On Changing One's Nature

GOOD Bishop Paley’s famous argument from the perfection of the human eye has lost something of its force for a generation which has taken to wearing glasses in childhood. Curiously enough, the one organ of the body which the eighteenth century thought especially designed to refute the atheist has most conspicuously broken down under the demands of the nineteenth. That most “undevout astronomer,” Laplace, regretted that he was not present at the creation because he had various improvements to suggest. More than one anatomist since his day has wondered why Nature gave the birds the best eye she ever made, and left mankind to toil and spin at short range with an eye designed for distant vision.

How disastrous may be the results of forcing an eye more than usually ill-fitted for its task to do “ work for which the history of a million years has made no demand, and for which the eye has been outfitted with no mechanism,” appears from Dr. Gould’s study of the lives of fourteen distinguished writers who, in his opinion, suffered from eye-strain.¹ These all had essentially the same clinical history. Their troubles came on in youth as soon as they began to put their eyes to steady near work, and continued through middle life, only to disappear as if by magic when, as age came on, the final loss of accommodation made further eye-strain impossible. The symptoms — headache, nervousness, dyspepsia, insomnia — were always promptly relieved by sport, society, travel, change of scene,—anything, in short, which stopped near work, — only to return again with the renewal of the cause. Yet nobody saw clearly what the matter was! Altogether it is a sad story of thwarted ambition and useless pain. Darwin could work but two hours a day; Spencer only by fifteen-minute periods. Parkman averaged six lines of finished work a day for fourteen years. Nietzsche broke down at forty-four, after suffering two hundred prostrating attacks of illness in a single year. Jane Carlyle endured sick headaches sixty hours on end, and her husband “was turned into a terrible dyspeptic and misanthrope, made to suffer as only genius and eye-strain and pseudo-medicine, when combined, can make men suffer, and was also commanded to walk, walk, walk, ride, ride, ride, and waste, waste, waste both time and talents of infinite value, in order to rest his eyes, his eyes that needed only a pair of appropriate spectacles.” Dr. Gould’s essays, admirable as an argument, are by no means cheerful reading.

Fortunately, no such wanton suffering can again afflict any person likely to attain to a biography. Unfortunately, it is still the fate of thousands of obscure persons who do not suspect the cause of their trouble, or who have depended for its relief on itinerant spectacle venders or department stores.

If the eye were the only one of our members in respect to which the interests of civilized man have been ignored or sacrificed to the convenience of some cavedweller, we could still get on. The mischief is that while we lack several useful organs we are loaded down with inherited structures and instincts which we certainly do not want, yet cannot change or discard. Six fingers instead of five for the Arabians to count on would have given us a duodecimal arithmetic, incidentally saved all the fuss over the metric system, and helped to make the typewriter still more mighty than the pen. On the other hand, our savage forbears needed a digestive apparatus capable, on a pinch, of working over roots and scraps of skin, and making up for a week’s starvation by one magnificent gorge. Cooks, cold storage, breakfast foods have so far “ameliorated the condition of the eating classes ” that any such powerful digestive machinery has become unnecessary. In vain, however, do we amputate the appendix and extract the superfluous third molars. Satan finds some mischief still for idle glands to do. Half the minor ills of life and a goodly portion of its serious troubles come from disorders of the digestion, and nothing less than eternal vigilance is the price of a waist. Animum non coelum mutant who cross from barbarism to civilization.

We who have made the passage, heirs of too many ages, are alone of all creatures under heaven in being fundamentally ill-suited to our environment. We only, of all living things, find our immediate impulses at war with our permanent good. We only are moral and unhappy.

No philosopher oppressed by

no saint confronted with the law in his members warring against the law of his mind has treated the great problems of humanity, “life and sex and death and the fear of death,” with a more adequate knowledge or a finer simplicity than Elie Metchnikoff of the Pasteur Institute. Metchnikoff writes frankly as a Russian; hopefully as one who has seen and shared some of the greatest triumphs of science over human ills. “Behold, O monks,” said Buddha, “the holy truth as to suffering: birth is suffering, old age is suffering, disease is suffering, and death is suffering.” Two of these, at least, are no longer what they were, now that the pestilence has ceased to walk in darkness, and there is no more unalleviable pain. And granted that not all the science any more than

it would still be no small gain if one could count on dying “an hundred and twenty years old, his eye not dimmed, nor his natural force abated.” As things are, “our strong will to live is opposed to the infirmities of old age and the shortness of life. Here lies the greatest disharmony of the constitution of man.”

Yet, after all, the great paradox is this: a lump of living protoplasm, older a hundred times than the everlasting hills, becomes the servant of a conscious intelligence, and goes to pieces within fourscore years. But if, as Weismann argued ingeniously twenty years ago, the uni-cellular organisms are immortal, growing old may be only a deep-seated habit. If Cornaro, broken down at forty, could by taking thought attain to a hundred years; if Thomas Parr,born in 1483,could keep himself alive until 1635, surely the rest of us give up too easily!

It has long been known that many of the lower animals — conspicuously certain insects — round out the circle of their days and die suddenly with no sign of age. Merkel, in 1890, announced his discovery that some of our own tissues, in particular the outer skin and the membranes, never grow old; and within ten years Metchnikoff advanced to the conclusions which are the basis of the present work.² Senile decay,if we may trust Metchnikoff, is essentially “the atrophy of the higher and specific cells of a tissue and their replacement by hyper-trophied connective tissue; ” in no sense is it a general failure of all organs together. Proximately the trouble is with our white blood corpuscles, which should die in the last lymph sinus to defend the body against invading germs, but which, instead, lift up their pseudopodia against us. Ultimately, since the activities of any tissue are affected one way or another by the contents of the blood-stream, the onset of age depends on “the actions and interactions of the bacteria harbored in the body, the white corpuscles that are a natural part of the body, and the various juices or serums produced naturally or introduced by accident or design.” But any bodily process which depends on bacteria, serums, or toxins, is bound sooner or later to come under human control. In the scientific study of old age, then, lie unknown possibilities for a race which, having curtailed its working life on one end, must needs seek to extend it on the other.

These Studies in Optimism have, however, a significance beyond that which comes from their learning and their candor. The last century saw a bewildering advance in branches of pure science; the practical gain for human welfare came largely from physics alone. But the science which can alter the face of nature almost beyond recognition will sooner or later change human nature to fit it. And surely the zoölogist who can make sixteen starfishes out of the material intended for one, and grow extra heads anywhere on the body of a planarian worm,is on the way to rival the triumphs of the engineer. Dr. Gould reminds us that practically we are making over the eye to fit civilized needs. Sir Henry Thompson’s sane and helpful little book,³ just come to a welldeserved fourth edition, outlines a simple regimen, which, followed from youth, will remove the natural disabilities of old age. Dr. Waldstein ⁴ suggests the power over human fate which lies in the less explored regions of our own minds. Metchnikoff, more than any one else of late years, sees that, where religion and philosophy have failed, science, untrammeled and triumphant, may yet create a world wherein the children of men, desiring life, and loving many days, shall still see good. E. T. B.