ctment of his fellows.

For all history provides the material, literature the critique,
biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The
historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection
of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time
and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have
been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have
been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has
remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for
the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.

The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,
structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that
individuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom,
law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of
man preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of
predatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are
evoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe and
cataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.

Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man
is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his
brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast
is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the
satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of
freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand
against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has
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