Part 3

It was of course as the result of its invasion by _Porphyrococcus_ that the sea assumed the intense purple colour which seems so natural to us, but which so distressed the more aesthetically minded of our great grand-parents who witnessed the change. It is certainly curious to us to read of the sea as having been green or blue. I need not detail the work of Ferguson and Rahmatullah who in 1957 produced the lichen which has bound the drifting sand of the world’s deserts (for it was merely a continuation of that of Selkovski), nor yet the story of how the agricultural countries dealt with their unemployment by huge socialistic windpower schemes.

It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion, and it was not till 1940 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using Kehlmann’s solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of the nutrition and support of the emo was more difficult, and was only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air. Schwarz never got such good results, but the news of his first success caused an unprecedented sensation throughout the entire world, for the birth-rate was already less than the death-rate in most civilised countries. France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was intensified by the Papal Bull “Nunquam prius audito”, and the similar fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960.

As we know ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country less than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman. The effect on human psychology and social life of the separation of sexual love and reproduction which was begun in the 19th century and completed in the 20th is by no means wholly satisfactory. The old family life had certainly a good deal to commend it, and although nowadays we bring on lactation in women by injection of placentin as a routine, and thus conserve much of what was best in the former instinctive cycle, we must admit that in certain respects our great grand-parents had the advantage of us. On the other hand it is generally admitted that the effects of selection have more than counterbalanced these evils. The small proportion of men and women who are selected as ancestors for the next generation are so undoubtedly superior to the average that the advance in each generation in any single respect, from the increased output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft, is very startling. Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the population in almost all countries.

It is perhaps fortunate that the process of becoming an ectogenetic mother of the next generation involves an operation which is somewhat unpleasant, though now no longer disfiguring or dangerous, and never physiologically injurious, and is therefore an honour but by no means a pleasure. Had this not been the case, it is perfectly possible that popular opposition would have proved too strong for the selectionist movement. As it was the opposition was very fierce, and characteristically enough this country only adopted its present rather stringent standard of selection a generation later than Germany, though it is now perhaps more advanced than any other country in this respect. The advantages of thorough-going selection, have, however, proved to be enormous. “The question of the ideal sex-ratio is still a matter of violent discussion, but the modern reaction towards equality is certainly strong.”

Our essayist would then perhaps go on to discuss some far more radical advances made about 1990, but I have only quoted his account of the earlier applications of biology. The second appears to me to be neither impossible nor improbable, but it has those features which we saw above to be characteristic of biological inventions. If reproduction is once completely separated from sexual love mankind will be free in an altogether new sense. At present the national character is changing slowly according to quite unknown laws. The problem of politics is to find institutions suitable to it. In the future perhaps it may be possible by selective breeding to change character as quickly as institutions. I can foresee the election placards of 300 years hence, if such quaint political methods survive, which is perhaps improbable, “Vote for Smith and more musicians”, “Vote for O’Leary and more girls”, or perhaps finally “Vote for Macpherson and a prehensile tail for your great-grandchildren”. We can already alter animal species to an enormous extent, and it seems only a question of time before we shall be able to apply the same principles to our own.

I suggest then that biology will probably be applied on lines roughly resembling the above. There are perhaps equally great possibilities in the way of the direct improvement of the individual, as we come to know more of the physiological obstacles to the development of different faculties. But at present we can only guess at the nature of these obstacles, and the line of attack suggested in the myth is the one which seems most obvious to a Darwinian. We already know however that many of our spiritual faculties can only be manifested if certain glands, notably the thyroid and sex-glands, are functioning properly, and that very minute changes in such glands affect the character greatly. As our knowledge of this subject increases we may be able, for example, to control our passions by some more direct method than fasting and flagellation, to stimulate our imagination by some reagent with less after-effects than alcohol, to deal with perverted instincts by physiology rather than prison. Conversely there will inevitably arise possibilities of new vices similar to but even more profound than those opened up by the pharmacological discoveries of the 19th century.

The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870 medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called it “Institutes of medicine”. Disease was looked at from the point of view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur’s discovery of the nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made it possible to abolish one group of diseases. But it also diverted scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that, were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease and cancer. Certain diseases such as cancer are probably not due to specific organisms, whilst others such as phthisis are due to forms which are fairly harmless to the average person, but attack others for unknown reasons. We are not likely to deal with them effectually on Pasteur’s lines, we must divert our view from the micro-organism to the patient. Where the doctor cannot deal with the former he can often keep the patient alive long enough to be able to do so himself. And here he has to rely largely on a knowledge of physiology. I do not say that a physiologist will discover how to prevent cancer. Pasteur started life as a crystallographer. But whoever does so is likely at least to make use of physiological data on a large-scale.

The abolition of disease will make death a physiological event like sleep. A generation that has lived together will die together. I suspect that man’s desire for a future life is largely due to two causes, a feeling that most lives are incomplete, and a desire to meet friends from whom we have parted prematurely. A gentle decline into the grave at the end of a completed life’s work will largely do away with the first, and our contemporaries will rarely leave us sorrowing for long.

Old age is perhaps harder on women than on men. They live longer, but their life is too often marred by the sudden change which generally overtakes them between forty and fifty, and sometimes leaves them a prey to disease, though it may improve their health. This change seems to be due to a sudden failure of a definite chemical substance produced by the ovary. When we can isolate and synthesize this body we shall be able to prolong a woman’s youth, and allow her to age as gradually as the average man.

Psychology is hardly a science yet. Like biology it has arrived at certain generalizations of a rather abstract and philosophic character, but these are still to some extent matters of controversy. And though a vast number of most important empirical facts are known, only a few great generalizations from them--such as the existence of the subconscious mind--have yet been made. But anyone who has seen even a single example of the power of hypnotism and suggestion must realise that the face of the world and the possibilities of existence will be totally altered when we can control their effects and standardize their application, as has been possible, for example, with drugs which were once regarded as equally magical. Infinitely greater, of course, would be the results of the opening up of systematic communication with spiritual beings in another world, which is claimed as a scientific possibility. Spiritualism is already Christianity’s most formidable enemy, and we have no data which allows us to estimate the probable effect on man of a religion whose dogmas are a matter of experiment, whose mysteries are prosaic as electric lighting, whose ethics are based on the observed results in the next world of a good or bad life in this. Yet that is the prospect before us if spiritualism obtains the scientific verification which it is now demanding, not perhaps with great success.

I have only been able, in the time at my disposal, to traverse a very few of the possible fields of scientific advance. If I have convinced anyone present that science has still a good deal up her sleeve, and that of a sufficiently startling character, I shall be amply repaid. If anything I have said appears to be of a gratuitously disgusting nature, I would reply that certain phenomena of normal life do seem to many to be of that nature, and that these phenomena are of the utmost scientific and practical importance.

I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he feels to be higher than himself.

The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions. These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters, disintegrators, deicides. In the past they have been, in general, men like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine Julius, but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there will be more Darwins. Such men are interested primarily in truth as such, but they can hardly be quite uninterested in what will happen when they throw down their dragon’s teeth into the world.

I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any detail the future applications of their science. The central problems of life for them may be the relationship between the echinoderms and brachiopods, and the attempt to live on their salaries. They do not see themselves as sinister and revolutionary figures. They have no time to dream. But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to confess it.

I have given above a very small selection from my dreams. Perhaps they are bad dreams. It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. And though personally I am Victorian enough in my sympathies to hope that after all family life, for example, may be spared, I can only reiterate that not one of the practical advances which I have predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. If a chemist or physicist living at the end of the seventeenth century had been asked to predict the future application of his science he would doubtless have made many laughable errors in the best Laputan style, but he would have been certain that it would somehow be applied, and his faith would have been justified.

We must regard science then from three points of view. First it is the free activity of man’s divine faculties of reason and imagination. Secondly it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for wealth, comfort and victory, for “νόσων τ’ ἀπείρους καὶ μακραίωνας βίους,” gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security and stagnation. Finally it is man’s gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil elements in his own soul.

None of these conquests will ever be complete, but all, I believe will be progressive. The question of what he will do with these powers is essentially a question for religion and aesthetic. It may be urged that they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

The answer to this contention may, I think, be found in the daily papers. For scores of centuries idealists had urged that wars must cease and all the earth be united under one rule. As long as any other alternative was possible it was persisted in. The events of the last nine years constituted a reductio ad absurdum of war, but when we ask who was responsible for this we shall find that it was not the visionaries but men like Black, Kekule, and Langley, who enlarged man’s power over nature until he was forced by the inexorable logic of facts to form the nucleus of an international government.

We have already reacted against the frame of mind that engendered the league of nations, but we have not reacted at all completely. The league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are many people, and ordinary normal people, who favour the idea in one form or another of a world-state. I do not suggest that a world-state will arise from the present league--or for the matter of that from the third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority. The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war is a very dirty business.

No doubt there is a fair chance that the possibility of human organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand years for another opportunity. But to the student of geology such a period is negligible. It took man 250,000 years to transcend the hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation.

I think then that the tendency of applied science is to magnify injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns at last and extinguishes the evil at its source. Marx’ theory of industrial evolution is a particular example of this tendency, though it does not in the least follow that his somewhat artificial solution of the problem will be adopted.

It is probable that biological progress will prove to be as incompatible with certain of our social evils as industrial progress has proved to be with war or certain systems of private ownership. To take a concrete example it is clear that the second biological invention considered by my future essayist would be intolerable in conjunction with our present system of relations between classes and sexes. Moral progress is so difficult that I think any developments are to be welcomed which present it as the naked alternative to destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus which is necessary before man will take the moral step in question.

To sum up then, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example of the disruptive results that we may constantly expect from the progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his accessions of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for stage. To those who believe in the divinity of that part of man which aspires after knowledge for its own sake, who are able, in the words of Boethius:

“te cernere finis, “Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem”.

the prospect will appear most hopeful. But it is only hopeful if mankind can adjust its morality to its powers. If we can succeed in this, then science holds in her hands one at least of the keys to the thorny and arduous path of moral progress, then:

“Per cruciamina leti, “Via panditur ardua justis, “Et ad astra doloribus itur”.

That is possibly a correct large-scale view, but it is only for short periods that one can take views of history sufficiently broad to render the fate of one’s own generation irrelevant. The scientific worker is brought up with the moral values of his neighbours. He is perhaps fortunate if he does not realize that it is his destiny to turn good into evil. The moral and physical (though not the intellectual) virtues are means between two extremes. They are essentially quantitative. It follows that an alteration in the scale of human power will render actions bad which were formerly good. Our increased knowledge of hygiene has transformed resignation and inaction in face of epidemic disease from a religious virtue to a justly punishable offence. We have improved our armaments, and patriotism, which was once a flame upon the altar, has become a world-devouring conflagration.

The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.

There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.

No doubt many people hope that such a religion may develop from christianity. The human intellect is feeble, and there are times when it does not assert the infinity of its claims. But even then:

“Though in black jest it bows and nods”

* * * * *

“I know it is roaring at the gods Waiting the last eclipse.”

The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it.

“Black is his robe from top to toe, His flesh is white and warm below, All through his silent veins flow free Hunger and thirst and venery, But in his eyes a still small flame Like the first cell from which he came Burns round and luminous, as he rides Singing my song of deicides.”

FOOTNOTES

[Footnote 1: Embden, Grafe, and Schmitz. _Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie_, Vol. 113, p. 67, 1921.]

[Footnote 2: The Hindus have recognized the special and physiological relation of man to the cow by making the latter animal holy. A good Hindu would no more kill a cow than his foster-mother. But the holiness of the cow has unfortunately extended to all its products, and the extensive use of cowdung in Indian religious ceremonies is disgusting to the average European. The latter however, is insensitive to the equally loathsome injunctions of the Catholic Church with regard to human marriage. It would perhaps be better if both marriage and milking could be secularized.]