bly, but be not blinded to her
defects. Learn from Nature? We should sit humbly at her feet until we
can stand erect and go our own way. Love Nature? Never! She is our
treacherous and unsleeping foe, ever to be feared and watched and
circumvented, for at any moment and in spite of all our vigilance she
may wipe out the human race by famine, pestilence or earthquake and
within a few centuries obliterate every trace of its achievement. The
wild beasts that man has kept at bay for a few centuries will in the end
invade his palaces: the moss will envelop his walls and the lichen
disrupt them. The clam may survive man by as many millennia as it
preceded him. In the ultimate devolution of the world animal life will
disappear before vegetable, the higher plants will be killed off before
the lower, and finally the three kingdoms of nature will be reduced to
one, the mineral. Civilized man, enthroned in his citadel and defended
by all the forces of nature that he has brought under his control, is
after all in the same situation as a savage, shivering in the darkness
beside his fire, listening to the pad of predatory feet, the rustle of
serpents and the cry of birds of prey, knowing that only the fire keeps
his enemies off, but knowing too that every stick he lays on the fire
lessens his fuel supply and hastens the inevitable time when the beasts
of the jungle will make their fatal rush.

Chaos is the "natural" state of the universe. Cosmos is the rare and
temporary exception. Of all the million spheres this is apparently the
only one habitable and of this only a small part--the reader may draw
the boundaries to suit himself--can be called civilized. Anarchy is the
natural state of the human race. It prevailed exclusively all over the
world up to some five thousand years ago, since which a few peoples have
for a time succeeded in establishing a certain degree of peace and
order. This, however, can be maintained only by strenuous and persistent
efforts, for society tends naturally to sink into the chaos out of which
it has arisen.

It is only by overcoming nature that man can rise. The sole salvation
for the human race lies in the removal of the primal curse, the sentence
of hard labor for life that was imposed on man as he left Paradise. Some
folks are trying to elevate the laboring classes; some are trying to
keep them down. The scientist has a more radical remedy; he wants to
annihilate the laboring classes by abolishing labor