Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there, but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the museums of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are condemned to be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming discoverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of the gods, let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but irretrievably willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us except to beat our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it? MAN AS A TRANSIENT Yet, true as it is that 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, is there no way out anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves, Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature, differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and allow him to play out his existence in cage cities. The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst in the desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the gray-and-dreary lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution. But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?