The other day I decided to return to the future and pay a visit to my thirty year old son, to find out how he will be faring fourty years from now, when his dad has become an old prat. Last time we had seen each other, my son and I, it was in 2025, local time. He was just about to get married when I landed in front of the church doorstep . Happily enough, the sound of the bells covered the noise of the crash landing [ I still need to gain some experiment with the new "Boliscom" type of spacecraft. "Peter", the .... computer who regulates flight parameters, always starts up first time... ). The only person to notice my late arrrival was a beggar standing in the doorway. The celebration had been publicized and sponsored by the local Catolcoholic Church of the famous divine Piper Henessey, so the poor lad was probably expecting a free drink of "mustard champagne" after the ceremony had ended ( "mustard champagne" was the only one available in that period of time since the german phylloxera had invaded and destroyed the french vineyards during the summer of 2014 ). I brushed down my rags, put on my beret, and pushed the entrance door of the church. There were billboards all around the main nave. On one of them you could read " We believe in the transsubstantiation of Christ in the Black Host". Another said : " If thou Receive Communion under Cassia, thou will remain Pure in the eyes of Thy Lord ". The priest was about to start his homily : "Our virtues , my brethren, are older than we are." "For the value of our instincts as a guide is of the highest quality. Instinct is the crystallized experience of thousands of generations. It is the golden seed chosen of a million harvests and a myriad threshings. It ranks lower than reason because less of individual volition enters into it. But as a guide it is safer, and as a spring of action far more reliable and effective. The beauty, the accuracy and the beneficence of the instincts of the lower form of life have been the marvel and the admiration of every observer and philosopher, even of theologians. But it is calmly assumed that in our own species alone, they have utterly lost their force and value. Our pride would not permit us to depend upon or even recognize them, lest we should seem to admit our kinship to "mere brutes". Fortunately for us, they still remain with us in spite of our haughty refusal to officially recognize them. Did any one ever hear of a baby with an instinct for whisky, or a child who enjoyed the taste of tobacco or the smell of a cigar ? Tongue, nose and stomach unite in their disapproval of all three, as the comic horrors of a boy's first smoke, and the racking headache of a freshman's spree abundantly testify. It is only by systematic and repeated repression of instinct by reason and intelligence that either of these habits is formed. Yet we have the colossal impudence to say that a man who is reeling drunk has made a "beast" of himself ! And this is by no means an excpetional instance. Indeed one could say that the vast majority of diseases are due to the neglect or deliberate repression of some instinct. Instincts are not only valuable in health, they are also tremendous indicators of disease and recovery processes. The sick man is popularly supposed to want just those things he ought not to have, and to dislike just those things which are good for him. And indeed altogether too much of both household and medical treatment was originally constructed on that very principle. Unflattering as it may be to the medical profession, up to the middle of the XIX c., the old "demon" theory of disease had far too much influence over therapeutics. Disease was still regarded as an entity which must be driven out of the body of the patient by more or less violent or repulsive means. This distrust of the instincts in disease .." I knew that homily by heart, having been, in my youth, a member of one of these instinctive sects. Was there nothing to be learned from the future ? I managed to slip out of the church during the cassia distribution. Not that I disliked cassia, just the way they were having it... The beggar had disappeared, and in his stead were two girls with black eyes and soft curly hairs falling down on slender shoulders. Even Bruno Comby would have noticed that they were sisters. The tallest, probably the eldest, came in my direction. Her mouth was as round as her face. If it hadn't been for the awkward look that teenage girls display unvolontarily when they behave as mature women, I would have thought her name was "Love me". "We know where you are coming from, and why you are here. Please bring this message to your friends crudivores, so that they do not loose hope in the midst of the storm". I took the paper from her hand. It was an article from the New Scientist, year 2129 . The girls had been traveling towards the past, while I had been traveling towards the future, to meet me in year 2025. The title of the article read " Cooked food relapse finally cured by selective unpluging of nervous connections in the corpus striatum, a structure of the CNS associated with long term potentiation of food likes and dislikes. " I raised up my eyes again : the two girls had disappeared. I went back to my spacecraft, vexed and frustrated, but my heart full of hope by the late promise of the two young girls. As I climbed on board, I saw the beggar at the same place where they'd appeared to me. "Gosh !" I thought pulling on the choke of my perlimpinpin fueled engine, " I will never get used to these science fiction tricks...." Cheers Denis