor vote, nor keep track of the bacterial count in the milk they drank, nor study past history in order to interpret the present, nor even to learn the science of horticulture.

WAR FOR EVOLUTION’S SAKEInits last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the “made in Germany” stamp, so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser.In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficientfactor is natural selection on a basis of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature’s principle is mutual fight and antagonism.Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy. In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people; namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. TheGottof the German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth fromGott und uns; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was well illustrated by the conditions of the moment—and it was a memorable one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and cunning, apparently winning inthis biological struggle for existence,—and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its evolution in harmony with natural law.But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.First we can say of this natural law that it isn’t natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free fromcontrol by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination. Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer formulations of the present and just passed centuries.Even the essence of Darwin’s famous explanation of evolution by natural selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural conditions.But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of any that has been offered.Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, “the inheritance of acquired characters,” that is, the inheritance by the immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or “acquirements” which came to the parents during their life because of their special use or disuse of parts andtheir individual reactions to environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten away the flies.Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very different explanation from Lamarck’s, and one also very plausible and logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck’s theory; but he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck’s explanation entirely, and accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.What is this “natural selection” that we all know so well by name, and so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it. Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin’s time, the generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to have devised;—or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;—an explanation based partly on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be sufficient base.The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves, they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble otherindividuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents success in the struggle for life.More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those advantageous differences—this by the laws of variation as antidote needed just here for the laws of heredity—in even more marked degree than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous variations from the old or species type that make them especially “fit for the conditions under which they must live.”Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences. This is “species transformation,” or the “origin of species” by natural selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle; extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeingan animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not be.It was Weismann’s new facts and new theories about heredity that did much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible and absurd the German claims of theAllmachtof natural selectionas evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of the potent causes and controls of evolution—if we may call that revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do not understand.If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular literature.But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the social or communal insects, thenumerous instances of commensalism, or the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of different species—the various ants alone have more than a thousand known kinds of other insects living with them—and the innumerable observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects—all these had convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers thatifnatural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the present character and the future of the living world it was a very different natural selection from that so redly painted by the Neo-Darwinians.It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others, he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck’s for certain cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and between species.But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis of an alleged identity between the characterand control of human evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy and war practise.The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal descended, or ascended, from the lower ones—as he is—and if animals are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by virtue—or evil—of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle, out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human evolution is simple.Schlusswith discussion!But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the premises. They are wrong.Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as “animal among animals,” and despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing, ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation, leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have begun the course of our truly human evolutionwe have come an immensely long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits, and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity; and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters, which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech, writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in the race.This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today contains all the present expression and future promise of man’s higher evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man’s natural traits, and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its natural validity in the great strength it adds to man’s position in Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.Now it is all this side of human evolution that the Germannatural philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one, would not care to live longer in it.I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.

Inits last throes the cruel Neo-Darwinian philosophy of nature and man is having one terrible, final, satanic triumph, for it is in no mean measure responsible for this incredible war, and especially for its incredible brutality. For just as the war and the peculiarly revolting and degrading methods of its conduct bear the “made in Germany” stamp, so does the Neo-Darwinian conception of evolution and its method bear the same precious label. For it was not only that Weismann of Freiburg gave form and seeming validity to this conception, during the course of his violent attacks on Lamarckism, but it was his following troop of German biologists and natural philosophers who gleefully put the conception into final form for general assimilation. For, as we shall explain later, it was a kind of biological philosophy that fitted in beautifully with German political and military philosophy; everything to the winner, nothing to the loser.

In the evolution of the human race the different peoples and nations are the analogue of the different species in lower creation. Just as among these brute species of field and jungle, ocean and stream, there is a constant relentless struggle of one species against the other nearest like it in habits, or nearest it in space, or most in the way of its increase numerically or expansion geographically, so is it among the peoples of the earth. And just as the species with the advantage of longer tooth or claw, or more ferocity, more endurance, or more cunning, wins by killing out, or, as among certain ant kinds, enslaving the other, so is it with these higher brutes, the peoples of the earth.

Human evolution is governed by the same factors as brute evolution, and the all-mighty and all-sufficientfactor is natural selection on a basis of life and death struggle and survival of the winner. Therefore the whole matter is very simple: that people is the chosen of Nature and God that devotes its best attention and energy to the business of fighting and fights in the most approved brute way with complete rejection of all those unnatural, debilitating and disadvantageous principles that an artificial and weakening form of social evolution has grafted on to human life. For this social evolution that the human species has adopted is based on a principle that is in direct conflict with nature, the principle of mutual aid and altruism. Nature’s principle is mutual fight and antagonism.

Thus said Weismann and his Neo-Darwinian followers; and thus quickly repeated the men who saw in this philosophy exactly the needed foundation and sustaining pillars for their own militaristic philosophy. In this fundamental natural philosophy they found exactly what they needed to give their militarism full acceptance among the German people; namely, the cold, disinterested support of science, the potent aid of scientific dogma. For Science is the German religion. TheGottof the German Kaiser is a god of steel and power, not of heart and pity. German success, so far as it goes, and of the kind it is, comes in truth fromGott und uns; but from their kind of god and their kind of us.

I heard the first impressive exposition of this Germanized Darwinism in a great German University twenty years ago, and I heard the second impressive exposition of it only a year ago at the Great Headquarters of the German General Staff in occupied France. This latter exposition was well illustrated by the conditions of the moment—and it was a memorable one for me. Here was the apparently conquering species, pushing into the land of the struggling native species; here was the species longer in tooth and claw, more ferocious and brutal, more unscrupulous and cunning, apparently winning inthis biological struggle for existence,—and taking breath and a few moments to explain why. No wonder we win; for we are in tune with Nature. We win because we ought to win for the sake of the future of the human race, for the sake of its evolution in harmony with natural law.

But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law.

First we can say of this natural law that it isn’t natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution.

The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected.

The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free fromcontrol by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day.

Let us glance over the history of the doctrine.

The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination. Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer formulations of the present and just passed centuries.

Even the essence of Darwin’s famous explanation of evolution by natural selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural conditions.

But it was the great French naturalists, Buffon and Lamarck, who first expressed the evolution conception in fully worked out and reasonable form, while it was Lamarck who first offered a simple and wholly plausible explanation of evolutionary cause and control. His explanation remains to-day the simplest and most appealing to the reasoning mind of any that has been offered.

Unfortunately it lacked, and still lacks, the necessary basis of indispensable proof for its most fundamental assumption, to-wit, “the inheritance of acquired characters,” that is, the inheritance by the immediate offspring of those structural and functional changes or “acquirements” which came to the parents during their life because of their special use or disuse of parts andtheir individual reactions to environmental conditions. The young giraffe had a longer neck than it otherwise would have had because its parents had stretched their necks by continual reaching up to the leaves on the highest branches. The young man-thing of Glacial Times had weaker and less developed scalp muscles because its parents had gradually given up any considerable use of these muscles for twitching their heavy shocks of hair to frighten away the flies.

Then came Darwin with his natural selection explanation, a very different explanation from Lamarck’s, and one also very plausible and logical. Darwin did not altogether disbelieve in Lamarck’s theory; but he believed much more in his own. Later came the Neo-Darwinians, and they went the whole way of rejecting Lamarck’s explanation entirely, and accepting the natural selection explanation as the wholly sufficient cause and the only one needed to explain all evolution. The leader of the Neo-Darwinians was August Weismann of the University of Freiburg. He had as followers most of the German natural philosophers.

What is this “natural selection” that we all know so well by name, and so little, I am afraid, by content? For natural selection is much more widely known as a dominating scientific dogma, accepted popularly with little question as a sufficient explanation of evolution, than as something to be itself explained and viewed with a proper scientific doubt. As a matter of fact, it is high time that it should be generally known that not many naturalists of standing today accept natural selection as a sufficient explanation of the thoroughly accepted fact of evolution, or even as the most important among the numerous probable contributing factors of evolution. Indeed there are many reputable naturalists who repudiate natural selection altogether, as an actual contributing factor in species-forming and descent, and concede its influence as an evolutionary control, only in most general relations.

But in the popularization and wide acceptance of the natural selection dogma, we are in face of one of those familiar histories of the rise and dominance of a plausible, logically-constructed, apparently simple and sufficient explanation of a great problem pressing for solution. It is difficult for the world to accept the evolution theory without a causal explanation of it. But as the known facts prove the theory beyond reasonable doubt, it is necessary to accept it. Hence there is to most people a simultaneous necessity for accepting some explanation of it. Natural selection has had the fortune of being, since Darwin’s time, the generally accepted explanation. What then is it, really?

It is an explanation of evolution which it is the merit of Darwin to have devised;—or perhaps we ought already to say in the light of the fatal results brought about by the wide unreasoning acceptance of it, it is the demerit of Darwin to have devised;—an explanation based partly on certain observed facts, but more largely on a certain logical elaboration of argument for which the observed facts are assumed to be sufficient base.

The more relevant of these facts are the production by parents of too many young and the slight differing of these young among themselves in most of their characters, physical and mental. The production of too many young leads, according to the natural selectionists, to a life and death struggle for existence among them, and the slight differences among them lead to a decision in this struggle on a basis of the slight advantages or disadvantages of these differences. The two logical conclusions seem to be inevitable on the basis of the two facts.

On the structure so far reared, however, other blocks are placed. The selectionists believe that by the laws of heredity, although the young of a different parent or pair of parents do differ among themselves, they resemble their own parents more closely than they resemble otherindividuals of their kind of species. So that the young produced by the survivors in the struggle for existence, although again slightly differing from their parents and each other, will, by the laws of heredity, tend to reproduce in their make-up the advantageous variations which were possessed by their parents and which gave these parents success in the struggle for life.

More than that: some of these young will tend to possess those advantageous differences—this by the laws of variation as antidote needed just here for the laws of heredity—in even more marked degree than existed in the parents, while others will possess them in less degree and still others in about the same degree. Hence, the particular young showing the increased differences will be the individuals of this generation to survive in the struggle. These will then leave behind them new young again tending to possess in varying degree those advantageous variations from the old or species type that make them especially “fit for the conditions under which they must live.”

Thus there will result, in a series of many generations, a gradual shifting of the character of the species to the type characterized by an ever increasing and perfecting of the original advantageous differences. This is “species transformation,” or the “origin of species” by natural selection. It is evolution on a basis of life and death struggle; extinction of the unfit; and survival of the fit, fitter or fittest. And just as with the different individuals inside the species, so with the different varying species. Each struggles with the other and the one or ones with the advantageous differences win at the expense of the others.

There is no doubt of the fascinating plausibility and seeming reality and sufficiency of this explanation. It makes a strong appeal to the logical mind; to the theory-spinning brain. You can understand it, prove it, expand it, improve on it, and, all this almost without ever seeingan animal or a plant, or knowing anything of its actual life and relations to the world it lives in. No wonder it fascinated and seized a world demanding a logical explanation for the theory of evolution. No wonder that this explanation of Darwin, offered at the same time with a clear elucidation of the evolution theory itself to a world just ready for both, came to be the one all-sufficient explanation, came to be a scientific dogma of the most dogmatic type.

Now for real thorough-going dogmatism there is nothing like scientific dogmatism, there is no dogmatist like a scientific dogmatist. There are many scientific men who pretend to know absolutely that many things cannot possibly be because they have never seen them, heard them, felt them or measured them. It is because of these men, who are not many, but loud, that we scientific men as a class have a reputation among many people of being narrow-minded and bigoted; and I hasten to admit that many of us are. Not all that is called science is proved; and most certainly not all that is called non-science is disproved, or because as yet unproved is to be tossed lightly or sneeringly aside. The scientific man who declares what cannot possibly be, exposes himself as a boaster and a charlatan, for by such declaration he, by implication, claims to know all the order of nature, which certainly no man does know. No man knows all that is or may be; hence no man knows what is not or may not be.

It was Weismann’s new facts and new theories about heredity that did much to overthrow Lamarckism and make it possible to expand rational Darwinism into irrational ultra-Darwinism and then claim for it such an insolently dominating place among the explanations of evolution. And now it is the still newer and far less theoretical and more concrete knowledge of heredity that has dethroned Neo-Darwinism, made impossible and absurd the German claims of theAllmachtof natural selectionas evolution explanation, and revealed to us how little we really know of the potent causes and controls of evolution—if we may call that revelation which reveals darkness where before was apparent light. The factors of evolution that today we are more certain of than any others are the unknown factors, the causes we do not know, the methods we do not understand.

If this seems to be a humiliating confession to come from a biologist and professed student of evolution, it is one in which all honest scholars must join. If the Germans will not, they are not honest.

The new heredity, to characterize by this term the extraordinary increase and the more exact kind of knowledge of heredity acquired since the first recognition, in 1900, of Mendelism, has so shattered the seemingly unassailable logical structure of the natural selection explanation of evolution that it stands now only as a tottering skeleton of its once imposing self. It had always too much assumption of premises for its foundation and too much logic and finespun theory in its superstructure to be an enduring building. Even before the new knowledge of the facts and mechanism of heredity was available natural selection was already weakening under the criticism of scientific men, although but little of this was known to the man in the street. And even now when the new heredity has furnished the knowledge for a complete undermining of the natural selection theory as a species-forming factor, only occasional rumors of the disaster find their way into popular literature.

But long ago there began a popular revolt against the conception of the whole world of nature and man as ruled by a theory of continuous ruthless bloody struggle. Everyone knew that this was not the only relation of human beings to each other, and even most casual observation indicated that it was not the only relation of various kinds of the lower animals to each other. The obvious biological success of the social or communal insects, thenumerous instances of commensalism, or the living together on terms of mutual advantage of individuals of different species—the various ants alone have more than a thousand known kinds of other insects living with them—and the innumerable observed instances of what might be called balanced adaptations, such as those of the flower-visiting insects and the insect-visited flowers resulting in the needed cross-fertilization of the flowers and the needed supply of nectar and pollen food for the insects—all these had convinced biologists and nature-students and just nature-lovers thatifnatural selection were the all-ruling factor in determining the present character and the future of the living world it was a very different natural selection from that so redly painted by the Neo-Darwinians.

It is quite certain that Darwin himself never conceived of any such utterly brutal conception of natural selection as the Teutonized one. In all his writing he recognizes that the bringing about of adaptation to the conditions of life is the essential feature of evolution, and, when it seemed impossible or too far-fetched to explain adaptation by a ruthless struggle that extinguished some species and preserved others, he looked for other explanations, even accepting Lamarck’s for certain cases. He accepted everything that could make for adaptation, and among these other things than bitter fighting that could bring about and perfect adaptation he especially recognized mutual aid, and repeatedly called attention to species change based on mutual aid both within and between species.

But however suggestive and important it is to note how out of tune with the facts concerned with general evolution are the natural selection extremists, our special present interest centers around the attempt to bring the explanation of human evolution into tune with this out of tune conception of evolution in general. For it is on this basis, the basis of an alleged identity between the characterand control of human evolution and the character and control of brute evolution, that the Germans find their justification in natural law for their war philosophy and war practise.

The Germans are greatly given to explanations. These explanations always contain a specious show of reasoning and pseudo-reasoning. They are in line with some accepted philosophy or pseudo-philosophy. Their accepted pseudo-philosophy of human evolution is a thoroughly mechanistic one. It is one of economy of thought and argument. If man is an animal descended, or ascended, from the lower ones—as he is—and if animals are what they are today and will be what they will be tomorrow by virtue—or evil—of a natural law of bitter, brutal, bloody struggle, out of which emerge as survivors only those most brutally and fearfully qualified for such struggle, why, then, the case of man and of human evolution is simple.Schlusswith discussion!

But the trouble with this simple convincing argument is with the premises. They are wrong.

Not only is bitter, brutal, bloody struggle not the single, nor the chief explanation of general evolution, but it is particularly not the chief explanation of human evolution, despite our origin and earlier life in Glacial or pre-Glacial Time as “animal among animals,” and despite the stream of ever more diluted inheritance from tiger and ape ancestors that flows with us, as we move through the ages, changing, ever-changing, as we move. The simplicity of the explanation of human nature and human life from origins makes its appeal to all of us, and especially to those de-spiritualized ones of us who find in pure mechanistic conceptions a satisfying and ultra-economical explanation of every complex and difficult problem. But it is a dangerous explanation, leading us to be blind to many facts that are, if we are honest in our seeing, quite clearly before us. No matter when or where we may have begun the course of our truly human evolutionwe have come an immensely long way, a way so long that we have, we may say, almost no right at all to try to interpret our condition of today by the light of our condition in the beginning. And we have come to this point by the interjection into our nature by natural mutation, or conscious self-effort, of elements that were essentially foreign to our ancestors of the beginning days. We have, indeed, in our evolution a sort of double line; one that we may call our natural evolution, concerned with our physical characteristics and the fundamentals of our mental and social traits, and like all natural characters carried along in the race by heredity; and the other, that we may call our social or moral evolution, made possible, to be sure, only by the stage of our natural evolution, but concerned chiefly with various acquired mental and social characters, which are not an integral part of our heredity, but depend on speech, writing, education, precept and practise for transmission from one generation to the other, and, thus, for perpetuation and expansion in the race.

This social evolution, added to a natural evolutionary development of the social or altruistic habit based on the advantage of the mutual aid principle as opposed to the mutual fight principle, has had an amazingly swift flowering since the earlier days of human prehistory, and today contains all the present expression and future promise of man’s higher evolution. It has its roots in all of the best of man’s natural traits, and acts as a powerful inhibitor of the worst of them. It finds its natural validity in the great strength it adds to man’s position in Nature, for it permits a much swifter and more extreme development of human possibilities than would be possible by the slow processes of natural evolution. That which would take many generations to incorporate into our natural heredity can be put quickly into our social inheritance and still be hardly any the less powerful in its control of our life.

Now it is all this side of human evolution that the Germannatural philosophy, especially as applied to international relations, leaves out of account. The Germans do indeed recognize the value of social evolution inside the race or nation, but its advantage is all for the sake of building up a powerful organism to fight effectively and viciously with all other races and nations. The different peoples are to be looked on as the analogues of different brute species, all terribly and everlastingly at war with each other, each using everything possible to it to gain the upper hand. Everything that can be construed to be of military advantage in this struggle is justified as biological advantage, and there is no doubt that to be inhumanly ferocious, brutal and cunning is of biological advantage in tiger evolution.

The test of this war philosophy will come for the Germans when they are being beaten and are beaten. Will they hold then consistently to their thesis, and admit that their line of human evolution is proved by their defeat to be a wrong line because it is not the strongest line? They have a way out. This way was suggested to me by the principal expositor at Great Headquarters of the brute struggle and survival theory. He said that it was possible to conceive of a failure of natural selection to work its ennobling way because of the perverse opposition to it of the artificial character of much of human life, but if natural law was to be restrained or upset by such an interpolated artificial control he, at least, would prefer to die in the catastrophe and not have to live in a world perverse to natural law. Of course he did not admit of the probability of such a situation. The Germans would win because they were fighting with Nature on their side. They were biologically right, and biological law would work with them to success. But there was the bare possibility of such an outcome to be reckoned with. If this possibility came to reality, why then all was wrong with the world, and he, for one, would not care to live longer in it.

I do not mean to say that all Germans think out war in terms of biological struggle and evolutionary advancement of the human race. But there are many who do, and they are leaders. Now, in Germany leaders not only lead; they compel. Most Germans not only do as they are told to do; they think as they are told to think. Their whole training and tradition is to put themselves unreservedly in the hands of their masters. And as long as things go well, or fairly well, or even not very well but with promise of going better, they make little complaint. But when things are too hard for too long a time, they begin to question the infallibility of the All-Highest and the Near-Highest. And Germany already has suffered terribly and suffered long, and still suffers.

The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.

But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.

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