Treponema
pallidum
has exterminated more great families than have all the wars of the world.
Likewise, alcoholics, morphinomaniacs, and cocaine addicts may beget defectives, who
pay during their entire life for the vices of their fathers. Indeed, the consequences of one's
faults are easily passed on to one's descendants. But it is far more difficult to give them
the benefit of one's virtues. Each individual puts his mark on his environment, his house,
his family, his friends. He lives as if surrounded by himself. Through his deeds, he may
transfer his qualities to his descendants. The child depends on his parents for a long
period. He has time to learn all that they can teach him. He uses his innate capacity for
imitation and tends to become like them. He takes on their true visage, and not the mask
that they wear in social life. In general, his feeling toward his father and mother is one of
indifference and of some contempt. But he willingly imitates their ignorance, vulgarity,
selfishness, and cowardice. Of course, there are many types of parents. Some of them
leave their offspring a heritage of intelligence, goodness, esthetic sense, and courage.
After their death their personality goes on living through their scientific discoveries, their
artistic production, the political, economic, or social institutions they have founded, or
more simply through the house which they have built, and the fields which they have
cultivated with their own hands. It is by such people that our civilization has been
created.
The influence of the individual upon the future is not equivalent to an extension of the
self in time. It takes place by means of the fragments of cell substance directly
transmitted by him to his children, or of his creations in the domains of art, religion,
science, philosophy, etc. Sometimes, however, personality seems really to extend beyond
physiological duration. There is in certain individuals a psychical element capable of
traveling in time.
3
As already mentioned, clairvoyants perceive not only events spatially
remote, but also past and future events. They seem to wander as easily in time as in
space. Or to escape from the physical continuum and contemplate the past and the future
as a fly could contemplate a picture if, instead of walking on its surface, it flew at some
distance above it. The facts of prediction of the future lead us to the threshold of an
unknown world. They seem to point to the existence of a psychic principle capable of
evolving outside the limits of our bodies. The specialists of spiritism interpret certain of
these phenomena as proof of the survival of consciousness after death. The medium
believes himself to be inhabited by the spirit of the deceased. He may reveal to the
experimenters some details known only to the dead man, and the exactness of which is
verified later. According to Broad, these facts could be interpreted as indicating the
persistence after death, not of the mind, but of a psychic factor capable of grafting itself
temporarily upon the organism of the medium. This psychic factor, in uniting with a
human being, would constitute a sort of consciousness belonging both to the medium and
to the defunct. Its existence would be transitory. It would progressively break up and
finally disappear. The results obtained by the spiritists' experiments are of great
importance. But their significance is not precise. For the clairvoyant there are no secrets.
At the present time, therefore, it does not seem possible to make a distinction between the
survival of psychic principle and a phenomenon of mediumistic clairvoyance.
3
See footnote #2.
9
To summarize. Individuality is not merely an aspect of the organism. It also constitutes
an essential characteristic of each component part of this organism. It remains virtual in
the fertilized ovum, and progressively unfolds its characteristics as the new being extends
into time. The ancestral tendencies of this being are forced to actualize by his conflict
with the environment. They incline his adaptive activities in a certain direction. In fact,
the mode of utilization of its surroundings by the body is determined by its innate
properties. Each individual responds to these surroundings in his own way. He chooses
among the things of the outer world those which increase his individualization. He is a
focus of specific activities. These activities are distinct but indivisible. The soul cannot be
separated from the body, the structure from the function, the cell from its medium, the
multiplicity from the unity, or the determining from the determined. We are beginning to
realize that our surface is not our real frontier, that it merely sets up between us and the
cosmic universe a plane of cleavage indispensable to our action. We are constructed like
the castles of the Middle Ages, whose dungeons were surrounded by several lines of
fortifications. Our inner defenses are numerous and entangled one with another. The skin
is the barrier that our microscopic enemies must not traverse. But we extend much farther
beyond it. Beyond space and time. We know the individual's center, yet ignore where his
outer limits are located. These limits, in fact, are hypothetical. Perhaps they do not exist.
Each man is bound to those who precede and follow him. He fuses in some manner into
them. Humanity does not appear to be composed of separate particles, as a gas is of
molecules. It resembles an intricate network of long threads extending in space-time and
consisting of series of individuals. Individuality is doubtless real. But it is much less
definite than we believe. And the independence of each individual from the others and
from the cosmos is an illusion.
Our body is made up of the chemical substances of the environment. These substances
enter it and become modified according to its individuality. They are built up into
temporary edifices, tissues, humors, and organs, which ceaselessly disintegrate and are
reconstructed during our whole life. After our death, they return to the world of inert
matter. Certain chemical compounds assume our racial and individual peculiarities. They
become truly ourselves. Others only pass through the body. They participate in the
existence of our tissues without taking any of their characteristics, just as wax does not
modify its chemical composition when made into statues of different shapes. They flow
through the organism like a large river, from which cells draw the substances required for
their growth, their maintenance, and their expenditure of energy. According to Christian
mystics, we receive from the outer world certain spiritual elements. The grace of God
permeates soul and body, just as atmospheric oxygen, or nitrogen from the food, diffuses
in our tissues.
Individual specificity persists during the entire life, although tissues and humors
continually change. The organs and their medium move at the rhythm of physiological
time, that is, at the rhythm of irreversible processes, towards definitive transformations
and death. But they always keep their inherent qualities. They are not modified by the
stream of matter in which they are immersed, any more than the spruce trees on the
mountains by the clouds passing through their branches. However, individuality grows
stronger or weaker according to environmental conditions. When these conditions are
particularly unfavorable, it dissolves. Sometimes, mental personality is less marked than
organic personality. One may rightly ask whether it still exists in modem men. Some
observers doubt its reality. Theodore Dreiser considers it a myth. It is certain that the
inhabitants of the new city show great uniformity in their mental and moral weakness.
Most of the individuals belong to the same type. A mixture of nervousness and apathy, of
vanity and lack of confidence in themselves, of muscular strength and tendency to
fatigue. Of genesic impulses, both irresistible and not strong, sometimes homosexual.
Such a state is due to profound disorders in the formation of personality. It does not
consist only in an attitude of mine, a fashion which could easily change. It expresses
either a degeneration of the race, or a defective development of the individual, or both
these phenomena.
This debasement is, in a certain measure, of hereditary origin. The suppression of
natural selection, as already mentioned, has caused the survival of children whose tissues
and consciousness are defective. The race has been weakened by the preservation of such
reproducers. The relative importance of this factor of degeneration is not yet known. As
we have already mentioned, the influence of heredity cannot be distinguished clearly
from that of environment. Feeble-mindedness and insanity surely have an ancestral cause.
The intellectual weakness observed in schools and universities, and in the population in
general, comes from developmental disorders, and not from hereditary defects. When
these flabby, silly young people are removed from their customary environment and
placed in more primitive conditions of life, they sometimes change for the better and
recover their virility. The atrophic character of the products of our civilization, therefore,
is not incurable. It is far from being always the expression of a racial degeneration.
Among the multitude of weak and defective there are, however, some completely
developed men. These, men, when closely observed, appear to be superior to the classical
schemata. In fact, the individual whose potentialities are all actualized does not resemble
the human being pictured by the specialists. He is not the fragments of consciousness
which psychologists attempt to measure. He is not to be found in the chemical reactions,
the functional processes, and the organs which physicians have divided between
themselves. Neither is he the abstraction whose concrete manifestations the educators try
to guide. He is almost completely wanting in the rudimentary being manufactured by
social workers, prison wardens, economists, sociologists, and politicians. In fact, he never
appears to a specialist unless this specialist is willing to look at him as a whole. He is
much more than the sum of all the facts accumulated by the particular sciences. We never
apprehend him in his entirety. He contains vast, unknown regions. His potentialities are
almost inexhaustible. Like the great natural phenomena, he is still unintelligible. When
one contemplates him in the harmony of all his organic and spiritual activities, one
experiences a profound esthetic emotion. Such an individual is truly the creator and the
center of the universe.
10
Modern society ignores the individual. It only takes account of human beings. It
believes in the reality of the Universals and treats men as abstractions. The confusion of
the concepts of individual and of human being has led industrial civilization to a
fundamental error, the standardization of men. If we were all identical, we could be
reared and made to live and work in great herds, like cattle. But each one has his own
personality. He cannot be treated like a symbol. Children should not be placed, at a very
early age, in schools where they are educated wholesale. As is well known, most great
men have been brought up in comparative solitude, or have refused to enter the mold of
the school. Of course, schools are indispensable for technical studies. They also fill, in a
certain measure, the child's need of contact with other children. But education should be
the object of unfailing guidance. Such guidance belongs to the parents. They alone, and
more especially the mother, have observed, since their origin, the physiological and
mental peculiarities whose orientation is the aim of education. Modern society has
committed a serious mistake by entirely substituting the school for the familial training.
The mothers abandon their children to the kindergarten in order to attend to their careers,
their social ambitions, their sexual pleasures, their literary or artistic fancies, or simply to
play bridge, go to the cinema, and waste their time in busy idleness. They are, thus,
responsible for the disappearance of the familial group where the child was kept in
contact with adults and learned a great deal from them. Young dogs brought up in
kennels with others of the same age do not develop as well as puppies free to run about
with their parents. It is the same with children living in a crowd of other children, and
with those living in the company of intelligent adults. The child easily molds his
physiological, affective, and mental activities upon those of his surroundings. He learns
little from children of his own age. When he is only a unit in a school he remains
incomplete. In order to reach his full strength, the individual requires the relative
isolation and the attention of the restricted social group consisting of the family.
The neglect of individuality by our social institutions is, likewise, responsible for the
atrophy of the adults. Man does not stand, without damage, the mode of existence, and
the uniform and stupid work imposed on factory and office workers, on all those who
take part in mass production. In the immensity of modern cities he is isolated and as if
lost. He is an economic abstraction, a unit of the herd. He gives up his individuality. He
has neither responsibility nor dignity. Above the multitude stand out the rich men, the
powerful politicians, the bandits. The others are only nameless grains of dust. On the
contrary, the individual remains a man when he belongs to a small group, when he
inhabits a village or a small town where his relative importance is greater, when he can
hope to become, in his turn, an influential citizen. The contempt for individuality has
brought about its factual disappearance.
Another error, due to the confusion of the concepts of human being and individual, is
democratic equality. This dogma is now breaking down under the blows of the
experience of the nations. It is, therefore, unnecessary to insist upon its falseness. But its
success has been astonishingly long. How could humanity accept such faith for so many
years? The democratic creed does not take account of the constitution of our body and of
our consciousness. It does not apply to the concrete fact which the individual is. Indeed,
human beings are equal. But individuals are not. The equality of their rights is an illusion.
The feeble-minded and the man of genius should not be equal before the law. The stupid,
the unintelligent, those who are dispersed, incapable of attention, of effort, have no right
to a higher education. It is absurd to give them the same electoral power as the fully
developed individuals. Sexes are not equal. To disregard all these inequalities is very
dangerous. The democratic principle has contributed to the collapse of civilization in
opposing the development of an elite. It is obvious that, on the contrary, individual
inequalities must be respected. In modem society the great, the small, the average, and
the mediocre are needed. But we should not attempt to develop the higher types by the
same procedures as the lower. The standardization of men by the democratic ideal has
already determined the predominance of the weak. Everywhere, the weak are preferred to
the strong. They are aided and protected, often admired. Like the invalid, the criminal,
and the insane, they attract the sympathy of the public. The myth of equality, the love of
the symbol, the contempt for the concrete fact, are, in a large measure, guilty of the
collapse of individuality. As it was impossible to raise the inferior types, the only means
of producing democratic equality among men was to bring all to the lowest level. Thus
vanished personality.
Not only has the concept of the individual been confused with that of the human being,
but the latter has been adulterated by the introduction of foreign elements, and deprived
of certain of its own elements. We have applied to man concepts belonging to the
mechanical world. We have neglected thought, moral suffering, sacrifice, beauty, and
peace. We have treated the individual as a chemical substance, a machine, or part of a
machine. We have amputated his moral, esthetic, and religious functions. We have also
ignored certain aspects of his physiological activities. We have not asked how tissues and
consciousness would accommodate themselves to the changes in the mode of life
imposed upon us. We have totally forgotten the important r61e of the adaptive functions,
and the momentous consequences of their enforced rest. Our present weakness comes
both from our unappreciation of individuality and from our ignorance of the constitution
of the human being.
11
Man is the result of heredity and environment, of the habits of life and thought imposed
upon him by modern society. We have described how these habits affect his body and his
consciousness. We know that he cannot adapt himself to the environment created by
technology, that such environment brings about his degradation. Science and machines
are not responsible for his present state. We alone are guilty. We have not been capable
of distinguishing the prohibited from the lawful. We have infringed natural laws. We
have thus committed the supreme sin, the sin that is always punished. The dogmas of
scientific religion and industrial morals have fallen under the onslaught of biological
reality. Life always gives an identical answer when asked to trespass on forbidden
ground. It weakens. And civilizations collapse. The sciences of inert matter have led us
into a country that is not ours. We have blindly accepted all their gifts. The individual has
become narrow, specialized, immoral, unintelligent, incapable of managing himself and
his own institutions. But at the same time the biological sciences have revealed to us the
most precious of all secrets--the laws of the development of our body and of our
consciousness. This knowledge has brought to humanity the means of renovating itself.
As long as the hereditary qualities of the race remain present, the strength and the
audacity of his forefathers can be resurrected in modern man by his own will. But is he
still capable of such an effort?
Chapter VIII
THE REMAKING OF MAN
1
SCIENCE, which has transformed the material world, gives man the power of
transforming himself. It has unveiled some of the secret mechanisms of his life. It has
shown him how to alter their motion, how to mold his body and his soul on patterns born
of his wishes. For the first time in history, humanity, helped by science, has become
master of its destiny. But will we be capable of using this knowledge of ourselves to our
real advantage? To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake
himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover
his true visage he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer. He
will not submit to such treatment unless driven by necessity. While surrounded by the
comfort, the beauty, and the mechanical marvels engendered by technology, he does not
understand how urgent is this operation. He fails to realize that he is degenerating. Why
should he strive to modify his ways of being, living, and thinking?
Fortunately, an event unforeseen by engineers, economists, and politicians took place.
The superb edifice of American finance and economics suddenly collapsed. At first, the
public did not believe in the reality of such a catastrophe. Its faith was not disturbed. The
explanations given by the economists were heard with docility. Prosperity would return.
But prosperity has not returned. Today, the more intelligent heads of the flock are
beginning to doubt. Are the causes of the crisis uniquely economic and financial? Should
we not also incriminate the corruption and the stupidity of the politicians and the
financiers, the ignorance and the illusions of the economists? Has not modern life
decreased the intelligence and the morality of the whole nation? Why must we pay
several billions of dollars each year to fight criminals? Why do the gangsters continue
victoriously to attack banks, kill policemen, kidnap, ransom, or assassinate children, in
spite of the immense amount of money spent in opposing them? Why are there so many
feeble-minded and insane among civilized people? Does not the world crisis depend on
individual and social factors that are more important than the economic ones? It is to be
hoped that the spectacle of civilization at this beginning of its decline will compel us to
ascertain whether the causes of the catastrophe do not lie within ourselves, as well as in
our institutions. And that we will fully realize the imperativeness of our renovation.
Then, we will be faced by a single obstacle, our inertia. And not by the incapacity of
our race to rise again. In fact, the economic crisis came before the complete destruction
of our ancestral qualities by the idleness, corruption, and softness of life. We know that
intellectual apathy, immorality, and criminality are not, in general, hereditary. Most
children, at their birth, are endowed with the same potentialities as their parents. We can
develop their innate qualities if we wish earnestly to do so. We have at our disposal all
the might of science. There are still many men capable of using this power unselfishly.
Modern society has not stifled all the focuses of intellectual culture, moral courage,
virtue, and audacity. The flame is still burning. The evil is not irreparable. But the
remaking of the individual demands the transformation of modern life. It cannot take
place without a material and mental revolution. To understand the necessity of a change,
and to possess the scientific means of realizing this change, are not sufficient. The
spontaneous crash of technological civilization may help to release the impulses required
for the destruction of our present habits and the creation of new modes of life.
Do we still have enough energy and perspicacity for such a gigantic effort? At first
sight, it does not seem so. Man has sunk into indifference to almost everything except
money. There are, however, some reasons for hope. After all, the races responsible for
the construction of our world are not extinct. The ancestral potentialities still exist in the
germ-plasm of their weak offspring. These potentialities can yet be actualized. Indeed,
the descendants of the energetic strains are smothered in the multitude of proletarians
whom industry has blindly created. They are in small number. But they will not succumb.
For they possess a marvelous, although hidden, strength. We must not forget the
stupendous task we have accomplished since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the small
area of the states of western Europe, amid unceasing wars, famines, and epidemics, we
have succeeded in keeping, throughout the Middle Ages, the relics of antique culture.
During long, dark centuries we shed our blood on all sides in the defense of Christendom
against our enemies of the north, the east, and the south. At the cost of immense efforts
we succeeded in thrusting back the sleep of Islamism. Then a miracle happened. From the
mind of men sharpened by scholastic discipline, sprang science. And, strange to say,
science was cultivated by those men of the Occident for itself, for its truth and its beauty,
with complete disinterestedness. Instead of stagnating in individual egoism, as it did in
the Orient and especially in China, this science, in four hundred years, has transformed
the world. Our fathers have made a prodigious effort. Most of their European and
American descendants have forgotten the past. History is also ignored by those who now
profit from our material civilization. By the white who, in the Middle Ages, did not fight
beside us on the European battlefields, by the yellow, the brown, and the black, whose
mounting tide exaggeratedly alarms Spengler. What we accomplished once we are
capable of accomplishing again. Should our civilization collapse, we would build up
another one. But is it indispensable to suffer the agony of chaos before reaching order and
peace? Can we not rise again, without undergoing the bloody regeneration of total
overthrow? Are we capable of renovating ourselves, of avoiding the cataclysms which
are imminent, and of continuing our ascension?
2
We cannot undertake the restoration of ourselves and of our environment before having
transformed our habits of thought. Modern society has suffered, ever since its origin,
from an intellectual fault--a fault which has been constantly repeated since the
Renaissance. Technology has constructed man, not according to the spirit of science, but
according to erroneous metaphysical conceptions. The time has come to abandon these
doctrines. We should break down the fences which have been erected between the
properties of concrete objects, and between the different aspects of ourselves. The error
responsible for pur sufferings comes from a wrong interpretation of a genial idea of
Galileo. Galileo, as is well known, distinguished the primary qualities of things,
dimensions and weight, which are easily measurable, from their secondary qualities,
form, color, odor, which cannot be measured. The quantitative was separated from the
qualitative. The quantitative, expressed in mathematical language, brought science to
humanity. The qualitative was neglected. The abstraction of the primary qualities of
objects was legitimate. But the overlooking of the secondary qualities was not. This
mistake had momentous consequences. In man, the things which are not measurable are
more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as
fundamental as, for instance, the physicochemical equilibria of blood serum. The
separation of the qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created
the dualism of the body and the soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became
inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures
and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure,
sorrow, and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to
triumph and man to degradation.
In order to find again the right direction we must return in thought to the men of the
Renaissance, imbue ourselves with their spirit, their passion for empiric observation, and
their contempt for philosophical systems. As they did, we have to distinguish the primary
and secondary qualities of things. But we must radically differ from them and attribute to
secondary qualities the same importance as to primary qualities. We should also reject the
dualism of Descartes. Mind will be replaced in matter. The soul will no longer be distinct
from the body. Mental manifestations, as well as physiological processes, will be within
our reach. Indeed, the qualitative is more difficult to study than the quantitative. Concrete
facts do not satisfy our mind, which prefers the definitive aspect of abstractions. But
science must not be cultivated only for itself, for the elegance of its methods, for its light
and its beauty. Its goal is the material and spiritual benefit of man. As much importance
should be given to feelings as to thermodynamics. It is indispensable that our thought
embraces all aspects of reality. Instead of discarding the residues of scientific abstractions
we will utilize those residues as fully as the abstractions. We will not accept the tyranny
of the quantitative, the superiority of mechanics, physics, or chemistry. We will renounce
the intellectual attitude generated by the Renaissance, and its arbitrary definition of the
real. But we must retain all the conquests made since Galileo's day. The spirit and the
techniques of science are our most precious possessions.
It will be difficult to get rid of a doctrine which, during more than three hundred years,
has dominated the intelligence of the civilized. The majority of men of science believe in
the reality of the Universals, the exclusive right to existence of the quantitative, the
supremacy of matter, the separation of the mind from the body, and the subordinated
position of the mind. They will not easily give up this faith. For such a change would
shake pedagogy, medicine, hygiene, psychology, and sociology to their foundations. The
little garden which each scientist easily cultivates would be turned into a forest, which
would have to be cleared. If scientific civilization should leave the road that it has
followed since the Renaissance and return to the naive observation of the concrete,
strange events would immediately take place. Matter would lose its supremacy. Mental
activities would become as important as physiological ones. The study of moral, esthetic,
and religious functions would appear as indispensable as that of mathematics, physics,
and chemistry. The present methods of education would seem absurd. Schools and
universities would be obliged to modify their programs. Hygienists would be asked why
they concern themselves exclusively with the prevention of organic diseases, and not
with that of mental and nervous disturbances. Why they pay no attention to spiritual
health. Why they segregate people ill with infections, and not those who propagate
intellectual and moral maladies. Why the habits responsible for organic diseases are
considered dangerous, and not those which bring on corruption, criminality, and insanity.
The public would refuse to be attended by physicians knowing nothing but a small part of
the body. Specialists would have to learn general medicine, or work as units of a group
under the direction of a general practitioner. Pathologists would be induced to study the
lesions of the humors as well as those of the organs. To take into account the influence of
the mental upon the tissues, and vice versa. Economists would realize that human beings
think, feel, and suffer, that they should be given other things than work, food, and leisure,
that they have spiritual as well as physiological needs. And also that the causes of
economic and financial crises may be moral and intellectual. We should no longer be
obliged to accept the barbarous conditions of life in great cities, the tyranny of factory
and office, the sacrifice of moral dignity to economic interest, of mind to money, as
benefactions conferred upon us by modern civilization. We should reject mechanical
inventions that hinder human development. Economics would no longer appear as the
ultimate reason of everything. It is obvious that the liberation of man from the
materialistic creed would transform most of the aspects of our existence. Therefore,
modern society will oppose with all its might this progress in our conceptions.
However, we must take care that the failure of materialism does not bring about a
spiritual reaction. Since technology and worship of matter have not been a success, the
temptation may be great to choose the opposite cult, the cult of mind. The primacy of
psychology would be no less dangerous than that of physiology, physics, and chemistry.
Freud has done more harm than the most extreme mechanicists. It would be as disastrous
to reduce man to his mental aspect as to his physiological and physiochemical
mechanisms. The study of the physical properties of blood serum, of its ionic equilibria,
of protoplasmic permeability, of the chemical constitution of antigens, etc., is as
indispensable as that of dreams, libido, mediumistic states, psychological effects of
prayer, memory of words, etc. Substitution of the spiritual for the material would not
correct the error made by the Renaissance. The exclusion of matter would be still more
detrimental to man than that of mind. Salvation will be found only in the relinquishing of
all doctrines. In the full acceptation of the data of observation. In the realization of the
fact that man is no less and no more than these data.
3
These data must be the basis of the construction of man. Our first task is to make them
utilizable. Every year we hear of the progress made by eugenists, geneticists, statisticians,
behaviorists, physiologists, anatomists, biological chemists, physical chemists,
psychologists, physicians, hygienists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, immunologists,
educators, social workers, clergymen, sociologists, economists, etc. But the practical
results of these accomplishments are surprisingly small. This immense amount of
information is disseminated in technical reviews, in treatises, in the brains of men of
science. No one has it in his possession. We have now to put together its disparate
fragments, and to make this knowledge live within the mind of at least a few individuals.
Then, it will become productive.
There are great difficulties in such an undertaking. How should we proceed to build up
this synthesis? Around what aspect of man should the others be grouped? What is his
most important activity? The economic, the political, the sociological, the mental, or the
organic? What particular science should be caused to grow and absorb the others?
Obviously, the remaking of man and of his economic and social world should be inspired
by a precise knowledge of his body and of his soul --that is, of physiology, psychology,
and pathology.
Medicine is the most comprehensive of all the sciences concerning man, from anatomy
to political economy. However, it is far from apprehending its object in its full extent.
Physicians have contented themselves with studying the structure and the activities of the
individual in health and in disease, and attempting to cure the sick. Their effort has met,
as we know, with modest success. Their influence on modern society has been sometimes
beneficial, sometimes harmful, always secondary. Excepting, however, when hygiene
aided industry in promoting the growth of civilized populations. Medicine has been
paralyzed by the narrowness of its doctrines. But it could easily escape from its prison
and help us in a more effective manner. Nearly three hundred years ago a philosopher,
who dreamed of consecrating his life to the service of man, clearly conceived the high
functions of which medicine is capable. "The mind," wrote Descartes in his
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