The Supreme Progress

by Brian Stableford

  No technical equipment was visible in the apartment to which that attractive wife introduced me; nothing was to be seen there but a divan and a few chairs, and also an occasional table supporting the apparatus necessary for mixing hot toddies.

  The place was quite cheerful. The windows framed a section of garden where a few snowdrops were fluttering slowly in sparse winter sunlight. A blazing fire in the hearth doubled with a dance of light shadow of Dr. Gipson’s long black garment on the pale green of the opposite wall. The light emphasized the tallness and thinness of his upper body and colored the disorderly mass of grey hair on his head. It faded away in the distracted expression the depths of his black eyes, but by way of compensation, it sparkled in the facets of an enormous diamond—perhaps too fabulously enormous—which stood out against a white cravat in a fashion that one could only compare to fragments of a blaze.

  I noted these details while the doctor, after a few words of welcome, constrained me, in view of the cold outside, to take my share of a toddy that, even though divided between us, appeared no less vigorous. During this interval, Mrs. Gipson handed her husband his carefully-brushed hat, and then we left the house.

  Rapid as this departure was, however, I had time to note the pensive glance that Mrs. Gibson directed at the immense diamond that the doctor was wearing. Was I mistaken? One might have thought that she was attributing a fateful significance to that circumstance—or did she simply regret seeing her spouse take that prodigious item of jewelry out of the house?

  In spite of the aforementioned cocktail, the cold of the street froze the words on our lips. We hastened to my club, where a well-laid table awaited us. Our wellbeing was quickly restored by the preliminaries of the meal, and I finally embarked upon the scientific conversation into which I needed to draw my gust.

  I began by announcing to the eminent practitioner my desire to obtain a few autobiographical details, while depreciating my ability, as a simple reporter, to follow him into more abstract discourse. As proof of my layman’s sincerity, as much as to ask him to correct my errors, I then set out to summarize what I had read about him in various specialist periodicals, without neglecting certain items of information that, doubtless due to my ignorance, seemed to me to be buffooneries of the most extravagant sort.

  “Your admirers and your adversaries,” I said, “agree, each from his own viewpoint, in calling attention to your extraordinary manner of practicing autoplasty.62 At a young age, it is said, you invented a host of ‘transmutative’ instruments adapted to the sad necessities of war, and that, also being endowed with an incomparable promptitude of execution, you accomplished the boldest operations imperturbably under a hail of bullets. You were seen, on one of the last battlefields of the old world, to relieve combatants of their shattered limbs and to replace them, hic et nunc,63 with similar appendices taken from freshly-killed soldiers.

  “Bellicose rage and nervous surges of heroism or terror favored these surgical improvisations on living flesh. Arms switched shoulders without letting go of their rifles, firing continually all the while. Cadavers were seen lying on the ground by their own eyes, introduced into the blind orbits of brothers-in-arms. The heads of private soldiers suddenly found themselves on the bodies of officers—a prodigious promotion imposed by the pressure of the circumstances of battle.

  “Taking advantage of the recent carnage executed by Europeans in Asia and Africa, you transported in your wake caravans of exceedingly rich clients, who had been treated with extreme disfavor by nature, on whom you effected transplantations and connections that were all the more fruitful for benefiting from a mixture of races. And it is certainly consoling to think that these frightful butcheries, in which conquerors persist under the pretext of being civilizers, will no longer serve in future for the exclusive satisfaction of inhumanity, but that, thanks to you and the popularization of your method, will work to the advantage of scientific progress.”

  I thought I had surpassed the most extreme limits of exaggeration, but the doctor listened to me with a sly benevolence, and fixed upon me the gaze of a superior individual who is delighted to learn what the ignorant irony of the public is saying about him.

  Thus encouraged, I continued—while we were emptying our first two or three glasses—to tell him in a eulogistic manner about certain other extreme farces that were being laid at his door.

  “These marvels were nothing, however,” I said to him, “by comparison with the mighty feats that you accomplished later, after long studies whose mystery no one has penetrated. Not satisfied with your superficial applications, you pushed the audacity of the vivisector so far as to inaugurate modification in the internal organs of the human species. It is asserted that, during a sojourn in Paris, you opened a ‘cooperative ovariotomy dispensary’ that was a great success.

  “That sort of feminine ablation gave rise to ardent controversy at the time. The ruling classes, which demanded plebeian abundance for the needs of war and industry, feared the propagation of that mode of sterilization among the populace. The clan of sociologists, persuaded that a wealthy minority is better than a limitless proliferation of poor people, praised the timely utility of the artifice in question, and embraced polemic as firebrands of its paradoxes. Then, terrorized by the speeches of conservatives, and, most of all, by clerical objurgations, the majority of your desexualized individuals fell into the most bitter remorse—but your art brought them salvation. You were not the routine kind of surgeon who limits himself, once and for all, to cutting out the organ that displeases him. You hold that organ in reserve, in conditions that permit it, if necessary, to resume its original place, and you were counting on a quantity of fashionable women who would eventually undertake alternately to abandon and recover the means of fecundation according to their interests or whims.

  “Your skill, in what I dare to call subjective surgery, then seemed to have attained the final limits of the possible, and yet you were to cause the scientific world even more astounding surprises. You eventually shed complete light on the fact, scarcely glimpsed at the time, that sexual specialization remains indecisive during uterine life. The distinctive marks of each genre, although they seem very clear after emergence into the world, sometimes retain a few more of less profound indications of that original hesitation. For example, some men, integral in other respects, look at life with eyes that seem to have a feminine constitution, and their visual sensations have the advantages and inconveniences of that anomaly. Some women provided with the most specific external attributes of their sex nevertheless embody, without emphasizing vague corporeal deformations, some fragment of masculinity, and a brain imprinted with a persistence of virility that inspires them with all its actions and, sometimes all its extravagances.

  “I shall not expand further on the innumerable natural imbroglios of this sort, for they often give rise to more-than-scabrous eccentricities of which contemporary literature has too often provided an ignorant echo, solely in the desire to hook the curiosity of numerous readers. What I can venture to say is that, in more than one household in which some such disparity afflicts both spouses instead of than amusing them, you have brought about a concordance or exchange of organs by a prodigious series of interpolations that would have made you the most admired man of our century if the honorability of your fortunate clients had not rigorously constrained you to professional secrecy…”

  My statements were beginning to take on the appearance of an impertinent “leg-pull,” and, no longer knowing exactly what I was doing, I had refilled a certain number of glasses to the brim when doctor made a gesture indicating that he was about to speak in his turn.

  “Let us leave there, I beg you,” he said, “these trifling operations, of which those that are not yet authentic will necessarily come about in the course of time. Surgery, that purely manual art, benefits from equipment whose sequential improvement will proceed indefinitely and will vanquish all mechanical obstacles.

  “Besides, a living being is not, as the vu
lgar suppose, a pure unity. It is, on the contrary, composed of a multitude of substances that retain, within the agglomerate, their own function, their particular progress and, ordinarily, their independent activity. It is therefore, in the destiny of the profession that I have long practiced eventually to attain, gradually but surely, absolute mastery in the faculty of making all desirable modifications in animal bodies by the separate treatment of their parts. These results, already foreseeable, should not astonish us, even in advance.

  “The surgeon, however, limits himself to the relatively simple task of carnal mechanization. It is not within his competence to go back to the sources of life, to extract that phenomenon from the mystery that envelops it, to direct its course and, at will, to extend it. Such is the problem on which I am now mounting a frontal attack, with the hope—almost with the certainty—of a solution. It is in that respect only that I propose to affirm my personal and creative role in the history of science.”

  On the last words of that exordium, the doctor made me a sign to refill the glasses, as if as an oratory precaution, in view of a long speech, and I summoned up all my attention.

  “Yes,” Dr. Gipson continued, “to extend the gift of human life for as long as possible, and to devote all medical resources to that end—that it is the task for which I wish, at least, to construct the theory, while simultaneously furnishing the first elements of the procedures to be put to work on the service of that desideratum.

  “In truth, existence has thus far only appeared in each of us as a temporary configuration of matter in motion, like a bubble dissolving after a brief moment into the liquid that the air has buoyed up. We can therefore assume that there can be no permanence in our present form. However, that permanence manifests itself as a possibility to some observers.

  “On this matter, before any other explanation and for the purposes of greater clarity, permit me to affirm with Virchow64 that ‘the continuity of life must be, for us, a dogma’. Whether it is a matter of the birth of an organism or of a disease, the great scientist declares, it is a living cell that we find at the point of origin. Darwinism emerges in its entirety from that idea—as Virchow alleges—and the continuity of cellular life suffices to explain the hereditary transformations of the most complex organisms.

  “To this I will add that, 40 years ago, Monsieur G. Ville65 showed that certain vegetable enjoy the singular property of transforming the mineral nitrogen in the air into organic nitrogen—which is to say, into living cells. We are therefore entitled to suppose, with some plausibility, that the vital continuity or permanence of which I speak resides at least in the admixture of our posthumous decompositions—that is to say, of the aforementioned still-living cells—with the analogous and imperishable particles of the environmental substance, to which we thus restore that which we have borrowed from passive and sensitive elements.

  “Until now, physicians have made scarcely any progress in this direction, because they have not understood the intimate mixture of vegetation and sensation that constitutes animality, even though the ancient philosophers and even the Church Fathers glimpsed this state of affairs a long time ago. One of the most assiduous reasoners among the latter, Tertullian, whom I have studied extensively, made a considerable contribution to the emphasization of this truth: ‘The soul,’ he wrote, ‘is made of matter. It is composed of a special substance that differs from that of the body. It has all the qualities of matter, but it is immortal.’

  “The ingenious theologian did not imagine that matter is equally indestructible. He thus affirmed, without knowing it, the simultaneous perpetuity of the soul and the body. In another work—concerning, I believe, the resurrection of the flesh—this same theologian tells us: ‘The soul is the director and, in a sense, the coachman of the body. It has the exclusive power of forming thoughts, willing, desiring and disposing what it proposes, and, when it acts to that effect, it expects the flesh to do the work. The flesh is the carriage of the soul, its adornment and its wealth. The soul does not withdraw alone, like the flesh, it has its retreats, which are waters, fires, birds and beasts of every sort, as well as plants of all kinds. Our double personality does not dissolve in these substances, it merely flows within them, and also in mires—and if those mires dissipate, it still flows within them, and, as if it emerged in alternate turns and returns, is thrown back thrown back into the earth, its ultimate origin.’”

  Toward the end of this tirade I had filled a few glasses, half of which the doctor absorbed very calmly, and I the other half, a trifle bewildered by this unexpected Tertullian cited by Dr. Gipson in tone of freshly-revived memory, like an introduction to a set of axioms that he was about to extract.

  “Yes, Tertullian was very largely correct,” he went on. “Yes, the mind, the thinking faculty encounters appropriate receptacles in scattered matter—and it is marvelous to think that if the body proceeds germinatively, and if the soul, by the same token, proceeds intellectually in communion with imperishable matter, we finally hold the complete solution to the entire metaphysical problem. You see, in addition, how the chances of demonstration abound in favor of those penetrations that operate between us and surrounding organisms—for the naïve Tertullian only forgot one thing, which is the law of reciprocity that must necessarily preside over these transfusions.

  “Can we, for example, deny a transitive exchange of vitality between ourselves and animals, the masks of which are imprinted on our faces, and whose spontaneous penetrations also act in the secrecy of our instincts? May it not be, on the other hand, from our animistic atoms that coffee, tea, tobacco, hashish, opium, ether and so on borrow the effects of stimulation, excitation and hallucination that their usage restores to us? There is evidently a human humor latent in these substances, the mental action of which one cannot logically attribute to simple inert contact. By the same token, the cellular emanations of our thought must be present in enormous quantities in various alcoholic beverages, since their absorption generally causes within us a prodigious outflow of gaiety and imagination, and sometimes tenderness, bitterness, sarcasm, anger or fury, and that their abuse turns our intellect upside down, in an irrepressible and tumultuous chaos of faculties.”

  At this point, I could not help noticing on the table the already-considerable number of bottles, the aroma of which, equally savored by each of us, seemed, in spite of the doctor’s sustained impassivity, to be volatilizing in an increasing eloquence on his par. Meanwhile, the gigantic diamond in his cravat sparkled with an ever-more-vivid joyful fire.

  “So what if people raise an objection to the purely rational principle of molecular affinities?” Dr. Gipson continued, in a tone of lofty pity for those supposed contradictors. “What does it matter to me if the present lack of proofs attracts vulgar suspicions of illumination or ineptitude? The lack of evidence of a fact—which is to say, the mystery of things—is merely an appeal to scientific effort in the search for the truth. We march all the more surely on the track of the truth because it elevates its beacon light in the darkness. I shall always steer toward that distant light, which marks the relay where plausible hypotheses are elucidated to which I shall hold firm so long as their lack of exactitude has not been demonstrated to me. Experiment, in fact—that guide-donkey of graduate scientists—only enquires into things that are. Independent minds want to exercise their foresight on the subject of what is to come—which is to say that, if pure science desires to exceed its limits, as is its incessant duty, it must accumulate its experiments to discover rather than to explain.

  “Such is my own method, and I have already extracted therefrom the conclusion that the true role of the physician is to prepare, support and facilitate our posthumous dispersal. The Bible calls that returning to the dust from which we have emerged. The metaphor is even more exact than it is eloquent, for that dust contains an ensemble of molecules, living or otherwise, reduced to impalpability; it contains, integrally, the supply of organic substances that the phenomenon of life temporarily coordinates wi
thin us. Taken and rendered to the cosmic universality, a human being is only matter, and matter, as we have just seen—and mark this well!—is merely chemistry.

  “It is, therefore, now up to chemist-physicians to appropriate human beings, by an adequate hygiene, to their destiny and to their material evolution—for those two terms, one naïve and the other pretentious, have exactly the same fundamental meaning—and to render humans equally apt to their various modes of life, concentric or diffuse.”

  The doctor allowed these final words to be followed by a brief silence—time for us each to empty a glass of champagne—and I took advantage of it to examine the orator, while making every effort to remain serious. He was speaking with his eyes staring into nowhere, as if he were making a public speech—but the wonderful diamond in his cravat was directing frolicsome rays of light at me, which seemed to be mocking my internal alarm.

  “My theory,” Dr. Gipson went on, “thus consists of proposing to our descendants a chemical regime in harmony with both their zoomorphic state and their final dispersion in nature. Oh, I’m not the first person to have made this discovery”—and the doctor, with my collaboration, drank a glassful less measured than his modesty—“the idea was in the air. Some time ago, a celebrated foreign scientist66 made a speech at a banquet given in his honor, and prophesied a future humankind exclusively nourished on chemical substances—which, by virtue of the abundance and condensed volume of mixtures would reduce the problem of daily bread to a minimum. Let us not hesitate to say that it was only an intellectual joke, which the illustrious guest was only inspired to make by the excess of the feast in which he had shared—but it was a flash of light for my intuition. Without delay, I formed the thesis and offered a preview of the consequences of chemical alimentation in the Manifesto with whose renown you’re familiar, although it barely touches on the subject.