Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/557

Rh through this time-killing process in its own mother's bosom, and that telepathy is, therefore, particularly a feminine science, as it is only a woman who can write history based on original facts at the rate of 40,000,000 years in nine months. When the world has been brought to respect the true literary function of woman, then she will recognize her duty to rescue history by properly editing her historical productions on the part consecrated by immemorial usage to that purpose, and not till then.

Now, I must say that I think all this fault-finding about instrumentation is just too silly for anything; but I don't think Mr. Starr Jordan is as bad as some other people I know. It always seemed to me that some of these men, perhaps even the married ones who live in a far, far away State, are just put out because so many pretty girls, and as many ugly ones as could ring in, crowd around the telepathic savant and never go near them. But I am not speaking of the vanity of men, which is simply immense; for, as in the Dark Ages, devoted women fled from the brutality of the world and vowed their maidenhood to Heaven in a nunnery, so I have vowed myself to science in the Division of Karyokinesis.

Men have their principia as a starting point in their 'science of brains,' as I suppose they would call it, and it winds up in the 'conservation of energy'; and now they are trying to find out the meaning of a star's childhood which it passes in the Milky Way, just as though that wasn't the proper place for an orphan to be born in. Women have their Karyokinesis for a starting point and wind up in telepathy. Where is the difference? Our science is older than theirs as a philosophy. What is the meaning of chivalry but adoration of Karyokinesis? What is the cell theory but chivalry materialized? Well might the genus beautifully symbolized as the slave of the lamp in Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp kick up such a row when Aladdin wanted an egg put under the skylight of his palace.

The feminine in science acknowledges no master save caprice—whim and an Uebermensch. Yet, while on the surface it is Uebermensch enthroned, beneath all is an unstable equilibrium caused by would-be Uebermenschen who are exploiting the wide interval between the reigning Uebermensch's promises and his performances. This is the basis of Karyokinetic sociology. Pious wishes, not natural laws, is its normal motto, and each for himself and the devil take the hindmost is its only possible principle of action. The 'psychology of the mob' thus is lifted from a subordinate to a primary social fact, and comes to mean the same as though it read 'the psychology of fashions,' which are supposed to be made in Paris. It is very absurd to hear the man intellect vaporing about the great social axioms which a self-perpetuating society must obey, and the rule of action which a manly and only possibly true non-imperialistic people must try to follow out if it wishes to stamp out imperialism, and the so-called 'laws' which your stick-in-the-mud scientists are formulating at a snail's pace—laws which 'prove' the accuracy of these 'majestic' generalizations of Moses and of Jesus. No, the feminine in science demands immediate, up-to-date facts, or, if it will afford Mr. Starr Jordan any satisfaction, hysterical theories for its inductions, and these are furnished by telepathy, which, like every dramatic science, requires scenery and stage furniture, so as to be able to tell the past by the actual me, the cogito ergo sum automaton, not by the interrogation of invaluable sequence and stuff.

Seated upon his stage, surrounded by a painted vale of Italian softness and bathed in an atmosphere of amorous music and perfumes, with soft couches that invite the drowsy indolence that crawls upon the intellect, the telepathic physiological psychologist or Uebermensch can not, it is true, get ahead of the future; but he can get behind the past; he can annihilate time, he can annihilate space, for by the magic power