What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings

All the controlling ideas appeared in the 1898 draft. Man is a machine in that his behavior is determined by heredity and temperament, evironment and training. Thus he deserves no praise for good acts or blame for bad; every act is beyond his control, and he always seeks to please himself. One should not attempt to deny these facts by the conventional distinction betwen men and animals. The superiority of human intelligence is a matter of degree rather than quality, and the Moral Sense does not raise man above the other creatures. In a chapter later deleted, Mark Twain argued that it placed man beneath them because it enabled him to do wrong. In two other deleted chapters he turned to considerations of God. Traditional accounts of heaven tell us, he contended, that only the devout and righteous are admitted, thus showing that God does not prize intellectual achievement. From experience and the Bible it is also obvious that He loathes mankind. He inflicts miseries as a matter of course and punishes man for sing He made him able to commit. But man deserves hardly more than God's indifference because man, like God, is cruel, vindictive, and tyrannical. Thus it seems absurd to believe that heaven is God's reward for righteousness, particularly if the "lower animals"—morally superior to man—are not admitted. And besides, the miseries of this life suggest that God furnishes greater ones hereafter.