Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
1922
The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.
—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.
Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce hastaken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species.In the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature ofthe queer beings about him. As he grows, the research continues,amplifies, broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracyof the data he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature,consciously cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature—everyman feels himself entitled to that degree from the universityof disillusioning experience. In defense of his claim, only thelimitations of his articulate faculty will curb the vehemence of hisindictment of his fellows.
For all history provides the material, literature the critique,biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. Thehistorical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collectionof chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of timeand space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production havebeen multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power havebeen systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man hasremained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target forthe barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.
The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,structures of societies, variations in the scales of value thatindividuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom,law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented ofman preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and ofpredatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally areevoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe andcataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.
Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Manis linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with hisbrethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beastis a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and thesatisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort offreedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Unive