Louis Berman

“ When the nightingale warbles passionately and the mocking bird gurgles provokingly, when the robin fills its scarlet breast and the starling floats in ecstasy through the perfumed air, when the pigeon coyly woos its mate, and the butterfly flirts with the dazzling multicolors of its wings, when all the marvelous devices of sex attraction in nature, selection and courting, mating and reproducing are pondered, who but must wonder at the infinite possibilities of reaction of the sex hormones? ”

“ The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an incurable disease. ”

“ But perpetually, the underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him in his ascent.
Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and speculation in intellect which mankind is. ”

“ Not only do the internal secretions open up before us the great hope—that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect. They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human nature and evolution.
Every department of human life, the questions of labor and industry, science and art, education, puericulture, international problems, crime and disease, may be illuminated. ”

“ It is the bubble of education all over again. What in our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental barracks.
Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe. They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. ”

“ Every unpleasant social fact, every outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity, incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German, American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. ”

“ But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities, jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases? Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps, the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What future have they as they recur in the generations? ”

“ Indeed, does not the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us: that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no future?
That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always will be the same." ”

“ For all history provides the material, literature the critique, biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer. ”

“ The implications for the statesman, the educator, the vocational expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents, deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and dull types, as well as of those two master interests of mankind, Sex and War, are manifest. The mystery of the individual, in all his distinct uniqueness, begins to be penetrated. And so every phase of social life, in which the individual is at bottom the final determinant, must be reviewed in the light of the new knowledge. ”

“ As someone has noted, to ask a criminal to promise not to misbehave, when discharged from prison, is like asking a typhoid fever patient to promise not to have a temperature above ninety-nine degrees the next morning. For a large proportion of criminals—the percentage has yet to be determined, although the most recent police commissioner of Chicago has estimated it at ninety per cent—punishment for a period of time and then letting him go free is like imprisoning a diphtheria carrier for a while and then permitting him to commingle with his fellows and spread the germ of diphtheria. ”

“ What a theme for the reflections upon appearances the eminent Victorians loved!
There are possibilities the imagination may envisage. One may suppose such a cretin, with all his other ductless glands intact, grown successfully to manhood under careful medical guidance. No one but himself is aware of his affliction, outside of his medical advisers. Luck aids him to rise in the world, or perhaps he has been born with a spoon of the precious metals in his mouth. Adolescence, love and marriage dance their sequence. Our hero of course keeps his dread secret to himself. ”

“ Like God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution. But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior? ”

“ Reflexes, instincts, habits, tendencies and emotions are involved in their machinery. The development and normal functioning of the intellect, the pure reason as Kant called it, are controlled by them. Brain, without them in solution, without enough of them in that wonderful solution, the blood, sleeps or remains dormant like the butterfly in the cocoon. The cretin, who has not enough thyroid or no thyroid, is an imbecile because of his deficiency. Supply him with thyroid from outside sources, feed him animal thyroid, be it of the sheep, the pig, or the goat, and behold a miracle! ”

“ What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime. ”

“ A synthesis of the known in the field provides even now a means of understanding and control of the perplexities of human nature and life that are like a vista seen from a mountain top after the lifting of a fog.
The most precious bit of knowledge we possess today about Man is that he is the creature of his glands of internal secretion. That is, Man as a distinctive organism is the product, the by-product, of a number of cell factories which control the parts of his make-up. Much as the different divisions of an automobile concern produce the different parts of a car. ”

“ Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena, were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no fanfare of trumpets. ”

“ SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. ”

“ Marvelous are all the manifestations of the reproductive necessity. Considering that reproduction was at first merely a form of growth, a discontinuous kind of growth, that seized upon sex as a splendid means to escape death, the chemical methods evolved arouse a sense of awe. A baby is born with her or his glands practically as fixed for her or him as the color of the eyes. Thymus and pineal keep him a child, keep him unsexed. Then at puberty, a new current is added to the calmly flowing river, and behold! ”

“ The luxuriant vegetation of the torrid zone flourished and swarmed, for the temperature all over was what it is today at the equator. Gigantic vegetarians were the animals, creatures like the dinosaurs, enormous, gargoylean monsters, of an incredible size and strength, but clumsy and grotesque, with small brains and little intelligence. For what need was there for brain and intelligence when food lay about so abundantly at hand for them to gorge themselves. ”

“ Rejuvenation, especially in connection with sexual activity, as well as with tissue and spiritual elasticity, has been one of the haunting phantoms of the imagination for as long as we have records of articulate humanity. Together with El Dorado, the Elixir of Youth has shared the honors with the Philosopher's Stone. The idea of employing the chemical materials of the sex glands, the testes or the ovaries, to bring back youth, to restore juvenility, had not, as far as we know, occurred to anyone who at any rate put himself on record, by word or deed, until 1889. ”

“ But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life, undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain cells. ”

“ Consciousness is a circuit. Swinging around in it are the wish-feelings generated by the vegetative dynamo. From each viscus, from the stomach and intestine, from the kidneys and bladder, from the liver and spleen, from the blood-vessels, from all the glands of external and internal secretion, there flow along the vegetative nerves, to and from the brain, energies of various qualities and intensities. All the members of the vegetative apparatus are more or less active, and so all our wishes are all more or less active. ”

“ To be sure, at every moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and defeat for the others. But the Freudian material per se—the sex material—is it not merely the by-product of a certain state of society? A sane society would eliminate nearly all of Freudian disease, but still have original human nature upon its hands. Why is it that of two individuals exposed to the same situation, one will develop a complex, the other will remain immune? ”

“ Their inferiority has thrown them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few. War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to wholesale slavery and carnage.
Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? ”

“ Since every step of the daily routine or adventure, from waking to sleeping, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, working, idling, fighting, playing, feeling, enjoying, sorrowing, every shade of emotion and nuance of mood, in short every phase of happiness and unhappiness, are endocrine episodes in the life history of the individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep as life itself. ”

“ SCIENCE VS. ART Not that all the vast accumulation needs to be thrown pell-mell, higgledy-piggledy into the discard. The love lyrics of the poet, the magic of the emotions of Shelley and Poe, for instance, with their marvelous music and exquisite intonings of feeling, furnish us with important information. They are the facts of the sex life, as much as the song of the nightingale, or the mocking laughter of the cuckoo pursued by its mate. ”

“ We thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest adventure ever attempted in time and space. ”

“ Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old, very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of civilization. ”

“ It is human nature for us to be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid. ”

“ NEW PSYCHOLOGY There are the claims and outcries and promises of the psychologists—the specialists in the probing of the human soul and human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them into two schools—the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious, the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the Freudians. ”

“ War and Sex, those two master interests of mankind, may be understood and handled sympathetically as they have never before. The reactions of man alone, and man in the crowd, will be clarified. The red thread of individuality which runs through the woof and warp of all human affairs will be unraveled.
Inevitably, customs, morals, codes of procedure and practice, institutions, all those expressions of opinion which make conduct, all the currents which contrive the infinite variety of life, will be transmitted into another set of values. ”