The Genesis of Man

Man, in his emergence, acquired one of the cruellest and most generous endowments ever given to a species of life by a mysterious and mischievous providence. For thereby a life form arose denuded of the innate reflex instincts which, tried and tested through millions of years of biological experience, constitute each form's most precious inheritance. No other species comes into the world with so few fixed reactions for survival, knows less inherently how to maintain itself. In no other form of life are the instincts so malleable, so changeable in object, so easy to reverse into their opposites. In what other species than man could self-flagellation create a feeling of well-being, celibacy and castration become a means of ensuring immortality?

Along with this deficiency in innate, individual survival instincts, nature has endowed man prodigiously with an apparatus which has enabled him to become her competitor and lately in many spheres her master. Man's control over nature arises out of his unique powers to register, analyse, and synthesize into techniques the phenomena of the external world. By virtue of the fact that he can form ideas out of experience and can transform the ideas in his mind into hypotheses and experimental procedures he has been able to insinuate his will into the mighty and awesome processes of nature (11). This power, even if only in fantasy as in previous epochs, has caused man to identify himself in direct descent with the gods with whom he has associated the powers of nature.

This strange paradox, which has come into sharp and dangerous focus with the triumphs of modern technology, has been commented upon by many observers and thinkers. Breasted (1) has stated the matter succinctly as follows: '… man is morally still a mere child playing in a nursery full of the most dangerous toys …' In psychiatric terms man is an idiot genius; in neurological terms a motor god with a sensory defect; a gigantic technological intelligence attached to