Book summary “Man, the unknown”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world where remarkable technological achievements surround you, yet your own body and mind remain poorly understood. Modern civilization has mastered physics and mechanics while completely neglecting the biological and moral sciences of man. This imbalance creates a dangerous crisis of degeneracy, because society has been built at random without respecting natural human laws.

Alexis Carrel argues in Man, the Unknown that you must study the human being as a concrete whole rather than a collection of isolated fragments. The book investigates your physiological activities, mental functions, and adaptive mechanisms to understand why modern institutions fail you.

• What are the true laws of your physiological and mental constitution?
• How does modern industrial life degrade your physical and moral existence?
• Through what scientific methods can you help reconstruct human life and society?

1. The Neglect of Human Science

Mechanics, physics, and chemistry are abstract and quantitative, giving humanity mastery over the material world. In contrast, biological and human sciences remain descriptive and complex, leading to an ignorance of the human body and soul that causes modern society to be built at random without respecting natural laws.

There is a dangerous disparity between the highly advanced sciences of inert matter and our rudimentary knowledge of living beings and man.

Galileo reduced the earth to a humble satellite of the sun while his contemporaries lacked any elementary notion of the brain, liver, or thyroid gland. You live in a world where operational concepts yield immense physical power while human nature remains wrapped in shadow.

Modern industrial civilization creates conditions of life that endanger the race, nations, and individuals, leading to moral, nervous, and mental decay.

The Crisis of Modern Society

While hygiene and medicine have protected civilized nations from epidemics and increased average lifespan, they have failed to improve intellectual and moral quality. The birth rate is falling in Western nations while demographic pressure rises elsewhere, threatening qualitative and quantitative deterioration.

Panic spread through the population when a radio broadcast enacted an invasion of the earth by inhabitants of Mars, illustrating prevailing mental weakness and instability. You face a society characterized by staggering figures of social and psychological failure:

• 15 per cent of modern men and women remain at the psychologic age of twelve years;
• 30 to 40 million misfits or feeble-minded and insane;
• nearly 5 million criminals in the United States according to statistics of J. Edgar Hoover.

Average life duration reaches 59 years in the United States and 65 years in New Zealand, yet these extended years do not correspond to superior vitality or wisdom.

The industrial revolution has silently replaced the natural ancestral environment with an artificial habitat that profoundly alters human existence. Modern populations live in restricted urban areas inside temperature-regulated, artificially lit buildings, using rapid communications and machines that eliminate muscular effort. While this artificial existence provides material comfort and lessens labor, it exposes individuals to chronic worry, economic insecurity, and nervous fragility.

2. Body and Physiological Activities

The human body is an anatomical heterogeneity and a physiological homogeneity, sustained by blood plasma, endocrine glands, and a dual nervous system.

Physiological Organization

The human body functions as a unified whole. Cells congregate into tissues and organs immersed in an internal aquatic medium comparable to sea water. This organic medium consists of blood plasma and interstitial lymph that surround every living element.

The blood stream acts as a moving tissue that carries nourishment, removes waste products, and repairs injuries. It contains 25 to 30 thousand billions of red cells in blood and 50 billions of white cells in blood. The weight of blood equal to about one-tenth of total weight.

Endocrine glands secrete chemical regulators that integrate all bodily functions. These internal secretions travel through the organic medium and influence distant organs.

Man possesses a dual nervous system consisting of the conscious cerebrospinal system for external action and the autonomous sympathetic system for internal organ control. The central nervous system receives environmental stimuli and commands skeletal muscles through neurons via the reflex arc. The cerebral substance contains more than twelve thousand millions of cells.

The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems control visceral organs independently of the will. However, intense emotional states and mental worries can disturb this visceral autonomy and cause physical disease.

Fundamental physiological and psychological differences between men and women are governed by exact sexual gland secretions and cannot be erased by education. Testicles and ovaries secrete specific chemical substances into the blood that impregnate the entire organism and shape tissues, humors, and consciousness. The ovary influences female organization and requires pregnancy for optimum development, proving that physiological laws of sex are inexorable.

A young woman possesses about three hundred thousand ova present in the ovary of a young woman. Among these, about four hundred ova reach maturity during reproductive life.

3. Mental Activities and Adaptive Functions

While infectious diseases shifted to degenerative conditions, mental activities, metapsychic phenomena, and adaptive mechanisms determine individual survival.

Modern medicine did not conquer all sicknesses. It shifted the burden from acute bacterial infections to chronic degenerative conditions. In the United States, 1,100,000 personnel attend to the medical needs of 120,000,000 people. This results in about 100,000,000 illnesses annually and 700,000 hospital beds occupied every day.

Mental and nervous disorders constitute the most dangerous threat of modern civilization, outnumbering all other physical diseases combined. In New York State, statistics published by Benjamin Malzberg and Dr. H. M. Pollock show that one person out of every twenty-two is placed in an asylum at some time. State hospitals cared for 340,000 insane individuals in 1932.

Clairvoyance and telepathy are normal, though rare, activities of human consciousness that allow the transmission of thought across distance without sense organs. Scientific investigation bodies include the Society for Psychical Research founded in London in 1882, the International Institute of Metapsychics established in Paris in 1919 under Charles Richet, and researches at Duke University under Dr. J. B. Rhine.

Moral sense is the most critical human activity for the survival of civilization, far more vital than pure intelligence. Socrates drinking the hemlock demonstrates the supreme reality of the moral sense and the feeling of duty.

Physiological time is an irreversible movement measured by organic changes, such as the rate of wound healing or blood serum composition, rather than clock time. Lecomte du Noüy developed equations using an index of cicatrization to prove mathematically that a twenty-year-old patient heals a wound twice as quickly as a forty-year-old patient.

Intense mystical prayer can trigger extraordinary physiological phenomena characterized by an extreme and instantaneous acceleration of organic repair known as miracles. The Medical Bureau of Lourdes records documented cases where patients afflicted with peritoneal tuberculosis, osteitis, and cancer were cured almost instantaneously. The author began his study of miraculous healing at Lourdes in 1902.

Disease and Adaptation

Adaptation is a watchful physiological automatism that maintains the constancy of the internal organic medium and repairs injuries to ensure individual survival. When you face environmental extremes, poisons, or trauma, all functional systems coordinate automatically to restore internal stability.

Modern industrial comfort and standardized living eliminate necessary physical and moral hardships, causing the dangerous atrophy of human adaptive functions. Children of wealthy or modern urban backgrounds who are never exposed to privation or effort frequently grow up handsome and pleasant, but excessively selfish, physically easily tired, and lacking in nervous resistance.

4. The Remaking of Man

To overcome civilizational degeneracy, society must reject Cartesian dualism, expand medicine into a superscience, institute voluntary eugenics, and enforce rigorous physical and psychological discipline.

Civilization was led to degradation by Galileo and Descartes, who mistakenly separated the quantitative measurable qualities from the qualitative aspects of man and isolated the body from the soul. Science must now reunite the qualitative with the quantitative and replace mind within matter.

The sudden collapse of American finance and economics demonstrated that crises stem from individual, moral, and social factors rather than purely economic ones, as seen in rampant crime and the failure of politicians. Because man is both the marble and the sculptor, you will only undertake the painful operation of self-renovation driven by absolute necessity.

Medicine should be expanded according to Descartes' dream to become the comprehensive superscience of the human being, uniting body, mind, and sociology to guide human development. This aggrandized medicine would act as an engineer of the human body and soul, directing education, hygiene, and town planning based on natural laws rather than political or economic prejudices.

To train the leaders of this superscience, you must follow specific rigorous paths:

• Dedicate about twenty-five years of uninterrupted study to mastering the multiple sciences concerning man.
• Renounce common modes of existence, such as playing golf, attending banquets, and serving on committees, to live like monks of contemplative orders.

Only those who submitted to this discipline could effectively direct construction by the age of fifty. Society also needs research institutes dedicated to the total science of man and an immortal thinking center or high council to plan its future. Private philanthropic initiatives successfully founded major research centers like the Pasteur Institute, the Rockefeller Institute, and Johns Hopkins Medical School without initial state help.

Instead of artificially protecting and leveling down to the weak, modern society must foster the optimum growth of the strong to build a non-hereditary biological aristocracy.

Natural selection has been halted by hygiene and medicine, conserving inferior individuals. Because you cannot destroy the defective, you must amplify organic and mental inequalities by singling out children with high potentialities and aiding their social ascension. Social classes must once again become synonymous with biological classes.

You can develop these human assets through specific methods:

• Single out children who are endowed with high potentialities and develop them as completely as possible.
• Remove the sons of very rich men and criminals while still infants from their natural surroundings to let them manifest hereditary strength.

Voluntary eugenics is indispensable for the perpetuation of strong races, requiring individuals to avoid marrying into families contaminated by hereditary defects. In highly civilized nations, reproduction is decreasing among the best stock due to selfishness, feminism, and economic instability. To reverse this, you must adopt strict personal standards:

• Refrain from marrying any human being suffering from hidden hereditary defects, insanity, or feeble-mindedness.
• Introduce the concept of sacrifice and its absolute social necessity into the mind of modern man.

Human beings can be reshaped and given natural health, endurance, and moral strength through physical and psychological conditioning, strict discipline, and relative isolation from mass society. The Doukhobors of Canada demonstrated that a strong will can secure complete independence within modern civilization.

You can rebuild individual autonomy and resistance by applying strict rules:

• Refuse to go to certain plays or cinemas, listen to radio programs, or read certain newspapers and books.
• Impose upon members rules of conduct modeled on military or monastic discipline, emphasizing intellectual and moral restraint.
• Condition children without argument or discussion by establishing associated reflexes for honesty, courage, and physical dexterity.

To restore human personality and protect normal society, modern civilization must suppress the proletariat, diversify human types, and humanely dispose of hardened criminals and the insane. Industrial mass production and standardized offices destroy human personality, turning workers into modern serfs. You must take decisive action to reconstruct society:

• Break the frame of the school, factory, and office to reject the principles of technological civilization.
• Dispose of murderers, armed robbers, kidnappers, and criminals who despoil the poor in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.

Conclusion

Modern civilization faces a critical choice between biological decline through standardization and regeneration through the rigorous scientific study of human nature.

You must recognize that physical, mental, and social dimensions cannot be separated from the concrete individual. The preservation of civilization depends on turning your attention away from mechanical progress and toward the laws of human life.

1. Reject standardized mass culture and environments that weaken your physiological and mental resistance.
2. Cultivate your body and mind together through disciplined effort, continuous adaptation, and respect for physiological laws.
3. Support voluntary eugenics by refusing to pass on hereditary defects and valuing biological quality over mere numbers.
4. Elevate moral and intellectual intelligence to guide your actions alongside basic physiological needs.
5. Practice inner renunciation and self-mastery to build the strong personality required for leadership in a new society.

10 Key Ideas

1. Modern civilization has mastered physics and mechanics while completely neglecting the biological and moral sciences of man.
2. The human body functions as a unified whole sustained by blood plasma, endocrine glands, and a dual nervous system.
3. Mental and nervous disorders constitute the most dangerous threat of modern civilization, outnumbering all other physical diseases combined.
4. Modern industrial comfort and standardized living eliminate necessary physical and moral hardships, causing the dangerous atrophy of human adaptive functions.
5. Fundamental physiological and psychological differences between men and women are governed by exact sexual gland secretions and cannot be erased by education.
6. Industrial mass production and standardized offices destroy human personality by turning workers into modern serfs.
7. Society needs research institutes dedicated to the total science of man and an immortal thinking center or high council to plan its future.
8. Voluntary eugenics is indispensable for the perpetuation of strong races, requiring individuals to avoid marrying into families contaminated by hereditary defects.
9. Human beings can be reshaped and given natural health, endurance, and moral strength through physical and psychological conditioning, strict discipline, and relative isolation from mass society.
10. Society must protect normal citizens by humanely disposing of hardened criminals in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.