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are acquainted with the facts now ascertained, which denies the
orderly evolution of the kosmos by the regular operation of a more
or less completely ascertained series of properties resident in the
material of which it consists.[2] The process of evolution—the
interaction of these ascertainable, if not fully ascertained properties
—has led (it is held), in the case of the cooling cinder which we call
the earth—by an inevitable and predestined course—to the
formation of that which we call living matter and eventually of Man
himself. From this process all disorderly or arbitrary interferences
must, it seems, be excluded. The old fancies as to presiding demons
or fairies—which it was imagined had for their business to interrupt
the supposed feeble and limited efforts of Nature, as yet unexplored
and unappreciated—have passed out of mind. The consensus is
complete: Man is held to be a part of Nature, a product of the
definite and orderly evolution which is universal; a being resulting
from and driven by the one great nexus of mechanism which we call
Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that relentless
mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control it.
5. Unwarranted inferences from the Evolution of Man.
There are not wanting those who, accepting this conclusion, seek
to belittle Man and endeavour to represent that the veil is lifted, that
all is ‘explained’ obvious, commonplace, and mean in regard to the
significance of life and of Man, because it has become clear that the
kosmic process has brought them forth in due order. There are
others who rightly perceive that life is no common property of our
cooling matter, but unique and exceptional, and that Man stands
apart from and above all natural products, whether animate or
inanimate. Some of these thinkers appear to accept the conclusion
that if life and Man are regarded as products of the kosmic process—
that is, of Nature—‘life’ and ‘Man’ lose so much in importance and
significance that dire consequences must follow to Man’s conception
of his dignity and to the essential features of his systems of conduct
and social organization. Accordingly they cling to the belief that
living matter and Man have not proceeded from an orderly evolution

of Nature, but are ‘super’ natural. It is found on the other hand, by
many who have considered these speculations, and hold no less
explicitly than do the ‘supernaturalists’ that life is a momentous and
peculiar feature of our earth’s surface and Man the isolated and
unparalleled ‘piece of work,’ ‘the beauty of the world,’ ‘the paragon
of animals’—it is found by many such, I say, that nothing is gained in
regard to our conception of Man’s nobility and significance by
supposing that he and the living matter which has given rise to him,
are not the outcome of that system of orderly process which we call
Nature.
There is one consideration in regard to this matter which, it
seems, is often overlooked and should be emphasized. It is
sometimes—and perhaps with a sufficient excuse in a want of
acquaintance with Nature—held by those who oppose the conclusion
that Man has been evolved by natural processes, that the products
of Nature are arbitrary, haphazard, and due to chance, and that Man
cannot be conceived of as originating by chance. This notion of
‘chance’ is a misleading figment inherited by the modern world from
days of blank ignorance. The ‘Nature-searchers’ of to-day admit no
such possibility as ‘chance.’ It will be in the recollection of many
here, that a leading writer and investigator of the Victorian Era, the
physicist John Tyndall, pointed out in a celebrated address delivered
at Belfast that according to the conceptions of the mechanism of
Nature arrived at by modern science—the structure of that
mechanism is such that it would have been possible for a being of
adequate intelligence inspecting the gaseous nebula from which our
planetary system has evolved to have foreseen in that luminous
vapour the Belfast audience and the professor addressing it!
The fallacy that in given but unknown circumstances anything
whatever may occur in spite of the fact that some one thing has
been irrevocably arranged to occur, is a common one.[3] It is correct
to assume in the absence of any pertinent knowledge (if we are
compelled to estimate the probabilities) that one event is as likely as
another to occur; but nevertheless there is no ‘chance’ in the matter

since the event has been already determined, and might be
predicted by those possessing the knowledge which we lack. Thus
then it appears that the conclusion that Man is a part of Nature is by
no means equivalent to asserting that he has originated by ‘blind
chance’; it is in fact a specific assertion that he is the predestined
outcome of an orderly—and to a large extent ‘perceptible’—
mechanism.[4]
6. Nature’s Mode of Producing Organic Forms.
The general process by which the higher and more elaborate
forms of life, and eventually man himself, have been produced has
been shown by Darwin to depend upon two important properties of
living matter manifested in connexion with the multiplication of
individuals. Living matter has a special property of adding to its bulk
by taking up the chemical elements which it requires and building up
the food so taken as additional living matter. It further has the
power of separating from itself minute particles or germs which feed
and grow independently, and thus multiply their kind. It is a
fundamental character of this process of reproduction that the
detached or pullulated germ inherits or carries with it from its
parents the peculiarities of form and structure of its parent. This is
the property known as Heredity. It is most essentially modified by
another property—namely, that though eventually growing to be
closely like the parent, the germ (especially when it is formed, as is
usual, by the fusion of two germs from two separate parents) is
never identical in all respects with the parent. It shows Variation. In
virtue of Heredity, the new congenital variations shown by a new
generation are transmitted to their offspring when in due time they
pullulate or produce germs. Man has long been aware of this; and,
by selecting variations of beasts, birds, or plants agreeable or useful
to him, has intensified such variations and produced animals and
plants in many features very unlike those with which he started.
It was Darwin’s merit to show that a process of selection which he
called ‘Natural Selection’ must take place in the free untouched

conditions under which animals and plants exist, and have existed
for ages, on this globe. Both animals and plants produce germs, or
young, in excess—usually in vast excess. The world, the earth’s
surface, is practically full, that is to say, fully occupied. Only one pair
of young can grow up to take the place of the pair—male and female
—which have launched a dozen, or it may be as many as a hundred
thousand, young individuals on the world. The property of Variation
ensures that amongst this excess of young there are many
differences. Eventually those survive which are most fitted to the
special conditions under which this particular organism has to live.
The conditions may, and indeed in long lapses of time must, change,
and thus some variation not previously favoured will gain the day
and survive. The ‘struggle for existence’ of Darwin is the struggle
amongst all the superabundant young of a given species, in a given
area, to gain the necessary food, to escape voracious enemies, and
gain protection from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness.
One pair in the new generation—only one pair—survive for every
parental pair. Animal population does not increase: ‘Increase and
multiply’ has never been said by Nature to her lower creatures.
Locally, and from time to time, owing to exceptional changes, a
species may multiply here and decrease there; but it is important to
realize that the ‘struggle for existence’ in Nature—that is to say,
among the animals and plants of this earth untouched by man—is a
desperate one, however tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may
appear to us. The struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever
French writer[5] glibly informs his readers, between different species,
but between individuals of the same species, brothers and sisters
and cousins. The struggle between a beast of prey which seeks to
nourish itself and the buffalo which defends its life with its horns is
not ‘the struggle for existence’ so named by Darwin. Moreover, the
struggle among the members of a species in natural conditions
differs totally from the mere struggle for advancement or wealth
with which uneducated writers so frequently compare it. It differs
essentially in this—that in Nature’s struggle for existence, death,
immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the only

reward to the victors—few, very few, but rare and beautiful in the
fitness which has carried them to victory—is the permission to
reproduce their kind—to carry on by heredity to another generation
the specific qualities by which they triumphed.
It is not generally realized how severe is the pressure and
competition in Nature—not between different species, but between
the immature population of one and the same species, precisely
because they are of the same species and have exactly the same
needs. From a human point of view the pressure under which many
wild things live is awful in its severity and relentless tenacity. Not
only are new forms established by natural selection, but the old
forms, when they exactly fit the mould presented as it were for
competitive filling, are maintained by the same unremitting process.
A distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions (in which
man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous slaughter of
the unfit which is incessantly going on, and the absolute restriction
of the privilege of parentage to the happy few who attain to the
standard described as ‘the fittest.’
7. The Limited Variety of Nature’s Products.
The process of development of an immense variety of animal and
vegetable forms has proceeded in this way through countless ages
of geologic time, but it must not be supposed that any and every
conceivable form and variety has been produced. There are only two
great diverging lines of descent from original living matter—only the
animals and the plants. And in each of these there are and have
been only a limited number of branches to the pedigree—some
coming off at a lower level, others at higher points when more
elaborate structure has been attained. It is easy to imagine groups
of both plants and animals with characters and structures which
have never existed and never will exist. The limitation of the whole
process in spite of its enormous duration in time, its gigantic output
and variety, is a striking and important fact. Linnaeus said, ‘There
are just as many species as in the beginning the Infinite Being

created’; and the modern naturalist can go no further than the
paraphrase of this, and must say, ‘There are and have been just so
many and just so few varieties of animal and vegetable structure on
this earth as it was possible for the physical and chemical contents
of the still molten globe to form up to the hour now reached.’
8. The Emergence of Man.
As to how and when man emerged from the terrestrial animal
population so strictly controlled and moulded by natural selection is
a matter upon which we gain further information year by year. There
must be many here who remember, as I do, the astounding and
almost sudden discovery some forty-five years ago of abundant and
overwhelming evidence that man had existed in Western Europe as
a contemporary of the mammoth and rhinoceros, the hyaena and
the lion. The dispute over the facts submitted to the scientific world
by Boucher de Perthes was violent and of short duration. The
immense antiquity of man was established and accepted on all sides
just before Mr. Darwin published his book on The Origin of Species.
The palæolithic implements, though not improbably made 150,000
years ago, do not, any more than do the imperfect skulls
occasionally found in association with them, indicate a condition of
the human race much more monkey-like than is presented by
existing savage races (see Figs. 1 and 2 and Frontispiece, and their
explanations). The implements themselves are manufactured with
great skill and artistic feeling. Within the last ten years much
rougher flint implements, of peculiar types, have been discovered in
gravels which are 500 feet above the level of the existing rivers (see
Figs. 3 and 4). These “Eoliths” of the South of England indicate a
race of men of less-developed skill than the makers of the
Palæoliths, and carry the antiquity of man at least as far back
beyond the Palæoliths as these are from the present day. We have
as yet found no remains giving the direct basis for conclusions on
the subject; but judging by the analogy (not by any means a
conclusive method) furnished by the history of other large animals
now living alongside of man—such as the horse, the rhinoceros, the

tapir, the wolf, the hyaena, and the bear—it is not improbable that it
was in the remote period known as the lower Miocene—remote even
as compared with the gravels in which Eoliths occur—that Natural
Selection began to favour that increase in the size of the brain of a
large and not very powerful semi-erect ape which eventuated, after
some hundreds of thousands of years, in the breeding-out of a being
with a relatively enormous brain-case, a skilful hand, and an
inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks, protect himself
in caves, and in general to defeat aggression and satisfy his natural
appetites by the use of his wits rather than by strength alone—in
which, however, he was not deficient. Probably this creature had
nearly the full size of brain and every other physical character of
modern man, although he had not as yet stumbled upon the art of
making fire by friction, nor converted his conventional grunts and
groans, his screams, laughter, and interjections into a language
corresponding to (and thenceforth developing) his power of thought.
Fig. 1.—Pithecanthropus from Java Fig. 2.—Greek Skull
Photographs of a front view of the two skulls shewn in profile in the
frontispiece, taken so as to shew the breadth of the ‘forehead’ or

prefrontal area, which is seen to be very much greater in the Greek skull
(Fig. 2) than in the Javanese Pithecanthropus (Fig. 1). The prefrontal
area is marked out by a black dotted line, the outline of a plane (the
prefrontal plane) which is at right angles to the sagittal plane and
passes through the meeting point of the frontal with the two parietal
bones above; whilst below it passes through the median point called
‘ophryon.’ The plane of the picture is parallel with this prefrontal plane.
The white dotted line gives the breadth of the boss-like prefrontal area.
It is identical in position with the line d in the side view of the same
skulls given in the frontispiece. The black dotted line is identical in
position with the line A C in those figures. The two specimens are
equally reduced in the photograph. (Original).

Fig. 3.
Photographs of eight Eoliths of one and the same shape, namely, with
a chipped or worked tooth-like prominence, rendering the flint fit for use
as a ‘borer’—photographed of half the actual size (linear measurement)
from specimens found near Ightham, Kent, in the high-level gravel—
which form part of the Prestwich collection in the Natural History

Museum, Cromwell Road, London. Many others of the same shape have
been found in the same locality. These and the trinacrial implements
photographed in Fig. 4 are far older than the oval and leaf-shaped
‘palæoliths’ of the low-lying gravels of the valleys of the Thames,
Somme, and other rivers. (Original).

Fig. 4.
Photographs of six Eoliths of the ‘shoulder-of-mutton’ or ‘trinacrial’
type—from the same locality and collection as those shewn in Fig. 3.
The photographs are of half the length of the actual specimens. A
considerable number of worked flints of this peculiar shape have been
found in the same locality. Possibly their shape enabled the primitive
men who ‘chipped’ and used them to attach them by thongs to a stick
or club. The descriptive term ‘trinacrial’ is suggested by me for these
flints in allusion to the form of the island of Sicily which they resemble.
(Original).
9. The Enlarged Brain.
The leading feature in the development and separation of man
from amongst other animals is undoubtedly the relatively enormous
size of the brain in man, and the corresponding increase in its
activities and capacity. It is a very striking fact that it was not in the
ancestors of man alone that this increase in the size of the brain
took place at this same period, viz. the Miocene. The great mammals
such as the titanotherium, which represented the rhinoceros in early
Tertiary times, had a brain which was in proportion to the bulk of the
body, not more than one-eighth the volume of the brain of the
modern rhinoceros (see Fig. 5). Other great mammals of the earlier
Tertiary period were in the same case; and the ancestors of the
horse, which are better known than those of any other modern
animal, certainly had very much smaller brains in proportion to the
size of their bodies than has their descendant.

Fig. 5.
Four casts of the brain-cavities of a series of large Ungulate Mammals
in order to shew the relatively small size of the cerebral hemispheres of
the extinct creature from which A is taken.
A is that of Dinoceras, a huge extinct Eocene mammal which was as
large as a Rhinoceros; B is that of Hippopotamus; C of Horse; and D of
Rhinoceros.
We may well ask to what this sudden and marked increase in the
size of the brain in several lines of the animal pedigree is due. It
seems that the inborn hereditary nervous mechanism by which many
simple and necessary movements of the body are controlled and
brought into relation with the outer world acting upon the sense-
organs, can be carried in a relatively small bulk of brain-substance.
Fish, lizards, and crocodiles with their small brains carry on a
complex and effective life of relation with their surroundings. It
appears that the increased bulk of cerebral substance means
increased ‘educability’—an increased power of storing up individual
experience—which tends to take the place of the inherited
mechanism with which it is often in antagonism. The power of
profiting by individual experience, in fact educability, must in
conditions of close competition be, when other conditions are equal,
an immense advantage to its possessor. It seems that we have to

imagine that the adaptation of mammalian form to the various
conditions of life had in Miocene times reached a point when further
alteration and elaboration of the various types, which we know then
existed, could lead to no advantage. The variations presented for
selection in the struggle for existence presented no advantage—the
‘fittest’ had practically been reached, and was destined to survive
with little change. Assuming such a relative lull in the development
of mere mechanical form, it is obvious that the opportunity for those
individuals with the most ‘educable’ brains to defeat their
competitors would arise. No marked improvement in the instrument
being possible, the reward, the triumph, the survival would fall to
those who possessed most skill in the use of the instrument. And in
successive generations the bigger and more educable brains would
survive and mate, and thus bigger and bigger brains be produced.
It would not be difficult (though not, perhaps, profitable) to
imagine the conditions which have favoured the continuation of this
process to a far greater length in the Simian line of the pedigree
than in other mammalian groups. The result is that the creature
called Man emerged with an educable brain of some five or six times
the bulk (in proportion to his size and weight) of that of any other
surviving Simian. Great as is this difference, it is one of the most
curious facts in the history of man’s development that the bulk of his
brain does not appear to have continued to increase in any very
marked degree since early Palæolithic times. The cranial capacity of
many savage races and of some of the most ancient human skulls is
only a little less than that of the average man of highly-civilised race.
The value of the mental activities in which primitive man differs from
the highest apes may be measured in some degree by the difference
in the size of the man’s and the ape’s brain; but the difference in the
size of the brain of Isaac Newton and an Australian black-fellow is
not in the remotest degree proportionate to the difference in their
mental qualities. Man, it would seem, at a very remote period
attained the extraordinary development of brain which marked him
off from the rest of the animal world, but has ever since been

developing the powers and qualities of this organ without increasing
its size, or materially altering in other bodily features.[6]
10. The Progress of Man.
The origin of Man by the process of Natural Selection is one
chapter in man’s history; another one begins with the consideration
of his further development and his diffusion over the surface of the
globe.
The mental qualities which have developed in Man, though
traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition in some of his
animal associates, are of such an unprecedented power and so far
dominate everything else in his activities as a living organism, that
they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the
general operation of that process of Natural Selection and survival of
the fittest which up to their appearance had been the law of the
living world. They justify the view that Man forms a new departure
in the gradual unfolding of Nature’s predestined scheme. Knowledge,
reason, self-consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man. It is not
my purpose to attempt to trace their development from lower
phases of mental activity in man’s animal ancestors, nor even to
suggest the steps by which that development has proceeded. What
we call the will or volition of Man—a discussion of the nature and
limitation of which would be impossible in these pages and is happily
not necessary for my present purpose—has become a power in
Nature, an imperium in imperio, which has profoundly modified not
only man’s own history but that of the whole living world and the
face of the planet on which he exists. Nature’s inexorable discipline
of death to those who do not rise to her standard—survival and
parentage for those alone who do—has been from the earliest times
more and more definitely resisted by the will of Man. If we may for
the purpose of analysis, as it were, extract Man from the rest of
Nature of which he is truly a product and part, then we may say that
Man is Nature’s rebel. Where Nature says ‘Die!’ Man says ‘I will live.’
According to the law previously in universal operation, Man should

have been limited in geographical area, killed by extremes of cold or
of heat, subject to starvation if one kind of diet were unobtainable,
and should have been unable to increase and multiply, just as are his
animal relatives, without losing his specific structure and acquiring
new physical characters according to the requirements of the new
conditions into which he strayed—should have perished except on
the condition of becoming a new morphological ‘species.’ But Man’s
wits and his will have enabled him to cross rivers and oceans by
rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, to shelter himself
from heat and rain, to prepare an endless variety of food by fire, and
to ‘increase and multiply’ as no other animal without change of form,
without submitting to the terrible axe of selection wielded by
ruthless Nature over all other living things on this globe. And as he
has more and more obtained this control over his surroundings, he
has expanded that unconscious protective attitude towards his
immature offspring which natural selection had already favoured and
established in the animal race, into a conscious and larger love for
his tribe, his race, his nationality, and his kind. He has developed
speech, the power of communicating, and above all of recording and
handing on from generation to generation his thought and
knowledge. He has formed communities, built cities, and set up
empires. At every step of his progress Man has receded further and
further from the ancient rule exercised by Nature. He has advanced
so far and become so unfitted to the earlier rule, that to suppose
that Man can ‘return to Nature’ is as unreasonable as to suppose
that an adult animal can return to its mother’s womb.
In early tribal times natural selection still imposed the death
penalty on failure. The stronger, the more cunning, the better
armed, the more courageous tribe or family group, exterminated by
actual slaughter or starvation the neighbouring tribes less gifted in
one or all of these qualities. But from what we know of the history of
warlike exterminating savage tribes at the present day—as, for
instance, the Masai of East Africa—it seems unlikely that the method
of extermination—that is, of true natural selection—had much effect
in man’s development after the very earliest period. Union and

absorption were more usual results of the contact of primitive tribes
than struggles to the death. The expulsion of one group by another
from a desired territory was more usual than the destruction of the
conquered. In spite of the frequent assertions to the contrary, it
seems that neither the more ancient wars of mankind for conquest
and migration nor the present and future wars for commercial
privilege have any real equivalence to the simple removal by death
of the unfit and the survival and reproduction of the fit, which we
know as Natural Selection.[7]
The standard raised by the rebel man is not that of ‘fitness’ to the
conditions proffered by extra-human nature, but is one of an ideal
comfort, prosperity, and conscious joy in life—imposed by the will of
man and involving a control and in important respects a subversion
of what were Nature’s methods of dealing with life before she had
produced her insurgent son. The progress of man in the
acquirement of this control of Nature has been one of enormous
rapidity within the historical period, and within the last two centuries
has led on the one hand to immensely increased facilities in the
application of mechanical power, in locomotion, in agriculture, and in
endless arts and industries; and on the other hand to the mitigation
of disease and pain. The men whom we may designate as ‘the
Nature-searchers’—those who founded the New Philosophy of the
Invisible College at Oxford and the Royal Society in London—have
placed boundless power in the hands of mankind.
11. The Attainment by Man of the Knowledge of his Relations to
Nature.
But to many the greatest result achieved by the progress of
Natural Knowledge seems not to have been so much in its practical
applications and its material gifts to humanity as in the fact that Man
has arrived through it at spiritual emancipation and freedom of
thought.
In the latter part of the last century man’s place in Nature became
clearly marked out by the accumulation of definite evidence. The

significance and the immeasurable importance of the knowledge of
Nature to philosophy and the highest regions of speculative thought
are expressed in the lines of one who most truly and with keenest
insight embodied in his imperishable verse the wisdom and the
aspirations of the Victorian age:—
‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies:
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.’
To many the nearer approach to that ‘understanding’ has seemed
the greatest and a sufficient result of scientific researches. The
recognition that such an understanding leads to such vast
knowledge would seem to ensure further and combined effort to
bring it nearer and nearer to the complete form, even if the perfect
understanding of the ‘all in all’ be for ever unattainable.
Nevertheless, the clearer apprehension, so recently attained, of
man’s origin and destiny, and of the enormous powers of which he
has actually the control, has not led to any very obvious change in
the attitude of responsible leaders of human activity in the great
civilized communities of the world. They still attach little or no
importance to the acquirement of a knowledge of Nature: they
remain fixed in the old ruts of traditional ignorance, and obstinately
turn their faces towards the past, still believing that the teachings
and sayings of antiquity and the contemplation, not to say the
detailed enumeration, of the blunders and crimes of its ancestors,
can furnish mankind with the knowledge necessary for its future
progress. The comparative failure of what may be called the
speculative triumph of the New Philosophy to produce immediate
practical consequences has even led some among those prejudiced
by custom and education in favour of the exclusive employment of
Man’s thought and ingenuity in the delineation and imaginative
resurrection of the youthful follies and excesses of his race, to
declare that the knowledge of Nature is a failure, the New
Philosophy of the Nature-searchers a fraud. Thus the well-known

French publicist M. Brunetière has taken upon himself to declare
what he calls the Bankruptcy of Science.
12. The Regnum Hominis.
As a matter of fact the new knowledge of Nature—the newly-
ascertained capacity of Man for a control of Nature so thorough as to
be almost unlimited—has not as yet had an opportunity for showing
what it can do. A lull after victory, a lethargic contentment, has to
some extent followed on the crowning triumphs of the great Nature-
searchers whose days were numbered with the closing years of that
nineteenth century which through them marks an epoch. No power
has called on Man to arise and enter upon the possession of his
kingdom—the ‘Regnum Hominis’ foreseen by Francis Bacon and
pictured by him to an admiring but incredulous age with all the
fervour and picturesque detail of which he was capable. And yet at
this moment the mechanical difficulties, the want of assurance and
of exact knowledge, which necessarily prevented Bacon’s schemes
from taking practical shape, have been removed. The will to possess
and administer this vast territory alone is wanting.
13. Man’s Destiny.
Within the last few years an attempt to spur the will of Englishmen
in this direction has been made by some who have represented that
this way lie great fortunes, national ascendancy, imperial
domination. The effort has not met with much success. On the other
hand, I speak for those who would urge the conscious and
deliberate assumption of his kingdom by Man—not as a matter of
markets and of increased opportunity for the cosmopolitan dealers in
finance—but as an absolute duty, the fulfilment of Man’s destiny,[8] a
necessity the incidence of which can only be deferred and not
avoided.
This, is indeed, the definite purpose of my discourse; to point out
that civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with
extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living

organisms associated with him such a special state of things by his
rebellion against natural selection and his defiance of Nature’s pre-
human dispositions, that he must either go on and acquire firmer
control of the conditions or perish miserably by the vengeance
certain to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may
indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature
who by every step forward renders himself liable to greater and
greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in one single
step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to a vast and
magnificent kingdom who has been finally educated so as to fit him
to take possession of his property, and is at length left alone to do
his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many important respects, the
laws of his mother Nature by which the kingdom was hitherto
governed; he has gained some power and advantage by so doing,
but is threatened on every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto
restrained: no retreat is possible—his only hope is to control, as he
knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and disasters. They
already make him wince: how long will he sit listening to the fairy-
tales of his boyhood and shrink from manhood’s task?
A brief consideration of well-ascertained facts is sufficient to show
that Man, whilst emancipating himself from the destructive methods
of natural selection, has accumulated a new series of dangers and
difficulties with which he must incessantly contend.
14. Man and Disease.
In the extra-human system of Nature there is no disease and
there is no conjunction of incompatible forms of life, such as Man
has brought about on the surface of the globe. In extra-human
Nature the selection of the fittest necessarily eliminates those
diseased or liable to disease. Disease both of parasitic and
congenital origin occurs as a minor phenomenon. The congenitally
diseased are destroyed before they can reproduce: the attacks of
parasites great and small either serve only to carry off the
congenitally weak, and thus strengthen the race, or become

harmless by the survival of those individuals which, owing to peculiar
qualities in their tissues, can tolerate such attacks without injury,
resulting in the establishment of immune races. It is a remarkable
thing—which possibly may be less generally true than our present
knowledge seems to suggest—that the adjustment of organisms to
their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature apart from Man,
that diseases are unknown as constant and normal phenomena
under those conditions. It is no doubt difficult to investigate this
matter, since the presence of Man as an observer itself implies
human intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that every
disease to which animals (and probably plants also) are liable,
excepting as a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to
Man’s interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses,
are not known except in domesticated herds and those wild
creatures to which Man’s domesticated productions have
communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild
game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts have
become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man brings his
unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and horses into contact
with the parasite, that it is found to have deadly properties.[9] The
various cattle-diseases which in Africa have done so much harm to
native cattle, and have in some regions exterminated big game,
have per contra been introduced by man through his importation of
diseased animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all,
animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter things such
as insects, shell-fish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have been
brought into a condition of ‘adjustment’ to their parasites as well as
to the other conditions in which they live: it is this most delicate and
efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets. A solitary
case of a ravaging epidemic constantly recurring amongst animals
living in extra-human conditions, one of a strangely interesting
character, is the phosphorescent disease of the sand-shrimps or
sand-hoppers. This is due to a microscopic parasite, a bacterium,
which infests the blood and is phosphorescent, so that the infected
sand-hopper has at night the brilliancy of a glow-worm. The disease

is deadly, and is common among the sand-hoppers dwelling in the
sandy flats of the north coast of France, where it may readily be
studied.[10] It has not been recorded as occurring in this country. It
is not at all improbable that this disease is also in truth one which
only occurs in the trail of Man. It is quite likely that the artificial
conditions of sewage and garbage set up by Man on the sea-coast
are responsible for the prevalence of this parasite, and the weakly
receptivity of the too numerous sand-hoppers.
It is probable enough that, from time to time, under the influence
of certain changes of climate and associated fauna and flora—due to
meteoric or geologic movements—parasitic disease has for a time
ravaged this or that species newly exposed to it; but the final result
is one of the alternatives, extinction or adjustment, death or
toleration. The disease does not establish itself as a scourge against
which the diseased organism incessantly contends. It either
obliterates its victim or settles down with it into relations of
reciprocal toleration.
Man does not admit this alternative either for himself or for the
domesticated and cultivated organisms which he protects. He ‘treats’
disease, he staves off ‘the adjustment by death,’ and thus
accumulates vast populations of unadjusted human beings, animals
and plants, which from time to time are ravaged by disease—
producing uncertainty and dismay in human society. Within the past
few years the knowledge of the causes of disease has become so far
advanced that it is a matter of practical certainty that, by the
unstinted application of known methods of investigation and
consequent controlling action, all epidemic disease could be
abolished within a period so short as fifty years. It is merely a
question of the employment of the means at our command. Where
there is one man of first-rate intelligence employed in detecting the
disease-producing parasites, their special conditions of life and the
way to bring them to an end, there should be a thousand. It should
be as much the purpose of civilized governments to protect their
citizens in this respect as it is to provide defence against human

aggression. Yet it is the fact that this immensely important control of
a great and constant danger and injury to mankind is left to the
unorganized inquiries of a few enthusiasts. So little is this matter
understood or appreciated, that those who are responsible for the
welfare of States, with the rarest exceptions, do not even know that
such protection is possible, and others again are so far from an
intelligent view as to its importance, that they actually entertain the
opinion that it would be a good thing were there more disease in
order to get rid of the weakly surplus population!
In the spring of 1905 I was enabled to examine in the Pasteur
Institute in Paris, the minute spiral thread (see Fig. 6) which has just
been discovered and shown to be the cause of the most terrible and
widely spread of human diseases, destroying the health and strength
of those whom it does not kill and damaging the lives of their
children, so that it has been justly said that this malady and the use
of alcohol as a beverage are together responsible for more than half
the disease and early death of the mature population of Europe. For
more than thirty years, a few workers, here and there, have been
searching for this parasite, and the means of suppressing the awful
curse of which it is the instrument. It would have been discovered
many years ago had greater value been set on the inquiries which
lead to such discoveries by those who direct the public expenditure
of civilized States. And now the complete suppression of this dire
enemy of humanity is as plain and certain a piece of work to be at
once accomplished as is the building of an ironclad. But it will not be
done for many years because of the ignorance and unbelief of those
who alone can act for the community in such matters. The discovery
—the presentation to the eye and to exploring manipulation—of that
well-nigh ultra-microscopic germ of death, seemed to me, as I gazed
at its delicate shape, a thing of greater significance to mankind than
the emendation of a Greek text or the determination of the exact
degree of turpitude of a statesman of a bygone age.

Fig. 6.
The minute vibratile organism discovered by Fritz Schaudinn in 1905
in the eruptive formations and other diseased growths of syphilis—and
called by him Spirochæta pallida (since altered to Spironema pallidum):
a, common phase; b, shortened and thickened form leading on to e the
Trypanosoma-like form; c, d, stages of division by fission; f, elongated
multi-nuclear form; g, segments into which it breaks up; h, supposed
conjugation of male and female units (after Krystallovitch and
Siedlevski).
This organism, though resembling the spirillar forms of Bacteria, is
probably not one of that group of vegetable parasites, but allied to the
minute animal parasites known as Trypanosomes (see pp. 145 and 181
and figures.) It is regarded as the ‘germ’ or active cause of the terrible
disease known as Syphilis.
The knowledge of the causation of disease by bacterial and
protozoic parasites is a thing which has come into existence, under
our very eyes and hands, within the last fifty years. The parasite,
and much of its nature and history, has been discovered in the case

of splenic fever, leprosy, phthisis, diphtheria, typhoid fever, glanders,
cholera, plague, lock-jaw, gangrene, septic poisoning (of wounds),
puerperal fever, malaria, sleeping sickness, and some other diseases
which are fatal to man. In some cases the knowledge obtained has
led to a control of the attack or of the poisonous action of the
parasite. Antiseptic surgery, by defeating the poisonous parasite, has
saved not only thousands upon thousands of lives, but has removed
an incalculable amount of pain. Control is slowly being obtained in
regard to several others among these deadly microbes in various
ways, most wonderful of which is the development, under man’s
control, of serums containing antitoxins appropriate to each disease,
which have to be injected into the blood as the means of either cure
or protection. But why should we be content to wait long years,
even centuries, for this control, when we can have it in a few years?
If more men and abler men were employed to study and experiment
on this matter, we should soon make an end of all infectious disease.
Is there any one, man or woman, who would not wish to contribute
to the removal from human life of the suffering and uncertainty due
to disease, the anguish and misery caused by premature death? Yet
nothing is done by those who determine the expenditure of the
revenues of great States towards dealing adequately with this
matter.[11]
15. The Increase of Human Population.
Whilst there is a certainty of Man’s power to remove all disease
from his life, a difficulty which he has already created for himself will
be thereby increased. That difficulty is the increase of human
population beyond the capacity of the earth’s surface to provide food
and the other necessities of life. By rebelling against Nature’s
method, Man has made himself the only animal which constantly
increases in numbers. Whenever disease is controlled his increase
will be still more rapid than at present. At the same time no attempt
at present has been made by the more advanced communities of
civilized men to prevent the multiplication of the weakly or of those
liable to congenital disease. Already something like a panic on this

subject has appeared in this country. Inquiries have been conducted
by public authorities. But the only possible method of dealing with
this matter, and in the first place of estimating its importance as
immediate or remote, has not been applied. Man can only deal with
this difficulty created by his own departure from Nature—to which
he can never return—by thoroughly investigating the laws of
breeding and heredity, and proceeding to apply a control to human
multiplication based upon certain and indisputable knowledge.
It may be a century, or it may be more than five centuries, before
the matter would, if let alone, force itself upon a desperate
humanity, brutalized by over-crowding, and the struggle for food. A
return to Nature’s terrible selection of the fittest may, it is
conceivable, be in this way in store for us. But it is more probable
that humanity will submit, before that condition occurs, to a
restriction by the community in respect of the right to multiply, with
as good a grace as it has given up the right to murder and to steal.
In view of this Man must, in entering on his kingdom, at once
proceed to perfect those studies as to the transmission of qualities
by heredity which have as yet been only roughly carried out by
breeders of animals and horticulturists.
There is absolutely no provision for this study in any civilized
community, and no conception among the people or their leaders
that it is a matter which concerns any one but farmers.
16. An Untouched Source of Energy.
The applications of steam and electricity have so far astonished
and gratified the rebel Man, that he is sometimes disposed to
conclude that he has come to the end of his power of relieving
himself from the use of his own muscles for anything but refined
movements and well-considered health-giving exercises. One of the
greatest of chemical discoverers at this time living, M. Berthelot, has,
however, recently pressed on our attention the question of the
possibility of tapping the central heat of the earth and making use of
it as a perennial source of energy. Many competent physicists have

expressed the opinion that the mechanical difficulties of such a
boring, as would be necessary, are insuperable. No one, however,
would venture to prophesy, in such a matter as this, that what is
prevented by insuperable obstacles to-day may not be within our
powers in the course of a few years.
17. Speculations as to the Martians.
Such audacious control of the resources of our planet is suggested
as a possibility, a legitimate hope and aim, by recent observations
and speculations as to our neighbour, the planet Mars. I do not
venture to express any opinion as to the interpretation of the
appearances revealed by the telescope on the surface of the planet
Mars, and indeed would take the most sceptical attitude until further
information is obtained. But the influence of these statements about
Mars on the imagination and hopes of Man seems to me to possess
considerable interest. The markings on the surface of the planet
Mars, which have been interpreted as a system of canals, have been
known and discussed for many years (see Figs. 7 and 8). It has
recently been observed that these canals undergo a recurrent
seasonal change of appearance consistent with the hypothesis that
they are periodically filled with water, which is derived from the polar
snow-caps of the planet at the season of greatest polar heat. It is
suggested that Mars is inhabited by an intelligent population, not
necessarily closely similar to mankind, but, on the contrary unlike
mankind in proportion as the conditions of Mars are unlike those of
the Earth, and that these inhabitants have constructed by their own
efforts the enormous irrigation works upon which the fertility and
habitability of their planet, at the present time, depend. These
speculations lead M. Faguet of the French Academy to further
reflections. The Martians who have carried out this vast manipulation
of a planet must be not only far in advance of the inhabitants of the
Earth in intelligence and mechanical power, as a result of the greater
age of their planet and the longer continuance there of the evolution
of an intelligent race, but such a vast work and its maintenance
would seem to imply a complete unanimity among the Martians, a

world-wide peace and common government. Since we can imagine
such a result of the prolonged play of forces in Mars, similar to those
at work in our own Earth, and even obtain some slight confirmation
of the supposition, may we not indulge in the surmise that some
such future is in store for Man, that he may be able hereafter to deal
with great planetary factors to his own advantage, and not only
draw heat from the bowels of the earth for such purposes as are at
present within his scope, but even so as to regulate, at some distant
day, the climates of the earth’s surface, and the winds and the rain
which seem now for ever beyond his control?

Fig. 7.
Drawing of Mars in November with Long. 156° on the meridian,
shewing the ‘Mare Sirenum’ (the shaded sickle-shaped area), connected
with a network of ‘canals’ shewing ‘spots’ or ‘oases’ at the intersections
of the canals and a system of spherical triangles as the form of the
mesh-work.—From ‘Mars,’ by Perceval Lowell.
Fig. 8.

Drawing of Mars as seen on November 18th, 1894 (Long. 325° on the
meridian) by Mr. Perceval Lowell at the Flagstaff Observatory, Arizona,
U.S.A., shewing ‘twin’ or ‘double’ canals, connected northwards with the
‘Mare Icarium.’ The two figures here reproduced only give a small
portion of the system of canals, oases and seas of the planet Mars,
mapped by Mr. Lowell.
18. The Investigation of the Human Mind.
In such a desultory survey as that on which I have ventured, of
Man’s kingdom and its dangers, it occurs to me to mention another
area upon which it seems urgent that the activities of nature-
searchers should be immediately turned with increased power and
number. The experimental study of his body and of that of animals
has been carried far and with valuable results by inquiring Man. But
a singularly small amount of attention has as yet been given to the
investigation of Man’s mind as a natural phenomenon and one which
can be better understood to the immense advantage of the race.
The mind of Man—it matters not for my immediate argument
whether it be regarded as having arisen normally or abnormally from
the mind of animals—is obviously the one and all-powerful
instrument with which he has contended, and is destined hereafter
to contend, against extra-human Nature. It is no less important for
him to know the quality, the capacity, the mode of operation of this
instrument, its beginnings and its limitations, than it is for him to
know the minutest details of the workings of Nature. Just as much in
the one case as in the other, it is impossible for him to trust to the
imperfect analysis made by ancient races of men and the traditions
and fancies handed down in old writings—produced by generations
who had not arrived at the method of investigation which we now
can apply. Experiment upon the mental processes of animals and of
Man is greatly needed. Only here and there has anything been done
in this direction. Most promising results have been obtained by such
observations as those on hypnotism and on various diseased and
abnormal states of the brain. But the subject is so little explored that

wild and untested assertions as to the powers of the mind are
current and have given rise to strange beliefs, accepted by many
seriously-intentioned men and women. We boldly operate upon the
minds of children in our systems of education without really knowing
what we are doing. We blindly assume that the owners of certain
minds, traditionally trained in amusing elegancies, are fit to govern
their fellow-men and administer vast provinces; we assume that the
discovery and comprehension of Nature’s processes must be the
work of very few and peculiar minds; that if we take care of the
body the mind will take care of itself. We know really nothing of the
heredity of mental qualities, nor how to estimate their presence or
absence in the young so as to develop the mind to greatest
advantage. We know the pain and the penalty of muscular fatigue,
but we play with the brains of young and old as though they were
indestructible machinery. What is called experimental psychology is
only in its infancy, but it is of urgent necessity that it should be
systematically pursued by the application of public funds in order
that Man may know how to make the best use of his only weapon in
his struggle to control Nature.
19. Man’s Delay: its Cause and Remedy.
Even the slight and rapid review just given of Man’s position, face
to face with Nature, enables us to see what a tremendous step he
has taken, what desperate conditions he has created by the
wonderful exercise of his will; how much he has done and can do to
control the order of Nature, and how urgent it is, beyond all that
words can say, for him to apply his whole strength and capacity to
gaining further control, so that he may accomplish his destiny and
escape from misery.
It is obvious enough that Man is, at present, doing very little in
this direction; so little that one seeks for an explanation of his
apathy, his seeming paralysis.
The explanation is that the masses of the people, in civilized as
well as uncivilized countries, are not yet aware of the situation.

When knowledge on this matter reaches, as it inevitably will in time,
to the general population, it is certain that the democracy will
demand that those who expend the resources of the community, and
as government officials undertake the organization of the national
defence and other great public services for the common good, shall
put into practice the power of Nature-control which has been gained
by mankind, and shall exert every sinew to obtain more. To effect
this, the democracy will demand that those who carry on public
affairs shall not be persons solely acquainted with the elegant
fancies and stories of past ages, but shall be trained in the
acquisition of natural knowledge and keenly active in the skilful
application of Nature-control to the development of the well-being of
the community.
It would not be necessary to wait for this pressure from below
were the well-to-do class—which in most modern States exercises so
large an influence both in the actual administration of Governments
and by example—so situated as to be in any way aware of the
responsibilities which rest upon it. Traditional education has, owing
to causes which are not far to seek, deprived the well-to-do class of
a knowledge of, and interest in, Man’s relation to Nature, and of his
power to control natural processes. During the whole period of the
growth of man’s knowledge of Nature—that is to say, ever since the
days of Bruno—the education of the well-to-do has been directed to
the acquirement of entertaining information and elegant
accomplishments, whilst ‘useful knowledge’ has been despised and
obtained, when considered necessary, from lower-class ‘workmen’ at
workmen’s wages. It is of course not to be overlooked that there
have been notable exceptions to this, but they have been
exceptions. Even at the present day, in some civilized States, a body
of clerks, without any pretence to an education in the knowledge of
Nature, headed by gentlemen of title, equally ignorant, are entrusted
with, and handsomely paid and rewarded for, the superintendence of
the armies, the navies, the agriculture, the public works, the
fisheries, and even the public education of the State. When
compelled to seek the assistance of those who have been trained in

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