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Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.
let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. in a civilized community, in peacetime, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. but it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over nature. if i pay you to carry me, i am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things i have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men—by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s
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which they may,
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men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. by contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may
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it is in Man’s power to treat himself as a mere ‘natural object’ and his own judgements of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will.
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and democrats no less than among fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality.
