IS MAN A FAILURE?

Evening Star, Issue 14229, 1 December 1909, Page 5

IS MAN A FAILURE?

LESSONS OF THE PAST. .A modest and pathetic appeal for a more considerate view of man on the part of the advanced woman is entered by Mr Harold Owen in an article in the '"Daily Chronicle.' It is by the way of reply to Madame Sarah Ur'and's contention that man is a hopeless failure, and that women should cease to continue the hated species, t]lnt Mr Owen timidly • suggests that man should be given more time—a few thousands or millions of years—in which to progress towards that distant goal of perfection which lie fain hopes to reach some day We know, says Mr Owen, that the whole struggle of man since he emerged from the mists of his primitive state has been towards correcting the imperfections ot human nature, towards the development of a science, individual and social; towards good government and humane laws and increasing social obligations; towards actiter ethical perceptions—in short towards the light and further away from the darkness into which he was born, but out of. which he can perhaps never wholly emerge. The fundamental mistake that Madame Grand makes is to regard the age m which she happens to live as a culminating point, whereas it may prove to be, before the end of the story is reached! merely one of the early chapters of a marvellous book. She sees neither past nor future, but the present only. She looks round on an imperfect world, and does not ask herself whether it is better than it used to be, still less whether it is goinc to be better still; but because in the span of her own age and experience she discerns no millennial accomplishments she imagines that the process of evolution has suddenlv slopped. —Progress Must Be Slow.— A little more imagination, or perhaps a little less, might have suggested to her that the process of evolution in the moral nature of man must be as slow as that which has taken place in his physical nature, and that as a?ons were necessary to turn the anthropoid ape into man" so (eons may be necessary to turn him i„to the Superman But. taking her on her own ground, and accepting the theory that the world, as it is. is past praying for and not worth living in, let me challenge her assumption that man is responsible for it all—that he is a failure, gross and obvious, and deserving of the contempt of woman. Consider his beginnings. He is of verv humble origin, and entirely self-taught' since he broke away from his airy, quadrumanous, tree-swinging .stock, and learned the ai«'niheance ot his wonderful thumb, and began to make tools for himself—a self-made inan, indeed, entirely, after the first divine impulse which started him on his career at J a i m } scnt ,lim s P mnin ß down the ages and left him to work out his earthly destiny. It is really not so very long ago since he used a stone axe-head as the onlv auxiliary to his cunning and strength, and it probably took him n century or two to discover what an advantage it would be if an axe had a handle. And it is onlv just tno other side of recorded history since the paleolithic European had for his contemporaries the woolly rhinoceros and the cave bear. And from the very first the 'struggle for life" began, "and tt surely says something for the good part of him that lie has developed a conscience and a sense of sympathy and justice in the face or that struggle—a struggle which makes selfishness natural and sets a premium on the law of tooth and claw. —Must Be Allowed Some Credit,— What he is to-day he is bv his own endeavors, and if, as being the* predominant and governing sex, he must be held responsible tor the imperfections of the world, he must be allowed credit for the progress he has made since he shared a cave with woman, and went out to stun their dmner and brought it home for her to rook. It may be, of course, that in civilising himself ho has gone altogether on the wrong tack, and that what Madame brand calls his " so-called civilisation " is merely the huge monument of his failure But to contend that is to deny the whole process of evolution, and to set us unprofitable moving in a circle of unfathomable abstractions. All that one can humbly say is that man is gradually doing his best with the materials provided for him—himself, woman and nature—and that the progress he has so far made in self-culture warrants his belief in himself, even if woman has lost her faith in him. For. after all. he has prevailed not only in the physical and governing spheres, but in the moral sphere too—he has been behind every human impulse for the betterment of his race. All the great ethical teachers froni Aristotle and Plato down to Sidgwick and Spencer, have been "contemptible" men —man and not woman has created that immense moral force, a public conscience. And I think he will go serenely on his way, shaming the pessimists of'his own sex, and perhaps in the end he may prove that man. with his achievements, his aspirations, and his hopes, is better than fb* ultimate destiny. .