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War was only one item in the long education of Alexis Carrel. Science had taught him what human beings are and. with that knowledge, he felt that he had been exalted into a mystical invisible ruling class—a class which, if given the worldly power to match its intellectual prestige, might bring humanity to its full flower. Therefore in his Man, the Unknown Dr. Carrel solemnly proposes a High Council of Doctors to rule the world for its own good.
Council of Doctors. The active Carrel imagination envisages a ''thinking centre'' patterned on the U. S. Supreme Court to which the political leaders of the world would come for their orders. Candidates for this omnipotent body would start studying for the job at 25, would not be eligible for membership before they were 50. Dr. Carrel describes his Council's operation thus:
"The members . . . would be free from research and teaching. They would deliver no addresses. They would dedicate their lives to the contemplation of the economic, sociological, psychological, physiological and pathological phenomena manifested by the civilized nations and their constitutive individuals. And to that of the development of Science and of the influence of its applications to our habits of life and of thought. They would endeavor to discover how modern civilization could mold itself to man without crushing any of his essential qualities. Their silent meditation would protect the inhabitants of the new city from the mechanical inventions which are dangerous for their body or their mind, from the adulteration of thought as well as food, from the whims of the specialists in education, nutrition, morals, sociology, etc., from all progress inspired, not by the needs of the public, but by the greed or the illusions of their inventors. An institution of this sort would acquire enough knowledge to prevent the organic and mental deterioration of civilized nations. Its members should be given a position as highly considered, as free from political intrigues and from cheap publicity, as that of the justices of the Supreme Court. Their importance would, in truth, be much greater than that of the jurists who watch over the Constitution. For they would be the defenders of the body and the soul of a great race in its tragic struggle against the blind sciences of matter."
Dr. Carrel hints that he would make a good member of such a High Council. Writing of himself in the third person he says: "He has observed practically every form of human activity. He is acquainted with the poor and the rich, the sound and the diseased, the learned and the ignorant, the weak-minded, the insane, the shrewd, the criminal, etc. . . . farmers, proletarians, clerks, shopkeepers, financiers, manufacturers, politicians, statesmen, soldiers, professors, schoolteachers, clergymen, peasants, bourgeois, and aristocrats. The circumstances of his life have led him across the path of philosophers, artists, poets, and scientists. And also of geniuses, heroes, and saints. At the same time, he has studied the hidden mechanisms which, in the depth of the tissues and in the immensity of the brain, are the substratum of organic and mental phenomena."