Bernard Shaw[108] thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to _circa_ three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to one-half or one-quarter of what it now is we may assume that our culture and institutions would decline because children could not direct them. It is exactly the equivalent of this that has actually happened, only instead of life being shortened to half or a quarter of its span the problems of life have doubled or quadrupled in magnitude and difficulty so that present-day man is not grown up to them. Trained only to run a motor truck, he is now since the war called on to be an air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training with a great deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must now simply either live a great deal longer or the race will go under. This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first creative evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted to see and so evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of locomotion; the forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller and taller tree-tops and so grew long necks, etc. All this was done by the same phyletic impulsion as now impels us to talk, swim, skate, ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long and persistently and by and by, presto! the power comes from within because we will it, and it is never lost. In this same way man can and will acquire the power of living several times longer than he does now. As he does so he will put away his present occupations and interests, sports, amusements, party politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most of the things that now interest the populace, and come out into a new adulthood with vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who do this first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially the Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched the world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that has brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true evolution is from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic. Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the conviction that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding the putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because of this she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand years. In the next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.