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higher human type? How could this principle be unified through all
branches of science and reduced to an operable law? Questions such as
these kept me awake at night while I still wore short trousers. At
fourteen I was boarding alone in a kind of tenement on the East Side. Of
course I was quite different from all the people around me. Different. I
don't remember that they showed any affectionate interest in me, and why
on earth should they? As I say, I was different. There was nothing there
to suggest a conception of that brotherhood of man you speak of. I was
born with this impulse for isolation and work, and everything that
happened to me only emphasized it. I never had a day's schooling in my
life, and never a word of advice or admonition--never a scolding in all
my life till now. Here is a point on which your Christian theory of
living seems to me entirely too vague: how to reconcile individual
responsibility with the forces of heredity and circumstance. From my
point of view your talk would have been better rounded if you had
touched on that. Still, it was striking and interesting as it was. I
like to hear a clear statement of a point of view, and that your
statement happens to riddle me, personally, of course does not affect
the question in any way. If I regard human society and human life too
much as the biologist regards his rabbit, which appears to be the gist
of your criticism, I can at least cheerfully take my own turn on the
operating table as occasion requires. There is, of course, a great deal
that I might say in reply, but I do not understand that either of us
desires a debate. I will simply assert that your fundamental conception
of life, while novel and piquant, will not hold water for a moment. Your
conception is, if I state it fairly, that a man's life, to be useful, to
be a life of service, must be given immediately to his fellows. He must
do visible and tangible things with other men. I think a little
reflection will convince you that, on the contrary, much or most of the
best work of the world has been done by men whose personal lives were
not unlike my own. There was Palissy, to take a familiar minor instance.
Of course his neighbors saw in him only a madman whose cosmos was all
Ego. Yet people are grateful to Palissy to-day, and think little of the
suffering of his wife and children. Newton was no genial leader of the
people. Bacon could not even be loyal to his friends. The living world
around