Part 4

In this father the son had both a prototype and a teacher, the mother having died early. To spare the son the bitterness of miscalculations, and disapproving the whole current method of education, which with books of tales and terrifying histories, educated the children to be children instead of men, he raised at once the whole curtain of the temple of life and initiated the youth in the difficult art of life; taught him the intimate connection between human beings and the remainder of the creation, where certainly the human being stood highest on his planet, but still continued to remain a part of the creation, able in a measure to modify the action of the forces in nature but nevertheless ruled by them, this was a rational nature worship if nature signifies everything existing, and worshiping is an acknowledgment of the dependency of the existing laws of nature. By this he removed Christianity's mania for greatness of individuals, fear of the unknown, death and God, and created a prudent man, watchful of his actions and personally accountable for his deeds. The regulator of the lower propensities of human beings he found in the organ, which through its perfected form separates the human being from the beasts, the cerebrum. Judgment, founded on liberal knowledge should govern, and when necessary suppress the lower propensities to keep up a higher type. Nourishment and propagation were the lowest impulses, and therefore in common with the plants. The sensibilities, as the animals? lower rudiments of thinking were called, because they were localized in the arteries, spinal cord and other lower organs, must be absolutely subordinate to the cerebrum in a human being of the highest type, and the individuals, who could not regulate their lower impulses but were thinking with their spinal cord, were of the lower form. Therefore the old man warned against believing in youthful enchantment and enthusiasm, which could just as easily lead to crime as to virtue. This, however did not exclude the great passions of universal benefit, which did not belong to the feelings but were powerful utterances of the will toward good. All that youth could produce was completely worthless, for as a rule it lacked originality, being only the pure thoughts of older predecessors which the after-coming youths had taken up as their own and with great gestures would spread abroad. Originality could only be said to develop when the brain had matured, just as true propagation with a following education of the offspring could only take place when man had reached virility and had the ability to provide means for existence and education of the children. A sure sign of the immature brain's inability to judge was the constant Grossenwahn, in which youth and women were living. Youth has its future before it, as is habitually said, but that assertion is shattered because manhood shows a less per cent, of mortality than youth, and the unwitty reply that if youth is a fault it passes away in time, does not overturn the precept, that youth is a present defect, an imperfection, thus a fault, which is admitted by the acknowledgment that it can pass away, for that which never existed cannot pass away. All youthful attacks on the existing are hysterical spells of the inability of the weak to bear pressure, an evidence of the same lack of prudence as in the hornet when attacking a human being to its own sure destruction. As a good illustration of the want of judgment and syllogism in the youths he brought forth the book Robinson Crusoe, which was written for the plain purpose of showing the inferiority of a life under natural conditions and isolation, and yet for a century it had regularly been misunderstood by youths as a psalm to savage life while the book represented it as a punishment for the foolish youth who abused culture's wealth like a savage. This little trait at the same time showed of how much lower ontological form youth was, betraying it in his sympathy for Indians and other rudimentary laggers-behind, just as the feelings which eventually would be laid aside, like the thyroid gland, which has come into disuse by human beings but still remains on its old place.

When the son could not refute these bitter truths with rational arguments, declaring that his feelings, yes his most sacred feelings, rose against such a dry tenet, the father declared him to be a hornet which was still thinking with ganglia, and he warned him against dissolute fancies, or conclusions on insufficient ground and want of great material, not to be mistaken for scientific quick-reasoning, where from seemingly few premises--appearing few because the middle terms were omitted--new conclusions could be drawn, when, as if by a chemical union, two older ideas enter each other and form a new thought. Ontogenism had shown how the human fœtus was developed through all the earlier stages from the amœba through the frog and up to the anthropomorphic, how then could the youth question but that the spirit of a child must pass through the history of man through the animal and the savage upward, as long as the body was growing and that consequently man stood far ahead of youth! He warned him especially not to let the lowest of all our propensities, the sexual impulse cloud his judgment, for by its power it had so long dazzled sound reason, that erudite men still bore the superstition that woman was as high a type as man, yes even higher according to the opinion of some men, whereas she really is but an intermediate form between man and child, as is shown by the fœtal development, where the male at a certain stage is female but the female never male. To warn the young man of the danger of being over-powered by sexual impulses, was the same as to cast a shadow on woman, and the son soon commenced to make what the father called ganglionic conclusions, the bearing of which was that the Lieutenant-Colonel was a woman hater. And how could he do otherwise, when always hearing his father narrating how this or that man had thrown away his future on affairs with women, and how great geniuses had wasted their talents by procreation, and sacrificed happiness and position for a wife, who had been faithless and children who died before of mature age. Propagation was only for the lesser spirits, the greater ones should live in their works, and so forth.

Under such guidance the son grew up. He was born an unusually delicate child but with a harmoniously developed body; he had finely organized senses, quick and sure perception, keen understanding and a nobility of mind which manifested itself in forbearance and approachableness to mankind. He understood early how to regulate his life, to suppress the plant and animal propensities, and when he had accumulated a vast material of observations and knowledge, he began to work it up. His brain soon showed its prolific capacity--from a couple of known quantities to find the wanted unknown, from old thoughts to produce new ones, in a word the capacity of what is called originality. He was the coming regenerator and possessed ability to see the inter-relations in disorder, to discover the invisible force behind the phenomena, and even the concealed and extremely compound motives in the actions of men. Therefore his schoolmates looked upon him with suspicion, and the teachers discerned in him a silent critic of what they communicated as unalterable facts.

His arrival at the university occurred contemporarily with the great popular movements which concerned the parliamentary reform. Borg perceived well the defects of the representation by a four-class system, while the state consists of at least twenty classes with different interests and different abilities to judge in so complicated a problem as that of the government of a people, but on the other hand he could not consent to revert to the organization of the hord or tribe where everybody had equally much or equally little to say. He perceived at once that this simplifying of the method of governing, where the multitude should do it was not a reform suited to the needs of the time, moreover he had lately seen the right of universal suffrage in France produce an Emperor and a sham representation of lawyers, merchants and army officers, with the exclusion of laborers, farmers, savants and scientific men, thus only three classes, arbitrarily selected by the Emperor, were represented. He had calculated that the most correct would be a perfect class representation with proportional rights of representation, well balanced according to the interests of the respective classes and with due consideration given to the highest interests, or the higher right of the wise to own the preponderance, as they promote progress more than the ignorant. This, to be sure, the authors of the two chamber systems had already had in mind, when they perceived the necessity of referring questions to committees and disentangling certain questions by special committees, even by committees of experts. To complete the assembly, so that all interests would be guarded and all points taken and all information of the condition of the realm made accessible, each class of people, from the highest to the lowest, should elect representatives in proportion partly to their numbers and partly to their importance for the advancement of the country as a whole. Neglecting the Royal Court, which together with the monarch ought to be assorted under the foreign department, to which they properly belong, for the monarch is only permitted to represent the nation before foreign powers, this consultative, though not a legislative, class parliament would be constructed as follows, viz., First class: land owners and renters, tenants, overseers, foremen on farms and so forth. The second class: operators of mines and quarries, manufacturers and their laborers. Third class: merchants, mariners, pilots, hotel owners, porters, hackmen, and all employed in banks, custom houses, postal service, railroads and telegraphs. Fourth class: civil and military officers, clergymen, with servants, janitors and privates. Fifth class: savants, teachers, literateurs, and artists. Sixth class: physicians, apothecaries, superintendents of poorhouses. Seventh class: house owners, capitalists and rentiers.

In what proportion to elect from each class was the question, which could not be solved off hand, but it was necessary that skillful men with knowledge in the science of government should probe the new order of representation, which would therefore only and always be provisional. Over this consultative assembly should sit a council of specialists in the science of government, who had been professionally trained for that difficult calling, so that this most complicated of all arts would not be pursued by bunglers and enterprising amateurs, as had hitherto been done, and statesmen's accession to office would be preceded by a careful investigation of their past life, their private financial and social situation. This would spur youth to self-education and heedfulness of what they were doing, and would form a body of excellent men, while so called irreproachable conduct, or negative virtue, without talents would not as hitherto be the short cut to advancement. This would constitute the new nobility which would succeed the old military and court nobility, and the fact that this nobility established itself only through a natural selection of the fittest was a guarantee that the country would be ruled in the best manner. The Reichstag by only having to vote an opinion, not any decision, would thus furnish a vast material of investigation, not a legionary army that could be bribed and wheedled to commit voting outrages.

The young man, however, was too prudent to express his opinions, at a period, when noblemen were synonymous with the degenerated, left behind and blasé, and the masses were pushing so blindly forward that the mechanics were the ones that worked mostly into the hands of their coming class enemies, the peasants; a prudent man could only smile and wait. And he waited until he saw the four-chamber system succeeded by a one-class representation, when the realm was henceforth governed by the former peasantry alone. These historical events had, however, a very great influence in directing the young man's thoughts and development. He had there seen in what terrible confusion the thought mechanism of the majority was, and when he read the protocols of the Reichstag, and noticed the speeches of the most influential and brilliant speakers, he observed that what he called ganglionic reasoning, causing valvular contraction and congestion of the heart, exerted the greatest influence on the public opinion. It seemed to him sometimes as though it was not the question of the fatherland or progress, but only the motionary's triumph to gain his own will by fallacies, gross blunders in logic and hideous distortions of facts. In him was aroused, through observation, the great suspicion that everything was intended as a struggle for power, for the enjoyment of using the power of the brain for putting other brains into consonance, of sowing seeds of thought in the brain bark of others, where they would grow as parasites like the mistletoe, while the mother tree would proudly lift her shoulders at the thought that the parasites up in the crown still were nothing but parasites. This was the foundation of his ambition, to satisfy which required knowledge and experience through study, travel and conversation with learned and illustrious men. In the midst of this eternally movable chaos of contending forces and interests, he sought a place of anchorage for his being, the center of the sphere which reality threw around him--in himself. Instead of, like weak Christians assuming an external support in God, he took the real, palpable in his own self and sought to create his personality to a perfect type of man whose life and deeds would not violate anyone's rights, convinced that the fruit of a well-nursed tree could not fail to be of use and rejoicing to others. All the confusion and awkwardness that he saw in the struggles of those who say they are living for others while in reality they only live on others, on others' gratitude, others' opinion and others' acknowledgment, he avoided, holding his own straight course convinced that a single great and strong individual could not help doing more good than these masses of thoughtless people whose numbers stand in inverse ratio to their usefulness.

By this setting of his _ego_ he enforced a norm for his life, which led him to a high degree of morality, for, instead of relinquishing the final settlement to the uncertain hereafter, he regulated his deeds so that he had nothing left unsettled, he did not shift the blame from himself to an innocently suffering Christ, but in conscious self-responsibility he committed no acts that would awaken the need of a scapegoat.

Thereby he learned to rely only upon himself and never to take advice, always reflecting on the probable consequences of an act. This did not prevent him from suffering with nervousness like his generation, which was born and brought up during the period of steam and electricity when the vital activity was increased in speed. How could it be otherwise considering that he must destroy millions of old brain cells, storages for antiquated impressions, that every moment when he would form a judgment, he must carefully sift out superannuated axioms, which tried to come forward as premises. It was a work of total reconstruction which caused these disorders in the nervous system which are all laid to our ancestors' alcoholism and sexual excesses, but which pathological symptom was an uttering of increased vitality accompanied by extreme sensibility, like the crawfish when it shifts its shell, or the bird when molting. It was the regeneration of a genus or at least a variety of man which appeared to the old as diseased or unsound because it was in a process of development, something that they were disinclined to acknowledge as they themselves would be the norm and called themselves sound, although they were in a state of decomposition.

This nervous sensibility of the growing youth was enhanced by moderation in eating and drinking, and vigorous disciplining of the sexual desires. He found it debasing to place oneself into the ungovernable state of a lunatic or a savage through the use of fermented drinks, and his soul was far too aristocratic to play a moment's illicit love with a prostitute. With this, however, followed an increasing acuteness of the senses and a sensibility to disagreeable impressions which sometimes brought him disgust where others of a coarser nature would have found enjoyment.

Thus he felt abased for a few hours when his morning coffee was not strong enough, and a poorly painted billiard ball or a soiled cue constrained him to turn away in search of another place. A badly wiped glass raised his loathing and he felt the smell of human being on a newspaper which another had read, while he could on others' furniture see human grease deposited on the polish, and he always opened the window when the maid had arranged the room. However, if he was traveling and necessity constrained, then he could shut off, as it were, all conduits from his organs of perceptions and harden himself against all disagreeable sensations.

When he had completed his studies at the University, in natural science, that least dependent of all sciences, because opinion plays a lesser roll than a collection of material, he received a place as assistant in the Royal Academy of Science.

He had applied for a situation here for the purpose of obtaining a view of the kingdoms of nature, collected and classified in one place, and if possible to read therein and discover the great connection if there was any, or the universal confusion which probably was there. His intentions soon became manifest, especially when he could no longer avoid the danger of their enticing from him, his project to classify the birds after an entirely different method than the current one. The professors, who of course did not want to be lowered to collectors of material for a young man, and were not willing to become obsolete with their works, took an instinctive aversion to the scrutinizer. The first obstacle to the intruder was made by placing him to detail work of a subordinate character which was disgusting to his sense of beauty, during six months he had to change alcohol in the fish collection; at first he was retching from the nauseating odor, but after he had overcome this disagreeable perception he turned furiously to the study of the fishes, and as he worked rapidly he had inside of the half year thoroughly studied the great material. He had been standing the whole winter in a cold, dirty and semi-dark kitchen where he had been smelling bad alcohol, frozen his hands and contracted a severe chronic cystitis.

Afterwards he was set to writing labels for the algæ. As he had received no instructions in calligraphy at the University and by nature he had a wreak, unsteady hand, all the labels were discarded and he gained the name of being useless.--He could not even write.--But in two months, during which time he attended a writing school, and in the evenings sat at home over writing book and copy, he acquired a beautiful and legible hand and at the same time gained a more complete knowledge of the algæ than he had before, while into the bargain he learned the inestimable art of penmanship. The professors who had thought he would reject such subordinate work soon saw what kind of grit he had and that he understood how to use all adversities for his benefit, increasing his knowledge while turning aside softly from the leash and warding off the blows.

His improved penmanship was to be a new source of humiliations, for he was now placed at copying office records and letters, sinking finally, as they believed, to an ordinary copyist's rôle. Without complaining he took the occupation and, at the same time learning foreign languages, he had the opportunity of glancing into the secrets of all these great men, which they thought would be worthless to him. Thus he saw the scientific questions of the period, debated through correspondence and he discovered the ways to the secret meetings of learned societies, gained knowledge about the subterranean passages to distinction, and the opportunities to make his investigations fruitful. Thus he was unassailable, and just as they believed they had crushed him he arose again.