abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and
breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of
course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate
and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric
superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our
social systems.

But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices
and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities,
jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases?
Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they
represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps,
the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas
Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What
future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not
the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of
other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to
which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us:
that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no
future?

That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent
question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen
angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for
eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always
will be the same." "As a man is built." "Bred in the bone." These are
the axioms of our social and economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming
that his nature is as uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has
limited his research into the substance of freedom to a groping for an
understanding of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he