It is, of course, not to be supposed that disease can altogether be banished from a world so highly artificial as that of the next century will be. Undoubtedly the growth of sanitary science and the knowledge of the larger facts of hygiene, which is only now beginning to dawn upon us, will have a great influence in correcting some of the evils which over-civilisation at present entails. But the very progress of the art of healing will no doubt have the effect of perpetuating in a manner the existence of illness. Every forward step in medicine serves to save alive some weakling that in a less advanced civilisation would die; and these survivors, possibly propagating their species, will have weak descendants, on whom whatever possibility of disease continues to exist will certainly fasten. The discovery of means by which we can make a weak “constitution” into a strong one is perhaps the least likely of medical innovations. It would be altogether contrary to the general spirit of the times anticipated to expect that we shall have steeled our hearts to the destruction of feeble lives as dangerous to the race. We are much more likely to go on finding better means to perpetuate them: and this means that there will always be work for the doctor, though the infective fevers will have been banished from the earth. Medicine, therefore, will still aspire. But apart from what are called occupation-diseases, caused by certain manufacturing processes (of which the more deadly, as phosphorus match-making, lead-glazing of earthenware and the manufacture of enamelled iron will before long certainly be abolished), the elaborate machinery and rapid travel of the new age must needs exact a certain toll of death and mutilation. The surgeon will have more to do than the physician. Frightful accidents will occur from time to time. The maim, the halt and the blind must pay the price of progress. And it is hardly possible that nervous diseases and insanity, incident to the pressure of civilisation, can be eliminated. But certainly the alleviations of all but the last, and even of that except in its extreme expression as total dementia, will have advanced to a high standard. We shall no doubt, for instance, have discovered means of so acting on the sensory system that we shall be able innocuously and temporarily to paralyse at any desired spot the nerves which transmit pain. Thus, during convalescence, the injured will suffer no discomfort except that of confinement, and our means of amusing the patient by talking machines that will read and sing to him, and the theatroscopes that will project before him moving and coloured pictures of life or the play, will make the sick bed almost a paradise.
As we have seen that, apart from the sentimental reasons which have been suggested,[7] animal and flesh foods must, for economical reasons, have been abandoned long before the end of the century, the grazing of cattle being far too expensive a method of utilising the soil, we may be quite sure that the sciences connected with agriculture will receive far greater attention than they now enjoy. It will grow more important with every decade to obtain the greatest possible tribute from the portions of land, steadily decreasing in area, which can be spared from the growing needs of the builder. Every discovery of the chemist which can be laid under contribution by the agriculturist will eagerly be seized upon. Every means which can be devised for replacing what we take from the soil will be utilised to the full: and of course the inevitable disappearance of the horse as a means of traction, and of the flocks and herds which now yield manure, and perhaps the gradual exhaustion of the minerals (as rock phosphates) from which artificial soil enrichers are prepared, will make it necessary to rearrange, on safe, economical and convenient lines, our present plans of sanitation. The insane wastefulness of draining into the sea cannot long be tolerated. Every conceivable means of conserving our mundane capital will have to be made use of. In other ways science will come to the rescue. The farmer’s sufferings from the depredations of vermin of various kinds will perhaps never be much affected by invention, because all nature is so curiously interdependent that the eradication of one pest has an awkward way of intensifying some greater evil: we destroy birds and are punished by a plague of caterpillars. The accidents of climate, too, can perhaps only be obviated in a very small measure, though the science of meteorology, constantly being helped by facilities for better observation-reporting, will unquestionably help the agriculturist by giving him timely warnings. It seems hardly possible to doubt that the eccentricities of climate and the unexpected shifting of the rainy season in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese war must have been caused by the vast atmospheric disturbances created by days and weeks of cannonading: and of course it is an old theory that heavy gun-fire “brings down the rain.” Military historians say that the number of wet-day battles altogether exceeds any expectation which could have been formed without allowing for effects of this sort. When science has pondered upon the subject, and instituted in an ordered manner experiments of a kind hitherto never taken very seriously, it may very well be that some means less violent than the detonation of explosives may be discovered by the practical meteorologist for creating disturbances in the atmosphere; and while it may not be possible to prevent excessive rainfall at inconvenient times, it seems easy to conceive that when there is moisture in the atmosphere we may be able to bring it down as rain. Of course this is a very different thing from breaking up droughts: and artificial rain-making cannot in itself be anything but a momentary expedient. The effects of deforestation have for some time been observed and the plan of improving waterless areas by the contrary process is already discussed. While it seems rather a “large order” to undertake to meddle with the balance of atmospheric composition on a large scale, especially as we know so little of the conditions that even success might very possibly be attended by unforeseen and perhaps calamitous results, there is nothing intrinsically absurd in the notion that we might adopt means on a vast scale for increasing oceanic evaporation and, utilising the exact foreknowledge of winds and air currents which we shall certainly have achieved, bring moisture and rain to arid tracts or countries suffering from drought. The operation would no doubt require to be stupendous, but the next century is not going to be afraid of stupendous operations; and anticipating vast and unforeseen progress in meteorology, it would be hazardous to believe that no practical use will be made of such progress.
While our knowledge and mastery of the planet we possess, and of its forces, are being steadily advanced by scientific discovery, and the researches of the pure scientist are constantly yielding practical results at first undreamed of, it is impossible to doubt that man’s knowledge of himself will make equal progress. And it is not alone the physical constitution of man that will be interrogated. Everything assists the belief that this century will be among other things the century of psychical advance. We appear to be on the verge of great discoveries concerning the human mind, and especially concerning the relation of body to consciousness. Hypnotism has only during a comparatively short time been the subject of systematic observation, even in France; but at any time during the last ten years results have been achieved which, if foreseen a century ago, would certainly have produced a widespread recrudescence of belief in witchcraft. What the developed science of a hundred years hence will be capable of would certainly be a great deal more surprising if we could foresee it to-day. It is reported from the Salpetrière Hospital that a woman, under hypnosis, has had the existence of a picture on a blank sheet of paper suggested to her with such vividness that, on the suggestion being revived at a subsequent period, even after a considerable interval, she was able to detect that the “picture” was upside down, the blank paper having been actually reversed. This phenomenon is attributed to a great accentuation of the sense of vision produced by hypnotism, it being supposed that the paper, perfectly blank on ordinary observation, had really some local irregularity of colour or surface which the sharpened vision of the subject was able, unconsciously, to utilise. What secrets in the mechanism of the senses may not this fore-shadow? Without any recourse to hypnotism, as we at present understand hypnotism, impressions have, in a number of instances sufficient to exclude all possibility of collusion or error, been conveyed from one mind to another without the use of any of the ordinary means of communication: and it is shown in experiments seriously conducted by trained observers that the faculties of thus communicating and receiving impressions can be steadily cultivated. In other words, it would appear that human consciousness possesses some sort of emanation, and although certain “ray” experiments possibly connected with the subject have not received universal acceptance, it is evident that the future is going to enlarge considerably our knowledge of the nature of mental process. At present we know nothing—and it has been said with some rashness that we must always remain in a like ignorance—of the interval between sense and consciousness. We know how the ear receives air-vibrations, how it collects and conducts them to the auditory nerves, carefully protecting itself, by the action of beautifully ordered springs and cushions, from the effects of vibrations violent enough to be dangerous to its own integrity. But even when we have followed vibrations as far as the nerve, and recognised the subtle variation of its own substance by which the nerve conducts the impression of them to the brain, we have no inkling of the means by which the phenomenon of consciousness which we call “mind” is produced. Well, now that by suggestion alone we can with perfect precision, and without the use of any air vibration whatever, cause a hypnotised person (or even a person who has at some earlier period been hypnotised but has recovered his normal state) to hear—in his mind alone—sounds which have no objective existence, just as vividly and clearly as any sounds we can physically produce, does it seem extravagant to believe that the whole mechanism of sense, nay, the dark mind-gulf beyond mechanism too, will receive full illumination from the science of the coming time? Such a discovery would, of course, throw utterly into shadow anything we have yet learned of the nature of man. It would bring us a step nearer to the knowledge of the unknown soul of him. What secrets might it not carry with it of those mysterious co-partners, mind and body, thought and brain? With this, the noblest subject that can be proposed to the intellect of man, the science of a hundred years hence will assuredly be busy, and imagination pales before the contemplation of a notion so vast. Limited as we are by the knowledge of our own time, we cannot even conjecture whither such discoveries might lead us. All we can affirm is that the whole outlook of man, nay, the nature of man himself, might very conceivably be changed by them, and the greatest problems of the thinker may be resolved when we eat of the fruit tendered us by this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps the soul of man may quail before the revelations in store, fearing that in the day we eat thereof we shall surely die.
[2] That is to say, the gases which are most difficult to liquefy, and which consequently store up most energy in liquefying, viz., hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, as distinguished from ammonia, carbon-dioxide, chlorine, and other gases relatively easy to liquefy. [↑]
[3] The Recent Development of Physical Science. By W. C. Whetham, F.R.S., 1904. London: John Murray. [↑]
[4] I do not forget that a good deal of what is on record as an account of experiments in transmutation is purely mystical writing, and that when Paracelsus and some of the French alchemists describe what appear to be chemical experiments they are in reality referring to something quite different. But the learned in these matters tell me that one of their chief difficulties arises from the fact that, contemporary with the mystics, there were other investigators who, not having the key to the occult significance of the masters’ writings, really devoted themselves to research, some valuable, if accidental, results of which have come down to us and are recorded in all text-books of chemistry. [↑]
[6] I might have “boggled” (to use one of Mr Andrew Lang’s stately colloquialisms) before this suggestion, but for a remark by Dr C. W. Saleeby, which may here be quoted, to keep me in countenance. “Malaria,” he writes in Nova Medica, Nov. 1904, “which causes more illness than any other disease, is already obsolescent. Tuberculosis, which causes more deaths than any other disease, can be disposed of, apparently, whenever the human race, now mightily smitten with internecine strife, decides that this campaign against a common foe is worth while. It takes some seconds to realise—or begin to realise—what the extinction of tuberculosis will signify in private and hospital practice. Yet the extermination of the last tubercle bacillus is an event quite certainly hidden in the womb of time—time pregnant by science.” [↑]