China Learn

I think that, from a biological standpoint, human life almost reads like a poem. It has its own rhythm and beat, its internal cycles of growth and decay. It begins with innocent childhood, followed by awkward adolescence trying awkwardly to adapt itself to mature society, with its young passions and follies, its ideals and ambitions; then it reaches a manhood of intense activities, profiting from experience and learning more about society and human nature; at middle age, there is a slight easing of tension, a mellowing of character like the ripening of fruit or the mellowing of good wine, and the gradual acquiring of a more tolerant, more cynical and at the same time a kindlier view of life; then in the sunset of our life, the endocrine glands decrease their activity, and if we have a true philosophy of old age and have ordered our life pattern according to it, it is for us the age of peace and security and leisure and contentment; finally, life flickers out and one goes into eternal sleep, never to wake up again. One should be able to sense the beauty of this rhythm of life, to appreciate, as we do in grand symphonies, its main theme, its strains of conflict and the final resolution. The movements of these cycles are very much the same in a normal life, but the music must be provided by the individual himself. In some souls, the discordant note becomes harsher and harsher and finally overwhelms or submerges the main melody. Sometimes the discordant’ note gains so much power that the music can no longer go on, and the individual shoots himself with a pistol or jumps into a river. But that is because his originalleit-motif has been hopelessly over-shadowed through the lack of a good self-education. Otherwise the normal human life runs to its normal end in a kind of dignified movement and procession. There are sometimes in many of us too many staccatos or impetuosos, and because the tempo is wrong, the music is not pleasing to the ear; we might have more of the grand rhythm and majestic tempo of the Ganges, flowing slowly and eternally into the sea.

No one can say that a life with childhood, manhood and old age is not a beautiful arrangement; the day has its morning, noon and sunset, and the year has its seasons, and it is good that it is so. There is no good or bad in life, except what ‘is good according to its own season. And if we take this biological view of life and try to live according to the seasons, no one but a conceited fool or an impossible idealist can deny that human life can be lived like a poem. Shakespeare has expressed this idea more graphically in his passage about the seven stages of life, and a good many Chinese writers have said about the same thing. It is curious that Shakespeare was never very religious, or very much concerned with religion. I think this was his greatness; he took human life largely as it was, and intruded himself as little upon the general scheme of things as he did upon the characters of his plays. Shakespeare was like Nature herself, and that is the greatest compliment we can pay to a writer or thinker. He merely lived, observed life and went away.

To me, spiritually a child of the East and the West, man’s dignity consists in the following facts which distinguish man from animals. First, that he has a playful curiosity and a natural genius for exploring knowledge; second, that he has dreams and a lofty idealism (often vague, or confused, or cocky, it is true, but nevertheless worthwhile); third, and still more important, that he is able to correct his dreams by a sense of humor, and thus restrain his idealism by a more robust and healthy realism; and finally, that he does not react to surroundings mechanically and uniformly as animals do, but possesses the ability and the freedom to determine his own reactions and to change surroundings at his will. This last is the same as saying that human personality is the last thing to be reduced to mechanical laws; somehow the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable and unpredictable, and manages to wriggle out of mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him. Man, therefore, is a curious, dreamy, humorous and wayward creature.

In short, my faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined and regimented soldier. The scamp is probably the most glorious type of human being, as the soldier is the lowest type, according to this conception. It seems in my last book, My Country and My People, the net impression of readers was that I was trying to glorify the “old rogue.” It is my hope that the net impression of the present one will be that I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. I hope I shall succeed. For things are not so simple as they sometimes seem. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.

Probably the Creator knew well that, when He created man upon this earth, He was producing a scamp, a brilliant scamp, it is true, but a scamp nonetheless. The scamp-like qualities of man are, after all, his most hopeful qualities. This scamp that the Creator has produced is undoubtedly a brilliant chap. He is still a very unruly and awkward adolescent, thinking himself greater and wiser than he really is, still full of mischief and naughtiness and love of a free-for-all. Nevertheless, there is so much good in him that the Creator might still be willing to pin on him His hopes, as a father sometimes pins his hopes on a brilliant but somewhat erratic son of twenty. Would He be willing some day to retire and turn over the management of this universe to this erratic son of His? I wonder.

Speaking as a Chinese, I do not think that any civilization can be called complete until it has progressed from sophistication to unsophistication, and made a conscious return to simplicity of thinking and living, and I call no man wise until he has made the progress from the wisdom of knowledge to the wisdom of foolishness, and become a laughing philosopher, feeling first life’s tragedy and then life’s comedy. For we must weep before we can laugh. Out of sadness comes the awakening and out of the awakening comes the laughter of the philosopher, with kindliness and tolerance to boot.

The world, I believe, is far too serious, and being far too serious, it has need of a wise and merry philosophy. The philosophy of the Chinese art of living can certainly be called the “gay science,” if anything can be called by that phrase used by Nietzsche. After all, only a gay philosophy is profound philosophy; the serious philosophies of the West haven’t even begun to understand what life is. To me personally, the only function of philosophy is to teach us to take life more lightly and gayly than the average business man does, for no business man who does not retire at fifty, if he can, is in my eyes a philosopher. This is not merely a casual thought, but is a fundamental point of view with me. The world can be made a more peaceful and more reasonable place to live in only when men have imbued themselves in the light gayety of this spirit. The modern man takes life far too seriously, and because he is too serious, the world is full of troubles. We ought, therefore, to take time to examine the origin of that attitude which will make possible a wholehearted enjoyment of this life and a more reasonable, more peaceful and less hot-headed temperament.

I am perhaps entitled to call this the philosophy of the Chinese people rather than of anyone school. It is a philosophy that is greater than Confucius and greater than Laotse, for it transcends these and other ancient philosophers; it draws from these fountain springs of thought and harmonizes them into a whole, and from the abstract outlines of their wisdom, it has created an art of living in the flesh, visible, palpable and understandable by the common man. Surveying Chinese literature, art and philosophy as a whole, it has become quite clear to me that the philosophy of a wise disenchantment and a hearty enjoyment of life is their common message and teaching-the most constant, most characteristic and most persistent refrain of Chinese thought.

The circumstances of my youth, combined with the endless difficulties of my life with Virendranath in Germany, drove me almost to the verge of insanity. Twice I left him and sought rest and recovery in the Bavarian Alps, where I planned to continue my interrupted journey to India. Friends in London tried to secure a visa for me to enter India, but they failed because of my imprisonment in America in connection with the Indian exiles, my articles in the Indian press, and my association with Virendranath. My desire to live ebbed and I lay ill for nearly three years. For whole days I remained in a coma, unable to move or speak, longing only for oblivion. Nor could the best nerve specialists of Germany cure me. More than death I feared insanity, and the terror of this possibility haunted my very dreams. Once I attempted suicide, but succeeded only in injuring myself.

When all else failed, I was introduced to a woman nerve specialist, a former associate of Freud. An alienist in the Berlin courts, she was also connected with the University of Berlin. My psychoanalysis began, and continued torturously for two years. During this infinite suffering one image haunted my sleeping and my waking: I held a small Chinese vase in my outstretched palm and contemplated its beauty. A crack kept growing down the side, the vase broke, and the fragment rolled out of my outstretched palm. It seemed a symbol of my life. As I grew better, the image returned less often, yet seemed to hover, a menace, in the offering.

As my health returned, I began teaching English to university students and took up again the study of Indian history. I became a teacher in the English Seminar of the University of Berlin and, upon occasion, lectured before the seminar on Indian history. When plans were made for an English theater in Berlin, I coached actors and actresses, and in this way came into contact with the theatrical world. One of the friends I made here was TiIIa Durieux, who was so often cast in psychological studies. She was one of the strangest of German actresses, but quite learned, having one of the best libraries of anyone in her profession. In a way she became my teacher in literature, architecture, music, and the theater. We spent one summer together in Austria, where we attended the Mozart Festspiel in Salzburg, then wandered through Austria and southern Germany, visiting historic cities and old cathedrals.

As a kind of counterthrust against growing Communism, the Hitler movement was rising in Germany, but to most of us it seemed just another fad that would soon die. Since I had to earn my living and struggle for health, I was too burdened to study it closely. Once when Virendranath had come to Bavaria to induce me to return to him and we were on our way back to Berlin we paused in Munich to attend Wagner’s Ring. By chance one evening we followed a small crowd and found ourselves in a hall where Hitler was speaking. This event made so little impression on me that I recall nothing but Hitler’s frothy shouting.

As my health improved I decided to shoulder another burden: attendance at the university and study leading to the Ph.D. degree. I did not have the academic qualifications, but by a law under the German Republic men and women could produce research work which, if accepted, would entitle them to work for their degrees. I produced two works on Indian history which were published by two leading German historical magazines; one was the ZeiJ:schrift fur Geopolitik, official organ for the Institut fiir Geopolitik, of which Professor Karl Hanshofer was head. He had been a General in the World War, a military observer in Japan from the time of the Russo-Japanese W1.r onward, Then he had founded the institute. Since he had published my thesis, I made a special trip to his home in the Bavarian Alps and secured his sponsorship for my entrance to the university.

It has since become clear that Haushofer was one of the men who made Adolf Hitler. His institute was even then the concealed General Staff of German Imperialism. It was he and this General Staff that furnished Hitler with such demagogic ideas as BIut und Boden, and, though his wife was part Jewish, Haushofer was perhaps one of those who helped write Mein Kampf.

Why Haushofer sponsored me, a woman, even though he and his class preached the inferiority of women, I do not know. Perhaps it was because of my Asiatic connections. I had prefaced my published thesis with the assertion that the nation that ruled India was the master of Europe. Haushofer apparently wanted to keep in touch with Asiatics, but when he once invited Virendranath and me to his place, there was nothing warm or friendly in his manner. He was wooden - a silent, suspicious man.

I was admitted to Berlin University to study for my Ph.D., but after a short time I realized that it was hopeless. I lacked a foundation in science and mathematics and I failed to keep pace with the thirty or forty older men in my seminar. Most of these men were already teachers in the Gymnasiums, who had returned to the university to take their final degree. I had to earn my living while studying and could find no time to master the language.

After a brief struggle I gave up my long-cherished plan. The classes which I conducted in the English Seminar of the University resembled those automatic devices that pick up approaching sounds at a great distance. In them, liberals, Socialists, Communists, and Nazis defended their ideas with passion. Almost every class had at least one or more corps students, with dueling scars across their cheeks, who openly attacked the Republic, workers, Communists, Socialists, liberals, and Jews. One corps student once proclaimed to the class that degeneracy under the Republic was demonstrated even by the fact that Germans were forced to study under a foreign woman who wore her hair short and smoked cigarettes.

At this time I joined a group of Republican, Socialist, and Communist physicians trying to establish the first state birth-eontrol clinic in Berlin. Margaret Sanger financed our first research branch and soon afterwards the Government took over the clinics and established branches in many cities. They continued until the Nazis came to power, after which women were ordered back to the bedroom. A German woman Communist doctor and I once got into a debate with her husband, a Communist physician in the Public Health Service, because he argued that if men could be conscripted to fight, women could be conscripted to breed. His attitude was no different from that of my Nazi students who sent a grievance committee to the head of the English Seminar of the University because my class had debated the question of birth-control.

The bitter fruits of defeat in war were eaten hourly by the German people and nourished only hatred for their conquerors. Month by month I saw people die of slow hunger and watched funeral processions enter and leave the little church on my street. One day in December 1923 I found a man, a shoemaker from the French-occupied Ruhr district, dying of hunger in the street near our house. He carried a dirty, ragged baby in his arms. A group of women gathered, each undertaking to do something for him, while I cared for the baby until the city welfare bureau could take it.

In the corner grocery I often observed gaunt workers payout their week’s wages, billions of paper marks, for a couple of loaves of bread, some potatoes, and margarine. Meat and fruit were beyond their reach. There was no sugar, only saccharine, and even this they could not afford. Families sought foreign boarders in order to get foreign currency, and decent foreigners were filled with shame. During this period I met American bankers and industrialists, among them a representative of General Motors, who regarded German poverty and helplessness as a gold mine for foreign investments: they could command very high rates of interest. What political guarantees they demanded against revolution I never knew, but they most certainly were demanded. The Nazis later came to power on such guarantees and with their help.

The Nazi movement was growing, loudly voicing revolutionary social ideas stolen from the Socialists and Communists, and utilizing the despair of the people and the Versailles Treaty with a masterly hand. With their coffers filled from mysterious sources, they were challenging Socialists and Communists and making a tremendous bid for power. But because they were still relatively weak, they revived a murder fraternity of the Middle Ages, the Fememord. Members of this group moved about at night, murdering tradeunion leaders, Socialists and Communists, Jews, and professors who had enough integrity to defend the Republic. From the foreign bankers I heard no protests at such outrages; they talked only of “Communist violence.”

Despite all their fierce talk, the Germans were still an orderly and disciplined people. Too disciplined, in fact. It was a Russian Communist who said that the German workers would revolt only if the Reichstag passed a law giving them permission. When the mounted police once charged a workers’ demonstration in the Lustgarten in Berlin, the people who fled along the walks did not even step on the grass.

As an illustration of the servility of German womanhood, I recall the case of a woman from whom Viren and I rented rooms. She made a living for herself, her husband, and their son, but her husband beat her regularly, and once injured her so seriously that she nearly died. Viren and I took the case to police headquarters, but were informed that the police could not interfere in family affairs unless the wife was killed; in that case they could arrest the husband for murder.

It was the political confusion and inertia of the German people that left ajar the gates of the state and allowed the Nazis to move in. This attitude spread most rapidly during that era of heart-destroying insecurity; it grew out of hunger, despair, and political abuse until millions were willing to put their minds to sleep and follow anyone who promised them food, shelter, and peace. Of course, along with food, shelter, and temporary peace the Nazis assumed the right to feed the minds of the people. When the German people accepted this, they surrendered the one thing that separates man from beast - the responsibility of thinking for himself. When I visited Germany a number of years later, I heard people say with pride: “Hitler thinks for me.”

The most obvious fact which philosophers refuse to see is that we have got a body. Tired of seeing our mortal imperfections and our savage instincts and impulses, sometimes our preachers wish that we were made like angels, and yet we are at a total loss to imagine what the angels’ life would be like. We either give the angels a body and a shape like our own-except for a pair of wings-or we don’t. It is interesting that the general conception of an angel is still that of a human body with a pair of wings. I sometimes think that it is an advantage even for angels to have a body with the five senses. If I were to be an angel, I should like to have a school-girl complexion, but how am I going to have a school-girl complexion without a skin? I still should like to drink a glass of tomato juice or iced orange juice, but how am I going to appreciate iced orange juice without having thirst? And how am I going to enjoy food, when I am incapable of hunger? How would an angel paint without pigment, sing without the hearing of sounds, smell the fine morning air without a nose? How would he enjoy the immense satisfaction of scratching an itch, if his skin doesn’t itch? And what a terrible loss in the capacity for happiness that would be! Either we have to have bodies and have all our bodily wants satisfied, or else we are pure spirits and have no satisfactions at all. All satisfactions imply want.

I sometimes think what a terrible punishment it would be for a ghost or an angel to have no body, to look at a stream of cool water and have no feet to plunge into it and get a delightful cooling sensation from it, to see a dish of Peking or Long Island duck and have no tongue to taste it, to see crumpets and have no teeth to chew them, to see the beloved faces of our dear ones and have no emotions to feel toward them. Terribly sad it would be if we should one day return to this earth as ghosts and move silently into our children’s bedroom, to see a child lying there in bed and have no hands to fondle him and no arms to clasp him, no chest for his warmth to penetrate to, no round hollow between cheek and shoulder for him to nestle against, and no ears to hear his voice.

A defense of the angels-without-bodies theory will be found to be most vague and unsatisfying. Such a defender might say, “Ah, yes, but in the world of spirit, we don’t need such satisfactions.” “But what instead have you got?” Complete silence; or perhaps, “VoidPeace-Calm.” “What then do you gain by it?” “Absence of work and pain and sorrow.” I admit such a heaven has a tremendous attraction to galley slaves. Such a negative ideal and conception of happiness is dangerously near to Buddhism and is ultimately to be traced to Asia (Asia Minor, in this case) rather than Europe.

Such speculations are necessarily idle, but I may at least point out that the conception of a “senseless spirit” is quite unwarranted, since we are coming more and more to feel that the universe itself is a sentient being. Perhaps motion rather than standing still will be a characteristic of the spirit, and one of the pleasures of a bodiless angel will be to revolve like a proton around a nucleus at the speed of twenty or thirty thousand revolutions a second. There may be a keen delight in that, more fascinating than a ride on a Coney Island scenic railway. It will certainly be a kind of sensation. Or perhaps the bodiless angel will dart like light or cosmic rays in ethereal waves around curved space at the rate of 183,000 miles per second. There must still be spiritual pigments for the angels to paint and enjoy some form of creation, ethereal vibrations for the angels to feel as tone and sound and color, and ethereal breeze to brush against the angels’ cheeks. Otherwise spirit itself would stagnate like water in a cesspool, or feel like men on a hot, suffocating summer afternoon without a whiff of fresh air. There must still be motion and emotion (in whatever form) if there is to be life; certainly not complete rest and insensit

What I have known of it has made me content that I was not carefully trained in its principles. The virtue of submission to injustice, of rendering unto Casar that which Casar did not produce himself, made no impression on me. Beyond that, the belief in immortality has always seemed cowardly to me. When very young I learned that all things die, and all that we wish of good must be won on shis earth or not at all.

When I was sixteen, my mother lay down and died from hard labor, undernourishment, and a disease which she had no money to cure. My father fell on his knees and wept dramatically, then rifled her old tin trunk. With the fortyfive dollars he found hidden between the quilt patches he went to the saloon and got drunk with the boys. My elder sister had just died in childbed, leaving a baby boy, and I was thus the eldest child, with responsibility for this baby, as well as for my younger sister and two brothers.

Had I been more like my mother and less like my father, I would have accepted this burden as inevitable. But I resented my mother’s suffering and refused to follow in her footsteps. I knew nothing of the world save the tales related by cowboys, miners, and teamsters. I knew that Columbus had sailed the seas and discovered a new continent and that my forefathers had fought in the American Revolution. The clatter of the hoofs of the horse of Jesse James as he robbed the rich to give to the poor echoed in my ears. It seemed that men could go anywhere, do anything, discover new worlds, but that women could only trail behind or sit at home having babies. Such a fate I rejected. After making a few rudimentary arrangements for the care of my sister and baby nephew and leaving my small brothers to my father, I began a life of semi-vagabondage that was to last for years.

That first period of life, which had ended with my mother’s death, seemed to have little significance. I had been born and I had existed. I had no goal nor did I know enough to have one.

At the beginning of the second stage the primary need was, as always, to earn a living. An aunt helped me learn stenography, but I could seldom hold a job for more than a few days or a week. I might have learned to spell and punctuate correctly had I not seen girls about me who did it very well. Uncomplainingly they spent their lives taking down the thoughts of bosses, then turning away to type them out.

This resentment prevented me from becoming a good stenographer, and for years I wandered from one job to another - stenographer, waitress, tobacco stripper, book agent, or just plain starveling. My mother’s voice urging me to “go on an’ git an edjicashun” sent me to libraries, but I did not know what to read. Now and then I found a school where I could work as a waitress and attend lectures and one year I managed to spend as a special student in the Normal School at Tempe, Arizona.

While in this school, two events occurred which affected my life. The first was my introduction to natural science, in particular to biology. The second was a friendship with a Swedish-American woman, a university graduate from New York City who had come west to be near her brother, a civil engineer working in the Arizona desert. Shortly afterwards I married this brother but he soon divorced me. I didn’t blame him at all; and once the humiliating bonds of marriage were removed, we became good friends. This friendship has continued throughout my life, and long after he had married a second time and had several lovely children, his wife and I also became close friends. I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman. Friendship is far more human. I personally have never been able to reconcile myself to the sex relationship, for it seemed to me only a trap which limited women in every way. For women marriage is at best an economic investment; at its worst, a relic of human slavery. I have, however, heard of no society which has solved this problem; decades later I did not fail to tell men in the Soviet Union that I had listened to many men make speecIies from the Tomb of Lenin in the Red Square, but only one woman and that one on International Women’s Day.

There are tales, long whispered in my family, which, if true, explain the two strains that mingled when my father and mother married. One strain - my mother’s - was of a hardworking, gentle, and devout folk. The other consisted of rebels, wanderers, tellers of tall tales, singers of songs.

My father eloped with my mother before she was of age.

Her father, John, found them in the home of my father’s sister, Mary. Aunt Mary was a widow with many children, but a woman of unusual capacity and determination. Her eyes fell approvingly on Grandfather John, a frail, gentle man resembling pictures of Jesus Christ. John’s wife was still alive and, to judge by a faded tintype, very beautiful. But she died shortly after, following a long illness, and my grandfather married Aunt Mary. In the small, drab villages and isolated farmhouses of northern Missouri little rumors often grew to gargantuan proportions. The gossips specialized most of all in the gruesome and more than one farm woman was thereafter seen wagging her head and heard talking of the strange things that were supposed to have happened in my grandfather’s house - of evil widows … and poor ailing wives… and poison…

Finally Grandfather wasted away and died of tuberculosis. Mary cared for him with infinite tenderness, uttering never a harsh word at his endless exactions, warning her many children, and his, to behave as she did. There lingers in my memory a vision of this tall, strong woman, sitting or kneeling by his bedside, engaged in low conversation or silent waiting.

So, John had died, said the gossips, shaking their heads knowingly. What else could you expect, when, as everyone knew, he had spent his declining years walking the floor complaining that his first wife’s spirit haunted him? As he lay dying, rumor ran, he wanted to cleanse his soul of the sin of poisoning his first wife, but Mary had smothered his confession by placing her hand across his mouth! Anything could be expected of that big woman, who came from God only knew where and could do anything from curing diseases with herbs to managing a big farm and rearing more than a dozen children!

If Aunt Mary had lived in an earlier period, her abilities might have caused her to be burned as a witch. Instead, she was well over ninety before she laid down her corncob pipe for the last time. People said she sped around the country in a Ford until her dying day, her white hair flying, her pipe in her mouth. She was so tall that when she died a special coffin had to be built for her. I have not yet heard just how many men were needed to carry the coffin, but by the time I get around to investigating the story, I’m sure the number will be fabulous. I’ve heard it said by the gentle branch of our family that Mary is most certainly not taking any back seat in the Hereafter.

All my mother’s people died young - which, considering their goodness, was only natural, On the other hand, all my father’s people, save one uncle who turned Christian missionary, lived to a ripe old age. The two family strains, meeting in me, made my spirit a battlefield across which a civil war raged endlessly.

When I was very young, my father dragged us from northern Missouri to southern Colorado, where Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company owned everything but the air. My father went to this region to make his fortune, but fell victim to a system the fruits of which were poverty, disease and ignorance for the miners.

We lived a primitive life in the camps, but I now understand that our intellectual poverty was far worse than our physical condition. When I try to recollect the impact of so-called cultural influences, I can recall only Scotch and English folk-songs, cowboy songs, and such ballads as those in praise of Jesse James - all of them sung by my father. I do not remember hearing my mother sing; she was too unhappy.

Until I was fifteen years old I knew little of the world beyond that Rockefeller domain of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. My father did unskilled labor and drank to forget his hopes, and my mother worked intermittently as a washwoman and a keeper of boarders. We Smedley children - there were five of us - somehow managed to get to the poor local primary schools. But I never finished grade school and never attended a high school. Most highschool graduates of today inspire no regret in me, but I have always believed that had I had some basic knowledge of science, mathematics, literature, and language, I would have been better equipped to meet life. I have long felt that the poverty and ignorance of my youth were the tribute which I, like millions of others, paid to “private interests.”

The schools my brothers and sisters and I attended were perhaps no more boring than most. However, my thinking was not to be disciplined, and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could teach me grammar or arithmetic. Even in later years my efforts to learn languages ended in dismal failure, although in the case of German I managed to absorb what I needed or whatever sounded beautiful or powerful. If I disliked a person, my mind closed and I could learn nothing from him. So I took from schools and from life what I found interesting, not what people thought good for me. But my mother and a red-haired woman schoolteacher in Tercio, a mining camp, must have regarded me with hope, for they kept urging me to get an education. Education seemed to consist in reading many books, but just which I did not know. For years I groped, reading anything between covers, often understanding hardly a sentence, but believing mystically that the key to knowledge lay buried in words. My reading covered everything from trashy romance to a ghastly book on school law and one called Behaviorist Psychology.

The nearest I ever came to the classics was a large volume of something called “poetry.” Because it was printed on very thin paper, it quite naturally hung from a string in a privy. A man by the name of Shakespeare seemed to have written it but I could make neither head nor tail of it. In later years I often read of men who received their first noble impulses from contacts with great minds; I was in my early twenties before I learned who Shakespeare was, and in my forties before I read his plays. In the mining camps he had made no impression whatsoever and I returned the volume of thin paper to its nail on the privy wall.

I disliked so many things in life and received so many humiliations from rich little girls that my teachers used to keep me after school and lecture me on the bourgeois virtues. It was in vain. I fought boys with jimson weeds and rocks, and nothing could make a little lady of me. When I was nine my mother put me out to work washing dishes and caring for squawling babies. I was later promoted to stripping tobacco leaves in a cigar store, but I dawdled so much over my work that I was fired. One employer told me that I was a bad worker because I read too many books. “Here’s your wages for the week, and you needn’t come back,” he said. He gave me two dollars and a half. For years after that I did all kinds of unskilled labor.

The better knowledge of our own bodily functions and mental processes gives us a truer and broader view of ourselves and takes away from the word “animal” some of its old bad flavor. The old proverb that “to understand is to forgive” is applicable to our own bodily and mental processes. It may seem strange, but it is true, that the very fact that we have a better understanding of our bodily functions makes it impossible for us to look down upon them with contempt. The important thing is not to say whether our digestive process is noble or ignoble; the important thing is just to understand it, and somehow it becomes extremely noble. This is true of every biological function or process in our body, from perspiration and the elimination of waste to the functions of the pancreatic juice, the gall, the endocrine glands and the finer emotive and cogitative processes. One no longer despises the kidney, one merely tries to understand it; and one no longer looks upon a bad tooth as symbolic of the final decay of our body and a reminder to attend to the welfare of our soul, but merely goes to a dentist, has it examined, explained and properly fixed up. Somehow a man coming out from a dentist’s office no longer despises his teeth, but has an increased respect for them-because he is going to gnaw apples and chicken bones with increased delight. As for the superfine metaphysician who says that the teeth belong to the devil, and the Neo-Platonists who deny that individual teeth exist, I always get a satirical delight in seeing a philosopher suffering from a tooth-ache and an optimistic poet suffering from dyspepsia. Why doesn’t he go on with his philosophic disquisitions, and why does he hold his hand against his cheek, just as you or I or the woman in the next house would do? And why does optimism seem so unconvincing to a dyspeptic poet? Why doesn’t he sing any more? How ungrateful it is, of him, therefore, to forget the intestines and sing about the spirit when the intestines behave and give him no trouble!

Science, if anything, has taught us an increased respect for our body, by deepening a sense of the wonder and mystery of its workings. In the first place, genetically, we begin to understand how we came about, and see that, instead of being made out of clay, we are sitting on the top of the genealogical tree of the animal kingdom. That must be a fine sensation, sufficiently satisfying for any man who is not intoxicated with his own spirit. Not that I believe dinosaurs lived and died millions of years ago in order that we today might walk erect with our two legs upon this earth. Without such gratuitous assumptions, biology has not at all destroyed a whit of human dignity, or cast doubt upon the view that we are probably the most splendid animals ever evolved on this earth. So that is quite satisfying for any man who wants to insist on human dignity. In the second place, we are more impressed than ever with the mystery and beauty of the body. The workings of the internal parts of our body and the wonderful correlation between them com. pel in us a sense of the extreme difficulty with which these correlations are brought about and the extreme simplicity and finality with which they are nevertheless accomplished. Instead of simplifying these internal chemical processes by explaining them, science makes them all the more difficult to explain. These processes are incredibly more difficult than the layman without any knowledge of physiology usually imagines. The great mystery of the universe without is similar in quality to the mystery of the universe within.

The more a physiologist tries to analyze and study the bio-physical and bio-chemical processes of human physiology, the more his wonder increases. That is so to the extent that sometimes it compels a physiologist with a broad spirit to accept the mystic’s view of life, as in the case of Dr. Alexis Carrel. Whether we agree with him or not, as he states his opinions in Man, the Unknown, we must agree with him that the facts are there, unexplained and unexplainable. We begin to acquire a sense of the intelligence of matter itself:

The organs are correlated by the organic fluids and the nervous system. Each element of the body adjusts itself to the others, and the others to it. This mode of adaptation is essentially teleological. If we attribute to tissues an intelligence of the same kind as ours, as mechanists and vitalists do, the physiological processes appear to associate together in view of the end to be attained. The existence of finality within the organism is undeniable. Each part seems to know the present and future needs of the whole, and acts accordingly. The significance of time and space is not the same for our tissues as for our mind. The body perceives the remote as well as the near, the future as well as the present.”

And we should wonder, for instance, and be extremely amazed that our intestines heal their own wounds, entirely without our voluntary effort:

The wounded loop first becomes immobile. It is temporarily paralyzed, and fecal matter is thus prevented from running into the abdomen. At the same time, some other intestinal loop, or the surface of the omentum, approaches the wound and, owing to a known property of peritoneum, adheres to it. Within four or five hours the opening is occluded. Even if the surgeon’s needle has drawn the edges of the wound together, healing is due to spontaneous adhesion of the peritoneal surfaces.”

Why do we despise the body, when the flesh itself shows such intelligence? After all, we are endowed with a body, which is a selfnourishing, self-regulating, self-repairing, self-starting and selfreproducing machine, installed at birth and lasting like a good grandfather clock for three-quarters of a century, requiring very little attention. It is a machine provided with wireless vision and 2 Man, wireless hearing, with a more highly complicated system of nerves and lymphs than the most complicated telephone and telegraph system of the world. It has a system of filing reports done by a vast complexus of nerves, managed with such efficiency that some files, the less important ones, are kept in the attic and others are kept in a more convenient desk, but those kept in the attic, which may be thirty years old and rarely referred to, are nevertheless there and sometimes can be found with lightning speed and efficiency. Then it also manages to go about like a motor car with perfect kneeaction and absolute silence of engines, and if the motor car has an accident and breaks its glass or its steering wheel, the car automatically exudes or manufactures a substance to replace the glass and does its best to grow a steering wheel, or at least manages to do the steering with a swollen end of the steering shaft; for we must remember that when one of our kidneys is cut out, the other kidney swells and increases its function to insure the passage of the normal volume of urine. Then it also keeps up a normal temperature within a tenth of a Fahrenheit degree, and manufactures its own chemicals for the processes of transforming food into living tissues.

Above all, it has a sense of the rhythm of life, and a sense of time, not only of hours and days, but also of decades; the body regulates its own childhood, puberty and maturity, stops growing when it should no longer grow, and brings forth a wisdom tooth at a time when no one of us ever thought of it. Our conscious wisdom has nothing to do with our wisdom tooth. It also manufactures specific antidotes against poison, on the whole with amazing success, and it does all these things with absolute silence, without the usual racket of a factory, so that our superfine metaphysician may not be disturbed and is free to think about his spirit or his essence.

The human mind, you say, is probably the noblest product of the Creation. This is a proposition that most people will admit, particularly when it refers to a mind like Albert Einstein’s that can prove curved space by a long mathematical equation, or Edison’s that can invent the gramaphone and the motion picture, or the minds of other physicists who can measure the rays of an advancing or receding star or deal with the constitution of the unseen atoms, or that of the inventor of natural-color movie cameras. Compared with the aimless, shifting and fumbling curiosity of the monkeys, we must agree that we have a noble, a glorious intellect that can comprehend the universe in which we are born.

The average mind, however, is charming rather than noble. Had the average mind been noble, we should be completely rational beings without sins or weaknesses or misconduct, and what an insipid world that would be! We should be so much less charming as creatures. I am such a humanist that saints without sins don’t interest me. But we are charming in our irrationality, our inconsistencies, our follies, our sprees and holiday gaieties, our prejudices, bigotry and forgetfulness. Had we all perfect brains, we shouldn’t have to make new resolutions every New Year. The beauty of the human life consists in the fact that, as we review on New Year’s Eve our last New Year resolutions, we find we have fulfilled a third of them, left unfulfilled another third, and can’t remember what the other third was. A plan that is sure to be carried out down to its last detail already loses interest for me. A general who goes to battle and is completely sure of his victory beforehand, and can even predict the exact number of casualties, will lose all interest in the battle, and might just as well throw up the whole thing. No one would play chess if he knew his opponent’s mind-good, bad or indifferent-was infallible. All novels would be unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work and were we able consequently to predict the exact outcome. The reading of a novel is but the chase of a wayward and unpredictable mind making its incalculable decisions at certain moments, through a maze of evolving circumstances. A stern, unforgiving father who does not at some moment relax ceases to impress us as human, and even a faithless husband who is forever faithless soon forfeits the reader’s interest. Imagine a renowned, proud composer, whom no one could induce to compose an opera for a certain beautiful woman, but who, on hearing that a hated rival composer is thinking of doing it, immediately snatches at the job; or a scientist who in his life has consistently refused to publish his writings in newspapers, but who, on seeing a rival scientist make a slip with one single letter, forgets his own rule and rushes into print. There we have laid our finger upon the singularly human quality of the mind.

The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability. If we haven’t learned this truth, we have learned nothing from the century of study of human psychology. In other words, our minds still retain the aimless, fumbling quality of simian intelligence.

Consider the evolution of the human mind. Our mind was originally an organ for sensing danger and preserving life. That this mind eventually came to appreciate logic and a correct mathematical equation I consider a mere accident. Certainly it was not created for that purpose. It was created for sniffing food, and if after sniffing food, it can also sniff an abstract mathematical formula, that’s all to the good. My conception of the human brain, as of all animal brains, is that it is like an octopus or a starfish with tentacles, tentacles for feeling the truth and eating it. Today we still speak of “feeling” the truth, rather than “thinking” it. The brain, together with other sensory organs, constitutes the feelers. How its tentacles feel the truth is still as great a mystery in physics as the sensitivity to light of the purple in the eye’s retina. Every time the brain dissociates itself from the collaborating sensory apparatus and indulges in so-called “abstract thinking,” every time it gets away from what William James calls the perceptual reality and escapes into the world of conceptual reality, it becomes devitalized, dehumanized and degenerate. We all labor under the misconception that the true function of the mind is thinking, a misconception that is bound to lead to serious mistakes in philosophy unless we revise our notion of the term “thinking” itself. It is a misconception that is apt to leave the philosopher disillusioned when he goes out of his studio and watches the crowd at the market. As if thinking had much to do with our everyday behavior!

The late James Harvey Robinson has tried to show, in The Mind in the Making, how our mind gradually evolved from, and is still operating upon, four underlying layers: the animal mind, the savage mind, the childish mind and the traditional civilized mind, and has further shown us the necessity of developing a more critical mind if the present human civilization is to continue. In my scientific moments, I am inclined to agree with him, but in my wiser moments, I doubt the feasibility, or even the desirability, of such a step of general progress. I prefer to have our mind charmingly unreasonable as it is at present. I should hate to see a world in which we are all perfectly rational beings. Do I distrust scientific progress? No, I distrust sainthood. Am I anti-intellectualistic? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. I am merely in love with life, and being in love with life, I distrust the intellect profoundly. Imagine a world in which there are no stories of murder in newspapers, everyone is so omniscient that no house ever catches fire, no airplane ever has an accident, no husband deserts his wife, no pastor elopes with a choir girl, no king abdicates his throne for love, no man changes his mind and everyone proceeds to carry out with logical precision a career that he mapped out for himself at the age of ten-good-by to this happy human world! All the excitement and uncertainty of life would be gone. There would be no literature because there would be no sin, no misbehavior, no human weakness, no upsetting passion, no prejudices, no irregularities and, worst of all, no surprises. It would be like a horse race in which everyone of the forty or fifty thousand spectators knew the winner. Human fallibility is the very essence of the color of life, as the upsets are the very color and interest of a steeplechase. Imagine a Doctor Johnston without his bigoted prejudices! If we were all completely rational beings, we should then, instead of growing into perfect wisdom, degenerate into automatons, the human mind serving merely to register . certain impulses as unfailingly as a gas meter. That would be inhuman, and anything inhuman is bad.

My readers may suspect that I am trying a desperate defense of human frailties and making virtues of their vices, and yet it is not so. What we gained in correctness of conduct through the development of a completely rational mind, we should lose in the fun and color of life. And nothing is so uninteresting as to spend one’s life with a paragon of virtue as a husband or wife. I have no doubt that a society of such perfectly rational beings would be perfectly fitted to survive, and yet I wonder whether survival on such terms is worth having. Have a society that is well-ordered, by all means -but not too well-ordered! I recall the ants, who, to my mind, are probably the most perfectly rational creatures on earth. No doubt ants have evolved such a perfect socialist state that they have been able to live on this pattern for probably the last million years. So far as complete rationality of conduct is concerned, I think we have to hand it to the ants, and let the human beings come second (I doubt very much whether they deserve that). The ants are a hard-working, sane, saving and thrifty lot. They are the socially regimented and individually disciplined beings that we are not. They don’t mind working fourteen hours a day for the state or the community; they have a sense of duty and almost no sense of rights; they have persistence, order, courtesy and courage, and above all, self-discipline. Weare poor specimens of self-discipline, not even good enough for museum pieces.

Run across any hall of honor, with statues of the great men of history lining the corridor, and you will perceive that rationality of conduct is probably the last thing to be recalled from their lives. This Julius Caesar, who fell in love with Cleopatra-noble Julius Caesar, who was so completely irrational that he almost forgot (as Anthony did entirely forget) an empire for a woman. That Moses, who in a fit of rage shattered the sacred stone tablets which had taken him forty days on Mount Sinai to inscribe in company with God, and in that he was no more rational than the Israelites who forsook God and took to worshiping the Golden Calf during his absence. That King David, who was alternately cruel and generous, alternately religious and impious, who worshiped God and sinned and wrote psalms of repentance and worshiped God again. King Solomon, the very image of wisdom, who couldn’t do a thing about his son… Confucius, who told a visitor he was not at home and then, as the visitor was just outside the door, sang upstairs in order to let him know that he was at home… Jesus, with his tears at Gethsemane and his doubts on the cross . . . Shakespeare, who bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife… Milton, who couldn’t get along with his seventeen-year-old wife and therefore wrote a treatise on divorce and, being attacked, then burst forth into a defense of the liberty of speech in Areopagitica…

Goethe, who went through the Church’s wedding ceremony with his wife, their nineteen-year-old son standing by their side… Jonathan Swift and Stella… Ibsen and Emilie Bardach (he kept rational-good for him) …

Is it not plain that passion rather than reason rules the world?

And that what made these great men lovable, what made them human, was not their rationality, but their lack of rationality? Chinese obituary notices and biographical sketches of men and women written by their children are so unreadable, so uninteresting and so untrue, because they make all their ancestors appear abnormally and wholly virtuous beings … The great criticism of my book on China by my countrymen is that I make the Chinese too human, that I have painted their weaknesses as well as their strength. My countrymen (at least the little bureaucrats) believe that if I had painted China as a paradise inhabited by Confucianist saints only, living in a millennium of peace and reason, I could have done more effective propaganda for my country! There is really no limit to the stupidity of bureaucrats… But the very charm of biography, its very readability, depends on showing the human side of a great character which is so similar to ours. Every touch of irrational behavior in a biography is a stroke in convincing reality. On that alone, the success of Lytton Strachey’s portraits depends.

An excellent illustration of a perfectly sound mind is provided

by the English. The English have got bad logic, but very good tentacles in their brains for sensing danger and preserving life. I have not been able to discover anything logical in their national behavior or their rational history. Their universities, their constitution, their Anglican Church are all pieces of patchwork, being the steady accretions of a process of historical growth. The very strength of the British Empire consists in the English lack of cerebration, in their total inability to see the other man’s point of view, and in their strong conviction that the English way is the only right way and English food is the only good food. The moment the Englishmen learn to reason and lose their strong confidence in themselves, the British Empire will collapse. For no one can go about conquering the world if he has doubts about himself. You can make absolutely nothing out of the English attitude toward their king, their loyalty to, and their quite genuine affection for, a king who is deprived by them of the liberty of speech and is summarily told to behave or quit the throne… When Elizabethan England needed pirates to protect the Empire, she was able to produce enough pirates to meet the situation and glorified them. In every period, England was able to fight the right war, against the right enemy, with the right ally, on the right side, at the right time, and call it by a wrong name. They didn’t do it by logic, did they? They did it by their tentacles.

The English have a ruddy complexion, developed no doubt by the London fog and by cricket. A skin that is so healthy cannot but help playing an important part in their thinking, that is, in the process of feeling their way through life. And as the English think with their healthy skin, so the Chinese think with their profound intestines. That is a pretty generally established matter in China. We Chinese know that we do think with our intestines; scholars are said to have “a bellyful of ideas,” or “of scholarship,” “of poetry and literature,” or “a bellyful of sorrow,” or “of anger,” “remorse,” “chagrin,” or ‘longing.” Chinese lovers separated from each other write letters to say that “their sorrowful intestines are tied into a hundred knots,” or that at their last parting “their intestines were broken.” Chinese scholars who have arranged their ideas for an essay or a speech, but have not written them down on paper, are said to have their “belly manuscript” ready. They have got their ideas all arranged down there. I’m quite sure they have. This is, of course, all strictly scientific and capable of proof, especially when modern psychologists come to understand better the emotional quality and texture of our thought. But the Chinese don’t need any scientific proof. They just feel it down there. Only by appreciating the fact that the emotional quality of Chinese melodies all starts from below the diaphragm of the singers, can one understand Chinese music with its profound emotional color.

One must never deprecate the capacity of the human mind when dealing with the natural universe or anything except human relationships. Optimistic about the conquests of science, I am less hopeful about the general development of a critical mind in dealing with human affairs, or about mankind reaching a calm and understanding far above the sway of passions. Mankind as individuals may have reached austere heights, but mankind as social groups are still subject to primitive passions, occasional back-slidings and outcroppings of the savage instincts, and occasional waves of fanaticism and mass hysteria.

Knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch who in demagogue fashion makes use of our human foibles to hound us into another world war; who inculcates hatred, of which we already have too much; who glorifies self-aggrandizement and self-interest, of which there is no lack; who appeals to our animal bigotry and racial prejudice; who deletes the fifth commandment in the training of youth and encourages killing and war as noble, as if we were not already warlike enough creatures; and who whips up and stirs our mortal passions, as if we were not already very near the beast. This wretch’s mind, no matter how cunning, how sagacious, how worldly-wise, is itself a manifestation of the beast. The gracious spirit of wisdom is tied down to a beast or a demon in us, which by this time we have come to understand is nothing but our animal heritage, or rather it ties this demon down by an old and worn leash and holds it but in temporary submission. At any time the leash may snap, and the demon be unleashed, and amidst hosannas the car of Juggernaut will ride roughshod over us, just to remind us once more how terribly near the savage we have been all this time, and how superficial is our civilization. Civilization will then be turned into a magnificent stage, on which Moors will kill Christians and Christians kill Moors and Negroes fall upon whites and whites stab Negroes and field mice emerge from sewers to eat human corpses and hawks circle in the air over an abundant human feast-all just to remind ourselves of the brotherhood of animals. Nature is quite capable of such experiments.

Psychoanalyists often cure mental patients by making them review their past and see their life objectively. Perhaps if mankind will think more of their past, they will also have a better mastery over themselves. The knowledge that we have an animal heritage and that we are very near the beasts might help to check our behaving like beasts. This animal heritage of ours makes it easier to see ourselves as we are in animal fables and satires, as in Aesop’s Fables, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Anatole France’s Penguin Island. These animal fables were good in Aesop’s day and will still be good in the year A. D. 4000•

How can we remedy the situation? The critical mind is too thin and cold, thinking itself will help little and reason will be of small avail; only the spirit of reasonableness, a sort of warm, glowing, emotional and intuitive thinking, joined with compassion, will insure us against a reversion to our ancestral type. Only the development of our life to bring it into harmony with our instincts can save us. I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas.

Another important consequence of our being animals and of our having mortal bodies is that we are susceptible to murder, and the average man doesn’t like murder. True, we have a divine desire for knowledge and wisdom, but with knowledge come also differences of point of view and therefore arguments. Now in a world of immortals, arguments would last forever; for I can conceive of no way of settling a dispute, if neither of the disputing immortals is willing to admit that he is wrong. In a world of mortals, the situation is different. The disputing party generally gets so obnoxious in the eyes of his opponent-and the more obnoxious he will appear, the more embarrassingly right his arguments are-so that the latter just kills him, and that settles the argument. If “A” kills “B,” “A” is right; and if “B” kills “A,” “B” is right. This, we hardly need remind ourselves, is the old, old method of settling arguments among brutes. In the animal kingdom, the lion is always right.

This is basically so true of human society that it offers a good interpretation of human history, even down to the present time. After all, Galileo retracted as well as discovered certain ideas about the roundness of the earth and the solar system. He retracted because he had a mortal body, susceptible to murder or torture. It would have taken infinite trouble to have argued with Galileo, and if Galileo had had no mortal body, you could never have convinced him that he was wrong, and that would have been an eternal nuisance. As it was, however, a torture chamber or a prison cell, not to speak of the gallows or the stake, sufficed to show how wrong he was. The clergy and the gentlemen of the period were determined to have a showdown with Galileo. The fact that Galileo was convinced that he was wrong strengthened the belief of the clergy of that period that they were right. That settled the matter very neatly.

There is something convenient and handy and efficient about this method of settling quarrels. Wars of depredation, religious wars, the conflict of Saladin and the Christians, the Inquisition, the burning of witches, the more modern preaching of the Christian gospel and proselytizing of heathens by gun-boats, the bearing of the White Man’s Burden by the same means, the spread of civilization to Ethiopia by Mussolini’s tanks and airplanes-all these proceed upon this animal logic to which all mankind is heir. If the Italians have better guns and shoot straighter and kill more people, Mussolini carries civilization to Ethiopia, and if, on the other hand, the Ethiopians have better guns and shoot straighter and kill more people, and then Haile Selassie carries civilization to Italy.

There is something of the noble lion in us that disdains arguments. Hence our glorification of the soldier because he makes short shrift with dissenters. The quickest way to shut up a man who believes he is right, and who shows the propensity to argue, is to hang him. Men resort to talking only when they haven’t the power to enforce their convictions upon others. On the other hand, men who act and have the power to act seldom talk. They despise arguments. After all, we talk in order to influence people, and if we know we can influence people, or control them, where is the need for talking at all? In this connection, is it not somewhat disheartening that the League of Nations talked so much during the last Manchurian and Ethiopian wars? It was altogether pathetic. There is something ominous about this quality of the League of Nations. On the other hand, this method of settling arguments by force can sometimes be carried to absurdity, if there is no sense of humor, as when the Japanese actually believe they can stamp out anti-Japanese feeling among the Chinese by bombing and machine-gunning them. That is why I am always slow to admit that we are rational animals.

I have always thought that the League of Nations was an excellent School for Modern Languages, specializing in translation of the modern tongues, giving the hearers excellent practice by first making an accomplished orator deliver a perfect address in English, and after the audience is thus made acquainted with the gist and content of the speech, having it rendered into fluent, flawless, classical French by a professional translator, with intonation, accent and all. In fact, it is better than the Berlitz School; it is a school of modern languages and public speaking to boot. One of my friends, in fact, reported that, after a six months’ stay at Geneva, his lisping habit which had bothered him for years was cured. But the amazing fact is that even in this League of Nations, consecrated to the exchange of opinions, in an institution that conceivably has no other purpose than talking, there should be a distinction between Big Talkers and Small Talkers, the Big Talkers being those having Big Fists, and the Small Talkers being those having Small Fists, which shows the whole thing is quite silly, if not a fake. As if the nations with Small Fists couldn’t talk as fluently as the others! That is to say, if we mean just talking… I cannot but think that this inherent belief in the eloquence of the Big Fist belongs to that animal heritage we have spoken of. (I shouldn’t like to use the word “brute” here, and yet it would seem most appropriate in this connection.)

Of course, the gist of the matter lies in the fact that mankind is endowed with a chattering instinct as well as the fighting instinct. The tongue is, historically speaking, as old as the fist or the strong arm. The ability to talk distinguishes man from animals, and the mixture of verbiage and barrage seems to be a peculiarly human trait. This would seem to point to the permanency of institutions like the League of Nations, or the American Senate, or a tradesmen’s convention-anything that affords men an opportunity to talk. It seems we humans are destined to chatter in order to find out who is right. That is all right; chattering is a characteristic of the angels. The peculiarly human trait lies in the fact that we chatter to a certain point until one of the parties of the dispute who has a stronger arm feels so embarrassed or angered-”Embarrassment leads naturally to anger,” the Chinese say-until that embarrassed and therefore angered party thinks that this chattering has gone far enough, bangs the table, takes his opponent by the neck, gives him a wallop, and then looks about and asks the audience, which is the jury, “Am I right or am I wrong?” And as we learn at every tea house, the audience invariably replies, “You are right!” Only humans ever settle a thing like that. Angels settle arguments all by chatter; brutes settle arguments all by muscle and claws; human beings alone settle them by a strange confusion of muscle and chatter. Angels believe solely in right; brutes believe solely in might; and human beings alone believe that might is right. Of the two, the chattering instinct, or the effort to find out who is right, is of course the nobler instinct. Someday we must all just chatter. That will be the salvation of mankind. At present, we must be content with the tea house method and tea house psychology. It doesn’t matter whether we settle an argument in a tea house or at the League of Nations; at both places, we are consistently and characteristically human.

I have witnessed two such tea house scenes, one in 1931-32 and one in 1936. And the most amusing thing is, there was an admixture of a third instinct, modesty, in these two squabbles. In the 1931 affair, we were at the tea house and there was one party in dispute with another and we were supposed to be the jury in the matter. The charge was some sort of a theft or stealing of property. The fellow with the strong arm at first joined in the argument, made an address to justify himself, spoke of his infinite patience with his neighbor-what restraint, what magnanimity, what unselfishness of motive in his desire to cultivate his neighbor’s garden! The funny thing was, he encouraged us to go on with our chatter while he stole outside the room and completed the stealing by staking up a fence around the stolen property, and then came in to ask us to go and see for ourselves if he wasn’t right. We all went, saw the new fence being steadily pushed farther and farther to the West, for even then the fence was being constantly shifted. “Now, then, am I right or wrong?” We returned the verdict of “You are wrong!”-a little impudent of us to have said that. Thereupon the fellow with the strong arm protested that he was publicly insulted, that his sense of modesty was injured and his honor besmirched. Angrily and proudly he walked out of the room, wiping the dust off his shoes with sneering contempt, thinking us not good company for him. Imagine a man like that feeling insulted! That is why I say the third instinct of modesty complicates the matter. Thereupon the tea house lost a good bit of its reputation as a place for scientific settling of private quarrels.

Then in 1936 we were called upon to judge another dispute.

Another fellow with a strong arm said he would lay the facts of the dispute before the table and ask for justice. I heard the word “justice” with a shudder. And we believed him-not without a premonition as to the awkwardness of the situation or our questionable capacity as a jury. Determined to justify our reputation as fair-minded and competent judges, we, almost to a man, told him to his face that he was wrong, that he was nothing but a bully. He, too, felt insulted; again his sense of modesty was injured and his honor was besmirched. Well, then, he took the opponent by the neck and went outside and killed him, and then he came back and asked us, “Now am I right or wrong?” And we echoed, “You are right!” with a profound bow. Still not satisfied, he asked us, “Am I good enough company for you now?” and we shouted like a regular tea house crowd, “Of course you are!” But what modesty on the part of the killer!

That is human civilization in the year of Our Lord 1936. I think the evolution of law and justice must have passed through scenes like the above in its earliest dawn, when we were little better than savages. From that tea house scene to the Supreme Court of Justice, where the convicted does not protest that he is insulted by the conviction, seems a long, long way of development. For some ten years, while we started the tea house, we thought we were on the road to civilization, but a wiser God, knowing human beings and our essential human traits, might have predicted the setback. He might have known how we must fail and falter at the beginning, being only half civilized as we are at present. For the present, the reputation of the tea house is gone, and we are back to falling upon each other and tearing each other’s hair out and digging our teeth into each other’s flesh, in the true grand style of the jungle. Still I am not in total despair. That thing called modesty or shame is after all a good thing and the chattering instinct also. The way I look at it is we are quite devoid of real shame at present. But let us continue to pretend that we have a sense of shame, and continue to chatter. By chattering we shall one day attain the blessed state of the angels.

One of the most important consequences of our being animals is that we have got this bottomless pit called the stomach. This fact has colored our entire civilization. The Chinese epicure Li Liweng wrote a complaint about our having this bottomless pit, in the prefatory note to the section on food in his book on the general art of living.

I see that the organs of the human body, the ear, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the hands, the feet and the body, have all a necessary function, but the two organs which are totally unnecessary but with which we are nevertheless endowed are the mouth and the stomach, which cause all the worry and trouble of mankind throughout the ages. With this mouth and this stomach, the matter of getting a living becomes complicated, and when the matter of getting a living becomes complicated, we have cunning and falsehood and dishonesty in human affairs. With the coming of cunning and falsehood and dishonesty in human affairs, comes the criminal law, so that the king is not able to protect with his mercy, the parents are not able to gratify their love, and even the kind Creator is forced to go against His will. All this comes of a little lack of forethought in His design for the human body at the time of the creation, and is the consequence of our having these two organs. The plants can live without a mouth and a stomach, and the rocks and the soil have their being without any nourishment. Why, then, must we be given a mouth and a stomach and endowed with these two extra organs? And even if we were to be endowed with these organs, He could have made it possible for us to derive our nourishment as the fish and shell fish derive theirs from water, or the cricket and the cicada from the dew, who all are able to obtain their growth and energy this way and swim or fly or jump or sing. Had it been like this, we should not have to struggle in this life and the sorrows of mankind would have disappeared. On the other hand, He has given us not only these two organs, but has also endowed us with manifold appetites or desires, besides making the pit bottomless, so that it is like a valley or a sea that can never be filled. The consequence is that we labor in our life with all the energy of the other organs, in order to supply inadequately the needs of these two. I have thought over this matter over and over again, and cannot help blaming the Creator for it. I know, of course, that He must have repented of His mistake also, but simply feels that nothing can be done about it now, since the design or pattern is already fixed. How important it is for a man to be very careful at the time of the conception of a law or an institution!

There is certainly nothing to be done about it, now that we have got this bottomless pit to fill, and the fact of our having possessed a stomach has, to say the least, colored the course of human history. With a generous understanding of human nature, Confucius reduced the great desires of human beings to two: alimentation and reproduction, or in simpler terms, food and drink and women. Many men have circumvented sex, but no saint has yet circumvented food and drink. There are ascetics who have learned to live a continent life, but even the most spiritual of men cannot forget about food for more than four or five hours. The most constant refrain of our thought occurring unfailingly every few hours is, “When do I eat?” This occurs at least three times a day, and in some cases four or five times. International conferences, in the midst of discussion of the most absorbing and most critical political situations, have to break up for the noon meal. Parliaments have to adjust their schedule of sessions to meal hours. A coronation ceremony that lasts more than five or six hours or conflicts with the midday meal, will be immediately denounced as a public nuisance. And stomach-gifted that we all are, the best arrangement we can think of when we gather to render public homage to a grandfather is to give him a birthday feast.

There is a reason for it. Friends that meet at meals meet at peace.

A good birds’ nest soup or a delicious chow mein has the tendency to assuage the heat of our arguments and tone down the harshness of our conflicting points of view. Put two of the best friends together when they are hungry, and they will invariably end up in a quarrel. The effect of a good meal lasts not only a few hours, but for weeks and months. We rather hesitate to review unfavorably a book written by somebody who gave us a good dinner three or four months ago. It is for this reason that, with the Chinese deep insight into human nature, all quarrels and disputes are settled at dinner tables instead of at the court of justice. The pattern of Chinese life is such that we not only settle disputes at dinner, after they have arisen, but also forestall the arising of disputes by the same means. In China, we bribe our way into the good will of everybody by frequent dinners. It is, in fact, the only safe guide to success in politics. Should some one take the trouble of compiling statistical figures, he would be able to find an absolute correlation between the number of dinners a man gives to his friends and the rate or speed of his official promotion.

But, constituted as we all are, how can we react otherwise? I do not think this is peculiarly Chinese. How can an American post master-general or chief of department decline a private request for a personal favor from some friend at whose home he has eaten five or six good meals? I bet on the Americans being as human as the Chinese. The only difference is the Americans haven’t got insight into human nature or haven’t proceeded logically to organize their political life in accordance with it. I guess there is something similar to this Chinese way of life in the American political world, too, since I cannot but believe human nature is very much the same and we are all so much alike under the skin. Only I don’t notice it practiced so generally as in China. The only thing I have heard of is that candidates for public office give outings for the families in the district, bribing the mothers by feeding their children with ice cream and soda pop. The inevitable conviction of the people after such a public feeding is that “He’s a jolly good fellow,” which usually bursts out in song. This is merely another form of the practice of the medieval lords and nobles in Europe who, on the occasion of a wedding or a noble’s birthday, gave their tenants a generous feast with liberal meats and wine.

So basically influenced are we by this matter of food and drink that revolutions, peace, war, patriotism, international understanding, our daily life and the whole fabric of human social life are profoundly influenced by it. What was the cause of the French Revolution? Rousseau and Voltaire and Diderot? No, just food. What is the cause of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment? Just food again. As for war, Napoleon showed the essential depth of his wisdom by saying that “an army fights on its stomach.” And what is the use of saying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace below the diaphragm? This applies to nations as well as individuals. Empires have collapsed and the most powerful regimes and reigns of terror have broken down when the people were hungry. Men refuse to work, soldiers refuse to fight, prima donnas refuse to sing, senators refuse to debate, and even presidents refuse to rule the country when they are hungry. And what does a husband work and sweat in the office the whole day for, except the prospect of a good meal at home? Hence the proverb that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. When his flesh is satisfied, his spirit is calmer and more at ease, and he becomes more amorous and appreciative. Wives have complained that husbands don’t notice their new dresses, new shoes, new eyebrows, or new covers for chairs. But have wives ever complained that husbands don’t notice a good steak or a good omelette?

What is patriotism but love of the good things we ate in our childhood? I have said elsewhere that the loyalty to Uncle Sam is the loyalty to doughnuts and ham and sweet potatoes and the loyalty to the German Vaterland is the loyalty to Pjannkuchen and Christmas Stollen. As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini. It is a pity that, in the minds of some people, at least, who are not in favor of the Mussolini regime, what macaroni has done Mussolini has undone in the cause of understanding between Italy and the outside world. That is because in food, as in death, we feel the essential brotherhood of mankind.

How a Chinese spirit glows over a good feast! How apt is he to cry out that life is beautiful when his stomach and his intestines are well-filled! From this well-filled stomach suffuses and radiates a happiness that is spirituaL The Chinese relies upon instinct and his instinct tells him that when the stomach is right, everything is right. That is why I claim for the Chinese a life closer to instinct and a philosophy that makes a more open acknowledgment of it possible. The Chinese idea of happiness is, as I have noted elsewhere, being “warm, well-filled, dark and sweet”-referring to the condition of going to bed after a good supper. It is for this reason that a Chinese poet says, “A well-filled stomach is indeed a great thing; all else is luxury.”

With this philosophy, therefore, the Chinese have no prudery about food, or about eating it with gusto. When a Chinese drinks a mouthful of good soup, he gives a hearty smack. Of course, that would be bad table manners in the West. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that Western table manners, compelling us to sip our soup noiselessly and eat our food quietly with the least expression of enjoyment, are the true reason for the arrested development of the art of cuisine. Why do the Westerners talk so softly and look so miserable and decent and respectable at their meals? Most Americans haven’t got the good sense to take a chicken drumstick in their hand and chew it clean, but continue to pretend to play at it with a knife and fork, feeling utterly miserable and afraid to say a thing about it. This is criminal when the chicken is really good. As for the so-called table manners, I feel sure that the child gets his first initiation into the sorrows of this life when his mother forbids him to smack his lips. Such is human psychology that if we don’t express our joy, we soon cease to feel it even, and then follow dyspepsia, melancholia, neurasthenia and all the mental ailments peculiar to the adult life. One ought to imitate the French and sigh an “Ah!” when the waiter brings a good veal cutlet, and makes a sheer animal grunt like “Ummm!” after tasting the first mouthful. What shame is there in enjoying one’s food, what shame in having a normal, healthy appetite? No, the Chinese are different. They have bad table manners, but great enjoyment of a feast.

In fact, I believe the reason why the Chinese failed to develop botany and zoology is that the Chinese scholar cannot stare coldly and unemotionally at a fish without immediately thinking of how it tastes in the mouth and wanting to eat it. The reason I don’t trust Chinese surgeons is that I am afraid that when a Chinese surgeon cuts up my liver in search of a gall-stone, he may forget about the stone and put my liver in a frying pan. For I see a Chinese cannot look at a porcupine without immediately thinking of ways and means of cooking and eating its flesh without being poisoned. Not to be poisoned is for the Chinese the only practical, important aspect of it. The taste of the porcupine meat is supremely important, if it should add one more flavor known to our palate. The bristles of the porcupine don’t interest us. How they arose, what is their function and how they are connected with the porcupine’s skin and endowed with the power of sticking up at the sight of an enemy are questions that seem to the Chinese eminently idle. And so with all the animals and plants, the proper point of view is how we humans can enjoy them and not what they are in themselves. The song of the bird, the color of the flower, the petals of the orchid, the texture of chicken meat are the things that concern us. The East has to learn from the West the entire sciences of botany and zoology, but the West has to learn from the East how to enjoy the trees, the flowers, and the fishes, birds and animals, to get a full appreciation of the contours and gestures of different species and associate them with different moods or feelings.

Food, then, is one of the very few solid joys of human life. It is a happy fact that this instinct of hunger is less hedged about with taboos and a social code than the other instinct of sex, and that generally speaking, no question of morality arises in connection with food. There is much less prudery about food than there is about sex. It is a happy condition of affairs that philosophers, poets, merchants and artists can join together at a dinner, and without a blush perform the function of feeding themselves in open public, although certain savage tribes are known to have developed a sense of modesty about food and eat only when they are individually alone. The problem of sex will come in for consideration later, but here at least is an instinct which, because less hampered, produces fewer forms of perversion and insanity and criminal behavior. This difference between the instinct of hunger and the instinct of sex in their social implications is quite natural. But the fact remains that here is one instinct which does not complicate our psychological life, but is a pure boon to humanity. The reason is because it is the one instinct about which humanity is pretty frank. Because there is no problem of modesty here, there is no psychosis, neurosis or perversion connected with it. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, but once food gets inside the lips, there is comparatively little sidetracking. It is freely admitted that everybody must have food, which is not the case with the sexual instinct. And being gratified, it leads to no trouble. At the worst, some people eat their way into dyspepsia, or an ulcered stomach or a hardened liver, and a few dig their graves with their own teeth-there are cases of Chinese dignitaries among my contemporaries who do this-but even then, they are not ashamed of it.

For the same reason, fewer social crimes arise from food than from sex. The criminal code has comparatively little to do with the sins of illegal, immoral and faithless eating, while it has a large section on adultery, divorce, and assault on women. At the worst, husbands may ransack the icebox, but we seldom hang a man for spiking a Frigidaire. Should such a case ever be brought up, the judge will be found to be full of compassion. The frank admission of the necessity of every man feeding himself makes this possible. Our hearts go out to people in famine, but not to the cloistered nuns.

This speculation is far from being idle because there is little public ignorance about the subject of food, as compared with public ignorance on the subject of sex, which is appalling. There are Manchu families which school their daughters in the art of love as well as in the art of cooking before their marriage, but how much of this is done elsewhere in the world? The subject of food enjoys the sunshine of knowledge, but sex is still surrounded with fairy tales, myths and superstitions. There is sunshine about the subject of food, but very little sunshine about the subject of sex.

On the other hand, it is highly unfortunate that we haven’t got a gizzard or a crop or a maw. In that case, human society would be altered beyond recognition; in fact, we should have an altogether different race of men. A human race endowed with gullets or gizzards would be found to have the most peaceful, contented and sweet nature, like the chicken or the lamb. We might grow a beak, which would alter our sense of beauty, or we might have merely done with rodent teeth. Seeds and fruits might be sufficient, or we might pasture on the green hillsides, for Nature is so abundant. Because we should not have to fight for our food and dig our teeth into the flesh of our defeated enemy, we would not be the terrible warlike creatures that we are today.

There is a closer relation between food and temperament-in Nature’s terms-than we thought. All herbivorous animals are peaceful by nature: the lamb, the horse, the cow, the elephant, the sparrow, etc.; all carnivorous animals are fighters: the wolf, the lion, the tiger, the hawk, etc. Had we been an herbivorous race, our nature would certainly be more elephantine. Nature does not produce a pugnacious temperament where no fighting is needed. Cocks still fight with each other, but they fight not about food, but about women. There would still be a little fighting of this sort among the males in human society, but it would be vastly different from this fighting for exported canned goods that we see in present-day Europe.

I do not know about monkeys eating monkeys, but I do know about men eating men, for certainly all evidences of anthropology point to a pretty universal practice of cannibalism. That was our carnivorous ancestry. Is it therefore any wonder that we are still eating each other in more senses than one-individually, socially and internationally? There is this much to be said for the cannibals, that they are sensible about this matter of killing. Conceding that killing is an undesirable but unavoidable evil, they proceed to get something out of it by eating the delicious sirloins, ribs and livers of their dead enemies. The difference between cannibals and civilized men seems to be that cannibals kill their enemies and eat them, while civilized men kill their foes and bury them, put a cross over their bodies and offer up prayers for their souls. Thus we add stupidity to conceit and a bad temper.

I quite realize that we are on the road to perfection, which means that we are excusably imperfect at present. That, I think, is what we are. Not until we develop a gizzard temper can we call ourselves truly civilized. I see in the present generation of men both carnivorous and herbivorous animals-those who have a sweet temper and those who have not. The herbivorous men go their way through life minding their own business, while the carnivorous men make their living by minding that of others. If I abjured politics ten years ago, after having a foretaste of it during four months, it was because I early made the discovery that I was not by nature a carnivorous animal, although I enjoy a good steak. Half of the world spends its time doing things, and half the world spends its time making others do things for them, or making it impossible for others to do anything. The characteristic of the carnivorous is a certain sheer delight in pugilism, logrolling, wire-pulling, and in double-crossing, outwitting and forestalling the enemy, all done with a genuine interest and real ability, for which, however, I confess I fail to have the slightest appreciation. But it is all a matter of instinct; men born with this pugilistic instinct seem to enjoy and revel in it, while real creative ability, ability in doing their own jobs or knowing their own subjects, seems at the same time usually to be underdeveloped. How many good, quiet herbivorous professors are totally lacking in rapacity and the ability to get ahead in competition with others, and yet how truly I admire them! In fact I may essay the opinion that all the world’s creative artists are vastly better at minding their own business than minding that of others, and are therefore of the herbivorous species. True evolution of mankind consists in the multiplication of the herbivorous homo sapiens over against the carnivorous variety. For the moment, however, the carnivorous must still be our rulers. That must be so in a world believing in strong muscles.