medicine has made but little progress. It can tell us clearly what nephritis is, but it cannot tell us why it is. Even when it ventures to answer—as in the case of typhoid fever—it really begs the question. The bacillus typhosus, in itself, cannot cause typhoid: there must be a preliminary state of receptivity in the body. What that state of receptivity is and how it is produced are questions that scientific medicine has yet failed to answer in simple terms. The answers given by osteopathy and Christian Science, of course, are not true, but they are at least simple, and to the popular mind they thus become plausible. Even an antivivisectionist is intelligent enough to understand the theory that typhoid is caused by the pressure of hard bone upon soft nervous tissue. But only a few persons can understand the warring hypotheses of immunity, and even these are left in doubt and darkness.
8. I have spoken above (in paragraph 5) of the impulse to danger and courage that is inherent in all of us. Its psychological roots are to be found in the wille zur macht, the will to power—a thing differing considerably from Schopenhauer’s will to live, despite many elements in common. The impulse to do something daring is simply an impulse to give an exhibition of efficiency—in particular, of the sort of efficiency that few other men possess. And added to this psychical impulse (and no doubt underlying it) is the purely physical impulse to function: in brief, the life force. That the life force, working thus through the medium of the impulse to daring enterprise, may produce its own destruction—i. e., may produce death—is not an objection of any importance. We all know that nature is an ass. She is constantly failing, through what may be called excess of zeal, to accomplish her own purposes. She is extraordinarily inept, clumsy and wasteful. Even when her purposes seem to be clear (which is not often) her means of accomplishing them are commonly fatuous to the point of unintelligibility. Nature’s plans are magnificent, but her workmanship is almost always bad. An optician who made a microscope as defective as the human eye would be taken out into the alley and shot.
9. The hardest job in the world is that of a clergyman. If he preaches a scheme of life that is actually livable, he is condemned as a compromiser with evil, and if he preaches a scheme that is ideal, and hence unlivable, he is condemned for not living it himself. No other man is watched so closely, or judged so harshly. And not only are the judgments upon him harsh, but they are also wholly unfair. He is expected to have sympathy for every human weakness, even the worst, and yet to show no human weakness himself, even the least. Imagine a grown man, perhaps with sciatica, Mexican mine stock and a mother-in-law, who is forbidden to utter so much as a single damn! Imagine a man whose material rewards in his profession are exactly in inverse proportion to his sincerity, his industry and his enthusiasm! Again, recall this staggering fact: the clergyman is the only professional man who cannot, in decency, abandon his profession. And yet, being founded wholly upon faith, without any support whatever in exact knowledge, it is precisely the profession which exposes its practitioner to the most insidious doubts. A lawyer who begins to doubt the law may switch to business or politics, and still hold up his head. But a clergyman who is unfrocked, even at his own request, remains a suspicious character to the end of his days.
These, at least, are my honest views. If I err I shall be very glad to apologize. [25 March 1914, 30 March 1914, 10 April 1914]
BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS?
The Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association, in THE EVENING SUN of yesterday:
It is all very well, so long as we ourselves have beer and skittles, to say that the vast majority of us get exactly what we deserve, and that all is as it should be in this best of all possible worlds. But in our hearts we know that it’s a lie while our lips are saying it. * * * Resign from the World’s Boomers’ Association, Brother Mencken! * * *
For shame, Charles! Oblique and unmanly advice! When have I ever preached any such rubbishy doctrine? The best of all possible worlds, forsooth! How can this ever be the best of all possible worlds so long as I have hay fever, and grow bulky to the verge of immobility, and have to work eight hours every day for a meagre living, and owe $7 on my Sunday clothes?
Best of all possible worlds? Bosh! One of the worst worlds I can imagine. The fact that I never blush is proof enough that I did not make it, and do not defend it. Huxley once ventured the modest guess that he could improve upon the weather. I go much further. I think that I could improve upon sciatica, upon the human liver, upon the tonsils, upon mud, upon jiggers, upon snakes, upon babies, upon chilblains. If I were manager of the world there would be no whiskers, no bunions, no twins. No fat women, incrusted with diamonds, would loll provokingly in automobiles. Vice crusading would develop swiftly into convulsions, coma and dissolution. The Hon. Mr. Anderson would choke upon his own sinister eloquence.
No, Charles, I am no apologist for this world, no press agent for nature. I know very well that the human eye, so loudly praised as nature’s masterpiece, is really the most fragile and undependable of optical instruments, that any man who made a microscope so badly would be heaved out of the union. I wonder that so clumsy a banjo as the glottis should ever make music at all. I deny that katzenjammer1 is either a logical or a moral necessity. I believe that many men die too soon, and that a great many more men do not die soon enough.
But after all, what would you? Say what you will, the massive fact remains that the world is as it is. You and I didn’t make it, we are not consulted about its management, we do not even know why it exists, we can do precious little to change it, even in minor details. Was it Romanes or Lankester who said that we human beings sometimes prevail modestly against nature, that we sometimes gain a puny and trivial victory of outposts, but that every time we do so we lose as much as we have won? Taking man as he stands, is he better off than his anthropoid fathers? Is he healthier, happier, more fit? In many ways he undoubtedly is. In many other ways he undoubtedly isn’t. And in so far as he is, it is probably due as much to nature’s victories over advancing civilization as to civilization’s victories over nature.
In brief, the world, as it stands, at least works. By hook or crook it wabbles along. Revile it as you will, my dear Ogle, you must always admit, in the end, that you and I have survived in it, and that, to that extent, it is humane, benevolent, intelligent, praiseworthy, and a success. Our survival, true enough, has had a million times more luck in it than merit—but who are we to complain against luck? Why try to discount it, deplore it, account for it? Why worry so much about the other fellow? Is he worrying about us? I doubt it. His one great passion is to increase his own luck, his own beer, his own skittles—and nine times out of ten he tries to do it by decreasing ours.
Therefore, let us admit freely the injustice and savagery of the world, and at the same time put the matter out of mind. Nothing that we can do can set aside, for more than an inconsequential moment or two, the great natural law that the strong shall prey upon the weak. In the most lovely Utopia that you and I could plan, there would still be men who were less fitted to survive than the best man, or even than the average man. And nothing that laws or philanthropy could accomplish would make these men more fit. [21 August 1912]
THE ESSENCE OF EDUCATION
The Rev. Charles Fiske, D. D., in the course of an article on “The Debt of the Educated Man”:
Some years since Senator Lodge expressed the opinion that the chief defect of our modern educated life was its tendency to arouse unduly the critical spirit. * * * There are plenty of intellectual mugwumps2 in the world, and they are always barren of lasting achievement. They sit complacently on judgment stools, passing cynical criticisms on evils which they make no effort to correct.
To which, perhaps, the most apt of answers was made by Immanuel Kant fully 150 years ago, to wit:
So viel ist gewiss: wer einmal Kritik gekostet hat, den ekelt auf immer alles dogmatische Gewäsche.
Which may be put into English as follows:
So
