DR. VORONOFF'S VITAL INVERSION
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sm,—Mr. A. M. Crosfield in his critical letter says that he read mine with surprise. This is not easy to under- stand in regard to my statement that " Darwin came to tell us that we have descended from monkeys," in the light of the recent presidential address to the British Association by Sir Arthur Keith, entitled " Darwinism Up to Date." Is it that he is under the obsession of that irrepressible pioneer of Darwinism, Professor Huxley, and his Cathybius theory of the origin of life, far antedating the monkey epoch, and of which he wrote : " Given the first speck of protoplasm endowed with reflex irritability, anything more would be mere waste in the opinion of a consistent evolutionist." Of that omniscient sentence the then Duke of Argyll, in a twenty- five page article in the Nineteenth Century titled " Professor Huxley on the Warpath," wrote : "The reduction of the resources of nature to the opinion of a consistent evolutionist, is very rich. It reminds one of the American joke that ' the planets revolve round the sun, subject to the constitution of the United States.' " It is certainly obvious that no morally sane mind can feel otherwise than in accord with Sir Kenneth Mackenzie's description of Dr. Voronoff's rejuvenation process. It is one of those unnatural monstrosities which vivisection if given rein enough inevitably leads to. As history and present experience show, there are infernally as well as celestially related forms of genius. Dean Inge, though a pro- vivisectionist, in a letter read at Miss Lind-af-Hageby's protest meeting held at Caxton Hall, Westminster, said : " I quite agree that Dr. Voronoff's experiments are disgusting, etc."
At the same meeting the Duchess of Hamilton moved a resolution to the effect that " this meeting protests against the revolting practice of grafting sex-glands from live monkeys into men, women and' children, introduced by Dr. Voronoff, considering the practice to be an offence against morality, hygiene, and decency."
' The diversity of degrees of mental capacities makes us liable to mistake our deficiencies and limitations for superior endowments. Moral idiocy in its many forms and degrees is quite overlooked, especially in the oracles of physiological
science, who mistake it for superior -illumination. In view of the multitude of religious geniuses which the history of the human race presents, of whom Christ is the teleiosis, and to which the race entirely owes its evolutional progress; those
destitute of such exalted forms of conscious relativity are no more qualified to deny their existence than persons who cannot distinguish between any two notes are qualified to deny the existence of musical genius ; or the colour-blind to deny the existence of colours which they cannot perceive. Does not the fact that the natives in some countries where monkeys abound never doubt that they are incarnations of lost human souls, give the belief intrinsic weight quite apart from my opinion ?
Is it not obviously an abstract truth that one form of exorbitance in relation to nature begets another, whether the Atlanteans incurred it or not ?
Darwin pays a tribute to missionaries in referring to the security of life in some of the aboriginal lands he had visited, where missionaries had been, as compared with those where they had not. Had his mind represented a higher order of abstract insight he would have perceived that the injunction of Christ, " Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature," is the potential nucleus of all evolution. Voronoffism is so morally repulsive as to recall the obsession which Goethe makes Mephistopheles give expression to : No, no, say I, to everything that tries to bubble into being " ; and its votaries belong to the same category as the irrepressible birth-control agitators. Mr. Churchill prophesies that as a result of the indomitable efforts of those emissaries of death : " Within a generation the population of this country will consist of a large number of old people supported by the labours of a small number of young people." And Dr. Halliday Sutherland, honorary secretary of the League of National Life, says : " The statistics are tantamount to the writing on the wall, ' God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.' " That the spirit of nature, the veiled divinity of truth, does not reveal the sacred mysteries of the esoteric principles by which she operates the occult drama of life to those who resort to morally lawless and repulsive means to extort them from her, Goethe knew when he wrote :-
" If from her spirit thine receives, When hushed it listens and believes, Secrets revealed : else vainly sought, Her true gift when man questions not ; Think not with lever or with screws, To wring them out if she refuse."
--I am, Sir, &c., M. L. JoimsoN.
The Polygon, Clifton, Bristol.
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