[The following are excerpts from the important book, Man, the Unknown, by Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), 1912 Nobel Prize Winner for Physiology and Medicine (transplantation and repair of bodily organs, pioneered blood vessel suturing).]

Man, the Unknown, by Alexis Carrel (pub.1935)

PREFACE

The author of this book is not a philosopher. He is only a man of science. He spends a large part of his time in a laboratory studying living matter. And another part in the world, watching human beings and trying to understand them. He does not pretend to deal with things that lie outside the field of scientific observation.

In this book he has endeavored to describe the known, and to separate it clearly from the plausible. Also to recognize the existence of the unknown and the unknowable. He has considered man as the sum of the observations and experiences of all times and of all countries. But what he describes he has either seen with his own eyes or learned directly from those with whom he associates. It is his good fortune to be in a position to study, without making any effort or deserving any credit, the phenomena of life in their bewildering complexity. He has observed practically every form of human activity. He is acquainted with the poor and the rich, the sound and the diseased, the learned and the ignorant, the weak-minded, the insane, the shrewd, the criminal, etc. He knows farmers, proletarians, clerks, shopkeepers, financiers, manufacturers, politicians, Statesmen, soldiers, professors, school-teachers, clergymen, peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats. The circumstances of his life have led him across the path of philosophers, artists, poets, and scientists. And also of geniuses, heroes, and saints. At the same time, he has studied the hidden mechanisms which, in the depth of the tissues and in the immensity of the brain, are the substratum of organic and mental phenomena.

He is indebted to the techniques of modern civilization for the possibility of witnessing such a gigantic spectacle. These techniques have enabled him simultaneously to give his attention to several subjects. He lives in the New World, and also in the Old. He has the privilege of spending most of his time in the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, as one of the scientists brought together in that Institute by Simon Flexner. There he has contemplated the phenomena of life while they were analyzed by incomparable experts such as Meltzer, Jacques Loeb, Noguchi, and many others. Owing to the genius of Flexner, the study of living things has been undertaken with a broadness of vision so far unequaled. Matter is investigated in those laboratories at every level of its organization, of its ascension toward the making of man. With the help of X-rays, physicists are unveiling the architectonic of the molecules of the simpler substances of our tissues—that is, the spatial relations of the atoms constituting those molecules. Chemists and physical chemists devote themselves to the analysis of the more complex substances encountered within the body, such as the hemoglobin of the blood, the proteins of the tissues and the humors, and the ferments responsible for the unceasing splitting and building up of those enormous aggregates of atoms. Instead of directing their attention to the molecular edifices themselves, other chemists consider the relations of those edifices with one another when they encounter the fluids of the body. In short, the physicochemical equilibria that maintain constant the composition of blood serum in spite of the perpetual changes of the tissues. Thus are brought to light the chemical aspects of physiological phenomena. Several groups of physiologists, with the aid of the most varied techniques, are studying the larger structures resulting from the aggregation and organization of molecules, the cells of the tissues and of the blood-that is, living matter itself. They examine those cells, their ways of association, and the laws governing their relations with their surroundings; the whole made up of the organs and humors; the influence of the cosmic environment on this whole; and the effects of chemical substances on tissues and consciousness. Other specialists devote themselves to the investigation of those small beings, the viruses and bacteria, whose presence in our tissues is responsible for infectious diseases; of the marvelous methods used by the organism in its fight against them; of the degenerative diseases, such as cancer, heart lesions, nephritis. Finally, the momentous problem of individuality and of its chemical basis is being successfully attacked. The writer has had the exceptional opportunity of listening to great men specialized in these researches, and of following the results of their experiments. Thus, the effort of inert matter toward organization, the properties of living beings, and the harmony of our body and our mind appeared to him in their beauty. In addition, he himself has studied the most diverse subjects, from surgery to cell physiology and to metapsychics. This was made possible by facilities which, for the first time, were put at the disposal of science for the performance of its task. It seems that the subtle inspiration of Welch and the practical idealism of Frederick T. Gates caused new conceptions of biology and new formulas for research to spring from Flexner’s mind. To the pure spirit of science Flexner gave the help of new methods designed to save the workers’ time, to facilitate their free cooperation, and to create better experimental techniques. Owing to these innovations, one cannot only undertake extensive researches of one’s own, but also acquire a first-hand knowledge of subjects whose mastery in former days necessitated the whole lifetime of several scientists.

We now possess such a large amount of information on human beings that its very immensity prevents us from using it properly. In order to be of service, our knowledge must be synthetic and concise. This book, therefore, was not intended to be a treatise on Man. For such a treatise would run into dozens of volumes. The author’s intention was merely to build up an intelligible synthesis of the data which we possess about ourselves. He has attempted to describe a large number of fundamental facts in a very simple manner, and still not to be elementary. Not to indulge in scientific popularization or to offer to the public a weak and childish aspect of reality. He has written for the scholar as well as for the layman.

He fully understands the difficulties inherent in the temerity of his undertaking. He has tried to confine all knowledge of man within the pages of a small book. Of course, he has not succeeded. He will not satisfy the specialists, because they know far more than he does, and they will regard him as superficial. Neither will he please the general public, for this volume contains too many technical details. However, in order to acquire a synthetic knowledge of ourselves, it was indispensable to summarize the data of several sciences. And also to depict with bold and rapid strokes the physical, chemical, and physiological mechanisms hidden under the harmony of our acts and our thoughts. We must realize that an attempt, however awkward and though partly a failure, is better than no attempt at all.

The necessity of compressing a large amount of information into a short space has important drawbacks. It gives a dogmatic appearance to propositions which are nothing but conclusions of observations and experiments. Subjects that have engrossed physiologists, hygienists, physicians, educators, economists, sociologists for years have often had to he described in a few lines or a few words. Almost every sentence of this book is the expression of the long labor of a scientist, of his patient researches, sometimes of his entire lifetime spent in the study of a single problem. For the sake of conciseness, the writer has been obliged briefly to summarize gigantic masses of observations. Thus, descriptions of facts have been given the form of assertions. To a similar cause may be attributed a seeming lack of accuracy. Most organic and mental phenomena have been treated in a diagrammatic manner. Therefore, things that markedly differ appear to be grouped together. As, at a distance, houses, rocks, and trees are not distinguishable from one another. It must not be forgotten that in this book the expression of reality is only approximately accurate. A brief description of an immense subject involves inevitable defects. But the sketch of a landscape should not be expected to contain all the details of a photograph.

Before beginning this work the author realized its difficulty, its almost impossibility. He undertook it merely because somebody had to undertake it. Because men cannot follow modem civilization along its present course, because they are degenerating. They have been fascinated by the beauty of the sciences of inert matter. They have not understood that their body and consciousness are subjected to natural laws, more obscure than, but as inexorable as, the laws of the sidereal world. Neither have they understood that they cannot transgress these laws without being punished. They must, therefore, learn the necessary relations of the cosmic universe, of their fellow men, and of their inner selves, and also those of their tissues and their mind. Indeed, man stands above all things. Should he degenerate, the beauty of civilization, and even the grandeur of the physical universe, would vanish. For these reasons this book was written. It was not written in the peace of the country but in the confusion, the noise, and the weariness of New York. The author has been urged to carry out this work by his friends, philosophers, scientists, jurists, economists, with whom he has for years discussed the great problems of our time. From Frederic R. Coudert, whose penetrating vision reaches, beyond the horizons of America, those of Europe, came the impulse responsible for this book. Indeed, the majority of the nations follow the lead of North America. Those countries that have blindly adopted the spirit and the techniques of industrial civilization, Russia as well as England, France, and Germany, are exposed to the same dangers as the United States. Humanity’s attention must turn from the machines and the world of inanimate matter to the body and the soul of man, to the organic and mental processes which have created the machines and the universe of Newton and Einstein.

The only claim of this book is to put at everyone’s disposal an ensemble of scientific data concerning the human beings of our time. We are beginning to realize the weakness of our civilization. Many want to shake off the dogmas imposed upon them by modern society. This book has been written for them, and also for those who are bold enough to understand the necessity, not only of mental, political, and social changes, but of the overthrow of industrial civilization and of the advent of another conception of human progress. This book is, therefore, dedicated to all whose everyday task is the rearing of children, the formation or the guidance of the individual. To school-teachers, hygienists, physicians, clergymen, social workers, professors, judges, army officers, engineers, economists, politicians, industrial leaders, etc. Also to those who are interested in the mere knowledge of our body and our mind. In short, to every man and every woman. It is offered to all as a simple account of facts revealed about human beings by scientific observation.

[-- Man, the Unknown, by Alexis Carrel, Harper & Bros., New York, 1935, Preface, pp ix - xv]

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK is having the paradoxical destiny of becoming more timely while it grows older. Since its publication, its significance has increased continually. For the value of ideas, as of all things, is relative. It augments or decreases according to our state of mind. Under the pressure of the events that agitate Europe, Asia, and America, our mental attitude has progressively changed. We are beginning to understand the meaning of the crisis. We know that it does not consist simply in the cyclic recurrence of economic disorders. That neither prosperity nor war will solve the problems of modern society. Like sheep at the approach of a storm, civilized humanity vaguely feels the presence of danger. And we are driven by anxiety toward the ideas that deal with the mystery of our ills.

   This book originated from the observation of a simple fact--the high development of the sciences of inanimate matter, and our ignorance of life. Mechanics, chemistry, and physics have progressed much more rapidly than physiology, psychology, and sociology. Man has gained the mastery of the material world before knowing himself. Thus, modern society has been built at random, according to the chance of scientific discoveries and to the fancy of ideologies, without regard for the laws of our body and soul. We have been the victims of a disastrous illusion--the illusion of our ability to emancipate ourselves from natural laws. We have forgotten that nature never forgives.

   In order to endure, society, as well as individuals, should conform to the laws of life. We cannot erect a house without a knowledge of the law of gravity. "In order to be commanded, nature must be obeyed," said Bacon. The essential needs of the human being, the characteristics of his mind and organs, his relations with his environment, are easily subjected to scientific observation. The jurisdiction of science extends to all observable phenomena--the spiritual as well as the intellectual and the physiological. Man in his entirety can be apprehended by the scientific method. But the science of man differs from all other sciences. It must be synthetic as well as analytic, since man is simultaneously unity and multiplicity. This science alone is capable of giving birth to a technique for the construction of society. In the future organization of the individual and collective life of humanity, philosophical and social doctrines must give precedence to the positive knowledge of ourselves. Science, for the first time in the history of the world, brings to a tottering civilization the power to renovate itself and to continue its ascension.

   The necessity for this renovation is becoming more evident each year. Newspapers, magazines, cinema, and radio ceaselessly spread news illustrating the growing contrast between material progress and social disorder. The triumphs of science in some fields mask its impotence in others. For the marvels of technology, such as featured, for example, in the New York World's Fair, create comfort, simplify our existence, increase the rapidity of communications, put at our disposal quantities of new materials, synthesize chemical products that cure dangerous diseases as if by magic. But they fail to bring us economic security, happiness, moral sense, and peace. These royal gifts of science have burst like a thunderstorm upon us while we are still too ignorant to use them wisely. And they may become highly destructive. Will they not make war an unprecedented catastrophe? For they will be responsible for the death of millions of men who are the flower of civilization, for the destruction of priceless treasures accumulated by centuries of culture on the soil of Europe, and for the ultimate weakening of the white race. Modern life has brought another danger, more subtle but still more formidable than war: the extinction of the best elements of the race. The birth rate is falling in all nations, except in Germany and Russia. France is becoming depopulated already. England and Scandinavia will soon be in the same condition. In the United States, the upper third of the population reproduces much less rapidly than the lower third. Europe and the United States are thus undergoing a qualitative as well as quantitative deterioration. On the contrary, the Asiatics and Africans, such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today. Even if a suicidal war is avoided, we will be faced with degeneration because of the sterility of the strongest and most intelligent stock.

   No conquests deserve so much admiration as those made by physiology and medicine. The civilized nations are now protected from the great epidemics, such as plague, cholera, typhus, and other infectious diseases. Owing to hygiene and to a growing knowledge of nutrition, the inhabitants of the over-populated cities are clean, well-nourished, in better health, and the average duration of life has increased considerably. Nevertheless, hygiene and medicine, even with the aid of the schools, have not succeeded in improving the intellectual and moral quality of the population. Modern men and women manifest nervous weakness, mental instability, lack of moral sense. About 15 per cent remain at the psychologic age of twelve years. There are hosts of feeble-minded and insane. The number of misfits reaches perhaps thirty or forty million. Furthermore, criminality increases. The recent statistics of J. Edgar Hoover show that this country actually contains nearly five million criminals. The tone of our civilization cannot help being influenced by the prevalence of mental weakness, dishonesty, and criminality. It is significant that panic spread through the population when a radio cast enacted an invasion of the earth by the inhabitants of Mars. Also, that a former president of the Stock Exchange of New York was convicted of theft, and an eminent Federal judge of selling his verdicts. At the same time, normal individuals are being crushed under the weight of those who are incapable of adapting themselves to life. The majority of the people lives on the work of the minority. Despite the enormous sums spent by the government, the economic crisis continues. In the richest country of the world, millions are in want. It is evident that human intelligence has not increased simultaneously with the complexity of the problems to be solved. Today, as much as in the past, civilized humanity shows itself incapable of directing either its individual or its collective existence.

   As a matter of fact, modern society--that society produced by science and technology--is committing the same mistake as have all the civilizations of antiquity. It has created conditions of life wherein life itself becomes impossible. It justifies the sally of Dean Inge: "Civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal." The real significance of the events that are taking place in Europe and in this country is not yet understood by the public. Nevertheless, it is becoming obvious to those few who have the inclination and the time to think. Our civilization is in danger. And this danger menaces simultaneously the race, the nations, and the individuals. Each one of us will be struck by the ruin brought about by a European war. Each one suffers already from the confusion in our life and in our social institutions, from the general weakening of moral sense, from economic insecurity, from the burden imposed upon the community by defectives and criminals. The crisis is due neither to the presence of Mr. Roosevelt in the White House, nor to that of Hitler in Germany nor of Mussolini in Rome. It comes from the very structure of civilization. It is a crisis of man. Man is not able to manage the world derived from the caprice of his intelligence. He has no other alternative than to remake this world according to the laws of life. He must adapt his environment to the nature of his organic and mental activities, and renovate his habits of existence. Otherwise, modern society will join ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in the realm of nothingness. And the basis of this renovation can be found only in the knowledge of our body and soul.

   No lasting civilization will ever be founded upon philosophical and social ideologies. The democratic ideology itself, unless reconstructed upon a scientific basis, has no more chance of surviving than the fascist or marxist ideologies. For none of these systems embraces man in his entire reality. In truth, all political and economic doctrines have so far ignored the science of man. However, the power of the scientific method is obvious. Science has conquered the material world. And science will give man, if his will is indomitable, mastery over life and over himself.

   The domain of science comprises the totality of the observable and of the measurable. That is, all the things that are located in the spatio-temporal continuum--man, as well as the ocean, the clouds, the atoms, the stars. As man is endowed with mental activities, science reaches through him the world of the mind, that world which stretches beyond space and time. Observation and experience are the only means of apprehending reality in a positive manner. For observation and experience give birth to concepts which, although incomplete, remain eternally true. These concepts are operational concepts, as defined by Bridgman. They proceed directly from the measurement or the accurate observation of things. They are applicable to the study of man as well as to that of inanimate objects. For such a study, they must be constructed in as great a number as possible, with the aid of all the techniques that we are capable of developing. In the light of these concepts, man appears as unity and multiplicity--a center of activities simultaneously material and spiritual, and strictly dependent on the physicochemical and psychological environment in which he is immersed. Considered thus in a concrete manner, he differs profoundly from the abstract being dreamed by political and social ideologies. It is upon this concrete man, and not upon abstractions, that society should be erected. There is no other road open to human progress than the optimum development of all the physiological, intellectual, and spiritual potentialities of the individual. Only apprehension of the whole reality can save modern man. We must, therefore, give up philosophical systems, and rely exclusively upon scientific concepts.

   The natural fate of all civilizations is to rise and to decline--and to vanish into dust. Our civilization may perhaps escape the common fate, because it has at its disposal the unlimited resources of science. But science deals exclusively with the forces of intelligence. And intelligence never urges men to action. Only fear, enthusiasm, self-sacrifice, hatred, and love can infuse with life the products of our mind. The youth of Germany and Italy, for example, are driven by faith to sacrifice themselves for an ideal--even if that ideal is false. Perhaps the democracies will also engender men burning with the passion to create. Perhaps, in Europe and in America, there are such men, still young, poor, and unknown. But enthusiasm and faith, if not united to the knowledge of the whole reality, will remain sterile. The Russian revolutionists had the will and the strength to build up a new civilization. They failed because they relied upon the incomplete vision of Karl Marx, instead of a truly scientific concept of man. The renovation of modern society demands, besides a profound spiritual urge, the knowledge of man in his wholeness.

   But the wholeness of man has many different aspects. These aspects are the object of special sciences, such as physiology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, pedagogy, medicine, and many others. There are specialists for each of them. But none for man as a whole. Special sciences are incapable of solving even the most simple human problems. An architect, a schoolmaster, a physician, for example, are acquainted in an incomplete manner with the problems of habitation, education, and health. For each of these problems concerns all human activities, and transcends the frontiers of any special science. There is, at this moment, imperative need for men possessing, like Aristotle, universal knowledge. But Aristotle himself could not embrace all modern sciences. We must, therefore, have recourse to composite Aristotles. That is, to small groups of men belonging to different specialties, and capable of welding their individual thoughts into a synthetic whole. Such minds can certainly be found--minds endowed with that universalism which spreads its tentacles over all things. The technique of collective thinking requires much intelligence and disinterestedness. Few individuals are apt at this type of research. But collective thinking alone will permit human problems to be solved. Today, mankind should be given an immortal brain, a permanent focus of thoughts to guide its faltering steps. Our institutions for scientific research are not sufficient, because their discoveries are always fragmentary. In order to build a science of man, and a technology of civilization, centers of synthesis must be created where collective thinking and integration of specialized data will forge a new knowledge. In this manner, both individuals and society will be given the immovable foundations of operational concepts, and the power to survive.

   To sum up, the events of the last few years have rendered more evident the danger menacing the entire civilization of the Occident. However, the public does not yet fully understand the significance of the economic crisis, of the decline in the birth rate, of the moral, nervous, and mental decay of the individual. It does not conceive how immense a catastrophe a European war will be for humanity--how urgent is our renovation. Nevertheless, in democratic countries, the initiative for this renovation must emanate from the people, and not from the leaders. This is the reason for presenting this book again to the public. Although, during the four years of its career, it has spread beyond the frontiers of the English-speaking countries through all civilized nations, the ideas that it contains have reached only a few million persons. To contribute, even in a humble manner, to the construction of the new City, these ideas must invade the population as the sea infiltrates the sands of the shore. Our renovation can come only from the effort of all. "To progress again, man must remake himself. And he cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. In order to uncover his true visage, he must shatter his own substance with heavy blows of his hammer."

New York, June 15, 1939

[-- Man, the Unknown, by Alexis Carrel, Harper & Bros., New York, 1935, Introduction (new).]

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