FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying ‘Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die,’ and the poor, ’How long, O Lord, how long?’ But the pitiless reply still is that God helps those who help themselves.  This does not mean that if Man cannot find the remedy no remedy will be found.  The power that produced Man when the monkey was not up to the mark, can produce a higher creature than Man if Man does not come up to the mark.  What it means is that if Man is to be saved, Man must save himself.  There seems no compelling reason why he should be saved.  He is by no means an ideal creature.  At his present best many of his ways are so unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is compelled to pretend that pain is often a good.  Nature holds no brief for the human experiment:  it must stand or fall by its results.  If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment.

What hope is there then of human improvement?  According to the Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other equally senseless accident.

CREATIVE EVOLUTION

But this dismal creed does not discourage those who believe that the impulse that produces evolution is creative.  They have observed the simple fact that the will to do anything can and does, at a certain pitch of intensity set up by conviction of its necessity, create and organize new tissue to do it with.  To them therefore mankind is by no means played out yet.  If the weight lifter, under the trivial stimulus of an athletic competition, can ‘put up a muscle,’ it seems reasonable to believe that an equally earnest and convinced philosopher could ’put up a brain.’  Both are directions of vitality to a certain end.  Evolution shews us this direction of vitality doing all sorts of things:  providing the centipede with a hundred legs, and ridding the fish of any legs at all; building lungs and arms for the land and gills and fins for the sea; enabling the mammal to gestate its young inside its body, and the fowl to incubate hers outside it; offering us, we may say, our choice of any sort of bodily contrivance to maintain our activity and increase our resources.

VOLUNTARY LONGEVITY