P. S. To sum it all up I should like to advance another theory of mine in regard to the duality of sex. It is quite probable that in the beginning (biologically speaking) the sexual progenitor of the human race or of evoluted species contained in itself the full chemical content of what has since been evoluted into the so-called male and female. Such being the case its chemical responsiveness to the movements of the universe, chemical, physical, spiritual, or let us say emotional, and to its immediate surroundings, was complete in itself. It was not divided into two sexes and therefore not dependent on any alienated portion of itself for its chemical, spiritual, emotional or physical satiation. What happened to it individually and momentarily was all that could happen to it. It needed no complementary organism, no other half, to make its understanding of, its reaction to, life complete. That is not true to-day. Man (male or female) appears to be individual and complete, but it is an illusion. He is complete and separate as an organism in everything save his chemical responsiveness to the universe which requires his union, not merely physically but spiritually, with his sexual companion to be complete. Their union sexually, temperamentally, emotionally, intellectually and so on is required before a full measure of chemical responsiveness to life can be attained in either. It may seem otherwise in individual cases, but it is not so. Such being the case (and a world of biological data might be here introduced), you have the amazing spectacle of love which confounds all theories of life, which laughs at death, and, in its fullest expression, defies all human theory and understanding, acting as a new non-understandable thing, and letting in dreams, emotions, conditions from a deeper world than any we know and whereby this shadow called existence is resolved, modified, made over into something else so that it bears no resemblance to its former state. It becomes apparently what it well may be: a dream and an illusion of beauty or pain or delight, or all. Evolutionary progress seems to be based on this non-understandable, mysterious, idealistic reaction and contact which baffles the most searching suggestions and intuitions of the imagination and leaves us awed and dumb before the great classics of desire and passion.
But the great fact, not to be lost sight of, is that love, complete chemical responsiveness to the universe, is only attained in the reunion of the separated chemical constituents of the original asexual individual, and without love or this union there is no full chemical-spiritual responsiveness to the universe. Man does not soar emotionally into the empyrean except in love, and by “in love” I mean when stirred by the sex impulse which makes for mate-seeking and union. It does not follow that there need ever be physical satiation to complete this union. Spiritual pollination can spring from the merest accidental contact for a moment with a mate. But the fact remains that the greatest, most complete spiritual and physical responsiveness to the universe (which after all is a mere matter of chemical reaction) springs from this responsiveness, which springs from love, and as such our so-called love (desire, passionate chemical response, physical and spiritual) becomes the most significant fact in the universe as we now understand it. For what is the universe without intellectual perception on our part, the beholding of it with the eye, the perception of it with the senses, the responsiveness to it through the emotions?
MORE DEMOCRACY OR LESS? AN INQUIRY
IN my youth no country was so significant to me as the United States, of course, so wonderful, so fully representative of the natural spirit of aspiration in man, his dreams, hopes, superior and constructive possibilities. All that America did, could do, had done, was in line with the noblest and best principles in Nature, as I then understood Nature. And I still believe that this nation might be one of tremendous significance in connection with intellectual development, but some marked changes will need to come about.
Plainly, in a material and (socially speaking) internal organic way, it has accomplished much, even if thus far its intellectual stature has not proved so tremendous. We are, as I see it now, a deeply-illusioned people, concerned solely with material things when they are really no longer very important—certainly not as much so as when the land was new and without material means—and yet we remain almost entirely interested in such things when our minds should be beginning to grasp the wider possibilities of life—still fighting over beef and coal trusts and railroads and cables, the mere money return involved—who is to have the control of them—when we ought to be intensely concerned with the mysteries of chemistry and physics and a more pliable form of government.
Though my personal feeling once was that America was destined to take high rank, if not complete leadership, in the intellectual world, I am now not so sure. At this writing it looks as though it might retrograde, and that speedily, and give place to newer lands—newer in spirit, I mean. It may not, but the signs are somewhat against it. Our literature has plainly developed to the level of the best seller and then stopped. Our art is sporadic, and with a few exceptions lymphatic and strongly suggestive of older forms. The futuristic dream did not originate here. Our science—well, who are our American scientists anyhow? Loeb? Carel? Tesla? Bell? All foreigners.
In architecture, markedly allied, I must say, to mechanics, in which we flourish, we have done better—yes, and in anything and everything which relates, or has, to mechanics, trade, commercial organization. In those things, indeed, we have appeared to do most astoundingly, although I am firmly convinced that the boundless and virgin resources of the land have had as much—more, in fact—to do with this than anything else. We have not had so much to create as to develop, and other countries and other financiers—their trade geniuses—have done quite as well if not better in some instances than have we. I refer to such concerns and individuals as the English East India Company, the Royal Dutch Shell, the Allgemeine Elektrische Gesellschaft, the Cunard, Allen and other such organizations, to say nothing of such individuals as Lord Strathcona, Baron Shibusawa, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cowdray, Alfred Harmsworth, Sir Thomas Lipton, etc.
Indeed the one thing I would like to point out most definitely in passing is this: that the by now ingrown idea in every average American’s mind that all of the most significant inventions and discoveries, mental as well as mechanical, of the last hundred years or more are entirely of American origin is not true by any means. Far from it. Those great prime movers—for instance, the steam engine, the electric motor, and the gas engine (as well as its natural child, the automobile)—came to us from abroad. So did the telegraph, the railroad, radium, X-ray photography and—what is most remarkable, considering that the ironclad came from here—every step in steel manufacture. The telephone was invented by a Scot who was twenty-five years old when he became an emigrant to our country.
Other countries, so I was condescendingly taught—Egypt, Greece, Rome, France, England, Spain (for a little while) and Holland—in times past and even approximating our own day, had been blessed with some opportunities and had done considerable toward fulfilling what I was taught was not so much the material as the spiritual and moral well-being of man—his intellectual and therefore his mental and social happiness. But nevertheless and never before, however (or since), had any country had, or could have, the natural, noble and spiritual impulse, to say nothing of the amazing opportunities, which America, the United States, was enjoying—a vast and fertile soil, an equable climate, engrossing varieties of scenery, a people given over entirely to industry, frugality and proper social and spiritual ideals. In other words America, according to my teachers, was destined to lead the world in thought, truth, beauty, liberty, justice, industry, and what not achievement, among other things.
Well, consider Greece in its day, faced by or placed in a virgin and undiscovered world, To the south and east Egypt and Phœnicia, to the north and west darkness, mystery, an unexplored world. No ships but oared boats—not even the trireme at first—no compass, no machinery, no implements of agriculture, and consider that to-day we quote Galen, Hippocrates and Æsculapius, its doctors; Euripides, Sophocles, Æschylus and Aristophanes, its playwrights; Herodotus and Xenophon, its historians; Demosthenes, its orator; Homer, Anacreon, Pindar and Sappho, its poets; Æsop and Helodorus, its writers; Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and twenty others, its philosophers—the greatest in all the world—Solon, Alcibiades, Pericles, Aristides, and ten others, its statesmen. Also we marvel at Praxiteles, Phidias and Skopas, its sculptors; Alexander, Miltiades and Themistocles, its generals; and Archimedes, its mathematician. Nations, like individuals, are apparently born with genius, or they are not. They think, or they do not; they are dull merchants and tricksters like the Carthaginians and Phœnicians, or they are not.