“Without devil’s knowledge”—that, if he understood aright, was the qualification for admission to the life that had survived disaster. “Devil’s knowledge” being—if he was not mad—the scientific, mechanical, engineering lore which was the everyday acquirement of thousands on thousands of ordinary civilized men. The everyday acquirements of ordinary men were anathema; if he was not mad, his own life had been granted him for the reason only that he was unskilled and devoid of them. Ignorant, even as the men who spared him, of practical science and mechanics—a plain man, like unto them. … Ignorance was prized here, esteemed as a virtue—the old man’s query, “You’re a college man?” had been accusation disguised.
In a flash it was clear to him, and he saw through the farce whereby he had been tested and tempted; understood the motive that had prompted its cruel low cunning and all that the cunning implied of acceptance of barbarism, insistence on it. … What these outcasts, these remnants of humanity feared above all things was a revival of the science, the mechanical powers, that had wrecked their cities, their houses and their lives and made them—what they were. … In knowledge was death and in ignorance alone was a measure of peace and security; hence, fearing lest he was of those who knew too much, they had tempted him to confess to forbidden knowledge, to boast of it—that, having boasted, they might kill him without mercy, make an end of his wits with his life. In the torments inflicted by science destructive they had turned upon science and renounced it; and, that their terrors might not be renewed in the future, they were setting up against it an impassable barrier of ignorance. They had put devil’s knowledge behind them—with intention forever. … If when they questioned him and led him on, he had yielded to the natural impulse to lie, they would have knocked him on the head—like vermin—without scruple; and the sweat broke out on him as he remembered how nearly he had lied. …
He sat up, sweating and staring at darkness, and thrust back the hair from his forehead. … He was back among men—who, of set purpose and deliberately, had turned their faces from the knowledge their fathers had acquired by the patience and toil of generations! Who, of set purpose and deliberately, sought to filch from their children the heritage of the ages, the treasure of the mind of man! … That was what it meant—the treasure of the mind of man! Renunciation of all that long generations had striven for with patience and learning and devotion. … The impossibility and the treason of it—to know nothing, to forget all their fathers had won for them. … He remembered old talk of education as a birthright and the agitations of reformers and political parties. To this end.
Who were they, he asked himself, these people who had made a decision so terrible—what manner of men in the old life? Now they were seeking to live as the beasts live, and not only the world material had died to them, but the world of human aspiration. … To this they had come, these people who once were human—the beast in them had conquered the brain … and like fire there blazed into his brain the commandment: “Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge! Thou shalt not eat … lest ye die.”
The command, the prohibition, had suddenly a new significance. Was this, then, the purport of a legend hitherto meaningless? Was this the truth behind the childish symbol? The deadly truth that knowledge is power of destruction—power of destruction too great for the human, the fallible, to wield? … Odd that he had never thought of it before—that, familiar all his life with a deadly truth, he had read it as primitive childishness!
“Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat … lest ye die. …”
He sat numbly repeating the words half aloud till there flashed into his brain a memory, a vision of Markham. In his room off Great Smith Street on the night when war was declared—talking rapidly with his mouth full of biscuit. “Only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been strangled at birth. … If the human animal must fight, it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the race of ’em!” … What was that but a paraphrase, a modern application of the command laid upon Adam. “Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat … lest ye die.”
To his first impulse—of amazement and shrinking, as from treason—succeeded understanding of the outlook of these men and their decision. More, he wondered why, even in the worst of his despair, he had always believed in the persistence, the rebirth, of the civilization that had bred him. … These people—he saw it—were logical, as Markham had been logical—were wise after the event as Markham had been wise before it; and it amazed him that in his porings and guessings at a world reviving he had never hit upon their simple solution of the eternal problem of war. Markham’s solution; which, till this moment, he had not taken literally. … “You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of war; in the end it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove that—very definitely.” One or the other. The fighting instinct or knowledge!
Man, because he fights, must deny himself knowledge—which is power over the forces of nature; the secrets of nature must be veiled from him by his own ignorance—lest, when the impulse to strife wells up in him, they serve him for infinite destruction. These renegades, in agony, had made confession of their sin, of the corporate sin of a world; had faced the brutality of their own nature; had
