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.