l
minutiae, but also mind and behaviour, we are justified in putting
down the white man's predominance on the planet to a greater
all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones.
While the Negro is relatively subadrenal, the Mongol is relatively
subthyroid. Their relative deficiency in internal secretions
constitutes the essence of the White Man's Burden.

MAN'S ATTITUDE TOWARD HIMSELF

A last, but by no means least, application we may consider of the
developing knowledge of the internal secretions in relation to human
evolution is its effect upon Man's attitude toward himself and so
toward his fellow men. Whatever else he is, man is a land animal with
ideas. That makes him a thought-adventurer among materials. In a word,
he is the last word of mind working upon matter. But persistently he
has refused to recognize himself as matter and as subject to the laws,
to the physics and chemistry of matter.

History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of the
interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of man in
time and space. Materials and ideas have reacted, the record shows;
materials come upon have begotten strange fantasies. Ideas that
flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have transformed utterly the
face of the earth. The herd-brute, agglutinated with his fellows by a
magnetism beyond his ken, could be infected with thought, and so cast
in the heroic mould. The possibility of communion,--that possibility
of possibilities, for without it none other could be possible--has
rendered man the heir of a divine destiny. For the progressive
education of the race, a single discoverer here, an inventor there,
and thinkers everywhere have been inspired. In due time their
inspiration becomes the possession of even the lowest brain but
capable of grasping it.

Man's attitude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his
attitude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and
evolved with his education about himself. According to the theory he
formulated concerning his being, his why and wherefore, he directed
and governed, punished and mutilated himself and them. But the
pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable quality of the truth
would not let him stand still. The poetic genius within him, as Blake
called it, struggled on from one dogma concerning his nature to
another. Behaviour malignant or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy
and pitiable in its comedy, flowed