Doppelgangers (32 page)

“But Marx was right in one thing. His vision was narrow, but what he saw was there. He saw that his revolution was bound to take place, was bound to demote the old political revolution based on democracy and on all men being equal to all the possible pressures a complete society generates. Marx was wrong because he thought his Economic Revolution was the final one, instead of the penultimate phase.”

“But Sheldon is final, isn't he?” broke in Alpha II.

“Final, yes, if you mean that, with his revolutionary insight into the nature of man or the natures of men, the whole revolutionary epoch is over, for it then reaches its fourth phase, ceases to be revolutionary, and becomes again, in accord with Life, evolutionary. It ceases from convulsions and goes back to growth. It ends the age of crises and cataclysm and enters on the epoch of development and understood advances.”

“You're not going to take all the adventure out of life?” the boy broke in.

The man in saffron smiled and, looking at the secretary, who had been turning from one to the other in a distressed way, remarked, “That remark, daughter, is meant for you, really. Do you see, he's telling you about himself and his rightful needs. That is why, just as much for your happiness, for his, and for this job we are on together, I have a piece of work ready for him as an engagement present.

“No,” he went on, “no, we won't take the adventure out of life; rather, we are going to take the blinkers off mankind's eyes so they will see for the first time—at least those who want to—the immense size of the adventure on which they are all launched. Sheldon was nearly right; and so, beside the statue of Manu I would like you,” he turned again to Alpha II, “to put one to that remarkable thinker. Manu spoke the first word, Sheldon spoke the second. But Manu was misunderstood and hence caste resulted. And Sheldon is in danger of being misapprehended, too; and if that is so, then we are left with the present state of affairs: true, it is a more workable, because more detailed and worked-out, system than Manu's. Instead of rigid hereditary castes, Sheldonism, as we know, permits men to be picked, somatotyped, and graded. They can be shown the body-mind type to which they belong and then by vocational guidance and leading put to that position in which—” he paused, and then said with emphasis—“in which, if they don't grow and there is no basic development through life, they should stay. But if life is a hatching, then there is growth. If we are embryos in this life, psychic embryos, then we should grow.”

“‘It is not growing like a tree, in bulk, that makes man better be.'” It was the secretary humming the famous Ben Jonson glee song. He nodded and smiled at her.

“Sheldonism has been, we know,” he glanced across at Alpha's seat, “expanded by further glandular knowledge. His three types are somewhat rigid outlines (though, of course, he himself devised a system of elaborate intermixture definitions) of glandular states. Now, today we know that those glandular states are not rigid endowments, settlements for life, but rather delicate balances which we are free to shift and bring forward in a rising series of efficiencies.”

“What do you mean?” broke in Alpha II, at last taken out of his self-interest as this scheme began to unfold. “Aren't Sheldon's three types full and final? If everyone is seen as a compound of these three elements, haven't we a system suited to mankind and one in which, as you say, and,” he paused, “I have become convinced, the revolutionary epoch ends? And, surely, then, mankind rests?”

“Rests, yes, as a recovered patient rests from fever but is also up and about; rests in the recovered energy for creative and steady work. Now there's the point, and it points to your future. Sheldon's three types are balances and balances which we can now direct. The first type, which we all now know by his title, the viscerotonic, what has it shown itself to be? That basic type, that child type, that finds its drive in life from the polar balance of the interstitial glands of secretion balanced against the suprarenal glands.”

“Then,” broke in Alpha II, suddenly recalling the last time Alpha I had been prophetic, “then you
would
have a type of person whose energy cycle was circulating chiefly through the pelvic balance center and whose easy acceptance of life was kept from becoming sloth by being shot across with the secretions from the glands of combat, while these adrenalin secretions would be kept from making the man a constant fighter by being soothed by the easy lustiness of the interstitial. Yes, you've made your point there, right enough.”

“And I can give you two further confirmations,” the man in the saffron cloak went on. “This basic type is mainly what the Sanskrit physiological sociologists called the Tamasic type crossed with the Rajasic, an easy-going acceptance of what comes, balanced up against constant injections and dashes of the noble rage that protests. And secondly, this is the basic type whose demands made the First Revolution. But to that in a moment. For, just to finish with the two other types: The somatotonic,” and he nodded at the boy, “if he is to be the balance that really works (Sheldon knew that a pure type would not be able to survive but would die of its own excess), he in turn is a polar glandular balance—this time between the suprarenals, the glands of conflict, and the thyroid, the gland of sustained effort. That is clear, without a doubt. A tiger has huge suprarenals and a small thyroid; man small suprarenals and a big thyroid. The somatotonic type is central in society and is made of a central balance of the central glandular couple.”

Alpha II turned his ring on his finger. All this was indeed confirming his predecessor's last attempt to see ahead and grasp the Life trend.

To be certain, he asked, “Then mankind is an immense extension of the actual body of a man, and our social progress, is it marked, is it ruled by the advancing, ascending progress of accent and emphasis in the couple-linkages of the inner glands?”

“I believe you are right,” the other replied. “The notion of Adam-Kadmon, the primordial man, which I detect in that somewhat abraxid signet on your hand, is, I believe, one of those true insights. It's the same as the Hermetic, ‘As above, so below,' and the whole fertile conception of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. Anyhow, what I have to tell you is that this evolution can be continued by anyone who wishes to pay the cost of the psychophysical training. There is no need why they should. They can rest where they will at any of the stages, any of the ‘mansions' up that great ascent of Mount Carmel, the trackway of the Spine. As long as they come to a settlement with one of the balance-couplings, they are viable; and indeed they have their social place, use, value, and enjoyment.”

“But what of the further levels?” Strange to say, it was the secretary who was asking, but it did not seem to surprise the speaker.

“There,” he said, “we reach the present highest stage, the level to which, as the revolutionary age closes, mankind has been reared. For here, of course, we have the next coupling, the thyroid-pituitary balance, and that gives us the cerebrotonic type, the present master administrator, the man whose steady drive of persistent energy (which comes from the thyroid dominance, and which by itself becomes simply the unimaginative hard worker, the indefatigable official and civil servant) is pointed, aligned, and lit by the gland which the glandularists of the West have a little prematurely called the master gland. For above this third linkage-balance is a fourth: the pituitary now in turn becomes the assistant partner, the backer-up. And the initiative passes to the final gland system, that of the pineal.”

“Yes,” thought Alpha II, “yes, here we reach my predecessor's thought-frontier.”

“Of course, the West is still wondering what it can be for, for they have found no use for it, for they have not given it the uses on which it could deploy its supreme energies. It is the gland of vision—for there, the Sanskrit thinkers saw, was the inner eye, ‘the aperture of Brahman,' the final look-out point of man and mankind. Hence we obtain integral thought and, when this opens, then the man has climbed the long internal tower which it has taken him about a million years to mount. He emerges out into the sunlight, sees the whole of his past pilgrimage lying below him and the whole of the kingdoms of the earth, and is ready for his flight out into an element which only those who have seen and touched it can know.”

He paused, and was already, they saw, looking out from his top of the tower over skyscapes they could not see.

Alpha called him back, “Does history sustain your vision, or is it mere prophecy?”

“No, it is fact. First as regards individuals: we have in our records a valuable old picture book. It is a collection of portraits put together some seventy years ago. But the portraits themselves range over some sixteen hundred years. It is a typological series of a very particular type. The book is called
The True Likeness of the Saint.
A great number of these pictures are contemporary portraits and not a few photographs of the person when alive, or lying dead, or the death-mask. Their interest is great for somatotyping. For it is startling how many of these men and women of outstanding energy and ability are obviously at the very limit of glandular balance. Some are, like the popeyed, gaping-mouthed, swollen-throated Saints Ambrose of Milan, Teresa of Avila, and Joseph of Copertino, obviously excessive thyroidics: others, like sickle-nosed Saint Carlo Borromeo and Saint Pius the Fifth are, as clearly, excessive pituitarists. Yes, I have long had no doubt, these are the first natural mutations of that oncoming emergent type which we today are already becoming able to release scientifically and which your new order needs more than anything else as its new faculty for entering on and developing this its new world.

“But to leave the sporadic individual and turn to history in the mass. History is the clinching proof of this progression that I have been outlining. It is that second proof I promised you when I began this sketched-out demonstration. For look at the four revolutionary phases of this epoch of the last five hundred years which now closes its great revolutionary epoch.

“The first was the Religious Revolution, and the force driving that from below was the viscerotonic type. They wanted a profound emotional experience. The old convention, tradition, religion, had ceased to be able to give it. It had become dried up in its later scholastic disputations. The popular cultus in consequence became morbid: first of all the dreadful Dooms, and soon after the grotesquely dreadful dances of death and then devotions based on blood, five wounds, and bleeding hearts.

“The second revolution, of course, has long been recognized as political, the turning from devotion to direct action. But we have only lately recognized who made it, what type. The puritan is the somatotonic protestant fighter, and he turns from religion to politics, from Cromwell down to Carnot. This is the age of action
per se
because men of that type must do; and, soon, doing takes the place of all thinking. Nationalism and imperialism are the two poles, one of contraction and nuclear resistance and the other of expansion and explosion, whereby the maximum of contest and struggle is achieved; the atmosphere in which the ungeared, uncomprehending middle type, the somatotonic division, finds its expression—but society's destruction. Mercifully, it cannot last, for it is energized by only one-third of natural mankind.

“And the turn comes for the third—concerned with planning, with supply, with production, with increase; in short, with economy. After a scatterer comes a gatherer; yes, nature can always use the pessimistic proverbs of mankind to as much as fro. But, of course, in this, neither, is there finality. The Economic Revolution made by the thyroid-pituitary type has to pass. When old Stalin brought back the ballot and then the Church, people said, ‘And now we are back at democracy, nationalism, and orthodoxy.' But there is no going back. He was simply handing back the cards to the force we call Nature, that
THAT
might deal them for the fourth hand. Hence we are come to the fourth revolutionary phase which closes the revolutionary cycle.”

“Then you mean,” said Alpha, “that you bow yourself onto the stage as the final fulfiller of the law of being?”

“But not to eliminate, only to complete and help the other levels to understand their place and pleasure in life.”

IX

THE UP-TURNING OF THE MOLE

Alpha II sat still a while and the others watched him. Finally he said, “It's a proof, but is it a process? Can it actually be lived? What would you do here and now,
here and now,
” and his voice became almost harshly definite, “with this young couple? With the Mole?? With me???

“You've put the series of questions rightly,” the other remarked with a smile, “but before I can answer them I must begin even before the young. I have to say something about myself—why I venture to answer these your questions. I described myself accurately as an Elevator man. I've already said that there are three levels on which the present process is working; the lowest is a protest, then the middle is a pretext, and, at the limit of what I can see, is a prospect.

“I see,” he smiled again at their bewilderment, “that my effort at definition hasn't cleared things much for you. All I want to say is that the three levels, though they may seem antagonistic, are really three points in a circuit. But two poles are better than three. I have been sent, as I said, on a double message. One is to you: to open up your circuit, if you will, in the direction toward which you are feeling your way. But you can't find that upper objective until the lower is closed. So I have come, also, to close that lower.”

“What do you mean” was said first by the man in the chair but was echoed by the other two.

“Well, perhaps I have said too much before doing enough. That is why, I believe, I am sent on these missions, because I still like talking, and at the same time they can see that I get mixed up in a good deal of action—I have to prove my words. All I wanted to make you see at this point was that the Elevated isn't something that looks down detached from the earthbound traffics. You can see the design of life either laterally or vertically, perpendicularly. Seen that latter way, the three levels are really three piers of one bridge. ‘This world is a bridge, pass over it but build no house upon it.' Man must be increasingly a mobile organism, not sessile. So, you see,” he said, looking hard at the boy, “everyone who rises to office is simply an officer; his name, whether it be Osiris, Indra, or Alpha, is simply the title and description of a place on the bridge, on the wheel.”