the nineteenth century naturalists and physicists assured
the world, in the name of Science, that salvation and damnation are
all nonsense, and that predestination is the central truth of religion,
inasmuch as human beings are produced by their environment, their sins
and good deeds being only a series of chemical and mechanical reactions
over which they have no control. Such figments as mind, choice, purpose,
conscience, will, and so forth, are, they taught, mere illusions,
produced because they are useful in the continual struggle of the human
machine to maintain its environment in a favorable condition, a process
incidentally involving the ruthless destruction or subjection of its
competitors for the supply (assumed to be limited) of subsistence
available. We taught Prussia this religion; and Prussia bettered our
instruction so effectively that we presently found ourselves confronted
with the necessity of destroying Prussia to prevent Prussia destroying
us. And that has just ended in each destroying the other to an extent
doubtfully reparable in our time.

It may be asked how so imbecile and dangerous a creed ever came to be
accepted by intelligent beings. I will answer that question more fully
in my next volume of plays, which will be entirely devoted to the
subject. For the present I will only say that there were better reasons
than the obvious one that such sham science as this opened a scientific
career to very stupid men, and all the other careers to shameless
rascals, provided they were industrious enough. It is true that
this motive operated very powerfully; but when the new departure in
scientific doctrine which is associated with the name of the great
naturalist Charles Darwin began, it was not only a reaction against a
barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all
scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries
of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless
method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection.
Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and
that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel
Butler vehemently put it, "of mind from the universe."

Hypochondria

Now Heartbreak House, with Butler and Bergson and Scott Haldane
alongside Blake and the other major poets on its shelves (to say nothing
of Wagner and the tone poets), was not so completely blinded by t