War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either
the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to
wholesale slavery and carnage.

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,