Letters to the Editor

DR. VORONOFF'S VITAL INVERSION

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—Darwin came to tell us that we have descended from monkeys ; although to speak of the higher having descended from the lower is a reversal of every principle of sane speech. And now Dr. Voronoff appears, to tell us that the way to super-manhood is by supplementing the conscious characters inherited and evolved from our monkey progenitors, by ingrafting new potentialities of the monkey psychonomy into the human personality when age has reduced it to senile decay.

It is Goethe who makes Mephistopheles say of mankind "Always the same ! They never scent the devil, even when he has them by the nape of the neck ! "

And no morally sane mind can feel otherwise than in accord with Sir Kenneth Mackenzie's description of Voronoff's rejuvenation process as " nothing less than another deliberate attempt of the Forces of Evil against humanity, veiled as usual under a cloak of beneficence, and carried out through agents unconscious of what they are really doing."

Truly does Tennyson say:

" And out of darkness come the hands

That reach through nature, moulding men."

Both Sir K. Mackenzie and Dr. Beddow Bayly refer to the " possibly horrible psychic effects of the bestial operation of monkey-gland grafts upon the human species."

" The transference of blood from a kleptomaniac to a respectable citizen would not endanger the moral balance of the citizen, nor would a graft of tissue transfer thieving instincts from one person to another."

This sentence of Dr. Voronoff's quoted by Sir K. Mackenzie is an ipse digit of doubtful psycho-physiological value. Highly susceptible subjects take on the thoughts and conscious states of those by whom they are massaged ; and the eminent Italian anthropologist, Professor Lombroso, mentions, in his Female Offender, thieves whose hunger cannot be sated with any but stolen food. This shows how absolutely inter-contingent the psychic and physical functions are.

The higher human conscious faculties are constituted because obviously intended to govern the lower, otherwise nature would quickly become a self-consuming chaos of devolution.

In some of the countries in which monkeys are indigenous, the natives never doubt that they are incarnations of lost human souls. Sir Arthur Keith stated, on, I think, the authority of some physiologist, that the only difference between the human and monkey brain is one of size. Such an assertion is as contrary to facts as to reason. To quote only one logically insuperable fact : if it were so, in cases of microcephalic idiocy—idiocy resulting from deficiency in size of brain, which is by no means rare—such reversion of the all-determining organ the brain to the monkey-equation in dimension would mean the reduction of the human personality to the monkey-equation in all its other characters ; whereas, except for deficiency of human mentality, their characteristics are human, only on a correspondingly defective scale.

The British Medical Journal of August 13th, 1903, contained an account of the experiments of Drs. Griinbaum and Sherrington, on five chimpanzees and one orang-outang, in trying to make them speak by direct faradization of the part of their brains corresponding to what in the human brain is known as Broca's speech-centre. Needless to say, their efforts were fruitless. Physiologists and doctors labour under the delusion that the speech-function of the brain- centre was first discovered by an Italian doctor named Broca ; but it was discovered three-quarters of a century before, by Dr. Gall, the founder of phrenology.

Facts make it clear that rejuvenation cannot be repeated indefinitely. " Each time Steinach's thrice-rejuvenated rat fell into senility it did so quicker than the time before," says Professor Huxley. The human identity bears quite different phases of relativity to life, at different stages of its evolution. Thus, infancy, childhood, youth, adolescence, maturity, age, gradually pass one into the other. Voronoff's monkey-gland rejuvenation method is a complete reversal of this scale of cosmic physio- logical transitions, and is as logically impossible of available realization in this actual life as it could be during the pre-natal stages of its terrestrial, vital evolution.

It is impossible for the human intellect to function sanely in relation to this life, except as conditioned by the intuitions which relate it to a more abstract future plane of being as the higher realization of its self-evolution on this. If the soul would retain its true outlook, it must develop by practising them, the Christian sentiments, principles, and virtues, upon which alone the sane affinities of this life depend. This is why, if any principle such as Socialism be erected into an end in itself, it leads to atheism by enthronement of the concrete, thus making this world the be-all and end of life. To those with intuitions consciously relating them to the spiritual side of nature, the prospect of no higher life than one dependent on such pitiful and painful expedients as vivisection experiments seems a doubtful boon to prolong. They feel, as Tennyson says :—

" 'Twere scarcely worth the while to choose Of things all mortal, or to use A little patience ere we die."

Are not all the proposals of materialistic physiologists to prolong this terrestrial stage of life by rejuvenating the aged forms of black magic ? It is when Faust wishes to repent of the bargain he has made with the devil to sell him his soul for temporary physical rejuvenescence that he hears the chorus of devils say, " If you repent, we will tear you in pieces ! " He had " sold eternity to get a toy."

The Atlanteans are said to have precipitated the submergence of their continent by abandoning themselves to sensual luxury, and then resorting to black magic to keep themselves alive. Thus one form of exorbitance in relation to nature begets another.—I am, Sir, &c.,