achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed
himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes.
And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out
to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.

Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature
of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but
the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,
institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems
of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized,
established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more
perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom
to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life,
vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well
as of man is the history of a searching for freedom.

Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it
dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon
the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its
rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is
manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime.
When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba,
protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.
For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new
power--the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead
of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just
happen along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist
pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a
new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist.