Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OUR NERVOUS HUMANITY WE stand aghast before the great new ordeal of pain that has opened at our feet—humanity's dancing feet of 1914. We thought we had progressed beyond the old plane of humanity's physical pain and had stepped upon the great new plane of humanity's moral pain. Physical pain unites us close to mother earth, but moral pain unites us to some nerve of the divine.—And here we are dragged down again to the old plane of the physical, beholding another crusade against the new-grown spirit of man in the hell being dealt his body in the Great War—by the aggressive union of the Normal, the triumphant majority in humanity. And how has this occurred in our new humanity—the humanity so proud of itself until a certain date last summer—so sure of its change from the past nature of man, so humane and well-read in the lessons of history, so sensible and nervous? All our questioning seems to lead us for answer to the bed-rock of human nature, the human nature that we have divided so fluently into types of the so-called normal and abnormal natures of man. Is there something wrong in this—our conception of human nature? Is society—in the sense of embodying the science of human conduct and ideals—the expression of the best, the soundest, the most evolutive instincts of humanity?—We see everywhere that society is the creation and fortress of the normal being and that by the normal being is meant the more fit and hardy, the more resistant to pain, the more personal in his relations and nerveless of humankind. Whereas the abnormal being —thus conceived—is the type that is too affected by pain, too impersonal in his relations to life, too nervous—hence disqualified for the struggle of existence in this material world which, so far, the normal has dominated. Humanity has bee... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.