“I grant you that the soul is not to be found in the dissecting-room, Herman,” he answered. “I, as you know, have devoted my life to the empirical investigation of truth, and I do not decry the method. But you cannot ignore the interior way of analysis, through the one thing we know most intimately—consciousness.”
“A by-product of matter,” answered Lazaroff contemptuously. “Or, if we want to be precisely true, the sum and substance of cell consciousness.”
“Well, throw the blame on the cell, then, in the modern fashion,” said Sir Spofforth, smiling. “I doubt, though, whether you have solved the one big problem by creating some million smaller ones. On the contrary, you are postulating a hierarchy of intelligences, quite in the Catholic fashion. If brain consciousness is not a specialized form of omniscient consciousness, how does the brainless amoeba find its food and engulf it, or the vine its supports? If you have robbed us of the abortive hope of saving the little empire of the brain beyond the change of death—and I deny even that entirely—some of us have identified consciousness with a non-material personality functioning through all life and fashioning it.”
“Vitalism!” scoffed Lazaroff.
I watched Esther’s eager face as she looked from one speaker to the other. Sir Spofforth seemed more agitated than the situation warranted, and I saw him glance at his daughter a little nervously before he answered.
“Herman, I repeat that I have given my life to scientific investigation,” he replied. “But I have always recognized the validity of the metaphysical inquiry. I believe Faith and Science have found their paths convergent. Lodge thinks so, too. Kelvin took that stand. James, your great psychologist, shifted before he died. Science must confine her activities within their natural bounds and not seek to play a pontifical part, or the excesses of the Scholastics will be repeated in a new and darker age.”
“I cannot agree with you,” cried Lazaroff vehemently. “An age is dawning when, relieved from their chains, men will look open-eyed into Nature to learn her secrets. Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening.
“It will go, that relic of degrading, savage superstition called the soul, the barbarous legacy of the ages enshrined in a hundred fairy stories. Science will rule. Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future. For we are outgrowing childish things. Man is coming of age. If only I could live to see it! But I was born a century too soon!”
The expression on Lazaroff’s face at that moment was so singular that I could not take my eyes away from it.
“It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too,” he cried. “Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead—”