The Complete Works of

OLAF STAPLEDON

(1886-1950)

Contents

The Novels

Last and First Men (1930)

Last Men in London (1932)

Odd John (1935)

Star Maker (1937)

Darkness and the Light (1942)

Sirius (1944)

Death into Life (1946)

The Flames (1947)

A Man Divided (1950)

The Shorter Fiction

The Short Stories of Olaf Stapledon

The Poetry

Latter-Day Psalms (1914)

The Non-Fiction

A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929)

Waking World (1934)

Youth and Tomorrow (1946)

Interplanetary Man? (1948)

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

© Delphi Classics 2021

Version 1

Browse our Main Series

Browse our Ancient Classics

Browse our Poets

Browse our Art eBooks

Browse our Classical Music series

The Complete Works of

OLAF STAPLEDON

By Delphi Classics, 2021

COPYRIGHT

Complete Works of Olaf Stapledon

First published in the United Kingdom in 2021 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2021.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 80170 004 7

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: sales@delphiclassics.com

www.delphiclassics.com

Parts Edition Now Available!

Love reading Olaf Stapledon?

Did you know you can now purchase the Delphi Classics Parts Edition of this author and enjoy all the novels, plays, non-fiction books and other works as individual eBooks?  Now, you can select and read individual novels etc. and know precisely where you are in an eBook.  You will also be able to manage space better on your eReading devices.

The Parts Edition is only available direct from the Delphi Classics website.

Try free Parts Edition downloads

Out-of-this-world classics

Explore Sci-Fi at Delphi Classics…

The Novels

Seacombe, a district of the town of Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula, Cheshire — Stapledon’s birthplace

Last and First Men (1930)

A STORY OF THE NEAR AND FAR FUTURE

Stapledon was educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA degree in Modern History (Second Class) in 1909, which was promoted to an MA degree in 1913. After a brief stint as a teacher at Manchester Grammar School, he worked in shipping offices in Liverpool and Port Said from 1910 to 1912. During the First World War, he served as a conscientious objector, acting as an ambulance driver with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919; he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. His wartime experiences influenced his pacifist beliefs and advocating of a World Government. He was awarded a PhD degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his doctoral thesis as the basis for his first published book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929). However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his pioneering ideas to a wider public. The relative success of his first novel prompted him to become a full-time writer.

A work of unprecedented scale in the genre of science-fiction, Last and First Men (1930) describes the history of humanity from the present onwards, across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first. The book employs a narrative conceit that, under subtle inspiration, the novelist has unknowingly been used as a means of dictation, channelling a text from the very last human species. The author’s conception of history follows a repetitive cycle with many varied civilisations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, as the later civilisations rise to far greater heights than the first. The novel anticipates the science of genetic engineering and is an early example of the fictional ‘supermind’ — a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals.

Chapters 1 to 6 concern the First Men, our own species. Beginning in the early twenty-first century, several increasingly devastating wars take place in Europe, resulting in the United States and China becoming the two dominant superpowers on Earth. In the twenty-fourth century, the US and China go to war, which concludes with the formation of the First World State. Two centuries later, all religions and secular science consolidate into a religion based on the worship of motion, whose god is Gordelpus, the Prime Mover. Four millennia after the formation of the First World State, humans deplete Earth’s supply of fossil fuels, resulting in the total collapse of civilisation. One hundred thousand years later, the Patagonian Civilisation emerges as a cult of youth. When a riot occurs at a mine, the rioters inadvertently cause a colossal subterranean explosion, rendering most of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable for millions of years, except for the poles and the northern coast of Siberia. The only survivors of the disaster are thirty-five humans stationed at the North Pole, whose descendants eventually split up into two separate species.

The novel has come to be hugely influential in the course of science-fiction writing. Brian Aldiss, in his preface to the 1962 edition, acknowledges the considerable influence on his own later writing of Stapledon’s first novel, which he encountered in 1943 while a British soldier fighting the Japanese in Burma. Aldiss described it as, “An appropriately unusual period of life at which to encounter a vision so far outside ordinary experience”. C. S. Lewis in his own preface to That Hideous Strength, notes:

“I believe that one of the central ideas of this tale came into my head from conversations I had with a scientific colleague, some time before I met a rather similar suggestion in the works of Mr. Olaf Stapledon. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Stapledon is so rich in invention that he can afford to lend, and I admire his invention (though not his philosophy) so much that I should feel no shame to borrow”.

Arthur C. Clarke admitted that “No other book had a greater influence on my life ...  and its successor Star Maker (1937) are the twin summits of literary career”.

H. P. Lovecraft held Last and First Men in very high regard, though he did not say whether it influenced any of his own stories, writing in a 1936 letter to Fritz Leiber “no one ought to miss reading W. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men ... Probably you have read it. If not, make a bee line for library or bookstall!”. And in another 1936 letter to Leiber, Lovecraft commented,

“I’m glad to hear of your perusal of Last and First Men — a volume which to my mind forms the greatest of all achievements in the field that Master Ackerman would denominate ‘scientifiction’. Its scope is dizzying — and despite a somewhat disproportionate acceleration of the tempo toward the end, and a few scientific inferences which might legitimately be challenged, it remains a thing of unparalleled power. As you say, it has the truly basic quality of a myth, and some of the episodes are of matchless poignancy and dramatic intensity.”

The great astronomer Sir Patrick Moore was also an admirer of the novel, who admitted that “The science fiction novel Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon is immensely thought-provoking and I’ve read it time and time again.”

The first edition

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction by One of the Last Men

I Balkan Europe

1. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND AFTER

2. THE ANGLO-FRENCH WAR

3. EUROPE AFTER THE ANGLO-FRENCH WAR

4. THE RUSSO-GERMAN WAR

II Europe’s Downfall

1. EUROPE AND AMERICA

2. THE ORIGINS OF A MYSTERY

3. EUROPE MURDERED

III America and China

1. THE RIVALS

2. THE CONFLICT

3. ON AN ISLAND IN THE PACIFIC

IV An Americanized Planet

1. THE FOUNDATION OF THE FIRST WORLD STATE

2. THE DOMINANCE OF SCIENCE

3. MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT

4. THE CULTURE OF THE FIRST WORLD STATE

5. DOWNFALL

V The Fall of the First Men

1. THE FIRST DARK AGE

2. THE RISE OF PATAGONIA

3. THE CULT OF YOUTH

4. THE CATASTROPHE

VI Transition

1. THE FIRST MEN AT BAY

2. THE SECOND DARK AGE

VII The Rise of the Second Men

1. THE APPEARANCE OF A NEW SPECIES

2. THE INTERCOURSE OF THREE SPECIES

3. THE ZENITH OF THE SECOND MEN

VIII The Martians

1. THE FIRST MARTIAN INVASION

2. LIFE ON MARS

3. THE MARTIAN MIND

4. DELUSIONS OF THE MARTIANS

IX Earth and Mars

1. THE SECOND MEN AT BAY

2. THE RUIN OF TWO WORLDS

3. THE THIRD DARK AGE

X The Third Men in the Wilderness

1. THE THIRD HUMAN SPECIES

2. DIGRESSIONS OF THE THIRD MEN

3. THE VITAL ART

4. CONFLICTING POLICIES

XI Man Remakes Himself

1. THE FIRST OF THE GREAT BRAINS

2. THE TRAGEDY OF THE FOURTH MEN

3. THE FIFTH MEN

4. THE CULTURE OF THE FIFTH MEN

XII The Last Terrestrials

1. THE CULT OF EVANESCENCE

2. EXPLORATION OF TIME

3. VOYAGING IN SPACE

4. PREPARING A NEW WORLD

XIII Humanity on Venus

1. TAKING ROOT AGAIN

2. THE FLYING MEN

3. A MINOR ASTRONOMICAL EVENT

XIV Neptune

1. BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

2. DA CAPO

3. SLOW CONQUEST

XV The Last Men

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE LAST HUMAN SPECIES

2. CHILDHOOD AND MATURITY

3. A RACIAL AWAKENING

4. COSMOLOGY

XVI The Last of Man

1. SENTENCE OF DEATH

2. BEHAVIOUR OF THE CONDEMNED

3. EPILOGUE

The first edition’s title page

Preface

THIS IS A work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

But if such imaginative construction of possible futures is to be at all potent, our imagination must be strictly disciplined. We must endeavour not to go beyond the bounds of possibility set by the particular state of culture within which we live. The merely fantastic has only minor power. Not that we should seek actually to prophesy what will as a matter of fact occur; for in our present state such prophecy is certainly futile, save in the simplest matters. We are not set up as historians attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

Yet our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture’s best vision. This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.

The kind of future which is here imagined, should not, I think, seem wholly fantastic, or at any rate not so fantastic as to be without significance, to modern western individuals who are familiar with the outlines of contemporary thought. Had I chosen matter in which there was nothing whatever of the fantastic, its very plausibility would have rendered it implausible. For one thing at least is almost certain about the future, namely, that very much of it will be such as we should call incredible. In one important respect, indeed, I may perhaps seem to have strayed into barren extravagance. I have supposed an inhabitant of the remote future to be communicating with us of today. I have pretended that he has the power of partially controlling the operations of minds now living, and that this book is the product of such influence. Yet even this fiction is perhaps not wholly excluded by our thought. I might, of course, easily have omitted it without more than superficial alteration of the theme. But its introduction was more than a convenience. Only by some such radical and bewildering device could I embody the possibility that there may be more in time’s nature than is revealed to us. Indeed, only by some such trick could I do justice to the conviction that our whole present mentality is but a confused and halting first experiment.

If ever this book should happen to be discovered by some future individual, for instance by a member of the next generation sorting out the rubbish of his predecessors, it will certainly raise a smile; for very much is bound to happen of which no hint is yet discoverable. And indeed even in our generation circumstances may well change so unexpectedly and so radically that this book may very soon look ridiculous. But no matter. We of today must conceive our relation to the rest of the universe as best we can; and even if our images must seem fantastic to future men, they may none the less serve their purpose today.

Some readers, taking my story to be an attempt at prophecy, may deem it unwarrantably pessimistic. But it is not prophecy; it is myth, or an essay in myth. We all desire the future to turn out more happily than I have figured it. In particular we desire our present civilization to advance steadily toward some kind of Utopia. The thought that it may decay and collapse, and that all its spiritual treasure may be lost irrevocably, is repugnant to us. Yet this must be faced as at least a possibility. And this kind of tragedy, the tragedy of a race, must, I think, be admitted in any adequate myth.

And so, while gladly recognizing that in our time there are strong seeds of hope as well as of despair, I have imagined for aesthetic purposes that our race will destroy itself. There is today a very earnest movement for peace and international unity; and surely with good fortune and intelligent management it may triumph. Most earnestly we must hope that it will. But I have figured things out in this book in such a manner that this great movement fails. I suppose it incapable of preventing a succession of national wars; and I permit it only to achieve the goal of unity and peace after the mentality of the race has been undermined. May this not happen! May the League of Nations, or some more strictly cosmopolitan authority, win through before it is too late! Yet let us find room in our minds and in our hearts for the thought that the whole enterprise of our race may be after all but a minor and unsuccessful episode in a vaster drama, which also perhaps may be tragic.

American readers, if ever there are any, may feel that their great nation is given a somewhat unattractive part in the story. I have imagined the triumph of the cruder sort of Americanism over all that is best and most promising in American culture. May this not occur in the real world! Americans themselves, however, admit the possibility of such an issue, and will, I hope, forgive me for emphasizing it, and using it as an early turning-point in the long drama of Man.

Any attempt to conceive such a drama must take into account whatever contemporary science has to say about man’s own nature and his physical environment. I have tried to supplement my own slight knowledge of natural science by pestering my scientific friends. In particular, I have been very greatly helped by conversation with Professors P. G. H. Boswell, J. Johnstone, and J. Rice, of Liverpool. But they must not be held responsible for the many deliberate extravagances which, though they serve a purpose in the design, may jar upon the scientific ear.

To Dr L. A. Reid I am much indebted for general comments, and to Mr E. V. Rieu for many very valuable suggestions. To Professor and Mrs L. C. Martin, who read the whole book in manuscript, I cannot properly express my gratitude for constant encouragement and criticism. To my wife’s devastating sanity I owe far more than she supposes.

Before closing this preface I would remind the reader that throughout the following pages the speaker, the first person singular, is supposed to be, not the actual writer, but an individual living in the extremely distant future.

O. S.

West Kirby

July 1930

Introduction by One of the Last Men

THIS BOOK HAS two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future. The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being’s conception, inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.

The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction. Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself, nor expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.

You cannot believe it. Your acquaintance with time is very imperfect, and so your understanding of it is defeated. But no matter. Do not perplex yourselves about this truth, so difficult to you, so familiar to us of a later aeon. Do but entertain, merely as a fiction, the idea that the thought and will of individuals future to you may intrude, rarely and with difficulty, into the mental processes of some of your contemporaries. Pretend that you believe this, and that the following chronicle is an authentic message from the Last Men. Imagine the consequences of such a belief. Otherwise I cannot give life to the great history which it is my task to tell.

When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed human nature. I shall not describe any such paradise. Instead, I shall record huge fluctuations of joy and woe, the results of changes not only in man’s environment but in his fluid nature. And I must tell how, in my own age, having at last achieved spiritual maturity and the philosophic mind, man is forced by an unexpected crisis to embark on an enterprise both repugnant and desperate.

I invite you, then, to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of change, grief, hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else occurred, within the girdle of the Milky Way. But first, it is well to contemplate for a few moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical events. For, compressed as it must necessarily be, the narrative that I have to tell may seem to present a sequence of adventures and disasters crowded together, with no intervening peace. But in fact man’s career has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids. Ages of quiescence, often of actual stagnation, filled with the monotonous problems and toils of countless almost identical lives, have been punctuated by rare moments of racial adventure. Nay, even these few seemingly rapid events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They acquire a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative.

The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imaged save by beings of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to naïve vision almost as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked with light. Yet in reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned in an hour’s walking, the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond plain. Similarly with time. While the near past and the new future display within them depth beyond depth, time’s remote immensities are foreshortened into flatness. It is almost inconceivable to simple minds that man’s whole history should be but a moment in the life of the stars, and that remote events should embrace within themselves aeon upon aeon.

In your day you have learnt to calculate something of the magnitudes of time and space. But to grasp my theme in its true proportions, it is necessary to do more than calculate. It is necessary to brood upon these magnitudes, to draw out the mind toward them, to feel the littleness of your here and now, and of the moment of civilization which you call history. You cannot hope to image, as we do, such vast proportions as one in a thousand million, because your sense-organs, and therefore your perceptions, are too coarse-grained to discriminate so small a fraction of their total field. But you may at least, by mere contemplation, grasp more constantly and firmly the significance of your calculations.

Men of your day, when they look back into the history of their planet, remark not only the length of time but also the bewildering acceleration of life’s progress. Almost stationary in the earliest period of the earth’s career, in your moment it seems headlong. Mind in you, it is said, not merely stands higher than ever before in respect of percipience, knowledge, insight, delicacy of admiration, and sanity of will, but also it moves upward century by century ever more swiftly. What next? Surely, you think, there will come a time when there will be no further heights to conquer.

This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by cloud, rise precipices and snow-fields. The mental and spiritual advances which, in your day, mind in the solar system has still to attempt, are overwhelmingly more complex, more precarious and dangerous, than those which have already been achieved. And though in certain humble respects you have attained full development, the loftier potencies of the spirit in you have not yet even begun to put forth buds.

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind’s possible modes. But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the range of your imagination.

Historians living in your day need grapple only with one moment of the flux of time. But I have to present in one book the essence not of centuries but of aeons. Clearly we cannot walk at leisure through such a tract, in which a million terrestrial years are but as a year is to your historians. We must fly. We must travel as you do in your aeroplanes, observing only the broad features of the continent. But since the flier sees nothing of the minute inhabitants below him, and since it is they who make history, we must also punctuate our flight with many descents, skimming as it were over the house-tops, and even alighting at critical points to speak face to face with individuals. And as the plane’s journey must begin with a slow ascent from the intricate pedestrian view to wider horizons, so we must begin with a somewhat close inspection of that little period which includes the culmination and collapse of your own primitive civilization.

THE CHRONICLE

I Balkan Europe

1. THE EUROPEAN WAR AND AFTER

OBSERVE NOW YOUR own epoch of history as it appears to the Last Men.

Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered eyes, and slept again. One of these moments of precocious experience embraces the whole struggle of the First Men from savagery towards civilization. Within that moment, you stand almost in the very instant when the species attains its zenith. Scarcely at all beyond your own day is this early culture to be seen progressing, and already in your time the mentality of the race shows signs of decline.

The first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your own ‘Western’ culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct, both essential to the spirit’s well-being. Socrates, delighting in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends, glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus, delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for unselfish love of neighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.

Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals, in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its decay.

There were other causes. The peoples from whom sprang Socrates and Jesus were also among the first to conceive admiration for Fate. In Greek tragic art and Hebrew worship of divine law, as also in the Indian resignation, man experienced, at first very obscurely, that vision of an alien and supernal beauty, which was to exalt and perplex him again and again throughout his whole career. The conflict between this worship and the intransigent loyalty to Life, embattled against Death, proved insoluble. And though few individuals were ever clearly conscious of the issue, the first human species was again and again unwittingly hampered in its spiritual development by this supreme perplexity.

While man was being whipped and enticed by these precocious experiences, the actual social constitution of his world kept changing so rapidly through increased mastery over physical energy, that his primitive nature could no longer cope with the complexity of his environment. Animals that were fashioned for hunting and fighting in the wild were suddenly called upon to be citizens, and moreover citizens of a world-community. At the same time they found themselves possessed of certain very dangerous powers which their petty minds were not fit to use. Man struggled; but, as you shall hear, he broke under the strain.

The European War, called at the time the War to End War, was the first and least destructive of those world conflicts which display so tragically the incompetence of the First Men to control their own nature. At the outset a tangle of motives, some honourable and some disreputable, ignited a conflict for which both antagonists were all too well prepared, though neither seriously intended it. A real difference of temperament between Latin-France and Nordic Germany combined with a superficial rivalry between Germany and England, and a number of stupidly brutal gestures on the part of the German Government and military command, to divide the world into two camps; yet in such a manner that it is impossible to find any difference of principle between them. During the struggle each party was convinced that it alone stood for civilization. But in fact both succumbed now and again to impulses of sheer brutality, and both achieved acts not merely of heroism, but of generosity unusual among the First Men. For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.

As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while, a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction. The peace which followed the European War is one of the most significant moments of ancient history; for it epitomizes both the dawning vision and the incurable blindness, both the impulse toward a higher loyalty and the compulsive tribalism of a race which was, after all, but superficially human.

2. THE ANGLO-FRENCH WAR

ONE BRIEF BUT tragic incident, which occurred within a century after the European War, may be said to have sealed the fate of the First Men. During this century the will for peace and sanity was already becoming a serious factor in history. Save for a number of most untoward accidents, to be recorded in due course, the party of peace might have dominated Europe during its most dangerous period; and, through Europe, the world. With either a little less bad luck or a fraction more of vision and self-control at this critical time, there might never have occurred that aeon of darkness, in which the First Men were presently to be submerged. For had victory been gained before the general level of mentality had seriously begun to decline, the attainment of the world state might have been regarded, not as an end, but as the first step towards true civilization. But this was not to be.

After the European War the defeated nation, formerly no less militaristic than the others, now became the most pacific, and a stronghold of enlightenment. Almost everywhere, indeed, there had occurred a profound change of heart, but chiefly in Germany. The victors on the other hand, in spite of their real craving to be human and generous, and to found a new world, were led partly by their own timidity, partly by their governors’ blind diplomacy, into all the vices against which they believed themselves to have been crusading. After a brief period in which they desperately affected amity for one another they began to indulge once more in physical conflicts. Of these conflicts, two must be observed.

The first outbreak, and the less disastrous for Europe, was a short and grotesque struggle between France and Italy. Since the fall of ancient Rome, the Italians had excelled more in art and literature than in martial achievement. But the heroic liberation of Italy in the nineteenth Christian century had made Italians peculiarly sensitive to national prestige; and since among Western peoples national vigour was measured in terms of military glory, the Italians were fired, by their success against a rickety foreign domination, to vindicate themselves more thoroughly against the charge of mediocrity in warfare. After the European War, however, Italy passed through a phase of social disorder and self-distrust. Subsequently a flamboyant but sincere national party gained control of the State, and afforded the Italians a new self-respect, based on reform of the social services, and on militaristic policy. Trains became punctual, streets clean, morals puritanical. Aviation records were won for Italy. The young, dressed up and taught to play at soldiers with real fire-arms, were persuaded to regard themselves as saviours of the nation, encouraged to shed blood, and used to enforce the will of the Government. The whole movement was engineered chiefly by a man whose genius in action combined with his rhetoric and crudity of thought to make him a very successful dictator. Almost miraculously he drilled the Italian nation into efficiency. At the same time, with great emotional effect and incredible lack of humour he trumpeted Italy’s self-importance, and her will to ‘expand’. And since Italians were slow to learn the necessity of restricting their population, ‘expansion’ was a real need.

Thus it came about that Italy, hungry for French territory in Africa, jealous of French leadership of the Latin races, indignant at the protection afforded to Italian ‘traitors’ in France, became increasingly prone to quarrel with the most assertive of her late allies. It was a frontier incident, a fancied ‘insult to the Italian flag’, which at last caused an unauthorized raid upon French territory by a small party of Italian militia. The raiders were captured, but French blood was shed. The consequent demand for apology and reparation was calm, but subtly offensive to Italian dignity. Italian patriots worked themselves into short-sighted fury. The Dictator, far from daring to apologize, was forced to require the release of the captive militia-men, and finally to declare war. After a single sharp engagement the relentless armies of France pressed into North Italy. Resistance, at first heroic, soon became chaotic. In consternation the Italians woke from their dream of military glory. The populace turned against the Dictator whom they themselves had forced to declare war. In a theatrical but gallant attempt to dominate the Roman mob, he failed, and was killed. The new government made a hasty peace, ceding to France a frontier territory which she had already annexed for ‘security’.

Thenceforth Italians were less concerned to outshine the glory of Garibaldi than to emulate the greater glory of Dante, Giotto, and Galileo.

France had now complete mastery of the continent of Europe; but having much to lose, she behaved arrogantly and nervously. It was not long before peace was once more disturbed.

Scarcely had the last veterans of the European War ceased from wearying their juniors with reminiscence, when the long rivalry between France and England culminated in a dispute between their respective Governments over a case of sexual outrage said to have been committed by a French African soldier upon an Englishwoman. In this quarrel, the British Government happened to be definitely in the wrong, and was probably confused by its own sexual repressions. The outrage had never been committed. The facts which gave rise to the rumour were, that an idle and neurotic Englishwoman in the south of France, craving the embrace of a ‘cave man’, had seduced a Senegalese corporal in her own apartments. When, later, he had shown signs of boredom, she took revenge by declaring that he had attacked her indecently in the woods above the town. This rumour was such that the English were all too prone to savour and believe. At the same time, the magnates of the English Press could not resist this opportunity of trading upon the public’s sexuality, tribalism, and self-righteousness. There followed an epidemic of abuse, and occasional violence, against French subjects in England; and thus the party of fear and militarism in France was given the opportunity it had long sought. For the real cause of this war was connected with air power. France had persuaded the League of Nations (in one of its less intelligent moments) to restrict the size of military aeroplanes in such a manner that, while London lay within easy striking distance of the French coast, Paris could only with difficulty be touched by England. This state of affairs obviously could not last long. Britain was agitating more and more insistently for the removal of the restriction. On the other hand, there was an increasing demand for complete aerial disarmament in Europe; and so strong was the party of sanity in France, that the scheme would almost certainly have been accepted by the French Government. On both counts, therefore, the militarists of France were eager to strike while yet there was opportunity.

In an instant, the whole fruit of this effort for disarmament was destroyed. That subtle difference of mentality which had ever made it impossible for these two nations to understand one another, was suddenly exaggerated by this provocative incident into an apparently insoluble discord. England reverted to her conviction that all Frenchmen were sensualists, while to France the English appeared, as often before, the most offensive of hypocrites. In vain did the saner minds in each country insist on the fundamental humanity of both. In vain did the chastened Germans seek to mediate. In vain did the League, which by now had very great prestige and authority, threaten both parties with expulsion, even with chastisement. Rumour got about in Paris that England, breaking all her international pledges, was now feverishly building giant planes which would wreck France from Calais to Marseilles. And indeed the rumour was not wholly a slander, for, when the struggle began, the British air force was found to have a range of intensive action far wider than was expected. Yet the actual outbreak of war took England by surprise. While the London papers were selling out upon the news that war was declared, enemy planes appeared over the city. In a couple of hours a third of London was in ruins, and half her population lay poisoned in the streets. One bomb, falling beside the British Museum, turned the whole of Bloomsbury into a crater, wherein fragments of mummies, statues, and manuscripts were mingled with the contents of shops, and morsels of salesmen and the intelligentsia. Thus in a moment was destroyed a large proportion of England’s most precious relics and most fertile brains.

Then occurred one of those microscopic, yet supremely potent incidents which sometimes mould the course of events for centuries. During the bombardment a special meeting of the British Cabinet was held in a cellar in Downing Street. The party in power at the time was progressive, mildly pacifist, and timorously cosmopolitan. It had got itself involved in the French quarrel quite unintentionally. At this Cabinet meeting an idealistic member urged upon his colleagues the need for a supreme gesture of heroism and generosity on the part of Britain. Raising his voice with difficulty above the bark of English guns and the volcanic crash of French bombs, he suggested sending by radio the following message. ‘From the people of England to the people of France. Catastrophe has fallen on us at your hands. In this hour of agony, all hate and anger have left us. Our eyes are opened. No longer can we think of ourselves as merely English, and you as merely French; all of us are, before all else, civilized beings. Do not imagine that we are defeated, and that this message is a cry for mercy. Our armament is intact, and our resources still very great. Yet, because of the revelation which has come to us today, we will not fight. No plane, no ship, no soldier of Britain shall commit any further act of hostility. Do what you will. It would be better even that a great people should be destroyed than that the whole race should be thrown into turmoil. But you will not strike again. As our own eyes have been opened by agony, yours now will be opened by our act of brotherhood. The spirit of France and the spirit of England differ. They differ deeply; but only as the eye differs from the hand. Without you, we should be barbarians. And without us, even the bright spirit of France would be but half expressed. For the spirit of France lives again in our culture and in our very speech; and the spirit of England is that which strikes from you your most distinctive brilliance.’

At no earlier stage of man’s history could such a message have been considered seriously by any government. Had it been suggested during the previous war, its author would have been ridiculed, execrated, perhaps even murdered. But since those days much had happened. Increased communication, increased cultural intercourse, and a prolonged vigorous campaign for cosmopolitanism, had changed the mentality of Europe. Even so, when, after a brief discussion, the Government ordered this unique message to be sent, its members were awed by their own act. As one of them expressed it, they were uncertain whether it was the devil or the deity that had possessed them, but possessed they certainly were.

That night the people of London (those who were left) experienced an exaltation of spirit. Disorganization of the city’s life, overwhelming physical suffering and compassion, the consciousness of an unprecedented spiritual act in which each individual felt himself to have somehow participated — these influences combined to produce, even in the bustle and confusion of a wrecked metropolis, a certain restrained fervour, and a deep peace of mind, wholly unfamiliar to Londoners.

Meanwhile the undamaged North knew not whether to regard the Government’s sudden pacificism as a piece of cowardice or as a superbly courageous gesture. Very soon, however, they began to make a virtue of necessity, and incline to the latter view. Paris itself was divided by the message into a vocal party of triumph and a silent party of bewilderment. But as the hours advanced, and the former urged a policy of aggression, the latter found voice for the cry, ‘Vive l’Angleterre, vive l’humanité’. And so strong by now was the will for cosmopolitanism that the upshot would almost certainly have been a triumph of sanity, had there not occurred in England an accident which tilted the whole precarious course of events in the opposite direction.

The bombardment had occurred on a Friday night. On Saturday the repercussions of England’s great message were echoing throughout the nations. That evening, as a wet and foggy day was achieving its pallid sunset, a French plane was seen over the western outskirts of London. It gradually descended, and was regarded by onlookers as a messenger of peace. Lower and lower it came. Something was seen to part from it and fall. In a few seconds an immense explosion occurred in the neighbourhood of a great school and a royal palace. There was hideous destruction in the school. The palace escaped. But, chief disaster for the cause of peace, a beautiful and extravagantly popular young princess was caught by the explosion. Her body, obscenely mutilated, but still recognizable to every student of the illustrated papers, was impaled upon some high park-railings beside the main thoroughfare towards the city. Immediately after the explosion the enemy plane crashed, burst into flame, and was destroyed with its occupants.

A moment’s cool thinking would have convinced all onlookers that this disaster was an accident, that the plane was a belated straggler in distress, and no messenger of hate. But, confronted with the mangled bodies of schoolboys, and harrowed by cries of agony and terror, the populace was in no state for ratiocination. Moreover there was the princess, an overwhelmingly potent sexual symbol and emblem of tribalism, slaughtered and exposed before the eyes of her adorers.

The news was flashed over the country, and distorted of course in such a manner as to admit no doubt that this act was the crowning devilry of sexual fiends beyond the Channel. In an hour the mood of London was changed, and the whole population of England succumbed to a paroxysm of primitive hate far more extravagant than any that had occurred even in the war against Germany. The British air force, all too well equipped and prepared, was ordered to Paris.

Meanwhile in France the militaristic government had fallen, and the party of peace was now in control. While the streets were still thronged by its vociferous supporters, the first bomb fell. By Monday morning Paris was obliterated. There followed a few days of strife between the opposing armaments, and of butchery committed upon the civilian populations. In spite of French gallantry, the superior organization, mechanical efficiency, and more cautious courage of the British Air Force soon made it impossible for a French plane to leave the ground. But if France was broken, England was too crippled to pursue her advantage. Every city of the two countries was completely disorganized. Famine, riot, looting, and above all the rapidly accelerating and quite uncontrollable spread of disease, disintegrated both States, and brought war to a standstill.

Indeed, not only did hostilities cease, but also both nations were too shattered even to continue hating one another. The energies of each were for a while wholly occupied in trying to prevent complete annihilation by famine and pestilence. In the work of reconstruction they had to depend very largely on help from outside. The management of each country was taken over, for the time, by the League of Nations.

It is significant to compare the mood of Europe at this time with that which followed the European War. Formerly, though there had been a real effort toward unity, hate and suspicion continued to find expression in national policies. There was much wrangling about indemnities, reparations, securities; and the division of the whole continent into two hostile camps persisted, though by then it was purely artificial and sentimental. But after the Anglo-French war, a very different mood prevailed. There was no mention of reparations, no possibility of seeking security by alliances. Patriotism simply faded out, for the time, under the influence of extreme disaster. The two enemy peoples cooperated with the League in the work of reconstructing not only each one itself, but each one the other. This change of heart was due partly to the temporary collapse of the whole national organization, partly to the speedy dominance of each nation by pacifist and anti-nationalist Labour, partly to the fact that the League was powerful enough to inquire into and publish the whole story of the origins of the war, and expose each combatant to itself and to the world in a sorry light.

We have now observed in some detail the incident which stands out in man’s history as perhaps the most dramatic example of petty cause and mighty effect. For consider. Through some miscalculation, or a mere defect in his instruments, a French airman went astray, and came to grief in London after the sending of the peace message. Had this not happened, England and France would not have been wrecked. And, had the war been nipped at the outset, as it almost was, the party of sanity throughout the world would have been very greatly strengthened; the precarious will to unity would have gained the conviction which it lacked, would have dominated man not merely during the terrified revulsion after each spasm of national strife, but as a permanent policy based on mutual trust. Indeed so delicately balanced were man’s primitive and developed impulses at this time, that, but for this trivial accident, the movement which was started by England’s peace message might have proceeded steadily and rapidly toward the unification of the race. It might, that is, have attained its goal, before, instead of after, the period of mental deterioration, which in fact resulted from a long epidemic of wars. And so the first Dark Age might never have occurred.

3. EUROPE AFTER THE ANGLO-FRENCH WAR

A SUBTLE CHANGE now began to affect the whole mental climate of the planet. This is remarkable, since, viewed for instance from America or China, this war was, after all, but a petty disturbance, scarcely more than a brawl between quarrelsome statelets, an episode in the decline of a senile civilization. Expressed in dollars, the damage was not impressive to the wealthy West and the potentially wealthy East. The British Empire, indeed, that unique banyan tree of peoples, was henceforward less effective in world diplomacy; but since the bond that held it together was by now wholly a bond of sentiment, the Empire was not disintegrated by the misfortune of its parent trunk. Indeed, a common fear of American economic imperialism was already helping the colonies to remain loyal.

Yet this petty brawl was in fact an irreparable and far-reaching disaster. For in spite of those differences of temperament which had forced the English and French into conflict, they had cooperated, though often unwittingly, in tempering and clarifying the mentality of Europe. Though their faults played a great part in wrecking Western civilization, the virtues from which these vices sprang were needed for the salvation of a world prone to uncritical romance. In spite of the inveterate blindness and meanness of France in international policy, and the even more disastrous timidity of England, their influence on culture had been salutary, and was at this moment sorely needed. For, poles asunder in tastes and ideals, these two peoples were yet alike in being on the whole more sceptical, and in their finest individuals more capable of dispassionate yet creative intelligence than any other Western people. This very character produced their distinctive faults, namely, in the English a caution that amounted often to moral cowardice, and in the French a certain myopic complacency and cunning, which masqueraded as realism. Within each nation there was, of course, great variety. English minds were of many types. But most were to some extent distinctively English; and hence the special character of England’s influence in the world. Relatively detached, sceptical, cautious, practical, more tolerant than others, because more complacent and less prone to fervour, the typical Englishman was capable both of generosity and of spite, both of heroism and of timorous or cynical abandonment of ends proclaimed as vital to the race. French and English alike might sin against humanity, but in different manners. The French sinned blindly, through a strange inability to regard France dispassionately. The English sinned through faintheartedness, and with open eyes. Among all nations they excelled in the union of common sense and vision. But also among all nations they were most ready to betray their visions in the name of commonsense. Hence their reputation for perfidy.

Differences of national character and patriotic sentiment were not the most fundamental distinctions between men at this time. Although in each nation a common tradition or cultural environment imposed a certain uniformity on all its members, yet in each nation every mental type was present, though in different proportions. The most significant of all cultural differences between men, namely, the difference between the tribalists and the cosmopolitans, traversed the national boundaries. For throughout the world something like a new, cosmopolitan ‘nation’ with a new all-embracing patriotism was beginning to appear. In every land there was by now a salting of awakened minds who, whatever their temperament and politics and formal faith, were at one in respect of their allegiance to humanity as a race or as an adventuring spirit. Unfortunately this new loyalty was still entangled with old prejudices. In some minds the defence of the human spirit was sincerely identified with the defence of a particular nation, conceived as the home of all enlightenment. In others, social injustice kindled a militant proletarian loyalty, which, though at heart cosmopolitan, infected alike its champions and its enemies with sectarian passions.

Another sentiment, less definite and conscious than cosmopolitanism, also played some part in the minds of men, namely loyalty toward the dispassionate intelligence and perplexed admiration of the world which was beginning to be revealed, a world august, immense, subtle, in which, seemingly, man was doomed to play a part minute but tragic. In many races there had, no doubt, long existed some fidelity toward the dispassionate intelligence. But it was England and France that excelled in this respect. On the other hand, even in these two nations there was much that was opposed to this allegiance. These, like all peoples of the age, were liable to bouts of insane emotionalism. Indeed the French mind, in general so clear-sighted, so realistic, so contemptuous of ambiguity and mist, so detached in all its final valuations, was yet so obsessed with the idea ‘France’ as to be wholly incapable of generosity in international affairs. But it was France, with England, that had chiefly inspired the intellectual integrity which was the rarest and brightest thread of Western culture, not only within the territories of these two nations, but throughout Europe and America. In the seventeenth and eighteenth Christian centuries, the French and English had conceived, more clearly than other peoples, an interest in the objective world for its own sake, had founded physical science, and had fashioned out of scepticism the most brilliantly constructive of mental instruments. At a later stage it was largely the French and English who, by means of this instrument, had revealed man and the physical universe in something like their true proportions; and it was chiefly the elect of these two peoples that had been able to exult in this bracing discovery.

With the eclipse of France and England this great tradition of dispassionate cognizance began to wane. Europe was now led by Germany. And the Germans, in spite of their practical genius, their scholarly contributions to history, their brilliant science and austere philosophy, were at heart romantic. This inclination was both their strength and their weakness. Thereby they had been inspired to their finest art and their most profound metaphysical speculation. But thereby they were also often rendered un-self-critical and pompous. More eager than other Western minds to solve the mystery of existence, less sceptical of the power of human reason, and therefore more inclined to ignore or argue away recalcitrant facts, the Germans were courageous systematizes. In this direction they had achieved great things. Without them, European thought would have been chaotic. But their passion for order and for a systematic reality behind the disorderly appearances, rendered their reasoning all too often biased. Upon shifty foundations they balanced ingenious ladders to reach the stars. Thus, without constant ribald criticism from across the Rhine and the North Sea, the Teutonic soul could not achieve full self-expression. A vague uneasiness about its own sentimentalism and lack of detachment did indeed persuade this great people to assert its virility now and again by ludicrous acts of brutality, and to compensate for its dream life by ceaseless hard-driven and brilliantly successful commerce; but what was needed was a far more radical self-criticism.

Beyond Germany, Russia. Here was a people whose genius needed, even more than that of the Germans, discipline under the critical intelligence. Since the Bolshevik revolution, there had risen in the scattered towns of this immense tract of corn and forest, and still more in the metropolis, an original mode of art and thought, in which were blended a passion for iconoclasm, a vivid sensuousness, and yet also a very remarkable and essentially mystical or intuitive power of detachment from all private cravings. America and Western Europe were interested first in the individual human life, and only secondarily in the social whole. For these peoples loyalty involved a reluctant self-sacrifice, and the ideal was ever a person, excelling in prowess of various kinds. Society was but the necessary matrix of this jewel. But the Russians, whether by an innate gift, or through the influence of age-long political tyranny, religious devotion, and a truly social revolution, were prone to self-contemptuous interest in groups, prone, indeed, to a spontaneous worship of whatever was conceived as loftier than the individual man whether society, or God, or the blind forces of nature. Western Europe could reach by way of the intellect a precise conception of man’s littleness and irrelevance when regarded as an alien among the stars; could even glimpse from this standpoint the cosmic theme in which all human striving is but one contributory factor. But the Russian mind, whether orthodox or Tolstoyan or fanatically materialist, could attain much the same conviction intuitively, by direct perception, instead of after an arduous intellectual pilgrimage; and, reaching it, could rejoice in it. But because of this independence of intellect, the experience was confused, erratic, frequently misinterpreted; and its effect on conduct was rather explosive than directive. Great indeed was the need that the West and East of Europe should strengthen and temper one another.

After the Bolshevik revolution a new element appeared in Russian culture, and one which had not been known before in any modern state. The old regime was displaced by a real proletarian government, which, though an oligarchy, and sometimes bloody and fanatical, abolished the old tyranny of class, and encouraged the humblest citizen to be proud of his partnership in the great community. Still more important, the native Russian disposition not to take material possessions very seriously cooperated with the political revolution, and brought about such a freedom from the snobbery of wealth as was quite foreign to the West. Attention which elsewhere was absorbed in the amassing or display of money was in Russia largely devoted either to spontaneous instinctive enjoyments or to cultural activity.

In fact, it was among the Russian townsfolk, less cramped by tradition than other city-dwellers, that the spirit of the First Men was beginning to achieve a fresh and sincere readjustment to the facts of its changing world. And from the townsfolk something of the new way of life was spreading even to the peasants; while in the depths of Asia a hardy and ever-growing population looked increasingly to Russia, not only for machinery, but for ideas. There were times when it seemed that Russia might transform the almost universal autumn of the race into a new spring.

After the Bolshevik revolution the new Russia had been boycotted by the West, and had therefore passed through a stage of self-conscious extravagance. Communism and naïve materialism became the dogmas of a new crusading atheist church. All criticism was suppressed, even more rigorously than was the opposite criticism in other countries; and Russians were taught to think of themselves as saviours of mankind. Later, however, as economic isolation began to hamper the Bolshevik state, the new culture was mellowed and broadened. Bit by bit, economic intercourse with the West was restored, and with it cultural intercourse increased. The intuitive mystical detachment of Russia began to define itself, and so consolidate itself, in terms of the intellectual detachment of the best thought of the West. Iconoclasm was harnessed. The life of the senses and of impulse was tempered by a new critical movement. Fanatical materialism, whose fire had been derived from a misinterpreted, but intense, mystical intuition of dispassionate Reality, began to assimilate itself to the far more rational stoicism which was the rare flower of the West. At the same time, through intercourse with peasant culture and with the peoples of Asia, the new Russia began to grasp in one unifying act of apprehension both the grave disillusion of France and England and the ecstasy of the East.

The harmonizing of these two moods was now the chief spiritual need of mankind. Failure to integrate them into an all-dominant sentiment could not but lead to racial insanity. And so in due course it befell. Meanwhile this task of integration was coming to seem more and more urgent to the best minds of Russia, and might have been finally accomplished had they been longer illumined by the cold light of the West.

But this was not to be. The intellectual confidence of France and England, already shaken through progressive economic eclipse at the hands of America and Germany, was now undermined. For many decades England had watched these newcomers capture her markets. The loss had smothered her with a swarm of domestic problems, such as could never be solved save by drastic surgery; and this was a course which demanded more courage and energy than was possible to a people without hope. Then came the war with France, and harrowing disintegration. No delirium seized her, such as occurred in France; yet her whole mentality was changed, and her sobering influence in Europe was lessened.

As for France, her cultural life was now grievously reduced. It might, indeed, have recovered from the final blow, had it not already been slowly poisoned by gluttonous nationalism. For love of France was the undoing of the French. They prized the truly admirable spirit of France so extravagantly that they regarded all other nations as barbarians.

Thus it befell that in Russia the doctrines of communism and materialism, products of German systematists, survived uncriticized. On the other hand, the practice of communism was gradually undermined. For the Russian state came increasingly under the influence of Western, and especially American, finance. The materialism of the official creed also became a farce, for it was foreign to the Russian mind. Thus between practice and theory there was, in both respects, a profound inconsistency. What was once a vital and promising culture became insincere.

4. THE RUSSO-GERMAN WAR

THE DISCREPANCY BETWEEN communist theory and individualist practice in Russia was one cause of the next disaster which befell Europe. Between Russia and Germany there should have been close partnership, based on interchange of machinery and corn. But the theory of communism stood in the way, and in a strange manner. Russian industrial organization had proved impossible without American capital; and little by little this influence had transformed the communistic system. From the Baltic to the Himalayas and the Bering Straits, pasture, timberlands, machine-tilled corn-lands, oil-fields, and a spreading rash of industrial towns, were increasingly dependent on American finance and organization. Yet not America but the far less individualistic Germany had become in the Russian mind the symbol of capitalism. Self-righteous hate of Germany compensated Russia for her own betrayal of the communistic ideal. This perverse antagonism was encouraged by the Americans; who, strong in their own individualism and prosperity, and by now contemptuously tolerant of Russian doctrines, were concerned only to keep Russian finance to themselves. In truth, of course, it was America that had helped Russia’s self-betrayal; and it was the spirit of America that was most alien to the Russian spirit. But American wealth was by now indispensable to Russia; so the hate due to America had to be borne vicariously by Germany.

The Germans, for their part, were aggrieved that the Americans had ousted them from a most profitable field of enterprise, and in particular from the exploitation of Russian Asiatic oil. The economic life of the human race had for some time been based on coal, but latterly oil had been found a far more convenient source of power, and as the oil store of the planet was much smaller than its coal store, and the expenditure of oil had of course been wholly uncontrolled and wasteful, a shortage was already being felt. Thus the national ownership of the remaining oil-fields had become a main factor in politics and a fertile source of wars. America, having used up most of her own supplies, was now anxious to compete with the still prolific sources under Chinese control, by forestalling Germany in Russia. No wonder the Germans were aggrieved. But the fault was their own. In the days when Russian communism had been seeking to convert the world, Germany had taken over England’s leadership of individualistic Europe. While greedy for trade with Russia, she had been at the same time frightened of contamination by Russian social doctrine, the more so because communism had at first made some headway among the German workers. Later, even when sane industrial reorganization in Germany had deprived communism of its appeal to the workers, and thus had rendered it impotent, the habit of anti-communist vituperation persisted.

Thus the peace of Europe was in constant danger from the bickerings of two peoples who differed rather in ideals than in practice. For the one, in theory communistic, had been forced to delegate many of the community’s rights to enterprising individuals; while the other, in theory organized on a basis of private business, was becoming ever more socialized.

Neither party desired war. Neither was interested in military glory, for militarism as an end was no longer reputable. Neither was professedly nationalistic, for nationalism, though still potent, was no longer vaunted. Each claimed to stand for internationalism and peace, but accused the other of narrow patriotism. Thus Europe, though more pacific than ever before, was doomed to war.

Like most wars, the Anglo-French War had increased the desire for peace, yet made peace less secure. Distrust, not merely the old distrust of nation for nation, but a devastating distrust of human nature, gripped men like the dread of insanity. Individuals who thought of themselves as wholehearted Europeans, feared that at any moment they might succumb to some ridiculous epidemic of patriotism, and participate in the further crippling of Europe.

This dread was one cause of the formation of a European Confederacy, in which all the nations of Europe, save Russia, surrendered their sovereignty to a common authority and actually pooled their armaments. Ostensibly the motive of this act was peace; but America interpreted it as directed against herself, and withdrew from the League of Nations. China, the ‘natural enemy’ of America, remained within the League, hoping to use it against her rival.

From without, indeed, the Confederacy at first appeared as a close-knit whole: but from within it was known to be insecure, and in every serious crisis it broke. There is no need to follow the many minor wars of this period, though their cumulative effect was serious, both economically and psychologically. Europe did at last, however, become something like a single nation in sentiment, though this unity was brought about less by a common loyalty than by a common fear of America.

Final consolidation was the fruit of the Russo-German War, the cause of which was partly economic and partly sentimental. All the peoples of Europe had long watched with horror the financial conquest of Russia by the United States, and they dreaded that they also must presently succumb to the same tyrant. To attack Russia, it was thought, would be to wound America in her only vulnerable spot. But the actual occasion of the war was sentimental. Half a century after the Anglo-French War, a second-rate German author published a typically German book of the baser sort. For as each nation had its characteristic virtues, so also each was prone to characteristic follies. This book was one of those brilliant but extravagant works in which the whole diversity of existence is interpreted under a single formula, with extreme detail and plausibility, yet with amazing naïvéte. Highly astute within its own artificial universe, it was none the less in wider regard quite uncritical. In two large volumes the author claimed that the cosmos was a dualism in which a heroic and obviously Nordic spirit ruled by divine right over an un-self-disciplined, yet servile and obviously Slavonic spirit. The whole of history, and of evolution, was interpreted on this principle; and of the contemporary world it was said that the Slavonic element was poisoning Europe. One phrase in particular caused fury in Moscow, ‘the anthropoid face of the Russian subman’.

Moscow demanded apology and suppression of the book. Berlin regretted the insult but with its tongue in its cheek; and insisted on the freedom of the press. Followed a crescendo of radio hate, and war.

The details of this war do not matter to one intent upon the history of mind in the Solar System, but its result was important. Moscow, Leningrad and Berlin were shattered from the air. The whole West of Russia was flooded with the latest and deadliest poison gas, so that not only was all animal and vegetable life destroyed, but also the soil between the Black Sea and the Baltic was rendered infertile and uninhabitable for many years. Within a week the war was over, for the reason that the combatants were separated by an immense territory in which life could not exist. But the effects of the war were lasting. The Germans had set going a process which they could not stop. Whiffs of the poison continued to be blown by fickle winds into every country of Europe and Western Asia. It was spring-time; but save in the Atlantic coast-lands the spring flowers shrivelled in the bud, and every young leaf had a withered rim. Humanity also suffered; though, save in the regions near the seat of war, it was in general only the children and the old people who suffered greatly. The poison spread across the Continent in huge blown tresses, broad as principalities, swinging with each change of wind. And wherever it strayed, young eyes, throats, and lungs were blighted like the leaves.

America, after much debate, had at last decided to defend her interests in Russia by a punitive expedition against Europe. China began to mobilize her forces. But long before America was ready to strike, news of the widespread poisoning changed her policy. Instead of punishment, help was given. This was a fine gesture of good will. But also, as was observed in Europe, instead of being costly, it was profitable; for inevitably it brought more of Europe under American financial control.

The upshot of the Russo-German war, then, was that Europe was unified in sentiment by hatred of America, and that European mentality definitely deteriorated. This was due in part to the emotional influence of the war itself, partly to the socially damaging effects of the poison. A proportion of the rising generation had been rendered sickly for life. During the thirty years which intervened before the Euro-American war, Europe was burdened with an exceptional weight of invalids. First-class intelligence was on the whole rarer than before, and was more strictly concentrated on the practical work of reconstruction.

Even more disastrous for the human race was the fact that the recent Russian cultural enterprise of harmonizing Western intellectualism and Eastern mysticism was now wrecked.

II Europe’s Downfall

1. EUROPE AND AMERICA

OVER THE HEADS of the European tribes two mightier peoples regarded each other with increasing dislike. Well might they; for the one cherished the most ancient and refined of all surviving cultures, while the other, youngest and most self-confident of the great nations, proclaimed her novel spirit as the spirit of the future.

In the Far East, China, already half American, though largely Russian and wholly Eastern, patiently improved her rice lands, pushed forward her railways, organized her industries, and spoke fair to all the world. Long ago, during her attainment of unity and independence, China had learnt much from militant Bolshevism. And after the collapse of the Russian state it was in the East that Russian culture continued to live. Its mysticism influenced India. Its social ideal influenced China. Not indeed that China took over the theory, still less the practice of communism; but she learnt to entrust herself increasingly to a vigorous, devoted, and despotic party, and to feel in terms of the social whole rather than individualistically. Yet she was honeycombed with individualism, and in spite of her rulers she had precipitated a submerged and desperate class of wage-slaves.

In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph, and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the ether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.

For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.

Inevitably. Yet here was a people of unique promise, gifted innately beyond all other peoples. Here was a race brewed of all the races, and mentally more effervescent than any. Here were intermingled Anglo-Saxon stubbornness, Teutonic genius for detail and systematization, Italian gaiety, the intense fire of Spain, and the more mobile Celtic flame. Here also was the sensitive and stormy Slav, a youth-giving Negroid infusion, a faint but subtly stimulating trace of the Red Man, and in the West a sprinkling of the Mongol. Mutual intolerance no doubt isolated these diverse stocks to some degree; yet the whole was increasingly one people, proud of its individuality, of its success, of its idealistic mission in the world, proud also of its optimistic and anthropocentric view of the universe. What might not this energy have achieved, had it been more critically controlled, had it been forced to attend to life’s more forbidding aspects! Direct tragic experience might perhaps have opened the hearts of this people. Intercourse with a more mature culture might have refined their intelligence. But the very success which had intoxicated them rendered them also too complacent to learn from less prosperous competitors.

Yet there was a moment when this insularity promised to wane. So long as England was a serious economic rival, America inevitably regarded her with suspicion. But when England was seen to be definitely in economic decline, yet culturally still at her zenith, America conceived a more generous interest in the last and severest phase of English thought. Eminent Americans themselves began to whisper that perhaps their unrivalled prosperity was not after all good evidence either of their own spiritual greatness or of the moral rectitude of the universe. A minute but persistent school of writers began to affirm that America lacked self-criticism, was incapable of seeing the joke against herself, was in fact wholly devoid of that detachment and resignation which was the finest, though of course the rarest mood of latter-day England. This movement might well have infused throughout the American people that which was needed to temper their barbarian egotism, and open their ears once more to the silence beyond man’s strident sphere. Once more, for only latterly had they been seriously deafened by the din of their own material success. And indeed, scattered over the continent throughout this whole period, many shrinking islands of true culture contrived to keep their heads above the rising tide of vulgarity and superstition. These it was that had looked to Europe for help, and were attempting a rally when England and France blundered into that orgy of emotionalism and murder which exterminated so many of their best minds and permanently weakened their cultural influence.

Subsequently it was Germany that spoke for Europe. And Germany was too serious an economic rival for America to be open to her influence. Moreover German criticism, though often emphatic, was too heavily pedantic, too little ironical, to pierce the hide of American complacency. Thus it was that America sank further and further into Americanism. Vast wealth and industry, and also brilliant invention, were concentrated upon puerile ends. In particular the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. Those who achieved power were satisfied so long as they could merely retain it, and advertise it uncritically in the conventionally self-assertive manner.

It was almost inevitable that when Europe had recovered from the Russo-German disaster she should come to blows with America; for she had long chafed under the saddle of American finance, and the daily life of Europeans had become more and more cramped by the presence of a widespread and contemptuous foreign ‘aristocracy’ of American business men. Germany alone was comparatively free from this domination, for Germany was herself still a great economic power. But in Germany, no less than elsewhere, there was constant friction with the Americans.

Of course neither Europe nor America desired war. Each was well aware that war would mean the end of business prosperity, and for Europe very possibly the end of all things; for it was known that man’s power of destruction had recently increased, and that if war were waged relentlessly, the stronger side might exterminate the other. But inevitably an ‘incident’ at last occurred which roused blind rage on each side of the Atlantic. A murder in South Italy, a few ill-considered remarks in the European Press, offensive retaliation in the American Press accompanied by the lynching of an Italian in the Middle West, an uncontrollable massacre of American citizens in Rome, the despatch of an American air fleet to occupy Italy, interception by the European air fleet, and war was in existence before ever it had been declared. This aerial action resulted, perhaps unfortunately for Europe, in a momentary check to the American advance. The enemy was put on his mettle, and prepared a crushing blow.

2. THE ORIGINS OF A MYSTERY

WHILE THE AMERICANS were mobilizing their whole armament there occurred the really interesting event of the war. It so happened that an international society of scientific workers was meeting in England at Plymouth, and a young Chinese physicist had expressed his desire to make a report to a select committee. As he had been experimenting to find means for the utilization of subatomic energy by the annihilation of matter, it was with some excitement that, according to instruction, the forty international representatives travelled to the north coast of Devon and met upon the bare headland called Hartland Point.

It was a bright morning after rain. Eleven miles to the north-west, the cliffs of Lundy Island displayed their markings with unusual detail. Sea-birds wheeled about the heads of the party as they seated themselves on their raincoats in a cluster upon the rabbit-cropped turf.

They were a remarkable company, each one of them a unique person, yet characterized to some extent by his particular national type. And all were distinctively ‘scientists’ of the period. Formerly this would have implied a rather uncritical leaning towards materialism, and an affectation of cynicism; but by now it was fashionable to profess an equally uncritical belief that all natural phenomena were manifestations of the cosmic mind. In both periods, when a man passed beyond the sphere of his own serious scientific work he chose his beliefs irresponsibly, according to his taste, much as he chose his recreation or his food.

Of the individuals present we may single out one or two for notice. The German, an anthropologist, and a product of the long-established cult of physical and mental health, sought to display in his own athletic person the characters proper to Nordic man. The Frenchman, an old but still sparkling psychologist, whose queer hobby was the collecting of weapons, ancient and modern, regarded the proceedings with kindly cynicism. The Englishman, one of the few remaining intellectuals of his race, compensated for the severe study of physics by a scarcely less devoted research into the history of English expletives and slang, delighting to treat his colleagues to the fruits of his toil. The West African president of the Society was a biologist, famous for his interbreeding of man and ape.

When all were settled, the President explained the purpose of the meeting. The utilization of subatomic energy had indeed been achieved, and they were to be given a demonstration.

The young Mongol stood up, and produced from a case an instrument rather like the old-fashioned rifle. Displaying this object, he spoke as follows, with that quaintly stilted formality which had once been characteristic of all educated Chinese. ‘Before describing the details of my rather delicate process, I will illustrate its importance by showing what can be done with the finished product. Not only can I initiate the annihilation of matter, but also I can do so at a distance and in a precise direction. Moreover, I can inhibit the process. As a means of destruction, my instrument is perfect. As a source of power for the constructive work of mankind, it has unlimited potentiality. Gentlemen, this is a great moment in the history of Man. I am about to render into the hands of organized intelligence the means to stop for ever man’s internecine brawls. Henceforth this great Society, of which you are the élite, will beneficently rule the planet. With this little instrument you will stop the ridiculous war; and with another, which I shall soon perfect, you will dispense unlimited industrial power wherever you consider it needed. Gentlemen, with the aid of this handy instrument which I have the honour to demonstrate, you are about to become absolute masters of this planet.’

Here the representative of England muttered an archaism whose significance was known only to himself, ‘Gawd ‘elp us!’ In the minds of some of those foreigners who were not physicists this quaint expression was taken to be a technical word having some connexion with the new source of energy.

The Mongol continued. Turning towards Lundy, he said, ‘That island is no longer inhabited, and as it is something of a danger to shipping, I will remove it.’ So saying he aimed his instrument at the distant cliff, but continued speaking. ‘This trigger will stimulate the ultimate positive and negative charges which constitute the atoms at a certain point on the rock-face to annihilate each other. These stimulated atoms will infect their neighbours, and so on indefinitely. This second trigger, however, will stop the actual annihilation. Were I to refrain from using it, the process would indeed continue indefinitely, perhaps until the whole of the planet had disintegrated.’

There was an anxious movement among the spectators, but the young man took careful aim, and pressed the two triggers in quick succession. No sound from the instrument. No visible effect upon the smiling face of the island. Laughter began to gurgle from the Englishman, but ceased. For a dazzling point of light appeared on the remote cliff. It increased in size and brilliance, till all eyes were blinded in the effort to continue watching. It lit up the under parts of the clouds and blotted out the sun-cast shadows of gorse bushes beside the spectators. The whole end of the island facing the mainland was now an intolerable scorching sun. Presently, however, its fury was veiled in clouds of steam from the boiling sea. Then suddenly the whole island, three miles of solid granite, leapt asunder; so that a covey of great rocks soared heavenwards, and beneath them swelled more slowly a gigantic mushroom of steam and debris. Then the sound arrived. All hands were clapped to ears, while eyes still strained to watch the bay, pocked white with the hail of rocks. Meanwhile a great wall of sea advanced from the centre of turmoil. This was seen to engulf a coasting vessel, and pass on towards Bideford and Barnstaple.

The spectators leaped to their feet and clamoured, while the young author of this fury watched the spectacle with exultation, and some surprise at the magnitude of these mere after-effects of his process.

The meeting was now adjourned to a neighbouring chapel to hear the report of the research. As the representatives were filing through the door it was observed that the steam and smoke had cleared, and that open sea extended where had been Lundy. Within the chapel, the great Bible was decorously removed and the windows thrown open, to dispel somewhat the odour of sanctity. For though the early and spiritual interpretations of relativity and the quantum theory had by now accustomed men of science to pay their respects to the religions, many of them were still liable to a certain asphyxia when they were actually within the precincts of sanctity. When the scientists had settled themselves upon the archaic and unyielding benches, the President explained that the chapel authorities had kindly permitted this meeting because they realized that, since men of science had gradually discovered the spiritual foundation of physics, science and religion must henceforth be close allies. Moreover the purpose of this meeting was to discuss one of those supreme mysteries which it was the glory of science to discover and religion to transfigure. The President then complimented the young dispenser of power upon his triumph, and called upon him to address the meeting.

At this point, however, the aged representative of France intervened, and was granted a hearing. Born almost a hundred and forty years earlier, and preserved more by native intensity of spirit than by the artifices of the regenerator, this ancient seemed to speak out of a remote and wiser epoch. For in a declining civilization it is often the old who see furthest and see with youngest eyes. He concluded a rather long, rhetorical, yet closely reasoned speech as follows: ‘No doubt we are the intelligence of the planet; and because of our consecration to our calling, no doubt we are comparatively honest. But alas, even we are human. We make little mistakes now and then, and commit little indiscretions. The possession of such power as is offered us would not bring peace. On the contrary it would perpetuate our national hates. It would throw the world into confusion. It would undermine our own integrity, and turn us into tyrants. Moreover it would ruin science. And — well, when at last through some little error the world got blown up, the disaster would not be regrettable. I know that Europe is almost certainly about to be destroyed by those vigorous but rather spoilt children across the Atlantic. But distressing as this must be, the alternative is far worse. No, Sir! Your very wonderful toy would be a gift for developed minds; but for us, who are still barbarians — no, it must not be. And so, with deep regret I beg you to destroy your handiwork, and, if it were possible, your memory of your marvellous research. But above all breathe no word of your process to us, or to any man.’

The German then protested that to refuse would be cowardly. He briefly described his vision of a world organized under organized science, and inspired by a scientifically organized religious dogma. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘to refuse were to refuse the gift of God, of that God whose presence in the humblest quantum we have so recently and so surprisingly revealed.’ Other speakers followed, for and against; but it soon grew clear that wisdom would prevail. Men of science were by now definitely cosmopolitan in sentiment. Indeed so far were they from nationalism, that on this occasion the representative of America had urged acceptance of the weapon, although it would be used against his own countrymen.

Finally, however, and actually by a unanimous vote, the meeting, while recording its deep respect for the Chinese scientists, requested, nay ordered, that the instrument and all account of it should be destroyed.

The young man rose, drew his handiwork from its case, and fingered it. So long did he remain thus standing in silence with eyes fixed on the instrument, that the meeting became restless. At last, however, he spoke. ‘I shall abide by the decision of the meeting. Well, it is hard to destroy the fruit of ten years’ work, and such fruit, too. I expected to have the gratitude of mankind; but instead I am an outcast.’ Once more he paused. Gazing out of the window, he now drew from his pocket a field-glass, and studied the western sky. ‘Yes, they are American. Gentlemen, the American air fleet approaches.’

The company leapt to its feet and crowded to the windows. High in the west a sparse line of dots stretched indefinitely into the north and the south. Said the Englishman, ‘For God’s sake use your damned tool once more, or England’s done. They must have smashed our fellows over the Atlantic.’

The Chinese scientist turned his eyes on the President. There was a general cry of ‘Stop them’. Only the Frenchman protested. The representative of the United States raised his voice and said, ‘They are my people, I have friends up there in the sky. My own boy is probably there. But they’re mad. They want to do something hideous. They’re in the lynching mood. Stop them.’ The Mongol still gazed at the President, who nodded. The Frenchman broke down in senile tears. Then the young man, leaning upon the window sill, took careful aim at each black dot in turn. One by one, each became a blinding star, then vanished. In the chapel, a long silence. Then whispers; and glances at the Chinese scientist, expressive of anxiety and dislike.

There followed a hurried ceremony in a neighbouring field. A fire was lit. The instrument and the no less murderous manuscript were burnt. And then the grave young Mongol, having insisted on shaking hands all round, said, ‘With my secret alive in me, I must not live. Some day a more worthy race will rediscover it, but today I am a danger to the planet. And so I, who have foolishly ignored that I live among savages, help myself now by the ancient wisdom to pass hence.’ So saying, he fell dead.

3. EUROPE MURDERED

RUMOUR SPREAD BY voice and radio throughout the world. An island had been mysteriously exploded. The American fleet had been mysteriously annihilated in the air. And in the neighbourhood where these events had occurred, distinguished scientists were gathered in conference. The European Government sought out the unknown saviour of Europe, to thank him, and secure his process for their own use. The President of the scientific society gave an account of the meeting and the unanimous vote. He and his colleagues were promptly arrested, and ‘pressure’, first moral and then physical, was brought to bear on them to make them disclose the secret; for the world was convinced that they really knew it, and were holding it back for their own purposes.

Meanwhile it was learnt that the American air commander, after he had defeated the European fleet, had been instructed merely to ‘demonstrate’ above England while peace was negotiated. For in America, big business had threatened the government with boycott if unnecessary violence were committed in Europe. Big business was by now very largely international in sentiment, and it was realized that the destruction of Europe would inevitably unhinge American finance. But the unprecedented disaster to the victorious fleet roused the Americans to blind hate, and the peace party was submerged. Thus it turned out that the Chinese scientist’s one hostile act had not saved England, but doomed her.

For some days Europeans lived in panic dread, knowing not what horror might at any moment descend on them. No wonder, then, that the Government resorted to torture in order to extract the secret from the scientists. No wonder that out of the forty individuals concerned, one, the Englishman, saved himself by deceit. He promised to do his best to ‘remember’ the intricate process. Under strict supervision, he used his own knowledge of physics to experiment in search of the Chinese trick. Fortunately, however, he was on the wrong scent. And indeed he knew it. For though his first motive was mere self-preservation, later he conceived the policy of indefinitely preventing the dangerous discovery by directing research along a blind alley. And so his treason, by seeming to give the authority of a most eminent physicist to a wholly barren line of research, saved this undisciplined and scarcely human race from destroying its planet.

The American people, sometimes tender even to excess, were now collectively insane with hate of the English and of all Europeans. With cold efficiency they flooded Europe with the latest and deadliest of gases, till all the peoples were poisoned in their cities like rats in their holes. The gas employed was such that its potency would cease within three days. It was therefore possible for an American sanitary force to take charge of each metropolis within a week after the attack. Of those who first descended into the great silence of the murdered cities, many were unhinged by the overwhelming presence of dead populations. The gas had operated first upon the ground level, but, rising like a tide, it had engulfed the top stories, the spires, the hills. Thus, while in the streets lay thousands who had been overcome by the first waves of poison, every roof and pinnacle bore the bodies of those who had struggled upwards in the vain hope of escaping beyond the highest reach of the tide. When the invaders arrived they beheld on every height prostrate and contorted figures.

Thus Europe died. All centres of intellectual life were blotted out, and of the agricultural regions only the uplands and mountains were untouched. The spirit of Europe lived henceforth only in a piece-meal and dislocated manner in the minds of Americans, Chinese, Indians, and the rest.

There were indeed the British Colonies, but they were by now far less European than American. The war had, of course, disintegrated the British Empire. Canada sided with the United States. South Africa and India declared their neutrality at the outbreak of war. Australia, not through cowardice, but through conflict of loyalties, was soon reduced to neutrality. The New Zealanders took to their mountains and maintained an insane but heroic resistance for a year. A simple and gallant folk, they had almost no conception of the European spirit, yet obscurely and in spite of their Americanization they were loyal to it, or at least to that symbol of one aspect of Europeanism, ‘England’. Indeed so extravagantly loyal were they, or so innately dogged and opinionated, that when further resistance became impossible, many of them, both men and women, killed themselves rather than submit.

But the most lasting agony of this war was suffered, not by the defeated, but by the victors. For when their passion had cooled the Americans could not easily disguise from themselves that they had committed murder. They were not at heart a brutal folk, but rather a kindly. They liked to think of the world as a place of innocent pleasure-seeking, and of themselves as the main purveyors of delight. Yet they had been somehow drawn into this fantastic crime; and henceforth an all-pervading sense of collective guilt warped the American mind. They had ever been vainglorious and intolerant; but now these qualities in them became extravagant even to insanity. Both as individuals and collectively, they became increasingly frightened of criticism, increasingly prone to blame and hate, increasingly self-righteous, increasingly hostile to the critical intelligence, increasingly superstitious.

Thus was this once noble people singled out by the gods to be cursed, and the minister of curses.

III America and China

1. THE RIVALS

AFTER THE ECLIPSE of Europe, the allegiance of men gradually crystallized into two great national or racial sentiments, the American and the Chinese. Little by little all other patriotisms became mere local variants of one or other of these two major loyalties. At first, indeed, there were many internecine conflicts. A detailed history of this period would describe how North America, repeating the welding process of the ancient ‘American Civil War’, incorporated within itself the already Americanized Latins of South America; and how Japan, once the bully of young China, was so crippled by social revolutions that she fell a prey to American Imperialism; and how this bondage turned her violently Chinese in sentiment, so that finally she freed herself by an heroic war of independence, and joined the Asian Confederacy, under Chinese leadership.

A full history would also tell of the vicissitudes of the League of Nations. Although never a cosmopolitan government, but an association of national governments, each concerned mainly for its own sovereignty, this great organization had gradually gained a very real prestige and authority over all its members. And in spite of its many shortcomings, most of which were involved in its fundamental constitution, it was invaluable as the great concrete focusing point of the growing loyalty toward humanity. At first its existence had been precarious; and indeed it had only preserved itself by an extreme caution, amounting almost to servility towards the ‘great powers’. Little by little, however, it had gained moral authority to such an extent that no single power, even the mightiest, dared openly and in cold blood either to disobey the will of the League or reject the findings of the High Court. But, since human loyalty was still in the main national rather than cosmopolitan, situations were all too frequent in which a nation would lose its head, run amok, throw its pledges to the winds, and plunge into fear-inspired aggression. Such a situation had produced the Anglo-French war. At other times the nations would burst apart into two great camps, and the League would be temporarily forgotten in their disunion. This happened in the Russo-German War, which was possible only because America favoured Russia and China favoured Germany. After the destruction of Europe, the world had for a while consisted of the League on one side and America on the other. But the League was dominated by China, and no longer stood for cosmopolitanism. This being so, those whose loyalty was genuinely human worked hard to bring America once more into the fold, and at last succeeded.

In spite of the League’s failure to prevent the ‘great’ wars, it worked admirably in preventing all the minor conflicts which had once been a chronic disease of the race. Latterly, indeed, the world’s peace was absolutely secure, save when the League itself was almost equally divided. Unfortunately, with the rise of America and China, this kind of situation became more and more common. During the war of North and South America an attempt was made to recreate the League as a Cosmopolitan Sovereignty, controlling the pooled armaments of all nations. But, though the cosmopolitan will was strong, tribalism was stronger. The upshot was that, over the Japanese question, the League definitely split into two Leagues, each claiming to inherit universal sovereignty from the old League, but each in reality dominated by a kind of supernational sentiment, the one American, the other Chinese.

This occurred within a century after the eclipse of Europe. The second century completed the process of crystallization into two systems, political and mental. On the one hand was the wealthy and close-knit American Continental Federation, with its poor relations, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the bedridden remains of Western Europe, and part of the soulless body that was Russia. On the other hand were Asia and Africa. In fact the ancient distinction between East and West had now become the basis of political sentiment and organization.

Within each system there were of course real differences of culture, of which the chief was the difference between the Chinese and Indian mentalities. The Chinese were interested in appearances, in the sensory, the urbane, the practical; while the Indians inclined to seek behind appearances for some ultimate reality, of which this life, they said, was but a passing aspect. Thus the average Indian never took to heart the practical social problem in all its seriousness. The ideal of perfecting this world was never an all-absorbing interest to him; since he had been taught to believe that this world was mere shadow. There was, indeed, a time when China had mentally less in common with India than with the West, but fear of America had drawn the two great Eastern peoples together. They agreed at least in earnest hate of that strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary, and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.

China, owing to her relative weakness and the irritation caused by the tentacles of American industry within her, was at this time more nationalistic than her rival. America, indeed, professed to have outgrown nationalism, and to stand for political and cultural world unity. But she conceived this unity as a unity under American organization; and by culture she meant Americanism. This kind of cosmopolitanism was regarded by Asia and Africa without sympathy. In China a concerted effort had been made to purge the foreign element from her culture. Its success, however, was only superficial. Pigtails and chopsticks had once more come into vogue among the leisured, and the study of Chinese classics was once more compulsory in all schools. Yet the manner of life of the average man remained American. Not only did he use American cutlery, shoes, gramophones, domestic labour-saving devices, but also his alphabet was European, his vocabulary was permeated by American slang, his newspapers and radio were American in manner, though anti-American in politics. He saw daily on his domestic television screen every phase of American private life and every American public event. Instead of opium and joss sticks, he affected cigarettes and chewing gum.

His thought also was largely a Mongolian variant of American thought. For instance, since his was a non-metaphysical mind, but since also some kind of metaphysics is unavoidable, he accepted the naïvely materialistic metaphysics which had been popularized by the earliest Behaviourists. In this view the only reality was physical energy, and the mind was but the system of the body’s movements in response to stimulus. Behaviourism had formerly played a great part in purging the best Western minds of superstition; and indeed at one time it was the chief growing point of thought.

This early, pregnant, though extravagant, doctrine it was that had been absorbed by China. But in its native land Behaviourism had gradually been infected by the popular demand for comfortable ideas, and had finally changed into a curious kind of spiritism, according to which, though the ultimate reality was indeed physical energy, this energy was identified with the divine spirit. The most dramatic feature of American thought in this period was the merging of Behaviourism and Fundamentalism, a belated and degenerate mode of Christianity. Behaviourism itself, indeed, had been originally a kind of inverted puritan faith, according to which intellectual salvation involved acceptance of a crude materialistic dogma, chiefly because it was repugnant to the self-righteous, and unintelligible to intellectuals of the earlier schools. The older Puritans trampled down all fleshly impulses; these newer Puritans trampled no less self-righteously upon the spiritual cravings. But in the increasingly spiritistic inclination of physics itself, Behaviourism and Fundamentalism had found a meeting place. Since the ultimate stuff of the physical universe was now said to be multitudinous and arbitrary ‘quanta’ of the activity of ‘spirits’, how easy was it for the materialistic and the spiritistic to agree! At heart, indeed, they were never far apart in mood, though opposed in doctrine. The real cleavage was between the truly spiritual view on the one hand, and the spiritistic and materialistic on the other. Thus the most materialistic of Christian sects and the most doctrinaire of scientific sects were not long in finding a formula to express their unity, their denial of all those finer capacities which had emerged to be the spirit of man.

These two faiths were at one in their respect for crude physical movement. And here lay the deepest difference between the American and the Chinese minds. For the former, activity, any sort of activity, was an end in itself; for the latter, activity was but a progress toward the true end, which was rest, and peace of mind. Action was to be undertaken only when equilibrium was disturbed. And in this respect China was at one with India. Both preferred contemplation to action.

Thus in China and India the passion for wealth was less potent than in America. Wealth was the power to set things and people in motion; and in America, therefore, wealth came to be frankly regarded as the breath of God, the divine spirit immanent in man. God was the supreme Boss, the universal Employer. His wisdom was conceived as a stupendous efficiency, his love as munificence towards his employees. The parable of the talents was made the corner-stone of education; and to be wealthy, therefore, was to be respected as one of God’s chief agents. The typical American man of big business was one who, in the midst of a show of luxury, was at heart ascetic. He valued his splendour only because it advertised to all men that he was of the elect. The typical Chinese wealthy man was one who savoured his luxury with a delicate and lingering palate, and was seldom tempted to sacrifice it to the barren lust of power.

On the other hand, since American culture was wholly concerned with the values of the individual life, it was more sensitive than the Chinese with regard to the well-being of humble individuals. Therefore industrial conditions were far better under American than under Chinese capitalism. And in China both kinds of capitalism existed side by side. There were American factories in which the Chinese operatives thrived on the American system, and there were Chinese factories in which the operatives were by comparison abject wage-slaves. The fact that many Chinese industrial workers could not afford to keep a motor-car, let alone an aeroplane, was a source of much self-righteous indignation amongst American employers. And the fact that this fact did not cause a revolution in China, and that Chinese employers were able to procure plenty of labour in spite of the better conditions in American factories, was a source of perplexity. But in truth what the average Chinese worker wanted was not symbolical self-assertion through the control of privately owned machines, but security of life, and irresponsible leisure. In the earlier phase of ‘modern’ China there had indeed been serious explosions of class hatred. Almost every one of the great Chinese industrial centres had, at some point in its career, massacred its employers, and declared itself an independent communist city-state. But communism was alien to China, and none of these experiments was permanently successful. Latterly, when the rule of the Nationalist Party had become secure, and the worst industrial evils had been abolished, class feeling had given place to a patriotic loathing of American interference and American hustle, and those who worked under American employers were often called traitors.

The Nationalist Party was not, indeed, the soul of China; but it was, so to speak, the central nervous system, within which the soul presided as a controlling principle. The Party was an intensely practical yet idealistic organization, half civil service, half religious order, though violently opposed to every kind of religion. Modelled originally on the Bolshevik Party of Russia, it had also drawn inspiration from the native and literary civil service of old China, and even from the tradition of administrative integrity which had been the best, the sole, contribution of British Imperialism to the East. Thus, by a route of its own, the Party had approached the ideal of the Platonic governors. In order to be admitted to the Party, it was necessary to do two things, to pass a very strict written examination on Western and Chinese social theory, and to come through a five years apprenticeship in actual administrative work. Outside the Party, China was still extremely corrupt; for peculation and nepotism were not censured, so long as they were kept decently hidden. But the Party set a brilliant example of self-oblivious devotion; and this unheard-of honesty was one source of its power. It was universally recognized that the party man was genuinely interested in social rather than private matters; and consequently he was trusted. The supreme object of his loyalty was not the Party, but China, not indeed the mass of Chinese individuals, whom he regarded with almost the same nonchalance as he regarded himself, but the corporate unity and culture of the race.

The whole executive power in China was now in the hands of members of the Party, and the final legislative authority was the Assembly of Party Delegates. Between these two institutions stood the President. Sometimes no more than chairman of the Executive Committee, this individual was now and then almost a dictator, combining in himself the attributes of Prime Minister, Emperor, and Pope. For the head of the Party was the head of the state; and like the ancient emperors, he became the symbolical object of ancestor worship.

The Party’s policy was dominated by the Chinese respect for culture. Just as Western states had been all too often organized under the will for military prestige, so the new China was organized under the will for prestige of culture. For this end the American state was reviled as the supreme example of barbarian vulgarity; and so patriotism was drawn in to strengthen the cultural policy of the Party. It was boasted that, while indeed in America every man and woman might hope to fight a way to material wealth, in China every intelligent person could actually enjoy the cultural wealth of the race. The economic policy of the party was based on the principle of affording to all workers security of livelihood and full educational opportunity. (In American eyes, however, the livelihood thus secured was scarcely fit for beasts, and the education provided was out of date and irreligious.) The party took good care to gather into itself all the best of every social class, and also to encourage in the unintelligent masses a respect for learning, and the illusion that they themselves shared to some extent in the national culture.

But in truth this culture, which the common people so venerated in their superiors and mimicked in their own lives, was scarcely less superficial than the cult of power against which it was pitted. For it was almost wholly a cult of social rectitude and textual learning; not so much of the merely literary learning which had obsessed ancient China, as of the vast corpus of contemporary scientific dogma, and above all of pure mathematics. In old days the candidate for office had to show minute but uncritical knowledge of classical writers; now he had to give proof of a no less barren agility in describing the established formulae of physics, biology, psychology, and more particularly of economics and social theory. And though never encouraged to puzzle over the philosophical basis of mathematics, he was expected to be familiar with the intricacy of at least one branch of that vast game of skill. So great was the mass of information forced upon the student, that he had no time to think of the mutual implications of the various branches of his knowledge.

Yet there was a soul in China. And in this elusive soul of China the one hope of the First Men now lay. Scattered throughout the Party was a minority of original minds, who were its source of inspiration and the growing point of the human spirit in this period. Well aware of man’s littleness, these thinkers regarded him none the less as the crown of the universe. On the basis of a positivistic and rather perfunctory metaphysic, they built a social ideal and a theory of art. Indeed, in the practice and appreciation of art they saw man’s highest achievement. Pessimistic about the remote future of the race, and contemptuous of American evangelism, they accepted as the end of living the creation of an intricately unified pattern of human lives set in a fair environment. Society, the supreme work of art (so they put it), is a delicate and perishable texture of human intercourse. They even entertained the possibility that in the last resort, not only the individual’s life, but the whole career of the race, might be tragic, and should be valued according to the standards of tragic art. Contrasting their own spirit with that of the Americans, one of them had said, ‘America, a backward youth in a play-room equipped with luxury and electric power, pretends that his mechanical toy moves the world. China, a gentleman walking in his garden in the evening, admires the fragrance and the order all the more because in the air is the first nip of winter, and in his ear rumour of the irresistible barbarian.’

In this attitude there was something admirable, and sorely needed at the time; but also there was a fatal deficiency. In its best exponents it rose to a detached yet fervent salutation of existence, but all too easily degenerated into a supine complacency, and a cult of social etiquette. In fact it was ever in danger of corruption through the inveterate Chinese habit of caring only for appearances. In some respects the spirit of America and the spirit of China were complementary, since the one was restless and the other bland, the one zealous and the other dispassionate, the one religious, the other artistic, the one superficially mystical or at least romantic, the other classical and rationalistic, though too easy-going for prolonged rigorous thought. Had they cooperated, these two mentalities might have achieved much. On the other hand, in both there was an identical and all-important lack. Neither of them was disturbed and enlightened by that insatiable lust for the truth, that passion for the free exercise of critical intelligence, the gruelling hunt for reality, which had been the glory of Europe and even of the earlier America, but now was no longer anywhere among the First Men. And, consequent on this lack, another disability crippled them. Both were by now without that irreverent wit which individuals of an earlier generation had loved to exercise upon one another and on themselves, and even on their most sacred values.

In spite of this weakness, with good luck they might have triumphed. But, as I shall tell, the spirit of America undermined the integrity of China, and thereby destroyed its one chance of salvation. There befell, in fact, one of those disasters, half inevitable and half accidental, which periodically descended on the First Men, as though by the express will of some divinity who cared more for the excellence of his dramatic creation than for the sentient puppets which he had conceived for its enacting.

2. THE CONFLICT

AFTER THE EURO-AMERICAN War there occurred first a century of minor national conflicts, and then a century of strained peace, during which America and China became more and more irksome to each other. At the close of this period the great mass of men were in theory far more cosmopolitan than nationalist, yet the inveterate tribal spirit lurked within each mind and was ever ready to take possession. The planet was now a delicately organized economic unit, and big business in all lands was emphatically contemptuous of patriotism. Indeed the whole adult generation of the period was consciously and without reserve internationalist and pacifist. Yet this logically unassailable conviction was undermined by a biological craving for adventurous living. Prolonged peace and improved social conditions had greatly reduced the danger and hardship of life, and there was no socially harmless substitute to take the place of war in exercising the primitive courage and anger of animals fashioned for the wild. Consciously men desired peace, unconsciously they still needed some such gallantry as war afforded. And this repressed combative disposition ever and again expressed itself in explosions of irrational tribalism.

Inevitably a serious conflict at last occurred. As usual the cause was both economic and sentimental. The economic cause was the demand for fuel. A century earlier a very serious oil famine had so sobered the race that the League of Nations had been able to impose a system of cosmopolitan control upon the existing oil-fields, and even the coal fields. It had also imposed strict regulations as to the use of these invaluable materials. Oil in particular was only to be used for enterprises in which no other source of power would serve. The cosmopolitan control of fuel was perhaps the supreme achievement of the League, and it remained a fixed policy of the race long after the League had been superseded. Yet, by a choice irony of fate, this quite unusually sane policy contributed largely to the downfall of civilization. By means of it, as will later transpire, the end of coal was postponed into the period when the intelligence of the race was so deteriorated that it could no longer cope with such a crisis. Instead of adjusting itself to the novel situation, it simply collapsed.

But at the time with which we are at present dealing, means had recently been found of profitably working the huge deposits of fuel in Antarctica. This vast supply unfortunately lay technically beyond the jurisdiction of the World Fuel Control Board. America was first in the field, and saw in Antarctic fuel a means for her advancement, and for her self-imposed duty of Americanizing the planet. China, fearful of Americanization, demanded that the new sources should be brought under the jurisdiction of the Board. For some years feeling had become increasingly violent on this point, and both peoples had by now relapsed into the crude old nationalistic mood. War began to seem almost inevitable.

The actual occasion of conflict, however, was, as usual, an accident. A scandal was brought to light about child labour in certain Indian factories. Boys and girls under twelve were being badly sweated, and in their abject state their only adventure was precocious sex. The American Government protested, and in terms which assumed that America was the guardian of the world’s morals. India immediately held up the reform which she had begun to impose, and replied to America as to a busy-body. America threatened an expedition to set things right, ‘backed by the approval of all the morally sensitive races of the earth’. China now intervened to keep the peace between her rival and her partner, and undertook to see that the evil should be abolished, if America would withdraw her extravagant slanders against the Eastern conscience. But it was too late. An American bank in China was raided, and its manager’s severed head was kicked along the street. The tribes of men had once more smelled blood. War was declared by the West upon the East.

Of the combatants, Asia, with North Africa, formed geographically the more compact system, but America and her dependents were economically more organized. At the outbreak of war neither side had any appreciable armament, for war had long ago been ‘outlawed’. This fact, however, made little difference; since the warfare of the period could be carried on with great effect simply by the vast swarms of civil aircraft, loaded with poison, high explosives, disease microbes, and the still more lethal ‘hypo-biological’ organisms, which contemporary science sometimes regarded as the simplest living matter, sometimes as the most complex molecules.

The struggle began with violence, slackened, and dragged on for a quarter of a century. At the close of this period, Africa was mostly in the hands of America. But Egypt was an uninhabitable no-man’s land, for the South Africans had very successfully poisoned the sources of the Nile. Europe was under Chinese military rule. This was enforced by armies of sturdy Central-Asians, who were already beginning to wonder why they did not make themselves masters of China also. The Chinese language, with European alphabet, was taught in all schools. In England, however, there were no schools, and no population; for early in the war, an American air-base had been established in Ireland, and England had been repeatedly devastated. Airmen passing over what had been London, could still make out the lines of Oxford Street and the Strand among the green and grey tangle of ruins. Wild nature, once so jealously preserved in national ‘beauty spots’ against the incursion of urban civilization, now rioted over the whole island. At the other side of the world, the Japanese islands had been similarly devastated in the vain American effort to establish there an air-base from which to reach the heart of the enemy. So far, however, neither China nor America had been very seriously damaged; but recently the American biologists had devised a new malignant germ, more infectious and irresistible than anything hitherto known. Its work was to disintegrate the highest levels of the nervous system, and therefore to render all who were even slightly affected incapable of intelligent action; while a severe attack caused paralysis and finally death. With this weapon the American military had already turned one Chinese city into a bedlam; and wandering bacilli had got into the brains of several high officials throughout the province, rendering their behaviour incoherent. It was becoming the fashion to attribute all one’s blunders to a touch of the new microbe. Hitherto no effective means of resisting spread of this plague had been discovered. And as in the early stages of the disease the patient became restlessly active, undertaking interminable and objectless journeys on the flimsiest pretexts, it seemed probable that the ‘American madness’ would spread throughout China.

On the whole, then, the military advantage lay definitely with the Americans; but economically they were perhaps the more damaged, for their higher standard of prosperity depended largely on foreign investment and foreign trade. Throughout the American continent there was now real poverty and serious symptoms of class war, not indeed between private workers and employers, but between workers and the autocratic military governing caste which inevitably war had created. Big business had at first succumbed to the patriotic fever, but had soon remembered that war is folly and ruinous to trade. Indeed, upon both sides the fervour of nationalism had lasted only a couple of years, after which the lust of adventure had given place to mere dread of the enemy. For on each side the populace had been nursed into the belief that its foe was diabolic. When a quarter of a century had passed since there had been free intercourse between the two peoples, the real mental difference which had always existed between them appeared to many almost as a difference of biological species. Thus in America the Church preached that no Chinaman had a soul. Satan, it was said, had tampered with evolution of the Chinese race when first it had emerged from the prehuman animal. He had contrived that it should be cunning, but wholly without tenderness. He had induced in it an insatiable sensuality, and wilful blindness towards the divine, towards that superbly masterful energy-for-energy’s sake which was the glory of America. Just as in a prehistoric era the young race of mammals had swept away the sluggish, brutish and demoded reptiles, so now, it was said, young soulful America was destined to rid the planet of the reptilian Mongol. In China, on the other hand, the official view was that the Americans were a typical case of biological retrogression. Like all parasitic organisms, they had thriven by specializing in one low-grade mode of behaviour at the expense of their higher nature; and now, ‘tape-worms of the planet’, they were starving out the higher capacities of the human race by their frantic acquisitiveness.

Such were the official doctrines. But the strain of war had latterly produced on each side a grave distrust of its own government, and an emphatic will for peace at any price. The governments hated the peace party even more than each other, since their existence now depended on war. They even went so far as to inform one another of the clandestine operations of the pacifists, discovered by their own secret service in enemy territory.

Thus when at last big business and the workers on each side of the Pacific had determined to stop the war by concerted action, it was very difficult for their representatives to meet.

3. ON AN ISLAND IN THE PACIFIC

SAVE FOR THE governments, the whole human race now earnestly desired peace; but opinion in America was balanced between the will merely to effect an economic and political unification of the world, and a fanatical craving to impose American culture on the East. In China also there was a balance of the purely commercial readiness to sacrifice ideals for the sake of peace and prosperity, and the will to preserve Chinese culture. The two individuals who were to meet in secret for the negotiation of peace were typical of their respective races; in both of them the commercial and cultural motives were present, though the commercial was by now most often dominant.

It was in the twenty-sixth year of the war that two seaplanes converged by night from the East and West upon an island in the Pacific, and settled on a secluded inlet. The moon, destined in another age to smother this whole equatorial region with her shattered body, now merely besparkled the waves. From each plane a traveller emerged, and rowed himself ashore in a rubber coracle. The two men met upon the beach, and shook hands, the one with ceremony, the other with a slightly forced brotherliness. Already the sun peered over the wall of the sea, shouting his brilliance and his heat. The Chinese, taking off his air-helmet, uncoiled his pigtail with a certain emphasis, stripped off his heavy coverings, and revealed a sky-blue silk pyjama suit, embroidered with golden dragons. The other, glancing with scarcely veiled dislike at this finery, flung off his wraps and displayed the decent grey coat and breeches with which the American business men of this period unconsciously symbolized their reversion to Puritanism. Smoking the Chinese envoy’s cigarettes, the two sat down to re-arrange the planet.

The conversation was amicable, and proceeded without hitch; for there was agreement about the practical measures to be adopted. The government in each country was to be overthrown at once. Both representatives were confident that this could be done if it could be attempted simultaneously on each side of the Pacific; for in both countries finance and the people could be trusted. In place of the national governments, a World Finance Directorate was to be created. This was to be composed of the leading commercial and industrial magnates of the world, along with representatives of the workers’ organizations. The American representative should be the first president of the Directorate, and the Chinese the first vice-president. The Directorate was to manage the whole economic reorganization of the world. In particular, industrial conditions in the East were to be brought into line with those of America, while on the other hand the American monopoly of Antarctica was to be abolished. That rich and almost virgin land was to be subjected to the control of the Directorate.

Occasionally during the conversation reference was made to the great cultural difference between the East and West; but both the negotiants seemed anxious to believe that this was only a minor matter which need not be allowed to trouble a business discussion.

At this point occurred one of those incidents which, minute in themselves, have disproportionately great effects. The unstable nature of the First Men made them peculiarly liable to suffer from such accidents, and especially so in their decline.

The talk was interrupted by the appearance of a human figure swimming round a promontory into the little bay. In the shallows she arose, and walked out of the water towards the creators of the World State. A bronze young smiling woman, completely nude, with breasts heaving after her long swim, she stood before them, hesitating. The relation between the two men was instantly changed, though neither was at first aware of it.

‘Delicious daughter of Ocean,’ said the Chinese, in that somewhat archaic and deliberately un-American English which the Asians now affected in communication with foreigners, ‘what is there that these two despicable land animals can do for you? For my friend, I cannot answer, but I at least am henceforth your slave.’ His eyes roamed caressingly, yet as it were with perfect politeness, all over her body. And she, with that added grace which haloes women when they feel the kiss of an admiring gaze, pressed the sea from her hair and stood at the point of speech.

But the American protested, ‘Whoever you are, please do not interrupt us. We are really very busy discussing a matter of great importance, and we have no time to spare. Please go. Your nudity is offensive to one accustomed to civilized manners. In a modern country you would not be allowed to bathe without a costume. We are growing very sensitive on this point.’

A distressful but enhancing blush spread under the wet bronze, and the intruder made as if to go. But the Chinese cried, ‘Stay! We have almost finished our business talk. Refresh us with your presence. Bring the realities back into our discussion by permitting us to contemplate for a while the perfect vase line of your waist and thigh. Who are you? Of what race are you? My anthropological studies fail to place you. Your skin is fairer than is native here, though rich with sun. Your breasts are Grecian. Your lips are chiselled with a memory of Egypt. Your hair, night though it was, is drying with a most bewildering hint of gold. And your eyes, let me observe them. Long, subtle, as my countrywomen’s, unfathomable as the mind of India, they yet reveal themselves to your new slave as not wholly black, but violet as the zenith before dawn. Indeed this exquisite unity of incompatibles conquers both my heart and my understanding.’

During this harangue her composure was restored, though she glanced now and then at the American, who kept ever removing his gaze from her.

She answered in much the same diction as the other; but, surprisingly, with an old-time English accent, ‘I am certainly a mongrel. You might call me, not daughter of Ocean, but daughter of Man; for wanderers of every race have scattered their seed on this island. My body, I know, betrays its diverse ancestry in a rather queer blend of characters. My mind is perhaps unusual too, for I have never left this island. And though it is actually less than a quarter of a century since I was born, a past century has perhaps had more meaning for me than the obscure events of today. A hermit taught me. Two hundred years ago he lived actively in Europe; but towards the end of his long life he retreated to this island. As an old man he loved me. And day by day he gave me insight into the great spirit of the past; but of this age he gave me nothing. Now that he is dead, I struggle to familiarize myself with the present, but I continue to see everything from the angle of another age. And so,’ (turning to the American) ‘if I have offended against modern customs, it is because my insular mind has never been taught to regard nakedness as indecent. I am very ignorant, truly a savage. If only I could gain experience of your great world! If ever this war ends, I must travel.’

‘Delectable,’ said the Chinese, ‘exquisitely proportioned, exquisitely civilized savage! Come with me for a holiday in modern China. There you can bathe without a costume, so long as you are beautiful.’

She ignored this invitation, and seemed to have fallen into a reverie. Then absently she continued, ‘Perhaps I should not suffer from this restlessness, this craving to experience the world, if only I were to experience motherhood instead. Many of the islanders from time to time have enriched me with their embraces. But with none of them could I permit myself to conceive. They are dear; but not one of them is at heart more than a child.’

The American became restless. But again the Mongol intervened, with lowered and deepened voice. ‘I,’ he said, ‘I, the Vice-President of the World Finance Directorate, shall be honoured to afford you the opportunity of motherhood.’

She regarded him gravely, then smiled as on a child who asks more than it is reasonable to give. But the American rose hastily. Addressing the silken Mongol, he said, ‘You probably know that the American Government is in the act of sending a second poison fleet to turn your whole population insane, more insane than you are already. You cannot defend yourselves against this new weapon; and if I am to save you, I must not trifle any longer. Nor must you, for we must act simultaneously. We have settled all that matters for the moment. But before I leave, I must say that your behaviour towards this woman has very forcibly reminded me that there is something wrong with the Chinese way of thought and life. In my anxiety for peace, I overlooked my duty in this respect. I now give you notice that when the Directorate is established, we Americans must induce you to reform these abuses, for the world’s sake and your own.’

The Chinese rose and answered, ‘This matter must be settled locally. We do not expect you to accept our standards, so do not you expect us to accept yours.’ He moved towards the woman, smiling. And the smile outraged the American.

We need not follow the wrangle which now ensued between the two representatives, each of whom, though in a manner cosmopolitan in sentiment, was heartily contemptuous of the other’s values. Suffice it that the American became increasingly earnest and dictatorial, the other increasingly careless and ironical. Finally the American raised his voice and presented an ultimatum. ‘Our treaty of world-union,’ he said, ‘will remain unsigned unless you add a clause promising drastic reforms, which, as a matter of fact, my colleagues had already proposed as a condition of cooperation. I had decided to withhold them, in case they should wreck our treaty; but now I see they are essential. You must educate your people out of their lascivious and idle ways, and give them modern scientific religion. Teachers in your schools and universities must pledge themselves to the modern fundamentalized physics, and behaviourism, and must enforce worship of the Divine Mover. The change will be difficult, but we will help you. You will need a strong order of Inquisitors, responsible to the Directorate. They will see also to the reform of your people’s sexual frivolity in which you squander so much of the Divine Energy. Unless you agree to this, I cannot stop the war. The law of God must be kept, and those who know it must enforce it.’

The woman interrupted him. ‘Tell me, what is this “God” of yours? The Europeans worshipped love, not energy. What do you mean by energy? Is it merely to make engines go fast, and to agitate the ether?’

He answered flatly, as if repeating a lesson, ‘God is the all-pervading spirit of movement which seeks to actualize itself wherever it is latent. God has appointed the great American people to mechanize the universe.’ He paused, contemplating the clean lines of his sea-plane. Then he continued with emphasis, ‘But come! Time is precious. Either you work for God, or we trample you out of God’s way.’

The woman approached him, saying, ‘There is certainly something great in this enthusiasm. But somehow, though my heart says you are right, my head is doubting still. There must be a mistake somewhere.’

‘Mistake!’ he laughed, overhanging her with his mask of power. ‘When a man’s soul is action, how can he be mistaken that action is divine? I have served the great God, Energy, all my life, from garage boy to World President. Has not the whole American people proved its faith by its success?’

With rapture, but still in perplexity, she gazed at him. ‘There’s something terribly wrong-headed about you Americans,’ she said, ‘but certainly you are great.’ She looked him in the eyes. Then suddenly she laid a hand on him, and said with conviction, ‘Being what you are, you are probably right. Anyhow you are a man, a real man. Take me. Be the father of my boy. Take me to the dangerous cities of America to work with you.’

The President was surprised with sudden hunger for her body, and she saw it; but he turned to the Vice-President and said, ‘She has seen where the truth lies. And you? War, or cooperation in God’s work?’

‘The death of our bodies, or the death of our minds,’ said the Chinese, but with a bitterness that lacked conviction; for he was no fanatic. ‘Well, since the soul is only the harmoniousness of the body’s behaviour, and since, in spite of this little dispute, we are agreed that the coordination of activity is the chief need of the planet today, and since in respect of our differences of temperament this lady has judged in favour of America, and moreover since, if there is any virtue in our Asian way of life, it will not succumb to a little propaganda, but rather will be strengthened by opposition — since all these matters are so, I accept your terms. But it would be undignified in China to let this great change be imposed upon her externally. You must give me time to form in Asia a native and spontaneous party of Energists, who will themselves propagate your gospel, and perhaps give it an elegance which, if I may say so, it has not yet. Even this we will do to secure the cosmopolitan control of Antarctica.’

Thereupon the treaty was signed; but a new and secret codicil was drawn up and signed also, and both were witnessed by the Daughter of Man, in a clear, round, old-fashioned script.

Then, taking a hand of each, she said, ‘And so at last the world is united. For how long, I wonder. I seem to hear my old master’s voice scolding, as though I had been rather stupid. But he failed me, and I have chosen a new master, Master of the World.’

She released the hand of the Asian, and made as if to draw the American away with her. And he, though he was a strict monogamist with a better half waiting for him in New York, longed to crush her sun-clad body to his Puritan cloth. She drew him away among the palm trees.

The Vice-President of the World sat down once more, lit a cigarette, and meditated, smiling.

IV An Americanized Planet

1. THE FOUNDATION OF THE FIRST WORLD STATE

WE HAVE NOW reached that point in the history of the First Men when, some three hundred and eighty terrestrial years after the European War, the goal of world unity was at last achieved — not, however, before the mind of the race had been seriously crippled.

There is no need to recount in detail the transition from rival national sovereignties to unitary control by the World Financial Directorate. Suffice it that by concerted action in America and China the military governments found themselves hamstrung by the passive resistance of cosmopolitan big business. In China this process was almost instantaneous and bloodless; in America there was serious disorder for a few weeks, while the bewildered government attempted to reduce its rebels by martial law. But the population was by now eager for peace; and, although a few business magnates were shot, and a crowd of workers here and there mown down, the opposition was irresistible. Very soon the governing clique collapsed.

The new order consisted of a vast system akin to guild socialism, yet at bottom individualistic. Each industry was in theory democratically governed by all its members, but in practice was controlled by its dominant individuals. Coordination of all industries was effected by a World Industrial Council, whereon the leaders of each industry discussed the affairs of the planet as a whole. The status of each industry on the Council was determined partly by its economic power in the world, partly by public esteem. For already the activities of men were beginning to be regarded as either ‘noble’ or ‘ignoble’; and the noble were not necessarily the most powerful economically. Thus upon the Council appeared an inner ring of noble ‘industries,’ which were, in approximate order of prestige, Finance, Flying, Engineering, Surface Locomotion, Chemical Industry, and Professional Athletics. But the real seat of power was not the Council, not even the inner ring of the Council, but the Financial Directorate. This consisted of a dozen millionaires, with the American President and the Chinese Vice-President at their head.

Within this august committee internal dissensions were inevitable. Shortly after the system had been inaugurated the Vice-President sought to overthrow the President by publishing his connexion with the coloured woman who now styled herself the Daughter of Man. This piece of scandal was expected to enrage the virtuous American public against their hero. But by a stroke of genius the President saved both himself and the unity of the world. Far from denying the charge, he gloried in it. In that moment of sexual triumph, he said, a great truth had been revealed to him. Without this daring sacrifice of his private purity, he would never have been really fit to be President of the World; he would have remained simply an American. In this lady’s veins flowed the blood of all races, and in her mind all cultures mingled. His union with her, confirmed by many subsequent visits, had taught him to enter into the spirit of the East, and had given him a broad human sympathy such as his high office demanded. As a private individual, he insisted, he remained a monogamist with a wife in New York; and, as a private individual, he had sinned, and must suffer for ever the pangs of conscience. But as President of the World, it was incumbent upon him to espouse the World. And since nothing could be said to be real without a physical basis, this spiritual union had to be embodied and symbolized by his physical union with the Daughter of Man. In tones of grave emotion he described through the microphone how, in the presence of that mystical woman, he had suddenly triumphed over his private moral scruples; and how, in a sudden access of the divine energy, he had consummated his marriage with the World in the shade of a banana tree.

The lovely form of the Daughter of Man (decently clad) was transmitted by television to every receiver in the world. Her face, blended of Asia and the West, became a most potent symbol of human unity. Every man on the planet became in imagination her lover. Every woman identified herself with this supreme woman.

Undoubtedly there was some truth in the plea that the Daughter of Man had enlarged the President’s mind, for his policy had been unexpectedly tactful towards the East. Often he had moderated the American demand for the immediate Americanization of China. Often he had persuaded the Chinese to welcome some policy which at first they had regarded with suspicion.

The President’s explanation of his conduct enhanced his prestige both in American and Asia. America was hypnotized by the romantic religiosity of the story. Very soon it became fashionable to be a strict monogamist with one domestic wife, and one ‘symbolical’ wife in the East, or in another town, or a neighbouring street, or with several such in various localities. In China the cold tolerance with which the President was at first treated was warmed by this incident into something like affection. And it was partly through his tact, or the influence of his symbolical wife, that the speeding up of China’s Americanization was effected without disorder.

For some months after the foundation of the World State, China had been wholly occupied in coping with the plague of insanity, called ‘the American madness,’ with which her former enemy had poisoned her. The coast region of North China had been completely disorganized. Industry, agriculture, transport, were at a standstill. Huge mobs, demented and starving, staggered about the country devouring every kind of vegetable matter and wrangling over the flesh of their own dead. It was long before the disease was brought under control; and indeed for years afterwards an occasional outbreak would occur, and cause panic throughout the land.

To some of the more old-fashioned Chinese it appeared as though the whole population had been mildly affected by the germ; for throughout China a new sect, apparently a spontaneous native growth, calling themselves Energists, began to preach a new interpretation of Buddhism in terms of the sanctity of action. And, strange to say, this gospel throve to such an extent that in a few years the whole educational system was captured by its adherents, though not without a struggle with the reactionary members of the older universities. Curiously enough, however, in spite of this general acceptance of the New Way, in spite of the fact that the young of China were now taught to admire movement in all its forms, in spite of a much increased wage-scale, which put all workers in possession of private mechanical locomotion, the masses of China continued at heart to regard action as a mere means towards rest. And when at last a native physicist pointed out that the supreme expression of energy was the tense balance of forces within the atom, the Chinese applied the doctrine to themselves, and claimed that in them quiescence was the perfect balance of mighty forces. Thus did the East contribute to the religion of this age. The worship of activity was made to include the worship of inactivity. And both were founded on the principles of natural science.

2. THE DOMINANCE OF SCIENCE

SCIENCE NOW HELD a position of unique honour among the First Men. This was not so much because it was in this field that the race long ago during its high noon had thought most rigorously, nor because it was through science that men had gained some insight into the nature of the physical world, but rather because the application of scientific principles had revolutionized their material circumstances. The once fluid doctrines of science had by now begun to crystallize into a fixed and intricate dogma; but inventive scientific intelligence still exercised itself brilliantly in improving the technique of industry, and thus completely dominated the imagination of a race in which the pure intellectual curiosity had waned. The scientist was regarded as an embodiment, not merely of knowledge, but of power; and no legends of the potency of science seemed too fantastic to be believed.

A century after the founding of the first World State a rumour began to be heard in China about the supreme secret of scientific religion, the awful mystery of Gordelpus, by means of which it should be possible to utilize the energy locked up in the opposition of proton and electron. Long ago discovered by a Chinese physicist and saint, this invaluable knowledge was now reputed to have been preserved ever since among the élite of science, and to be ready for publication as soon as the world seemed fit to possess it. The new sect of Energists claimed that the young Discoverer was himself an incarnation of Buddha, and that, since the world was still unfit for the supreme revelation, he had entrusted his secret to the Scientists. On the side of Christianity a very similar legend was concerned with the same individual. The Regenerate Christian Brotherhood, by now overwhelmingly the most powerful of the Western Churches, regarded the Discoverer as the Son of God, who, in this his Second Coming, had proposed to bring about the millennium by publishing the secret of divine power; but, finding the peoples still unable to put in practice even the more primitive gospel of love which was announced at his First Coming, he had suffered martyrdom for man’s sake, and had entrusted his secret to the Scientists.

The scientific workers of the world had long ago organized themselves as a close corporation. Entrance to the International College of Science was to be obtained only by examination and the payment of high fees. Membership conferred the title of ‘Scientist,’ and the right to perform experiments. It was also an essential qualification for many lucrative posts. Moreover, there were said to be certain technical secrets which members were pledged not to reveal. Rumour had it that in at least one case of minor blabbing the traitor had shortly afterwards mysteriously died.

Science itself, the actual corpus of natural knowledge, had by now become so complex that only a tiny fraction of it could be mastered by one brain. Thus students of one branch of science knew practically nothing of the work of others in kindred branches Especially was this the case with the huge science called Subatomic Physics. Within this were contained a dozen studies, any one of which was as complex as the whole of the physics of the Nineteenth Christian Century. This growing complexity had rendered students in one field ever more reluctant to criticize, or even to try to understand, the principles of other fields. Each petty department, jealous of its own preserves, was meticulously respectful of the preserves of others. In an earlier period the sciences had been coordinated and criticized philosophically by their own leaders and by the technical philosophers. But philosophy, as a rigorous technical discipline, no longer existed. There was, of course, a vague framework of ideas, or assumptions, based on science, and common to all men, a popular pseudo-science, constructed by the journalists from striking phrases current among scientists. But actual scientific workers prided themselves on the rejection of this ramshackle structure, even while they themselves were unwittingly assuming it. And each insisted that his own special subject must inevitably remain unintelligible even to most of his brother scientists.

Under these circumstances, when rumour declared that the mystery of Gordelpus was known to the physicists, each department of subatomic physics was both reluctant to deny the charge explicitly in its own case, and ready to believe that some other department really did possess the secret. Consequently, the conduct of the scientists as a body strengthened the general belief that they knew and would not tell.

About two centuries after the formation of the first World State, the President of the World declared that the time was ripe for a formal union of science and religion, and called a conference of the leaders of these two great disciplines. Upon that island in the Pacific which had become the Mecca of cosmopolitan sentiment, and was by now one vast many-storied and cloud-capped Temple of Peace, the heads of Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, the Regenerate Christian Brotherhood, and the Modern Catholic Church in South America, agreed that their differences were but differences of expression. One and all were worshippers of the Divine Energy, whether expressed in activity, or in tense stillness. One and all recognized the saintly Discoverer as either the last and greatest of the prophets or an actual incarnation of divine Movement. And these two concepts were easily shown, in the light of modern science, to be identical.

In an earlier age it had been the custom to single out heresy and extirpate it with fire and sword. But now the craving for uniformity was fulfilled by explaining away differences, amid universal applause.

When the Conference had registered the unity of the religions, it went on to establish the unity of religion and science. All knew, said the President, that some of the scientists were in possession of the supreme secret, though, wisely, they would not definitely admit it. It was time, then, that the organizations of Science and Religion should be merged, for the better guidance of men. He, therefore, called upon the International College of Science to nominate from amongst themselves a select body, which should be sanctified by the Church, and called the Sacred Order of Scientists. These custodians of the supreme secret were to be kept at public expense. They were to devote themselves wholly to the service of science, and in particular to research into the most scientific manner of worshipping the Divine Gordelpus.

Of the scientists present, some few looked distinctly uncomfortable, but the majority scarcely concealed their delight under dignified and thoughtful hesitation. Amongst the priests also two expressions were visible; but on the whole it was felt that the Church must gain by thus gathering into herself the unique prestige of science. And so it was that the Order was founded which was destined to become the dominant force in human affairs until the downfall of the first world civilization.

3. MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENT

SAVE FOR OCCASIONAL minor local conflicts, easily quelled by the World Police, the race was now a single social unit for some four thousand years. During the first of these millennia material progress at least was rapid, but subsequently there was little change until the final disintegration. The whole energy of man was concentrated on maintaining at a constant pitch the furious routine of his civilization, until, after another three thousand years of lavish expenditure, certain essential sources of power were suddenly exhausted. Nowhere was there the mental agility to cope with this novel crisis. The whole social order collapsed.

We may pass over the earlier stages of this fantastic civilization, and examine it as it stood before the fatal change began to be felt.

The material circumstances of the race at this time would have amazed all its predecessors, even those who were in the true sense far more civilized beings. But to us, the Last Men, there is an extreme pathos and even comicality, not only in this most thorough confusion of material development with civilization, but also in the actual paucity of the vaunted material development itself, compared with that of our own society.

All the continents, indeed, were by now minutely artificialized. Save for the many wild reserves which were cherished as museums and playgrounds, not a square mile of territory was left in a natural state. Nor was there any longer a distinction between agricultural and industrial areas. All the continents were urbanized, not of course in the manner of the congested industrial cities of an earlier age, but none the less urbanized. Industry and agriculture interpenetrated everywhere. This was possible partly through the great development of aerial communication, partly through a no less remarkable improvement of architecture. Great advances in artificial materials had enabled the erection of buildings in the form of slender pylons which, rising often to a height of three miles, or even more, and founded a quarter of a mile beneath the ground, might yet occupy a ground plan of less than half a mile across. In section these structures were often cruciform; and on each floor, the centre of the long-armed cross consisted of an aerial landing, providing direct access from the air for the dwarf private aeroplanes which were by now essential to the life of every adult. These gigantic pillars of architecture, prophetic of the still mightier structures of an age to come, were scattered over every continent in varying density. Very rarely were they permitted to approach one another by a distance less than their height; on the other hand, save in the arctic, they were very seldom separated by more than twenty miles. The general appearance of every country was thus rather like an open forest of lopped tree-trunks, gigantic in stature. Clouds often encircled the middle heights of these artificial peaks, or blotted out all but the lower stories. Dwellers in the summits were familiar with the spectacle of a dazzling ocean of cloud, dotted on all sides with steep islands of architecture. Such was the altitude of the upper floors that it was sometimes necessary to maintain in them, not merely artificial heating, but artificial air pressure and oxygen supply.

Between these columns of habitation and industry, the land was everywhere green or brown with the seasonal variations of agriculture, park, and wild reserve. Broad grey thoroughfares for heavy freight traffic netted every continent; but lighter transport and the passenger services were wholly aerial. Over all the more populous districts the air was ever aswarm with planes up to a height of five miles, where the giant air-liners plied between the continents.

The enterprise of an already distant past had brought every land under civilization. The Sahara was a lake district, crowded with sun-proud holiday resorts. The arctic islands of Canada, ingeniously warmed by directed tropical currents, were the homes of vigorous northerners. The coasts of Antarctica, thawed in the same manner, were permanently inhabited by those engaged in exploiting the mineral wealth of the hinterland.

Much of the power needed to keep this civilization in being was drawn from the buried remains of prehistoric vegetation, in the form of coal. Although after the foundation of the World State the fuel of Antarctica had been very carefully husbanded, the new supply of oil had given out in less than three centuries, and men were forced to drive their aeroplanes by electricity generated from coal. It soon became evident, however that even the unexpectedly rich coal-fields of Antarctica would not last for ever. The cessation of oil had taught men a much needed lesson, had made them feel the reality of the power problem. At the same time the cosmopolitan spirit, which was learning to regard the whole race as compatriots, was also beginning to take a broader view temporally, and to see things with the eyes of remote generations. During the first and sanest thousand years of the World State, there was a widespread determination not to incur the blame of the future by wasting power. Thus not only was there serious economy (the first large-scale cosmopolitan enterprise), but also efforts were made to utilize more permanent sources of power. Wind was used extensively. On every building swarms of windmills generated electricity, and every mountain range was similarly decorated, while every considerable fall of water forced its way through turbines. More important still was the utilization of power derived from volcanos and from borings into the subterranean heat. This, it had been hoped, would solve the whole problem of power, once and for all. But even in the earlier and more intelligent period of the World State inventive genius was not what it had been, and no really satisfactory method was found. Consequently at no stage of this civilization did volcanic sources do more than supplement the amazingly rich coal seams of Antarctica. In this region coal was preserved at far greater depth than elsewhere, because, by some accident, the earth’s central heat was not here fierce enough (as it was elsewhere) to turn the deeper beds into graphite. Another possible source of power was known to exist in the ocean tides; but the use of this was forbidden by the S.O.S. because, since tidal motion was so obviously astronomical in origin, it had come to be regarded as sacred.

Perhaps the greatest physical achievement of the First World State in its earlier and more vital phase had been in preventive medicine. Though the biological sciences had long ago become stereotyped in respect of fundamental theories, they continued to produce many practical benefits. No longer did men and women have to dread for themselves or those dear to them such afflictions as cancer, tuberculosis, angina pectoris, the rheumatic diseases, and the terrible disorders of the nervous system. No longer were there sudden microbic devastations. No longer was child-birth an ordeal, and womanhood itself a source of suffering. There were no more chronic invalids, no more life-long cripples. Only senility remained; and even this could be repeatedly alleviated by physiological rejuvenation. The removal of all these ancient sources of weakness and misery, which formerly had lamed the race and haunted so many individuals either with definite terrors or vague and scarcely conscious despond, brought about now a pervading buoyancy and optimism impossible to earlier peoples.

4. THE CULTURE OF THE FIRST WORLD STATE

SUCH WAS THE physical achievement of this civilization. Nothing half so artificial and intricate and prosperous had ever before existed. An earlier age, indeed, had held before itself some such ideal as this; but its nationalistic mania prevented it from attaining the necessary economic unity. This latter-day civilization, however, had wholly outgrown nationalism, and had spent many centuries of peace in consolidating itself. But to what end? The terrors of destitution and ill-health having been abolished, man’s spirit was freed from a crippling burden, and might have dared great adventures. But unfortunately his intelligence had by now seriously declined. And so this age, far more than the notorious ‘nineteenth century’, was the great age of barren complacency.

Every individual was a well-fed and physically healthy human animal. He was also economically independent. His working day was never more than six hours, often only four. He enjoyed a fair share of the products of industry; and in his long holidays he was free to wander in his own aeroplane all over the planet. With good luck he might find himself rich, even for those days, at forty; and if fortune had not favoured him, he might yet expect affluence before he was eighty, when he could still look forward to a century of active life.

But in spite of this material prosperity he was a slave. His work and his leisure consisted of feverish activity, punctuated by moments of listless idleness which he regarded as both sinful and unpleasant. Unless he was one of the furiously successful minority, he was apt to be haunted by moments of brooding, too formless to be called meditation, and of yearning, too blind to be called desire. For he and all his contemporaries were ruled by certain ideas which prevented them from living a fully human life.

Of these ideas one was the ideal of progress. For the individual, the goal imposed by his religious teaching was continuous advance in aeronautical prowess, legal sexual freedom, and millionaireship. For the race also the ideal was progress, and progress of the same unintelligent type. Ever more brilliant and extensive aviation, ever more extensive legal sexual intercourse, ever more gigantic manufacture and consumption, were to be coordinated in an ever more intricately organized social system. For the last three thousand years, indeed, progress even of this rude kind had been minute; but this was a source of pride rather than of regret. It implied that the goal was already almost attained, the perfection which should justify the release of the secret of divine power, and the inauguration of an era of incomparably mightier activity.

For the all-pervading idea which tyrannized over the race was the fanatical worship of movement. Gordelpus, the Prime Mover, demanded of his human embodiments swift and intricate activity, and the individual’s prospect of eternal life depended on the fulfilment of this obligation. Curiously, though science had long ago destroyed the belief in personal immortality as an intrinsic attribute of man, a complementary belief had grown up to the effect that those who justified themselves in action were preserved eternally, by special miracle, in the swift spirit of Gordelpus. Thus from childhood to death the individual’s conduct was determined by the obligation to produce as much motion as possible, whether by his own muscular activity or by the control of natural forces. In the hierarchy of industry three occupations were honoured almost as much as the Sacred Order of Scientists, namely flying, dancing, and athletics. Every one practised all three of these crafts to some extent, for they were imposed by religion; but the professional fliers and aeronautical engineers, and the professional dancers and athletes, were a privileged class.

Several causes had raised flying to a position of unique honour. As a means of communication it was of extreme practical importance; and as the swiftest locomotion it constituted the supreme act of worship. The accident that the form of the aeroplane was reminiscent of the main symbol of the ancient Christian religion lent flying an additional mystical significance. For though the spirit of Christianity was lost, many of its symbols had been preserved in the new faith. A more important source of the dominance of flying was that, since warfare had long ceased to exist, aviation of a gratuitously dangerous kind was the main outlet for the innate adventurousness of the human animal. Young men and women risked their lives fervently for the glory of Gordelpus and their own salvation, while their seniors took vicarious satisfaction in this endless festival of youthful prowess. Indeed, apart from the thrills of devotional aerial acrobatics, it is unlikely that the race would so long have preserved its peace and its unity. On each of the frequent Days of Sacred Flight special rituals of communal and solo aviation were performed at every religious centre. On these occasions the whole sky would be intricately patterned with thousands of planes, wheeling, tumbling, soaring, plunging, in perfect order and at various altitudes, the dance at one level being subtly complementary to the dance at others. It was as though the spontaneous evolutions of many distinct flocks of redshank and dunlin were multiplied a thousandfold in complexity, and subordinated to a single ever-developing terpsichorean theme. Then suddenly the whole would burst asunder to the horizon, leaving the sky open for the quartets, duets, and solos of the most brilliant stars of flight. At night also, regiments of planes bearing coloured lights would inscribe on the zenith ever-changing and symbolical patterns of fire. Besides these aerial dances, there had existed for eight hundred years a custom of spelling out periodically in a dense flight of planes six thousand miles long the sacred rubrics of the gospel of Gordelpus, so that the living word might be visible to other planets.

In the life of every individual, flying played a great part. Immediately after birth he was taken up by a priestess of flight and dropped, clinging to a parachute, to be deftly caught upon the wings of his father’s plane. This ritual served as a substitute for contraception (forbidden as an interference with the divine energy); for since in many infants the old simian grasping-instinct was atrophied, a large proportion of the new-born let go and were smashed upon the paternal wings. At adolescence the individual (male or female) took charge of a plane for the first time, and his life was subsequently punctuated by severe aeronautical tests. From middle-age onwards, namely as a centenarian, when he could no longer hope to rise in the hierarchy of active flight, he continued to fly daily for practical purposes.

The two other forms of ritual activity, dancing and athletics, were scarcely less important. Nor were they confined wholly to the ground. For certain rites were celebrated by dances upon the wings of a plane in mid air.

Dancing was especially associated with the Negro race, which occupied a very peculiar position in the world at this time. As a matter of fact the great colour distinctions of mankind were now beginning to fade. Increased aerial communication had caused the black, brown, yellow and white stocks so to mingle that everywhere there was by now a large majority of the racially indistinguishable. Nowhere was there any great number of persons of marked racial character. But each of the ancient types was liable to crop up now and again in isolated individuals, especially in its ancient homeland. These ‘throw-backs’ were customarily treated in special and historically appropriate manners. Thus, for instance, it was to ‘sports’ of definite Negro character that the most sacred dancing was entrusted.

In the days of the nations, the descendants of emancipated African slaves in North America had greatly influenced the artistic and religious life of the white population, and had inspired a cult of negroid dancing which survived till the end of the First Men. This was partly due to the sexual and primitive character of Negro dancing, sorely needed in a nation ridden by sexual taboos. But it had also a deeper source. The American nation had acquired its slaves by capture, and had long continued to spurn their descendants. Later it unconsciously compensated for its guilt by a cult of the Negro spirit. Thus when American culture dominated the planet, the pure Negroes became a sacred cast. Forbidden many of the rights of citizenship, they were regarded as the private servants of Gordelpus. They were both sacred and outcast. This dual role was epitomized in an extravagant ritual which took place once a year in each of the great national parks. A white woman and Negro, both chosen for their prowess in dance, performed a long and symbolical ballet, which culminated in a ritual act of sexual violation, performed in full view of the maddened spectators. This over, the Negro knifed his victim, and fled through the forest pursued by an exultant mob. If he reached sanctuary, he became a peculiarly sacred object for the rest of his life. But if he was caught, he was torn to pieces, or drenched with inflammable spirit and burned. Such was the superstition of the First Men at this time that the participants in this ceremony were seldom reluctant; for it was firmly believed that both were assured of eternal life in Gordelpus. In America this Sacred Lynching was the most popular of all festivals; for it was both sexual and bloody, and afforded a fierce joy to the masses whose sex-life was restricted and secret. In India and Africa the violator was always an ‘Englishman,’ when such a rare creature could be found. In China the whole character of the ceremony was altered; for the violation became a kiss, and the murder a touch with a fan.

One other race, the Jews, were treated with a similar combination of honour and contempt, but for very different reasons. In ancient days their general intelligence, and in particular their financial talent, had cooperated with their homelessness to make them outcasts; and now, in the decline of the First Men, they retained the fiction, if not strictly the fact, of racial integrity. They were still outcasts, though indispensable and powerful. Almost the only kind of intelligent activity which the First Men could still respect was financial operation, whether private or cosmopolitan. The Jews had made themselves invaluable in the financial organization of the world state, having far outstripped the other races because they alone had preserved a furtive respect for pure intelligence. And so, long after intelligence had come to be regarded as disreputable in ordinary men and women, it was expected of the Jews. In them it was called satanic cunning, and they were held to be embodiments of the powers of evil, harnessed in the service of Gordelpus. Thus in time the Jews had made something like ‘a corner’ in intelligence. This precious commodity they used largely for their own purposes; for two thousand years of persecution had long ago rendered them permanently tribalistic, subconsciously if not consciously. Thus when they had gained control of the few remaining operations which demanded originality rather than routine, they used this advantage chiefly to strengthen their own position in the world. For, though relatively bright, they had suffered much of the general coarsening and limitation which had beset the whole world. Though capable to some extent of criticizing the practical means by which ends should be realized, they were by now wholly incapable of criticizing the major ends which had dominated their race for thousands of years. In them intelligence had become utterly subservient to tribalism. There was thus some excuse for the universal hate and even physical repulsion with which they were regarded; for they alone had failed to make the one great advance, from tribalism to a cosmopolitanism which in other races was no longer merely theoretical. There was good reason also for the respect which they received, since they retained and used somewhat ruthlessly a certain degree of the most distinctively human attribute, intelligence.

In primitive times the intelligence and sanity of the race had been preserved by the inability of its unwholesome members to survive. When humanitarianism came into vogue, and the unsound were tended at public expense, this natural selection ceased. And since these unfortunates were incapable alike of prudence and of social responsibility, they procreated without restraint, and threatened to infect the whole species with their rottenness. During the zenith of Western Civilization, therefore, the subnormal were sterilized. But the latter-day worshippers of Gordelpus regarded both sterilization and contraception as a wicked interference with the divine potency. Consequently the only restriction on population was the suspension of the new-born from aeroplanes, a process which, though it eliminated weaklings, favoured among healthy infants rather the primitive than the highly developed. Thus the intelligence of the race steadily declined. And no one regretted it.

The general revulsion from intelligence was a corollary of the adoration of instinct, and this in turn was an aspect of the worship of activity. Since the unconscious source of human vigour was the divine energy, spontaneous impulse must so far as possible never be thwarted. Reasoning was indeed permitted to the individual within the sphere of his official work, but never beyond. And not even specialists might indulge in reasoning and experiment without obtaining a licence for the particular research. The licence was expensive, and was only granted if the goal in view could be shown to be an increase of world activity. In old times certain persons of morbid curiosity had dared to criticize the time-honoured methods of doing things, and had suggested ‘better’ methods not convenient to the Sacred Order of Scientists. This had to be stopped. By the fourth millennium of the World State the operations of civilization had become so intricately stereotyped that novel situations of a major order never occurred.

One kind of intellectual pursuit in addition to finance was, indeed, honoured, namely mathematical calculation. All ritual movements, all the motions of industrial machinery, all observable natural phenomena, had to be minutely described in mathematical formulae. The records were filed in the sacred archives of the S.O.S. And there they remained. This vast enterprise of mathematical description was the main work of the scientists, and was said to be the only means by which the evanescent thing, movement, could be passed into the eternal being of Gordelpus.

The cult of instinct did not result simply in a life of ungoverned impulse. Far from it. For the fundamental instinct, it was said, was the instinct to worship Gordelpus in action, and this should rule all the other instincts. Of these, the most important and sacred was the sexual impulse, which the First Men had ever tended to regard as both divine and obscene. Sex, therefore, was now very strictly controlled. Reference to sexuality, save by circumlocution, was forbidden by law. Persons who remarked on the obvious sexual significance of the religious dances were severely punished. No sexual activity and no sex knowledge were permitted to the individual until he had won his (or her) wings. Much information, of a distorted and perverted nature could, indeed, be gained meanwhile by observation of the religious writings and practices; but officially these sacred matters were all given a metaphysical, not a sexual interpretation. And though legal maturity, the Wing-Winning, might occur as early as the age of fifteen, sometimes it was not attained till forty. If at that age the individual still failed in the test, he or she was forbidden sexual intercourse and information for ever.

In China and India this extravagant sexual taboo was somewhat mitigated. Many easy-going persons had come to feel that the imparting of sex knowledge to the ‘immature’ was only wrong when the medium of communication was the sacred American language. They therefore made use of the local patois. Similarly, sexual activity of the ‘immature’ was permissible so long as it was performed solely in the wild reserves, and without American speech. These subterfuges, however, were condemned by the orthodox, even in Asia.

When a man had won his wings, he was formally initiated into the mystery of sex and all its ‘biologico-religious’ significance. He was also allowed to take a ‘domestic wife,’ and after a much more severe aviation test, any number of ‘symbolical’ wives. Similarly with the woman. These two kinds of partnership differed greatly. The ‘domestic’ husband and wife appeared in public together, and their union was indissoluble. The ‘symbolic’ union, on the other hand, could be dissolved by either party. Also it was too sacred ever to be revealed, or even mentioned, in public.

A very large number of persons never passed the test which sanctioned sexuality. These either remained virgin, or indulged in sexual relations which were not only illegal but sacrilegious. The successful, on the other hand, were apt to consummate sexually every casual acquaintance.

Under these circumstances it was natural that there should exist among the sexually submerged part of the population certain secret cults which sought escape from harsh reality into worlds of fantasy. Of these illicit sects, two were most widespread. One was a perversion of the ancient Christian faith in a God of Love. All love, it was said, is sexual; therefore in worship, private or public, the individual must seek a direct sexual relation with God. Hence arose a grossly phallic cult, very contemptible to those more fortunate persons who had no need of it.

The other great heresy was derived partly from the energy of repressed intellective impulses, and was practised by persons of natural curiosity, who nevertheless, shared the universal paucity of intelligence. These pathetic devotees of intellect were inspired by Socrates. That great primitive had insisted that clear thought is impossible without clear definition of terms, and that without clear thinking man misses fullness of being. These his last disciples were scarcely less fervent admirers of truth than their master, yet they missed his spirit completely. Only by knowing the truth, they said, can the individual attain immortality; only by defining can he know the truth. Therefore, meeting together in secret, and in constant danger of arrest for illicit intellection, they disputed endlessly about the definition of things. But the things which they were concerned to define were not the basic concepts of human thought; for these, they affirmed, had been settled once for all by Socrates and his immediate followers. Therefore, accepting these as true, and grossly misunderstanding them, the ultimate Socratics undertook to define all the processes of the world state and the ritual of the established religion, all the emotions of men and women, all the shapes of noses, mouths, buildings, mountains, clouds, and in fact the whole superficies of their world. Thus they believed that they emancipated themselves from the philistinism of their age, and secured comradeship with Socrates in the hereafter.

5. DOWNFALL

THE COLLAPSE OF this first world-civilization was due to the sudden failure of the supplies of coal. All the original fields had been sapped centuries earlier, and it should have been obvious that those more recently discovered could not last for ever. For some thousands of years the main supply had come from Antarctica. So prolific was this continent that latterly a superstition had arisen in the clouded minds of the world-citizens that it was in some mysterious manner inexhaustible. Thus when at last, in spite of strict censorship, the news began to leak out that even the deepest possible borings had failed to reveal further vegetable deposits of any kind, the world was at first incredulous.

The sane policy would have been to abolish the huge expense of power on ritual flying, which used more of the community’s resources than the whole of productive industry. But to believers in Gordelpus such a course was almost unthinkable. Moreover it would have undermined the flying aristocracy. This powerful class now declared that the time had come for the release of the secret of divine power, and called on the S.O.S. to inaugurate the new era. Vociferous agitation in all lands put the scientists in an awkward plight. They gained time by declaring that, though the moment of revelation was approaching, it had not yet arrived; for they had received a divine intimation that this failure of coal was imposed as a supreme test of man’s faith. The service of Gordelpus in ritual flight must be rather increased than reduced. Spending a bare minimum of its power on secular matters, the race must concentrate upon religion. When Gordelpus had evidence of their devotion and trust, he would permit the scientists to save them.

Such was the prestige of science that at first this explanation was universally accepted. The ritual flights were maintained. All luxury trades were abolished, and even vital services were reduced to a minimum. Workers thus thrown out of employment were turned over to agricultural labour; for it was felt that the use of mechanical power in mere tillage must be as soon as possible abolished. These changes demanded far more organizing ability than was left in the race. Confusion was widespread, save here and there where serious organization was attempted by certain Jews.

The first result of this great movement of economy and self-denial was to cause something of a spiritual awakening among many who had formerly lived a life of bored ease. This was augmented by the widespread sense of crisis and impending marvels. Religion, which, in spite of its universal authority in this age, had become a matter of ritual rather than of inward experience, began to stir in many hearts — not indeed as a moment of true worship, but rather as a vague awe, not unmixed with self-importance.

But as the novelty of this enthusiasm dwindled, and life became increasingly uncomfortable, even the most zealous began to notice with horror that in moments of inactivity they were prone to doubts too shocking to confess. And as the situation worsened, even a life of ceaseless action could not suppress these wicked fantasies.

For the race was now entering upon an unprecedented psychological crisis, brought about by the impact of the economic disaster upon a permanently unwholesome mentality. Each individual, it must be remembered, had once been a questioning child, but had been taught to shun curiosity as the breath of Satan. Consequently the whole race was suffering from a kind of inverted repression, a repression of the intellective impulses. The sudden economic change, which affected all classes throughout the planet, thrust into the focus of attention a shocking curiosity, an obsessive scepticism, which had hitherto been buried in the deepest recesses of the mind.

It is not easy to conceive the strange mental disorder that now afflicted the whole race, symbolizing itself in some cases by fits of actual physical vertigo. After centuries of prosperity, of routine, of orthodoxy, men were suddenly possessed by a doubt which they regarded as diabolical. No one said a word of it; but in each man’s own mind the fiend raised a whispering head, and each was haunted by the troubled eyes of his fellows. Indeed the whole changed circumstances of his life jibed at his credulity.

Earlier in the career of the race, this world crisis might have served to wake men into sanity. Under the first pressure of distress they might have abandoned the extravagances of their culture. But by now the ancient way of life was too deeply rooted. Consequently, we observe the fantastic spectacle of a world engaged, devotedly and even heroically, on squandering its resources in vast aeronautical displays, not through single-minded faith in their rightness and efficacy, but solely in a kind of desperate automatism. Like those little rodents whose migration became barred by an encroachment of the sea, so that annually they drowned themselves in thousands, the First Men helplessly continued in their ritualistic behaviour; but unlike the lemmings, they were human enough to be at the same time oppressed by unbelief, an unbelief which, moreover, they dared not recognize.

Meanwhile the scientists were earnestly and secretly delving in the ancient literature of their science, in hope of discovering the forgotten talisman. They undertook also clandestine experiments, but upon a false trail laid by the wily English contemporary of the Discoverer. The main results were, that several researchers were poisoned or electrocuted, and a great college was blown up. This event impressed the populace, who supposed the accident to be due to an over-daring exercise of the divine potency. The misunderstanding inspired the desperate scientists to rig further impressive ‘miracles’, and moreover to use them to dispel the increasing restlessness of hungry industrial workers. Thus when a deputation arrived outside the offices of Cosmopolitan Agriculture to demand more flour for industrialists Gordelpus miraculously blew up the ground on which they stood, and flung their bodies among the onlookers. When the agriculturists of China struck to obtain a reasonable allowance of electric power for their tillage, Gordelpus affected them with an evil atmosphere, so that they choked and died in thousands. Stimulated in this manner by direct divine intervention, the doubting and disloyal elements of the world-population recovered their faith and their docility. And so the world jogged on for a while, as nearly as possible as it had done for the last four thousand years, save for a general increase of hunger and ill-health.

But inevitably, as the conditions of life became more and more severe, docility gave place to desperation. Daring spirits began publicly to question the wisdom, and even the piety, of so vast an expenditure of power upon ritual flight, when prime necessities such as food and clothing were becoming so scarce. Did not this helpless devotion merely ridicule them in the divine eyes? God helps him who helps himself. Already the death-rate had risen alarmingly. Emaciated and ragged persons were beginning to beg in public places. In certain districts whole populations were starving, and the Directorate did nothing for them. Yet, elsewhere, harvests were being wasted for lack of power to reap them. In all lands an angry clamour arose for the inauguration of the new era.

The scientists were by now panic-stricken. Nothing had come of their researches, and it was evident that in future all wind- and water-power must be devoted to the primary industries. Even so, there was starvation ahead for many. The President of the Physical Society suggested to the Directorate that ritual flying should at once be reduced by half, as a compromise with Gordelpus. Immediately the hideous truth, which few hitherto had dared to admit even to themselves, was blurted out upon the ether by a prominent Jew: the whole hoary legend of the divine secret was a lie, else why were the physicists temporizing? Dismay and rage spread over the planet. Everywhere the people rose against the scientists, and against the governing authority which they controlled. Massacres and measures of retaliation soon developed into civil wars. China and India declared themselves free national states, but could not achieve internal unity. In America, ever a stronghold of science and religion, the Government maintained its authority for a while; but as its seat became less secure, its methods became more ruthless. Finally it made the mistake of using not merely poison gas, but microbes; and such was the decayed state of medical science that no one could invent a means of restraining their ravages. The whole American continent succumbed to a plague of pulmonary and nervous diseases. The ancient ‘American Madness’, which long ago had been used against China, now devastated America. The great stations of water-power and wind-power were wrecked by lunatic mobs who sought vengeance upon anything associated with authority. Whole populations vanished in an orgy of cannibalism.

In Asia and Africa, some semblance of order was maintained for a while. Presently, however, the American Madness spread to these continents also, and very soon all living traces of their civilization vanished.

Only in the most naturally fertile areas of the world could the diseased remnant of a population now scrape a living from the soil. Elsewhere, utter desolation. With easy strides the jungle came back into its own.

V The Fall of the First Men

1. THE FIRST DARK AGE

WE HAVE REACHED a period in man’s history rather less than five thousand years after the life of Newton. In this chapter we must cover about one hundred and fifteen thousand years, and in the next chapter another ten million years. That will bring us to a point as remotely future from the First World State as the earliest anthropoids were remotely past. During the first tenth of the first million years after the fall of the World State, during a hundred thousand years, man remained in complete eclipse. Not till the close of this span, which we will call the First Dark Age, did he struggle once more from savagery through barbarism into civilization. And then his renaissance was relatively brief. From its earliest beginnings to its end, it covered only fifteen thousand years; and in its final agony the planet was so seriously damaged that mind lay henceforth in deep slumber for ten more millions of years. This was the Second Dark Age. Such is the field which we must observe in this and the following chapter.

It might have been expected that, after the downfall of the First World State, recovery would have occurred within a few generations. Historians have, indeed, often puzzled over the cause of this surprisingly complete and lasting degradation. Innate human nature was roughly the same immediately after as immediately before the crisis; yet minds that had easily maintained a world-civilization in being, proved quite incapable of building a new order on the ruins of the old. Far from recovering, man’s estate rapidly deteriorated till it had sunk into abject savagery.

Many causes contributed to this result, some relatively superficial and temporary, some profound and lasting. It is as though Fate, directing events toward an allotted end, had availed herself of many diverse instruments, none of which would have sufficed alone, though all worked together irresistibly in the same sense. The immediate cause of the helplessness of the race during the actual crisis of the World State was of course the vast epidemic of insanity and still more widespread deterioration of intelligence, which resulted from the use of microbes. This momentary seizure made it impossible for man to check his downfall during its earliest and least unmanageable stage. Later, when the epidemic was spent, even though civilization was already in ruins, a concerted effort of devotion might yet have rebuilt it on a more modest plan. But among the First Men only a minority had ever been capable of wholehearted devotion. The great majority were by nature too much obsessed by private impulses. And in this black period, such was the depth of disillusion and fatigue that even normal resolution was impossible. Not only man’s social structure but the structure of the universe itself, it seemed, had failed. The only reaction was supine despair. Four thousand years of routine had deprived human nature of all its suppleness. To expect these beings to refashion their whole behaviour, were scarcely less unreasonable than to expect ants, when their nest was flooded, to assume the habits of water beetles.

But a far more profound and lasting cause doomed the First Men to lie prone for a long while, once they had fallen. A subtle physiological change, which it is tempting to call ‘general senescence of the species’, was undermining the human body and mind. The chemical equilibrium of each individual was becoming more unstable, so that, little by little, man’s unique gift of prolonged youth was being lost. Far more rapidly than of old, his tissues failed to compensate for the wear and tear of living. This disaster was by no means inevitable; but it was brought on by influences peculiar to the make-up of the species, and aggravated artificially. For during some thousands of years man had been living at too high a pressure in a biologically unnatural environment, and had found no means of compensating his nature for the strain thus put upon it.

Conceive, then, that after the fall of the First World State, the generations slid rapidly through dusk into night. To inhabit those centuries was to live in the conviction of universal decay, and under the legend of a mighty past. The population was derived almost wholly from the agriculturists of the old order, and since agriculture had been considered a sluggish and base occupation, fit only for sluggish natures, the planet was now peopled with yokels. Deprived of power, machinery, and chemical fertilizers, these bumpkins were hard put to it to keep themselves alive. And indeed only a tenth of their number survived the great disaster. The second generation knew civilization only as a legend. Their days were filled with ceaseless tillage, and in banding together to fight marauders. Women became once more sexual and domestic chattels. The family, or tribe of families, became the largest social whole. Endless brawls and feuds sprang up between valley and valley, and between the tillers and the brigand swarms. Small military tyrants rose and fell; but no permanent unity of control could be maintained over a wide region. There was no surplus wealth to spend on such luxuries as governments and trained armies.

Thus without appreciable change the millennia dragged on in squalid drudgery. For these latter-day barbarians were hampered by living in a used planet. Not only were coal and oil no more, but almost no mineral wealth of any kind remained within reach of their feeble instruments and wits. In particular the minor metals, needed for so many of the multifarious activities of developed material civilization, had long ago disappeared from the more accessible depths of the earth’s crust. Tillage moreover was hampered by the fact that iron itself, which was no longer to be had without mechanical mining, was now inaccessible. Men had been forced to resort once more to stone implements, as their first human ancestors had done. But they lacked both the skill and the persistence of the ancients. Not for them the delicate flaking of the Paleoliths nor the smooth symmetry of the Neoliths. Their tools were but broken pebbles, chipped improvements upon natural stones. On almost every one they engraved the same pathetic symbol, the Swastika or cross, which had been used by the First Men as a sacred emblem throughout their existence, though with varying significance. In this instance it had originally been the figure of an aeroplane diving to destruction, and had been used by the rebels to symbolize the downfall of Gordelpus and the State. But subsequent generations reinterpreted the emblem as the sign manual of a divine ancestor, and as a memento of the golden age from which they were destined to decline for ever, or until the gods should intervene. Almost one might say that in its persistent use of this symbol the first human species unwittingly epitomized its own dual and self-thwarting nature.

The idea of irresistible decay obsessed the race at this time. The generation which brought about the downfall of the World State oppressed its juniors with stories of past amenities and marvels, and hugged to itself the knowledge that the young men had not the wit to rebuild such complexity. Generation by generation, as the circumstances of actual life became more squalid, the legend of past glory became more extravagant. The whole mass of scientific knowledge was rapidly lost, save for a few shreds which were of practical service even in savage life. Fragments of the old culture were indeed preserved in the tangle of folk lore that meshed the globe, but they were distorted beyond recognition. Thus there was a widespread belief that the world had begun as fire, and that life had evolved out of the fire. After the apes had appeared, evolution ceased (so it was said), until divine spirits came down and possessed the female apes, thereby generating human beings. Thus had arisen the golden age of the divine ancestors. But unfortunately after a while the beast in man had triumphed over the god, so that progress had given place to age-long decay. And indeed decay was now unavoidable, until such time as the gods should see fit to come down to cohabit with women and fire the race once more. This faith in the second coming of the gods persisted here and there throughout the First Dark Age, and consoled men for their vague conviction of degeneracy.

Even at the close of the First Dark Age the ruins of the ancient residential pylons still characterized every landscape, often with an effect of senile domination over the hovels of latter-day savages. For the living races dwelt beneath these relics like puny grandchildren playing around the feet of their fathers’ once mightier fathers. So well had the past built, and with such durable materials, that even after a hundred millennia the ruins were still recognizably artifacts. Though for the most part they were of course by now little more than pyramids of debris overgrown with grass and brushwood, most of them retained some stretch of standing wall, and here and there a favoured specimen still reared from its rubble-encumbered base a hundred foot or so of cliff, punctured with windows. Fantastic legends now clustered round these relics. In one myth the men of old had made for themselves huge palaces which could fly. For a thousand years (an aeon to these savages) men had dwelt in unity, and in reverence of the gods; but at last they had become puffed up with their own glory, and had undertaken to fly to the sun and moon and the field of stars, to oust the gods from their bright home. But the gods sowed discord among them, so that they fell a-fighting one another in the upper air, and their swift palaces crashed down to the earth in thousands, to be monuments of man’s folly for ever after. In yet another saga it was the men themselves who were winged. They inhabited dovecots of masonry, with summits overtopping the stars and outraging the gods; who therefore destroyed them. Thus in one form or another, this theme of the downfall of the mighty fliers of old tyrannized over these abject peoples. Their crude tillage, their hunting, their defence against the reviving carnivora, were hampered at every turn by fear of offending the gods by any innovation.

2. THE RISE OF PATAGONIA

AS THE CENTURIES piled up, the human species had inevitably diverged once more into many races in the various geographical areas. And each race consisted of a swarm of tribes, each ignorant of all but its immediate neighbours. After many millennia this vast diversification of stocks and cultures made it possible for fresh biological transfusions and revivifications to occur. At last, after many racial copulations, a people arose in whom the ancient dignity of humanity was somewhat restored. Once more there was a real distinction between the progressive and the backward regions, between ‘primitive’ and relatively enlightened cultures.

This rebirth occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. Complex climatic changes had rendered the southern part of South America a fit nursery for civilization. Further, an immense warping of the earth’s crust to the east and south of Patagonia had turned what was once a relatively shallow region of the ocean into a vast new land connecting America with Antarctica by way of the former Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and stretching thence east and north-east into the heart of the Atlantic.

It happened also that in South America the racial conditions were more favourable than elsewhere. After the fall of the First World State the European element in this region had dwindled, and the ancient ‘Indian’ and Peruvian stock had come into dominance. Many thousands of years earlier, this race had achieved a primitive civilization of its own. After its ruin at the hands of the Spaniards, it had seemed a broken and negligible thing; yet it had ever kept itself curiously aloof in spirit from its conquerors. Though the two stocks had mingled inextricably, there remained ever in the remoter parts of this continent a way of life which was foreign to the dominant Americanism. Superficially Americanized, it remained fundamentally ‘Indian’ and unintelligible to the rest of the world. Throughout the former civilization this spirit had lain dormant like a seed in winter; but with the return of barbarism it had sprouted, and quietly spread in all directions. From the interaction of this ancient primitive culture and the many other racial elements left over in the continent from the old cosmopolitan civilization, civil life was to begin once more. Thus in a manner the Incas were at last to triumph over their conquerors.

Various causes, then, combined in South America, and especially in the new and virgin plains of Patagonia, to bring the First Dark Age to an end. The great theme of mind began to repeat itself. But in a minor key. For a grave disability hampered the Patagonians. They began to grow old before their adolescence was completed. In the days of Einstein, an individual’s youth lasted some twenty-five years, and under the World State it had been artificially doubled. After the downfall of civilization the increasing natural brevity of the individual life was no longer concealed by artifice, and at the end of the First Dark Age a boy of fifteen was already settling into middle-age. Patagonian civilization at its height afforded considerable ease and security of life, and enabled man to live to seventy or even eighty; but the period of sensitive and supple youth remained at the very best little more than a decade and a half. Thus the truly young were never able to contribute to culture before they were already at heart middle-aged. At fifteen their bones were definitely becoming brittle, their hair grizzled, their faces lined. Their joints and muscles were stiffening, their brains were no longer quick to learn new adjustments, their fervour was evaporating.

It may seem strange that under these circumstances any kind of civilization could be achieved by the race, that any generation should ever have been able to do more than learn the tricks of its elders. Yet in fact, though progress was never swift, it was steady. For though these beings lacked much of the vigour of youth, they were compensated somewhat by escaping much of youth’s fevers and distractions. The First Men, in fact, were now a race whose wild oats had been sown; and though their youthful escapades had somewhat crippled them, they had now the advantage of sobriety and singleness of purpose. Though doomed by lassitude, and a certain fear of extravagance, to fall short of the highest achievements of their predecessors, they avoided much of the wasteful incoherence and mental conflict which had tortured the earlier civilization at its height, though not in its decline. Moreover, because their animal nature was somewhat subdued, the Patagonians were more capable of dispassionate cognition, and more inclined toward intellectualism. They were a people in whom rational behaviour was less often subverted by passion, though more liable to fail through mere indolence or faintheartedness. Though they found detachment relatively easy, theirs was the detachment of mere lassitude, not the leap from the prison of life’s cravings into a more spacious world.

One source of the special character of the Patagonian mind was that in it the sexual impulses was relatively weak. Many obscure causes had helped to temper that lavish sexuality in respect of which the first human species differed from all other animals, even the continuously sexual apes. These causes were diverse, but they combined to produce in the last phase of the life of the species a general curtailment of excess energy. In the Dark Ages the severity of the struggle for existence had thrust the sexual interest back almost into the subordinate place which it occupies in the animal mind. Coitus became a luxury only occasionally desired, while self-preservation had become once more an urgent and ever-present necessity. When at last life began to be easier, sexuality remained in partial eclipse, for the forces of racial ‘senescence’ were at work. Thus the Patagonian culture differed in mood from all the earlier cultures of the First Men. Hitherto it had been the clash of sexuality and social taboo that had generated half the fervour and half the delusions of the race. The excess energy of a victorious species, directed by circumstance into the great river of sex, and damned by social convention, had been canalized for a thousand labours. And though often it would break loose and lay all waste before it, in the main it had been turned to good account. At all times indeed, it had been prone to escape in all directions and carve out channels for itself, as a lopped tree stump sends forth not one but a score of shoots. Hence the richness, diversity, incoherence, violent and uncomprehended cravings and enthusiasms, of the earlier peoples. In the Patagonians there was no such luxuriance. That they were not highly sexual was not in itself a weakness. What mattered was that the springs of energy which formerly happened to flood into the channel of sex were themselves impoverished.

Conceive, then, a small and curiously sober people established east of the ancient Bahia Blanca, and advancing century by century over the plains and up the valleys. In time it reached and encircled the heights which were once the island of South Georgia, while to the north and west it spread into the Brazilian highlands and over the Andes. Definitely of higher type than any of their neighbours, definitely more vigorous and acute, the Patagonians were without serious rivals. And since by temperament they were peaceable and conciliatory, their cultural progress was little delayed, either by military imperialism or internal strife. Like their predecessors in the northern hemisphere, they passed through phases of disruption and union, retrogression and regeneration; but their career was on the whole more steadily progressive, and less dramatic, than anything that had occurred before. Earlier peoples had leapt from barbarism to civil life and collapsed again within a thousand years. The slow march of the Patagonians took ten times as long to pass from a tribal to a civic organization.

Eventually they comprised a vast and highly organized community of autonomous provinces, whose political and cultural centre lay upon the new coast north-east of the ancient Falkland Islands, while its barbarian outskirts included much of Brazil and Peru. The absence of serious strife between the various parts of this ‘empire’ was due partly to an innately pacific disposition, partly to a genius for organization. These influences were strengthened by a curiously potent tradition of cosmopolitanism, or human unity, which had been born in the agony of disunion before the days of the World State, and was so burnt into men’s hearts that it survived as an element of myth even through the Dark Age. So powerful was this tradition, that even when the sailing ships of Patagonia had founded colonies in remote Africa and Australia, these new communities remained at heart one with the mother country. Even when the almost Nordic culture of the new and temperate Antarctic coasts had outshone the ancient centre, the political harmony of the race was never in danger.

3. THE CULT OF YOUTH

THE PATAGONIANS PASSED through all the spiritual phases that earlier races had experienced, but in a distinctive manner. They had their primitive tribal religion, derived from the dark past, and based on the fear of natural forces. They had their monotheistic impersonation of Power as a vindictive Creator. Their most adored racial hero was a god-man who abolished the old religion of fear. They had their phases, also, of devout ritual and their phases of rationalism, and again their phases of empirical curiosity.

Most significant for the historian who would understand their special mentality is the theme of the god-man; so curiously did it resemble, yet differ from, similar themes in earlier cultures of the first human species. He was conceived as eternally adolescent, and as mystically the son of all men and women. Far from being the Elder Brother, he was the Favourite Child; and indeed he epitomises that youthful energy and enthusiasm which the race now guessed was slipping away from it. Though the sexual interest of this people was weak, the parental interest was curiously strong. But the worship of the Favourite Son was not merely parental; it expressed also both the individual’s craving for his own lost youth, and his obscure sense that the race itself was senescent.

It was believed that the prophet had actually lived a century as a fresh adolescent. He was designated the Boy who Refused to Grow up. And this vigour of will was possible to him, it was said, because in him the feeble vitality of the race was concentrated many millionfold. For he was the fruit of all parental passion that ever was and would be; and as such he was divine. Primarily he was the Son of Man, but also he was God. For God, in this religion, was no prime Creator but the fruit of man’s endeavour. The Creator was brute power, which had quite inadvertently begotten a being nobler than itself. God, the adorable, was the eternal outcome of man’s labour in time, the eternally realized promise of what man himself should become. Yet though this cult was based on the will for a young-hearted future, it was also overhung by a dread, almost at times a certainty, that in fact such a future would never be, that the race was doomed to grow old and die, that spirit could never conquer the corruptible flesh, but must fade and vanish. Only by taking to heart the message of the Divine Boy, it was said, could man hope to escape this doom.

Such was the legend. It is instructive to examine the reality. The actual individual, in whom this myth of the Favourite Son was founded, was indeed remarkable. Born of shepherd parents among the Southern Andes, he had first become famous as the leader of a romantic ‘youth movement’; and it was this early stage of his career that won him followers. He urged the young to set an example to the old, to live their own life undaunted by conventions, to enjoy, to work hard but briefly, to be loyal comrades. Above all, he preached the religious duty of remaining young in spirit. No one, he said, need grow old, if he willed earnestly not to do so, if he would but keep his soul from falling asleep, his heart open to all rejuvenating influences and shut to every breath of senility. The delight of soul in soul, he said, was the great rejuvenator; it re-created both lover and beloved. If Patagonians would only appreciate each other’s beauty without jealousy, the race would grow young again. And the mission of his ever-increasing Band of Youth was nothing less than the rejuvenation of man.

The propagation of this attractive gospel was favoured by a seeming miracle. The prophet turned out to be biologically unique among Patagonians. When many of his coevals were showing signs of senescence, he remained physically young. Also he possessed a sexual vigour which to the Patagonians seemed miraculous. And since sexual taboo was unknown, he exercised himself so heartily in love-making, that he had paramours in every village, and presently his offspring were numbered in hundreds. In this respect his followers strove hard to live up to him, though with small success. But it was not only physically that the prophet remained young. He preserved also a strikingly youthful agility of mind. His sexual prodigality, though startling to his contemporaries, was in him a temperate overflow of surplus energy. Far from exhausting him, it refreshed him. Presently, however, this exuberance gave place to a more sober life of work and meditation. It was in this period that he began to differentiate himself mentally from his fellows. For at twenty-five, when most Patagonians were deeply settled into a mental groove, he was still battling with successive waves of ideas, and striking out into the unknown. Not till he was forty, and still physically in earliest prime, did he gather his strength and deliver himself of his mature gospel. This, his considered view of existence, turned out to be almost unintelligible to Patagonians. Though in a sense it was an expression of their own culture, it was an expression upon a plane of vitality to which very few of them could ever reach.

The climax came when, during a ceremony in the supreme temple of the capital city, while the worshippers were all prostrated before the hideous image of the Creator, the ageless prophet strode up to the altar, regarded first the congregation and then the god, burst into a hearty peal of laughter, slapped the image resoundingly, and cried, ‘Ugly, I salute you! Not as almighty, but as the greatest of all jokers. To have such a face, and yet to be admired for it! To be so empty, and yet so feared!’ Instantly there was hubbub. But such was the young iconoclast’s god-like radiance, confidence, unexpectedness, and such his reputation as the miraculous Boy, that when he turned upon the crowd, they fell silent, and listened to his scolding.

‘Fools!’ he cried. ‘Senile infants! If God really likes your adulation, and all this hugger-mugger, it is because he enjoys the joke against you, and against himself, too. You are too serious, yet not serious enough; too solemn, and all for puerile ends. You are so eager for life, that you cannot live. You cherish your youth so much that it flies from you. When I was a boy, I said, “Let us keep young”; and you applauded, and went about hugging your toys and refusing to grow up. What I said was not bad for a boy, but it was not enough. Now I am a man; and I say, “For God’s sake, grow up!” Of course we must keep young; but it is useless to keep young if we do not also grow up, and never stop growing up. To keep young, surely, is just to keep supple and keen; and to grow up is not at all a mere sinking into stiffness and into disillusion, but a rising into ever finer skill in all the actions of the game of living. There is something else, too, which is a part of growing up — to see that life is really, after all, a game; a terribly serious game, no doubt, but none the less a game. When we play a game, as it should be played, we strain every muscle to win; but all the while we are less for winning than for the game. And we play the better for it. When barbarians play against a Patagonian team, they forget that it is a game, and go mad for victory. And then how we despise them! If they find themselves losing, they turn savage; if winning, blatant. Either way, the game is murdered, and they cannot see that they are slaughtering a lovely thing. How they pester and curse the umpire, too! I have done that myself, of course, before now; not in games but in life. I have actually cursed the umpire of life. Better so, anyhow, than to insult him with presents, in the hope of being favoured; which is what you are doing here, with your salaams and your vows. I never did that. I merely hated him. Then later I learned to laugh at him, or rather at the thing you set up in his place. But now at last I see him clearly, and laugh with him, at myself, for having missed the spirit of the game. But as for you! Coming here to fawn and whine and cadge favours of the umpire!’

At this point the people rushed toward him to seize him. But he checked them with a young laugh that made them love while they hated. He spoke again.

‘I want to tell you how I came to learn my lesson. I have a queer love for clambering about the high mountains; and once when I was up among the snow-fields and precipices of Aconcagua, I was caught in a blizzard. Perhaps some of you may know what storms can be like in the mountains. The air became a hurtling flood of snow. I was swallowed up and carried away. After many hours of floundering, I fell into a snow-drift. I tried to rise, but fell again and again, till my head was buried. The thought of death enraged me, for there was still so much that I wanted to do. I struggled frantically, vainly. Then suddenly — how can I put it? — I saw the game that I was losing, and it was good. Good, no less to lose than to win. For it was the game, now, not victory, that mattered. Hitherto I had been blindfold, and a slave to victory; suddenly I was free, and with sight. For now I saw myself, and all of us, through the eyes of the umpire. It was as though a play-actor were to see the whole play, with his own part in it, through the author’s eyes, from the auditorium. Here was I, acting the part of a rather fine man who had come to grief through his own carelessness before his work was done. For me, a character in the play, the situation was hideous; yet for me, the spectator, it had become excellent within a wider excellence. I saw that it was equally so with all of us, and with all the worlds. For I seemed to see a thousand worlds taking part with us in the great show. And I saw everything through the calm eyes, the exultant, almost derisive, yet not unkindly, eyes of the playwright.

‘Well, it had seemed that my exit had come; but no, there was still a cue for me. Somehow I was so strengthened by this new view of things that I struggled out of the snow-drift. And here I am once more. But I am a new man. My spirit is free. While I was a boy, I said, “Grow more alive”; but in those days I never guessed that there was an aliveness far intenser than youth’s flicker, a kind of still incandescence. Is there no one here who knows what I mean? No one who at least desires this keener living? The first step is to outgrow this adulation of life itself, and this cadging obsequiousness toward Power. Come! Put it away! Break the ridiculous image in your hearts, as I now smash this idol.’

So saying he picked up a great candlestick and shattered the image. Once more there was an uproar, and the temple authorities had him arrested. Not long afterwards he was tried for sacrilege and executed. For this final extravagance was but the climax of many indiscretions, and those in power were glad to have so obvious a pretext for extinguishing this brilliant but dangerous lunatic.

But the cult of the Divine Boy had already become very popular, for the earlier teaching of the prophet expressed the fundamental craving of the Patagonians. Even his last and perplexing message was accepted by his followers, though without real understanding. Emphasis was laid upon the act of iconoclasm, rather than upon the spirit of his exhortation.

Century by century the new religion, for such it was, spread over the civilized world. And the race seemed to have been spiritually rejuvenated to some extent by widespread fervour. Physically also a certain rejuvenation took place; for before his death this unique biological ‘sport’, or throw-back to an earlier vitality, produced some thousands of sons and daughters; and they in turn propagated the good seed far and wide. Undoubtedly it was this new strain that brought about the golden age of Patagonia, greatly improving the material conditions of the race, carrying civilization into the northern continents, and attacking problems of science and philosophy with renewed ardour.

But the revival was not permanent. The descendants of the prophet prided themselves too much on violent living. Physically, sexually, mentally, they over-reached themselves and became enfeebled. Moreover, little by little the potent strain was diluted and overwhelmed by intercourse with the greater volume of the innately ‘senile’; so that, after a few centuries, the race returned to its middle-aged mood. At the same time the vision of the Divine Boy was gradually distorted. At first it had been youth’s ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry. But insensibly it became a pattern of that which was expected of youth by sad maturity. The violent young hero was sentimentalized into the senior’s vision of childhood, naïve and docile. All that had been violent was forgotten; and what was left became a whimsical and appealing stimulus to the parental impulses. At the same time this phantom was credited with all the sobriety and caution which are so easily appreciated by the middle-aged.

Inevitably this distorted image of youth became an incubus upon the actual young men and women of the race. It was held up as the model of social virtue; but it was a model to which they could never conform without doing violence to their best nature, since it was not any longer an expression of youth at all. Just as, in an earlier age, woman had been idealized and at the same time hobbled, so now youth.

Some few, indeed, throughout the history of Patagonia, attained a clearer vision of the prophet. Fewer still were able to enter into the spirit of his final message, in which his enduring youthfulness raised him to a maturity alien to Patagonia. For the tragedy of this people was not so much their ‘senescence’ as their arrested growth. Feeling themselves old, they yearned to be young again. But, through fixed immaturity of mind, they could never recognize that the true, though unlooked-for, fulfilment of youth’s passionate craving is not the mere achievement of the ends of youth itself, but an advance into a more awake and far-seeing vitality.

4. THE CATASTROPHE

IT WAS IN these latter days that the Patagonians discovered the civilization that had preceded them. In rejecting the ancient religion of fear, they had abandoned also the legend of a remote magnificence, and had come to regard themselves as pioneers of the mind. In the new continent which was their homeland there were, of course, no relics of the ancient order; and the ruins that besprinkled the older regions had been explained as mere freaks of nature. But latterly, with the advance of natural knowledge, archaeologists had reconstructed something of the forgotten world. And the crisis came when, in the basement of a shattered pylon in China, they found a store of metal plates (constructed of an immensely durable artificial element), on which were embossed crowded lines of writing. These objects were, in fact, blocks from which books were printed a thousand centuries earlier. Other deposits were soon discovered, and bit by bit the dead language was deciphered. Within three centuries the outline of the ancient culture was laid bare; and presently the whole history of man’s rise and ruin fell upon this latter-day civilization with crushing effect, as though an ancient pylon were to have fallen on a village of wigwams at its foot. The pioneers discovered that all the ground which they had so painfully won from the wild had been conquered long ago, and lost; that on the material side their glory was nothing beside the glory of the past; and that in the sphere of mind they had established only a few scattered settlements where formerly was an empire. The Patagonian system of natural knowledge had been scarcely further advanced than that of pre-Newtonian Europe. They had done little more than conceive the scientific spirit and unlearn a few superstitions. And now suddenly they came into a vast inheritance of thought.

This in itself was a gravely disturbing experience for a people of strong intellectual interest. But even more overwhelming was the discovery, borne in on them in the course of their research, that the past had been not only brilliant but crazy, and that in the long run the crazy element had completely triumphed. For the Patagonian mind was by now too sane and empirical to accept the ancient knowledge without testing it. The findings of the archaeologists were handed over to the physicists and other scientists, and the firm thought and valuation of Europe and America at their zenith were soon distinguished from the degenerate products of the World State.

The upshot of this impact with a more developed civilization was dramatic and tragic. It divided the Patagonians into loyalists and rebels, into those who clung to the view that the new learning was a satanic lie, and those who faced the facts. To the former party the facts were thoroughly depressing; the latter, though overawed, found in them a compelling majesty, and also a hope. That the earth was a mote among the starclouds was the least subversive of the new doctrines, for the Patagonians had already abandoned the geocentric view. What was so distressing to the reactionaries was the theory that an earlier race had long ago possessed and spent the vitality that they themselves so craved. The party of progress, on the other hand, urged that this vast new knowledge must be used; and that, thus equipped, Patagonia might compensate for lack of youthfulness by superior sanity.

This divergence of will resulted in a physical conflict such as had never before occurred in the Patagonian world. Something like nationalism emerged. The more vigorous Antarctic coasts became modern, while Patagonia itself clung to the older culture. There were several wars, but as physics and chemistry advanced in Antarctica, the Southerners were able to devise engines of war which the Northerners could not resist. In a couple of centuries the new ‘culture’ had triumphed. The world was once more unified.

Hitherto Patagonian civilization had been of a medieval type. Under the influence of physics and chemistry it began to change. Wind- and water-power began to be used for the generation of electricity. Vast mining operations were undertaken in search of the metals and other minerals which no longer occurred at easy depths. Architecture began to make use of steel. Electrically driven aeroplanes were made, but without real success. And this failure was symptomatic; for the Patagonians were not sufficiently foolhardy to master aviation, even had their planes been more efficient. They themselves naturally attributed their failure wholly to lack of a convenient source of power, such as the ancient petrol. Indeed this lack of oil and coal hampered them at every turn. Volcanic power, of course, was available; but, never having been really mastered by the more resourceful ancients, it defeated the Patagonians completely.

As a matter of fact, in wind and water they had all that was needed. The resources of the whole planet were available, and the world-population was less than a hundred million. With this source alone they could never, indeed, have competed in luxury with the earlier World State, but they might well have achieved something like Utopia.

But this was not to be. Industrialism, though accompanied by only a slow increase of population, produced in time most of the social discords which had almost ruined their predecessors. To them it appeared that all their troubles would be solved if only their material power were far ampler. The strong and scarcely rational conviction was a symptom of their ruling obsession, the craving for increased vitality.

Under these circumstances it was natural that one event and one strand of ancient history should fascinate them. The secret of limitless material power had once been known and lost. Why should not Patagonians rediscover it, and use it, with their superior sanity, to bring heaven on earth? The ancients, no doubt, did well to forego this dangerous source of power; but the Patagonians, level-headed and single-minded, need have no fear. Some, indeed, considered it less important to seek power than to find a means of checking biological senescence; but, unfortunately, though physical science had advanced so rapidly, the more subtle biological sciences had remained backward, largely because among the ancients themselves little more had been done than to prepare their way. Thus it happened that the most brilliant minds of Patagonia, fascinated by the prize at stake, concentrated upon the problem of matter. The state encouraged this research by founding and endowing laboratories whose avowed end was this sole work.

The problem was difficult, and the Patagonian scientists, though intelligent, were somewhat lacking in grit. Only after some five hundred years of intermittent research was the secret discovered, or partially so. It was found possible, by means of a huge initial expenditure of energy, to annihilate the positive and negative electric charges in one not very common kind of atom. But this limitation mattered not at all; the human race now possessed an inexhaustible source of power which could be easily manipulated and easily controlled. But though controllable, the new gift was not fool-proof; and there was no guarantee that those who used it might not use it foolishly, or inadvertently let it get out of hand.

Unfortunately, at the time when the new source of energy was discovered, the Patagonians were more divided than of old. Industrialism, combined with the innate docility of the race, had gradually brought about a class cleavage more extreme even than that of the ancient world, though a cleavage of a curiously different kind. The strongly parental disposition of the average Patagonian prevented the dominant class from such brutal exploitation as had formerly occurred. Save during the first century of industrialism, there was no serious physical suffering among the proletariat. A paternal government saw to it that all Patagonians were at least properly fed and clothed, that all had ample leisure and opportunities of amusement. At the same time they saw to it also that the populace became more and more regimented. As in the First World State, civil authority was once more in the hands of a small group of masters of industry, but with a difference. Formerly the dominant motive of big business had been an almost mystical passion for the creation of activity; now the ruling minority regarded themselves as standing towards the populace in loco parentis, and aimed at creating ‘a young-hearted people, simple, gay, vigorous, and loyal’. Their ideal of the state was something between a preparatory school under a sympathetic but strict adult staff, and a joint-stock company, in which the shareholders retained only one function, to delegate their powers thankfully to a set of brilliant directors.

That the system had worked so well and survived so long was due not only to innate Patagonian docility, but also to the principle by which the governing class recruited itself. One lesson at least had been learnt from the bad example of the earlier civilization, namely respect for intelligence. By a system of careful testing the brightest children were selected from all classes and trained to be governors. Even the children of the governors themselves were subjected to the same examination, and only those who qualified were sent to the ‘schools for young governors’. Some corruption no doubt existed, but in the main this system worked. The children thus selected were very carefully trained in theory and practice, as organizers, scientists, priests, and logicians.

The less brilliant children of the race were educated very differently from the young governors. It was impressed on them that they were less able than the others. They were taught to respect the governors as superior beings, who were called upon to serve the community in specially skilled and arduous work, simply because of their ability. It would not be true to say that the less intelligent were educated merely to be slaves; rather they were expected to be the docile, diligent, and happy sons and daughters of the fatherland. They were taught to be loyal and optimistic. They were given vocational training for their various occupations, and encouraged to use their intelligence as much as possible upon the plane suited to it; but the affairs of the state and the problems of religion and theoretical science were strictly forbidden. The official doctrine of the beauty of youth was fundamental in their education. They were taught all the conventional virtues of youth, and in particular modesty and simplicity. As a class they were extremely healthy, for physical training was a very important part of education in Patagonia. Moreover, the universal practice of sun-bathing, which was a religious rite, was especially encouraged among the proletariat, as it was believed to keep the body ‘young’ and the mind placid. The leisure of the governed class was devoted mostly to athletics and other sport, physical and mental. Music and other forms of art were also practised, for these were considered fit occupations for juveniles. The government exercised a censorship over artistic products, but it was seldom enforced; for the common folk of Patagonia were mostly too phlegmatic and too busy to conceive anything but the most obvious and respectable art. They were fully occupied with work and pleasure. They suffered no sexual restraints. Their impersonal interests were satisfied with the official religion of youth-worship and loyalty to the community. This placid condition lasted for some four hundred years after the first century of industrialism. But as time passed the mental difference between the two classes increased. Superior intelligence became rarer and rarer among the proletariat; the governors were recruited more and more from their own offspring, until finally they became an hereditary caste. The gulf widened. The governors began to lose all mental contact with the governed. They made a mistake which could never have been committed had their psychology kept pace with their other sciences. Ever confronted with the workers’ lack of intelligence, they came to treat them more and more as children, and forgot that, though simple, they were grown men and women who needed to feel themselves as free partners in a great human enterprise. Formerly this illusion of responsibility had been sedulously encouraged. But as the gulf widened the proletarians were treated rather as infants than as adolescents, rather as well-cared-for domestic animals than as human beings. Their lives became more and more minutely, though benevolently, systematized for them. At the same time less care was taken to educate them up to an understanding and appreciation of the common human enterprise. Under these circumstances the temper of the people changed. Though their material condition was better than had ever been known before, save under the first World State, they became listless, discontented, mischievous, ungrateful to their superiors.

Such was the state of affairs when the new source of energy was discovered. The world-community consisted of two very different elements, first a small, highly intellectual caste, passionately devoted to the state and to the advancement of culture amongst themselves; and, second, a much more numerous population of rather obtuse, physically well-cared-for, and spiritually starved industrialists. A serious clash between the two classes had already occurred over the use of a certain drug, favoured by the people for the bliss it produced, forbidden by the governors for its evil after-effects. The drug was abolished; but the motive was misinterpreted by the proletariat. This incident brought to the surface a hate that had for long been gathering strength in the popular mind, though unwittingly.

When rumour got afoot that in future mechanical power would be unlimited, the people expected a millennium. Every one would have his own limitless source of energy. Work would cease. Pleasure would be increased to infinity. Unfortunately the first use made of the new power was extensive mining at unheard-of depths in search of metals and other minerals which had long ago ceased to be available near the surface. This involved difficult and dangerous work for the miners. There were casualties. Riots occurred. The new power was used upon the rioters with murderous effect, the governors declaring that, though their paternal hearts bled for their foolish children, this chastisement was necessary to prevent worse evils. The workers were urged to face their troubles with that detachment which the Divine Boy had preached in his final phase; but this advice was greeted with the derision which it deserved. Further strikes, riots, assassinations. The proletariat had scarcely more power against their masters than sheep against the shepherd, for they had not the brains for large-scale organization. But it was through one of these pathetically futile rebellions that Patagonia was at last destroyed.

A petty dispute had occurred in one of the new mines. The management refused to allow miners to teach their trade to their sons; for vocational education, it was said, should be carried on professionally. Indignation against this interference with parental authority caused a sudden flash of the old rage. A power unit was seized, and after a bout of insane monkeying with the machinery, the mischief-makers inadvertently got things into such a state that at last the awful djinn of physical energy was able to wrench off his fetters and rage over the planet. The first explosion was enough to blow up the mountain range above the mine. In those mountains were huge tracts of the critical element, and these were detonated by rays from the initial explosion. This sufficed to set in action still more remote tracts of the element. An incandescent hurricane spread over the whole of Patagonia, reinforcing itself with fresh atomic fury wherever it went. It raged along the line of the Andes and the Rockies, scorching both continents with its heat. It undermined and blew up the Bering Straits, spread like a brood of gigantic fiery serpents into Asia, Europe, and Africa. Martians, already watching the earth as a cat a bird beyond its spring, noted that the brilliance of the neighbour planet was suddenly enhanced. Presently the oceans began to boil here and there with submarine commotion. Tidal waves mangled the coasts and floundered up the valleys. But in time the general sea level sank considerably through evaporation and the opening of chasms in the ocean floor. All volcanic regions became fantastically active. The polar caps began to melt, but prevented the arctic regions from being calcined like the rest of the planet. The atmosphere was a continuous dense cloud of moisture, fumes, and dust, churned in ceaseless hurricanes. As the fury of the electro-magnetic collapse proceeded, the surface temperature of the planet steadily increased, till only in the Arctic and a few favoured corners of the sub-Arctic could life persist.

Patagonia’s death agony was brief. In Africa and Europe a few remote settlements escaped the actual track of the eruptions, but succumbed in a few weeks to hurricanes of steam. Of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated within three months — all but thirty-five, who happened to be in the neighbourhood of the North Pole.

VI Transition

1. THE FIRST MEN AT BAY

BY ONE OF those rare tricks of fortune, which are as often favourable as hostile to humanity, an Arctic exploration ship had recently been embedded in the pack-ice for a long drift across the Polar sea. She was provisioned for four years, and when the catastrophe occurred she had already been at sea for six months. She was a sailing vessel; the expedition had been launched before it was practicable to make use of the new source of power. The crew consisted of twenty-eight men and seven women. Individuals of an earlier and more sexual race, proportioned thus, in such close proximity and isolation, would almost certainly have fallen foul of one another sooner or later. But to Patagonians the arrangement was not intolerable. Besides managing the whole domestic side of the expedition, the seven women were able to provide moderate sexual delight for all, for in this people the female sexuality was much less reduced than the male. There were, indeed, occasional jealousies and feuds in the little community, but these were subordinated to a strong esprit de corps. The whole company had, of course, been very carefully chosen for comradeship, loyalty, and health, as well as for technical skill. All claimed descent from the Divine Boy. All were of the governing class. One quaint expression of the strongly parental Patagonian temperament was that a pair of diminutive pet monkeys was taken with the expedition.

The crew’s first intimation of the catastrophe was a furious hot wind that melted the surface of the ice. The sky turned black. The Arctic summer became a weird and sultry night, torn by fantastic thunderstorms. Rain crashed on the ship’s deck in a continuous waterfall. Clouds of pungent smoke and dust irritated the eyes and nose. Submarine earthquakes buckled the pack-ice.

A year after the explosion, the ship was labouring in tempestuous and berg-strewn water near the Pole. The bewildered little company now began to feel its way south; but, as they proceeded, the air became more fiercely hot and pungent, storms more savage. Another twelve months were spent in beating about the Polar sea, ever and again retreating north from the impossible southern weather. But at length conditions improved slightly, and with great difficulty these few survivors of the human race approached their original objective in Norway, to find that the lowlands were a scorched and lifeless desert, while on the heights the valley vegetation was already struggling to establish itself, in patches of sickly green. Their base town had been flattened by a hurricane, and the skeletons of its population still lay in the streets. They coasted further south. Everywhere the same desolation. Hoping that the disturbance might be merely local, they headed round the British Isles and doubled back on France. But France turned out to be an appalling chaos of volcanoes. With a change of wind, the sea around them was infuriated with falling debris, often red hot. Miraculously they got away and fled north again. After creeping along the Siberian coast they were at last able to find a tolerable resting-place at the mouth of one of the great rivers. The ship was brought to anchor, and the crew rested. They were a diminished company, for six men and two women had been lost on the voyage.

Conditions even here must recently have been far more severe, since much of the vegetation had been scorched, and dead animals were frequent. But evidently the first fury of the vast explosion was now abating.

By this time the voyagers were beginning to realize the truth. They remembered the half jocular prophecies that the new power would sooner or later wreck the planet, prophecies which had evidently been all too well founded. There had been a world-wide disaster; and they themselves had been saved only by their remoteness and the Arctic ice from a fate that had probably overwhelmed all their fellow-men.

So desperate was the outlook for a handful of exhausted persons on a devastated planet, that some urged suicide. All dallied with the idea, save a woman, who had unexpectedly become pregnant. In her the strong parental disposition of her race was now awakened, and she implored the party to make a fight for the sake of her child. Reminded that the baby would only be born into a life of hardship, she reiterated with more persistence than reason, ‘My baby must live’.

The men shrugged their shoulders. But as their tired bodies recovered after the recent struggle, they began to realize the solemnity of their position. It was one of the biologists who expressed a thought which was already present to all. There was at least a chance of survival, and if ever men and women had a sacred duty, surely these had. For they were now the sole trustees of the human spirit. At whatever cost of toil and misery they must people the earth again.

This common purpose now began to exalt them, and brought them all into a rare intimacy. ‘We are ordinary folk,’ said the biologist, ‘but somehow we must become great.’ And they were, indeed, in a manner made great by their unique position. In generous minds a common purpose and common suffering breed a deep passion of comradeship, expressed perhaps not in words but in acts of devotion. These, in their loneliness and their sense of obligation, experienced not only comradeship, but a vivid communion with one another as instruments of a sacred cause.

The party now began to build a settlement beside the river. Though the whole area had, of course, been devastated, vegetation had soon revived, from roots and seeds, buried or wind-borne. The countryside was now green with those plants that had been able to adjust themselves to the new climate. Animals had suffered far more seriously. Save for the Arctic fox, a few small rodents, and one herd of reindeer, none were left but the dwellers in the actual Arctic seas, the Polar bear, various cetaceans, and seals. Of fish there were plenty. Birds in great numbers had crowded out of the south, and had died off in thousands through lack of food, but certain species were already adjusting themselves to the new environment. Indeed, the whole remaining fauna and flora of the planet was passing through a phase of rapid and very painful readjustment. Many well-established species had wholly failed to get a footing in the new world, while certain hitherto insignificant types were able to forge ahead.

The party found it possible to grow maize and even rice from seed brought from a ruined store in Norway. But the great heat, frequent torrential rain, and lack of sunlight made agriculture laborious and precarious. Moreover, the atmosphere had become seriously impure, and the human organism had not yet succeeded in adapting itself. Consequently the party were permanently tired and liable to disease.

The pregnant woman had died in child-birth, but her baby lived. It became the party’s most sacred object, for it kindled in every mind the strong parental disposition so characteristic of Patagonians.

Little by little the numbers of the settlement were reduced by sickness, hurricanes, and volcanic gases. But in time they achieved a kind of equilibrium with their environment, and even a certain strenuous amenity of life. As their prosperity increased, however, their unity diminished. Differences of temperament began to be dangerous. Among the men two leaders had emerged, or rather one leader and a critic. The original head of the expedition had proved quite incapable of dealing with the new situation, and had at last committed suicide. The company had then chosen the second navigating officer as their chief and had chosen him unanimously. The other born leader of the party was a junior biologist, a man of very different type. The relations of these two did much to determine the future history of man, and are worthy of study in themselves; but here we can only glance at them. In all times of stress the navigator’s authority was absolute, for everything depended on his initiative and heroic example. But in less arduous periods, murmurs arose against him for exacting discipline when discipline seemed unnecessary. Between him and the young biologist there grew up a strange blend of hostility and affection; for the latter, though critical, loved and admired the other, and declared that the survival of the party depended on this one man’s practical genius.

Three years after their landing, the community, though reduced in numbers and in vitality, was well established in a routine of hunting, agriculture, and building. Three fairly healthy infants rejoiced and exasperated their elders. With security, the navigator’s genius for action found less scope, while the knowledge of the scientists became more valuable. Plant and poultry-breeding were beyond the range of the heroic leader, and in prospecting for minerals he was equally helpless. Inevitably as time passed he and the other navigators grew restless and irritable; and at last, when the leader decreed that the party should take to the ship and explore for better land, a serious dispute occurred. All the sea-farers applauded; but the scientists, partly through clearer understanding of the calamity that had befallen the planet, partly through repugnance at the hardship involved, refused to go.

Violent emotions were aroused; but both sides restrained themselves through well-tried mutual respect and loyalty to the community. Then suddenly sexual passion set a light to the tinder. The woman who, by general consent, had come to be queen of the settlement, and was regarded as sacred to the leader, asserted her independence by sleeping with one of the scientists. The leader surprised them, and in sudden rage killed the young man. The little community at once fell into two armed factions, and more blood was shed. Very soon, however, the folly and sacrilege of this brawl became evident to these few survivors of a civilized race, and after a parley a grave decision was made.

The company was to be divided. One party, consisting of five men and two women, under the young biologist, was to remain in the settlement. The leader himself, with the remaining nine men and two women, was to navigate the ship toward Europe, in search of a better land. They promised to send word, if possible, during the following year.

With this decision taken the two parties once more became amicable. All worked to equip the pioneers. When at last it was the time of departure, there was a solemn leave-taking. Every one was relieved at the cessation of a painful incompatibility; but more poignant than relief was the distressed affection of those who had so long been comrades in a sacred enterprise.

It was a parting even more momentous than was supposed. For from this act arose at length two distinct human species.

Those who stayed behind heard no more of the wanderers, and finally concluded that they had come to grief. But in fact they were driven west and south-west past Iceland, now a cluster of volcanoes, to Labrador. On this voyage through fantastic storms and oceanic convulsions they lost nearly half their number, and were at last unable to work the ship. When finally they were wrecked on a rocky coast, only the carpenter’s mate, two women, and the pair of monkeys succeeded in clambering ashore.

These found themselves in a climate far more sultry than Siberia; but like Siberia, Labrador contained uplands of luxuriant vegetation. The man and his two women had at first great difficulty in finding food, but in time they adapted themselves to a diet of berries and roots. As the years passed, however, the climate undermined their mentality, and their descendants sank into abject savagery, finally degenerating into a type that was human only in respect of its ancestry.

The little Siberian settlement was now hard-pressed but single-minded. Calculation had convinced the scientists that the planet would not return to its normal state for some millions of years; for though the first and superficial fury of the disaster had already ceased, the immense pent-up energy of the central explosions would take millions of years to leak out through volcanic vents. The leader of the party, by rare luck a man of genius, conceived their situation thus. For millions of years the planet would be uninhabitable save for a fringe of Siberian coast. The human race was doomed for ages to a very restricted and uncongenial environment. All that could be hoped for was the persistence of a mere remnant of civilized humanity, which should be able to lie dormant until a more favourable epoch. With this end in view the party must propagate itself, and make some possibility of cultured life for its offspring. Above all it must record in some permanent form as much as it could remember of Patagonian culture. ‘We are the germ,’ he said. ‘We must play for safety, mark time, preserve man’s inheritance. The chances against us are almost overwhelming, but just possibly we shall win through.’

And so in fact they did. Several times almost exterminated at the outset, these few harassed individuals preserved their spark of humanity. A close inspection of their lives would reveal an intense personal drama; for, in spite of the sacred purpose which united them, almost as muscles in one limb, they were individuals of different temperaments. The children, moreover, caused jealousy between their parentally hungry elders. There was ever a subdued, and sometimes an open, rivalry to gain the affection of these young things, these few and precious buds on the human stem. Also there was sharp disagreement about their education. For though all the elders adored them simply for their childishness, one at least, the visionary leader of the party, thought of them chiefly as potential vessels of the human spirit, to be moulded strictly for their great function. In this perpetual subdued antagonism of aims and temperaments the little society lived from day to day, much as a limb functions in the antagonism of its muscles.

The adults of the party devoted much of their leisure during the long winters to the heroic labour of recording the outline of man’s whole knowledge. This task was very dear to the leader, but the others often grew weary of it. To each person a certain sphere of culture was assigned; and after he or she had thought out a section and scribbled it down on slate, it was submitted to the company for criticism, and finally engraved deeply on tablets of hard stone. Many thousands of such tablets were produced in the course of years, and were stored in a cave which was carefully prepared for them. Thus was recorded something of the history of the earth and of man, the outlines of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and geometry. Each scribe set down also in some detail a summary of his own special study, and added a personal manifesto of his own views about existence. Much ingenuity was spent in devising a vast pictorial dictionary and grammar, with which, it was hoped, the remote future might interpret the whole library.

Years passed while this immense registration of human thought was still in progress. The founders of the settlement grew feebler while the eldest of the next generation were still adolescent. Of the two women, one had died and the other was almost a cripple, both martyrs to the task of motherhood. A youth, an infant boy, and four girls of various ages — on these the future of man now depended. Unfortunately these precious beings had suffered from their very preciousness. Their education had been bungled. They had been both pampered and oppressed. Nothing was thought too good for them, but they were overwhelmed with cherishing and teaching. Thus they came to hold the elders at arm’s length, and to weary of the ideals imposed on them. Brought into a ruined world without their own consent, they refused to accept the crushing obligation toward an improbable future. Hunting, and the daily struggle of a pioneering age, afforded their spirits full exercise in courage, mutual loyalty, and interest in one another’s personality. They would live for the present only, and for the tangible reality, not for a culture which they knew only by hearsay. In particular, they loathed the hardship of engraving endless verbiage upon granitic slabs.

The crisis came when the eldest girl had crossed the threshold of physical maturity. The leader told her that it was her duty to begin bearing children at once, and ordered her to have intercourse with her half-brother, his own son. Having herself assisted at the last birth, which had destroyed her mother, she refused; and when pressed she dropped her graving tool and fled. This was the first serious act of rebellion. In a few years the older generation was deposed from authority. A new way of life, more active, more dangerous, zestful, and careless, resulted in a lowering of the community’s standard of comfort and organization, but also in greater health and vitality. Experiments in plant and stock-breeding were neglected, buildings went out of repair; but great feats of hunting and exploration were undertaken. Leisure was given over to games of hazard and calculation, to dancing, singing, and romantic story-telling. Music and romance, indeed, were now the main expression of the finer nature of these beings, and became the vehicles of obscure religious experience. The intellectualism of the elders was ridiculed. What could their poor sciences tell of reality, of the many-faced, never-for-a-moment-the-same, superbly inconsequent, and ever-living Real? Man’s intelligence was all right for hunting and tillage in the world of common sense; but if he rode it further afield, he would find himself in a desert, and his soul would starve. Let him live as nature prompted. Let him keep the young god in his heart alive. Let him give free play to the struggling, irrational, dark vitality that sought to realize itself in him not as logic but as beauty.

The tablets were now engraved only by the aged.

But one day, after the infant boy had reached the early Patagonian adolescence, his curiosity was roused by the tail-like hind limbs of a seal. The old people timidly encouraged him. He made other biological observations, and was led on to envisage the whole drama of life on the planet, and to conceive loyalty to the cause which they had served.

Meanwhile, sexual and parental nature had triumphed where schooling had failed. The young things inevitably fell in love with each other, and in time several infants appeared.

Thus, generation by generation, the little settlement maintained itself with varying success, varying zestfulness, and varying loyalty toward the future. With changing conditions the population fluctuated, sinking as low as two men and one woman, but increasing gradually up to a few thousand, the limit set by the food capacity of their strip of coast. In the long run, though circumstances did not prevent material survival, they made for mental decline. For the Siberian coast remained a tropical land, bounded on the south by a forest of volcanoes; and consequently in the long run the generations declined in mental vigour and subtlety. This result was perhaps due in part to too intensive inbreeding; but this factor had also one good effect. Though mental vigour waned, certain desirable characteristics were consolidated. The founders of the group represented the best remaining stock of the first human species. They had been chosen for their hardihood and courage, their native loyalty, their strong cognitive interest. Consequently, in spite of phases of depression, the race not only survived but retained its curiosity and its group feeling. Even while the ability of men decreased, their will to understand, and their sense of racial unity, remained. Though their conception of man and the universe gradually sank into crude myth, they preserved a strong unreasoning loyalty towards the future, and toward the now sacred stone library which was rapidly becoming unintelligible to them. For thousands and even millions of years, after the species had materially changed its nature, there remained a vague admiration for mental prowess, a confused tradition of a noble past, and pathetic loyalty toward a still nobler future. Above all, internecine strife was so rare that it served only to strengthen the clear will to preserve the unity and harmony of the race.

2. THE SECOND DARK AGE

WE MUST NOW pass rapidly over the Second Dark Age, observing merely those influences which were to affect the future of humanity.

Century by century the pent energy of the vast explosion dispersed itself; but not till many hundred thousand years had passed did the swarms of upstart volcanoes begin to die, and not till after millions of years did the bulk of the planet become once more a possible home for life.

During this period many changes took place. The atmosphere became clearer, purer, and less turbulent. With the fall of temperature, frost and snow appeared occasionally in the Arctic regions, and in due course the Polar caps were formed again. Meanwhile, ordinary geological processes, augmented by the strains to which the planet was subjected by increased internal pressure, began to change the continents. South America mostly collapsed into the hollows blasted beneath it, but a new land rose to join Brazil with West Africa. The East Indies and Australia became a continuous continent. The huge mass of Tibet sank deeply into its disturbed foundations, lunged West, and buckled Afghanistan into a range of peaks nearly forty thousand feet above the sea. Europe sank under the Atlantic. Rivers writhed shiftingly hither and thither upon the continents, like tortured worms. New alluvial areas were formed. New strata were laid upon one another under new oceans. New animals and plants developed from the few surviving Arctic species, and spread south through Asia and America. In the new forests and grasslands appeared various specialized descendants of the reindeer, and swarms of rodents. Upon these preyed the large and small descendants of the Arctic fox, of which one species, a gigantic wolf-like creature, rapidly became the ‘King of Beasts’ in the new order, and remained so, until it was ousted by the more slowly-modified offspring of the polar bears. A certain genus of seals, reverting to the ancient terrestrial habit, had developed a slender snake-like body and an almost swift, and very serpentine, mode of locomotion among the coastal sand-dunes. There it was wont to stalk its rodent prey, and even follow them into their burrows. Everywhere there were birds. Many of the places left vacant by the destruction of the ancient fauna were now filled by birds which had discarded flight and developed pedestrian habits. Insects, almost exterminated by the great conflagration, had afterwards increased so rapidly, and had refashioned their types with such versatility, that they soon reached almost to their ancient profusion. Even more rapid was the establishment of the new micro-organisms. In general, among all the beasts and plants of the earth there was a great change of habit, and a consequent overlaying of old body-forms with new forms adapted to a new way of life.

The two human settlements had fared very differently. That of Labrador, oppressed by a more sweltering climate, and unsupported by the Siberian will to preserve human culture, sank into animality; but ultimately it peopled the whole West with swarming tribes. The human beings in Asia remained a mere handful throughout the ten million years of the Second Dark Age. An incursion of the sea cut them off from the south. The old Taimyr Peninsula, where their settlements clustered, became the northern promontory of an island whose coasts were the ancient valley-edges of the Yenessi, the Lower Tunguska, and the Lena. As the climate became less oppressive, the families spread towards the southern coast of the island, but there the sea checked them. Temperate conditions enabled them to regain a certain degree of culture. But they had no longer the capacity to profit much from the new clemency of nature, for the previous ages of tropical conditions had undermined them. Moreover, towards the end of the ten million years of the Second Dark Age, the Arctic climate spread south into their island. The crops failed, the rodents that formed their chief cattle dwindled, their few herds of deer faded out through lack of food. Little by little this scanty human race degenerated into a mere remnant of Arctic savages. And so they remained for a million years. Psychologically they were so crippled that they had almost completely lost the power of innovation. When their sacred quarries in the hills were covered with ice, they had not the wit to use stone from the valleys, but were reduced to making implements of bone. Their language degenerated into a few grunts to signify important acts, and a more complex system of emotional expressions. For emotionally these creatures still preserved a certain refinement. Moreover, though they had almost wholly lost the power of intelligent innovation, their instinctive responses were often such as a more enlightened intelligence would justify. They were strongly social, deeply respectful of the individual human life, deeply parental, and often terribly earnest in their religion.

Not till long after the rest of the planet was once more covered with life, not till nearly ten million years after the Patagonian disaster, did a group of these savages, adrift on an iceberg, get blown southward across the sea to the mainland of Asia. Luckily, for Arctic conditions were increasing, and in time the islanders were extinguished.

The survivors settled in the new land and spread, century by century, into the heart of Asia. Their increase was very slow for they were an infertile and inflexible race. But conditions were now extremely favourable. The climate was temperate; for Russia and Europe were now a shallow sea warmed by currents from the Atlantic. There were no dangerous animals save the small grey bears, an offshoot from the polar species, and the large wolf-like foxes. Various kinds of rodents and deer provided meat in plenty. There were birds of all sizes and habits. Timber, fruit, wild grains, and other nourishing plants throve on the well-watered volcanic soil. The prolonged eruptions, moreover, had once more enriched the upper layers of the rocky crust with metals.

A few hundred thousand years in this new world sufficed for the human species to increase from a handful of individuals to a swarm of races. It was in the conflict and interfusion of these races, and also through the absorption of certain chemicals from the new volcanic soil, that humanity at last recovered its vitality.

VII The Rise of the Second Men

1. THE APPEARANCE OF A NEW SPECIES

IT WAS SOME ten million years after the Patagonian disaster that the first elements of a new human species appeared, in an epidemic of biological variations, many of which were extremely valuable. Upon this raw material the new and stimulating environment worked for some hundred thousand years until at last there appeared the Second Man.

Though of greater stature and more roomy cranium, these beings were not wholly unlike their predecessors in general proportions. Their heads, indeed, were large even for their bodies, and their necks massive. Their hands were huge, but finely moulded. Their almost titanic size entailed a seemingly excessive strength of support; their legs were stouter, even proportionately, than the legs of the earlier species. Their feet had lost the separate toes, and, by a strengthening and growing together of the internal bones, had become more efficient instruments of locomotion. During the Siberian exile the First Men had acquired a thick hairy covering, and most races of the Second Man retained something of this blonde hirsute appearance throughout their career. Their eyes were large, and often jade green, their features firm as carved granite, yet mobile and lucent. Of the second human species one might say that Nature had at last repeated and far excelled the noble but unfortunate type which she had achieved once, long ago, with the first species, in certain prehistoric cave-dwelling hunters and artists.

Inwardly the Second Men differed from the earlier species in that they had shed most of those primitive relics which had hampered the First Men more than was realized. Not only were they free of appendix, tonsils, and other useless excrescences, but also their whole structure was more firmly knit into unity. Their chemical organization was such that their tissues were kept in better repair. Their teeth, though proportionately small and few, were almost completely immune from caries. Such was their glandular equipment that puberty did not begin till twenty; and not till they were fifty did they reach maturity. At about one hundred and ninety their powers began to fail, and after a few years of contemplative retirement they almost invariably died before true senility could begin. It was as though, when a man’s work was finished, and he had meditated in peace upon his whole career, there were nothing further to hold his attention and prevent him from falling asleep. Mothers carried the foetus for three years, suckled the infant for five years, and were sterile during this period and for another seven years. Their climacteric was reached at about a hundred and sixty. Architecturally massive like their mates, they would have seemed to the First Men very formidable titanesses; but even those early half-human beings would have admired the women of the second species both for their superb vitality and for their brilliantly human expression.

In temperament the Second Men were curiously different from the earlier species. The same factors were present, but in different proportions, and in far greater subordination to the considered will of the individual. Sexual vigour had returned. But sexual interest was strangely altered. Around the ancient core of delight in physical and mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of innately sublimated, and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and plant. Parental interest also was strong in the new species, but it too was universalized. It had become a strong innate interest in, and a devotion to, all beings that were conceived as in need of help. In the earlier species this passionate spontaneous altruism occurred only in exceptional persons. In the new species, however, all normal men and women experienced altruism as a passion. And yet at the same time primitive parenthood had become tempered to a less possessive and more objective love, which among the First Men was less common than they themselves were pleased to believe. Assertiveness had also greatly changed. Formerly very much of a man’s energy had been devoted to the assertion of himself as a private individual over against other individuals; and very much of his generosity had been at bottom selfish. But in the Second Men this competitive self-assertion, this championship of the most intimately known animal against all others, was greatly tempered. Formerly the major enterprises of society would never have been carried through had they not been able to annex to themselves the egoism of their champions. But in the Second Men the parts were reversed. Few individuals could ever trouble to exert themselves to the last ounce for merely private ends, save when those ends borrowed interest or import from some public enterprise. It was only his vision of a world-wide community of persons, and of his own function therein, that could rouse the fighting spirit in a man. Thus it was inwardly, rather than in outward physical characters, that the Second Men differed from the First. And in nothing did they differ more than in their native aptitude for cosmopolitanism. They had their tribes and nations. War was not quite unknown amongst them. But even in primitive times a man’s most serious loyalty was directed toward the race as a whole; and wars were so hampered by impulses of kindliness towards the enemy that they were apt to degenerate into rather violent athletic contests, leading to an orgy of fraternization.

It would not be true to say that the strongest interest of these beings was social. They were never prone to exalt the abstraction called the state, or the nation, or even the world-commonwealth. For their most characteristic factor was not mere gregariousness but something novel, namely an innate interest in personality, both in the actual diversity of persons and in the ideal of personal development. They had a remarkable power of vividly intuiting their fellows as unique persons with special needs. Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another. But the Second Men, more intensely and accurately self-conscious, were also more intensely and accurately conscious of one another. This they achieved by no unique faculty, but solely by a more ready interest in each other, a finer insight, and a more active imagination.

They had also a remarkable innate interest in the higher kinds of mental activity, or rather in the subtle objects of these activities. Even children were instinctively inclined towards a genuinely aesthetic interest in their world and their own behaviour, and also towards scientific inquiry and generalization. Small boys, for instance, would delight in collecting not merely such things as eggs or crystals, but mathematical formulae expressive of the different shapes of eggs and crystals, or of the innumerable rhythms of shells, fronds, leaflets, grass-nodes. And there was a wealth of traditional fairy-stories whose appeal was grounded in philosophical puzzles. Little children delighted to hear how the poor things called Illusions were banished from the Country of the Real, how one-dimensional Mr Line woke up in a two-dimensional world, and how a brave young tune slew cacophonous beasts and won a melodious bride in that strange country where the landscape is all of sound and all living things are music. The First Men had attained to interest in science, mathematics, philosophy, only after arduous schooling, but in the Second Men there was a natural propensity for these activities, no less vigorous than the primitive instincts. Not, of course, that they were absolved from learning; but they had the same zest and facility in these matters as their predecessors had enjoyed only in humbler spheres.

In the earlier species, indeed, the nervous system had maintained only a very precarious unity, and was all too liable to derangement by the rebellion of one of its subordinate parts. But in the second species the highest centres maintained an almost absolute harmony among the lower. Thus the moral conflict between momentary impulse and considered will, and again between private and public interest, played a very subordinate part among the Second Men.

In actual cognitive powers, also, this favoured species far outstripped its predecessor. For instance, vision had greatly developed. The Second Men distinguished in the spectrum a new primary colour between green and blue; and beyond blue they saw, not a reddish blue, but again a new primary colour, which faded with increasing ruddiness far into the old ultra-violet. These two new primary colours were complementary to one another. At the other end of the spectrum they saw the infra-red as a peculiar purple. Further, owing to the very great size of their retinae, and the multiplication of rods and cones, they discriminated much smaller fractions of their field of vision.

Improved discrimination combined with a wonderful fertility of mental imagery to produce a greatly increased power of insight into the character of novel situations. Whereas among the First Men, native intelligence had increased only up to the age of fourteen, among the Second Men it progressed up to forty. Thus an average adult was capable of immediate insight into problems which even the most brilliant of the First Men could only solve by prolonged reasoning. This superb clarity of mind enabled the second species to avoid most of those age-long confusions and superstitions which had crippled its predecessor. And along with great intelligence went a remarkable flexibility of will. In fact the Second Men were far more able than the First to break habits that were seen to be no longer justified.

To sum the matter, circumstance had thrown up a very noble species. Essentially it was of the same type as the earlier species, but it had undergone extensive improvements. Much that the First Men could only achieve by long schooling and self-discipline the Second Men performed with effortless fluency and delight. In particular, two capacities which for the First Men had been unattainable ideals were now realized in every normal individual, namely the power of wholly dispassionate cognition, and the power of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, without reservation. Indeed, in this respect the Second Men might be called ‘Natural Christians’, so readily and constantly did they love one another in the manner of Jesus, and infuse their whole social policy with loving-kindness. Early in their career they conceived the religion of love, and they were possessed by it again and again, in diverse forms, until their end. On the other hand, their gift of dispassionate cognition helped them to pass speedily to the admiration of fate. And being by nature rigorous thinkers, they were peculiarly liable to be disturbed by the conflict between their religion of love and their loyalty to fate.

Well might it seem that the stage was now set for a triumphant and rapid progress of the human spirit. But though the second human species constituted a real improvement on the first, it lacked certain faculties without which the next great mental advance could not be made.

Moreover its very excellence involved one novel defect from which the First Men were almost wholly free. In the lives of humble individuals there are many occasions when nothing but an heroic effort can wrest their private fortunates from stagnation or decline, and set them pioneering in new spheres. Among the First Men this effort was often called forth by passionate regard for self. And it was upon the tidal wave of innumerable egoisms, blindly surging in one direction, that the first species was carried forward. But, to repeat, in the Second Men self-regard was never an over-mastering motive. Only at the call of social loyalty or personal love would a man spur himself to desperate efforts. Whenever the stake appeared to be mere private advancement, he was apt to prefer peace to enterprise, the delights of sport, companionship, art or intellect, to the slavery of self-regard. And so in the long run, though the Second Men were fortunate in their almost complete immunity from the lust of power and personal ostentation (which cursed the earlier species with industrialism and militarism), and though they enjoyed long ages of idyllic peace, often upon a high cultural plane, their progress towards full self-conscious mastery of the planet was curiously slow.

2. THE INTERCOURSE OF THREE SPECIES

IN A FEW thousand years the new species filled the region from Afghanistan to the China Sea, overran India, and penetrated far into the new Australasian continent. Its advance was less military than cultural. The remaining tribes of the First Men, with whom the new species could not normally interbreed, were unable to live up to the higher culture that flooded round them and over them. They faded out.

For some further thousands of years the Second Men remained as noble savages, then passed rapidly through the pastoral into the agricultural stage. In this era they sent an expedition across the new and gigantic Hindu Kush to explore Africa. Here it was that they came upon the subhuman descendants of the ship’s crew that had sailed from Siberia millions of years earlier. These animals had spread south through America and across the new Atlantic Isthmus into Africa.

Dwarfed almost to the knees of the superior species, bent so that as often as not they used their arms as aids to locomotion, flat-headed and curiously long-snouted, these creatures were by now more baboon-like than human. Yet in the wild state they maintained a very complicated organization into castes, based on the sense of smell. Their powers of scent, indeed, had developed at the expense of their intelligence. Certain odours, which had become sacred through their very repulsiveness, were given off only by individuals having certain diseases. Such individuals were treated with respect by their fellows; and though, in fact, they were debilitated by their disease, they were so feared that no healthy individual dared resist them. The characteristic odours were themselves graded in nobility, so that those individuals who bore only the less repulsive perfume, owed respect to those in whom a widespread rotting of the body occasioned the most nauseating stench. These plagues had the special effect of stimulating reproductive activity; and this fact was one cause both of the respect felt for them, and of the immense fertility of the species, such a fertility that, in spite of plagues and obtuseness, it had flooded two continents. For though the plagues were fatal, they were slow to develop. Further, though individuals far advanced in disease were often incapable of feeding themselves, they profited by the devotion of the healthy, who were well-pleased if they also became infected.

But the most startling fact about these creatures was that many of them had become enslaved to another species. When the Second Men had penetrated further into Africa they came to a forest region where companies of diminutive monkeys resisted their intrusion. It was soon evident that any interference with the imbecile and passive subhumans in this district was resented by the monkeys. And as the latter made use of a primitive kind of bow and poisoned arrows, their opposition was seriously inconvenient to the invaders. The use of weapons and other tools, and a remarkable coordination in warfare, made it clear that in intelligence this simian species had far outstripped all creatures save man. Indeed, the Second Men were now face to face with the only terrestrial species which ever evolved so far as to compete with man in versatility and practical shrewdness.

As the invaders advanced, the monkeys were seen to round up whole flocks of the submen and drive them out of reach. It was noticed also that these domesticated submen were wholly free from the diseases that infected their wild kinsfolk, who on this account greatly despised the healthy drudges. Later it transpired that the submen were trained as beasts of burden by the monkeys and that their flesh was a much relished article of diet. An arboreal city of woven branches was discovered, and was apparently in course of construction, for the submen were dragging timber and hauling it aloft, goaded by the boneheaded spears of the monkeys. It was evident also that the authority of the monkeys was maintained less by force than by intimidation. They anointed themselves with the juice of a rare aromatic plant, which struck terror into their poor cattle, and reduced them to abject docility.

Now the invaders were only a handful of pioneers. They had come over the mountains in search of metals, which had been brought to the earth’s surface during the volcanic era. An amiable race, they felt no hostility toward the monkeys, but rather amusement at their habits and ingenuity. But the monkeys resented the mere presence of these mightier beings; and, presently collecting in the tree-tops in thousands, they annihilated the party with their poisoned arrows. One man alone escaped into Asia. In a couple of years he returned, with a host. Yet this was no punitive expedition, for the bland Second Men were strangely lacking in resentment. Establishing themselves on the outskirts of the forest region, they contrived to communicate and barter with the little people of the trees, so that after a while they were allowed to enter the territory unmolested, and begin their great metallurgical survey.

A close study of the relations of these very different intelligences would be enlightening, but we have no time for it. Within their own sphere the monkeys showed perhaps a quicker wit than the men; but only within very narrow limits did their intelligence work at all. They were deft at finding new means for the better satisfaction of their appetites. But they wholly lacked self-criticism. Upon a normal outfit of instinctive needs they had developed many acquired, traditional cravings, most of which were fantastic and harmful. The Second Men, on the other hand, though often momentarily outwitted by the monkeys, were in the long run incomparably more able and more sane.

The difference between the two species is seen clearly in their reaction to metals. The Second Men sought metal solely for the carrying on of an already well-advanced civilization. But the monkeys, when for the first time they saw the bright ingots, were fascinated. They had already begun to hate the invaders for their native superiority and their material wealth; and now this jealousy combined with primitive acquisitiveness to make the slabs of copper and tin become in their eyes symbols of power. In order to remain unmolested in their work, the invaders had paid a toll of the wares of their own country, of baskets, pottery, and various specially designed miniature tools. But at the sight of the crude metal, the monkeys demanded a share of this noblest product of their own land. This was readily granted, since it did away with the need of bringing goods from Asia. But the monkeys had no real use for metal. They merely hoarded it, and became increasingly avaricious. No one had respect among them who did not laboriously carry a great ingot about with him wherever he went. And after a while it came to be considered actually indecent to be seen without a slab of metal. In conversation between the sexes this symbol of refinement was always held so as to conceal the genitals.

The more metal the monkeys acquired the more they craved. Blood was often shed in disputes over the possession of hoards. But this internecine strife gave place at length to a concerted movement to prevent the whole export of metal from their land. Some even suggested that the ingots in their possession should be used for making more effective weapons, with which to expel the invaders. This policy was rejected, not merely because there were none who could work up the crude metal, but because it was generally agreed that to put such a sacred material to any kind of service would be base.

The will to be rid of the invader was augmented by a dispute about the submen. These abject beings were treated very harshly by their masters. Not only were they overworked, but also they were tortured in cold blood, not precisely through lust in cruelty, but through a queer sense of humour, or delight in the incongruous. For instance, it afforded the monkeys a strangely innocent and extravagant pleasure to compel these cattle to carry on their work in an erect posture, which was by now quite unnatural to them, or to eat their own excrement or even their own young. If ever these tortures roused some exceptional subman to rebel, the monkeys flared into contemptuous rage at such a lack of humour, so incapable were they of realizing the subjective processes of others. To one another they could, indeed, be kindly and generous; but even among themselves the imp of humour would sometimes run riot. In any matter in which an individual was misunderstood by his fellows, he was sure to be gleefully baited, and often harried to death. But in the main it was only the slave-species that suffered.

The invaders were outraged by this cruel imbecility, and ventured to protest. To the monkeys the protest was unintelligible. What were cattle for, but to be used in the service of superior beings? Evidently, the monkeys thought, the invaders were after all lacking in the finer capacities of mind, since they failed to appreciate the beauty of the fantastic.

This and other causes of friction finally led the monkeys to conceive a means of freeing themselves for ever. The Second Men had proved to be terribly liable to the diseases of their wretched subhuman kinsfolk. Only by very rigorous quarantine had they stamped out the epidemic that had revealed this fact. Now partly for revenge, but partly also through malicious delight in the topsy-turvy, the monkeys determined to make use of this human weakness. There was a certain nut, very palatable to both men and monkeys, which grew in a remote part of the country. The monkeys had already begun to barter this nut for extra metal; and the pioneering Second Men were arranging to send caravans laden with nuts into their own country. In this situation the monkeys found their opportunity. They carefully infected large quantities of nuts with the plagues rampant among those herds of submen which had not been domesticated. Very soon caravans of infected nuts were scattered over Asia. The effect upon a race wholly fresh to these microbes was disastrous. Not only were the pioneering settlements wiped out, but the bulk of the species also. The submen themselves had become adjusted to the microbes, and even reproduced more rapidly because of them. Not so the more delicately organized species. They died off like autumn leaves. Civilization fell to pieces. In a few generations Asia was peopled only by a handful of scattered savages, all diseased and mostly crippled.

But in spite of this disaster the species remained potentially the same. Within a few centuries it had thrown off the infection and had begun once more the ascent towards civilization. After another thousand years, pioneers again crossed the mountain and entered Africa. They met with no opposition. The precarious flicker of simian intelligence had long ago ceased. The monkeys had so burdened their bodies with metal and their minds with the obsession of metal, that at length the herds of subhuman cattle were able to rebel and devour their masters.

3. THE ZENITH OF THE SECOND MEN

FOR NEARLY A quarter of a million years the Second Men passed through successive phases of prosperity and decline. Their advance to developed culture was not nearly so steady and triumphal as might have been expected from a race of such brilliance. As with individuals, so with species, accidents are all too likely to defeat even the most cautious expectations. For instance, the Second Men were for a long time seriously hampered by a ‘glacial epoch’ which at its height imposed Arctic conditions even as far south as India. Little by little the encroaching ice crowded their tribes into the extremity of that peninsula, and reduced their culture to the level of the Esquimaux. In time, of course, they recovered, but only to suffer other scourges, of which the most devastating were epidemics of bacteria. The more recently developed and highly organized tissues of this species were peculiarly susceptible to disease, and not once but many times a promising barbarian culture or ‘medieval’ civilization was wiped out by plagues.

But of all the natural disasters which befell the Second Men, the worst was due to a spontaneous change in their own physical constitution. Just as the fangs of the ancient sabre-toothed tiger had finally grown so large that the beast could not eat, so the brain of the second human species threatened to outgrow the rest of its body. In a cranium that was originally roomy enough, this rare product of nature was now increasingly cramped; while a circulatory system, that was formerly quite adequate, was becoming more and more liable to fail in pumping blood through so cramped a structure. These two causes at last began to take serious effect. Congenital imbecility became increasingly common, along with all manner of acquired mental diseases. For some thousands of years the race remained in a most precarious condition, now almost dying out, now rapidly attaining an extravagant kind of culture in some region where physical nature happened to be peculiarly favourable. One of these precarious flashes of spirit occurred in the Yang-tze valley as a sudden and brief effulgence of city states peopled by neurotics, geniuses and imbeciles. The lasting upshot of this civilization was a brilliant literature of despair, dominated by a sense of the difference between the actual and the potential in man and the universe. Later, when the race had attained its noontide glory, it was wont to brood upon this tragic voice from the past in order to remind itself of the underlying horror of existence.

Meanwhile, brains became more and more overgrown, and the race more and more disorganized. There is no doubt that it would have gone the way of the sabre-toothed tiger, simply through the fatal direction of its own physiological evolution, had not a more stable variety of this second human species at last appeared. It was in North America, into which, by way of Africa, the Second Men had long ago spread, that the roomier-skulled and stronger-hearted type first occurred. By great good fortune this new variety proved to be a dominant Mendelian character. And as it interbred freely with the older variety, a superbly healthy race soon peopled America. The species was saved.

But another hundred thousand years were to pass before the Second Men could reach their zenith. I must not dwell on this movement of the human symphony, though it is one of great richness. Inevitably many themes are now repeated from the career of the earlier species, but with special features, and transposed, so to speak, from the minor to the major key. Once more primitive cultures succeed one another, or pass into civilization, barbarian or ‘medieval’; and in turn these fall or are transformed. Twice, indeed, the planet became the home of a single world-wide community which endured for many thousands of years, until misfortune wrecked it. The collapse is not altogether surprising, for unlike the earlier species, the Second Men had no coal and oil. In both these early world societies of the Second Men there was a complete lack of mechanical power. Consequently, though world-wide and intricate, they were in a manner ‘medieval’. In every continent intensive and highly skilled agriculture crept from the valleys up the mountain sides and over the irrigated deserts. In the rambling garden-cities each citizen took his share of drudgery, practised also some fine handicraft, and yet had leisure for gaiety and contemplation. Intercourse within and between the five great continental communities had to be maintained by coaches, caravans, and sailing ships. Sail, indeed, now came back into its own, and far surpassed its previous achievements. On every sea, fleets of great populous red-sailed clippers, wooden, with carved poops and prows, but with the sleek flanks of the dolphin, carried the produce of every land, and the many travellers who delighted to spend a sabbatical year among foreigners.

So much, in the fullness of time, could be achieved, even without mechanical power, by a species gifted with high intelligence and immune from anti-social self-regard. But inevitably there came an end. A virus, whose subtle derangement of the glandular system was never suspected by a race still innocent of physiology, propagated throughout the world a mysterious fatigue. Century by century, agriculture withdrew from the hills and deserts, craftsmanship deteriorated, thought became stereotyped. And the vast lethargy produced a vast despond. At length the nations lost touch with one another, forgot one another, forgot their culture, crumbled into savage tribes. Once more Earth slept.

Many thousand years later, long after the disease was spent, several great peoples developed in isolation. When at last they made contact, they were so alien that in each there had to occur a difficult cultural revolution, not unaccompanied by bloodshed, before the world could once more feel as one. But this second world-order endured only a few centuries, for profound subconscious differences now made it impossible for the races to keep whole-heartedly loyal to each other. Religion finally severed the unity which all willed but none could trust. An heroic nation of monotheists sought to impose its faith on a vaguely pantheist world. For the first and last time the Second Men stumbled into a world-wide civil war; and just because the war was religious it developed a brutality hitherto unknown. With crude artillery, but with fanaticism, the two groups of citizen armies harried one another. The fields were laid waste, the cities burned, the rivers, and finally the winds, were poisoned. Long after that pitch of horror had been passed, at which an inferior species would have lost heart, these heroic madmen continued to organize destruction. And when at last the inevitable breakdown came, it was the more complete. In a sensitive species the devastating enlightenment which at last began to invade every mind, the overwhelming sense of treason against the human spirit, the tragic comicality of the whole struggle, sapped all energy. Not for thousands of years did the Second Men achieve once more a world-community. But they had learnt their lesson.

The third and most enduring civilization of the Second Men repeated the glorified medievalism of the first, and passed beyond it into a phase of brilliant natural science. Chemical fertilizers increased the crops, and therefore the world-population. Wind- and water-power was converted into electricity to supplement human and animal labour. At length, after many failures, it became possible to use volcanic and subterranean energy to drive dynamos. In a few years the whole physical character of civilization was transformed. Yet in this headlong passage into industrialism the Second Men escaped the errors of ancient Europe, America, and Patagonia. This was due partly to their greater gift of sympathy, which, save during the one great aberration of the religious war, made them all in a very vivid manner members one of another. But partly also it was due to their combination of a practical commonsense that was more than British, with a more than Russian immunity from the glamour of wealth, and a passion for the life of the mind that even Greece had never known. Mining and manufacture, even with plentiful electric power, were occupations scarcely less arduous than of old; but since each individual was implicated by vivid sympathy in the lives of all persons within his ken, there was little or no obsession with private economic power. The will to avoid industrial evils was effective, because sincere.

At its height, the culture of the Second Men was dominated by respect for the individual human personality. Yet contemporary individuals were regarded both as end and as means, as a stage towards far ampler individuals in the remote future. For, although they themselves were more long-lived than their predecessors, the Second Men were oppressed by the brevity of human life, and the pettiness of the individual’s achievement in comparison with the infinity round about him which awaited apprehension and admiration. Therefore they were determined to produce a race endowed with much greater natural longevity. Again, though they participated in one another far more than their predecessors, they themselves were dogged by despair at the distortion and error which spoiled every mind’s apprehension of others. Like their predecessors, they had passed through all the more naïve phases of self-consciousness and other-consciousness, and through idealizations of various modes of personality. They had admired the barbarian hero, the romantical, the sensitive-subtle, the bluff and hearty, the decadent, the bland, the severe. And they had concluded that each person, while being himself an expression of some one mode of personality, should seek to be also sensitive to every other mode. They even conceived that the ideal community should be knit into one mind by each unique individual’s direct telepathic apprehension of the experience of all his fellows. And the fact that this ideal seemed utterly unattainable wove through their whole culture a thread of darkness, a yearning for spiritual union, a horror of loneliness, which never seriously troubled their far more insulated predecessors.

This craving for union influenced the sexual life of the species. In the first place, so closely was the mental related to the physiological in their composition, that when there was no true union of minds, the sexual act failed to give conception. Casual sexual relations thus came to be regarded very differently from those which expressed a deeper intimacy. They were treated as a delightful embroidery on life, affording opportunity of much elegance, light-hearted tenderness, banter, and of course physical inebriation; but they were deemed to signify nothing more than the delight of friend in friend. Where there was a marriage of minds, but then only during the actual passion of communion, sexual intercourse almost always resulted in conception. Under these circumstances, intimate persons had often to practise contraception, but acquaintances never. And one of the most beneficial inventions of the psychologists was a technique of auto-suggestion, which, at will, either facilitated conception, or prevented it, surely, harmlessly, and without inaesthetic accompaniments.

The sexual morality of the Second Men passed through all the phases known to the First Men; but by the time that they had established a single world-culture it had a form not known before. Not only were both men and women encouraged to have as much casual sexual intercourse as they needed for their enrichment, but also, on the higher plane of spiritual union, strict monogamy was deprecated. For in sexual union of this higher kind they saw a symbol of that communion of minds which they longed to make universal. Thus the most precious gift that a lover could bring to the beloved was not virginity but sexual experience. The union, it was felt, was the more pregnant the more each party could contribute from previous sexual and spiritual intimacy with others. Yet, though as a principle monogamy was not applauded, the higher kind of union would in practice sometimes result in a life-long partnership. But since the average life was so much longer than among the First Men, such fortuitously perennial unions were often deliberately interrupted for a while, by a change of partners, and then restored with their vitality renewed. Sometimes, on the other hand, a group of persons of both sexes would maintain a composite and permanent marriage together. Sometimes such a group would exchange a member, or members, with another group, or disperse itself completely among other groups, to come together again years afterwards with enriched experience. In one form or another, this ‘marriage of groups’ was much prized, as an extension of the vivid sexual participation into an ampler sphere. Among the First Men the brevity of life made these novel forms of union impossible; for obviously no sexual, and no spiritual, relation can be developed with any richness in less than thirty years of close intimacy. It would be interesting to examine the social institutions of the Second Men at their zenith; but we have not time to spare for this subject, nor even for the brilliant intellectual achievements in which the species so far outstripped its predecessor. Obviously any account of the natural science and the philosophy of the Second Men would be unintelligible to readers of this book. Suffice it that they avoided the errors which had led the First Men into false abstraction, and into metaphysical theories which were at once sophisticated and naïve.

Not until after they had passed beyond the best work of the First Men in science and philosophy did the Second Men discover the remains of the great stone library in Siberia. A party of engineers happened upon it while they were preparing to sink a shaft for subterranean energy. The tablets were broken, disordered, weathered. Little by little, however, they were reconstructed and interpreted, with the aid of the pictorial dictionary. The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document. The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable. So little of the old world had survived the volcanic epoch that the Second Men had failed hitherto to get a clear picture of their predecessors.

One item alone in this archaeological treasure had more than historical interest. The biologist leader of the little party in Siberia had recorded much of the sacred text of the Life of the Divine Boy. At the end of the record came the prophet’s last words, which had so baffled Patagonia. This theme was full of meaning for the Second Men, as indeed it would have been even for the First Men in their prime. But whereas for the First Men the dispassionate ecstasy which the Boy had preached was rather an ideal than a fact of experience, the Second Men recognized in the prophet’s words an intuition familiar to themselves. Long ago the tortured geniuses of the Yang-tze cities had expressed this same intuition. Subsequently also it had often been experienced by the more healthy generations, but always with a certain shame. For it had become associated with morbid mentality. But now with growing conviction that it was wholesome, the Second Men had begun to grope for a wholesome expression of it. In the life and the last words of the remote apostle of youth they found an expression which was not wholly inadequate. The species was presently to be in sore need of this gospel.

The world-community reached at length a certain relative perfection and equilibrium. There was a long summer of social harmony, prosperity, and cultural embellishment. Almost all that could be done by mind in the stage to which it had then reached seemed to have been done. Generations of long-lived, eager, and mutually delightful beings succeeded one another. There was a widespread feeling that the time had come for man to gather all his strength for a flight into some new sphere of mentality. The present type of human being, it was recognized, was but a rough and incoherent natural product. It was time for man to take control of himself and remake himself upon a nobler pattern. With this end in view, two great works were set afoot, research into the ideal of human nature, and research into practical means of remaking human nature. Individuals in all lands, living their private lives, delighting in each other, keeping the tissue of society alive and vigorous, were deeply moved by the thought that their world-community was at last engaged upon this heroic task.

But elsewhere in the solar system life of a very different kind was seeking, in its own strange manner, ends incomprehensible to man, yet at bottom identical with his own ends. And presently the two were to come together, not in cooperation.

VIII The Martians

1. THE FIRST MARTIAN INVASION

UPON THE FOOTHILLS of the new and titanic mountains that were once the Hindu Kush, were many holiday centres, whence the young men and women of Asia were wont to seek Alpine dangers and hardships for their souls’ refreshment. It was in this district, and shortly after a summer dawn, that the Martians were first seen by men. Early walkers noticed that the sky had an unaccountably greenish tinge, and that the climbing sun, though free from cloud, was wan. Observers were presently surprised to see the green concentrate itself into a thousand tiny cloudlets, with clear blue between. Field-glasses revealed within each fleck of green some faint hint of a ruddy nucleus, and shifting strands of an infra-red colour, which would have been invisible to the earlier human race. These extraordinary specks of cloud were all of about the same size, the largest of them appearing smaller than the moon’s disc; but in form they varied greatly, and were seen to be changing their shapes more rapidly than the natural cirrus which they slightly resembled. In fact, though there was much that was cloud-like in their form and motion, there was also something definite about them, both in their features and behaviour, which suggested life. Indeed they were strongly reminiscent of primitive amoeboid organisms seen through a microscope.

The whole sky was strewn with them, here and there in concentrations of unbroken green, elsewhere more sparsely. And they were observed to be moving. A general drift of the whole celestial population was setting toward one of the snowy peaks that dominated the landscape. Presently the foremost individuals reached the mountain’s crest, and were seen to be creeping down the rock-face with a very slow amoeboid action.

Meanwhile a couple of aeroplanes, electrically driven, had climbed the sky to investigate the strange phenomenon at close quarters. They passed among the drifting cloudlets, and actually through many of them, without hindrance, and almost without being obscured from view.

On the mountain a vast swarm of the cloudlets was collecting, and creeping down the precipices and snow-fields into a high glacier valley. At a certain point, where the glacier dropped steeply to a lower level, the advance guard slowed down and stopped, while hosts of their fellows continued to pack in on them from behind. In half an hour the whole sky was once more clear, save for normal clouds; but upon the glacier lay what might almost have been an exceptionally dark solid-looking thundercloud, save for its green tinge and seething motion. For some minutes this strange object was seen to concentrate itself into a somewhat smaller bulk and become darker. Then it moved forward again, and passed over the cliffy end of the glacier into the pine-clad valley. An intervening ridge now hid it from its first observers.

Lower down the valley there was a village. Many of the inhabitants, when they saw the mysterious dense fume advancing upon them, took to their mechanical vehicles and fled; but some waited out of curiosity. They were swallowed up in a murky olive-brown fog, shot here and there with queer shimmering streaks of a ruddier tint. Presently there was complete darkness. Artificial lights were blotted out almost at arm’s length. Breathing became difficult. Throats and lungs were irritated. Every one was seized with a violent attack of sneezing and coughing. The cloud streamed through the village, and seemed to exercise irregular pressures upon objects, not always in the general direction of movement but sometimes in the opposite direction, as though it were getting a purchase upon human bodies and walls, and actually elbowing its way along. Within a few minutes the fog lightened; and presently it left the village behind it, save for a few strands and whiffs of its smoke-like substance, which had become entangled in side-streets and isolated. Very soon, however, these seemed to get themselves clear and hurry to overtake the main body.

When the gasping villagers had somewhat recovered, they sent a radio message to the little town lower down the valley, urging temporary evacuation. The message was not broadcast, but transmitted on a slender beam of rays. It so happened that the beam had to be directed through the noxious matter itself. While the message was being given, the cloud’s progress ceased, and its outlines became vague and ragged. Fragments of it actually drifted away on the wind and dissipated themselves. Almost as soon as the message was completed, the cloud began to define itself again, and lay for a quarter of an hour at rest. A dozen bold young men from the town now approached the dark mass out of curiosity. No sooner did they come face to face with it, round a bend in the valley, than the cloud rapidly contracted, till it was no bigger than a house. Looking now something between a dense, opaque fume and an actual jelly, it lay still until the party had ventured within a few yards. Evidently their courage failed, for they were seen to turn. But before they had retreated three paces, a long proboscis shot out of the main mass with the speed of a chameleon’s tongue, and enveloped them. Slowly it withdrew; but the young men had been gathered in with it. The cloud, or jelly, churned itself violently for some seconds, then ejected the bodies in a single chewed lump.

The murderous thing now elbowed itself along the road towards the town, leaned against the first house, crushed it, and proceeded to wander hither and thither, pushing everything down before it, as though it were a lava-stream. The inhabitants took to their heels, but several were licked up and slaughtered.

Powerful beam radiation was now poured into the cloud from all the neighbouring installations. Its destructive activity slackened, and once more it began to disintegrate and expand. Presently it streamed upwards as a huge column of smoke; and, at a great altitude, it dissipated itself again into a swarm of the original green cloudlets, noticeably reduced in numbers. These again faded into a uniform greenish tinge, which gradually vanished.

Thus ended the first invasion of the Earth from Mars.

2. LIFE ON MARS

OUR CONCERN IS with humanity, and with the Martians only in relation to men. But in order to understand the tragic intercourse of the two planets, it is necessary to glance at conditions on Mars, and conceive something of those fantastically different yet fundamentally similar beings, who were now seeking to possess man’s home.

To describe the biology, psychology, and history of a whole world in a few pages is as difficult as it would be to give the Martians themselves in the same compass a true idea of man. Encyclopaedias, libraries, would be needed in either case. Yet, somehow, I must contrive to suggest the alien sufferings and delights, and the many aeons of struggle, which went to the making of these strange non-human intelligences, in some ways so inferior yet in others definitely superior to the human species which they encountered.

Mars was a world whose mass was about one-tenth that of the earth. Gravity therefore had played a less tyrannical part in Martian than in terrestrial history. The weakness of Martian gravity combined with the paucity of the planet’s air envelope to make the general atmospheric pressure far lighter than on earth. Oxygen was far less plentiful. Water also was comparatively rare. There were no oceans or seas, but only shallow lakes and marshes, many of which dried up in summer. The climate of the planet was in general very dry, and yet very cold. Being without cloud, it was perennially bright with the feeble rays of a distant sun.

Earlier in the history of Mars, when there were more air, more water, and a higher temperature from internal heat, life had appeared in the coastal waters of the seas, and evolution had proceeded in much the same manner as on earth. Primitive life was differentiated into the fundamental animal and vegetable types. Multicellular structures appeared, and specialized themselves in diverse manners to suit diverse environments. A great variety of plant forms clothed the lands, often with forests of gigantic and slender-stemmed plumes. Mollusc-like and insect-like animals crept or swam, or shot themselves hither and thither in fantastic jumps. Huge spidery creatures of a type not wholly unlike crustaceans, or gigantic grasshoppers, bounded after their prey, and developed a versatility and cunning which enabled them to dominate the planet almost as, at a much later date, early man was to dominate the terrestrial wild.

But meanwhile a rapid loss of atmosphere, and especially of water-vapour, was changing Martian conditions beyond the limits of adaptability of this early fauna and flora. At the same time a very different kind of vital organization was beginning to profit by the change. On Mars, as on the Earth, life had arisen from one of many ‘subvital’ forms. The new type of life on Mars evolved from another of these subvital kinds of molecular organization, one which had hitherto failed to evolve at all, and had played an insignificant part, save occasionally as a rare virus in the respiratory organs of animals. These fundamental subvital units of organization were ultra-microscopic, and indeed far smaller than the terrestrial bacteria, or even the terrestrial viruses. They originally occurred in the marshy ponds, which dried up every spring, and became depressions of baked mud and dust. Certain of their species, borne into the air upon dust-particles, developed an extremely dry habit of life. They maintained themselves by absorbing chemicals from the wind-borne dust, and a very slight amount of moisture from the air. Also they absorbed sunlight by a photosynthesis almost identical with that of the plants.

To this extent they were similar to the other living things, but they had also certain capacities which the other stock had lost at the very outset of its evolutionary career. Terrestrial organisms, and Martian organisms of the terrestrial type, maintained themselves as vital unities by means of nervous systems, or other forms of material contact between parts. In the most developed forms, an immensely complicated neural ‘telephone’ system connected every part of the body with a vast central exchange, the brain. Thus on the earth a single organism was without exception a continuous system of matter, which maintained a certain constancy of form. But from the distinctively Martian subvital unit there evolved at length a very different kind of complex organism, in which material contact of parts was not necessary either to coordination of behaviour or unity of consciousness. These ends were achieved upon a very different physical basis. The ultra-microscopic subvital members were sensitive to all kinds of ethereal vibrations, directly sensitive, in a manner impossible to terrestrial life; and they could also initiate vibrations. Upon this basis Martian life developed at length the capacity of maintaining vital organization as a single conscious individual without continuity of living matter. Thus the typical Martian organism was a cloudlet, a group of free-moving members dominated by a ‘group-mind’. But in one species individuality came to inhere, for certain purposes, not in distinct cloudlets only, but in a great fluid system of cloudlets. Such was the single-minded Martian host which invaded the Earth.

The Martian organism depended, so to speak, not on ‘telephone’ wires, but on an immense crowd of mobile ‘wireless stations’, transmitting and receiving different wave-lengths according to their function. The radiation of a single unit was of course very feeble; but a great system of units could maintain contact with its wandering parts over a considerable distance.

One other important characteristic distinguished the dominant form of life on Mars. Just as a cell, in the terrestrial form of life, has often the power of altering its shape (whence the whole mechanism of muscular activity), so in the Martian form the free-floating ultra-microscopic unit might be specialized for generating around itself a magnetic field, and so either repelling or attracting its neighbours. Thus a system of materially disconnected units had a certain cohesion. Its consistency was something between a smoke-cloud and a very tenuous jelly. It had a definite though ever-changing contour and resistant surface. By massed mutual repulsions of its constituent units it could exercise pressure on surrounding objects; and in its most concentrated form the Martian cloud-jelly could bring to bear immense forces which could also be controlled for very delicate manipulation. Magnetic forces were also responsible for the mollusc-like motion of the cloud as a whole over the ground, and again for the transport of lifeless material and living units from region to region within the cloud.

The magnetic field of repulsion and attraction generated by a subvital unit was much more restricted than its field of ‘wireless’ communication. Similarly with organized systems of units. Thus each of the cloudlets which the Second Men saw in their sky was an independent motor unit; but also it was in a kind of ‘telepathic’ communication with all its fellows. Indeed in every public enterprise, such as the terrestrial campaigns, almost perfect unity of consciousness was maintained within the limits of a huge field of radiation. Yet only when the whole population concentrated itself into a small and relatively dense cloud-jelly, did it become a single magnetic motor unit. The Martians, it should be noted, had three possible forms, or formations, namely: first, an ‘open order’ of independent and very tenuous cloudlets in ‘telepathic’ communication, and often in strict unity as a group-mind; second, a more concentrated and less vulnerable corporate cloud; and third, an extremely concentrated and formidable cloud-jelly.

Save for these very remarkable characteristics, there was no really fundamental difference between the distinctively Martian and the distinctively terrestrial forms of life. The chemical basis of the former was somewhat more complicated than that of the latter; and selenium played a part in it, to which nothing corresponded in terrestrial life. The Martian organism, moreover, was unique in that it fulfilled within itself the functions of both animal and vegetable. But, save for these peculiarities, the two types of life were biochemically much the same. Both needed material from the ground, both needed sunlight. Each lived in the chemical changes occurring in its own ‘flesh’. Each, of course, tended to maintain itself as an organic unity. There was a certain difference, indeed, in respect of reproduction; for the Martian subvital units retained the power of growth and subdivision. Thus the birth of a Martian cloud arose from the subdivision of myriads of units within the parent cloud, followed by their ejection as a new individual. And, as the units were highly specialized for different functions, representatives of many types had to pass into the new cloud.

In the earliest stages of evolution on Mars the units had become independent of each other as soon as they parted in reproduction. But later the hitherto useless and rudimentary power of emitting radiation was specialized, so that, after reproduction, free individuals came to maintain radiant contact with one another, and to behave with ever-increasing coordination. Still later, these organized groups themselves maintained radiant contact with groups of their offspring, thus constituting larger individuals with specialized members. With each advance in complexity the sphere of radiant influence increased; until, at the zenith of Martian evolution, the whole planet (save for the remaining animal and vegetable representatives of the other and unsuccessful kind of life) constituted sometimes a single biological and psychological individual. But this occurred as a rule only in respect of matters which concerned the species as a whole. At most times the Martian individual was a cloudlet, such as those which first astonished the Second Men. But in great public crises each cloudlet would suddenly wake up to find himself the mind of the whole race, sensing through many individuals, and interpreting his sensations in the light of the experience of the whole race.

The life which dominated Mars was thus something between an extremely well-disciplined army of specialized units, and a body possessed by one mind. Like an army, it could take any form without destroying its organic unity. Like an army it was sometimes a crowd of free-wandering units, yet at other times also it disposed itself in very special orders to fulfil special functions. Like an army it was composed of free, experiencing individuals who voluntarily submitted themselves to discipline. On the other hand, unlike an army, it woke occasionally into unified consciousness.

The same fluctuation between individuality and multiplicity which characterized the race as a whole, characterized also each of the cloudlets themselves. Each was sometimes an individual, sometimes a swarm of more primitive individuals. But while the race rather seldom rose to full individuality, the cloudlets declined from it only in very special circumstances. Each cloudlet was an organization of specialized groups formed of minor specialized groups, which in turn were composed of the fundamental specialized varieties of subvital units. Each free-roving group of free-roving units constituted a special organ, fulfilling some particular function in the whole. Thus some were specialized for attraction and repulsion, some for chemical operations, some for storing the sun’s energy, some for emitting radiation, some for absorbing and storing water, some for special sensitivities, such as awareness of mechanical pressure and vibration, or temperature changes, or light rays. Others again were specialized to fulfil the function of the brain of man; but in a peculiar manner. The whole volume of the cloudlet vibrated with innumerable ‘wireless’ messages in very many wave-lengths from the different ‘organs’. It was the function of the ‘brain’ units to receive, and correlate, and interpret these messages in the light of past experience, and to initiate responses in the wave-lengths appropriate to the organs concerned.

All these subvital units, save a few types that were too highly specialized, were capable of independent life as air-borne bacteria or viruses. And whenever they lost touch with the radiation of the whole system, they continued to live their own simple lives until they were once more controlled. All were free-floating units, but normally they were under the influence of the cloudlet’s system of electro-magnetic fields, and were directed hither and thither for their special functions. And under this influence some of them might be held rigidly in position in relation to one another. Such was the case of the organs of sight. In early stages of evolution, some of the units had specialized for carrying minute globules of water. Later, much larger droplets were carried, millions of units holding between them a still microscopic globule of life’s most precious fluid. Ultimately this function was turned to good account in vision. Aqueous lenses as large as the eye of an ox were supported by a scaffolding of units; while, at focal length from the lens, a rigid retina of units was held in position. Thus the Martian could produce eyes of every variety whenever he wanted them, and telescopes and microscopes too. This production and manipulation of visual organs was of course largely subconscious, like the focusing mechanism in man. But latterly the Martians had greatly increased their conscious control of physiological processes; and it was this achievement which facilitated their remarkable optical triumphs.

One other physiological function we must note before considering the Martian psychology. The fully evolved, but as yet uncivilized, Martian had long ago ceased to depend for his chemicals on wind-borne volcanic dust. Instead, he rested at night on the ground, like a knee-high mist on terrestrial meadows, and projected specialized tubular groups of units into the soil, like rootlets. Part of the day also had to be occupied in this manner. Somewhat later this process was supplemented by devouring the declining plant-life of the planet. But the final civilized Martians had greatly improved their methods of exploiting the ground and the sunlight, both by mechanical means and by artificial specialization of their own organs. Even so, however, as their activities increased, these vegetable functions became an ever more serious problem for them. They practised agriculture; but only a very small area of the arid planet could be induced to bear. It was terrestrial water and terrestrial vegetation that finally determined them to make the great voyage.

3. THE MARTIAN MIND

THE MARTIAN MIND was of a very different type from the terrestrial, different, yet at bottom identical. In so strange a body, the mind was inevitably equipped with alien cravings, and alien manners of apprehending its environment. And with so different a history, it was confused by prejudices very unlike those of man. Yet it was none the less mind, concerned in the last resort with the maintenance and advancement of life, and the exercise of vital capacities. Fundamentally the Martian was like all other living beings, in that he delighted in the free working of his body and his mind. Yet superficially, he was as unlike man in mind as in body.

The most distinctive feature of the Martian, compared with man, was that his individuality was both far more liable to disruption, and at the same time immeasurably more capable of direct participation in the minds of other individuals. The human mind in its solid body maintained its unity and its dominance over its members in all normal circumstances. Only in disease was man liable to mental or physical dissociation. On the other hand, he was incapable of direct contact with other individuals, and the emergence of a ‘super-mind’ in a group of individuals was quite impossible. The Martian cloudlet, however, though he fell to pieces physically, and also mentally, far more readily than a man, might also at any moment wake up to be the intelligent mind of his race, might begin to perceive with the sense-organs of all other individuals, and experience thoughts and desires which were, so to speak, the resultant of all individual thoughts and desires upon some matter of general interest. But unfortunately, as I shall tell, the common mind of the Martians never woke into any order of mentality higher than that of the individual.

These differences between the Martian and the human psyche entailed characteristic advantages and disadvantages. The Martian, immune from man’s inveterate selfishness and spiritual isolation from his fellows, lacked the mental coherence, the concentrated attention and far-reaching analysis and synthesis, and again the vivid self-consciousness and relentless self-criticism, which even the First Men, at their best, had attained in some degree, and which in the Second Men were still more developed. The Martians, moreover, were hampered by being almost identical in character. They possessed perfect harmony; but only through being almost wholly in temperamental unison. They were all hobbled by their sameness to one another. They were without that rich diversity of personal character, which enabled the human spirit to cover so wide a field of mentality. This infinite variety of human nature entailed, indeed, endless wasteful and cruel personal conflicts in the first, and even to some extent in the second, species of man; but also it enabled every individual of developed sympathy to enrich his spirit by intercourse with individuals whose temperament, thought, and ideals differed from his own. And while the Martians were little troubled by internecine strife and the passion of hate, they were also almost wholly devoid of the passion of love. The Martians individual could admire, and be utterly faithful to, the object of his loyalty; but his admiration was given, not to concrete and uniquely charactered persons of the same order as himself, but at best to the vaguely conceived ‘spirit of the race’. Individuals like himself he regarded merely as instruments or organs of the ‘super-mind’.

This would not have been amiss, had the mind of the race, into which he so frequently awoke under the influence of the general radiation, been indeed a mind of higher rank than his own. But it was not. It was but a pooling of the percipience and thought and will of the cloudlets. Thus it was that the superb loyalty of the Martians was squandered upon something which was not greater than themselves in mental calibre, but only in mere bulk.

The Martian cloudlet, like the human animal, had a complex instinctive nature. By night and day, respectively, he was impelled to perform the vegetative functions of absorbing chemicals from the ground and energy from the sunlight. Air and water he also craved, though he dealt with them, of course, in his own manner. He had also his own characteristic instinctive impulses to move his ‘body’, both for locomotion and manipulation. Martian civilization provided an outlet for these cravings, both in the practice of agriculture and in intricate and wonderfully beautiful cloud-dances and gymnastics. For these perfectly supple beings rejoiced in executing aerial evolutions, flinging out wild rhythmical streamers, intertwining with one another in spirals, concentrating into opaque spheres, cubes, cones, and all sorts of fantastical volumes. Many of these movements and shapes had intense emotional significance for them in relation to the operations of their life, and were executed with a religious fervour and solemnity.

The Martian had also his impulses of fear and pugnacity. In the remote past these had often been directed against hostile members of his own species; but since the race had become unified, they found exercise only upon other types of life and upon inanimate nature. Instinctive gregariousness was, of course, extremely developed in the Martian at the expense of instinctive self-assertion. Sexuality the Martian had not; there were not partners in reproduction. But his impulse to merge physically and mentally with other individuals, and wake up as the super-mind, had in it much that was characteristic of sex in man. Parental impulses, of a kind, he knew; but they were scarcely worthy of the name. He cared only to eject excessive living matter from his system, and to keep en rapport with the new individual thus formed, as he would with any other individual. He knew no more of the human devotion to children as budding personalities than of the subtle intercourse of male and female temperaments. By the time of the first invasion, however, reproduction had been greatly restricted; for the planet was fully populated, and each individual cloudlet was potentially immortal. Among the Martians there was no ‘natural death’, no spontaneous death through mere senility. Normally the cloudlet’s members kept themselves in repair indefinitely by the reproduction of their constituent units. Diseases, indeed, were often fatal. And chief among them was a plague, corresponding to terrestrial cancer, in which the subvital units lost their sensitivity to radiation, so that they proceeded to live as primitive organisms and reproduce without restraint. As they also became parasitic on the unaffected units, the cloudlet inevitably died.

Like the higher kinds of terrestrial mammal, the Martians had strong impulses of curiosity. Having also many practical needs to fulfil as a result of their civilization, and being extremely well equipped by nature for physical experiment and microscopy, they had gone far in the natural sciences. In physics, astronomy, chemistry, and even in the chemistry of life, man had nothing to teach them.

The vast corpus of Martian knowledge had taken many thousands of years to grow. All its stages, and its current achievements, were recorded on immense scrolls of paper made from vegetable pulp, and stored in libraries of stone. For the Martians, curiously enough, had become great masons, and had covered much of their planet with buildings of feathery and toppling design, such as would have been quite impossible on earth. They had no need of buildings for habitation, save in the arctic regions; but as workshops, granaries, and store rooms of all sorts, buildings had become very necessary to the Martians. Moreover these extremely tenuous creatures took a peculiar joy in manipulating solids. Even their most utilitarian architecture blossomed with a sort of gothic or arabesque ornateness and fantasy, wherein the ethereal seemed to torture the substance of solid rock into its own likeness.

At the time of the invasion, the Martians were still advancing intellectually; and, indeed, it was through an achievement in theoretical physics that they were able to leave their planet. They had long known that minute particles at the upper limit of the atmosphere might be borne into space by the pressure of the sun’s rays at dawn and sunset. And at length they discovered how to use this pressure as the wind is used in sailing. Dissipating themselves into their ultra-microscopic units, they contrived to get a purchase on the gravitational fields of the solar system, as a boat’s keel and rudder get a purchase on the water. Thus they were able to tack across to the earth as an armada of ultra-microscopic vessels. Arrived in the terrestrial sky, they re-formed themselves as cloudlets, swam through the dense air to the alpine summit, and climbed downwards, as a swimmer may climb down a ladder under water.

This achievement involved very intricate calculations and chemical inventions, especially for the preservation of life in transit and on an alien planet. It could never have been done save by beings with far-reaching and accurate knowledge of the physical world. But though in respect of ‘natural knowledge’ the Martians were so well advanced, they were extremely backward in all those spheres which may be called ‘spiritual knowledge’. They had little understanding of their own mentality, and less of the place of mind in the cosmos. Though in a sense a highly intelligent species, they were at the same time wholly lacking in philosophical interest. They scarcely conceived, still less tackled, the problems which even the First Men had faced so often, though so vainly. For the Martians there was no mystery in the distinction between reality and appearance or in the relation of the one and the many, or in the status of good and evil. Nor were they ever critical of their own ideals. They aimed whole-heartedly at the advancement of the Martian super-individual. But what should constitute individuality, and its advancement, they never seriously considered. And the idea that they were under obligation also towards beings not included in the Martian system of radiation, proved wholly beyond them. For, though so clever, they were the most naïve of self-deceivers, and had no insight to see what it is that is truly desirable.

4. DELUSIONS OF THE MARTIANS

TO UNDERSTAND HOW the Martians tricked themselves, and how they were finally undone by their own insane will, we must glance at their history.

The civilized Martians constituted the sole remaining variety of a species. That species itself, in the remote past, had competed with, and exterminated, many other species of the same general type. Aided by the changing climate, it had also exterminated almost all the species of the more terrestrial kind of fauna, and had thereby much reduced the vegetation which it was subsequently to need and foster so carefully. This victory of the species had been due partly to its versatility and intelligence, partly to a remarkable zest in ferocity, partly to its unique powers of radiation and sensitivity to radiation, which enabled it to act with a coordination impossible even to the most gregarious of animals. But, as with other species in biological history, the capacity by which it triumphed became at length a source of weakness. When the species reached a stage corresponding to primitive human culture, one of its races, achieving a still higher degree of radiant intercourse and physical unity, was able to behave as a single vital unit; and so it succeeded in exterminating all its rivals. Racial conflict had persisted for many thousands of years, but as soon as the favoured race had developed this almost absolute solidarity of will, its victory was sweeping, and was clinched by joyous massacre of the enemy.

But ever afterwards the Martians suffered from the psychological effects of their victory at the close of the epoch of racial wars. The extreme brutality with which the other races had been exterminated conflicted with the generous impulses which civilization had begun to foster, and left a scar upon the conscience of the victors. In self-defence they persuaded themselves that since they were so much more admirable than the rest, the extermination was actually a sacred duty. And their unique value, they said, consisted in their unique radiational development. Hence arose a gravely insincere tradition and culture, which finally ruined the species. They had long believed that the physical basis of consciousness must necessarily be a system of units directly sensitive to ethereal vibrations, and that organisms dependent on the physical contact of their parts were too gross to have any experience whatever. After the age of the racial massacres they sought to persuade themselves that the excellence, or ethical worth, of any organism depended upon the degree of complexity and unity of its radiation. Century by century they strengthened their faith in this vulgar doctrine, and developed also a system of quite irrational delusions and obsessions based upon an obsessive and passionate lust in radiation.

It would take too long to tell of all these subsidiary fantasies, and of the ingenious ways in which they were reconciled with the main body of sane knowledge. But one at least must be mentioned, because of the part it played in the struggle with man. The Martians knew, of course, that ‘solid matter’ was solid by virtue of the interlocking of the minute electro-magnetic systems called atoms. Now rigidity had for them somewhat the same significance and prestige that air, breath, spirit, had for early man. It was in the quasi-solid form that Martians were physically most potent; and the maintenance of this form was exhausting and difficult. These facts combined in the Martian consciousness with the knowledge that rigidity was after all the outcome of interlocked electro-magnetic systems. Rigidity was thus endowed with a peculiar sanctity. The superstition was gradually consolidated, by a series of psychological accidents, into a fanatical admiration of all very rigid materials, but especially of hard crystals, and above all of diamonds. For diamonds were extravagantly resistant; and at the same time, as the Martians themselves put it, diamonds were superb jugglers with the ethereal radiation called light. Every diamond was therefore a supreme embodiment of the tense energy and eternal equilibrium of the cosmos, and must be treated with reverence. In Mars, all known diamonds were exposed to sunlight on the pinnacles of sacred buildings; and the thought that on the neighbour planet might be diamonds which were not properly treated, was one motive of the invasion.

Thus did the Martian mind, unwittingly side-tracked from its true development, fall sick, and strive ever more fanatically towards mere phantoms of its goal. In the early stages of the disorder, radiation was merely regarded as an infallible sign of mentality, and radiative complexity was taken as an infallible measure, merely, of spiritual worth. But little by little, radiation and mentality failed to be distinguished, and radiative organization was actually mistaken for spiritual worth.

In this obsession the Martians resembled somewhat the First Men during their degenerate phase of servitude to the idea of movement; but with a difference. For the Martian intelligence was still active, though its products were severely censored in the name of the ‘spirit of the race’. Every Martian was a case of dual personality. Not merely was he sometimes a private consciousness, sometimes the consciousness of the race, but further, even as a private individual he was in a manner divided against himself. Though his practical allegiance to the super-individual was absolute, so that he condemned or ignored all thoughts and impulses that could not be assimilated to the public consciousness, he did in fact have such thoughts and impulses, as it were in the deepest recesses of his being. He very seldom noticed that he was having them, and whenever he did notice it, he was shocked and terrified; yet he did have them. They constituted an intermittent, sometimes almost a continuous, critical commentary on all his more reputable experience.

This was the great tragedy of the spirit on Mars. The Martians were in many ways extremely well equipped for mental progress and for true spiritual adventure, but through a trick of fortune which had persuaded them to prize above all else unity and uniformity, they were driven to thwart their own struggling spirits at every turn.

Far from being superior to the private mind, the public mind which obsessed every Martian was in many ways actually inferior. It had come into dominance in a crisis which demanded severe military coordination; and though, since that remote age, it had made great intellectual progress, it remained at heart a military mind. Its disposition was something between that of a field-marshal and the God of the ancient Hebrews. A certain English philosopher once described and praised the fictitious corporate personality of the state, and named it ‘Leviathan’. The Martian super-individual was Leviathan endowed with consciousness. In this consciousness there was nothing but what was easily assimilated and in accord with tradition. Thus the public mind was always intellectually and culturally behind the times. Only in respect of practical social organization did it keep abreast of its own individuals. Intellectual progress had always been initiated by private individuals, and had only penetrated the public mind when the mass of individuals had been privately infected by intercourse with the pioneers. The public consciousness itself initiated progress only in the sphere of social, military, and economic organization.

The novel circumstances which were encountered on the earth put the mentality of the Martians to a supreme test. For the unique enterprise of tackling a new world demanded the extremes of both public and private activity, and so led to agonizing conflicts within each private mind. For, while the undertaking was essentially social and even military, and necessitated very strict coordination and unity of action, the extreme novelty of the new environment demanded all the resources of the untrammelled private consciousness. Moreover the Martians encountered much on the earth which made nonsense of their fundamental assumptions. And in their brightest moment of private consciousness they sometimes recognized this fact.

IX Earth and Mars

1. THE SECOND MEN AT BAY

SUCH WERE THE beings that invaded the earth when the Second Men were gathering their strength for a great venture in artificial evolution. The motives of the invasion were both economic and religious. The Martians sought water and vegetable matter; but they came also in a crusading spirit, to ‘liberate’ the terrestrial diamonds.

Conditions on the earth were very unfavourable to the invaders. Excessive gravitation troubled them less than might have been expected. Only in their most concentrated form did they find it oppressive. More harmful was the density of the terrestrial atmosphere, which constricted the tenuous animate cloudlets very painfully, hindering their vital processes, and deadening all their movements. In their native atmosphere they swam hither and thither with ease and considerable speed; but the treacly air of the earth hampered them as a bird’s wings are hampered under water. Moreover, owing to their extreme buoyancy as individual cloudlets, they were scarcely able to dive down so far as the mountain-tops. Excessive oxygen was also a source of distress; it tended to put them into a violent fever, which they had only been able to guard against very imperfectly. Even more damaging was the excessive moisture of the atmosphere, both through its solvent effect upon certain factors in the subvital units, and because heavy rain interfered with the physiological processes of the cloudlets and washed many of their materials to the ground.

The invaders had also to cope with the tissue of ‘radio’ messages that constantly enveloped the planet, and tended to interfere with their own organic systems of radiation. They were prepared for this to some extent; but ‘beam wireless’ at close range surprised, bewildered, tortured, and finally routed them; so that they fled back to Mars, leaving many of their number disintegrated in the terrestrial air.

But the pioneering army (or individual, for throughout the adventure it maintained unity of consciousness) had much to report at home. As was expected, there was rich vegetation, and water was even too abundant. There were solid animals, of the type of the prehistoric Martian fauna, but mostly two-legged and erect. Experiment had shown that these creatures died when they were pulled to pieces, and that though the sun’s rays affected them by setting up chemical action in their visual organs, they had no really direct sensitivity to radiation. Obviously, therefore, they must be unconscious. On the other hand, the terrestrial atmosphere was permanently alive with radiation of a violent and incoherent type. It was still uncertain whether these crude ethereal agitations were natural phenomena, mere careless offshoots of the cosmic mind, or whether they were emitted by a terrestrial organism. There was reason to suppose this last to be the case, and that the solid organisms were used by some hidden terrestrial intelligence as instruments; for there were buildings, and many of the bipeds were found within the buildings. Moreover, the sudden violent concentration of beam radiation upon the Martian cloud suggested purposeful and hostile behaviour. Punitive action had therefore been taken, and many buildings and bipeds had been destroyed. The physical basis of such a terrestrial intelligence was still to be discovered. It was certainly not in the terrestrial clouds, for these had turned out to be insensitive to radiation. Anyhow, it was obviously an intelligence of very low order, for its radiation was scarcely at all systematic, and was indeed excessively crude. One or two unfortunate diamonds had been found in a building. There was no sign that they were properly venerated.

The Terrestrials, on their side, were left in complete bewilderment by the extraordinary events of that day. Some had jokingly suggested that since the strange substance had behaved in a manner obviously vindictive, it must have been alive and conscious; but no one took the suggestion seriously. Clearly, however, the thing had been dissipated by beam radiation. That at least was an important piece of practical knowledge. But theoretical knowledge about the real nature of the clouds, and their place in the order of the universe, was for the present wholly lacking. To a race of strong cognitive interest and splendid scientific achievement, this ignorance was violently disturbing. It seemed to shake the foundations of the great structure of knowledge. Many frankly hoped, in spite of the loss of life in the first invasion, that there would soon be another opportunity for studying these amazing objects, which were not quite gaseous and not quite solid, not (apparently) organic, yet capable of behaving in a manner suggestive of life. An opportunity was soon afforded.

Some years after the first invasion, the Martians appeared again, and in far greater force. This time, moreover, they were almost immune from man’s offensive radiation. Operating simultaneously from all the alpine regions of the earth, they began to dry up the great rivers at their sources; and, venturing further afield, they spread over jungle and agricultural land, and stripped off every leaf. Valley after valley was devastated as though by endless swarms of locusts, so that in whole countries there was not a green blade left. The booty was carried off to Mars. Myriads of the subvital units, specialized for transport of water and food materials, were loaded each with a few molecules of the treasure, and dispatched to the home planet. The traffic continued indefinitely. Meanwhile the main body of the Martians proceeded to explore and loot. They were irresistible. For the absorption of water and leafage, they spread over the countryside as an impalpable mist which man had no means to dispel. For the destruction of civilization, they became armies of gigantic cloud-jellies, far bigger than the brute which had formed itself during the earlier invasion. Cities were knocked down and flattened, human beings masticated into pulp. Man tried weapon after weapon in vain.

Presently the Martians discovered the sources of terrestrial radiation in the innumerable wireless transmitting stations. Here at last was the physical basis of the terrestrial intelligence! But what a lowly creature! What a caricature of life! Obviously in respect of complexity and delicacy of organization these wretched immobile systems of glass, metal, and vegetable compounds were not to be compared with the Martian cloud. Their only feat seemed to be that they had managed to get control of the unconscious bipeds who tended them.

In the course of their explorations the Martians also discovered a few more diamonds. The second human species had outgrown the barbaric lust for jewellery; but they recognized the beauty of gems and precious metals, and used them as badges of office. Unfortunately, the Martians, in sacking a town, came upon a woman who was wearing a large diamond between her breasts; for she was mayor of the town, and in charge of the evacuation. That the sacred stone should be used thus, apparently for the mere identification of cattle, shocked the invaders even more than the discovery of fragments of diamonds in certain cutting-instruments. The war now began to be waged with all the heroism and brutality of a crusade. Long after a rich booty of water and vegetable matter had been secured, long after the Terrestrials had developed an effective means of attack, and were slaughtering the Martian clouds with high-tension electricity in the form of artificial lightning flashes, the misguided fanatics stayed on to rescue the diamonds and carry them away to the mountain-tops, where, years afterwards, climbers discovered them, arranged along the rock-edges in glittering files, like sea-bird’s eggs. Thither the dying remnant of the Martian host had transported them with its last strength, scorning to save itself before the diamonds were borne into the pure mountain air, to be lodged with dignity. When the Second Men learned of this great hoard of diamonds, they began to be seriously persuaded that they had been dealing, not with a freak of physical nature, nor yet (as some said) with swarms of bacteria, but with organisms of a higher order. For how could the jewels have been singled out, freed from their metallic settings, and so carefully regimented on the rocks, save by conscious purpose? The murderous clouds must have had at least the pilfering mentality of jackdaws, since evidently they had been fascinated by the treasure. But the very action which revealed their consciousness suggested also that they were no more intelligent than the merely instinctive animals. There was no opportunity of correcting this error, since all the clouds had been destroyed.

The struggle had lasted only a few months. Its material effects on Man were serious but not insurmountable. Its immediate psychological effect was invigorating. The Second Men had long been accustomed to a security and prosperity that were almost utopian. Suddenly they were overwhelmed by a calamity which was quite unintelligible in terms of their own systematic knowledge. Their predecessors, in such a situation, would have behaved with their own characteristic vacillation between the human and the subhuman. They would have contracted a fever of romantic loyalty, and have performed many random acts of secretly self-regarding self-sacrifice. They would have sought profit out of the public disaster, and howled at all who were more fortunate than themselves. They would have cursed their gods, and looked for more useful ones. But also, in an incoherent manner, they would sometimes have behaved reasonably, and would even have risen now and again to the standards of the Second Men. Wholly unused to large-scale human bloodshed, these more developed beings suffered an agony of pity for their mangled fellows. But they said nothing about their pity, and scarcely noticed their own generous grief; for they were busy with the work of rescue. Suddenly confronted with the need of extreme loyalty and courage, they exulted in complying, and experienced that added keenness of spirit which comes when danger is well faced. But it did not occur to them that they were bearing themselves heroically; for they thought they were merely behaving reasonably, showing commonsense. And if any one failed in a tight place, they did not call him coward, but gave him a drug to clear his head; or, if that failed, they put him under a doctor. No doubt, among the First Men such a policy would not have been justified, for these bewildered beings had not the clear and commanding vision which kept all sane members of the second species constant in loyalty.

The immediate psychological effect of the disaster was that it afforded this very noble race healthful exercise for its great reserves of loyalty and heroism. Quite apart from this immediate invigoration, however, the first agony, and those many others which were to follow, influenced the Second Men for good and ill in a train of effects which may be called spiritual. They had long known very well that the universe was one in which there could be not only private but also great public tragedies; and their philosophy did not seek to conceal this fact. Private tragedy they were able to face with a bland fortitude, and even an ecstasy of acceptance, such as the earlier species had but rarely attained. Public tragedy, even world-tragedy, they declared should be faced in the same spirit. But to know world-tragedy in the abstract, is very different from the direct acquaintance with it. And now the Second Men, even while they held their attention earnestly fixed upon the practical work of defence, were determined to absorb this tragedy into the very depths of their being, to scrutinize it fearlessly, savour it, digest it, so that its fierce potency should henceforth be added to them. Therefore they did not curse their gods, nor supplicate them. They said to themselves, ‘Thus, and thus, and thus, is the world. Seeing the depth we shall see also the height; and we shall praise both.’

But their schooling was yet scarcely begun. The Martian invaders were all dead, but their subvital units were dispersed over the planet as a virulent ultra-microscopic dust. For, though as members of the living cloud they could enter the human body without doing permanent harm, now that they were freed from their functions within the higher organic system, they became a predatory virus. Breathed into man’s lungs, they soon adapted themselves to the new environment, and threw his tissues into disorder. Each cell that they entered overthrew its own constitution, like a state which the enemy has successfully infected with lethal propaganda through a mere handful of agents. Thus, though man was temporarily victor over the Martian super-individual, his own vital units were poisoned and destroyed by the subvital remains of his dead enemy. A race whose physique had been as Utopian as its body politic, was reduced to timid invalidity. And it was left in possession of a devastated planet. The loss of water proved negligible; but the destruction of vegetation in all the war areas produced for a while a world famine such as the Second Men had never known. And the material fabric of civilization had been so broken that many decades would have to be spent in rebuilding it.

But the physical damage proved far less serious than the physiological. Earnest research discovered, indeed, a means of checking the infection; and, after a few years of rigorous purging the atmosphere and man’s flesh were clean once more. But the generations that had been stricken never recovered; their tissues had been too seriously corroded. Little by little, of course, there arose a fresh population of undamaged men and women. But it was a small population; for the fertility of the stricken had been much reduced. Thus the earth was now occupied by a small number of healthy persons below middle-age and a very large number of ageing invalids. For many years these cripples had contrived to carry on the work of the world in spite of their frailty, but gradually they began to fail both in endurance and competence. For they were rapidly losing their grip on life, and sinking into a long-drawn-out senility, from which the Second Men had never before suffered; and at the same time the young, forced to take up work for which they were not equipped, committed all manner of blunders and crudities of which their elders would never have been guilty. But such was the general standard of mentality in the second human species, that what might have been an occasion for recrimination produced an unparalleled example of human loyalty at its best. The stricken generations decided almost unanimously that whenever an individual was declared by his generation to have outlived his competence, he should commit suicide. The younger generations, partly through affection, partly through dread of their own incompetence, were at first earnestly opposed to this policy. ‘Our elders’, one young man said, ‘may have declined in vigour, but they are still beloved, and still wise. We dare not carry on without them.’ But the elders maintained their point. Many members of the rising generation were no longer juveniles. And, if the body politic was to survive the economic crisis, it must now ruthlessly cut out all its damaged tissues. Accordingly the decision was carried out. One by one, as occasion demanded, the stricken ‘chose the peace of annihilation,’ leaving a scanty, inexperienced, but vigorous, population to rebuild what had been destroyed.

Four centuries passed, and then again the Martian clouds appeared in the sky. Once more devastation and slaughter. Once more a complete failure of the two mentalities to conceive one another. Once more the Martians were destroyed. Once more the pulmonary plague, the slow purging, a crippled population, and generous suicide.

Again, and again they appeared, at irregular intervals for fifty thousand years. On each occasion the Martians came irresistibly fortified against whatever weapon humanity had last used against them. And so, by degrees, men began to recognize that the enemy was no merely instinctive brute, but intelligent. They therefore made attempts to get in touch with these alien minds, and make overtures for a peaceful settlement. But since obviously the negotiations had to be performed by human beings, and since the Martians always regarded human beings as the mere cattle of the terrestrial intelligence, the envoys were always either ignored or destroyed.

During each invasion the Martians contrived to dispatch a considerable bulk of water to Mars. And every time, not satisfied with this material gain, they stayed too long crusading, until man had found a weapon to circumvent their new defences; and then they were routed. After each invasion man’s recovery was slower and less complete, while Mars, in spite of the loss of a large proportion of its population, was in the long run invigorated with the extra water.

2. THE RUIN OF TWO WORLDS

RATHER MORE THAN fifty thousand years after their first appearance, the Martians secured a permanent footing on the Antarctic tableland and overran Australasia and South Africa. For many centuries they remained in possession of a large part of the earth’s surface, practising a kind of agriculture, studying terrestrial conditions, and spending much energy on the ‘liberation’ of diamonds.

During the considerable period before their settlement their mentality had scarcely changed; but actual habitation of the earth now began to undermine their self-complacency and their unity. It was borne in upon certain exploring Martians that the terrestrial bipeds, though insensitive to radiation, were actually the intelligences of the planet. At first this fact was studiously shunned, but little by little it gripped the attention of all terrestrial Martians. At the same time they began to realize that the whole work of research into terrestrial conditions, and even the social construction of their colony, depended, not on the public mind, but on private individuals, acting in their private capacity. The colonial super-individual inspired only the diamond crusade, and the attempt to extirpate the terrestrial intelligence, or radiation. These various novel acts of insight woke the Martian colonists from an age-long dream. They saw that their revered super-individual was scarcely more than the least common measure of themselves, a bundle of atavistic fantasies and cravings, knit into one mind and gifted with a certain practical cunning. A rapid and bewildering spiritual renascence now came over the whole Martian colony. The central doctrine of it was that what was valuable in the Martian species was not radiation but mentality. These two utterly different things had been confused, and even identified, since the dawn of Martian civilization. At last they were clearly distinguished. A fumbling but sincere study of mind now began; and distinction was even made between the humbler and loftier mental activities.

There is no telling whither this renascence might have led, had it run its course. Possibly in time the Martians might have recognized worth even in minds other than Martian minds. But such a leap was at first far beyond them. Though they now understood that human animals were conscious and intelligent, they regarded them with no sympathy, rather indeed, with increased hostility. They still rendered allegiance to the Martian race, or brotherhood, just because it was in a sense one flesh, and, indeed, one mind. For they were concerned not to abolish but to recreate the public mind of the colony, and even that of Mars itself.

But the colonial public mind still largely dominated them in their more somnolent periods, and actually sent some of those who, in their private phases, were revolutionaries across to Mars for help against the revolutionary movement. The home planet was quite untouched by the new ideas. Its citizens cooperated whole-heartedly in an attempt to bring the colonists to their senses. But in vain. The colonial public mind itself changed its character as the centuries passed, until it became seriously alienated from Martian orthodoxy. Presently, indeed, it began to undergo a very strange and thorough metamorphosis, from which, conceivably, it might have emerged as the noblest inhabitant of the solar system. Little by little it fell into a kind of hypnotic trance. That is to say, it ceased to possess the attention of its private members, yet remained as a unity of their subconscious, or unnoticed mentality. Radiational unity of the colony was maintained, but only in this subconscious manner; and it was at that depth that the great metamorphosis began to take place under the fertilizing influence of the new ideas; which, so to speak, were generated in the tempest of the fully conscious mental revolution, and kept on spreading down into the oceanic depth of the subconsciousness. Such a condition was likely to produce in time the emergence of a qualitatively new and finer mentality, and to waken at last into a fully conscious super-individual of higher order than its own members. But meanwhile this trance of the public consciousness incapacitated the colony for that prompt and coordinated action which had been the most successful faculty of Martian life. The public mind of the home planet easily destroyed its disorderly offspring, and set about re-colonizing the earth.

Several times during the next three hundred thousand years this process repeated itself. The changeless and terribly efficient super-individual of Mars extirpated its own offspring on the earth, before it could emerge from the chrysalis. And the tragedy might have been repeated indefinitely, but for certain changes that took place in humanity.

The first few centuries after the foundation of the Martian colony had been spent in ceaseless war. But at last, with terribly reduced resources, the Second Men had reconciled themselves to the fact that they must live in the same world with their mysterious enemy. Moreover, constant observation of the Martians began to restore somewhat man’s shattered self-confidence. For during the fifty thousand years before the Martian colony was founded his opinion of himself had been undermined. He had formerly been used to regarding himself as the sun’s ablest child. Then suddenly a stupendous new phenomenon had defeated his intelligence. Slowly he had learned that he was at grips with a determined and versatile rival, and that this rival hailed from a despised planet. Slowly he had been forced to suspect that he himself was outclassed, outshone, by a race whose very physique was incomprehensible to man. But after the Martians had established a permanent colony, human scientists began to discover the real physiological nature of the Martian organism, and were comforted to find that it did not make nonsense of human science. Man also learned that the Martians, though very able in certain spheres, were not really of a high mental type. These discoveries restored human self-confidence. Man settled down to make the best of the situation. Impassable barriers of high-power electric current were devised to keep the Martians out of human territory, and men began patiently to rebuild their ruined homes as best they could. At first there was little respite from the crusading zeal of the Martians, but in the second millennium this began to abate, and the two races left one another alone, save for occasional revivals of Martian fervour. Human civilization was at last reconstructed and consolidated, though upon a modest scale. Once more, though interrupted now and again by decades of agony, human beings lived in peace and relative prosperity. Life was somewhat harder than formerly, and the physique of the race was definitely less reliable than of old; but men and women still enjoyed conditions which most nations of the earlier species would have envied. The age of ceaseless personal sacrifice in service of the stricken community had ended at last. Once more a wonderful diversity of untrammelled personalities was put forth. Once more the minds of men and women were devoted without hindrance to the joy of skilled work, and all the subtleties of personal intercourse. Once more the passionate interest in one’s fellows, which had for so long been hushed under the all-dominating public calamity, refreshed and enlarged the mind. Once more there was music, sweet, and backward-hearkening towards a golden past. Once more a wealth of literature, and of the visual arts. Once more intellectual exploration into the nature of the physical world and the potentiality of mind. And once more the religious experience, which had for so long been coarsened and obscured by all the violent distractions and inevitable self-deceptions of war, seemed to be refining itself under the influence of reawakened culture.

In such circumstances the earlier and less sensitive human species might well have prospered indefinitely. Not so the Second Men. For their very refinement of sensibility made them incapable of shunning an ever-present conviction that in spite of all their prosperity they were undermined. Though superficially they seemed to be making a slow but heroic recovery they were at the same time suffering from a still slower and far more profound spiritual decline. Generation succeeded generation. Society became almost perfected, within its limited territory and its limitations of material wealth. The capacities of personality were developed with extreme subtlety and richness. At last the race proposed to itself once more its ancient project of remaking human nature upon a loftier plane. But somehow it had no longer the courage and self-respect for such work. And so, though there was much talk, nothing was done. Epoch succeeded epoch, and everything human remained apparently the same. Like a twig that has been broken but not broken off, man settled down to retain his life and culture, but could make no progress.

It is almost impossible to describe in a few words the subtle malady of the spirit that was undermining the Second Men. To say that they were suffering from an inferiority complex, would not be wholly false, but it would be a misleading vulgarization of the truth. To say that they had lost faith, both in themselves and in the universe, would be almost as inadequate. Crudely stated, their trouble was that, as a species, they had attempted a certain spiritual feat beyond the scope of their still-primitive nature. Spiritually they had over-reached themselves, broken every muscle (so to speak) and incapacitated themselves for any further effort. For they had determined to see their own racial tragedy as a thing of beauty, and they had failed. It was the obscure sense of this defeat that had poisoned them. For, being in many respects a very noble species, they could not simply turn their backs upon their failure and pursue the old way of life with the accustomed zest and thoroughness.

During the earliest Martian raids, the spiritual leaders of humanity had preached that the disaster must be an occasion for a supreme religious experience. While striving mightily to save their civilization, men must yet (so it was said) learn not merely to endure, but to admire, even the sternest issue. ‘Thus and thus is the world. Seeing the depth, we shall see also the height, and praise both.’ The whole population had accepted this advice. At first they had seemed to succeed. Many noble literary expressions were given forth, which seemed to define and elaborate, and even actually to create in men’s hearts, this supreme experience. But as the centuries passed and the disasters were repeated, men began to fear that their forefathers had deceived themselves. Those remote generations had earnestly longed to feel the racial tragedy as a factor in the cosmic beauty; and at last they had persuaded themselves that this experience had actually befallen them. But their descendants were slowly coming to suspect that no such experience had ever occurred, that it would never occur to any man, and that there was in fact no such cosmic beauty to be experienced. The First Men would probably, in such a situation, have swung violently either into spiritual nihilism, or else into some comforting religious myth. At any rate, they were of too coarse-grained a nature to be ruined by a trouble so impalpable. Not so the Second Men. For they realized all too clearly that they were faced with the supreme crux of existence. And so, age after age the generations clung desperately to the hope that, if only they could endure a little longer, the light would break in on them. Even after the Martian colony had been three times established and destroyed by the orthodox race in Mars, the supreme preoccupation of the human species was with this religious crux. But afterwards, and very gradually, they lost heart. For it was borne in on them that either they themselves were by nature too obtuse to perceive this ultimate excellence of things (an excellence which they had strong reason to believe in intellectually, although they could not actually experience it), or the human race had utterly deceived itself, and the course of cosmic events after all was not significant, but a meaningless rigmarole.

It was this dilemma that poisoned them. Had they been still physically in their prime, they might have found fortitude to accept it, and proceed to the patient exfoliation of such very real excellences as they were still capable of creating. But they had lost the vitality which alone could perform such acts of spiritual abnegation. All the wealth of personality, all the intricacies of personal relationship, all the complex enterprise of a very great community, all art, all intellectual research, had lost their savour. It is remarkable that a purely religious disaster should have warped even the delight of lovers in one another’s bodies, actually taken the flavour out of food, and drawn a veil between the sunbather and the sun. But individuals of this species, unlike their predecessors, were so closely integrated, that none of their functions could remain healthy while the highest was disordered. Moreover, the general slight failure of physique, which was the legacy of age-long war, had resulted in a recurrence of those shattering brain disorders which had dogged the earliest races of their species. The very horror of the prospect of racial insanity increased their aberration from reasonableness. Little by little, shocking perversions of desire began to terrify them. Masochistic and sadistic orgies alternated with phases of extravagant and ghastly revelry. Acts of treason against the community, hitherto almost unknown, at last necessitated a strict police system. Local groups organized predatory raids against one another. Nations appeared, and all the phobias that make up nationalism.

The Martian colonists, when they observed man’s disorganization, prepared, at the instigation of the home planet, a very great offensive. It so happened that at this time the colony was going through its phase of enlightenment, which had always hitherto been followed sooner or later by chastisement from Mars. Many individuals were at the moment actually toying with the idea of seeking harmony with man, rather than war. But the public mind of Mars, outraged by this treason, sought to overwhelm it by instituting a new crusade. Man’s disunion offered a great opportunity.

The first attack produced a remarkable change in the human race. Their madness seemed suddenly to leave them. Within a few weeks the national governments had surrendered their sovereignty to a central authority. Disorders, debauchery, perversions, wholly ceased. The treachery and self-seeking and corruption, which had by now been customary for many centuries, suddenly gave place to universal and perfect devotion to the social cause. The species was apparently once more in its right mind. Everywhere, in spite of the war’s horrors, there was gay brotherliness, combined with a heroism, which clothed itself in an odd extravagance of jocularity.

The war went ill for man. The general mood changed to cold resolution. And still victory was with the Martians. Under the influence of the huge fanatical armies which were poured in from the home planet, the colonists had shed their tentative pacifism, and sought to vindicate their loyalty by ruthlessness. In reply the human race deserted its sanity, and succumbed to an uncontrollable lust for destruction. It was at this stage that a human bacteriologist announced that he had bred a virus of peculiar deadliness and transmissibility, with which it would be possible to infect the enemy, but at the cost of annihilating also the human race. It is significant of the insane condition of the human population at this time that, when these facts were announced and broadcast, there was no discussion of the desirability of using this weapon. It was immediately put in action, the whole human race applauding.

Within a few months the Martian colony had vanished, their home planet itself had received the infection, and its population was already aware that nothing could save it. Man’s constitution was tougher than that of the animate clouds, and he appeared to be doomed to a somewhat more lingering death. He made no effort to save himself, either from the disease which he himself had propagated, or from the pulmonary plague which was caused by the disintegrated substance of the dead Martian colony. All the public processes of civilization began to fall to pieces; for the community was paralysed by disillusion, and by the expectation of death. Like a bee-hive that has no queen, the whole population of the earth sank into apathy. Men and women stayed in their homes, idling, eating whatever food they could procure, sleeping far into the mornings, and, when at last they rose, listlessly avoiding one another. Only the children could still be gay, and even they were oppressed by their elders’ gloom. Meanwhile the disease was spreading. Household after household was stricken, and was left unaided by its neighbours. But the pain in each individual’s flesh was strangely numbed by his more poignant distress in the spiritual defeat of the race. For such was the high development of this species, that even physical agony could not distract it from the racial failure. No one wanted to save himself; and each knew that his neighbours desired not his aid. Only the children, when the disease crippled them, were plunged into agony and terror. Tenderly, yet listlessly, their elders would then give them the last sleep. Meanwhile the unburied dead spread corruption among the dying. Cities fell still and silent. The corn was not harvested.

3. THE THIRD DARK AGE

SO CONTAGIOUS AND so lethal was the new bacterium, that its authors expected the human race to be wiped out as completely as the Martian colony. Each dying remnant of humanity, isolated from its fellows by the breakdown of communications, imagined its own last moments to be the last of man. But by accident, almost one might say by miracle, a spark of human life was once more preserved, to hand on the sacred fire. A certain stock or strain of the race, promiscuously scattered throughout the continents, proved less susceptible than the majority. And, as the bacterium was less vigorous in a hot climate, a few of these favoured individuals, who happened to be in the tropical jungle, recovered from the infection. And of these few a minority recovered also from the pulmonary plague which, as usual, was propagated from the dead Martians.

It might have been expected that from this human germ a new civilized community would have soon arisen. With such brilliant beings as the Second Men, surely a few generations, or at the most a few thousand years, should have sufficed to make up the lost ground.

But no. Once more it was in a manner the very excellence of the species that prevented its recovery, and flung the spirit of Earth into a trance which lasted longer than the whole previous career of mammals. Again and again, some thirty million times, the seasons were repeated; and throughout this period man remained as fixed in bodily and mental character as, formerly, the platypus. Members of the earlier human species must find it difficult to understand this prolonged impotence of a race far more developed than themselves. For here apparently were both the requisites of progressive culture, namely a world rich and unpossessed, and a race exceptionally able. Yet nothing was done.

When the plagues, and all the immense consequent putrefactions, had worked themselves off, the few isolated groups of human survivors settled down to an increasingly indolent tropical life. The fruits of past learning were not imparted to the young, who therefore grew up in extreme ignorance of almost everything beyond their immediate experience. At the same time the elder generation cowed their juniors with vague suggestions of racial defeat and universal futility. This would not have mattered, had the young themselves been normal; they would have reacted with fervent optimism. But they themselves were now by nature incapable of any enthusiasm. For, in a species in which the lower functions were so strictly disciplined under the higher, the long-drawn-out spiritual disaster had actually begun to take effect upon the germ-plasm; so that individuals were doomed before birth to lassitude, and to mentality in a minor key. The First Men, long ago, had fallen into a kind of racial senility through a combination of vulgar errors and indulgences. But the second species, like a boy whose mind has been too soon burdened with grave experience, lived henceforth in a sleep-walk.

As the generations passed, all the lore of civilization was shed, save the routine of tropical agriculture and hunting. Not that intelligence itself had waned. Not that the race had sunk into mere savagery. Lassitude did not prevent it from readjusting itself to suit its new circumstances. These sleep-walkers soon invented convenient ways of making, in the home and by hand, much that had hitherto been made in factories and by mechanical power. Almost without mental effort they designed and fashioned tolerable instruments out of wood and flint and bone. But though still intelligent, they had become by disposition, supine, indifferent. They would exert themselves only under the pressure of urgent primitive need. No man seemed capable of putting forth the full energy of a man. Even suffering had lost its poignancy. And no ends seemed worth pursuing that could not be realized speedily. The sting had gone out of experience. The soul was calloused against every goad. Men and women worked and played, loved and suffered; but always in a kind of rapt absent-mindedness. It was as though they were ever trying to remember something important which escaped them. The affairs of daily life seemed too trivial to be taken seriously. Yet that other, and supremely important thing, which alone deserved consideration, was so obscure that no one had any idea what it was. Nor indeed was anyone aware of this hypnotic subjection, any more than a sleeper is aware of being asleep.

The minimum of necessary work was performed, and there was even a certain dreamy zest in the performance, but nothing which would entail extra toil ever seemed worth while. And so, when adjustment to the new circumstances of the world had been achieved, complete stagnation set in. Practical intelligence was easily able to cope with a slowly changing environment, and even with sudden natural upheavals such as floods, earthquakes, and disease epidemics. Man remained in a sense master of his world, but he had no idea what to do with his mastery. It was everywhere assumed that the sane end of living was to spend as many days as possible in indolence, lying in the shade. Unfortunately human beings had, of course, many needs which were irksome if not appeased, and so a good deal of hard work had to be done. Hunger and thirst had to be satisfied. Other individuals beside oneself had to be cared for, since man was cursed with sympathy and with a sentiment for the welfare of his group. The only fully rational behaviour, it was thought, would be general suicide, but irrational impulses made this impossible. Beatific drugs offered a temporary heaven. But, far as the Second Men had fallen, they were still too clear-sighted to forget that such beatitude is outweighed by subsequent misery.

Century by century, epoch by epoch, man glided on in this seemingly precarious, yet actually unshakable equilibrium. Nothing that happened to him could disturb his easy dominance over the beasts and over physical nature; nothing could shock him out of his racial sleep. Long-drawn-out climatic changes made desert, jungle, and grass-land fluctuate like the clouds. As the years advanced by millions, ordinary geological processes, greatly accentuated by the immense strains set up by the Patagonian upheaval, remodelled the surface of the planet. Continents were submerged, or lifted out of the sea, till presently there was little of the old configuration. And along with these geological changes went changes in the fauna and flora. The bacterium which had almost exterminated man had also wrought havoc amongst other mammals. Once more the planet had to be re-stocked, this time from the few surviving tropical species. Once more there was a great remaking of old types, only less revolutionary than that which had followed the Patagonian disaster. And since the human race remained minute, through the effects of its spiritual fatigue, other species were favoured. Especially the ruminants and the large carnivora increased and diversified themselves into many habits and forms.

But the most remarkable of all the biological trains of events in this period was the history of the Martian subvital units that had been disseminated by the slaughter of the Martian colony, and had then tormented men and animals with pulmonary diseases. As the ages passed, certain species of mammals so readjusted themselves that the Martian virus became not only harmless but necessary to their well-being. A relationship which was originally that of parasite and host became in time a true symbiosis, a cooperative partnership, in which the terrestrial animals gained something of the unique attributes of the vanished Martian organisms. The time was to come when Man himself should look with envy on these creatures, and finally make use of the Martian ‘virus’ for his own enrichment.

But meanwhile, and for many million years, almost all kinds of life were on the move, save Man. Like a ship-wrecked sailor, he lay exhausted and asleep on his raft, long after the storm had abated.

But his stagnation was not absolute. Imperceptibly, he was drifting on the oceanic currents of life, and in a direction far out of his original course. Little by little, his habit was becoming simpler, less artificial, more animal. Agriculture faded out, since it was no longer necessary in the luxuriant garden where man lived. Weapons of defence and of the chase became more precisely adapted to their restricted purposes, but at the same time less diversified and more stereotyped. Speech almost vanished; for there was no novelty left in experience. Familiar facts and familiar emotions were conveyed increasingly by gestures which were mostly unwitting. Physically, the species had changed little. Though the natural period of life was greatly reduced, this was due less to physiological change than to a strange and fatal increase of absent-mindedness in middle-age. The individual gradually ceased to react to his environment; so that even if he escaped a violent death, he died of starvation.

Yet in spite of this great change, the species remained essentially human. There was no bestialization, such as had formerly produced a race of submen. These tranced remnants of the second human species were not beasts but innocents, simples, children of nature, perfectly adjusted to their simple life. In many ways their state was idyllic and enviable. But such was their dimmed mentality that they were never clearly aware even of the blessings they had, still less, of course, of the loftier experiences which had kindled and tortured their ancestors.

X The Third Men in the Wilderness

1. THE THIRD HUMAN SPECIES

WE HAVE NOW followed man’s career during some forty million years. The whole period to be covered by this chronicle is about two thousand million. In this chapter, and the next, therefore, we must accomplish a swift flight at great altitude over a tract of time more than three times as long as that which we have hitherto observed. This great expanse is no desert, but a continent teeming with variegated life, and many successive and very diverse civilizations. The myriads of human beings who inhabit it far outnumber the First and Second Men combined. And the content of each one of these lives is a universe, rich and poignant as that of any reader of this book.

In spite of the great diversity of this span of man’s history, it is a single movement within the whole symphony, just as the careers of the First and of the Second Men are each a single movement. Not only is it a period dominated by a single natural human species and the artificial human species into which the natural species at length transformed itself; but, also, in spite of innumerable digressions, a single theme, a single mood of the human will, informs the whole duration. For now at last man’s main energy is devoted to remaking his own physical and mental nature. Throughout the rise and fall of many successive cultures this purpose is progressively clarifying itself, and expressing itself in many tragic and even devastating experiments; until, towards the close of this immense period, it seems almost to achieve its end.

When the Second Men had remained in their strange racial trance for about thirty million years, the obscure forces that make for advancement began to stir in them once more. This reawakening was favoured by geological accident. An incursion of the sea gradually isolated some of their number in an island continent, which was once part of the North Atlantic ocean-bed. The climate of this island gradually cooled from sub-tropical to temperate and sub-arctic. The vast change of conditions caused in the imprisoned race a subtle chemical re-arrangement of the germ-plasm, such that there ensued an epidemic of biological variation. Many new types appeared, but in the long run one, more vigorous and better adapted than the rest, crowded out all competitors and slowly consolidated itself as a new species, the Third Men.

Scarcely more than half the stature of their predecessors, these beings were proportionately slight and lithe. Their skin was of a sunny brown, covered with a luminous halo of red-gold hairs, which on the head became a russet mop. Their golden eyes, reminiscent of the snake, were more enigmatic than profound. Their faces were compact as cat’s muzzles, their lips full, but subtle at the corners. Their ears, objects of personal pride and of sexual admiration, were extremely variable both in individuals and races. These surprising organs, which would have seemed merely ludicrous to the First Men, were expressive both of temperament and passing mood. They were immense, delicately involuted, of a silken texture, and very mobile. They gave an almost bat-like character to the otherwise somewhat feline heads. But the most distinctive feature of the Third Men was their great lean hands, on which were six versatile fingers, six antennae of living steel.

Unlike their predecessors, the Third Men were short-lived. They had a brief childhood and a brief maturity, followed (in the natural course) by a decade of senility, and death at about sixty. But such was their abhorrence of decrepitude, that they seldom allowed themselves to grow old. They preferred to kill themselves when their mental and physical agility began to decline. Thus, save in exceptional epochs of their history, very few lived to be fifty.

But though in some respects the third human species fell short of the high standard of its predecessor, especially in certain of the finer mental capacities, it was by no means simply degenerate. The admirable sensory equipment of the second species was retained, and even improved. Vision was no less ample and precise and colourful. Touch was far more discriminate, especially in the delicately pointed sixth finger-tip. Hearing was so developed that a man could run through wooded country blindfold without colliding with the trees. Moreover the great range of sounds and rhythms had acquired an extremely subtle gamut of emotional significance. Music was therefore one of the main preoccupations of the civilizations of this species.

Mentally the Third Men were indeed very unlike their predecessors. Their intelligence was in some ways no less agile; but it was more cunning than intellectual, more practical than theoretical. They were interested more in the world of sense-experience than in the world of abstract reason, and again far more in living things than in the lifeless. They excelled in certain kinds of art, and indeed also in some fields of science. But they were led into science more through practical, aesthetic, or religious needs than through intellectual curiosity. In mathematics, for instance (helped greatly by the duo-decimal system, which resulted from their having twelve fingers), they became wonderful calculators; yet they never had the curiosity to inquire into the essential nature of number. Nor, in physics, were they ever led to discover the more obscure properties of space. They were, indeed, strangely devoid of curiosity. Hence, though sometimes capable of a penetrating mystical intuition, they never seriously disciplined themselves under philosophy, nor tried to relate their mystical intuitions with the rest of their experience.

In their primitive phases the Third Men were keen hunters; but also, owing to their strong parental impulses, they were much addicted to making pets of captured animals. Throughout their career they displayed what earlier races would have called an uncanny sympathy with, and understanding of, all kinds of animals and plants. This intuitive insight into the nature of living things, and this untiring interest in the diversity of vital behaviour, constituted the dominating impulse throughout the whole career of the third human species. At the outset they excelled not only as hunters but as herdsmen and domesticators. By nature they were very apt in every kind of manipulation, but especially in the manipulation of living things. As a species they were also greatly addicted to play of all kinds, but especially to manipulative play, and above all to the playful manipulation of organisms. From the first they performed great feats of riding on the moose-like deer which they had domesticated. They tamed also a certain gregarious coursing beast. The pedigree of this great leonine wolf led, through the tropical survivors of the Martian plague, back to those descendants of the arctic fox which had over-run the world after the Patagonian disaster. This animal the Third Men trained not only to help them in shepherding and in the chase, but also to play intricate hunting games. Between this hound and its master or mistress there frequently arose a very special relation, a kind of psychical symbiosis, a dumb intuitive mutual insight, a genuine love, based on economic cooperation, but strongly toned also, in a manner peculiar to the third human species, with religious symbolism and frankly sexual intimacy.

As herdsmen and shepherds the Third Men very early practised selective breeding; and increasingly they became absorbed in the perfecting and enriching of all types of animals and plants. It was the boast of every local chieftain not only that the men of his tribe were more manly and the women more beautiful than all others, but also that the bears in his territory were the noblest and most bear-like of all bears, that the birds built more perfect nests and were more skilful fliers and singers than birds elsewhere. And so on, through all the animal and vegetable races.

This biological control was achieved at first by simple breeding experiments, but later and increasingly by crude physiological manipulation of the young animal, the foetus and (later, still) the germ-plasm. Hence arose a perennial conflict, which often caused wars of a truly religious bitterness, between the tender-hearted, who shrank from the infliction of pain, and the passionately manipulative, who willed to create at whatever cost. This conflict, indeed, was waged not only between individuals but within each mind; for all were innately hunters and manipulators, but also all had intuitive sympathy even with the quarry which they tormented. The trouble was increased by a strain of sheer cruelty which occurred even in the most tender-hearted. This sadism was at bottom an expression of an almost mystical reverence for sensory experience. Physical pain, being the most intense of all sensed qualities, was apt to be thought the most excellent. It might be expected that this would lead rather to self-torture than to cruelty. Sometimes it did. But in general those who could not appreciate pain in their own flesh were yet able to persuade themselves that in inflicting pain on lower animals they were creating vivid psychic reality, and therefore high excellence. It was just the intense reality of pain, they said, that made it intolerable to men and animals. Seen with the detachment of the divine mind, it appeared in its true beauty. And even man, they declared, could appreciate its excellence when it occurred not in men but in animals.

Though the Third Men lacked interest in systematic thought, their minds were often concerned with matters outside the fields of private and social economy. They experienced not only aesthetic but mystical cravings. And though they were without any appreciation of those finer beauties of human personality, which their predecessors had admired as the highest attainment of life on the planet, the Third Men themselves, in their own way, sought to make the best of human nature, and indeed of animal nature. Man they regarded in two aspects. In the first place he was the noblest of all animals, gifted with unique aptitudes. He was, as was sometimes said, God’s chief work of art. But secondly, since his special virtues were his insight into the nature of all living things and his manipulative capacity, he was himself God’s eye and God’s hand. These convictions were expressed over and over again in the religions of the Third Men by the image of the deity as a composite animal, with wings of the albatross, jaws of the great wolf-fox, feet of the deer, and so on. For the human element was represented in this deity by the hands, the eyes, and the sexual organs of man. And between the divine hands lay the world, with all its diverse population. Often the world was represented as being the fruit of God’s primitive potency, but also as in process of being drastically altered and tortured into perfection by the hands.

Most of the cultures of the Third Men were dominated by this obscure worship of Life as an all-pervading spirit, expressing itself in myriad diverse individuals. And at the same time the intuitive loyalty to living things and to a vaguely conceived life-force was often complicated by sadism. For in the first place it was recognized, of course, that what is valued by higher beings may be intolerable to lower; and, as has been said, pain itself was thought to be a superior excellence of this kind. And again in a second manner sadism expressed itself. The worship of Life, as agent or subject, was complemented by worship of environment, as object to life’s subjectivity, as that which remains ever foreign to life, thwarting its enterprises, torturing it, yet making it possible, and, by its very resistance, goading it into nobler expressions. Pain, it was said, was the most vivid apprehension of the sacred and universal Object.

The thought of the third human species was never systematic. But in some such manner as the foregoing it strove to rationalize its obscure intuition of the beauty which includes at once Life’s victory and defeat.

2. DIGRESSIONS OF THE THIRD MEN

SUCH, IN BRIEF, was the physical and mental nature of the third human species. In spite of innumerable distractions, the spirit of the Third Men kept on returning to follow up the thread of biological interest through a thousand variegated cultures. Again and again folk after folk would clamber out of savagery and barbarism into relative enlightenment; and mostly, though not always, the main theme of this enlightenment was some special mood either of biological creativeness or of sadism, or of both. To a man born into such a society, no dominant characteristic would be apparent. He would be impressed rather by the many-sidedness of human activities in his time. He would note a wealth of personal intercourse, of social organization and industrial invention, of art and speculation, all set in that universal matrix, the private struggle to preserve or express the self. Yet the historian may often see in a society, over and above this multifarious proliferation, some one controlling theme.

Again and again, then, at intervals of a few thousand or a few hundred thousand years, man’s whim was imposed upon the fauna and flora of the earth, and at length directed to the task of remaking man himself. Again and again, through a diversity of causes, the effort collapsed, and the species sank once more into chaos. Sometimes indeed there was an interlude of culture in some quite different key. Once, early in the history of the species, and before its nature had become fixed, there occurred a non-industrial civilization of a genuinely intellectual kind, almost like that of Greece. Sometimes, but not often, the third human species fooled itself into an extravagantly industrial world civilization, in the manner of the Americanized First Men. In general its interest was too much concerned with other matters to become entangled with mechanical devices. But on three occasions at least it succumbed. Of these civilizations one derived its main power from wind and falling water, one from the tides, one from the earth’s internal heat. The first, saved from the worst evils of industrialism by the limitations of its power, lasted some hundred thousand years in barren equilibrium, until it was destroyed by an obscure bacterium. The second was fortunately brief; but its fifty thousand years of unbridled waste of tidal energy was enough to interfere appreciably with the orbit of the moon. This world-order collapsed at length in a series of industrial wars. The third endured a quarter of a million years as a brilliantly sane and efficient world organization. Throughout most of its existence there was almost complete social harmony with scarcely as much internal strife as occurs in a bee-hive. But once more civilization came at length to grief, this time through the misguided effort to breed special human types for specialized industrial pursuits.

Industrialism, however, was never more than a digression, a lengthy and disastrous irrelevance in the life of this species. There were other digressions. There were for instance cultures, enduring sometimes for several thousand years, which were predominantly musical. This could never have occurred among the First Men; but, as was said, the third species was peculiarly developed in hearing, and in emotional sensitivity to sound and rhythm. Consequently, just as the First Men at their height were led into the wilderness by an irrational obsession with mechanical contrivances, just as the Third Men themselves were many times undone by their own interest in biological control, so, now and again, it was their musical gift that hypnotized them.

Of these predominantly musical cultures the most remarkable was one in which music and religion combined to form a tyranny no less rigid than that of religion and science in the remote past. It is worth while to dwell on one of these episodes for a few moments.

The Third Men were very subject to a craving for personal immortality. Their lives were brief, their love of life intense. It seemed to them a tragic flaw in the nature of existence that the melody of the individual life must either fade into a dreary senility or be cut short, never to be repeated. Now, music had a special significance for this race. So intense was their experience of it, that they were ready to regard it as in some manner the underlying reality of all things. In leisure hours, snatched from a toilful and often tragic life, groups of peasants would seek to conjure about them by song or pipe or viol a universe more beautiful, more real, than that of daily labour. Concentrating their sensitive hearing upon the inexhaustible diversity of tone and rhythm, they would seem to themselves to be possessed by the living presence of music, and to be transported thereby into a lovelier world. No wonder they believed that every melody was a spirit, leading a life of its own within the universe of music. No wonder they imagined that a symphony or chorus was itself a single spirit inhering in all its members. No wonder it seemed to them that when men and women listened to great music, the barriers of their individuality were broken down, so that they became one soul through communion with the music.

The prophet was born in a highland village where the native faith in music was intense, though quite unformulated. In time he learnt to raise his peasant audiences to the most extravagant joy and the most delicious sorrow. Then at last he began to think, and to expound his thoughts with the authority of a great bard. Easily he persuaded men that music was the reality, and all else illusion, that the living spirit of the universe was pure music, and that each individual animal and man, though he had a body that must die and vanish for ever, had also a soul that was music and eternal. A melody, he said, is the most fleeting of things. It happens and ceases. The great silence devours it, and seemingly annihilates it. Passage is essential to its being. Yet though for a melody, to halt is to die a violent death, all music, the prophet affirmed, has also eternal life. After silence it may occur again, with all its freshness and aliveness. Time cannot age it; for its home is in a country outside time. And that country, thus the young musician earnestly preached, is also the homeland of every man and woman, nay of every living thing that has any gift of music. Those who seek immortality, must strive to waken their tranced souls into melody and harmony. And according to their degree of musical originality and proficiency will be their standing in the eternal life.

The doctrine, and the impassioned melodies of the prophet, spread like fire. Instrumental and vocal music sounded from every pasture and corn plot. The government tried to suppress it, partly because it was thought to interfere with agricultural productivity, largely because its passionate significance reverberated even in the hearts of courtly ladies, and threatened to undo the refinement of centuries. Nay, the social order itself began to crumble. For many began openly to declare that what mattered was not aristocratic birth, nor even proficiency in the time-honoured musical forms (so much prized by the leisured), but the gift of spontaneous emotional expression in rhythm and harmony. Persecution strengthened the new faith with a glorious company of martyrs who, it was affirmed, sang triumphantly even in the flames.

One day the sacred monarch himself, hitherto a prisoner within the conventions, declared half sincerely, half by policy, that he was converted to his people’s faith. Bureaucracy gave place to an enlightened dictatorship, the monarch assumed the title of Supreme Melody, and the whole social order was refashioned, more to the taste of the peasants. The subtle prince, backed by the crusading zeal of his people, and favoured by the rapid spontaneous spread of the faith in all lands, conquered the whole world, and founded the universal Church of Harmony. The prophet himself, meanwhile, dismayed by his own too facile success, had retired into the mountains to perfect his art under the influence of their great quiet, or the music of wind, thunder, and waterfall. Presently, however, the silence of the fells was shattered by the blare of military bands and ecclesiastical choirs, which the emperor had sent to salute him and conduct him to the metropolis. He was secured, though not without a scrimmage, and lodged in the High Temple of Music. There he was kept a prisoner, dubbed God’s Big Noise, and used by the world-government as an oracle needing interpretation. In a few years the official music of the temple, and of deputations from all over the world, drove him into raving madness; in which state he was the more useful to the authorities.

Thus was founded the Holy Empire of Music, which gave order and purpose to the species for a thousand years. The sayings of the prophet, interpreted by a series of able rulers, became the foundation of a great system of law which gradually supplanted all local codes by virtue of its divine authority. Its root was madness; but its final expression was intricate commonsense, decorated with harmless and precious flowers of folly. Throughout, the individual was wisely, but tacitly, regarded as a biological organism having definite needs or rights and definite social obligations; but the language in which this principle was expressed and elaborated was a jargon based on the fiction that every human being was a melody, demanding completion within a greater musical theme of society.

Toward the close of this millennium of order a schism occurred among the devout. A new and fervent sect declared that the true spirit of the musical religion had been stifled by ecclesiasticism. The founder of the religion had preached salvation by individual musical experience, by an intensely emotional communion with the Divine Music. But little by little, so it was said, the church had lost sight of this central truth, and had substituted a barren interest in the objective forms and principles of melody and counterpoint. Salvation, in the official view, was not to be had by subjective experience, but by keeping the rules of an obscure musical technique. And what was this technique? Instead of making the social order a practical expression of the divine law of music, churchmen and statesmen had misinterpreted these divine laws to suit mere social convenience, until the true spirit of music had been lost. Meanwhile on the other side a counter-revival took place. The self-centred and soul-saving mood of the rebels was ridiculed. Men were urged to care rather for the divine and exquisitely ordered forms of music itself than for their own emotion.

It was amongst the rebel peoples that the biological interest of the race, hitherto subordinate, came into its own. Mating, at least among the more devout sort of women, began to be influenced by the desire to have children who should be of outstanding musical brilliance and sensitivity. Biological sciences were rudimentary, but the general principle of selective breeding was known. Within a century this policy of breeding for music, or breeding ‘soul’, developed from a private idiosyncrasy into a racial obsession. It was so far successful that after a while a new type became common, and thrived upon the approbation and devotion of ordinary persons. These new beings were indeed extravagantly sensitive to music, so much so that the song of a skylark caused them serious torture by its banality, and in response to any human music of the kind which they approved, they invariably fell into a trance. Under the stimulus of music which was not to their taste they were apt to run amok and murder the performers.

We need not pause to trace the stages by which an infatuated race gradually submitted itself to the whims of these creatures of human folly, until for a brief period they became the tyrannical ruling caste of a musical theocracy. Nor need we observe how they reduced society to chaos; and how at length an age of confusion and murder brought mankind once more to its senses, but also into so bitter a disillusionment that the effort to re-orientate the whole direction of its endeavour lacked determination. Civilization fell to pieces and was not rebuilt till after the race had lain fallow for some thousands of years.

So ended perhaps the most pathetic of racial delusions. Born of a genuine and potent aesthetic experience, it retained a certain crazy nobility even to the end.

Many scores of other cultures occurred, separated often by long ages of barbarism, but they must be ignored in this brief chronicle. The great majority of them were mainly biological in spirit. Thus one was dominated by an obsessive interest in flight, and therefore in birds, another by the concept of metabolism, several by sexual creativity, and very many by some general but mostly unenlightened policy of eugenics. All these we must pass over, so that we may descend to watch the greatest of all the races of the third species torture itself into a new form.

3. THE VITAL ART

IT WAS AFTER an unusually long period of eclipse that the spirit of the third human species attained its greatest brilliance. We need not watch the stages by which this enlightenment was reached. Suffice it that the upshot was a very remarkable civilization, if such a word can be applied to an order in which agglomerations of architecture were unknown, clothing was used only when needed for warmth, and such industrial development as occurred was wholly subordinated to other activities.

Early in the history of this culture the requirements of hunting and agriculture, and the spontaneous impulse to manipulate live things, gave rise to a primitive but serviceable system of biological knowledge. Not until the culture had unified the whole planet, did biology itself give rise to chemistry and physics. At the same time a well-controlled industrialism, based first on wind and water, and later on subterranean heat, afforded the race all the material luxuries it desired, and much leisure from the business of keeping itself in existence. Had there not already existed a more powerful and all-dominating interest, industrialism itself would probably have hypnotized the race, as it had so many others. But in this race the interest in live things, which characterized the whole species, was dominant before industrialism began. Egotism among the Third Men could not be satisfied by the exercise of economic power, nor by the mere ostentation of wealth. Not that the race was immune from egotism. On the contrary, it had lost almost all that spontaneous altruism which had distinguished the Second Men. But in most periods the only kind of personal ostentation which appealed to the Third Men was directly connected with the primitive interest in ‘pecunia’. To own many and noble beasts, whether they were economically productive or not, was ever the mark of respectability. The vulgar, indeed, were content with mere numbers, or at most with the convential virtues of the recognized breeds. But the more refined pursued, and flaunted, certain very exact principles of aesthetic excellence in their control of living forms.

In fact, as the race gained biological insight, it developed a very remarkable new art, which we may call ‘plastic vital art’. This was to become the chief vehicle of expression of the new culture. It was practised universally, and with religious fervour; for it was very closely connected with the belief in a life-god. The canons of this art, and the precepts of this religion, fluctuated from age to age, but in general certain basic principles were accepted. Or rather, though there was almost always universal agreement that the practice of vital art was the supreme goal, and should not be treated in a utilitarian spirit, there were two conflicting sets of principles which were favoured by opposed sects. One mode of vital art sought to evoke the full potentiality of each natural type as a harmonious and perfected nature, or to produce new types equally harmonious. The other prided itself on producing monsters. Sometimes a single capacity was developed at the expense of the harmony and welfare of the organism as a whole. Thus a bird was produced which could fly faster than any other bird; but it could neither reproduce nor even feed, and therefore had to be maintained artificially. Sometimes, on the other hand, certain characters incompatible in nature were forced upon a single organism, and maintained in precarious and torturing equilibrium. To give examples, one much-talked-of feat was the production of a carnivorous mammal in which the fore-limbs had assumed the structure of a bird’s wings, complete with feathers. This creature could not fly, since its body was wrongly proportioned. Its only mode of locomotion was a staggering run with outstretched wings. Other examples of monstrosity were an eagle with twin heads, and a deer in which, with incredible ingenuity, the artists had induced the tail to develop as a head, with brain, sense-organs, and jaws. In this monstrous art, interest in living things was infected with sadism through the preoccupation with fate, especially internal fate, as the divinity that shapes our ends. In its more vulgar forms, of course, it was a crude expression of egotistical lust in power.

This motif of the monstrous and the self-discrepant was less prominent than the other, the motif of harmonious perfection; but at all times it was apt to exercise at least a subconscious influence. The supreme aim of the dominant, perfection-seeking movement was to embellish the planet with a very diverse fauna and flora, with the human race as at once the crown and the instrument of terrestrial life. Each species, and each variety, was to have its place and fulfil its part in the great cycle of living types. Each was to be internally perfected to its function. It must have no harmful relics of a past manner of life; and its capacities must be in true accord with one another. But, to repeat, the supreme aim was not concerned merely with individual types, but with the whole vital economy of the planet. Thus, though there were to be types of every order from the most humble bacterium up to man, it was contrary to the canon of orthodox sacred art that any type should thrive by the destruction of a type higher than itself. In the sadistic mode of the art, however, a peculiarly exquisite tragic beauty was said to inhere in situations in which a lowly type exterminated a higher. There were occasions in the history of the race when the two sects indulged in bloody conflict because the sadists kept devising parasites to undermine the noble products of the orthodox.

Of those who practised vital art, and all did so to some extent, a few, though they deliberately rejected the orthodox principles, gained notoriety and even fame by their grotesques; while others, less fortunate, were ready to accept ostracism and even martyrdom, declaring that what they had produced was a significant symbol of the universal tragedy of vital nature. The great majority, however, accepted the sacred canon. They had therefore to choose one or other of certain recognized modes of expression. For instance, they might seek to enhance some extant type of organism, both by perfecting its capacities and by eliminating from it all that was harmful or useless. Or else, a more original and precarious work, they might set about creating a new type to fill a niche in the world, which had not yet been occupied. For this end they would select a suitable organism, and seek to remake it upon a new plan, striving to produce a creature of perfectly harmonious nature precisely adapted to the new way of life. In this kind of work sundry strict aesthetic principles must be observed. Thus it was considered bad art to reduce a higher type to a lower, or in any manner to waste the capacities of a type. And further, since the true end of art was not the production of individual types, but the production of a world-wide and perfectly systematic fauna and flora, it was inadmissible to harm even accidentally any type higher than that which it was intended to produce. For the practice of orthodox vital art was regarded as a cooperative enterprise. The ultimate artist, under God, was mankind as a whole; the ultimate work of art must be an ever more subtle garment of living forms for the adornment of the planet, and the delight of the supreme Artist, in relation to whom man was both creature and instrument.

Little was achieved, of course, until the applied biological sciences had advanced far beyond the high-water mark attained long ago during the career of the Second Men. Much more was needed than the rule-of-thumb principles of earlier breeders. It took this brightest of all the races of the third species many thousands of years of research to discover the more delicate principles of heredity, and to devise a technique by which the actual hereditary factors in the germ could be manipulated. It was this increasing penetration of biology itself that opened up the deeper regions of chemistry and physics. And owing to this historical sequence the latter sciences were conceived in a biological manner, with the electron as the basic organism, and the cosmos as an organic whole.

Imagine, then, a planet organized almost as a vast system of botanical and zoological gardens, or wild parks, interspersed with agriculture and industry. In every great centre of communications occurred annual and monthly shows. The latest creations were put through their paces, judged by the high priests of vital art, awarded distinctions, and consecrated with religious ceremony. At these shows some of the exhibits would be utilitarian, others purely aesthetic. There might be improved grains, vegetables, cattle, some exceptionally intelligent or sturdy variety of herdsman’s dog, or a new micro-organism with some special function in agriculture or in human digestion. But also there would be the latest achievements in pure vital art. Great sleek-limbed, hornless, racing deer, birds or mammals adapted to some hitherto unfulfilled role, bears intended to outclass all existing varieties in the struggle for existence, ants with specialized organs and instincts, improvements in the relations of parasite and host, so as to make a true symbiosis in which the host profited by the parasite. And so on. And everywhere there would be the little unclad ruddy faun-like beings who had created these marvels. Shy forest-dwelling folk of Gurkha physique would stand beside their antelopes, vultures, or new great cat-like prowlers. A grave young woman might cause a stir by entering the grounds followed by several gigantic bears. Crowds would perhaps press round to examine the creatures’ teeth or limbs, and she might scold the meddlers away from her patient flock. For the normal relation between man and beast at this time was one of perfect amity, rising, sometimes, in the case of domesticated animals, to an exquisite, almost painful, mutual adoration. Even the wild beasts never troubled to avoid man, still less to attack him, save in the special circumstances of the hunt and the sacred gladiatorial show.

These last need special notice. The powers of combat in beasts were admired no less than other powers. Men and women alike experienced a savage joy, almost an ecstasy, in the spectacle of mortal combat. Consequently there were formal occasions when different kinds of beasts were enraged against one another and allowed to fight to the death. Not only so, but also there were sacred contests between beast and man, between man and man, between woman and woman, and, most surprising to the readers of this book, between woman and man. For in this species, woman in her prime was not physically weaker than her partner.

4. CONFLICTING POLICIES

ALMOST FROM THE first, vital art had been applied to some extent to man himself, though with hesitation. Certain great improvements had been effected, but only improvements about which there could be no two opinions. The many diseases and abnormalities left over from past civilizations were patiently abolished, and various more fundamental defects were remedied. For instance, teeth, digestion, glandular equipment, and the circulatory system were greatly improved. Extreme good health and considerable physical beauty became universal. Child-bearing was made a painless and health-giving process. Senility was postponed. The standard of practical intelligence was appreciably raised. These reforms were made possible by a vast concerted effort of research and experiment supported by the world-community. But private enterprise was also effective, for the relation between the sexes was much more consciously dominated by the thought of offspring than among the First Men. Every individual knew the characteristics of his or her hereditary composition, and knew what kinds of offspring were to be expected from intercourse of different hereditary types. Thus in courtship the young man was not content to persuade his beloved that his mind was destined by nature to afford her mind joyful completion; he sought also to persuade her that with his help she might bear children of a peculiar excellence. Consequently there was at all times going on a process of selective breeding towards the conventionally ideal type. In certain respects the ideal remained constant for many thousands of years. It included health, cat-like agility, manipulative dexterity, musical sensitivity, refined perception of rightness and wrongness in the sphere of vital art, and an intuitive practical judgement in all the affairs of life. Longevity, and the abolition of senility, were also sought, and partially attained. Waves of fashion sometimes directed sexual selection toward prowess in combat, or some special type of facial expression or vocal powers. But these fleeting whims were negligible. Only the permanently desired characters were actually intensified by private selective breeding.

But at length there came a time when more ambitious aims were entertained. The world-community was now a highly organized theocratic hierarchy, strictly but on the whole benevolently ruled by a supreme council of vital priests and biologists. Each individual, down to the humblest agricultural worker, had his special niche in society, allotted him by the supreme council or its delegates, according to his known heredity and the needs of society. This system, of course, sometimes led to abuse, but mostly it worked without serious friction. Such was the precision of biological knowledge that each person’s mental calibre and special aptitudes were known beyond dispute, and rebellion against his lot in society would have been rebellion against his own heredity. This fact was universally known, and accepted without regret. A man had enough scope for emulation and triumph among his peers, without indulging in vague attempts to transcend his own nature, by rising into a superior hierarchical order. This state of affairs would have been impossible had there not been universal faith in the religion of life and the truth of biological science. Also it would have been impossible had not all normal persons been active practitioners of the sacred vital art, upon a plane suited to their capacity. Every individual adult of the rather scanty world-population regarded himself or herself as a creative artist, in however humble a sphere. And in general he, or she, was so fascinated by the work, that he was well content to leave social organization and control to those who were fitted for it. Moreover, at the back of every mind was the conception of society itself as an organism of specialized members. The strong sentiment for organized humanity tended, in this race, to master even its strong egotistical impulses, though not without a struggle.

It was such a society, almost unbelievable to the First Men, that now set about remaking human nature. Unfortunately there were conflicting views about the goal. The orthodox desired only to continue the work that had for long been on foot; though they proposed greater enterprise and coordination. They would perfect man’s body, but upon its present plan; they would perfect his mind, but without seeking to introduce anything new in essence. His physique, percipience, memory, intelligence, and emotional nature should be improved almost beyond recognition; but they must, it was said, remain essentially what they had always been.

A second party, however, finally persuaded orthodox opinion to amplify itself in one important respect. As has already been said, the Third Men were prone to phases of preoccupation with the ancient craving for personal immortality. This craving had often been strong among the First Men; and even the Second Men, in spite of their great gift of detachment, had sometimes allowed their admiration for human personality to persuade them that souls must live for ever. The short-lived and untheoretical Third Men, with their passion for living things of all kinds, and all the diversity of vital behaviour, conceived immortality in a variety of manners. In their final culture they imagined that at death all living things whom the Life God approved passed into another world, much like the familiar world, but happier. There they were said to live in the presence of the deity, serving him in untrammelled vital creativeness of sundry kinds.

Now it was believed that communication might occur between the two worlds, and that the highest type of terrestrial life was that which communicated most effectively, and further that the time had now arrived for much fuller revelation of the life to come. It was therefore proposed to breed highly specialized communicants whose office should be to guide this world by means of advice from the other. As among the First Men, this communication with the unseen world was believed to take place in the mediumistic trance. The new enterprise, then, was to breed extremely sensitive mediums, and to increase the mediumistic powers of the average individual.

There was yet another party, whose aim was very different. Man, they said, is a very noble organism. We have dealt with other organisms so as to enhance in each its noblest attributes. It is time to do the same with man. What is most distinctive in man is intelligent manipulation, brain and hand. Now hand is really outclassed by modern mechanisms, but brain will never be outclassed. Therefore we must breed strictly for brain, for intelligent coordination of behaviour. All the organic functions which can be performed by machinery, must be relegated to machinery, so that the whole vitality of the organism may be devoted to brain-building and brain-working. We must produce an organism which shall be no mere bundle of relics left over from its primitive ancestors and precariously ruled by a glimmer of intelligence. We must produce a man who is nothing but man. When we have done this we can, if we like, ask him to find out the truth about immortality. And also, we can safely surrender to him the control of all human affairs.

The governing caste were strongly opposed to this policy. They declared that, if it succeeded, it would only produce a most inharmonious being whose nature would violate all the principles of vital aesthetics. Man, they said, was essentially an animal, though uniquely gifted. His whole nature must be developed, not one faculty at the expense of others. In arguing thus, they were probably influenced partly by the fear of losing their authority; but their arguments were cogent, and the majority of the community agreed with them. Nevertheless a small group of the governors themselves were determined to carry through the enterprise in secret.

There was no need of secrecy in breeding communicants. The world state encouraged this policy and even set up institutions for its pursuit.

XI Man Remakes Himself

1. THE FIRST OF THE GREAT BRAINS

THOSE WHO SOUGHT to produce a super-brain embarked upon a great enterprise of research and experiment in a remote corner of the planet. It is unnecessary to tell in detail how they fared. Working first in secret, they later strove to persuade the world to approve of their scheme, but only succeeded in dividing mankind into two parties. The body politic was torn asunder. There were religious wars. But after a few centuries of intermittent bloodshed the two sects, those who sought to produce communicants and those who sought the super-brain, settled down in different regions to pursue their respective aims unmolested. In time each developed into a kind of nation, united by a religious faith and crusading spirit. There was little cultural intercourse between the two.

Those who desired to produce the super-brain employed four methods, namely selective breeding, manipulation of the hereditary factors in germ cells (cultivated in the laboratory), manipulation of the fertilized ovum (cultivated also in the laboratory), and manipulation of the growing body. At first they produced innumerable tragic abortions. These we need not observe. But at length, several thousand years after the earliest experiments, something was produced which seemed to promise success. A human ovum had been carefully selected, fertilized in the laboratory, and largely reorganized by artificial means. By inhibiting the growth of the embryo’s body, and the lower organs of the brain itself, and at the same time greatly stimulating the growth of the cerebral hemispheres, the dauntless experimenters succeeded at last in creating an organism which consisted of a brain twelve feet across, and a body most of which was reduced to a mere vestige upon the under-surface of the brain. The only parts of the body which were allowed to attain the natural size were the arms and hands. These sinewy organs of manipulation were induced to key themselves at the shoulders into the solid masonry which formed the creature’s house. Thus they were able to get a purchase for their work. The hands were the normal six-fingered hands of the Third Men, very greatly enlarged and improved. The fantastic organism was generated and matured in a building designed to house both it and the complicated machinery which was necessary to keep it alive. A self-regulating pump, electrically driven, served it as a heart. A chemical factory poured the necessary materials into its blood and removed waste products, thus taking the place of digestive organs and the normal battery of glands. Its lungs consisted of a great room full of oxidizing tubes, through which a constant wind was driven by an electric fan. The same fan forced air through the artificial organs of speech. These organs were so constructed that the natural nerve-fibres, issuing from the speech centres of the brain, could stimulate appropriate electrical controls so as to produce sounds identical with those which they would have produced from a living throat and mouth. The sensory equipment of this trunkless brain was a blend of the natural and the artificial. The optic nerves were induced to grow out along two flexible probosces, five feet long, each of which bore a huge eye at the end. But by a very ingenious alteration of the structure of the eye, the natural lens could be moved aside at will, so that the retina could be applied to any of a great diversity of optical instruments. The ears also could be projected upon stalks, and were so arranged that the actual nerve endings could be brought into contact with artificial resonators of various kinds, or could listen directly to the microscopic rhythms of the most minute organisms. Scent and taste were developed as a chemical sense, which could distinguish almost all compounds and elements by their flavour. Pressure, warmth, and cold were detected only by the fingers, but there with great subtlety. Sensory pain was to have been eliminated from the organism altogether; but this end was not achieved.

The creature was successfully launched upon life, and was actually kept alive for four years. But though at first all went well, in his second year the unfortunate child, if such he may be called, began to suffer severe pain, and to show symptoms of mental derangement. In spite of all that his devoted foster-parents could do, he gradually sank into insanity and died. He had succumbed to his own brain weight and to certain failures in the chemical regulation of his blood.

We may overlook the next four hundred years, during which sundry vain attempts were made to repeat the great experiment more successfully. Let us pass on to the first true individual of the fourth human species. He was produced in the same artificial manner as his forerunners, and was designed upon the same general plan. His mechanical and chemical machinery, however, was far more efficient; and his makers expected that, owing to careful adjustments of the mechanisms of growth and decay, he would prove to be immortal. His general plan, also, was changed in one important respect. His makers built a large circular ‘brain turret’ which they divided with many partitions, radiating from a central space, and covered everywhere with pigeon-holes. By a technique which took centuries to develop, they induced the cells of the growing embryonic brain to spread outwards, not as normal hemispheres of convolutions, but into the pigeon-holes which had been prepared for them. Thus the artificial ‘cranium’ had to be a roomy turret of ferro-concrete some forty feet in diameter. A door and a passage led from the outer world into the centre of the turret, and thence other passages radiated between tiers of little cupboards. Innumerable tubes of glass, metal, and a kind of vulcanite conveyed blood and chemicals over the whole system. Electric radiators preserved an even warmth in every cupboard, and throughout the innumerable carefully protected channels of the nerve fibres. Thermometers, dials, pressure gauges, indicators of all sorts, informed the attendants of every physical change in this strange half-natural, half-artificial system, this preposterous factory of mind.

Eight years after its inception the organism had filled its brain room, and attained the mentality of a new-born infant. His advance to maturity seemed to his foster-parents dishearteningly slow. Not till almost at the end of his fifth decade could he be said to have reached the mental standard of a bright adolescent. But there was no real reason for disappointment. Within another decade this pioneer of the Fourth Men had learned all that the Third Men could teach him, and had also seen that a great part of their wisdom was folly. In manual dexterity he could already vie with the best; but though manipulation afforded him intense delight, he used his hands almost wholly in service of his tireless curiosity. In fact, it was evident that curiosity was his main characteristic. He was a huge bump of curiosity equipped with most cunning hands. A department of state had been created to look after his nurture and education. An army of learned persons was kept in readiness to answer his impatient questions and assist him in his own scientific experiments. Now that he had attained maturity these unfortunate pundits found themselves hopelessly outclassed, and reduced to mere clerks, bottle-washers, and errand-boys. Hundreds of his servants were for ever scurrying into every corner of the planet to seek information and specimens; and the significance of their errands was by now often quite beyond the range of their own intelligence. They were careful, however, not to let their ignorance appear to the public. On the contrary, they succeeded in gaining much prestige from the mere mysteriousness of their errands.

The great brain was wholly lacking in all normal instinctive responses, save curiosity and constructiveness. Instinctive fear he knew not, though of course he was capable of cold caution in any circumstances which threatened to damage him and hinder his passionate research. Anger he knew not, but only an adamantine firmness in the face of opposition. Normal hunger and thirst he knew not, but only an experience of faintness when his blood was not properly supplied with nutriment. Sex was wholly absent from his mentality. Instinctive tenderness and instinctive group-feeling were not possible to him, for he was without the bowels of mercy. The heroic devotion of his most intimate servants called forth no gratitude, but only cold approval.

At first he interested himself not at all in the affairs of the society which maintained him, served his every whim, and adored him. But in time he began to take pleasure in suggesting brilliant solutions of all the current problems of social organization. His advice was increasingly sought and accepted. He became autocrat of the state. His own intelligence and complete detachment combined with the people’s superstitious reverence to establish him far more securely than any ordinary tyrant. He cared nothing for the petty troubles of his people, but he was determined to be served by a harmonious, healthy, and potent race. And as relaxation from the more serious excitement of research in physics and astronomy, the study of human nature was not without attractions. It may seem strange that one so completely devoid of human sympathy could have the tact to govern a race of the emotional Third Men. But he had built up for himself a very accurate behaviouristic psychology; and like the skilful master of animals, he knew unerringly how much could be expected of his people, even though their emotions were almost wholly foreign to him. Thus, for instance, while he thoroughly despised their admiration of animals and plants, and their religion of life, he soon learned not to seem hostile to these obsessions, but rather to use them for his own ends. He himself was interested in animals only as material for experiments. In this respect his people readily helped him, partly because he assured them that his goal was the further improvement of all types, partly because they were fascinated by his complete disregard, in his experimentation, of the common techniques for preventing pain. The orgy of vicarious suffering awakened in his people the long-suppressed lust in cruelty which, in spite of their intuitive insight into animal nature, was so strong a factor in the third human species.

Little by little the great brain probed the material universe and the universe of mentality. He mastered the principles of biological evolution, and constructed for his own delight a detailed history of life on earth. He learned, by marvellous archaeological technique, the story of all the earlier human peoples, and of the Martian episode, matters which had remained hidden from the Third Men. He discovered the principles of relativity and the quantum theory, the nature of the atom as a complex system of wave trains. He measured the cosmos; and with his delicate instruments he counted the planetary systems in much of the remote universe. He casually solved, to his own satisfaction at least, the ancient problems of good and evil, of mind and its object, of the one and the many, and of truth and error. He created many new departments of state for the purpose of recording his discoveries in an artificial language which he devised for the purpose. Each department consisted of many colleges of carefully bred and educated specialists who could understand the subject of their own department to some extent. But the coordination of all, and true insight into each, lay with the great brain alone.

2. THE TRAGEDY OF THE FOURTH MEN

WHEN SOME THREE thousand years had passed since his beginning, the unique individual determined to create others of his kind. Not that he suffered from loneliness. Not that he yearned for love, or even for intellectual companionship. But solely for the undertaking of more profound research, he needed the cooperation of beings of his own mental stature. He therefore designed, and had built in various regions of the planet, turrets and factories like his own, though greatly improved. Into each he sent, by his servants, a cell of his own vestigial body, and directed how it should be cultivated so as to produce a new individual. At the same time he caused far-reaching operations to be performed upon himself, so that he should be remade upon a more ample plan. Of the new capacities which he inculcated in himself and his progeny the most important was direct sensitivity to radiation. This was achieved by incorporating in each brain-tissue a specially bred strain of Martian parasites. These henceforth were to live in the great brain as integral members of each one of its cells. Each brain was also equipped with a powerful wireless transmitting apparatus. Thus should the widely scattered sessile population maintain direct ‘telepathic’ contact with one another.

The undertaking was successfully accomplished. Some ten thousand of these new individuals, each specialized for his particular locality and office, now constituted the Fourth Men. On the highest mountains were super-astronomers with vast observatories, whose instruments were partly artificial, partly natural excrescences of their own brains. In the very entrails of the planet others, specially adapted to heat, studied the subterranean forces, and were kept in ‘telepathic’ union with the astronomers. In the tropics, in the Arctic, in the forests, the deserts, and on the ocean floor, the Fourth Men indulged their immense curiosity; and in the homeland, around the father of the race, a group of great buildings housed a hundred individuals. In the service of this world-wide population, those races of Third Men which had originally cooperated to produce the new human species tilled the land, tended the cattle, manufactured the immense material requisites of the new civilization, and satisfied their spirits with an ever more stereotyped ritual of their vital art. This degradation of the whole race to a menial position had occurred slowly, imperceptibly. But the result was none the less irksome. Occasionally there were sparks of rebellion, but they always failed to kindle serious trouble; for the prestige and persuasiveness of the Fourth Men were irresistible.

At length, however, a crisis occurred. For some three thousand years the Fourth Men had pursued their research with constant success, but latterly progress had been slow. It was becoming increasingly difficult to devise new lines of research. True, there was still much detail to be filled in, even in their knowledge of their own planet, and very much in their knowledge of the stars. But there was no prospect of opening up entirely new fields which might throw some light on the essential nature of things. Indeed, it began to dawn on them that they had scarcely plumbed a surface ripple of the ocean of mystery. Their knowledge seemed to them perfectly systematic, yet wholly enigmatic. They had a growing sense that though in a manner they knew almost everything, they really knew nothing.

The normal mind, when it experiences intellectual frustration, can seek recreation in companionship, or physical exercise, or art. But for the Fourth Men there was no such escape. These activities were impossible and meaningless to them. The Great Brains were whole-heartedly interested in the objective world, but solely as a vast stimulus to intellection, never for its own sake. They admired only the intellective process itself and the interpretative formulae and principles which it devised. They cared no more for men and women than for material in a test-tube, no more for one another than for mechanical calculators. Nay, of each one of them it might almost be said that he cared ever for himself solely as an instrument of knowing. Many of the species had actually sacrificed their sanity, even in some cases their lives, to the obsessive lust of intellection.

As the sense of frustration became more and more oppressive, the Fourth Men suffered more and more from the onesidedness of their nature. Though so completely dispassionate while their intellectual life proceeded smoothly, now that it was thwarted they began to be confused by foolish whims and cravings which they disguised from themselves under a cloak of excuses. Sessile and incapable of affection, they continually witnessed the free movement, the group life, the love-making of their menials. Such activities became an offence to them, and filled them with a cold jealousy, which it was altogether beneath their dignity to notice. The affairs of the serf-population began to be conducted by their masters with less than the accustomed justice. Serious grievances arose.

The climax occurred in connexion with a great revival of research, which, it was said, would break down the impalpable barriers and set knowledge in progress again. The Great Brains were to be multiplied a thousandfold, and the resources of the whole planet were to be devoted far more strictly than before to the crusade of intellection. The menial Third Men would therefore have to put up with more work and less pleasure. Formerly they would willingly have accepted this fate for the glory of serving the superhuman brains. But the days of their blind devotion were past. It was murmured among them that the great experiment of their forefathers had proved a great disaster, and that the Fourth Men, the Great Brains, in spite of their devilish cunning, were mere abortions.

Matters came to a head when the tyrants announced that all useless animals must be slaughtered, since their upkeep was too great an economic burden upon the world-community. The vital art, moreover, was to be practised in future only by the Great Brains themselves. This announcement threw the Third Men into violent excitement, and divided them into two parties. Many of those whose lives were spent in direct service of the Great Brains favoured implicit obedience, though even these were deeply distressed. The majority, on the other hand, absolutely refused to permit the impious slaughter, or even to surrender their privileges as vital artists. For, they said, to kill off the fauna of the planet would be to violate the fair form of the universe by blotting out many of its most beautiful features. It would be an outrage to the Life God, and he would surely avenge it. They therefore urged that the time was come for all true human beings to stand together and depose the tyrants. And this, they pointed out, could easily be done. It was only necessary to cut a few electric cables, connecting the Great Brains with the subterranean generating stations. The electric pumps would then cease to supply the brain-turrets with aerated blood. Or, in the few cases in which the Great Brains were so located that they could control their own source of power in wind or water, it was necessary merely to refrain from transporting food to their digestion laboratories.

The personal attendants of the Great Brains shrank from such action; for their whole lives had been devoted, proudly and even in a manner lovingly, to service of the revered beings. But the agriculturists determined to withhold supplies. The Great Brains, therefore, armed their servitors with a diversity of ingenious weapons. Immense destruction was done; but since the rebels were decimated, there were not enough hands to work the fields. Some of the Great Brains, and many of their servants, actually died of starvation. And as hardship increased, the servants themselves began to drift over to the rebels. It now seemed certain to the Third Men that the Great Brains would very soon be impotent, and the plant once more under the control of natural beings. But the tyrants were not to be so easily defeated. Already for some centuries they had been secretly experimenting with a means of gaining a far more thorough dominion over the natural species. At the eleventh hour they succeeded.

In this undertaking they had been favoured by the results which a section of the natural species itself had produced long ago in the effort to breed specialized communicants to keep in touch with the unseen world. That sect, or theocratic nation, which had striven for many centuries toward this goal, had finally attained what they regarded as success. There came into existence an hereditary caste of communicants. Now, though these beings were subject to mediumistic trances in which they apparently conversed with denizens of the other world and received instructions about the ordering of matters terrestrial, they were in fact merely abnormally suggestible. Trained from childhood in the lore of the unseen world, their minds, during the trance, were amazingly fertile in developing fantasies based on that lore. Left to themselves, they were merely folk who were abnormally lacking in initiative and intelligence. Indeed, so naïve were they, and so sluggish, that they were mentally more like cattle than human beings. Yet under the influence of suggestion they became both intelligent and vigorous. Their intelligence, however, operating strictly in service of the suggestion, was wholly incapable of criticizing the suggestion itself.

There is no need to revert to the downfall of this theocratic society, beyond saying that, since both private and public affairs were regulated by reference to the sayings of the communicants, inevitably the state fell into chaos. The other community of the Third Men, that which was engaged upon breeding the Great Brains, gradually dominated the whole planet. The mediumistic stock, however, remained in existence, and was treated with a half-contemptuous reverence. The mediums were still generally regarded as in some manner specially gifted with the divine spirit, but they were now thought to be too holy for their sayings to have any relation to mundane affairs.

It was by means of this mediumistic stock that the Great Brains had intended to consolidate their position. Their earlier efforts may be passed over. But in the end they produced a race of living and even intelligent machines whose will they could control absolutely, even at a great distance. For the new variety of Third Men was ‘telepathically’ united with its masters. Martian units had been incorporated in its nervous system.

At the last moment the Great Brains were able to put into the field an army of these perfect slaves, which they equipped with the most efficient lethal weapons. The remnant of original servants discovered too late that they had been helping to produce their supplanters. They joined the rebels, only to share in the general destruction. In a few months all the Third Men, save the new docile variety, were destroyed; except for a few specimens which were preserved in cages for experimental purposes. And in a few years every type of animal that was not known to be directly or indirectly necessary to human life had been exterminated. None were preserved even as specimens, for the Great Brains had already studied them through and through.

But though the Great Brains were now absolute possessors of the Earth, they were after all no nearer their goal than before. The actual struggle with the natural species had provided them with an aim; but now that the struggle was over, they began to be obsessed once more with their intellectual failure. With painful clarity they realized that, in spite of their vast weight of neural tissue, in spite of their immense knowledge and cunning, they were practically no nearer the ultimate truth than their predecessors had been. Both were infinitely far from it.

For the Fourth Men, the Great Brains, there was no possible life but the life of intellect; and the life of intellect had become barren. Evidently something more than mere bulk of brain was needed for the solving of the deeper intellectual problems. They must, therefore, somehow create a new brain-quality, or organic formation of brain, capable of a mode of vision or insight impossible in their present state. They must learn somehow to remake their own brain-tissues upon a new plan. With this aim, and partly through unwitting jealousy of the natural and more balanced species which had created them, they began to use their captive specimens of that species for a great new enterprise of research into the nature of human brain-tissue. It was hoped thus to find some hint of the direction in which the new evolutionary leap should take place. The unfortunate specimens were therefore submitted to a thousand ingenious physiological and psychological tortures. Some were kept alive with their brains spread out permanently on a laboratory table, for microscopic observation during their diverse psychological reactions. Others were put into fantastic states of mental abnormality. Others were maintained in perfect health of body and mind, only to be felled at last by some ingeniously contrived tragic experience. New types were produced which, it was hoped, might show evidence of emergence into a qualitatively higher mode of mentality; but in fact they succeeded only in ranging through the whole gamut of insanity.

The research continued for some thousands of years, but gradually slackened, so utterly barren did it prove to be. As this frustration became more and more evident, a change began to come over the minds of the Fourth Men.

They knew, of course, that the natural species valued many things and activities which they themselves did not appreciate at all. Hitherto this had seemed a symptom merely of the low mental development of the natural species. But the behaviour of the unfortunate specimens upon whom they had been experimenting had gradually given the Fourth Men a greater insight into the likings and admirations of the natural species, so that they had learned to distinguish between those desires which were fundamental and those merely accidental cravings which clear thinking would have dismissed. In fact, they came to see that certain activities and certain objects were appreciated by these beings with the same clear-sighted conviction as they themselves appreciated knowledge. For instance, the natural human beings valued one another, and were sometimes capable of sacrificing themselves for the sake of others. They also valued love itself. And again they valued very seriously their artistic activities; and the activities of their bodies and of animal bodies appeared to them to have intrinsic excellence.

Little by little the Fourth Men began to realize that what was wrong with themselves was not merely their intellectual limitation, but, far more seriously, the limitation of their insight into values. And this weakness, they saw, was the result, not of paucity of intellective brain, but of paucity of body and lower brain tissues. This defect they could not remedy. It was obviously impossible to remake themselves so radically that they should become of a more normal type. Should they concentrate their efforts upon the production of new individuals more harmonious than themselves? Such a work, it might be supposed, would have seemed unattractive to them. But no. They argued thus. ‘It is our nature to care most for knowing. Full knowledge is to be attained only by minds both more penetrating and more broadly based than ours. Let us, therefore, waste no more time in seeking to achieve the goal in ourselves. Let us seek rather to produce a kind of being, free from our limitations, in whom we may attain the goal of perfect knowledge vicariously. The producing of such a being will exercise all our powers, and will afford the highest kind of fulfilment possible to us. To refrain from this work would be irrational.’

Thus it came about that the artificial Fourth Men began to work in a new spirit upon the surviving specimens of the Third Men to produce their own supplanters.

3. THE FIFTH MEN

THE PLAN OF the proposed new human being was worked out in great detail before any attempt was made to produce an actual individual. Essentially he was to be a normal human organism, with all the bodily functions of the natural type; but he was to be perfected through and through. Care must be taken to give him the greatest possible bulk of brain compatible with such a general plan, but no more. Very carefully his creators calculated the dimensions and internal proportions which their creature must have. His brain could not be nearly as large as their own, since he would have to carry it about with him, and maintain it with his own physiological machinery. On the other hand, if it was to be at all larger than the natural brain, the rest of the organism must be proportionately sturdy. Like the Second Men, the new species must be titanic. Indeed, it must be such as to dwarf even those natural giants. The body, however, must not be so huge as to be seriously hampered by its own weight, and by the necessity of having bones so massive as to be unmanageable.

In working out the general proportions of the new man, his makers took into account the possibility of devising more efficient bone and muscle. After some centuries of patient experiment they did actually invent a means of inducing in germ cells a tendency toward far stronger bone-tissues and far more powerful muscle. At the same time they devised nerve-tissues more highly specialized for their particular functions. And in the new brain, so minute compared with their own, smallness was to be compensated for by efficiency of design, both in the individual cells and in their organization.

Further, it was found possible to economize somewhat in bulk and vital energy by improvements in the digestive system. Certain new models of micro-organisms were produced, which, living symbiotically in the human gut, should render the whole process of digestion easier, more rapid, and less erratic.

Special attention was given to the system of self-repair in all tissues, especially in those which had hitherto been the earliest to wear out. And at the same time the mechanism regulating growth and general senescence was so designed that the new man should reach maturity at the age of two hundred years, and should remain in full vigour for at least three thousand years, when, with the first serious symptom of decay, his heart should suddenly cease functioning. There had been some dispute whether the new being should be endowed with perennial life, like his makers. But in the end it had been decided that, since he was intended only as a transitional type, it would be safer to allow him only a finite, though a prolonged lifetime. There must be no possibility that he should be tempted to regard himself as life’s final expression.

In sensory equipment, the new man was to have all the advantages of the Second and Third Men, and, in addition a still wider range and finer discrimination in every sense organ. More important was the incorporation of Martian units in the new model of germ cell. As the organism developed, these should propagate themselves and congregate in the cells of the brain, so that every brain area might be sensitive to ethereal vibrations, and the whole might emit a strong system of radiation. But care was taken so that this ‘telepathic’ faculty of the new species should remain subordinate. There must be no danger that the individual should become a mere resonator of the herd.

Long drawn out chemical research enabled the Fourth Men to design also far-reaching improvements in the secretions of the new man, so that he should maintain both a perfect physiological equilibrium, and a well-balanced temperament. For they were determined that though he should experience all the range of emotional life, his passions should not run into disastrous excess; nor should he be prone to some one emotion in season and out of season. It was necessary also to revise in great detail the whole system of natural reflexes, abolishing some, modifying others, and again strengthening others. All the more complex, ‘instinctive’ responses, which had persisted in man since the days of Pithecanthropus Erectus, had also to be meticulously revised, both in respect of the form of the activity and the objects upon which they should be instinctively directed. Anger, fear, curiosity, humour, tenderness, egoism, sexual passion, and sociality must all be possible, but never uncontrollable. In fact, as with the Second Men, but more emphatically, the new type was to have an innate aptitude for, and inclination toward, all those higher activities and objects which, in the First Men, were only achieved after laborious discipline. Thus, while the design included self-regard, it also involved a disposition to prize the self chiefly as a social and intellectual being, rather than as a primeval savage. And while it included strong sociality, the group upon which instinctive interest was to be primarily directed was to be nothing less than the organized community of all minds. And again, while it included vigorous primitive sexuality and parenthood, it provided also those innate ‘sublimations’ which had occurred in the second species; for instance, the native aptitude for altruistic love of individual spirits of every kind, and for art and religion. Only by a miracle of pure intellectual skill could the cold-natured Great Brains, who were themselves doomed never to have actual experience of such activities, contrive, merely by study of the Third Men, to see their importance, and to design an organism splendidly capable of them. It was much as though a blind race, after studying physics, should invent organs of sight.

It was recognized, of course, that in a race in which the average life-span should be counted in thousands of years, procreation must be very rare. Yet it was also recognized that, for full development of mind, not only sexual intercourse but parenthood was necessary in both sexes. This difficulty was overcome partly by designing a very prolonged infancy and childhood; which, necessary in themselves for the proper mental and physical growth of these complicated organisms, provided also a longer exercise of parenthood for the mature. At the same time the actual process of child-birth was designed to be as easy as among the Third Men. And it was expected that with its greatly improved physiological organization the infant would not need that anxious and absorbing care which had so seriously hobbled most mothers among the earlier races.

The mere sketching out of these preliminary specifications of an improved human being involved many centuries of research and calculation which taxed even the ingenuity of the Great Brains. Then followed a lengthy period of tentative experiment in the actual production of such a type. For some thousands of years little was done but to show that many promising lines of attack were after all barren. And several times during this period the whole work was held up by disagreements among the Great Brains themselves as to the policy to be adopted. Once, indeed, they took to violence, one party attacking the other with chemicals, microbes, and armies of human automata.

In short it was only after many failures, and after many barren epochs during which, for a variety of reasons, the enterprise was neglected, that the Fourth Men did at length fashion two individuals almost precisely of the type they had originally designed. These were produced from a single fertilized ovum, in laboratory conditions. Identical twins, but of opposite sexes, they became the Adam and Eve of a new and glorious human species, the Fifth Men.

It may fittingly be said of the Fifth Men that they were the first to attain true human proportions of body and mind. On the average they were more than twice as tall as the First Men, and much taller than the Second Men. Their lower limbs had therefore to be extremely massive compared with the torso which they had to support. Thus, upon the ample pedestal of their feet, they stood like columns of masonry. Yet though their proportions were in a manner elephantine, there was a remarkable precision and even delicacy in the volumes that composed them. Their great arms and shoulders, dwarfed somewhat by their still mightier legs, were instruments not only of power but also of fine adjustment. Their hands also were fashioned both for power and for minute control; for, while the thumb and forefinger constituted a formidable vice, the delicate sixth finger had been induced to divide its tip into two Lilliputian fingers and a corresponding thumb. The contours of the limbs were sharply visible, for the body bore no hair, save for a close, thick skullcap which, in the original stock, was of ruddy brown. The well-marked eyebrows, when drawn down, shaded the sensitive eyes from the sun. Elsewhere there was no need of hair, for the brown skin had been so ingeniously contrived that it maintained an even temperature alike in tropical and sub-Arctic climates, with no aid either from hair or clothes. Compared with the great body, the head was not large, though the brain-capacity was twice that of the Second Men. In the original pair of individuals the immense eyes were of a deep violet, the features strongly moulded and mobile. These facial characters had not been specially designed, for they seemed unimportant to the Fourth Men; but the play of biological forces resulted in a face not unlike that of the Second Men, though with an added and indescribable expression which no human face had hitherto attained.

How from this pair of individuals the new population gradually arose; how at first it was earnestly fostered by its creators; how it subsequently asserted its independence and took control of its own destiny; how the Great Brains failed piteously to understand and sympathize with the mentality of their creatures, and tried to tyrannize over them; how for a while the planet was divided into two mutually intolerant communities, and was at last drenched with man’s blood, until the human automata were exterminated, the Great Brains starved or blown to pieces, and the Fifth Men themselves decimated; how, as a result of these events, a dense fog of barbarism settled once more upon the planet, so that the Fifth Men, like so many other races, had after all to start rebuilding civilization and culture from its very foundations; how all these things befell we must not in detail observe.

4. THE CULTURE OF THE FIFTH MEN

IT IS NOT possible to recount the stages by which the Fifth Men advanced toward their greatest civilization and culture; for it is that fully developed culture itself which concerns us. And even of their highest achievement, which persisted for so many millions of years, I can say but little, not merely because I must hasten to the end of my story, but also because so much of that achievement lies wholly beyond the comprehension of those for whom this book is intended. For I have at last reached that period in the history of man when he first began to reorganize his whole mentality to cope with matters whose very existence had been hitherto almost completely hidden from him. The old aims persist, and are progressively realized as never before; but also they become increasingly subordinate to the requirements of new aims which are more and more insistently forced upon him by his deepening experience. Just as the interests and ideals of the First Men lie beyond the grasp of their ape contemporaries, so the interests and ideals of the Fifth Men in their full development lie beyond the grasp of the First Men. On the other hand, just as, in the life of primitive man, there is much which would be meaningful even to the ape, so in the life of the Fifth Men much remains which is meaningful even to the First Men.

Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from the actual annihilation of matter through the union of electrons and protons to form radiation, completely abolished the whole grotesque burden of drudgery which hitherto had seemed the inescapable price of civilization, nay of life itself. The vast economic routine of the world-community was carried on by the mere touching of appropriate buttons. Transport, mining, manufacture, and even agriculture, were performed in this manner. And indeed in most cases the systematic coordination of these activities was itself the work of self-regulating machinery. Thus, not only was there no longer need for any human beings to spend their lives in unskilled monotonous labour, but further, much that earlier races would have regarded as highly skilled though stereotyped work was now carried on by machinery. Only the pioneering of industry, the endless exhilarating research, invention, design, and reorganization, which is incurred by an ever-changing society, still engaged the minds of men and women. And though this work was of course immense, it could not occupy the whole attention of a great world-community. Thus very much of the energy of the race was free to occupy itself with other no less difficult and exacting matters, or to seek recreation in its many admirable sports and arts. Materially every individual was a multi-millionaire, in that he had at his beck and call a great diversity of powerful mechanisms; but also he was a penniless friar, for he had no vestige of economic control over any other human being. He could fly through the upper air to the ends of the earth in an hour, or hang idle among the clouds all day long. His flying machine was no cumbersome aeroplane, but either a wingless aerial boat, or a mere suit of overalls in which he could disport himself with the freedom of a bird. Not only in the air, but in the sea also, he was free. He could stroll about the ocean bed, or gambol with the deep-sea fishes. And for habitation he could make his home, as he willed, either in a shack in the wilderness or in one of the great pylons which dwarfed the architecture even of the American age. He could possess this huge palace in loneliness and fill it with his possessions, to be automatically cared for without human service; or he could join with others and create a hive of social life. All these amenities he took for granted as the savage takes for granted the air which he breathes. And because they were as universally available as air, no one craved them in excess, and no one grudged another the use of them.

Yet the population of the earth was now very numerous. Some ten thousand million persons had their homes in the snow-capped pylons which covered the continents with an open forest of architecture. Between these great obelisks lay corn-land, park, and wilderness. For there were very many areas of hill-country and forest which were preserved as playgrounds. And indeed one whole continent, stretching from the Tropical to the Arctic, was kept as nearly as possible in its natural state. This region was chosen mainly for its mountains; for since most of the Alpine tracts had by now been worn into insignificance by water and frost, mountains were much prized. Into this Wild Continent individuals of all ages repaired to spend many years at a time in living the life of primitive man without any aid whatever for civilization. For it was recognized that a highly sophisticated race, devoted almost wholly to art and science, must take special measures to preserve its contact with the primitive. Thus in the Wild Continent was to be found at any time a sparse population of ‘savages’, armed with flint and bone, or more rarely with iron, which they or their friends had wrested from the earth. These voluntary primitives were intent chiefly upon hunting and simple agriculture. Their scanty leisure was devoted to art, and meditation, and to savouring fully all the primeval human values. Indeed it was a hard life and a dangerous one that these intellectuals periodically imposed on themselves. And though of course they had zest in it, they often dreaded its hardship and the uncertainty that they would ever return from it. For the danger was very real. The Fifth Men had compensated for the Fourth Men’s foolish destruction of the animals by creating a whole system of new types, which they set at large in the Wild Continent; and some of these creatures were extremely formidable carnivora, which man himself, armed only with primitive weapons, had very good reason to fear. In the Wild Continent there was inevitably a high death-rate. Many promising lives were tragically cut short. But it was recognized that from the point of view of the race this sacrifice was worth while, for the spiritual effects of the institution of periodic savagery were very real. Beings whose natural span was three thousand years, given over almost wholly to civilized pursuits, were greatly invigorated and enlightened by an occasional decade in the wild.

The culture of the Fifth Men was influenced in many respects by their ‘telepathic’ communication with one another. The obvious advantages of this capacity were now secured without its dangers. Each individual could isolate himself at will from the radiation of his fellows, either wholly or in respect of particular elements of his mental process; and thus he was in no danger of losing his individuality. But, on the other hand, he was immeasurably more able to participate in the experience of others than were beings for whom the only possible communication was symbolic. The result was that, though conflict of wills was still possible, it was far more easily resolved by mutual understanding than had ever been the case in earlier species. Thus there were no lasting and no radical conflicts, either of thought or desire. It was universally recognized that every discrepancy of opinion and of aim could be abolished by telepathic discussion. Sometimes the process would be easy and rapid; sometimes it could not be achieved without a patient and detailed ‘laying of mind to mind’, so as to bring to light the point where the difference originated.

One result of the general ‘telepathic’ facility of the species was that speech was no longer necessary. It was still preserved and prized, but only as a medium of art, not as a means of communication. Thinking, of course, was still carried on largely by means of words; but in communication there was no more need actually to speak the words than in thinking in private. Written language remained essential for the recording and storing of thought. Both language and the written expression of it had become far more complex and accurate than they had ever been, more faithful instruments for the expression and creation of thought and emotion.

‘Telepathy’ combined with longevity and the extremely subtle brain-structure of the species to afford each individual an immense number of intimate friendships, and some slight acquaintance actually with the whole race. This, I fear, must seem incredible to my readers, unless they can be persuaded to regard it as a symptom of the high mental development of the species. However that may be, it is a fact that each person was aware of every other, at least as a face, or a name, or the holder of a certain office. It is impossible to exaggerate the effects of this facility of personal intercourse. It meant that the species constituted at any moment, if not strictly a community of friends, at least a vast club or college. Further, since each individual saw his own mind reflected, as it were, in very many other minds, and since there was great variety of psychological types, the upshot in each individual was a very accurate self-consciousness.

In the Martians, ‘telepathic’ intercourse had resulted in a true group-mind, a single psychical process embodied in the electro-magnetic radiation of the whole race; but this group-mind was inferior in calibre to the individual minds. All that was distinctive of an individual at his best failed to contribute to the group-mind. But in the fifth human species ‘telepathy’ was only a means of intercourse between individuals; there was no true group-mind. On the other hand, telepathic intercourse occurred even on the highest planes of experience. It was by ‘telepathic’ intercourse in respect of art, science, philosophy, and the appreciation of personalities, that the public mind, or rather the public culture, of the Fifth Men had being. With the Martians, ‘telepathic’ union took place chiefly by elimination of the differences between individuals; with the Fifth Men ‘telepathic’ communication was, as it were, a kind of spiritual multiplication of mental diversity, by which each mind was enriched with the wealth of ten thousand million. Consequently each individual was, in a very real sense, the cultured mind of the species; but there were as many such minds as there were individuals. There was no additional racial mind over and above the minds of the individuals. Each individual himself was a conscious centre which participated in, and contributed to, the experience of all other centres.

This state of affairs would not have been possible had not the world-community been able to direct so much of its interest and energy into the higher mental activities. The whole structure of society was fashioned in relation to its best culture. It is almost impossible to give even an inkling of the nature and aims of this culture, and to make it believable that a huge population should have spent scores of millions of years not wholly, not even chiefly, on industrial advancement, but almost entirely on art, science, and philosophy, without ever repeating itself or falling into ennui I can only point out that, the higher a mind’s development, the more it discovers in the universe to occupy it.

Needless to say, the Fifth Men had early mastered all those paradoxes of physical science which had so perplexed the First Men. Needless to say, they had a very complete knowledge of the geography of the cosmos and of the atom. But again and again the very foundations of their science were shattered by some new discovery, so that they had patiently to reconstruct the whole upon an entirely new plan. At length, however, with the clear formulation of the principles of psycho-physics, in which the older psychology and the older physics were held, so to speak, in chemical combination, they seemed to have built upon the rock. In this science, the fundamental concepts of psychology were given a physical meaning, and the fundamental concepts of physics were stated in a psychological manner. Further, the most fundamental relations of the physical universe were found to be of the same nature as the fundamental principles of art. But, and herein lay mystery and horror even for the Fifth Men, there was no shred of evidence that this aesthetically admirable cosmos was the work of a conscious artist, nor yet that any mind would ever develop so greatly as to be able to appreciate the Whole in all its detail and unity.

Since art seemed to the Fifth Men to be in some sense basic to the cosmos, they were naturally very much preoccupied with artistic creation. Consequently, all those who were not social or economic organizers, or scientific researchers, or pure philosophers, were by profession creative artists or handicraftsmen. That is to say, they were engaged on the production of material objects of various kinds, whose form should be aesthetically significant to the receiver. In some cases the material object was a pattern of spoken words, in others pure music, in others moving coloured shapes, in others a complex of steel cubes and bars, in others some translation of the human figure into a particular medium, and so on. But also the aesthetic impulse expressed itself in the production, by hand, of innumerable common utensils, indulging sometimes in lavish decoration, trusting at other times to the beauty of function. Every medium of art that had ever been employed was employed by the Fifth Men, and innumerable new vehicles were also used. They prized on the whole more highly those kinds of art which were not static, but involved time as well as space, for as a race they were peculiarly fascinated by time.

These innumerable artists held that they were doing something of great importance. The cosmos was to be regarded as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions, and of inconceivable complexity. Human works of pure art were thought of as instruments through which man might behold and admire some aspect of the cosmic beauty. They were said to focus together features of the cosmos too vast and elusive for man otherwise to apprehend their form. The work of art was sometimes likened to a compendious mathematical formula expressive of some immense and apparently chaotic field of facts. But in the case of art, it was said, the unity which the artistic object elicited was one in which factors of vital nature and of mind itself were essential members.

The race thus deemed itself to be engaged upon a great enterprise both of discovery and creation in which each individual was both an originator of some unique contribution, and an appraiser of all.

Now, as the years advanced in millions and in decades of millions, it began to be noticed that the movement of world-culture was in a manner spiral. There would be an age during which the interest of the race was directed almost wholly upon certain tracts or aspects of existence; and then, after perhaps a hundred thousand years, these would seem to have been fully cultivated, and would be left fallow. During the next epoch attention would be in the main directed to other spheres, and then afterwards to yet others, and again others. But at length a return would be made to the fields that had been deserted, and it would be discovered that they could now miraculously bear a millionfold the former crop. Thus, in both science and art man kept recurring again and again to the ancient themes, to work over them once more in meticulous detail and strike from them new truth and new beauty, such as, in the earlier epoch, he could never have conceived. Thus it was that, though science gathered to itself unfalteringly an ever wider and more detailed view of existence, it periodically discovered some revolutionary general principle in terms of which its whole content had to be given a new significance. And in art there would appear in one age works superficially almost identical with works of another age, yet to the discerning eye incomparably more significant. Similarly, in respect of human personality itself, those men and women who lived at the close of the aeon of the Fifth Men could often discover in the remote beginning of their own race beings curiously like themselves, yet, as it were, expressed in fewer dimensions than their own many-dimensional natures. As a map is like the mountainous land, or the picture like the landscape, or indeed as the point and the circle are like the sphere, so, and only so, the earlier Fifth Men resembled the flower of the species.

Such statements would be in a manner true of any period of steady cultural progress. But in the present instance they have a peculiar significance which I must now somehow contrive to suggest.

XII The Last Terrestrials

1. THE CULT OF EVANESCENCE

THE FIFTH MEN had not been endowed with that potential immortality which their makers themselves possessed. And from the fact that they were mortal and yet long-lived, their culture drew its chief brilliance and poignancy. Beings for whom the natural span was three thousand years, and ultimately as much as fifty thousand, were peculiarly troubled by the prospect of death, and by the loss of those dear to them. The more ephemeral kind of spirit, that comes into being and then almost immediately ceases, before it has entered at all deeply into consciousness of itself, can face its end with a courage that is half unwitting. Even its smart in the loss of other beings with whom it has been intimate is but a vague and dream-like suffering. For the ephemeral spirit has no time to grow fully awake, or fully intimate with another, before it must lose its beloved, and itself once more fade into unconsciousness. But with the long-lived yet not immortal Fifth Men the case was different. Gathering to themselves experience of the cosmos, acquiring an ever more precise and vivid insight and appreciation, they knew that very soon all this wealth of the soul must cease to be. And in love, though they might be fully intimate not merely with one but with very many persons, the death of one of these dear spirits seemed an irrevocable tragedy, an utter annihilation of the most resplendent kind of glory, an impoverishment of the cosmos for evermore.

In their brief primitive phase, the Fifth Men, like so many other races, sought to console themselves by unreasoning faith in a life after death. They conceived, for instance, that at death terrestrial beings embarked upon a career continuous with earthly life, but far more ample, either in some remote planetary system, or in some wholly distinct orb of space-time. But though such theories were never disproved in the primitive era, they gradually began to seem not merely improbable but ignoble. For it came to be recognized that the resplendent glories of personality, even in that degree of beauty which now for the first time was attained, were not after all the extreme of glory. It was seen with pain, but also with exultation, that even love’s demand that the beloved should have immortal life is a betrayal of man’s paramount allegiance. And little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts, and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, an obtuseness of the spirit. Though the love which had misled them was itself a very lovely thing, yet they were misled. Like children, searching for lost toys, they wandered. Like adolescents seeking to recapture delight in the things of childhood, they shunned those more difficult admirations which are proper to the grown mind.

And so it became a constant aim of the Fifth Men to school themselves to admire chiefly even in the very crisis of bereavement, not persons, but that great music of innumerable personal lives, which is the life of the race. And quite early in their career they discovered an unexpected beauty in the very fact that the individual must die. So that, when they had actually come into possession of the means to make themselves immortal, they refrained, choosing rather merely to increase the life-span of succeeding generations to fifty thousand years. Such a period seemed to be demanded for the full exercise of human capacity; but immortality, they held, would lead to spiritual disaster.

Now as their science advanced they saw that there had been a time, before the stars were formed, when there was no possible footing for minds in the cosmos; and that there would come a time when mentality would be driven out of existence. Earlier human species had not needed to trouble about mind’s ultimate fate; but for the long-lived Fifth Men the end, though remote, did not seem infinitely distant. The prospect distressed them. They had schooled themselves to live not for the individual but for the race; and now the life of the race itself was seen to be a mere instant between the endless void of the past and the endless void of the future. Nothing within their ken was more worthy of admiration than the organized progressive mentality of mankind; and the conviction that this most admired thing must soon cease filled many of their less ample minds with horror and indignation. But in time the Fifth Men, like the Second Men long before them, came to suspect that even in this tragic brevity of mind’s course there was a quality of beauty, more difficult than the familiar beauty, but also more exquisite. Even thus imprisoned in an instant, the spirit of man might yet plumb the whole extent of space, and also the whole past and the whole future; and so, from behind his prison bars, he might render the universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded of him. Better so, they said, than that he should fret himself with puny efforts to escape. He is dignified by his very weakness, and the cosmos by its very indifference to him.

For aeons they remained in this faith. And they schooled their hearts to acquiesce in it, saying, if it is so, it is best, and somehow we must learn to see that it is best. But what they meant by ‘best’ was not what their predecessors would have meant. They did not, for instance, deceive themselves by pretending that after all they themselves actually preferred life to be evanescent. On the contrary, they continued to long that it might be otherwise. But having discovered, both behind the physical order and behind the desires of minds, a fundamental principle whose essence was aesthetic, they were faithful to the conviction that whatever was fact must somehow in the universal view be fitting, right, beautiful, integral to the form of the cosmos. And so they accepted as right a state of affairs which in their own hearts they still felt grievously wrong.

This conviction of the irrevocability of the past and of the evanescence of mind induced in them a great tenderness for all beings that had lived and ceased. Deeming themselves to be near the crest of life’s achievement, blessed also with longevity and philosophic detachment, they were often smitten with pity for those humbler, briefer, and less free spirits whose lot had fallen in the past. Moreover, themselves extremely complex, subtle, conscious, they conceived a generous admiration for all simple minds, for the early men, and for the beasts. Very strongly they condemned the action of their predecessors in destroying so many joyous and delectable creatures. Earnestly they sought to reconstruct in imagination all those beings that blind intellectualism had murdered. Earnestly they delved in the near and the remote past so as to recover as much as possible of the history of life on the planet. With meticulous love they would figure out the life stories of extinct types, such as the brontosaurus, the hippopotamus, the chimpanzee, the Englishman, the American, as also of the still extant amoeba. And while they could not but relish the comicality of these remote beings, their amusement was the outgrowth of affectionate insight into simple natures, and was but the obverse of their recognition that the primitive is essentially tragic, because blind. And so, while they saw that the main work of man must have regard to the future, they felt that he owed also a duty toward the past. He must preserve it in his own mind, if not actually in life at least in being. In the future lay glory, joy, brilliance of the spirit. The future needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness, confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered, torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique manner beautiful.

The reconstruction of the past, not merely as abstract history but with the intimacy of the novel, thus became one of the main preoccupations of the Fifth Men. Many devoted themselves to this work, each individual specializing very minutely in some particular episode of human or animal history, and transmitting his work into the culture of the race. Thus increasingly the individual felt himself to be a single flicker between the teeming gulf of the never-more and the boundless void of the not-yet. Himself a member of a very noble and fortunate race, his zest in existence was tempered, deepened, by a sense of the presence, the ghostly presence, of the myriad less fortunate beings in the past. Sometimes, and especially in epochs when the contemporary world seemed most satisfactory and promising, this piety toward the primitive and the past became the dominant activity of the race, giving rise to alternating phases of rebellion against the tyrannical nature of the cosmos, and faith that in the universal view, after all, this horror must be right. In this latter mood it was held that the very irrevocability of the past dignified all past existence, and dignified the cosmos, as a work of tragic art is dignified by the irrevocability of disaster. It was this mood of acquiescence and faith which in the end became the characteristic attitude of the Fifth Men for many millions of years.

But a bewildering discovery was in store for the Fifth Men, a discovery which was to change their whole attitude toward existence. Certain obscure biological facts began to make them suspect, on purely empirical grounds, that past events were not after all simply non-existent, that though no longer existent in the temporal manner, they had eternal existence in some other manner. The effect of this increasing suspicion about the past was that a once harmonious race was divided for a while into two parties, those who insisted that the formal beauty of the universe demanded the tragic evanescence of all things, and those who determined to show that living minds could actually reach back into past events in all their pastness.

The readers of this book are not in a position to realize the poignancy of the conflict which now threatened to wreck humanity. They cannot approach it from the point of view of a race whose culture had consisted of an age-long schooling in admiration of an ever-vanishing cosmos. To the orthodox it seemed that the new view was iconoclastic, impertinent, vulgar. Their opponents, on the other hand, insisted that the matter must be decided dispassionately, according to the evidence. They were also able to point out that this devotion to evanescence was after all but the outcome of the conviction that the cosmos must be supremely noble. No one, it was said, really had direct vision of evanescence as in itself an excellence. So heartfelt was the dispute that the orthodox party actually broke off all ‘telepathic’ communication with the rebels, and even went so far as to plan their destruction. There can be no doubt that if violence had actually been used the human race would have succumbed; for in a species of such high mental development internecine war would have been a gross violation of its nature. It would never have been able to live down so shameful a spiritual disaster. Fortunately, however, at the eleventh hour, commonsense prevailed. The iconoclasts were permitted to carry on their research, and the whole race awaited the result.

2. EXPLORATION OF TIME

THIS FIRST ATTACK upon the nature of time involved an immense cooperative work, both theoretical and practical. It was from biology that the first hint had come that the past persisted. And it would be necessary to restate the whole of biology and the physical sciences in terms of the new idea. On the practical side it was necessary to undertake a great campaign of experiment, physiological and psychological. We cannot stay to watch this work. Millions of years passed by. Sometimes, for thousands of years at a spell, temporal research was the main preoccupation of the race; sometimes it was thrust into the background, or completely ignored, during epochs which were dominated by other interests. Age after age passed, and always the effort of man in this sphere remained barren. Then at last there was a real success.

A child had been selected from among those produced by an age-long breeding enterprise, directed towards the mastery of time. From infancy this child’s brain had been very carefully controlled physiologically. Psychologically also he had been subjected to a severe treatment, that he might be properly schooled for his strange task. In the presence of several scientists and historians he was put into a kind of trance, and brought out of it again, half an hour later. He was then asked to give an account ‘telepathically’ of his experiences during the trance. Unfortunately he was now so shattered that his evidence was almost unintelligible. After some months of rest he was questioned again, and was able to describe a curious episode which turned out to be a terrifying incident in the girlhood of his dead mother. He seemed to have seen the incident through her eyes, and to have been aware of all her thoughts. This alone proved nothing, for he might have received the information from some living mind. Once more, therefore, and in spite of his entreaties, he was put into the peculiar trance. On waking he told a rambling story of ‘little red people living in a squat white tower’. It was clear that he was referring to the Great Brains and their attendants. But once more, this proved nothing; and before the account was finished the child died.

Another child was chosen, but was not put to the test until late in adolescence. After an hour of the trance, he woke and became terribly agitated, but forced himself to describe an episode which the historians assigned to the age of the Martian invasions. The importance of this incident lay in his account of a certain house with a carved granite portico, situated at the head of a waterfall in a mountain valley. He said he had found himself to be an old woman, and that he, or she, was being hurriedly helped out of the house by the other inmates. They watched a formless monster creep down the valley, destroy their house, and mangle two persons who failed to get away in time. Now this house was not at all typical of the Second Men, but must have expressed the whim of some freakish individual. From evidence derived from the boy himself, it proved possible to locate the valley with reference to a former mountain, known to history. No valley survived in that spot; but deep excavations revealed the ancient slopes, the fault that had occasioned the waterfall, and the broken pillars.

This and many similar incidents confirmed the Fifth Men in their new view of time. There followed an age in which the technique of direct inspection of the past was gradually improved, but not without tragedy. In the early stages it was found impossible to keep the ‘medium’ alive for more than a few weeks after his venture into the past. The experience seemed to set up a progressive mental disintegration which produced first insanity, then paralysis, and, within a few months, death. This difficulty was at last overcome. By one means and another a type of brain was produced capable of undergoing the strain of supra-temporal experience without fatal results. An increasingly large proportion of the rising generation had now direct access to the past, and were engaged upon a great re-statement of history in relation to their first-hand experience; but their excursions into the past were uncontrollable. They could not go where they wanted to go, but only where fate flung them. Nor could they go of their own will, but only through a very complicated technique, and with the cooperation of experts. After a time the process was made much easier, in fact, too easy. The unfortunate medium might slip so easily into the trance that his days were eaten up by the past. He might suddenly fall to the ground, and lie rapt, inert, dependent on artificial feeding, for weeks, months, even for years. Or a dozen times in the same day he might be flung into a dozen different epochs of history. Or, still more distressing, his experience of past events might not keep pace with the actual rhythm of those events themselves. Thus he might behold the events of a month, or even a lifetime, fantastically accelerated so as to occupy a trance of no more than a day’s duration. Or, worse, he might find himself sliding backwards down the vista of the hours and experiencing events in an order the reverse of the natural order. Even the magnificent brains of the Fifth Men could not stand this. The result was maniacal behaviour, followed by death. Another trouble also beset these first experimenters. Supra-temporal experience proved to be like a dangerous and habit-forming drug. Those who ventured into the past might become so intoxicated that they would try to spend every moment of their natural lives in roaming among past events. Thus gradually they would lose touch with the present, live in absentminded brooding, fail to react normally to their environment, turn socially worthless, and often come actually to physical disaster through inability to look after themselves.

Many more thousands of years passed before these difficulties and dangers were overcome. At length, however, the technique of supra-temporal experience was so perfected that every individual could at will practise it with safety, and could, within limits, project his vision into any locality of space-time which he desired to inspect. It was only possible, however, to see past events through the mind of some past organism, no longer living. And in practice only human minds, and to some extent the minds of the higher mammals, could be entered. The explorer retained throughout his adventure his own personality and system of memory. While experiencing the past individual’s perceptions, memories, thoughts, desires, and in fact the whole process and content of the past mind, the explorer continued to be himself, and to react in terms of his own character, now condemning, now sympathizing, now critically enjoying the spectacle.

The task of explaining the mechanism of this new faculty occupied the scientists and philosophers of the species for a very long period. The final account, of course, cannot be presented save by parable; for it was found necessary to recast many fundamental concepts in order to interpret the facts coherently. The only hint that I can give of the explanation is in saying, metaphorically of course, that the living brain had access to the past, not by way of some mysterious kind of racial memory, nor by some equally impossible journey up the stream of time, but by a partial awakening, as it were, into eternity, and into inspection of a minute tract of space-time through some temporal mind in the past, as though through an optical instrument. In the early experiments the fantastic speeding, slowing, and reversal of the temporal process resulted from disorderly inspection. As a reader may either skim the pages of a book, or read at a comfortable pace, or dwell upon one word, or spell the sentence backwards, so, unintentionally, the novice in eternity might read or misread the mind that was presented to him.

This new mode of experience, it should be noted, was the activity of living brains, though brains of a novel kind. Hence what was to be discovered ‘through the medium of eternity’ was limited by the particular exploring brain’s capacity of understanding what was presented to it. And, further, though the actual supra-temporal contact with past events occupied no time in the brain’s natural life, the assimilating of that moment of vision, the reduction of it to normal temporal memory in the normal brain structures, took time, and had to be done during the period of the trance. To expect the neural structure to record the experience instantaneously would be to expect a complicated machine to effect a complicated readjustment without a process of readjusting.

The new access to the past had, of course, far-reaching effects upon the culture of the Fifth Men. Not only did it give them an incomparably more accurate knowledge of past events, and insight into the motives of historical personages, and into large-scale cultural movements, but also it effected a subtle change in their estimate of the importance of things. Though intellectually they had, of course, realized both the vastness and the richness of the past, now they realized it with an overwhelming vividness. Matters that had been known hitherto only historically, schematically, were now available to be lived through by intimate acquaintance. The only limit to such acquaintance was set by the limitations of the explorer’s own brain-capacity. Consequently the remote past came to enter into a man and shape his mind in a manner in which only the recent past, through memory, had shaped him hitherto. Even before the new kind of experience was first acquired, this race had been, as was said, peculiarly under the spell of the past; but now it was infinitely more so. Hitherto the Fifth Men had been like stay-at-home folk who had read minutely of foreign parts, but had never travelled; now they had become travellers experienced in all the continents of human time. The presences that had hitherto been ghostly were now presences of flesh and blood seen in broad daylight. And so the moving instant called the present appeared no longer as the only, and infinitesimal, real, but as the growing surface of an everlasting tree of existence. It was now the past that seemed most real, while the future still seemed void, and the present merely the impalpable becomingness of the indestructible past.

The discovery that past events were after all persistent, and accessible, was of course for the Fifth Men a source of deep joy; but also it caused them a new distress. While the past was thought of as a mere gulf of non-existence, the inconceivably great pain, misery, baseness, that had fallen into that gulf, could be dismissed as done with; and the will could be concentrated wholly on preventing such horrors from occurring in the future. But now, along with past joy, past distress was found to be everlasting. And those who, in the course of their voyaging in the past, encountered regions of eternal agony, came back distraught. It was easy to remind these harrowed explorers that if pain was eternal, so also was joy. Those who had endured travel in the tragic past were apt to dismiss such assurances with contempt, affirming that all the delights of the whole population of time could not compensate for the agony of one tortured individual. And anyhow, they declared, it was obvious that there had been no preponderance of joy over pain. Indeed, save in the modern age, pain had been overwhelmingly in excess.

So seriously did these convictions prey upon the minds of the Fifth Men, that in spite of their own almost perfect social order, in which suffering had actually to be sought out as a tonic, they fell into despair. At all times, in all pursuits, the presence of the tragic past haunted them, poisoning their lives, sapping their strength. Lovers were ashamed of the delight in one another. As in the far-off days of sexual taboo, guilt crept between them, and held their spirits apart even while their bodies were united.

3. VOYAGING IN SPACE

IT WAS WHILE they were struggling in the grip of this vast social melancholy, and anxiously craving some new vision by which to reinterpret or transcend the agony of the past, that the Fifth Men were confronted with a most unexpected physical crisis. It was discovered that something queer was happening to the moon; in fact, that the orbit of the satellite was narrowing in upon the earth in a manner contrary to all the calculations of the scientists.

The Fifth Men had long ago fashioned for themselves an all-embracing and minutely coherent system of natural sciences, every factor in which had been put to the test a thousand times and had never been shaken. Imagine, then, their bewilderment at this extraordinary discovery. In ages when science was still fragmentary, a subversive discovery entailed merely a reorganization of some one department of science; but by now, such was the coherence of knowledge, that any minute discrepancy of fact and theory must throw man into a state of complete intellectual vertigo.

The evolution of the lunar orbit had, of course, been studied from time immemorial. Even the First Men had learned that the moon must first withdraw from and subsequently once more approach the earth, till it should reach a critical proximity and begin to break up into a swarm of fragments like the rings of Saturn. This view had been very thoroughly confirmed by the Fifth Men themselves. The satellite should have continued to withdraw for yet many hundreds of millions of years; but in fact it was now observed that not only had the withdrawal ceased, but a comparatively rapid approach had begun.

Observations and calculations were repeated, and ingenious theoretical explanations were suggested; but the truth remained completely hidden. It was left to a future and more brilliant species to discover the connexion between a planet’s gravitation and its cultural development. Meanwhile, the Fifth Men knew only that the distance between the earth and the moon was becoming smaller with ever-increasing rapidity.

This discovery was a tonic to a melancholy race. Men turned from the tragic past to the bewildering present and the uncertain future.

For it was evident that, if the present acceleration of approach were to be maintained, the moon would enter the critical zone and disintegrate in less than ten million years; and, further, that the fragments would not maintain themselves as a ring, but would soon crash upon the earth. Heat generated by their impact would make the surface of the earth impossible as the home of life. A short-lived and short-sighted species might well have considered ten million years as equivalent to eternity. Not so the Fifth Men. Thinking primarily in terms of the race, they recognized at once that their whole social policy must now be dominated by this future catastrophe. Some there were indeed who at first refused to take the matter seriously, saying that there was no reason to believe that the moon’s odd behaviour would continue indefinitely. But as the years advanced, this view became increasingly improbable. Some of those who had spent much of their lives in exploration of the past now sought to explore the future also, hoping to prove that human civilization would always be discoverable on the earth in no matter how remote a future. But the attempt to unveil the future by direct inspection failed completely. It was surmised, erroneously, that future events, unlike past events, must be strictly non-existent until their creation by the advancing present.

Clearly humanity must leave its native planet. Research was therefore concentrated on the possibility of flight through empty space, and the suitability of neighbouring worlds. The only alternatives were Mars and Venus. The former was by now without water and without atmosphere. The latter had a dense moist atmosphere, but one which lacked oxygen. The surface of Venus, moreover, was known to be almost completely covered with a shallow ocean. Further the planet was so hot by day that, even at the poles, man in his present state would scarcely survive.

It did not take the Fifth Men many centuries to devise a tolerable means of voyaging in interplanetary space. Immense rockets were constructed, the motive power of which was derived from the annihilation of matter. The vehicle was propelled simply by the terrific pressure of radiation thus produced. ‘Fuel’ for a voyage of many months, or even years, could, of course, easily be carried, since the annihilation of a minute amount of matter produced a vast wealth of energy. Moreover, when once the vessel had emerged from the earth’s atmosphere, and had attained full speed, she would, of course, maintain it without the use of power from the rocket apparatus. The task of rendering the ‘ether-ship’ properly manageable and decently habitable proved difficult, but not insurmountable. The first vessel to take the ether was a cigar-shaped hull some three thousand feet long, and built of metals whose artificial atoms were incomparably more rigid than anything hitherto known. Batteries of ‘rocket’ apparatus at various points on the hull enabled the ship not only to travel forward, but to reverse, turn in any direction, or side-step. Windows of an artificial transparent element, scarcely less strong than the metal of the hull, enabled the voyagers to look around them. Within there was ample accommodation for a hundred persons and their provisions for three years. Air for the same period was manufactured in transit from protons and electrons stored under pressure comparable to that in the interior of a star. Heat was, of course, provided by the annihilation of matter. Powerful refrigeration would permit the vessel to approach the sun almost to the orbit of Mercury. An ‘artificial gravity’ system, based on the properties of the electro-magnetic field, could be turned on and regulated at will, so as to maintain a more or less normal environment for the human organism.

This pioneer ship was manned with a navigating crew and a company of scientists, and was successfully dispatched upon a trial trip. The intention was to approach close to the surface of the moon, possibly to circumnavigate it at an altitude of ten thousand feet, and to return without landing. For many days those on earth received radio messages from the vessel’s powerful installation, reporting that all was going well. But suddenly the messages ceased, and no more was ever heard of the vessel. Almost at the moment of the last message, telescopes had revealed a sudden flash of light at a point on the vessel’s course. It was therefore surmised that she had collided with a meteor and fused with the heat of the impact.

Other vessels were built and dispatched on trial voyages. Many failed to return. Some got out of control, and reported that they were heading for outer space or plunging towards the sun, their hopeless messages continuing until the last of the crew succumbed to suffocation. Other vessels returned successfully, but with crews haggard and distraught from long confinement in bad atmosphere. One, venturing to land on the moon, broke her back, so that the air rushed out of her, and her people died. After her last message was received, she was detected from the earth, as an added speck on the stippled surface of a lunar ‘sea’.

As time passed, however, accidents became rarer; indeed, so rare that trips in the void began to be a popular form of amusement. Literature of the period reverberates with the novelty of such experiences, with the sense that man had at last learned true flight, and acquired the freedom of the solar system. Writers dwelt upon the shock of seeing, as the vessel soared and accelerated, the landscape dwindle to a mere illuminated disc or crescent, surrounded by constellations. They remarked also the awful remoteness and mystery which travellers experienced on these early voyages, with dazzling sunlight on one side of the vessel and dazzlingly bespangled night on the other. They described how the intense sun spread his corona against a black and star-crowded sky. They expatiated also on the overwhelming interest of approaching another planet; of inspecting from the sky the still visible remains of Martian civilization; of groping through the cloud banks of Venus to discover islands in her almost coastless ocean; of daring an approach to Mercury, till the heat became insupportable in spite of the best refrigerating mechanism; of feeling a way across the belt of the asteroids and onwards toward Jupiter, till shortage of air and provisions forced a return.

But though the mere navigation of space was thus easily accomplished, the major task was still untouched. It was necessary either to remake man’s nature to suit another planet, or to modify conditions upon another planet to suit man’s nature. The former alternative was repugnant to the Fifth Men. Obviously it would entail an almost complete refashioning of the human organism. No existing individual could possibly be so altered as to live in the present conditions of Mars or Venus. And it would probably prove impossible to create a new being, adapted to these conditions, without sacrificing the brilliant and harmonious constitution of the extant species.

On the other hand, Mars could not be made habitable without first being stocked, with air and water; and such an undertaking seemed impossible. There was nothing for it, then, but to attack Venus. The polar surfaces of that planet, shielded by impenetrable depths of cloud, proved after all not unendurably hot. Subsequent generations might perhaps be modified so as to withstand even the sub-arctic and ‘temperate’ climates. Oxygen was plentiful, but it was all tied up in chemical combination. Inevitably so, since oxygen combines very readily, and on Venus there was no vegetable life to exhale the free gas and replenish the ever-vanishing supply. It was necessary, then, to equip Venus with an appropriate vegetation, which in the course of ages should render the planet’s atmosphere hospitable to man. The chemical and physical conditions on Venus had therefore to be studied in great detail, so that it might be possible to design a kind of life which would have a chance of flourishing. This research had to be carried out from within the ether-ships, or with gas helmets, since no human being could live in the natural atmosphere of the planet.

We must not dwell upon the age of heroic research and adventure which now began. Observations of the lunar orbit were showing that ten million years was too long an estimate of the future habitability of the earth; and it was soon realized that Venus could not be made ready soon enough unless some more rapid change was set on foot. It was therefore decided to split up some of the ocean of the planet into hydrogen and oxygen by a vast process of electrolysis. This would have been a more difficult task, had not the ocean been relatively free from salt, owing to the fact that there was so little dry land to be denuded of salts by rain and river. The oxygen thus formed by electrolysis would be allowed to mix with the atmosphere. The hydrogen had to be got rid of somehow, and an ingenious method was devised by which it should be ejected beyond the limits of the atmosphere at so great a speed that it would never return. Once sufficient free oxygen had been produced, the new vegetation would replenish the loss due to oxidation. This work was duly set on foot. Great automatic electrolysing stations were founded on several of the islands; and biological research produced at length a whole flora of specialized vegetable types to cover the land surface of the planet. It was hoped that in less than a million years Venus would be fit to receive the human race, and the race fit to live on Venus.

Meanwhile a careful survey of the planet had been undertaken. Its land surface, scarcely more than a thousandth that of the earth, consisted of an unevenly distributed archipelago of mountainous islands. The planet had evidently not long ago been through a mountain-forming era, for soundings proved its whole surface to be extravagantly corrugated. The ocean was subject to terrific storms and currents; for since the planet took several weeks to rotate, there was a great difference of temperature and atmospheric pressure between the almost Arctic hemisphere of night and the sweltering hemisphere of day. So great was the evaporation, that open sky was almost never visible from any part of the planet’s surface; and indeed the average daytime weather was a succession of thick fogs and fantastic thunderstorms. Rain in the evening was a continuous torrent. Yet before night was over the waves clattered with fragments of ice.

Man looked upon his future home with loathing, and on his birthplace with an affection which became passionate. With its blue sky, its incomparable starry nights, its temperate and varied continents, its ample spaces of agriculture, wilderness, and park, its well-known beasts and plants, and all the material fabric of the most enduring of terrestrial civilizations, it seemed to the men and women who were planning flight almost a living thing imploring them not to desert it. They looked often with hate at the quiet moon, now visibly larger than the moon of history. They revised again and again their astronomical and physical theories, hoping for some flaw which should render the moon’s observed behaviour less mysterious, less terrifying. But they found nothing. It was as though a fiend out of some ancient myth had come to life in the modern world, to interfere with the laws of nature for man’s undoing.

4. PREPARING A NEW WORLD

ANOTHER TROUBLE NOW occurred. Several electrolysis stations on Venus were wrecked, apparently by submarine eruption. Also, a number of ether-ships, engaged in surveying the ocean, mysteriously exploded. The explanation was found when one of these vessels, though damaged, was able to return to the earth. The commander reported that, when the sounding line was drawn up, a large spherical object was seen to be attached to it. Closer inspection showed that this object was fastened to the sounding apparatus by a hook, and was indeed unmistakably artificial, a structure of small metal plates riveted together. While preparations were being made to bring the object within the ship, it happened to bump against the hull, and then it exploded.

Evidently there must be intelligent life somewhere in the ocean of Venus. Evidently the marine Venerians resented the steady depletion of their aqueous world, and were determined to stop it. The terrestrials had assumed that water in which no free oxygen was dissolved could not support life. But observation soon revealed that in this world-wide ocean there were many living species, some sessile, others free-swimming, some microscopic, others as large as whales. The basis of life in these creatures lay not in photosynthesis and chemical combination, but in the controlled disintegration of radio-active atoms. Venus was particularly rich in these atoms, and still contained certain elements which had long ago ceased to exist on the earth. The oceanic fauna subsisted in the destruction of minute quantities of radio-active atoms throughout its tissues.

Several of the Venerian species had attained considerable mastery over their physical environment, and were able to destroy one another very competently with various mechanical contrivances. Many types were indeed definitely intelligent and versatile within certain limits. And of these intelligent types, one had come to dominate all the others by virtue of its superior intelligence, and had constructed a genuine civilization on the basis of radio-active power. These most developed of all the Venerian creatures were beings of about the size and shape of a swordfish. They had three manipulative organs, normally sheathed within the long ‘sword’, but capable of extension beyond its point, as three branched muscular tentacles. They swam with a curious screw-like motion of their bodies and triple tails. Three fins enabled them to steer. They had also organs of phosphorescence, vision, touch, and something analogous to hearing. They appeared to reproduce asexually, laying eggs in the ooze of the ocean bed. They had no need of nutrition in the ordinary sense; but in infancy they seemed to gather enough radio-active matter to keep them alive for many years. Each individual, when his stock was running out and he began to be feeble, was either destroyed by his juniors or buried in a radio-active mine, to rise from this living death in a few months completely rejuvenated.

At the bottom of the Venerian ocean these creatures thronged in cities of proliferated coral-like buildings, equipped with many complex articles, which must have constituted the necessities and luxuries of their civilization. So much was ascertained by the Terrestrials in the course of their submarine exploration. But the mental life of the Venerians remained hidden. It was clear, indeed, that like all living things, they were concerned with self-maintenance and the exercise of their capacities; but of the nature of these capacities little was discoverable. Clearly they used some kind of symbolic language, based on mechanical vibrations set up in the water by the snapping claws of their tentacles. But their more complex activities were quite unintelligible. All that could be recorded with certainty was that they were much addicted to warfare, even to warfare between groups of one species; and that even in the stress of military disaster they maintained a feverish production of material articles of all sorts, which they proceeded to destroy and neglect.

One activity was observed which was peculiarly mysterious. At certain seasons three individuals, suddenly developing unusual luminosity, would approach one another with rhythmic swayings and tremors, and would then rise on their tails and press their bodies together. Sometimes at this stage an excited crowd would collect, whirling around the three like driven snow. The chief performers would now furiously tear one another to pieces with their crab-like pincers, till nothing was left but tangled shreds of flesh, the great swords, and the still twitching claws. The Terrestrials, observing these matters with difficulty, at first suspected some kind of sexual intercourse; but no reproduction was ever traced to this source. Possibly the behaviour had once served a biological end, and had now become a useless ritual. Possibly it was a kind of voluntary religious sacrifice. More probably it was of a quite different nature, unintelligible to the human mind.

As man’s activities on Venus became more extensive, the Venerians became more energetic in seeking to destroy him. They could not come out of the ocean to grapple with him, for they were deep-sea organisms. Deprived of oceanic pressure, they would have burst. But they contrived to hurl high explosives into the centres of the islands, or to undermine them from tunnels. The work of electrolysis was thus very seriously hampered. And as all efforts to parley with the Venerians failed completely, it was impossible to effect a compromise. The Fifth Men were thus faced with a grave moral problem. What right had man to interfere in a world already possessed by beings who were obviously intelligent, even though their mental life was incomprehensible to man? Long ago man himself had suffered at the hands of Martian invaders, who doubtless regarded themselves as more noble than the human race. And now man was committing a similar crime. On the other hand, either the migration to Venus must go forward, or humanity must be destroyed; for it seemed quite certain by now that the moon would fall, and at no very distant date. And though man’s understanding of the Venerians was so incomplete, what he did know of them strongly suggested that they were definitely inferior to himself in mental range. This judgement might, of course, be mistaken; the Venerians might after all be so superior to man that man could not get an inkling of their superiority. But this argument would apply equally to jelly-fish and micro-organisms. Judgement had to be passed according to the evidence available. So far as man could judge at all in the matter, he was definitely the higher type.

There was another fact to be taken into account. The life of the Venerian organism depended on the existence of radio-active atoms. Since those atoms are subject to disintegration, they must become rarer. Venus was far better supplied than the earth in this respect, but there must inevitably come a time when there would be no more radio-active matter in Venus. Now submarine research showed that the Venerian fauna had once been much more extensive, and that the increasing difficulty of procuring radio-active matter was already the great limiting factor of civilization. Thus the Venerians were doomed, and man would merely hasten their destruction.

It was hoped, of course, that in colonizing Venus mankind would be able to accommodate itself without seriously interfering with the native population. But this proved impossible for two reasons. In the first place, the natives seemed determined to destroy the invader even if they should destroy themselves in the process. Titanic explosions were engineered, which caused the invaders serious damage, but also strewed the ocean surface with thousands of dead Venerians. Secondly, it was found that, as electrolysis poured more and more free oxygen into the atmosphere, the ocean absorbed some of the potent element back into itself by solution; and this dissolved oxygen had a disastrous effect upon the oceanic organisms. Their tissues began to oxidize. They were burnt up, internally and externally, by a slow fire. Man dared not stop the process of electrolysis until the atmosphere had become as rich in oxygen as his native air. Long before this state was reached, it was already clear that the Venerians were beginning to feel the effects of the poison, and that in a few thousand years, at most, they would be exterminated. It was therefore determined to put them out of their misery as quickly as possible. Men could by now walk abroad on the islands of Venus, and indeed the first settlements were already being founded. They were thus able to build a fleet of powerful submarine vessels to scour the ocean and destroy the whole native fauna.

This vast slaughter influenced the mind of the fifth human species in two opposite directions, now flinging it into despair, now rousing it to grave elation. For on the one hand the horror of the slaughter produced a haunting guiltiness in all men’s minds, an unreasoning disgust with humanity for having been driven to murder in order to save itself. And this guiltiness combined with the purely intellectual loss of self-confidence which had been produced by the failure of science to account for the moon’s approach. It reawakened, also, that other quite irrational sense of guilt which had been bred of sympathy with the everlasting distress of the past. Together, these three influences tended toward racial neurosis.

On the other hand a very different mood sometimes sprang from the same three sources. After all, the failure of science was a challenge to be gladly accepted; it opened up a wealth of possibilities hitherto unimagined. Even the unalterable distress of the past constituted a challenge; for in some strange manner the present and future, it was said, must transfigure the past. As for the murder of Venerian life, it was, indeed, terrible, but right. It had been committed without hate; indeed, rather in love. For as the navy proceeded with its relentless work, it had gathered much insight into the life of the natives, and had learned to admire, even in a sense to love, while it killed. This mood, of inexorable yet not ruthless will, intensified the spiritual sensibility of the species, refined, so to speak, its spiritual hearing, and revealed to it tones and themes in the universal music which were hitherto obscure.

Which of these two moods, despair or courage, would triumph? All depended on the skill of the species to maintain a high degree of vitality in untoward circumstances.

Man now busied himself in preparing his new home. Many kinds of plant life, derived from the terrestrial stock, but bred for the Venerian environment, now began to swarm on the islands and in the sea. For so restricted was the land surface, that great areas of ocean had to be given over to specially designed marine plants, which now formed immense floating continents of vegetable matter. On the least torrid islands appeared habitable pylons, forming an architectural forest, with vegetation on every acre of free ground. Even so, it would be impossible for Venus ever to support the huge population of the earth. Steps had therefore been taken to ensure that the birth-rate should fall far short of the death-rate; so that, when the time should come, the race might emigrate without leaving any living members behind. No more than a hundred million, it was reckoned, could live tolerably on Venus. The population had therefore to be reduced to a hundredth of its former size. And since, in the terrestrial community, with its vast social and cultural activity, every individual had fulfilled some definite function in society, it was obvious that the new community must be not merely small but mentally impoverished. Hitherto, each individual had been enriched by intercourse with a far more intricate and diverse social environment that would be possible on Venus.

Such was the prospect when at length it was judged advisable to leave the earth to its fate. The moon was now so huge that it periodically turned day into night, and night into a ghastly day. Prodigious tides and distressful weather conditions had already spoilt the amenities of the earth, and done great damage to the fabric of civilization. And so at length humanity reluctantly took flight. Some centuries passed before the migration was completed, before Venus had received, not only the whole remaining human population, but also representatives of many other species of organisms, and all the most precious treasure of man’s culture.

XIII Humanity on Venus

1. TAKING ROOT AGAIN

MAN’S SOJOURN ON Venus lasted somewhat longer than his whole career on the Earth. From the days of Pithecanthropus to the final evacuation of his native planet he passed, as we have seen, through a bewildering diversity of form and circumstance. On Venus, though the human type was somewhat more constant biologically, it was scarcely less variegated in culture.

To give an account of this period, even on the minute scale that has been adopted hitherto, would entail another volume. I can only sketch its bare outline. The sapling, humanity, transplanted into foreign soil, withers at first almost to the root, slowly readjusts itself, grows into strength and a certain permanence of form, burgeons, season by season, with leaf and flower of many successive civilizations and cultures, sleeps winter by winter, through many ages of reduced vitality, but at length (to force the metaphor), avoids this recurrent defeat by attaining an evergreen constitution and a continuous efflorescence. Then once more, through the whim of Fate, it is plucked up by the roots and cast upon another world.

The first human settlers on Venus knew well that life would be a sorry business. They had done their best to alter the planet to suit human nature, but they could not make Venus into another Earth. The land surface was minute. The climate was almost unendurable. The extreme difference of temperature between the protracted day and night produced incredible storms, rain like a thousand contiguous waterfalls, terrifying electrical disturbances, and fogs in which a man could not see his own feet. To make matters worse, the oxygen supply was as yet barely enough to render the air breathable. Worse still, the liberated hydrogen was not always successfully ejected from the atmosphere. It would sometimes mingle with the air to form an explosive mixture, and sooner or later there would occur a vast atmospheric flash. Recurrent disasters of this sort destroyed the architecture and the human inhabitants of many islands, and further reduced the oxygen supply. In time, however, the increasing vegetation made it possible to put an end to the dangerous process of electrolysis.

Meanwhile, these atmospheric explosions crippled the race so seriously that it was unable to cope with a more mysterious trouble which beset it some time after the migration. A new and inexplicable decay of the digestive organs, which first occurred as a rare disease, threatened within a few centuries to destroy mankind. The physical effects of this plague were scarcely more disastrous than the psychological effects of the complete failure to master it; for, what with the mystery of the moon’s vagaries and the deep-seated, unreasoning sense of guilt produced by the extermination of the Venerians, man’s self-confidence was already seriously shaken, and his highly organized mentality began to show symptoms of derangement. The new plague was, indeed, finally traced to something in the Venerian water, and was supposed to be due to certain molecular groupings, formerly rare, but subsequently fostered by the presence of terrestrial organic matter in the ocean. No cure was discovered.

And now another plague seized upon the enfeebled race. Human tissues had never perfectly assimilated the Martian units which were the means of ‘telepathic’ communication. The universal ill-health now favoured a kind of ‘cancer’ of the nervous system, which was due to the ungoverned proliferation of these units. The harrowing results of this disease may be left unmentioned. Century by century it increased; and even those who did not actually contract the sickness lived in constant terror of madness.

These troubles were aggravated by the devastating heat. The hope that, as the generations passed, human nature would adapt itself even to the more sultry regions, seemed to be unfounded. Far otherwise, within a thousand years the once-populous arctic and antarctic islands were almost deserted. Out of each hundred of the great pylons, scarcely more than two were inhabited, and these only by a few plague-stricken and broken-spirited human relics. These alone were left to turn their telescopes upon the earth and watch the unexpectedly delayed bombardment of their native world by the fragments of the moon.

Population decreased still further. Each brief generation was slightly less well developed than its parents. Intelligence declined. Education became superficial and restricted. Contact with the past was no longer possible. Art lost its significance, and philosophy its dominion over the minds of men. Even applied science began to be too difficult. Unskilled control of the subatomic sources of power led to a number of disasters, which finally gave rise to a superstition that all ‘tampering with nature’ was wicked, and all the ancient wisdom a snare of Man’s Enemy. Books, instruments, all the treasures of human culture, were therefore burnt. Only the perdurable buildings resisted destruction. Of the incomparable world-order of the Fifth Men nothing was left but a few island tribes cut off from one another by the ocean, and from the rest of space-time by the depths of their own ignorance.

After many thousands of years human nature did begin to adapt itself to the climate and to the poisoned water without which life was impossible. At the same time a new variety of the fifth species now began to appear, in which the Martian units were not included. Thus at last the race regained a certain mental stability, at the expense of its faculty of ‘telepathy’, which man was not to regain until almost the last phase of his career. Meanwhile, though he had recovered somewhat from the effects of an alien world, the glory that had been was no more. Let us therefore hurry through the ages that passed before noteworthy events again occurred.

In early days on Venus men had gathered their foodstuff from the great floating islands of vegetable matter which had been artificially produced before the migration. But as the oceans became populous with modifications of the terrestrial fauna, the human tribes turned more and more to fishing. Under the influence of its marine environment, one branch of the species assumed such an aquatic habit that in time it actually began to develop biological adaptations for marine life. It is perhaps surprising that man was still capable of spontaneous variation; but the fifth human species was artificial, and had always been prone to epidemics of mutation. After some millions of years of variation and selection there appeared a very successful species of seal-like submen. The whole body was moulded to stream-lines. The lung capacity was greatly developed. The spine had elongated, and increased in flexibility. The legs were shrunken, grown together, and flattened into a horizontal rudder. The arms also were diminutive and fin-like, though they still retained the manipulative forefinger and thumb. The head had sunk into the body and looked forward in the direction of swimming. Strong carnivorous teeth, emphatic gregariousness, and a new, almost human, cunning in the chase, combined, to make these seal-men lords of the ocean. And so they remained for many million years, until a more human race, annoyed at their piscatorial successes, harpooned them out of existence.

For another branch of the degenerated fifth species had retained a more terrestrial habit and the ancient human form. Sadly reduced in stature and in brain, these abject beings were so unlike the original invaders that they are rightly considered a new species, and may therefore be called the Sixth Men. Age after age they gained a precarious livelihood by grubbing roots upon the forest-clad islands, trapping the innumerable birds, and catching fish in the tidal inlets with ground bait. Not infrequently they devoured, or were devoured by, their seal-like relatives. So restricted and constant was the environment of these human remnants, that they remained biologically and culturally stagnant for some millions of years.

At length, however, geological events afforded man’s nature once more the opportunity of change. A mighty warping of the planet’s crust produced an island almost as large as Australia. In time this was peopled, and from the clash of tribes a new and versatile race emerged. Once more there was methodical tillage, craftsmanship, complex social organization, and adventure in the realm of thought.

During the next two hundred million years all the main phases of man’s life on earth were many times repeated on Venus with characteristic differences. Theocratic empires; free and intellectualistic island cities; insecure overlordships of feudal archipelagos; rivalries of high priest and emperor; religious feuds over the interpretation of sacred scriptures; recurrent fluctuations of thought from naïve animism, through polytheism, conflicting monotheisms, and all the desperate ‘isms’ by which mind seeks to blur the severe outline of truth; recurrent fashions of comfort-seeking fantasy and cold intelligence; social disorders through the misuse of volcanic or wind-power in industry; business empires and pseudo-communistic empires — all these forms flitted over the changing substance of mankind again and again, as in an enduring hearth-fire there appear and vanish the infinitely diverse forms of flame and smoke. But all the while the brief spirits, in whose massed configurations these forms inhered, were intent chiefly on the primitive needs of food, shelter, companionship, crowd-lust, love-making, the two-edged relationship of parent and child, the exercise of muscle and intelligence in facile sport. Very seldom, only in rare moments of clarity, only after ages of misapprehension, did a few of them, here and there, now and again, begin to have the deeper insight into the world’s nature and man’s. And no sooner had this precious insight begun to propagate itself, than it would be blotted out by some small or great disaster, by epidemic disease, by the spontaneous disruption of society, by an access of racial imbecility, by a prolonged bombardment of meteorites, or by the mere cowardice and vertigo that dared not look down the precipice of the fact.

2. THE FLYING MEN

WE NEED NOT dwell upon these multitudinous reiterations of culture, but must glance for a moment at the last phase of this sixth human species, so that we may pass on to the artificial species which it produced.

Throughout their career the Sixth Men had often been fascinated by the idea of flight. The bird was again and again their most sacred symbol. Their monotheism was apt to be worship not of a god-man, but of a god-bird, conceived now as the divine sea eagle, winged with power, now as the giant swift, winged with mercy, now as a disembodied spirit of air, and once as the bird-god that became man to endow the human race with flight, physical and spiritual.

It was inevitable that flight should obsess man on Venus, for the planet afforded but a cramping home for groundlings; and the riotous efflorescence of avian species shamed man’s pedestrian habit. When in due course the Sixth Men attained knowledge and power comparable to that of the First Men at their height, they invented flying machines of various types. Many times, indeed, mechanical flight was rediscovered and lost again with the downfall of civilization. But at its best it was regarded only as a makeshift. And when at length, with the advance of the biological sciences, the Sixth Men were in a position to influence the human organism itself, they determined to produce a true flying man. Many civilizations strove vainly for this result, sometimes half-heartedly, sometimes with religious earnestness. Finally the most enduring and brilliant of all the civilizations of the Sixth Men actually attained the goal.

The Seventh Men were pigmies, scarcely heavier than the largest of terrestrial flying birds. Through and through they were organized for flight. A leathery membrane spread from the foot to the tip of the immensely elongated and strengthened ‘middle finger’. The three ‘outer’ fingers, equally elongated, served as ribs to the membrane; while the index, and thumb remained free for manipulation. The body assumed the stream-lines of a bird, and was covered with a deep quilt of feathery wool. This, and the silken down of the flight-membranes, varied greatly from individual to individual in colouring and texture. On the ground the Seventh Men walked much as other human beings, for the flight-membranes were folded close to the legs and body, and hung from the arms like exaggerated sleeves. In flight the legs were held extended as a flattened tail, with the feet locked together by the big toes. The breastbone was greatly developed as a keel, and as a base for the muscles of flight. The other bones were hollow, for lightness, and their internal surfaces were utilized as supplementary lungs. For, like the birds, these flying men had to maintain a high rate of oxidation. A state which others would regard as fever was normal to them.

Their brains were given ample tracts for the organization of prowess in flight. In fact, it was found possible to equip the species with a system of reflexes for aerial balance, and a true, though artificial, instinctive aptitude for flight, and interest in flight. Compared with their makers their brain volume was of necessity small, but their whole neural system was very carefully organized. Also it matured rapidly, and was extremely facile in the acquirement of new modes of activity. This was very desirable; for the individual’s natural life period was but fifty years, and in most cases it was deliberately cut short by some impossible feat at about forty, or whenever the symptoms of old age began to be felt.

Of all human species these bat-like Flying Men, the Seventh Men, were probably the most carefree. Gifted with harmonious physique and gay temperament, they came into a social heritage well adapted to their nature. There was no occasion for them, as there had often been for some others, to regard the world as fundamentally hostile to life, or themselves as essentially deformed. Of quick intelligence in respect of daily personal affairs and social organization, they were untroubled by the insatiable lust of understanding. Not that they were an unintellectual race, for they soon formulated a beautifully systematic account of experience. They clearly perceived, however, that the perfect sphere of their thought was but a bubble adrift in chaos. Yet it was an elegant bubble. And the system was true, in its own gay and frankly insincere manner, true as significant metaphor, not literally true. What more, it was asked, could be expected of human intellect? Adolescents were encouraged to study the ancient problems of philosophy, for no reason but to convince themselves of the futility of probing beyond the limits of the orthodox system. ‘Prick the bubble of thought at any point’, it was said, ‘and you shatter the whole of it. And since thought is one of the necessities of human life, it must be preserved.’

Natural science was taken over from the earlier species with half-contemptuous gratitude, as a necessary means of sane adjustment to the environment. Its practical applications were valued as the ground of the social order; but as the millennia advanced, and society approached that remarkable perfection and stability which was to endure for many million years, scientific inventiveness became less and less needful, and science itself was relegated to the infant schools. History also was given in outline during childhood, and subsequently ignored.

This curiously sincere intellectual insincerity was due to the fact that the Seventh Men were chiefly concerned with matters other than abstract thought. It is difficult to give to members of the first human species an inkling of the great preoccupation of these Flying Men. To say that it was flight would be true, yet far less than the truth. To say that they sought to live dangerously and vividly, to crowd as much experience as possible into each moment, would again be a caricature of the truth. On the physical plane, indeed, ‘the universe of flight’, with all the variety of peril and skill afforded by a tempestuous atmosphere, was every individual’s chief medium of self-expression. Yet it was not flight itself, but the spiritual aspect of flight which obsessed the species.

In the air and on the ground the Seventh Men were different beings. Whenever they exercised themselves in flight they suffered a remarkable change of spirit. Much of their time had to be spent on the ground, since most of the work upon which civilization rested was impossible in the air. Moreover, life in the air was life at high pressure, and necessitated spells of recuperation on the ground. In their pedestrian phase the Seventh Men were sober folk, mildly bored, yet in the main cheerful, humorously impatient of the drabness and irk of pedestrian affairs, but ever supported by memory and anticipation of the vivid life of the air. Often they were tired, after the strain of that other life, but seldom were they despondent or lazy. Indeed, in the routine of agriculture and industry they were industrious as the wingless ants. Yet they worked in a strange mood of attentive absent-mindedness; for their hearts were ever in the air. So long as they could have frequent periods of aviation, they remained bland even on the ground. But if for any reason such as illness they were confined to the ground for a long period, they pined, developed acute melancholia, and died. Their makers had so contrived them that with the onset of any very great pain or misery their hearts should stop. Thus they were to avoid all serious distress. But, in fact, this merciful device worked only on the ground. In the air they assumed a very different and more heroic nature, which their makers had not foreseen, though indeed it was a natural consequence of their design.

In the air the flying man’s heart beat more powerfully. His temperature rose. His sensation became more vivid and more discriminate, his intelligence more agile and penetrating. He experienced a more intense pleasure or pain in all that happened to him. It would not be true to say that he became more emotional; rather the reverse, if by emotionality is meant enslavement to the emotions. For the most remarkable feature of the aerial phase was that this enhanced power of appreciation was dispassionate. So long as the individual was in the air, whether in lonely struggle with the storm, or in the ceremonial ballet with sky-darkening hosts of his fellows; whether in the ecstatic love dance with a sexual partner, or in solitary and meditative circlings far above the world; whether his enterprise was fortunate, or he found himself dismembered by the hurricane, and crashing to death; always the gay and the tragic fortunes of his own person were regarded equally with detached aesthetic delight. Even when his dearest companion was mutilated or destroyed by some aerial disaster, he exulted; though also he would give his own life in the hope of effecting a rescue. But very soon after he had returned to the ground he would be overwhelmed with grief, would strive vainly to recapture the lost vision, and would perhaps die of heart failure.

Even when, as happened occasionally in the wild climate of Venus, a whole aerial population was destroyed by some world-wide atmospheric tumult, the few broken survivors, so long as they could remain in the air, exulted. And actually while at length they sank exhausted towards the ground, towards certain disillusionment and death, they laughed inwardly. Yet an hour after they had alighted, their constitution would be changed, their vision lost. They would remember only the horror of the disaster, and the memory would kill them.

No wonder the Seventh Men grudged every moment that was passed on the ground. While they were in the air, of course, the prospect of a pedestrian interlude, or indeed of endless pedestrianism, though in a manner repugnant, would be accepted with unswerving gaiety; but while they were on the ground, they grudged bitterly to be there. Early in the career of the species the proportion of aerial to terrestrial hours was increased by a biological invention. A minute food-plant was produced which spent the winter rooted in the ground, and the summer adrift in the sunlit upper air, engaged solely in photosynthesis. Henceforth the populations of the Flying Men were able to browse upon the bright pastures of the sky, like swallows. As the ages passed, material civilization became more and more simplified. Needs which could not be satisfied without terrestrial labour tended to be outgrown. Manufactured articles became increasingly rare. Books were no longer written or read. In the main, indeed, they were no longer necessary; but to some extent their place was taken by verbal tradition and discussion, in the upper air. Of the arts, music, spoken lyric and epic verse, and the supreme art of winged dance, were constantly practised. The rest vanished. Many of the sciences inevitably faded into tradition; yet the true scientific spirit was preserved in a very exact meteorology, a sufficient biology, and a human psychology surpassed only by the second and fifth species at their height. None of these sciences, however, was taken very seriously, save in its practical applications. For instance, psychology explained the ecstasy of flight very neatly as a febrile and ‘irrational’ beatitude. But no one was disconcerted by this theory; for every one, while on the wing, felt it to be merely an amusing half-truth.

The social order of the Seventh Men was in essence neither utilitarian, nor humanistic, nor religious, but aesthetic. Every act and every institution were to be justified as contributing to the perfect form of the community. Even social prosperity was conceived as merely the medium in which beauty should be embodied, the beauty, namely, of vivid individual lives harmoniously related. Yet not only for the individual, but even for the race itself (so the wise insisted), death on the wing was more excellent than prolonged life on the ground. Better, far better, would be racial suicide than a future of pedestrianism. Yet though both the individual and the race were conceived as instrumental to objective beauty, there was nothing religious, in any ordinary sense, in this conviction. The Seventh Men were completely without interest in the universal and the unseen. The beauty which they sought to create was ephemeral and very largely sensuous. And they were well content that it should be so. Personal immortality, said a dying sage, would be as tedious as an endless song. Equally so with the race. The lovely flame, of which we all are members, must die, he said, must die; for without death she would fall short of beauty.

For close on a hundred million terrestrial years this aerial society endured with little change. On many of the islands throughout this period stood even yet a number of the ancient pylons, though repaired almost beyond recognition. In these nests the men and women of the seventh species slept through the long Venerian nights, crowded like roosting swallows. By day the same great towers were sparsely peopled with those who were serving their turn in industry, while in the fields and on the sea others laboured. But most were in the air. Many would be skimming the ocean, to plunge, gannet-like, for fish. Many, circling over land or sea, would now and again stoop like hawks upon the wildfowl which formed the chief meat of the species. Others, forty or fifty thousand feet above the waves, where even the plentiful atmosphere of Venus was scarcely capable of supporting them, would be soaring, circling, sweeping, for pure joy of flight. Others, in the calm and sunshine of high altitudes, would be hanging effortless upon some steady up-current of air for meditation and the rapture of mere percipience. Not a few love-intoxicated pairs would be entwining their courses in aerial patterns, in spires, cascades, and true-love knots of flight, presently to embrace and drop ten thousand feet in bodily union. Some would be driving hither and thither through the green mists of vegetable particles, gathering the manna in their open mouths. Companies, circling together, would be discussing matters social or aesthetic; others would be singing together, or listening to recitative epic verse. Thousands, gathering in the sky like migratory birds, would perform massed convolutions, reminiscent of the vast mechanical aerial choreography of the First World State, but more vital and expressive, as a bird’s flight is more vital than the flight of any machine. And all the while there would be some, solitary or in companies, who, either in the pursuit of fish and wildfowl, or out of pure devilment, pitted their strength and skill against the hurricane, often tragically, but never without zest, and laughter of the spirit.

It may seem to some incredible that the culture of the Seventh Men should have lasted so long. Surely it must either have decayed through mere monotony and stagnation or have advanced into richer experience. But no. Generation succeeded generation, and each was too short-lived to outlast its young delight and discover boredom. Moreover, so perfect was the adjustment of these beings to their world, that even if they had lived for centuries they would have felt no need of change. Flight provided them with intense physical exhilaration, and with the physical basis of a genuine and ecstatic, though limited, spiritual experience. In this their supreme attainment they rejoiced not only in the diversity of flight itself, but also in the perceived beauties of their variegated world, and most of all, perhaps, in the thousand lyric and epic ventures of human intercourse in an aerial community.

The end of this seemingly everlasting elysium was nevertheless involved in the very nature of the species. In the first place, as the ages lengthened into aeons, the generations preserved less and less of the ancient scientific lore. For it became insignificant to them. The aerial community had no need of it. This loss of mere information did not matter so long as their condition remained unaltered; but in due course biological changes began to undermine them. The species had always been prone to a certain biological instability. A proportion of infants, varying with circumstances, had always been misshapen; and the deformity had generally been such as to make flight impossible. The normal infant was able to fly early in its second year. If some accident prevented it from doing so, it invariably fell into a decline and died before its third year was passed. But many of the deformed types, being the result of a partial reversion to the pedestrian nature, were able to live on indefinitely without flight. According to a merciful custom these cripples had always to be destroyed. But at length, owing to the gradual exhaustion of a certain marine salt essential to the high-strung nature of the Seventh Men, infants were more often deformed than true to type. The world-population declined so seriously that the organized aerial life of the community could no longer be carried on according to the time-honoured aesthetic principles. No one knew how to check this racial decay, but many felt that with greater biological knowledge it might be avoided. A disastrous policy was now adopted. It was decided to spare a carefully selected proportion of the deformed infants, those namely which, though doomed to pedestrianism, were likely to develop high intelligence. Thus it was hoped to raise a specialized group of persons whose work should be biological research untrammelled by the intoxication of flight.

The brilliant cripples that resulted from this policy looked at existence from a new angle. Deprived of the supreme experience for which their fellows lived, envious of a bliss which they knew only by report, yet contemptuous of the naïve mentality which cared for nothing (it seemed) but physical exercise, love-making, the beauty of nature, and the elegances of society, these flightless intelligences sought satisfaction almost wholly in the life of research and scientific control. At the best, however, they were a tortured and resentful race. For their natures were fashioned for the aerial life which they could not lead. Although they received from the winged folk just treatment and a certain compassionate respect, they writhed under this kindness, locked their hearts against all the orthodox values, and sought out new ideals. Within a few centuries they had rehabilitated the life of intellect, and, with the power that knowledge gives, they had made themselves masters of the world. The amiable fliers were surprised, perplexed, even pained; and yet withal amused. Even when it became evident that the pedestrians were determined to create a new world-order in which there would be no place for the beauties of natural flight, the fliers were only distressed while they were on the ground.

The islands were becoming crowded with machinery and flightless industrialists. In the air itself the winged folk found themselves outstripped by the base but effective instruments of mechanical flight. Wings became a laughing stock, and the life of natural flight was condemned as a barren luxury. It was ordained that in future every flier must serve the pedestrian world-order, or starve. And as the cultivation of wind-borne plants had been abandoned, and fishing and fowling rights were strictly controlled, this law was no empty form. At first it was impossible for the fliers to work on the ground for long hours, day after day, without incurring serious ill-health and an early death. But the pedestrian physiologists invented a drug which preserved the poor wage-slaves in something like physical health, and actually prolonged their life. No drug, however, could restore their spirit, for their normal aerial habit was reduced to a few tired hours of recreation once a week. Meanwhile, breeding experiments were undertaken to produce a wholly wingless large-brained type. And finally a law was enacted by which all winged infants must be either mutilated or destroyed. At this point the fliers made an heroic but ineffectual bid for power. They attacked the pedestrian population from the air. In reply the enemy rode them down in his great aeroplanes and blew them to pieces with high explosive.

The fighting squadrons of the natural fliers were finally driven to the ground in a remote and barren island. Thither the whole flying population, a mere remnant of its former strength, fled out of every civilized archipelago in search of freedom: the whole population — save the sick, who committed suicide, and all infants that could not yet fly. These were stifled by their mothers or next-of-kin, in obedience to a decree of the leaders. About a million men, women and children, some of whom were scarcely old enough for the prolonged flight, now gathered on the rocks, regardless that there was not food in the neighbourhood for a great company.

Their leaders, conferring together, saw clearly that the day of Flying Man was done, and that it would be more fitting for a high-souled race to die at once than to drag on in subjection to contemptuous masters. They therefore ordered the population to take part in an act of racial suicide that should at least make death a noble gesture of freedom. The people received the message while they were resting on the stony moorland. A wail of sorrow broke from them. It was checked by the speaker, who bade them strive to see, even on the ground, the beauty of the thing that was to be done. They could not see it; but they knew that if they had the strength to take wing again they would see it clearly, almost as soon as their tired muscles bore them aloft. There was no time to waste, for many were already faint with hunger, and anxious lest they should fail to rise. At the appointed signal the whole population rose into the air with a deep roar of wings. Sorrow was left behind. Even the children, when their mothers explained what was to be done, accepted their fate with zest; though, had they learned of it on the ground, they would have been terror-stricken. The company now flew steadily West, forming themselves into a double file many miles long. The cone of a volcano appeared over the horizon, and rose as they approached. The leaders pressed on towards its ruddy smoke plume; and unflinchingly, couple by couple, the whole multitude darted into its fiery breath and vanished. So ended the career of Flying Man.

3. A MINOR ASTRONOMICAL EVENT

THE FLIGHTLESS YET still half avian race that now possessed the planet settled down to construct a society based on industry and science. After many vicissitudes of fortune and of aim, they produced a new human species, the Eighth Men. These long-headed and substantial folk were designed to be strictly pedestrian, physically and mentally. Apt for manipulation, calculation, and invention, they very soon turned Venus into an engineer’s paradise. With power drawn from the planet’s central heat, their huge electric ships bored steadily through the perennial monsoons and hurricanes, which also their aircraft treated with contempt. Islands were joined by tunnels and by millipede bridges. Every inch of land served some industrial or agricultural end. So successfully did the generations amass wealth that their rival races and rival castes were able to indulge, every few centuries, in vast revelries of mutual slaughter and material destruction without, as a rule, impoverishing their descendants. And so insensitive had man become that these orgies shamed him not at all. Indeed, only by the ardours of physical violence could this most philistine species wrench itself for a while out of its complacency. Strife, which to nobler beings would have been a grave spiritual disaster, was for these a tonic, almost a religious exercise. These cathartic paroxysms, it should be observed, were but the rare and brief crises which automatically punctuated ages of stolid peace. At no time did they threaten the existence of the species; seldom did they even destroy its civilization.

It was after a lengthy period of peace and scientific advancement that the Eighth Men made a startling astronomical discovery. Ever since the First Men had learned that in the life of every star there comes a critical moment when the great orb collapses, shrinking to a minute, dense grain with feeble radiation, man had periodically suspected that the sun was about to undergo this change, and become a typical ‘White Dwarf’. The Eighth Men detected sure signs of the catastrophe, and predicted its date. Twenty thousand years they gave themselves before the change should begin. In another fifty thousand years, they guessed, Venus would probably be frozen and uninhabitable. The only hope was to migrate to Mercury during the great change, when that planet was already ceasing to be intolerably hot. It was necessary then to give Mercury an atmosphere, and to breed a new species which should be capable of adapting itself finally to a world of extreme cold.

This desperate operation was already on foot when a new astronomical discovery rendered it futile. Astronomers detected, some distance from the solar system, a volume of non-luminous gas. Calculation showed that this object and the sun were approaching one another at a tangent, and that they would collide. Further calculation revealed the probable results of this event. The sun would flare up and expand prodigiously. Life would be quite impossible on any of the planets save, just possibly, Uranus, and more probably Neptune. The three planets beyond Neptune would escape roasting, but were unsuitable for other reasons. The two outermost would remain glacial, and, moreover, lay beyond the range of the imperfect ether-ships of the Eighth Men. The innermost was practically a bald globe of iron, devoid not merely of atmosphere and water, but also of the normal covering of rock. Neptune alone might be able to support life; but how could even Neptune be populated? Not only was its atmosphere very unsuitable, and its gravitational pull such as to make man’s body an intolerable burden, but also up to the time of the collision it would remain excessively cold. Not till after the collision could it support any kind of life known to man.

How these difficulties were overcome I have no time to tell, though the story of man’s attack upon his final home is well worthy of recording. Nor can I tell in detail of the conflict of policy which now occurred. Some, realizing that the Eighth Men themselves could never live on Neptune, advocated an orgy of pleasure-living till the end. But at length the race excelled itself in an almost unanimous resolve to devote its remaining centuries to the production of a human being capable of carrying the torch of mentality into a new world.

Ether-vessels were able to reach that remote world and set up chemical changes for the improvement of the atmosphere. It was also possible, by means of the lately rediscovered process of automatic annihilation of matter, to produce a constant supply of energy for the warming of an area where life might hope to survive until the sun should be rejuvenated.

When at last the time for migration was approaching, a specially designed vegetation was shipped to Neptune and established in the warm area to fit it for man’s use. Animals, it was decided, would be unnecessary. Subsequently a specially designed human species, the Ninth Men, was transported to man’s new home. The giant Eighth Men could not themselves inhabit Neptune. The trouble was not merely that they could scarcely support their own weight, let alone walk, but that the atmospheric pressure on Neptune was unendurable. For the great planet bore a gaseous envelope thousands of miles deep. The solid globe was scarcely more than the yolk of a huge egg. The mass of the air itself combined with the mass of the solid to produce a gravitational pressure greater than that upon the Venerian ocean floor. The Eighth Men, therefore, dared not emerge from their ether-ships to tread the surface of the planet save for brief spells in steel diving suits. For them there was nothing else to do but to return to the archipelagos of Venus, and make the best of life until the end. They were not spared for long. A few centuries after the settlement of Neptune had been completed by transferring thither all the most precious material relics of humanity, the great planet itself narrowly missed collision with the dark stranger from space. Uranus and Jupiter were at the time well out of its track. Not so Saturn, which, a few years after Neptune’s escape, was engulfed with all its rings and satellites. The sudden incandescence which resulted from this minor collision was but a prelude. The huge foreigner rushed on. Like a finger poked into a spider’s web, it tangled up the planetary orbits. Having devoured its way through the asteroids, it missed Mars, caught Earth and Venus in its blazing hair, and leapt at the sun. Henceforth the centre of the solar system was a star nearly as wide as the old orbit of Mercury and the system was transformed.

XIV Neptune

1. BIRD’S-EYE VIEW

I HAVE TOLD man’s story up to a point about half-way from his origin to his annihilation. Behind lies the vast span which includes the whole Terrestrial and Venerian ages, with all their slow fluctuations of darkness and enlightenment. Ahead lies the Neptunian age, equally long, equally tragic perhaps, but more diverse, and in its last phase incomparably more brilliant. It would not be profitable to recount the history of man on Neptune on the scale of the preceding chronicle. Very much of it would be incomprehensible to terrestrials, and much of it repeats again and again, in the many Neptunian modes, themes that we have already observed in the Terrestrial or the Venerian movements of the human symphony. To appreciate fully the range and subtlety of the great living epic, we ought, no doubt, to dwell on its every movement with the same faithful care. But this is impossible to any human mind. We can but attend to significant phrases, here and there, and hope to capture some fragmentary hint of its vast intricate form. And for the readers of this book, who are themselves tremors in the opening bars of the music, it is best that I should dwell chiefly on things near to them, even at the cost of ignoring much that is in fact greater.

Before continuing our long flight let us look around us. Hitherto we have passed over time’s fields at a fairly low altitude, making many detailed observations. Now we shall travel at a greater height and with speed of a new order. We must therefore orientate ourselves within the wider horizon that opens around us; we must consider things from the astronomical rather than the human point of view. I said that we were half-way from man’s beginning to his end. Looking back to that remote beginning we see that the span of time which includes the whole career of the First Men from Pithecanthropus to the Patagonian disaster is an unanalysable point. Even the preceding and much longer period between the first mammal and the first man, some twenty-five millions of terrestrial years, seems now inconsiderable. The whole of it, together with the age of the First Men, may be said to lie half-way between the formation of the planets, two thousand million years earlier, and their final destruction, two thousand million years later. Taking a still wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun’s age. And before the birth of the suns the stuff of this galaxy had already endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even these aeons look brief in relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebulae themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist in the beginning. Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.

Spatially, also, man is inconceivably minute. If in imagination we reduce this galaxy of ours to the size of an ancient terrestrial principality, we must suppose it adrift in the void with millions of other such principalities, very remote from one another. On the same scale the all-embracing cosmos would bulk as a sphere whose diameter was some twenty times greater than that of the lunar orbit in your day; and somewhere within the little wandering asteroid-like principality which is our own universe, the solar system would be an ultra-microscopic point, the greatest planet incomparably smaller.

We have watched the fortunes of eight successive human species for a thousand million years, the first half of that flicker which is the duration of man. Ten more species now succeed one another, or are contemporary, on the plains of Neptune. We, the Last Men, are the Eighteenth Men. Of the eight pre-Neptunian species, some, as we have seen, remained always primitive; many achieved at least a confused and fleeting civilization, and one, the brilliant Fifth, was already wakening into true humanity when misfortune crushed it. The ten Neptunian species show an even greater diversity. They range from the instinctive animal to modes of consciousness never before attained. The definitely subhuman degenerate types are confined mostly to the first six hundred million years of man’s sojourn on Neptune. During the earlier half of this long phase of preparation, man, at first almost crushed out of existence by a hostile environment, gradually peopled the huge north; but with beasts, not men. For man, as man, no longer existed. During the latter half of the preparatory six hundred million years, the human spirit gradually awoke again, to undergo the fluctuating advance and decline characteristic of the pre-Neptunian ages. But subsequently, in the last four hundred million years of his career on Neptune, man has made an almost steady progress toward full spiritual maturity.

Let us now look rather more closely at these three great epochs of man’s history.

2. DA CAPO

IT WAS IN desperate haste that the last Venerian men had designed and fashioned the new species for the colonization of Neptune. The mere remoteness of the great planet, moreover, had prevented its nature from being explored at all thoroughly, and so the new human organism was but partially adapted to its destined environment. Inevitably it was a dwarf type, limited in size by the necessity of resisting an excessive gravitation. Its brain was so cramped that everything but the bare essentials of humanity had to be omitted from it. Even so, the Ninth Men were too delicately organized to withstand the ferocity of natural forces on Neptune. This ferocity the designers had seriously underestimated; and so they were content merely to produce a miniature copy of their own type. They should have planned a hardy brute, lustily procreative, cunning in the struggle for physical existence, but above all tough, prolific, and so insensitive as to be scarcely worthy of the name man. They should have trusted that if once this crude seed could take root, natural forces themselves would in time conjure from it something more human. Instead, they produced a race cursed with the inevitable fragility of miniatures, and designed for a civilized environment which feeble spirits could not possibly maintain in a tumultuous world. For it so happened that the still youthful giant, Neptune, was slowly entering one of his phases of crustal shrinkage, and therefore of earthquake and eruption. Thus the frail colonists found themselves increasingly in danger of being swallowed in sudden fiery crevasses or buried under volcanic dust. Moreover, their squat buildings, when not actually being trampled by lava streams, or warped and cracked by their shifting foundations, were liable to be demolished by the battering-ram thrust of a turbulent and massive atmosphere. Further, the atmosphere’s unwholesome composition killed all possibility of cheerfulness and courage in a race whose nature was doomed to be, even in favourable circumstances, neurotic.

Fortunately this agony could not last indefinitely. Little by little, civilization crumbled into savagery, the torturing vision of better things was lost, man’s consciousness was narrowed and coarsened into brute-consciousness. By good luck the brute precariously survived.

Long after the Ninth Men had fallen from man’s estate, nature herself, in her own slow and blundering manner, succeeded where man had failed. The brute descendants of this human species became at length well adapted to their world. In time there arose a wealth of subhuman forms in the many kinds of environment afforded by the lands and seas of Neptune. None of them penetrated far towards the Equator, for the swollen sun had rendered the tropics at this time far too hot to support life of any kind. Even at the pole the protracted summer put a great strain on all but the most hardy creatures.

Neptune’s year was at this time about one hundred and sixty-five times the length of the old terrestrial year. The slow seasonal change had an important effect on life’s own rhythms. All but the most ephemeral organisms tended to live through at least one complete year, and the higher mammals survived longer. At a much later stage this natural longevity was to play a great and beneficial part in the revival of man. But, on the other hand, the increasing sluggishness of individual growth, the length of immaturity in each generation, retarded the natural evolutionary process on Neptune, so that compared with the Terrestrial and Venerian epochs the biological story now moves at a snail’s pace.

After the fall of the Ninth Men the subhuman creatures had one and all adopted a quadruped habit, the better to cope with gravity. At first they had indulged merely in occasional support from their knuckles, but in time many species of true quadrupeds had appeared. In several of the running types the fingers, like the toes, had grown together, and a hoof had developed, not on the old finger-tips, which were bent back and atrophied, but on the knuckles.

Two hundred millions years after the solar collision innumerable species of subhuman grazers with long sheep-like muzzles, ample molars, and almost ruminant digestive systems, were competing with one another on the polar continent. Upon these preyed the subhuman carnivora, of whom some were built for speed in the chase, others for stalking and a sudden spring. But since jumping was no easy matter on Neptune, the cat-like types were all minute. They preyed upon man’s more rabbit-like and rat-like descendants, or on the carrion of the larger mammals, or on the lusty worms and beetles. These had sprung originally from vermin which had been transported accidentally from Venus. For of all the ancient Venerian fauna only man himself, a few insects and other invertebrates, and many kinds of micro-organisms, succeeded in colonizing Neptune. Of plants, many types had been artificially bred for the new world, and from these eventually arose a host of grasses, flowering plants, thick-trunked bushes, and novel sea-weeds. On this marine flora fed certain highly developed marine worms; and of these last, some in time became vertebrate, predatory, swift, and fish-like. On these in turn man’s own marine descendants preyed, whether as subhuman seals, or still more specialized subhuman porpoises. Perhaps most remarkable of these developments of the ancient human stock was that which led, through a small insectivorous bat-like glider, to a great diversity of true flying mammals, scarcely larger than humming birds, but in some cases agile as swallows.

Nowhere did the typical human form survive. There were only beasts, fitted by structure and instinct to some niche or other of their infinitely diverse and roomy world.

Certain strange vestiges of human mentality did indeed persist here and there, even as, in the fore-limbs of most species, there still remained buried the relics of man’s once cunning fingers. For instance, there were certain grazers which in times of hardship would meet together and give tongue in cacophonous ululation; or, sitting on their haunches with fore-limbs pressed together, they would listen by the hour to the howls of some leader, responding intermittently with groans and whimpers, and working themselves at last into foaming madness. And there were carnivora which, in the midst of the spring-time fervour, would suddenly cease from love-making, fighting, and the daily routine of hunting, to sit alone in some high place day after day, night after night, watching, waiting; until at last hunger forced them into action.

Now in the fullness of time, about three hundred million terrestrial years after the solar collision, a certain minute, hairless, rabbit-like creature, scampering on the polar grasslands, found itself greatly persecuted by a swift hound from the south. The subhuman rabbit was relatively unspecialized, and had no effective means of defence or flight. It was almost exterminated. A few individuals, however, saved themselves by taking to the dense and thick-trunked scrub, whither the hound could not follow them. Here they had to change their diet and manner of life, deserting grass for roots, berries, and even worms and beetles. Their fore-limbs were now increasingly used for digging and climbing, and eventually for weaving nests of stick and straw. In this species the fingers had never grown together. Internally the fore-paw was like a minute clenched fist from the elongated and exposed knuckles of which separate toes protruded. And now the knuckles elongated themselves still further, becoming in time a new set of fingers. Within the palm of the new little monkey-hand there still remained traces of man’s ancient fingers, bent in upon themselves.

As of old, manipulation gave rise to clearer percipience. And this, in conjunction with the necessity of frequent experiments in diet, hunting, and defence, produced at length a real versatility of behaviour and suppleness of mind. The rabbit throve, adopted an almost upright gait, continued to increase in stature and in brain. Yet, just as the new hand was not merely a resurrection of the old hand, so the new regions of the brain were no mere revival of the atrophied human cerebrum, but a new organ, which overlaid and swallowed up that ancient relic. The creature’s mind, therefore, was in many respects a new mind, though moulded to the same great basic needs. Like his forerunners, of course, he craved food, love, glory, companionship. In pursuit of these ends he devised weapons and traps, and built wicker villages. He held pow-wows. He became the Tenth Men.

3. SLOW CONQUEST

FOR A MILLION terrestrial years these long-armed hairless beings were spreading their wicker huts and bone implements over the great northern continents, and for many more millions they remained in possession without making further cultural progress; for evolution, both biological and cultural, was indeed slow on Neptune. At last the Tenth Men were attacked by a micro-organism and demolished. From their ruins several primitive human species developed, and remained isolated in remote territories for millions of decades, until at length chance or enterprise brought them into contact. One of these early species, crouched and tusked, was persistently trapped for its ivory by an abler type, till it was exterminated. Another, long of muzzle and large of base, habitually squatted on its haunches like the kangaroo. Shortly after this industrious and social species had discovered the use of the wheel, a more primitive but more war-like type crashed into it like a tidal wave and overwhelmed it. Erect, but literally almost as broad as they were tall, these chunkish and bloody-minded savages spread over the whole arctic and sub-arctic region and spent some millions of years in monotonous reiteration of progress and decline; until at last a slow decay of their germ-plasm almost ended man’s career. But after an aeon of darkness, there appeared another thick-set, but larger brained, species. This, for the first time on Neptune, conceived the religion of love, and all those spiritual cravings and agonies which had flickered in man so often and so vainly upon Earth and Venus. There appeared again feudal empires, militant nations, economic class wars, and, not once but often, a world-state covering the whole northern hemisphere. These men it was that first crossed the equator in artificially cooled electric ships, and explored the huge south. No life of any kind was discovered in the southern hemisphere; for even in that age no living matter could have crossed the roasting tropics without artificial refrigeration. Indeed, it was only because the sun’s temporary revival had already passed its zenith that even man, with all his ingenuity, could endure a long tropical voyage.

Like the First Men and so many other natural human types, these Fourteenth Men were imperfectly human. Like the First Men, they conceived ideals of conduct which their imperfectly organized nervous systems could never attain and seldom approach. Unlike the First Men, they survived with but minor biological changes for three hundred million years. But even so long a period did not enable them to transcend their imperfect spiritual nature. Again and again and again they passed from savagery to world-civilization and back to savagery. They were captive within their own nature, as a bird in a cage. And as a caged bird may fumble with nest-building materials and periodically destroy the fruit of its aimless toil, so these cramped beings destroyed their civilizations.

At length, however, this second phase of Neptunian history, this era of fluctuation, was brought to an end. At the close of the six hundred million years after the first settlement of the planet, unaided nature produced, in the Fifteenth human species, that highest form of natural man which she had produced only once before, in the Second species. And this time no Martians interfered. We must not stay to watch the struggle of this greatheaded man to overcome his one serious handicap, excessive weight of cranium and unwieldy proportions of body. Suffice it that after a long-drawn-out immaturity, including one great mechanized war between the northern and southern hemispheres, the Fifteenth Men outgrew the ailments and fantasies of youth, and consolidated themselves as a single world-community. This civilization was based economically on volcanic power, and spiritually on devotion to the fulfilment of human capacity. It was this species which, for the first time on Neptune, conceived, as an enduring racial purpose, the will to remake human nature upon an ampler scale.

Henceforth in spite of many disasters, such as another period of earthquake and eruption, sudden climatic changes, innumerable plagues and biological aberrations, human progress was relatively steady. It was not by any means swift and sure. There were still to be ages, often longer than the whole career of the First Men, in which the human spirit would rest from its pioneering to consolidate its conquests, or would actually stray into the wilderness. But never again, seemingly, was it to be routed and crushed into mere animality.

In tracing man’s final advance to full humanity we can observe only the broadest features of a whole astronomical era. But in fact it is an era crowded with many thousands of long-lived generations. Myriads of individuals, each one unique, live out their lives in rapt intercourse with one another, contribute their heart’s pulses to the universal music, and presently vanish, giving place to others. All this age-long sequence of private living, which is the actual tissue of humanity’s flesh, I cannot describe. I can only trace, as it were, the disembodied form of its growth.

The Fifteenth Men first set themselves to abolish five great evils, namely, disease, suffocating toil, senility, misunderstanding, and ill-will. The story of their devotion, their many disastrous experiments, and ultimate triumph, cannot here be told. Nor can I recount how they learned and used the secret of deriving power from the annihilation of matter, nor how they invented ether-ships for the exploration of neighbouring planets, nor how, after ages of experiments, they designed and produced a new species, the Sixteenth, to supersede themselves.

The new type was analogous to the ancient Fifth, which had colonized Venus. Artificial rigid atoms had been introduced into its bone-tissues, so that it might support great stature and an ample brain; in which, moreover, an exceptionally fine-grained cellular structure permitted a new complexity of organization. ‘Telepathy’, also, was once more achieved, not by means of the Martian units, which had long ago become extinct, but by the synthesis of new molecular groups of a similar type. Partly through the immense increase of mutual understanding, which resulted from ‘telepathic’ rapport, partly through improved coordination of the nervous system, the ancient evil of selfishness was entirely and finally abolished from the normal human being. Egoistic impulses, whenever they refused to be subordinated, were henceforth classed as symptoms of insanity. The sensory powers of the new species were, of course, greatly improved; and it was even given a pair of eyes in the back of the head. Henceforth man was to have a circular instead of a semi-circular field of vision. And such was the general intelligence of the new race that many problems formerly deemed insoluble were now solved in a single flash of insight.

Of the great practical uses to which the Sixteenth Men put their powers, one only need be mentioned as an example. They gained control of the movement of their planet. Early in their career they were able, with the unlimited energy at their disposal, to direct it into a wider orbit, so that its average climate became more temperate, and snow occasionally covered the polar regions. But as the ages advanced, and the sun became steadily less ferocious, it became necessary to reverse this process and shift the planet gradually nearer to the sun.

When they had possessed their world for nearly fifty million years, the Sixteenth Men, like the Fifth before them, learned to enter into past minds. For them this was a more exciting adventure than for their forerunners, since they were still ignorant of Terrestrial and Venerian history. Like their forerunners, so dismayed were they at the huge volume of eternal misery in the past, that for a while, in spite of their own great blessings and spontaneous gaiety, existence seemed a mockery. But in time they came to regard the past’s misery as a challenge. They told themselves that the past was calling to them for help, and that somehow they must prepare a great ‘crusade to liberate the past’. How this was to be done, they could not conceive; but they were determined to bear in mind this quixotic aim in the great enterprise which had by now become the chief concern of the race, namely the creation of a human type of an altogether higher order.

It had become clear that man had by now advanced in understanding and creativeness as far as was possible to the individual human brain acting in physical isolation. Yet the Sixteenth Men were oppressed by their own impotence. Though in philosophy they had delved further than had ever been possible, yet even at their deepest they found only the shifting sands of mystery. In particular they were haunted by three ancient problems, two of which were purely intellectual, namely the mystery of time and the mystery of mind’s relation to the world. Their third problem was the need somehow to reconcile their confirmed loyalty to life, which they conceived as embattled against death, with their ever-strengthening impulse to rise above the battle and admire it dispassionately.

Age after age the races of the Sixteenth Men blossomed with culture after culture. The movement of thought ranged again and again through all the possible modes of the spirit, ever discovering new significance in ancient themes. Yet throughout this epoch the three great problems remained unsolved, perplexing the individual and vitiating the policy of the race.

Forced thus at length to choose between spiritual stagnation and a perilous leap in the dark, the Sixteenth Men determined to set about devising a type of brain which, by means of the mental fusion of many individuals, might waken into an altogether new mode of consciousness. Thus, it was hoped, man might gain insight into the very heart of existence, whether finally to admire or loathe. And thus the racial purpose, which had been so much confused by philosophical ignorance, might at last become clear.

Of the hundred million years which passed before the Sixteenth Men produced the new human type, I must not pause to tell. They thought they had achieved their hearts’ desire; but in fact the glorious beings which they had produced were tortured by subtle imperfections beyond their makers’ comprehension. Consequently, no sooner had these Seventeenth Men peopled the world and attained full cultural stature, than they also bent all their strength to the production of a new type, essentially like their own, but perfected. Thus after a brief career of a few hundred thousand years, crowded with splendour and agony, the Seventeenth gave place to the Eighteenth, and, as it turns out, the Last, human species. Since all the earlier cultures find their fulfilment in the world of the Last Men, I pass over them to enlarge somewhat upon our modern age.

XV The Last Men

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE LAST HUMAN SPECIES

IF ONE OF the First Men could enter the world of the Last Men, he would find many things familiar and much that would seem strangely distorted and perverse. But nearly everything that is most distinctive of the last human species would escape him. Unless he were to be told that behind all the obvious and imposing features of civilization, behind all the social organization and personal intercourse of a great community, lay a whole other world of spiritual culture, round about him, yet beyond his ken, he would no more suspect its existence than a cat in London suspects the existence of finance or literature.

Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. While he himself laboured under the weight of his own body, these giants would be easily striding. He would consider them very sturdy, often thick-set, folk, but he would be compelled to allow them grace of movement and even beauty of proportion. The longer he stayed with them the more beauty he would see in them, and the less complacently would he regard his own type. Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered with fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display bronze, yellow, or ruddy skin, and yet others a translucent ashgreen, warmed by the underflowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many. Some characters, of course, are common to all of us. The traveller might perhaps be surprised by the large yet sensitive hands which are universal, both in men and women. In all of us the outermost finger bears at its tip three minute organs of manipulation, rather similar to those which were first devised for the Fifth Men. These excrescences would doubtless revolt our visitor. The pair of occipital eyes, too, would shock him; so would the upward-looking astronomical eye on the crown, which is peculiar to the Last Men. This organ was so cunningly designed that, when fully extended, about a hand-breadth from its bony case, it reveals the heavens in as much detail as your smaller astronomical telescopes. Apart from such special features as these, there is nothing definitely novel about us; though every limb, every contour, shows unmistakably that much has happened since the days of the First Men. We are both more human and more animal. The primitive explorer might be more readily impressed by our animality than our humanity, so much of our humanity would lie beyond his grasp. He would perhaps at first regard us as a degraded type. He would call us faun-like, and in particular cases, ape-like, bear-like, ox-like, marsupial, or elephantine. Yet our general proportions are definitely human in the ancient manner. Where gravity is not insurmountable, the erect biped form is bound to be most serviceable to intelligent land animals; and so, after long wanderings, man has returned to his old shape. Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species. He would perhaps say, ‘These men that are beasts are surely gods also’. He would be reminded of those old Egyptian deities with animal heads. But in us the animal and the human interpenetrate in every feature, in every curve of the body, and with infinite variety. He would observe in us, together with hints of the long-extinct Mongol, Negro, Nordic, and Semitic, many outlandish features and expressions, deriving from the subhuman period on Neptune, or from Venus. He would see in every limb unfamiliar contours of muscle, sinew, or bone, which were acquired long after the First Men had vanished. Besides the familiar eye-colours, he would discover orbs of topaz, emerald, amethyst, and ruby, and a thousand varieties of these. But in all of us he would see also, if he had discernment, a facial expression and bodily gesture peculiar to our own species, a certain luminous, yet pungent and ironical significance, which we miss almost wholly in the earlier human faces.

The traveller would recognize among us unmistakable sexual features, both of general proportions and special organs. But it would take him long to discover that some of the most striking bodily and facial differences were due to differentiation of the two ancient sexes into many sub-sexes. Full sexual experience involves for us a complicated relationship between individuals of all these types. Of the extremely important sexual groups I shall speak again.

Our visitor would notice, by the way, that, though all persons on Neptune go habitually nude, save for a pouch or ruck-sack, clothing, often brightly coloured, and made of diverse lustrous or homely tissues unknown before our time, is worn for special purposes.

He would notice also, scattered about the green countryside, many buildings, mostly of one storey; for there is plenty of room on Neptune even for the million million of the Last Men. Here and there, however, we have great architectural pylons, cruciform or star-shaped in section, cloud-piercing, dignifying the invariable planes of Neptune. These mightiest of all buildings, which are constructed in adamantine materials formed of artificial atoms, would seem to our visitor geometrical mountains, far taller than any natural mountain could be, even on the smallest planet. In many cases the whole fabric is translucent or transparent, so that at night, with internal illumination, it appears as an edifice of light. Springing from a base twenty or more miles across, these star-seeking towers attain a height where even Neptune’s atmosphere is somewhat attenuated. In their summits work the hosts of our astronomers, the essential eyes through which our community, on her little raft, peers across the ocean. Thither also all men and women repair at one time or another to contemplate this galaxy of ours and the unnumbered remoter universes. There they perform together those supreme symbolic acts for which I find no adjective in your speech but the debased word ‘religious’. There also they seek the refreshment of mountain air in a world where natural mountains are unknown. And on the pinnacles and precipices of these loftiest horns many of us gratify that primeval lust of climbing which was ingrained in man before ever he was man. These buildings thus combine the functions of observatory, temple, sanatorium, and gymnasium. Some of them are almost as old as the species, some are not yet completed. They embody, therefore, many styles. The traveller would find modes which he would be tempted to call Gothic, Classical, Egyptian, Peruvian, Chinese, or American, besides a thousand architectural ideas unfamiliar to him. Each of these buildings was the work of the race as a whole at some stage in its career. None of them is a mere local product. Every successive culture has expressed itself in one or more of these supreme monuments. Once in forty thousand years or so some new architectural glory would be conceived and executed. And such is the continuity of our cultures that there has scarcely ever been need to remove the handiwork of the past.

If our visitor happened to be near enough to one of these great pylons, he would see it surrounded by a swarm of midges, which would turn out to be human fliers, wingless, but with outspread arms. The stranger might wonder how a large organism could rise from the ground in Neptune’s powerful field of gravity. Yet flight is our ordinary means of locomotion. A man has but to put on a suit of overalls fitted at various points with radiation-generators. Ordinary flight thus becomes a kind of aerial swimming. Only when very high speed is desired do we make use of closed-in air-boats and liners.

At the feet of the great buildings the flat or undulating country is green, brown, golden, and strewn with houses. Our traveller would recognize that much land was under cultivation, and would see many persons at work upon it with tools or machinery. Most of our food, indeed, is produced by artificial photosynthesis on the broiling planet Jupiter, where, even now that the sun is becoming normal again, no life can exist without powerful refrigeration. As far as mere nutrition is concerned, we could do without vegetation; but agriculture and its products have played so great a part in human history that today agricultural operations and vegetable foods are very beneficial to the race psychologically. And so it comes about that vegetable matter is in great demand, not only as raw material for innumerable manufactures, but also for table delicacies. Green vegetables, fruit, and various alcoholic fruit drinks have come to have the same kind of ritual significance for us as wine has for you. Meat also, though not a part of ordinary diet, is eaten on very rare and sacred occasions. The cherished wild fauna of the planet contributes its toll to periodic symbolical banquets. And whenever a human being has chosen to die, his body is ceremoniously eaten by his friends.

Communication with the food-factories of Jupiter and the agricultural polar regions of the less torrid Uranus, as also with the automatic mining stations on the glacial outer planets, is maintained by ether-ships, which, travelling much faster than the planets themselves, make the passage to the neighbour worlds in a small fraction of the Neptunian year. These vessels, of which the smallest are about a mile in length, may be seen descending on our oceans like ducks. Before they touch the water they cause a prodigious tumult with the downward pressure of their radiation; but once upon the surface, they pass quietly into harbour.

The ether-ship is in a manner symbolic of our whole community, so highly organized is it, and so minute in relation to the void which engulfs it. The ethereal navigators, because they spend so much of their time in the empty regions, beyond the range of ‘telepathic’ communication and sometimes even of mechanical radio, form mentally a unique class among us. They are a hardy, simple, and modest folk. And though they embody man’s proud mastery of the ether, they are never tired of reminding land-lubbers, with dour jocularity, that the most daring voyages are confined within one drop of the boundless ocean of space.

Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased, and mentally unbalanced. To a race that thought itself so well established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that not human. They dare not go out at night. They live in an extravagant passion for the presence of others. And since all others are astronomically minded, they cannot find real companionship. They insanely refuse to participate in the mental life of the race upon the plane where all things are seen in their just proportions. They cling piteously to the sweets of individual life; and so they are led to curse the immensities. They fill their minds with human conceits, and their houses with toys. By night they draw the curtains and drown the quiet voice of the stars in revelry. But it is a joyless and a haunted revelry, desired less for itself than as a defence against reality.

2. CHILDHOOD AND MATURITY

I SAID THAT we were all astronomically minded; but we are not without ‘human’ interests. Our visitor from the earth would soon discover that the low buildings, sprinkled on all sides, were the homes of individuals, families, sexual groups, and bands of companions. Most of these buildings are so constructed that the roof and walls can be removed completely or partially, for sun-bathing and for the night. Round each house is a wilderness, or a garden, or an orchard of our sturdy fruit trees. Here and there men and women may be seen at work with hoe or spade or secateurs. The buildings themselves affect many styles; and within doors our visitor would find great variety from house to house. Even within a single house he might come on rooms seemingly of different epochs. And while some rooms are crowded with articles, many of which would be incomprehensible to the stranger, others are bare, save for a table, chairs, a cupboard, and perhaps some single object of pure art. We have an immense variety of manufactured goods. But the visitor from a world obsessed with material wealth would probably remark the simplicity, even austerity, which characterizes most private houses.

He would doubtless be surprised to see no books. In every room, however, there is a cupboard filled with minute rolls of tape, microscopically figured. Each of these rolls contains matter which could not be cramped into a score of your volumes. They are used in connexion with a pocket-instrument, the size and shape of the ancient cigarette case. When the roll is inserted, it reels itself off at any desired speed, and interferes systematically with ethereal vibrations produced by the instrument. Thus is generated a very complex flow of ‘telepathic’ language which permeates the brain of the reader. So delicate and direct is this medium of expression that there is scarcely any possibility of misunderstanding the author’s intention. The rolls themselves, it should be said, are produced by another special instrument, which is sensitive to vibrations generated in the author’s brain. Not that it produces a mere replica of his stream of consciousness; it records only those images and ideas with which he deliberately ‘inscribes’ it. I may mention also that, since we can at any moment communicate by direct ‘telepathy’ with any person on the planet, these ‘books’ of ours are not used for the duplication of merely ephemeral thought. Each one of them preserves only the threshed and chosen grain of some mind’s harvest.

Other instruments may be observed in our houses, which I cannot pause to describe, instruments whose office is either to carry out domestic drudgery, or to minister directly in one way or another to cultured life. Near the outer door would be hanging a number of flying-suits, and in a garage attached to the house would be the private air-boats, gaily coloured torpedo-shaped objects of various sizes.

Decoration in our houses, save in those which belong to children, is everywhere simple, even severe. None the less we prize it greatly, and spend much consideration upon it. Children, indeed, often adorn their houses with splendour, which adults themselves can also enjoy through children’s eyes, even as they can enter into the frolics of infants with unaffected glee.

The number of children in our world is small in relation to our immense population. Yet, seeing that every one of us is potentially immortal, it may be wondered how we can permit ourselves to have any children at all. The explanation is twofold. In the first place, our policy is to produce new individuals of higher type than ourselves, for we are very far from biologically perfect. Consequently we need a continuous supply of children. And as these successively reach maturity, they take over the functions of adults whose nature is less perfect; and these, when they are aware that they are no longer of service, elect to retire from life.

But even though every individual, sooner or later, ceases to exist, the average length of life is not much less than a quarter of a million terrestrial years. No wonder, then, that we cannot accommodate many children. But we have more than might be expected, for with us infancy and adolescence are very lengthy. The foetus is carried for twenty years. Ectogenesis was practised by our predecessors, but was abandoned by our own species, because, with greatly improved motherhood, there is no need for it. Our mothers, indeed, are both physically and mentally most vigorous during the all too rare period of pregnancy. After birth, true infancy lasts for about a century. During this period, in which the foundations of body and mind are being laid, very slowly, but so securely that they will never fail, the individual is cared for by his mother. Then follow some centuries of childhood, and a thousand years of adolescence.

Our children, of course, are very different beings from the children of the First Men. Though physically they are in many respects still childlike, they are independent persons in the community. Each has either a house of his own, or rooms in a larger building held in common by himself and his friends. Thousands of these are to be found in the neighbourhood of every educational centre. There are some children who prefer to live with their parents, or with one or other of their parents; but this is rare. Though there is often much friendly intercourse between parents and children, the generations usually fare better under separate roofs. This is inevitable in our species. For the adult’s overwhelmingly greater experience reveals the world to him in very different proportions from those which are possible even to the most brilliant of children; while on the other hand with us the mind of every child is, in some potentiality or other, definitely superior to every adult mind. Consequently, while the child can never appreciate what is best in his elders, the adult, in spite of his power of direct insight into all minds not superior to himself, is doomed to incomprehension of all that is novel in his own offspring.

Six or seven hundred years after birth a child is in some respects physically equivalent to a ten-year-old of the First Men. But since his brain is destined for much higher development, it is already far more complex than any adult brain of that species. And though temperamentally he is in many ways still a child, intellectually he has already in some respects passed beyond the culture of the best adult minds of the ancient races. The traveller, encountering one of our bright boys, might sometimes be reminded of the wise simplicity of the legendary Child Christ. But also he might equally well discover a vast exuberance, boisterousness, impishness, and a complete inability to stand outside the child’s own eager life and regard it dispassionately. In general our children develop intellectually beyond the level of the First Men long before they begin to develop the dispassionate will which is characteristic of our adults. When there is conflict between a child’s personal needs and the need of society, he will as a rule force himself to the social course; but he does so with resentment and dramatic self-pity, thereby rendering himself in the adult view exquisitely ridiculous.

When our children attain physical adolescence, nearly a thousand years after birth, they leave the safe paths of childhood to spend another thousand years in one of the antarctic continents, known as the Land of the Young. Somewhat reminiscent of the Wild Continent of the Fifth Men, this territory is preserved as virgin bush and prairie. Sub-human grazers and carnivora abound. Volcanic eruption, hurricanes, and glacial seasons afford further attractions to the adventurous young. There is consequently a high death rate. In this land our young people live the half primitive, half sophisticated life to which their nature is fitted. They hunt, fish, tend cattle, and till the ground. They cultivate all the simple beauties of human individuality. They love and hate. They sing, paint, and carve. They devise heroic myths, and delight in fantasies of direct intercourse with a cosmic person. They organise themselves as tribes and nations. Sometimes they even indulge in warfare of a primitive but bloody type. Formerly when this happened, the adult world interfered; but we have since learned to let the fever run its course. The loss of life is regrettable; but it is a small price to pay for the insight afforded even by this restricted and juvenile warfare, into those primitive agonies and passions which, when they are experienced by the adult mind, are so transformed by philosophy that their import is wholly changed. In the Land of the Young our boys and girls experience all that is precious and all that is abject in the primitive. They live through in their own persons, century by century, all its toilsomeness and cramped meanness, all its blind cruelty and precariousness; but also they taste its glamour, its vernal and lyrical glory. They make in little all the mistakes of thought and action that men have ever made; but at last they emerge ready for the large and more difficult world of maturity.

It was expected that some day, when we should have perfected the species, there would be no need to build up successive generations, no need of children, no need of all this schooling. It was expected that the community would then consist of adults only; and that they would be immortal not merely potentially but in fact, yet also, of course, perennially in the flower of young maturity. Thus, death should never cut the string of individuality and scatter the hard-won pearls, necessitating new strings, and laborious re-gatherings. The many and very delectable beauties of childhood could still be amply enjoyed in exploration of the past.

We know now that this goal is not to be attained, since man’s end is imminent.

3. A RACIAL AWAKENING

IT IS EASY to speak of children; but how can I tell you anything significant of our adult experience, in relation to which not only the world of the First Men but the worlds of the most developed earlier species seem so naïve?

The source of the immense difference between ourselves and all other human races lies in the sexual group, which is in fact much more than a sexual group.

The designers of our species set out to produce a being that might be capable of an order of mentality higher than their own. The only possibility of doing so lay in planning a great increase of brain organization. But they knew that the brain of an individual human being could not safely be allowed to exceed a certain weight. They therefore sought to produce the new order of mentality in a system of distinct and specialized brains held in ‘telepathic’ unity by means of ethereal radiation. Material brains were to be capable of becoming on some occasions mere nodes in a system of radiation which itself should then constitute the physical basis of a single mind. Hitherto there had been ‘telepathic’ communication between many individuals, but no super-individual, or group-mind. It was known that such a unity of individual minds had never been attained before, save on Mars; and it was known how lamentably the racial mind of Mars had failed to transcend the minds of the Martians. By a combination of shrewdness and good luck the designers hit upon a policy which escaped the Martian failure. They planned as the basis of the super-individual a small multi-sexual group.

Of course the mental unity of the sexual group is not the direct outcome of the sexual intercourse of its members. Such intercourse does occur. Groups differ from one another very greatly in this respect; but in most groups all the members of the male sexes have intercourse with all the members of the female sexes. Thus sex is with us essentially social. It is impossible for me to give any idea of the great range and intensity of experience afforded by these diverse types of union. Apart from this emotional enrichment of the individuals, the importance of sexual activity in the group lies in its bringing individuals into that extreme intimacy, temperamental harmony, and complementariness, without which no emergence into higher experience would be possible.

Individuals are not necessarily confined to the same group for ever. Little by little a group may change every one of its ninety-six members, and yet it will remain the same super-individual mind, though enriched with the memories grafted into it by the newcomers. Very rarely does an individual leave a group before he has been in it for ten thousand years. In some groups the members live together in a common home. In others they live apart. Sometimes an individual will form a sort of monogamous relation with another individual of his group, homing with the chosen one for many thousands of years, or even for a lifetime. Indeed some claim that life-long monogamy is the ideal state, so deep and delicate is the intimacy which it affords. But of course, even in monogamy, each partner must be periodically refreshed by intercourse with other members of the group, not only for the spiritual health of the two partners themselves, but also that the group-mind may be maintained in full vigour. Whatever the sexual custom of the group, there is always in the mind of each member a very special loyalty towards the whole group, a peculiar sexually toned esprit de corps, unparalleled in any other species.

Occasionally there is a special kind of group intercourse in which, during the actual occurrence of group mentality, all the members of one group will have intercourse with those of another. Casual intercourse outside the group is not common, but not discouraged. When it occurs it comes as a symbolic act crowning a spiritual intimacy.

Unlike the physical sex-relationship, the mental unity of the group involves all the members of the group every time it occurs, and so long as it persists. During times of group experience the individual continues to perform his ordinary routine of work and recreation, save when some particular activity is demanded of him by the group-mind itself. But all that he does as a private individual is carried out in a profound absent-mindedness. In familiar situations he reacts correctly, even to the extent of executing familiar types of intellectual work or entertaining acquaintances with intelligent conversation. Yet all the while he is in fact ‘far away’, rapt in the process of the group-mind. Nothing short of an urgent and unfamiliar crisis can recall him; and in recalling him it usually puts an end to the group’s experience.

Each member of the group is fundamentally just a highly developed human animal. He enjoys his food. He has a quick eye for sexual attraction, within or without the group. He has his personal idiosyncrasies and foibles, and is pleased to ridicule the foibles of others — and of himself. He may be one of those who abhor children, or one of those who enter into children’s antics with fervour, if they will tolerate him. He may move heaven and earth to procure permission for a holiday in the Land of the Young. And if he fails, as he almost surely does, he may go walking with a friend, or boating and swimming, or playing violent games. Or he may merely potter in his garden, or refresh his mind though not his body by exploring some favourite region of the past. Recreation occupies a large part of his life. For this reason he is always glad to get back to work in due season, whether his function is to maintain some part of the material organization of our world, or to educate, or to perform scientific research, or to cooperate in the endless artistic venture of the race, or, as is more likely, to help in some of those innumerable enterprises whose nature it is impossible for me to describe.

As a human individual, then, he or she is somewhat of the same type as a member of the Fifth species. Here once more is the perfected glandular outfit and instinctive nature. Here too is the highly developed sense perception and intellection. As in the Fifth species, so in the Eighteenth, each individual has his own private needs, which he heartily craves to fulfil; but also, in both species, he subordinates these private cravings to the good of the race absolutely and without struggle. The only kind of conflict which ever occurs between individuals is not the irreconcilable conflict of wills, but the conflict due to misunderstanding, to imperfect knowledge of the matter under dispute; and this can always be abolished by patient telepathic explication.

In addition to the brain organization necessary to this perfection of individual human nature, each member of a sexual group has in his own brain a special organ which, useless by itself, can cooperate ‘telepathically’ with the special organs of other members of the group to produce a single electro-magnetic system, the physical basis of the group-mind. In each sub-sex this organ has a peculiar form and function; and only by the simultaneous operation of the whole ninety-six does the group attain unified mental life. These organs do not merely enable each member to share the experience of all; for this is already provided in the sensitivity to radiation which is characteristic of all brain tissue in our species. By means of the harmonious activity of the special organs a true group-mind emerges, with experience far beyond the range of the individuals in isolation.

This would not be possible did not the temperament and capacity of each sub-sex differ appropriately from those of the others. I can only hint at these differences by analogy. Among the First Men there are many temperamental types whose essential natures the psychologists of that species never fully analysed. I may mention, however, as superficial designations of these types, the meditative, the active, the mystical, the intellectual, the artistic, the theoretical, the concrete, the placid, the highly-strung. Now our sub-sexes differ from one another temperamentally in some such manners as these, but with a far greater range and diversity. These differences of temperament are utilized for the enrichment of a group-self, such as could never have been attained by the First Men, even if they had been capable of ‘telepathic’ communication and electro-magnetic unity; for they had not the range of specialized brain form.

For all the daily business of life, then, each of us is mentally a distinct individual, though his ordinary means of communication with others is ‘telepathic’. But frequently he wakes up to be a group-mind. Apart from this ‘waking of individuals together’, if I may so call it, the group-mind has no existence; for its being is solely the being of the individuals comprehended together. When this communal awakening occurs, each individual experiences all the bodies of the group as ‘his own multiple body’, and perceives the world equally from all those bodies. This awakening happens to all the individuals at the same time. But over and above this simple enlargement of the experienced field is the awakening into new kinds of experience. Of this obviously I can tell you nothing, save that it differs from the lowlier state more radically than the infant mind differs from the mind of the individual adult, and that it consists of insight into many unsuspected and previously inconceivable features of the familiar world of men and things. Hence, in our group mode, most, but not all, of the perennial philosophical puzzles, especially those connected with the nature of personality, can be so lucidly restated that they cease to be puzzles.

Upon this higher plane of mentality the sexual groups, and therefore the individuals participating in them, have social intercourse with one another as super-individuals. Thus they form together a community of minded communities. For each group is a person differing from other groups in character and experience somewhat as individuals differ. The groups themselves are not allocated to different works, in such a manner that one group should be wholly engaged in industry, another in astronomy, and so on. Only the individuals are thus allocated. In each group there will be members of many professions. The function of the group itself is purely some special manner of insight and mode of appreciation; in relation to which, of course, the work of the individuals is constantly controlled, not only while they are actually supporting the group-self, but also when they have each fallen once more into the limited experience which is ordinary individual selfhood. For though, as individuals, they cannot retain clear insight into the high matters which they so recently experienced, they do remember so much as is not beyond the range of individual mentality; and in particular they remember the bearing of the group experience upon their own conduct as individuals.

Recently another and far more penetrating kind of experience has been attained, partly by good fortune, partly through research directed by the group-minds. For these have specialized themselves for particular functions in the mental life of the race, as previously the individuals were specialized for functions within the mind of a group. Very rarely and precariously has this supreme experience been achieved. In it the individual passes beyond his group experience, and becomes the mind of the race. At all times, of course, he can communicate ‘telepathically’ with other individuals anywhere upon the planet; and frequently the whole race ‘listens in’ while one individual addresses the world. But in the true racial experience the situation is different. The system of radiation which embraces the whole planet, and includes the million million brains of the race, becomes the physical basis of a racial self. The individual discovers himself to be embodied in all the bodies of the race. He savours in a single intuition all bodily contacts, including the mutual embraces of all lovers. Through the myriad feet of all men and women he enfolds his world in a single grasp. He sees with all eyes, and comprehends in a single vision all visual fields. Thus he perceives at once and as a continuous, variegated sphere, the whole surface of the planet. But not only so. He now stands above the group-minds as they above the individuals. He regards them as a man may regard his own vital tissues, with mingled contempt, sympathy, reverence, and dispassion. He watches them as one might study the living cells of his own brain; but also with the aloof interest of one observing an ant hill; and yet again as one enthralled by the strange and diverse ways of his fellow-men; and further as one who, from above the battle, watches himself and his comrades agonizing in some desperate venture; yet chiefly as the artist who has no thought but for his vision and its embodiment. In the racial mode a man apprehends all things astronomically. Through all eyes and all observatories, he beholds his voyaging world, and peers outward into space. Thus he merges in one view, as it were, the views of deck-hand, captain, stoker, and the man in the crow’s-nest. Regarding the solar system simultaneously from both limbs of Neptune, he perceives the planets and the sun stereoscopically, as though in binocular vision. Further, his perceived ‘now’ embraces not a moment but a vast age. Thus, observing the galaxy from every point in succession along Neptune’s wide orbit, and watching the nearer stars shift hither and thither, he actually perceives some of the constellations in three dimensions. Nay, with the aid of our most recent instruments the whole galaxy appears stereoscopically. But the great nebulae and remote universes remain mere marks upon the flat sky; and in contemplation of their remoteness man, even as the racial self of the mightiest of all human races, realizes his own minuteness and impotence.

But chiefly the racial mind transcends the minds of groups and individuals in philosophical insight into the true nature of space and time, mind and its objects, cosmical striving and cosmical perfection. Some hints of this great elucidation must presently be given; but in the main it cannot be communicated. Indeed such insight is beyond the reach of ourselves as isolated individuals, and even beyond the group-minds. When we have declined from the racial mentality, we cannot clearly remember what it was that we experienced.

In particular we have one very perplexing recollection about our racial experience, one which involves a seeming impossibility. In the racial mind our experience was enlarged not only spatially but temporarily in a very strange manner. In respect of temporal perception, of course, minds may differ in two ways, in the length of the span which they can comprehend as ‘now’, and the minuteness of the successive events which they can discriminate within the ‘now’. As individuals we can hold within one ‘now’ a duration equal to the old terrestrial day; and within that duration, we can, if we will, discriminate rapid pulsations such as commonly we hear together as a high musical tone. As the race-mind we perceived as ‘now’ the whole period since the birth of the oldest living individuals, and the whole past of the species appeared as personal memory, stretching back into the mist of infancy. Yet we could, if we willed, discriminate within the ‘now’ one light-vibration from the next. In this mere increased breadth and precision of temporal perception there is no contradiction. But how, we ask ourselves, could the race-mind experience as ‘now’ a vast period in which it had no existence whatever? Our first experience of racial mentality lasted only as long as Neptune’s moon takes to complete one circuit. Before that period, then, the race-mind was not. Yet during the month of its existence it regarded the whole previous career of the race as ‘present’.

Indeed, the racial experience has greatly perplexed us as individuals, and we can scarcely be said to remember more of it than that it was of extreme subtlety and extreme beauty. At the same time we often have of it an impression of unspeakable horror. We who, in our familiar individual sphere are able to regard all conceivable tragedy not merely with fortitude but with exultation, are obscurely conscious that as the racial mind we have looked into an abyss of evil such as we cannot now conceive, and could not endure to conceive. Yet even this hell we know to have been acceptable as an organic member in the austere form of the cosmos. We remember obscurely, and yet with a strange conviction, that all the age-long striving of the human spirit, no less than the petty cravings of individuals, was seen as a fair component in something far more admirable than itself; and that man ultimately defeated, no less than man for a while triumphant, contributes to this higher excellence.

How colourless these words! How unworthy of that wholly satisfying beauty of all things, which in our awakened racial mode we see face to face. Every human being, of whatever species, may occasionally glimpse some fragment or aspect of existence transfigured thus with the cold beauty which normally he cannot see. Even the First Men, in their respect for tragic art, had something of this experience. The Second, and still more surely the Fifth, sought it deliberately. The winged Seventh happened upon it while they were in the air. But their minds were cramped; and all that they could appreciate was their own small world and their own tragic story. We, the Last Men, have all their zest in private and in racial life, whether it fares well or ill. We have it at all times, and we have it in respect of matters inconceivable to lesser minds. We have it, moreover, intelligently. Knowing well how strange it is to admire evil along with good, we see clearly the subversiveness of this experience. Even we, as mere individuals, cannot reconcile our loyalty to the striving spirit of man with our own divine aloofness. And so, if we were mere individuals, there would remain conflict in each of us. But in the racial mode each one of us has now experienced the great elucidation of intellect and of feeling. And though, as individuals once more, we can never recapture that far-seeing vision, the obscure memory of it masters us always, and controls all our policies. Among yourselves, the artist, after his phase of creative insight is passed, and he is once more a partisan in the struggle for existence, may carry out in detail the design conceived in his brief period of clarity. He remembers, but no longer sees the vision. He tries to fashion some perceptible embodiment of the vanished splendour. So we, living our individual lives, delighting in the contacts of flesh, the relations of minds, and all the delicate activities of human culture, cooperating and conflicting in a thousand individual undertakings and performing each his office in the material maintenance of our society, see all things as though transfused with light from a source which is itself no longer revealed.

I have tried to tell you something of the most distinctive characteristics of our species. You can imagine that the frequent occasions of group mentality, and even more the rare occasions of race mentality, have a far-reaching effect on every individual mind, and therefore on our whole social order. Ours is in fact a society dominated, as no previous society, by a single racial purpose which is in a sense religious. Not that the individual’s private efflorescence is at all thwarted by the racial purpose. Indeed, far otherwise; for that purpose demands as the first condition of its fulfilment a wealth of individual fulfilment, physical and mental. But in each mind of man or woman the racial purpose presides absolutely; and hence it is the unquestioned motive of all social policy.

I must not stay to describe in detail this society of ours, in which a million million citizens, grouped in over a thousand nations, live in perfect accord without the aid of armies or even a police force. I must not tell of our much prized social organization which assigns a unique function to each citizen, controls the procreation of new citizens of every type in relation to social need, and yet provides an endless supply of originality. We have no government and no laws, if by law is meant a stereotyped convention supported by force, and not to be altered without the aid of cumbersome machinery. Yet, though our society is in this sense an anarchy, it lives by means of a very intricate system of customs, some of which are so ancient as to have become spontaneous taboos, rather than deliberate conventions. It is the business of those among us who correspond to your lawyers and politicians to study these customs and suggest improvements. Those suggestions are submitted to no representative body, but to the whole world-population in ‘telepathic’ conference. Ours is thus in a sense the most democratic of all societies. Yet in another sense it is extremely bureaucratic, since it is already some millions of terrestrial years since any suggestion put forward by the College of Organizers was rejected or even seriously criticized, so thoroughly do these social engineers study their material. The only serious possibility of conflict lies now between the world population as individuals and the same individuals as group minds or racial mind. But though in these respects there have formerly occurred serious conflicts, peculiarly distressing to the individuals who experienced them, such conflicts are now extremely rare. For, even as mere individuals, we are learning to trust more and more to the judgement and dictates of our own super-individual experience.

It is time to grapple with the most difficult part of my whole task. Somehow, and very briefly, I must give you an idea of that outlook upon existence which has determined our racial purpose, making it essentially a religious purpose. This outlook has come to us partly through the work of individuals in scientific research and philosophic thought, partly through the influence of our group and racial experiences. You can imagine that it is not easy to describe this modern vision of the nature of things in any manner intelligible to those who have not our advantages. There is much in this vision which will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.

4. COSMOLOGY

WE FIND OURSELVES living in a vast and boundless, yet finite, order of spatio-temporal events. And each of us, as the racial mind, has learned that there are other such orders, other and incommensurable spheres of events, related to our own neither spatially nor temporally but in another mode of eternal being. Of the contents of those alien spheres we know almost nothing but that they are incomprehensible to us, even in our racial mentality.

Within this spatio-temporal sphere of ours we remark what we call the Beginning and what we call the End. In the Beginning there came into existence, we know not how, that all-pervading and unimaginably tenuous gas which was the parent of all material and spiritual existence within time’s known span. It was in fact a very multitudinous yet precisely numbered host. From the crowding together of this great population into many swarms, arose in time the nebulae, each of which in its turn condenses as a galaxy, a universe of stars. The stars have their beginnings and their ends; and for a few moments somewhere in between their beginnings and their ends a few, very few, may support mind. But in due course will come the universal End, when all the wreckage of the galaxies will have drifted together as a single, barren, and seemingly changeless ash, in the midst of a chaos of unavailing energy.

But the cosmic events which we call the Beginning and the End are final only in relation to our ignorance of the events which lie beyond them. We know, and as the racial mind we have apprehended as a clear necessity, that not only space but time also is boundless, though finite. For in a sense time is cyclic. After the End, events unknowable will continue to happen during a period much longer than that which will have passed since the Beginning; but at length there will recur the identical event which was itself also the Beginning.

Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself. For time is but an abstraction from the successiveness of events that pass; and since all events whatsoever form together a cycle of successiveness, there is nothing constant in relation to which there can be repetition. And so the succession of events is cyclic, yet not repetitive. The birth of the all-pervading gas in the so-called Beginning is not merely similar to another such birth which will occur long after us and long after the cosmic End, so-called; the past Beginning is the future Beginning.

From the Beginning to the End is but the span from one spoke to the next on time’s great wheel. There is a vaster span, stretching beyond the End and round to the Beginning. Of the events therein we know nothing, save that there must be such events.

Everywhere within time’s cycle there is endless passage of events. In a continuous flux, they occur and vanish, yielding to their successors. Yet each one of them is eternal. Though passage is of their very nature, and without passage they are nothing, yet they have eternal being. But their passage is no illusion. They have eternal being, yet eternally they exist with passage. In our racial mode we see clearly that this is so; but in our individual mode it remains a mystery. Yet even in our individual mode we must accept both sides of this mysterious antinomy, as a fiction needed for the rationalizing of our experience.

The Beginning precedes the End by some hundred million million terrestrial years, and succeeds it by a period at least nine times longer. In the middle of the smaller span lies the still shorter period within which alone the living worlds can occur. And they are very few. One by one they dawn into mentality and die, successive blooms in life’s short summer. Before that season and after it, even to the Beginning and to the End, and even before the Beginning and after the End, sleep, utter oblivion. Not before there are stars, and not after the stars are chilled, can there be life. And then, rarely.

In our own galaxy there have occurred hitherto some twenty thousand worlds that have conceived life. And of these a few score have attained or surpassed the mentality of the First Men. But of those that have reached this development, man has now outstripped the rest, and today man alone survives.

There are the millions of other galaxies, for instance the Andromedan island. We have some reason to surmise that in that favoured universe mind may have attained to insight and power incomparably greater than our own. But all that we know for certain is that it contains four worlds of high order.

Of the host of other universes that lie within range of our mind-detecting instruments, none have produced anything comparable with man. But there are many universes too remote to be estimated.

You may wonder how we have come to detect these remote lives and intelligences. I can say only that the occurrence of mentality produces certain minute astronomical effects, to which our instruments are sensitive even at great distances. These effects increase slightly with the mere mass of living matter on any astronomical body, but far more with its mental and spiritual development. Long ago it was the spiritual development of the world-community of the Fifth Men that dragged the moon from its orbit. And in our own case, so numerous is our society today, and so greatly developed in mental and spiritual activities, that only by continuous expense of physical energy can we preserve the solar system from confusion.

We have another means of detecting minds remote from us in space. We can, of course, enter into past minds wherever they are, so long as they are intelligible to us; and we have tried to use this power for the discovery of remote minded worlds. But in general the experience of such minds is too different in fibre from our own for us to be able even to detect its existence. And so our knowledge of minds in other worlds is almost wholly derived from their physical effects.

We cannot say that nowhere save on those rare bodies called planets does life ever occur. For we have evidence that in a few of the younger stars there is life, and even intelligence. How it persists in an incandescent environment we know not, nor whether it is perhaps the life of the star as a whole, as a single organism, or the life of many flame-like inhabitants of the star. All that we know is that no star in its prime has life, and therefore that the lives of the younger ones are probably doomed.

Again, we know that mind occurs, though very seldom, on a few extremely old stars, no longer incandescent. What the future of these minds will be, we cannot tell. Perhaps it is with them, and not with man, that the hope of the cosmos lies. But at present they are all primitive.

Today nothing anywhere in this galaxy of ours can compare with man in respect of vision and mental creativeness.

We have, therefore, come to regard our community as of some importance. Especially so in the light of our metaphysics; but I can only hint at our metaphysical vision of things by means of metaphors which will convey at best a caricature of that vision.

In the Beginning there was great potency, but little form. And the spirit slept as the multitude of discrete primordial existents. Thenceforth there has been a long and fluctuating adventure towards harmonious complexity of form, and towards the awakening of the spirit into unity, knowledge, delight, and self-expression. And this is the goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning. Man in our day has gained some depth of insight, some breadth of knowledge, some power of creation, some faculty of worship. We have looked far afield. We have probed not altogether superficially into the nature of existence, and have found it very beautiful, though also terrible. We have created a not inconsiderable community; and we have wakened together to be the unique spirit of that community. We had proposed to ourselves a very long and arduous future, which should culminate, at some time before the End, in the complete achievement of the spirit’s ideal. But now we know that disaster is already near at hand.

When we are in full possession of our faculties, we are not distressed by this fate. For we know that though our fair community must cease, it has also indestructible being. We have at least carved into one region of the eternal real a form which has beauty of no mean order. The great company of diverse and most lovely men and women in all their subtle relationships, striving with a single purpose towards the goal which is mind’s final goal; the community and super-individuality of that great host; the beginnings of further insight and creativeness upon the higher plane — these surely are real achievements — even though, in the larger view, they are minute achievements.

Yet though we are not at all dismayed by our own extinction, we cannot but wonder whether or not in the far future some other spirit will fulfil the cosmic ideal, or whether we ourselves are the modest crown of existence. Unfortunately, though we can explore the past wherever there are intelligible minds, we cannot enter into the future. And so in vain we ask, will ever any spirit awake to gather all spirits into itself, to elicit from the stars their full flower of beauty, to know all things together, and admire all things justly.

If in the far future this end will be achieved, it is really achieved even now; for whenever it occurs, its being is eternal. But on the other hand if it is indeed achieved eternally, this achievement must be the work of spirits or a spirit not wholly unlike ourselves, though infinitely greater. And the physical location of that spirit must lie in the far future.

But if no future spirit will achieve this end before it dies, then, though the cosmos is indeed very beautiful, it is not perfect.

I said that we regard the cosmos as very beautiful. Yet it is also very terrible. For ourselves, it is easy to look forward with equanimity to our end, and even to the end of our admired community; for what we prize most is the excellent beauty of the cosmos. But there are the myriads of spirits who have never entered into that vision. They have suffered, and they were not permitted that consolation. There are, first, the incalculable hosts of lowly creatures scattered over all the ages in all the minded worlds. Theirs was only a dream life, and their misery not often poignant; but none the less they are to be pitied for having missed the more poignant experience in which alone spirit can find fulfilment. Then there are the intelligent beings, human and otherwise; the many minded worlds throughout the galaxies, that have struggled into cognizance, striven for they knew not what, tasted brief delights and lived in the shadow of pain and death, until at last their life has been crushed out by careless fate. In our solar system there are the Martians, insanely and miserably obsessed; the native Venerians, imprisoned in their ocean and murdered for man’s sake; and all the hosts of the forerunning human species. A few individuals no doubt in every period, and many in certain favoured races, have lived on the whole happily. And a few have even known something of the supreme beatitude. But for most, until our modern epoch, thwarting has outweighed fulfilment; and if actual grief has not preponderated over joy, it is because, mercifully, the fulfilment that is wholly missed cannot be conceived.

Our predecessors of the Sixteenth species, oppressed by this vast horror, undertook a forlorn and seemingly irrational crusade for the rescue of the tragic past. We see now clearly that their enterprise, though desperate, was not quite fantastic. For, if ever the cosmic ideal should be realized, even though for a moment only, then in that time the awakened Soul of All will embrace within itself all spirits whatever throughout the whole of time’s wide circuit. And so to each one of them, even to the least, it will seem that he has awakened and discovered himself to be the Soul of All, knowing all things and rejoicing in all things. And though afterwards, through the inevitable decay of the stars, this most glorious vision must be lost, suddenly or in the long-drawn-out defeat of life, yet would the awakened Soul of All have eternal being, and in it each martyred spirit would have beatitude eternally, though unknown to itself in its own temporal mode.

It may be that this is the case. If not, then eternally the martyred spirits are martyred only, and not blest.

We cannot tell which of these possibilities is fact. As individuals we earnestly desire that the eternal being of things may include this supreme awakening. This, nothing less than this, has been the remote but ever-present goal of our practical religious life and of our social policy.

In our racial mode also we have greatly desired this end, but differently.

Even as individuals, all our desires are tempered by that relentless admiration of fate which we recognize as the spirit’s highest achievement. Even as individuals, we exult in the issue whether our enterprises succeed or fail. The pioneer defeated, the lover bereaved and overwhelmed, can find in his disaster the supreme experience, the dispassionate ecstasy which salutes the Real as it is and would not change one jot of it. Even as individuals, we can regard the impending extinction of mankind as a thing superb though tragic. Strong in the knowledge that the human spirit has already inscribed the cosmos with indestructible beauty, and that inevitably, whether sooner or later, man’s career must end, we face this too sudden end with laughter in our hearts, and peace.

But there is the one thought by which, in our individual state, we are still dismayed, namely that the cosmic enterprise itself may fail; that the full potentiality of the Real may never find expression; that never, in any stage of time, the multitudinous and conflicting existents should be organized as the universal harmonious living body; that the spirit’s eternal nature, therefore, should be discordant, miserably tranced; that the indestructible beauties of this our sphere of space and time should remain imperfect, and remain, too, not adequately worshipped.

But in the racial mind this ultimate dread has no place. On those few occasions when we have awakened racially, we have come to regard with piety even the possibility of cosmical defeat. For as the racial mind, though in a manner we earnestly desired the fulfilment of the cosmical ideal, yet we were no more enslaved to this desire than, as individuals, we are enslaved to our private desires. For though the racial mind wills this supreme achievement, yet in the same act it holds itself aloof from it, and from all desire, and all emotion, save the ecstasy which admires the real as it is, and accepts its dark-bright form with joy.

As individuals, therefore, we try to regard the whole cosmic adventure as a symphony now in progress, which may or may not some day achieve its just conclusion. Like music, however, the vast biography of the stars is to be judged not in respect of its final moment merely, but in respect of the perfection of its whole form; and whether its form as a whole is perfect or not, we cannot know. Actual music is a pattern of intertwining themes which evolve and die; and these again are woven of simpler members, which again are spun of chords and unitary tones. But the music of the spheres is of a complexity almost infinitely more subtle, and its themes rank above and below one another in hierarchy beyond hierarchy. None but a God, none but a mind subtle as the music itself, could hear the whole in all its detail, and grasp in one act its close-knit individuality, if such it has. Not for any human mind to say authoritatively, ‘This is music, wholly’, or to say, ‘This is mere noise, flecked now and then by shreds of significance’.

The music of the spheres is unlike other music not only in respect of its richness, but also in the nature of its medium. It is a music not merely of sounds but of souls. Each of its minor themes, each of its chords, each single tone of it, each tremor of each tone, is in its own degree more than a mere passive factor in the music; it is a listener, and also a creator. Wherever there is individuality of form, there is also an individual appreciator and originator. And the more complex the form, the more percipient and active the spirit. Thus in every individual factor within the music, the musical environment of that factor is experienced, vaguely or precisely, erroneously or with greater approximation to truth; and, being experienced, it is admired or loathed, rightly or falsely. And it is influenced. Just as in actual music each theme is in a manner a determination of its forerunners and followers and present accompaniment, so in this vaster music each individual factor is itself a determination of its environment. Also it is a determinant, both of that which precedes and that which follows.

But whether these manifold interdeterminations are after all haphazard, or, as in music, controlled in relation to the beauty of the whole, we know not; nor whether, if this is the case, the beautiful whole of things is the work of some mind; nor yet whether some mind admires it adequately as a whole of beauty.

But this we know: that we ourselves, when the spirit is most awake in us, admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright form with joy.

XVI The Last of Man

1. SENTENCE OF DEATH

OURS HAS BEEN essentially a philosophical age, in fact the supreme age of philosophy. But a great practical problem has also concerned us. We have had to prepare for the task of preserving humanity during a most difficult period which was calculated to begin about one hundred million years hence, but might, in certain circumstances, be sprung upon us at very short notice. Long ago the human inhabitants of Venus believed that already in their day the sun was about to enter the ‘white dwarf’ phase, and that the time would therefore soon come when their world would be frost-bound. This calculation was unduly pessimistic; but we know now that, even allowing for the slight delay caused by the great collision, the solar collapse must begin at some date astronomically not very distant. We had planned that during the comparatively brief period of the actual shrinkage, we would move our planet steadily nearer to the sun, until finally it should settle in the narrowest possible orbit.

Man would then be comfortably placed for a very long period. But in the fullness of time there would come a far more serious crisis. The sun would continue to cool, and at last man would no longer be able to live by means of solar radiation. It would become necessary to annihilate matter to supply the deficiency. The other planets might be used for this purpose, and possibly the sun itself. Or, given the sustenance for so long a voyage, man might boldly project his planet into the neighbourhood of some younger star. Thenceforth, perhaps, he might operate upon a far grander scale. He might explore and colonize all suitable worlds in every corner of the galaxy, and organize himself as a vast community of minded worlds. Even (so we dreamed) he might achieve intercourse with other galaxies. It did not seem impossible that man himself was the germ of the world-soul, which, we still hope, is destined to awake for a while before the universal decline, and to crown the eternal cosmos with its due of knowledge and admiration, fleeting yet eternal. We dared to think that in some far distant epoch the human spirit, clad in all wisdom, power, and delight, might look back upon our primitive age with a certain respect; no doubt with pity also and amusement, but none the less with admiration for the spirit in us, still only half awake, and struggling against great disabilities. In such a mood, half pity, half admiration, we ourselves look back upon the primitive mankinds.

Our prospect has now suddenly and completely changed, for astronomers have made a startling discovery, which assigns to man a speedy end. His existence has ever been precarious. At any stage of his career he might easily have been exterminated by some slight alteration of his chemical environment, by a more than usually malignant microbe, by a radical change of climate, or by the manifold effects of his own folly. Twice already he has been almost destroyed by astronomical events. How easily might it happen that the solar system, now rushing through a somewhat more crowded region of the galaxy, should become entangled with, or actually strike, a major astronomical body, and be destroyed. But fate, as it turns out, has a more surprising end in store for man.

Not long ago an unexpected alteration was observed to be taking place in a near star. Through no discoverable cause, it began to change from white to violet, and increase in brightness. Already it has attained such extravagant brilliance that, though its actual disc remains a mere point in our sky, its dazzling purple radiance illuminates our nocturnal landscapes with hideous beauty. Our astronomers have ascertained that this is no ordinary ‘nova’, that it is not one of those stars addicted to paroxysms of brilliance. It is something unprecedented, a normal star suffering from a unique disease, a fantastic acceleration of its vital process, a riotous squandering of the energy which should have remained locked within its substance for aeons. At the present rate it will be reduced either to an inert cinder or to actual annihilation in a few thousand years. This extraordinary event may possibly have been produced by unwise tamperings on the part of intelligent beings in the star’s neighbourhood. But, indeed, since all matter at very high temperature is in a state of unstable equilibrium, the cause may have been merely some conjunction of natural circumstances.

The event was first regarded simply as an intriguing spectacle. But further study roused a more serious interest. Our own planet, and therefore the sun also, was suffering a continuous and increasing bombardment of ethereal vibrations, most of which were of incredibly high frequency, and of unknown potentiality. What would be their effect upon the sun? After some centuries, certain astronomical bodies in the neighbourhood of the deranged star were seen to be infected with its disorder. Their fever increased the splendour of our night sky, but it also confirmed our fears. We still hoped that the sun might prove too distant to be seriously influenced, but careful analysis now showed that this hope must be abandoned. The sun’s remoteness might cause a delay of some thousands of years before the cumulative effects of the bombardment could start the disintegration; but sooner or later the sun itself must be infected. Probably within thirty thousand years life will be impossible anywhere within a vast radius of the sun, so vast a radius that it is quite impossible to propel our planet away fast enough to escape before the storm can catch us.

2. BEHAVIOUR OF THE CONDEMNED

THE DISCOVERY OF this doom kindled in us unfamiliar emotions. Hitherto humanity had seemed to be destined for a very long future, and the individual himself had been accustomed to look forward to very many thousands of years of personal life, ending in voluntary sleep. We had of course often conceived, and even savoured in imagination, the sudden destruction of our world. But now we faced it as a fact. Outwardly everyone behaved with perfect serenity, but inwardly every mind was in turmoil. Not that there was any question of our falling into panic or despair, for in this crisis our native detachment stood us in good stead. But inevitably some time passed before our minds became properly adjusted to the new prospect, before we could see our fate outlined clearly and beautifully against the cosmic background.

Presently, however, we learned to contemplate the whole great saga of man as a completed work of art, and to admire it no less for its sudden and tragic end than for the promise in it which was not to be fulfilled. Grief was now transfigured wholly into ecstasy. Defeat, which had oppressed us with a sense of man’s impotence and littleness among the stars, brought us into a new sympathy and reverence for all those myriads of beings in the past out of whose obscure strivings we had been born. We saw the most brilliant of our own race and the lowliest of our prehuman forerunners as essentially spirits of equal excellence, though cast in diverse circumstances. When we looked round on the heavens, and at the violet splendour which was to destroy us, we were filled with awe and pity, awe for the inconceivable potentiality of this bright host, pity for its self-thwarting effort to fulfil itself as the universal spirit.

At this stage it seemed that there was nothing left for us to do but to crowd as much excellence as possible into our remaining life, and meet our end in the noblest manner. But now there came upon us once more the rare experience of racial mentality. For a whole Neptunian year every individual lived in an enraptured trance, in which, as the racial mind, he or she resolved many ancient mysteries and saluted many unexpected beauties. This ineffable experience, lived through under the shadow of death, was the flower of man’s whole being. But I can tell nothing of it, save that when it was over we possessed, even as individuals, a new peace, in which, strangely but harmoniously, were blended grief, exaltation, and god-like laughter.

In consequence of this racial experience we found ourselves faced with two tasks which had not before been contemplated. The one referred to the future, the other to the past.

In respect of the future, we are now setting about the forlorn task of disseminating among the stars the seeds of a new humanity. For this purpose we shall make use of the pressure of radiation from the sun, and chiefly the extravagantly potent radiation that will later be available. We are hoping to devise extremely minute electro-magnetic ‘wave-systems’, akin to normal protons and electrons, which will be individually capable of sailing forward upon the hurricane of solar radiation at a speed not wholly incomparable with the speed of light itself. This is a difficult task. But, further, these units must be so cunningly inter-related that, in favourable conditions, they may tend to combine to form spores of life, and to develop, not indeed into human beings, but into lowly organisms with a definite evolutionary bias toward the essentials of human nature. These objects we shall project from beyond our atmosphere in immense quantities at certain points of our planet’s orbit, so that solar radiation may carry them towards the most promising regions of the galaxy. The chance that any of them will survive to reach their destination is small, and still smaller the chance that any of them will find a suitable environment. But if any of this human seed should fall upon good ground, it will embark, we hope, upon a somewhat rapid biological evolution, and produce in due season whatever complex organic forms are possible in its environment. It will have a very real physiological bias toward the evolution of intelligence. Indeed it will have a much greater bias in that direction than occurred on the Earth in those subvital atomic groupings from which terrestrial life eventually sprang.

It is just conceivable, then, that by extreme good fortune man may still influence the future of this galaxy, not directly but through his creature. But in the vast music of existence the actual theme of mankind now ceases for ever. Finished, the long reiterations of man’s history; defeated, the whole proud enterprise of his maturity. The stored experience of many mankinds must sink into oblivion, and today’s wisdom must vanish.

The other task which occupies us, that which relates to the past, is one which may very well seem to you nonsensical.

We have long been able to enter into past minds and participate in their experience. Hitherto we have been passive spectators merely, but recently we have acquired the power of influencing past minds. This seems an impossibility; for a past event is what it is, and how can it conceivably be altered at a subsequent date, even in the minutest respect?

Now it is true that past events are what they are, irrevocably; but in certain cases some feature of a past event may depend on an event in their far future. The past event would never have been as it actually was (and is, eternally), if there had not been going to be a certain future event, which, though not contemporaneous with the past event, influences it directly in the sphere of eternal being. The passage of events is real, and time is the successiveness of passing events; but though events have passage, they have also eternal being. And in certain rare cases mental events far separated in time determine one another directly by way of eternity.

Our own minds have often been profoundly influenced by direct inspection of past minds; and now we find that certain events of certain past minds are determined by present events in our own present minds. No doubt there are some mental events which are what they are by virtue of mental past-processes which we shall perform but have not yet performed.

Our historians and psychologists, engaged on direct inspection of past minds, had often complained of certain ‘singular’ points in past minds, where the ordinary laws of psychology fail to give a full explanation of the course of mental events; where, in fact, some wholly unknown influence seemed to be at work. Later it was found that, in some cases at least, this disturbance of the ordinary principles of psychology corresponded with certain thoughts or desires in the mind of the observer, living in our own age. Of course, only such matters as could have significance to the past mind could influence it at all. Thoughts and desires of ours which have no meaning to the particular past-individual fail to enter into his experience. New ideas and new values are only to be introduced by arranging familiar matter so that it may gain a new significance. Nevertheless we now found ourselves in possession of an amazing power of communicating with the past, and contributing to its thought and action, though of course we could not alter it.

But, it may be asked, what if, in respect of a particular ‘singularity’ in some past mind, we do not, after all, choose to provide the necessary influence to account for it? The question is meaningless. There is no possibility that we should not choose to influence those past minds which are, as a matter of fact, dependent on our influence. For it is in the sphere of eternity (wherein alone we meet past minds), that we really make this free choice. And in the sphere of time, though the choosing has relations with our modern age, and may be said to occur in that age, it also had relations with the past mind, and may be said to have occurred also long ago.

There are in some past minds singularities which are not the product of any influence that we have exerted today. Some of these singularities, no doubt, we shall ourselves produce on some occasion before our destruction. But it may be that some are due to an influence other than ours, perhaps to beings which, by good fortune, may spring long hence from our forlorn seminal enterprise; or they may be due perhaps to the cosmic mind, whose future occurrence and eternal existence we earnestly desire. However that may be, there are a few remarkable minds, scattered up and down past ages and even in the most primitive human races, which suggest an influence other than our own. They are so ‘singular’ in one respect or another, that we cannot give a perfectly clear psychological account of them in terms of the past only; and yet we ourselves are not the instigators of their singularity. Your Jesus, your Socrates, your Gautama, show traces of this uniqueness. But the most original of all were too eccentric to have any influence on their contemporaries. It is possible that in ourselves also there are ‘singularities’ which cannot be accounted for wholly in terms of ordinary biological and psychological laws. If we could prove that this is the case, we should have very definite evidence of the occurrence of a high order of mentality somewhere in the future, and therefore of its eternal existence. But hitherto this problem has proved too subtle for us, even in the racial mode. It may be that the mere fact that we have succeeded in attaining racial mentality involves some remote future influence. It is even conceivable that every creative advance that any mind has ever made involves unwitting cooperation with the cosmic mind which, perhaps, will awake at some date before the End.

We have two methods of influencing the past through past individuals; for we can operate either upon minds of great originality and power, or upon any average individual whose circumstances happen to suit our purpose. In original minds we can only suggest some very vague intuition, which is then ‘worked up’ by the individual himself into some form very different from that which we intended, but very potent as a factor in the culture of his age. Average minds, on the other hand, we can use as passive instruments for the conveyance of detailed ideas. But in such cases the individual is incapable of working up the material into a great and potent form, suited to his age.

But what is it, you may ask, that we seek to contribute to the past? We seek to afford intuitions of truth and of value, which, though easy to us from our point of vantage, would be impossible to the unaided past. We seek to help the past to make the best of itself, just as one man may help another. We seek to direct the attention of past individuals and past races to truths and beauties which, though implicit in their experience, would otherwise be overlooked.

We seek to do this for two reasons. Entering into past minds, we become perfectly acquainted with them, and cannot but love them; and so we desire to help them. By influencing selected individuals, we seek to influence indirectly great multitudes. But our second motive is very different. We see the career of Man in his successive planetary homes as a process of very great beauty. It is far indeed from the perfect; but it is very beautiful, with the beauty of tragic art. Now it turns out that this beautiful thing entails our operation at various points in the past. Therefore we will to operate.

Unfortunately our first inexperienced efforts were disastrous. Many of the fatuities which primitive minds in all ages have been prone to attribute to the influence of disembodied spirits, whether deities, fiends, or the dead, are but the gibberish which resulted from our earliest experiments. And this book, so admirable in our conception, has issued from the brain of the writer, your contemporary, in such disorder as to be mostly rubbish.

We are concerned with the past not only in so far as we make very rare contributions to it, but chiefly in two other manners.

First, we are engaged upon the great enterprise of becoming lovingly acquainted with the past, the human past, in every detail. This is, so to speak, our supreme act of filial piety. When one being comes to know and love another, a new and beautiful thing is created, namely the love. The cosmos is thus far and at that date enhanced. We seek then to know and love every past mind that we can enter. In most cases we can know them with far more understanding than they can know themselves. Not the least of them, not the worst of them, shall be left out of this great work of understanding and admiration.

There is another manner in which we are concerned with the human past. We need its help. For we, who are triumphantly reconciled to our fate, are under obligation to devote our last energies not to ecstatic contemplation but to a forlorn and most uncongenial task, the dissemination. This task is almost intolerably repugnant to us. Gladly would we spend our last days in embellishing our community and our culture, and in pious exploration of the past. But it is incumbent on us, who are by nature artists and philosophers, to direct the whole attention of our world upon the arid labour of designing an artificial human seed, producing it in immense quantities, and projecting it among the stars. If there is to be any possibility of success, we must undertake a very lengthy programme of physical research, and finally organize a world-wide system of manufacture. The work will not be completed until our physical constitution is already being undermined, and the disintegration of our community has already begun. Now we could never fulfil this policy without a zealous conviction of its importance. Here it is that the past can help us. We, who have now learnt so thoroughly the supreme art of ecstatic fatalism, go humbly to the past to learn over again that other supreme achievement of the spirit, loyalty to the forces of life embattled against the forces of death. Wandering among the heroic and often forlorn ventures of the past, we are fired once more with primitive zeal. Thus, when we return to our own world, we are able, even while we preserve in our hearts the peace that passeth understanding, to struggle as though we cared only for victory.

3. EPILOGUE

I AM SPEAKING to you now from a period about twenty thousand terrestrial years after the date at which the whole preceding part of this book was communicated. It has become very difficult to reach you, and still more difficult to speak to you; for already the Last Men are not the men they were.

Our two great undertakings are still unfinished. Much of the human past remains imperfectly explored, and the projection of the seed is scarcely begun. That enterprise has proved far more difficult than was expected. Only within the last few years have we succeeded in designing an artificial human dust capable of being carried forward on the sun’s radiation, hardy enough to endure the conditions of a trans-galactic voyage of many millions of years, and yet intricate enough to bear the potentiality of life and of spiritual development. We are now preparing to manufacture this seminal matter in great quantities, and to cast it into space at suitable points on the planet’s orbit.

Some centuries have now passed since the sun began to show the first symptoms of disintegration, namely a slight change of colour towards the blue, followed by a definite increase of brightness and heat. Today, when he pierces the ever-thickening cloud, he smites us with an intolerable steely brilliance which destroys the sight of anyone foolish enough to face it. Even in the cloudy weather which is now normal, the eye is wounded by the fierce violet glare. Eye-troubles afflict us all, in spite of the special glasses which have been designed to protect us. The mere heat, too, is already destructive. We are forcing our planet outward from its old orbit in an ever-widening spiral; but, do what we will, we cannot prevent the climate from becoming more and more deadly, even at the poles. The intervening regions have already been deserted. Evaporation of the equatorial oceans has thrown the whole atmosphere into tumult, so that even at the poles we are tormented by hot wet hurricanes and incredible electric storms. These have already shattered most of our great buildings, sometimes burying a whole teeming province under an avalanche of tumbled vitreous crags.

Our two polar communities at first managed to maintain radio communication; but it is now some time since we of the south received news of the more distressed north. Even with us the situation is already desperate. We had recently established some hundreds of stations for the dissemination, but less than a score have been able to operate. This failure is due mainly to an increasing lack of personnel. The deluge of fantastic solar radiation has had disastrous effect on the human organism. Epidemics of a malignant tumour, which medical science has failed to conquer, have reduced the southern people to a mere remnant, and this in spite of the migration of the tropical races into the Antarctic. Each of us, moreover, is but the wreckage of his former self. The higher mental functions, attained only in the most developed human species, are already lost or disordered, through the breakdown of their special tissues. Not only has the racial mind vanished, but the sexual groups have lost their mental unity. Three of the sub-sexes have already been exterminated by derangement of their chemical nature. Glandular troubles, indeed, have unhinged many of us with anxieties and loathings which we cannot conquer, though we know them to be unreasonable. Even the normal power of ‘telepathic’ communication has become so unreliable that we have been compelled to fall back upon the archaic practice of vocal symbolism. Exploration of the past is now confined to specialists, and is a dangerous profession, which may lead to disorders of temporal experience.

Degeneration of the higher neural centres has also brought about in us a far more serious and deep-seated trouble, namely a general spiritual degradation which would formerly have seemed impossible, so confident were we of our integrity. The perfectly dispassionate will had been for many millions of years universal among us, and the corner-stone of our whole society and culture. We had almost forgotten that it has a physiological basis, and that if that basis were undermined, we might no longer be capable of rational conduct. But, drenched for some thousands of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behaviour. Everyone is now liable to an irrational bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows. Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty, formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common. At first when men began to notice in themselves these archaic impulses, they crushed them with amused contempt. But as the highest nerve centres fell further into decay, the brute in us began to be ever more unruly, and the human more uncertain. Rational conduct was henceforth to be achieved only after an exhausting and degrading ‘moral struggle’, instead of spontaneously and fluently. Nay, worse, increasingly often the struggle ended not in victory but defeat. Imagine then, the terror and disgust that gripped us when we found ourselves one and all condemned to a desperate struggle against impulses which we had been accustomed to regard as insane. It is distressing enough to know that each one of us might at any moment, merely to help some dear individual or other, betray his supreme duty toward the dissemination; but it is harrowing to discover ourselves sometimes so far sunk as to be incapable even of common loving-kindness toward our neighbours. For a man to favour himself against his friend or beloved, even in the slightest respect, was formerly unknown. But today many of us are haunted by the look of amazed horror and pity in the eyes of an injured friend.

In the early stages of our trouble lunatic asylums were founded, but they soon became over-crowded and a burden on a stricken community. The insane were then killed. But it became clear that by former standards we were all insane. No man now can trust himself to behave reasonably.

And, of course, we cannot trust each other. Partly through the prevalent irrationality of desire, and partly through the misunderstandings which have come with the loss of ‘telepathic’ communication, we have been plunged into all manner of discords. A political constitution and system of laws had to be devised, but they seem to have increased our troubles. Order of a kind is maintained by an overworked police force. But this is in the hands of the professional organizers, who have now all the vices of bureaucracy. It was largely through their folly that two of the antarctic nations broke into social revolution, and are now preparing to meet the armament which an insane world-government is devising for their destruction. Meanwhile, through the breakdown of the economic order, and the impossibility of reaching the food-factories on Jupiter, starvation is added to our troubles, and has afforded to certain ingenious lunatics the opportunity of trading at the expense of others.

All this folly in a doomed world, and in a community that was yesterday the very flower of a galaxy! Those of us who still care for the life of the spirit are tempted to regret that mankind did not choose decent suicide before ever the putrescence began. But indeed this could not be. The task that was undertaken had to be completed. For the Scattering of the Seed has come to be for every one of us the supreme religious duty. Even those who continually sin against it recognize this as the last office of man. It was for this that we outstayed our time, and must watch ourselves decline from spiritual estate into that brutishness from which man has so seldom freed himself.

Yet why do we persist in the forlorn effort? Even if by good luck the seed should take root somewhere and thrive, there will surely come an end to its adventure, if not swiftly in fire, then in the ultimate battle of life against encroaching frost. Our labour will at best sow for death an ampler harvest. There seems no rational defence of it, unless it be rational to carry out blindly a purpose conceived in a former and more enlightened state.

But we cannot feel sure that we really were more enlightened. We look back now at our former selves, with wonder, but also with incomprehension and misgiving. We try to recall the glory that seemed to be revealed to each of us in the racial mind, but we remember almost nothing of it. We cannot rise even to that more homely beatitude which was once within the reach of the unaided individual, that serenity which, it seemed, should be the spirit’s answer to every tragic event. It is gone from us. It is not only impossible but inconceivable. We now see our private distresses and the public calamity as merely hideous. That after so long a struggle into maturity man should be roasted alive like a trapped mouse, for the entertainment of a lunatic! How can any beauty lie in that?

But this is not our last word to you. For though we have fallen, there is still something in us left over from the time that is passed. We have become blind and weak; but the knowledge that we are so has forced us to a great effort. Those of us who have not already sunk too far have formed themselves into a brotherhood for mutual strengthening, so that the true human spirit may be maintained a little longer, until the seed has been well sown, and death be permissible. We call ourselves the Brotherhood of the Condemned. We seek to be faithful to one another, and to our common undertaking, and to the vision which is no longer revealed. We are vowed to the comforting of all distressed persons who are not yet permitted death. We are vowed also to the dissemination. And we are vowed to keep the spirit bright until the end.

Now and again we meet together in little groups or great companies to hearten ourselves with one another’s presence. Sometimes on these occasions we can but sit in silence, groping for consolation and for strength. Sometimes, the spoken word flickers hither and thither amongst us, shedding a brief light but little warmth to the soul that lies freezing in a torrid world.

But there is among us one, moving from place to place and company to company, whose voice all long to hear. He is young, the last born of the Last Men; for he was the latest to be conceived before we learned man’s doom, and put an end to all conceiving. Being the latest, he is also the noblest. Not him alone, but all his generation, we salute, and look to for strength; but he, the youngest, is different from the rest. In him the spirit, which is but the flesh awakened into spirituality, has power to withstand the tempest of solar energy longer than the rest of us. It is as though the sun itself were eclipsed by this spirit’s brightness. It is as though in him at last, and for a day only, man’s promise were fulfilled. For though, like others, he suffers in the flesh, he is above his suffering. And though more than the rest of us he feels the suffering of others, he is above his pity. In his comforting there is a strange sweet raillery which can persuade the sufferer to smile at his own pain. When this youngest brother of ours contemplates with us our dying world and the frustration of all man’s striving, he is not, like us, dismayed, but quiet. In the presence of such quietness despair wakens into peace. By his reasonable speech, almost by the mere sound of his voice, our eyes are opened, and our hearts mysteriously filled with exultation. Yet often his words are grave.

Let his words, not mine, close this story:

Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling’s knowledge. His admiration is a nestling’s admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.

Last Men in London (1932)

Stapledon’s second novel, Last Men in London (1932), introduces the same narrator, a member of the eighteenth and final human species, who purportedly induces Stapledon to write Last and First Men. It tells the story of this being’s exploration of the consciousness of a present-day Englishman named Paul, from childhood through service with an ambulance crew in the First World War (mirroring Stapledon’s own personal experiences) to adult life as a schoolteacher faced with a “submerged superman” in his class nicknamed Humpty. The inadequacies of Paul’s character, the various dilemmas he has to face and the sporadic influence of the advanced being that shares his experiences, provide Stapledon with a semi-autobiographical platform on which to expound his philosophical and moral beliefs. Interestingly, the novel includes a piece of satire on sexual morality. An unspecified future human species (one of the Eighteenth Men’s predecessors on Neptune) is presented as having an attitude to nutrition analogous to the First Men’s sexual puritanism. Hence they invent mouth aprons and food privies, while having sex in public.

The first edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION. THE FUTURE’S CONCERN WITH THE PAST

1 THE WORLD OF THE LAST MEN

i. HOLIDAY ON NEPTUNE

ii. MEN AND MAN

iii. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

2 EXPLORING THE PAST

i. THE PORTAL TO THE PAST

ii. DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS

iii. INFLUENCING PAST MINDS

iv. HOVERING OVER TIME

v. DESCENT AMONG THE FIRST MEN

vi. IN THE STREETS OF LONDON

3 THE CHILD PAUL

i. PAUL AND HIS NEPTUNIAN PARASITE

ii. THE CHILD PAUL

iii. EARLY EXPERIMENTS ON PAUL

iv. PAUL’S CHANGING WORLD

4 PAUL COMES OF AGE

i. PAUL AND SEX

ii. PAUL DEVOUT

iii. PAUL FACES THE FACTS

5 ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WAR

i. THE NEPTUNIAN ATTITUDE TO THE WAR

ii. THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEMURS

iii. PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE WAR

iv. THE HISTORICAL PERIOD

6 THE WAR

i. EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

ii. EUROPE CHOOSES WAR

iii. EUROPE AT WAR

iv. PAUL IN THE WAR

7 AFTER THE WAR

i. THE NEW HOPE

ii. PAUL GATHERS UP THE THREADS

iii. PAUL COMES TO TERMS WITH WOMAN

iv. LONDON AND THE SPIRIT

8 THE MODERN WORLD

i. PAUL UNDERTAKES HIS TASK

ii. THE RESEARCH

iii. FRUITS OF THE RESEARCH

iv. PAUL SETTLES DOWN

9 ON EARTH AND ON NEPTUNE

i. SUBMERGED SUPERMEN

ii. PAUL AND HUMPTY

iii. BACK TO NEPTUNE

iv. EPILOGUE BY THE TERRESTRIAL AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK

The first edition’s title page

PREFACE

THOUGH THIS IS a work of fiction, it does not pretend to be a novel. It has no hero but Man. Since its purpose is not the characterization of individual human beings, no effort has been made to endow its few persons with distinctive personalities. There is no plot, except the theme of man’s struggle in this awkward age to master himself and to come to terms with the universe. This theme I seek to present by imagining that a member of a much more developed human species, living on Neptune two thousand million years hence, enters into our minds to observe the Terrestrial field through our eyes but with his own intelligence. Using one of us as a mouthpiece, he contrives to tell us something of his findings. The shortcomings of his report must be attributed to the limitations of his Terrestrial instrument.

This book is intelligible without reference to another fantasy, which I produced two years ago, and called Last and First Men. But readers of that earlier book will find that Last Men in London is complementary to it. In both, the same Neptunian being speaks, formerly to tell the story of man’s career between our day and his, now to describe the spiritual drama which, he tells us, underlies the whole confused history of our species, and comes to its crisis today. The present book is supposed to be communicated from a date in Neptunian history later than the body of the earlier book, but before its epilogue.

The last section of the chapter on the War, though it makes use to some extent of personal experience, is none the less fiction.

It will be obvious to many readers that I have been influenced by the very suggestive work of Mr Gerald Heard. I hope he will forgive me for distorting some of his ideas for my own purpose.

My thanks are due once more to Mr E. V. Rieu for many valuable criticisms and suggestions; and to Professor and Mrs L. C. Martin (who read the untidy manuscript) for condemnation and encouragement without which the book would have been much worse than it is. Finally I would thank my wife both for hard labour, and for other help which she is apparently incapable of appreciating.

Let me remind the reader that henceforth and up to the opening of the Epilogue the speaker is a Neptunian man of the very remote future.

W. O. S.
September 1932

INTRODUCTION. THE FUTURE’S CONCERN WITH THE PAST

MEN AND WOMEN of Earth! Brief Terrestrials, of that moment when the First Human Species hung in the crest of its attainment, wavelike, poised for downfall, I a member of the last Human Species, address you for a second time from an age two thousand million years after your day, from an age as remotely future to you as the Earth’s beginning is remotely past.

In my earlier communication I told of the huge flux of events between your day and mine. I told of the rise and fall of many mankinds, of the spirit’s long desolations and brief splendours. I told how, again and again, after age-long sleep, man woke to see dimly what he should be doing with himself; how he strove accordingly to master his world and his own nature; and how, each time, circumstances or his own ignorance and impotence flung him back into darkness. I told how he struggled with invaders, and how he was driven from planet to planet, refashioning himself for each new world. I told, not only of his great vicissitudes, but also of the many and diverse modes of mind which he assumed in different epochs. I told how at length, through good fortune and skilled control, there was fashioned a more glorious mankind, the Eighteenth Human Species, my own. I hinted as best I might at the great richness and subtlety, the perfect harmony and felicity, of this last expression of the human spirit. I told of our discovery that our own fair planet must soon be destroyed with all the sun’s offspring; and of our exultant acceptance even of this doom. I told of the final endeavours which the coming end imposes on us.

In this my second communication I shall say little of my own world, and less of the ages that lie between us. Instead I shall speak mostly of your world and of yourselves. I shall try to show you yourselves through the eyes of the Last Men. Of myself and my fellow-workers, I shall speak, but chiefly as the link between your world and mine, as pioneering explorers in your world, and secret dwellers in your minds. I shall tell of the difficulties and dangers of our strange exploration of ages that to us are past, and of our still stranger influence upon past minds. But mostly I shall speak of men and women living in Europe in your twentieth Christian century, and of a great crisis that we observe in your world, a great opportunity which you tragically fail to grasp.

In relation to the long drama which I unfolded in my earlier communication it might well seem that even the most urgent and the most far-reaching events of your little sphere are utterly trivial. The rise and fall of your world-moving individuals, the flowering and withering of your nations, and all their blind, plant-like struggle for existence, the slow changes and sudden upheavals of your society, the archaic passions of your religious sects, and quick-changes of your fashionable thought, all seem, in relation to those aeons of history, no more than the ineffective gyrations of flotsam of the great river of humanity, whose direction is determined, not by any such superficial movements, but by the thrust of its own mass and the configuration of the terrain.

In the light of the stars what significance is there in such minute events as the defeat of an army, the issue of a political controversy, the success or failure of a book, the result of a football match? In that cold light even the downfall of a species is a matter of little importance. And the final extinction of man, after his two thousand million years of precarious blundering, is but the cessation of one brief tremulous theme in the great music of the cosmos.

Yet minute events have sometimes remarkable consequences. Again and again this was evident in the great story that I told. And now I am to describe events some of which, though momentary and minute in relation to the whole career of man, are yet in relation to yourselves long-drawn-out and big with destiny. In consequence of these momentary happenings, so near you, yet so obscure, man’s career is fated to he the Weary succession of disasters and incomplete victories which I described on an earlier occasion.

But the account of these events, though it is in some sense the main theme of this book, is not its sole, not even its chief purpose. I shall say much of your baseness, much of your futility. But all that I say, if I say it well, and if the mind that I have chosen for my mouthpiece serves me adequately, shall be kindled with a sense of that beauty which, in spite of all your follies and treasons, is yours uniquely. For though the whole career of your species is so confused and barren, and though, against the background of the rise and fall of species after species and the destruction of world after world, the life of any individual among you, even the most glorious, seems so completely ineffective and insignificant, yet, in the least member of your or any other species, there lies for the discerning eye a beauty peculiar not only to that one species but to that one individual.

To us the human dawn is precious for its own sake. And it is as creatures of the dawn that we regard you, even in your highest achievement. To us the early human natures and every primitive human individual have a beauty which we ourselves, in spite of all our triumphs, have not; the beauty namely of life’s first bewildered venturing upon the wings of the spirit, the beauty of the child with all its innocent brutishness and cruelty. We understand the past better than it can understand itself, and love it better than it can love itself. Seeing it in relation to all things, we see it as it is; and so we can observe even its follies and treasons with reverence, knowing that we ourselves would have behaved so, had we been so placed and so fashioned. The achievements of the past, however precarious and evanescent, we salute with respect, knowing well that to achieve anything at all in such circumstances and with such a nature entailed a faith and fortitude which in those days were miracles. We are therefore moved by filial piety to observe all the past races of men, and if possible every single individual life, with careful precision, so that, before we are destroyed, we may crown those races our equals in glory though not in achievement. Thus we shall contribute to the cosmos a beauty which it would otherwise lack, namely the critical yet admiring love which we bear toward you.

But it is not only as observers that we, who are of man’s evening, are concerned with you, children of the dawn. In my earlier message I told how the future might actually influence the past, how beings such as my contemporaries, who have in some degree the freedom of eternity, may from their footing in eternity, reach into past minds and contribute to their experience. For whatever is truly eternal is present equally in all times; and so we, in so far as we are capable of eternity, are influences present in your age. I said that we seek out all those points in past history where our help is entailed for the fulfilment of the past’s own nature, and that this work of inspiration has become one of our main tasks. How this can be, I shall explain more fully later. Strange it is indeed that we, who are so closely occupied with the great adventure of racial experience, so closely also with preparations to face the impending ruin of our world, and with research for dissemination of a seed of life in remote regions of the galaxy, should yet also find ourselves under obligation toward the vanished and unalterable past.

No influence of ours can save your species from destruction. Nothing could save it but a profound change in your own nature; and that cannot be. Wandering among you, we move always with fore-knowledge of the doom which your own imperfection imposes on you. Even if we could, we would not change it; for it is a theme required in the strange music of the spheres.

1 THE WORLD OF THE LAST MEN

i. HOLIDAY ON NEPTUNE
ii. MEN AND MAN
iii. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

i. HOLIDAY ON NEPTUNE

WHEN I AM in your world and your epoch I remember often a certain lonely place in my own world, and in the time that I call present. It is a comer where the land juts out into the sea as a confusion of split rocks, like a herd of monsters crowding into the water. Subterranean forces acting at this point once buckled the planet’s crust into a mountain; but it was immediately tom and shattered by gravity, that implacable djin of all great worlds. Nothing is now left of it but these rocks. On Neptune we have no mountains, and the oceans are waveless. The stout sphere holds its watery cloak so tightly to it that even the most violent hurricanes fail to raise more than a ripple.

Scattered among these rocks lies a network of tiny fjords, whose walls and floors are embossed with variegated life. There you may see beneath the crystal water all manner of blobs and knobs and brilliant whorls, all manner of gaudy flowers, that search with their petals, or rhythmically smack their lips, all manner of clotted sea-weeds, green, brown, purple or crimson, from whose depths sometimes a claw reaches after a drowsing sprat, while here and there a worm, fringed with legs, emerges to explore the sandy sunlit bottom.

Among these rocks and fjords I spent my last day of leisure before setting out on one of those lengthy explorations of the past which have made me almost as familiar with your world as with my own. It is my task to tell you of your own race as it appears through the eyes of the far future; but first I must help you to reconstruct in imagination something of the future itself, and of the world from which we regard you. This I can best achieve by describing, first that day of delight, spent where the broken mountain sprawls into the sea, and then a more august event, namely the brief awakening of the Racial Mind, which was appointed for the exaltation of the explorers upon the eve of their departure into the obscure recesses of past aeons. Finally I shall tell you something of my own upbringing and career.

Almost the first moments of that day of recreation afforded me one of those pictures which haunt the memory ever after. The sun had risen over a burning ocean. He was not, as you might expect in our remote world, a small and feeble sun; for between your age and ours a collision had increased his bulk and splendour to a magnitude somewhat greater than that with which you are familiar.

Overhead the sky was blue. But for Neptunian eyes its deep azure was infused with another unique primary colour, which your vision could not have detected. Toward the sunrise, this tincture of the zenith gave place to green, gold, fire-red, purple, and yet another of the hues which elude the primitive eye. Opposite there lay darkness. But low in the darkness gleamed something which you would have taken for a very distant snowy horn, whose base was lost in night, though its crest glowed orange in the morning. A second glance would have revealed it as too precipitous and too geometrical for any mountain. It was in fact one of our great public buildings, many scores of miles distant, and nearly one score in height. In a world where mountains are crushed by their own weight these towering edifices could not stand, were it not for their incredibly rigid materials, wherein artificial atoms play the chief part. The huge crag of masonry now visible was relatively new, but it could compare in age with the younger of your terrestrial mountains.

The shadowed sides of its buttresses and gables, and also the shadowed faces of the near rocks and of every stone, glowed with a purple bloom, the light from a blinding violet star. This portent we call the Mad Star. It is a unique heavenly body, whose energies are being squandered with inconceivable haste, so that it will soon be burnt out. Meanwhile it is already infecting its neighbours with its plague. In a few thousand years our own sun will inevitably run amok in the same manner, and turn all his planets to white-hot gas. But at present, I mean in the age which I call present, the Mad Star is only a brilliant feature of our night sky.

On the morning of which I am speaking there lay full length on the brink of a little cliff, and gazing into the pool beneath her, a woman of my world. To me she is lovely, exquisite, the very embodiment of beauty; to you she would seem a strange half-human monster. To me, as she lay there with her breasts against the rock and one arm reaching down into the water, her whole form expressed the lightness and suppleness of a panther. To you she would have seemed unwieldy, elephantine, and grotesque in every feature. Yet if you were to see her moving in her own world, you would know, I think, why her name in our speech is the equivalent of Panther in yours.

If you or any of your kind were to visit our world, and if by miracle you were to survive for a few moments in our alien atmosphere, gravity would make it almost impossible for you to support yourselves at all. But we, since our bones, like our buildings, are formed largely of artificial atoms, and are far more rigid than steel, since moreover our muscle cells have been most cunningly designed, can run and jump with ease. It is true, however, that in spite of our splendid tissues we have to be more solidly built than the Terrestrials, whose limbs remind us unpleasantly of insects.

The woman on the rock would certainly have surprised you, for she is a member of one of our most recent generations, whose skin and flesh are darkly translucent. Seeing her there, with the sunlight drenching her limbs, you might have taken her for a statue, cut from some wine-dark alabaster, or from carbuncle; save that, with every movement of her arm, sunken gleams of crimson, topaz, and gold-brown rippled the inner night of her shoulder and flank. Her whole substance, within its lovely curves and planes, looked scarcely solid, but rather a volume of obscure flame and smoke poised on the rock. On her head a mass of hair, flame-like, smoke-like, was a reversion to the primitive in respect of which she could never decide whether it was a thing for shame or complacency. It was this pre-historic decoration which first drew me toward her. In a closer view you would have noticed that on her back and the outer sides of her limbs the skin’s translucency was complicated by a very faint leopard-like mottling. I also bear that mottling; but I am of the sort whose flesh is opaque, and my bronze-green skin is of a texture somewhat harsher than I should choose. In her, how well I know it, the skin is soft and rich to the exploring hand.

While I watched her, she raised her face from studying the water-dwellers, and looked at me, laughing. It was that look which gave me the brief but strangely significant experience the memory of which was to refresh me so often in your uncouth world. It was not only that her face was lit up with merriment and tenderness; but in that fleeting expression the very spirit of humanity seemed to regard me. I cannot make you realize the potency of that glance, for the faces of your own kind afford almost no hint of such illumination. I can only assert that in our species, facial expression is more developed than in yours. The facial muscles respond to every changing flicker of experience and emotion, as pools respond to every breath of wind with a thousand criss-cross rippling tremors.

The face that now looked at me was unlike terrestrial countenances both in its subtly alien contours and in its dark translucency, which half-revealed the underlying paleness of bone. It was like a stirred and dancing pool of dark but warm-tinted wine, in which the sunlight revelled. But the eyes were bright jewels capable of many phases from sapphire to emerald.

Like others of our kind, this girl bore two additional bright eyes in the back of her head. They sparkled quaintly in the archaic glory of her hair. Like the rest of us, she had on her crown yet another and more important organ of vision which we call the astronomical eye. Normally sunken level with her hair, it could at will be projected upwards like a squat telescope. The exquisite development of this organ in her had determined her career. All of us are in a manner astronomers; but she is an astronomer by profession.

Her whole face, though so brilliantly alive, was unlike any human type known to readers of this book, since it was so much more animal. Her nose was broad and feline, but delicately moulded. Her full lips were subtle at the corners. Her ears moved among her locks like the ears of a lion.

Grotesque, you say, inhuman! No! Beside this the opaque and sluggish faces of your proudest beauties are little better than lumps of clay, or the masks of insects.

But indeed it is impossible for you to see her as I saw her then. For in that look there seemed to find expression the whole achievement of our race, and the full knowledge of its impending tragedy. At the same time there was in it a half-mischievous piety toward the little simple creatures that she had been watching, and equally, it seemed, toward the stars and man himself.

Smiling, she now spoke to me; if I may call ‘speech’ the telepathic influence which invaded my brain from hers.

That you may understand the significance of her words, I must explain that in our Neptunian rock-pools there are living things of three very different stocks. The first is rare. One may encounter in some sheltered cranny a vague greenish slime. This is the only relic of primeval Neptunian life, long since outclassed by invaders. The second stock is by far the commonest throughout our world. Nearly all our living types are triumphant descendants of the few animals and plants which men brought, deliberately or by accident, to Neptune from Venus, nearly a thousand million years before my day, and almost as long after the age that you call present. Third, there are also, even in these little fjords, a few descendants of those ancient men themselves. These very remote cousins of my own human species are, of course, fantastically degenerate. Most have long ago ceased to be recognizably human; but in one, whose name in our language you might translate ‘Homunculus’, nature has achieved a minute and exquisite caricature of humanity. Two splay feet glue him to the rock. From these rises an erect and bulbous belly, wearing on its summit an upturned face. The unpleasantly human mouth keeps opening and shutting. The eyes are mere wrinkles, the nose a wide double trumpet. The ears, deaf but mobile, have become two broad waving fans, that direct a current of water toward the mouth. Beneath each ear is a little wart-like excrescence, all that is left of the human arm and hand.

One of these degenerate human beings, one of these fallen descendants of your own kind, had attracted my companion’s attention. Laughing, she said, ‘Little Homunculus has got wind of his mate, and he can’t unstick his feet to go after her. What a pilgrimage it will be for him after a whole month of standing still!’

She looked down again and cried, ‘Quick! Come and see! He’s loose, he’s moved an inch. He’s waddling at breakneck speed. Now he’s got her, and she’s willing.’ After a pause she exclaimed, ‘What a world this pond is! Like the world that you are to plunge into so soon.’

Then she looked up at the fierce star, and the light in her face changed and chilled. She became like your Egyptian Sphinx, which looks across the desert and waits, for something unknown and terrible, but the appointed end.

Suddenly she laughed, sprang to her feet, ran down the rock-edge to the sea, and dived. I followed; and the rest of the morning we spent swimming, either far out in the bay or among the islets and fjords, chasing each other sometimes through submarine rock-arches, or clinging to a sunken tussock of weed to watch some drama of the sea-bottom.

At last, when the sun was high, we returned to the grassy place where we had slept, and took from the pockets of our flying-suits our meal of rich sun-products. Of these, some had been prepared in the photosynthesis stations on Jupiter, others came from the colonies on Uranus; but we ourselves had gathered the delicacies in our own orchards and gardens.

Having eaten, we lay back on the grass and talked of matters great and small.

I challenged her: ‘This has been the best of all our matings.’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘because the shortest? Because after the richest experience in separation. And perhaps because of the Star.’

‘In spite of all your lovers,’ I exulted, ‘you come back to me. In spite of your tigers, your bulls, and all your lap-dog lovers, where you squander yourself.’

‘Yes, old python, I come back to you, the richer for that squandering. And you in spite of all the primroses and violets and blowsy roses and over-scented lilies that you have plucked and dropped, you come back to me, after your thousand years of roaming.’

‘Again and again I shall come back, if I escape from the Terrestrials, and if the Star permits.’

Our conversation, let me repeat, was telepathic. If I were to report all that passed from mind to mind as we lay in the sun that afternoon, I should fill a book; for telepathic communication is incomparably swifter and more subtle than vocal speech. We ranged over all manner of subjects, from the difference between her eyes and mine, which are crimson, to the awakening of the Racial Mind, which we had experienced some thousands of years earlier, and were so soon to experience again. We talked also about the marriage groups to which we severally belonged, and of our own strange irregular yet seemingly permanent union outside our respective groups. We talked about the perplexing but lovely nature of our son, whom she had been allowed to conceive at our last meeting. We spoke also of her work in one of the great observatories. With other astronomers she was trying to discover in some distant region of our galaxy a possible home for the human seed which, it was hoped, would be scattered among the stars before man’s destruction. We spoke also of the work on which I am engaged as one of the million specialists who are trying to complete the exploration of the human past by direct participation in it. Inevitably we spoke also of the Star, and of the coming destruction of our world; and of how, if we were both alive in that age we would cling together.

Before sundown we clambered over the rocks and ran inland over the flower-strewn turf. But at last we returned to our grassy nest; and after supper, when darkness had fallen, we were moved to sing, together or each in turn. Sometimes our choice fell upon the latest, wildest, scintillations of rhythm and melody, sometimes on the old songs of her nation or mine, sometimes on the crude chants which we explorers had discovered among the ancient peoples and in extinct worlds. In particular I taught her a Terrestrial song which I myself had found. With difficulty we formed the uncouth syllables and caught the lilt. With difficulty we called up in imagination the dark confusion that gave it birth, the harshness of man to man, and the yearning for a better world. Readers of this book may know the song. Old Man River is its name.

While we were still striving with this archaic melody, the colours of the sunset gave place to the profound azure which the Neptunian sky assumes by night for Neptunian eyes. Stars began to appear, first singly and faintly, then in companies and brightly patterned constellations. The wide heaven flashed with them. The Milky Way, flung from horizon to horizon, revealed itself to us, not as a pale cloud-zone, but as an incredibly multitudinous host of lights. Here and there our astronomical eyes could detect even those misty points which are in fact the remote universes. Our singing was now hushed into a murmuring and wordless chant; for this comparatively simple yet overwhelmingly significant percept of the night sky commands us all with a power which might seem to you extravagant. It is, as it were, the visible epitome of our whole thought and feeling. It has for us more than the potency of your most venerated religious symbols. It stirs not only the surface of our being but the ancestral depths, and yet it is relevant to the most modern ventures of our intellect.

While we were still saluting with our voices and our spirits this august and never-too-familiar presentation, the Mad Star rose once more, and scattered its cold steel across the sea. We fell silent, watching. Its dread effulgence extinguished the constellations.

Whether it was the influence of those barbarian melodies that we had been savouring, or a mere flaw in my nature, I know not; but suddenly I heard myself cry out. Hideous! That such a world as ours should be burnt, wasted such a world of spirit and sweet flesh!’

She looked quickly in my eyes, with amazed laughter thrusting down dismay. But before she could speak I saw rightly again. ‘No!’ I said, not hideous, but terrible. Strange, how our thoughts can slip back for a moment into the bad old ways, as though we were to lose sight of the great beauty, and be like the blind spirits of the past.’

And she, ‘When the end begins, shall we still see the great beauty? Shall we see it even in the fire?’

And I, ‘Who knows? But we see it now.’

Silently we watched the Star climb with increasing splendour of violet and ultra-violet illumination. But at last we lay down together in our sheltered grassy nest, and took intimate delight in one another.

At dawn we rose. After a short swim, we put on our flying-suits, those overalls studded with minute sources of sub-atomic energy on the soles of the feet, the palms of the hands, and the whole front surface of the body. It is with these that all lesser flights are performed in our world; and as the action entails much skill and some muscular exertion, it is a delight in itself. Side by side we climbed the air, until the coast was like a map beneath us. We headed inland, first over a wide tract of rock and prairie, marsh and scrub, then over corn and orchard, sprinkled with innumerable homes. Once we passed near a great building, whose crystal precipices towered over us with snow on their cornices. A white cloud covered its upper parts, save for one slender pinnacle, which tiptoed into the sunlight. Sometimes a flying-boat would detach itself from the walls or emerge from the cloud. As we travelled over more densely inhabited regions, sprinkled somewhat more closely with private houses and cottages, a more numerous swarm of these flying-boats continually passed over our heads in all directions from horizon to horizon at so great a speed that they seemed darting insects. We encountered also many fliers like ourselves. Many we saw beneath us, moving from house to house across the intervening tillage. At one point an arm of the sea lay across our route; and there we saw, entering dock, a five-mile long ether-ship, lately returned from Jupiter or Uranus with a cargo of foodstuffs. She was a great fish of stainless metal, studded with windows over her back and flanks. Hidden under water also there would be windows; for this seemingly marine monster could rise like cormorant, with a great churning of the ocean, to find herself within a few minutes surrounded above and below by stars.

At noon we reached another wild district, and took our meal near a warren of creatures which I can best describe as Neptunian rabbits. The form of these furry descendants of an extinct human species was chiefly determined, as so often with our fauna, by gravity. For support they use, not only their short thick legs, but also their leathern bellies and tails. No sooner had we sat down to eat than these mammalian lizards crowded round us in the hope of titbits, One of them actually made off with a loaf; but before he could reach his earth I captured him, and administered such punishment that henceforth the whole tribe treated us with more respect.

When our meal was over, we took leave of one another. It was a gay, grave parting; for we knew that we might not meet again for thousands of years, perhaps not before the sun, infected by the Mad Star, should already have begun the destruction of our beloved world. When we had looked in one another’s eyes for a long moment, we buckled on our flying-suits once more; then, in opposite directions, we climbed the air. By dawn next day we had to be at our appointed stations, far asunder on the great planet’s surface, to participate in the Racial Awakening, the sublime event to which every adult person on the planet must needs contribute.

ii. MEN AND MAN

WHEN AN ATTEMPT is to be made to call the Race Mind into being, all adult persons on the planet seek their allotted places near one or other of a number of great towers which are scattered throughout the continents. After a preparatory phase, in which much telepathic intercourse occurs between individuals and between the group minds of various orders which now begin to emerge, there comes a supreme moment, when, if all goes well, every man and woman in the world-wide multitude of multitudes awakes, as it were, to become the single Mind of the Race, possessing the million bodies of all men and women as a man’s mind possesses the multitude of his body’s cells.

Had you been privileged to watch from the summit of the great needle of masonry round which I and so many others had gathered on that morning, you would have seen far below, at the foot of the twenty-mile high architectural precipice, and stretching to the horizon in every direction, a featureless grey plain, apparently a desert. Had you then used a powerful field-glass, you would have discovered that the plain was in fact minutely stippled with microscopic dots of brown, separated by almost invisible traces of green. Had you then availed yourself of a much more powerful telescope, you would have found, with amazement, that each of these brown dots was in fact a group of persons. The whole plain would have been revealed as no mere desert, but a prodigious host of men and women, gathered into little companies between which the green grass showed. The whole texture of the earth would have appeared almost like some vegetable tissue seen through the microscope, or the cellular flesh of Leviathan. Within each cell you might have counted ninety-six granules, ninety-six minute sub-cellular organs, in fact ninety-six faces of men and women. Of these small marriage groups which are the basis of our society, I have spoken elsewhere, and shall say no more now. Suffice it that you would have found each dot to be not a face, but a group of faces. Everywhere you would have seen faces turned towards the tower, and motionless as grains of sand. Yet this host was one of thousands such, scattered over all the continents.

A still more powerful telescope would have shown that we were all standing, each with a doffed flying-suit hanging over an arm or shoulder. As you moved the telescope hither and thither you would have discovered our great diversity. For though we are all of one species, it is a species far more variable even than your domestic dog; and our minds are no less diverse than our bodies. Nearly all of us, you would have noted, were unclad; but a few were covered with their own velvet fur. The great majority of the Last Men, however, are hairless, their skins brown, or gold, or black, or grey, or striped, or mottled. Though you would recognize our bodies as definitely human, you would at the same time be startled by the diversity of their forms, and by their manifold aberrations from what you regard as the true human type. You would notice in our faces and in the moulding of our limbs a strong suggestion of animal forms; as though here a horse, there a tiger, and there some ancient reptile, had been inspired with a human mind in such a manner that, though now definitely man or woman, it remained reminiscent of its animal past. You would be revolted by this animal character of ours. But we, who are so securely human, need not shrink from being animal too. In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.

Your wandering telescope would have revealed us as one and all in the late spring or full summer of life. Infants had been left behind for the day in the automatic creches; children were at large in their own houses; the youths and girls were living their wild romantic lives in the Land of the Young. And though the average age of the host gathered below you was many thousands of years, not one of its members would have appeared to you aged. Senility is unknown among us.

Regarding us in the mass, you would have found it hard to believe that each human atom beneath you was in reality a unique and highly developed person, who would judge the immature personality of your Own species as you judge your half-human progenitors. Careful use of the telescope, however, would have revealed the light of intense and unique consciousness in every face. For every member of this great host had his peculiar and subtle character, his rich memories, his loves and aims, and his special contribution to our incredibly complex society. Farmers and gardeners, engineers and architects, chemists and sub-atomic physicists, biologists, psychologists and eugenists, stood together with creative artists of many kinds, with astronomers, philosophers, historians, explorers of the past, teachers, professional mothers, and many more whose work has no counterpart in your world. There would be also, beside the more permanent denizens of Neptune, a sprinkling of ethereal navigators, whose vessels happened to be on the home-planet, and even a few pioneers from the settlements on Uranus and Pluto. The ethereal navigators who ply between the planets are our only transport-workers. Passenger traffic on the home-planet takes place entirely in private air-boats or flying-suits. Freight travels automatically in subterranean tubes, some of which, suitably refrigerated, take direct routes almost through the heart of the planet. Industry and commerce, such as you know, have no representatives among us, for in our world there is nothing like your industrial system. Our industry has neither operatives nor magnates. In so far as manufacture is a routine process, it is performed by machinery which needs no human influence but the pressing of a button. In so far as it involves innovation, it is the work of scientists and engineers. In so far as it involves organization, it is controlled by the professional organizers. As for commerce, we have no such thing, because we have no buying and no selling. Both production and distribution are regulated by the organizers, working under the Supreme College of Unity. This is in no sense a governing body, since its work is purely advisory; but owing to our constant telepathic intercourse, its recommendations are always sane, and always persuasive. Consequently, though it has no powers of compulsion, it is the great co-ordinator of our whole communal life. In the crowd beneath you many members of this Supreme College would be present; but nothing would distinguish them from members of the other and equally honourable professions.

If you had watched us for long enough, you would have noticed, after some hours of stillness, a shimmering change in the grey plain, a universal stirring, which occurred at the moment of the awakening of the Racial Mind throughout the whole population of the planet. The telescope would have revealed that all the faces, formerly placid, were suddenly illuminated with an expression of tense concentration and triumph. For now at last each one of us was in the act of emerging into the higher self-hood, to find himself the single and all-embracing mind of a world.

At that moment, I, Man, perceived, not merely the multitudinous several perceptions of all men and women on the face of the planet, but the single significance of all those perceptions. Through the feet of all individuals I grasped my planet, as a man may hold a ball in his hand. Possessing all the memories of all men and women, not merely as memory but as direct experience of the present. I perceived the whole biography of my generation, nay, of my species, as you perceive a melody, in flux yet all of it ‘now’. I perceived the planets whirling round the sun, and even the fixed stars creeping about the sky like insects. But also at will I perceived movements within the atoms, and counted the pulsations of light Waves. I possessed also all the emotions and desires of all men and women. I observed them inwardly, as a man may introspect his own delighting and grieving; but I observed them dispassionately. I was present in the loving of all lovers, and the adventuring of all who dare. I savoured all victories and defeats, all imaginings and reasonings. But from all these teeming experiences of my tiny members I held myself in detachment, turning my attention to a sphere remote from these, where I, Man, experienced my own grave desires and fears, and pursued my own high reasoning and contemplation of what it was that then occupied me, the Mind of the Race, it is impossible for me, the little individual who is now communicating with you, to say anything definite. For these experiences lie beyond the understanding of any individual. But this at least may be said. Waking into this lofty experience, and looking down upon my individual members as a man may regard the cells of his flesh, I was impressed far more by my littleness than by my greatness. For in relation to the whole of things I saw myself to be a very minute, simple, and helpless being, doomed to swift destruction by the operation of a stellar event whose meaning remained unintelligible to me, even upon my new and lofty plain of understanding. But even the little individual who is now communicating with you can remember that, when I, Man, faced this doom, I was in no manner dismayed by it. I accepted it with exultation, as an evident beauty within the great beauty of the whole. For my whole experience was transfused and glorified by the perception of that all-embracing and terrible beauty. Even on that loftier plane of my being I did but glimpse it; but what I glimpsed I contemplated with an insight and a rapture impossible in my lowlier mode of being.

Had you remained upon the tower until the following morning, you would have seen, shortly after sunrise, the whole plain stir again. We were preparing to go. Presently it would have seemed to you that the surface of the planet was detaching itself and rising, like dust on a wind-swept road, or steam from hot water, or like a valley cloud seen from a mountain-top, and visibly boiling upwards. Higher and higher it would have risen toward you, presently to resolve itself even for the naked eye into a vast smoke of individual men and women. Soon you would have seen them all around you and above you, swimming in the air with outspread arms, circling, soaring, darkening the sky. After a brief spell of random and ecstatic flight, they would have been observed streaming away in all directions to become a mere haze along the horizon. Looking down, you would now have seen that the grey plain had turned to green, fading in the distance into blues and purples.

The dispersal of the gatherings does not put an end to the racial experience. For an indefinite period of months or years each individual, though he goes his own way, living his own life and fulfilling his special function in the community, remains none the less possessed by the race mind. Each perceives, thinks, strives as an individual; but also he is Man, perceiving racially, and thinking in manners wholly impossible in the humbler mode of being. As each cell in a brain lives its own life, yet participates in the experience of the whole brain, so we. But after a while the great being sleeps again.

After the awakening which I have just described the racial mentality endured for many years; but one class of individuals had perforce to refrain from any further participation in it, namely those who were to engage upon exploration of the past. For this work it is necessary, for reasons which I shall explain later, to cut off all telepathic communication with one’s fellows, and consequently to leave the telepathic system in which the Race Mind inheres. Yet it was expressly to further our work that this particular awakening had been ordained. It was to strengthen us for our adventures. For my part, as I hastened first to my home and thence through the upper air in my flying-boat toward the Arctic, I felt that I had been kindled with an inextinguishable flame; and that though I must henceforth be exiled from the lofty experience of the Race Mind, I had acquired a new fervour and clarity of vision which would enable me to observe your world with finer insight than on my earlier visits.

iii. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

AT THIS POINT it seems desirable to say a few words about myself, so that you may have some idea of the kind of being who is communicating with you, and the angle from which he is regarding you.

I am at present twenty thousand years old according to your Terrestrial reckoning, and therefore I am still in the spring-time of my life. My parents were chosen for me. They had long been intimate with one another, but the call to have a child arose from the knowledge that there was need of such a being as they together could produce. Recent improvements in man’s powers of entering into past minds, together with the new urgency for completing the exploration of the past before our own world should be destroyed, had increased the call for past-explorers. For such a career I was destined even before I was conceived; and while I was still in the womb, the eugenists were still influencing me so as to give me novel powers.

During infancy I remained with my mother. Throughout my life I have retained a closer intimacy with her than is common in my world; for with her tenderness and strange innocent ruthlessness she embodies for me the very spirit of the past and the primitive. And these have enthralled me always. Not that in your eyes she would have seemed primitive; but underlying all her reasonableness and sophistication I detect that savage temperament which, perhaps partly because of my own extreme sophistication, I so enjoy in others.

I spent my thousand years of childhood in the manner characteristic of my race. Mostly I lived in a children’s residential club. We managed it with more dash than efficiency; but in intervals between domestic duties, games, quarrels and sentimental attachments, we managed to lay the foundations of our education. Even at this early stage my predisposition toward the primitive and the past was beginning to wake. While others were making toy ether-ships and model planetary systems, I was digging for fossils, haunting museums, brooding on ancient folklore, and writing histories of imaginary past worlds. In all my recreations and in all my studies this interest was ever apt to insinuate itself.

My second thousand years was spent, as is customary with us, in the reserved continent called the Land of the Young. There our young people sow their wild oats by living as savages and barbarians. During this phase they are definitely juvenile in disposition. They appreciate only such barbarian virtues as were admired even by the most primitive human species. They are capable of loyalty, but only by an uneasy and heroic victory over self-regard. Their loyalties are never easeful, for they have not yet developed the self-detachment of the adult. Further, they care only for the beauties of triumphant individual life. The supernal beauties of the cosmos, which form the main preoccupation of grown men and women, are hidden from these young things. Consequently our adult world lies very largely beyond their comprehension.

For some centuries I gave myself wholly to a ‘Red Indian’ life, becoming a master of the bow and arrow, and a really brilliant tracker. I remember too that I fell in love with a dangerous young Amazon with golden hair. My first encounter with her was warlike. She escaped, but left her javelin in my shoulder, and her presence in my heart. Long afterwards, when we were both in the adult world, I met her again. She had by now entered upon her career, having been chosen as one of our professional mothers. Later still, she volunteered to submit to a very dangerous maternity experiment, and was so shattered by it, that the eugenists had finally to put her to death.

I had not been many centuries in the Land of the Young before my master passion began to assert itself. I set about collecting material for a complete history of that juvenile world. For this end I sampled every kind of life in every corner of the continent. I also sharpened my perception, or so I persuaded myself, by intimacy with many resplendent young women. But long before I had completed my history, the work began to be interrupted by visits to the adult world.

There is a party in the Land of the Young who preach that the juvenile world is happier and nobler than the world of the adults. They send missionaries among those whom they know to be turning from the primitive, and seek to persuade them to join a small and pathetic band called the Old Young, who elect to remain in the Land of the Young for ever. These poor arrested beings become the guardians of tradition and morality among the nations of the Young. Like the village idiot, they are despised even while at the same time their sayings are supposed to be pregnant with mysterious truth. I myself, with my taste for the past and the primitive, was persuaded to take the vow of this order. But when I was introduced to one of these bright old things, I was so depressed that I recanted. It came as a revelation to me that my task was not actually to become primitive, but to study the primitive. It was borne in on me that even the past and the primitive can be understood and loved better by the full-grown mind than by the primitive itself.

During their last century in the Land of the Young our boys and girls normally develop beyond the larval stage very rapidly, though not without severe mental agony. For during this period the mind is in bitter conflict with itself. It clings to the primitive, but is at the same time nauseated; it yearns toward the mature, but is at the same time fearful and reluctant. This profound metamorphosis of body and mind continues for some centuries even after the young person has entered the adult world. The simple male or female sexual characters specialize themselves into one or other of the ninety-six sub-sexes. Intelligence soars into a new order of proficiency. New centres of the brain integrate the nervous system so perfectly that henceforth behaviour will be, without exception, and without serious struggle, rational; or, as you would say, moral. At the same time the faculty of telepathic communication appears; and, through the cumulative effect of constant telepathic intercourse, the mind comes into such exact understanding and vivid sympathy with other minds, that the diversity of all serves but to enhance the mental richness of each.

This radical change of nature, which raises the individual in a few centuries to a new plane of experience, was for me the more torturing because of my innate hunger for the primitive. This same characteristic made it difficult for me to reconcile myself to the highly complex adult sexual life of my species, which is based on the marriage group of the ninety-six sub-sexes. My group formed itself with unusual difficulty; but, once constituted, it was maintained without undue emphasis. Only once in a century or so are we moved to come together, and live together, and love together; and then only for about a year. During these periods we take delicate joy in one another, and in ourselves. And though we remain self-conscious individuals, a single group-self emerges in us. We spend much of our time rapt in the perceptions and thoughts which are possible only to the minds of the sexual groups; brooding especially on the subtleties of personality and super-personality, and preparing the ground for the recurrent phases of that far more complex mode of consciousness, the Mind of the Race. Apart from these occasional periods of group-mentality, each of us lives an independent life, and is only obscurely conscious of his group-membership. Nevertheless, much as, after swimming, a freshness may vaguely cheer the body for the rest of the day, or after sunbathing a tingling beatitude, so for each of us participation in the group affords an enhanced vitality which may endure for many decades.

When I had settled into my sexual group, I was about three thousand years old. My body had attained that youthful maturity which with us is perennial, and my mind had shed all the follies of the Land of the Young. I was apprenticed to work which was perfectly suited to my nature. It was exacting work, for the novel powers with which I was endowed were as yet imperfectly understood. But my working hours would have seemed ridiculously short even in your most ardent trade-unionists. Only for a few years in every century was my mind actually absent from the contemporary world. Only for a decade or two would I devote my mornings to formulating the results of my research. Though inevitably the past, and my study of the past, would be nearly always in my thoughts, the great bulk of my time was occupied with other activities. For decade after decade I would merely watch the manifold operations of our great community, wandering into all countries, seeking intimacy with all sorts of persons, peering through microscopes and astronomical instruments, watching the birth of inventions in other minds, studying the eugenists’ plans for new generations, or the latest improvements in ethereal navigation. Much of my time was spent in ether-ships, much in the Uranian colonies, much in the interior of the mine-honeycombed Pluto. Sometimes I would go as a guest into the Land of the Young to spend years in comparing our own young things with the primitive races of the past. Occasionally I have been chiefly concerned for a decade at a time with the appreciation or practice of some creative art, most often with our supreme art, which I must reluctantly call ‘telepathic verse’. Somewhat as auditory verse uses sound, this most subtle of all arts uses our direct sensitivity to ethereal vibrations for the evocation of rhythms and patterns of sensory images and ideas. Sometimes, on the other hand, I have been absorbed in some special problem of natural science, and have done little but follow the experiments of scientific workers. Much of my time, of course, has been given to cosmology, and much to metaphysics; for in my world these subjects compel the attention of every man and woman. Sometimes for a year or so I would do little but rebuild my house or cultivate my garden; or I would become wholly absorbed in the invention or construction of some toy for a child friend. Sometimes my main preoccupation for several years has been intimacy with some woman, of my own nation or another. It must be confessed that I am more disposed to this kind of refreshment than most of my fellows. But I do not regret it. In these many brief lyrical matings of body and mind I seem to experience in a very special manner that which unites the developed and the primitive. Now and then, like most of my fellows, I spend a decade or so in lonely wandering, giving myself wholly to the sensuous and instinctive life. It was on one of these occasions that I first met the translucent woman whom I have called Panther. Many have I loved; but with her, whom I meet only in the wilderness, I have a very special relation. For whereas my spirit turns ever to the past, hers turns to the future; and each without the other is an empty thing.

This great freedom and variety of life, and this preponderance of leisure over work, are characteristic of my world. The engineer, the chemist, even the agriculturist and the ethereal navigator, spend less time at their own special tasks than in watching the lives of others. Indeed it is only by means of this system of mutual observation, augmented by our constant telepathic intercourse, that we can preserve that understanding of one another which is the life-blood of our community. In your world this perfect accord of minds is impossible. Yet your differences of racial temperament and of acquired bias are as nothing beside the vast diversity of innate disposition which is at once our constant danger and our chief strength.

From the time when I had reached full maturity of mind, and had become expert in my special calling, up to my present age of twenty thousand Years, my life has been even, though eventful. I have of course had my difficulties and anxieties, my griefs and my triumphs. I lost my two closest friends in an ether-ship disaster. Another friend, younger than myself, has developed in such a strange manner that, though I do my best to understand him telepathically, I cannot but feel that he is seriously abnormal, and will sooner or later either come to grief or achieve some novel splendour. This has been my most serious anxiety apart from my work.

Work has been by far the most important factor in my life. Peculiarly gifted by inheritance, I have co-operated with the equally gifted fellow-workers of my generation to raise the art of past exploration to a new range of power. My novitiate was spent in studying one of the earlier Neptunian civilizations. Since then I have acquired considerable first-hand knowledge of every one of the eighteen human species. In addition I have specialized in some detail on the Venetian Flying Men and the Last Terrestrials. But the great bulk of my work has been done among the First Men, and upon the particular crisis which you can present.

Apart from the exigencies of my work, two events have produced profound changes in my life; but they were events of public rather than private significance, and have affected the whole race with equal urgency. One was the first occasion on which we awakened into the racial mentality. The other was the discovery of the Mad Star, and of the doom of our world. For all of us these two great happenings have changed a life of serenely victorious enterprise into something more mysterious, more pregnant, and more tragic.

2 EXPLORING THE PAST

i. THE PORTAL TO THE PAST
ii. DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS
iii. INFLUENCING PAST MINDS
iv. HOVERING OVER TIME
v. DESCENT AMONG THE FIRST MEN
vi. IN THE STREETS OF LONDON

i. THE PORTAL TO THE PAST

IT WAS WITH an overwhelming sense of the mystery and formidable beauty of existence that I hastened, after the racial awakening, toward that Arctic settlement which we call the Portal to the Past. Travelling now by flying-boat, I soon reached the icefields; and by noon the great towers which marked my destination stood like bristles on the horizon. Already I encountered many other boats and boatless flyers, bound for the same goal. Presently I arrived, docked my little vessel in her appointed garage, and entered the great white gate of the particular tower which concerned me. Greeting some of my colleagues, I passed through the entrance hall and stepped into one of the many lifts. In a few moments I had sunk a thousand feet below the ground. I then proceeded along a lofty and well-lit passage, in the walls of which were doors, at intervals of a hundred yards. One of these I opened. Within was a comfortable room, in which were chairs, a table, cupboards, and a bed. At the far side of the room was a window, opening from ceiling to ground, and beyond it a delightful sunny garden. How could this be, you wonder, a thousand feet below ground? Had you walked out into the garden, you would have seen that in the luminous blue ceiling there blazed an artificial sun, and you would have felt a refreshing breeze, which issued from among the bushes.

Behind every one of the doors in the many underground passages you would have found similar rooms and gardens, varying only in detail according to the tastes of their occupiers. Such are the apartments where we explorers of the past undertake our strange adventures. You ask, why in the Arctic, why underground? Our work demands that the mind shall be isolated from the contemporary human world; only in a remote land, and beneath its surface, can we escape the telepathic influence of the world-population. Our telepathic intercourse is based on the transmission and reception of ethereal vibrations from brain to brain.

Normally our powers of reception are kept under strict control, so that we receive messages only when we will. But, in the peculiar trance which is our medium for exploring the past, this control fails; so that, unless the explorer is isolated, his mind is lashed like a pond in which torrential rain is falling.

When I had entered my room and shut my door, I went out into my garden and walked up and down for a while, preparing my mind for its adventure. I then brought out from the room a drawer full of rolls of microscopically figured tape, which in my world take the place of books. In normal circumstances these little rolls work by systematically interrupting the radiation of a special instrument. This radiation penetrates the brain of the’ reader’, and is interpreted telepathically by the telepathic organ of his brain. But since in the catacombs no radiation other than the normal solar wave-lengths is permitted, we explorers have to learn actually to read the rolls, with the aid of a microscope.

I now spent many hours lying on the turf in the sunshine, reading about the epoch which I was to visit. After a while I re-entered the room and pressed a button in the wall. A tray appeared, bearing an appetizing meal. When I had finished this, and dismissed the tray, I returned to the garden and my studies. For a period equivalent to about ten days I lived in this manner, studying, meditating, eating occasionally, but sleeping not at all. Sometimes I would break off my studies to tend my garden. Frequently I would swim about in the pond among the bushes. But for the most part I merely browsed on my books or on my own records of the past. Toward the end of this period of preparation, I grew desperately sleepy. To keep myself awake, I had to walk up and down more and more, and my dips in the pond became more frequent. It was almost time to be gone. I drew my little bed out into the garden and made it ready to receive me. I pressed another button, which would make day slowly become night. I took a final dip and a final walk, then staggered to my bed and lay down in the twilight.

But even yet I must not sleep. Instead, I concentrated my attention on the recurrent rise and fall of my own breathing, and on the nature of time. This process I had to maintain for about thirty hours, without food or sleep or any respite. Toward the end of this period, had you seen me, you would have said that I was at last falling asleep, and finally you would have declared me to be in a very profound slumber. And so in a manner I was, save that a single organ in my brain, usually dormant, was now intensively active, and preparing to take possession of my whole body as soon as my brain should have been refreshed by its deep sleep. After a couple of days of unconsciousness I did indeed wake, but not to the familiar surroundings.

For months, even years or decades, my body might now remain inert upon its bed, save for periodic risings to perform its natural functions of eating, drinking and excretion. Frequently also it would walk for hours at a time in the garden or bathe in the pond. But these activities would be carried out in complete abstraction, and had anyone spoken to me at these times, I should have been unaware. For the higher centres of my brain were wholly possessed by the past. To anyone watching me during these routine activities, I should have appeared as a sleep-walker. At these times, no less than during the long periods of quiescence on my bed, the observer would have seen that my face, and sometimes my whole body, was constantly influenced by emotion and thought. For during the whole trance, of course, my brain would be experiencing sequences of events in the remote past, and my whole body would respond to these experiences with my normal emotional reactions. Thus to the observer I should appear to be asleep and dreaming, save that my expressions would be far more definite and systematic than those of a dreamer.

Here I will mention one point of philosophical interest. The duration of the trance has no relation to the duration of the past events observed. Thus I might lie in my comfortable prison for a year, and in that time I might observe many years of past events, or many thousands of Years, or even the whole span of man’s history. The length of the trance depends only on the complexity of the matter observed. I might for instance spend a year in observing an immense number of simultaneous events which took only a few minutes to occur. Or I might cover the whole life of one individual in far more detail than was afforded by his own consciousness of his life story. Or I might sweep through whole epochs, tracing out only some one simple thread of change. In fact the length of the trance depends simply on the brain’s capacity to assimilate, not upon the actual duration of the events observed.

When as much material has been gathered as can be conveniently grasped, the explorer gradually withdraws his attention from the past. He then sinks into an undisturbed sleep which may last for several weeks. During this phase his body shows none of that ceaseless emotional expression which is characteristic of the main trance. It lies inert, as though stunned. Finally the explorer’s attention begins to concentrate itself again, and to revert once more to his own body and its surroundings. He wakes, and lies for a while passively accepting the new visual impressions. He then lives in his apartments for months or years recording his experiences in rough notes, to be organized at a later date. Sometimes, when this process is finished, he chooses to return at once, without respite, to the past for further data. Sometimes he leaves his room to confer with other workers. Sometimes he decides to drop his work and return to the contemporary world for refreshment.

ii. DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS

HOW IT COMES that at the moment of the onset of the trance the explorer is freed from the limitations of his own date and place I cannot tell you. Suffice it that the process involves both a special organ in the brain and a special technique, which has to be learned through a long apprenticeship. In that moment of awakening the worker has seemingly a confused experience of all the great successive epochal phases of the human spirit, up to his own date. But as the content of that supreme moment almost wholly escapes his memory as soon as it is past, it is impossible to say anything definite about it. He seems, indeed, to see in a flash, as though from another dimension of time, the whole historical order of events. Of course, he sees them only schematically. Their vast complexity of detail cannot be grasped in an instantaneous view. What he experiences can only be described (unintelligibly I fear) as a summation of all happening, of all physical, mental and spiritual flux. One is tempted to say also that he is aware of the human aspect of this flux as a vast slumber of the spirit, punctuated with moments of watchfulness, a vast stagnation troubled here and there with tremors of tense activity. Though all this is seen in an instant, it does not appear static, but alive with real passage and change.

This sublime moment must not be permitted to endure, for it is lethal. Immediately the explorer must begin to select that part of the historical order which he desires to study. To do this he must adopt the fundamental attitude of mind, or temperamental flavour, which he knows to be distinctive of the desired period. This process demands very great skill, and involves a host of uncouth and nerve-racking experiences. As soon as he begins to succeed in assuming the appropriate mental attitude, all the periods save that which he has chosen fade out of his consciousness, and the chosen period becomes increasingly detailed. He has then to specialize his mental attitude still further, so as to select a particular phase or group-culture within his period. And this specialization he may carry further again, till he has brought himself into the mind of some particular individual at a particular moment. Having once gained a footing in the individual mind, he can henceforth follow all its experiences from within; or, if he prefers, he can remain in one moment of that mind, and study its microscopic detail.

Such is the essence of our method. First we have to attain the momentary glimpse of eternity, or, more precisely, to take up for one instant the point of view of eternity. Then by imagination and sympathy we have to re-enter the stream of time by assuming the fundamental form of the minds or the mind that we wish to observe. In this process we have to work by means of a very delicate ‘selectivity’, not wholly unlike that physical selectivity which you exercise when you pick up ethereal messages on a particular wavelength. But this process of picking up past minds is far more delicate, since the system of basic mental patterns is very much more complex than the one-dimensional series of wave-frequencies.

When our ancestors first acquired the power of ‘entering into the point of view of eternity’ they suffered many disasters through ignorance of its principles. Very many of the earliest explorers succumbed simply by failing to keep their bodies alive during the trance. Their sleep turned into death. Others fell into such violent convulsions that they damaged themselves irreparably, and were mercifully killed by the superintendents. In other cases the normal trance lasted indefinitely, the body remaining alive but unresponsive for millions of years. A section of the catacombs was until recently filled with these persons, who were looked after by the attendants in the hope that some day they might wake. But a few thousand years ago it was decided to do away with some, and use others for experimental purposes.

Of the early explorers who successfully emerged from ‘the point of view of eternity’ into some past epoch, many returned insane. Others, though sane when they woke, kept falling into the trance again and again. Others were so embittered by their experiences that they became plague-spots in the community, and had to be requested to stop their hearts. Of these, some few refused, and remained at large, doing so much damage that finally they were put to death. One or two of the pioneers, and one or two of my contemporaries also, have returned from the trance with a peculiar kind of insanity, which suggested that they had actually found their way into the future, and that they still regarded our contemporary world as an episode in the remote past. Unfortunately they could give no account of their experiences; but in one of the earliest cases the recorded ravings seem to refer to the Mad Star, which did not earn its name until long afterwards.

In the early stages of the work few persons were engaged on it, and all that they could do was to collect random incidents from the very recent past. Gradually, however, the technique was greatly improved. It became possible to inspect almost any sequence of events in the history of our own species. This could only be done because the basic mental patterns of all the races of our own species had already been fairly well worked out by our psychologists and historians. Later, however, the psychologists began to formulate a vast theoretical system of possible basic mental patterns; and after some barren experimenting the explorers finally learned to assume certain of these patterns in the trance. The result was startling. Not only did they, as was expected, gain access to many primitive cultures upon Neptune, but also they began to find themselves sometimes in alien worlds, apparently much smaller than their familiar planet. The proportions of common things were all altered. The seas rose into great waves; the lands were often buckled into huge mountain ranges. The native organisms, though unfortified by artificial atoms, were able to attain great size and yet remain slender and agile. And these facts were observed through the medium of human types the existence of which had never been guessed. The very planets which these races inhabited could not be identified. No wonder, since all traces of Earth and Venus had long ago been wiped out by the solar collision that had driven man to Neptune.

This discovery of Past worlds Was even more exciting to us than the discovery of America to your own ancestors; for it entailed incidentally the overthrow of a well-grounded theory, which traced the evolution of the human race to a primitive Neptunian organism. Interest in the exploration of the past now greatly increased. The technique was developed far beyond the dreams of the early explorers. Little by little the outline of man’s whole history on Earth and Venus Was plotted, and tract after tract of it was elaborated in some detail.

In observing these extinct species, the explorers found traces of experience very different from their own. Although, of course, the basic mental pattern or temperamental ground-plan was in every case one which the explorer himself had been able to conceive, and even in a manner assume, in order to make contact with these primitive beings at all, yet when the contact had been made, he seemed to enter into a new mental world. For instance, he had to deal with minds whose sensory powers were much more limited than his own. Looking through those Primitive eyes, he saw things in much less detail than through his own eyes, so that, though he observed everything with all the precision that his host’s crude vision could afford, yet everything seemed to him blurred, and out of focus. The colours of objects, too, were diluted and simplified; for several colours familiar to us are hidden from more primitive eyes. Consequently the world as seen through those eyes appears to us at first strangely drab, almost monochromatic, as though the observer himself had become partially colour-blind. The other senses also are impoverished. For instance, all touched shapes and textures seem curiously vague and muffled. The sensations of sexual intercourse, too, which with us are richly variegated and expressive, are reduced in the primitive to a nauseating sameness and formlessness. It is impossible for you to realize the jarring, maddening effects of this coarseness and emptiness of all the sensory fields, especially to the inexperienced explorer, who has not yet learned to submit his spirit generously to the primitive.

In the sphere of thought, we find all the primitive species of man, however different from one another, equally remote from ourselves. Even the most advanced members of the most advanced primitive species inhabit worlds of thought which to us seem naive and grotesque. The explorer finds himself condemned to cramp the wings of his mind within the caging of some gimcrack theory or myth, which, if he willed, he could easily shatter. Even in those rare cases in which the ground-plan of some edifice of primitive thought happens to be true to the simplest basic facts of the cosmos, as in your own theory of relativity, the superstructure which it ought to support is wholly absent. The explorer thus has the impression that the cosmos, with himself in it, has been flattened into a two-dimensional map.

In the sphere of desire the explorer has to deal with very unfamiliar and very jarring kinds of experience. In all human species, of course, the most fundamental animal desires are much the same, the desires for safety, food, a mate, and companionship; but the kind of food, the kind of companionship, and so on, which the primitive human mind seeks, are often very foreign and distasteful to us. Take the case of food. Of course the explorer’s body, lying in the catacombs on Neptune, does not, if perchance he is inhabiting some primitive glutton of the past, suffer dyspepsia; save occasionally, through the influence of suggestion. But none the less he may experience acute distress, for his brain is forced to accept sensory complexes of overeating which in normal life would disgust him. And they disgust him now. Even when overeating does not occur, the food percepts are often repulsive to our centres of taste and odour. In the matter of personal beauty, too, the explorer is at first repelled by the grotesque caricature of humanity which among primitive species passes for perfection, much as you yourselves may be repelled by the too-human animality of apes. Often, when he is following the growth of some primitive love-sentiment in your epoch, he is nauseated by the adored object, and by the intimacy in which he is reluctantly entangled. It is much as though a part of the mind were to watch the other part entrapped into romantic adoration of a female ape; as if with infinite disgust one were to find himself pressing against those hairy thighs. But indeed in this matter, as in others, since it is not mere animality that disgusts, but the failure to be human, the explorer is far more outraged than if he were compelled to cohabit with an ape. With familiarity, however, these repulsions can be surmounted. Just as your disgust of the ape’s approximation to the human is a weakness in you, due to lack of vision and sympathy, so our tendency to a disgust of your own crude approximation to the human is a weakness in us, which we have to learn to transform into a reverent, though often ironical, sympathy. Just as the surgeon may become accustomed to delving among viscera, and may even find beauty in them, so the explorer may and must accustom himself to all these primitive forms, and find beauty in them too. Of course the beauty which he discovers in the adored yet repulsive ape-woman is never simply identical with the beauty which delights the adoring ape-man; for it is a beauty which includes within itself both that which delights the primitive and that which disgusts the developed mind.

To all the preoccupations then, and to all the ways of life, and all the ideals, of the early races, the explorer must react with that delight which triumphs over contempt and disgust. Of course there is very much in this sphere which he can whole-heartedly enjoy, since much in primitive life is the unspoiled behaviour of the animal, and much also improves upon the animal. But at a very early stage primitive man begins to torture his own nature into grotesque forms, inadvertently or by intent; much as, inadvertently, he tortures his domestic animals, and by intent he turns his pets into freaks and caricatures. This violation of his own nature increases as he gains power, and reaches its height in primitive industrial communities such as your own. In such phases the individual body and spirit become more and more distorted, impoverished, noisome. The early explorer, studying these phases, was hard put to it to prevent his overwhelming indignation and nausea from spoiling his study. He had, of course, to observe it all as though it were happening to himself, since he observed it through the suffering minds of its victims. And so he was almost in the position of a sick doctor, whose spirit must triumph by delighting in the study of his own disease.

Grotesque sentiments such as the lust of business success or economic power of any kind, and indeed every purely self-regarding passion, from that of the social climber to that of the salvation-seeking ascetic, are experienced by the explorer with something of that shame which the child, emerging into adolescence, may feel toward the still-clinging fascination of his outgrown toys, or with such disgust as the youth may feel when he wakes from some unworthy sexual infatuation. But this shame and disgust the explorer must learn to transcend as the surgeon the disgust of blood. Even the passions of hate and gratuitous cruelty, so widespread in your own and all other primitive species, he must learn to accept with sympathy, in spite of his spontaneous revulsion from them and his well-justified moral condemnation of them.

One great difference between ourselves and most primitive minds is that, while in us all motives are fully conscious, fully open to introspection, in them scarcely any of their more complex motives are ever brought fully to light. Thus when the explorer is following some train of action in a primitive mind, he very often observes an immense discrepancy between the mind’s own view of its motives and the real motives which he himself sees to be in fact the source of the activity. To experience all the daily and hourly perversities of a life-long complex, to experience them not merely through clinical observation but in the most intimate manner, puts him to an extremely severe strain. At every turn his own mind is wrenched by the conflict in the mind that he is observing. And in him the conflict is wholly conscious and shattering. Not a few of our early observers became infected by the disorder which they had been studying, so that when they returned to their native world they could no longer behave with perfect sanity, and had to be destroyed.

To sum up, then, the earlier explorers were often desperately fatigued by the monotony of primitive existence and the sameness of primitive minds; and also they fell into disgust, an agony of disgust, with the crudity, insensitivity and folly of the primitive. From the one point of view it might be said that the Neptunian found himself condemned to sift the almost identical sand-grains of a desert, and even to record the minute distinctive features of each grain. From the other point of view, it was as though he had been banished from the adult world to the nursery or the jungle, and was actually imprisoned in the mind of babe or beast. For, once settled in the mind which he has chosen to study, the explorer is indeed a captive until study calls him elsewhere. Though he thinks his own thoughts, he perceives only what the other perceives, and is forced to endure every least sensation, thought, desire and emotion of the other, be it never so banal. Like one who feels within his own mind the beginnings of some mania or obsession which, though he recognizes that it is irrational or base, he cannot control, so the explorer is doomed to experience sympathetically all his subject’s thinking and desiring, even while he is nauseated by it. No wonder, then, that many early explorers were tortured by disgust or ennui.

Long before my time, most of these dangers and irks of exploration had been greatly reduced. One serious trouble, however, remains, and has even increased. A great army of workers was of course bred with special aptitudes for supra-temporal experience, and with special insight into the primitive types of mind. These new workers were given also a special enthusiasm and sympathy in respect of the past; and herein lay their danger. In my day every member of the race has something of this enthusiasm and sympathy; and we explorers have them in an extreme degree. So enthralling do we find the past, even in all its monotony and squalor, that many have succumbed to its spell, and lost all footing in the present world. Rapt in some great movement of history, or in some individual life-story, the explorer may lose, little by little, all memory of the future world of which he is a native, may in fact cease to be a future mind inspecting a past mind, and become instead a mere undertone or freakish propensity in the past mind itself, or in many Past minds. In time even this may vanish, so that the explorer becomes identical with the explored. If this occurs, his own body, situated in the future and in Neptune, gradually disintegrates and dies.

Certain other troubles hamper even the most modern explorers, in spite of improved technique. The method by which we enter a past epoch is, as I have said, this process of shaping our minds to the basic pattern or ground tone of the epoch to be studied. But when the explorer desires to enter a particular individual, he must try to assume the complex form or temperament which is distinctive of that individual; or else he must seize on one unique desire or thought, which he supposes to be peculiar to that individual at a certain date of his life. Now this process of mental infection or association does not necessarily work in his favour. Often, when he is trying to establish himself in some mind, or even when he has long been established, some chance association in his own thought-process may suddenly snatch him away from the object of his study and fling him into some other mind. Sometimes this other is a contemporary of the recent object of study; but often it is a mind in some different epoch or world. When this happens, not only is the study broken short, but also the explorer may be very seriously damaged. His brain, on Neptune, suffers such a fundamental and rapid readjustment that it is grievously jarred and strained, and may never recover. Even if he does not actually succumb, he may have to take a long holiday for recuperation. Fortunately, however, it is only the more extravagant dislocations that are really dangerous. Occasional jolts into minds of the same basic pattern as the original object of study are more exasperating than harmful.

Often when the explorer is resident in a particular individual he encounters through that individual’s perception another individual, who, he thinks, would repay immediate study. He has then to observe this other carefully through the perceptions of the first, so as to discover, if possible, some entry into his mind. This may be very difficult, since one primitive mind’s awareness of another is often so erroneous and biased that the perceptions which would make for true understanding of the other fail to occur. Moreover there is always the danger that, when the explorer attempts this ‘change of mounts’ he may fall between them, and be flung violently once more into his native location in time and space. Or again, he may at the critical moment be snatched by some chance association into some other epoch or world. Such accidents are of course very damaging, and may prove fatal.

Here I may mention that some minds, scattered up and down the ages, defeat all attempts to enter them. They are very rare, only one in millions of millions; but they are such as we should most desire to enter. Each one of these rare beings has caused the ruin of a great company of our most able explorers. They must be in some vital respect alien to us, so that we cannot assume their nature accurately enough to enter them. Possibly they are themselves subject to an influence future even to us. Possibly they are possessed and subtly transformed by minds native to some world in a remote stellar system. Possibly, even, they are under the direct influence of the cosmical mind, which, we hope, will awaken in the most remote of all futures.

Explorers of the past incur one other danger which I may mention. Sometimes the past individual under observation dies suddenly, before the explorer can foresee the death, and free himself. In many cases, of course, he knows the date at which the other’s death will occur, and can therefore, having prepared himself for a normal departure, observe the course of events right up to the moment of death, and yet escape before it is too late. But sometimes, especially in pioneering in some unexplored region of history, the explorer is as ignorant of the immediate future as the observed mind itself.. In such cases a dagger, a bullet, a flash of lightning, even an unforeseen heart-failure, may fling him back to his own world with a shattering jerk, which may irreparably damage his brain, or even kill him outright. Many of the early observers of your recent European War were caught in this manner. Resident in the mind of some soldier in action, the observer himself was annihilated by the shell that destroyed the observed. If burial were one of our practices, we, like you, might have our war graves of 1914 to 1918, though they would not have been dug till two thousand million years later. Nor would they be decorated by national emblems. Nor would they bear the cross.

iii. INFLUENCING PAST MINDS

OUR POWER OF taking effect on past minds is much more restricted than our power of passively observing their processes. It is also a much more recent acquisition. To you it seems impossible; for future events, you suppose, have no being whatever until their predecessors have already ceased to exist. I can only repeat that, though future events have indeed no temporal being until their predecessors have ceased to exist with temporal being, all events have also eternal being. This does not mean that time is unreal, but that evanescence is not the whole truth about the passing of events. Now some minds, such as ours, which are to some extent capable of taking up the point of view of eternity, and of experiencing the eternal aspects of past events in other minds, can also to some extent contribute to the experience of those minds in the past. Thus when I am observing your mental processes, my activity of observing is, in one sense, located in the past. Although it is carried out from the point of view of my own experience in the future, it enters the past through the eternal side of past events in your minds. When I act upon your minds, as for instance in inculcating thoughts and images in the writer of this book, that activity of mine is located in your age. Yet it is done, so to speak, from my purchase in the future, and with all my Neptunian experience in view.

From this rare but important action of the future on the past it follows that past events, which themselves cause future events, are in part the product of future events. This may seem unintelligible. But in fact there is no more mystery in it than in the reciprocal interaction of two minds that know one another. The one, which owes its form partly to the other, is itself one factor determining the other’s form.

As I said before, the only way in which we can influence a past mind is by suggesting in that mind some idea or desire, or other mental event, which is intelligible to a mind of that particular order, and is capable of being formulated in terms of its own experience. Some minds are much more receptive than others. The great majority are wholly impervious to our influence; and, even among those who are not insensitive, very many are so strictly dominated by their own desires and prejudices that any thought or valuation which we consider worth suggesting to them is at once violently rejected.

There are many complications and difficulties in this strange work. In the first place we may chance to do serious damage to the past mind by unwise influence, for instance by presenting it with ideas which are too disturbing to its nature. For though some ideas are so foreign to a mind that they are simply rejected, others, though alien to the superficial part of its nature, may be incendiary to the submerged part, as sparks falling upon tinder. Thus an idea which to the explorer seems straightforward and harmless may produce in the past mind a self-discrepant experience both of revelation and of horror; and the resulting conflict throughout the mind may lead to catastrophe. Or the idea may so captivate and exalt the unfortunate person that he loses all sense of proportion, is instigated to some fantastic course of action, and finally comes into serious collision with his society.

Another difficulty lies in the fact that our influence is not always voluntary. Thoughts and desires of our own, which we have no intention of transmitting, may sometimes find their way into the mind under observation; and their effect may be disastrous. For instance, a sudden surge of contempt or indignation on the part of an inexperienced explorer, when he observes his ‘host’ commit some egregious folly or meanness, may flood a hitherto complacent mind with bewildering self-contempt. And this novel experience, coming thus without preparation, may shatter the whole flimsy structure of the mind by destroying its carapace of self-pride. Or again, the explorer’s own clear-eyed and ecstatic view of the cosmos, as both tragic and worshipful, may sear the optimistic faith of a primitive religious mind, without being able to raise it to the loftier worship.

Our influence, then, upon the past is a very much more precarious and restricted power than our past-exploration. All that we can do is to offer to a very small minority of minds some vague hint of a truth or of a beauty which would otherwise be missed, or some special precept, or seminal idea, relevant to the mind’s particular circumstances. This may be done either by a constant ‘tilting’ of the mind in a certain general direction, or, much more rarely, by occasional impregnation of the mind with some precise idea or valuation. In very exceptional cases, which number no more than one in many thousands of millions, we can subject the individual to a constant stream of detailed suggestion which he himself can embody in a more or less faithful report. But here we find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. To undergo this detailed suggestion, the individual must be extremely receptive; but in the main those that are extremely receptive lack originality, so that, in spite of their detailed receptivity, they either entirely miss the true spirit of the communication, or fail to embody it in a manner capable of stirring their fellows. On the other hand the highly original minds, even when they are also very receptive, tend deliberately to ignore the detail of the suggestion. Thus they produce works which, though true to the spirit of the suggestion, are embodied in manners expressive of their own genius.

iv. HOVERING OVER TIME

I MUST NOW give you a more precise idea of the strange experiences which befall the explorer when he is trying to get a footing in some particular moment of some particular past mind. Each explorer has his own technique, and each adventure its own vicissitudes; but I shall tell simply of my own approach to your world and epoch on that occasion which I have already begun to describe.

Emerging presently from that ineffable moment in which I participated in the eternal view, I was at the outset conscious of a vague restlessness, a most poignant yet indefinite yearning, and along with this a violent and confused agitation of all my senses. Even though this was not my first excursion into these realms, I was overwhelmed with the pathos of man’s ever-unsatisfied and blindly fumbling desire, and equally by the tyranny of his rare joys and the torture of his distresses. At the outset this yearning and this sensory tumult were, so to speak, all that there was of me; but with an effort I woke to something more precise. I held the obscure thing away from me, and looked at it calmly. As I did so, it developed under my very eyes, the eyes of my mind, into a surge of specific primitive cravings and passions, which, though I lived them as my own, I also regarded, as it were, from a great height of aloofness. I was now experiencing the summed and confused experiences of all mankind. They came to me with the vagueness of a composite photograph, but also with that sense of multitude, of innumerable individual uniquenesses, which one may sometimes catch in listening to the murmur of a great crowd. Yet all these multitudinous experiences were in a manner mine, and combined into one experience, like the single deliverance of a man’s two eyes. I was terrified and longed for safety, hungry and lusted for food. I was enraged against some obscure adversary. I tasted the joy of murder, and equally the final despair of the victim. I was solitary, and my flesh burned with sexual potency; outcast, and my mind hungered for companionship.

Against this vast enduring background of primitive craving I experienced also momentary gleams of loftier desire, rare and faint as voices heard above the storm. I felt the longing and the delight of spiritual intimacy with another mind, the longing and the delight of truth, the longing and the delight and glory of participation in a great community, the longing and the delight of faith. I felt also the terror, the despair, the peace and final ecstasy, which is the way of true worship. But all these illuminations of the spirit were no more than stars piercing for a moment the storm-cloud of the primitive.

While I was undergoing all these obscure impulses, tumultuous messages were also pouring in through all my senses. At first indeed I received such a medley of impressions that I was aware only of a nondescript and distressing commotion. But, as I attended to this, the matter of the various senses began to differentiate itself. Thus at first I seemed to be subjected to a general pressure all over my body; but under scrutiny this developed into a profusion of hardnesses and softnesses, roughnesses and smoothnesses, rotundities and angularities. I felt the pressure of earth under my feet. I felt myself lying on hard ground, and then on a kindly bed. With my hands I felt a multitude of textures, as of stone, tree-trunks, fur, and the incomparable touch of human flesh, in all its repellent and its enticing modes. I felt also a vague warmth and chill, which, by attending to them, I could develop into violent heat and cold, or the bite of fire and frost. Innumerable pains invaded me. At first they seemed to struggle against a sense of physical well-being, a tingling healthiness; but soon pain triumphed; for it had at the outset a compelling poignancy which increased alarmingly under attention. The whole surface of my body, it seemed, was tortured; and my internal organs were all gripped in agony. My brain throbbed and burned, and was stabbed through and through in all directions. But in truth the brain that was thus tormented was not mine, nor the bowels mine, nor the skin. The source of my torture lay in the innumerable bodies of my predecessors. Wrenching my attention from this horror, I noticed a confusion of tastes, fragrances and stenches. And along with these there came sounds. A muffled roar, as of the sea or a distant bombardment, grew as I listened to it into a crashing and shrieking, which reverberated through my whole body. By a special act of attention, a straining of the mind’s ear, I could penetrate beyond this uproar, and hear an obscure vocal sound, which, as I listened, became inarticulate lamentation, flecked here and there with laughter.

In the field of vision I experienced at first nothing but a vague brightness above and obscurity below. This was due to the fact that in most minds of all periods, save those in which indoor life predominates over outdoor life, daytime-experience contains in the main a light sky and a darker ground. As soon as I began to attend to the matter of this vision, it revealed itself as being after all rich with detail. First, both in the light and in the dark field, there moved unrecognizable shadowy forms and occasional colours. Then aloft I began to see white clouds sailing in blue sky, then widespread rain-cloud, then thunder-cloud, and then in a moment the broad unbroken blue; then night, obscure, starry, moonlit, and again obscure. Below, I saw sometimes hills, crags, tree-tops, meadows, bright flowers and plumage, sometimes breakers on the shore, sometimes huts, mansions in many styles, or congested towns, sometimes interiors of splendour or comfortable homeliness or squalor. All these forms kept appearing, vanishing, reappearing, invading one another and exterminating one another, like the visions that haunt us between waking and sleeping. I saw also forms of beasts, and human forms of all the species, from hairy pithecanthropus, and your own fantastically clothed half-human kind, to those large and noble beings who were the last Terrestrials, and the bat-like fliers of Venus, and my own immediate ancestors on Neptune. I saw limbs writhing in agony, limbs dancing, limbs straining in toil and sport, fair limbs embracing, limbs grotesque and crippled. Faces also appeared and vanished, singly or in crowds, faces eager and disillusioned, faces twisted by pain, or by rapacity, faces expressionless as pebbles, faces of terror, hate, meanness, faces of peace and of exultation; child faces, faces of maturity all aglow with life, faces grey, wrinkled, sagging, old; and faces of the dead, impassive, sealed against experience.

Along with these visions of humanity, would sometimes come faint sexual sensations, which, when I attended to them, opened out into a whole world of amorous experience, of lyrical first matings and desolate repetitions, of violations, thwarted crises, lonely makeshifts, of the bland unions of long-tried lovers, of senile failures, and the whole gamut of perversions.

Intermingled with these purely perceptual visions, there came to me all manner of experiences of personal relationships. I was flooded with the lovings and hatings, of all men and women, by their co-operations and rivalries, by all the modes of leadership, by all c fealties and servitudes. I became a mother toiling for a son whose thought was not of her; I became a son held within the soft, strong meshes of his home. I had a glimpse, as it were both from without and from within their minds, of myriads of the boys and girls of all the species, opening their eyes in amazement upon life, knowing neither what they ought to be doing with it nor even how to wrest from it the simple joys they so vaguely conceived. I glimpsed likewise the myriads of grown men and women, with all their hopes thwarted, and their minds desparately concerned only to keep their bodies alive, or at most their heads above their fellows. And the old I glimpsed also, with their lives written indelibly into the great story of worlds. Through their eyes I watched the young things rising up all around them and beyond them, like birds that rise and leave their wounded on the ground. It seemed too that I entered into the minds of the innumerable toilers of all the aeons. I felt the ache and the leaden weight of their limbs, the sick ache of their eye-balls, and the hopelessness of their crippled souls. I felt also the calm of spirit, the strenuous peacefulness, of those few who are wholly and gladly possessed by their work.

There poured in upon me also all the thoughts and fantasies and ideals of all men and women in all ages. My mind reeled and staggered in the tide of them, and was swept to and fro upon the great ocean of whimsies and dreams, doctrines and theories. With the pre-human beings, I fashioned imaginatively, step by step, the whole world of perceptual common sense, that tissue of theories and images, so true and so false, which to most human beings of all species appears to be the unquestionable real. I observed, as in my own mind, the flashes of primeval genius that had gone to the making of that great medley of fact and fiction. With the ape-men, too, I projected souls into trees and mountains, storms and stars. And with them also I felt the first painful birth-throes of true intellect. To trap my prey, to beguile my mate, or build my shelter, I reasoned, I put two and two together. But every motion of this reason I distorted with fantasies born of mere desire, and when this hybrid failed me I blamed reason.

All manner of laborious reasonings and intricate bright myths flashed across my mind and vanished. In the twinkling of an eye I savoured cosmology after cosmology, I saw Shiva, Odin, Zeus, Jaweh and his fair offspring Jesus, and innumerable other god-heads, of wrath and righteousness, of wisdom, of power, of love, emanations from the minds of all the races, all the species of man. And with these I tried out a million sciences and philosophies, amongst which, as yet ever so faint and remote, like the voices of two bright confident quarrelling children, that’ materialism’ and that’ spiritism’ which resound throughout your little play-room world. Theories, theories, myriads upon myriads of them, streamed over me like wind-borne leaves, like the contents of some titanic paper-factory flung aloft by the storm, like dust-clouds in the hurricane advance of the mind. Gasping in this vast whirling aridity, I almost forgot that in every mote of it lay some few spores of the organic truth, most often parched and dead, but sometimes living, pregnant, significant.

v. DESCENT AMONG THE FIRST MEN

DURING THE WHOLE of this early stage of my adventure I was already trying to select from the confusion of experiences something which might serve to bring me nearer to your own particular phase of the human process. My chief method of directing myself toward your age is, as I have already said, to assume imaginatively, and as precisely as possible, first the basic temperamental pattern of your species, and then the particular form of it which is characteristic of your period, and of that unique point and moment of individuality which I desire to study. This work I was already attempting; but it was hampered on this occasion, and on most others, by the prodigious influx of perceptions, thoughts and emotions which I have attempted to describe. I was like a swimmer swept hither and thither by great waves, and scarcely able to make the particular rocky creek which is his haven.

I had first to conceive, and emotionally assume, the general form of all primitive human mentality, so as to exclude from my view the whole of my own species, and also that other, abortive, phase of spiritual maturity, which took place just before man left the earth. I had to become in imagination a bewildered limited being, ignorant of its own nature, ever racked by inner conflicts which eluded its apprehension, ever yearning to be whole, yet ever carried away by momentary cravings which were ludicrous even in its own estimation. With patience I was able to achieve this piece of inner play-acting with such success that I began to have definite but fleeting glimpses of individuals and incidents among the primitive kinds of men, now a winged Venerian, skimming his wild ocean, now a woman of the Third Men, ruddy and lithe, feeding her beasts, now a scarcely human early inhabitant of Neptune. These individuals I perceived, of course, through the eyes of some contemporary; and if ever I troubled to look at ‘my own’ body during these experiences, I perceived it to be not my familiar body at all, but of the same species as the observed individual. Perceiving through the eyes of past beings, I perceived their bodies as though they were each in turn my own body.

I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings. Now though all the races of your species in all its stages manifest, in spite of their differences, one unique blend of these factors, yet the process of imaginatively assuming this mode of mentality is dangerous; for there is another species, one of our fore-runners on Neptune, which is strangely like you in this respect. I now found myself, as often before, oscillating painfully between these two phases of man’s career. I saw now the hills and tall trees of Earth, now the plains and bushes of Neptune. I assumed now the spidery limbs and jaunty gait of a Terrestrial, now the elephantine legs, kangaroo arms and grave demeanour of an early Neptunian. I listened for a moment to Attic disputation, then suddenly to primitive Neptunian grunts and clicks. It was as though I were listening-in with a radio set of bad selectivity. Or, to change the image, I was a storm-tossed buzzard among the hills, beneath me a dividing range, on either side of it a valley. Into one of these valleys I purposed to descend, but the wind kept thrusting me back over the ridge into the other. At one moment I saw beneath me the desired valley; then, after a vain struggle, the other. At length, however, by a violent effort of attention I succeeded in concentrating upon your species and avoiding the other. Gradually the imagery and thought which flooded in on me came to be entirely derived from the First Men, in one or other of their phases.

But my experience was still chaotic. I had indeed a strong but vague apprehension of your species as a historic whole, of its many long phases of somnolence and its few brief effulgences. And after careful inspection I detected that sense of cosmical tragedy which overwhelmed, or, from your point of view, will overwhelm, the more intelligent of your descendants, when they realize that their species is setting inevitably into decline. But for the most part I had merely a sickening confusion of random samples from all your ages. Thus, at one moment I was an Aurignacian, engraving his cave wall with vivid shapes of deer and bison, while my fellow hunters peered with admiration through the smoke. Now I was a Chinese citizen of that Americanized world-state which lies future to you; and I was speaking in worn and polluted English to my Soudanese wife. Now I was an Elizabethan dame, tight-laced and plastered with jewellery. Suddenly I flashed many thousands of years ahead into that Patagonian civilization which is the last weary effort of your species. I was a prematurely aged boy, prostrate in a temple before the grotesque image of Power. Not until many more of these visions had appeared, and been dismissed, did I find myself approximately in your age. I was an Indian confronting a topeed, bare-kneed Englishman. Rage was in my heart, fear, contempt and subterfuge, and as little understanding of the other as he had of me.

Fatigued but now more hopeful, I forced myself rigorously into the mentality which is common to most members of a primitive industrialistic community. To you this curious mode of experience is so familiar that you do not suspect its rarity and oddity, though many of you feel that it is neither wholesome nor inevitable. That you may realize the violent effort of imagination and emotional control that was now incumbent on me, I will set down the main features which render the primitive industrial mentality so difficult for the explorer. To revert to the image which I have already used, it is as though the buzzard, having successfully descended into the valley of his choice, were now to enter the ventilation shaft of an old disused mine, and were to sink downwards in the dark through fetid air, with scarcely room to keep his wings outspread. No wonder that he suffers considerable distress and incurs serious dangers, before he finally alights amongst the pale and eyeless fauna of the pit. No wonder that his own eyes take time to accustom themselves to the dim phosphorescence which is the sole illumination of that world. When the explorer seeks to establish himself in your society, he has first to assume that jarred and restless mood which is common to all those whose habitual environment is alien to their native capacities. In particular he must imaginatively produce in himself the lifelong strain of perceiving streets, traffic, and stuffy interiors, instead of the landscapes which originally moulded his capacities. He must also reconstruct in himself the unconscious obsession with matter, or rather with the control of matter by machinery and chemical manipulation. He must conceive also the mind’s unwitting obeisance and self-distrust before its robot offspring. Further, he must subject his own free-roaming spirit to the hideous effects of a narrow specialism, both of body and mind. He must conceive the almost inconceivable ignorance and groping hate of the being whose life is moulded to one narrow round of duties and perceptions. Equally he must conceive the profound unwitting guiltiness of the primitive industrial master, and also of that idle scum that floats on the surface of all primitive industrial societies.

Little by little I reproduced in myself this cramped and ungenerous mode of the mind; and, as I did so, visions of your world came crowding in upon me with increasing vividness. I became a half-naked woman in a coal-mine of your Industrial Revolution. I crept on hands and knees along a low gallery. Tugging at the collar like a beast, I dragged a truck. The trace passed between my legs. I was whimpering, not from any present discomfort, but because I had lost a keepsake. This incident was obviously a century or more too early, but others followed, and more and more of them were of your period. I had now to seek out a particular individual among you, and a particular moment of his life. But in doing so, I nearly suffered catastrophe. On Venus there was once, or rather from your point of view there will be, an industrial phase much like your own in certain respects, although the species which produced it was very different from yours. Into that epoch I was suddenly flung by I know not what detail of identity. A face which was obviously not of the First Men, a pale and blinking frog-like face, with a running sore beneath the left eye and a fantastic hat cocked backwards, slowly grimaced at me. For one anxious moment I feared that I should be trapped in that Venerian phase of man, with my mind still moulded to the mentality of the First Men. But by a desperate effort of concentration upon the Terrestrial mode of experience I managed to disengage myself from this dangerous irrelevance. And with one leap I found myself back again at the desired point of your history.

vi. IN THE STREETS OF LONDON

I WAS IN a town. A great red vehicle, roaring and trumpeting, was in the act of swooping upon me. Leaping out of its track, I ran to the pavement where two contrary streams of pedestrians brushed past one another. As the archaic chariot left me, I saw on its flank the English word ‘General’, in letters of gold. I had already become familiar with this device on my previous visit to your world, and I now knew that I must be in London somewhere between the invention of the motor-omnibus and the socialization of all such vehicles under a metropolitan authority. The clothes of the women pedestrians were of the style worn in 1914. Skirts left the ankle exposed, waists were confined within broad belts of ribbon, hats were large, and poised high on the crown. Clearly I had struck the right period, but who was I, or rather who was my host? I noted with satisfaction that his basic mental pattern fitted very precisely the mood which I had already myself assumed to take me to my chosen object of study. Surely this must be the young man whom I sought. I shall not reveal his name, since with its aid he or his relatives might recognize the portrait, or the setting, which I must give in some detail. I shall therefore refer to him simply as Paul. I had already observed him on an earlier visit, but now I proposed to follow him through the most critical moment of the career of his species.

Paul was gravely agitated. I noticed a visual image looming in the recesses of his mind, an image not open to his own introspection. It was the face of his pet enemy of childhood days, and it was streaming with tears and blood. The child Paul had just put an end to this lad’s bullying by defending himself with a table-fork. He now consciously felt once more (though he knew not why) the horror and guilt that he had suffered long ago at the sight of his enemy’s damaged cheek. The experience was now accompanied by confused images of khaki, bayonets, and the theme of a patriotic song. Paul was experiencing, and I experienced through him, a distressing conflict of blood-loathing and martial fervour. Evidently I had come upon Paul in the midst of his great crisis. Like so many of his contemporaries, he was faced with the necessity of deciding whether he would or would not fight for king and country and gallant little Belgium. But with Paul the situation was complicated by the fact that ever since his childhood I had been tampering with his mind so as to make him more sensitive to the momentous issues which were at stake.

Had I needed further confirmation that my host was indeed Paul, it was available. He was now passing a shop which bore a panel of mirror between its windows. Such mirrors I had often noticed in your cities, cunning devices for attracting the attention of your amusingly and fatally self-gratulatory species. My host slackened his pace and gazed into the mirror. Indeed he actually halted for a moment. I at once recognized the youthful and anxious face that I had perforce so often observed in the shaving-glass. But I noticed that its habitual expression of watchful self-reserve was now intensified with some kind of suppressed but haunting terror. Neptunian vision detected also, contrasting with this callow distress, a gleam of contemptuous irony, new in Paul.

Only for a moment did Paul regard himself. With a blush and an impatient jerk he turned away, and looked anxiously to see if any one had been watching him. Immediately, with a deeper blush, he faced the mirror again, and pretended to be searching for grit, in his eye. Amongst the crowd of passers-by, two figures were approaching, and almost upon us. The young man was in khaki. The girl clung to his arm with demure possessiveness. He did not notice Paul, but she caught Paul’s eyes as he was turning toward the mirror. In the fraction of a second that elapsed before his eyes could free themselves, he saw that she dismissed him as no true male, that she thanked God her man was a soldier, and that she was ready to do her bit by yielding herself unconditionally to him. Real tears welled in Paul’s eyes to wash out the imaginary grit. I took a hasty glance at the most recent memories of my host, and saw that, while he had been walking along the Strand after his lunch he had been subject to several encounters of this sort, real or imaginary. By now he was badly shaken. He turned down a side-street, and wandered along the Embankment. Presently he was calmed by the quietly flowing water, still more, perhaps, by the Obelisk, that proud ancient captive among Lilliputians. To Paul it seemed refreshingly indifferent to their ant-wars. Suddenly his peace was shattered. Half a dozen urchins approached in military formation, accompanied by martial rhythms on an old tin can. As they passed him, one of them struck up on a mouth-organ an excruciating but recognizable version of a catchy song already in vogue among the troops. I felt Paul’s mind rear and plunge beneath me like a startled horse. Many times he had heard that tune; many columns of troops he had seen, with full equipment, marching toward the great railway terminus for entrainment toward the coast. But this commonplace little incident stirred him more deeply. It filled him with a desperate longing to be at one with the herd, to forget himself in the herd’s emotions, to sacrifice himself heroically to the herd’s gods.

A visual image now flashed into his view, a shop-front converted into a recruiting office. The window displayed posters to incite the laggard, ‘Your king and country need you’, and so on. This image Paul now greeted with a violent assent. On the heels of that swift mental gesture there followed a fleeting tactual image of a hand’s pressure on his hand, as though the whole nation were congratulating him on his decision.

Paul hurried away from the river with an almost swaggering gait. He took a short cut by back-streets to the recruiting office that he had so often passed, and as often circumvented so as to avoid’ its blatant reproaches. Street after street he threaded, and in each: succeeding street his resolution was less secure and his swagger less evident. The only clear conviction in his mind, was that, whichever course he finally took, he would regret it, and feel ashamed that he had not taken the other. His perplexity was the outcome not only of the objective moral problem as to what course was in fact the right course, but also of a subjective psychological problem, namely what would his motives really be if he took this course, and what if he took that.

I myself, observing his mind as he hurried along in dangerous abstraction among pedestrians and vehicles, was able to detect in him many motives hidden from his own observation. There is no need to give a complete inventory of the tangled impulses that were pulling him hither and thither in his perplexity, but one point must be made clear because of its significance. Paul’s indecision was in fact only superficial, was indeed illusory. To me, though not to Paul himself, it was evident that he had resolved on his course a good month earlier, and that however much he might seem to himself to be vacillating, his will was already fixed. This curious state of affairs was due to the fact that his deciding motive was not clearly apprehended; while at the same time he was very poignantly aware of a conflict between other motives which were not strictly relevant to the problem at all. Thus, he dared not enlist, lest his motive should be merely moral cowardice; he dared not refuse to enlist, lest his motive should be merely physical cowardice or moral pride. Whatever course he chose would almost certainly spring from purely selfish motives. In fact although the decision had indeed really been made long ago, he had ever since been chafing within his illusory cage of morality and selfishness, like a captive beast that rubs itself painfully against its bars without hope of escape.

The same forlorn task was occupying him when at last the recruiting office leapt into view. It was a comer house, diagonally opposite him. He stepped off the pavement, dodged the traffic, and was already half-way across, when his resolution finally vanished.

At the door stood a sergeant with a red, white and blue cockade. He had already sighted Paul, and was preparing to greet him with acquisitive geniality. Paul’s legs continued to carry him toward the door, though weakly; but Paul’s mind now woke to a surprisingly clear conviction that, whatever the reason, this thing must not be done. He reached the pavement. The sergeant stood aside to let him pass. Paul was almost in the doorway when he suddenly veered and scuttled away. His conviction vanished, but he continued to hurry along the pavement. Tears came to his eyes, and he whimpered to himself, ‘Coward, Coward’; with which verdict the sergeant doubtless agreed.

But to me, the detached observer, it was evident that though Paul was on the whole more of a coward than the average, and would have made a very bad soldier, it was not cowardice that had put him to flight. It is difficult to describe the determining though deeply hidden motive which, on this occasion as on others, snatched him away from the recruiting office. It was a motive present also in the majority of his contemporaries, though in few was it able to disturb the operation of more familiar motives. The real determinant of Paul’s behaviour was an obscure intuition, which your psychologists mostly fail to recognize as a basic and unanalysable factor in your nature. They fail to recognize it, because in you it is so precarious and so blind. You have no satisfactory name for it, since few of you are at all clearly aware of it. Call it, if you will, loyalty to the enterprise of Life on your planet and among the stars; but realize that, though it is a natural product of age-long events, and though it cannot express itself at all unless it is evoked by education, it becomes, at a certain stage of evolution, a bias as strong and unreasoned as the bias in favour of food or offspring. Indeed these propensities are but gropings toward this more general but equally non-rational bias. This it was that in Paul, partly through my earlier influence, partly through his own constitution, was strong enough to turn him aside on the threshold of the recruiting office. This it was that in the majority of Paul’s contemporaries caused, indeed, grave agony of mind, but could not bring them to refuse war.

3 THE CHILD PAUL

I. PAUL AND HIS NEPTUNIAN PARASITE ii. THE CHILD PAUL iii. EARLY EXPERIMENTS ON PAUL iv. PAUL’S CHANGING WORLD

i. PAUL AND HIS NEPTUNIAN PARASITE

WHY DO I choose Paul for study? Why do I propose to tell you more of him than of anyone else in my collection? I have examined in detail at one time and another an immense number of specimens of your kind, not only your contemporaries but many others whose date is earlier than yours, and many who in your day are still to live. I have made myself familiar with every trait and whim, every minute episode in the minds of selected individuals from among the Greeks, the Indians, the early Teutons, the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese of all China’s phases, and also the still unborn Americans and Patagonians. In fact, there is no race of the First Men that has not yielded me samples; which, as I have grown intimate with them, have so captivated me with their fantastic personalities that I have come to regard them not merely as specimens but, in a manner, as friends. For these beings have yielded me the secrets of their nature to an extent impossible in normal intercourse; and yet they have never communicated with me, and for the most part have never suspected my existence.

If I chose, I could tell you many strange secrets about your famous characters, for instance about your Queen Elizabeth, who is among my collection. Through her eyes I have looked not only on the fair face of Essex, but also on that abnormal formation of her own body which caused her to be so lonely, so insistent on her womanhood, and withal so kingly. And I have tasted her bitter rage against fate, her greedy self-love, her love of England. Leonardo da Vinci also I have inhabited. It was I that tormented him with a thousand ideas in advance of his age. It was the enigma of my influence in him that he embodied in pigment as a smile. Aknahton also I swayed, and in his wife’s face my influence conjured another smile. There are moments in my life on Neptune when my beloved specimens crowd in upon my memory and overwhelm me with the infinity of their uniquenesses; when, forgetful of my own Neptunian personality, I seem to be nothing but the theatre in which these many play their parts.

If it is incredible to you that I should have millions of these intimates, remember, not only that the minds of the Last Men are far more agile and far more capacious than your minds, but also that I have spent many thousands of years upon the work, and that in most cases a whole terrestrial lifetime occupies me for no more than a day of my life on Neptune. Of course even my millions of specimens can afford only partial knowledge of your kind. But those of my colleagues who have been working in the same field have worked with no less industry. No doubt all of us together have studied only a minute fraction of your species; but at least we have by now sampled every culture, every local strain, every generation. And your own age, since it is the turning-point of your history, we have sifted again and again with special care.

Why then out of all this collection do I choose Paul as the text and the epitome of what I have to say to you? I choose him because he does epitomize in his character, his circumstances, and his reaction to my influence, the spiritual crisis of your age, and indeed the doom of your species. It would not be true to say that he was an exceptionally average member of his race. Far from it. Though in a sense typical and significant, Paul was not average. Indeed both in character and in circumstance he was rather unusual. Yet he is typical in that he illustrates very clearly the confused nature of his species, and the disorder of its world. In Paul’s life there appear with an almost naive simplicity of outline certain phases of spiritual growth, distorted by the all-pervading blight of his age, nay of his species. In all of you, from the earliest flint-worker, even to the last survivors of Patagonia, the conflict between the primitive simian nature and the genuinely human (or from your point of view the super-human) is present as a fundamental condition of life. In Paul the old simian nature was undisguised and insistent, while the new human nature had defined itself with precision and emphasis. The conflict therefore was clear.

I pride myself somewhat on the discovery of Paul. My crowning research upon the mentality of the First Men and on the crisis of their career demanded a specimen such as I knew would be hard to find. I cannot tell you at all clearly what was necessary, since you are ignorant of the principles of my work. But, to repeat, I had to select an individual both typical and unique, a being of average intelligence, average abilities, average strength of will, but one in whom the simian and the distinctively human were both well developed and delicately balanced. Further, he must be one capable of a degree of self-consciousness abnormal in your species. Many other more subtle requirements I must leave unmentioned. In order to discover this unique creature I had to explore not only your own age but many earlier generations in search of genetic strains favourable to my requirements.

In the Seventeenth Century there was a German family which promised what I wanted; but in them the desirable features were complicated by a musical sensitivity which in many individuals afforded escape from the conflict. I noticed, however, that those members of the clan who most nearly fulfilled my requirements had a subtly characteristic laugh; or rather that, though they laughed in many different styles, the laughter of each had a curious fleeting tremor of bewilderment. Armed with this clue, and certain others more introspective, I continued my search, until in the England of King Alfred I found a similar and even more promising strain. This I followed through the generations hither and thither. One branch of it, the most promising, was exterminated by the Black Death, another became hopelessly contaminated by interbreeding with a strain of defectives, a third produced witches in the Sixteenth Century and mystics in the Seventeenth. Early in the Eighteenth Century a member of this line married into another stock which I had already marked out, and produced a number of more scientifically-minded folk. Throughout the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries this line suffered social decline, and proliferated in a swarm of poverty-stricken households scattered over the industrial north of England. From one of these sprang Paul’s grandmother, who by good fortune married into yet another of my chosen lines. Paul’s father also was of a stock that had already interested me.

Having now discovered my unique specimen, I first took a hasty glance at his career, and found to my delight that circumstance was destined to intensify and clarify in him the characteristics which I proposed to study. In that first hasty glance I saw also the quite unmistakable effects of a Neptunian influence, doubtless my own influence which I had not yet exerted. I then proceeded to make a thorough investigation of every line of Paul’s ancestry, in order that I might know his nature through and through. Many volumes could be filled with the results of this inquiry, but here I need not elaborate. Incidentally I traced the evolution of Paul’s physical appearance, of his nose, eyebrows, hands, and so on. A curious twist of the hair of his left eyebrow, which was a recessive character, and had not appeared in any of his more recent ancestors, came in with a French strain in the Fourteenth Century. A certain scarcely noticeable prominence of the cheek-bones I traced to a Danish invader of the Eighth Century, and beyond him through Swedes and Finns into Central Asia. Another remarkable line of his ancestry, in part responsible for his intellectual curiosity and certain features of his thumb-print, took me via a Dutch merchant of the Seventeenth Century, a Rhenish baron of the Thirteenth, various Swiss herdsmen and Italian farmers to Syracuse, and so to ancient Greece, where one of Paul’s ancestors once handed a cup to Socrates. But apart from a dozen or so curious threads of this type, which of course occur in many family trees, Paul’s ancestry was the usual tangle of intercrossing lines; stretching back in manifold complexity among the Norse, the Low Germans, the Ancient British, and the Neolithic, and beyond these to the common forefathers of all your races. It would have been useless to trace Paul’s ancestry any further in detail, since nothing more that was distinctive of Paul himself remained to be discovered. In the more remote past the genes that were to produce Paul were ancestral also to the mass of his contemporaries. This story was already known to me.

I must now tell you what it was that I intended to do with Paul, and how I carried out my plan. I wished to perform certain delicate experiments on him and observe his reactions. To some of the readers of this book the mental vivisection which I had to practise upon Paul may seem merely brutal. I would remind them first that it was a necessary part of a very lofty task; second, that Paul himself in his best moments would have gladly accepted all and more of my torturing manipulation for the sake of that high enterprise; and lastly that the final result upon Paul, the individual human being, was a very great spiritual enrichment.

It is difficult to give you any clear idea of my aim beyond saying that, having found this uniquely typical yet also exceptionally self-conscious being, I intended to influence him periodically in such a manner that he should see his world as far as possible from the Neptunian point of view. I should then be able to observe in detail the effect of this vision on his primitive nature. Had he been of the heroic type, this policy would have turned him into some kind of prophet or crank. But he was made of milder stuff, and would never spoil my experiment in that style. Indeed, one effect of my intermittent manipulation of his experience was to inspire him with a dread of showing himself to be different from others. Just because he possessed a whole secret world of his own, and was prone to see the actual world turn farcical or hideous in the light cast by that other world, he became increasingly anxious to maintain a secure footing in the actual world and conform to all the customary modes of behaviour. For in spite of his Neptunian vision he remained essentially a product of his own world. But as my influence extended, he was forced to admit that there was something in him profoundly alien to his environment, something alien even to himself. At times he feared he was going mad; at other times he would persuade himself with immense complacency that he was ‘inspired’, and that he must indeed be a prophet; but as he was incapable of any such heroism, this delusion was soon shattered. There were moments when he threatened to break into two personalities, one the natural Paul, the other a violent and spasmodic idealist. But I had chosen him carefully; he was too well integrated actually to succumb to this easy solution of his conflict. Instead of disintegrating, he remained one mind, though torn and perplexed.

But as time passed a change came over him. At first he had regarded his native terrestrial mentality as himself, and the Neptunian influence as alien, disturbing, irrational, insane. He was fascinated by it, but he wished to keep it thoroughly suppressed and ineffective. Later, however, it came to seem a divine enlightenment, sane and joyous, still alien to himself but most precious. Then at last he began to try to live according to my influence, and incurred at once the ridicule and hostility of his own world. With horror he now foreswore his ‘inner light’ which had so misled him. He earnestly tried to become blind to it, and to be like his fellows. But my influence left him no peace. It found something responsive in him, which, as he matured, was emboldened to identify itself wholly with the Neptunian point of view. Little by little he came to think of this Neptunian factor in his mind as truly ‘himself’, and the normal Terrestrial as’ other’, something like an unruly horse which his true self must somehow break in and ride. There followed a period of struggle, which ended in despair; for it became clear that he could not master his Terrestrial nature. Indeed, it seemed to him that he himself was bound and helpless upon the back of this uncontrolled animal; or that while his body and his mundane intelligence went about the world performing all manner of aimless antics, his essential spirit was imprisoned somewhere in his head watching all, but almost wholly impotent. This essential spirit which he regarded as ‘himself’ was not, of course, merely my influence in him; it was his own best and most human nature, on which my influence was able to work. But this best of his was only the rudimentary best which was characteristic of his species; and though my influence had endowed it with an immense treasure of imagination, it remained almost wholly ineffective, as is usual with your kind. Yet there were times in his life when Paul did succeed in acting in a manner that was really human, and on these occasions my influence played a part. Of these crises I shall presently tell.

ii. THE CHILD PAUL

I KNOW PAUL perhaps better than I know myself. I have been Paul. I have been Paul throughout his life, and watched him to the very moment of his death. The more important passages of his life I have experienced again and again. I know little intimate facts about him, like the feel of the inside of his mouth. I know the feel of Paul slightly drunk, Paul sexually excited, and Paul with one of his bad colds. I know, far better than Paul himself knew it, the obscure tone of his whole body, when through eating too many muffins, he seemed to see the world itself turn foul. I know also, and can hold together for comparison, the feel of Paul the child, Paul the boy, Paul the young man, stiffening into middle age, and Paul awaiting death in helpless senility.

Fortunately there is no need for me to tell you all the details that I know about Paul. I have only to make you realize the main mental themes or motifs of his life. I need not, for instance, tell you much about his birth. It was a normal birth. Several times I have examined the obscure experiences which harassed him during that earliest of his adventures. For it seemed possible that even then something might have occurred to contribute to his idiosyncrasies. But neither in his passage into the outer world nor in his fungoid pre-natal experience (so difficult for the explorer to penetrate) did I find anything significant, save what is common to all his kind. In Paul, whose nature was more sensitive than the average, the shock of exchanging the elysium of the womb for an alien world was serious, and was accentuated somewhat by the clumsiness of the physician. But it caused no unusual damage to his mind, nothing but the common yearning toward a warmer, cosier, less noxious world, which, in so many of you, favours legends of a golden age in the past, or of a golden heaven in the future.

One feature of Paul’s experience of birth was indeed significant, and served to confirm my choice of him as a subject of experiment. Like many others, he did not breathe till a smack made him take breath to bellow. I experienced, of course, his bewildered fury at the chastisement. I also experienced his awareness of the cold air that flooded his lungs, and the shock of glee that came with it. In that instant a connexion was registered in Paul’s mind for ever after, a connexion between what I may call fate’s smiting and the breath of life. In after years Paul was to know himself a coward, yet in spite of his cowardice, he was ever to seek in the harshness of fate for the breath of a new life. Even though, in all his ages, he yearned to creep back into the warm close peace of the womb, he craved also to absorb into his blood the atmosphere of a wider world.

I need not describe Paul’s arduous self-education in the cot, the nursery and the garden. Like all organisms he had to learn to cope with his world. Like all animals he had to grapple with the problems of perceiving and acting in a world of space and time. Little by little he learned to observe and to respond to all manner of objects, such as the rotund and fragrant dairy of his mother’s breast, and the less delectable bottle. He learned the geography of his own body, mapping it out patiently, unwittingly, day by day, in a surprisingly intricate system of explorations, discovering that all these complex findings fell together beautifully in a three-dimensional system of touch and sight. Many great arts he acquired, first the art of sucking, and of shifting about in bed, then the art of the rattle. Presently he learned how to use his whole body as a vehicle to transport him to and fro in a wider sphere. He mastered the more dangerous arts of crawling and walking, the art of the bouncing ball, and so on. Meanwhile he had distinguished the soothing and indignant tones of the human voice. Also, the intermittent human breasts and arms and laps and voices had fallen into order to make more or less constant systems, each of which might be expected to behave in a distinctive manner. Then at last he discovered that human voices had meanings, and that he himself could use these noises so as to make the great grown-up creatures do his bidding.

This power of controlling the movements of adults was one of Paul’s most exciting early triumphs. It was a limited and erratic power. All too often the great creature refused to obey, or actually turned the tables and compelled him to do what he did not want to do. Altogether these adults were a very perplexing fact in Paul’s early life. In some ways they were so necessary and reliable, in others so inconsequent and even noxious. Of course, Paul did not consciously make these generalizations, but they were implied in his behaviour. Thus in certain respects, such as physical care and protection, he trusted the adult absolutely, but in others he learned to expect nothing but misunderstanding and ridicule. In yet other respects he himself was so influenced by the prestige suggestion which these mighty beings brought to bear on him, that many of their unintelligible admirations and taboos gradually took root in his own nature. For instance, he slavishly accepted their views about sex. Very early in his childhood he had begun to take an interest in those parts of his body which adults pointedly ignored. He had discovered that a vague pleasure occurred when these organs were touched. But long before he was told that it was wicked and dangerous to take any notice of them, he already profoundly felt that it was so, merely through the awkwardness that beset adults whenever he referred to them. Had Paul been born a young baboon or chimpanzee he would at least have escaped the agony of mind and waste of energy which, as I shall tell later, he, like so many of his kind, incurred through this too ready acceptance of adult standards. Meanwhile it was inevitable that, before sex became an imperious need, Paul should adjust himself to adult standards in this as in so many other respects. Adults were objects which one had to learn to cope with, just as one had to learn to cope with dogs and chairs and fire. Sometimes one failed and suffered for it, but on the whole one succeeded.

I must not, however, dwell on the process by which Paul gradually mastered these earliest problems. In all his adventures, I, his parasite, tasted his success and failure. I suffered all his bumps, scratches and scaldings. I saw beforehand what was impending. I saw both that it was inevitable and that with a little more skill it might have been avoided. Had I chosen, I might have played the mother to him and saved him from many a disaster, but it was better to let him learn. During his earliest Years I refrained from any kind of influence, since it was important that he should develop normally up to a certain stage.

Little by little Paul’s world crystallized into extensive patterns. No longer a meagre and obscure flux of dream-like forms, it became a more or less reliable world of ‘common sense’, a house and garden, with surrounding continents made up of other houses and gardens, streets and fields. Gradually also he was able to look backwards not merely into a confused cloud of pastness but along a brief but orderly vista of nights and days.

But with this gradual increase of order in his daylight world, Paul became more and more distressed by that other chaotic world which swallowed him at night. When the light was put out and he was left alone in bed, the whole reliable order vanished. Even if he kept his eyes shut, terrifying shades confronted him with their vague and shifty forms. He saw animal heads and shoulders, and stealthily moving gorilla arms. They kept changing from one thing into another thing. They were unintelligible and therefore terrible.

Still worse, sometimes the seething confusion of shadows would be dominated by a single staring eye. Paul could not escape it. Wherever he looked, there it was, watching him. Perhaps it was God’s eye, seeing right through him, coldly noting all his most secret wickedness. Perhaps God had done away with the world of day because Paul had been so naughty in it. Perhaps there was nothing now but Paul and God and the close dark, with one streak of light pretending to be under the door, to keep up appearances. Somehow the Eye seemed to him both very wise and very stupid, a vindictive clever thing, that intended to kill him just by gazing at him, for no reason but that he did not please the Eye. Sometimes Paul was so terrified that he screamed. Then an exasperated grown-up would appear and ask what on earth was the matter. He could never tell, for grown-ups were somehow blind to the night world, and would think him silly. But to me, Paul’s trouble was very real, and also intelligible. To Paul, though he knew it not, the night was the womb. When he was very sleepy, it promised rest and peace; but when he was not sleepy, he regarded it as a well of blackness, stuffiness, formlessness, negation. It threatened to swallow him back from the bright orderly extra-uterine world of day, with its complicated geography, its reliable persons, and its winds that came with obscure messages from still wider spheres.

Throughout Paul’s life this contrast of the day world and the night world lay at the back of his thinking and feeling, influencing it, perplexing it. As he grew older, however, the two worlds seemed to interpenetrate more and more, until at last he found that there was a day view of everything and a night view also. But which was the true view? Perhaps the night view of things was in fact just nightmare, a bad dream. But then perhaps it was the other way round. Perhaps the whole day universe was just a foolish dream of the eternal foetus imprisoned in the eternal womb. In early days, of course, Paul never thought of the problem in this way, but I myself could see how the obscure movements of his mind were related to the forgotten experience of birth.

There was one aspect of the night which seemed even to the child Paul very different from the night which imprisoned him in bed, namely the starry sky. He seldom saw it, but even a brief glimpse of it would have lasting effect on him. It gave him a sort of calm elation which fortified him against the terrors of darkness, and would sometimes even last into the next day, soothing his troubles and tempering his joys. This experience, which played an important part in Paul’s life, was not simply a spontaneous outcome of his own nature. It was in part due to my presence in his mind, though in part also to his native disposition. Throughout his life, these occasions on which he was able to regard the night sky had a very considerable effect on me, the imprisoned and often fatigued observer of all his experience. They afforded me refreshing glimpses of something common to his world and my own. When I had become too deeply immersed in the minutiae of Paul’s behaviour, and was beginning to feel your world more real than mine, the sight of the stars, even through the inefficient eyes of a member of your species, would recall to me with great vividness the Neptunian plains and dwarf jungles, the sky-piercing towers and bland inhabitants of my own far-future world. This vivid recollection would rekindle in me the still, flame-like ardour which is the spirit of our doomed but unperturbed community. And the serene emotion which then surged through me would infect Paul also, lending a tone to his experience, which, though he could never properly account for it, he came in time to recognize as in some manner a gift from a source beyond his mundane nature. I well remember the hush of surprise and gurgle of delight with which the child Paul first greeted the stars. He was in his mother’s arms. He stretched out his own fat arms and turned his head slowly from side to side, surveying the heaven. On another occasion, much later, when he was being brought home from a Christmas party, so tired that he could hardly walk, a brilliant night sky overpowered him so that he burst into tears of uncomprehending joy.

As the years advanced, Paul’s sense that the starry night was present even by day became an increasing influence in his life. This was partly my doing; for I soon found that by giving him visual images of the night sky in the midst of mundane situations I could help him to regard the affairs of himself and his companions with Uranian detachment. There was an early stage in his development when, through this action of mine, he came to think of the universe as a sandwich made of the upper and nether night, with, between them, the meat of day. Below was the horrible darkness and confusion and closeness which he encountered in his stuffy bedroom. Above was the high mystery of the stars. Between was the world of familiar things.

This middle world had already spread outwards to become a vague expanse of countries, embracing somewhere beyond the familiar streets all kinds of wonders, which were nevertheless definitely day-time wonders. Somewhere there was India, full of tigers, elephants, jewelled princes, and jugglers. Elsewhere lay Iceland, all solid ice, with rivers of fire running down the crystal volcanoes. Then there was France, where they ate frogs and snails and were terribly polite; Germany, where they made cheap copies of English toys, and fought duels; Greece, where they wore no clothes except helmets with clothes-brushes on them; Egypt, all mummies and crocodiles; Fairyland, where magic happened more easily than in England. Yet even in England, magic was not unknown. There was Santa Claus, and dozens of lucky and unlucky things to be sought and avoided.

Over the whole world of countries hung the sky, a blue or cloudy ceiling. Here a discrepancy entered into Paul’s universe. If you thought about it from the day-time point of view, you believed that beyond the sky and the stars there was heaven, full of winged angels in nightgowns, their eyes always turned upwards. And above them again was God, whom Paul had somehow come to think of as a huge grown-up, sprawling from horizon to horizon, and looking down precisely at Paul, with eyes that saw even his thoughts. Somehow those eyes were the same as the Eye that stared at him in the nether darkness of his bedroom. When Paul remembered the Eye by day, he would repeat rapidly, ‘Oh God, I love you, I love you, I love you.’

But if you thought of things from the point of view of the starry night, God and the angels did not seem to fit in very well. Paul half believed that they were pictures painted on the ceiling of the day world.

In time, of course, Paul’s day world ceased to be flat, and became a huge ball. At this stage the universe was more like a dumpling than a sandwich. Vaguely Paul still conceived the three levels of existence. The nether night was deep down within the ball of the day world. The starry night was all around it. On the ball were all the countries except Fairyland, which was nowhere. Many of the countries were British Possessions, and red. At school he learned much about England and the Empire, and became a patriot. The English were — well, English. They had the greatest empire in the world. They were the only people who played fair in games, and were kind to animals, and could govern black people, and fight a losing battle to the end, and rule the seas. And because they were such fine people, God had hidden a lot of coal and iron under their country, so that they could use it for ships and engines and for making thousands of things that other countries were not clever enough to make for themselves. God had also written the Bible in English, because it was the best language, and the angels talked it.

Paul’s patriotism was largely an affectation. At this time he had a great longing to be like his fellows, and his fellows made it very obvious that they were patriotic. Also he found in patriotism a source of self-gratulation. Somehow or other, through patriotism, the worm that was the ordinary Paul became one of the lords of the earth. But there was also another factor at work. He had already begun to feel an obscure impulse to devote himself to ends beyond private gratification. Much of this sadly misconceived yearning for lofty ends was expressed in bragging about his school and vilifying other schools; but the Empire afforded it a more imposing object.

iii. EARLY EXPERIMENTS ON PAUL

NOT UNTIL PAUL was already at school did I begin to exercise a deliberate influence over him. My aim was to prepare him to attain in early maturity as complete an insight as possible into the Neptunian view of Terrestrial affairs. In his early years I seldom influenced him, but the rare occasions on which I did so had a deep effect on him. They were designed to intensify his consciousness beyond the normal limitations of his species. By goading and delicately controlling his attention I contrived to make him startlingly aware, now and again, of data which commonly lie beyond the apprehension of the First Men. The scope of my early work upon him might be described by saying that I forced him to a more vivid sense of the reality and uniqueness of perceptual objects, of himself, of others as selves, and also of his own underlying unity with others, and of his own participation in the cosmos.

For instance, to deal with the simplest matter first, Paul once found a curious green pebble. He picked it up and examined it intently, noting with delight its veining, its smooth curvature, its rigidity. He turned it about, fingered it, tapped it. Then suddenly I flooded him with a spate of relevant imagery, visual and tactual, so that he seemed to encounter in this one pebble the whole splendour of sight, the whole poignancy of touch. The thing suddenly leapt at him with its unveiled reality. The change in his experience was as impressive as the change from imagery to actual perception, from picturing a friend’s face to actually seeing it. It was as though the earlier experience, which at the time seemed normally vivid, had been after all but a shadowy imagination of a pebble, compared with the later experience, which was an actual apprehension of an objective reality. It was over in a moment. Paul dropped the pebble and collapsed on the grass, holding his head in his hands. For a moment he thought someone had thrown a pebble at him and that it had gone right through his head. He opened his eyes. Everything seemed ordinary again. Then he caught sight of the pebble, half-hidden under a dandelion leaf. It was just a little round green thing, but it seemed to look at him meaningly. As they regarded one another, Paul and the pebble, Paul felt the pebble rushing at him again. He covered his eyes and sat for a long while thinking of nothing but his splitting head. He had been rather badly hurt, but also he was intrigued. The effect was something like his forgotten experience of birth, a confusion of shock, pain, brilliant novelty, fear of the unknown, and exhilaration.

Paul spent the next two days in bed with a ‘bilious headache’. When he was recovered, he went in search of his pebble. He picked it up almost as though it were a live bomb, but though it raised a vivid memory of the adventure, it gave him no fresh experience.

I repeated this experiment on Paul at rare intervals and in relation to very diverse objects, such as his precious knife, the tolling of a bell, a flying hawk, and his own hand. The last entailed a whole week in bed, for not only had he perceived his hand externally as he had perceived the pebble, he had also perceived it from within; and moreover he had been fascinated by his volitional control of it. It was a little grubby brown hand with black-rimmed nails and many scratches. He turned it about, bending and straightening the fingers, confidently willing it to perform various antics, intensely aware of his own fiat, yet not at all self-conscious in any deeper sense.

Through my influence Paul continued to suffer these experiences throughout his childhood. He became accustomed to them, and to look forward to them with mingled dread and zest. At length I judged him ripe for a different kind of experiment. He had been coveting a minute bronze dog which belonged to one of his companions. He tried to persuade the owner to ‘swop’ it, but in vain. Paul became more and more obsessed, and finally stole the dog. While he was guiltily playing with it in his own house I played a trick on him. I gave him an intense and detailed visual image of his friend rummaging frantically among his toys for the lost dog. So aggressive did this image become that it blotted out Paul’s actual environment. It had, moreover, the intensified reality that he had first encountered in the pebble. Paul’s reaction was strange. For a moment he stared at the hallucination, while hatred welled within him. Then, as soon as the vision had faded, he rushed into the street and dropped the little bronze figure down a grid. Henceforth he treated his former friend with shocking spite, mingled with terror.

I did not attempt to influence Paul’s slowly dawning awareness of self till he was already well advanced in boyhood. One day, after he had been bathing with his favourite schoolfellow, the two boys, naked, wet, gleaming in the sunlight, had a friendly wrangle over a towel. They tugged in opposite directions, shouting and panting. For a moment they stood still, staring into one another’s eyes. Suddenly I re-kindled in Paul all his past groping realizations of the difference between himself and the other, all his past obscure awareness of ‘me’ and ‘you’. I focused, so to speak, the whole vague illumination of this mass of experience upon the present moment. As formerly the pebble and his hand, so now his friend and his own being, impinged upon him with overwhelming reality. It was a reality not alone of visual and tactual form but also of experiencing. Through my manipulation of his imagery he seemed to enter imaginatively into the mind of the other, to have the feel of a different being, in a different body. A fly settled on the other’s neck. Paul felt it tickle, and felt the quick contortion that sent it away. Through the other’s eyes he seemed to see his own intent face, and his own arms lightly pulling at the towel. He began murmuring to himself, ‘I, Paul; you, Dick; I, Dick; you, Paul.’ And through Dick’s eyes he seemed to see his own lips moving. Through Dick’s ears and through his own ears also he heard his own voice. Dick, meanwhile, had seen the sudden intensity of Paul’s expression, and was alarmed. Paul saw, and vividly experienced, Dick’s alarm. They dropped the towel. Paul reached out a hand and felt Dick’s shoulder, as formerly he had felt the pebble. ‘Odd!’ he said, ‘I’ve waked up. I do sometimes. But never quite this way before.’ Dick began to question, but Paul went on, ‘I sort-of woke to be really me. Then I was you. And both of us at once. Did it happen to you too?’ Dick shook his head, very perplexed. Then came the headache. Paul dropped, and lay whimpering, with his hands over his eyes.

My next experiment was performed during a violent quarrel between Paul and Dick. Paul had spent a free afternoon making a boat. He was hollowing it with a gouge borrowed from Dick. Dick arrived to demand the gouge, which was long overdue, and was needed for hollowing his own boat. Paul, intent on his work and eager to finish it before tea, refused to surrender the tool. They wrangled, while Paul carried on his work. Dick tried to stop him. At this moment I forced on Paul a vivid apprehension of the other boy, and of his craving to have his tool, and of his rage against Paul. Paul stopped working. Once more he seemed for a moment to be Dick, and to see his own ugly scowl through Dick’s eyes. For a moment Paul hung paralysed in a mental conflict. Then suddenly he jabbed Dick’s hand with the gouge. Both boys screamed with Dick’s pain. Paul rushed toward the door, crying, ‘Beast, get out of me, you taste horrid.’ Before he reached the door he vomited. Then he fled, yelling. He carried off the gouge.

This reaction of Paul’s was very typical of his species. His brief insight into the other’s point of view merely filled him with resentment. Typical also was his subsequent remorse, which tortured him during his period of illness after this experiment. Dick had been thoroughly frightened. It seemed to him that Paul had gone mad.

In time, however, the friendship was restored, and even deepened; for Paul now treated Dick with a gentleness and understanding beyond his years. Occasionally I induced in him the more vivid apprehension of his friend and himself, but I carefully refrained from doing so when their interests were violently opposed.

In this way I produced in Paul a self-insight and insight into others which is very unusual in your species. His rare abnormal experiences now coloured his whole life, and sowed in him the seed of a lifelong conflict between the behaviour natural to his kind and the behaviour which his enhanced insight demanded. When he found himself forced to choose between the two, he almost always acted in the baser way, though afterwards he was bitterly remorseful. Once or twice, however, things turned out differently. I will give one example.

Paul was one of those timid boys who is a constant temptation to the bully. When any bullying was afoot in which Paul himself was not involved, he always took care not to interfere. Sometimes he would actually try to ingratiate himself with the stronger party. One winter day at school, when Paul and a few others of his form were supposed to be doing their’ preparation’, the arch bully of the form began tormenting a little Jew whom Paul intensely disliked. The smaller boys, with Paul among them, looked on, applauding now and then with anxious giggles. I chose this moment for an experiment. With dismay Paul felt his cursed imagination beginning to work. He tried to bury himself in his French exercise, but vainly. Do what he would, he could not help entering imaginatively into ‘that beastly little Jew’. Then he started being not only the Jew but the bully also. He imagined the big lout feeling the helpless self-disgust which he himself had felt in his one experiment in the art of bullying. I worked up this imagination till he really apprehended the mind of the bully far better than the bully himself. He realized vividly the drowsy, fumbling, vaguely distressed and frightened life that was going on in that hulk of flesh, and was disguised even from itself by the pose of braggartism. Suddenly Paul said aloud in a clear but dreamy voice, ‘Chuck it, Williams, you’re hurting yourself.’ There was a sudden silence of amazement. Paul, terrified at his own voice, bowed over his French book. The bully remarked, ‘Your turn next’, and then applied himself once more to his victim, who squealed. Paul rose, crossed the floor, laid a hand on the bully’s shoulder, and was sent crashing into the hearth. He sat for a moment among the cinders listening to the general laugh. Then slowly he rose, and slowly surveyed his grinning fellow-mortals. Williams gave an extra twist to the Jew’s arm, and there followed a yell, Paul, saying quietly, ‘Williams, you’ve got to stop’, put his own left hand into the fire and picked out a large completely redhot coal. Ignoring the pain and the smell of his burning flesh, he went over to Williams and said, ‘Now, clear out or I’ll brand you,’ Someone tried to seize Paul’s arm, He used his coal with effect, so that the other retired, Then he rushed at Williams, The bully fled. I felt Paul’s eyebrows rise and his lips twist in a whimsical smile, He stood dreaming for a moment, then restored the still faintly glowing coal to its place in the fire, Suddenly he caught sight of the charred and smoking mess that was his hand. All along he had been aware of the pain, but he had calmly ignored it. But now that the incident was completed, ignoring was impossible. His strange exaltation vanished. He gave one sharp scream, half for pain, half for surprise, and then fainted. Paul’s hand recovered within a few weeks, though of course it remained scarred for ever. Paul’s mind was more deeply affected. He was terrified about himself. He felt that he had been possessed, and he dreaded being let in for even worse scrapes in the future. All the same, he was rather proud of himself, and half-wished he could be like that always.

iv. PAUL’S CHANGING WORLD

DURING HIS SCHOOLDAYS Paul suffered more than the normal growing pains, for his mind was shooting upward in response not only to normal but to abnormal influences. He was outgrowing not only toys and childish interests; he was outgrowing the world which school life imposed upon him, Like a crab that has become too big for its shell and must struggle out of it, Paul was now too big for his world. It had cracked under the stress of his vital movement, and he was in the act of issuing from it in a soft vulnerable, but flexible and expansible covering, which some day would harden into a new and ampler dwelling-place.

Two conflicting influences dominated him at school, the impulse to assume the stereotyped’ schoolboy’ nature and live comfortably in the schoolboy world, and in opposition to this the impulse to find himself and to find reality. He strove to live according to the schoolboy ethic, partly because he genuinely admired it, partly so as to assume the protective colouring of his surroundings. But he could never succeed. The forces at work within him were too strong for him. In his early schooldays Paul never clearly understood that he was trying to live two inconsistent lives at once. He did not know that, while he was so earnestly trying to adjust himself to the school universe, he was also trying to burst that universe apart and grow an entirely new universe to suit the expanding tissues of his mind.

This growth, or rather this profound metamorphosis, was controlled by certain experiences which had an enduring effect on him. They were, so to speak, the centres of reorganization which, little by little, changed the larval Paul into the adult imago. These seminal experiences were of two kinds, though he did not clearly distinguish between them. His attention was arrested, and he was stung into excited admiration by two widespread facts: by the intricacy and relentlessness of physical happenings, and also by biological perfection, or at least functional perfection of every sort.

Paul’s sense of the austerity of the physical universe awoke early. Even in the nursery he had conceived an uncomprehending respect for the mechanism of natural events. This spontaneous movement of piety toward ‘nature’ developed not only into a strong scientific interest, but also into strangely exultant awe, for which there seemed to be no rational justification.

It was his father who first pointed out to him the crossing wave-trains of a mountain tarn, and by eloquent description made him feel that the whole physical world was in some manner a lake rippled by myriads of such crossing waves, great and small, swift and slow. This little significant experience took place during a holiday spent on the Welsh moors. They were standing on a crag overlooking the grey ‘llyn’. They counted five distinct systems of waves, some small and sharp, some broad and faint. There were also occasional brief ‘cat’s paws’ complicating the pattern. Father and son went down to the sheltered side of the lake and contemplated its more peaceful undulations. With a sense almost of sacrilege, Paul stirred the water with his stick, and sent ripple after ripple in widening circles. The father said, ‘That is what you are yourself, a stirring up of the water, so that waves spread across the world. When the stirring stops, there will be no more ripples.’ As they walked away, they discussed light and sound and the rippled sky, and the sun, great source of ripples. Thus did an imaginative amateur anticipate in a happy guess the’ wave mechanics’ which was to prove the crowning achievement of the physics of the First Men. Paul was given to understand that even his own body, whatever else it was, was certainly a turmoil of waves, inconceivably complex but no less orderly than the waves on the tarn. His apprehension of this novel information was confused but dramatic. It gave him a sense of the extreme subtlety and inevitability of existence. That even his own body should be of this nature seemed to him very strange but also very beautiful. Almost at the outset, however, he said, ‘If my body is all waves, where do I come in? Do I make the waves, or do the waves make me?’ To this the father answered, with more confidence than lucidity, ‘You are the waves. What stirs is God.’

This experience remained with Paul for ever. It became for him the paradigm of all physical sciences, and at the same time an epitome of the mystery of life. In his maturity he would often, when he came upon still water, pause to disturb its serenity. The little act would seem to him darkly impious yet also creative. He would mutter to himself, ‘God stirs the waters.’ Sometimes he would take a handful of little stones and throw them into the pond, one after the other in different directions. Then he would stand motionless, watching the intersecting circles spread and fade and die, till at last peace was wholly restored.

Paul’s first view of the moon through his father’s modest telescope was another memorable experience. He had already seen a ship disappearing below the horizon, and had been told that the earth and the moon were round. But actually to see the rotund moon, no longer as a flat white shilling, but as a distant world covered with mountains, was an experience whose fascination he never outgrew. Throughout his life he was ready to gaze for ten minutes at a time through telescope or field-glass at the bright summits and black valleys along the line between lunar night and day. This vision had a startling power over him which he himself could not rationally justify. It would flash mysteriously upon him with bewildering and even devastating effect in the midst of some schoolboy activity, in the midst of a Latin lesson, or morning prayers, or a game of cricket, or a smutty story. Under the influence of this experience he began to devour popular astronomy books. He looked with new eyes at the first page of the school atlas, which had hitherto meant nothing to him. Rapidly the school-boy universe ceased to be the whole real universe, and was reduced to a very faulty picture of a tiny comer of a universe which teemed with suns and inhabited worlds. For at this stage he imagined that every star was attended by a dozen or so populous planets.

He was perplexed to find that most adults, though many of them fully believed in some such universe, did nothing with the knowledge. That which to him was so significant was to them either tiresome or terrifying. Even his father, who had helped him to discover the new world, did not seem to appreciate it as it deserved. To the father it did indeed seem wonderful. He called it ‘sublime’. But for him it remained merely a sublime irrelevance. It compelled his attention, and in a manner his admiration also; but the tone of his voice, when he was talking of it, suggested a veiled reluctance, almost resentment. He seemed, in spite of all his scientific interest, to be happier and more at home in the world of the Iliad or of the ‘Faerie Queene ‘. The son, on the other hand, though he did his best to appreciate these dream worlds, was never moved by them. But the stars gave him an intense exhilaration, which, when he tried to justify it to his father, turned out to be, or to seem, wholly irrational.

Another overwhelming fact that gradually emerged into the child Paul’s ken, partly through the help of his father, partly through his own unaided apprehension, was what he came later to call’ the aliveness of all living things ‘. His boon companion of early days had been a terrier, with whom he used surreptitiously to share his bread and butter, bite by bite. Of course he believed that this creature had a mind much more like his own mind than was actually the case; but also, by long experience of this animal, he learned to enter into imaginative sympathy with a mind that was not human. This canine friendship drove deep into his own mind and heart both a sense of the kinship of all living things and a sense of their differences. Though Jack could enter into a romp, he could never be induced to play trains. Nor could he be persuaded that rabbits were beings like himself, whose lives should be respected. Paul himself, of course, had to make that discovery; but even in his earliest fly-tormenting and beetle-crushing phase he was already making it. Later there came a stage when this mystery of alien lives was his chief absorption and his chief perplexity. He would watch ants toiling through the grass-jungle with food for the public store, or ‘talking’ to one another as they met on one of their highways, or fighting to the death in organized battle. Always, of course, he imputed far too much of human intelligence to these strange beings. But even when at a much later date he discovered this error, he remained firm in his sense of their fundamental community with himself. Even worms, exploring the soil with their blind noses, seemed to him infinitely more like himself than the soil they devoured. And when one of them was snapped up by a thrush, Paul suffered an agony of indecision, debating whether to save the worm or let the bird have its dinner in peace. When he saw a cat with a mouse, he rushed indignantly to the rescue; yet somehow, after the event, he fell to wondering if he had merely been meddlesome.

In short, during this phase of his growth he was overwhelmed with what some would call a mystical apprehension of the inner being of all living things, and shocked by their insensitivity to one another, their essential harmfulness to one another. He was troubled by the fact that he himself ate meat and wore leather boots, and amazed that even kind-hearted persons, who doted on their own pets, did likewise without any hesitation. He was still more distressed by a streak of real sadism which survived in himself. At one time he used to catch wasps and cut them in two, so as to observe the strange behaviour of the parts. Worse still was his reaction to stag-hunting. His rare excursions into the world of sport did not occur until he was in his last year at school. They ceased while he was at the University. A well-to-do and much respected friend of his father sometimes invited Paul to spend part of the summer holidays at his house in Devon. He taught Paul to ride, and was determined to make a sportsman of him. When the lad was considered proficient, he was taken out to follow the hounds. With a sickening guiltiness, a sickening sense of his own bad horsemanship, with a sickening blend of adulation and contempt for the rest of the field, he let himself be bumped over moors and through covers, down lanes and through villages, till surprisingly he found himself in at the death. There at last was the stag, chin-deep in a river, or slithering on the roof of some outhouse in a village street, or more majestically at bay in the angle of two hedges. Then Paul exulted, even while he sickened with shame and pity. Why did he do it? he wondered. Why did he stand there watching the great weary beast mauled by the hounds, while the huntsmen tried to grab one of its antlers from behind? And when the knife went home, why did he feel, just for a fraction of a second, a sudden glee and triumph? Why was he so anxiously self-complacent as he stood at his horse’s head chewing cake and apples, while the stag was disembowelled and the hounds clamoured for their share? Why did he so desire to be taken for one of these sporting gentry, these overgrown schoolboys? These questions remained for Paul unanswered. Clearly his larval nature was making a desperate effort to reject the more developed mentality that I was forcing on him. In spite of his incompetence, he felt toward the sporting English gentleman not merely respect and envy but a deep kinship. In his revulsion against the primeval hunter and fighter, and aristocrat, he was divided against himself. Essentially the same conflict racked him a few years later when the war forced him to choose once and for all between the two allegiances. But of course in his war-perplexity, the primitive motive was reinforced by much that was by no means primitive.

4 PAUL COMES OF AGE

i. PAUL AND SEX
ii. PAUL DEVOUT
iii. PAUL FACES THE FACTS

i. PAUL AND SEX

I HAVE NOW to describe Paul’s advance from boyhood to early manhood, which he reached just before the outbreak of the European War. In order to do this I must tell chiefly of his changing reactions to three facts in his experience, namely to sex, to personality, and to the immense impersonal.

As I have already said, Paul discovered early in his childhood that a very special and delectable experience could be obtained from that part of his body on which his elders had conferred a most intriguing mystery. Their dropped voices, their hesitations, their veiled suggestions and warnings, had long ago roused his curiosity and prepared him to feel guilt in his new pleasure. Later, during adolescence, the natural development of his body, combined with the influence of stories and drawings circulated at school, increased his itch of experimentation in this field. His own sensitivity, which had been exaggerated by my influence, made him peculiarly susceptible.

In this new experience Paul found something unique, arresting, mysteriously significant, yet significant of he knew not what. I myself, the observer of these disturbing events, can only describe the character which he seemed to himself to find in them, by calling it an impression of almost mystical fulfilment, or of communion with some presence, or being, or power, wholly beyond the grasp of this intellect. It was as though he had unexpectedly discovered how to reach down and touch the deep, living heart of reality, and as though this contact were to quicken him through and through with an exquisite, though deadly thrill. The experience was all too brief, and after it came a vague fear. In the very act it seemed to be promising more than it could ever give. That fleeting contact with the heart of things was but an earnest, seemingly, of some more profound and lasting penetration, not yet to be achieved.

Now this attainment and this promise were not wholly illusory. To minds that have passed far beyond your stage of growth, every sensory experience whatever may afford this exquisite, inebriating sense of contact with objective reality. More primitive minds, however, seldom attain this insight. For them it is only when the sensuous has the added glamour of rarity, or of sin and sanctity, that it can deliver its full content. And so the amazed spirit falsely assumes that only through this one particular sensory window can it reach out and touch reality. Among you the sexual experience alone has universally this unique significance and power. For in you, as in the apes, almost alone among mammals, reproductive potency is constant and excessive. And in nearly all your cultures the consequent excessive interest in sex has been thwarted, in most cases very clumsily.

In Paul’s case it soon became clear that, unless I intervened, the mystery and horror with which sex was treated would cause in him an obsessive fascination. His plight is well enough expressed in a poem which he wrote at this time, but showed to no one. I should explain that henceforth he was frequently to indulge in what he regarded as poetical expression. I shall occasionally quote from his writings to illustrate his spiritual progress. Note that even at this early stage he was deserting the forms of verse that were still orthodox. Here is the poem.

SIN>

I have touched filth.

Only with the finger tip I touched it.

inquisitive of the taste of it.

But it creeps.

It has spread over my body a slime.

and into my soul a stupor.

It is a film over the eyes.

blurring the delicate figuring and ethereal hue of things.

It clogs the ears.

The finer tones of truth are muffled from me.

Beauty has turned her back on me.

I have shamed her, I am desolate.

There is no escape from myself.

And in my loneliness,

It was because of my mad loneliness,

I touched again.

I dabbled for a moment in the sweet filth.

and fled back shuddering in the silence.

Presently I shall slink down again and wallow.

for solace in my mad loneliness.

One of the most difficult facts for the Neptunian explorer to grasp about primitive minds is their obsession and their abject guilt and disgust in respect of bodily appetites. In the constitution of the last human species the excess energy of these appetites is very largely sublimated, innately, into the spiritual and intellectual life. On the other hand, whenever they do demand direct satisfaction, they are frankly and zestfully gratified. In Paul’s species it was the sexual appetite that caused trouble. Now it did not suit me that Paul should become tangled inextricably in sex. His whole generation, I knew, was going to develop along the lines of sex mania, in revulsion from the prudery of its predecessors. But it was necessary that Paul should maintain a true balance, so that his spirit’s energies should be free to direct themselves elsewhere.

The method by which I brought peace to Paul’s troubled mind was easy to me, though disturbing to him. Whenever he began to worry himself with guilty fears, I would force upon his imagination scenes from another world, in which not sex but nutrition was the deed of supreme uncleanness and sanctity. Little by little I pieced together in his mind a considerable knowledge of an early Neptunian species whose fantastic culture has many points in common with your own. Let me here tell you briefly of that culture.

On Neptune, then, there once lived, or from your point of view, there will live, a race of human beings which attained a certain aflluence and social complexity, but was ever hampered by its morbid interest in nutrition. By what freakish turns of fortune this state of affairs was brought about, I need not pause to describe. Suffice it that physiological changes had produced in this human species an exaggerated mechanism of hunger. This abnormality saddled all its members with a craving for food much in excess of biological need; and from the blundering social repression of this craving there arose a number of strange taboos and perversions. By the time this Neptunian species had attained civil life, the function of nutrition had become as perverse and malignant as the function of reproduction in your own society. No reference might be made to it in public, save to its excretory side, which was regarded as a rite of purification. Eating became a private and vaguely obscene act. While in many social situations sexual intercourse was a recognized means of expression and diversion, and even drinking was permitted in the less puritanical circles so long as it was performed through the nose, eating in the presence of another person was not tolerated. In every home a special privy was set aside for eating. This was stocked during the night by the public food carriers, who constituted the lowest caste of society. In place of your chastity ideal there arose a fiction that to refrain from eating was virtuous, and that the most holy persons could live without eating at all. Even ordinary folk, though pardoned for occasional indulgence, were supposed to refrain from the filthy act as far as possible. Repressed nutrition had by now coloured the Whole life of the race. The mouth occupied in its culture much the same position as the phallus with you. A vast and subtle symbolism, like that which in your culture is associated with the sacred and obscene reproductive act, was generated in this case by the sacred and obscene nutritive act. Eating became at once a sin and an epitome of the divine power; for in eating does not the living body gather into itself lifeless matter to organize it, vitalize it? The mouth was, of course, never exposed to view. The awful member was concealed behind a little modesty apron, which was worn below the nose. In prehistoric times the lips had formed the chief visual stimulus to sexual interest, and like the rump of the baboon had developed lavish coloration and turgescence. But very early in the cultural development of the species the modesty apron became universal. Even when the rest of the body was unclad, this garment was retained. And just as in your culture the notorious fig-leaf is vaguely suggestive of that which it conceals, so, in this Neptunian culture, the conventionally decorated covering of the mouth came to mimic furtively the dread orifice itself. Owing to the fact that in polite society no sound might be made which betrayed movement of the lips, speech became distorted and debased. One curious consequence of this obscenity of the mouth was the peculiar status of kissing. Though sexual promiscuity was almost universal, kissing was a deadly sin, except between man and wife. A kiss, bestowed in privacy and darkness, was the true consummation of marriage, and was something infinitely more desirable and more disturbing than the procreative act itself. All lovers longed to be united in a kiss; or, if they were innocents, they looked for some unknown fulfilment, which they vaguely and guiltily felt must be somehow connected with the mouth. Coitus they regarded merely as an innocent and peculiarly delightful caress; but the kiss was the dark, exquisite, sacred, mystically significant, forbidden fruit of all their loving. It was a mutual devouring, the act in which, symbolically, the lover took the substance of the other within his or her own system. Through this connexion with romantic love the kiss gathered to itself all that obscure significance of tender personal relations, of spiritual communion between highly developed personalities, which in your world the same romantic love may confer on coitus. Further, since, like your Trobriand Islanders, the less sophisticated races of this species were often ignorant of the connexion between the sexual act and conception, and since, as with those islanders, sexual intercourse outside the marriage bond often failed to produce offspring, it was commonly believed in the more primitive of these Neptunian societies that the true reproductive act was the kiss. Consequently conception and child-birth came to be endowed with the same mystery, sanctity, and obscenity as nutrition. Sex, on the other hand, remained delightfully uncontaminated. These traditions maintained their power even in civilized societies, which had long ago realized the truth about parenthood. Children were carefully instructed in the hygiene of sex, and encouraged to have blithe sexual relations as soon as they needed that form of expression. But in respect of nutrition they were left in disastrous ignorance. As infants they were suckled, but in strict seclusion. Later they were taken to the food-privy and fed; but they were trained never to mention food in public and of course never to expose their mouths. Obscure and terrifying hints were let fall about the disastrous effects of gustatory self-indulgence. They were told not to go to the privy more than once a day, and not to stay longer than necessary. From their companions they gathered much distorted information about eating; and they were likely to contract diverse kinds of nutritive perversion, such as chewing stones and earth, biting one another or themselves for the taste of blood. Often they contracted such a prurient mania of thumb-sucking, that mouth and thumb would fester. If they escaped these perversions, it was by means of ignorant licentiousness in the food-privy. In consequence of this they were prone to contract serious digestive disorders, which moreover, if discovered, inevitably brought them into contempt. In either case they incurred a shattering sense of guilt, and contracted by auto-suggestion many of the symptoms which rumour attributed to their vice. In maturity they were likely to become either secret gourmets or puritans.

The effect of introducing Paul to this remote world was beneficial in more ways than one. Not only did it lead him gradually to regard his own sexual nature with a new tolerance and a new detachment, so that his mind was no longer tethered to the stake of sex; it also gave him a considerable insight into the mentality of his elders, and opened his eyes precociously to the farcical aspect of his species. Of course, he did not seriously believe his visions. Or rather, as the alien world embodied itself with increasing detail in his mind, he could not entirely disbelieve it, but came to regard it as ‘over there’, instead of ‘here’ like his own world. I had, of course, made him picture the Neptunian species. He glimpsed its squat stone cities, thronged with nude and bulky caricatures of his own race. He saw their mouth-aprons, and their secret vices of nutrition. He saw also their frank sexual behaviour, and actually from the study of sex in that remote age and world he learned much about sex in his own race. Not only so, but he learned his first lesson in that general detachment from the purely Terrestrial values, which I needed to produce in him. He learned, too, to scrutinize all prized and all condemned things to discover whether they were prized or condemned for their own sakes or for some other reason. For instance, comparing his fantasy world with the normal world, he saw that sexual activity and nutritive activity were both valued in both worlds, but that in each world one of these activities had gathered a purely accidental and farcical significance. On the other hand, in both worlds, love, the passionate admiration of spirit for spirit, was a genuine experience which lent something of its glory here to sex, there to nutrition.

Paul’s mysterious life of imagination gave him an understanding of human nature far beyond his years. Combining with his enhanced self-consciousness, it made him strangely sympathetic yet strangely cynical. His companions regarded him as ‘queer’. At most times he behaved as a rather selfish and rather cowardly boy, and he was not incapable of spite. Yet at any moment, it seemed, he might blaze up with what to his companions seemed an almost insane generosity and an entirely self-oblivious courage. At other times he displayed a disconcerting indifference and remoteness. In the middle of some wild game he would suddenly ‘fade out’, play his part perfunctorily or not at all, and presently be seen watching the action with an interest that was somehow not the interest of a boy.

During his schooldays Paul was generally in love with some other boy or with a girl. His erratic temperament prevented the course of true love from running even as smoothly as it does with normal young human animals. One day he would be terrifyingly earnest, next day entirely uninterested, or, worse, interested in the manner of a scientific observer. One day he would be possessive, touchy, spiteful, the next day devoted and self-oblivious. Consequently his loves were uneasy, brief, and in retrospect bitter. The more he was defeated, the more he longed for a lasting intimacy. The more he longed, the more’ impossible’ he became. During the latter part of his school career he grew increasingly aware of and absorbed in human personality. It came to seem to him that the only thing of any account in life was the intimacy of one person with another, in fact with a perfect mate. His whole attention was given to the task of finding for himself the perfect mate. Gradually he began to realize that he would never succeed, and indeed that success was almost impossible. It seemed to him that human beings were doomed to miss for ever the only goal worth seeking, and that in their fated striving for it they must ever lacerate one another.

It was with this conviction that Paul ended his much-prolonged school career and embarked upon an arts course at the University of London. He was very unlike the ordinary ‘freshman’. Some years older than the average, cripplingly self-conscious, scholastically backward and erratic, but equipped with a very unusual stock of random knowledge, and of insight into human nature, he seemed to his fellows an amiable but rather tiresome freak.

While he was still at the university Paul met a young woman some years older than himself, whose image was destined to be a permanent influence in his mind. From the Terrestrial point of view she was no doubt a delightful creature, though not a paragon of classical or any other recognized kind of beauty. Even to the Neptunian eye, sufficiently fortified by long Terrestrial experience, she was not without charm. Of course, very little of her was visible. Save for the face and hands, her whole body was covered and insulted by the peculiarly grotesque clothing of her period. But in her face there was something more than the prettiness which attracted the males of her own species and was a source of a certain winsome complacency in herself. There was a vitality in it which to me was elusively reminiscent of the full-blown and fully conscious beauty of women of my own species. In fact, there was a hint of the more fully human and more frankly animal spirit, which the Last Men look for in woman and the Last Woman in man. But in the eyes of her contemporaries, and in her own eyes too, this pervading characteristic of her face, of her slow free gait, and, as I was later to discover, of her body also (about which there was something of the young cart-horse), was but an oddity, a blemish. Now Paul believed that he was attracted only by her conventional prettiness. He did not know that my influence had inadvertently brought him under the spell of a beauty beyond his usual ken, He prided himself on being able, in spite of his adoration, to point out and ridicule her imperfections, and even delight in them. He did not know that these very ‘imperfections’ of body and mind were the source of her strange spell over him, He recognized, almost apologetically, that they made her for him lovelier, more individual, more real, more peculiarly herself, He did not recognize, though in fact he obscurely felt, that her peculiarity was not a falling short from, but a transcending of, Terrestrial beauty. Mentally she was, he felt, exquisitely complementary to himself, yet basically at one with him. She was able to appreciate and enrich his inner life of fantasy, which hitherto he had never revealed to anyone. She flattered him by regarding him as a’ genius’, He was well content that she should treat him also as a dear simpleton whose dreams were impracticable. Above all, he was strengthened by the knowledge that each had become to the other a most necessary playmate and helpmeet, and that each had already been spiritually enriched by the other for ever after.

This girl, whom I will call Katherine, took delight in ‘bringing Paul out of his shell’, in helping him to hold his own in social intercourse. She taught him to dance; and, though the physical contact made his head swim, he did her credit. They went to many dances, but the custom of the period forbade them to dance together more than two or three times in an evening. Dancing was at first their only opportunity of close contact; for a strange reason. This fundamentally downright and generous creature had unfortunately been educated in a puritanical tradition. Through loyalty to her father, for whom, as I later discovered, she felt a deep affection, she corseted her nature within the limits of a strict social and moral etiquette. By native constitution strong both in animal zest and in maternal tenderness, by upbringing severely conscientious, she had tried to solve the inevitable conflict between her generous vitality and her moral severity by kindliness toward others and strictness toward herself. Maintaining her own puritan conduct, she took vicarious delight in the peccadilloes of others. It was partly her combination of romantically puritanical idealism with imaginative sympathy that won Paul’s respect. Her relation with Paul was at first extremely correct. It had to compensate for the restriction of its physical side by a romantic efflorescence on the mental side. They found many intellectual and aesthetic enthusiasms in common. They also inculcated in one another a common zeal for social service. He swore that in the great cause of making a better world he would ‘wear always the armour of her love’ so that nothing should strike him down. His own love for her would be his lance. Her beauty would be his inspiration, her sense of beauty his guiding star. Theirs was a union, they told one another, primarily of spirit and spirit. The body should fulfil its minor function, in due season.

It was extremely interesting to see how Paul acted his part during the first weeks of this intimacy. The detachment from Terrestrial values which I had been teaching him, at first enabled him to ridicule and damp down his cravings for a more sexual relationship. Neptunian fantasies helped him here. But soon they began to work on the other side also. He came to see the folly and futility of his romance. Externally he remained for long the tame squire of his beloved; but inwardly, though often he was a selfless admirer of this lovely human animal that had confided in him, sometimes he was sheer greedy sex, chafing within the bonds of decency. At other times, behind his caresses he was ice-cold, or even disgusted, or just an ironical observer, correlating events Terrestrial with events Neptunian. But for long these great inner fluctuations appeared to the beloved only as slight whimsical changes of mood, to which’ with maternal tact she gladly adjusted herself.

As time passed, however, Paul became more difficult’. Hitherto, in spite of his moods, he had seemed to the young woman absolutely safe, absolutely devoted to their common code of decency. His occasional respectful importunity flattered her without seriously disturbing her. But now his normal mood began to be penetrated with rather terrifying moments in which his personality seemed to change to something at once more cynical and more violent, more remote and more animal. Most terrifying was the fact that, to her own amazement, she could not feel disgusted, but only conscientious.

The crisis occurred on a summer evening after a dance. Paul and his beloved, flushed with exertion and mutual delight and exalted by a sense of their own daring unconventionality, escaped through the garden to the bare down that fringed their suburb. Arm in arm they walked, then seated themselves on the grass to watch the rising moon. After the usual discreet caresses, Paul extended a reverent hand and stroked her throat. His finger-tips ventured down to the white expanse of bosom, revealed by her low-cut evening dress. Surprised less by his boldness than by her own sudden delight, she caressed the caressing fingers. He ventured further, feeling his way toward her breasts. Paralysed between desire and anxiety, she allowed him to explore those warm, secret, holy excrescences.

This little tactual event, this marvellous, ecstatic new experience, affected both somewhat violently. For Paul it seemed to constitute an important new stage in that quest which had so long tormented him, the quest for reality. It seemed to fulfil, or almost fulfil, at once his hunger for sexual contact and his yearning for spiritual intimacy. It had about it a quality of home-coming after long absence, as though he had been there before in some forgotten existence. It was indeed as though the starved exile, who had for so long been nourished only on phantoms, and had lost even the memory of his motherland, were to find himself back once more in the bosom of reality, bewildered yet fundamentally at home. In her it roused both sexual warmth and also a poignant tenderness almost as of mother for babe. She was torn between a sudden longing to give herself wholly and a sudden alarm at this unprecedented invasion.

How distressed these two innocents would have been had they known that a third person was witness of this shocking deed, that another human being, a man older than Paul by some thousands of years (though not to be born till long after the earth’s destruction) was noting through Paul’s eyes the moonlit eyes and features of the girl, was himself caressing, though through Paul’s hand, the thrilled Terrestrial breasts, and comparing them with corresponding objects upon Neptune! All these data, and also Paul’s own guilty swooning ecstasy, I observed with sympathy born of the most intimate acquaintance, but also with amusement and some impatience, in spite of the detachment and remoteness of two thousand million years.

Even Paul himself was in a manner a detached spectator of his own behaviour. He himself was in a manner standing outside himself and observing these two young courting mammals. This detachment I myself had induced in him. For already at this time of his life I had trained him to be the calm spectator of his own reactions in every fervent experience. In the present case it seemed good to emphasize certain aspects of the matter for him. I therefore began to influence the course of his thoughts. As he savoured the experience, he became increasingly aware of a disturbing and fantastic under-current to his delicious perceptions. He saw with the mind’s eye an early Neptunian couple engaged upon an act which to them was one of shocking licentiousness and excruciating delight, but to the Terrestrial eye was merely ridiculous. This guilty pair stood facing one another, their mouth-aprons removed. From mouth to crimson mouth there stretched a curious fruit, not unlike a much-elongated banana. With mobile lips both he and she were drawing this object into the mouth, and eating it progressively. They gazed into one another’s kindled eyes, their cheeks aflame. Clearly they were both enrapt in that exquisite sweet horror which is afforded only by the fruit that is forbidden. Paul watched the banana shrinking, the faces approaching one another. His own hand, feeling the responsive breasts, paused, lay inert. The fruit had vanished. The faces made contact in a long mumbling kiss. The vision faded. Paul was left with an agonized conflict of the sublime and the ridiculous, for it was evident to him that in this farcical scene he had witnessed the exquisite union of two impassioned spirits.

For a moment Paul stayed motionless, wondering whether to an alien eye he and Katherine would seem any less comic. Almost he decided to withdraw his hand. But now that I had forced him in the very act of single-minded zest to take an unsympathetic view, I was able to give him an exaltation which was secure against ridicule because it included ridicule. First I let him suffer in a single flash of insight the stabbing pleasure of those two Neptunians. I then flooded his mind with a spate of visions, such that he seemed to himself to be witnessing in a few seconds the whole pageant of amorous adventure. He seemed to see the earliest mutual devourings of microscopic jellies in the sea, the far-flung pollination of great trees, slow reptilian embraces, the aerial copulations of swallows, the rutting of stags, the apes’ more conscious amorousness. He saw human forms, brown, yellow, black or white, in their first adventurous fondlings, or clipped together. He saw them now in caves, now in jungle lairs, now in snow huts, blubber-lit, now in lake dwellings, the water lapping the piles, now in curtained Tudor four-posters, now in jangling iron bedsteads in slums, now between fine linen sheets, now among the bushes of public gardens, furtive, struggling with clothes, now beside moorland tams, the untrammelled limbs sun-darkened, glossy. Throughout this experience Paul retained a flavour of the earlier ludicrous scene over the forbidden fruit; but he gathered also a new sense of the deep, groping earnestness of sex. And this jerked him into one of his rare moods of heightened consciousness. The little breast and nipple beneath his hand suddenly revealed itself to him in a most poignant vision, and at the same time the individual spirit of the girl (so it seemed) was laid bare dazzlingly to his own spirit’s gaze. He saw, moreover, that she wanted what he also wanted.

But now the girl, sensing a change in his mood, and feeling that something ought to be done, first pressed his hand upon her yielding breast, and then tried to extricate it. Paul felt the soft flesh crushed between his fingers. Exulting, he gripped, so vigorously that she gave a little scream. Then suddenly she found herself caught in an embrace that was altogether too frankly sexual to be tolerated. Yet, to her own surprise, she yielded to it for a moment, savouring the new experience. Then it became clear that if she was to preserve any longer that which a virtuous young lady is supposed to cherish more than life itself, she must take immediate action. She struggled, expostulated, then suddenly, greedily, seized Paul’s lip between her teeth. The pain shot through him like lightning. His grip relaxed. They separated. While he mopped his bleeding mouth, she arranged her clothing, swore she would never see him again, and then retreated toward the house with all the dignity she could muster.

But they continued to meet, for each had by now become necessary to the other. The intimacy deepened. They became ‘engaged’, though for financial reasons they had no prospect of marriage. They saw one another every day. The solid basis of their friendship, their mental insight into one another and joy in each other’s natures, compelled them to seek one another. But their love was becoming warped by the longing for that final bodily intimacy which both craved, but she dared not permit. To the Neptunian observer it was obvious that for both their sakes she ought to have cut herself away from him once and for all, or else to have yielded fully to her own desire and his. For the former course she had no will The initial feminine reluctance, the desire to preserve herself intact, had long since given place to the no less feminine hunger to give herself and be merged with her chosen male. But an irregular union would have been intolerable to her self-respect. She was a child of her age, and her age was still in spirit, though not in date, ‘nineteenth century’. Though under Paul’s influence she had recently begun to modify her puritanism, and now liked to think of herself as ‘modern’ and unconventional, there was a point beyond which she dared not go.

The months passed. Paul became more and more obsessed. He thought of nothing but love-making and his own unhappy situation It became necessary that he should stagnate no longer; for the year 1914 was approaching, in which he must be fully recovered from all the fevers of adolescence. I therefore decided to interfere. Two courses were open to me. Either I could make the girl give herself, or I could remove her. From the Neptunian point of view the obvious course was to let Paul have his way, and gain the little treasure of experience that would thus be added to him. In many ways they would both have benefited. They would have found new health and vigour of body, and for a while new peace and vitality of mind. But I knew that, harmless and invigorating as this culmination would have been for other individuals and in another society, for these two young Terrestrials it would have brought disaster. In the first place, they might have inadvertently produced a new individual of their species; and then both mother and child, and the young father also, would have been persecuted by the barbarian society in which they lived. I judged that such an experience would render Paul unfit for my experiment. It would have tethered his attention for too long to the personal. Secondly, they would have suffered a spiritual disaster, for they themselves both accepted the code which they would have infringed. Had I driven them on to taste their innocuous, pretty, forbidden fruit, they would soon have become a burden to one another. With the inevitable cooling of ardour they would have assumed a false obligation each to the other, and at the same time they would have lapsed into guilty disgust, recriminations and moral degradation. This would have side-tracked Paul’s attention for too long a period.

I therefore decided to remove the girl. To do this I had first to enter her mind and discover how I might conveniently effect my purpose. Poor child, she would indeed have been overwhelmed with shame and horror had she known that for several weeks all her most private acts and secret thoughts were observed by a hidden, an indwelling and a male spectator. I was, for instance, present one Saturday night while she lowered her still coltish body into a hot bath, tingling and gasping as the heat devoured her. I detected her mind’s quick backward glance at Paul’s devouring but unfulfilled embraces. I noted also that she let the hot water flow and the temperature of the bath rise till she was on the verge of agony, before she finally sat up and turned off the tap. I was present also at her dreams, in which so often she let Paul have his way, before she woke and was regretfully thankful it had only been a dream.

A brief study of her personality sufficed to show just which of the -young men in her environment would best suit her nature. I turned her attention in his direction; rather roughly, I fear, for I noticed that she began to have doubts of her sanity. In self-pride and in compassion for Paul she clung for a while to the old love, but in vain. She struggled desperately against her fate, bitterly ashamed of her impotence and fickleness. But by a kind of inner hypnotism I forced her to receive into her heart the image of the new love that I had chosen for her. I made her dwell on his admirable and charming qualities, and I blinded her to his somewhat grotesque appearance. Very soon I had made her undertake a vigorous, almost shameless campaign upon him. Much to his surprise and delight, much to the bewilderment of their mutual friends, this unassuming but prosperous young merchant found himself the adored adorer of one who hitherto had treated him merely with calm kindness. I now filled the bemused young woman with immodest haste for the wedding. Within a few weeks the pair did actually enter into a union which, owing to my careful selection, was quite the most successful marriage of their generation. I bore in mind, however, that it would later become desirable to bring her once more into relation with Paul.

While these events were proceeding I was in a sense resident in two minds at once; for when I had done my work upon the girl, I returned to Paul at the very instant in which I had left him. Thus I was able to watch his reactions to the whole drama, and to help him triumph in his defeat.

When first he had begun to suspect that she was turning away from him, he plunged into a more determined suit. But I was now very constantly treating him with visions and meditations of an impersonal kind, which so drenched his wooing that it became less persuasive than disturbing. In fact, by philosophical and poetical extravagances he frightened Katherine into the arms of his rival. When at last he learned of the marriage, he passed, of course, through a phase of self-pitying despair; but within a fortnight he was already, through my influence, no less than through native resilience, beginning to explore a very different field of experience.

ii. PAUL DEVOUT

WHEN PAUL HAD recovered from the first shock of his misfortune, he emerged to find himself painfully oscillating between two moods. In the one he strove to protect his wounded soul under a bright new armour of cynicism. She was just an animal, and her behaviour was the expression of obscure physiological events. And so, after all, was his own. The love that he so prized had no intrinsic virtue whatever. In the other mood, however, he clung to the faith that though this love of his had foundered, nevertheless love, the mutual insight and worship of one human person for another, was good in itself, and indeed the supreme good of life. All other goods, it seemed, ‘were either negligible, or instrumental to this greatest good. He had recently lived for many weeks on a plane that was formerly beyond him. Now in his loneliness he began to go over again and again the treasure that he had acquired, namely his new and overwhelmingly vivid and delightful apprehension of a particular human being, called Katherine. Bitter as was his loneliness, this treasure could never be taken from him. And the more he pored over it, the more he asked himself whether it was exceptional, or whether it was a fair sample of existence. Hitherto he had increasingly thought of the universe in terms of mechanical intricacies and the huge star-sprinkled darkness, or at best in terms of a vital but impersonal trend of all things toward some goal inconceivable to man. But now he began to regard all this as mere aridity in which there was no abiding place for the one superlative excellence, human personality, love-inspired. It was borne in upon him at last with new significance that love was’ divine ‘. He began to find a new and lucid meaning for the brave statement, ‘God is Love ‘. It meant, surely, that this best of all things known to man was also present in spheres beyond man’s sphere; that human personality and love were not the only nor the highest forms of personality and love; that Love, with a capital L, Love which was not merely a relation between persons but somehow itself a Person, an all-pervading and divine Person, was after all the governing power of the universe. If this were indeed so, as many professed to believe, then all human loves must, in spite of temporary frustration, be secure of eternal fulfilment. Even his love for Katherine and her no less divine, though now distracted, love for him must somehow, ‘in eternity’, have its fruition.

I must not here describe the struggle that took place in Paul’s mind between his cynical and his devotional impulses. It was a fluctuating battle. Wandering along Gower Street, with his hands in the pockets of his grey flannel trousers, and half a dozen books under his arm, he would breathe in cheerfulness with the dilute spring air of London, till, as he pursued his course round Bedford Square, God was once more in his heaven. In Charing Cross Road he would stray into the ‘Bomb Shop’, and be confronted with new doubts. Walking over the spot where subsequently Nurse Cavell’s monument was to proclaim her courage and her countrymen’s vulgarity, the poor boy would sometimes be infected by a momentary and unintelligible horror, derived from my own foreseeing mind. Soon the placid bustle of the great railway station would bring comfort once more; but on the journey to his southern suburb he would be flung again into despair by the faces of sheep, cattle, pigs and monkeys that masked the spirits of his fellow-travellers. Then at last, walking bare-headed on the suburban down that overhung his home, Paul might once more, though rather wearily, believe in God.

It seemed to Paul that in his cynical mood he was definitely smaller, meaner and more abject than when he was once more unfurling on the battlements of his own heart the banner of his faith in the God of Love. In many of his contemporaries also much the same fluctuation of mood was occurring, and to them as to Paul it seemed that the issue lay between the old faith, however modernized, and the complete abnegation of human dignity. Yet Paul and his contemporaries were mistaken. It was not in faith but in utter disillusionment and disgust that the human spirit had to triumph, if ever it was to triumph at all.

While he was absorbed in his religious perplexity, Paul was intrigued by a group of fellow-students whose aim it was to solve the troubles of the modern world by making modern men and women into sincere Christians. They introduced him to a young priest, whom the whole group regarded as their spiritual leader. At first this young man’s emphatic hand-grip and earnest gaze roused in Paul nothing but a new variant of the disgust and suspicion which, long ago, he had felt toward the ghastly heartiness of the family doctor. He was also repelled by the fact that the elect secretly referred to their master as the Archangel. But as he became better acquainted with the priest, he, like the others, began to fall under his spell. To Paul in his new phase of reverence for human personality, his new revulsion from ‘materialism’, this man appeared as a spiritual aristocrat, as one who could move about the world without being swallowed up by the world, without so much as dirtying his feet. He was ‘other-worldly’, not in the sense that he sought to escape from this world, but that he carried round with him an atmosphere which was not this world’s atmosphere. Like those water-insects which take down with them into the deep places a bubble of air for breathing, he took down with him into this world a celestial ether to maintain his spiritual life.

So it seemed to Paul. But to his Neptunian guest the matter did not appear in the same light. During Paul’s love affair I had of course to put up with much that was tedious and banal, but I had been constantly refreshed by the underlying simplicity and sincerity of the amorous couple. In the new incident, however, I had to watch Paul indulging in a very tiresome self-deception. He allowed his admiration for the person of this young priest to obscure his view of the universe. This aberration was indeed a necessary phase in his growth, a necessary process in the preparation of the experimental culture upon which I was to operate. But it was none the less a tiresome phase for the observer. Not that Paul’s new enthusiasm was wholly misguided. Far from it. Even from the Neptunian point of view, this ‘Archangel’ was indeed in a limited sense a spiritual aristocrat, for undoubtedly he was gifted with a vision and a moral heroism impossible to most of his fellows. But he was an aristocrat debased by circumstance. He had not been able to resist an environment which was spiritually plebeian. Though in his life he faithfully expressed what he called the superhuman humanity of his God, he almost wholly failed to do justice to another and more austere feature of his own vision, a feature which indeed he never dared fully to acknowledge, even to himself, since in terms of his own religious dogma it appeared starkly as a vision of superhuman inhumanity.

Paul saw the Archangel often and in many circumstances, in public meetings, at the homes of his followers, and at the boys’ club which the priest had organized for the young ‘rough diamonds’ of his dockland parish. He saw him also at his church services. These impressed Paul in a perplexing manner. He noted, at first with some misgiving, the setting in which they took place, the scant and rather smelly congregation, so uncomprehending, but so obviously devoted to the person of the priest; the debased Gothic architecture and strident coloured windows; the music, so historic, so trite, yet to Paul so moving, the surpliced urchins of the choir, furtively sucking sweets, the paraphernalia of the altar, brass and velvet; the muffled noise of traffic in the great thoroughfare outside; and the occasional interruptions by some ship’s steam-whistle as she nosed her way through the Thames fog toward China or the Argentine. In the midst of all this stood the tall, white-robed, fair-haired Archangel, intoning with that restrained yet kindling voice of his, which to Paul in his more devout mood made the hackneyed words of the service novel, urgent, significant with a piercing, blinding lucidity. In his rarer cynical mood, however, the same performance seemed no more meaningful than the ritual phrases of a parrot.

The Archangel’s influence on Paul was partly physical. The younger man was attracted by the still athletic figure, the delicate firm lips, the finely cut aquiline nose. They seemed to him to embody ages of righteousness. In the priest’s manner, too, he found a strong attraction. It soothed him, like a cool hand on the brow. Yet also it gripped him and shook him into life. But chiefly Paul was impressed by the man’s sublime confidence, almost arrogance, in his own religious faith and practice, and by his lively bantering affection for the straying sheep of his flock. Paul’s faith was weak. His love of his fellow-men was more theoretical than practical. But the Archangel, seemingly, was a real Christian. He practised what he preached. He really did love his fellows, not merely as savable souls but as unique individuals. He really did see something peculiar and beautiful in each person. He accepted others as he found them, and served them with the same spontaneity as a man serves his own needs. Through him Paul began at last to feel a real warmth toward his fellow human animals, and in doing so he felt exultantly that he was definitely rising to an ampler and more generous life. Because of this he became extremely ready to receive the metaphysical implications of the Archangel’s religion, which also had been the religion of his own childhood, seldom seriously contemplated but always absent-mindedly believed.

Paul fancied that he now saw at last, with almost the intuitive certainty of elementary mathematics, not only that the governing principle of the universe was love, but that the actual embodiment of that love was Jesus. Moreover, under the influence of the Arch-angel, who had been stimulated by Paul’s searching questions to make statements of doubtful orthodoxy, Paul now affirmed that the universe was celestial through and through, that all things in it, including Satan, worked together for the perfect expression of love, the perfect expression of the nature of Jesus. And the nature of Jesus, Paul learned not from the Bible but from contemplation of the Archangel. For the Archangel was very obviously sustained from morning till evening by a sense of the presence of his divine master. All who came near him were infected with something of this sense. He radiated a conviction of the ultimate rightness of all things, and at the same time he fired men with a zeal for putting the apparently wrong things right. Not that he was a mere stained-glass saint. Paul was proudly, lovingly conscious of the Archangel’s vivid humanity, even of his little weaknesses, which served greatly to endear him to his admirers. He had, for instance, a quaint passion for raisins. After a trying day he would eat them by the handful, almost defiantly. They seemed to have for him the double attraction of the grape’s sacred and profane significance.

Little by little Paul became an earnest Christian. Deep down in his breast, rather than in his mind, he argued thus, ‘Can such a perfect being as the Archangel be mistaken about God? He is too wise. Can he be deceiving me? He is too sincere, too loving. If this man says that God is Love, it is so.’ If ever his doubts returned, he would run to the Archangel to gain strength to abolish them. Once when this had happened, and the two were talking in the priest’s sitting-room, before a fire that radiated optimism, while the landlady’s cat lay asleep on the hearth-rug, Paul had what he considered a real religious experience. The Archangel had been patiently throttling Paul’s doubts. ‘Hang on to this, Paul,’ he said, ‘Love alone matters. And whatever is needed in the world for the existence of love is justified. What kind of a world is it that we actually find around us? I don’t mean your beloved stars and nebulae and your pettifogging laws of nature. No doubt they are marvellous, and all part of God’s house. But they are only the floor-boards. I mean the human world. What do you find there? You find Satan still at large. He always was, and always will be, till time is finished. And why? Because love that has not got to be for ever fighting is no more love than the unborn babe is a man. And so, Paul, we must thank God that, of his great love for us, he made Satan to torment us.’ He paused, then continued: ‘That’s heresy! You see what happens if one thinks too much about these old problems. Think of Christ only. Feel his god-head. Can’t you feel his presence in this room now?’

The Archangel raised his hand and looked at Paul as though listening to angel choirs. For some moments both remained silent. Gradually it came to seem to Paul that the room was all alive, all aglow, all a-murmur with a presence. Was it the presence of this man? Yes, but surely also it was the presence of Jesus. The room? Nay, the universe. The whole universe, it seemed, was somehow gathered into that room, and the whole of it was manifestly infused with the divine love. Everything was warm and bright, tender and true, or else heroically triumphant over an Evil that was not merely defeated but somehow shown never to have been really evil at all. To the adoring Paul it seemed that the very stars and outer universes came flocking into that little room, like lambs, to be comforted by this Shepherd, this supreme Archangel Jesus. They brought with them their little troubles, their sore feet and their stomachaches, and he, with the magic of his love, cured these little troubles so miraculously that they never had existed at all, save as occasions for his love. Paul and the universes nestled together like little white lambs in the bosom of this Love. Once more it seemed to him that he had made contact with reality, that he had penetrated this time surely to the very heart of the universe. The experience was very wonderful, very strange, yet also mysteriously familiar, with the familiarity of some forgotten existence, an existence so remote that it seemed entirely outside time. It seemed to Paul that an immense energy flooded in upon him. He felt in himself the ancient, the longed-for strength of faith. At last, after all his barren years, he was tense with a new vitality, fully charged, ready to spend himself in a new effulgent life.

The smiling, transfigured Archangel laid a hand on Paul’s knee. Paul said, ‘At last I feel Jesus.’

Now while Paul and the Archangel were yielding themselves to this glamorous experience, there was indeed a presence’ with them in the room, though one of a very different nature from that which these two Terrestrial animals themselves had conjured in their imaginations. It was the presence of a man who had seen human species after human species wrest for itself out of chaos some slight amenity and some precarious faith, only to collapse into misery, into despair, often into agony. It was the presence of one who himself looked forward to the impending extinction of Man; who found in this event, and in all existence, overmastering beauty indeed, but for the love-sick human individual no consolation. Strange that it was my presence in Paul’s mind, my coldly scrutinizing presence, that had lent actuality to his sense of union with the God of Love! The exhortation of the priest had made him notice in himself an obscure feeling which had already on earlier occasions fleetingly disturbed him with a sense that in Some way he was ‘possessed’. I now found him peering, as it were, into the recesses of his being in search of the source of this feeling, believing that what he would see would be the love-gaze of Jesus. Had he discovered what it was that actually’ possessed’ him, had he come, so to speak, face to face with his Neptunian parasite, his vision would have been shattered, and no doubt he would have taken me for the Devil. But I was at pains to elude detection. Mentally I held my breath, as it were, lest any slight movement of my mind should reveal more of me than that vague’ presence’ which he had so fantastically misinterpreted.

It was not easy for me to maintain my immobility, for the spectacle of Paul’s fervour stirred me deeply, both toward pity and toward laughter. For what was it that was happening to him? Apart from the complication of my presence’, which lent a spurious actuality to his vision, his experience was an epitome of the religious history of the First Human Species, a pitiable confusion of factors irrelevant to one another. In the first place Paul, partly through the wealth of cosmic imagery with which I had already drenched him, had indeed come face to face with the majesty of the universe. In the second place he had with Katherine experienced very vividly the great excellence which is called love. But the Christian tradition, working on him through his revered priest, had combined with his own desire so as to persuade him to attribute love to the pitiless universe itself. This confusion was caused partly by a trick played upon him by his own remote past. For the strange familiarity and the delicious consolation and peace which Paul had savoured in this religious moment were after all but an echo of his own obscure yearning for the tenderness of the breast and the elysium of the womb.

Henceforth Paul thought of himself as a soldier of Christ. He undertook a campaign of asceticism and general discipline. For instance, he made rules to limit his eating. When he succeeded in keeping them, the only result was that he rose from every meal with a wolfish craving, and thoughts of food haunted him throughout the day. He tried sleeping on his bedroom floor, but always before the night was over he crept guiltily into bed. His self-discipline was always half-hearted and ineffective, for he had no real faith in its spiritual efficacy. He did it, not with the earnestness of the God-hungry soul, but because earnestly religious persons were supposed to do so, and he wanted to be one of them.

Paul found great satisfaction in doing odd jobs for the Archangel. He took up work at the boys’ club. Unfortunately he soon found that he was not much good with boys, having few of the attributes which they admired. He was useless at boxing and billiards, useless at back-chat. And he had no authority, for in his heart he was frightened of the boys. But for the Archangel’s sake, and also for self-discipline, he stuck to the club. Finally he took charge of the canteen. He was cheated over halfpence, and at the end of the evening he basely made up the losses out of his own pocket. In intervals of selling coffee and buns be sat behind the counter reading. But this furtive practice caused him much heart-searching and when the Archangel was about, he put his book away and tried to be genial with the boys.

Paul succeeded in persuading himself that nearly all his actions were expressions of his master-motive, to be a soldier of Christ in the modern world. But as a matter of fact he had many quite independent interests. He lived a varied and often hilarious life with the little band of the Archangel’s student admirers. He had also several tentative amorous passages. He worked industriously and with some success. He read much contemporary literature and some popular science. But all his scientific thought he censored rigorously for religion’s sake.

Paul’s religious fervour expressed itself chiefly not in action but in writing free verse of a quasi-biblical character. He persuaded himself that he had an ‘urge’ to produce verbal formulations of his spiritual experience, that he was’ inspired’. But to his parasite it was clear that what he produced in this phase was not wrung from him by the intensity of experience. These poems were but literary exercises, imitative in technique, and seldom vitalized by any original imagination. The Archangel applauded these effusions because they were Correct in sentiment, but he regarded them as merely play, not as a man’s work for God. He could not perceive that though they failed they meant much to Paul. It is worth while to give one example for the light which it throws on Paul’s mind at this time.

MEN

Behold the sons of men.

who sin.

whose hearts are divine!

In selfishness they heap misery on one another;

yet for love they die.

They are blown about like dead leaves;

yet for love they stand firm.

For bread they trample one another.

yet for a dream they die.

Scatter gold among them, and they are beasts;

show them God, and they are sons of God.

iii. PAUL FACES THE FACTS

WITHOUT MY HELP it might have taken Paul some years to outgrow his phase of mental obedience and spiritual confusion. But time was pressing. I needed him to be well-advanced in his next phase at the close of his university career, so that he might be prepared to meet the crisis of 1914 in a significant manner. Therefore, when I had allowed him some months of play in his little Christian nursery, I began once more to exercise my influence upon him. I infiltrated him with images of cosmical majesty and horror, with apprehensions of human weakness and meanness and agony, with doubts and questions intolerable to his religion.

During the previous two years Paul had come across a number of distressing facts about the world, but he had contrived to see them in the rosy light of his religion. These experiences now, through my influence, began to haunt him. At all times of the day and night he was now liable to sinister visual and auditory images, either taken intact from his own past, or reconstructed in still more repugnant forms. It was as though hitherto he had been wandering in a luxuriant but volcanic land in which only now and again he had encountered the blow-holes and sulphurous jets of nether chaos; but now, it seemed, the whole terrain was heaving, cracking, belching under his feet. Over his books in his own comfortable suburban home he would be distressed by visions of the slum-tenement homes that he had visited when he was working for an ‘after-care’ committee. And somehow they seemed more sordid and overcrowded in imagination than in reality. While he was walking on the down, he would remember with abnormal distinctiveness a brawl that he had once witnessed in the East End. Bottles were thrown. A man’s face was cut. A woman was knocked over. Her head came against the kerbs tone with an audible crack, like the collision of bowls on a green. While he was reading or eating or walking, and especially while he was lying in bed and not yet asleep, faces would confront him; faces which, when he had encountered them in actuality, had seemed but opaque masks, grey, pinched, flabby, or purplish and bloated, but now in imagination revealed their underlying personalities to him with harrowing expressiveness. For I permitted him to see them as they would have appeared to a Neptunian fresh from the world of the Last Men. He had once been shown over a lunatic asylum. The faces that now haunted him were, he recognized, faces of sane men and women, yet they reminded him distressingly of those imbecile faces. Faces of all kinds they were, young and old, business men, fashionable women, unshaven labourers, clerks, young bloods, lawyers; all pushing themselves forward at him, leering, smirking, whimpering, impressing, imploring, all so intent, so self-important, so blind. Somehow they reminded him of cheap ornate lamps, rusty, shop-soiled, and never lit. The queer phrase ‘blind lamps’ reiterated itself to him on these occasions. Another image haunted him in connexion with these faces, and seemed to him to summarize them all and symbolize the condition of his species. It was an image which I constructed in his mind in detail and with verisimilitude, and endowed with a sense of familiarity, though in fact it was not derived from his past but from his future experience during the war. He seemed to see, lying in mud, a dead mare, already decaying. From its hindquarters, which were turned towards him, there projected the hideously comical face of its unborn foal. The first time he encountered this apparition Paul was at a political meeting. Before him on the platform sat a company of politicians, city worthies and their wives. A cabinet minister was perorating. Suddenly Paul saw the foal, and in a flash recognized its expression in the speaker, in the ladies and gentlemen on the platform, in the audience. His gorge rose, he thought he was going to vomit. Stumbling over his neighbour’s feet, he fled out of the hall. Henceforth he was very prone to see the foal, at lectures, at dances, in church. Even in the Archangel’s smile he sometimes recognized with horror that foetal grin.

Another type of imagery and of thought I also forced on Paul at this time. I first impelled him to read works of contemporary literature and science which were discountenanced by the Archangel. Furtively he began to return to the interests that had been roused in him before he came to the university, interests in the intricacy of the physical world, in the types of living things, in the theory of evolution, in the astronomical immensities. But whereas formerly these things delighted him, now they terrified him, even while they fascinated. I took care that they should haunt him with imagery. He had curious sensations as of sweeping with increasing speed through space, while the stars streamed past him like harbour lights. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was dropping into the tumultuous and incandescent vapours of the sun. Sometimes he glimpsed spinning worlds, parched and airless, uninhabited, meaningless.

When Paul had been subjected to this violent influence for some weeks, he began, like many of his contemporaries, to find a kind of consolation in the theory of evolution, romantically interpreted. It made worm and ant and man fellow-workers in a great cause. Exactly what they were all working for, he did not know; nor could he justify his strong conviction that, though all had achieved something, man was doing far more than the others, and might yet do infinitely better. Those thrusting imbecile faces that haunted him, and were the faces of his fellow-men and himself, those foal faces, were really not men at all, not what men should be and might be, any more than the grinning and putrefying foal was a horse. Gallantly Paul now began to convince himself that the whole universe was striving toward some supreme expression of life, though blindly in conflict with itself, torturing itself. He wrote a poem in which man appeared as ‘the germ of the cosmic egg’. Later he tore it up and wrote another in which the cosmic egg was said to consist entirely of germs, each of which was trying to devour the others and include their substance in its own expanding form. In another he declared that God was’ the Soul of the World, striving to wake’. He put great pains into the making of these verses, and had a sense of vision and achievement such as he had never known before. One short poem I quote, as it shows clearly the rebirth of my influence in him and the quickening of his own imagination.

EVANESCENCE

As a cloud changes.

so changes the earth.

Coasts and valley.

and the deep-rooted hills

fade.

They last but for a little while;

as cloud-tresses among the rocks.

they vanish.

And as a smile gleams and fades.

so for a very little while.

Life rejoices the earth.

From the beginning fire.

then frost, endless.

And between, the swift smile, Life.

From the beginning fire.

then frost, endless.

and between.

Mind.

Paul ventured to show these poems to the Archangel. The young author was diffident about them, and did not expect them to be taken very seriously; but the manner in which the Archangel received them was something of a shock to him. Gently but also emphatically the priest told him that he was in danger of serious heresy. God could not be the soul of the world, since he had created the world and would survive the world. As for the cosmic egg, still more the evanescence of life in the universe, Paul ought to realize that such bizarre ideas were dangerous, since they obscured the central fact of religion, namely the direct and eternal intercourse between God and man. Surely that amazing fact was far more interesting than these grotesque fancies. Paul was so upset that he turned actually dizzy and faint. No wonder, for here was the being whom he respected above all others and even took to be in some manner divine, condemning ideas which to Paul himself seemed to have very far-reaching and very beautiful significance.

This experience was the beginning of a long period of heart-searching in which Paul became increasingly aware of being torn in two directions, namely, toward the Archangel and toward something which he could not yet at all clearly see. He began to oscillate between two moods. One was a mood of interest in personality and the personal God whom man had rightly or wrongly conceived in his own image. The other was a mood of revulsion from man and his God, and of interest in all that vastness within which man is but a tremulous candle-flame, very soon to be extinguished. He could not integrate these moods in one. Yet whichever was the mood of the day, he felt obscurely but strangely that it was incomplete, that somehow the other was just as necessary, though at the moment he could not feel it. On the one hand was the Archangel, and Jesus, and all the humbler beauties of human persons. On the other was the rippled lake, the stars, the whole vast intricacy of nature. On the one hand was Love, and on the other the more mysteriously beautiful thing, Fate. And Life, how did Life relate itself to this profound dichotomy of the spirit? When he was in what he called the Archangel mood, he could without difficulty extend his interest so as to regard the story of evolution as the story of a great crusade of myriads of spirits freely striving to achieve some glorious end in praise of God, and sacrificing themselves by the way in myriads of casualties. When he was in the mood of the stars, he regarded the same great story as one somewhat intricate system of wave-trains spreading its innumerable undulations in ever-widening, ever-fading circles on the surface of existence, presently to vanish. Strange that, so long as he remained in the mood of the stars, this thought did not outrage him. He accepted it — not with reluctance, but with joy.

It was while he was still only beginning to discover the existence of these two moods in himself that Paul had to decide once and for all what he would do in the world. The Archangel said, ‘If your faith is secure, prepare to become a priest of the one God. If it is not secure, find some solid practical work to do in the service of man.’ Paul’s faith was not secure. On the other hand, he dreaded the thought of being caught up in the mills of business or industry. And he did seriously desire to play some part in the great work of salvation. If it was not for him to turn men’s attention to Jesus, at least he might turn the attention of the young to the many lovely features of existence. After much agonized hesitation he finally decided that he must become a teacher. He therefore persuaded his family to let him take a diploma, hoping that a thorough preparation would do away with his proved incompetence with boys. At the outbreak of the European War he was about to take up his first post, in one of the large suburban secondary schools of the Metropolis.

For some months Paul was engaged on what seemed to him a life and death struggle in two entirely different spheres. While he was desperately trying to acquire the art of teaching, he was at the same time, and increasingly, concerned with an unprecedented fact in his world, namely, the European War. Presently this fact gave rise to a new and bewildering personal problem, namely, the problem of his own conduct in a war-racked world.

At the school he had set out to inspire his pupils with the love of ‘culture’. In fact he took the work very seriously. He spent many hours in preparation and correction, but was always behindhand, and therefore in class always uncertain. The boys soon found him out, and took delight in tripping him. He became more and more insecure. On the side of discipline also he came to grief, though he had excellent theories on this subject. Discipline, he argued, should be self-imposed, not imposed by others. Unfortunately such discipline is the most difficult to inculcate, especially amongst rebellious young animals who have been brought up on something different. Paul himself had none of that native and unconscious authority which alone could have ensured success in such circumstances. The boys soon found that good sport was to be had by baiting him. He changed his method, and tried to impose order, but could achieve no more than a partial suppression of disorder. The more tyrannous his control, the more gleefully did rebellion raise her hydra heads. Things came to such a pass that one afternoon when the last class was over, and the boys had stampeded away along the corridor, Paul, seated upon his dais, dropped his head forward on his chalk-dusty hands. I felt tears trickle through his fingers on to the desk. The syllables of a desperate prayer formed themselves in his throat and on his lips. ‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ he cried, ‘make me different from what I am.’ It seemed to him that he had reached the very rock-bottom of despair. For this despair was more acutely conscious, more precisely formulated than any of his earlier despairs. He was a grown man (so he imagined), and completely incompetent to deal with life. In adolescence his dread had been that he himself would miss fulfilment, that he would’ get stuck’, stranded, and never explore the promised lands of life. But now he dreaded far more (so he persuaded himself) that he would never be able to do anything even of the humblest order ‘to the glory of God ‘. This was now his master motive, to pull his weight, to do a man’s work, to be able to look his fellows in the eyes and say, ‘Of course I am nothing out of the common, but you can see that I am pulling my weight.’ He longed to cut adrift and start all over again at something else. But at what? Outside his little prison there was nothing but the war. The boys were already skilfully torturing him about the war. Then why did he not go? He would make a wretched soldier, but the Government said that every one was needed. Even if he merely got himself shot, he would have ‘done his bit’. And he would be quit of all this misery.

For some while he continued to lie with his head in one hand, while the other crumpled the harsh black folds of his gown. To go and be a soldier. What did it really mean? Military discipline. Doing stupid things just because you were told to. Pushing bayonets into straw dummies, and later into live bellies. Feeling those jagged shell splinters tear through your own flesh and bones. It was all inconceivably horrible. But apparently it had to be, since Civilization was in danger. Then surely he must go. And how good to be out of all this fiasco of teaching. Anything was better than that. How good to surrender one’s conscience into the keeping of the army. That way surely lay peace of mind. Like surrendering your conscience to the Church. Give it to a general to look after. Yes, he must not stand aside any longer from the great spiritual purification and revival that the Archangel said was coming out of the war. It had begun already. The war was helping people to get out of themselves, helping them to see Jesus. The Archangel said so. Yes, he would enlist. Then there would be nothing to do but to obey, be courageous, relentless. Then all his troubles would be escaped. Just set your teeth and be a hero. So easy, compared with this work that was simply beyond him. He looked at his watch. Late! And he wanted to get his hair cut before catching the train home. Hurriedly he began to gather up his books.

Then he paused. Once more he bowed over the desk. Must he really help in their stupid war, their filthy, mad, backward-looking war, that was wrecking the civilization it was meant to save. It was like saving a man from death by an operation that was bound to be fatal. People said war was better than dishonour. But from the world point of view war was dishonour. Nothing was so base as war. Better far that the Germans should overrun Belgium, France, England. But no. The Archangel said this was all wrong. He said Jesus was definitely on our side. What was the truth about it all, what was the truth? ‘Jesus, Jesus, help me, if you ever help anyone. Why am I alive? What is it all for? Why is there this terrible world? Why are we all so horrible?’ Jesus did not answer. Paul lay still, his mind almost blank; then he yawned, raised his head, and rested his chin on his hand. He had no further thoughts. He gazed vacantly at the chalk-grains on the desk.

At this point I undertook a serious intervention in Paul’s mind. As he gazed at the minute white points of the chalk, I induced him to regard them as stars in the Milky Way. I then made him blow upon the desk. The whole galaxy shifted, spread outwards, streamed down the sloping board; thousands of stars tumbled into the abyss. Paul watched, fascinated. Then he shuddered arid covered his face with his hands. I now flooded his astonished mind with images and ideas. In imagination he still saw the star-dust streaming, whirling. But I made him seize, with miraculous vision, one out of all the myriad suns, round which circled infinitesimal planets. One of these planets his piercing eye regarded minutely. He watched its surface boiling, seething, settling into oceans and continents. Then with supernaturally penetrative eyes, he saw in the tidal waters of the ever-fluctuating, drifting continents the living Scum, our ancestor. He saw it propagate, spread, assume a thousand forms, invade the oceans and the lands. He saw forests creep over the plains; and with his magically piercing vision he detected among the greenery a sparse dust of beasts. Reptiles clambered, ran, took wing, or reached up to crunch the tree-tops. In a twinkling they vanished. Then beneath his eyes a finer and more vital dust, the mammals, was blown into every land. Now the tempo of his vision slowed, slowed. Man, super-simian, sprinkled the valleys with his hovels, the lake-shallows with his huts, the hill-tops with his megaliths. He set fire to the forests, tilled the plains, built cities, temples, palaces, Nilotic pyramids, Acropolis. Along thread-like imperial roads the legionaries percolated, like blood corpuscles. Upon a minute hill, beside a city wall, a minute crowd existed and vanished. Presently there was a rash of churches, then little smoke-clouds of wars and revolutions, then a sudden tissue of steel tracks and murky blotches. And now to Paul’s straining eyes there appeared for an instant a little crooked line stretching across Europe. On either side of this line wave-trains drifted, infinitely faint, confused, but unmistakable. Wave-trains of grey, blue, khaki, were seen to advance upon the line from East and West, recoiling in feebler undulation athwart their own advancing successors. They vanished. The tempo of the vision accelerated. Aeons rushed headlong into pastness. The minute continents deformed themselves. The little sun shrank, faded to a red spark; and as it did so the little planet became snowy white, a simple chalk-grain, which presently was lost in obscurity. The sun-spark was snuffed out. Paul’s gaze seized upon another sun. This also was snuffed out. One by one, thousand by thousand, all the stars were extinguished, till the whole galaxy had vanished. There was nothing left but darkness. It seemed to Paul that the dark flooded into his mind, wave upon wave. In vain he battled against it. The spirit of night had triumphed. His mind reeled, sickened, sank into unconsciousness. He lay still, with open eyes unseeing. But though he was now profoundly tranced, I, who had worked this change in him, still perceived through all his sense organs. I felt the slight indigestion that had been aggravating his despond. I felt the constriction of his collar, which was rather too small for him. Presently I felt a fly walk across his eyeball. He took no notice. But I, fearing that his trance might break too soon, caused his hand to drive away the intruder, and soothe the irritation. Once more he lay still.

When at length Paul emerged from this swoon, he found himself recalling with strange distinctness the tarn where long ago he had first watched the intersecting waves. In imagination he watched them now, progressing, interlacing, fading, reappearing in varying patterns on every quarter of the lake. On the actual occasion, they had roused in him little more than intellectual curiosity; but now they had acquired such grave significance that every briefest flurry, every ripple, seemed to imprint its form upon his own being. At first he resisted, though vainly. But soon the insistent rhythms calmed him to acquiescence. He let them mould him, re-form him, as they willed; and in this passivity he found peace. Presently he raised his head, sat up, looked round at the desks, the maps, the grey fields of the windows, his chalky hands, the clumsy writing of some’ exercises’ awaiting correction. All was as before, yet all was now acceptable, strangely right, even beautiful. Under his breath he whispered ‘God! What a fool I was not to see it long ago!’

He looked at his watch, gathered up his things, and hurried away. In his step I felt anew buoyancy, in the stream of his thoughts a new and bracing freshness. Soon, no doubt, he would return to his former despair, but the memory of this experience would never wholly desert him.

At this point I left Paul, and returned to my own world. My first task was to work up the material which I had gathered from Paul and others, and to make it known to my colleagues. Next I took that holiday which was described at the outset of this book. I also participated in the awakening of the Racial Mind. Then at last I came back to Paul, rediscovering him, not precisely at the date where I had left him, but a few days later. The good that I had worked in him seemed already to have disappeared. I found him, as I have already reported, in an agony of indecision, tortured by little incidents in the streets of London.

It will be necessary to tell how Paul finally tackled his war problem. But for the present we must leave him. My concern with him is incidental to my main theme. He is but an instrument through which I chose to observe your world, and through which I choose to exhibit your world to you. He is also a sample of that world. I have shown the instrument in some detail, and I have displayed the sample; warning you that, though peculiarly significant, it is not an average sample. You have seen that Paul, when he came face to face with the war, was already at grips with certain problems which are in fact the supreme problems of your age. Let me close this chapter by enumerating them. There was the problem of ‘the flesh’ and ‘the spirit’, the problem of human personality and evolving Life, the problem-of the divinity of love and the austerity of fate. It was with these problems already troubling consciousness or stirring in regions deeper than consciousness, that all the more developed members of your species faced the war.

I now pass on to tell you how your war and your reactions to your war appear to the Last Men.

5 ORIGINS OF THE EUROPEAN WAR

i. THE NEPTUNIAN ATTITUDE TO THE WAR
ii. THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEMURS
iii. PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE WAR
iv. THE HISTORICAL PERIOD

i. THE NEPTUNIAN ATTITUDE TO THE WAR

IN YOUR HOMERIC saga the human conflict is observed and swayed by invisible but mighty presences. The achievement of each hero is the issue not simply of his own virtue but of the inspiration and machination of some favouring divinity. The gods and goddesses take sides, some with the Greeks, others with the Trojans.

In the war which I am to describe, the European War, the War to End War, which played so great a part in setting your species toward decline, every turn of events was noted by invisible presences, but these unseen observers were neither divine nor partisan. As on the Trojan plains, so on the plains of Flanders, the hills of Picardy and Champagne and Argonne, Tyrol’s wild heights, the bogs and steppes of Russia, so equally in Arabia, Mesopotamia and Salonika, on the sea and in the upper air, in fact, wherever war was present or indirectly felt, there watched invisible and unsuspected presences. These were not gods and goddesses mentally inferior to the humanity that had created them, interested in men only to use them for their own petty though celestial strife; they were actual human minds. They strove not to give victory to one side or the other; they were concerned only to record and relish the ineluctable course of events, and to kindle in such of you as were open to their influence some glimpse of their own high zest.

When first we examined your war, it was not uncommon for us to observe in that epoch features which, inexplicable at the time, suggested that some still future influence of our own must be at work upon them, influences which we had not yet, from the Neptunian point of view, been able to exert. Thus to take the most striking example, in our earliest study we had been perplexed by the fact that the Salonika episode did not develop on the scale that might have been expected. Later in Neptunian time, we discovered that we ourselves were responsible. For it now turned out that certain persons in high military and naval posts were open to our influence. We accordingly swayed them toward inertia, and thus deliberately prevented a sequence of events which would have been far more repugnant to us than those which actually occurred. But such large-scale influence is very seldom possible. Moreover we have become extremely chary of indulging in it; for not infrequently we have come later to regret our meddling.

In our world, as I have said elsewhere, the mature individual has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism. His will is for the racial good. But his heart may still be tom asunder in respect of conflicts between loyalty to the spirit of man and piety toward the actual issue of fate. Even as individuals, but far more clearly as the race mind, we pass beyond the human loyalty which is the spring of all our action, and see in the form of the cosmos a beauty superior to any human triumph.

Now although we regard events in your epoch with complete detachment from your many archaic aims, we do feel with you in your racial struggle to become more fully human. When you fail, or when we fail to help you, we grieve. When we take action in your world, we are often tom by doubt as to whether we shall in fact improve or mar the fortune of the race. But in us pity and doubt are tempered by our intuition that in the highest view the whole, although severe, is excellent. Even as individuals, we have this conviction of the superlative beauty of the cosmos. But in the unique racial experience this insight is far more developed, and has a very curious and beatific effect upon us as individuals. For, if our memory is to be trusted, the race mind, when it looks back on the texture of events accomplished in the past, finds each one of them to be a needed feature in the cosmical beauty. In that supreme experience, seemingly, man looks upon the cosmos with a new discerning vision, and would not have any past event to be other than in fact it is. Thus it seems that, in so far as we ourselves have influenced the course of events, our influence has indeed contributed to the cosmical beauty; yet in so far as we have refrained or failed to achieve what we planned, that inaction and that failure were also for the best, were contributory to that supernal excellence which is clearly seen only by the racial mind.

But do not suppose that, since apparently whatever has occurred is cosmically right, therefore human endeavour is unnecessary. Only by means of endeavour can the great theme of the cosmos proceed. But also, by some influence which is not revealed to us, the issue of all human endeavour is seemingly controlled so that in its failures no less than in its triumphs it does in fact contribute to the excellent and perfect form of the Whole. I say ‘seemingly’; for even to us it is not clear that it must be so; although hitherto, the more we have increased in spiritual stature, the more often and the more clearly have we experienced instances of its being in fact so.

Let us now revert to your war. It is perhaps needless to say that, on those rare occasions when we have influenced the course of events in your war, we have never been concerned merely to give victory to one side, or to the other; save when, as has sometimes befallen, an unhappy observer has become so infected by the terrestrial mentality that he has lost completely his Neptunian integrity and understanding. Such disasters are rare. For the most part our observers maintain their sanity and their detachment perfectly. .

You may be tempted to suppose that the great concentration of our observers in and around the period of your first world war implies that we are interested in your war for the same reasons as you yourselves are normally interested in it. In this you would be mistaken. We do indeed enter into your feelings in regard to the war. No less fully than you yourselves have felt them, we feel your agony and despair, your glory and shame; for we have participated in them directly. But throughout, we have normally preserved our own detachment. Events which through your minds we have savoured as world-shattering and God-condemning we have seen also in their wider relations, and recognized as but microscopic features in the great whole. And so we have been able to regard your agony and passion with that blend of sympathy and irony which, upon a lowlier plane, the adult feels towards the ardours of children in their games, or the grief of children in their nursery troubles.

The strategy of your generals, for instance, has for us only the kind of interest which your own psychologists have found in watching apes baflled by the simplest problems of intelligence. As chimpanzees, tantalized by fruit which lies beyond their reach, may achieve or miss insight into the potentialities of sticks, packing-cases or ropes, so your commanders painfully achieved, or more often missed, insight into military potentialities which lay all the while patent to every Neptunian intelligence. Time after time we saw these gilt-edged commanders frustrated by problems which even your own brighter minds might well have surmounted. Again and again we saw thousands of lives destroyed, and hard-won military gains abandoned, through the stupidity, or even the mere personal conceit, of some single strategist or tactician. And though this kind of betrayal was the very stuff that we had come to study, and normally we could regard it with equanimity, there have been, for all of us, occasions when such lapses have kindled a certain amused exasperation, or, if we have been too long subjected to the terrestrial mentality, even a momentary rage.

Your war-time politicians, perhaps more clearly than your generals, displayed for us the essential weakness of your kind. We are not greatly interested in the political aspects of your war, save as expressions of factors in your nature much deeper than politics. In the antics of your political leaders, even more clearly than in humbler lives, we saw the insidious, devastating struggle between private interest, patriotism, and that newer, more difficult allegiance which serves before all else the race, or the essential spirit that is man. In the commonalty, public and private interest stood in less dramatic and less momentous conflict than in those who framed national and military policy. It might have been expected that those upon whose acts great issues hung would hold their self-regarding propensity the more firmly under control, that the vast public import of their conduct would induce them constantly to scrutinize their motives with relentless penetration. But no. Decisions which were ostensibly concerned only with the national good were determined in fact by envy, jealousy, or pride. Yet in most cases the agent himself, we discovered, never doubted his own honesty. Similarly, as you yourselves later came to recognize, policies which were expressed in the language of cosmopolitan idealism or of religion, were in fact inspired by nothing but national aggressiveness or fear, or by some even more disreputable private motive. This being so, the diplomatic history of your war period interests us not at all as a record of high policy, but solely as a tangle of psychological data.

With yourselves, interest in your war is often the mere lust of horror, the fascination of bloodshed and destruction. To us, your horrors are unimpressive; for, ranging up and down the aeons of human history, we have observed many more complete and harrowing devastations. We have seen races, civilized beyond your dreams, completely annihilated in swift, or again in long-drawn-out, disaster. We have seen whole populations writhing and shrieking in physical agony. Your restricted and aseptic mutual slaughter, almost homely and kindly in comparison with that which lies a few decades ahead of you, has therefore no horrific interest for us. It has of course the appeal of every human tragedy; but neither in magnitude nor in intensity of suffering is it at all remarkable. Through your minds and your flesh we do, indeed, experience it as unique, world-shattering and world-condemning. We savour very thoroughly the agony of despair which oppressed so many of you in the years of war. Imaginatively we contract our vision within the limits of your war-bound vision, and enter fully into your consequent world-disgust. Indeed, having entered there, we are sometimes shocked that you do not feel more deeply. For even the most sensitive of you is protected from suffering the full agony appropriate to your own short-sighted world-disgust by the mere crudity of his nervous organization, and the consequent obtuseness and callousness of his mentality.

If it was not horror nor yet political or military interest that caused us to flock in thousands to observe your war, what was it? Was it perhaps your acts of individual heroism, your self-transcendence in devotion to a cause? Or was it your rare impulses of generosity toward the enemy, your groping efforts to escape the obsession of nationalism, and to feel the unity of man? We have indeed watched respectfully whatever in your war was truly heroic, devoted. Even when we have been forced to smile at the ends upon which that heroism was squandered, we have recognized that in its degree it was indeed heroism, a virtue which to beings of your stature is precious and difficult. We have also recorded faithfully every occasion on which any of you has transcended nationalism. But we cannot agree with you in regarding your heroism as the very flower of human achievement, or t your generosity and your timid cosmopolitanism as sublime triumphs of the spirit. In our world we are accustomed to a completely relentless self-abnegation in all situations which demand it. Any failure in this respect we attribute to insanity. And as for cosmopolitanism, to put the interest of one nation before that of another seems to any member of any of our thousand Neptunian nations no less preposterous than for a man to favour his left eye against his right.

If even your heroism is commonplace to us, seeming no more remarkable than nursery pluck, what is it that we find in your war to attract our interest? The answer can be simply stated, but its full significance needs some further development. We came to see your species face a situation such as it had never hitherto needed to face. We came to see it fail to grapple with that situation in any manner which could have saved it from a fatal spiritual poison, or auto-intoxication. We knew that this failure was inevitable. We had watched your nature evolve and your world situation develop. We had watched these two factors cooperate to produce at a certain date a violent acceleration of world -change, and subsequently a tangle of problems with which you could not cope. We had observed a neck-and-neck race between your developing nature and the developing world, which your nature itself kept stimulating into constant advance. The world won. We had seen far back in your history the first stirrings of a new capacity in you, which, given time, might well have so matured as to master even the kind of world in which you now find yourselves. But your ‘modern’ world came too soon. In the century before the war it developed with increasing acceleration. You had neither the intelligence nor the moral integrity to cope with your brave new world. When at last in 1914 accident posed you with a crucial choice, you chose wrongly. It was inevitable that you should do so. Being such as you were, you would most certainly choose as you did. But you have only yourselves to blame, for your choice was a considered expression of your own essential nature. The newer kind of behaviour, which alone was really appropriate to the new world-situation, did indeed make here and there a tentative appearance, and no doubt in very many persons there was at least some leaning toward that behaviour; but everywhere a rigorous suppression, both by governmental authority and by the primitive disposition within each individual mind, prevented the more courageous and the only sane behaviour from occurring; save here and there, spasmodically and ineffectively. And so inevitably you took the first step toward disaster.

This was the drama which we came to watch, and not your horrors or your heroics or your strategic prowess or your policies. The actors were the millions of Europeans and Americans. The dramatic conflict took place at first within each mind. It then became a struggle between those many in whom the archaic disposition was victorious, and those few in whom it was defeated. The immediate upshot of your choice was war; but in that choice you set in motion a sequence of causes and effects destined to develop throughout your future. During the war itself we saw your more percipient minds tortured and warped, not only by physical pain and fear, but by the growing though unacknowledged conviction that they had acquiesced in a great and irrevocable treason against the still-slumbering spirit of man; that through blindness or cowardice or both, they had betrayed that which was the only hope of the future. Very often, of course, this betrayal was at the same time itself an heroic transcendence of mere self-regard for the supposed good of a nation; but it was none the less betrayal of that half-formed and nobler nature upon which alone depended man’s future well-being. During the war itself the working of this poison this profound and almost unrecognized shame, was obscured by the urgency of the military situation. But after the war it acted with ever-increasing effect. This effect we have observed in detail, and I shall describe it. When I have told you of the war itself as it appears to us through your eyes, I shall tell how, after the war, a subtle paralysis and despair fastened upon your best minds, and percolated throughout your social organism. I shall tell how both in theory and in affairs you produced a spate of symptoms which your psychologists would call ‘defence-mechanisms’, designed unwittingly to conceal from yourselves the full realization of your treason and the clear perception of its effects.

That you may appreciate this drama in all its poignancy, I must first report briefly our findings in respect of the nature and the past career of your species, and of the delicate balance of forces which issued inevitably in this betrayal.

ii. THE PHILOSOPHICAL LEMURS

YOUR HISTORIANS, WHEN they seek to trace the origin of your war, refer only to events which took place within the previous century. They single out such accidents as the murder of an archduke, the ambition of an emperor, the vendetta of two jealous nations, the thrusting growth of a new empire and the resistance of an old, the incompatibility of racial cultures, the debasing effects of materialism, or the inevitable clash of rival economic systems. Each of these factors was in some sense a cause of your war; but to assert that any of them or all of them together constituted the essential cause would be scarcely more profound than to say that the war was brought about by the movement of the pen that signed the first mobilization order. The Neptunian observer, though he duly notes these facts, seeks behind them all for the more general and more profound cause, by virtue of which these lesser causes were able to take effect. He looks further even than the birth of the nations of Europe many centuries before the war. He finds the explanation of your mutual slaughter by regarding it as a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species.

Our observers have traced by direct inspection all the stages in the awakening of man out of his ape-like forerunner. Indeed, as our technique advances we are able to press back our exploration even along the generations of man’s pre-simian ancestors. Our most brilliant workers have actually succeeded in entering a few isolated individuals of a much more remote past, when the mammal had not yet emerged from the reptile. They have savoured the sluggish and hide-bound mentality that alone was possible to the cold-blooded forefathers of all men and beasts. They have also savoured by contrast th new warmth and lambent flicker of experience which was kindled when the first tentative mammal began living in a chronic fever. But for the understanding of your war it is unnecessary to go further into the past than the emergence of the ape from the pre-simian.

Even at that early age we observe two themes of mental growth which together constitute the vital motif of the career of the first human species, and the key to your present plight. These themes are the increasing awareness of the external world, and the more tardily increasing insight into the nature of the human spirit itself. The first theme is one of fluctuating but triumphant progress, since it was but the mental aspect of the intelligent mastery of physical nature which brought your species to dominance. The second theme depended on the application of intelligence to another sphere, namely the inner world of desires and fears. Unlike apprehension of the external, it had no survival value, and so its progress was halting. Because this inner wisdom had long ago been outstripped by the outer knowledge, there came at last your war and all its consequences.

Our observers have studied minutely all the crucial events of this age-long drama. Searching even among the dark pre-simian minds, we have singled out in every generation every individual that has been in advance of his kind in respect either of outward prowess and apprehension or of inward self-knowledge. As one may extract any fragments of iron from a heap of rubbish by passing a magnet over its surface, so we, with our minds set to a slightly higher degree of practical intelligence or of self-consciousness than that of the generation under study, have been able to single out from the mass those rare individuals whose minds were definitely in advance of their contemporaries. We find, of course, that of these geniuses some few have succeeded in handing on their achievement to the future, while many more have been defeated by adverse circumstance.

Roaming among the pre-simian minds, we discovered one surprising efflorescence of mentality whose tragic story is significant for the understanding of your own very different fate. Long before the apes appeared, there was a little great-eyed lemur, more developed than the minute tarsier which was ultimately to produce ape and man. Like the tarsier, it was arboreal, and its behaviour was dominated by its stereoscopic and analytic vision. Like the tarsier also, it was gifted with a fund of restless curiosity. But unlike the tarsier, it was prone to spells of quiescence and introversion. Fortune favoured this race. As the years passed in tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands it produced large individuals with much larger brains. It passed rapidly to the anthropoid level of intelligence, and then beyond. Among this race there was once born an individual who was a genius of his kind, remarkable both for practical intelligence and for introspection. When he reached maturity, he discovered how to use a stick to’ beat down fruit that was beyond his reach. So delighted was he with this innovation, that often, when he had performed the feat, and his less intelligent fellows were scrambling for the spoils, he would continue to wave his stick for very joy of the art. He savoured both the physical event and his own delight in it. Sometimes he would pinch himself, to get the sharp contrast between his new joy and a familiar pain. Then he would fall into a profound and excited meditation, if such I may call his untheorized tasting of his new mental processes. One evening, while he was thus absorbed, a tree-cat got him. Fortunately this early philosopher left descendants; and from them arose, in due course and by means of a series of happy mutations, a race of large-brained and non-simian creatures whose scanty remains your geologists have yet to unearth, and catalogue as an offshoot of the main line of evolution.

These beings have intrigued our explorers more than anything else in the whole terrestrial field. Their capacity for self-knowledge and mutual insight sprang from the vagaries of mutation, and was at first biologically useless. Yet, merely because in this species it was genetically linked to the practical intelligence which had such great survival value, it developed; until at last it justified itself in an event which from the human point of view seems almost miraculous. At an early stage the new race threatened to break up into a confusion of warring tribes, each jealously preserving its own fruit groves and raiding its neighbours. There was wholesale destruction of fruit. Starvation and mutual slaughter began to tell upon the nerves of this highly strung race. Population declined. Then it was that the miracle occurred. A certain remarkable female, the supreme genius of her race, organized a truce, and a concourse of all the tribes in the trees around a forest glade. Here, with the help of confederates and a heap of fruit, she performed an amazing pantomime, which might be called the forerunner of all sermons and of all propaganda plays. First, by means of dance and ululation, she put the spectators into an hypnoidal state of tense observation. She then evoked in them, by mere gesture and emotive sounds, a fury of tribal passion. At the moment when the companies in the tree-tops seemed about to fling themselves upon one another in battle, she suddenly changed the tone of her pantomime. By sheer histrionic ability she revealed to her bewildered but comprehending fellows her own agony of revulsion from hate, her own heart-searching and self-analysis, her own discovery of profound cravings which had hitherto been ignored. With no medium but the language of gesture and tone which she had in part to improvise, she praised love and beauty, she praised pure cognizance and spiritual peace. The enthralled spectators followed her every movement with unconscious mimicry. Each one of them recognized in his own heart that deeper nature which she was expressing. The result was something like a revivalist meeting, though shorn of the supernatural. In the midst of it the exhausted prophetess, overwhelmed by the emotional strain, succumbed to heart-failure, and thus sealed her gospel with death The whole incident was miraculous enough, but still more amazing was the issue. Seemingly at one stride, the race passed to a level of self-knowledge and mutual loyalty which the first human specie: was to seek in vain, and which therefore it is not possible for me to describe to you.

At their height these amiable lemurs attained also a crude material culture. They had wattle dwellings, set in the forks of trees. They used rough wooden tools, and earthenware vessels, which hung from the branches like fruit. They even learned to plant trees so as to extend their forest. They dried their fruits, and stored them in clay-lined baskets. But to our observers this practical ability was less interesting than the precocious inner life with which it was linked. Nature had favoured these animals by setting them in a great luxuriant island. Their sole enemies, the great cats, they trapped to extinction. Unlike their cousins on the mainland, the ancestors of ape and man, these lemurs were neither over-sexed nor over-aggressive. Consequently their population remained limited in numbers, and united in sentiment. They rivalled the ants in sociality; but theirs was an intelligent, self-conscious sociality; whose basis was not blind gregariousness but mutual insight. When they had attained a very modest standard of amenity and a stationary social order, their native genius for self-knowledge and mutual insight combined with their truly aesthetic relish of acrobatics and of visual perception to open up a whole world of refined adventures. They developed song and articulate speech, arboreal dance, and an abstract art based on wicker-work and clay. The flowers of personality and personal intercourse bloomed throughout the race. They began to generalize and speculate, in a naive but promising manner. By meditation and self-discipline they cultivated mystical experience. It was with amazement, almost with awe, that our earliest observers felt the minds of these tailed, soft-furred arboreals grope toward and even surpass the intuitions of your Socrates and your Jesus. It might be said that these, who flourished millions of years before the Christian era, were the only truly Christian race that ever existed. They were in fact a race of spiritual geniuses, a race which, if only it could have been preserved against the stresses of a savage world, might well have attained a far lovelier mentality than was ever to be attained by the First Men.

This could not be. Nothing but rare good fortune had saved them from extinction throughout the million years of their career. It was by practical intelligence alone that they had won their position, not by self-knowledge, which in the early stages of evolution is indeed rather a hindrance than a help to the battling species. With security and a stereotyped social condition, their practical versatility declined. When at last a submarine upheaval turned their island into a peninsula, the gentle lemurs met their doom. A swarm of the still half-simian ancestors of man invaded the little paradise. Far less percipient than the natives, and less truly intelligent, but larger, more powerful, quarrelsome, and entirely ruthless, these fanged and hirsute brutes overpowered the lemurs by numbers and weight of muscle; by cunning also, for they had a well-established repertoire of foxy tricks. The lemurs had but one weapon, kindliness; and this in the circumstances was ineffective. Moreover they were by now emotionally refined into such fastidiousness that at the sight of blood they fainted. If one of them was caught and slaughtered by the enemy, his horrified companions would drop like ripe fruit from the trees and break their necks. Within a decade the race was extinct.

With the defeat of the lemurs at the hands of a hardier and a more extravert species, it was written in the book of fate that, sooner or later, a world-situation such as your own must occur, and give rise to an epoch of world wars such as you are now to suffer. Between the downfall of the lemurs and your own age there has been a slow, but in the long run triumphant, advance of practical intelligence. That other application of intelligence, namely to the inner life, has developed but spasmodically, as an accidental consequence of the growth of intelligence in action. And so it has happened that man’s motives have remained throughout the career of your species almost invariably primitive. Even in your own day, when primitive impulses are intellectually seen to be inadequate, and you struggle pathetically toward loftier desires, your hearts remain the hearts of apes, and your struggle is vain. From the point of view of cosmical perfection, of course, your struggle is not vain at all. By your gallant effort and by your fated downfall also, you fulfil your part well and truly within the drama of existence. But from the point of view of the advancement of the race your struggle is indeed vain, doomed to failure. The profound reorganization of the human will, which you now see to be necessary, cannot be achieved in time to avert disaster. While the world remained primitive, and man’s power over physical nature feeble, this paucity of the inner life, though in itself deplorable, did not imperil the survival of the race. But in your day man has gained considerable power. Not only has he made his world so complex and so explosive that it threatens to break from the control of his practical intelligence but further, and more serious, it is now such that the operation of the old blind motives may destroy it. Nothing could save you but a far more radical exercise of those capacities of self-knowledge which in your species have flowered only in rare circumstances, and in your own feverish epoch are more and more crushed out by the routine of industrial society.

iii. PREHISTORIC ORIGINS OF THE WAR

IN ITS EARLIEST phase, then, and throughout its career, your species triumphed by means of pertinacity, quarrelsomeness and practical versatility. Little by little, success has strengthened these qualities. In the early conflict of many intelligent half-simian species, one conquered, the most cunning and courageous of all. The rest vanished. By wit and constancy of purpose the one creature made himself at last the veritable king of beasts, attacking even the great flesh-eating cats, till his very smell became dreadful to them. Thus by extravert intelligence did your ancestors come into their kingdom. For savouring their own experience they had neither need nor inclination. They gulped it down, and then sought more. For probing their own hearts they had no capacity. They could never become clearly aware of themselves. Since then, the aptitude for self-knowledge, which in your stock was never great, has not been fostered, save here and there and in a few periods of your history. There came of course a stage when the mere growth of intelligence made man realize that his heart was an unexplored jungle, and forced him to attack it. But this stage came late, too late: The jungle was by then too dense, too well-established.

Our observers have inspected everyone of those great strokes of genius by which man came into his power. We have tasted the surprise and glee of him who first smashed his enemy’s face with a stone, the triumph of him who first shaped a flint-edge to his liking, of him who secured fire and used it, of him who improved the floating log into a boat with paddles, and the rolling log into a wheel, of him who wrought the first metal tools, of him who made a sail, and so on. We have seen these inventions attained, forgotten sometimes even by the individual discoverers, re-invented, again, and again lost and rediscovered, until at last they became the permanent property of the race. In each case we have entered the mind of the innovator, and felt his sudden ecstasy of achievement, his leap into keener being, like the fanned spark’s leap into flame. We have watched him subsequently sink back into the old dream-like routine mentality, forgetful of past insight. Again and again, when a primitive man has stared uncomprehendingly at the very stone with which yesterday he triumphantly cracked the marrow-bones, our observer, being himself but human, has longed to remind the poor fool of his past prowess. As the ages advanced, this intelligence, this power of insight into the potentialities of external objects, evolved from a rare flicker to a constant flame, an established habit of mind. It was formerly intermittent, unreliable. It was like the earliest tools, which were but natural clumsy stones, picked up and used occasionally, and then forgotten. In time it became like the wrought and tempered knife, which is kept ever about the person, used at every turn, used often for mere love of using it, toyed with and applied to all manner of objects which seem at first without any practical significance whatever. Sometimes, indeed, as the ages pass, this keen knife of the mind is even applied to the mind itself. The inventor notices his own inventive activity, and tries to dissect it. The hungry man observes his own hunger, the amorous man his own lust. But the process turns out to be rather bewildering, even painful. Also it distracts one from the actual business of living. In the early stages it is therefore shunned.

Nevertheless, as the epochs unfold, the mind of man becomes more capacious, more unified, more active. It is no longer an ephemeral perception, forgetful of the past, or troubled now and then by a mere gleam of memory. Increasingly it carries the past forward with it, and refers to this stored past for light upon the present and the future. Increasingly every moment of its experience becomes interfused by all the rest of its experience. Today gains meaning from yesterday. Nothing can happen to the mind that does not reverberate, faintly or violently, through its whole nature. Every event is interpreted and valued in relation to other events. The man’s mind becomes increasingly one mind, not a host of disconnected stupid little minds, awakening one after the other in response to special stimuli. Or so it tends to become. But in fact, it remains, in spite of all advances, very far from unified.

Along with this growing art of comprehending things together and taking more and more into account, comes an increasing discrimination of the actual differences in the world. Eyes distinguish new delicacies of shape, new shades of colour, ears detect new modulations of sound, fingers touch with increasing percipience, manipulate with increasing skill. Thus, age by age, man’s experience of his world becomes richer, more coherent. Beasts, trees, one’s fellows, become ever more characteristic, recognizable, reckonable. Space enlarges itself, is measured out in paces, leagues, marches; and time in days, months, seasons, years, generations. There looms a past before the clan was founded, a future for grandchildren’s grandchildren. Meanwhile things that were formerly mere’ brute facts’, shallow, opaque, barren of significance beyond themselves, reveal unexpected depths of meaning, become luminous, pregnant, charged with mysterious power. The sun and moon, darkness, the storm, the seasons, beasts of the chase and hostile beasts, all gather to themselves out of the past a strange, obscure, potent significance.

Meanwhile also another, very different, class of objects is at length gaining precision and significance. The roving curiosity looks sometimes inward. Intelligence is turned more resolutely than of old upon the anatomy of the mind itself. The hunter, in ambush for his prey, is suddenly confronted with his own being. He beholds that strange thing’ himself’, with the surprise and awe which he felt when he encountered for the first time some unfamiliar beast of the forest. But this time he has no clear apprehension of the mysterious quarry, only a most tantalizing glimpse, as of a dark form lurking behind the brushwood. He falls into abstraction. He ruminates his own being. ‘I -am waiting for the stag. I want to kill the stag.’ The strain of stalking himself gives him a kind of vertigo. It even frightens him. Suddenly he wakes from his novel experience, to find that the physical quarry that he proposed to ambush has appeared and escaped. He has missed his dinner. He vows he will never again be bemused in this way. But on another occasion something similar happens. He is courting his young love, with the great brown eyes and gentle voice. She is ready to be taken. But suddenly two strange things loom into his inner vision, himself and herself, very near to one another, very closely entwined into one another’s minds, yet strange to one another, infinitely remote. Once more he falls into abstraction, fascinated, perplexed. ‘I — she. I — she’. As he sinks into this meditation, she sees his face change and fade. She seeks to rouse him by winsome tricks, but he remains for a while abstracted. In sudden fear and resentment she breaks from him and flies.

Thus, little by little, men and women grope toward a certain tentative superficial self-knowledge, and knowledge of one another. And, as they proceed, these strange objects, selves, become charged with ever-greater significance. Individuals come to prize themselves as no less gifted creature could ever do. They are proving that they are mighty selves. And, prizing themselves, they learn at the same time to prize other selves. Woman, whom man once saw merely as a thing to covet and embrace and then to ignore, or at most as a vague’ other’, agreeable or irksome, now gathers to herself the significance of all past intercourse, all subtle passages of lust and love and hate, and reveals herself at last as a spirit, mysterious, potent, tender, ruthless. So also the man to the woman. Children, once mere objects to tend, defend, fondle, or, as the mood changed, to spurn, now become beings in their own right, rightly demanding service, even to the death. The group, once a vague swarm of fluctuating, discontinuous phantoms, companionable, quarrelsome, tyrannous, crystallizes at length into a system of persons. Close around oneself there is discovered a nucleus of well-tried friends and enemies, each one unique, incomparable. Over the heads of all, remote, mysterious, the old man of the tribe, or the tribal mother, or later the king of the whole land, embodies in his own person the ancient impersonal presence of the group, and later ascends heavenward as the tribal god, finally to become the one God of all tribes and all existence.

But long before this apotheosis there begin to appear here and there among the tribes beings of an intenser self-consciousness and a more insistent egoism, heroes, violent men for whom nothing is respect-worthy but their own exultant spirits. The word ‘I’ is ever on their lips and in their deeds. Each one of them is poignantly aware of himself as pitted against a huge, base, reptilian universe; and is confident that he will master it. Each lives for the mere zest of mastery. In his triumphant course each is accompanied by a swarm of jackal followers, not of his own kind, but striving to be of his kind. With them he smites the established powers, changing man’s life for good or bad, making his mark upon the world, for very lust of scribbling. At the close of it all he confidently expects translation into some Valhalla. Often as not, all trace of him vanishes in a generation, save his name and legend on the lips of bards. If in any other manner his work lasts, it is more or less an accident. For, though aware of the superficies of his individuality in a manner impossible to his fellows, the hero has neither inclination nor time nor courage to penetrate within it and explore it. He accepts the bright superficies of himself at its face-value, and cares nothing for its deeper potentiality. In this respect he is typical of your kind.

Not only so, but the glamour of the hero has helped to make you what you now are. The ideal of personal prowess, which he set, though at first helpful to man’s sluggish spirit, became later the curse of your species. With its facile glory it inveigled your forefathers into accepting outworn values, puerile aims. Throughout the whole career of your species the ideal of heroism has dominated you, for good and bad. In the earliest of all human phases, the almost simian mind of man could not yet conceive any ideal whatever, but the hero ideal was none the less already implicit in his behaviour, though unconscious. The best from which man sprang was already self-regarding, quarrelsome, resolute; and his hands were skilled for battle. Since then, epoch by epoch, the glory of innumerable heroes, the spell of innumerable heroic myths have ground the ideal of heroism into men’s hearts so deeply that it has become impossible for you ‘modern’ men, in spite of your growing perception that heroism by itself is futile, to elicit from your hearts any larger ideal. You pay lip-service to other ideals, to love, and social loyalty, and religious possession; but you cannot feel them reverberate in your hearts, as does the ideal of the splendid all-conquering individual. To this ideal alone your hearts have “been tuned by age-long hero-worship. No doubt, throughout your career loyalty has played a part. Y our triumph, such as it is, rests upon the work of brilliant individuals cooperating in the group’s service. But you have never taken the group to your hearts as you have taken the hero. You cannot. Your hearts are strung for the simpler music. They are but one-stringed instruments, incapable of symphonic harmony. Even your groups, even your modern nations,” you must needs personify as heroic individuals, vying with one, another, brandishing weapons, trumpeting their glory.

Our observers, wandering through the ages which you call prehistoric, have watched your kind spread in successive waves into every habitable corner of your planet, multiplying itself in a thousand diversities of race, diversities of bodily form, or temperament, of tradition, of culture. We have seen these waves, as they spread over the plains and along the coasts and up the valleys, every now and again crash into one another, obliterate one another, augment one another, traverse one another. We have seen the generations succeed one another as the leaves of an evergreen tree. As the leaves of a young tree differ from the leaves of an old tree, the early generations differ from the later in bodily and mental configuration. Yet they remain within the limits of their specific type. And so, inevitably, do you, spiked leaves of the holly.

We have watched all the stages, gradual or sudden, by which the common ancestor, crouched, hairy, and pot-bellied, has given place to the more erect Pithecanthropus, to the still almost simian Neanderthalian, and at last to the taller and more human progenitor, of all your races. We have seen the first bare rippled backs, and the first broad upright brows. We have seen woman’s breasts form themselves out of the old simian dugs. We have watched the gradual crystallization of your four great racial beauties, white, yellow, brown and black. We have followed in detail many a minor strand of bodily character, and the many facial types within each race, which blend and part and blend again, generation by generation Similarly we have traced, generation by generation, the infinitely diverse exfoliation of the simian mind into your four great racial temperaments, and all the subtleties of disposition inborn in the many stocks within each race.

There came at length a stage in the career of your species when through the operation of intelligence, men began vaguely to feel that there was something wrong with their own nature. They had already, here and there, acquired a superficial self-knowledge and mutual insight. They had begun to distinguish, though haltingly the lesser and the somewhat greater goods of the spirit. From mere sex, mere parenthood, mere gregariousness, they had passed here and there to a kind of love and a kind of loyalty; but they could not maintain any sure footing on this higher plane. They were for ever slipping into the old bad ways. Increasingly they surmised that the purely animal way of life, even when glorified into heroism, was not the best that men and women could attain. Yet when they anxiously peered into their chaotic hearts to discover what was better, they could see nothing clearly, could find no constant illumination. Our observers, studying your early races, report that for each race there came a phase, early or late, poignant or obscure in which there spread a vague but profound restlessness, a sense of potentialities not exercised, a sense of an insecure new nature struggling to shape itself, but in the main failing to do more than confuse the old brute nature. It is of this phase of your career that I must now speak.

iv. THE HISTORICAL PERIOD

THE ACTION OF the drama accelerates. With ever-increasing speed the human intelligence masters its world, brings natural forces more and more under control of the still primitive will, and unwittingly prepares a new world, a man-made world, which is destined to become in your day too intricate for the still unfinished intelligence to master, too precariously balanced to withstand the irresponsible vagaries of a will that is still in essence simian, though equipped with dangerous powers. The ape has awakened into a subtler and more potent cunning. He has attained even a vague perception of what it would be like to be truly human in mind and heart. Ineffectually, intermittently, he strives to behave as a true man would behave; and in rare moments he actually achieves thoughts and actions not unworthy of a man. But for the most part he remains throughout the history of your species, and in your own moment of that history, at heart a monkey, though clothed, housed and armed.

Before we look more closely at your ‘modern’ world, let us glance at the hundred centuries preceding it. At the outset we see tribes of hunters settling down to till the valleys, especially the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yangtze. Millennia pass. Mud huts proliferate along the river-banks, condense into cities, are overhung by megalithic tombs, temples, palaces. The tribes coalesce into kingdoms and empires, and produce the first phases of civilization. Traders score the t continents with their tracks. Little ships creep around the coasts, and sometimes venture beyond sight of land. Heroes gather armies and perform mighty evanescent conquests. Hardy barbarians invade the plains, dominate the empires, and are absorbed by the conquered. Daily life becomes steadily more secure, amenable, regular, complex. Triumphantly the intelligent beast finds new ways to gratify its ancient cravings for food, shelter, safety, adventure, for self-display, amorousness, and herd-activity. Yet at heart it remains a beast, disturbed but seldom by an obscure discontent with its own nature and with the world that it has fashioned around it.

With the increase of security a few exceptional minds begin to explore their environment intellectually, and even to probe their own nature. Increasingly the more awakened individuals become aware of their own inner chaos, both of understanding and of will. Here and there, where circumstance is peculiarly favourable to the life of the spirit, men are almost persistent in their self-searching. In India, where the physical cravings are insurgent and irresistible as the jungle, they strive through asceticism to establish the spirit over the flesh. In Greece they seek harmonious fulfilment of body and mind. For the sake of this fulfilment they seek the truth. They pass beyond the rule-of-thumb devices of medicine men, astrologers, builders, navigators, to make guesses about the inner nature of things, about the stars, the shape of the earth, the human body and soul, about number, space, time, and the nature of thinking. Meanwhile in Palestine others conceive a divine law; and in obeying it they expect a heaven of eternal bliss.

Then at length appear, here and there along the centuries, here and there among the peoples, a few supremely penetrating minds. Mostly their careers are cut short by indifferent fate, or by the vindictive herd. But three triumph, Gautama, Socrates, Jesus. Seeing with the mind’s eye and feeling with the heart more vividly and more precisely than their fellows, they look round them at the world, and within them at their own nature, as none had done before them. It is a strange world that confronts them, a world of beings superficially like themselves, yet different. So uncomprehending are their fellows, so insensitive, so pitifully weak. In rigorous and ceaseless meditation the three great ones strive to formulate their teeming intuitions in a few great principles, a few great precepts. They live out their precepts in their own lives relentlessly. Gautama said: By self-denial, self-oblivion, seek that annihilation of particular being which is the way to universal being. Socrates said: Let us fulfil ourselves to the uttermost by embodying in ourselves, and in the world that is our city, the true and the good. Jesus said: Love one another; love God; God is love.

From these three greatest of your kind, these three vital germs issue three vast ramifications of spiritual influence, three widespread endemic infections of the minds of men, passing from generation to generation. The tragedy of your species may be said, to lie in its complete failure to embody, rather than merely to mimic, the spirit of these three men. Our observers, as I have already said, have never been able to establish themselves in any of these three. As the single racial mind of the Last Men we do indeed, if the obscure recollection of that experience is to be trusted, savour and even influence them. But to each individual observer they remain impenetrable. We can, however, study them through their contemporaries, and have done so, very minutely. We have seen those great ones face to face, listened to every word that they have spoken, watched every act they have performed in the presence of any spectator. Through dying eyes we have observed Gautama contemplating death. In the mind of the young Plato we have attended to the quiet ironical voice of Socrates and been confronted by his disturbing gaze. We have heard Jesus preaching on the mount, with dark face kindled. We have stood around the cross and heard him cry out on the God whom he had misconceived.

In such experiences three facts invariably impress us, and fill us with a sense of the pathos of your kind. We are amazed both at the unique genius of these men and at the world-imposed limitation of their genius. We are pressed also by the inability of their fellow-men to grasp even that part of their vision which found expression. For neither their immediate fellows nor you, with all your complacent historical knowledge, can ever understand them. How should you? They themselves strove in vain to comprehend their own profound, unique, intuitions, within terms of their world’s naive beliefs. But though the flame burned brightly in their hearts, they could neither understand it not express it. For neither their conception nor their language was adequate to such a task.

But even if they could have expressed their vision, they would have been misunderstood. For each of these three, though sorely cramped and bewildered by his archaic world, was a veritable man; while his fellows, like the rest of you, were but half-human apes. And so, inevitably, these great ones are misinterpreted even by their own chosen followers. Socrates, who is so much more fortunate in Plato than Jesus in his disciples and Gautama in his interpreters, is seen by us, not only to be more profound in intellect than the great Plato, but to have also a vision, an illumination, perplexing to himself and utterly incommunicable to any of his associates. The lemurs might have understood him. The lemurs might have understood Jesus, and Gautama also. But they, too innocent, could not maintain themselves against the muscle and cunning of man’s progenitors.

It is clear to our observers that in your three great minds there occurred an identical insight into the nature of man and of the world. But each interpreted his vision differently, and expressed it differently in action. And from each a very different influence was selected by his followers.

We have traced that influence, that spreading ferment in men’s minds. The three proliferations are very diverse. But in the early stages of each, during the first and even the second generation, there occurs a new intensity of experience, an increased though still confused self-knowledge, mutual insight and apprehension of the world. There is also a gloriously increased pertinacity of the will to be man rather than ape. Tidal waves of a new enthusiasm now begin to surge across the peoples, lifting up men’s hearts, spreading over the continents. And, spreading, they fade. They multiply into a thousand meandering variations. They are deflected hither and thither, traversing one another again and again.. They confuse, annihilate or augment one another. In your day there is not a mind anywhere on your planet which does not pulse, however faintly, to the endlessly wandering reverberations of your three true men.

But long before your day the character of the influence is changed. At first it stormfully resounds in the secret places of men’s hearts, and even wrenches their poor ape-hearts into something of the human form. But in the end the simian nature triumphs. Those crude instruments, forced for a while to reverberate in response to a music too subtle and too vast for them, presently relapse into the archaic mode.

The ape nature corrupts the new, precarious, divinely human will, turning it into a lofty egoism, a new heroism.

Here, there is heroism of the intellect, loyal only to the truth-seeking self; there, heroism of the heart, determined to embrace all men in indiscriminate brotherliness, through mere loyalty to the love-proud self; there, heroism of the spirit, domineering over the flesh, proclaiming as the supreme affirmation mere negation.

But there remains a memory, a tradition, a legend, an obscure yearning in the hearts of men for a way of life that is too difficult for them. And so there are formed various mighty associations, whose office is to preserve one aspect or another of the fading illumination. The Christian and the Buddhist churches spread far and wide their hierarchies and their monastic orders. Institutions of learning, schools and universities, are precipitated around the Mediterranean coasts and over the European lands. Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Latins, Franks, thus preserve amongst themselves Some smouldering embers. But the flame is vanished.

Yet now and again, once in a few generations, now in this land, now in that, the coals break once more into conflagration. There is a spreading revival of the original ecstasy. Once more, but not for long, the ape-hearts resound obscurely with counterfeit echoes of an experience whose true form they cannot support. Once more it seems to them that they are merged in one another and gathered into God in a mystic communion, that they have pierced behind appearances to the eternal truth, that by self-annihilation they have escaped the limitation of the flesh and individual consciousness, to be gathered into the absolute being. But once more, though the few attain some genuine illumination, the many misunderstand, ignore what is essential and mimic what is accidental; or in frank hostility persecute. Once more, as the insight fades, the institution flourishes, and takes up its place in the established order. Once more the ape triumphs over the man.

Our observers have savoured the minds of the First Men in all these wave-crests of the spirit, these religious revivals, protestations, counter-reformations, these fervours of heart-searching, stampedes of soul-saving, these martyrdoms for an inner light so precious and so misperceived. Everywhere we detect an identical fact. Vaguely aware of his own blindness and incoherence, man yearns toward vision and toward harmony; but he yearns in vain. Vision, indeed, he does now and again achieve, fleetingly, misleadingly; but harmony never. Here and there men see obscurely what they should be doing with themselves, but always their conduct, and their vision also, is distorted by preconceptions and predilections forced upon them by their ape nature. They are confused by phantom lures of immortality, of celestial bliss, of abstract righteousness, of divine love.

Nevertheless men do begin, here and there, to feel stirring within them, striving for expression, some strange new life of the spirit. Did they but know, they are in travail for a twin birth. They are troubled with the first movements of a new piety toward fate and a new loyalty toward man. Of the first they know as yet almost nothing, for whenever they experience it, they confuse it with the old complacent love of a loving God. Of the second, they guess only that they must make the best of man, must seek to know ever more truly both the world and the self, must seek to feel ever more delicately, and to will ever more harmoniously. Obscurely they begin to surmise that the whole active duty of men is to live for men; and that man must be made one, a spirit winged perhaps for enterprise unimaginable in their day. But these two conflicting spirits of cosmical piety and human loyalty remain still deeply hidden in their hearts; and men can neither see into their hearts nor bring forth in action what still is hidden. They cannot obey, they cannot even understand, these two seemingly incompatible divine commandments of the future. Blindly they seek vision; but the knowledge that they would have is for power, not piety. And so they are tricked at every turn by their own cravings. Harmony they seek; but neither within the individual nor in the race of individuals can they attain it. Nor can they find harmony with the universe. In each heart there rages the old conflict between the man and the monkey, and also the obscure new conflict between cosmical piety and human loyalty. In the external world, the quarrelsome apes that fought of old for prey, for mates, for kingship, for hunting-grounds, war now for cornlands, mines, trade, for national glory or security, for fantasies of religion. Armies surge hither and thither. Fields and cities are laid waste; and always in a good cause, whether for some royal master, or some burgher caste, or some nation, or for the glory of God.

While all this is afoot, something else which is new is beginning to happen to mankind. The still unrecognized piety toward fate and fact, and toward the actual course of the world, stirs men to observe the daily features of the world with new interest. At the same time loyalty toward man fires them to master the physical world for man’s use, and therefore to understand its working. Some few individuals here and there, fretted by a recrudescence of that curiosity by which the ape had triumphed, begin to pry into the behaviour of physical things. They drop weights from towers, seek new descriptions of planetary motions, peer at the heavens through lenses, observe the workings of flesh and blood, put one stuff with another stuff and watch the issue, brood upon the falling apple, and on the jumping lid of a kettle, devise pistons, cog-wheels, gears, wheels within wheels. Suddenly man puts together a mesh of dangerous little fragments of knowledge, and comes into possession of little dangerous powers. Victoriously, the human ape assimilates the teeming influx of new facts. Decade by decade he discovers new features of the intricacy and majesty of the physical universe. Imagination strains to cope with the very great, the very little, the very complex, the very swift, the very long-enduring. Little by little, the familiar universe crumbles away, and a new stupendous universe forces itself on man’s reluctant fascinated gaze.

Within this new pattern of things man sees himself as among the very little, the very brief, the very impotent, the wholly mechanical. This discovery, which fills him with indignation and despair, should have been a step in his salvation. It should have taught him to value himself no longer as the immortal, precious, unique child of a God whom his own mind had created, but henceforth as a thread in the fair web of the universe, a theme in the great music, and also as one brief sentient focus of cosmical aspects. But, wholly ignorant of his own interior being, he still cherishes the belief that he is something peculiar, distinct from the physical, something uniquely free, vital, spiritual. And so, when he is forced to regard himself as all of a piece with his world, he feels himself degraded. All that he knows of the physical world is shape, movement, resistance, mechanical sequence of changes. These he takes to be no mere superficies, but the very essence of the physical. And these abstractions he now applies to himself, condemning himself as mere ‘matter’. If he knew himself as well as he now begins to know his world, the science of the physical would not dismay him about his own nature, nor remain itself a science of mere appearances. But through inveterate self-blindness the First Men are doomed to misconceive themselves in the light of a physical nature, which, also through self-blindness, they must misconceive. Ignorant of their own interior being, they remain ignorant of the interior being of the world whose gorgeous superficies is now stage by stage terrifyingly revealed.

When the First Men have already firmly grounded their science of the physical world, they begin to direct the same objective study upon their own behaviour. Thus they will acquire in due season a vision of themselves even more devastating, because more precise. They will see themselves at last unambiguously as greedy, self-absorbed, vindictive, timorous apes, cunning and powerful up to a point, yet also incredibly weak and stupid. This knowledge, could they but pursue it relentlessly and to the bitter end, should lead them at last up to the locked door behind which is true self-knowledge. Once there, they should be able by biological control to produce a generation capable of penetrating that interior stronghold. Thus should the First Men arrive at last where the lemurs started, and should proceed to surpass those wise innocents in every activity of the spirit. But in the book of fate it is written that this shall not happen. While men are taking the first few halting steps in the new venture, while they are still debating the course, the storm breaks upon them. A world situation arises which demands for its control more intelligence and far more integrity of will than their half-formed nature can achieve.

While man is becoming less and less confident of his own spiritual dignity, he acquires more and more power over his physical world, and sinks further and further into obsession with the material. Steam drives ships across the oceans without care for winds, drives trains across the lands, carrying great loads at incredible speeds. Later comes electricity, and with it the flashing of messages around the planet on wires or on the ether. The age-old dream of flying is at last realized by aeroplane and airship. Meanwhile by machinery and chemical synthesis innumerable materials and utensils are manufactured for comfort, luxury or power.

What is the upshot? From its germ in Europe a new world spreads, devouring the old world. Formerly events happening in one region had seldom any appreciable effect elsewhere. But now, increasingly, each event in every Part of the world reverberates within all other events. By means of steam and electricity the human world is becoming one system. Its regions become interdependent economically, even in a manner culturally; but not politically, and not socially. The hearts of men are massed against one another in jealous and mistrustful nations. And across this, cleavage runs another, the division in all lands between masters and servants, the economically free and the economically enslaved. The new world should have been a happy and glorious world. But it is not. The new powers should have been organized in service of the human spirit, the one right object of loyalty. But they are not. The First Men can do almost nothing, with their powers, but serve the old ape-cravings for private comfort, safety, self-display and tribal glory.

At the moment of the outbreak of the European War the great majority of mankind are extremely ignorant not only of their own essential nature but of the world. They feel no need that man should be made one, and that all men should cooperate in the supreme racial enterprise. They take the nations to be the true objects of loyalty, and the social classes to be natural elements of the nation. But a minority, mostly in the Western lands, have blindly felt this need of human unity. Their leaders have formulated it obscurely in one manner or another, often discrepantly. But few can take it at all seriously, very few can live for it passionately. In most cases, however bravely they can talk about it, they cannot act for it. If ever they are put to the test, they shy away, affirming that nationalism is ‘practical’, cosmopolitanism but a remote ideal. Though they see it intellectually, their hearts are not capable of responding to it. If ever the nation is in danger, their cosmopolitanism evaporates, and they stand for the nation in the good old style. Yet intellectually they know that in their modern world this way leads to disaster.

The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your Part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos. In spite of your failure it shall be said of you, had they not striven as they did, the Whole would have been less fair. And yet also it shall be said, even had they triumphed and not suffered their disaster, the Whole would have been less fair.

6 THE WAR

i. EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR
ii. EUROPE CHOOSES WAR
iii. EUROPE AT WAR
iv. PAUL IN THE WAR

i. EUROPE BEFORE THE WAR

I MUST NOW describe from the Neptunian point of view that moment in the career of the First Men which seemed to those who experienced it an eternity of war.

As the summer of 1914 advanced, our observers crowded in ever-greater numbers into your world, seeking out among you suitable minds in which and from which to observe your coming crisis. As a flock of birds, before settling on a tree, hovers for a. moment while each individual selects a convenient twig, so we settled upon your race. The tree knows nothing of its living burden; you were wholly ignorant of your Neptunian guests.

Long before this great company began to arrive, those of us who, like myself, are specialists in your epoch had, of course, already been at work among you, wandering from mind to mind and studying the great movements of human history which were to ‘result in your crisis. But in 1914 an immensely greater company gathered to watch in as much detail as possible your reaction to the unprecedented events of the next four years. In spite of this influx, of observers, not every one of you could be directly studied. But a considerable proportion of the total European population harboured within themselves Neptunian visitors. We diligently sought out all those who were significant, not only those in prominent positions but very many obscure persons who seemed to afford peculiarly lucid examples of your nature and of the trend of thought and feeling in your day. Such persons would have been astounded had they known that they were singled out for study along with generals and political leaders; but in truth it was in the masses, rather than in their leaders, that the real drama of the war was taking place. For in the leaders the poignancy and subtlety of experience was in most cases reduced by the necessity of pursuing some official policy.

Throughout the summer of 1914, then, a huge anthropological expedition, organized on Neptune two thousand million years in the future, was invading your minds in its thousands and its hundreds of thousands. Yet also (to repeat) at the very same time, in the Neptunian sense, other and even greater expeditions were at work upon crises of one or other of the sixteen human species which have their historical location between the First Men and the Last Men. Thus some were studying the fall of the noble Second Men in their long struggle with the cloud-like Martian invaders; others watched the heroic colonization of Venus by the Fifth Men, the last Terrestrials; others, most fortunate, wandered among the lyrical minds of the pygmy Flying Men of Venus, the Seventh species; and many more carried out their devoted work in the field of man’s age-long and tortured struggle to take root on Neptune; others again studied the later and happier Neptunian races. But these expeditions I must not now describe, for my concern is with yourselves. In our work upon the First Men we have concentrated our main force in your own crucial age.

In every European capital, in every drab provincial town, in every agricultural district, our observers settled. Had you been gifted with Neptunian vision, you might have seen, whenever you walked in the streets of Berlin, Paris, or London, that the crowd was composed of persons of two kinds. Most of them were uncontaminated members of your species; but about one in twenty (at least in these metropolitan areas) would have appeared to you curiously altered. You would have seen in the expression of their eyes, had you peered closely at them, a fitful gleam, a faint surprise, verging on bewilderment, a queer inwardness combined oddly with an increased intensity of observation and interest, in fact an almost haunted look, which the Neptunian has learned to recognize in such of you as have been singled out by one of his colleagues as a convenient observation-point. It is not surprising that you should manifest some outward symptom when you are thus possessed, as it were, by an all-pervading mental parasite, whose filaments reach into every nook and cranny of your minds. Yet so subtle is this unintentional influence of ours, that the hosts themselves are, as a rule, completely unaware of it, and even their most intimate friends do not notice any alteration in them. Only to Neptunians, using the eyes of other individuals of your species is the ‘possessed’ look apparent. Sometimes, of course, we deliberately make our presence felt by some act of definite influence, and when such influence is frequent, the host himself may have a sense that he is somehow possessed, or going mad. But the more passive presence of a Neptunian produces only a slight increase of the intensity of consciousness, and especially of self-consciousness.

Conceive then that, before war was declared, Neptunian observers were busy making themselves acquainted with their chosen hosts. That we concentrated in greatest number upon the years of the war and the two decades following, is not to be attributed to any special preference for the mentality of your Twentieth over your Nineteenth Century. As between the generations which, through complacent materialism and sentimentality, brought the war into being, and the generation which, through moral timidity and lack of faith in the human nature of the ‘enemy’, allowed itself to be herded into the trenches, and again the later generations, which, attaining maturity when the war was over, blamed its predecessors or malicious fate for its own supine laziness and lack of vision, — as between these three groups of persons we have no predilection. To us all alike are ‘human’, in the manner characteristic of a half-human species. Each is the inevitable product of its predecessors and its world, yet each is in part responsible for its own turpitude. This is, I know, a paradox which must remain insoluble upon your plane of understanding. But to us, there is no paradox. All your generations appear equally culpable, equally pitiable. But since, in the war itself and its consequences, the whole drama of your species finds its climax, it is in the war period and the decades following it that our observers chiefly congregate.

Very thoroughly the pioneers had already sifted your populations for significant individuals, so that when the main expedition arrived it was possible to allocate each new-comer to a suitable host. Most often (but not always) we set our women observers to study Terrestrial women. And as far as possible we contrived to arrange matters so that there should be some kind of temperamental similarity between observer and observed; for thus, we find, the work proceeds most smoothly and effectively. Some of us occupied the minds of the politicians on whose decision so much was to depend, seeking to understand and sympathize with their ingrained political convictions, sorting out the obscure tangle of self-interest and public loyalty which was to determine their behaviour, harking back now and then into their youth or childhood, or even infancy, to discover the submerged sources of their whims, delusions and prejudices. Others of us familiarized themselves with the astounding mixture of honest heart-searching and intricate self-deception which was the habitual attitude of your religious leaders to all serious problems, and was so soon to find its most striking expression in the futility of your churches in the face of war. Yet others were savouring the insistent itch of military experts to put their huge lethal toy in action, or the mere boyish braggartism, a relic of the heroic age, which infected your more romantic militarists.

In varying degrees of minuteness we have studied your Asquith and your Grey, your Bethmann-Hollweg, your von Bülow and your Treitschke, your Hindenburg, your Foch, your Clemenceau and your Lloyd George. Each of these, though not one of them is intrinsically of serious interest to us, has called for careful study on account of the momentous results of his actions. Your Lenin, however, we have studied in greater detail; many of my colleagues have had occasion to live through all the phases of that remarkable spirit, in whom, as in no other, we find a most instructive blend of that which might have saved your species with that which was bound to destroy it.

Sometimes we have performed curious experiments by introducing into one mind thoughts and valuations derived from another, as in biological research the experimenter may introduce blood or portions of tissue from one organism to another. Thus it has proved instructive to bewilder statesmen at the council table by momentarily forcing upon them ideas disruptive of their policies and their most cherished faiths. For instance, one of my most brilliant young colleagues, fresh from the revolutionary and exiled Lenin, once contrived, that Asquith, the legal-minded premier, in the presence of his cabinet, should sink for a moment into horrified abstraction while a blast of revolutionary schemes and cravings fell on him like a whirlwind. It was indeed instructive to observe how, after the attack the ageing statesman soothed himself by dipping into Carlyle’s French Revolution, and by slightly changing his attitude to the Welsh thorn in his flesh. Of deeper effects we observed none.

To give another example of this transfusion of thought, Lenin himself, that man of stainless steel, that future Almighty, was once, to his own surprise, so flooded with the timid megalomaniac fantasies of the Czar, that he found himself pitying, even pitifully loving that imperial half-wit. On another occasion, while he was in the act of composing a relentless article on the baseness of an archimandrite, my colleague forced upon him a precise apprehension of the old villain’s mind. He suddenly realized in imagination that this profligate priest had once yearned toward the supernal beauty, and that even yet his blind spirit carried out by rote the gesture of prostration before the great lover, Jesus. This incident had a strange and significant effect on the revolutionary. Pent-up springs of mercy and piety welled in him. He experienced, as few Christians have ever experienced, the divinity of Love. Sitting in his hired room in Paris, with the indictment of the priest spread out on the table before him, he whom many were yet to call Anti-Christ, received the divine love into his heart. My young colleague who was in charge of the experiment reports that his host accepted the revelation like any Christian saint, and that for an hour he remained in ecstasy. At the close of that period he whispered in his Russian speech, ‘I come not to bring peace, but a sword’, and so once more took up his pen.

Not only men of action, but leaders of thought, too, our observers inhabited. In many minds of writers and artists they had detected in the ‘pre-war’ age the first stirrings of that disillusionment and horror which the war climate was later to foster.

Earlier they had seen the English Tennyson, under the influence of science and a friend’s death, face the spectre for a moment, only to cover his eyes and comfortably pray. Carlyle they had seen praise action as a drug for doubt. But now, they saw the writings of Thomas Hardy, formerly neglected, gradually compel men’s attention more by their gloomy verisimilitude, than by their obscure conviction of cosmical beauty. In each people our observers heard already, in the midst of the complacency of that age, a whisper of uneasiness, rising here and there to despair. Already the old gods were failing, and no new gods appeared to take their place. The universe, it seemed, was a stupendous machine, grinding for no purpose. Man’s mind was but a little friction upon a minor axle, a casual outcome of natural law. He dared not even regard himself as the one divine spark in a waste of brute matter; for he himself was just matter, and his behaviour the expression of his brute nature. Moreover, Freud had spoken, and ripples of horror were already spreading across Europe.

But there was Evolution. Our observers watched Bergson and all those whose faith was given to evolution champion their doctrine of a biological deity with something of the fervour of the old church militant. Their gospel touched few hearts. Disillusionment was already in the air. In laboratories our observers watched great scientists conduct their crucial experiments, and weave their theories, so subtle, so wide-sweeping, so devastating, so true on one plane and so meaningless on another. Again and again we have seen the truth missed when it was hidden only by a film. Again and again we have watched promising enterprises run to waste through the influence of some mad whim or prejudice. In many a study and on many a college lawn we have noted the turn of argument wherein acute minds first began to stray down some blind alley, or first tethered themselves to false assumptions.

But the overwhelming majority of our explorers were concerned with humbler persons. Our pioneers had flitted from mind to mind among artisans, factory hands, dock labourers, peasants, private soldiers, in search of those most significant or most subject to Neptunian influence, so that the main company should be able to settle promptly into posts of vantage for their work. If you incline to commiserate with those of us to whom it was allotted to observe simple minds in obscure positions, you are under a misconception. The difference between your mentally richest and your mentally poorest is negligible to us.

We have sat all day on heaps of road metal in country lanes, wielding a hammer, and savouring humble thoughts in minds not barren but not fortune-favoured. In French peasants we have driven sewage carts over our hectares, estimating the unsown crop, and the cost, and the sowing. In Prussian military messes we have drunk to ‘der Tag’. In British foc’s’les, homeward bound from Yokohama and Kobe, we have looked back upon Geisha girls; forward to the wife in Canning Town. In provincial suburbs we have pondered the sententious wisdom of scavengers, while they: pushed their hand-carts and condescended to speak with tramps; We have been present with trapped miners, while the flooding water crept up legs and bodies, or lungs were invaded by hostile gases. We have listened to doomed men chanting under the roots of mountains. Some of us, in zeal to observe last acts of piety or panic, have been destroyed in the destruction of their hosts. In factories we have spent our Terrestrial years feeding voracious machines and dreaming impossible triumphs or love idylls. On holidays we have been borne by the released flood of our fellow-workers along esplanades and heaths. Over shop-counters in Bond Street and the rue de Rivoli we have fingered camisoles, stockings, dress pieces. We have pondered, tone by tone, cliché by cliché, the intercourse of customers and shop-girls. We have jostled around buses and down subways, and hurried into city offices. In third-class railway carriages we have read innumerable evening papers through the eyes of clerks and typists, devouring the murders and the sex, skimming the politics. In the discreet darkness of picture palaces we have had forbidden tactual intimacies. In jails we have estimated the civilization of Europe through the rage of its outcasts. We have battered impotently on cell doors, counted and recounted the threads of spider-webs, strained to catch sounds of the world’s great tide of life, which had left us stranded. We have entered into inmates of lunatic asylums, to gain insight into your mentality by watching its disintegration. We know also what it is to be segregated as mad by a world madder than oneself. In public-houses and Bier Stuben we have escaped for a while from nagging reality through the cheap ecstasy of inebriation. Or, less forlorn, we have found in the applause of our companions false consolation for our defeat in life.

More precisely it was our hosts that had all these experiences, while we, calm scrutinizers, appraised their minds. With the patience of big-game photographers, who endure tropical heat and drought or stand up to the neck in marsh for the sake of one snap of the camera-shutter, we have suffered interminable floods of rhetoric and infantile philosophy, in the hope of confronting one of those rare denizens of the mind’s jungle, those most vital and significant mental occurrences, which give insight into the mentality of an alien species.

We have also suffered vicariously the pains, both maternal and filial, of many births. We have watched the clean pages of many infant minds ignorantly scribbled over with indelible fears and loathings, We have experienced in many young things the same hungers and worships that we ourselves have known in our own far-future childhood upon Neptune. But in Terrestrial childhood we find these young healthy lusts and admirations all poisoned, misdirected, blunderingly thwarted or sapped, so that again and again we are reminded that the folly of your generation, as of every generation of your species, is due less to its innate coarseness of fibre than to the disastrous influence of its parents and teachers. Could we but, like your Pied Piper, rescue all your infants from their mothers and fathers, could we but transport them to Neptune, even with their ineradicable simian impulses and their inherited distortions of mind and body, could we but keep them from the contamination of their elders, what a race we could make of them! We could not indeed bring them further than the threshold of true humanity, but within their natural limits they might be made generous, free-minded, zestful, unafraid, Then, if we could but return them to your planet in the first bloom of maturity, how they would remake your world! But instead they must remain unfulfilled, like seeds which, blown into a cave, send forth long pale stems and flaccid leaves, seeking in vain the light.

The many boys and girls whom we have seen, confident at first that life held in store for them some as yet unimaginable treasure or some opportunity of high devotion, already in a few years disillusioned! We have encountered them at first unsullied, equipped by nature to learn prowess of body and mind, to advance from triumph to triumph of skilled and generous living, Then we have seen their bodies hampered, constricted, poisoned by misguided care, and their spirits even more seriously maltreated. Though in physical athletics they have often been patiently trained to habits of free and effective action, in the athletics of the mind and of the spirit they have acquired a cramped style and blind tactics, In the great game of life they never learned to keep their eyes on the ball. For them indeed the ball was invisible. They hit out stiffly or limply at nothing at all, or at hypnotic hallucinations, conjured before them by the exhortations of blind coaches.

Everywhere we have found in the lives of grown men and women a bewildered futility and resentfulness. The men blamed the women for their hobbled lives, the women the men for their servitude. The rich blamed the poor for disloyalty, the poor the rich for tyranny, the young blamed the old for lack of vision, the old the young for rebelliousness. And increasingly, even in that age before the war men and women, rich and poor, old and young, were beginning to suspect that they were playing their brief game in a madhouse with no rules and a phantom ball. .

No wonder that in our research among the aged of that time we found very prevalent a most tragic condition of the spirit. In. numerable old men and old women, looking back with conscious complacency upon their achievements, and forward with confidence to their reward in heaven, were yet haunted in the recesses of their being with a sense that their lives had been phantasmal, that they had never really lived at all. Most of them were able on the whole to ignore these deep whispers of misgiving, or to drown them with vociferous piety; but many of the more self-conscious old people whom we studied, whether successful business men or members of the ‘professions’, socially triumphant old ladies or, retired matrons of institutions, reviewed their careers with blank dissatisfaction and a nightmare sense that in their moment of living they had missed some great drudgery-redeeming good, simply by looking in the wrong direction. Only those whose lives had been dominated by concrete misfortune or disappointment, or by the demands of some all-absorbing heroic ministration, escaped this universal distaste of all values.

Such was the condition of the First Men as it was revealed to our observers in their survey of the years before the outbreak of the European War. Such were the beings that they studied. On the whole they found themselves forced to be twi-minded about these distressful creatures. From one point of view, as I have said, they could not but regard your species as not yet human; a thing incredibly stupid and insensitive, incredibly distorted and tortured by the fantastic habits, the rudimentary’ culture’ which alone distinguished it from the lower beasts; a thing in some ways further removed from true humanity even than ox or tiger, because it had strayed further down the wrong path; a thing incomparably more filthy than the baboon, because, retaining brutality, it had lost innocence and learned to affect righteousness; a thing which was squandering the little powers that it had stumbled upon for ends essentially the same as the ends of monkeys, and in its frantic grabbing, devouring, voiding, had fouled a whole planet.

But from the other point of view our observers were forced to admit, at first reluctantly, that this errant and brutal thing had in it the distinctive essence which is man. Penetrating with difficulty into the minds of tiger and baboon to compare them with your species, they found indeed less brutality, but also less divinity; in fact a greater emptiness. In you they recognized the first blind restlessness of the spirit, which never troubles the mere beast, and wins its beatitude only in the full human estate. In you they found the rudimentary insight of the mind into itself and into others, that insight which lay beyond the reach of all Terrestrial organisms save Homo Sapiens and the Philosophical Lemurs, whose far more brilliant achievement man himself had terminated. In you they found love, though more often hate; in you philosophy though halting and superstitious; in you worship, though for the most part directed on unworthy objects.

All this might have been truly said of your species at any time of its career; but, at the moment which I am now describing, it was balanced on a still finer knife-edge between beast and man. This was due not to any change in its nature but to the pressure of circumstances. Hitherto, though a sensitive minority had been aware that the aims toward which men commonly strove were for the most part puerile, the majority were able to pursue these aims in undisturbed complacency. But in 1914 many forces were combining to shock even minds of average percipience into a sense of the contemptible insufficiency of the extant plan of human life, both individual and social. It is worthwhile to enumerate these forces. First, then, although the nations and races were still violently opposed to one another in sentiment, the world was already becoming a single economic system. Each section was growing more and more dependent on the healthy life of others. Secondly, though national and racial cultures were still for the most part mutually unintelligible and repugnant, the seeds of an all-inclusive world culture were already quickening. Third, the battle between doctrinal religion and scientific materialism, in which science had been steadily advancing all along the line, was already beginning to dissolve and crystallize out in a new alignment. For while the old religion was beginning to seem not only intellectually incredible but also spiritually insufficient, the old science was already appearing not only spiritually arid but intellectually naive. Fourth, man’s increasing awareness of his littleness under the stars was combining with his first crude apprehension of the cosmical enterprise of Life to give him a wider horizon, a new humility, and also the first obscure glimpse of a new aim. Unfortunately in 1914 the effect of these forces was nowhere profound; and only in certain regions of the Western Civilization was it at all widespread. It was not strong enough to prevent the outbreak of war. All it produced was a devastating, though mostly unacknowledged, suspicion in all the combatants that human nature had failed.

ii. EUROPE CHOOSES WAR

IN AUGUST 1914 it was said by the more thoughtful among you that a great war in Europe might well cause the’ downfall’ of civilization. They expected that the war would lead at once to complete economic and social confusion. In this prophecy they were wrong. They underestimated the recuperative powers of their material civilization. But the war was to cause a disaster more subtle and profound than any which was foreseen in 1914. It was to undermine man’s confidence in his own nature. Henceforth your species was to suffer a kind of racial neurosis blended of guilt, horror, inferiority, and hate. Not only civilization was to be undermined, but the integrity of a species.

In the fateful days when ultimatums and declarations of war were being bandied from capital to capital, the population of Europe was wholly unprepared to take the one line which could have saved it. It had neither the courage nor the imagination for a general to fight. On the other hand it could not accept the war innocently, as earlier generations had accepted wars. Hitherto men had fought with a clear conscience, however much they might personally loathe the distresses that war must bring. But, since the last war in Europe, a change had begun to come over men’s minds. Though it was not yet possible for the masses to reject war, it was no longer possible for them to accept it without guilt. Few, even of those who suffered no conscious heart-searching, were wholly immune from that unwitting shame and embitterment which was the characteristic mood of your war-tortured populations, and had never occurred at all widely in any earlier war.

It was extremely interesting to observe within minds of various types the different reactions of your species to the novel fact of war. Most were taken completely by surprise. In the manner characteristic of their species they had lived hitherto without serious thought ‘for matters of public concern. The rivalries of national states might indeed rouse in them some sentimental interest, but the life of the race lay almost wholly beyond their grasp. They were fully occupied in keeping themselves and their families afloat in the maelstrom of economic individualism. Inevitably their chief concern was private fulfilment, and its essential means, money. National affairs, racial affairs, cosmical events, were of interest to them only in their economic bearing, or at most as occasions of curiosity, wonder or ridicule. They produced and consumed, bought and sold, played ritual games with balls, and transported themselves hither and thither in mechanical vehicles in search of a goal which ever eluded them. They indulged in illicit sexual intercourse; or with public applause they married, propagated, launched their children upon the maelstrom. They put on their best clothes on Sunday, and after church or chapel they walked in the park. Or, with a sense less of moral guilt than of social degradation, they spent their Sundays in old clothes and upon congenial occupations. Almost invariably they applauded the things they had been taught to revile. Or, if they were’ original’ and dared to think and feel spontaneously, they found themselves harassed both by their fellows and by their own archaic consciences. They then either recanted or developed into extravagant cranks. But these were few. The overwhelming majority were enslaved by the custom of the herd.

Such were the beings on whom the fate of the Terrestrial spirit now depended. Nowhere was there any clear perception of the issues at stake, nowhere any recognition that the species was faced with the supreme crisis of its career. Scarcely a man or woman in Europe or America, still less in the remote East, realized that the great test of the human animal had come, and come, alas, too soon.

In their reaction to war, Western men and women revealed, themselves as falling into a few well-marked types, which nevertheless graded into one another. Indeed, scarcely any individuals could be said to belong wholly to any one type. In almost all there were traces of every kind of war sentiment, and in many there was an almost diurnal fluctuation of mood from one to another. Nevertheless Western Europeans may be significantly classified according to their most characteristic attitude to the war as’ follows:

First, in every nation there was the incredibly large swarm of’ persons who, in spite of their vociferous patriotism, were at most tinles incapable of taking the war seriously in any sense except as a source of possible danger or profit to themselves. Such creatures we found in all classes, from manual labourers to captains of industry and respected statesmen. In the armies also we found, many, who had failed to evade their military obligations. They were of all orders of intelligence, from the very stupid to the acute; but even the most brilliant of them lacked the power to see beyond the horizon of private, or at most family, interest. They were nearly always quite unconscious of their own deficiency; yet almost with the unwitting mimicry shown by some insects, they managed to behave, verbally at least, with impeccable correctness. They were seldom suspected of being inhuman. Often have we experinlented on these backward animals, striving to introduce into the mind of some munition-profiteer, some popular demagogue, some climbing staff-officer, or some abject shirker in the ranks, glimmers of a self-oblivious view. Most often the experiment has failed completely; but in some cases we have been rewarded by a curious spectacle. The little self, outraged by the incursion of unself-centred fantasies, has called ‘morality’ or ‘duty’ to its assistance. The ambitious general, for instance, troubled for a moment by the sacrifice of life entailed in some brilliant barren attack, has told himself that it is necessary, and could not see that he was caring only for his reputation as a resolute commander.

The second type recorded by our observers was less contemptible, but almost as backward. These were the persons who, though often strong in a kind of social sense, innocently accepted war and the martial code. Their vision was limited to the hero ideal. They saw the war in the good old way as a supreme opportunity of personal courage and devotion. It came, they said, to purge men of the selfishness bred of industrialism and of the softness bred of security. These guiltless champions of the war might personally behave toward it either with cowardice or heroism; but they never questioned it. With complete sincerity they faced it as a god-sent ordeal. For them it was indeed a religious test, an opportunity to enter into communion with some obscurely conceived heroic deity. To speak against it was sacrilege; but a sacrilege so gross and fantastic that it should be regarded as a sign rather of idiocy than of wickedness. Consequently, though they condemned pacifism whole-heartedly, there was no vindictiveness in their condemnation. Again and again our observers, experimenting in these simple minds, have tried to introduce some doubt, some apprehension that there might be another side to the matter. But such doubts as could be introduced appeared to the subject himself as merely an intellectual exercise, not as a live issue. Such images of brutality and disgust as were introduced were accepted simply as tests of fortitude.

Curiously it was among these archaic souls, these happy warriors, that we sometimes came upon a pellucid kind of religious experience. Fortunate innocents, they were exempt from the guilt and torture which wrecked so many of their fellows. For them the issue was a clear issue between self-regard and loyalty to all that they most cherished. And those who had the strength to bear themselves throughout according to their code had the reward of a very sweet and well-deserved beatitude. We attended many a death-agony that was thus redeemed, especially in the earliest phase of the war. Many an old regular thus found his rest. Many a very young subaltern, whose photograph on the parental mantelpiece truthfully commemorated a bright immaculate boy-soldier, found in his last moment that peace which passed his simple understanding. But many more, to whom death came less suddenly or more brutally, could not attain that bliss. Hundreds, thousands of these luckless beings, betrayed by their god, we have watched slipping down into the gulf of death, clutching, screaming, bewildered and indignant, or utterly dehumanized by pain.

More common than the ‘happy warriors’ was a third type, namely those who, having passed in spirit beyond this knightly innocence, still tried to retain it. These, when the war began, were first shocked and tom asunder by conflicting motives, by loyalty to the old idea of War and by the obscure stirrings of something new which they dared not clearly face. For, in spite of all their regrets and compassion, they very deeply lusted for war. And because this new thing that disturbed them ran counter to this lust and to the familiar code, they strove to ignore it. Or they persuaded themselves that though war was an evil, this war was a necessary evil. They elaborated all manner of arguments to convince themselves that their country’s cause was the cause of humanity, or that the War, though tragic, would result in a great moral purgation. They eagerly accepted every slander against the enemy, for it was very urgent for these distraught spirits to believe that the enemy peoples were almost sub-human. Only so could they feel confident that the War was right, and indulge their martial zeal with a clear conscience. The pacifists they condemned even more bitterly than the enemy, for in tormenting the pacifists they seemed to be crushing the snake in their own hearts.

The fourth type, though not actually a majority in all lands, had the greatest influence, because in most of the other types the sentiment of this fourth type was present in some considerable degree. These were at the outset little stirred by patriotism, and for them war had but a slight romantic appeal. They thought only of individual lives and happiness, and nearest their hearts were the lives and happiness of their fellow-countrymen. Under the influence of the lying propaganda with which the spirit of each nation was poisoned by its government, they sincerely believed that the enemy government was in the wrong, and was carrying out a base policy by brutal measures. But they preserved their sanity so far as to believe that the enemy peoples were on the whole not very different from themselves. As individuals the enemy were ‘just ordinary decent folk’ who, through some lack of resolution, had been led into a false policy. Consequently (so it was said) the ‘group spirit’ of these swarms of harmless enemy individuals was unhealthy. In the mass they were a danger to civilization, and so at all costs they must be beaten.

Such was the attitude of most men and many women in both the opposed groups of peoples. They lacked faith in human nature. And through their lack of faith in it they betrayed it. They might so easily have risen up in their millions in all lands to say, ‘This war must stop; we will not fight.’ Yet of course, though in a sense so easy, such a refusal was also utterly impossible to them. Because they were without any perception of man’s true end, because they accepted the world as it stood and human nature as it seemed, they inevitably missed the great opportunity, and condemned their species to decline. Pitiable beings, they brought upon their own heads, and upon the future, deluges of pain, grief, despair, all through lack of vision, or of courage. They manned a thousand trenches, endured a thousand days and nights of ennui or horror, displayed what in your kind is called superb devotion. All this they did, and all for nothing. They thrust bayonets into one another’s entrails, they suffered nightmares of terror, disgust and frantic remorse. They were haunted by bloody and filthy memories, and by prospects of desolation. Those of them who were parents gave up their sons, those who were women gave up their men, and all for nothing; or for a hope that was as impossible, as meaningless, as self-contradictory, as a round square, for the mad hope that war should end war. They believed that from their agony there must spring anew, fair world. But in fact through their lack of faith in one another the whole future of their species was overclouded.

The fifth type that we discovered was actually opposed to the war. There were many kinds of pacifists. A few were those naive beings who, loyal to the Christian faith both in the spirit and the letter, simply accepted the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and thought no further. But the main body of effective pacifists, even of those who gave as their motive ‘religious scruples’, were of a very different water. One and all, though they knew it not were ruled by that imperious, but still unformulated impulse which I have already noted in the case of Paul, the impulse of loyalty to the dawning spirit of man. But since the real spring of their conduct Was still so obscure, they had to rationalize it in various manners. Many supposed themselves to be moved simply by the Christian faith. But indeed in these, so our observers discovered, it was not Christianity that had bred pacifism, but pacifism that had given Christianity a new significance. Strong in the intuitive loyalty to the great adventure of the Terrestrial mind, they interpreted that intuition as loyalty to the Christian God. They strove, so they said, to love their fellows as Jesus had bidden them, but also they strove to love Jesus himself even more. And for them Jesus, though they knew it not, was the divine spirit embodied in their groping species.

Others there were, upon whom the basis of the same intuition constructed other rationalizations. Some, believing that they cared only for the happiness of individuals, declared that the misery of war must far outweigh all its good effects. They cared nothing for national honour, nothing for treaty obligations to defend weak peoples, nothing for the propagation of national culture. These, they said, were mere phantoms, for which not one life should be sacrificed. Better for the weak peoples to have their countries occupied peaceably than turned into a battlefield. Let them be defended not by force but by the pressure of world-opinion. As for culture, it was worth nothing if it depended on bayonets and guns. Nothing whatever mattered, so they affirmed, but the happiness of individuals. Yet all the while these hedonistic pacifists unwittingly drew the fervour which made them face tribunals, prison, and in some cases a firing party, not from their liberal individualism but from that deep and obscure intuition that the human race was no mere swarm of happy-unhappy individuals, but a vessel still unfilled, an instrument still roughly fashioned, and some day to be used for cosmical achievement. For this they went to prison, for this they resisted the taunts of their own herd-consciences. For this they died; and because they felt it in their hearts that the Western peoples must now at last dare to say, each to the other, ‘Rather than make war, we will let you overrun our lands, sequester our goods, sleep with our wives, educate our children to your way of living. For we are all equal vessels of the one spirit, we and you.’

Such was the composition of Europe when the war began. There was the great host of those who regarded it almost solely from the personal point of view; the smaller company of martial romantics; the conflict-racked enemy-haters and pacifist-baiters; the swarms of unimaginative loyal folk, who accepted the war as the only way to preserve human happiness, but were sorely perplexed by the savagery that was expected of them; the minute band of those who intuited that war between modern civilized men was utter folly and sacrilege, than which there could be no worse alternative.

Of these last the more resolute and the more pugnacious refused absolutely to have any part in the great madness, and were therefore persecuted, imprisoned, or even shot. But others, like Paul, less heroic, less confident of their own opinion, or more sympathetic to the great public agony, could not bring themselves to stand aside inactive. They chose therefore to help the wounded, to expose themselves so far as was permitted, to accept so far as possible on the one hand the great common agony, and on the other the private loneliness of those who cannot share the deepest passions of their fellows.

To Neptunian observers these perplexed beings were the most significant matter for study, for in them the balance between the archaic and the modern was most delicate. The conflict which in most had been violently solved, in one way or the other, was in these ever present and insoluble.

iii. EUROPE AT WAR

VIEWED FROM THE moon, and with eyes such as yours, your little Great War would have been invisible, save through a powerful telescope, which would have revealed it as a minute and intermittent smoky stain on the dimly green surface of Europe. To the Martians, those intelligent clouds who in the fullness of time were to invade your planet, it was unnoticeable. With optical organs much more powerful than any terrestrial telescope, their astronomers were already observing the Earth as a promised land seen from Pisgah. But what concerned them was your atmosphere, your plentiful water, your vegetation. They sometimes wondered whether the many smears and stipples of cloud which kept appearing and disappearing in your temperate zones were intelligent organisms like themselves. But they guessed that it was not so. They detected normal clouds of vapour, and, much more rarely, clouds of smoke and dust, which they rightly believed to be of volcanic origin, The minute traces produced by your war were assumed to be of the latter type. It did not occur to the Martians that these were artificial smoke-palls, beneath which the proud denizens of Earth were blundering through a great, though a fantastic agony.

Even to the average Terrestrial, your little Great War was a minor and a remote disturbance. A few miles behind the lines one might often find complete rural peace, marred only by distant muttering. Across the English Channel men sometimes heard with awe the sound of the guns; but the widespread sense that the tragedy in France had somehow changed the spirit of peaceful landscapes in Surrey, Cumberland, or the distant Hebrides, was but a projection of war-haunted minds. The psychological reverberations of the war did indeed spread far afield. Few comers of Europe escaped such serious influences as the removal of their young men, the rationing of their food, the over-work of their remaining inhabitants. Throughout the continent there was a sense, illusory but profound, that war had somehow altered the very constitution of the universe; or that it had laid bare the sinister depths of existence, which hitherto had been concealed by the scum, the multi-coloured film, of Nineteenth-century civilization. But elsewhere, over whole continents the military operations were known only as a distant marvel, romantic, magical, scarcely real. Folk tilled and hunted, copulated and bore children, propitiated the gods of rain and storm, trapped marauding beasts and sometimes listened incredulously to travellers’ tales of the White Man’s War. In more remote parts of the earth, on the upper reaches of the Amazon, in African jungles, and on the Thibetan plateau, there were isolated folk who never heard rumour of your war until after it had ceased.

But to most Europeans it did indeed seem that when the war began the whole ground-tone of existence was altered. For a few months many clung to the conviction that this profound change of key was for the good, a transition from the sordid, though safe, to the heroic, though tortured. The Germans pressed forward toward Paris, that mythical city of delight. The French and the British ‘gallantly contested every inch’, and at last ‘miraculously’ they held their own. Stories of heroism and horror percolated through Europe, stories of the incredible effects of high-explosive shells, of great buildings collapsing like card-houses, of men’s bodies blown to pieces or mown down in hundreds by machine-guns. All this was at first accepted as quite in order, quite as it should be, in the new bewildering heroic universe that had come into being. Amiable bank-clerks and shop-keepers began to spend their leisure in learning to be ‘frightful’ in the sacred cause, learning to give the right sort of lunge with a bayonet, to stick it successfully into a belly; learning the right twist to release it. Paul in those early days had bought a little red manual of military training, in which he diligently studied the theory of co-operative slaughter. Here at last, he had told himself, was the grim and heroic reality, the thing that had always lain behind this solid-seeming but, in fact, phantasmal ‘civilization’. Yet somehow the little book failed to give him any sense of reality at all. It seemed entirely beside the mark. This killing was after all a laborious, useless, imbecile accomplishment, like learning to play the piano with your toes. Yes, it was a new world that had come into being, and one took some time to get the feel of it. Many people seemed to Paul to unearth a new self to cope with it, a simpler, less doubting, more emotional self, a self that concealed under righteous indignation a terrible glee in the breakdown of old taboos. Even while they inveighed against the enemy’s rumoured brutality, these beings of the new world seemed to savour it on the mental palate lingeringly, lustfully. They were trapped hopelessly, these vengeful ones, trapped by the spirit of the archaic animal from which the true spirit of man could not free itself. Talking to such persons, Paul glimpsed images of the half-born foal, which, through my influence, had so long haunted him.

Gradually the romantic early phase of your war was succeeded by something very different. It almost seemed that man, in origin arboreal and subsequently terrestrial, was to end his career as the greatest and most noxious of burrowing vermin. The armies dug themselves in. They constructed immensely elongated and complex warrens, and settled down to a subterranean life of tedium punctuated by horrors formerly unimagined. It became evident to the combatants, and gradually to the home populations also, that the war was not going to be what it ought to have been. It was not a gentlemanly war. It was ruthless in a way that made the wars of the history books seem temperate. It was a life-and-death struggle in which rules were an abandoned. And it was mechanized. The spirit of it was indeed a strange blend of the machine, with its regularity and large-scale effectiveness, and the brute at bay. It was an affair of stop-watches, mathematical calculations, weight and frequency of projectiles, mechanical transport, railway co-ordination; but also it Was an affair of mud, dust, blood, knives, even teeth. Everything that happened in it had two sides, a mechanical and a brutal, at the one end the exquisite designing, making, emplacing and sighting of the great gun, at the other, the shattering of human bodies, the agony of human minds. At one end the hum of munition factories, at the other the corpse-laden mud of No-man’s-land, and the scream of tortured men out on the wire, imploring, inaccessible. Machinery, that creature of human imagination, had seemingly turned upon its creator, and was not only tearing up his body, but reducing his mind to the brute level from which it had emerged. For strange and disturbing things were now happening in civilized Europe. There were still of course, plentiful stories of heroism; human nature was said to be showing itself capable of unexpected devotion and fortitude. But also there were whispers of something less reputable. The bravest and most it seemed, might be suddenly converted into panic-stricken cattle, trampling one another under foot. The most level-headed might suddenly run mad. The most generous might suddenly indulge in brutality or meanness. There were stories also of tragic muddle and betrayal of duty, stories of British shells falling in British trenches, of troops sent up to certain destruction through a staff-officer’s blunder, of supplies misdirected, of whole forlorn offensives launched for no reason but to satisfy the pride of some general or politician.

There is no need for me to enlarge upon these matters. They have been well enough recorded by your own scribes, and are, on the other hand, of little interest to the Neptunian observers of your great folly. Though more than ordinarily disastrous, they were but typical of the blend of organization and chaos, which is the outstanding character of your whole world-order. The Neptunian, studying that order, is inevitably reminded of the fortuitous, unplanned organization, and the blindly apt, but precarious behaviour of an ant colony. But though your massed stupidity afforded us little interest, we found in the lives of individual soldiers, and in their diverse adjustments to the war, much to arrest our attention.

For the majority, adjustment consisted in acquiring the technique of a new life, in learning to make good use of cover, to contrive some slight animal comfort for oneself even in the trenches, to make the best of minute pleasures, savouring them, drop by drop, to live upon the hope of strawberry jam, or a parcel from home, or a letter in a well-known hand, or a visit to some woman behind the lines; or, failing these ecstasies, to make the best of plum jam, of a rum-ration, or of sex without woman; to ‘wangle’ small privileges out of the great military machine, to be expert in ‘système D’; and at the same time to take deep into one’s heart the soldier’s morality of faithful obedience to superiors, faithful loyalty to comrades, and complete irresponsibility in respect of all things further afield; to live within the moment and within the visible horizon; to shut the eyes of the spirit against disgust, and stop the ears of the spirit against horror, against self-pity, against doubt.

It is true that to many spiritually undeveloped beings the war-life was a tonic. Many of those who had been nurtured in prosperity, or at least in ease, who had never faced distress, and never been tortured by compassion, were now roughly awakened. Generously they gave themselves, and in the giving they found themselves. But others of their kind were broken by the ordeal. The awakening came too late, or to natures incapable of generosity.

But it was not in these, either the made or the marred, that our observers were interested. We were concerned rather to watch the adjustments of those in whom there was at work a force alien to the simple soldier ideal. Many such have I myself inhabited. At the outset they have gone forth with a sense that the heavens applaud them, that there was a God whom they were serving, and who would recompense them for their huge sacrifice with the inestimable prize of his approval. But, Soon or late, their faith has been destroyed by the ugly facts of war.

Let me tell of one case, unique, yet typical of thousands on both sides of the line. From the Terrestrial point of view, the events which I am about to relate were contemporary with the story of Paul, already Partially recounted; and they culminated in 1917, when the war was far advanced, and Paul had already been more than two years in France. But from the Neptunian point of view my exploration of these events took place some time before I had made the acquaintance of Paul. The specimen case that I shall now report is one of my most interesting treasures. Also, it nearly cost me my life.

He was a young German, a native of Neustadt in the Black Forest, and he had been trained for the care of trees. His hands were skilled in tending the baby pines in their crowded nurseries, and in planting them out in the greater world of the forest. When he wielded the axe or the saw, the deed was done with precision, and also with a deep sense of fate. The resinous odour of the forest and of fresh-cut wood, the ever-present vision of towering shafts and swaying branches, the occasional glimpse of a deer, — these things he valued lightly while he was yet with them; but when he was removed from them he longed for them.

Now this young man, whom I will call Hans, had been selected for study because, though he became a good soldier, he was more than a good soldier. During his career as a forester I had found in him a very unusual feeling for individual trees, and for the massed ranks of the forest. He could not help regarding them as each one a unique spirit, living according to the laws of its own being, and striving toward perfection of life. In his capacity of woodman, tender in nurturing, relentless in the final execution, he persuaded himself that, though to the trees themselves the goal seemed to be merely endless enlargement in girth and stature, he, in his lethal ministration, afforded them in spite of themselves a nobler destiny, a fuller achievement. Sometimes when he regarded a score or so of the great felled trunks, laid flank to flank, with the resin still oozing from their clean-sawn wounds, he would say to the standing forest, ‘Do not pity them, for they have gloriously attained their destiny.’ Then with reverence, almost it seemed with envy of this beatitude, he would lay his hand on the rough and tawny skin of some prone giant, in a last salute. For the great communal being of the forest, reclining so grandly on its many hills, he had a feeling compounded of benevolence and awe. It was for him a spirit, one of God’s nobler creatures. When it began to be depleted for the war he was distressed. But even the forest, he admitted, must be sacrificed for that even nobler forest, the Fatherland.

He was a good son of the Fatherland, and also a good Catholic. They told him that the English and the French were servants of Satan, who wanted to harm the Fatherland. He went to the war filled with a sense of glorious adventure in a great cause. He was very proud of his new life. He cared for his rifle as he cared for his axe, and became as deadly a shot as he was precise a sawyer. When he killed his first man, with a bullet through the forehead, he had that sense of fate, and of calm almost loving execution, which he had known in felling the beloved trees in their ripeness. His next man he overcame in savage hand-to-hand struggle in the dark. For the Fatherland and in defence of his own life he did it; but there was no joy in it. Little by little he earned a reputation for coolness and resolution. He volunteered for a number of dangerous tasks and carried them out with distinction. When steel helmets were issued, he was proud to wear one. Its noble curves suggested the mythical heroes of his race. Its weight on his head crowned him.

At first Hans thought of the war in terms of his forest-born philosophy. He and his comrades were trees, who sought one destiny but were to find another, less easeful but more fulfilling to the spirit. But little by little it began to appear to him that this war, nay this world, was no well-tended forest but a terrible primeval jungle in which everything was crippled by everything else, and all things were useless. He strove to put a way this thought by drugging himself with war propaganda, or with duties, or with pleasures. But it would not leave him. So greatly did it disturb him that everything began to seem changed and sinister to him. Common objects looked at him meaningfully, tauntingly. Empty tins and trampled cigarette-ends would leer at him like little devils, deriding him for being trapped. His own hands in their ordinary actions seemed somehow to reproach him for putting them to serve the Devil. He had an overwhelming sense of betrayal. But whether it was that he himself was betrayed, or that he had betrayed something else, was never quite clear. Emblems of his religion, encountered in shattered churches or shrines, sometimes reproached him with his irrevocable treason; sometimes on the other hand they confessed themselves mere jests perpetrated by the universal diabolic power which had masqueraded as the God of Love. He began to think about the men he had killed, and to see them again, especially at night, especially a French corporal whose face he had smashed with a hand grenade. His rifle now took on a snake-like coldness in his hands, so that he shuddered. His helmet pressed on his forehead vindictively. Over all things there was a kind of darkness, which was the worse because he knew it was not ‘real’. In his ears there began to be a distant wailing as of wind, which when the great guns roared and crashed, was yet heard screaming above them.

In fact, Hans was on the way to breakdown. Now Neptunian observers found amongst you two kinds of breakdown, very different in origin. Both types are of great interest to us, because the more effectively integrated minds of our own species afford the psychologist no such opportunity of study, even under the most severe strain. One type of Terrestrial disorder, the commoner, was due to the conflict between primitive biological impulses of self-preservation and the behaviour imposed by military obligation. The other, which was more interesting to us, sprang from the conflict between military obligation and the still unrecognized impulse of loyalty to the striving Terrestrial spirit. This was the conflict which was most seriously undermining Hans, though the other also was of course adding to his distress. He himself lacked the selfknowledge to understand his trouble. He thought it was simply a trouble of the more primitive kind, and was bitterly ashamed. He determined not to give way, but to pull himself together. Both loyalty and self-pride demanded it.

In the case of Hans and a small minority of his fellow-men this ruinous mental conflict was complicated by another and even less understood division of the mind, namely by the fundamental and insoluble problem of your species, the discord between loyalty to the adventuring spirit of Man and on the other hand the ecstatic admiration of fate even when tragic. Although deep in his heart Hans was coming to realize that to fight for the Fatherland or any nation was treason to Man, and that this war was diabolic, he had also a vivid though unintelligible apprehension of the whole great hideous tumult as somehow an expression of super-human, inhuman, beauty. His mind was therefore tom by a three-cornered conflict, between old tribal loyalty, the new loyalty to Man, and the zest of tragic existence.

It was with dreadful satisfaction that Hans found himself involved once more in the centre of a great offensive. I, his indwelling companion, knew that within the next few days he would meet his death; but I did not know precisely when it would occur. I had therefore to prepare myself to leave him by partially reverting my attention to my own world. But at the same time it was necessary to observe him closely, for the moments of his life which would be of supreme interest to me were now at hand. I had also to keep a wary eye upon his circumstances, lest I should be entangled with him in his death.

All this happened at a time when I had been rather too constantly engaged on work in your world, and was so soaked in your mentality that I could not at all easily disengage myself from it. Moreover I found myself extremely reluctant to do so. Not only was I desirous to follow Hans through to his last moment, and if possible to afford his tortured spirit something of the Neptunian serenity, but also I was by now trapped by an overwhelming affection for your tragic world. It was therefore both with difficulty and with a strangely violent regret that I set myself to recapture in imagination the wider horizons and the crystalline titanic edifices of Neptune, the great limbs and eloquent features of my own race. My regret alarmed me; for it was a sure sign that I had stayed in your world much longer than was wholesome. Like one lost in the snow, who has an overwhelming desire to lie down and sleep, but knows that if he does he will never rise again, and never complete his work, so I now realized that a great effort was necessary. I began to goad myself by thinking of all the precious fruits of my exploration, which, if I were to succumb, would never be delivered to my own world.

Meanwhile the hour of the offensive was approaching. From the felt tone of Hans’s body, it was evident that he was going sick; but he would not admit it to himself. He developed a distressing colic and diarrhoea, but he clung to his post. He was seized also by a strong premonition of death, an infection from my own awareness that this was indeed his last battle. While he and his comrades were awaiting the order to attack. Hans experienced a sudden increase of mental lucidity. In desperate haste he reviewed his whole life, his whole experience of existence. He was terrified at the contrast, not the physical but the spiritual contrast, between his forest years and the present. Then, there was a bland rightness about everything. Now, everything, even generous and gallant action, was somehow evil, tainted by an all-pervading shame. He said to himself. ‘We have simply walked all together into Hell.’

It was almost the moment of attack. I knew that he would survive the storming of the enemy first-line trench; for I had previously learned from a Neptunian colleague, who had already observed this action through the eyes of another individual, that Hans was to be seen alive in the trench. Therefore I felt secure enough to watch my man minutely for a while, and to prepare his mind to meet death with peace, instead of the rage and despair that had hitherto possessed him. While he was still waiting inactive, Hans was very near to breaking-point. It seemed possible that he would not obey the order to advance. But when the word came, he clambered up with the rest; and as he pounded across the tract of shell-torn earth and tangled wire, he suddenly blazed up with maniac hate of the universe and all its denizens. In those moments it mattered not at all to him whether his bayonet should pierce a blue or a grey uniform. Nothing mattered, but that he should void the hate that was in him. I felt a bullet tear one of his ears. He did not notice it. A near shell killed the man on his right, and half-buried Hans himself. He picked himself up and stumbled on.

It now became clear that I was far more dangerously entangled in your world than I had thought; for at this moment, as I watched the desperate plight of this blind half-human spirit, I found myself suddenly undermined by doubt of my own Neptunian vision. Here was a mind blessed neither with the insensitivity of the beast nor with the all-redeeming vision of my own species, a mind deranged by the horror and guilt of three years of war, and now overwhelmingly nauseated by its own being and by the satanic universe which had spawned it only to devour it, a mind which looked forward to nothing but horror and annihilation for itself, and futility for its world. It suddenly appeared to me that a universe in which such torture could occur must be utterly vile, and that the Neptunian complacency was heartless. This apostasy I noted with dismay; but by now I was in no mood to withdraw myself into spiritual safety. More important it seemed to stay with Hans, and afford him at all costs at least an illusory consolation.

While he was covering the last few paces to the enemy trench, I was somewhat anxiously engaged in two very different undertakings. The first was to thrust upon the mind of Hans an image of the forest, which might serve as the starting-point for a spiritual change. The second, which I undertook at first with reluctance, was to prepare myself for a sudden exit from your world. I successfully established in him the vision of lofty trunks and sombre foliage. As he plunged into the trench with his bayonet in the neck of an enemy, this image took possession of the deeper region of his mind. I then began to think more conscientiously of my own safety, and to steady myself in earnest for the leap to Neptune. I pictured my own far future body, lying asleep in my subterranean garden. I dwelt upon the translucent features of the woman called Panther. I reminded myself of the Mad Star and of the supreme disaster which we, the Last Men, await undismayed. Contemplating this the last scene of the tragedy of Man, I began once more to see your little war in its true proportions. Presently the cramped and unwholesome feel of the young German’s body began to fade from me. The racket of battle, the tumbled and bleeding human forms, began to seem as a dream when one is all but wakened, a dream of being entangled in the insensate feuds of wild animals.

But now something happened which recalled my attention wholly to your sphere. A savage tussle was taking place in the trench, and the invaders were becoming masters of the situation. Hans, however, was playing no part in the fight. He was standing aside watching it, as though it were a dog-fight. In his mind was a vast confusion, caused by a sudden enlightenment. Not only had the forest-image started a change in him, but also he had been infected by my own reversion to the Neptunian mentality, so that in those moments he too experienced a kind of awakening. Suddenly he flung away his rifle and rushed with a huge laugh into the melee. Seizing one of his countrymen by the collar and the seat of the trousers, he tugged him away, crying, ‘No more brawling.’ An officer, seeing that Hans was out of his mind and causing trouble, shot him through the head.

Fortunately I had caught sight of the muzzle of the weapon out of the comer of Hans’s eye. Desperately, with a wild leap of the mind, I disengaged myself from your world.

I awoke to find myself in bed in my garden. I could not remember what had happened, but I had a violent pain in my head, and several of my colleagues were standing round me. They had heard me scream, they said, and had come running to my assistance. A few minutes later, apparently, I lost consciousness again and fell into convulsions. I remember nothing further tin six weeks later, when I awoke to find myself in the tree-girt hospital where shattered explorers are nursed back to health.

iv. PAUL IN THE WAR

WHILE I WAS studying Hans, I was of course also, in the very same span of Terrestrial duration, resident in Paul. Yet from the Neptunian point of view, let me repeat, my operations upon Hans took place before I had even discovered Paul. Consequently while I was in Hans I knew nothing about Paul and my work upon him, but while I was in Paul I remembered my experiences in Hans. This fact, as I shall tell in due season, had in one respect a curious effect on Paul.

Meanwhile I must revert to Paul’s career at the point where I. first introduced him into this survey. It will be remembered that he was suffering an agony of indecision about the war, that he hurried to a recruiting office, and then fled away from it. We left him slinking through the streets of London.

During the next few days Paul was frequently troubled by his waking nightmare, the mare that was dead, with her strangled foal. Sometimes it seemed to him that he himself was the foal, unable to free himself from the restriction of an outgrown mentality. Sometimes the whole human race was the foal. Sometimes on the other hand, the foal was just his unborn martial self, throttled by his most unmartial past.

A few days later Paul heard of a curious semi-religious ambulance organization, which, while professing pacifism, undertook voluntary succour of the wounded at the front. It was controlled and largely manned by a certain old-established and much-respected religious sect which adhered strictly to the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and to its own unique tradition of good works and quietism. Some members of this sect preached a rigorous pacifism which very soon brought them into conflict with authority; but others, who tempered pacifism with a craving to take some part in the great public ordeal, created this anomalous organization, whose spirit was an amazing blend of the religious, the military, the pacific, the purely adventurous, and the cynical. This ‘Ambulance Unit’ lasted throughout the war. It was formed in the first instance as an outlet for the adventurousness of the younger sectarians, who very naturally chafed at their exclusion from the tremendous adventure and agony of their contemporaries. Throughout its career it contained many such, normal young men eager for ardours and endeavours, who, though they had no very serious pacifist convictions, remained loyal to the tradition of their fathers, and refused to bear arms. Others there were, both within and without the sectarian fold, who, though they profoundly felt that to make war in modern Europe under any circumstances whatever was treason against something more sacred than nationalism, had yet not the heart to wash their hands of the world’s distresses.

Such were the pioneers of this strange organization; but as time passed it gathered to itself a very diverse swarm of persons who were driven from their civil occupations either by public opinion or their own consciences, or finally by legal compulsion. A few, very few, were narrow-hearted beings whose chief motive was simply to avoid what they regarded as the spiritual defilement of a soldier’s work. There was also a sprinkling of artists and intellectuals whose main concern was neither religion nor pacifism, but the adventures of the mind in novel circumstances. Among those who were admitted into the Unit after conscription had been introduced into England, some were serious pacifists who had been loyal to their civilian duties as long as possible; and a few, whose pacifism was only skin deep, chose the Unit as the line of least resistance, simply because they had no stomach either for the trenches or for prison.

To the military authorities this fantastic organization was a minute and negligible excrescence on the military machine. The dignitaries of the armies, if ever they came across it at all, regarded it at first as something to be kept at arm’s length until it had been brought under proper military control. It was a God-sent butt for ridicule. On the other hand it proved to have its uses; and often it earned a kind of incredulous respect, even affection.

To Neptunian observers this uncomfortable medley of cranks and commonplace individuals appeared, surprising as it may seem, as one of the most interesting phenomena of your whole war. It was not the mere pacifism of these beings that concerned us, for at home and later in the prisons there were pacifists more logical and more heroic. What interested us was the heart-searching bewilderment of minds which could not find harmony either with the great mass of their warring fellows or with the more relentless pacifists. We are interested too in the reactions which these unclassified beings aroused in any ordinary persons who happened to come across them. For they were neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. They claimed to be pacifists, but obviously they were ‘helping to win the war’ by releasing others for more arduous military duties. Surely, then, they were either fools or shirkers. Surely, said the martial-minded, they ought all to be in the trenches, or put in prison, or, better still, shot. But others, the majority, gave them a contemptuous toleration.

To Paul it seemed that by joining this body he would be both taking part in the war and registering his protest against it. In fact, as he ruefully admitted, he would both have his cake and eat it. But what else could he do? He was convinced at last that some mysterious thing inside him would always prevent him from enlisting. But if he could not fight, neither must he shirk. That he was moved at all by the will to avoid the extremity of danger and agony he did not admit; for he pictured himself as a stretcher-bearer rescuing the wounded under fire, or as a motor-ambulance driver trundling his car where the fight was hottest. So little did he yet know of ‘modern’ warfare.

Paul joined the Unit. With surprise and with shame-faced delight, he learned that he must dress as a British officer, though with certain distinguishing signs. On his left arm he must wear a red-cross brassard, stamped with a kind of postage mark. His hat also bore a red cross on a huge white square. Neptunian observers have been much indebted to this uniform. Nothing could have better symbolized the mental discord of Paul and his like. Nothing could have been more nicely calculated to intensify that discord. One side of Paul clung to the delusion that since he was to be dressed as an officer he must be after all, in spirit, a member of that gallant fraternity. The other side of him recognized that this could not be. He became in fact an object of ridicule, sometimes of indignant scorn. Wherever he went, he felt people wondering what on earth he was, and how he dared to caricature his betters. Pacifists, on the other hand, raised their eyebrows at his military colouring. One day while he was still painfully conscious of his uniform, he met Katherine in the street. Her husband was already in the trenches. She gazed at Paul for a moment in amazement, suppressed a smile, was smitten by Paul’s distress, and became blunderingly tactful.

In France Paul was less conscious of his uniform. There were others of his kind, and anyhow no one seemed to mind. Moreover he had work to do. Having had some slight acquaintance with a motor-bicycle, he was set to help in the repair of broken-down cars at the headquarters of the Unit. A few weeks later he became an orderly on a motor ambulance. He made innumerable journeys between the advanced stations and the hospitals, working entirely for the French army. For the first time he dealt with the wounded, with sitting-cases mostly cheerful at their release, and stretcher-cases in all phases of distress and weakness. Paul was at first deeply disturbed by compassion for these much-bandaged blue-clad figures, many of whom moaned and lamented at every jerk of the car. He was also bitterly ashamed before them, because he was whole and full of life. Yet there was another part of him which reacted in a less orthodox manner, and one which Paul himself at first regarded as disreputable, even Satanic. It was almost like the glee of the scientist watching a successful experiment, or of the artist apprehending some high, intricate, inevitable form. Paul tried hard not to feel in this way, or not to know that he felt so. But he could not help it; and he was abashed at his own brutality. It was I who caused this feeling in him, I, working upon his own rudimentary impulses. He need not have been ashamed.

In these days the main concern of Paul’s life, apart from the overwhelming wounded themselves, was to get to the end of each journey without a mishap, and to escape night work. There was also an increasing sense that, after all, this was not good enough, not the sort of thing he wanted for his conscience’ sake. Occasionally he saw a shell burst in the sand-dunes, or knock off the corner of a house. But as for stretcher-bearing in the front line, there was not to be anything of the sort. None of the armies were going to let irresponsible volunteers do work which demanded strict military discipline. One day, however, a gay young member of the party was killed by a shell. Paul found himself torn between regret for the dead boy and selfish satisfaction that, after all, this work was not entirely sheltered.

The weeks and months passed, weeks made up of sultry day-driving and pitch-black night-driving, of blood-stained blankets, packs, overcoats, of occasional alarms, of letters written and received, of bathes in the sea, not far from the steel entanglements which crossed the beach at the end of the line. Then there were talks, talks with those who shared the dilemma of Paul himself, and talks with the utterly different beings who accepted the war with a shrug; laborious, joking conversations with innumerable poilus, and still more laborious smutty jests, sometimes with Algerians and Moroccans.

Some months after the beginning of his war career, Paul, who had learnt to drive, was put in charge of a motor ambulance on a new convoy, which was to go far away south to a part of the line beyond the British front. His companions, some forty in all, constituted a fair sample of the Unit. There were sons of rich and religious manufacturers, and there were very small traders. There were printer’s apprentices, social workers, mechanics, students, clerks, teachers, shop assistants, artists. There were devout sectarians, less devout sectarians, and those who in revulsion from piety were at pains to shock the devout with cynicism and ribaldry. There were careless young Irishmen seeking adventure without ‘military discipline. There were kindly and earnest products of sectarian schools, and others who had emerged from the same schools with a no less earnest, no less kindly, frivolity. There were grizzled men who secretly cared nothing for pacifism, but sought the quickest way of seeing the spectacle of war. Here I may mention, too, the colourless but useful creature whom I have chosen as my mouthpiece for communicating with you. He has served me well in the past for the recounting of events in which he played no part; but now that it is necessary to dwell for a moment on microscopic occurrences of which he himself was a witness, I find him less manageable. It is not always possible to prevent him from dwelling unduly on the insignificant hardships and dangers in which he participated. Such were the companions of Paul, the unique being whom I had so carefully prepared for this experience.

With a sense that at last the test was coming, the Convoy lumbered south. It left behind it all traces of the British Army, which it so envied, respected, and obscurely feared. Presently it found itself established in a town beside an old royal hunting forest. And there for months it stayed, finding much hard work, but none of the ardours which it sought. In time even the work decreased, to a steady routine. In the earliest and more disorderly phase of the war the pioneers of this ‘Ambulance Unit’ had found ample opportunity to show that pacifism was not incompatible with courage and endurance; and even now, other Convoys of the Unit, it was said, were being of real use, and suffering real danger and hardship. But this Convoy, it seemed, was fated to idleness. There grew up a general restlessness, a tendency to quarrel over nothing, a disposition to walk violently along the geometrically ruled ‘allées’ of that prim forest. Paul conceived a sentimental passion for the forest. He withdrew as far as possible from his companions, and tried to think of himself as some kind of a fawn trapped into a human way of life. He found a deep satisfaction in sleeping on a stretcher under the stars and branches. I contrived that the forest should increasingly take possession of him, for I wished to perform a minor experiment on him. Reconstructing in my own mind the personality of Hans, who was at this time sniping Frenchmen further down the line, I brought Paul also under the young forester’s influence. Paul began to feel toward this neat French forest almost as Hans toward his grander German one. He spent all his spare time in it, laying bare his spirit, so he thought, to the presence of the trees. He began to write verses again, in his own groping technique. Here is one of them.

TIMBER

Stroke of the Axe! The trunk shivers and gapes.

Stroke on stroke! The chips fly.

‘Oh year upon year upon year I grew.

since I woke in the seed.’

Stroke of the axe!

Raw, wounded wood, and the heart laid bare.

‘Oh sun, and wind, and rain!

Oh leafing, and the fall of leaves!

Oh flower, love, and love’s fruit!’

Fierce bite of the axe!

Staggering, crying timber.

Down!

The twigs and the little branches are shattered

on the ground.

The woodman stands.

measuring.

After some months of futility, the Convoy became so restless that its leaders persuaded the army authorities to give it a change. Henceforth it was to be attached permanently to one of the divisions of the French army. Once more the dark-green vehicles, plastered with red and white emblems of mercy, lumbered through France in search of a dreaded and a longed-for goal. The Convoy joined its Division in ‘Lousy Champagne’, whose barren hills were now snowclad. This was during the Great Cold. The bread crystallized, the ration wine froze. The radiators of the cars, boiling at the top, froze at the bottom. At night Paul, shivering in his sleeping-bag under a pile of blankets in his canvas-sided car, thought of the trenches and was abashed.

The weeks rolled by. In quiet times Paul and his friends played rugger with the Division, or walked over the down-like hills which were already beginning to stipple themselves with flowers. It grew warm, hot. They bathed in the stream, their white bodies rejoicing in freedom from stiff military clothes. On one of these occasions Paul, dozing naked in the sun before his dip, dreamed about my seaside holiday with the woman, Panther. This dream had an interesting effect on him. He woke with a sense of the shadowy unreality of all Terrestrial events beyond the immediate reach of his senses; but the bright meadow, the willow-shaded stream, the delicious aliveness of his own sun-kindled body, had gained from his dream a more intense reality, an added spiritual significance. He thought of Katherine, whose breasts at least he had known. His flesh stirred. In sudden exasperation at his own futility and the world’s perversity, he dived.

Sometimes the young Englishmen went into the little town behind the lines to take wine or coffee, omelettes or gauffres; or to talk to the daughter of the patron. By the cynics it was maliciously suggested that this grey-eyed Athene had relations other than conventional with certain members of the Convoy. But to the devout this horror was incredible. Paul at least confessed to himself that he would have gladly lain with her, for he was hungry for woman, and she found her way into his dreams. But, however she treated others, to Paul she remained sweetly unapproachable. His failure with her intensified his discontent with the whole life of the Convoy. He wanted to prove himself a man, to have a share in the world’s burden, even if the world was a fool to bear it. To the Neptunian it was very interesting to observe in the Convoy this growing obsession with the need to vindicate pacifism by physical courage. At this time some who had hot blood and little care for pacifism went home to join the fighting forces. Others went home not to enlist but to go to prison for their pacifism, New hands came from headquarters to replenish the Convoy. Now that conscription was in force there was no lack of personnel.

Paul himself, whenever he went home on leave, had thoughts of joining the army. But he knew that these thoughts sprang only from his loneliness in a land intent on war, not from conviction of duty. On leave he was always cowed. He felt himself an outcast. He felt the women flaunting their soldiers at him. And the soldiers, though they let him alone, put him to shame. People at home judged him according to their own natures, as an impossible idealist, a fool, or a common shirker. All arguments closed with the same formula, ‘But we must fight, to keep the Germans out.’ When Paul dared to say ‘Would it really matter so very much if they came?’ he was silenced by stories of atrocities which in his heart he could not believe.

Once when he was on leave he met the Archangel, who was now an army chaplain, and had been wounded. They dined together at a railway restaurant among officers and women. Paul, homeward bound, was shabby. His tunic had a torn pocket, mended clumsily by his own hands. Those hands, which he had scrubbed till they seemed unusually clean, now turned out after all to be ingrained with engine oil; and his nails were ragged. He felt as though, for his ungentlemanly conduct in refusing to fight, he had been degraded from his own social class. This sense of loss of caste was intensified by the fact that he was wearing a closed collar; for since conscription had come in, the Unit had been made to give up the secretly cherished open collar of the officer’s tunic. The Archangel was friendly, sympathetic even. Yet in his very sympathy, so at least it seemed to Paul, condemnation was implied. Over coffee Paul suddenly asked, not without malice, ‘What would Jesus have done?’ While the priest was looking at the tablecloth for an answer, Paul, to his own horror, said in a clear loud voice, ‘Jesus would have shot the politicians and the war lords and started a European revolution.’ There was a silence in the restaurant. The pained Archangel murmured, ‘Strange talk from a pacifist, isn’t it?’ Then at last quite suddenly Paul’s pacifism defined itself in his mind, assumed a precise and limiting outline. To the Archangel he said, not too loud, but with conviction, ‘To fight for one’s nation against other nations in a world insane with nationalism, is an offence against the spirit, like fighting for a religious sect in a world insane with sectarianism. But to fight for revolution and a new world-order might become necessary.’ Paul was surprised at himself for making this statement. How it would grieve his pacifist friends! Was it true, he wondered. One conviction at least became clear in his mind. Whatever was needed to bring about a right world-order was itself right. But national wars could never do this, and were utterly wrong. Perhaps the only thing that could bring about a right world-order was not violence but a very great change in the hearts of ordinary people. But could that change ever occur? Somehow, it must.

Such were the thoughts that occupied Paul during the pause that followed the Archangel’s protest.

It was always with mingled despair and relief that Paul went back from leave. On leave he was haunted by the foal-image. When he was in the war area he felt there was some life in the creature yet; it was struggling though doomed. But at home it seemed already dead, mere horsemeat, never to be the friend of Man.

Life on the familiar sector was in the main too humdrum to be very repugnant. Sometimes for a day or two there would be activity. The roads would be seriously shelled, and the loaded cars would have to run the gauntlet. It was unpleasant, even nerve-racking, but it was soon over. And always one knew that this was but child’s play, not the real thing. During one of these minor disturbances, while Paul was returning to the front with an empty car, and shells were dropping close around him, he saw a figure lying at the road-side, its head badly smashed. Obviously the man was dead, so Paul drove on. But the next car stopped to pick him up, and he was still alive. For months Paul was haunted by that incident, going over it again and again in an agony of shame. It became to him the nadir of his existence. It increased his ludicrous obsession over physical courage.

The Division liked its ‘Section Sanitaire Anglaise’. It had come to regard these strayed English no longer with suspicion, but with affection tempered by incredulity. It excused their pacifism as one might excuse a Mohammedan for not eating pork. No doubt in both cases there was some equally remote and fantastic historical explanation. To Frenchmen it was apparently inconceivable that anyone should take pacifism seriously unless it happened to be an element of his religious orthodoxy. For Frenchmen themselves, so the Convoy had long ago discovered, the only serious religion was France, the only orthodoxy uncompromising loyalty to France. If anyone suggested that some policy beneficial to France might not be acceptable to other peoples, these amiable, lucid, but strangely unimaginative Latin children would no doubt charmingly express regret, but would also point out that if the policy was necessary for France, they must support it. The extermination of wild animals by the march of civilization is to be regretted, but no sane man would suggest that civilization should be restricted in order to save them. As to pacifism, anyhow, it was no more practicable in Europe than in the jungle. Thus talked the considerate and very gallant officers of the Division, so respect-worthy in sky-blue and gold. Thus talked the amiable poilus, so devoted to their distant families and the land they should be tilling. And, indeed, all that the troops said about pacifism was true. They and their like made it impossible. Once more, the foal.

One Frenchman indeed did show some understanding of these English cranks. He was one of the two priests attached to the Division. His colleague, a red-bearded lover of wine, wore military uniform, and was a hearty friend of the troops; but M. l’Abbé himself wore his black cassock, tramped the whole sector with his finger in a little volume of St. Thomas, and was revered. He would talk long with the English over meals in dug-outs, for he was interested in their sect and their ideas. Of their pacifism he would repeat, ‘Ah, mes chers messieurs, si tout le monde pouvait sentir comme vous!’ One day he was caught by a shell, which broke his leg. Members of the Convoy visited him in hospital, where his clean body was making a quick recovery. Then, through some muddle over a change of staff, he was neglected, and died. In the commemorative address given by his colleague, the abbot’s death was laid to the account of the God-hating enemy. To Paul it seemed to be due to more complex causes.

In most Frenchmen’s eyes the pacifism of these English merely gave an added and farcical piquancy to a body that had already earned respect for its efficiency. For these pacifists were extremely Conscientious in their work, as is indeed to be expected where consciences suffer from chronic irritation. The Division also admired, and politely ridiculed, the extravagant cleanliness of the Convoy. In quiet times the paintwork of its cars was sleek with paraffin. Lamps, fittings, even crank-cases were kept bright with metal polish. Some of the members grumbled, but all acquiesced. Thus did the Convoy pay tribute to the great British Army, which in spite of antimilitarism it so faithfully admired.

Cleanliness did not interfere with efficiency. What the Convoy undertook to do, it invariably did. On the other hand, from the Division’s point of view, the conscientiousness of these English sometimes went too far, as when they flatly refused to transport rifles and ammunition to the front in their red-cross cars. The General was indignant, and threatened to get rid of this pack of lunatics. But an artist member of the Convoy was at that time painting his portrait, so the matter was dropped.

By now this little speck of Englishmen in an ocean of Latins had acquired a strong group-spirit. Though internally it was generally at loggerheads with itself, all its jarring elements were in accord in maintaining the prestige of the Convoy. H anyone indulged in some minor lapse, public opinion was emphatically against him. On the other hand, if the officers of the Convoy sought to introduce customs which to the rank and file seemed unnecessary or obnoxious, the cry of ‘militarism’ was raised; and the long-suffering officers, though they had behind them the whole power of the British and French armies, patiently argued the matter out with the rebels. Punishment was unknown in the Convoy.

This little group of two score persons was ever in a state of internal strain, either between the officers and the rest, or between, one clique and another. Thus the earnestly devout would outrage the earnestly frivolous by organizing religious meetings. The frivolous would conscientiously get mildly drunk on ration wine. The earnestly philistine talked sex and sport, motors and war, to maintain their integrity against the earnestly intellectual, who talked art, politics, pacifism, and what they thought was philosophy. Yet all alike, or nearly all, received something from the strange corporate being of the Convoy. All were intensely conscious of their nationality, and of the need to impress these foreigners with British excellence. Yet all were outcasts from their nation, and deeply ashamed; even though also they consciously despised nationalism, and vehemently prophesied cosmopolitanism.

At last the test came. The Division moved to a part of the line beside the Montagne de Rheims. On the way the Convoy was caught up in a continuous stream of traffic making for the front, a stream of troops, guns, limbers, troops, motor-lorries, tanks, troops, ambulance sections. There was indescribable congestion, long waits, snail progress. Ahead a ceaseless roar of guns. On this journey I found in Paul a ludicrous blend of thankfulness and fright. His body was continuously in a state of suppressed tremor. Now and then he fetched a huge sigh, which he carefully turned into a yawn, lest his companion should guess that he was not looking forward to this offensive with the enthusiasm affected by all true members of the Convoy. Paul kept saying to himself, ‘This is the real thing, this is reality.’ But sometimes what he said was, ‘Reality? It’s just a bloody farce.’

The Convoy reached its destination and took over its duties. For a few days there was normal work, save that the roads were fairly steadily shelled. One shell Paul had reason to remember. He was in the courtyard that served the Convoy as a parking-ground. A score of blue figures tramped past the gateway singing, exchanging pleasantries with the English. They marched on, and disappeared behind the wall. Then there was a shattering explosion, followed by dead silence. The English rushed out into the road. There lay the twenty blue figures, one of them slowly moving the stump of an arm. Blood trickled down the camber of the road, licking up the dust. It flowed along the gutters. Paul and his mates got stretchers and carried away those who were not dead, shouting instructions to one another, for the shelling continued. During this operation Paul had one of those strange fits of heightened percipience which my influence sometimes brought upon him. Everything seemed to be stamped upon his senses with a novel and exquisite sharpness, the limpness of the unconscious bodies that he lifted, a blood-stained letter protruding from a torn pocket, a steel helmet lying in the road, with a fragment of someone’s scalp in it, bloody and lousy. Paul’s legs were trembling with fright and nausea, while the compassionate part of him insisted that these unhappy fellow mortals must be succoured. For some might live. That letter might yet after all be answered. It seemed to Paul now imperative that this poilu and his maraine should communicate once more. Yet at the same time that deep mysterious alien part of him, which he was gradually coming to accept and even value, laughed delicately, laughed as one may laugh with tenderness at the delicious gaucherie of a child.

It seemed to say to the other Paul, and to the stricken men also, ‘You dear, stupid children, to hurt yourselves like this, and to be so upset about it! Babes will be babes; and monkeys, monkeys.’

When Paul was off duty he went up into the forest-clad mountains and looked down at the line of dense smoke which marked the front, overhung at regular intervals by the two rows of captive balloons, stretching indefinitely into the south-east. An enemy ‘plane, harassed at first by white points of shrapnel, attacked a French balloon, which burst into flame. A scarcely visible parachute sank earthward from it. Paul went further into the forest. Here there was a kind of peace in spite of the roaring guns. Under my influence the spirit of Hans came on him again, so that he had a perplexing sense that, in the presence of his brothers the trees, he was brought mysteriously into touch also with his brothers the enemy.

The offensive began. Henceforth there was continuous work, with rare meals and no sleep. French and German wounded came flooding in. Hundreds who could find no place in the cars had to stagger all the way down to the chateau where the gaily-clad doctors grew more and more flustered. Slowly, uncertainly, these walking wounded swarmed along the road, their blue and their grey clothes sometimes indistinguishable for dust and blood. The roads now began to be impossible with shell-holes, and choked with wreckage. At one time Paul, hurrying along under shell-fire with a full load of sorrowing creatures shaken together in his reeling car, found himself behind a galloping artillery wagon. At the cross-roads, where some one, for reasons unknown, had propped a dead sergeant against the sign-post, a shell fell on the front of the wagon. The two men and one of the rear horses were killed. Its fellow floundered with broken legs, then died. The leaders stampeded. The road was now completely blocked. French and English dragged the dead horses and the limber to the ditch, tugging frantically at harness and splintered wood, while the wounded in the waiting cars, supposing themselves deserted under fire, cried out for help.

At night things were worse. Cars slipped into ditches, plunged into shell-holes. Paul, with a full load of stretcher-cases, almost drove off a broken bridge into the river. All the cars were damaged by shell-fire. Some were put out of action. One, going up empty to the front, suddenly found itself in a covey of bursting shells. The driver and orderly tumbled hurriedly into a ditch, and a shell burst on the driving-seat. The petrol went up in a huge column of flame’ and soon nothing remained of the car, but scrap iron and pools of aluminium on the road. Later, a line of tanks, going up, met a line of ambulances, coming down, where there was no room to pass. Confusion and altercations. A tank was hit; once more a column of flame, dwarfing the other, afforded a beacon for enemy guns.

Two or three days and nights of this kind of thing severely strained the Convoy. One or two members had already been wounded, and others had been badly shaken. Nerves developed here and there. Some one began to behave oddly, wandering about delivering meaningless messages. He was taken away. Paul himself was in a queer state; for his head was splitting, his mouth foul, his limbs curiously stiff and heavy. His stomach seemed to have collapsed. Worse, his driving was becoming erratic, and he sometimes said things he did not intend to say. He was continuously scared, and also scared of being found out by his calmer colleagues. His bogy, the foal, began to haunt him again. Somehow it was all mixed up with another vision, a bloodstained letter protruding from a torn pocket; and with yet another, a cow so flattened in the mud by the wheels of lorries and the feet of troops that nothing of it remained three-dimensional except its head in the gutter, and one broken horn. The thought that, after all, this ambulance life was mere child’s play compared with what was afoot elsewhere, hurt him so badly that inwardly he whined. For if things grew much worse than this he would certainly crack; and yet ‘this’ was nothing. Superficially he had maintained thus far something like the appearance of calm. He even contrived an occasional stammering joke. But inwardly he was by now going faint with terror. And this welling terror was beginning to spoil his affected calm. People were beginning to look at him anxiously. Paul found himself reviewing his case in this manner once while he was crouching in a ditch waiting for a lull in the shelling, and for a load of wounded. Yes, inwardly he was by now not far from cracking.

Yet more inwardly still, so he remarked to himself, he was quite calm. That was the odd part of it all. His silly body, or animal nature, as he put it, might very well crack, or run away howling, and yet he, Paul, would have no part in it. He, Paul, the rider of this quivering animal, was unperturbed, interested, amused. The beast might run away with him or throw him. It was proving a rather worthless sort of beast, and he had his work cut out to force it to the jumps. He would damned well master it if he could; but if he could not, well, it was all in the game, the extremely interesting game of being a human thing, half god, half beast. He knew quite well it didn’t seriously matter if he was killed, or even if he was horribly wounded. It didn’t really matter even if he cracked, though he must hang on if he could. He had a strange conviction, there in the ditch, that whichever did happen would be just the right thing; that even if he cracked, it would somehow be part of the’ music of the spheres’. Even the foal unborn was part of the music. Even this war, this bloody awful farce, was part of the music. If you couldn’t be anything but a vibrating, a tortured string in the orchestra, you didn’t like it. But if you had ears to listen, it was — great. These wounded — if only they could somehow hear, even through their own pain, the music of the spheres! If he himself were to be caught by the next shell, would he still keep hold of the music? Not he! He would be a mere tortured animal. Well, what matter? The music would still be there, even if he could not hear it, even if no man heard it. That was nonsense. Yet profoundly he knew that it was true.

Presently, for no apparent reason, the sector quietened down. The offensive, it seemed, had been a failure. The advance, which was to have swept the Germans out of France, never began. The Division, moreover, was in a state of mutiny, sensing mismanagement, declaring that thousands of lives had been lightly thrown away. It was withdrawn. The Convoy travelled with it into a flowery region far behind the lines. Tin hats were discarded.

Then occurred a little incident very significant to the Neptunian observer. The Convoy, having borne itself well, was cited in the orders of the Corps d’ Armée. It was therefore entitled to have the Croix de Guerre painted on its cars. The artists undertook this task. The bronze cross, with its red and green ribbon, was earned also by certain individual members of the Convoy. Should they accept it, should they wear the ribbon? To refuse would be insulting to the French army. But that pacifists should display military decorations was too ridiculous. There was some debate, but the thing was done. Thus did these pacifists, hypnotized for so long by the prestige and glamour of the military, bring themselves to devour the crumbs of glory that fell from the master’s table.

There is no need to dwell upon the subsequent adventures of this war-scarred and war-decorated group of pacifists. The being whose brain I use in communicating with you would gladly tell of them in detail, for in his memory they have a false glamour and significance. But already I have allowed him too much rein. The life of his Convoy is indeed significant to the student of your species; but the events on which he seeks to dwell are minute with an even more microscopic minuteness than the Great War, which to the Neptunian observer, searching for your War through past ages, is so easily to be overlooked. The significance of the war itself, lies partly in its fatal results, partly in that it reveals so clearly the limits of a half-developed mind. The importance of the ulto-microscopic events that I have allowed my instrument to enlarge upon in this section, is that they show how, even in the less conventional minds of your race, the archaic impulses caused devastating perplexity.

When the Convoy had rested, it wandered from sector to sector, till at last it found itself once more near the vine-clad and forest-crowned Mountain of Rheims, and once more destined for a great offensive. Once more the din of the troops, guns, lorries. Once more tom-up roads, smashed cars, night-driving in blurred and suffocating gas-masks. Once more the in-flooding wounded, and now and again a member of the little group itself wounded or killed. This time the offensive went on and on. Car after car was put out of action. Half the personnel were laid low, some by gas, some seemingly by bad water.

One day, as Paul was turning his car round before loading, a shell caught his companion, who was directing him from the road. This was a lad with whom Paul had often worked, and often amicably wrangled about art and life, a boy full of promise, and of the will to make his mark. Now, he lay crumpled on the road. Paul and others rushed to him. The lower part of his body had been terribly smashed, but he was still conscious. His eyes turned to Paul, and his lips moved. Paul bent to listen, and seemed to hear a faint gasping reiteration of one phrase, ‘Won’t die yet.’ With difficulty they got the boy on to a stretcher, his face twisted with added pain.. As they carried him away, he stirred feebly, then suddenly went limp, his head rolling loosely with the motion of the bearers. An arm slipped off the stretcher, and dangled. They put him down again and bent over him. A French broncardier, who was helping, stood up with a shrug and a sigh. ‘C’est déjà fini,’ he said. Looking down at the smooth face, he added, ‘Qui, mon pauvre, c’est fini. Mort pour la patrie! Ah, les sales Boches!’

Paul gazed at the tanned bloodless features, the curiously changed eyes, the sagging mouth. This was the moment for me to undertake an operation which I had long contemplated. Bringing all my strength to bear on Paul I lashed him into a degree of self-consciousness and other-consciousness which I had not hitherto produced in him. With this heightened sensitivity, he was overwhelmed by vivid apprehension of the life that had been cut short, the intricacy and delicate organization of the spirit which he had known so well, and had now seen extinguished, with all its young ambitions, fears, admirations, loves, all its little whims and lusts and laughters. The experience came on him in a flash, so that he let slip a quick sharp scream of surprise and compassion. He stared fascinated at a smear of blood on the cheek, seeing as it were right through the present death-mask into the boy’s whole living past, retaining it in one imaginative grasp, as music may be retained in the mind’s ear after it has been interrupted; may still be heard, gathering strength, proliferating, and suddenly broken across with the breaking of the instrument. Paul heard, indeed, what the boy himself did not hear, the terrible snap and silence of the end. This was but the first stage of my operation on Paul. I also contrived that, with his hypersensitive vision, he should seem to see, beyond this one dead boy, the countless hosts of the prematurely dead, not the dead of your war only, but of all the ages, the whole massed horror of young and vital spirits snuffed out before their time. Paul’s mind reeled and collapsed; but not before he had glimpsed in all this horror a brilliant, and insupportable, an inhuman, beauty. The operation had been completed, and in due season I should observe the results. He fell, and was carried away in one of the ambulances.

In a few days, however, he recovered, and was able to take part in a new phase of the war, the advance of the Allies. It was a swarming advance along unspeakable roads, over pontoon bridges, through burning villages.

During this final advance Paul one day perceived in a field by the road the mare and unborn foal whose image had so long haunted him. The unexpected but all too familiar sight shocked him deeply. Volume by volume it corresponded with his image, but there was an added stench. How came it, he wondered, that for years he had ‘remembered’ this thing before ever he had seen It?

One symbolical aspect of his foal was still hidden from him. When at last the armistice came, so longed for, so incredible, Paul did not yet know that the peace ensuing on the world’s four years’ travail was to be the peace, not of accomplished birth but of strangulation.

The following curious poem, which Paul devised shortly before the end of the war, expresses his sense of the futility and pettiness of all human activity.

If God has not noticed us?

He is so occupied

with the crowded cycle of nature.

The sea’s breath.

by drenching the hills

and descending along the meadow brooklets

(whose backwaters

are playgrounds of busy insect populations).

returns seaward

to rise again.

Water-beetles

skating on the stagnant skin of a backwater.

we get rumour of Oceanus.

of storm-driven worlds and island universes.

And we would annex them!

We would dignify the fiery currents of the Cosmos

by spawning in them!

But the minnow, death, he snaps us;

and presently some inconsiderable spate

will scour the cranny clean of us.

Long after man, the stars

will continually evaporate in radiant energy

to recondense as nebulae.

and again stars;

till here and there some new planet

will harbour again

insect populations.

7 AFTER THE WAR

I. THE NEW HOPE ii. PAUL GATHERS UP THE THREADS iii. PAUL COMES TO TERMS WITH WOMAN iv. LONDON AND THE SPIRIT

i. THE NEW HOPE

YOUR LITTLE GREAT War reached its ignominious end. During the four years of misery and waste, the short-lived combatants felt that the war area, fringed with the remote and insubstantial lands of peace, was the whole of space, and that time itself was but the endless Duration of the War. But to Neptunian observers, ranging over the considerable span occupied by human history, the events of those four years appeared but as an instantaneous flicker of pain in the still embryonic life of Man. The full-grown Spirit of Man, the Race Mind of the Eighteenth Human Species may be said to use the great company of individual Neptunian observers as a kind of psychical and supra-temporal microscope for the study of its own prenatal career. Peering down that strange instrument, it searches upon the slide for the little point of life which is to become in due season Man himself. The thing is discovered. It is seen to reach that stage of its history when for the first time it begins to master its little Terrestrial environment. Then is to be detected by the quick eye of mature Man the faint and instantaneous flicker, your Great War. Henceforth the minute creature slowly retracts its adventuring pseudopodia, enters into itself, shrinks, and lapses into a state of suspended animation, until at last, after some ten million years, it is ripe for its second phase of adventure, wholly forgetful of its first. It becomes, in fact, the Second Human Species.

When your Great War ended, it seemed to the soldiers of all the nations that a new and happier age had dawned. The veterans prepared to take up once more the threads that war had cut; the young prepared for the beginning of real life. All alike looked forward to security, to freedom from military discipline, to the amusements of civilized society, to woman. Those who had been long under restraint found it almost incredible that they would soon be able to go wherever they pleased without seeking permission, that they would be able to lie in bed in the morning, that they might wear civilian clothes, that they would never again be under the eye of a sergeant, or a captain, or some more exalted officer, and never again take part in an offensive.

For the majority these anticipations were enough. If they could but secure a livelihood, capture some charming and adoring woman, keep a family in comfort, enjoy life, or return to some engrossing work, they would be happy. And a grateful country would surely see to it that they were at least thus rewarded for their years of heroism.

But there were many who demanded of the peace something more than personal contentment. They demanded, and indeed confidently looked for, the beginnings of a better world. The universe, which during the war years, had been progressively revealed as more and more diabolical, was now transfused with a new hope, a new or a refurbished divinity. The armies of the Allies had been fighting for justice and for democracy; or so at least they had been told. They had won. Justice and democracy would henceforth flourish everywhere. On the other hand the armies of the Central Powers had believed that they had been fighting for the Fatherland or for Culture. They had been beaten; but after a gallant fight, and because their starved and exhausted peoples could no longer support them. To those hard-pressed peoples the end of war came not indeed as a bright dawn, as to the Allies, but none the less as the end of unspeakable things, and with the promise of a new day. Henceforth there would at least be food. The pinched and ailing children of Central Europe, whom the Allies had so successfully, so heroically stricken by their blockade, might now perhaps be nursed into precarious health. The beaten nations, trusting to the high-sounding protestations of the victors, not only surrendered, but appealed for help in the desperate task of re-establishing society. President Wilson prophesied a new world, a Brotherhood of Nations, and pronounced his Fourteen Points. Henceforth there would be no more wars, because this last and most bitter war had expunged militarism from the hearts of all the peoples; and had made all men feel, as never before, the difference between the things that were essential and the things that were trivial in the life of mankind What mattered (men now vehemently asserted) was the fellowship of man, Christian charity, the co-operation of all men in the making of a happier world. The war had occurred because the fundamental kindliness of the peoples towards one another had been poisoned by the diplomats. Henceforth the peoples would come into direct contact with one another. The old diplomacy must go.

These sentiments were tactfully applauded by the diplomats of all nations, and were embalmed, suitably trimmed and tempered, in a new charter of human brotherhood, the Peace Treaty of Versailles.

To Neptunian observers, estimating the deepest and most obscure mental reactions of thousands of demobilized soldiers and of the civilian populations that welcomed them, it was clear that the First Human Species had not yet begun to realize the extent of the disaster which it had brought upon itself. All the belligerent peoples were, of course, war-weary. It was natural that after the four years of strain they should experience a serious lassitude, that after responding so magnificently (as was said) to the call for sacrifice, they should be more than usually prone to take the easy course. But our observers, comparing minutely the minds of 1914 with the same minds of 1918, noted a widespread, subtle, and in the main unconscious change. Not a few minds, indeed, had been completely shattered by the experience of those four years, succumbing either to the conflict between personal fear and tribal loyalty or to that rarer conflict between tribal loyalty and the groping loyalty to Man. But also, even in the great mass of men, who had escaped this obvious ruin, there had occurred a general coarsening and softening of the mental fibre, such that they were henceforth poor stuff for the making of a new world.

The slight but gravely significant lassitude which we now observed in all the Western peoples had its roots not merely in fatigue, but in self-distrust and disillusionment. At first obscured by the new hope which peace had gendered, this profound moral disheartenment was destined to increase, not dwindle, as the years advanced. In those early months of peace scarcely any man was aware of it, but to our observers it was evident as a faint odour of corruption in almost every mind. It was the universal though unacknowledged sense of war-guilt, the sense that the high moral and patriotic fervours of 1914 had somehow obscured a deeper and more serious issue. Western Man had blundered into a grave act of treason against the spirit that had but recently and precariously been conceived in him. Few could see that it was so; and yet in almost every mind we found an all-pervading shame, unwitting but most hurtful. Knowing not that they did so, all men blamed themselves and their fellow-men for a treason which they did not know they had committed, against a spirit that was almost completely beyond their ken. Neptunian observers did not blame them. For these unhappy primitives had but acted according to their lights. They could not know that another and a purer light had been eclipsed in them before they could recognize it.

In many thousands of minds we have watched this subtle guilt at work. Sometimes it expressed itself as a touchy conscientiousness in familiar moral issues, combined with a laxity in matters less stereotyped. Sometimes it became a tendency to blame others unduly, or to mortify the self. More often it gave rise to a lazy cynicism, a comfortable contempt of human nature, and disgust with all existence. Its issue was a widespread, slight loosening of responsibility, both toward society and toward particular individuals. Western men were to be henceforth on the whole less trustworthy, less firm with themselves, less workmanlike, less rigorous in abstract thought, less fastidious in all spheres, more avid of pleasure, more prone to heartlessness, to brutality, to murder. And, when, later, it began to be realized that this deterioration had taken place, the realization itself, by suggestion, increased the deterioration.

But the effects of the war were by no means wholly bad. In the great majority of minds observed by Neptunians after the war, there was detected a very interesting conflict between the forces of decay and the forces of rebirth. The hope of a new world was not entirely ungrounded. The war had stripped men of many hampering illusions; and, for those that had eyes to see, it had underlined in blood the things that really mattered. For the most clear-sighted it was henceforth evident that only two things mattered, the daily happiness of individual human beings and the advancement of the human spirit in its gallant cosmical adventure. To the great majority of those who took serious interest in public affairs the happiness of men and women throughout the world became henceforth the one goal of social action. Only a few admitted that the supreme care of all the peoples should be the adventure of the Terrestrial spirit. Because so few recognized this cosmical aspect of human endeavour, even the obvious goal of world-happiness became unrealizable. For if happiness alone is the goal, one man’s happiness is as good as another’s, and no one will feel obligation to make the supreme sacrifice. But if the true goal is of another order, those who recognize it may gladly die for it.

In the Western World, during the decades that followed the war we encountered far and wide among the hearts of men the beginnings of a true rebirth, an emphatic rejection of the outworn ideals of conduct and of world policy, and a desperate quest for something better, something to fire men’s imaginations and command their allegiance even to the death; something above suspicion, above ridicule, above criticism. Far and wide, among many peoples, the new ideal began to stir for birth, but men’s spirits had been subtly poisoned by the war. What should have become a world-wide religious experience beside which all earlier revivals would have seemed mere tentative and ineffectual gropings, became only a revolutionary social policy, became in fact the wholly admirable but unfinished ideal of a happy world. The muscles which should have thrust the new creature into the light were flaccid. The birth was checked. The young thing, half-born, struggled for a while, then died, assuming the fixed grin of Paul’s nightmare foal.

In Russia alone, and only for a few decades, did there seem to be the possibility of complete rebirth. In that great people of mixed Western and Eastern temperament the poison of war had not worked so disastrously. The great mass of Russians had not regarded the war as their war, but as the war of their archaic government. And as the suffering bred of war increased beyond the limit of endurance, they rose and overthrew their government. The revolutionists who heroically accomplished this change were troubled by no war-shame, for the blood which they shed was truly split in the birth throes of a new world. They were indeed fighting for the spirit, though they would have laughed indignantly had they been told so. For to them ‘spirit’ was but an invention of the oppressors, and ‘matter’ alone was real. They fought, so they believed, for-the free physiological functioning of human animals. They fought, that is, for the fulfilling of whatever capacities those animals might discover in themselves. And in fighting thus they fought unwittingly for the human spirit in its cosmical adventure. When their fight was won, and they had come into power, they began to discipline their people to lead a world-wide crusade. Each man, they said, must regard himself as but an instrument of something greater than himself, must live for that something, and if necessary die for it. This devotion that they preached and practised was indeed the very breath of the spirit within them. Little by little a new hope, a new pride, a new energy, spread among the Russian people. Little by little they fashioned for themselves a new community, such as had never before occurred on the planet. And because they allowed no one to hold power through riches, they became the horror of the Western World.

To the thousands of our observers stationed in Russian minds it was evident even at the outset that this promise of new birth would never be fulfilled. The ardour of revolution and the devotion of community-building could not suffice alone for ever. There must come a time when the revolution was won, the main structure of the new community completed, when the goal of a happy world, though not in fact attained, would no longer fire men, no longer suffice as the ‘something’ for which they would gladly live or die; when the spirit so obscurely conceived in men would need more nourishment than social loyalty. Then the only hope of the world would be that Russian men and women should look more closely into their hearts, and discover there the cosmical and spiritual significance of human life, which their creed denied. But this could not be. In few of them did we find a capacity for insight strong enough to apprehend what man is, and what the world, and the exquisite relation of them. And being without that vision, they would have nothing to strengthen them against the infection of the decaying Western civilization. Feared and hated by their neighbours, they themselves would succumb to nationalistic fear and hate. Craving material power for their defence, they would betray themselves for power, security, prosperity.

In short, the new hope which the European War had occasioned, especially in Russia, was destined, sooner or later, to be destroyed by the virus which war itself had generated in the guilty Western peoples. While that new hope, still quick and bright, was travelling hither and thither over Asia like a smouldering fire, this dank effluence also was spreading, damping the fibre of men’s hearts with disillusionment about human nature and the universe. And so, that which should have become a world-wide spiritual conflagration was doomed never to achieve more than revolutionary propaganda, and smoke.

ii. PAUL GATHERS UP THE THREADS

IT IS MY task to show your world in its ‘post-war’ phase as it seemed to one of your own kind who had been infected with something of the Neptunian mood. First, however, I must recall how Paul faced his own private ‘post-war’ problems, and emerged at last as a perfected instrument for my purpose.

Crossing the Channel for the last time in uniform, Paul looked behind and forward with mixed feelings. Behind lay the dead, with their thousands upon thousands of wooden crosses; and also (for Paul’s imagination) the wounded, grey, blue and khaki, bloody, with splintered bones. Behind, but indelible, lay all that horror, that waste, that idiocy; yet also behind lay, as he was forced to admit to himself, an exquisite, an inhuman, an indefensible, an intolerable beauty. Forward lay life, and a new hope. Yet looking toward the future he felt misgivings both for himself and for the world. For himself he feared, because he had no part in the common emotion of his fellow-countrymen, in the thankfulness that the war had been nobly won. For the world he feared, because of a growing sense that man’s circumstances were rapidly passing beyond man’s control. They demanded more intelligence and more integrity than he possessed.

Thus Paul on his homeward journey could not conjure in himself the pure thankfulness of his fellows. Yet, looking behind and forward, with the wind chanting in his ears and the salt spray on his lips, he savoured zestfully the bitter and taunting taste of existence. Comparing his present self with the self of his first war-time crossing, he smiled at the poor half-conscious thing that he had been, and said, at least, I have come awake.’ Then he thought again of those thousands under the crosses, who would not wake ever. He remembered the boy whom he had known so well, and had watched dying; who should have wakened so splendidly. And then once more he savoured that mysterious, indefensible beauty which he had seen emerge in all this horror.

I chose this moment of comparatively deep self-consciousness and world-consciousness to force upon Paul with a new clarity the problem with which I intended henceforth to haunt him. This task was made easier by the circumstances of the voyage. The sea was boisterous. Paul greatly enjoyed a boisterous sea and the plunging of a ship, but his pleasure was complicated by a feeling of sea-sickness. He fought against his nausea and against its depressing influence. He wanted to go on enjoying the wind and the spray and the motion and the white-veined sea, but he could not. Presently, however, he very heartily vomited; and then once more he could enjoy things, and even think about the world. His thinking was coloured both by his nausea and by his zest in the salt air. Resolutely blowing his nose, meditatively wiping his mouth, he continued to lean on the rail and watch the desecrated but all-unsullied waves. He formulated his problem to himself, ‘How can things be so wrong, so meaningless, so filthy; and yet also so right, so overwhelmingly significant, so exquisite?’ How wrong things were, and how exquisite, neither Paul nor any man had yet fully discovered. But the problem was formulated. I promised myself that I should watch with minute attention the efforts of this specially treated member of your kind to come to terms with the universe.

Paul returned to his native suburb, and was welcomed into the bosom of the home. It was good to be at home. For a while he was content to enjoy the prospect of an endless leave, lazing in flannel trousers and an old tweed coat. At home, where he was not expected to explain himself, he was at peace; but elsewhere, even when he was dressed as others, he felt an alien. He attributed his sense of isolation to his pacifism, not knowing how far opinion had moved since the beginning of the war. This loneliness of his was in fact due much more to my clarifying influence in him, to his having been as it were impregnated with seminal ideas gendered in another species and another world. He found his mind working differently from other minds, yet he could not detect where the difference lay. This distressed him. He hated to be different. He longed to become an indistinguishable member of the herd, of his own social class. He began to take great pains to dress correctly, and to use the slang of the moment. He tried to play bridge, but could never keep awake. He tried to play golf, but his muscles seemed to play tricks on him at the critical moment. The truth was that he did not really want to do these things at all. He wanted to do ‘the done thing’.

There was another trouble. He had not been at home more than a fortnight before he realized with distress that his relations with his parents were not what they had been. In the old days he used to say, ‘I have been lucky in my choice of parents. Of course they don’t really know me very well, but they understand as much as is necessary. They are both endlessly kind, sympathetic; helpful, and they have the sense to leave me alone.’ Now, he began to see that in the old days they really had understood him far more than he supposed, but that the thing that he had since become was incomprehensible to them. Even at the beginning of the war they had lost touch with him over his pacifism; accepting it thankfully as a means of saving him from the trenches, but never taking it seriously. Now, they were more out of touch than ever. It seemed to him that they were living in a kind of mental Flat Land, without acquaintance with the third dimension. They were so sensible, so kind, so anxious to be tolerant. He could see eye to eye with them in so many things, in all those respects in which Flat Land was in accord with Solid Land. But every now and then intercourse would break down. They would argue with him patiently for a while in vain; then fall silent, regarding him with an expression in which he seemed to see, blended together, love, pity and horror. He would then shrug his shoulders, and wonder whether in earlier times the gulf between the generations had ever been so wide. They, for their part, sadly told one another that his war experience (or was it his pacifism?) had so twisted his mind that he was ‘not quite, not absolutely, sane’.

After a few weeks Paul went back to his old post in the big suburban secondary school. He was surprised that they took him, in spite of his pacifism and his incompetence. Later he discovered that his father knew the Chairman of the Council. Ought he to resign? Probably, but he would not. He was by now well established as one of the less brilliant but not impossible members of the staff; and though the work never came easily to him, it was no longer the torture that it had formerly been. He was older, and less easily flustered. And he must have money. After all, he found, he rather liked boys, so long as he could keep on the right side of them. If you got wrong with them, they were hell; but if you kept right, they were much more tolerable than most adults. The work was respectable useful work. Indeed, it was in a way the most important of all work, if it was done properly. Moreover, it was the only work he could do. And he must have money; not much, but enough to make him independent.

His aim at this time was to live an easy and uneventful life. He told himself that he did want to pull his weight, but he was not prepared to overstrain himself. He must have time to enjoy himself. He proposed to enjoy himself in two ways, and both together. He wanted to win his spurs in the endless tournament of sex; for his virginity filled him with self-doubt, and disturbed his judgements about life. At the same time he promised himself a good deal of what he called ‘intellectual sight-seeing’ or ‘spiritual touring’. Comfortably, if not with a first-class ticket, at least with a second-class one, he would explore all the well-exploited travel-routes of all the continents of the mind. Sometimes he might even venture into the untracked wild, but not dangerously. Never again, if he could help it, would he lose touch with civilization, with the comfortable mental structure of his fellows, as he had done through pacifism. Thus did this war-weary young Terrestrial propose. Much of his plan suited my purpose admirably, but by no means the whole of it.

So Paul settled down to teach history, geography, English and ‘scripture’. He taught whatever he was told to teach, and for mere pity’s sake, he made the stuff as palatable as he could. On the whole the boys liked him. He seemed to regard the business much as they did themselves, as a tiresome necessary grind, which must be done efficiently but might be alleviated by jokes and stories. Even discipline, formerly such a trouble to Paul, now seemed to work automatically. This was partly because he did not worry about it, having outgrown the notion that he must preserve his ‘dignity’, and partly because in the critical first days of his new school career I influenced his mood and his bearing so that he gave an impression of friendliness combined with careless firmness. Paul himself was surprised and thankful that the self-discipline of his classes relieved him of a dreadful burden. He used to say to visitors, in front of the class, ‘You see, we have not a dictator, but a chairman.’ All the same, he secretly took credit for his achievement.

By thus helping Paul to establish himself in a tolerable routine, I enabled him to keep his mind free and sensitive for other matters. The boys themselves knew that there was another side to him. Occasionally in class the lesson would go astray completely, and he would talk astoundingly about things interesting to himself, things outside the curriculum, and sometimes of very doubtful orthodoxy. He would dwell upon the age and number of the stars, the localization of functions in the brain, the abstractness of science and mathematics, the kinds of insanity, the truth about Soviet Russia, the theatre and the cinema, the cellular structure of the body, the supposed electronic structure of the atom, death and old age, cosmopolitanism, sun-bathing, the crawl stroke, Samuel Butler, coitus and the birth of babies. To these floods of language the boys reacted according to their diverse natures. The stupid slipped thankfully into torpor, the industrious revised their home-work. The shrewd masticated whatever in the harangue seemed to have a practical value, and spat out the rest. The intellectually curious listened aloofly. The main mass fluctuated between amusement, enthusiastic support, and boredom. A few sensitive ones took Paul as their prophet. After these outbursts Paul became unusually reticent and cautious. Sometimes he even told the boys they’ had better forget it all’ because he was’ a bit mad then’. He was obviously anxious that rumour of his wildness should not go beyond the class-room door. The sense of secrecy appealed to the boys. Whatever their diverse opinions of the stuff, all could enjoy a conspiracy. Paul’s own class began to regard itself as something between a band of disciples (or even prophets), a secret revolutionary society, and a pirate crew.

iii. PAUL COMES TO TERMS WITH WOMAN

FOR SOME MONTHS Paul was so busy becoming an efficient school-master that he had little time for those’ other matters’ which I required him to undertake. But when he had established his technique and could look around him, he began to ask himself, ‘What next?’ His intention was to see life safely, to observe all its varieties and nuances, to read it in comfort as one might enjoy a novel of passion and agony without being upset by it. What was the field to be covered? There was woman. Until he had explored that field he could never give his attention to others. There was art, literature, music. There was science. There was the intricate spectacle of the universe, including the little peep-show, man. There were certain philosophical questions which had formed themselves in his mind without producing their answers. There was religion. Was there anything in it at all? But here, as also in the sphere of woman, one must be careful. One might so easily find oneself too deeply entangled. For the post-war Paul, entanglement, becoming part of the drama instead of a spectator, was to be avoided at all costs. But could he avoid it? Could he preserve in all circumstances this new snug aloofness, which had come to him with the end of war’s long torment of pity and shame and indignation? He knew very well that there were strange forces in him which might wreck his plans. He must be very careful, but the risk must be taken. His sheer curiosity, and his cold passion for savouring the drama of the world, must be satisfied.

Paul now began to lead a double life. In school-hours he tried to be the correct schoolmaster, and save for his lapses he succeeded. Out of school he inspected the universe. With cold judgement he decided that the first aspect of the universe to be inspected was woman. But how? There was Katherine. She alone, he felt, could be for him the perfect mate. But she was obviously happy with her returned soldier and her two children. He met her now and again. She was gentle with him, and distressingly anxious that he should like her husband. Strangely enough, he did like the man, as a man. He was intellectually unexciting, but he had an interested and open mind, and could readily be enticed out of Flat Land. Paul, however, disliked the sense that Katherine wanted to hold the two of them in one embrace. No, he must look elsewhere for woman, for the woman that was to show him the deep cosmical significance of womanhood.

The girls of his suburb were no good. In his thwarted, virginal state, they often stirred him, but he could not get anywhere with them. He lacked the right touch. Sometimes he would take one of them on the river or to a dance, or to the pictures, but nothing came of it. They found him queer, a little ridiculous, sometimes alarming. When he should have been audacious, he was diffident. His voice went husky and his hand trembled. When he should have been gentle, he was rough. With one of them, indeed, he got so far as to realize that to go further would be disastrous; for though she was a ‘dear’ she was dull. Moreover, she would expect to be married. And for marriage he had neither means nor inclination.

Of course there were prostitutes. They would sell him something that he wanted. But he wanted much more than they could sell. He wanted, along with full physical union, that depth of intimacy which he had known with Katherine. Once in Paris while he was coming home on leave, a girl in the street had said to him ‘Venez faire l’amour avec moi’, and he had stopped. But there was something about her, some trace of a repugnance long since outworn, that made his cherished maleness contemptible in his own eyes. He hurried away, telling himself she was too unattractive. Henceforth all prostitutes reminded him of her. They made him dislike himself.

What other hope was there for him? He once found himself alone with a little dusky creature in a railway carriage. She reminded him of a marmoset. Might he smoke, he asked. Certainly. Would she smoke too? Well, yes, since there was no one else there. They talked about the cinema. They arranged to meet again. He took her to a dance, and to picture shows, and for walks. She told him she was unhappy at home. Things advanced to such an extent that one day he put a protecting arm round her, with his hand under her breast; and he kissed her. She began to trust him, rely on him. Suddenly he felt an utter cad, and determined to give her up. But when he said he would never see her again, she wept like a child and clung to him. He told her what a beast he was, and how he had intended merely to get what he wanted from her, and take no responsibility. As for marrying her, he was not the marrying sort. She said she didn’t care. She didn’t want marriage, she wanted him, just now and again. Yet somehow he couldn’t do it. Was it fear of the consequences? No, not fear, shame. She was only a child, after all, and he found himself feeling responsible for her. Damn it, why couldn’t he go through with it? It wouldn’t hurt her really. It would all be experience. But he couldn’t do it. Yet he had not the heart to keep away from her. Hell! Then why not marry her and go through with it that way? No, that would be certain hell for both of them. The affair began to get on his nerves. His teaching was affected; for in class he was haunted by images of the little marmoset, of her great wide black eyes, or of the feel of her hair on his cheek. Obviously he must put an end to it all. He wrote her a strange muddled letter, saying he loved her too much to go on, or too little; that in fact he did not really love her at all, and she must make the best of it; that he was desperately in love with her and would be miserable for ever without her; that the upshot anyhow was that he could never see her again. He kept to his resolve. In spite of a number of beseeching letters, he never saw her or wrote to her again.

Paul thanked his stars he had escaped from that trap. But his problem remained completely unsolved. How was he to come to terms with this huge factor in the universe, woman? For in his present state he could not but regard sex as something fundamental to the universe. He was desperate. He could not keep his mind off woman. Every train of thought brought him to the same dead end, woman, and how he was to cope with her. He spent hours wandering in the streets of the metropolis, watching all the slender figures, the silken ankles, the faces. Even in his present thwarted and obsessed mood, in which every well-formed girl seemed to him desirable, his interest was in part disinterested, impersonal. Behind his personal problem lay the universal problem. What was the cosmical significance of this perennial effloresence of femininity, this host of ‘other’ beings, ranging from the commonplace to the exquisite? Many of them were just female animals, some so brutish as to stir him little more than a bitch baboon; some though merely animal, were animals of his kind, and they roused in him a frankly animal but none the less divine desire. So at least he told himself. Many, on the other hand, he felt were more than animal, and the worse for it. They were the marred and vulgar products of a vulgar civilization. But many also, so it seemed to him, were divinely human and more than human. They eloquently manifested the woman-spirit, the female mode of the cosmic spirit. They had but to move a hand or turn the head or lean ever so slightly, ever so tenderly toward a lover, and Paul was smitten with a hushed, a religious, wonder. What was the meaning of it all? The man-spirit in himself, he said, demanded communion with one of these divine manifestations. The thing must be done. It was a sacred trust that he must fulfil. But how?

He made the acquaintance of a young actress whom he had often admired from the auditorium. He took her out a good deal. He spent more money on her than he could afford. But this relationship, like the other, came to nothing. It developed into a kind of brother-sister affection, though spiced with a sexual piquancy. Whenever he tried to bring in a more sensual element, she was distressed, and he was torn between resentment and self-reproach.

There were others. But nothing came of any of them, except a ceaseless expenditure on dance tickets, theatre tickets, chocolates, suppers, gifts. There was also a more ruinous and no less barren, expense of spirit, and a perennial sense of frustration. The girls that he really cared for he was afraid of hurting. Of course, he might marry one of them, if he could find one willing. But he felt sure he would be a bad husband, that he would be sick to death of the relationship within a month. And anyhow he could not afford a wife. On the other hand, the girls toward whom he felt no responsibility, he feared for his own sake, lest they should entangle him. Meanwhile he was becoming more and more entangled in his own obsession. The intellectual touring which he had proposed for himself, and was even now, in a desultory manner, undertaking, was becoming a labour instead of a delight, because he could not free his mind from woman. In bed at night he would writhe and mutter self-pityingly, ‘God, give me a woman!’

At last he decided to go with a prostitute. On the way with her he was like a starved dog ready to eat anything. But when he was alone with her, it suddenly came over him with a flood of shame and self-ridicule, that here was a girl, at bottom a ‘good sort’ too, who did not want him at all, and yet had to put up with him. It must be like having to make your living by hiring out your tooth-brush to strangers. How she must despise him! His hunger vanished. She tried to rouse him, using well-practised arts. But it was no good. He saw himself through her eyes. He felt his own body as she would feel it, clinging, repugnant. Stammering that he was ill, he put down his money, and fled.

From the point of view of my work with Paul the situation was very unsatisfactory. It was time to free his mind for the wider life that I required of him. I decided that the most thorough cure could be obtained only by means of Katherine, who was by now a superb young wife and mother. I therefore entered her once more, and found that by a careful use of my most delicate arts I might persuade her to serve my purpose. Five years of exceptionally happy marriage had deepened her spirit and enlarged her outlook. The colt had grown into a noble mare, the anxious young suburban miss into a mature and zestful woman, whose mind was surprisingly untrammelled. I found her still comfortably in love with the husband that I had given her, and the constant friend of her children. But also I found, on deeper inspection, a core of peaceful aloofness, of detachment from all the joys and anxieties of her busy life; of detachment, as yet unwitting, even from the moral conventions which hitherto she had had no cause to question. I found, too, a lively interest in her renewed acquaintance with Paul She saw clearly that he was in distress, that he was ‘sexually dead-ended ‘. Such was the phrase she used to describe Paul’s condition to her husband. She felt responsible for his trouble. Also, before I began to work on her, she had already recognized in herself a tender echo of her old love for Paul. But without my help she would never have taken the course toward which I now began to lead her. For long she brooded over Paul and his trouble and her own new restlessness. Little by little I made her see that Paul would be for ever thwarted unless she let herself be taken. I also forced her to admit to herself that she wanted him to take her. At first she saw the situation conventionally, and was terrified lest Paul should ruin all her happiness. For a while she shunned him. But Paul himself was being drawn irresistibly under her spell; and when at last she forbade him to come near her, he was so downcast and so acquiescent, that she shed tears for him. He duly kept away, and she increasingly wanted him.

But presently, looking into her own heart with my help, she realized a great and comforting truth about herself, and another truth about Paul. She did not want him forever, but only for sometimes. For ever, she wanted her husband, with whom she had already woven an intricate and lovely pattern of life, not yet completed, scarcely more than begun. But with Paul also she had begun to weave a pattern long ago; and now she would complete it, not as was first intended, but in another and less intricate style. It would re-vitalize her, enrich her, give her a new bloom and fragrance for her husband’s taking. And Paul, she knew, would find new life. With all the art at her command she would be woman for him, and crown his manhood, and set him free from his crippling obsession, free to do all the fine things which in old days he had talked of doing. For this was the truth that she had realized about Paul, that he also had another life to lead, independent of her, that for him, too, their union must be not an end but a refreshment.

But what about her husband? If only he could be made to feel that there was no danger of his losing her, or of his ceasing to be spiritually her husband, he ought surely to see the sanity of her madness. The thought of talking to him about it all made her recognize how mad she really was, how wicked, too. But somehow the recognition did not dismay her, for I kept her plied with clear thoughts and frank desires, which somehow robbed the conventions of their sanctity.

Katherine I had dealt with successfully. But there remained the more difficult task of persuading her husband, Richard. I had at the outset chosen him carefully; but now, when I took up my position in his mind, I was more interested in my experiment than hopeful of its success. It would have been easy to infatuate him with some woman, and so render him indifferent to his wife’s conduct. But if tolerance had to rest merely, on indifference, this marriage, in which I took some pride, would have been spoiled. I had decided, moreover, that Richard’s predicament would afford me the opportunity of a crucial piece of research upon your species. I was curious to know whether it would be possible so to influence him that he should regard the whole matter with Neptunian sanity.

I took some pains to prepare him, leading his mind to ruminate in unfamiliar fields. I did nothing to dim in any way his desire for his wife; on the contrary, I produced in him a very detailed and exquisite apprehension of her. And when at last she found courage to tell him of her plan, I used all my skill to give him full imaginative insight into her love for Paul and her different love for himself. It was very interesting to watch his reaction. For a few minutes he sat gazing at his wife in silence. Then he said that of course she must do what seemed best to her, but he asked her to give him time to think. For a whole day he acted to himself the part of the devoted and discarded husband, biting through a pipe-stem in the course of his tortured meditations. He conceived a dozen plans for preventing the disaster, and dismissed them all. Already on the second day, however, he saw the situation more calmly, even with something like Neptunian detachment; and on the third he recognized with my help that it did not concern him at all in any serious manner how Katherine should spend her holiday, provided that she should come back to him gladly, and with enhanced vitality.

Paul and Katherine took a tent and went off together for three weeks. They pitched beside a little bay on the rocky and seal-haunted coast of Pembroke. In this choice they had been unwittingly influenced by me. Thoughts of my recent (and remotely future) holiday on a Neptunian coast infected them with a desire for rocks and the sea. In this holiday of theirs I myself found real refreshment. Through the primitive mind of Paul I rejoiced in the primitive body and primitive spirit of Katherine.

She was already well practised in the art of love, at least in the unsubtle Terrestrial mode. Paul was a novice. But now he surprised himself, and Katherine also, by the fire, the assurance, the gentleness, the sweet banter of his wooing. Well might he, for I who am not inexperienced even according to Neptunian standards, prompted him at every turn of his dalliance. Not only was I determined, for my work’s sake, to afford these two children full enrichment of one another, but also I myself, by now so well adapted to the Terrestrial sphere, was deeply stirred by this ‘almost woman’, this doe of a half-human species. Her real beauty, interwoven with the reptilian clumsiness of an immature type, smote me with a savage delight of the flesh, and yet also with a vast remoteness which issued in grave tenderness and reverence.

They lay long in the mornings, with the sun pouring in at the open end of the tent. They swam together in the bay, pretending to be seals. They cooked and washed up, and shopped in the neighbouring village. They scrambled over the rocks and the heather. And they made love. In the night, and also naked on the sunlit beach, they drank one another in through eye and ear and tactile flesh. Of many things they spoke together, sitting in the evening in the opening of the tent. One night there was a storm. The tent was blown down, and their bedding was wet. They dressed under the floundering canvas, and having made things secure, for the rest of the night they walked in the rain, reeling with sleep. Next day they repaired the tent, spread out their blankets in the sun, and on the sunny grass they lay down to sleep. Paul murmured, ‘We could have been man and wife so well.’ But Katherine roused herself to say, ‘No, no! Richard has me for keeps, and you for sometimes. I should hate you for a husband, you’d be too tiring, and probably no good with children. Paul, if I have a baby, it will count as Richard’s.’

For three weeks Paul basked in intimacy with the bland Katherine. This, then, was woman, this intricacy of lovely volumes and movements, of lovely resistances and yieldings, of play, laughter and quietness. She was just animal made perfect, and as such she was unfathomable spirit at once utterly dependable and utterly incalculable, mysterious. Paul knew, even in his present huge content, that there was much more of woman than was revealed to him, more which could only be known through long intimacy, in fact in the stress and long-suffering and intricate concrescence of marriage. This, Richard had, but he himself had not, perhaps would never have. The thought saddened him; but it did not bite into him poisonously, as his virginity had done. Fundamentally, he was to be henceforth in respect of woman at peace. Her beauties would no longer taunt him and waylay him and tether him. Henceforth he would have strength of her, not weakness.

In these expectations Paul was justified. His retarded spirit, starved hitherto of women, now burgeoned. I could detect in him day by day, almost hour by hour, new buds and growing points of sensitivity, of percipience, hitherto suppressed by the long winter of his frustration. Even during the rapturous holiday itself, when his whole interest was centred on the one being and on his love play with her, he was at the same time exfoliating into a new and vital cognizance of more remote spheres. On their last day he wrote this poem:

Last night.

walking on the heath.

she and I.

alive.

condescended toward the stars.

For then we knew

quite surely

that all the pother of the universe

was but a prelude to that summer night

and our uniting.

and all the ages to come

but a cadence

after our loving.

Nestled down into the heather.

we laughed.

and took joy of one another.

justifying the cosmic enterprise for ever

by the moments of our caressing.

while the simple stars

watched

unseeing.

Thus lovers, nations, worlds, nay galaxies.

conceive themselves the crest of all that is.

iv. LONDON AND THE SPIRIT

PAUL SPENT THE last fortnight of his summer holiday at home, preparing for the next term, and feeling the influence of Katherine spread deeply into his being. When he returned to work, he found that he looked about him with fresh interest. Walking in the streets of London, he now saw something besides stray flowers of femininity adrift on the stream of mere humanity. He saw the stream itself, to which, after all, the women were not alien but integral. And just as woman had been a challenge to him, so now the great human flood was a challenge to him, something which he must come to terms with, comprehend.

The time had come for me to attempt my most delicate piece of work on Paul, the experiment which was to lead me to a more inward and sympathetic apprehension of your kind than anything that had hitherto been possible; the deep and subtle manipulation which incidentally would give Paul a treasure of experience beyond the normal reach of the first Men. It was my aim to complete in him the propaedeutic influence with which I had occasionally disturbed him in childhood. I therefore set about to induce in him such an awakened state that he should see in all things, and with some constancy, the dazzling intensity of being, the depth beyond depth of significance, which even in childhood he had glimpsed, though rarely. With this heightened percipience he must assess his own mature and deeper self and the far wider and more fearsome world which he now inhabited. Then should I be able to observe how far and with what idiosyncrasies the mentality of your kind, thus aided, could endure the truth and praise it.

It was chiefly in the streets and in the class-room that Paul found his challenge, but also, as had ever been the case with him, under the stars. Their frosty glance had now for him a more cruel, a more wounding significance than formerly, a significance which drew poignancy not only from echoes of the street, and the class-room, and from the sunned flesh of Katherine, but also from the war.

Paul had promised himself that when he had come to terms with woman he would devote his leisure to that intellectual touring in which he had never yet been able seriously to indulge. But even now, it seemed, he was not to carry out his plan, or at least not with the comfort and safety which he desired. What was meant to be a tour of well-marked and well-guided routes of the mind, threatened to become in fact a desperate adventure in lonely altitudes of the spirit. It was as though by some inner compulsion he were enticed to travel not through but above all the mental cities and dominions, not on foot but in the air; as though he who had no skill for flight were to find himself perilously exploring the currents and whirlpools, the invisible cliffs and chasms, of an element far other than the earth; which, however, now displayed to his miraculous vision a detailed inwardness opaque to the pedestrian observer.

Even in the class-room, expounding to reluctant urchins the structure of sentences, the provisions of Magna Carta, the products of South America, Paul constantly struggled for balance in that remote ethereal sphere. Sometimes he would even fall into complete abstraction, gazing with disconcerting intensity at some boy or other, while the particular juvenile spirit took form in his imagination, conjured by my skill. He would begin by probing behind the defensive eyes into the vast tangled order of blood-vessels and nerve fibres. He would seem to watch the drift of blood corpuscles, the very movements of atoms from molecule to molecule. He would narrow his eyes in breathless search for he knew not what. Then suddenly, not out there but somehow in the depth of his own being, the immature somnolent spirit of the child would confront him. He would intimately savour those little lusts and fears, those little joys and unwilling efforts, all those quick eager movements of a life whose very earnestness was but the earnestness of a dream. With the boy’s hand in the boy’s pocket he would finger pennies and sixpences, or a precious knife or toy. He would look into all the crannies of that mind, noting here a promise to be fulfilled, there a blank insensitivity, here some passion unexpressed and festering. Rapt in this contemplation, he would fall blind to everything but this unique particular being, this featured monad. Or he would hold it up in contrast with himself, as one might hold for comparison in the palm of the hand two little crystals, or in the field of the telescope a double star. Sometimes it would seem to him that the boy and himself were indeed two great spheres of light hugely present to one another, yet held eternally distinct from one another by the movement, the swing, of their diverse individualities. Then, like a memory from some forgotten life, there would come to him the thought, ‘This is just Jackson Minor, a boy whom I must teach.’ And then, ‘Teach what’!’ And the answer, more apt than explicit, ‘Teach to put forth an ever brighter effulgence of the spirit.’

While Paul was thus rapt, some movement would recall the class to him, and he would realize with a kind of eager terror that not only one but many of these huge presences were in the room with him. It was as though by some miracle a company of majestic and angelic beings was crowded upon this pin-point floor. And yet he knew that they were just a bunch of lads, just a collection of young and ephemeral human animals, who almost in the twinkle of a star would become black-coated citizens, parents, grandparents and discreetly laid-out corpses. Between then and now, what would they do’! What were they for’! They would do geography and scripture, they would make money or fail to make money, they would take young women to the pictures, they would do the done thing, and say the said thing. Then one day they would realize that they were growing old. Some of them would scream that they had not yet begun to live, others would shrug and drift heavily gravewards. So it would be, but why?

In the lunch hour, or when the school day was over, or in the evening when he was waiting to go to some show, he would let himself glide on the street flood to watch the faces, the action, to speculate on the significance of this gesture and that.

Sometimes he would walk unperturbed through street after street, carelessly turning the pages of the great picture book, dwelling lightly for a moment on this or that, on this comicality or elegance, on that figure of defeat or of complacency. Straying up Regent Street, he would amuse himself by sorting out the natives from the provincial visitors, and the foreign nationals from one another. He would surmise whether that painted duchess knew how desolate she looked, or that Lancashire holiday-maker how conscious that he was a stranger here, or whether the sweeper, with slouch hat and broom, felt, as he looked, more real than the rest. Odours would assail him: odour of dust and horse-dung, odour of exhaust fumes, rubber and tar, odour of cosmetics precariously triumphing over female sweat. Sounds would assail him: footsteps, leather-hard and rubber-soft, the hum and roar of motors, the expostulation of their horns; voices also of human animals, some oddly revealing, others a mere mask of sound, a carapace of standard tone, revealing nothing. Above all, forms and colours would assail him with their depths of significance. Well-tailored young women, discreet of glance; others more blowsy, not so discreet. Young men, vacantly correct, or betraying in some movement of the hand or restlessness of the eye an undercurrent of self-doubt. Old men, daughter-attended, tremblingly holding around their withered flesh the toga of seniority, bath-wrap-wise. Women of a past decade, backward leaning for weight of bosom, bullock-eyed, uncomprehending, backward straining under the impending pole-axe. After the smooth drift of Regent Street, he would find himself in the rapids of Oxford Street, buffeted, whirled hither and thither by successive vortices of humanity, of tweed-clad men, and women of artificial silk, of children toffee-smeared, of parents piloting their families, of messenger boys, soldiers, sailors, Indian students, and everywhere the constant flood of indistinguishable humanity, neither rich nor poor, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither happy nor sad, but restless, obscurely anxious, like a dog shivering before a dying fire.

At some point or other of his easeful wandering a change would probably happen to Paul. He would suddenly feel himself oppressed and borne down by the on-coming flood of his fellows. He would realize that he himself was but one indistinguishable drop in this huge continuum; that everything most unique and characteristic in him he had from It; that nothing whatever was himself, not even this craving for discrete existence; that the contours of his body and his mind had no more originality than one ripple in a wave-train. But with a violent movement of self-affirmation he would inwardly cry out, ‘I am I, and not another.’ Then in a flash he would feel his reality, and believe himself to be a substantial spirit, and eternal. For a moment all these others would seem to him but as moving pictures in the panorama of his own all-embracing self. But almost immediately some passing voice-tone in the crowd, some passing gesture, would stab him, shame him into realization of others. It would be as in the class-room. He would be overwhelmed not by the featureless drops of an ocean, but by a great company of unique and diverse spirits. Behind each on-coming pair of eyes he would glimpse a whole universe, intricate as his own, but different; similar in its basic order, but different in detail, and permeated through and through by a different mood, a different ground-tone or timbre. Each of them was like a ship forging toward him, moving beside him and beyond, and trailing a great spreading wake of past life, past intercourse with the world. He himself, it seemed, was tossed like a cork upon the inter-crossing trains of many past careers. Looking at them one by one as they came upon him, he seemed to see with his miraculous vision the teeming experiences of each mind, as with a telescope one may see on the decks of a passing liner a great company of men and women, suddenly made real and intimate, though inaccessible. The ship’s bow rises to the slow waves, and droops, in sad reiteration, as she thrusts her way forward, oxlike, obedient to some will above her but not of her. And so, seemingly, those wayfarers blindly thrust forward on their courses, hand-to-mouth fulfilment of their mechanism, ignorant of the helmsman’s touch, the owner’s instructions. Here, bearing down upon him, would appear perhaps a tall woman with nose like a liner’s stem, and fo’c’sle brows. Then perhaps an old gentleman with the white wave of his moustache curling under his prow. Then a rakish young girl. Then a bulky freighter. Thus Paul would entertain himself with fantasies, till sooner or later a bleak familiar thought would strike him. Each of these vessels of the spirit (this was the phrase he used) had indeed a helmsman, keeping her to some course or other; had even a master, who worked out the details of navigation and set the course; but of owner’s instructions he was in most cases completely ignorant. And so these many ships ploughed hither and thither on the high seas vainly, not fulfilling, but forlornly seeking, instructions. And because the mechanism of these vessels was not of insensitive steel but of desires and loathings, passions and admirations, Paul was filled with a great pity for them, and for himself as one of them, a pity for their half-awakened state between awareness and unawareness.

After such experiences in the heart of the city, Paul, in the train for his southern suburb, would already change his mood. Even while the train crossed the river the alteration would come. He would note, perhaps, the sunset reflected in the water. Though so unfashionable, it was after all alluring. The barges and tugs, jewelled with port and starboard and mast-head lights, the vague and cliffy rank of buildings, the trailing smoke, all these the sunset dignified. Of course it was nothing but a flutter of ether waves and shifting atoms, glorified by sentimental associations. Yet it compelled attention and an irrational worship. Sometimes Paul withdrew himself from it into his evening paper, resentful of this insidious romanticism. Sometimes he yielded to it, excusing himself in the name of Whitehead.

If it was a night-time crossing, with the dim stars beyond the smoke and glow of London, Paul would experience that tremor of recognition, of unreasoning expectation, which through my influence the stars had ever given him, and now gave him again, tinctured with a new dread, a new solemnity.

And when at last he was at home, and, as was his custom, walking for a few minutes on the Down before going to bed, he would feel, if it were a jewelled night, the overwhelming presence of the Cosmos. It was on these occasions that I could most completely master him, and even lift him precariously to the Neptunian plane. First he would have a powerful apprehension of the earth’s rotundity, of the continents and oceans spreading beneath him and meeting under his feet. Then would I, using my best skill on the many keyboards of his brain, conjure in him a compelling perception of physical immensity, of the immensity first of the galactic universe, with its intermingling streams of stars, its gulfs of darkness; and then the huger immensity of the whole cosmos. With the eye of imagination he would perceive the scores, the millions, of other universes, drifting outwards in all directions like the fire-spray of a rocket. Then, fastening his attention once more on the stray atom earth, he would seem to see it forging through time, trailing its long wake of aeons, thrusting forward into its vaster, its more tempestuous future. I would let him glimpse that future. I would pour into the overflowing cup of his mind a torrent of visions. He would conceive and sensuously experience (as it were tropical rain descending on his bare head) the age-long but not everlasting downpour of human generations. Strange human-inhuman faces would glimmer before him and vanish. By a simple device I made these glimpsed beings intimate to him; for I permitted him ever and again to see in them something of Katherine, though mysteriously transposed. And in the strange aspirations, strange fears, strange modes of the spirit that would impose themselves upon his tortured but exultant mind I took care that he should feel the strange intimate remoteness that he knew in Katherine. With my best art I would sometimes thrash the strings of his mind to echoes of man’s last, most glorious achievement. And here again I would kindle this high theme with Katherine. Along with all this richness and splendour of human efflorescence I established in him an enduring emotional certainty that in the end is downfall and agony, then silence. This he had felt already as implicit in the nature of his own species, his own movement of the symphony; but now through my influence he knew with an absolute conviction that such must be the end also of all things human.

Often he would cry out against this fate, inwardly screaming like a child dropped from supporting arms. But little by little, as the months and years passed over him, he learned to accept this issue, to accept it at least in the deepest solitude of his own being, but not always to conduct himself in the world according to the final discipline of this acceptance.

At last there came a night when Paul, striding alone through the rough grass of the Down, facing the Pole Star and the far glow of London, wakened to a much clearer insight. One of Katherine’s children had recently been knocked over by a car and seriously hurt. Paul saw Katherine for a few moments after the accident. With shock he saw her, for she was changed. Her mouth had withered. Her eyes looked at him like the eyes of some animal drowning in a well. It was upon the evening of that day that Paul took this most memorable of all his walks upon the Down. I plied him, as so often before, with images of cosmical pain and grief, and over all of them he saw the changed face of Katherine. Suddenly the horror, the cruelty of existence burst upon him with a new and insupportable violence, so that he cried out, stumbled, and fell. It seemed to him in his agony of compassion that if only the pain of the world were his own pain it might become endurable; but it was the pain of others, and therefore he could never master it with that strange joy which he knew was sometimes his. If all pain could be made his own only, he could surely grasp it firmly and put it in its place in the exquisite pattern of things. Yet could he? He remembered that mostly he was a coward, that he could not endure pain even as well as others, that it undermined him, and left him abject. But sometimes he had indeed been able to accept its very painfulness with a strange, quiet joy.

He thought of a thing to do. He would have a careful look at this thing, pain. And so, sitting up in the grass, he took out his pocket-knife, opened the big blade, and forced the point through the palm of his left hand. Looking fixedly at the Pole Star, he twisted the blade about, while the warm blood spread over his hand and trickled on to the grass. With the first shock his body had leapt, and now it writhed. The muscles of his face twisted, he set his teeth lest he should scream. His forehead was wet and cold, and faintness surged over him; but still he looked at Polaris, and moved the knife.

Beneath the Star spread the glow of London, a pale glory over-arching the many lives. On his moist face, the wind. In his hand, grasped in the palm of his hand, the thing, pain. In his mind’s eye the face of Katherine, symbol of all compassion. And, surging through him, induced by my power in him, apprehensions of cosmical austerity.

Then it was that Paul experienced the illumination which was henceforth to rule his life. In a sudden blaze of insight he saw more deeply into his own nature and the world’s than had ever before been possible to him. While the vision lasted, he sat quietly on the grass staunching his wounded hand and contemplating in turn the many facets of his new experience. Lest he should afterwards fail to recapture what was now so exquisitely clear, he put his findings into words, which however seemed incapable of expressing more than the surrounding glow of his experience, leaving the bright central truth unspoken.

‘This pain in my hand’, he said, ’is painful because of the interruption that has been caused in the harmonious living of my flesh. All pain is hateful in that it is an interruption, a discord, an infringement of some theme of living, whether lowly or exalted. This pain in my hand, which is an infringement of my body’s lowly living, is not, it so happens, an infringement also of my spirit. No. Entering into my spirit, this pain is a feature of beauty. My spirit? What do I really mean by that? There is first I, the minded body, or the embodied mind; and there is also my spirit. What is it? Surely it is no substantial thing. It is the music rather, which I, the instrument, may produce, and may also appreciate. My glory is, not to preserve myself, but to create upon the strings of myself the music that is spirit, in whatever degree of excellence I may; and to appreciate the music in myself and others, and in the massed splendours of the cosmos, with whatever insight I can muster. Formerly I was dismayed by the knowledge that pain’s evil was intrinsic to pain. But now I see clearly that though this is so, though pain’s evil to the pain-blinded creature is an absolute fact in the universe, yet the very evil itself may have a place in the music which spirit is. There is no music without the torture of the strings. Even the over-straining, the slow wearing out, the sudden shattering of instruments may be demanded for the full harmony of this dread music. Nay, more. In this high music of the spheres, even the heartless betrayals, the mean insufficiencies of will, common to all human instruments, unwittingly contribute by their very foulness to the intolerable, the inhuman, beauty of the music.’

By now Paul, having bound up his hand, having wiped his knife and put it away, had risen to his feet, and was walking towards home with trembling knees, pursuing his argument.

‘To make the music that spirit is, that, I now see, is the end for which all living things exist, from the humblest to the most exalted. In two ways they make it: gloriously, Purposefully, in their loyal strivings, but also shamefully, unwittingly, in their betrayals. Without Satan, with God only, how poor a universe, how trite a music! Purposefully to contribute to the music that spirit is, this is the great beatitude. It is permitted only to the elect. But the damned also, even they, contribute, though unwittingly. Purposefully to contribute upon the strings of one’s own being, and also to respond with ecstasy to the great cosmic theme inflooding from all other instruments, this is indeed the sum of duty, and of beatitude. Though in my own conduct I were to betray the music which is spirit, and in my own heart dishonour it, yet seemingly it is not in reality sullied; for it dare avail itself alike of Christ and Judas. Yet must I not betray it, not dishonour it. Yet if I do, it will not be sullied. Mystery! Purposefully to make the music that spirit is, and to delight in it! The delighting and suffering of all minded beings are within the music. Even this very profound, very still delight, this ecstasy, with which I now contemplate my hand’s pain and Katherine’s distress and the long effort and agony of the worlds, this also is a contribution to the music which it contemplates. Why am I thus chosen? I do not know. But it is irrelevant that this instrument rather than that should sound this theme and not another, create this ecstasy and not that agony. What matters is the music, that it should unfold itself through the ages, and be fulfilled in whatever end is fitting, and crowned with admiration, worship. But if it should never be rightly fulfilled, and never meetly crowned? I have indeed a very clear conviction that over the head of time the whole music of the cosmos is all the while a fulfilled perfection, the eternal outcome of the past, the present and the future. But if I am mistaken? Then if it is not perfected, it is at least very excellent. For this much my eyes have seen.’

He was now coming down the slope toward the street lamps and lighted windows. On the other side of the little valley the water-tower of the lunatic asylum rose black against the sky. He stood for a while. At that moment a faint sound came to him from across the valley. Was it a cat? Or had a dog been run over? Or was it a human sound between laughter and horror? To Paul it came as the asylum’s comment on his meditation. Or was it the comment of the whole modern age? For a while, he kept silent, then said aloud, ‘Yes, you may be right. Perhaps it is I that am mad. But if so this madness is better than sanity. Better, and more sane.’

On the following day Paul wrote a poem. It reveals the blend of intuitive exaltation and metaphysical perplexity in which he now found himself.

When a man salutes the perfection of reality Peace invades him. as though upon the completion of some high duty as though his life’s task were achieved in this act of loyalty Was the task illusory? Is this beatitude but the complacency of self-expansion? Or does the real, perfect formally. yet claim for its justification and fulfilment admiration? As a man’s love transmutes a woman. kindling her features with an inner radiance. does mind’s worship transfigure the world?

8 THE MODERN WORLD

I. PAUL UNDERTAKES HIS TASK ii. THE RESEARCH iii. FRUITS OF THE RESEARCH iv. PAUL SETTLES DOWN

i. PAUL UNDERTAKES HIS TASK

WITH THIS SPIRITUAL achievement solidly accomplished, Paul was ready to observe London and the world with new eyes. In fact he was now well fitted to carry out the main work that I had purposed for him. He himself would have been content simply to carry on his teaching with new vitality and conscientiousness, and for the rest to pursue with deeper understanding his leisurely tour of the countries of the mind. But he was soon to discover that more was demanded of him, and that he who had so lately learned the lesson of quietness, must now embark on a life more active, more resolute, than anything that he had formerly attempted.

His new purpose dawned on him slowly, and as it became clear to him and formidable, he both lusted in it and feared it. His final and precise apprehension of it flashed upon him as he was waiting on the top of a stationary and throbbing motor-omnibus outside the great railway terminus of Cannon Street, watching the streams of bowlered or soft-hatted business men, hurrying to their offices. There surged through him suddenly a violent hunger, or was it a sacred call, to apprehend precisely and with understanding the whole phenomenon of the modern world, to see it in relation to his recent vision, to discover its deeper significance. So insistent was this new craving that he had to restrain himself from descending there and then into the street to ask each of the crowd in turn what he was really doing with his life, and why.

Paul was frightened by the violence of his own desire, and by its quality of freakishness, even of insanity. He pulled himself together and argued against it. It would interfere with his own work, and with his peace of mind. He was not fitted for any such world-study. Moreover, he ought not to give up his life to merely apprehending; he must do, must serve. However well he should understand, the world would be none the better.

As the days passed, however, this new craving took firmer hold of him. He felt it growing into an irresistible, an insane obsession. So violently did he strive to exorcize it, that he was threatened with breakdown. Clearly, if he were forced to pursue my purpose against this desperate reluctance, he would pursue it ill. I therefore decided that, in order to gain his willing co-operation, I must attempt to give him a frank and precise explanation of my relations with him. This would be a difficult undertaking, and one which would have been impossible to carry out on any but a carefully selected and prepared individual.

One night, as Paul was lying in bed, I constructed in his imagination a detailed image of myself as I should have appeared to his eyes. He saw me as a great grey human monolith, snake-eyed. I then spoke to him, through his own imagination. I explained that I was a human being of the remote future, living upon Neptune, and that it was my task to study the Terrestrial ages of Man. For this work, I said, I had chosen him as my instrument. If necessary I could by an inner compulsion force him to work for me, but the work would fare better if he would enter into it willingly. I explained that, by helping me to render something of Terrestrial history into the consciousness of my own species, which, I said, was mentally far more advanced than his own, he would be serving not only me but his own kind.

Next morning Paul recalled the night’s experience with amazement, but dismissed it as a dream. On succeeding nights I influenced him again, giving him more detail of my world and my power over himself. I referred him, moreover, to two books. One of these, already published, was An Experiment with Time, by J. W. Dunne, This work, I told him, though to the Neptunian mind it was philosophically naive, might help him to understand the incursion of future events into the present. The other book, which would be called Last and First Men, had yet to appear.

When Paul encountered the first of these books, he was profoundly disturbed, and still more so when, some months later, he read the other in manuscript. He now became convinced of the reality of my intercourse with him. For a while he was terrified and revolted at the knowledge that another human mind had access to his every thought, and could even induce him to think and desire as it was not in his own nature to think and desire. That his character should be largely the product of another mind seemed to him at first an intolerable violation of his privacy, nay, of his identity. I had therefore to remind him, patiently and night by night, that even apart from my power over him he was an expression of influences other than himself, that whatever was distinctive of him was not truly his at all. ‘You forget’, I said, ‘that your nature is the product of an infinite mesh of causes; of evolution, of the hither-thither turmoil of human history, and finally of your parents, of Katherine, of the war, and of your boys. Will you then rebel because yet another influence, hitherto unsuspected, is discovered to have part in you, an influence, too, which has very greatly increased your spiritual stature? If so, your recent illumination on the Down was less deep than it should have been. You have not realized in your heart that the bare private individuality is a negligible thing, that what is glorious or base is the form which circumstance imposes on it. I myself am in the same case with you. I am the product of a vast web of circumstance, and my mind is probably open to the critical inspection and even the influence of I know not what beings superior to myself. Compared with you I am indeed of a higher order of mentality, but no credit is due to me for this greater richness and significance of my nature. As well might the concluding chord of a symphony take credit for the significance poured into it by all its predecessors. There is of course in both of us, and in all men, and all living things, and all sub-vital beings, the one universal miracle of spontaneous doing, which is the essential life of all existence. Through the aid or the limitation of circumstance some may do much, others little. What matter which of us does which? All the tones of the music are needed for the music’s perfection. And it is the music alone that matters, not the glorification of this instrument or that.’

In a few days Paul was reconciled to his fate to such an extent that he began eagerly to debate with himself how he should gratify the new passion which hitherto he had only with difficulty restrained. The fervour with which he embarked on his task combined the lusty hunger of an appetite with the exaltation of a sacred duty.

I further prepared him by making him realize that his recent experience on the Down was the vital spark lacking to all typical modern thought, the missing and all-relevant word without which its jumble of verbiage could never make sense, the still small voice which alone, working in each heart, could ever bring peace to the modern world. Paul knew, of course, that this experience of his was by no means unique. Other ages had more profoundly entered into it. Even in his own age it sometimes occurred. But it had played little part in the common life of the mind; the few who had known it had nearly always withdrawn into their inner fortress. Disengaging themselves from the dross which confuses modern thought, they had at the same time unwittingly rejected a treasure which had never before come within man’s reach. Contenting themselves with vain repetitions of old truths, they were deaf to the new truth which was as yet but stammeringly expressing itself in men’s minds. They could see very clearly the central error of the modern spirit, namely, the belief that reality is wholly included in the world of sense. Revolting from this folly, they erroneously declared this world a phantom and a snare, and naively conceived that in their ecstasy the soul, escaping from illusion, found herself at last untrammelled and immortal. I was at pains to make Paul see unmistakably that, for those who have entered superficially into the life of the spirit, this is the most insidious, the most lethal of all snares.

On the day after his illumination upon the Down, Paul had told himself that he had escaped from the foundering vessel of himself. The swarms of his fellow men and women all over the world could do nothing but labour incessantly from wave to wave of the maelstrom, pausing only now and then on some crest to look around them and realize that they were ploughing a waste of waters; and that one and all must sink. Paul saw them tormented by self-prizing; though also more nobly tortured and exalted by personal love, and by the intensified pain of watching the beloved’s pain. This it was, indeed, that chiefly dignified them above the beasts. But this also it was that tethered them to the waste of waters, like foundering may-flies. Their interest was almost wholly personal, either in self-regard, or hate, or love; but increasingly they saw that in the waste of existence there could be no lasting home for personal spirits anywhere, and so no permanency of comfort for anyone’s beloved. Each of them, and each beloved, must settle heavily down into old age, like leaky vessels. If only they could have sunk in battle array fighting for some great cause! But their sailing orders had not come through to them, or had been so mutilated that they found no clear direction.

Thus Paul had figured things out on the day after his illumination. By some miracle he himself, seemingly, had escaped from the foundering vessel of himself. He had escaped simply by a leap of the imagination, a soaring flight into the upper air; whence, selfless, he could watch the shipwreck of himself and all selves with a strange, still compassion, but without revolt. Yet subsequently, under my continued influence, he saw that this image was false and dangerous. He had not escaped. No self could escape. And now at last he realized that escape was not desirable. For he had seen something of the beauty for which all selves, if they could but see it, would suffer gladly, and gladly be annihilated.

Paul now once more turned his attention to the world that it was his task to observe. Suddenly a truth, which he had long vaguely known, but had never before clearly stated to himself, became both clear and urgent. At last he saw the situation of his species unambiguously from the cosmical point of view. He saw what it was that he and his contemporaries should be doing with their world. Fate had given them an opportunity which had been withheld from every early age. They had stumbled on the power of controlling the destiny of the human race. They had already gained some mastery over physical nature, and a far greater mastery was seemingly in store for them. Already their world had become one world, as it had never been before. Moreover, they must some day learn how to remake human nature itself, for good or for ill. If they could begin to outgrow their limitations of will, if they could feel beyond their self-regard, their tribal jealousies and their constant puerile obsessions, then they could begin not only to construct a Utopia of happy individuals, but to make of their planet a single and most potent instrument of the spirit, capable of music hitherto unconceived.

What humanity should do with itself in the far future, no one could tell; but one conviction now stood out with certainty in Paul’s mind, namely, that over all the trivial and inconsistent purposes that kept the tribes of men in conflict with one another, there was one purpose which should be the supreme and inviolate purpose of all men today, namely, to evoke in every extant human being the fullest possible aliveness, and to enable all men to work; together harmoniously for the making of a nobler, a more alive human nature.

Some such purpose as this was obscurely dawning in many minds throughout the Western and even the Eastern world. But though they were many, they were a minute proportion of the whole; and their vision was unclear, their will unsure. Opposed to them were many violent powers, and the dead-weight of custom, not only in the world but in themselves also. What chance was there that these few groping minds would wrench the great world into a new way of living? Paul now with eager interest, nay with passion, with awe, with grim zest, took up his task of watching and assessing the intense little drama of your age.

Lest he should lose sight of the wider bearings of that drama, Paul first meditated on the cosmical significance of human endeavour, which now for the first time was beginning to be tentatively apprehended by man himself. The immediate outcome of his meditation was this poem:

Is man a disease

that the blood of a senile star

cannot resist?

And when the constellations regard us.

is it fear, disgust, horror.

(at a plague-stricken brother

derelict from beauty).

that stares yonder

so sharply?

Gas the stars are.

They regard us not.

they judge us not.

they care for nothing.

We are alone in the hollow sky.

Then ours, though out of reach, those trinkets.

withheld.

unspoiled;

ours the sleeping and uncommanded genii

of those old lamps;

ours by right of mentality;

by right of agony.

by right of long heart-searching.

by right of all we must do with them

when our day comes.

when we have outlived our childishness.

when we have outgrown

the recurrent insanity of senility.

Then surely at last man.

and not bickering monkeys.

shall occupy the universe.

ii. THE RESEARCH

PAUL NOW DEVOTED all his leisure to his great exploration. He began tentatively, by reading much modern literature, and talking politics and philosophy with his friends. Both these occupations were of course familiar to him; but whereas formerly they had been pursued in the spirit of the tourist, a rather bewildered tourist, now they were carried out with passion and an assurance which to Paul himself seemed miraculous. This beginning led him on to make a careful study of the mentality of the whole teaching profession, both in schools and universities; and this in turn developed into a wide and profound research into all manner of mental types and occupations from road-menders to cabinet ministers. With my constant help, and to his own surprise, the silent and retiring young schoolmaster, who had always been so painfully conscious of the barrier between himself and his kind, began actively to seek out whatever contacts promised to be significant for his task. With amazement he discovered in himself a talent for devising inoffensive methods of making acquaintance with all sorts of persons whom he needed for his collection. Indeed, he pursued his work very much in the spirit of a collector in love with his specimens, and eager to discover by wealth of instances the laws of their being. If one day he happened to conceive that such and such a well-known personage or humble neighbour could give him light, he would be tormented by a violent, almost sexual, craving to meet the chosen one, and would leave no stone unturned until he had achieved his end.

Under my influence he also developed a captivating power of social intercourse, which, however, would only come into action in special circumstances. In the ordinary trivial social occasions he remained as a rule clumsy, diffident and tiresome; but in any situation which was relevant to his task, he seemed to come alive, to be a different person, and one that he thoroughly delighted to be. It was not merely that he discovered a gift of conversation. Sometimes he would say almost nothing. But what he did say would have a startling effect on his hearer, drawing him out, compelling him to get a clear view of his own work and aims, forcing him to unburden himself in a confession, such that at the close of it he would perhaps declare, ‘Yes, that is really how I face the world, though till today I hardly thought of it that way.’ Sometimes, however, Paul himself would be almost voluble, commenting with a strangely modest assurance on the other’s function; Often he would find himself assuming for the occasion an appropriate personality, a mask peculiarly suited to appear intelligent and sympathetic to this particular man or woman. Paul was sometimes shocked at the insincerity of this histrionic behaviour; though he pursued it, for the sake of its extraordinary effectiveness. And indeed it was not really insincere, for it was but the natural result of his new and intense imaginative insight into other minds. Sometimes when he was in the presence of two very different individuals whom he had previously encountered apart, he would be hard put to it to assume for each the right mask without rousing the other’s indignation. Thus, to give a rather crude example of this kind of predicament, having on Monday won the confidence of a member of the Communist Party, and on Tuesday the benevolence of a British Patriot, he happened on Wednesday to come upon them both together in violent altercation. Both at first greeted him as an ally, but before he fled he had been reviled by each in turn.

One curious limitation of Paul’s talent he found very distressing. Brilliant as he was at evoking in others a clearer consciousness of their own deeper thoughts and desires, he was incapable of impressing them with his own ideas. Strong in his own recent spiritual experiences, and in his increasing grasp of the contemporary world, he yet failed completely to express himself on these subjects. This was but natural, for he was no genius, still less a prophet; and, save in the office in which I needed him and inspired him, he remained inarticulate. This incapacity disturbed him increasingly as the months and years passed. For increasingly he became convinced that the modern world was heading toward a huge disaster, and that nothing could save it but the awakening of the mass of men into a new mood and greater insight. More and more clearly he saw in his own meditations just what this awakening must be. Yet he could never make it clear to others, for as soon as he tried to express himself, he fell stammering or mute. The trouble lay partly in his incompetence, but partly also in the fact that through my help he had seen both sides of a truth which to his fellows was almost never revealed thus in the solid. Paul’s interlocutor, therefore, was sure to be blind either to one or to the other aspect of Paul’s central conviction; either to his sense of obligation in the heroic and cosmically urgent enterprise of man upon his planet, or to his seemingly inconsistent perception of the finished, the inhuman, beauty of the cosmos.

Most painfully when he was with members of the ‘intelligentsia’ did his mental paralysis seize him. He made contact with many writers and artists. Each of these brilliant beings he treated at first with doglike respect, believing that at last he had come into the presence of one who had broken into new truth. But somehow he never went very far with any of them. For a while he delighted them, because he stimulated them to apprehend their own vision with a new clarity. But since their visions were not as a rule very profound, they and he soon saw all there was to see in them. At this point Paul’s talent invariably disappeared, and henceforth they thought him dull, bourgeois, not worth knowing. He could no longer hold their attention. He had not the necessary flow of personal tittle-tattle to carry him through when deeper interests flagged. On the other hand, if ever he dared to tell them his own views, he merely made a fool of himself, and was treated either with kindly ridicule or with inattention. Thus, though he came to know his way about the intellectual life of London, he was never taken into any circle or school. Most circles had at one time or other tolerated him on their fringes; yet he remained unknown, for no one ever bothered to mention him to anyone else. Thus it happened that he was always apart, always able to look on without pledging his faith to any creed, his intellect to any theory. Every creed, every theory, he secretly tested and sooner or later rejected in the light of his own recent illumination. In this manner Paul served my purpose admirably. As a tissue-section, to be studied under the microscope, may be stained to bring out details of structure that would otherwise have remained invisible, so Paul, whom I had treated with a tincture of Neptunian vision, revealed in exquisite detail the primitive organs of his mind, some of which took the stain and others not. Obviously it is impossible to reveal the whole issue of the experiment to readers of this book, since they themselves suffer from Paul’s limitations.

Throughout these crowded years Paul still carried on his daily work at the school, though inevitably as his attention became more and more occupied, his teaching suffered. All his free time, all his holidays, he now spent on his task of exploration. It was a strange life, so rich in human intercourse, and yet so lonely; for he dared not tell anyone of the real purpose of his activities, of their Neptunian aspect, lest he should bethought insane. To his friends he appeared to have been bitten by some queer bug of curiosity, which, they said, had filled him with a quite aimless mania for inquiry, and was ruining his work.

To aid his project he undertook a number of enterprises, none of which he did well, since at heart he regarded them only as means of the pursuit of his secret purpose. He worked for a political party, lectured to classes organized by the Workers’ Educational Association, collaborated in a social survey of a poor district. Also he haunted certain public-houses, attended revivalist meetings, became intimate with burglars, swindlers, and one or two uncaught murderers, who, he found, were extremely thankful for the opportunity of unburdening themselves under the spell of his mysteriously aloof sympathy and understanding. He made contact with many prostitutes and keepers of brothels. He respectfully explored the minds of homosexuals, and others whose hungers did not conform to the lusts of their fellows. He found his way into many chambers of suffering, and was present at many death-beds. He was welcomed in mining villages, and in slum tenements. He discussed revolution in the homes of artisans. Equally he was received in the houses of bank managers, of ship-owners, of great industrial employers. He conferred with bishops, and also with the dignitaries of science, but no less eagerly with vagabonds; over stolen delicacies, seated behind hedges. Part of one summer he spent as a dock labourer, and part of another as a harvest hand in the West of England. He travelled steerage on an emigrant ship, and worked his passage on a tramp steamer along the Baltic coasts. He made a brief but crowded pilgrimage to Russia, and came home a Communist, with a difference. He tramped and bicycled in Western Europe; and in England he made contact with many visitors from the East. Yet also he found time to keep abreast of contemporary literature, to haunt studios, to discuss epistemology and ethics with bright young Cambridge philosophers.

In all this work he found that he was constantly and sometimes sternly guided by an inner power, which, though I never again openly communicated with him, he knew to spring from me. Thus he was endowed with an infallible gift of selection and of detective inquiry. Through my help he covered in a few years the whole field of modern life, yet he never wasted his strength on vain explorations. With the precision of a hawk he descended upon the significant individual, the significant movement; and with a hawk’s assurance he neglected the irrelevant. Sometimes his own impulses would run counter to my guidance. Then he would find himself directed by a mysterious, an inner and hypnotic, impulsion, either to give up what he had planned to do, or to embark on some adventure for which his own nature had no inclination.

Month by month, year by year, there took shape in Paul’s mind a new and lucid image of his world, an image at once terrible and exquisite, tragic and farcical. It is difficult to give an idea of this new vision of Paul’s, for its power depended largely on the immense intricacy and diversity of his recent experience; on his sense of the hosts of individuals swarming upon the planet, here sparsely scattered, there congested into great clusters and lumps of humanity, here machine-ridden, there ground into the earth from which they sucked their scanty livelihood. Speaking in ten thousand mutually incomprehensible dialects, living in manners reprehensible or ludicrous to one another, thinking by concepts unintelligible to one another, they worshipped in modes repugnant to one another. This new sense of the mere bulk and variety of men was deepened in Paul’s mind by his enhanced apprehension of individuality in himself and others, his awed realization that each single unit in all these earth-devastating locust armies carried about with it a whole cognized universe, was the plangent instrument of an intense and self-important theme of mind. For Paul had by now learned very thoroughly to perceive the reality of all human beings and of the world with that penetrating insight which I had first elicited from him in childhood. On the other hand, since he was never wholly forgetful of the stars, the shock between his sense of human littleness in the cosmos and his new sense of man’s physical bulk and spiritual intensity increased his wonder. Thus in spite of his perception of the indefeasible reality of everyday things, he had also an overwhelming conviction that the whole fabric of common experience, nay the whole agreed universe of human and biological and astronomical fact, though real, concealed some vaster reality.

It must not be forgotten that throughout his exploration Paul was jealously mindful of my presence within him, and that his sense of an ulterior, a concealed, reality, was derived partly from the knowledge that within himself, or above himself, there was concealed a more exalted being. He knew that I was ever behind his eyes, ever attentive in his ears, ever pondering and sifting the currents of his brain. Yet, save when I swayed him with unaccountable cravings and reluctances, my presence was wholly unperceived.

It must be remembered that I used Paul in two manners, both as a transparent instrument of observation, and as a sample of your mentality. I was interested not only in the external facts which he recorded, but in his reaction to them, in the contrast between his appraisement of them and my own. That contrast I may express by saying that whereas I myself regarded the Terrestrial sphere primarily with detachment, though with detachment which held within itself a passion of imaginative sympathy, Paul regarded all things primarily from the human point of view, though he was able also by a continuous effort to maintain himself upon the loftier plane. For me it was a triumph of imagination that I could enter so fully into your remote and fantastic world. For Paul it was a triumph that in spite of his fervent humanity, his compassion and indignation, he could now regard his world with celestial aloofness. Thus the two of us together were like two different musical instruments playing against one another in two different tempos to produce a single intricacy of rhythm.

To the Neptunian intelligence, however, there was a slightly nauseating pathos even in Paul’s most chastened enthusiasm. Only through the secret and ironical influence of my presence within him could he avoid taking the fate of his world too much to heart. The mind that has but lately received a commanding revelation which exalts it above the pettiness of daily life is very prone to a certain extravagance, a certain farcical pomp, in its devotion. The Neptunian mind, on the other hand, born into the faith and needing no sententious conversion, was sometimes impelled by Paul’s solemnity to wonder whether even the final tragedy of man on Neptune called most for grief or for laughter.

iii. FRUITS OF THE RESEARCH

PAUL HAD ALREADY made it clear in his own mind what the human aim should be. Man should be striving into ever-increasing richness of personality. He should be preparing his planet and his many races of persons to embody the great theme of spirit which was as yet so dimly, so reluctantly, conceived. In fact man should be preparing to fulfil his office as a centre in which the cosmos might rejoice in itself, and whence it might exfoliate into ever more brilliant being. Paul found also in his heart a conviction, calm, though humanly reluctant, that in the end must come downfall; and that though man must strive with all his strength and constancy of purpose, he must yet continually create in his heart the peace, the acceptance, the cold bright star of cognizance which if we name it we misname.

In his exploration Paul sought to discover what progress man was making in this twofold venture. He found a world in which, far from perceiving the cosmical aspect of humanity, men were for the most part insensitive even to the purely human aspect, the need to make a world of full-blown and joyful human individuals. Men lived together in close proximity, yet with scarcely more knowledge of one another than jungle trees, which blindly jostle and choke, each striving only to raise its head above its neighbours. Beings with so little perception of their fellows had but a vague apprehension of the human forest as a whole, and almost none of its potentialities. Some confused and dreamlike awareness of man’s cosmical function no doubt there was. As a very faint breeze, it spread among the waiting tree-tops. But what was to come of it?

In such a world there was one kind of work which seemed to Paul, not indeed the most important, for many operations were equally important, but the most directly productive work of all, namely, education. Among the teachers, as in all walks of life, Paul found that, though some were indeed pioneers of the new world-order, many were almost entirely blind to the deeper meaning of their task. Even those few who had eyes to see could do but little. Their pupils had at all costs to be fitted for life in a world careless of the spirit, careless of the true ends of living, and thoughtful only for the means. They must be equipped for the economic struggle. They must become good business men, good engineers and chemists, good typists and secretaries, good husband-catchers, even if the process prevented them irrevocably from becoming fully alive human beings. And so the population of the Western world was made up for the most part of strange thwarted creatures, skilled in this or that economic activity, but blind to the hope and the plight of the human race. For them the sum of duty was to play the economic game shrewdly and according to rule, to keep their wives in comfort and respectability, their husbands well fed and contented, to make their offspring into quick and relentless little gladiators for the arena of world-prices. One and all they ignored that the arena was not merely the market or the stock exchange, but the sand-multitudinous waste of stars.

Of the innumerable constructors, the engineers, architects, chemists, many were using their powers merely for gladiatorial victory. Even those who were sincere workers had but the vaguest notion of their function in the world. For them it was enough to serve faithfully some imposing individual, some firm, or at best some national State. They conceived the goal of corporate human endeavour in terms of comfort, efficiency, and power, in terms of manufactures, oil, electricity, sewage disposal, town-planning, aeroplanes and big guns. When they were not at work, they killed time by motor-touring, the cinema, games, domesticity or sexual adventures. Now and then they registered a political vote, without having any serious knowledge of the matters at stake. Yet within the limits of their own work they truly lived; their creative minds were zestfully obedient to the laws of the materials in which they worked, to the strength and elasticity of metals, the forms of cantilevers, the affinities of atoms.

Of much the same mentality, though dealing with a different material, were the doctors and surgeons; for whom men and women were precariously adjusted machines, walking bags of intestines, boxes of telephone nerves, chemical factories liable to go wrong at any minute, fields for exploration and fee-making, possible seats of pain, the great evil, and of death, which, though often preferable, was never to be encouraged. They were familiar equally with death, and birth, conception and contraception, and all the basic agonies and pities. They protected themselves against the intolerable dead-weight of human suffering, sometimes by callousness of imagination, sometimes by drink or sport or private felicity, sometimes by myths of compensation in eternity. A few faced the bleak truth unflinchingly yet also with unquenched compassion. But nearly all, though loyal to the militant life in human bodies, were too hard pressed to be familiar with the uncouth exploratory ventures of human minds. And so, through very loyalty to life, they were for the most part blind to the other, the supernal, beauty.

Even more insulated, those very different servants of human vitality, the agriculturists, whose minds were fashioned to the soil they worked on, lived richly within the limits of their work, yet were but obscurely, delusively, conscious of the world beyond their acres. In the straightness of their furrows, and the fullness of their crops, in their sleek bulls and stallions, they knew the joy of the maker; and they knew beauty. But what else had they? They had to thrust and heave from morning till night. They had to feed their beasts. Brooding over their crops, dreading floods and droughts, they had not time for the world. Yet they enviously despised the town-dwellers. They censured all newfangled ways, they condescended to teach their sons the lore of their grandfathers, and they guarded their daughters as prize heifers. They put on black clothes for chapel, to pray for good weather. They believed themselves the essential roots of the State. They measured national greatness in terms of wheat and yeoman muscle. The younger ones, town-infected with their motor-bicycles, their wireless, their artificial silks, their political views, their new-fangled morals, revolted against enslavement to the soil. Both young and old alike were vaguely unquiet, disorientated, sensing even in their fields the futility of existence.

Most typical of your isolation from one another were the seamen, who, imprisoned nine parts of their lives in a heaving box of steel, looked out complainingly upon a world of oceans and coasts. They despised the landsmen, but they were ever in search of a shore job. Monastic, by turns celibate and polygamous, they were childlike in their unworldly innocence, brutelike in their mental blindness, godlike (to Paul’s estimation) in their patience and courage. They loved the flag as no landsman could love it. They were exclusively British (or German or what not) but loyal also to the universal brotherhood of the sea (or disloyal), and faithful to the owners (or unfaithful). Day after day they toiled, shirked, slandered, threatened one another with knives; but in face of the typhoon they could discover amongst themselves a deep, an inviolable communion. They measured all persons by seamanship, crew-discipline, and all things by seaworthiness and ship-shapeliness. They took the stars for signposts and timepieces, and on Sundays for the lamps of angels. Contemptuous of democracy, innocent of communism, careless of evolution, they ignored that the liquid beneath their keels was but a film between the solid earth and the void, but a passing phenomenon between the volcanic confusion of yesterday and the all-gripping ice-fields of tomorrow.

Seemingly very different, yet at bottom the same, was the case of the industrial workers of all occupations and ranks, whose dreams echoed with the roar of machinery. For the mass of them, work was but a slavery, and the height of bliss was to be well paid in idleness. They loudly despised the wealthy, yet in their hearts they desired only to mimic them, to display expensive pleasures, to have powers of swift locomotion. What else could they look for, with their stunted minds? Many were unemployed, and spiritually dying of mere futility. Some, dole-shamed, fought for self-esteem, cursing the world that had no use for them; others, dole-contented, were eager to plunder the society that had outlawed them. But many there were among the industrial workers who waited only to be wrought and disciplined to become the storm troops of a new order. Many there were who earnestly willed to make a new world and not merely to destroy an old one. But what world? Who could seize this half-fashioned instrument, temper it, and use it? Who had both the courage and the cunning to do so? Seemingly only those who had been themselves so tempered and hardened by persecution that they could not conceive any final beatitude for man beyond regimentation in a proletarian or a fascist State.

Certainly the politicians could never seize that weapon. They climbed by their tongues; and when they reached the tree-top, they could do nothing but chatter like squirrels, while the storm cracked the branches, and the roots parted.

The journalists? Was it they who could fertilize the waiting seed of the new world? Little seekers after copy, they made their living by the sale of habit-forming drugs. They had their loyalties, like the rest of men; but they trusted that in preserving the tradition of the Press, or in serving some great journal, they served well enough. They ignored that in the main their journals spread poison, lies, the mentality of society’s baser parts. They made sex obscene, war noble, and patriotism the height of virtue. A few there were of another kind, who sought to bring to light what the authorities would keep dark, whose aim it was to make men think by offering them sugared pills of wisdom, spiced problems of state-craft, peepshows of remote lands and lives, glimpses of the whole of things. They were indeed possible trumpeters of a new order, though not world-builders. But they were few and hobbled, for at every turn they must please or go under. And the thought which they so devotedly spread was of necessity over-simplified and vulgarized, to suit the spirit of the times.

The civil servants, could they remake the world? Wrought and tempered to a great tradition of loyalty, they were devoted only to the smooth-running and just-functioning and minor improvement of the social machine.

The social workers, so formidable with eye-witnessed facts, so indignant with the machine, so kindly-firm with ‘cases’, so loyal to the social gospel, and to the fulfilling of personality, so contemptuous of cosmical irrelevances, and morally outraged by those who, even in a foundering world, have an eye for beauty! They had their part to play, but they were repairers, physicians, not procreators of a new world.

The religious folk, who should have been society’s red blood-corpuscles, transfusing their spiritual treasure into all its tissues, had settled down to become a huge proliferating parasite. Mostly of the middle class, they projected their business interests into another world by regular payments of premiums on an eternal-life assurance policy; or they compensated for this world’s unkindness by conceiving themselves each as the sole beloved in the arms of Jesus, or at least as a life member in the very select celestial club. But some, teased by a half-seen vision, by a conviction of majesty, of beauty they knew not whereabouts nor of what kind, were persuaded to explain their bewildered ecstasy by ancient myths and fantasies. For the sake of their bright, featureless, guiding star, they believed what was no longer credible and desired what it was now base to desire.

The scientists, so pious toward physical facts, so arch-priestly to their fellow-men, were indeed a noble army of miners after truths; but they were imprisoned in deep galleries, isolated even from each other in their thousand saps. Daily they opened up new veins of the precious metal; and sent the bright ingots aloft, to be mortised into the golden temple of knowledge, with its great thronged halls of physics, astronomy and chemistry, biology and psychology; or to be put to commercial use, whether for the increase of happiness, or for killing, or for spiritual debasement, or to be instrumental in one way or another to the achievement of pure cognizance. Two kinds of scientists Paul found. Some were but eyeless cave-reptiles, or moles who came reluctantly into the upper world, nosing across men’s path, concealing their bewilderment under dust-clouds of pronouncements. Some, though innocent of philosophy, ventured to set up metaphysical edifices, in which they repeated all the structural defects of the old systems, or were sent toppling by the dizzying of their own unschooled desires, whether for the supremacy of mind, or for the immortality of the individual. The public, tricked by the same unschooled desires, applauded their acrobatic feats, and was blind to their disaster. Others, more cautious, knew that all scientific knowledge was of numbers only, yet that with the incantation of numbers new worlds might be made. They were preparing to take charge of mankind, to make the planet into a single well-planned estate, and to re-orientate human nature. But what kind of a world would they desire to make, whose knowledge was only of numbers?

But the philosophers themselves were scarcely more helpful. Some still hoped to reach up to reality (which the scientists had missed) by tiptoeing on a precarious scaffold of words. Others, preening their intellectual consciences, abjured all such adventures. They were content merely to melt down and remodel the truth ingots of the scientists, and to build them together upon the high, the ever-unfinished tower of the golden temple; Some were so in love with particularity that they ignored the universal, others so impressed by the unity of all things that they overlooked discreteness. Yet doubtless by exchange of findings and by mutual devastation they were year by year approaching, corporately, irresistibly, but asymptotically, toward a central truth; which lay ever at hand, yet infinitely remote, because eternally beyond the comprehension of half-human minds. For, like their fellows, the philosophers of the species had a blind spot in the centre of the mind’s vision, so that what they looked at directly they could never see. Like archaeologists who lovingly study and classify the script of a forgotten language but have found no key to its meaning, the philosophers were wise chiefly in knowing that whoever claims to interpret the rigmarole of half-human experience is either a fool or a charlatan.

There were the artists, despisers of the mere analytical intelligence. What hope lay with them? Microcosmic creators, for whom love and hate and life itself were but the matter of art, in their view the whole meaning of human existence seemed to lie solely in the apprehension of forms intrinsically ‘significant’, and in the embodiment of visions without irrelevance. Athletes of the spirit, by the very intensity of their single aesthetic achievement they were prone to cut themselves off from the still-living, though desperately imperilled world.

There were others, artists and half-artists, who were leaders of thought in Paul’s day, publicists, novelists, playwrights, even poets. Some still preached the Utopia of individuals, the private man’s heaven on earth, ignorant that this ideal had lost its spell, that it must be sought not as an end but as a means, that it must borrow fervour from some deeper fire. Some affirmed, pontifically or with the licence of a jester, that all human endeavour expresses unwittingly the urge of some cryptic, evolving, deity, which tries out this and that organic form, this and that human purpose, in pursuit of an end hidden even from itself. Some, ridiculing all superstition, declared existence to be nothing but electrons, protons, ethereal undulations, and superstitiously asserted that cognisance, passion and will are identical with certain electrical disturbances in nerve fibres or muscles. Some, zestfully proclaiming the futility of the cosmos and the impotence of man, cherished their own calm or heroic emotions, and deployed their cloak of fortitude and flowing rhetoric, mannequins even on the steps of the scaffold. Some, whose sole care was to avoid the taunt of credulity, and the taunt of emotionalism, fastidiously, elegantly, shook off from their fingers the dust of belief, the uncleanness of enthusiasm. Some, because reason (jockeyed and overpressed by so many riders) had failed to take her fences, condemned her as a jade fit only for the knackers; and led out in her stead a dark horse, a gift horse whose mouth must not be inspected, a wooden horse, bellyful of trouble. Some, gleefully discovering that the hated righteousness of their fathers drew its fervour from disreputable and unacknowledged cravings, preached therefore that primeval lusts alone directed all human activities. Some, because their puritan mothers dared not receive the revelation of the senses, themselves wallowed in the sacred wine till their minds drowned. Some were so tangled in the love of mother, and the discord of mother and mate, that they received from woman not nourishment, not strength, but a sweet and torturing poison, without which they could not live, by which their minds were corroded. Some, exquisitely discriminating the myriad flavours and perfumes of experience, cared only to refine the palate to the precision of a wine-taster; but registered all their subtle apprehensions with a desolate or with a defiant conviction of futility, a sense of some huge omission in the nature of things or in man’s percipience. Some cognized their modern world but as flotsam gyrating on the cosmical flux, a film or ordure in which men and women swam spluttering, among disintegrated cigarette-ends, clattering cans, banana skins, toffee papers, and other disused sheathings. For them filth was the more excruciating by reason of their intuitions of purity violated, of austerity desecrated. Others there were, no less excruciated, who nevertheless by natatory prowess reached the mud-flats of old doctrine, whereat last they thankfully reclined, ‘wrapped in the old miasmal mist’, and surrounded by the rising tide.

What was the upshot of Paul’s whole exploration? For me there issued in my own mind the pure, the delighted cognizance, both of Paul’s world and of Paul himself, the appraising organ that I had chosen. For Paul the upshot was a sense of horror and of exaltation, a sense that he was participating in a torrent of momentous happenings whose final issue he could but vaguely guess, but whose immediate direction was toward ruin.

He saw clearly that man, the most successful of all Terrestrial animals, who had mastered all rivals and taken the whole planet as his hunting-ground, could not master himself, could not even decide what to do with himself. All over the West man was visibly in decline. The great wave of European energy, which gave him mastery over nature, which carried the European peoples into every continent, which lent them for a while unprecedented intellectual vision and moral sensitivity, now visibly failed. And what had come of it? The Black Country and its counterpart in all Western lands, mechanized life, rival imperialisms, aerial bombardment, poison gas; for the mind, a deep and deadly self-disgust, a numbing and unacknowledged shame, a sense of huge opportunities missed, of a unique trust betrayed, and therewith a vast resentment against earlier generations, against human nature, against fate, against the universe. What more? An attempt to cover up guilt and futility by mechanical triumphs, business hustle, and the sound of a hundred million gramophones and radio-sets.

Paul asked himself ‘How has all this happened?’ And he answered, ‘Because we cannot look into our minds and see what really affords lasting satisfaction, and what is merely reputed to do so; because our individuality is a dimensionless point, because our personalities are but masks with nothing behind them. But in the East, where they say man is less superficial, what is happening? There, presumably, men have seen truths which the West has missed, But they stared at their truths till they fell into a hypnotic trance which lasted for centuries. They made it an excuse for shunning the world and all its claims, for gratifying themselves in private beatitude. And now, when at the hands of the West the world is forced on them irresistibly, they fall into the very same errors that they condemn in us. And the Russians? Socially they are the hope of the world. But have they as individual beings any more reality, any more percipience, than the rest of us?’

Over this despair, this disgust of human futility, Paul triumphed by taking both a longer and a wider view.

‘We shall win through,’ he told himself. ‘We must. Little by little, year by year, aeon by aeon, and in spite of long dark ages, man will master himself, will gain deeper insight, will make a better world. And if not man, then surely some other will in the end fulfil his office as the cosmical eye and heart and hand. If in our little moment he is in regression, what matter? The great music must not always be triumphant music. There are other songs beside the songs of victory. And all songs must find their singers.’

Shortly after the final meditation in which he summed up the whole issue of his inquiry, Paul wrote a poem in which he made it clear to himself, though with a certain bitterness, that he cared more for the music which is spirit than for the human or any other instrument. In the final couplet there appears the self-conscious disillusionment which is characteristic of your age.

If man encounter

on his proud adventure

other intelligence?

If mind more able.

ranging among the galaxies.

noose this colt and break him

to be a beast of draught and burden

for ends beyond him?

If man’s aim and his passion be ludicrous.

and the flight of Pegasus

but a mulish caper?

Dobbin! Pull your weight!

Better be the donkey of the Lord.

whacked on beauty’s errand.

than the wild ass of the desert

without destination.

Vision! From star to star the human donkey

transports God’s old street organ and his monkey.

iv. PAUL SETTLES DOWN

PAUL HAD BY now almost fulfilled the task that I had demanded of him. Not only had he collected for me an immense store of facts about the crisis of his species, facts the significance of which he himself often entirely failed to see, but also in his own experience he had already afforded me a very precise insight into the capacity of his kind. He had shown me, through years of inner turmoil, the aspirations and reluctances of a primitive being haunted by visions from a higher sphere. In particular he had shown me the limits of your intelligence and of your will. There were innumerable problems which Paul even with my patient help could never understand. There were austerities of beauty which even with my most earnest illumination he could not admire. But one test at least Paul had triumphantly passed. He had shown that it was possible for the average mentality of the First Men, under careful tuition, to apprehend without any doubt whatever the two supreme and seemingly discordant offices of the individual mind, namely, loyalty to man and worship of fate. To the Last Men these offices are displayed as organic to one another; but to the First Men, they are for ever discrepant. Paul’s intellect at least saw this discrepancy, and refused to be put off with false solutions of the problem. For the rest though he so clearly recognized that all human purposes should be subordinated to these two supreme ends, he himself, like the rest of his kind, was but a frail vessel.

Since I had no further use for Paul as a visual and auditory instrument through which to examine your world, I now ceased to trouble him with the insatiable lust of inquiry which had mastered him since the conclusion of the war. Hitherto he had pursued his task indefatigably, but now his energy began to flag. This was due partly to the withdrawal of my stimulation, partly to the fact that his uncapacious brain was already charged to the full and could bear no more, partly also to the long physical strain of the double life which he had led. For Paul had indeed been wearing himself out. Katherine, with whom he still spent an occasional week, had declared that he was withering before his time, that his arms and legs were sticks and his ribs an old rat-trap. Privately she had noted also that his embraces had lost their vigour. She had urged him to ‘take things easy for a while’. And now at last he discovered that he had in fact neither the energy nor the inclination to pursue the old racketing way of life.

I made it clear to him that I required no more work of him, but that I should continue to be with him to observe the movements of his mind during his normal career. For, though I had no further use for him as an exploratory instrument, it was my intention to watch the way in which his Neptunian tincture would influence him in middle age and senility. At this juncture Paul displayed rather interestingly the weakness of his kind by futile rebellion, and an attempt to pursue a heroic career for which he was unsuited. I must not dwell upon this incident, but it may be briefly recorded for the light which it throws upon your nature. He had already, it will be remembered, become convinced that his race was heading for a huge disaster, from which nothing could save it but an impossible change of heart, of native capacity. In spite of the current ‘world-economic crisis’, he had no serious expectation of a sudden catastrophe; but he had come to believe in a long-drawn-out spiritual decline, masked by a revival of material prosperity. He looked forward to centuries, perhaps millennia, of stagnation, in which the half-awakened mind of man would have sunk back once more into stupor. But he saw this phase as but a momentary episode in the life of the planet. And he saw the little huge tragedy of the modern world as, after all, acceptable, a feature of cosmical beauty. He knew, moreover, not clearly but yet with conviction, that he himself had played some small part in apprehending the drama of his age for the cognizance of the mature and final human mind. He knew also that without my continuous support he had no outstanding ability. Yet, though fundamentally he had accepted all this, and was indeed profoundly at peace, he could not express this acceptance and this peace in conduct. He could not bring himself to participate in the tragedy without making efforts to avert it, efforts which he knew must be futile, because in the first place he himself was not made of the stuff of prophets, and because in the second place the nature of his species was inadequate. Though he knew it was so, an irrational fury of partisanship now seized him. Instead of continuing the work which he could do tolerably well, instead of striving by his school-teaching to elicit in certain young minds an enhanced percipience and delight, he must needs take it upon himself to become the prophet of a new social and spiritual order.

It is no part of my purpose to tell in detail how Paul, after earnestly seeking excuses for a project which he knew to be ridiculous, gave up his post in the school; how he devoted himself to writing and speaking, in fact to preaching the new truth that he supposed himself to possess; how he tried to gather round him a group of collaborators, whom secretly he regarded as disciples; how he made contact once more with his old acquaintance the author of Last and First Men, hailed that timid and comfort-loving creature as a fellow-prophet, and was hastily dismissed for a lunatic; how, subsequently, his literary products proved even to himself their inability to find their way into print, and his efforts at vocal prophecy earned him the reputation of a crank and a bore; how he tried to persuade the Communists that he knew their mind better than they did themselves; how he was expelled from the Communist Party as an incorrigible bourgeois; how the communistically inclined editor of a well-known literary journal, who at first hoped to bring Paul within his own circle, was soon very thankful to get rid of him; how after several disorderly scenes in Hyde Park, Paul was eventually marched off by the police, from whose care he finally escaped only to take up his abode in the Lunatic Asylum near his suburban home; how after some months of enforced meditation he was at last released, thoroughly cured of his disease; how, finally, but not until many far-reaching wires had been pulled in his interest, he was re-established in his old school. These facts I record chiefly so that I may also record another. Throughout this fantastic phase of his life, Paul remained inwardly the calm, the compassionately amused spectator of his own madness.

Of his subsequent career I need only say that within a year he had settled himself firmly into harness once more, with the determination never again to see the inside of a lunatic asylum. He became indeed an admirable schoolmaster of the more advanced and sympathetic type, bent upon reform, but cautious. In consequence of my influence during his youth he was now able to earn a reputation for daring ideas, yet also for patience, tact and extreme conscientiousness. In due season he married, begat children, became a head master, and introduced far-reaching novelties into his school, in respect of curriculum, teaching methods, and dress. From the point of view of readers of this book, the tense of this last sentence should have been future, for up to the date of publication, Paul remains a bachelor, Nevertheless I have already observed his future career, and can report that, when the time comes for him to retire, he will look back on his work with thankfulness and modest pride; that, having earlier determined to commit suicide soon after his retirement, he will change his mind and allow himself a year or two to re-assess his life and his world in the mellow light of a peaceful old age; that during this period he will afford me much further knowledge of the senescent phase of your individuality, with its strange blend of wisdom and puerility, its increased potentiality of insight, progressively thwarted by neural decay; that when there is no further reason for him to remain alive, Paul will no longer have the resolution to kill himself, and will be trapped in the quagmire of senility.

9 ON EARTH AND ON NEPTUNE

i. SUBMERGED SUPERMEN
ii. PAUL AND HUMPTY
iii. BACK TO NEPTUNE
iv. EPILOGUE BY THE TERRESTRIAL AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK

i. SUBMERGED SUPERMEN

I HAVE BEEN describing a situation in which, had the intelligence and the integrity of average men and women been slightly more robust, your world might have passed almost at a leap from chaos to organization, from incipient dissolution to a new order of vitality. Many minds were clearly aware that they were puppets in a huge and tragic farce, though none were able to put an end to it. I have now to tell of a different and much less imposing pattern of events, which was enacted in your midst without revealing its significance to any man. In this case disaster was brought about, not by any lack of native intelligence or of native integrity, but by the action of a savage environment on minds too gifted for your world.

While our observers were watching the forlorn efforts of your species to cope with problems beyond its powers, they detected also in many regions of your planet the promise of a new and more human species. The tragic fate of these more brilliant beings is amongst the most remarkable incidents in the whole history of Man. Here it is impossible to do more than outline this amazing story.

Throughout the career of your species, biological forces have now and then thrown up individuals in whom there was some promise of a higher type. Nearly always this promise was frustrated simply by the physiological instability of the new mutation. The new brain forms were associated either with actual distortions of body, or at best with normal structures which were inadequate to bear the novel strain. During the great ferment of industrial revolution in Europe and America, these biological mutations became much more numerous. Thus was afforded a serious possibility of the emergence somewhere or other of a type which should combine superior mentality with a physique capable of supporting the new cerebral organs.

When the earliest phase of industrialism was passed and conditions had improved somewhat, it became less difficult for abnormal beings to preserve themselves. The growth of humanitarianism, moreover, tended to foster these crippled supernormals along with the subnormals for whom they were invariably mistaken. Toward the end of the Nineteenth and the beginning of the Twentieth Centuries, we found here and there in the cities and industrial areas of the Western World, and later in industrial Asia, many hundreds of these individuals. They were of diverse biological constitution, but similar in respect of the factors which, with good fortune, should produce supernormal intelligence and supernormal integrity. Many of them, however, were tormented by gross bodily malformation; some, though more or less like their fellows in general anatomy, were no less hampered by biochemical maladjustments; some, though otherwise normal, were crippled by excessive weight of brain. But a few, sprung from stock of exceptionally tough fibre and ample proportions, were able to support and nourish their not excessively large heads without undue strain, at least in favourable conditions.

Now it might have been expected that these individuals, potentially far more brilliant than the most gifted of the normal kind, would have risen very rapidly to positions of power; and that, at the same time, they would have successfully established their type by propagation. Within a few generations, surely, they would have completely dominated the earlier and inferior species. But this was not to be. Even among the very small minority who combined mental superiority with bodily health, circumstance was fatally and ironically hostile. With regard to propagation, to take the simpler matter first, most of these superior beings, even those who were healthy and sexually potent, were strongly repellent to normal members of the opposite sex. They did not conform to any recognized pattern of sexual beauty. They were neither of the classical nor of the negroid nor of the mongolian styles, which alone were favoured by the ‘cinema’. Indeed they were definitely grotesque. Their heads, in most cases, looked too big for their bodies, and they were apt to have bull necks. In many of them, moreover, there was a disturbing uncouthness of facial expression, which to the normal eye seemed sometimes insane, sometimes infantile, sometimes diabolic. Consequently it was almost impossible for them to find mates.

More interesting to our observers was the failure of these potentially superior beings to assert themselves in a world of inferiors. Though they were biologically very diverse, springing in fact from entirely independent mutations, these beings were alike in one respect, namely their very prolonged childhood and adolescence. The new and more complex brain organization could not develop successfully unless it was associated with an abnormally slow rate of growth. Therefore such of these beings as were able to survive were always ‘backward’ not only in appearance, but in some respects, mentally also. Thus a boy of ten years would look like a child of six; and mentally, though in some respects already more developed than his parents, he would seem to them to be hopelessly incompetent. Judged by similar standards, the normal human child would appear hopelessly backward in comparison with the baby ape, although in reality he would be far more intelligent and promising. Similarly, these superior children were invariably considered by their parents and guardians as distressingly inferior.

This backwardness of the new individual was due, not solely to the slowness of physiological growth, but also to the fact that with more delicate percipience he found in the experiences of childhood far more to delight and intrigue him than the normal child could gather. These beings remained so long in the phase of perceptual and motor experimentation, and later so long in the phase of play, partly because for them these fields were so crowded with interest. Similarly, when at length they attained adolescence, the dawn of self-consciousness and other-consciousness was for them so brilliant and overwhelming that they had inevitably to take many years to adjust themselves to it.

So great was this seeming backwardness that they were often regarded by their elders, and by their own generation also, not merely as inferior, but as seriously deficient. Often they were actually treated as insane. Thus in spite of their superiority they grew up with a devastating sense of their own incapacity, which increased as they became increasingly aware of the difference between themselves and others. This illusion of inferiority was aggravated by their slow sexual development; for at twenty they were sexually equivalent to a normal child of thirteen. But, it may be asked, if these beings were really so brilliant, how could they be so deceived about themselves? The answer is given partly by their serious physiological backwardness, but partly also by the overwhelming prestige of the inferior culture into which they were born. At thirty they had still the immaturity of the normal youth of eighteen; and finding a fundamental discrepancy between their own way of thinking and the thought of the whole world, they were forced to conclude that the world was right. It must be remembered, moreover, that they were isolated individuals, that no one of them would be likely ever to come across another of his kind. Further, owing to the precarious balance of their vital economy, they were all short-lived. Hardly any survived beyond forty-five, the age at which they should have been upon the brink of mental maturity.

One characteristic of their childhood was, as I said, a seeming backwardness of interest, which was taken to be a symptom of mental limitation. Now with the passage of years this limitation seemed to become more pronounced. At an age when the normal young man would be dominated by the will to make his mark in the world by eclipsing his fellows, these strange beings seemed quite incapable of ‘taking themselves seriously’. At school and college they could never be induced to apply themselves resolutely to matters which concerned only private advancement. While admitting that for the community’s sake it was necessary that individuals should’ look after themselves’, so as not to be a burden, they could never be made to see the importance of personal triumph over others in the great game of life, the great gladiatorial display of personal prowess, which was ever the main preoccupation of the First Men. Consequently they could never conjure up the necessary forcefulness, the relentlessness, the singleminded pushfulness which alone can advance a man. Their minds, it seemed, were so limited that they could not form a really effective sentiment of self-regard.

There were other respects in which the interest of these beings seemed to be pitiably limited. Even those few who enjoyed physical health and delighted in bodily activity, could never be persuaded to concentrate their attention earnestly upon athletics, still less to give up all their leisure to the pursuit of the ball. To the football-playing and football-watching population these lonely beings seemed almost criminally lax. Further, while enjoying occasionally the spectacle of a horse race, they could raise no interest whatever in betting. Blood sports they heartily loathed, yet without hate of those who practised them; for they had no blood lust secretly at work within themselves. They seemed also to be incapable of appreciating military glory and national prestige. Though in some ways extremely social, they could not pin their loyalty to one particular group rather than another. Moral sensitivity, too, seemed either absent or so distorted as to be unrecognizable. Not only did they break the sabbath without shame, even in districts where sabbatarianism was unquestioned, but also in respect of sex they were a source of grave offence; for they seemed wholly incapable of feeling that sex was unclean. Both in word and act they were shameless. Nothing but their sexual unattractiveness restricted their licentious tendencies. Persuasion was entirely ineffective, calling from them only a spate of arguments which, though of course fantastic, were very difficult to refute. Compulsion alone could restrain them; but unfortunately, though these beings were so lacking in self-pride and personal rivalry, any attempt to prevent them from behaving as seemed good to them was apt to call forth a fanatical resistance, in pursuance of which they would readily suffer even the extremes of agony without flinching. This capacity for diabolic heroism was almost the only character that earned them any respect from their fellows; but since it was generally used in service of ends which their neighbours could not appreciate, respect was outweighed by ridicule or indignation. Only when this heroism was exercised to succour some suffering fellow-mortal could the normal mind fully appreciate it. Sometimes they would perform acts of superb gallantry to rescue people from fire, from drowning, from maltreatment. But on another occasion the very individual who had formerly gone to almost certain death to rescue a fellow-citizen or a child, might refuse even a slight risk when some popular or important personage was in danger. The former hero would scoff at all appeals, merely remarking that he was worth more than the other, and must not risk his life for an inferior being.

Though capable of earnest devotion, these god-forsaken creatures were thought to be too deficient to appreciate religion. In church they showed no more percipience than a cat or dog. Attempts by parents and guardians to make them feel the fundamental religious truths merely puzzled or bored them. Yet Neptunian observers, stationed in these sorely perplexed but sensitive young minds, found them often violently disturbed and exalted by the two fundamental religious experiences, namely by militant love of all living things and by the calm fervour of resignation. Far more than the normal species, and in spite of their own racked bodies, they were able to relish the spectacle of human existence.

Most of them, both male and female, showed a very lively curiosity, which in one or two cases was successfully directed towards a scientific training. Generally, however, they made no headway at all in science, because at the outset of their studies they could not see the validity of the assumptions and method of the sciences. One or two of them did, indeed, have the enterprise to go through with their training, acquiring with remarkable ease an immense mass of facts, arguments and theories. But they proved incapable of making use of their knowledge. They seemed to regard all their scientific work as a game that had little to do with reality, a rather childish game of skill in which the arbitrary rules failed to develop the true spirit of the game with rigorous consistency. Moreover, the further they explored the corpus of any science, the more frivolously they regarded it, being apparently unable to appreciate the subtleties of specialized technique and theory. Not only in science, but in all intellectual spheres, they were, in fact, constantly hampered by a lucidity of insight which seemed to the normal mind merely obtuseness. In philosophy, for instance, whither their natural curiosity often led them, they could not make head or tail even of principles agreed upon or unconsciously assumed by all schools alike. Their teachers were invariably forced to condemn them as entirely without metaphysical sense; save in one respect, for it was often noticed that they were capable of remarkable insight into the errors of theories with which their teachers themselves disagreed. The truth was that at the base of every intellectual edifice these beings found assumptions which they could not accept, or in which they could find no clear meaning; while throughout the structure they encountered arguments in which they could not see a logical connexion.

There was one sphere in which several of these beings did earnestly try to make themselves felt, namely in politics and social improvement. But here they were even more ineffective than elsewhere. They could never see the importance of the accepted political aims or the validity of the recognized party maxims. When politicians demonstrated the inevitable results of this policy or that, these unhappy misfits could only deplore their own stupidity in not being able to follow the argument. When they themselves confessed how they would deal with some problem or other, they were either cursed for their lack of true feeling or derided for their childish idealism. In either case they were charged with being ignorant of human nature; and this charge was, in a manner, just, for they had seldom any conception of the gulf between themselves and the members of the older species.

I have been speaking of those few who were educated so far as to be able to take thought for matters of theoretical interest or public concern. But the great majority never attained this level. Those who were born into comfortable circumstances generally came into conflict with the taboos of their society, and were ostracized; so that they sank into the underworld. Those also who were born into poor families were frequently outlawed by their fellows; and being entirely unfit to make their way in the huge dog-fight of industrialism, they nearly always subsided into the humblest occupations. They became dock-labourers, charwomen, agricultural labourers, clerks of the lowest order, very small shop-keepers, and especially vagrants. It was remarkable that they received on the whole more sympathy and understanding in the lower than in the higher reaches of society. This was because in the simpler, less sophisticated, manner of life their native intelligence and integrity did not come into obvious conflict with the proud but crude culture of more ‘educated’ folk. Indeed, those whose lot fell among the ‘lower’ classes of society were generally treated by their peers with a strange blend of contempt and respect. Though they were regarded as ineffective cranks or freaks, as children whose development had somehow been arrested, as ‘daft’, ‘fey’, ‘mental’, they were also credited with an odd kind of impracticable wisdom that was too good for this world. Not only so, but even in practical matters their advice was often sought; for they seemed to combine a divine innocence and self-disregard with a shrewdness, a cunning, which, though it was never used for self-advancement, struck the normal mind as diabolic.

The kind of life into which these abortive supermen gravitated most frequently was a life of wandering and contemplation. Often they became tramps, drifting from one big town to another, trekking through agricultural districts, tinkering, sharpening scissors, mending crockery, poaching, stealing, breaking stones, harvesting. A few became postmen, others drivers of motor vans or buses; but though, whatever their occupations, they worked with incredible efficiency, seldom could they remain for long in posts which entailed subordination to members of the normal species. The women were more unfortunate than the men, for vagrancy was less easily practised by women. Some became seamstresses. A few, protected by sexual unattractiveness, faced the difficulties and dangers of the road. Others, blessed with more or less normal looks, chose prostitution as the least repugnant way of earning a livelihood.

Our observers, whenever they studied these unfulfilled approximations to a new species, found invariably a mental pattern definitely far superior to the normal, but also one which was much less developed than that of the Second Men, whose career was destined to begin some ten million years after your day. These superior contemporaries of yours had indeed, for beings whose heads were not much larger than your own, remarkable intelligence. They were remarkable also in respect of the organization and unity of their minds. Where the normal personality, torn by conflicts of desire and loyalty, would split into two or more incomplete systems imperfectly related to one another, these preserved their integrity, and chose that action which did in fact offer the greatest good possible in the circumstances. They were almost entirely without selfishness, for they had a capacity for self-insight definitely more penetrating than that of the normal species. Like the Second Men, they had also an innate interest in the higher mental activities, a craving for intellectual exercise and aesthetic delight no less imperious than the simple needs for food and drink. But unfortunately, since they were isolated individuals overwhelmed in childhood by a world of inferior calibre, they were unable to satisfy these cravings wholesomely. They were like potential athletes trained from birth to use certain muscles in grotesque and cramping actions, and the rest of their bodies not at all. Thus they never developed their powers, and were haunted by a sense of falsity and futility in all their mental life. They were beings, moreover, in whom we found a vigorous and lucid innate loyalty toward the supreme adventure of the awakening spirit in man, and in the cosmos. They were very ready to regard themselves and others as vessels, instruments of a great corporate endeavour. But, unfortunately, in their terrible spiritual isolation from their neighbours, they could never whole-heartedly give themselves to the communal life. In spite of the contempt with which they were treated, in spite of their own confusion of mind, those of them who survived beyond the age of twenty-five or thirty could not but observe that the minds of their fellow-men were woven upon a different pattern from their own, a pattern at once cruder and more confused, less intricate yet more discrepant. Moreover, they soon found reason to suspect that they themselves alone had the cause of the spirit at heart, and that the rest of the world was frivolous. Each of them was like an isolated human child brought up by apes in the jungle. When at last he had begun to realize the gulf between himself and others, he realized also that he had been damaged past repair by his simian upbringing. In these circumstances he would, as a rule, content himself with a life of personal kindliness and humour, which was ever rooted in the strength of his own unshakable ecstasy of contemplation.

ii. PAUL AND HUMPTY

IT SO HAPPENED that one of these rare beings was sent by his parents to the school where Paul was head master. In appearance he was a great lout rather like a grotesque child of eight seen through a magnifying-glass. His thick neck and immense, almost bald head, was very repulsive to the normal eye. Only the hinder part of his head bore hair, which was sparse, wiry, and in colour like grey sand. The bare and lumpy dome of his cranium overhung two pale brown eyes, so large that they seemed to occupy the whole middle region of his face. Beneath an inconspicuous nose was a huge and clear-cut mouth. So small was the lower jaw that the chin, though well moulded, seemed but another nose under the great lips. The head was held erect in the attitude of one supporting a pitcher on his crown. This carriage gave to the face a farcical dignity which the alert and cautious eyes rendered at times malignant. The thick-set body and great restless hands made women shudder.

No wonder that this unfortunate child, who received the nickname Humpty, was persecuted by his schoolfellows. In class his laziness was relieved now and then by fits of activity, and by uncouth remarks which roused derision among the boys, but which to Paul were sometimes very disturbing. The form master at first reported that Humpty was stupid and incorrigibly indolent; but later it appeared that he was perpetually active either in remote meditations or in observing and criticizing everything save the work in hand. Puzzled by the lad’s seeming alternation between stupidity and brilliance, Paul contrived to give the whole class a series of intelligence tests. Humpty’s performance defeated analysis. Some of the simplest tests floored him, yet some of those’ intended for ‘superior adults’ he solved without hesitation. Inquiring into the failures in the low-grade tests, Paul found that they were always due to some subtle ambiguity in the problem. The psychologists were not intelligent enough to test this unique boy.

Paul tried to win Humpty’s confidence. He took him out to tea, and walked with him occasionally at week-ends. Paul had long been in the habit of taking parties of boys into the country and on the river, and in the summer he organized camping holidays and trips on the Continent. At first he had hoped to fit Humpty into this communal activity, but very soon he realized that nothing could be done with the strange creature in the presence of his contemporaries. He therefore devoted some time to treating the boy separately. Humpty was at first hostile, then politely reticent. When he found that Paul (with my aid) realized the gulf that lay between him and his fellows, he became cautiously well-disposed.

Conversation was at first extremely difficult. Paul’s old gift of adopting a persona suited to his companions was now invaluable, but failed to produce the sudden and easy intimacy which he desired. The trouble was that Humpty did not belong to any known type. It was impossible to get in touch with him on the assumption that he was a normal adolescent; yet in spite of his infantile traits he could not be successfully treated as a child, for in some ways his interests were already those of an adult. On the other hand, Paul’s well-tried policy of speaking to his boys ‘as man to man’ was in this case unsuccessful, because Humpty seemed to be without the normal craving to be a member of the adult fraternity. With patience, however, and with a sense that he was exploring a mentality more remote than anything he had discovered in earlier adventures. Paul plotted out some of the main landmarks of Humpty’s nature. Gradually an important principle emerged in this study. In so far as Humpty was infantile, his attention was arrested by aspects of infantile experience which the normal child would miss. Sometimes, for instance, before a swim he would lie naked on the bank twiddling his toes for a solid quarter of an hour, like a baby in its cot, untouched by Paul’s bright talk, or his suggestions that it was time to take the plunge. This conduct filled Paul with despair, till he discovered that what fascinated the boy was the difference between his control of his toes and his control of his fingers. Moreover, Paul had reason to suspect that there was some other more recondite aspect of the situation, which either could not be expressed in the English language, or was too subtle for Paul’s apprehension.

When Paul first made the acquaintance of Humpty, he found the boy in a state of morbid diffidence punctuated now and then by flashes of contempt for his fellows. But under the influence of Paul’s sympathy and insight Humpty began to realize that he was not, after all, merely an inferior being. As his mind developed, and as he came to understand that he was made on a different pattern from his fellows, it was borne in on him that in many ways he was superior, that he was basically more intelligent, more capable of coherent behaviour, less beset by atavistic impulses, and above all that there were certain aspects of his experience (in some cases the most delectable) to which none but the most sensitive of his fellow human beings had any access whatever.

A year after his first contact with Humpty, Paul began to feel that the tables had been turned, that he who had formerly played the part of the superior was being forced step by step to yield precedence. The change began one day when Paul had been trying to rouse Humpty to work harder at school by appealing to his competitive self-regard. When the sermon was over, the boy looked at him with a wonder tinged with dismay. Then he gave out a single bark of laughter, and said, ‘But why on earth should I want to beat Johnson Minor and the rest?’ This was not a very remarkable question, but coming from Humpty it seemed to have a peculiar significance. And Paul felt that somehow in his error of tactics he had displayed a gross vulgarity of feeling.

Somewhat later Paul discovered with dismay that he had been quite seriously asking Humpty’s advice about certain matters of school policy. It was his custom to ask his boys for advice, so as to give them a sense of responsibility; but this time he was perturbed to find that he actually wanted the advice, and intended to use it. By now Humpty had sized up the mentality of his fellow-mortals very shrewdly; and in spheres of which he had experience, such as the school, he displayed a cold and often a cynical intelligence.

After another year had passed, the indolent. Humpty surprised Paul by settling down to work, and making up for lost ground so successfully that he soon became the school’s most brilliant, but most difficult, pupil. He gave his teachers the impression that in all his work he was but playing a game, or that he was learning the mental tricks of the human race without believing in them or approving of them. It was impossible to avoid thinking of him as a naturalist in the jungle studying the mentality of apes. After six months his fame as a prodigy of scholarship had spread over the whole country. This change in Humpty gratified Paul, but there was another change which was both incomprehensible and distressing. Hitherto he had seemed to Paul to be dangerously lacking in self-regard. Amongst the boys his generosity over toys, sweets and money had caused him to be mercilessly plundered, while in his work it was inveterate carelessness of self (so Paul thought) that had made him so ineffective. But now, along with his fever of work he developed a propensity for sacrificing the pleasure or well-being of others to his own interests. In most respects he retained his normal and unselfish nature though tinged with a contemptuousness that made him cast favours about him as one might fling refuse to the dogs; but in matters in which he felt a serious concern he was now a relentless self-seeker. It took Paul some months to discover the cause of this extraordinary change, and of the boy’s increasing reticence and frigidity. At last, however, Humpty, during a walk on Leith Hill, announced that he would take his head master into his confidence, because he must have the help of some intelligent adult. Paul was then given a lengthy account of the boy’s conclusions about himself, about the world which he had the misfortune to inhabit, and about his future. Paul had a sense that the tables had indeed been turned with a vengeance, and that the grotesque youth was treating him with the confident superiority with which normally a grown man condescends toward a child; while the head master himself involuntarily adopted the respectfulness of one of his own prefects receiving instructions. Yet according to all sane standards Humpty’s plans were preposterous.

After careful psychological and biological inquiry, so Humpty said, he had discovered that he was profoundly different from the normal human being, and indeed very superior in mental calibre. Unfortunately his nature had been seriously distorted by his barbarous upbringing, ‘Though’, he added, ‘you yourself have certainly treated me with sympathy, and with as much comprehension as can be expected of your kind. Indeed it is to you I owe it that I was not completely ruined during my adolescent phase.’ Having made this contemptuous acknowledgement, the formidable boy declared that, in spite of Paul’s care, he was probably by now too much damaged to win through in the enterprise which he must attempt. However, he would triumph or die fighting. Here Paul unwisely interrupted to say how glad he was that Humpty was at last determined to show his ability, and that undoubtedly he would make a mark in the world whatever career he chose. The boy stood still and faced his head master, gazing at him with a quizzing expression under which Paul found it hard to preserve his self-respect.

Presently Humpty remarked, with all the assurance and quietness of one who says he must buy cigarettes, or change his clothes, ‘What I must do is to make a new world. I am not sure yet whether I shall have to destroy it and produce another.’ Paul, with immense relief, burst into laughter. But the other said only, ‘I thought you had more intelligence. In fact I know you have. Think! I mean what I say.’ With dismay Paul realized that Humpty did mean what he said; and with bewilderment he realized further that something in his own mind applauded. However, he reminded himself that this would-be builder of worlds was merely an eccentric boy; and he set himself to persuade Humpty that he was making a fool of himself, that no single individual, no matter how superior, could achieve such a task. The boy replied, ‘What you say is sound common sense, the kind of sense by which your species has hitherto triumphed. But an alien mentality such as mine can see very clearly that common sense is also your undoing, and that, as a species, you have neither the intelligence nor the virtue to save yourselves in your present plight. A superior mind may perhaps be able to discipline you, or to afford you a merciful extinction. With regard to myself, you are right that I shall almost certainly fail. Your world is not easy to move, or to destroy; and I have been terribly mutilated by early contact with an insensitive, a brutish, species. But I must make the attempt. And for a few years I shall need your help. Think the matter over for a few weeks, and you will see that I am right, and that unless you would betray your own highest ideals you must henceforth subordinate everything else to my service.’

Once more Paul earnestly protested against this folly; but to humour the lad he listened during the rest of the walk to his amazing plans. First, Humpty declared he would assimilate all the cultures of the human race. He was convinced that this would not take him long; for, having discovered his own superiority, he had also gained unique insight into the weakness and the limited but solid achievement of the best human minds. Having made himself the master of all man’s wisdom, he would proceed to correct it by his own finer percipience and intelligence. Much that he would thus produce would be beyond the comprehension of his fellows, but he would publish simplified versions of all his work, based on his thorough knowledge of the inferior mentality. When this preliminary, easy, and purely theoretical, task was completed, he would set about the practical reform of the world. He was confident that by the time he had reached maturity, his superior tact and the unique power of his personality would enable him to deal with normal individuals much as a shepherd deals with his sheep; but he did not disguise from himself the fact that he would have to cope not only with sheep but with wolves, and that very grave difficulties would arise when the time came to break down the great atavistic organizations and vested interests of the world. This task, he admitted, would need all his skill, and would probably defeat him. Meanwhile, however, he would have taken steps to produce other individuals of superior type. Possibly, if his sexual development turned out normally, some of these would be his own offspring. Possibly he would have encountered other unique beings scattered up and down the world. Possibly he would be able to use his finer understanding of biology and physiology to produce superior men and women from normal ova. Anyhow, by one means or another, if the worst came to the worst, and the normal species proved incorrigible, he would found a small colony of supermen in some remote part of the world. This would become the germ of a new human species and a new world-order. Little by little it would gain control of the whole planet, and would either exterminate the inferior species, or more probably domesticate such members of the subhuman hordes as it required for its own uses.

At the close of this announcement of policy Humpty paused, then began again in a voice which betrayed an unexpected hesitation and distress. ‘This programme,’ he said, ‘sounds to you fantastic, but it should be possible to one of my powers in a world of inferiors. I am no paragon. There should some day be minds incomparably finer than mine. Yet even I, if my health can stand the strain, should prove fit for the task, but for the severe mutilation which I have already received at the hands of your species. Till now I have never told you of my most serious trouble. I must bring myself to lay bare my secret, since you must help me to make myself whole for the work which I am to do.’

Humpty now told Paul that his sufferings during childhood had filled him with a violent hate of whatever passed as morality amongst his fellows. Things had come to such a pitch that, whenever any conduct seemed likely to earn general approval, he conceived an irresistible desire to take the opposite course. In his recent burst of hard work, for instance, public commendation had almost forced him to plunge back into indolence. Only by reminding himself that the real aim of his work was to destroy the so-called morality of the inferior species could he keep himself in hand. His increasing contempt for the well-being of others, though it found its excuse in his self-dedication to a great duty, drew its vigour from the sense that he was earning the condemnation of his fellows. There was also a more serious, or at least more dramatic, way in which his revulsion from the stink of moralism threatened to undo him. He was sometimes seized with an ungovernable, an insane, impulse to violate public decency in whatever manner would seem at the time most outrageous. He himself was sexually backward, but the awe and shame with which his elders regarded sex had in early days intimidated him; and when at last he came to realize the folly and abject superstitiousness of his countrymen in this matter, he conceived a violent craving to shock them.

Having forced himself to broach the subject, Humpty was carried away by his passion. He poured out on the bewildered head master a torrent of grotesque and mostly obscene fantasies ranging, from schoolboy smut to acts of brutal sexual aggression. Of the most horrible of these gruesome titbits he said, after a hushed, almost it seemed a reverent, laugh, ‘That ought to be done on the island in Piccadilly Circus, if you could catch the right woman there, one of those who look like princesses. But could I do it before they got at me?’

Paul felt with relief that leadership had once more come into his hands. He reasoned with the unhappy boy, and promised to help him. Subsequently he took Humpty to a psycho-analyst who had often dealt successfully with difficult cases in the school. But this time the expert was defeated. It was impossible to cure Humpty by bringing to life his unconscious cravings, for in this strange mind everything was fully conscious. Humpty knew himself through and through. Suggestion and hypnotism proved equally impossible. After a few meetings the analyst began to be ill at ease, for Humpty was taking a malicious pleasure in forcing him step by step to a most unflattering self-knowledge. Not only did the unhappy man begin to realize that his skill was mostly blind guesswork, and that his wisdom left out of account far more than it embraced, but also to his horror he discovered that he was dominated by secret desires and loyalties of a religious type which he had never had the courage to recognize. When Humpty appeared for the fifteenth meeting he was told that the analyst was missing. Later it turned out that the distracted man had suffered a religious conversion, and had fled away into solitude to meditate. Like so many of his profession, he was at bottom a simple soul; and when he found in himself needs that could be satisfied by religion but not by the doctrines of Freud, he could discover nothing better to do than to leap from the frying-pan of one orthodoxy into the fire of another. Within a few weeks he had joined a monastic order, and was studying the psychological principles of St Thomas.

The crippled mind of Humpty seemed now to go from bad to worse. The more clearly he realized the damage that had been inflicted on him in childhood, the more he succumbed to hatred, not of his fellow-men, but of their false righteousness.

In sane periods he told himself that his passion was fantastic; that when the mood was on him he lusted merely to violate and smash, and would harm what was precious no less than what was contemptible; that his obsession was ruining his mind, and making him unfit for his great task; that he must not let himself be dragged down to the level of the unhappy and unseeing beasts who surrounded him.

Paul, watching from day to day the desperate struggle of his protégé, was overawed by the sense of a momentous biological tragedy. For he could not but surmise that, if this lonely and potent being had not been mutilated, he might indeed have founded a new mankind. Humpty had already fallen into several minor scrapes, from which Paul had with difficulty extricated him. The head master now lived in dread of the final catastrophe which would ruin Humpty and incidentally disgrace the school. But the school was, after all, spared the extreme disaster. One morning Paul received a letter in which Humpty declared that, realizing that he was defeated, and that at any moment he might do grievous harm to some innocent person, he had decided to die. It was his last wish that his body should be given to a certain world-famous neurologist for dissection. Inquiry proved that Humpty had indeed ceased to live, though the cause of his death was never determined. Needless to say, though he had always been the black sheep of his family, his parents secured for him a decent Christian burial.

Thus ended one of Nature’s blundering attempts to improve upon her first, experimental, humanity. One other superior and much more fortunate individual was destined almost to succeed in the task that Humpty had merely imagined. Of this other, of the utopian colony which he founded, and of its destruction by a jealous world, I may tell on another occasion.

iii. BACK TO NEPTUNE

MY TASK IS almost completed. My mind is stored with an immense treasure, which I have gathered, bee-like, in your world, and with which I must now return to the great and fair hive whence I came. The other side of my task also is drawing to a close. I have almost finished this my second message to my own remote ancestors, the First Men.

Very soon I shall be free to leave your world of sorrow and vain hope, of horror and of promise unfulfilled. Presently I shall return to an age long after the destruction of your planet, and not long before the more tragic destruction of my own more delectable world. Only with difficulty and danger can the explorer, after close work in the past, revert once more to his own world. With difficulty and reluctance also, I shall now begin to put off your mental pattern from my mind, as one may put off a mask. As the grown man who has been long with children, living in their games, grieving with them in their childish sorrows, is tom with regret when at last he must leave them, and half-persuades himself that their nature and their ways are better than his own, so I now with reluctance leave your world, with its childish, its so easily to be avoided yet utterly inescapable, its farcical and yet most tragic, disaster. But even as, when at last the grown man is once more at grips with the world of men, his childishness falls from him, so, when I earnestly revert in imagination to my own world, my assumed primitiveness falls from me.

It is time to recall myself to myself. I have been dwelling in your little world, not as one of you, but in order that I might bring to the racial mind of the Last Men matter for delighting cognizance; in order, also, that your world may find its crown of glory, not indeed in the way that was hoped, but in being exquisitely savoured, life by life, event by event, in the racial mind of the Last Men.

I recall myself to myself. The great world to which I am native has long ago outgrown the myths, the toys, the bogies of your infant world. There, one lives without the fear of death and pain, though there one dies and suffers. There, one knows no lust to triumph over other men, no fear of being enslaved. There one loves without craving to possess, worships without thought of salvation, contemplates without pride of spirit. There one is free as none in your world is free, yet obedient as none of you is obedient.

I recall myself to myself. The most lovely community of which I am a member, the most excellently fulfilled Spirit of Man, within which my mind is organic, must very soon be destroyed. The madness of the Sun is already hideously at work upon my world. There lies before my contemporaries an age of incalculable horror and disintegration. From that horror we must not escape by means of the racial suicide which alone could save us; for our two supreme acts of piety are not yet accomplished. We have not yet succeeded in impregnating the remote regions of this galaxy with the seed of a new mankind. We have not yet completed our devoted survey of the past. Therefore we may not yet put an end to ourselves. We must be loyal to the past and to the future.

I recall myself to myself. Presently I shall wake in my Arctic and subterranean garden. Once more I shall see with precision and with full colour through my own eyes, not through the obscuring organs of the First Men. I shall recognize the familiar forms of Neptunian leaves and flowers, swaying in the subterranean breeze. I shall feel the large easefulness of my own body. I shall yawn and stretch and rise. I shall swim luxuriously in my pool. I shall enter my apartment and ring for food. Then, before I see any of my colleagues, I shall begin to review my exploration; I shall record it, and critically edit it. For now at last I shall have recovered full Neptunian mentality. I shall see with new insight not only your world but my own self as I was during my long immersion in your world. Probably I shall smile at my recent earth-infected thoughts and feelings. I shall smile when I remember this book, this strange hybrid sprung from the intercourse of a purely Terrestrial mind and a Neptunian mind, earth-infected. I shall know that, even when I most strained the understanding of my poor collaborator, I was not really giving him the full wisdom of the Last Men, but something far less profound, something that was already earth-dimmed, already three-parts Terrestrial even at its source in my own mind.

With a great thankfulness I shall recognize my own complete reversion to lucidity. With a new awe and zest I shall lay myself open once more to the inflooding richness and subtlety of my well-loved world.

After many weeks of labour I shall have completed my report, and then I shall leave my apartment and meet many of my colleagues, to exchange findings with them.

But, since in the Catacombs telepathic intercourse may not occur, we shall soon travel south to live together for a while in a great crystal pylon where we may pursue our collaboration telepathically. And when we have made of our combined findings a single, living, apprehension of your species, we shall broadcast our great treasure telepathically over the whole world; so that all the million million minds of our fellows may be enriched by it, so that when the time comes for the next awakening of the single mind of the race, that great spirit also, which is not other than each of us fully awakened, may avail itself of our findings, for its meditation and ecstasy.

When all this is done I shall call up telepathically the ever dear companion of my holidays, with whom, before my last exploration, I played and slept, where the broken mountain lies spread out into the sea. There once more we shall meet and play, watching the populations of the rock pools, and the risings and settings of the Mad Star. There once more we shall wander over the turfy hillocks and swim, seal-like, in the bay, and make for ourselves nests in the long grass, where we may lie together in the night. There perhaps I shall tell her how, in another world, seemingly in another universe, I myself, striving in the numb, the half-human flesh of Paul, lay with the half-human Katherine. There we shall contemplate the strange beauties of the past and of the dread future. There we shall savour lingeringly the present.

When our holiday is over I shall return with her to her place of work, where they prepare for the spreading of the seed. And when she has shown me how the task is progressing, I shall go wandering about the world for a very long time, absorbing its intricate beauty, watching its many and diverse operations, having intercourse with the great population of my intimate friends, playing my part in the life of my marriage group, visiting the Land of the Young, voyaging in ether-ships among the planets, wandering alone in the wild places of the home planet, idling or meditating in my garden or working among my fruit trees, or watching the most distant universes from some great observatory, or studying with the help of astronomers the slow but fatal progress of the sun’s disease.

It may be that before it is time for me to go once more into the past, there will occur again a supreme awakening of the racial mind. It may be that after the unique day of the awakening I shall for a long time move about the world entranced like my fellows, rapt in the ineffable experiences of the single Spirit of Man, contemplating perhaps at last the supernal entities which it is man’s chief glory to strive to worship. Sooner or later, however, I shall return once more to my work in the past, either to the First Men or to some other primitive species. I shall bring back with me more treasure of living history, and deliver it into the world of the Last Men. And again I shall play, and again I shall participate in the rich life of my world, and again I shall return to the past. And so on for I know not how many times.

But each time, when I leave the present for the past, there will have been a change in my world, a slight deterioration, sometimes perhaps imperceptible. The climate will have grown hotter and more unwholesome. The inescapable rays of the mad sun will have done more harm to eyes and brains. Society will perhaps no longer be perfect, rational conduct no longer invariable, telepathy perhaps already difficult; and very probably the racial mentality will have already become impossible. But also the exploration of the past will be advancing toward completion, though with increasing difficulty; and the dissemination of the seed of life will be at last begun.

The Last Men can look forward without dismay to the inevitable deterioration of all that they cherish most, to the death of their fair community, and to the extinction of the human spirit. We have only one desire, namely that our two tasks may be accomplished; and that happily they may be accomplished before our deterioration is so far advanced as to make us incapable of choosing to put an end to ourselves when at last we are free to do so. For the thought is somewhat repugnant to us that we should slowly sink into barbarism, into the sub-human, into blind and whimpering agony, that the last of Man should be a whine.

This may well happen, but even by such a prospect we are not seriously dismayed. If it does occur, it will doubtless seem intolerable to our degraded spirits. But today, we are fully possessed of ourselves. Even as individuals, even apart from the exaltation of racial mentality, we can accept with resignation, nay with a surprising fervour of appreciation, even the moral downfall of our world. For we have gone far. We have drunk deeply of beauty. And to the spirit that has drunk deeply of the grave beauty of the cosmos, even the ultimate horror is acceptable.

iv. EPILOGUE BY THE TERRESTRIAL AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK

READERS OF MY earlier book, Last and First Men, may remember that it closed with an epilogue which my Neptunian controller claimed to have transmitted to me from a date in Neptunian history many thousands of years after the communication of the body of the book. The present book was obviously originated at a Neptunian date shortly after the transmission of the main part of the earlier book, but very long before its epilogue. Now I have reason to believe that at some date long after the communication of that former epilogue itself, my controller attempted to give me an epilogue to the present volume, but that owing to the serious disintegration of the most delicate brain tracts of the Last Men, and the gradual break-up of their world society, the result has been extremely confused and fragmentary.

I shall now attempt to piece together the random thoughts and passions, and occasional definite statements, which have come into my mind seemingly from my Neptunian controller. By supplementing them with a careful use of my own imagination, I shall try to construct a picture of the state of affairs on Neptune when the disaster was already far advanced.

From the vague flood of intimations that has come through to me I gather that the hope of disseminating a seed of life abroad among the stars, before the disaster should have extinguished man’s powers, was not fulfilled. The dissemination had indeed actually been begun, when it was discovered that the vital seed was all the while being destroyed in the process of scattering. This trouble, and other unexpected difficulties, which occurred seemingly at some date after the communicating of the earlier epilogue, not merely delayed the enterprise, but even led to its abandonment for some thousands of years. Then some new discovery in psychophysics raised a hope of achieving the Dissemination by an entirely new method. A vast new enterprise was therefore set on foot; but was seriously hampered by the increasingly cruel climate, the steady deterioration of mental calibre, the ceaseless national wars and civil confusion. It would seem, though the inference is by no means certain, that at the date of this final and intermittent communication, the Dissemination had already ceased for ever; whether because it had been successfully accomplished or because it was no longer physically possible, or because the will to pursue it had already been broken, I cannot ascertain. Probably the work was now beyond the powers of a degenerate and disorganized world-community.

The other great task which the doomed population had undertaken to complete before its final downfall, the Exploration of the Human Past, seems to have been in a manner finished, though in less detail than was originally planned. Several communications suggest that such workers as remained able and willing to enter into the past were trying to concentrate their failing powers on certain critical points of Man’s career, so as to reconstruct at least these moments in full minuteness. But as the racial mode of mentality had already become impossible, and as the individual explorers had evidently very seriously deteriorated, it seems clear that such data as were still being collected would never be incorporated in the single racial consciousness, in the aesthetic apprehension of the Cosmos by the fully awakened Spirit of Man. In fact the continuation of the work of exploring the past seems to have become as automatic and irrational as the aimless researches of some of our Terrestrial historians.

In the epilogue to the earlier book it was reported that, as the higher and more recent brain-tracts were corroded by the fury of ultra-violet solar radiation, the surviving members of the community suffered a harrowing struggle between their nobler and their baser natures, a struggle which issued inevitably in the defeat of all that was most excellent in them. At the date of the epilogue to the present book, the race seems to have been reduced to a remnant of distraught and almost sub-human beings clustering round the South Pole, which, one may suppose, was the only region of the planet still capable of supporting human existence at all. The life of this remnant must have been completely aimless and abject. It apparently consisted of half-hearted agriculture, occasional hunting expeditions against the wild creatures that had been driven south by the heat, and frequent predatory raids of neighbouring groups to capture one another’s food and women.

The population was evidently obsessed by the terror of death, of starvation, and above all of insanity. The death-rate must have been very high, but there was also a huge birthrate. Conception was no longer controlled. Invalid children seem to have composed a large proportion of the population. Parenthood and sex evidently bulked very largely in the popular mind. There were wild sexual orgies, which apparently had acquired some religious significance; and there was a vast ritual of superstitious taboos, most of which seem to have been intended to purify the soul and prepare it for eternal life. Apparently some divinity, referred to as the God of Man, was expected to destroy the world by fire, but to snatch into eternal bliss those who had kept all the taboos. His Younger Brother, it seems, had already appeared on Neptune, but had been killed by his enemies. This legend should, perhaps, be connected in some way or other with the superior being who, in the epilogue to the previous book is referred to as ‘this younger brother of ours’.

Not every one succumbed to these superstitions. My controller himself rejected them, and retained a pathetic loyalty to the ancient wisdom, some shreds of which he now and then remembered. But I have reason to believe that very often his memory of them was but a verbal formula, without insight.

Clearly, for those who, like my controller, had kept alive in themselves something of the former purpose of the race, there was now no longer any reason to refrain from racial suicide. The two enterprises for which euthanasia had been postponed could no longer be usefully continued. But the unhappy members of what had once been the noblest of all human communities had no longer the courage or the common sense to destroy themselves. Those who accepted the popular superstitions declared that the God had forbidden men to seek death before their time. Those who rejected the doctrine of salvation persuaded themselves that they refrained from suicide because to flee was cowardly.

At this point I will report a verbal fragment of communication which is typical of most that I have received, and seems to bear out many of the foregoing inferences.

‘Vain to live. Yet Life insists. Work insists. Too many thousands of men, of women, of crawling children with eyes festering. Too little food. Blue sun piercing the deep cloud-zone, parching the fields. Child meat in the flesh pots. Eat the mad, who come to grief. The many mad. Mad men with knives. Mad women with smiles, with skull-faces. (And I remember beauty.) Too many labours and fears. Too hot. Hateful proximity of men hot. Love one another? With sweat between! Love best in the water, the cooling water, that makes the body lighter. The pools, the rains, the house-uprooting storms, the everlasting cloud, blinding purple. God will come soon, they say it. To burn the world, to take away his friends. The God-dream. Too good, too cheap. Radiation the one God, all pervading, cruel. To die quickly, to sleep and not wake! But life insists, work insists. Vain work insists. Yet why? The old far days, Godless, beautiful. The glorious world. The fair world of men and women and of the single awareness. Eye of the cosmos. Heart of the cosmos. Cunning hand. Then, we faced all things gaily. Even this corruption, when we foresaw it, we called “a fair end to the brief music that is man”. This! The strings all awry, screaming out of tune, a fair end!’

This passage is typical, though more coherent than most. There are others more striking, but so repugnant to the taste of my contemporaries that I dare not repeat them, passages describing the prevailing brutishness of sexual relations in a population that had already so far degenerated that neither sex could interest the other save in the crudest manner. This impoverishment of sexual life was due to the fact that physical health and beauty had been undermined, that apprehension of the more delicate, aesthetic and spiritual aspects of experience had become almost impossible, that the realization of other individuals as living personalities was very uncommon. Nearly all behaviour was the impulsive behaviour of beasts, though of beasts in whose nature were incorporated many tricks derived from a forgotten humanity.

Some men and women there still were who had not permanently sunk to this brutish level. Several communications make it clear that, although the culture and the actual mental capacity of the Last Men were by now so degenerate, some few, a scattered and dwindling aristocracy, were still capable, at least intermittently, of personal love, and even of perplexed loyalty to certain ideals of conduct. The evidence for this lies in such passages as the following, which with its fleeting recovery of the earlier intelligence, and its bewildered groping after a forgotten ecstasy, affords perhaps the right conclusion to this book.

‘She lies motionless in the shallow water. The waves, fingering, the hot sand, recoil steaming. Her flesh, translucent formerly, now is filmed and grey, blind like her filmed eyes. We have taken of each other very deeply. The heat tricks us sometimes into intolerance each of the other’s unyouthful body, unpliant mind; yet each is the other’s needed air for breathing. We have ranged in our work very far apart, she into the astronomical spaces, I into the pre-historical times. But now we will remain together until the end. There is nothing more for us to do but to remember, to tolerate, to find strength together, to keep the spirit clear so long as may be. The many aeons of man! The many million, million selves; ephemeridae, each to itself, the universe’s one quick point, the crux of all cosmical endeavour. And all defeated! The single, the very seldom achieved, spirit! We two, now so confused, participated once in man’s clearest elucidation. It is forgotten. It leaves only a darkness, deepened by blind recollection of past light. Soon, a greater darkness! Man, a moth sucked into a furnace, vanishes; and then the furnace also, since it is but a spark islanded in the wide, the everlasting darkness. If there is a meaning, it is no human meaning. Yet one thing in all this welter stands apart, unassailable, fair, the blind recollection of past light.’

THE END

Odd John (1935)

A STORY BETWEEN JEST AND EARNEST

This 1935 science fiction novel explores the theme of the Übermensch (superman) in the character of John Wainwright, whose supernormal human mentality inevitably leads to conflict with normal human society and to the destruction of the utopian colony founded by John and other superhumans. Clearly, the novel resonates with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as the influential work of the English writer J. D. Beresford, with an allusion to Beresford’s superhuman child character of Victor Stott in The Hampdenshire Wonder (1911). As the devoted narrator remarks, John does not feel obliged to observe the restricted morality of Homo sapiens. Stapledon’s recurrent vision of cosmic angst — that the universe may be indifferent to intelligence, no matter how spiritually refined — also provides the narrative added depth.

The protagonist is portrayed as extremely intelligent, though stunted in his physical development. Like Stapledon himself, he believes in Communist ideas, but is critical of mainstream Marxism. John is also vain and highly skilful in the arts of seduction. From a human viewpoint, he can be considered amoral or perhaps to be following a morality beyond human understanding. The First Phase concerns John’s parents and his life from birth (c. 1910) to five years of age. At the age of four, he learns to speak and nine months later he learns to count. He claims to learn all of mathematics, and develops an ability to visualise n-dimensional space. In the next phase, ‘Enfant Terrible’, he learns to walk at the age of six and practises acrobatics and fighting with a neighbourhood boy called Stephen.

John Wainwright ultimately feels oppressed, and, together with fellow “Homines Superiores” he locates in mental asylums and other far-flung places, he flees to an island where they can form a colony. Eventually, the activities of the colonists are looked upon by the rest of humanity with suspicion and when the island is invaded, the colonists deliberately destroy it. The theme of misunderstood intellectualism would become a recurring subject in Stapledon’s work.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. JOHN AND THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST PHASE

CHAPTER III. ENFANT TERRIBLE

CHAPTER IV. JOHN AND HIS ELDERS

CHAPTER V. THOUGHT AND ACTION

CHAPTER VI. MANY INVENTIONS

CHAPTER VII. FINANCIAL VENTURES

CHAPTER VIII. SCANDALOUS ADOLESCENCE

CHAPTER IX. METHODS OF A YOUNG ANTHROPOLOGIST

CHAPTER X. THE WORLD’S PLIGHT

CHAPTER XI. STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

CHAPTER XII. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS

CHAPTER XIII. JOHN SEEKS HIS KIND

CHAPTER XIV. ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

CHAPTER XV. JACQUELINE

CHAPTER XVI. ADLAN

CHAPTER XVII. NG-GUNKO AND LO

CHAPTER XVIII. THE SKID’S FIRST VOYAGE

CHAPTER XIX. THE COLONY IS FOUNDED

CHAPTER XX. THE COLONY IN BEING

CHAPTER XXI. THE BEGINNING OF THE END

CHAPTER XXII. THE END

J. D. Beresford (1873-1947) was an English writer, now remembered for his early science fiction and some short stories in the horror story and ghost story genres. His novel, in turn inspired by H. G. Wells, ‘The Hampdenshire Wonder’ was a major influence on Olaf Stapledon.

CHAPTER I. JOHN AND THE AUTHOR

WHEN I TOLD John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed. “My dear man!” he said. “But of course it was inevitable.” The word “man” on John’s lips was often equivalent to “fool.”

“Well,” I protested, “a cat may look at a king.”

He replied, “Yes, but can it really see the king? Can you, puss, really see me?”

This from a queer child to a full-grown man.

John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in a sense intimate with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his followers died.

Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other of the six Great Powers, I shall tell the world all that I can remember.

Something else I know, which will be very difficult to explain. In a confused way I know why he founded his colony. I know too that although he gave his whole energy to this task, he never seriously expected to succeed. He was convinced that sooner or later the world would find him out and destroy his work. “Our chance,” he once said, “is not as much as one in a million.” And then he laughed.

John’s laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp chuckle. It reminded me of that whispered crackling prelude which sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But no thunder followed it, only a moment’s silence; and for his hearers an odd tingling of the scalp.

I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh of John’s contained the key to all that baffles me in his character. Again and again I asked myself why he laughed just then, what precisely was he laughing at, what did his laughter really mean, was that strange noise really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for instance, did the infant John laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when his end came, his last breath spent itself in zestful laughter. Why?

In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the essential John. His laughter, I am convinced, sprang from some aspect of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore, of course, as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep silence, the facts of his unique career will be lost for ever. In spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the hope that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John’s own stature, he may imaginatively see through them to the strange but glorious spirit of John himself.

That others of his kind, or approximately of his kind, are now alive, and that yet others will appear, is at least probable. But as John himself discovered, the great majority of these very rare supernormals, whom John sometimes called “wide-awakes,” are either so delicate physically or so unbalanced mentally that they leave no considerable mark on the world. How pathetically one-sided the supernormal development may be is revealed in Mr. J. D. Beresford’s account of the unhappy Victor Stott. I hope that the following brief record will at least suggest a mind at once more strikingly “superhuman” and more broadly human.

That the reader may look for something more than an intellectual prodigy I will here at the outset try to give an impression of John’s appearance in his twenty-third and last summer.

He was indeed far more like a boy than a man, though in some moods his youthful face would assume a curiously experienced and even patriarchal expression. Slender, long limbed, and with that unfinished coltish look characteristic of puberty, he had also a curiously finished grace all his own. Indeed to those who had come to know him he seemed a creature of ever-novel beauty. But strangers were often revolted by his uncouth proportions. They called him spiderish. His body, they complained, was so insignificant, his legs and arms so long and lithe, his head all eye and brow.

Now that I have set down these characters I cannot conceive how they might make for beauty. But in John they did, at least for those of us who could look at him without preconceptions derived from Greek gods, or film stars. With characteristic lack of false modesty, John once said to me, “My looks are a rough test of people. If they don’t begin to see me beautiful when they have had a chance to learn, I know they’re dead inside, and dangerous.”

But let me complete the description. Like his fellow-colonists, John mostly went naked. His maleness, thus revealed, was immature in spite of his twenty-three years. His skin, burnt by the Polynesian sun, was of a grey, almost a green brown, warming to a ruddier tint in the cheeks. His hands were extremely large and sinewy. Somehow they seemed more mature than the rest of his body. “Spiderish” seemed appropriate in this connexion also. His head was certainly large but not out of proportion to his long limbs. Evidently the unique development of his brain depended more on manifold convolutions than on sheer bulk. All the same his was a much larger head than it looked, for its visible bulk was scarcely at all occupied by the hair, which was but a close skull-cap, a mere superficies of Negroid but almost white wool. His nose was small but broad, rather Mongolian perhaps. His lips, large but definite, were always active. They expressed a kind of running commentary on his thoughts and feelings. Yet many a time I have seen those lips harden into granitic stubbornness. John’s eyes were indeed, according to ordinary standards, much too big for his face, which acquired thus a strangely cat-like or falcon-like expression. This was emphasized by the low and level eyebrows, but often completely abolished by a thoroughly boyish and even mischievous smile. The whites of John’s eyes were almost invisible. The pupils were immense. The oddly green irises were as a rule mere filaments. But in tropical sunshine the pupils narrowed to mere pin-pricks. Altogether, his eyes were the most obviously “queer” part of him. His glance, however, had none of that weirdly compelling power recorded in the case of Victor Stott. Or rather, to feel their magic, one needed to have already learnt something of the formidable spirit that used them.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST PHASE

JOHN’S FATHER, THOMAS Wainwright, had reason to believe that Spaniards and Moroccans had long ago contributed to his making. There was indeed something of the Latin, even perhaps of the Arab, in his nature. Every one admitted that he had a certain brilliance; but he was odd, and was generally regarded as a failure. A medical practice in a North-country suburb gave little scope for his powers, and many opportunities of rubbing people up the wrong way. Several remarkable cures stood to his credit; but he had no bedside manner, and his patients never accorded him the trust which is so necessary for a doctor’s success.

His wife was no less a mongrel than her husband, but one of a very different kind. She was of Swedish extraction. Finns and Lapps were also among her ancestors. Scandinavian in appearance, she was a great sluggish blonde, who even as a matron dazzled the young male eye. It was originally through her attraction that I became the youthful friend of her husband, and later the slave of her more than brilliant son. Some said she was “just a magnificent female animal,” and so dull as to be subnormal. Certainly conversation with her was sometimes almost as one-sided as conversation with a cow. Yet she was no fool. Her house was always in good order, though she seemed to spend no thought upon it. With the same absent-minded skill she managed her rather difficult husband. He called her “Pax.” “So peaceful,” he would explain. Curiously her children also adopted this name for her. Their father they called invariably “Doc.” The two elder, girl and boy, affected to smile at their mother’s ignorance of the world; but they counted on her advice. John, the youngest by four years, once said something which suggested that we had all misjudged her. Some one had remarked on her extraordinary dumbness. Out flashed John’s disconcerting laugh, and then, “No one notices the things that interest Pax, and so she just doesn’t talk.”

John’s birth had put the great maternal animal to a severe strain. She carried her burden for eleven months, till the doctors decided that at all costs she must be relieved. Yet when the baby was at last brought to light, it had the grotesque appearance of a seven-months fetus. Only with great difficulty was it kept alive in an incubator. Not till a year after the forced birth was this artificial womb deemed no longer necessary.

I saw John frequently during his first year, for between me and the father, though he was many years my senior, there had by now grown up a curious intimacy based on common intellectual interests, and perhaps partly on a common admiration for Pax.

I can remember my shock of disgust when I first saw the thing they had called John. It seemed impossible that such an inert and pulpy bit of flesh could ever develop into a human being. It was like some obscene fruit, more vegetable than animal, save for an occasional incongruous spasm of activity.

When John was a year old, however, he looked almost like a normal new-born infant, save that his eyes were shut. At eighteen months he opened them; and it was as though a sleeping city had suddenly leapt into life. Formidable eyes they were for a baby, eyes seen under a magnifying glass, each great pupil like the mouth of a cave, the iris a mere rim, an edging of bright emerald. Strange how two black holes can gleam with life! It was shortly after his eyes had opened that Pax began to call her strange son “Odd John.” She gave the words a particular and subtle intonation which, though it scarcely varied, seemed to express sometimes merely affectionate apology for the creature’s oddity, but sometimes defiance, and sometimes triumph, and occasionally awe. The adjective stuck to John throughout his life.

Henceforth John was definitely a person and a very wide-awake person, too. Week by week he became more and more active and more and more interested. He was for ever busy with eyes and ears and limbs.

During the next two years John’s body developed precariously, but without disaster. There were always difficulties over feeding, but when he had reached the age of three he was a tolerably healthy child, though odd, and in appearance extremely backward. This backwardness distressed Thomas, Pax, however, insisted that most babies grew too fast. “They don’t give their minds a chance to knit themselves properly,” she declared. The unhappy father shook his head.

When John was in his fifth year I used to see him nearly every morning as I passed the Wainwrights’ house on my way to the railway station. He would be in his pram in the garden rioting with limbs and voice. The din, I thought, had an odd quality. It differed indescribably from the vocalization of any ordinary baby, as the call of one kind of monkey differs from that of another species. It was a rich and subtle shindy, full of quaint modulations and variations. One could scarcely believe that this was a backward child of four. Both behaviour and appearance suggested an extremely bright six-months infant. He was too wide awake to be backward, too backward to be four. It was not only that those prodigious eyes were so alert and penetrating. Even his clumsy efforts to manipulate his toys seemed purposeful beyond his years. Though he could not manage his fingers at all well, his mind seemed to be already setting them very definite and intelligent tasks. Their failure distressed him.

John was certainly intelligent. We were all now agreed on that point. Yet he showed no sign of crawling, and no sign of talking. Then suddenly, long before he had attempted to move about in his world, he became articulate. On a certain Tuesday he was merely babbling as usual. On Wednesday he was exceptionally quiet, and seemed for the first time to understand something of his mother’s baby-talk. On Thursday morning he startled the family by remarking very slowly but very correctly, “I — want — milk.” That afternoon he said to a visitor who no longer interested him, “Go — away. I — do — not — like — you — much.”

These linguistic achievements were obviously of quite a different type from the first remarks of ordinary children.

Friday and Saturday John spent in careful conversation with his delighted relatives. By the following Tuesday, a week after his first attempt, he was a better linguist than his seven-year-old brother, and speech had already begun to lose its novelty for him. It had ceased to be a new art, and had become merely a useful means of communication, to be extended and refined only as new spheres of experience came within his ken and demanded expression.

Now that John could talk, his parents learned one or two surprising facts about him. For instance, he could remember his birth. And immediately after that painful crisis, when he had been severed from his mother, he actually had to learn to breathe. Before any breathing reflex awoke, he had been kept alive by artificial respiration, and from this experience he had discovered how to control his lungs. With a prolonged and desperate effort of will he had, so to speak, cranked the engine, until at last it “fired” and acted spontaneously. His heart also, it appeared, was largely under voluntary control. Certain early “cardiac troubles,” very alarming to his parents, had in fact been voluntary interferences of a too daring nature. His emotional reflexes also were far more under control than in the rest of us. Thus if, in some anger-provoking situation, he did not wish to feel angry, he could easily inhibit the anger reflexes. And if anger seemed desirable he could produce it. He was indeed “Odd John.”

About nine months after John had learnt to speak, some one gave him a child’s abacus. For the rest of that day there was no talking, no hilarity; and meals were dismissed with impatience. John had suddenly discovered the intricate delights of number. Hour after hour he performed all manner of operations on the new toy. Then suddenly he flung it away and lay back staring at the ceiling.

His mother thought he was tired. She spoke to him. He took no notice. She gently shook his arm. No response. “John!” she cried in some alarm, and shook more violently. “Shut up, Pax,” he said, “I’m busy with numbers.”

Then, after a pause, “Pax, what do you call the numbers after twelve?” She counted up to twenty, then up to thirty. “You’re as stupid as that toy, Pax.” When she asked why, he found he had not words to explain himself; but after he had indicated various operations on the abacus, and she had told him the names of them, he said slowly and triumphantly, “You’re stupid, Pax, dear, because you (and the toy there) ‘count’ in tens and not in twelves. And that’s stupid because twelves have ‘fourths’ and ‘threeths’, I mean ‘thirds’, and tens have not.” When she explained that all men counted in tens because when counting began, they used their five fingers, he looked fixedly at her, then laughed his crackling, crowing laugh. Presently he said, “Then all men are stupid.”

This, I think, was John’s first realization of the stupidity of Homo sapiens, but not the last.

Thomas was jubilant over John’s mathematical shrewdness, and wanted to report his case to the British Psychological Society. But Pax showed an unexpected determination to “keep it all dark for the present.” “He shall not be experimented on,” she insisted. “They’d probably hurt him. And anyhow they’d make a silly fuss.” Thomas and I laughed at her fears, but she won the battle.

John was now nearly five, but still in appearance a mere baby. He could not walk. He could not, or would not, crawl. His legs were still those of an infant. Moreover, his walking was probably seriously delayed by mathematics, for during the next few months he could not be persuaded to give his attention to anything but numbers and the properties of space. He would lie in his pram in the garden by the hour doing “mental arithmetic” and “mental geometry,” never moving a muscle, never making a sound. This was most unhealthy for a growing child, and he began to ail. Yet nothing would induce him to live a more normal and active life.

Visitors often refused to believe that he was mentally active out there for all those hours. He looked pale and “absent.” They privately thought he was in a state of coma, and developing as an imbecile. But occasionally he would volunteer a few words which would confound them.

John’s attack upon geometry began with an interest in his brother’s box of bricks and in a diaper wallpaper. Then came a phase of cutting up cheese and soap into slabs, cubes, cones, and even into spheres and ovoids. At first John was extremely clumsy with a knife, cutting his fingers and greatly distressing his mother. But in a few days he had become amazingly dextrous. As usual, though he was backward in taking up a new activity, once he had set his mind to it, his progress was fantastically rapid. His next stage was to make use of his sister’s school-set of geometrical instruments. For a week he was enraptured, covering innumerable sheets.

Then suddenly he refused to take any further interest in visual geometry. He preferred to lie back and meditate. One morning he was troubled by some question which he could not formulate. Pax could make nothing of his efforts, but later his father helped him to extend his vocabulary enough to ask, “Why are there only three dimensions? When I grow up shall I find more?”

Some weeks later came a much more startling question. “If you went in a straight line, on and on and on, how far would you have to go to get right back here?”

We laughed, and Pax exclaimed, “Odd John!” This was early in 1915. Then Thomas remembered some talk about a “theory of relativity” that was upsetting all the old ideas of geometry. In time he became so impressed by this odd question of John’s, and others like it, that he insisted on bringing a mathematician from the university to talk to the child.

Pax protested, but not even she guessed that the result would be disastrous.

The visitor was at first patronizing, then enthusiastic, then bewildered; then, with obvious relief, patronizing again; then badly flustered. When Pax tactfully persuaded him to go (for the child’s sake, of course), he asked if he might come again, with a colleague.

A few days later the two of them turned up and remained in conference with the baby for hours. Thomas was unfortunately going the round of his patients. Pax sat beside John’s high chair, silently knitting, and occasionally trying to help her child to express himself. But the conversation was far beyond her depth. During a pause for a cup of tea, one of the visitors said, “It’s the child’s imaginative power that is so amazing. He knows none of the jargon and none of the history, but he has seen it all already for himself. It’s incredible. He seems to visualize what can’t be visualized.”

Later in the afternoon, so Pax reported, the visitors began to grow rather agitated, and even angry; and John’s irritatingly quiet laugh seemed to make matters worse. When at last she insisted on putting a stop to the discussion, as it was John’s bedtime, she noticed that both the guests were definitely “out of control.” “There was a wild look about them both,” she said, “and when I shooed them out of the garden they were still wrangling; and they never said good-bye.”

But it was a shock to learn, a few days later, that two mathematicians on the university staff had been found sitting under a street lamp together at 2 a.m. drawing diagrams on the pavement and disputing about “the curvature of space.”

Thomas regarded his youngest child simply as an exceptionally striking case of the “infant prodigy.” His favourite comment was, “Of course, it will all fizzle out when he gets older.” But Pax would say, “I wonder.”

John worried mathematics for another month, then suddenly put it all behind him. When his father asked him why he had given it up, he said, “There’s not much in number really. Of course, it’s marvellously pretty, but when you’ve done it all — well, that’s that. I’ve finished number. I know all there is in that game. I want another. You can’t suck the same piece of sugar for ever.”

During the next twelve months John gave his parents no further surprises. It is true he learned to read and write, and took no more than a week to outstrip his brother and sister. But after his mathematical triumphs this was only a modest achievement. The surprising thing was that the will to read should have developed so late. Pax often read aloud to him out of books belonging to the elder children, and apparently he did not see why she should be relieved of this duty.

But there came a time when Anne, his sister, was ill, and his mother was too occupied to read to him. One day he clamoured for her to start a new book, but she would not. “Well, show me how to read before you go,” he demanded. She smiled, and said, “It’s a long job. When Anne’s better I’ll show you.”

In a few days she began the task, in the orthodox manner. But John had no patience with the orthodox manner. He invented a method of his own. He made Pax read aloud to him and pass her finger along the line as she read, so that he could follow, word by word. Pax could not help laughing at the barbarousness of this method, but with John it worked. He simply remembered the “look” of every “noise” that she made, for his power of retention seemed to be infallible. Presently, without stopping her, he began analysing out the sounds of the different letters, and was soon cursing the illogicality of English spelling. By the end of the lesson John could read, though of course his vocabulary was limited. During the following week he devoured all the children’s books in the house, and even a few “grown-up” books. These, of course, meant almost nothing to him, even though the words were mostly familiar. He soon gave them up in disgust. One day he picked up his sister’s school geometry, but tossed it aside in five minutes with the remark, “Baby book!”

Henceforth John was able to read anything that interested him; but he showed no sign of becoming a book-worm. Reading was an occupation fit only for times of inaction, when his overtaxed hands demanded repose. For he had now entered a phase of almost passionate manual constructiveness, and was making all manner of ingenious models out of cardboard, wire, wood, plasticine, and any other material that came to hand. Drawing, also, occupied, much of his time.

CHAPTER III. ENFANT TERRIBLE

AT LAST, AT the age of six, John turned his attention to locomotion. In this art he had hitherto been even more backward than the appearance of his body seemed to warrant. Intellectual and constructive interests had led to the neglect of all else.

But now at last he discovered the need of independent travel, and also the fascination of conquering the new art. As usual, his method of learning was original and his progress rapid. He never crawled. He began by standing upright with his hands on a chair, balancing alternately on each foot. An hour of this exhausted him, and for the first time in his life he seemed utterly disheartened. He who had treated mathematicians as dull-witted children now conceived a new and wistful respect for his ten-year-old brother, the most active member of the family. For a week he persistently and reverently watched Tommy walking, running, “ragging” with his sister. Every movement was noted by the anxious John. He also assiduously practised balancing, and even took a few steps, holding his mother’s hand.

By the end of the week, however, he had a sort of nervous breakdown, and for days afterwards he never set foot to ground. With an evident sense of defeat, he reverted to reading, even to mathematics.

When he was sufficiently recovered to take the floor again, he walked unaided right across the room, and burst into hysterical tears of joy — a most un-John-like proceeding. The art was now conquered. It was only necessary to strengthen his muscles by exercise.

But John was not content with mere walking. He had conceived a new aim in life; and with characteristic resolution he set himself to achieve it.

At first he was greatly hampered by his undeveloped body. His legs were still almost fetal, so short and curved they were. But under the influence of constant use, and (seemingly) of his indomitable will, they soon began to grow straight and long and strong. At seven he could run like a rabbit and climb like a cat. In general build he now looked about four; but something wiry and muscular about him suggested an urchin of eight or nine. And though his face was infantile in shape, its expression was sometimes almost that of a man of forty. But the huge eyes and close white wool gave him an ageless, almost an inhuman look.

He had now achieved a very striking control of his muscles. There was no more learning of skilled movements. His limbs, nay the individual muscles themselves, did precisely as he willed. This was shown unmistakably when, in the second month after his first attempt to walk, he learned to swim. He stood in the water for a while watching his sister’s well-practised strokes, then lifted his feet from the bottom and did likewise.

For many months John’s whole energy was given to emulating the other children in various kinds of physical prowess; and in imposing his will upon them. They were at first delighted with his efforts. All except Tommy, who already realized that he was being outclassed by his kid brother. The older children of the street were more generous, because they were at first less affected by John’s successes. But increasingly John put them all in the shade.

It was of course John, looking no more than a rather lanky four-year-old, who, when a precious ball had lodged in one of the roof-gutters, climbed a drain-pipe, crawled along the gutter, threw down the ball; and then for sheer joy clambered up a channel between two slopes of tiles, and sat astraddle on the crest of the roof. Pax was in town, shopping. The neighbours were of course terrified for the child’s life. Then John, foreseeing amusement, simulated panic and inability to move. Apparently he had quite lost his head. He clung trembling to the tiles. He whimpered abjectly. Tears trickled down his cheeks. A local building contractor was hurriedly called up on the phone. He sent men and ladders. When the rescuer appeared on the roof, John “pulled snooks” at him, and scuttled for his drain-pipe, down which he descended like a monkey, before the eyes of an amazed and outraged crowd.

When Thomas learned of this escapade, he was both horrified and delighted. “The prodigy,” he said, “has advanced from mathematics to acrobatics.” But Pax said only, “I do wish he wouldn’t draw attention to himself.”

John’s devouring passion was now personal prowess and dominance. The unfortunate Tommy, formerly a masterful little devil, was eclipsed and sick at heart. But his sister Anne adored the brilliant John, and was his slave. Hers was an arduous life. I can sympathize with her very keenly, for at a much later stage I was to occupy her post.

John was now either the hero or the loathed enemy of every child in the neighbourhood. At first he had no intuition of the effect his acts would have on others, and was regarded by most as a “beastly cocky little freak.” The trouble was simply that he always knew when others did not, and nearly always could when others could not. Strangely he showed no sign of arrogance; but also he made no effort to assume false modesty.

One example, which marked the turning-point in his policy towards his fellows, will show his initial weakness in this respect, and his incredible suppleness of mind.

The big schoolboy neighbour, Stephen, was in the next garden struggling with a dismembered and rather complicated lawn-mower. John climbed the fence, and watched for a few minutes in silence. Presently he laughed. Stephen took no notice. Then John bent down, snatched a cog-wheel from the lad’s hands, put it in place, assembled the other parts, turned a nut here and a grub-screw there, and the job was finished. Stephen meanwhile stood in sheepish confusion. John moved toward the fence saying, “Sorry you’re no good at that sort of thing, but I’ll always help when I’m free.” To his immense surprise, the other flew at him, knocked him down twice, then pitched him over the fence. John, seated on the grass rubbing various parts of his body, must surely have felt at least a spasm of anger, but curiosity triumphed over rage, and he inquired almost amiably, “Why did you want to do that?” But Stephen left the garden without answering.

John sat meditating. Then he heard his father’s voice indoors, and rushed to find him. “Hi! Doc!” he cried, “if there was a patient you couldn’t cure, and one day some one else came and cured him, what would you do?” Thomas, busy with other matters, replied carelessly, “Dunno! Probably knock him down for interfering.” John gasped, “Now just why? Surely that would be very stupid.” His father, still preoccupied, answered, “I suppose so, but one isn’t always sensible. It depends how the other fellow behaved. If he made me feel a fool, I’m sure I’d want to knock him down.” John gazed at his father for some time, then said, “I see!”

“Doc!” he suddenly began again, “I must get strong, as strong as Stephen. If I read all those books” (glancing at the medical tomes), “shall I learn how to get frightfully strong?” The father laughed. “I’m afraid not,” he said.

Two ambitions now dominated John’s behaviour for six months, namely to become an invincible fighter, and to understand his fellow human beings.

The latter was for John the easier task. He set about studying our conduct and our motives, partly by questioning us, partly by observation. He soon discovered two important facts, first that we were often surprisingly ignorant of our own motives, and second that in many respects he differed from the rest of us. In later years he himself told me that this was the time when he first began to realize his uniqueness.

Need I say that within a fortnight, John was apparently a changed character? He had assumed with perfect accuracy that veneer of modesty and generosity which is so characteristic of the English.

In spite of his youth and his even more youthful appearance John now became the unwilling and unassuming leader in many an escapade. The cry was always, “John will know what to do,” or “Fetch that little devil John, he’s a marvel at this kind of job.” In the desultory warfare which was carried on with the children of the Council School (they passed the end of the street four times a day), it was John who planned ambushes; and John who could turn defeat into victory by the miraculous fury of an unexpected onslaught. He was indeed an infant Jove, equipped with thunder-bolts instead of fists.

These battles were partly a repercussion of a greater war in Europe, but also, I believe, they were deliberately fostered by John for his own ends. They gave him opportunities both for physical prowess and for a kind of unacknowledged leadership.

No wonder the children of the neighbourhood told one another, “John’s a great little sport now,” while their mothers, impressed more by his manners than his military genius, said to one another, “John’s a dear these days. He’s lost all his horrid freakishness and conceit.”

Even Stephen was praiseful. He told his mother, “That kid’s all right really. The hiding did him good. He has apologized about the mower, and hoped he hadn’t jiggered it up.”

But fate had a surprise in store for Stephen.

In spite of his father’s discouragement, John had been spending odd moments among the medical and physiological books. The anatomical drawings interested him greatly, and to understand them properly, he had to read. His vocabulary was of course very inadequate, so he proceeded in the manner of Victor Stott, and read through from cover to cover, first a large English dictionary, then a dictionary of physiological terms. Very soon he became so fluent that he had only to run his eye rapidly down the middle of a printed page to be able to understand it and retain it indefinitely.

But John was not content with theory. One day, to Pax’s horror, he was found cutting up a dead rat on the dining-room floor, having thoughtfully spread a newspaper to protect the carpet. Henceforth his anatomical studies, both practical and theoretical, were supervised by Doc. For a few months John was enthralled. He showed great skill in dissection and microscopy. He catechized his father at every opportunity, and often exposed the confusion of his answers; till at last Pax, remembering the mathematicians, insisted that the tired doctor must have respite. Henceforth John studied unaided.

Then suddenly he dropped biology as he had dropped mathematics. Pax asked, “Have you finished with ‘life’ as you finished with ‘number?’ ” “No,” replied John, “but life doesn’t hang together like number. It won’t make a pattern. There’s something wrong with all those books. Of course, I often see they’re stupid, but there must be something deeper wrong too, which I can’t see.”

About this time, by the way, John was actually sent to school, but his career lasted only three weeks. “His influence is too disturbing,” said the head mistress, “and he is quite unteachable. I fear the child, though apt in some limited directions, is really subnormal, and needs special treatment.” Henceforth, to satisfy the law, Pax herself pretended to teach him. To please her, he glanced at the school books, and could repeat them at will. As for understanding them, those that interested him he understood as well as the authors; those that bored him he ignored. Over these he could show the stupidity of a moron.

When he had finished with biology, John gave up all intellectual pursuits and concentrated on his body. That autumn he read nothing but adventure stories and several works on jiu-jitsu. Much of his time he spent in practising this art, and in gymnastic exercises of his own invention. Also he dieted himself extremely carefully upon principles of his own. John’s digestive organs had been his one weak spot. They seemed to remain infantile longer even than the rest of his body. Up to his sixth year they were unable to cope with anything but specially prepared milk, and fruit juice. The food-shortage caused by the war had added to the difficulty of nourishing John, and he was always liable to minor digestive troubles. But now he took matters into his own hands, and worked out an intricate but very scanty diet, consisting of fruit, cheese, malted milk, and whole-meal bread, carefully spaced with rest and exercise. We laughed at him; all but Pax, who saw to it that his demands should be fulfilled.

Whether through diet, or gymnastics, or sheer strength of will, he certainly became exceptionally strong for his weight and age. One by one the boys of the neighbourhood found themselves drawn into a quarrel with John. One by one they were defeated. Of course it was not strength but agility and cunning that made him fit to cope with opponents much bigger than himself. “If that kid once gets hold of you the way he wants, you’re done,” it used to be said, “and you can’t hit him, he’s too quick.”

The strange thing was that in every quarrel it seemed to the public that not John but the other was the aggressor.

The climax was the case of Stephen, now captain of his school’s First Fifteen, and a thoroughly good friend to John.

One day when I was talking to Thomas in his study we heard an unusual scuffling in the garden. Looking out, we saw Stephen rushing vainly at the elusive John; who, as he leapt aside, landed his baby fist time after time with dire effect on Stephen’s face. It was a face almost unrecognizable with rage and perplexity, shockingly unlike the kindly Stephen. Both combatants were plastered with blood, apparently from Stephen’s nose.

John too was a changed being. His lips were drawn back in an inhuman blend of snarl and smile. One eye was half closed from Stephen’s only successful blow, the other cavernous like the eye of a mask. For when John was enraged, the iris drew almost entirely out of sight.

The conflict was so unprecedented and so fantastic that for some moments Thomas and I were paralysed. At last Stephen managed to seize the diabolic child; or was allowed to seize him. We dashed downstairs to the rescue. But when we reached the garden, Stephen was lying on his stomach writhing and gasping, with his arms pinned behind him in the grip of John’s tarantula hands.

The appearance of John at that moment gave me a startling impression of something fiendish. Crouched and clutching, he seemed indeed a spider preparing to suck the life out of the tortured boy beneath him. The sight, I remember, actually made me feel sick.

We stood bewildered by this unexpected turn of events. John looked around, and his eye met mine. Never have I seen so arrogant, so hideous an expression of the lust of power as on that childish face.

For some seconds we gazed at one another. Evidently my look expressed the horror that I felt, for his mood rapidly changed. Rage visibly faded out and gave place first to curiosity then to abstraction. Suddenly John laughed that enigmatic laugh of his. There was no ring of triumph in it, rather a note of self-mockery, and perhaps of awe.

He released his victim, rose and said, “Get up, Stephen, old man. I’m sorry I made you lose your hair.”

But Stephen had fainted.

We never discovered what it was all about. When we questioned John, he said, “It’s all over. Let’s forget about it. Poor old Stephen! But no, I won’t forget.”

When we questioned Stephen a few days later, he said, “I can’t bear to think of it. It was my fault, really. I see that now. Somehow I went mad, when he was intending to be specially decent, too. But to be licked by a kid like that! But he’s not a kid, he’s lightning.”

Now I do not pretend to be able to understand John, but I cannot help having one or two theories about him. In the present case my theory is this. He was at this time plainly going through a phase of concentrated self-assertion. I do not believe, however, that he had been nursing a spirit of revenge ever since the affair of the mower. I believe he had determined in cold blood to try his strength, or rather his skill, against the most formidable of his acquaintances; and that with this end in view he had deliberately and subtly goaded the wretched Stephen into fury. John’s own rage, I suspect, was entirely artificial. He could fight better in a sort of cold fury, so he produced one. As I see it, the great test had to be no friendly bout, but a real wild-beast, desperate encounter. Well, John got what he wanted. And having got it, he saw, in a flash and once for all, right through it and beyond it. So at least I believe.

CHAPTER IV. JOHN AND HIS ELDERS

THOUGH THE FIGHT with Stephen was, I believe, one of the chief landmarks in John’s life, outwardly things went on much as before; save that he gave up fighting, and spent a good deal more time by himself.

Between him and Stephen, friendship was restored, but it was henceforth an uncomfortable friendship. Each seemed anxious to be amicable, but neither felt at ease with the other. Stephen’s nerve, I think, had been seriously shaken. It was not that he feared another licking, but that his self-respect had suffered. I took an opportunity to suggest that his defeat had been no disgrace, since John was clearly no ordinary child. Stephen jumped at this consolation. With a hysterical jerk in his voice he said, “I felt — I can’t say what I felt — like a dog biting its master and being punished. I felt — sort of guilty, wicked.”

John, I think, was now beginning to realize more clearly the gulf that separated him from the rest of us. At the same time, he was probably feeling a keen need for companionship, but companionship of a calibre beyond that of normal human beings. He continued to play with his old companions, and was indeed still the moving spirit in most of their activities; but always he played with a certain aloofness, as it were with his tongue in his cheek. Though in appearance he was by far the smallest and most infantile of the whole gang, he reminded me sometimes of a little old man with snowy hair condescending to play with young gorillas. Often he would break away in the middle of some wild game and drift into the garden to lie dreaming on the lawn. Or he would hang around his mother and discuss life with her, while she did her house-work, tidied the garden, or (a common occupation with Pax) just waited for the next thing to happen.

In some ways John with his mother suggested a human foundling with a wolf foster-mother; or, better, a cow foster-mother. He obviously gave her complete trust and affection, and even a deep though perplexed reverence; but he was troubled when she could not follow his thought or understand his innumerable questions about the universe.

The foster-mother image is not perfect. In one respect, indeed, it is entirely false. For though intellectually Pax was by far his inferior, there was evidently another field in which she was at this time his equal, perhaps even his superior. Both mother and son had a peculiar knack of appreciating experience, a peculiar relish which was at bottom, I believe, simply a very special and subtle sense of humour. Often have I seen a covert glance of understanding and amusement pass between them when the rest of us found nothing to tickle us. I guessed that this veiled merriment was in some way connected with John’s awakening interest in persons and his rapidly developing insight into his own motives. But what it was in our behaviour that these two found so piquant, I could never discover.

With his father John’s relation was very different. He made good use of the doctor’s active mind, but between them there was no spontaneous sympathy, and little community of taste save intellectual interest. I have often seen on John’s face while he was listening to his father a fleeting contortion of ridicule, even disgust. This happened especially at times when Thomas believed himself to be giving the boy some profound comment on human nature or the universe. Needless to say it was not only Thomas, but myself also and many another that roused in John this ridicule or revulsion. But Thomas was the chief offender, perhaps because he was the most brilliant, and the most impressive example of the mental limitations of his species. I suspect that John often deliberately incited his father to betray himself in this manner. It was as though the boy had said to himself, “I have somehow to understand these fantastic beings who occupy the planet. Here is a fine specimen. I must experiment on him.”

At this point I had better say that I myself was becoming increasingly intrigued by the fantastic being, John. I was also unwittingly coming under his influence. Looking back on this period, I can see that he had already marked me down for future use, and was undertaking the first steps of my capture. His chief method was the cool assumption that though I was a middle-aged man, I was his slave; that however much I might laugh at him and scold him, I secretly recognized him as a superior being, and was at heart his faithful hound. For the present I might amuse myself playing at an independent life (I was at this time a rather half-hearted free-lance journalist), but sooner or later I must come to heel.

When John was nearly eight and a half in actual years, he was as a rule taken for a very peculiar child of five or six. He still played childish games, and was accepted by other children as a child, though a bit of a freak. Yet he could take part in any adult conversation. Of course, he was always either far too brilliant or far too ignorant of life to play his part in anything like a normal manner; but he was never simply inferior. Even his most naïve remarks were apt to have a startling significance.

But John’s naïvety was rapidly disappearing. He was now reading an immense amount at an incredible rate. No book, on any subject which did not lie outside his experience, took him more than a couple of hours to master, however tough its matter. Most he could assimilate thoroughly in a quarter of an hour. But the majority of books he glanced at only for a few moments, then flung aside as worthless.

Now and then, in the course of his reading, he would demand to be taken (by his father or mother or myself) to watch some process of manufacture, or to go down a mine, or see over a ship, or visit some place of historic interest, or to observe experiments in some laboratory. Great efforts were made to fulfil these demands, but in many cases we had not the necessary influence. Many projected trips, moreover, were prevented by Pax’s dread of unnecessary publicity for the boy. Whenever we did undertake an expedition, we had to pretend to the authorities that John’s presence was accidental, and his interest childish and unintelligent.

John was by no means dependent on his elders for seeing the world. He had developed a habit of entering into conversation with all kinds of persons, “to find out what they were doing and what they thought about things.” Any one who was tactfully accosted in street or train or country road by this small boy with huge eyes, hair like lamb’s wool, and adult speech was likely to find himself led on to say much more than he intended. By such novel research John learned, I am convinced, more about human nature and our modern social problems in a month or two than most of us learn in a lifetime.

I was privileged to witness one of these interviews. On this occasion the subject was the proprietor of a big general store in the neighbouring industrial city. Mr. Magnate (it is safer not to reveal his name) was to be accosted while he was travelling to business by the 9:30 train. John consented to my presence, but only on condition that I should pretend to be a stranger.

We let the quarry pass through the turnstile and settle himself in his first-class compartment. Then we went to the booking office, where I rather self-consciously demanded “a first single and a half.” Independently we strayed into Mr. Magnate’s carriage. When I arrived, John was already settled in the corner opposite to the great man, who occasionally glanced from his paper at the queer child with a cliff for brow and caves for eyes. Soon after I had taken my post, in the corner diagonally opposite to John, two other business men entered, and settled themselves to read their papers.

John was apparently deep in Comic Cuts, or some such periodical. Though this had been bought merely to serve as stage property, I believe he was quite capable of enjoying it; for at this time, in spite of his wonderful gifts, he was still at heart “the little vulgar boy”. In the conversation which followed he was obviously to some extent playing up to the business man’s idea of a precocious yet naïve child. But also he was a naïve child, backward as well as diabolically intelligent. I myself, though I knew him well, could not decide how much of his talk on this occasion was sincere, and how much mere acting.

When the train had started, John began to watch his prey so intently that Mr. Magnate took cover behind a wall of newspaper. Presently John’s curiously precise treble gathered all eyes upon him. “Mr. Magnate,” he said, “may I talk to you?” The newspaper was lowered, and its owner endeavoured to look neither awkward nor condescending.

“Certainly, boy, go ahead. What’s your name?”

“Oh, my name’s John. I’m a queer child, but that doesn’t matter. It’s you we’re going to talk about.”

We all laughed. Mr. Magnate shifted in his seat, but continued to look his part.

“Well,” he said, “you certainly are a queer child.” He glanced at his adult fellow travellers for confirmation. We duly smiled.

“Yes,” replied John, “but you see from my point of view you are a queer man.” Mr. Magnate hung for a moment between amusement and annoyance; but since we had all laughed, except John, he chose to be tickled and benevolent.

“Surely,” he said, “there’s nothing remarkable about me. I’m just a business man. Why do you think I’m queer?”

“Well,” said John, “I’m thought queer because I have more brains than most children. Some say I have more brains than I ought to have. You’re queer because you have more money than most people; and (some say) more than you ought to have.”

Once more we laughed, rather anxiously.

John continued: “I haven’t found out yet what to do with my brains, and I’m wondering if you have found out what to do with your money.”

“My dear boy, you may not believe me, but the fact is I have no real choice. Needs of all sorts keep cropping up, and I have to fork out.”

“I see,” said John; “but then you can’t fork out for all the possible needs. You must have some sort of big plan or aim to help you to choose.”

“Well now, how shall I put it? I’m James Magnate, with a wife and family and a rather complicated business and a whole lot of obligations rising out of all that. All the money I control, or nearly all, goes in keeping all those balls rolling, so to speak.”

“I see,” said John again. “ ’My station and its duties,’ as Hegel said, and no need to worry about the sense of it all.”

Like a dog encountering an unfamiliar and rather formidable smell, Mr. Magnate sniffed this remark, bristled, and vaguely growled.

“Worry!” he snorted. “There’s plenty of that; but it’s practical day-to-day worry about how to get goods cheap enough to sell them at a profit instead of a loss. If I started worrying about ‘the sense of it all’ the business would soon go to pieces. No time for that. I find myself with a pretty big job that the country needs doing, and I just do it.”

There was a pause, then John remarked, “How splendid it must be to have a pretty big job that needs doing, and to do it well! Do you do it well, sir? And does it really need doing? But of course you do, and it must; else the country wouldn’t pay you for it.”

Mr. Magnate looked anxiously at all his fellow travellers in turn, wondering whether his leg was being pulled. He was reassured, however, by John’s innocent and respectful gaze. The boy’s next remark was rather disconcerting. “It must be so snug to feel both safe and important.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” the great man replied. “But I give the public what it wants, and as cheaply as I can, and I get enough out of it to keep my family in reasonable comfort.”

“Is that what you make money for, to keep your family in comfort?”

“That and other things. I get rid of my money in all sorts of ways. If you must know, quite a lot goes to the political party that I think can govern the country best. Some goes to hospitals and other charities in our great city. But most goes into the business itself to make it bigger and better.”

“Wait a minute,” said John. “You’ve raised a lot of interesting points. I mustn’t lose any of them. First, about comfort. You live in that big half-timbered house on the hill, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s a copy of an Elizabethan mansion. I could have done without it, but my wife had set her heart on it. And putting it up was a great thing for the local building trade.”

“And you have a Rolls, and a Wolseley?”

“Yes,” said the Magnate, adding with magnanimity, “Come up the hill on Saturday and I’ll give you a run in the Rolls. When she’s doing eighty it feels like thirty.”

John’s eyelids sank and rose again, a movement which I knew as an expression of amused contempt. But why was he contemptuous? He was a bit of a speed-hog himself. Never, for instance, was he satisfied with my cautious driving. Was it that he saw in this remark a cowardly attempt to side-track the conversation? After the interview I learned that he had already made several trips in the Magnate car, having suborned the chauffeur. He had even learned to drive it, with cushions behind him, so as to help his short legs to reach the pedals.

“Oh, thank you, I should love to go in your Rolls,” he said, looking gratefully into the benevolent grey eyes of the rich man. “Of course, you couldn’t work properly unless you had reasonable comfort. And that means a big house and two cars, and furs and jewels for your wife, and first-class railway fares, and swank schools for your children.” He paused, while Mr. Magnate looked suspiciously at him. Then he added, “But you won’t be really comfortable till you’ve got that knighthood. Why doesn’t it come? You’ve paid enough already, haven’t you?”

One of our fellow passengers sniggered. Mr. Magnate coloured, gasped, muttered, “Offensive little brat!” and retired behind his paper.

“Oh, sir, I’m sorry,” said John, “I thought it was all quite respectable. Surely it’s just like Poppy Day. Pay your money, and you get your badge, and everyone knows you have done your bit. And that’s true comfort, to know that everyone knows you’re all right.”

The paper dropped again, and its owner said, with mild firmness, “Look here, young man! You mustn’t believe everything you’re told, specially when it’s libellous. I know you don’t mean harm yourself, but — be more critical of what you hear.”

“I’m frightfully sorry,” said John, looking pained and abashed. “It’s so hard to know what one may say and what not.”

“Yes, of course,” said Magnate amiably. “Perhaps I had better explain things a bit. Any one who finds himself in a position like mine, if he’s worth his salt, has to make the best possible use of his opportunities for serving the Empire. Now he can do this partly by running his business well, partly by personal influence. And if he is to have influence he must not only be, but also appear, a man of weight. He must spend a good deal on keeping up a certain style in his way of life. The public does attend more to a man who lives a bit expensively than to a man who doesn’t. Often it would be more comfortable not to live expensively. Just as it would be more comfortable for a judge in court on a hot day to do without his robe and wig. But he mustn’t. He must sacrifice comfort to dignity. At Christmas I bought my wife a rather good diamond necklace (South African — the money stayed in the Empire). Whenever we go to an important function, say a dinner at the Town Hall, she’s got to wear it. She doesn’t always want to. Says it’s heavy or hard, or something. But I say, ‘My dear, it’s a sign that you count. It’s a badge of office. Better wear it.’ And about the knighthood. If anyone says I want to buy one, it’s just a mean lie. I give what I can to my party because I know quite well, with my experience, that it’s the party of common sense and loyalty. No other party cares seriously for British prosperity and power. No other cares about our great Empire and its mission to lead the world. Well, clearly I must support that party in any way open to me. If they saw fit to give me a knighthood, I’d be proud. I’m not one of those prigs who turn up their noses at it. I’d be glad, partly because it would mean that the people who really count were sure I was really serving the Empire, partly because the knighthood would give me more weight to go on serving the Empire with.”

Mr. Magnate glanced at his fellow passengers. We all nodded approval. “Thank you, sir,” said John, with solemn, respectful eyes. “And it all depends on money, doesn’t it? If I’m going to do anything big, I must get money, somehow. I have a friend who keeps saying, ‘Money’s power.’ He has a wife who’s always tired and cross, and five children, ugly dull things. He’s out of a job. Had to sell his push-bike the other day. He says it’s not fair that he should be where he is and — you where you are. But it’s all his own fault really. If he had been as wide awake as you, he’d be as rich as you. Your being rich doesn’t make anyone else poor, does it? If all the slum people were as wide awake as you, they’d all have big houses and Rollses and diamonds. They’d all be some use to the Empire, instead of being just a nuisance.”

The man opposite me tittered. Mr. Magnate looked at him with the sidelong glance of a shy horse, then pulled himself together and laughed.

“My lad,” he said, “you’re too young to understand these things. I don’t think we shall do much good by talking any more about them.”

“I’m sorry,” John replied, seemingly crushed. “I thought I did understand.” Then after a pause he continued: “Do you mind if we go on just a little bit longer? I want to ask you something else.”

“Oh, very well, what is it?”

“What do you think about?”

“What do I think about? Good heavens, boy! All sorts of things. My business, my home, my wife and children, and — about the state of the country.”

“The state of the country? What about it?”

“Well,” said Mr. Magnate, “that’s much too long a story. I think about how England is to recover her foreign trade — so that more money may come into the country, and people may live happier, fuller lives. I think about how we can strengthen the hands of the Government against the foolish people who want to stir up trouble, and those who talk wildly against the Empire. I think — —”

Here John interrupted. “What makes life full and happy?”

“You are a box of questions! I should say that for happiness people need plenty of work to keep them out of mischief, and some amusement to keep them fresh.”

“And, of course,” John interposed, “enough money to buy their amusements with.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Magnate. “But not too much. Most of them would only waste it or damage themselves with it. And if they had a lot, they wouldn’t work to get more.”

“But you have a lot, and you work.”

“Yes, but I don’t work for money exactly. I work because my business is a fascinating game, and because it is necessary to the country. I regard myself as a sort of public servant.”

“But,” said John, “aren’t they public servants too? Isn’t their work necessary too?”

“Yes, boy. But they don’t as a rule look at it that way. They won’t work unless they’re driven.”

“Oh, I see!” John said. “They’re a different sort from you. It must be wonderful to be you. I wonder whether I shall turn out like you or like them.”

“Oh, I’m not really different,” said Mr. Magnate generously. “Or if I am, it’s just circumstances that have made me so. As for you, young man, I expect you’ll go a long way.”

“I want to, terribly,” said John. “But I don’t know which way yet. Evidently whatever I do I must have money. But tell me, why do you bother about the country, and about other people?”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Magnate, laughing, “I bother about other people because when I see them unhappy I feel unhappy myself. And also,” he added more solemnly, “because the Bible tells us to love our neighbours. And I suppose I bother about the country partly because I must have something big to be interested in, something bigger than myself.”

“But you are big, yourself,” said John, with hero-worship in his eyes, and not a twinkle.

Mr. Magnate said hastily, “No, no, only a humble instrument in the service of a very big thing.”

“What thing do you mean?” asked John.

“Our great Empire, of course, boy.”

We were arriving at our destination. Mr. Magnate rose and took his hat from the rack. “Well, young man,” he said, “we have had an interesting talk. Come along on Saturday afternoon about 2:30, and we’ll get the chauffeur to give you a quarter of an hour’s spin in the Rolls.”

“Thank you, sir!” said John. “And may I see Mrs. Magnate’s necklace? I love jewels.”

“Certainly you shall,” Mr. Magnate answered.

When I had met John again outside the station, his only comment on the journey was his characteristic laugh.

CHAPTER V. THOUGHT AND ACTION

DURING THE SIX months which followed this incident, John became increasingly independent of his elders. The parents knew that he was well able to look after himself, so they left him almost entirely to his own devices. They seldom questioned him about his doings, for anything like prying was repugnant to them both; and there seemed to be no mystery about John’s movements. He was continuing his study of man and man’s world. Sometimes he would volunteer an account of some incident in his day’s adventure; sometimes he would draw upon his store of data to illustrate a point in discussion.

Though his tastes remained in some respects puerile, it was clear from his conversation that in other respects he was very rapidly developing. He would still spend days at a stretch in making mechanical toys, such as electric boats. His electric railway system spread its ramifications all over the garden in a maze of lines, tunnels, viaducts, glass-roofed stations. He won many a competition in flying home-made model aeroplanes. In all these activities he seemed at heart a typical schoolboy, though abnormally skilful and original. But the actual time spent in this way was really not great. The only boyish occupation which seemed to fill a large proportion of his time was sailing. He had made himself a minute but seaworthy canoe, fitted both with sail and an old motor-bicycle engine. In this he spent many hours exploring the estuary and the sea-coast, and studying the sea-birds, for which he had a surprising passion. This interest, which at times seemed almost obsessive, he explained apologetically by saying, “They do their simple jobs with so much more style than man shows in his complicated job. Watch a gannet in flight, or a curlew probing the mud for food. Man, I suppose, is about as clever along his own line as the earliest birds were at flight. He’s a sort of archaeopteryx of the spirit.”

Even the most childish activities which sometimes gripped John were apt to be illuminated in this manner by the more mature side of his nature. His delight in Comic Cuts, for instance, was half spontaneous, half a relish of his own silliness in liking the stuff.

At no time of his life did John outgrow his childhood interests. Even in his last phase he was always capable of sheer schoolboy mischief and make-believe. But already this side of his nature was being subordinated to the mature side. We knew, for instance, that he was already forming opinions about the proper aims of the individual, about social policy, about international affairs. We knew also that he was reading a great deal of physics, biology, psychology, astronomy; and that philosophical problems were now seriously occupying him. His reaction to philosophy was curiously unlike that of the normal philosophically minded adult human being. When one of the great classical philosophical puzzles attracted his attention for the first time, he plunged into the literature of the subject, read solidly for a week, and then gave up philosophy entirely till the next puzzle occurred to him.

After several of these raids upon the territory of philosophy he undertook a serious campaign. For nearly three months philosophy appeared to be his main intellectual interest. It was summer-time, and he liked to study out of doors. Every morning he would set off on his push-bike with a box of books and food strapped on the carrier. Leaving his bicycle at the top of the clay cliffs which formed the coastline of the estuary, he would climb down to the shore, and settle himself for the day. Having undressed and put on his scanty “bathers,” he would lie in the full sunshine reading, or thinking. Sometimes he broke off to bathe or wander about the mud flats watching the birds. Shelter from rain was provided by two rusty pieces of corrugated iron sheeting laid across two low walls, which he built of stones from a ruined lime-kiln near at hand. Sometimes, when the tide was up, he went by the sea route in his canoe. On calm days he might be seen a mile or two from the coast, drifting and reading.

I once asked John how his philosophical researches were progressing. His answer is worth recording. “Philosophy,” he said, “is really very helpful to the growing mind, but it’s terribly disappointing too. At first I thought I’d found the mature human intelligence at work at last. Reading Plato, and Spinoza, and Kant, and some of the modern realists too, I almost felt I had come across people of my own kind. I walked in step with them. I played their game with a sense that it called out powers that I had never exercised before. Sometimes I couldn’t follow them. I seemed to miss some vital move. The exhilaration of puzzling over these critical points, and feeling one had met a real master mind at last! But as I went on from philosopher to philosopher and browsed around all over the place, I began to realize the shocking truth that these critical points were not what I thought they were, but just outrageous howlers. It had seemed incredible that these obviously well-developed minds could make simple mistakes; and so I had respectfully dismissed the possibility, and looked for some profound truth. But oh my God, I was wrong! Howler after howler! Sometimes a philosopher’s opponents spot his howlers, and are frightfully set up with their own cleverness. But most of them never get spotted at all, so far as I can discover. Philosophy is an amazing tissue of really fine thinking and incredible, puerile mistakes. It’s like one of those rubber ‘bones’ they give dogs to chew, damned good for the mind’s teeth, but as food — no bloody good at all.”

I ventured to suggest that perhaps he was not really in a position to judge the philosophers. “After all,” I said, “you’re ridiculously young to tackle philosophy. There are spheres of experience that you have not touched yet.”

“Of course there are,” he said. “But — well, for instance, I have little sexual experience, yet. But even now I can see that a man is blathering if he says that sex (properly defined) is the real motive behind all agricultural activities. Take another case. I have no religious experience, yet. Maybe I shall have it, some day. Maybe there’s really no such thing. But I can see quite well that religious experience (properly defined) is no evidence that the sun goes round the earth, and no evidence that the universe has a purpose, such as the fulfilment of personality. The howlers of philosophers are mostly less obvious than these, but of the same kind.”

At the time of which I am speaking, when John was nearly nine, I had no idea that he was leading a double life, and that the hidden part of it was melodramatic. On one single occasion my suspicion was roused for a few moments, but the possibility that flashed upon me was too fantastic and horrible to be seriously entertained.

One morning I happened to go round to the Wainwrights to borrow one of Thomas’s medical books. It must have been about 11:30. John, who had recently developed the habit of reading late at night and rising late in the morning, was being turned out of bed by his indignant mother. “Come and get your breakfast before you dress,” she said. “I’ll keep it no longer.”

Pax offered me “morning tea,” so we both sat down at the breakfast-table. Presently a blinking and scowling John appeared, wearing a dressing-gown over his pyjamas. Pax and I talked about one thing and another. In the course of conversation she said, “Matilda has come with a really lurid story to-day.” (Matilda was the washerwoman.) “She’s as pleased as Punch about it. She says a policeman was found murdered in Mr. Magnate’s garden this morning, stabbed, she says.” John said nothing, and went on with his breakfast. We continued talking for a while, and then the thing happened that startled me. John reached across the table for the butter, exposing part of his arm beyond the end of the dressing-gown sleeve. On the inner side of the wrist was a rather nasty-looking scrape with a certain amount of dirt still in it. I felt pretty sure that there had been no scrape there when I saw him on the previous evening. Nothing very remarkable in that, but what disturbed me was this: John himself saw that scrape, and then glanced quickly at me. For a fraction of a second his eyes held mine; then he took up the butter-dish. In that moment I seemed to see John, in the middle of the night, scraping his arm as he climbed up the drain-pipe to his bedroom. And it seemed to me that he was returning from Mr. Magnate’s. I pulled myself together at once, reminding myself that what I had seen was a very ordinary abrasion, that John was far too deeply engrossed in his intellectual adventures to indulge in nocturnal pranks, and anyhow far too sensible to risk a murder charge. But that sudden look?

The murder gave the suburb matter for gossip for many weeks. There had recently been a number of extremely clever burglaries in the neighbourhood, and the police were making vigorous efforts to discover the culprit. The murdered man had been found lying on his back in a flower-bed with a neat knife-wound in his chest. He must have died “instantaneously,” for his heart was pierced. A diamond necklace and other valuable pieces of jewellery had disappeared from the house. Slight marks on a window-sill and a drain-pipe suggested that the burglar had climbed in and out by an upper storey. If so, he must have ascended the drain-pipe and then accomplished an almost impossible hand-traverse, or rather finger-tip-traverse, up and along one of the ornamental timbers of the pseudo-Elizabethan house.

Sundry arrests were made, but the perpetrator of the crime was never detected. The epidemic of burglaries, however, ceased, and in time the whole matter was forgotten.

At this point it seems well to draw upon information given me by John himself at a much later stage, in fact during the last year of his life, when the colony had been successfully founded, and had not yet been discovered by the “civilized” world. I was already contemplating writing his biography, and had formed a habit of jotting down notes of any striking incident or conversation as soon as possible after the event. I can, therefore, give the account of the murder approximately in John’s own words.

“I was in a bad mess, mentally, in those days,” said John. “I knew I was different from all other human beings whom I had ever met, but I didn’t realize how different. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, but I knew I should soon find something pretty big and desperate to do, and that I must make myself ready for it. Also, remember, I was a child; and I had a child’s taste for the melodramatic, combined with an adult’s cunning and resolution.

“I can’t possibly make you really understand the horrible muddle I was in, because after all your mind doesn’t work along the same lines as mine. But think of it this way, if you like. I found myself in a thoroughly bewildering world. The people in it had built up a huge system of thought and knowledge, and I could see quite well that it was shot through and through with error. From my point of view, although so far as it went it was sound enough for practical purposes, as a description of the world it was simply crazy. But what the right description was I could not discover. I was too young. I had insufficient data. Huge fields of experience were still beyond me. So there I was, like some one in the dark in a strange room, just feeling about among unknown objects. And all the while I had a frantic itch to be getting on with my work, if only I could find out what it was.

“Add to all this that as I grew older I grew more and more lonely, because fewer and fewer people were able to meet me half-way. There was Pax. She really could help, bless her, because she really did see things from my angle — sometimes. And even when she didn’t she had the sense to guess I was seeing something actual, and not merely fantasies. But at bottom she definitely belonged with the rest of you, not with me. Then there was you, much blinder than Pax, but more sympathetic with the active side of me.”

Here I interposed half seriously, half mischievously, “At least a trusty hound.” John laughed, and I added, “And sometimes rising to an understanding beyond my canine capacity, through sheer devotion.” He looked at me and smiled, but did not, as I had hoped he would, assent.

“Well,” he continued, “I was most damnably lonely. I was living in a world of phantoms, or animated masks. No one seemed really alive. I had a queer notion that if I pricked any of you, there would be no bleeding, but only a gush of wind. And I couldn’t make out why you were like that, what it was that I missed in you. The trouble really was that I didn’t clearly know what it was in myself that made me different from you.

“Two clear points emerged from my perplexity. First and simplest, I must make myself independent, I must acquire power. In the crazy world in which I found myself, this meant getting hold of much money. Second I must make haste to sample all sorts of experience, and I must accurately experience my own reactions to all sorts of experience.

“It seemed to me, in my childishness, that I should at any rate begin to fulfil both these needs by bringing off a few burglaries. I should get money, and I should get experience, and I should watch my reactions very carefully. Conscience did not prick me at all. I felt that Mr. Magnate and his like were fair game.

“I first set about studying the technique, partly by reading, partly by discussing the subject with my friend the policeman whom I was afterwards forced to kill. I also undertook a number of experimental and innocuous burglaries on our neighbours. House after house I entered by night, and after locating but not removing the small treasures which they contained, I retired home to bed, well satisfied with my progress.

“At last I felt ready for serious work. In my first house I took only some old-fashioned jewellery, which, I surmised, would not be missed for some time. Then I began taking modern jewellery, cash, silver plate. I found extraordinarily little difficulty in acquiring the stuff. Getting rid of it was much more ticklish work. I managed to make an arrangement with the purser of a foreign-going vessel. He turned up at his home in our suburb every few weeks and bought my swag. I have no doubt that when he parted with it, in foreign ports, he got ten times what he gave me for it. Looking back, I realize how lucky I was that the export side of my venture never brought me to disaster. My purser might so easily have been spotted by the police. Of course, I was still far too ignorant of society to realize the danger. Bright as I was, I had not the data.

“Well, things went swimmingly for some months. I entered dozens of houses and collected several hundred pounds from my purser. But naturally the suburb had got thoroughly excited by this epidemic of housebreaking. Indeed, I had been forced to extend my operations to other districts so as to dissipate the attention of the police. It was clear that if I went on indefinitely I should be caught. But I had been badly bitten by the game. It gave me a sense of independence and power, especially independence, independence of your crazy world.

“I promised myself three more ventures. The first, and the only one to be accomplished, was the Magnate burglary. I went over the ground pretty carefully, and I ascertained the movements of the police pretty thoroughly too. On the actual night all went according to plan until, with my pockets bulging with Mrs. Magnate’s pearls and diamonds (in her full regalia she must have looked like Queen Elizabeth), I started back along that finger-traverse. Suddenly a torch flashed on me from below, and a quiet cheery voice said, ‘Got you this time, my lad.’ I said nothing, for I recognized the voice, and did not wish mine to be recognized in turn. The constable was my own particular pal, Smithson, who had unwittingly taught me so much.

“I hung motionless by my finger-tips, thinking hard, and keeping my face to the wall. But it was useless to conceal my identity, for he said, ‘Buck up, John, boy, come along down or you’ll drop and break your leg. You’re a sport, but you’re beat this time.’

“I must have hung motionless for three seconds at most, but in that time I saw myself and my world as never before. An idea toward which I had been long but doubtfully groping suddenly displayed itself to me with complete clarity and certainty. I had already, some time before, come to think of myself as definitely of a different biological species from Homo sapiens, the species of that amiable bloodhound behind the torch. But at last I realized for the first time that this difference carried with it what I should now describe as a far-reaching spiritual difference, that my purpose in life, and my attitude to life, were to be different from anything which the normal species could conceive, that I stood, as it were, on the threshold of a world far beyond the reach of those sixteen hundred million crude animals that at present ruled the planet. The discovery made me feel, almost for the first time in my life, fear, dread. I saw, too, that this burglary game was not worth the candle, that I had been behaving very much like a creature of the inferior species, risking my future and much more than my personal success for a cheap kind of self-expression. If that amiable bloodhound got me, I should lose my independence. I should be henceforth known, marked, and in the grip of the law. That simply must not be. All these childish escapades had been a blind, fumbling preparation for a lifework which at last stood out more or less clearly before me. It was my task, unique being that I was, to ‘advance the spirit’ on this planet. That was the phrase which flashed into my mind. And though at that early stage I had only a very dim idea about ‘spirit’ and its ‘advance,’ I saw quite clearly that I must set about the more practical side of my task either by taking charge of the common species and teaching it to bring out the best in itself, or, if that proved impossible, by founding a finer human type of my own.

“Such were the thoughts that flashed on me in the first couple of seconds as I hung by my finger-tips in the blaze of poor Smithson’s torch. If ever you do write that threatened biography, you’ll find it quite impossible to persuade your readers that I, a child of nine, could have had such thoughts in such circumstances. Also, of course, you won’t be able to give anything of the actual character of my new attitude, because it involved a kind of experience beyond your grasp.

“During the next two seconds or so I was desperately considering if there was any way to avoid killing the faithful creature. My fingers were giving out. With their last strength I reached the drain-pipe, and began to descend. Half-way I stopped, ‘How’s Mrs. Smithson?’ I said. ‘Bad,’ he answered. ‘Look sharp, I want to get home.’ That made matters worse. How could I do it? Well, it just had to be done, there was no way out of it. I thought of killing myself, and getting out of the whole mess that way. But I couldn’t do that. It would be sheer betrayal of the thing I must live for. I thought of just accepting Smithson and the law; but no, that, I knew, was betrayal also. The killing just had to be. It was my own childishness that had got me into this scrape, but now — the killing just had to be. All the same, I hated the job. I had not yet reached the stage of liking whatever had to be done. I felt over again, and far more distressingly, the violent repulsion which had surprised me years earlier, when I had to kill a mouse. It was that one I had tamed, you remember, and the maids wouldn’t stand it running about the house.

“Well, Smithson had to die. He was standing at the foot of the pipe. I pretended to slip, and fell on him, overbalancing him by kicking off from the wall. We both went down with a crash. With my left hand I seized the torch, and with my right I whipped out my little scout’s knife. The position of the human heart was not unknown to me. I plunged the knife home, leaning on it with all my weight. Smithson flung me off with one frantic spasm, then lay still.

“The scrimmage had made a considerable noise, and I heard a bed creak in the house. For a moment I looked at Smithson’s open eyes and open mouth. I pulled out the knife, and then there was a spurt of blood.”

John’s account of this strange incident showed me how little I had known of his real character at that time.

“You must have felt pretty bad on the way home,” I said.

“As a matter of fact,” he answered, “I didn’t. The bad feeling ended when I made my decision. And I didn’t go straight home. I went to Smithson’s house, intending to kill his wife. I knew she was down with cancer and in for a lot of pain, and would be broken-hearted over her husband’s death; so I decided to take one more risk and put her out of her misery. But when I got there, by secret ways of my own, I found the house lit up and awake. She was evidently having a bad night. So I had to leave her, poor wretch. Even that didn’t really upset me. You may say I was saved by the insensitivity of childhood. Perhaps to some extent; though I had a pretty vivid notion of what Pax would suffer if she lost her husband. What really saved me was a kind of fatalism. What must be, must be. I felt no remorse for my own past folly. The ‘I’ that had committed that folly was incapable of realizing how foolish it was being. The new ‘I,’ that had suddenly awakened, realized very clearly, and was anxious to make amends so far as possible; but of remorse or shame it felt nothing.”

To this confession I could make only one reply, “Odd John!”

I then asked John if he was preyed on by the dread of being caught. “No,” he said. “I had done all I could. If they caught me, they caught me. But I had done the job as efficiently as it is ever done. I had worn rubber gloves, and left a few false fingerprints, made by an ingenious little instrument of my own. My only serious anxiety was over my purser. I sold him the swag in small instalments over a period of several months.”

CHAPTER VI. MANY INVENTIONS

ALTHOUGH I DID not at the time know that John was responsible for the murder, I noticed that a change came over him. He became less communicative, in a way more aloof from his friends, both juvenile and adult, and at the same time more considerate and even gentle. I say “in a way” more aloof, because, though less ready to talk about himself, and more prone to solitariness, he had also his sociable times. He could indeed be a most sympathetic companion, the sort in whom one was tempted to confide all manner of secret hopes and fears that were scarcely admitted by oneself. One day, for instance, I found myself discovering, under the influence of John’s presence and my own effort to explain myself, that I had already become very strongly attracted to a certain Pax-like young woman, and further that I had been kept from recognizing this feeling through an obscure sense of loyalty to John. The discovery of the strength of my feeling for John was more of a shock than the discovery of my feeling for the girl. I knew that I was deeply interested in John, but till that day I had no idea how subtle and far-reaching were the tentacles with which the strange child had penetrated me.

My reaction was a violent and rather panicky rebellion. I flaunted before John the new-found normal sexual attraction which he himself had pointed out to me, and I ridiculed the notion that I was psychologically his captive. He replied, “Well, be careful. Don’t spoil your life for me.” It was strange to be talking like this to a child of less than ten years old. It was distressing to feel that he knew more about me than I knew about myself. For in spite of my denial, I knew that he was right.

Looking back, I recognize that John’s interest in my case was partly due to curiosity about a relationship which he himself could not yet experience, partly to straightforward affection for a well-known companion, partly to the need to understand as fully as possible one whom he intended to use for his own ends. For it is clear that he did intend to use me, that he did not for a moment intend me to free myself. He wanted my affair with the Pax-like girl to go forward and complete itself not only because, as my friend, he espoused my need, but also because, if I were to give it up for his sake, I should become a vindictive rather than a willing slave. He preferred, I imagine, to be served by a free and roving hound rather than by a chained and hungry wolf.

His feeling for individuals of the species which, as a species, he heartily despised, was a strange blend of contempt and respect, detachment and affection. He despised us for our stupidity and fecklessness; he respected us for our occasional efforts to surmount our natural disabilities. Though he used us for his own ends with calm aloofness, he could also, when fate or our own folly brought us into trouble, serve us with surprising humility and devotion.

His growing capacity for personal relationships with members of the inferior species was shown most quaintly in his extraordinary friendship with a little girl of six. Judy’s home was close to John’s, and she had come to regard John as her private property. He played uproarious games with her, helped her to climb trees, and taught her to swim and roller-skate. He told her wildly imaginative stories. He patiently explained to her the sorry jokes of Comic Cuts. He drew pictures of battle and murder, shipwreck and volcanic eruption for Judy’s sole delight. He mended her toys. He chaffed her for her stupidity or praised her for her intelligence as occasion demanded. If any one was less than kind to her, John rushed to her defence. In all communal games it was taken for granted that John and Judy must be on the same side. In return for this devotion she mauled him, laughed at him, scolded him, called him “stoopid Don,” showed no respect at all for his marvellous powers, and presented him with all the most cherished results of her enterprise in the “hand-work” class at school.

I once challenged John, “Why are you so fond of Judy?” He answered promptly, imitating her unusually backward baby speech, “Doody made for be’n’ fon’ of. Can’t not be fon’ of Doody.” Then after a pause he said, “I’m fond of Judy as I’m fond of sea-birds. She does only simple things, but she does them all with style. She be’s Judy as thoroughly and perfectly as a gannet be’s a gannet. If she could grow up to do the grown-up things as well as she does the baby things, she’d be glorious. But she won’t. When it comes to doing the more difficult things, I suppose she’ll mess up her style like — like the rest of you. It’s a pity. But meanwhile she’s — Judy.”

“What about yourself?” I said. “Do you expect to grow up without losing your style?”

“I’ve not found my style yet,” he answered. “I’m groping. I’ve messed things pretty badly already. But when I do find it — well, we shall see. Of course,” he added surprisingly, “God may find grown-ups as delightful to watch as I find Judy; because, I suppose, he doesn’t want them to have a finer style than they actually have. Sometimes I can feel that way about them myself. I can feel their bad style is part of what they are, and strangely fascinating to watch. But I have an idea God expects something different from me. Or, leaving out the God myth, I expect something different from me.”

A few weeks after the murder, John developed a surprising interest in a very homely sphere, namely the management of a house. He would spend an hour at a time in following Martha the maid about the house on her morning’s work, or in watching the culinary operations. For her entertainment he kept up a stream of small talk compounded of scandal, broad humour, and chaff about her “gentlemen friends.” The same minute observation, but a very different kind of talk was devoted to Pax when she was in the pantry or the larder, or when she was “tidying” a room or mending clothes. Sometimes he would break off his tittle-tattle to say, “Why not do it this way?” Martha’s response to such suggestions varied from haughty contempt to grudging acceptance, according to her mood. Pax invariably gave serious attention to the new idea, though sometimes she would begin by protesting, “But my way works well enough; why bother?” In the end, however, she nearly always adopted John’s improvement, with an odd little smile which might equally well have meant maternal pride or indulgence.

Little by little John introduced a number of small labour-saving devices into the house, shifting a hook or a shelf to suit the natural reach of the adult arm, altering the balance of the coal-scuttle, reorganizing the larder and the bathroom. He tried to introduce his methods into the surgery, suggesting new ways of cleaning test-tubes, sterilizing instruments and storing drugs; but after a few attempts he gave up this line of activity, since, as he put it, “Doc likes to muddle along in his own way.”

After two or three weeks John’s interest in household economy seemed to fade, save for occasional revivals in relation to some particular problem. He now spent most of his time away from home, ostensibly reading on the shore. But as the autumn advanced, and we began to inquire how he managed to keep himself warm, he apparently developed a passion for long walks by himself. He also spent much time in excursions into the neighbouring city. “I’m going to town for the day to see some fellows I’m interested in,” he would tell us; and in the evening he would return tired and absorbed.

It was toward the end of the winter that John, now about ten and a half, took me into his confidence with regard to the amazing commercial operations which had been occupying him during the previous six months. One filthy Sunday morning, when the windows were plastered with sleet, he suggested a walk. I indignantly refused. “Come on,” he insisted. “It’s going to be amusing for you. I want to show you my workshop.” He slowly winked first one huge eye and then the other.

By the time we had reached the shore my inadequate mackintosh was letting water through on my shoulders, and I was cursing John, and myself too. We tramped along the soaked sands till we reached a spot where the steep clay cliffs gave place to a slope, scarcely less steep, but covered with thorn bushes. John went down on his knees and led the way, crawling on all-fours up a track between the bushes. I was expected to follow. I found it almost impossible to force my larger bulk where John had passed with ease. When I had gone a few yards I was jammed, thorns impaling me on every side. Laughing at my predicament and my curses, John turned and cut me adrift with his knife, the same, doubtless, as had killed the constable. After another ten yards the track brought us into a small clearing on the steep slope. Standing erect at last, I grumbled, “Is this what you call your workshop?” John laughed, and said, “Lift that.” He was pointing to a rusty sheet of corrugated iron, which lay derelict on the hillside. One end of it was buried under a mass of rubbish. The exposed part was about three feet square. I tugged its free end up a couple of inches, cut my fingers on the rusty jagged edge, and let go with a curse. “Can’t be bothered,” I said. “Do your own dirty work, if you can.” “Of course you can’t be bothered,” he replied, “nor would anyone else who found it.” He then worked his hand under the free corners of the sheet, and disentangled some rusty wire. The sheet was now easily lifted, and opened like a trap-door in the hillside. It revealed a black hole between three big stones. John crawled inside, and bade me follow; but before I could wedge my way through he had to move one of the stones. I found myself in a low cave, illuminated by John’s flash-light. So this was the workshop! It had evidently been cut out of the clay slope and lined with cement. The ceiling was covered with rough planks, and shored up here and there with wooden posts.

John now lit an acetylene lamp, which was let into the outer wall. Shutting its glass face, he remarked, “Its air comes in by a pipe from outside, and its fumes go out by another. There’s an independent ventilation system for the room.” Pointing to a dozen round holes in the wall, “Drainpipes,” he said. Such pipes were a common sight on the coast, for they were used for draining the fields; and the ever-crumbling cliff often exposed them.

For a few minutes I crouched in silence, surveying the little den. John watched me, with a grin of boyish satisfaction. There was a bench, a small lathe, a blow-lamp, and quantities of tools. On the back wall was a tier of shelves covered with a jumble of articles. John took one of these and handed it to me, saying, “This is one of my earlier gadgets, the world’s perfect wool-winder. No curates need henceforth apply. The Church’s undoing! Put the skein on those prongs, and an end of wool in that slot, then waggle the lever, so, and you get a ball of wool as sleek as the curate’s head. All made of aluminum sheeting, and a few aluminum knitting needles.”

“Damned ingenious,” I said, “but what good is it to you?”

“Why, you fool! I’m going to patent it and sell the patent.”

Producing a deep leather pouch, he said, “This is a detachable and untearable trouser-pocket for boys; and men, if they’ll have the sense to use it. The pocket itself clips on to this L-shaped strip, so; and all your trousers have strips like this, firmly sewn into the lining. You have one pair of pockets for all your trousers, so there’s no bother about emptying pockets when you change your clothes. And no more holes for Mummy to mend. And no more losing your treasures. Your pocket clips tight shut, so.”

Even my interest in John’s amazing enterprise (so childish and so brilliant, I told myself) could not prevent me from feeling wet and chilled. Taking off my dripping mackintosh, I said, “Don’t you get horribly cold working in this hole in the winter?”

“I heat the place with this,” he said, turning to a little oil-stove with a flue leading round the room and through the wall. He proceeded to light it, and put a kettle on the top, saying, “Let’s have some coffee.”

He then gave me a “gadget for sweeping out corners.” On the end of a long tubular handle was a brush like a big blunt cork-screw. This could be made to rotate by merely pressing it into the awkward corner. The rotatory motion was obtained by a device reminiscent of a “propelling” pencil, for the actual shaft of the brush was keyed into a spiral groove within the hollow handle.

“It’s possible the thing I’m on now will bring more money than anything else, but it’s damned hard to make even an inch or two of it by hand.” The article which John now showed me was destined to become one of the most popular and serviceable of modern devices connected with clothing. Throughout Europe and America it has spawned its myriads of offspring. Nearly all the most ingenious and lucrative of John’s inventions have had such outstanding success that almost every reader must be familiar with every one of them. I could mention a score of them; but for private reasons, connected with John’s family, I must refrain from doing so. I will only say that, save for one universally adopted improvement in road-traffic appliances, he worked entirely in the field of household and personal labour-saving devices. The outstanding fact about John’s career as an inventor was his knack of producing not merely occasional successes but a steady flow of “best sellers.” Consequently to describe only a few minor achievements and interesting failures must give a very false impression of his genius. The reader must supplement this meagre report by means of his own imagination. Let him, in the act of using any of the more cunning and efficient little instruments of modern comfort, remind himself that this may well be one of the many “gadgets” which were conceived by the urchin-superman in his subterranean lair.

For some time John continued to show me his inventions. I may mention a parsley cutter, a potato-peeler, a number of devices for using old razor-blades as penknife, scissors, and so on. Others, to repeat, were destined never to be taken up, or never to become popular. Of these perhaps the most noteworthy was a startlingly efficient dodge for saving time and trouble in the watercloset. John himself had doubts about some, including the detachable pocket. “The trouble is,” he said, “that however good my inventions are, Homo sapiens may be too prejudiced to use them. I expect he’ll stick to his bloody pockets.”

The kettle was boiling, so he made the coffee and produced a noble cake, made by Pax.

While we were drinking and munching I asked him how he got all his plant. “It’s all paid for,” he said. “I came in for a bit of money. I’ll tell you about that some day. But I want much more money, and I’ll get it too.”

“You were lucky to find this cave,” I said. He laughed, “Find it, you chump! I made it. Dug it out with pick and spade and my own lily-white hands.” (At this point he reached out a grubby and sinewy bunch of tentacles for a biscuit.) “It was the hell of a grind, but it hardened my muscles.”

“And how did you transport the stuff, that lathe, for instance?” “By sea, of course.” “Not in the canoe!” I protested. “Had it all sent to X,” he said, naming a little port on the other side of the estuary. “There’s a bloke over there who acts as my agent in little matters like that. He’s safe, because I know things about him that he doesn’t want the police to know. Well, he dumped the cases of parts on the shore over there one night while I pinched one of the Sailing Club’s cutters and took her over to fetch the stuff. It had to be done at spring tide, and of course the weather was all wrong. When I got the stuff over I nearly died lugging it up here from the shore, though it was all in small pieces. And I only just managed to get the cutter back to her moorings before dawn. Thank God that’s all over. Have another cup, won’t you?”

Toasting ourselves over the oil-stove, we now discussed the part which John intended me to play in his preposterous adventure. I was at first inclined to scoff at the whole project, but what with his diabolical persuasiveness and the fact that he had already achieved so much, I found myself agreeing to carry out my share of the plan. “You see,” he said, “all this stuff must be patented and the patents sold to manufacturers. It’s quite useless for a kid like me to interview patent agents and business men. That’s where you come in. You’re going to launch all these things, sometimes under your own name, sometimes under sham names. I don’t want people to know they all come from one little brain.”

“But, John,” I said, “I should get stung every time. I know nothing about the job.”

“That’s all right,” he answered. “I’ll tell you exactly what to do in each case. And if you do make a few mistakes, it doesn’t matter.”

One odd feature of the relationship which he had planned for us was that, though we expected to deal with large sums of money, there was not to be any regularized business arrangement between us, no formal agreement about profit-sharing and liabilities. I suggested a written contract, but he dismissed the idea with contempt. “My dear man,” he said, “how could I enforce a contract against you without coming out of hiding, which I must not do on any account? Besides, I know perfectly well that so long as you keep in physical and mental health you’re entirely reliable. And you ought to know the same of me. This is to be a friendly show. You can take as much as you like of the dibs, when they begin to come in. I’ll bet my boots you won’t want to take half as much as your services are worth. Of course, if you start taking that girl of yours to the Riviera by air every week-end, we’ll have to begin regularizing things. But you won’t.”

I asked him about a banking account. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve had one running for some time at a London branch of the —— Bank. But the payments will have to be made to you at your bank mostly, so as to keep me dark. These gadgets are to go out as yours, not mine, and as the inventions of lots of imaginary people. You’re their agent.”

“But,” I protested, “don’t you see you’re giving me absolute power to swindle you out of the whole proceeds? Suppose I just use you? Suppose the taste of power goes to my head, and I collar everything? I’m only Homo sapiens, not Homo superior.” And for once I privately felt that John was perhaps not so superior after all.

John laughed delightedly at the title, but said, “My dear thing, you just won’t. No, no, I refuse to have any business arrangements. That would be too ‘sapient’ altogether. We should never be able to trust one another. Probably I’d cheat you all round, just for fun.”

“Oh, well,” I sighed, “you’ll keep accounts and see how the money goes.”

“Keep accounts, man! What in hell do I want with accounts? I keep ’em in my head, but never look at ’em.”

CHAPTER VII. FINANCIAL VENTURES

HENCEFORTH MY OWN work was seriously interfered with by my increasing duties in connexion with John’s commercial enterprise. I spent a great deal of my time travelling about the country, visiting patent agents and manufacturers. Quite often John accompanied me. He had always to be introduced as “a young friend of mine who would so like to see the inside of a factory.” In this way he picked up a lot of knowledge of the powers and limitations of different kinds of machines, and was thus helped to produce easily manufacturable designs.

It was on these expeditions that I first came to realize that even John had his disability, his one blind spot, I called it. I approached these industrial gentlemen with painful consciousness that they could do what they liked with me. Generally I was kept from disaster by the advice of the patent agents, who, being primarily scientists, were on our side not only professionally but by sympathy. But quite often the manufacturer managed to get at me direct. On several of these occasions I was pretty badly stung. Nevertheless, I learned in time to be more able to hold my own with the commercial mind. John, on the other hand, seemed incapable of believing that these people were actually less interested in producing ingenious articles than in getting the better of us, and of every one else. Of course, he knew intellectually that it was so. He was as contemptuous of the morality as of the intelligence of Homo sapiens. But he could not “feel it in his bones” that men could really “be such fools as to care so much about sheer money-making as a game of skill.” Like any other boy, he could well appreciate the thrill of beating a rival in personal combat, and the thrill of triumph in practical invention. But the battle of industrial competition made no appeal whatever to him, and it took him many months of bitter experience to realize how much it meant to most men. Though he was himself in the thick of a great commercial adventure, he never felt the fascination of business undertakings as such. Though he could enter zestfully into most of man’s instinctive and primitive passions, the more artificial manifestations of those passions, and in particular the lust of economic individualism, found no spontaneous echo in him. In time, of course, he learned to expect men to manifest such passions, and he acquired the technique of dealing with them. But he regarded the whole commercial world with a contempt which suggested now the child, and now the philosopher. He was at once below it and above it.

Thus it was that in the first phase of John’s commercial life it fell to me to play the part of hard-headed business man. Unfortunately, as was said, I myself was extremely ill-equipped for the task, and at the outset we parted with several good inventions for a price which we subsequently discovered to be ludicrously inadequate.

But in spite of early disasters we were in the long run amazingly successful. We launched scores of ingenious contrivances which have since become universally recognized as necessary adjuncts of modern life. The public remarked on the spate of minor inventions which (it was said) showed the resilience of human capacity a few years after the war.

Meanwhile our bank balance increased by leaps and bounds, while our expenses remained minute. When I suggested setting up a decent workshop in my name in a convenient place, John would not hear of it. He produced a number of poor arguments against the plan, and I concluded that he was determined to cling to his lair for no reason but boyish love of sensationalism. But presently he divulged his real reason, and it horrified me. “No,” he said, “we mustn’t spend yet. We must speculate. That bank balance must be multiplied by a hundred, and then by a thousand.”

I protested that I knew nothing about finance, and that we might easily lose all we had. He assured me that he had been studying finance, and that he already had a few neat little plans in mind. “John,” I said, “you simply mustn’t do it. That’s the sort of field where sheer intelligence is not enough. You want half a lifetime’s special knowledge of the stock market. And anyhow it’s nearly all luck.”

It was no use talking. After all, he had good reason to trust his own judgement rather than mine. And he gave evidence that he had gone into the subject thoroughly, both by reading the financial journals and by ingratiating himself with local stockbrokers on the morning and evening trains to town. He had by now passed far beyond the naïve child that had interviewed Mr. Magnate, and he was, as ever, an adept at making people talk about their own work.

“It’s now or never,” he said. “We’re entering a boom, inevitable after the war; but in a few years we shall be in the midst of such a slump that people will wonder if civilization is going smash. You’ll see.”

I laughed at his assurance, and was treated to a lecture on economics and the state of Western society, the sort of thing that in eight or ten years was to be generally accepted among the more advanced students of social problems. At the end of this discourse John said, “We’ll put half our capital into British light industry — motors, electricity and so on, because that sort of thing is bound to go ahead, comparatively. The rest we’ll use for speculation.”

“We’ll lose the whole lot, I expect,” I grumbled. Then I tried a new line of attack. “Anyhow isn’t all this money-making a bit too trivial for Homo superior? I believe you’re bitten by the speculation bug after all. I mean, what is the object of it all?”

“It’s all right, Fido, old thing,” he answered. (It was about this time that he began to use this nickname for me. When I protested, he assured me that it was meant to be φαίδω, which name, he said, was connected with the Greek for “brilliant.”) “It’s all right. I’m quite sane still. I don’t care a damn about finance for its own sake, but in the world of Hom. sap. it’s the quickest way to get power, which means money. And I must have money, big money. Now don’t snort! We’ve made a good little start, but it’s only a start.”

“What about ‘advancing the spirit,’ as you called it?”

“That’s the goal, all right; but you seem to forget I’m only a child, and very backward too, in all that really matters. I must do the things I can do before the things I can’t yet do. And what I can do is to prepare — by getting (a) experience, (b) independence. See?”

Evidently the thing had to be. But it was with grave misgiving that I agreed to act as John’s financial agent; and when he insisted on indulging in various wild speculations against my advice, I began to tell myself that I had been a fool to treat him as anything but a brilliant child.

John’s financial operations did not spontaneously hold his attention as his practical inventions had done. And by now both kinds of activity were being subordinated increasingly to the study of human society and the absorbing personal contacts which came to him with adolescence. There was a certain absent-mindedness and dilatoriness about his buying and selling of stock, very exasperating to me, his agent. For though most of our common fortune was in my name, I could never bring myself to act without his consent.

During the first six months of our speculative ventures we lost far more than we gained. John at last woke up to the fact that if we went on this way we should lose everything. After hearing of a particularly devastating disaster he indulged in a memorable outburst. “Blast!” he said. “It means I must take this damned dull game much more seriously. And there’s so much else to be done just now, far more important in the long run. I see it may be as difficult for me to beat Hom. sap. at this game as it is for Hom. sap. to beat apes at acrobatics. The human body is not equipped for the jungle, and my mind may not be equipped for the jungle of individualistic finance. But I’ll get round it somehow, just as Hom. sap. got round acrobatics.”

It was characteristic of John that when he had made a serious mistake through lack of experience he never tried to conceal the fact. On this occasion he recounted with complete detachment, neither blaming nor excusing himself, how he, the intellectual superior of all men, had been tricked by a common swindler. One of his financial acquaintances had evidently guessed that the boy’s interest in speculation had ulterior sources, in fact that some adult with money to invest was using him as a spy. This individual proceeded to treat John extremely well, and to “prattle to him about his ventures,” anxiously pledging him to secrecy. In this way Homo superior was completely diddled by Homo sapiens. John insisted that I should put large sums of money into concerns which his friend had advocated. At first I refused; but John was blandly confident in his alleged “inside information that it’s an absolute scoop,” and finally I consented. I need not recount the history of these disastrous speculations. Suffice it that we lost everything that we had risked, and that John’s friend disappeared.

For some time after this disaster we refrained from speculation. John spent a good deal of his time away from home and away from his workshop also. When I asked what he had been up to, he usually said, “studying finance,” but refused any further information. During this period his health began to deteriorate. His digestion, always his weakest spot, gave him some trouble, and he complained of headaches. Evidently he was leading a rather unwholesome life.

He began to spend many of his nights away from home. His father had relatives in London, and increasingly often John was allowed to visit them. But the relatives did not for long tolerate his independence. (He disappeared every morning and returned late at night or not till the next day, and refused to give an account of his actions.) Consequently these visits had to cease. But John, meanwhile, had learnt that, in summer, he could live the life of a stray cat in the Metropolis, in spite of the police. To his parents he said that he knew “a man who had a flat who would let him sleep there any night.” Actually, as I learned much later, he used to sleep in parks and under bridges.

I learned also how he had occupied himself. By a series of tricks of the “gate-crashing” type he had managed to make contacts with several big financiers in London, and had set about captivating and amusing them, and unobtrusively picking their brains, before they sent him by car with a covering note to his indignant relatives, or paid his railway fare home to the North, and sent the letter by post.

Here is a specimen, one of many such documents which caused much perturbation to Doc and Pax.

Dear Sir,

Your small son’s bicycle tour came to an untimely end yesterday evening owing to a collision with my car near Guildford. He fully admits that the fault was his own. He is unhurt, but the bicycle is past repair. As it was late, I took him to my home for the night. I congratulate you on having a very remarkable boy whose precocious passion for finance was extremely entertaining to my party. My chauffeur will put him on the 10:26 at Euston this morning. I am telegraphing you to that effect.

Yours faithfully,

(Signed by a personage whose name I

had better not divulge.)

John’s parents, and I also, knew that he was on a bicycling tour, but we supposed him to have gone into North Wales. The fact that he had been so soon encountered in Surrey proved that he must have taken his bicycle by train. Needless to say, John did not turn up by the 10:26 from Euston. He gave the chauffeur the slip, poor man, by jumping out of the car in a traffic jam. That night he spent as the guest of another financier. If I remember rightly, he arrived in the late afternoon at the front door with a story that he and his mother were staying somewhere near, and that he had lost his way and forgotten the address. As police inquiries failed to discover his mother in the neighbourhood, he was kept for the night, and then for the following night, in fact for the Saturday and Sunday. I have no doubt that he made good use of the time. On Monday morning, when the great man had gone to business, he disappeared.

After some months spent partly on such adventures, partly on close study of the literature of finance and political economy and social changes, John felt himself ready to take action once more. He knew that I was likely to be sceptical of his plans, so he operated with money standing in his own name, and told me nothing until, six months later, he was able to show me the results in the shape of a considerable sum standing to his credit.

As time passed it became clear that he had mastered financial speculation as effectively as he had mastered mathematics. I have no knowledge of the principles on which he went to work, for henceforth I played no part in his business deals, save occasionally as his agent when a personal interview was to be undertaken. I remember his saying once when we were reviewing our position, “After all there’s not much in this speculation game, once you know your facts and get the hang of the way money trickles about the world. Of course there’s a frightful lot of mere flukiness about it. You can never be quite sure which way the cat will jump. But if you know your cat well (Hom. sap. I mean), and if you know the ground well, you can’t go far wrong in the long run.”

By the use of his new technique John gradually, throughout the earlier part of his adolescence, amassed a very imposing fortune, much of which was legally owned by me. It may seem strange that he never told his parents about his wealth until the time came for him to use it on a lavish scale. “I don’t want to upset their lives sooner than I need,” he said, “and I don’t want to give them the worry of trying not to blab.” On the other hand he allowed them to know that I had come in for a lot of money (supposed to be entirely due to luck on the Stock Exchange), and he was glad that I should help his parents in a number of ways, such as paying for the education of his brother and sister, and taking them all (John included) on foreign holidays. The parental gratitude, I may say, was extremely embarrassing. John made it more so by joining unctuously in the chorus, and dubbing me “The Benefactor,” which title he soon shortened aggravatingly to “The Benny,” and subsequently changed to “The Bean.”

CHAPTER VIII. SCANDALOUS ADOLESCENCE

ALTHOUGH DURING A large part of his fourteenth year finance constituted John’s main occupation, his attention was never wholly absorbed by it; and after his period of intensive study and speculation he was able to continue the business of gaining monetary power while giving the best of his energies to very different matters. He was increasingly intrigued by the new experiences consequent on adolescence. At the same time he was very seriously engaged on the study of the potentialities and limitations of Homo sapiens as manifested in contemporary world-problems. And as his opinion of the normal species became more and more unflattering, he began to turn his attention to the search for other individuals of his own calibre. Though all these activities were pursued together, it will be convenient to deal with them separately.

The onset of John’s adolescence was very late compared with that of the normal human being, and its duration was extremely prolonged. At fourteen he was physically comparable with a normal child of ten. When he died, at twenty-three, he was still in appearance a lad of seventeen. Yet, though physically he was always far behind his years, mentally, and not merely in intelligence but also in temperament and sensibility, he often seemed to be incredibly advanced beyond his actual age. This mental precocity, I should say, was entirely due to imaginative power. Whereas the normal child clings to the old interests and attitudes long after more developed capacities have actually begun to awaken in him, John seemed to seize upon every budding novelty in his own nature and “force” it into early bloom by the sheer intensity and heat of his imagination.

This was obvious, for instance, in the case of his sexual experience. It should be said that his parents were for their time exceptional in their attitude to sex in their children. All three grew up unusually free from the common shames and obsessions. Doc took a frankly physiological view of sexual development; and Pax treated the sexual curiosity and experimentation of her children in a perfectly open and humorous way.

Thus John may be said to have had an exceptionally good start. But the use which he made of it was very different from that which satisfied his brother and sister. They were exceptional only in being permitted to develop naturally, and in thus escaping the normal distortions. They did all that most children were solemnly forbidden to do, and they were not condemned. I have no doubt that they practised whatever “vices” they happened to think of, and then passed light-heartedly to other interests. In the home circle they would prattle about sex and conception in a shameless manner; but not in public, “because people don’t understand yet that it doesn’t matter.” Later they obviously had their romantic attachments. And later still they both married, and are seemingly well content.

The case of John was strikingly different. Like them, he passed in infancy through a phase of intense interest in his own body. Like them he found peculiar gratification in certain parts of his body. But whereas with them sexual interest began long before consciousness of personality had become at all precise, with John self-consciousness and other-consciousness were already vivid and detailed long before the onset of adolescence. Consequently, when that great change first began to affect him, and his imagination seized upon its earliest mental symptoms, he plunged headlong into kinds of behaviour that might have been deemed far beyond his years.

For instance, when John was ten, but physiologically much younger, he went through a phase of sexual interest more or less equivalent to the infantile sexuality of the normal type, but enlivened by his precocious intelligence and imagination. For some weeks he amused himself and outraged the neighbours by decorating walls and gate-posts with “naughty” drawings in which particular adults whom he disliked were caricatured in the act of committing various “wicked” practices. He also enticed his friends into his evil ways, and caused such a storm among the local parents that his father had to intervene. This phase, I take it, was due largely to a sense of impotence and consequent inferiority. He was trying to be sexually mature before his body was ready. After a week or two he apparently worked through this interest, as he had worked through the interest in personal combat.

But as the months advanced into years, he obviously felt an increasing delight in his own body, and this came in time to change his whole attitude to life. At fourteen he was generally taken for a strange child of ten, though it was not unusual for an observer sensitive to facial expression to suppose him some kind of “genius” of eighteen with arrested physique. His general proportions were those of a ten-year-old; but over a childlike skeleton he bore a lean and knotted musculature about which his father used to say that it was not quite human, and that there ought to be a long prehensile tail to complete the picture. How far this muscular development was due to nature, and how far to his deliberate physical culture, I do not know.

His face was already changing from the infantile to the boyish in underlying structure; but the ceaseless expressive movements of mouth and nostrils and brows were already stamping it with an adult, alien, and almost inhuman character. Thinking of him at this period, I recall a creature which appeared as urchin but also as sage, as imp but also as infant deity. In summer his usual dress was a coloured shirt, shorts and sandshoes, all of them fairly grubby. His large head and close platinum wool, and his immense green-rimmed, falcon eyes, gave one a sense that these commonplace clothes had been assumed as a disguise.

Such was his general appearance when he began to discover a vast attractiveness in his own person, and a startling power of seducing others to delight in him no less luxuriously than he did himself. His will to conquest was probably much exaggerated by the knowledge that from the point of view of the normal species there was something grotesque and repellent about him. His narcissism was also, I imagine, aggravated and prolonged by the fact that, from his own point of view, there was no other to meet him on an equal footing, none fit for him to regard with that blend of selfishness and devotion which is romantic love.

I must make it clear that in reporting John’s behaviour at this time I do not seek to defend it. Much of it seems to me outrageous. Had it been perpetrated by anyone other than John, I should have unhesitatingly condemned it as the expression of a self-centred and shockingly perverted mind. But in spite of the most reprehensible incidents in his career, I am convinced that John was far superior to the rest of us in moral sensibility, as in intelligence. Therefore, even in respect of the seemingly disgraceful conduct which I have now to describe, I feel that the right course is not to condemn but to suspend judgement and try to understand. I tell myself that, if John was indeed a superior being, much of his conduct would certainly outrage us, simply because we, with our grosser sensibility, would never be able to apprehend its true nature. In fact, had his behaviour been simply an idealization of normal human behaviour, I should have been less disposed to regard him as of an essentially different and superior type. On the other hand it should be remembered that, though superior in capacity, he was also juvenile, and may well have suffered in his own way from the inexperience and crudity of the juvenile mind. Finally, his circumstances were such as to warp him, for he found himself alone in a world of beings whom he regarded as only half human.

It was in his fourteenth year that John’s new consciousness of himself first appeared, and shortly after his fourteenth birthday that it expressed itself in what I can only call an orgy of ruthless vamping. I myself was one of the few persons within his circle at whom he never “set his cap,” and I was exempt only because he could not regard me as fair game. I was his slave, his hound, toward whom he felt a certain responsibility. One other who escaped was Judy; for there again he felt no need to enforce his attractiveness, and there again he felt responsibility and affection.

So far as I know, his first serious affair was with the unfortunate Stephen, now a consciously grown-up young man who went to business every day. Stephen had a girl friend whom he took out on Saturdays on his motor-bike. One Saturday, when John and I were returning from a business trip in my car (we had visited a rubber factory), we stopped for tea at a popular roadside café. We found Stephen and his girl inside, almost ready to leave. John persuaded them to “stay and talk to us for a bit”. The girl was obviously reluctant, having perhaps already had reason to dislike John’s behaviour toward her man; but Stephen delayed departure. Then began a most distressing scene. John behaved toward Stephen in a manner calculated to eclipse the young woman at his side. He prattled. He sparkled with just the right standard of wit to fascinate Stephen and pass over the head of his simple companion. He kept the whole conversation well beyond her powers, occasionally appealing to her in a manner likely to trap her into making herself ridiculous. He faced Stephen now with the shy hauteur of a deer, now with seductiveness. He found excuses to move about the room and display his curiously feline, though also coltish, grace. Stephen was obviously captivated against his will, and, I feel sure, not for the first time. Toward the girl his gallantry grew laboured and false. She, poor outclassed little creature, could not conceal her distress, but Stephen never noticed it, for he was hypnotized. At last she looked at her watch and tremulously snapped, “It’s frightfully late. Please take me home.” But even as they were leaving the room John enticed Stephen back for a final sally.

When the couple had gone I told John very emphatically what I thought of his behaviour. He looked at me with the offensive complacency of a cat, then drawled, “Homo sapiens!” Whether he was referring to me or to Stephen was not clear. But presently he said, “Tickle him the right way, and you’ve got him.”

A week later people were talking about the change in Stephen. They said “he ought to be ashamed to carry on that way with the boy,” and that John would be ruined. When I saw the two of them together, I felt that Stephen was struggling heroically against an obsession. He shunned all physical contact with John, but when contact came, either by accident or through John’s contrivance, he was electrified, and could not help prolonging it under a pretence of ragging. John himself appeared to be suffering from a conflict of luxury and disgust. It was clear that he was gratified by his conquest, but at the same time he was repelled. Often he would terminate an amatory brawl with harshness, venting his repulsion by some unexpected piece of brutality, pushing his thumb fiercely into Stephen’s eye, or tearing at his ear. As on an earlier occasion, my disgust and indignation at this kind of behaviour seemed to lead John to self-criticism. He was not above learning from his inferiors. His attitude to Stephen changed back to “man to man” comradeship, tempered by an almost humble gentleness. Stephen, too, slowly woke from his infatuation, but he woke with lasting scars.

For some weeks John refrained, so far as I know, from activities of this kind. But his behaviour toward his elders had become definitely more self-conscious and more body-conscious. He was evidently discovering in his own person an interest which had hitherto escaped him. He studied the art of displaying the bizarre attractiveness of his young body to the best advantage in the eyes of the inferior species. Of course he was far too intelligent to indulge in those excesses of adornment which so often render the adolescent ludicrous. Indeed, I doubt whether any but the most intimate and persevering observer would have guessed that the artistry of his behaviour was at all conscious. That it actually was so I inferred from the fact that it varied according to the standards of his audience, now expressing the crudest sort of self-delight and shameless seductiveness, now attaining to that unadorned and steely grace which was to characterize the later John.

During the eighteen months before he reached the age of sixteen John indulged in occasional and abortive love-affairs with older boys and young men. He was still sexually undeveloped, but imagination forestalled his physique, and made him capable of amatory sensitiveness beyond his years. Throughout this phase, however, he seemed indifferent to the fact that most girls showed some degree of physical repulsion in his presence.

But when he was sixteen, and in appearance a queer sort of twelve-year-old, he turned his attention to woman. For some weeks the girls with whom he came in contact had shown a more positive, often a positively vindictive, attitude to him. This suggests at least that they were being forced to take note of him with new eyes, and that he had already begun to study a new technique of behaviour, directed toward the opposite sex.

Having perfected his technique, he proceeded to use it with cold deliberation upon one of the acknowledged stars of local society. This haughty young woman, who bore the surprising name of Europa, was the daughter of a wealthy shipowner. She was fair, large, athletic. Her normal expression was a rather contemptuous pout, tempered by a certain cow-like wistfulness about the eyes. She had been engaged twice, but rumour affirmed that her experience of the opposite sex had been far more intimate than was justified by mere betrothal.

One afternoon down at the bathing place accident (seemingly) brought John to the notice of Europa. She was lying in the sun, attended by her admirers. Unwitting, she had settled herself close to John’s towel. Her elbow was on the corner of it. John, needing to dry himself after a swim, approached her from behind, mildly tugged at the towel and murmured, “Excuse me.” She turned, found a grotesque young face close to her own, gave a start of repulsion, hastily released the towel, and recovered her composure by remarking to her audience, “Heavens! What an imp!” John must have heard.

Later, when Europa executed one of her admirable dives from the top board, John evidently managed to get entangled with her under water, for they came up together in close contact. John laughed, and broke away. Europa was left gasping for a moment, then she, too, laughed, and returned to the diving platform. John, looking like a gargoyle, was already squatting on one of the boards. As she stretched her arms for the dive, she remarked with kindly contempt, “You won’t catch me this time, little monkey.” John dropped like a stone, and entered the water half a second behind her. After a considerable time they appeared together again. Europa was seen to smack his face, break from his clinging arm, and make for shore. There, she sunned and preened herself.

John now disported himself in her view, diving and swimming. He had invented a stroke of his own, very different from the “trudgeon” which was still at this time almost unchallenged in the remote northern provinces. Lying on his stomach in the water and flicking his feet alternately, while his arms behaved in the ordinary “trudgeon” manner, he was able to outstrip many experts older than himself. Some said that if he would only learn a decent stroke he would develop into a really fine swimmer. No one in the little provincial suburb realized that John’s eccentric stroke, or something very like it, a product of Polynesia, was even then ousting the “trudgeon” from the more advanced swimming circles of Europe and America, and even England.

With this eccentric stroke John displayed his prowess before the reluctantly attentive eyes of Europa. Presently he came out of the water and played ball with his companions, running, leaping, twisting, with that queer grace which few could detect, but by which those few were strangely enthralled. Europa, talking to her swains, watched and was evidently intrigued.

In the course of the game John threw the ball, seemingly by accident, so that it knocked her cigarette from her hand. He leapt to her, sank on one knee, took the outraged fingers and kissed them, with mock gallantry and a suggestion of real tenderness. Every one laughed. Still holding Europa’s hand, he brought his great eyes to bear upon her face, inquiringly. The proud Europa laughed, unaccountably blushed, withdrew her hand.

This was the beginning. There is no need to follow the stages by which the urchin captured the princess. It is enough to dwell for a moment on their relations when the affair was at its height. Little knowing what was in store for her, Europa encouraged the juvenile philanderer, not only at the swimming pool, where they gambolled together, but also by taking him out in her car. John, I should say, was much too wise, and much too occupied with other matters, to make his society cheap. Their meetings were not very frequent; but they were frequent enough to secure his prey.

The metaphor is perhaps unjust. I do not pretend to be able to analyse John’s motives adequately, even the comparatively simple motives of his adolescence. Though I feel fairly sure that the origin of his attack upon Europa was his new craving to be admired by a woman in her prime, I can well believe that, as the relationship developed, he came to regard her in a much more complex manner. He sometimes watched her with an expression in which aloofness struggled not only with contempt but with genuine admiration. His delight in her caresses was doubtless in part due to dawning sexual appreciation. But though he could imaginatively judge her and enjoy her from the point of view of the male of her species, he was, I think, always conscious of her biological and spiritual inferiority to himself. The delight of conquest and the luxury of physical contact with a full-blooded and responsive woman were always for him poisoned by the sense that this contact was with a brute, with something which could never satisfy his deeper needs, and might debase him.

On Europa the relationship had striking effects. The swains found themselves spurned. Bitter taunts were flung. It was said that she had “fallen for a kid, and a freak kid, too.” She herself was obviously torn between the need to preserve her dignity and the half-sexual, half-maternal hunger which John had inspired. Horror at her plight and revulsion from the strangeness of the thing that had enthralled her made matters worse. She once said something to me which revealed the nerve of her feeling for John. It was at a tennis party. She and I were alone for a few minutes. Examining her racquet, she suddenly asked, “Do you blame me, about John?” While I was trying to reply, she added, “I expect you know what a power he has. He’s like — a god pretending to be a monkey. When you’ve been noticed by him, you can’t bother about ordinary people.”

The climax of this strange affair must have happened very shortly after that incident. I heard the story from John himself several years later. He had laughingly threatened to invade Europa’s bedroom one night by way of the window. It seemed to her an impossible feat, and she dared him to do it. In the small hours of the following morning she woke to a soft touch on her neck. She was being kissed. Before she had time to scream a well-known boyish voice made known that the invader was John. What with astonishment, amusement, defiance and sexual-maternal craving, Europa seems to have made but a half-hearted resistance to the boy’s advances. I can imagine that in the grip of his still childish arms she found an intoxicating blend of the innocent and the virile. After some protest and sweet struggle she threw prudence to the winds and responded with passion. But when she began to cling to him, revulsion and horror invaded him. The spell was broken.

The caressing fingers, which at first had seemed to open up for him a new world of mutual intimacy, affection, trust, in relation with a spirit of his own stature, became increasingly subhuman, “as though a dog were smelling round me, or a monkey.” The impression became so strong that he finally sprang from the bed and disappeared through the window, leaving his shirt and shorts behind him. So hasty was his retreat that he actually bungled the descent in a most un-John-like manner, fell heavily into a flower-bed, and limped home in the darkness with a sprained ankle.

For some weeks John was painfully torn between attraction and repulsion, but never again did he climb into Europa’s window. She, for her part, was evidently horrified at her own behaviour, for she deliberately avoided her boy-lover, and when she encountered him in public she acted the part of the remote though kindly adult. Presently, however, she realized that John’s attitude to her had changed, that his ardour had apparently cooled and given place to a gentle and disconcerting protectiveness.

When John took me into his confidence about his relations with Europa, he said, if I remember rightly, something like this. “That one night gave me my first real shaking. Before, I had been sure of myself; suddenly I found myself swept this way and that by currents that I could neither stem nor understand. I had done something that night which I knew deeply I was meant to do, but it was somehow all wrong. Time after time, during the next few weeks, I went to Europa intending to make love to her, but when I found her I just didn’t. Before I reached her I’d be all full of the recollection of that night, and her vital responsiveness, and her so-called beauty; but when I saw her — well, I felt as Titania felt when she woke to see that Bottom was an ass. Dear Europa seemed just a nice old donkey, a fine one of course, but rather ridiculous and pitiable because of her soullessness. I felt no resentment against her, just kindness and responsibility. Once, for the sake of experiment, I started being amorous, and she, poor thing, rejoiced like an encouraged dog. But it wouldn’t do. Something fierce in me rose up and stopped me, and filled me with an alarming desire to get my knife into her breasts and smash up her face. Then something else woke in me that looked down on the whole matter from a great height and felt a sort of passion of contemptuous affection for us both; but gave me a mighty scolding.”

At this point, I remember, there was a long silence. At last John told me something which it is better not to report. I did, indeed, write a careful account of this most disturbing incident in his career; and I confess that at the time I was so deeply under the spell of his personality that I could not feel his behaviour to have been vile. I recognized, of course, that it was flagrantly unconventional. But I had so deep an affection and respect for both the persons concerned that I gladly saw the affair as John wished me to see it. Years later, when I innocently showed my manuscript to others of my species, they pointed out that to publish such matter would be to shock many sensitive readers, and to incur the charge of sheer licentiousness.

I am a respectable member of the English middle class, and wish to remain so. All I will say, then, is that the motive of the behaviour which John confessed seems to have been double. First, he needed soothing after the disastrous incident with Europa, and, therefore, he sought delicate and intimate contact with a being whose sensibility and insight were not wholly incomparable with his own; with a being, moreover, who was beloved, who also loved him deeply, and would gladly go to any lengths for his sake. Second, he needed to assert his moral independence of Homo sapiens, to free himself of all deep unconscious acquiescence in the conventions of the species that had nurtured him. He needed, therefore, to break what was one of the most cherished of all the taboos of that species.

CHAPTER IX. METHODS OF A YOUNG ANTHROPOLOGIST

JOHN HAD BEEN engaged in studying his world ever since he was born; but from fourteen to seventeen this study became much more earnest and methodical than it had been, and took the form of a far-reaching examination of the normal species in respect of its nature, achievement and present plight.

This vast enterprise had to be carried on in secret. John was determined not to attract attention to himself. He had to behave as a naturalist who studies the habits of some dangerous brute by stalking it with field-glass and camera, and by actually insinuating himself among the herd under a stolen skin, and an assumed odour.

Unfortunately, I cannot give at all a full account of this phase of John’s career, for I played but a minor part in it. His disguise was always the precocious but naïve “schoolboy” character which had served him so well in making contact with financiers; and his approach was very often a development of the “gate-crashing” tactics which he had used in the same connexion. This technique was combined with his diabolically skilled vamping. Always his methods were nicely adjusted to the mentality of the particular quarry. I will mention only a few examples, to give the reader some idea of the procedure, and then I will pass on to record some of the ruthless judgements which his researches enabled him to make.

He effected contact with a Cabinet minister by being taken ill outside the great man’s private residence at the moment when the minister’s wife was entering the house. It will be remembered that John had remarkable control over his organic reflexes, and could influence his glandular secretions, his temperature, his digestive processes, the rate of his heart-beat, the distribution of blood in his body, and so on. By careful manipulation of these controls he was able to produce a disorder the symptoms of which were sufficiently alarming though its after-effects were not serious. A pale pathetic wreck, he was laid on a couch and mothered by the minister’s wife while the minister himself phoned for the family doctor. Before the physician arrived, John was already an intriguing little convalescent, and was busy attaching the minister to himself with subtle bonds of compassion and interest. The medical pundit did his best to conceal his bewilderment, and recommended that the boy should rest where he was till his parents were found. But John wailed that his parents were away for the day, and the house would be shut till the evening. Might he stay until their return, and then go home in a taxi? By the time he left the house he had already gained some insight into the mind of his host, and had secured an invitation to come again.

The artificial illness had proved so successful that it became one of his favourite methods. He used it, for instance, to make contact with a Communist leader, supplementing it with an account of his shocking home-conditions since his father “got the sack for organizing a strike.” Variants of the same method of artificial illness, with appropriate religious trimmings, were used also upon a bishop, a Catholic priest, and several other clerical gentlemen. It also proved effective with a woman M.P.

As an example of a different approach I may mention that John bagged an eminent astronomer-physicist by writing him a schoolboyish letter of the naïve-brilliant kind, begging to be shown over an observatory. The request was granted, and John turned up at the appointed rendezvous equipped with schoolcap and a pocket telescope. This meeting led to other connexions among physicists, biologists, physiologists.

The epistolary method was also used upon a well-known Cambridge philosopher and social writer. This time the handwriting was disguised; and, when finally John called on his man, he turned up with dyed hair, dark glasses and a Cockney accent. He intended to assume a very different character from that which had served with the astronomer; and he was anxious to avoid all possibility that the philosopher might identify him as the lad whom the astronomer had encountered.

The letter by which he effected this contact was nicely adapted to its purpose. It combined crude handwriting, bad spelling, dislike of religion, scraps of striking though crude philosophical analysis, and enthusiasm for the philosopher’s books. I quote a characteristic passage:

My father beet me for saying if god made the world he made a mess. I said you said it was silly to beet children, so he beet me again for knowing you said it. I said being abel to beet a fellow didn’t proove he was wrong. He said I was evil to answer back on my father. I said wots good and evil anyhow but just wot I like and dont like. He said it was blastphemy. Please let me call and ask you some questiuns about how a mind works and wot it is.

John had already made several visits to the philosopher’s rooms in Cambridge, when he received a note from the astronomer. I should have explained that a young schoolmaster in a London suburb was allowing John to use his flat as a postal address. The astronomer asked John to come and meet “another very wide-awake boy,” who lived in Cambridge and was a friend of the philosopher. The ingenuity and relish which John displayed in defeating the repeated efforts of both men to bring about this meeting afforded me an amusing sidelight on his character, but I have not space to describe it.

The epistolary approach was used with equal effect upon a well-known modern poet. In this case the style of the letter and the persona which John assumed in the subsequent interviews were very different from those which had served for the astronomer and the philosopher. They were adjusted, moreover, not precisely to the conscious mentality of the poet as he was then known to the public and to himself, but to a mood or attitude in him which was subsequently to dominate his work. I quote the most striking passage from John’s letter:

In all my hideous frustration of spirit, at home, at school, and in my confused attempts to come to terms with the modern world, the greatest comfort and source of strength is your poetry. How is it, I wonder, that, although you seem simply to describe a tortured and degenerate civilization, the very describing lends it dignity and significance, as though revealing it to be, after all, not mere frustration, but the necessary darkness before some glorious enlightenment.

John’s efforts were not directed solely upon the intelligentsia and the leaders of political and social movements. Using appropriate methods, he made friends with engineers, artisans, clerks, dock-labourers. He acquired first-hand information about the mental differences between South Wales and Durham coal-miners. He was smuggled into Trade Union meetings. He had his soul saved in Baptist chapels. He received messages from a mythical dead sister in spiritualists’ séances. He spent some weeks attached to a gipsy caravan, touring the southern counties. This post he apparently gained by showing his proficiency at petty theft and at repairing pots and pans.

One activity he repeated again and again, spending on it a length of time which seemed to me disproportionate to its significance. He became very friendly with the owner of a fishing smack near home, and would often spend days or nights with this man and his mate on the estuary or the open sea. When I asked John why he gave so much attention to the fishing community and these two men in particular, he said, “Well, they’re damned fine stuff, these fishermen, and Abe and Mark are two of the best. You see, when Homo sapiens is up against the sort of job and the sort of life that’s not really beyond him, he’s all right. It’s only when civilization gives him a job that’s too much for his intelligence or too much for his imagination that he fails. And then the failure poisons him through and through.” It was not till long afterwards that I realized his ulterior purpose in giving so much attention to the sea. At one time he became very friendly with the skipper of a coasting schooner, and made several voyages with him up and down the narrow seas. I ought to have realized that one motive of these adventures was the desire to learn how to handle a ship.

One other matter should be mentioned here. John’s study of Homo sapiens now extended to the European Continent. In my capacity of family benefactor I was charged with the task of persuading Doc and Pax to join me on excursions to France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia. John always accompanied us, with or without his brother and sister. Since Doc could not leave his practice frequently or for long at a time, these occasional family holidays had to be supplemented by trips in which the parents did not participate. I would announce that I had to “run over to Paris to a journalists’ conference,” or to Berlin to see a newspaper proprietor, or to Prague to report on a conference of philosophers, or to Moscow to see what they were doing about education. Then I would ask the parents to let me take John. Consent was certain, and our plans were often laid in detail before it was given. In this way John was enabled to carry on abroad the researches that he was already pursuing in the British Isles.

Foreign travel in John’s company was apt to be a humiliating experience. Not only did he learn to speak a new language in an incredibly short time and in a manner indistinguishable from that of the native; he was also amazingly quick at learning foreign customs and intuiting foreign attitudes of mind. Consequently, even in countries with which I was familiar I found myself outclassed by my companion within a few days after his arrival.

When it was a case of learning a language entirely new to him, John simply read through a grammar and a dictionary, took concentrated courses of pronunciation from one or two natives or from gramophone records, and proceeded to the country. At this stage he would be regarded by natives as a native child who had been in foreign parts for some time and had lost touch somewhat with his own speech. At the end of a week or so, in the case of most European languages, no one would suspect that he had ever been out of the country. Later in his career, when his travels took him farther afield, he reckoned that even an Eastern language, such as Japanese, could be thoroughly mastered in a fortnight from his landing in the country.

Travelling with John on the European Continent I often asked myself why I allowed this strange being to hold me perpetually as his slave. I had much time for thought, for John was as often as not away hunting some writer or scientist or priest, some politician or popular agitator. Or else he was getting in touch with the workers by travelling in third or fourth class railway carriages, or talking to navvies. While he was thus engaged he often preferred to be without me. Every now and then, however, I was needed to act the part of guardian or travelling tutor. Sometimes, when John was particularly anxious to avoid giving any suggestion of his unique superiority, he would coach me carefully before the interview, priming me with questions to ask and observations to make.

On one occasion, for instance, he persuaded me to take him to an eminent psychiatrist. John himself played the part of a backward and neurotic child while I discussed his case with the professional man. This interview led to a course of treatment for John, and occasional meetings between the psychiatrist and myself to discuss progress. The poor man remained throughout ignorant that his small patient, seemingly so absorbed in his own crazy fantasies, was all the while experimenting on the physician, and that my own intelligent, though often provoking, questions had all originated in the mind of the patient himself.

Why did I let John use me thus? Why did I allow him to occupy so much of my time and attention, and to interfere so seriously with my career as a journalist? It could hardly be said that he was lovable. Of course, he was unique material for the journalist or the biographer, and I had already decided that some day I would tell the world all that I knew of him. But it is clear that even at this early stage the unfledged spirit of John exercised over me a fascination more subtle than that of novelty. I think I felt already that he was groping towards some kind of spiritual re-orientation which would put the whole of existence in a new light. And I hoped that I myself should catch some gleam of this illumination. Not till much later did I realize that his vision was essentially beyond the range of normal human minds.

For the present the only kind of illumination which came to John was apparently a devastating conviction of the futility of the normal species. To this discovery he reacted sometimes with mere contempt, sometimes with horror at the doom which awaited the human world, and with terror at his own entanglement in it. But on other occasions his mood was compassion, and on others again sardonic delight, and yet on others delight of a more serene kind in which compassion and horror and grim relish were strangely transmuted.

CHAPTER X. THE WORLD’S PLIGHT

I SHALL NOW try to give some idea of John’s reactions to our world by setting down, more or less at random, some of his comments on individuals and types, institutions and movements, which he studied during this period.

Let us begin with the psychiatrist. John’s verdict on this eminent manipulator of minds seemed to me to show both his contempt for Homo sapiens and his sympathetic appreciation of the difficulties of beings that are neither sheer animal nor fully human.

After our last visit to the consulting-room, indeed before the door was closed behind us, John indulged in a long chuckling laugh that reminded me of the cry of a startled grouse. “Poor devil!” he cried. “What else could he do anyhow? He’s got to seem wise at all costs, even when he’s absolutely blank. He’s in the same fix as a successful medium. He’s not just a quack. There’s a lot of real sound stuff in his trade. No doubt when he’s dealing with straightforward cases of a fairly low mental order, with troubles that are at bottom primitive, he fixes them up all right. But even then he doesn’t really know what he’s doing or how he gets his cures. Of course, he has his theories, and they’re damned useful, too. He gives the wretched patient doses of twaddle, as a doctor might give bread pills, and the poor fool laps it all up and feels hopeful and manages to cure himself. But when another sort of case comes along, who is living habitually on a mental storey about six floors above our friend’s own snug little flat, so to speak, there must be a glorious fiasco. How can a mind of his calibre possibly understand a mind that’s at all aware of the really human things? I don’t mean the highbrow things. I mean subtle human contacts, and world-contacts. He is a sort of highbrow, with his modern pictures and his books on the unconscious. But he’s not human in the full sense, even according to the standards of Homo sapiens. He’s not really grown up. And so, though he doesn’t know it, the poor man is all at sea when he comes up against really grown-up people. For instance, in spite of his modern pictures, he hasn’t a notion what art is after, though he thinks he has. And he knows less of philosophy, real philosophy, than an ostrich knows about the upper air. You can’t blame him. His wings just wouldn’t carry his big fleshy pedestrian mind. But that’s no reason why he should make matters worse by burying his head in the sand and kidding himself he sees the foundations of human nature. When a really winged case comes along, with all sorts of troubles due to not giving his wings exercise, our friend hasn’t the slightest perception what’s the matter. He says in effect, ‘Wings? What’s wings? Just flapdoodle. Look at mine. Get ’em atrophied as quick as possible, and bury your head in the sand to make sure.’ In fact he puts the patients into a sort of coma of the spirit. If it lasts, he’s permanently ‘cured,’ poor man, and completely worthless. Often it does last, because your psychiatrist is an extremely good suggestionist. He could turn a saint into a satyr by mere sleight of mind. God! Think of a civilization that hands over the cure of souls to toughs like that! Of course, you can’t blame him. He’s a decent sort on his own plane, and doing his bit. But it’s no use expecting a vet to mend a fallen angel.”

If John was critical of psychiatry, he was no less so of the churches. It was not only with the purpose of studying Homo sapiens that he had begun to take an interest in religious practices and doctrines. His motive was partly (so he told me) the hope that some light might be thrown upon certain new and perplexing experiences of his own which might perhaps be of the kind that the normal species called religious. He actually attended a few services at churches and chapels. He always returned from these expeditions in a state of excitement, which found outlet sometimes in ribald jests about the proceedings, sometimes in almost hysterical exasperation and perplexity. Coming out from an emotional chapel service of the Bethel type he remarked, “Ninety-nine per cent. slush and one per cent. — something else, but what?” A tensity about his voice made me turn to look at him. To my amazement I saw tears in his eyes. Now John’s lachrymatory reflexes were normally under absolute voluntary control. Since his infancy I had never known him to weep except by deliberate policy. Yet these were apparently spontaneous tears, and he seemed unconscious of them. Suddenly he laughed and said, “This soul-saving! If one were God, wouldn’t one laugh at it, or squirm! What does it matter whether we’re saved or not? Sheer blasphemy to want to be, I should say. But what is it that does matter, and comes through all the slush like light through a filthy window?”

On Armistice Day he persuaded me to go with him to a service in a Roman Catholic cathedral. The great building was crowded. Artificiality and insincerity were blotted out by the solemnity of the occasion. The ritual was somehow disturbing even to an agnostic like me. One felt a rather terrifying sense of the power which worship in the grand tradition could have upon massed and susceptible believers.

John had entered the cathedral in his normal mood of aloof interest in the passions of Homo sapiens. But as the service proceeded, he became less aloof and more absorbed. He ceased to look about him with his inscrutable hawklike stare. His attention, I felt, was no longer concentrated on individuals of the congregation, or on the choir, or on the priest, but on the totality of the situation. An expression strangely foreign to all that I knew of him now began to flicker on his face, an expression with which I was to become very familiar in later years, but cannot to this day satisfactorily interpret. It suggested surprise, perplexity, a kind of incredulous rapture, and withal a slightly bitter amusement. I naturally assumed that John was relishing the folly and self-importance of our kind; but when we were leaving the cathedral he startled me by saying, “How splendid it might be, if only they could keep from wanting their God to be human!” He must have seen that I was taken aback for he laughed and said, “Oh, of course I see it’s nearly all tripe. That priest! The way he bows to the altar is enough to show the sort he is. The whole thing is askew, intellectually and emotionally; but — well, don’t you get that echo of something not wrong, of some experience that happened ages ago, and was right and glorious? I suppose it happened to Jesus and his friends. And something remotely like it was happening to about a fiftieth of that congregation. Couldn’t you feel it happening? But, of course, as soon as they got it they spoilt it by trying to fit it all into the damned silly theories their Church gives them.”

I suggested to John that this excitement which he and others experienced was just the sense of a great crowd and a solemn occasion, and that we should not “project” that excitement, and persuade ourselves we were in touch with something superhuman.

John looked quickly at me, then burst into hearty laughter. “My dear man,” he said, and this I believe was almost the first time he used this devastating expression, “even if you can’t tell the difference between being excited by a crowd and the other thing, I can. And a good many of your own kind can, too, till they let the psychologists muddle them.”

I tried to persuade him to be more explicit, but he only said, “I’m just a kid, and it’s all new to me. Even Jesus couldn’t really say what it was he saw. As a matter of fact, he didn’t try to say much about it. He talked mostly about the way it could change people. When he did talk about it, itself, he nearly always said the wrong thing, or else they reported him all wrong. But how do I know? I’m only a kid.”

It was in a very different mood that John returned from an interview with a dignitary of the Anglican Church, one who was at the time well known for his efforts to revitalize the Church by making its central doctrines live once more in men’s hearts. John had been away for some days. When he returned he seemed much less interested in the Churchman than in an earlier encounter with a Communist. After listening to a disquisition on Marxism I said, “But what about the Reverend Gentleman?” “Oh, yes, of course, there was the Reverend Gentleman, too. A dear man, so sensible and understanding. I wish the Communist bloke could be a bit sensible, and a bit dear. But Homo sapiens evidently can’t be that when he has any sort of fire in him. Funny how members of your species, when they do get any sort of real insight and grasp some essential truth, like Communism, nearly always go crazy with it. Funny, too, what a religious fellow that Communist really is. Of course, he doesn’t know it, and he hates the word. Says men ought to care for Man and nothing else. A moral sort of cove, he is, full of ‘oughts.’ Denies morality, and then damns people for not being communist saints. Says men are all fools or knaves or wasters unless you can get ’em to care for the Class War. Of course, he tells you the Class War is needed to emancipate the Workers. But what really gets him about it isn’t that. The fire inside him, though he doesn’t know it, is a passion for what he calls dialectical materialism, for the dialectic of history. The one selfishness in him is the longing to be an instrument of the Dialectic, and oddly enough what he really means by that, in his heart of hearts, is what Christians so quaintly describe as the law of God, or God’s will. Strange! He says the sound element in Christianity was love of one’s fellow men. But he doesn’t really love them, not as actual persons. He’d slaughter the lot of them if he thought that was part of the Dialectic of History. What he really shares with Christians, real Christians, is a most obscure but teasing, firing awareness of something super-individual. Of course, he thinks it’s just the mass of individuals, the group. But he’s wrong. What’s the group, anyhow, but just everybody lumped together, and nearly all fools or pimps or knaves? It’s not simply the group that fires him. It’s justice, righteousness, and the whole spiritual music that ought to be made by the group. Damned funny, that! Of course, I know all Communists are not religious, some are merely — well, like that bloody little man the other day. But this fellow is religious. And so was Lenin, I guess. It’s not enough to say his root motive was desire to avenge his brother. In a sense that’s true. But one can feel behind nearly everything he said a sense of being the chosen instrument of Fate, of the Dialectic, of what might almost as well be called God.”

“And the Reverend Gentleman?” I queried. “The Reverend Gentleman? Oh, him! Well, he’s religious in about the same sense as firelight is sunshine. The coal-trees once lapped up the sun’s full blaze, and now in the grate they give off a glow and a flicker that snugs up his room nicely, so long as the curtains are drawn and the night kept at arm’s length. Outside, every one is floundering about in the dark and the wet, and all he can do is to tell them to make a nice little fire and squat down in front of it. One or two he actually fetches into his own beautiful room, and they drip all over the carpet, and leave muddy marks, and spit into the fire. He gets very unhappy about it, but he puts up with it nobly because, though he hasn’t a notion what worship is, he does up to a point try to love his neighbours. Funny, that, when you think of the Communist who doesn’t. Of course, if people got really nasty, the Reverend would phone the police.”

Lest the reader should suppose that John was not critical of the Communists, I will quote some of his comments on that other Communist, referred to above. “He knows in an obscure way that he’s an utter waster, though he pretends to himself that he’s noble and unfortunate. Of course he is unfortunate, frightfully unfortunate, in being the sort he is. And of course that’s society’s fault as much as his own. So the wretched creature has to spend his life putting out his tongue at society, or at the powers that be in society. He’s just a hate-bag. But even his hate isn’t really sincere. It’s a posture of self-defence, self-justification, not like the hate that smashed the Tsar, and turned creative and made Russia. Things haven’t got bad enough for that in England yet. At present all that can be done by blokes like this is to spout hate and give the other side a fine excuse for repressing Communism. Of course, hosts of well-off people and would-be-well-off people are just as ashamed of themselves subconsciously as that blighter, and just as full of hate, and in need of a scapegoat to exercise their hate upon. He and his like are a godsend to them.”

I said there was more excuse for the have-nots to hate than for the haves. This remark brought from John a bit of analysis and prophecy that has since been largely justified.

“You talk,” he said, “as if hate were rational, as if men only hated what they had reason to hate. If you want to understand modern Europe and the world, you have to keep in mind three things that are really quite distinct although they are all tangled up together. First there’s this almost universal need to hate something, rationally or irrationally, to find something to unload your own sins on to, and then smash it. In perfectly healthy minds (even of your species) this need to hate plays a small part. But nearly all minds are damnably unhealthy, and so they must have something to hate. Mostly, they just hate their neighbours or their wives or husbands or parents or children. But they get a much more exalted sort of excitement by hating foreigners. A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners, a sort of super-hate-club. The second thing to bear in mind is the obvious one of economic disorder. The people with economic power try to run the world for their own profit. Not long ago they succeeded, more or less, but now the job has got beyond them, and, as we all know, there’s the hell of a mess. This gives hate a new outlet. The have-nots with very good reason exercise their hate upon the haves, who have made the mess and can’t clean it up. The haves fear and therefore zestfully hate the have-nots. What people can’t realize is that if there were no deep-rooted need to hate in almost every mind the social problem would be at least intelligently faced, perhaps solved. Then there’s the third factor, namely, the growing sense that there’s something all wrong with modern solely-scientific culture. I don’t mean that people are intellectually doubtful about science. It’s much deeper than that. They are simply finding that modern culture isn’t enough to live by. It just doesn’t work in practice. It has got a screw loose somewhere. Or some vital bit of it is dead. Now this horror against modern culture, against science and mechanization and standardization, is only just beginning to be a serious factor. It’s newer than Bolshevism. The Bolshies, and all the socially left-wing people, are still content with modern culture. Or rather, they put all its faults down to capitalism, dear innocent theorists. But the essence of it they still accept. They’re rationalistic, scientific, mechanistic, brass-tack-istic. But another crowd, scattered about all over the place, are having the hell of a deep revulsion against all this. They don’t know what’s the matter with it, but they’re sure it’s not enough. Some of them, feeling that lack, just creep back into church, specially the Roman Church. But too much water has passed under the bridge since the churches were alive, so that’s no real use. The crowds who can’t swallow the Christian dope are terribly in need of something, though they don’t know what, or even know they’re in need at all. And this deep need gets mixed up with their hate-need; and, if they’re middle class, it gets mixed up also with their fear of social revolution. And this fear, along with their hate-need, may get played on by any crook with an axe to grind, or by any able man with an itch for bossing. That’s what happened in Italy. That sort of thing will spread. I’d bet my boots that in a few years there’ll be a tremendous anti-left movement all over Europe, inspired partly by fear and hate, partly by that vague, fumbling suspicion that there’s something all wrong with scientific culture. It’s more than an intellectual suspicion. It’s a certainty of the bowels, call it a sort of brute-blind religious hunger. Didn’t you feel the beginnings of it in Germany last year when we were there? A deep, still-unconscious revulsion from mechanism, and from rationality, and from democracy, and from sanity. That’s it, a confused craving to be mad, possessed in some way. Just the thing for the well-to-do haters to use for their own ends. That’s what’s going to get Europe. And its power depends on its being a hotch-potch of self-seeking, sheer hate, and this bewildered hunger of the soul, which is so worthy and so easily twisted into something bloody. If Christianity could hold it in and discipline it, it might do wonders. But Christianity’s played out. So these folk will probably invent some ghastly religion of their own. Their God will be the God of the hate-club, the nation. That’s what’s coming. The new Messiahs (one for each tribe) won’t triumph by love and gentleness, but by hate and ruthlessness. Just because that’s what you all really want, at the bottom of your poor diseased bowels and crazy minds. Jesus Christ!”

I was not much impressed by this tirade. I said the best minds had outgrown that old tribal god, and the rest would follow the best minds in the long run. John’s laughter disconcerted me.

“The best minds!” he said. “One of the main troubles of your unhappy species is that the best minds can go even farther astray than the second best, much farther than the umpteenth best. That’s what has been happening during the last few centuries. Swarms of the best minds have been leading the populace down blind alley after blind alley, and doing it with tremendous courage and resource. Your trouble, as a species, is that you can’t keep hold of everything at once. Any one who is very wide awake toward one set of facts invariably loses sight of all the other equally important sets. And as you have practically no inner experience to orientate you, compass-wise, to the cardinal points of reality, there’s no telling how far astray you’ll go, once you start in the wrong direction.”

Here I interjected, “Surely that is one of the penalties of being gifted with intelligence; it may lead one forward, but it may lead one badly astray.”

John replied, “It’s one of the penalties of being more than beast and less than fully human. Pterodactyls had a great advantage over the old-fashioned creepy crawly lizards, but they had their special dangers. Because they could fly a bit, they could crash. Finally, they were outclassed by birds. Well, I’m a bird.”

He paused, and then said, “Centuries ago all the best minds were in the Church. In those days there was nothing to compare with Christianity for practical significance and theoretical interest. And so the best minds swarmed upon it, and generation after generation of them used their bright intelligences on it. Little by little they smothered the actual living spirit of religion, with their busy theorizing. Not only so but they also used their religion, or rather their precious doctrines, to explain all physical events. Presently there came along a generation of best minds that found all this ratiocination very unconvincing, and began watching how things really did happen in physical nature. They and their successors made modern science, and gave man physical power, and changed the face of the earth. All this was as impressive in its own way as the effects of religion had been, real live religion, in a quite different way, centuries earlier. So now nearly all the best minds buzzed off to science, or to the job of working out a new scientific view of the universe and a new scientific way of feeling and acting. And being so impressed by science and by industry and the business attitude to life, they lost whatever trace of the old religion they ever had, and also they became even more blind to their own inner nature than they need have been. They were too busy with science, or industry, or empire-building, to bother about interior things. Of course, a few of the best minds, and some ordinary folk, had mistrusted fashionable thought all the way through. But after the war mistrust became widespread. The war made Nineteenth Century culture look pretty silly, didn’t it? So what happened? Some of the best minds (the best minds, mind you) tumbled helter-skelter back to the Churches. Others, the most social ones, declared that we ought all to live to improve mankind, or to make the future generations happy. Others, feeling that mankind was really past hope, just struck a fine attitude of despair, based either on contempt and hate of their fellows or on a compassion which was at bottom self-pity. Others, the bright young things of literature and art, set out to enjoy themselves as best they might in a crashing world. They were out for pleasure at any price, pleasure not entirely unrefined. For instance, though they demanded unrestrained sexual pleasure, it was to be highly conscious and discriminating. They also demanded aesthetic pleasure of a rather self-indulgent sort, and the thoroughly self-indulgent pleasure of tasting ideas, just for their spiciness or tang, so to speak. Bright young things! Yes, blowflies of a decaying civilization. Poor wretches! How they must hate themselves, really. But damn it, after all, they’re mostly good stuff gone wrong.”

John had recently spent some weeks studying the intelligentsia. He had made his entry into Bloomsbury by acting the part of a precocious genius, and allowing a well-known writer to exhibit him as a curio. Evidently he flung himself into the life of these brilliant and disorientated young men and women with characteristic thoroughness, for when he returned he was something of a wreck. I need not retail his account of his experiences, but his analysis of the plight of the leaders of our thought is worth reporting.

“You see,” he said, “they really are in a sense the leaders of thought, or leaders of fashion in thought. What they think and feel to-day, the rest think and feel next year or so. And some of them really are, according to the standards of Hom. sap., first-class minds, or might have been, in different circumstances. (Of course, most are just riff-raff, but they don’t count.) Well, the situation’s really very simple, and very desperate. Here is the centre to which nearly all the best sensibility and best intellect of the country gets attracted in the expectation of meeting its kind and enriching its experience; but what happens? The poor little flies find themselves caught in a web, a subtle mesh of convention, so subtle in fact that most of them are unaware of it. They buzz and buzz and imagine they are free fliers, when as a matter of fact each one is stuck fast on his particular strand of the web. Of course, they have the reputation of being the most unconventional people of all. The centre imposes on them a convention of unconventionality, of daring thought and conduct. But they can only be ‘daring’ within the limits of their convention. They have a sameness of intellectual and moral taste which makes them fundamentally all alike in spite of their quite blatant superficial differences. That wouldn’t matter so much if their taste were really discriminate taste, but it’s not, in most cases; and such innate powers of precision and delicacy as they actually have get dulled by the convention. If the convention were a sound one, all might be well, but it’s not. It consists in trying to be ‘brilliant’ and ‘original,’ and in craving ‘experience.’ Some of them are brilliant and original according to the standards of your species; and some of them have the gift for experience. But when they do achieve brilliance and experience, this is in spite of the web, and consists at best in a certain flutter and agitation, not in flight. The influence of the all-pervading convention turns brilliance into brightness, originality into perversity, and deadens the mind to all but the cruder sorts of experience. I don’t mean merely crudity in sex-experience and personal relations, though indeed their quite sound will to break the old customs and avoid sentimentality at all costs has led them in the end to a jading and coarsening extravagance. What I mean is crudity of — well, of spirit. Though they are often very intelligent (for your species) they haven’t got any of the finer aspects of experience to use their intelligence on. And that seems to be due partly to a complete lack of spiritual discipline, partly to an obscure, half-conscious funk. You see they’re all very sensitive creatures, very susceptible to pleasure and pain; and early in their lives, whenever they bumped into anything like a fundamental experience, they found it terribly upsetting. And so they formed habits of avoiding that sort of thing. And they made up for this persistent avoidance by drenching themselves in all sorts of minor and superficial (though sensational) experiences; and also by talking big about Experience with a capital E, and buzzing intellectually.”

This analysis made me feel uncomfortable, for though I was not one of “them” I could not disguise from myself that the same sort of condemnation might apply to me. John evidently saw my thoughts, for he grinned, and moreover indulged in an entirely vulgar wink. Then he said, “Strikes home, old thing, doesn’t it? Never mind, you’re not in the web. You’re an outsider. Fate has kept you safely fluttering in the backward North.”

Some weeks after this conversation John’s mood seemed to change. Hitherto he had been light-hearted, sometimes even ribald, both in the actual pursuit of his investigation and in his comments. In his more serious phases he displayed the sympathetic though aloof interest of an anthropologist observing the customs of a primitive tribe. He had always been ready to talk about his experiences and to defend his judgements. But now he began to be much less communicative, and, when he did condescend to talk, much more terse and grim. Banter and friendly contemptuousness vanished. In their place he developed a devastating habit of coldly, wearily pulling to pieces whatever one said to him. Finally this reaction also vanished, and his only response to any remark of general interest was a steady gloomy stare. So might a lonely man gaze at his frisking dog when the need of human intercourse was beginning to fret him. Had any one other than John treated one in that way, the act would have been offensive. Coming from John it was merely disturbing. It roused in me a painful self-consciousness, and an irresistible tendency to look away and busy myself with something.

Once only did John express himself freely. By appointment I had met him in his subterranean workshop to discuss a financial project which I proposed to undertake. He was lying in his little bunk, swinging one leg over the side. Both hands were behind his head. I embarked on my theme, but his attention was obviously elsewhere. “Damn it, can’t you listen?” I said. “Are you inventing a gadget or what?” “Not inventing,” he replied, “discovering.” There was such solemnity in his voice that a wave of irrational panic seized me. “Oh, for God’s sake do be explicit. What’s up with you these days? Can’t you tell a fellow?” He transferred his gaze from the ceiling to my face. He stared. I started to fill my pipe.

“Yes, I’ll tell you,” he said, “if I can, or as much as I can. Some time ago I asked myself a question, namely this. Is the plight of the world to-day a mere incident, an illness that might have been avoided and may be cured? Or is it something inherent in the very nature of your species? Well, I have got my answer. Homo sapiens is a spider trying to crawl out of a basin. The higher he crawls, the steeper the hill. Sooner or later, down he goes. So long as he’s on the bottom, he can get along quite nicely, but as soon as he starts climbing, he begins to slip. And the higher he climbs the farther he falls. It doesn’t matter which direction he tries. He can make civilization after civilization, but every time, long before he begins to be really civilized, skid!”

I protested against John’s assurance. “It may be so,” I said, “but how can you possibly know? Hom. sap. is an inventive animal. Might not the spider some time or other contrive to make his feet sticky? Or — well, suppose he’s not a spider at all but a beetle. Beetles have wings. They often forget how to use them, but — aren’t there signs that Hom. sap.’s present climb is different from all the others? Mechanical power is a stickiness for his feet. And I believe his wing-cases are stirring, too.”

John regarded me in silence. Pulling himself together, he said, as if from a great distance, “No wings. No wings.” Then, in a more normal voice, “And as for mechanical power, if he knew how to use it, it might help him up a few steps farther, but he doesn’t. You see, for every type of creature there’s a limit of possible development of capacity, a limit inherent in the ground plan of its organization. Homo sapiens reached his limit a million years ago, but he has only recently begun to use his powers dangerously. In achieving science and mechanism he has brought about a state of affairs which cannot be dealt with properly save by capacity which is much more developed than his. Of course, he may not slip just yet. He may succeed in muddling through this particular crisis of history. But if he does, it will only be muddling through to stagnation, not to the soaring that even he in his own heart is desperately craving. Mechanical power, you see, is indeed vitally necessary to the full development of the human spirit; but to the subhuman spirit it is lethal.”

“But, how can you know that? Aren’t you being a bit too confident in your own judgement?”

John’s lips compressed themselves and assumed a crooked smile. “You’re right,” he said. “There’s just one possibility that I have not mentioned. If the species as a whole, or a large proportion of the world population, were to be divinely inspired, so that their nature became truly human at a stride, all would soon be well.”

I took this for irony, but he went on to say, “Oh, no, I’m quite serious. It’s possible; if you interpret ‘divinely inspired’ to mean lifted out of their pettiness by a sudden and spontaneous access of strength to their own rudimentary spiritual nature. It happens again and again in individuals here and there. When Christianity came, it happened to large numbers. But they were a very small proportion of the whole, and the thing petered out. Short of that kind of thing, or rather something much more widespread and much more powerful than the Christian miracle, there’s no hope. The early Christians, you see, and the early Buddhists and so on, remained at bottom what I should call subhuman, in spite of their miracle. In intelligence they remained what they were before the miracle; and in will, though they were profoundly changed by the new thing in them, the change was insecure. Or rather the new thing seldom managed to integrate their whole being into a new and harmonious order. Its rule was precarious. The new psychological compound, so to speak, was a terribly unstable compound. Or, putting it in another way, they managed to become saints, but seldom angels. The subhuman and the human were always in violent conflict in them. And so they mostly got obsessed with the idea of sin, and saving their souls, instead of being able to pass on to live the new life with fluency and joy, and with creative effect in the world.”

At this point we fell silent. I relit my pipe, and John remarked, “Match number nine, you funny old thing!” It was true. There lay the eight burnt matches, though I had no recollection of using them. John from his position on the bed could not see the ash-tray. He must have noticed the actual re-lightings. It was simply that he observed whatever happened however engrossed he might be. “You funnier young thing!” I retorted.

Presently he began talking again. He kept his eye on me, but I felt that he was talking rather to himself than to me. “At one time,” he said, “I thought I should simply take charge of the world and help Homo sapiens to remake himself on a more human plan. But now I realize that only what men call ‘God’ could do that. Unless perhaps a great invasion of superior beings from another planet, or another dimension, could do it. But I doubt if they would trouble to do it. They would probably merely use the Terrestrials as cattle or museum pieces or pets, or just vermin. All the same, if they wanted to make a better job of Hom. sap. I expect they could. But I can’t do it. I believe, if I set my mind to it, I could fairly easily secure power and take charge of the normal species; and, once in charge, I could make a much more satisfactory world, and a much happier world; but always I should have to accept the ultimate limitations of capacity in the normal species. To make them try to live beyond their capacity would be like trying to civilize a pack of monkeys. There would be worse chaos than ever, and they would unite against me, and sooner or later destroy me. So I’d just have to accept the creature with all its limitations. And that would be to waste my best powers. I might as well spend my life chicken-farming.”

“You arrogant young cub!” I protested. “I don’t believe we are as bad as you think.”

“Oh, don’t you! Of course not, you’re one of the pack,” he said. “Look here, now! I’ve spent some time and trouble poking about in Europe, and what do I find? In my simplicity I thought the fellows who had come to the top, the best minds, the leaders in every walk, would be something like real human beings, fundamentally sane, rational, efficient, self-detached, loyal to the best in them. Actually they are nothing of the sort. Mostly they’re even below the average. Their position has undermined them. Think of old Z (naming a Cabinet minister). You’d be amazed if you could see him as I have seen him. He simply can’t experience anything clearly and correctly, except things that bear on his petty little self-esteem. Everything has to penetrate to him through a sort of eider-down of preconceived notions, clichés, diplomatic phrases. He has no more idea of the real issues in politics to-day than a mayfly has of the fish in the stream it’s fluttering on. He has, of course, the trick of using a lot of phrases that might mean very important things, but they don’t mean them to him. They are just counters for him, to be used in the game of politics. He’s simply not alive, to the real things. That’s what’s the matter with him. And take Y, the Press magnate. He’s just a nimble-witted little guttersnipe who has found out how to hoax the world into giving him money and power. Talk to him about the real things, and he just hasn’t a notion what you’re driving at. But it’s not only that sort that terrify me with their combination of power and inanity. Take the real leaders, take young X, whose revolutionary ideas are going to have a huge effect on social thought. He’s got a brain, and he’s using it on the right side, and he has nerve, too. But — well, I’ve seen enough of him to spot his real motive, hidden from himself, of course. He had a thin time long ago, and now he wants to get his own back, he wants to make the oppressor frightened of him. He wants to use the have-nots to break the haves, for his own satisfaction. Well, let him get his own back, and good luck to him. But fancy taking that as your life’s goal, even unconsciously! It has made him do damned good work, but it has crippled him, too, poor devil. Or take that philosopher bloke, W, who did so much toward showing up the old school with their simple trust in words. He’s really in much the same fix as X. I know him pretty well, the perky old bird. And knowing him I can see the mainspring of all that brilliant work quite clearly, namely, the idea of himself as bowing to no man and no god, as purged of prejudice and sentimentality, as faithful to reason yet not blindly trustful of it. All that is admirable. But it obsesses him, and actually warps his reasoning. You can’t be a real philosopher if you have an obsession. On the other hand, take V. He knows all about electrons and all about galaxies, and he’s first-class at his job. Further, he has glimmers of spiritual experience. Well, what’s the mechanism this time? He’s a kind creature, very sympathetic. And he likes to think that the universe is all right from the human point of view. Hence all his explorations and speculations. Well, so long as he sticks to science he is sound enough. But his spiritual experience tells him science is all very superficial. Right, again; but his is not very deep spiritual experience, and it gets all mixed up with kindliness, and he tells us things about the universe that are sheer inventions of his kindliness.”

John paused. Then with a sigh he resumed. “It’s no good going on about it. The upshot is simple enough. Homo sapiens is at the end of his tether, and I’m not going to spend my life tinkering a doomed species.”

“You’re mighty sure of yourself, aren’t you?” I put in. “Yes,” he said, “perfectly sure of myself in some ways, and still utterly unsure in others, in ways I can’t explain. But one thing is stark clear. If I were to take over Hom. sap. I should freeze up inside, and grow quite incapable of doing what is my real job. That job is what I’m not yet sure about, and can’t possibly explain. But it begins with something very interior to me. Of course, it’s not just saving my soul. I, as an individual, might damn myself without spoiling the world. Indeed, my damning myself might happen to be an added beauty to the world. I don’t matter on my own account, but I have it in me to do something that does matter. This I know. And I’m pretty sure I have to begin with — well, interior discovery of objective reality, in preparation for objective creation. Can you make anything of that?”

“Not much,” I said, “but go on.”

“No,” he said, “I won’t go on along that line, but I’ll tell you something else. I’ve had the hell of a fright lately. And I’m not easily frightened. This was only the second time, ever. I went to the Cup Tie Final last week to see the crowd. You remember, it was a close fight (and a damned good game from beginning to end) and three minutes before time there was trouble over a foul. The ball went into goal before the referee’s whistle had got going for the foul, and that goal would have won the match. Well, the crowd got all het up about it, as you probably heard. That’s what frightened me. I don’t mean I was scared of being hurt in a row. No, I should have quite enjoyed a bit of a row, if I’d known which side to be on, and there’d been something to fight about. But there wasn’t. It clearly was a foul. Their precious ‘sporting instinct’ ought to have kept them straight, but it didn’t. They just lost their heads, went brute-mad over it. What got me was the sudden sense of being different from every one else, of being a human being alone in a vast herd of cattle. Here was a fair sample of the world’s population, of the sixteen hundred millions of Homo sapiens. And this fair sample was expressing itself in a thoroughly characteristic way, an inarticulate bellowing and braying, and here was I, a raw, ignorant, blundering little creature, but human, really human, perhaps the only real human being in the world; and just because I was really human, and had in me the possibility of some new and transcendent spiritual achievement, I was more important than all the rest of the sixteen hundred million put together. That was a terrifying thought in itself. What made matters worse was the bellowing crowd. Not that I was afraid of them, but of the thing they were a sample of. Not that I was afraid as a private individual, so to speak. The thought was very exhilarating from that point of view. If they had turned on me I’d have made a damned good fight for it. What terrified me was the thought of the immense responsibility, and the immense odds against my fulfilling it.”

John fell silent; and I was so stunned by his prodigious self-importance that I had nothing to say. Presently he began again.

“Of course I know, Fido old thing, the whole business must seem fantastic to you. But, perhaps, by being a bit more precise on one point I may make the thing clearer. It’s already pretty common knowledge of course that another world-war is likely, and that if it does come it may very well be the end of civilization. But I know something that makes the whole situation look much worse than it’s generally thought to be. I don’t really know what will happen to the species in the long run, but I do know that unless a miracle happens there is bound to be a most ghastly mess in the short run for psychological reasons. I have looked pretty carefully into lots of minds, big and little, and it’s devastatingly clear to me that in big matters Homo sapiens is a species with very slight educable capacity. He has entirely failed to learn his lesson from the last war. He shows no more practical intelligence than a moth that has fluttered through a candle-flame once and will do so again as soon as it has recovered from the shock. And again and yet again, till its wings are burnt. Intellectually many people realize the danger. But they are not the sort to act on the awareness. It’s as though the moth knew that the flame meant death, yet simply couldn’t stop its wings from taking it there. Then what with this new crazy religion of nationalism that’s beginning, and the steady improvement in the technique of destruction, a huge disaster is simply inevitable, barring a miracle, which of course may happen. There might be some sort of sudden leap forward to a more human mentality, and therefore a world-wide social and religious revolution. But apart from that possibility I should give the disease fifteen to twenty years to come to a head. Then one fine day a few great powers will attack one another, and — phut! Civilization will have gone in a few weeks. Now, of course, if I took charge I could probably stave off the smash. But, as I say, it would mean chucking the really vital thing I can do. Chicken-farming is not worth such a sacrifice. The upshot is, Fido, I’m through with your bloody awful species. I must strike out on my own, and, if possible, in such a way as to avoid being smashed in the coming disaster.”

CHAPTER XI. STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

THE GRAVE DECISION about the plight of Homo sapiens seems to have occurred at a time when John’s own development had ripened him for a far-reaching spiritual crisis. Some weeks after the incident which I have just described he seemed to retire within himself more than ever, and to shun companionship even with those who had counted themselves among his friends. His former lively interest in the strange creatures among whom he lived apparently evaporated. His conversation became perfunctory; save on rare occasions when he flared up into hostile arrogance. Sometimes he seemed to long for intimacy and yet be quite unable to attain it. He would persuade me to go off with him for a day on the hills or for an evening at the theatre, and after a brave effort to restore our accustomed relationship, he would fall miserably silent, scarcely listening to my attempts at conversation. Or he would dog his mother’s footsteps for a while, and yet find nothing to say to her. She was thoroughly frightened about his state, and indeed feared that “his brain was giving out,” so blankly miserable and speechless could he be. One night, so she told me, she heard sounds in his room and crept in to see what was the matter. He was “sobbing like a child that can’t wake from a bad dream.” She stroked his head and begged him to tell her all about it. Still sobbing, he said, “Oh, Pax, I’m so lonely.”

When this distressful state of affairs had lasted many weeks, John disappeared from home. His parents were well used to absences of a few days, but this time they received a post card, bearing a Scotch postmark, saying that he was going to have a holiday in the mountains, and would not be back “for quite a long time.”

A month later, when we were beginning to feel anxious about him, an acquaintance of mine, Ted Brinston, who knew that John had disappeared, told me that a friend of his, McWhist, who was a rock-climber, had encountered “a sort of wild boy In the mountains of northern Scotland.” He offered to put me in touch with McWhist.

After some delay Brinston asked me to dine with him to meet McWhist and his climbing companion, Norton. When the occasion arrived I was surprised and disconcerted to find that both men seemed reluctant to speak frankly about the incident that had brought us four together. Alcohol, however, or my anxiety about John, finally broke down their reluctance. They had been exploring the little-known crags of Ross and Cromarty, pitching their tent for a few days at a time beside a handy burn or loch. One hot day, as they were climbing a grassy spur of a mountain (which they refused to name) they heard a strange noise, apparently coming from the head of the glen to the right of them. They were so intrigued by its half-animal, half-human character that they went in search of its cause. Presently they came down to the stream and encountered a naked boy sitting beside a little waterfall and chanting or howling “in a way that gave me the creeps,” said McWhist. The lad saw them and fled, disappearing among the birch-trees. They searched, but could not find him.

A few days later they told this story in a little public-house. A red-bearded native, who had not drunk too little, immediately retailed a number of yarns about encounters with such a lad — if it was a lad, and not some sort of kelpie. The good man’s own sister-in-law’s nephew said he had actually chased him and seen him turn into a wisp of mist. Another had come face to face with him round a rock, and the creature’s eyes were as large as cannon balls, and black as hell.

Later in the week the climbers came upon the wild boy again. They had been climbing a rather difficult chimney, and had reached a point where further direct ascent seemed impossible. McWhist, who was leading, had just brought his second man up, and was preparing to traverse round a very exposed buttress in search of a feasible route. Suddenly a small hand appeared round the far side of the buttress, feeling for a hold. A moment later a lean brown shoulder edged its way round into view, followed by the strangest face that McWhist had ever seen. From his description I judged confidently that it was John. I was disturbed by the stress that McWhist laid on the leanness of the face. The cheeks seemed to have shrunk to pieces of leather, and there was a startling brightness about the eyes. No sooner had John appeared than his face took on an expression of disgust almost amounting to horror, and he vanished back round the buttress. McWhist traversed out to catch a view of him again. John was already half-way down a smooth face of rock which the climbers had attempted on the way up and then rejected in favour of the chimney. Recounting the incident, McWhist ejaculated, “God! The lad could climb! He oozed from hold to hold.” When John reached the bottom of the bad pitch, he cut away to the left and disappeared.

Their final encounter with John was more prolonged. They were groping their way down the mountain late one evening in a blizzard. They were both wet through. The wind was so violent that they could hardly make headway against it. Presently they realized that they had missed their way in the cloud, and were on the wrong spur of the mountain. Finally they found themselves hemmed in by precipices, but they roped themselves and managed to climb down a gully or wide chimney, choked with fallen rocks. Half-way down, they were surprised to smell smoke, and saw it issuing from behind a great slab jammed in an angle of rocks beside their route. With considerable difficulty McWhist worked his way by rare and precarious holds over to a little platform near the smoking slab, and Norton followed. Light came from under it and behind it. A step or two of scrambling brought them to the illuminated space between one end of the slab and the cliff. The sides and opposite end of the slab were jammed in a mass of lesser rocks, and held in position by the two sides of the chimney. Stooping, they peered through the bright hole into a little irregular cave, which was lit by a fire of peat and heather. Stretched on a bed of dried grass and heather lay John. He was gazing into the fire, and his face was streaming with tears. He was naked, but there was a jumble of deer-skin beside him. By the fire was part of a cooked bird on a flat stone.

Feeling unaccountably abashed by the tears of this strange lad, the climbers quietly withdrew. Whispering together, however, they decided that they really must do something about him. Therefore, making a noise on the rocks with their boots as though in the act of reaching the cave, they remained out of sight while McWhist demanded, “Is anyone there?” No answer was given. Once more they peered through the tiny entrance. John lay as before, and took no notice. Near the bird lay a stout bone knife or dirk, obviously “home-made,” but carefully pointed and edged. Other implements of bone or antler were scattered about. Some of them were decorated with engraved patterns. There was also a sort of pan-pipe of reeds and a pair of hide sandals or moccasins. The climbers were struck by the fact that there were no traces whatever of civilization, nothing, for instance, that was made of metal.

Cautiously they spoke again, but still John took no notice. McWhist crept through the entrance, noisily, and laid a hand on the boy’s bare foot, gently shaking it. John slowly looked round and stared in a puzzled way at the intruder; then suddenly his whole form came alive with hostile intelligence. He sprang into a crouching posture, clutching a sort of stiletto made of the largest tine of an antler. McWhist was so startled by the huge glaring eyes and the inhuman snarl that he backed out of the cramping entrance of the cave.

“Then,” said McWhist, “an odd thing happened. The boy’s anger seemed to vanish, and he stared intently at me as though I were a strange beast that he had never seen before. Suddenly he seemed to think of something else. He dropped his weapon, and began gazing into the fire again with that look of utter misery. Tears welled in his eyes again. His mouth twisted itself in a kind of desperate smile.”

Here McWhist paused in his narrative, looking both distressed and awkward. He sucked violently at his pipe. At last he proceeded.

“Obviously we couldn’t leave the kid like that, so I asked cautiously if we could do anything for him. He did not answer. I crept in again, and squatted beside him, waiting. As gently as I could I put a hand on his knee. He gave a start and a shudder, looked at me with a frown, as if trying to get things straight in his mind, made a quick movement for the stiletto, checked himself, and finally broke into a wry boyish grin, remarking, ‘Oh, come in, please. Don’t knock, it’s a shop.’ He added, ‘Can’t you blighters leave a fellow alone?’ I said we had come upon him quite by accident, but of course we couldn’t help being puzzled about him. I said we’d been very struck with his climbing, the other day. I said it seemed a pity for him to be stuck up here alone. Wouldn’t he come along with us? He shook his head, smiling, and said he was quite all right there. He was just having a bit of a rough holiday, and thinking about things. At first it had been difficult feeding himself, but now he’d got the technique, and there was plenty of time for the thinking. Then he laughed. A sudden sharp crackle it was that made my scalp tingle.”

Here Norton broke in and said, “I had crawled into the cave by then, and I was terribly struck by the gaunt condition he was in. There wasn’t a bit of fat on him anywhere. His muscles looked like skeins of cord under his skin. He was covered with scars and bruises. But the most disturbing thing was the look on his face, a look that I have only seen on someone that had just come out of the anaesthetic after a bad op. — sort of purified. Poor kid, he’d evidently been through it all right, but through what?”

“At first,” said McWhist, “we thought he was mad. But now I’m ready to swear he wasn’t. He was possessed. Something that we don’t know anything about had got him, something good or bad, I don’t know which. The whole business gave me the creeps, what with the noise of the storm outside, and the dim firelight, and the smoke that kept blowing back on us down the sort of chimney he’d made for it. We were a bit light-headed with lack of food, too. He offered us the rest of his bird, by the way, and some bilberries, but of course we didn’t want to run him short. We asked if there wasn’t anything we could do for him, and he answered, yes, there was, we could make a special point of not telling anyone about him. I said, couldn’t we take a message to his people. He grew very serious and emphatic, and said, ‘No, don’t tell a soul, not a soul. Forget. If the papers get on to my tracks,’ he said very slowly and coldly, ‘I shall just have to kill myself.’ This put us in a hole. We felt we really ought to do something and yet somehow we felt we must promise.”

McWhist paused, then said crossly, “And we did promise. And then we cleared out, and floundered about in the dark till we reached our tent. We roped to get down the rock, and the lad went in front, unroped, to show us the way.” He paused again, then added, “The other day when I happened to hear from Brinston about your lost lad, I broke my promise. And now I’m feeling damned bad about it.”

I laughed, and said, “Well, no harm’s done. I shan’t tell the Press.”

Norton spoke again. “It’s not as simple as that. There’s something McWhist hasn’t told you yet. Go on, Mac.”

“Tell him yourself,” said McWhist, “I’d rather not.”

There was a pause, then Norton laughed awkwardly, and said, “Well, when one tries to describe it in cold blood over a cup of coffee, it just sounds crazy. But damn it, if the thing didn’t happen, something mighty queer must have happened to us, for we both saw it, as clearly as you see us now.”

He paused. McWhist rose from his arm-chair and began examining the rows of books on shelves behind us.

Norton proceeded: “The lad said something about making us realize we’d come up against something big that we couldn’t understand, said he’d give us something to remember, and help us to keep the secret. His voice had changed oddly. It was very low and quiet and composed. He stretched his skinny arm up to the roof, saying, ‘This slab must weigh fifty tons. Above it there’s just blizzard. You can see the raindrops in the doorway there.’ He pointed to the cave entrance. ‘What of it?’ he said in a cold proud voice. ‘Let us see the stars.’ Then, my God, you won’t believe it, of course, but the boy lifted that blasted rock upon his finger-tips like a trap door. A terrific gust of wind and sleet entered, but immediately died away. As he lifted he rose to his feet. Overhead was a windless, clear, starry sky. The smoke of the fire rose as a wavering column, illuminated at the base, and spreading dimly far above us, where it blotted out a few stars with a trail of darkness. He pushed the rock back till it was upright, then leaned lightly against it with one arm, crooking the other on his hip. ‘There!’ he said. In the starlight and firelight I could see his face as he gazed upwards. Transfigured, I should call it, bright, keen, peaceful.

“He stayed still for perhaps half a minute, and silent; then, looking down at us, he smiled, and said, ‘Don’t forget. We have looked at the stars together.’ Then he gently lowered the rock into position again, and said, ‘I think you had better go now. I’ll take you down the first pitch. It’s difficult by night.’ As we were both pretty well paralysed with bewilderment we made no immediate sign of quitting. He laughed, gently, reassuringly, and said something that has haunted me ever since. (I don’t know about McWhist.) He said, ‘It was a childish miracle. But I am still a child. While the spirit is in the agony of outgrowing its childishness, it may solace itself now and then by returning to its playthings, knowing well that they are trivial.’ By now we were creeping out of the cave, and into the blizzard.”

There was a silence. Presently McWhist faced us again, and glared rather wildly at Norton. “We were given a great sign,” he said, “and we have been unfaithful.”

I tried to calm him by saying, “Unfaithful in the letter, perhaps, but not in the spirit. I’m pretty sure John wouldn’t mind my knowing. And as to the miracle, I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “He probably hypnotized you both in some odd sort of way. He’s a weird kid.”

Toward the end of the summer Pax received a post card, saying “Home late to-morrow. Hot bath, please. John.”

On the first opportunity I had a long talk with John about his holiday. It was a surprise to me to find that he was ready to talk with perfect frankness, and that he had apparently quite got over the phase of uncommunicative misery which had caused us so much anxiety before his flight from home. I doubt if I really understood what he told me, and I am sure there was a good deal that he didn’t tell me because he knew I wouldn’t understand. I had a sense that he was all the while trying to translate his actual thoughts into language intelligible to me, and that the translation seemed to him very crude. I can give only so much of his statement as I understood.

CHAPTER XII. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS

JOHN SAID THAT when he had begun to realize the tragic futility of Homo sapiens he was seized with “a panicky sense of doom,” and along with that “a passion of loneliness.” He felt more lonely in the presence of others than in isolation. At the same time, apparently, something strange was happening to his own mind. At first he thought perhaps he was going mad, but clung to the faith that he was after all merely growing up. Anyhow he was convinced that he must cut right adrift and face this upheaval in himself undisturbed. It was as though a grub were to feel premonitions of dissolution and regeneration, and to set purposefully about protecting itself with a cocoon.

Further, if I understood him, he felt spiritually contaminated by contact with the civilization of Homo sapiens. He felt he must for a while at least strip away every vestige of it from his own person, face the universe in absolute nakedness, prove that he could stand by himself, without depending in any way whatever on the primitive and debased creatures who dominated the planet. At first I thought this hunger for the simple life was merely an excuse for a boyish adventure, but now I realize that it did have for him a grave importance which I could only dimly comprehend.

Of some such kind were the motives that drove him into the wildest region of this island. The thoroughness with which he carried out his plan amazed me. He simply walked out of a Highland railway station, had a good meal in an inn, strode up on to the moors toward the high mountains, and, when he judged himself safe from interruption, took off all his clothes, including his shoes, and buried them in a hole among the rocks. He then took his bearings carefully, so as to be able to recover his property in due season, and moved away in his nakedness, seeking food and shelter in the wilderness.

His first days were evidently a terrible ordeal. The weather turned wet and cold. John, it must be remembered, was an extremely hardy creature, and he had prepared himself for this adventure by a course of exposure, and by studying beforehand all possible means of securing food in the valleys and moors of Scotland without so much as a knife or a piece of string to aid him. But fate was at first against him. The bad weather made shelter a necessity, and in seeking it he had to spend much time that might otherwise have been spent in the search for food.

He passed the first night under a projecting rock, wrapped in heather and grass that he had collected before the weather broke. Next day he caught a frog, dismembered it with a sharp stone, and ate it raw. He also ate large quantities of dandelion leaves, and other green stuff which from previous study he knew to be edible. Certain fungi, too, contributed to his diet on that day, and indeed throughout his adventure. On the second day he was feeling “pretty queer.” On the third evening he was in a high fever, with a bad cough and diarrhœa. On the previous day, foreseeing possible illness, he had greatly improved his shelter, and laid by a store of such food as he considered least indigestible. For some days, he didn’t know how long, he lay desperately sick, scarcely able to crawl to the stream for water. “I must have been delirious at one time,” he said, “because I seemed to have a visit from Pax. Then I came to and found there wasn’t any Pax, and I thought I was dying, and I loved myself desperately, knowing I was indeed a rare bright thing. And it was torture to be just wasted like that. And then that unspeakable joy came, that joy of seeing things as it were through God’s eyes, and finding them after all right, fitting, in the picture.” There followed a few days of convalescence, during which, he said, “I seemed to have lost touch completely with all the motives of my adventure. I just lay and wondered why I had been such a self-important fool. Fortunately, before I was strong enough to crawl back to civilization I lashed myself into facing this spiritual decay. For even in my most abject state I vaguely knew that somewhere there was another ‘I,’ and a better one. Well, I set my teeth and determined to go on with the job even if it killed me.”

Soon after he had come to this decision some local boys with a dog came up the hill right on to his hiding-place. He leapt up and fled. They must have caught a glimpse of his small naked figure, for they gave chase, hallooing excitedly. As soon as he was on his feet he realized that his legs were like water. He collapsed. “But then,” he said, “I suddenly managed to tap some deep reserve of vitality, so to speak. I simply jumped up and ran like hell round a corner of hillside, and farther, to a rocky place. There I climbed a pretty bad pitch into a hole I knew of and had counted on. Then I must have fainted. In fact, I think I must have lain unconscious for almost twenty-four hours, for when I came to, the sun seemed to have gone back to early morning. I was cold as death, and one huge ache, and so weak I couldn’t move from the twisted position I was in.”

Later in the day he managed to crawl back to his lair, and with great difficulty moved his bedding to a safer but less comfortable spot. The weather was now hot and bright. For ten days or so he spent nearly all his time creeping about in search of frogs, lizards, snails, birds’ eggs and green stuff, or just lying in the sun recovering his strength. Sometimes he managed to catch a few fish by “tickling” them in a pool in the river. The whole of one day he spent in trying to get a flame by striking sparks from stones on a handful of dry grass. At last he succeeded, and began to cook his meal, in an ecstasy of pride and anticipation. Suddenly he noticed a man, far away but obviously interested in the smoke of his fire. He put it out at once and decided to go much farther into the wilds.

Meanwhile, though his feet had been hardened with long practice at home, they were now terribly sore, and quite unfit for “a walking tour.” He made moccasins out of ropes of twisted grass which he bound round his feet and ankles. They kept in place for a while, but were always either coming undone or wearing through. After many days of exploration, and several nights without shelter, two of which were wet, he found the high cave where later the climbers discovered him. “It was only just in time,” he said. “I was in a pretty bad state. Feet swollen and bleeding, ghastly cough, diarrhœa. But in that cave I soon felt snugger than I had ever felt in my life, by contrast with the past few weeks. I made myself a lovely bed, and a fireplace, and I felt fairly safe from intrusion, because mine was a remote mountain, and anyhow very few people could climb those rocks. Not far below there were grouse and ptarmigan; and deer. On my first morning, sitting in the sun on my roof, positively happy, I watched a herd of them crossing a moor, stepping so finely, ears spread, heads high.”

The deer seem to have become his chief interest for a while. He was fascinated by their beauty and freedom. True, they now depended for their existence on a luxurious civilization; but equally they had existed before there was any civilization at all. Moreover, he coveted the huge material wealth that the slaughter of one stag would afford him. And he had apparently a queer lust to try his strength and cunning against a worthy quarry. For at this time he was content to be almost wholly the primitive hunter, “though with a recollection, away at the back of my mind, that all this was just a process of getting clean in spirit for a very different enterprise.”

For ten days or so he did little but devise means for catching birds and hares, and spent all spare time in resting, recuperating, and brooding over the deer. His first hare, caught after many failures, he took by arranging a trap in its runway. A huge stone was precariously held in position by a light stick, which the creature dislodged. Its back was broken. But a fox ate most of it in the night. From its skin, however, he made a rough bow-string, also soles and thongs for his foot-gear. By splitting its thigh bones and filing them on the rock he made some fragile knives to help him in preparing his food. Also he made some minute sharp arrowheads. With a diversity of traps, and his toy bow and arrows, and vast patience and aptitude, he managed to secure enough game to restore him to normal strength. Practically his whole time was spent in hunting, trapping, cooking, making little tools of bone or wood or stone. Every night he rolled himself in his grass bedding dead tired, but at peace. Sometimes he took his bedding outside the cave and slept on a ledge of the precipice, under stars and driving cloud.

But there were the deer; and beyond them the spiritual problem which was the real motive of his adventure, and had not yet been consciously faced at all. It was clear that if he did not greatly improve his way of life, he would have no time for that concentrated meditation and spiritual exercise which he so greatly needed. The killing of the stag became a symbol for him. The thought of it stirred unwonted feelings in him. “It was as though all the hunters of the past challenged me,” he said, “and as though, as though — well, as though the angels of God ordered me to do this little mighty deed in preparation for mightier deeds to come. I dreamt of stags, of their beauty and power and speed. I schemed and plotted, and rejected every plan. I stalked the herd, weaponless, intent only on learning their ways. One day I came upon some deer-stalkers, and I stalked them too, until they brought down a stag of ten; and how I despised them for their easy slaughter. To me they were just vermin preying upon my game. But when I had thought that thought, I laughed at myself; for I had no more right to the creatures than any one else.”

The story of how John finally took his stag seemed to me almost incredible, yet I could not but believe it. He had marked down as his quarry the finest beast of the herd, an eight-year-old monarch, bearing besides his brow, bay and tray, “three on top” on the right, and four on the left. The weight of antler gave his head a superb poise. One day John and the stag met one another face to face round a shoulder of moor. They stood for full three seconds, twenty paces apart, gazing at one another, the stag’s wide nostrils taking the scent of him. Then the beast swung round and cantered easefully away.

When John described that meeting, his strange eyes seemed to glow with dark fire. He said, I remember, “With my soul I saluted him. Then I pitied him, because he was doomed, and in the prime. But I remembered that I too was doomed. I suddenly knew that I should never reach my prime. And I laughed aloud, for him and for me, because life is brief and wild, and death too is in the picture.”

John took long to decide on the method of his attack. Should he dig a pit for him, or lasso him with a cord of hide, or set a mighty stone to fell him, or pierce him with a bone-pointed arrow? Few of these devices seemed practicable; all but the last seemed ugly, and that last was not practicable. For some time he busied himself making dirks of various kinds, of wood, of the fragile bones of hares, of keen stone splinters from a neighbouring mountain. Patient experiment produced at last a preposterous little stiletto of hard wood pointed with bone, the whole “stream-lined” by filing upon the rock. With this fantastic weapon and his knowledge of anatomy, he proposed to leap on the stag from a hiding-place and pierce its heart. And this in the end he did, after many days of fruitless stalking and waiting. There was a little glade where the deer sometimes grazed, and beside it a rock some ten feet high. On the top of this rock he secreted himself early one morning, when the wind was such that his scent would not betray him. The great stag came round the shoulder of hill, attended by three hinds. Cautiously they sniffed and peered; then, at last, lowered their heads and peacefully grazed. Hour after hour John lay, waiting for the right beast to stray below the rock. But it was as though the stag deliberately avoided the danger-spot. Finally the four deer left the glade. Two more days were spent in vain watching. Not till the fourth day did John leap from the rock upon the back of the grazing stag, bringing it down with its right flank to the ground. Before the creature could regain its feet John had thrust his primitive weapon home with all his weight. The stag half righted itself, wildly swung its antlers, tearing John’s arm, then collapsed. And John, to his own surprise, behaved in a style most unseemly in a hunter. For the third time in his life, he burst into spontaneous tears.

For days afterwards he struggled to dismember the carcass with his inadequate implements. This task proved even more difficult than the killing, but in the end he found himself with a large quantity of meat, an invaluable hide, and the antlers, which, with desperate efforts, he smashed in pieces with a great stone and worked up as knives and other tools, by scraping them on the rocks.

At the end he could hardly lift his hands with fatigue, and they were covered with bleeding blisters. But the deed was accomplished. The hunters of all the ages saluted him, for he had done what none of them could have done. A child, he had gone naked into the wilderness and conquered it. And the angels of heaven smiled at him, and beckoned him to a higher adventure.

John’s way of life now changed. It had become a fairly easy matter for him to keep himself alive, and even in comfort. He set his traps, and let fly his arrows, and gathered his green things; but all was now routine work. He was able to carry it out while giving his best attention to the strange and disturbing events which were beginning to occur within his own mind.

It is obviously quite impossible for me to give anything like a true account of the spiritual side of John’s adventure in the wilderness. Yet to ignore it would be to ignore all that was most distinctive in John. I must at least try to set down as much of it as I was able to understand, for that little seems to me to have real significance for beings of my own species. Even if as a matter of fact I have merely misunderstood what he told me, my misunderstanding afforded at least to me a real enlightenment.

For a time he seems to have been chiefly concerned with art. He “sang against the waterfall.” He made and played his pan-pipes, apparently adopting some weird scale of his own. He played strange themes and figures on the shores of the loch, in the woods, on the mountain-tops, and in his rock home. He decorated his tools with engraved angles and curves consonant with their form and use. On pieces of bone and stone he recorded symbolically his adventures with fish and birds; and with the stag. He devised strange shapes which epitomized for him the tragedy of Homo sapiens, and the promise of his own kind. At the same time he was allowing the perceptual forms with which he was surrounded to work themselves deeply into his mind. He accepted with insight the quality of moor and sky and crag. From the bottom of his heart he gave thanks for all these subtle contacts with material reality; and found in them a spiritual refreshment which we also find, though confusedly and grudgingly. He was also constantly, and ever surprisingly, illuminated by the beauty of the beasts and birds on which he preyed, a beauty significant of their power and their frailty, their vitality and their obtuseness. Such perceived organic forms seem to have moved him far more deeply than I could comprehend. The stag, in particular, that he had killed and devoured, and now daily used, seems to have had some deep symbolism for him which I could but dimly appreciate, and will not attempt to describe. I remember his exclaiming, “How I knew him and praised him! And his death was his life’s crown.”

This remark epitomized, I believe, some new enlightenment which John was now receiving about himself and about Homo sapiens and indeed about all living things. The actual nature of that enlightenment I find it impossible to conceive, but certain dim reflections of it I do seem able to detect, and must try to record.

It will be remembered that John had shown, even as an infant, a surprising detachment and strange relish in situations in which he himself was the sufferer. Referring to this, he now said, “I could always enjoy the ‘realness’ and the neatness of my own pains and griefs, even while I detested them. But now I found myself faced with something of quite a new order of horribleness, and one which I could not get into place. Hitherto my distresses had been merely isolated smarts and temporary frustrations, but now I saw my whole future as something at once much more vivid and much more painfully frustrated than anything I had conceived. You see, I knew so clearly by now that I was a unique being, far more awake than other people. I was beginning to understand myself and discover all sorts of new and exquisite capacities in myself; and at the same time I saw now all too clearly that I was up against a savage race which would never tolerate me or my kind, and would sooner or later smash me with its brute weight. And when I told myself that after all this didn’t really matter, and that I was just a little self-important microbe making a fuss over nothing, something in me cried out imperiously that, even if I was of no account, the things I could do, the beauty I could make, and the worship that I was now beginning to conceive, did most emphatically matter, and must be brought to fruition. And I saw that there would be no fruition, that the exquisite things that it was my office to do would never be done. This was a sort of agony altogether different from anything that my adolescent mind had ever known.”

While he was wrestling with this horror, and before he had triumphed over it, there came upon him the realization that for members of the normal species every pain, every distress of body and mind, had this character of insurmountable hideousness which he himself had found only in respect of the highest reach of his experience, and was determined to conquer even there. It came as a shocking revelation to him that normal human beings were quite incapable of detachment and zest even in sufferings upon the personal plane. In fact he realized clearly for the first time the torture that lies in wait at every turn for beings who are more sensitive and more awakened than the beasts and yet not sensitive enough, not fully awakened. The thought of the agony of this world of nightmare-ridden half-men crushed him as nothing else had ever done.

His attitude to the normal species was undergoing a great change. When he had fled into the wilderness his dominant reaction was disgust. One or two of us he unreasonably cherished, but as a species he loathed us. He had recently seen too much, lived at too close quarters, been fouled and poisoned. His researches into the world of men had been too devastating for a mind which, though superior in quality, was immature and delicate. But the wild had cleansed him, healed him, brought him to sanity again. He could now put Homo sapiens at arm’s length for study and appreciation. And he saw that, though no divinity, the creature was after all a noble and even a lovable beast, indeed the noblest and most lovable of them all; nay further, that its very repulsiveness lay in its being something more than beast, but not enough more. A normal human being, he now ungrudgingly admitted, was indeed a spirit of a higher order than any beast, though in the main obtuse, heartless, unfaithful to the best in himself.

Realizing all this, and realizing for the first time the incapacity of Homo sapiens to accept his pains and sorrows with equanimity, John was overwhelmed with pity, a passion which he had not hitherto experienced in any intensity; save on particular occasions, as when Judy’s dog was run over by a car, and when Pax was ill and in great pain. And even then his pity was always tempered by his assumption that every one, even little Judy, could always “look at it from outside and enjoy it,” as he himself could do.

For many days John seems to have been at grips with this newly realized problem of the absoluteness of evil, and the novel fact that beings that were tissues of folly and baseness could yet be pitiable and, in their kind, beautiful. What he sought was not an intellectual solution but an emotional enlightenment. And this, little by little, he seems to have gained. When I pressed him to tell me more of this strange enlightenment, he said it was just “seeing my own fate and the piteous plight of the normal species in the same way as I had always, since I was a kid, seen bumps and burns and disappointments. It was a case of delighting in their clear-cut form, and in their unity with the rest of things, and the way they — how shall I put it? — deepened and quickened the universe.” Here, I remember, John paused, then repeated, “Yes, deepened and quickened the universe, — that’s the main point. But it wasn’t a case of understanding that they did so, but just seeing and feeling that they did so.”

I asked him if what he meant was some kind of coming face to face with God. He laughed, and said, “What do I know about God? No more than the Archbishop of Canterbury, and that’s nothing whatever.”

He said that when McWhist and Norton came upon him in the cave he was “still desperately puzzling things out,” and that their presence filled him just for a moment with the old disgust at their species, but that he had really done with all that long ago, and when he saw them there, looking so blank, he remembered his first close meeting with the stag. And suddenly the stag seemed to symbolize the whole normal human species, as a thing with a great beauty and dignity of its own, and a rightness of its own, so long as it was not put into situations too difficult for it. Homo sapiens, poor thing, had floundered into a situation too difficult for him, namely the present world-situation. The thought of Homo sapiens trying to run a mechanized civilization suddenly seemed to him as ludicrous and pathetic as the thought of a stag in the driving-seat of a motor-car.

I took this opportunity of asking him about the “miracle” with which he had so impressed his visitors. He laughed again. “Well,” he said, “I had been discovering all sorts of odd powers. For instance I found that by a kind of telepathy I could get in touch with Pax and talk to her. It’s true. You can ask her about it. Also I could sometimes feel what you were thinking about, though you were too dull to catch my messages and respond to me. And I had made queer little visits to events in my own past life. I just lived them again, with full vividness, as though they were ‘now.’ And in a telepathic way I had begun to get something very like evidence that after all I was not the only one of my kind in the world, that there were in fact quite a number of us scattered about in different countries. And then again, when McWhist and Norton appeared in the cave I found that by looking at them I could read the whole of their past lives in their faces, and I saw how thoroughly sound they both were within the limitations of their kind! And I think I saw something about their future, something that I won’t tell you. Then, when it was necessary to impress them, I suddenly got the idea of lifting the roof and clearing away the blizzard so that we could see the stars. And I knew perfectly well that I could do it, so I did it.”

I looked at John with misgiving. “Oh yes,” he said, “I know you think I’m mad, and that all I did was to hypnotize them. Well, put it that I hypnotized myself too, for I saw the whole thing as clearly as they did. But, believe me, to say I hypnotized us all is no more true and no less true than to say I actually shifted the rock and the blizzard. The truth of the matter was something much more subtle and tremendous than any plain little physical miracle could ever be. But never mind that. The important thing was that, when I did see the stars (riotously darting in all directions according to the caprice of their own wild natures, yet in every movement confirming the law), the whole tangled horror that had tormented me finally presented itself to me in its true and beautiful shape. And I knew that the first, blind stage of my childhood had ended.”

I had indeed sensed a change in John. Even physically he had altered strikingly during his six months’ absence. He was harder, more close-knit; and there were lines on his face suggestive of ordeals triumphantly passed. Mentally, though still capable of a most disconcerting impishness, he had also acquired that indefinable peacefulness and strength which is quite impossible to the adolescent of the normal species, and is very seldom acquired even by the mature. He himself said that his “discovery of sheer evil” had fortified him. When I asked, “How fortified?” he said, “My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have felt it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.”

He was right. By what magic he did it I do not know, but in all his future, and in the final destruction of all that he most cherished, he accepted the worst not with resignation, merely, but with a strange joy that must remain to the rest of us incomprehensible.

I will mention one other point that emerged in my long talk with John. It will be remembered that after performing his “miracle” he apologized for it. I questioned him on this matter, and he said something like this: “To enjoy exercising one’s powers is healthy. Children enjoy learning to walk. Artists enjoy painting pictures. As a baby I exulted in the tricks I could do with numbers, and later in my inventions, and recently in killing my stag. And of course the full exercise of one’s powers really is part of the life of the spirit. But it is only a part, and sometimes we are inclined to take it as the whole purpose of our existence, especially when we discover new powers. Well, in Scotland, when I began to come into all those queer powers that I mentioned just now, I was tempted to regard the exercise of them as the true end of my life. I said to myself, ‘Now at last, in these wonderful ways, I shall indeed advance the spirit.’ But after the momentary exaltation of lifting the rock I saw clearly that such acts were in no sense the goal of the spirit, but just a by-play of its true life, amusing, and sometimes useful, and often dangerous, but never themselves the goal.”

“Then tell me,” I said, perhaps rather excitedly, “what is the goal, the true life of the spirit?” John suddenly grinned like a boy of ten, and laughed that damnably disturbing laugh of his. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, Mr. Journalist,” he said. “It is time your interview was concluded. Even if I knew what the true life of the spirit was, I couldn’t put it into English, or any ‘sapient’ language. And if I could, you wouldn’t understand.” After a pause he added, “Perhaps we might safely say this much about it anyhow. It’s not doing any one particular kind of thing, like miracles, or even good deeds. It’s doing everything that comes along to be done, and doing it not only with all one’s might but with — spiritual taste, discrimination, full consciousness of what one is doing. Yes, it’s that. And it’s more. It’s — praise of life, and of all things in their true setting.” Once more he laughed, and said, “What stuff! To describe the spiritual life, we should have to remake language from the foundations upwards.”

CHAPTER XIII. JOHN SEEKS HIS KIND

FOR MANY WEEKS after his return from the wilderness John spent a good deal of his time at home, or in the neighbouring city. Apparently he was content to sink back into the interests of the normal adolescent. He resumed his friendship with Stephen, and with Judy. Often he took the child to a picture show, a circus, or any entertainment suited to her years. He acquired a motor-bicycle, on which, upon the very day of the purchase, Judy was treated to a wild ride. The neighbours said that John’s holiday had done him good. He was much more normal now. With his brother and sister too, on the rare occasions when he met them, John became more fraternal. Anne was now married. Tom was a successful young architect. The two brothers had generally maintained a relation of restrained hostility to one another, but now hostility seemed to have mellowed into mutual tolerance. After a family reunion Tom remarked, “Our infant prodigy’s positively growing up.” Doc was delighted by John’s new companionableness, and often talked to him at great length. Their main topic was John’s future. Doc was anxious to persuade him to take to medicine and become “a greater Lister.” John used to attend to these exhortations thoughtfully, seeming to be almost persuaded. Once Pax was present. She shook her head, smilingly but reprovingly at John. “Don’t believe him, Doc,” she said, “he’s pulling your leg.” In this period, by the way, John and Pax often went together to a theatre or concert. Indeed, mother and son were now seeing a great deal of each other. Pax’s interest in the drama, and in “persons,” seemed to afford him an unfailing common platform. Occasionally they even went up to London together for a week-end, “to see the shows.”

There came a time when I began to feel a certain curiosity as to the meaning of this prolonged period of relaxation. John’s behaviour seemed now almost completely normal. There was, indeed, one unusual but unobtrusive feature about it. In the midst of conversation or any other activity he would sometimes give a noticeable start of surprise. He would then perhaps repeat the immediately preceding remark, whether his own or the other person’s; and then he would look around him with amused interest. I fancied that for some time after such an incident he was more alert than before it. Not that in the earlier stage he had seemed at all absent-minded. He was at all times thoroughly adjusted to his surroundings. But after these curious jerks the current of his life seemed to reach a higher tension.

One evening I accompanied the three Wainwrights to the local Repertory Theatre. During an interval, while we were drinking coffee in the foyer and discussing the play, John gave a more violent start than usual, spilling his coffee into the saucer. He laughed, and looked about him with surprised interest. After a moment’s awkward silence, in which Pax regarded her boy with veiled solicitude, John continued his comments on the play, but (as it seemed to me) with new penetration. “My point is just this,” he said. “The thing’s too lifelike to be really alive. It’s not a portrait but a death-mask.”

Next day I asked him what had happened when he spilt his coffee. We were in my flat. John had come to inquire if the post had brought information about some patent or other. I was at my writing-table. He was standing at the window, looking out across the deserted promenade to the wintry sea. He was chewing an apple that he had picked up from a dish on my table. “Yes,” he said, “it’s time you were told, even if you can’t believe. At present I am looking for other people more or less like me, and to do it I become a sort of divided personality. Part of me remains where my body is, and behaves quite correctly, but the other, the essential I, goes off in search of them. Or if you like, I stay put all the time, but reach out in search of them. Anyhow, when I come back, or stop the search, I get a bit of a jolt, taking up the threads of ordinary life again.”

“You never seem to lose the threads,” I said.

“No,” he answered. “The incoming ‘I’ comes slick into possession of all the past experiences of the residential one, so to speak. But the sudden jump from God knows where to here gives a bit of a jar, all the same.”

“And when you’re away,” I asked, “where do you go, what do you find?”

“Well,” he said, “I had better begin at the beginning. I told you before that when I was in Scotland I used to find myself in telepathic touch with people, and that some of the people seemed queer people, or people in a significant way more like me than you. Since I came home I’ve been working up the technique for tuning in to the people I want. Unfortunately it’s much easier to pick up the thoughts of folk one knows well than of strangers. So much depends on the general form of the mind, the matrix in which the thoughts occur, so to speak. To get you or Pax I have only to think of you. I can get your actual consciousness, and if I want to, I can get a good bit of the deeper layers of you too.”

I was seized with horror, but I comforted myself with incredulity.

“Oh, yes, I can,” said John. “While I’ve been talking, half your mind was listening and the other half was thinking about a quarrel you had last night with — —” I cut him short with an expostulation.

“Righto, don’t get excited,” said John. “You haven’t much to be ashamed of. And anyhow I don’t want to pry. But just now, — well, you kept fairly shouting the stuff at me, because while you were attending to me you were thinking about it. You’ll probably soon learn how to shut me out at will.”

I grunted, and John continued: “As I was saying, it’s much harder to get in touch with people one doesn’t know, and at first I didn’t know any of the people I was looking for. On the other hand, I found that the people of my sort make, so to speak, a much bigger ‘noise’ telepathically than the rest. At least they do when they want to, or when they don’t care. But when they want not to, they can shut themselves off completely. Well, at last I managed to single out from the general buzz of telepathic ‘noise,’ made by the normal species, a few outstanding streaks or themes that seemed to have about them something or other of the special quality that I was looking for.”

John paused, and I interjected, “What sort of quality?”

He looked at me for some seconds in silence. Believe it or not, but that prolonged gaze had a really terrifying effect on me. I am not suggesting that there was something magical about it. The effect was of the same kind as any normal facial expression may have. But knowing John as I did, and remembering the strange events of his summer in Scotland, I was no doubt peculiarly susceptible. I can only describe what I felt by means of an image. It was as though I was confronted with a mask made of some semi-transparent substance, and illuminated from within by a different and a spiritually luminous face. The mask was that of a grotesque child, half monkey, half gargoyle, yet wholly urchin, with its huge cat’s eyes, its flat little nose, its teasing lips. The inner face, — obviously it cannot be described, for it was the same in every feature, yet wholly different. I can only say that it seemed to me to combine the august and frozen smile of a Buddha with the peculiar creepy grimness that the battered Sphinx can radiate when the dawn first touches its face. No, these images fail utterly. I cannot describe the symbolical intention that John’s features forced upon me in those seconds. I can only say that I longed to look away and could not, or dared not. Irrational terror welled up in me. When one is under the dentist’s drill, one may endure a few moments of real torture without flinching. But as the seconds pile up, it becomes increasingly difficult not to move, not to scream. And so with me, looked at by John. With this difference, that I was bound, and could not stir, that I had passed the screaming point and could not scream. I believe my terror was largely a wild dread that John was about to laugh, and that his laugh would annihilate me. But he did not laugh.

Suddenly the spell broke, and I leapt up to put more coal on the fire. John was gazing out of the window, and saying, in his normal friendly voice, “Well, of course I can’t tell you what that special quality is, can I? Think of it this way. It’s seeing each thing, each event, on its eternal side, instead of merely as a dated thing; seeing it as a living leaf on the tree Yggdrasil, flushed with the sap of eternity, and not merely as a plucked and dried and dated specimen in the book of history.”

There was a long silence, then he continued his report. “The first trace of mentality like my own gave me a lot of trouble. I could only catch occasional glimpses of this fellow, and I couldn’t make him take any notice of me. And the stuff that did come through to me was terribly incoherent and bewildering. I wondered whether this was the fault of my technique, or whether his was a mind too highly developed for me to understand. I tried to find out where he was, so that I could go and see him. He was evidently living in a large building with lots of rooms and many other people. But he had very little to do with the others. Looking out of his window, he saw trees and houses and a long grassy hill. He heard an almost continuous noise of trains and motor traffic. At least I recognized it as that, but it didn’t seem to mean much to him. Clearly, I thought, there’s a main line and a main road quite close to where he lives. Somehow I must find that place. So I bought the motor-bike. Meanwhile I kept on studying him. I couldn’t catch any of his thoughts, but only his perceptions, and the way he felt about them. One striking thing was his music. Sometimes when I found him he was outside the house in a sloping field with trees between it and the main road; and he would be playing a pipe, a sort of recorder, but with the octave very oddly divided. I discovered that each of his hands had five fingers and a thumb. Even so, I couldn’t make out how he managed all the extra notes. The kind of music he played was extraordinarily fascinating to me. Something about it, the mental pose of it, made me quite sure the man was really my sort. I discovered, by the way, that he had the not very helpful name of James Jones. Once when I got him he was out in the grounds and near a gap in the trees, so that he could see the road. Presently a bus flashed past. It was a ‘Green Line’ bus, and it was labelled ‘BRIGHTON.’ I noticed with surprise that these words apparently meant nothing to James Jones. But they meant a lot to me. I went off on the bike to search the Green Line routes out of Brighton. It took me a couple of days to find the right spot — the big building, the grassy hill, and so on. I stopped and asked someone what the building was. It was a lunatic asylum.”

John’s narrative was interrupted by my guffaw of relief. “Funny,” he said, “but not quite unexpected. After pulling lots of wires I got permission to see James Jones, who was a relative of mine, I said. They told me at the Asylum that there was a family likeness, and when I saw James Jones I knew what they meant. He’s a little old man with a big head and huge eyes, like mine. He’s quite bald, except for a few crisp white curls above the ears. His mouth was smaller than mine (for the size of him) and it had a sort of suffering sweetness about it, specially when he let it do a peculiar compressed pout, which was a characteristic mannerism of his. Before I saw him they had told me a bit about him. He gave no trouble, they said, except that his health was very bad, and they had to nurse him a lot. He hardly ever spoke, and then only in monosyllables. He could understand simple remarks about matters within his ken, but it was often impossible to get him to attend to what was said to him. Yet oddly enough, he seemed to have a lively interest in everything happening around him. Sometimes he would listen intently to people’s voices; but not, apparently, for their significance, simply for their musical quality. He seemed to have an absorbing interest in perceived rhythms of all sorts. He would study the grain of a piece of wood, poring over it by the hour; or the ripples on a duck-pond. Most music, ordinary music invented by Homo sapiens, seemed at once to interest and outrage him; though when one of the doctors played a certain bit of Bach, he was gravely attentive, and afterwards went off to play oddly twisted variants of it on his queer pipe. Certain jazz tunes had such a violent effect on him that after hearing one record he would sometimes be prostrate for days. They seemed to tear him with some kind of conflict of delight and disgust. Of course the authorities regarded his own pipe-playing as the caterwauling of a lunatic.

“Well, when we were brought face to face, we just stood and looked at one another for so long that the attendant found it uncomfortable. Presently James Jones, keeping his eyes on mine, said one word, with quiet emphasis and some surprise, ‘Friend!’ I smiled and nodded. Then I felt him catch a glimpse of my mind, and his face suddenly lit up with intense delight and surprise. Very slowly, as if painfully searching for each word, he said, ‘You — are — not — mad, NOT MAD! We two, NOT MAD! But these—’ (slowly pointing at the attendant and smiling) ‘All mad, quite, quite mad. But kind and clever. He cares for me. I cannot care for self. Too busy with — with — —’ The sentence trailed into silence. Smiling seraphically, he nodded slowly, again and again. Then he came forward and laid a hand for an instant on my head. That was the end. When I said yes, we were friends, and he and I saw things the same way, he nodded again; but when he tried to speak, an expression of almost comic perplexity came over his face. Looking into his mind, I saw that it was already a welter of confusion. He perceived but could not find any mundane significance in what he perceived. He saw the two human beings that confronted him, but he no longer connected my visible appearance with human personality, with the mind that he was still striving to communicate with. He didn’t even see us as physical objects at all, but just as colour and shape, without any meaning. I asked him to play to me. He could not understand. The attendant put the pipe into his hand, closing the fingers over it. He looked blankly at it. Then with a sudden smile of enlightenment he put it to his ear, like a child listening to a shell. The attendant took it again, and played a few notes on it, but in vain. Then I took it and played a little air that I had heard him play before I found him. His attention was held. Perplexity cleared from his face. To our surprise he spoke, slowly but without difficulty. ‘Yes, John Wainwright,’ he said, ‘you heard me play that the other day. I knew some person was listening. Give me my pipe.’

“He took it, seated himself on the edge of the table, and played, with his eyes fixed on mine.”

John startled me with one sharp gasp of laughter. “God! it was music,” he said. “If you could have heard it! I mean if you could have really heard it, and not merely as a cow might! It was lucid. It straightened out the tangles of my mind. It showed me just precisely the true, appropriate attitude of the adult human spirit to its world. Well, he played on, and I went on listening, hanging on to every note, to remember it. Then the attendant interrupted. He said this sort of noise always upset the other patients. It wasn’t as if it was real music, but such crazy stuff. That was why J. J. was really only allowed to play out of doors.

“The music stopped with a squawk. J. J. looked with a kindly but tortured smile at the attendant. Then he slid back into insanity. So complete was his disintegration that he actually tried to eat the mouthpiece.”

I believe I saw John shudder. He was now standing at the window once more, and he stood silent, while I wondered what to say. Then he exclaimed, “Where’s your field-glass, quick! Damned if that’s not a grey phalarope. Priceless little devil, isn’t he!” In turn we watched the small silvery bird as it swam hither and thither in search of food, heedless of the buffeting wave-crests. Beside the gulls it was a yacht amongst the liners. “Yes,” said John, answering my thought, “the way you feel when you watch that little blighter, just observant and delighted, and — well, curiously pious yet aloof, — yes, that’s the starting-point, the very first moment, of what J. J. was working out in his music. If you could hold that always, and fill it out with a whole world of overtones, you’d be well on the way to ‘us.’ ”

In the tone of John’s “us” there was something of the shy audacity with which a newly married couple first speak of “us.” It began to dawn on me that the discovery of his own kind, even in a lunatic asylum, must have been for John a deeply moving experience. I began to realize that, having lived for nearly eighteen years with mere animals, he had at last discovered a human being.

John sighed, and took up his narrative. “Well, of course James Jones was no good as a partner in the job of founding a new world. I’ve seen him several times since, and he always plays to me, and I come away a little clearer in my head, and a little more grown up. But he’s incurably mad, all the same. So I started ‘listening in’ again; rather gloomily, for I was afraid they might all turn out to be mad. And really the next one almost cured me of looking any more. You see, I was trying to get in touch with the near ones first, because they were handier. I had already spotted a strain of French thinking that must be one of us, and also an Egyptian, and a Chinese or Tibetan. But for the present I left these alone. Well, my next was an infant more or less, the son of a crofter in South Uist (Outer Hebrides). He’s a ghastly cripple; no legs, and arms like a newt’s arms. And there’s something wrong with his mouth, so that he can’t talk. And he’s always sick, because his digestion doesn’t work properly. In fact he’s the sort any decent society would drown at birth. But the mother loves him like a tigress; though she’s scared stiff of him too, and loathes him. Neither parent has any idea he’s — what he is. They think he’s just an ordinary little cripple. And because he’s a cripple, and because they treat him all wrong, he’s brewing the most murderous hate imaginable. Within the first five minutes of my visit he spotted me as different from the others. He got me telepathically. I got him too, but he shut his mind up immediately. Now you’d think that finding a kindred spirit for the first time ever would be an occasion for thanksgiving. But he didn’t take it that way at all. He evidently felt at once there wasn’t room for him and me together on the same planet. But he didn’t let on he was going to do anything about it. He kept his mind shut like an oyster, and his face as blank as a piece of paper. I began to think I had made a mistake, that he was not one of us after all. Yet all the circumstances corresponded with my earlier telepathic glimpses of him, — the minute room with a flagged floor, the peat fire, his mother’s face, with one eye slightly bigger than the other, and traces of a moustache at the corners of her lips. By the way, his parents were quite old people, both grey. This made me curious, because the kid looked about a three-year-old. I asked how old the baby was, but they seemed unwilling to say. I tactfully said the child had a terribly wise face, not like a baby’s. The father blurted out that he was eighteen years old, and the mother gave a high-pitched hysterical sort of laugh. Gradually I succeeded in making friends with his parents. (I had told them, by the way, that I was on a fishing holiday with a party on the neighbouring island.) I flattered them by telling them I had read in a book that deformed children sometimes turned out to be great geniuses. Meanwhile I was still trying to get behind the kid’s defences to see what his mind was like inside. It’s impossible to give you a clear idea of the murderous trick he played on me. He must have made up his mind as soon as he saw me that he’d do me in. He chose the only effective weapon he had, and it was a diabolic one. It happened this way, so far as I can tell you. I had turned from his parents and was talking to him, trying to make friends. He just stared at me blankly. I tried harder and harder to open the oyster, and was just about ready to give up in disgust when, my God, the oyster opened wide, and I — well, this is the indescribable thing. I can only carry on with the image. The mental oyster opened wide and tried to swallow me into itself. And itself was — just the bottomless black pit of Hell. Of course, that sounds silly and romantic to you. But that’s what it was like. I felt myself dropping plumb into the most appalling gulf of darkness, of mental and spiritual darkness, in which there was nothing whatever but eternally unsatisfied black hate; a sort of dank atmosphere of poison, in which everything that I had ever cared for seemed to moulder away into nastiness. I can’t explain, I can’t explain.”

John had been sitting on the corner of my writing-table. He got up suddenly and walked to the window. “Thank God for light,” he said, looking at the grey sky. “If there was some one who could understand, I could tell it all and be rid of it, perhaps. But half-telling it just makes it all come welling up again. And some say there’s no Hell!”

He remained silent for some time, looking out of the window. Then he said, “Look at that cormorant. He’s got a conger fatter than his own neck.” I came up beside him, and we watched the fish writhing and lashing. Sometimes bird and prey disappeared together under water. Once the conger got away, but was speedily recovered. After many failures, the cormorant caught it by the head, and swallowed it, slick, so that nothing was to be seen of it but its tail, and a huge swelling in the bird’s neck.

“And now,” said John, “he’ll be digested. That’s what nearly happened to me. I felt my whole mind being disintegrated by the digestive juices of that Satanic young mollusc. I don’t know what happened next. I remember seeing a perfectly diabolic expression on the kid’s face; and then I must have saved myself somehow, for presently I found myself lying on the grass some way from the house, alone and in a cold sweat. The very sight of the house in the distance gave me the creeps. I couldn’t think. I kept seeing that infantile grin of hate, and turning stupid again. After a while I realized I was cold, so I got up and walked toward the little bay where the boats were. Presently I began to ask myself what sort of a devil this baby Satan really was. Was he one of ‘us,’ or something quite different? But there was very little doubt in my mind, actually. Of course he was one of us, and probably a much mightier one than either J. J. or myself. But everything had gone wrong with him, from conception onwards. His body had failed him, and was tormenting him, and his mind was as crippled as his body, and his parents were quite unable to give him a fair chance. So the only self-expression possible to him was hate. And he had specialized in hate pretty thoroughly. But the oddest thing about it all was this. The further I got away from the experience, the more clearly it was borne in on me that his ecstasy of hate was really quite self-detached. He wasn’t hating for himself. He hated himself as much as me. He hated everything, including hate. And he hated it all with a sort of sacred fervour. And why? Because, as I begin to discover, there’s a sort of minute, blazing star of worship right down in the pit of his hell. He sees everything from the side of eternity just as clearly as I do, perhaps more clearly; but — how shall I put it? — he conceives his part in the picture to be the devil’s part, and he’s playing it with a combination of passion and detachment like a great artist, and for the glory of God, if you understand what I mean. And he’s right. It’s the only thing he can do, and he does it with style. I take off my hat to him, in spite of everything. But it’s pretty ghastly, really. Think of the life he’s living; just like an infant’s, and with his powers! I dare say he’ll manage to find some trick for blowing up the whole planet some day, if he lives much longer. And there’s another thing. I’ve got to keep a sharp look-out or he’ll catch me again. He can reach me anywhere, in Australia or Patagonia. God! I can feel him now! Give me another apple, and let’s talk about something else.”

Crunching his second Cox, John became calm again. Presently he went on with his narrative. “I haven’t done much since that affair. It took me some time to get my mind straight, and then I felt depressed about the chances of ever finding any one anywhere that was really my sort and yet also sane. But after ten days or so I began the search again. I found an old gipsy woman who was a sort of half-baked one of ‘us.’ But she’s always having fits. She tells fortunes, and perhaps has some sort of glimpses of the future. But she’s as old as the hills, and cares for nothing but fortune-telling and rum. Yet she’s quite definitely one of us, up to a point; not intellectually, though she has the reputation of being damnably cunning, but in insight. She sees things on their eternal side all right, though not very steadily. Then there are several others in asylums, quite hopeless. And a hermaphrodite adolescent in a sort of home for incurables. And a man doing a life-sentence for murder. I fancy he might have been the real thing if he hadn’t had a bit of his skull knocked in when he was a kid. Then there’s a lightning calculator, but he doesn’t seem to be anything else. He’s not really one of us at all, but he’s got just one of the essential factors in his make up. Well, that’s all there is of Homo superior in these islands.”

John began pacing the room, quickly, methodically, like a polar bear in its cage. Suddenly he stopped, and clenched his fists and cried out, “Cattle! Cattle! A whole world of cattle! My God, how they stink!” He stared at the wall. Then he sighed, and turning to me he said, “Sorry, Fido, old man! That was a lapse. What do you say to a walk before lunch?”

CHAPTER XIV. ENGINEERING PROBLEMS

NOT LONG AFTER John told me of his efforts to make contact with other supernormals he took me into his confidence about his plans for the future. We were in the subterranean workshop. He was absorbed in a new invention, a sort of generator-accumulator, he said. His bench was covered with test-tubes, jars, bits of metal, bottles, insulated wires, voltmeters, lumps of stone. He was so intent on his work that I said, “I believe you’re regressing to childhood. This sort of thing has got hold of you again and made you forget all about — Scotland.”

“No, you’re wrong,” he said. “This gadget is an important part of my plan. When I have finished this test I’ll tell you.” Silently he proceeded with the experiment. Presently, with a little shout of triumph, he said, “Got it, this time!”

Over a cup of coffee we discussed his plans. He was determined to search the whole world in the hope of discovering a few others of his kind, and of suitable age for joining with him in the founding of a little colony of supernormals in some remote part of the earth. In order to do this without loss of time, he said, he must have an ocean-going yacht and a small aeroplane, or flying machine of some kind, which could be stowed on the yacht. When I protested that he knew nothing about flying and less about designing planes, he replied. “Oh yes, I do. I learned to fly yesterday.” It seems he had managed to persuade a certain brilliant young airman to give him not only a joy-ride but a long spell in control of the machine. “Once you get the feel of it,” he said, “it’s easy enough. I landed twice, and took off twice, and did a few stunts. But of course there’s a good deal more to learn. As for designing, I’m on the job already, and on the yacht design too. But a lot depends on this new gadget. I can’t explain it very well. At least, I can explain, in a way, but you just won’t believe it. I’ve been looking into nuclear chemistry lately, and in the light of my Scotch experiences an idea struck me. Probably even you know (though you have a genius for keeping out of touch with science) that there’s the hell of a lot of energy locked up in every atomic nucleus, and that the reason why you can’t release it is that the unlocking would take a fantastically powerful electric current, to overcome the forces that hold the electrons and protons, and so on, together. Well, I’ve found a much handier key. But it’s not a physical key at all but a psychical one. It’s no use trying to overcome those terrific interlocking forces. You must just abolish them for the time being; send them to sleep, so to speak. The interlocking forces, and the disruptive forces too, are just the spontaneous urges of the basic physical units, call them electrons and protons, if you like. What I do, then, is to hypnotize the little devils so that they go limp for a moment and loosen their grip on one another. Then when they wake up they barge about in hilarious freedom, and all you have to do is to see that their barging drives your machinery.”

I laughed, and said I like his parable. “Parable be damned,” he said. “It’s only a parable in the sense that the protons and electrons themselves are merely fictitious characters in a parable. They’re not really independent entities at all, but determinations within a system — the cosmos. And they’re not really just physical, but determinations within a psycho-physical system. Of course if you take ‘sapient’ physics as God’s truth, and not as an abstraction from a more profound truth, the whole idea seems crazy. But I thought it worth looking into, and I find it works. Of course there are difficulties. The main one is the psychological one. The ‘sapient’ mind could never do the trick; it’s not awake enough. But the supernormal has the necessary influence, and practice makes the job reasonably safe and easy. The physical difficulties,” he said, glancing at his apparatus, “are all connected with selecting the most favourable atoms to work on, and with tapping the flood of energy as it comes into action. I’m working on those problems now. Ordinary mud from the estuary is pretty good for the job. There’s a minute percentage of a very convenient element in it.”

With a pair of tweezers he took a pinch of mud from a test-tube and put it in a platinum bowl. He opened the trap-door of the workshop and placed the bowl outside, then returned, almost closing the trap-door. We both looked through the opening at the little bowl. Smiling, he said, “Now all you little electrons and protons go to sleep, and don’t wake up till Mummy tells you.” Turning to me, he added, “The patter, I may say, is for the audience, not for the rabbits in the conjurer’s hat.”

An expression of grave concentration came over his face. His breathing quickened. “Now!” he said. There was a terrific flash, and a report like a gun.

John wiped his forehead with a grubby pocket handkerchief, and remarked, “Alone I did it!” We returned to our coffee, and his plans.

“I’ve still got to find some really good way of bottling the energy till it’s wanted. You can’t be at one and the same time hypnotizing electrons and navigating a ship. I may simply have to use the energy to drive a dynamo and charge an accumulator. But there’s a more interesting possibility. I may be able, when I have hypnotized the little beggars, to give them a sort of ‘post-hypnotic suggestion,’ so that they can only wake up and barge about again in response to some particular stimulus. See?”

I laughed. We both sipped our coffee. I may as well say at once that the “post-hypnotic” system turned out ultimately to be feasible, and was adopted.

“Well, you can see,” he said, “there are great possibilities in this new dodge of mine. Now, while the yacht and plane are building, you are to come on the Continent with me. (I’m sure Bertha will be glad to have a holiday from you.) I want to do a bit of research. There’s an obviously supernormal mind in Paris, and one in Egypt, and perhaps others, not too far away. When I have the yacht and plane I’ll do the world tour in search of the rest. If I find a few suitable young things, I’ll voyage in the Pacific to find a satisfactory island for the Colony.”

During the next two months John was absorbed in the practical work of designing the yacht and the plane, perfecting the new power technique, and improving his flying.

At this time he was often to be seen “playing at boats” on the Park Lake or the more boisterous Estuary, like any ordinary boy. He was now over eighteen, but in appearance under fifteen. Thus his behaviour seemed quite normal. He produced a large number of models and fitted them out with electric motors or steam engines. These he dispatched across the lake in all weathers, observing their performance with great care. The design was largely determined by the necessity of stowing the plane on board, with wings folded, and by the need for extreme seaworthiness. John’s final choice was an extraordinary craft which local yachtsmen regarded as a mere caricature of a ship. John made a special three-foot model to this design, and fitted her out in great detail. In general shape she was ludicrously broad in the beam, and of shallow draft, in fact an exaggeration of the speed-boat hull; a sort of cross between a speed-boat and a life-boat, with a saucer somewhere in her ancestry, and perhaps a flat pebble of the “ducks and drakes” type. She was certainly a delightful toy; and I feel sure that John thoroughly enjoyed her simply as a toy, and had put much more work into her than was needed for mere experimentation. She represented a vessel the size of a small tug. No detail was omitted from her equipment. There were bunks for nine persons, but twenty could sleep on board at a pinch, and she could be handled comfortably by a single navigator. There was a realistic dining-saloon, with tables, chairs, cupboards. There was a latrine, glass portholes, minute navigation controls. These controls could be operated by some sort of radio device on shore. The engine was a fairly detailed replica of the sub-atomic engine that John intended for the actual ship.

Much entertainment was afforded by the antics which John made his model perform. On the Park Lake he would send her in leisurely pursuit of the terrified ducks. On the estuary, when the tide was in, he would stop her far out at sea, and persuade some kindly member of the sailing club to salvage her in dinghy. When the sweating oarsman had reached the little derelict, and was putting out his hand to seize her, John (on shore, and half a mile away) would set her going for a yard or two and watch the man’s repeated efforts to recover her. Finally he would let her out at full speed for the shore, and she would return to her master’s hand like a well-trained dog.

John had also been at work on several model planes. He used to spend much time flying them; but in secret, for he feared that, if they were seen performing their surprising antics, they would attract too much attention. He therefore used to retire with them into the wilds of North Wales, by means of his motor-bike or my car. There he would try out his models in the fickle mountain winds, their sub-atomic power enabling them to perform feats which no elastic-driven model could possibly achieve.

His final choice was a surprising mechanism, made on the same scale as the model yacht, and capable of being dismantled and stowed on board. With this stub-winged instrument he would amuse himself and me by the hour, making it rise from the surface of a “llyn” (it had both wheels and floats), and climb heavenwards, till we had to use a field-glass to follow it. It maintained its equilibrium automatically, but was steered by radio from the ground. When he had become adept in the management of this mechanical bird, he sometimes used it for a modern sort of hawking, sending the sparrow-like little object in chase of curlews, buzzards and ravens. This sport needed very delicate perception as well as control. As a rule the quarry would hurry away as soon as it realized it was being chased. The plane would then chevy it, or even swoop upon its back. But one old raven turned to fight, and before John could bring his toy’s superior speed into operation for escape, the raven’s horny neb had slashed one of the silken wings, and the plane came tumbling to the heather.

The plans for the yacht and the plane were finished before John reached the age of nineteen. I need not describe how I negotiated with shipbuilders and aeroplane manufacturers, and finally placed orders for the actual construction. I gained the reputation of being a mad millionaire; for the designs appeared to be quite unworkable, and I would not consider any of the objections raised against them. The main trouble was that in both plane and yacht the space allotted to the generation of power was by all ordinary standards quite insufficient. Contracts for the generators and machinery were distributed among several engineering firms in such a manner as to arouse as little curiosity as possible.

CHAPTER XV. JACQUELINE

WHEN THESE PROBLEMS of engineering had been solved, John was able to turn his attention once more to his telepathic researches. As he still looked too young to be wandering about the Continent by himself, he insisted on taking me with him to Paris. When we were approaching our destination he showed signs of eagerness. Well might he, for he expected to find a being who could meet him as an equal and afford him a far more satisfying companionship than any he had yet known. But when we had lodged ourselves in a little hotel in the rue Bertholet (off the avenue de Claude Bernard) he became almost disheartened. When I questioned him he laughed awkwardly, and said, “I’m having a new sensation. I’m feeling shy! She doesn’t seem particularly keen on my coming. She won’t help me to find her. I know she’s somewhere in the Quartier Latin. She passes the end of this street quite often. I know she knows some one is looking for her, and yet she won’t help. Also, she’s evidently very old and wise. She remembers the Franco-Prussian War. I’ve been trying to see what she sees when she looks in a mirror, so as to get her face; but I can’t catch her at the right time.”

At that moment his head jerked, and he said without any pause, “While I was talking to you, I, the real I, was in touch with her. She’s in a certain café. She’ll be there for some time. Let’s find her.”

He had an obscure feeling that the café was near the Odéon, so thither we hastened. After some hesitation he selected a certain establishment, and we entered. As soon as he had passed through the door, he whispered excitedly, “This is it all right. This is the room she is seeing at the moment.” He stood for a second or two, a queer little foreigner, jostled by waiters and a stream of guests. Then he made his way to an empty table at the far side of the room.

“There she is,” said John, with surprise in his voice, almost with awe. Following his gaze I saw at a near table two women. One had her back to us, but I judged that she was under thirty, for her figure was slim and the curve of her cheek almost juvenile. The other was extravagantly old. Her face was a relief map; all ridges and valleys. I studied her with disappointment, for she had a dull and peevish face, and she was looking at John with offensive curiosity.

But now the other woman turned her head and looked about the room. There was no mistaking those large eyes. They were John’s, though heavy-lidded. For a moment they rested on me, then on John. The drooping lids were lifted to reveal two black and lofty caverns more abysmal even than John’s. The whole face lit up with intelligence and amusement. She rose, and advanced toward John, who also rose. They faced one another in silence. Then the woman said, “Alors c’est toi qui me cherches toujours!”

She was not what I had expected. In spite of the great eyes, she might almost have passed for a normal woman, an eccentric specimen of the normal species. Her head, though large, did not look noticeably out of proportion to her body, for she was tall, and the black hair which scarcely showed under her close-fitting hat added little to its size. Her ample mouth, I guessed, had been skilfully reduced by painting.

But though passably “human,” according to the standards of Homo sapiens, she was strange. Were I an imaginative writer, and not merely a journalist, I might be able to suggest symbolically something of the almost “creepy” effect she had on me, something of its remote and sleepy power. As it is I can only record certain obvious features, and in general that curious combination of the infantile or even the foetal, with the mature. The protruding brow, the short broad nose, the great distance between the great eyes, the surprising breadth of the whole face, the marked furrow from nose to lips — all these characters were definitely foetal; and yet the precisely chiselled lips themselves and the delicate moulding of the eyelids produced an expression of subtle experience suggestive of an ageless divinity. To me, at least, prepared of course by familiarity with John’s own strangeness, this strange face seemed to combine idiosyncrasy and universality. Here, in spite of a vaguely repulsive uncouthness, was a living symbol of womanhood. Yet here also was a being utterly different from any other, something unique and individual. When I looked from her to the most attractive girl in the room I was shocked to find that it was the normal beauty that was repulsive. With something like vertigo I looked once more at the adorable grotesque.

While I was watching her, she and John stood regarding one another in complete silence. Presently the New Woman, as I had already cynically named her for my private amusement, asked us to move to her table, which we accordingly did. Her real name was given as Jacqueline Castagnet. The old lady, introduced as Mme. Lemaître, regarded us with hostility, but had to put up with us. She was thoroughly commonplace; yet I was struck with certain points of likeness with Jacqueline, certain indescribable traits of expression and of voice. I guessed that the two women were mother and daughter. Later it turned out that I was right; and yet also quite wrong.

There followed a few aimless remarks, and then Jacqueline began speaking in a language quite unknown to me. For a second John looked surprised, then laughed, and answered, apparently in the same tongue. For half an hour or so they continued speaking, while I laboured to maintain conversation with Mme. Lemaître in very bad French.

Presently the old lady reminded Jacqueline that they were both due elsewhere. When the two women had left us, John and I remained at the table for a while. He was silent and absorbed. I asked what language they had been talking. “English,” he said. “She wanted to tell me a lot about herself, and didn’t want the old one to know about it, so she started in on English-back-to-front. I’ve never tried that before, but it’s quite easy, for us.” There was a faint stress on the “us.” John evidently knew that I felt “left out,” for he continued: “I had better tell you the gist of what she said. The old lady is her daughter, but doesn’t know it. Jacqueline was married to a man called Cazé eighty-three years ago, but she cleared out when the child was four. A few days ago she came across this old thing, and recognized her as her baby daughter, and made friends with her. Mme. Lemaître showed her a photograph ‘of my mother who died when I was quite little — strangely like you, my dear. Perhaps you are some sort of great niece of mine.’ Jacqueline herself was born in 1765.”

John’s account of the amazing life story of Jacqueline I can only summarize. It deserves to be recorded in a fat volume, but my concern is with John.

Her parents were peasants of that bleak country called “Lousy Champagne,” between Châlons-sur-Marne and the Forest of Argonne. They were thrifty even to miserliness. Jacqueline, with her supernormal intelligence and sensibility and her ravenous capacity for life, was brought up in very cramping circumstances. This was probably a cause of the passion for pleasure and power which played so great a part in the earlier phases of her career. Like John, she took an unconscionable time a-growing up. This was a grievance to her parents, who were impatient for her to help in the house and on the land, and later were indignant that at an age when other girls were ready for marriage she was still a breastless child. The life which she was compelled to lead was physically healthy, but devastating to her spirit. She soon realized that she had capacities for all manner of subtle experiences beyond the reach of her fellow mortals, and that the sane course was to devote herself to the exercise of these capacities; but her monotonous and dour existence made it impossible for her to detach herself from the less developed cravings of her nature, the increasing hunger for luxury and power. The fact that she inhabited a world of half-wits was borne in on her most obviously in the perception that the neighbouring peasants’ daughters, though they eclipsed her in normal sexual appeal, were too stupid to make full use of this asset as a means to dominance.

Before adolescence had properly begun, when she was only nineteen, she had already determined to beat them all at their own game, and indeed to become a queen among women. In the neighbouring town of Ste. Menehould she sometimes saw fine ladies passing through in their coaches on their way to Paris, or breaking their journey at the local inn. She observed them with scientific care, and laid the foundations of her future technique.

When she was on the threshold of womanhood, her parents betrothed her to a neighbouring farmer. She ran away. Making full use of her only two weapons, sex and intelligence, she struggled through from the humblest and most brutish sort of prostitution to become the mistress of a wealthy Parisian merchant. For some years she lived upon him, latterly giving him nothing in return but the terrible charm of her society once a week at dinner.

When she had reached the age of thirty-five she fell in love, for the first time in her life, with a young artist, one of those who were preparing the way for the vital and triumphant movement of Parisian painting. This novel experience brought to a climax the great conflict which tormented her. She who had followed the most ancient profession without repugnance was now horrified at herself. For the young man had wakened in her those dormant capacities which had perforce been thwarted by her career. She used her technique to capture him, and easily succeeded. They lived together. For a few months both were happy.

Gradually, however, she came to realize that, after all, she was mated to something which, from her point of view, was little better than an ape. She had known, of course, that her peasant clients, her Parisian clients, and her amiable wealthy patron, were “subhuman”; the artist, she had persuaded herself, was an exception. Yet she still clung to her man. To break with the being to whom she had given her soul, even though in error, would, she felt, have killed her. Moreover, she still genuinely, though irrationally, loved him. He was her almost-human animal. She cared for him as a huntswoman and a spinster might care for her horse. He was not human, and could never be the mate of her spirit; but he was a noble animal and she was proud of his animal attainments, namely of his triumphs in the sphere of “subhuman” art. She entered into his work with enthusiasm. She was not merely his source of inspiration; increasingly she took command of his artistic faculty. The more she possessed him, the more clearly the unhappy man realized that his native genius was being overborne and suffocated by the flood of her fertile imagination. His was a complex tragedy. He seems to have recognized that the pictures which he produced under her influence were more daring and aesthetically more triumphant than anything he could produce without her; but he realized also that he was losing his reputation, that even the most sensitive of his fellow-artists could not appreciate them. He made a stand for independence, and began to regain his self-respect and reputation. On her this turn of affairs had the effect of rousing all her suppressed disgust. Each was striving to be rid of the other, yet each craved the other. There was a quarrel, in which she played the part of the divinity who had come down to raise him to her own level, and was rejected. Next day he shot himself.

This tragedy evidently had a profound effect on her still juvenile mind. The finality of the deed bred in her a new tenderness and respect for the subhuman beings who surrounded her. Somehow this death lessened the distance between her and them. Though her passion for self-expression soon returned, and though she sometimes indulged it ruthlessly, it was tempered by the recollection that she had killed the one being in the world who for a whole month had seemed to her superior to herself.

For a few years after the death of the artist Jacqueline lived in great poverty on savings which she had accumulated in her association with the merchant. She tried to make a name for herself as a writer, under a masculine pseudonym; but the stuff which she produced was too remote to be appreciated, and she could not bring herself to write in a different vein. When she was in her forties, and still in the first flush of maturity, her obsessive craving for luxury and power returned with such insistence that, in a panic, she became a nun. She did not believe any of the explicit doctrines of the Church; but she made up her mind to pay lip service to all its superstitions for the sake of its bicker of genuine and corporate religious experience, which, she felt, she needed for the strengthening of her better nature. Her presence in the nunnery, however, very soon caused such an upheaval that the institution was finally disbanded, and Jacqueline, with bitter laughter in her heart, returned to her original calling.

But to her own surprise prostitution now afforded her something more than the means to wealth and power. Her experience in the nunnery had not been wholly barren. She had learned a good deal about the spiritual cravings of the subhuman kind; and this knowledge she now put to good use. Her motive in returning to prostitution had been purely self-regarding, but she soon discovered that the more human of her clients were suffering from an unconscious need for something more than carnal satisfaction. And she found exaltation in ministering to this essentially spiritual need. Carnal satisfaction she gave ungrudgingly. Her own initial distaste at intercourse with beings of a lowly order gave way to delight in her new office. Many a man whose real need was not merely copulation but intimacy with a sensitive yet fearless woman, many who needed moreover help in the seemingly hopeless task of “coming to terms with the universe,” found in Jacqueline a well of strength. As her reputation grew, ever greater demands were made on her. Hoping to save herself from a breakdown, she chose disciples, young women who were ready to live her life and give themselves as she gave herself. Some of them were partially successful, but none could do as she had done. The strain increased until at last she fell seriously ill.

When she recovered, her old self-seeking passion was once more uppermost. Using all her prowess she fought her way up the social ladder of Europe, till, at fifty-seven and on the threshold of full maturity, she married a Russian prince. She did so knowing that he was a worthless creature and a half-wit, even by normal standards. So skilfully did she play her cards during the next fifteen years that she had a good prospect of setting him on the throne. Increasing disgust and horror, however, flung her into another mental disorder. From this she emerged once more her true self. She cut adrift, disguised herself, and fled back to Paris to carry on her old profession. Occasionally she met one or other of her former clients, now well advanced in years. But as she herself had retained her youthful appearance, and indeed seemed to have the full flower of womanhood still ahead of her, she easily persuaded them that she was the former Jacqueline’s young niece.

All this while she had never had a child, never conceived. In her early years she had taken precaution to avoid such a disaster; but in maturity, though she had felt no craving for motherhood, she had been less reluctant to risk it, and less cautious. As the decades passed and her remaining caution dwindled out, she came to suspect that she was sterile, and in the end she ceased to take any precautions at all. On her return from Russia an obscure sense that in missing motherhood she had missed a valuable experience developed into a definite hunger to have a baby of her own.

Not a few of her clients had tried to persuade her to accept marriage. Hitherto she had laughed at these suitors, but when she had passed her eightieth year, she began to be seriously attracted by the prospect of a spell of quiet married life. Among her clients was a young Parisian lawyer, Jean Cazé. Whether he was in fact the father of her child she did not know; but when, to her amazement, she found that she had conceived, she singled him out as a suitable husband. He, it so happened, had never thought of marrying her; but when she had slipped the idea into his mind, he pressed her ardently, overcame her feigned reluctance and carried her off in pride. After eleven months of pregnancy she bore her daughter, and very nearly died in the ordeal. Four years of maternal duties and of companionship with the faithful Cazé were enough for her. Jean, she knew, would treasure the infant; and indeed he did, to the extent of spoiling her for life. Jacqueline fled not only from Paris but from France, and started all over again in Dresden.

Throughout the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century Jacqueline appears to have had alternating spells of exalted prostitution and marriage. She counted among her husbands, she said, a British ambassador, a famous writer, and a West African Negro who was a private in the French colonial army. Never again did she conceive. Probably John was right in surmising that she had the power of preventing conception by an act of volition, though she had no idea how she exercised this power.

Since the close of the nineteenth century Jacqueline had not indulged in marriage. She had preferred to carry on her profession, because of her “great affection for the dear children,” by which she meant her clients. Hers must have been a strange life. Of course she gave herself for money, like any member of her profession, or of any other profession. Nevertheless, her heart was in her work, and she chose her clients, not according to their power to pay, but according to their needs and their capacity to benefit by her ministrations. She seems to have combined in her person the functions of harlot, psycho-analyst and priest.

During the war of 1914-18 she was drawn into overstraining herself once more. So many tragic cases came her way. And after the war, being wholly without national prejudices, she moved to Germany, where the need was greater. It was in Germany, in 1925, that she had once more collapsed, and was forced to spend a year in a “mental home.” When we met her she was again established in Paris, and again at work.

On the day after our meeting in the café John had left me to amuse myself as best I could while he visited Jacqueline. He stayed away four days, and when he returned he was haggard and obviously in great distress. Not till long afterwards could he bring himself to tell the cause of his misery, and then he said only, “She’s glorious, and hurt, and I can’t help her, and she won’t help me. She was terribly kind and sweet to me. Said she had never met any one like me, wished we’d met a hundred years ago. She says my work is going to be great. But really she thinks it’s just schoolboy adventure, no more.”

CHAPTER XVI. ADLAN

JOHN CONTINUED HIS search. I accompanied him. I shall not at this stage describe the few suitable supernormal youngsters whom he discovered and persuaded to prepare themselves for the great adventure. There was a young girl in Marseilles, an older girl in Moscow, a boy in Finland, a girl in Sweden, another in Hungary, and a young man in Turkey. Save for these, John found nothing but lunatics, cripples, invalids, and inveterate old vagabonds in whom the superior mentality had been hopelessly distorted by contact with the normal species.

But in Egypt John actually met his superior. This incident was so strange that I hesitate to record it, or even to believe it myself.

John had for long been convinced that a very remarkable mind was secreted somewhere in the Levant or the Nile Delta. From Turkey we took ship to Alexandria. Thence, after further investigation, we moved to Port Saïd. Here we spent some weeks. As far as I was concerned, they were weeks of idleness. There was nothing for me to do but to play tennis, bathe and indulge in mild flirtations. John himself seemed to be idling. He bathed, rowed in the harbour, wandered about the town. He was unusually absent-minded, and sometimes almost irritable.

When Port Saïd was beginning to bore me excessively, I suggested that we should try Cairo. “Go yourself,” said John, “if you want to, but I’m staying here. I’m busy.” I therefore took him at his word, and crossed the Delta by train. Long before we reached Cairo the Great Pyramids came into view, overtopping the palm trees and the unseen city. I shall not forget that first glimpse of them, for later it seemed to symbolize the experience that John himself was passing through in Port Saïd. They were grey-blue, in the blue sky. They were curiously simple, remote, secure.

I took a room at Shepheard’s Hotel, and gave myself over to sight-seeing. One day, about three weeks after I left Port Saïd, a telegram came from John. It said merely, “Home, John.” Nothing loath, I packed my traps and took the next tram for Port Saïd.

As soon as I arrived, John made me book accommodation for three to Toulon by an Orient boat that was due to pass through the Canal a few days later. The new member of the party, he said, was on his way from Upper Egypt, and would join us as soon as he could. Before giving details of our future fellow passenger I must try to report what John told me of the very different being with whom he was in contact during my absence in Cairo.

“You see,” he said, “the fellow I was after (Adlan, by name) turned out to have died thirty-five years ago. He was trying to get me from his place in the past, and at first I didn’t realize. When at last we effected some sort of communication, he managed to show me what he was seeing, and I noticed that the steamers in the harbour were all little low old things with yards on their masts. Also there wasn’t any Canal Company’s Building where it ought to have been. (You know, the green-domed thing.) You can imagine how exciting this was. It took me a long time to get myself into the past instead of his coming to me in the present.”

John’s story must be condensed. In order to secure a less precarious footing in the past, John, under Adlan’s direction, made the acquaintance of a middle-aged Englishman, a ship-chandler, who had spent much of his childhood in Port Saïd in Adlan’s time. This Anglo-Egyptian, Harry Robinson, was easily persuaded to talk about his early experiences, and to describe Adlan, whom he used at one time to meet almost daily. John soon made himself familiar with Robinson’s mind to such an extent that he was able to reach back and establish himself quite firmly in the child Harry and in the Port Saïd that had long since vanished.

Seen through Harry’s eyes. Adlan turned out to be an aged and poverty-stricken native boatman. His face, John said, was like a mummy’s, black and pinched and drawn, but very much alive, with a frequent and rather grim smile. His gigantic head bore upon its summit a fez which was ridiculously small for it. When, as occasionally happened, this covering fell off, his cranium was seen to be perfectly bald. John said it reminded him of a dark and polished and curiously moulded lump of wood. He had the typical great eyes, one of which was bloodshot, and running with yellow mucus. Like so many natives, he had suffered from ophthalmia. His bare brown legs and feet were covered with scars. Several toe-nails had been lost.

Adlan made his living by ferrying passengers between the liners and the shore, and by transporting European residents to and from the “bathhouses” — wooden erections built out over the sea on angle-irons. The Robinson family hired Adlan and his boat several times a week to row them across the harbour to their “bath house.” He had to wait while they bathed and lunched. Then he would row them back to the town. It was while Adlan was tugging at the oars in his long-prowed and gaily painted boat, and while Harry was prattling to his parents or his sister or even to Adlan himself, that John, regarding the scene through Harry’s eyes, carried on his telepathic conversations with the unique Egyptian.

John’s projection of his mind into the past took him back to the year 1896. At this time Adlan claimed that he was three hundred and eighty-four years old. John would have been less inclined to believe this before he met Jacqueline, but by now he was ready to accept it. Adlan, then, was born in 1512, somewhere in the Soudan. Most of his first century was spent as the wise man of his tribe, but in the end he resolved to exchange his primitive environment for something more civilized. He travelled down the Nile, and settled in Cairo, where in time he gained a reputation as a sorcerer. During the seventeenth century he played an active part in the turbulent political life of Egypt, and was at one time the power behind the throne. But political activities could not satisfy him. He was drawn into them much as an intelligent spectator might be drawn into a game of chess played by blockheads. He could not help seeing how the game might be played most effectively, and presently he found himself playing it. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, he became more and more absorbed in the development of his “occult” powers, and chiefly his most recent art, that of projecting himself into the past.

A few years before Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition Adlan broke with his political life entirely by faking a suicide. For some years he continued to live in Cairo, but in complete obscurity and very humble circumstances. He made his living as a water-carrier, driving his ass, laden with swollen and dripping skins, along the dusty streets. Meanwhile he continued to improve his supernormal powers, and would sometimes use them to practise psycho-therapy upon his fellow-proletarians. But his chief interest was exploration of the past. At this time the knowledge of Ancient Egypt was extremely scanty, and Adlan’s passion was to gain direct experience of the great race of long ago. Hitherto his powers had only enabled him to reach a few years back, to events which occurred in an environment similar to his own. But presently he determined to bury himself in some obscure village and till the soil of the Delta, entering into the life of the primitive agriculturalists whose customs and culture had probably changed little since the days of the Pharaohs. For many decades he wielded the hoe and the shadoof; and in due course he learned to be almost as familiar with ancient Memphis as with modern Cairo.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, when he was still in appearance no more than middle-aged, he conceived the need to explore other cultures. For this purpose he settled in Alexandria, and took up his old profession of water-carrier. Here, with less ease and less success than in his study of Ancient Egypt, he made his entry into Ancient Greece, learning to project himself into the era of the great Library, and even into Greece itself of the age of Plato.

Not till the last quarter of the nineteenth century did Adlan ride his donkey along the strip of sand between Lake Menzaleh and the sea, and settle in Port Saïd, once more as a water-carrier. He did not practise his old profession exclusively. Sometimes he would hire out his donkey to a European passenger, ashore for the day. Then he would run barefoot behind the tall white ass, affectionately whacking its hind-quarters, and crying “Haa! Haa!” Once, when his beast, which he called “Two Lovely Black Eyes,” was stolen, he ran thirty miles in chase of it, following its footprints on the moist shore. When at last he overtook the thief, he battered him, and returned in triumph on the ass. Sometimes he would board the liners and amuse the passengers with conjuring tricks with rings and balls and restless little yellow chicks. Sometimes he would sell them silk or jewellery.

Adlan’s object in moving to Port Saïd had been to put himself into touch with contemporary European life and thought, and if possible to make some kind of contact with India and China. The Canal was by now the most cosmopolitan spot in all the world. Levantines, Greeks, Russians, Lascars, Chinese firemen, Europeans on their way to the East, Asiatics on their way to London and Paris, Moslem pilgrims on their way to Mecca, — all passed through Port Saïd. Scores of races, scores of languages, scores of religions and cultures jostled one another in that most flagrantly mongrel town.

Adlan soon learned how to get the best out of his new environment. His methods were diverse, but all depended chiefly on telepathy and extreme intelligence. He constructed little by little in his own mind a very clear picture of European, and even Indian and Chinese culture. He did not, indeed, find any culture ready to hand in the minds of the beings with whom he made contact in Port Saïd, for they, residents and passengers alike, were nearly all quite philistine. But by a brilliant process of inference from the meagre and incoherent traces of thought in these migrants he was able to reconstruct the cultural matrix in which they had developed. This method he supplemented by reading books lent him by a shipping agent who had a liking for literature. He learned also to extend his telepathic reach to such an extent that, by conjuring up all that he knew of John Ruskin (let us say), he could make contact with that didactic sage in his remote home by Coniston Water.

Presently it became evident to Adlan that the really interesting period of European thought lay in the future. Could he, then, explore the future as he had explored the past? This proved a far more difficult task, and one which he could never have performed at all effectively had he not, by great good luck, discovered John, a mind of somewhat the same calibre as his own. He conceived the idea of teaching that fellow-supernormal to reach back into the past to him, so that he himself might learn about the future without the precarious and dangerous labour of projecting himself into it.

I was surprised to hear from John, that, though only a few weeks had passed since our arrival in Egypt, he had in that period spent many months with Adlan. Or perhaps I should say that his interviews with Adlan (through the mind of Harry) were distributed over a period of many months in Adlan’s life. Day after day the old man would ferry the Robinsons to their bathhouse, pulling steadily at his battered oars, and prattling in kitchen Arabic to Harry about ships and camels. And at the same time he would be carrying on a most earnest and subtle telepathic conversation with John about relativity or the quantum theory or the economic determination of history. John was soon convinced that he had encountered a mind which either through native superiority or through prolonged meditation was far in advance of his own, even in ability to cope with Western European culture. But Adlan’s brilliance made his way of life seem all the more perplexing. With some complacency John assured himself that if he were to live as long as Adlan he would not have to spend his old age toiling for a pittance from Homo sapiens. But before he parted from Adlan he began to take a humbler view of himself and a more respectful attitude to Adlan.

The old man was greatly interested in John’s biological knowledge, and its bearing upon himself and John. “Yes,” he said, “we are very different from other men. I have known it since I was eight. Indeed these creatures that surround us are scarcely men at all. But perhaps, my son, you take that difference too seriously. No, I should not say that. What I mean is that though for you this project of founding the new species is the true way, for me there is another way. And each of us must serve Allah in the way that Allah demands of him.”

It was not, John explained, that Adlan threw cold water on his great adventure. On the contrary he entered into it with sympathy and made many helpful suggestions. Indeed one of his favourite occupations, as he plied his oars, was to expound to John with prophetic enthusiasm the kind of world that “John’s New Men” would make, and how much more vital and more happy it would be than the world of Homo sapiens. This enthusiasm was undoubtedly sincere yet, said John, there was a delicate mockery behind it. It was not wholly unlike the zeal with which grown men enter into the games of children. One day John deliberately challenged him by referring to his project as the greatest adventure that man could ever face. Adlan was resting on his oars before crossing the harbour, for an Austrian Lloyd steamer was passing into the Canal. Harry was intent upon the liner, but John induced him to turn his eyes on the old boatman. Adlan was looking gravely at the lad. “My son, my dear son,” he said, “Allah wills of his creatures two kinds of service. One is that they should toil to fulfil his active purpose in the world, and that is the service which you have most at heart. The other is that they should observe with understanding and praise with discriminate delight the excellent form of his handiwork. And this is my service, to lay at Allah’s feet such a life of praise that no man, not even you, my very dear son, can give him. He has fashioned you in such a manner that you may serve him best in action, though in action inspired always by deep-searching contemplation. But me he has fashioned such that I must serve him directly through contemplation and praise, though for this end I had first to pass through the school of action.”

John protested that the end of praise would be far better served by a world of the New Men than by a few isolated lofty spirits in a world of subhuman creatures; and that, therefore, the most urgent of all tasks was to bring such a world into being.

But Adlan replied, “It seems so to you, because you are fashioned for action, and because you are young. And indeed it is so. Spirits of my kind know well that in due season spirits of your kind will in fact create the new world. But we know also that for us there is another task. It may even be that part of my task is actually to peer so far into the future that I may see and praise those great deeds which you, or some other, are destined to perform.”

When John had reported this speech to me he said, “Then the old man broke off his communication with me, and also ceased prattling to Harry. Presently he thought to me again. His mind embraced me with grave tenderness, and he said, ‘It is time for you to leave me, you very dear and godlike child. I have seen something of the future that lies before you. And though you could bear the foreknowledge without faltering from the way of praise, it is not for me to tell you.’ Next day I met him again, but he was uncommunicative. At the end of the trip, when the Robinsons were stepping out of the boat, he took Harry in his arms and set him on the land, saying in the lingo that passed as Arabic with European residents, ‘ ’L hwaga swoia, quaïs ketír!’ (the little master, very nice). To me he said in his thoughts, ‘To-night, or perhaps to-morrow, I will die. For I have praised the past and the present, and the near future too, with all the insight that Allah has given me. And peering into the farther future I have been able to see nothing but obscure and terrible things which it is not in me to praise. Therefore it is certain that I have fulfilled my task, and may now rest.’ ”

Next day another boat took Harry and his parents to the bathhouses.

CHAPTER XVII. NG-GUNKO AND LO

IT WILL BE remembered that we booked passages for three persons by Orient to Toulon and England. The third member of the party turned up three hours before the ship sailed.

John explained that in discovering this amazing child, who went by the name of Ng-Gunko, he had been helped by Adlan. The old man in the past had been in touch with this contemporary of John’s, and had helped the two to make contact with one another.

Ng-Gunko was a native of some remote patch of forest-clad mountain in or near Abyssinia; and though only a child he had at John’s request found his way from his native country to Port Saïd by a series of adventures which I will not attempt to describe.

As time advanced and he failed to appear, I became more and more sceptical and impatient, but John was confident that he would arrive. He turned up at our hotel as I was trying to shut my cabin trunk. He was a grotesque and filthy little blackamoor, and I resented the prospect of sharing accommodation with him. He appeared to be about eight years old, but was in fact over twelve. He wore a long, blue and very grubby caftan and a battered fez. These clothes, we subsequently learned, he had acquired on his journey, in order to attract less attention. But he could not help attracting attention. My own first reaction to his appearance was frank incredulity. “There ain’t no such beast,” I said to myself. Then I remembered, that, when a species mutates, it often produces a large crop of characters so fantastic that many of the new types are not even viable. Ng-Gunko was decidedly viable, but he was a freak. Though his face was a dark blend of the Negroid and the Semitic with an unmistakable reminiscence of the Mongolian, his Negroid wool was not black but sombre red. And though his right eye was a huge black orb not inappropriate to his dark complexion, his left eye was considerably smaller, and the iris was deep blue. These discrepancies gave his whole face a sinister comicality which was borne out by his expression. His full lips were frequently stretched in a grin which revealed three small white teeth above and one below. The rest had apparently not yet sprouted.

Ng-Gunko spoke English fluently but incorrectly, and with an uncouth pronunciation. He had picked up this foreign tongue on his six-weeks’ journey down the Nile valley. By the time we reached London his English was as good as our own.

The task of making Ng-Gunko fit for a trip on an Orient liner was arduous. We scrubbed him all over and applied insecticide. On his legs there were several festering sores. John sterilized the sharpest blade of his penknife and cut away all the bad flesh, while Ng-Gunko lay perfectly still, but sweating, and pulling the most hideous grimaces, which expressed at once torture and amusement. We purchased European clothes, which, of course, he detested. We had him photographed for his passport, which John had already arranged with the Egyptian authorities. In triumph we took him off to the ship in his new white shorts and shirt.

Throughout the voyage we were busy helping him to acquire European ways. He must not pick his nose in public, still less blow it in the natural manner. He must not take hold of his meat and vegetables with his hands. He had to acquire the technique of the bathroom and the watercloset. He must not relieve himself in inappropriate places. He must not, though a mere child, saunter into the crowded dining-saloon without his clothes. He must not give evidence that he was excessively intelligent. He must not stare at his fellow passengers. Above all, he must, we said, restrain his apparently irresistible impulse to play practical jokes on them.

Though frivolous, Ng-Gunko was certainly of superior intelligence. It was, for instance, remarkable that a child who had lived his fourteen years in the forest should easily grasp the principle of the steam turbine, and should be able to ask the chief engineer (who showed us round the engine room) questions which made that experienced old Scot scratch his head. It was on this expedition that John had to whisper fiercely to the little monster, “If you don’t take the trouble to bottle up your blasted curiosity, I’ll pitch you overboard.”

When we reached our northern suburb Ng-Gunko was installed in the Wainwright household. As we did not want him to cause more of a sensation than need be, we dyed his hair black and made him wear spectacles with a dark glass for one eye. Only in the house might he be without them. Unfortunately he was too young to be able to resist the temptation of startling the natives. Walking along the street with John or me, muffled to the eyes against the alien climate, duly spectacled and demure, he would sometimes drop a pace behind as we were approaching some old lady or child. Then, projecting his chin above his scarf, he would whip off his glasses and assume a maniacal grin of hate. How often he did this without being caught I do not know, but on one occasion he was so successful that the victim let out a scream. John turned upon his protégé and seized him by the throat. “Do that again,” he said, “and I’ll have that eye of yours right out, and step on it.” Never again did Ng-Gunko play the trick when John was present. But with me he did, knowing I was too amiable to report him.

In a few weeks, however, Ng-Gunko began to enter more seriously into the spirit of the great adventure. The conspiratorial atmosphere appealed to him. And the task of preparing himself to play his part gradually absorbed his attention. But he remained at heart a little savage. Even his extraordinary passion for machinery suggested the uncritical delight of the primitive mind in its first encounter with the marvels of our civilization. He had a mechanical gift which in some ways eclipsed even John’s. Within a few days of his arrival he was riding the motor-bicycle and making it perform incredible “stunts.” Very soon he took it to pieces and put it together again. He mastered the principles of John’s psycho-physical power unit, and found, to his intense delight, that he could perform the essential miracle of it himself. It began to be taken for granted that he would be the responsible engineer of the yacht, and of the future colony, leaving John free for more exalted matters. Yet in all Ng-Gunko’s actions, and in his whole attitude to life, there was an intensity and even a passion which was very different from John’s invariable calm. Indeed I sometimes wondered whether he was emotionally a true supernormal, whether he had anything unusual in his nature beyond brilliant intelligence. But when I suggested this to John he laughed. “Ng-Gunko’s a kid,” he said, “but Ng-Gunko’s all right. Amongst other things he has a natural gift for telepathy, and when I have trained him a bit he may beat me in that direction. But we are both beginners.”

Not long after our return from Egypt another supernormal arrived. This was the girl whom John had found in Moscow. Like others of her kind, she looked much younger than she was. She seemed a child, not yet on the threshold of womanhood, but was actually seventeen. She had run away from home, taken a job as stewardess on a Soviet steamer, and slipped ashore at an English port. Thence, equipped with a sufficiency of English money, which she had secured in Russia, she had found her way to the Wainwrights.

Lo was at first glance a much more normal creature than either Ng-Gunko or John. She might have been Jacqueline’s youngest sister. No doubt her head was strikingly large, and her eyes occupied more of her face than was normal, but her features were regular, and her sleek black hair was long enough to pass for a “shingle.” She was clearly of Asiatic origin, for her cheek bones were high, and her eyes, though great, were deeply sunk within their half-closed and slanting lids. Her nose was broad and flat, like an ape’s, her complexion definitely “yellow.” She suggested to me a piece of sculpture come to life, something in which the artist had stylized the human in terms of the feline. Her body, too, was feline, “so lean and loose,” said John. “It feels breakable, and yet it’s all steel springs covered with loose velvet.”

During the few weeks which passed before the sailing of the yacht, Lo occupied the room which had once belonged to Anne, John’s sister. Relations between her and Pax were never easy, yet always amicable. Lo was exceptionally silent. This, I am sure, would not trouble Pax, for she was generally drawn to silent persons. Yet with Lo she seemed to feel constantly an obligation to talk, and an inability to talk naturally. To all her remarks Lo would reply appropriately, even amiably, yet whatever she said seemed to make matters worse. Whenever Lo was present, Pax would seem ill at ease. She would make silly little mistakes in her work, putting things into wrong drawers, sewing buttons on in the wrong place, breaking her needle, and so on. And everything took longer than it should.

I never discovered why Pax was so uncomfortable with Lo. The girl was, indeed, a disconcerting person, but I should have expected Pax to be more, not less, able to cope with her than others were. It was not only Lo’s silence that was so disturbing, but also her almost complete lack of facial expression, or rather of changes of expression, for her very absence of expression was itself expressive of a profound detachment from the world around her. In all ordinary social situations, when others would show amusement or pleasure or exasperation, and Ng-Gunko would register intense emotion, Lo’s features remained unmoved.

At first I imagined that she was simply insensitive, perhaps dull-witted; but one curious fact about her soon proved that I was wrong. She discovered a passion for the novel, and most of all for Jane Austen. She read all the works of that incomparable authoress over and over again, indeed so often that John, whose interest ran in very different channels, began to chaff her. This roused her to deliver her one long speech. “Where I come from,” she said, “there is nothing like Jane Austen. But in me there is something like that, and these old books are helping me to know myself. Of course, they are only ‘sapient,’ I know; but that is half the fun. It’s so interesting to transpose it all to suit us. For instance, if Jane could understand me, which she couldn’t, what, I ask myself, would she say about me? I find the answer extraordinarily enlightening. Of course, our minds are quite outside her range, but her attitude can be applied to us. Her attitude to her little world is so intelligent and sprightly that it gives it a significance that it could never have discovered in itself. Well, I want to regard even us, even our virtuous Colony, in a Jane-like manner. I want to give it a kind of significance that would have remained hidden even from its earnest and noble leader. You know, John, I fancy Homo sapiens has still quite a lot to teach you about personality. Or if you are too busy to learn, then I must, or the colony will be intolerable.”

To my surprise John replied by giving her a hearty kiss, and she remarked, demurely, “Odd John, you have indeed a lot to learn.”

This incident may suggest to the reader that Lo was lacking in humour. She was not. Indeed she had a gift of not unkindly wit. Though she seemed incapable of smiling, she often roused others to laughter. And yet, as I say, she was mysteriously disconcerting to most of us. Even John was sometimes uncomfortable in her presence. Once when he was giving me some instructions about finance he broke off to say, “That girl’s laughing at me, in spite of her solemn face. She never laughs at all, and yet she’s always laughing. Now tell me, Lo, what’s amusing you.” Lo replied, “Dear and important John, it is you who are laughing, at your own reflection in me.”

Lo’s chief occupation during her few weeks in England was to master the science and art of medicine, and to make herself acquainted with all the most advanced work on the subject of embryology. The reason for this I did not learn till much later. Her vocational training she pursued partly by means of an intensive study under an embryologist of some distinction at the local university, partly by prolonged discussion with John.

As the time approached when the yacht was to be ready and the adventure to begin, Lo’s studies became more and more exacting. She began to show signs of strain. We urged her to take a holiday for a few days. “No,” she said, “I must get to the end of this business before we sail. Then I will rest.” We asked if she was sleeping all right. She was evasive. John became suspicious. “Do you sleep, ever?” he asked. She hesitated, then replied, “Not ever, if I can help it. In fact it is some years since I last slept. And then I slept for ages. But I will never sleep again if I can help it.” Her first answer to John’s incredulous “Why?” was a shudder; then she added as an afterthought, “It is a waste of time. I do go to bed, but I read all night; or just think.”

I forget whether I mentioned that all the other supernormals were brief sleepers. John, for instance, was satisfied with four hours a night, and could comfortably do entirely without sleep for three nights at a stretch.

A few days after this incident I learned that Lo had not come down to breakfast, and that Pax had found her still in bed, and asleep. “But it’s all wrong,” said Pax. “It’s more like a fit. She’s lying there with her eyes tight shut and awful expressions of horror and rage passing over her face; and she keeps muttering Russian or something, and her hands keep clawing at her chest.”

We tried to wake her, but could not. We sat her upright. We put cold water on her. We shouted at her. We shook her and pricked her, but it was no good. That evening she began to scream. She kept it up, off and on, all that night. I stayed with the Wainwrights, though I could do nothing. But somehow I couldn’t go. The whole street was kept awake. It was sometimes just an inarticulate screech like an animal beside itself with pain and fury, sometimes a torrent of Russian, shouted at the top of her voice, but so blurred that John could make nothing of it.

Next morning she quietened down, and for more than a week she slept without stirring. One morning she came down to breakfast as though nothing had happened, but looking, so John said, “like a corpse animated by a soul out of Hell.” As she sat down she said to John, “Now do you understand why I like Jane Austen, better for instance than Dostoievski?”

It took her some time to regain her strength and her normal equanimity. One day, when she had settled down to work again, she told Pax a bit about herself. Away back in her infancy, before the Revolution, when her people lived in a small town beyond the Urals, she used to sleep every night; but she often had bad dreams, which she said were extremely terrifying, and completely indescribable in terms of any normal experience. All she could say of them was that she felt herself turn into a mad beast or a devil, yet that inwardly she always remained her sane little self, an impotent spectator of her own madness. As she grew older, these infantile terrors left her. During the Revolution and the years immediately following it her family experienced terrible sufferings from civil war and famine. She was still in appearance an infant but mentally well able to appreciate the significance of events going on around her. She had, for instance, already reached a conviction that, though both sides in the civil war were equally capable of brutality and generosity, the spirit of the one was on the whole right, the other wrong. Even at that early age she felt, vaguely but with conviction, that the horror of her life, the bombardments, the fires, the mass executions, the cold, the hunger, must somehow be embraced, not shunned. Triumphantly she did embrace them. But there came a time when her town was sacked by the Whites. Her father was killed. Her mother fled with her in a refugee train crowded with wounded men and women. The journey was, of course, desperately fatiguing. Lo fell asleep, and was plunged once more into her nightmare, with the difference that it was now peopled with all the horrors of the civil war, and she herself was forced to watch impotently while her other self perpetrated the most hideous atrocities.

Ever since those days any great strain was liable to bring sleep upon her, with all its horrors. She reported, however, that the attacks were now much less frequent; but that on the other hand the content of her dreams was more terrible, because — she couldn’t properly explain — because it was more universal, more metaphysical, more cosmically significant, and at the same time more definitely an expression of something Satanic (her own word) within her very self.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE SKID’S FIRST VOYAGE

HENCEFORTH PAX WAS more at ease with Lo. She had nursed her, received her confidence, and found occasion to pity her. All the same it was clear that the continued presence of Lo was a strain on Pax. When the yacht was launched, John himself said to me, “We must get away as soon as possible now. Lo is killing Pax, though she does her best not to. Poor Pax! She’s being driven into old age at last.” It was true. Her hair was fading, and her mouth drawn.

It was with mixed feelings that I learned that I was not to take part in the coming voyage in search of additional members for the colony. I could live my own life. I could marry and settle down, holding myself in readiness to serve John when he should need me. But how could I live without John? I tried to persuade him that I was necessary to him. A saucer-like craft wandering the oceans with a crew of three children would attract less attention if she carried one adult. But my suggestion was dismissed. John claimed that he no longer looked a child, and further declared that he could touch up his face so as to appear at least twenty-five.

I need not describe in detail the preparations which these three young eccentrics undertook in order to fit themselves for their adventure. Both Ng-Gunko and Lo had to learn to fly; and all three had to become familiar with the mannerisms of their own queer aeroplane and their own queer yacht. The vessel was launched on the Clyde by Pax, and christened Skid, under which odd but appropriate name she was duly registered. I may mention that for the Board of Trade inspection she was fitted with a normal motor-engine, which was subsequently removed to make room for the psycho-physical power unit and motor.

When both yacht and plane were ready for use, a trial trip was made among the Western Isles. On this trip I was tolerated as a guest. The experience was enough to cure me of any desire for a longer voyage in such a diabolical vessel. The three-foot model had somehow failed to make me imagine the discomforts of the actual boat. Her great beam made her fairly steady, but she was so shallow, and therefore low in the water, that every considerable wave splashed over her, and in rough weather she was always awash. This did not greatly matter, as her navigating controls were all under cover in a sort of stream-lined deck-house reminiscent of a sporting saloon motor-car. In fine weather one could stretch one’s legs on deck, but below deck there was scarcely room to move, as she was a mass of machinery, bunks, stores. And there was the plane. This strange instrument, minute by ordinary standards, and folded up like a fan, occupied a large amount of her space.

After emerging from Greenock we skidded comfortably down the Clyde, past Arran, and round the Mull of Kintyre. Then we struck heavy weather, and I was violently sick. So also, much to my satisfaction, was Ng-Gunko. Indeed, he was so ill that John decided to make for shelter, lest he should die. But quite suddenly Ng-Gunko learned to control his vomiting reflexes. He stopped being sick, lay still for ten minutes, then leapt from his bunk with a shout of triumph, only to be hurled into the galley by a lurch of the ship.

The trials were said to be entirely successful. When she was going full speed the Skid lifted the whole part of herself right out of the water and set up a mountain-range of water and foam on either side of her. Though the weather was rather wild, the plane also was tested. It was heaved out aft on a derrick and unfolded while afloat. All three members of the crew took a turn at flying it. The most surprising thing about it was that, owing to its cunning design and its immense reserve of power, it rose straight from the water without taxi-ing.

A week later the Skid set out on her first long voyage. Our farewells were made at the dock. The Wainwright parents reacted very differently to the departure of their youngest son. Doc was genuinely anxious about the dangers of the voyage in such a vessel, and mistrustful of the abilities of the juvenile crew. Pax showed no anxiety, so complete was her confidence in John. But clearly she found it difficult to face his departure without showing distress. Hugging her, he said, “Dear Pax,” then sprang on board. Lo, who had already made her farewells, came back to Pax, took both her hands, and said, actually smiling, “Dear mother of important John!” To this odd remark Pax replied simply with a kiss.

My slender knowledge of the voyage is derived partly from John’s laconic letters, partly from conversation after his return. The programme was determined by his telepathic researches. Distance, apparently, made no difference to the ease with which he could pick up the psychic processes of other supernormals. Success depended entirely on his ability to “tune in” to their mental “setting” or mode of experience, and this depended on the degree of similarity of their mode to his own. Thus he was already in clear communication with a supernormal in Tibet, and two others in China, but for the rest he could only make the vaguest guesses as to the existence and location of possible members of the colony.

Letters told us that the Skid had spent an unprofitable three weeks on the West Coast of Africa. John had flown into the hinterland, pursuing traces of a supernormal in some oasis in the Sahara. He struck a sand storm of peculiar violence, and made a forced landing in the desert, with his engine choked with sand. “When the wind had dropped I cleaned her guts,” said John, “and then flew back to the Skid, still chewing sand.” What epic struggles were involved in this adventure I can only guess.

At Cape Town the Skid was docked, and the three young people set off to comb South Africa, following up certain meagre traces of the supernormal mentality. Both John and Lo soon returned empty-handed. In his letter John remarked, “Delicious to watch the Whites treating the Blacks as an inferior species. Lo says it reminds her of her mother’s stories of Tsarist Russia.”

John and Lo waited impatiently for some weeks while Ng-Gunko, doubtless revelling in his return to native conditions, nosed about in the remote woodlands and saltpans of Ngamiland. He was in telepathic communication with John, but there seemed to be some mystery about his activities. John grew anxious, for the lad was dangerously juvenile, and possibly of a less balanced type than himself. At last he was driven to tell Ng-Gunko that if he did not “chuck his antics” the Skid would sail without him. The reply was merely a cheerful assurance that he would be starting back in a day or two. A week later came a message that combined a cry of triumph and an S.O.S. He had secured his prey, and was making his way through the wilds to civilization, but had no money for the return railway journey. John therefore set out to fly to the spot indicated, while Lo, single handed, took the Skid round to Durban.

John had already been waiting some days at the primitive settlement when Ng-Gunko appeared, dead beat, but radiant. He removed a bundle from his back, uncovered the end of it, and displayed to the indignant John a minute black infant, immature, twitching and gasping.

Ng-Gunko, it seems, had traced the telepathic intimations to a certain tribe and a certain woman. His African experiences had enabled him to detect in this woman’s attitude to the life of the forest something akin to his own. Further investigation led him to believe that though she herself was in some slight degree supernormal, the main source of those obscure hints which he had been pursuing was not the mother but her unborn child, in whose pre-natal experiences Ng-Gunko recognized the rudiments of supernormal intensity. It was indeed remarkable that before birth a mind should have any telepathic influence at all. The mother had already carried her baby for eleven months. Now Ng-Gunko knew that he himself had been born late, and that his mother had not been delivered of him till certain incentives had been used upon her by the wise women of the tribe. This treatment he persuaded the black matron to undergo, for she was weary to death. As best he could, Ng-Gunko applied what he knew of the technique. The baby was born, but the mother died. Ng-Gunko fled with his prize. When John asked how he had fed the baby on the long journey, Ng-Gunko explained that in his Abyssinian days he and other youngsters used to milk wild antelopes. They stalked them, and by means of a process that reminded me of “tickling” trout, they persuaded the mothers to let themselves be milked. This trick had served on the journey. The infant, of course, had not thrived, but it was alive.

The kidnapper was pained to find that his exploit, far from being applauded, was condemned and ridiculed. What on earth, John demanded, could they possibly do with the creature? And anyhow, was he really at all worth bothering about? Ng-Gunko was convinced that he had secured an infant superman who would outclass them all; and in time John himself was impressed by his telepathic explorations of the new-comer.

The plane set out for Durban with the baby in Ng-Gunko’s arms. One would have expected the care and maintenance of it to fall to Lo, but her attitude toward it was aloof. Moreover, Ng-Gunko himself made it clear that he would bear all responsibility for the new-comer, who somehow acquired the name Sambo. Ng-Gunko became as devoted to Sambo as a mother to her first-born or a schoolboy to his white mice.

The Skid now headed for Bombay. Somewhere north of the Equator she ran into very heavy weather. This was a matter of small importance to a craft of her seaworthiness, though it must have greatly increased the discomfort of her crew. At a much later date I learned of a sinister incident that occurred in those wild days, an incident to which John made no reference in his letters. The Skid sighted a small British steamer, the Frome, in distress. Her steering engine was out of action, and she was labouring broadside-on to the storm. The Skid stood by, till, when the Frome’s plight was obviously hopeless, the crew took to the two remaining boats. The Skid attempted to take them both in tow. This operation was evidently very dangerous, for a sea flung one of the boats bodily on to the after deck of the yacht, thrusting her stern under water, and threatening to sink her. Ng-Gunko, who was dealing with the tow rope, had a foot rather badly crushed. The boat then floated off, and capsized. Of her crew only two were rescued, both by the Skid. The other boat was successfully taken in tow. A few days later the weather improved, and the Skid and her charge made good progress toward Bombay. But now the two strangers on board the Skid began to show great curiosity. Here were three eccentric children and a black baby cruising the ocean in a most eccentric craft driven by some unintelligible source of power. The two seamen were loud in praise of their rescuers. They assured John that they would speak up for him in the public inquiry which would be held over the loss of the Frome.

This was all very inconvenient. The three supernormals discussed the situation telepathically, and agreed that drastic action was demanded. John produced an automatic pistol and shot the two guests. The noise caused great excitement in the boat. Ng-Gunko slipped the tow rope, and John cruised round while Ng-Gunko and Lo, lying on the deck with rifles, disposed of all the Frome’s survivors. When this grim task was finished, the corpses were thrown to the sharks. The boat was scrubbed of blood stains, and then scuttled. The Skid proceeded to Bombay.

Long afterwards, when John told me about this shocking incident, I was as much perplexed as revolted. Why, I asked, if he dared not risk a little publicity, had he been willing to risk destruction in the work of rescuing the ship’s boats? And how did he fail to realize, during that operation, that publicity was inevitable? And was there, I demanded, any enterprise whatever, even the founding of a new species, that could justify such cold butchery of human beings? If this was the way of Homo superior, I said, thank God I was of another species. We might be weak and stupid, but at least we were able sometimes to feel the sanctity of human life. Was not this piece of brutality on exactly the same footing as the innumerable judicial murders, political murders, religious murders, that had sullied the record of Homo sapiens? These, I declared, had always seemed to their perpetrators righteous acts, but were regarded by the more human of our kind as barbarous.

John answered with that mildness and thoughtfulness with which he treated me only on those rare occasions when I gave him matter for serious consideration. He first pointed out that the Skid had still to spend much time in contact with the world of Homo sapiens. Her crew had work to do in India, Tibet and China. It was certain, therefore, that if their part in the Frome incident became public, they would be forced to give evidence at the inquiry. He insisted, further, that if they were discovered, their whole venture would be ruined. Had they at that early stage known all that they knew later about hypnotically controlling the humbler species, they might indeed have abolished from the minds of the Frome’s survivors all memory of the rescue. “But you see,” he said, “we could not do it. We had deliberately risked publicity, as we had risked destruction by the storm, hoping to avoid it. We tried to set up a process of ‘oblivifaction’ in our guests, but we failed. As for the wickedness of the act, Fido, it naturally revolts you, but you are leaving something out of account. Had we been members of your species, concerned only with the dreamlike purposes of the normal mind, what we did would have been a crime. For to-day the chief lesson which your species has to learn is that it is far better to die, far better to sacrifice even the loftiest of all ‘sapient’ purposes, than to kill beings of one’s own mental order. But just as you kill wolves and tigers so that the far brighter spirits of men may flourish, so we killed those unfortunate creatures that we had rescued. Innocent as they were, they were dangerous. Unwittingly they threatened the noblest practical venture that has yet occurred on this planet. Think! If you, and Bertha, had found yourselves in a world of great apes, clever in their own way, lovable too, but blind, brutish, and violent, would you have refused to kill? Would you have sacrificed the founding of a human world? To refuse would be cowardly, not physically, but spiritually. Well, if we could wipe out your whole species, frankly, we would. For if your species discovers us, and realizes at all what we are, it will certainly destroy us. And we know, you must remember, that Homo sapiens has little more to contribute to the music of this planet, nothing in fact but vain repetition. It is time for finer instruments to take up the theme.”

When he had done, John looked at me almost pleadingly. He seemed to long for my approval, the approval of a half-human thing, his faithful hound. Did he, after all, feel guilty? I think not. I think this strong desire to persuade me sprang simply from affection. For my part, such is my faith in John, that though I cannot approve, I cannot condemn. There must surely be some aspect that I am too stupid or insensitive to grasp. John, I feel, must be right. Though he did what would have been utterly wrong if it had been done by any of us, I have an almost passionate faith that, done by John, and in John’s circumstances, the terrible deed was right.

But to return to the story. At Bombay John and Lo spent some time studying Indian and Tibetan languages, and otherwise preparing themselves for contact with Eastern races. When at length they left the Skid, and Bombay, Ng-Gunko remained behind to nurse Sambo and his damaged foot. The two explorers set out together in the plane; but Lo, disguised as a Nepalese boy, was put down at an Indian hill station. There, it was hoped, she might develop a telepathic contact which was thought to indicate a supernormal in some such environment. John himself continued his flight over the great mountains to Tibet to meet the young Buddhist monk with whom he had often been in communication.

In his brief letter describing his expedition to Tibet John scarcely mentioned the actual journey, though the flight over the Himalayas must have been an exacting task even for a superman in a superplane. He said only, “She took the jump splendidly, and then was blown right back again into India, head over heels, too. She dropped my thermos flask. Coming back I saw it on the ridge, but let it lie.”

As the Tibetan monk was able to guide him telepathically, he found the monastery quite easily. John described Langatse as a supernormal of forty years, physically but little advanced beyond the threshold of manhood. He had been born without eyes. Blindness had forced him to concentrate on his telepathic powers, which he had developed far beyond John’s own attainment. He could always see telepathically what other people were seeing; consequently, for reading he had simply to use some one else’s eyes. The other would cast his eye over the page while Langatse followed telepathically. He had trained several young men to perform this task for him so well that he could read almost as quickly as John. One curious effect of his blindness was that, since he could use many pairs of eyes at a time, and could see all round an object at once, his mental imagery was of a kind quite inconceivable to ordinary persons. As John put it, he grasped things visually, instead of merely having a single aspect of them. He saw things mentally from every point of view at once.

John had originally hoped to persuade Langatse to join his great adventure, but he soon found that this was out of the question. The Tibetan regarded the whole matter much as Adlan had done. He was interested, encouraging, but aloof. To him the founding of a new world, though it must indeed some day be accomplished by some one, was not a matter of urgency, and must not tempt him from his own more lofty spiritual services. Nevertheless he consented gladly to be the spiritual adviser of the colony, and meanwhile he would impart to John all that he knew of the telepathic technique and other supernormal activities. At one time Langatse suggested that John should give up his enterprise and settle in Tibet to share the more exacting and more exalted spiritual adventures on which he himself was engaged. But, finding that John was not to be easily persuaded, he soon desisted. John stayed at the monastery a week. During his return flight he received a message from Langatse to the effect that, after grave spiritual exercise, he had decided to help John by seeking out and preparing any young supernormals that were in Asia and suited to the adventure.

John received a communication also from Lo. She had discovered two remarkable sisters, both younger than herself. They would join the expedition; but as the elder was just now in a very poor state of health, and the younger a little child, they must stay where they were for the present.

The Skid now set her course for the China Seas. In Canton John met Shên Kuo, the Chinese supernormal boy with whom he had already had some communication. Shên Kuo readily agreed to make his way inland to join the two other boys and two girls whom Langatse had discovered in the remote Eastern Province of Sze Chwan. Thence the five would journey to Tibet to Langatse’s monastery, to undergo a course of spiritual discipline in preparation for their new life. Langatse reported that he had also secured three Tibetan boys and a girl for the colony, and that these also would be prepared at the monastery.

One other convert was made. This was a half-caste Chinese American girl resident in San Francisco. This child, who went by the name of Washingtonia Jong, was also discovered by Langatse telepathically. The Skid crossed the Pacific to pick her up, and she straightway became a member of the crew. I did not meet her till a much later date; but I may as well say at once that “Washy,” as she was called, appeared to me at first a quite normal young person, a keen little American flapper with rather Chinese eyes and black cropped hair. But I was to find that there was more in her than that.

John’s next task was to discover a suitable island for the colony. It must have a temperate or subtropical climate. It must have a fertile soil, and be well situated for fishing. It must be remote from any frequented steamer route. This last requirement was extremely important, for complete secrecy was essential. Even the most remote and unconsidered island would certainly be visited sooner or later; so John had thought out certain steps to prevent ships from reaching his island, and certain others to ensure that any visitors who should make a landing should not spread news of the colony among the normal species. Of these devices I shall speak in due season.

The Skid crossed the Equator and began a systematic exploration of the South Seas. After many weeks of cruising a suitable though minute island was discovered somewhere in the angle between the routes from New Zealand to Panama and New Zealand to Cape Horn, and well away from both courses. This discovery was an incredible stroke of luck, indeed it might well have been an act of Providence. For the island was one which was not marked on any charts, and there were clear signs that it had only within the last twenty years or so been thrown up by sub-oceanic disturbance. There were no non-human mammals on it, and no reptiles. Vegetation was still scanty and undiversified. Yet the island was inhabited. A small native group had taken possession of it, and were living by fishing around its coasts. Many varieties of plants and trees they themselves had brought over from their original home and established on the island.

I did not hear about these original inhabitants till much later, when I visited the island. “They were simple and attractive creatures,” said John, “but, of course, we could not allow them to interfere with our plans. It might have been possible to obliterate from their minds every recollection of the island and of ourselves, and then to transport them. But though I had learned much from Langatse, our technique of oblivifaction was still unreliable. Moreover, where could we have deposited the natives without rousing protests, and curiosity? We might have kept them alive on the island, as domestic animals, but this would have wrecked our plans. It would also have undermined the natives spiritually. So we decided to destroy them. One bit of hypnotic technique (or magic, if you like) I felt sure I could now perform successfully on normal minds in which there were strong religious convictions. This we decided to use. The natives had welcomed us to their island and arranged a feast for us. After the feast there were ritual dances and religious rites. When the excitement was at a climax, I made Lo dance for them. And when she had done, I said to them, in their own language, that we were gods, that we needed their island, that they must therefore make a great funeral pyre for themselves, mount it together, lie down together, and gladly die. This they did, most gladly, men, women and children. When they had all died we set fire to the faggots and their bodies were burnt.”

I cannot defend this act. But I may point out that, had the invaders been members of the normal species, they would probably have baptised the natives, given them prayer books and European clothes, rum and all the diseases of the White Man. They would also have enslaved them economically, and in time they would have crushed their spirits by confronting them at every turn with the White Man’s trivial superiority. Finally, when all had died of drink or bitterness, they would have mourned for them.

Perhaps the only defence of the psychological murders which the supernormals committed when they took possession of the island would run as follows. Having made up their minds that at all costs the island must be theirs, and unencumbered, they did not shirk the consequences of their decision. With open eyes they went about their task, and fulfilled it in the cleanest possible way. Whether the end which they so ruthlessly pursued did in fact justify the means, I simply do not feel competent to decide. All my sympathies lie with the view that murder can never be justified, however lofty the end at stake. Certainly, had the killing been perpetrated by members of my own kind, such a deed would have deserved the sternest condemnation. But who am I that I should judge beings who in daily contact with me constantly proved themselves my superiors not only in intelligence but in moral insight?

When the five superior beings, John and Lo, Ng-Gunko and Washingtonia and the infant Sambo, had taken possession of the island, they spent some weeks resting from their travels, preparing the site for future settlement, and conferring with Langatse and those who were under his guidance. It was arranged that as soon as the Asiatics were spiritually equipped they should find their way as best they could to one of the French Polynesian islands, whence the Skid would fetch them. Meanwhile, however, the Skid would make a hurried trip to England via the Straits of Magellan to secure materials for the founding of the colony, and to fetch the remaining European supernormals.

CHAPTER XIX. THE COLONY IS FOUNDED

THE SKID REACHED England three weeks before the date on which I was to be married. As she had no radio, and her voyage had been speedy, she arrived unannounced. Bertha and I had been shopping. We called at my flat to deposit some parcels before going out for the evening. Arm in arm, we entered my sitting-room, and found the Skid’s crew snugly installed, eating my apples and some chocolates which I kept for Bertha’s entertainment. We stood for a moment in silence. I felt Bertha’s arm tighten on mine. John was enjoying his apple in an easy chair by the fire. Lo, squatting on the hearth rug, was turning over the pages of the New Statesman. Ng-Gunko was in the other easy chair, chewing sweets and bending over Sambo. I think he was helping the infant to readjust the thick and unfamiliar clothes without which he could not have faced the English climate. Sambo, all head and stomach, with limbs that were mere buds, cocked an inquisitive eye at me. Washingtonia, whom I had not seen before, struck me at that moment as reassuringly commonplace among those freaks.

John had risen, and was saying with his mouth full, “Hullo, old Fido, hullo, Bertha! You’ll hate me, Bertha, but I must have Fido to help me for a few weeks, buying stores and things.” “But we’re just going to get married,” I protested. “Damn!” said John. Then to my surprise I assured John that of course we would put it off for a couple of months. Bertha wilted on to a chair with a voiceless “Of course.” “Good,” cried John cheerfully. “After this affair I may not bother you any more.” Unexpectedly my heart sank.

The following weeks were spent in a whirl of practical activities. The Skid had to be reconditioned, the plane repaired. Tools and machinery, electric fittings and plumbing materials must be bought and shipped to Valparaiso to await transshipment. Timber must be sent from the South American forests to the same port. General stores must be purchased in England. My task was to negotiate all these transactions, under John’s direction. John himself prepared a list of books which I must somehow procure and dispatch. There were to be scores of technical works on various biological subjects, tropical agriculture, medicine and so on. There were to be books on theoretical physics, astronomy, philosophy, and a rather intriguing selection of purely literary works in many languages. Most difficult to procure were many scores of Asiatic writings with titles suggestive of the occult.

Shortly before the Skid’s next sailing-date the additional European members of the party began to arrive. John himself went to Hungary to fetch Jelli, a mite said to be seventeen years old. She was no beauty. The frontal and the occipital regions of her head were repulsively overdeveloped, so that the back of her head stretched away behind her, and her brow protruded beyond her nose, which was rudimentary. In profile her head suggested a croquet mallet. She had a hare-lip and short bandy legs. Her general appearance was that of a cretin; yet she had supernormal intelligence and temperament, and also hyper-sensitive vision. Not only did she distinguish two primary colours within the spectrum-band that we call blue, but also she could see well down into the infra-red. In addition to this colour-discrimination, she had a sense of form that was, so to speak, much finer-grained than ours. Probably there were more nerve-endings in her retinae than in normal eyes, for she could read a newspaper at twenty yards’ distance, and she could see at a glance that a penny was not accurately circular. So sensitive was she to form that, if the parts of a puzzle picture were flung down before her, she took in their significant relations at a glance, and could construct the picture without a pause. This amazing percipience often caused her distress, for no man-made article appeared to her to achieve the shape that its maker intended. And in the sphere of art she was excruciated, not merely by inaccuracy of execution but also by crudity of conception.

Besides Jelli, there was the French girl, Marianne Laffon, quite normal in contrast with Jelli, and rather pretty with her dark eyes and olive skin. She was seemingly a repository of the whole of French culture, and could quote any passage of any classic, and, by some magic of her own, so amplify it that she seemed to plumb the author’s mind.

There was also a Swedish girl, Sigrid, whom John called the Comb-Wielder, “because she has such a gift for combing out tangled minds till they’re all sleek and sane.” She had been a consumptive, but had apparently cured herself by some sort of mental “immunizing” of her tissues. Even after her cure she retained the phthisic’s cheerfulness. A great-eyed, fragile thing, she combined her wonderful gift of sympathy and insight with a maternal tenderness toward brute strength. When she found it being brutal, she censured but still loved it. She was moved to send it away howling with its tail between its legs, but at the same time she “felt all sloppy about it, as though it were just a delicious little naughty boy.”

Several young male supernormals turned up, one by one, to join the Skid. (The Wainwrights’ house became at this time a shocking slum.) There was Kemi, the Finn, a younger John; Shahîn, the Turk, a few years older than John, but well content to be his subordinate; and Kargis from the Caucasus.

Of these, Shahîn was from the normal point of view the most attractive, for he had the build of a Russian dancer and in social intercourse a lightness of touch which one took according to one’s mood, either as charming frivolity or as sublime detachment.

Kargis, who was not much younger than John, arrived in a state bordering on mania. He had had a very trying journey in a tramp steamer, and his unstable mind had failed to stand the strain. In appearance he was of John’s type, but darker and less hardy. I found it very difficult to form a consistent idea of this strange being. He oscillated between excitement and lethargy, between passion and detachment. The cause of these fluctuations was not, I was assured, anything in his body’s physiological rhythm, but external events which were hidden from me. When I inquired what kind of events, Lo, who was trying to help me, said, “He’s like Sigrid in having a great sense of personality. But he regards persons rather differently from her way. She just loves them, and laughs at them too, and helps them, and cures them. But for him each person is like a work of art, having a particular quality or style, or ideal form which he embodies well or ill. And when a person is jarringly untrue to his peculiar style or ideal form, Kargis is excruciated.”

The ten young people and one helpless infant set sail in the Skid in August of 1928.

John kept in communication with us by the ordinary mail. As I shall explain later, the Skid, and sometimes the plane, had occasion to make frequent voyages among the Islands or to Valparaiso. Thus it was possible to post John’s brief and guarded letters. From these documents we learned first that the voyage out had been uneventful; that they had called at Valparaiso to load as much of the stores as possible; that they had reached the island; that the Skid, manned by Ng-Gunko, Kemi and Marianne, was plying to and from Valparaiso to transport the rest of the stores; that the building of the settlement was now well under way; that the Asiatic members had arrived, and were “settling in nicely,” that a hurricane had struck the island, destroying all the temporary buildings, depositing the damaged Skid on a little hill beside the harbour, and hurting one of the Tibetan boys; that they had sowed large tracts of fruit and vegetables; that they had built six canoes for fishing; that Kargis had fallen seriously ill of some digestive disease and was expected to die; that he had recovered; that the remains of a Galapagos lizard had been washed up on the shore after God knows how long a journey; that Sigrid had tamed an albatross, and that it stole the breakfast; that the Colony had suffered its first tragedy, for Yang Chung had been caught by a shark, and Kemi had been seriously mauled in the vain attempt to rescue him; that Sambo was spending all his time reading, but could not yet sit upright; that they had made for themselves pipes on the James Jones model, but with special attachments so that they could be played by normal five-fingered hands; that Tsomotre (one of the Tibetans) and Shahîn were composing wonderful music; that Jelli had developed acute appendicitis and Lo had operated successfully; that Lo herself had been working too hard on some embryological experiments and had fallen into one of her terrible nightmares; that she was awake again; that Marianne and Shên Kuo had gone to live on the far side of the Island “because they wanted to be alone for a bit”; that “Washy” was going mad, for she complained of feeling hate for Lankor (a Tibetan girl who had won the heart of Shahîn); that “Washy” had tried to kill Lankor and herself; that Sigrid, in spite of prolonged and patient efforts, had failed to cure “Washy,” and was now herself showing signs of strain, that both girls were now being cured from afar by Langatse’s telepathic influence; that the Colonists had completed their stone library and meeting-house, and the observatory was being started; that Tsomotre and Lankor, who were evidently the most expert telepathists, were now able to provide the colony with the news of the world in daily bulletins; that the more advanced members of the party, under the direction of Langatse, were undergoing severe exercises in spiritual discipline, which in time should raise them to a new plane of experience; that a severe earthquake had caused the whole island to sink nearly two feet, so that they had to lay several new courses of stone on the quays, and would henceforth need to keep the Skid in readiness for a sudden exodus, in case the island should disappear.

As the months protracted themselves into years, John’s letters became less frequent and more brief. He was evidently entirely absorbed in the affairs of the colony; and as the party became more and more concerned with supernormal activities, he found it increasingly difficult to give us an intelligible account of their life.

In the spring of 1932, however, I was greatly surprised to receive a long letter from John, the main purport of which was to urge me to visit the island as soon as possible. I quote the essential passage. “You will laugh when I tell you I want you to come and use your journalistic prowess upon us. In fact I want you to write that threatened biography after all, not for our sakes but for your own species. I must explain. We have made a wonderful start. Sometimes it was a bit grim, but now we have worked out a very satisfactory life and society. Our practical activities run smoothly, delightfully, and we are able at last to join in a great effort to reach the higher planes of experience. Already we are very different mentally from what we were when we landed. Some of us have seen far and deep into reality, and we have at least gained a clear view of the work we have undertaken. But a number of signs suggest that before very many months have passed the colony will be destroyed. If your species discovers us, it will certainly try to smash us; and we are not yet in a position to defeat it. Langatse has urged us (and he is right) to push on with the spiritual part of our work, so as to complete as much as possible of it before the end. But also we may as well leave records of our little adventure as an example for any future supernormals who may attempt to found the new world, and for the benefit of the more sensitive members of Homo sapiens. Langatse will take charge of the record for supernormals; the record for your species entails only normal powers and can be done satisfactorily by yourself.”

I was now a tolerably successful free-lance journalist, and I had a full programme before me. I was married, and Bertha was expecting a child. Yet I eagerly accepted the invitation. That afternoon I made inquiries about steamers for Valparaiso, and replied to John (post restante at that city), telling him when to expect me.

Guiltily, I broke my news to Bertha. She was hard hit by it, but she said, “Yes, if John wants you, of course you must go.” Then I went round to the Wainwrights’. Pax greatly surprised me, for no sooner had I begun to tell her about the letter than she interrupted me. “I know,” she said, “for some weeks he has been giving me little stray visions of the island, and even talking to me. He said he would be asking for you.”

CHAPTER XX. THE COLONY IN BEING

WHEN I ARRIVED at Valparaiso the Skid was waiting for me manned by Ng-Gunko and Kemi. Both lads had appreciably matured since I had last seen them, nearly four years earlier. Those crowded years seemed to have speeded up the slow growth natural to their kind. Ng-Gunko, in particular, who was actually sixteen and might have been taken for twelve, had acquired a grace and a seriousness which I never expected of him. Both seemed in a great hurry to put to sea. I asked if there was any special engagement to keep on the island. “No,” said Ng-Gunko, “but we may have less than a year to live, and we love the island, and all our friends. We want to go home.”

As soon as my baggage and some cases of books and stores had been transshipped in the Skid’s dinghy, we got under way. Ng-Gunko and Kemi promptly divested themselves of their clothes, for it was a hot day. Kemi’s fair skin had been burnt to the colour of the teak woodwork of the Skid.

When we had come within about forty miles of the island, Kemi, who was at the helm, said, glancing from the magnetic to the gyroscopic compass, “They must be using the deflector. That means some ship has come too close, and they’re heading her off.” He went on to explain that on the island they had an instrument for deflecting a magnetic compass at any range up to about fifty miles. This was the fourth occasion for its use.

At last we sighted the island, a minute grey hump on the horizon. As we approached, it rose and displayed itself as a double mountain. Even when we were quite close to land I failed to detect any sign of habitation. Ng-Gunko explained that the buildings had all been placed in such a manner as to escape detection. Not till the island had opened out its little harbour to embrace us did I see the corner of one wooden building protruding from behind some trees. Not till we had entered the inner harbour did the whole settlement appear. It consisted of a score or more of small wooden buildings, with a larger stone building behind them and slightly higher up the slope. Most of the little wooden buildings, I was told, were the private houses of the residents. The stone building was the library and meeting-house. There were also buildings on the quayside, including a stone power-station. Somewhat remote from the rest of the settlement was a collection of wooden sheds which were said to be temporary labs.

The Skid was moored alongside the lowest of three stone quays, for the tide was out. The colonists were waiting to receive us and unload. They were a bunch of naked, sunburnt youngsters of both sexes and very diverse appearance. John sprang on board to greet me, and I found myself tongue-tied. He had become a dazzling figure, at least to my faithful eyes. There was a new firmness and a new dignity about him. His face was brown and smooth and hard like a hazel nut. His whole body was like shaped and bees-waxed oak. His hair was bleached to a dazzling whiteness. I noted among the party several unfamiliar faces, the Asiatics, of course, from China, Tibet and India. Seeing all these supernormals together, I was struck by a pervading Chinese or Mongolian expression about them. They had come from many lands, but they had a family likeness. John might well be right in guessing that all had sprung from a single “sporting point” centuries ago, probably in Central Asia. From that original mutation, or perhaps from a number of similar mutations, successive generations of offspring had spread over Asia, Europe, Africa, interbreeding with the normal kind, but producing occasionally a true supernormal individual.

Subsequently I learned that Shên Kuo’s direct researches in the past had confirmed this theory.

I had been dreading life in this colony of superior persons. I expected to feel unwanted, to be as useless and distracting as a dog at a highbrow concert. But my reception reassured me. The younger members accepted me gaily and carelessly, treating me much as nieces and nephews might treat an uncle whose special office it was to make a fool of himself. The elders of the party were more restrained, but genial.

I was assigned one of the wooden cottages or shacks as my private residence. It was surrounded by a verandah. “You may prefer to have your bed out here,” said John. “There are no mosquitoes.” I noticed at once that the cottage had been made with the care and accuracy of fine cabinet-making. It was sparsely furnished with solid and simple articles of waxed wood. On one wall of the sitting-room was a carved panel representing in an abstract manner a boy and a girl (of the supernormal type) apparently at sea in a canoe, and hunting a shark. In the bedroom was another carving, much more abstract, but vaguely suggestive of sleep. On the bed were sheets and blankets, woven of rough yarns unknown to me. I was surprised to see electric light, an electric stove, and beyond the bedroom a minute bathroom with hot and cold taps. The water was heated by an electric contrivance in the bathroom itself. Fresh water was plentiful, I was told, for it was distilled from the sea as a sort of by-product of the psycho-physical power-station.

Glancing at the small electric clock, let into the wall, John said, “There’ll be a meal in a few minutes. That long building is the feeding-house, with the kitchen alongside of it.” He pointed to a low wooden building among the trees. In front of it was a terrace, and on the terrace, tables.

I shall not forget my first meal on the island. I was seated between John and Lo. The table was crowded with unfamiliar eatables, especially tropical and subtropical fruits, fish, and a queer sort of bread, all served in vessels made of wood or of shell. Marianne and the two Chinese girls seemed responsible for the meal, for they kept disappearing into the kitchen to produce new dishes.

Looking at the slight naked figures of various shades from Ng-Gunko’s nigger-brown to Sigrid’s rich cream, all seated round the table and munching with the heartiness of a school treat, I felt that I had strayed into an island of goblins. This was in the main an effect of the two rows of large heads and eyes like field-glass lenses, but was accentuated by the disproportionately large hands which were busy with the food. The islanders were certainly a collection of young freaks, but one or two of them were freakish even in relation to the standards of the group itself. There was Jelli with her hammer-head and hare-lip, Ng-Gunko with his red wool and discrepant eyes. Tsomotre, a Tibetan boy, whose head seemed to grow straight out of his shoulders without the intervention of a neck, Hwan Tê, a Chinese youngster, whose hands outclassed all the others in size, and bore, in addition to the normal set of fingers, an extra and very useful thumb.

Since the death of Yang Chung the party comprised eleven youths and boys (including Sambo) and ten girls, of whom the youngest was a little Indian child. Of these twenty-one individuals, three lads and a girl were Tibetan, two youths and two girls were Chinese, two girls were Indian. All the others were of European origin, except Washingtonia Jong. I was to discover that of the Asiatics the outstanding personalities were Tsomotre, the neckless expert in telepathy, and Shên Kuo, a Chinese youth of John’s age who specialized in direct research into the past. This gentle and rather frail young man, who, I noticed, was given specially prepared food, was said to be in some ways the most “awakened” member of the colony. John once said half seriously, “Shên Kuo is a reincarnation of Adlan.”

On my first afternoon John took me for a tour of inspection round the island. We went first to the power-house, a stone building on the quay. Outside the door the infant Sambo lay upon a mat, kicking with his crooked black legs. Curiously, he seemed to have changed less than the other supernormals. His legs were still too weak to support him. As we passed, he piped to John, “Hi! What about a bit of a talk? I’ve got a problem.” John replied without checking his progress, “Sorry, too busy just now.” Within we found Ng-Gunko, his back shining with sweat, shovelling sand, or rather dried ooze, into a sort of furnace. “Convenient,” I said, laughing, “to be able to burn mud.” Ng-Gunko paused, grinning, and wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

John explained. “The element that we use now is particularly easy to disintegrate by the psychical technique, but also it occurs only in very small quantities. Of course, if we disintegrated all this mass of stuff and let it go off with a bang, the whole island would be blown up. But only about a millionth part of the raw material is the element we want. The furnace merely frees the desired atoms as a sort of ash, which has to be refined out of the other ash, and stored in that hermetically sealed container.”

He now led the way into another room, and pointed to a much smaller and very solid-looking bit of mechanism. “That,” he said, “is where the real business is done. Every now and then Ng-Gunko puts a pinch of the stuff on a sticky wafer, pops it in there, and ‘hypnotizes’ it. That makes it go invisible and intangible and materially non-existent, at least for ordinary purposes; because, you see, it has gone to sleep and can’t take any effect on anything. Well, either Ng-Gunko wakes it up again at once, and it sends the hell of a blast of power into that engine, to drive the dynamos; or it is taken away for use on the Skid, or elsewhere.”

We passed into a room full of machinery, a mass of cylinders, rods, wheels, tubes, dials. Beyond that were three big dynamos, and beyond them the plant for distilling sea-water.

We then moved over to the laboratory, a rambling collection of wooden buildings rather apart from the settlement. There we found Lo and Hwan Tê working with microscopes. Lo explained that they were “trying to spot a bug that’s got at the maize plantation.” The place was much like any ordinary lab., crowded with jars, test-tubes, retorts and so on. It evidently served for work on both the physical and the biological sciences, but the biological was preponderant. On one side of the room was an immense cupboard, or rather series of small cupboards. These, I learned, were incubators for use in embryological work. I was to hear more of this later.

The library and meeting-room was a stone erection which had evidently been built to last, and to delight the eye. It was quite a small building of one storey, and I was not surprised to learn that most of the books were still housed in wooden sheds. But the shelves of the library itself were already filled with all the most prized volumes. When we entered the room, we found Jelli, Shên Kuo and Shahîn surrounded by piles of books. The smaller half of the building was occupied by the meeting-room, which was panelled with strange woods and decorated with much-stylized carvings. Of these works, some repelled and intrigued me, others moved me not at all. The former, John said, had been done by Kargis, the latter by Jelli. It was plain that Jelli’s creations had a significance unperceived by me, for John was evidently held by them, and to my surprise we found Lankor, the Tibetan girl, standing motionless before one of them, her lips moving. When he saw her, John said, lowering his voice, “She’s far away, but we mustn’t risk disturbing her.”

After leaving the library we walked through a big kitchen garden, where several of the young people were at work, and thence up the valley between the island’s two mountains. Here we passed through fields of maize and groves of baby orange-trees and shaddock, which, it was hoped, would some day bear a rich crop. The vegetation of the island ranged from tropical to subtropical and even temperate. The extinct native pioneers had introduced much valuable tropical vegetation, such as the ubiquitous and invaluable coco-palm, and also bread-fruit, mango, and guava. Owing to the saltiness of the air none but the coco-palm had really prospered until the supernormals had invented a spray to counteract the salt. When we had climbed out of the valley by a little track amongst a tangle of aromatic bushes, we presently emerged upon a tract of bare hillside consisting of rock, covered in places with dried sub-oceanic ooze. Here and there a wind-borne seed had alighted and prospered, and founded a little colony of vegetation. On a shoulder of the mountain John pointed out “the island’s main attraction for sightseers.” It was the keel and broken ribs of a wooden vessel evidently wrecked and sunk before the island rose from the bottom of the Pacific. Within it were bits of crockery and a human skull.

On the top of the little mountain we came upon the unfinished observatory. Its walls had risen only a foot from the ground, yet the whole place had a deserted look. To my question John replied, “When we found out how short a time lay before us, we abandoned all work of that kind, and concentrated on undertakings that we could bring to some sort of conclusion. I’ll tell you more about them, some day.”

I have reached the part of my narrative that I intended to present with most detail and greatest effect, but several attempts to tackle it have finally convinced me that the task is beyond my powers. Again and again I have tried to plan an anthropological and psychological report on the colony. Always I have failed. I can give only a few incoherent observations. I can say, for instance, that there was something incomprehensible, something “inhuman,” about the emotional life of the islanders. In all normal situations, though of course their behaviour varied from the exuberance of Ng-Gunko and the fastidiousness of Kargis to the perfect composure of Lo, their emotions seemed on the whole normal. Doubtless, even in the most hearty expression of normal emotion in everyday situations, there was a curious self-observation and a detached relish, which seemed to me not quite “human.” But it was in grave and exceptional situations and particularly in disaster that the islanders revealed themselves as definitely of a different texture from that of Homo sapiens. One incident must serve as an example.

Shortly after my arrival Hsi Mei, the Chinese girl, commonly called May, was seized with a terrible fit, and in disastrous circumstances. In her, apparently, the supernormal nature, though highly developed, was very precariously established. Her fit was evidently caused by a sudden reversion to the normal, but to the normal in a distorted and savage form. One day she was out fishing with Shahîn, who had recently become her mate. She had been strange all the morning. Suddenly she flew at him and began tearing him with nails and teeth. In the scuffle the boat capsized, and the inevitable shark seized May by the leg. Fortunately Shahîn wore a sheath-knife, for use in cleaning fish. With this he attacked the shark, which by good luck was a young one. There was a desperate struggle. Finally the brute released its prey and fled. Shahîn, mauled and exhausted, succeeded with great difficulty in bringing May back to land. During the following three weeks he nursed her constantly, refusing to allow anyone to relieve him. What with her almost severed leg and her mental disorder, she was in a desperate plight. Sometimes her true self seemed to reappear, but more often she was either unconscious or maniacal. Shahîn was hard put to it to restrain her from doing serious hurt to herself or to him. When at last she seemed to be recovering, Shahîn was ecstatically delighted. Presently, however, she grew much worse. One morning, when I took his breakfast over to their cottage, he greeted me with a gaunt but placid face, and said, “Her soul is torn too deeply now. She will never mend. This morning she knows me, and has reached out her hand for me. But she is not herself, she is frightened. And very soon she will not know me ever again. I will sit with my dear this morning as usual, but when she is asleep I must kill her.” Horrified, I rushed to fetch John. But when I had told him, he merely sighed and said, “Shahîn knows best.”

That afternoon, in the presence of the whole colony, Shahîn carried the dead Hsi Mei to a great rock beside the harbour. Gently he laid her down, gazed at her for a moment with longing, then stepped back among his companions. Thereupon John, using the psycho-physical technique, caused a sufficient number of the atoms of her flesh to disintegrate, so that there was a violent outpouring of their pent-up energies, and her whole body was speedily consumed in a dazzling conflagration. When this was done, Shahîn passed his hand over his brow, and then went down with Kemi and Sigrid to the canoes. The rest of the day they spent repairing the nets. Shahîn talked easily, even gaily, about May; and laughed, even, over the desperate battle of her spirit with the powers of darkness. And sometimes while he worked, he sang. I said to myself, “Surely this is an island of monsters.”

I must now try to convey something of my vivid impression that strange and lofty activities were all the while going on around me on the island although I could not detect them. I felt as though I were playing blind man’s buff with invisible spirits. The bodily eye watched unhindered the bright perceived world and the blithe physical activities of these young people; but the mind’s eye was blindfold, and the mind’s ear could gather only vague hints of incomprehensible happenings.

One of the most disconcerting features of life on the island was that much of the conversation of the colonists was carried on telepathically. So far as I could judge, vocal speech was in process of atrophy. The younger members still used it as the normal means of communication, and even among the elders it was often indulged in for its own sake, much as we may prefer to walk rather than take a bus. The spoken language was prized chiefly for its aesthetic value. Not only did the islanders make formal poems for one another as frequently as the cultured Japanese; they also delighted sometimes to converse with one another in subtle metre, assonance and rhyme. Vocal speech was used also for sheer emotional expression, both deliberately and inadvertently. Our civilization had left its mark on the island in such ejaculations as “damn” and “blast” and several which we do not yet tolerate in print. In all reactions to the personality of others, too, speech played an important part. It was often a vehicle for the expression of rivalry, friendship and love. But even in this field all finer intercourse, I was told, depended on telepathy. Speech was but an obbligato to the real theme. Serious discussion was always carried on telepathically and in silence. Sometimes, however, emotional stress would give rise to speech as a spontaneous but unconsidered accompaniment of telepathic discourse. In these circumstances vocal activity tended to be blurred and fragmentary like the speech of a sleeper. Such mutterings were rather frightening to one who could not enter into the telepathic conversation. At first, by the way, I had been irrationally disturbed whenever a group of the islanders, working in silence in the garden or elsewhere, suddenly began to laugh for no apparent reason though actually in response to some telepathic jest. In time I came to accept these oddities without the “nervy” creepiness which they used to arouse in me.

There were happenings on the island far more strange than the normal flow of telepathic conversation. On my third evening, for instance, all the colonists gathered in the meeting-room. John explained that this was one of the regular twelfth-day meetings “to review our position in relation to the universe.” I was advised to come, but to go away when I was bored. The whole party sat in the carved wooden chairs round the walls of the room. There was silence. Having had some experience of Quaker meetings, I was not at first ill at ease. But presently a rather terrifying absolute stillness came upon the company. Not only gross fidgetings, but even those almost imperceptible movements which characterize all normal living, ceased, and became noticeable through their absence. I might have been in a roomful of stone images. On every face was an expression of intent but calm concentration which was not solemn, was even perhaps faintly amused. Suddenly and with keen scrutiny, all eyes turned upon me. I was seized with a sudden panic; but immediately there came over all the intent faces a reassuring smile. Then followed an experience which I can only describe by saying that I felt directly the presence of those supernormal minds, felt telepathically a vague but compelling sense of their immature majesty, felt myself straining desperately to rise to their level, felt myself breaking under the strain, so that I had finally to flee back into my little isolated and half-human self, with the thankfulness of one who falls asleep after great toil, but with the loneliness of an exile.

The many eyes were now turned from me. The young winged minds had soared beyond my reach.

Presently Tsomotre, the neckless Tibetan, moved to a sort of harpsichord, tuned to the strange intervals which the islanders enjoyed. He played. To me his music was indescribably unpleasant. I could have screamed, or howled like a dog. When he had done, a faint involuntary murmur from several throats seemed to indicate deep approval. Shahîn rose from his seat, looking with keen inquiry at Lo, who hesitated, then also rose. Tsomotre began playing once more, tentatively. Lo, meanwhile, had opened a huge chest, and after a brief search she took from it a folded cloth, which when she had shaken it out was revealed as an ample and undulatory length of silk, striped in many colours. This she wrapped around her. The music once more took definite form. Lo and Shahîn glided into a solemn dance, which quickened presently to a storm of wild movement. The silk whirled and floated, revealing the tawny limbs of Lo; or was gathered about her with pride and disdain. Shahîn leapt hither and thither around her, pressed toward her, was rejected, half accepted, spurned again. Now and then came moments of frank sexual contact, stylized and knit into the movement-pattern of the dance. The end suggested to me that the two lovers, now clinging together, were being engulfed in some huge catastrophe. They glanced hither and thither, above, below, with expressions of horror and exaltation, and at one another with gleams of triumph. They seemed to thrust some invisible assailant from them, but less and less effectively, till gradually they sank together to the ground. Suddenly they sprang up and apart to perform slow marionette-like antics which meant nothing to me. The music stopped, and the dance. As she returned to her seat, Lo flashed a questioning, taunting look at John.

Later, when I had described this incident in my notes, I showed my account of it to Lo. When she had glanced at it, she said, “But you have missed the point, you old stupid. You’ve made it into a love story. Of course, what you say is all right — but it’s all wrong too, you poor dear.”

After the dance the company relapsed into silence and immobility. Ten minutes later I slipped away to refresh myself with a walk. When I returned, the atmosphere seemed to have changed. No one noticed my entrance. There was something indescribably eerie in the spectacle of those young faces staring with adult gravity at nothing. Most disturbing of all was Sambo, sitting like a little black doll in his ample chair. Tears were trickling down his cheeks, but his soft little mouth seemed to have grown hard and proud and old. After a few minutes I fled.

Next morning, though the meeting had not ended till dawn, the normal life of the colony was afoot once more. I asked John to explain what had been happening at the meeting. He said they had at first merely been looking into their motives. The young especially had still a lot to learn in this respect. Both young and old had also done a good deal of work upon their deeper mutual relations, relations which in the normal species would have been far below the threshold of consciousness.

All the colonists, John said, had been engaged in making themselves known to one another as fully as possible. They had also, all of them, been disciplining themselves, making their minds more seemly and more effective. This they had performed in the presence of Langatse, their spiritual adviser, and of course under his guidance. With him they had also meditated deeply about metaphysics. In addition to all this, said John, they had been learning to expand their “now” to embrace hours, days; and narrowing it also to distinguish the present and the past strokes of a gnat’s wing. “And we explored the remote past,” he said, “helped greatly by Shên Kuo, whose genius moves in that sphere. We attained also a kind of astronomical consciousness. Some of us at least glimpsed the myriads of peopled worlds, and even the minds of stars and of nebulae. We saw also very clearly that we must soon die. And there were other things which I must not tell you.”

Life on the island did not consist entirely of this exalted corporate activity. The islanders had to do a good deal of hard work of a much more practical kind. Every day two or three canoes would go out fishing. Nets and boats and harpoons had to be repaired. There was constant work in the garden and fruit-groves, and in the maize-fields. Hitherto there had been endless building operations in wood and stone, but when the islanders had discovered their impending fate, such work was abandoned. A good deal of minor woodwork was still afoot. Much of the “crockery” was made of wood, and the rest of shell or gourd. The machinery needed constant attention, and so did the Skid. I was surprised to learn that the Skid had made many voyages among the Polynesian Islands, actually bartering some of the handicrafts of the colony for native produce. Later I found that these voyages had another purpose.

All this manual work was entered into rather as sport than as toil, for it had never been a tyranny. The most serious attention of every member was given to very different matters. The younger islanders spent much time in the library and the lab., absorbing the culture of the inferior species. The elders were concerned with a prolonged research into the physical and mental attributes of their own kind. In particular they were grappling with the problem of breeding. At what age might their young women safely conceive? Or should reproduction be ectogenetic? And how could they ensure that the offspring should be both viable and supernormal? This research was evidently the chief work of the laboratory. Originally its aim had been mainly practical, but even after the discovery of their impending doom the islanders continued these biological experiments for their theoretical interest.

When we entered the labs we found several persons at work. Lo, Kargis and the two Chinese boys were apparently in charge of the research. Delicate experiments were being carried out on the germ cells of molluscs, fishes and specially imported mammals. Still more difficult work was in progress upon human ova and spermatozoa, both normal and supernormal. I was shown a series of thirty-eight living human embryos, each in its own incubator. These startled me considerably, but the story of their conception and capture startled me even more. Indeed, it filled me with horror, and with violent though short-lived moral indignation. The eldest of these embryos was three months old. Its father, I was told, was Shahîn, its mother a native of the Tuamotu Archipelago. The unfortunate girl had been seduced, brought to the island, operated upon, and killed while still under the anaesthetic. The more recent specimens, however, had been secured by milder methods, for Lo had invented a technique by which the fertilized ovum could be secured without violence to the mother. In all the more recent cases the mothers had yielded up their treasure unwittingly, and without leaving their native islands. They were merely persuaded to agree to comply with certain instructions given by the supernormal father. The technique apparently combined physical and psychical methods, and was imposed upon the girls as a sublime religious ritual.

There was also a series of five much younger and ectogenetically fertilized ova. In these cases both father and mother were members of the colony. Lo herself had contributed one specimen. The father was Tsomotre. “You see,” she said, “I am rather young for gestation, but my ova are all right for experimental purposes.” I was puzzled. I knew well that sexual intercourse was practised on the island. Why then had the fertilization of this ovum been carried out artificially? As tactfully as I could, I stated my difficulty. Lo answered with some asperity, “Why, of course, because I was not in love with Tsomotre.”

Since I am on this subject of sex I had better pursue it. The younger members of the colony, such as Ng-Gunko and Jelli, were only on the threshold of adolescence. Nevertheless, they were very sensitive to one another, both physically and mentally. Moreover, though physically backward, they were (so to speak) imaginatively precocious, as John had been. Consequently the mental side of sexual love was surprisingly developed among them.

Among the elder members there were, of course, more serious attachments. As they had discovered how to bring conception under direct voluntary control, their unions were followed by no practical difficulties. They had, however, produced a crop of emotional stresses.

From what I was told, I gathered that there must have been a subtle difference between the love experiences of the islanders and those of normal persons. So far as I can tell, the difference was caused by two characteristics of the supernormal, namely, more discriminate awareness of self and of others, and greater detachment. The greater accuracy of self- and other-consciousness was of course responsible for a high degree of mutual understanding, tolerance and sympathy in ordinary relations. It seems to have rendered the loves of these strange beings at once exceptionally vivid and in most cases exceptionally harmonious. Occasionally some surge of crude and juvenile emotion would threaten to blot out this insight, but then detachment would normally supervene to prevent disaster. Thus between the very different spirits of Shahîn and Lankor there arose a passionate relationship in which there were frequent conflicts of desire. With beings like us this would have produced endless strife. But in them mutual insight and self-detachment seems to have kindled in each the spirit of the other, so that the result was not strife but the mental aggrandizement of both. On the other hand, when the unhappy Washingtonia found herself forsaken by Shahîn, primitive impulses had triumphed in her to such an extent that, as I have reported, she hated her rival. Such an irrational emotion was from the supernormal point of view sheer insanity. The girl herself was terrified at her own derangement. A similar incident occurred when Marianne favoured Kargis rather than Hwan Tê. But the Chinese youth apparently cured himself without help. Yet not strictly without help, for all the islanders had formed a habit of recounting their amatory experiences to Jacqueline, far away in France; and she had often played the part of the wise woman, comforting them, helping these complicated and inexperienced young creatures to make effective spiritual contact with one another.

When the young people had enjoyed one another promiscuously for a period of many months, they seem to have passed into a new phase. They gradually sorted themselves out into more or less constant couples. In some cases a couple would actually build for themselves a single cottage, but as a rule they were content to make free of each other’s private homes. In spite of these permanent “marriages” there were many fleeting unions, which did not seem to break up the more serious relationship. Thus at one time or other nearly every lad was mated with nearly every lass. This statement may suggest that the islanders lived in a ceaseless round of promiscuous sexual activity. They did nothing of the sort. The sexual impulse was not violent in them. But though coitus was on the whole a rare event on the island, it was always permitted when both parties desired it. Moreover, though the culminating sexual act was rare, much of the normal social life of the island was flushed, so to speak, with a light-hearted and elegant sexuality.

I believe that there were only one male and one female who had never spent a night in one another’s arms, and indeed had never embraced at all. These, surprisingly, and in spite of their long connexion and deep mutual intimacy and respect, were John and Lo. Neither of them had a permanent mate. Each had played a part in the light-hearted promiscuity of the colony. Their seeming detachment from one another I attributed at first to sheer sexual indifference. But I was mistaken. When I remarked to John in my blundering way that I was surprised that he never seemed to be in love with Lo, he said simply, “But I am in love with Lo, always.” I concluded that she was not attracted by him, but John read my thoughts, and said, “No, it’s mutual all right.” “Then why?” I demanded. John said nothing until I had pressed him again. He looked away, like any bashful adolescent. Just as I was about to apologize for prying, he said, “I just don’t know. At least, I half know. Have you noticed that she never lets me so much as touch her? And I’m frightened of touching her. And sometimes she shuts me right out of her mind. That hurts. I’m frightened even of trying to make telepathic contact with her, unless she begins it; in case she doesn’t want it. And yet I know her so well. Of course, we are very young, and though we have both had many loves and have learnt a lot, I think we mean so much to one another that we are afraid of spoiling it all by some false step. We are frightened to begin until we have learned much more about the art of living. Probably if we were to live another twenty years — but we shall not.” That “not” sounded with an undercurrent of grief which shocked me. I did not believe John would ever be shaken by purely personal emotion.

I decided to make an opportunity for asking Lo about her relations with John. One day, while I was meditating a tactful approach, she discovered my intention telepathically, and said, “About me and John — I keep him away because I know, and he knows too, that we are not in a position yet to give our best to one another. Jacqueline advised me to be careful, and she’s right. You see, John is amazingly backward in some ways. He’s cleverer than most of us, but quite simple about some things. That’s why he’s — Odd John. Though I’m the younger, I feel much older. It would never do to go all the way with him before he’s really grown up. These years on the island with him have been very beautiful, in their kind. In another five we might be ready. But of course, since we have to die soon, I shall not wait too long. If the tree is to be destroyed, we must pluck the fruit before it is ripe.”

When I had written and revised the foregoing account of life on the island, I realized that it failed almost completely to convey even so much of the spirit of the little community as I myself had been able to appreciate. But, try as I may, I cannot give concrete embodiment to that strange combination of lightness and earnestness, of madness and superhuman sanity, of sublime common sense and fantastic extravagance, which characterized so much on the island.

I must now give up the attempt, and pass on to describe the sequence of events which led to the destruction of the colony, and the death of all its members.

CHAPTER XXI. THE BEGINNING OF THE END

WHEN I HAD been on the island nearly four months a British surveying vessel discovered us. We knew beforehand from telepathic sources that she was likely to come our way, for she had orders to study the oceanic conditions of the South-east Pacific. We knew also that she had a gyroscopic compass. It would be difficult to lead her astray.

This vessel, the Viking, strayed about the ocean for some weeks, following the dictates of research. With innumerable zigzags she approached the island. When she came within range of our deflector her officers were perplexed by the discrepancy between the magnetic and gyroscopic compasses, but the ship maintained her true course. On one of her laps she passed within twenty miles of the island, but at night. Would she on the next lap miss us entirely? No! Approaching from the south-west, she sighted us far away on the port bow. The effect was unexpected. Since no island had any business to be in that spot, the officers concluded that the gyro was wrong after all, although their observation of the sun had seemed to confirm it. This island, then, must be one of the Tuamotu Group. The Viking, therefore, veered away from us. Tsomotre, our chief telepathist, reported that the officers of the Viking were feeling very much like people lost in the dark.

A month later the Viking sighted us again. This time she changed her course and headed for the island. We saw her approaching, a minute toy vessel, white, with buff funnel. She plunged and swayed, and grew larger. When she was within a few miles of the island, she cruised round it, inspecting. She came a mile or two nearer and described another circle, at half speed, using the lead. She anchored. A motor-launch was lowered. It left the Viking and nosed along the coast till it found the entrance to our harbour. In the outer harbour it came to shore and landed an officer and three men. They advanced inland among the brushwood.

We still hoped that they might make a perfunctory examination and then return. Between the inner and the outer harbours, and along the slopes of the outer harbour itself, there was a dense wilderness of scrub, which would give pause to any explorer. The actual channel to the inner harbour had been concealed with a curtain of vegetation hung from a rope which stretched from shore to shore.

The invaders wandered about in the comparatively open space for a while, then turned back to the launch. Presently one of them stooped and picked up something. John, who was in hiding beside me, watching both the bodies and the minds of the four men, exclaimed, “God! He’s found one of your bloody cigarette-ends — a fresh one, too.” In horror I sprang to my feet, crying, “Then he must find me.” I plunged down the hillside, shouting. The men turned and waited for me. As I approached, naked, dirty and considerably scratched by the scrub, they gaped at me in astonishment. Panting, I poured out an impromptu story. I was the sole survivor of a schooner, wrecked on the island. I had smoked my last cigarette to-day. At first they believed me. While we made our way toward the launch, they fired questions at me. I played my part tolerably well, but by the time we reached the Viking, they were growing suspicious. Though superficially dirty after my stampede, I was quite decently groomed. My hair was short, I was beardless, my nails were cut and clean. Under cross-examination by the Commander of the vessel I became confused; and finally, in despair, I told them the whole truth. Naturally they concluded that I was mad. All the same, the Commander determined to make further investigations on the island. He himself came with the party. I was taken, too, in case I should prove useful.

I now feigned complete idiocy, hoping they might still find nothing. But they discovered the camouflage curtain, and forced the launch through it into the inner harbour. The settlement was now in full view. John and the others had decided that it was useless to hide, and were standing about on the quay, waiting for us. As we came alongside, John advanced to greet us. He was an uncouth but imposing figure, with his dazzling white hair, his eyes of a nocturnal beast, and his lean body. Behind him the others waited, a group of unclad boys and girls with formidable heads. One of the Viking’s officers was heard to exclaim, “Jesus Christ! What a troupe!”

The invaders were fluttered by the sight of naked young women, several of whom were of the white race.

We took the officers to the feeding-house terrace, and gave them light refreshments, including our best Chablis. John explained to them rather fully about the colony; and though, of course, they could not appreciate the more subtle aspect of the great adventure, and were frankly though politely incredulous of the “new species” idea, they were sympathetic. They appreciated the sporting aspect of the matter. They were also impressed by the fact that I, the only adult and the only normal human figure among these juvenile freaks, was obviously a quite unimportant person on the island.

Presently John took them to see the power-station, which they just wouldn’t believe, and the Skid, which impressed them more than anything else. To them she was a subtle blend of the crazy and the shipshape. There followed a tour of the other buildings and the estate. I was surprised that John was so anxious to show everything, more surprised that he made no attempt to persuade the Commander not to report on the island and its inhabitants. But John’s policy was more subtle. After the tour of inspection he persuaded the Commander to allow all his men to leave the launch and come to the terrace for refreshments. There the party spent another half-hour. John and Lo and Marianne talked to the officers. Other islanders talked to the men. When at last the party made its farewells on the quay, the Commander assured John that he would make a full report on the island, and give high praise to its inhabitants.

As we watched the launch retreating, several of the islanders showed signs of mirth. John explained that throughout the interview the visitors had been subjected to an appropriate psychological treatment, and that by the time they reached the Viking their memory of recent events on the island would be so obscure that they would be quite unable to produce a plausible report, or even to give their shipmates an account of their adventure. “But,” said John, “this is the beginning of the end. If only we could have treated the whole ship’s company thoroughly, all might have been well. As it is, some distorted information is sure to get through and rouse the curiosity of your species.”

For three months the life of the island proceeded undisturbed. But it was a changed life. Knowledge that the end could not be far off produced a fresh intensity of consciousness in all personal relations and social activities. The islanders evidently discovered a new and passionate love of their little society, a kind of poignant and exalted patriotism, such as must have been felt in Greek city-states when the enemy was at the gates. But it was a patriotism curiously free from hate. The impending disaster was regarded less as an attack by human enemies than as a natural catastrophe, like destruction by an avalanche.

The programme of activities on the island was now altered considerably. All work that could not bear fruit within the next few months was abandoned. The islanders told me that they had certain supreme tasks on hand which must, if possible, be finished before the end. The true purpose of the awakened spirit, they reminded me, is twofold, namely to help in the practical talk of world-building, and to employ itself to the best of its capacity in intelligent worship. Under the first head they had at least created something glorious though ephemeral, a microcosm, a world in little. But the more ambitious part of their practical purpose, the founding of a new species, they were destined never to fulfil. Therefore they were concentrating all their strength upon the second aim. They must apprehend existence as precisely and zestfully as they could, and salute That in the universe which was of supreme excellence. This purpose, with the aid of Langatse, they might yet advance to a definite plane of achievement which at present still lay beyond them, though their most mature minds had already glimpsed it. With their unique practical experience and their consciousness of approaching doom they might, they said, within a few months offer to the universal Spirit such a bright and peculiar jewel of worship as even the great Langatse himself, alone and thwarted, could not create.

This most exalting and most exacting of all tasks made it necessary for them to give up all but the necessary daily toil in the fields and in the canoes. Not that very much of their time could be devoted to their spiritual exercises, for there was danger of overstraining their powers. It was necessary therefore to secure plentiful relaxation. Much of the life of the colony during this period seemed to consist of recreation. There was much bathing in the shark-free harbour, much love-making, much dancing and music and poetry, and much aesthetic juggling with colour and form. It was difficult for me to enter into the aesthetic appreciation of the islanders, but from their reactions to their own art in this period I judged that the pervading sense of finality had sharpened their sensibility. Certainly in the sphere of personal relations the knowledge that the group would soon be destroyed produced a passion of sociality. Solitariness lost its charm.

One night Chargut, who was on duty as telepathic look-out, reported that a British light cruiser was under orders to make a search for the mysterious island which had somehow temporarily undermined the sanity of so many of the Viking’s crew.

Some weeks later the vessel entered the zone of our deflector, but had little difficulty in keeping her course. She had expected some sort of craziness on the part of the magnetic needle, and trusted only to her gyroscopic compass. After some groping, she reached the island. This time the islanders made no attempt at concealment. From a convenient shoulder of the mountain we watched the grey ship drop anchor and heave slowly in the swell, displaying her red bottom-colour. A launch left her. When it was near enough, we signalled it round to the harbour entrance. John received the visitors of the quay. The lieutenant (in white duck and stiff collar) was inclined to stand on his dignity as the representative of the British Navy. The presence of naked white girls obviously increased his hauteur by upsetting his equilibrium. But refreshments on the terrace, combined with secret psychological treatment, soon produced a more friendly atmosphere. Once more I was impressed by John’s wisdom in keeping a store of good wine and cigars.

I have not space to give details of this second encounter with Homo sapiens. There was unfortunately much coming and going between the cruiser and the shore, and it was impossible to administer a thorough hypnotic inoculation to every man who saw the settlement. A good deal was achieved, however, and the visit of the Commander himself, a grizzled and a kindly gentleman of the sea, was particularly satisfactory. John soon discovered telepathically that he was a man of imagination and courage, and that he regarded his calling with unusual detachment. Therefore, seeing that a number of the naval men had escaped with only slight psychological treatment, it seemed best not to administer “oblivifaction” to the Commander, but instead to attempt the more difficult enterprise of rousing in him an overmastering interest in the colony, and loyalty to its purpose. The Commander was one of those exceptional seamen who spend a good deal of their time in reading. His mind had a background of ideas which rendered him susceptible to the technique. His was not, indeed, a brilliant intellect, but he had dabbled in popular science and popular philosophy, and his sense of values was intuitively discriminate, though uncultivated.

The cruiser remained for some days off the island, and during this time the Commander spent much of his time ashore. His first official act was to annex the island to the British Empire. I was reminded of the way in which robins and other birds annex gardens and orchards, regardless of human purposes. But alas in this case the robin represented a Great Power — the power, indeed, of the jungle over this minute garden of true humanity.

Though the Commander alone was to be allowed clear memory of his experiences on the island, all the visitors were treated in such a way as to help them to appreciate the colony as well as it was in them to do. Some were of course impervious, but many were affected to some extent. All were forced to use every ounce of their imagination to envisage the colony at least as a gay and romantic experiment. In most cases, doubtless, the notion that they conceived of it was extremely crude and false; but in one or two, besides the Commander, all sorts of rudimentary and inhibited spiritual capacities were roused into unfamiliar and disturbing activity.

When at last the time came for the visitors to leave the island, I noticed that their demeanour was different from what it had been on their arrival. There was less formality, less of a gulf between officers and men, less strict discipline. I noticed, too, that some who had formerly looked at the young women with disapproval or lust or both, now bade them farewell with friendly courtesy, and with some appreciation of their uncouth beauty. I noticed also on the faces of the more sensitive a look of anxiety, as though they did not feel altogether “at home” in their own minds. The Commander himself was pale. As he shook hands with John, he muttered, “I’ll do my best, but I’m not hopeful.”

The cruiser departed. Events on board her were followed by our telepathists with intense interest. Tsomotre and Chargut and Lankor reported that amnesia for all events on the island was rapidly spreading; that some of those who still had clear recollection were so tortured by their spiritual upheaval, and the contrast between the island and the ship, that they were losing all sense of discipline and patriotism; that two had committed suicide; that a vague panic was spreading, a sense that madness was afoot amongst them; that, apart from the Commander, none who had been in close contact with the islanders could now recall more than the most confused and incredible memories of the island; that those who escaped severe psychological treatment were also very confused, but that they remembered enough to make them a source of grave danger; that the Commander had addressed the whole ship’s company, ordering them, imploring them, to keep strict silence ashore on the subject of their recent experiences. He himself must of course report to the Admiralty, but the crew must regard the whole matter as an official secret. To spread incredible stories would only cause trouble, and get the ship into disgrace. Privately, of course, he intended to make a perfectly colourless and harmless report.

Some weeks later the telepathists announced that fantastic stories of the island were current in the Navy; that a reference had been made in a foreign paper to “an immoral and communistic colony of children on a British island in the Pacific”; that foreign secret services were nosing out the truth, in case it should prove diplomatically useful; that the British Admiralty was holding a secret inquiry; that the Commander of the cruiser had been dismissed from the Service for making a false report; that the Soviet Government had collected a good deal of information about the island, and intended to embarrass Britain by organizing a secret expedition to make contact with the colony; that the British Government had learnt of this intention, and was determined to evacuate the island at once. We were told also that the world at large knew practically nothing of the matter. The British Press had been warned against making any reference to it. The Foreign Press had not given serious attention to the vague rumour which one paper had published.

The visit of the second cruiser ended much as the previous incident, but at one stage it entailed desperate measures. The second Commander had perhaps been chosen for his uncompromising character. He was in fact a bit of a bully. Moreover, his instructions were emphatic, and he had no thought but to carry them out promptly. He sent a launch to give the islanders five hours to pack up and come aboard. The lieutenant returned “in a state of nerves” and reported that the instructions were not being carried out. The Commander himself came ashore with a party of armed men. He was determined to stand no nonsense. Refusing offers of hospitality, he announced that all the islanders must come aboard at once.

John asked for an explanation, trying to lead the man into normal conversation. He also pointed out that most of the islanders were not British subjects, and that the colony was doing no harm to any one. It was no use. The Commander was something of a sadist, and the sight of unclad female flesh had put him in a mood of ruthlessness. He merely ordered the arrest of every member of the colony.

John intervened in a changed and solemn voice. “We will not leave the island alive. Any one that you seize will drop down dead.”

The Commander laughed. Two tars approached Chargut, who happened to be the nearest. The Tibetan looked around at John, and, at the first touch of the sailors’ hands, he dropped. The sailors examined him. There was no sign of life.

The Commander was flustered; but, pulling himself together, he repeated his order. John said, “Be careful! Don’t you see yet that you’re up against something you can’t understand? Not one of us will be taken alive.” The sailors hesitated. The Commander snapped out, “Obey orders. Better begin on a girl, for safety.” They approached Sigrid, who turned with her bright smile to John, and extended a hand behind her to feel for Kargis, her mate. One of the sailors laid a gentle and hesitating paw on her shoulder. She collapsed backwards into the arms of Kargis, dead.

The Commander was now thoroughly upset, and the sailors were showing signs of insubordination. He tried to reason with John, assuring him that the islanders would be well treated on the ship; but John merely shook his head. Kargis was sitting on the ground with the dead Sigrid in his arms. His own face looked dead. After a moment’s contemplation of Kargis the Commander said, “I shall consult with the Admiralty about you. Meanwhile you may stay here.” He and his men returned to their boat. The cruiser departed.

On the island the two bodies were laid upon the great rock by the harbour. For some time we all stood round in silence, while the seagulls cried. One of the Indian girls, who had been attached to Chargut, fainted. But Kargis showed now no sign of grief. The desolate expression that had come over his face when Sigrid fell dead in his arms had soon cleared. The supernormal mind would never for long succumb to emotion that must perforce be barren. For a few moments he stood gazing on the face of Sigrid. Suddenly he laughed. It was John-like laugh. Then Kargis stooped and kissed the cold lips of his mate, gently but with a smile. He stepped aside. Once more John availed himself of the psycho-physical technique. There was a fierce blaze. The bodies were consumed.

Some days later I ventured to ask John why he had sacrificed these two lives, and indeed why the islanders could not come to terms with Britain. No doubt the colony would have to be disbanded, but its members would be allowed to return to their respective countries, and each of them might expect a long life of intense experience and action. John shook his head and replied, “I cannot explain. I can only say that we are one together now, and there is no life for us apart. Even if we were to do as you suggest and go back into the world of your species, we should be watched, controlled, persecuted. The things that we live for beckon us to die. But we are not ready yet. We must stave off the end for a while so that we may finish our work.”

Shortly after the departure of the second cruiser an incident occurred which gave me fresh understanding of the mentality of the islanders. Ng-Gunko had for some time been absorbed in private researches. With the self-importance and mysteriousness of a child he announced that he would rather not explain until he had finished his experiments. Then one day, grinning with pride and excitement, he summoned the whole company to the laboratory and gave a full account of his work. His speech was telepathic; so also were the subsequent discussions. My report is based on information given me by John, and also by Shên Kuo and others.

Ng-Gunko had invented a weapon which, he said, would make it impossible for Homo sapiens ever again to interfere with the island. It would project a destructive ray, derived from atomic disintegration, with such effect that a battleship could be annihilated at forty miles’ distance, or an aeroplane at any height within the same radius. A projector placed on the higher of the two mountain-tops could sweep the whole horizon. The designs were complete in every detail, but their execution would involve huge co-operative work, and certain castings and wrought-steel parts would have to be ordered secretly in America or Japan. Smaller weapons, however, could be laboriously made at once on the island, and fitted to the Skid and the plane to equip them for dealing with any attack that might be expected within the next few months.

Careful scrutiny proved that the invention was capable of doing all that was claimed for it. The discussion passed on to the detailed problems of constructing the weapon. But at this point, apparently, Shên Kuo interposed, and urged that the project should be abandoned. He pointed out that it would absorb the whole energy of the colony, and that the great spiritual task would have to be shelved, at any rate for a very long time. “Any resistance on our part,” he said, “would bring the whole force of the inferior species against us, and there would be no peace till we had conquered the world. That would take a long time. We are young, and we should have to spend the most critical years of our lives in warfare. When we had finished the great slaughter, should we be any longer fit mentally for our real work, for the founding of a finer species, and for worship? No! We should be ruined, hopelessly distorted in spirit. Violent practical undertakings would have blotted out for ever such insight as we have now gained into the true purpose of life. Perhaps if we were all thirty years older we should be sufficiently mature to pass through a decade of warfare without becoming too impoverished, spiritually, for our real work. But as things are, surely the wise course is to forego the weapon, and make up our minds to fulfil as much as possible of our accepted spiritual task of worship before we are destroyed.”

I could tell by merely watching the faces of the islanders that they were now in the throes of a conflict of wills such as they had never before experienced. The issue was not merely one of life and death; it was one of fundamental principle. When Shên Kuo had done, there was a clamour of protest and argument, much of which was actually vocal; for the islanders were deeply moved. It was soon agreed that the decision should be postponed for a day. Meanwhile there must be a solemn meeting in the meeting-room, and all hearts must be deeply searched in a most earnest effort to reach mental accord and the right decision. The meeting was silent. It lasted for many hours. When it was over I learned that all, including Ng-Gunko and John himself, had accepted with conviction and with gladness the views of Shên Kuo.

The weeks passed. Telepathic observation informed us that, when the second cruiser had left us, considerable amnesia and other mental derangements had occurred among those of the crew who had landed on the island. The Commander’s report was incoherent and incredible. Like the first Commander, he was disgraced. The Foreign Offices of the world, through their secret services, ferreted out as much as possible of this latest incident. They did not form anything like an accurate idea of events, but they procured shreds of truth embroidered with fantastic exaggeration. There was a general feeling that something more was at stake than a diplomatic coup, and the discomfiture of the British Government. Something weird, something quite beyond reckoning was going on on that remote island. Three ships had been sent away with their crews in mental confusion. The islanders, besides being physically eccentric and morally perverse, seemed to have powers which in an earlier age would have been called diabolic. In a vague subconscious way Homo sapiens began to realize that his supremacy was challenged.

The Commander of the second cruiser had informed his Government that the islanders were of many nationalities. The Government, feeling itself to be in an extremely delicate position in which a false step might expose it as guilty of murdering children, yet feeling that the situation must be dealt with firmly and speedily before the Communists could make capital out of it, decided to ask other Powers to co-operate and share responsibility.

Meanwhile the Soviet vessel had left Vladivostok and was already in the South Seas. Late one afternoon we sighted her, a small trading-vessel of unobtrusive appearance. She dropped anchor and displayed the Red Flag, with its golden device.

The Captain, a grey-haired man in a peasant blouse, who seemed to me to be still inwardly watching the agony of the Civil War, brought us a flattering message from Moscow. We were invited to migrate to Russian territory, where, we were assured, we should be left free to manage our colony as we wished. We should be immune from persecution by the Capitalist Powers on account of our Communism and our sexual customs. While he was delivering himself of this speech, slowly, but in excellent English, a woman who was apparently one of his officers was making friendly advances to Sambo, who had crawled toward her to examine her boots. She smiled, and whispered a few endearments. When the Captain had finished, Sambo looked up at the woman and remarked, “Comrade, you have the wrong approach.” The Russians were taken aback, for Sambo was still in appearance an infant. “Yes,” said John, laughing, “Comrades, you have the wrong approach. Like you, we are Communists, but we are other things also. For you, Communism is the goal, but for us it is the beginning. For you the group is sacred, but for us it is only the pattern made up of individuals. Though we are Communists, we have reached beyond Communism to a new individualism. Our Communism is individualistic. In many ways we admire the achievements of the New Russia; but if we were to accept this offer we should very soon come into conflict with your Government. From our point of view it is better for our colony to be destroyed than to be enslaved by any alien Power.” At this point he began to speak in Russian, with great rapidity, sometimes turning to one or other of his companions for confirmation of his assertions. Once more the visitors were taken aback. They interjected remarks, they began arguing with each other. The discussion seemed to become heated.

Presently the whole company moved to the feeding terrace, where the visitors were given refreshments, and their psychological treatment was continued. As I cannot understand Russian I do not know what was said to them; but from their expressions I judged that they were greatly excited, and that, while some were roused to bewildered enthusiasm, others kept their heads so far as to recognize in these strange beings a real danger to their species and more particularly to the Revolution.

When the Russians departed, they were all thoroughly confused in mind. Subsequently, we learned from our telepathists that the Captain’s report to his Government had been so brief, self-contradictory and incredible, that he was relieved of his command on the score of insanity.

News that the Russian expedition had occurred, and that it had left the islanders in possession, confirmed the worst fears of the Powers. Obviously, the island was an outpost of Communism. Probably it was now a highly fortified base for naval and aerial attack upon Australia and New Zealand. The British Foreign Office redoubled its efforts to persuade the Pacific Powers to take prompt action together.

Meanwhile the incoherent stories of the crew of the Russian vessel had caused a flutter in the Kremlin. It had been intended that when the islanders had been transported to Russian territory the story of their persecution by Britain should be published in the Soviet Press. But such was the mystery of the whole matter that the authorities were at a loss, and decided to prevent all reference to the island.

At this point they received a diplomatic note protesting against their interference in an affair which concerned Britain alone. The party in the Soviet Government which was anxious to prove to the world that Russia was a respectable Power now gained the upper hand. The Russian reply to Britain was a request for permission to take part in the proposed international expedition. With grim satisfaction Britain granted the request.

Telepathically the islanders watched the little fleet converging on it from Asia and America. Near Pitcairn Island the vessels assembled. A few days later we saw a tuft of smoke on the horizon, then another, and others. Six vessels came into view, all heading toward us. They displayed the ensigns of Britain, France, the United States, Holland, Japan, and Russia; in fact, “the Pacific Powers.” When the vessels had come to anchor, each dispatched a motor-launch, bearing its national flag in the stern.

The fleet of launches crowded into the harbour. John received the visitors on the quay. Homo superior faced the little mob of Homo sapiens, and it was immediately evident that Homo superior was indeed the better man. It had been intended to effect a prompt arrest of all the islanders, but an odd little hitch occurred. The Englishman, who was to be spokesman, appeared to have forgotten his part. He stammered a few incoherent words, then turned for help to his neighbour the Frenchman. There followed an anxious whispered discussion, the rest of the party crowding round the central couple. The islanders watched in silence. Presently the Englishman came to the fore again, and began to speak, rather breathlessly. “In the name of the Governments of the Pacif—” He stopped, frowning distractedly and staring at John. The Frenchman stepped forward, but John now intervened. “Gentlemen,” he said, pointing, “let us move over to the shady end of that terrace. Some of you have evidently been affected by the sun.” He turned and strode away, the little flock following him obediently.

On the terrace, wine and cigars appeared. The Frenchman was about to accept, when the Japanese cried, “Do not take. It is perhaps drugged.” The Frenchman paused, withdrew his hand and smiled deprecatingly at Marianne, who was offering the refreshments. She set the tray on the table.

The Englishman now found his tongue, and blurted out in a most unofficial manner, “We’ve come to arrest you all. You’ll be treated decently, of course. Better start packing at once.”

John regarded him in silence for a moment, then said affably, “But please tell us, what is our offence, and your authority?”

Once more the unfortunate man found that the power of coherent speech had left him. He stammered something about “The Pacific Powers” and “boys and girls on the loose,” then turned plaintively to his colleagues for help. Babel ensued, for every one attempted to explain, and no one could express himself. John waited. Presently he began speaking. “While you find your speech,” he said, “I will tell you about our colony.” He went on to give an account of the whole venture. I noticed that he said almost nothing about the biological uniqueness of the islanders. He affirmed only that they were sensitive and freakish creatures who wanted to live their own life. Then he drew a contrast between the tragic state of the world and the idyllic life of the islanders. It was a consummate piece of pleading, but I knew that it was really of much less importance than the telepathic influence to which the visitors were all the while being subjected. Some of them were obviously deeply moved. They had been raised to an unaccustomed clarity and poignancy of experience. All sorts of latent and long-inhibited impulses came to life in them. They looked at John and his companions with new eyes, and at one another also.

When John had finished, the Frenchman poured himself out some wine. Begging the others to fill their glasses and drink to the colony, he made a short but eloquent speech, declaring that he recognized in the spirit of these young people something truly noble, something, indeed, almost French. If his Government had known the facts, it would not have participated in this attempt to suppress the little society. He submitted to his colleagues that the right course was for them all to leave the island and communicate with their Governments.

The wine was circulated and accepted by all, save one. Throughout John’s speech the Japanese representative had remained unmoved. Probably he had not understood well enough to feel the full force of John’s eloquence. Possibly, also, his Asiatic mind was not to be mastered telepathically by the same technique as that which applied to his colleagues. But the main source of his successful resistance, so John told me later, was almost certainly the influence of the terrible Hebridean infant, who, ever desiring to destroy John, had contrived to be telepathically present at this scene. I had seen John watching the Jap with an expression in which were blended amusement, anxiety and admiration. This dapper but rather formidable little man now rose to his feet, and said, “Gentlemen, you have been tricked. This lad and his companions have strange powers which Europe does not understand. But we understand. I have felt them. I have fought against them. I have not been tricked. I can see that these are not boys and girls; they are devils. If they are left, some day they will destroy us. The world will be for them, not for us. Gentlemen, we must obey our orders. In the name of the Pacific Powers I — I — —” Confusion seized him.

John intervened and said, almost threateningly, “Remember, any one of us that you try to arrest, dies.”

The Japanese, whose face was now a ghastly colour, completed his sentence, “I arrest you all.” He shouted a command in Japanese. A party of armed Japanese sailors stepped on to the terrace. The lieutenant in command of them approached John, who faced him with a stare of contempt and amusement. The man came to a stand a few yards from him. Nothing happened.

The Japanese Commander himself stepped forward to effect the arrest. Shahîn barred his way, saying, “You shall take me first.” The Jap seized him. Shahîn collapsed. The Jap looked down at him with horror, then stepped over him and moved toward John. But the other officers intervened. All began talking at once. After a while it was agreed that the islanders should be left in peace until the representatives of Homo sapiens had communicated with their Governments.

Our visitors left us. Next morning the Russian ship weighed anchor and sailed. One by one the others followed suit.

CHAPTER XXII. THE END

JOHN WAS UNDER no illusion that the colony had been saved; but if we could gain another three months’ respite, he said, the immediate task which the islanders had undertaken would be finished. A minor part of this work consisted in completing certain scientific records, which were to be entrusted to me for the benefit of the normal species. There was also an amazing document, written by John himself, and purporting to give an account of the whole story of the Cosmos. Whether it should be taken as a plain statement of fact or a poetic fantasy I do not know. These various documents were now being typed, filed and packed in wooden cases; for the time had come for my departure. “If you stay much longer,” John said, “you will die along with the rest of us, and our records will be lost. To us it matters not at all whether they are saved or not, but they may prove of interest to the more enlightened members of your own species. You had better not attempt to publish them till a good many years have passed, and the Governments have ceased to feel sore about us. Meanwhile, if you like, you can perpetuate the biography — as fiction, of course, since no one would believe it.”

One day Tsomotre reported that a party of toughs was being secretly equipped for our destruction by agents of certain governments which I will not name.

The wooden chests were loaded on to the Skid along with my baggage. The whole colony assembled on the quay to bid me farewell. I shook hands with them all in turn; and Lo, to my surprise, kissed me. “We do love you, Fido,” she said. “If they were all like you, domestic, there’d have been no trouble. Remember, when you write about us, that we loved you.” Sambo, when his turn came, clambered from Ng-Gunko’s arms to mine, then hurriedly back again. “I’d go with you if I wasn’t so tied up with these snobs that I couldn’t live without them.”

John’s parting words were these. “Yes, say in the biography that I loved you very much.” I could not reply.

Kemi and Marianne, who were in charge of the Skid, were already hauling in the mooring lines. We crept out of the little harbour and gathered speed as we passed between the outer headlands. The double pyramid of the island shrank, faded, and was soon a mere cloud on the horizon.

I was taken to one of the least important of the French islands, one on which there were no Europeans. By night we unloaded the baggage in the dinghy and set it on a lonely beach. Then we made our farewells, and very soon the Skid with her crew vanished into the darkness. When morning came I went in search of natives and arranged for the transport of my goods and myself to civilization. Civilization? No, that I had left behind for ever.

Of the end of the colony I know very little. For some weeks I hung about in the South Seas trying to pick up information. At last I came upon one of the hooligans who had taken part in the final scene. He was very reluctant to speak, not only because he knew that to blab was to risk death, but also because the whole affair had evidently got on his nerves. Bribery and alcohol, however, loosened his tongue.

The assassins had been warned to take no risks. The enemy, though in appearance juvenile, was said to be diabolically cunning and treacherous. Machine-guns might be useful, and it would be advisable not to parley.

A large and well-armed party of the invaders landed outside the harbour, and advanced upon the settlement. The islanders must have known telepathically that these ruffians were too base to be dealt with by the technique which had been used on former invaders. Probably it would have been easy to destroy them by atomic disintegration as soon as they landed; though I remember being told that it was much more difficult to disintegrate the atoms of living bodies than of corpses. Apparently no attempt was made to put this method in action. Instead, John seems to have devised a new and subtler method of defence; for according to my informant the landing-party very soon “began to feel there were devils in the place.” They were apparently seized with a nameless horror. Their flesh began to creep, their limbs to tremble. This was all the more terrifying because it was broad daylight, and the sun was beating heavily down on them. No doubt the supernormals were making their presence felt telepathically in some grim and formidable manner unintelligible to us. As the invaders advanced hesitatingly through the brushwood, this terrifying sense of some overmastering presence became more and more intense. In addition they began to experience a crazy fear of one another. Every man cast sidelong glances of fright and hate at his neighbour. Suddenly they all fell upon one another, using knives, fire-arms, teeth and fingers. The brawl lasted only a few minutes, but several were killed, many wounded. The survivors took to their heels, and to the boats.

For two days the ship lay off the island, while her crew debated violently among themselves. Some were for abandoning the venture; but others pointed out that to return empty-handed was to go to certain destruction; for the great ones who had sent them had made it clear that, though success would be generously rewarded, failure would be punished ruthlessly. There was nothing for it but to try again. Another landing-party was organized, and fortified with large quantities of rum. The result was much the same as on the former occasion; but it was noticed that those who were most drunk were least affected by the sinister influence.

The assassins took three more days to screw up their courage for another landing. The bodies of their dead comrades were visible upon the hillside. How many of the living were destined to join that ghastly company? The party made itself so drunk that it could hardly row the boats. It braced itself with uproarious song. Also it carried the brave liquor with it in a keg. After the landing the gruesome influence was again felt, but this time the invaders answered it with reinforcements of rum and revelry. Reeling, clinging together, dropping their weapons, tripping over roots and one another’s feet, but defiantly singing, they advanced over the spur of hill, and saw the harbour and the settlement beneath them. They floundered down the slope. One of them accidentally discharged a pistol into his own thigh. He collapsed, yelling, but the others rushed on.

They stumbled into the presence of the supernormals, who were gathered near the power-station. There the reeling assailants sheepishly came to a stand. By now the effects of the rum were somewhat abated; and the sight of those strange beings, motionless, with their great calm eyes, seems to have dismayed the assassins. Suddenly they fled.

For some days they wrangled among themselves, and kept to their ship. They dared not land again; they dared not sail.

One afternoon, however, they were amazed to see a prodigious and dazzling spread of flame rise from behind the hill, and light up land and sea. There followed a muffled roar which echoed from the clouds like thunder. The blaze died down, but it was followed by an even more alarming phenomenon. The whole island began to sink. Waves appeared to be clambering up the hills. Presently the ship’s anchor released itself from the sinking bottom, and she was cast adrift. The island continued to descend, and the sea swept in upon it, bearing the gyrating vessel over the tops of the sunken trees. The twin peaks were submerged. Converging currents met above their heads and reared a great spout of ocean. This liquid horn, descending, drove hills of water outwards in all directions. The ship was overwhelmed. Her top-hamper, boats, and most of her deck-houses were torn away. Half the crew were lost overboard.

This cataclysm apparently occurred on the 15th December 1933. It may, of course, have been an effect of purely physical causes. Even when I first heard of it, however, I was inclined to think that it was not. I suspected that the islanders had been holding their assailants at bay in order to gain a few days for the completion of their high spiritual task, or in order to bring it at least to a point beyond which there was no hope of further advancement. I liked to believe that during the few days after the repulse of the third landing-party they accomplished this aim. They then decided, I thought, not to await the destruction which was bound sooner or later to overtake them at the hands of the less human species, either through these brutish instruments or through the official forces of the Great Powers. The supernormals might have chosen to end their career by simply falling dead, but seemingly they desired to destroy their handiwork along with themselves. They would not allow their home, and all the objects of beauty with which they had adorned it, to fall into subhuman clutches. Therefore they deliberately blew up their power-station, thereby destroying not only themselves but their whole settlement. I surmised further that this mighty convulsion must have spread downwards into the precarious foundations of the island, disturbing them so violently that the whole island collapsed.

As soon as I had gleaned as much information as possible, I hurried home with my documentary treasures, wondering how I should give the news to Pax. It did not seem to me likely that she would have learnt it already from John. When I landed in England, she and Doc met me. Her face showed me that she was prepared. At once she said, “You need not break the news gently, because we know the main part of it. John gave me visions of it. I saw those tipsy brutes routed by his power. And in a few days afterwards I saw many happy things on the island. I saw John and Lo, walking together on the shore, like lovers at last. One day I saw all the young people sitting in a panelled room, evidently their meeting-room. I heard John say that it was time to die. They all rose and went away, in couples and little groups; and presently they gathered round the door of a stone building that must have been their power-station. Ng-Gunko went through the door, carrying Sambo. Suddenly there was blinding light and noise and pain, then nothing.”

Star Maker (1937)

First published in 1937, Star Maker describes a history of life in the universe over two billion years, dwarfing in scale Stapledon’s previous work, Last and First Men (1930). The novel tackles philosophical themes such as the essence of life, birth, decay and death, and the relationship between creation and creator. A pervading theme is that of progressive unity within and between different civilisations. It is a work of great influence, prefiguring later fiction concerning genetic engineering and alien life forms. Sir Arthur C. Clarke considered Star Maker to be “probably the most powerful work of imagination ever written” and Brian W. Aldiss called the novel “the one great grey holy book of science fiction”.

The plot concerns how a human narrator from England is transported out of his body via unexplained means. He is able to explore space and other planets in our galaxy. After exploring a civilisation on another planet thousands of light years from Earth (the “Other Earth”), which is at a level of development similar to our own that existed millions of years ago, his mind merges with that of one of its inhabitants. As they travel together, they are joined by more ‘group-minds’, as the narrative explores many more planets in less and less detail.

The disembodied travelers encounter many ideas that are interesting from both science-fictional and philosophical points of view, allowing the author to introduce many of his complex theories. These include imaginative descriptions of species, civilisations and methods of warfare, descriptions of the multiverse and the concept that the stars and pre-galactic nebulae are intelligent beings, operating on vast time scales. A key idea is the formation of collective minds from many telepathically linked individuals, on the level of planets, galaxies and eventually the cosmos itself.

The climax of the novel is the “supreme moment of the cosmos”, when the cosmic mind, including the narrator, attains momentary contact with the titular “Star Maker” — the creator of the universe, who stands in the same relation as an artist to his artwork, calmly assessing its quality without any feeling for the suffering of its inhabitants.

Star Maker is one of the most highly acclaimed novels of the science fiction genre, being lauded at the time of its first publication due to its inventive and daring approach. Among its famous admirers were H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Aldiss, Doris Lessing and Stanisław Lem. Freeman Dyson was also an enthusiast of the novel, admitting to basing his concept of Dyson spheres on a section of the book, even calling “Stapledon sphere” a better name for the idea. Other writers were not so impressed with Star Maker; C. S. Lewis was appalled at Stapledon’s philosophy in a letter to Arthur C. Clarke in 1943, describing the ending as “sheer devil worship.”

Stapledon, soon after the publication of ‘Star Maker’, 1938

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. THE EARTH

1. THE STARTING POINT

2. EARTH AMONG THE STARS

II. INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

III. THE OTHER EARTH

1. ON THE OTHER EARTH

2. A BUSY WORLD

3. PROSPECTS OF THE RACE

IV. I TRAVEL AGAIN

V. WORLDS INNUMERABLE

1. THE DIVERSITY OF WORLDS

2. STRANGE MANKINDS

3. NAUTILOIDS

VI. INTIMATIONS OF THE STAR MAKER

VII. MORE WORLDS

1. A SYMBIOTIC RACE

2. COMPOSITE BEINGS

3. PLANT MEN AND OTHERS

VIII. CONCERNING THE EXPLORERS

IX. THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS

1. BUSY UTOPIAS

2. INTERMUNDANE STRIFE

3. A CRISIS IN GALACTIC HISTORY

4. TRIUMPH IN A SUB-GALAXY

5. THE TRAGEDY OF THE PERVERTS

6. A GALACTIC UTOPIA

X. A VISION OF THE GALAXY

XI. STARS AND VERMIN

1. THE MANY GALAXIES

2. DISASTER IN OUR GALAXY

3. STARS

4. GALACTIC SYMBIOSIS

XII. A STUNTED COSMICAL SPIRIT

XIII. THE BEGINNING AND THE END

1. BACK TO THE NEBULAE

2. THE SUPREME MOMENT NEARS

3. THE SUPREME MOMENT AND AFTER

XIV. THE MYTH OF CREATION

XV. THE MAKER AND HIS WORKS

1. IMMATURE CREATING

2. MATURE CREATING

3. THE ULTIMATE COSMOS AND THE ETERNAL SPIRIT

XVI. EPILOGUE: BACK TO EARTH

A NOTE ON MAGNITUDE

The first edition

PREFACE

AT A MOMENT when Europe is in danger of a catastrophe worse than that of 1914 a book like this may be condemned as a distraction from the desperately urgent defence of civilization against modern barbarism.

Year by year, month by month, the plight of our fragmentary and precarious civilization becomes more serious. Fascism abroad grows more bold and ruthless in its foreign ventures, more tyrannical toward its own citizens, more barbarian in its contempt for the life of the mind. Even in our own country we have reason to fear a tendency toward militarization and the curtailment of civil liberty. Moreover, while the decades pass, no resolute step is taken to alleviate the injustice of our social order. Our outworn economic system dooms millions to frustration.

In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced judgement. Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with their minds closed against the world’s most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their contemporaries but also are subtly insincere. For these writers must consciously or unconsciously contrive to persuade themselves either that the crisis in human affairs does not exist, or that it is less important than their own work, or that it is anyhow not their business. But the crisis does exist, is of supreme importance, and concerns us all. Can anyone who is at all intelligent and informed hold the contrary without self-deception?

Yet I have a lively sympathy with some of those ‘intellectuals’ who declare that they have no useful contribution to make to the struggle, and therefore had better not dabble in it. I am, in fact, one of them. In our defence I should say that, though we are inactive or ineffective as direct supporters of the cause, we do not ignore it. Indeed, it constantly, obsessively, holds our attention. But we are convinced by prolonged trial and error that the most useful service open to us is indirect. For some writers the case is different. Gallantly plunging into the struggle, they use their powers to spread urgent propaganda, or they even take up arms in the cause. If they have suitable ability, and if the particular struggle in which they serve is in fact a part of the great enterprise of defending (or creating) civilization, they may, of course, do valuable work. In addition they may gain great wealth of experience and human sympathy, thereby immensely increasing their literary power. But the very urgency of their service may tend to blind them to the importance of maintaining and extending, even in this age of crisis, what may be called metaphorically the ‘self-critical self-consciousness of the human species’, or the attempt to see man’s life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan. They nobly forgo something of that detachment, that power of cold assessment, which is, after all, among the most valuable human capacities. In their case this is perhaps as it should be; for a desperate struggle demands less of detachment than of devotion. But some who have the cause at heart must serve by striving to maintain, along with human loyalty, a more dispassionate spirit. And perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our charity toward one another.

In this belief I have tried to construct an imaginative sketch of the dread but vital whole of things. I know well that it is a ludicrously inadequate and in some ways a childish sketch, even when regarded from the angle of contemporary human experience. In a calmer and a wiser age it might well seem crazy. Yet in spite of its crudity, and in spite of its remoteness, it is perhaps not wholly irrelevant.

At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words ‘spiritual’ and ‘worship’, which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should say, involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him prize them in a new way. The ‘spiritual life’ seems to be in essence the attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate to our experience as a whole, just as admiration is felt to be in fact appropriate toward a well-grown human being. This enterprise can lead to an increased lucidity and finer temper of consciousness, and therefore can have a great and beneficial effect on behaviour. Indeed, if this supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is a mere sham and a snare.

Before closing this preface I must express my gratitude to Professor L. C. Martin, Mr. L. H. Myers, and Mr. E. V. Rieu, for much helpful and sympathetic criticism, in consequence of which I re-wrote many chapters. Even now I hesitate to associate their names with such an extravagant work. Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.

Certain ideas about artificial planets were suggested by Mr. J. D. Bernal’s fascinating little book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. I hope he will not strongly disapprove of my treatment of them.

My wife I must thank both for work on the proofs and for being herself.

At the end of the book I have included a note on Magnitude, which may be helpful to readers unfamiliar with astronomy. The very sketchy time scales may amuse some.

O. S.

March 1937

I. THE EARTH

1. THE STARTING POINT

ONE NIGHT WHEN I had tasted bitterness I went out on to the hill. Dark heather checked my feet. Below marched the suburban street lamps. Windows, their curtains drawn, were shut eyes, inwardly watching the lives of dreams. Beyond the sea’s level darkness a lighthouse pulsed. Overhead, obscurity.

I distinguished our own house, our islet in the tumultuous and bitter currents of the world. There, for a decade and a half, we two, so different in quality, had grown in and in to one another, for mutual support and nourishment, in intricate symbiosis. There daily we planned our several undertakings, and recounted the day’s oddities and vexations. There letters piled up to be answered, socks to be darned. There the children were born, those sudden new lives. There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life than either alone.

All this, surely, was good. Yet there was bitterness. And bitterness not only invaded us from the world; it welled up also within our own magic circle. For horror at our futility, at our own unreality, and not only at the world’s delirium, had driven me out on to the hill.

We were always hurrying from one little urgent task to another, but the upshot was insubstantial. Had we, perhaps, misconceived our whole existence? Were we, as it were, living from false premises? And in particular, this partnership of ours, this seemingly so well-based fulcrum for activity in the world, was it after all nothing but a little eddy of complacent and ingrown domesticity, ineffectively whirling on the surface of the great flux, having in itself no depth of being, and no significance? Had we perhaps after all deceived ourselves? Behind those rapt windows did we, like so many others, indeed live only a dream? In a sick world even the hale are sick. And we two, spinning our little life mostly by rote, seldom with clear cognizance, seldom with firm intent, were products of a sick world.

Yet this life of ours was not all sheer and barren fantasy. Was it not spun from the actual fibres of reality, which we gathered in with all the comings and goings through our door, all our traffic with the suburb and the city and with remoter cities, and with the ends of the earth? And were we not spinning together an authentic expression of our own nature? Did not our life issue daily as more or less firm threads of active living, and mesh itself into the growing web, the intricate, ever-proliferating pattern of mankind?

I considered ‘us’ with quiet interest and a kind of amused awe. How could I describe our relationship even to myself without either disparaging it or insulting it with the tawdry decoration of sentimentality? For this our delicate balance of dependence and independence, this coolly critical, shrewdly ridiculing, but loving mutual contact, was surely a microcosm of true community, was after all in its simple style an actual and living example of that high goal which the world seeks.

The whole world? The whole universe? Overhead, obscurity unveiled a star. One tremulous arrow of light, projected how many thousands of years ago, now stung my nerves with vision, and my heart with fear. For in such a universe as this what significance could there be in our fortuitous, our frail, our evanescent community?

But now irrationally I was seized with a strange worship, not, surely of the star, that mere furnace which mere distance falsely sanctified, but of something other, which the dire contrast of the star and us signified to the heart. Yet what, what could thus be signified? Intellect, peering beyond the star, discovered no Star Maker, but only darkness; no Love, no Power even, but only Nothing. And yet the heart praised.

Impatiently I shook off this folly, and reverted from the inscrutable to the familiar and the concrete. Thrusting aside worship, and fear also and bitterness, I determined to examine more coldly this remarkable ‘us’, this surprisingly impressive datum, which to ourselves remained basic to the universe, though in relation to the stars it appeared so slight a thing.

Considered even without reference to our belittling cosmical background, we were after all insignificant, perhaps ridiculous. We were such a commonplace occurrence, so trite, so respectable. We were just a married couple, making shift to live together without undue strain. Marriage in our time was suspect. And ours, with its trivial romantic origin, was doubly suspect.

We had first met when she was a child. Our eyes encountered. She looked at me for a moment with quiet attention; even, I had romantically imagined, with obscure, deep-lying recognition. I, at any rate, recognized in that look (so I persuaded myself in my fever of adolescence) my destiny. Yes! How predestinate had seemed our union! Yet now, in retrospect, how accidental! True, of course, that as a long-married couple we fitted rather neatly, like two close trees whose trunks have grown upwards together as a single shaft, mutually distorting, but mutually supporting. Coldly I now assessed her as merely a useful, but often infuriating adjunct to my personal life. We were on the whole sensible companions. We left one another a certain freedom, and so we were able to endure our proximity.

Such was our relationship. Stated thus it did not seem very significant for the understanding of the universe. Yet in my heart I knew that it was so. Even the cold stars, even the whole cosmos with all its inane immensities could not convince me that this our prized atom of community, imperfect as it was, short-lived as it must be, was not significant.

But could this indescribable union of ours really have any significance at all beyond itself? Did it, for instance, prove that the essential nature of all human beings was to love, rather than to hate and fear? Was it evidence that all men and women the world over, though circumstance might prevent them, were at heart capable of supporting a world-wide, love-knit community? And further, did it, being itself a product of the cosmos, prove that love was in some way basic to the cosmos itself? And did it afford, through its own felt intrinsic excellence, some guarantee that we two, its frail supporters, must in some sense have eternal life? Did it, in fact, prove that love was God, and God awaiting us in his heaven?

No! Our homely, friendly, exasperating, laughter-making, undecorated though most prized community of spirit proved none of these things. It was no certain guarantee of anything but its own imperfect rightness. It was nothing but a very minute, very bright epitome of one out of the many potentialities of existence. I remembered the swarms of the unseeing stars. I remembered the tumult of hate and fear and bitterness which is man’s world. I remembered, too, our own not infrequent discordancy. And I reminded myself that we should very soon vanish like the flurry that a breeze has made on still water.

Once more there came to me a perception of the strange contrast of the stars and us. The incalculable potency of the cosmos mysteriously enhanced the rightness of our brief spark of community, and of mankind’s brief, uncertain venture. And these in turn quickened the cosmos.

I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat. In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star by star.

On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars.

If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!

2. EARTH AMONG THE STARS

OVERHEAD OBSCURITY WAS gone. From horizon to horizon the sky was an unbroken spread of stars. Two planets stared, unwinking. The more obtrusive of the constellations asserted their individuality. Orion’s foursquare shoulders and feet, his belt and sword, the Plough, the zig-zag of Cassiopeia, the intimate Pleiades, all were duly patterned on the dark. The Milky Way, a vague hoop of light, spanned the sky.

Imagination completed what mere sight could not achieve. Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried grave-yards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the Earth’s core of iron; then on again, still seemingly downwards, through the southern strata to the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their blue, sun-pierced awning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.

In a strange vertigo, I looked for reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still were; and the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all. It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass, or of some more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled the first stroke.

Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jewelled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood forth as our near neighbours, some brilliant stars were seen to be in fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists, and deep perspectives of stellar populations.

The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was more. Peering between the stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of light, other such vortices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the void, depth beyond depth, so far afield that even the eye of imagination could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet’s dark side a hill, and on that hill myself. For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of imagination, the rays coming thus to me ‘round’ the cosmos would have revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth, or perhaps even the Sun, was formed.

But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the curtained windows of our home, which, though star-pierced, was still more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me an insubstantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could neither see nor touch my own flesh. And when I willed to move my limbs, nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my body, and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given way to a vague lightness and exhilaration.

When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I had died, and was entering some wholly unexpected new existence. Such a banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I understood that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized, concrete atom of community. The violence of my distress shocked me. But soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which I might wake at any minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this mysterious change. With scientific interest I would observe all that happened to me.

I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was shrinking and condensing. The nether stars were no longer visible through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top, a broad disc of darkness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun, formerly visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I must have been hundreds of miles above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and a delightful effervescence of thought. The extraordinary brilliance of the stars excited me. For, whether through the absence of obscuring air, or through my own increased sensitivity, or both, the sky had taken on an unfamiliar aspect. Every star had seemingly flared up into higher magnitude. The heavens blazed. The major stars were like the headlights of a distant car. The Milky Way, no longer watered down with darkness, was an encircling, granular river of light.

Presently, along the Planet’s eastern limb, now far below me, there appeared a faint line of luminosity; which, as I continued to soar, warmed here and there to orange and red. Evidently I was travelling not only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with his brilliance. But as I sped on, sun and planet were seen to drift apart, while the thread of dawn thickened into a misty breadth of sunlight. This increased, like a visibly waxing moon, till half the planet was illuminated. Between the areas of night and day, a belt of shade, warm-tinted, broad as a sub-continent, now marked the area of dawn. As I continued to rise and travel eastwards, I saw the lands swing westward along with the day, till I was over the Pacific and high noon.

The Earth appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the full moon. In its centre a dazzling patch of light was the sun’s image reflected in the ocean. The planet’s circumference was an indefinite breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of space. Much of the northern hemisphere, tilted somewhat toward me, was an expanse of snow and cloud-tops. I could trace parts of the outlines of Japan and China, their vague browns and greens indenting the vague blues and greys of the ocean. Toward the equator, where the air was clearer, the ocean was dark. A little whirl of brilliant cloud was perhaps the upper surface of a hurricane. The Philippines and New Guinea were precisely mapped. Australia faded into the hazy southern limb.

The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.

I reflected that not one of the visible features of this celestial and living gem revealed the presence of man. Displayed before me, though invisible, were some of the most congested centres of human population. There below me lay huge industrial regions, blackening the air with smoke. Yet all this thronging life and humanly momentous enterprise had made no mark whatever on the features of the planet. From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts.

II. INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL

WHILE I WAS thus contemplating my native planet, I continued to soar through space. The Earth was visibly shrinking into the distance, and as I raced eastwards, it seemed to be rotating beneath me. All its features swung westwards, till presently sunset and the Mid-Atlantic appeared upon its eastern limb, and then the night. Within a few minutes, as it seemed to me, the planet had become an immense half-moon. Soon it was a misty, dwindling crescent, beside the sharp and minute crescent of its satellite.

With amazement I realized that I must be travelling at a fantastic, a quite impossible rate. So rapid was my progress that I seemed to be passing through a constant hail of meteors. They were invisible till they were almost abreast of me; for they shone only by reflected sunlight, appearing for an instant only, as streaks of light, like lamps seen from an express train. Many of them I met in head-on collision, but they made no impression on me. One huge irregular bulk of rock, the size of a house, thoroughly terrified me. The illuminated mass swelled before my gaze, displayed for a fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface, and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me; but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the middle distance than I found myself already leaving it behind.

Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the passage of time was now very confused. Minutes and hours, and perhaps even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable.

While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across the thoroughfare of the asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they appeared as great stars streaming across the constellations. One or two revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me.

Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted its position among the fixed stars. The great globe now appeared as a disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major satellites were little pearls floating beside it. The planet’s surface now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds fogged its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it. Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night and day merged into one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its eastern and unilluminated hemisphere vague areas of ruddy light, which were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense cloud by volcanic upheavals.

In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star, and then was lost in the splendour of the diminished but still blazing sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon realized that I must be far beyond the limits of even Pluto’s orbit. The sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me.

At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, mocked me with their familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the other bright stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was this my punishment for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices?

In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hill-top. I saw our home. The door opened. A figure came out into the garden, lit by the hall light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went back into the house. But all this was imagination only. In actuality, there was nothing but the stars.

After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighbourhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still travelling, and travelling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as blue.

Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me. Surrounding the ruby constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside my course, on every side, the colours faded into the normal white of the sky’s familiar diamonds. Since I was travelling almost in the plane of the galaxy, the hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red behind. Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven, each hole surrounded by a zone of coloured stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light from the forward and the hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the range of my human vision.

As my speed increased, the two starless patches, before and behind, each with its coloured fringe, continued to encroach upon the intervening zone of normal stars which lay abreast of me on every side. Amongst these I now detected movement. Through the effect of my own passage the nearer stars appeared to drift across the background of the stars at greater distance. This drifting accelerated, till, for an instant, the whole visible sky was streaked with flying stars. Then everything vanished. Presumably my speed was so great in relation to the stars that light from none of them could take normal effect on me.

Though I was now perhaps travelling faster than light itself, I seemed to be floating at the bottom of a deep and stagnant well. The featureless darkness, the complete lack of all sensation, terrified me, if I may call ‘terror’ the repugnance and foreboding which I now experienced without any of the bodily accompaniments of terror, without any sensation of trembling, sweating, gasping or palpitation. Forlornly, and with self-pity, I longed for home, longed to see once more the face that I knew best. With the mind’s eye I could see her now, sitting by the fire sewing, a little furrow of anxiety between her brows. Was my body, I wondered, lying dead on the heather? Would they find it there in the morning? How would she confront this great change in her life? Certainly with a brave face; but she would suffer.

But even while I was desperately rebelling against the dissolution of our treasured atom of community, I was aware that something within me, the essential spirit within me, willed very emphatically not to retreat but to press on with this amazing voyage. Not that my longing for the familiar human world could for a moment be counterbalanced by the mere craving for adventure. I was of too home-keeping a kind to seek serious danger and discomfort for their own sake. But timidity was overcome by a sense of the opportunity that fate was giving me, not only to explore the depths of the physical universe, but to discover what part life and mind were actually playing among the stars. A keen hunger now took possession of me, a hunger not for adventure but for insight into the significance of man, or of any manlike beings in the cosmos. This homely treasure of ours, this frank and spring-making daisy beside the arid track of modern life, impelled me to accept gladly my strange adventure; for might I not discover that the whole universe was no mere place of dust and ashes with here and there a stunted life, but actually, beyond the parched terrestrial waste land, a world of flowers?

Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man’s true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer. Also I must learn to see a little more clearly and confront a little more rightly (so I put it to myself) that which, when we glimpse it at all, compels our worship.

I now seemed to my self-important self to be no isolated individual, craving aggrandizement, but rather an emissary of mankind, no, an organ of exploration, a feeler, projected by the living human world to make contact with its fellows in space. At all cost I must go forward, even if my trivial earthly life must come to an untimely end, and my wife and children be left without me. I must go forward; and somehow, some day, even if after centuries of interstellar travel, I must return.

When I look back on that phase of exaltation, now that I have indeed returned to earth after the most bewildering adventures, I am dismayed at the contrast between the spiritual treasure which I aspired to hand over to my fellow men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure was perhaps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret reservations. Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recognize, dimmed the brightness of my will. My resolution, so boldly formed, proved after all frail. My unsteady courage often gave place to yearnings for my native planet. Over and over again in the course of my travels I had a sense that, owing to my timid and pedestrian nature, I missed the most significant aspects of events.

Of all that I experienced on my travels, only a fraction was clearly intelligible to me even at the time; and then, as I shall tell, my native powers were aided by beings of superhuman development. Now that I am once more on my native planet, and this aid is no longer available, I cannot recapture even so much of the deeper insight as I formerly attained. And so my record, which tells of the most far-reaching of all human explorations, turns out to be after all no more reliable than the rigmarole of any mind unhinged by the impact of experience beyond its comprehension.

To return to my story. How long I spent in debate with myself I do not know, but soon after I had made my decision, the absolute darkness was pierced once more by the stars. I was apparently at rest, for stars were visible in every direction, and their colour was normal.

But a mysterious change had come over me. I soon discovered that, by merely willing to approach a star, I could set myself in motion toward it, and at such a speed that I must have travelled much faster than normal light. This, as I knew very well, was physically impossible. Scientists had assured me that motion faster than the speed of light was meaningless. I inferred that my motion must therefore be in some manner a mental, not a physical phenomenon, that I was enabled to take up successive view-points without physical means of locomotion. It seemed to me evident, too, that the light with which the stars were now revealed to me was not normal, physical light; for I noticed that my new and expeditious means of travel took no effect upon the visible colours of the stars. However fast I moved, they retained their diamond hues, though all were somewhat brighter and more tinted than in normal vision.

No sooner had I made sure of my new power of locomotion than I began feverishly to use it. I told myself that I was embarking on a voyage of astronomical and metaphysical research; but already my craving for the Earth was distorting my purpose. It turned my attention unduly toward the search for planets, and especially for planets of the terrestrial type.

At random I directed my course toward one of the brighter of the near stars. So rapid was my advance that certain lesser and still nearer luminaries streamed past me like meteors. I swung close to the great sun, insensitive to its heat. On its mottled surface, in spite of the pervading brilliance, I could see, with my miraculous vision, a group of huge dark sun-spots, each one a pit into which a dozen Earths could have been dropped. Round the star’s limb the excrescences of the chromosphere looked like fiery trees and plumes and prehistoric monsters, atiptoe or awing, all on a globe too small for them. Beyond these the pale corona spread its films into the darkness. As I rounded the star in hyperbolic flight I searched anxiously for planets, but found none. I searched again, meticulously, tacking and veering near and far. In the wider orbits a small object like the earth might easily be overlooked. I found nothing but meteors and a few insubstantial comets. This was the more disappointing because the star seemed to be of much the same type as the familiar sun. Secretly I had hoped to discover not merely planets but actually the Earth.

Once more I struck out into the ocean of space, heading for another near star. Once more I was disappointed. I approached yet another lonely furnace. This too was unattended by the minute grains that harbour life.

I now hurried from star to star, a lost dog looking for its master. I rushed hither and thither, intent on finding a sun with planets, and among those planets my home. Star after star I searched, but far more I passed impatiently, recognizing at once that they were too large and tenuous and young to be Earth’s luminary. Some were vague ruddy giants broader than the orbit of Jupiter; some, smaller and more definite, had the brilliance of a thousand suns, and their colour was blue. I had been told that our Sun was of average type, but I now discovered many more of the great youngsters than of the shrunken, yellowish middle-aged. Seemingly I must have strayed into a region of late stellar condensation.

I noticed, but only to avoid them, great clouds of dust, huge as constellations, eclipsing the star-streams; and tracts of palely glowing gas, shining sometimes by their own light, sometimes by the reflected light of stars. Often these nacrous cloud-continents had secreted within them a number of vague pearls of light, the embryos of future stars.

I glanced heedlessly at many star-couples, trios, and quartets, in which more or less equal partners waltz in close union. Once, and once only, I came on one of those rare couples in which one partner is no bigger than a mere Earth, but massive as a whole great star, and very brilliant. Up and down this region of the galaxy I found here and there a dying star, sombrely smouldering; and here and there the encrusted and extinguished dead. These I could not see till I was almost upon them, and then only dimly, by the reflected light of the whole heaven. I never approached nearer to them than I could help, for they were of no interest to me in my crazy yearning for the Earth. Moreover, they struck a chill into my mind, prophesying the universal death. I was comforted, however, to find that as yet there were so few of them.

I found no planets. I knew well that the birth of planets was due to the close approach of two or more stars, and that such accidents must be very uncommon. I reminded myself that stars with planets must be as rare in the galaxy as gems among the grains of sand on the sea-shore. What chance had I of coming upon one? I began to lose heart. The appalling desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole universe, hideously oppressed me. And now, an added distress, my power of locomotion began to fail. Only with a great effort could I move at all among the stars, and then but slowly, and ever more slowly. Soon I should find myself pinned fast in space like a fly in a collection; but lonely, eternally alone. Yes, surely this was my special Hell.

I pulled myself together. I reminded myself that even if this was to be my fate, it was no great matter. The Earth could very well do without me. And even if there was no other living world anywhere in the cosmos, still, the Earth itself had life, and might wake to far fuller life. And even though I had lost my native planet, still, that beloved world was real. Besides, my whole adventure was a miracle, and by continued miracle might I not stumble on some other Earth? I remembered that I had undertaken a high pilgrimage, and that I was man’s emissary to the stars.

With returning courage my power of locomotion returned. Evidently it depended on a vigorous and self-detached mentality. My recent mood of self-pity and earthward-yearning had hampered it.

Resolving to explore a new region of the galaxy, where perhaps there would be more of the older stars and a greater hope of planets, I headed in the direction of a remote and populous cluster. From the faintness of the individual members of this vaguely speckled ball of light I guessed that it must be very far afield.

On and on I travelled in the darkness. As I never turned aside to search, my course through the ocean of space never took me near enough to any star to reveal it as a disc. The lights of heaven streamed remotely past me like the lights of distant ships. After a voyage during which I lost all measure of time I found myself in a great desert, empty of stars, a gap between two star-streams, a cleft in the galaxy. The Milky Way surrounded me, and in all directions lay the normal dust of distant stars; but there were no considerable lights, save the thistle-down of the remote cluster which was my goal.

This unfamiliar sky disturbed me with a sense of my increasing dissociation from my home. It was almost a comfort to note, beyond the furthest stars of our galaxy, the minute smudges that were alien galaxies, incomparably more distant than the deepest recesses of the Milky Way; and to be reminded that, in spite of all my headlong and miraculous travelling, I was still within my native galaxy, within the same little cell of the cosmos where she, my life’s friend, still lived. I was surprised, by the way, that so many of the alien galaxies appeared to the naked eye, and that the largest was a pale, cloudy mark bigger than the moon in the terrestrial sky.

By contrast with the remote galaxies, on whose appearance all my voyaging failed to make impression, the star-cluster ahead of me was now visibly expanding. Soon after I had crossed the great emptiness between the star-streams, my cluster confronted me as a huge cloud of brilliants. Presently I was passing through a more populous area, and then the cluster itself opened out ahead of me, covering the whole forward sky with its congested lights. As a ship approaching port encounters other craft, so I came upon and passed star after star. When I had penetrated into the heart of the cluster, I was in a region far more populous than any that I had explored. On every side the sky blazed with suns, many of which appeared far brighter than Venus in the Earth’s sky. I felt the exhilaration of a traveller who, after an ocean crossing, enters harbour by night and finds himself surrounded by the lights of a metropolis. In this congested region, I told myself, many close approaches must have occurred, many planetary systems must have been formed.

Once more I looked for middle-aged stars of the sun’s type. All that I had passed hitherto were young giants, great as the whole solar system. After further searching I found a few likely stars, but none had planets. I found also many double and triple stars, describing their incalculable orbits; and great continents of gas, in which new stars were condensing.

At last, at last I found a planetary system. With almost insupportable hope I circled among these worlds; but all were greater than Jupiter, and all were molten. Again I hurried from star to star. I must have visited thousands, but all in vain. Sick and lonely I fled out of the cluster. It dwindled behind me into a ball of down, sparkling with dew-drops. In front of me a great tract of darkness blotted out a section of the Milky Way and the neighbouring area of stars, save for a few near lights which lay between me and the obscuring opacity. The billowy edges of this huge cloud of gas or dust were revealed by the glancing rays of bright stars beyond it. The sight moved me with self-pity; on so many nights at home had I seen the edges of dark clouds silvered just so by moonlight. But the cloud which now opposed me could have swallowed not merely whole worlds, not merely countless planetary systems, but whole constellations.

Once more my courage failed me. Miserably I tried to shut out the immensities by closing my eyes. But I had neither eyes nor eyelids. I was a disembodied, wandering view-point. I tried to conjure up the little interior of my home, with the curtains drawn and the fire dancing. I tried to persuade myself that all this horror of darkness and distance and barren incandescence was a dream, that I was dozing by the fire, that at any moment I might wake, that she would reach over from her sewing and touch me and smile. But the stars still held me prisoner.

Again, though with failing strength, I set about my search. And after I had wandered from star to star for a period that might have been days or years or aeons, luck or some guardian spirit directed me to a certain sun-like star; and looking outwards from this centre, I caught sight of a little point of light, moving, with my movement, against the patterned sky. As I leapt toward it, I saw another, and another. Here was indeed a planetary system much like my own. So obsessed was I with human standards that I sought out at once the most earth-like of these worlds. And amazingly earth-like it appeared, as its disc swelled before me, or below me. Its atmosphere was evidently less dense than ours, for the outlines of unfamiliar continents and oceans were very plainly visible. As on the earth, the dark sea brilliantly reflected the sun’s image. White cloud-tracts lay here and there over the seas and the lands, which, as on my own planet, were mottled green and brown. But even from this height I saw that the greens were more vivid and far more blue than terrestrial vegetation. I noted, also, that on this planet there was less ocean than land, and that the centres of the great continents were chiefly occupied by dazzling creamy-white deserts.

III. THE OTHER EARTH

1. ON THE OTHER EARTH

AS I SLOWLY descended toward the surface of the little planet, I found myself searching for a land which promised to be like England. But no sooner did I realize what I was doing than I reminded myself that conditions here would be entirely different from terrestrial conditions, and that it was very unlikely that I should find intelligent beings at all. If such beings existed, they would probably be quite incomprehensible to me. Perhaps they would be huge spiders or creeping jellies. How could I hope ever to make contact with such monsters?

After circling about at random for some time over the filmy clouds and the forests, over the dappled plains and prairies and the dazzling stretches of desert, I selected a maritime country in the temperate zone, a brilliantly green peninsula. When I had descended almost to the ground, I was amazed at the verdure of the country-side. Here unmistakably was vegetation, similar to ours in essential character, but quite unfamiliar in detail. The fat, or even bulbous, leaves reminded me of our desert-flora, but here the stems were lean and wiry. Perhaps the most striking character of this vegetation was its colour, which was a vivid blue-green, like the colour of vineyards that have been treated with copper salts. I was to discover later that the plants of this world had indeed learnt to protect themselves by means of copper sulphate from the microbes and the insect-like pests which formerly devastated this rather dry planet.

I skimmed over a brilliant prairie scattered with Prussian-blue bushes. The sky also attained a depth of blue quite unknown on earth, save at great altitudes. There were a few low yet cirrus clouds, whose feathery character I took to be due to the tenuousness of the atmosphere. This was borne out by the fact that, though my descent had taken place in the forenoon of a summer’s day, several stars managed to pierce the almost nocturnal sky. All exposed surfaces were very intensely illuminated. The shadows of the nearer bushes were nearly black. Some distant objects, rather like buildings, but probably mere rocks, appeared to be blocked out in ebony and snow. Altogether the landscape was one of unearthly and fantastical beauty.

I glided with wingless flight over the surface of the planet, through glades, across tracts of fractured rock, along the banks of streams. Presently I came to a wide region covered by neat, parallel rows of fern-like plants, bearing masses of nuts on the lower surfaces of their leaves. It was almost impossible to believe that this vegetable regimentation had not been intelligently planned. Or could it after all be merely a natural phenomenon not known on my own planet? Such was my surprise that my power of locomotion, always subject to emotional interference, now began to fail me. I reeled in the air like a drunk man. Pulling myself together, I staggered on over the ranked crops toward a rather large object which lay some distance from me beside a strip of bare ground. Presently, to my amazement, my stupefaction, this object revealed itself as a plough. It was rather a queer instrument, but there was no mistaking the shape of the blade, which was rusty, and obviously made of iron. There were two iron handles, and chains for attachment to a beast of draught. It was difficult to believe that I was many light-years distant from England. Looking round, I saw an unmistakable cart track, and a bit of dirty ragged cloth hanging on a bush. Yet overhead was the unearthly sky, full noon with stars.

I followed the lane through a little wood of queer bushes, whose large fat drooping leaves had cherry-like fruits along their edges. Suddenly, round a bend in the lane, I came upon — a man. Or so at first he seemed to my astounded and star-weary sight. I should not have been so surprised by the strangely human character of this creature had I at this early stage understood the forces that controlled my adventure. Influences which I shall later describe doomed me to discover first such worlds as were most akin to my own. Meanwhile the reader may well conceive my amazement at this strange encounter.

I had always supposed that man was a unique being. An inconceivably complex conjunction of circumstances had produced him, and it was not to be supposed that such conditions would be repeated anywhere in the universe. Yet here, on the very first globe to be explored, was an obvious peasant. Approaching him, I saw that he was not quite so like terrestrial man as he seemed at a distance; but he was a man for all that. Had God, then, peopled the whole universe with our kind? Did he perhaps in very truth make us in his image? It was incredible. To ask such questions proved that I had lost my mental balance.

As I was a mere disembodied view-point, I was able to observe without being observed. I floated about him as he strode along the lane. He was an erect biped, and in general plan definitely human. I had no means of judging his height, but he must have been approximately of normal terrestrial stature, or at least not smaller than a pigmy and not taller than a giant. He was of slender build. His legs were almost like a bird’s, and enclosed in rough narrow trousers. Above the waist he was naked, displaying a disproportionately large thorax, shaggy with greenish hair. He had two short but powerful arms, and huge shoulder muscles. His skin was dark and ruddy, and dusted plentifully with bright green down. All his contours were uncouth, for the details of muscles, sinews and joints were very plainly different from our own. His neck was curiously long and supple. His head I can best describe by saying that most of the brain-pan, covered with a green thatch, seemed to have slipped backwards and downwards over the nape. His two very human eyes peered from under the eaves of hair. An oddly projecting, almost spout-like mouth made him look as though he were whistling. Between the eyes, and rather above them, was a pair of great equine nostrils which were constantly in motion. The bridge of the nose was represented by an elevation in the thatch, reaching from the nostrils backwards over the top of the head. There were no visible ears. I discovered later that the auditory organs opened into the nostrils.

Clearly, although evolution on this Earth-like planet must have taken a course on the whole surprisingly like that which had produced my own kind, there must also have been many divergencies.

The stranger wore not only boots but gloves, seemingly of tough leather. His boots were extremely short. I was to discover later that the feet of this race, the ‘Other Men’, as I called them, were rather like the feet of an ostrich or a camel. The instep consisted of three great toes grown together. In place of the heel there was an additional broad, stumpy toe. The hands were without palms. Each was a bunch of three gristly fingers and a thumb.

The aim of this book is not to tell of my own adventures but to give some idea of the worlds which I visited. I shall therefore not recount in detail how I established myself among the Other Men. Of myself it is enough to say a few words. When I had studied this agriculturalist for a while, I began to be strangely oppressed by his complete unawareness of myself. With painful clearness I realized that the purpose of my pilgrimage was not merely scientific observation, but also the need to effect some kind of mental and spiritual traffic with other worlds, for mutual enrichment and community. How should I ever be able to achieve this end unless I could find some means of communication? It was not until I had followed my companion to his home, and had spent many days in that little circular stone house with roof of mudded wicker, that I discovered the power of entering into his mind, of seeing through his eyes, sensing through all his sense organs, perceiving his world just as he perceived it, and following much of his thought and his emotional life. Not till very much later, when I had passively ‘inhabited’ many individuals of the race, did I discover how to make my presence known, and even to converse inwardly with my host.

This kind of internal ‘telepathic’ intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult, ineffective, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and accuracy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular thoughts secret from me.

It can well be understood that at first I found these alien minds quite unintelligible. Their very sensations differed from my familiar sensations in important respects. Their thoughts and all their emotions and sentiments were strange to me. The traditional groundwork of these minds, their most familiar concepts, were derived from a strange history, and expressed in languages which to the terrestrial mind were subtly misleading.

I spent on the Other Earth many ‘other years’, wandering from mind to mind and country to country, but I did not gain any clear understanding of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history till I had encountered one of their philosophers, an aging but still vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had prevented him from attaining eminence. Most of my hosts, when they became aware of my presence within them, regarded me either as an evil spirit or as a divine messenger. The more sophisticated, however, assumed that I was a mere disease, a symptom of insanity in themselves. They therefore promptly applied to the local ‘Mental Sanitation Officer’. After I had spent, according to the local calendar, a year or so of bitter loneliness among minds who refused to treat me as a human being, I had the good fortune to come under the philosopher’s notice. One of my hosts, who complained of suffering from ‘voices’, and visions of ‘another world’, appealed to the old man for help. Bvalltu, for such approximately was the philosopher’s name, the ‘ll’ being pronounced more or less as in Welsh, Bvalltu effected a ‘cure’ by merely inviting me to accept the hospitality of his own mind, where, he said, he would very gladly entertain me. It was with extravagant joy that I made contact at last with a being who recognized in me a human personality.

2. A BUSY WORLD

SO MANY IMPORTANT characteristics of this world-society need to be described that I cannot spend much time on the more obvious features of the planet and its race. Civilization had reached a stage of growth much like that which was familiar to me. I was constantly surprised by the blend of similarity and difference. Travelling over the planet I found that cultivation had spread over most of the suitable areas, and that industrialism was already far advanced in many countries. On the prairies huge flocks of mammal-like creatures grazed and scampered. Larger mammals, or quasi-mammals, were farmed on all the best pasture land for food and leather. I say ‘quasi-mammal’ because, though these creatures were viviparous, they did not suckle. The chewed cud, chemically treated in the maternal belly, was spat into the offspring’s mouth as a jet of pre-digested fluid. It was thus also that human mothers fed their young.

The most important means of locomotion on the Other Earth was the steam-train, but trains in this world were so bulky that they looked like whole terraces of houses on the move. This remarkable railway development was probably due to the great number and length of journeys across deserts. Occasionally I travelled on steam-ships on the few and small oceans, but marine transport was on the whole backward. The screw propeller was unknown, its place being taken by paddle wheels. Internal-combustion engines were used in road and desert transport. Flying, owing to the rarified atmosphere, had not been achieved; but rocket-propulsion was already used for long-distance transport of mails, and for long-range bombardment in war. Its application to aeronautics might come any day.

My first visit to the metropolis of one of the great empires of the Other Earth was an outstanding experience. Everything was at once so strange and so familiar. There were streets and many-windowed stores and offices. In this old city the streets were narrow, and so congested was the motor traffic that pedestrians were accommodated on special elevated tracks slung beside the first-storey windows and across the streets.

The crowds that streamed along these footpaths were as variegated as our own. The men wore cloth tunics, and trousers surprisingly like the trousers of Europe, save that the crease affected by the respectable was at the side of the leg. The women, breastless and high-nostrilled like the men, were to be distinguished by their more tubular lips, whose biological function it was to project food for the infant. In place of skirts they disported green and glossy silk tights and little gaudy knickers. To my unaccustomed vision the effect was inexpressibly vulgar. In summer both sexes often appeared in the streets naked to the waist; but they always wore gloves.

Here, then, was a host of persons who, in spite of their oddity, were as essentially human as Londoners. They went about their private affairs with complete assurance, ignorant that a spectator from another world found them one and all grotesque, with their lack of forehead, their great elevated quivering nostrils, their startlingly human eyes, their spout-like mouths. There they were, alive and busy, shopping, staring, talking. Children dragged at their mothers’ hands. Old men with white facial hair bowed over walking-sticks. Young men eyed young women. The prosperous were easily to be distinguished from the unfortunate by their newer and richer clothes, their confident and sometimes arrogant carriage.

How can I describe in a few pages the distinctive character of a whole teeming and storied world, so different from my own, yet so similar? Here, as on my own planet, infants were being born every hour. Here, as there, they clamoured for food, and very soon for companionship. They discovered what pain was, and what fear, and what loneliness, and love. They grew up, moulded by the harsh or kindly pressure of their fellows, to be either well nurtured, generous, sound, or mentally crippled, bitter, unwittingly vindictive. One and all they desperately craved the bliss of true community; and very few, fewer here, perhaps, than in my own world, found more than the vanishing flavour of it. They howled with the pack and hounded with the pack. Starved both physically and mentally, they brawled over the quarry and tore one another to pieces, mad with hunger, physical or mental. Sometimes some of them paused and asked what it was all for; and there followed a battle of words, but no clear answer. Suddenly they were old and finished. Then, the span from birth to death being an imperceptible instant of cosmical time, they vanished.

This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo Sapiens. All the modes and facets of the spirit manifested in our history had their equivalents in the history of the Other Men. As with us, there had been dark ages and ages of brilliance, phases of advancement and of retreat, cultures predominantly material, and others in the main intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual. There were ‘Eastern’ races and ‘Western’ races. There were empires, republics, dictatorships. Yet all was different from the terrestrial. Many of the differences, of course, were superficial; but there was also an underlying, deep-lying difference which I took long to understand and will not yet describe.

I must begin by speaking of the biological equipment of the Other Men. Their animal nature was at bottom much like ours. They responded with anger, fear, hate, tenderness, curiosity, and so on, much as we respond. In sensory equipment they were not unlike ourselves, save that in vision they were less sensitive to colour and more to form than is common with us. The violent colours of the Other Earth appeared to me through the eyes of its natives very subdued. In hearing also they were rather ill equipped. Though their auditory organs were as sensitive as ours to faint sounds, they were poor discriminators. Music, such as we know, never developed in this world.

In compensation, scent and taste developed amazingly. These beings tasted not only with their mouths, but with their moist black hands and with their feet. They were thus afforded an extraordinarily rich and intimate experience of their planet. Tastes of metals and woods, of sour and sweet earths, of the many rocks, and of the innumerable shy or bold flavours of plants crushed beneath the bare running feet, made up a whole world unknown to terrestrial man.

The genitals also were equipped with taste-organs. There were several distinctive male and female patterns of chemical characteristics, each powerfully attractive to the opposite sex. These were savoured faintly by contact of hands or feet with any part of the body, and with exquisite intensity in copulation.

This surprising richness of gustatory experience made it very difficult for me to enter fully into the thoughts of the Other Men. Taste played as important a part in their imagery and conception as sight in our own. Many ideas which terrestrial man has reached by way of sight, and which even in their most abstract form still bear traces of their visual origin, the Other Men conceived in terms of taste. For example, our ‘brilliant’, as applied to persons or ideas, they would translate by a word whose literal meaning was ‘tasty’. For ‘lucid’ they would use a term which in primitive times was employed by hunters to signify an easily runnable taste-trail. To have ‘religious illumination’ was to ‘taste the meadows of heaven’. Many of our non-visual concepts also were rendered by means of taste. ‘Complexity’ was ‘many-flavoured’, a word applied originally to the confusion of tastes round a drinking pool frequented by many kinds of beasts. ‘Incompatibility’ was derived from a word meaning the disgust which certain human types felt for one another on account of their flavours.

Differences of race, which in our world are chiefly conceived in terms of bodily appearance, were for the Other Men almost entirely differences of taste and smell. And as the races of the Other Men were much less sharply localized than our own races, the strife between groups whose flavours were repugnant to one another played a great part in history. Each race tended to believe that its own flavour was characteristic of all the finer mental qualities, was indeed an absolutely reliable label of spiritual worth. In former ages the gustatory and olfactory differences had, no doubt, been true signs of racial differences; but in modern times, and in the more developed lands, there had been great changes. Not only had the races ceased to be clearly localized, but also industrial civilization had produced a crop of genetic changes which rendered the old racial distinctions meaningless. The ancient flavours, however, though they had by now no racial significance at all, and indeed members of one family might have mutually repugnant flavours, continued to have the traditional emotional effects. In each country some particular flavour was considered the true hall-mark of the race of that country, and all other flavours were despised, if not actually condemned.

In the country which I came to know best the orthodox racial flavour was a kind of saltness inconceivable to terrestrial man. My hosts regarded themselves as the very salt of the earth. But as a matter of fact the peasant whom I first ‘inhabited’ was the only genuine pure salt man of orthodox variety whom I ever encountered. The great majority of that country’s citizens attained their correct taste and smell by artificial means. Those who were at least approximately salt, with some variety of saltness, though not the ideal variety, were for ever exposing the deceit of their sour, sweet, or bitter neighbours. Unfortunately, though the taste of the limbs could be fairly well disguised, no effective means had been found for changing the flavour of copulation. Consequently newly married couples were apt to make the most shattering discoveries about one another on the wedding night. Since in the great majority of unions neither party had the orthodox flavour, both were willing to pretend to the world that all was well. But often there would turn out to be a nauseating incompatibility between the two gustatory types. The whole population was rotten with neuroses bred of these secret tragedies of marriage. Occasionally, when one party was more or less of the orthodox flavour, this genuinely salt partner would indignantly denounce the impostor. The courts, the news bulletins, and the public would then join in self-righteous protests.

Some ‘racial’ flavours were too obtrusive to be disguised. One in particular, a kind of bitter-sweet, exposed its possessor to extravagant persecution in all but the most tolerant countries. In past times the bitter-sweet race had earned a reputation of cunning and self-seeking, and had been periodically massacred by its less intelligent neighbours. But in the general biological ferment of modern times the bitter-sweet flavour might crop up in any family. Woe, then, to the accursed infant, and to all its relatives! Persecution was inevitable; unless indeed the family was wealthy enough to purchase from the state ‘an honorary salting’ (or in the neighbouring land, ‘an honorary sweetening’), which removed the stigma.

In the more enlightened countries the whole racial superstition was becoming suspect. There was a movement among the intelligentsia for conditioning infants to tolerate every kind of human flavour, and for discarding the deodorants and degustatants, and even the boots and gloves, which civilized convention imposed.

Unfortunately this movement of toleration was hampered by one of the consequences of industrialism. In the congested and unhealthy industrial centres a new gustatory and olfactory type had appeared, apparently as a biological mutation. In a couple of generations this sour, astringent, and undisguisable flavour dominated in all the most disreputable working-class quarters. To the fastidious palates of the well-to-do it was overwhelmingly nauseating and terrifying. In fact it became for them an unconscious symbol, tapping all the secret guilt and fear and hate which the oppressors felt for the oppressed.

In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story!

As conditions deteriorated, and the movements of charity and state-charity became less and less able to cope with the increasing mass of unemployment and destitution, the new pariah-race became more and more psychologically useful to the hate-needs of the scared, but still powerful, prosperous. The theory was spread that these wretched beings were the result of secret systematic race-pollution by riff-raff immigrants, and that they deserved no consideration whatever. They were therefore allowed only the basest forms of employment and the harshest conditions of work. When unemployment had become a serious social problem, practically the whole pariah stock was workless and destitute. It was of course easily believed that unemployment, far from being due to the decline of capitalism, was due to the worthlessness of the pariahs.

At the time of my visit the working class had become tainted through and through by the pariah stock, and there was a vigorous movement afoot amongst the wealthy and the official classes to institute slavery for pariahs and half-pariahs, so that these might be openly treated as the cattle which in fact they were. In view of the danger of continued race-pollution, some politicians urged wholesale slaughter of the pariahs, or, at the least, universal sterilization. Others pointed out that, as a supply of cheap labour was necessary to society, it would be wiser merely to keep their numbers down by working them to an early death in occupations which those of ‘pure race’ would never accept. This, at any rate, should be done in times of prosperity; but in times of decline, the excess population could be allowed to starve, or might be used up in the physiological laboratories.

The persons who first dared to suggest this policy were scourged by the whips of generous popular indignation. But their policy was in fact adopted; not explicitly but by tacit consent, and in the absence of any more constructive plan.

The first time that I was taken through the poorest quarter of the city I was surprised to see that, though there were large areas of slum property far more squalid than anything in England, there were also many great clean blocks of tenements worthy of Vienna. These were surrounded by gardens, which were crowded with wretched tents and shanties. The grass was worn away, the bushes damaged, the flowers trampled. Everywhere men, women, and children, all filthy and ragged, were idling.

I learned that these noble buildings had been erected before the world-economic-crisis (familiar phrase!) by a millionaire who had made his money in trading an opium-like drug. He presented the buildings to the City Council, and was gathered to heaven by way of the peerage. The more deserving and less unsavoury poor were duly housed; but care was taken to fix the rent high enough to exclude the pariah-race. Then came the crisis. One by one the tenants failed to pay their rent, and were ejected. Within a year the buildings were almost empty.

There followed a very curious sequence of events, and one which, as I was to discover, was characteristic of this strange world. Respectable public opinion, though vindictive toward the unemployed, was passionately tender toward the sick. In falling ill, a man acquired a special sanctity, and exercised a claim over all healthy persons. Thus no sooner did any of the wretched campers succumb to a serious disease than he was carried off to be cared for by all the resources of medical science. The desperate paupers soon discovered how things stood, and did all in their power to fall sick. So successful were they, that the hospitals were soon filled. The empty tenements were therefore hastily fitted out to receive the increasing flood of patients.

Observing these and other farcical events, I was reminded of my own race. But though the Other Men were in many ways so like us, I suspected increasingly that some factor still hidden from me doomed them to a frustration which my own nobler species need never fear. Psychological mechanisms which in our case are tempered with common sense or moral sense stood out in this world in flagrant excess. Yet it was not true that Other Man was less intelligent or less moral than man of my own species. In abstract thought and practical invention he was at least our equal. Many of his most recent advances in physics and astronomy had passed beyond our present attainment. I noticed, however, that psychology was even more chaotic than with us, and that social thought was strangely perverted.

In radio and television, for instance, the Other Men were technically far ahead of us, but the use to which they put their astounding inventions was disastrous. In civilized countries everyone but the pariahs carried a pocket receiving set. As the Other Men had no music, this may seem odd; but since they lacked newspapers, radio was the only means by which the man in the street could learn the lottery and sporting results which were his staple mental diet. The place of music, moreover, was taken by taste- and smell-themes, which were translated into patterns of ethereal undulation, transmitted by all the great national stations, and restored to their original form in the pocket receivers and taste-batteries of the population. These instruments afforded intricate stimuli to the taste-organs and scent organs of the hand. Such was the power of this kind of entertainment that both men and women were nearly always seen with one hand in a pocket. A special wave length had been allotted to the soothing of infants.

A sexual receiving set had been put upon the market, and programmes were broadcast for it in many countries; but not in all. This extraordinary invention was a combination of radio-touch, -taste, -odour, and -sound. It worked not through the sense organs, but by direct stimulation of the appropriate brain-centres. The recipient wore a specially constructed skull-cap, which transmitted to him from a remote studio the embraces of some delectable and responsive woman, as they were then actually being experienced by a male ‘love-broadcaster’, or as electromagnetically recorded on a steel tape on some earlier occasion.

Controversies had arisen about the morality of sexual broadcasting. Some countries permitted programmes for males but not for females, wishing to preserve the innocence of the purer sex. Elsewhere the clerics had succeeded in crushing the whole project on the score that radio-sex, even for men alone, would be a diabolical substitute for a certain much desired and jealously guarded religious experience, called the immaculate union, of which I shall tell in the sequel. Well did the priests know that their power depended largely on their ability to induce this luscious ecstasy in their flock by means of ritual and other psychological techniques.

Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder would decline.

Since in all the more respectable countries broadcasting had been put under the control of retired soldiers or good churchmen, the new device was at first adopted only in the more commercial and the more disreputable states. From their broadcasting stations the embraces of popular ‘radio love-stars’ and even of impecunious aristocrats were broadcast along with advertisements of patent medicines, taste-proof gloves, lottery results, savours, and degustatants.

The principle of radio-brain-stimulation was soon developed much further. Programmes of all the most luscious or piquant experiences were broadcast in all countries, and could be picked up by simple receivers that were within the means of all save the pariahs. Thus even the labourer and the factory hand could have the pleasures of a banquet without expense and subsequent repletion, the delights of proficient dancing without the trouble of learning the art, the thrills of motor-racing without danger. In an ice-bound northern home he could bask on tropical beaches, and in the tropics indulge in winter sports.

Governments soon discovered that the new invention gave them a cheap and effective kind of power over their subjects. Slum-conditions could be tolerated if there was an unfailing supply of illusory luxury. Reforms distasteful to the authorities could be shelved if they could be represented as inimical to the national radio-system. Strikes and riots could often be broken by the mere threat to close down the broadcasting studios, or alternatively by flooding the ether at a critical moment with some saccharine novelty.

The fact that the political Left Wing opposed the further development of radio amusements made Governments and the propertied classes the more ready to accept it. The Communists, for the dialectic of history on this curiously earth-like planet had produced a party deserving that name, strongly condemned the scheme. In their view it was pure Capitalist dope, calculated to prevent the otherwise inevitable dictatorship of the proletariat.

The increasing opposition of the Communists made it possible to buy off the opposition of their natural enemies, the priests and soldiers. It was arranged that religious services should in future occupy a larger proportion of broadcasting time, and that a tithe of all licensing fees should be allocated to the churches. The offer to broadcast the immaculate union, however, was rejected by the clerics. As an additional concession it was agreed that all married members of the staffs of Broadcasting Authorities must, on pain of dismissal, prove that they had never spent a night away from their wives (or husbands). It was also agreed to weed out all those B.A. employees who were suspected of sympathy with such disreputable ideals as pacifism and freedom of expression. The soldiers were further appeased by a state-subsidy for maternity, a tax on bachelors, and regular broadcasting of military propaganda.

During my last years on the Other Earth a system was invented by which a man could retire to bed for life and spend all his time receiving radio programmes. His nourishment and all his bodily functions were attended to by doctors and nurses attached to the Broadcasting Authority. In place of exercise he received periodic massage. Participation in the scheme was at first an expensive luxury, but its inventors hoped to make it at no distant date available to all. It was even expected that in time medical and menial attendants would cease to be necessary. A vast system of automatic food-production, and distribution of liquid pabulum by means of pipes leading to the mouths of the recumbent subjects, would be complemented by an intricate sewage system. Electric massage could be applied at will by pressing a button. Medical supervision would be displaced by an automatic endocrine-compensation system. This would enable the condition of the patient’s blood to regulate itself automatically by tapping from the communal drug-pipes whatever chemicals were needed for correct physiological balance.

Even in the case of broadcasting itself the human element would no longer be needed, for all possible pleasant experiences would have been already recorded from the most exquisite living examples. These would be continuously broadcast in a great number of alternative programmes.

A few technicians and organizers might still be needed to superintend the system; but, properly distributed, their work would entail for each member of the World Broadcasting Authority’s staff no more than a few hours of interesting activity each week.

Children, if future generations were required, would be produced ectogenetically. The World Director of Broadcasting would be requested to submit psychological and physiological specifications of the ideal ‘listening breed’. Infants produced in accordance with this pattern would then be educated by special radio programmes to prepare them for adult radio life. They would never leave their cots, save to pass by stages to the full-sized beds of maturity. At the latter end of life, if medical science did not succeed in circumventing senility and death, the individual would at least be able to secure a painless end by pressing an appropriate button.

Enthusiasm for this astounding project spread rapidly in all civilized countries, but certain forces of reaction were bitterly opposed to it. The old-fashioned religious people and the militant nationalists both affirmed that it was man’s glory to be active. The religious held that only in self-discipline, mortification of the flesh, and constant prayer, could the soul be fitted for eternal life. The nationalists of each country declared that their own people had been given a sacred trust to rule the baser kinds, and that in any case only the martial virtues could ensure the spirit’s admittance to Valhalla.

Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favoured radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labour they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact, the ‘Other Fascism’, complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.

Opposed to all these critics of radio-bliss, and equally opposed to radio-bliss itself, there was in each country a small and bewildered party which asserted that the true goal of human activity was the creation of a world-wide community of awakened and intelligently creative persons, related by mutual insight and respect, and by the common task of fulfilling the potentiality of the human spirit on earth. Much of their doctrine was a re-statement of the teachings of religious seers of a time long past, but it had also been deeply influenced by contemporary science. This party, however, was misunderstood by the scientists, cursed by the clerics, ridiculed by the militarists, and ignored by the advocates of radio-bliss.

Now at this time economic confusion had been driving the great commercial empires of the Other Earth into more and more desperate competition for markets. These economic rivalries had combined with ancient tribal passions of fear and hate and pride to bring about an interminable series of war scares each of which threatened universal Armageddon.

In this situation the radio-enthusiasts pointed out that, if their policy were accepted, war would never occur, and on the other hand that, if a world-war broke out, their policy would be indefinitely postponed. They contrived a world-wide peace movement; and such was the passion for radio-bliss that the demand for peace swept all countries. An International Broadcasting Authority was at last founded, to propagate the radio gospel, compose the differences between the empires, and eventually to take over the sovereignty of the world.

Meanwhile the earnestly ‘religious’ and the sincere militarists, rightly dismayed at the baseness of the motives behind the new internationalism, but in their own manner equally wrong-headed, determined to save the Other Men in spite of themselves by goading the peoples into war. All the forces of propaganda and financial corruption were heroically wielded to foment the passions of nationalism. Even so, the greed for radio-bliss was by now so general and so passionate, that the war party would never have succeeded had it not been for the wealth of the great armourers, and their experience in fomenting strife.

Trouble was successfully created between one of the older commercial empires and a certain state which had only recently adopted mechanical civilization, but was already a Great Power, and a Power in desperate need of markets. Radio, which formerly had been the main force making for cosmopolitanism, became suddenly in each country the main stimulus to nationalism. Morning, noon and night, every civilized people was assured that enemies, whose flavour was of course sub-human and foul, were plotting its destruction. Armament scares, spy stories, accounts of the barbarous and sadistic behaviour of neighbouring peoples, created in every country such uncritical suspicion and hate that war became inevitable. A dispute arose over the control of a frontier province. During those critical days Bvalltu and I happened to be in a large provincial town. I shall never forget how the populace plunged into almost maniacal hate. All thought of human brotherhood, and even of personal safety, was swept away by a savage blood-lust. Panic-stricken governments began projecting long-range rocket bombs at their dangerous neighbours. Within a few weeks several of the capitals of the Other Earth had been destroyed from the air. Each people now began straining every nerve to do more hurt than it received.

Of the horrors of this war, of the destruction of city after city, of the panic-stricken, starving hosts that swarmed into the open country, looting and killing, of the starvation and disease, of the disintegration of the social services, of the emergence of ruthless military dictatorships, of the steady or catastrophic decay of culture and of all decency and gentleness in personal relations, of this there is no need to speak in detail.

Instead, I shall try to account for the finality of the disaster which overtook the Other Men. My own human kind, in similar circumstances, would never, surely, have allowed itself to be so completely overwhelmed. No doubt, we ourselves are faced with the possibility of a scarcely less destructive war; but, whatever the agony that awaits us, we shall almost certainly recover. Foolish we may be, but we always manage to avoid falling into the abyss of downright madness. At the last moment sanity falteringly reasserts itself. Not so with the Other Men.

3. PROSPECTS OF THE RACE

THE LONGER I stayed on the Other Earth, the more I suspected that there must be some important underlying difference between this human race and my own. In some sense the difference was obviously one of balance. Homo Sapiens was on the whole better integrated, more gifted with common sense, less apt to fall into extravagance through mental dissociation.

Perhaps the most striking example of the extravagance of the Other Men was the part played by religion in their more advanced societies. Religion was a much greater power than on my own planet; and the religious teachings of the prophets of old were able to kindle even my alien and sluggish heart with fervour. Yet religion, as it occurred around me in contemporary society, was far from edifying.

I must begin by explaining that in the development of religion on the Other Earth gustatory sensation had played a very great part. Tribal gods had of course been endowed with the taste-characters most moving to the tribe’s own members. Later, when monotheisms arose, descriptions of God’s power, his wisdom, his justice, his benevolence, were accompanied by descriptions of his taste. In mystical literature God was often likened to an ancient and mellow wine; and some reports of religious experience suggested that this gustatory ecstasy was in many ways akin to the reverent zest of our own wine-tasters, savouring some rare vintage.

Unfortunately, owing to the diversity of gustatory human types, there had seldom been any widespread agreement as to the taste of God. Religious wars had been waged to decide whether he was in the main sweet or salt, or whether his preponderant flavour was one of the many gustatory characters which my own race cannot conceive. Some teachers insisted that only the feet could taste him, others only the hands or the mouth, others that he could be experienced only in the subtle complex of gustatory flavours known as the immaculate union, which was a sensual, and mainly sexual, ecstasy induced by contemplation of intercourse with the deity.

Other teachers declared that, though God was indeed tasty, it was not through any bodily instrument but to the naked spirit that his essence was revealed; and that his was a flavour more subtle and delicious than the flavour of the beloved, since it included all that was most fragrant and spiritual in man, and infinitely more.

Some went so far as to declare that God should be thought of not as a person at all but as actually being this flavour. Bvalltu used to say, ‘Either God is the universe, or he is the flavour of creativity pervading all things.’

Some ten or fifteen centuries earlier, when religion, so far as I could tell, was most vital, there were no churches or priesthoods; but every man’s life was dominated by religious ideas to an extent which to me was almost incredible. Later, churches and priesthoods had returned, to play an important part in preserving what was now evidently a declining religious consciousness. Still later, a few centuries before the Industrial Revolution, institutional religion had gained such a hold on the most civilized peoples that three-quarters of their total income was spent on the upkeep of religious institutions. The working classes, indeed, who slaved for the owners in return for a mere pittance, gave much of their miserable earnings to the priests, and lived in more abject squalor than need have been.

Science and industry had brought one of those sudden and extreme revolutions of thought which were so characteristic of the Other Men. Nearly all the churches were destroyed or turned into temporary factories or industrial museums. Atheism, lately persecuted, became fashionable. All the best minds turned agnostic. More recently, however, apparently in horror at the effects of a materialistic culture which was far more cynical and blatant than our own, the most industrialized peoples began to turn once more to religion. A spiritistic foundation was provided for natural science. The old churches were re-sanctified, and so many new religious edifices were built that they were soon as plentiful as cinema houses with us. Indeed, the new churches gradually absorbed the cinema, and provided non-stop picture shows in which sensual orgies and ecclesiastical propaganda were skilfully blended.

At the time of my visit the churches had regained all their lost power. Radio had indeed at one time competed with them, but was successfully absorbed. They still refused to broadcast the immaculate union, which gained fresh prestige from the popular belief that it was too spiritual to be transmitted on the ether. The more advanced clerics, however, had agreed that if ever the universal system of ‘radio-bliss’ was established, this difficulty might be overcome. Communism, meanwhile, still maintained its irreligious convention; but in the two great Communist countries the officially organized ‘irreligion’ was becoming a religion in all but name. It had its institutions, its priesthood, its ritual, its morality, its system of absolution, its metaphysical doctrines, which, though devoutly materialistic, were none the less superstitious. And the flavour of deity had been displaced by the flavour of the proletariat.

Religion, then, was a very real force in the life of all these peoples. But there was something puzzling about their devoutness. In a sense it was sincere, and even beneficial; for in very small personal temptations and very obvious and stereotyped moral choices, the Other Men were far more conscientious than my own kind. But I discovered that the typical modern Other Man was conscientious only in conventional situations, and that in genuine moral sensibility he was strangely lacking. Thus, though practical generosity and superficial comradeship were more usual than with us, the most diabolic mental persecution was perpetrated with a clear conscience. The more sensitive had always to be on their guard. The deeper kinds of intimacy and mutual reliance were precarious and rare. In this passionately social world, loneliness dogged the spirit. People were constantly ‘getting together’, but they never really got there. Everyone was terrified of being alone with himself; yet in company, in spite of the universal assumption of comradeship, these strange beings remained as remote from one another as the stars. For everyone searched his neighbour’s eyes for the image of himself, and never saw anything else. Or if he did, he was outraged and terrified.

Another perplexing fact about the religious life of the Other Men at the time of my visit was this. Though all were devout, and blasphemy was regarded with horror, the general attitude to the deity was one of blasphemous commercialism. Men assumed that the flavour of deity could be bought for all eternity with money or with ritual. Further, the God whom they worshipped with the superb and heart-searching language of an earlier age was now conceived either as a just but jealous employer or as an indulgent parent, or else as sheer physical energy. The crowning vulgarity was the conviction that in no earlier age had religion been so widespread and so enlightened. It was almost universally agreed that the profound teachings of the prophetic era were only now being understood in the sense in which they had originally been intended by the prophets themselves. Contemporary writers and broadcasters claimed to be re-interpreting the scriptures to suit the enlightened religious needs of an age which called itself the Age of Scientific Religion.

Now behind all the complacency which characterized the civilization of the Other Men before the outbreak of the war I had often detected a vague restlessness and anxiety. Of course for the most part people went about their affairs with the same absorbed and self-satisfied interest as on my own planet. They were far too busy making a living, marrying, rearing families, trying to get the better of one another, to spare time for conscious doubt about the aim of life. Yet they had often the air of one who has forgotten some very important thing and is racking his brains to recover it, or of an aging preacher who uses the old stirring phrases without clear apprehension of their significance. Increasingly I suspected that this race, in spite of all its triumphs, was now living on the great ideas of its past, mouthing concepts that it no longer had the sensibility to understand, paying verbal homage to ideals which it could no longer sincerely will, and behaving within a system of institutions many of which could only be worked successfully by minds of a slightly finer temper. These institutions, I suspected, must have been created by a race endowed not only with much greater intelligence, but with a much stronger and more comprehensive capacity for community than was now possible on the Other Earth. They seemed to be based on the assumption that men were on the whole kindly, reasonable and self-disciplined.

I had often questioned Bvalltu on this subject, but he had always turned my question aside. It will be remembered that, though I had access to all his thoughts so long as he did not positively wish to withhold them, he could always, if he made a special effort, think privately. I had long suspected that he was keeping something from me, when at last he told me the strange and tragic facts.

It was a few days after the bombardment of the metropolis of his country. Through Bvalltu’s eyes and the goggles of his gas-mask I saw the results of that bombardment. We had missed the horror itself, but had attempted to return to the city to play some part in the rescue work. Little could be done. So great was the heat still radiated from the city’s incandescent heart, that we could not penetrate beyond the first suburb. Even there, the streets were obliterated, choked with fallen buildings. Human bodies, crushed and charred, projected here and there from masses of tumbled masonry. Most of the population was hidden under the ruins. In the open spaces many lay gassed. Salvage parties impotently wandered. Between the smoke-clouds the Other Sun occasionally appeared, and even a daytime star.

After clambering among the ruins for some time, seeking vainly to give help, Bvalltu sat down. The devastation round about us seemed to ‘loosen his tongue’, if I may use such a phrase to express a sudden frankness in his thinking toward myself. I had said something to the effect that a future age would look back on all this madness and destruction with amazement. He sighed through his gas-mask, and said, ‘My unhappy race has probably now doomed itself irrevocably.’ I expostulated; for though ours was about the fortieth city to be destroyed, there would surely some day be a recovery, and the race would at last pass through this crisis and go forward from strength to strength. Bvalltu then told me of the strange matters which, he said, he had often intended to tell me, but somehow he had always shunned doing so. Though many scientists and students of the contemporary world-society had now some vague suspicion of the truth, it was clearly known only to himself and a few others.

The species, he said, was apparently subject to strange and long-drawn-out fluctuations of nature, fluctuations which lasted for some twenty thousand years. All races in all climates seemed to manifest this vast rhythm of the spirit, and to suffer it simultaneously. Its cause was unknown. Though it seemed to be due to an influence affecting the whole planet at once, perhaps it actually radiated from a single starting point, but spread rapidly into all lands. Very recently an advanced scientist had suggested that it might be due to variations in the intensity of ‘cosmic rays’. Geological evidence had established that such a fluctuation of cosmical radiation did occur, caused perhaps by variations in a neighbouring cluster of young stars. It was still doubtful whether the psychological rhythm and the astronomical rhythm coincided, but many facts pointed to the conclusion that when the rays were more violent, the human spirit declined.

Bvalltu was not convinced by this theory. On the whole he inclined to the opinion that the rhythmical waxing and waning of human mentality was due to causes nearer home. Whatever the true explanation, it was almost certain that a high degree of civilization had been attained many times in the past, and that some potent influence had over and over again damped down the mental vigour of the human race. In the troughs of these vast waves Other Man sank to a state of mental and spiritual dullness more abject than anything which my own race had ever known since it awoke from the sub-human. But at the wave’s crest man’s intellectual power, moral integrity, and spiritual insight seem to have risen to a pitch that we should regard as superhuman.

Again and again the race would emerge from savagery, and pass through barbarian culture into a phase of world-wide brilliance and sensibility. Whole populations would conceive simultaneously an ever-increasing capacity for generosity, self-knowledge, self-discipline, for dispassionate and penetrating thought and uncontaminated religious feeling.

Consequently within a few centuries the whole world would blossom with free and happy societies. Average human beings would attain an unprecedented clarity of mind, and by massed action do away with all grave social injustices and private cruelties. Subsequent generations, inherently sound, and blessed with a favourable environment, would create a world-wide utopia of awakened beings.

Presently a general loosening of fibre would set in. The golden age would be followed by a silver age. Living on the achievements of the past, the leaders of thought would lose themselves in a jungle of subtlety, or fall exhausted into mere slovenliness. At the same time moral sensibility would decline. Men would become on the whole less sincere, less self-searching, less sensitive to the needs of others, in fact less capable of community. Social machinery, which had worked well so long as citizens attained a certain level of humanity, would be dislocated by injustice and corruption. Tyrants and tyrannical oligarchies would set about destroying liberty. Hate-mad submerged classes would give them good excuse. Little by little, though the material benefits of civilization might smoulder on for centuries, the flame of the spirit would die down into a mere flicker in a few isolated individuals. Then would come sheer barbarism, followed by the trough of almost sub-human savagery.

On the whole there seemed to have been a higher achievement on the more recent crests of the wave than on those of the ‘geological’ past. So at least some anthropologists persuaded themselves. It was confidently believed that the present apex of civilization was the most brilliant of all, that its best was yet to come, and that by means of its unique scientific knowledge it would discover how to preserve the mentality of the race from a recurrence of deterioration.

The present condition of the species was certainly exceptional. In no earlier recorded cycle had science and mechanization advanced to such lengths. So far as could be inferred from the fragmentary relics of the previous cycle, mechanical invention had never passed beyond the crude machinery known in our own mid-nineteenth-century. The still earlier cycles, it was believed, stagnated at even earlier stages in their industrial revolutions.

Now though it was generally assumed in intellectual circles that the best was yet to be, Bvalltu and his friends were convinced that the crest of the wave had already occurred many centuries ago. To most men, of course, the decade before the war had seemed better and more civilized than any earlier age. In their view civilization and mechanization were almost identical, and never before had there been such a triumph of mechanization. The benefits of a scientific civilization were obvious. For the fortunate class there was more comfort, better health, increased stature, a prolongation of youth, and a system of technical knowledge so vast and intricate that no man could know more than its outline or some tiny corner of its detail. Moreover, increased communications had brought all the peoples into contact. Local idiosyncrasies were fading out before the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone. In comparison with these hopeful signs it was easily overlooked that the human constitution, though strengthened by improved conditions, was intrinsically less stable than formerly. Certain disintegrative diseases were slowly but surely increasing. In particular, diseases of the nervous system were becoming more common and more pernicious. Cynics used to say that the mental hospitals would soon outnumber even the churches. But the cynics were only jesters. It was almost universally agreed that, in spite of wars and economic troubles and social upheavals, all was now well, and the future would be better.

The truth, said Bvalltu, was almost certainly otherwise. There was, as I had suspected, unmistakable evidence that the average of intelligence and of moral integrity throughout the world had declined; and they would probably continue to do so. Already the race was living on its past. All the great seminal ideas of the modern world had been conceived centuries ago. Since then, world-changing applications of these ideas had indeed been made; but none of these sensational inventions had depended on the extreme kind of penetrating and comprehensive intuition which had changed the whole course of thought in an earlier age. Recently there had been, Bvalltu admitted, a spate of revolutionary scientific discoveries and theories, but not one of them, he said, contained any really novel principle. They were all re-combinations of familiar principles. Scientific method, invented some centuries ago, was so fertile a technique that it might well continue to yield rich fruit for centuries to come even in the hands of workers incapable of any high degree of originality.

But it was not in the field of science so much as in moral and practical activity that the deterioration of mental calibre was most evident. I myself, with Bvalltu’s aid, had learnt to appreciate to some extent the literature of that amazing period, many centuries earlier, when every country seemed to blossom with art, philosophy and religion; when people after people had changed its whole social and political order so as to secure a measure of freedom and prosperity to all men; when state after state had courageously disarmed, risking destruction but reaping peace and prosperity; when police forces were disbanded, prisons turned into libraries or colleges; when weapons and even locks and keys came to be known only as museum pieces; when the four great established priesthoods of the world had exposed their own mysteries, given their wealth to the poor, and led the triumphant campaign for community; or had taken to agriculture, handicrafts teaching, as befitted humble supporters of the new priestless, faithless, Godless religion of world-wide community and inarticulate worship.

After some five hundred years locks and keys, weapons and doctrines, began to return. The golden age left behind it only a lovely and incredible tradition, and a set of principles which, though now sadly misconceived, were still the best influences in a distraught world.

Those scientists who attributed mental deterioration to the increase of cosmic rays affirmed that if the race had discovered science many centuries earlier, when it had still before it the period of greatest vitality, all would have been well. It would soon have mastered the social problems which industrial civilization entails. It would have created not merely a ‘mediaeval’ but a highly mechanized utopia. It would almost certainly have discovered how to cope with the excess of cosmic rays and prevent deterioration. But science had come too late.

Bvalltu, on the other hand, suspected that deterioration was due to some factor in human nature itself. He was inclined to believe that it was a consequence of civilization, that in changing the whole environment of the human species, seemingly for the better, science had unwittingly brought about a state of affairs hostile to spiritual vigour. He did not pretend to know whether the disaster was caused by the increase of artificial food, or the increased nervous strain of modern conditions, or interference with natural selection, or the softer upbringing of children, or to some other cause. Perhaps it should be attributed to none of these comparatively recent influences; for evidence did suggest that deterioration had set in at the very beginning of the scientific age, if not even earlier. It might be that some mysterious factor in the conditions of the golden age itself had started the rot. It might even be, he suggested, that genuine community generated its own poison, that the young human being, brought up in a perfected society, in a veritable ‘city of God’ on earth, must inevitably revolt toward moral and intellectual laziness, toward romantic individualism and sheer devilment; and that, once this disposition had taken root, science and a mechanized civilization had augmented the spiritual decay.

Shortly before I left the Other Earth a geologist discovered a fossil diagram of a very complicated radio set. It appeared to be a lithographic plate which had been made some ten million years earlier. The highly developed society which produced it had left no other trace. This find was a shock to the intelligent world; but the comforting view was spread abroad that some non-human and less hardy species had long ago attained a brief flicker of civilization. It was agreed that man, once he had reached such a height of culture, would never have fallen from it.

In Bvalltu’s view man had climbed approximately to the same height time after time, only to be undone by some hidden consequence of his own achievement.

When Bvalltu propounded this theory, among the ruins of his native city, I suggested that some time, if not this time, man would successfully pass this critical point in his career. Bvalltu then spoke of another matter which seemed to indicate that we were witnessing the final act of this long-drawn-out and repetitive drama.

It was known to scientists that, owing to the weak gravitational hold of their world, the atmosphere, already scant, was steadily decreasing. Sooner or later humanity would have to face the problem of stopping this constant leakage of precious oxygen. Hitherto life had successfully adapted itself to the progressive rarefaction of atmosphere, but the human physique had already reached the limit of adaptability in this respect. If the loss were not soon checked, the race would inevitably decline. The only hope was that some means to deal with the atmospheric problem would be discovered before the onset of the next age of barbarism. There had only been a slight possibility that this would be achieved. This slender hope the war had destroyed by setting the clock of scientific research back for a century just at the time when human nature itself was deteriorating and might never again be able to tackle so difficult a problem.

The thought of the disaster which almost certainly lay in wait for the Other Men threw me into a horror of doubt about the universe in which such a thing could happen. That a whole world of intelligent beings could be destroyed was not an unfamiliar idea to me; but there is a great difference between an abstract possibility and a concrete and inescapable danger.

On my native planet, whenever I had been dismayed by the suffering and the futility of individuals, I had taken comfort in the thought that at least the massed effect of all our blind striving must be the slow but glorious awakening of the human spirit. This hope, this certainty, had been the one sure consolation. But now I saw that there was no guarantee of any such triumph. It seemed that the universe, or the maker of the universe, must be indifferent to the fate of worlds. That there should be endless struggle and suffering and waste must of course be accepted; and gladly, for these were the very soil in which the spirit grew. But that all struggle should be finally, absolutely vain, that a whole world of sensitive spirits should fail and die, must be sheer evil. In my horror it seemed to me that Hate must be the Star Maker.

Not so to Bvalltu. ‘Even if the powers destroy us,’ he said, ‘who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent.’ But I protested, ‘What theme could justify such waste, such futility? And how can we help judging; and how otherwise can we judge than by the light of our own hearts, by which we judge ourselves? It would be base to praise the Star Maker, knowing that he was too insensitive to care about the fate of his worlds.’ Bvalltu was silent in his mind for a moment. Then he looked up, searching among the smoke-clouds for a daytime star. And then he said to me in his mind, ‘If he saved all the worlds, but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it, or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no notion of its meaning. Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but in you it must be right.’

He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, ‘And if after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I will call it only the sharp tang and savour of existence. But to call it this is to say little.’

IV. I TRAVEL AGAIN

I MUST HAVE spent several years on the Other Earth, a period far longer than I intended when I first encountered one of its peasants trudging through the fields. Often I longed to be at home again. I used to wonder with painful anxiety how those dear to me were faring, and what changes I should discover if I were ever to return. It was surprising to me that in spite of my novel and crowded experiences on the Other Earth thoughts of home should continue to be so insistent. It seemed but a moment since I was sitting on the hill looking at the lights of our suburb. Yet several years had passed. The children would be altered almost beyond recognition. Their mother? How would she have fared?

Bvalltu was partly responsible for my long spell on the Other Earth. He would not hear of my leaving till we had each attained a real understanding of the other’s world. I constantly stimulated his imagination to picture as clearly as possible the life of my own planet, and he had discovered in it much the same medley of the splendid and the ironical as I had discovered in his. In fact he was far from agreeing with me that his world was on the whole the more grotesque.

The call to impart information was not the only consideration that bound me to Bvalltu. I had come to feel a very strong friendship for him. In the early days of our partnership there had sometimes been strains. Though we were both civilized human beings, who tried always to behave with courtesy and generosity, our extreme intimacy did sometimes fatigue us. I used, for instance, to find his passion for the gustatory fine art of his world very wearisome. He would sit by the hour passing his sensitive fingers over the impregnated cords to seize the taste sequences that had for him such great subtlety of form and symbolism. I was at first intrigued, then aesthetically stirred; but in spite of his patient help I was never at this early stage able to enter fully and spontaneously into the aesthetic of taste. Sooner or later I was fatigued or bored. Then again, I was impatient of his periodic need for sleep. Since I was disembodied, I myself felt no such need. I could, of course, disengage myself from Bvalltu and roam the world alone; but I was often exasperated by the necessity of breaking off the day’s interesting experiences merely in order to afford my host’s body time to recuperate. Bvalltu, for his part, at least in the early days of our partnership, was inclined to resent my power of watching his dreams. For though, while awake, he could withdraw his thoughts from my observation, asleep he was helpless. Naturally I very soon learned to refrain from exercising this power; and he, on his side, as our intimacy developed into mutual respect, no longer cherished this privacy so strictly.

In time each of us came to feel that to taste the flavour of life in isolation from the other was to miss half its richness and subtlety. Neither could entirely trust his own judgement or his own motives unless the other were present to offer relentless though friendly criticism.

We hit upon a plan for satisfying at once our friendship, his interest in my world, and my own longing for home. Why should we not somehow contrive to visit my planet together? I had travelled thence; why should we not both travel thither? After a spell on my planet, we could proceed upon the larger venture, again together.

For this end we had to attack two very different tasks. The technique of interstellar travel, which I had achieved only by accident and in a very haphazard manner, must now be thoroughly mastered. Also we must somehow locate my native planetary system in the astronomical maps of the Other Men.

This geographical, or rather cosmographical, problem proved insoluble. Do what I would, I could provide no data for the orientation. The attempt, however, led us to an amazing, and for me a terrifying discovery. I had travelled not only through space but through time itself. In the first place, it appeared that, in the very advanced astronomy of the Other Men, stars as mature as the Other Sun and as my own Sun were rare. Yet in terrestrial astronomy this type of star was known to be the commonest of all throughout the galaxy. How could this be? Then I made another perplexing discovery. The galaxy as known to the Other Astronomers proved to be strikingly different from my recollection of the galaxy as known to our own astronomers. According to the Other Men the great star-system was much less flattened than we observe it to be. Our astronomers tell us that it is like a circular biscuit five times as wide as it is thick. In their view it was more like a bun. I myself had often been struck by the width and indefiniteness of the Milky Way in the sky of the Other Earth. I had been surprised, too, that the Other Astronomers believed the galaxy to contain much gaseous matter not yet condensed into stars. To our astronomers it seemed to be almost wholly stellar.

Had I then travelled unwittingly much further than I had supposed, and actually entered some other and younger galaxy? Perhaps in my period of darkness, when the rubies and amethysts and diamonds of the sky had all vanished, I had actually sped across intergalactic space. This seemed at first the only explanation, but certain facts forced us to discard it in favour of one even stranger.

Comparison of the astronomy of the Other Men with my fragmentary recollections of our own astronomy convinced me that the whole cosmos of galaxies known to them differed from the whole cosmos of galaxies known to us. The average form of the galaxies was much more rotund and much more gaseous, in fact much more primitive, for them than for us.

Moreover, in the sky of the Other Earth several galaxies were so near as to be prominent smudges of light even for the naked eye. And astronomers had shown that many of these so-called ‘universes’ were much closer to the home ‘universe’ than the nearest known in our astronomy.

The truth that now flashed on Bvalltu and me was indeed bewildering. Everything pointed to the fact that I had somehow travelled up the river of time and landed myself at a date in the remote past, when the great majority of the stars were still young. The startling nearness of so many galaxies in the astronomy of the Other Men could be explained on the theory of the ‘expanding universe’. Well I knew that this dramatic theory was but tentative and very far from satisfactory; but at least here was one more striking bit of evidence to suggest that it must be in some sense true. In early epochs the galaxies would of course be congested together. There could be no doubt that I had been transported to a world which had reached the human stage very long before my native planet had been plucked from the sun’s womb.

The full realization of my temporal remoteness from my home reminded me of a fact, or at least a probability, which, oddly enough, I had long ago forgotten. Presumably I was dead. I now desperately craved to be home again. Home was all the while so vivid, so near. Even though its distance was to be counted in parsecs and in aeons, it was always at hand. Surely, if I could only wake, I should find myself there on our hill-top again. But there was no waking. Through Bvalltu’s eyes I was studying star-maps and pages of outlandish script. When he looked up, I saw standing opposite us a caricature of a human being, with a frog-like face that was scarcely a face at all, and with the thorax of a pouter-pigeon, naked save for greenish down. Red silk knickers crowned the spindle shanks that were enclosed in green silk stockings. This creature, which, to the terrestrial eye, was simply a monster, passed on the Other Earth as a young and beautiful woman. And I myself, observing her through Bvalltu’s benevolent eyes, recognized her as indeed beautiful. To a mind habituated to the Other Earth her features and her every gesture spoke of intelligence and wit. Clearly, if I could admire such a woman, I myself must have changed.

It would be tedious to tell of the experiments by which we acquired and perfected the art of controlled flight through interstellar space. Suffice it that, after many adventures, we learned to soar up from the planet whenever we wished, and to direct our course, by mere acts of volition, hither and thither among the stars. We seemed to have much greater facility and accuracy when we worked together than when either ventured into space by himself. Our community of mind seemed to strengthen us even for spatial locomotion.

It was a very strange experience to find oneself in the depth of space, surrounded only by darkness and the stars, yet to be all the while in close personal contact with an unseen companion. As the dazzling lamps of heaven flashed past us, we would think to one another about our experiences, or debate our plans, or share our memories of our native worlds. Sometimes we used my language, sometimes his. Sometimes we needed no words at all, but merely shared the flow of imagery in our two minds.

The sport of disembodied flight among the stars must surely be the most exhilarating of all athletic exercises. It was not without danger; but its danger, as we soon discovered, was psychological, not physical. In our bodiless state, collision with celestial objects mattered little. Sometimes, in the early stages of our adventure, we plunged by accident headlong into a star. Its interior would, of course, be inconceivably hot, but we experienced merely brilliance.

The psychological dangers of the sport were grave. We soon discovered that disheartenment, mental fatigue, fear, all tended to reduce our powers of movement. More than once we found ourselves immobile in space, like a derelict ship on the ocean; and such was the fear roused by this plight that there was no possibility of moving till, having experienced the whole gamut of despair, we passed through indifference and on into philosophic calm.

A still graver danger, but one which trapped us only once, was mental conflict. A serious discord of purpose over our future plans reduced us not only to immobility but to terrifying mental disorder. Our perceptions became confused. Hallucinations tricked us. The power of coherent thought vanished. After a spell of delirium, filled with an overwhelming sense of impending annihilation, we found ourselves back on the Other Earth; Bvalltu in his own body, lying in bed as he had left it, I once more a disembodied view-point floating somewhere over the planet’s surface. Both were in a state of insane terror, from which we took long to recover. Months passed before we renewed our partnership and our adventure.

Long afterwards we learned the explanation of this painful incident. Seemingly we had attained such a deep mental accord that, when conflict arose, it was more like dissociation within a single mind than discord between two separate individuals. Hence its serious consequences.

As our skill in disembodied flight increased, we found intense pleasure in sweeping hither and thither among the stars. We tasted the delights at once of skating and of flight. Time after time, for sheer joy, we traced huge figures-of-eight in and out around the two partners of a ‘double star’. Sometimes we stayed motionless for long periods to watch at close quarters the waxing and waning of a variable. Often we plunged into a congested cluster, and slid amongst its suns like a car gliding among the lights of a city. Often we skimmed over billowy and palely luminous surfaces of gas, or among feathery shreds and prominences; or plunged into mist, to find ourselves in a world of featureless dawn light. Sometimes, without warning, dark continents of dust engulfed us, blotting out the universe. Once, as we were traversing a populous region of the heaven, a star suddenly blazed into exaggerated splendour, becoming a ‘nova’. As it was apparently surrounded by a cloud of non-luminous gas, we actually saw the expanding sphere of light which was radiated by the star’s explosion. Travelling outward at light’s speed, it was visible by reflection from the surrounding gas, so that it appeared like a swelling balloon of light, fading as it spread.

These were but a few of the stellar spectacles that delighted us while we easefully skated, as on swallow wings, hither and thither among the neighbours of the Other Sun. This was during our period of apprenticeship to the craft of interstellar flight. When we had become proficient we passed further afield, and learned to travel so fast that, as on my own earlier and involuntary flight, the forward and the hinder stars took colour, and presently all was dark. Not only so, but we reached to that more spiritual vision, also experienced on my earlier voyage, in which these vagaries of physical light are overcome.

On one occasion our flight took us outwards toward the limits of the galaxy, and into the emptiness beyond. For some time the near stars had become fewer and fewer. The hinder hemisphere of sky was now crowded with faint lights, while in front of us lay starless blackness, unrelieved save by a few isolated patches of scintillation, a few detached fragments of the galaxy, or planetary ‘sub-galaxies’. Apart from these the dark was featureless, save for half a dozen of the vague flecks which we knew to be the nearest of the alien galaxies.

Awed by this spectacle, we stayed long motionless in the void. It was indeed a stirring experience to see spread out before us a whole ‘universe’, containing a billion stars and perhaps thousands of inhabited worlds; and to know that each tiny fleck in the black sky was itself another such ‘universe’, and that millions more of them were invisible only because of their extreme remoteness.

What was the significance of this physical immensity and complexity? By itself, plainly, it constituted nothing but sheer futility and desolation. But with awe and hope we told ourselves that it promised an even greater complexity and subtlety and diversity of the psychical. This alone could justify it. But this formidable promise, though inspiring, was also terrifying.

Like a nestling that peers over the nest’s rim for the first time, and then shrinks back from the great world into its tiny home, we had emerged beyond the confines of that little nest of stars which for so long, but falsely, men called ‘the universe’. And now we sank back to bury ourselves once more in the genial precincts of our native galaxy.

As our experiences had raised many theoretical problems which we could not solve without further study of astronomy, we now decided to return to the Other Earth; but after long and fruitless search we realized that we had completely lost our bearings. The stars were all much alike, save that few in this early epoch were as old and temperate as the Other Sun. Searching at random, but at high speed, we found neither Bvalltu’s planet nor mine, nor any other solar system. Frustrated, we came to rest once more in the void to consider our plight. On every side the ebony of the sky, patterned with diamonds, confronted us with an enigma. Which spark of all this star-dust was the Other Sun? As was usual in the sky of this early epoch, streaks of nebular matter were visible in all directions; but their shapes were unfamiliar, and useless for orientation.

The fact that we were lost among the stars did not distress us. We were exhilarated by our adventure, and each was a cause of good spirits in the other. Our recent experiences had quickened our mental life, still further organizing our two minds together. Each was still at most times conscious of the other and of himself as separate beings; but the pooling or integration of our memories and of our temperaments had now gone so far that our distinctness was often forgotten. Two disembodied minds, occupying the same visual position, possessing the same memories and desires, and often performing the same mental acts at the same time, can scarcely be conceived as distinct beings. Yet, strangely enough, this growing identity was complicated by an increasingly intense mutual realization and comradeship.

Our penetration of one another’s minds brought to each not merely addition but multiplication of mental riches; for each knew inwardly not only himself and the other but also the contrapuntal harmony of each in relation to the other. Indeed, in some sense which I cannot precisely describe, our union of minds brought into being a third mind, as yet intermittent, but more subtly conscious than either of us in the normal state. Each of us, or rather both of us together, ‘woke up’ now and then to be this superior spirit. All the experiences of each took on a new significance in the light of the other; and our two minds together became a new, more penetrating, and more self-conscious mind. In this state of heightened lucidity we, or rather the new I, began deliberately to explore the psychological possibilities of other types of beings and intelligent worlds. With new penetration I distinguished in myself and in Bvalltu those attributes which were essential to the spirit and those mere accidents imposed on each by his peculiar world. This imaginative venture was soon to prove itself a method, and a very potent method, of cosmological research.

We now began to realize more clearly a fact that we had long suspected. In my previous interstellar voyage, which brought me to the Other Earth, I had unwittingly employed two distinct methods of travel, the method of disembodied flight through space and a method which I shall call ‘psychical attraction’. This consisted of telepathic projection of the mind directly into some alien world, remote perhaps in time and space, but mentally ‘in tune’ with the explorer’s own mind at the time of the venture. Evidently it was this method that had really played the chief part in directing me to the Other Earth. The remarkable similarities of our two races had set up a strong ‘psychical attraction’ which had been far more potent than all my random interstellar wanderings. It was this method that Bvalltu and I were now to practise and perfect.

Presently we noticed that we were no longer at rest but slowly drifting. We had also a queer sense that, though we were seemingly isolated in a vast desert of stars and nebulae, we were in fact in some kind of mental proximity with unseen intelligences. Concentrating on this sense of presence, we found that our drift accelerated; and that, if we tried by a violent act of volition to change its course, we inevitably swung back into the original direction as soon as our effort ceased. Soon our drift became a headlong flight. Once more the forward stars turned violet, the hinder red. Once more all vanished.

In absolute darkness and silence we debated our situation. Clearly we were now passing through space more quickly than light itself. Perhaps we were also, in some incomprehensible manner, traversing time. Meanwhile that sense of the proximity of other beings became more and more insistent, though no less confused.

Then once again the stars appeared. Though they streamed past us like flying sparks, they were colourless and normal. One brilliant light lay right ahead of us. It waxed, became a dazzling splendour, then visibly a disc. With an effort of will we decreased our speed, then cautiously we swung round this sun, searching. To our delight, it proved to be attended by several of the grains that may harbour life. Guided by our unmistakable sense of mental presence, we selected one of these planets, and slowly descended toward it.

V. WORLDS INNUMERABLE

1. THE DIVERSITY OF WORLDS

THE PLANET ON which we now descended after our long flight among the stars was the first of many to be visited. In some we stayed, according to the local calendar, only a few weeks, in others several years, housed together in the mind of some native. Often when the time came for our departure our host would accompany us for subsequent adventures. As we passed from world to world, as experience was piled upon experience like geological strata, it seemed that this strange tour of worlds was lasting for many lifetimes. Yet thoughts of our own home-planets were constantly with us. Indeed, in my case it was not till I found myself thus exiled that I came to realize fully the little jewel of personal union that I had left behind. I had to comprehend each world as best I could by reference to the remote world where my own life had happened, and above all by the touchstone of that common life that she and I had made together.

Before trying to describe, or rather suggest, the immense diversity of worlds which I entered, I must say a few words about the movement of the adventure itself. After the experiences which I have just recorded it was clear that the method of disembodied flight was of little use. It did indeed afford us extremely vivid perception of the visible features of our galaxy; and we often used it to orientate ourselves when we had made some fresh discovery by the method of psychological attraction. But since it gave us freedom only of space and not of time, and since, moreover, planetary systems were so very rare, the method of sheer random physical flight alone was almost infinitely unlikely to produce results. Psychical attraction, however, once we had mastered it, proved very effective. This method depended on the imaginative reach of our own minds. At first, when our imaginative power was strictly limited by experience of our own worlds, we could make contact only with worlds closely akin to our own. Moreover, in this novitiate stage of our work we invariably came upon these worlds when they were passing through the same spiritual crisis as that which underlies the plight of Homo Sapiens to-day. It appeared that, for us to enter any world at all, there had to be a deep-lying likeness or identity in ourselves and our hosts.

As we passed on from world to world we greatly increased our understanding of the principles underlying our venture, and our powers of applying them. Further, in each world that we visited we sought out a new collaborator, to give us insight into his world and to extend our imaginative reach for further exploration of the galaxy. This ‘snowball’ method by which our company was increased was of great importance, since it magnified our powers. In the final stages of the exploration we made discoveries which might well be regarded as infinitely beyond the range of any single and unaided human mind.

At the outset Bvalltu and I assumed that we were embarking on a purely private adventure; and later, as we gathered helpers, we still believed that we ourselves were the sole initiators of cosmical exploration. But after a while we came in psychical contact with another group of cosmical explorers, natives of worlds as yet unknown to us. With these adventurers, after difficult and often distressing experiments, we joined forces, entering first into intimate community, and later into that strange mental union which Bvalltu and I had already experienced together in some degree on our first voyage among the stars.

When we had encountered many more such groups, we realized that, though each little expedition had made a lonely start, all were destined sooner or later to come together. For, no matter how alien from one another at the outset, each group gradually acquired such far-reaching imaginative power that sooner or later it was sure to make contact with others.

In time it became clear that we, individual inhabitants of a host of worlds, were playing a small part in one of the great movements by which the cosmos was seeking to know itself, and even see beyond itself.

In saying this I do not for a moment claim that, because I have shared in this vast process of cosmical self-discovery, the story which I have to tell is true in a fully literal sense. Plainly it does not deserve to be taken as part of the absolute objective truth about the cosmos. I, the human individual, can only in a most superficial and falsifying way participate in the superhuman experience of that communal ‘I’ which was supported by the innumerable explorers. This book must needs be a ludicrously false caricature of our actual adventure. But further, though we were and are a multitude drawn from a multitude of spheres, we represent only a tiny fraction of the diversity of the whole cosmos. Thus even the supreme moment of our experience, when it seemed to us that we had penetrated to the very heart of reality, must in fact have given us no more than a few shreds of truth, and these not literal but symbolic.

My account of that part of my adventure which brought me into contact with worlds of more or less human type may be fairly accurate; but that which deals with more alien spheres must be far from the truth. The Other Earth I have probably described with little more falsehood than our historians commit in telling of the past ages of Homo Sapiens. But of the less human worlds, and the many fantastic kinds of beings which we encountered up and down the galaxy and throughout the whole cosmos, and even beyond it, I shall perforce make statements which, literally regarded, must be almost wholly false. I can only hope that they have the kind of truth that we sometimes find in myths.

Since we were now free of space, we ranged with equal ease over the nearer and the remoter tracts of this galaxy. That we did not till much later make contact with minds in other galaxies was not due to any limitations imposed by space, but seemingly to our own inveterate parochialism, to a strange limitation of our own interest, which for long rendered us inhospitable to the influence of worlds lying beyond the confines of the Milky Way. I shall say more of this curious restriction when I come to describe how we did at last outgrow it.

Along with freedom of space we had freedom of time. Some of the worlds that we explored in this early phase of our adventure ceased to exist long before my native planet was formed; others were its contemporaries; others were not born till the old age of our galaxy, when the Earth had been destroyed, and a large number of the stars had already been extinguished.

As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, as we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, the planlessness of the cosmos. A few worlds did indeed wake to such lucidity that they passed beyond our ken. But several of the most brilliant of these occurred in the earliest epoch of the galactic story; and nothing that we could as yet discover in the later phases of the cosmos suggested that any galaxies, still less the cosmos as a whole, had at last come (or will at last come) more under the sway of the awakened spirit than they were during the epoch of those early brilliant worlds. Not till a much later stage of our enquiry were we fitted to discover the glorious but ironical and heart-rending climax for which this vast proliferation of worlds was but a prologue.

In the first phase of our adventure, when, as I have said, our powers of telepathic exploration were incomplete, every world that we entered turned out to be in the throes of the same spiritual crisis as that which we knew so well on our native planets. This crisis I came to regard as having two aspects. It was at once a moment in the spirit’s struggle to become capable of true community on a world-wide scale; and it was a stage in the age-long task of achieving the right, the finally appropriate, the spiritual attitude toward the universe.

In every one of these ‘chrysalis’ worlds thousands of millions of persons were flashing into existence, one after the other, to drift gropingly about for a few instants of cosmical time before they were extinguished. Most were capable, at least in some humble degree, of the intimate kind of community which is personal affection; but for nearly all of them a stranger was ever a thing to fear and hate. And even their intimate loving was inconstant and lacking in insight. Nearly always they were intent merely on seeking for themselves respite from fatigue or boredom, fear or hunger. Like my own race, they never fully awoke from the primeval sleep of the subman. Only a few here and there, now and then, were solaced, goaded, or tortured by moments of true wakefulness. Still fewer attained a clear and constant vision, even of some partial aspect of truth; and their half-truths they nearly always took to be absolute. Propagating their little partial truths, they bewildered and misdirected their fellow-mortals as much as they helped them.

Each individual spirit, in nearly all these worlds, attained at some point in life some lowly climax of awareness and of spiritual integrity, only to sink slowly or catastrophically back into nothingness. Or so it seemed. As in my own world, so in all these others, lives were spent in pursuit of shadowy ends that remained ever just round the corner. There were vast tracts of boredom and frustration, with here and there some rare bright joy. There were ecstasies of personal triumph, of mutual intercourse and love, of intellectual insight, of aesthetic creation. There were also religious ecstasies; but these, like all else in these worlds, were obscured by false interpretations. There were crazy ecstasies of hate and cruelty, felt against individuals and against groups. Sometimes during this early phase of our adventure we were so distressed by the incredible bulk of suffering and of cruelty up and down the worlds that our courage failed, our telepathic powers were disordered, and we slipped toward madness.

Yet most of these worlds were really no worse than our own. Like us, they had reached that stage when the spirit, half awakened from brutishness and very far from maturity, can suffer most desperately and behave most cruelly. And like us, these tragic but vital worlds, visited in our early adventures, were agonized by the inability of their minds to keep pace with changing circumstance. They were always behindhand, always applying old concepts and old ideals inappropriately to novel situations. Like us, they were constantly tortured by their hunger for a degree of community which their condition demanded but their poor, cowardly, selfish spirits could by no means attain. Only in couples and in little circles of companions could they support true community, the communion of mutual insight and respect and love. But in their tribes and nations they conceived all too easily the sham community of the pack, baying in unison of fear and hate.

Particularly in one respect these races were recognizably our kin. Each had risen by a strange mixture of violence and gentleness. The apostles of violence and the apostles of gentleness swayed them this way and that. At the time of our visit many of these worlds were in the throes of a crisis of this conflict. In the recent past, loud lip-service had been paid to gentleness and tolerance and freedom; but the policy had failed, because there was no sincere purpose in it, no conviction of the spirit, no true experience of respect for individual personality. All kinds of self-seeking and vindictiveness had flourished, secretly at first, then openly as shameless individualism. Then at last, in rage, the peoples turned away from individualism and plunged into the cult of the herd. At the same time, in disgust with the failure of gentleness, they began openly to praise violence, and the ruthlessness of the god-sent hero and of the armed tribe. Those who thought they believed in gentleness built up armaments for their tribes against those foreign tribes whom they accused of believing in violence. The highly developed technique of violence threatened to destroy civilization; year by year gentleness lost ground. Few could understand that their world must be saved, not by violence in the short run, but by gentleness in the long run. And still fewer could see that, to be effective, gentleness must be a religion; and that lasting peace can never come till the many have wakened to the lucidity of consciousness which, in all these worlds, only the few could as yet attain.

If I were to describe in detail every world that we explored, this book would develop into a world of libraries. I can give only a few pages to the many types of worlds encountered in this early stage of our adventure, up and down the whole breadth and length and the whole duration of our galaxy. Some of these types had apparently very few instances; others occurred in scores or hundreds.

The most numerous of all classes of intelligent worlds is that which includes the planet familiar to readers of this book. Homo Sapiens has recently flattered and frightened himself by conceiving that, though perhaps he is not the sole intelligence in the cosmos, he is at least unique, and that worlds suited to intelligent life of any kind must be extremely rare. This view proves ludicrously false. In comparison with the unimaginable number of the stars intelligent worlds are indeed very rare; but we discovered some thousands of worlds much like the Earth and possessed by beings of essentially human kind, though superficially they were often unlike the type that we call human. The Other Men were amongst the most obviously human. But in a later stage of our adventure, when our research was no longer restricted to worlds that had reached the familiar spiritual crisis, we stumbled on a few planets inhabited by races almost identical with Homo Sapiens, or rather with the creature that Homo Sapiens was in the earliest phase of his existence. These most human worlds we had not encountered earlier because, by one accident or another, they were destroyed before reaching the stage of our own mentality.

Long after we had succeeded in extending our research from our peers among the worlds to our inferiors in mental rank we remained unable to make any sort of contact with beings who had passed wholly beyond the attainment of Homo Sapiens. Consequently, though we traced the history of many worlds through many epochs, and saw many reach a catastrophic end, or sink into stagnation and inevitable decline, there were a few with which, do what we would, we lost touch just at that moment when they seemed ripe for a leap forward into some more developed mentality. Not till a much later stage of our adventure, when our corporate being had itself been enriched by the influx of many superior spirits, were we able to pick up once more the threads of these most exalted world-biographies.

2. STRANGE MANKINDS

THOUGH ALL THE worlds which we entered in the first phase of our adventure were in the throes of the crisis known so well in our own world, some were occupied by races biologically similar to man, others by very different types. The more obviously human races inhabited planets of much the same size and nature as the Earth and the Other Earth. All, whatever the vagaries of their biological history, had finally been moulded by circumstance to the erect form which is evidently most suited to such worlds. Nearly always the two nether limbs were used for locomotion, the two upper limbs for manipulation. Generally there was some sort of head, containing the brain and the organs of remote perception, and perhaps the orifices for eating and breathing. In size these quasi-human types were seldom larger than our largest gorillas, seldom much smaller than monkeys; but we could not estimate their size with any accuracy, as we had no familiar standards of measurements.

Within this approximately human class there was great variety. We came upon feathered, penguin-like men, descended from true fliers, and on some small planets we found bird-men who retained the power of flight, yet were able to carry an adequate human brain. Even on some large planets, with exceptionally buoyant atmosphere, men flew with their own wings. Then there were men that had developed from a slug-like ancestor along a line which was not vertebrate, still less mammalian. Men of this type attained the necessary rigidity and flexibility of limb by means of a delicate internal ‘basket-work’ of wiry bones.

On one very small but earth-like planet we discovered a quasi-human race which was probably unique. Here, though life had evolved much as on earth, all the higher animals differed remarkably from the familiar type in one obvious respect. They were without that far-reaching duplication of organs which characterizes all our vertebrates. Thus a man in this world was rather like half a terrestrial man. He hopped on one sturdy, splay-footed leg, balancing himself with a kangaroo tail. A single arm protruded from his chest, but branched into three forearms and prehensile fingers. Above his mouth was a single nostril, above that an ear, and on the top of his head a flexible three-pronged proboscis bearing three eyes.

A very different and fairly common quasi-human kind was sometimes produced by planets rather larger than the Earth. Owing to the greater strength of gravitation, there would first appear, in place of the familiar quadruped, a six-legged type. This would proliferate into little sextuped burrowers, swift and elegant sextuped grazers, a sextuped mammoth, complete with tusks, and many kinds of sextuped carnivora. Man in these worlds sprang usually from some small opossum-like creature which had come to use the first of its three pairs of limbs for nest-building or for climbing. In time, the forepart of its body thus became erect, and it gradually assumed a form not unlike that of a quadruped with a human torso in place of a neck. In fact it became a centaur, with four legs and two capable arms. It was very strange to find oneself in a world in which all the amenities and conveniences of civilization were fashioned to suit men of this form.

In one of these worlds, rather smaller than the rest, man was not a centaur, though centaurs were among his remote ancestors. In sub-human stages of evolution the pressure of the environment had telescoped the horizontal part of the centaur’s body, so that the forelegs and the hind-legs were drawn closer and closer together, till at last they became a single sturdy pair. Thus man and his nearer ancestors were bipeds with very large rumps, reminiscent of the Victorian bustle, and legs whose internal structure still showed their ‘centaur’ origin.

One very common kind of quasi-human world I must describe in more detail, as it plays an important part in the history of our galaxy. In these worlds man, though varying greatly in form and fortune in particular worlds, had in every case developed from a sort of five-pronged marine animal, rather like a star-fish. This creature would in time specialize one prong for perceiving, four for locomotion. Later it would develop lungs, a complex digestive apparatus, and a well-integrated nervous system. Later still the perceiving limb would produce a brain, the others becoming adapted for running and climbing. The soft spines which covered the body of the ancestral star-fish often developed into a kind of spiky fur. In due season there would arise an erect, intelligent biped, equipped with eyes, nostrils, ears, taste-organs, and sometimes organs of electric perception. Save for the grotesqueness of their faces, and the fact that the mouth was generally upon the belly, these creatures were remarkably human. Their bodies, however, were usually covered with the soft spines or fat hairs characteristic of these worlds. Clothes were unknown, save as protection against cold in the arctic regions. Their faces, of course, were apt to be far from human. The tall head often bore a coronet of five eyes. Large single nostrils, used for breathing and smelling and also speaking, formed another circlet below the eyes.

The appearance of these ‘Human Echinoderms’ belied their nature, for though their faces were inhuman, the basic pattern of their minds was not unlike our own. Their senses were much like ours, save that in some worlds they developed a far more varied colour-sensitivity. Those races that had the electric sense gave us some difficulty; for, in order to understand their thought, we had to learn a whole new gamut of sense qualities and a vast system of unfamiliar symbolism. The electric organs detected very slight differences of electric charge in relation to the subject’s own body. Originally this sense had been used for revealing enemies equipped with electric organs of offence. But in man its significance was chiefly social. It gave information about the emotional state of one’s neighbours. Beyond this its function was meteorological.

One example of this kind of world, one which clearly illustrates the type, and at the same time presents interesting peculiarities must be described in more detail.

The key to the understanding of this race is, I believe, its strange method of reproduction, which was essentially communal. Every individual was capable of budding a new individual; but only at certain seasons, and only after stimulation by a kind of pollen emanating from the whole tribe and carried on the air. The grains of this ultra-microscopically fine pollen dust were not germ-cells but ‘genes’, the elementary factors of inheritance. The precincts of the tribe were at all times faintly perfumed by the communal pollen; but on occasions of violent group emotion the pollen cloud became so intensified as to be actually visible as a haze. Only on these rare occasions was conception probable. Breathed out by every individual, the pollen was breathed in by those who were ripe for fertilization. By all it was experienced as a rich and subtle perfume, to which each individual contributed his peculiar odour. By means of a curious psychical and physiological mechanism the individual in heat was moved to crave stimulation by the full perfume of the tribe, or of the great majority of its members; and indeed, if the pollen clouds were insufficiently complex, conception would not occur. Cross-fertilization between tribes happened in inter-tribal warfare and in the ceaseless coming and going between tribes in the modern world.

In this race, then, every individual might bear children. Every child, though it had an individual as its mother, was fathered by the tribe as a whole. Expectant parents were sacred, and were tended communally. When the baby ‘Echinoderm’ finally detached itself from the parental body, it also was tended communally along with the rest of the tribe’s juvenile population. In civilized societies it was handed over to professional nurses and teachers.

I must not pause to tell of the important psychological effects of this kind of reproduction. The delights and disgusts which we feel in contact with the flesh of our kind were unknown. On the other hand, individuals were profoundly moved by the ever-changing tribal perfume. It is impossible to describe the strange variant of romantic love which each individual periodically felt for the tribe. The thwarting, the repression, the perversion of this passion was the source at once of the loftiest and the most sordid achievements of the race.

Communal parenthood gave to the tribe unity and strength quite unknown in more individualistic races. The primitive tribes were groups of a few hundred or a few thousand individuals, but in modern times their size greatly increased. Always, however, the sentiment of tribal loyalty, if it was to remain healthy, had to be based on the personal acquaintance of its members. Even in the larger tribes, everyone was at least ‘the friend of a friend’s friend’ to every other member. Telephone, radio, and television enabled tribes as large as our smaller cities to maintain a sufficient degree of personal intercourse among their members.

But always there was some point beyond which further growth of the tribe was unwholesome. Even in the smallest and most intelligent tribes there was a constant strain between the individual’s natural passion for the tribe and his respect for individuality in himself and his fellows. But whereas in the small tribes and healthy larger tribes the tribal spirit was kept sweet and sane by the mutual-respect and self-respect of the individuals, in the largest and imperfectly sane tribes the hypnotic influence of the tribe was all too apt to drown personality. The members might even lose all awareness of themselves and their fellows as persons, and become mere mindless organs of the tribe. Thus the community would degenerate into an instinctive animal herd.

Throughout history the finer minds of the race had realized that the supreme temptation was the surrender of individuality to the tribe. Prophets had over and over again exhorted men to be true to themselves, but their preaching had been almost wholly vain. The greatest religions of this strange world were not religions of love but religions of self. Whereas in our world men long for the utopia in which all men shall love one another, the ‘Echinoderms’ were apt to exalt the religious hunger for strength to ‘be oneself’ without capitulation to the tribe. Just as we compensate for our inveterate selfishness by religious veneration of the community, so this race compensated for inveterate ‘gregism’ by religious veneration of the individual.

In its purest and most developed form, of course, the religion of self is almost identical with the religion of love at its best. To love is to will the self-fulfilment of the beloved, and to find, in the very activity of loving, an incidental but vitalizing increase of oneself. On the other hand, to be true to oneself, to the full potentiality of the self, involves the activity of love. It demands the discipline of the private self in service of a greater self which embraces the community and the fulfilment of the spirit of the race.

But the religion of self was no more effective with the ‘Echinoderms’ than the religion of love with us. The precept, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ breeds in us most often the disposition to see one’s neighbour merely as a poor imitation of oneself, and to hate him if he proves different. With them the precept, ‘Be true to thyself,’ bred the disposition merely to be true to the tribal fashion of mentality.

Modern industrial civilization caused many tribes to swell beyond the wholesome limit. It also introduced artificial ‘super-tribes’ or ‘tribes of tribes’, corresponding to our nations and social classes. Since the economic unit was the internally communistic tribe, not the individual, the employing class was a small group of small and prosperous tribes, and the working class was a large group of large and impoverished tribes. The ideologies of the super-tribes exercised absolute power over all individual minds under their sway.

In civilized regions the super-tribes and the overgrown natural tribes created an astounding mental tyranny. In relation to his natural tribe, at least if it was small and genuinely civilized, the individual might still behave with intelligence and imagination. Along with his actual tribal kinsmen he might support a degree of true community unknown on Earth. He might in fact be a critical, self-respecting and other-respecting person. But in all matters connected with the super-tribes, whether national or economic, he behaved in a very different manner. All ideas coming to him with the sanction of nation or class would be accepted uncritically and with fervour by himself and all his fellows. As soon as he encountered one of the symbols or slogans of his super-tribe he ceased to be a human personality and became a sort of de-cerebrate animal, capable only of stereotyped reactions. In extreme cases his mind was absolutely closed to influences opposed to the suggestion of the super-tribe. Criticism was either met with blind rage or actually not heard at all. Persons who in the intimate community of their small native tribe were capable of great mutual insight and sympathy might suddenly, in response to tribal symbols, be transformed into vessels of crazy intolerance and hate directed against national or class enemies. In this mood they would go to any extreme of self-sacrifice for the supposed glory of the super-tribe. Also they would show great ingenuity in contriving means to exercise their lustful vindictiveness upon enemies who in favourable circumstances could be quite as kindly and intelligent as themselves.

At the time of our visit to this world it seemed that mob passions would destroy civilization completely and irrevocably. The affairs of the world were increasingly conducted under the sway of the spreading mania of super-tribalism; conducted, in fact, not intelligently but according to the relative emotional compulsions of almost meaningless slogans.

I must not stay to describe how, after a period of chaos, a new way of life at last began to spread over this distressed world. It could not do so till the super-tribes had been disintegrated by the economic forces of mechanized industry, and by their own frenzied conflict. Then at last the individual mind became once more free. The whole prospect of the race now changed.

It was in this world that we first experienced that tantalizing loss of contact with the natives just at that point where, having established something like a social utopia throughout their planet, they were beset by the first painful stirrings of the spirit before advancement to some mental plane beyond our reach, or at least beyond such comprehension as we then had.

Of the other ‘Echinoderm’ worlds in our galaxy, one, more promising than the average, rose early to brilliance, but was destroyed by astronomical collision. Its whole solar system encountered a tract of dense nebula. The surface of every planet was fused. In several other worlds of this type we saw the struggle for the more awakened mentality definitely fail. Vindictive and superstitious herd-cults exterminated the best minds of the race, and drugged the rest with customs and principles so damaging that the vital sources of sensitivity and adaptability on which all mental progress depends were destroyed for ever.

Many thousands of other quasi-human worlds, besides those of the ‘Echinoderm’ type, came to an untimely end. One, which succumbed to a curious disaster, perhaps deserves brief notice. Here we found a race of very human kind. When its civilization had reached a stage and character much like our own, a stage in which the ideals of the masses are without the guidance of any well-established tradition, and in which natural science is enslaved to individualistic industry, biologists discovered the technique of artificial insemination. Now at this time there happened to be a widespread cult of irrationalism, of instinct, of ruthlessness, and of the ‘divine’ primitive ‘brute-man’. This figure was particularly admired when he combined brutishness with the power of the mob-controller. Several countries were subjected to tyrants of this type, and in the so-called democratic states the same type was much favoured by popular taste.

In both kinds of country, women craved ‘brute-men’ as lovers, and as fathers for their children. Since in the ‘democratic’ countries women had attained great economic independence, their demand for fertilization by ‘brute-men’ caused the whole matter to be commercialized. Males of the desirable type were taken up by syndicates, and graded in five ranks of desirability. At a moderate charge, fixed in relation to the grade of the father, any woman could obtain ‘brute-man’ fertilization. So cheap was the fifth grade that only the most abject paupers were debarred from its services. The charge for actual copulation with even the lowest grade of selected male was, of course, much higher, since perforce the supply was limited.

In the non-democratic countries events took a different turn. In each of these regions a tyrant of the fashionable type gathered upon his own person the adoration of the whole population. He was the god-sent hero. He was himself divine. Every woman longed passionately to have him, if not as a lover, at least as father of her children. In some lands artificial insemination from the Master was permitted only as a supreme distinction for women of perfect type. Ordinary women of every class, however, were entitled to insemination from the authorized aristocratic stud of ‘brute-men’. In other countries the Master himself condescended to be the father of the whole future population.

The result of this extraordinary custom, of artificial fatherhood by ‘brute-men’, which was carried on without remission in all countries for a generation, and in a less thorough manner for a very much longer period, was to alter the composition of the whole quasi-human race. In order to maintain continued adaptability to an ever-changing environment a race must at all costs preserve in itself its slight but potent salting of sensibility and originality. In this world the precious factor now became so diluted as to be ineffective. Henceforth the desperately complex problems of the world were consistently bungled. Civilization decayed. The race entered on a phase of what might be called pseudo-civilized barbarism, which was in essence sub-human and incapable of change. This state of affairs continued for some millions of years, but at last the race was destroyed by the ravages of a small rat-like animal against which it could devise no protection.

I must not stay to notice the strange fortunes of all the many other quasi-human worlds. I will mention only that in some, though civilization was destroyed in a succession of savage wars, the germ of recovery precariously survived. In one, the agonizing balance of the old and the new seemed to prolong itself indefinitely. In another, where science had advanced too far for the safety of an immature species, man accidentally blew up his planet and his race. In several, the dialectical process of history was broken short by invasion and conquest on the part of inhabitants of another planet. These and other disasters, to be described in due course, decimated the galactic population of worlds.

In conclusion I will mention that in one or two of these quasi-human worlds a new and superior biological race emerged naturally during the typical world crisis, gained power by sheer intelligence and sympathy, took charge of the planet, persuaded the aborigines to cease breeding, peopled the whole planet with its own superior type, and created a human race which attained communal mentality, and rapidly advanced beyond the limits of our exploring and over-strained understanding. Before our contact failed, we were surprised to observe that, as the new species superseded the old and took over the vast political and economic activity of that world, it came to realize with laughter the futility of all this feverish and aimless living. Under our eyes the old order began to give place to a new and simpler order, in which the world was to be peopled by a small ‘aristocratic’ population served by machines, freed alike from drudgery and luxury and intent on exploration of the cosmos and the mind.

This change-over to a simpler life happened in several other worlds not by the intervention of a new species, but simply by the victory of the new mentality in its battle against the old.

3. NAUTILOIDS

AS OUR EXPLORATION advanced and we gathered more and more helpers from the many worlds that we entered, our imaginative insight into alien natures increased. Though our research was still restricted to races which were in the throes of the familiar spiritual crisis, we gradually acquired the power of making contact with beings whose minds were very far from human in texture. I must now try to give some idea of the main types of these ‘non-human’ intelligent worlds. In some cases the difference from humanity, though physically striking, and even mentally very remarkable, was not nearly so far-reaching as the cases to be described in the next chapter.

In general the physical and mental form of conscious beings is an expression of the character of the planet on which they live. On certain very large and aqueous planets, for instance, we found that civilization had been achieved by marine organisms. On these huge globes no land-dwellers as large as a man could possibly thrive, for gravitation would have nailed them to the ground. But in the water there was no such limitation to bulk. One peculiarity of these big worlds was that, owing to the crushing action of gravitation, there were seldom any great elevations and depressions in their surface. Thus they were usually covered by a shallow ocean, broken here and there by archipelagos of small, low islands.

I shall describe one example of this kind of world, the greatest planet of a mighty sun. Situated, if I remember rightly, near the congested heart of the galaxy, this star was born late in galactic history, and it gave birth to planets when already many of the older stars were encrusted with smouldering lava. Owing to the violence of solar radiation its nearer planets had (or will have) stormy climates. On one of them a mollusc-like creature, living in the coastal shallows, acquired a propensity to drift in its boat-like shell on the sea’s surface, thus keeping in touch with its drifting vegetable food. As the ages passed, its shell became better adapted to navigation. Mere drifting was supplemented by means of a crude sail, a membrane extending from the creature’s back. In time this nautiloid type proliferated into a host of species. Some of these remained minute, but some found size advantageous, and developed into living ships. One of these became the intelligent master of this great world.

The hull was a rigid, stream-lined vessel, shaped much as the nineteenth-century clipper in her prime, and larger than our largest whale. At the rear a tentacle or fin developed into a rudder, which was sometimes used also as a propeller, like a fish’s tail. But though all these species could navigate under their own power to some extent, their normal means of long-distance locomotion was their great spread of sail. The simple membranes of the ancestral type had become a system of parchment-like sails and bony masts and spars, under voluntary muscular control. Similarity to a ship was increased by the downward-looking eyes, one on each side of the prow. The mainmast-head also bore eyes, for searching the horizon. An organ of magnetic sensitivity in the brain afforded a reliable means of orientation. At the fore end of the vessel were two long manipulatory tentacles, which during locomotion were folded snugly to the flanks. In use they formed a very serviceable pair of arms.

It may seem strange that a species of this kind should have developed human intelligence. In more than one world of this type, however, a number of accidents combined to produce this result. The change from a vegetarian to a carnivorous habit caused a great increase of animal cunning in pursuit of the much speedier submarine creatures. The sense of hearing was wonderfully developed, for the movements of fish at great distances could be detected by the under-water ears. A line of taste-organs along either bilge responded to the ever-changing composition of the water, and enabled the hunter to track his prey. Delicacy of hearing and of taste combined with omnivorous habits, and with great diversity of behaviour and strong sociality, to favour the growth of intelligence.

Speech, that essential medium of the developed mentality, had two distinct modes in this world. For short-range communication, rhythmic under-water emissions of gas from a vent in the rear of the organism were heard and analysed by means of under-water ears. Long-distance communication was carried on by means of semaphore signals from a rapidly agitating tentacle at the mast head.

The organizing of communal fishing expeditions, the invention of traps, the making of lines and nets, the practice of agriculture, both in the sea and along the shores, the building of stone harbours and workshops, the use of volcanic heat for smelting metals, and of wind for driving mills, the projection of canals into the low islands in search of minerals and fertile ground, the gradual exploration and mapping of a huge world, the harnessing of solar radiation for mechanical power, these and many other achievements were at once a product of intelligence and an opportunity for its advancement.

It was a strange experience to enter the mind of an intelligent ship, to see the foam circling under one’s own nose as the vessel plunged through the waves, to taste the bitter or delicious currents streaming past one’s flanks, to feel the pressure of air on the sails as one beat up against the breeze, to hear beneath the water-line the rush and murmur of distant shoals of fishes, and indeed actually to hear the sea-bottom’s configuration by means of the echoes that it cast up to the under-water ears. It was strange and terrifying to be caught in a hurricane, to feel the masts straining and the sails threatening to split, while the hull was battered by the small but furious waves of that massive planet. It was strange, too, to watch other great living ships, as they ploughed their way, heeled over, adjusted the set of their yellow or russet sails to the wind’s variations; and very strange it was to realize that these were not man-made objects but themselves conscious and purposeful.

Sometimes we saw two of the living ships fighting, tearing at one another’s sails with snake-like tentacles, stabbing at one another’s soft ‘decks’ with metal knives, or at a distance firing at one another with cannon. Bewildering and delightful it was to feel in the presence of a slim female clipper the longing for contact, and to carry out with her on the high seas the tacking and yawing, the piratical pursuit and overhauling, the delicate, fleeting caress of tentacles, which formed the love-play of this race. Strange, to come up alongside, close-hauled, grapple her to one’s flank, and board her with sexual invasion. It was charming, too, to see a mother ship attended by her children. I should mention, by the way, that at birth the young were launched from the mother’s decks like little boats, one from the port side, one from the starboard. Thenceforth they were suckled at her flanks. In play they swam about her like ducklings, or spread their immature sails. In rough weather and for long voyaging they were taken aboard.

At the time of our visit natural sails were beginning to be aided by a power unit and propeller which were fixed to the stern. Great cities of concrete docks had spread along many of the coasts, and were excavated out of the hinterlands. We were delighted by the broad waterways that served as streets in these cities. They were thronged with sail and mechanized traffic, the children appearing as tugs and smacks among the gigantic elders.

It was in this world that we found in its most striking form a social disease which is perhaps the commonest of all world-diseases — namely, the splitting of the population into two mutually unintelligible castes through the influence of economic forces. So great was the difference between adults of the two castes that they seemed to us at first to be distinct species, and we supposed ourselves to be witnessing the victory of a new and superior biological mutation over its predecessor. But this was far from the truth.

In appearance the masters were very different from the workers, quite as different as queen ants and drones from the workers of their species. They were more elegantly and accurately stream-lined. They had a greater expanse of sail, and were faster in fair weather. In heavy seas they were less seaworthy, owing to their finer lines; but on the other hand they were the more skilful and venturesome navigators. Their manipulatory tentacles were less muscular, but capable of finer adjustments. Their perception was more delicate. While a small minority of them perhaps excelled the best of the workers in endurance and courage, most were much less hardy, both physically and mentally. They were subject to a number of disintegrative diseases which never affected the workers, chiefly diseases of the nervous system. On the other hand, if any of them contracted one of the infectious ailments which were endemic to the workers, but seldom fatal, he would almost certainly die. They were also very prone to mental disorders, and particularly to neurotic self-importance. The whole organization and control of the world was theirs. The workers, on the other hand, though racked by disease and neurosis bred of their cramping environment, were on the whole psychologically more robust. They had, however, a crippling sense of inferiority. Though in handicrafts and all small-scale operations they were capable of intelligence and skill, they were liable, when faced with tasks of wider scope, to a strange paralysis of mind.

The mentalities of the two castes were indeed strikingly different. The masters were more prone to individual initiative and to the vices of self-seeking. The workers were more addicted to collectivism and the vices of subservience to the herd’s hypnotic influence. The masters were on the whole more prudent, far-seeing, independent, self-reliant; the workers were more impetuous, more ready to sacrifice themselves in a social cause, often more clearly aware of the right aims of social activity, and incomparably more generous to individuals in distress.

At the time of our visit certain recent discoveries were throwing the world into confusion. Hitherto it had been supposed that the natures of the two castes were fixed unalterably, by divine law and by biological inheritance. But it was now certain that this was not the case, and that the physical and mental differences between the classes were due entirely to nurture. Since time immemorial, the castes had been recruited in a very curious manner. After weaning, all children born on the port side of the mother, no matter what the parental caste, were brought up to be members of the master caste; all those born on the starboard side were brought up to be workers. Since the master class had, of course, to be much smaller than the working class, this system gave an immense superfluity of potential masters. The difficulty was overcome as follows. The starboard-born children of workers and the port-born children of masters were brought up by their own respective parents; but the port-born, potentially aristocratic children of workers were mostly disposed of by infant sacrifice. A few only were exchanged with the starboard-born children of masters.

With the advance of industrialism, the increasing need for large supplies of cheap labour, the spread of scientific ideas and the weakening of religion, came the shocking discovery that port-born children, of both classes, if brought up as workers, became physically and mentally indistinguishable from workers. Industrial magnates in need of plentiful cheap labour now developed moral indignation against infant sacrifice, urging that the excess of port-born infants should be mercifully brought up as workers. Presently certain misguided scientists made the even more subversive discovery that starboard-born children brought up as masters developed the fine lines, the great sails, the delicate constitution, the aristocratic mentality of the master caste. An attempt was made by the masters to prevent this knowledge from spreading to the workers, but certain sentimentalists of their own caste bruited it abroad, and preached a new-fangled and inflammatory doctrine of social equality.

During our visit the world was in terrible confusion. In backward oceans the old system remained unquestioned, but in all the more advanced regions of the planet a desperate struggle was being waged. In one great archipelago a social revolution had put the workers in power, and a devoted though ruthless dictatorship was attempting so to plan the life of the community that the next generation should be homogeneous and of a new type, combining the most desirable characters of both workers and masters. Elsewhere the masters had persuaded their workers that the new ideas were false and base, and certain to lead to universal poverty and misery. A clever appeal was made to the vague but increasing suspicion that ‘materialistic science’ was misleading and superficial, and that mechanized civilization was crushing out the more spiritual potentialities of the race. Skilled propaganda spread the ideal of a kind of corporate state with ‘port and starboard flanks’ correlated by a popular dictator, who, it was said, would assume power ‘by divine right and the will of the people’.

I must not stay to tell of the desperate struggle which broke out between these two kinds of social organizations. In the world-wide campaigns many a harbour, many an ocean current, flowed red with slaughter. Under the pressure of a war to the death, all that was best, all that was most human and gentle on each side was crushed out by military necessity. On the one side, the passion for a unified world, where every individual should live a free and full life in service of the world-community, was overcome by the passion to punish spies, traitors, and heretics. On the other, vague and sadly misguided yearnings for a nobler, less materialistic life were cleverly transformed by the reactionary leaders into vindictiveness against the revolutionaries.

Very rapidly the material fabric of civilization fell to pieces. Not till the race had reduced itself to an almost sub-human savagery, and all the crazy traditions of a diseased civilization had been purged away, along with true culture, could the spirit of these ‘ship-men’ set out again on the great adventure of the spirit. Many thousands of years later it broke through on to that higher plane of being which I have still to suggest, as best I may.

VI. INTIMATIONS OF THE STAR MAKER

IT MUST NOT be supposed that the normal fate of intelligent races in the galaxy is to triumph. So far I have spoken mainly of those fortunate Echinoderm and Nautiloid worlds which did at last pass triumphantly into the more awakened state, and I have scarcely even mentioned the hundreds, the thousands, of worlds which met disaster. This selection was inevitable because my space is limited, and because these two worlds, together with the even stranger spheres that I shall describe in the next chapter, were to have great influence on the fortunes of the whole galaxy. But many other worlds of ‘human’ rank were quite as rich in history as those which I have noticed. Individual lives in them were no less varied than lives elsewhere, and no less crowded with distress and joy. Some triumphed; some in their last phase suffered a downfall, swift or slow, which lent them the splendour of tragedy. But since these worlds play no special part in the main story of the galaxy, they must be passed over in silence, along with the still greater host of worlds which never attained even to ‘human’ rank. If I were to dwell upon their fortunes I should commit the same error as a historian who should try to describe every private life and neglect the pattern of the whole community.

I have already said that, as our experience of the destruction of worlds increased, we were increasingly dismayed by the wastefulness and seeming aimlessness of the universe. So many worlds, after so much distress, attained so nearly to social peace and joy, only to have the cup snatched from them for ever. Often disaster was brought by some trivial flaw of temperament or biological nature. Some races had not the intelligence, some lacked the social will, to cope with the problems of a unified world-community. Some were destroyed by an upstart bacterium before their medical science was mature. Others succumbed to climatic change, many to loss of atmosphere. Sometimes the end came through collision with dense clouds of dust or gas, or with swarms of giant meteors. Not a few worlds were destroyed by the downfall of a satellite. The lesser body, ploughing its way, age after age, through the extremely rarefied but omnipresent cloud of free atoms in interstellar space, would lose momentum. Its orbit would contract, at first slowly, then rapidly. It would set up prodigious tides in the oceans of the larger body, and drown much of its civilization. Later, through the increasing stress of the planet’s attraction, the great moon would begin to disintegrate. First it would cast its ocean in a deluge on men’s heads, then its mountains, and then the titanic and fiery fragments of its core. If in none of these manners came the end of the world, then inevitably, though perhaps not till the latter days of the galaxy, it must come in another way. The planet’s own orbit, fatally contracting, must bring every world at last so close to its sun that conditions must pass beyond the limit of life’s adaptability, and age by age all living things must be parched to death and roasted.

Dismay, terror, horror many a time seized us as we witnessed these huge disasters. An agony of pity for the last survivors of these worlds was part of our schooling.

The most developed of the slaughtered worlds did not need our pity, since their inhabitants seemed capable of meeting the end of all that they cherished with peace, even a strange unshakable joy which we in this early stage of our adventure could by no means comprehend. But only a few, very few, could reach this state. And only a few out of the great host of worlds could win through even to the social peace and fulness toward which all were groping. In the more lowly worlds, moreover, few were the individuals who won any satisfaction of life even within the narrow bounds of their own imperfect nature. No doubt one or two, here and there, in almost every world, found not merely happiness but the joy that passes all understanding. But to us, crushed now by the suffering and futility of a thousand races, it seemed that this joy itself, this ecstasy, whether it was supported by scattered individuals or by whole worlds, must after all be condemned as false, and that those who had found it must after all have been drugged by their own private and untypical well-being of spirit. For surely it had made them insensitive to the horror around them.

The sustaining motive of our pilgrimage had been the hunger which formerly drove men on Earth in search of God. Yes, we had one and all left our native planets in order to discover whether, regarding the cosmos as a whole, the spirit which we all in our hearts obscurely knew and haltingly prized, the spirit which on Earth we sometimes call humane, was Lord of the Universe, or outlaw; almighty, or crucified. And now it was becoming clear to us that if the cosmos had any lord at all, he was not that spirit but some other, whose purpose in creating the endless fountain of worlds was not fatherly toward the beings that he had made, but alien, inhuman, dark.

Yet while we felt dismay, we felt also increasingly the hunger to see and to face fearlessly whatever spirit was indeed the spirit of this cosmos. For as we pursued our pilgrimage, passing again and again from tragedy to farce, from farce to glory, from glory often to a final tragedy, we felt increasingly the sense that some terrible, some holy, yet at the same time unimaginably outrageous and lethal, secret lay just beyond our reach. Again and again we were torn between horror and fascination, between moral rage against the universe (or the Star Maker) and unreasonable worship.

This same conflict was to be observed in all those worlds that were of our own mental stature. Observing these worlds and the phases of their past growth, and groping as best we might toward the next plane of spiritual development, we came at last to see plainly the first stages of any world’s pilgrimage. Even in the most primitive ages of every normal intelligent world there existed in some minds the impulse to seek and to praise some universal thing. At first this impulse was confused with the craving for protection by some mighty power. Inevitably the beings theorized that the admired thing must be Power, and that worship was mere propitiation. Thus they came to conceive the almighty tyrant of the universe, with themselves as his favoured children. But in time it became clear to their prophets that mere Power was not what the praiseful heart adored. Then theory enthroned Wisdom, or Law, or Righteousness. And after an age of obedience to some phantom lawgiver, or to divine legality itself, the beings found that these concepts too were inadequate to describe the indescribable glory that the heart confronted in all things, and mutely prized in all things.

But now, in every world that we visited, alternative ways opened out before the worshippers. Some hoped to come face to face with their shrouded god solely by inward-searching meditation. By purging themselves of all lesser, all trivial desires, by striving to see everything dispassionately and with universal sympathy, they hoped to identify themselves with the spirit of the cosmos. Often they travelled far along the way of self-perfecting and awakening. But because of this inward absorption most of them became insensitive to the suffering of their less-awakened fellows and careless of the communal enterprise of their kind. In not a few worlds this way of the spirit was thronged by all the most vital minds. And because the best attention of the race was given wholly to the inner life, material and social advancement was checked. The sciences of physical nature and of life never developed. Mechanical power remained unknown, and medical and biological power also. Consequently these worlds stagnated, and sooner or later succumbed to accidents which might well have been prevented.

There was a second way of devotion, open to creatures of a more practical temperament. These, in all the worlds, gave delighted attention to the universe around them, and chiefly they found the worshipped thing in the persons of their fellow-beings, and in the communal bond of mutual insight and love between persons. In themselves and in each other they prized above all things love.

And their prophets told them that the thing which they had always adored, the universal spirit, the Creator, the Almighty, the All-wise, was also the All-loving. Let them therefore worship in practical love of one another, and in service of the Love-God. And so for an age, short or long, they strove feebly to love and to become members one of another. They spun theories in defence of the theory of the Love-God. They set up priesthoods and temples in service of Love. And because they hungered for immortality they were told that to love was the way to attain eternal life. And so love, which seeks no reward, was misconceived.

In most worlds these practical minds dominated over the meditators. Sooner or later practical curiosity and economic need produced the material sciences. Probing every region with these sciences, the beings found nowhere, neither in the atom nor in the galaxy, nor for that matter in the heart of ‘man’ either, any signature of the Love-God. And what with the fever of mechanization, and the exploitation of slaves by masters, and the passions of inter-tribal warfare, and the increasing neglect or coarsening of all the more awakened activities of the spirit, the little flame of praise in their hearts sank lower than it had ever been in any earlier age, so low that they could no longer recognize it. And the flame of love, long fanned by the forced draught of doctrine, but now suffocated by the general obtuseness of the beings to one another, was reduced to an occasional smouldering warmth, which was most often mistaken for mere lust. With bitter laughter and rage the tortured beings now dethroned the image of the Love-God in their hearts.

And so without love and without worship the unhappy beings faced the increasingly formidable problems of their mechanized and hate-racked world.

This was the crisis which we in our own worlds knew so well. Many a world up and down the galaxy never surmounted it. But in a few, some miracle, which we could not yet clearly envisage, raised the average minds of these worlds to a higher plane of mentality. Of this I shall speak later. Meanwhile I will say only that in the few worlds where this happened, we noticed invariably, before the minds of that world passed beyond our reach, a new feeling about the universe, a feeling which it was very difficult for us to share. Not till we had learned to conjure in ourselves something of this feeling could we follow the fortunes of these worlds.

But, as we advanced on our pilgrimage, our own desires began to change. We came to wonder whether, in demanding lordship of the universe for the divinely humane spirit that we prized most in ourselves and in our fellow-mortals in all the worlds, we were perhaps impious. We came less and less to require that Love should be enthroned behind the stars; more and more we desired merely to pass on, opening our hearts to accept fearlessly whatever of the truth might fall within our comprehension.

There was a moment, late in this early phase of our pilgrimage, when, thinking and feeling in unison, we said to one another, ‘If the Star Maker is Love, we know that this must be right. But if he is not, if he is some other, some inhuman spirit, this must be right. And if he is nothing, if the stars and all else are not his creatures but self-subsistent, and if the adored spirit is but an exquisite creature of our minds, then this must be right, this and no other possibility. For we cannot know whether the highest place for love is on the throne or on the cross. We cannot know what spirit rules, for on the throne sits darkness. We know, we have seen, that in the waste of stars love is indeed crucified; and rightly, for its own proving, and for the throne’s glory. Love and all that is humane we cherish in our hearts. Yet also we salute the throne and the darkness upon the throne. Whether it be Love or not Love, our hearts praise it, out-soaring reason.’

But before our hearts could be properly attuned to this new, strange feeling, we had still far to go in the understanding of worlds of human rank, though diverse. I must now try to give some idea of several kinds of worlds very different from our own, but not in essentials more mature.

VII. MORE WORLDS

1. A SYMBIOTIC RACE

ON CERTAIN LARGE planets, whose climates, owing to the proximity of a violent sun, were very much hotter than our tropics, we sometimes found an intelligent fish-like race. It was bewildering to us to discover that a submarine world could give rise to mentality of human rank, and to that drama of the spirit which we had now so often encountered.

The very shallow and sun-drenched oceans of these great planets provided an immense diversity of habitats and a great wealth of living things. Green vegetation, which could be classified as tropical, subtropical, temperate and arctic, basked on the bright ocean floors. There were submarine prairies and forests. In some regions the giant weeds stretched from the sea-bottom to the waves. In these jungles the blue and blinding light of the sun was reduced almost to darkness. Immense coral-like growths, honeycombed with passages and swarming with all manner of live-things, lifted their spires and turrets to the surface. Innumerable kinds of fish-like creatures of all sizes from sprat to whale inhabited the many levels of the waters, some gliding on the bottom, some daring an occasional leap into the torrid air. In the deepest and darkest regions hosts of sea-monsters, eyeless or luminous, browsed on the ceaseless rain of corpses which sank from the upper levels. Over their deep world lay other worlds of increasing brightness and colour, where gaudy populations basked, browsed, stalked, or hunted with arrowy flight.

Intelligence in these planets was generally achieved by some unimposing social creature, neither fish nor octopus nor crustacean, but something of all three. It would be equipped with manipulatory tentacles, keen eyes and subtle brain. It would make nests of weed in the crevices of the coral, or build strongholds of coral masonry. In time would appear traps, weapons, tools, submarine agriculture, the blossoming of primitive art, the ritual of primitive religion. Then would follow the typical fluctuating advance of the spirit from barbarism to civilization.

One of these submarine worlds was exceptionally interesting. Early in the life of our galaxy, when few of the stars had yet condensed from the ‘giant’ to the solar type, when very few planetary births had yet occurred, a double star and a single star in a congested cluster did actually approach one another, reach fiery filaments toward one another, and spawn a planet brood. Of these worlds, one, an immense and very aqueous sphere, produced in time a dominant race which was not a single species but an intimate symbiotic partnership of two very alien creatures. The one came of a fish-like stock. The other was in appearance something like a crustacean. In form it was a sort of paddle-footed crab or marine spider. Unlike our crustaceans, it was covered not with a brittle carapace but with a tough pachydermatous hide. In maturity this serviceable jerkin was more or less rigid, save at the joints; but in youth it was very pliant to the still-expanding brain. This creature lived on the coasts and in the coastal waters of the many islands of the planet. Both species were mentally of human rank, though each had specific temperament and ability. In primitive times each had attained by its own route and in its own hemisphere of the great aqueous planet to what might be called the last stage of the sub-human mentality. The two species had then come into contact, and had grappled desperately. Their battle-ground was the shallow coastal water. The ‘crustaceans’, though crudely amphibian, could not spend long under the sea; the ‘fish’ could not emerge from it.

The two races did not seriously compete with one another in economic life, for the ‘fish’ were mainly vegetarian, the ‘crustaceans’ mainly carnivorous; yet neither could tolerate the presence of the other. Both were sufficiently human to be aware of one another as rival aristocrats in a sub-human world, but neither was human enough to realize that for each race the way of life lay in cooperation with the other. The fish-like creatures, which I shall call ‘ichthyoids’, had speed and range of travel. They had also the security of bulk. The crab-like or spider-like ‘crustaceans’, which I shall call ‘arachnoids’, had greater manual dexterity, and had also access to the dry land. Cooperation would have been very beneficial to both species, for one of the staple foods of the arachnoids was parasitic to the ichthyoids.

In spite of the possibility of mutual aid, the two races strove to exterminate one another, and almost succeeded. After an age of blind mutual slaughter, certain of the less pugnacious and more flexible varieties of the two species gradually discovered profit in fraternization with the enemy. This was the beginning of a very remarkable partnership. Soon the arachnoids took to riding on the backs of the swift ichthyoids, and thus gained access to more remote hunting grounds.

As the epochs passed, the two species moulded one another to form a well-integrated union. The little arachnoid, no bigger than a chimpanzee, rode in a snug hollow behind the great ‘fish’s’ skull, his back being stream-lined with the contours of the larger creature. The tentacles of the ichthyoid were specialized for large-scale manipulation, those of the arachnoid for minute work. A biochemical interdependence also evolved. Through a membrane in the ichthyoid’s pouch an exchange of endocrine products took place. This mechanism enabled the arachnoid to become fully aquatic. So long as it had frequent contact with its host, it could stay under water for any length of time and descend to any depth. A striking mental adaptation also occurred in the two species. The ichthyoids became on the whole more introvert, the arachnoids more extravert.

Up to puberty the young of both species were free-living individuals; but, as their symbiotic organization developed, each sought out a partner of the opposite species. The union which followed was life-long, and was interrupted only by brief sexual matings. The symbiosis itself constituted a kind of contrapuntal sexuality; but a sexuality that was purely mental, since, of course, for copulation and reproduction each individual had to seek out a partner belonging to his or her own species. We found, however, that even the symbiotic partnership consisted invariably of a male of one species and a female of the other; and the male, whichever his species, behaved with parental devotion to the young of his symbiotic partner.

I have not space to describe the extraordinary mental reciprocity of these strange couples. I can only say that, though in sensory equipment and in temperament the two species were very different, and though in abnormal cases tragic conflicts did occur, the ordinary partnership was at once more intimate than human marriage and far more enlarging to the individual than any friendship between members of distinct human races. At certain stages of the growth of civilization malicious minds had attempted to arouse widespread interspecific conflict, and had met with temporary success; but the trouble seldom went as deep even as our ‘sex war’, so necessary was each species to the other. Both had contributed equally to the culture of their world, though not equally at all times. In creative work of every kind one of the partners provided most of the originality, the other most of the criticism and restraint. Work in which one partner was entirely passive was rare. Books, or rather scrolls, which were made from pulped seaweed, were nearly always signed by couples. On the whole the arachnoid partners dominated in manual skill, experimental science, the plastic arts, and practical social organization. The ichthyoid partners excelled in theoretical work, in literary arts, in the surprisingly developed music of that submarine world, and in the more mystical kind of religion. This generalization, however, should not be interpreted very strictly.

The symbiotic relationship seems to have given the dual race a far greater mental flexibility than ours, and a quicker aptitude for community. It passed rapidly through the phase of inter-tribal strife, during which the nomadic shoals of symbiotic couples harried one another like hosts of submarine cavalry; for the arachnoids, riding their ichthyoid mates, attacked the enemy with bone spears and swords, while their mounts wrestled with powerful tentacles. But the phase of tribal warfare was remarkably brief. When a settled mode of life was attained, along with submarine agriculture and coral-built cities, strife between leagues of cities was the exception, not the rule. Aided no doubt by its great mobility and ease of communication, the dual race soon built up a world-wide and unarmed federation of cities. We learned also with wonder that at the height of the pre-mechanical civilization of this planet, when in our worlds the cleavage into masters and economic slaves would already have become serious, the communal spirit of the city triumphed over all individualistic enterprise. Very soon this world became a tissue of interdependent but independent municipal communes.

At this time it seemed that social strife had vanished for ever. But the most serious crisis of the race was still to come.

The submarine environment offered the symbiotic race no great possibilities of advancement. All sources of wealth had been tapped and regularized. Population was maintained at an optimum size for the joyful working of the world. The social order was satisfactory to all classes, and seemed unlikely to change. Individual lives were full and varied. Culture, founded on a great tradition, was now concerned entirely with detailed exploration of the great fields of thought that had long ago been pioneered by the revered ancestors, under direct inspiration, it was said, of the symbiotic deity. Our friends in this submarine world, our mental hosts, looked back on this age from their own more turbulent epoch sometimes with yearning, but often with horror; for in retrospect it seemed to them to display the first faint signs of racial decay. So perfectly did the race fit its unchanging environment that intelligence and acuity were already ceasing to be precious, and might soon begin to fade. But presently it appeared that fate had decreed otherwise.

In a submarine world the possibility of obtaining mechanical power was remote. But the arachnoids, it will be remembered, were able to live out of the water. In the epochs before the symbiosis their ancestors had periodically emerged upon the islands, for courtship, parenthood, and the pursuit of prey. Since those days the air-breathing capacity had declined, but it had never been entirely lost. Every arachnoid still emerged for sexual mating, and also for certain ritual gymnastic exercises. It was in this latter connection that the great discovery was made which changed the course of history. At a certain tournament the friction of stone weapons, clashing against one another, produced sparks, and fire among the sun-scorched grasses.

In startlingly quick succession came smelting, the steam engine, the electric current. Power was obtained first from the combustion of a sort of peat formed on the coasts by congested marine vegetation, later from the constant and violent winds, later still from photochemical light traps which absorbed the sun’s lavish radiation. These inventions were of course the work of arachnoids. The ichthyoids, though they still played a great part in the systematization of knowledge, were debarred from the great practical work of scientific experiment and mechanical invention above the seas. Soon the arachnoids were running electric cables from the island power-stations to the submarine cities. In this work, at least, the ichthyoids could take part, but their part was necessarily subordinate. Not only in experience of electrical engineering but also in native practical ability they were eclipsed by their arachnoid partners.

For a couple of centuries or more the two species continued to cooperate, though with increasing strain. Artificial lighting, mechanical transport of goods on the ocean floor, and large-scale manufacture, produced an immense increase in the amenities of life in the submarine cities. The islands were crowded with buildings devoted to science and industry. Physics, chemistry, and biology made great progress. Astronomers began to map the galaxy. They also discovered that a neighbouring planet offered wonderful opportunities for settlement by arachnoids, who might without great difficulty, it was hoped, be conditioned to the alien climate, and to divorce from their symbiotic partners. The first attempts at rocket-flight were leading to mingled tragedy and success. The directorate of extra-marine activities demanded a much increased arachnoid population.

Inevitably there arose a conflict between the two species, and in the mind of every individual of either species. It was at the height of this conflict, and in the spiritual crisis in virtue of which these beings were accessible to us in our novitiate stage, that we first entered this world. The ichthyoids had not yet succumbed biologically to their inferior position, but psychologically they were already showing signs of deep mental decay. A profound disheartenment and lassitude attacked them, like that which so often undermines our primitive races when they find themselves struggling in the flood of European civilization. But since in the case of the symbiotics the relation between the two races was extremely intimate, far more so than that between the most intimate human beings, the plight of the ichthyoids deeply affected the arachnoids. And in the minds of the ichthyoids the triumph of their partners was for long a source of mingled distress and exultation.

Every individual of both species was torn between conflicting motives. While every healthy arachnoid longed to take part in the adventurous new life, he or she longed also, through sheer affection and symbiotic entanglement, to assist his or her ichthyoid mate to have an equal share in that life. Further, all arachnoids were aware of subtle dependence on their mates, a dependence at once physiological and psychological. It was the ichthyoids who mostly contributed to the mental symbiosis the power of self-knowledge and mutual insight, and the contemplation which is so necessary to keep action sweet and sane. That this was so was evident from the fact that already among the arachnoids internecine strife had appeared. Island tended to compete with island, and one great industrial organization with another.

I could not help remarking that if this deep cleavage of interests had occurred on my own planet, say between our two sexes, the favoured sex would have single-mindedly trampled the other into servitude. Such a ‘victory’ on the part of the arachnoids did indeed nearly occur. More and more partnerships were dissolved, each member attempting by means of drugs to supply his or her system with the chemicals normally provided by the symbiosis. For mental dependence, however, there was no substitute, and the divorced partners were subject to serious mental disorders, either subtle or flagrant. Nevertheless, there grew up a large population capable of living after a fashion without the symbiotic intercourse.

Strife now took a violent turn. The intransigents of both species attacked one another, and stirred up trouble among the moderates. There followed a period of desperate and confused warfare. On each side a small and hated minority advocated a ‘modernized symbiosis’, in which each species should be able to contribute to the common life even in a mechanized civilization. Many of these reformers were martyred for their faith.

Victory would in the long run have gone to the arachnoids, for they controlled the sources of power. But it soon appeared that the attempt to break the symbiotic bond was not as successful as it had seemed. Even in actual warfare, commanders were unable to prevent widespread fraternization between the opposed forces. Members of dissolved partnerships would furtively meet to snatch a few hours or moments of each other’s company. Widowed or deserted individuals of each species would timidly but hungrily venture toward the enemy’s camps in search of new mates. Whole companies would surrender for the same purpose. The arachnoids suffered more from neuroses than from the weapons of the enemy. On the islands, moreover, civil wars and social revolutions made the manufacture of munitions almost impossible.

The most resolute faction of the arachnoids now attempted to bring the struggle to an end by poisoning the ocean. The islands in turn were poisoned by the millions of decaying corpses that rose to the sea’s surface and were cast up on the shores. Poison, plague, and above all neurosis, brought war to a standstill, civilization to ruin, and the two species almost to extinction. The deserted sky-scrapers that crowded the islands began to crumble into heaps of wreckage. The submarine cities were invaded by the submarine jungle and by shark-like sub-human ichthyoids of many species. The delicate tissue of knowledge began to disintegrate into fragments of superstition.

Now at last came the opportunity of those who advocated a modernized symbiosis. With difficulty they had maintained a secret existence and their individual partnerships in the more remote and inhospitable regions of the planet. They now came boldly forth to spread their gospel among the unhappy remnants of the world’s population. There was a rage of interspecific mating and remating. Primitive submarine agriculture and hunting maintained the scattered peoples while a few of the coral cities were cleared and rebuilt, and the instruments of a lean but hopeful civilization were refashioned. This was a temporary civilization, without mechanical power, but one which promised itself great adventures in the ‘upper world’ as soon as it had established the basic principles of the reformed symbiosis.

To us it seemed that such an enterprise was doomed to failure, so clear was it that the future lay with a terrestrial rather than a marine creature. But we were mistaken. I must not tell in detail of the heroic struggle by which the race refashioned its symbiotic nature to suit the career that lay before it. The first stage was the reinstatement of power-stations on the islands, and the careful reorganization of a purely submarine society equipped with power. But this reconstruction would have been useless had it not been accompanied by a very careful study of the physical and mental relations of the two species. The symbiosis had to be strengthened so that interspecific strife should in future be impossible. By means of chemical treatment in infancy the two kinds of organism were made more interdependent, and in partnership more hardy. By a special psychological ritual, a sort of mutual hypnosis, all newly joined partners were henceforth brought into indissoluble mental reciprocity. This interspecific communion, which every individual knew in immediate domestic experience, became in time the basic experience of all culture and religion. The symbiotic deity, which figured in all the primitive mythologies, was reinstated as a symbol of the dual personality of the universe, a dualism, it was said, of creativity and wisdom, unified as the divine spirit of love. The one reasonable goal of social life was affirmed to be the creation of a world of awakened, of sensitive, intelligent, and mutually understanding personalities, banded together for the common purpose of exploring the universe and developing the ‘human’ spirit’s manifold potentialities. Imperceptibly the young were led to discover for themselves this goal.

Gradually and very cautiously all the industrial operations and scientific researches of an earlier age were repeated, but with a difference. Industry was subordinated to the conscious social goal. Science, formerly the slave of industry, became the free colleague of wisdom.

Once more the islands were crowded with buildings and with eager arachnoid workers. But all the shallow coastal waters were filled with a vast honeycomb of dwelling-houses, where the symbiotic partners took rest and refreshment with their mates. In the ocean depths the old cities were turned into schools, universities, museums, temples, palaces of art and of pleasure. There the young of both kinds grew up together. There the full-grown of both species met constantly for recreation and stimulation. There, while the arachnoids were busy on the islands, the ichthyoids performed their work of education and of refashioning the whole theoretical culture of the world. For it was known clearly by now that in this field their temperament and talents could make a vital contribution to the common life. Thus literature, philosophy, and non-scientific education were carried out chiefly in the ocean; while on the islands industry, scientific inquiry, and the plastic arts were more prominent.

Perhaps, in spite of the close union of each couple, this strange division of labour would have led in time to renewed conflict, had it not been for two new discoveries. One was the development of telepathy. Several centuries after the Age of War it was found possible to establish full telepathic intercourse between the two members of each couple. In time this intercourse was extended to include the whole dual race. The first result of this change was a great increase in the facility of communication between individuals all over the world, and therewith a great increase in mutual understanding and in unity of social purpose. But before we lost touch with this rapidly advancing race we had evidence of a much more far-reaching effect of universal telepathy. Sometimes, so we were told, telepathic communion of the whole race caused something like the fragmentary awakening of a communal world-mind in which all individuals participated.

The second great innovation of the race was due to genetic research. The arachnoids, who had to remain capable of active life on dry land and on a massive planet, could not achieve any great improvement in brain weight and complexity; but the ichthyoids, who were already large and were buoyed up by the water, were not subject to this limitation. After long and often disastrous experiment a race of ‘super-ichthyoids’ was produced. In time the whole ichthyoid population came to consist of these creatures. Meanwhile the arachnoids, who were by now exploring and colonizing other planets of their solar system, were genetically improved not in respect of general brain complexity but in those special brain-centres which afforded telepathic intercourse. Thus, in spite of their simpler brain-structure, they were able to maintain full telepathic community even with their big-brained mates far away in the oceans of the mother-planet. The simple brains and the complex brains formed now a single system, in which each unit, however simple its own contribution, was sensitive to the whole.

It was at this point, when the original ichthyoid race had given place to the super-ichthyoids, that we finally lost touch. The experience of the dual race passed completely beyond our comprehension. At a much later stage of our adventure we came upon them again, and on a higher plane of being. They were by then already engaged upon the vast common enterprise which, as I shall tell, was undertaken by the Galactic Society of Worlds. At this time the symbiotic race consisted of an immense host of arachnoid adventurers scattered over many planets, and a company of some fifty thousand million super-ichthyoids living a life of natatory delight and intense mental activity in the ocean of their great native world. Even at this stage physical contact between the symbiotic partners had to be maintained, though at long intervals. There was a constant stream of space-ships between the colonies and the mother-world. The ichthyoids, together with their teeming colleagues on a score of planets, supported a racial mind. Though the threads of the common experience were spun by the whole symbiotic race, they were woven into a single web by the ichthyoids alone in their primeval oceanic home, to be shared by all members of both races.

2. COMPOSITE BEINGS

SOMETIMES IN THE course of our adventure we came upon worlds inhabited by intelligent beings, whose developed personality was an expression not of the single individual organism but of a group of organisms. In most cases this state of affairs had arisen through the necessity of combining intelligence with lightness of the individual body. A large planet, rather close to its sun, or swayed by a very large satellite, would be swept by great ocean tides. Vast areas of its surface would be periodically submerged and exposed. In such a world flight was very desirable, but owing to the strength of gravitation only a small creature, a relatively small mass of molecules, could fly. A brain large enough for complex ‘human’ activity could not have been lifted.

In such worlds the organic basis of intelligence was often a swarm of avian creatures no bigger than sparrows. A host of individual bodies were possessed together by a single individual mind of human rank. The body of this mind was multiple, but the mind itself was almost as firmly knit as the mind of a man. As flocks of dunlin or redshank stream and wheel and soar and quiver over our estuaries, so above the great tide-flooded cultivated regions of these worlds the animated clouds of avians manœuvred, each cloud a single centre of consciousness. Presently, like our own winged waders, the little avians would settle, the huge volume of the cloud shrinking to a mere film upon the ground, a sort of precipitate along the fringe of the receding tide.

Life in these worlds was rhythmically divided by the tides. During the nocturnal tides the bird-clouds all slept on the waves. During the daytime tides they indulged in aerial sports and religious exercises. But twice a day, when the land was dry, they cultivated the drenched ooze, or carried out in their cities of concrete cells all the operations of industry and culture. It was interesting to us to see how ingeniously, before the tide’s return, all the instruments of civilization were sealed from the ravages of the water.

We supposed at first that the mental unity of these little avians was telepathic, but in fact it was not. It was based on the unity of a complex electromagnetic field, in fact on ‘radio’ waves permeating the whole group. Radio, transmitted and received by every individual organism, corresponded to the chemical nerve current which maintains the unity of the human nervous system. Each brain reverberated with the ethereal rhythms of its environment; and each contributed its own peculiar theme to the complex pattern of the whole. So long as the flock was within a volume of about a cubic mile, the individuals were mentally unified, each serving as a specialized centre in the common ‘brain’. But if some were separated from the flock, as sometimes happened in stormy weather, they lost mental contact and became separate minds of very low order. In fact each degenerated for the time being into a very simple instinctive animal or a system of reflexes, set wholly for the task of restoring contact with the flock.

It may easily be imagined that the mental life of these composite beings was very different from anything which we had yet encountered. Different and yet the same. Like a man, the bird-cloud was capable of anger and fear, hunger and sexual hunger, personal love and all the passions of the herd; but the medium of these experiences was so different from anything known to us that we found great difficulty in recognizing them.

Sex, for instance, was very perplexing. Each cloud was bisexual, having some hundreds of specialized male and female avian units, indifferent to one another, but very responsive to the presence of other bird-clouds. We found that in these strange multiple beings the delight and shame of bodily contact were obtained not only through actual sexual union of the specialized sexual members but, with the most exquisite subtlety, in the aerial interfusion of two flying clouds during the performance of courtship gymnastics in the air.

More important for us than this superficial likeness to ourselves was an underlying parity of mental rank. Indeed, we should not have gained access to them at all had it not been for the essential similarity of their evolutionary stage with that which we knew so well in our own worlds. For each one of these mobile minded clouds of little birds was in fact an individual approximately of our own spiritual order, indeed a very human thing, torn between the beast and the angel, capable of ecstasies of love and hate toward other such bird-clouds, capable of wisdom and folly, and the whole gamut of human passions from swinishness to ecstatic contemplation.

Probing as best we could beyond the formal similarity of spirit which gave us access to the bird-clouds, we discovered painfully how to see with a million eyes at once, how to feel the texture of the atmosphere with a million wings. We learned to interpret the composite percepts of mud-flats and marshes and great agricultural regions, irrigated twice daily by the tide. We admired the great tide-driven turbines and the system of electric transport of freight. We discovered that the forests of high concrete poles or minarets, and platforms on stilts, which stood in the shallowest of the tidal areas, were nurseries where the young were tended till they could fly.

Little by little we learned to understand something of the alien thought of these strange beings, which was in its detailed texture so different from our own, yet in general pattern and significance so similar. Time presses, and I must not try even to sketch the immense complexity of the most developed of these worlds. So much else has still to be told. I will say only that, since the individuality of these bird-clouds was more precarious than human individuality, it was apt to be better understood and more justly valued. The constant danger of the bird-clouds was physical and mental disintegration. Consequently the ideal of the coherent self was very prominent in all their cultures. On the other hand, the danger that the self of the bird-cloud would be psychically invaded and violated by its neighbours, much as one radio station may interfere with another, forced these beings to guard more carefully than ourselves against the temptations of the herd, against drowning the individual cloud’s self in the mob of clouds. But again, just because this danger was effectively guarded against, the ideal of the world-wide community developed without any life-and-death struggle with mystical tribalism, such as we know too well. Instead the struggle was simply between individualism and the twin ideals of the world-community and the world-mind.

At the time of our visit world-wide conflict was already breaking out between the two parties in every region of the planet. The individualists were stronger in one hemisphere, and were slaughtering all adherents of the world-mind ideal, and mustering their forces for attack on the other hemisphere. Here the party of the world-mind dominated, not by weapons but by sheer radio-bombardment, so to speak. The pattern of ethereal undulations issuing from the party imposed itself by sheer force on all recalcitrants. All rebels were either mentally disintegrated by radio-bombardment or were absorbed intact into the communal radio-system.

The war which ensued was to us astounding. The individualists used artillery and poison gas. The party of the world-mind used these weapons far less than the radio, which they, but not their enemies, could operate with irresistible effect. So greatly was the radio-system strengthened, and so adapted to the physiological receptivity of the avian units, that before the individualists had done serious harm, they found themselves engulfed, so to speak, in an overwhelming torrent of radio stimulation. Their individuality crumbled away. The avian units that made up their composite bodies were either destroyed (if they were specialized for war), or reorganized into new clouds, loyal to the world-mind.

Shortly after the defeat of the individualists we lost touch with this race. The experience and the social problems of the young world-mind were incomprehensible to us. Not till a much later stage of our adventure did we regain contact with it.

Others of the worlds inhabited by races of bird-clouds were less fortunate. Most, through one cause or another, came to grief. In many of them the stresses of industrialism or of social unrest brought about a plague of insanity, or disintegration of the individual into a swarm of mere reflex animals. These miserable little creatures, which had not the power of independent intelligent behaviour, were slaughtered in myriads by natural forces and beasts of prey. Presently the stage was clear for some worm or amoeba to reinaugurate the great adventure of biological evolution toward the human plane.

In the course of our exploration we came upon other types of composite individuals. For instance, we found that very large dry planets were sometimes inhabited by populations of insect-like creatures each of whose swarms or nests was the multiple body of a single mind. These planets were so large that no mobile organism could be bigger than a beetle, no flying organism bigger than an ant. In the intelligent swarms that fulfilled the part of men in these worlds, the microscopic brains of the insect-like units were specialized for microscopic functions within the group, much as the members of an ant’s nest are specialized for working, fighting, reproduction, and so on. All were mobile, but each class of the units fulfilled special ‘neurological’ functions in the life of the whole. In fact they acted as though they were special types of cells in a nervous system.

In these worlds, as in the worlds of the bird-clouds, we had to accustom ourselves to the unified awareness of a huge swarm of units. With innumerable hurrying feet we crept along Lilliputian concrete passages, with innumerable manipulatory antennae we took part in obscure industrial or agricultural operations, or in the navigation of toy ships on the canals and lakes of these flat worlds. Through innumerable many-faceted eyes we surveyed the plains of moss-like vegetation or studied the stars with minute telescopes and spectroscopes.

So perfectly organized was the life of the minded swarm that all routine activities of industry and agriculture had become, from the point of view of the swarm’s mind, unconscious, like the digestive processes of a human being. The little insectoid units themselves carried on these operations consciously, though without understanding their significance; but the mind of the swarm had lost the power of attending to them. Its concern was almost wholly with such activities as called for unified conscious control, in fact with practical and theoretical invention of all kinds and with physical and mental exploration.

At the time of our visit to the most striking of these insectoid worlds the world-population consisted of many great nations of swarms. Each individual swarm had its own nest, its Lilliputian city, an area of about an acre, in which the ground was honeycombed to a depth of two feet with chambers and passages. The surrounding district was devoted to the cultivation of the moss-like food-plants. As the swarm increased in size, colonies might be founded beyond the range of the physiological radio-system of the parent swarm. Thus arose new group-individuals. But neither in this race, nor in the race of bird-clouds, was there anything corresponding to our successive generations of individual minds. Within the minded group, the insectoid units were ever dying off and giving place to fresh units, but the mind of the group was potentially immortal. The units succeeded one another; the group-self persisted. Its memory reached back past countless generations of units, fading as it receded, and finally losing itself in that archaic time when the ‘human’ was emerging from the ‘sub-human’. Thus the civilized swarms had vague and fragmentary memories of every historical period.

Civilization had turned the old disorderly warrens into carefully planned subterranean cities; had turned the old irrigation channels into a widespread mesh of waterways for the transport of freight from district to district; had introduced mechanical power, based on the combustion of vegetable matter; had smelted metals from outcrops and alluvial deposits; had produced the extraordinary tissue of minute, almost microscopic machinery which had so greatly improved the comfort and health of the more advanced regions; had produced also myriads of tiny vehicles, corresponding to our tractors, trains, ships; had created class distinctions between those group-individuals that remained primarily agricultural, those that were mainly industrial, and those that specialized in intelligent co-ordination of their country’s activities. These last became in time the bureaucratic tyrants of the country.

Owing to the great size of the planet and the extreme difficulty of long-distance travel by creatures so small as the insectoid units, civilizations had developed independently in a score of insulated regions; and when at last they came in contact, many of them were already highly industrialized, and equipped with the most ‘modern’ weapons. The reader may easily imagine what happened when races that were in most cases biologically of different species, and anyhow were completely alien in customs, thought, and ideals, suddenly found themselves in contact and in conflict. It would be wearisome to describe the insane warfare which ensued. But it is of interest to note that we, the telepathic visitors from regions remote in time and space, could communicate with these warring hosts more easily than one host could communicate with another. And through this power we were actually able to play an important part in the history of this world. Indeed, it was probably through our mediation that these races were saved from mutual destruction. Taking up positions in ‘key’ minds on each side of the conflict, we patiently induced in our hosts some insight into the mentality of the enemy. And since each of these races had already passed far beyond the level of sociality known on the Earth, since in relation to the life of his own race a swarm-mind was capable of true community, the realization of the enemy as being not monstrous but essentially humane, was enough to annihilate the will to fight.

The ‘key’ minds on either side, enlightened by ‘divine messengers’, heroically preached peace. And though many of them were hastily martyred, their cause triumphed. The races made terms with each other; all save two formidable and culturally rather backward peoples. These we could not persuade; and as they were by now highly specialized for war, they were a very serious menace. They regarded the new spirit of peace as mere weakness on the part of the enemy, and they were determined to take advantage of it, and to conquer the rest of that world.

But now we witnessed a drama which to terrestrial man must surely seem incredible. It was possible in this world only because of the high degree of mental lucidity which had already been attained within the bounds of each race. The pacific races had the courage to disarm. In the most spectacular and unmistakable manner they destroyed their weapons and their munition factories. They took care, too, that these events should be witnessed by enemy-swarms that had been taken prisoner. These captives they then freed, bidding them report their experiences to the enemy. In reply the enemy invaded the nearest of the disarmed countries and set about ruthlessly imposing the military culture upon it, by means of propaganda and persecution. But in spite of mass executions and mass torture, the upshot was not what was expected. For though the tyrant races were not appreciably more developed in sociality than Homo Sapiens, the victims were far superior. Repression only strengthened the will for passive resistance. Little by little the tyranny began to waver. Then suddenly it collapsed. The invaders withdrew, taking with them the infection of pacifism. In a surprisingly short time that world became a federation, whose members were distinct species.

With sadness I realized that on the Earth, though all civilized beings belong to one and the same biological species, such a happy issue of strife is impossible, simply because the capacity for community in the individual mind is still too weak. I wondered, too, whether the tyrant races of insectoids would have had greater success in imposing their culture on the invaded country if there had been a distinct generation of juvenile malleable swarms for them to educate.

When this insectoid world had passed through its crisis, it began to advance so rapidly in social structure and in development of the individual mind that we found increasing difficulty in maintaining contact. At last we lost touch. But later, when we ourselves had advanced, we were to come upon this world again.

Of the other insectoid worlds, I shall say nothing, for not one of them was destined to play an important part in the history of the galaxy.

To complete the picture of the races in which the individual mind had not a single, physically continuous, body, I must refer to a very different and even stranger kind. In this the individual body is a cloud of ultramicroscopic sub-vital units, organized in a common radio-system. Of this kind is the race which now inhabits our own planet Mars. As I have already in another book described these beings and the tragic relations which they will have with our own descendants in the remote future, I shall say no more of them here; save that we did not make contact with them till a much later stage of our adventure, when we had acquired the skill to reach out to beings alien to ourselves in spiritual condition.

3. PLANT MEN AND OTHERS

BEFORE PASSING ON to tell the story of our galaxy as a whole (so far as I can comprehend it) I must mention another and a very alien kind of world. Of this type we found few examples, and few of these survived into the time when the galactic drama was at its height; but one at least had (or will have) a great influence on the growth of the spirit in that dramatic era.

On certain small planets, drenched with light and heat from a near or a great sun, evolution took a very different course from that with which we are familiar. The vegetable and animal functions were not separated into distinct organic types. Every organism was at once animal and vegetable.

In such worlds the higher organisms were something like gigantic and mobile herbs; but the violent flood of solar radiation rendered the tempo of their life much more rapid than that of our plants. To say that they looked like herbs is perhaps misleading, for they looked equally like animals. They had a definite number of limbs and a definite form of body; but all their skin was green, or streaked with green, and they bore here or there, according to their species, great masses of foliage. Owing to the slight power of gravitation on these small planets, the plant-animals often supported vast superstructures on very slender trunks or limbs. In general those that were mobile were less generously equipped with leaves than those that were more or less sedentary.

In these small hot worlds the turbulent circulation of water and atmosphere caused rapid changes in the condition of the ground from day to day. Storm and flood made it very desirable for the organisms of these worlds to be able to move from place to place. Consequently the early plants, which owing to the wealth of solar radiation could easily store themselves with energy for a life of moderate muscular activity, developed powers of perception and locomotion. Vegetable eyes and ears, vegetable organs of taste, scent and touch, appeared on their stems or foliage. For locomotion, some of them simply withdrew their primitive roots from the ground and crept hither and thither with a kind of caterpillar action. Some spread their foliage and drifted on the wind. From these in the course of ages arose true fliers. Meanwhile the pedestrian species turned some of their roots into muscular legs, four or six, or centipedal. The remaining roots were equipped with boring instruments, which on a new site could rapidly proliferate into the ground. Yet another method of combining locomotion and roots was perhaps more remarkable. The aerial portion of the organism would detach itself from its embedded roots, and wander off by land or air to strike root afresh in virgin soil. When the second site was exhausted the creature would either go off in search of a third, and so on, or return to its original bed, which by now might have recovered fertility. There, it would attach itself once more to its old dormant roots and wake them into new activity.

Many species, of course, developed predatory habits, and special organs of offence, such as muscular boughs as strong as pythons for constriction, or talons, horns, and formidable serrated pincers. In these ‘carnivorous’ creatures the spread of foliage was greatly reduced, and all the leaves could be tucked snugly away along the back. In the most specialized beasts of prey the foliage was atrophied and had only decorative value. It was surprising to see how the environment imposed on these alien creatures forms suggestive of our tigers and wolves. And it was interesting, too, to note how excessive specialization and excessive adaptation to offence or defence ruined species after species; and how, when at length ‘human’ intelligence appeared, it was achieved by an unimposing and inoffensive creature whose sole gifts were intelligence and sensibility toward the material world and toward its fellows.

Before describing the efflorescence of ‘humanity’ in this kind of world I must mention one grave problem which faces the evolving life of all small planets, often at an early stage. This problem we had already come across on the Other Earth. Owing to the weakness of gravitation and the disturbing heat of the sun, the molecules of the atmosphere very easily escape into space. Most small worlds, of course, lose all their air and water long before life can reach the ‘human’ stage, sometimes even before it can establish itself at all. Others, less small, may be thoroughly equipped with atmosphere in their early phases, but at a much later date, owing to the slow but steady contraction of their orbits, they may become so heated that they can no longer hold down the furiously agitated molecules of their atmosphere. On some of these planets a great population of living forms develops in early aeons only to be parched and suffocated out of existence through the long-drawn denudation and desiccation of the planet. But in more favourable cases life is able to adapt itself progressively to the increasingly severe conditions. In some worlds, for instance, a biological mechanism appeared by which the remaining atmosphere was imprisoned within a powerful electromagnetic field generated by the world’s living population. In others the need of atmosphere was done away with altogether; photosynthesis and the whole metabolism of life were carried on by means of liquids alone. The last dwindling gases were captured in solution, stored in huge tracts of spongy growths among the crowded roots, and covered with an impervious membrane.

Both these natural biological methods occurred in one or other of the plant-animal worlds that reached the ‘human’ level. I have space only to describe a single example, the most significant of these remarkable worlds. This was one in which all free atmosphere had been lost long before the appearance of intelligence.

To enter this world and experience it through the alien senses and alien temperament of its natives was an adventure in some ways more bewildering than any of our earlier explorations. Owing to the complete absence of atmosphere, the sky, even in full sunlight, was black with the blackness of interstellar space; and the stars blazed. Owing to the weakness of gravitation and the absence of the moulding action of air and water and frost on the planet’s shrinking and wrinkled surface, the landscape was a mass of fold-mountains, primeval and extinct volcanoes, congealed floods and humps of lava, and craters left by the impact of giant meteors. None of these features had ever been much smoothed by atmospheric and glacial influences. Further, the ever-changing stresses of the planet’s crust had shattered many of the mountains into the fantastic forms of ice-bergs. On our own earth, where gravity, that tireless hound, pulls down its quarry with so much greater strength, these slender, top-heavy crags and pinnacles could never have stood. Owing to the absence of atmosphere the exposed surfaces of the rock were blindingly illuminated; the crevasses and all the shadows were black as night.

Many of the valleys had been turned into reservoirs, seemingly of milk; for the surfaces of these lakes were covered with a deep layer of a white glutinous substance, to prevent loss by evaporation. Round about clustered the roots of the strange people of this world, like tree-stumps where a forest has been felled and cleared. Each stump was sealed with the white glue. Every stretch of soil was in use; and we learned that, though some of this soil was the natural result of past ages of action by air and water, most was artificial. It had been manufactured by great mining and pulverizing processes. In primitive times, and indeed throughout all ‘pre-human’ evolution, the competitive struggle for a share of the rare soil of this world of rock had been one of the main spurs to intelligence.

The mobile plant-men themselves were to be seen by day clustered in the valleys, their foliage spread to the sun. Only by night did we observe them in action, moving over the bare rock or busy with machines and other artificial objects, instruments of their civilization. There were no buildings, no roofed weatherproof enclosures; for there was no weather. But the plateaux and terraces of the rock were crowded with all manner of artifacts unintelligible to us.

The typical plant-man was an erect organism, like ourselves. On his head he bore a vast crest of green plumes, which could be either folded together in the form of a huge, tight, cos lettuce, or spread out to catch the light. Three many-faceted eyes looked out from under the crest. Beneath these were three arm-like manipulatory limbs, green and serpentine, branching at their extremities. The slender trunk, pliable, encased in hard rings which slid into one another as the body bowed, was divided into three legs for locomotion. Two of the three feet were also mouths, which could either draw sap from the root or devour foreign matter. The third was an organ of excretion. The precious excrement was never wasted, but passed through a special junction between the third foot and the root. The feet contained taste-organs, and also ears. Since there was no air, sound was not propagated above ground.

By day the life of these strange beings was mainly vegetable, by night animal. Every morning, after the long and frigid night, the whole population swarmed to its rooty dormitories. Each individual sought out his own root, fixed himself to it, and stood throughout the torrid day, with leaves outspread. Till sunset he slept, not in a dreamless sleep, but in a sort of trance, the meditative and mystical quality of which was to prove in future ages a well of peace for many worlds. While he slept, the currents of sap hastened up and down his trunk, carrying chemicals between roots and leaves, flooding him with a concentrated supply of oxygen, removing the products of past katabolism. When the sun had disappeared once more behind the crags, displaying for a moment a wisp of fiery prominences, he would wake, fold up his leaves, close the passages to his roots, detach himself, and go about the business of civilized life. Night in this world was brighter than moonlight with us, for the stars were unobscured, and several great clusters hung in the night sky. Artificial light, however, was used for delicate operations. Its chief disadvantage was that it tended to send the worker to sleep.

I must not try even to sketch the rich and alien social life of these beings. I will only say that here as elsewhere we found all the cultural themes known on earth, but that in this world of mobile plants all was transposed into a strange key, a perplexing mode. Here as elsewhere we found a population of individuals deeply concerned with the task of keeping themselves and their society in being. Here we found self-regard, hate, love, the passions of the mob, intellectual curiosity, and so on. And here, as in all the other worlds that we had thus far visited, we found a race in the throes of the great spiritual crisis which was the crisis familiar to us in our own worlds, and formed the channel by which we had telepathic access to other worlds. But here the crisis had assumed a style different from any that we had yet encountered. We had, in fact, begun to extend our powers of imaginative exploration.

Leaving all else unnoticed, I must try to describe this crisis, for it is significant for the understanding of matters which reached far beyond this little world.

We did not begin to have insight into the drama of this race till we had learned to appreciate the mental aspect of its dual, animal-vegetable nature. Briefly, the mentality of the plant-men in every age was an expression of the varying tension between the two sides of their nature, between the active, assertive, objectively inquisitive, and morally positive animal nature and the passive, subjectively contemplative, and devoutly acquiescent vegetable nature. It was of course through animal prowess and practical human intelligence that the species had long ago come to dominate its world. But at all times this practical will had been tempered and enriched by a kind of experience which among men is very rare. Every day, throughout the ages, these beings had surrendered their feverish animal nature not merely to unconscious or dream-racked sleep, such as animals know, but to the special kind of awareness which (we learned) belongs to plants. Spreading their leaves, they had absorbed directly the essential elixir of life which animals receive only at second hand in the mangled flesh of their prey. Thus they seemingly maintained immediate physical contact with the source of all cosmical being. And this state, though physical, was also in some sense spiritual. It had a far-reaching effect on all their conduct. If theological language were acceptable, it might well be called a spiritual contact with God. During the busy night-time they went about their affairs as insulated individuals, having no present immediate experience of their underlying unity; but normally they were always preserved from the worst excesses of individualism by memory of their daytime life.

It took us long to understand that their peculiar daytime state did not consist simply in being united as a group mind, whether of tribe or race. Theirs was not the condition of the avian units in the bird-cloud, nor yet of the telepathically constituted world-minds which, as we were later to discover, had a very great part to play in galactic history. The plant-man did not in his daytime life come into possession of the percepts and thoughts of his fellow plant-men, and thereby waken into a more comprehensive and discriminate awareness of the environment and of the multiple body of the race. On the contrary, he became completely unresponsive to all objective conditions save the flood of sunlight drenching his spread leaves. And this experience afforded him an enduring ecstasy whose quality was almost sexual, an ecstasy in which subject and object seemed to become identical, an ecstasy of subjective union with the obscure source of all finite being. In this state the plant-man could meditate upon his active, night-time life, and could become aware, far more clearly than by day, of the intricacies of his own motives. In this daytime mode he passed no moral judgments on himself or others. He mentally reviewed every kind of human conduct with detached contemplative joy, as a factor in the universe. But when night came again, bringing the active nocturnal mood, the calm, daytime insight into himself and others was lit with a fire of moral praise and censure.

Now throughout the career of this race there had been a certain tension between the two basic impulses of its nature. All its finest cultural achievements had been made in times when both had been vigorous and neither predominant. But, as in so many other worlds, the development of natural science and the production of mechanical power from tropical sunlight caused grave mental confusion. The manufacture of innumerable aids to comfort and luxury, the spread of electric railways over the whole world, the development of radio communication, the study of astronomy and mechanistic biochemistry, the urgent demands of war and social revolution, all these influences strengthened the active mentality and weakened the contemplative. The climax came when it was found possible to do away with the daytime sleep altogether. The products of artificial photosynthesis could be rapidly injected into the living body every morning, so that the plant-man could spend practically the whole day in active work. Very soon the roots of the peoples were being dug up and used as raw material in manufacture. They were no longer needed for their natural purpose.

I must not spend time in describing the hideous plight into which this world now fell. Seemingly, artificial photosynthesis, though it could keep the body vigorous, failed to produce some essential vitamin of the spirit. A disease of robotism, of purely mechanical living, spread throughout the population. There was of course a fever of industrial activity. The plant-men careered round their planet in all kinds of mechanically propelled vehicles, decorated themselves with the latest synthetic products, tapped the central volcanic heat for power, expended great ingenuity in destroying one another, and in a thousand other feverish pursuits pushed on in search of a bliss which ever eluded them.

After untold distresses they began to realize that their whole way of life was alien to their essential plant nature. Leaders and prophets dared to inveigh against mechanization and against the prevalent intellectualistic scientific culture, and against artificial photosynthesis. By now nearly all the roots of the race had been destroyed; but presently biological science was turned to the task of generating, from the few remaining specimens, new roots for all. Little by little the whole population was able to return to natural photosynthesis. The industrial life of the world vanished like frost in sunlight. In returning to the old alternating life of animal and vegetable, the plant-men, jaded and deranged by the long fever of industrialism, found in their calm daytime experience an overwhelming joy. The misery of their recent life intensified by contrast the ecstasy of the vegetal experience. The intellectual acuity that their brightest minds had acquired in scientific analysis combined with the special quality of their revived plant life to give their whole experience a new lucidity. For a brief period they reached a plane of spiritual lucidity which was to be an example and a treasure for the future aeons of the galaxy.

But even the most spiritual life has its temptations. The extravagant fever of industrialism and intellectualism had so subtly poisoned the plant-men that when at last they rebelled against it they swung too far, falling into the snare of a vegetal life as one-sided as the old animal life had been. Little by little they gave less and less energy and time to ‘animal’ pursuits, until at last their nights as well as their days were spent wholly as trees, and the active, exploring, manipulating, animal intelligence died in them for ever.

For a while the race lived on in an increasingly vague and confused ecstasy of passive union with the universal source of being. So well established and automatic was the age-old biological mechanism for preserving the planet’s vital gases in solution that it continued long to function without attention. But industrialism had increased the world-population beyond the limits within which the small supply of water and gases could easily fulfil its function. The circulation of material was dangerously rapid. In time the mechanism was over-strained. Leakages began to appear, and no one repaired them. Little by little the precious water and other volatile substances escaped from the planet. Little by little the reservoirs ran dry, the spongy roots were parched, the leaves withered. One by one the blissful and no longer human inhabitants of that world passed from ecstasy to sickness, despondency, uncomprehending bewilderment, and on to death.

But, as I shall tell, their achievement was not without effect on the life of our galaxy.

‘Vegetable humanities’, if I may so call them, proved to be rather uncommon occurrences. Some of them inhabited worlds of a very curious kind which I have not yet mentioned. As is well known, a small planet close to its sun tends, through the sun’s tidal action upon it, to lose its rotation. Its days become longer and longer, till at last it presents one face constantly toward its luminary. Not a few planets of this type, up and down the galaxy, were inhabited; and several of them by ‘vegetable humanities’.

All these ‘non-diurnal’ worlds were very inhospitable to life, for one hemisphere was always extravagantly hot, the other extravagantly cold. The illuminated face might reach the temperature of molten lead; on the dark face, however, no substances could retain the liquid state, for the temperature would remain but a degree or two above absolute zero. Between the two hemispheres there would lie a narrow belt, or rather a mere ribbon, which might be called temperate. Here the immense and incendiary sun was always partly hidden by the horizon. Along the cooler side of this ribbon, hidden from the murderous rays of the sun’s actual disc, but illuminated by his corona, and warmed by the conduction of heat from the sun-ward ground, life was not invariably impossible.

Inhabited worlds of this kind had always reached a fairly high stage of biological evolution long before they had lost their diurnal rotation. As the day lengthened, life was forced to adapt itself to more extreme temperatures of day and night. The poles of these planets, if not too much inclined toward the ecliptic, remained at a fairly constant temperature, and were therefore citadels whence the living forms ventured into less hospitable regions. Many species managed to spread toward the equator by the simple method of burying themselves and ‘hibernating’ through the day and the night, emerging only for dawn and sunset to lead a furiously active life. As the day lengthened into months, some species, adapted for swift locomotion, simply trekked round the planet, following the sunset and the dawn. Strange it was to see the equatorial and most agile of these species sweeping over the plains in the level sunlight. Their legs were often as tall and slender as a ship’s masts. Now and then they would swerve, with long necks extended to snatch some scurrying creature or pluck some bunch of foliage. Such constant and rapid migration would have been impossible in worlds less rich in solar energy.

Human intelligence seems never to have been attained in any of these worlds unless it had been attained already before night and day became excessively long, and the difference of their temperatures excessively great. In worlds where plant-men or other creatures had achieved civilization and science before rotation had become seriously retarded, great efforts were made to cope with the increasing harshness of the environment. Sometimes civilization merely retreated to the poles, abandoning the rest of the planet. Sometimes subterranean settlements were established in other regions, the inhabitants issuing only at dawn and sunset to cultivate the land. Sometimes a system of railways along the parallels of latitude carried a migratory population from one agricultural centre to another, following the twilight.

Finally, however, when rotation had been entirely lost, a settled civilization would be crowded along the whole length of the stationary girdle between night and day. By this time, if not before, the atmosphere would have been lost also. It can well be imagined that a race struggling to survive in these literally straightened circumstances would not be able to maintain any richness and delicacy of mental life.

VIII. CONCERNING THE EXPLORERS

BVALLTU AND I, in company with the increasing band of our fellow explorers, visited many worlds of many strange kinds. In some we spent only a few weeks of the local time; in others we remained for centuries, or skimmed from point to point of history as our interest dictated. Like a swarm of locusts we would descend upon a new-found world, each of us singling out a suitable host. After a period of observation, long or short, we would leave, to alight again, perhaps, on the same world in another of its ages; or to distribute our company among many worlds, far apart in time and in space.

This strange life turned me into a very different being from the Englishman who had at a certain date of human history walked at night upon a hill. Not only had my own immediate experience increased far beyond the normal range, but also, by means of a peculiarly intimate union with my fellows, I myself had been, so to speak, multiplied. For in a sense I was now as much Bvalltu and each one of my colleagues as I was that Englishman.

This change that had come over us deserves to be carefully described, not merely for its intrinsic interest, but also because it afforded us a key for understanding many cosmical beings whose nature would otherwise have been obscure to us.

In our new condition our community was so perfected that the experiences of each were available to all. Thus I, the new I, participated in the adventures of that Englishman and of Bvalltu and the rest with equal ease. And I possessed all their memories of former, separate existence in their respective native worlds.

Some philosophically minded reader may ask, ‘Do you mean that the many experiencing individuals became a single individual, having a single stream of experience? Or do you mean that there remained many experiencing individuals, having numerically distinct but exactly similar experiences?’ The answer is that I do not know. But this I know. I, the Englishman, and similarly each of my colleagues, gradually ‘woke’ into possession of each other’s experience, and also into more lucid intelligence. Whether, as experients, we remained many or became one, I do not know. But I suspect that the question is one of those which can never be truly answered because in the last analysis it is meaningless.

In the course of my communal observation of the many worlds, and equally in the course of my introspection of my own communal mental processes, now one and now another individual explorer, and now perhaps a group of explorers, would form the main instrument of attention, affording through their particular nature and experience material for the contemplation of all. Sometimes, when we were exceptionally alert and eager, each awakened into a mode of perception and thought and imagination and will more lucid than any experiencing known to any of us as individuals. Thus, though each of us became in a sense identical with each of his friends, he also became in a manner a mind of higher order than any of us in isolation. But in this ‘waking’ there seemed to be nothing more mysterious in kind than in those many occasions in normal life when the mind delightedly relates together experiences that have hitherto been insulated from one another, or discovers in confused objects a pattern or a significance hitherto unnoticed.

It must not be supposed that this strange mental community blotted out the personalities of the individual explorers. Human speech has no accurate terms to describe our peculiar relationship. It would be as untrue to say that we had lost our individuality, or were dissolved in a communal individuality, as to say that we were all the while distinct individuals. Though the pronoun ‘I’ now applied to us all collectively, the pronoun ‘we’ also applied to us. In one respect, namely unity of consciousness, we were indeed a single experiencing individual; yet at the same time we were in a very important and delightful manner distinct from one another. Though there was only the single, communal ‘I’, there was also, so to speak, a manifold and variegated ‘us’, an observed company of very diverse personalities, each of whom expressed creatively his own unique contribution to the whole enterprise of cosmical exploration, while all were bound together in a tissue of subtle personal relationships.

I am well aware that this account of the matter must seem to my readers self-contradictory, as indeed it does to me. But I can find no other way of expressing the vividly remembered fact that I was at once a particular member of a community and the possessor of the pooled experience of that community.

To put the matter somewhat differently, though in respect of our identity of awareness we were a single individual, in respect of our diverse and creative idiosyncrasies we were distinct persons observable by the common ‘I’. Each one, as the common ‘I’, experienced the whole company of individuals, including his individual self, as a group of actual persons, differing in temperament and private experience. Each one of us experienced all as a real community, bound together by such relations of affection and mutual criticism as occurred, for instance, between Bvalltu and myself. Yet on another plane of experience, the plane of creative thought and imagination, the single communal attention could withdraw from this tissue of personal relationships. Instead, it concerned itself wholly with the exploration of the cosmos. With partial truth it might be said that, while for love we were distinct, for knowledge, for wisdom, and for worship we were identical. In the following chapters, which deal with the cosmical, experiences of this communal ‘I’, it would be logically correct to refer to the exploring mind always in the singular, using the pronoun ‘I’, and saying simply, ‘I did so and so, and thought so and so’; nevertheless the pronoun ‘we’ will still be generally employed so as to preserve the true impression of a communal enterprise, and to avoid the false impression that the explorer was just the human author of this book.

Each one of us had lived his individual active life in one or other of the many worlds. And for each one, individually, his own little blundering career in his remote native world retained a peculiar concreteness and glamour, like the vividness which mature men find in childhood memories. Not only so, but individually he imputed to his former private life an urgency and importance which, in his communal capacity, was overwhelmed by matters of greater cosmical significance. Now this concreteness and glamour, this urgency and importance of each little private life, was of great moment to the communal ‘I’ in which each of us participated. It irradiated the communal experience with its vividness, its pathos. For only in his own life as a native in some world had each of us actually fought, so to speak, in life’s war as a private soldier at close grips with the enemy. It was the recollection of this fettered, imprisoned, blindfold, eager, private individuality, that enabled us to watch the unfolding of cosmical events not merely as a spectacle but with a sense of the poignancy of every individual life as it flashed and vanished.

Thus I, the Englishman, contributed to the communal mind my persistently vivid recollections of all my ineffectual conduct in my own troubled world; and the true significance of that blind human life, redeemed by its little imperfect jewel of community, became apparent to me, the communal ‘I’, with a lucidity which the Englishman in his primeval stupor could never attain and cannot now recapture. All that I can now remember is that, as the communal ‘I’, I looked on my terrestrial career at once more critically and with less guilt than I do in the individual state; and on my partner in that career at once with clearer, colder understanding of our mutual impact and with more generous affection.

One aspect of the communal experience of the explorers I have still to mention. Each of us had originally set out upon the great adventure mainly in the hope of discovering what part was played by community in the cosmos as a whole. This question had yet to be answered; but meanwhile another question was becoming increasingly insistent. Our crowded experiences in the many worlds, and our new lucidity of mind, had bred in each of us a sharp conflict of intellect and feeling. Intellectually the idea that some ‘deity’, distinct from the cosmos itself, had made the cosmos now seemed to us less and less credible. Intellectually we had no doubt that the cosmos was self-sufficient, a system involving no logical ground and no creator. Yet increasingly, as a man may feel the psychical reality of a physically perceived beloved or a perceived enemy, we felt in the physical presence of the cosmos the psychical presence of that which we had named the Star Maker. In spite of intellect, we knew that the whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being, and that the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos. And with unreasoning passion we strove constantly to peer behind each minute particular event in the cosmos to see the very features of that infinity which, for lack of a truer name, we had called the Star Maker. But, peer as we might, we found nothing. Though in the whole and in each particular thing the dread presence indubitably confronted us, its very infinity prevented us from assigning to it any features whatever.

Sometimes we inclined to conceive it as sheer Power, and symbolized it to ourselves by means of all the myriad power-deities of our many worlds. Sometimes we felt assured that it was pure Reason, and that the cosmos was but an exercise of the divine mathematician. Sometimes Love seemed to us its essential character, and we imagined it with the forms of all the Christs of all the worlds, the human Christs, the Echinoderm and Nautiloid Christs, the dual Christ of the Symbiotics, the swarming Christ of the Insectoids. But equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness. This it might for a while foster with maternal solicitude, till in a sudden jealousy of the excellence of its own creature, it would destroy what it had made.

But we knew well that all these fictions were very false. The felt presence of the Star Maker remained unintelligible, even though it increasingly illuminated the cosmos, like the splendour of the unseen sun at dawn.

IX. THE COMMUNITY OF WORLDS

1. BUSY UTOPIAS

THERE CAME A time when our new-found communal mind attained such a degree of lucidity that it was able to maintain contact even with worlds that had passed far beyond the mentality of terrestrial man. Of these lofty experiences I, who am once more reduced to the state of a mere individual human being, have only the most confused memory. I am like one who, in the last extremity of mental fatigue, tries to recapture the more penetrating intuitions that he achieved in his lost freshness. He can recover only faint echoes and a vague glamour. But even the most fragmentary recollections of the cosmical experiences which befell me in that lucid state deserve recording.

The sequence of events in the successfully waking world was generally more or less as follows. The starting point, it will be remembered, was a plight like that in which our own Earth now stands. The dialectic of the world’s history had confronted the race with a problem with which the traditional mentality could never cope. The world-situation had grown too complex for lowly intelligences, and it demanded a degree of individual integrity in leaders and in led, such as was as yet possible only to a few minds. Consciousness had already been violently awakened out of the primitive trance into a state of excruciating individualism, of poignant but pitifully restricted self-awareness. And individualism, together with the traditional tribal spirit, now threatened to wreck the world. Only after a long-drawn agony of economic distress and maniac warfare, haunted by an increasingly clear vision of a happier world, could the second stage of waking be achieved. In most cases it was not achieved. ‘Human nature’, or its equivalent in the many worlds, could not change itself; and the environment could not remake it.

But in a few worlds the spirit reacted to its desperate plight with a miracle. Or, if the reader prefers, the environment miraculously refashioned the spirit. There occurred a widespread and almost sudden waking into a new lucidity of consciousness and a new integrity of will. To call this change miraculous is only to recognize that it could not have been scientifically predicted even from the fullest possible knowledge of ‘human nature’ as manifested in the earlier age. To later generations, however, it appeared as no miracle but as a belated wakening from an almost miraculous stupor into plain sanity.

This unprecedented access of sanity took at first the form of a widespread passion for a new social order which should be just and should embrace the whole planet. Such a social fervour was not, of course, entirely new. A small minority had long ago conceived it, and had haltingly tried to devote themselves to it. But now at last, through the scourge of circumstance and the potency of the spirit itself, this social will became general. And while it was still passionate, and heroic action was still possible to the precariously awakened beings, the whole social structure of the world was reorganized, so that within a generation or two every individual on the planet could count upon the means of life, and the opportunity to exercise his powers fully, for his own delight and for the service of the world-community. It was now possible to bring up the new generations to a sense that the world-order was no alien tyranny but an expression of the general will, and that they had indeed been born into a noble heritage, a thing for which it was good to live and suffer and die. To readers of this book such a change may well seem miraculous, and such a state utopian.

Those of us who had come from less fortunate planets found it at once a heartening and yet a bitter experience to watch world after world successfully emerge from a plight which seemed inescapable, to see a world-population of frustrated and hate-poisoned creatures give place to one in which every individual was generously and shrewdly nurtured, and therefore not warped by unconscious envy and hate. Very soon, though no change had occurred in the biological stock, the new social environment produced a world-population which might well have seemed to belong to a new species. In physique, in intelligence, in mental independence and social responsibility, the new individual far outstripped the old, as also in mental wholesomeness and in integrity of will. And though it was sometimes feared that the removal of all sources of grave mental conflict might deprive the mind of all stimulus to creative work, and produce a mediocre population, it was soon found that, far from stagnating, the spirit of the race now passed on to discover new fields of struggle and triumph. The world-population of ‘aristocrats’, which flourished after the great change, looked back with curiosity and incredulity into the preceding age, and found great difficulty in conceiving the tangled, disreputable and mostly unwitting motives which were the mainsprings of action even in the most fortunate individuals among their ancestors. It was recognized that the whole pre-revolutionary population was afflicted with serious mental diseases, with endemic plagues of delusion and obsession, due to mental malnutrition and poisoning. As psychological insight advanced, the same kind of interest was aroused by the old psychology as is wakened in modern Europeans by ancient maps which distort the countries of the world almost beyond recognition.

We were inclined to think of the psychological crisis of the waking worlds as being the difficult passage from adolescence to maturity; for in essence it was an outgrowing of juvenile interests, a discarding of toys and childish games, and a discovery of the interests of adult life. Tribal prestige, individual dominance, military glory, industrial triumphs lost their obsessive glamour, and instead the happy creatures delighted in civilized social intercourse, in cultural activities, and in the common enterprise of world-building.

During the phase of history which followed the actual surmounting of the spiritual crisis in a waking world the attention of the race was of course still chiefly occupied with social reconstruction. Many heroic tasks had to be undertaken. There was need not only for a new economic system but for new systems of political organization, of world-law, of education. In many cases this period of reconstruction under the guidance of the new mentality was itself a time of serious conflict. For even beings who are sincerely in accord about the goal of social activity may disagree violently about the way. But such conflicts as arose, though heated, were of a very different kind from the earlier conflicts which were inspired by obsessive individualism and obsessive group-hatreds.

We noted that the new world-orders were very diverse. This was, of course, to be expected, since biologically, psychologically, culturally, these worlds were very different. The perfected world-order of an Echinoderm race had of course to be different from that of the symbiotic Ichthyoids and Arachnoids; and this from that of a Nautiloid world, and so on. But we noted also in all these victorious worlds a remarkable identity. For instance, in the loosest possible sense, all were communistic; for in all of them the means of production were communally owned, and no individual could control the labour of others for private profit. Again, in a sense all these world-orders were democratic, since the final sanction of policy was world-opinion. But in many cases there was no democratic machinery, no legal channel for the expression of world-opinion. Instead, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a world-dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world’s activity with legally absolute power, but under constant supervision by popular will expressed through the radio. We were amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence democratic. We observed with incredulity situations in which the ‘absolute’ world-government, faced with some exceptionally momentous and doubtful matter of policy, had made urgent appeals for a formal democratic decision, only to receive from all regions the reply, ‘We cannot advise. You must decide as your professional experience suggests. We will abide by your decision.’

Law in these worlds was based on a very remarkable kind of sanction which could not conceivably work successfully on Earth. There was never any attempt to enforce the law by violence, save against dangerous lunatics, such as sometimes occurred as throw-backs to an earlier age. In some worlds there was a complex body of ‘laws’ regulating the economic and social life of groups, and even the private affairs of individuals. It seemed to us at first that freedom had vanished from such worlds. But later we discovered that the whole intricate system was regarded as we should regard the rules of a game or the canons of an art, or the innumerable extra-legal customs of any long-established society. In the main, everyone kept the law because he had faith in its social value as a guide to conduct. But if ever the law seemed inadequate he would without hesitation break it. His conduct might cause offence or inconvenience or even serious hardship to his neighbours. They would probably protest vigorously. But there was never question of compulsion. If those concerned failed to persuade him that his behaviour was socially harmful, his case might be tried by a sort of court of arbitration, backed by the prestige of the world-government. If the decision went against the defendant, and yet he persisted in his illegal behaviour, none would restrain him. But such was the power of public censure and social ostracism that disregard of the court’s decision was very rare. The terrible sense of isolation acted on the law-breaker like an ordeal by fire. If his motive was at bottom base, he would sooner or later collapse. But if his case had merely been misjudged, or if his conduct sprang from an intuition of value beyond the range of his fellows, he might persist in his course till he had won over the public.

I mention these social curiosities only to give some illustration of the far-reaching difference between the spirit of these utopian worlds and the spirit which is familiar to readers of this book. It may be easily imagined that in our wanderings we came upon a wonderful diversity of customs and institutions, but I must not pause to describe even the most remarkable of them. I must be content to outline the activities of the typical waking worlds, so as to be able to press on to tell a story not merely of particular worlds but of our galaxy as a whole.

When a waking world had passed through the phase of radical social reconstruction, and had attained a new equilibrium, it would settle into a period of steady economic and cultural advancement. Mechanism, formerly a tyrant over body and mind, but now a faithful servant, would secure for every individual a fulness and diversity of life far beyond anything known on earth. Radio communication and rocket travel would afford to each mind intimate knowledge of every people. Labour-saving machinery would reduce the work of maintaining civilization; all mind-crippling drudgery would vanish, and the best energy of every one of the world-citizens would be freely devoted to social service that was not unworthy of a well-grown intelligent being. And ‘social service’ was apt to be interpreted very broadly. It seemed to permit many lives to be given over wholly to freakish and irresponsible self-expression. The community could well afford a vast amount of such wastage for the sake of the few invaluable jewels of originality which occasionally emerged from it.

This stable and prosperous phase of the waking worlds, which we came to call the utopian phase, was probably the happiest of all the ages in the life of any world. Tragedy of one sort or another there would still be, but never widespread and futile distress. We remarked, moreover, that, whereas in former ages tragedy had been commonly thought of in terms of physical pain and premature death, now it was conceived more readily as resulting from the clash and mutual yearning and mutual incompatibility of diverse personalities; so rare had the cruder kind of disaster become, and on the other hand so much more subtle and sensitive were the contacts between persons. Widespread physical tragedy, the suffering and annihilation of whole populations, such as we experience in war and plague, were quite unknown, save in those rare cases when a whole race was destroyed by astronomical accident, whether through loss of atmosphere or the bursting of its planet or the plunging of its solar system into some tract of gas or dust.

In this happy phase, then, which might last for a few centuries or for many thousands of years, the whole energy of the world would be devoted to perfecting the world-community and raising the calibre of the race by cultural and by eugenical means.

Of the eugenical enterprise of these worlds I shall report little, because much of it would be unintelligible without a minute knowledge of the biological and biochemical nature of each of these non-human world-populations. It is enough to say that the first task of the eugenists was to prevent the perpetuation of inheritable disease and malformation of body and mind. In days before the great psychological change even this modest work had often led to serious abuses. Governments would attempt to breed out all those characters, such as independence of mind, which were distasteful to governments. Ignorant enthusiasts would advocate ruthless and misguided interference in the choice of mates. But in the more enlightened age these dangers were recognized and avoided. Even so, the eugenical venture did often lead to disaster. One splendid race of intelligent avians we saw reduced to the sub-human level by an attempt to extirpate susceptibility to a virulent mental disease. The liability to this disease happened to be genetically linked in an indirect manner with the possibility of normal brain development in the fifth generation.

Of positive eugenical enterprises I need only mention improvements of sensory range and acuity (chiefly in sight and touch), the invention of new senses, improvements in memory, in general intelligence, in temporal discrimination. These races came to distinguish ever more minute periods of duration, and at the same time to extend their temporal grasp so as to apprehend ever longer periods as ‘now’.

Many of the worlds at first devoted much energy to this kind of eugenical work, but later decided that, though it might afford them some new richness of experience, it must be postponed for the sake of more important matters. For instance, with the increasing complexity of life it soon appeared very necessary to retard the maturing of the individual mind, so as to enable it to assimilate its early experience more thoroughly. ‘Before life begins’, it was said, ‘there should be a lifetime of childhood.’ At the same time efforts were made to prolong maturity to three or four times its normal extent, and to reduce senility. In every world that had gained full eugenical power there arose sooner or later a sharp public discussion as to the most suitable length of individual life. All were agreed that life must be prolonged; but, while one party wished to multiply it only three or four times, another insisted that nothing less than a hundred times the normal life-span could afford the race that continuity and depth of experience which all saw to be desirable. Another party even advocated deathlessness, and a permanent race of never-aging immortals. It was argued that the obvious danger of mental rigidity, and the cessation of all advancement, might be avoided by contriving that the permanent physiological state of the deathless population should be one of very early maturity.

Different worlds found different solutions for this problem. Some races assigned to the individual a period no longer than three hundred of our years. Others allowed him fifty thousand. One race of Echinoderms decided on potential immortality, but endowed themselves with an ingenious psychological mechanism by which, if the ancient began to lose touch with changing conditions, he could not fail to recognize the fact, and would thereupon crave and practise euthanasia, gladly yielding his place to a successor of more modern type.

Many other triumphs of eugenical experiment we observed up and down the worlds. The general level of individual intelligence was, of course, raised far beyond the range of Homo Sapiens. But also that super-intelligence which can be attained only by a psychically unified community was greatly developed on the highest practicable plane, that of the conscious individuality of a whole world. This, of course, was impossible till the social cohesion of individuals within the world-community had become as close-knit as the integration of the elements of a nervous system. It demanded also a very great advance of telepathy. Further, it was not possible till the great majority of individuals had reached a breadth of knowledge unknown on earth.

The last and most difficult power to be attained by these worlds in the course of their utopian phase was psychical freedom of time and space, the limited power to observe directly, and even contribute to, events remote from the spacio-temporal location of the observer. Throughout our exploration we had been greatly perplexed by the fact that we, most of whom were beings of a very humble order, should have been able to achieve this freedom, which, as we now discovered, these highly developed worlds found so difficult to master. The explanation was now given us. No such venture as ours could have been undertaken by our unaided selves. Throughout our exploration we had unwittingly been under the influence of a system of worlds which had attained this freedom only after aeons of research. Not one step could we have taken without the constant support of those brilliant Ichthyoid and Arachnoid Symbiotics who played a leading part in the history of our galaxy. They it was who controlled our whole adventure, so that we might report our experiences in our primitive native worlds.

The freedom of space and time, the power of cosmical exploration and of influence by means of telepathic contact, was at once the most potent and the most dangerous asset of the fully awakened utopian worlds. Through the unwise exercise of it many a glorious and single-minded race came to disaster. Sometimes the adventuring world-mind failed to maintain its sanity in face of the welter of misery and despair that now flooded in upon it telepathically from all the regions of the galaxy. Sometimes the sheer difficulty of comprehending the subtleties that were revealed to it flung it into a mental breakdown from which there was no recovery. Sometimes it became so enthralled by its telepathic adventures that it lost touch with its own life upon its native planet, so that the world-community, deprived of its guiding communal mind, fell into disorder and decay, and the exploring mind itself died.

2. INTERMUNDANE STRIFE

OF THE BUSY utopias which I have been describing, a few were already established even before the birth of the Other Earth, a larger number flourished before our own planet was formed, but many of the most important of these worlds are temporally located in an age far future to us, an age long after the destruction of the final human race. Casualties among these awakened worlds are of course much less common than among more lowly and less competent worlds. Consequently, though fatal accidents occurred in every epoch, the number of awakened worlds in our galaxy steadily increased as time advanced. The actual births of planets, due to the chance encounters of mature but not aged stars, reached (or will reach) a maximum fairly late in the history of our galaxy, and then declined. But since the fluctuating progress of a world from bare animality to spiritual maturity takes, on the average, several thousands of millions of years, the maximum population of utopian and fully awakened worlds occurred very late, when physically the galaxy was already somewhat past its prime. Further, though even in early epochs the few awakened worlds did sometimes succeed in making contact with one another, either by interstellar travel or by telepathy, it was not till a fairly late stage of galactic history that intermundane relations came to occupy the main attention of the wakened worlds.

Throughout the progress of a waking world there was one grave, subtle, and easily overlooked danger. Interest might be ‘fixated’ upon some current plane of endeavour, so that no further advance could occur. It may seem strange that beings whose psychological knowledge so far surpassed the attainment of man should have been trapped in this manner. Apparently at every stage of mental development, save the highest of all, the mind’s growing point is tender and easily misdirected. However this may be, it is a fact that a few rather highly developed worlds, even with communal mentality, were disastrously perverted in a strange manner, which I find very difficult to understand. I can only suggest that in them, seemingly, the hunger for true community and true mental lucidity itself became obsessive and perverse, so that the behaviour of these exalted perverts might deteriorate into something very like tribalism and religious fanaticism. The disease would soon lead to the stifling of all elements which seemed recalcitrant to the generally accepted culture of the world-society. When such worlds mastered interstellar travel, they might conceive a fanatical desire to impose their own culture throughout the galaxy. Sometimes their zeal became so violent that they were actually driven to wage ruthless religious wars on all who resisted them.

Obsessions derived from one stage or another of the progress toward utopia and lucid consciousness, even if they did not bring violent disaster, might at any stage side-track the waking world into futility. Super-human intelligence, courage, and constancy on the part of the devoted individuals might be consecrated to misguided and unworthy world purposes. Thus it was that, in extreme cases, even a world that remained socially utopian and mentally a super-individual, might pass beyond the bounds of sanity. With a gloriously healthy body and an insane mind it might do terrible harm to its neighbours.

Such tragedy did not become possible till after interplanetary and interstellar travel had been well established. Long ago, in an early phase of the galaxy, the number of planetary systems had been very small, and only half a dozen worlds had attained utopia. These were scattered up and down the galaxy at immense distances from one another. Each lived its life in almost complete isolation, relieved only by precarious telepathic intercourse with its peers. In a somewhat later but still early period, when these eldest children of the galaxy had perfected their society and their biological nature, and were on the threshold of super-individuality, they turned their attention to interplanetary travel. First one and then another achieved rocket-flight in space, and succeeded in breeding specialized populations for the colonization of neighbouring planets.

In a still later epoch, the middle period of galactic history, there were many more planetary systems than in the earlier ages, and an increasing number of intelligent worlds were successfully emerging from the great psychological crisis which so many worlds never surmount. Meanwhile some of the elder ‘generation’ of awakened worlds were already facing the immensely difficult problems of travel on the interstellar and not merely the interplanetary scale. This new power inevitably changed the whole character of galactic history. Hitherto, in spite of tentative telepathic exploration on the part of the most awakened worlds, the life of the galaxy had been in the main the life of a number of isolated worlds which took no effect upon one another. With the advent of interstellar travel the many distinct themes of the world-biographies gradually became merged in an all-embracing drama.

Travel within a planetary system was at first carried out by rocket-vessels propelled by normal fuels. In all the early ventures one great difficulty had been the danger of collision with meteors. Even the most efficient vessel, most skilfully navigated and travelling in regions that were relatively free from these invisible and lethal missiles, might at any moment crash and fuse. The trouble was not overcome till means had been found to unlock the treasure of sub-atomic energy. It was then possible to protect the ship by means of a far-flung envelope of power which either diverted or exploded the meteors at a distance. A rather similar method was with great difficulty devised to protect the space-ships and their crews from the constant and murderous hail of cosmic radiation.

Interstellar, as opposed to interplanetary, travel was quite impossible until the advent of sub-atomic power. Fortunately this source of power was seldom gained until late in a world’s development, when mentality was mature enough to wield this most dangerous of all physical instruments without inevitable disaster. Disasters, however, did occur. Several worlds were accidentally blown to pieces. In others civilization was temporarily destroyed. Sooner or later, however, most of the minded worlds tamed this formidable djin, and set it to work upon a titanic scale, not only in industry, but in such great enterprises as the alteration of planetary orbits for the improvement of climate. This dangerous and delicate process was effected by firing a gigantic sub-atomic rocket-apparatus at such times and places that the recoil would gradually accumulate to divert the planet’s course in the desired direction.

Actual interstellar voyaging was first effected by detaching a planet from its natural orbit by a series of well-timed and well-placed rocket impulsions, and thus projecting it into outer space at a speed far greater than the normal planetary and stellar speeds. Something more than this was necessary, since life on a sunless planet would have been impossible. For short interstellar voyages the difficulty was sometimes overcome by the generation of sub-atomic energy from the planet’s own substance; but for longer voyages, lasting for many thousands of years, the only method was to form a small artificial sun, and project it into space as a blazing satellite of the living world. For this purpose an uninhabited planet would be brought into proximity with the home planet to form a binary system. A mechanism would then be contrived for the controlled disintegration of the atoms of the lifeless planet, to provide a constant source of light and heat. The two bodies, revolving round one another, would be launched among the stars.

This delicate operation may well seem impossible. Had I space to describe the age-long experiments and world-wrecking accidents which preceded its achievement, perhaps the reader’s incredulity would vanish. But I must dismiss in a few sentences whole protracted epics of scientific adventure and personal courage. Suffice it that, before the process was perfected, many a populous world was either cast adrift to freeze in space, or was roasted by its own artificial sun.

The stars are so remote from one another that we measure their distances in light-years. Had the voyaging worlds travelled only at speeds comparable with those of the stars themselves, even the shortest of interstellar voyages would have lasted for many millions of years. But since interstellar space offers almost no resistance to a travelling body, and therefore momentum is not lost, it was possible for the voyaging world, by prolonging the original rocket-impulsion for many years, to increase its speed far beyond that of the fastest star. Indeed, though even the early voyages by heavy natural planets were by our standards spectacular, I shall have to tell at a later stage of voyages by small artificial planets travelling at almost half the speed of light. Owing to certain ‘relativity effects’ it was impossible to accelerate beyond this point. But even such a rate of travel made voyages to the nearer stars well worth undertaking if any other planetary system happened to lie within this range. It must be remembered that a fully awakened world had no need to think in terms of such short periods as a human lifetime. Though its individuals might die, the minded world was in a very important sense immortal. It was accustomed to lay its plans to cover periods of many million years.

In early epochs of the galaxy expeditions from star to star were difficult, and rarely successful. But at a later stage, when there were already many thousands of worlds inhabited by intelligent races, and hundreds that had passed the utopian stage, a very serious situation arose. Interstellar travel was by now extremely efficient. Immense exploration vessels, many miles in diameter, were constructed out in space from artificial materials of extreme rigidity and lightness. These could be projected by rocket action and with cumulative acceleration till their speed was almost half the speed of light. Even so, the journey from end to end of the galaxy could not be completed under two hundred thousand years. However, there was no reason to undertake so long a voyage. Few voyages in search of suitable systems lasted for more than a tenth of that time. Many were much shorter. Races that had attained and secured a communal consciousness would not hesitate to send out a number of such expeditions. Ultimately they might project their planet itself across the ocean of space to settle in some remote system recommended by the pioneers.

The problem of interstellar travel was so enthralling that it sometimes became an obsession even to a fairly well-developed utopian world. This could only occur if in the constitution of that world there was something unwholesome, some secret and unfulfilled hunger impelling the beings. The race might then become travel-mad.

Its social organization would be refashioned and directed with Spartan strictness to the new communal undertaking. All its members, hypnotized by the common obsession, would gradually forget the life of intense personal intercourse and of creative mental activity which had hitherto been their chief concern. The whole venture of the spirit, exploring the universe and its own nature with critical intelligence and delicate sensibility, would gradually come to a standstill. The deepest roots of emotion and will, which in the fully sane awakened world were securely within the range of introspection, would become increasingly obscured. Less and less, in such a world, could the unhappy communal mind understand itself. More and more it pursued its phantom goal. Any attempt to explore the galaxy telepathically was now abandoned. The passion of physical exploration assumed the guise of a religion. The communal mind persuaded itself that it must at all costs spread the gospel of its own culture throughout the galaxy. Though culture itself was vanishing, the vague idea of culture was cherished as a justification of world-policy.

Here I must check myself, lest I give a false impression. It is necessary to distinguish sharply between the mad worlds of comparatively low mental development and those of almost the highest order. The humbler kinds might become crudely obsessed by sheer mastery or sheer travel, with its scope for courage and discipline. More tragic was the case of those few very much more awakened worlds whose obsession was seemingly for community itself and mental lucidity itself, and the propagation of the kind of community and the special mode of lucidity most admired by themselves. For them travel was but the means to cultural and religious empire.

I have spoken as though I were confident that these formidable worlds were indeed mad, aberrant from the line of mental and spiritual growth. But their tragedy lay in the fact that, though to their opponents they seemed to be either mad or at heart wicked, to themselves they appeared superbly sane, practical, and virtuous. There were times when we ourselves, the bewildered explorers, were almost persuaded that this was the truth. Our intimate contact with them was such as to give us insight, so to speak, into the inner sanity of their insanity, or the core of rightness in their wickedness. This insanity or wickedness I have to describe in terms of simple human craziness and vice; but in truth it was in a sense superhuman, for it included the perversion of faculties above the range of human sanity and virtue.

When one of these ‘mad’ worlds encountered a sane world, it would sincerely express the most reasonable and kindly intentions. It desired only cultural intercourse, and perhaps economic cooperation. Little by little it would earn the respect of the other for its sympathy, its splendid social order, and its dynamic purpose. Each world would regard the other as a noble, though perhaps an alien and partly incomprehensible, instrument of the spirit. But little by little the normal world would begin to realize that in the culture of the ‘mad’ world there were certain subtle and far-reaching intuitions that appeared utterly false, ruthless, aggressive, and hostile to the spirit, and were the dominant motives of its foreign relations. The ‘mad’ world, meanwhile, would regretfully come to the conclusion that the other was after all gravely lacking in sensibility, that it was obtuse to the very highest values and most heroic virtues, in fact that its whole life was subtly corrupt, and must, for its own sake, be changed, or else destroyed. Thus each world, though with lingering respect and affection, would sadly condemn the other. But the mad world would not be content to leave matters thus. It would at length with holy fervour attack, striving to destroy the other’s pernicious culture, and even exterminate its population.

It is easy for me now, after the event, after the final spiritual downfall of these mad worlds, to condemn them as perverts, but in the early stages of their drama we were often desperately at a loss to decide on which side sanity lay.

Several of the mad worlds succumbed to their own foolhardiness in navigation. Others, under the strain of age-long research, fell into social neurosis and civil strife. A few, however, succeeded in attaining their end, and after voyages lasting for thousands of years were able to reach some neighbouring planetary system. The invaders were often in a desperate plight. Generally they had used up most of the material of their little artificial sun. Economy had forced them to reduce their ration of heat and light so far that when at last they discovered a suitable planetary system their native world was almost wholly arctic. On arrival, they would first take up their position in a suitable orbit and, perhaps spend some centuries in recuperating. Then they would explore the neighbouring worlds, seek out the most hospitable, and begin to adapt themselves or their descendants to life upon it. If, as was often the case, any of the planets was already inhabited by intelligent beings, the invaders would inevitably come sooner or later into conflict with them, either in a crude manner over the right to exploit a planet’s resources, or more probably over the invaders’ obsession for propagating their own culture. For by now the civilizing mission, which was the ostensible motive of all their heroic adventures, would have become a rigid obsession. They would be quite incapable of conceiving that the native civilization, though less developed than their own, might be more suited to the natives. Nor could they realize that their own culture, formerly the expression of a gloriously awakened world, might have sunk, in spite of their mechanical powers and crazy religious fervour, below the simpler culture of the natives in all the essentials of mental life.

Many a desperate defence did we see, carried out by some world of the lowly rank of Homo Sapiens against a race of mad supermen, armed not only with the invincible power of sub-atomic energy but with overwhelmingly superior intelligence, knowledge, and devotion, and moreover with the immense advantage that all its individuals participated in the unified mind of the race. Though we had come to cherish above all things the advancement of mentality, and were therefore prejudiced in favour of the awakened though perverted invaders, our sympathies soon became divided, and then passed almost wholly to the natives, however barbaric their culture. For in spite of their stupidity, their ignorance, and superstition, their endless internecine conflicts, their spiritual obtuseness and grossness, we recognized in them a power which the others had forfeited, a naïve but balanced wisdom, an animal shrewdness, a spiritual promise. The invaders, on the other hand, however brilliant, were indeed perverts. Little by little we came to regard the conflict as one in which an untamed but promising urchin had been set upon by an armed religious maniac.

When the invaders had exploited every world in the new-found planetary system, they would again feel the lust of proselytization. Persuading themselves that it was their duty to advance their religious empire throughout the galaxy, they would detach a couple of planets and dispatch them into space with a crew of pioneers. Or they would break up the whole planetary system, and scatter it abroad with missionary zeal. Occasionally their travel brought them into contact with another race of mad superiors. Then would follow a war in which one side or the other, or possibly both, would be exterminated.

Sometimes the adventurers came upon worlds of their own rank which had not succumbed to the mania of religious empire. Then the natives, though they would at first meet the invaders with courtesy and reason, would gradually realize that they were confronted with lunatics. They themselves would hastily convert their civilization for warfare. The issue would depend on superiority of weapons and military cunning; but if the contest was long and grim, the natives, even if victorious, might be so damaged mentally by an age of warfare that they would never recover their sanity.

Worlds that suffered from the mania of religious imperialism would seek interstellar travel long before economic necessity forced it upon them. The saner world-spirits, on the other hand, often discovered sooner or later a point beyond which increased material development and increased population were unnecessary for the exercise of their finer capacities. These were content to remain within their native planetary systems, in a state of economic and social stability. They were thus able to give most of their practical intelligence to telepathic exploration of the universe. Telepathic intercourse between worlds was now becoming much more precise and reliable. The galaxy had emerged from the primitive stage when any world could remain solitary, and live out its career in splendid isolation. In fact, just as, in the experience of Homo Sapiens, the Earth is now ‘shrinking’ to the dimensions of a country, so, in this critical period of the life of our galaxy, the whole galaxy was ‘shrinking’ to the dimensions of a world. Those world-spirits that had been most successful in telepathic exploration had by now constructed a fairly accurate ‘mental map’ of the whole galaxy, though there still remained a number of eccentric worlds with which no lasting contact could yet be made. There was also one very advanced system of worlds, which had mysteriously ‘faded out’ of telepathic intercourse altogether. Of this I shall tell more in the sequel.

The telepathic ability of the mad worlds and systems was by now greatly reduced. Though they were often under telepathic observation by the more mature world-spirits, and were even influenced to some extent, they themselves were so self-complacent that they cared not to explore mental life of the galaxy. Physical travel and sacred imperial power were for them good enough means of intercourse with the surrounding universe.

In time there grew up several great rival empires of the mad worlds, each claiming to be charged with some sort of divine mission for the unifying and awakening of the whole galaxy. Between the ideologies of these empires there was little to choose, yet each was opposed to the others with religious fervour. Germinating in regions far apart, these empires easily mastered any sub-utopian worlds that lay within reach. Thus they spread from one planetary system to another, till at last empire made contact with empire.

Then followed wars such as had never before occurred in our galaxy. Fleets of worlds, natural and artificial, manœuvred among the stars to outwit one another, and destroyed one another with long-range jets of sub-atomic energy. As the tides of battle swept hither and thither through space, whole planetary systems were annihilated. Many a world-spirit found a sudden end. Many a lowly race that had no part in the strife was slaughtered in the celestial warfare that raged around it.

Yet so vast is the galaxy that these intermundane wars, terrible as they were, could at first be regarded as rare accidents, mere unfortunate episodes in the triumphant march of civilization. But the disease spread. More and more of the sane worlds, when they were attacked by the mad empires, reorganized themselves for military defence. They were right in believing that the situation was one with which non-violence alone could not cope; for the enemy, unlike any possible group of human beings, was too thoroughly purged of ‘humanity’ to be susceptible to sympathy. But they were wrong in hoping that arms could save them. Even though, in the ensuing war, the defenders might gain victory in the end, the struggle was generally so long and devastating that the victors themselves were irreparably damaged in spirit.

In a later and perhaps the most terrible phase of our galaxy’s life I was forcibly reminded of the state of bewilderment and anxiety that I had left behind me on the Earth. Little by little the whole galaxy, some ninety thousand light-years across, containing more than thirty thousand million stars, and (by this date) over a hundred thousand planetary systems, and actually thousands of intelligent races, was paralysed by the fear of war, and periodically tortured by its outbreak.

In one respect, however, the state of the galaxy was much more desperate than the state of our little world to-day. None of our nations is an awakened super-individual. Even those peoples which are suffering from the mania of herd glory are composed of individuals who in their private life are sane. A change of fortune might perhaps drive such a people into a less crazy mood. Or skilful propaganda for the idea of human unity might turn the scale. But in this grim age of the galaxy the mad worlds were mad almost down to the very roots of their being. Each was a super-individual whose whole physical and mental constitution, including the unit bodies and minds of its private members, was by now organized through and through for a mad purpose. There seemed to be no more possibility of appealing to the stunted creatures to rebel against the sacred and crazy purpose of their race than of persuading the individual brain-cells of a maniac to make a stand for gentleness.

To be alive in those days in one of the worlds that were sane and awakened, though not of the very highest, most percipient order, was to feel (or will be to feel) that the plight of the galaxy was desperate. These average sane worlds had organized themselves into a League to resist aggression; but since they were far less developed in military organization than the mad worlds, and much less inclined to subject their individual members to military despotism, they were at a great disadvantage.

Moreover, the enemy was now united; for one empire had secured complete mastery over the others, and had inspired all the mad worlds with an identical passion of religious imperialism. Though the ‘United Empires’ of the mad worlds included only a minority of the worlds of the galaxy, the sane worlds had no hope of a speedy victory; for they were disunited, and unskilled in warfare. Meanwhile war was undermining the mental life of the League’s own members. The urgencies and horrors were beginning to blot out from their minds all the more delicate, more developed capacities. They were becoming less and less capable of those activities of personal intercourse and cultural adventure which they still forlornly recognized as the true way of life.

The great majority of the worlds of the League, finding themselves caught in a trap from which, seemingly, there was no escape, came despairingly to feel that the spirit which they had thought divine, the spirit which seeks true community and true awakening, was after all not destined to triumph, and therefore not the essential spirit of the cosmos. Blind chance, it was rumoured, ruled all things; or perhaps a diabolic intelligence. Some began to conceive that the Star Maker had created merely for the lust of destroying. Undermined by this terrible surmise, they themselves sank far toward madness. With horror they imagined that the enemy was indeed, as he claimed, the instrument of divine wrath, punishing them for their own impious will to turn the whole galaxy, the whole cosmos, into a paradise of generous and fully awakened beings. Under the influence of this growing sense of ultimate satanic power and the even more devastating doubt of the rightness of their own ideals, the League members despaired. Some surrendered to the enemy. Others succumbed to internal discord, losing their mental unity. The war of the worlds seemed likely to end in the victory of the insane. And so, indeed, it would have done, but for the interference of that remote and brilliant system of worlds which, as was mentioned above, had for a long while withdrawn itself from telepathic intercourse with the rest of our galaxy. This was the system of worlds which had been founded in the spring-time of the galaxy by the symbiotic Ichthyoids and Arachnoids.

3. A CRISIS IN GALACTIC HISTORY

THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD of imperial expansion a few world-systems of a very high order, though less awakened than the Symbiotics of the sub-galaxy, had watched events telepathically from afar. They saw the frontiers of empire advancing steadily toward them, and knew that they themselves would soon be implicated. They had the knowledge and power to defeat the enemy in war; they received desperate appeals for help; yet they did nothing. These were worlds that were organized through and through for peace and the activities proper to an awakened world. They knew that, if they chose to remake their whole social structure and reorientate their minds, they could ensure military victory. They knew also that they would thereby save many worlds from conquest, from oppression and from the possible destruction of all that was best in them. But they knew also that in reorganizing themselves for desperate warfare, in neglecting, for a whole age of struggle, all those activities which were proper to them, they would destroy the best in themselves more surely than the enemy would destroy it by oppression; and that in destroying this they would be murdering what they believed to be the most vital germ in the galaxy. They therefore forswore military action.

When at last one of these more developed world-systems was itself confronted by mad religious enthusiasts, the natives welcomed the invaders, readjusted all their planetary orbits to accommodate the in-coming planets, pressed the foreign power actually to settle part of its population in such of their own planets as afforded suitable climatic conditions; and secretly, gradually, subjected the whole mad race throughout the combined solar system to a course of telepathic hypnotism so potent that its communal mind was completely disintegrated. The invaders became mere uncoordinated individuals, such as we know on Earth. Henceforth they were bewildered, short-sighted, torn by conflicts, ruled by no supreme purpose, obsessed more by self than by community. It had been hoped that, when the mad communal mind had been abolished, the individuals of the invading race would soon be induced to open their eyes and their hearts to a nobler ideal. Unfortunately the telepathic skill of the superior race was not sufficient to delve down to the long-buried chrysalis of the spirit in these beings, to give it air and warmth and light. Since the individual nature of these forlorn individuals was itself the product of a crazy world, they proved incapable of salvation, incapable of sane community. They were therefore segregated to work out their own unlovely destiny in ages of tribal quarrels and cultural decline, ending in the extinction which inevitably overtakes creatures that are incapable of adaptation to new circumstances.

When several invading expeditions had been thus circumvented, there arose among the worlds of the mad United Empires a tradition that certain seemingly pacific worlds were in fact more dangerous than all other enemies, since plainly they had a strange power of ‘poisoning the soul’. The imperialists determined to annihilate these terrible opponents. The attacking forces were instructed to avoid all telepathic parley and blow the enemy to pieces at long range. This, it was found, could be most conveniently performed by exploding the sun of the doomed system. Stimulated by a potent ray, the atoms of the photosphere would start disintegrating, and the spreading fury would soon fling the star into the ‘nova’ state, roasting all his planets.

It was our lot to witness the extraordinary calm, nay the exaltation and joy with which these worlds accepted the prospect of annihilation rather than debase themselves by resistance. Later we were to watch the strange events which saved this galaxy of ours from disaster. But first came tragedy.

From our observation points in the minds of the attackers and the attacked, we observed not once but three times the slaughter of races nobler than any that we had yet encountered by perverts whose own natural mental rank was almost as high. Three worlds, or rather systems of worlds, each possessed by a diversity of specialized races, we saw annihilated. From these doomed planets we actually observed the sun break out with tumultuous eruption, swelling hourly. We actually felt, through the bodies of our hosts, the rapidly increasing heat, and through their eyes the blinding light. We saw the vegetation wither, the seas begin to steam. We felt and heard the furious hurricanes which wrecked every structure and bowled the ruins before them. With awe and wonder we experienced something of that exaltation and inner peace with which the doomed angelic populations met their end. Indeed, it was this experienced angelic exaltation in the hour of tragedy that gave us our first clear insight into the most spiritual attitude to fate. The sheer bodily agony of the disaster soon became intolerable to us, so that we were forced to withdraw ourselves from those martyred worlds. But we left the doomed populations themselves accepting not only this torture but the annihilation of their glorious community with all its infinite hopes, accepting this bitterness as though it were not lethal but the elixir of immortality. Not till almost the close of our own adventure did we grasp for a moment the full meaning of this ecstasy.

It was strange to us that none of these three victims made any attempt to resist the attack. Indeed, not one inhabitant in any of these worlds considered for a moment the possibility of resistance. In every case the attitude to disaster seemed to express itself in such terms as these: ‘To retaliate would be to wound our communal spirit beyond cure. We choose rather to die. The theme of spirit that we have created must inevitably be broken short, whether by the ruthlessness of the invader or by our own resort to arms. It is better to be destroyed than to triumph in slaying the spirit. Such as it is, the spirit that we have achieved is fair; and it is indestructibly woven into the tissue of the cosmos. We die praising the universe in which at least such an achievement as ours can be. We die knowing that the promise of further glory outlives us in other galaxies. We die praising the Star Maker, the Star Destroyer.’

4. TRIUMPH IN A SUB-GALAXY

IT WAS AFTER the destruction of the third system of worlds, when a fourth was preparing for its end, that a miracle, or a seeming miracle, changed the whole course of events in our galaxy. Before telling of this turn of fortune I must double back the thread of my story and trace the history of the system of worlds which was now to play the leading part in galactic events.

It will be remembered that in an outlying ‘island’ off the galactic ‘continent’ there lived the strange symbiotic race of Ichthyoids and Arachnoids. These beings supported almost the oldest civilization in the galaxy. They had reached the ‘human’ plane of mental development even before the Other Men; and, in spite of many vicissitudes, during the thousands of millions of years of their career they had made great progress. I referred to them last as having occupied all the planets of their system with specialized races of Arachnoids, all of which were in permanent telepathic union with the Ichthyoid population in the oceans of the home planet. As the ages passed, they were several times reduced almost to annihilation, now by too daring physical experiments, now through too ambitious telepathic exploration; but in time they won through to a mental development unequalled in our galaxy.

Their little island universe, their outlying cluster of stars, had come wholly under their control. It contained many natural planetary systems. Several of these included worlds which, when the early Arachnoid explorers visited them telepathically, were found to be inhabited by native races of pre-utopian rank. These were left to work out their own destiny, save that in certain crises of their history the Symbiotics secretly brought to bear on them from afar a telepathic influence that might help them to meet their difficulties with increased vigour. Thus when one of these worlds reached the crisis in which Homo Sapiens now stands, it passed with seemingly natural ease straight on to the phase of world-unity and the building of utopia. Great care was taken by the Symbiotic race to keep its existence hidden from the primitives, lest they should lose their independence of mind. Thus, even while the Symbiotics were voyaging among these worlds in rocket-vessels and using the mineral resources of neighbouring uninhabited planets, the intelligent worlds of pre-utopian rank were left unvisited. Not till these worlds had themselves entered the full utopian phase and were exploring their neighbour planets were they allowed to discover the truth. By then they were ready to receive it with exultation, rather than disheartenment and fear.

Thenceforth, by physical and telepathic intercourse the young utopia would be speedily brought up to the spiritual rank of the Symbiotics themselves, and would cooperate on an equal footing in a symbiosis of worlds.

Some of these pre-utopian worlds, not malignant but incapable of further advance, were left in peace, and preserved, as we preserve wild animals in national parks, for scientific interest. Aeon after aeon, these beings, tethered by their own futility, struggled in vain to cope with the crisis which modern Europe knows so well. In cycle after cycle civilization would emerge from barbarism, mechanization would bring the peoples into uneasy contact, national wars and class wars would breed the longing for a better world-order, but breed it in vain. Disaster after disaster would undermine the fabric of civilization. Gradually barbarism would return. Aeon after aeon, the process would repeat itself under the calm telepathic observation of the Symbiotics, whose existence was never suspected by the primitive creatures under their gaze. So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naïve zest dramas learned by their ancestors aeons ago.

The Symbiotics could well afford to leave these museum pieces intact, for they had at their disposal scores of planetary systems. Moreover, armed with their highly developed physical sciences and with sub-atomic power, they were able to construct, out in space, artificial planets for permanent habitation. These great hollow globes of artificial super-metals, and artificial transparent adamant, ranged in size from the earliest and smallest structures, which were no bigger than a very small asteroid, to spheres considerably larger than the Earth. They were without external atmosphere, since their mass was generally too slight to prevent the escape of gases. A blanket of repelling force protected them from meteors and cosmic rays. The planet’s external surface, which was wholly transparent, encased the atmosphere. Immediately beneath it hung the photosynthesis stations and the machinery for generating power from solar radiation. Part of this outer shell was occupied by astronomical observatories, machinery for controlling the planet’s orbit, and great ‘docks’ for interplanetary liners. The interior of these worlds was a system of concentric spheres supported by girders and gigantic arches. Interspersed between these spheres lay the machinery for atmospheric regulation, the great water reservoirs, the food factories and commodity-factories, the engineering shops, the refuse-conversion tracts, residential and recreational areas, and a wealth of research laboratories, libraries and cultural centres. Since the Symbiotic race was in origin marine, there was a central ocean where the profoundly modified, the physically indolent and mentally athletic descendants of the original Ichthyoids constituted the ‘highest brain tracts’ of the intelligent world. There, as in the primeval ocean of the home planet, the symbiotic partners sought one another, and the young of both species were nurtured. Such races of the sub-galaxy as were not in origin marine constructed, of course, artificial planets which, though of the same general type, were adapted to their special nature. But all the races found it also necessary to mould their own nature drastically to suit their new conditions.

As the aeons advanced, hundreds of thousands of worldlets were constructed, all of this type, but gradually increasing in size and complexity. Many a star without natural planets came to be surrounded by concentric rings of artificial worlds. In some cases the inner rings contained scores, the outer rings thousands of globes adapted to life at some particular distance from the sun. Great diversity, both physical and mental, would distinguish worlds even of the same ring. Sometimes a comparatively old world, or even a whole ring of worlds, would feel itself outstripped in mental excellence by younger worlds and races, whose structure, physical and biological, embodied increasing skill. Then either the superannuated world would simply continue its life in a sort of backwater of civilization, tolerated, loved, studied by the younger worlds; or it would choose to die and surrender the material of its planet for new ventures.

One very small and rather uncommon kind of artificial world consisted almost wholly of water. It was like a titanic bowl of gold-fish. Beneath its transparent shell, studded with rocket-machinery and interplanetary docks, lay a spherical ocean, crossed by structural girders, and constantly impregnated with oxygen. A small solid core represented the sea-bottom. The population of Ichthyoids and the visiting population of Arachnoids swarmed in this huge encrusted drop. Each Ichthyoid would be visited in turn by perhaps a score of partners whose working life was spent on other worlds. The life of the Ichthyoids was indeed a strange one, for they were at once imprisoned and free of all space. An Ichthyoid never left his native ocean, but he had telepathic intercourse with the whole Symbiotic race throughout the sub-galaxy. Moreover, the one form of practical activity which the Ichthyoids performed was astronomy. Immediately beneath the planet’s glassy crust hung observatories, where the swimming astronomers studied the constitution of the stars and the distribution of the galaxies.

These ‘gold-fish-bowl’ worlds turned out to be transitional. Shortly before the age of the mad empires the Symbiotics began to experiment for the production of a world which should consist of a single physical organism. After ages of experiment they produced a ‘gold-fish-bowl’ type of world in which the whole ocean was meshed by a fixed net-work of Ichthyoid individuals in direct neural connection with one another. This world-wide, living, polyp-like tissue had permanent attachments to the machinery and observatories of the world. Thus it constituted a truly organic world-organism, and since the coherent Ichthyoid population supported together a perfectly unified mentality, each of these worlds was indeed in the fullest sense a minded organism, like a man. One essential link with the past was preserved. Arachnoids, specially adapted to the new symbiosis, would visit from their remote planets and swim along the submarine galleries for union with their anchored mates.

More and more of the stars of the outlying cluster or sub-galaxy came to be girdled with rings of worlds, and an increasing number of these worlds were of the new, organic type. Of the populations of the sub-galaxy most were descendants of the original Ichthyoids or Arachnoids; but there were also many whose natural ancestors were humanesque, and not a few that had sprung from avians, insectoids or plant-men. Between the worlds, between the rings of worlds, and between the solar systems there was constant intercourse, both telepathic and physical. Small, rocket-propelled vessels plied regularly within each system of planets. Larger vessels or high-speed worldlets voyaged from system to system, explored the whole sub-galaxy, and even ventured across the ocean of emptiness into the main body of the galaxy, where thousands upon thousands of planetless stars awaited encirclement by rings of worlds.

Strangely, the triumphant advance of material civilization and colonization now slowed down and actually came to a standstill. Physical intercourse between worlds of the sub-galaxy was maintained, but not increased. Physical exploration of the neighbouring fringe of the galactic ‘continent’ was abandoned. Within the sub-galaxy itself no new worlds were founded. Industrial activities continued, but at reduced pressure, and no further advance was made in the standard of material convenience. Indeed, manners and customs began to grow less dependent on mechanical aids. Among the Symbiotic worlds, the Arachnoid populations were reduced in number; the Ichthyoids in their cells of ocean lived in a permanent state of mental concentration and fervour, which of course was telepathically shared by their partners.

It was at this time that telepathic intercourse between the advanced sub-galaxy and the few awakened worlds of the ‘continent’ was entirely abolished. During recent ages, communication had been very fragmentary. The Sub-Galactics had apparently so far outstripped their neighbours that their interest in those primitives had become purely archaeological, and was gradually eclipsed by the enthralling life of their own community of worlds, and by their telepathic exploration of remote galaxies.

To us, the band of explorers, desperately struggling to maintain contact between our communal mind and the incomparably more developed minds of these worlds, the finest activities of the Sub-Galactics were at present inaccessible. We observed only a stagnation of the more obvious physical and mental activities of these systems of worlds. It seemed at first that this stagnation must be caused by some obscure flaw in their nature. Was it, perhaps, the first stage of irrevocable decline?

Later, however, we began to discover that this seeming stagnation was a symptom not of death but of more vigorous life. Attention had been drawn from material advancement just because it had opened up new spheres of mental discovery and growth. In fact the great community of worlds, whose members consisted of some thousands of world-spirits, was busy digesting the fruits of its prolonged phase of physical progress, and was now finding itself capable of new and unexpected psychical activities. At first the nature of these activities was entirely hidden from us. But in time we learned how to let ourselves be gathered up by these superhuman beings so as to obtain at least an obscure glimpse of the matters which so enthralled them. They were concerned, it seemed, partly with telepathic exploration of the great host of ten million galaxies, partly with a technique of spiritual discipline by which they strove to come to more penetrating insight into the nature of the cosmos and to a finer creativity. This, we learned, was possible because their perfect community of worlds was tentatively waking into a higher plane of being, as a single communal mind whose body was the whole sub-galaxy of worlds. Though we could not participate in the life of this lofty being, we guessed that its absorbing passion was not wholly unlike the longing of the noblest of our own human species to ‘come face to face with God’. This new being desired to have the percipience and the hardihood to endure direct vision of the source of all light and life and love. In fact this whole population of worlds was rapt in a prolonged and mystical adventure.

5. THE TRAGEDY OF THE PERVERTS

SUCH WAS THE state of affairs when, in the main galactic ‘continent’, the mad United Empires concentrated their power upon the few worlds that were not merely sane but of superior mental rank. The attention of the Symbiotics and their colleagues in the supremely civilized sub-galaxy had long been withdrawn from the petty affairs of the ‘continent’. It was given instead to the cosmos as a whole and to the inner discipline of the spirit. But the first of the three murders perpetrated by the United Empires upon a population far more developed than themselves seems to have caused a penetrating reverberation to echo, so to speak, through all the loftier spheres of existence. Even in the full flight of their career, the Sub-Galactics took cognizance. Once more attention was directed telepathically to the neighbouring continent of stars.

While the situation was being studied, the second murder was committed. The Sub-Galactics knew that they had power to prevent any further disaster. Yet, to our surprise, our horror and incomprehension, they calmly awaited the third murder. Still more strange, the doomed worlds themselves, though in telepathic communication with the Sub-Galaxy, made no appeal for help. Victims and spectators alike studied the situation with quiet interest, even with a sort of bright exultation not wholly unlike amusement. From our lowlier plane this detachment, this seeming levity, at first appeared less angelic than inhuman. Here was a whole world of sensitive and intelligent beings in the full tide of eager life and communal activity. Here were lovers newly come together, scientists in the midst of profound research, artists intent on new delicacies of apprehension, workers in a thousand practical social undertakings of which man has no conception, here in fact was all the rich diversity of personal lives that go to make up a highly developed world in action. And each of these individual minds participated in the communal mind of all; each experienced not only as a private individual but as the very spirit of his race. Yet these calm beings faced the destruction of their world with no more distress seemingly than one of us would feel at the prospect of resigning his part in some interesting game. And in the minds of the spectators of this impending tragedy we observed no agony of compassion, but only such commiseration, tinged with humour, as we might feel for some distinguished tennis-player who was knocked out in the first round of a tournament by some trivial accident such as a sprained ankle.

With difficulty we came to understand the source of this strange equanimity. Spectators and victims alike were so absorbed in cosmological research, so conscious of the richness and potentiality of the cosmos, and above all so possessed by spiritual contemplation, that the destruction was seen, even by the victims themselves, from the point of view which men would call divine. Their gay exaltation and their seeming frivolity were rooted in the fact that to them the personal life, and even the life and death of individual worlds, appeared chiefly as vital themes contributing to the life of the cosmos. From the cosmical point of view the disaster was after all a very small though poignant matter. Moreover, if by the sacrifice of another group of worlds, even of splendidly awakened worlds, greater insight could be attained into the insanity of the Mad Empires, the sacrifice was well worth while.

So the third murder was committed. Then came the miracle. The telepathic skill of the Sub-Galaxy was far more developed than that of the scattered superior worlds on the galactic ‘continent’. It could dispense with the aid of normal intercourse, and it could overcome every resistance. It could reach right down to the buried chrysalis of the spirit even in the most perverted individual. This was not a merely destructive power, blotting out the communal mind hypnotically; it was a kindling, an awakening power, brought to bear on the sane but dormant core of each individual. This skill was now exercised upon the galactic continent with triumphant but also tragic effect; for even this skill was not omnipotent. There appeared here and there among the mad worlds a strange and spreading ‘disease’ of the mind. To the orthodox imperialists in those worlds themselves it seemed a madness; but it was in fact a late and ineffectual waking into sanity on the part of beings whose nature had been moulded through and through for madness in a mad environment.

The course of this ‘disease’ of sanity in a mad world ran generally as follows. Individuals here and there, while still playing their part in the well-disciplined action and communal thought of the world, would find themselves teased by private doubts and disgusts opposed to the dearest assumptions of the world in which they lived, doubts of the worth of record-breaking travel and record-breaking empire, and disgust with the cult of mechanical triumph and intellectual servility and the divinity of the race. As these disturbing thoughts increased, the bewildered individuals would begin to fear for their own ‘sanity’. Presently they would cautiously sound their neighbours. Little by little, doubt would become more widespread and more vocal, until at last considerable minorities in each world, though still playing their official part, would lose contact with the communal mind, and become mere isolated individuals; but individuals at heart more sane than the lofty communal mind from which they had fallen. The orthodox majority, horrified at this mental disintegration, would then apply the familiar ruthless methods that had been used so successfully in the uncivilized outposts of empire. The dissentients would be arrested, and either destroyed outright or concentrated upon the most inhospitable planet, in the hope that their torture might prove an effective warning to others.

This policy failed. The strange mental disease spread more and more rapidly, till the ‘lunatics’ outnumbered the ‘sane’. There followed civil wars, mass-martyrdom of devoted pacifists, dissension among the imperialists, a steady increase of ‘lunacy’ in every world of the empire. The whole imperial organization fell to pieces; and since the aristocratic worlds that formed the backbone of empire were as impotent as soldier-ants to maintain themselves without the service and tribute of the subject worlds, the loss of empire doomed them to death. When almost the whole population of such a world had gone sane, great efforts would be made to reorganize its life for self-sufficiency and peace. It might have been expected that this task, though difficult, would not have defeated a population of beings whose sheer intelligence and social loyalty were incomparably greater than anything known on earth. But there were unexpected difficulties, not economic but psychological. These beings had been fashioned for war, tyranny and empire. Though telepathic stimulation from superior minds could touch into life the slumbering germ of the spirit in them, and help them to realize the triviality of their world’s whole purpose, telepathic influence could not refashion their nature to such an extent that they could henceforth actually live for the spirit and renounce the old life. In spite of heroic self-discipline, they tended to sink into inertia, like wild beasts domesticated; or to run amok, and exercise against one another those impulses of domination which hitherto had been directed upon subject worlds. And all this they did with profound consciousness of guilt.

For us it was heart-rending to watch the agony of these worlds. Never did the newly enlightened beings lose their vision of true community and of the spiritual life; but though the vision haunted them, the power to realize it in the detail of action was lost. Moreover, there were times when the change of heart that they had suffered seemed to them actually a change for the worse. Formerly all individuals had been perfectly disciplined to the common will, and perfectly happy in executing that will without the heart-searchings of individual responsibility. But now individuals were mere individuals; and all were tormented by mutual suspicion and by violent propensities for self-seeking.

The issue of this appalling struggle in the minds of these former imperialists depended on the extent to which specialization for empire had affected them. In a few young worlds, in which specialization had not gone deep, a period of chaos was followed by a period of reorientation and world-planning, and in due season by sane utopia. But in most of these worlds no such escape was possible. Either chaos persisted till racial decline set in, and the world sank to the human, the sub-human, the merely animal states; or else, in a few cases only, the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual was so distressing that the whole race committed suicide.

We could not long endure the spectacle of scores of worlds falling into psychological ruin. Yet the Sub-Galactics who had caused these strange events, and continued to use their power to clarify and so destroy these minds, watched their handiwork unflinchingly. Pity they felt, pity such as we feel for a child that has broken its toy; but no indignation against fate.

Within a few thousand years every one of the imperial worlds had either transformed itself or fallen into barbarism or committed suicide.

6. A GALACTIC UTOPIA

THE EVENTS THAT I have been describing took place, or from the human point of view will take place, at a date as far future to us as we are from the condensation of the earliest stars. The next period of galactic history covers the period from the fall of the mad empires to the achievement of utopia in the whole galactic community of worlds. This transitional period was in itself in a manner utopian; for it was an age of triumphant progress carried out by beings whose nature was rich and harmonious, whose nurture was entirely favourable, and their ever-widening galactic community a wholly satisfying object of loyalty. It was only not utopian in the sense that the galactic society was still expanding and constantly changing its structure to meet new needs, economic and spiritual. At the close of this phase there came a period of full utopia in which the attention of the perfected galactic community was directed mainly beyond itself toward other galaxies. Of this I shall tell in due course; and of the unforeseen and stormy events which shattered this beatitude.

Meanwhile we must glance at the age of expansion. The worlds of the Sub-Galaxy, recognizing that no further great advance in culture was possible unless the population of awakened worlds was immensely increased and diversified, now began to play an active part in the work of reorganizing the whole galactic continent. By telepathic communication they gave to all awakened worlds throughout the galaxy knowledge of the triumphant society which they themselves had created; and they called upon all to join them in the founding of the galactic utopia. Every world throughout the galaxy, they said, must be an intensely conscious individual; and each must contribute its personal idiosyncrasy and all the wealth of its experience to the pooled experience of all. When at last the community was completed, they said, it must go on to fulfil its function in the far greater community of all galaxies, there to participate in spiritual activities as yet but dimly guessed.

In their earlier age of meditation the Sub-Galactic worlds, or rather the single intermittently awakening mind of the Sub-Galaxy, had evidently made discoveries which had very precise bearing on the founding of the galactic society; for they now put forward the demand that the number of minded worlds in the Galaxy must be increased to at least ten thousand times its present extent. In order that all the potentialities of the spirit should be fulfilled, they said there must be a far greater diversity of world-types, and thousands of worlds of each type. They themselves, in their small Sub-Galactic community, had learned enough to realize that only a very much greater community could explore all the regions of being, some few of which they themselves had glimpsed, but only from afar.

The natural worlds of the galactic continent were bewildered and alarmed by the magnitude of this scheme. They were content with the extant scale of life. The spirit, they affirmed, had no concern for magnitude and multiplicity. To this the reply was made that such a protest came ill from worlds whose own achievement depended on the splendid diversity of their members. Diversity and multiplicity of worlds was as necessary on the galactic plane as diversity and multiplicity of individuals on the world plane and diversity and multiplicity of nerve-cells on the individual plane.

In the upshot the natural worlds of the ‘continent’ played a decreasing part in the advancing life of the galaxy. Some merely remained at the level of their own unaided achievement. Some joined in the great cooperative work, but without fervour and without genius. A few joined heartily and usefully in the enterprise. One, indeed, was able to contribute greatly. This was a symbiotic race, but of a very different kind from that which had founded the community of the Sub-Galaxy. The symbiosis consisted of two races which had originally inhabited separate planets of the same system. An intelligent avian species, driven to desperation by the desiccation of its native planet, had contrived to invade a neighbouring world inhabited by a manlike species. Here I must not tell how, after ages of alternating strife and cooperation, a thorough economic and psychological symbiosis was established.

The building of the galactic community of worlds lies far beyond the comprehension of the writer of this book. I cannot now remember at all clearly what I experienced of these obscure matters in the state of heightened lucidity which came to me through participation in the communal mind of the explorers. And even in that state I was bewildered by the effort to comprehend the aims of that close-knit community of worlds.

If my memory is to be trusted at all, three kinds of activity occupied the minded worlds in this phase of galactic history. The main practical work was to enrich and harmonize the life of the galaxy itself, to increase the number and diversity and mental unity of the fully awakened worlds up to the point which, it was believed, was demanded for the emergence of a mode of experience more awakened than any hitherto attained. The second kind of activity was that which sought to make closer contact with the other galaxies by physical and telepathic study. The third was the spiritual exercise appropriate to beings of the rank of the world-minds. This last seems to have been concerned (or will be concerned) at once with the deepening of the self-awareness of each individual world-spirit and the detachment of its will from merely private fulfilment. But this was not all. For on this relatively high level of the spirit’s ascent, as on our own lowliest of all spiritual planes, there had also to be a more radical detachment from the whole adventure of life and mind in the cosmos. For, as the spirit wakens, it craves more and more to regard all existence not merely with a creature’s eyes, but in the universal view, as though through the eyes of the creator.

At first the task of establishing the galactic utopia occupied almost the whole energy of the awakened worlds. More and more of the stars were encircled with concentric hoops of pearls, perfect though artificial. And each pearl was a unique world, occupied by a unique race. Henceforth the highest level of persistent individuality was not a world but a system of scores or hundreds of worlds. And between the systems there was as easy and delightful converse as between human individuals.

In these conditions, to be a conscious individual was to enjoy immediately the united sensory impressions of all the races inhabiting a system of worlds. And as the sense organs of the worlds apprehended not only ‘nakedly’ but also through artificial instruments of great range and subtlety, the conscious individual perceived not only the structure of hundreds of planets, but also the configuration of the whole system of planets clustered about its sun. Other systems also it perceived, as men perceive one another; for in the distance the glittering bodies of other ‘multi-mundane’ persons like itself gyrated and drifted.

Between the minded planetary systems occurred infinite variations of personal intercourse. As between human individuals, there were loves and hates, temperamental sympathies and antipathies, joyful and distressful intimacies, cooperations and thwartings in personal ventures and in the great common venture of building the galactic utopia.

Between individual systems of worlds, as between symbiotic partners, there sometimes occurred relationships with an almost sexual flavour, though actual sex played no part in them. Neighbouring systems would project travelling worldlets, or greater worlds, or trains of worlds, across the ocean of space to take up orbits round each other’s suns and play intimate parts in symbiotic, or rather ‘sympsychic’ relationships in one another’s private life. Occasionally a whole system would migrate to another system, and settle its worlds in rings between the rings of the other system.

Telepathic intercourse united the whole galaxy; but telepathy, though it had the great advantage that it was not affected by distance, was seemingly imperfect in other ways. So far as possible it was supplemented by physical travel. A constant stream of touring worldlets percolated through the whole galaxy in every direction.

The task of establishing utopia in the galaxy was not pursued without friction. Different kinds of races were apt to have different policies for the galaxy. Though war was by now unthinkable, the sort of strife which we know between individuals or associations within the same state was common. There was, for instance, a constant struggle between the planetary systems that were chiefly interested in the building of utopia, those that were most concerned to make contact with other galaxies, and those whose main preoccupation was spiritual. Besides these great parties, there were groups of planetary systems which were prone to put the well-being of individual world-systems above the advancement of galactic enterprise. They cared more for the drama of personal intercourse and the fulfilment of the personal capacity of worlds and systems than for organization or exploration or spiritual purification. Though their presence was often exasperating to the enthusiasts, it was salutary, for it was a guarantee against extravagance and against tyranny.

It was during the age of the galactic utopia that another salutary influence began to take full effect on the busy worlds. Telepathic research had made contact with the long-extinct Plant Men, who had been undone by the extravagance of their own mystical quietism. The utopian worlds now learned much from these archaic but uniquely sensitive beings. Henceforth the vegetal mode of experience was thoroughly, but not dangerously, knit into the texture of the galactic mind.

X. A VISION OF THE GALAXY

IT SEEMED TO us now that the troubles of the many worlds of this galaxy were at last over, that the will to support the galactic utopia was now universal, and that the future must bring glory after glory. We felt assured of the same progress in other galaxies. In our simplicity we looked forward to the speedy, the complete and final, triumph of the striving spirit throughout the cosmos. We even conceived that the Star Maker rejoiced in the perfection of his work. Using such symbols as we could to express the inexpressible, we imagined that, before the beginning, the Star Maker was alone, and that for love and for community he resolved to make a perfect creature, to be his mate. We imagined that he made her of his hunger for beauty and his will for love; but that he also scourged her in the making, and tormented her, so that she might at last triumph over all adversity, and thereby achieve such perfection as he in his almightiness could never attain. The cosmos we conceived to be that creature. And it seemed to us in our simplicity that we had already witnessed the greater part of cosmical growth, and that there remained only the climax of that growth, the telepathic union of all the galaxies to become the single, fully awakened spirit of the cosmos, perfect, fit to be eternally contemplated and enjoyed by the Star Maker.

All this seemed to us majestically right. Yet we ourselves had no joy in it. We had been sated with the spectacle of continuous and triumphant progress in the latter age of our galaxy, and we were no longer curious about the host of the other galaxies. Almost certainly they were much like our own. We were, in fact, overwhelmingly fatigued and disillusioned. During so many aeons we had followed the fortunes of the many worlds. So often we had lived out their passions, novel to them, but to us for the most part repetitive. We had shared all kinds of sufferings, all kinds of glories and shames. And now that the cosmical ideal, the full awakening of the spirit, seemed on the point of attainment, we found ourselves a little tired of it. What matter whether the whole huge drama of existence should be intricately known and relished by the perfected spirit or not? What matter whether we ourselves should complete our pilgrimage or not?

During so many aeons our company, distributed throughout the galaxy, had with difficulty maintained its single communal mentality. At all times ‘we’, in spite of our severalty, were in fact ‘I’, the single observer of the many worlds; but the maintaining of this identity was itself becoming a toil. ‘I’ was overpowered with sleepiness; ‘we’, severally, longed for our little native worlds, our homes, our lairs; and for the animal obtuseness that had walled us in from all the immensities. In particular, I, the Englishman, longed to be sleeping safely in that room where she and I had slept together, the day’s urgencies all blotted out, and nothing left but sleep and the shadowy, the peaceful awareness in each of the other.

But though I was fatigued beyond endurance, sleep would not come. I remained perforce with my colleagues, and with the many triumphant worlds.

Slowly we were roused from our drowsiness by a discovery. It gradually appeared to us that the prevailing mood of these countless utopian systems of worlds was at heart very different from that of triumph. In every world we found a deep conviction of the littleness and impotence of all finite beings, no matter how exalted. In a certain world there was a kind of poet. When we told him our conception of the cosmical goal, he said, ‘When the cosmos wakes, if ever she does, she will find herself not the single beloved of her maker, but merely a little bubble adrift on the boundless and bottomless ocean of being.’

What had seemed to us at first the irresistible march of god-like world-spirits, with all the resources of the universe in their hands and all eternity before them, was now gradually revealed in very different guise. The great advance in mental calibre, and the attainment of communal mentality throughout the cosmos, had brought a change in the experience of time. The temporal reach of the mind had been very greatly extended. The awakened worlds experienced an aeon as a mere crowded day. They were aware of time’s passage as a man in a canoe might have cognizance of a river which in its upper reaches is sluggish but subsequently breaks into rapids and becomes swifter and swifter, till, at no great distance ahead, it must plunge in a final cataract down to the sea, namely to the eternal end of life, the extinction of the stars. Comparing the little respite that remained with the great work which they passionately desired to accomplish, namely the full awakening of the cosmical spirit, they saw that at best there was no time to spare, and that, more probably, it was already too late to accomplish the task. They had a strange foreboding that unforeseen disaster lay in store for them. It was sometimes said, ‘We know not what the stars, even, have in store for us, still less what the Star Maker.’ And it was sometimes said, ‘We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colours that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.’

The sense of the fated incompleteness of all creatures and of all their achievements gave to the Galactic Society of Worlds a charm, a sanctity, as of some short-lived and delicate flower. And it was with an increasing sense of precarious beauty that we ourselves were now learning to regard the far-flung utopia. In this mood we had a remarkable experience.

We had embarked upon a sort of holiday from exploration, seeking the refreshment of disembodied flight in space. Gathering our whole company together out of all the worlds, we centred ourselves into a single mobile view-point; and then, as one being, we glided and circled among the stars and nebulae. Presently the whim took us to plunge into outer space. We hastened till the forward stars turned violet, the hinder red; till both forward and hinder vanished; till all visible features were extinguished by the wild speed of our flight. In absolute darkness we brooded on the origin and the destiny of the galaxies, and on the appalling contrast between the cosmos and our minute home-lives to which we longed to return.

Presently we came to rest. In doing so we discovered that our situation was not such as we expected. The galaxy whence we had emerged did indeed lie far behind us, no bigger than a great cloud; but it was not the featured spiral that it should have been. After some confusion of mind we realized that we were looking at the galaxy in an early stage of its existence, in fact at a time before it was really a galaxy at all. For the cloud was no cloud of stars, but a continuous mist of light. At its heart was a vague brilliance, which faded softly into the dim outer regions and merged without perceptible boundary into the black sky. Even the sky itself was quite unfamiliar. Though empty of stars, it was densely peopled with a great number of pale clouds. All seemingly were farther from us than that from which we had come, but several bulked as largely as Orion in the Earth’s sky. So congested was the heaven that many of the great objects were continuous with one another in their filmy extremities, and many were separated only by mere channels of emptiness, through which loomed vistas of more remote nebulae, some of them so distant as to be mere spots of light.

It was clear that we had travelled back through time to a date when the great nebulae were still near neighbours to one another, before the explosive nature of the cosmos had done more than separate them out from the continuous and congested primal substance.

As we watched, it became obvious that events were unfolding before us with fantastic speed. Each cloud visibly shrank, withdrawing into the distance. It also changed its shape. Each vague orb flattened somewhat, and became more definite. Receding and therefore diminishing, the nebulae now appeared as lens-shaped mists, tilted at all angles. But, even as we watched, they withdrew themselves so far into the depth of space that it became difficult to observe their changes. Only our own native nebula remained beside us, a huge oval stretching across half the sky. On this we now concentrated our attention.

Differences began to appear within it, regions of brighter and of less bright mist, faint streaks and swirls, like the foam on the sea’s waves. These shadowy features slowly moved, as wisps of cloud move on the hills. Presently it was clear that the internal currents of the nebula were on the whole set in a common pattern. The great world of gas was in fact slowly rotating, almost as a tornado. As it rotated it continued to flatten. It was now like some blurred image of a streaked and flattish pebble, handy for ‘ducks and drakes’, held too near the eye to be focused.

Presently we noticed, with our novel and miraculous vision, that microscopic points of intenser light were appearing here and there throughout the cloud, but mainly in its outer regions. As we watched, their number grew, and the spaces between them grew dark. Thus were the stars born.

The great cloud still span and flattened. It was soon a disc of whirling star-streams and strands of uncondensed gas, the last disintegrating tissues of the primal nebula. These continued to move within the whole by their own semi-independent activity, changing their shapes, creeping like living things, extending pseudopodia, and visibly fading as clouds fade; but giving place to new generations of stars. The heart of the nebula was now condensing into a smaller bulk, more clearly defined. It was a huge, congested globe of brilliance. Here and there throughout the disc knots and lumps of light were the embryonic star-clusters. The whole nebula was strewn with these balls of thistle-down, these feathery, sparkling, fairy decorations, each one in fact pregnant with a small universe of stars.

The galaxy, for such it could now be named, continued visibly to whirl with hypnotic constancy. Its tangled tresses of star-streams were spread abroad on the darkness. Now it was like a huge broad-brimmed white sombrero, the crown a glowing mass, the brim a filmy expanse of stars. It was a cardinal’s hat, spinning. The two long whirling tassels on the brim were two long spiralling star-streams. Their frayed extremities had broken away and become sub-galaxies, revolving about the main galactic system. The whole, like a spinning top, swayed; and, as it tilted before us, the brim appeared as an ever narrower ellipse, till presently it was edge-on, and the outermost fringe of it, composed of non-luminous matter, formed a thin, dark, knotted line across the glowing inner substance of nebula and stars.

Peering, straining to see more precisely the texture of this shimmering and nacrous wonder, this largest of all the kinds of objects in the cosmos, we found that our new vision, even while embracing the whole galaxy and the distant galaxies, apprehended each single star as a tiny disc separated from its nearest neighbours much as a cork on the Arctic Ocean would be separated from another cork on the Antarctic. Thus, in spite of the nebulous and opalescent beauty of its general form, the galaxy also appeared to us as a void sprinkled with very sparse scintillations.

Observing the stars more closely, we saw that while they streamed along in companies like shoals of fishes, their currents sometimes interpenetrated. Then seemingly the stars of the different streams, crossing one another’s paths, pulled at one another, moving in great sweeping curves as they passed from one neighbour’s influence to another. Thus, in spite of their remoteness each from each, the stars often looked curiously like minute living creatures taking cognizance of one another from afar. Sometimes they swung hyperbolically round one another and away, or, more rarely, united to form binaries.

So rapidly did time pass before us that aeons were packed into moments. We had seen the first stars condense from the nebular tissue as ruddy giants, though in the remote view inconceivably minute. A surprising number of these, perhaps through the centrifugal force of their rotation, were burst asunder to form binaries, so that, increasingly, the heaven was peopled by these waltzing pairs. Meanwhile, the giant stars slowly shrank and gathered brightness. They passed from red to yellow, and on to dazzling white and blue. While other young giants condensed around them, they shrank still further, and their colour changed once more to yellow and to smouldering red. Presently we saw the eldest of the stars one by one extinguished like sparks from a fire. The incidence of this mortality increased, slowly but steadily. Sometimes a ‘nova’ flashed out and faded, outshining for a moment all its myriad neighbours. Here and there a ‘variable’ pulsated with inconceivable rapidity. Now and again we saw a binary and a third star approach one another so closely that one or other of the group reached out a filament of its substance toward its partner. Straining our supernatural vision, we saw these filaments break and condense into planets. And we were awed by the infinitesimal size and the rarity of these seeds of life among the lifeless host of the stars.

But the stars themselves gave an irresistible impression of vitality. Strange that the movements of these merely physical things, these mere fire-balls, whirling and travelling according to the geometrical laws of their minutest particles, should seem so vital, so questing. But then the whole galaxy was itself so vital, so like an organism, with its delicate tracery of star-streams, like the streams within a living cell; and its extended wreaths, almost like feelers; and its nucleus of light. Surely this great and lovely creature must be alive, must have intelligent experience of itself and of things other than it.

In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.

With rising affection and longing we directed our attention more minutely toward the earliest planetary grains as they condensed out of the whirling filaments of flame, to become at first molten drops that span and pulsated, then grew rock-encrusted, ocean-filmed, and swathed in atmosphere. Our piercing sight observed their shallow waters ferment with life, which soon spread into their oceans and continents. A few of these early worlds we saw waken to intelligence of human rank; and very soon these were in the throes of the great struggle for the spirit, from which still fewer emerged victorious.

Meanwhile new planetary births, rare among the stars, yet, in all, thousands upon thousands, had launched new worlds and new biographies. We saw the Other Earth, with its recurrent glories and shames, and its final suffocation. We saw the many other humanesque worlds, Echinoderm, Centaurian, and so on. We saw Man on his little Earth blunder through many alternating phases of dullness and lucidity, and again abject dullness. From epoch to epoch his bodily shape changed as a cloud changes. We watched him in his desperate struggle with Martian invaders; and then, after a moment that included further ages of darkness and of light, we saw him driven, by dread of the moon’s downfall, away to inhospitable Venus. Later still, after an aeon that was a mere sigh in the lifetime of the cosmos, he fled before the exploding sun to Neptune, there to sink back into mere animality for further aeons again. But then he climbed once more and reached his finest intelligence, only to be burnt up like a moth in a flame by irresistible catastrophe.

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster.

Before and after man’s troubled life we saw other humanesque races rise in scores and hundreds, of which a mere handful was destined to waken beyond man’s highest spiritual range, to play a part in the galactic community of worlds. These we now saw from afar on their little Earth-like planets, scattered among the huge drift of the star-streams, struggling to master all those world-problems, social and spiritual, which man in our ‘modern’ era is for the first time confronting. Similarly, we saw again the many other kinds of races, nautiloid, submarine, avian, composite, and the rare symbiotics, and still rarer plant-like beings. And of every kind only a few, if any, won through to utopia, and took part in the great communal enterprise of worlds. The rest fell by the way.

From our remote look-out we now saw in one of the islanded sub-galaxies the triumph of the Symbiotics. Here at last was the germ of a true community of worlds. Presently the stars of this islet-universe began to be girdled with living pearls, till the whole sub-galaxy was alive with worlds. Meanwhile in the main system arose that flagrant and contagious insanity of empire, which we had already watched in detail. But what had before appeared as a war of titans, in which great worlds manœuvred in space with inconceivable speed, and destroyed one another’s populations in holocausts, was now seen as the jerky motion of a few microscopic sparks, a few luminous animalcules, surrounded by the indifferent stellar hosts.

Presently, however, we saw a star blaze up and destroy its planets. The Empires had murdered something nobler than themselves. There was a second murder, and a third. Then, under the influence of the sub-galaxy, the imperial madness faded, and empire crumbled. And soon our fatigued attention was held by the irresistible coming of utopia throughout the galaxy. This was visible to us chiefly as a steady increase of artificial planets. Star after star blossomed with orbit after crowded orbit of these vital jewels, these blooms pregnant with the spirit. Constellation after constellation, the whole galaxy became visibly alive with myriads of worlds. Each world, peopled with its unique, multitudinous race of sensitive individual intelligences united in true community, was itself a living thing, possessed of a common spirit. And each system of many populous orbits was itself a communal being. And the whole galaxy, knit in a single telepathic mesh, was a single intelligent and ardent being, the common spirit, the ‘I’, of all its countless, diverse, and ephemeral individuals.

This whole vast community looked now beyond itself toward its fellow galaxies. Resolved to pursue the adventure of life and of spirit in the cosmical, the widest of all spheres, it was in constant telepathic communication with its fellows; and at the same time, conceiving all kinds of strange practical ambitions, it began to avail itself of the energies of its stars upon a scale hitherto unimagined. Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy.

Suddenly our attention was held by an event which even at a distance was visibly incompatible with utopia. A star encircled by planets exploded, destroying all its rings of worlds, and sinking afterwards into wan exhaustion. Another and another, and yet others in different regions of the galaxy, did likewise.

To enquire into the cause of these startling disasters we once more, by an act of volition, dispersed ourselves to our stations among the many worlds.

XI. STARS AND VERMIN

1. THE MANY GALAXIES

THE GALACTIC SOCIETY of Worlds had sought to perfect its communication with other galaxies. The simpler medium of contact was telepathic; but it seemed desirable to reach out physically also across the huge void between this galaxy and the next. It was in the attempt to send envoys on such voyages that the Society of Worlds brought upon itself the epidemic of exploding stars.

Before describing this series of disasters I shall say something of the conditions of other galaxies as they were known to us through our participation in the experience of our own galaxy.

Telepathic exploration had long ago revealed that at least in some other galaxies there existed minded worlds. And now, after long experiment, the worlds of our galaxy, working for this purpose as a single galactic mind, had attained much more detailed knowledge of the cosmos as a whole. This had proved difficult because of an unsuspected parochialism in the mental attitude of the worlds of each galaxy. In the basic physical and biological constitutions of the galaxies there was no far-reaching difference. In each there was a diversity of races of the same general types as those of our own galaxy. But upon the cultural plane the trend of development in each galactic society had produced important mental idiosyncrasies, often so deep-seated as to be unwitting. Thus it was very difficult at first for the developed galaxies to make contact with one another. Our own galactic culture had been dominated by the culture of the Symbiotics, which had developed in the exceptionally happy sub-galaxy. In spite of the horrors of the imperial age, ours was therefore a culture having a certain blandness which made telepathic intercourse with more tragic galaxies difficult to establish. Further, the detail of basic concepts and values accepted by our own galactic society was also largely a development of the marine culture that had dominated the sub-galaxy. Though the ‘continental’ population of worlds was mainly humanesque, its native cultures had been profoundly influenced by the oceanic mentality. And since this oceanic mental texture was rare amongst galactic societies, our galaxy was rather more isolated than most.

After long and patient work, however, our galactic society succeeded in forming a fairly complete survey of the cosmical population of galaxies. It was discovered that at this time the many galaxies were in many stages of mental, as of physical, development. Many very young systems, in which nebular matter still predominated over stars, contained as yet no planets. In others, though already there was a sprinkling of the vital grains, life had nowhere reached the human level. Some galaxies, though physically mature, were wholly barren of planetary systems, either through sheer accident or by reason of the exceptionally sparse distribution of their stars. In several, out of the millions of galaxies, a single intelligent world had spread its race and its culture throughout the galaxy, organizing the whole as an egg’s germ organizes into itself the whole substance of the egg. In these galaxies, very naturally, the galactic culture had been based on the assumption that from the one single germ the whole cosmos was to be peopled. When telepathic intercourse with other galaxies was at last stumbled upon, its effect was at first utterly bewildering. There were not a few galaxies in which two or more such germs had developed independently and finally come into contact. Sometimes the result was symbiosis, sometimes endless strife or even mutual destruction. By far the commonest type of galactic society was that in which many systems of worlds had developed independently, come into conflict, slaughtered one another, produced vast federations and empires, plunged again and again into social chaos, and struggled between whiles haltingly toward galactic utopia. A few had already attained that goal, though seared with bitterness. More were still floundering. Many were so undermined by war that there seemed little prospect of recovery. To such a type our own galaxy would have belonged had it not been for the good fortune of the Symbiotics.

To this account of the galactic survey two points should be added. First, there were certain very advanced galactic societies which had been telepathic spectators of all history in our own and all other galaxies. Secondly, in not a few galaxies the stars had recently begun unexpectedly exploding and destroying their girdles of worlds.

2. DISASTER IN OUR GALAXY

WHILE OUR GALACTIC Society of Worlds was perfecting its telepathic vision, and at the same time improving its own social and material structure, the unexpected disasters which we had already observed from afar forced it to attend strictly to the task of preserving the lives of its constituent worlds.

The occasion of the first accident was an attempt to detach a star from its natural course and direct it upon an intergalactic voyage. Telepathic intercourse with the nearest of the foreign galaxies was fairly reliable, but, as I have said, it had been decided that a physical exchange of worlds would be invaluable for mutual understanding and cooperation. Plans were therefore made for projecting several stars with their attendant systems of worlds across the vast ocean of space that separated the two floating islets of civilization. The voyage would of course be thousands of times longer than anything hitherto attempted. At its completion many more of the stars in each galaxy would already have ceased to shine, and the end of all life in the cosmos would already be in sight. Yet it was felt that the enterprise of linking galaxy with galaxy throughout the cosmos in this manner would be well justified by the great increase of mutual insight which it would produce in the galaxies in the last and most difficult phase of cosmical life.

After prodigies of experiment and calculation the first attempt at intergalactic voyaging was undertaken. A certain star, barren of planets, was used as a reservoir of energy, both normal and sub-atomic. By cunning devices far beyond my comprehension this fund of power was directed upon a chosen star with planetary girdles in such a way as to sway it gradually in the direction of the foreign galaxy. The task of securing that its planets should remain in their true orbits during this operation, and during the subsequent acceleration of their sun, was very delicate, but was accomplished without the destruction of more than a dozen worlds. Unfortunately, just as the star was correctly aimed and was beginning to gather speed, it exploded. A sphere of incandescent material, expanding from the sun with incredible speed, swallowed up and destroyed every girdle of planets. The star then subsided.

Throughout the history of the galaxy such sudden effulgence and quiescence of a star had been a very common occurrence. It was known to consist of an explosion of sub-atomic energy from the star’s superficial layers. This was caused sometimes by the impact of some small wandering body, often no bigger than an asteroid; sometimes by factors in the star’s own physical evolution. In either case the Galactic Society of Worlds could predict the event with great accuracy and take steps either to divert the intruding body or to remove the threatened world-system out of harm’s way. But this particular disaster was entirely unforeseen. No cause could be assigned to it. It infringed the established laws of physics.

While the Society of Worlds was trying to understand what had happened, another star exploded. This was the sun of one of the leading world-systems. Attempts had recently been made to increase this star’s output of radiation, and it was thought that the disaster must have been due to these experiments. After a while another and yet other stars exploded, destroying all their worlds. In several cases attempts had recently been made either to alter the star’s course or tap its stored energy.

The trouble spread. System after system of worlds was destroyed. All tampering with stars had now been abandoned, yet the epidemic of ‘novae’ continued, even increased. In every case the exploding star was a sun with a planetary system.

The normal ‘nova’ phase, the explosion caused not by collision but by internal forces, was known to occur only in a star’s youth or early maturity, and seldom, if ever, more often than once in each star’s career. In this late phase of the galaxy far more stars had passed the natural ‘nova’ stage than not. It would be possible, therefore, to move whole systems of worlds from the dangerous younger stars and settle them in close orbits round the older luminaries. With immense expense of energy this operation was several times performed. Heroic plans were made for the transformation of the whole galactic society by migration to the safe stars, and the euthanasia of the excess population of worlds that could not be thus accommodated.

While this plan was being carried out it was defeated by a new series of disasters. Stars that had already exploded developed a power of exploding again and again whenever they were girdled with planets. Moreover, yet another kind of disaster now began to occur. Very aged stars, which had long since passed the period when explosion was possible, began to behave in an astounding manner. A plume of incandescent substance would issue from the photosphere, and this, as the star revolved, would sweep outwards as a trailing whirl. Sometimes this fiery proboscis calcined the surface of every planet in every orbit, killing all its life. Sometimes, if the sweep of the proboscis was not quite in the plane of the planetary orbits, a number of planets escaped. But in many cases in which the destruction was not at first complete the proboscis gradually brought itself more accurately into the planetary plane and destroyed the remaining worlds.

It soon became clear that, if the two kinds of stellar activity remained unchecked, civilization would be undermined and perhaps life exterminated throughout the galaxy. Astronomical knowledge provided no clue whatever to the problem. The theory of stellar evolution had seemed perfect, but it had no place for these singular events.

Meanwhile the Society of Worlds had set about the task of artificially exploding all stars that had not yet spontaneously passed through the ‘nova’ phase. It was hoped thus to render them comparatively safe, and then to use them once more as suns. But now that all kinds of stars had become equally dangerous, this work was abandoned. Instead, arrangements were made to procure the radiation necessary to life from the stars that had ceased to shine. Controlled disintegration of their atoms would turn them into satisfactory suns, at least for a while. Unfortunately the epidemic of fiery plumes was increasing rapidly. System by system, the living worlds were being swept out of existence. Desperate research hit at last on a method of diverting the fiery tentacle away from the plane of the ecliptic. This process was far from reliable. Moreover, if it succeeded, the sun would sooner or later project another filament.

The state of the galaxy was being very rapidly changed. Hitherto there had been an incalculable wealth of stellar energy, but this energy was now being shed like rain from a thunder-cloud. Though a single explosion did not seriously affect the vigour of a star, repetitions became more exhausting as they increased in number. Many young stars had been reduced to decrepitude. The great majority of the stellar population had now passed their prime; multitudes were mere glowing coals or lightless ash. The minded worlds, also, were much reduced in number, for in spite of all ingenious measures of defence, casualties were still heavy. This reduction of the population of the worlds was the more serious because in its prime the Galactic Society of Worlds had been so highly organized. In some ways it was less like a society than a brain. The disaster had almost blotted out certain higher ‘brain-centres’ and greatly reduced the vitality of all. It had also seriously impaired telepathic intercourse between the systems of worlds by forcing each system to concentrate on its own urgent physical problem of defence against the attacks of its own sun. The communal mind of the Society of Worlds now ceased to operate.

The emotional attitude of the worlds had also changed. The fervour for the establishment of cosmical utopia had vanished, and with it the fervour for the completion of the spirit’s adventure by the fulfilment of knowledge and creative capacity. Now that extermination seemed inevitable within a comparatively short time, there was an increasing will to meet fate with religious peace. The desire to realize the far cosmical goal, formerly the supreme motive of all awakened worlds, now seemed to be extravagant, even impious. How should the little creatures, the awakened worlds, reach out to knowledge of the whole cosmos, and of the divine. Instead they must play their own part in the drama, and appreciate their own tragic end with god-like detachment and relish.

This mood of exultant resignation, appropriate to unavoidable disaster, quickly changed under the influence of a new discovery. In certain quarters there had long been a suspicion that the irregular activity of the stars was not merely automatic but purposeful, in fact that the stars were alive, and were striving to rid themselves of the pest of planets. This possibility had at first seemed too fantastic; but it gradually became obvious that the destruction of a star’s planetary system was the end which determined the duration of the irregular action. Of course it was possible that in some unexplained but purely mechanical way the presence of many planetary girdles created the explosion, or the fiery limb. Astronomical physics could suggest no mechanism whatever which could have this result.

Telepathic research was now undertaken in order to test the theory of stellar consciousness, and if possible to set up communication with the minded stars. This venture was at first completely barren. The worlds had not the slightest knowledge of the right method of approach to minds which, if they existed at all, must be inconceivably different from their own. It seemed all too probable that no factors in the mentality of the minded worlds were sufficiently akin to the stellar mentality to form a means of contact. Though the worlds used their imaginative powers as best they might, though they explored, so to speak, every subterranean passage and gallery of their own mentality, tapping everywhere in the hope of answer, they received none. The theory of stellar purposefulness began to seem incredible. Once more the worlds began to turn to the consolation, nay the joy, of acceptance.

Nevertheless, a few world-systems that had specialized in psychological technique persisted in their researches, confident that, if only they could communicate with the stars, some kind of mutual understanding and concord could be brought about between the two great orders of minds in the galaxy.

At long last the desired contact with the stellar minds was effected. It came not through the unaided efforts of the minded worlds of our galaxy but partly through the mediation of another galaxy where already the worlds and the stars had begun to realize one another.

Even to the minds of fully awakened worlds the stellar mentality was almost too alien to be conceived at all. To me, the little human individual, all that is most distinctive in it is now quite incomprehensible. Nevertheless, its simpler aspect I must now try to summarize as best I may, since it is essential to my story. The minded worlds made their first contact with the stars on the higher planes of stellar experience, but I shall not follow the chronological order of their discoveries. Instead I shall begin with aspects of the stellar nature which were haltingly inferred only after intercourse of a sort had become fairly well established. It is in terms of stellar biology and physiology that the reader may most easily conceive something of the mental life of stars.

3. STARS

STARS ARE BEST regarded as living organisms, but organisms which are physiologically and psychologically of a very peculiar kind. The outer and middle layers of a mature star apparently consist of ’tissues’ woven of currents of incandescent gases. These gaseous tissues live and maintain the stellar consciousness by intercepting part of the immense flood of energy that wells from the congested and furiously active interior of the star. The innermost of the vital layers must be a kind of digestive apparatus which transmutes the crude radiation into forms required for the maintenance of the star’s life. Outside this digestive area lies some sort of coordinating layer, which may be thought of as the star’s brain. The outermost layers, including the corona, respond to the excessively faint stimuli of the star’s cosmical environment, to light from neighbouring stars, to cosmic rays, to the impact of meteors, to tidal stresses caused by the gravitational influence of planets or of other stars. These influences could not, of course, produce any clear impression but for a strange tissue of gaseous sense organs, which discriminate between them in respect of quality and direction, and transmit information to the correlating ‘brain’ layer.

The sense experience of a star, though so foreign to us, proved after all fairly intelligible. It was not excessively difficult for us to enter telepathically into the star’s perception of the gentle titillations, strokings, pluckings, and scintillations that came to it from the galactic environment. It was strange that, though the star’s own body was actually in a state of extreme brilliance, none of this outward-flowing light took effect upon its sense organs. Only the faint in-coming light of other stars was seen. This afforded the perception of a surrounding heaven of flashing constellations, which were set not in blackness but in blackness tinged with the humanly inconceivable colour of the cosmic rays. The stars themselves were seen coloured according to their style and age.

But though the sense perception of the stars was fairly intelligible to us, the motor side of stellar life was at first quite incomprehensible. We had to accustom ourselves to an entirely new way of regarding physical events. For the normal voluntary motor activity of a star appears to be no other than the star’s normal physical movement studied by our science, movement in relation to other stars and the galaxy as a whole. A star must be thought of as vaguely aware of the gravitational influence of the whole galaxy, and more precisely aware of the ‘pull’ of its near neighbours; though of course their influence would generally be far too slight to be detected by human instruments. To these influences the star responds by voluntary movement, which to the astronomers of the little minded worlds seems purely mechanical; but the star itself unquestioningly and rightly feels this movement to be the freely willed expression of its own psychological nature. Such at least was the almost incredible conclusion forced on us by the research carried out by the Galactic Society of Worlds.

Thus the normal experience of a star appears to consist in perception of its cosmical environment, along with continuous voluntary changes within its own body and in its position in relation to other stars. This change of position consists, of course, in rotation and passage. The star’s motor life is thus to be thought of almost as a life of dance, or of figure-skating, executed with perfect skill according to an ideal principle which emerges into consciousness from the depths of the stellar nature and becomes clearer as the star’s mind matures.

This ideal principle cannot be conceived by men save as it is manifested in practice as the well-known physical principle of ‘least action’, or the pursuit of that course which in all the gravitational and other conditions is the least extravagant. The star itself, by means of its purchase on the electromagnetic field of the cosmos, apparently wills and executes this ideal course with all the attention and delicacy of response which a motorist exercises in threading his way through traffic on a winding road, or a ballet-dancer in performing the most intricate movements with the greatest economy of effort. Almost certainly, the star’s whole physical behaviour is normally experienced as a blissful, an ecstatic, an ever successful pursuit of formal beauty. This the minded worlds were able to discover through their own most formalistic aesthetic experience. In fact it was through this experience that they first made contact with stellar minds. But the actual perception of the aesthetic (or religious?) rightness of the mysterious canon, which the stars so earnestly accepted, remained far beyond the mental range of the minded worlds. They had to take it, so to speak, on trust. Clearly this aesthetic canon was in some way symbolical of some spiritual intuition that remained occult to the minded worlds.

The life of the individual star is not only a life of physical movement. It is also undoubtedly in some sense a cultural and a spiritual life. In some manner each star is aware of its fellow stars as conscious beings. This mutual awareness is probably intuitive and telepathic, though presumably it is also constantly supported by inference from observation of the behaviour of others. From the psychological relations of star with star sprang a whole world of social experiences which were so alien to the minded worlds that almost nothing can be said of them.

There is perhaps some reason for believing that the free behaviour of the individual star is determined not only by the austere canons of the dance but also by the social will to cooperate with others. Certainly the relation between stars is perfectly social. It reminded me of the relation between the performers in an orchestra, but an orchestra composed of persons wholly intent on the common task. Possibly, but not certainly, each star, executing its particular theme, is moved not only by the pure aesthetic or religious motive but also by a will to afford its partners every legitimate opportunity for self-expression. If so, the life of each star is experienced not only as the perfect execution of formal beauty but also as the perfect expression of love. It would, however, be unwise to attribute affection and comradeship to the stars in any human sense. The most that can safely be said, is that it would probably be more false to deny them affection for one another than to assert that they were, indeed, capable of love. Telepathic research suggested that the experience of the stars was through and through of a different texture from that of the minded worlds. Even to attribute to them thought or desire of any kind is probably grossly anthropomorphic, but it is impossible to speak of their experience in any other terms.

The mental life of a star is almost certainly a progress from an obscure infantile mentality to the discriminate consciousness of maturity. All stars, young and old, are mentally ‘angelic’, in that they all freely and joyfully will the ‘good will’, the pattern of right action so far as it is revealed to them; but the great tenuous young stars, though they perfectly execute their part in the galactic dance, would seem to be in some manner spiritually naïve or childlike in comparison with their more experienced elders. Thus, though there is normally no such thing as sin among the stars, no deliberate choice of the course known to be wrong for the sake of some end known to be irrelevant, there is ignorance, and consequent aberration from the pattern of the ideal as revealed to stars of somewhat maturer mentality. But this aberration on the part of the young is itself apparently accepted by the most awakened class of the stars as itself a desirable factor in the dance pattern of the galaxy. From the point of view of natural science, as known to the minded worlds, the behaviour of young stars is of course always an exact expression of their youthful nature; and the behaviour of the elder stars an expression of their nature. But, most surprisingly, the physical nature of a star at any stage of its growth is in part an expression of the telepathic influence of other stars. This fact can never be detected by the pure physics of any epoch. Unwittingly scientists derive the inductive physical laws of stellar evolution from data which are themselves an expression not only of normal physical influences but also of the unsuspected psychical influence of star on star.

In early ages of the cosmos the first ‘generation’ of stars had been obliged to find their way unhelped from infancy to maturity; but later ‘generations’ were in some manner guided by the experience of their elders so that they should pass more quickly and more thoroughly from the obscure to the fully lucid consciousness of themselves as spirits, and of the spiritual universe in which they dwelt.

Almost certainly, the latest stars to condense out of the primeval nebula advanced (or will advance) more rapidly than their elders had done; and throughout the stellar host it was believed that in due season the youngest stars, when they had attained maturity, would pass far beyond the loftiest spiritual insight of their seniors.

There is good reason to say that the two overmastering desires of all stars are the desire to execute perfectly their part in the communal dance, and the desire to press forward to the attainment of full insight into the nature of the cosmos. The latter desire was the factor in stellar mentality which was most comprehensible to the minded worlds.

The climax of a star’s life occurs when it has passed through the long period of its youth, during which it is what human astronomers call a ‘red giant’. At the close of this period it shrinks rapidly into the dwarf state in which our sun now is. This physical cataclysm seems to be accompanied by far-reaching mental changes. Henceforth, though the star plays a less dashing part in the dance-rhythms of the galaxy, it is perhaps more clearly and penetratingly conscious. It is interested less in the ritual of the stellar dance, more in its supposed spiritual significance. After this very long phase of physical maturity there comes another crisis. The star shrinks into the minute and inconceivably dense condition in which our astronomers call it a ‘white dwarf’. Its mentality in the actual crisis proved almost impervious to the research of the minded worlds. It appeared to be a crisis of despair and of reorientated hope. Henceforth the stellar mind presents increasingly a strain of baffling and even terrifying negativity, an icy, an almost cynical aloofness, which, we suspected, was but the obverse of some dread rapture hidden from us. However that may be, the aged star still continues meticulously to fulfil its part in the dance, but its mood is deeply changed. The aesthetic fervours of youth, the more serene but earnest will of maturity, all maturity’s devotion to the active pursuit of wisdom, now fall away. Perhaps the star is henceforth content with its achievement, such as it is, and pleased simply to enjoy the surrounding universe with such detachment and insight as it has attained. Perhaps; but the minded worlds were never able to ascertain whether the aged stellar mind eluded their comprehension through sheer superiority of achievement or through some obscure disorder of the spirit.

In this state of old age a star remains for a very long period, gradually losing energy, and mentally withdrawing into itself, until it sinks into an impenetrable trance of senility. Finally its light is extinguished and its tissues disintegrate in death. Henceforth it continues to sweep through space, but it does so unconsciously, and in a manner repugnant to its still conscious fellows.

Such, very roughly stated, would seem to be the normal life of the average star. But there are many varieties within the general type. For stars vary in original size and in composition, and probably in psychological impact upon their neighbours. One of the commonest of the eccentric types is the double star, two mighty globes of fire waltzing through space together, in some cases almost in contact. Like all stellar relations, these partnerships are perfect, are angelic. Yet it is impossible to be certain whether the members experience anything which could properly be called a sentiment of personal love, or whether they regard one another solely as partners in a common task. Research undoubtedly suggested that the two beings did indeed move on their winding courses in some kind of mutual delight, and delight of close cooperation in the measures of the galaxy. But love? It is impossible to say. In due season, with the loss of momentum, the two stars come into actual contact. Then, seemingly in an agonizing blaze of joy and pain, they merge. After a period of unconsciousness, the great new star generates new living tissues, and takes its place among the angelic company.

The strange Cepheid variables proved the most baffling of all the stellar kinds. It seems that these and other variables of much longer period alternate mentally between fervour and quietism, in harmony with their physical rhythm. More than this it is impossible to say.

One event, which happens only to a small minority of the stars in the course of their dance-life, is apparently of great psychological importance. This is the close approach of two or perhaps three stars to one another, and the consequent projection of a filament from one toward another; In the moment of this ‘moth kiss’, before the disintegration of the filament and the birth of planets, each star probably experiences an intense but humanly unintelligible physical ecstasy. Apparently the stars which have been through this experience are supposed to have acquired a peculiarly vivid apprehension of the unity of body and spirit. The ‘virgin’ stars, however, though unblessed by this wonderful adventure, seem to have no desire to infringe the sacred canons of the dance in order to contrive opportunities for such encounters. Each one of them is angelically content to play its allotted part, and to observe the ecstasy of those that fate has favoured.

To describe the mentality of stars is of course to describe the unintelligible by means of intelligible but falsifying human metaphors. This tendency is particularly serious in telling of the dramatic relations between the stars and the minded worlds, for under the stress of these relations the stars seem to have experienced for the first time emotions superficially like human emotions. So long as the stellar community was immune from interference by the minded worlds, every member of it behaved with perfect rectitude and had perfect bliss in the perfect expression of its own nature and of the common spirit. Even senility and death were accepted with calm, for they were universally seen to be involved in the pattern of existence; and what every star desired was not immortality, whether for itself or for the community, but the perfect fruition of stellar nature. But when at last the minded worlds, the planets, began to interfere appreciably with stellar energy and motion, a new and terrible and incomprehensible thing presumably entered into the experiences of the stars. The stricken ones found themselves caught in a distracting mental conflict. Through some cause which they themselves could not detect, they not merely erred but willed to err. In fact they sinned. Even while they still adored the right, they chose the wrong.

I said that the trouble was unprecedented. This is not strictly true. Something not wholly unlike this public shame seems to have occurred in the private experience of nearly every star. But each sufferer succeeded in keeping his shame secret until either with familiarity it became tolerable or else its source was overcome. It was indeed surprising that beings whose nature was in many ways so alien and unintelligible should be in this one respect at least so startlingly ‘human’.

In the outer layers of young stars life nearly always appears not only in the normal manner but also in the form of parasites, minute independent organisms of fire, often no bigger than a cloud in the terrestrial air, but sometimes as large as the Earth itself. These ‘salamanders’ either feed upon the welling energies of the star in the same manner as the star’s own organic tissues feed, or simply prey upon those tissues themselves. Here as elsewhere the laws of biological evolution come into force, and in time there may appear races of intelligent flame-like beings. Even when the salamandrian life does not reach this level, its effect on the star’s tissues may become evident to the star as a disease of its skin and sense organs, or even of its deeper tissues. It then experiences emotions not wholly unlike human fright and shame, and anxiously and most humanly guards its secret from the telepathic reach of its fellows.

The salamandrian races have never been able to gain mastery over their fiery worlds. Many of them succumb, soon or late, either to some natural disaster or to internecine strife or to the self-cleansing activities of their mighty host. Many others survive, but in a relatively harmless state, troubling their stars only with a mild irritation, and a faint shade of insincerity in all their dealings with one another.

In the public culture of the stars the salamandrian pest was completely ignored. Each star believed itself to be the only sufferer and the only sinner in the galaxy. One indirect effect the pest did have on stellar thought. It introduced the idea of purity. Each star prized the perfection of the stellar community all the more by reason of its own secret experience of impurity.

When the minded planets began to tamper seriously with stellar energy and stellar orbits, the effect was not a private shame but a public scandal. It was patent to all observers that the culprit had violated the canons of the dance. The first aberrations were greeted with bewilderment and horror. Amongst the hosts of the virgin stars it was whispered that if the result of the much prized interstellar contacts, whence the natural planets had sprung, was in the end this shameful irregularity, probably the original experience itself had also been sinful. The erring stars protested that they were not sinners, but victims of some unknown influence from the grains which revolved about them. Yet secretly they doubted themselves. Had they long ago, in the ecstatic sweep of star to star, after all infringed the canon of the dance? They suspected, moreover, that in respect of the irregularities which were now creating this public scandal, they could, if they had willed firmly enough, have contained themselves, and preserved their true courses in spite of the irritants that had affected them.

Meanwhile the power of the minded planets increased. Suns were boldly steered to suit the purposes of their parasites. To the stellar population it seemed, of course, that these erring stars were dangerous lunatics. The crisis came, as I have already said, when the worlds projected their first messenger toward the neighbouring galaxy. The hurtling star, terrified at its own maniac behaviour, took the only retaliation that was known to it. It exploded into the ‘nova’ state, and successfully destroyed its planets. From the orthodox stellar point of view this act was a deadly sin; for it was an impious interference with the divinely appointed order of a star’s life. But it secured the desired end, and was soon copied by other desperate stars.

Then followed that age of horror which I have already described from the point of view of the Society of Worlds. From the stellar point of view it was no less terrible, for the condition of the stellar society soon became desperate. Gone was the perfection and beatitude of former days. ‘The City of God’ had degenerated into a place of hatred, recrimination and despair. Hosts of the younger stars had become premature and embittered dwarfs, while the elders had mostly grown senile. The dance pattern had fallen into chaos. The old passion for the canons of the dance remained, but the conception of the canons was obscured. Spiritual life had succumbed to the necessity of urgent action. The passion for the progress of insight into the nature of the cosmos also remained, but insight itself was obscured. Moreover, the former naïve confidence, common to young and mature alike, the certainty that the cosmos was perfect and that the power behind it was righteous, had given place to blank despair.

4. GALACTIC SYMBIOSIS

SUCH WAS THE state of affairs when the minded worlds first attempted to make telepathic contact with the minded stars. I need not tell the stages by which mere contact was developed into a clumsy and precarious kind of communication. In time the stars must have begun to realize that they were at grips, not with mere physical forces, nor yet with fiends, but with beings whose nature, though so profoundly alien, was at bottom identical with their own. Our telepathic research obscurely sensed the amazement which spread throughout the stellar population. Two opinions, two policies, two parties seem to have gradually emerged.

One of these parties was convinced that the pretensions of the minded planets must be false, that beings whose history was compact of sin and strife and slaughter must be essentially diabolic, and that to parley with them was to court disaster. This party, at first in a majority, urged that the war should be continued till every planet had been destroyed.

The minority party clamoured for peace. The planets, they affirmed, were seeking in their own way the very same goal as the stars. It was even suggested that these minute beings, with their more varied experience and their long acquaintance with evil, might have certain kinds of insight which the stars, those fallen angels, lacked. Might not the two sorts of being create together a glorious symbiotic society, and achieve together the end that was most dear to both, namely the full awakening of the spirit?

It was a long while before the majority would listen to this counsel. Destruction continued. The precious energies of the galaxy were squandered. System after system of worlds was destroyed. Star after star sank into exhaustion and stupor.

Meanwhile the Society of Worlds maintained a pacific attitude. No more stellar energy was tapped. No more stellar orbits were altered. No stars were artificially exploded.

Stellar opinion began to change. The crusade of extermination relaxed, and was abandoned. There followed a period of ‘isolationism’ in which the stars, intent on repairing their shattered society, left their former enemies alone. Gradually a fumbling attempt at fraternization began between the planets and their suns. The two kinds of beings, though so alien that they could not at all comprehend each other’s idiosyncrasies, were too lucid for mere tribal passions. They resolved to overcome all obstacles and enter into some kind of community. Soon it was the desire of every star to be girdled with artificial planets and enter into some sort of ‘sympsychic’ partnership with its encircling companions. For it was by now clear to the stars that the ‘vermin’ had much to give them. The experience of the two orders of beings was in many ways complementary. The stars retained still the tenor of the angelic wisdom of their golden age. The planets excelled in the analytic, the microscopic, and in that charity which was bred in them by knowledge of their own weak and suffering forbears. To the stars, moreover, it was perplexing that their minute companions could accept not merely with resignation but with joy a cosmos which evidently was seamed with evil.

In due season a symbiotic society of stars and planetary systems embraced the whole galaxy. But it was at first a wounded society, and ever after an impoverished galaxy. Few only of its million million stars were still in their prime. Every possible sun was now girdled with planets. Many dead stars were stimulated to disintegrate their atoms so as to provide artificial suns. Others were used in a more economical manner. Special races of intelligent organisms were bred or synthetized to inhabit the surfaces of these great worlds. Very soon, upon a thousand stars that once had blazed, teeming populations of innumerable types maintained an austere civilization. These subsisted on the volcanic energies of their huge worlds. Minute, artificially contrived worm-like creatures, they crept laboriously over the plains where oppressive gravitation allowed not so much as a stone to project above the general level. So violent, indeed, was gravitation, that even the little bodies of these worms might be shattered by a fall of half an inch. Save for artificial lighting, the inhabitants of the stellar worlds lived in eternal darkness, mitigated only by the starlight, the glow of volcanic eruption, and the phosphorescence of their own bodies. Their subterranean borings led down to the vast photosynthesis stations which converted the star’s imprisoned energy for the uses of life and of mind. Intelligence in these gigantic worlds was of course a function not of the separate individual but of the minded swarm. Like the insectoids, these little creatures, when isolated from the swarm, were mere instinctive animals, actuated wholly by the gregarious craving to return to the swarm.

The need to people the dead stars would not have arisen had not the war reduced the number of minded planets and the number of suns available for new planetary systems dangerously near the minimum required to maintain the communal life in full diversity. The Society of Worlds had been a delicately organized unity in which each element had a special function. It was therefore necessary, since the lost members could not be repeated, to produce new worlds to function in their places at least approximately.

Gradually the symbiotic society overcame the immense difficulties of reorganization, and began to turn its attention to the pursuit of that purpose which is the ultimate purpose of all awakened minds, the aim which they inevitably and gladly espouse because it is involved in their deepest nature. Henceforth the symbiotic society gave all its best attention to the further awakening of the spirit.

But this purpose, which formerly the angelic company of the stars and the ambitious Society of Worlds had each hoped to accomplish in relation not merely to the galaxy but to the cosmos, was now regarded more humbly. Both stars and worlds recognized that not merely the home galaxy but the cosmical swarm of galaxies was nearing its end. Physical energy, once a seemingly inexhaustible fund, was becoming less and less available for the maintenance of life. It was spreading itself more and more evenly over the whole cosmos. Only here and there and with difficulty could the minded organisms intercept it in its collapse from high to low potential. Very soon the universe would be physically senile.

All ambitious plans had therefore to be abandoned. No longer was there any question of physical travel between the galaxies. Such enterprises would use up too many of the pence out of the few pounds of wealth that survived after the extravagance of former aeons. No longer was there any unnecessary coming and going, even within the galaxy itself. The worlds clung to their suns. The suns steadily cooled. And as they cooled, the encircling worlds contracted their orbits for warmth’s sake.

But though the galaxy was physically impoverished, it was in many ways utopian. The symbiotic society of stars and worlds was perfectly harmonious. Strife between the two kinds was a memory of the remote past. Both were wholly loyal to the common purpose. They lived their personal lives in zestful cooperation, friendly conflict, and mutual interest. Each took part according to its capacity in the common task of cosmical exploration and appreciation. The stars were now dying off more rapidly than before, for the great host of the mature had become a great host of aged white dwarfs. As they died, they bequeathed their bodies to the service of the society, to be used either as reservoirs of sub-atomic energy, or as artificial suns, or as worlds to be peopled by intelligent populations of worms. Many a planetary system was now centred round an artificial sun. Physically the substitution was tolerable; but beings that had become mentally dependent on partnership with a living star regarded a mere furnace with despondency. Foreseeing the inevitable dissolution of the symbiosis throughout the galaxy, the planets were now doing all in their power to absorb the angelic wisdom of the stars. But after very few aeons the planets themselves had to begin reducing their number. The myriad worlds could no longer all crowd closely enough around their cooling suns. Soon the mental power of the galaxy, which had hitherto been with difficulty maintained at its highest pitch, must inevitably begin to wane.

Yet the temper of the galaxy was not sad but joyful. The symbiosis had greatly improved the art of telepathic communion; and now at last the many kinds of spirit which composed the galactic society were bound so closely in mutual insight that there had emerged out of their harmonious diversity a true galactic mind, whose mental reach surpassed that of the stars and of the worlds as far as these surpassed their own individuals.

The galactic mind, which was but the mind of each individual star and world and minute organism in the worlds, enriched by all its fellows and awakened to finer percipience, saw that it had but a short time to live. Looking back through the ages of galactic history, down temporal vistas crowded with teeming and diversified populations, the mind of our galaxy saw that itself was the issue of untold strife and grief and hope frustrated. It confronted all the tortured spirits of the past not with pity or regret but with smiling content, such as a man may feel toward his own childhood’s tribulations. And it said, within the mind of each one of all its members, ‘Their suffering, which to them seemed barren evil, was the little price to be paid for my future coming. Right and sweet and beautiful is the whole in which these things happen. For I, I am the heaven in which all my myriad progenitors find recompense, finding their heart’s desire. For in the little time that is left me I shall press on, with all my peers throughout the cosmos, to crown the cosmos with perfect and joyful insight, and to salute the Maker of Galaxies and Stars and Worlds with fitting praise.’

XII. A STUNTED COSMICAL SPIRIT

WHEN AT LAST our galaxy was able to make a full telepathic exploration of the cosmos of galaxies it discovered that the state of life in the cosmos was precarious. Very few of the galaxies were now in their youth; most were already far past their prime. Throughout the cosmos the dead and lightless stars far outnumbered the living and luminous. In many galaxies the strife of stars and worlds had been even more disastrous than in our own. Peace had been secured only after both sides had degenerated past hope of recovery. In most of the younger galaxies, however, this strife had not yet appeared; and efforts were already being made by the most awakened galactic spirits to enlighten the ignorant stellar and planetary societies about one another before they should blunder into conflict.

The communal spirit of our galaxy now joined the little company of the most awakened beings of the cosmos, the scattered band of advanced galactic spirits, whose aim it was to create a real cosmical community, with a single mind, the communal spirit of its myriad and diverse worlds and individual intelligences. Thus it was hoped to acquire powers of insight and of creativity impossible on the merely galactic plane.

With grave joy we, the cosmical explorers, who were already gathered up into the communal mind of our own galaxy, now found ourselves in intimate union with a score of other galactic minds. We, or rather I, now experienced the slow drift of the galaxies much as a man feels the swing of his own limbs. From my score of view-points I observed the great snow-storm of many million galaxies, streaming and circling, and ever withdrawing farther apart from one another with the relentless ‘expansion’ of space. But though the vastness of space was increasing in relation to the size of galaxies and stars and worlds, to me, with my composite, scattered body, space seemed no bigger than a great vaulted hall.

My experience of time also had changed; for now, as on an earlier occasion, the aeons had become for me as brief as minutes. I conceived the whole life of the cosmos not as an immensely protracted and leisurely passage from a remote and shadowy source to a glorious and a still more remote eternity, but as a brief, a headlong and forlorn, race against galloping time.

Confronted by the many backward galaxies, I seemed to myself to be a lonely intelligence in a wilderness of barbarians and beasts. The mystery, the futility, the horror of existence now bore down upon me most cruelly. For to me, to the spirit of that little band of awakened galaxies, surrounded by unawakened and doomed hordes in the last day of the cosmos, there appeared no hope of any triumph elsewhere. For to me the whole extent, seemingly, of existence was revealed. There could be no ‘elsewhere’. I knew with exactness the sum of cosmical matter. And though the ‘expansion’ of space was already sweeping most of the galaxies apart more swiftly than light could bridge the gulf, telepathic exploration still kept me in touch with the whole extent of the cosmos. Many of my own members were physically divided from one another by the insurmountable gulf created by the ceaseless ‘expansion’; but telepathically they were still united.

I, the communal mind of a score of galaxies, seemed now to myself to be the abortive and crippled mind of the cosmos itself. The myriadfold community that supported me ought surely to have expanded to embrace the whole of existence. In the climax of cosmical history the fully awakened mind of the cosmos ought surely to have won through to the fulness of knowledge and of worship. But this was not to be. For even now, in the late phase of the cosmos, when the physical potency was almost all exhausted, I had reached only to a lowly state of spiritual growth. I was mentally still adolescent, yet my cosmical body was already in decay. I was the struggling embryo in the cosmical egg, and the yolk was already in decay.

Looking back along the vistas of the aeons, I was impressed less by the length of the journey that had led me to my present state than by its haste and confusion, and even its brevity. Peering into the very earliest of the ages, before the stars were born, before the nebulae were formed from chaos, I still failed to see any clear source, but only a mystery as obscure as any that confronts the little inhabitants of the Earth.

Equally, when I tried to probe the depths of my own being, I found impenetrable mystery. Though my self-consciousness was awakened to a degree thrice removed beyond the self-consciousness of human beings, namely from the simple individual to the world-mind, and from the world-mind to the galactic mind, and thence to the abortively cosmical, yet the depth of my nature was obscure.

Although my mind now gathered into itself all the wisdom of all worlds in all ages, and though the life of my cosmical body was itself the life of myriads of infinitely diverse worlds and myriads of infinitely diverse individual creatures, and though the texture of my daily life was one of joyful and creative enterprise, yet all this was as nothing. For around lay the host of the unfulfilled galaxies; and my own flesh was already grievously impoverished by the death of my stars; and the aeons were slipping past with fatal speed. Soon the texture of my cosmical brain must disintegrate. And then inevitably I must fall away from my prized though imperfect state of lucidity, and descend, through all the stages of the mind’s second childhood, down to the cosmical death.

It was very strange that I, who knew the whole extent of space and time, and counted the wandering stars like sheep, overlooking none, that I who was the most awakened of all beings, I, the glory which myriads in all ages had given their lives to establish, and myriads had worshipped, should now look about me with the same overpowering awe, the same abashed and tongue-tied worship as that which human travellers in the desert feel under the stars.

XIII. THE BEGINNING AND THE END

1. BACK TO THE NEBULAE

WHILE THE AWAKENED galaxies were striving to make full use of the last phase of their lucid consciousness, while I, the imperfect cosmical mind, was thus striving, I began to have a strange new experience. I seemed to be telepathically stumbling upon some being or beings of an order that was at first quite incomprehensible to me.

At first I supposed that I had inadvertently come into touch with sub-human beings in the primitive age of some natural planet, perhaps with some very lowly amoeboid micro-organisms, floating in a primeval sea. I was aware only of crude hungers of the body, such as the lust to assimilate physical energy for the maintenance of life, the lust of movement and of contact, the lust of light and warmth.

Impatiently I tried to dismiss this trivial irrelevance. But it continued to haunt me, becoming more intrusive and more lucid. Gradually it took on such an intensity of physical vigour and well-being, and such a divine confidence, as was manifested by no spirits up and down the ages since the stars began.

I need not tell of the stages by which I learned at last the meaning of this experience. Gradually I discovered that I had made contact not with micro-organisms, nor yet with worlds or stars or galactic minds, but with the minds of the great nebulae before their substance had disintegrated into stars to form the galaxies.

Presently I was able to follow their history from the time when they first wakened, when they first existed as discrete clouds of gas, flying apart after the explosive act of creation, even to the time when, with the birth of the stellar hosts out of their substance, they sank into senility and death.

In their earliest phase, when physically they were the most tenuous clouds, their mentality was no more than a formless craving for action and a sleepy perception of the infinitely slight congestion of their own vacuous substance.

I watched them condense into close-knit balls with sharper contours, then into lentoid discs, featured with brighter streams and darker chasms. As they condensed, each gained more unity, became more organic in structure. Congestion, though so slight, brought greater mutual influence to their atoms, which still were no more closely packed, in relation to their size, than stars in space. Each nebula was now a single great pool of faint radiation, a single system of all-pervasive waves, spreading from atom to atom.

And now mentally these greatest of all megatheria, these amoeboid titans, began to waken into a vague unity of experience. By human standards, and even by the standards of the minded worlds and the stars, the experience of the nebulae was incredibly slow-moving. For owing to their prodigious size and the slow passage of the undulations to which their consciousness was physically related, a thousand years was for them an imperceptible instant. Periods such as men call geological, containing the rise and fall of species after species, they experienced as we experience the hours.

Each of the great nebulae was aware of its own lentoid body as a single volume compact of tingling currents. Each craved fulfilment of its organic potency, craved easement from the pressure of physical energy welling softly within it, craved at the same time free expression of all its powers of movement, craved also something more.

For though, both in physique and in mentality, these primordial beings were strangely like the primeval micro-organisms of planetary life, they were also remarkably different; or at least they manifested a character which even I, the rudimentary cosmical mind, had overlooked in micro-organisms. This was a will or predilection that I can only by halting metaphor suggest.

Though even at their best these creatures were physically and intellectually very simple, they were gifted with something which I am forced to describe as a primitive but intense religious consciousness. For they were ruled by two longings, both of which were essentially religious. They desired, or rather they had a blind urge toward union with one another, and they had a blind passionate urge to be gathered up once more into the source whence they had come.

The universe that they inhabited was of course a very simple, even a poverty-stricken universe. It was also to them quite small. For each of them the cosmos consisted of two things, the nebula’s own almost featureless body and the bodies of the other nebulae. In this early age of the cosmos the nebulae were very close to one another, for the volume of the cosmos was at this time small in relation to its parts, whether nebulae or electrons. In that age the nebulae, which in man’s day are like birds at large in the sky, were confined, as it were, within a narrow aviary. Thus each exercised an appreciable influence on its fellows. And as each became more organized, more of a coherent physical unity, it distinguished more readily between its native wave-pattern and the irregularities which its neighbours’ influence imposed upon that pattern. And by a native propensity implanted in it at the time of its emergence from the common ancestral cloud, it interpreted this influence to mean the presence of other minded nebulae.

Thus the nebulae in their prime were vaguely but intensely aware of one another as distinct beings. They were aware of one another; but their communication with each other was very meagre and very slow. As prisoners confined in separate cells give one another a sense of companionship by tapping on their cell walls, and may even in time work out a crude system of signals, so the nebulae revealed to one another their kinship by exercising gravitational stress upon one another, and by long-drawn-out pulsations of their light. Even in the early phase of their existence, when the nebulae were very close to one another, a message would take many thousands of years to spell itself out from beginning to end, and many millions of years to reach its destination. When the nebulae were at their prime, the whole cosmos reverberated with their talk.

In the earliest phase of all, when these huge creatures were still very close to one another and also immature, their parleying was concerned wholly with the effort to reveal themselves to one another. With childlike glee they laboriously communicated their joy in life, their hungers and pains, their whims, their idiosyncrasies, their common passion to be once more united, and to be, as men have sometimes said, at one in God.

But even in early days, when few nebulae were yet mature, and most were still very unclear in their minds, it became evident to the more awakened that, far from uniting, they were steadily drifting apart. As the physical influence of one on another diminished, each nebula perceived its companions shrinking into the distance. Messages took longer and longer to elicit answers.

Had the nebulae been able to communicate telepathically, the ‘expansion’ of the universe might have been faced without despair. But these beings were apparently too simple to make direct and lucid mental contact with one another. Thus they found themselves doomed to separation. And since their life-tempo was so slow, they seemed to themselves to have scarcely found one another before they must be parted. Bitterly they regretted the blindness of their infancy. For as they reached maturity they conceived, one and all, not merely the passion of mutual delight which we call love, but also the conviction that through mental union with one another lay the way to union with the source whence they had come.

When it had become clear that separation was inevitable, when indeed the hard-won community of these naïve beings was already failing through the increased difficulty of communication, and the most remote nebulae were already receding from one another at high speed, each perforce made ready to face the mystery of existence in absolute solitude.

There followed an aeon, or rather for the slow-living creatures themselves a brief spell, in which they sought, by self-mastery of their own flesh and by spiritual discipline, to find the supreme illumination which all awakened beings must, in their very nature, seek.

But now there appeared a new trouble. Some of the eldest of the nebulae complained of a strange sickness which greatly hampered their meditations. The outer fringes of their tenuous flesh began to concentrate into little knots. These became in time grains of intense, congested fire. In the void between, there was nothing left but a few stray atoms. At first the complaint was no more serious than some trivial rash on a man’s skin; but later it spread into the deeper tissues of the nebula, and was accompanied by grave mental troubles. In vain the doomed creatures resolved to turn the plague to an advantage by treating it as a heaven-sent test of the spirit. Though for a while they might master the plague simply by heroic contempt of it, its ravages eventually broke down their will. It now seemed clear to them that the cosmos was a place of futility and horror.

Presently the younger nebulae observed that their seniors, one by one, were falling into a state of sluggishness and confusion which ended invariably in the sleep that men call death. Soon it became evident even to the most buoyant spirit that this disease was no casual accident but a fate inherent in the nebular nature.

One by one the celestial megatheria were annihilated, giving place to stars.

Looking back on these events from my post in the far future, I, the rudimentary cosmical mind, tried to make known to the dying nebulae in the remote past that their death, far from being the end, was but an early stage in the life of the cosmos. It was my hope that I might give them consolation by imparting some idea of the vast and intricate future, and of my own final awakening. But it proved impossible to communicate with them. Though within the sphere of their ordinary experience they were capable of a sort of intellection, beyond that sphere they were almost imbecile. As well might a man seek to comfort the disintegrating germ-cell from which he himself sprang by telling it about his own successful career in human society.

Since this attempt to comfort was vain, I put aside compassion, and was content merely to follow to its conclusion the collapse of the nebular community. Judged by human standards the agony was immensely prolonged. It began with the disintegration of the eldest nebulae into stars, and it lasted (or will last) long after the destruction of the final human race on Neptune. Indeed, the last of the nebulae did not sink into complete unconsciousness till many of the corpses of its neighbours had already been transformed into symbiotic societies of stars and minded worlds. But to the slow-living nebulae themselves the plague seemed a galloping disease. One after the other, each great religious beast found itself at grips with the subtle enemy, and fought a gallant losing fight until stupor overwhelmed it. None ever knew that its crumbling flesh teemed with the young and swifter lives of stars, or that it was already sprinkled here and there with the incomparably smaller, incomparably swifter, and incomparably richer lives of creatures such as men, whose crowded ages of history were all compressed within the last few distressful moments of the primeval monsters.

2. THE SUPREME MOMENT NEARS

THE DISCOVERY OF nebular life deeply moved the incipient cosmical mind that I had become. Patiently I studied those almost formless megatheria, absorbing into my own composite being the fervour of their simple but deep-running nature. For these simple creatures sought their goal with a single-mindedness and passion eclipsing all the worlds and stars. With such earnest imagination did I enter into their history that I myself, the cosmical mind, was in a manner re-made by contemplation of these beings. Considering from the nebular point of view the vast complexity and subtlety of the living worlds, I began to wonder whether the endless divagations of the worlds were really due so much to richness of being as to weakness of spiritual perception, so much to the immensely varied potentiality of their nature as to sheer lack of any intense controlling experience. A compass needle that is but feebly magnetized swings again and again to west and east, and takes long to discover its proper direction. One that is more sensitive will settle immediately toward the north. Had the sheer complexity of every world, with its host of minute yet complex members, merely confused its sense of the proper direction of all spirit? Had the simplicity and spiritual vigour of the earliest, hugest beings achieved something of highest value that the complexity and subtlety of the worlds could never achieve?

But no! Excellent as the nebular mentality was, in its own strange way, the stellar and the planetary mentalities had also their special virtues. And of all three the planetary must be most prized, since it could best comprehend all three.

I now allowed myself to believe that I, since I did at last include in my own being an intimate awareness not only of many galaxies but also of the first phase of cosmical life, might now with some justice regard myself as the incipient mind of the cosmos as a whole.

But the awakened galaxies that supported me were still only a small minority of the total population of galaxies. By telepathic influence I continued to help on those many galaxies that were upon the threshold of mental maturity. If I could include within the cosmical community of awakened galaxies some hundreds instead of a mere score of members, perhaps I myself, the communal mind, might be so strengthened as to rise from my present state of arrested mental infancy to something more like maturity. It was clear to me that even now, in my embryonic state, I was ripening for some new elucidation; and that with good fortune I might yet find myself in the presence of that which, in the human language of this book, has been called the Star Maker.

At this time my longing for that presence had become an overmastering passion. It seemed to me that the veil which still hid the source and goal of all nebulae and stars and worlds was already dissolving. That which had kindled so many myriad beings to worship, yet had clearly revealed itself to none, that toward which all beings had blindly striven, representing it to themselves by the images of a myriad divinities, was now, I felt, on the point of revelation to me, the marred but still growing spirit of the cosmos.

I who had myself been worshipped by hosts of my little members, I whose achievement reached far beyond their dreams, was now oppressed, overwhelmed, by the sense of my own littleness and imperfection. For the veiled presence of the Star Maker already overmastered me with dreadful power. The further I ascended along the path of the spirit, the loftier appeared the heights that lay before me. For what I had once thought to be the summit fully revealed was now seen to be a mere foot-hill. Beyond lay the real ascent, steep, cragged, glacial, rising into the dark mist. Never, never should I climb that precipice. And yet I must go forward. Dread was overcome by irresistible craving.

Meanwhile under my influence the immature galaxies one by one attained that pitch of lucidity which enabled them to join the cosmical community and enrich me with their special experience. But physically the enfeeblement of the cosmos continued. By the time that half the total population of galaxies had reached maturity it became clear that few more would succeed.

Of living stars, very few were left in any galaxy. Of the host of dead stars, some, subjected to atomic disintegration, were being used as artificial suns, and were surrounded by many thousands of artificial planets. But the great majority of the stars were now encrusted, and themselves peopled. After a while it became necessary to evacuate all planets, since the artificial suns were too extravagant of energy. The planet-dwelling races therefore one by one destroyed themselves, bequeathing the material of their worlds and all their wisdom to the inhabitants of the extinguished stars. Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.

By far the commonest type of being in these stellar worlds was the intelligent swarm of minute worms or insectoids. But there were also many races of larger creatures of a very curious kind adapted to the prodigious gravitation of their giant worlds. Each of these creatures was a sort of living blanket. Its under surface bore a host of tiny legs that were also mouths. These supported a body that was never more than an inch thick, though it might be as much as a couple of yards wide and ten yards long. At the forward end the manipulatory ‘arms’ travelled on their own battalions of legs. The upper surface of the body contained a honeycomb of breathing-pores and a great variety of sense organs. Between the two surfaces spread the organs of metabolism and the vast area of brain. Compared with the worm-swarms and insect-swarms, these tripe-like beings had the advantage of more secure mental unity and greater specialization of organs; but they were more cumbersome, and less adapted to the subterranean life which was later to be forced on all populations.

The huge dark worlds with their immense weight of atmosphere and their incredible breadths of ocean, where the waves even in the most furious storms were never more than ripples such as we know on quicksilver, were soon congested with the honeycomb civilizations of worms and insectoids of many species, and the more precarious shelters of the tripe-like creatures. Life on these worlds was almost like life in a two-dimensional ‘flat-land’. Even the most rigid of the artificial elements was too weak to allow of lofty structures.

As time advanced, the internal heat of the encrusted stars was used up, and it became necessary to support civilization by atomic disintegration of the star’s rocky core. Thus in time each stellar world became an increasingly hollow sphere supported by a system of great internal buttresses. One by one the populations, or rather the new and specially adapted descendants of the former populations, retired into the interiors of the burnt-out stars.

Each imprisoned in its hollow world, and physically isolated from the rest of the cosmos, these populations telepathically supported the cosmical mind. These were my flesh. In the inevitable ‘expansion’ of the universe, the dark galaxies had already for aeons been flying apart so rapidly that light itself could not have bridged the gulf between them. But this prodigious disintegration of the cosmos was of less account to the ultimate populations than the physical insulation of star from star through the cessation of all stellar radiation and all interstellar travel. The many populations, teeming in the galleries of the many worlds, maintained their telepathic union. Intimately they knew one another in all their diversity. Together they supported the communal mind, with all its awareness of the whole vivid, intricate past of the cosmos, and its tireless effort to achieve its spiritual goal before increase of entropy should destroy the tissue of civilizations in which it inhered.

Such was the condition of the cosmos when it approached the supreme moment of its career, and the illumination toward which all beings in all ages had been obscurely striving. Strange it was that these latter-day populations, cramped and impoverished, counting their last pence of energy, should achieve the task that had defeated the brilliant hosts of earlier epochs. Theirs was indeed the case of the wren that outsoared the eagle. In spite of their straitened circumstances they were still able to maintain the essential structure of a cosmical community, and a cosmical mentality. And with native insight they could use the past to deepen their wisdom far beyond the range of any past wisdom.

The supreme moment of the cosmos was not (or will not be) a moment by human standards; but by cosmical standards it was indeed a brief instant. When little more than half the total population of many million galaxies had entered fully into the cosmical community, and it was clear that no more were to be expected, there followed a period of universal meditation. The populations maintained their straitened utopian civilizations, lived their personal lives of work and social intercourse, and at the same time, upon the communal plane, refashioned the whole structure of cosmical culture. Of this phase I shall say nothing. Suffice it that to each galaxy and to each world was assigned a special creative mental function, and that all assimilated the work of all. At the close of this period I, the communal mind, emerged re-made, as from a chrysalis; and for a brief moment, which was indeed the supreme moment of the cosmos, I faced the Star Maker.

For the human author of this book there is now nothing left of that age-long, that eternal moment which I experienced as the cosmical mind, save the recollection of a bitter beatitude, together with a few incoherent memories of the experience itself which fired me with that beatitude.

Somehow I must tell something of that experience. Inevitably I face the task with a sense of abysmal incompetence. The greatest minds of the human race through all the ages of human history have failed to describe their moments of deepest insight. Then how dare I attempt this task? And yet I must. Even at the risk of well-merited ridicule and contempt and moral censure, I must stammer out what I have seen. If a shipwrecked seaman on his raft is swept helplessly past marvellous coasts and then home again, he cannot hold his peace. The cultivated may turn away in disgust at his rude accent and clumsy diction. The knowing may laugh at his failure to distinguish between fact and illusion. But speak he must.

3. THE SUPREME MOMENT AND AFTER

IN THE SUPREME moment of the cosmos I, as the cosmical mind, seemed to myself to be confronted with the source and the goal of all finite things.

I did not, of course, in that moment sensuously perceive the infinite spirit, the Star Maker. Sensuously I perceived nothing but what I had perceived before, the populous interiors of many dying stellar worlds. But through the medium which in this book is called telepathic I was now given a more inward perception. I felt the immediate presence of the Star Maker. Latterly, as I have said, I had already been powerfully seized by a sense of the veiled presence of some being other than myself, other than my cosmical body and conscious mind, other than my living members and the swarms of the burnt-out stars. But now the veil trembled and grew half-transparent to the mental vision. The source and goal of all, the Star Maker, was obscurely revealed to me as a being indeed other than my conscious self, objective to my vision, yet as in the depth of my own nature; as, indeed, myself, though infinitely more than myself.

It seemed to me that I now saw the Star Maker in two aspects: as the spirit’s particular creative mode that had given rise to me, the cosmos; and also, most dreadfully, as something incomparably greater than creativity, namely as the eternally achieved perfection of the absolute spirit.

Barren, barren and trivial are these words. But not barren the experience.

Confronted with this infinity that lay deeper than my deepest roots and higher than my topmost reach, I, the cosmical mind, the flower of all the stars and worlds, was appalled, as any savage is appalled by the lightning and the thunder. And as I fell abject before the Star Maker, my mind was flooded with a spate of images. The fictitious deities of all races in all worlds once more crowded themselves upon me, symbols of majesty and tenderness, of ruthless power, of blind creativity, and of all-seeing wisdom. And though these images were but the fantasies of created minds, it seemed to me that one and all did indeed embody some true feature of the Star Maker’s impact upon the creatures.

As I contemplated the host of deities that rose to me like a smoke cloud from the many worlds, a new image, a new symbol of the infinite spirit, took shape in my mind. Though born of my own cosmical imagination, it was begotten by a greater than I. To the human writer of this book little remains of that vision which so abashed and exalted me as the cosmical mind. But I must strive to recapture it in a feeble net of words as best I may.

It seemed to me that I had reached back through time to the moment of creation. I watched the birth of the cosmos.

The spirit brooded. Though infinite and eternal, it had limited itself with finite and temporal being, and it brooded on a past that pleased it not. It was dissatisfied with some past creation, hidden from me; and it was dissatisfied also with its own passing nature. Discontent goaded the spirit into fresh creation.

But now, according to the fantasy that my cosmical mind conceived, the absolute spirit, self-limited for creativity, objectified from itself an atom of its infinite potentiality.

This microcosm was pregnant with the germ of a proper time and space, and all the kinds of cosmical beings.

Within this punctual cosmos the myriad but not unnumbered physical centres of power, which men conceive vaguely as electrons, protons, and the rest, were at first coincident with one another. And they were dormant. The matter of ten million galaxies lay dormant in a point.

Then the Star Maker said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.

From all the coincident and punctual centres of power, light leapt and blazed. The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centres of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single spirit of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all others throughout all the cosmical space and time.

No longer punctual, the cosmos was now a volume of inconceivably dense matter and inconceivably violent radiation, constantly expanding. And it was a sleeping and infinitely dissociated spirit.

But to say that the cosmos was expanding is equally to say that its members were contracting. The ultimate centres of power, each at first coincident with the punctual cosmos, themselves generated the cosmical space by their disengagement from each other. The expansion of the whole cosmos was but the shrinkage of all its physical units and of the wave-lengths of its light.

Though the cosmos was ever of finite bulk, in relation to its minutiae of light-waves, it was boundless and centre-less. As the surface of a swelling sphere lacks boundary and centre, so the swelling volume of the cosmos was boundless and centre-less. But as the spherical surface is centred on a point foreign to it, in a ‘third dimension’, so the volume of the cosmos was centred in a point foreign to it, in a ‘fourth dimension’.

The congested and exploding cloud of fire swelled till it was of a planet’s size, a star’s size, the size of a whole galaxy, and of ten million galaxies. And in swelling it became more tenuous, less brilliant, less turbulent.

Presently the cosmical cloud was disrupted by the stress of its expansion in conflict with the mutual clinging of its parts, disrupted into many million cloudlets, the swarm of the great nebulae.

For a while these were as close to one another in relation to their bulk as the flocculations of a mottled sky. But the channels between them widened, till they were separated as flowers on a bush, as bees in a flying swarm, as birds migrating, as ships on the sea. More and more rapidly they retreated from one another; and at the same time each cloud contracted, becoming first a ball of down and then a spinning lens and then a featured whirl of star-streams.

Still the cosmos expanded, till the galaxies that were most remote from one another were flying apart so swiftly that the creeping light of the cosmos could no longer bridge the gulf between them.

But I, with imaginative vision, retained sight of them all. It was as though some other, some hypercosmical and instantaneous light, issuing from nowhere in the cosmical space, illuminated all things inwardly.

Once more, but in a new and cold and penetrating light, I watched all the lives of stars and worlds, and of the galactic communities, and of myself, up to the moment wherein now I stood, confronted by the infinity that men call God, and conceive according to their human cravings.

I, too, now sought to capture the infinite spirit, the Star Maker, in an image spun by my own finite though cosmical nature. For now it seemed to me, it seemed, that I suddenly outgrew the three-dimensional vision proper to all creatures, and that I saw with physical sight the Star Maker. I saw, though nowhere in cosmical space, the blazing source of the hypercosmical light, as though it were an overwhelmingly brilliant point, a star, a sun more powerful than all suns together. It seemed to me that this effulgent star was the centre of a four-dimensional sphere whose curved surface was the three-dimensional cosmos. This star of stars, this star that was indeed the Star Maker, was perceived by me, its cosmical creature, for one moment before its splendour seared my vision. And in that moment I knew that I had indeed seen the very source of all cosmical light and life and mind; and of how much else besides I had as yet no knowledge.

But this image, this symbol that my cosmical mind had conceived under the stress of inconceivable experience, broke and was transformed in the very act of my conceiving it, so inadequate was it to the actuality of the experience. Harking back in my blindness to the moment of my vision, I now conceived that the star which was the Star Maker, and the immanent centre of all existence, had been perceived as looking down on me, his creature from the height of his infinitude; and that when I saw him I immediately spread the poor wings of my spirit to soar up to him, only to be blinded and seared and struck down. It had seemed to me in the moment of my vision that all the longing and hope of all finite spirits for union with the infinite spirit were strength to my wings. It seemed to me that the Star, my Maker, must surely stoop to meet me and raise me and enfold me in his radiance. For it seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.

It was not only physical effulgence that struck me down in that supreme moment of my life. In that moment I guessed what mood it was of the infinite spirit that had in fact made the cosmos, and constantly supported it, watching its tortured growth. And it was that discovery which felled me.

For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a very different spirit. And at once I knew that the Star Maker had made me not to be his bride, nor yet his treasured child, but for some other end.

It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work; calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws in its initial conception, and already lusting for fresh creation.

His gaze anatomized me with calm skill, dismissing my imperfections, and absorbing for his own enrichment all the little excellence that I had won in the struggle of the ages.

In my agony I cried out against my ruthless maker. I cried out that, after all, the creature was nobler than the creator; for the creature loved and craved love, even from the star that was the Star Maker; but the creator, the Star Maker, neither loved nor had need of love.

But no sooner had I, in my blinded misery, cried out, than I was struck dumb with shame. For suddenly it was clear to me that virtue in the creator is not the same as virtue in the creature. For the creator, if he should love his creature, would be loving only a part of himself; but the creature, praising the creator, praises an infinity beyond himself. I saw that the virtue of the creature was to love and to worship, but the virtue of the creator was to create, and to be the infinite, the unrealizable and incomprehensible goal of worshipping creatures.

Once more, but in shame and adoration, I cried out to my maker. I said, ‘It is enough, and far more than enough, to be the creature of so dread and lovely a spirit, whose potency is infinite, whose nature passes the comprehension even of a minded cosmos. It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumuluously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation.’

And so there came upon me a strange peace and a strange joy.

Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet interest, my own decline and fall. I saw the populations of the stellar worlds use up more and more of their resources for the maintenance of their frugal civilizations. So much of the interior matter of the stars did they disintegrate, that their worlds were in danger of collapse. Some worlds did indeed crash in fragments upon their hollow centres, destroying the indwelling peoples. Most, before the critical point was reached, were re-made, patiently taken to pieces and rebuilt upon a smaller scale. One by one, each star was turned into a world of merely planetary size. Some were no bigger than the moon. The populations themselves were reduced to a mere millionth of their original numbers, maintaining within each little hollow grain a mere skeleton civilization in conditions that became increasingly penurious.

Looking into the future aeons from the supreme moment of the cosmos, I saw the populations still with all their strength maintaining the essentials of their ancient culture, still living their personal lives in zest and endless novelty of action, still practising telepathic intercourse between worlds, still telepathically sharing all that was of value in their respective world-spirits, still supporting a truly cosmical community with its single cosmical mind. I saw myself still preserving, though with increasing difficulty, my lucid consciousness; battling against the onset of drowsiness and senility, no longer in the hope of winning through to any more glorious state than that which I had already known, or of laying a less inadequate jewel of worship before the Star Maker, but simply out of sheer hunger for experience, and out of loyalty to the spirit.

But inevitably decay overtook me. World after world, battling with increasing economic difficulties, was forced to reduce its population below the numbers needed for the functioning of its own communal mentality. Then, like a degenerating brain-centre, it could no longer fulfil its part in the cosmical experience.

Looking forward from my station in the supreme moment of the cosmos, I saw myself, the cosmical mind, sink steadily toward death. But in this my last aeon, when all my powers were waning, and the burden of my decaying body pressed heavily on my enfeebled courage, an obscure memory of past lucidity still consoled me. For confusedly I knew that even in this my last, most piteous age I was still under the zestful though remote gaze of the Star Maker.

Still probing the future, from the moment of my supreme unwithered maturity, I saw my death, the final breaking of those telepathic contacts on which my being depended. Thereafter the few surviving worlds lived on in absolute isolation, and in that barbarian condition which men call civilized. Then in world after world the basic skills of material civilization began to fail; and in particular the techniques of atomic disintegration and photosynthesis. World after world either accidentally exploded its little remaining store of matter, and was turned into a spreading, fading sphere of light-waves in the immense darkness; or else died miserably of starvation and cold. Presently nothing was left in the whole cosmos but darkness and the dark whiffs of dust that once were galaxies. Aeons incalculable passed. Little by little each whiff of dust-grains contracted upon itself through the gravitational influence of its parts; till at last, not without fiery collisions between wandering grains, all the matter in each whiff was concentrated to became a single lump. The pressure of the huge outer regions heated the centre of each lump to incandescence and even to explosive activity. But little by little the last resources of the cosmos were radiated away from the cooling lumps, and nothing was left but rock and the inconceivably faint ripples of radiation that crept in all directions throughout the ever ‘expanding’ cosmos, far too slowly to bridge the increasing gulfs between the islanded grains of rock.

Meanwhile, since each rocky sphere that had once been a galaxy had been borne beyond every possible physical influence of its fellows, and there were no minds to maintain telepathic contact between them, each was in effect a wholly distinct universe. And since all change had ceased, the proper time of each barren universe had also ceased.

Since this apparently was to be the static and eternal end, I withdrew my fatigued attention back once more to the supreme moment which was in fact my present, or rather my immediate past. And with the whole mature power of my mind I tried to see more clearly what it was that had been present to me in that immediate past. For in that instant when I had seen the blazing star that was the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendour, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos.

XIV. THE MYTH OF CREATION

A WALKER IN mountainous country, lost in mist, and groping from rock to rock, may come suddenly out of the cloud to find himself on the very brink of a precipice. Below he sees valleys and hills, plains, rivers, and intricate cities, the sea with all its islands, and overhead the sun. So I, in the supreme moment of my cosmical experience, emerged from the mist of my finitude to be confronted by cosmos upon cosmos, and by the light itself that not only illumines but gives life to all. Then immediately the mist closed in upon me again.

That strange vision, inconceivable to any finite mind, even of cosmical stature, I cannot possibly describe. I, the little human individual, am now infinitely removed from it; and even to the cosmical mind itself it was most baffling. Yet if I were to say nothing whatever of the content of my adventure’s crowning moment, I should belie the spirit of the whole. Though human language and even human thought itself are perhaps in their very nature incapable of metaphysical truth, something I must somehow contrive to express, even if only by metaphor.

All I can do is to record, as best I may with my poor human powers, something of the vision’s strange and tumultuous after-effect upon my own cosmical imagination when the intolerable lucidity had already blinded me, and I gropingly strove to recollect what it was that had appeared. For in my blindness the vision did evoke from my stricken mind a fantastic reflex of itself, an echo, a symbol, a myth, a crazy dream, contemptibly crude and falsifying, yet, as I believe, not wholly without significance. This poor myth, this mere parable, I shall recount, so far as I can remember it in my merely human state. More I cannot do. But even this I cannot properly accomplish. Not once, but many times, I have written down an account of my dream, and then destroyed it, so inadequate was it. With a sense of utter failure I stammeringly report only a few of its more intelligible characters.

One feature of the actual vision my myth represented in a most perplexing and inadequate manner. It declared that the supreme moment of my experience as the cosmical mind actually comprised eternity within it, and that within eternity there lay a multiplicity of temporal sequences wholly distinct from one another. For though in eternity all times are present, and the infinite spirit, being perfect, must comprise in itself the full achievement of all possible creations, yet this could not be unless in its finite, its temporal and creative mode, the infinite and absolute spirit conceived and executed the whole vast series of creations. For creation’s sake the eternal and infinite spirit entails time within its eternity, contains the whole protracted sequence of creations.

In my dream, the Star Maker himself, as eternal and absolute spirit, timelessly contemplated all his works; but also as the finite and creative mode of the absolute spirit, he bodied forth his creations one after the other in a time sequence proper to his own adventure and growth. And further, each of his works, each cosmos, was itself gifted with its own peculiar time, in such a manner that the whole sequence of events within any single cosmos could be viewed by the Star Maker not only from within the cosmical time itself but also externally, from the time proper to his own life, with all the cosmical epochs co-existing together.

According to the strange dream or myth which took possession of my mind, the Star Maker in his finite and creative mode was actually a developing, an awakening spirit. That he should be so, and yet also eternally perfect, is of course humanly inconceivable; but my mind, overburdened with superhuman vision, found no other means of expressing to itself the mystery of creation.

Eternally, so my dream declared to me, the Star Maker is perfect and absolute; yet in the beginning of the time proper to his creative mode he was an infant deity, restless, eager, mighty, but without clear will. He was equipped with all creative power. He could make universes with all kinds of physical and mental attributes. He was limited only by logic. Thus he could ordain the most surprising natural laws, but he could not, for instance, make twice two equal five. In his early phase he was limited also by his immaturity. He was still in the trance of infancy. Though the unconscious source of his consciously exploring and creating mentality was none other than his own eternal essence, consciously he was at first but the vague blind hunger of creativity.

In his beginning he immediately set about exploring his power. He objectified from himself something of his own unconscious substance to be the medium of his art, and this he moulded with conscious purpose. Thus again and again he fashioned toy cosmos after toy cosmos.

But the creative Star Maker’s own unconscious substance was none other than the eternal spirit itself, the Star Maker in his eternal and perfect aspect. Thus it was that, in his immature phases, whenever he evoked from his own depth the crude substance of a cosmos, the substance itself turned out to be not formless but rich in determinate potentialities, logical, physical, biological, psychological. These potentialities were sometimes recalcitrant to the conscious purpose of the young Star Maker. He could not always accommodate, still less fulfil them. It seemed to me that this idiosyncrasy of the medium itself often defeated his plan; but also that it suggested again and again more fertile conceptions. Again and again, according to my myth, the Star Maker learned from his creature, and thereby outgrew his creature, and craved to work upon an ampler plan. Again and again he set aside a finished cosmos and evoked from himself a new creation.

Many times in the early part of my dream I felt doubt as to what the Star Maker was striving to accomplish in his creating. I could not but believe that his purpose was at first not clearly conceived. He himself had evidently to discover it gradually; and often, as it seemed to me, his work was tentative, and his aim confused. But at the close of his maturity he willed to create as fully as possible, to call forth the full potentiality of his medium, to fashion works of increasing subtlety, and of increasingly harmonious diversity. As his purpose became clearer, it seemed also to include the will to create universes each of which might contain some unique achievement of awareness and expression. For the creature’s achievement of perception and of will was seemingly the instrument by which the Star Maker himself, cosmos by cosmos, woke into keener lucidity.

Thus it was that, through the succession of his creatures, the Star Maker advanced from stage to stage in the progress from infantile to mature divinity.

Thus it was that in the end he became what, in the eternal view, he already was in the beginning, the ground and crown of all things.

In the typically irrational manner of dreams, this dream-myth which arose in my mind represented the eternal spirit as being at once the cause and the result of the infinite host of finite existents. In some unintelligible manner all finite things, though they were in a sense figments of the absolute spirit, were also essential to the very existence of the absolute spirit. Apart from them it had no being. But whether this obscure relationship represented some important truth or was merely a trivial dream-fiction, I cannot say.

XV. THE MAKER AND HIS WORKS

1. IMMATURE CREATING

ACCORDING TO THE fantastic myth or dream that was evoked from my mind after the supreme moment of experience, the particular cosmos which I had come to regard as ‘myself’ falls somewhere neither early nor late in the vast series of creations. It appeared to be in some respects the Star Maker’s first mature work; but in comparison with later creations it was in many ways juvenile in spirit.

Though the early creations express the nature of the Star Maker merely in his immature phase, for the most part they fall in important respects aside from the direction of human thought, and therefore I cannot now recapture them. They have left me with little more than a vague sense of the multiplicity and diversity of the Star Maker’s works. Nevertheless a few humanly intelligible traces remain and must be recorded.

In the crude medium of my dream the first cosmos of all appeared as a surprisingly simple thing. The infant Star Maker, teased, as it seemed to me, by his unexpressed potency, conceived and objectified from himself two qualities. With these alone he made his first toy cosmos, a temporal rhythm, as it were of sound and silence. From this first simple drum-beat, premonitory of a thousand creations, he developed with infantile but god-like zest a flickering tattoo, a changeful complexity of rhythm. Presently, through contemplation of his creature’s simple form, he conceived the possibility of more subtle creating. Thus the first of all creatures itself bred in its creator a need that itself could never satisfy. Therefore the infant Star Maker brought his first cosmos to a close. Regarding it from outside the cosmical time which it had generated, he apprehended its whole career as present, though none the less a flux. And when he had quietly assessed his work, he withdrew his attention from it and brooded for a second creation.

Thereafter, cosmos upon cosmos, each more rich and subtle than the last, leapt from his fervent imagination. In some of his earliest creations he seemed to be concerned only with the physical aspect of the substance which he had objectified from himself. He was blind to its psychical potentiality. In one early cosmos, however, the patterns of physical quality with which he played simulated an individuality and a life which they did not in fact possess. Or did they possess it? In a later creation, certainly, true life broke out most strangely. This was a cosmos which the Star Maker apprehended physically much as men apprehend music. It was a rich sequence of qualities diverse in pitch and in intensity. With this toy the infant Star Maker played delightedly, inventing an infinite wealth of melody and counterpoint. But before he had worked out all the subtleties of pattern implied in this little world of cold, mathematical music, before he had created more than a few kinds of lifeless, musical creatures, it became evident that some of his creatures were manifesting traces of a life of their own, recalcitrant to the conscious purpose of the Star Maker. The themes of the music began to display modes of behaviour that were not in accord with the canon which he had ordained for them. It seemed to me that he watched them with intense interest, and that they spurred him to new conceptions, beyond the creatures’ power to fulfil. Therefore he brought this cosmos to completion; and in a novel manner. He contrived that the last state of the cosmos should lead immediately back to the first. He knotted the final event temporally to the beginning, so that the cosmical time formed an endless circlet. After considering his work from outside its proper time, he set it aside, and brooded for a fresh creation.

For the next cosmos he consciously projected something of his own percipience and will, ordaining that certain patterns and rhythms of quality should be the perceivable bodies of perceiving minds. Seemingly these creatures were intended to work together to produce the harmony which he had conceived for this cosmos; but instead, each sought to mould the whole cosmos in accordance with its own form. The creatures fought desperately, and with self-righteous conviction. When they were damaged, they suffered pain. This, seemingly, was something which the young Star Maker had never experienced or conceived. With rapt, surprised interest, and (as it seemed to me) with almost diabolical glee, he watched the antics and the sufferings of his first living creatures, till by their mutual strife and slaughter they had reduced this cosmos to chaos.

Thenceforth the Star Maker never for long ignored his creatures’ potentiality for intrinsic life. It seemed to me, however, that many of his early experiments in vital creation went strangely awry, and that sometimes, seemingly in disgust with the biological, he would revert for a while to purely physical fantasies.

I can only briefly describe the host of the early creations. Suffice it that they issued from the divine though still infantile imagination one after the other like bright but trivial bubbles, gaudy with colour, rich with all manner of physical subtleties, lyrical and often tragic with the loves and hates, the lusts and aspirations and communal enterprises of the Star Maker’s early experimental conscious beings.

Many of these early universes were non-spatial, though none the less physical. And of these non-spatial universes not a few were of the ‘musical’ type, in which space was strangely represented by a dimension corresponding to musical pitch, and capacious with myriads of tonal differences. The creatures appeared to one another as complex patterns and rhythms of tonal characters. They could move their tonal bodies in the dimension of pitch, and sometimes in other dimensions, humanly inconceivable. A creature’s body was a more or less constant tonal pattern, with much the same degree of flexibility and minor changefulness as a human body. Also, it could traverse other living bodies in the pitch dimension much as wave-trains on a pond may cross one another. But though these beings could glide through one another, they could also grapple, and damage one another’s tonal tissues. Some, indeed, lived by devouring others; for the more complex needed to integrate into their own vital patterns the simpler patterns that exfoliated throughout the cosmos directly from the creative power of the Star Maker. The intelligent creatures could manipulate for their own ends elements wrenched from the fixed tonal environment, thus constructing artifacts of tonal pattern. Some of these served as tools for the more efficient pursuit of ‘agricultural’ activities, by which they enhanced the abundance of their natural food. Universes of this non-spatial kind, though incomparably simpler and more meagre than our own cosmos, were rich enough to produce societies capable not only of ‘agriculture’ but of ‘handicrafts’, and even a kind of pure art that combined the characteristics of song and dance and verse. Philosophy, generally rather Pythagorean, appeared for the first time in a cosmos of this ‘musical’ kind.

In nearly all the Star Maker’s works, as revealed in my dream, time was a more fundamental attribute than space. Though in some of his earliest creations he excluded time, embodying merely a static design, this plan was soon abandoned. It gave little scope to his skill. Moreover, since it excluded the possibility of life and mind, it was incompatible with all but the earliest phase of his interest.

Space, my dream declared, appeared first as a development of a non-spatial dimension in a ‘musical’ cosmos. The tonal creatures in this cosmos could move not merely ‘up’ and ‘down’ the scale but ‘sideways’. In human music particular themes may seem to approach or retreat, owing to variations of loudness and timbre. In a rather similar manner the creatures in this ‘musical’ cosmos could approach one another or retreat and finally vanish out of earshot. In passing ‘sideways’ they travelled through continuously changing tonal environments. In a subsequent cosmos this ‘sideways’ motion of the creatures was enriched with true spatial experience.

There followed creations with spatial characters of several dimensions, creations Euclidean and non-Euclidean, creations exemplifying a great diversity of geometrical and physical principles. Sometimes time, or space-time, was the fundamental reality of the cosmos, and the entities were but fleeting modifications of it; but more often, qualitative events were fundamental, and these were related in spatio-temporal manners. In some cases the system of spatial relations was infinite, in others finite though boundless. In some the finite extent of space was of constant magnitude in relation to the atomic material constituents of the cosmos; in some, as in our own cosmos, it was manifested as in many respects ‘expanding.’ In others again space ‘contracted’; so that the end of such a cosmos, rich perhaps in intelligent communities, was the collision and congestion of all its parts, and their final coincidence and vanishing into a dimensionless point.

In some creations expansion and ultimate quiescence were followed by contraction and entirely new kinds of physical activity. Sometimes, for example, gravity was replaced by anti-gravity. All large lumps of matter tended to burst asunder, and all small ones to fly apart from each other. In one such cosmos the law of entropy also was reversed. Energy, instead of gradually spreading itself evenly throughout the cosmos, gradually piled itself upon the ultimate material units. I came in time to suspect that my own cosmos was followed by a reversed cosmos of this kind, in which, of course, the nature of living things was profoundly different from anything conceivable to man. But this is a digression, for I am at present describing much earlier and simpler universes.

Many a universe was physically a continuous fluid in which the solid creatures swam. Others were constructed as series of concentric spheres, peopled by diverse orders of creatures. Some quite early universes were quasi-astronomical, consisting of a void sprinkled with rare and minute centres of power.

Sometimes the Star Maker fashioned a cosmos which was without any single, objective, physical nature. Its creatures were wholly without influence on one another; but under the direct stimulation of the Star Maker each creature conceived an illusory but reliable and useful physical world of its own, and peopled it with figments of its imagination. These subjective worlds the mathematical genius of the Star Maker correlated in a manner that was perfectly systematic.

I must not say more of the immense diversity of physical form which, according to my dream, the early creations assumed. It is enough to mention that, in general, each cosmos was more complex, and in a sense more voluminous than the last; for in each the ultimate physical units were smaller in relation to the whole, and more multitudinous. Also, in each the individual conscious creatures were generally more in number, and more diverse in type; and the most awakened in each cosmos reached a more lucid mentality than any creatures in the previous cosmos.

Biologically and psychologically the early creations were very diverse. In some cases there was a biological evolution such as we know. A small minority of species would precariously ascend toward greater individuation and mental clarity. In other creations the species were biologically fixed, and progress, if it occurred, was wholly cultural. In a few most perplexing creations the most awakened state of the cosmos was at the beginning, and the Star Maker calmly watched this lucid consciousness decay.

Sometimes a cosmos started as a single lowly organism with an internal, non-organic environment. It then propagated by fission into an increasing host of increasingly small and increasingly individuated and awakened creatures. In some of these universes evolution would continue till the creatures became too minute to accommodate the complexity of organic structure necessary for intelligent minds. The Star Maker would then watch the cosmical societies desperately striving to circumvent the fated degeneration of their race.

In some creations the crowning achievement of the cosmos was a chaos of mutually unintelligible societies, each devoted to the service of some one mode of the spirit, and hostile to all others. In some the climax was a single utopian society of distinct minds; in others a single composite cosmical mind.

Sometimes it pleased the Star Maker to ordain that each creature in a cosmos should be an inevitable, determinate expression of the environment’s impact on its ancestors and itself. In other creations each creature had some power of arbitrary choice, and some modicum of the Star Maker’s own creativity. So it seemed to me in my dream; but even in my dream I suspected that to a more subtle observer both kinds would have appeared as in fact determinate, and yet both of them also spontaneous and creative.

In general the Star Maker, once he had ordained the basic principles of a cosmos and created its initial state, was content to watch the issue; but sometimes he chose to interfere, either by infringing the natural laws that he himself had ordained, or by introducing new emergent formative principles, or by influencing the minds of the creatures by direct revelation. This according to my dream, was sometimes done to improve a cosmical design; but, more often, interference was included in his original plan.

Sometimes the Star Maker flung off creations which were in effect groups of many linked universes, wholly distinct physical systems of very different kinds, yet related by the fact that the creatures lived their lives successively in universe after universe, assuming in each habitat an indigenous physical form, but bearing with them in their transmigration faint and easily misinterpreted memories of earlier existences. In another way also, this principle of transmigration was sometimes used. Even creations that were not thus systematically linked might contain creatures that mentally echoed in some vague but haunting manner the experience or the temperament of their counterparts in some other cosmos.

One very dramatic device was used in cosmos after cosmos. I mentioned earlier that in my dream the immature Star Maker had seemed to regard the tragic failure of his first biological experiment with a kind of diabolical glee. In many subsequent creations also he appeared to be twi-minded. Whenever his conscious creative plan was thwarted by some unsuspected potentiality of the substance which he had objectified from his unconscious depth, his mood seemed to include not only frustration but also surprised satisfaction, as of some unrecognized hunger unexpectedly satisfied.

This twi-mindedness at length gave rise to a new mode of creating. There came a stage in the Star Maker’s growth, as my dream represented it, when he contrived to dissociate himself as two independent spirits, the one his essential self, the spirit that sought positive creation of vital and spiritual forms and ever more lucid awareness, the other a rebellious, destructive and cynical spirit, that could have no being save as a parasite upon the works of the other.

Again and again he dissociated these two moods of himself, objectified them as independent spirits, and permitted them to strive within a cosmos for mastery. One such cosmos, which consisted of three linked universes, was somewhat reminiscent of Christian orthodoxy. The first of these linked universes was inhabited by generations of creatures gifted with varying degrees of sensibility, intelligence, and moral integrity. Here the two spirits played for the souls of the creatures. The ‘good’ spirit exhorted, helped, rewarded, punished; the ‘evil’ spirit deceived, tempted, and morally destroyed. At death the creatures passed into one or other of the two secondary universes, which constituted a timeless heaven and a timeless hell. There they experienced an eternal moment either of ecstatic comprehension and worship or of the extreme torment of remorse.

When my dream presented me with this crude, this barbaric figment, I was at first moved with horror and incredulity. How could the Star Maker, even in his immaturity, condemn his creatures to agony for the weakness that he himself had allotted to them? How could such a vindictive deity command worship?

In vain I told myself that my dream must have utterly falsified the reality; for I was convinced that in this respect it was not false, but in some sense true, at least symbolically. Yet, even when I was confronted by this brutal deed, even in the revulsion of pity and horror, I saluted the Star Maker.

To excuse my worship, I told myself that this dread mystery lay far beyond my comprehension, and that in some sense even such flagrant cruelty must, in the Star Maker, be right. Did barbarity perhaps belong to the Star Maker only in his immaturity? Later, when he was fully himself, would he finally outgrow it? No! Already I deeply knew that this ruthlessness was to be manifested even in the ultimate cosmos. Could there, then, be some key fact, overlooked by me, in virtue of which such seeming vindictiveness was justified? Was it simply that all creatures were indeed but figments of the creative power, and that in tormenting his creatures the Star Maker did but torment himself in the course of his adventure of self-expression? Or was it perhaps that even the Star Maker himself, though mighty, was limited in all creation by certain absolute logical principles, and that one of these was the indissoluble bond between betrayal and remorse in half-awakened spirits? Had he, in this strange cosmos, simply accepted and used the ineluctable limitations of his art? Or again, was my respect given to the Star Maker only as the ‘good’ spirit, not as the ‘evil’ spirit? And was he in fact striving to eject evil from himself by means of this device of dissociation?

Some such explanation was suggested by the strange evolution of this cosmos. Since its denizens had mostly a very low degree of intelligence and moral integrity, the hell was soon overcrowded, while the heaven remained almost empty. But the Star Maker in his ‘good’ aspect loved and pitied his creatures. The ‘good’ spirit therefore entered into the mundane sphere to redeem the sinners by his own suffering. And so at last the heaven was peopled, though the hell was not depopulated.

Was it, then, only the ‘good’ aspect of the Star Maker that I worshipped? No! Irrationally, yet with conviction, I gave my adoration to the Star Maker as comprising both aspects of his dual nature, both the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’, both the mild and the terrible, both the humanly ideal and the incomprehensibly inhuman. Like an infatuated lover who denies or excuses the flagrant faults of the beloved, I strove to palliate the inhumanity of the Star Maker, nay positively I gloried in it. Was there then something cruel in my own nature? Or did my heart vaguely recognize that love, the supreme virtue in creatures, must not in the creator be absolute?

This dire and insoluble problem confronted me again and again in the course of my dream. For instance there appeared a creation in which the two spirits were permitted to strive in a novel and more subtle manner. In its early phase this cosmos manifested only physical characters; but the Star Maker provided that its vital potentiality should gradually express itself in certain kinds of living creatures which, generation by generation, should emerge from the purely physical and evolve toward intelligence and spiritual lucidity. In this cosmos he permitted the two spirits, the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’, to compete even in the very making of the creatures.

In the long early ages, the spirits struggled over the evolution of the innumerable species. The ‘good’ spirit worked to produce creatures more highly organized, more individual, more delicately related to the environment, more skilled in action, more comprehensively and vividly aware of their world, of themselves, and of other selves. The ‘evil’ spirit tried to thwart this enterprise.

The organs and tissues of every species manifested throughout their structure the conflict of the two spirits. Sometimes the ‘evil’ spirit contrived seemingly unimportant but insidious and lethal features for a creature’s undoing. Its nature would include some special liability to harbour parasites, some weakness of digestive machinery, some instability of nervous organization. In other cases the ‘evil’ spirit would equip some lower species with special weapons for the destruction of the pioneers of evolution, so that they should succumb, either to some new disease, or to plagues of the vermin of this particular cosmos, or to the more brutish of their own kind.

A still more ingenious plan the evil spirit sometimes used with great effect. When the ‘good’ spirit had hit upon some promising device, and from small beginnings had worked up in its favoured species some new organic structure or mode of behaviour, the evil spirit would contrive that the process of evolution should continue long after it had reached perfect adjustment to the creature’s needs. Teeth would grow so large that eating became excessively difficult, protective shells so heavy that they hampered locomotion, horns so curved that they pressed upon the brain, the impulse to individuality so imperious that it destroyed society, or the social impulse so obsessive that individuality was crushed.

Thus in world after world of this cosmos, which greatly surpassed all earlier creations in complexity, almost every species came sooner or later to grief. But in some worlds a single species reached the ‘human’ level of intelligence and of spiritual sensibility. Such a combination of powers ought to have secured it from all possible attack. But both intelligence and spiritual sensibility were most skilfully perverted by the ‘evil’ spirit. For though by nature they were complementary, they could be brought into conflict; or else one or both could be exaggerated so as to become as lethal as the extravagant horns and teeth of earlier kinds. Thus intelligence, which led on the one hand to the mastery of physical force and on the other to intellectual subtlety, might, if divorced from spiritual sensibility, cause disaster. The mastery of physical force often produced a mania for power, and the dissection of society into two alien classes, the powerful and the enslaved. Intellectual subtlety might produce a mania for analysis and abstraction, with blindness to all that intellect could not expound. Yet sensibility itself, when it rejected intellectual criticism and the claims of daily life, would be smothered in dreams.

2. MATURE CREATING

ACCORDING TO THE myth that my mind conceived when the supreme moment of my cosmical experience had passed, the Star Maker at length entered into a state of rapt meditation in which his own nature suffered a revolutionary change. So at least I judged from the great change that now came over his creative activity.

After he had reviewed with new eyes all his earlier works, dismissing each, as it seemed to me, with mingled respect and impatience, he discovered in himself a new and pregnant conception.

The cosmos which he now created was that which contains the readers and the writer of this book. In its making he used, but with more cunning art, many of the principles which had already served him in earlier creations; and he wove them together to form a more subtle and more capacious unity than ever before.

It seemed to me, in my fantasy, that he approached this new enterprise in a new mood. Each earlier cosmos appeared to have been fashioned with conscious will to embody certain principles, physical, biological, psychological. As has already been reported, there often appeared a conflict between his intellectual purpose and the raw nature which he had evoked for his creature out of the depth of his own obscure being. This time, however, he dealt more sensitively with the medium of his creation. The crude spiritual ‘material’ which he objectified from his own hidden depth for the formation of his new creature was moulded to his still tentative purpose with more sympathetic intelligence, with more respect for its nature and its potentiality, though with detachment from its more extravagant demands.

To speak thus of the universal creative spirit is almost childishly anthropomorphic. For the life of such a spirit, if it exists at all, must be utterly different from human mentality, and utterly inconceivable to man. Nevertheless, since this childish symbolism did force itself upon me, I record it. In spite of its crudity, perhaps it does contain some genuine reflection of the truth, however distorted.

In the new creation there occurred a strange kind of discrepancy between the Star Maker’s own time and the time proper to the cosmos itself. Hitherto, though he could detach himself from the cosmical time when the cosmical history had completed itself, and observe all the cosmical ages as present, he could not actually create the later phases of a cosmos before he had created the earlier. In his new creation he was not thus limited.

Thus although this new cosmos was my own cosmos, I regarded it from a surprising angle of vision. No longer did it appear as a familiar sequence of historical events beginning with the initial physical explosion and advancing to the final death. I saw it now not from within the flux of the cosmical time but quite otherwise. I watched the fashioning of the cosmos in the time proper to the Star Maker; and the sequence of the Star Maker’s creative acts was very different from the sequence of historical events.

First he conceived from the depth of his own being a something, neither mind nor matter, but rich in potentiality, and in suggestive traits, gleams, hints for his creative imagination. Over this fine substance for a long while he pondered. It was a medium in which the one and the many demanded to be most subtly dependent upon one another; in which all parts and all characters must pervade and be pervaded by all other parts and all other characters; in which each thing must seemingly be but an influence in all other things; and yet the whole must be no other than the sum of all its parts, and each part an all-pervading determination of the whole. It was a cosmical substance in which any individual spirit must be, mysteriously, at once an absolute self and a mere figment of the whole.

This most subtle medium the Star Maker now rough-hewed into the general form of a cosmos. Thus he fashioned a still indeterminate space-time, as yet quite ungeometrized; an amorphous physicality with no clear quality or direction, no intricacy of physical laws; a more distinctly conceived vital trend and epic adventure of mentality; and a surprisingly definite climax and crown of spiritual lucidity. This last, though its situation in the cosmical time was for the most part late, was given a certain precision of outline earlier in the sequence of creative work than any other factor in the cosmos. And it seemed to me that this was so because the initial substance itself so clearly exposed its own potentiality for some such spiritual form. Thus it was that the Star Maker at first almost neglected the physical minutiae of his work, neglected also the earlier ages of cosmical history, and devoted his skill at first almost entirely to shaping the spiritual climax of the whole creature.

Not till he had blocked in unmistakably the most awakened phase of the cosmical spirit did he trace any of the variegated psychological trends which, in the cosmical time, should lead up to it. Not till he had given outline to the incredibly diverse themes of mental growth did he give attention fully to constructing the biological evolutions and the physical and geometrical intricacy which could best evoke the more subtle potentialities of his still rough-hewn cosmical spirit.

But, as he geometrized, he also intermittently turned again to modify and elucidate the spiritual climax itself. Not till the physical and geometrical form of the cosmos was almost completely fashioned could he endow the spiritual climax with fully concrete individuality.

While he was still working upon the detail of the countless, poignant individual lives, upon the fortunes of men, of ichthyoids, of nautiloids, and the rest, I became convinced that his attitude to his creatures was very different from what it had been for any other cosmos. For he was neither cold to them nor yet simply in love with them. In love with them, indeed, he still was; but he had seemingly outgrown all desire to save them from the consequences of their finitude and from the cruel impact of the environment. He loved them without pity. For he saw that their distinctive virtue lay in their finitude, their minute particularity, their tortured balance between dullness and lucidity; and that to save them from these would be to annihilate them.

When he had given the last touches to all the cosmical ages from the supreme moment back to the initial explosion and on to the final death, the Star Maker contemplated his work. And he saw that it was good.

As he lovingly, though critically, reviewed our cosmos in all its infinite diversity and in its brief moment of lucidity, I felt that he was suddenly filled with reverence for the creature that he had made, or that he had ushered out of his own secret depth by a kind of divine self-midwifery. He knew that this creature, though imperfect, though a mere creature, a mere figment of his own creative power, was yet in a manner more real than himself. For beside this concrete splendour what was he but a mere abstract potency of creation? Moreover in another respect the thing that he had made was his superior, and his teacher. For as he contemplated this the loveliest and subtlest of all his works with exultation, even with awe, its impact upon him changed him, clarifying and deepening his will. As he discriminated its virtue and its weakness, his own perception and his own skill matured. So at least it seemed to my bewildered, awe-stricken mind.

Thus, little by little, it came about, as so often before, that the Star Maker outgrew his creature. Increasingly he frowned upon the loveliness that he still cherished. Then, seemingly with a conflict of reverence and impatience, he set our cosmos in its place among his other works.

Once more he sank into deep meditation. Once more the creative urge possessed him.

Of the many creations which followed I must perforce say almost nothing, for in most respects they lay beyond my mental reach. I could not have any cognizance of them save in so far as they contained, along with much that was inconceivable, some features that were but fantastic embodiments of principles which I had already encountered. Thus all their most vital novelty escaped me.

I can, indeed, say of all these creations that, like our own cosmos, they were immensely capacious, immensely subtle; and that, in some alien manner or other, every one of them had both a physical and a mental aspect; though in many the physical, however crucial to the spirit’s growth, was more transparent, more patently phantasmal than in our own cosmos. In some cases this was true equally of the mental, for the beings were often far less deceived by the opacity of their individual mental processes, and more sensitive to their underlying unity.

I can say too that in all these creations the goal which, as it seemed to me, the Star Maker sought to realize was richness, delicacy, depth and harmoniousness of being. But what these words in detail mean I should find it hard to say. It seemed to me that in some cases, as in our own cosmos, he pursued this end by means of an evolutionary process crowned by an awakened cosmical mind, which strove to gather into its own awareness the whole wealth of the cosmical existence, and by creative action to increase it. But in many cases this goal was achieved with incomparably greater economy of effort and suffering on the part of the creatures, and without the huge dead loss of utterly wasted, ineffective lives which is to us so heart-rending. Yet in other creations suffering seemed at least as grave and widespread as in our own cosmos.

In his maturity the Star Maker conceived many strange forms of time. For instance, some of the later creations were designed with two or more temporal dimensions, and the lives of the creatures were temporal sequences in one or other dimension of the temporal ‘area’ or ‘volume’. These beings experienced their cosmos in a very odd manner. Living for a brief period along one dimension, each perceived at every moment of its life a simultaneous vista which, though of course fragmentary and obscure, was actually a view of a whole unique ‘transverse’ cosmical evolution in the other dimension. In some cases a creature had an active life in every temporal dimension of the cosmos. The divine skill which arranged the whole temporal ‘volume’ in such a manner that all the infinite spontaneous acts of all the creatures should fit together to produce a coherent system of transverse evolutions far surpassed even the ingenuity of the earlier experiment in ‘pre-established harmony’.

In other creations a creature was given only one life, but this was a ‘zig-zag line’, alternating from one temporal dimension to another according to the quality of the choices that the creature made. Strong or moral choices led in one temporal direction, weak or immoral choices in another.

In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combinations of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.

In some creations each being had sensory perception of the whole physical cosmos from many spatial points of view, or even from every possible point of view. In the latter case, of course, the perception of every mind was identical in spatial range, but it varied from mind to mind in respect of penetration or insight. This depended on the mental calibre and disposition of particular minds. Sometimes these beings had not only omnipresent perception but omnipresent volition. They could take action in every region of space, though with varying precision and vigour according to their mental calibre. In a manner they were disembodied spirits, striving over the physical cosmos like chess-players, or like Greek gods over the Trojan Plain.

In other creations, though there was indeed a physical aspect, there was nothing corresponding to the familiar systematic physical universe. The physical experience of the beings was wholly determined by their mutual impact on one another. Each flooded its fellows with sensory ‘images’, the quality and sequence of which were determined according to psychological laws of the impact of mind on mind.

In other creations the processes of perception, memory, intellection, and even desire and feeling were so different from ours as to constitute in fact a mentality of an entirely different order. Of these minds, though I seemed to catch remote echoes of them, I cannot say anything.

Or rather, though I cannot speak of the alien psychical modes of these beings, one very striking fact about them I can record. However incomprehensible their basic mental fibres and the patterns into which these were woven, in one respect all these beings came fleetingly within my comprehension. However foreign to me their lives, in one respect they were my kin. For all these cosmical creatures, senior to me, and more richly endowed, constantly faced existence in the manner that I myself still haltingly strove to learn. Even in pain and grief, even in the very act of moral striving and of white-hot pity, they met fate’s issue with joy. Perhaps the most surprising and heartening fact that emerged from all my cosmical and hypercosmical experience was this kinship and mutual intelligibility of the most alien beings in respect of the pure spiritual experience. But I was soon to discover that in this connection I had still much to learn.

3. THE ULTIMATE COSMOS AND THE ETERNAL SPIRIT

IN VAIN MY fatigued, my tortured attention strained to follow the increasingly subtle creations which, according to my dream, the Star Maker conceived. Cosmos after cosmos issued from his fervent imagination, each one with a distinctive spirit infinitely diversified, each in its fullest attainment more awakened than the last; but each one less comprehensible to me.

At length, so my dream, my myth, declared, the Star Maker created his ultimate and most subtle cosmos, for which all others were but tentative preparations. Of this final creature I can say only that it embraced within its own organic texture the essences of all its predecessors; and far more besides. It was like the last movement of a symphony, which may embrace, by the significance of its themes, the essence of the earlier movements; and far more besides.

This metaphor extravagantly understates the subtlety and complexity of the ultimate cosmos. I was gradually forced to believe that its relation to each earlier cosmos was approximately that of our own cosmos to a human being, nay to a single physical atom. Every cosmos that I had hitherto observed now turned out to be but a single example of a myriadfold class, like a biological species, or the class of all the atoms of a single element. The internal life of each ‘atomic’ cosmos had seemingly the same kind of relevance (and the same kind of irrelevance) to the life of the ultimate cosmos as the events within a brain cell, or in one of its atoms, to the life of a human mind. Yet in spite of this huge discrepancy I seemed to sense throughout the whole dizzying hierarchy of creations a striking identity of spirit. In all, the goal was conceived, in the end, to include community and the lucid and creative mind.

I strained my fainting intelligence to capture something of the form of the ultimate cosmos. With mingled admiration and protest I haltingly glimpsed the final subtleties of world and flesh and spirit, and of the community of those most diverse and individual beings, awakened to full self-knowledge and mutual insight. But as I strove to hear more inwardly into that music of concrete spirits in countless worlds, I caught echoes not merely of joys unspeakable, but of griefs inconsolable. For some of these ultimate beings not only suffered, but suffered in darkness. Though gifted with full power of insight, their power was barren. The vision was withheld from them. They suffered as lesser spirits would never suffer. Such intensity of harsh experience was intolerable to me, the frail spirit of a lowly cosmos. In an agony of horror and pity I despairingly stopped the ears of my mind. In my littleness I cried out against my maker that no glory of the eternal and absolute could redeem such agony in the creatures. Even if the misery that I had glimpsed was in fact but a few dark strands woven into the golden tapestry to enrich it, and all the rest was bliss, yet such desolation of awakened spirits, I cried, ought not, ought never to be. By what diabolical malice, I demanded, were these glorious beings not merely tortured but deprived of the supreme consolation, the ecstasy of contemplation and praise which is the birthright of all fully awakened spirits?

There had been a time when I myself, as the communal mind of a lowly cosmos, had looked upon the frustration and sorrow of my little members with equanimity, conscious that the suffering of these drowsy beings was no great price to pay for the lucidity that I myself contributed to reality. But the suffering individuals within the ultimate cosmos, though in comparison with the hosts of happy creatures they were few, were beings, it seemed to me, of my own, cosmical, mental stature, not the frail, shadowy existences that had contributed their dull griefs to my making. And this I could not endure.

Yet obscurely I saw that the ultimate cosmos was nevertheless lovely, and perfectly formed; and that every frustration and agony within it, however cruel to the sufferer, issued finally, without any miscarriage, in the enhanced lucidity of the cosmical spirit itself. In this sense at least no individual tragedy was vain.

But this was nothing. And now, as through tears of compassion and hot protest, I seemed to see the spirit of the ultimate and perfected cosmos face her maker. In her, it seemed, compassion and indignation were subdued by praise. And the Star Maker, that dark power and lucid intelligence, found in the concrete loveliness of his creature the fulfilment of desire. And in the mutual joy of the Star Maker and the ultimate cosmos was conceived, most strangely, the absolute spirit itself, in which all times are present and all being is comprised; for the spirit which was the issue of this union confronted my reeling intelligence as being at once the ground and the issue of all temporal and finite things.

But to me this mystical and remote perfection was nothing. In pity of the ultimate tortured beings, in human shame and rage, I scorned my birthright of ecstasy in that inhuman perfection, and yearned back to my lowly cosmos, to my own human and floundering world, there to stand shoulder to shoulder with my own half animal kind against the powers of darkness; yes, and against the indifferent, the ruthless, the invincible tyrant whose mere thoughts are sentient and tortured worlds.

Then, in the very act of this defiant gesture, as I slammed and bolted the door of the little dark cell of my separate self, my walls were all shattered and crushed inwards by the pressure of irresistible light, and my naked vision was once more seared by lucidity beyond its endurance.

Once more? No. I had but reverted in my interpretative dream to the identical moment of illumination, closed by blindness, when I had seemed to spread wing to meet the Star Maker, and was struck down by terrible light. But now I conceived more clearly what it was that had overwhelmed me.

I was indeed confronted by the Star Maker, but the Star Maker was now revealed as more than the creative and therefore finite spirit. He now appeared as the eternal and perfect spirit which comprises all things and all times, and contemplates timelessly the infinitely diverse host which it comprises. The illumination which flooded in on me and struck me down to blind worship was a glimmer, so it seemed to me, of the eternal spirit’s own all-penetrating experience.

It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit’s temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defences, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was. And though there was love, there was also hate comprised within the spirit’s temper, for there was cruel delight in the contemplation of every horror, and glee in the downfall of the virtuous. All passions, it seemed, were comprised within the spirit’s temper; but mastered, icily gripped within the cold, clear, crystal ecstasy of contemplation.

That this should be the upshot of all our lives, this scientist’s, no, artist’s, keen appraisal! And yet I worshipped!

But this was not the worst. For in saying that the spirit’s temper was contemplation, I imputed to it a finite human experience, and an emotion; thereby comforting myself, even though with cold comfort. But in truth the eternal spirit was ineffable. Nothing whatever could be truly said about it. Even to name it ‘spirit’ was perhaps to say more than was justified. Yet to deny it that name would be no less mistaken; for whatever it was, it was more, not less, than spirit, more, not less, than any possible human meaning of that word. And from the human level, even from the level of a cosmical mind, this ‘more’, obscurely and agonizingly glimpsed, was a dread mystery, compelling adoration.

XVI. EPILOGUE: BACK TO EARTH

I WOKE ON the hill. The street lamps of our suburb outshone the stars. The reverberation of the clock’s stroke was followed by eleven strokes more. I singled out our window. A surge of joy, of wild joy, swept me like a wave. Then peace.

The littleness, but the intensity, of earthly events! Gone, abolished in an instant, was the hypercosmical reality, the wild fountain of creations, and all the spray of worlds. Vanished, transmuted into fantasy, and into sublime irrelevance.

The littleness, but the intensity, of this whole grain of rock, with its film of ocean and of air, and its discontinuous, variegated, tremulous film of life; of the shadowy hills, of the sea, vague, horizonless; of the pulsating, cepheid, lighthouse; of the clanking railway trucks. My hand caressed the pleasant harshness of the heather.

Vanished, the hypercosmical apparition. Not such as I had dreamed must the real be, but infinitely more subtle, more dread, more excellent. And infinitely nearer home.

Yet, however false the vision in detail of structure, even perhaps in its whole form, in temper surely it was relevant; in temper perhaps it was even true. The real itself, surely, had impelled me to conceive that image, false in every theme and facet, yet in spirit true.

The stars wanly trembled above the street lamps. Great suns? Or feeble sparks in the night sky? Suns, it was vaguely rumoured. Lights at least to steer by, and to beckon the mind from the terrestrial flurry; but piercing the heart with their cold spears.

Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man’s science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence. And our loyalties! so self-deceiving, so mis-informed and misconceived. So savagely pursued and hate-warped! Our very loves, and these in full and generous intimacy, must be condemned as unseeing, self-regarding, and self-gratulatory.

And yet? I singled out our window. We had been happy together! We had found, or we had created, our little treasure of community. This was the one rock in all the welter of experience. This, not the astronomical and hypercosmical immensity, nor even the planetary grain, this, this alone, was the solid ground of existence.

On every side was confusion, a rising storm, great waves already drenching our rock. And all around, in the dark welter, faces and appealing hands, half-seen and vanishing.

And the future? Black with the rising storm of this world’s madness, though shot through with flashes of a new and violent hope, the hope of a sane, a reasonable, a happier world. Between our time and that future, what horror lay in store? Oppressors would not meekly give way. And we two, accustomed only to security and mildness, were fit only for a kindly world; wherein, none being tormented, none turns desperate. We were adapted only to fair weather, for the practice of the friendly but not too difficult, not heroical virtues, in a society both secure and just. Instead, we found ourselves in an age of titanic conflict, when the relentless powers of darkness and the ruthless because desperate powers of light were coming to grips for a death struggle in the world’s torn heart, when grave choices must be made in crisis after crisis, and no simple or familiar principles were adequate.

Beyond our estuary a red growth of fire sprang from a foundry. At hand, the dark forms of the gorse lent mystery to the suburb’s foot-worn moor.

In imagination I saw, behind our own hill’s top, the further and unseen hills. I saw the plains and woods and all the fields, each with its myriads of particular blades. I saw the whole land curving down from me, over the planet’s shoulder. The villages were strung together on a mesh of roads, steel lines, and humming wires. Mist-drops on a cobweb. Here and there a town displayed itself as an expanse of light, a nebulous luminosity, sprinkled with stars.

Beyond the plains, London, neon-lit, seething, was a microscope-slide drawn from foul water, and crowded with nosing animalcules. Animalcules! In the stars’ view, no doubt, these creatures were mere vermin; yet each to itself, and sometimes one to another, was more real than all the stars.

Gazing beyond London, imagination detected the dim stretch of the Channel, and then the whole of Europe, a patch-work of tillage and sleeping industrialism. Beyond poplared Normandy spread Paris, with the towers of Notre-Dame tipped slightly, by reason of Earth’s curvature. Further on, the Spanish night was ablaze with the murder of cities. Away to the left lay Germany, with its forests and factories, its music, its steel helmets. In cathedral squares I seemed to see the young men ranked together in thousands, exalted, possessed, saluting the flood-lit Führer. In Italy too, land of memories and illusions, the mob’s idol spell-bound the young.

Far left-wards again, Russia, an appreciably convex segment of our globe, snow-pale in the darkness, spread out under the stars and cloud-tracts. Inevitably I saw the spires of the Kremlin, confronting the Red Square. There Lenin lay, victorious. Far off, at the foot of the Urals, imagination detected the ruddy plumes and smoke-pall of Magnetostroy. Beyond the hills there gleamed a hint of dawn; for day, at my midnight, was already pouring westward across Asia, overtaking with its advancing front of gold and rose the tiny smoke-caterpillar of the Trans-Siberian Express. To the north, the iron-hard Arctic oppressed the exiles in their camps. Far southward lay the rich valleys and plains that once cradled our species. But there I now saw railway lines ruled across the snow. In every village Asiatic children were waking to another school-day, and to the legend of Lenin. South again the Himalayas, snow-clad from waist to crest, looked over the rabble of their foot-hills into crowded India. I saw the dancing cotton plants, and the wheat, and the sacred river that bore the waters of Kamet past rice-fields and crocodile-shallows, past Calcutta with its shipping and its offices, down to the sea. From my midnight I looked into China. The morning sun glanced from the flooded fields and gilded the ancestral graves. The Yang Tse, a gleaming, crumpled thread, rushed through its gorge. Beyond the Korean ranges, and across the sea, stood Fujiyama, extinct and formal. Around it a volcanic population welled and seethed in that narrow land, like lava in a crater. Already it spilled over Asia a flood of armies and of trade.

Imagination withdrew and turned to Africa. I saw the man-made thread of water that joins West to East; then minarets, pyramids, the ever-waiting Sphinx. Ancient Memphis itself now echoed with the rumour of Magnetostroy. Far southward, black men slept beside the great lakes. Elephants trampled the crops. Further still, where Dutch and English profit by the Negro millions, those hosts were stirred by vague dreams of freedom.

Peering beyond the whole bulge of Africa, beyond cloud-spread Table Mountain, I saw the Southern Ocean, black with storms, and then the ice-cliffs with their seals and penguins, and the high snow-fields of the one unpeopled continent. Imagination faced the midnight sun, crossed the Pole, and passed Erebus, vomiting hot lava down his ermine. Northward it sped over the summer sea, past New Zealand, that freer but less conscious Britain, to Australia, where clear-eyed horsemen collect their flocks.

Still peering eastward from my hill, I saw the Pacific, strewn with islands; and then the Americas, where the descendants of Europe long ago mastered the descendants of Asia, through priority in the use of guns, and the arrogance that guns breed. Beside the further ocean, north and south, lay the old New World; the River Plate and Rio, the New England cities, radiating centre of the old new style of life and thought. New York, dark against the afternoon sun, was a cluster of tall crystals, a Stonehenge of modern megaliths. Round these, like fishes nibbling at the feet of waders, the great liners crowded. Out at sea also I saw them, and the plunging freighters, forging through the sunset, port holes and decks aglow. Stokers sweated at furnaces, look-out men in crow’s-nests shivered, dance music, issuing from opened doors, was drowned by the wind.

The whole planet, the whole rock-grain, with its busy swarms, I now saw as an arena where two cosmical antagonists, two spirits, were already preparing for a critical struggle, already assuming terrestrial and local guise, and coming to grips in our half-awakened minds. In city upon city, in village after village, and in innumerable lonely farmsteads, cottages, hovels, shacks, huts, in all the crevices where human creatures were intent on their little comforts and triumphs and escapes, the great struggle of our age was brewing.

One antagonist appeared as the will to dare for the sake of the new, the longed for, the reasonable and joyful, world, in which every man and woman may have scope to live fully, and live in service of mankind. The other seemed essentially the myopic fear of the unknown; or was it more sinister? Was it the cunning will for private mastery, which fomented for its own ends the archaic, reason-hating, and vindictive, passion of the tribe.

It seemed that in the coming storm all the dearest things must be destroyed. All private happiness, all loving, all creative work in art, science, and philosophy, all intellectual scrutiny and speculative imagination, and all creative social building; all, indeed, that man should normally live for, seemed folly and mockery and mere self-indulgence in the presence of public calamity. But if we failed to preserve them, when would they live again?

How to face such an age? How to muster courage, being capable only of homely virtues? How to do this, yet preserve the mind’s integrity, never to let the struggle destroy in one’s own heart what one tried to serve in the world, the spirit’s integrity.

Two lights for guidance. The first, our little glowing atom of community, with all that it signifies. The second, the cold light of the stars, symbol of the hypercosmical reality, with its crystal ecstasy. Strange that in this light, in which even the dearest love is frostily assessed, and even the possible defeat of our half-waking world is contemplated without remission of praise, the human crisis does not lose but gains significance. Strange, that it seems more, not less, urgent to play some part in this struggle, this brief effort of animalcules striving to win for their race some increase of lucidity before the ultimate darkness.

THE END

A NOTE ON MAGNITUDE

IMMENSITY IS NOT itself a good thing. A living man is worth more than a lifeless galaxy. But immensity has indirect importance through its facilitation of mental richness and diversity. Things are of course only large and small in relation to one another. To say that a cosmos is large is only to say that, in relation to it, some of its constituents are small. To say that its career is long is merely to say that many happenings are contained within it. But though the spacial and temporal immensity of a cosmos have no intrinsic merit, they are the ground for psychical luxuriance, which we value. Physical immensity opens up the possibility of vast physical complexity, and this offers scope for complex minded organisms. This is at any rate true of a cosmos like ours in which mind is conditioned by the physical.

The probable size of our cosmos may be very roughly conceived by means of the following analogy, adapted from one given in W. J. Luyten’s The Pageant of the Stars. Let Wales represent the size of our galaxy, say 100,000 light-years. This is said to be surrounded by a system of seven much smaller sub-galaxies and globular clusters, all lying within a diameter of 1,000,000 light-years. In our model, they would spread far into the Atlantic and into Europe. Other such systems would lie throughout space at average intervals represented by the distance from Wales to North America. On the same scale the remotest galaxy visible through the great 100-inch telescope, some 500,000,000 light-years distant, would lie 60,000 miles off, or a quarter of the distance to the moon. The forthcoming 200-inch telescope will doubtless have a far greater range. The total extent of the cosmos would be represented in this model by a volume about 11,000,000 miles across, or one-eighth the distance from the earth to the sun. The distance between the sun and the nearest star (4·5 light-years) would be about thirteen feet. A light year itself would be rather less than three feet. The average speed of stellar motion (20 miles a second) is represented by a rate of about four inches in 100 years. The earth’s orbit is one-thousandth of an inch in diameter; the sun’s diameter is six-millionths of an inch; the earth is reduced to a grain one-twentieth of an inch across.

The circle represents the time proper to the Star Maker as creative. Its uppermost point is the beginning and the end of the Star Maker’s time. The passage of time is clockwise. Each ‘broken spoke’ of the wheel represents a cosmical time. The cosmical times are, of course, incommensurable; but the progress in the Star Maker’s creative activity is represented by making the cosmical lines increasingly long as the creation becomes more mature. The increase of length represents the increasing complexity and subtlety of successive creations. The ‘View Point of Eternity’ represents the Star Maker’s ‘timeless’ apprehension of all existence, in his capacity of eternal and absolute spirit. The goal of the creative spirit is the complete fulfilment of its capacity, and the attainment of the eternal view through the climax of the ultimate cosmos. Earlier creations approach, but do not reach, this climax. Each cosmical history is represented as lying in a dimension at right angles to the Star Maker’s own time. He can, of course, ‘live through’ a cosmical history, but he can also apprehend it all at once. Some of the cosmical histories might have been represented by circles, since the times of some are cyclic. Others might have been areas, since they have more than one temporal dimension. I have only represented a few of the infinite number of creations.

Darkness and the Light (1942)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Part I. CRISIS

1. MAN’S TWO FUTURES

2. THE MODERN AGE

3. MANKIND AT THE CROSS ROADS

i. RISE AND FALL OF A GERMAN REICH

ii. NORTH AMERICA

iii. RUSSIA AND CHINA

iv. THE RISE OF TIBET

Part II. DARKNESS

4. THE QUENCHING OF THE LIGHT

i. REPERCUSSIONS IN BRITAIN

ii. A SYNTHETIC FAITH

iii. THE TIBETANS DEFEND THEMSELVES

iv. THE DESTRUCTION OF TIBET

5. THE REIGN OF DARKNESS

i. THE JAPANESE REVOLUTION

ii. A SYNTHETIC WAR

iii. DIABOLIC WORLD EMPIRE

6. THE TRIUMPH OF THE RATS

i. ECONOMIC DECLINE

ii. DECLINE OF POPULATION

iii. DISINTEGRATION OF THE WORLD EMPIRE

iv. FINAL DEGENERACY

v. THE END OF MAN

Part III. THE LIGHT

7. THE SPARK SURVIVES

i. HARKING BACK TO THE TIBETAN REVOLUTION

ii. WAR AGAINST THE EMPIRES

iii. ARMED PEACE

iv. WAR AGAIN, AND A NEW ORDER

8. PRECARIOUS ADVANCE

i. DIFFICULTIES OVER AMERICA

ii. DIFFICULTIES WITH THE BUREAUCRATS

iii. PROGRESS

iv. THE POPULATION PROBLEM

v. ARISTOCRATS AND DEMOCRATS

9. NEW WORLD

i. A WORLD OF VILLAGES

ii. VILLAGE CULTURE

iii. THE FORWARDS

10. REMOTE HORIZONS

i. PEACEFUL GROWTH

ii. BEHIND THE VEIL

iii. A PHASE OF CONFUSION

iv. PREPARATION FOR A GREAT TASK

v. DESPAIR AND NEW HOPE

vi. MAN PASSES ON

The first edition

PREFACE

A REVIEWER OF an earlier book of mine said that it was difficult to see why such a book should ever have been written. From his point of view the remark was reasonable enough, for the aim of the book happened to fall outside the spot-light of his consciousness. All the same, the fact that the great majority of books ought never to have been written must give the writer pause. To-day, what with the paper shortage and the urgency of war work, the question whether a book is worth writing, let alone publishing, is more pertinent than ever. Whether this book has enough significance to justify its appearance must be left to the judgment of readers and reviewers; but perhaps they will not take it amiss if I offer a word of explanation.

This book is, of course, not meant to be regarded as prophecy. Neither of the two futures which I here imagine for mankind is in the least likely to happen. Historical prediction is doomed always to fail. The most sophisticated sociologist, let alone a writer of fiction, is scarcely a more trustworthy prophet than Old Moore. Certainly I, who entirely failed to foresee the advent of Fascism, cannot lay claim to describe the next phase of European change.

But this book is not concerned to prophesy. It seeks merely to give a symbolic expression to two dispositions now in conflict in the world. For lack of better words I call them the will for darkness and the will for the light. I present in concrete form, but rather as caricature than with photographic accuracy, two kinds of possibility that lie before the human race. The justification for writing such a book depends on the answers to three questions. Is there such a conflict? Is it important? Is the caricature that I have drawn of it well enough drawn to clear the mind and stir the heart?

OLAF STAPLEDON
October 1941

Part I. CRISIS

1. MAN’S TWO FUTURES

IS IT CREDIBLE that our world should have two futures? I have seen them. Two entirely distinct futures lie before mankind, one dark, one bright; one the defeat of all man’s hopes, the betrayal of all his ideals, the other their hard-won triumph.

At some date within the age that we call modern, some date not precisely known to me, for I looked back towards it from the distant futures as though searching in my remote past, the single torrent of terrestrial events is split, as though by a projecting promontory, so that it becomes thenceforth two wholly distinct and mutually exclusive surging floods of intricate existence, each one a coherent and actual history, in which the lives of countless generations succeed one another along separate ravines of time.

How can this be? It cannot! Yet I have seen it happen. I have watched those two divergent futures. I have lived through them. In any world, as on our planet, it needs must happen, when the will for the light and the will for the darkness are so delicately balanced in the ordinary half-lucid spirits of the world that neither can for long prevail over the other. Out of their age-long stress and fluctuating battle must spring at last a thing seemingly impossible, seemingly irrational, something wore stupendously miraculous than any orthodox miracle. For how can time itself be divided into two streams? And if our planet has two futures, which of them has place in the future of the solar system, and what of the other? Or does man’s vacillation create not only two future Earths but two future universes of stars and galaxies?

Reader, affirm if you will that only one of the two futures that I have watched is the real future, knit into the real cosmos, while the other is mere fantasy. Then which, I ask in terror, is real, the bright or the dark? For to me, who have seen both, neither is less real than the other, but one is infinitely more to be desired. Perhaps, reader, you will contend that both are figments of my crazy mind, and that the real future is inaccessible and inconceivable. Believe what you will, but to me both are real, both are somehow close-knit into the dread and lovely pattern of the universe. Nay more! My heart demands them both. For the light is more brilliant when the dark offsets it. Though pity implores that all horror should turn out to have been a dream, yet for the light’s own sake some sterner passion demands that evil may have its triumph.

As I write this book my own death must lie somewhere in the near future. When, I cannot tell; for so minute an event could not imprint itself on the vision that has possessed me. Seemingly it is at the time of my death that the strange experience begins, obscurely and intermittently at first. For this reason the earlier part of the twofold story is fragmentary and chaotic, like the experiences of childhood remembered in maturity.

Moreover the twin streams of history are in their upper reaches so similar as to be indistinguishable, like the almost identical views which a man has through his two eyes. Not till the two futures begin to differ strikingly can they be distinguished and known to be inconsistent themes. Thenceforth whoever witnesses them, as I did, must become a divided personality, living not merely two lives but in two universes.

As I write this book, immersed once more in the passions and savage deeds of contemporary mankind, hearing each day of horror and brutality, fearing that very soon some hideous disaster may fall upon my people and on the whole human race, and on those few who, being most dear to me, are for me the living presence of humanity, it is impossible for me to recapture fully the serene and intelligent mood of my post-mortal experience. For throughout that age-long future I must, I think, have been strengthened by the felt presence of other and superhuman spectators. Was it that the more lucid populations of the cosmos, in their scattered worlds, up and down the constellations, here and there among the galaxies, had sent observers to witness the terrestrial miracle; or had focused their attention and their presence from afar on our little orb, so forlorn, so inconsiderable, where man, poised between the light and the dark on the knife-edge of choice, fought out his destiny. It was as though, under their influence, I was able to put off to some extent my human pettiness; as though, haltingly and with celestial aid, I could see man’s double fate through the eyes of those superhuman but not divine intelligences. Their presence is now withdrawn. But in memory of them I shall do my utmost to tell the twofold story at once with intimate human sympathy and with something of that calm insight which was lent to me.

2. THE MODERN AGE

AT SOME DATE which to readers of this book is far off in the future I became aware that I had long been dreamily witnessing a flux of human events. Peering back into my post-mortal memory as though into a second infancy, I came upon fragments of what must have been a long age of turmoil. Within that age must have lain, or must lie, the period that readers of this book call modern, a moment within a longer period during which the struggle between the light and the darkness remained inconclusive.

On the one side was the sluggish reptilian will for ease and sleep and death, rising sometimes to active hate and destructiveness; on the other side the still blindfold and blundering will for the lucid and coherent spirit. Each generation, it seemed, set out with courage and hope, and with some real aptitude for the life of love and wisdom, but also with the fatal human frailty, and in circumstances hostile to the generous development of the spirit. Each in turn, in the upshot of innumerable solitary ephemeral struggles, sank into middle age, disillusioned or fanatical, inert or obsessively greedy for personal power.

The world was a chrysalis world, but the chrysalis was damaged. Under the stress of science and mechanization the old order had become effete, the old patterns of life could no longer be healthily lived; yet the new order and the new mentality could not be born. The swarms of human creatures whose minds had been moulded to the old patterns were plunged from security into insecurity and bewilderment. Creatures specialized by circumstance to knit themselves into the existing but disintegrating social texture found themselves adrift in dreadful chaos, their talents useless, their minds out-moded, their values falsified. And so, like bees in a queenless hive, they floundered into primitive ways. They became marauding gangsters, or clamoured for some new, strong, ruthless and barbaric tribal order, into which they might once more themselves. In this nadir of civilization, this wide- craving for the savage and the stark, this night of spirit, there rose to power the basest and hitherto t despised of human types, the hooligan and the gun-man, who recognized no values but personal dominance, whose vengeful aim was to trample the civilization that spurned them, and to rule for brigandage alone a new gangster society.

Thus, wherever the breakdown of the old order was far gone, a new order did indeed begin to emerge, ruthless, barbaric, but armed with science and intricately fashioned for war. And war in that age, though not perpetual, was never far away. In one region or another of the planet there was nearly always war. No sooner had one war ended than another began elsewhere. And where there was no actual war, there was the constant fear of wars to come.

The crux for this unfinished human species, half animal but potentially humane, had always been the inconclusive effort to will true community, true and integrated union of individual spirits, personal, diverse, but mutually comprehending and mutually cherishing. And always the groping impulse for community had been frustrated by the failure to distinguish between true community and the savage unity of the pack; and on the other hand between a man’s duty to the innermost spirit and mere subtle self-pride, and again between love and mere possessiveness.

And now, in this final balance of the strife between light and darkness, the newly won Aladdin’s lamp, science, had given men such power for good and evil that they inevitably must either win speedily through to true community or set foot upon a steepening slope leading to annihilation. In the immediate contacts of man with man, and in the affairs of cities, provinces, slates and social classes, and further (newest and most dangerous necessity) in the ordering of the planet as a whole, there must now begin some glimmer of a new spirit; or else, failing in the great test, man must slide into a new and irrevocable savagery. And in a world close-knit by science savagery brings death.

In the new world, made one by trains, ships, aeroplanes and radio there was room for one society only. But a world-wide society must inevitably be planned and organized in every detail. Not otherwise can freedom and fulfilment be secured for all individuals. The old haphazard order so favourable to the fortunate and cunning self- seeker, was everywhere vanishing. Inevitably men’s lives w bound to be more and more regulated by authority. But what authority, and in what spirit? A great planned state, controlled without insight into true community, must turn to tyranny. And, armed with science for oppression and propaganda, it must inevitably destroy the humanity of its citizens. Only the insight and the will of true community can wield rightly a state’s authority, let alone a world’s.

Lacking that insight and that will, the states of theworld in the age of balanced light and darkness bore very heavily on their citizens and on one another. For national safety men’s actions were increasingly controlled by the state, their minds increasingly moulded to the formal pattern that the state required of them. All men were disciplined and standardized. Everyone had an official place and task in the huge common work of defence and attack. Anyone who protested or was lukewarm must be destroyed. The state was always in danger, and every nerve was constantly at strain. And because each state carefully sowed treason among the citizens of other states, no man could trust his neighbour. Husbands and wives suspected one another. Children proudly informed against their parents. Under the strain even of peace-time life all minds were damaged. Lunacy spread like a plague. The most sane, though in their own view their judgment was unwarped, were in fact fear-tortured neurotics. And so the race, as a whole, teased by its obscure vision of the spirit, its frail loyalty to love and reason, surrendered itself in the main to its baser nature.

3. MANKIND AT THE CROSS ROADS

i. RISE AND FALL OF A GERMAN REICH
ii. NORTH AMERICA
iii. RUSSIA AND CHINA
iv. THE RISE OF TIBET

i. RISE AND FALL OF A GERMAN REICH

OF THE DETAILED historical events of this age of fluctuation I cannot recover much. Of the war which is present to me as I write this book I remember almost nothing. A few shreds of recollection suggest that it resulted in a British victory of sorts, but I place no reliance on this surmise. If it is correct, the great opportunity afforded by this victory, the opportunity of a generous peace and a federal order in Europe, must have been missed; for rival imperialisms continued to exist after that war and real peace was not established. Subsequent wars and upheavals come rather more clearly into my mind. For instance, I seem to remember a defeat of the democratic peoples, led at first by the British, but later by the North Americans, against a totalitarian Europe. For a while the struggle was between Britain alone and the whole of Europe, martialled once more by Germany. Not till the remnant of the British forces had been driven into Scotland, and were desperately holding a line roughly equivalent to the Roman Wall, did the American power begin to make itself felt, and then only for a while; for in America, as elsewhere, the old order was failing, its leaders had neither the imagination nor the courage to adjust themselves to the new world-conditions. Consequently, when at last their turn carne they were quite incapable of organizing their haphazard capitalism for war. The American people began to realize that they were the victims of incompetence and treachery, and the population of the Atlantic seaboard demanded a new regime. In this state of affairs resistance became impossible. Britain was abandoned, and North America reverted to a precarious isolationism knowing that the struggle would very soon begin again.

This Euro-American war was certainly not the war which is being waged while I write this book, in spite of obvious similarities. At this time the Germans had recovered from that extravagant hooliganism which had turned the world against them in an earlier period. They had in a manner reverted from Nazism to the more respectable Prussianism. Other facts also show that this was not our present war. Both India and South Africa had left the British Empire and were already well- established independent states. Moreover, weapons were now of a much more lethal kind, and the American coast was frequently and extensively bombarded by fleets of European planes. In this war Scotland had evidently become the economic centre of gravity of Britain. The Lowlands were completely industrialized, and huge tidal electric generators crowded the western sounds. Tidal electricity had become the basis of Britain’s power. But the British, under their effete financial oligarchy, had not developed this new asset efficiently before the German attack began.

After the defeat of the democracies it seemed that the cause of freedom had been lost for ever. The Russians, whose initial revolutionary passion had long since been corrupted by the constant danger of attack and a consequent reversion to nationalism, now sacrificed all their hard-won social achievements for a desperate defence against the attempt of the German ruling class to dominate the planet. China, after her victory over Japan, had split on the rock of class strife. Between the Communist North and the Capitalist South there was no harmony. North America became a swarm of ‘independent’ states which Germany controlled almost as easily as the Latin South. India, freed from British rule, maintained a precarious unity in face of the German danger.

But the Totalitarian world was not to be. The end of the German power came in an unexpected manner, and through a strange mixture of psychological and economic causes. Perhaps the main cause was the decline of German intelligence. Ever since the industrial revolution the average intelligence of the European and American peoples had been slowly decreasing. Contraception had produced not only a decline of population but also a tendency of the more intelligent strains in the population to breed less than the dullards and half-wits. For in the competition for the means of comfort and luxury the more intelligent tended in the long run to rise into the comfortable classes. There they were able to avail themselves of contraceptive methods which the poorer classes could less easily practise. And because they took more forethought than the dullards for their personal comfort and security, they were more reluctant to burden themselves with children. The upshot was that, while the population as a whole tended to decline, the more intelligent strains declined more rapidly than the less intelligent; and the European and American peoples, and later the Asiatics, began to suffer from a serious shortage of able leaders in politics, industry, science, and general culture.

In Germany the process had been intensified by the persecution of free intelligences by the former Hitlerian Third Reich, and by the subsequent Fourth Reich, which had defeated America not by superior intelligence but superior vitality and the resources of an empire which included all Europe and most of Africa.

The Fourth Reich had persecuted and destroyed the free intelligences in all its subject lands, save one, namely Norway, where it had been necessary to allow a large measure of autonomy.

The Norwegians, who many centuries earlier had been the terror of the European coastal peoples, had in recent times earned a reputation for peaceable common sense. Like several others of the former small democracies, they of had attained a higher level of social development than their mightier neighbours. In particular they had fostered intelligence. After their Conquest by the Fourth Reich their remarkable fund of superior minds had stood them in good stead. They had successfully forced their conquerors into allowing them a sort of ‘dominion status’. In this condition they had been able to carry on much of their former social life while fulfilling the functions which the conquerors demanded of them. Two influences, however gradually combined to change their docility into energy and berserk fury. One was the cumulative effect of their experience of German domination. Contact with their foreign masters filled them with contempt and indignation. The other influence was the knowledge that under German exploitation their country had become the world’s greatest generator of tidal power, and that this power was being used for imperial, not human, ends.

The German dictatorship had, indeed, treated the Norwegians in a very special manner. Other conquered peoples had been simply enslaved or actually exterminated. The British, for instance, had been reduced to serfdom under a German landed aristocracy. The Poles and Czechs and most of the French had been persecuted, prevented from mating and procreating, and finally even sterilized, until their stock had been completely destroyed. But the Scandinavian peoples were in a class apart. The Nordic myth had a strong hold on the German people. It was impossible to pretend that the Norwegians were not Nordic, more Nordic than the Germans, who were in fact of very mixed stock. Moreover Norwegian maritime prowess was necessary to the German rulers; and many Norwegian sailors were given responsible positions for the training of Germans and even the control of German ships. Finally, the exploitation of tidal power in the fjords had produced a large class of Norwegian technicians with highly specialized skill. Thus little by little the small Norwegian people attained for itself a privileged positionin the German Empire. Prosperity and relative immunity from German tyranny had not brought acceptance of foreign domination. The Norwegians had preserved their independent spirit while other subject peoples had been utterly cowed by torture.

The initial fervour of the old Hitlerian faith had long since spent itself. Gone was the crazy zeal which had led millions of carefully indoctrinated young Germans to welcome death for the fatherland to drive their tanks not only over the fleeing refugees but over their own wounded, and to support a cruel tyranny throughout Europe. The German ruling minority was by now merely a highly organized, mechanically efficient, ruthless, but rather dull-witted and rather tired and cynical bureaucracy. The German people, who claimed to have taken over from the British the coveted ‘white man’s’ burden, were in fact the docile serfs of a harsh and uninspired tyranny.

There came a time when the Reich was seriously divided over the question of succession to the semi-divine post of Fuhrer. (The original Fuhrer, of course, was by now a mythical figure in the past, and the empire was sprinkled with gigantic monuments to his memory.) Suddenly the Norwegians, seizing the opportunity afforded by dissension in the German aristocracy, set in action a long-prepared system of conspiracy. They seized the tidal generators and military centres, and declared Norway’s independence. They also issued a call to all freedom-loving peoples to rise against their tyrants. The Norwegians themselves were in a very strong position. Not only did they control the Reich’s main source of power, but also a large part of the mercantile marine and Imperial Navy. The huge sea-plane force was also mainly on their side. Though at first the rebellion seemed a forlorn hope, it soon spread to Britain and Northern France. Insurrection then broke out in Switzerland, Austria, and southern Germany. The decisive factors were the revived passion for freedom and for human kindness, and also the new, extremely efficient and marvellously light accumulator, which enabled not only ships but planes to be driven electrically. The new accumulator had been secretly invented in Norway and secretly manufactured in large quantities in Spitsbergen. Even before the insurrection many ships and planes had been secretly fitted with it. After the outbreak of war a great fleet of electric planes, far more agile than the old petrol planes, soon broke the nerve of the imperial force. Within a few weeks the rebels were completely victorious.

With the fall of the German Reich the human race was once more given an opportunity to turn the corner from barbarism to real civilization. Once more the opportunity was lost. The free Federation of Europe, which was expected to bring lasting peace, was in fact no free federation at all. Germany was divided into the old minor states, and these were disarmed. This would have been reasonable enough if the victorious Norwegians, realizing the precariousness of the new order, had not insisted on retaining control of their own tidal generators and their air fleet, which, though disarmed, could very easily be turned into bombers. Thus, they hoped, they would be able to control and guide the Federation during its delicate infancy. Inevitably the demand for ‘the disarmament of Norway’ was used by the secret enemies of the light in their effort to dominate the Federation. After a period of uncertain peace, full of suspicion and intrigue, came the great European Civil War between the Scandinavian peoples and the rest of the European Federation. When the federated peoples had reduced one another to exhaustion, Russia intervened, and presently the Russian Empire stretched from the Behring Straits to the Blasket Islands.

During the first, confused phase of my post-mortal experience I failed to gain any clear vision of events in Russia. I have an impression of alternating periods of light and darkness. Sometimes the truly socialistic and democratic forces dominated, sometimes the totalitarian and despotic. In spite of the grave perversion of the original generous revolutionary impulse, so much of solid worth had been achieved that the Soviet system of states was never in serious danger of disintegration. During the long peril from the German Fourth Reich the Russian dictator, who was now known as the ‘Chief Comrade’, enforced a very strict military discipline on the whole people. When Germany had fallen, a wave of militant communist imperialism swept over the vast Russian territories. Hosts of ‘Young Communists’ demanded that ‘the spirit of Lenin’ should now be spread by tank and aeroplane throughout the world. The conquest of Europe was the first great expression of this mood. But other forces were also at work in Russia. After the destruction of German power, true socialistic, liberal, and even reformed Christian tendencies once more appeared throughout European Russia and in Western Europe. The Western peoples had by now begun to sicken of the sham religion of ruthless power. Christian sects, experimental religious movements, liberal-socialist and ‘reformed communist’ conspiracies were everywhere leading a vigorous underground life. It seemed to me that I must be witnessing the turning-point of human history, that the species had at last learnt its lesson. But in this I was mistaken. What I was observing was but one of the many abortive upward fluctuations in the long age of inconclusive struggle between the will for the light and the will for darkness. For, though men utterly loathed the hardships of war, their moral energy remained slight. Their loyalty to the common human enterprise, to the spiritual task of the race, had not been strengthened.

Thus it was that the movement which had seemed to promise a regeneration of Russia succeeded only in creating an under-current of more lucid feeling and action. The power of the dictatorship remained intact and harsh; and was able, moreover, to inspire the majority, and particularly the young, with superb energy and devotion in the spreading of the Marxian ideals which the regime still claimed to embody, but had in fact sadly perverted.

ii. NORTH AMERICA

I SHALL NOT pause to recount all the wars and social tumults of this age. I could not, if I would, give a clear report on them. I can remember only that waves of fruitless agony spread hither and thither over the whole planet like seismic waves in the planet’s crust. Fruitless the agony seemed to me because time after time hope was disappointed. The door to a new world was thrust ajar, then slammed.

Thus in India, when freedom had at last been gained, and under the stress of external danger Hindus and Mohammedans had sunk their differences, it seemed for a while that out of these dark Aryan peoples the truth was coming which could save mankind. For the ancient Indian wisdom, which permeated all the faiths, now came more clearly into view, stripped of the irrelevances of particular creeds. The new India, it seemed, while armed with European science and European resolution, would teach mankind a quietude and detachment which Europe lacked. But somehow the movement went awry, corrupted by the surviving power of the Indian princes and capitalists. The wealthy controlled the new state for their own ends. Public servants were venal and inefficient. And the ancient wisdom, though much advertised, became merely an excuse for tolerating gross social evils. When at last the armies of the Russian Empire poured through the Himalayan passes, the rulers of India could not cope with the attack, and the peoples of India were on the whole indifferent to a mere change of masters. Not until much later were the Indians to make their great contribution to human history.

There were other hopeful movements of regeneration. Obscurely I can remember a great and promising renaissance in North America. Adversity had purged Americans of their romantic commercialism. No longer could the millionaire, the demi-god of money power, command admiration and flattering imitation from the humble masses. Millionaires no longer existed. And the population was becoming conscious that personal money power had been the main cause of the perversion of the old civilization. For a while the Americans refused to admit to themselves that their ‘hundred per cent Americanism’ had been a failure; but suddenly the mental barrier against this realization collapsed. Within a couple of years the whole mental climate of the American people was changed. Up and down the continent men began to re-examine the principles on which American civilization had been based, and to sort out the essential values from the false accretions. Their cherished formulation of the Rights of Man was now supplemented by an emphatic statement of man’s duties. Their insistence on freedom was balanced by a new stress on discipline in service of the community. At the same time, in the school of adversity the former tendency to extravagance in ideas, either in the direction of hard-baked materialism or towards sentimental new-fangled religion, was largely overcome. The Society of Friends, who had always been a powerful sect in North America, now came into their own. They had been prominent long ago during the earliest phase of colonization from England, and had stood not only for gentleness and reasonableness towards the natives but also for individual courage, devotion, and initiative in all practical affairs. At their best they had always combined hard-headed business capacity with mystical quietism. At their worst, undoubtedly, this combination resulted in self-deception of a particularly odious kind. A ruthless though ‘paternal’ tyranny over employees was practised on weekdays, and on Sundays compensation and self-indulgence was found in a dream- world of religious quietism. But changed times had now brought about a revival and a purging. The undoctrinal mysticism of the Young Friends and their practical devotion to good works became a notable example to a people who were by now keenly aware of the need for this very combination.

Under the influence of the Friends and the growing danger from Russia, four North American states, Canada, the Atlantic Republic, the Mississippi Republic, and the Pacific Republic, were once more unified. North America became once more a great, though not the greatest, power. For a while, moreover, it looked as though North America would become the model community, destined to save mankind by example and by leadership. Here at last, it seemed, was the true though inarticulate and un-doctrinal faith in the spirit. Here was the true liberalism of self-disciplined free citizens, the true communism of mutually respecting individuals. Rumour of this new happy society began to spread even in conquered Europe in spite of the Russian imperial censorship, and to hearten the many secret opponents of the dictatorship. Between the new North America and the new India there was close contact and interchange of ideas. From the Indian wisdom the Friends learned much, and they gave in return much American practical skill.

But it became clear that the American renaissance somehow lacked vitality. Somehow the old American forcefulness and drive had waned. On the surface all seemed well, and indeed Utopian. The population lived in security and frugal comfort. Class differences had almost wholly vanished. Education was consciously directed towards the creation of responsible citizens. European classical and Christian culture was studied afresh, with a new zeal and a new critical judgment; for it was realized that in the European tradition lay the true antidote to the new-fangled barbarism. Yet in spite of all this manifestation of sanity and good will, something was lacking. The American example appealed only to those who were already well- disposed. The great mass of mankind remained unimpressed. Many observers conceded that North America was a comfortable and amiable society; but it was stagnant, they said, and mediocre. It was incapable of giving a lead to a troubled world. No doubt this general ineffectiveness was partly due to the decline of average intelligence which North America shared with Europe. There Was a lack of able leaders and men of far-reaching vision; and the average citizen, though well trained in citizenship, was mentally sluggish and incapable of clear-headed devotion to the ideals of his state. The new Russian imperialism, on the other hand, in spite of all its faults, combined the crusading and at heart mystical fervour of the short- lived German Fourth Reich with some measure at least of the fundamental rightness the original Russian revolution. In competition with the vigour and glamour of Russia the American example had little power to attract ‘men. Even in the South American continent the lead given by the North Americans proved after all ineffective. One by one the Southern states turned increasingly to Russia for guidance, or were forcibly annexed.

In the Northern Continent itself disheartenment was spreading. One of its causes, and one of its effects, was an increasingly rapid decline of population. Every inducement was made to encourage procreation, but in vain. The state granted high maternity subsidies, and honorific titles were offered to parents of large families. Contraception, though not illegal, was morally condemned. In spite of all this, the birth rate continued to decline, and the average age of the population to increase. Labour became a most precious commodity. Labour-saving devices were developed to a pitch hitherto unknown on the planet. Domestic service was completely eliminated by electrical contraptions. Transport over the whole country was carried out mainly by self- regulating railways. The predominantly middle-aged population felt more at home on the ground than in the air. There was no shortage of power, for the deeply indented north western coast-line afforded vast resources of tidal electricity. But in spite of this wealth of power and other physical resources North American society began to fall into disorder simply through its mediocre intelligence and increasing shortage of young people. Every child was brought up under the anxious care of the National Fertility Department. Every device of education and technical training was lavished upon him, or her. Every young man and every young woman was assured of prosperity and of a career of skilled work in service of the community. But the increasing preponderance of the middle-aged gave an increasingly conservative tilt to the whole social policy. In spite of lip-service to the old pioneering spirit and the old ideal of endless progress, the effective aim of this society was merely to maintain itself in stability and comfort. This was no satisfying ideal for the young. Those young people who were not cowed by the authority of their elders were flung into violent opposition to the whole social order and ideology of the Republic. They were thus very susceptible to the propaganda of Russian imperial communism, which under the old heart-stirring slogans of the Revolution was now making its supreme effort to dominate the world, and was able to offer great opportunities of enterprise and courage to its swarms of vigorous but uncritical young.

The fall of India dismayed the middle-aged North American community. When at last the Soviet dictatorship picked a quarrel with it, internal dissensions made resistance impossible. The regime of the middle-aged collapsed. The youthful minority seized power and welcomed the Russian aerial armada. The Hammer and Sickle, formerly the most heartening emblem of the will for the light, but now sadly debased, was displayed on the Capitol.

The whole double American continent now fell under the control of Russia, and with it Australia and New Zealand. In Southern and Central Africa, meanwhile, the Black populations, after a series of abortive and bloody rebellions, had at last overthrown their white masters, avenging themselves for centuries of oppression by perpetrating the greatest massacre of history. If the Negroes had been politically experienced they might now have become one of the most formidable states in the world, for the inland water power of their continent was immense. Even under European domination this had been to a large extent exploited, but vast resources remained to be tapped. Unfortunately the Black populations had been so long inservitude that they were incapable of organizing themselves and their country efficiently. The Negro states which emerged in Africa were soon at loggerheads with one another. When foreign oppression had been abolished, unity of purpose ceased; and the condition of Africa was one of constant petty wars and civil wars. Little by little however, Russian imperialism, profiting by Negro disunity, annexed the whole of Africa.

iii. RUSSIA AND CHINA

ONE POWER ALONE in all the world now remained to be brought within the Russian grasp, and this was potentially the greatest power of all, namely China. It was in the relations between Russia and China that the discrepancy in my experience first became evident, and the two parallel histories of mankind emerged. Since these two great peoples bulk so largely in my story, I shall dwell for a while on the forces which had moulded them.

The first Russian revolution, under Lenin, had been mainly a groping but sincere expression of the will for true community, and also an act of vengeance against a cruel and inefficient master class. When the leaders of the Revolution had established their power they proceeded to remake the whole economy of Russia for the benefit of the workers. Foreign hostility, however, forced them to sacrifice much to military necessity. Not only the physical but also the mental prosperity of the population suffered. What should have become a population of freely inquiring, critical, and responsible minds became instead a mentally- regimented population, prone to mob enthusiasm and contempt for unorthodoxy. Danger favoured the dictatorship of one man and the dominance of a disciplined and militarized party. The will for true community tended more and more to degenerate into the passion for conformity within the herd and for triumph over the herd’s enemies.

For a long while, for many decades or possibly a few centuries, the struggle between the light and the darkness in Russia fluctuated. There were periods when it seemed that discipline would be relaxed for the sake of liberal advancement in education. But presently foreign danger, real or fictitious, or else some threat of internal conflict would become an excuse for the intensification of tyranny. Thousands of officials would be shot, the army and the factories purged of disaffected persons. Education would be cleansed of all tendency to foster critical thought.

The two military regimes which now vied with one another for control of the planet were in many respects alike. In each of them a minority held effective power over the whole society, and in each a single individual was at once the instrument and the wielder of that power. Each dictatorship imposed upon its subjects a strict discipline and a stereotyped ideology which, in spite of its much emphasized idiosyncracies, was in one respect at least identical with the ideology of its opponent; for both insisted on the absolute subordination of the individual to the state, yet in both peoples there was still a popular conviction that the aim of social planning should be fullness of life for all individuals.

Between the two world powers there were great differences. Russia had been first in the field, and had triumphed largely through the mental bankruptcy of European civilization. Though the Russian culture was itself an expression of that civilization, the Russians were relatively an uncivilized race which had found no great difficulty in breaking away from a lightly imposed alien ideology. China, on the other hand, boasted the oldest civilization of the planet, and one which was more conservative than any other. Moreover, while the Russians had asserted themselves against a decadent but partially civilized Europe, and had always been secretly overawed by Europe’s cultural achievement, the Chinese had asserted themselves against a people whom they regarded as upstarts and barbarians, the Japanese. More consciously than the Russians they had fought not only for social justice but for civilization, for culture, and the continuity of their tradition.

Whatever the defects of the Chinese tradition, in one respect it had been indirectly of immense value. Among both rich and poor the cult of the family had persisted throughout Chinese history, and had survived even the modern revolutionary period. In many ways this cult, this obsession, had been a reactionary influence, but in two respects it had been beneficial. It had prevented decline of population; and, more important, it had prevented a decline of intelligence. In China as elsewhere the more intelligent had tended to rise into the more comfortable circumstances. But whereas in Europe and America the more prosperous classes had failed to breed adequately, in China the inveterate cult of family ensured that they should do so. In post- revolutionary China the old love of family was a useful stock on which to graft a new biologically-justified respect not merely for family as such but for those stocks which showed superior intelligence or superior social feeling. Unfortunately, though public opinion did for a while move in this direction, the old financial ruling families, seeing their dominance threatened by upstart strains, used all their power of propaganda and oppression to stamp out this new and heretical version of the old tradition. Thus, though on the whole the Chinese Empire was richer in intelligence than the Russian, it seriously squandered its resources in this most precious social asset. And later, as I shall tell, the reactionary policy of the ruling caste threatened this great people with complete bankruptcy of mental capacity.

In social organization there were differences between imperial Russia and imperial China. In Russia the heroic attempt to create a communist state had finally gone astray through the moral deterioration of the Communist Party. What had started as a devoted revolutionary corps had developed as a bureaucracy which in effect owned the whole wealth of the empire. Common ownership theoretically existed, but in effect it was confined to the Party, which thus became a sort of fabulously wealthy monastic order. In its earlier phase the Party was recruited by strict social and moral testing, but latterly the hereditary principle had crept in, so that the Party became an exclusive ruling caste. In China, under the influence partly of Russian communism, partly of European capitalism, a similar system evolved, but one in which the common ownership of the ruling caste as a whole was complicated by the fact that the great families of the caste secured a large measure of economic autonomy. As in Japan at an earlier stage, but more completely and definitely, each great department of production became the perquisite of a particular aristocratic, or rather plutocratic, family. Within each family, common ownership was strictly maintained.

There was a deep difference of temper between the two peoples. Though the Russian revolutionaries had prided themselves on their materialism, the Russian people retained a strong though unacknowledged tendency towards mysticism. Their veneration of Lenin, which centred round his embalmed body in the Kremlin, was originally simple respect for the founder of the new order; but little by little it acquired a character which would have called from Lenin himself condemnation and ridicule. The phraseology of dialectical materialism came to be fantastically reinterpreted in such a way as to enable the populace to think of ‘matter’ as a kind of deity, with Marx as the supreme prophet and Lenin as the terrestrial incarnation of the God himself. Marx’s system was scientific in intention, and it claimed to be an expression of intelligence operating freely on the data of social life. But the early Marxists had insisted, quite rightly, that reason was no infallible guide, that it was an expression of social causes working through the individual’s emotional needs. This sound psychological principle became in time a sacred dogma, and during the height of Russian imperial power the rejection of reason was as complete and as superstitious as it had been in Nazi Germany. Men were able, while accepting all the social and philosophical theories of Marx, to indulge in all kinds of mystical fantasies.

In this matter the Chinese were very different from the Russians. Whatever the truth about ancient China, the China that had freed itself from Japan was little interested in the mystical aspect of experience. For the Chinese of this period common sense was absolute. Even in regard to science, which for so many Russians had become almost a religion, the Chinese maintained their common-sense attitude. Science for them was not a gospel but an extremely useful collection of precepts for gaining comfort or power. When the educated Russian spoke of the far-reaching philosophical significance of materialistic science, the educated Chinese would generally smile and shrug his shoulders. Strange that the fanatical materialist was more addicted to metaphysical speculation and mystical fantasy, and the unspeculative adherent of common sense was in this respect capable of greater piety towards the occult depth of reality.

The culture of the new China was often regarded as ‘Eighteenth Century’ in spirit, but at its best it included also a tacit intuitive reverence for the mystery which encloses human existence. Even after the bitter struggle against the Japanese there remained something eighteenth century about the educated Chinese, something of the old urbanity and liking for decency and order. The old respect for learning, too, remained, though the kind of learning which was now necessary to the aspiring government official was very different from that which was required in an earlier age. Then, all that was demanded was familiarity with classical texts; now, the candidate had to show an equally minute acquaintance with the lore of physics, biology, psychology, economics, and social science. In the new China as in old, the supreme interest of the intellectuals was not theoretical, as it had been with the Greeks, nor religious, as with the Jews, nor mystical, as with the Indians, nor scientific and industrial, as with the Europeans, but social. For them, as for their still-revered ancestors, the all absorbing problem was to discover and practise the right way of living together.

To understand the Chinese social ideas of this period with their emphasis at once on freedom and self-discipline for the common task, one must bear in mind the effects of the Japanese wars. At the outset the Chinese had been hopelessly divided against themselves, and the Japanese had profited by their discord. But invasion united them, and to the surprise of the World they showed great skill and devotion in reorganizing their whole economy to resist the ruthless enemy. Though their armies were driven inland, they contrived to create a new China in the West. There, great factories sprang up, great universities were founded. There, the young men and women of the new China learned to believe in their people’s mission to free the world from tyranny and to found a world-civilization which should combine the virtues of the ancient and the Modern.

During the first phase of the resistance against Japan, during the emergence of the new national consciousness which was also a new consciousness of mankind, the whole resources of the state and the whole energy of the people were concentrated on defence. Arms had to be bought or made, armies raised. And the new soldiers had to be politically trained so that each of them should be not merely an efficient fighter but also a radiating centre of the new ideas. Education, military and civilian, was one of the state’s main cares. Under the influence of a number of brilliant minds there appeared the outline of the old new culture. Based on the ethics of the ancient China, but influenced also by Christianity, by European democracy, by European science, by Russian communism, it was at the same time novel through and through.

Unfortunately, though the ideas that inspired the new China included common service, common sacrifice, and common ownership, the structure of Chinese society was still in part capitalist. Though under the stress of War the commercial and financial oligarchy sacrificed much, freely or under compulsion, it managed to retain its position as the effective power behind the throne of the people’s representatives, and later behind the dictator. In the period of acute danger this power had been exercised secretly, and had effected intrigues with the similar power in Japan. Later, when the tide had turned, when the Japanese armies were either surrounded or in flight to the coast, the plea of national danger was no longer sufficiently urgent to subdue or disguise the efforts of finance to re-establish itself. A period of violent internal strain was followed by a civil war. Once more the rice plains were overrun by troops and tanks, railways were destroyed, cities bombed, savage massacres perpetrated in the name of freedom or justice or security.

The result of the war was that Communism triumphed in the North, Capitalism in the South. For a while the two states maintained their independence, constantly intriguing against one another. The North, of course, depended largely on Russian support, and as Russia was at this time triumphantly expanding over Europe, it looked as though South China must soon succumb. But Russia, though by now the greatest military power in the world, was no longer a revolutionary and inspiring influence. The jargon of communism was still officially used, but its spirit had vanished; much as, in an earlier age, the jargon of liberal democracy was used in support of capitalist exploitation. Consequently the leaders of the South were able to defeat communist propaganda both in their own country and in the North by ardent appeals to Chinese nationalism. The result was that after a while the nationalists seized power in the North. There followed a solemn act of union between the North and South Chinese states. And thus was created the formidable Chinese financial-military dictatorship.

While the Russian Empire was busy digesting America and Africa, the Chinese would-be empire was consolidating itself throughout eastern Asia. In the north, Japan, Korea, Manchuria and Mongolia, in the south, Assam, Siam, Burma and the East Indies, were one by one brought within the new empire. Tibet, which had formerly been part of the ancient Chinese Empire, was able to main’ a precarious independence by playing off each of its formidable neighbours against the other.

The period of human history that I have been describing may seem to have been one in which the will for darkness triumphed, but in fact it was not. It was merely as I have said, a phase in the long age of balance between the light and the dark. Neither of the two empires that now competed for mastery over the planet was wholly reactionary. In each great group of peoples a large part of the population, perhaps the majority, still believed in friendliness and reasonableness, and tried to practice them. When the sacrifice was not too great, they even succeeded. In personal contacts the form and often the spirit of Christian behaviour or of the ancient Chinese morality were still evident. Even in indirect social relations liberal impulses sometimes triumphed. Moreover in, both empires an active minority worked vigorously for the light, urging humane conduct and propagating the idea of a just social order in which all might find fulfilment. In fact on both sides the more intelligent of the adherents of the light confidently looked forward to a great and glorious Change, if not in the near future, at least in the lifetime of their children. Even the rulers themselves, the military-political groups which controlled the two empires, believed sincerely not indeed in radical change, but in their mission to rule the world and lead it to a vaguely conceived Utopia of discipline and martial virtue. In neither empire was there at this time the ruthless lust for power and delight in cruelty which had for a’ while dominated Germany. Between the rulers of the two empires there was an ambiguous relationship. Though each desired to conquer the other by diplomacy or war, and though to each the social ideas and the forms of social behaviour propagated by the other were repugnant, yet, both agreed in regarding something else as more repugnant, namely the overthrow of their own state by their own progressive minority. Consequently their policy was guided not only by fluctuations in their power in relation to the enemy but also by the strength or weakness of their own progressives. Sincerely, and sometimes even with sincere reluctance, they used the plea of external danger to enforce stricter discipline at home. Yet at times when social upheaval seemed imminent they would not scruple to ask the external enemy to ease his pressure for a while. And invariably the request was granted; for neither of the ruling groups wished to see its opponents overthrown in revolution.

iv. THE RISE OF TIBET

THE LIFE AND death struggle which at last broke out between the empires of Russia and China centred upon Tibet. More important, it was seemingly in Tibet that the balance between the will for darkness and the will for the light was finally destroyed. It is necessary therefore to examine the fortunes of the Tibetans in some detail.

Although their lofty, secluded, and mainly arid land had formerly been an outpost of the ancient Chinese Empire, it had always maintained a measure of independence. During China’s long struggle with Japan this independence had become absolute, and henceforth the clerical oligarchy of Tibet maintained its freedom by playing off Russia and China against one another. Within the Tibetan frontiers there was a constant struggle between the secret propagandists of Russia and those of China, but the Tibetan government put up a strong resistance against both. Ever since the age of the commercial expansion of Europe Tibet had fought for the preservation of native culture. Foreigners had been excluded from the country. Foreign loans for exploitation of Tibet’s natural resources had been refused. Little by little, however, the barriers had broken down. European and American, and subsequently Russian and Chinese, goods and ideas had found their way into the high valleys and plains. Modern aids to agriculture, modern methods of transport, the cinema, the radio, seemed to threaten to destroy the individuality of this last stronghold of unmechanized culture.

But in the case of Tibet, forewarned was indeed forearmed. After a period of internal conflict an economically progressive, but culturally conservative, party was able to seize power and effect a revolution in the economic life of the country. The new rulers, the new advisers of the Grand Lama, wisely distinguished between the material achievements of modernism and its social and moral absurdities. They undertook to modernize their country materially and even to some extent mentally, while preserving the essentials of the native cultural life. In this they were but following in the footsteps of the Japanese, but with the tragic example of that upstart modern society ever before them. Moreover in the Tibetan culture there was something far deeper, more spiritual and more hardy than in the culture of Japan. The natural poverty of the country, too, had proved a blessing. Powerful neighbours regarded Tibet as not worth systematic exploitation or conquest; and the belated native attempt to develop the country without foreign aid could not produce, even if it had been intended to do so, anything like the flood of luxury and the insane lust for commercial power which had enervated the dominant class in Europe. Physically Tibetan resources were indeed negligible. Save for certain remaining deposits of gold, mostly in the eastern part of the country, there was little mineral wealth, and agriculture was hobbled by severe shortage of water. Even pasture was at first desperately meagre. Sheep and cattle, however, and particularly the hardy native yak, formed the mainstay of the population. The government undertook a great irrigation scheme; with the willing and even heroic co-operation of the people. Within a few decades, it was hoped, much of the country would be capable of intensive cultivation.

But the main resources of Tibet were the people themselves. A pacific, industrious, and sturdy folk, they had been encouraged to regard themselves not as a backward race doomed to succumb to foreign powers, but as the custodians of the ancient wisdom in a period of worldwide darkness. Some of their recent leaders had suggested also that the Tibetan people must now become the pioneers of a new and comprehensive wisdom in which ancient and modern should be combined more significantly than was possible, for instance, in the depraved communities of Russia and China.

The leaders of the first Tibetan revolution, though they saw vaguely the need to modify the native culture, were not in practice able to carry forward the great process of development which they had started. There had to be a second revolution, which was led by the forward- looking section of the Lama class, with the backing of the people. This new class of leaders had come into being through the first revolution. A measure of frugal prosperity had increased the people’s leisure and thoughtfulness. Though they were eager for certain physical improvements to their country, they had escaped the dangerous spell of modern industrialism, for that simple faith had by now been discredited among thoughtful people throughout the world. Though these ‘servants of the light’, as they called themselves, welcomed the scientific education which the government offered them, they also welcomed its insistence on the ancient wisdom. Indeed the young began flocking into the monasteries, and particularly to the houses of the reformed, modernistic monastic orders. The leaders of this new Lama class were persons who, after being well grounded in the principles of Buddhism, had in their maturity been greatly influenced by modern ideas without being false to the essence of the native culture. Most of them had spent a year or two in China or India, many in Russia, some in America, where they had been impressed by the Friends. Foreign contacts had made them realize fully the superstition and hypocrisy of the worst type of Lamas and the shallow pretentiousness of much of the orthodox learning. But this disillusionment had merely brought out more clearly the truth which had been perverted. This, they affirmed, was a truth not of intellect but of intuition. It was a feeling or apprehension of something which put all things into their true perspective. The whole intellectual edifice of Buddhism, they said, was an attempt, sometimes sound sometimes false, to elucidate this inarticulate discovery. And the discovery itself was to be won not at a stroke but progressively, through a long discipline of actual life. In modernism also they found a truth of feeling. The real achievement of modern culture, apart from science, they summarized under three headings; first, its insistence on action, individual and social, as opposed to Eastern quietism; second, its demand for equality of opportunity for all human beings; and, finally, its understanding of the primitive unconscious sources of all human thought and feeling.

The new monastic orders were at first tolerated and even encouraged by the Lhasa oligarchy, but presently they were reprimanded for stirring up unrest. For though each had its headquarters in some craggy monastery, the inmates travelled periodically, exhorting the people. They were in fact something between monks, friars, and revolutionaries. They preached a sort of religious communism, and demanded the abdication of the ruling class, the wealthy monastic orders. The crisis came when the new Lamas renounced the celibacy which for centuries had been accepted by the monastic class. The motive of this change was a thoroughly modernistic motive. It was realized in the new monasteries that the two most precious innate social capacities were the disposition for genuine community and the capacity for intelligent action. It was realized also that, although the average level of intelligence had not sunk so far in Tibet as in more advanced’ countries, there was a steady drain of the more intelligent into the celibate monastic orders. This, said the servants of the light, must stop. Recognizing the importance of self-denial for spiritual discipline, they recognized also the importance of propagating intelligence. They therefore boldly affirmed their intention of striving for complete spiritual discipline and insight though ‘unsupported by the prop of celibacy’. Biological responsibility, they said, must not be shirked by the servants of the light, even though they must assume other weighty responsibilities. Not only so, but the experience of family life, with all its trials and all its mental enrichment, must not be shirked by those who undertook to lead and govern the people. They recognized that family life must not be allowed to absorb too much attention, but to avoid this they advocated that the state should assume the final responsibility for the upbringing of all children.

The renunciation of celibacy and the attack on the ruling class inevitably caused a serious conflict between the old and the new monastic orders. Inevitably the Grand Lama excommunicated the servants of the light, and finally outlawed them. Civil war followed. Since the Young Lamas, the servants of the light, were strongly supported by the people, their victory was decisive. It happened that at this critical moment of Tibetan history neither Russia nor China was in a position to interfere effectively, because a move by either would have precipitated an attack by the other; and since internal unrest in both empires was grave, war would have turned into civil war. So the second Tibetan revolution was successfully accomplished, and a new Tibet was founded, a society which to all earlier statesmen would have seemed a fantastic dream.

While modest economic development was continued, the main work of the new government was to educate the people in citizenship and in the new, purged version of the ancient culture. At the same time equality of opportunity for the rising generation, opportunity both economic and educational, was made absolute. In the new constitution ultimate power lay with the whole adult population. The constitution could be altered only by their elected assembly, which also could depose the government or withhold supplies. Current legislation, however, was carried out not by the general assembly but by a body elected by a section of the population known as the Active Citizens. These were men and women who had qualified by undertaking certain kinds of social service and by passing certain intelligence tests and academic examinations. The Active Citizens elected representatives from among themselves, but only those who had completed a rigorous political training, practical and theoretical, could stand for election. Parallel with this system there was a kind of Soviet system, based on occupation. All important legislation had to be sanctioned both by the representatives of the Active Citizens and by the body which formed the elected apex of this occupational system. This constitution could never have been put into action had there not already existed throughout the country a high standard of political education and a body of trusted leaders, proved in the revolution.

The new government at once passed a mass of progressive legislation. Ownership of all means of production was vested in the state, but delegated, with suitable checks, to the occupations themselves. In particular, the peasants were assured of ownership of their land. For some purposes their control was individualistic, and for other purposes co-operative. The government also issued ‘an appeal to all persons of goodwill throughout the world’ to work with new courage to found a new and unified world order, ‘to establish freedom and the rule of the spirit’. The Tibetans, it declared, dedicated themselves absolutely to this end.

It is to this point of the history of man that I shall return when I begin to tell of the triumph of the will for light. Meanwhile I must from this point pursue the story of increasing darkness; for at this very moment, when seemingly the will for the light had gained unprecedented power, the will for darkness gathered its strength for final triumph.

The actual bifurcation of history may have begun long before this date. It may have begun in China, in Russia, in America, in Britain, or in all these countries at different dates. But equally it may well be that Tibet was the crucial point. Whatever the truth about the actual bifurcation, the relations of the new Tibet with its two mighty neighbours constituted the occasion on which the great duplication became unmistakable and irrevocable. Henceforth my experience was dual. On the one hand I witnessed the failure of the Tibetan renaissance, and the destruction of the Tibetan people. This was followed by the final Russo-Chinese war which unified the human race but also undermined its capacity. On the other hand I saw the Tibetans create, seemingly in the very jaws of destruction, a community such as man had never before achieved. And this community, I saw, so fortified the forces of the light in the rival empires that the war developed into a revolutionary war which spread over the whole planet, and did not end until the will for the light had gained victory everywhere.

Part II. DARKNESS

4. THE QUENCHING OF THE LIGHT

i.REPERCUSSIONS IN BRITAIN
ii. A SYNTHETIC FAITH
iii. THE TIBETANS DEFEND THEMSELVES
iv. THE DESTRUCTION OF TIBET

i. REPERCUSSIONS IN BRITAIN

THE AWAKENING OF the Tibetans caused a stir throughout the world. For a while it seemed that at last the light would win. Bold young Tibetans, ‘itinerant servants of the light’, left their frugal and crag-bound ‘incipient Utopia’ to spread the gospel across the high passes of the Karakorum Range into Sinkiang and far into the Russian plain. Others, still more daring, penetrated eastward to the upper reaches of the Hwang Ho. Evading the efficient Chinese police, they carried the word even to Shanghai, and thence to Japan. Yet others, crossing the more difficult and neglected of the Himalayan passes, percolated like an invisible ferment into the peoples of India; while others again crept along the gorges of Kashmir, seeking Europe. Thousands were caught, and tortured with all the cunning of medical and psychological science. In China these tortures were often carried out in public to entertain the people and warn those who had any leanings towards the light. But few of the missionaries were extirpated before they had infected with their message many who were ripe to receive it. Meanwhile in Lhasa and the other great centres of the new-old truth swarms of young men and women were being trained to carryon the great task.

In every land the servants of the light were heartened. The servants of darkness were bewildered and anxious. Here and there throughout the two great empires brave attempts were made to copy the Tibetan experiment. Here and there, notably in Britain, the party of the light organized an armed rebellion.

The three peoples of Britain, the English, the Scotch, and the Welsh, had long ago ceased to count politically in the world. Enslaved first by Germany and then by Russia, they had adapted themselves to their servile condition. Nevertheless they retained a precious memory not only of their ancient national splendour but also of that humane and liberal spirit for which, in spite of heinous faults, they had once been famous. Whenever in any part of the world a stand was made for freedom and individual integrity the three British peoples, and often the Irish too, were ready to cause trouble for their masters. Rumour soon told them that the new Tibetan state was not the Gilbert and Sullivan fantasy which Russian propaganda reported. Presently the secret emissaries of Tibet were at work in London and the North-west. The gospel spread. But the British, imperfectly schooled in the life of the spirit, never clearly grasped it. Only the political aspect of it was fully intelligible to them. Politically they were still gifted with a certain tact, forbearance, and inventiveness; and they were not incapable of making a bold stand against tyranny. But this was not enough. To break the mechanized power of the foreign dictatorship they needed to have, as a whole people, that outstanding fortitude and integrity which are possible only to those who have endured a long and intelligent discipline under the light. The British rebellion failed because the spirit behind it was confused and uncertain, and therefore incapable of that fantastic and universal heroism which alone can triumph over odds that are obviously impossible. The young Russian air-police quickly obliterated the few towns which the rebels were able to seize.

ii. A SYNTHETIC FAITH

THIS LITTLE EPISODE on the fringe of the Russian Empire was of no general significance. The focus of interest was always Tibet itself. The two imperial powers had, of course tried to frustrate the Tibetan revolution, but at first each had regarded the strange commotion on ‘the Roof of the World’ as a comic side-show. Each had been concerned to gain a diplomatic victory over its rival in the Tibetan no-man’s- land rather than to preserve the old Tibetan régime. But when the revolution was actually accomplished, the Russian and Chinese oligarchs began to be alarmed. And when it became evident that the insignificant Tibetan state was fomenting the subversive forces beyond its frontiers and planning a world-wide revolution, both the imperial governments began to take serious action. The campaign of terrorism which each undertook within its own frontiers was not as successful as had been hoped. The progressive minority, disciplined by Tibetan leaders, showed fanatical courage. Moreover each imperial government at first made the mistake of fostering the subversive movement in its rival’s territory. Not till matters had become very grave was this policy abandoned by a tacit agreement between the two great powers to postpone all action against one another till the epidemic of sedition had been crushed. Even so, neither could trust the other not to use the crushing of the Tibetan experiment as a pretext for annexing the country. Whenever one of the two powers threatened invasion if Tibetan propaganda did not cease, the government at Lhasa was able to count on diplomatic or even military intervention by the other.

There came a time, however, when fear of Tibetan ideas overcame imperial rivalry. Both oligarchies were finding it impossible to cope with the rising tide of religious fanaticism within their own frontiers. Though every city had now its own congested concentration camp, though time after time these camps were emptied to provide a public holocaust in which, before the eyes of a howling and ecstatic mob, thousands were roasted alive or vivisected by machinery devised to produce maximal pain, the movement continued to spread. It even infected the troops. In these circumstances the two oligarchies were forced to put aside their rivalry. Their leaders met in conference in the newest and wealthiest suburb of Irkutsk, on the forest-clad shores of Lake Baikal. There they worked out a common policy. The conference was dominated by a young Chinese official psychologist who claimed to have an infallible cure for the world’s madness.

To appreciate his contentions it is necessary to understand the mentality of the oligarchs. They were in the main sincere believers in their respective empires, and in imperialism itself. Their conscious minds were those of devoted, meticulously accurate civil servants who felt that their society was in danger of disintegration through an enthusiasm beyond their comprehension. On the whole they disliked the orgy of torture with which it was hoped to break the movement, but they believed it necessary; Moreover most of them unwittingly derived satisfaction from it, for most were frustrated spirits, teased by an unrecognized itch of resentment against those who had maintained spiritual liberty and integrity by rebelling against the established barbarism. Moreover in the Russian and the Chinese cultures there were elements which favoured cruelty. The Russians were a kindly not a cruel people, but in the pseudo-mysticism of degenerate Russia there was in some respects a return to pre-revolutionary ideas. Suffering was conceived of as the supreme purifier and the supreme source of illumination. Consequently the infliction of suffering on others might sometimes be laudable. The Chinese, on the other hand, though so fastidious and so friendly, had always been liable both to cold cruelty and to passionate vindictiveness. The Chinaman who had ‘run amok’ did but manifest an impulse which was latent in all his race, and indeed in all mankind, though with less dramatic expression.

The argument of the young psychologist was briefly this. Tibet had become obsessed with an idea, and was infecting every people. To resist such an emotional and dynamic idea it was necessary to have another idea, contrary and even more potent. It was necessary to give the people something to live for, die for, and kill for. The Tibetan idea was the incredible ideal of a world in which men would fulfil their powers in joyful service of the common weal. To counter this insidious doctrine it was necessary to preach sacrifice, self- immolation, enlightenment in suffering, obedience to the divine and ruthless Will, embodied, of course, in the fiat of the state. Two ideas, the psychologist insisted, must be reiterated on all possible occasions and given some kind of concrete symbolization. In the first place it must be constantly pointed out that though the Tibetans themselves insisted on submission to the divine will, their conception of that will was effeminate. Moreover the Tibetan emphasis on submission was incompatible with the contrary exhortation to strive for revolutionary change. Submission must be absolute, fervent, ecstatic. Only at the command of the state must it give place to struggle, and then struggle itself must spring from utter submission to the divine state. Of course if the state was palpably not divine, if it was, for instance, the utterly perverted Tibetan state, struggle must be constant and resolute until the true state was founded. But under the divine state the supreme virtue was obedience. For the state in its wisdom would decide what was the right function of everyone. As for the right to education, there was no such thing. In its place must be set the right and duty of ignorance. Let each man know merely whatever was needed for the fulfilling of his function. To know more was wicked, and to the truly spiritual mind repugnant. Obedience involved also the pious acceptance of suffering, one’s own and one’s neighbour’s. But indeed suffering was not only to be reluctantly accepted; it must be welcomed. For the second great idea which the psychologist stressed was the excellence both of suffering and of cruelty. In praising kindliness and mutual respect the Tibetans had overlooked another important value. No doubt there was a place for kindliness. Between members of one family, and between loyal members of the divine state, kindliness was necessary so long as it did not infringe against loyalty, But from the spiritual point of view there was a virtue more important and more illuminating than kindliness, namely cruelty. For cruelty, he said, was complementary to suffering. In torture, both victim and agent should experience an ineffable illumination. Like the union of love, and in a far more vivid manner, the union of victim and torturer was a creative synthesis in which a new and splendid reality was brought into being. The proof of this was in the experience itself. The torturer knew well that ecstasy. The victim, if he was spiritually disciplined beforehand, should experience an even more exquisite, excruciating joy.

The psychologist urged that the two governments should secretly select and train the future prophets of this faith, and launch them out as spontaneous religious enthusiasts throughout the two empires. It would be well that these agitators should be critical of the existing imperial governments, condemning them as but feeble embodiments of the truth. Indeed these state-aided revolutionaries should be encouraged to demand a new regime. Let them go so far as to incur persecution by the existing governments. Some of them would then have to be sacrificed, but the survivors must be heavily financed to rouse a revolutionary fervour among the populace, the object of which would be not the milk-sop liberal-socialist Utopia achieved by Tibet but the fulfilment of the potentialities of the existing order. Only when the true divine state had been established would the virtue of absolute acquiescence be possible.

Such a movement, the psychologist prophesied, would sweep the world. It would appeal both to the universal impulse to ‘pass by on the other side’ when help was demanded and to the no less ‘widespread need for destruction and cruelty. He suggested that, in consonance with the two national temperaments, acquiescence should be stressed in Russia, cruelty in China. This difference, he added, could be used as a basis on which to build Russo-Chinese national hatred when the time came (as it surely would) for the world-wide ruling class to tighten its grip on the people by means of a world war. It was never clear whether the young man believed in the faith that he was preaching or whether he advocated it merely as a piece of necessary statecraft. It was as statecraft that the conference accepted the policy.

Presently the Tibetan missionaries found themselves confronted by a rival missionary movement, with which they could not cope. The instigators of this new movement were a kind of wild dervish. They lashed their audiences into fury, preaching sacred cruelty and demanding a revitalization of the imperial state. After their meetings there was always a lynching, sometimes a mass sacrifice of captive servants of the light. The movement spread from Canton to Leningrad. The two governments bowed before the storm. Their personnel was somewhat changed, their policy clarified and brought into line with the new faith. National differences were for the time submerged under the common will to destroy Tibet.

iii. THE TIBETANS DEFEND THEMSELVES

IT WAS OBVIOUS that the Tibetans, few, relatively poor, and unequipped for war, could not resist the combined forces of the two empires that covered the world. There was only one hope, namely that the servants of the light in all countries would be able to carry out so great a campaign of passive resistance and active sabotage that the attack would never be launched.

The Tibetan renaissance had been strongly pacifist in temper, though never pledged to absolute non-violence. The Indian influence had been complicated by the influence of China. In the new crisis a vociferous party urged that, since resistance was anyhow hopeless, the time had come for heroic non-resistance to invasion; and that sabotage in the two empires must not be encouraged. Against this view it was pointed out that non-resistance was doomed to fail against invaders schooled to despise gentleness, and that no policy could succeed but one which combined total revolutionary action in the imperial territories, desperate resistance to invasion, and absolute loyalty to the spirit.

This became the official policy, but as the war proceeded the pure pacifists became strong enough to blunt the edge of resolution. In relation to Russian and Chinese propaganda in Tibet the strength of pure pacifism in the country had an unfortunate influence. Large numbers of the less intelligent Tibetans, seeing clearly enough that pure pacifism would not work against the ruthless enemy, conceived suspicion and disgust against all those who were in any way sympathetic to pacifism. They thus laid themselves open to the propaganda of the servants of darkness, who soon discovered that their efforts to undermine Tibetan faith were not wholly unsuccessful.

But the battle was not yet lost. The servants of light throughout the empires did succeed in rousing many peoples to organize strikes and rebellions in defence of Tibet. In parts of Western China, in Sinkiang, and in Kashmir, all of which had been greatly influenced by the new Tibet, the imperial governments were defeated, and governments of the light were created. Even in far Europe and in farther America the Russian power was seriously threatened. Everywhere the rebels knew that they were fighting in a desperate cause, and that if they were defeated the vengeance of the tyrants would be diabolic. But Tibet had become for millions throughout the world a holy land, and its people the chosen people who must be preserved at all costs. For Tibet was thought of as the germ from which a new world-organism would in due season develop. If the germ was destroyed, all hope would be for ever lost. .

While these rebellions were in progress, and while throughout Asia munition factories were mysteriously blowing up and aeroplanes showing a strange inability to leave the ground, the Tibetans were hastily organizing a forlorn defence. Rebellions beyond their northern frontiers made it possible to work unhindered to turn the Karakorum and Dangla Ranges into a continuous fortress. To thesouth the Himalayas were a natural barrier. To the west the successful Kashmiri rebels would defend them to the death. Eastward the Chwanben gorges were still being held.

But the main defence against invasion, though not against attack from the air, was a device recently invented by geneticists and biochemists in one of the great reformed Lamasseries. The character of this invention shows how strangely science was developing under the influence of will for the light. Some miles in front of the fortifications the new defences formed a belt about two miles wide and completely surrounding Tibetan territory, save for the exits and entrances of rivers. Througout this belt the ground was impregnated to a depth of several feet with a micro-organism which had been artificially bred from a natural virus. It had a strange property. Though in one stage of’ its life-cycle this ultra-microscopic object remained deep underground in chemical reaction with certain products of vegetable decomposition, in another stage it gradually percolated towards the surface and finally drifted off into the air, to reproduce and take part in other chemical reactions before settling once more on the ground and sinking into the subsoil. In the air this virus formed an ultra-microscopic dust which would inevitably be inhaled by all animals in the infected area. From the respiratory organs it travelled to the brain. It had a startling effect on the higher brain centres. It produced a complete but temporary loss of memory and of nearly all acquired skills. Even those habits that were most long-established and familiar were seriously disturbed. Speech and walking became infantile, perception largely meaningless. Intelligence remained; but, shorn of all its acquired experience, it was like the intelligence of a bright and ignorant child. But the most striking aspect of the virus was that its influence could be almost completely resisted by minds of high intelligence and integrity that had undergone a thorough spiritual discipline. Many Tibetans, therefore, could cross the defence belt in safety so long as they kept their minds occupied with meditation, while on the journey and resisted the oppressive drowsiness which was the first symptom of disintegration.

When at last the dull-witted armies of Russia and China with their irresistible war machines attempted to cross the belt, their personnel was mysteriously reduced to infantilism. Many accidentally killed themselves with their own machinery. The army became a stumbling, helpless mob. They were shepherded back into their own territory by Tibetan police. Many were then slaughtered by their Russian or Chinese compatriots as worthless goods. Some were preserved for observation, and after a few weeks they completely recovered. Fresh attempts at invasion met with the same fate. Respirators were of no avail, for the ultra-microscopic spores could pass through any filter, and nothing would poison them that was not also poisonous to human beings.

But though on the ground the frontier was inviolate, the virus provided no defence against attack by air. The Tibetans had a small but brilliant air force. It had been assumed that in any attack by one of the two empires the other would be eager to check aggression by its rival. In such circumstances such an air force as Tibet possessed might prove invaluable. But against the combined air forces of Russia and China, it must surely (thought the leaders of those empires) prove impotent. This calculation omitted the spiritual factor. Not only had the Tibetan airmen been trained to the highest technical proficiency. They were also, one and all, conscious servants of the light. Boys though they were, and therefore as yet incapable of the deeper spiritual insight, they had been brought up to experience without perversion the fundamental values for which Tibet was standing. Full well they knew that the Tibetan community was the one sane and joyful community in a crazy world, and indeed the first terrestrial society to be consciously planned for the full expression of the spirit. They also knew that if they allowed Tibet to be conquered they would doom the human race to servitude under the will for darkness. They knew that henceforth all human loveliness would wither and vanish. And they were convinced that for themselves fulfilment must lie in perfect service in the air. With a calm and absolute courage more formidable than any fanaticism these young men soared against the invading bombers, and brought them down in thousands.

In passing I record one unusual qualification which the Tibetan government exacted of its young airmen. They must be married men. Further, none might go into action against the enemy unless he had a child, or his wife was pregnant. It even became a point of honour with these strange ‘aces’ not to take extreme risks until they had at least three children to their credit.

So effective was the defence put up by the Tibetan air force that the repeated waves of attack became more and more infrequent and finally ceased for several years. During this period the Tibetans maintained themselves in complete isolation from the rest of the world, save by radio and occasional daring excursions by planes to foment revolution or seize some much needed commodity. Meanwhile the imperialists were preparing so great an air-fleet and so numerous a population of pilots that effective resistance by the shrunken Tibetan air force would be impossible.

When the great attack was launched, the sky over Tibet was darkened by the invading bombers. Every town and village and all the great isolated monasteries were very soon destroyed. Lhasa, the spiritual heart of the country, was completely obliterated.

Watching these events from my look-out in the remote future, with superhuman intelligences as my fellow spectators, I might surely have been immune from human pity. But in fact compassion and admiration overwhelmed me. For here was a people most sensitive, most aware, the heirs and upholders of a most rare and glorious social fabric, a people rightly believing themselves to be the sole effective champions of the light in a darkened world. And all that they had built was being destroyed. Not only the loved temples of their faith, not only their precious houses of learning and all their instruments of economic production, were now being sacrificed, but also, and far more precious, their young people, the perfect fruit of all their past endeavour. Homes were broken up for ever, parents bereft, children orphaned, and lovers, seizing delight even under the wings of death, were suddenly mingled in a hideous and undesired union. By night the high clouds were lit up continuously by the flashes of guns and bombs and the sinister but lovely glow of the great fires. By night and by day the bombs still screamed and crashed, while men searched the wreckage for their companions. The Tibetans did not give way to self- pity. The prevailing temper was a devoted patriotism, which, like so many earlier patriotisms, but this time with justice, regarded the preservation of this nation and its culture as urgent for the well- being of humanity. At this stage of the war the population went about its work in a state of exaltation tempered by humour; with a sense that this was the supreme moment of mankind and a battle infinitely worth fighting, yet with surprisingly detached relish of the irony of Tibet’s plight.

The people now set about adapting themselves to their new conditions.

The country was large, and the population small. Agriculture, which had been so carefully fostered by the new régime, now ceased to be possible, for the homesteads were bombed and machine-gunned, and the dams of the great reservoirs were destroyed. But the yak remained; the population reverted to a nomad pastoral life. Wandering in small groups, pitching their camouflaged tents in fresh places every night, they offered a poor target to the enemy. Fortunately the imperialists at first made no attempt to land troops by plane, for they believed that the whole country was infected with the strange disease that had frustrated the first land attacks. The Tibetans, meanwhile, were hastily spreading the precious virus throughout their territory. Its effect was to eliminate all who did not attain the necessary standard of lucidity to resist infection. Only a small minority were thus put out of action. These were cared for in special homes. A much larger number, but still only a minority, suffered from temporary mild attacks of the disease. The virus was now also spreading itself beyond the frontiers. There, of course, its effects were incomparably worse. Organization in the infected areas completely vanished.

iv. THE DESTRUCTION OF TIBET

FOR LONG THE Tibetans remained in good heart, sending constant radio encouragement to the tormented servants of the light throughout the world. But the bombing increased. The whole strength of the two empires was concentrated on the destruction of the heroic nomads. According to a current jest Tibet had bombs instead of raindrops. The enemy air forces succeeded in infecting the reservoirs with disease- germs. Disease spread like fire through the population. Prolonged freedom from infection had deprived it of the normal powers of resistance. Meanwhile the pure pacifists, and also the secret believers in the synthetic faith which was propagated from the empires, were urging the government to surrender. From the point of view of the ‘fifth-columnists’ peace was indeed earnestly to be desired; for the gradual impregnation of the whole land with the virus of defence was already reducing them to imbeciles. Many whose faith in the light had been strong were now so physically enfeebled by the strains of war that even they could no longer resist the virus. It soon became evident that in time the great mass of the population would succumb.

The obliteration of Lhasa had destroyed the educational and spiritual nerve-centre of the state. For a while the great provincial religious institutions successfully carried on the task of maintaining the spiritual discipline of the population. But one by one these were destroyed. The older generation were still fortified by their past schooling, but the education of the young, formerly the state’s most urgent task, had now perforce to be neglected in favour of the insistent demands of defence. Consequently it became increasingly difficult for adolescents to resist the virus. Even at the height of Tibet’s prosperity the population had been small. Warfare had now greatly reduced it. Under the progressive regime the Tibetans had been the world’s healthiest people. Native toughness had co-operated with a magnificent health service. Those days were gone, for war had not only introduced disease germs but destroyed the health service. Moreover there had been heavy casualties among the herds of yak. Famine was still further weakening the stamina of the people. Worst of all, the water supply, always meagre, had been greatly reduced by the constant bombing of the dams.

Already the weaker brethren were openly demanding surrender and even plotting betrayal. But betrayal turned out to be impossible because it involved spiritual disintegration, and therefore surrender to the all- pervading virus.

Beyond the frontiers the rebellions organized by the servants of the light had long since been crushed. Tibet now faced the world alone. The only hope was that, since the victory of the imperial powers seemed now certain, they would begin to quarrel with one another and use their armaments for mutual destruction. But the Russian and Chinese ruling classes now regarded Tibet with unreasoning, obsessive terror and hate. Consciously believing in their own righteousness and their social usefulness, they were at the same time unconsciously tormented by a guilt which they dared not confess to themselves, a guilt which was both social and spiritual. Against a community which had purged itself of that guilt, and demanded a world-wide purge, they felt bitter resentment and loathing. Moreover the Tibetan community had manifested strange powers which the imperialists in their own hearts knew to be the powers of light, but which consciously they condemned as diabolical. Thus their action against Tibet showed all the persistence of one who, discovering on his body the first minute pustule of some frightful disease, believes it to be the fruit of his own sin, and resolves to cut out the infected part.

For the Tibetans the crisis came when a party within the government itself declared that further resistance was not only futile but wrong, since it involved the useless sacrifice of lives. The advocates of surrender were clearly not guilty of treason against the spirit, for they showed no signs of succumbing to the virus. The disagreement was between persons of equal integrity. In the end the peace party triumphed. Those who were still determined to maintain their freedom at all costs withdrew into the wild country on the northern slopes of the Himalayas.

Tibet surrendered; and, under the shock of this recognition of defeat, practically the whole population succumbed to the virus.. Those who retained their sanity strove in vain to protect the hosts of their childish compatriots from coming to hurt; but these, unable to cope with ordinary situations, were killed off in thousands. Their decaying bodies littered the plains and added to the pestilence. The sane were helpless, and their numbers constantly decreased. Meanwhile surrender had not brought peace. The victors dared not enter the conquered country, lest they should succumb to the virus. They therefore continued their efforts to exterminate the Tibetan people from the air. In this policy in due season they succeeded. For a few years the Himalayan remnant miserably survived, but in the end these last servants of the spirit were discovered by the Russian airmen. Henceforth their high valleys and gorges were systematically bombed until all trace of habitation had vanished.

The imperialists still dared not enter the country, for fear of the virus. They first undertook what must have been the greatest of all decontamination operations. Aeroplanes systematically sprayed the whole vast area with a strong disinfectant which destroyed not only the virus but every trace of animal and vegetable life. The home of the world’s most developed community was thus turned into a desert.

5. THE REIGN OF DARKNESS

i. THE JAPANESE REVOLUTION
ii. A SYNTHETIC WAR
iii. DIABOLIC WORLD EMPIRE

i. THE JAPANESE REVOLUTION

THE WAR AGAINST Tibet had enabled the ruling classes of Russia and China to impose a conveniently strict discipline upon their respective peoples. When the war was over, the excuse for this discipline vanished. Inevitably the change from war to peace brought hardship to many. The transition was not simply haphazard, as it would have been under individualism; it was controlled by the supreme capitalist, the state. And it was controlled in such a way as to strengthen the ruling class, not to increase general prosperity. Further, it was clumsily controlled. Skilled workers were put to unskilled work for which they had neither the ability nor the temper. Whole populations, deprived of their livelihood by the exigencies of peace, were left to starve. Other populations, meanwhile, were over-worked mercilessly, and in bad conditions.

Among the worst sufferers were the Japanese. In an earlier phase of the industrialization of the East this swarming island people had played a vigorous but unhappy part. The old feudal ruling class, wisely refusing to allow European finance to exploit the country, had itself undertaken the westernization of Japan. Unfortunately the Japanese were far more successful in imitating the worst features of European commercialism than in absorbing the best spirit of European civilization. Ruthless industrialism and ruthless imperialism landed them in the long and disastrous attack on China. Their ultimate defeat brought loss of markets, unemployment, and constant social turmoil. Henceforth China, not Japan, was the economic master of the East. Japan’s feverishly accumulated machinery fell out of use, and its human adjuncts were starved. The crowded population could not possibly be kept alive on home-grown food. The standard of living, never high, sank to famine level. The communists, though repeatedly exterminated, repeatedly reappeared, and with increasing strength. Meanwhile the military and financial oligarchy could think of nothing better to do than copy the notorious ‘two hundred families’ of France, as it had formerly copied the pioneering industrial families of Britain. It preached an anti-bolshevik crusade, made overtures to the Chinese Empire, and finally surrendered Japan’s independence. Like the men of Vichy before them, the Japanese rulers hoped that at least a few crumbs of power would thus be secured to them. This, of course, did not happen. The only result was that the Chinese police took charge of the country, and ‘made an example of’ all those who caused trouble, whether on the left or the right. Through the combination of famine, torture, and profound disillusionment the population of the Japanese islands was greatly reduced, while immense numbers of Chinese officials were settled in the country to reorganize the whole economy of Japan as a slave state for the benefit of the Chinese Empire in its crusade against Tibet.

After the fall of Tibet and the end of war-time economy, the Japanese, like the rest of the world, eagerly awaited the promised improvement of conditions and relaxation of discipline. But like the rest of the world they were disappointed. Very soon desperation in Japan reached the pitch at which suicide becomes the commonest form of death. The population seemed to be so completely cowed that the Chinese army of occupation was reduced to a skeleton. At this point the will for the light in Japan blunderingly reasserted itself. Once more the Japanese copied the West, with their accustomed thoroughness and lack of understanding. The Communist leaders, skilfully using Russian gold, succeeded in persuading large numbers in Tokio and elsewhere that it was better to die for the Revolution than meekly commit suicide. They declared, moreover, that revolution was by no means doomed to failure. The fall of Tibet, they said, had been due to contamination from sentimental bourgeois ideas derived from the ecclesiastical oligarchy. That mistake must not be made again. The basis of the Japanese revolution must be strictly materialistic, and its emotional drive must come from hate of the oppressor, not from metaphysical delusions.

Entirely careless of their lives, the revolutionaries advanced in thousands on the machine-guns of their masters. Before effective help could come from China the régime was broken, and a people’s government was in command. The rulers of China were at this time much occupied with the danger from Russia. They refrained from sending an expeditionary force against Japan, and contented themselves with a very strict blockade. The new Japanese government set about slaughtering all who were suspected of implication in the former regime, and all who disobeyed its orders. Food was the supreme problem. The more people were killed, the more hope for the survivors. The death penalty was therefore inflicted for the most venial offences, and whenever guilt seemed at all plausible. Everything feasible was done to stimulate agriculture. The peasants were forced, under threat of death, to cultivate vast tracts of poor land, for which, owing to the blockade, fertilizer were lacking. It was promised, however, that though in the coming year famine was inevitable, next season would see a plentiful harvest. Loyalty towards the future of Japan and the human race, it was said, demanded the utmost sacrifice from the present generation. But the new land produced a miserable crop; and the people, enfeebled by famine and disease, harassed by brutal treatment, and utterly without the religious stiffening that had fortified Tibet, became incapable of effort, and too physically weak for hard agricultural work. The regime was impotent. The more desperate its plight, the more it killed and tortured. The new rulers knew well that any relaxation of discipline would have brought immediate destruction to themselves; and most of them still sincerely believed that their survival was necessary to the state. In the end the Chinese government, choosing its own time, quietly recovered possession of the Japanese islands.

ii. A SYNTHETIC WAR

BOTH THE CHINESE and the Russian Empires, had been harassed by social disorders. It was clear that nothing short of another major war could restore discipline. The leaders of the two ruling classes therefore secretly conferred with one another and agreed to institute a worldwide war between the two empires. They agreed also on the rules of this lethal game. Certain districts were to remain inviolate. Trade intercourse between the two empires was to be maintained through certain demilitarized ports and frontier towns. Each side was to refrain from blotting out the other’s main centres of production, while seeming to attempt to do so. On the other hand, whenever there was any awkward social disturbance in any locality in one of the empires, the government of the other, if requested by its rival, was to launch a violent air attack on the infected area. Steps would be taken secretly by the inviting government to see that its defending air-force was unable to put up serious resistance.

There was no lack of a casus belli. The two industrial oligarchies had long been manreuvring against one another to secure the large unworked gold des posits of Eastern Tibet. There had been a time when the rivers of Tibet were rich with gold-dust, brought down from the hills. Gold had also been profitably mined within a few feet of the surface. That time had long since passed. The new Tibetan state had been aware of deeper and vaster gold deposits, but had not troubled to exploit them. To the rival empires this bright treasure was a perennial lure. China, plausibly stealing a march on her accomplice and rival, now seized this territory. With an indignation that was by no means feigned, the Russian government protested, and attacked.

For some years all went according to plan. On the plea of danger, discipline was restored. The synthetic faith which had been so effectively used to create unity against Tibet was now with equal effect used to rouse a savage hate between the two great groups of people ruled by the Russian and Chinese oligarchies. This time the differences between the Russian and the Chinese versions of the faith were duly emphasized. In Russia it was said that the Chinese heresy, which glorified cruelty, was perverse and diabolic; in China, that the Russian heresy, which exaggerated acquiescence and irresponsibility, sprang simply from lethargy, and was insincere and base.

Under the stress of violent warfare social conditions throughout the two empires inevitably grew worse. On the plea of military necessity legislation to protect labour was repealed, hours were lengthened, wages reduced, food adulterated, and rationed in such a way as to leave the rich the chance of buying substitutes which the poor could not-afford. In China, for instance, rice was rationed to a bare subsistence minimum, but a new and more nutritious grain, which was rapidly supplanting rice, was left unrationed. Its price mounted far beyond the poor man’s means. The whole crop was available for the rich. Personal liberty was of course, so far as possible, destroyed. The military could move anyone to any part of the empire, could imprison, kill, or torture at their own pleasure. They did not hesitate to do so. Education was wholly concerned with producing efficient machine-tenders who could be trusted to carry out orders without question. The synthetic faith was inculcated from childhood onwards. Nearly all accepted it outwardly; most people thoughtlessly believed it; a few secretly doubted while they outwardly conformed; still fewer tried to rally the forces of light, and were promptly destroyed; a fairly large minority believed the faith with some degree of conviction; and of these a small number practised it with passion.

These were the active servants of darkness, and increasingly the rulers of the planet. Of many psychological types and all social classes, they had at least one thing in common. All were frustrated spirits. Many were innately of low-grade sensibility, incapable of appreciating any values but physical gratification, personal dominance, and sadistic passion. These were frustrated in that civilization had hitherto restrained them from the only kind of self- expression that they could conceive. Many more were innately normal, but they had been permanently warped in infancy through untoward relations with their elders. Some, though their homes had been fairly wholesome, had been damaged by their schools. Others had suffered distortion in youth or early maturity through economic failure or the lethal sense that society was against them. All alike, though in differing manners, had been forced by the disease of their society to regress into primitive behaviour. The whole population, of course, suffered in some degree from the prevailing social neurosis, but these active servants of darkness had suffered excessively. In them neurosis bred the positive will for darkness, the satanic will. In them, for one reason or another, the natural impulse of spiritual growth had been thwarted and turned into a perverse craving for power, for destruction, for cruelty. These unhappy souls did indeed experience in the act of cruelty a kind of ecstasy of release and self-expression, which all too easily they mistook for an ecstasy of illumination.

But these servants of darkness had no lasting joy in their service. In all of them the will for darkness was a perversion of the will for the light. In all but a few maniacs the satisfaction of the will for darkness was at all times countered by a revulsion which the unhappy spirit either dared not confess even to itself, or else rejected as cowardly and evil. In all, darkness appeared in the guise of light, so that they believed themselves to be the true and faithful servants not of darkness but of light, heroically denying in themselves the subtly disguised temptations of the dark power.

Such were the servants of darkness. The great majority in the two empires consisted of minds in which the darkness and the light were still equally balanced, but upon which the impact of circumstance overwhelmingly favoured darkness. For from childhood onwards they were conditioned to inhuman behaviour and to an evil faith. Though not themselves inherently perverse, but merely weak and obtuse, they were wholly incapable of resisting the climate of their age, in which darkness was persistently presented in the guise of light. Many of them indeed might reasonably be called true servants of the light, true to the flickering light in their own hearts, but utterly bewildered by the prevalent ideas which they had neither the wit nor the courage to reject. In personal relations with their children, wives, husbands, friends, and workmates they were still intermittently and timorously faithful to the ancient light which had entered them from a more lucid age. But in public affairs they meekly accepted the perverse conventions of their society, either withdrawing their attention and making a virtue of acquiescence, or surrendering themselves to the tribal passion of hate and cruelty against unfortunate individuals whom they dared not recognize as indeed their fellows.

Though for some years the policy of ‘synthetic war’ instituted by the Russian and Chinese rulers was very successful, it was bound sooner or later to fail. For its success, the two imperial powers had to be approximately equal in strength. So long as this condition held, each party respected the other’s interests and relied on the other’s co- operation. Thus a serious rebellion against the Russian authorities in Capetown was crushed by a vigorous Chinese air raid. South Africans were persuaded to believe that defence against Chinese aggression was at the time more important than the assertion of local rights against the Russian government, which after all was far less methodically ruthless than its rival. On the other hand when, in the course of a successful Russian offensive in Manchuria, the power of the local Chinese authorities began to break, and a progressive anti-war party attempted to make an independent peace so as to found a new, independent, and socialistic state, the Chinese government telephoned to Moscow to stop the offensive until the rebels had been crushed. The request was complied with, and all military action against the Chinese forces ceased. Only in the region of the Khingan Mountains, where the rebels had set up their government, did the Russians continue hostilities, attacking from the west while the Chinese pressed forward from the east.

Gradually, however, the balance of power in the world altered in favour of the Chinese Empire. This was due at bottom to the greater efficiency and colder intelligence of the Chinese ruling class. The world’s most ancient and most phlegmatic civilization, though by now so grievously perverted, had an advantage in this respect against the world’s newest, immature, and equally perverted civilization. Moreover though Chinese imperialism was handicapped by a late start, it was better organized, more wealthy, and more united than the Russian variety. After the trouble in Manchuria the Chinese government tightened its hold on all its outlying provinces, moving whole populations hither and thither so as to create a homogeneous people stretching from the Altai Mountains to the Timor Sea. Thus the rulers contrived that, although in every region there was servitude and frustration, in none was there a sufficient local tradition and consciousness to form the focus of a serious uprising. In the huge, straggling Russian Empire, on the other hand, the ancient Soviet tradition had maintained a great deal of local autonomy. Further, the personnel of the Russian imperial service, if it lacked the tyrannical meddlesomeness of the Chinese, lacked also its cunning in propaganda and oppression. The Russian provinces were therefore in a constant state of unrest, which frequently broke out into turmoil, now in North America, now in Britain, now in India. Indeed every country had its history of revolt, alternating between secret sedition and open rebellion. The consequence was that throughout the latter part of the Russo-Chinese war Russia appealed to China for help far more often than China to Russia.

There came a time when the Chinese imperialists began to make excuses for not carrying out the suggestions of their Russian colleagues and rivals. At last, so far from helping the Russian government, they actually sided with the rebels. This first occurred in India, where clumsy oppression had produced widespread revolt. Instead of bombing the progressive centres, the Chinese dropped leaflets offering help and protesting their own progressive and liberalizing intentions. At the same time they launched a great attack by means of giant mountain- crossing tanks through Burma and Assam, while their navy seized the main Indian ports. The misguided Indians welcomed them with enthusiasm. Throughout India the Russian ruling class was massacred, and the regime collapsed. An independent Indian state was founded, under Chinese supervision, and within a few years the Indians were completely assimilated to the Chinese Empire.

The Russo-Chinese war now became frankly a struggle by the Russian oligarchy to retain its territories against the attack of its more efficient rival. Man’s powers of destruction were being constantly improved. There was at this time little or no research for the improvement of health, nutrition, psychological adjustment, or social organization, but vast state-financed researches into military technique, and psychological methods of discipline. Tidal electricity, which formerly had been the world’s main form of industrial power, was by now subordinate to volcanic sources. The great natural volcanic regions of South America, the East Indies, and Japan were immensely developed by artificial borings to tap the planet’s subterranean energies. The light accumulator and the greatly improved methods of electrical transmission made it possible to distribute electricity economically into every region of the world. In respect of volcanic power, the two empires were at first equally well fortified, but the Chinese gradually outstripped their rivals by their more resolute development of their resources.

There is no need to tell in any detail of the course of the final phase of the forty-years war between Russia and China. Like all wars it was of absorbing, even obsessive, interest to those whom it directly affected, but to the developed mind its battles and campaigns and ultimate massacre are more depressing than significant. One or two striking features of the war may be mentioned. Throughout, the Chinese were greatly helped by the rebelliousness of the Russian dependencies. One by one they asserted their independence or succumbed to Chinese attack. The Russian imperialists were by now fully engaged in defending the heart of their empire, and could do nothing to maintain their authority in Africa, America, or Western Europe. In the decisive campaign the Chinese used two new inventions against which the orthodox methods of Russia were powerless. One was the giant tank, the other the legged aeroplane. The new Chinese tank was so large that to call it a land-battleship was to disparage it. This new engine was indeed a moving fortified town, complete with its own workshops, and food stores for its thousand men for three weeks. It could crush and trample modern sky-scraper cities. On good ground it moved at a hundred miles an hour. It could travel over mountainous country by using its great clawed mechanical arms or legs. The legged aeroplane had the great advantage that it could land anywhere and take off anywhere. It was indeed a giant mechanical fly which could cling to precipitous places or suddenly leap from the ground by kicking with its prodigious thighs. Some hundreds of the new tanks, each attended by its own swarm of the new aeroplanes, advanced through central Asia. Russian bombers attacked in successive waves of a thousand planes, but their bombs could not harm these armour-plated monsters, whose artillery swept them from the sky. Unchecked, these greatest of all man’s engines streamed across the prairies and deserts of Outer Mongolia, flattened out the forest, crossed the mountain barriers, turned aside here and there to grind a town to rubble, took the Urals in their stride, and headed for Moscow. The Russian government fled. The city surrendered. But the enemy, obsessed with the worship of cruelty and ecstatic with slaughter, hurried on to catch the city before it could be evacuated. Arrived, the monsters steam-rollered the whole urban area into a flat waste of rubble. The sacred mummy of Lenin was pulverized in the general ruin. The invaders then amused themselves by overtaking and squashing the hosts of refugees as a man may crush a swarm of ants under his boot. Leningrad and other cities were similarly treated.

iii. DIABOLIC WORLD EMPIRE

THUS ENDED THE Second Russian Empire, the evil offspring of man’s first great though ill-starred attempt to organize society for the well-being of the many rather than for the power of the few. Some of the former Russian provinces hastily made peace, others declared their independence of both empires, only to be speedily crushed. America alone resisted for two years, but was finally overcome and treated to a very special punishment for its contumacy. The whole child population was transported to various parts of the world as slaves.

With the fall of America the human race had succeeded for the first time in establishing the political unity of the whole planet. The imperial Chinese government now assumed the title ‘The Celestial Government of the World’, and ordered celebrations in every town and every household of the planet. Everywhere desperate efforts were made to produce tolerable specimens of the ancient Chinese dragon flag, which had been revived by the second empire and was henceforth to be the dreaded emblem of the world-government. Everywhere, even on the blood-stained Russian plains, this emblem, or some crude approximation to it, was now anxiously flaunted. It was affirmed that at last the green Chinese dragon had devoured the red orb that had for so long hung tantalizingly before him in the golden sky. The red orb was no longer interpreted as the sun of Japan but as the red world of Russian imperialism. It was added in a whisper that, with luck the dragon might soon die of indigestion.

World-unity had been attained! But what a unity! Nowhere throughout the world was there any considerable group who were at peace with the world, save the governing class and its jackals. Everywhere the peasants were enslaved to the universal imperial landlord. Everywhere they toiled to produce the world’s food. Everywhere they starved and were harshly regimented. Miners and factory hands were in the same condition. The world-government, instead of organizing a great and universal movement of social reconstruction, thereby keeping the workers and the soldiers in employment, dismissed half its armies and kept the rest in idleness. The workers it treated with utter contempt, confident in its power to coerce them. The great class of technicians who had been persuaded to support the war in the hope that under world-unity they would be given the chance to build universal prosperity, found themselves used either for strengthening the oligarchy or for producing its luxuries; or else dismissed and maintained by the state in a sort of half-life of penury and despond.

Although individualistic capitalism had long since vanished, the universal decadent state-capitalism was in many ways subject to the same disorders. Though the power for social planning was in the hands of the world-government, the will was lacking. The rulers were concerned only to maintain their position. Vast economic powers, at first the perquisites of the great ruling Chinese families, were now farmed out to irresponsible state-servants, who turned themselves into dictators of the industries under their control. And since there was little co-ordination of their actions, and, anyhow, they were mainly concerned to feather their own nests, chaos followed. Unemployment increased, and brought with it its attendant evils. Desperate populations became difficult to handle. Punitive massacres were very frequent.

At last a new invention, one of the very few which the declining species managed to achieve, brought temporary aid. A biochemist produced a method of putting human beings into a state of suspended animation from which, he said, they could be easily wakened, ‘fresh and young’, after a sleep of many years. The world-government, believing that unemployment was a passing phase, and that later on there would be a great need of labour, set about building in every country a system of cold-storage warehouses where unwanted human beings could be deposited until the times changed. The unemployed and their families were forcibly stored in these warehouses. The struggling creatures were chained down, lying shoulder to shoulder on tiers of shelves inside huge tanks, which were then filled first with a succession of gases and finally with a preserving liquid. Millions of men, women, and children in almost every country were thus stored for future use. Though the lives of the workers were almost intolerably arid and distressful, they did all in their power to avoid being sent to the cold-storage houses. The will for the light expressed itself in them as a blind will for active life, however abject. But a few welcomed this opportunity of escape, without irrevocable extinction; believing that in their next phase of active life they would have better opportunities of expressing themselves. In most of these, the acquiescence in suspended animation was at bottom an expression of the will for darkness, though rationalized to satisfy the still smouldering will for light. For the individual in whom the will for the light is strong and clear finds his heart inextricably bound up with the struggle of the forces of light in his native place and time. Much as he may long for the opportunity of fuller self- expression in a happier world, he knows that for him self-expression is impossible save in the world in which his mind is rooted. The individual in whom the will for the light is weak soon persuades himself that his opportunity lies elsewhere. And so, as the spirit of the race was progressively undermined through ever deteriorating physical and psychological conditions, acquiescence in ‘the deep sleep’ became more and more widespread.

One of the main factors in the waning of the will for the light in this period was the attitude of the intellectuals. The academics, musicians, painters, cinema-artists, and, above all, the writers flagrantly betrayed their trust. In all these groups there were persons of four types. Many were paid servants of the government, engaged on propaganda through work which was ostensibly independent. These were concerned chiefly to put a good complexion on the regime, and to praise the fundamental principles of the synthetic faith, in particular the virtues of acquiescence and obedience, and the ecstasy of cruelty. Still more numerous were the independent but futile intellectual ostriches who shut their eyes to the horror of their time and won adulation and power by spinning fantasies of self- aggrandizement and sexual delight, distracting men’s attention from contemporary evils with seductive romances of other ages and other worlds, or with exalted and meaningless jargon about a life after death. There were also large numbers of progressive intellectuals. These saw clearly enough that contemporary society was mortally sick, and in a dream-like, unearnest way they expounded their tenuous Utopias, in which there was often much common sense and even wisdom; but they preached without that fury of conviction which alone can rouse men to desperate action. And they themselves lived comfortably upon the existing system, in their flats and suburban houses. Vaguely they knew that they ought to give up all for the revolution; but being what they were, they could not. The fourth type were the very few sincere and impotent rebels, who flung away their lives in vain and crazy attempts to be great prophets.

Crucial to the fate of the human race at this time was the attitude of the class of technicians, the host of highly trained engineers, electricians, aeronautical experts, agricultural experts, and scientific workers in industry. These, if they could have formed a clear idea of the plight of the race, might have saved it. But they were experts who had been carefully trained in the tradition that the expert should not meddle in politics. In times of great stress, of course, they did meddle; but, because they had consistently held themselves aloof, their pronouncements were childish, and their attempts at political action disastrous. A few had, indeed, taken the trouble to study society, and had come to understand its present ills. These fought constantly to enlighten their fellows and unite them in a great effort to control the course of events. Undoubtedly, if the will for the light had been strong in this great class, which controlled throughout theworld all the innumerable levers and switches and press- buttons of the material life of society, it could have overthrown the world-oligarchy in a few days, and set about organizing a sane order. But the appeal to the technicians met with a half-hearted response. Most of them shrugged their shoulders and went on with their work. A few took timid action and were promptly seized and put to torture by the rulers. The movement failed.

It seemed to me very strange that a class which included nearly all the best intelligence of the world and very much of the world’s good will should be incapable of ousting a set of tyrants who were both insensitive and stupid. The explanation, seemingly, was twofold. First, the rulers found themselves in possession of a vast and highly mechanized system of oppression. If anyone did anything obnoxious to the régime, immediately and automatically he was put out of action. Some colleague would certainly inform against him, and the police would do the rest. For the whole population, it must be remembered, was now tormented by neurotic jealousy and fear. The infliction of pain on a fellow mortal could afford a crazy satisfaction. Informers were, of course, well rewarded, but it was the joy of persecution that inspired them. Secondly, the mechanization of propaganda had been developed to an extent hitherto unknown. Psychology, the youngest of the sciences, had by now attained a thorough knowledge of the primitive and the morbid in man without reaching to any real understanding of the distinctively human reaches of human personality. Government psychologists had worked out a subtle technique of suggestion by reiterated symbolic appeals to suppressed motives. This method, applied from infancy onwards, had ensured that all the unwitting cravings of a neurotic population, all their unacknowledged fear, hate, energy, cruelty, lechery, selfishness, and mob-passion, should depend both for stimulation and assuagement on the existing social order, and should issue consciously in a jealous and vengeful loyalty to the oligarchy. Thus did a group of scientists who should have used their skill for the purgation and elucidation of men’s minds help to deepen the general darkness and misery. The power of propaganda was greatly increased by the prevailing educational principles. The free intelligence, which criticizes fearlessly and without prejudice, was ridiculed, condemned, and carefully suppressed. Bound intelligence, acting within the universe of discourse of the established culture, was encouraged; but it was mane clear to every pupil that intelligence was rather a necessary evil than a thing to prize for its own sake. What was intrinsically good was orthodoxy, unison with the tradition. To strengthen the passion for orthodoxy it was ordained that school classes should be as large as possible, and that the main method of teaching should be by organizing mass chanting of the traditional truths. Had the will for the light been less feeble, this procedure might well have induced in some pupils a revulsion in favour of free intelligence; but in this latter day of the human race, such rebellion was very rare.

The government’s control over its subjects was greatly increased by a new invention which would have been a eaurse of increased social well- being had it occurred in a more wholesome society. This was the product of advances in physiology and electrical engineering. The mechanism of the human brain was by now fairly well known; and by means of a vast mesh of minute photoelectric cells, inserted by a brilliant surgical technique between the cerebral cortex and the skull, it was possible to record very accurately the ever-changing pattern of activity in the cortical nerve-fibres. Advances in the technique of radio made it easy to transmit this record over great distances, and to decode it automatically in such a way that the thoughts and impulses of the observed person could be accurately ‘read’ by observers in far-away government offices. The immense knowledge and skill which went to these inventions might have caused untold benefits to mankind; but through the treason of the technologists and the power-lust of the rulers they were combined to form a diabolical instrument of tyranny.

A law was passed by which everyone suspected of harbouring dangerous thoughts was condemned to have his brain made available for constant observation. This involved an operation for the insertion of the photoelectric mesh under his skull and the attachment of the necessary miniature accumulators to his crown by screws driven into the skull itself. If any attempt was made to tamper with the instrument, or if the accumulator was allowed to run down beyond a certain point, the unfortunate individual was automatically subjected to the most excruciating pain, which, if prolonged for more than an hour so so, culminated in permanent insanity. In addition to this transmission- instrument there was a minute radio telephone receiver driven into the mastoid bone. Thus not only were the subject’s thoughts and feelings open to inspection at every moment of his life by some remote official but also instructions, threats, or repetitive gramophone propaganda could be inflicted on him morning, noon, and night.

At first this technique was applied only to those under suspicion, but little by little it was extended to all classes of society, save the oligarchs themselves and their most favoured servants. Immense offices were set up in all the main centres, where hosts of inspectors were constantly at work taking sample readings of the world’s two thousand million minds. Every ordinary man, woman, and adolescent knew that at any moment he might be under inspection. At any moment a voice might interrupt his thoughts with some propaganda commentary on them, or with a rough warning or the imposition of a penalty. While he was going to sleep he might be invaded by music and incantations calculated to mould his mind into the temper approved by the government. Those who were brought up from childhood to be accustomed to this treatment accepted it cheerfully. The very young were sometimes even impatient to receive what they foolishly regarded as this certificate of maturity. Under the constant influence of official scrutiny the minds of adolescents became almost perfectly correct. Dangerous thoughts, even of the mildest type, were for them unthinkable. Those who received the treatment as grown men or women suffered prolonged mental agony, and many committed suicide.

The policy of those who controlled this vast system of espionage was simply to ensure that all minds should be orthodox. As time went on, the inquisitors themselves came to be chosen solely from the ranks of those who were products of the system itself. So amazingly correct were these minds that they suffered nothing from the publicity of all their mental processes.

The strangest aspect of the system was this. Those who controlled it were themselves enslaved to it; they used their power not to emancipate themselves but to support the ruling caste. In the earlier phase of the Chinese world-empire the caste, or rather the non- hereditary class from which the caste later developed, had maintained its position by superior cunning and resolution; but in its later phase, when cunning and resolution had given place to stupidity and self-indulgence, the position of the ruling caste was maintained automatically by the mechanical functioning of the established social system. The rulers had immense privileges and great arbitrary powers. For them the workers piled up luxuries. In accordance with the vagaries of their fickle taste, fashions changed, whole working populations were suddenly worked to death or flung aside into the cold-storage warehouses. When the rulers said ‘do this’ or ‘do that’, the world obeyed. But their power lay wholly in the fact that the technicians were hypnotized in their service, hypnotized, not through the cunning and resolution of the rulers themselves, but through the vast momentum of traditional culture. Thus little by little the ruling caste became at once helpless and absolutely secure. In the same manner the slave-owning ants depend wholly on the ministrations of devoted slaves who have all the skill but not the wit to rebel.

The perfection of the system of social control was reached by means of a further triumph of inventive genius. After much laborious experiment a method was devised by which the impulses and desires of the individual could be either stimulated or suppressed by radio. Thus it was possible for the officials in a distant government office to force upon a man an irresistible craving to carry out a prescribed course of action. Like one under hypnotic influence, but with full consciousness of the enormity of his action, he might find himself compelled to betray his friend, to murder his wife, to torture his child or himself, to work himself to death, to fight against impossible odds.

Little by little the whole subject population of the world was fitted with the instruments of volitional control. The government was now practically omnipotent.

Once more, the strangest aspect of the new invention was that those who controlled it were themselves under its control. For the operators themselves were fitted with the instruments. Operators in each department were controlled by their superiors, and these by their superiors. These again were controlled by the supreme council of the locality, which was composed of all heads of departments. The supreme council of the locality was in turn controlled by the council of the province or state; and the state councils by the World Imperial Council. Members of this body were automatically controlled. Automatic machinery ensured that any incipient desire inconsistent with the orthodox system of desires should automatically be obliterated, while certain desires fundamental to orthodoxy were automatically maintained.

This ingenious system, it must be noted, had not been devised by the rulers themselves but by the technologists, by physiologists, psychologists, and electrical engineers. They had done it partly out of blind professional enthusiasm, partly because they felt the need of such a system to fortify their orthodoxy against the unorthodox impulses which occasionally distressed them.

As for the rulers themselves, these sacred beings, these sacred animals, were not controlled. They were free to think and act according to their nature, which by now had degenerated into a mess of stupidity, selfishness, and malice. Their stupidity was the stupidity of beasts. Though they were free, they were powerless. Of degenerate stock, they were conditioned by upbringing to a life of fantastic luxury and desolating self-indulgence. So long as they behaved according to the orthodox pattern, they were preserved and reverenced. If any showed some sign of individuality he was at once de-classed and operated upon for radio control. But this was very rare. Nearly all were content to live at ease on the fat of the land and the adulation of the masses. They were kept busy with the innumerable ceremonies and pageants without which, it was thought, the state would collapse, and in which the representative members of the ruling caste always played the central part. Those who obscurely felt the barrenness of their lives sought notoriety in the fields of sport or aeronautics. But, as the generations passed and their capacity deteriorated, they were forced to seek less exacting forms of self-display. Of these, one of the chief was the infliction of torture. The subject population, though conditioned to believe in the mystical virtue of cruelty, and though capable up to a point of relishing the spectacle of torture inflicted on strangers, were prone to lapse into squeamishness or even compassion. Not so the rulers. Unconsciously poisoned by their own futility and baseness, they were obsessed by hatred of the masses, the technicians, their own peers, and themselves. Without any radio control, therefore, they could inflict the most disgusting tortures with equanimity, and even unfeigned relish. When one of them had to perform the office of tearing out the eyes or bowels or genitals of the sacrificial victim, he did so without a qualm. To the fascinated and nauseated spectators this callousness appeared as aristocratic virtue. When humble people came to be subject to radio control of volition they often welcomed the artificial reinforcement to their ruthlessness. On the other hand when an erring member of the ruling caste had to be de-classed and put to torture, he invariably showed less than the average fortitude. It never occurred to the public, while they howled with glee at his discomfiture, that the aristocrats, even before de-classing, were after all no better than themselves; for the ceremony of de-classing was supposed to have deprived the culprit of his native virtue.

One of the causes of this admiration of cruelty in the world-culture of this period was the widespread respect for ‘the unconscious’. The distinction between the conscious and unconscious motives, which had played such a beneficial part in an earlier psychology, had by now led to absurdities. The unconscious was now said to be the divine will working in us. The unconscious sources of action were therefore sacred. In a race in which, through unwholesome conditioning, the ‘unconscious’ was a tissue of perverted cravings, this meant that the perverse was deified.

Another curious aspect of this degenerate culture was that, along with ‘the unconscious’, reason was deified; and this in spite of the bitter condemnation of the exercise of free intelligence. But sacred reason was nothing whatever like ordinary human reasoning. It was the occult rationality of the universe, forever inaccessible to man. Everything, it was said, had in the divine view its reason. Everything followed necessarily from the divine reason. In the human sphere free intelligence was an impious attempt to probe the divine reason. The true scope for man’s own divine spark of reason was not in the free exercise of intelligence but in the pious and unquestioning study of the metaphysical arguments of the inspired scriptures.

One branch of the cult of reason was a fantastic use of mathematics. But again, what was admired was not the free exercise of mathematical intelligence. This, indeed, was heartily condemned. A number of complex and valid mathematical operations were, of course, performed by the technicians for practical purposes; but they were all well- established operations, handed down from a more intelligent generation. Mathematical innovation was deemed wicked.

Further, the actual symbols of mathematics were gradually acquiring mystical virtue. As intelligence deteriorated, the time-honoured operations continued to be used both in industrial research and in religious ritual, but they were performed with ever-dwindling insight. In the final phase mathematical understanding had vanished altogether. The operations were still called rational, but their rationality was said to’ be patent only to the divine reason. This was proved by the fact that the whole of physical nature ‘obeyed’ mathematical laws. Human reason, however, could not possibly detect the occult necessity of the higher mathematical processes. Any attempt to do so was sacrilegious.

6. THE TRIUMPH OF THE RATS

i. ECONOMIC DECLINE
ii. DECLINE OF POPULATION
iii. DISINTEGRATION OF THE WORLD EMPIRE
iv. FINAL DEGENERACY
v. THE END OF MAN

i. ECONOMIC DECLINE

I CANNOT BE sure how long the Celestial World Empire endured. Its life must certainly be counted in centuries, and possibly it lasted for a couple of thousand years. Though the world empire was at heart a diseased society and bound to disintegrate, it inherited from earlier societies a certain toughness of fibre, and its structure was such that it could carryon in a sort of living death so long as conditions remained unchanged. While its material resources were unimpaired it functioned automatically and without change.

The human race had in fact attained the kind of stability which insect species have maintained for many million years. Its whole economy had been worked out in intricate detail by the technicians of an earlier age through a period of many decades, and had at last become absolutely stereotyped. Raw materials, produced in appropriate regions and in regular annual quantities, were assigned to manufacturing districts according to a time-honoured plan, to be distributed in time-honoured proportions to the various nations and social classes. The whole industrial technique had acquired a kind of religious sanctity. No variations were to be tolerated, except the seasonal variations which were themselves sanctified.

In these circumstances the function of the technicians, the unacknowledged but effective rulers of the planet, was radically altered. From being primarily inventors of new processes and new adjustments they became simply orthodox vehicles of the sacred lore. Intelligence, therefore, even bound intelligence, came to have an increasingly restricted function. Before the onset of decline, planning had been becoming more and more comprehensive and far-seeing. Men had planned for centuries ahead and for great societies, even tentatively for the future of the species. But after the world empire had become firmly established and stereotyped, large planning was no longer necessary. Only in the ordering of individual lives was there any scope for intelligence. Even here, as individual lives became more and more dominated by the regularities imposed by the state, the office of intelligence became more restricted. Whenever any daring spirit did try to improve upon the orthodox procedure, his intelligence proved feeble and his action misguided. His failure merely strengthened the general distrust of innovation.

For a very long while the material resources and the biological condition of the race did remain in effect constant. To the subjects of the world empire it seemed certain that the existing order was eternal. The idea of progress, material or mental, had long since ceased to seem plausible, for society was universally regarded as perfect. On the other hand the idea of racial decline was never contemplated. But behind the appearance of stability great changes were already at work, both in the physical environment and in the constitution of the human race itself.

Though volcanic power was inexhaustible, certain essential raw materials were not. Coal and oil had long ago been superseded as sources of power, but as raw materials for many synthetic products they were valuable, and becoming ever more difficult to procure. The world’s phosphate deposits, so necessary for agriculture, were being steadily reduced. Guano, long ago abandoned, was once more assiduously collected. Potash deposits had been heavily worked and were seriously depleted. An earlier age had known that an unlimited supply of potash could, when necessary, be obtained from sea water, but there had been no need to work out a technique for isolating it. Now, when potash was scarce, there was no longer the inventive capacity to tackle so difficult a task. Nitrogen had for long been derived from the air for use in fertilizers and high explosives. In this case, however, the technique was well established, and so there was no immediate danger of its loss. Iron, though one of the commonest of all elements, was becoming steadily more difficult to reach. All ordinarily accessible deposits were seriously depleted, and the skill for much deeper mining was by now lacking.

The condition of forestry in the latter days of the world-empire throws a strange light on the mental decay of the race. Wood-pulp had been the main raw material for many synthetic products. In early days, when the intelligence of the technicians was still effective, afforestation schemes had been organized so as to keep the balance of production and consumption. But latterly planting had seriously lagged behind felling. This may seem surprising, since the balance of planting and felling was part of the rigid and sacred technique of social organization. The cause of the ever-increasing discrepancy was very simple but completely hidden from the sluggish minds of the latter-day empire controllers. The original scheme had been calculated on the assumption that the art of forestry would continue to be practised with quick intelligence. Some margin had been allowed for accidents and errors, but not a fool-proof margin. When intelligence had declined, mistakes became more frequent, and less successfully repaired. Consequently the old sacred formulae failed. The forests slowly but surely dwindled. But according to the sacred scriptures of afforestation this was impossible, if the formulae had indeed been followed. Therefore it was impious to suggest that the forests were dwindling. Therefore anyone who began to suspect that this was happening turned a blind eye on the facts. Thus the rot continued without any attempt being made to stop it.

The same disastrous decay took place in agriculture. The original organizers of the empire’s tillage had worked out a delicately balanced agricultural system which should yield an adequate crop of food-stuffs without impoverishing the land. But this system had depended on intelligent adjustment. It was not fool-proof. When sluggish minds took charge, there was a far greater wastage at every point in the system. The old formulae therefore became inadequate. But since any alteration would have been impious, the upshot was that century by century rather less was put into the ground than was taken from it. Thus there set in a steady process of denudation. Slowly but surely all the great agricultural districts became less productive. The corn-bearing plains of North America and Russia, the rice plains of China and India, the great scattered areas that had provided the world’s greens, the fruit lands of California, Australia, South Africa, one and all deteriorated. Little by little they turned into wastes of sand, like the once fertile Sahara. The process was made all the worse by climatic changes caused by the shrinking of the forests.

The gradual failure of agriculture was of course a very slow process. Ordinary citizens of the empire did not notice it. True, there were great desert tracts in which the ruins of former farmsteads might be observed; but the slow-witted populace never dreamed that this was a symptom of an ever-spreading disaster. Only by comparing the present output with past records could the trouble be realized. But the records and the sacred proportions of agricultural production were known only to the ‘mystery’ of agriculture, in fact to the heads of the world agricultural system. These magnates knew vaguely that something was wrong; but since for sundry reasons it was unlikely that there would be trouble in their day, they held their tongues. The decline was in fact easily concealed, because, while supplies were dwindling, the population of the world was also rapidly decreasing.

ii. DECLINE OF POPULATION

THE DECLINE OF world-population had started long ago after the period of rapid increase which took place in the early phase of industrialization. It was due partly to the widespread use of efficient contraceptive methods, partly to anxiety about economic insecurity, partly to a vague sense of the futility and falsity of civilization. In the rather tired Utopia of North America, where the decline was first seriously felt, insecurity cannot have been a cause, for prosperity was universal. But disillusionment about a curiously aimless Utopia was a serious factor in American life. The early totalitarian states had always feared decline of population, and had done their utmost to check it, but without much success. The newer totalitarian states, the Russian and Chinese Empires, and the World Empire in its early phase, had attacked the problem with characteristic ruthlessness.

The most obvious way to increase population was waken the hundreds of millions whom past governments had from time to time put into cold storage all over the world in order to solve the unemployment problem. There was at first great reluctance to do this, for a reason which reveals the incredible stupidity and superstition of the human race in this period. Declining population, far from solving the unemployment problem, had increased it. Demand was constantly declining. Mass- productive machinery could less easily be worked at a profit. Though the rulers saw clearly enough with one side of their minds that an increase in population was needed, on the other side they were painfully aware of the unemployment problem, and reluctant to add to the stagnant pool of potential labour. Consequently, though there was much discussion about the cold-storage houses, nothing was done. Meanwhile population continued to decline.

The governments tried to compel the peoples to reproduce. Women were educated to believe that their sole function was reproduction. Mothers were honoured in relation to the number of their offspring. Those produced fifteen or more babies were given the title ‘Prolific Mother’. Any who succeeded in launching twenty human beings were deified. Contraception was made illegal and condemned as immoral. In spite of all these measures the fertility-rate declined. In desperation the World Government tightened its grip on the women. Every girl was compelled to have intercourse with a man as soon as she was certified as mature. A month after certification she appeared before her medical board again and was examined to prove that she was no longer a virgin. If after three months she had not conceived, she was sent to an institution that combined the characters of a brothel and a stud-farm. If after another three months she still failed to conceive, she was subjected to medical and surgical treatment to cure her barrenness. If this also failed, she was publicly disgraced, appropriately tortured, and gradually killed.

After helplessly watching the decline of population for many decades, perhaps centuries, the World Government decided to take the obvious step, which, moreover, was sanctioned by scripture. For it was part of the sacred canon that some day, when there was great need of workers, the sleepers must be wakened. The rulers now declared that the time had come. In panic and without proper preparation it ordered the physiologists to thaw out the whole refrigerated multitude. The process was a delicate one, and the instructions left by an earlier and brighter generation were at first badly bungled. Millions were killed, or woke up to a brief period of misery and bewilderment, speedily followed by death. Millions more survived only for a life of permanent invalidism or insanity. The majority, however, though seriously damaged by their rough awakening, were fit for active life of a sort. But they had slept through much history. Their minds had been formed by a world long vanished. Their speech and thought were often so archaic that modern individuals could not understand them. Their limbs, and their minds too, moved at first with painful sluggishness. Their procreative impulses were apparently quenched. Moreover they gradually discovered that their new world was even less propitious than the old one. Some of them, when they had entirely thrown off the miasma of their age-long sleep and had painfully adjusted themselves to the new environment, proved to be rather more quick-witted than their normal neighbours in the new world. And, as they had not been brought up to accept the recent and more extravagant prejudices of the new world, they were generally very critical of the modern customs and institutions. In fact they soon became a grave nuisance to the authorities. The Government hastened to order that all the ‘reawakened’ should at once be fitted with radio control. This obvious precaution had been delayed less through fear of putting them to too great a strain before they had recovered from the effects of refrigeration, than out of an amazingly stupid reluctance to raise them to the rank of citizens. Millions were now subjected to the operation. Half of these died under the anaesthetic. Millions more put up a desperate resistance and had to be destroyed. Here and there, where there was a large concentration of the ‘reawakened’, they were able to seize power and set up a rebel state. The spectacle of human beings resisting authority was utterly bewildering to the robot citizens of the world-state. In many minds there arose an agonizing conflict between the orthodox radio-generated will and a shocking impulse to rebel. This would probably not have occurred had not the technique of radio-control seriously degenerated, owing to the general decline of intelligence. Many of the unfortunate sub-humans (for men were no longer human) went mad or died under the stress of this conflict. Some succeeded in resisting the control and joined the rebels. It almost appeared that an era of new hope was to begin for the human race. Unfortunately the ‘reawakened’ could not stand the strain. While their cause prospered, all was well with them, but every passing misfortune was accompanied by a great crop of suicides. So little heart had they for life. One by one the rebel centres collapsed, till none was left.

The population problem remained unsolved. One other method of coping with it had been tried, at first with some success.

In the early middle period of the world empire, while innovation was still possible, a group of physiologists and surgeons had devized a method which, it was hoped, would settle the matter for ever. The new technique was a. half-way stage towards true ectogenesis. The womb and other necessary organs were removed from a young woman and kept alive artificially. The mutilated donor of these precious organs was then destroyed, but part of her blood-stream was put into artificial circulation through the excised organs and used as the medium for supplying them with necessary chemicals. The womb could then be inseminated, and would produce an infant. By various technical methods the process could be made far more rapid than normal reproduction. Moreover quintuplets could be procured from every conception. Unfortunately the excised organs could not be kept alive for more than ten years, so it was necessary to have a constant supply of young women. The government therefore imposed the death penalty on women for the most trivial offences, and used them up for artificial reproduction. At the same time it tried to educate female children in such a way that when they reached maturity many would actually desire the supreme glory of sacrificing their lives so that their wombs might live on with enhanced fertility. The response to this propaganda was disappointing. In fear of a really catastrophic decline of population the government passed a law that every woman, except members of the sacred governing class, must ‘give her life for her children’s sake’ at the age of twenty-five.

Unfortunately the method of artificial reproduction involved a very delicate surgical technique, and it did not come into general use until first-class manipulative intelligence was already in decline. Increasingly, therefore, the excised wombs failed to survive the operation, or, if they did survive, failed to produce viable infants. Presently it became clear to the few free intelligences of the race that the method, far from increasing the population, was actually hastening its decline. But already the method had become part of the sacred tradition and could not be abandoned. For decades, therefore, it continued to be practised with increasingly disastrous results. There came a time, however, when even the dull and enslaved wits of the Celestial Empire could not but realize that if the decline of population was not quickly stopped civilization would disintegrate. A great struggle ensued between the orthodox and the protestants, until at last a compromise was agreed upon. At the age of twenty-five every young woman must receive a ceremonial cut on the abdomen, accompanied by suitable ritual and incantations. This, it was believed, would increase the fertility of her reproductive organs without the necessity of excising them.

In spite of everything, population continued to decline. I was not able to discover the cause of this universal process. Perhaps the root of the trouble was physiological. Some chemical deficiency may have affected the germ cells. Or again some subtle mutation of the human stock may have rendered conception less ready. Or perhaps the neurotic condition of the population had produced’ hormones unfavourable to conception. I am inclined to believe that the real cause, through whatever physical mechanism it took effect, was the profound disheartenment and spiritual desolation which oppressed the whole race.

Whatever the cause, the world-population continued to shrink, and in the process it became a predominantly middle-aged population. The small company of the young, though cherished and venerated, counted for nothing in decisions of policy. An ice-age of feebleness and conservatism gripped the world with increasing force.

iii. DISINTEGRATION OF THE WORLD EMPIRE

PRESENTLY THERE CAME a time when the sacred customs could no longer be even superficially maintained. There was neither the labour nor the degree of vigour and intelligence to maintain the sacred stereotyped functions of society. The first serious breakdown was connected with volcanic power. Whenever great volcanic eruptions occurred, the machinery for harnessing and using the submerged titan was likely to be thrown out of gear or destroyed. When the tumult had subsided the local system had to be reconstructed, probably in new conditions. Great eruptions are rare, but over the centuries they occur in every active volcano. So long as intelligence was strong, the damage was quickly repaired. Long after the extinction of the fully free intelligence the limited, bound intelligence which functioned only within the orthodox system of ideas and values was still capable of great practical inventiveness. When a volcanic power station was destroyed and the volcano changed its whole configuration, even the bound intelligence was able to reconstruct the generating system. But when the actual innate capacity for intelligence had seriously declined, when even the best surviving intelligence was not only bound but feeble, such great problems of engineering could seldom be successfully tackled. In due season they became completely insoluble. Inevitably the great volcanic power stations fell one by one into disuse. The world’s supply of power steadily diminished. Since the needs of the declining population were also shrinking, this might not have mattered, had it not been for the effect on communications. After a while it became impossible to maintain the world’s transport system. Little by little the continents, and then the regions within a single continent, failed to maintain the orthodox trade-intercourse with one another. This obvious breakdown in the sacred system caused not only grave economic disorder but also a severe psychological disturbance in men’s minds. It should be mentioned that radio-control of thought and volition had by now broken down completely. The delicate surgical operation and the delicate mechanism which it involved were far beyond the compass of latter-day man. Relieved of this tyranny, men were once more independent individuals; or at least they would have been, had not the tyranny of mob-feeling and suggestion still controlled them. Generally mob-feeling and suggestion favoured the government; but the increasing gap between the official version of events and the state of affairs that men perceived around them sometimes inclined even the degenerate latter-day mobs to criticism. For at last it became impossible even for the average dullard of the race not to recognize that the Celestial World Empire, for which he had been taught to sacrifice himself body and soul, was disintegrating. This knowledge produced a kind of religious terror. The very universe, it seemed, was crumbling about men’s heads.

The process of disintegration must have lasted for several centuries at least. During this period, until the isolation of the provinces was complete and all clear memory of the past age had been lost, there was a phase of violent social unrest. The race, it seemed, was on the verge of waking from the neurotic trance which had so long gripped it. It might at any moment insist on revolutionary changes. But such was the strength of the old culture, and such the stupidity and aimlessness of the revolutionaries, that the crisis was weathered. Instead of waking into sanity the rare somnambulistically adjusted itself to its new circumstances without sacrificing its cherished delusions.

The transition from a very complex and close-knit world-economy to a medley of isolated societies was very significant of the condition of the species. So long as some meagre communication persisted, it was impossible for people not to realize that foreign countries existed, and to be perturbed by the failure of the empire. When mechanical transport had collapsed altogether, attempts were made to maintain contact by sailing-ships and caravans. But both these occupations depended on techniques long since abandoned. The half-wit populations could not effectively recover them. The radio still for a while maintained contact between peoples, for this technique, though fairly complex, was preserved in the tradition. Radio communication with foreign lands, however, came to seem very objectionable to the provincial governments, which, of course, controlled the whole of each provincial radio system. Radio news kept reminding people of the existence of a world which, from the government’s point of view, they should forget; since the recollection of it filled them with restlessness and awkward questioning. One by one the governments therefore broke off all radio communication with foreign countries. Any attempt to make contact by radio with ‘imaginary other lands’ was henceforth punished by death. This state of affairs lasted until the final loss of radio through the further deterioration of intelligence.

When contact with the outside world had been completely severed, each isolated people was able to readjust itself mentally by accepting the fiction that it was in fact the whole of mankind and that its state was the world empire. The sacred formulae for production and consumption could not, of course, any longer be literally applied; but they were ‘symbolically interpreted’ to mean something very different from their original intention, something adapted to the reduced life of the ‘world empire’. It was interesting to observe the stages by which this reinterpretation established itself.

The slow breakdown of communications had, of course, involved a constantly increasing infringement of the sacred formulae for international trade. In the heyday of the empire the provinces had been highly specialized for particular forms of agriculture, mining, and manufacture. Specialization had been encouraged by the early world-governments, for individuals, social classes, and peoples. Everything must be done to increase dependence on the imperial organization and the government. No region must be self-sufficient, no individual a person of all-round development. No one must ever be more than a cog in the great machine or a specialized cell in the great body politic. But now the failure of communications forced the peoples to change their whole economy or be extinguished. The great change was of course unplanned or misguided. The paucity of intelligence and the sanctity of the traditional economy made conscious planning impossible. New industries had to sprout in every region; but lack of inventiveness and organizing talent, and the universal condemnation of novelty, forced the pioneers to flounder along under a heavy cloak of subterfuge and self-deception. Inevitably the standard of living in each province deteriorated. Little by little the flood of mass- produced machine-made goods gave place to a miserable trickle of the crudest hand-made makeshifts produced by local craftsmen who were hampered not only by innate obtuseness, but by lack of all traditional technique, and also by the enervating sense that their occupation was sinful.

In agricultural regions, though food was for a while plentiful, comfort vanished; and presently, through the failure to procure new agricultural machines, tillage itself degenerated into a kind of half- wit caricature of primitive methods. In manufacturing regions there was for a while a huge surplus of certain goods and a complete absence of others, while food became ever more difficult to obtain. Populations were slowly starved, their numbers shrinking, catastrophically. The remnant, generation by generation, turned more and more to tillage of a wretchedly inefficient type.

In the old industrial regions the sacred tradition of industrialism remained as a cult wholly divorced from practical life. The ruins of the great factories were treated as temples, where, once every seven days and on the many sanctified ‘bankolidays’, everyone repaired to carry out rituals which were corruptions of the forgotten techniques of the ancient industry. The fields would not bear, it was believed, unless these rituals were meticulously performed. Throughout the week men guiltily scratched the surface of the earth with home-made implements of stone or bone, implements which the ancient Stone Age men would nave been ashamed to use. On the sabbath the whole population implored the gods of industrialism to forgive men their impious infringement of the sacred law, and to refrain from blasting the fields. One or two of the great machines in some of the former industrial regions were successfully maintained by a caste of priestly engineers, and put in action on holy days. When possible, appropriate raw materials were procured for them, so that they were able to produce a small and erratic stream of the ancient goods. These were considered far too sacred to use. Since in the old days the products of the local industry had mainly been exported, these ritual products were, if possible, carried to the sea by a great procession of the faithful. They were then loaded into a sacred ship which was taken out to sea and over the horizon, there to be ceremonially sunk.

iv. FINAL DEGENERACY

I HOPED THAT when the power of the Celestial World Empire had been thoroughly broken and the culture on which it was based had been reduced to absurdity, the human race might be able to develop a much less specialized economy, so that the distinctively human capacities would at last reassert themselves, and history begin again. But this was not to be. The rot had already gone much too far. Superficially the isolated human communities had still the appearance of civilization, though a severely damaged civilization. To a slight extent mechanical power was still used. Electric lighting, the telephone, water and sewage services remained in the more fortunate states, though they were all extremely inefficient, and a serious breakdown was apt to defeat all efforts at repair. Here and there, even railways remained, connecting a metropolis with some specially important provincial town. But accidents were so frequent that many people preferred to sacrifice speed for safety in the resuscitated stage-coach. The ancient main-line continental railways ‘I could still be traced by their cuttings and embankments, but the tracks had long since vanished. In the wars which frequently broke out between states with common frontiers explosives were still used, though tanks and aeroplanes were no longer available.

The cultures of the states, though both crude and crazy, were such as could not have existed save as products of a past civilization. In most regions the average intelligence had sunk almost to the bushman level, and in the more degenerate populations far below it. Even outstandingly brilliant individuals were mostly mere dullards according to early standards. And these dullards were grievously hampered by their faulty upbringing. The languages of this age, mostly corruptions of the ancient English, Russian, or Chinese, were rich in fossil remains of ancient thought. Language was much cherished. It was the vehicle through which the sacred wisdom was handed down. Two dead languages, ancient English and ancient I Chinese, were taught to the children of the wealthy, and proficiency in these languages was demanded of every aspirant to posts of responsibility. Ancient literature and historical records were very carefully studied, and subtly interpreted so as to accord with local mythology about the World Empire. Much of the ancient thought, particularly the great scientific and philosophical inquiries of the past, were by now far beyond the understanding of even the brightest individuals. Nevertheless immense labour was devoted to criticism of the ancient texts, which were given symbolical or magical meanings adapted to the degenerate modern mentality. Meanwhile the great mass of scientific knowledge accumulated by earlier ages was reduced to a few well-tried practical precepts, of use in manufacture and electrical engineering of a very crude kind. In physics and astronomy certain sensational mysteries were still handed down in the sacred tradition, but they were accepted without any attempt at understanding, and in general they were gross perversions of the original discovery. For instance, the theory of relativity was completely lost, but it was affirmed that if a man were to walk far enough in a straight line he would reach his starting-point. This true statement was not derived from the roundness of the earth, for the earth was assumed to be flat; it was regarded simply as a sacred mystery. Men also believed that the universe was very big; but since astronomy was a lost science, they assumed that the universe itself was a sphere, half of which was solid ground and the other half sky. Sun, moon, and stars were supposed to emerge from the eastern rim of the ground to be blown across the sky, and finally to settle down once more in the west.

In consequence of the decline of intelligence all complex organization tended to disintegrate. The great national states, the former provinces of the world-empire, fell into hopeless disorder. One by one they crumbled into small quarrelling principalities. These were ever rising and collapsing, coalescing into petty empires, splitting into a score of fragments, passing from the hands of one tyrant to another. Little by little even these small social units decayed into mere tribal territories, each occupying its own valley or plain.

Meanwhile the manner of life of the degenerate tribes of men steadily decayed. Agriculture was less and less efficient. In district after district, through lack of fertilizers and intelligent rotation of crops, it was gradually abandoned. The miserable remnant of mankind now sank to collecting wild vegetable foods and hunting the swarms of wild animals which had greatly increased with the decline of man. Wild cattle were abundant in many regions, but only the hardiest and most cunning of the half-wit hunters dared attack such large and dangerous beasts. For the most part the populations lived on the swarms of rabbits and other small rodents that thrived in a world in which the large carnivora had long since been exterminated. In some regions the starving tribes were reduced to eating mice, toads, and beetles.

Once more it seemed to me possible that from this utter debasement man might now once more take the first step on the long journey towards lucidity. The whole lethal social order which had hitherto frustrated it had now vanished. Reduced once more to the primitive family, surely men would rediscover their essential humanity. But this could not be. The dead hand of the past still gripped even their most intimate relationships. Debased intelligence, debased self-consciousness, debased sensibility towards others made it impossible for the new sub- men to realize the folly and cruelty that they were constantly perpetrating. No individual was ever treated with respect even for such rudiments of personality as he might possess. Every man and woman was merely the node of a number of formal social relations. Everyone was either a chieftain or a slave or a free hunter, either a husband or bachelor, a wife or a virgin, and so on. And for each relationship there was an intricate pattern of conventional conduct, which must never be infringed. These patterns were in the main not expressions of existing circumstances but confused survivals of a past culture, in many cases cruelly frustrating to the individual. This state of affairs was damaging to everyone, not only because of the discrepancy between his actual circumstances and the behaviour imposed by convention, but also because in everyone there still lurked a tortured and bewildered germ of that spirit which in the past had flowered as Jesus, Socrates, Gautama, and the hosts of the wise and the good.

Though the degenerate species was no longer capable of revival, it did at last attain a condition of equilibrium. The scanty world- population, scattered throughout the continents in little isolated groups persisted probably for half a million years. Floods, climatic changes, volcanic eruptions, land subsidence, plagues, might now and again wipe out whole tribes, but their place would sooner or later be taken by others. Man had found his appropriate niche in the natural system of the planet’s fauna. Generation after generation he survived. His sluggish wits were wholly occupied in the tasks of food-gathering, the maintenance of crude shelters, reproduction, and the performing of traditional rites.

v. THE END OF MAN

THIS PROLONGED EQUILIBRIUM was insecure. Sooner or later some more than usually widespread scourge would extinguish the species. The end came in a manner that I had not expected. The rat had accompanied man through all his adventures. Indeed, long before man appeared on the earth, the rat was well-established. And it was destined to survive him. A considerable part of the energy of the human race had always been devoted to defence against the rat. Even at the height of material civilization this ubiquitous rodent devoured much of man’s food stores and infected him with plagues. With the decline of human intelligence the rat became a much more serious menace. It exacted a far heavier toll on his food stores. It multiplied extravagantly. In the last long phase of human degeneracy the rat-catcher was the most honoured profession. Only the most intelligent of men could cope with the limited but adequate native cunning of the inferior species. Century by century man held his own against this formidable enemy, but only by a narrow margin and at great cost.

At last there came a crisis. Some climatic change covering the whole planet seems to have made life rather suddenly more difficult for man, and therefore for his parasite. Driven by starvation, the rats began to change their habits. Not content with ravaging man’s food stores, they attacked men themselves. They began by devouring the babies whenever they were left for a while unguarded. Sleeping adults were also attacked. Sometimes a host of hungry rodents would waylay a lonely hunter, seize his legs, clamber up his body, hang on to his flesh with their incisors, bite at his throat, drag him to the ground and devour him alive. It seems probable that some mutation in the rat had increased its efficiency as a carnivorous beast, for attack on large mammals and particularly on men became increasingly common. Men were by now much reduced in stature, rats increased in weight. There came a time when the rats no longer confined their attention to stealthy attacks on children and sleeping adults or to persons isolated from their fellows. They gathered in great armies and invaded the scattered settlements, exterminating their inhabitants. Century by century men fought a losing battle. Tribe after tribe was exterminated, country after country depopulated, until only in the most favoured region a few hard-pressed families lurked in the woods, feeding on roots and worms, meeting at the full moon in solemn conclave to chant their spells against the rodent enemy, and assert with stupid pride their superiority over all beasts. The almost meaningless jargon which issued from these baying mouths was their one remaining title to humanity. In it there still lurked fantastic corruptions of civilized speech, relics which had lived in the times of Shakespeare, Plato, Con-fu-tsze. For a few decades, perhaps centuries, these ultimate remnants of mankind hung on to life, attacked not only by the rats but many other pests and plagues, and by the weather. In this constant warfare their frail human physique combined with their sub-human mentality to make extinction inevitable. At some time or other, unmourned and unnoticed, the last human being was destroyed.

The planet which had once and again haltingly attained the lucid mentality sank now for ever into torpor. For no species remained on earth capable of evolving to the human level. The torch which had fallen from the hand of man could never be picked up and carried forward by a fresh runner. For incalculable aeons, for a period immeasurably longer than the whole career of mankind, the terrestrial globe spun and circled, its surface possessed by a host of lowly creatures.

Meanwhile the sun, like all stars of his age and size, was growing hotter, through the increasingly rapid release of energy in his interior. The more highly specialized biological types on the Earth were gradually destroyed. The lowlier kinds became adapted to an ever more torrid climate. More and still more of the ocean vaporized into the atmosphere, shutting out the heavens with perennial cloud. Little by little conditions on the earth passed beyond the limit of adaptability of any terrestrial species. The ocean began to boil, the sands to melt, the atmosphere to vanish into outer space. The increasing heat of the sun, however, had favoured the evolution of life on Uranus. Slowly, as on Earth, there appeared a multitude of species. And as on Earth these one by one reached a climax of specialization beyond which no further evolution was possible to them. At last, as on Earth, one single type, specialized only for versatility, stood at the threshold of lucidity. But then the sun, as so many stars before him, exploded into the nova state, fusing all his planets.

These remote events I did not witness. They seem to have been obscurely borne in upon my mind through contact with the minds of my superhuman fellow explorers.

My personal experience was confined to terrestrial events. And as soon as earth’s brief flicker of lucidity had ended, my attention was withdrawn from this whole sad stream of time, in which the will for darkness had prevailed. For other scarcely less agonizing but glorious events were all the while unfolding before me.

Part III. THE LIGHT

7. THE SPARK SURVIVES

i. HARKING BACK TO THE TIBETAN
ii. A WAR AGAINST THE EMPIRES
iii. ARMED PEACE
iv. WAR AGAIN, AND A NEW ORDER

i. HARKING BACK TO THE TIBETAN REVOLUTION

READER, WE HAVE followed the sorry tale through to its end. We have seen one of the two great streams of history lose itself in a swamp of misery and abject brutishness. We may now return to that point where I first realized an inconsistency in my experience of man’s career, where, in fact, the torrent of history was already dividing. This was the point at which the Tibetan revolution had been successfully brought off by the Young Lamas. Under their guidance the new Tibetan state was already becoming a thing of splendid achievement and more splendid promise.

I had already noticed among the Tibetans two very different tempers. Sometimes the one had dominated, sometimes the other. In the one mood the leaders of the new society faced their task with sober fortitude and a clear understanding that only by a miracle could they preserve the new order against the hostility of the two great empires. In the other mood these same leaders, though they fully realized the difficulties and dangers, were buoyed up by a seemingly irrational and almost boisterous hopefulness, nay a certainty of victory. Though they recognized that only a miracle could save Tibet and perhaps the whole species, they also knew, so long as the mood of exaltation was on them, that the miracle had already happened in themselves, and that it could be made to happen in the whole Tibetan people. By now the Tibetan people had supreme confidence in their leaders. Even the dullards, who could not appreciate at all clearly the aim of the new society, felt vaguely that they were sharing in a glorious enterprise.

The first sign of inconsistency in my experience was a strange sense that this miraculous hopefulness both dominated and did not dominate the whole life of the people. Then inconsistencies of external events began to appear, so that little by little my torn mind was forced to live in two mutually exclusive worlds.

This duality of temper, followed by a duality of external events, soon made itself evident beyond the frontiers of Tibet. The progressive minority in all lands was dominated and was not dominated by a new, defiant, and gay confidence. Each mood produced everywhere its effect on action; but it was in Tibet that hope first triumphed, and it was Tibet’s miraculous success that inspired the rest of the world.

It was in connection with the synthetic faith propagated in Russia and China that the Tibetans gained their first important success. The calculated appeal to man’s baser nature, it will be remembered, had been propagated in order to defeat the Tibetan missionaries. In the story that I have already told it succeeded; in the story that I shall now tell it failed. The Tibetan missionaries in their mood of bright confidence disconcerted the imperial governments by laughing the new movement into frustration. For a sham faith cannot stand ridicule. The symbols and slogans of the religion of pain were ridiculed and parodied on every wall. By skilful heckling the meetings organized by the dervishes were given a tilt towards farce. But this was not all. Many a missionary bore witness to his own faith by unflinching behaviour under torture. For the governments were at first eager to ‘make an exhibition’ of them, until it was clear that every public martyrdom merely spread the Tibetan faith. The missionaries were trained both in spiritual discipline and in the technique of advertisement. The symbols and slogans of their faith were made to appear in every public place, often superimposed on the emblems of the synthetic faith. The propaganda meetings organized by the dervishes were often frustrated by some obscure member of the audience who challenged the speaker to compete with him in an ordeal by torture. According to the synthetic faith, it will be remembered, the supreme ecstasy was to be experienced under torture. The challenger would suggest to the dervish that they should both, in public and at once, inflict severe pain on themselves, or be tortured by a third party. The mere challenge was often enough to expose the impostor. But when dervishes who had been specially chosen and handsomely paid for their ability to endure pain undertook to prove their faith under torture, it soon appeared that the missionaries could draw upon some source of strength inaccessible to hired martyrs. The missionary could allow his flesh to be torn or crushed to a far greater extent, and in doing so he made no false claim that he enjoyed it. Though he rejoiced in the opportunity to bear witness to his faith through pain, he took no delight, he said, in pain itself. The dervish, on the other hand, would make agonized protestations of delight, until suddenly, and sooner than his rival, he called out for release. The governments did, indeed, gain a temporary success by sending out dervishes who had been specially prepared for the inevitable ordeal by having an arm permanently anaesthetized. But it was not long before the trick was exposed. The next move by the imperialists was to organize ‘spontaneous’ lynchings of those who dared to challenge the dervishes. But this policy also was defeated, partly by the courage of the missionaries, partly by highly trained crowd-controllers who by shrewd interjections often succeeded in turning the temper of the mob from sadism to kindliness.

The source of the courage of the missionaries was, of course, their faith in the spirit. But courage alone might not have achieved so swift and complete a discomfiture of the synthetic faith had it not been reinforced by a sly and friendly ridicule. There was nothing new in the method of the missionaries; but never before had it been used on such a scale and with such expert psychological understanding. And never before had those who used these methods been the emissaries of an established Utopian society preparing to fight for its life.

The success of the missionaries certainly did not depend wholly on their powers of enduring pain. They constituted a great army of ‘fifth-columnists’ disseminated throughout the imperial territories, secretly inspiring the people with dangerous political and social thoughts. The original Tibetan missionaries were reinforced by a great company of native missionaries in every country. Altogether there were millions of them, and each one was a travelling spark of the new fire. Under this influence men’s desiccated hearts were tinder. Most of the missionaries worked at some trade in the lower or middle reaches of society, and were at pains to earn the respect and love of their fellow workers for their efficiency, integrity, and loyal comradeship. Armed with this personal prestige, they were able to capture the allegiance and fire the imagination of all who were not yet hopelessly perverted; and to build up little by little a great body of servants of the light in every land. Their method combined that of the religious missionary with that of the social revolutionary. On the one hand, though they showed no insistence on any metaphysical doctrine, they preached the inner light, and manifested it in action. On the other, though they avoided the subtle Machiavellian intrigues which had been used by so many revolutionaries in the past, they entered into political disputes and declared, often at the cost of their lives, that the time had come to withhold from Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. Of the universe, as a whole, they said, man knows next to nothing; but in our hearts we find that in right personal relation man fulfils himself. Love, they said, and wisdom are right absolutely. True community of mutually respecting individuals, and also fearless free intelligence and imagination, are right absolutely. And we all knew it. There is one intrinsic good, they said, and one only, the awakened life, the life of love and wisdom. This is the sacred thing which all developed beings throughout the universe cannot but will, unless they have been blinded. This spirit, they said, is in the long run all-powerful in the affairs of conscious beings. But the run may be very long. And what the scope of that spirit is in the whole of things no man can know, nor needs to know.

The world-wide missionary effort would have been far less effective if the missionaries had not been able to point to the example of Tibet’s actual achievement. ‘In Tibet the police are few and unarmed,’ they said. ‘In Tibet no doors need be locked. In Tibet no one feels any need of the debauch of cruelty. We have neither rich nor poor. Our prisons have been destroyed or turned into laboratories and art galleries. We know how to live, and we have the means.’ Visitors to Tibet were welcomed and could see for themselves that these claims were true. At last the imperial governments adopted drastic measures. Realizing that ‘the roof of the world’ was becoming a Mecca where the seditious gathered to study and plan revolution, they forbade all travel to Tibet, and made a great effort to round up and destroy all the missionaries. But intercourse with Tibet continued. In spite of all restrictions, hosts of daring enthusiasts managed to slip through into ‘the fortunate country’ for mental and spiritual fortification; and to slip out again to spread the gospel. And the stream of native Tibetan missionaries was restricted not by the imperial attempt to put an end to it but by the needs of the home country to organize a desperate military defence.

ii. WAR AGAINST THE EMPIRES

AT LAST WAR came. I have told how, in the theme of darkness it resulted in the destruction of man’s most promising society. In the theme of light the issue was far otherwise. Not only had the empires been effectively undermined by the missionaries, so that rebellions were frequent; more important was the fact that the servants of the light in all countries, and specially in Tibet, were armed with an inner certainty of victory. As in the darker theme, the Tibetan frontier was defended by microbes which reduced the invaders to infantilism. But whereas in the dark theme the respite thus secured was used merely for strengthening the defence, in the theme of the triumphing light it was turned into an opportunity for attack. Against all probability, the small but highly trained and highly mechanized Tibetan army, supported by its small but well-appointed air force, pushed forward into the imperial territory of Kashmir. There it attacked before the Russians had had time to recover from the effects of the microbe, and it gained a surprising victory. The Russian imperialists hastily concentrated vast new armies and air forces upon the invaders; but owing to a combination of inefficiency, corruption, and above all half-heartedness and positive disloyalty the imperial armies put up a feeble resistance, and were presently retreating in disorder, closely pursued by the Tibetans, and constantly attacked by the natives themselves. Organized revolt had of course broken out in Kashmir, and the imperialists’ defeat ensured its success. The whole of this mountainous land was soon freed. A temporary government was set up by the Kashmiri servants of the light, and the new state formed a close alliance with Tibet.

The moral effect of this surprising victory was immense. In Russia itself, particularly in Moscow, there was serious disorder. An army which was ordered to proceed to the recovery of the lost territory, was incapacitated by mutiny. Meanwhile the whole mountainous tract stretching from Kashmir through Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey to the Aegean Sea rose against the oppressors. In Greece, in Britain, and in Scandinavia isolated rebellions were started. To the north of Tibet, Sinkiang and the more mountainous part of Outer Mongolia overcame the local imperial forces. Meanwhile the main Tibetan land and air armament, far from resting on their success, were hurried from the western to the eastern end of the country where the Chinese, a much more formidable enemy, were heavily bombing Lhasa and the whole comparatively rich eastern part of Tibet.

It was desperately important for the Tibetans to secure at once some positive and spectacular success against the Chinese Empire, so as to start in China also that process of galloping decay which was already at work in the rival empire. The people of eastern Tibet were able to retire to their deep shelters, prepared long before the war, and to escape the destruction which now fell upon their cities, their herds, their precious irrigation system. It now appeared that the government, convinced many years ago of the inevitability of war, had established a great number of underground munition factories. But the attack was too heavy to be endured for long without the crippling of the Tibetan resistance. The method of surprise, which had succeeded so well in Kashmir, was impossible against the Chinese imperialists, for they had concentrated an immense force in Chwanben. The efficiency of this army was beyond question. Its loyalty to its imperial master had never been tested. After much discussion the Tibetan leaders decided that there was nothing for it but to court disaster and hope for a miracle. Or rather, divinely confident of victory, they saw that the only way to it was the way of inspired foolhardiness. The Tibetan air force, though heavily outnumbered, proved far more resourceful and skilful than the Chinese, and their courage was fanatical. They did their utmost to destroy the enemy aerodromes. They dropped bombs and the microbes of infantilism on the advancing army in Chwanben. They scattered leaflets on the great industrial centres. At the same time the Tibetan land forces put up a desperate defence upon the frontier.

There is no need to give details of the fighting. At one time it seemed that resistance had broken, yet the Tibetan leaders and fighters maintained their irrational confidence. ‘Hang on, hang on,’ it was said. ‘The tide will turn.’ And sure enough it did. The enemy’s attack began to weaken, both in the air and on land. Deserters, who came oyer in large numbers to the Tibetan side, told that the population of Chwanben had sacrificed itself in thousands so as to create confusion behind the lines. The spirit of the imperial army was changing from bored acceptance of this tiresome frontier war to whispering complaint and doubt. The air force was suffering from badly damaged professional pride. The Tibetan leaders judged that the moment had come for the great gamble. Instead of using the lull to recuperate and prepare to withstand the next blow, they threw the whole Tibetan strength into an attack which violated all the accepted principles of warfare. Though they were the weaker side, they flooded the whole of Chwanben with parachute troops, leaving Tibet almost undefended. The effect was as spectacular as the result of peppering a forest with incendiary bombs. Bewildered by the multitude of the parachutists, and never imagining that this move was the last effort of a beaten enemy, the Chinese troops fell into disorder. Some, of course, obeyed their officers and rounded up the aerial invaders, but many others rallied to the parachutists themselves. The whole of Chwanben fell into chaos. The minute remnant of the Tibetan land army advanced into Chwanben without meeting serious opposition. From the eastern heights of the province they looked down upon the hilly lowlands of Szechwan, amazed at their own success. Disorder now broke out all along the Yangtze Valley and spread to most of the great cities of China.

But the Chinese Empire was tougher than the Russian. The imperial air force bombed many of the revolting cities into submission. The routed imperial armies in the Yangtze Valley were rallied and stiffened with fresh troops. The rebels in the eastern part of Szechwan were overcome and massacred. The fantastic Tibetan advance was checked before Ichang.

The leaders of Tibet knew well that the peoples of China could not be freed unless the imperialists were everywhere attacked by their own subject population. This seemed at first likely to happen; but Chinese nationalism was a strong sentiment, and the rulers were able to make good use of it. The Tibetan leaders, though daring and even foolhardly when their daemon urged them forward, were also realists. Instead of trying to press on into the heart of China, they consolidated the positions they had gained, and waited. They also broadcast to the people of China, saying in effect, ‘We are not conquerors. We desire no empire. If you want freedom, rebel, and we will press on to help you. Otherwise we shall leave you alone. We shall merely defend those peoples whom we have already freed, and only if they wish us to help them.’ All this they said knowing that the Chinese rulers had an exaggerated idea of the Tibetan power, that they feared the complete destruction of their empire, and that they were in the mood to arrange a peace.

The imperialists believed that if they could stave off the immediate disintegration ‘of their empire they could later gather all the resources of both empires to crush Tibet for ever. They therefore proposed a peace conference. The final settlement was one which left China itself almost intact. The Tibetans held plebiscites in their conquered territories, and respected the wish of the majority in Szechwan to remain within the imperial system. Chwanben, however, along with the rest of the great plateau of southern central Asia, including Afghanistan, chose to be free from the rule of the imperialists. The rebellions in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey had been crushed by the Russian forces. The freed peoples of Central Asia now formed a Mountain Federation, which was dominated by the Tibetans in virtue of their civilization and military prestige.

The effect of the war was from the political point of view by no means spectacular. It might even be represented as a kind of victory for the empires, since they recovered much territory that had at first been lost to the rebels. Moreover Tibet had been very seriously crippled from the air. Lhasa was destroyed. Most of the surface factories had been put out of action. A large proportion of Tibetan adult males had been killed in the fighting. On the imperial side the damage was very small in proportion to total population and resources. But psychologically the effect of the war was far-reaching. The empires, in spite of their traditional and inveterate hostility, had thought it worth while to combine to crush weak and ‘barbarian’ state which, it had seemed, could easily have been destroyed by either of them alone. Yet the mountain people had not only successfully defended themselves but had counter-attacked, and in the end it was the empires that sued for peace. In every country the imperialists, in spite of their loud rejoicing over their ‘victory’, were secretly dismayed; while their enemies gradually came to realize that the war had opened a new and hopeful chapter in the history of man. At the peace conference the Tibetans had firmly refused to agree to refrain from propaganda in imperial territories. Indeed they declared that they would do all in their power to support the struggle for freedom in every country, and that whenever opportunity offered they would assist rbellion so long as its aims seemed to them to spring from the will for the light. The mere fact that the empires were unable to alter these provisions showed how far their authority had been damaged.

iii. ARMED PEACE

THE HUMAN RACE now settled down to a long period of armed peace, in which the Mountain Federation developed its defences, propagated its gospel, and strove to make its own social order a model for the future order of the world. The imperialists meanwhile prepared for the war in which Tibet and its satellites and their dangerous ideas must be extirpated. Peace, however, revived the rivalry of the imperial tyrannies. When a sudden rebellion broke out in the remote British Isles, and Was supported by an attack by the Mountain Peoples against Russian forces in Iran, the Chinese government refrained from helping Russia by attacking Tibet from the east. This was a grave error, for Britain gained its independence, and Iran, Iraq, and Turkey joined the Federation. The economic resources of the Federation were still ridiculously small compared with those of the empires, whose sway covered all the rest of the earth save isolated Britain; but the prestige and moral authority of the Federation were ever increasing. The Russian Empire’s territories were now constantly in revolt. Chief offenders Were India, so near to Tibet, and America, so remote from Moscow. It was clear to the Chinese rulers that the whole Russian system would soon collapse, if nothing was done to save it; and that its fragments would coalesce with the hated Federation. They therefore determined to seize what they could before it was too late. India was the obvious starting-point. They ‘proposed to police the turbulent subcontinent for the Russian government, and they reinforced the offer with threats. Russia had no choice but to agree. The Chinese imperialists then flooded India with police, commercial agents, and propagandists. Rapidly they gained complete power, so that Russia’s relationship became one of theoretical and impotent suzerainty.

Further details need not be given of the process by which the whole Russian Empire was gradually annexed to China. The world now consisted of a mighty imperial system and a small federation of free peoples occupying a tract which was very largely mountain. Britain had failed to maintain itself against the more efficient imperial power.

In the imperial system the great majority of human beings were practically serfs, while in the free system all shared equally in the frugal prosperity of the whole federation, and there was ample individual freedom. The one was a gigantic police state, the other a co-operative venture of free men. In the one there was strict censorship, in the other complete freedom of expression. In the one the dominant mood was apathy, mutual suspicion, and neurotic vindictiveness; in the other buoyant confidence and unfailing mutual friendliness prevailed in spite of the constant external danger. It might have been expected that the need for watchfulness and unity would have forced the Tibetans to sacrifice freedom to military dictatorship, and would set up the kind of deterioration which external danger had long ago caused in revolutionary Russia. But the Tibetans were by now too sure of themselves and of each other to feel the need to restrict freedom. Their discipline was at bottom a thorough self-discipline, which, though it permitted unlimited discussion and criticism, freely and fervently accepted in the last resort the decision of the government. And treason was by now unthinkable.

The contrast between the two systems must not be overdrawn. Within the Empire was much that was good, much right personal relationship, much of true culture, much honest search for the way to a better world. But all this was crippled by the system and poisoned by the false assumptions on which the system was based. On the other hand in the Federation there was much that was thoroughly bad. The individual human beings who made up the freed peoples were themselves mostly pro- ducts of the bad old system. They could not at a stroke wipe out the mental damage that had been done to them. Save in Tibet, where the new order was by now well established, there was probably in men’s daily lives almost as much sheer self-seeking, downright meanness, insensitivity, cruelty, and stupidity as there was in the rest of the world. Sometimes the forces of darkness gained considerable power in some region of the Federation, and might threaten to dominate. In Turkey, for instance, a movement was started to gain special privilege for this wealthiest of the newly federated countries. There was a dangerous recrudescence of nationalism within the Federation. The ‘fifth column’ of the Empire did its best to use this opportunity for weakening its enemies. The imperial government even suggested secretly that imperial gold and armaments might help the Turks to gain their point. But this danger was turned to a new strength by the forbearance and tact of the federal government. By an overwhelming majority the Turks reaffirmed their loyalty.

The great difference between the Empire and the Federation was that, while in the one case human decency was damped down by a false social system and moral tradition, in the other it was immensely strengthened by the new institutions and the steady dominance of the will for the light. In the one case the average frail but potentially humane individual was nearly always corrupted by a debasing environment, while in the other he was constantly supported in a higher range of integrity and intelligence than would otherwise have been possible to him.

For several decades the world remained divided between the Empire and the Federation. More than once in this period the Empire made ready to crush the Federation; but, as zero hour approached, unrest within the Empire itself strangely increased to such a pitch that at the critical moment serious rebellions, generally in Britain or America or China itself, made attack impossible. Throughout these decades the government of the Federation concentrated on defence and social development. For defence it relied partly on its mountains, but mainly on a great air force, built at heavy cost of luxury and comfort. Economic resources were meagre. A. modest supply of oil was still produced in the western territory of the Federation. Water-power was developed to the utmost. Gold was assiduously sifted from the river- beds and mined in the mountains for the purchase of urgently needed foreign goods. Agriculture and pasture were the main occupations throughout the territory, apart from the manufacture of munitions and planes. The manner of life of the Free Peoples had perforce to be very simple, but it was adequate to health and fullness of mentality, and the standard was the same for all.

Throughout these decades the Mountain government continued its propaganda in every part of the Empire, and kept its frontiers open to all political refugees who were able to pass an expert psychological examination for sincerity. After a month of this careful observation they were given citizenship. Many fugitives from imperial tyranny were caught before they reached the ‘frontier, but a steady trickle of immigration from every part of the world crept in through the coastal cities of Asia Minor, the passes of the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, from far-eastern Nan Shan, along the valleys of Chwanben, over the Himalayan passes, and through the ports on the Persian Gulf. Thus little by little the Federated Peoples were impregnated with new blood, new skills, and new elements of culture. This influx of refugees caused a serious food problem, but in spite of protests from short-sighted critics the Federal Government insisted on welcoming the new-comers. Intensive cultivation and new development of earthless agriculture alleviated the problem.

iv. WAR AGAIN, AND A NEW ORDER

AT LAST THE long period of armed peace came to an end. Propaganda for the light was rapidly gaining ground throughout the Empire. The imperialists decided that at all costs they must destroy their enemy at once. For some years they prepared in secret, while trying to persuade the Free Peoples of their increasing friendliness. Then suddenly they flung their whole armament into a double attack, from north to south, to cut the Federation in two between Afghanistan and Kashmir. With clouds of planes and swarms of mountain tanks the imperial armament pressed up among the hills. Behind the attacking forces came ‘supporting’ forces whose office it was to bombard the attackers should they show any signs of wavering. The Federation defended itself desperately, but the pincer movement of the enemy succeeded in cutting the Federal territory in two. Not long afterwards the richer and more vulnerable western half of the Federation collapsed. Tibet, with Kashmir and Chwanben, was once more alone against the world, a world more effectively organized than that which they had formerly opposed. Moreover their own economy was gravely mutilated by the loss of the western lands, which had been well integrated with the eastern districts. Tibet had become largely dependent on the more industrial West. But once more the Tibetans rose to strange irrational and almost hilarious confidence. Aided by their mountains and their microbes, they held the frontiers intact. Air bombardment once more blasted their homes and factories and reservoirs. Yet Tibetan life continued. Still the yak browsed, the crops were tended, save where lack of water had ruined them. Food was strictly rationed. No one had enough, but none actually starved. The whole population of Tibet, Kashmir, and Chwanben was united in the will to resist. ‘If we hang on long enough,’ they said, ‘the tide will surely turn.’ They were right.

Throughout the world the rumour spread that the whole strength of the World Empire could not subdue these mountain peoples. Their example encouraged the servants of the light in every land to organize a crop of well-correlated rebellions, of which the most important was in China itself. With surprising suddenness the imperial power throughout Asia and Europe collapsed, giving place to a medley of unstable independent local states, some genuinely of the light, some merely ostensibly so, some frankly nationalist and blind. For a while the imperialists retained their hold on China, America, and South Africa, but in time these also were lost to them.

The world was in chaos. Already minor wars were breaking out in China and Europe. Already little leaders were seeking a foothold on the ladder to power. The Mountain Federation was at once re-formed, and the Federal Government issued an appeal to the peoples of the world, urging a world-wide federation. The forces of the light in every country worked strongly for the new order. There was a short period of civil wars and interstate wars. But behind the backs of these struggles, so to speak, the new world order was steadily ramifying. World-wide commissions for transport, health, postal services, the regulation of industrial disputes, and so on, were gradually forming into a vast network of cosmopolitan organization. Even states at war generally respected this incipient supranational organization, and it was common for enemies to co-operate with one another in the spheres of health, industrial, and agricultural organization. But mere commissions could not prevent wars from occurring. Potentially hostile states would not surrender to any mere committee their control of aeroplanes and tanks. And because they would not do this, and because in many of the new states the new ruling class, though ostensibly loyal to the light, was in fact a power-seeking oligarchy, predatory towards other states and its own subject population, economic rivalry often produced the bitter fruit of war.

But though it seemed at first that in breaking the World Empire mankind had merely exchanged one evil condition for another, the period of chaos was brief. One by one the peoples of the world joined the new ‘Federation of the Light’. Within a couple of decades the whole planet was brought within the new order, which then was solemnly renamed the Federation of Mankind.

The preamble to the constitution of the new world organization became one of the most cherished scriptures of the human race. It was based on the appeal which the Tibetans had issued after the downfall of the world empire, and it had been developed little by little in subsequent years by the best minds of all countries; so that in its final form it was truly co-operative and anonymous. I now remember and will quote some garbled fragments of it.

‘We, inhabitants of every land, intelligences of the planet Earth, having overthrown a world-wide tyranny, having abolished a world-wide darkness of the spirit, now, through our chosen representatives, pledge ourselves to the light. We acknowledge that the high goal of all the lives of men is to awaken themselves and one another to love and wisdom and creative power, in service of the spirit. Of the universe we know very little; but in our hearts we know certainly that for all beings of human stature this is the way of life. In service of the spirit, therefore, we the human inhabitants of this planet, unite in a new order, in which every human being, no matter how lowly his nature, shall be treated with respect as a vessel of the spirit, shall be given every possible aid from infancy onwards to express whatever power is in him for bodily and mental prowess, for his own delight and for service of the common life. We resolve that in future none shall be crippled in body or perverted in mind by unwholesome conditions. ‘For this end we declare that in future no powerful individual or class or nation shall have the means, economic or military, to control the lives of men for private gain.’

8. PRECARIOUS ADVANCE

i. DIFFICULTIES OVER AMERICA
ii. DIFFICULTIES WITH THE BUREAUCRATS
iii. PROGRESS
iv. THE POPULATION PROBLEM
v. ARISTOCRATS AND DEMOCRATS

i. DIFFICULTIES OVER AMERICA

THE TROUBLES OF mankind were by no means over. Nor will they ever be. But with the founding of the new world-order the species entered on a new phase of its career, in which the balance of the forces of the light and the forces of darkness, already slightly favourable to the light, was tipped still farther by a much improved social structure. To many of the generation which founded the new world it seemed not only that a new age had started, which was true, but that henceforth there could be no serious troubles. In this they were mistaken. Masses of human beings who were not ready for the new order were included in it against their wills. In their hearts they still clung to the old values. They still desired a disorderly world so that they could continue to practise brigandage of one kind or another. They still cared mainly for personal dominance or for tribal glory. In the new world, therefore, they set out to make trouble. They tried to undermine the federal authority and the people’s confidence in the new order. They exaggerated its failures, disparaged its successes, fomented the differences between the peoples and between social classes.

Two great conflicts had to be solved before the new order could be so firmly established that no large group within it would ever dare to take arms against it. The one was a conflict between the eastern and western hemispheres, the other between the leaders and the led.

In the conflict of hemispheres, Australia and New Zealand must be counted in the American hemisphere, as they had long ago come under the American influence. During the struggle between the free peoples. and the empires the Americans had been relatively untouched. The North Americans had greatly changed since their tired Utopia had been annexed by the Russian Empire. Under the not very efficient tyranny which followed they discovered a new aim, namely to free themselves. A new generation of young people, sons and daughters of those earlier young who had welcomed the Russians, began to rediscover the virtue of the great American tradition. The heroes of the first American republic, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, were once more, though secretly, studied and praised. A new but vigorous and underground current of individualism began to flow through North America. Once more the state, even in the Utopian form that had once existed in America, began to seem merely an unpleasant necessity. The Russian state was an unmitigated curse. Men lauded once more the virtues of individual enterprise and ingenuity, liberty and personal integrity.

During the decline of the Russian power the movement of individualism generated a sort of submerged individual capitalism, a Robin Hood capitalism, one might say; for the outstanding American intelligences, copying in this respect the Jews of the medieval world, found means of wresting wealth from their conquerors and transferring much of it to their own oppressed people. Under the subsequent and more efficient Chinese rule this system of illicit capitalism in America was methodically destroyed, but it left a spirit of passionate individualism. With the fall of China the Americans reverted to a more or less benevolent and restrained capitalism. There followed a great wave of material reconstruction under the influence of the new aristocrats of wealth. The new capitalism was strikingly different from the old. It was much more like what the old capitalism had claimed to be but never was. No doubt the higher standard of the new capitalism was a symptom of the slightly increased power of the will for the light in the minds of ordinary people.

Imperial tyranny had never impinged on the peoples of America, Australia, and New Zealand with quite the same searching brutality as on the rest of the world. And so, confident in their own spirit of responsible individualism, they did not easily recognize the urgency of bringing the private enterprise of individuals, social classes and nations under the control of a common world authority.

Trouble arose over the disposal of American tidal power. The World Federal Government declared that all the great resources of production must henceforth be controlled exclusively by the World Government, which alone could organize them effectively for the immense task of raising the standard of life of all peoples to the level needed for full psychological development. The American capitalists replied that, having constructed their great tidal system by their own enterprise, having watched it for so long being exploited and misused by the late imperial government of the world, they intended to retain control of it themselves. They agreed, of course, that the system ought to be used strictly for the benefit of the human race as a whole. They had no intention of using it to benefit America exclusively, still less to strengthen their own capitalist class. ‘But since we,’ they said, ‘by fostering private enterprise in our country, have become the world’s greatest inventors and organizers, we claim the right, nay the duty, of managing our own unique generating system and disposing of its power as seems fit to us for the full economic development of the world. Who else could do it? Not the Tibetan revolutionary leaders. Splendid as their record is, their experience of economic organization is far too restricted. Not the Indians, for they are neither organizers nor engineers. Not the Chinese, for they are for the present too soaked in the tradition of their recent imperialism. It is the Americans alone who must take charge in the field of organization, leaving to the Tibetans the great task of educational and spiritual leadership.’ In reply it was urgently pointed out that no one people and no one class should be assigned leadership in any sphere. Those individuals who were capable of leadership would rise to positions of responsibility in whatever fields were suited to them. Privilege and vested interest must never more be allowed to appear on the earth. Moreover the American social system, though it had usefully built up American prosperity behind the backs of the alien tyrants, was quite unsuited to the new world-order, in which there must be fully co- ordinated planning of the world as a whole.

The American capitalists refused to give way. Though unarmed they were confident in their strength, because they were confident in the rightness of their cause. The American national government announced its withdrawal from the World Federation. To this direct challenge the World Government, including its American members, appealed to the Americans in the most friendly terms to reconsider this momentous step, and reminded them of the ancient American ‘War of Secession’. They added, reluctantly but firmly, that, if necessary, force would be used to prevent the secession from the new and greater Federation. The human race had declared its unity and would no longer tolerate local sovereign powers. In answer the American capitalists cut the great cables by which their surplus current was transmitted to Europe. The World Government ordered the world police in America to occupy all the generating stations and see that the cables were repaired.

The Americans, of course, like all other peoples, had agreed to the abolition of national armaments. They had their own unarmed police; and a contingent of the armed World Police, drawn from all peoples, was stationed at key points throughout the two continents. The seizing of the generators was carried out without opposition; but the American Government organized a general strike in protest, and there were great demonstrations in all the cities. In several parts of the continent rioters attacked the offices of the World Government. The native police did not intervene. Thereupon the World Police took control of the whole of the two American continents, along with Australia and New Zealand. Democratic government in the American hemisphere ceased. Rioting became widespread. But the American, Australian, and New Zealand governments, recognizing the futility of mere rioting, organized a vast campaign of civil disobedience and non-co-operation.

Throughout these troubles the World Government showed great forbearance. There were many arrests, but the prisoners found themselves treated almost as honoured guests. Many of them were not even retained in captivity at all but put on parole on condition that they left the American hemisphere and spent their time, until further notice, in touring the rest of the world, at the expense of the World Government. Thus, it was hoped, they would see the system at work and be impressed by it. Special facilities were given them for interviewing high officials in charge of industrial organization.

Meanwhile a great war of words was resounding throughout the world. The Americans were allowed complete freedom of expression. Floods of radio propaganda issued from both sides. It became increasingly difficult to keep order in the Americas. There were many attacks on foreigners. Sheer nationalistic passion grew from day to day.

At last the President of the World, at this time a Zulu, decided to make a great gesture to end the dispute. He offered to tour the Americas, along with two American members of the World Government, and to meet all the leaders of American capitalism for intimate discussion. Before leaving the hemisphere he would make fresh proposals. The offer was accepted. It is hard to say which member of the party needed the greater courage, the President, whose race was still distasteful to the Americans, or the two American ‘traitors’. Unescorted and unarmed, they travelled in the hemisphere for four months, then called all the American leaders to a conference. The President reminded his hearers of the epic struggle of the Tibetans, and the founding of the Federation of Mankind.

He then paid a generous tribute to the achievement of America and the ideals for which the rebels (he did not shrink from the word) were now (he recognized) making a sincere stand. He himself had learnt much from his tour, and he now had a proposal to make. He recognized that in the world’s present transitional state, a state of rapid and bewildering economic enrichment, there was much to be said for allowing a good deal of scope to private enterprise in industry. He recognized also that the motives of most of the American capitalists were generous social motives, and that the American peoples on the whole supported them. On the other hand the World Government could not tolerate any attempt to flout its authority; otherwise the whole new order, so painfully created and on the whole so beneficial, would soon break down. Authority, however, had been unhesitatingly asserted. The World Government could now afford to be generous. He therefore proposed, with his Government’s full assent, a temporary arrangement allowing the Americas economic autonomy within the Federation. The World Government reserved the power of constant inspection of American industry and would not permit any infringement of the rights of the workers, as laid down in the preamble to the constitution of the Federation. Certain kinds of industry were excluded from capitalist enterprise entirely, such as armaments and the great means of expression. These, and education, were to be nationalized under the American state, subject to final control by the World Government. It also reserved a power of veto on any industry which it regarded as undesirable from the point of view of the world, and it might order American industry to produce some particular kind of goods needed by the world. Such work might be subsidized by the World Government. The American capitalists, then, must regard themselves as civil servants under the World Government, liable to dismissal and confiscation of their property if they broke the agreement, though paid for their services through the open market. The American peoples, of course, would regain the right to abolish the whole system of local capitalism at any time.

Such was the compromise of ‘capitalism within socialism’ that was finally established. The conflict could never have been successfully solved by such a precarious arrangement had not both sides been convinced of the fundamental goodwill of the other. The World Government came out of its first great crisis with increased authority. On the whole the compromise worked.

In South America, however, it lasted only for a decade. There the worse elements of the capitalist class gained power and indulged in secret violations of the agreements. The peoples of South America came to realize that they were being exploited, not flagrantly, as in former times, but at least annoyingly. The movement for socialism rapidly gained ground. The World Government, foreseeing the end, refrained from action, preferring that the change to a socialistic local economy should be brought about by local effort. The bosses of South American capitalism appealed to their colleagues in the northern continent, but in vain. Without trouble the South Americans went over to socialism.

A few years later Australia and New Zealand followed suit. And within a couple of decades the North Americans themselves, not without heated discussion, decided to enter fully into the world economic system.

ii. DIFFICULTIES WITH THE BUREAUCRATS

THE OTHER SERIOUS conflict which troubled the early World State did not come to a head until a couple of centuries after the solution of the American trouble. This was a new kind of class war, a worldwide struggle between the bureaucracy and the mass of ordinary citizens.

The world bureaucracy was selected by psychological tests for organizing ability and moral integrity. It was known that superior organizing ability ran mainly in certain families or biological strains. Consequently there began to emerge strong traces of an aristocracy of birth, rather in the manner of the loose network of crystals which appears in water in the act of freezing. The ranks of the bureaucracy were never closed to suitable candidates from outside the great bureaucratic families, but in subtle ways scions of the well-tried stocks had the advantage. Certain family names became labels promising bureaucratic ability. The prouder families guarded their names very jealously. Members who failed to come up to the family’s high standard of ability were deprived of the family name. Able children of female members of the family who married into humbler stocks were granted the name of the maternal family. Newcomers into the bureaucracy were subtly influenced by the prestige of the old families, imitating their manners and ideas, and seeking to gather similar prestige for their Own family names.

Thus, little by little, the new aristocracy crystallized upon the surface of the world-society. It was an aristocracy not of mere birth, nor of wealth, but of genuine ability; but of a special kind of ability, namely the aptitude for organization and for managing human beings. It did its work well; and superior intelligences of other kinds, such as the scientific and the literary, were well content to leave the born organizers in power. But there carne a time when people began to murmur that the bureaucrats were becoming rather self- important and meddlesome. No one denied that their rule was in the main efficient and honest, but there was a growing suspicion that they were growing too fond of power, and that their loyalty to the world community was increasingly tempered by unwitting preoccupation with their own prestige, not as individuals but as a class. They held their position, of course, under the will of the federal and national assemblies. Unfortunately the politicians were themselves members of the bureaucratic class, and would seldom take action against officials who exceeded their powers. Thus, little by little, the strength of the bureaucrats broadened out from precedent to precedent. Increasingly they resented criticism. Increasingly they hung together, developing little by little the beginnings of a distinctive way of life and a distinctive moral code.

Matters came to a head when a great physical research-laboratory in Russia was ordered by the World Research Ministry to give up its inquiry into the condition of matter in the interior of stars and to concentrate on the practical problem of applying sub-atomic energy to industry. The eminent Russian physicists protested, refused, appealed to the World President, and were arrested. There was great indignation in scientific circles throughout the world. Many research workers went out on strike in defence of their arrested colleagues. Industrial workers, though their pay was good and their hours were short, took this opportunity of complaining of excessive discipline in the factories and of interference in their home life. The small but well- established class of pioneering industrial capitalists (incorporated in the World State as a result of the American experiment) complained that factory inspectors used every means to hamper their work and destroy their profession. Certain writers affirmed that they could not get their books published because the national or federal ministry of publication disliked them. This, they said, was a violation of the original function of the ministries, which had been founded not to censor but to foster matter critical of the regime. Similar charges were made against the ministries of radio.

The movement of protest began in the British Isles, and, though it spread throughout the world, the British and Irish peoples were its most vigorous upholders. The islanders expressed their discontent in mass meetings, processions, broadcasts, letters to the press, letters to members of parliament and cabinet ministers, and above all in hearty resistance to particular instances 01 bureaucratic tyranny. The most popular slogans were, ‘Less efficiency, more freedom’, and ‘Less producing, more living’, and above all ‘We won’t be robots’. I could not but smile when I compared the grievances of my countrymen of this period with the disheartening inroads into civil liberty which had occurred in my own time and had been far less indignantly resisted. The dominant note of this movement was the insistence on individuality. Comic relief was given by processions of ‘typical Englishmen’. The marchers, or rather the disorderly stragglers, were persons made up to represent ‘unstereotyped types’ and odd individuals in the present world and in all ages. Nineteenth-century tramps, and vagabonds of every period were the most popular figures. They were represented as unshaven, ragged, filthy, drunk, and friendly. Each was got up to be as unlike as possible to every other. These jostled with medieval minstrels, friars, and fools, scatter-brained philosophers, artists, research scientists entangled in electric wires and test- tubes. This motley host of ancient and modern eccentrics strayed along the street in studied disorder, singing songs of freedom, blithely recalcitrant to the efforts of the comic ‘officials’ who fussed beside them, trying to get them into regular formation. In contrast with this rabble might come a batch of well-drilled robots, made up to look like machinery and linked together by red tape or electric cables. All this buffoonery the real bureaucrats regarded with contempt and indignation. In their view it was a symptom of a sinister weakening of social morale, a neurotic craving for anarchy, a denial of the dignity of the human species.

The agitation and the comic relief welled up in every country. The governments were forced to promise certain immediate reforms, and the World Government set up an independent commission to investigate the whole matter. It was characteristic of the improved condition of the human race that the commission’s report was issued within three months, and that, although it firmly condemned the bureaucrats for their unnecessary officialism, it also won their respect by its insight into their point of view. But its proposals for reform they strongly condemned. There was to be a vast system of special courts of appeal to deal with cases of alleged officialism and interference with liberty. The most notorious bureaucrats in every country were to be dismissed. Worst of all, in future no family should have more than three members in the bureaucracy at any time. After much debate the World Government decided to accept the plan, with a few modifications. Thereupon the bureaucrats, honestly convinced of their own importance and the rightness of their ideals, announced that they alone, who were carefully selected and carefully educated for their task, could possibly know what was needed in the life of the world society. They frankly claimed to be a true aristocracy; and in this emergency they were forced, they said, to suspend the constitution and resume dictatorial power. The World Parliament and the swarm of national parliaments, composed almost entirely of members of the bureaucratic class, and secretly in sympathy with their claims, put up only a half- hearted resistance. In all the states except Britain, Ireland, and Tibet, the oldest and the newest homes of freedom, the coup d’etat was at once successful, for the chiefs of the World Police were of course members of the bureaucracy. In Ireland the local government split, and the country boiled up in disorder. The British and Tibetan governments made a stand for freedom. Guarding themselves with their unarmed police, they arrested the local bureaucratic leaders and appealed to the local World Police to defend the constitution. But the World Police carried out the instructions of its Chief Constable. Armed forces appeared at the two ‘rebel’ parliaments. Much to the distress of the police, the rebels made an effort to resist, and fire-arms had to be used against them. Several members of the two parliaments were slightly damaged by shots fired at their legs. The governments were duly arrested, along with their supporters.

But the peoples of the earth were by now far too spirited to accept dictatorship, even a dictatorship which was manifestly benevolent according to its lights. A general strike started in Britain, was taken up in Tibet, Iceland, America, New Zealand, and developed into a universal campaign of civil disobedience. From the point of view of the bureaucrats the human race had gone quite mad. For these hosts of civil servants and politicians were very conscious of their own integrity and fundamental human loyalty. They were not Nazis or ‘wicked capitalists’ but conscientious servants of mankind, and, moreover, demonstrably superior members of it. Their only fault was that they had served not wisely but too well. This one fault, however, they could not recognize. They attributed the whole agitation to ‘subversive elements’, to ne’er-do-weels who could do nothing but stir up trouble. But the agitation increased. Only minimum services were maintained. In a world of limitless wealth people settled down to a life of penury till liberty could be restored. Meanwhile there was still complete freedom of expression. There were great demonstrations and protest meetings, and many serious clashes between rioters and police. Yet, though feeling was now very strong, there was practically no bloodshed, for the temper of mankind had indeed improved. But the new spirit was still frail.

As the conflict developed, both sides became more exasperated and harsh. Matters came to a head in London. Huge crowds converged on Whitehall and broke the windows of the World Government Building. The Chief World Emissary himself appeared on a balcony to appease the crowd, but as luck had it some one threw a bottle which hit him in the face and covered him with blood. Suddenly the repressed brutishness of both sides surged up and broke away all restraint. Anyone dressed as a bureaucrat was roughly handled. The authorities were forced to make a display of their fire-arms. This merely roused the mob to fury. They charged the building. The guards fired at their legs, but the majority rushed on, overwhelmed the guards, broke into the building, and set fire to it. The officials were badly knocked about, but even at this stage no serious hurt was committed. A fresh force of the World Police was brought to the spot. Not realizing that they were confronted by a brawl rather than a bloody revolution, the new-comers used machine guns. Owing to the practise of low firing there were very few serious casualties, but the crowd, far from being quelled, rushed forward, regardless of further casualties. There was a massacre. But thousands upon thousands of furious citizens now poured in from all directions. The police, now completely surrounded and fighting for their lives, fired indiscriminately. Walls of dead and dying surrounded them. But the people of London were by now possessed by savage and reckless hate. All the barbarous impulses that had been so thoroughly tamed during the last three centuries suddenly took charge. As the wall of dead rose, new attackers climbed over it, only to add their own dead bodies to its height. Presently ammunition ran out. The mob broke in and murdered everyone of the defenders. By now large reinforcements of World Police were converging on London. Desperate struggles took place in the suburbs.

At this stage the Lord Mayor of London made a radio appeal by loud speakers in the streets, urging the World Police to retire, and the people to go home. Meanwhile the metropolitan unarmed police, who were popular with the London crowds, were sent out to all the danger spots and coolly took charge of their rather weary fellow citizens. Seeing that the mobs were now well in hand, the armed police retired.

The news of London’s orgy spread by radio over the world. Other cities flared up in rage, and one by one were persuaded into quietness again. At last a statement was broadcast by a large section of the World Police in every country saying that they would no longer carry out the orders of their bureaucratic chiefs. It was now clear to the bureaucrats that the game was up. The World Government resigned, and many national governments followed its example. In Japan the ministers committed hara-kiri. Many of the chiefs of the great public services, national and international, surrendered their offices. Most of them reaffirmed their ideals but recognized that mankind was not yet ready to live up to so high an aim. Others recanted. For a whole month there was scarcely any public authority anywhere in the world except the local governments of Tibet, Britain, and Iceland. There was no world government. The police and the civil services were without their administrative heads. Yet there was no disorder. Everything functioned normally, in the spirit of benevolent anarchy. This condition could not last indefinitely, but no one had any authority to alter it. Earnest discussion took place by radio; and from this, as in a world- wide Friends’ Meeting, it emerged that the ‘feeling of the meeting’ was in favour of reinstating the old governments and the old bureaucratic class in general, and charging them with the task of putting the world on its feet again. Meanwhile the new political and social constitution could be thought out in detail. Thus for the time being the old governing class, chastened by its experience, retained its position, save for a small number of fanatics and adventurers who were dismissed. It is impossible that a revolution should end in this manner in any community that had not already far surpassed our present level of integrity and intelligence.

Thus the human race successfully avoided the danger of taking the first step towards reviving class dominance. With the warning of the recent troubles constantly in mind mankind gradually acquired a new temper and tradition of morality in public life. It was but an extension of the new temper and tradition of personal relations which had resulted in the slight but general increase in the will for the light. Once it had become firmly rooted, this new temper grew with surprising vigour. Whereas formerly honesty and generosity had been regarded as ideals difficult to attain, and men had on the whole expected their neighbours to treat them scurvily and their rulers to be tyrannical and corrupt, now honesty and generosity were increasingly ‘in the air’. Both in private and in public affairs men confidently expected to be treated decently.

iii. PROGRESS

THE HUMAN RACE was now able to carryon without distraction enterprises that had been started as soon as world unity had been attained. Industrial production and distribution had to be fully developed in such a way as to afford security, comfort, and full growth of body and mind to every human being between the poles. Resources of tidal and volcanic power had to be exploited to their full extent. For the needs of the race would soon be a thousandfold what they had been. New and better synthetic materials must be invented, and some old materials must be produced in far larger quantities. There must be new and plentiful building materials and standardized parts of buildings, more durable plastics for articles of domestic use, better and far more plentiful fabrics for clothing, better food, better transport, far more lavish educational equipment.

All this production must be done in such a way that ‘sub-human’ work could be carried on solely by machines. Of course, so long as the standard of human capacity remained what it was, many world-citizens would be content with low-grade work; but no human being must ever have to spend his life on work below his capacity, and none must ever be tied to a kind of work for which his special aptitudes were unsuited. There must be a great advance in vocational psychology, and therefore much research.

Psychology, indeed, now came into its own. Human culture in the scientific age had at first been dominated by physics and chemistry, then by biology; and now finally it was largely influenced by psychology. As the understanding of human nature increased, great advances were made in educational method. Crippling neuroses gradually disappeared. A composite photograph of mankind would have shown an expression of frankness, confidence, and friendliness such as in an earlier age was to be seen only in those who were outstandingly fortunate in their genes and their nurture.

By now it was universally realized that fullness of life, though it involved ample material means, was not to be measured simply in terms of luxury, but rather in terms of bodily well-being and the higher ranges of bodily and mental skill. A rather sharp distinction was made in the new order between articles of mere luxury and articles needed for the development of body or mind. Industry was planned so as to make the former difficult to procure, the latter easy. Luxury was by no means condemned, but the unlimited power of the world-society to produce luxury articles was deliberately restricted, so that though every one could procure a certain amount of pure luxury with his ‘luxury allowance’, no one could gather to himself masses of choice articles which it was beyond his power to use or appreciate. Thus the more flamboyant kinds of clothing, though not banned, were produced in very small quantities; while simpler materials and patterns were plentiful and various. Essential foods were obtainable everywhere in lavish amounts. Luxury foods and the more precious kinds of wine were difficult to come by. Serviceable motor cars and aeroplanes were available for every citizen. Luxury cars and planes were to be obtained only by the fanatic who was willing to stint himself in all other respects. Choice jewellery was almost unobtainable, and was used mainly for communal rather than individual display, but simple trinkets, hand-made by craftsmen steeped in some local tradition or venturing upon new forms, were available for all who wanted them. In general the aim was to use the vast mechanical resources of the race not to complicate but to simplify life, and to bring all that was needed within the reach of all. Full use was to be made of machinery while ensuring that machinery should not dominate. In the old days the needs of ordinary people were catered for incidentally by enterprises undertaken for private profit. The result was a constant appeal to the more primitive and more insistent impulses of men, and a gross degradation of sensibility and integrity. But now that public need was the first claim it was necessary to decide what the public need really was, and which needs were most to be fostered. Industry had to be planned accordingly.

The world which now began to emerge was of very different type from the old one. While nearly everyone was in some style a worker, the ‘working class’ was rapidly vanishing. No longer did the bulk of the population work for long hours and for insufficient pay, living more or less in squalor, and failing to secure that small amount of self- expression without which mental health is impossible. The general frustration and misery of the past had produced a characteristic mentality, now vanished. In politics, for instance, frustration had expressed itself in a gnawing vindictiveness which later on seemed merely silly. At each end of the political spectrum, and indeed to a great extent throughout it, fear, jealousy, hatred, and a frustrated itch for self-display, were dominant motives, though often appearing under the guise of righteous indignation. Hence Fascism, Nazism, and the baser sort of Communism. By now, Fascism and Nazism had of course long ago vanished. Communism, which at one time had made so great a contribution to thought and feeling and institutions, was no longer a fanatical creed. In a sense all sane men were communists, since all accepted much of the Marxin social analysis; but the militant Communist Party had long since vanished, and the Marxian attempt to do without the primacy of the fundamental values, love and wisdom, was recognized as a perversity due to the poisonous atmosphere of the machine age.

Instead of the ‘working class’ there were increasing millions of people whose standard of life we should call ‘comfortable middle- class’, but whose minds were very different from our middle-class minds, since they were no longer moulded by the desperate necessity of trying to get the better of their neighbours in the commercial dog- fight. Most men were now salaried servants of the world state or some national state or local or vocational authority. Three classes alone received no salary, but drew, when necessary, the liberal maintenance allowance to which every citizen was entitled when he needed it. The small and curious class of private capitalists, whose function it was to provide society with the benefits of daring private enterprise in industrial pioneering, lived on profits, but were prevented by sumptuary laws and taxation from attaining more than the tolerated degree of affluence. Their employees were skilled workers of all kinds, attracted by the possibility of somewhat higher pay and shorter hours than were allowed in state service, and by a sense of adventure in a small common enterprise. Most of them were persons who had saved up their luxury allowances to contribute to the equipping of the factory. Thus they themselves were capitalists. The aim of the original capitalist or group of capitalists who founded the concern was always to build up a co-operative and self-governing society in which all the members were in some degree capitalists.

The second class of unsalaried persons were the artists and writers who started professional life in complete dependence on the maintenance allowance and such extra help as they could obtain from their parents or friends. They might also gain state ‘subsidies of merit’; but in the main they hoped to live on the sale of their works, since in the new world the demand for books, pictures, musical performances, and so on, was far greater than in our own day.

The third unsalaried class was made up of the born idlers and tramps. These, a small minority, either supplemented their maintenance allowance with an occasional day’s labour, or frankly depended wholly on the ‘dole’. Although the great majority of these people were socially quite useless, the world society could easily afford to keep them in idleness for the sake of the few outstandingly creative or critical minds that now and then emerged from among them. Many of these inveterate tramps were people with strong anti-social impulses. They regarded all social organization as a nuisance and as ‘fair game’ for the predatory wanderer. The fact that they were nevertheless tolerated and even fostered is a measure of the stability and the wisdom of the leaders of the new world. These ne’er-do-weels were very few, for improved education had greatly reduced the number of merely warped minds. These were apparently not warped but innately individualistic. Some were individualistic to such an extent that they refused to avail themselves of the dole, and lived almost entirely by pilfering, sometimes by audacious highway robbery. To me it seemed at first incredible that this sort of thing should be permitted in this almost Utopian society. But these ‘outlaws’ were a minute section of the individualist class, and anyone who suffered from their attentions could claim compensation from the state. There was therefore no attempt to eradicate them. When they were caught they were very leniently punished, except when they had done bodily hurt to their victims.

In the vocational representative system which ran parallel to the parliamentary system, the capitalists, writers, artists, and tramps had their own voting colleges, along with the salaried occupations, such as engineers and teachers. The tramps and outlaws, however, very seldom exercised their right to vote.

The lives of salaried persons of course varied very much. The aim was to provide that in boring occupations hours should be short, and in interesting work long. Exceptionally, some monotonous work involved rather long hours, but in such cases the workers were chosen from the psychological class who thrive best on monotonous occupations in which they can day-dream. On the other hand some enthralling work was restricted to short hours because of the strain which it involved.

One striking institution, first tried out in North America, but immediately copied in China and soon adopted throughout the world, was the Corps of Emergency. This consisted of workers from almost every occupation chosen for their versatility and enterprise, and kept in training and on full pay, to be moved hither and thither as occasion required. Thus, if for some reason a river had to be deflected, a mountain removed, a sea drained, thousands of civil engineers were available without disturbance to existing enterprises. The Corps fulfilled the function of the unemployed in the old capitalist system, but with a very different temper.

The professed aim of the World Government was to secure a right balance of specialization and all-roundness. Thus the more specialized a man’s trade, the more he was encouraged to take up outside activities. Every individual, of course, was educated primarily to be a developed personality and a responsible citizen. He was given an outline of world-history and of the modern world culture. He was also deliberately educated for breadth of sympathy and understanding. Whatever his special capacities, he was trained to some degree of insight into the activities of others. It was constantly urged upon him that his prime duty was twofold, both to develop his own special aptitude and to comprehend and foster so far as possible the special aptitudes of others.

The World Government jealously exercised its right to supervise all national educational systems so as to ensure that the essential principles of education for citizenship in the new world should not be violated; should in fact be vigorously practised. The aim was, not only to impart a clear outline of man’s story, along with some detail of national and provincial history, but also to foster the two supremely important human impulses, the will for community and the will for intelligence. Not only as between individuals but also as between peoples specialization was carefully restricted. Inevitably at first some countries were predominantly industrial, others agricultural, but it was deliberately designed that this specialization should be based on an underlying self-sufficiency. This surprised me, for the danger of war between the peoples had by now vanished. Why, then, this insistence on self-sufficiency? Partly, self-sufficiency was a result of natural economic development. With the great advance of physical and chemical technique, industry had become far less dependent on locality. Anything from food to typewriters could now be produced in almost any district, for the primary raw materials were vegetable tissues and the very common minerals.

But there was another reason for increasing self-sufficiency. At first sight it seemed a reason pointing in the opposite direction. The aim of the world government was the development of the world as a whole, not of any one people. Local cultural differences were therefore to be fostered, since it was realized that mental diversity was the breath of life. This, it might seem, would involve fostering economic specialization in each country, since economic diversity should produce mental diversity. But extreme psychological specialization was now recognized to be very dangerous. The highly specialized factory worker of the past had been but the caricature of a real man. The agricultural worker who knew of nothing but turnips had been equally limited. For a people to be capable of significant cultural variation it must have within its range a great diversity of activities. Persons in each walk of life must be open to the direct and constant influence of persons whose occupations, and therefore their mentalities, are different. A highly specialized national economy breeds a lop-sided mental culture. In a world of highly specialized nations this danger can be partly avoided by the insistence on foreign travel; but not effectively; for travel is either a holiday occupation, in which case its effect though valuable, is not far-reaching; or a way of life, in which case the traveller is mentally uprooted from his native culture.

The aim of the leaders of the new world was a high degree not only of national but of provincial self-sufficiency. Thus in Britain, where economic organization centred on the tidal generators of the west coast of Scotland, industry was not allowed to concentrate in that district. Improved transmission made it possible to take the electric current into every part of the island, and to scatter the new bright factories and workers’ dwellings throughout the agricultural regions. On the other hand much of the former congested industrial area of Lancashire and Yorkshire and the Midlands was once more largely agricultural. In consequence, not only the Scottish and Welsh nations but the new-old English provinces of Wessex, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, and so on, developed each its own limited but vigorous autonomy, and made its own contribution to the English culture. England in turn was becoming far more self-sufficient than of old. Improved agriculture and reduced population made it possible for the three British peoples to feed themselves, though there was always a large import of luxury foods from abroad. Britain had long ago ceased to be ‘the workshop of the world’, since every country was in the main its Own workshop, but Britain’s imports were ‘paid for’ by the export of the special lines of high-quality machinery and fabrics for which the British were becoming famous. Trade, in fact, was becoming more and more an exchange not of necessities, but of products which local genius produced for the amplification and embellishment of life throughout the world. Each people aimed at being basically self- sufficient but also at producing for the world economy some special class of goods which could be produced with unique success by its local tradition and skill. Each also prided itself both on its cosmopolitan and on its national culture, both on its insight into the common human tradition and on its peculiar contribution to that ever- exfoliating culture.

Thus the British, never a highly cultured race in the intellectual sense, claimed with some justice that they could still teach the world through the example of their political life, with its anomalous but effective institutions and its temperate and forbearing spirit. And though the population of Britain remained relatively unresponsive to literature, English writers, and particularly English poets, wrote for the world and were read by the world more than the writers of any other land. This was partly due to the importance which the luck of history had given to the English language, for at this time it had become the ‘second language’ of all other peoples, and was being constantly enriched by extensive borrowings from other languages, to such an extent that the Englishman of that age considered the English of our day as archaic as Chaucer’s English.

The Germans still gave the world great music, monumental works of philosophy (increasingly often written in English) and meticulous applications of science. Their organizing ability expressed itself throughout the world in the great preponderance of Germans in the control of cosmopolitan institutions such as the World Commissions for Health, Postage, Radio, Transport. Indeed there were those who murmured that the Germans had at last achieved their dream of world empire. The Russians, freed from their delusion of imperialism, rightly claimed the world’s admiration for their powers of insight into personality and their spirit of comradeship. The Tibetans, ever- respected for the glorious victory that they had won against the forces of darkness through their spiritual discipline, were universally regarded as the main fastness of the spirit. The more subtle and more diverse Indians, however, were becoming the main interpreters of spiritual experience to the rest of the world. The North Americans, now the leading pioneers in industrial invention, and also in man’s ever-increasing astronomical exploration, claimed in addition that they were leaders in the important task of digesting and co-ordinating the other cultures. The Chinese, who in virtue of sheer numbers and the continuity of their civilization played an immense part in forming the culture of the new world, ensured that the ordinary man should indeed within his powers be a cultured man, and provided him with a subtle and humane pattern of personal conduct. Thus at the outset of the phase of Utopian development there was great cultural diversity among the peoples. Of course, to excel in any one cultural direction an individual had not necessarily to belong to the people which was its chief exponent. Indeed, in every cultural sphere outstanding contributions might be made by individuals of any nation. Moreover, some cultural activities were far more international than others. Most of the natural sciences, for instance, depended on many peoples equally. But on the whole, and in the long run, each people gained its special reputation, and to excel in any sphere a man must if possible start by absorbing the contribution of the people that had done most in that sphere. Not that the talent of a people remained fixed for ever. Reputations might be lost, and new ones made. Indeed each people was capable of surprising the world with achievement in directions hitherto unattempted by it. Few would have expected that the Russians, after an age of fanatical materialism, would develop a special aptitude for mystical experience; still fewer that the minute and storm-racked population of the Shetland Isles would come to excel in philosophy to such an extent that the new little university of Lerwick vied with the great German and Indian seats of learning in this respect.

Though everything possible was done to encourage each people to develop its special capacities, certain essential principles were ensured in all states, namely those customs, institutions, and values which were deemed necessary for the welfare of mankind as a whole and the further development of human capacity. Thus in education, while each people and each large minority within a people was permitted to arrange curricula and the temper of its schools and colleges in accord with its peculiar needs and tradition, all must conform to the fundamental principles of the new world, educating for personality and world-citizenship, and the full expression of the potentiality of man. Similarly in respect of law, though each country preserved its legal system mainly intact, all must in respect of such vital matters as civil liberty, health, the prevention of economic exploitation, fulfil certain essential requirements. If in any respect its national legal system fell short of the common standard of mankind, changes, however drastic, had to be made. But indeed, in respect of law there was a strong tendency to abolish all national oddities and to work out a single uniform system of world law.

Now that the new world order was firmly established the main concern of the World Government was the detailed organization of human affairs so as to secure that future’ generations should have the best possible conditions. In the economic field the aim was to strike such a balance between producer’s goods and consumer’s goods that, though present conditions should be as favourable as was necessary for physical and mental health, future conditions should be far better. This involved a great deal of research and bold planning by the World Economic Development Commission. At the same time the World Health Ministry was able to organize a well-co-ordinated attack on disease, and to secure that the rising generation should be more healthy than their predecessors.

iv. THE POPULATION PROBLEM

OF ALL THE problems that confronted the World Government the most difficult was that of population. During the period of the Russian and Chinese Empires and subsequently under the World Empire, population in most countries had very seriously declined, and the average age had increased. The French had dwindled to a sprinkling of disheartened old people in a swarm of German and Russian invaders. Yet Germany and Russia themselves had suffered a startling decline’ of population. China under the Empire was badly depleted. The Japanese, whose sufferings had been worse than those of any other people, were almost exterminated. The Indians had multiplied after gaining their independence from Britain, but had declined heavily under the Russian and Chinese Empires. The British, reduced during the tyranny to a handful of semi-barbarians in a land of ruined factories, had later, under the influence of Tibetan missionaries, conceived a new national purpose even under the heel of the tyranny, and had concentrated on reproduction so effectively that the decline was stayed and these island peoples became sufficiently vigorous to undertake rebellion after rebellion. At the founding of the World Federation, Great Britain was inhabited by some eight million human beings.

The two Empires had tried to stem the downfall of world population by forbidding birth-control and persecuting the childless. These methods had little effect, for under the empires life was not worth living.

While numbers were declining, the average level of intelligence was declining also. The more intelligent were more reluctant than the dullards to burden themselves with children in a hostile world; or else, climbing into wealth and-comfort without any social or religious ideals to stimulate them into assuming the burden, they avoided it.

One of the first acts of the World Federal Government was to set up a Ministry of Parenthood, charged not only with stemming the general decline of population but also with securing that intelligent stocks should not dwindle while dull stocks increased. The first task was to make parenthood attractive to people of average and superior intelligence. This was done partly by heavy subsidies. Every intelligent child, far from being a burden to its parents, became a financial asset. Great efforts were made to free childbirth of its distress and danger, and to ensure that the upbringing of children should not demand the enslavement of the mother during the best years of her life. With the aid of communal meals, communal nurseries and labour-saving devices within the home the mothers were freed and yet the home was preserved as the fundamental unit of social life. All girls were trained in mothercraft. The Ministry also undertook careful propaganda to persuade all young people that parenthood was at once their supreme privilege and their first obligation; the supreme privilege, because only through marriage and the rearing of a family could they know community in its most intimate form; the supreme obligation because in the present condition of the species the ‘most urgent need was that the decline of population should be checked, and that there should be a lavish supply of vigorous and intelligent young. For this age of mankind’s history, they said, was the true age of sunrise. The period from the origin of the species to the overthrow of the world tyranny had been merely the long-drawn-out dawn. But with the founding of the Federation of Mankind bright light had suddenly appeared over the horizon. At last the whole prospect was clear and golden. Not only must population cease to decline; the needs of the new world were such that the number of human beings must be increased to a hundred times their present number. The world-resources were ample, and for the fulfilment of man’s potentiality it was necessary to have a world of many scores of great diversified peoples. But more important even than numbers was quality. It must be the task of each generation to secure that its successor should be more healthy, more intelligent, more generous, more sane, and more creative than earlier generations. Every young couple must surely desire this for its own children, and must covet the rarest of parental glories, namely to bring into the world some outstanding genius, whether in political action, science, art, or spiritual leadership.

Much was done in order to foster intelligence and integrity in the rising generation. Lavish research produced at last very reliable mental tests. Defectives and certain types prone to criminality were sterilized. Dullards were severely discouraged from having children. Parents of good average intelligence were of course helped to have large families. Those of exceptionally high intelligence were handsomely subsidized. Outstanding children were treated as the world’s most precious possession, and trained with the utmost care and skill to enable them to make full use of their powers.

v. ARISTOCRATS AND DEMOCRATS

WITHIN A FEW generations this policy of fostering intelligence and integrity began to have surprising results. Society began to be stratified in ranks of ability. People tended to confine their mating within their own rank of capacity. Consequently the first signs of a new caste system appeared. Serious problems were thus raised, and two world-wide political parties, opposed to one another with increasing emphasis, advocated opposite policies. One party, the Aristocrats, favoured the acceptance of the caste tendency, and even the deliberate breeding of specialized human types for specialized functions, including a caste of world-organizers or rulers. The other party, the Democrats, insisted that, though inevitably there must be great differences between men in respect of mental and spiritual developments, and some differences were no doubt desirable, it was important to prevent such divergences from broadening into unbridgeable gulfs. The distinctive attribute of man, they said, was not specialism but versatility, not social organization of types alien to each other, but free community among mutually understanding and respecting persons. For man, the way of aristocracy was the way of insectification and of death.

Against this view it was insisted that society was like an organism composed of highly specialized cells. A man’s body could not be made up wholly of brain cells; nor could a highly developed society consist wholly of the highest possible types of individuals. The Democrats agreed, but added that human society was far more like a brain than a body. Its body was the material fabric of civilization. Itself was a cerebrum which, whatever the specialization of its cells, must act as a whole. Every unitary member must be at least able to appreciate the rhythm of the whole. In fact, human society must be human society, must be a genuine community. Just as in the body the cells must not be so different that they could not hold together in organic relation, so in a human community the members must not be so different that they could not hold together in the distinctively human relation of true community. Or rather, it did not matter how great the differences. The greater they were the better for mutual enrichment, so long as it remained possible for every member to recognize the humanity of every other whom he might encounter, to speak to him as man to man, to feel fundamentally at one with him, to welcome his differences for the sake of his essential kinship, nay to value them for their enriching power.

Some of the Aristocrats were inclined to agree with all this; but they held that in the time of transition from semi-humanity to full humanity the race must inevitably consist of an élite and a commonalty, and that the élite must be segregated and given special privileges and responsibilities. True, replied the Democrats. The élite clan must carry forward the advance of humanity, must do all the creative work. Their capacity to do this is in fact their supreme privilege. They need no other, save the special environment and instruments needed for their special occupations. But if they come to demand as of right that inferior types should exist beneath them to do the baser work of society, they are being false to their own humanity. Sub-normal individuals, of course, there will inevitably be in any society, and they must be cared for and if possible helped to serve in some humble capacity; but no society can be healthy, can be really human, if it requires that some of its members should fall short of that level of mentality needed for intelligent partnership in the common enterprise.

The Aristocrats argued that the urgent task was to improve the calibre of the creative intelligence which led the human advance, gradually specializing all the castes for their peculiar functions, the clerks for clerking, the manuals for hand-labour, and so on. The Democrats demanded that the main effort should be to raise the general level and blot out the incipient caste systems.

This great dispute was carried on for centuries, and became increasingly violent as its solution became more urgent. Successive world-governments adopted conflicting policies. Some peoples inclined more to one view, some to the other. The upshot of this confused and ineffective policy was that the caste structure gradually developed automatically. It became possible to tell a man’s caste even by the appearance of his naked body. The heavy-limbed labourer, the brisk and bird-like clerk, the strong-armed, weak-legged mechanic, could be singled out in the swimming bath. Already there was a movement to provide special accommodation for each caste and to forbid intercourse.

Little by little, however, it became clear even to members of the Aristocratic Party that the world was once more falling sick, and that the source of trouble was the caste system. Sharp conflicts arose between the castes, and particularly between the more privileged and the less privileged. Official secretiveness and official meddlesomeness began to return. Fundamental human liberties were imperceptibly but ceaselessly curtailed, save for the élite. The sacred scriptures of the race began to echo reproachfully in men’s ears. In spite of the improved intelligence and goodwill of the race, the bulk of the privileged class found reason for clinging to their privileges. It seemed that the world must sooner or later be torn once more by a bitter class conflict and a civil war. But once more the improvement in mentality, slight though it was, made the difference between disaster and precarious triumph. Many even of the supporters of the incipient caste system could not shut their eyes to the fact that their party was drawn almost entirely from the élite alone, that the rest of the race was violently opposed to their policy, and that oppression, though tempered with decency, was once more appearing.

As so often before, a crisis was brought about by a change in the method of production. Through a long series of new discoveries and inventions a new and incomparably mightier source of mechanical power was at last brought into action. This source was sub-atomic; but whether it lay in the disintegration of atoms or in the actual conversion of the ultimate material particles into free energy, or some more obscure activity, I could never clearly understand. Its impact on society, anyhow, was obvious. Both tidal electricity and volcanic power were quickly superseded. Power could now be generated anywhere on the earth’s surface, and to a limitless extent. The generators, however, though small were extremely complex and delicate. They were dangerous too, for mishandling might easily lead to the devastation of a whole province. Only a highly trained physicist of superior intelligence could control them. The adoption of the new process throughout the world was restricted by the lack of a supply of practical intelligence of sufficiently high grade; and also by the fact that the huge class of workers connected with the old sources of power were too specialized to be turned over to any other skilled work. Owing to the caste tendency they had become ‘bound intelligences’ of an exaggerated type, apt for the routine problems of their profession, but utterly incapable of versatility.

Thus the work of adapting the structure of society to the new means of production was very difficult. Physicists had to be trained in huge numbers; the old engineering profession had somehow to be transformed. But how? Some advocated pensioning off the whole population of them for life. Some few did not scruple to suggest the lethal chamber.

This state of affairs brought the caste problem to a head. Discussion was world-wide and heated. The radio sets of all the peoples resounded with earnest speeches from those who advocated the abolition of caste and a rapid change over, and on the other hand from those who urged a slow transformation both of the caste system and of the productive method. There were some who would have sacrificed sub-atomic power altogether in order to preserve the caste principle. But to common sense it had long ago become obvious that the caste principle was harmful anyhow. Many even of the Aristocrats were by now convinced at heart. In an earlier age this would not have prevented them from fighting to the death for their privileges, but the temper of men had indeed improved. By an overwhelming majority the Parliament of the World accepted the principle that henceforth everything possible should be done to raise the general level of intellectual and moral calibre rather than to produce a caste of cultural and social leaders supported by specialized castes of various types of bound intelligence. It was recognized that special aptitudes would always be needed and must be developed to the full, so far as they did not interfere with the fundamental human identity of all members of the species.

Certain principles of policy were laid down for the guidance of the World Government. The transition to sub-atomic power must be tempered to the needs of the old engineering caste. These unfortunate servants of the human species must be given the choice of either accepting a pension, or learning some new work, or continuing their present occupation in normal circumstances, even if this involved slowing down the rate of transition to sub-atomic power. Intermarriage between castes must be encouraged. Social segregation of castes must be prevented. Individuals with extreme specialized characters must be forbidden to marry individuals of the same type. And so on.

The dissolution of the incipient caste system formed the end of an epoch. Hitherto the great conflicts which occurred in the human race had been in the main uncontrolled and gravely damaging. In tribal warfare, national warfare, and class struggles the organs of humanity tore at one another in blind fury, so that their common life was at all times crippled and abject, and every human being was to some extent warped. Not only were the types of cell within the great organism but feebly united but often by nature they were lethal to one another. Each was to the other an army of disease cells. Even during that long first phase of the career of the species some conflicts had of course been successfully integrated into the life of the whole, or at least into the life of a whole nation or class. But henceforth, conflicts were far better subordinated to the needs of the whole human race. They ceased to be desperate internecine life-and-death struggles, and became merely internal strains, needed to preserve the taut balance of the common life, like the tension between the antagonist muscles of a limb.

Two conditions, it seemed to me, assured this new sanity of the race. The first was a social order in which every individual who was not gravely sub-normal could count on a life of self-expression and co- operation. The second was the widespread, heartfelt, and not merely verbal acceptance of the fundamental religious aim of social life, namely the development of man’s capacity for personality in service of the spirit.

9. NEW WORLD

i. A WORLD OF VILLAGES
ii. VILLAGE CULTURE
iii. THE FORWARDS

i. A WORLD OF VILLAGES

THE AGE THAT now dawned was one of almost explosive progress, explosive, yet controlled. Unlike the industrial revolution which is familiar to readers of this book, it was not dependent on licentious economic individualism. Its energy was derived, of course, very largely from the self-assertive itch of able individuals, but the means of satisfying this craving were now in the main centrally planned and socially useful.

Superficially at least I was able to grasp the material achievement of the race in this period, but its cultural life henceforth increasingly escaped me, outranging my comprehension.

Nevertheless it seems worth while to describe the main features of the new order, not only because it was characteristic of the human race for a very long time but also because of its novelty and its significance for our own age. At the outset the innate calibre of the average human being was not appreciably higher than our own. Men were on the whole no more intelligent, and had no more capacity for generosity than we have; but, owing to the world-wide victory of the will for the light and the founding of a new tradition of moral integrity and a more wholesome economy, average individuals behaved far better. They lived normally far nearer the upper limit of their capacity. Instead of being constantly degraded by their environment, they were constantly braced and humanized. The rulers of the new world were not content with this. The whole social organization was dominated by the aim of continuously raising the average human capacity far beyond its present level.

The social order of the new world was very different from any earlier form. It might be described as at once ‘super-modern’ and yet in a way medieval. At bottom it depended on the special characters of the new source of mechanical power. Two contrary but harmonized tendencies were at work. On the one hand mechanization was being steadily pushed forward; on the other there was a surprising recovery of manual skill and versatility in the life of the ordinary human being. On the one hand came the fulfilment of social unity and harmony, on the other the development of the individual’s self-sufficiency and all-roundness.

This balanced economy was greatly assisted by the fact that power came to be accessible almost anywhere and was derived from quite ordinary materials. In our own age, no doubt, such an order would be far more difficult to establish, since in our stage of industrial evolution, power and manufacture both demand far-reaching organization, and the reducing of individuals to specialized cogs in the great machine. But even we, had we clear sight and the will for change, could at least set our faces in this direction.

Though at first the generators had been exceedingly cumbersome and delicate, the method was later transformed by a series of brilliant inventions, resulting from world-wide co-operative research. The standard generator, which supported the new civilization as combustion engines of all sorts support our own, was a subtle little machine which could be housed in a small barn. All the skill of the most expert physicists was needed for the making of this instrument; but the finished article, if hot fool-proof, was reliable, potent, and versatile. It could be used not only for the production of power but also for the transmutation of the elements, and the synthesizing of a vast range of materials for use. As a power-unit it demanded little more skill than we use in motoring; but as an instrument for the varied synthesizing of materials it could employ every range of ability. Some elements and compounds could be produced easily by any competent person, some demanded rather special aptitude and training, some could be attempted only by the most brilliant masters, and some had to be undertaken in the great electro-chemical factories.

Little by little every village came to have its own power plant. Even isolated houses generated their own power and could produce the simpler materials. In the main, however, the village was the unit of the new social system. Its strength was due to the scope and limitations of the standard generator, which employed directly and indirectly in village industry and agriculture between fifty and five hundred persons. The population of the average village consisted of the electro-magnetic engineers who saw to the generating of power, a number of craftsmen specialized in the production of the different kinds of material needed by the village, and another set of craftsmen who worked up the materials into articles of use. The former class of craftsmen, who were called ‘atomic weavers’, used as their raw material ingredients in the local earth. These they bombarded with sub-atomic particles, fired out by their mighty power plant, and thus they produced a great range of elements and compounds. The process demanded the same kind of skill as that of the old-time hand-spinners and weavers, the craftsmen vying with each other to produce the subtlest and most serviceable compounds and mixtures free from all impurities. These products were then worked up by craftsmen of the other class into crockery, furniture, cutting tools, building materials, clothing, and so on. The village textile workers clothed their fellow villagers in a great variety of simple but pleasing fabrics. Even isolated households, with their smaller plant, could provide themselves with many of the simpler materials. On the other hand some villages excelled so much in a particular line of craftsmanship that their products were in demand throughout the countryside. Only the most difficult materials and articles had to be brought to the village from the local factory, itself but a large and highly specialized village or cluster of villages around a great power house and synthesis station.

The food of the village was not produced by the synthesis of organic compounds under sub-atomic power. Agriculture was still practised. But the old kind of agriculture was rapidly giving way to direct photo- synthesis of the essential food factors under sunlight. The village was surrounded by its private gardens and communal fields. The earth was impregnated with appropriate chemicals and sprinkled with the spore of an artificial ‘organic molecule’, which absorbed light and propagated itself till it covered the field with a green exfoliation. It was then gathered by a tractor armed with a sort of vacuum cleaner, washed, and worked up with other materials (similarly produced) into a great variety of food-stuffs. Throughout the summer the fields were harvested at intervals of about a week. The advantage of this system over the old-fashioned agriculture was that the land produced nearly ten times its former yield in food value.

Certain luxury foods, and every villager demanded his share of luxury, had to be procured from the local or national factory, and some specially choice articles from foreign lands. But any village with any pretension to taste and local pride could produce characteristic local variants of the essential synthetic ‘meats’, ‘breads’, ‘cheeses’, ‘fruits’, and drinks. Many an isolated homestead, if its food-making was managed with intelligence and artistry, could produce a simple but elegant meal to delight the most fastidious traveller.

Little by little the new processes transformed the whole economy of the world. A miniature aeroplane, driven by sub-atomic power derived from one of the rarer elements in the air, made it possible for everyone to travel anywhere at a speed which we should regard as more than adequate. For very long fast journeys people had to resort to air-liners and stratosphere-liners; but enterprising young men, and young women also, often went to the farthest countries in their own miniature planes. These little vehicles, commonly called ‘flies’, were rather smaller than our smallest gliders. The flyer lay full length on his stomach in the coffin-like fuselage, which was padded to form a sort of bed.

Towns such as we know were disappearing. It was no longer necessary for people to live in great warrens, and I there was a general demand for spaciousness. Owing to the invaluable fly, this was no longer incompatible with constant social intercourse. Many of the old towns were being demolished or thinned out so as to display to better advantage their few but valued architectural treasures. Slums had long since been turned into parks or agricultural land, with here and there a village. Of the old towns, the great ports alone fulfilled their old function, but these too were transformed. Save where ground space was restricted, as in New York, the congested area gave place to a host of villages separated by parks, market gardens, orchards, and fields. The great increase of local self-sufficiency might have been expected to kill sea-borne trade, but though at first the ports declined, a new tendency soon appeared. Sub-atomic power had released so great a fund of human energy and skill that many of the peoples began to specialize once more, not indeed in the production of basic necessities, but in luxury foodstuffs, luxury handicrafts, superfine machines and tools. A new and fierce competition arose between peoples that vied with each other to produce the very best articles of some particular type, such as optical instruments, textiles, furniture, and so on. This competition was not of the capitalist sort. Its motive was sheer pride of workmanship and enlightened patriotism. In consequence of all this I new industrial specialization, sea-borne and air-borne trade, and the transport of goods along the great arterial roads of the continents, were still important social services. Every village in this new and prosperous world demanded that, in addition to its self- sufficiency in essentials and its pride in local craftsmanship, it should have a share in the choicest products of the excess energy of all peoples.

The average individual in the new order, in whatever land he lived, was either a village craftsman in one of the specialized sub-atomic skills or a sort of glorified subsistence farmer. On his personal acre or in the communal village fields he produced enough food for his family or co-operated in the communal production of the village. Enough was left over for taxes, bartering, trade with foreign lands, and lavish hospitality. As he would not be fully occupied by the new agriculture, unless he specialized in some difficult luxury product, he might also be enough of a craftsman with the sub-atomic machinery to make many of his household goods. His wife, possibly aided by the daughters, would prepare the food and keep the house in order. With the new power and the new labour-saving devices this would occupy no more than a couple of hours a day. The women would therefore lend a hand on the farm and probably spend a good deal of time on the production of clothes for the household. The children also would help on the farm, chiefly for their education. They would learn crafts for future use. The difference between the village agriculturalists and the village craftsmen was only one of emphasis. Both classes practised both activities, but while the agriculturalists supplemented their main occupation with simple crafts, the craftsmen were tillers and gardeners in their spare time.

As in the period that we call the Middle Ages, the great majority of men were agriculturalists to some extent; though minorities specialized completely, working in the factories, laboratories, and so on. In some districts specialism was more common than elsewhere. The different countries retained much of their characteristic pattern of life, but native customs were transmuted to accord with the general pattern and spirit of the new world. In some lands the ordinary village included, along with the houses of the village craftsmen, those of the local agriculturalists, who went to the communal or private fields each day by fly. Elsewhere the villages were populated mainly by craftsmen. The agriculturalists lived in scattered farm- houses throughout the countryside. In some countries there were few specialists, in others many. In some, agriculture was mainly individualistic, though subject to strict control by the state or the village; in others it was carried on by communal village enterprise. In some, where population was sparse, the grown sons would set up new farms in the untamed land. In others, densely populated, the sons might either decide among themselves who was to take over the paternal farm, or all might stay on in the old home with their wives and families, supplementing its produce by trade in handicrafts. Sometimes the individual homestead expanded into a clan village. Sometimes a dwelling-house would be little more than a dormitory, all social activity being centred upon the village. Sometimes the villages them- selves tended to be mentally dominated by some neighbouring town or metropolis. But even the greatest cities of the’ world were now organic clusters of villages, each making its own special contribution to the city’s life.

ii. VILLAGE CULTURE

ONE REMARKABLE INSTITUTION was almost universal, namely the village ‘meeting’, a gathering of all the villagers for the planning of their communal life. The ‘meeting’ took a great variety of forms in different lands; but nearly always it centred on a building which combined many of the characters of a village hall, a church, and a public house. By some freak of the evolution of language it was known in all countries as the ‘poob’. In it the village met every evening to yarn, play games, sing, drink their synthetic elixirs, smoke their synthetic tobaccos. It was also the communal eating-house where friends could meet over a meal, where many of the more sociable villagers fed every day, where the guests of the village were entertained, where village banquets were held. In it also the villagers met for concerts and lectures. In it at regular intervals they held their formal ‘meetings’ to discuss communal business and settle disputes. There they also held their sacred ceremonies, such as marriages, funerals, initiations into citizenship, commemorations of great events, local, national, or cosmopolitan.

The poob housed the village sports trophies, historical relics, and art treasures. It contained also, normally behind curtains, but displayed on great occasions, the village ‘ark’. This was at once a safe where valuable documents were preserved, a mascot, a sacred symbol, and a shrine. The ark was a great carved chest, often surmounted by a symbolic statue or picture. Sometimes it was the work of local craftsmen, sometimes it was a much treasured import from the near-by city or some foreign land. These objects varied greatly in aesthetic value and in symbolic power. A few were visited by pilgrims from every part of the planet. Others, though dear and sacred to the hearts of their own villagers, drew no attention from elsewhere. These symbols sometimes represented in a stylized manner incidents of special significance in the life of the village or the nation or mankind. Sometimes they symbolized love or reason or family, or the unity of the human race, or man’s relation to the cosmos. On any solemn occasion, such as a marriage or one of the regular ‘days of contemplation’, the ark would be unveiled, and the assembled villagers would sit in silence for a few minutes before it. Music would follow, choral or instrumental, and then the brief and simple ceremony would be performed by the village headman or some specially deputed villager or stranger, either with some well-established form of words or impromptu, or perhaps with silent gesture. When the ceremony was over the ark would be once more veiled, and the villagers would drink or feed together.

Often the poob was simply the ancient village church or temple. In cities it might be the cathedral or the city hall or some other historic building. Meetings of essentially the same type as the village meetings, but more ritualistic, took place in all the cities and ill each national metropolis. Specially important meetings occurred in the four great cultural world-centres, Peking, Benares, Moscow, and San Francisco. But most exalted of all were the annual commemorations in sacred Lhasa.

Now that the economic problem had been solved, public attention was more and more directed to the cultural life of the race. Education was no longer dominated by the need to equip the young for the individualistic economic ‘battle of life’, nor yet by the demand for efficient and docile robots. Vocational training was still an important element in education, but it no longer devoured the whole time and attention of the young people. All children were brought up mainly in their native village. There were no boarding schools, great swarms of young things living in monastic isolation from the life of the world. Normally every child lived at home, and grew up in the normal environment of farm life, acquiring the various skills which were demanded by the varied life of adults. The village schools, though some were severely criticized for inefficiency or laxity, were in the main inspired by the new tradition of the race. In every country the teachers were jealously selected, and carefully trained in the great residential universities. In some countries a group of a score or a hundred neighbouring villages might combine to set up a common school for the brighter children of the whole district. Elsewhere this principle was rejected as tending to create a class division between the bright and the dull. Instead, both types were kept in the village school, but those who showed superior capacity were allowed to absent themselves from classes so long as they kept pace with the class work. The time thus gained they spent on developing their special powers or interests. A searching system of vocational selection skimmed off from the village schools those children of leaving age who had superior aptitude for particular occupations, and those who, through high general intelligence were fitted to become teachers or research workers in some branch of science or in technical philosophy, and also those whose special talents for organizing and social intercourse were needed for industrial management, large-scale economic planning, and political leadership.

Potential artists were also selected. These might either go into residence at one of the great art schools or universities; or else, living on the maintenance grant, they could allow their genius to pursue its own course, eking out their meagre grant by selling their works. Of set purpose, and not through mere niggardliness, the state allowed the young man or woman who chose to avoid all state-organized professions only a bare minimum of help, whether his field of adventure was art or science or philosophy. Thus it was hoped to weed out those who had not actually ‘got it in them’ to produce creative work. On the other hand, no matter how preposterous or shocking to the public his products might be, the adventurer was at least assured of his minimum grant. And if it had any real merit (unperceived by the majority), and indeed often if it had no real merit at all, he might well succeed in selling. For, unless his work was both technically feeble and quite extravagantly idiosyncratic, it was very likely to find some sort of market in the new culturally conscious world. For in this new world-society pictures, statues, music, and writing were in demand, in some cases by the national, in others by the world-wide public, and in yet others by one or other of the special publics, each interested in some particular sphere or genre of art. It. was not uncommon for a neglected young painter to leap from penury to affluence and fame on the sale of a single work. Many artists, however, had no such luck, and were forced to live on the maintenance grant alone throughout their lives. Some of these, ahead of their time, became world-famous after death, but the great majority were merely untalented enthusiasts. No one dreamed of grudging them their futile but harmless careers, since the community could well afford to maintain them. Indeed, since most farms kept open house for any stray travellers, and all villages provided meals and beds for a constant flow of visitors, these artistic failures could eat and sleep their way over the face of the earth and use their maintenance grant wholly for clothing and extra comforts.

iii. THE FORWARDS

ONE CLASS OF persons in the new world-order it is very difficult to describe. They cannot be fitted into any of our categories. Moreover their function gradually changed and increased in importance. In the earlier period of the continually developing world-Utopia they were merely tramps with a bent for self-observation, observation of their fellow men and speculation about the universe. Later, they became a recognize and increasingly respected profession. They were called by an Indian name which was translated into the English of that period as ‘the forwards’. In some respects they were the equivalent of the ancient ‘Servants of the Light’ who had played so great a part in the overthrow of the Tyranny, but their function was not to overthrow a social order and found another. In some ways they were a religious body, but they had no common creed save their common loyalty to the spirit. Like the medieval friars they were under a vow of poverty. A forward’s belongings were never to be more than such as could be carried easily in a moderate-sized rucksack. They spent much of their time wandering from village to village and from continent to continent, much also in retreat in the austere and beautiful hostels which they themselves had built with their own hands. There they occupied themselves with communal farming and craftsmanship, and also with meditation and discussion. They practised ‘psychic exercise’, a form of self-discipline leading to super-normal clarity and depth of experience and to profound personal integration. On their travels they often helped in harvesting or other emergency work, and they took part in the social and religious life of the villages where they stayed, absorbing the atmosphere of the local poob and in return giving whatever was communicable in their own life of contemplation and discipline. They were under no vow of chastity, but marriage and domesticity were rare among them. A few married couples lived in the hostels or wandered together, gipsy-like, with their children. The celibate sometimes permitted themselves sexual love, either with colleagues of the opposite sex or with persons outside the order. Women who bore children from these unions were not disgraced but honoured. The extramarital sexual relationships of the forwards were mostly passionate and brief. Long before their fire was quenched the consecrated partner would hear the call to pass on. Then in grief but without rancour, and in thankfulness for the past, the lovers would part.

It was the aim of every member of the order to participate so far as possible in all the great emotional experiences of the awakened human life, while at the same time remaining in his innermost self detached from all save fundamental loyalty to the spirit. Thus sexual love, and even marriage and the responsibilities of parenthood, must be broken off at the first sign of enthralment, and on the other hand before the deep and pure current of emotion was contaminated by disillusionment. Every partner who entered into relation with one of the forwards knew well that this was the stern condition of the union. But the agony of these separations could be a fruitful agony for both members. It was the claim of many of the forwards themselves that in the desolate recovery from these partings they sometimes rose to their states of clearest vision. On the other hand those few who lived in permanent marriage were apt to pity rather than admire the majority, saying, ‘Well, for each there is an appropriate way; but for us the undying, the life-giving union.’

In addition to the duty of detachment from ordinary human experiences, the forwards laid upon themselves a complementary obligation. They must in a manner preserve detachment even from their supreme consecrated task of spiritual adventure. This too, if it should become enthralling to the hungry individual spirit, or lead to any slightest withdrawal of active sympathy from the life of the world, or again if it should be poisoned by any faint breath of self-pride, must be at once abandoned. The penitent would then impose on himself some weeks or months or even years of mundane life, as a farm worker or craftsman, a factory-hand, organizer, or teacher.

The twofold aim of the forwards was to explore the highest capacities of the human spirit and to impart their findings to the world. They were very widely respected, but not universally. There were some intellectuals of sceptical temper and also some hard-headed men of affairs who regarded the whole enterprise of the forwards as futile. These critics pointed out that in the perfecting of society and the raising of average intelligence and the endless developing of intellectual culture the race would be able to occupy itself fully for centuries to come, and probably for ever. There was no need, they said, to peer into the black fog of mystery.

For hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years I seemed to watch the successful carrying out of this policy, the patient perfecting of the social organization, the amplification of human life, the slow but universal rise of intelligence, the proliferation of culture in a thousand novel directions. Throughout this long period the forwards played an unostentatious but valuable part. Their spiritual researches led to no striking discovery, but they formed mankind’s permanent outposts towards the super-human; and their influence in keeping the daily lives of ordinary men and women sweet, and in preventing the temper of the race from becoming merely mundane, was probably very great. Of course there were fluctuations in their integrity and in their usefulness, phases of corruption and regeneration, of stagnation and of significant change; periods too when their presence was barely tolerated or even actively resented, and others when their influence was very great. But on the whole throughout this age their part was never central and dominant, as it was later to become.

10. REMOTE HORIZONS

i. PEACEFUL GROWTH
ii. BEHIND THE VEIL
iii. A PHASE OF CONFUSION
iv. PREPARATION FOR A GREAT TASK
v. DESPAIR AND NEW HOPE
vi. MAN PASSES ON

i. PEACEFUL GROWTH

I HAVE TOLD how, after the victory of the will for the light, there followed a period of explosive progress which gradually gave place to a much longer phase of Utopian stability. This phase, in which material civilization changed only in minor ways, must have lasted for many centuries. In the cultural life of the race also, though minor experiments and advances were constantly being made, no revolutionary changes occurred. The best minds of the race were busy exploring the new vistas which had been opened up for intellect and feeling by the founding of the new order. Of these cultural achievements naturally I can say no more than that achievement did occur. In the earlier part of this phase the new cultural ventures were not, I think, beyond the range of our contemporary human intelligence, but we have not the necessary background of experience to comprehend them. As well might a resuscitated ancient Egyptian understand modern science. Suffice it that throughout this period the growing point of culture kept shifting from one field to another. At one time it lay in pure science, at another in the application of science to industry or eugenics, at another in one or other of the arts, or in philosophy, or in the minutiae of concrete personal relations, or in religious feeling. Cultural leadership would pass now to one people or one social class, now to another.

As the centuries passed, the various new vistas became more and more fully explored and exploited. The golden age gave place to a silver age devoted to minute intensive cultivation of the heavily cropped ground of human experience. Only the steady though slow rise in average and superior intelligence prevented stagnation by making it possible to dig more thoroughly into the familiar soil.

Occasionally some outstanding mind in peculiarly stimulating circumstances would cause a minor revolution in some branch of culture, the consequences of which might afford to less original workers decades of minuter exploration. But in the main, since social circumstances remained stable, culture became more and more traditional.

Throughout this period the main purport of cultural development was grasped by every member of the race. And though all kinds of strains and conflicts occurred between peoples, between classes, vocations, political parties, these conflicts were subordinated to the universal acceptance of world-community. Wars and revolutions were never contemplated. Similarly in the sphere of personal contacts, though rivalries and conflicts were no less common than with us, they were seldom permitted to interfere seriously with co-operation in the public cause. Vindictive persecution was almost unknown.

It is difficult for us, who live in an exceptionally tumultuous age, to conceive of the bland happiness and leisurely progress of this future world. All men were assured of personal expression, and all were blessed with a sense of responsibility within the great common enterprise, the development of the capacity of man, the perfecting of the human race to become an ever finer vessel of the spirit.

ii. BEHIND THE VEIL

BUT THIS AGE of peaceful development and confidence was not to last for ever. The first symptom was a crisis among the forwards. This crisis was at first kept secret, but in time it became clear that something grave was afoot. The forwards were evidently deeply disturbed. Those that were in the hostels and houses of contemplation came pouring out into the world. They travelled and took up work, but they lived in a state of anxious abstraction. There were endless private discussions during casual encounters, and many prearranged conferences, the subject of which was never disclosed. At last a world conference was arranged at Lhasa. For many months hosts of forwards from every city crowded the sacred city, and camped in the surrounding country. Several months were spent by the assembled forwards in discussing their secret problem and performing severe spiritual exercises in order to fit themselves for right judgment. During this period the rest of the world showed little curiosity. Life was far too full of more interesting matters. When at last the conference had ended and the forwards had returned to their home countries, a manifesto was issued to the peoples of the world. Its content was greeted by ordinary world-citizens with astonishment, varying from dismay among the friends of the forwards to hilarious incredulity among the sceptics.

It was not possible to me, a creature of an earlier age and a less developed culture, to understand save in the most superficial way the immense expansion of experience which the forwards had achieved, and the terrible choice which was now to be forced upon the human race. But the effect on the life of the race was far-reaching. Although the statement of the forwards was at first treated as merely remote sensationalism, their presence in every village, bearing witness to its truth and constantly directing men’s attention to its dreadful significance for the human race, gradually turned incredulity into heavy-hearted acceptance.

The new discovery, if such it was, carried human consciousness beyond the familiar physical actuality, and opened up in one stride a sphere of existence which was of an entirely different order.

Man’s knowledge both of the physical cosmos and of mentality within the physical cosmos had for long been very far-reaching. It was known, for instance, that there were other intelligent races on planets belonging to other solar systems. Already the scientists of the earth had turned their attention to exploring our own sun’s other planets, believing that in the exploitation of these globes lay the next great field of human enterprise. Some day, they said, it would be possible even to attempt the immense journey to the sun’s nearest stellar neighbour, which was now known to have attendant planets. Indeed there was already a dispute between the romantic enthusiasts for ‘human advancement’ in the form of extraterrestrial ventures and the ‘classicists’ who insisted that any such enterprise would distract man from his proper task, since here on earth there was far more than enough to occupy the race. The endless refinement of sensibility and intelligence, they affirmed, offered a task far more worthy of the human spirit than the schoolboy’s excitement of interplanetary travel, and the unnecessary attempt to tap the resources of remote worlds. By all means let telepathic communication be improved, if possible, so that man could communicate easily and profitably with remote intelligences, but the childish dream of interstellar travel must be abandoned.

Another great dispute was also coming to the fore, namely between the classical humanists and the eugenists, who urged that the time had come for man to ‘take charge of his own evolution’ and create a new and more highly developed human type. They believed that by genetic control the range of intelligence and sensibility could be immensely increased. To this the classicists replied that any such rash adventure might undermine the constitution of the race and bring chaos into the well-tried order of the world. By all means let minor eugenical researches be carried out for increased health, longevity, and the prolongation of mental maturity, but the hope of transforming human nature into something superhuman must not be entertained.

At the time when these two great disputes were ceasing to be merely academic, and were actually appearing over the horizon of practical politics, the forwards stumbled upon the discovery, or seeming discovery, which, if true, must force the abandonment, not only of interstellar adventure and of eugenical improvement, but also of classical humanism itself. The announcement which they made, so far as I could comprehend it, was to this effect.

They had discovered, they said, that the universe of familiar space and time, though no mere illusion or dream, was but the surface of a deeper reality. The familiar natural laws, both physical and psychological, were not fundamental laws at all, but superficial descriptions of the ‘local’ incidence of deeper and hitherto unguessed laws. Plato’s parable of the shadow figures cast by unseen persons and an unseen source of light was to this extent profoundly true. The whole universe of stars, of galaxies, though fully actual and no mere figment of man’s mind, was but spindrift caught up by occult winds and driven along the surface of an occult ocean of existence. The laws of this spindrift universe, which science had so thoroughly explored, were up to a point coherent; but certain things could never be adequately described in terms of these laws alone, for instance mind, and good and evil. It was in the hope of gaining insight into these matters, but above all in order to have access to the occult reality, that the forwards had been working during the preceding centuries.

At last, they said, they had momentarily penetrated to the deeper truth. They had for the first time come face to face with the vaster real.

But the experience, far from being beatific, had been terrible. They had recoiled in horror from the unspeakable facts. Servants of the light, children of the light, they had discovered that the light itself in their own eyes was but a subjective figment, like the retinal lights that a man sees in the dark, or when his eyes are closed. For a moment they had succeeded in opening their eyes, but only to discover a deeper and more formidable darkness. Or was it something worse than darkness?

They had pressed forward thus far without any doubt that their venture would lead to a fortifying of the struggling human spirit by intercourse with a vaster but essentially kindred spiritual reality. Over a period of many generations many great saints and thousands of devoted followers, spurred by this hope, had passed through the testing fires of discipline, had ventured into strange and icy spheres of spiritual experience, had gathered signs and intimations of a glory still to be revealed, had borne witness to their fellow men. And now at last the heirs to all this great treasure and greater promise, having gathered all their strength for the final assault on the locked door of mystery, had prized it open only to glimpse an incomprehensible horror, and to fall back in dismay.

During the long conference in Lhasa the whole population of forwards, assembled under their spiritual leaders, dared once more to face the terrible truth, lest there should have been some mistake. But once more they encountered the seemingly ultimate horror. After long contemplation and discussion they came to a decision, and then dispersed to tell the little human race the truth, and to suggest a course of action.

Their discovery, they insisted, transcended the Powers of human language. It was ineffable. It could be described only in metaphor. They had been seeking, they said, evidence that man’s struggle for the light was in harmony with the essential spirit of the universe They had found instead a vast and obscure confusion of powers, careless not only of man’s fate but of all that he had so painfully learned to hold sacred. To communicate their discovery they conceived a myth which, though fantastic and petty, did, they affirmed, convey the essence of the strange and desolate truth. This universe, they said, of galaxies and atoms, of loves and hates and strifes, is no more than a melting snowflake which at any moment may be trampled into the slush by indifferent and brawling titans. Not otherwise than in this far- fetched image, they said, could they express the truth that they had seen. It was an inadequate image; for these snowflakes, descending from the formless and impenetrable blackness of the night sky, were indeed not frozen but warm with the potentiality of life and of spirit, and their thawing was in truth a dying, a dissipation of their vital energy. Myriad upon myriad of these snowflakes, each one a great physical cosmos, faltered downwards and rested on the field of snow. The footmarks of the ‘titans’, the forwards affirmed, developing the strange myth, were areas where thousands of these universes had been crushed together into a muddy chaos. Every moment, as the meaningless brawl continued, new devastations were inflicted. The snowfield of. universes was more and more closely trampled, like a city more and more bombed, month by month. At any moment the fundamental physical structure and substance of our own many-galaxied cosmos might be reduced to chaos, so that in a flash all its frail intelligent worlds would vanish. At any moment, they insisted, this might happen. Indeed, that it had not already happened, seemed to be a miracle.

The forwards affirmed that they had peered and peered upwards (so to speak) between the rioting titanic limbs in search of the celestial light; but the only luminosity was on the ground. It was all though the flakes themselves, congested into a thawing snowfield, created in their constant dying a dim phosphorescence. Pursuing this strange metaphor, which (they reiterated) was almost wholly inadequate to the unspeakable facts, they declared that the faint, diffused glow emitted by each separate snowflake universe, resolved itself in closer, microscopic inspection, into a myriad instantaneous scintillations, each one a short-lived world’s bright climax of spiritual lucidity. Overhead there was nothing but the blinding darkness, whence ‘the flakes vacillated groundwards.

Such was the bleak image by which the forwards tried to express their new and dreadful vision. They also discussed the implications of the repugnant truth, and the policy which the human race should adopt towards it. One and all, they affirmed their continued loyalty to the spirit. ‘Every man,’ they said, ‘knows in his own experience that the life of love and of intelligence is good absolutely, is the only satisfying life for awakened beings. No devastating discovery about the nature of the ultimate reality can shake that immediate perception. Therefore, whatever the prospect, the human race will continue the struggle for love and intelligence here on earth. But it would be foolish to pretend that our metaphysical discovery makes no difference. Formerly it seemed that man would soon make contact with the life-giving and enheartcning source of all spirit. We have found only desolation.’

But the forwards did not leave matters thus. They suggested also a hope and a policy. The hope lay in the fact that, after all, the snowstorm of physical and potentially spiritual universes must come from somewhere. The ‘titans’ were not the whole ultimate reality. And so it might after all be that further discipline and contemplation might enable man to penetrate the utter blackness of the sky and come at last face to face with the true light.

Hope, they said, might even permit itself a higher though a precarious flight. For some of the most adept forwards had claimed that in their most lucid moments they had seen something more. They had seen that in spite of the precarious existence of the snowflake universes and of the conscious beings within them, these beings themselves, when they attained mature spiritual stature, acquired very formidable powers. The pioneering forwards claimed that, in terms of the inadequate image, they had sometimes seen a brief but dazzling effulgence blaze up within some snowflake, like the brilliance of a new star. So brilliant might this conflagration be that it illuminated the whole wide snowfield. When this happened, the ‘titans’, seemingly terrified by the sudden light, fled in all directions, away from its source. Some of them were even annihilated by the radiance, like the shades of night at sunrise. Clearly, then, the right course for every intelligent world was to strive for that brilliance of the spirit. Clearly this alone could overcome the ‘titans’. Clearly what was most lovely and precious, though commonly so frail, was also, in the fullness of its growth, the mightiest power of all. But this power, intensified to such a pitch that it could destroy the ‘titans’, was not the power of a few individuals exploring in isolation; it was the power of a whole race, of a whole conscious world, perhaps of a whole cosmos, united in most intimate spiritual communion. And such power was not to be attained without the utmost racial dedication.

Hence arose the challenge which the forwards laid before mankind. It was a call to action. It was a call to all individuals throughout the world to live wholly for the common task, to give up everything but the spirit, to discard not only mundane ends but also the vanity of science and art and intellectual exploration, to detach themselves absolutely even from the gentle bondage of personal love, to refrain from procreation, to drain the whole energy of the race to the last drop for the supreme spiritual task.

Hitherto there had been two possible ventures open to the human race. One was the romantic scientist’s ideal of developing communication between the planetary systems, so as to create a galaxy-wide community of intelligent worlds. The other, which assumed that man’s proper business must always be with man, was the classical aim of the intensive development of man’s present home and culture.

A third and more revolutionary policy was now open. For the inhabitants of a snowflake among brawling ‘titans’, it was the sole reasonable policy. This was the heroic venture of sacrificing everything in the attempt to destroy the ‘titans’ with the lucidity of the human spirit.

iii. A PHASE OF CONFUSION

WHEN THE PEOPLES of the earth first heard all this they were indeed incredulous. But little by little the new knowledge invaded their peace. There was endless discussion between the romantic scientists, the classical humanists, and the forwards. It was not claimed by the forwards that if their advice were not taken the universe would be annihilated certainly and soon. Possibly it would last for thousands of millions of years. Possibly, if the human race were to choose to remain in its present course of social and cultural advancement, it would be able to prosper for a very long age. But at any time it might be annihilated, and the whole cosmos with it. And, anyhow, it would always be haunted by the knowledge that its supreme test had been refused. In such a condition there could be no health.

The decision was postponed. Little by little, under the weight of the new knowledge and the continual indecision and uncertainty about the future, there appeared signs of mental strain. The texture of community throughout the world began to deteriorate. Men became rather less conscientious, rather less considerate. Personal intercourse, formerly so bland and genial, showed symptoms of resentfulness and bitterness. Sadistic crime, formerly unknown in the new world, once more troubled society. A new note of perversion and diabolism appeared in the arts and in public affairs. Clearly the race had fallen into a gravely neurotic condition. Children suffered in a special manner. Their minds were poisoned by a suspicion of the insincerity of their elders. Unless something could be done to stop the rot, this glorious society, the achievements of age-long bitter experience, would be corrupted beyond hope of recovery.

As the plight of the race grew worse, feeling on both sides became more violent. The fundamental accord on which the world-community had for so long been founded began to fail. Matters reached such a pitch that civil war seemed once more possible. The scientific romantics and the classical humanists had settled their differences, but only to combine against the supporters of the forwards and their policy of ascetic dedication. Every village, every family was divided against itself, but in some countries one side was on the whole stronger, in some the other. Preparations were actually made for a war which would have had all the bitterness of the old wars of religion, but would have been waged with more formidable weapons than man had ever used before. For sub-atomic power could be easily directed to mass murder.

In this situation the forwards themselves were divided. One party single-mindedly preached the new policy. The other, dismayed at the prospect of war, realized that a race which could contemplate the use of violence to settle such a dispute could not yet be fit to undertake the destruction of the ‘titans’ by the power of the spirit. They therefore suggested a compromise. Let the life of the world be carried on much as before, but with a slowly increasing emphasis on the spirit and the great task which lay ahead. When the race had outgrown its present adolescent state, it would face that task with singleness of purpose. Perhaps it would be destroyed before maturity was reached. No matter! Some other race in some other cosmos would perhaps accomplish the task.

This policy was in the end accepted by all the peoples of the world, expressing themselves through a special plebiscite.

iv. PREPARATION FOR A GREAT TASK

FROM THIS TIME forward my contact with the human race in the far future became more and more uncertain. It was of course something of a miracle that I had been able to keep in touch even thus far. Without the constant influence of the superhuman beings who were my fellow spectators even this would have been utterly impossible. But now even their presence could not sufficiently aid me. This was due, I think, to the fact that the mentality of human animals was beginning to outreach my mental range in a new manner. I had always been grievously hampered by the fact that I had not the cultural background of these future men, but the actual calibre of their minds had not hitherto been greatly superior to that of my own generation. Now, however, human affairs began to include themes which were wholly meaningless to me. And as events became less intelligible I was less able to maintain contact.

I did, nevertheless, receive certain general impressions of the course of history and of a few outstanding events. After the settlement of the great dispute mankind recovered its fundamental unity of purpose. The villages carried on their busy and varied lives and their worldwide intercourse. The scientists continued their patient explorations and inventions. The classicists pursued the development of human culture into endless exfoliation. The forwards persisted in their spiritual exploration. As the general level of thought and feeling was raised, new spheres of experience were constantly explored. Generation succeeded generation with ever increasing capacity and opportunity. But also each generation came more surely into the knowledge that all this continuous Utopianism was in fact but a preparation for a great ordeal, and that before the race was ready to face that ordeal the very foundations of existence might crumble. The stars might suddenly be swept away like dust. Man’s dear and beautiful home might be shattered, and man himself annihilated.

This knowledge did not seem to weigh heavily on men. Each generation faced it and accommodated themselves to it. But its presence in the background of every mind changed the temper of the race into something very different from that of the age before the forwards had made their strange discovery. Then, the prospect of limitless human advancement had bred a certain complacency; now, the expectation of endless progress was succeeded by the possibility of sudden destruction, and by the frail hope of utterly new horizons. The mental climate of the race therefore changed to an intenser appreciation of its ordinary mundane life, compact of personal joys and sorrows, and at the same time a more constant loyalty to the spirit. No doubt the ordinary man, intent on his private affairs, gave little conscious thought to the prospect of the race, which, he felt, would probably last out his time anyhow. But in his phases of contemplation the sense of fleetingness would enter deeply into his mind, so that at all times the physical features of the planet, the woods, the hills, the sea, affected him with an added poignancy. The customs of daily life, such as dressing and eating, the technique of his work, the little common acts of friendliness, the intonations of familiar voices, all these became more dear because more precarious, because balanced from day to day on the brink of the unknown. At the same time the standard of personal conduct was seemingly raised by the sense that the species as a whole had accepted the challenge to live beyond its normal nature.

I was able to realize that there was a gradual shift, so to speak, of the centre of gravity of culture. Metaphysics was absorbing more and more of human attention. The natural sciences tended to fall into a second place. Spiritual discipline was undertaken by every member of the race. The numbers of the forwards greatly increased, and their influence became more far-reaching.

All this I could realize, though vaguely and externally. What passed my comprehension was the changing detail of social and cultural life. It was natural in the circumstances that living should be greatly simplified. Luxuries were less and less in demand. The arts were shorn of their luxurious detail. On the other hand art of a stripped and purposeful kind played an increasing though an altered part in life. In words, in music, in colour and plastic form, men created a ceaseless flood of symbolic aids to the spirit, mostly in styles which I could not at all appreciate. Surprisingly, also, though living under the threat of annihilation, men were addicted to erecting great and durable temples, upon which they lavished all the skill and care which was ceasing to find an outlet in ordinary life. Sub-atomic technique, by its wealth of new materials, had made possible a far more daring, soaring, and colourful architecture than is known to us. Along with the new materials came new architectural canons, strange to me. The architecture of mundane life was simple and impermanent. The temples alone were built to last; yet they were often demolished to make room for finer structures.

One striking aspect of culture was a vast development of the technique of personal intercourse. Language blossomed into a great forest of terms for all the new subtleties of emotion and intuition, and all the types and shades of personality. The citizen of the new world could by the Use of this rich linguistic symbolism become intimately aware of a stranger’s personality in an hour. There was also a subtle ideography of psychological and spiritual phenomena. By the careful drawing of a number of Chinese-looking symbols an artist who was something between a novelist and an abstract painter could present the essential form of the intercourse of several human beings from birth to death. In comparison with these ideograms verbal language, though so greatly improved, was a cumbersome medium. A single meticulously inscribed page could convey a whole biography. Thus arose a new visual art, which, by means of highly abstract signs charged with the emotional and intellectual experience of the race, obtained the far-reaching effect of great poetry.

This ideographic art I could at least comprehend sufficiently to grasp its general nature, but it must also have symbolized ranges of experience beyond my reach. It played a great part in the decoration of the temples; and certain ideograms, which remained meaningless to me, seemed to have a mystical power over anyone that earnestly contemplated them.

My contact with future mankind became more and more vague and intermittent, until I received but random intimations of a few outstanding and often very strange events. Sometimes, for instance, I seemed to see that great companies of men and women had chosen to destroy themselves because they felt that they could no longer play a useful part. Sometimes the concord of the race was broken by a keen but never a vindictive dispute about some matter which lay beyond my understanding. It would then be found necessary to restore harmony by a world-wide penance.

At last, after how many centuries or millennia I know not, there arose a generation which felt itself fully equipped for the great task. A Sacred Year was appointed for the supreme effort, a quarter of a century ahead. Meanwhile procreation was to cease, and all forward- looking social and economic activity. Enough food must still be produced to keep the ascetic population alive, and the temples must be kept in good order. Apart from this necessary work, the energy of the race must be concentrated wholly on the great task.

It was a strange and austere world in this period. No t babies were anywhere, then no children, then no adolescents; only young men and women and their elders. Population, of course, rapidly declined. Life was wholly dominated by the spiritual enterprise, which inevitably lay beyond my comprehension. It was not uncommon for people to be so abstracted from the physical world that they forgot to feed, and so would have starved to death, had not some neighbour recalled them. Most individuals, however, still carried on a normal life, though in a state of remote detachment.

A date was appointed, towards the end of the twenty-fifth year, after which no more food was to be eaten. Meanwhile feeding was to be progressively reduced throughout the world so as to leave the spirit unhampered by bodily vigour. When the time came for the complete cessation of feeding, all private houses were to be deserted. The population was to gather into the poobs and temples, to fast and contemplate, and create in themselves that extreme spiritual lucidity which, it was now confidently believed, would destroy the ‘titans’ and attain a clearer, brighter, truer view of all existence. Under the stress of this adventure the exhausted race would die. The earth would be given over once more to sub-human nature. Visitors from some other world might some day discover the ruins of the great temples, not suspecting, perhaps, that those who had built them and died in them had conquered the ‘titans’, and had thereby secured the salvation of all beings in all the snowflake universes; the salvation, it was surmised, not of external life for individuals, but of escape from premature racial extinction before the potentiality of the race was fulfilled by the attainment of spiritual maturity and the supreme beatific vision.

v. DESPAIR AND NEW HOPE

SUCH WAS THE great plan, but an unforeseen event frustrated it. About a year before the appointed climax and the complete cessation of eating there appeared among the frail and ageing population a new and strange disease. I was never able to determine whether its source was wholly natural, wholly intrinsic to our physical cosmos, to our snowflake, or whether in some manner beyond my comprehension some obscure powers of darkness had somehow made incursion into our cosmos to stimulate or create this hideous epidemic. Its form and the time of its onset seemed nicely calculated to undermine the impending victory of the light.

The first symptom of the disease was violent vomiting and diarrhoea. So formidable were the spasms that the gullet and rectum might be torn and even forced outwards. Many patients succumbed in this initial phase. Those that recovered were left with terrible glandular disturbances which might result in any or several of a number of frightful symptoms. A very common trouble was galloping senescence, which turned the young man into a maundering and toothless gaffer in a few weeks. But infantilism of body and mind was almost as common. Another effect was an extravagant growth of the skeleton, such that the overstrained flesh and skin would split on every limb, revealing the bare bone. But a softening of the bony structure was also a frequent symptom, causing the limbs to bend in unnatural places and the head to turn as soft as an over-ripe orange. Or the skin might grow till it became a loose voluminous garment. Sufferers were often in danger of tripping on the folds of skin trailing from their own legs. Another frequent result was rapid confusion of sex. Men would visibly acquire female characters, women would turn mannish. Most distressing of all, perhaps, was the frequent and fantastic exaggeration of sexuality. The organs became grossly distended. The secondary sexual characters, such as the female breasts, were repulsively enlarged. The mind became so enslaved to the pressure of the body’s superabundant sexuality that every physical object and every concept became charged with sexual meaning, and even the most self-disciplined found themselves swept away in a continuous orgy of fornication and all kinds of perversion. Other consequences of glandular disorder were purely emotional. Some sufferers were obsessed by recurrent fits of objectless and frantic rage, others by irrational terror or equally irrational bravado. Sometimes a sudden access of hate would force the patient to kill or torture whoever was at hand. Sometimes a permanent and icy hatred would be concentrated on a wholly innocent victim. The disease might take the form of maudlin sentimentality, directed either on human persons or animals, or the human race as a whole, or some fictitious deity invented to suit the patient’s peculiar needs. One common effect was a crazy dread of isolation. Another was such panic fear of the presence of other human beings that, when the patient was surprised by a visitor, he might leap out of an upper window or dash himself against the wall like a terrified bird. Yet another effect was a reduction of sensibility. Blind and deaf, without taste and smell, almost without touch, the wretched creature would snatch a morbid pleasure from the only sense that remained to rouse him to some faint interest, namely pain. With fumbling eagerness he would tear back his finger-nails, crush his eyes, bite his tongue to bloody pulp.

Some of these symptoms were permanent, some passed off in a few weeks. But in every case the final emotional state was identical and permanent. The patient emerged into profound apathy. In extreme cases he cared for nothing but the satisfaction of bodily needs of nutrition and excretion. Even these might cease to interest him, so that, if left to himself, he might lie inert from morning till night. Such extreme cases were uncommon, but on the average the damage caused by the disease, though less obvious, was scarcely less disastrous. Most people recovered so far as to behave in a normal manner in respect of all simple animal impulses, but they no longer found any satisfaction whatever in the activities which are distinctively human. Thus an impulsive animal affection might be within their reach, but persistent and genuinely other-conscious human love was beyond them. Impossible also were all the other, less intimate forms of true community. Old habits of community-behaviour would persist and might at first carry the sufferers through the familiar social situations without any manifest change; but the fire was quenched. Little by little even the forms of decent social behaviour were abandoned. Abstract thought, even when their intelligence was still capable of it, they found unutterably boring. Art had no longer any meaning for them. Or rather, though intellectually they might still understand its technique, it could no longer stir them. The life of the spirit was wholly fatuous to them. The great common discipline and adventure, which they formerly accepted with enthusiasm, now stimulated them only to yawn and shrug their shoulders. Intellectually they understood it, but they had no feeling for it.

Different types of mind reacted differently to this deep change in themselves. All suffered from a severe conflict between their established mental habit and their new disposition. Many put up a half-hearted struggle to feel in the old way, and were bewildered and oppressed by their failure. Some, though the inner light was extinguished, listlessly carried on all the old forms of behaviour, but with increasing slovenliness. Others became well-bred cynics. Others gradually conceived a cold and spiteful hatred of all that was once so precious to them and now escaped them, and a relentless vindictiveness against those who had not been affected by the disease. Hate sometimes seemed even to provide them with a new intensity of feeling, and become the dominant motive of their lives, leading them to do all in their power to distress and defeat those who were still faithful to the light.

One serious aspect of the disease was not at first realized. It emerged into view as data accumulated. On the whole the emotionally most developed individuals, though rather less susceptible, were also, when the microbe secured a hold on them, far more gravely damaged. Their initial resistance was greater, but once it had been broken down, they were specially liable to die in the early phase. At the other end of the scale the lowest emotional types, though very liable to contract the disease, recovered easily and suffered only mild after-effects. The young were specially susceptible, though if they succeeded in surmounting the first phase of the disease, they tended to make a good recovery, escaping serious after-effects, and sometimes even the final apathy.

In preparation for the sacred year the medical services had been greatly reduced. Both cure and research into the causes of the plague were seriously hampered. It seems to have begun in Malaya during the wet season. Thence it soon spread into Asia, and into every continent. Within a few months millions had died and more millions had recovered only to live on as helpless invalids or cripples. Whole populations, though their bodily health was restored, were emotionally reduced to apathy or cynicism. Research proved that the disease was caused by a micro-organism which infested rain-drops, rivers, lakes. A cloudy atmosphere and a heavy rainfall were peculiarly favourable to the spread of the plague. The microbe entered the human body by the mouth, multiplied in the digestive organs, and spread thence by way of the blood into the glands. If it was detected early enough it could be destroyed, and the patient cured by a very simple method, namely the drinking of large quantities of alcohol. Thus it came about that a generation which had consecrated itself to the most exalted life was forced to drown its troubles in drink.

The sacred year had to be postponed. This was a very grave step, for the population was ageing, and there were no children. But no other course was possible. The ban on procreation was removed, and the peoples were urged to have as many children as possible. The apathetic populations made little response to this appeal.

Meanwhile the disease continued to spread, though less rapidly, and with decreasing virulence. One strange aspect of the scourge suggested that the real enemy was not the micro-organism itself but some devilish intelligence which was directing its attack. It was noticed, for instance, that when a district had been cleared of the disease, a spell of bad weather was apt to occur. Contaminated rain drenched the ground and filled the reservoirs. Moreover, maps plotting the incidence of the disease from month to month had revealed a startlingly purposive movement in the advance of the microbe. Not only was the plague mysteriously attracted to populous districts, but in order to reach a great centre of population it might extend a vast pscudopodium of wet weather and infection, even across an arid desert. This was particularly striking in its advance from Asia to South Africa. While Iran was in the throes, a great tongue of drenching weather was protruded across the Arabian Desert and Abyssinia into moist Central Africa. Thence the bad weather extended southwards till it reached the crowded areas in South Africa. In order to reach America it appeared to make several attempts to bridge the Atlantic from Britain, but its ‘artificial’ east winds were overcome by the prevailing westerlies. Finally, however, it stretched out an arm of cloud from West Mica to the Amazon, whence it spread throughout the Americas. Australia it invaded from its original foothold in the East Indies. New Zealand it failed to discover.

This seeming purposiveness may have been illusory. Some natural cause may very well have produced it. But when it is taken in conjunction with the fact that the disease attacked the human race just when its physical resistance was weakest owing to universal under-nourishment, and when its spiritual power was not yet fully developed, some occult evil purpose seems plausible.

The plague was not finally stamped out until a majority of the world population had been reduced to apathy. In most countries not more than about three in a hundred persons retained their full human calibre, and these became generally so disheartened by their neighbours apathy that they too sank into lethargy. Two regions alone were unaffected, namely Tibet, through the fortunate combination of its exceptionally dry climate, its altitude, and the high development of its population and New Zealand, which the plague had not ‘discovered’.

Lhasa wisely abandoned all hope of restoring the sacred year, and called upon mankind to devote itself for the present mainly to reproduction and the re-establishment of material civilization. New Zealand responded eagerly. Elsewhere small groups and isolated individuals answered the call in full sincerity. The rest either professed agreement and did nothing, or ignored the appeal.

Owing to the prevailing lethargy, village life in most countries gravely deteriorated. Sub-atomic agriculture and handicrafts were still carried on, but in a slipshod manner. The life of the poobs degenerated into something like the life of the pubs in our own day, often into something far less wholesome. Many persons who had been cured by alcohol had contracted an addiction to this habit-forming drug, and maqe no effort to restrain themselves. Fornication of a lazy, unenterprising sort, was general, but procreation was prevented by birth-control. The surviving forwards indolently carried on the outward forms of their old life, but its spirit was lost. Sluggishness inevitably produced a rapid deterioration in all social behaviour and institutions. The old vices of self-seeking and mob mentality reappeared, but without the old vigour and passion. Population steadily declined, for very few children were born; save in Tibet and New Zealand, where every woman of child-bearing age was devotedly producing a child every year. Presently research discovered a method of securing triplets, and the birth-rate was promptly trebled. Under the strain, and in spite of all the care and skill and honour that was lavished on them, the mothers were heavily overstrained. They clung to their task, however, and though maternal mortality was high, population increased rapidly. The children were of course given every possible advantage, under state supervision. The whole social organization of the two peoples was arranged for their benefit.

There came a time when emigrants from Tibet and New Zealand were flooding into other countries to intermarry with the remnants of the native populations, and to reorganize their moribund society. Gradually village life was revitalized. All the familiar activities of the civilized world were once more afoot. The forwards once more explored; though for the present there was no question of reviving the abandoned spiritual venture. The main task of the race was to recover its strength and to find out how to prevent any recurrence of the plague. For there were occasional incipient epidemics. They occurred whenever and wherever the work of the forwards was most active. It was as though the pioneers of spiritual activity contracted the disease through the very success of their adventure. Even if they happened to be individuals of so developed a type that they were immune, they apparently became carriers (or actual generators?) of the microbe, infecting the atmosphere through their breath.

vi. MAN PASSES ON

FROM THIS TIME forward my intimations of humanity’s future became too vague to be worth reporting at length. I have a fairly clear impression of the recovery of material and cultural civilization, and the re-peopling of the planet. Dimly I saw, or I vaguely sensed, the world-wide preparation for a fresh attack on the occult ‘titanic’ forces. But dimly also I felt that with the advance of knowledge and spiritual insight the problem must have taken on an entirely new form; for there seems to have come a time, remotely future to us, when, after earnest debate, the main energy of the race was diverted from the occult back to the scientific, and particularly to the eugenical problem of producing a superior human type. But whether this new type was to be specially equipped for spiritual activities or for natural life on the earth or perhaps for migration to another planet I cannot determine.

All I know is that the enterprise was cut short, almost before it had begun, by the need to concentrate all human energy upon a purely terrestrial problem. For at this time the surface of the planet began to suffer from immense upheavals and subsidences, buckling and cracking like the skin of a roasting apple. Prodigious volcanic eruptions calcined whole countries. The seas poured torrentially into new depressions, drowning the populations; or retreated from newly upheaved continents; or was sucked down, in gigantic maelstroms through fissures in the ocean bed, to issue again with explosive and devastating effect as spouts of superheated water and steam, tearing apart the solid crust of the earth, boiling the cities, and soaring to the stratosphere. Whether this disastrous activity was due to the accumulation of radioactivity in the planet’s core or merely to the cooling and shrinking of the core, and the consequent collapse of the crust, or to some occult cause, I do not know.

The disturbance was brief. Within a few centuries it was over. There emerged a world the geography of which was largely unfamiliar and its climate temporarily moister; for much of the ocean had been boiled into the sky, and immense tracts of hot lava had appreciably raised the average temperature, so that the moisture in the air did not at all quickly condense. Mankind was reduced to a remnant living in the less devastated corners of the lands. Material civilization was destroyed, and men were forced to resort once more to primitive agriculture. The factories for the making of sub-atomic machinery were all destroyed, and most of the generators themselves. Experts of all kinds were decimated. Precious skills were lost. Laboratories, libraries, the records of human culture, were nearly all burnt or submerged under the new seas or the floods, of lava.

But throughout the disaster the will for the light remained alive in men: Each generation handed onto its successor the essential wisdom of the developed mind, the essential loyalty to the spirit. When the earth’s crust had settled down to its new form, recovery was carefully planned, and rapid. The main centre of henceforth was not China, which had been largely submerged, but the great new island of Atlantis, thrust up between America and Europe. At first a continent of mud, it soon became fertile beyond other lands, and in time was invaded by colonists from Europe and America, who crossed the narrow oceans in their sailing ships, and settled down to farm and rediscover the lost arts of civilization. Within a few centuries the planet was once more a well-ordered, flourishing, diversified, populous, human world.

Obscurely it seems to me that the dominant concern of that world was to produce a new human type, capable of greater powers of intelligence and sensibility, and also of spiritual insight. Obscurely I see that the new type was indeed produced; for I have a darkling vision of a prolonged and tense yet temperate divergence of will between the primary human race and the secondary, more developed race which the primaries had so lovingly conceived and patiently actualized. The disagreement was about the goal of human co-operative endeavour. The secondaries advocated some re-orientation of world policy which to the primaries was repugnant. The nature of this re-orientation I could not determine. I suspect that the whole primary population were incapable of comprehending it, and that they resisted it simply because it conflicted with their own world-policy. But it seemed to me that in the end they were persuaded to accept this re-orientation, humbly acknowledging that if the secondaries willed it, it must be the way of the light. Thenceforth the primary human race gradually withdrew from active control of human destiny. For a while it continued to reproduce itself, though at a steadily decreasing rate, and continued to perform minor functions within the new world economy; but its status was something between that of the aged parent, the pensioned family-nurse, and the conquered ‘aboriginals’. Its young people found themselves unable to keep pace with the young of the new type. They came into a world which could never be their own world, though they obscurely recognized it as a world ruled by the very same light that ruled in their own hearts. In these conditions the primary population inevitably dwindled into extinction. The secondaries possessed the earth and proceeded in the way that seemed good to them.

Beyond this point I see nothing. The life of those future men is wholly beyond my range. I emerged from my vision in weariness but also in peace and joy, for it seemed that those new men, though I could not keep pace with the movement of their minds, were loyal to the light and well equipped to serve it, loyal to that same light which my own generation so vaguely sees and falteringly serves.

THE END

Sirius (1944)

A FANTASY OF LOVE AND DISCORD

The title character of this 1944 science fiction novel is a dog named Sirius, who has humanlike intelligence. A sense of existential questioning suffuses the narrative, as Stapledon delves into aspects of Sirius’s psyche. Sirius deals with many human issues through its canine protagonist and his experiences, his unusual nature, his ideas and his relationships with humans. The characters go to great lengths to prevent Sirius from becoming a circus-type wonder dog, seeking to develop Sirius’ character, much like a family would create and foster that of a human child.

Sirius is raised by the scientist Thomas Trelone in North Wales, near Trawsfynydd. Thomas embarks on a program of using steroids and other chemicals to rapidly develop cognitive power of dogs, resulting in superior sheep dogs. Sirius, however, proves to possess an intelligence comparable to a normal human being. He is able to communicate with English words, although it takes some time for the humans to understand his canine pronunciation. He is born at the same time as his creator’s human daughter, Plaxy, and the two of them are raised together as brother and sister. During childhood, Sirius and Plaxy develop an intense bond. In time their physical and intellectual growth becomes something of a competition, with Sirius striving to equal his ‘sister’. As their relationship comes under strain, Sirius develops a dog-like sensitivity to sound, leading to a unique musicality, while Plaxy has a strong visual aesthetic. Their different sensory experiences result in their losing interest in each other’s experience of the world. Soon it is time for Plaxy to attend primary school, but Sirius is of course unable to join her. Despite his pleas to learn, Plaxy is reluctant to share her school and social life experiences with him and so their lives drift further apart. When Plaxy departs for boarding school, Thomas wants to bring Sirius to Mr. Pugh’s farm, where he will work as a “sheep-dog apprentice” before taking him to the city, believing the experience would be beneficial to his character.  After a period of time, Sirius becomes desperately lonely and longs for his family — Plaxy especially. He yearns to write to her and after weeks of difficulty and strings of failure, he manages to write a letter to her, without the aid of human hands.

As in several of Stapledon’s works, he employs the viewpoint of an outsider to take a sensitive look at modern-day society, analysing its positive and negative aspects. This novel is no heavy-handed satire, but a work of subtle and rational philosophy, as the author explores the various tensions between Sirius’ canine and human heritage.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

I should like to acknowledge my debt to Mr. J. Herries McCulloch’s delightful study, Sheep Dogs and Their Masters. He must not, however, be held in any way responsible for my sheer fantasies.

CHAPTER I

FIRST MEETING

PLAXY AND I had been lovers; rather uneasy lovers, for she would never speak freely about her past, and sometimes she withdrew into a cloud of reserve and despond. But often we were very happy together, and I believed that our happiness was striking deeper roots.

Then came her mother’s last illness, and Plaxy vanished. Once or twice I received a letter from her, giving no address, but suggesting that I might reply to her “care of the Post Office” in a village in North Wales, sometimes one, sometimes another. In temper these letters ranged from a perfunctory amiability to genuine longing to have me again. They contained mysterious references to “a strange duty,” which, she said, was connected with her father’s work. The great physiologist, I knew, had been engaged on very sensational experiments on the brains of the higher mammals. He had produced some marvellously intelligent sheep-dogs, and at the time of his death it was said that he was concerned with even more ambitious research. One of the colder of Plaxy’s letters spoke of an “unexpectedly sweet reward” in connection with her new duty, but in a more passionate one she cried out against “this exacting, fascinating, dehumanizing life.” Sometimes she seemed to be in a state of conflict and torture about something which she must not explain. One of these letters was so distraught that I feared for her sanity. I determined therefore to devote my approaching leave to walking in North Wales in the hope of finding her.

I spent ten days wandering from pub to pub in the region indicated by the addresses, asking everywhere if a Miss Trelone was known in the neighbourhood. At last, in Llan Ffestiniog, I heard of her. There was a young lady of that name living in a shepherd’s cottage on the fringe of the moor somewhere above Trawsfynydd. The local shopkeeper who gave me this information said with an air of mystery, “She is a strange young lady, indeed. She has friends, and I am one of them; but she has enemies.”

Following his directions, I walked for some miles along the winding Trawsfynydd road and then turned to the left up a lane. After another mile or so, right on the edge of the open moor, I came upon a minute cottage built of rough slabs of shale, and surrounded by a little garden and stunted trees. The door was shut, but smoke rose from a chimney. I knocked. The door remained shut. Peering through a window, I saw a typical cottage kitchen, but on the table was a pile of books. I sat down on a rickety seat in the garden and noted the neat rows of cabbages and peas. Away to my right, across the deep Cynfal gorge, was Ffestiniog, a pack of slate-grey elephants following their leader, the unsteepled church, down a spur of hill towards the valley. Behind and above stood the Moelwyn range.

I was smoking my second cigarette when I heard Plaxy’s voice in the distance. It was her voice that had first attracted me to her. Sitting in a café I had been enthralled by that sensitive human sound coming from some unknown person behind me. And now once more I heard but did not see her. For a moment I listened with delight to her speech, which, as I had often said, was like the cool sparkling talk of small waves on the pebbly shore of a tarn on a hot day.

I rose to meet her, but something strange arrested me. Interspersed with Plaxy’s remarks was no other human voice but a quite different sound, articulate but inhuman. Just before she came round the corner of the house she said, “But, my dear, don’t dwell on your handlessness so! You have triumphed over it superbly.” There followed a strange trickle of speech from her companion; then through the gate into the garden came Plaxy and a large dog.

She halted, her eyes wide with surprise, and (I hoped) with joy; but her brows soon puckered. Laying a hand on the dog’s head, she stood silent for a moment. I had time to observe that a change had come over her. She was wearing rather muddy corduroy trousers and a blue shirt. The same grey eyes, the same ample but decisive mouth, which had recently seemed to me to belie her character, the same shock of auburn, faintly carroty hair. But instead of a rather pale face, a ruddy brown one, and a complete absence of make-up. No lip-stick, even. The appearance of rude health was oddly contradicted by a darkness under the eyes and a tautness round the mouth. Strange how much one can notice in a couple of seconds, when one is in love!

Her hand deserted the dog’s head, and was stretched out to me in welcome. “Oh well,” she said smiling, “since you have nosed us out, we had better take you into our confidence.” There was some embarrassment in her tone, but also perhaps a ring of relief. “Hadn’t we, Sirius,” she added, looking down at the great dog.

Then for the first time I took note of this remarkable creature. He was certainly no ordinary dog. In the main he was an Alsatian, perhaps with a dash of Great Dane or Mastiff, for he was a huge beast. His general build was wolf-like, but he was slimmer than a wolf, because of his height. His coat, though the hair was short, was superbly thick and silky, particularly round the neck, where it was a close turbulent ruff. Its silkiness missed effeminacy by a hint of stubborn harshness. Silk wire, Plaxy once called it. On back and crown it was black, but on flanks and legs and the under surface of his body it paled to an austere greyish fawn. There were also two large patches of fawn above the eyes, giving his face a strangely mask-like look, or the appearance of a Greek statue with blank-eyed helmet pushed back from the face. What distinguished Sirius from all other dogs was his huge cranium. It was not, as a matter of fact, quite as large as one would have expected in a creature of human intelligence, since, as I shall explain later, Trelone’s technique not only increased the brain’s bulk but also produced a refinement of the nerve-fibres themselves. Nevertheless, Sirius’s head was far loftier than any normal dog’s. His high brow combined with the silkiness of his coat to give him a look of the famous Border Collie, the outstanding type of sheep-dog. I learned later that this brilliant race had, indeed, contributed to his make-up. But his cranium was far bigger than the Border Collie’s. The dome reached almost up to the tips of his large, pointed Alsatian ears. To hold up this weight of head, the muscles of his neck and shoulders were strongly developed. At the moment of our encounter he was positively leonine, because the hair was bristling along his spine. Suspicion of me had brushed it up the wrong way. His grey eyes might have been wolf’s eyes, had not the pupils been round like any dog’s, not slits like the wolf’s. Altogether he was certainly a formidable beast, lean and sinewy as a creature of the jungle.

Without taking his gaze off me, he opened his mouth, displaying sierras of ivory, and made a queer noise, ending with an upward inflection like a question. Plaxy replied, “Yes, it’s Robert. He’s true as steel, remember.” She smiled at me deprecatingly, and added, “And he may be useful.”

Sirius politely waved his amply feathered tail, but kept his cold eyes fixed on mine.

Another awkward pause settled upon us, till Plaxy said, “We have been working on the sheep out on the moor all day. We missed our dinner and I’m hungry as hell. Come in and I’ll make tea for us all.” She added as we entered the little flagged kitchen, “Sirius will understand everything you say. You won’t be able to understand him at first, but I shall, and I’ll interpret.”

While Plaxy prepared a meal, passing in and out of the little larder, I sat talking to her. Sirius squatted opposite me, eyeing me with obvious anxiety. Seeing him, she said with a certain sharpness fading into gentleness, “Sirius! I tell you he’s all right. Don’t be so suspicious!” The dog rose, saying something in his strange lingo, and went out into the garden. “He’s gone to fetch some firewood,” she said; then in a lowered voice, “Oh, Robert, it’s good to see you, though I didn’t want you to find me.” I rose to take her in my arms, but she whispered emphatically, “No, no, not now.” Sirius returned with a log between his jaws. With a sidelong glance at the two of us, and a perceptible drooping of the tail, he put the log on the fire and went out again. “Why not now?” I cried, and she whispered, “Because of Sirius. Oh, you’ll understand soon.” After a pause she added, “Robert, you mustn’t expect me to be wholly yours ever, not fully and single-heartedly yours. I’m too much involved in — in this work of my father’s.” I expostulated, and seized her. “Nice human Robert,” she sighed, putting her head on my shoulder. But immediately she broke away, and said with emphasis, “No, I didn’t say that. It was just the female human animal that said it. What I say is, I can’t play the game you want me to play, not wholeheartedly.”

Then she called through the open door, “Sirius, tea!” He replied with a bark, then strode in, carefully not looking at me.

She put a bowl of tea for him on a little table-cloth on the floor, remarking, “He has two meals generally, dinner at noon and supper in the evening. But to-day is different.” Then she put down a large crust of bread, a hunk of cheese, and a saucer with a little lump of jam. “Will that keep you going?” she asked. A grunt signified approval.

Plaxy and I sat at the table to eat our bread and rationed butter and war-time cake. She set about telling me the history of Sirius. Sometimes I put in an occasional question, or Sirius interrupted with his queer speech of whimper and growl.

The matter of this and many other conversations about the past I shall set down in the following chapters. Meanwhile I must say this. Without the actual presence of Sirius I should not have believed the story; but his interruptions, though canine and unintelligible, expressed human intelligence by their modulation, and stimulated intelligible answers from Plaxy. Obviously he was following the conversation, commenting and watching my reaction. And so it was not with incredulity, though of course with amazement, that I learned of the origin and career of Sirius. I listened at first with grave anxiety, so deeply involved was Plaxy. I began to understand why it was that our love had always been uneasy, and why when her mother died she did not come back to me. I began to debate with myself the best way of freeing her from this “inhuman bondage”. But as the conversation proceeded I could not but recognize that this strange relationship of girl and dog was fundamentally beautiful, in a way sacred. (That was the word I used to myself.) Thus my problem became far more difficult.

At one point, when Plaxy had been saying that she often longed to see me again, Sirius made a more sustained little speech. And in the middle of it he went over to her, put his fore-paws oh the arm of her chair, and with great gentleness and delicacy kissed her cheek. She took the caress demurely, not shrinking away, as human beings generally do when dogs try to kiss them. But the healthy glow of her face deepened, and there was moisture in her eyes as she stroked the shaggy softness under his neck, and said to me, while still looking at him, “I am to tell you, Robert, that Sirius and Plaxy grew up together like the thumb and forefinger of a hand, that he loves me in the way that only dogs can love, and much more now that I have come to him, but that I must not feel bound to stay with him, because by now he can fend for himself. Whatever happens to him ever, I — how did you say it, Sirius, you foolish dear?” He put in a quick sentence, and she continued, “Oh, yes, I am the scent that he will follow always, hunting for God.”

She turned her face towards me with a smile that I shall not forget. Nor shall I forget the bewildering effect of the dog’s earnest and almost formal little declaration. Later I was to realize that a rather stilted diction was very characteristic of him, in moments of deep feeling.

Then Sirius made another remark with a sly look and a tremor of the tail. She turned back to him laughing, and softly smacked his face. “Beast,” she said, “I shall not tell Robert that.”

When Sirius kissed her I was startled into a sudden spasm of jealousy. (A man jealous of a dog!) But Plaxy’s translation of his little speech roused more generous feelings. I now began to make plans by which Plaxy and I together might give Sirius a permanent home and help him to fulfil his destiny, whatever that might be. But, as I shall tell, a different fate lay in store for us.

During that strange meal Plaxy told me that, as I had guessed, Sirius was her father’s crowning achievement, that he had been brought up as a member of the Trelone family, that he was now helping to run a sheep farm, that she herself was keeping house for him, and also working on the farm, compensating for his lack of hands.

After tea I helped her to wash up, while Sirius hovered about, jealous, I think, of my handiness. When we had finished, she said they must go over to the farm to complete a job of work before dark. I decided to walk back to Ffestiniog, collect my baggage and return by the evening train to Trawsfynedd, where I could find accommodation in the local pub. I noticed Sirius’s tail droop as I said this. It drooped still further when I announced that I proposed to spend a week in the neighbourhood in the hope of seeing more of Plaxy. She said, “I shall be busy, but there are the evenings.”

Before I left she handed over a collection of documents for me to take away and read at leisure. There were scientific papers by her father, including his journal of Sirius’s growth and education. These documents, together with a diary of her own and brief fragmentary records by Sirius himself, all of which I was given at a much later date, form the main “sources” of the following narrative; these, and many long talks with Plaxy, and with Sirius when I had learnt to understand his speech.

I propose to use my imagination freely to fill out with detail many incidents about which my sources afford only the barest outline. After all, though a civil servant (until the Air Force absorbed me) I am also a novelist; and I am convinced that with imagination and self-criticism one can often penetrate into the essential spirit of events even when the data are superficial. I shall, therefore, tell the amazing story of Sirius in my own way.

CHAPTER II

THE MAKING OF SIRIUS

PLAXY’S FATHER, THOMAS Trelone, was too great a scientist to escape all publicity, but his work on the stimulation of cortical growth in the brains of mammals was begun while he was merely a brilliant young research worker, and it was subsequently carried on in strict secrecy. He had an exaggerated, a morbid loathing of limelight. This obsession he justified by explaining that he dreaded the exploitation of his technique by quacks and profit-mongers. Thus it was that for many years his experiments were known only to a few of his most intimate professional colleagues in Cambridge, and to his wife, who had a part to play in them.

Though I have seen his records and read his papers, I can give only a layman’s account of his work, for I am without scientific training. By introducing a certain hormone into the blood-stream of the mother he could affect the growth of the brain in the unborn young. The hormone apparently had a double effect. It increased the actual bulk of the cerebral cortices, and also it made the nerve-fibres themselves much finer than they normally are, so that a far greater number of them, and a far greater number of connections between them, occurred in any given volume of brain. Somewhat similar experiments, I believe, were carried out in America by Zamenhof; but there was an important difference between the two techniques. Zamenhof simply fed the young animal with his hormone; Trelone, as I have said, introduced his hormone into the foetus through the mother’s blood-stream. This in itself was a notable achievement, because the circulatory systems of mother and foetus are fairly well insulated from each other by a filtering membrane. One of Trelone’s difficulties was that the hormone caused growth in the maternal as well as the foetal brain, and since the mother’s skull was adult and rigid there must inevitably be very serious congestion, which would lead to death unless some means were found to insulate her brain from the stimulating drug. This difficulty was eventually overcome. At last it became possible to assure the unborn animal a healthy maternal environment. After its birth Trelone periodically added doses of the hormone to its food, gradually reducing the dose as the growing brain approached what he considered a safe maximum size. He had also devised a technique for delaying the closing of the sutures between the bones of the skull, so that the skull might continue to expand as required.

A large population of rats and mice was sacrificed in the attempt to perfect Trelone’s technique. At last he was able to produce a number of remarkable creatures. His big-headed rats, mice, guinea-pigs, rabbits, though their health was generally bad, and their lives were nearly always cut short by disease of one kind or another, were certainly geniuses of their humble order. They were remarkably quick at finding their way through mazes, and so on. In fact they far excelled their species in all the common tests of animal intelligence, and had the mentality rather of dogs and apes than of rodents.

But this was for Trelone only the beginning. While he was improving his technique so that he could ensure a rather more healthy animal, he at the same time undertook research into methods of altering the tempo of its life so that it should mature very slowly and live much longer than was normal to its kind. Obviously this was very important. A bigger brain needs a longer life-time to fulfil its greater potentiality for amassing and assimilating experience. Not until he had made satisfactory progress in both these enterprises did he begin to experiment on animals of greater size and higher type. This was a much more formidable undertaking, and promised no quick results. After a few years he had produced a number of clever but seedy cats, a bright monkey that died during its protracted adolescence, and a dog with so big a brain that its crushed and useless eyes were pushed forward along its nose. This creature suffered so much that its producer reluctantly destroyed it in infancy.

Not till several more years had elapsed, had Trelone perfected his technique to such an extent that he was able to pay less attention to the physiological and more to the psychological aspect of his problem. Contrary to his original plan, he worked henceforth mainly on dogs rather than apes. Of course apes offered the hope of more spectacular success. They were by nature better equipped than dogs. Their brains were bigger, their sight was more developed, and they had hands. Nevertheless from Trelone’s point of view dogs had one overwhelming advantage. They were capable of a much greater freedom of movement in our society. Trelone confessed that he would have preferred to work on cats, because of their more independent mentality; but their small size made them unsuitable. A certain absolute bulk of brain was necessary, no matter what the size of the animal, so as to afford a wealth of associative neural paths. Of course a small animal did not need as large a brain as a large animal of the same mental rank. A large body needed a correspondingly large brain merely to work its machinery. A lion’s brain had to be bigger than a cat’s. An elephant’s brain was even larger than a much more intelligent but smaller man’s. On the other hand, each rank of intelligence, no matter what the size of the animal, required a certain degree of complexity of neural organization, and so of brain bulk. In proportion to the size of the human body a man’s brain was far bigger than an elephant’s. Some animals were large enough to accommodate the absolute bulk of brain needed for the human order of intelligence; some were not. A large dog could easily do so, but a cat’s organization would be very gravely upset by so great an addition. For a mouse anything of the sort would be impossible.

Not that Trelone had at this stage any expectation of raising any animal so far in mental stature that it would approach human mentality. His aim was merely to produce, as he put it, “a rather super-sub-human intelligence, a missing-link mind.” For this purpose the dog was admirably suited. Human society afforded for dogs many vocations requiring intelligence at the upper limit of the sub-human range. Trelone chose as the best vocation of all for his purpose that of the sheep-dog. His acknowledged ambition was to produce a “super-sheep-dog.”

One other consideration inclined him to choose the dog; and the fact that he took this point into account at all in the early stage of his work shows that he was even then toying with the idea of producing something more than a missing-link mind. He regarded the dog’s temperament as on the whole more capable of development to the human level. If cats excelled in independence, dogs excelled in social awareness; and Trelone argued that only the social animal could make full use of its intelligence. The independence of the cat was not, after all, the independence of the socially aware creature asserting its individuality; it was merely the blind individualism that resulted from social obtuseness. On the other hand he admitted that the dog’s sociality involved it, in relation to man, in abject servility. But he hoped that with increased intelligence it might gain a measure of self-respect, and of critical detachment from humanity.

In due course Trelone succeeded in producing a litter of big-brained puppies. Most of them died before reaching maturity, but two survived, and became exceptionally bright dogs. This result was on the whole less gratifying than disappointing to Trelone. He carried out further experiments, and at last, from an Old English Sheep-dog bitch, produced a big-brained family, three of which survived, and reached a definitely super-canine level of mentality.

The research continued for some years. Trelone found it necessary to take more trouble about the “raw material” to which his technique was to be applied. He could not afford to neglect the fact that the most capable of all the canine races is the Border Collie, bred through a couple of centuries for intelligence and responsibility. All modern champions are of this breed, and all are descendants of a certain brilliant animal, named Old Hemp, who was born in Northumberland in 1893. The Border Collie of to-day is hardy, but rather small. Trelone, therefore, decided that the best raw material would be a cross between some outstanding champion of the International Sheep-Dog Trials and another intelligent but much heavier animal. The Alsatian was the obvious choice. After a good deal of negotiation with owners of champion sheep-dogs and enthusiasts for Alsatians, he produced several strains, which blended the two types in various proportions. He then applied his improved technique to various expectant mothers of these types, and in due season he was able to provide several of his friends with animals of “almost missing-link intelligence” as house-dogs. But there was nothing spectacular about these creatures; and unfortunately all were delicate, and all died before their somewhat protracted adolescence was completed.

But at last further improvements in his technique brought him real success. He achieved several very bright animals with normally strong constitutions, predominantly Alsatian in appearance.

He had persuaded his wife Elizabeth that, if ever he succeeded to this extent, they should take a house in a sheep district in Wales. There she and the three children and the forthcoming baby would live, and he himself would spend the vacations and week-ends. After much exploration they found a suitable old farm-house not far from Trawsfynedd. Its name was “Garth.” A good deal of work had to be done to turn it into a comfortable family home. Water-closets and a bathroom had to be installed. Some of the windows were enlarged. Electricity was laid on from the village. An outhouse was converted into a palatial kennel.

Some time after the fourth baby had been born, the family moved. They were accompanied by Kate, the long-established servant, who had somehow become practically a member of the family. A village girl was engaged as her assistant. There was also a nursemaid, Mildred; and, of course, the children, Thomasina, Maurice, Giles, and the baby Plaxy. Thomas took with him two canine families. One consisted of a bitch and four hardy little animals that he intended to train as “super-sheep-dogs.” The other family of four were orphans, the mother having died in giving birth to them. They had therefore to be hand-nursed. The brains of these animals were very much bigger than the brains of the other family, but unfortunately three of them were much less healthy. Two died shortly after the removal to Wales. Another was subject to such violent fits that it had to be destroyed. The fourth, Sirius, was a healthy and cheerful little creature that remained a helpless infant long after the other litter were active adolescents. For months it could not even stand. It merely lay on its stomach with its bulgy head on the ground, squeaking for sheer joy of life; for its tail was constantly wagging.

Even the other litter matured very slowly for dogs, though far more rapidly than human children. When they were nearly adult all but one of them were disposed of to neighbouring farms. The one was kept as the family dog. Most of the local farmers had proved very reluctant to take on these big-headed animals even as gifts. But a neighbour, Mr. Llewelyn Pugh of Caer Blai, had entered into the spirit of the venture, and he subsequently bought a second pup as a colleague for the first.

The production of these super-sheep-dogs and others which followed formed a camouflage for Thomas’s more exciting venture, of which Sirius was at present the only outcome. The public would be led to believe that super-sheep-dogs and other animals of missing-link mentality were his whole concern. If the little Alsatian really developed to human mental stature, few people would suspect it. Thomas was always morbidly anxious that it should not be exploited. It must grow up in decent obscurity, and mature as naturally as possible.

The super-sheep-dogs, on the other hand, were allowed to gain notoriety. The farmers who had accepted them mostly with great reluctance soon found that fate had given them pearls of great price. The animals learned their technique surprisingly quickly, and carried out their orders with unfailing precision. Commands had seldom to be repeated. Sheep were never hustled, and yet never allowed to break away. Not only so, but Trelone’s dogs had an uncanny way of understanding instructions and carrying them out with no human supervision. They attached the right meanings to the names of particular pastures, hillsides, valleys, moors. Told to “fetch sheep from Cefn” or from Moel Fach or what not, they succeeded in doing so while their master awaited them at home. They could also be sent on errands to neighbouring farms or villages. They would take a basket and a note to a particular shop and bring back the required meat or haberdashery.

All this was very useful to the farmers, and extremely interesting to Trelone, who was of course allowed every chance of studying the animals. He found in them a startlingly high degree of practical inventiveness, and a rudimentary but remarkable understanding of language. Being after all sub-human, they could not understand speech as we do, but they were incomparably more sensitive than ordinary dogs to familiar words and phrases. “Fetch wood from shed,” “Take basket to butcher and baker,” and all such simple familiar orders could be distinguished and obeyed, as a rule without distraction. Thomas wrote a monograph on his super-sheep-dogs, and consequently scientists from all over the world used to turn up at Garth to be shown the animals at work. Throughout the district their fame was fully established among farmers, and there were many demands for puppies. Very few could be supplied. Some farmers refused to believe that the offspring of these bright animals would not inherit their parents’ powers. Naturally, all attempts to breed super-sheep-dogs from super-sheep-dogs without the introduction of the hormone into the mother were a complete failure.

But it is time to return to the little Alsatian, in fact, to Sirius. Trelone was from the first very excited about this animal. The longer it remained a helpless infant, the more excited he became. He saw in it the possibility of the fulfilment of his almost wildest hopes. Discussing it with Elizabeth, he fired her imagination with the prospects of this canine infant, and unfolded his plan before her. This animal must have as far as possible the same kind of psychological environment as their own baby. He told her of an American animal-psychologist and his wife who had brought up a baby chimpanzee in precisely the same conditions as their own little girl. It was fed, clothed, cared for, exactly as the child; and with very interesting results. This, Thomas said, was not quite what he wanted for little Sirius, because one could not treat a puppy precisely as a baby without violating its nature. Its bodily organization was too different from the baby’s. But what he did want was that Sirius should be brought up to feel himself the social equal of little Plaxy. Differences of treatment must never suggest differences of biological or social rank. Elizabeth had already, he said, proved herself an ideal mother, giving the children that precious feeling of being devotedly loved by a divinely wise and generous being, yet fostering their independence and making no greedy emotional claims on them. This was the atmosphere that Thomas demanded for Sirius; this and the family environment. And their family, he told her, had taught him a very important truth. Unfortunate experiences in his own childhood had led him to regard family as a hopelessly bad institution, and one which ought to be abolished. She would remember his wild ideas of experimenting with their own children. She had tactfully and triumphantly resisted every attempt to remove her own first two children from her; and before the third was born Thomas was already convinced that a really good family environment was the right influence for a growing child. No doubt she had made mistakes. Certainly he had made many. No doubt they had to some extent unwittingly damaged their children. There was Tamsy’s occasional mulishness and Maurice’s diffidence. But on the whole — well it would be false modesty and unfair to the children not to recognize that they were all three fine specimens, friendly, responsible, yet independent and critical. This was the ideal social tradition in which to perform the great experiment with baby Sirius. Dogs, Thomas reminded Elizabeth, were prone to servility; but this vice was probably not due to something servile in their nature; it sprang from the fact that their great social sensitivity was forced to take a servile turn by the tyranny of the more developed species which controlled them. A dog with human intelligence, brought up to respect itself, would probably not be servile at all, and might quite well develop a superhuman gift for true social relationship.

Elizabeth took some time to consider her husband’s suggestion, for the responsibility would be mainly hers. Moreover, she was naturally anxious about the effects of the experiment on her own baby. Would her little Plaxy suffer in any way? Thomas persuaded her that no harm would be done, and indeed that the companionship of child and super-canine dog must be beneficial to both. With fervour he insisted that the most valuable social relationships were those between minds as different from one another as possible yet capable of mutual sympathy. It is perhaps remarkable that Thomas, who was not himself gifted with outstanding personal insight or sympathy, should have seen intellectually the essential nature of community. It would be very interesting, he said, to watch the growth of this difficult but pregnant companionship. Of course it might never develop. There might be mere antagonism. Certainly Elizabeth would have to exercise great tact to prevent the child from overpowering the dog with its many human advantages. In particular the little girl’s hands and more subtle eyesight would be assets which the puppy could never attain. And the whole human environment, which was inevitably alien and awkward for the dog, might well breed neurosis in a mind that was not human but humanly sensitive. Everything possible must be done to prevent Sirius from becoming either unduly submissive or defiantly arrogant in the manner so familiar in human beings suffering from a sense of inferiority.

One other principle Thomas wanted Elizabeth to bear in mind. It was, of course, impossible to know beforehand how the dog’s nature would develop. Sirius might, after all, never reach anything like human mental stature. But everything must be done on the assumption that he would do so. Hence it was very important to bring him up not as a pet but as a person, as an individual who would in due season live an active and independent life. This being so, his special powers must be fostered. While he was still, as Thomas put it, a “schoolboy,” his interests would, of course, be “schoolboy” interests, physical, primitive, barbarian; but being a dog, his expression of them would necessarily be very different from a real schoolboy’s. He would have to exercise them in normal canine occupations, such as desultory roaming and hunting and fighting. But later, as his intelligence opened up the human world to him, he would want some kind of persistent “human” activity; and obviously sheep could provide him with a career, even if he far excelled the typical super-sheep-dog mentality. With this in view, and whatever his destiny, he must be brought up “as hard as nails and fit as hell.” This had always been Elizabeth’s policy with her own children; but Sirius would some time need to face up to conditions far more Spartan than those of the most Spartan human family. It would not do simply to force him into such conditions. Somehow she must wile him into wanting them, for sheer pride in his own nature, and later for the sake of his work. This, of course, would not apply to his childhood, but in adolescence he must begin of his own free will to seek hardness. Later still, when his mind was no longer juvenile, he would perhaps drop the sheep-dog career entirely and give his mind to more adult pursuits. Even so, the hard practical life of his youth would not have been in vain. It would endow him with permanent grit and self-reliance.

Elizabeth was a good deal more sceptical than her husband about the future of Sirius. She expressed a fear, which did not trouble Thomas, that such a disunited being as Sirius might be doomed to a life of mental torture. Nevertheless, she finally made up her mind to enter into the spirit of the experiment, and she planned accordingly.

CHAPTER III

INFANCY

WHILE HE WAS still unable to walk, Sirius showed the same sort of brightness as Plaxy in her cot. But even at this early stage his lack of hands was a grave disadvantage. While Plaxy was playing with her rattle, he too played with his; but his baby jaws could not compete with Plaxy’s baby hands in dexterity. His interest even in his earliest toys was much more like a child’s than like the ordinary puppy’s monomania for destruction. Worrying his rattle, he was attentive to the sound that it made, alternately shaking it and holding it still to relish the contrast between sound and silence. At about the time when Plaxy began to crawl, Sirius achieved a staggering walk. His pride in this new art and his joy in the increased scope that it gave him were obvious. He now had the advantage over Plaxy, for his method of locomotion was far better suited to his quadruped structure than her crawl to her biped form. Before she had begun to walk he was already lurching erratically over the whole ground, floor and garden. When at last she did achieve the upright gait, he was greatly impressed, and insisted on being helped to imitate her. He soon discovered that this was no game for him.

Plaxy and Sirius were already forming that companionship which was to have so great an effect on both their minds throughout their lives. They played together, fed together, were washed together, and were generally good or naughty together. When one was sick, the other was bored and abject. When one was hurt, the other howled with sympathy. Whatever one of them did, the other had to attempt. When Plaxy learned to tie a knot, Sirius was very distressed at his inability to do likewise. When Sirius acquired by observation of the family’s super-sheep-dog, Gelert, the habit of lifting a leg at gate-posts to leave his visiting card, Plaxy found it hard to agree that this custom, though suitable for dogs, was not at all appropriate to little girls. She was deterred only by the difficulty of the operation. Similarly, though she was soon convinced that to go smelling at gate-posts was futile because her nose was not as clever as Sirius’s, she did not see why the practice should outrage the family’s notions of propriety. Plaxy’s inability to share in Sirius’s developing experience of social smelling, if I may so name it, was balanced by his clumsiness in construction. Plaxy was the first to discover the joy of building with bricks; but there soon came a day when Sirius, after watching her intently, himself brought a brick and set it clumsily on the top of the rough wall that Plaxy was building. His effort wrecked the wall. This was not Sirius’s first achievement in construction, for he had once been seen to lay three sticks together to form a triangle, an achievement which caused him great satisfaction. He had to learn to “handle” bricks and dolls in such a way that neither his saliva nor his pin-point teeth would harm them. He was already enviously impressed by Plaxy’s hands and their versatility. The normal puppy shows considerable inquisitiveness, but no impulse to construct; Sirius was more persistently inquisitive and at times passionately constructive. His behaviour was in many ways more simian than canine. The lack of hands was a handicap against which he reacted with a dogged will to triumph over disability.

Thomas judged that his weakness in construction was due not only to handlessness but to a crudity of vision which is normal in dogs. Long after infancy he was unable to distinguish between visual forms which Plaxy would never confuse. For instance, it took him far longer than Plaxy to distinguish between string neatly tied up in little bundles and the obscure tangle which, at Garth as in so many homes, composed the general content of the string-bag. Again, for Sirius, rather fat ovals were no different from circles, podgy oblongs were the same as squares, pentagons were mistaken for hexagons, angles of sixty degrees were much the same as right angles. Consequently in building with toy bricks he was apt to make mistakes which called forth derision from Plaxy. Later in life he corrected this disability to some extent by careful training, but his perception of form remained to the end very sketchy.

In early days he did not suspect his inferiority in vision. All his failures in construction were put down to lack of hands. There was indeed a grave danger that his handlessness would so obsess him that his mind would be warped, particularly during a phase when the infant Plaxy was apt to laugh at his helplessness. A little later she was brought to realize that poor Sirius should not be ragged for his misfortune, but helped whenever possible. Then began a remarkable relationship in which Plaxy’s hands were held almost as common property, like the toys. Sirius was always running to ask Plaxy to do things he could not manage himself, such as opening boxes and winding up clock-work toys. Sirius himself began to develop a surprising “manual” dexterity, combining the use of fore-paws and teeth; but many operations were for ever beyond him. Throughout his life he was unable to tie a knot in a piece of cotton, though there came a time when he could manage to do so in a rope or stout cord.

Plaxy was the first to show signs of understanding speech, but Sirius was not far behind. When she began to talk, he often made peculiar little noises which, it seemed, were meant to be imitations of human words. His failure to make himself understood often caused him bitter distress. He would stand with his tail between his legs miserably whining. Plaxy was the first to interpret his desperate efforts at communication, but Elizabeth in time found herself understanding; and little by little she grew able to equate each of the puppy’s grunts and whines with some particular elementary sound of human speech. Like Plaxy, Sirius began with a very simple baby-language of monosyllables. Little by little this grew into a canine, or super-canine, equivalent of educated English. So alien were his vocal organs to speech, that even when he had perfected the art no outsider would suspect his strange noises of being any human language at all. Yet he had his own equivalent of every vocal sound. Some of his consonants were difficult to distinguish from one another, but Elizabeth and Plaxy and the rest of the family came to understand him as easily as they understood each other. I described his speech as composed of whimpers and grunts and growls. This perhaps maligns it, though essentially true. He spoke with a notable gentleness and precision, and there was a fluid, musical quality in his voice.

Thomas was, of course, immensely elated by the dog’s development of true speech, for this was a sure sign of the fully human degree of intelligence. The baby chimpanzee that was brought up with a human baby kept level with its foster-sister until the little girl began to talk, but then dropped behind; for the ape never showed any sign of using words.

Thomas determined to have a permanent record of the dog’s speech. He bought the necessary apparatus for making gramophone discs, and reproduced conversations between Sirius and Plaxy. He allowed no one to hear these records except the family and his two most intimate colleagues, Professor McAlister and Dr. Billing, who were influential in procuring funds for the research, and knew that Thomas’s secret ambition soared far above the production of super-sheep-dogs. On several occasions Thomas brought the distinguished biologists to see Sirius.

There was a time when it seemed that these gramophone records would be the sole lasting and tangible evidence of Thomas’s triumph. In spite of inoculation, Sirius developed distemper and almost succumbed. Day after day, night after night, Elizabeth nursed the wretched little animal through this peculiarly noisome disease, leaving her own child mainly to Mildred, the nursemaid. Had it not been for Elizabeth’s skill and devotion, Sirius would not have come through with his powers unimpaired. Probably he would have died. This incident had two important results. It created in Sirius a passionate and exacting affection for his foster-mother, so that for weeks he would scarcely let her out of his sight without making an uproar; and it bred in Plaxy a dreadful sense that her mother’s love was being given wholly to Sirius. In fact Plaxy became lonely and jealous. This trouble was soon put right when Sirius had recovered, and Elizabeth was able to give more attention to her child; but then it was the dog’s turn to be jealous. The climax came when Sirius, seeing Elizabeth comforting Plaxy after a tumble, rushed savagely at her and actually nipped her little bare leg. There was then a terrible scene. Plaxy screamed and screamed. Elizabeth was for once really angry. Sirius howled with remorse for what he had done; and actually, out of a sense that retribution was needed, made a half-hearted attempt to bite his own leg. Then matters were made much worse by the family’s super-sheep-dog, Gelert, who rushed to the scene of uproar. Seeing Plaxy’s bleeding leg, and Elizabeth being very angry with the puppy, Gelert assumed that this was a case for severe punishment, and set upon the abject culprit. Sirius was bowled over and none too gently mauled by the furiously growling Gelert. The puppy’s remorse gave place to fright, and his whimpers to screams of terror, to which the weeping Plaxy added screams of fear for her beloved friend. The other children rushed upon the scene, followed by Kate and Mildred with brooms and a rolling pin. Even the infant Plaxy seized Gelert by the tail and tried to drag him off. But it was Elizabeth herself who snatched Sirius from the jaws of death (as it seemed to him) and roundly cursed the officious Gelert.

This incident seems to have had several important results. It made both Sirius and Plaxy realize how much, after all, they cared for one another. It persuaded Plaxy that her mother had not discarded her for Sirius. And it proved to Sirius that Elizabeth loved him even when he had been very wicked. The unfortunate Gelert alone gained no comfort.

The only further punishment inflicted on Sirius was deep disgrace. Elizabeth withdrew her kindness. Plaxy, in spite of her secret knowledge that Sirius was very dear, was filled with self-pity once more when he had been rescued, and treated him with cold self-righteousness. To punish Sirius, Plaxy showed a violent affection for the kitten, Tommy, who had recently been imported from a neighbouring farm. Sirius, of course, was tortured with jealousy, and was afforded good practice in self-control. He succeeded all the better because on the one occasion when he did attack Tommy, he discovered that the kitten had claws. Sirius was very sensitive to neglect and censure. When his human friends were displeased with him he lost interest in everything but his misery. He would not play, he would not eat. On this occasion he set himself to win Plaxy over by many little attentions. He brought her a beautiful feather, then a lovely white pebble, and each time he timidly kissed her hand. Suddenly she gave him a hearty hug, and both broke into a romp. Towards Elizabeth, Sirius was less bold. He merely eyed her askance, his tail timorously vibrating when he caught her glance. So comic was this spectacle that she could not help laughing. Sirius was forgiven.

At a stage in his puppyhood shortly after this incident Sirius conceived a respectful admiration for Gelert. The slightly older and biologically quite adult super-sub-human animal treated him with careless contempt. Sirius followed Gelert about and mimicked all his actions. One day Gelert by great good fortune caught a rabbit and devoured it, growling savagely when Sirius approached. The puppy watched him with mingled admiration and horror. The spectacle of that swift pursuit and capture roused in him the hunting impulses of the normal dog. The scream of the rabbit, its struggle, sudden limpness and hideous dismemberment, shocked him deeply; for he had a sympathetic and imaginative nature, and Elizabeth had brought up her family in a tradition of tenderness towards all living things. But now a conflict arose which was to distress him throughout his life, the conflict between what he later called his “wolf-nature” and his compassionate civilized mentality.

The immediate result was a strong and guilty lust for the chase and an intensified, awed passion for Gelert. He became obsessed by the rabbit-warren. He was for ever sniffing at the entrances to the burrows, whimpering with excitement. For a while Plaxy was almost forgotten. Vainly she tried to win him back into partnership in her games. Vainly she hung about the burrows with him, bored and cross. In her presence he once caught a frog and disgustingly mangled it in an attempt to eat it. She burst into tears. His hunting impulse was suddenly quenched, and horror supervened. He rushed whimpering to his darling and covered her face with bloody kisses.

Many times henceforth he was to suffer the torturing conflict between his normal canine impulses and his more developed nature.

His admiration of Gelert was gradually damped down by the discovery that the older dog had no interest in anything but hunting and eating. Once more there was a conflict. Hunting now gripped Sirius as the main joy of life; but it was a guilty joy. He felt its call almost as a religious claim upon him, the claim of the dark blood-god for sacrifice; but he was also disgusted with the sacrifice, and deeply disturbed by Plaxy’s horror. Moreover, after his first obsession he began to recover interest in the many activities which he shared with Plaxy. These were of no interest to Gelert.

The final disillusionment came when Sirius began to realize that Gelert not merely would not but could not talk. This suspicion had long haunted Sirius, but he had believed that Gelert’s unresponsiveness was merely due to his haughty disposition. There came a day, however, when this theory ceased to be possible. Young Sirius, whose four-foot locomotion was far more developed than Plaxy’s running, had been trying to keep up with Gelert at the outset of a hunting expedition. They came upon a sheep with a broken leg. Though Gelert was not in the sheep-tending profession, he knew very well that sheep were things to be cherished. He knew also that Mr. Pugh of Caer Blai was in this case the responsible man. He therefore hurried off to Caer Blai, far outstripping the loose-limbed puppy. When at last Sirius arrived in the farmyard, he found Gelert making an inarticulate fuss around Pugh, vainly trying to persuade him to come up the hill. Sirius knew that he himself could not make Pugh understand, but he knew also that he could explain to any member of his own family. He therefore set off to find one of them and encountered Giles on his way home from school. He pantingly told Giles the story, and the two hurried to Caer Blai. Giles momentarily forgot the great family taboo about “not telling people about Sirius,” and said to Pugh, “Sirius says there’s a sheep with a broken leg in Nant Twll-y-cwm, and it may get drowned.” Pugh looked at him with incredulity, but was impressed by the boy’s earnestness and the antics of the dogs. He accompanied them up the valley, and there was the sheep. After this incident Sirius regarded Gelert as a nit-wit, and the farmer suspected Sirius of being an altogether “super” super-sheep-dog.

The discovery that Gelert could not speak, and was in other respects, also a half-wit, was a shock to Sirius. Gelert excelled him in all those ways in which he outshone his human friends, in speed, in endurance, in scent and in hearing. For some time he had taken Gelert as his model. Mimicking Gelert’s taciturnity, he had even tried not to talk. So successful had he been that Elizabeth in one of her letters to Thomas said that Sirius’s human mentality seemed to be waning. The realization that the older dog simply could not talk changed the puppy’s attitude. Suddenly he became garrulous, and showed an increased desire to keep pace with Plaxy in acquiring all sorts of human skills. Also he devised an amusing way of ridiculing Gelert. He would hold imaginary conversations with the super-sheep-dog, pretending that Gelert’s silence was due to deliberate taciturnity. The older animal would at first ignore the garrulous puppy; but presently, particularly if the spectators laughed, his super-canine though sub-human mind would begin to suspect that Sirius was making a fool of him. He would look very self-conscious and perplexed, and sooner or later drive the insolent youngster away, or seize him and chastise him.

Plaxy was by now being taught to read and write. Her mother devoted an hour a day to this task. Sirius had at first shown a mild curiosity about the queer business, but under the influence of Gelert he had thrown it over for the sake of hunting. Elizabeth made no effort to compel him to carry on his studies. Either his distaste was a passing phase, soon to be outgrown, or his mind was after all not sufficiently super-canine to persist in this alien occupation, in which case compulsion would be disastrous. However, when his idol had fallen, he reverted to the game of reading and writing. He had missed a good deal, so Elizabeth undertook to coach him up to Plaxy’s standard. Of course his handlessness made it impossible for him ever to write save with some special apparatus. It was also discovered that, apart from his obvious disability for writing, his reading also was doomed to be very seriously hampered, so crude was his perception of visual form. Plaxy used to spell out simple words with her box of letters, but Sirius found it very difficult to distinguish between C, G, D, O and Q, and also between B, P, R, and K. He was also greatly confused by E and F, by S and Z, by A and H, by H and K. At a later stage, when Plaxy was mastering the lower-case letters, and these in small type, Sirius was still more handicapped. Sometimes it almost seemed that his intelligence was after all sub-human. Elizabeth, who, in spite of her triumphant impartiality towards her child and her foster-child, had always a secret desire for Plaxy to excel, now wrote to Thomas that after all Sirius was not much better than a moron. But Thomas, whose secret desire was the reverse of his wife’s, replied with a dissertation on the poor vision of dogs, and urged her to encourage Sirius by telling him of this canine disability, to praise his enterprise in learning to read and write at all, and to remind him that he had great advantages over human beings in other spheres. Encouragement tapped a surprising fund of doggedness in Sirius, for he spent hours every day by himself practising reading. Great progress was made, but after a week or so Elizabeth felt bound to intervene because of symptoms of mental breakdown. She praised him and petted him, and persuaded him that he would learn more quickly and permanently if he tried a bit less hard.

Sirius recognized, of course, that in writing he could not possibly reach Plaxy’s standard, but he was determined not to be entirely without this valuable art. It was he himself that invented a way out of his disability. He persuaded Elizabeth to make him a tight leather mitten for his right paw. On the back of the mitten was a socket into which a pen or pencil could be inserted. When this article was completed, he made his first experiment in writing. He was very excited. Lying in the “couchant” position with his left foreleg on the paper to hold it in place, he kept his right elbow on the ground, and was able to scrawl out DOG, CAT, PLAXY, SIRIUS, and so on. The neural organization of his leg and the motor-centres of his brain were probably not at all well adapted to this activity; but once more his doggedness triumphed. Long practice brought him after some years the skill to write a letter in large, irregular but legible characters. In later life, as I shall tell, he even ventured on the task of writing books.

Thomas was more impressed than Elizabeth by Sirius’s achievement, because he probably appreciated more fully the difficulties that the puppy had overcome.

So far as possible, Sirius took part in all the simple lessons that Elizabeth gave to Plaxy. He was never very good at arithmetic, perhaps because of his poor visual powers; but he managed to avoid being outclassed by Plaxy, who was none too good herself. His spelling, too, was very bad, probably for the same reason. But at an early age he showed a great interest in language and the art of precise expression. Poetry had sometimes a deep effect on him. In spite of his visual weakness he read a good deal, and he often begged members of the family to read aloud to him. This they did very frequently, knowing how great a boon it was for him.

But to return to his puppyhood. There came a time when it seemed desirable for Plaxy to attend the village school. Sirius, of course, could not do so. It was sometimes with thankfulness for his freedom, but sometimes with envy, that he watched his little foster-sister set off with her books in the morning. He was now of an age to do a great deal of free roaming, and the passion for the scents and adventures of the countryside was now strong in him. But the thought that Plaxy was outstripping him in knowledge of the great world of men worried him sorely. In the afternoons, when she returned from school, she often assured him that lessons were a bore; but he could tell from her tone that she felt important and proud, and that a good deal that happened at school was great fun. He made a habit of gleaning from her the most useful bits of information that she had acquired during the day. It became a regular custom with her to do her homework with him, to the profit of them both. Meanwhile Elizabeth continued Sirius’s education in a desultory but stimulating way. Often he was able to pay his debt to Plaxy by passing on to her the fruits of his own lessons, though she generally adopted a superior attitude to his tit-bits. Sometimes he told her about conversations with Thomas, who had made a habit of taking Sirius for walks on the hills and telling him all sorts of significant scraps of science or world-history. Plaxy herself, of course, was sometimes present on these walks. But generally Thomas needed vigorous exercise at the week-ends, and his little daughter could not keep up with him as well as Sirius. During his puppyhood Sirius often came home tired after long expeditions with Thomas, but when he reached mid-adolescence he used to look forward with pleasure to the almost weekly trek over Arenig, the Rhinogs or Moelwyn, listening to the far-ranging flow of Thomas’s thought, or probing him with questions. These the great physiologist answered with all the patience and care which he was accustomed to give to his students. This was Sirius’s main intellectual education, this frequent contact with a mature and brilliant mind. Often the two would discuss Sirius’s future, Thomas encouraging him to believe that a great work lay before him. But of this later. I have let myself pass beyond the dog’s puppyhood, and now I must return to it.

Not only in reading and writing but in another way also Sirius was inevitably inferior to Plaxy, and indeed to nearly all human beings. He was entirely colour-blind. I understand that there is still doubt about colour-sensitivity in dogs. Dissection, I believe, has revealed that they have approximately the same equipment of “rods and cones” in their retinae as that of human beings. But psychological experiments have not yet proved that dogs are in fact sensitive to colour. Possibly the truth is that, though some dogs are aware of colour, the incidence of colour-blindness in the canine species is much greater than in man. However that may be, it is certain that Sirius was completely colour-blind. Until quite late in his puppyhood, long after he had learned to talk, he himself had no suspicion that his seeing lacked any qualities possessed by Plaxy’s. Thomas had told Elizabeth that dogs were almost certainly colour-blind, but she refused to believe it of Sirius, insisting that he could distinguish between her differently coloured dresses. “No,” said Thomas, “he probably does it by scent or the touch of his sensitive tongue. Besides, haven’t you noticed that he goes badly adrift in his use of the names of colours? Anyhow, let’s test him.” For this purpose Thomas bought a child’s box of wooden picture-blocks, and covered the faces of the cubes with paper of different colours very carefully selected so that their tone values and tactual and olfactory qualities should be identical. Any differences of odour that might be due to differences of pigment he blotted out by drenching the blocks in eau-de-Cologne. He then presented the “box of bricks” to Plaxy and Sirius. Plaxy at once produced a chequer of pink and blue squares. Sirius was obviously uninterested in the blocks, but he was persuaded to copy Plaxy’s chequer. He put the pieces together quite at random. It was soon obvious even to Sirius himself that Plaxy saw something which he missed. He at once set about the same kind of self-education which he had undertaken in order to read. With Plaxy’s aid he must discover the thing that had escaped him in the bricks, and then strengthen his powers of seeing it. Plaxy displayed coloured objects to him one after another, naming their colours. She showed him a coloured print and a monochrome photograph. Giles produced a flash-light with red and green glasses. But all was in vain. Sirius was quite unable to discover what colour was.

He was at first greatly distressed, but Thomas comforted him by assuring him that all dogs were colour-blind, and probably all mammals but apes and men. And he reminded Sirius that dogs were at any rate far superior in hearing and smelling. Sirius had long known that human noses were very poor instruments. He had often been contemptuous because Plaxy could not smell out her mother’s track in the garden, or tell with her nose whether a certain footprint was Gelert’s or another dog’s. Moreover at an early age he was surprised and disappointed at her obtuseness to all the mysterious and exciting smells of the countryside after rain. While she mildly enjoyed an indiscriminate freshness and fragrance, he would analyse the messages of the breeze with quivering nostrils, gasping out words between the sniffs. “Horse,” he would say; then after another sniff, “And not a horse I have smelt before.” Or, “Postman! Must be coming up the lane.” Or perhaps, “Sea-smell to-day,” though the sea was several miles away behind the Rhinogs. A slight veering of the wind might bring him whiffs of a distant waterfall, or more fragrant odours of the moor, or peat or heather or bracken. Sometimes, gripped by some strange enticing scent, he would rush off to trace it. Once he came trotting back after a few minutes of exploration and said, “Strange bird, but I couldn’t see him properly.” On another occasion he suddenly rushed out of the house, sniffed the breeze, raced off up the moor, cast about till he picked up a trail, and then streamed along it round the hill shoulder. After an hour or so he returned in great excitement, made Plaxy fetch out the animal book and turn the pages till she came to The Fox. “That’s him!” he cried, “Gosh, what a smell!” Once in the middle of a romping game in the garden he came to a sudden halt, sniffing. His hair bristled, his tail curled under his belly. “Let’s go inside,” he said, “there’s some dreadful thing up wind.” Plaxy laughed, but he seemed so disturbed that she consented. Twenty minutes later Giles arrived from school, full of the news that he had seen a menagerie pass along the road to Ffestiniog.

Giles was so tickled by Sirius’s reaction that he clamoured for Sirius to be taken to see the wild beasts with the rest of the family, arguing that the little coward had better learn that bad smells were not really dangerous. After much persuasion Sirius consented to go. The experience had a lasting effect on him. As he entered the enclosure the appalling confusion of odours, some enticing, some formidable, tore his nerves as though (as he said long afterwards) all the instruments of an orchestra were tuning up together at full blast. With tucked-in tail and scared eyes he kept close to Elizabeth as the party moved from cage to cage. Many of the animals roused his hunting impulse; but the great carnivora, the abject and mangy lion, tiger, and bear, forlornly pacing their narrow cages, tortured him, partly by their terrifying natural smell, partly by their acquired odour of ill-health and misery. The slit-eyed wolf, too, greatly affected him with its similarity to himself. While he was gazing with fascination at this distant cousin, the lion suddenly roared, and Sirius, shivering with fright, shrank up against Elizabeth’s legs. Stimulated by the lion, the rest of the animals started to give tongue. When the elephant rent the air with a blast of his trumpet, Sirius took to his heels and vanished.

The world of odour was one in which Plaxy had only slight experience. In the world of sound she was not so completely outclassed, but she was far behind Sirius. He could hear approaching footsteps long before Plaxy or any other human being could detect them, and he could unfailingly tell who it was that was coming. The cry of a bat, entirely beyond the range of most human ears, was described by Sirius as a sharp needle of sound. Both Elizabeth and Plaxy soon discovered that he was incredibly sensitive to their tone of voice. He could distinguish unerringly between spontaneous praise and mere kindly encouragement, between real condemnation and censure with an undertone of amusement or approval. Not only so, but he seemed able to detect changes of temper in them before they themselves had noticed them. “Elizabeth,” he would suddenly ask, “why are you sad?” She would reply, laughing, “But I’m not! I’m rather pleased because the bread has risen nicely.” “Oh, but you are sad, underneath,” he would answer. “I can hear it quite well. You are only pleased on top.” And after a pause she would have to say, “Oh, well, perhaps I am. I wonder why.”

His nose, too, gave him a lot of information about people’s emotional states. He sometimes spoke of a “cross smell,” a “friendly smell,” a “frightened smell,” a “tired smell.”

So sensitive was he to odour and to sound, that he found human speech quite inadequate to express the richness of these two universes. He once said of a certain odour in the house, “It’s rather like the trail of a hare where a spaniel has followed it, and some time ago a donkey crossed it too.” Both scent and sound had for him rich emotional meaning, innate and acquired. It was obvious that many odours that he encountered for the first time roused a strong impulse of pursuit, while others he sought to avoid. It was obvious, too, that many odours acquired an added emotional meaning through their associations. One day when he was out on the moor by himself one of his paws was badly cut on a broken bottle. It happened that while he limped home there was a terrifying thunderstorm. When at last he staggered in at the front door, Elizabeth mothered him and cleaned up his foot with a certain well-known disinfectant. The smell of it was repugnant to him, but it now acquired a flavour of security and kindliness which was to last him all his life.

Many sounds stirred him violently. Thunder and other great noises terrified him. The tearing of calico made him leap with a purely physiological fright, and set him barking in merry protest. Human laughter he found very infectious. It roused in him a queer yelping laughter which was all his own. The tones of the human voice not only told him of the emotional state of the speaker but also stimulated strong emotional responses in himself. The odours of emotion had a similar effect.

Like many dogs, young Sirius found human music quite excruciating. An isolated vocal or instrumental theme was torture enough to him; but when several voices or instruments combined, he seemed to lose control of himself completely. His fine auditory discrimination made even well-executed solos seem to him badly out of tune. Harmony and the combination of several themes resulted for him in hideous cacophany. Elizabeth and the children would sometimes sing rounds, for instance when they were coming down the moor after a picnic. Sirius invariably had to give up his usual far-ranging course and draw into the party to howl. The indignant children would chase him away, but as soon as the singing began again he would return and once more give tongue. On one occasion Tamsy, who was the most seriously musical member of the family, cried imploringly, “Sirius, do either keep quiet or keep away! Why can’t you let us enjoy ourselves?” He replied, “But how can you like such a horrible jarring muddle of sweet noises? I have to come to you because they’re so sweet, and I have to howl because it’s a mess, and because — oh because it might be so lovely.” Once he said, “If I were to paint a picture could you just keep away? Wouldn’t you go crazy because of the all-wrongness of the colour? Well, sounds are far more exciting to me than your queer colour is to you.”

The family refused to admit that their singing was a mess. Instead, they determined to “teach Sirius music.” He accepted his fate with dog-like docility and fortitude. After all, painful as the process must be, it would help him to find out more about human beings; and even at a very early age he had begun to be curious about the difference between himself and his friends.

The whole family gathered in the sitting-room to “teach Sirius music.” Elizabeth produced her cherished but now neglected violin. On the few earlier occasions when she had played on it within earshot of Sirius, he always came hurrying to her, howling. If the door was shut, he gave tongue outside. Otherwise he rushed into the room and leapt up at her till she had to stop. On this occasion he at first made some effort to keep a hold on himself during the painful operation that his family were determined to perform on him. But excitement soon overcame him. Tamsy was at the piano. Maurice and Giles were ready, if wanted, with their recorders. Plaxy sat on the floor with her arms around the resigned but rather mischievous Sirius, “to keep him from going mad on us.” For it was clear that Sirius was going to be difficult. When Plaxy let him escape, he bounded from instrument to instrument, making mock attacks on each. His tail thrashed from side to side in a conflict of agony and delight, knocking the bow from Elizabeth’s hand, and sending a recorder flying across the room. Even when Plaxy held him, he turned the experiment to chaos by giving tongue with such vigour and virtuosity that the simple tones of the instrument were drowned. When at last he was persuaded to co-operate seriously, it was soon found that he had at any rate a far better ear for pitch than any of the family. When Elizabeth moved her finger so slightly on the string that none of the children could hear any difference, Sirius detected a change. Elizabeth was amazed to find that he could also sing accurately in tune. Once when she played a single tone and he could not restrain himself from giving tongue, the main element in his wail was obviously in tune with the violin. With a little encouragement he produced the pure note without any trimmings. When Maurice played a scale on his recorder, Sirius sang in unison with it, keeping perfectly in tune even with the inaccurate tones produced by the young musician on an imperfect instrument.

With his usual doggedness Sirius set about conquering this excruciating thing, music. He showed surprising aptitude for singing, soon outstripping Plaxy in reproducing the family songs. Sometimes he sang without words; sometimes he used his own canine equivalent of the English words of the song. (His lingo, being simply mispronounced English, rhymed and scanned appropriately.)

With practice he became less tortured by human music. In fact he actually came to like it, so long as it was not too badly out of tune. He would often join in singing the rounds that had formerly tormented him. Sometimes when Elizabeth played her violin he would come to listen. In certain moods he would retire to a favourite point of vantage on the moor and spend hours singing to himself. He would go over and over the songs that Elizabeth had so often sung about the house.

It was a tune-loving family. Under Elizabeth’s influence it had developed an amusing system of musical calls which served the function of bugle-calls. A certain little tune meant “Time to get up,” another “Breakfast is ready,” another “All is now prepared for starting on the expedition,” and so on. Plaxy and Sirius, the two youngest members of the family, invented a number of private calls of their own. One of these, for instance, meant “Come and help me!” Another said, “Something interesting here. Come and investigate;” another “Come and play with me!” One little trickle of sound meant, “I am going to pee.” To this there were two possible musical answers. One said, “Right oh! So am I,” and the other “Nothing doing by me.” It was curious, by the way, that if one of them made water the other had always to follow suit on the same spot, in the approved canine manner. Always? No! Plaxy soon found that she could not keep pace with Sirius in this etiquette of leaving tokens.

When Thomas heard of Sirius’s habit of retiring on to the moor to practise singing, he feared lest his precious animal should become notorious as “the singing dog,” and be exploited. It was indeed startling for the natives to hear the sweet, accurate, but inarticulate and inhuman voice, and to come upon a large dog squatting on his haunches melodiously giving tongue. Thomas, it was rumoured, had sinister powers. He could put demons into dogs. Fortunately the farther these rumours spread, the less they were believed. No craze equivalent to the case of the talking mongoose or the Loch Ness monster developed over the singing dog.

In his puppyhood Sirius sang only human music. Throughout his life he was deeply interested in the great classical achievements of man’s musical genius, but as he had always found the fundamental structure of human music crude, and inadequate to his interest in sound-form and the emotions which sought musical expression, he began to experiment with new scales, intervals, and rhythms, suited to his more sensitive hearing. He made use of the quarter-tone and even the eighth-of-a-tone. Sometimes, in his purely canine mood, his melodies divided the octave in quite a different manner from any human musical mode. Thus to the human listener his most distinctive music became less recognizably musical and more like the baying of a dog, though a strangely varied and disturbing baying.

A supple and mellow voice was Sirius’s only medium of expression. He often longed to play some instrument, so as to be able to introduce harmony into his experiments, but his tragic lack of hands prevented him. Sometimes he sat at the piano trying to finger out a two-note accompaniment to his singing, but his paws were far too clumsy to do even this properly. For long spells he would give up music entirely because his handlessness prevented him from doing what he wanted with it. At these times he would wander about with tail and head low, refusing comfort. The mingled sense of helplessness and talent tormented him. But presently his buoyant spirits would revive, and he would resolve that, if instrumental music must remain for ever impossible to him, he would do new and marvellous things with his voice. Throughout his life Sirius alternated between self-pity on account of his disabilities and a surprisingly detached and humorous acceptance of his nature and his environment, issuing in a zestful will to triumph in spite of everything.

CHAPTER IV

YOUTH

IN THE FOREGOING chapter I should have written only about Sirius as a puppy, but in dealing with his disabilities and powers I was inevitably led on to speak of his later life. His serious musical adventures, for instance, did not begin till puppyhood was well over. I must now concentrate more definitely on his adolescence and early maturity, preparing the way for an account of that part of his life with which my own life became for a while closely entangled.

Already in adolescence Sirius was larger than most sheep-dogs. But though tall, he was at this time very slight and lanky, and it was often said that he had “overgrown his strength.” He was also far from courageous. His caution in his encounters with other dogs was increased by his discovery in sundry minor brawls that his large cranium made his head unwieldy and his seizing of his opponent rather less slick than it might have been. This weakness was largely overcome when he reached full maturity, for constant exercise developed the muscles of his neck sufficiently to cope with his extra weight of head. In youth, however, he was no match for the smaller but more experienced collies that tended the sheep. One of these, unfortunately a near neighbour, formed a habit of persecuting Sirius whenever possible. There came a day when he was ignominiously chased home by this animal, who bore the appropriate name Diawl Du, black devil. It was the schoolgirl Plaxy who seized the yard broom and drove off the black devil with blows and shrill curses. Later Sirius heard Plaxy telling her mother about the incident. She ended the story with, “I’m afraid poor Sirius hasn’t much spunk.” Sirius did not know the word “spunk,” but he detected in Plaxy’s voice, which she intended to be merely amused, a note of deep mortification. He sneaked off to find a dictionary. With some trouble and much use of his wet tongue for turning the “India paper” pages he found the word; and he didn’t like the idea that Plaxy thought him lacking in spunk. For “spunk” according to the Oxford Concise Dictionary meant “courage, mettle, spirit, anger,” and was connected with “spark.” Somehow he must regain Plaxy’s respect, but how?

That same day Plaxy seemed to turn her attention away from Sirius towards the young cat, Trix, successor to Tommy. This impulse to make much of cats was a common reaction with her when she was at all alienated from Sirius. She would cuddle Trix in front of him and remark on her lovely tortoise-shell coat or her dainty nose. Also, Sirius noted, she would become strangely cat-like herself, sitting about in lofty silence and indolence, “hugging herself,” as he sometimes put it.

Shortly after his defeat by Diawl Du, Sirius got himself into serious disgrace over Trix. The cat was contemplating a leap into Plaxy’s lap when Sirius lost control of himself and attacked his minute rival with noisy rage. She arched her back and stood firm, slashing Sirius’s face, so that he retreated, yelping. Plaxy’s scream turned into a laugh. Reviling Sirius for a bully and a coward, she snatched up Trix and lavished endearments on her. Sirius slunk away in shame and misery.

A fortnight later it was remarked in the family that Sirius had developed an unexpected craze for worrying an old spade handle which had been lying in the outhouse. Whenever possible he would persuade some sturdy human being, preferably Maurice, who was home from boarding school, to join in the game. Boy and dog would hang on to opposite ends of the piece of ash and swing hither and thither about the garden, each trying to shake off his opponent. Towards the end of the holidays Maurice remarked, “Sirius is getting damned strong. You can’t tear the thing from him; you can’t twist it from him.” All this time Sirius had been carefully avoiding Diawl Du, but at last he felt ready. Though he was confident that his grip was much more powerful than it had been, and his head movements quicker and more precise, he would not trust to physical powers alone; cunning must be his mainstay. His strategy was planned with great care. He studied his chosen battle-ground, and rehearsed the crucial action which was to give him victory in the very scene of his former discomfiture, and under the eyes of Plaxy.

One afternoon when Plaxy had returned from school he hurried over to Glasdo, the farm where Diawl Du lived, and ostentatiously hung about till his enemy issued like a black avalanche from the farmyard gate. Sirius at once took to his heels, bolting for home. To reach the front door of Garth, which was ostensibly his objective, he had to make a right-angled turn through the yard gate. (Garth, it will be remembered, was an old farm-house.) As he checked himself to do this and swing through the gate, he glanced behind to see that Diawl Du was at the correct distance. Then he raced round the yard in a great curve, arriving back at the gate, but at right angles to his original course through it, and hidden from Diawl Du by the wall. At that moment the collie swerved through the gate in pursuit, and Sirius with great momentum crashed into him on the left flank. Diawl Du rolled over with Sirius on top of him. Sirius gripped his throat, his teeth finding a much firmer hold than on the hard old spade handle. He hung on desperately, fearing that if he once let go the superior skill of the other dog would be his undoing. The collie’s throttled screams and Sirius’s own continuous muffled growl soon brought out the inmates of the house. Out of the corner of his eye, as he rolled over and over with his enemy, Sirius caught sight of Plaxy. The warm blood seeped into his mouth and threatened to choke him, but he hung on, coughing for breath. The saltness and odour of Diawl Du’s blood, he afterwards said, turned him mad. Some pent-up energy and fury in him was released for the first time. At the height of the struggle the thought flashed upon him, “This is real life, this is what I am for, not all that human twaddle.” He gripped and tugged and worried, while Diawl Du’s struggles became weaker, and the horrified human beings did their best to loosen his grip. They beat him, they threw pepper in his face so that he sneezed violently, but he did not let go. They fell upon him in a mass to hold him quiet while they tried to prise his jaws open with a stick. His own blood mixed with the collie’s in his mouth, and he was surprised at the different flavour of it. Nothing that the family could do made him loosen his grip. Plaxy, desperate with horror, did her best to force her hands into his mouth. Then suddenly beside herself, she screamed. At last Sirius let go, and Diawl Du lay inert on the ground.

The victor stalked away, licking his blood-slippery lips, his spine still bristling. After taking a drink at the trough under the yard pump, he lay down with his chin on his paws to watch the proceedings. Elizabeth sent the children into the house for warm water, disinfectants, bandages, while she examined the wound. Presently Plaxy was holding the unconscious dog’s head, while Elizabeth applied a large cotton-wool pad and wound the bandage round his neck. After a while Diawl Du showed signs of life, moving his head slightly in Plaxy’s hands. He produced the ghost of a growl, which ended in a whimper. Then they carried him inside and laid him before the kitchen fire with a drink of water beside him.

No one took any notice of Sirius, who still lay in the yard, stiff and sore; triumphant, but also rather bewildered and resentful. If she wanted him to have spunk, why didn’t she come and praise him and pet him?

Presently Elizabeth came and started up the little car. When she had backed it into the road, she went in and, with Maurice’s help, brought out Diawl Du in her arms, while the others prepared a place for him on the back seat of the car. When he was comfortably laid on a rug on the seat, she drove off to Glasdo.

The children turned towards Sirius. “Gosh!” said Maurice, “you’ve done it this time!” And Tamsy, “They’ll have you shot as a dangerous animal.” Giles contributed, “It was just murder.” Plaxy said nothing but “Oh, Sirius!” He stared at her in silence, trying to analyse her tone of voice. Mainly it spoke reproach, and horror. But there was something else in it, perhaps exultation at his prowess, perhaps mere human superiority. Anyhow, what did he care? He lay still for a little longer with chin on paws, staring at Plaxy. At that moment Trix, the cat, came and rubbed herself against Plaxy’s legs. Plaxy picked her up and hugged her. Sirius rose, his back once more bristling, and with a low noise between a snort and a growl he stalked with conscious dignity out through the gate.

The fight with Diawl Du was a turning point in the career of Sirius. He had tasted victory. He had got his own back. Never again would he be cowed by half-wit persecutors. But something more had happened than a calculated triumph. His deeper nature, his unconscious nature, had found expression. He had discovered something far more satisfying than human sophistication. These thoughts were not clear in his mind at the time; but looking back on the incident from a much later period, this was the form that he gave them.

Elizabeth warned him that, if he attempted murder again, there might be serious trouble. “Remember,” she said, “to outsiders you are only a dog. You have no legal rights at all. If someone decides that you are a nuisance and shoots you, he won’t be had up for murder; he’ll merely get into trouble for destroying a bit of our property. Besides,” she added, “how could you do it? It was horrible, just animal.” Sirius gave no response to this taunt; but taunt he felt it to be. He could both smell and hear her contemptuous hostility. Probably some suppressed and unacknowledged hate for her canine foster-child had found a sudden outlet. Sirius saw the folly and danger of his action clearly enough, but her last remark filled him with rage. In his heart he said, “To hell with them all!” Outwardly he gave no sign that he was even listening. He was sitting in front of the kitchen fire, and after Elizabeth’s taunt he cocked up a hind leg and carefully, ostentatiously, groomed his private parts, a habit which he often used with great effect to annoy his women folk.

As the months piled up into years Sirius’s self-confidence in relation to other dogs was greatly augmented. His increasing weight and strength combined with superior intelligence to give him not only freedom from persecution but acknowledged superiority over all the sheep-dogs of the countryside, who were all much smaller than the young Alsatian. His combination of size and cunning put him in a class apart. As for “spunk”, the truth seems to be that throughout his life he remained at heart a timid creature who rose to a display of boldness only in desperation or when the odds were favourable, or on those rare occasions when the dark god of his blood took possession of him.

I cannot deal with his relations with animals of his own biological type without giving some account of his sexual adventures. Long before the fight with Diawl Du he had begun to be perplexedly interested in any bitch in heat that he happened to come across. Mostly they would have nothing to do with him, regarding him, presumably, as an overgrown puppy. But there was one large and rather elderly black bitch who seemed to find the callow young giant very attractive. With her he periodically indulged in a great deal of desultory love-play. Thomas observed the antics of the couple with keen interest, because it soon became obvious that Sirius lacked the ordinary dog’s intuitive aptitude for making full use of his opportunities. The two animals would race around, tumbling over one another in mock battle, obviously relishing the delectable contact of their bodies. But after a while Sirius would stand about foolishly wagging his tail, wondering what to do next. This aimlessness was of course a normal stage in the sexual development of dogs, but normally it soon led to copulation. Sirius, however, who as it happened had never observed another canine pair copulating, seemed permanently at a loss. It was not till he came upon his own beloved in the act of being taken by another dog, far younger than himself but more instinctive and more physiologically mature, that he discovered what it was that his body wanted to do.

Henceforth his amours were brought to a point in the normal manner. Physiologically he was still merely in the “schoolboy” phase, and not very attractive to mature bitches. Nor was sex at this stage an obsessive passion with him. It was more important as a symbol of maturity than as an end in itself. Its natural seductiveness was much enhanced by its being “the done thing” for grown-up dogs. In comparison with Plaxy and even the elder children Sirius seemed sexually precocious, simply because his unrestricted amours afforded him experience and technique, while to the children everything of the sort remained for a long while almost unexplored territory.

In one respect Sirius found his love affairs miserably unsatisfactory, throughout his life. For the beloved of the hour, however delectable in odour and appearance and in bodily contact, was invariably from his point of view something less than a half-wit. She could not speak, she could not understand his spoken endearments. She could not share the adventures of his wakening mind. And when her heat was over she became devastatingly frigid and unattractive. The fragrance was gone; the moron mentality remained.

Thomas was greatly interested in Sirius’s accounts of his love affairs; about which, by the way, he showed no reticence. To the question, “What is it that attracts you in her?” young Sirius could only reply, “She smells so lovely.” Later in life he was able to say more. Some years later I myself discussed the matter with him, and he said, “Of course it’s mostly the luscious smell of her. I can’t possibly make you understand the power of it, because you humans are so bad at smells. It’s as though your noses were not merely feeble but colour-blind. But think of all that your poets have ever said about the delectable curves and colours of the beloved, and how her appearance seems to express a lovely spirit (often deceptively), and then imagine the whole thing done in terms of fragrance. Morwen’s fragrance when she wants me is like the scent of the morning, with a maddening tang in it for which there are no words. It is the scent of a very gentle and fragrant spirit, but unfortunately the spirit of Morwen is nine-tenths asleep, and always will be. But she smells like what she would be if she were really awake.”

“But what about her appearance?” I said. “Doesn’t that attract you?” “It attracts me a lot,” he replied, “but ordinary dogs take little notice of it. With them it’s smell that counts, and of course the touch of her, too. But it’s the smell that enthrals one, the maddening, stinging, sweet smell, that soaks right through your body, so that you can’t think of anything else day or night. But her looks? Yes I certainly do care about her looks. She’s so sleek and slim and slick. Also her looks help a lot to express the spirit that she might have been if she had been properly awake, like me. But then you see I have been made to notice appearances so much by being with you sharp-eyed creatures. All the same, even for me her voice is really more important than her looks. She can’t talk, of course; but she can say the sweetest, tenderest things with the tone and rhythm of her voice. Of course she doesn’t really and clearly mean them. She says in her sleep, so to speak, things that she would mean if she were awake.”

But to return to Sirius’s adolescence. Elizabeth had brought up her children in the modern tradition. Living in the country they were bound to learn a bit about sex from watching beasts and birds. But since there was none of the still very common guiltiness attached to sex in their minds, their interest in sex was very desultory, and they took a surprisingly long time to tumble to it. When Sirius achieved his first love affair, the two younger members of the family, who were not yet at boarding school, suspected nothing; but presently he began to talk about it with obvious pride. Elizabeth had to use all her tact and humour to establish the convention that what was perfectly right and proper for Sirius was not to be indulged in by human children until they were grown up; and that anyhow one didn’t talk about these things outside the family; and above all, not in Wales. The whole affair, she confessed to Thomas, was really rather awkward, and she only hoped she hadn’t done more harm than good.

Plaxy had of course already had numerous childhood romances. Very early in her schooldays she had been violently in love with a little Welsh girl at the village school. Whether this should be regarded as a sexual sentiment or not, it was certainly an obsession. Sirius, for the first time in his life, found himself unwanted. Plaxy suddenly had no time for the games they used to play when school and homework were over; for she had always promised to do something with Gwen. She would not let him come with her when she went out with her friend, for (she said) Gwen would soon find out that Sirius could talk; and it was the whole family’s most sacred taboo that outsiders must not discover yet that Sirius was something more than a super-sheep-dog. This was the secret which they had learnt to cherish as a tribal mystery. No one but the six members of the family knew about it, except Kate, who had long ago been accepted into the tribe. The other two members of the domestic staff, Mildred the nursemaid and the local girl, had both been regretfully dismissed in order that the secret might not be endangered. Sirius therefore saw the force of Plaxy’s argument; but something in her voice told him that she was glad to have such a plausible excuse for leaving him behind. The sudden loss of Plaxy’s companionship and confidence weighed heavily on the puppy. He did nothing but mope about the house and garden waiting for her return. When she arrived he treated her with effusive affection, but in her response there was often a note of absentmindedness or even indifference.

After a while this early romance faded out, and Sirius was reinstated. But other romances followed. When she was twelve Plaxy lost her heart to the local blacksmith’s boy, Gwilim, who was eighteen. This was a one-sided affair, and Plaxy saw little of him. She made Sirius her confidant, and he comforted her by protesting that Gwilim must be stupid not to love such a nice girl. Once he said, “Anyhow, Plaxy, I love you.” She hugged him and said, “Yes, I know, and I love you. But I do love Gwilim. And you see he’s my kind, and you’re not. I love you differently; not less, but differently.”

It was while Plaxy was pining for her brawny young blacksmith that Sirius himself began to be seriously interested in the females of his own kind. Suddenly Plaxy found that her faithful confidant, who had always been ready to listen and sympathize, save during brief hunting expeditions, was no longer available. Often when she came back from school he was nowhere to be found. He failed to turn up either for homework or games or even meals. Or if he was present, he was mentally far away, and perfunctory in his sympathy. Once when she was telling him how marvellously Gwilim swung the hammer on to the red-hot iron, and how he smiled at her afterwards, Sirius suddenly sprang to his feet, stood for a moment sniffing the air, then bolted. Bitterly mortified, she said to herself, “He’s not a real friend, after all. He’s just a brute beast.” (This expression she had recently learnt at school.) “He doesn’t really understand, he doesn’t really care.” All this she knew to be quite untrue.

After her intermittent and always unrequited passion for Gwilim had dragged on for eighteen months, causing her much sweet sorrow and self-importance, she happened to come one day upon Sirius in the very act of love with his fragrant darling of the moment. On one occasion recently she had seen two dogs behaving in this odd way, but she had not seen Sirius doing it. She was surprised to find that it was a horrid shock to her. She hurried away, feeling unreasonably outraged and lonely.

It was two or three years after the affair with Gwilim that she made her first conquest. Conwy Pritchard, the postmaster’s son, was a much more responsive lover than the always friendly but never sentimental Gwilim. Conwy had a fight with another boy about her. This was very thrilling. She let herself be wholly monopolized by him. Sirius was once more neglected. When he himself happened to have an affair on, or was crazy about hunting, he did not mind at all. At other times he was often very lonely.

Moreover, during this enthralling intimacy with Conwy, Plaxy’s manner to Sirius sometimes showed an unwonted harshness. It was as though she had not merely forgotten about him, but resented his existence. Once he came upon the youthful lovers walking in a lane, hand in hand. When she saw him, Plaxy withdrew her hand and said in the way one speaks to a mere dog, “Go home, Sirius!” Conwy remarked, “Why does your father have to breed these fat-headed brutes?” Plaxy laughed nervously, and said in a rather squeaky voice, “Oh, but Sirius is a nice dog, really. Now off with you, Sirius. We don’t want you now.” While the dog stood still in the road, trying to analyse Plaxy’s tone, to discover her precise emotional state, Conwy made a move as though to pick up a stone, and shouted, “Go home, you tyke.” The strong silky mane rose along Sirius’s neck and shoulders, and he stalked ominously towards Conwy, with head down, ears back, and the ghost of a snarl. Plaxy cried out in a startled voice, “Sirius! Don’t be crazy!” He looked at her coldly, then turned and walked off down the lane.

That evening Plaxy tried hard to make friends with Sirius, but he would not respond. At last she said, and he could tell that she was nearly in tears, “I’m terribly sorry about this afternoon. But what could I do? I had to pretend you were just an ordinary dog, hadn’t I?” His reply disconcerted her. “You wish I really was one, don’t you!” A tear spilled out of her eye as she answered, “Oh, Sirius, I don’t. But I’m growing up, and I must be like other girls.” “Of course,” he answered, “just as I must be like other dogs, even though I’m not really one of them, and there’s no one of my sort in the whole world.” He began to move off, but she suddenly seized him and hugged him, and said, “Oh, oh, you and I will be friends always. Even if each of us wants to be away living another life sometimes, we’ll always, always, come back to one another afterwards, and tell about it.” “If it could be like that,” he said, “I should not be lonely even when you were away.” She smiled and fondled him. “Plaxy,” he said, “in spite of you being a girl and me a dog, you are nearest of all creatures to lonely me.” Sniffing lightly at her neck, he added, “And the smell of you is more lovely really than the crazy-making scents of bitches.” Then with his little whimpering laugh he said, “Nice human bitch!” Plaxy blushed, but she too laughed. She silently considered the phrase; then said, “If Conwy called me a bitch he’d mean something horrid, and I’d never speak to him again. When you say it, I suppose it’s a compliment.” “But you are a bitch,” he protested. “You’re a bitch of the species Homo sapiens, that Thomas is always talking about as though it was a beast in the Zoo.”

After the incident in the lane, Plaxy’s affair with Conwy went all awry. She saw him in a new light. He was an attractive enough human animal, but he was nothing more. Apart from his looks and his confident irresistible love-making, there was nothing to him. The dog Sirius was far more human.

For a while Plaxy and Sirius maintained a very close intimacy. She even persuaded him to walk to school in the morning and bring her back in the afternoon, “to keep Conwy from being a nuisance.” Indeed the two were always together, and never at a loss for talk. When Plaxy went to a party at the village school, where there was to be dancing, Sirius was of course lonely and bored, but he did not really mind. She would come back. When Sirius went off for the day with Thomas, it did not matter. Plaxy was lonely, but busy. And when he came back he would tell her all about it. Even when he went crazy over a new bitch she did not fundamentally mind. She was secretly and unexpectedly jealous; but she laughed at herself, and she kept her jealousy hidden. His love affairs, she told herself, were no concern of hers, and they did not really matter. Anyhow they were soon over; and she herself was beginning to be interested in a boy she had met at the dance, a young student, on holiday from Bangor.

At this time Plaxy was already (so I was told) developing that rather queer gracefulness which became so striking in her maturity. Whether by native composition or by constant companionship with a non-human creature, or both, she earned the remark of the local doctor’s wife, “That child is going to be a charmer, but somehow she’s not quite human.” At school she was often called “Pussy,” and there was indeed a cat-like quality about her. Her soft hair and very large greenish blue eyes, her rather broad face, with its little pointed chin and flat nose, were obviously feline; so was her deliberate, loose-limbed walk. Sometimes when she was moody, and inaccessible to her own kind, her mother would call her “The cat that walked by itself.” Not till long after I had married her did I tell her my own theory of her peculiar grace. It was, of course, the influence of Sirius, I said, that had created her “scarcely human” manner; but it was her latent antagonism to Sirius that had turned that manner cat-like. It was this character that enthralled him and exasperated him, and indeed all her admirers, from Conwy Pritchard to myself. There was one characteristic about her which particularly suggested an unconscious protest against Sirius, one which tended to be exaggerated whenever she was in conflict with him. This was the extraordinary delicacy and precision of the movements of her hands, both in practical operations and in gesture. It was as though her consciousness of herself was chiefly centred in her hands, and to a lesser degree in her eyes. This character of elegant “handedness” was something far stronger than mere felinity. It was reminiscent of those Javanese dancers who use their hands with such exquisite effect. It was at once human and “para-human,” so that she seemed to me not so much cat as fay. She was indeed at once cat, fawn, dryad, elf, witch.

This description really applies to Plaxy in her early maturity, when I first met her; no doubt in childhood her peculiar charm was only nascent. But even at fifteen or sixteen the “scarcely human” grace was appearing, and was strongly attractive to the young males of her own species.

It was in this period, in fact when Plaxy was sixteen, that Elizabeth suggested to Thomas that it was high time for the child to go to boarding school. The others had gone at a much earlier age. Plaxy had been kept back partly to be an intelligent companion for Sirius. “But now,” said Elizabeth, “she’s much too wrapped up in him. She won’t grow up properly this way. She’s cloistered here in this lonely place. She needs to see more of her own kind.” Thomas had been secretly planning not to send Plaxy to boarding school at all, partly for Sirius’s sake, but also because the other three, he felt, had been rather deadened by it. “Cloistered!” he cried, “what about that damned nunnery where Tamsy was?” Elizabeth admitted that it had turned out rather badly, and added, “Anyhow, I thought we might send Plaxy to a more modern place, preferably co-educational. She doesn’t mix enough with the boys.”

Strange, or perhaps not strange at all, that both parents, though consciously modern in outlook, and on friendly terms with their children, were kept completely in the dark about their children’s love affairs. They scarcely guessed that such things occurred!

I am inclined to think that there was another reason why Thomas was reluctant to send Plaxy away from home, a reason which, I suspect, Thomas himself did not recognize. Perhaps my guess is wrong, but on the few occasions when I saw father and daughter together, I felt that behind his detached and ostentatiously “scientific” interest in her lay a very strong feeling for his youngest child. And I suspect that he could not bring himself to face week-ends at Garth in her absence. Plaxy, on her side, was always rather aloof from her father, though quite friendly with him. She sometimes teased him about his mannerisms, for instance his habit of pursing his lips when he was puzzled. She was never infected by his passion for science, but when he was criticized she sometimes defended him with surprising ardour. For this reason, and in the light of subsequent events, it may be inferred that Thomas’s submerged passion for her was reciprocated. Yet many years later, when Plaxy and I were married, and I was planning out this biography of Sirius with her, she ridiculed my suggestion that there was any strong feeling between her and her father, arguing that, like so many amateur psychologists, I was “always looking for a parent complex.”

This book is about Sirius, not Plaxy. I should not mention the problem of Plaxy’s relation with Thomas did I not feel that it may throw some light on her extraordinarily deep, though conflicting, feelings about Sirius, who was Thomas’s crowning work, and the apple of his eye.

However this may be, Thomas was not easily persuaded to let Plaxy go to boarding school. When at last he agreed in principle, and both parents began to search for a suitable school, he found weighty objections against all of them. However, in the end he accepted a certain co-educational and temperately modern establishment, situated conveniently near Cambridge.

The whole matter had, of course, been discussed with Plaxy herself, who was not easily reconciled to the prospect of what she called “going to prison.” So great an upheaval in her life was bound to intimidate her. Moreover the thought came to her, “What will Sirius do without me?”

As though answering this unexpressed question, her mother said, “We think it’s time for Sirius to get away for a bit too. He is to begin learning to be a sheep-dog.”

Plaxy was in the end reconciled to going; and once she had made up her mind to it, she found herself sometimes strangely eager. This eagerness she could not help tracing to the prospect of being wholly a normal girl among other girls and boys. Evidently she was already suffering from a serious conflict over Sirius.

It was Thomas who talked to Sirius about the great change that was being planned. He began by saying that the time seemed to have come for Sirius to have an active life away from home. “I know quite well, of course, that I have no right to treat you as a mere dog, and that you yourself must settle your career; but you are young. In physical and mental growth, as in years, you are level with Plaxy, about sixteen. So the advice of an older mind may be helpful. Naturally I have my own ideas about your future. You are quite as intelligent as most human adolescents, and you have special advantages. I see you becoming one of the world’s great animal psychologists and working with my crowd at Cambridge. But you mustn’t get into the limelight yet. It would be very bad for you; and anyhow you have not had the right training yet, and of course mentally you are still too young. I think what you need now is a whole-time job as a sheep-dog, say for a year. I’ll put you across as my ‘super-super-sheep-dog.’ I think I can fix you up with Pugh, and he will certainly treat you decently. You’ll have a hard life, of course, but you need that. And the whole experience should be interesting, and very useful to you later on. You must be careful not to give it away that you can talk; but you have had some practice at that game already. I’m afraid the job will be terribly dull at times, but most jobs are. For intellectual interest you will have to depend on your own resources. There’ll be no chance of reading, but you will be able to make some very interesting observations of animal and human behaviour.”

Sirius listened intently to this long harangue as he walked with Thomas on the crest of the Moel. At last he spoke, slowly and carefully; for Thomas was less practised than the others at understanding him. “Yes,” he said, “I’m ready to have a shot at it. Do you think I should be able to come home fairly often?”

“Oh yes,” Thomas replied, in an altered voice. “You probably haven’t yet heard that Plaxy is going to boarding school. I’ll tell Pugh the whole family will be very disappointed if you are not with us a lot during the holidays, because you are the family dog, now that Gelert is dead. Pugh will arrange that all right.” He added, “I’m afraid you and Plaxy will miss one another badly at first. But you will both get used to it. And after all you must live your lives separately some day, so you had better begin practising now.”

“Yes, of course,” said Sirius, but his tail drooped and he fell silent for a long time.

In fact only once did he speak. He suddenly asked, “Why did you make only one of me? It’s going to be lonely being me.”

Thomas told him that there had been a litter of “four of you,” and that he alone had survived. “We have tried again many times,” he said. “It’s fairly easy to produce the Gelert sort, but you are a very different kettle of fish. We have two promising puppies coming on now, but they are too young yet for us to size up their powers. And there’s a super-chimp, though of course she’s no good to you. She’s a problem, sometimes a nit-wit and sometimes too clever by half.”

There was always a great bustle in the house when a child was being made ready for school. When it was the child’s first term, the preparations were even more prolonged. Clothes had to be bought or made. Books, writing materials, sports gear, had all to be procured. As the day approached, Plaxy became more and more absorbed in her urgent affairs. Sirius wondered at her cheerfulness. It was supposed to be a gallant pose in the face of impending sorrow, but often it “smelt” genuine. There was little for him to do in the preparations, save for occasional messages, so he had far too much time to brood on the future. Plaxy’s cheerfulness was, indeed, partly a cloak to cover her desolation at the prospect of leaving home and all that she loved. Had she been younger she might not have felt the break so badly. On the morning of her departure she happened to meet Sirius alone on the landing. She surprised him by dropping her bundle of clothes and kneeling down to hug him. With schoolgirl sentimentality but with underlying sincerity of feeling, she said, “Whatever becomes of me I shall always belong to you. Even when I have been unkind to you I belong to you. Even if — even if I fall in love with someone and marry him some day, I shall belong to you. Why did I not know it properly until to-day?” He said, “It is I that am yours until I die. I have known it ever so long — since I bit you.” Looking into his grey eyes and fondling the dense growth on his shoulder, she said, “We are bound to hurt one another so much, again and again. We are so terribly different.” “Yes,” he said, “But the more different, the more lovely the loving.”

CHAPTER V

SHEEP-DOG APPRENTICE

ON THE DAY after Plaxy went to boarding school Thomas took Sirius over to Pugh at Caer Blai. On the way he talked a great deal to the dog about his future, promising that when he had been with Pugh a year he should see something of the human world beyond the sheep-country, and possibly settle in Cambridge. Sirius listened and consented; but he was an anxious and a sorrowing animal, and his tail would not stay proud.

One source of solid comfort lay in the fact that he knew Pugh for a decent sort. Sirius classified human beings in respect of their altitude to dogs; and even in later life he found this a useful touchstone of human character. There were those who were simply indifferent to dogs, lacking sufficient imagination to enter into any reciprocal relation with them. There were the “dog-lovers,” whom he detested. These were folk who sentimentalized dogs, and really had no accurate awareness of them, exaggerating their intelligence and loveableness, mollycoddling them and over-feeding them; and starving their natural impulses of sex, pugnacity and hunting. For this sort, dogs were merely animate and “pathetically human” dolls. Then there were the dog-detesters, who were either too highbrow to descend to companionship with a dumb animal or too frightened of their own animal nature. Finally there were the “dog-interested,” who combined a fairly accurate sense of the difference between dog and man with a disposition to respect a dog as a dog, as a rather remote but essentially like-minded relative. Pugh was of this sort.

At the farm they were greeted with an uproar by the two super-sheep-dogs at present in Pugh’s possession. The farmer issued from the byre. He was a fresh-complexioned middle-aged man with a scrubby reddish moustache and blue eyes with a permanent twinkle. Sirius rather liked the smell of him. He guessed the man must do a lot of laughing. They were taken into the kitchen, where drinks were provided by Mrs. Pugh, while the two men talked. Pugh had a good look at Sirius, who was squatting on the floor by Thomas. “He’s really far too big for a sheep-dog, Mr. Trelone,” said Pugh in his singing Welsh voice. “He should be herding rhinoceroses, or not the little Welsh mountain sheep, anyhow. But, my! What a head he has on him! If it’s brain that counts, Mr. Trelone, he must be a genius, isn’t it! I can see it’s he that’ll be running this farm and me running after the sheep for him. Pity I’m so rheumatic!” Thomas admitted that Sirius was pretty bright, for a dog. “He’ll be useful. But don’t expect too much. After all, he’s only a dumb animal.” “Of course,” said Pugh, and then surprisingly he winked at Sirius. “I have had experience of your dogs, Mr. Trelone, and fine animals they are. There’s Idwal here now. He’s full of strength, though he is twelve, which is very unusual for a hard-working sheep-dog. Then there’s the bitch you sent me two years ago. Juno, we call her. My! She was quick to learn the tricks of the trade! And now she has had that litter of six by old Idwal. But the magic did not go into them from the parents. They are six little fools. But I have sold them all for a good price.” “Well,” said Thomas, “I told you not to expect anything from the second generation.” Pugh replied with a sigh. “Yes, indeed, and you did, Mr. Trelone. I told the purchasers what you said, but they would not believe it, whatever; so what could I do but take the good price and tell them they were fools.” After lighting his pipe Pugh asked, “And how old is this one, Mr. Trelone?” Thomas hesitated, then said, “Fifteen, aren’t you, Sirius?” The dog let slip a “Yes,” but Pugh apparently did not notice anything unusual in his sudden grunt. “Fifteen! Holy Moses, Mr. Trelone, but most dogs are dead long before that, and this one is not much more than a puppy.” Thomas reminded him that longevity had been one of the aims of the experiment. “Well,” said Pugh laughing, “if he will stay on with me he shall marry my daughter Jane and take over the farm when I am gone. But what is the name he answers to, Mr. Trelone, did you say?” “I call him Sirius,” said Thomas. Pugh pursed his mouth and frowned. “That is not a handy name for calling across the valley, is it!” He paused, puffing at his pipe, then added, “Perhaps, Mr. Sirius, you will permit me to call you by some other name. How would Bran do?” Sirius had tilted his head over on one side, as though he were vainly trying to understand this remark, obviously addressed to him. Thomas said, “That’s fine. He’ll pick it up in no time.”

Sirius’s despondency was increased by the discovery that even his name was to be taken from him. Surely, he thought, he would be changed into a new being. Nothing whatever of the old life was to be left to him but the memory of it. At home, though he had grown up in the custom of sharing ownership of most things with Plaxy, each of the two young creatures had possessions of their own. Nearly all their toys had been held in common, but when Plaxy had gone to the village school she had also begun to acquire personal property connected with her new life — books, pens, pencils and many little nondescript treasures gained through intercourse with her fellows. Sirius also had begun to collect a few personal possessions, though far fewer than Plaxy; for, owing to his lack of hands, there were few things that he could use. There were certain ancient treasures preserved on a shelf in the minute room that had been allotted him — a rubber bone, a lump of gleaming white quartz, a sheep’s skull, several picture books. And there were later-acquired possessions — more books, and music, his three writing gloves and several pens and pencils.

In his new life he had to be even more propertyless than St. Francis, for he was just a dog, and whoever heard of a dog with property? Fortunately property meant little to him; he had a propensity towards communism, due perhaps to his strong canine sociality. It should be remembered, however, that though dogs in many ways show a far more social disposition than human beings, in some respects they have a keen sense of personal ownership, for instance over bones, bitches, human friends, and localities. For Sirius, at any rate, to be completely stripped, even of his precious writing gloves, was indeed to be reduced to the status of a brute beast. And now they intended to take away his very name. Speech, too, was of course stolen from him by the simple fact that no one on the farm could understand him. Nor was he to be able as a rule to understand them, for among themselves the Pughs talked Welsh.

Sirius’s attention had wandered from the conversation, but it was recalled when Thomas rose to leave. All three went out into the yard. Thomas shook hands with Pugh, then patted Sirius, and said “Good-bye, old man. You stay there.” Sirius feigned perplexity, made as if to follow Thomas, was shooed back and retreated with a puzzled whimper.

In the afternoon Pugh took Sirius and Idwal to a high valley, on the slopes of which some of his sheep were grazing. He gave a word of command in Welsh. Idwal raced off and began to round up the sheep. Sirius looked anxiously at Pugh. The command was repeated, this time along with his new name, “Bran.” He shot away to help Idwal, who was moving round behind the sheep in a great semi-circle, so as to bunch them towards Pugh down in the valley. Sirius tumbled to the situation at once, and decided to start at the opposite horn of the semi-circle and meet Idwal in the middle. Automatically each dog took charge of his own arc. Idwal’s, however, was much wider than Sirius’s, partly because the less experienced dog had to spend time in retrieving sheep that he had allowed to slip away up the hill, partly because Idwal was the faster animal. The operation continued till all the sheep on the hillside had been brought down into the hollow where Pugh was standing. He said a Welsh word, and Idwal at once squatted, panting. Sirius followed suit, anxiously trying to fix the word in his memory.

Pugh then put the two dogs through sundry manœuvres with the sheep, folding them in a stone pen, fetching them out, taking them in a bunch along the valley, separating them into two equal groups, scattering them again, picking out a particular individual at which Pugh pointed with his stick. All this was done with commands in Welsh, aided by various kinds of whistling. After a while he issued commands to Idwal alone, keeping Sirius at his side. Idwal was made to single out a particular wether and hold it with his eye. He crept up to within a few feet of it, flat on the ground like a snake, all the while staring fixedly at it. Then he lay still, belly to earth, legs ready for sudden action, nose stretched out on the grass in front of him, tail on the grass behind him. The wether stared back, or made incipient movements, which Idwal checked by mere gestures. The animal just stood patiently waiting, or fidgeted with mild exasperation. Obviously it was not really afraid. It was used to this sort of game, and it recognized in Idwal’s eye a command that must be obeyed.

Sirius knew that he was witnessing the famous sheep-dog trick of control by “the eye.” Idwal evidently had developed “the eye” almost to perfection.

Idwal was then put through other manœuvres, which Sirius anxiously watched. Presently it was his turn to perform. The novice had strained every nerve to follow the proceedings, but he found himself badly at sea. Not only did the sheep constantly slip past him, causing Pugh to bellow with amiable rage, but also he found that fatigue was preventing him from managing his body with precision, so that he often stumbled over rocks or into holes. His great head became increasingly heavy, so that any slight slip might bowl him over like a shot rabbit. In addition to all this there was the language difficulty. Again and again Sirius found himself completely at a loss while Pugh repeated some strange Welsh noise in a frantic crescendo, and Idwal whimpered impatiently at his side. If only the man would talk English, thought Sirius.

But when it came to the exercise of holding the sheep by the power of the eye, Sirius found to his delight that he was by no means incompetent. Of course the process needed perfecting. Once or twice the sheep nearly broke away. It evidently did not feel itself as masterfully held as it did under Idwal, but it recognized Sirius’s authority. Pugh was obviously pleased.

Presently Pugh worked the two dogs together again, but issued different commands to each by name, and also in a different tone of voice for each. Sirius had to get accustomed to acting promptly to the shriller tone, whether his name, Bran, was mentioned or not; and to ignore the deeper tone which was meant for Idwal.

At last the lesson was over. Pugh walked back along the grassy valley with the two dogs at his heels. Sirius was more tired than he had ever been before, “dog-tired,” as we say. His tail hung, his head almost touched the ground. The under surface of his body was caked with bog-mud. His feet were sore, his head ached. With despair he looked forward to a whole year of this sort of thing, with no companion but the sub-human dogs and the remote Pugh. Perhaps he would forget language altogether, and when he met Plaxy again he would indeed be a dumb animal. But, worn out and despondent as he was, he was able to summon his fundamental doggedness, and promise himself that he would not be beaten by this new life. And when he caught Pugh’s eye quizzing him with friendly ridicule because of his abject appearance, he stuck up his tail and wagged it, at the same time grinning, as though to say, “Oh, I have spunk all right, you’ll see.” This unmistakably human response startled Pugh, and set him thinking.

When they reached the farm, the two dogs were given the remains of the family midday dinner. After they had devoured this they were put into an outhouse for the night. Under the straw bedding there was a rough stone floor. It seemed to Sirius that he had hardly lain down and gone to sleep when he woke up to the sound of Idwal whining at the shut door. Sunlight streamed through the chinks.

During the following weeks Sirius was given constant work with the sheep, and he soon began to get the hang of the job. With practice he wasted less energy on retrieving his mistakes, and arrived home less tired. He was successfully learning not only the Welsh commands but the names of the fields. One day Pugh took both dogs far up among the hills to inspect the sheep on the remote high pastures and teach Sirius the names of the hillsides, streams and cwms. Here he was in familiar country, for he had often walked in this direction with Thomas. At one point the tour brought him to a bwlch within a couple of miles of his home. He even seemed to catch a faint characteristic whiff of it on the wind, but this was probably a delusion.

It did not take long for Sirius to gain sufficient experience to carry out orders unattended. For instance he could be sent to search all the bracken areas for sick sheep; for when sheep feel ill they grow fearful of their disapproving fellows, and so they hide themselves in the bracken, where, if they are not found, they may die through lack of attention. Sirius knew also how to help a bogged or crag-bound sheep to free itself. He would carefully tug at it, till the extra force enabled it to struggle into safety. And he could catch a sheep and throw it, and hold it down for Pugh or his man to inspect.

The power of his “eye”, too, was greatly improving. In this matter dogs vary between excessive gentleness towards the sheep and excessive ruthlessness. Idwal was on the whole ruthless, sometimes making the sheep unduly nervous and restless. Sirius, on the other hand, was often too mild by disposition, so that his authority was not established until he had deliberately learnt a firmer policy. The difference of natural style appeared also in the whole method of the two dogs. Idwal was of the “obstinate” type, insisting on doing everything in his own way. If Pugh prevented him he would raise his tail defiantly and simply trot off the field of action, “refusing to play.” It was to Pugh’s credit that on these occasions he generally gave in, with humorous vituperation, knowing well that Idwal could be trusted to do the job efficiently in his own style. Sirius, on the other hand, was of the “biddable” type. He was desperately anxious to learn, and had little faith in his own intuition. Shepherds regard this type of dog as less brilliant in the long run than the other, since they lack the conviction of genius; but it soon became clear to Pugh that Bran’s docility was not due to a servile disposition. When he had learnt his lesson he often introduced novelties which greatly improved the method. Yet even when he had become an expert with sheep, he was always ready to pick up new tips from observation of other dogs at work.

Sirius could be sent out into the hills alone to select a required bunch of sheep from the flock, whether young ewes or “hoggs” (young sheep before their first shearing) or wethers; and he could bring them down from the hills to the farm without human aid. All this was real super-sheep-dog work. In order to make full use of his clever animals Pugh had arranged all his gates with latches that a dog could open or shut.

As autumn neared, the time came for bringing groups of lambs or of old or unhealthy ewes down from the mountains to be taken away for sale. This task Pugh entrusted almost entirely to Idwal and Sirius, helped sometimes by Juno. But that bright creature was of a distressingly unstable nature, and was often incapacitated by convulsions. The dogs would travel over the high moors, picking out the appropriate animals, sometimes losing them again in the cloud, and recovering them by scent, finally bringing them in a bunch along the turfy track in the high valley. All Pugh’s sheep bore a red mark on the rump, but this, of course, was invisible to the colour-blind dogs. In addition the sheep bore three little slits in the left ear to mark them as Pugh’s. This was invaluable to Idwal and Sirius, as a confirmation of the distinctive smell of the Caer Blai flock. Any sheep that had strayed into Caer Blai territory from a neighbouring run was soon detected and piloted home. In addition to the common smell of the flock, by the way, each individual sheep had its own peculiar odour. It did not take Sirius more than a few weeks to recognize every sheep in the flock by its smell, or even by its voice. Occasionally the dogs found a sheep that had been damaged, and then one of them had to set out to the farm to fetch Pugh. There was a recognized way of barking to signify “damaged sheep”; another, less excited, meant “sheep undamaged but crag-bound and inaccessible”; yet another meant “dead sheep.”

The collecting of sheep for sale was a process which occurred now and again over many weeks. When the lambs or ewes had been brought down from the moors they had to be taken by train, or in lorries hired for the purpose, to the auction sales in the lower country. The dogs accompanied them, and Sirius thoroughly enjoyed these excursions into the great world. It was a pleasure merely to hear the English language spoken again, and to find that he could still understand it.

When the sales were over and autumn was well under way, the main task of the dogs was to guard the high valley pastures from the sheep. It is often the custom of mountain sheep to sleep on the heights and come down in the morning to the richer grazing; but in the autumn they must be prevented from doing this because the valley grass will be more urgently needed in the winter. In the autumn, too, the ewes must be prevented from grazing in marshy places, lest they should become infected by liver fluke. And autumn is a time for dipping the whole flock. As Pugh had many hundreds of sheep, this was a great undertaking, and the dogs were desperately hard worked for many days, bringing the sheep down in batches and driving them into the pen, where Pugh or one of his helpers could seize each animal in turn and force it into the dip. Sirius was pleased to find that he stood up to the strain of this great undertaking as well as Idwal, though he was not at this stage quite so fast or quite so agile.

Presently came another task. The ewe lambs had to be collected and sent to a lowland farm so that they might escape the grim conditions on the mountains during winter, the savage weather and poor food. Not till the following May would they be brought home.

In spite of all this hard work, there were days when the dogs had nothing to do but hang about the yard or accompany Pugh on his rounds, or run messages to the village. A little stationery-cum-newspaper shop in the village used to attract Sirius. Outside were posters from which he gained the most sensational news. Sometimes he put his paws on the windowsill and read the headlines of the papers displayed within, or the titles of the little rank of cheap novels. In the village he met other dogs. They gave him no trouble, because he was by now very large and “hard as nails.” Out of loyalty to Thomas he tried to study the psychology of these animals; but apart from simple temperamental differences, they were mentally all depressingly alike. The most obvious differences between them had been imposed by human conditioning. Some were disposed towards friendliness with all human beings, some were cold to strangers but obsessively devoted to their masters, some habitually fawned, some cringed.

One day in the village Sirius came upon a fine young bitch in heat, a red setter. Suddenly life was worth living once more. Her odour and touch intoxicated him. In their love-play they careered about the open space in the village while Pugh was in the pub. (Pugh seems to have had an idea that super-sheep-dogs would be cruelly bored if they were forced to sit with him inside.) The consummation of this union took place under the lascivious eyes of two schoolboys and an unemployed quarryman.

Henceforth Sirius had a constant hunger for the village and the bitch. He was tempted to run away from the farm and have all he could of her while she was still in the mood; but he did not, because he had once seen a dog on a neighbouring farm thrashed for absenting himself from duty. Sirius was determined that he would never do anything to incur such an indignity. He had never been thrashed in his life, though occasionally hit or kicked in anger. To be deliberately thrashed seemed to him to be a mortal insult to his dignity as an intelligent and self-respecting person. If Pugh ever tried it on him, Pugh must be killed on the spot, whatever the consequences. But Pugh never did. Pugh belonged to the school of sheep-dog owners who pride themselves on obtaining obedience by kindness rather than ferocity. Sirius never saw him use violence on any dog. Probably he would never have beaten Sirius even if Sirius had given him serious provocation, for he had a firm though vague conviction that the new dog was somehow more than a dog, even more than a super-dog.

Several incidents had aroused this suspicion. Once he sent Sirius to the village with a basket and a ten-shilling note to fetch a pair of boots which the cobbler had repaired. The dog duly brought back the boots and the change. When he arrived in the yard, Pugh, who was in the darkness of an outhouse, saw Sirius take out the boots and study the money in the basket. After looking puzzled for some time he trotted back along his tracks, nosing the ground. Presently he came on a small object which he managed with great difficulty to pick up. With obvious satisfaction he brought it back with him. When he dropped it into the basket it was visible to Pugh as a small brown disc, in fact a penny. Sirius then brought the basket to Pugh. It contained the boots, the receipted bill and the change, which consisted of two half-crowns, a florin, and seven pennies. Pugh was not so fanciful as to suppose that the dog had actually counted the change and checked it by the bill, but at least he must have spotted the difference between six pennies and seven.

Another incident made Pugh suspect that there was something “human” (as he put it) about this dog. The farmer had a few cows and a fine young bull. Sirius had once been prodded by a cow, and he had heard alarming stories about bulls. From time to time a cow was brought from one or other of the neighbouring farms to be served by the Caer Blai bull. On these occasions the dogs had to enter the paddock, round up the bull, and bring it down the lane into the farmyard for its love-making. When the deed had been done, the dogs drove the bull back to its paddock. Sirius was always very nervous, and did his stuff very badly. Idwal would face the bull with fierce persistence, and slip away from its lowered horns in the nick of time; but Sirius was far too anxious to keep his distance. The bull discovered that Sirius was a coward, and formed a habit of chasing him.

Pugh, by the way, was struck with the different ways in which the two dogs behaved when bull and cow were brought together in the farmyard, generally surrounded by a small group of interested men and boys, while the women kept discreetly indoors. Idwal nosed about the yard or lay down to rest. Sirius watched the whole performance with the same cheerful interest as the human spectators. It was evident that his interest was sexual, for when the bull effected his clumsy embrace, the dog himself gave unmistakable signs of sexual excitement.

But the incident which impressed Pugh most, and made him suspect that Sirius’s intelligence was as quick as a man’s, occurred in connection with the bull’s habit of taking the offensive against the cowardly Sirius. Pugh had gone to the village with Idwal. Owen, the hired man, was ploughing in a remote field. Somehow the bull managed to break out of its paddock into the lane. It trotted down into the yard, saw Jane with a basket of washing, and approached her, snorting. Always a nervous girl, she screamed, dropped the basket and slipped into the stable. The bull spent a few minutes tossing the clothes, then made off down the lane. Meanwhile Mrs. Pugh had made a tentative sortie from the house. Then Sirius appeared, and raced down the lane after the bull. He did not overtake it till after it had reached the main road. Then he silently rushed at it, and seized its tail. With a roar the bull swung round, but Sirius had let go, and was retreating towards the lane, barking. The bull followed him, and he led it back to the farmyard and into its field. It was now rather blown, but Sirius led it round and round the field, till its ardour was cooled. The less anxious it was to follow him, the more bold grew Sirius. When it came to a standstill, he rushed in and nipped its hind leg. The reinfuriated beast chased him once more, but was soon exhausted. This process was repeated several times, till Sirius noticed that the two women had put some strands of barbed wire across the gap in the hedge. Then he retreated, with a proud tail, leaving a bull that was thoroughly cowed. Henceforth Sirius was always able to deal with the bull or any other cattle.

Some time after this incident Sirius did something which was far beyond super-sheep-dog capacity.

Throughout his first term he was desperately lonely. He longed for his own people, and most of all for Plaxy. If only he could write a letter! But he had no writing-glove, and no stationery. And anyhow the task of putting a stamp on a letter had always defeated him.

He knew he could write a few words very badly by holding a pencil in his mouth; if he could find one, and paper. He had once seen Pugh take out pen, ink and paper from the drawer in the oak dresser. One day, when Mrs. Pugh and Jane were milking, he slipped into the kitchen, opened the drawer, and found in it several sheets of paper, also envelopes, a pen, an ink-pot, and a pencil with a broken point. He stole a sheet and an envelope. Pen and ink seemed too complicated, and the pencil was useless, so he left these, and took merely an envelope and paper to the dog’s outhouse. He put them in an old packing case under some straw.

There was now nothing for it but to wait until someone should need to sharpen the pencil. He seized every opportunity to sneak into the kitchen and look into the drawer. Meanwhile he spent much thought in planning exactly how he would write his letter, and what he would say. Sometimes he practised. Holding a splinter of slate in his mouth, he scribbled on the slate doorstep. The process was difficult, because his nose was always in the way, and he could not see what he was doing; and generally the slate-splinter snapped.

At last, after many days, he found that the pencil had been sharpened. He took it away to the outhouse.

Not till several days later did Sirius find an opportunity of writing his letter. In spidery capitals it said, “Dear Plaxy, I hope you are happy. I am lonely without you, terribly. Love, Sirius.” With great care he addressed the envelope, hoping that his memory was trustworthy. He had serious difficulty in folding the paper and putting it into the envelope. Then he licked the gummy-edge, closed it, and held his paw on it. He had intended to post it unstamped; but the thought that Plaxy would have to pay threepence, double postage, on it distressed him so much that he decided to wait in the hope of finding some stamps in the drawer. When at last a sheet of six three-halfpenny stamps appeared, he ran off with them and set about trying to detach one. First he held the sheet between his paws and pulled with his teeth. The stamp tore across the middle, and the bit in his mouth stuck to his wet teeth, so that he could not get rid of it. Flustered by this experience, he decided to think the problem out more carefully. He hit on a plan. He held the envelope down with his paw and licked the right-hand top corner. Then with extreme care he took up the stamp-sheet in his teeth and laid it on the envelope so that one of the corner stamps was roughly in the right position. This was difficult, because as usual his nose was in the line of sight. He let go, and inspected the result. The stamp was crooked, and not wholly on the envelope. Hastily he lifted it off again and replaced it, well on the envelope. Again he inspected it, then carefully pulled it into better position. Then he pressed it on with his paw. When he thought the gum was dry, he held the sheet of stamps down with his paw and gently pulled the letter with his teeth. The letter came away, with the stamp intact, and part of the next one projecting over the edge. This he trimmed off with his teeth. He then restored the mangled sheet of stamps to the drawer. Not till he came back to the letter did he notice that the stamp was upside down.

He hid his letter under the straw and waited till his next errand to the village. This did not occur till some days later. It was fairly common for him to be sent with letters to the post, but on this occasion his own was the only one. He trotted off with his basket and an order for the grocer; and his letter. He went straight to the post office, put down his basket, took out the letter, raised himself against the wall, and slipped the precious document into the box.

This was no unusual sight in the village. Dr. Huw Williams, who was passing, scarcely noticed it; but when, next day, he met Mr. Pugh and wished him good day, he mentioned the incident, complimenting him on his dog’s intelligence. Now Pugh had sent off no letter that day. He wondered whether his wife had written to her mother in Bala, or if Jane had entrusted Bran with a love-letter. This possibility disturbed him, for though by nature a friendly man, prone to treat people with respect and trust, he was no modern parent. When he reached home he made inquiries. Mrs. Pugh and Jane both denied that they had given Bran a letter. Pugh went to the drawer and saw that the stamps had been badly mauled. One was missing, and two others were torn. In a burst of indignation he charged his daughter with clandestine correspondence, theft, lying and clumsiness. Jane defended herself with vigour, and added, “Go and ask Bran whose letter it was.” That sarcasm put a wild idea into Pugh’s head. He went to the drawer again and picked up the pencil. There were toothmarks on it — Bran’s or his own? Fantastic doubt!

CHAPTER VI

BIRTH-PANGS OF A PERSONALITY

TO SIRIUS, PLAXY’S first term at boarding school seemed endless, but in due season the holidays loomed near. Sirius had counted the days by putting a pebble a day in the old packing case. One day, when he had collected almost the right number of pebbles but was expecting two or three more days of labour, he returned with Pugh and the other dogs from the moors, with early snow on Pugh’s hat and the dogs’ backs, and encountered Thomas in the yard. Sirius rushed at him and nearly knocked him down with a wild welcome. After both men had shaken the worst of the snow from their clothes, Pugh took Thomas into the kitchen. Sirius knew that he was not supposed to go into the house when he was in a mess; but, after a violent shake, in he went. Mrs. Pugh smiled indulgently.

Thomas asked Pugh about Sirius’s success as a sheep-dog, and was given a good report. Sirius had proved himself as hardy as Idwal, and far more cunning and responsible. But he was not always quite “on the spot.” He was a bit of a day-dreamer. He was sometimes caught napping. A sheep might escape from the flock and run away before Sirius woke to the situation. It was “as though he had been thinking of something else.” After making the report Pugh nodded knowingly at Thomas, who merely changed the subject. Before they parted, Pugh insisted on handing over to Thomas ten shillings less fourpence halfpenny. This sum he described as Bran’s earnings, “less a small item of expenditure.” Saying this, he stared hard at Sirius and winked. The dog hastily looked away, but could not prevent a snort of surprise and a tremor of the tail. Thomas tried to refuse the money, but Pugh insisted.

The journey home through driving sleet was a journey to heaven. Thomas explained that he and Elizabeth had come home a couple of days early to get the house ready before Plaxy and Giles arrived from boarding school. Tamsy and Maurice, both of them undergraduates, were visiting friends.

Sirius recounted some of his experiences. “It has all been very good for me, I know, but I really don’t think I can go on with that life any longer. I should go mad with loneliness. No talk, no books, no music. And all the while knowing the world is so big and strange beyond the farm. Plaxy will leave me far behind.”

This speech came as a shock to the not very imaginative Thomas. He remarked cautiously, “Oh, it’s not quite as bad as all that, is it? Anyhow, we must talk it over carefully.” Sirius knew from his tone that he was rather put out about it, and that there would be trouble.

Elizabeth greeted Sirius as one of her children, hugging him and kissing him. He showed none of his former boisterousness, but gave a tremulous little whine of painful joy.

Next day Giles arrived, and in the evening Plaxy. Thomas took the car to the station to meet her, Sirius sitting beside him. Out of the train stepped the long-legged schoolgirl in her school hat and coat. Having kissed her father, no doubt with her customary rather distant affection, she squatted down to hug Sirius. “I got your letter,” she whispered, “but I couldn’t answer, could I?” Of course she couldn’t. Sirius savoured the well-known voice with delight; but with an undertone of anxiety, for school life had changed it.

During the first part of the holidays Sirius simply enjoyed being home again. He scarcely noticed the two disquieting facts that had obtruded themselves right at the beginning. Thomas would not let him off his sheep-dog apprenticeship; Plaxy was changed.

For a week or so he was content to live the old family life, which, though by no means entirely harmonious, did afford to every member the invaluable experience of belonging to a true community. There was always talk going on, and Sirius after his long isolation felt a great need for conversation. There were many walks with members of the family, and several long expeditions up Moelwyn, the Rhinogs, Arenig. But what Sirius now craved most was indoor life, with reading, music, talk, and all the little affairs that fill the day.

After a day or two of almost entirely social life he began to take up once more some of his old private occupations. Not only did he read as much as his eyesight would let him, and experiment a good deal in music; he also contrived adventures in his private art of odour. This he did by collecting all kinds of materials that had striking or significant smells, and blending them in saucers. Sometimes, much to the amusement of the family, he laid his materials out in a long trail round the garden path, and then followed it from beginning to end, giving tongue in a weird diversified chant that was neither human nor canine. After these olfactory adventures he was often very silent and remote. Sometimes they seemed to put him in the mood for hunting, for he would disappear for many hours, returning tired and dirty. Not infrequently he brought back a rabbit or hare, or even a wild duck or grouse, handing it over to Giles to prepare for cooking. But often he brought nothing, and behaved as though he himself had gorged.

Not much of his time was spent in solitary occupations, for he craved social intercourse more than ever, chiefly with Plaxy. Gradually it dawned on him that when she and he were out together they did not always find the careless intimacy which formerly had never failed them. Sometimes neither of them seemed able to think of anything to say; sometimes Sirius found himself bored with Plaxy’s stories of school life; sometimes she seemed to have lost interest in all the things that formerly they had enjoyed together. Sirius expected not only that she would have out-distanced him in knowledge of school subjects, which of course she had, but also that she would be more keenly and persistently interested in the life of the mind. But she was nothing of the sort. She was mainly absorbed, it seemed, in her school companions, with all their loves and hates; and in the teachers, male and female, who were playing so large a part in her new life. When he asked her to teach him some of the wonderful things that she must have learnt during the term, she said she would, some time; but always she found some excuse to postpone the lesson. At last there came a time when no excuse was available. She was idling in an easy chair petting the cat, Smut, who was purring heartily. Sirius, whose thirst for knowledge was at this time more insistent than discriminate, suggested that she should tell him what she had learnt during the term about the Cavaliers and Roundheads. Cornered, she blurted out, “Oh, I just can’t swot in the holidays.” He did not ask her again.

It was not that they were any less fond of one another. On the contrary, each craved the other’s society; but always there was a faint mist of remoteness between them. And occasionally open antagonism occurred, as when Plaxy ostentatiously doted upon Smut, half in jest, half in earnest, calling him “my black panther,” affirming that she was a witch, and witches always had black cats as their companions, and never clumsy dogs. But antagonism was rare. More often there was a faintly awkward friendliness. At this time Plaxy developed a maiden shyness in relation to Sirius. He was bewildered, for instance, by her new and to him quite inexplicable reluctance to respond to their familiar urinary tune by singing the antistrophe that signified assent, and crouching to relieve herself. Although this new shyness was only a passing phase, it was to recur whenever Plaxy was feeling too much involved with Sirius.

In fact her estrangement from him was partly a reaction against her deep-rooted entanglement with him. But he, who was far more conscious of her aloofness than she was herself, attributed it to the fact that she had outstripped him both in learning and in experience of human people, while he had stagnated at Caer Blai. Once or twice, however, when she had gently twitted him with being interested in nothing but learning, he wondered whether it was she that was stagnating. He had conceived a real passion for learning, for finding out about the great world, and understanding the miracle of human nature and the minor miracle of his own unique nature. The arid weeks behind him and the arid weeks to come filled him with a thirst not only for intelligent companionship but also for intellectual life. His proximity to the sub-human perhaps made him over-anxious to prove that even the loftier ranges of the human spirit were not beyond him.

It was during these holidays that another and a long-established source of alienation between Plaxy and Sirius took on a new form and a more disturbing effect. Even in earlier days Plaxy had developed a peculiarly keen interest in seeing. As a child she had often shown disappointment and exasperation with Sirius for his failure to share this delight with her. She would rhapsodize over the colour and shape of a speedwell, or of hills receding hazily one behind the other in a cadence of russet to purple. Once she had innocently called upon him to admire the golden elegance of her own young arm. On all such occasions his response was perfunctory, since vision was never for him a gateway to heaven. Even of Plaxy’s arm he could say only, “Yes, it’s lovely because it has the look of a handy tool. And it smells good, like the rest of you, and it’s good to lick.” From childhood onwards Plaxy had amused herself with pencil and paint box, and at school her gift for colour and shape had won her much praise from the drawing mistress. In the holidays she spent a good deal of time looking at reproductions of famous pictures, and in discussing art with her mother. Even more absorbed was she in drawing schoolgirls in blatantly graceful poses, and in painting the view of the Rhinogs from her bedroom window. Sirius found all this fuss over the looks of things very boring. He had tried hard to develop a taste for pictorial art, but had failed miserably. Now that Plaxy was so absorbed in it, he felt “left out.” If he took no notice of her creations she was disappointed. If he praised them, she was irritated, knowing quite well that he could not really appreciate them. Yet all this visual interest, which at bottom, no doubt, was a protest against Sirius, she also longed to share with him. Thus did these two alien but fundamentally united creatures torture one another and themselves.

As the end of the holidays approached, Sirius’s anxiety about his future increased. He took every opportunity of tackling Thomas on the subject. But Thomas always managed to turn the talk in some other direction. When at last the time came for Plaxy to return to school, it was assumed that Sirius would return to Caer Blai. When Plaxy said good-bye to him, she begged him to go back with a good grace. She herself, she said, hated leaving home. But he knew quite well from her voice and her tingling smell that, though in a way she did hate it, in another way she was glad and excited. But he — well, in a way he too was glad, surprised though he was at this discovery. He was glad to get away from the mist that had come between him and Plaxy; and also because a mist had come between him and the whole of his beloved home life. What was it? Why was there this remoteness? What was it that kept rising between him and all his dearest things, making him defiant and wild? Was it just that he wanted a fragrant bitch, a sweet though stupid companion of his own kind, instead of these stinking humans? Or did he need something more? Was it the ancestral jungle beast that sometimes woke in him? His farewell to Plaxy was seemingly all affection and sorrow. She never guessed that another and an alien Sirius was at that moment yawning himself awake, finding her company tiresome and her smell unpleasant.

There followed a term of bitter weather and heavy work with the sheep. All the dogs were now kept busy stopping the sheep from going up to the heights for the night, for fear of snow. This meant staying with them till dark whenever snow seemed likely. Sometimes, without warning, heavy snow would fall on the tops during the night, and then dogs and men would have to go up in the morning to bring the flock down into the valleys. Generally there is far less snow in Wales than in the more northerly mountain districts, but a run of severe winters caused the dogs much toil and a good deal of danger. On several occasions, up and down the district, dogs and even men were lost in the snow. Sometimes sheep were completely buried under snowdrifts. Only a dog could then find them; and often only a man with a spade could rescue them. Sometimes the snow covered both high and low pastures. So long as it remained soft, the sheep could scrape it away with their feet and feed on the grass below. But when the surface was hardened by frost following thaw, this was impossible, and then hay had to be taken out to them. This was a job for Pugh or his man with a cart and the old mare, Mab. But the dogs, being super-dogs, were expected to report on the condition of the snow. If it was hard, they would come home to scratch and whine at Pugh’s feet.

Sometimes when Sirius was out on the hills alone in the winter dawn, examining the condition of the snow and looking for sheep in distress, the desolation of the scene would strike him with a shivering dread of existence. The universal carpet of snow, the mist of drifting flakes, the miserable dark sheep, pawing for food, the frozen breath on his own jaws, combined to make him feel that after all this was what the world was really like; that the warm fireside and friendly talk at Garth were just a rare accident, or perhaps merely a dream. “The whole world is just a dreary accident, with a few nice accidents mixed up in the mass.” He had still to learn that there was something far worse than bitter weather with the near prospect of food and comfort, far worse even than his bitter loneliness at Caer Blai; and that the most horrible things in the world were all man-made. It was perhaps well that he did not yet realize the depth of man’s folly and heartlessness, for if he had done so he might have been turned against the dominant species for ever. As it was, he attributed all evil to accident or “fate,” and in fate’s very indifference he sometimes found a certain exhilaration. Plodding home through the snow one day (so he told me long afterwards) he had a kind of inner vision of all living things, led by man, crusading gallantly against indifferent or hostile fate, doomed in the end to absolute defeat, but learning to exult in the battle, and snatching much delight before the end. And he saw himself as a rather lonely outpost in this great war, in which victory was impossible, and the only recompense was the sheer joy of the struggle. But by the very next day, so he said, his mood had changed from self-dramatization to an amused acceptance of his littleness and impotence.

Before the lambing season Pugh went over all his ewes to cut locks of wool away from their udders, so that their lambs should not swallow wool and clog their stomachs. This simple process itself meant a great deal of work for men and dogs, but the actual lambing meant a great deal more. The flock had to be met at dawn on its way down from the heights. During the day the men would be hard at work, but the dogs would often be idle. Pugh noticed that Bran was far more interested than ordinary dogs and even super-sheep-dogs in the process of birth. This was one of the many signs that convinced him that Bran was really a sort of man-dog. Pugh had gradually formed a habit of giving Bran fairly detailed instructions in English, and they were always accurately carried out. He still had no idea that Bran himself could talk, and he kept his convictions about the dog’s nature strictly to himself. But he increasingly treated him as an assistant rather than as a chattel, an assistant who was particularly bright and responsible, but lamentably clumsy through lack of hands. All Sirius’s clever arrangements for fetching and carrying, for pouring from tins and bottles, and so on, failed to compensate for his grievous handlessness. One useful operation that needed dexterity he could do. He could drive Mab, the old mare, whether with the spring cart, the heavy cart, the roller or the harrow. Ploughing inevitably remained beyond him. And of course he could not load a cart with turnips or hay or manure, and so on. Nor could he manage the simple task of harnessing the mare. Buckles defeated him.

When, at the end of the school term, Elizabeth came to fetch Sirius home, his joy was tempered by a self-important doubt as to how Pugh would manage without him.

During these holidays he busied himself in intellectual work. Taxing his eyesight, he even plunged into Wells’s Outline of History and The Science of Life. He also pestered members of the family to read poetry aloud to him, and passages from the Bible. He was very sensitive to the rhythm of verse and prose, and of course to the musical quality of words; but vast tracts of literature meant nothing to him, save as verbal music, because his subconscious nature had not the necessary human texture to respond to them emotionally, nor had he the necessary associations in his experience. His strong feeling for personality led him at one time into an obsession with Browning. Later came a more lasting interest in what he called “the poetry of self and universe.” Hardy at one time fascinated him. The early Eliot intoxicated him with new rhythms and with a sense of facing the worst in preparation for a new vision. But the vision never came. Instead came orthodoxy. Sirius longed for that vision. He hoped for it from the younger moderns; but though he was even younger than any of them, they meant little to him.

Music was ever for Sirius a more satisfying art than poetry. But it tortured him, because the texture of his own musical sensibility remained alien to the human. He felt that he had to choose between two evils. Either he must express himself with full sincerity but in utter loneliness, unappreciated by dogs or men; or, for the sake of his underlying brotherhood with man, he must violate his finer canine sensibility, and discipline himself to the coarser human modes, in the hope that somehow he might express himself adequately to man in man’s own musical language. For this end he was anxious to absorb as much human music as possible.

His relations with Plaxy at this time were uneasy. While he was obsessed with the life of the mind, she was obsessed with personal relations. The loves and hates of school were still far more important to her than book-learning. And her school life was utterly different from Sirius’s hard and anxious life on the farm. It might have been expected that in these circumstances dog and girl would find little in common; and indeed superficially there was little enough. On their walks they were often silent, while each pursued a private train of thought. Sometimes one or the other would hold forth at some length, and the soliloquy would be punctuated by sympathetic but rather uncomprehending comments by the listener. Occasionally this mutual incomprehension caused exasperated outbursts.

Their discord was often increased by a tendency on Plaxy’s part to express her vague sense of frustration in subtle little cruelties. Very often the cattish torture of Plaxy’s behaviour was unconscious. For instance, at times when she was subconsciously resentful of his emotional hold over her, the affectionate ragging which they sometimes indulged in would change its character. Not knowing what she did, she would twist his ear too violently, or press his lip upon his teeth too hard. Then, realizing that she had hurt him, she would be all contrition. More often her felinities were mental. Once, for example, when they were coming down the moel during a brilliant sunset, and Plaxy was deeply stirred by the riot of crimson and gold, of purple and blue and green, she said, not remembering how it must wound her colour-blind companion, “Sunsets in pictures are so tiresome, but only boors and half-wits are not stirred by real sunsets.”

Apart from this infrequent and often thoughtless exposure of her claws, Plaxy kept up the manner of friendliness even when secretly she was straining away from him; for fundamentally each respected the other’s life and was thankful for the other’s society. The roots of these two alien beings were so closely intertwined that in spite of their divergence each needed the other. One unifying subject of common interest they always had, and they often talked about it. Both these sensitive young creatures were beginning to puzzle about their own nature as persons. Both, for very different reasons, were revolting against the purely scientific assumptions of their home, according to which a person was simply the psychological aspect of a very complex physical organism. Plaxy was feeling that persons were the most real of all things. Sirius was more than ever conscious of the inadequacy of his canine body to express his super-canine spirit. The word “spirit” seemed to them to epitomize the thing that science left out; but what precisely ought to be meant by the word they could not decide. Plaxy had come under the influence of a member of the school staff for whom she had conceived a great admiration. This quick-witted and sensitive young woman taught biology, but was also a lover of literature. It seems to have been her influence, by the way, that first made Plaxy clearly feel that, however important science was, for herself not science but literature was the way to full mental life. The young teacher had once said, “I suppose I ought to believe that Shakespeare was just a highly developed mammal, but I can’t really believe it. In some sense or other he was — well, a spirit.” This remark was the source of Plaxy’s juvenile dalliance with the word “spirit”; and then of Sirius’s.

The young dog was now seriously worrying about his future. Sheep-farming was not without interest, now that he was helping Pugh in a more human way; but it was not what he was for. What was he for? Was he for anything? He remembered his desolate impression on the snow-clad moors that the whole world was just a purposeless accident. Now, he somehow could not believe it. Yet the all-wise Thomas said no one was for anything, they just were. Well, what could a unique creature like him, a sheer freak, find to be? How could he discover peace of mind, of spirit? Thomas did not see why he should worry. Thomas had a nice slick programme for him.

One evening when the others had gone to bed, man and dog were left in the sitting-room in the course of one of those long talks which had been so great a factor in the education of Sirius. They were sitting before the fire, Thomas in one of the easy chairs, Sirius luxuriating on the couch. Thomas had been telling him of the progress of his research, and explaining the latest theory about the localization of mental powers in the brain-centres. He was pleased at the dog’s shrewd questions, and had said so. Sirius, after a pause in which he absently licked a paw while gazing into the fire, said, “Even by human standards I really am fairly bright, am I?” “Indeed you are,” was the prompt reply. Sirius continued, “You see, I don’t seem able to think properly. My mind keeps wandering. I start out to think about something, and then suddenly, with a jolt I wake up to find I’ve been thinking about something else instead; and often I can’t even remember what it was, or even what the first subject was. It’s frightening. Do you think I’m going mad? It’s like — going off on the trail of a rabbit and then being led aside by a hare, and then streaking off on the smell of a fox, and twisting and doubling on the trail till all of a sudden you find yourself up against water, and no trail at all. And then you say to yourself, ‘How on earth did I get here? What in hell was I doing?’ Human beings don’t think that way, do they?” Thomas laughed with delight. “Don’t they!” he said. “I certainly think that way myself, and I’m not exceptionally scatter-brained.” Sirius sighed with relief, but continued, “Then there’s another thing. Sometimes I manage to follow a trail of thought quite well for a long time, in and out, up and down, but always with my mind’s nose on the trail; and then suddenly I find — well, the weather has changed and given it all a different meaning. It was warm and bright, but now it’s cold and dank. No, worse than that! It was fox, and now it’s cat, so to speak, or just dull cow, or horrible menagerie tiger. No, it’s the same but I have changed. I wanted it desperately, and now I don’t. There’s an entirely new me. That’s frightening, too.” Thomas reassured him. “Don’t worry, old thing!” he said. “It’s just that you’re a rather complicated person, really, and there’s too much diversity in you to be easily systematized.”

Sirius once more licked his paw, but soon stopped to say, “Then I really am a person, not just a laboratory animal?” “Of course,” said Thomas, “and a very satisfactory person, too; and an excellent companion for this person, in fact the best I have, apart from one or two colleagues.” Sirius added for him, “And Elizabeth, I suppose.” “Of course, but that’s different. I meant man-to-man companionship.” Sirius pricked his ears at that phrase, and Thomas laughed at himself. Said the dog, “Then why apprentice me to a sub-human job, which is bound to dehumanize me?” “My dear Sirius,” replied Thomas with some heat, “we have had all that out before, but let’s try to settle it now, once for all. It’s true you have a first-class human intelligence, but you are not a man, you are a dog. It’s useless to train you for some human trade, because you can’t do it. But it’s immensely important to give you some responsible practical work until the time comes for you to join us at Cambridge. You are not to be an imitation man. You are a super-super-dog. This sheep-dog life is very good for you. Remember you are not yet seventeen. There’s no hurry. Your pace is Plaxy’s, not Idwal’s. If you grow up too quick, you’ll fossilize too quick. Stick to sheep. There’s a lot in that job, if you give your mind to it. When you come to us at the lab we want you to have had experience of a normal dog’s way of life.”

Inwardly Sirius said, “Blast the lab!” but to Thomas he said, “I have been putting my mind into the job. And as a matter of fact it’s not just sheer dog’s work now. Pugh has been giving me a lot of man’s work to do. He knows I am different from Idwal. But — well, that sort of work, though it is largely man’s work, does deaden the mind. And the mind — is me. I’m not human, but also I’m not canine. Fundamentally I’m just the sort of thing you are yourself. I have a canine clothing, just as you have a human clothing, but I — I am” — he paused and looked warily at Thomas— “a spirit, just as you are.” Thomas snorted, and presently his smell went rather sour. Then almost in the tone of a liberal-minded parent expostulating with a child that had said something “rude,” he remarked, “Why use that silly meaningless word? Besides, who has been putting such ideas into your head?”

Sirius did not answer this last question. Instead, he said, “There’s something in me very different from my canine body. If you had a dog’s body instead of a man’s, you would grasp that as clearly as I do. You couldn’t help it. You would feel like someone trying to typewrite on a sewing machine, or make music with a typewriter. You would never mistake the sewing machine for you, yourself.”

“I see what you mean,” said Thomas, “but the conflict is not really between your spirit and your canine body; it’s between the canine part of your body and the super-canine part, that I gave you.”

There was silence in the room for a full minute. Then Sirius yawned, and felt the warmth of the fire on his tongue. He said, “That sounds so sensible; and yet, though I’m only seventeen and only a dog, I can smell there’s something wrong with it. It’s only just a bit more true than the ‘soul’ dope that the parsons give — the Rev. Davies, for instance, when he called on us, and tried to convert you to Methodism, while you tried to convert him to scientific method. Do you remember? He caught me staring too interestedly at him, and he said I looked as if I was more open to persuasion than you were yourself, and it was a pity, almost, that God hadn’t given me a soul to be saved.”

Thomas smiled, and rose to go to bed. As he passed Sirius he gave his ear a friendly pull, and said, “Oh, well, nearly all great questions turn out in the end to be misconceived. Probably both our answers are wrong.”

Sirius, getting down from the couch, suddenly realized that he had been once more side-tracked from his purpose, which was to discuss his future. “One thing is sure,” he said, “My job is not just sheep, and it’s not to alternate between being a sheep-dog and being a super-laboratory-animal. It’s the spirit.”

Thomas came to a halt. “Oh, very well,” he said gently, respectfully, but with a faint ridicule that did not escape Sirius. “Your job’s the spirit.” Then after a pause he added with friendly sarcasm, “We must send you to a theological college.”

Sirius gave a snort of indignation. He said, “Of course I don’t want the old religious dope. But I don’t want just the new science dope either. I want the truth.” Then, realizing that he had said the wrong thing, he touched his master’s hand. “I’m afraid I’m not working out according to plan,” he said. “But if I am really a person you shouldn’t expect me to. Why did you make me without making a world for me to live in? It’s as though God had made Adam and not bothered to make Eden, nor Eve. I think it’s going to be frightfully difficult being me.”

Thomas laid his hand on the dog’s head. The two stood gazing into the dying fire. The man said to the dog, “It’s my fault that you are more than a dog. It’s my meddling that woke the ‘spirit’ in you, as you call it. I’ll do my best for you, I promise. And now let’s go to bed.”

CHAPTER VII

WOLF SIRIUS

THOMAS SUCCEEDED IN persuading Sirius to complete his year with Pugh, assuring him with Machiavellian subtlety that it would be an invaluable “spiritual training.” And it was. It was a Spartan, an ascetic life; for Sirius accepted all the ordinary sheep-dog conditions. At times it was a life of grim hardship and overwork. Men and dogs returned from their labour dead tired, and fit for nothing but supper and sleep. But there were other times when there was little to be done that did not necessitate human hands. Then Sirius used to lie about pretending to sleep, but in fact trying desperately to think about man and himself, and the identity of the spirit in them, a task in which he was singularly unsuccessful.

Since Pugh was by now fairly well in the know about Sirius, Thomas had arranged that during his last term the dog should have more or less regular hours, like a human worker, so that he could frequently go home and put in a little study. The word “study,” of course, was not mentioned, but Pugh agreed with a knowing wink.

Expeditions over the high hills were becoming rather much for the ageing Welshman, so he handed over more and more responsibility to Sirius. He arranged with the saddler to make two pairs of small panniers which could be strapped on to the dogs’ flanks. These he filled with lotions, medicines, bandages. Sirius could now travel far afield and doctor sick sheep without Pugh having to accompany him. He would set off with Idwal, who now accepted him as a leader, and spend the day inspecting the whole flock. When they had rounded up a bunch of sheep into some remote moorland pen, Sirius would examine each one of them for foot-rot or fly-strike. Any animal that showed restlessness, or kept trying to nibble at its own back, was probably infected with fly-strike. Sirius was sufficiently human to dislike exposing the grubs with his own teeth, and cleaning out the superficial wound with his tongue; but the work had to be done. By keeping a sharp watch on the flock, and tackling the earliest symptoms himself, he was able to reduce to a minimum the number of advanced cases which demanded attention from man’s exploring fingers. But inevitably a few were not found till they were deeply infected. These had to be taken away for human treatment. Very rarely Sirius came on sheep lying down, neither ruminating nor sleeping, and with great open wounds seething with grub. For these he had to fetch human aid at once, or they would soon die. Pugh, by the way, had put all the drugs and ointments into tins with clip-on lids which Sirius could open without excessive difficulty.

When the shearing season arrived the whole flock had to be brought down in batches, and put into pens to be tackled each in turn by one of the half-dozen shearers who were going the round of all the flocks in the district. The actual shearing was a job which Sirius would never be able to do. Nothing but human hands or some mechanical device could ever divide a sheep from its fleece. Sirius would stand about watching the manual dexterity of the shearers with fascination and sadness. The sheep, on its haunches between the knees of the man, would sometimes struggle, generally when its skin was nipped and little red stains appeared on the cream of its inner wool; but in the main the blades peeled off its coat as though merely undressing the creature. The gleaming inner surface of the fleece, as it was rolled back upon its own drab exterior, was a wave of curd. When the operation was over, the naked, angular beast would spring away bleating with bewilderment.

Throughout the last few months of his year with Pugh, Sirius was much absorbed in his work; but also he was in a state of suppressed excitement, and of conflict. He delighted in the prospect of release from this servitude, yet in spite of himself he regretted that the connection must be broken. He had become thoroughly interested, and he had a real affection for Pugh. It seemed mean to desert him. And though Cambridge promised novelty and a great diversity of human contacts, he was sufficiently imaginative to realize that town life might not suit him at all.

There was also another and a deeper conflict in his mind, one which was increasingly troubling him. It was the endless conflict over his relations with the dominant species of the planet. Never did he cease to feel that man and he were at once poles asunder and yet in essential nature identical. At this early stage the trouble had not come clear to him. He could not yet focus it. But to explain his obscure and still largely inarticulate distress, his biographer must set forth Sirius’s plight with a clarity which he himself had not yet attained. Men were many and he was one. They had walked the earth for a million years or more, and they had finally possessed it entirely. And he? Not only was he himself a unique product of their cunning, but the whole race of dogs were their creation. Only the wolf was independent. And wolves were now no more than a romantic relic that man would never again seriously fear. Little by little, through their million years, men had worked out their marvellous human way of living, culminating in civilization. With those enviable hands of theirs they had built themselves their first crude forest shelters, then settlements of huts, then good stone houses, cities, railways. With nicely correlated hand and eye they had made innumerable subtle implements, from microscopes to battleships and aeroplanes. They had discovered so much, from electrons to galaxies. They had written their millions of books, which they could read as easily as he could follow a trail on a damp morning. And some few of those books even he must read, because they had the truth in them, a bit of it. He, by contrast, with his clumsy paws and imprecise vision, could never do anything worthy of the brain that Thomas had given him. Everything worth while in him had come from mankind. His knowledge, such as it was, they had taught him. His love of the arts, of wisdom, of the “humanities”! God! Would that wisdom lay rather in “caninities”! For him there was no possible life-aim except to help on in some minute way the great human enterprise, whether through the humble work of sheep-tending or the career that Thomas had planned for him as a museum piece and a tenth-rate scientist. For him there could be no wisdom but man’s alien wisdom; just as for him there could be no real loving but the torturing business of loving these infinitely alien human creatures. Or would Thomas some day produce others of his kind for him to love? But they would be so young.

It was indeed mankind that had shown him what love was, with their gently ministering and caressing hands and their consoling voices. His ever-trusted and caninely revered foster-mother had loved him always as her own child; or only with so slight a difference that neither she herself nor her Plaxy but only he with his keen ears and nose could detect it. For this difference he could feel no resentment. It was not indeed strictly a difference of love at all but of animal maternal attraction. Then Thomas, yes Thomas also had shown him what love was, but in a different aspect, in the aspect of “man-to-man” intelligent companionship. Of course Thomas really loved his science far more. Probably he would be ready to submit his creature to any torture, physical or spiritual, for the advancement of his science, of his creative work. But this was as it should be. God himself, if there was a God, might be like that. Might he? Might he? Anyhow, Sirius could understand this attitude. It was not with Thomas nor with Elizabeth but with Plaxy that he had found the essence of love, the close mutual dependence and sharing. Yet strangely it was often the thought of Plaxy that wakened the other mood in him, in which he rebelled against humanity’s dominance.

Throughout the summer at the farm he brooded a great deal about his relationship with Plaxy. When the term was over and they met again, he found that time and difference of experience had increased the gulf between them. They still needed one another and gravitated towards each other, but they ever strained apart for the fulfilling of their divergent lives. Strange indeed was his relation to Plaxy! So alien were they in native propensity, yet so united in common history and in essential spirit. But now so divergent, like stars that have swung very near together out of space to fly apart towards opposite poles of the heaven. Altogether, how he loved her; and how, in another mood even while loving, he hated her!

The native odours of Plaxy were not naturally attractive to him, as was the intoxicating scent of a bitch. In nature, in the jungle, the characteristic human smell would probably have repelled him, like the stink of a baboon. Certainly it was an acquired taste, but he had acquired it so long ago and so thoroughly that the love of it had become a second and fuller nature to him; so that by now, though the sweet maddening smell of a bitch might at any time irresistibly draw him away from Plaxy, always he must return to her. She, he felt, must ever be the centre of his life and he of hers; and she knew it. Yet their lives must inevitably fall apart. There was no common future for them. Even now, how tiresome was her schoolgirl prattle, how boring her unfulfilled schoolgirl romances! (Why ever had the human race developed this ridiculous attitude to sex? How it disgusted him!) And those heartless artificial scents that she had begun to use, perversely wishing to cover her wholesome, and to him by now lovely, natural odour!

But there were times when the natural odour of Plaxy filled him with disgust. Then, all human beings stank in his nostrils, but Plaxy his darling most of all. Sometimes when he was lying in the yard waiting for orders, watching the old cock treading one of his harem, or Jane setting off in her best clothes to Dolgelly, or Mrs. Pugh carrying pails of milk to the dairy, or one of the hired men shifting muck out of the pig-sty, he tried hard to analyse his feelings about the human species, and the causes of his own fluctuation between adoration and contemptuous resentment. He recognized that the species that had produced him (more or less for fun) had on the whole treated him pretty well. The specimens that he knew best had on the whole been kindly. All the same he could not but resent his present servitude. Even Pugh, who was fundamentally decent, treated the dogs essentially as chattels. When they happened to be in the way they were just booted out of it; always with that ingrained rough friendliness of Pugh’s, but still it was exasperating. Then there were the village people. Many of them showed an unaccountable spite, kicking him or hitting him for no reason whatever, when Pugh was not looking. At first he thought they must be Pugh’s enemies, or Thomas’s; but no, they were just letting off some secret pent-up vindictiveness against a living thing that could not hit back. Most dogs had been thoroughly trained to take these cuffs and kicks meekly, but Sirius often surprised his assailants by vigorous retaliation.

One cause of Sirius’s incipient contempt for human beings was the fact that since they thought he was “only an animal,” they often gave themselves away badly in his presence. When they were observed by others of their kind, they maintained the accepted standard of conduct, and were indignant if they caught anyone falling short of that standard; but when they thought they were not being watched, they would commit the very same offences themselves. It was, of course, to be expected that in his presence they should pick their noses (how he chortled at their unconscious grimaces) or break wind, and so on. What roused his contempt was their proneness to insincerity. Mrs. Pugh, for instance, whom he had once seen licking a spoon instead of washing it, indignantly scolded her daughter for doing the very same thing. And the hired man, Rhys, who was a great chapel-goer, and very righteous about sex, would often, when he was alone, with only Sirius present, do unprintable things to relieve himself of sexual pressure. Not that Sirius saw anything wrong in such behaviour, but the insincerity of the man disgusted him.

This insincerity of the dominant species, he decided, was one of the main causes of those sudden uprushings of rage and physical repugnance which sometimes possessed him. At these times the human odour became an intolerable stench. He came to recognize this revulsion as a sign that his “wolf-nature,” as he called it, was waking. In this mood all the acquired meanings of smells seemed to evaporate, and their natural qualities smote him with exquisite delight or horror. If he was at home he would go out from the oppressive stench of the house to clean his nose with deep sniffs of the fragrant moorland air. A great loathing of man would seize him. He would perhaps plunge into a stream to wash away the pollution, or roll in sweet cow dung. Then he would go hunting, carefully avoiding every human being, irrationally feeling that the hand of man was everywhere against him. Most often his quarry was a mere rabbit; but with sufficient luck and intelligence he might take a mountain hare. The snap of his jaws on the spine, the yielding flesh, the rich blood welling into his mouth, went to his head like alcohol. He felt his spirit washed by the blood of the quarry, washed clean of humanity with all its itching monkey-inquisitiveness, all its restless monkeying with material things and living things and living minds. To hell with wisdom and love and all cultural dope. The way of life was to hunt, to overtake, to snatch, to hear the sharp scream, to wolf the crushed flesh and bones. Then a drink and a rest in the moorland sunshine, alone, at peace.

During his last month with Pugh, Sirius suffered a distressing alternation of moods. Sometimes he was wholly wrapped up in care of the sheep, sometimes he longed for the life of the mind, sometimes he felt the strange uprush of the wolf’s nature in him.

One day, after attending to some sheep that had been badly struck by fly, he was haunted by the stinging smell of the lotions that he had applied. They turned him savage. Why should he be the menial of these dunder-headed ruminants? Gradually the wolf-mood took complete possession of him. It was a free afternoon for him, and he should have gone home to read. Instead he cantered off among the hills till he reached a certain distant “foreign” sheep-run beyond Arenig Fach, a miniature Table Mountain far to the east. There he sniffed the wind and cast about with nose to earth till he found the trail he wanted. He had not followed it long before the quarry stood before him, a great ram with royal head and a neck heavy with muscle. Sirius checked, and stood looking at the beast, which also stood, sniffing the wind, pawing the ground. Suddenly the dog felt the human, the humane, in him coming uppermost again. Why murder this fine creature? But it was man’s creature, and it epitomized all the tyranny of the sheep-dog’s servitude. He rushed at the ram, who met his onslaught with lowered head and flung him off. There followed a long battle. Sirius was gashed in the shoulder. He persevered, however, running in again and again till at last he was given a chance to seize the ram by the throat. Desperately it tried to throw him off, crashing about among the heather and rocks; but Sirius hung on, remembering his battle with Diawl Du. The ram’s struggles became feebler, as Diawl Du’s had done. At last they ceased. Sirius let go. His tail tucked itself between his legs. He looked about to see if any human being was in sight. Then he looked at the dead ram. Human pity, horror, disgust, welled up in him. But he fought them down, remembering that he was hungry. He began tearing off great shreds of the hide, bracing his feet against the ground. Then he dragged at the warm flesh, and gorged himself. At last he slunk away.

It was sheer luck that Sirius was never charged with this crime. It so happened that another sheep-dog from a farm near by had run amok and killed several sheep; so the ram was attributed to him. But Sirius, when his wolf-mood had passed and he realized the full significance of his deed, lived in terror of detection. There was the tell-tale wound on his shoulder. But after all this might have been made by an old nail on a fence.

During the rest of his time with Pugh, Sirius devoted himself conscientiously to the sheep, treating them with new solicitation and tenderness. When at last Thomas came to fetch him away and Pugh made his final report, the old man said, “Yes, indeed, Mr. Trelone, it is a wonderful dog he is, and I don’t know how I shall do without him. This summer he is like a mother to the sheep, so loving he is in his ways with them. And they are all in great health because he has watched over them so closely, and tended any that would be poorly before it ever showed any sadness for itself. If only he were a man, Mr. Trelone, I would have my daughter marry him for the sheep’s sake. But she has set her heart on a two-legged animal, a draper’s assistant that has not half the brain of this dog, though he is no fool in his own business. So now I must look round and take some other young man into partnership, since Mr. Bran insists on going.” He looked at Sirius with a rueful and affectionate grimace, then continued, “But surely to goodness, Mr. Trelone, when you make another dog like this one you will not again forget that hands are as needful as a brain. I have often broken my heart for Bran when I have watched him trying to use his mouth to do the things I do so easily with these great clumsy paws of mine. Yes, you must give the next one hands, isn’t it, Mr. Trelone.”

Unexpectedly, when Sirius was once more at home, the wolf-mood became more insistent than ever. With Pugh he was generally absorbed in some bit of practical work, and had little time to brood; but at home during that summer holiday his future was all uncertain and had to be discussed; and Plaxy was present, with her familiar spell and her increasing remoteness.

Right at the outset, on the walk home from Caer Blai, Sirius had broached the subject of his future. “Well,” said Thomas with a guarded voice, “first you need a good holiday at home. Then I thought we might do a walking tour with my young colleague, McBane, in the Lake District, where you would see a different style of sheep-farming. Then you might enter for some of the Cumberland sheep-dog trials, just to surprise the local people a bit. Then it will be time for you to come into residence at the laboratory, so that we can begin a whole lot of fine experimental work on you, physiological and psychological. You’ll find it all very interesting, and of course your active co-operation will be needed throughout. You will learn a lot that way. Little by little, we shall train you to be a research worker in animal psychology. If you turn out well we may be glad to publish some of your stuff. Then, of course, scientists of all sorts passing through Cambridge will want to see you. So you will have a very interesting life, and you will be the cynosure of every scientific eye. I hope to God it doesn’t turn your head and make you an insufferable prig.” Sirius remained silent. Presently Thomas continued, “Oh, yes, and when we can spare you I think you might put in a few weeks now and then on sheep again, either at Pugh’s or elsewhere. In time we shall probably have done all the research we need of you, and then — well, you will probably come on to our staff as a permanent member.”

“I see,” said Sirius, and said no more. He thought about it all the way home. He thought about it by day and by night, and about other matters that were disturbing him.

One of these matters was of course his relationship with Plaxy. Shortly after she came home she learned that she had won a scholarship for one of the Cambridge colleges. Her subject, by the way, was English literature. It had been Thomas’s wish that she should become a doctor, but she had steadily veered away from science towards the arts, thus (according to my theory) asserting her independence against the father whom she secretly admired. The study of literature at Cambridge is scientific in temper, and in working for her scholarship Plaxy, I suggest, had both asserted her independence and been true to her father’s moral code. She had worked hard for her scholarship, and now for a time she put the life of the mind behind her. Sirius, on the other hand, after his hard labour with Pugh, proposed to spend all his spare time on the life of the mind. He had been hoping for her collaboration. Plaxy, however, was unusually silent and remote. Superficially she was as friendly as ever, and would often go for walks with him. But they were silent walks; and the silence, though apparently she did not notice it, oppressed him. She did not seem really interested in his problems. Even the great problem of his future, though she often encouraged him to speak of it, did not really interest her. And she spoke less and less of her school life, because it took so much explaining. Thus nearly all their talk centred round family or local affairs and the natural phenomena of a Welsh summer. This was easy and happy, but Sirius felt that it did not get them anywhere.

One day in mental agony he said, “Plaxy, why have you gone dead on me? I do so want us to be happy together!” She answered, “Oh, I know I’m sometimes a pig to you. The trouble is I’m terribly worried just now, and I can’t think of anything else.” “Tell me about it,” he said; but she replied, “I can’t. It’s too complicated. You wouldn’t understand. How could you? There’s nothing in your life to help you to begin to understand. No, I’m sorry, but somehow I can’t tell you. It’s — it’s just a human thing.”

It was not the words that offended him so much as the faint tone of superiority in the voice. The wolf-mood, which had been brewing in him ever since his conversation with Thomas, came violently into action. The smell of this human female beside him suddenly lost all its loveliness and became a repugnant stink. Sidelong he looked at her. Instead of seeing the dearest face in the world, he saw the uncouth hairless features of a super-ape, in fact of that species which so long ago had broken in his ancestors to be their slaves in body and soul.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to butt in.” He was startled at the snarl in his own voice, and surprised (and oddly resentful) that she did not notice it. All the way home they walked in silence. At the gate she touched his head with her hand, and said, “I’m sorry.” He answered, “That’s all right, I wish I could help.” The snarl was still in his voice, hidden under gentleness. She did not hear it. Her touch sent conflicting tremors down his back, for it was at once the touch of his darling and the touch of the super-simian tyrant.

At the doorway the human smell of the house raised his gorge. She entered. Longing to restore community with her, he actually licked her hand as she passed in; and while he did so, he felt to his horror his lips curl themselves back, baring his teeth for action. She vanished into the house. He turned away, sniffing the fresh air.

He cantered ruthlessly across a flower-bed, leapt the garden wall, and swung easily up the hillside with his tail streaming out behind him.

That night he failed to return home. There was nothing unusual in this, and no one was anxious. On the following night also he was absent. Thomas was disturbed, but concealed his anxiety under annoyance, for he had planned a long walk with Sirius for the next day. On the third night also there was no Sirius. Pugh had not seen him, nor had he put in an appearance at any of the neighbouring farms, nor in the village. Thomas was now alarmed; and Plaxy, thinking of their last meeting, felt remorse for her coldness.

The whole household was organized as a search party, with Idwal and another super-sheep-dog, who were borrowed for the occasion and made to smell Sirius’s sleeping-basket before setting out on the search. Since there was no news of him in the cultivated regions, it seemed probable that he had taken to the moor. The searchers spread out fanwise in allotted directions.

It was Plaxy who found Sirius, late in the afternoon. Coming round a buttress, she saw him standing over the carcass of a little moorland pony. She had approached up wind, and Sirius had not seen her. He began tugging savagely at the hide of the mangled neck, tearing it away from the flesh. His legs were driven deep into the bog in the effort to get a solid purchase. His tail curved under his belly. His jaws and shoulders were smeared with blood, and peaty mud was splashed all over him. A great pool of blood and mire spread from the pony’s throat. There had evidently been a wild struggle, for the pony’s flanks were torn and the bracken and grass were trampled.

Only for a second did Plaxy watch, unobserved and horror-stricken. Then she gasped out, “Sirius!” He let go and faced her, licking his crimson lips and muzzle. The two gazed at each other, she into the eyes of a wolf, he into the white, nude, super-simian face of his ancestral tyrant. His back bristled. A snarl twisted his lips. A low growl was all his greeting.

She was thoroughly frightened and nauseated, but also she realized that some desperate art was needed to save him from ruin. And in that moment (she afterwards said) she realized for the first time the strength of the bond between them. She advanced towards him. “Sirius, darling,” she cried, surprising herself no less than him, “what ever will become of us now?” Miserably she approached him, with the bog squelching over her shoe-tops. His growl became more threatening, for the beast in him was jealous for its quarry. His ears lay back. His teeth were more crimson than white. She felt a weakening at the knees, but plodded towards him, and stretched out a hand to touch the savage head. As she did so, she caught a nearer view of the carcass, and suddenly she vomited. When the paroxysm was over, she sobbed out, “Why did you have to do it? I don’t understand. Oh, they’ll want to kill you for it.” She sat down on a damp tussock and gazed at Sirius, and he at her. Presently he turned on the carcass and tore at the flesh. Plaxy screamed, leapt up and tried to drag him off by the collar. With a roar he turned on her, and she was flung back on to the boggy ground with the great beast standing over her, and the cold boggy water oozing about her shoulders. Their eyes were close together. His breath smelt of blood.

Some people in desperate moments have a knack of doing the right thing. Plaxy is one of them. “My dear,” she said, “you are not a wild beast, you’re Sirius. And you don’t really want to hurt me. You love me, you know you do. I’m your Plaxy.” His lips crept back over his teeth. His growl died out. Presently, with a little whimper he delicately kissed her cheek. Stroking his throat, she said, “Oh, my poor darling, you must have been mad”; then, as she rose to her feet, “Come, let me clean you up a bit.”

She took him to the edge of the boggy pond, and with a bit of moss for a sponge she wiped the blood from his muzzle and his neck and shoulders. While she was doing so she said, “Why did you have to do it? Why did you have to leave us? Was I very horrid to you that day?” He stood silent, passive to her ministrations, with his tail still tight under him. When he was more or less clean of blood, she kissed his forehead, then straightened herself. She walked over to the carcass. “Poor pony,” she said. “He’s like our Polly that we used to ride on when Giles and I were little. Do you remember how you used to kiss her nose, nearly getting yourself fallen over?” A sudden tortured whimper was his answer. Then she, still gazing at the pony, said in an altered voice, “If we leave this mess to be found, they won’t rest till they have tracked you down, and then? If only we could bury it in the bog! We had better go home and tell Thomas.”

On the long walk home she tried to make Sirius tell her all about it, and suddenly she realized that he had never said a word since she had found him. “Tell me, tell me!” she implored. “Oh, do at least say something. What’s the matter with you?”

At last he spoke. “You wouldn’t understand. There’s nothing in your life for you to judge it by. It’s just — a canine thing.” This echo of her own words startled and pained her. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “I was horrid.” But he said, “It wasn’t all your fault. I was going wild before that.”

The rest of the search party had arrived home before them. Sirius was given a hearty but anxious welcome. He took it coldly. Refusing his supper, he retired to bed. Plaxy at once told her story to Thomas, who was at first indignant and then increasingly interested, though of course alarmed for Sirius’s safety. Next day he traced the owner of the pony and told him the whole story, attributing the murder to “a new, untrained experimental super-sheep-dog of mine.” He paid up twice the value of the pony.

The killing of the pony was one of the turning points in Sirius’s career. It clarified his relations with Plaxy, and it made Thomas realize that Sirius was being seriously strained, and would have to be treated carefully.

A couple of days later Plaxy and Sirius found themselves talking more freely to one another than had been possible for many months. It began by her telling him about that “human” matter which she had formerly withheld. Consideration for Plaxy forbids me to publish its details, which are anyhow irrelevant to my theme. Let it suffice that Plaxy had allowed herself to become entangled with a young man for whom she felt a strong sexual attraction but no great respect; and that in these circumstances the shameless promiscuity of Sirius’s own sex life seemed to her to render him an impossible confidant. But the pony incident had made her realize more clearly how much her intimacy with Sirius mattered to both of them. She felt compelled to do her utmost to restore confidence. Sirius on his side told her of the conflict which was racking him, the alternating moods of respect and loathing for humanity. “You, for instance, are sometimes the dearest of all things in the world, and sometimes just a horrible monkey that has cast a filthy spell on me.” She answered at once, “And you are sometimes just my father’s experimental dog that I have somehow got tangled up with and responsible for, because of him; but sometimes you are — Sirius, the part of Sirius-Plaxy that I love.” A faint change in her fragrance made him realize the warmth of her feeling far better than her words could do, or even the shy frankness of her voice.

Thomas made a point of lecturing Sirius on the folly of killing ponies, but the lecture gradually changed into a discussion about the causes of the wolf-mood in him. At the crisis of this talk Sirius cried, “Unless you help me to be myself, you will force me to be — a sham wolf.” Thomas countered this with, “And what must you be to be ‘yourself’?” After a long pause Sirius said, “I don’t know, yet. But I must be given a chance to find out. I must be helped to look round at the world. I shall not see much of it if I just alternate between sheep and your laboratory. You see, I feel I have my own active contribution to make to — well, to human understanding. I can’t be just a passive subject for experiments, or at best a tenth-rate research worker. There’s something I must get clear in my own mind, and when I have got it clear, then I must get it across somehow to mankind.” Thomas softly whistled. “Sounds as though you wanted to be a sort of canine messiah to men!” Sirius moved restlessly and said, “No, I’m not as silly as all that. I don’t feel superior at all, far from it. But — well, my point of view is so utterly different from man’s, and yet at bottom the same. In making me you made something that sees man from clean outside man, and can tell him what he looks like.” Thomas was silent, considering this, and Sirius presently added, “There’s another point. When I feel I’m not going to be able to be my true self, or not allowed to try to be it, the whole human race turns foul in my nose, and I just go wild. Everything blacks out. I don’t know why, but there it is.”

Thomas was by now thoroughly aware that his policy for Sirius had been too simple. He undertook to modify it. On the following day he talked it all over with Elizabeth. “What a fool I was,” he said, “not to foresee this psychological trouble! I don’t think I ever really realized that if things went wrong with this experiment I couldn’t just wash my hands of it all, and start again; any more than a surgeon can wash his hands of an operation that has gone wrong. I feel as God ought to have felt towards Adam when Adam went wrong — morally responsible. The devil of it is that, though moral feelings are mere subjective feelings, you can’t ignore them.”

After a long discussion Elizabeth and Thomas decided on a new programme for Sirius. He should come to the Laboratory, as planned; but also he should be “shown round a bit” by Elizabeth, so that he could “begin to get the hang of this crazy human world.” He would go about simply as her dog, meeting her friends in Cambridge and elsewhere, listening to their talk. She would also help him to do a bit of sight-seeing, if it could be arranged — slums, factories, docks, museums, concerts. This could be done at odd times, from the lab. He could also, with Thomas’s aid, make proper use of Cambridge as an educational centre. Thomas would suggest lines of study and get him books from libraries. All this might help him to see more clearly what he could do with his life.

When Thomas explained the new plan to Sirius, he ended with a caution. If Sirius did wander about the country with Elizabeth, he must be very careful not to give the show away. He must behave simply as her dog. No one must suspect him of being able to talk, no one but the people in the know at the laboratory. “But why?” protested Sirius. “Surely it’s time I came out into the open. I can’t go on pretending for ever.” Thomas insisted that the time had not yet come for publicity. “We must have you firmly established in the scientific world before the commercial world can get hold of you. Otherwise some unscrupulous tough, out on the make, will try to kidnap you and run you into some foreign country to show you off for money. Then you really would be a slave for the rest of your life.” Sirius snorted. “Let ’em try, that’s all.” Thomas pointed out that a chloroform cloth would put him out of action very effectively, till they got him away. “Don’t think it’s just my fancy,” Thomas added. “There are some guys on your track already, and it’s time I warned you. Only yesterday two townee people called here to inquire about buying a super-sheep-dog. I put them off because I didn’t like the look of them. Told them I had no animal ready. They said they had seen one in Trawsfynydd posting a letter, you in fact. Wouldn’t I sell you? They offered £30, £40, and gradually raised it to £250. This was fantastic for a super-sheep-dog, so I began to be suspicious. Well, those fellows have been hanging about here since then, so look out. And remember, chloroform.”

Some weeks later, when Sirius had almost forgotten about this story, an attempt was actually made to kidnap him. He had been out hunting, and was returning by his usual route, which passed over a stile in a wall about a hundred yards or so above the house. He was on the point of climbing over the stile when he caught a whiff of something strange. It was sickly-sweet and pungent. He remembered chloroform, and checked. Now unfortunately for his assailants his meditations on the way home from the chase had been sombre. He had been brooding on his subjection to the human race, and so he was in a mood for retaliation. He leapt the stile and crashed into two men, who were waiting for him. They had not expected him to come over like a shell from a gun, exploding on impact. Both men were knocked flying, and in the struggle which followed Sirius got his teeth in the throat of one of the men before the other could apply the chloroform cloth. The choking smell forced him to let go and attack his other assailant. Number one, however, was temporarily out of action, so Sirius had to deal only with number two and the chloroform. The taste, or rather the idea, of human blood had roused the wolf-mood in Sirius. He became just an animal fighting its natural enemy-species. The man did his best with the chloroform, but though Sirius had a few strong whiffs he managed to avoid its full power. Meanwhile the noise of battle had roused Thomas, who was down below in the garden at Garth. He pounded up the hill shouting. The damaged man had risen to his feet to help his colleague, but when he saw Thomas he made off. The other had succeeded in doping Sirius enough to make him no longer dangerous; but he too, when he heard Thomas, clambered to his feet, with blood streaming from his face, and took to his heels, leaving the dog already three parts doped and quite unable to give chase. Both men reached the cart track where they had left their car, and drove off as fast as the bumps would permit. Thomas made no attempt to follow them. Instead, he went to Sirius and gripped his collar, lest the dog should recover in time to pursue his enemies.

Shortly after this incident Thomas took Sirius by car to the Lake District for the projected walking tour with his young colleague, McBane. His main object was to familiarize McBane with Sirius, and particularly to give him an opportunity of learning to understand the dog’s speech before undertaking work on him at the Laboratory. Incidentally Sirius was also given an opportunity to see the north country sheep-dogs at work. The party also attended an important sheep-dog trial. Thomas had been persuaded by McBane to enter Sirius as a competitor. Sirius had on several occasions acquitted himself brilliantly at trials in Wales, under Pugh; but Thomas knew nothing of the technique. It very soon became obvious to judges and spectators that the master was no shepherd, while the dog was more brilliant than any dog ought to have been. It did not matter how ineptly Thomas gave his orders; Sirius ignored them and carried out the desired operation with every refinement of skill. Finally it was discovered that Thomas was the famous producer of super-sheep-dogs. He received many offers to purchase Sirius, but laughingly refused. The would-be purchasers had to be content to have their names entered on the waiting list for future dogs.

CHAPTER VIII

SIRIUS AT CAMBRIDGE

WHEN THE HOLIDAY was over, Thomas took Sirius to Cambridge. A private bed-sitting-room had been prepared for the wonder-dog within the precincts of the Laboratory, near a room which Thomas occupied himself. The senior members of the staff were introduced to Sirius as “man to man,” on the understanding that they must keep the secret and behave in public as though this dog were only a rather specially bright super-sheep-dog.

Sirius was at first very happy at Cambridge. The bustle of city and university, though rather bewildering, was stimulating. During the first few days he spent much time in wandering about the streets watching the people, and the dogs. The abundance of the canine population surprised him, and so did the extraordinary diversity of breeds. It seemed to him incredible that the dominant species should keep so many of the dominated species alive in complete idleness, for not one of these pampered animals had any function but to be the living toy of some man or woman. Physically they were nearly all in good condition, save for a common tendency to corpulence, which in some cases reached a disgusting fulfilment. Mentally they were unwholesome. How could it be otherwise? They had nothing to do but wait for their meals, sink from boredom into sleep, attend their masters or mistresses on gentle walks, savour one another’s odours, and take part in the simple ritual of the lamp-post and the gate-post. Sexually they were all starved, for bitches were few, and jealously guarded by their human owners. Had not the canine race been of sub-human intelligence, they must one and all have been neurotics, but their stupidity saved them.

Sirius himself had often to act the part of these sub-human creatures. When Elizabeth took him out to visit her friends he allowed himself to be petted and laughed at, or praised for the “marvellous intelligence” that he showed in “shaking hands” or shutting the door. Then the company would forget him completely, while he lay stretched out on the floor in seeming boredom, but in fact listening to every word, and trying to get the hang of some conversation on books or painting; even furtively stealing a glance at drawings or bits of sculpture that were circulated for inspection.

Elizabeth did her best to give Sirius a fair sample of life in a university city. It became a sort of game with her to contrive means to insinuate him into meetings and concerts. After the simple subsistence life of the sheep-country, Cambridge filled him with respect for the surplus energies of the human species. All these great and ornate buildings had been put up stone by stone, century by century, with the cunning of human hands. All these articles in shop-windows had been made by human machinery and transported in human trains, cars and ships from the many lands of human occupation. Perhaps most impressive of all to his innocent mind was the interior of a great library, where, by patient intrigue, Elizabeth managed to effect an entry for him. The thousands of books lining the walls brought home to him as nothing else had done the vast bulk and incredible detail of human intellectual tradition. He stood speechless before it all, his tail drooping with awe. As yet he was far too simple-minded to realize that the majority of the volumes that faced him, shoulder to shoulder, were of little importance. He supposed all to be mightily pregnant. And the naïve belief that he could never attain wisdom until his poor eyes had travelled along most of those millions of lines of print filled him with despair.

Thomas had decided that the time had come to let out the secret of Sirius’s powers to a carefully selected public. A number of his scientific and academic friends must be allowed to make the dog’s acquaintance and form their own opinions of his ability, on the understanding that the truth must not yet be published. His policy was still to keep the greater public from sharing the secret, lest the forces of commercial stunt-manufacture should be brought to bear on his work, and possibly wreck it.

He arranged for Sirius to meet a few eminent persons in the University, mostly zoologists, biochemists, biologists of one sort or another, but also psychologists, philosophers, and philologists, who would be interested in his speech, and a few stray surgeons, painters, sculptors and writers who happened to be among Thomas’s personal friends. These meetings generally took place after a lunch in Thomas’s rooms. Over the meal Thomas would tell the party something about his experiments and the success of the super-sheep-dogs. Then he would lead on to his more daring research, and describe Sirius as “probably quite as bright as most university students.” When lunch was over, the small company would settle in easy chairs with their pipes, and Thomas, looking at his watch, would say, “I told him we should be ready for him at two o’clock. He’ll be along in a minute.” Presently the door would open and the great beast would stalk into the room. He did not lack presence. Tall and lean as a tiger, but with a faint suggestion of the lion’s mane, he would stand for a moment looking at the company. Thomas would rise to his feet and solemnly introduce his guests one by one to Sirius. “Professor Stone, anthropologist, Dr. James Crawford, President of —— College,” and so on. The guests generally felt extremely ill at ease, not knowing how to behave, and often suspecting that Thomas was playing a trick on them. Sometimes they remained stolidly seated, sometimes they rather sheepishly rose to their feet, as though Sirius were a distinguished human newcomer. Sirius looked steadily into the eyes of each guest as he was introduced, acknowledging him with a languid movement of his great flag of a tail. He would then take up his position in the centre of the company, generally squatting down on the hearth-rug. “Well,” Thomas would say, “first of all you want to know, of course, that Sirius really can understand English, so will someone ask him to do something?” Often the whole company was so paralysed by the oddity of the situation that it took a full half-minute for anyone to think of an appropriate task. At last the dog would be asked to fetch a cushion or a book, which of course he straightway did. Presently Thomas would carry on a conversation with Sirius, the guests listening intently to the strange canine speech, and failing to understand a word of it. Then Sirius would say a few simple words very slowly, Thomas translating. This would lead on to a general conversation in which the guests would often question the dog and receive the answer through Thomas. Not infrequently Sirius himself would question the visitors, and sometimes his questions were such that Thomas was obviously reluctant to pass on. In this way the guests received a clear impression of a strong and independent personality.

And in this way Sirius himself gradually reached certain conclusions about these distinguished specimens of the dominant species. One characteristic about them perplexed him greatly. It was such a deep-seated thing that they themselves did not seem to be aware of it. One and all, they undervalued or misvalued their hands. Many of them, in fact all but the surgeons, sculptors, painters, and research workers, were wretchedly clumsy with their hands, and by no means ashamed of it. Even those whose work involved manual skill, the surgeons, sculptors and so on, though they were so skilled in their own specialized technique, had often lost that general handiness, that manual versatility, by which their species had triumphed. On the whole they were helpless creatures. Hands were for them highly specialized instruments, like the bird’s wing or the seal’s flipper, excellent for some one action, but not versatile. Those that came on bicycles never mended their punctures themselves. They could not sew on their buttons or mend their socks. Moreover even these specialized geniuses of the hand had to some extent been infected by the general contempt for “manual toil,” which the privileged class had invented to excuse their laziness. As for the writers, academics, lawyers, politicians, their unhandiness and their contempt for mere manual dexterity were amazing. The writers couldn’t even write properly. They fell back on the cruder activity of pressing typewriter keys. Or they simply dictated. Sirius had heard that in Old China the scholar class let their finger-nails grow fantastically long so that their incapacity for manual work should be obvious. Think of the millions of cunning hands thus wasted! How he despised these regressive human types for the neglect and atrophy of the most glorious human organ, the very instrument of creation; and for infecting with their contempt for manual skill even the manual workers themselves, on whose practical dexterity the whole structure of civilization was founded! Artizans actually wanted their sons to “rise” into the class of “black-coated” workers. What would not Sirius himself have achieved if he had been given even the clumsy hands of an ape, let alone the least apt of all these neglected human organs!

The first few weeks at Cambridge were indeed delightful for Sirius. Every morning some bit of research was done upon him at the Laboratory, with his interested co-operation. Sometimes it was a case of studying his motor or sensory reactions, sometimes his glandular responses to emotional stimuli, sometimes his intelligence, and so on. X-ray photographs had to be made of his skull, gramophone records of his speech. With the co-operation of a psychologist he himself planned to write a monograph on his olfactory experiences, and another on his power of detecting human character and emotional changes by scent and tone of voice. Psychologists and musicians studied his musical powers. His sex life had also to be recorded.

In addition to all this strictly scientific work, in which Sirius collaborated with his human observers, he planned to undertake two popular books entirely on his own. One was to be called The Lamp-post, A Study of the Social Life of the Domestic Dog. The opening passage is interesting for the light which it throws on Sirius’s temperament. “In man, social intercourse has centred mainly on the process of absorbing fluid into the organism, but in the domestic dog and to a lesser extent among all wild canine species, the act charged with most social significance is the excretion of fluid. For man the pub, the estaminet, the Biergarten, but for the dog the tree-trunk, the lintel of door or gate, and above all the lamp-post, form the focal points of community life. For a man the flavours of alcoholic drinks, but for a dog the infinitely variegated smells of urine are the most potent stimuli for the gregarious impulse.” The other projected book, Beyond the Lamp-post, he kept a dead secret. It was to be autobiographical, and would express his philosophy of life. These works were never completed; the second was scarcely even begun, but I have found the random notes for it extremely useful in writing Sirius’s biography. They reveal a mind which combined laughable naïvety in some directions with remarkable shrewdness in others, a mind moreover which seemed to oscillate between a heavy, self-pitying seriousness and a humorous detachment and self-criticism.

It was flattering to Sirius to be the centre of so much interest; and it was very unwholesome. Inevitably he began to feel that his mission was after all simply to be his unique self, and to allow the human race respectfully to study him. Far from retaining the humility that had oppressed him on his visit to the library, he now swung away towards self-complacency. As his presence became more widely known, more people sought his acquaintance. Thomas received innumerable invitations from outside the chosen circle, persons who had evidently heard vague rumours of the human dog and were eager to verify them. When Sirius was out in the streets people often stared at him and whispered. Thomas strongly disapproved of his going out by himself, lest attempts should be made to kidnap him. The anxious physiologist even went so far as to hint that unless his precious charge agreed never to go out without a human escort he would have to be confined to the Laboratory. This threat, however, infuriated Sirius; and Thomas recognized that, if it were carried out, all friendly co-operation would cease. The best he could do was to engage a detective to follow the dog on a bicycle whenever he went out of doors. Sirius conceived a humorous dislike of this individual. “He’s rather like a tin can tied to my tail, he and his clattery old bike,” said Sirius; and henceforth always referred to him as “Old Tin Can.” The game of giving Old Tin Can the slip or leading him into awkward situations became Sirius’s main outdoor amusement.

Contrary to his original intention Sirius spent the whole of that autumn term at Cambridge. Though he was often very homesick for the country, and nearly always had a headache and often felt seedy, he found Cambridge life far too fascinating to surrender. Several times he did, indeed, suggest to Thomas that he ought to be moving on; but Thomas was reluctant to break off the research, and Sirius himself was too comfortable to find energy to press the matter.

Very soon the Christmas vacation was upon him, and he went back to Wales with Thomas, Elizabeth, and Plaxy. Once more on the hills, he discovered that he was in a sorry state of physical decay; and he spent much of his time trying to restore himself by long hunting expeditions.

During the spring term Sirius was less happy. The glamour of Cambridge had begun to fade, and he was increasingly restless about his future; the more so because Cambridge was like a habit-forming drug. By now he obtained only a mild satisfaction from it, yet it had got into his blood and he could not bring himself to do without it. He had arrived in Cambridge, an anatomical study of bone and muscle. A soft, inactive life, which included far too many delicacies received in the houses of admiring acquaintances, had already blurred his contours with a layer of fat, and filled out his waist. Once when he met Plaxy in the street, she exclaimed, “Gosh! You’re going fat and prosperous, and you waddle like a Pekinese.” This remark had greatly distressed him.

Along with physical decay went a less obvious mental decay, a tendency to sink into being a sort of super-lap-dog-cum-super-laboratory-animal. His disposition became increasingly peevish and self-centred. There came a day when a serious difference occurred between Sirius and McBane. Thomas’s lieutenant had prepared a piece of apparatus for a more minute research into Sirius’s olfactory powers. Sirius protested that he was not in the mood for such an exacting bit of work to-day; his nose was in a hypersensitive state and must not be put to any strain. McBane pointed out that, if Sirius refused, hours of preparation would be wasted. Sirius flew into a whimpering tantrum, crying that his nose was more important than a few hours of McBane’s time. “Good God!” cried McBane, “you might be a prima donna.”

Thomas had been surprised and pleased at the way in which Sirius had settled down to his new life. It seemed as though the dog had outgrown his romantic cravings, and was reconciled to becoming a permanent property at the Lab. But in his second term, though Sirius was still superficially able to enjoy his work, on a deeper level of his mind he was becoming increasingly perturbed and rebellious. This life of ease and self-gratulation was not at all what he was “meant for.” The mere shortage of physical exercise made him miserable. Sometimes he cantered a few miles along the tow-path, but this was very boring; and he was always oppressed by the knowledge that the faithful detective was following on a bicycle. He could not force himself to run every day. Consequently he was generally constipated and disgruntled. He felt a growing nostalgia for the moors, the mists, the rich smell of the sheep, with all its associations of hard work and simple triumphs. He remembered Pugh with affection, and thought how much more real he seemed than these dons and their wives.

He was vaguely aware too of his own moral decay. It was increasingly difficult for him to do anything that he did not want to do. Not that he was incapable of all mental effort, for he still generally carried out his intellectual work with conscientious thoroughness. But then, he happened to like that. What he was failing to do was to control his ordinary selfish impulses in relation to his human neighbours. He was also growing less capable even of prudential self-regard.

For instance there was the matter of bitches. Of the few bitches that he encountered in the Cambridge streets, most were anyhow too small for him, and many had been treated with a preparation which disguised the animal’s intoxicating natural odour, and made potential lovers regard her as a filthy-smelling hag. He insisted to Thomas that, since in Cambridge there was practically no scope at all for love-making, bitches must be provided for him. It was not to be expected that a vigorous young dog should be able to do without them and yet maintain his mental balance. So a succession of attractive females was procured for him. These creatures were brought in turn and at appropriate times to his rooms in the Laboratory; and the whole matter was treated as part of the prolonged and complicated scientific study in which he was co-operating. The Laboratory, by the way, had analysed the chemistry of the odours which were sexually stimulating to Sirius, and could choose seductive animals for him with considerable success. But, his appetite, instead of being assuaged, increased. Almost daily they brought a young bitch to his room, yet he was never satisfied. Indeed he became more and more lascivious and difficult to please. Thomas urged him to take himself in hand, otherwise his mental vitality would be sapped. Sirius agreed to do this, but failed to carry out his promise. And now a note of sadism crept into his love-making. Once there was a terrible commotion because in the very act of love he dug his teeth into the bitch’s neck.

This incident seems to have frightened Sirius himself, for a change now came over him. Dreading the dark power that seemed to rise up within him and control his behaviour, he made a desperate effort to pull himself together. He also determined to leave Cambridge at once and go back to Wales for a spell with the sheep. Thomas reluctantly agreed that he had better go, but pointed out that he was in no condition to undertake sheep work again without some weeks of severe physical training. This was all too true. The best that could be done was that Thomas should arrange with Pugh to take him for a month not as a sheep-dog but as a paying guest. This plan was much discussed, but somehow Sirius could not bring himself to such an ignominious course. In default of a better policy he simply stayed on at Cambridge till the end of the term. There followed an Easter Vacation in Wales, given over wholly to physical training in preparation for a spell of sheep-tending in Cumberland. But as no satisfactory arrangement could be made for him, the lure of Cambridge proved in the end too strong, and he returned with Thomas for the summer term.

In the familiar environment the old way of life proved fatally easy. Laboratory work, meetings with Thomas’s scientific or academic friends, a great deal of desultory biological and other scientific reading, a certain amount of philosophy, the writing of his monographs and notes for The Lamp-post and Beyond the Lamp-post, select parties at which he was lionised by the wives of dons, the perennial shortage of exercise, a succession of bitches, all this told upon his health and loosened his character. He developed more and more the prima donna disposition. He became increasingly self-centred and self-important. Yet all the while, deep in his heart, he felt completely disorientated and futile, spiritually enslaved to the will of man.

At last, when he felt in himself a return of sadistic impulses, he was seized with such a terror of sheer madness that he once more gathered all his moral strength together for a great recovery. He set himself a course of strict self-discipline and asceticism. He would have no more bitches. He would cut down his food by half. Sometimes he would fast; and “pray to whatever gods there be.” He would take exercise. He would co-operate conscientiously with the Laboratory staff in their researches on him. He would once more tackle his literary work; for even this, which had for long been his one remaining active interest, had recently been dropped.

For a while he did indeed live a more austere life, punctuated by bouts of wild self-indulgence; but presently his resolution began once more to fail, and he found himself slipping back into the old ways. Terror seized him; and a desperate loneliness in the midst of his social contacts. He felt a violent need for Plaxy, and sent her a note, asking her to come for a good walk with him.

Plaxy gladly made an appointment with him, but the day was not a success. She was naturally very absorbed in her university life; and though Sirius was in a manner a member of the same university, their experiences did not overlap. Lectures, essays, meetings, dances, and above all her new friendships filled her mind with matter that was remote from Sirius. At first they talked happily and freely, but there was no depth of intimacy between them. Several times he was on the verge of blurting out his troubles; but to say, “Oh, Plaxy, help me, I’m going to hell,” which was what he wanted to say, seemed somehow preposterous. Moreover, as the day wore on, he began to suspect from a faint change in her odour that she was growing subconsciously hostile to him. He had been talking to her about the bitches. It was then that her scent had begun to take on a slight asperity, though in speech and manner she remained quite friendly. Towards the end of the day a gloomy silence fell upon them both. Each tried to dispel it with light talk, but vainly. When at last they were on the point of parting, and Plaxy had said, “It was nice to be together again.” Sirius registered in his own mind the fact that her odour had been growing mellower as the parting approached. “Yes, it’s good indeed,” he said. But even as he said it the human smell of her, though unchanged in its sensory quality, began to nauseate him.

In order to return to the Laboratory he had to cross the town. He strolled off, without any positive desire to reach his destination, or indeed to do anything else. As he drifted along the streets, he felt stifled by the surrounding herd of the grotesque super-simians who had conquered the earth, moulded the canine species as they trimmed their hedges, and produced his unique self. Feelings of violent hatred surged up in him. A number of significant little memories presented themselves to his embittered mind. Long ago in a field near Ffestiniog he had come upon an angel-faced little boy taking baby thrushes out of a nest and skewering them one by one on a rusty nail. More recently in a Cambridge garden he had watched a well-dressed woman sitting on a seat and fondling a dog’s head. Presently she looked about as though to see if she was being observed. There was no one but Sirius, a mere animal. Still stroking the dog with one hand, she reached out with the other and pressed her lighted cigarette-end into the creature’s groin. This streak of sexual cruelty in human beings horrified Sirius all the more because he himself had indulged in something of the sort with his bitches. But he persuaded himself that this aberration in him was entirely due to some sort of infection from man, due, in fact, to his human conditioning. His own kind, he told himself, were not by nature cruel. Oh, no, they always killed as quickly as possible. Only the inscrutable and devilish cat descended to torture.

It was all due to man’s horrible selfishness, he told himself. Homo sapiens was an imperfectly socialized species, as its own shrewder specimens, for instance H. G. Wells, had pointed out. Even dogs, of course, were self-centred, but also far more spontaneously social. They might often fight for bones or bitches, and they persecuted one another for the glory of dominance; but when they were social they were more wholeheartedly social. They were much more ready to be loyal absolutely, without any secret nosing after self-advantage. So he told himself. They could give absolute, disinterested loyalty; for instance to the human family that claimed their pack-allegiance, or to a single adored master, or to the work that was entrusted to them. The sheep-dog didn’t expect to get anything out of his job. He did it for the work’s sake alone. He was an artist. No doubt some men were as loyal as any dog, but Cambridge life had taught Sirius to smell out self-regard under every bit of loyalty. Even Plaxy’s affection for him seemed in his present mood merely a sort of living up to a pattern for her precious self, not real self-oblivious love. Or take McBane. Was it science or the budding great scientist, Hugh McBane, that really stirred him? Sirius had noticed that he smelt most excited and eager whenever some little personal triumph was at stake. Then there were all those prominent people that he had met at Thomas’s lunch parties — biologists, physicists, psychologists, doctors, surgeons, academics, writers, painters, sculptors and God-knows-what-all. They were so very distinguished, and all so seeming modest and so seeming friendly; and yet every one of them, every bloody one of them, if he could trust his nose and his sensitive ears, was itching for personal success, for the limelight, or (worse) scheming to push someone else out of the limelight, or make someone in it look foolish or ugly. No doubt dogs would be just as bad, really, except when their glorious loyalty was upon them. That was the point! Loyalty with dogs could be absolute and pure. With men it was always queered by their inveterate self-love. God! They must be insensitive really; drunk with self, and insensitive to all else. There was something reptilian about them, snakish.

Long ago he had idealized humanity. His silly uncritical, canine loyalty had made him do so. But now his practised nose had found out the truth about the species. They were cunning brutes, of course, devilishly cunning. But they were not nearly so consistently intelligent as he had thought. They were always flopping back into sub-human dullness, just as he was himself. And they didn’t know themselves even as well as he knew himself, and not half as well as he knew them. How he knew them! He had been brought up in a rather superior family, but even the Trelones were often stupid and insensitive. Even Plaxy knew very little about herself. She was so absorbed in herself that she couldn’t see herself, couldn’t see the wood for the trees. How often she was unreasonable and self-righteous because of some miserable little self-regard that she herself didn’t spot. But he spotted it all right, oh yes! And she could be cruel. She could make him feel an outcast and a worm, just for spite.

What enraged him most of all about human beings, and particularly the superior ones that he met in Cambridge, was their self-deception. Every one of them was quite different really from the mask that he or she presented to the world. McBane, for instance. Of course he really was devoted to science, up to a point, but more so to himself; and he daren’t admit it, even to himself. Why couldn’t he just say, “Oh, I know I’m a selfish brute at heart, but I try not to be”? Instead, he pretended to have a real sheep-dog loyalty to science. But he didn’t really use himself up for science. Perhaps he might some day, just as Thomas did. Some day he might be ready to die for science even. But if he did, he would really be dying not absolutely for science, but for his own reputation as a devoted scientist.

Oh God! What a species to rule a planet! And so obtuse about everything that wasn’t human! So incapable of realizing imaginatively any other kind of spirit than the human! (Had not even Plaxy failed him?) And cruel, spiteful! (Had not even Plaxy had her claws in him?) And complacent! (Did not even Plaxy really, in her secret heart, regard him as “just a dog”?)

But what a universe, anyhow! No use blaming human beings for what they were. Everything was made so that it had to torture something else. Sirius himself no exception, of course. Made that way! Nothing was responsible for being by nature predatory on other things, dog on rabbit and Argentine beef, man on nearly everything, bugs and microbes on man, and of course man himself on man. (Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat.) Everything desperately struggling to keep its nose above water for a few breaths before its strength inevitably failed and down it went, pressed under by something else. And beyond, those brainless, handless idiotic stars, blazing away so importantly for nothing. Here and there some speck of a planet dominated by some half-awake intelligence like humanity. And here and there on such planets, one or two poor little spirits waking up and wondering what in hell everything was for, what it was all about, what they could make of themselves; and glimpsing in a muddled way what their potentiality was, and feebly trying to express it, but always failing, always missing fire, and very often feeling themselves breaking up, as he himself was doing. Just now and then they might find the real thing, in some creative work, or in sweet community with another little spirit, or with others. Just now and then they seemed somehow to create or to be gathered up into something lovelier than their individual selves, something which demanded their selves’ sacrifice and yet gave their selves new life. But how precariously, torturingly; and only just for a flicker of time! Their whole life-time would only be a flicker in the whole of titanic time. Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there’ll still be time. Oh, God, what for?

CHAPTER IX

SIRIUS AND RELIGION

AS SIRIUS WALKED home to the Laboratory after his day with Plaxy, brooding on the shortcomings of man, and his own loneliness, and the indifference of the universe, he began to slip into the wolf-mood. Frustration always tended to have this effect on him, and he was feeling desperately frustrated. He longed for self-expression, and could find no means of attaining it. When he was a puppy he had decided that he would be a general, deploying his human troops with superhuman skill, charging with them to superhuman victory. Ludicrous, impossible dream! Later he had determined to be an explorer of the Siberian Tundra or prairies (a country that he thought suited to his powers); but how could a dog take the necessary gear with him without causing excitement among the human inhabitants? Or perhaps Australian sheep-farming would suit him, or some kind of hunting career in the north of Canada. No, by now it was all too clear that nothing would suit him, nothing was possible but to be a super-lap-dog-cum-super-laboratory-animal.

Yet always there was a strange nagging “something” within him which said, “Get on with it! You have unique powers. There is only one of you, and you exist to make your contribution to the world. Find your calling. It is difficult for you, no doubt, but you must find it or be damned.” Sometimes the voice said, “For you, humanity is the pack. You are not one of them, but they made you and you are for them. And because you are different you can give them a vision which they can never win for themselves.” Could he, after all, fulfil his task, perhaps, through music? Grandiose fantasies assailed him. “Sirius, the unique canine composer, not only changed the whole character of human music, importing into it something of the dog’s finer auditory sensibility; he also, in his own incomparable creations, expressed the fundamental identity-in-diversity of all spirits, of whatever species, canine, human or superhuman.”

But no! It could not be. Man would never listen to him. And what reason had he to suppose that he had the genius to strike his music into the deep incomprehensible heart of man?

On the way back to the Laboratory Sirius heard the familiar nagging voice, calling him to express the “spirit” in him. He greeted it with an inward snarl. What could he possibly do about it? Nothing. He was a misfit, a mistake. He ought never to have occurred.

He felt an increasing impulse to run amok in the street. Life was no good to him. Why not throw it away, why not kill as many as he could of these ridiculously bedecked, swelled-headed apes, until they managed to destroy him? “I won’t, I won’t,” he kept saying to himself. “Even if they are apes, or forked worms, they are the same stuff really as I am.” Fleeing from himself, he broke into a trot, a canter, a real gallop, needing the seclusion of his own room. There, he paced up and down for many hours, far into the night. These hours form a crucial point in his life, so I shall quote from the account which he himself wrote down on the following day; turgid stuff, but significant of his unwholesome state.

“I walked and walked, rubbing my shoulder painfully against the wall every time I turned, snapping at the curtain as I passed it. This was affectation; I was dramatizing myself as a caged beast. The colleges and churches chimed, quarter by quarter. The noise of passing cars died down as the night advanced. I kept remembering with fury the smell of Plaxy, dear and loathsome; and the scent of my last bitch, so sweet, but false, promising a lovely spirit that did not exist. Then the sudden presence of Idwal’s friendly smell, and of a flock of sheep, drenched with mist. The smell of Pugh, sweaty and excited. Of frost, of a summer day, of wind from the sea, of the change of wind from west to east. Trails of rabbit and hare. The infuriating stink of cat. Fox, rich and subtle. The menagerie. Chloroform, and the two toughs that had attacked me. The faint, throat-tightening smell of suffering which sometimes seems to come from the part of the Lab where I have never been.

“Below all this flood of smells there was an undercurrent of sounds; tones of human voices, and dog voices; bleating of sheep and lambs; the wind, whimpering or furious; snatches of human music, and themes of my own singing.

“My whole life seemed to crowd in on me in smell and sound; and touch also, for I felt Plaxy’s hand on my neck, and the cracking of bones between my teeth, and the soft flanks of a young setter that I had loved long ago in Ffestiniog.

“Visual shapes came too, but dimly, unsteadily. Sometimes I glimpsed Thomas with pursed lips, considering me; sometimes Plaxy smiling.

“While these memories presented themselves to me, thoughts also kept racing and jostling one another through my mind, chiefly terrified and resentful thoughts about man’s power over me, and my own failure to be master of my fate. How could I ever save myself from the breakdown that had already begun in me? What help was there anywhere for me? Thomas did not really understand the creature he had made. Elizabeth was always ready to hear my troubles and comfort me; but somehow she turned them all into child’s troubles. And Plaxy was now so far away. It was ‘the spirit,’ we had said, that mattered. It was ‘in the spirit’ that we were eternally together. But now? Had we meant anything real at all by ‘the spirit’? I wondered. After all we were just animals, with some degree of intelligence; animals of different species, doomed never really to be at one with each other, always in discord, and now drifting inevitably apart.

“Why, why was everything so sweet in promise and yet always in realization bitter?

“But presently, as I paced up and down the little room, a queer thing happened. It was as though my wandering imagination came upon a new quality, different from all that I had ever known; yet one which was also more familiar and intimate than the smell of Plaxy in the mood of love, more piercing sweet than bitches, more hunt-worthy than the trail of a fox.

“No, I must not romanticize. This is a scientific report. No new sensory quality really came to me. But something happened in my mind which I can’t describe in any other way. If it was a fragrance at all, it was the fragrance of love and wisdom and creating, of these for their own sake, whether crowned with success and happiness or not. It was this fragrance, which somehow came to me with such a fresh poignancy that it was something entirely new to me. It was this fragrance, trailed across the universe, winding in and out of all its chasms and interstices, that had so often enticed me; but now in my excited state it presented itself to me so vividly that I had to dramatize it to myself as a new quality, neither odour nor sound nor visible form, but most like an odour to be pursued.

“And I did pursue it. I stopped pacing, and lay down with my forelegs stretched before me; and I laid my chin along them. Ignoring all the other remembered scents, I pursued this strange new trail, with the flying feet of inner attention. And as I followed, the trail became stronger, clearer, more exquisite. Sometimes it escaped me, but casting back I recovered it. Sometimes my strength failed, and as I flagged the trail grew fainter. But I gathered myself together again for the chase, and as I pursued, lessening the distance between myself and the quarry, the scent grew clearer and more compelling.

“At last a terrible thing happened. As I drew nearer, the quality of the heavenly quarry seemed to change. Though its exquisite sweetness remained, drawing me on, a new, pungent tang, a stinging, choking, bitter, exquisite and terrifying perfume, was mixed with it. There was something in it that made my mind reel, as the chloroform had done; and something fierce, like the mighty smells of tiger and lion, but with a grimness that no earthly smell ever had. I could not give up the chase. With staggering mind I still clung to the trail. The thing that I was hunting must surely be the source of all fragrance in the universe, and all horror also. And I was famished for the thing. I must, must reach it; though in the end surely not I should devour it, but it would devour me. Surely the thing that I was crazily hunting must be the very thing that men called God, the dear and beautiful and dread.

“At last it was as though the quarry turned at bay and overwhelmed me. Remembering, I cannot recapture that moment of agony and bliss, the agony of my slaughtered self, the bliss of the freed spirit in me. It was as though — how can I put it? — as though the trail which had first promised the most succulent prey, and then the most formidable but spell-binding enemy, had led after all not to the universal Tiger but to the universal Master, the superhuman master whom my super-canine nature so desperately needed to take possession of me and steady me with his claim for absolute loyalty and service.

“That supreme moment passed. I can remember only that when it passed I found peace such as I had not known before and shall never, I believe, quite lose. The whole universe now presented itself with a new quality, as though my monochrome vision had suddenly gained the glory of colour. But the colours that I saw were not of sensation. They were the colours that are seen by the eye of the spirit. All the things and people that I had seen hitherto in the plain greys of ordinary life were now enriched with a great diversity of the new quality which I am calling colour, so that they gained a new meaning, much as sounds gain a new meaning in speech or music. I saw them all in their own true colours and suffused with the music of the whole. And even now, on the day after my glorious moment, which is lost save for its afterglow in my mind, I still see everything coloured by the light of the spirit.”

There followed a postscript.

“All this was written on the day after my vision, if vision it was. And now another day has passed. I have read it over, and I see that it does not describe at all the thing that happened to me. It is sentimental verbiage. It does not recapture the experience for me, it blurs it. But I am certain that something big really did happen to me. And the proof shall be shown in my life. I will take charge of my life. I will drift no more. I will still be true to science, but I will be true to my new light also. I will be a sceptic about everything but one thing, which does not admit of scepticism (once one has clearly seen it), namely that it does indeed matter to be as quickened a spirit as possible, and to live for the quickening of the spirit everywhere. In fact I am going to be the hound of the spirit. Me? Lazy, excuse-finding me? That’s a good joke, isn’t it! Looking at the matter with scientific detachment, I am sure I shall be adrift again before the week is out. Well, even if I am, the thing that happened the night before last will make a difference. And looking at it all in the light of the thing — no, by God! I shall never be adrift again! Not fundamentally.”

With much misgiving Sirius dutifully offered this document to Thomas. Would he be amused, or annoyed? Or would he take it with all his aloof scientific detachment as a psychological datum? Sirius never discovered what Thomas really felt about it. The great physiologist was respectful, almost diffident; and hoped Sirius did not object to having the document typed in triplicate, “for the Laboratory records, and to show to a few of my friends, if you don’t mind.”

This seemingly mystical experience awakened in Sirius a new interest in religion. Through one of Thomas’s guests he stumbled on the literature of mysticism, and was soon devoting a great deal of his time to St. Catherine of Siena, St. John of the Cross, Jacob Boehme, the Vedanta, and so on. It was Thomas who had to procure these works for him; and the task made Thomas smell acrid and disapproving, even though in word and deed he remained sympathetic.

Sirius now conceived a great desire to discuss religion with some sincere and orthodox religious person. No such person, it seemed, was among Thomas’s circle of trusted friends who might be admitted into the secret of Sirius’s intelligence. They were all either strictly scientific in the narrow sense or inclined to say “One feels in one’s bones that there must be something in religion, but God knows what.” Contact with these people merely increased Sirius’s desire to pursue the matter, without helping him.

Sometimes he would hang about the doors of chapels and churches, to watch the congregation enter or leave the building, or to strain his hypersensitive ears to catch reverberations of the music, the prayers, the lessons and the sermon. The fact that as a mere dog he was not allowed into the sacred building increased his sense of exile and inferiority, and his readiness to believe that in spite of the critics it was within those walls that man attained his highest range of experience.

On one occasion his hunger for the truth was so great that he could not restrain himself from a very foolish act. It was summer time, and there was a heat wave. He had been watching the worshippers entering a little Methodist Chapel. Contrary to custom, the doors were not shut before the service began. Emotional prayer and vigorous singing flooded out upon him. To his refined sensibility the music was crude and the execution vulgar, but these very imperfections increased for him the feeling that music was here only a hastily executed symbol of some ulterior experience. A poem might be sincere no matter how hastily it had been scribbled. Jarred by the barbaric sound, yet fascinated, Sirius drifted step by step into the porch and across the inner threshold. He had entered during a prayer. The minister’s eyes were reverently closed. His tone of voice was unctuous and complacently servile. With the conventional intonation of penitence and worship, but without any inner experience of them, he affirmed the sinfulness of the whole human race, and confidently, flatteringly, asked his God for forgiveness and eternal bliss for himself and his flock. The backs of the bowed congregation appeared above the pews like the backs of sheep in a pen. But their smell on that hot day was all too human.

When the prayer was ended the minister opened his eyes. He saw the great dog standing in the aisle. Pointing dramatically at Sirius, he exclaimed, “Who has brought that animal into God’s House? Put it out!” Several black coats and striped trousers moved towards Sirius. They expected him to retire before them, but he stood his ground, his head and tail erect, his back bristling. A faint growl, rather like distant thunder, made the assailants hesitate. Sirius looked round the building. All eyes were turned on him, some outraged, some amused. He turned slowly to retrace his steps. The ejectors cautiously advanced. One of them said, “Good dog! Go home!” but another began to chivvy him with an umbrella, and rashly tapped his haunch. Sirius leapt round with a bark that echoed through the bare chapel, and his pursuers retreated a pace. He stood looking at them for a few moments, amused at his easy triumph. The hair on his spine subsided. He vaguely waved his tail, and turned towards the door. Then a mischievous idea took possession of him. At the door he once more faced the congregation, and in a clear, accurate, though wordless, voice he sang the refrain of the hymn that had been sung before he entered. As he turned to leave the building a woman screamed. The minister in a rather strained voice said, “Friends, I think we had better join once more in prayer.”

On another occasion he marched beside the drums of the Salvation Army, sometimes forgetting himself so far as to add his voice to the trumpets. The open air service gave him, he told Thomas, an irrational sense of salvation. What appealed to him most was one of the hymns, sung with immense gusto. “Washed in the blood of the Lamb,” was its theme. He could not resist joining in the singing, though softly. He could not see how the imagery of the hymn agreed with the religion of love, but somehow it had a strange power over him. He vaguely and quite irrationally felt it as unifying all the tenderness of his life with all the wolf in him. He scented again the seductive reek of his killed ram and his killed pony. Somehow the haunting conflict between pity and blood-lust seemed to be resolved. His guilt was washed away. There was no sound reason for this; he just felt it. He and these human animals somehow unloaded their sins upon the Lamb, and found a crude ecstasy of community one with another, and all together. They abased themselves into the personified spirit of the group. The intoxicated minds gave up all attempt to think clearly and feel precisely, and yielded to the common mentality; which somehow seemed to be universal, cosmical, the personified “togetherness” of all individual spirits in all the worlds. Thus he felt, as the barbaric tune soaked through his brain. Yet to another part of his mind the blasting of the trumpets, the thundering of the drums and the lusty human singing seemed as remote as the howling of an alien species in the jungle. Not in this way, said the protesting part of his mind, not in the remission of clear thought and feeling for the sake of the mere warmth of togetherness, could one find the essential spirit, identical in himself and in these humans. Only in the most articulate, precise self- and other-consciousness was the thing to be found; for instance on those rare occasions of spiritual accord with Plaxy, when through their very difference and distinctness they discovered their underlying identity. Yes, and in another manner he had sometimes found that thing, with Thomas, when their two intellects had moved together up the steep path of some argument, Thomas always leading, till they had reached together some pinnacle from which, it seemed, they could view the whole universe.

CHAPTER X

EXPERIENCES IN LONDON

ONE DAY SIRIUS demanded very urgently that Thomas should arrange for him to meet a few of the outstanding religious people of Cambridge. “But I don’t know any,” said Thomas. “They’re not my line. And anyhow I wouldn’t trust them not to blab.” Sirius was not to be put off; and finally it was agreed that Elizabeth should help him to satisfy his curiosity about religion, and at the same time show him London. She had a cousin who was a parson in the East End. He could be taken into their confidence, and the two of them could perhaps visit him.

The Rev. Geoffrey Adams, now well advanced in middle age, was one of those clerics who had cared more for his parishioners than for self-advancement. Long ago he had undertaken a slum parish, and he had stayed there ever since. His life had been spent in comforting the sick and the dying with assurances of peace hereafter, in fighting local authorities on behalf of hard cases, and in agitating for playgrounds, free milk for mothers and children, and decent treatment for the unemployed. Throughout the country he had something of a reputation as a fighting parson, for on several occasions his indiscreet championship of the oppressed had brought him up against the state or his ecclesiastical superiors. Nearly all his parishioners admired him, some loved him, very few attended his services.

Elizabeth wrote to Geoffrey, telling him about Sirius, and asking if she might visit him, with the wonder-dog. He replied that he was desperately busy, that religion was not a thing to be got merely by talking about it, but that if they came to the East End he would show them round, and they might see a little of it in action.

Elizabeth took Sirius by train to King’s Cross, a tiresome journey for the dog, as he had to travel in the luggage van. They spent the afternoon walking about the more prosperous end of the metropolis, for Sirius’s edification. Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and the parks gave Sirius a new impression of the multitude and power of the human race. What an amazing species it was, with its great buildings, its endless streams of cars, its shop-window displays, its swarming foot-passengers, with their trousered or silken legs! He could always detect the familiar sheep smell in the tweed; and in the fur coats there were still odours of the menagerie. Sirius had many questions to ask Elizabeth, but of course they dared not talk, for fear of rousing curiosity.

After a while Elizabeth was tired with all the walking, and wanted her tea. It was difficult to find a café where the great dog was acceptable, but after a while they settled beside a little table. Sirius, of course, lay on the floor, and was much in the way of the waitresses. Elizabeth gave him a bun and a slop-basin full of sweet tea. While she smoked, he watched the company. Someone was overheard to say, “That dog’s expression is almost human.”

After they had refreshed themselves they went eastwards by tube, and emerged in an entirely different world, the down-and-out world that Plaxy had often described to him. He was amazed by the contrast of homo sapiens in affluence and homo sapiens in penury. Young men hung about aimlessly at pub-corners. Dirty-faced children and shabby curs played in the gutters. Both the smell and the voices of the passers-by gave Sirius an unmistakable impression of defeat and resentment. He walked beside Elizabeth with alert and anxious eyes and heavy tail. This line of country threatened to be too much for him. The only familiar and comforting thing about it was the variety of odours left by his own kind at the foot of each lamp-post. The rest was overwhelming, not only because of the oppressive stink of man, but because it was a stink of man in abject anxiety. The western crowd had smelt mainly of cosmetics, perfume, soap, fresh tweed, tobacco smoke, moth balls and the slaughtered beasts whose furs they had stolen. There was also, of course, a strong undertone of human sweat, mostly female, and of all the other physical odours, including now and then an unmistakable whiff of sexual excitement. But in the eastern crowd the smell of crude human bodies dominated everything else; and it was on the average different in quality from the smell of the western bodies. In the prosperous region the odour was mainly of wholesome physique, but in the poorer region there was a faint but definite and very widespread smell of ill-health, rising sometimes (for his keen nose) to one or other of the repellent stenches of disease. There was another difference, too. Even in the west there was a tell-tale smell of peevish discontent; but in the east, where frustration was far more poignant, the same smell of discontent was stronger, and often accompanied by the acrid stink of chronic but suppressed rage.

Sirius, of course, had come across sordid town areas before, but never before had he imaginatively realized the extent of man’s degradation in Britain. So this, he kept saying to himself, is what man has done to man, this is the average condition of the proud tyrant species. Its fundamentally self-regarding intelligence and its inadequate feeling for community has led it to this. The West End cared not a damn for the East End, and both, in their several ways, were frustrated.

The Rev. Geoffrey Adams received his visitors with some embarrassment. He had no idea how to treat Sirius, and even ordinary dogs he felt to be rather remote and incomprehensible. However, he soon learned that this great beast must be treated more or less as a human being; and he showed a surprising quickness in recognizing that Sirius’s strange noises were an attempt at the English language. He accounted for his aptitude by saying, “I come across so many queer lingos at the docks.” Then, realizing that this remark might seem disrespectful, he looked anxiously at Sirius, who moved his tail slightly in sign of friendliness.

Elizabeth had intended that they should spend a couple of nights with Geoffrey and then return to Cambridge, but Sirius was determined to stay on by himself, if Geoffrey would have him. For here was an aspect of mankind about which he knew nothing, and he could not begin to understand it in a couple of days. Geoffrey had been at first rather sceptical and even offhand about Sirius’s search for religion, but some of the dog’s remarks during their first interview, interpreted by Elizabeth, had roused his interest, particularly his statement that the heart of religion was love, and nothing else mattered. Here was a truth that called for elaboration and qualification. Geoffrey was also much intrigued by Sirius’s real capacity for song, for the cleric was musical, and something of a singer himself. This was an added reason for his unexpectedly warm encouragement of Sirius’s suggestion that he should remain in the East End for a while.

It was arranged that the dog should stay with Geoffrey for a week. Actually he remained much longer, He masqueraded as Geoffrey’s dog, going with him among the parishioners whenever possible. Often, of course, he had to be left behind. Geoffrey could not take him to share death-bed scenes or difficult interviews with town councillors. But on most pastoral visits cleric and dog would set out together, and on the doorstep Geoffrey would ask, “May I bring in my dog? He’s quite friendly.” Sirius’s amiable expression and waving tail would nearly always gain him a welcome.

In this manner he saw much of the conditions in which the less fortunate members of the dominant species lived. He also listened to many a conversation on matters practical or spiritual. Sometimes Geoffrey would greatly amuse his friends in the parish by including Sirius in the conversation, and Sirius to their delight would “reply.” No one, of course, suspected that these little performances were genuine; but the Rev. Adams’s queer dog was well received in all but the most unimaginative families. Children were specially accessible, for Sirius allowed them to ride him and maul him, and often showed “an uncanny understanding” of their talk and games. One boy of twelve insisted that Sirius’s own talk was not sham at all, and that he himself could often understand it. Geoffrey affirmed, “Of course it’s real,” then knowingly smiled at the grown-ups.

Sometimes Geoffrey’s duties took him to a canteen or mission-hall in dockland, sometimes to a Men’s Club, where, followed by the observant Sirius, he would pass from room to room exchanging greetings with the members. Sometimes the parson took a turn at darts or billiards, or watched a boxing match. Once, with Sirius carelessly stretched out on the floor, he gave a talk on “Housing.”

It did not take long for Sirius to discover that there were many different reactions to Geoffrey in this club. A few members regarded him with resentment and suspicion; and expressed their spleen by furtive persecution of his dog. Others, while respecting Geoffrey’s kindliness and sincerity, regarded him and his religion as survivals from a prehistoric world. A few curried favour by professing conventional piety. One or two, for whom Geoffrey showed a special bantering affection, were for ever trying to convert him to atheism. The arguments, on both sides, rather shook Sirius’s faith in the intellectual honesty of the dominant species, for on both sides the calibre of the reasoning was sometimes laughably poor. It was as though neither side really cared about mere logical cogency, because both had already made up their minds. Of all the club members, not one, it seemed to Sirius, was a sincere Christian in Geoffrey’s sense of the term; though many were deeply influenced by Geoffrey’s personality.

Sometimes Geoffrey took Sirius into the actual land of docks. The strange odours of foreign merchandise greatly interested him. They afforded him, he said, not only information about the goods themselves but something of the atmosphere of the lands from which they came. They enabled him to “travel by nose.” He was greatly intrigued also by the new varieties of human odour associated with coloured people. Negroes, Lascars, Chinese, each had their distinctive racial scent, and in contrast with these the smell characteristic of Europeans distinguished itself in his mind.

On one occasion Geoffrey and Sirius came upon a minor riot. The dockers were on strike on account of the sacking of one of their number for political reasons. Blackleg labour was introduced, and the local men attacked the interlopers. Geoffrey and Sirius arrived at the height of the trouble. A large crowd of men was preventing a smaller crowd from going to work. Stones and bottles were thrown. A blackleg was knocked unconscious, and lay in the mud with a bleeding forehead. Geoffrey hastened to him, with Sirius at his heels, the wolf-mood rising. As Geoffrey bent over the stricken man, some of the dockers reviled him for helping their enemy. Someone even threw a stone, and Sirius took up a position between Geoffrey and the crowd, with bared teeth and a terrifying growl. Geoffrey did not take the men’s hostile action meekly. In fact, for the first time Sirius saw him lose his temper. “Fools!” cried the parson. “I’m on your side, but this man is as precious to God as any of us.” At this point God’s damaged treasure recovered consciousness and rose to his feet, using most ungodly language. Then the police arrived in considerable force, drew their truncheons, and charged the dockers, most of whom fled. A few put up a fight and were arrested; two were picked up unconscious.

Before going to bed that night, Geoffrey and Sirius, as was their custom, talked over the affairs of the day. This time Sirius was deeply interested. He had long ago discovered that the human species was not at one with itself, and that authority was not always sympathetic with the common people, but the scene at the dock entrance had brought this home to him. According to Geoffrey the aim of the strike was to make a stand against gross victimization; and yet the police, though their action had been legally correct, had shown unnecessary brutality.

The world that Sirius now lived in was bewilderingly different from both his two other worlds, North Wales and Cambridge. The three worlds were inhabited by such diverse creatures that he could almost believe them three different species. Country people, intellectuals, dockers! Mentally they were far more alien to one another than dogs, cats and horses. Yet, of course, the difference was really all imposed by environment. Well, for the present he was wholly occupied in studying his third world; the others faded imperceptibly into dreamlands. For some weeks he was far too interested in the East End to look back on those other worlds; but at last there came times, chiefly when Geoffrey was busy on committee work, when he found himself hankering after open country and the smell of the sheep. For at these times there was nothing for him to do but wander about the streets watching the rather shabby crowds, listening to their monkey chatter, smelling their slightly unhealthy and frustrated odour, and feeling himself utterly alien to them. Then he would begin to worry about his future. What was to become of him? In Wales he was just a sheep-dog and a chattel; in Cambridge, a curiosity. In London? Well, at least, he was a student of the human species. But what could he ever do? It was his nature to give himself absolutely to some work; but to what work? To mere sheep-tending? To science? Why, of course, to the spirit. But how? His despondency was largely due to constipation. Do what he would, he could not get enough physical exercise in a town, and he could not help eating far too much for an inactive life. Worse, his soul was constipated. He was always taking in mental food and never doing anything with it.

One day as he was strolling past the entrance to a railway station, he noticed a display of large framed photographs advertising holiday resorts. One of them was a magnificent picture of moorland with mist driving over it. There was a little llyn, and one or two sheep. Waves splashed seductively on the stony shore. In the background the mountain rose darkly into the cloud. The immediate foreground was all tussocks of grass and heather, inviting his legs to action. He stood for a long time looking at this picture, letting the feel of the moors soak into him again, getting the smell of them. He caught himself actually working his nostrils to take the sheep’s scent. Were they Pugh’s or a neighbour’s? It was all so real. And yet so far away and dreamlike. He could scarcely believe that he would ever be there again. Sudden panic seized him.

Then Sirius came to a firm resolution about his future. Science or no science, spirit, or no spirit, he would spend his life in that sort of country, not in slums, nor in universities. That alone was his line of country. That was the only world he could ever really live in. Somehow in that world he must express whatever potency it was that was always straining in him to find exercise. But how?

On Sundays Geoffrey was always very busy, and Sirius was of course excluded from his sacred duties. The dog generally took the opportunity of securing a bit of much-needed exercise, cantering off into Epping Forest. On Sunday evenings Geoffrey often seemed dejected and old. Sirius had observed that few people entered the church for any of the services. Unfortunately Geoffrey, though respected and loved by so many, could not attract a large congregation. This incapacity he regarded as a failure in his religious duty. He did not realize, but Sirius did, that the influence of his personality reached far beyond the range of his official ministrations, and that he had given to thousands the essence of religion, though they could not accept from him the ritual and doctrine which, though symbolically true for a past age, was quite out of keeping with the spirit of our times. Some of Geoffrey’s warmest admirers were persons who never attended his church or even counted themselves Christians. Of those who did attend, a few were of course sincere believers in the Christian myth as “gospel truth.” Others came because they vaguely felt the need of some kind of religious life. They recognized in Geoffrey a truly religious spirit, and he assured them that they ought to join in communal worship. But the living example which he gave them in his life of practical love was somehow not clarified or strengthened by his church services. Geoffrey had no power to infuse the services with the ardent religious passion which he himself felt; and this failure it was which filled him with a gnawing doubt of his own sincerity.

These conclusions Sirius boldly announced to Geoffrey in their many talks over meals or late in the evenings. The ageing priest was saddened by them. He could not for a moment contemplate the possibility that his rituals and doctrines had only symbolical truth, though he could and did doubt his own sincerity as a servant of God. He was saddened that men should be so blind as to doubt the literal truth of Christian doctrine, and specially sad that his friend Sirius should be so blind. For between priest and dog there had rapidly developed a deep mutual respect and affection. They had told one another much of their personal lives, and in particular of their religious searchings. To Geoffrey it seemed that Sirius’s vague yearnings and rigorous agnosticism formed only an utterly inadequate shadow of religion. To Sirius it seemed, of course, that Geoffrey’s religion was an incongruous tissue of true value-intuitions and false or meaningless intellectual propositions. Sirius had spoken of his love for Plaxy as “at heart a religious love for the universal spirit.” He had also told of his strange vision in Cambridge. On one occasion he had said, “I see, indeed I know, that in some sense God is love, and God is wisdom, and God is creative action, yes and God is beauty; but what God actually is, whether the maker of all things, or the fragrance of all things, or just a dream in our own hearts, I have not the art to know. Neither have you, I believe; nor any man, nor any spirit of our humble stature.” Geoffrey merely smiled sadly and said, “May God in His time show you the truth that His Son died to manifest.”

On another occasion Sirius challenged Geoffrey about immortality. They had been discussing for some while when Sirius said, “Now take me! Have I an immortal soul?” Geoffrey replied at once, “I have often wondered about you. I feel, indeed, that you are an immortal spirit, and I earnestly prayed that God should grant you salvation. But if you are, and if He does, it is a miracle which I cannot interpret.”

Sirius had come to Geoffrey in the hope of finding the true religion. At Cambridge, in spite of all the free and fearless intelligence, there had obviously been something lacking, something that he greatly needed, though Cambridge regarded it as something almost indecent. He had thought it must be simply “religion,” and he had come to London to find it. And in Geoffrey he had, indeed, found it. There could be no doubt that Geoffrey had a firm hold on the thing that Cambridge lacked, that Geoffrey was the very embodiment of “religion” in action. But — but — one couldn’t have Geoffrey’s religion without violating all that one had learnt at Cambridge, all the constant loyalty to intelligence that was the best thing in Cambridge. In a way it was easy to cling to faith and betray intelligence, though Geoffrey’s active faith was no easy-going affair. It was easy, too, to cling to intelligence and abandon faith, like McBane, for instance. But was there no way of being equally loyal to both? Vaguely it began to appear to Sirius that there was, but that it involved both keener intelligence and more sensitive religious feeling than either of the other courses. Passion for “the spirit,” the awakened way of living, whatever its fortune in the universe, passion for the spirit, stripped of all belief and comfort save the joy of that passion itself — this, expressed in a life of devoted action, like Geoffrey’s, this was the only, the true religion. But poor Sirius felt dismally that this was beyond him. He just hadn’t the guts. He hadn’t either the intelligence or the passion. If only the spirit itself would seize him and set fire to him! But then — he was not prepared. He was not really inflammable. There was too much damp fog drenching all his tissues.

The friendship of the parson and his dog was the source of much comment in the district; the more so when it became known that the Rev. Adams was sometimes to be heard talking to the great animal as though to a human being. The dear old man, they said, was growing more eccentric than ever. Some declared simply that he was crazy. But presently rumour had it that real conversations did take place between man and dog, and that there actually was something mysterious about Sirius. The devout said he was either possessed by the Devil or was an angel in disguise. The scientific wiseheads said it was all quite simple, the dog was a biological sport.

The climax came when Sirius made a dramatic appearance in church. He had for long been secretly planning to gain Geoffrey’s consent to this, partly because he wanted to witness one of Geoffrey’s services, partly because it rankled to be shut out from the most solemn activity of the human species, and treated as an inferior animal. Geoffrey, of course, felt that he ought not to permit a brute to enter the holy place. His curate would have been outraged, and so would the congregation. But he had been much impressed by Sirius’s superb singing voice, and Sirius had subtly induced him to toy with the idea of allowing his canine friend to sing a wordless anthem from behind the vestry door. When they were at home together, Sirius made a point of practising some of Geoffrey’s favourite “sacred” music.

With much misgiving, and a sense not of sin but of naughtiness, Geoffrey finally agreed to allow Sirius to sing at a Sunday morning service, unseen, from behind the vestry door. The great day arrived, Dog and man walked to the church, the priest explaining to the canine singer the point in the service at which the anthem should occur. “Keep well behind the door,” he said. “This is a bold step for me, Sirius. If they find out there will be trouble.”

When the couple reached the gate of the little church, Sirius paused for a moment, looked up at Geoffrey rather anxiously, and then deposited a few drops of golden fluid on the gate-post. With a rather nervous laugh Geoffrey said, “You might have relieved yourself somewhere else.” “No,” answered Sirius. “It was a religious act. I have poured my libation in honour of your God. And I have relieved my spirit of impurity. I am lightened for the chase, the pursuit of the divine quarry by song.”

When the service was about to begin, the verger noticed that the parson had left the vestry door open. He stepped over to shut it, but Geoffrey waved him away with his hand.

At the appropriate point in the service Geoffrey announced, “You will now hear a wordless anthem sung by a dear friend of mine who will remain unnamed and unseen.” Sirius’s strong pure voice, unaccompanied, then filled the church. Geoffrey listened with delight at its power and delicacy of expression. It seemed to him that in this music lay the truth that he himself had striven all his life long to express in word and deed. And now a dog, interpreting a great human composer (it was Bach) was saying it unmistakably, though without words. Many of the congregation also were deeply moved. The few musical members were impressed and mystified, for the execution was accurate, and it expressed with severe restraint a deep and subtle passion. But what perplexed them was the curiously non-human quality of the voice. Was it perhaps some cunning instrumental imitation of a man’s voice, or of a woman’s? The range, they said, was too great for either. If it was indeed a singer, why did he or she not appear? Throughout the following week rumour was busy. A great singer, it was said, had consented to do this thing for Mr. Adams on condition that his identity was not revealed. The pious secretly believed that the great singer was not a man but an angel from heaven. Such was the decay of faith, however, that fear of ridicule prevented all but a few simple souls from openly proclaiming this belief.

Next Sunday there were far more people than usual at the morning service, though not enough to make the church look full. The newcomers obviously had come out of mere curiosity. In his sermon Geoffrey scolded them for it. There was no anthem.

Not till the following Sunday, which was to be Sirius’s last before returning to Cambridge, did he sing again. His earlier success had made him long for another opportunity, and he wished to face the congregation. This was to be the beginning of his message to the human species. He would sing them something of his own composition. It must be something intelligible to human ears, and indeed to a good proportion of this simple congregation. It must be something which would help them to feel again the essential truth in their own religion, and the unimportance of its mythology.

Geoffrey was reluctant to let Sirius perform again, because too much of a “sensation” had already been caused. But he longed to hear that great voice filling his church once more. And his natural sincerity inclined him to let the singer be seen as well as heard. Moreover, though he knew there would be trouble with the bishop and some of the congregation, he felt that he was under an obligation to welcome his canine friend in God’s house. Further, he secretly relished the prospect of shocking his earnest young curate.

Sirius spent several mornings out in Epping Forest, trying over many of his compositions. Though he kept out of view, as far as possible, his strange voice caused several people to seek him out. Whenever anyone discovered him, he let his song turn imperceptibly into a normal canine baying, so that the intruder supposed that the musical quality had been an illusion.

At the morning service Sirius sang from behind the vestry door. But the music was very different from that of his previous performance. All the meaningful intonations of the human voice and all canine ullulations seemed to enter into this alien yet intelligibly musical, this sweet yet rather frightening, sound. It ranged from a thundering growl to a high clear piping, almost as of singing birds.

I am not myself sufficiently sensitive musically to judge whether “interpretation” of music is legitimate. In Geoffrey’s view, though he was intensely interested in music for its own sake, the supreme function of this art, as of all other arts, was as a medium of religious expression. Hence his eagerness to have Sirius sing in his church, and his intention to interpret the song to his congregation. Sirius, too, held that interpretation was legitimate, though in the hands of the imperfectly musical it often became ludicrous. I have heard him insist that, in so far as music ever had a “meaning” beyond the immediate and exquisite value of the sound-pattern itself, its “meaning” must be simply an emotional attitude. It could never speak directly about the objective world, or “the nature of existence”; but it might create a complex emotional attitude which might be appropriate to some feature of the objective world, or to the universe as a whole. It might therefore create religious feelings. Its “interpretation” in words would then involve describing those features of the universe which should evoke those feelings.

In this sense the strange music that Sirius put forth in Geoffrey’s church spoke of bodily delight and pain, and of the intercourse of spirits. It expressed through the medium of sound, and transformed into, universal symbols, the particular spirits of Thomas, Elizabeth, Plaxy and Geoffrey himself. It spoke of love and death, of the hunger for the spirit, and of Sirius’s own wolf-mood. It spoke of the East End and the West End, of the docker’s strike and the starry heaven.

All this it did at least for Sirius himself. To most of the congregation it was an inconsequent mixture of music and noise, and moreover a mixture of the recognizably, comfortably pious and the diabolical.

Geoffrey in his sermon tried to tell the congregation what the strange song had meant to him. “The singer,” he said, “must have known love in his own experience and recognized it as good absolutely. He must also have known the presence of Satan, in the world and in his own heart.”

In the evening service, when Geoffrey had announced the anthem, he added, “This time the singer will appear in the church. Do not be outraged. Do not think that a trick is being played on you. The singer is my dear friend, and it is good that you should know that God can still work miracles.”

Out of the vestry strode the great beast, black and frosty-fawn. Head and tail were proudly erect. Grey eyes keenly watched the congregation. There was an audible gasp of surprise and protest, then dead silence. It was as though the power of “the eye,” which the Border Collie used so successfully on sheep, was now being used by Sirius upon a whole human flock. He had made his entry with very solemn feelings; but the spectacle of these spellbound human sheep greatly tickled him, and he could not resist turning his head towards Geoffrey and giving him a very human wink with the eye that was hidden from the congregation. After this lapse, which shocked Geoffrey, Sirius pulled himself together. His mouth opened, displaying the white fangs that had recently killed ram and pony, and gripped the throat of a man. The church was then flooded with Sirius’s music. Geoffrey seemed to hear in it echoes of Bach and Beethoven, of Holst, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky and Bliss, but also it was pure Sirius. Most of the congregation, on a far lower musical level than their pastor, and a far lower human level also, were merely intrigued by its novelty. Some were sufficiently sensitive to be disturbed and revolted by it. A few conscious musical modernists probably decided that it was a bad imitation of the real thing. One or two, perhaps, were stirred more or less in the manner that Sirius intended. The performance lasted quite a long time, but the audience remained throughout still and attentive. When it was finished Sirius looked for a moment at Geoffrey, who returned his questioning gaze with a smile of admiration and affection. Sirius crouched down, muzzle on paws, tail stretched out along the ground. The service proceeded.

Geoffrey began his sermon by trying to interpret the music, warning his congregation that it might legitimately mean different things to different people, and that to the composer-singer his interpretation might seem very wrong. The congregation were startled. Were they expected to believe that the animal that had produced the music had also composed it, that what they had witnessed was not simply the result of brilliant circus-training but actually a miracle?

Geoffrey affirmed, rightly or wrongly, “The song gave me a view of humanity from outside humanity, from the point of view of another of God’s creatures, and one that both admires and despises us, one that has fed from our hands and has also suffered at our hands. By means of echoes of the great human composers mingled with themes reminiscent of the wolf’s baying and the dog’s barking and howling, the singer conjured up his vision of humanity. And what a humanity it was! With God and Satan, love and hate together in its heart; with cunning surpassing all the beasts, and wisdom too, but also utter folly; with fabulous power, turned as often as not to Satan’s will!” Geoffrey spoke of the luxury of the rich and the misery of the workers all over the world, of strikes and revolutions, of the ever-increasing threat of a war more terrible even than the last war. “And yet in our personal lives love is not unknown. In the song, as in my own knowledge, I seem to hear it said that love and wisdom must triumph in the end, because Love is God.”

He looked down at Sirius, who was showing signs of protest. Geoffrey continued, “My friend does not agree with that part of my interpretation. But that is indeed how the climax of his song affected me.”

He paused, then ended his sermon with these words: “I am growing old before my time. I shall not be able to carry on much longer. When I have gone, remember me by this Sunday. Remember that I once, by God’s grace, was able to let you witness a very lovely miracle.”

Not many of the congregation imagined even in that summer of 1939 that in a few months not only the ageing priest but many of the congregation themselves would be lying crushed under the East End buildings, or that the little church would become a blazing beacon for enemy planes.

At the end of the service Sirius walked out behind Geoffrey, and before the congregation had begun to leave the church he hurried off in the direction of Geoffrey’s home. Soon after the parson had returned, Elizabeth arrived (according to plan) to take Thomas’s canine masterpiece back to Cambridge.

During the following weeks Sirius received letters from Geoffrey talking of the excitement in the neighbourhood. Journalists had pestered him, but he had refused absolutely to give them any information. The church was filled on the following Sunday, but Geoffrey surmised that only a small minority had come for religion. Indeed he very soon realized that a daring act which he had undertaken with innocent motives was appearing to the public as no better than a piece of gross self-advertisement. His ecclesiastical superiors reprimanded him, and might well have deprived him of his office, had it not been for the passionate loyalty of his supporters in the parish.

When Thomas was told of the incident, he was at first annoyed, but the humour of it won him over to forgive Sirius for his escapade.

CHAPTER XI

MAN AS TYRANT

IN THE SUMMER of 1939 the clouds of war were already gathering over Europe. Everyone was living in dread of the future or hoping against hope that by some miracle the storm would after all not break. Sirius had never taken much interest in the international situation, but now, like so many others, he was forced to be interested. Thomas also was merely bored at the prospect of war. He wanted to carry on his work unhindered, and he feared that war would make this impossible. Of course, if the clash came, we should have to do our damnedest to win; but if only the fool politicians had been more intelligent and honest there would never have been any trouble. This was roughly Sirius’s attitude also, except that in addition he felt a rising fury against the dominant species, which had been given such power and such opportunity, and yet was making such a sorry mess of its affairs.

During the summer vac the Trelone family spent only a few weeks in Wales. It was a clouded holiday, for there was no escape from the international situation. Thomas was embittered, and Elizabeth desperately saddened. Tamsy, who had been married some months earlier, spent her week in Wales brooding over the newspapers and the wireless set. Maurice, now a don at Cambridge, argued a great deal with Tamsy about Hitler’s chances. Giles was very quiet, adjusting himself to the idea that he would soon have to fight. Plaxy ignored the war-clouds completely, and went out of the room whenever the subject was raised. Sirius concentrated on recovering physical fitness after Cambridge and London.

When war broke out Sirius was on a Cumberland sheep farm learning the ways of the Lakeland shepherds. Sirius’s Cumberland experiences were valuable, but painful. Thwaites, who was by no means typical of the fine Lakeland type, turned out to be a harsh and unreasonable master. He showed Sirius an aspect of humanity with which he had never before had personal contact to any appreciable extent. Sirius suspected Thwaites at the outset because his own dog, Roy, a Border Collie, avoided him whenever possible, and cringed when spoken to. In Thwaites’s relations with Sirius some quite irrelevant and probably forgotten conflict seems to have found expression. He conceived an uncontrollable dislike for the dog, perhaps because of a strong suspicion that Sirius was no ordinary super-sheep-dog, and was privately judging his character very ruthlessly. Whatever the cause, Thwaites soon began to treat Sirius with crude harshness. I find it difficult to excuse Thomas for his gross carelessness in choosing him as Sirius’s instructor. Thomas was always surprisingly insensitive about the psychological aspect of his great experiment; or perhaps not insensitive but unimaginative. But on this occasion his failure to secure decent conditions for Sirius was so flagrant that I am inclined to attribute it to deliberate purpose. Had he determined to afford the dog some first-hand experience of the more brutal aspect of humanity? If so, his purpose was only too well fulfilled.

Anyhow, Thwaites constantly indulged his spite against Sirius, ordering him to carry heavy loads in his mouth, forcing on him all sorts of tasks which only a human hand could perform efficiently, overworking him with awkward jobs that were obviously unnecessary, and laughing bitterly at him in conversation with his neighbours.

At first Sirius was rather pleased to have the experience of contact with a human being of brutal temper. Hitherto his immediate human environment had been on the whole too amiable to be a fair sample. He needed to know what man was like in his harsher modes. There was soon trouble, because Sirius did not cringe when Thwaites gave orders. Instead, he carried out his task with calm efficiency. This provoked the man to curse him on the flimsiest pretext; and when he did so, Sirius would gaze at him with cold and ostentatious surprise. This, of course, made matters worse. In time, Thwaites’s harsh voice and the whole atmosphere of the place began to get on Sirius’s nerves. The milder human contacts in Wales, Cambridge and London began to fade out of his consciousness, and he found himself feeling that Thwaites was the typical man. Obscurely he dramatized himself as the champion of his own kind against the tyrant race. Thwaites’s great cruel hands symbolized for him the process by which the ruthless species had mastered all the living creatures of the planet. Irrationally Sirius, though a hunter who had again and again inflicted agony and death, felt a self-righteous indignation against the sheer cruelty of man. Compassion for the weak; which had been inculcated in him by his own human friends, now turned him against humanity itself.

Thwaites had several times threatened Sirius with his stick, but had always thought better of it, sobered by the dog’s great size and a dangerous look in his eye. As time passed, the man’s irrational spite against the dog increased. But the incident which caused the final catastrophe was an attack not on Sirius but on Roy. A few days before Thomas was due to come and fetch Sirius away there was some difficulty with a bunch of sheep that Roy had brought into the yard. Thwaites caught the collie a sharp blow on the haunch. Sirius turned on Thwaites in fury and knocked him down; then, remembering himself, he withdrew and watched the man pick himself up. Roy promptly disappeared from the scene. It was a fixed principle with Thwaites that when dogs were rebellious one must thrash them into subjection, which meant in his view thrashing them almost to death. He called to his hired man, “Anderson, the brute’s gone savage, come and help me teach him.” There was no answer. Anderson was far afield. Thwaites was no coward, but he did not relish attacking the great cunning beast single-handed. However, insubordination must be crushed, at all costs. Besides, such a dangerous animal might do incalculable harm. Better destroy it at once. He could tell Trelone that the dog had gone mad and had to be shot. He went into the house. Sirius guessed that he would emerge with his gun. He therefore rushed to the house door and crouched at one side of it. Thwaites stepped over the threshold, looking round the yard. Sirius leapt at him, knocked him over again, and seized the gun with his teeth. Both antagonists rolled over and over. Thwaites struggled to his feet, and tried to turn the muzzle of the gun against the dog’s body. One barrel went off harmlessly, then the other. Sirius let go the gun and sprang away. Thwaites put his hand in his pocket and brought out a couple of cartridges. Sirius leapt at him, knocked him over again and seized his throat, gripping his windpipe with the full power of his strong jaws. The flavour of warm human blood and the sound of the man’s stifled gurgle filled him with an exultant, careless fury. In this symbolic act he would kill not only Thwaites but the whole tyrant race. Henceforth all beasts and birds should live naturally, and the planet’s natural order should never again be disturbed by the machinations of this upstart species. These thoughts flashed through his mind even as the couple floundered and crashed about, gripping each other’s throats.

Presently the man’s struggles slackened, his grip weakened. Then a change began to come over Sirius’s mind. Fury gave place to a more detached observation of the situation. After all, this creature was only expressing the nature that the universe had bred in him. And so was the whole human race. Why this silly hate? The human stink suddenly reminded him of Plaxy’s fragrance. The blood-taste nauseated him. The crushed windpipe between his teeth filled him with horror. He let go, moved away, and stood watching the feeble movements of his non-canine brother, whom he, Cain, had murdered.

Practical considerations presented themselves to him. The hand of man would now indeed be relentlessly turned against him. The hand of two thousand million human beings; all the race, save his own few friends. A panic of loneliness suddenly seized him. A solitary airman, flying over hostile territory, with nothing but enemies below and nothing but stars above, may sometimes feel desperately lonely; but that loneliness is nothing to the loneliness which now oppressed Sirius, with the whole human race against him, and his own species unable to comprehend him, and no pack anywhere to comfort him and accept his service.

He went over to the trough in the yard, drank, and licked his lips clean. Once more he stood watching Thwaites, who now lay still, with a torn and bloody neck. His own neck was stiff after Thwaites’s desperate effort. Imagining the pain that his teeth must have inflicted, he cringed. He returned to the body and sniffed the neck. Already there was a very faint odour of death. No need, then, to risk his own life fetching a doctor to save this human being. Obeying a sudden freakish impulse, he fleetingly touched the forehead of his slaughtered brother with his tongue.

Distant footsteps! He took to his heels in sudden panic, leapt the yard gate and raced away for the fells. Lest they should come after him with bloodhounds, he used every fox-trick to mislead them. He doubled on his track, he took to streams, and so on. That night he slept under the bracken in a remote ghyll. Next day hunger forced him to go hunting. He managed to secure a rabbit, and took it to his lair, where he wolfed it. He spent the rest of the day hidden, and haunted by his crime; haunted, yet strangely exultant. Though it was indeed a crime, it was a positive act of self-assertion which had emancipated him for ever from the spell of the master race. Henceforth he would fear no man simply as a man. Two more nights and the intervening day he spent in hiding. Then he set off to intercept Thomas, who was due at the farm in the afternoon. With great caution he worked his way back over the hills till he was looking down on the road to Thwaites’s farm. He went to a point on the road where there was good cover and a hairpin bend. Here the car would have to slow down almost to walking pace. He hid himself in the undergrowth of a little wood, and waited. An occasional foot-passenger passed, and an occasional car. At last there was the unmistakable sound of Thomas’s Morris Ten. Cautiously Sirius crept from his hiding, looking to see if any other human being was visible. There was no one. He stepped out into the road. Thomas stopped the car and got out with a cheery “Hello!” Sirius, with tucked-in tail, simply said, “I’ve killed Thwaites.” Thomas exclaimed, “God!” then gaped at him in silence. The dog’s keen ears heard distant footsteps, so they retired into the wood to discuss the situation. It was decided that Thomas should go up to the farm as though he knew nothing of the tragedy, while Sirius kept in hiding.

There is no need to record in detail how Thomas dealt with the problem. Naturally he did not tell the police that he had met Sirius. He strongly denied that his super-sheep-dogs were dangerous, and he produced evidence to that effect. He insisted that Thwaites must have treated Sirius very badly; and the man (it appeared) was known to be of a sadistic temper. Clearly he had attacked the animal with his gun, and had probably wounded it. In self-defence the dog had killed him. And where was the dog now? The valuable creature had probably died of wounds somewhere on the moors.

This much of the truth Thomas told Sirius, but not till long afterwards did the murderer learn the rest. Things had not in fact gone as well as Thomas had reported. The officers of the law remained suspicious, and ordered that if the dog was found it must be destroyed. Thomas therefore decided that in order to protect his unique canine masterpiece he must resort to trickery. After a suitable interval he would notify the authorities that the man-killing beast had at last found its way home, and that it had been duly destroyed. He would sacrifice a certain large Alsatian super-sheep-dog, and palm off his corpse as Sirius’s.

It was not until late on the day of the inquest that Thomas picked up Sirius at the hairpin bend. In spite of the black-out, they drove home through the night, helped by a full moon.

CHAPTER XII

FARMER SIRIUS

IT WAS NOT till dawn on the following day that Thomas and Sirius in the Morris Ten drove up the familiar Welsh lane, and came to a stand in the yard of Garth. Elizabeth and Plaxy were still asleep. When they woke, they were very surprised to find that man and dog had returned already. They were surprised also at the wretched condition of Sirius. He was filthy, his coat lacked its customary gloss, he was painfully thin, and he was silent and dejected.

Plaxy, fresh from a busy and happy term at Cambridge, was in the mood for a happy holiday. Moreover she was aware that in recent meetings with Sirius she had somehow proved inadequate, and she was anxious to make amends. She therefore set about being “sweet” to Sirius. It was she who gave him a thorough wash and carefully groomed his coat. She also took a thorn out of one of his feet, and dressed a bad cut in another. He surrendered himself to the firm and gentle touch of her hands and the subtle odour that was for him her most poignant feature. She pressed him to tell her all about his doings in Cumberland, and he told her — everything but the main thing. It was obvious that he was holding something back, so she pressed him no further, though suspecting that he really wanted to tell her. He did indeed long to confess to her. The memory of the crime was a constant source of turmoil in his mind. He had committed a murder. This was the stark fact that had to be faced. It was useless to pretend that he had been forced to kill Thwaites in self-defence, for he had hung on to him much longer than was necessary to put him out of action. No, it was murder, and sooner or later Thomas’s ruse would probably be found out. Even if Sirius remained uncaught he would have this thing hanging over him for ever; not just the fear of retribution, but the deadly remorse for the destruction of a creature who, though biologically alien to him, was none the less his fellow in the spirit. He longed for Plaxy’s sympathy, but feared her horror. And anyhow, Thomas had insisted that no one should be told.

During that Christmas holiday Sirius and Plaxy spent many an hour talking about themselves and their friends; about art, particularly Sirius’s music; about philosophy and religion, particularly his experiences with Geoffrey; about the war, for though both of them felt it to be utterly unreal and remote, and “not their fault anyhow,” it could not be ignored. Several of Plaxy’s friends were already in it.

But though at first they had much to say to one another, later they often fell into silence, and as time advanced these silences became longer and more frequent. He brooded over his prospects, she retired into her memories. She was beginning to yearn once more for human companionship. His nose told him that it was one of those phases when she was fully ripe for the love of her own kind. Her behaviour towards him alternated between exaggerated tenderness and aloofness. She seemed to want to maintain contact with him, but at these times the gulf between the human and the canine was generally too great. But not always. Sometimes the intensification of animal sex-feeling in the young human female linked up with her deep affection for the dog, so that she treated him with an altogether novel shyness, which somehow stimulated a similar sexually toned warmth of feeling in him. He would then, if she permitted, caress her with a new tenderness and ardour. But these passages were rare, and often they were followed on Plaxy’s side by a frightened aloofness. It seemed to her, so she told me long afterwards, that in those strange, sweet moments she was taking the first step towards some very far-reaching alienation from her own kind. Yet while they lasted they seemed entirely innocent and indeed beautiful.

Once Sirius said to Plaxy, “The music of our two lives is a duet of variations upon three themes. There is the difference between our biological natures, yours human and mine canine, and all the differences of experience that follow from that. Then there is the love that has grown up between us, alien as we are. It has gathered us together and made us one fundamentally, in spite of all our differences. It feeds on differences. And there is sex, which alternates between tearing us apart because of our biological remoteness and welding us together because of our love.” They silently gazed at one another. He added, “There is a fourth theme in our music, or perhaps it is the unity of the other three. There is our journey along the way of the spirit, together and yet poles apart.” Plaxy replied with sudden warmth, “Oh, my darling, I do, I do love you. We are never really poles apart, not in the spirit, I mean. But — oh, it’s all strange and frightening. And you see, don’t you, that I must be properly human. Besides — men can mean so much more to me than bitches can mean to you.” “Of course,” he answered. “You have your life and I have mine. And sometimes we meet, and sometimes clash. But always, yes, always, we are one in the spirit.”

He wondered whether, if she knew about Thwaites, it would make any difference; and he realized that it wouldn’t. She would be horrified, of course, but not revolted against him. Suddenly he realized that ever since the killing he had been anxiously condemning himself on behalf of Plaxy, and so nursing a sore resentment against her. But so deeply had he nursed it that he never till this moment recognized its existence. And now somehow he knew that she would not condemn him, and so the resentment became conscious and at the same time vanished.

Later in the vacation Plaxy busied herself with her studies. She was all behind-hand, she said. And when at last the day came for departure, she was as usual both sad and pleased. At the station she found an excuse to stray with Sirius to a less crowded stretch of the platform. “We have drifted apart again lately,” she said, “but whatever happens I never forget that I am the human part of Sirius-Plaxy.” He touched her hand and said, “We have a treasure in common, a bright gem of community.”

During the vacation Sirius had been anxiously concerned with other things besides that treasure. He had been carrying on an urgent discussion about his future with Thomas and Elizabeth, with Plaxy as a disinterested critic. Sirius was determined not to go back to the subtly enervating life of Cambridge. The time had come, he said, when he really must strike out on his own. He was ready to agree that at least for a while he might be able to find self-expression through his skill with sheep, but he could do so only in a responsible position, not as a mere sheep-dog. What did Thomas propose to do about it?

In the end a bold plan was adopted. Owing to the scarcity of labour, Pugh, whose health was failing, had found great difficulty in carrying on his farm. Thomas decided to tell him the whole truth about Sirius’s powers, and to propose that Sirius should join him not as a sheep-dog but as a prospective partner. Or rather, the Laboratory would legally be his partner, contributing capital to the farm. Elizabeth would be the Laboratory’s resident representative, and would lend a hand with the work. Sirius, being only a dog, could sign no contract and hold no property. But he would in effect be in the partnership relation to Pugh, who would initiate him into the whole management of the farm, and the business of marketing sheep and wool. An important side-line would be the training of super-sheep-dogs for sale.

There were several long discussions with Pugh. This was perhaps an advantage, as it gave him an opportunity of learning to understand Sirius’s speech with Thomas and Elizabeth present to help him. The old man was very ready to enter into the spirit of the game; but he was cautious, and he thought of many difficulties, each of which had to be patiently smoothed out. Mrs. Pugh regarded the arrangement with misgiving. She secretly feared that Satan, not God, was the worker of this miracle of the man-dog. That Thomas himself was responsible she never seriously supposed. The only other person who might have been concerned in the new arrangement was Pugh’s daughter, but she was by now married and settled in Dolgelly.

It was not long before Sirius was established at Caer Blai in his new capacity. It was arranged that normally he should sleep at home at Garth, since he could cover the distance between the two houses in a few minutes; but at Caer Blai the room formerly occupied by the daughter of the house was allotted to him for emergencies. To the new quarters Thomas transferred the dog’s accumulation of books on sheep and sheep-farming, also a spare writing-glove and other writing materials. In addition Sirius kept at the farm several of the girths and panniers that had been made for him from time to time to enable him to carry things while keeping his mouth free. In early days the apparatus had to be fastened on him by human hands, but by now, owing to his increased “manual” skill and an ingenious fastener, he could saddle or unsaddle himself in a few seconds.

Pugh could not teach Sirius anything about the actual care of sheep. The dog had a closer practical experience of them, and a far more scientific knowledge. He was eager to improve the breed on the farm and to develop the pasture. But on the side of farm management he had everything to learn. Not only had he to understand prices and the whole book-keeping problem; there was also the small but important agricultural side of the farm. Before the war this had been entirely subordinate to sheep, producing only hay and roots and a very small amount of grain. But in war-time every possible acre had to be ploughed up to produce food, and by now Pugh had a good deal of land under oats, rye and potatoes. The handless Sirius could never do much on this side of the work, but he was determined to understand it and learn to direct it. The necessity of employing hired human labour raised the whole question of Sirius’s contact with the outside world. Thomas, with his phobia of publicity, was very reluctant to let the countryside know just how developed a creature Sirius was, but clearly it would not be possible for him in his new life to masquerade as a dumb animal. However, said Thomas, let people discover the truth gradually. In this way it would be less of a shock to them. Pugh could begin by holding simple conversations with Sirius in public places. Gradually he could let it be realized that he respected the dog’s judgment in all matters connected with sheep. In this manner Sirius would little by little become a congenial figure in the neighbourhood.

For some time Sirius was too busy learning his new responsibilities to undertake the training of super-sheep-dogs. Old Idwal and another of these animals, Mifanwy, a young bitch, were on the farm already, and able to do far more intelligent work than the brightest normal animal. Juno, who had been one of the most intelligent of super-sheep-dogs, had developed some obscure kind of brain trouble, so that Pugh had been forced to destroy her.

After a while Sirius wrote to Thomas saying that he now felt ready for the new venture, and Thomas sent him three puppies of the right age for training. Sirius privately believed that with sympathetic education by one of their own species (though superior to them in intelligence) these animals could be made into something far more capable than Idwal and Mifanwy, or even Juno. He had also secret hopes that one of them, or one of some future batch, might turn out to be a creature of his own mental rank; but this, he had to admit, was very unlikely, for presumably Thomas would have detected any such animal long before it was old enough for training. Many attempts had, as a matter of fact, been made to produce another Sirius, but without success. Sirius himself seemed to have been something of a fluke. The effort to repeat his type had produced at best large-brained and highly intelligent animals that were too frail to reach maturity, and more often mental defectives of one sort or another. It seemed that, if the cerebral hemispheres were increased beyond a certain size, the discrepancy between them and the normal canine organization was too great for reliable viability. Even in man, whose brain and body had developed in step with one another for millions of years, the large cerebrum seems to put a strain on the system, and to be in fact something of a morbid growth, leading all too often to mental disorder. In the case of the dog, when it is suddenly given an enlarged brain, the stress is far more serious.

Not only Sirius but Elizabeth also had to be trained for work on the farm. Though normally she now spent more time in Cambridge than in the country, it was arranged that for some months she should live at Garth. She was now a middle-aged but sturdy woman, and during the last war she had been a land-girl. Pugh at first found it almost impossible to treat her otherwise than as a lady visitor, but the two of them gradually evolved a relationship which fitted his humour perfectly. She posed as the lazy and grumbling servant, he as the exacting master. He greatly enjoyed disparaging the results of all her labour, scolding her for idling, and threatening that he would report her to Sirius and have her sacked if she couldn’t keep a civil tongue in her head. She, for her part, treated him with mock servility and affectionate insolence. It took Mrs. Pugh a long time to realize that the constant wrangling was all friendly. She was confirmed in her anxiety by the fact that Sirius, entering into the spirit of the game, sometimes acted the part of the faithful dog defending his beloved mistress against threatened attack. One day when Mrs. Pugh earnestly tried to curb her husband’s tongue, Pugh shook a finger at her, winking at Elizabeth, and said, “Ah, but you don’t know, my dear, how Mrs. Trelone and I behave together when you are not watching. Yes indeed, for all you know it is then we are the love-birds, isn’t it, Mrs. Trelone?”

Both Sirius and Elizabeth were very busy during the Lent Term. Thomas contrived to spend several weeks in Wales to see how the venture was proceeding. On one occasion he brought two scientific friends to meet Sirius. On another, as Sirius was much interested in improving the local moorland pasture, dog and man went off for a couple of days to Aberystwyth to visit the Plant-Breeding Station. Sirius returned full of daring ideas to put before the sympathetic but cautious Pugh.

In a way this was probably the happiest time of Sirius’s life, for at last he felt that he was using his super-canine powers adequately, and he had attained a degree of independence that he had never known before. The work was often worrying, since he was in many respects a novice, and he made many mistakes; but it was varied, concrete, and (as he put it) spiritually sound. There was little time to think deep thoughts, and less to write; but now that he was doing responsible work he did not feel the same urge for intellectual activity. And anyhow he promised himself that later, when he was more at home with the work, he would take up once more the threads of his former literary and musical activities.

His only recreation was music. In the evenings, with Elizabeth yawning in an easy chair after the day of fresh air and exercise, he would listen to broadcast concerts, or try records on the radio-gram. Sometimes, when he was out on the moors with his young pupils, he would sing his own songs, some of which, the less humanized ones, had a strong emotional appeal for the super-sheep-dogs.

Then there was the bright young bitch, Mifanwy. She was an attractive creature, mainly collie but with a dash of setter. She was slim as a leopard, and had a luxurious silken coat. Sirius had intended to refrain from all sexual relations with his underlings. Moreover he regarded Mifanwy as Idwal’s preserve. But Idwal was growing old. Merely a super-sheep-dog, he was bound to sink far more rapidly into senescence than Sirius, who was still in early maturity. When Mifanwy was in heat she refused her former lover and did her best to seduce Sirius. For a while he took no notice, but one day he indulged in dalliance with this sweet sub-human though super-canine charmer. Of course there was protest from Idwal; but the heavier and biologically far younger dog could, if necessary, easily have shown his senior that protest was futile. In fact, however, Idwal was so overawed by, and faithful to, his canine master, that his protest never developed beyond a conflict-expressing whimper and an occasional rebellious growl.

In due season Mifanwy had a litter of five puppies. Their heads, of course, were of normal size, but most of them bore on their foreheads the large fawn patches which distinguished Sirius, and his mother before him. In a few weeks the Alsatian strain in them was obvious to all the world. It was obvious too that if Sirius was not their father he must at least be their grandfather. He was the original source of the Alsatian characters which were now fairly common among the dogs of the neighbourhood. There had been a time when the local farmers had perversely hoped (without official encouragement) that in allowing the man-dog to have intercourse with their bitches they would acquire super-canine puppies. Inevitably this hope was disappointed, though a dash of Alsatian had proved a useful stiffening to the local sheep-dog strain. Even when both parents were super-canine, the offspring were of course normal. As for Sirius, he took no interest in his numerous moron progeny. His three sons and two daughters by Mifanwy were treated as mere chattels. One of each sex was promptly drowned. The other three were allowed to remain with their mother considerably longer than was usual, in fact until her super-canine but sub-human maternal feelings had waned sufficiently to make it possible to deprive her of her offspring without causing her distress. Sirius then sold his two remaining sons and his daughter.

Meanwhile super-canine puppies continued to arrive from Cambridge for Sirius to train. Mostly they were turned into super-sheep-dogs, but owing to the war a new profession seemed to open up for Thomas’s bright animals.

The need for war economy was seriously interfering with the work of the Laboratory. Thomas foresaw the time when the whole organization would have to close down or turn over to some kind of war research. It was at this time, in the spring of 1940, that the war changed from its “phony” to its violent phase. The collapse of Holland, Belgium and finally France made the British feel that they really had to fight for their lives. Thomas had always regarded the war as a gigantic irrelevance. It was beneath the notice of minds that were given wholly to the advancement of science. But at last he was forced to recognize that this gigantic irrelevance must not be ignored or it would destroy the very possibility of science. He began to puzzle over two problems. How far, if at all, could his present work be made useful for winning the war? If it was quite useless, what kind of war-work could the Laboratory undertake? He saw that his super-sheep-dogs, if they could be produced in large enough numbers, might have an important function in war. The Government was already training normal dogs for running messages in the battle area, and clearly the super-sheep-dog mentality would be far more useful. He therefore set about the task of discovering a simplified technique for the mass-production of these animals. He also told Sirius to give some of his brightest pupils special training in running messages.

The time came when Thomas was ready to display three of his animals to the brass-hats, and after much importuning he secured an interview with a high military authority. The performance of the animals was brilliant. Thomas was assured that the War Office would undoubtedly make use of his super-canine messengers. He then waited impatiently for many weeks, wrote many respectful letters, and was repeatedly assured that the necessary machinery was now in action for adopting his suggestion. But somehow nothing happened. Every official whom he interviewed was at least sympathetic, and often eager to take any amount of trouble to help the great scientist. Yet nothing resulted. The vast and venerable institution remained unresponsive. Meanwhile the whole energy of the Laboratory had been turned over to the mass-production of “missing-link” dogs for war. The more interesting but less useful task of producing creatures of the calibre of Sirius had been abandoned; and Thomas’s dearest dream, the stimulation of a human foetus to super-normal brain growth, now faded into mere fantasy.

Sirius, no less than Thomas, now realized that the war had to be won, otherwise all that was best in the tyrant species would be destroyed. But he lived in the depth of the country, and he was wholly absorbed in his new work; which, moreover, seemed to him a piece of worthy national, or rather human, service. Consequently he did not realize the war emotionally as fully as Thomas. Moreover, though one side of his nature was wholly identified with this glorious human species, another side was secretly and irrationally gratified by the tyrant’s plight. Intellectually he knew that his future depended on the future of Britain, but emotionally he was as detached from the struggle as, at a later stage, the threatened millions of India were to be emotionally aloof from the menace of Japan.

When Plaxy came home, she found the Caer Blai atmosphere rather unreal. Of course she could not help being impressed by Sirius’s success. He really did seem to have come into his own, even from the point of view of war. But she was rather shocked at his aloofness from the agony of the human race, and perhaps also a little jealous of his new-found peace of mind. For she herself was painfully torn between revulsion from the whole crazy disgusting mess and the urge to play her part in the desperate crisis of her species. In Cambridge she always made a point of maintaining her accustomed detachment, for so many of her friends seemed to her obsessed by the war; but in Wales she found herself warning Sirius that he was living in a fool’s paradise, and that at any moment all familiar and precious things might be swept away in a tide of German invasion. She herself, she said, was feeling uncomfortable about her own work, a teaching post which she was to take up at the end of the summer. Perhaps she ought to do something more directly useful.

Sirius was impressed by all this talk, but emotionally he remained as unenthusiastic as ever. Perhaps he ought to go and be an Army messenger dog. (Anyhow he was training messenger dogs.) But to hell with the whole war! He had found his job, for the present, producing wool and food for the dominant species; which was probably destroying itself, anyhow. And good riddance, too! Good riddance? No, he didn’t really mean that. But damn it, anyhow it wasn’t his fault, and man was not his responsibility.

At this time Plaxy had become very much concerned with politics. For a short spell she had been a member of the Communist Party, but she had resigned, “because, though they are energetic and devoted, they’re also intolerably cocksure and unfair.” Nevertheless she remained very much under the influence of Marxism, though she was hard put to it to find room in Marxism for her faith in “the spirit,” which was playing an ever deeper part in her life. “The spirit,” she said, “must be the highest of all dialectical levels, the supreme synthesis.” While she was at home she talked much to Sirius about “equality of opportunity,” “the class war,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and so on. And she insisted that if Communism was not, after all, the whole truth, then nothing short of a great new idea, based on Communism, could win the war and found a tolerable social order. Sirius had always been sympathetic with the desire for revolutionary social change. His spell in the East End had shown him how necessary it was. He had heartily agreed with the plea for common ownership of the means of production, and for creative social planning. But now that he had property to look after he found himself, much to his own surprise, looking at the whole matter from a different angle. “That’s all quite true,” he would say, “but I’m a bit anxious about your new order. Are you going to merge all the farms into great collective farms? It all smells a bit dangerous. It’s too theoretical. And what about eccentric creative enterprises like Thomas’s? And what on earth would become of oddities like me, if I ever existed at all? The point is, who is to do the social planning? It’s all very well to say the people will do it, but God save us from the people. Anyhow they can’t really do it at all. Some minority will do it, either mere demagogues or bosses. Somehow we have to get the wide-awake people to do it. It’s always the wide-awake people who do everything worth while, really. The rest are just sheep.” “But surely,” said Plaxy, “it’s ordinary people that all the planning is for; and so it’s the ordinary people that must settle the aims of all the planning, and control it. The wide-awakes are servants of the community. The sheep-dogs serve the sheep.” “Rot,” said Sirius, “sheer tripe! The dogs serve a master, who uses the sheep, and the dogs.” Plaxy protested, “But the people, if they are a free people, have no master but themselves. The people as a whole are the master.” “No, no!” cried Sirius. “You might as well say the sheep as a whole are the master. I, at any rate, acknowledge only one master, not forty-five million two-legged sheep, or two thousand million, but simply and absolutely the spirit.” The answer came promptly, “But who is to say what the spirit demands? Who is to interpret the spirit?” “Why, the spirit itself, of course,” he replied, “working in the minds of its servants, its sheep-dogs, the wide-awake people.” “But, Sirius, dear, dangerous, ridiculous darling, that’s the way straight to Fascism. There’s a leader who knows, and the rest do what they’re told. And there’s a Party of faithful sheep-dogs who make them do it.” Sirius protested, “But a Fascist Party is not made up of wide-awake people. Its members don’t really know at all what the spirit is. They don’t know the smell of it. They can’t hear its voice. All they can ever be, even at their best is just sheep-dogs run amok, wild sheep-dogs, wolves under a wolf leader.” “But, Sirius, my own, don’t you see, that’s just what they would say about us. Who is to judge between us?” He had his answer ready. “Who judged between Christ and the High Priest? Not the people. They said ‘Crucify him.’ The real judge was Christ’s master, the spirit, speaking in Christ’s own mind; and in the High Priest’s, if only he would listen. The point is, if you serve the spirit you can’t serve any other master. But what the spirit demands always is love and intelligence and strong creative action in its service, love of the sheep as individuals to be made the most of, not merely as mutton or as coral insects in a lovely coral pattern, but as individual vessels of the spirit. That spirit — love, intelligence and creating — is precisely what ‘the spirit’ is.” Plaxy’s reply was merely ribald. “The Reverend Sirius preached one of his most profound and helpful sermons.”

They were sitting together on the lawn at Garth, and he playfully attacked her, pushing her over and making for her throat. Accustomed from childhood to such battles, she gripped his ears and tugged hard. Before his teeth had softly seized her, or his tongue had begun its tickling caresses, he squealed for mercy. They smiled into each other’s eyes. “Sadistic little bitch!” he said. “Sweet cruel bitch!” With one hand she seized his lower jaw and pressed it backwards and downwards into his neck. The sierras of ivory closed gently on the back of her hand. Dog and girl struggled playfully for a while, till she let go, exhausted. Wiping her hand on his coat, she protested, “Slobberry old thing!” They lay quietly on the grass.

Suddenly Plaxy said, “I expect you have great fun with Mifawny, don’t you?” He heard a faint tension in her voice. There was a pause before he answered, “She’s lovely. And though she’s so deadly stupid, she really has the rudiments of a soul.” Plaxy pulled a piece of grass and chewed it, looking at the distant Rhinogs. “I have a lover, too,” she said. “He wants me to marry him, but that would be so binding. He has just joined the R.A.F. He wants me to have babies, lots of them, as quickly as possible. But it’s too soon. I’m much too young to pledge myself for ever to anyone.” There was a long pause. Then Sirius asked, “Does he know about me?” “No.” “Will he make any difference to — us?” Promptly she answered, “I don’t feel any different. But perhaps I don’t really care enough about him. I love him terribly as a human animal, just as you love Mifawny, I suppose, as a canine animal. And I love him very much as a friend too. But I don’t know whether that’s enough for marriage. And it must be marriage, for the children’s sake, because they need a permanent father. They ought to grow up in the community of their parents.” Another long pause came between them. She threw him a quick sidelong glance. He was staring at her, his head very slightly tilted to one side, his brows puckered, like any puzzled terrier. “Well,” he said at last, “marry him, and have your litter, if you must. And of course you must. But all this is much more serious than bitches. Oh, Plaxy, fundamentally it’s you and I that are married, for ever. Will he spoil that? Will he put up with it?” She pulled nervously at the turf, and said, “I know, I know we’re somehow married in the spirit. But if that makes me ever unable to love a man wholeheartedly enough to want to be his wife and have babies with him, oh, I’ll hate the hold you have on me.” Before he could reply she looked squarely at him and continued, “I didn’t mean that. I can’t hate the hold you have on me. But — oh, God, what a mess!” Tears were in her eyes. He stretched forward to touch her hand, but thought better of it. Then he said, “If I am spoiling your life, it would have been better if Thomas had never made me.” She put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “If you had never been you, then I should never have been I, and there would have been no difficult, lovely ‘us.’ And even if I do hate you sometimes, I love you much more, always. Even while I am hating you, I know (and the best of me knows gladly) that I am not just Plaxy but the human part of Sirius-Plaxy.” He answered quickly, “But to be that properly you must be as much Plaxy as possible, and so you must somehow live your human life fully. Oh, yes, I understand. Being human, and a girl, and in England, and middle class, you can’t merely have lovers and an illegitimate litter. You must have a husband.” To himself he added, “And I, perhaps, must sometimes kill your kind.” But the memory of Thwaites murdered suddenly came upon him, and revolted him with its contrast to the present happy situation. It was as though, running on the moor in bright weather, he had suddenly been swallowed by a bog. And somehow it seemed that only Plaxy could pull him out. On a sudden impulse he told her the whole story.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EFFECTS OF WAR

BY THE AUTUMN of 1940 Sirius was well established at Caer Blai, was planning great improvements for the pasture, the breed and the arable land, and was known in the neighbourhood as “Pugh’s man-dog.” Precisely what his mental stature was, no one could decide. Pugh, by telling the whole truth about him, had put them off the scent. It was known that the man-dog had a marvellous facility with sheep, and was managing them on the latest scientific principles. But all this was vaguely thought to be less a matter of intelligence than of a sort of super-instinct mysteriously implanted in him by science. It was known too that he could understand a good deal of speech, and was actually able to use words himself to those who had the key to his queer pronunciation. He was learning a bit of Welsh; and the fact that his Welsh was so rudimentary, and that this was the language which alone was familiar in the district, disguised from everyone his true linguistic gifts and his fully human mentality.

Even so, had it not been war-time, the newspapers would certainly have publicized him, and with far more success than befell the stunt of the talking mongoose at an earlier date.

Sirius made himself thoroughly popular with most of the surrounding farmers and villagers, but there were a few who stubbornly regarded him with suspicion. Devout chapel-goers affirmed that the man-dog’s real master was not Pugh but Satan, and that Pugh had sold his soul to the Devil to help him out of the labour-shortage. Some of the sexually obsessed, aware of the great affection that held between the man-dog and the scientist’s younger daughter, whispered that it was Thomas, in the first instance, who had sold his soul, in order to gain scientific fame, and that Satan, incarnate in the dog, habitually gratified himself in perverse sexual intercourse with Thomas’s daughter. And she, they said, for all her charm, was little better than a witch. Anyone could see that there was something queer and inhuman about her. Rumours of a different type were spread by the cruder sort of patriots. They declared that Thomas was in the pay of the Nazis, who had found in his man-dog the ideal kind of spy. It was no accident that the animal was established in the neighbourhood of a big artillery camp.

Most people were too sensible to take these rumours seriously. Pugh was popular, and so was Sirius; for he was certainly a genius with sheep, and he lent distinction to the district. Thomas, though an Englishman, had won a place in local esteem; and his daughter, in spite of her new-fangled ways, was an attractive girl. Not till the pressure of war had been much prolonged, driving simple folk to look for scapegoats, was public opinion to become hostile.

When the great air attacks on London began, Elizabeth received a long letter from Geoffrey describing conditions in his parish, and urging her to take in some of his refugee children, and plant out others in suitable homes in her district. Geoffrey was one of those who believed in personal responsibility. He suspected all Government organization; consequently he was anxious to avoid as far as possible merely handing over his charges to the official evacuation authorities.

Geoffrey’s account of the devastation, heroism, muddle, callousness, and human kindness in the great blitzes had a deep effect on Sirius. He remembered vividly the smell of Geoffrey’s home, and of the bare little church and all the stuffy houses that he had visited. And these olfactory images called up in his mind a rich picture of human beings struggling against a hostile environment and their own inadequacy. He remembered many of the people whom Geoffrey reported as casualties, and many of the children for whom hospitality was required. He had a generous impulse to rush off to London at once with his panniers filled with first-aid equipment. But it was a foolish impulse. He would only be in the way. Besides, it was one thing to enjoy a generous impulse and quite another to put it in action. He suspected that he would be a thorough coward in an air raid; and anyhow, fundamentally he felt aloof from the whole war. If the human race was fool enough to torture itself in this crazy manner, what had he to do with it? Nevertheless he could not help being deeply moved by Geoffrey’s story, and by affection for Geoffrey himself. The plight of London became even more vivid to him and to the local population when, by one of those flukes which seem common in war, a single bomb, dropped at random by a stray raider, fell neatly on a lonely cottage in the neighbourhood, killing or wounding all its occupants.

Elizabeth undertook to take three London children into her house, and Mrs. Pugh, with much misgiving, agreed to accommodate two more. Sirius gave up his room at Caer Blai. Most of the local wives had already either taken on evacuees from blitzed towns in the north-west, or had refused to do so; but Elizabeth, after paying many calls, was able to tell Geoffrey that she had accommodation for fifteen more children and two mothers. It so happened that the neighbourhood had been rather lucky so far with its little immigrants. Though there had been a good deal of grumbling on the part of some hostesses, on the whole the scheme had worked. But the twenty little Londoners were a different kettle of fish. They were smelly, lousy, unruly little brats, and it was said in the district that no decent housewife would have had them across her doorstep if she had known what they were like. They made horrid messes in the house, broke the furniture, ruined the garden, lied, stole, bit one another and their hostesses, tormented the cat, and used dreadful language.

Some of the hostesses had the wit to realize that these children were simply the product of circumstances. It was shocking, they said, that society should allow its more unfortunate members to grow up in such degradation. The less imaginative housewives, however, indulged in orgies of self-righteous indignation against the children themselves and their parents. Some took the line that the immigrants were English, and that was what the English were like. As for Elizabeth, her popularity suffered somewhat. She alone was responsible for this recent affliction. It was remembered in some quarters not only that she was English, but that her husband had sold his soul to the Devil. Matters were made worse by the fact that her own evacuees turned out quite well. She was one of those who had a natural gift for treating children as human persons and expecting to be treated decently in return. There were troubles enough at first. But in a few weeks the little girl and her two small brothers were proudly helping with the house and the garden.

One day Elizabeth had news from Geoffrey that his church had been destroyed, but that he was continuing to devote his whole time to the care of his parishioners. He was elated that after long agitation he and others had secured great improvements in the public shelters in the district. A few days later she received a letter in an unknown hand saying that her cousin had been killed.

The news of Geoffrey’s death seemed to bring the war strangely near to Sirius. For the first time someone whom he knew and loved had vanished. This somehow put the whole thing into a new perspective. It should not have done so. He thought he had imagined the personal impact of war pretty well, but evidently he had not. Geoffrey had simply ceased to be, like a match flame when it is blown out. So simple, and yet somehow so incredible! For in a queer way Geoffrey now seemed more real than before, and nearer to him. For days he caught himself quietly talking to Geoffrey and getting perfectly good answers from him in his own mind. Queer! Just a trick of imagination, no doubt. But somehow he couldn’t really in his heart believe that Geoffrey had simply been snuffed out. Or rather, part of him believed it confidently and another part just couldn’t. He had a fantastic dream. Geoffrey sought out Thwaites in Hell, and found him with Sirius’s soul in his pocket. Somehow Geoffrey brought Thwaites up to Heaven, and his reward was the freeing of Sirius.

The war was soon to come even nearer to Sirius. In May Thomas took him by car to visit a farm near Shap, where several super-sheep-dogs were being successfully used to do practically the whole routine work on the sheep. The route back to North Wales passed through Liverpool. There had been a good deal of raiding on Merseyside from time to time, and Thomas judged it wise to be well across the river before dark. Unfortunately they were late in starting, and did not arrive in Liverpool till dusk. Somewhere in the outskirts of the town they developed engine trouble, and by the time an overworked garage hand had put matters right it was dark. They set out once more, but were much delayed by the condition of the town. There had been a bad raid on the previous night, and the streets had not yet been properly cleared. The result was that, before they could reach the entrance of the famous tunnel under the Mersey, a raid began. It was not far to the tunnel, so Thomas decided to hurry on. Sirius was terrified. Probably the noise was even more trying to his sensitive ears than to the duller human organ. Anyhow he had always been a coward, save in the wolf-mood. The moaning of planes, the prodigious smack and racket of anti-aircraft guns, the tearing rush of bombs (like a raucous and vastly amplified whisper, he thought), followed by such a crash as he had not believed possible, and then the clatter of falling masonry, the roaring and crackling of fires, the scurrying of human feet, the screams of casualties demanding help as the car passed a wrecked shelter, all this had a shattering effect on his morale. Sitting there in the back of the car he had nothing to do but be terrified. Then there were the smells, the stinging smells of gases from explosives, the dusty smell of shattered masonry, the pungent smell of burning woodwork, and occasionally the stench of mangled human bodies.

It seemed madness to go on any farther, so Thomas drew the car into the side of the road, and they dashed for the nearest shelter. The blast from a bomb pushed the side of a house across the street at them. Thomas was pinned under it; Sirius, though bruised and cut, was free. The lower part of Thomas’s body was covered with masonry. With great difficulty and in great pain he gasped out, “Save yourself. By the tunnel. Down the street. Then to Wales. Save yourself, for my sake. Please go, please!” Sirius tried frantically to shift the debris with his paws and teeth, but could not. “I’ll get help,” he said. “No, save yourself,” Thomas gasped. “I’m — done — anyhow. Good luck.” But Sirius hurried off, and presently was tugging at a man’s coat, and whimpering. It was obvious that he wanted help for someone, so a party came back with him. But when they reached the place where Thomas had been, they found only a fresh crater. The men returned to their former task, leaving Sirius blankly gazing. He sniffed about for a long while, whimpering miserably. Then his terror, which had been blotted out by action, welled up again. But his head was clear. He must find the tunnel entrance, which Thomas had said was quite near. He hurried along by the light of fires reflected from the clouds. At one point the road was completely blocked by fallen masonry, and he had to clamber over it. At last he reached the tunnel and managed to sneak in unobserved. He cantered along the footpath; and though a stream of cars was travelling towards Birkenhead, making a terrifying noise in the confined space of the tunnel, no one took much notice of him. At the Birkenhead entrance he made a dash for liberty, and found himself once more in the threatening racket of war and under the fire-lit sky. But the bombs were falling mostly on the Liverpool side of the Mersey.

Sirius gave me a very full account of his long trek from Birkenhead to Trawsfynydd, but there is no need to report it here in detail. Tired and mentally shattered, he made his way westward through the town and out across the Wirral towards Thurstastone Common. As he cantered through the night his mind kept reverting to the complete disappearance of Thomas, the being who had made him, whom he had at first adored with uncritical canine devotion, and more recently had strongly criticized, while always retaining a deep affection for him, and a deep respect for his powers. Intellectually he had little doubt that Thomas had simply ceased to exist; yet, as with Geoffrey’s death, he could not really believe it. Lobbing along a stretch of road, he found himself arguing with Thomas on the subject. The dead man insisted that there was now nothing anywhere in the universe which could reasonably be called Thomas Trelone, no mind continuous with that mind’s thoughts, desires, feelings. “Well, you ought to know,” said Sirius; and then came to a sudden halt, wondering if he was going mad.

From Thurstastone he travelled along the shore of the Dee Estuary and over the salt marshes to Queensferry, then by road and field and moorland, always in a south-westerly direction. Often he wondered how much he was guided by the sub-human mammal’s proverbial “homing faculty,” how far by vague memory of Thomas’s maps. The long stretches of road he found very tiring. The motor traffic was a constant worry, for the drivers gave him little consideration. He imagined the tyrant species as a composite creature made up of man and machine. How he hated its harsh voice and brutal ways! Yet only yesterday he himself, sitting in Thomas’s open tourer, had exulted in the speed and the wind as they streamed across the Lancashire plain. His present plight made him realize more clearly than ever how contemptuous and heartless men were towards “dumb animals” that did not happen to be their own pets.

Whenever he passed through a populous area he was careful to attract as little attention as possible. He slowed down and strayed about the road, sniffing at lamp-posts, like any local dog. When anyone made inquisitive or friendly advances, which was fairly often, for he was a striking animal, he replied with a nonchalant tail-wag, but never stopped. After crossing the Clwydian Range and the wide Vale of Clwyd, he made his way up into ample moors, and went badly astray in mist; but at last he dropped down into lower country near Pentrevoelas, and soon he was heading for the high wild hills of Migneint. Toiling up a steep grassy spur he entered heavy cloud, and it began to rain. Tired as he was, and with a painful task awaiting him, he exulted in the cold wet wind, the scents of the bog and turf and sheep. Once he caught the unmistakable odour of fox, that rare, intoxicating smell of the most illusive quarry. God! How the qualities of sensation seemed to hint at exquisite hidden things, always to be pursued, never found. Even sight could do it. The driving mist, the half-seen rocks, appearing and vanishing, and all the little grass-plumes jewelled with mist-drops, how they stabbed him with sweet familiarity and with a never-comprehended lure! No doubt it was all electrons and wave-trains and the tickling of nerve-endings, but oh how sweet and mysterious and frightening with uncomprehended truth! Somehow the beauty of it all was intensified to the point of agony by the horrors that he had so recently witnessed.

On and on he climbed, surprised at the height. Then suddenly the mist cleared for a moment, and he found himself almost at the top of a considerable mountain, which he soon identified as Carnedd Filast. Long ago, before he had taken to sheep, he used to hunt on these moors from Garth, but it was not often that he came quite so far afield.

Now that he was once more on the high hills, a change of mood came over him. Why should he go back to the tyrant species at all? Why give himself the pain of telling Elizabeth that her husband would not return? Why not live wild on the moor, free, spurning all mankind, feeding on rabbits and perhaps an occasional sheep, till at last man did him to death? Why not? He had lived wild for a time after killing Thwaites, but that had been spoilt by conscience. This time it would be different. It was clear by now that life had little to offer him. True, he had found a niche of sorts, but only by man’s aid and tolerance. And it was a cramping niche. He could not extend his powers thoroughly. Strangely, on this occasion, it was the thought not of Thomas but of his sheep unshepherded that turned his attention from these gloomy meditations.

The mist now closed down heavily on the mountains, and it was already twilight; but he had taken his bearings, and was able to grope his way down towards a high boggy valley, and then up round a shoulder of Arenig Fach. Soon he was on little Carnedd Iago, then stumbling down in darkness towards the road, which he crossed near the head of Cwm Prysor. Leaving the wild moorland valley on his left, he came into home pastures. Now, even in darkness, every crag, every hummock, every pool, almost every tussock of heather or grass was familiar, and redolent with associations. Here he had found a dead sheep and half-born lamb. Here he had sat with Thomas, eating sandwiches on one of those long walks that would never be repeated. Here he had killed a hare. But though every step was familiar, increasing darkness and the heavy mist greatly delayed him. It was almost midnight when he reached Garth. I calculate that, since leaving Thurstastone Common in the early morning, he must have covered altogether, including all his lengthy aberrations from the direct route, well over eighty miles. Much of the journey was on hard roads or through difficult, hedged agricultural country.

At the door of the darkened house he gave his special summoning bark. Elizabeth promptly let him into the blinding light and the familiar smells of home. Before he had said a word, she had closed the door, knelt down, and put her arms round him, saying “Thank God one of you is safe.” “Only me,” he said. She gave one small moan, and clung to him in silence. Held in a rather awkward position, tired out after the strain of the last few days, and oppressed by the indoor atmosphere, he suddenly went deadly faint, and wilted in her arms. She laid his head low on the floor and went to fetch some brandy. But in a moment he recovered, staggered on to his feet, dutifully but feebly wiped them on the door-mat, and walked unsteadily into the sitting-room. Then he realized that his under surface was covered with the wet black mud of the bog. When Elizabeth returned, he was standing with trembling legs and hanging head, wondering what to do. “Lie down, precious,” she said. “The mess is nothing.” Presently she had him lapping up sweet tea, and then eating bread and milk.

CHAPTER XIV

TAN-Y-VOEL

THOMAS’S DEATH AFFECTED the female members of the Trelone family very deeply. The two boys were away at the war, but Tamsy and Plaxy both came home to spend a week or so with their mother. Sirius at a later date told me that Tamsy was superficially more distressed than Plaxy. She wept a good deal, and by her too demonstrative sympathy she increased rather than assuaged the emotional strain that inevitably fell upon Elizabeth. Plaxy, on the other hand, was strangely cold and awkward. With a pale face, and an almost sullen expression, she occupied herself mainly with housework, leaving her mother and sister to dwell upon the past. One day Tamsy unearthed from Thomas’s chest of drawers a dilapidated handkerchief-case which Plaxy as a child had made and given to her father on his birthday. With swimming eyes Tamsy brought this relic to her sister, obviously expecting it to be a stimulus to sweet sorrow. Plaxy turned away, muttering, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t!” Then, unaccountably, and with a look almost of fury, she rushed at Sirius and gave him so brusque a hug that he wondered whether it was meant as a caress or as the opening of a wrestling bout. I mention this incident because it suggests that Plaxy’s relations with her father were in fact rather complex and emotional.

As for Sirius himself, his very real grief, he told me, was mingled with a new deep sense of independence. His canine nature lamented the loss of his master, and he was haunted by memories of Thomas’s affectionate guidance; yet his human intelligence now breathed more freely. At last he was his own master, not literally perhaps, but emotionally. At last he would be master of his fate and captain of his soul. Sometimes the thought frightened him; for he had grown up in complete emotional dependence on Thomas’s ultimate authority over him. Even when he stood out for his own will, he did so always in the hope of persuading Thomas to agree with him, never with any depth of intention to resist the will of his revered creator. And so, now that Thomas was gone, his creature was torn between anxious self-distrust and a strange new decisiveness.

But though Sirius was now emotionally freed from Thomas, he was destined to be for a while bound more closely than ever to his foster-mother.

Though Thomas’s death was a heavy blow to Elizabeth, she would not let it crush her. She carried on with her normal life, looking after the three little evacuees, digging and planting in the garden, helping Sirius with the sheep; for Pugh had grown very rheumatic and found the outlying pastures almost inaccessible. Plaxy had offered to give up teaching and settle down at home, but Elizabeth would not hear of it. “The child must live her own life,” she said.

Inevitably Elizabeth became more and more devoted to Sirius, who was the supreme achievement of Thomas’s creative power, and also her own adopted child. Indeed Sirius now seemed more to her than her own children, who were independent, and in no further need of her help. But Sirius constantly needed her more than ever. Once when she found him struggling to repair a wire fence with his teeth, he had cried out, “Oh for hands! At night I dream of hands.” She answered, “My hands belong to you till I die.” Between the dog and the middle-aged woman a very close, affectionate, but not entirely happy relationship developed. Elizabeth had always maintained towards her children a friendly detachment towards which they had readily responded. Sirius also she had formerly treated in the same way. But now, her devotion to her husband combined with maternal hunger to fix her attention obsessively upon Sirius. Helping him became her constant passion. Now that Pugh was partially incapacitated, and skilled labour was so hard to obtain, her help was valuable. But Sirius came to find it rather tiresome. She was too anxious to help, and too full of suggestions, which he tended to reject if he could find any plausible excuse for doing so. It was strange and tragic, and entirely unexpected, that a woman formerly so quiet-hearted and so unpossessive should in middle age have become so clinging. I cannot account for the change. It is easy to point to influences in her life making for neurosis, but why should they have taken effect so late, and so extravagantly as they were destined to do? How frail a thing is the human spirit, even at its best!

Elizabeth showed an unwelcome inclination to take part in the actual management of the farm, and particularly all contacts with the outside world. Sirius strongly disliked this, not only because she had insufficient experience and sometimes made bad mistakes, but also because he was anxious to accustom the local population to dealing with him direct, and it was his ambition to play an active part in the common life of the district. Already he had earned respect. Not only the local papers but the great national dailies had referred to “the brilliant man-dog of North Wales.” Only the paper shortage and the over-mastering interest of warfare had prevented them from using him for a stunt. Consequently he had been able to make himself known in the neighbourhood by personal contact without attracting too much attention from the rest of the country. Intellectuals of one sort or another did visit him now and then with introductions from the Laboratory; and these visits he greatly enjoyed, because they enabled him to keep in touch with movements of contemporary cultural life. He never gave up his intention of playing a part in that life as soon as the farm had been fully developed and regularized.

To return to Elizabeth. Perhaps out of loyalty to Thomas, who had always been extravagantly fearful of publicity, she did her utmost to keep Sirius from the public eye, and indeed from all social contacts. When at last she sent away her three little evacuee children in order to devote all her time to the farm, Sirius was torn between satisfaction at the prospect of having more help and fear of increased interference; and between affection and an exasperation which kindness forbade him to express. Why was it that one who had always been so tactful and detached in her relations had suddenly turned so difficult? He put it down to overwork and the emotional strain of losing her husband. No doubt advancing age had also something to do with it. Only when one or other of her own children was at home did she return almost to her normal self. Then Sirius would feel with relief that he was no longer the apple of her eye, and would be able to devote himself to his own affairs without having to consider her.

It was in the autumn of 1941 that Elizabeth fell ill. Her heart was tired, but Dr. Huw Williams told her that there was nothing seriously wrong with it. She had merely over-strained it, and must take things easy for a few weeks. Sirius saw the doctor to his car, and asked him whether he had told the truth or merely said what would comfort the patient. After Sirius had repeated the question several times, the doctor understood, and assured him that he had spoken the truth, and emphasized the need for a long rest. In a week Elizabeth refused to stay in bed any longer, and insisted on taking up light jobs on the farm. This led to another collapse, and the whole cycle was repeated several times in spite of Sirius’s strong protest. It was obvious that Elizabeth would work herself to death. She seemed to be impelled by some obscure passion for self-expression through self-destruction in service of Sirius. The perplexed dog could not keep a constant watch over her unless he gave up his work entirely. In despair he wrote to Tamsy, but she had just had her second baby; she could find no one to look after her family and free her to nurse her mother. Sirius and Mrs. Pugh took turns with the invalid; but when at last Elizabeth was taken more seriously ill, and the doctor’s optimism had given way to exasperation and despair, it was suggested to Elizabeth that she had better have a real rest in a nursing home. She rejected the idea with scorn. Very reluctantly Sirius now summoned Plaxy.

For several weeks Sirius and Plaxy and Mrs. Pugh kept a close watch on Elizabeth. The common task drew the girl and the dog closer to one another than they had ever been before. They were often together, but seldom alone together. This frequent compresence and infrequent intimacy generated in each a great longing for unrestrained talk, and an increasing sensibility towards each other’s slightest changes of mood. Both, of course, were mainly and anxiously concerned with the patient. Some exasperation was inevitable, but was tempered and indeed almost wholly silenced by the strong affection which both had felt for her since their infancy. Both were put to strain by the necessity of sacrificing their own urgent activities, perhaps for a very long time. Each knew that the other was strained, and the two were drawn closer by that knowledge.

Under Plaxy’s firm and loving treatment Elizabeth made good progress; but as her health improved she became increasingly restless. One day she insisted on dressing and going downstairs. It so happened that on the table there was an unopened newspaper. She picked it up and opened it. “British Cruiser Sunk,” said the main headline. It was the ship on which Maurice was serving. Owing to the fact that the Germans were the first to announce the sinking, the Admiralty had been forced to break their rule and publish the information before the next of kin had been told of the casualties. The shock of the news, and the suspense that followed it, killed Elizabeth before word came through that her son was among the survivors.

Plaxy, though “scarcely human,” though cat-like and fay, was human enough to have deep feelings for her mother, who had always shown special affection for her youngest child, and yet had built up with her an even freer, happier relationship than with the elder children; for she had learnt by her own past mistakes with them. Elizabeth’s death therefore hit Plaxy hard. Sirius too was greatly distressed, on his own account, and still more on hers. For himself, he was again strangely perplexed by this business of death. The dead Elizabeth kept talking to him. And it was not the Elizabeth that had just died, the over-strained and difficult Elizabeth; it was Elizabeth as she was in her prime. Again and again, with variations, she made or seemed to make a very intelligent contribution to his thoughts. She said, “Don’t puzzle your old head about it so! Minds like ours just aren’t clever enough to understand, and whichever way you decide you’re sure to be wrong. Don’t believe I still exist, for that would be false to your intellect; but don’t refuse the feeling of my presence in the universe, for that would be blind.”

Shared grief and common responsibility tended to bring Plaxy and Sirius into an ever closer intimacy. They now sank exhausted into mutual dependence. And there was much work to do together. With the aid of the family solicitor and a representative of the Laboratory, they had to wind up the Trelone affairs. Obviously the house must be sold. But the decision to surrender the home in which they had been brought up together was momentous both to girl and dog, for it meant severing the remaining tangible link between them. They spent many hours of many days sorting out the contents of the house. All the furniture had to go, save the few pieces that Tamsy wanted for her own house, and the fewer that were to be given to Sirius, who must now be re-established at Caer Blai. Books, crockery, kitchen utensils, clothes, all the multifarious possessions of the dead parents, had to be sorted out. The property of the absent children must be separated from the rest, and packed up and dispatched. Plaxy’s own and Sirius’s own things must be collected and sorted. A great bonfire of sheer rubbish was made every morning, and carefully extinguished at night, because of the black-out. Photographs of the parents themselves, of their parents and relatives, of the four children and Sirius at all ages, of super-sheep-dogs, of holiday expeditions, of Sirius at work with sheep, all had to be looked at by dog and girl together, squatting on the floor of the dismantled sitting-room. All had to be talked over, laughed over, sighed over, and finally assigned either to the rubbish pile or to the collection of things too good to destroy.

When the labour was over, when the furniture was all gone, when there was nothing in the house but a few packing cases not yet dispatched and the few crocks and scraps which the two had been using for their meals; when the floors were bare board and the house was the mere shell of a home, Plaxy prepared a final meal for the two of them. It was lunch. She was to leave by train early in the afternoon, and he was to begin at once to catch up with arrears of work at the farm. They sat together on the floor of the empty sitting-room, and ate almost in silence. They had as a matter of course settled down in the spot by the fireplace where they had so often sat together during the past two decades. The old soft hearth-rug had gone. They sat on Plaxy’s mackintosh, spread on the floor boards. She leaned against a packing case instead of the vanished couch. The solemn little picnic was soon finished. Sirius had licked out the last drop of his last bowl of tea. Plaxy had stubbed her cigarette-end in her saucer. Both sat silent.

Suddenly Plaxy said, “I have been thinking hard.” And he, “So it seems, oh wise woman.” “I’ve been thinking about us,” she continued. “Mother was useful on the farm, wasn’t she?” He agreed, and wondered how they would manage without her. “The new land-girl,” he added, “is not a patch on the last. She tries to keep her hands soft.” “Suppose,” said Plaxy, looking hard at her toe, “well — would you like it if I stayed to help you?” Sirius was licking a cut on his paw. He stopped to say, “Wouldn’t I just! But that’s impossible.” He went on licking. “Well,” said Plaxy, “why shouldn’t I, if I want to? And I have decided that I do want to, very much. I don’t want to go, I want to stay, if you’ll let me.” He stopped licking, and looked up at her. “You can’t stay. It’s all arranged. And you don’t really want to stay. But it’s nice of you to think you do.” “But, Sirius, sweet, I do really want to, not for always, but for the present. I have thought it all out, right here. We’ll rent Tan-y-Voel.” This was the labourer’s cottage on Pugh’s land, where later I was to discover them. “It’ll be fine,” she cried brightly; then with sudden shyness, for he was gazing at her sadly, she added, “Or wouldn’t you like it?” He reached out and nuzzled into her neck. “You needn’t ask,” he said, “but you have a life of your own to lead. You can’t give it all up for a dog.” “But,” she answered, “I am sick of teaching, or rather trying to. I suppose I’m not really interested enough in the little brats. Perhaps I’m too interested in me. Anyhow, I want to live.” “Then what about Robert,” he said, “and being a mother, and all that?” She looked away and was silent for a while, then sighed. “He’s a dear. But — oh, I don’t know. Anyhow, we have agreed that I must be myself, and being myself just now means staying with you.”

In the end she had her way. They went straight off to tell the Pughs of the change, and announce that they intended to seize the empty cottage at once. Pugh was of course overjoyed, and with innocent mirth he remarked, “I congratulate you, Mr. Sirius, on your bride.” Plaxy coloured, and did not respond well to this sally; so that Pugh had to smooth matters over by saying, “Just an old farmer’s joke, Miss Plaxy. No offence, indeed.” Mrs. Pugh scolded him, “For shame, Llewelyn! You are a horrid old man, and you have a nasty mind like a bubbling black bog.” They all laughed.

Before the lorry came to transport the last load from Garth, Plaxy had opened one of the cases and taken out some bedding, towels and so on. She dumped the remaining crocks and pans into the one empty case. Together they made a list of essential furniture which must be fetched back from the store and sent to Tan-y-Voel. When the furniture removers returned, they were mildly annoyed at the change and the confusion, but Plaxy used all her charm, and they duly delivered the goods at the cottage.

Even a two-roomed cottage takes some settling into, and Plaxy spent most of the following day arranging their new life. She brushed out the two rooms, scrubbed the stone floors, cleaned the grate, improvised black-out curtains for the little windows, and bought such stores as were possible in war-time. In the evening Sirius returned from his work to find a smiling home and a smiling though rather exhausted Plaxy. The table was laid for her supper, and on the carpet beside her chair was Sirius’s customary “table-cloth” and bowl. Sirius had two distinct styles of feeding. In the wild he fed wild, on rabbits and hares and so on; in the house he was given porridge, soup, bread-and-milk, bones, crusts of bread, cake and a good deal of tea. At one time it had been very difficult to buy enough to feed him adequately, because of the rationing system; but Thomas had pulled wires and secured a special ration for him as a valuable experimental animal.

After the meal, when Plaxy had washed up, they sat together on the couch that had been rescued from the old home. They had been gay, but now a sadness settled on them. Sirius said, “This is not real. It is a very lovely dream. Presently I shall wake up.” And she, “Perhaps it will not last long, but it is real while it lasts. And there is a rightness in it. It had to be, to make us one in spirit for ever, whatever else may come. We shall be happy, never fear.” He kissed her cheek.

They were both tired after the day’s work, and very soon they were yawning. Plaxy lit a candle and put out the lamp. In the next room her familiar bed was awaiting her, and on the floor was Sirius’s old sleeping-basket, a vast pan of wicker containing a circular mattress. Strange! They had been brought up together, child and puppy, sharing the same room; and even when they were grown up she had been thoroughly used to undressing before him without any self-consciousness; yet now, unexpectedly, she was shy.

At this point I cannot resist pausing to ask the reader a question. Does not Plaxy’s momentous decision to give up her career and live with Sirius need some explanation? Here was a young woman of outstanding charm, with many admirers, and one of them her accepted lover. She had taken up a teaching post which she filled with distinction, and in which she was finding a good opening for self-expression. Suddenly she gave up her work and practically broke off relations with her lover in order to join her life with the strange being who was her father’s most brilliant creation. Does it not seem probable that the underlying motive of this decision was the identification of Sirius with her father? Plaxy herself, now my wife, scorns this explanation, holding that it does not do justice to the power of Sirius’s own personality over her. Well, there is my theory, for what it is worth.

On the morning after the occupation of Tan-y-Voel, Plaxy began her apprenticeship on the farm. She cleaned out a pig-sty, harnessed the horse, loaded muck into the cart and unloaded it on the manure heap. She also helped Sirius to attend to a sick sheep on the moor. Towards the end of the day she put in some hard work on the wilderness that was meant to be the cottage garden. In such style, with variations, the days passed. Her face took on the healthy glow that delighted me when in due season I discovered her. With mingled distress and pride she watched her hands go blistered, grime-ingrained, scratched, cut and hard. Mrs. Pugh taught her to milk. Pugh himself taught her to broadcast a field with oats, while the instrument which she insisted on calling the “sowing machine” was out of order. Always there were countless nameless jobs to do about the farm. Her main function, she said, was to save Sirius’s teeth, which were beginning to wear down with too much gripping of wood and iron. So far as possible he confined his attention to the sheep and the super-sheep-dogs, but there was no end to the number of small unexpected tasks which really called for hands but could most easily be disposed of at once by his own clumsy jaws. On the farm premises he was always, in spite of his painfully acquired skill with those unsuitable instruments, too pitifully handless. But on the moors he was in his element. Plaxy greatly enjoyed the expeditions into the hills with Sirius and his canine pupils. Bounding through the bracken, he was a storm-tossed but seaworthy boat. Trotting around, giving orders to his pupils, he was a general and his charger all in one. When a sheep broke away and had to be retrieved, he would streak after it, belly to earth, like a torpedo.

In this new life there was almost no leisure, no time for reading, music, writing. Contact with the world beyond the hills was at a minimum. Expeditions to sheep sales were rare excitements. On these occasions both Sirius and Plaxy would accompany Pugh, she as Pugh’s unofficial land-girl. The bustle, the babble of Welsh voices, the clamour of sheep, the variety of human and canine types, the social atmosphere of the pubs, and of course the young men’s unconcealed admiration of this bright and humorously self-important, this forthcoming but rather queer land-girl (not in uniform) — all this Plaxy vastly enjoyed as a change from the seclusion of the farm.

Apart from these infrequent excursions, social intercourse was to be had only on expeditions to the village, and on visits to neighbouring farms to borrow or lend tools, or simply for friendly intercourse. Often Plaxy would tidy herself up and revert as far as possible to the gay young lady; and it was with deep peace of mind that she walked through the fields with the great sinewy beast at her side. With a careless, queenly self-confidence she accepted the inevitable admiration of the young farmers and shepherds, and sensed their puzzlement over her indefinable oddity.

After she had been with Sirius for several months, however, something happened which spoiled these social occasions for her. She was made to realize that, though she was so popular with many of the local people, there were some who were outraged by her living alone with the man-dog. Increasingly it was made difficult for her to be unselfconscious with Sirius in public. And her observed shyness with him fomented the salacious rumours.

The trouble began with a visit from a local nonconformist minister. This earnest young man took it upon himself to save Plaxy from damnation. He was simple enough to be impressed by the notion that Sirius was inspired by Satan, and he listened to the rumours of perverse relations between the dog and the girl. As the cottage lay within his sphere of responsibility, he felt it his duty to intervene. He timed his visit well. Plaxy had returned from the farm to prepare supper, and Sirius was still at work. Plaxy foresaw a late meal, but she treated the Reverend Mr. Owen Lloyd-Thomas with friendly ease. Indeed she made a point of being sweet to him, knowing that his good opinion counted. After beating about the bush for some time, he suddenly said, “Miss Trelone, it is my difficult duty as a minister of the Lord to speak to you on a very delicate matter. It is believed by simple people in the neighbourhood that your dog, or Mr. Pugh’s dog, is not merely an extraordinary animal but a spirit clothed in a dog’s flesh. And simple people, you know, sometimes go nearer to the truth than clever people. In spite of all the wonders of science, it may really be less false to say that the dog is possessed by a spirit than that it is just the work of man’s scientific skill. And if it is indeed possessed, then perhaps the spirit in the dog is of God, but perhaps it is of Satan. By their fruits ye shall know them.” He fell silent, cast a self-conscious glance at Plaxy, and fell to twisting the brim of his soft black hat. At last he continued, “It is felt by the neighbours, Miss Trelone, that for you to live alone with the animal is unseemly. It is believed that Satan has already snared you through the man-dog into sin. I do not know what the truth is. But I believe you are in danger. And as a minister I offer you advice. Change your way of living, even if only because it is an offence to the neighbours.”

According to the reverend young man’s reading of womanly nature, Plaxy should have blushed, either with innocent modesty or with guilty shame. If indeed she was guilty, then she might be expected either to confess with tears of penitence or to deny with self-righteous and unconvincing indignation. Her actual behaviour disconcerted him. For some time she just sat looking at him; then she rose and silently moved off into the minute larder. She came back with some potatoes, and sat down to peel them, saying, “Excuse me, won’t you, I must get the supper ready. We can talk while I do this. You see, I love Sirius. And to leave him alone now would be unkind. And it would hurt our love, because it would be a running away. Mr. Lloyd-Thomas, your religion is love. You must surely see that I can’t leave him.”

At that moment Sirius appeared in the doorway. He stood with his nostrils moving, to catch the smell of the visitor. Plaxy stretched out her arm to welcome him to her, and said. “Mr. Lloyd-Thomas thinks we ought not to live together, because you may be Satan dressed up as a dog, and perhaps you have taught me to live in sin.” She laughed. This was not a very tactful beginning, but tact had never been Plaxy’s strong suit. It is possible that if she had not made this remark their whole future would have been different. Lloyd-Thomas flushed, and said, “It is not good to jest about sin. I do not know whether you have done this thing, but I know now that your spirit is frivolous.” Sirius moved over to her, and she laid a hand on his back. He was still analysing the visitor’s smell. She felt the hair on his back rise against her hand. A very faint growl made her fear lest he should go wild. He advanced half a pace towards the cleric, but she clasped him round the neck with both arms. “Sirius!” she cried, “don’t be silly!” Lloyd-Thomas rose with careful dignity, saying, “This is not a good time for us to talk. Think over what I have said.” In the garden he turned, and saw through the open door Plaxy still holding Sirius. Girl and dog were staring at him. She bowed her head to the dog’s head, and laid her cheek to it.

When he had gone, Sirius said to Plaxy, “He smells as if he were in love with you. He smells a decent sort, really; but probably he would sooner see you dead than living in sin with me; just as McBane, I suspect, would rather see me dead than fail to squeeze every drop of information out of my body and mind. Morality and truth! The two most relentless divinities! I’m afraid we’re for it with Lloyd-Thomas sooner or later.”

Lloyd-Thomas’s sermons began to have obvious references to Plaxy and Sirius. He prayed for those who had been snared into unnatural vice. Some of his congregation were very receptive to the new minatory trend of his services. Little by little, among those who had no personal contact with Plaxy, there grew up a considerable movement of censure and indignation; and also anxiety, for would not the Lord punish the whole neighbourhood for harbouring the wicked couple? Fresh rumours seemed to sprout every day. Someone claimed that he had seen Plaxy swimming naked in a lonely llyn with the man-dog. This harmless story developed into unpublishable accounts of dalliance on the turf while they were basking in the sun before the bathe. A boy also reported that one Sunday he had peered through the hedge at Tan-y-Voel and seen Plaxy lying naked on the grass (“black as a nigger, she was, with the sun”), while the dog licked her from head to foot. The patriots and spy-hunters were also roused. It was affirmed that Sirius’s panniers contained a radio-set with which he signalled to enemy planes.

Sirius’s friends ridiculed these stories, or indignantly reprimanded those who spread them. Plaxy was still able to do her shopping in an atmosphere of friendly attentiveness. There were, however, a few unpleasant incidents. A village girl who worked for Mrs. Pugh on the farm was forbidden by her mother ever to enter Tan-y-Voel; and after a while she ceased to come to Caer Blai at all. Sometimes, when Plaxy entered a shop, conversation between shopkeeper and customers would suddenly cease. Some young hooligans, apparently in the hope of collecting evidence for scandal, haunted the spur of the moor overlooking the cottage. One evening, just before black-out time, a bold lad crept up to the window and peered into the lamp-lit room. Sirius with ferocious clamour chased him out of the garden and half-way to the main road.

These little incidents were of no great moment in themselves, but they were significant of a spreading movement of hostility. Plaxy began to be reluctant to go to the village. Both she and Sirius grew suspicious of callers. And between them there developed a rather tense emotional relationship, which alternated between reserve and tenderness.

Hitherto they had lived very happily. Their days were spent in hard work on the farm or away on the moors, often in co-operation upon the same task. Plaxy found a good deal to do in the cottage itself, cleaning and cooking, and there was always work in the little vegetable garden. The evenings they sometimes spent with the Pughs or at one or other of the neighbouring farms, where music often formed the medium of social intercourse. The musical Welsh were at first hostile to Sirius’s own unconventional creations, but his singing of human music won their applause. And in a few houses the more sensitive were becoming interested in his distinctively canine modes. But under the influence of scandal these social occasions were reduced. Far more often Plaxy and Sirius spent their evenings at home upon household chores, or singing in private the strange duets and solos that Sirius still occasionally conceived. Sometimes they would spend their evening with books. Sirius still took a deep delight in listening to prose and poetry read aloud by a good human voice. Often he would persuade Plaxy to read to him. And not infrequently he would suggest subtle modifications of tone or emphasis; for though his own reading was inevitably grotesque, his sensitive ear had detected many emotional cadences and changes of timbre, which human beings were apt to overlook until their attention was drawn to them.

As Plaxy and Sirius became more aware of the hostility and suspicion round about them, their relationship began to change. It became more passionate and less happy. Isolation, combined with contempt for the critics, drew girl and dog into closer intimacy, in fact into a manner of life which some readers may more easily condemn than understand. Plaxy herself, in spite of her fundamental joy in her love for Sirius, was increasingly troubled by a fear that she might irrevocably be losing touch with her own species, even that in this strange symbiosis with an alien creature she might be losing her very humanity itself. Sometimes, so she tells me, she would look at her own face in the little square mirror over the dressing-table, and feel a bewildering sense that it was not her face at all, but the face of the tyrant species that she had outraged. Then she would find herself in the same breath hating her unalterably human physiognomy and yet being half surprised and wholly thankful that it had not suffered a canine change.

This fear of ceasing to be human occasionally induced in her a dumb antagonism towards Sirius, which sprang not from any real sense of sin or even of indecorousness, for she was convinced that her behaviour was a fitting symbol of their deep spiritual union. No, the source of her infrequent fits of gloom was simply her consciousness of alienation from the world of normal human beings. The call of her kind was still strong in her, and she was tormented by her outlawry. The solemn taboos of humanity still dominated her through her unconscious nature, though consciously she had long since declared her independence of them. Once she said to Sirius, “I must indeed have become a bitch in a girl’s body, and so humanity has turned against me.” “No, no!” he answered. “You are always fully human, but just because you are also more than merely human, and I am more than merely canine, just because we are both in essence intelligent and sensitive beings, we can rise far above our differences, to reach across the gulf that separates us, and be together in this exquisite union of opposites.” Thus, in the rather naïvely formal diction that he was apt to use when he was speaking most earnestly, he tried to console her. In his mind there was no conflict over their intimacy. His love of her combined a dog’s devotion with human parity in comradeship, and blended the wolf’s over-mastering hunger with the respect of spirit for spirit.

At a later date both Plaxy and Sirius told me much about their life together at this time; but though after our marriage she urged me to publish all the facts for the light they throw on Sirius, consideration for her feelings and respect for the conventions of contemporary society force me to be reticent.

It was at such times that she would write those tortured letters to me, and by all sorts of devices contrived to have them posted far from home, lest I should track her down. For while she longed increasingly for human intimacy and human love, while she yearned to take up once more the threads of her life as a normal English girl, she clung with passion to the strange life and the strange love that fate had given her. It was clear from her letters that in the same breath she longed for me to take her away, and yet also dreaded the disruption of her life with Sirius.

CHAPTER XV

STRANGE TRIANGLE

I HAVE ALREADY told how I found Plaxy with Sirius at Tan-y-Voel, and how clear it was to me that any attempt to persuade her to leave him would have alienated her from me. It was not till some days after our first meeting, and after many talks with Plaxy, that I realized how intimate her relations with the dog had become. The discovery was a shock to me, but I took pains not to betray my revulsion; for Plaxy, finding me sympathetic, soon poured out in a flood of confession the whole story of her emotional relations with Sirius. When she had many times dwelt upon this theme I found myself putting aside the conventional feelings of the outraged lover. I could not but realize that the passion, which united these two dissimilar creatures was deep and generous. But this made me all the more fearful lest I should never win my strange darling back again. And I was deeply convinced that for her own sake, no less than for mine, she must in the end be won back to human ways.

During the few remaining days of my leave I spent much time at Tan-y-Voel, sometimes with Plaxy alone, sometimes with the two of them. Sirius was busy all day, but Plaxy allowed herself a good deal of time off duty to be with me. We used to work together in the garden. Indoors I helped her to clean and cook, and so on. I also constructed a number of labour-saving gadgets for her. I have always been fairly apt with my hands, and I thoroughly enjoyed putting up shelves and curtain rods, and improving the arrangements for washing up. Sirius’s sleeping-basket needed repairing, but it seemed better not to put this right until much later, when I had established friendly relations with him. While I was occupied with all these little manual tasks we would talk, sometimes seriously, sometimes with the old familiar banter. Sometimes I even ventured to tease her about her “canine husband”; but on one of these occasions (she was washing up and I was drying) she broke into tears. After that I was more tactful.

It was my fixed intention, of course, to wean Plaxy from her present life, though not to tear her from Sirius. I made no suggestion that she should come away with me. Indeed it was part of my plan to persuade her and Sirius that I fully accepted the continuance of their intimacy and of their present regime. My improvements in the house were calculated to strengthen this impression. They also accidentally served another purpose. They allowed me to take a rather mean advantage over Sirius, who could not himself help in this way. I could see that my handiness galled him; and, seeing it, I was ashamed of hurting him. Yet whenever an opportunity offered I failed to resist the temptation of triumphing over him and delighting my darling. After all, I told myself, all is fair in love and war. But I was ashamed; the more so because Sirius with inhuman generosity encouraged me to help Plaxy whenever possible. Perhaps it was in the long run a good thing that I indulged myself in this manner, for Sirius’s magnanimity forced me to realize quickly how fine a spirit he was, and compelled me to treat him with warm respect, not merely for being loved by Plaxy, but for his own sake.

Relations with Sirius were at first very awkward, and I feared at one time that our presence in the same house would prove intolerable to both of us. He made no attempt to get rid of me. He treated me with friendly politeness. But I could see that he hated to leave Plaxy with me. Obviously he feared that she might at any moment vanish out of his life. One source of strain between us was that I had at first very great difficulty in understanding his speech. Though in the end I learned to follow his uncouth English fairly easily, during that first visit to Wales I was often entirely at a loss, even when he spoke word by word and with many repetitions. In these circumstances it was almost impossible for us to come to terms at all. However, before we parted I succeeded at least in dispelling the initial chill by showing him that I had no intention of acting as the jealous rival, and that I did not condemn Plaxy for her relations with him. I went so far as to assure him that I did not want to come between them. To this he replied with a little speech which I laboriously made out to be, “But you do want to come between us. I don’t blame you. You want her to live with you, always. And obviously she must live with you, or some man. I cannot give her all that she needs. This life is only temporary for her. As soon as she wants to, she must go.” There was dignity and sanity in this statement, and I felt rebuked for my lack of candour.

By judicious wangling I was able to secure an extension of leave, so that I could spend some ten days with Plaxy and Sirius, conscientiously returning to my hotel every night. Sirius suggested that I should sleep at the cottage, but I pointed out that if I did there would be an added scandal. It seemed strangely tantalizing to me, who had been, and in a manner still was, Plaxy’s acknowledged lover, to kiss her good night at the garden gate while Sirius tactfully remained indoors. A revulsion little short of horror (which I was at pains to dissemble) would sometimes seize me at the thought of leaving her with the non-human being whom she strangely loved. On one of these occasions I must have somehow infected her with my own distress, for she suddenly clung to me with passion. A surge of joy and hunger swept over me, and I lost my presence of mind so far as to say, “Darling, come away with me. This life is all wrong for you.” But she disengaged herself, “No, dear Robert, you don’t understand. Humanly I do love you very much, but — how can I say it? — super-humanly, in the spirit, but therefore in the flesh also, I love my other dear, my strange darling. And for him there can never possibly be anyone but me.” I protested, “But he can’t give you what you really need. He said so, himself.” “Of course not,” she answered, “he can’t give me what as a girl I need most. But I am not just a girl. I am different from all other girls. I am Plaxy. And Plaxy is half of Sirius-Plaxy, needing the other half. And the other half needs me.” She paused, but before I had thought of an answer she said, “I must go. He may be thinking I shall never come back.” She kissed me hastily and hurried to the cottage door.

The next day was Sunday, which the Welsh keep with dreadful strictness. No work could be done on the farm, beyond feeding the beasts, so Sirius was free. I went round to Tan-y-Voel after breakfast and found Plaxy working in the garden, alone and rather self-conscious. Sirius, she said, had gone off for the day, and would not be back till after sunset. I was surprised, and in answer to my questions she explained, “The wild mood is on him, he says. It takes him and then leaves him. He has gone over the Rhinogs by the Roman Steps to a farm near Dyffryn to his crazy-making Gwen, a beautiful super-sheep-dog bitch. She should be ripe for him just now.” I showed signs of disgust and sympathy; but she promptly said, “I don’t mind. I did mind once, before I understood. But now it seems quite natural and right. Besides — —” I pressed her to continue, but she went on digging in silence. I forcibly stopped the digging. She looked me in the eyes, laughing, and said nothing. I kissed her warm sunned cheek.

There was human love-making in the cottage that day, and a great deal of talk. But though my darling responded to my caresses with ardour, I knew that she was all the while withholding her inmost self. Sometimes I found myself imagining with horror how a beast had awkwardly mauled the sweet human form that I now so fittingly embraced. Sometimes, on the other hand, it seemed to me that, after all, the lithe creature in my arms, though humanly, divinely shaped, was inwardly not human at all but some exquisite fawn-like beast, or perhaps a fox or dainty cat transformed temporarily into the likeness of a woman. Even the human form was not quite human; so spare and supple and delicately muscular was it that she did indeed seem more fawn than girl. Once she said, “Oh lovely, lovely to be human again, even for a little while! How we fit, my dear!” But when I urged, “This, Plaxy darling, is what you are meant for,” she answered: “This is what my body was meant for, but in spirit I cannot ever be wholly yours.” How I hated the brute Sirius in that moment! And she, sensing my hate, burst into tears, and struggled in my arms like a captive animal till she had freed herself. But the quarrel was soon made up. We spent the rest of that day as lovers do, wandering on the hill, sitting about in the garden, preparing and eating meals.

When the sun was low in the west I prepared to leave her, but she said, “Wait for Sirius. I do so want you to be friends.” Not till late in the evening, when we were sitting talking in the little kitchen, did we hear the garden gate. Presently Sirius opened the door and stood blinking in the lamp-light, his nostrils taking the scent of us. She held out both arms towards him, and when he reached her she drew his great head to her cheek. “Be friends, you two,” she said, taking my hand. Sirius looked at me steadily for a moment, and I smiled. He slowly waved his tail.

During my last few days I saw more of the dog than I had done before. We no longer avoided one another; and by now I could understand his speech rather better. One morning, while Plaxy was helping Mrs. Pugh in the dairy, I went out with Sirius and his pupils to the high pastures. It was wonderful to watch him controlling these bright but sub-human creatures with barks and singing cries that were to me quite unintelligible. It was wonderful, too, to see them at his bidding capture a particular sheep and hold it down on the ground while their master examined its feet or mouth, sometimes treating it from the panniers, which, by the way, were carried by one of the pupils. Between whiles we talked of Plaxy and of her future, and of the war, and of the prospects of the human species. Conversation was difficult, because he had so often to repeat himself, but gradually we established a genuine friendship. On the way home he said, “Come often to see us while Plaxy is still here. It is good for Plaxy. And it is good for me too to have your friendship. Some day, perhaps, it will be my turn to visit you two, if you will have me.” I felt a sudden warmth towards him, and I said, “If she and I have ever a home, it must certainly be your home too.”

CHAPTER XVI

PLAXY CONSCRIPTED

DURING THE NEXT few months I spent frequent week-ends at Tan-y-Voel. The more I saw of Sirius, the more I was drawn towards him. Always, of course, there was a latent but an acknowledged conflict over Plaxy. All three of us, however, were determined to work out a tolerable relationship, and between Sirius and me the strain was eased by a genuine mutual affection. Sometimes, of course, the latent conflict became overt, and only by heroic tact and restraint on one side or the other could friendliness be maintained. But little by little the identical spirit in each of us, as Sirius himself said, triumphed over the diversity of our natures and our private interests. Had I not actually experienced this close-knit triple relationship I should not have believed it possible. Nor should I, perhaps, have been able to sustain my part in it, had not my love for Plaxy been from the onset unpossessive; owing to the fact that I myself, like Sirius in his canine style, had sometimes loved elsewhere.

The three of us were drawn more closely together by the hostility of a small but active section of the local people. The Rev. Owen Lloyd-Thomas had on several occasions issued veiled warnings from his pulpit. A few other ministers, realizing, perhaps subconsciously, that the theme of the “unnatural vice” of a girl and dog was likely to increase their congregations, could not resist the temptation to use it for that end. The result was that a small but increasing number of persons who were in one way or another emotionally frustrated and in need of an object for persecution were using Plaxy and Sirius for the same sort of purpose as the Nazis had used the Jews. The neighbours were mostly far too friendly to be accessible to this disease of self-righteous hate; but farther afield, in fact throughout North Wales, rumours were spreading both about the vice and the supposed treasonable activities of the couple in the lonely cottage in Merioneth. Plaxy received anonymous letters which caused her much distress. Messages for “Satan’s Hound” were pinned on the door at night, including several threats that unless he released the spellbound girl he would be shot. Pugh’s sheep were sometimes found maimed. One was slaughtered and laid at the cottage door. Obscene drawings of a girl and dog were scrawled on blank walls. A local paper published a leading article calling the population to action. A battle occurred on the moors between the canine inhabitants of Caer Blai and a number of youths and dogs who had come out to do Sirius to death. Fortunately they had no firearms, and they were routed.

Meanwhile events of another type were threatening to change the fortunes of all three of us. I was expecting to be sent abroad very soon. The prospect caused Plaxy to treat me with increased tenderness. And if Sirius’s grief was feigned, the imitation was very convincing. But worse than the prospect of my departure was the official order that Plaxy herself must take up some form of approved national service. We had hoped that she might be allowed to remain in peace as a farm worker, but her position was anomalous. The authorities could not see why a girl with a university training, living alone with a dog in the depths of the country, should be let off merely because she voluntarily helped on a neighbouring farm. The officials, however, were at first friendly, and anxious to interpret the regulations in a human manner. But just when it seemed most probable that Plaxy would be allowed to remain with Sirius, there was a marked and unaccountable change of tone. I suspect that some local enemy of Sirius had been telling tales of the scandalous and reputedly treasonous actions of the strange couple. Anyhow, whatever the cause, Plaxy was told that her appeal was rejected. Pugh put in a strong plea for her retention, but it was pointed out that he could easily find a land-girl to take her place. She could then be used for national service more suited to her capacity. Pugh offered to take on Plaxy herself as a land-girl, paying her the official wage. This was too obviously a put-up job. Authority became increasingly suspicious and uncompromising. Plaxy must either join one of the military organizations for women or take a temporary post in the civil service. She chose the latter, hoping to get herself attached to one of the great government offices evacuated into Lancashire or North Wales.

Plaxy was greatly distressed at the prospect of leaving. “This is my life,” she said to Sirius. “You are my life, for the present, anyhow. The war matters terribly, I know; but I can’t feel that it matters. It feels an irrelevance. At least, I can’t feel that it makes any difference to the war whether I stay or go. Surely I’m doing more useful work here, really, even for the war. It’s as though the hand of man were turning more and more against us. And oh, my dear, my sweet, what will you do without me to brush you and wash you and take thorns out of your feet, to say nothing of helping you with the sheep?” “I shall manage,” he said. “And you, though part of you hates to go, another part will be glad of it, wanting to be entirely human again. And you will be freed from all this silly persecution.” She replied, “Oh, yes, part of me wants to go. But that part of me isn’t really me. The real I, the whole real Plaxy, desperately wants to carry on. The bit of me that wants to go is just a dream self. The only consolation is that perhaps when I am gone the persecutors will leave you alone.”

At last the day came for Plaxy to go. Sirius would henceforth live with the Pughs, but Tan-y-Voel was to be kept ready to receive them whenever Plaxy had her leave. On the last morning Sirius did his best to help her with her final preparations, his tail (when he could remember it) kept bravely up. Before the village car was due to take her to the station she made tea for the two of them. They sat together on the hearth-rug, drinking it almost in silence. “How glad I am,” she said, “that I decided as I did on that last morning at Garth!” “And I,” he answered, “if it has not drawn you away too far from your kind.” They heard the taxi hoot as it turned out of the main road. It roared up the hill in bottom gear. Plaxy sighed deeply and said, “My species has come to take me from you.” Then with sudden passion she clung to him and buried her face in the stubborn mane on his neck. Twisting himself round in her embrace, he snuggled to her breast. “Whatever happens now,” he said, “we have had these months together, nothing can destroy that.”

The taxi stopped at the garden gate and hooted again. They kissed. Then she stood up, tossed back her hair, seized some luggage and met the taxi-man at the door. Seated in the car, she leaned out of the window to touch Sirius, saying only “Good-bye, good luck!” It had been arranged that this should be their parting. He would not go with her to the station.

CHAPTER XVII

OUTLAW

PLAXY HAD HOPED to be stationed in North Wales, but she was sent to a much more remote part of the country, and would only be able to visit Sirius for a fortnight in the year. Meanwhile he was having a difficult time. Pugh had engaged an extra land-girl, Mary Griffith, to take Plaxy’s place. She had not been long on the farm before she began to be frightened of Sirius. She could not reconcile herself to the fact that the dog could talk and was in authority over her. Presently she began to hear of the scandal connected with him. She was terrified, and fascinated. Badly equipped by nature as a charmer of the male of her own species, she had never suffered the flattery of persecution. Though her moral sense was outraged by the possibility that the great brute would make love to her, something in her whispered, “Better a dog for a lover than no lover at all.” Spell-bound, she awaited pursuit. Sirius gave no sign. She did her best to understand his speech, hoping that his instructions might include endearments. Sirius’s conduct remained coldly correct. She herself began to make clumsy attempts to entice him. His failure to give any sign that he had ever noticed these signals roused a perverse hunger in her, and the thought that even a dog rejected her was too repugnant to be admitted to her consciousness. She protected herself against it by illusions that, as a matter of fact, it was he that had made unseemly advances, and she that had refused. She began to invent incidents, and allowed them to be transformed in her mind from fiction to false memory. She recounted her stories to her acquaintances in the village, and began to gain a welcome notoriety. Once, when she had vainly done her utmost to excite Sirius, she stayed out in the fields for half the night. Next day she declared that the animal had driven her with snarls and bites to the lonely cottage to rape her. Rents in her clothes and marks on her arm were said to be due to his teeth.

This improbable story was welcomed by Sirius’s enemies. They did not trouble to inquire why the girl did not complain to the Land Army authorities and get herself transferred to another post. They merely redoubled their activities against Sirius. A deputation called on Pugh to persuade him to destroy the lascivious brute. Pugh laughed at their stories and dismissed them with a quip. “You might as well ask me to destroy the nose on my face because you don’t like the way it dribbles. No! It’s worse than that, because my poor old nose does dribble, but the man-dog does none of the foul things you say he does. And if you try to do any harm to him, I’ll put the police on you. If you hurt him there’ll be gaol for you, and thousands of pounds damages to pay to the great Laboratory at Cambridge.” He sacked the Griffith girl, but found to his horror that no substitute was to be had. Rumour had been busy, and no girl would risk her reputation by working at Caer Blai.

Sirius’s enemies were not to be intimidated. Whenever he went to the village, a stone was sure to be thrown at him, and when he whisked round to spot the culprit no one looked guilty. Once, indeed, he did detect the assailant, a young labourer. Sirius approached him threateningly, but immediately a swarm of dogs and men set on him. Fortunately two of his friends, the local doctor and the village policeman, were able to quell the brawl.

Meanwhile Pugh and his wife were sharing the unpopularity of Sirius. Cows and sheep were damaged, crops trampled. The police force had been so depleted by the war that the miscreants were seldom caught.

Matters were brought to a head by a serious incident. This I recount on the evidence of Pugh, who had the story from Sirius himself. The man-dog was out on the hills with one of his canine pupils. Suddenly a shot was fired, and Sirius’s companion leapt into the air, then staggered about yelping. The charge, no doubt, was meant for Sirius; it winged the other dog. Sirius at once turned wolf. Getting wind of the man, he charged in his direction. The second barrel of the shot-gun was fired, but the assailant had lost his nerve; he missed again, and then he dropped his gun and ran to some steep rocks. Before he could climb out of reach, Sirius had him by the ankle. There followed a tug of war, with the human leg as rope. Sirius had not secured a good grip, and presently his teeth slipped on the ankle bone, coming away with a good deal of flesh. The dog rolled backwards down the slope, and the man, though in great pain, clambered out of reach. Sirius’s rage was now somewhat cooled. He wisely sought out the shot-gun and sank it in a bog. His companion had vanished. Sirius overtook him limping homewards.

When the wounded man, whose name was Owen Parry, had dragged himself back to the village, he told a story of gratuitous attack by the man-dog. He said he had found Sirius squatting on a hillside overlooking the camp, counting ammunition cases that were being unloaded from lorries. When the brute saw him it attacked. The more gullible villagers believed the whole story. They urged Parry to prosecute Pugh for damages, and to tell the military of the canine spy. Parry, of course, took no action.

Some weeks later Plaxy received a telegram from Pugh saying “S.O.S. Sirius wild.” As she had a good record with her superiors she was able to secure a spell of “compassionate leave.” A couple of days after Pugh had telegraphed she arrived at Caer Blai, tired and anxious.

Pugh told her a distressing story. After the incident with Parry a change seemed to come over Sirius. He carried on his work as usual, but after work hours he avoided all human contacts, retiring to the moors, and often staying out all night. He turned morose and touchy towards all human beings except the Pughs. Then one day he told Pugh he had decided to leave the farm so that the flock and the crops should be safe from violence. “He was very gentle in his speaking,” said the farmer, “but there was a look of the wild beast in his eye. His coat was out of condition, not all glossy as it used to be when you were here to look after him, Miss Plaxy, dear. And there was a little wound on his belly, festering with the mud that was always being splashed on it. I was frightened for him. He made his wildness so gentle for us that my eyes dribbled like my nose. I said he must stay, and not be beaten by a bunch of dirty-tongued hooligans. Together we would teach them. But he would not stay. When I asked him what he would do if he left, he looked very strange. It gave me the creeps, yes indeed, Miss Plaxy. As though it was a wild beast I was speaking to, with no sense and no human kindness. Then he seemed to make an effort, for he licked my hand ever so gently. But when I put my other hand on his head he jumped like a shot thing, and stood away from me, looking at me with his head cocked over, as though he was torn between friendliness and fear, and didn’t know what to do. His tail was miserable under his belly. ‘Bran,’ I said, ‘Sirius, my old friend! Don’t go off till I have fetched Miss Plaxy.’ Then he wagged his old tail under his belly, and he cried softly. But when I put out a hand to him he sprang away again, and then he ran off up the lane. When he was beside Tan-y-Voel he stopped for a moment, but soon he lolloped away up the moel.”

After Sirius’s disappearance several days passed without incident in the neighbourhood. No one saw anything of the fugitive. Pugh was so busy with farm work, and trying to find help to replace Sirius, that he could not make up his mind whether or not to tell Plaxy of the dog’s disappearance. Then one day he came upon Sirius outside Tan-y-Voel and hailed him, but in vain. At this stage Pugh telegraphed to Plaxy. Then a farmer in the Ffestiniog district found one of his sheep killed and partly eaten. Nearer home a dog that had been one of Sirius’s opponents in the battle was found dead with its throat torn. The police then organized a party of armed men and dogs to search the moors for the dangerous beast. The party, said Pugh, had just returned. They had drawn the whole district round the slaughtered sheep, arguing that Sirius would return to the carcass to feed, but they had seen nothing of him. To-morrow a larger party would search the whole moorland area between Ffestiniog, Bala and Dolgelly.

While Pugh was telling the story Plaxy listened in silence. “She stared at me,” he afterwards said, “as if she was a frightened hare, and me a stoat.” When Pugh had finished she insisted that she must sleep at Tan-y-Voel. “In the morning,” she said, “I will go out and look for him. I know I shall find him.” Mrs. Pugh urged her to stay at Caer Blai, but she shook her head, moving towards the door. Then she checked, and said piteously, “But if I bring him home they will take him from me. Oh, what am I to do?” The Pughs could give no helpful answer.

Plaxy groped her way over to Tan-y-Voel in the dark, lit the kitchen fire, and changed into her old working clothes. She made herself tea, ate a large number of biscuits, and stoked up the fire, so that there might be smoke visible in the morning. Then she went out again into the dark. She made her way over the moors by a familiar route, until after several hours she reached the place where long ago she had found Sirius with the dead pony. The eastern sky was already light. She called his name, or chanted it with the accustomed lilt that she had used ever since childhood. Again and again she called, but there was no answer; nothing but the sad bleating of a sheep and the far-off rippling pipe of a curlew. She wandered about till the sun rose from behind Arenig Fawr. Then she searched carefully round the bog where the pony had lain, until at last she found a large dog’s footprint. Bending down she scrutinized it eagerly, and others. One of them, the print of a left hind paw, gave her what she wanted. The mark of the outer toe was very slightly irregular, recording a little wound that Sirius had received when he was a puppy. Plaxy surprised herself by weeping. After standing for a while mopping her eyes, she unbuttoned her coat and dragged out from her waist a corner of the old blue and white check shirt, well known to Sirius. With her clasp knife, often used in the past for paring the hooves of sheep, she cut the hem, and tore out a little square of the material. This she laid beside the footmark. Sirius’s monochrome vision would miss the colour, but he might pick up the bold pattern from afar, and when he came near he would recognize it. Moreover, since the shirt had been next her body, it would hold the smell of her for a long time. He would know that she had seen the footprints and would return.

Then she wandered about the moor again for some time, frequently using a little monocular field-glass that I had recently given her for use with the sheep. (In the choice of a gift I had perhaps unconsciously emphasized the pleasure of human eyesight, which was so much more precise than any dog’s.) At last fatigue and hunger forced her to return to Tan-y-Voel. There she made herself tea, ate the rest of the biscuits, changed into smarter clothes and went straight into the village. People stared at her. Some greeted her warmly for old time’s sake. Others looked away. Most of the hostile ones were sufficiently impressed by her elegant appearance to treat her with respect, but a bunch of lads shouted at her in Welsh, and laughed.

She went to the police station, where the search party was already collecting. Her old friend the village constable took her into a private room and listened with distress to her earnest appeal for mercy. “I shall find him,” she said, “and take him away from Wales. His madness won’t last.” The constable shook his head, and said, “If they find him they’ll kill him. They want blood.” “But it would be murder,” she cried. “He’s not just an animal.” “No, he’s far more than an animal, Miss Plaxy, I know; but in the eyes of the law that’s just what he is, an animal. And the law says that dangerous animals must be destroyed. I have done my best to delay matters, but I can’t do more.” In desperation Plaxy said, “Tell them he’s worth thousands of pounds and must be taken alive. ‘Phone the Laboratory at Cambridge, and they will confirm this and put it in writing.” He fetched the inspector, who had come over from H.Q. to take charge of the search. After some discussion the inspector allowed Plaxy to call up the Laboratory. She summoned McBane and told him, incidentally, to come with his car as soon as possible to take Sirius away if she could recover him. The inspector then spoke to McBane and was sufficiently impressed to alter his plans. The search party would do their utmost to bring the animal back alive. With some reluctance he even agreed that the search should be called off for a day to give Miss Trelone a chance to capture her dog undisturbed.

When she left the police station she was almost light-hearted. And though she was shocked by the cold reception given her at the grocer’s, where she laid in a store of food, the baker was kindly and hopeful, and the warm-hearted lame tobacconist, whose meagre stock was sold out, produced a packet of cigarettes from his own pocket and thrust it upon her, “because you will need them, Miss Plaxy, and for old time’s sake.” She toiled up the lane to Tan-y-Voel, with a reeling head, made herself a good meal, changed into working clothes, called to tell the Pughs how things stood, and went straight out on to the moor. All morning she searched in vain. Then after eating her lunch she lay down in the sun, and sleep overcame her. Some hours later she woke, sprang to her feet, and renewed her search. At the pony-bog the bit of shirt remained as she had left it. She hurried away in the afternoon light to explore a remoter region, and in particular a certain rocky cleft in the wildest part of the moor, which in the past they had sometimes used as a lair. Near this she found a dog’s excrement, not recently dropped; but there was no other sign. Once more she left a piece of her shirt as a token. Then with weary limbs and a heavy heart she groped her way back in the dusk, and arrived in pitch darkness at the pony-pool. At a loss to know what to do next, she finally decided to wait there till dawn. She found a sheltered spot among the rocks and heather overlooking the bog, and made herself as comfortable as possible. In spite of the cold, she fell asleep. Not till the sun had risen did she wake, chilled and aching. Once more there was no sign of Sirius. After some desultory searching and calling she set off for home.

At the cottage she made herself breakfast, changed her clothes, attended to her haggard face, and returned to the police station. There she learned with horror that on the previous day a man had been killed and partly eaten. It had happened on the eastern shoulder of Filast, far beyond Arenig. He was a local sheep-farmer. Hearing that Sirius had been seen in the neighbourhood, he announced that he would hunt the brute down and destroy it, no matter what its value to the godless scientists. He went out with an old army rifle and a dog. In the evening the dog returned in great distress without his master. A search party had found the man’s body, and near it the rifle, with an empty magazine.

After this incident the police determined to bring about the destruction of Sirius as quickly as possible. Parties of Home Guards were being sent out to comb all the moorland areas of North Wales.

In great distress Plaxy hurried away to the moors again. At the pony-bog the bit of shirt was missing, and there were fresh canine footprints; but whether they were Sirius’s or not she could not determine. She put down another bit of shirt, then set off towards the lair, searching every hillside and valley with her field-glass. Once she saw on the distant skyline two men with rifles on their shoulders, but there was no other sign of the searchers. It was a bright day, with the wind in the north-west; no day at all for avoiding detection. But the moors were vast, and the searchers few.

As she was approaching the lair, she saw Sirius, his tail between his legs, his head low, like a tired horse. She was coming up wind, and behind him, so that he was unconscious of her presence till she called his name. He leapt at the sound, and whisked round, facing her, with a growl. In his mouth was the bit of shirt. She advanced, repeating his name. Seeing her, he stood still with his head cocked over and his brows puckered; but when she was within a few paces he backed, growling, away from her. At a loss, she stood still, with out-stretched hand, saying, “Sirius, dear darling, it’s Plaxy.” His tail under his belly trembled with recognition and love, but his teeth were still bared. He whimpered with the stress of conflict in his bewildered mind. Every time she advanced, he backed and growled. After Plaxy had tried many times to win his confidence, her spirit broke. She covered her face with her hands and threw herself on the ground sobbing. The sight of her impotent distress evidently worked the miracle which her advances had frustrated; for Sirius crept forward, crying with the strife of fear and love, till at last he reached out and kissed the back of her neck. The intimate smell of her body woke his mind to full clarity. While she continued to lie still, fearing that any movement might scare him away, he nuzzled under her face. She turned over and let his warm tongue caress her cheeks and lips. Though his breath was foul as a wild beast’s and the thought of his recent human killing revolted her, she made no resistance. At last he spoke. “Plaxy! Plaxy! Plaxy!” He nosed into the open neck of her shirt. Then she dared to put her arms round him.

“Come to the lair,” she said. “We must hide till after dark, then we’ll go down to Tan-y-Voel and wait till McBane comes with his car to take us away. I told him to hurry.”

The lair was as good a retreat as they could expect. At the foot of the cliff was a tangle of heather and broken rocks. A huge slab had split from the side of the cliff and moved away, leaving a gap. This formed the lair. Its floor was below the surrounding wreckage and heather clumps. The buttress above was inaccessible, so no one could look down on them. Inside lay the remains of the heather which Plaxy herself had gathered to form a couch long ago. She now added a fresh supply. They nestled close together, and little by little, by talk about their common past, she weaned his mind away from madness. For some hours they remained talking with increasing ease and happiness. Plaxy often spoke about their future, but whenever she led his attention forward a dark cloud seemed to settle on his mind. Once she said, “We will leave this district and start a flock somewhere in Scotland, as soon as we can find a place.” He answered, “There is no place for me in man’s world, and there is no other world for me. There is no place for me anywhere in the universe.” She answered quickly, “But wherever I am there is always a place for you. I’m your home, your footing in the world. And I’m — your wife, your dear constant bitch.” He caressed her hand, and said, “In the last few days, whenever I was not raging mad against your whole species, I was longing for you; but you — must not be tied to me. And anyhow you cannot make a world for me. Of course, any world that I could live in must have you in it for its loveliest scent, drawing me along the trail; but you can’t make a whole world for me. Indeed, it’s not possible for me to have a world at all, because my own nature doesn’t make sense. The spirit in me needs the world of men, and the wolf in me needs the wild. I could only be at home in a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland world, where I could have my cake and eat it.”

A distant voice set both their hearts racing. She clung to him, and they waited in silence, thankful for the deep shadow of the lair, for it was already almost sunset. They heard quite near at hand the scrape of a nailed boot on rock. Sirius began to move in her arms, and growl. “Idiot! Be quiet,” she whispered. She tried to hold his mouth shut with one hand while she desperately gripped him with the other. Footsteps moved past the entrance of the lair, then faded into the distance. After some minutes she could hold on no longer. Cautiously she let go, saying, “Now, for God’s sake keep quiet.”

For a long time they sat together waiting and occasionally talking. Twilight was now far advanced, and Plaxy began to feel that the worst of their ordeal was over. “Soon it will be dark enough to go home,” she said, “home to Tan-y-Voel, my dog, and a great big meal. I’m hungry as hell. Are you?” He said nothing for a moment; then, “Yesterday I ate part of a man.” He must have felt her shudder. “Oh,” he said, “I was savage. And I shall be again, unless you hold me tight with your love.” She hugged him, and a surge of joy made her softly laugh. Her imagination leapt forward to the time when they would be safely on the way to Cambridge.

Presently she rose, and went cautiously out to look round. The sunset colour had almost gone. There was no sign of the enemy. She moved round a projecting rock, and still there seemed to be no danger. After straying about for a few moments, searching the landscape, she felt the need to relieve herself. She crouched down in the heather, and sang softly the little tune which since childhood had been associated in both their minds with this homely operation. He should have responded with one or other of the appropriate antistrophes, but he was silent. She repeated her phrase several times, but there was no answer. Suddenly alarmed, she hurried round the intervening rock and saw Sirius standing outside the lair sniffing the wind. His tail was erect, his back bristling. At that moment another dog came into sight, and Sirius, rousing the echoes with his uproar, charged the intruder, who turned tail, with Sirius on his heels. Both dogs vanished round the shoulder of the hill. There was a savage sound of dog-fight, then human voices, and a shot, followed by a canine scream. Plaxy stood fixed in horror. After a moment’s silence a man’s voice cried, “Blast! I’ve hit the wrong one. The devil’s got away.” Two more shots were fired. Another voice said, “No bloody good. Too dark.” Plaxy from behind a rock peered at the men. They strode over to inspect the dead dog; then moved off down the valley. When they were out of sight, she wandered about looking for Sirius. After a while she returned to the lair, hoping to find him there. It was still empty. Anxiously she strayed about in the dark, sometimes softly calling his name. For hours she wandered. Some time in the middle of the night she heard the sirens wailing far off in the villages. Searchlights fingered the clouds. After a while the wavering drone of a plane passed overhead towards the north-east; then another, and many others. There was distant firing, and one larger thud. Dead tired, Plaxy still strayed farther and farther over the dark moor, sometimes calling.

At last, almost at her feet she heard a little sound. She stepped aside and found him stretched out on the grass. The end of his tail beat feebly on the ground for greeting. She knelt beside him. Passing her hand along his body, she found that his flank was wet and sticky. One of the Home Guards’ last shots had taken effect, though in the failing light he had seen only that the dog had not been immediately stopped. The badly damaged animal had staggered off towards the mountains, but shock and loss of blood had at last brought him down. With the first-aid outfit that she had carried on all her searches she put a pad on the wound and contrived to pass a bandage round his body to hold it, though he trembled with the added pain. Then she said, “I must go and get help and a stretcher.” He protested, with feeble earnestness; and when she rose to go, he cried piteously for her to come down to him again. In despair she sank beside him, and lay down to put her face to his cheek. “But, my darling,” she said, “we must get you home before daylight, else they’ll find you.” He feebly cried again, and seemed to say, “Dying — stay — Plaxy — dear.” Presently he said “Dying — is very — cold.” She took off her coat and laid it over him, then tried to lie closer to him to warm him. He said something which she guessed to be, “I don’t fit you. Robert does.” Stabbed with love and compassion, she said, “But dearest darling, our spirits fit.” His last words were “Plaxy-Sirius — worth while.” Some minutes later she saw his mouth fall open a little, revealing the white teeth in the faint light of dawn. His tongue slipped out. She buried her face in the strong fur of his neck, silently weeping.

For a long while she lay, till discomfort forced her to move. Then a shuddering sigh heaved her body, a sigh of bitter grief, but also of exhaustion; of love and compassion, but also of relief. Presently she realized that she was deadly cold and shivering. She sat up and rubbed her bare arms. Gently she took away the coat from dead Sirius, and put it on herself once more. The act seemed callous, and she wept again; then stooped once more to give the great head a kiss. For a while she sat by Sirius with a hand in the side pocket of her coat. She found that her fingers had closed upon the little field-glass that I had given her. Even this seemed a disloyalty to the dead; but she reminded herself that Sirius had accepted me.

Presently the sirens sounded, far down in the villages, steady, sad and thankful. A sheep called mournfully. Very far away a dog barked. Behind Arenig Fawr the dawn was already like the glow of a great fire. “What must I do now?” she wondered. She remembered how, a few hours earlier, with happiness too soon in her heart, she had sung for him to answer, but in vain. The memory overpowered her with a sense of the gulf that now divided them. He that had been so near seemed now as remote as their common mammalian ancestor. Not again would he sing to her.

But now at last she thought of a fitting thing to do. She would sing his requiem. Returning to her dead darling, she stood erect beside him, facing the dawn. Then in as firm and full a voice as she could muster, she began singing a strange thing that he himself had made for her in his most individual style. The wordless phrases symbolized for her the canine and the human that had vied in him all his life long. The hounds’ baying blended with human voices. There was a warm and brilliant theme which he said was Plaxy, and a perplexed one which was himself. It began in playfulness and zest, but developed in a tragic vein against which she had often protested. Now, looking down on him she realized that his tragedy was inevitable. And under the power of his music she saw that Sirius, in spite of his uniqueness, epitomized in his whole life and in his death something universal, something that is common to all awakening spirits on earth, and in the farthest galaxies. For the music’s darkness was lit up by a brilliance which Sirius had called “colour,” the glory that he himself, he said, had never seen. But this, surely, was the glory that no spirits, canine or human, had ever clearly seen, the light that never was on land or sea, and yet is glimpsed by the quickened mind everywhere.

As she sang, red dawn filled the eastern sky, and soon the sun’s bright finger set fire to Sirius.

Death into Life (1946)

This 1946 novel is not strictly of the science fiction genre. It primarily concerns the soul of a rear gunner, who is killed in World War II and finds himself surviving his apparent death; firstly as part of a spirit bomber-crew, then as part of the spirits that were killed in the battle, and so on until finally his soul becomes part of a ‘cosmical spirit’. The novel presents an intriguing analysis of life after death, somewhat fantastical in tone.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. BATTLE

CHAPTER II. EPHEMERAL SPIRITS

CHAPTER III. THE SPIRIT OF MAN SURVEYS HIS PAST

CHAPTER IV. THE SPIRIT OF MAN CONSIDERS HIS PLIGHT

CHAPTER V. MAN’S FUTURE

CHAPTER VI. THE COSMOS, AND BEYOND

CHAPTER VII -SALVATION

CHAPTER VIII. HERE AND NOW

CHAPTER I. BATTLE

THE RAIDERS

TEN THOUSAND BOYS in the upper air. Squadron upon squadron, their intricate machines thundered toward the target, heavy with death. Darkness below; and above, the stars. Below, the invisible carpet of the fields and little homes; above, and very far beyond those flashing stars, the invisible galaxies, gliding through the immense dark, squadron upon squadron of universes, deploying in the boundless and yet measured space.

In one of the bombers, seven boys. Seven young minds in patterned unity; each self-cherishing, but all knit inwardly together by fibres of steel-tempered comradeship. And all equally imprisoned, body and mind, in their intricate machinery.

Seven boys, and by strange chance a moth. It had strayed, no doubt, into the plane when the crew were taking their places. Since then it had wavered hither and thither, up and down its prison, from one domed transparent turret to another, teased by some obscure longing, needing though unwittingly a mate. Searching, softly colliding with now this young human cheek now that, kissing each one like the fluttered eyelash of an invisible beloved, it spent the numbered seconds of its life in vain. Or tremulously it thrust with feeble pressure against the prison windows, drawn by the pin-prick lights of the sky; but conceiving no immensity, no galaxies.

The seven boys too had their own, their more articulate yearnings. They craved the life that was normal to their human, and more conscious, but unfinished, nature. And like the moth sometimes their minds impotently fluttered at the prison windows, vainly questioning the stars.

THE REAR-GUNNER

The rear-gunner had never heard of galaxies. Even the stars were for him little more than drifting lights. He knew, of course, that they were suns; but what of it? The fact oppressed him. Shunned, it had sunk almost too deep for memory. And though, on nights like this he could not help remembering and wondering, after a moment’s blankness he was bored. The stars, he felt, didn’t help matters at all. Down here on earth it was hell, though streaked tantalizingly with unfulfilling joys, with sex and beer and the bitter shattering ecstasy of air-fighting. There were moments, too, rather frightening but somehow exalting, when something deep inside one seemed to take possession, so that the whole of life changed its colour and became terribly important, and one kicked oneself for being such a waster. But they didn’t last, those moments. They were probably due to digestion, or glands or something. No, down here it was hell; and up there, just those blank stars. And now, to make things worse, he was starting a cold in his nose. Already it tickled and exasperated him, and already his head was none too clear. Would it spoil his nerve? Would he muff his part in the show? Whatever happened, he must not let the crew down. That really mattered. Mattered? Why ‘mattered’? For a moment an abyss of emptiness opened before him, but he gallantly leapt it. Hell! He didn’t know why it ‘mattered’, but it did; it mattered terribly that the crew should do well. Then, remembering an earlier raid, when the air round the plane was all fire and hammer-blows of blast, he felt an inner sinking. Of course the odds were that the whole seven of them would come through safely. But some crews would not. And sooner or later — He pictured the plane ablaze.

Panic swooped on him; but instantly he beat it off. One mustn’t think such thoughts. Think rather of the pilot’s skill and his own gunnery. Oh well! Quite soon they would be racing home in front of the dawn, lightened of bombs, and of fear. Then breakfast. How he wanted to live! The moth’s careless kiss had stirred him strangely, like the tickle of a girl’s hair on one’s cheek, he thought. He had never been to bed with a girl yet, though he often pretended he had. And he might die tonight, never having done it. Why, he asked himself, was he so clumsy with girls? Perhaps he was really frightened of them, frightened of damaging something holy in them. He could never rid himself of that feeling, though he knew it was silly. They were just female animals, and he a male one. And so he covered his reverent shyness with a man-of-the-world swagger; but they saw through it. She saw through it. And she could lead him on and put him off so easily, the teasing little bitch. But oh God, perhaps — perhaps they were both messing things up; perhaps there really was something sacred; perhaps this business of loving was really the way to it, if only they had the right technique. By now the bomber was over the narrow sea. The risen moon’s reflection was a splash of light ahead. The moth pressed more urgently toward the increased luminosity, while far below, unseen, each wave-crest, each droplet of spray and bubble of foam, was transfused with moonlight.

The rear-gunner did not know that under this salt water was an ancient valley. There, forests had grown beside a great river. Mammoths had crushed their way through the brushwood, and swum the hurrying water, seeking new pastures in the future island. Crouching submen had used untrimmed stones for tools, and for weapons in’ their subhuman quarrels, preluding bombs. But to the rear-gunner the narrow sea was only the protecting moat of his island country. And his country was- just fields and houses, cities and mines, the King and the Princesses, and so on. And of course the decentest people in the world; and the motherland of an Empire which was a spreading decency in every continent. Some said it wasn’t, blast them! They ought to know better than to foul their own nest. But even if they were right, and the Empire was a huge fraud, what matter? It was only the people at home that really mattered. It was for them the crews were fighting, and for the whole decent way of life. Decent? What could that really mean? Sacred? Right absolutely? Or just the done thing, just a groundless habit?

Dark land now loomed beyond the moonlit sea. Soon they would be up against the enemy’s defences, and then there must be no more dreaming. Thank God, though he was clumsy with a girl, he was quick and sure with a gun; and though on the way to the target his belly melted and his legs might sometimes quiver, he was cool enough when the show began. How the seven of them would act as one living thing, keying their functions perfectly together! But oh, he wanted to live on. Of course those buggers must be stopped from smashing everything. And the island fortress must be defended, and the Empire, and all that. Yes, and though one longed like hell for Civvy Street, it was good to know that one was in on the greatest show, and doing it with style, like the ‘few’, the superb ‘few’, in the Battle of Britain. But oh, he wanted to live.

Well, if he did live through to the peace, he wouldn’t bother about politics. He’d have the hell of a good time to make up for all this. Suddenly he had a vision of himself with his medals and his wing on a shabby civilian coat, selling tooth-brushes from door to door. That sort of thing happened after the last war, but it shouldn’t happen to him! If they didn’t give him something better than that, he and his kind would smash everything. The country certainly needed cleaning up. It was all the fault of those dirty Jews, no doubt. Well, if life meant living as an ‘ex-serviceman’, far better die tonight, and have done. But pain! Like when he burned his hand, but all over. And death? One never spoke about these things. He didn’t even whisper about them to his secret self, not if he could help it. Tonight, somehow, he didn’t care. He must face the facts. It was so much easier for the Germans and the Japs, who believed they were going to Valhalla or something. But for us, it was different. Of course the Padre was sure we were all bound for some kind of heaven or other. At least he said he was, but that was what he was paid for. Risky to bet on it, anyhow. But if death was just a snuffing out, a switching off the current, what sense in all this, this mess of heaven and hell down here?

Once more the rear-gunner brooded on the wide pin-pricked dome. Those stars, those suns, were all looking at him with a cold objective stare; or blinking, the better to see him; the better to eat you up, my dear. At last he knew them for what they really were, the devils. So at least he half-persuaded himself.

Actually, of course, they ignored him as completely as he ignored any little phagocyte in his own blood-stream. The stars flowed in their thousands, their myriads, squadron upon squadron, phagocytes in the blood-stream of our galaxy. Depth behind depth behind depth, they streamed along the channels of space, the great stars and the small, the near and the far, the young giants and the senile dwarfs. And what their significance might be, neither the rear-gunner nor any earth-bound intelligence could ever know. Yet in the rear-gunner’s mind some dark, threatening hint of their possible meaning bore heavily down. He shivered and blew his nose. Christ! What sense was there in those bloody great fires? Those flying sparks, perhaps, from some unseen, far greater fire. What a thought! He must pull himself together. For him the flares, the flak, the tracer, must have more meaning; and to keep a sharp eye and a steady hand. For at any moment now enemy fighters might appear, and still far ahead lay the target, the City.

THE CITY AND ITS PEOPLE

Far ahead the City lay in the moonlight, exposed, waiting. The sirens had sounded. Seen from the air by its patrolling fliers, this metropolis was a huge smear, spilt on the patterned carpet of forest and lakes, rivers and gossamer roads. It was an amorphous, yet an obscurely detailed patch, as of lichen or some fungoid growth. It sprawled over the plain, vaguely organic, splayed, a squashed animal on the tarmac. But it was not lifeless. Restless antennae of light reached upward from it, sweeping the sky, probing the upper air, fading before the starry depth. For they searched, those prying feelers, not for any heaven but for the expected re-onset of hell.

In a nearer view the City, the great living, wounded creature, still displayed areas of vitality, intact tissues of patterned streets and roofs. But there were huge tracts also of roofless honeycomb, the cell-lids sheared away, leaving frail, broken, wax-thin walls, the honey spilt and lost, the grubs all killed. There were broad regions, too, where the comb had been crushed and flattened, the fragile tenements shattered down into formless rubble.

Within this hive, this ants’ nest, trampled and churned by giant footfall, insects were still alive. Though swarms of them had migrated outward into the forest and the frost to escape the nocturnal terror, many remained. Ousters were gathered in deep-lying crannies and into the buttressed shelters. Old people, their spirits already frayed out toward death, clung still to life’s last threads. Mothers clung to their babies, fiercely jealous lest death part them; and expectant mothers dreaded lest convulsive terror should drive the womb to vomit out too soon its unfinished treasure. Young men and women shared without privacy intimate delight, lest death should forestall them. But others of the city’s swarm had taken their stations for defence against Hell’s repeated impact. Gunners on their gun-sites waited. Fire-watchers on the roofs waited. Wardens were in the streets. Ambulance drivers were ready with their cars. In the casualty clearing stations doctors and nurses waited in tense idleness. In the mortuaries there were still displayed the unclaimed relics of the city’s previous agony, old withered bodies, and bodies in shattered bloom, bodies in rags that were recently fine clothing, and bodies in rags long worn; and tom disjected members, strangely impersonal, that were once the familiar limbs of living workers, housewives, children.

Hidden among the ruins, armed men in uniform were held in leash, ready to discipline the population.

City of horror, tortured no less in spirit than in flesh. Like any city, it was a swarm of anxious little solipsistic individuals, each encased in its own world, which seemed to it the one and only, the true, the great world. For each of these beings, these postmen, charwomen, shopkeepers, company directors, carried about with it, as an aquatic insect might carry down a breathable air-bubble, its own particular little universe, a microscopic and fragmentary excerpt from the immense real; and yet a universe, a microcosm, complete with landscapes and sentient beings, with cities and a starry sky, whether of pin-pricks merely or giant suns; complete, too, with its own flux of time, whether of a lifetime’s years only, or of historical centuries, or stellar æons. Within each universe the minute individual himself presided as a percipient, dynamic, scheming centre, endowing its peculiar bubble with fragrance and colour, with heats of desire and deadly chills of desolation. And these little selves, these body-minds, these vibrant instruments of passion and of will, insulated as mid-ocean islets, yet most strangely members one of another — might it be that these were fractional excerpts from one immensity, from one ultimate and single awareness? Or were they and all their kind throughout the cosmos utterly separate grains of consciousness, and the sole order of mentality in all the universe? Or did personal deity look down on them, sifting his myriad creatures like sand-grains between his fingers. Or were the little selves not in fact enduring spiritual substances at all, but merely evanescent wraiths of sentience and desire steaming from the physical processes of human bodies, like vapours from a dung-heap?

Viewed in the mass, as units in a city’s or a world’s population, or as insects in an ants’ nest, how indistinguishable they were; their prized differences merely the infinitesimal irregularities of a machined pattern. Yet in a closer, a more intimate view, how unique each one! Here, a little universe predominantly sunlit; until the common disaster of our times eclipsed the sun for all. There, a microcosm of sheer desolation. Here, a cauldron of furious events; there, a stagnant puddle. Here, a mean and shrunken universe, confined within a network of commercial or political intrigue, or of contrived occasions of self-display; there, an ample and ever-expanding microcosm, mirroring, however imperfectly, the whole tumult of our modern world, the sequence of human history, the dawn of man, and of the cosmos. Here, and here, and here, a universe disjointed by foolish dreams or crazy myths. But there, and there, a very simple microcosm, devoid of all immensities and subtleties, yet (who knows?) perhaps essentially true to the ultimate temper of reality, because lit inwardly by a few bright comradeships and loves.

And the little sentient, dynamic centres themselves, how diverse! This, a spider, spreading, day in, day out, its filaments to bind the wings of the innocent; that, a warm fountain of light irradiating neighbour universes. This, living by rote, unquesting as a sleep-walker; that, with fibres of martyred nerve extending into every cranny of its little world.

So diversified were the city’s millions in individual temper; and yet, under the stress of a common delusion, a common tyranny, a common tragedy, all now were harshly likened by the impress of an iron convention.

Crippled now, the city, but unflinchingly game; with the fury of the cornered rat, the tiger at bay. Proud and loyal people; but now bewildered, tragic. Their idols crumbling. Gentle at heart, most biddable. Delighting in the family and the Christmas tree; in the pregnant tome, the far-flung theory. Opening the heavens with their music. A people consciously how civilized; but latently barbarian; like all men, but perhaps more dangerously. Under all their subtlety, too simple. Under their gentleness, teased by the itch of their own brutality; like all men, though perhaps more fiercely. A people easily enslaved to brutish gods; the more so, since a nobler God had failed them. For now the old gentle faith of the West lay rotting in their hearts. Some, no doubt, still cherished it, were martyred for it, witnessing against the tyranny; yet for most it was dead. How faithfully had this people obeyed their new prophet, their frenzied medicine-man. Giving him their boys and girls to remake to his dream. Burning the books. Impounding, killing, torturing, to make a unified people. Swarming over the frontiers in the prophet’s name to make a unified world. Demented with visions, they had strained forward towards the promised land, the valhalla of glory and world-mastery and plenty, these self-chosen saviours of mankind. But mankind had refused them, had banded against them. And now their vision was fading. Not merely because their armies were driven back, their cities blasted; in their own hearts a spirit long dormant stirred in revolt against the prophet and his purpose. Was it perhaps because, month after month, year after year, the eyes of their victims and slaves had stabbed them? Impotent pin-pricks, merely, but infinitely reiterated. Or was it that their own suffering was at last teaching them gentleness?

Unhappy, tragic people. Deep sunk in guilt; but scapegoats also of a guilty world.

THE ATTACK

The straining ears of the city’s defenders were touched by a shadow of sound. Sound was it, or fancy? If sound, was it thunder, or the reverberation of distant battle? Advancing waves from the remote tumult vibrated through the city’s foundations, and slid along the air-ways of the streets. The ruins trembled. The whole great wounded creature quivered in every cell. And where the sound travelled, there travelled also throughout the city’s population, among the watchers at their posts and the crowds gathered in the shelters, a sigh, concealed by each from each.

Suddenly the city’s own guns shouted and raged. Windows rattled, crockery jangled. The sky’s pin-prick stars were outshone by short-lived brilliants. Ten thousand boys were in the upper air, intent on slaughter; fair game, these, for the guns. And now the downpour of great bombs tortured the city’s heart, each striking into street or building, with fierce rebound of fire; all intermingling their spreading blast as raindrops their rings on a tormented pool. And so, in half an hour, one more tract of the city’s honeycomb was obliterated, as by giant footfall. Once more, homes were disembowelled, or their fronts tom off, exposing the doll’s-house rooms and furniture. Factories, offices, schools, churches, became instantly mere rubble. And in these conglomerates of concrete and brick, of beams and girders, here and there were human bodies. Of these, many were quiet, their breath and life crushed out of them; but some still breathed, and cried. And now great fires were jubilant parasites upon the city, reaching their bright limbs skyward, their dark plumes above the bombers.

In those minutes, hundreds upon hundreds of the little personal universes vanished like the bubbles of a drying foam. Their vital centres annihilated, they were extinguished, as a lit room ceases when the lamp is shattered. And of the survivors some, because they were symbiotic with some slaughtered one, were themselves henceforth mutilated almost to death.

The city’s bright antennae swept and probed the sky. In the upper air the bombers picked their courses among cloud-high waving stems of enemy light and bursting blossoms of fire. The ten thousand were performing their appointed duty. For them the city’s heart was a target to be obliterated with finished skill before breakfast. That it was also a tissue of lives and loves, was by most, in the stress of the attack, forgotten. But for some it was obtrusive, and to be anxiously shunned; and by a few the stab of pity was turned aside by a carapace of self-righteousness; while fewer still, misshapen minds, secretly relished the vicarious agony. But the more lucid gravely faced the horror that they were inflicting, as one may press the core out of a boil; and in full awareness they carried on with the work.

Each crew was a steel-knit unity of special functions and diverse mentalities, obedient to a common purpose. Though each boy in each crew was indeed his own cherished self, with a private theme of life recalcitrant to this dread night, yet each was self-yieldingly organic to the crew. Here and there, maybe, some misfit in the mental pattern, some lone outsider or some untamed spirit, marred the crew’s unity; flustering all with mutual doubt and self-tender fear, poisoning the composite being’s single-heartedness and proficiency; much as an aching tooth, or any other thorn in the flesh, may loosen an athlete’s unity of eye and muscle.

But this discordancy was rare. Each crew, within the little universe of its common lethal purpose, was an integral creature. And the whole armada of aircraft, stooping squadron by squadron to the target, projecting their deadly spawn into the city’s heart with stop-watch precision and overwhelming concentration of onset, moved as a single creature, an organic and intelligent swarm of beings, self-tender, but self-yielding to the common life, the common purpose.

Not inviolate the bombers. Now one and now others, found by the city’s antennae, caught by the city’s guns or by airborne defenders, streaked the darkness with a long downward curve of flame; or blazed as a sudden eruption, then vanished.

The moth still vacillated up and down its flying prison, vaguely dissatisfied. But for the seven, the climax of their journey was now at hand, the releasing of their death-load. Rapt now in the urgency of their task, they were seven organs of one mechanical winged creature. If any thoughts from the world of individual living should flutter into any of the seven minds, these must be instantly destroyed. The composite life of the crew must be absolute. The moth only, unwilling and uncomprehending passenger, was separate. Imprisoned physically, it remained mentally unfettered to the human tyranny, through its very obtuseness.

The rear-gunner was happy. Already he had killed, and now he waited for the next attacker. But when again the moth touched him with the magic of a remote though so familiar world, his heart tripped; then instantly recovered. Fiercely he braced himself.

Suddenly the plane was caught by convergent fingers of light. Near shell-bursts blasted it hither and thither. In the storm of jagged illumination, the rear-gunner saw for a moment the moth, a tremulous creamy flake pinned on darkness.

Then overwhelmingly the rear-gunner’s universe became all brilliance and crashing noise: Wild pain flooded him through every nerve. Every cell of his body’s surface was attacked by smashing blast and furious heat. And so with all the seven. The moth’s papery tissues instantly became a whiff of disorganized molecules. The flesh of all the seven boys was agonizingly disintegrated. Seven young brains, the centres and king-pins of seven universes, received their last experience. Then these too became mere whiffs of gas, a rabble of wandering molecules.

And the seven young selves?

The rear-gunner’s ultimate moments were wholly occupied with pain, the frantic revulsion of his members against destruction. All other experienced things in his universe, the pin-prick stars that were suns, the crew’s sacred comradeship, the moth’s kiss, and all his nineteen years of growing, were obliterated in the white heat of his body’s agony. Then pain itself ceased. The rear-gunner was annihilated.

FIRST INTERLUDE

WHAT IS THIS DYING?

In the tube we said good-bye. You on the platform, I in the train. In the time of the rockets.

Smiling, you stepped back and blew me a kiss. It was bright with all our past.

The doors slid to, dividing us.

The chance that we should not meet any more was only, I told myself, one in many millions. And yet — that very morning, and only a few streets away, scores of people had been killed. Today, as on a thousand days, they had yawned themselves out of bed, dressed, breakfasted, set off about their business,’ then suddenly, or slowly and miserably, they had stopped being. Or so it seems.

What is this dying? No one who has done it can tell us what it is like.

Are we mere sparks of sentience that death extinguishes, or fledgeling immortals who fear to leave the nest? Or both, or neither?

We are conceived in mystery, and into mystery we die.

Let us, at least, not clamour for immortality, not pledge our hearts to it. If the end is sleep, well, when we are tired, sleep is the final bliss.

And yet perhaps what dies is only the dear trivial familiar self of each. Perhaps in our annihilation some vital and eternal thing does break wing, fly free. We cannot know.

But this we know: whether we are annihilated or attain in some strange way eternal life, to have loved is good.

CHAPTER II. EPHEMERAL SPIRITS

THE INSTANT OF DEATH

ANNIHILATION AND SURVIVAL

THE MEMBERS OF THE CREW

THE SPIRIT OF THE CREW

THE COMPANY OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

THE SPIRIT OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

DEATH OF THE SPIRIT OF THE KILLED

THE INSTANT OF DEATH

AT the very point of his annihilation the rear-gunner suffered a strange experience, and one not easily to be told. He had already swooned free from pain, and was falling headlong into nothingness. In that final instant, suddenly he woke into awareness of his whole past life. His whole past universe flashed miraculously upon him in exquisite early-morning clearness and manifold detail. Once more and all at once he was aware of all his days and nights, but as a string of variegated beads laid out before him, alternate light and dark. Each was figured with the unique experiences of that particular dated night or day. There, as though present, he saw the day when he had first been taken to school; the night of an indescribable nightmare which kept its teeth in him even for many nights and days; the day when, a school-boy, he had glimpsed divinity in a schoolgirl; the day when he had started work in a bank; the night of his first operational flight across the narrow sea. He saw too that the string holding all his days and nights together was his cherished and continuously growing body, now in the instant of destruction. Then, it lived, and was the vehicle of all memory, the medium of all passions and ecstasies, the source of all teasing hungers and all satisfaction. But now his flesh was in the very act of death, his mind in the instant of annihilation. Strange, strange that a mere instant should have room for crowding thoughts and desires, and contain within itself all his nineteen years!

At one end of the long sequence of his days he saw his first day of all, knotted into the peaceful darkness of the womb, a day of painful and novel churning and pressing, and of an agony of constriction, followed by the sting of cool air on tender skin, and a sudden smack that roused his lungs to their first breath and outcry. In the stress of this earliest and most deeply buried of his memories the rear-gunner was swept again by floods of blind infantile terror, rage and self-pity; and of yearning for the womb’s peace. And yet, surveying his first day from the miraculous viewpoint of his last instant, he no longer desired the womb, which seemed now about to swallow him once more, and for ever. Now, all his desire was for life, and the fulfilment of life’s frustrated promises. For there before him lay all his days, frustrated; bright with hopes and partial satisfactions, but scored over with countless boredoms, distresses, falsified intimations of future bliss, Greedily he licked up all the sweetness of his precious numbered days, and spat out all their bitterness. And with self-pity he brooded on the mature manhood that he was never to taste.

But now, in this same miraculously pregnant instant at the point of his annihilation, the rear-gunner became aware of a strange conflict within himself. With his whole being, seemingly, he was protesting against annihilation; and yet at the same time he in some deep way accepted annihilation with equanimity. With his whole being, seemingly, he clung greedily to every sweet thing in his lifetime; and yet also he turned away impatiently in search of ulterior ends, It was almost as though two selves of contrary tempers assessed each day and minute of his life, The one was recognizably himself as he had always been, an eager lapper-up of pleasures and spewer-out of pains. The other, the frightening and inhuman intruder, that was so alien and yet somehow more deeply himself than his familiar self could ever be, lapped up nothing, spewed nothing out, This formerly submerged but now active part of him, if such it could be accounted, accepted pleasures and pains alike dispassionately, judging each one for some ulterior significance, inquiring of each whether the issue had in fact been life or death, an increased range and penetration of personal being, or a mere crippling. Thus in assessing the occasion when he had shockingly burnt his hand the rear-gunner was twi-minded about it. As his normal self, he was transfixed by the memory of the pain; but in the other mode of his being, though equally aware of the body’s distress, he surveyed it quietly, and with a sort of voiceless laughter at the other’s gross enslavement. For this, after all, had been not a crippling but an enlarging, an illuminating, experience. Had it not initiated him into the formidable mystery of suffering? And how could one begin to be a man without such initiation?

But his normal self greeted this incursion of a superior mentality with incomprehension, ridicule and hate. He protested to himself, ‘If I must die, I’ll die honest to God as I really am, and not be a sham padre or a highbrow. Pain is just hell. I see no good in it, I hate it, I loathe it. To hell with it!’

In his final instant, the rear-gunner tasted again the thousand little experiences of wounded vanity or social mortification that had moth-eaten the fair textile of his life, as when he had been cold-shouldered by the belle of his suburb, or when he had discovered that a new and brilliant friend lived in a shabby street. But now he was torn by the violent discord between his familiar and his more lucid selves. The one surrendered abjectly to the long-past horror of social embarrassment; the other was tortured by shame of a very different order, shame at puerility and meanness. In particular, over the friend’s back-street home he was now thrown into an agony of self-contempt. For the friendship, which, as he now saw, might have been a quickening influence in his life, had been poisoned by his snobbery. In that first act of withdrawal, and in many other betrayals, up and down his life, he had given poison to his own soul, so that he became each time a little blinder, a little more heartless.

Assessing his blundering approach to the girl whom he had recently designed to possess, he saw now in his awakened mood that never once had he come face to face with her as a living spirit. Neither of them had any real perception either of themselves or of one another or of their relationship. Each had again and again wounded the other, not by cruelty but by sheer self-absorption and obtuseness. On an occasion when she, in distress over a crushed butterfly, had looked to him for sympathy, he had failed to conceive that her misery might have some hidden source. Secretly contemptuous of her childishness, he had petted her and made love to her. But though she clung to him, a strange chill came over her. And presently he grew exasperated at her unresponsiveness, and ridiculed her for grieving so much over a trifle. Then unaccountably she was seized with violent weeping. The rear-gunner in his last instant and his miraculous lucidity saw, what neither of them had at the time recognized, that through the butterfly’s destruction she had glimpsed with lightning suddenness the horror in which countless fighting men and whole populations of the oppressed were at that I moment engulfed. She was flung into a desperate conflict between compassion for the oppressed and a new sense that to participate in slaughter, even for the rescue of the tormented peoples, was hideous sacrilege; though a sacrilege which in a sick world needs must be perpetrated, to avoid a sacrilege more hideous. But all this happened upon a plane of her being which she had never before entered. Bewildered and terrified, she fled from it into mere pity for the butterfly. But vague perplexity and unreasonable terror remained. And in coming to him as an unhappy child rather than as a woman, and in confiding to him a seemingly trivial grief that tapped deeper sorrows, she was calling out to him for more than the familiar love-making; she was imploring him for understanding and for the healing of a wound which she herself dared not scrutinize; in fact she asked for love, for the mutual searching and cherishing of beings diverse in temper, yet members of one another. All this the awakened self of the rear-gunner now recognized. And bitterly he despised himself for his past obtuseness.

Yet in the very act of self-contempt, he also, as his normal self, resented and feared this intrusion of clearer insight. ‘What on earth’, he demanded, ‘has come over me? What’s the matter with me? Where does all this highbrow slush come from? Not from me, surely. I’m not like that; I never was. And anyhow, what’s a girl for? Damn it, it wasn’t up to me to get her out of her silly muddle. All that sob-stuff over an insect!’

In this matter of violence the new self of the rear-gunner revolted with peculiar horror from his normal self. The living boy had always accepted, though with obscure disquiet, the necessity of using violence to defend the right. He himself had been called to kill and to share in killing. For the crew’s sake and for his country’s sake he had played his part in slaughter, sealing off in a neglected corner of his mind all realization of the actuality, and of the horror and shame that it engendered. He had told himself, ‘It’s dirty work, but it has got to be done. If we’re damned for doing it, well we’re damned, but it has got to be done.’

His new self, however, was outraged and bitterly remorseful. His quickened imagination revealed with grim faithfulness the agony of the enemy airman smashed by machine-gun bullets or cannon-shell, and of the enemy citizens shattered or buried or burnt by the crew’s bombing. But more shameful even than this horror itself was the spiritual betrayal that made it possible, the betrayal of that which his new perception revealed as the most sacred thing, the bond of brotherhood between all personal beings. New thoughts welled up in him, thoughts which he could only with difficulty express, since his language was limited by the dead boy’s crude speech. Searching beyond the range of the rear-gunner’s familiar jargon, he brought out from the forgotten recesses of that mind words and phrases dusty with neglect. ‘How could I be so — so insensitive,’ he questioned, ‘so — coarse-grained, dull-witted, brutish, and so cowardly, as to take part in all that savagery, that wickedness! And how can I ever wipe out, expiate, that sin? I have wakened to find myself up to the neck in filth at the bottom of a deep and stinking pit from which I can never climb.’

But presently his mood changed. Lifted as it were outside himself, he regarded more objectively not only his participation in murder but his whole life of rudderless drifting.

Reverting to the old jargon, ‘Poor mut, poor twerp!’ he sighed. Then, painfully seeking out words that could express more faithfully his new quickened perception, ‘That poor sleep-walker’, he said, ‘could not possibly have done otherwise. How could so insensitive a being have struck free from the universal sin? How could anyone so scared of disapproval, so cowed by the tribe’s censure, have seen that the tribe was wrong, have stood out against the tribe’s will? The most that could be expected of him was that he should obey the tribal call to give up his freedom and learn to fight and in the end to die. And this he did.’

But now another thought slowly took shape under the anxious scrutiny of the rear-gunner’s newly awakened and more lucid self. Surveying all his fragmentary and hitherto undigested, uncriticized acquaintance with the world of men, he saw that even if he had been clearly conscious of the enormity of slaughter, yet to stand aside would have been wrong. For to stand aside would have been to refuse a desperate call for rescue. Millions of human beings, suffering under the most hideous tyranny, cried out for practical help, and there was no way of bringing them relief save the forlorn attempt of war. To preach human brotherhood and set an example of non-violence would in this case be quite futile. Moreover so deep-seated and subtle was the perversion of all men’s minds, so crazily were most men addicted to false values, and so desperate was the present plight of the human race, that nothing but violence, nothing but ruthless slaughter, could prevent the destruction of the very possibility of a better world.

‘If I had stood aside’, he admitted, ‘I should have been a peculiarly ugly kind of snob, I should have been guilty of a sort of snobbery of righteousness. I should have been just washing my hands of the whole mess to keep my precious self clean.’

Yet when he remembered stories he had heard of the selfless devotion of some who refused to take any part in war, he wondered whether they had perhaps some vision that he still lacked, so confident were they that violence must always in the long run inevitably do more harm than good.

But presently he told himself, ‘Those visionaries may, just may, be right; and certainly they were true to their own faith. But — how can one refuse for a doubtful vision a present and urgent cry for help against cruel oppressors, torturers?’

Bewilderment and horror weighed down on him. ‘Surely’, he cried, ‘the world must be sheer hell if the only hope is that millions, in order to rescue the tortured, will force themselves to use all the devilish devices of war, will freely commit this foul crime against — against what? Call it the spirit. This crime against the spirit, against the very thing that they want to defend. Yes, surely this world of ours is sheer hell.’

But recalling the brighter and fairer things in his own short life, he protested, ‘No, not hell, but something lovely that has been spoilt, something of lovely promise but terribly hurt, frustrated. Where was it, and when, and in what form that the poison entered?’ These questions were beyond his wit to answer; for his knowledge of the world was but the knowledge of an average young man; and, though his intelligence had been quickened by death, ignorance defeated it.

When the rear-gunner’s two selves, if two they were, and if truly ‘selves’, and if both were indeed ‘his’, reviewed his final instant of agony and annihilation, their feelings were very different. The normal boy, faced with utter destruction, cried out, seemingly with the whole force of his being, ‘Oh, Christ, let me live!’ And with that last desperate prayer the rear-gunner himself, the normal, greedy, snobbish, fear-tortured, yet within the crew well-disciplined and comradely, self of the rear-gunner utterly ceased to be. Surely the outcry of that poor self-cherishing and doomed individual mind might well have echoed from star to star, from galaxy to galaxy, might have reached even to the ears of compassionate God, if such there be; with the similar last cries of his six companions and the other slaughtered crews and the many killed citizens in their fiery honeycomb, and all the killed on land and sea and in the air, in every quarter of the planet.

But the other, alien self of the rear-gunner, and the alien self in all the company of the killed, scorned that prayer which all had prayed. ‘Not I,’ affirmed the rear-gunner in his more lucid mode, or the alien being that had awakened in the rear-gunner’s annihilation, ‘Surely not I, but some other, was guilty of that cry, some mere brute, some subhuman thing involved with me.’

Thus in his last instant the rear-gunner, like all the killed, had been torn by inner conflict. The normal boy, at the very point of extinction, was outraged by the aloofness and ulterior searching of that stranger within himself. He supposed that the coldness of desire in him must surely be death itself already dissolving his vitality and disintegrating his mind. Yet in the same instant he, his very self (if his self it truly was), his new, alien and quickened self, assessing his past life’s little worth, declared, ‘All my life I shirked the test. I took the easy line. I lapped up little pleasures and was cowed by little pains. I turned away from every opportunity of growth, held back always by sluggishness or fear or blank obtuseness, smothering the dim light in me at every step by my self-generated fog of trivial cravings. What might I have done, what become, if I had not chosen always to remain a sleep-walker. And now it is too late. Never will those lost openings be restored to me.’ Remorse and self-despising gripped him. Particularly he loathed his baser self for that final desperate cry to a divinity in whom he had never really believed, and whose name had hitherto been for him little more than an imprecation. ‘Abject creature that I am,’ he said, ‘nailed to self-pity! What matter that such a moth must die without fulfilment?’

Not that even in his more lucid mentality the rear-gunner accepted annihilation wholly without misgiving. Though he cared nothing for his personal survival, yet it seemed that with his ending must also come an end to something perhaps more worthy. Seemingly the whole little treasure of experience which he had gathered in his brief lifetime must now, with his extinction, be itself extinguished. If only he could know that in some way it contributed to some whole of cosmical or divine experience, as a raindrop to the ocean! But he had no reason to believe that this was so; and in his lucid mode he scorned to believe without reason, merely for comfort. Well, the ocean would not be perceptibly the poorer without his raindrop. Moreover, as he now bitterly realized, he had lived so obtusely that perhaps nothing whatever in his whole life was creatively unique and worthy of preservation. True, but what of his six companions, and the thousands of war dead and all the myriads that had died and were to die in all lands and ages? And what of all those stars that were indeed suns, and the minded worlds that perhaps were sprinkled, however sparsely, up and down the galaxies? Did all their vast treasure of experience simply vanish with the ephemeral individuals who had supported it?

The rear-gunner, even in his more lucid self, was oppressed by the seeming futility of all existence. But he told himself that even the loss of all that treasure mattered nothing. Really what mattered was just that the upshot of all those myriad lives should be the practical advancement of their particular worlds in individual happiness. But happiness? The happiness of insects like himself? Not sheer happiness, then, but the fulfilling of these insects in ever richer, keener, more discriminate, more creative living. (What unfamiliar language this! From what hidden source did it rise up in him?) The fulfilling of insects, generation after generation, in ever finer awareness! Then, was the justification of the æons of misery and pain some final, glorious, cosmical Utopia? And would it be a dreadfully superior Utopia of super-minds intent on super-highbrow activities? Once more oppression seized the rear-gunner. And presently he thought of the inevitable decline and fall of that far-off society. For scientists declared that the whole universe was running down like a clock, and that in the end all life would be extinguished. In imagination he saw a million frozen worlds, each sprinkled with frozen honeycombs that once were cities, their features now almost obliterated by the corpse coverlet of ultimate snow.

The rear-gunner, or that which had awakened in the rear-gunner’s final instant, was overwhelmed by a great weariness and loneliness, so that he cared only for sleep. Vaguely he thought of those occasions when, after a hard day, he had dropped into bed, and down, down, into the peace of sleep. (The womb again.) On those nights, had he on the brink been told that, if he slept now, he would never wake again, he would have leapt from his bed; but now, though believing that his sleep was to be eternal, he sighed thankfully and drew the blanket of oblivion over his head. Presently even the ultimate desire for extinction was expunged from him; and with it, all thinking, all awareness.

ANNIHILATION AND SURVIVAL

After an instant or an æon, he who had been the rear-gunner in the aeroplane where the moth was imprisoned woke from his nescience. And it was as though he woke into a new nature.

He took up once more the thread of his meditation, but now the whole climate of his being had changed, as though sleep had profoundly refreshed him. He smiled at his recent despond, reminding himself of the feebleness of human intellect. How should human animals, those upright worms with swelled heads, predict the issue of the æons? And if the last event must indeed be ultimate and eternal death, might not all still be well? After full achievement, what better than sleep? But anyhow, what matter! How foolish to despair over a disaster so remote and so uncertain!

Once more, he considered the chequered rosary of his own past days and nights. Little enough of achievement, certainly, could be seen in them. But he viewed them now no longer with a sense of personal frustration, no longer with exasperation and self-blame. Somehow a weight seemed to have fallen from him, as though an aeroplane had jettisoned its load, and suddenly flown free. Pitifully, but not with self-pity, he now fingered the little rosary of those days and nights. ‘Poor boy,’ he said, ‘so greedy was he for delight, and so misused by the world, and by himself. So unaware was he of all but his trivial hungers and pains. No! Not I! That poor sleep-walker was never I.’

And yet, fingering again those beads of time, and looking more closely into the heart of each obscurely translucent globe, he began to see that there were indeed occasions in the rear-gunner’s life of which he could without hesitation declare, ‘Now that, yes that, truly was I. Then, and then, and then, I, the real I, did indeed wake in the depth of the dreamer’s heart; and I, I, took possession for a while.’

He watched the schoolboy, startled once by seeing with new eyes a certain outlawed schoolmate, so that with fists and tongue and heart he hotly championed him. And when he had so thrillingly greeted divinity in a schoolgirl, his adoration, though callow and muddied with self-importance, was in essence disinterested. Responding to that alien sweetness he had indeed in his childish way saluted divinity. That adoration of another, that craving to live wholly for another’s sake, that obscure longing to find with another some still inconceivable but exquisite union and rebirth as ‘we’! There had been moments, too, when trees and flowers and clouds had opened strange windows for him. And sometimes, in his training for the air, most unexpectedly, a mathematical formula had stirred him with its economy and far range of significance. Music, too, had now and again struck from him a spark of perplexed worship. And after all, had he not given himself without reserve to the crew’s life, in service of a cause how vaguely conceived yet none the less recognized as binding? For that cause he, who feared death as a child the dark, had died.

‘Yes!’ affirmed the being who had awakened out of the rear-gunner, ‘on those occasions it was indeed I, my very self, who saw, felt, spoke, took action.’ And as he peered into the dimly luminous heart of each past day, he recognized everywhere traces of a lucidity which he need not disown, though everywhere it was overlayed with the poor sleep-walker’s obtuseness. ‘Though he was not I,’ he mused, ‘yet every day and every night I was astir within him, though drowsily, in the dark womb of his nature.’

‘But I?’ he wondered, ‘Who am I? What is it that I truly am? The creature that gave birth to me, the creature that cried out for immortality, is quite extinguished. It has no part in my future; whilst I, escaping from its death, am cut off from all nourishment from its finished life. And yet I live on. The cord is cut, but the first breath in the new world not taken. Unless this dark isolation ceases, I too, through sheer lack of experience, must soon be annihilated. Oh for a world, a heaven, where at last I can begin to fulfil the promise of my nature! Oh for the clash and concord and creative intercourse with others of my kind with whom I can rise beyond myself to richer, keener being!’

THE MEMBERS OF THE CREW

Musing in this style he suddenly recognized that a world was all the while around him. So absorbed had he been in his inner-drama that he had not noticed it. But now he knew that he had been all the while afloat in the sky over the burning city. He was the centre of an unbroken sphere of vision. Bodiless, his seeing was in no direction obstructed. Below him lay the fiery honeycomb; above, the climbing smoke plumes, with here and there a star, and the moon, now forging through little clouds. On every side he saw war’s shafts of light and bursting suns of fire. An obscurity downwind was the fading cloudlet left by the bomber’s recent explosion. Presently a near shell-burst engulfed him for a moment in an extremity of light and noise, but painlessly. And then an aeroplane, roaring out of the darkness, traversed harmlessly the very point from which he saw.

But once more his attention was distracted from his physical surroundings, for he became aware of the mental presence of his six killed companions.

The past lives of all were bared, like his own, for contemplation by all seven of them. It was as though all seven stood now together, each viewing all their seven pasts from the final instant in which all had died; as though all together looked along seven radiating tunnels of biography. All were embarrassingly aware of each other’s most intimate experience. For though all had rid themselves of their mortal natures, they were as yet not fully equipped for mutual insight. Each was still fettered by much of the ignorance and prejudice of his particular life. And so, in each, the habit of comradeship and self-yielding to the crew’s community was now put to new strain by this unwished-for intimacy. Formerly each, while outwardly performing his office in the common life, had preserved an inner sanctuary which the others could not, would not, violate. But now, in a bare instant, mutual perception was thrust on all. Shames formerly covered were now exposed. Conflicts formerly disciplined for the crew’s sake, but always smouldering, now flamed.

Secretly, the pilot had always despised the rear-gunner’s accent; the rear-gunner had resented the pilot’s self-assurance. Forbearance for the crew’s sake had restrained each from wounding the other. But now each looked with horror and incipient hate at the other’s unexpressed but now unconcealable hostility. The navigator’s diffidence, which had forced him always to be the last to go through a door, was now seen by all to be the fruit of secret annoyance and envy. The bomb-aimer’s stammer, formerly an occasion for kindly indulgence, though for unexpressed contempt, revealed its root in the shame of an obscene desire which made all shudder and draw away.

There was one of the seven, the engineer, a newcomer, who in the air was wholly of the crew, bound by the filaments of the crew’s unity; but off-duty he had remained apart, because of rough speech and manners and an inscrutable reticence. He now appeared to his six companions almost as a member of a strange barbarian tribe, or a creature of another world, never explored by any of the six. They, haling from little surburban villas and secondary schools, felt themselves to be integral to society. They regarded the policeman not indeed as their servant but at least as the necessary defender of orderly and decent living. But this other, nurtured in a northern work-town where work had formerly come almost to a standstill, where the common fate was hunger, sickness and social impotence, saw the whole convention of society’s Structure as a device of the prosperous to keep the poor in subjection. Every policeman was for him an enemy. Looking down the vista of his days and nights, this seventh member saw, and his six companions saw with him, a filthy urchin sitting on the kerb-stone playing with a broken bottle in the gutter; while in the six other lifetimes all observed nice children sitting on suburban grass-plots. They watched the schoolboy in a crowded classroom discovering his native power, but constantly hampering himself by rebellious acts and consequent punishments. They saw the young man unemployed, gripped in that steel trap of privation and futility, listening to angry speeches at street comers and in shabby halls, poring over revolutionary tracts, and presently himself making earnestly subversive speeches, or skirmishing with policemen. They saw not only these distressing events but also the inner passion exfoliating day by day in the young man’s heart, the passion of the iconoclast and the revolutionary. And they were outraged. For it seemed to these others, who, for all their man-of-the-world cynicism, had never really questioned the fundamental integrity of their society, that this passion sprang merely from self-pride and envy.

But the young revolutionary, looking into the lives of these sons of business men, clerks, shop assistants, mechanics, was amazed. Their parents, one and all, had been compelled by social circumstance to fight for a living against innumerable competitors, all seeking desperately for some foothold on the slope that leads up to affluence but down to penury; yet, these fathers and these sons, though they had been nearly always discontented and harassed, blamed merely their bad luck, or the state of trade, or bolshevik machinations, or the Jews, or the inveterate evil in man’s heart. They never had any thought that their troubles were in fact the issue of some deep-lying social disease, and that they were poor little infected cells in the social body. But, to the seventh member of the crew, the engineer, it seemed that for such as these, and indeed for all men, there could never be any hope unless they could learn to understand the great social forces which had produced all this frustration and misery. And understanding would surely drive them to take action together about it.

All seven were plunged into revulsion and protest, long-enduring (so it seemed to them) as a lifetime of painful learning; but, measured in physical time, it happened in the instant. Little by little, yet in the instant, after the spell of bewilderment and horror a change came over the seven emergent spirits of the crew. For each of these beings, who had been through that strange remaking which had befallen the rear-gunner, were now apt for learning. They were no longer simply boys who had died. They were the beings that had been obscurely born of those seven, and had awakened into clear awareness in the extinction of those mortal seven. Therefore, after the first revulsion, they yearned together, each saluting the other’s individuality with respect, and seeking mutual insight. The pilot and the rear-gunner laughingly forgave each other. The bomb-aimer’s obsession was seen by all no longer as a devilish lust but as a psychical scar left by misfortune. The revolutionary was no longer spurned. For now the six saw that their condemnation of him was less moral than snobbish, a mere unthinking rejection of standards alien to the tribe. They reminded themselves that this seeming enemy of society, whose energy appeared to be sheer hate, had been also their own trusted companion in the crew, one who in action had been well-integrated with them, one to whom all had paid a special though none an intimate admiration.

Eager to do justice, they looked with clearer vision. They saw the schoolboy in his bare home struggling with his homework, while the mother soothed a crying baby. They saw the parents daily trying to conceal mutual irritation under their sorely tried affection. They saw the lad himself noting day by day that the source of all their distress was poverty. And they saw him conceiving through suffering and mutual aid a passion of comradeship for certain schoolmates and young fellow gangsters, and a growing need to give himself in corporate and comradely activity.

They savoured more intelligently the lad’s frustration in unemployment; and his induction into the corporate life of the revolutionary Party, where at last he found peace in self-dedication to the revolution. With curiosity, with growing interest, and then with warm accord, they watched the young man’s mind form itself by reading and the experience of social action, until he was fully disciplined to a commanding idea, the conception of mankind as something of high promise but of crippled actuality.

Through his fervour the six themselves now for the first time felt the power of this human gospel. ‘It is indeed largely so,’ they said, ‘though the mortal boys that gave us being knew nothing of it.’

But they saw also, with their newly quickened intelligence, that the revolutionary’s majestic vision of class conflict and social evolution, though in a way true and serviceable, reached nowhere into the depths of truth; and that their comrade, spellbound by a theory, had conceived the world too glibly. They were distressed, too, that in service of the revolution he had often broken the moral law that they unquestioningly accepted. For the sake of a political though never for a personal advantage he had often lied; given false interpretations of facts, vilified the personal character of the opponents and half-hearted friends of the revolution. In their post-mortal lucidity they could well understand how revolutionary passion had seemed to justify such conduct; but they were perplexed, recognizing that to behave in this way was to do violence to something sacred, to that temper, that way of life, that universal spirit, which all, obscurely swayed by echoes of the old religion, had dumbly and shame-facedly recognized as in some sense divine. But they could not honestly blame their comrade for this error, if indeed error it was; for its source was the generous passion for the freeing of mankind from bondage. And for their own part the six were now deeply ashamed of their own past obtuseness to the world’s ills, and to the meaning of the great pattern of events in which all their lives had occurred.

The revolutionary seventh, on his side, having now fully recognized the personal reality of his six companions, looked with misgiving on many things in his own past, fearing that, in blind loyalty to the end, he had often, by lightly choosing evil means, done hurt to something without which the end, the true end, could never be achieved.

And so these disembodied seven, who in their former lives had scarcely ever given attention to the deeper questions, now entered perplexedly upon a philosophical discussion, if indeed such a name can be given to the strange direct interfusing of mind with mind which now swiftly brought them into accord.

Thus at last, through mutual insight, the community of the seven was restored and deepened. Each one of these diverse spirits, strangely born of the lives of seven young Englishmen, contributed his uniqueness to the common enrichment. And thus at last did their friendship find its consummation in intelligent love.

But in this final act of love the seven, as distinct beings, were doomed to attain not only their fulfilment but their end. For the upshot of this mystic fertilization of each by all was that all conceived within themselves co-operatively, or perhaps were gathered up into, a single spirit, which was the living identity of them all. Each with agony and terror but with overriding ecstasy was torn by strange death — or birth-throes. And out of this communal parturition, lethal to the seven, who now all fell headlong into nescience and non-entity, the single new-born spirit took wing.

New-born? Or newly awakened? Conceived perhaps much earlier in the seven’s active comradeship, but hitherto somnolent, tranced, impotent, and now at last awake and free. Whatever the metaphysical truth of it, the seven now had died into an identical, more vital being, who was no one of them, nor yet the sum of them, but the heir of all their lives.

THE SPIRIT OF THE CREW

This being woke to find himself at first no more than the fragmentary, ephemeral and single-purposed spirit of a certain bomber crew.

Strange that the seven should be dissolved in a fellowship which, after all, had possessed them so superficially. Each of them had lived almost the whole of his life without any relation to the crew. Only in their final year, their last few months, had they been thrown together. Probably all of them, certainly some, had participated in associations far more expressive of their personal natures than the upstart and grimly simple crew. Yet now in death all died into that stark spirit. Seemingly the cause was that in the moment of death all were intensely concerned in the crew’s united action. Moreover, only in the crew had they learnt to discipline their wills fully to a common purpose.

But indeed this simple spirit of a bomber crew was soon to discover in himself strange depths and heights of being. Brooding on the past lives of his seven members, he came to feel that, in some way still dark to him, he was in fact far more than the unity of those seven boys. As the sheer crew-spirit, he remembered those seven bodies as his own seven-fold body, though a body whose organs were often recalcitrant to the precariously enthroned common spirit. For each of his seven members had a life and a sentience and a will of his own. And each had a mentality far richer than the single-purposed spirit of the crew. Only in the air were they fully disciplined to the common will and to the fanatical simplicity of the common spirit. And even in the air they had remained seven individual minds, self-disciplined under a common loyalty.

But now, he who had emerged from the seven, felt that all the while he had been resident in each one of them, identical in each, though for the most part unconscious, deeply submerged, rising into clear perception and integral will only on those occasions when the crew’s action was most single-purposed. When it was less so, when some of his members were keyed up for battle and some were reluctant, then it was he himself (so it now seemed to him) who goaded the faint-hearted ones into courage, as a man may goad his own tired muscles into the vigour of desperation.

Looking back, it seemed to him that not merely the seven but the very machine that imprisoned them had been part of his body. For through the seven’s well-trained senses and through their instruments, and through their muscles and their mechanical controls, he lived the life of that composite being, biological and mechanical. As a man driving a car may feel the roughness of the road through the tyres, and the steepness of the hill through the straining engine, so he felt through those seven bodies and through the wings and air-screws and straining engines the very texture of the atmosphere, and the thrust and swoop of the plane. And as a man’s will controls a car, so he, through the seven minds who were but organs of his own mind, controlled and fought the plane. Looking back into his past, it seemed to him that he had always since the crew’s founding been present in each of his members as the identical will for efficient flying, efficient defence, efficient attack, and safe return. In the past he had participated only in the vaguest and most ineffectual manner in the personal lives of his members outside the aeroplane, outside the carapace of their common life in the crew. He knew them only in so far as they were intimate with each other. But now in their death and mutual insight he became fully possessed of all their experience.

In life, each one of them had been an individual boy fleetingly possessed by the crew’s unity. Moreover each had been a member also of other communal beings. For each had shared in other groupings, in family, school, team, working gang and innumerable other less durable associations. Looking back into the earlier lives of the seven, the spirit of the crew told himself that in the time before ever they came together as a crew he could have had no part in any of them at all. Indeed in those days, seemingly (though somehow he could not believe it) he had no being anywhere. And even later, in the time of the crew, one or other of his precious members was often possessed for a while by sheer self-concern, or by interest in some corporate being other than the crew. And indeed the young revolutionary, though of all the seven he had been the most self-disciplined to the crew in action, was also in his heart aloof, because dedicated ultimately to a loftier loyalty.

‘But I, I, who am I?’ questioned the crew’s spirit. ‘Am I really no more than the ephemeral community of the seven in whose lives I was conceived, and in whose death I discovered myself? And what future, if any, lies before me? In what world can I take action to express my nature more fully than my seven members could ever do?’

For as the crew’s simple spirit brooded over the lives of his seven members, all their diverse individualities became absorbed into himself. His nature deepened to include the whole wealth of all their being.

Further, it seemed to him that, though his contact with the world was limited to the experience of his seven members, yet in some manner he was indeed far more than those seven. Though they were in a sense his parents, yet it now seemed to him most insistently that throughout all their lives, and not merely since the forming of the crew, he had always been present within each one of them, feeding on the diversity of the experience of those young human persons, and always an identical spirit in them all. But always, until their death, he had been a sleep-walker.

Nay more. It seemed to him that not only in the seven but in all those whom the seven had ever known, in their lovers, friends, colleagues, enemies, a spirit lived which, if only he could reach out to it, would prove to be himself, or, if not himself, then perhaps some more lucid spirit, that he, like all those others, strangely harboured.

Intently brooding on those seven lives, assessing the quality of their fumbling commerce with their fellow mortals and with the world, this being who seemingly had been born of the seven as the starkly simple spirit of their vivid community in action, now seemed to himself far older than the seven, seemed indeed primeval, perhaps eternal, seemed also to be of umplumbed depth, and subtlety. And now he was possessed by an obscure but passionate longing to be more fully, more lucidly himself, and to come into active commerce and communion with a world. As a sleeper may sometimes struggle vainly and in terror to spring from sleeping into waking, while his limbs remain paralysed, his eyes shut, and his mind crushed down as though under a great weight of water, so this being struggled to wake and be fully himself, and greet the unknown world, the great reality beyond himself.

THE COMPANY OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

Suddenly the spirit of that crew with whom a moth had been imprisoned became aware of the cloudy moonlit sky and of the burning city, far below. The sirens were sounding to proclaim untranquil and unlasting peace.

He became aware also of a host of presences, bodiless like himself. It was as though a babel of voices deafened him with incoherent clamour; but these were in fact a swarm of spirits shifting, vanishing and reappearing, impinging directly upon his mind with violent conflict and intermittent sweet accord.

After a spell of bewilderment, he discovered that these beings with whom he was in such overwhelming contact were the spirits that had awakened in the final instants of all the killed in that battle, both in the air and on the ground. There were individual beings, and there were composite beings like himself. There were spirits emergent from those isolated killed who had not at the moment of death been deeply absorbed in the common life of any group; the spirits of particular airmen, firemen, soldiers, gunners, citizens. And there were those composite spirits that had awakened in the sudden destruction of whole close-knit crews of aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns.

The spirit of that moth-accompanied crew found this new experience painful. The tumult and conflict of all these beings entered deeply into his own personality. For, under the stress of these new attractions and repulsions, one or other of his own seven members, who had seemed so well integrated into his own single being, would wake again into individuality and strain away from him. Indeed the whole company of spirits was a strange quivering flux, criss-crossed by ever-changing new patterns of individuality and communion. Individuals coalesced with one another or broke apart to merge themselves in new corporate beings, which might presently be once more disintegrated, or engulfed in greater beings.

An electron within an atom, they say, has no distinct individuality at all. It is a mere factor pervading the whole atom. So, equally, with these disembodied individual spirits, dissolved in corporate beings. But the electron may recover its individuality and leap free from the atom, to join perhaps with some other atom and once more die from individuality into a new corporate being. So also with these spirits. Or again electrons may become links binding atoms together in larger wholes of individuality. So also these spirits.

For instance, the revolutionary member of that crew which had died when a moth died now woke once more into individuality through the influence of other spirits of his temper. But so well had he been merged in the corporate being of his crew that, far from breaking away, he became the link by which the whole sevenfold spirit of that crew found community with all those among the killed who had willed a new world.

The individuals and corporate beings in this company of all the killed seethed like bubbles on the surface of boiling water, appearing, vanishing, merging, separating; or like the ever-shifting patterns of wrinkles on the skin of heated milk.

But one at least among those killed, being of far finer temper than the rest, had a different fate. Like all, she suffered annihilation of her earthly self; but since, even in her earthly self, she had been so little blinded by worldliness, the spirit which woke in her death could pass easily and swiftly through all the strange forms of being which most others must so laboriously climb.

She was a saint of the City. Born to luxury, but also to sincerity, and schooled in the best temper of the old religion, she had early broken with the easeful and gilded life of her own class. She looked for friendliness with the poor. For years they had rejected her; but in the end their hearts were won by her service and her need of them. When the tyranny broke upon the City, she with modest daring, and the formidable prestige of her integrity, had defended the persecuted and rescued the hunted.

Eagerly she reached always outward in friendliness and service; yet the source of all her warmth and strength lay in her inner life of contemplation. She praised the spirit in such forms as were known to her, in field and wood and sky, in human grace and the significance of human words, but above all in human loving. Not for her the subtleties, of the theologians, nor the equal subtleties of the sceptics. For her the perception of love’s divinity, and the steep and excellent way.

When death destroyed her, then in virtue of her life’s devotion the spirit that awoke in her dying soared on strong wings; until she seemed, she seemed, to be gathered up in exquisite communion with the very God whom all her life had praised. But her true and ultimate fate cannot yet fittingly be told.

This saint, alone among all the dead of that battle, sprang straight to bliss; or if not she, then the being that in her dying woke and struck free. Some few others, airmen, citizens and gunners, were gathered quickly into the common being of some church or party or other storied or passionate group. But most remained for long in tumultuous intercourse with their fellow dead.

This merging and union among the spirits of the killed was never painless. For although what drew the spirits into union was always some deep identity of will, yet also, no sooner were they forced into thorough and respiteless intimacy than in sudden revulsion they strained apart.

Agonizingly the massed experience of all these lives was thrust upon each spirit, so that at first their only wish was to avoid the intolerable stress of conflicting opinions and desires. For among these dead were young and old, men and women, masterful and submissive, simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, knaves and heroes and saints. Moreover there were the raiders and their enemies, the attacking airmen and the citizens.

Not only were there antagonists from both sides of the battle, now tortured to find their minds poured together and subtly interfused with enemy minds, and their most sacred values spurned seemingly in the very sanctuary of their own souls; not only so, but worse, for there were many who, though on the same side of the battle, now with horror discovered one another to be at heart poles asunder in temper and ideals. For deeper far than the cleavage of the war was the difference between those who rendered ultimate allegiance to the very essence of spirit, to reason, love and creativity, and those whose hearts were secretly given mainly to personal or tribal power or to any other of the thousand phantasms that distract men. On both sides of the battle many simple spirits were in a confused way sincerely loyal to the light, and on both sides many were secretly wedded to darkness. But in the City the miasma of tribal doctrine grievously blinded even those who were for the spirit.

One thing alone, it seemed, the whole company of the spirits emergent from the killed had in common. All were the issue of lives cut short by violence. Unlike the members of a crew, no common purpose united them. Only death, violent and untimely, held them together as a single company.

But since all these beings, though hampered by the ignorances and prejudices of their mortal progenitors, were beings of lucid nature, their common tragedy of lives cut short was enough to form a stepping-stone to full mutual insight. Little by little, through what seemed to these spirits an age-long lifetime or remaking, though physically all happened within the spell of that brief battle, community triumphed over conflict. All came to appreciate under their many errors the identical truth in all. Conflicts still perplexed them, but now only as differences among friends united in trust, and pressing eagerly toward full mutual insight.

Presently they cried out together, ‘Had those poor mortals who generated us been able to see into one another’s hearts and minds as we now see, strife would have been less Common on earth, happiness less rare. But we, possessing fully our common inheritance of experience, can create together a true fellowship of spirits, can be translated, each one of us, into the richer, ampler being of our union.’

But no sooner did they rise into this ecstasy of mutual insight than all felt themselves reeling, swooning, into unconsciousness. For in their communion they doomed themselves as individuals to extinction. Together they became the parents, or perhaps rather the midwives, of a single being. Each one of all this company died utterly, but his experience was gathered up into a single, ampler spirit, in whom they as conscious individuals had no part.

THE SPIRIT OF SOME WHO WERE KILLED

This spirit, who was born or who was wakened in the annihilation of all the heterogeneous company of the killed, possessed the pasts of all. He remembered, for instance, how a certain rear-gunner was kissed by a certain moth. And he remembered the composite spirit of that crew. He remembered through many brains the air-fleet’s journey across the sea, and equally the preparations of the citizens for defence. The conflicts of will between citizens and attackers, between the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the forward-looking and the backward-yearning, he felt as conflicts between his own discordant moods, in the days before his waking into clear self-knowledge.

For it seemed to him that during the lives of his many members he had always been present in them all; though impotent, paralysed, sunk in a vast and incoherent dream. Always his members were divided from one another in location and in allegiance. And though in every one of them he had sometimes drowsily awakened and assumed precarious rule, never in those past lives had he, the loftier being, ruled for long.

‘But I, I, what is it that I really am?’ This question tormented him. ‘If indeed I am no more than the spirit emergent in this night’s killed, how comes it that I was alive in them before ever they were united in death? No! Though I possess the experience of this small company alone, I am indeed far more than their emergent spirit. I am that in all men which craves the light. Then why am I thus confined to a small company, and they all dead? Surely I am far more than the spirit of those few dead. I am the spirit of the dead of all lands and ages, and it is I that am immanent in all the living also. Always, in every generation since men first were men, I, I was the identical spirit in them. Then how comes it that I know nothing but those few ended lives?’

Through his experience of his dead members he now, chafing at the limitations and disabilities of those few, tried to form a clear view of the great world in which they had so briefly and so blindly lived. For though each of them had his unique world-view, none saw far, all saw crookedly. Vaguely therefore, the perplexed spirit of those killed pieced together from his members’ experience a fragmentary and incoherent vision of the plight of mankind upon its little planet.

Vaguely he saw the nations summoning all their strength for war; vaguely the slaughter, the hate, the fear, the universal hunger for peace. And still more vaguely he was aware of the deeper crisis of our age, the crumbling of the old world, the painful birth of the new. Vaguely he saw that the perennial inner drama in each man’s heart, the battle between darkness and the light, was in this moment of mankind’s long life most crucial.

Surveying the fragmentary visions of his members, he was tormented by their inconsistency and triviality, and tantalized by the veiled and surmised features of high truth; so that he cried, ‘Blind and paralysed that I am, I must, must wake and be my whole self. I must possess all men. I must know the whole truth about mankind. I must be a power in all men’s hearts. I must take action.’

Then suddenly the being who had emerged from those few killed mortals was assailed by the overwhelming onset of a crowding host of presences, by the individual minds of all who had been killed in this long war, and in the last war, and in all wars in all ages, and all who had died violent deaths in any way since man began, and all whose end had come by disease or sheer old age. And when the myriads of the dead had flooded upon him, there came at last the living, the two thousand million, white and black, yellow and brown, living their little various lives under the wide shadow of war. He knew them inwardly through their own experience, but also outwardly through their experience of each other. His consciousness widened to cover the whole field of human mentality; as an exploding star spreads its light-waves in an expanding sphere of illumination through the dark surrounding nebula. The massed experience of all living persons in all lands, fell upon him in an increasing cataract. But though he was compelled to be present in all these minds, he his very self remained distinct from them. They were voices sounding in his ears, not experiences of his own. Seemingly for a lifetime, an aeon, the cataract thundered upon him, while he battled to keep his identity afloat; yet all happened within the instant.

Piecemeal visions of the whole terrestrial globe, seen through two thousand millions pairs of eyes, inexorably assailed him; visions of night and day, of dreamlands and waking life, of tropical jungles and temperate champaigns and the planet’s frozen extremities, visions of plains and hills and storms at sea, of remote crofts and shacks and homesteads, and of a thousand cities; visions of factory-work and tillage, of miners at the coal face and hunters in the northern forests, of company meetings and cathedral services; visions of war.

A babel of voices also resounded in his tortured mind, speaking in many languages, all of which were perfectly familiar to him, voices of American citizens discussing investments, of German gauleiters enforcing discipline, of Indian peasants imploring food, of Russian tractor-drivers, Chinese students, and all the kinds and races of humanity. He heard inarticulate bellowings of hate, balanced sentences of persuasion and discussion, whispered instructions passed from soldier to soldier in ambush, and all the sweet and secret communications of lovers. Their embraces also he poignantly felt, in mansions and slums, on haystacks and in dark alleys. Through innumerable hands he felt the soft curves of human limbs, the textures of cloth and wood, and cold metal. Through a host of feet he felt the surface of the earth, the hot desert, the snowfields, the city pavements, the moors. Equally all the smells invaded him, of sweat and roses, corpses and sea breezes, of the hot tarmac and the cold smoke-laden fog, of spent explosives, dust, and blood and entrails. And all the flavours of all the foods and drinks, relished in innumerable mouths and swallowed down the world-population of gullets. He was assailed also by those expulsions which take place every day in every land, whether in immaculate closets or stinking latrines or behind hedges or in the open desert. And those other, those honoured expulsions too he felt, all the birth-pangs of that moment, of young mothers tom and frightened, and mothers old and tired; births sealed by death, and births easy as an animal’s.

Not only the physical perceptions of all human sense-organs but also the longings and fears and busy thoughts of all human minds were forced upon him; their inveterate self-cherishing, their self-sacrifice for ends great or petty, their myriad reasonings, in search of profit or of divinity.

And with this he was aware of the corporate and tenuous spirits emergent in all human associations, from the long-lived but nebulous individualities of nations, churches, social classes, to the brief ardent spirits of aircraft crews, of little ships, of party cells, and the intense communions of lovers. He was confronted also with the one-track minds emergent in innumerable special societies, in business firms, professional associations, trade unions, philanthropic associations, little chapels, churches, clubs, and the juvenile spirits of schools and colleges, wrapped in their cocoons of tradition or straining for new growth. The cosmopolitan, but in war-time sadly disintegrated, mind emergent in all pioneering men of science in all the warring lands was also present to him; and the thousand exploring or merely repetitive mentalities of cultural cliques, ‘movements’, religious fanaticisms, social policies:

The spirit of those killed was now confronted also with those rare and holy individuals, like the City’s dead saint, who through intensity of contemplation and integrity of action had become more nearly pure spirit than human individual. These he recognized as beings more lucid than himself. He strained against them, recalcitrant to their excellence; yet at the same time he longed to rise to them and include their clearer nature within himself.

DEATH OF THE SPIRIT OF THE KILLED

Reeling with the impact of all this voluminous and inconsistent experience, the being who had emerged from the killed in a certain battle over a certain city was torn between the desperate need to preserve his identity, and the longing to assimilate all this wealth of experience, and find communion with all these diverse spirits, individual and corporate. Exclusiveness and love struggled within him. For, in contemplating all this host, how could he not feel for them a deep compassion and kinship and yearning? But also, because they threatened his individuality, they were repugnant to him. Again and again he had to remind himself that fellowship and not self-cherishing is the way to the larger life. At last, after how long a struggle, he flung down all his defences and welcomed the invaders.

‘All you great cloud of beings,’ he cried, ‘though we are separate, surely also we are one. In our inmost being we are one. Under our severalty and our idiosyncrasy, we are identical, we are Man.’

But no sooner had he passionately affirmed his unity with that host of others, than a fog of darkness and of oblivion surged against him. Struggling to retain consciousness, he felt himself disintegrating, evaporating, under some powerful influence, as a dewdrop when the sun devours it. Presently he, as an individual being, the transient spirit that had emerged in those few killed, was extinguished. He died into the great spirit of Man.

SECOND INTERLUDE

THE HEART OF IT

You! Most single and singular, whom I love best! Even you are in fact immensely remote from me, you dear centre of an alien universe. Though you are the most near of all things, you are also sometimes perplexingly remote. Over how many decades have we been growing together in a joyful, a life-giving, an indissoluble symbiosis! Yet even now, sometimes I have no idea what you are feeling or thinking. You are apt for action, I for contemplation; you for responding to the minute particular that claims your service, I (Oh fatally) for the universal and the far-flung. Although our minds do indeed most often move in a common rhythm, like a close-dancing couple, yet sometimes we are at arm’s length, or we break step, or we fly apart, cleft by some sudden discord. How many times have I said to you, ‘Quick, there is a train to catch’, and you have answered, ‘There is plenty of time’; or I, ‘Now we are too late’, and you, ‘The train may be later’. Even in Hell you would be an optimist. But in the end, of course, through some black magic which you are forced to use on such occasions, the train is caught, and we sit together silent, waiting for it to start. Again and again our diversity hurts, it even infuriates,’ but it does not really matter. Indeed in the end it is an enrichment, a painful but In the end a welcome partiapation of each in the uniqueness of the other.

Even in that most sharp discordancy of all, did we not become more real to one another? In the end we have grown together more closely. We know one another the better for it; we love one another the better. We are more intimately and indissolubly ‘we’.

Of course each of us is still ‘I’, and the other is ‘you’, the far centre of an alien universe,’ but increasingly, and now indestructibly, the two of us together are also ‘we’, the single, though two-minded centre of a universe common to both of us. We see the world together. No longer does each of us look at it merely in solitariness, with single vision, seeing it as a fiat picture. We perceive it now in depth, stereoscopically. With our common binocular vision each regards all things from our two alien viewpoints.

Our distinctness is as precious as our unity, and our unity as our distinctness. Without deep harmony, in our roots and our flowers, how could we hold together? But without our difference, how kindle one another?

Nothing in my world is identical with anything in yours. Not a tree, not a word, not a person. Is redness, even, to me just I what it is to you? Probably it is much the same, for we are similar organisms; but perhaps, (who knows?) your ‘red’ is what I call ‘green’. What matter? Such a difference would be eternally insignificant for us, since it would be for ever indiscernible. But justice, beauty, truth and a good joke have meanings that we can share with one another, and are discovered to be never identical for the two of us. And though we have friends in common, they are never quite the same persons. Though the friends of each are the friends of both, yet also and inevitably the friend, the lover, of one is the other’s possible antagonist. These our differences, that haunt us elusively at every turn, or step suddenly forward and bar the way with fire, cannot without disaster be ignored. Blind love is no love at all.

We are indeed for ever separate, for ever different, for ever in some measure discordant; but with a discordancy ever more harmonized in the ‘we’ that is for each of us so much more than ‘I’ yes, and perhaps even than ‘you’. As centres of awareness we remain eternally distinct... but in participation in our ‘we’, each ‘I’ wakens to be an ampler, richer’ I’, whose treasure is not ‘myself’ but ‘we’. And so ‘I’ without ‘you’ am a mere torn-off ragged thing, a half-blinded crippled thing, a mere phantom whose embodiment is only in ‘us’.

This precious ‘we’ that we have conceived together, this close-knit unity in difference, this co-habitation and communion of two spirits, will not for ever exfoliate on this planet. Soon or late, one or other of us will die. Then ‘we’, no doubt, will live on for a while in the survivor, as a cherished but a growthless thing. When both are dead, it will vanish from this world. And then? Surely it is incredible that ‘we’ should have no further being.

Yes, but the incredible has often happened.

Dread, and to us inscrutable, are the dark ways of dark God.

CHAPTER III. THE SPIRIT OF MAN SURVEYS HIS PAST

THE SPIRIT OF MAN AND HIS MEMBERS

THE CHILDHOOD OF MAN

EDEN AND THE FALL

THE AGE OF THE PROPHETS

THE FAILURE OF THE PROPHETS

THE MODERN AGE

DAWN OF A NEW FAITH

THE CLIMAX OF MAN’S DISEASE

THE SPIRIT OF MAN AND HIS MEMBERS

THAT essence which is indeed the universal spirit of Man, identical in all human individuals, survived the extinction of the transient being which had emerged in those few killed. Gravely he had watched those men and women die. Feeling their pain and sorrow as in a way his own, he yet held himself aloof from it; much as a man may feel the hurt of a cut finger or a barked knuckle and yet carry on with his work.

The spirit of Man did not now for the first time wake. He had all the while been awake and aware in all the two thousand million living individuals that composed his living flesh; and equally in every moment of mankind’s long life-time he had been aware in the living population of the world. And in all the tenuous and fragmentary corporate beings, brief or lasting, that were emergent in human associations, the age-old spirit of Man had always been aware. He knew them not only as individual spirits distinct from himself but also as though they were sentiments and ideas of his own mind; as a man may know the interests and whims, the passions and high purposes, that jostle one another within him.

The spirit of Man confronted the City’s dead saint, and all the saints of all lands. These appeared to him not as something alien and lofty to which he could not attain, but as most truly and inwardly his very self; though often they were confused by doctrines which he, wise with all human wisdom, saw to be false. In spite of their errors, these angelic beings were at heart indeed himself; the more so for their inveterate yearning beyond him, beyond his mere humanity to some spirit purer and more Godlike. For this yearning was his own. And in the beatitude that these rare beings reached in seeming union with their Gods, he too found bliss. But his was a dumb and uninterpreted bliss. Not for him their little myths. To him their joy was rather a foretaste of strange joy still to be found; but never, perhaps, explained. For he knew well that the intelligence of no man, nor even of the essential spirit of Man, could solve high mystery.

The spirit of Man, unlike that lesser, transient spirit emergent in the killed of a certain battle, was not confused and nauseated by the welter of human experience. Perceiving through all men’s sense organs, he fused without effort all their perceptions into a single orderly perception. Thus, fingering the earth through swarms of little human feet, and watching it through hosts of little human eyes, he felt and saw his planet as a variegated sphere of lands and seas, of tropic, temperate and arctic.

And from this globe, on which his multiple body was a sparse and creeping vital dust, he now, as on many other occasions, looked wonderingly outwards through men’s eyes and telescopes to consider his location and prospects among the planets, among the stars and galaxies. ‘When I am full-grown’, he dreamed, ‘and not the fledgeling that I am, and not racked by the distemper which to-day distresses me, perhaps—’ But then the hugeness of the cosmos, beside the minuteness of his own bodily instrument, silenced his imagination. ‘I am so little,’ he murmured, ‘so young, so ignorant and weak; and so distorted by these fierce convulsions of my flesh. What part can such as I play ever among the stars?’

A persistent eagerness for he knew not what, a restlessness to exert some hidden potency that he could not yet conceive, impelled him again and again to look outward at the stars, in a conflict of exaltation and abasement. But in the main his interest was with his immediate fortunes, and so with his little planet and all his tingling multiple flesh, mankind. His flesh? In a way, yes, his multi-cellular flesh. And yet his own unified awareness of his individual members was very different from a man’s obscure consciousness of his body’s cells. For he could at will concentrate his attention on anyone of those minute personalities. They were for him at once persons into whose minds he had access and also parts within his own physique and mentality. For the personal lives of the great host of his members were fused into a single epic theme, which was the groundwork of his own being.

For him the whole ocean of human experience, far from being a chaos, formed a single clear though often self-conflicting pattern of his own self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. To a man at sea-level the waves may seem disorderly; but from an aeroplane he may observe that they are in fact well-ordered ranks, a number of drilled processions and regiments moving in many directions across each other’s tracks, inter-penetrating without losing their identity, reflected here and there from bays and promontories and distant coasts, disturbing each drop of the water with the summation of all their rhythms; but in some regions one wave-train and in some another dominates the rest. So, but with far greater complexity, the mental field composed of all human individuals was seen and felt by the spirit of Man to be traversed by many prevailing trends of thought and purpose, while ephemeral zephyrs flurried now one region and now another of the human sea with fleeting catspaws of passion and of fashion.

In respect, for example, of the many vocations of human beings the great spirit of Man felt innumerable special modes of mentality imposed by circumstance on the common human nature and the personal idiosyncrasies of men and women. Peasants, though infinitely diverse, were mainly peasant-minded, thrifty, patient, rich in country-lore; and superstitious. Wage-slaves in industry mainly lived for their brief hours of leisure. Like seedlings in barren ground their roots were starved; yet many put forth poor gallant starveling blooms of love. The minds of financiers were woven largely of figures and the abstractions of the money-market. They were strangely obtuse to the repercussions of their fiats on the lives of men and women. And yet they too were personal spirits, capable of loving. In physicians’ minds awareness of the human body’s intricacies and manifold disorders bulked overwhelmingly. For sailors the world was mainly water; for miners, tunnels.

There was one mode of experience which the spirit of Man felt as a character of the whole field of human mentality, here faint and there obtrusive, here obsessing the spotlight of consciousness, there a secret but powerful influence in the unwitting depths of the personality. All the little human creatures craved, frankly or under a cloak of revulsion, intimate bodily contact with some other of their kind, either in the normal union of the sexes or in some eccentric manner. The importunacy of this hunger, though rigorously restrained by convention, toned every feeling, every thought, of the spirit of Man’s individual members; toned also his own mentality, with an Adonis-like self-delight, a sweet mysterious, bisexual, hermaphrodite, sensual and spiritual passion, inconceivable to human individuals. Thus the spirit of Man enjoyed the beauty of all well-grown men and women, by perceiving them through the loving eyes of all their lovers. Not only the spiritual communion but also the physical delight of all lovers in one another was his treasure.

But in all this experience of beauty and of love, as in so much of his experience, he was distressfully aware of a widespread malaise and sickness in his flesh. The beauty of his members, exquisite here and there, was for the most part marred, disfigured. Starvation, disease, overstrain, and all kinds of disharmony with the world and with each other, blighted most of them, and oppressed the spirit of Man himself with the jaundice of his flesh. And so, he remembered, it had been for many thousands of years.

In each of his members he, his very self, was ever the spirit that craved understanding, wisdom, community, love, beauty and creativity; but in nearly all the little human creatures, this spirit was eternally frustrated by a pest of stupidities, hates, ugliness, and all manner of betrayals. And everywhere there was fear; not only the urgent fears of war but of death in every form, of incurable diseases, of poverty, of disgrace, of the loss of the beloved. And all the self-regarding fears of human beings were felt by the loftier being that was Man, felt with full poignancy; yet also with detachment. For these minute ephemeral beings, though indeed they were his flesh, were not he, himself. Their unhealthiness was indeed oppressive to him, because it was an unhealthiness in his own body lowering his vitality, and confusing his mind; but the sorrows of those spirits were not in themselves his sorrows. Though he experienced them from within, he experienced them with detachment.

Yet, most strangely, this detachment was not the whole of his feeling toward them. Just because they were all in their diverse ways persons, self-aware and other-aware, his own mere self-concern in their joys and pains was strangely mingled with the respect and compassion, yes and the love, due between all personal beings, no matter how remote from one another in the hierarchy of personality. A man cannot love his little brain-cells, for he has no acquaintance with them, and they are not persons; but the spirit of Man, knowing men inwardly, and knowing them as persons, needs must love them with such love as is their due. He loved them for being at once identical with himself and other than himself; identical in their groping will for the light, other in their littleness, their diversity, their frailty, and their mortality.

Moreover they and he were bound together in a strange mutual dependence. He, without them could have no footing in the world, perhaps no being; and they without him, constantly active within them, would be mere sub-human beasts. Without them, love would be for him inconceivable, for only in their severalty could love be. Yet without him in their hearts they could never love; for they could never be truly aware of one another as spirits, and as inwardly united. Through the unity of himself and his members, fellowship and even loving mutual insight were rhythms which pervaded, though unsurely, the whole human field. Only here and there, of course, did love blossom fully, only among serene or lifelong lovers, and in the few inspired lovers of mankind or of the very spirit of Man himself, or of some imagined God.

Because of love’s unfulfilment in his members, he himself was maimed, paralysed by their discordancy, and confused by their conflicting fantasies.

Particularly in this age of violence the spirit of Man was tormented by the convulsions of his flesh. He was oppressively aware throughout nearly all his peoples of the rending spasm and the harsh fatigue of warfare. Only in the deepest jungle and in the snow-huts of the Arctic were men wholly free from war’s effects. Everywhere else the slaughter and the fear and the strain weighed upon them, even if only as a vague shadow cast upon a normal life. And to some the war brought a black-out darkness of the spirit, though a darkness shot with flashes of much-needed pleasure or the pale light of hoped-for dawn. Everywhere, save among a few born warriors and a few strategists poring over the chess-board of war, and among those who made profit out of the urgency of war’s needs, the spirit of Man felt the unison vibration of men’s yearning for peace; though most were also fearful of what peace might bring. And in many great regions of the human field men, and women also, were crushed and annihilated by war’s fierce impact.

Though to his members the war was a prolonged gloom and misery, to him it seemed a brief though violent contortion of his body, paralysing his mind. He knew it as the climax of a long-suppressed disease. His organs, long discordant, were now divided against themselves in crazy conflict. And though he could not but will victory to the side which was on the whole for the light, and not to the other side, which was blindly astray, yet his sympathies were divided; for on both sides, though in unequal extent, there were men and women who were blunderingly obedient to his will; and on both sides were cancerous and rebellious growths. And every day swarms of his individual members, the precious cells of his flesh, the vessels and instruments of his essential being, suffered destruction or hideous maiming. Everywhere young minds, the only vehicle for a glorious change that had seemed imminent in him, were being squandered. With this huge killing of the young the tone of all his tissues must surely turn predominantly old. And he himself, whose million years were but a childhood, might well become in temper prematurely senile. Indeed, if men’s mutual destruction were not restrained, the race might destroy itself, and he, the spirit of Man, who was still so juvenile, and full of promise of great and glorious change, might prematurely end.

Glorious change! Cutting across all the pervading wave-trains and local flurries of human mentality the spirit of Man felt two strong conflicting wills in every region, in every mind. They thrust against one another as opposing waves meet on a tormented lake with violent pulse and throb of their conflicting rhythms. From one direction the minds of men were all stirred by a yearning for the womb, for easy bliss, for safety, for the familiar order with its known ills and known opportunities. From the other they were moved by a longing for new horizons and greater scope for their vitality, and by discontent with the existing pattern of human life. Indignation fired them because of the misery of their own lives or their fellows’. Here and there they rose even to a passion for the flowering of the human spirit, and therefore for a new-born world which alone could support that flowering. He saw that, though this internecine conflict had racked him always, now, in this tense moment, it was most severe, most urgent. For in some way that was still dark to him this moment of his life was felt as crucial. Something strange, unprecedented, dangerous, was causing a new restlessness, a ferment, throughout his flesh. Was this fever merely the climax of his familiar, long-suppressed disease, or could it be the stress and tumult preluding some vast remaking, some rebirth into a creature more subtle and more vital?

THE CHILDHOOD OF MAN

For so many centuries, for many centuries of millennia, the spirit of Man had been toilfully, painfully clarifying his purpose. At first, how slowly!

He looked back into the deep vista of his past. The historical and prehistorical ages of humanity crowded his t memory. As a man may peer back into his youth, and even into the mists of his infancy, so the spirit of Man reviewed his life. Every phase of his whole past lay open to him. And at the earliest point of all he saw the first of his remembered ages knotted into the dark womb of his subhuman ancestry. Out of that darkness he had sprung to life as a certain individual fully human infant, a male child, the first true human being, offspring of subhuman parents. By whatever mutation of genes he had been created, there he was, the I. one bright individuality in a certain almost human but still subhuman family, the one twinkling star of half-lucidity in the dark world of the subhuman. And he himself was in appearance scarcely distinguishable from his subhuman kin. Only in his half-lucid spirit was he man.

In this forefather of us all the spirit of Man first breathed. And well he remembered how In this his first germ cell he slowly wakened and slowly discovered his uniqueness. For this father Adam of all human beings had painfully to find himself. Loving his subhuman mother for her animal affection, he loathed her for her obtuseness to his human needs. Accepting his brothers and sisters for their companionableness, he despised them for their stupidity. Soon, though the youngest, he became the master of them all. And then in youth and maturity he was the genius, the medicine man, the tyrant, of his subhuman tribe. Timorous yet arrogant, revered but hated, maddened by loneliness, without speech or the support of any human tradition, the first true man was so hampered by his subhuman nurture that to the spirit of Man, looking back on him from a future time, he seemed scarcely human. Yet, though by upbringing a mere subman, ignorant, inarticulate, bewildered, teased by his own unfulfilled humanity, he was by native capacity fully human. A man by nature, but by nurture almost a beast. He accepted the simple customs of the submen, and was content to beat them at their own simple game. But the spirit of Man, reviewing the first man’s life, remembered occasions when, in unfamiliar torment of self-consciousness, he had fluttered impotently, mothlike, against the shut windows of his nature, and how, in his dealings with companions and his sexual mate, he had craved what could never be given, what he himself could never conceive, personal awareness and true love.

How far, how very far, had the spirit of Man travelled, since he was that Adam! Now, at least he knew clearly what his nature was. And that knowledge, in spite of all his errors, was a constant light. Yes! But his members? When he compared his present members with Adam, he saw that by far the most of them were scarcely more lucid. There was a certain rear-gunner, for instance, who, in spite of all the prophets and philosophers through all the ages, knew scarcely better than the first man what his nature needed. Of love he had little more understanding than Adam in his subhuman world; of wisdom, in spite of his smattering of science, rather less; and of creative action, less, far less.

Among Adam’s offspring some had been clear-minded like himself; and among them, as comrades or incestuous mates, human loving had first begun.

When at last that Father Adam had died, when the first truly human self was annihilated, the spirit of Man had disengaged himself from that ephemeral being, and wakened into clearer but still halting insight into his own and Adam’s nature; as, long afterwards, in the death of a certain rear-gunner, a more lucid spirit had awakened. Though still imprisoned within the limits of poor Adam’s knowledge, he was not enslaved, like Adam, to Adam’s greeds and fears. And he was sensitive to all the subtlest features of that bewildered mind’s experience, as Adam himself could never be. And so, already, though darkly and without the winged vehicle of language, he felt, but could not clearly conceive, that his main concern must ever be to know, to love, to make.

The spirit of Man, peering back into the ages of his long infancy, saw Adam’s descendants slowly win mastery over their tribe of submen.

And always the first true men had lived mainly as submen, though ruling those poor half-human cattle; and sometimes, teased by the strange spark within them, men groped for more human living. How dark, how fog-bound had been their minds! And yet, because these his first members had been indeed part-lucid, like all subsequent men, and not wholly unseeing like the submen, already the more sensitive among them were obscurely loyal to him; already he was alive in them, a spark disturbing them; but only with spasmodic intuitions, gleams of understanding, flashes of mutual insight, only with passing miracles of clear love, or wisdom, and short, precarious flights of divine creating. Our earliest human forefathers were no less human inwardly than men to-day, no less aware, intelligent, and apt for love; but they lacked the long treasure of experience yet to be gathered and scrutinized by the thousands of generations. And lacking this, they lacked judgment and clear human purpose. And he too, the spirit of Man, in his far-off infancy, lacked judgment; and though already his purpose was the essential human purpose, it was imprecise, not rigorously conceived, not even constant. For not yet, not in that earliest age of man, could there be, even for the spirit of Man, any clear vision of the way.

The millennia of his infancy succeeded one another as the weeks of a child’s life. His members multiplied. They spread into every land, a sparse, percipient vital dust on Earth’s vast skin. He remembered, as his own hard-won prowess, how they learned and lost and learned again the skills and lore that were the earliest human tradition. Above all he savoured his memories of the first halting speech; recalling how, out of familiar grunts and cries in familiar situations, significance had slowly emerged. He remembered too, as his own most distinctive strokes of insight, the acts of the early geniuses who had first used stones as missiles or as hammers, first shaped a flint, first seized a flaming brand from the bush-fire to tame and use the bright, biting creature; first tamed a dog, a horse; first turned the rolled log into a wheel. He remembered also how they had passed from continent to continent, storm-driven in their canoes. It was he, his very self, too (how he remembered it!), who, through the minds of early medicine men, had first used marks as signs; and he who first led them to symbolize their hungers; and their aspirations by drawings on cave walls and by rhythmic incantations. And he had made them find in the growing subtlety of gesture and of intonation, and later in dance and song, in sculpture and painting, the means to quicken their consciousness of self and other, and of the dread and lovely world. He again it was who teased them with an itch for understanding; so that, in haste for satisfaction, they childishly explained the universe in terms of their own hunting lore or peasant wisdom.

In short it was he who had always (so at least it seemed to him) been the lucid though often misguided spirit in them, forcing them to conceive and then abandon illusion after illusion. Yes, it was he, the spirit of Man, who had done all this; and yet he was nothing but his little members themselves in their highest reach of percipience and integrity, united as a single mind.

EDEN AND THE FALL

Ten thousand centuries after his birth from the womb of the subhuman, in fact in the full bloom of his childhood, when generations of hunters, fishers, pickers of wild fruits and herbs, and the nomadic herdsmen, and finally the settled farmers, had played their parts in weaving the long tapestry of early culture, then, ah then, there came a happy age. The spirit of Man remembered how at that time he was a small, clear, constant flame in every heart, fostered by a strong though but half-conscious custom of reason and friendliness. Men lived in Eden, and in innocence. War was not, and violence between man and man was a private madness only. The families of hunters or herdsmen, and the companies of communal farmers, were each unified by a common purpose and by comradeship in work. Each family was a close-knit crew, fretted no doubt with conflicts and jealousies, but rooted in mutual acceptance; and far more deeply rooted than the ephemeral crew of ship or aeroplane could ever be. And because of this wholesomeness of the social tissue of mankind, this age was the bright phase which, ever after, tradition would enshrine and glorify as the Golden Age. The spirit of Man, looking back in perplexity from this tortuous age of ours, reviewed in memory that long-past candour of his members, and sighed. Crowning that bliss, came the first cities, each set in its own wide cornland, and each the seed-plot of a new elegance and subtlety of mind. And all was weaponless. And lords and kings were only leaders among brothers. All men took care for all.

But presently, through the land-hunger of the swelling cities, and their rivalry in splendour, empires had risen, knit by arms. And often remote barbarian tribes, greedy for wealth and power, had overrun whole civilizations. And all the while the hosts of little farms, once worked by free comradely yeomen, were welded into great estates, where gangs of slaves were forced to labour for the lords who owned them.

The spirit of Man, looking back on this phase in his childhood, saw that this was the time of his first undoing. Some secret poison had crept into his flesh to start the smouldering cancer that was to rack him throughout his life. Before that age, men’s greed had been tempered by their unquestioned custom of brotherhood. Opportunities for mastery had been slight, and censure powerful. But in the new affluence of the cities, new dazzling prizes enticed men. And since all men were spellbound by this glamour, censure of arrogance and self-seeking lost its power; save among slaves, and what matter the censure of slaves? And what authority, anyhow, the masters demanded, was there for censure? Merely the dying prestige of the blind and outworn custom of the tribal age that had passed. Now, new ambitions charmed men. New moralities whispered plausibly in their hearts. Wealth and military power and imperial majesty demanded the allegiance of all men.

The spirit of Man remembered that even he himself had been misled by the new specious values. For in the earlier, golden age his multiple body had been a disorderly swarm of little tribes, but now it was becoming orderly; and so it seemed to him that the order of the whole was worth the sacrifice of some. For order promised new power to his limbs. Organized into great states, and into heirarchies of social classes, his multiple body (he believed) could develop new sensitive organs and new creative skills. In the new cities some men, saved from toil by the toiling masses, could give their whole minds to the problems of the spirit, the problem of man’s nature and his destiny. And so it had seemed even to the spirit of Man himself that the new order opened new reaches of the long way of life; even though hosts of his individual members, born to be persons, were doomed by the new order to become slaves, mere units of the great machine.

Remembering his folly, he cried, ‘What fiend, what power of outer darkness, was it that crept into every tissue of my flesh, and even into my inmost self? Or what inherent weakness in me was it that then undid me?’

He watched the hosts of labourers, their spirits maimed, tilling the stubborn ground with inadequate tools, to keep the rich in affluence; or being driven in gangs to carry great stones for the building of temples for the priests, and palaces and tombs for the kings. In each suffering individual slave of all these millions, generation upon generation, the spirit of Man was himself present. He saw each child denied its human birthright; its promise of human happiness broken by toil and harshness. He was alive, too, in the minds of the privileged, who should have become the peculiar instruments of his own awakening mentality; but in them he found for the most part obsession with luxury or personal glory, and dreams of immortality. He watched them conceive a thousand myths of a life hereafter, and consecrate half their energy and the labour of innumerable slaves to securing comfort for themselves in the other world.

Reviewing those millennia of his late childhood, the spirit of Man saw man’s power constantly increase. Cities grew more splendid, empires vaster, armies more cunningly equipped, handicrafts more apt and lavish. But the cost was the sweat, and often the blood, of innumerable slaves. And to the privileged it seemed natural and right that this should be so, for the comradely custom of the ancient tribes was forgotten. And though between lovers and between friends and in working gangs love might often emerge, the steel threads that knit society were no longer comradeship but power. And again, though the brighter minds were stirred by curiosity about the secret nature of the universe, they still assuaged that itch merely by fantasy, by wishful fantasy. They could not yet see clearly what thinking was, nor what the ceiling of its flight. Neither love nor reason was a constant star to guide.

The spirit of Man recalled how, in that phase of his life, even he himself had strayed from the way which in the Golden Age he had already half-conceived. In this age of slaves and empires the sickness of his flesh had clouded his wit and obscured his feeling. He was like a man whose mind wanders in fever. And the new lure of power was one of the dream visions that confused him. But now and then, here and there, even in this dark phase, he had recovered lucidity; and in the mind of some unheeded prophet or humble slave he had declared, though vainly, some facet of the truth.

THE AGE OF THE PROPHETS

Shifting now the searchlight of his memory to the next movement of his life, the spirit of Man recalled his sudden waking, as it were, from childhood to adolescence.

Tormented by the distress of the swarming workers and the futility of the privileged, and frightened at his own delirium, he, the spirit of Man, had at last put forth the whole strength of his will to wake again and more fully into such percipience as was possible to him, and to wrestle as never before with the problem of his own nature, and of his relation to his members and to the whole universe beyond him.

Through his recent centuries of sickness he had conceived health more clearly. Through participation in a great evil he had more urgently perceived the good. Of the follies that beset his members, some he could easily avoid, others not. Never had he been tempted to suppose that the triumph of one particular empire or potentate or noble caste or priestly class or creed was in itself of any importance. As well might a man be loyal to his right hand against his left. Nor did it ever seem to him desirable or credible that little human individuals should have eternal life. Too well he knew their littleness, their triviality. Too often, indeed in every death, he himself had struck free from the drowning individual spirit and watched it suffer extinction. But in men’s internecine struggles for power and empire he saw the promise of world order, and for himself theocratic dictatorship over all his flesh. Spellbound by this hope, he had overlooked the degradation of his members in slavery. But never again, no never again, would he persuade himself that in their degradation he himself could thrive; or that, while the many suffered, his work could be carried on by an unheeding few.

Something more was also borne in on him. Since all his little members, though so minute and so crippled, were of stature personal, he recognized that in permitting their degradation he had not only harmed his own flesh and dulled his own mentality; he had sinned. And this recognition of his sin had been a new and terrible and enlightening experience for the spirit of Man. He discovered that, in some way not yet clear to him, he was under obligation to respect and foster the life of personal spirits of whatever order. With shame and remorse he confessed to himself, ‘Even if slavery and empire had indeed been the way for my advancement, yet I ought to have rejected them. In accepting them I sinned against something deep within me that was at once my essential self yet also somehow far greater than myself.’

In mental agony he cried, ‘I, the spirit of Man, have sinned against the Spirit’. And in that spontaneous cry he recognized for the first time that he, even he, the spirit of Man, was not a law unto himself, not the ultimate rightful arbiter of his own conduct, not the measure of all things. But what power, what divinity, could it be that thus mastered him?

Looking back to that dread discovery, and that unanswered question, after thousands of years had passed, he remembered well how, when he had suffered this half-enlightenment, he had gazed outward from his planet, through the eyes of Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, and the remote Chinese, and the isolated, and still savage Americans. Through these scattered human eyes he had contemplated the joined hemispheres of night and day. Of the true nature of sun and stars he still knew nothing, but knew that he knew nothing. He knew neither that they were mere balls of fire, nor that they were immense, and engulfed in inconceivable immensity. But in the passion of his repentance it seemed to him that the surrounding dark-bright sphere was alive, was spirit like himself, but greater; and that all its luminaries were flashing eyes, and angry. .

Looking back from our latter day across the gulf of centuries the spirit of Man tasted once more the bitter blood-guilt of his youthful sin, and seemed to see once more the flashing anger of the heavens. And yet surely that sin was expiated. For had he not inwardly lived through and suffered, generation after generation, all the sorrows of the downtrodden? And had not compassion tormented him?

In his childhood’s remorse he had wondered what he could do to wipe out his sin, to overthrow the tyranny that he had permitted, and thereby to heal his sickly flesh and purge his erring will.

At last with innocent hopefulness he had resolved upon a twofold plan. Strengthening his own will with earnest contemplation, and searching with new insight and reverence the groping spirits of his saints, he would more forcibly than ever make his presence felt in the minds of all men and women. And also he would choose out some, the most aware of all his members, to be peculiar vessels of the light. These should become self-consecrated instruments of his new chastened purpose. They should influence all men, both humble and powerful, like master cells controlling the growth of tissues. They should so work upon men’s minds that all men would henceforth gladly dedicate themselves to the great cause that he and they together served. And so tyranny would be forsworn. Thus the cancerous tumours that were destroying his flesh would melt away, and his flesh would be once more wholesome.

This plan he had vigorously executed. With redoubled strength, born of his new passion, he had stirred the minds of all men and women in every land, so that all yearned, though still obscurely, for new life. At the same time he had chosen out his prophets, the many lesser and the few great, to explore the truth, and to preach it. Thus was it that within a span of a few centuries the leading peoples had conceived those high visions which were to hold all men till the age that we call modern.

Looking back at that time of youthful hope across the centuries of disillusion, the spirit of Man smiled and sighed. To suppose that so easily the enemy could be defeated, the fiend exorcized!

But it had been a gallant venture. In land after land prophet after prophet had preached some partial aspect of the truth. And the hearts of the peoples took fire. The prophets had spoken each in the language of his own people, and they had shaped their message according to the concepts of their age. And so, even in their own minds, the truth that each had felt was shot through with error. Accepting the old gods and the old taboos, they strove to purify them in the light of the flame which the spirit of Man had kindled in them. But, being creatures of their age, they could not abandon the old images wholly to the flame.

In the East a young man of royal birth, shielded from the truth by luxury and pomp, went out to find how the common people lived. Penury, disease and sorrow everywhere confronted him. And all men were enslaved to their distresses, as he himself had been enslaved to his pleasures and his royal style. Neither in personal triumph, he discovered, nor in the frustration of cherished desires could men find peace. The spirit of Man moved him to consecrate his life wholly to seeking out the way of peace, the way of reality, for his fellow mortals. Forswearing for ever the pleasures and I glories of the favoured individual triumphing in the world, this prophet set out to free himself wholly from desire, save the one desire, to surrender his will and destroy his individual self utterly and be dissipated into the spirit not of man merely but of the cosmos. For the individual selves of men, with their enthralling pleasures and their torturing woes seemed to him to be phantoms only, moments of the universal sprit, real-seeming to themselves merely because of their strange isolation and privation from the universal. To find his reality in the whole, a man must deny himself utterly, must kill his individuality. So long as he remained in the world, he must use himself wholly in service of his fellows; yet even toward them he must remain always detached, caring at heart only that he and they should travel along their destined ways toward the ultimate dissolution of their finite selves in the universal Spirit.

Other great prophets in the East described more minutely the Way by which alone men might hope to escape from their littleness and their enslavement, the Way of reasonableness, forbearance, mutual respect and self-detachment.

But in the West another, apostle of truth, lover of wisdom, strove above all to clarify men’s thinking, by patient questioning; and to show that the way of reason also must lead a man to stand outside himself, and see himself wholly as one among his fellow mortals. He affirmed that to favour oneself against another was to be false to reason, and that the right goal for each man was to express the essential spirit of Man in the integrity of his own life.

Another, between East and West, schooled in his people’s vision of the one almighty creator, the law-giver, the just and jealous God, most high, most dread and holy, found in his own heart-searching another and a nobler gospel. He saw that all his fellows were deep in sin. They lied and cheated and drove hard bargains. They were heartless toward one another. And above all the rich used their power not to free the poor from poverty but to keep them enslaved. All, all, in a thousand ways, sinned constantly against the spirit. And yet also they loved. And love was their salvation. The prophet in his own daily living had found that in fact men were inevitably members one of another, and that only in mutual insight and friendship could they fulfil themselves. For in love, in which each self-regard is restrained for the other’s sake, each spirit finds also self-increase through joy in the other; and in the community of the lovers love itself is greater than either.

Long ago the lonely Adam of our species had hungered blindly, vainly, for human companionship. Since then, throughout the generations the human creatures had tasted friendship, love, comradeship in work; but without clear perception of its excellence. At last this great prophet, a chosen instrument of the spirit of Man, and supreme lover of his fellows, saw clearly that in this relationship of mutual awareness and cherishing between persons individual human creatures were transformed, dissolved and remade to a finer pattern, and indeed possessed by something greater than themselves. And he affirmed, using inevitably the thought-forms of his people, that this glory residing in the communion of human spirits was in fact God, all-loving, all-knowing and almighty. And because this prophet was indeed inspired by the spirit of Man, and raised above his fellow mortals in the power of love, and because in his day his people were expecting a great leader, he believed that he himself, the Son of Man, was also the unique Son of God, and that he himself must be the leader, not of that people only but of all mankind. And because the spirit of Man, resident in all men’s hearts willed to expiate his own former sin by bearing all men’s suffering, the prophet believed that he, the Son of Man, who conceived himself to be also the Son of God the Almighty Lover, was sent by his divine father to die for men’s salvation.

Other prophets also there had been, great and small, in every inhabited land. Stung by the quickening presence of the spirit of Man within them, but confused by the desires and fantasies of those early cultures, all these prophets had roused men somewhat, yet also entangled them in further fantasies. Always the heart of truth that fired them was the same, the excellence of wisdom, love and creative action. But some preached one aspect and some preached others, and all their gospels were distorted by the longing of individual human beings for immortality for their little selves.

THE FAILURE OF THE PROPHETS

The spirit of Man, looking back across two millennia, and more, to the few centuries of his great venture with the prophets, sighed and smiled. How he had strained with all his strength to quicken his ailing flesh! And for a while, first here, then there, he had succeeded. One people after another, one great limb of his multiple body after another, had been stirred by the quickening current of a great idea. In land after land an inspired and disciplined few had set all men an example of life in service of the spirit. For a while his whole body seemed to be reviving. But the poison still remained in all his tissues, not easily to be overcome. For the very structure of his flesh, the pattern of men’s social relations, had been too long distorted by the disease. The form of society, the organization of men in hierarchies of social classes, was itself largely a product of the poison, so that its structure favoured the disease rather than health. How clearly he now saw it!

True, under the influence of the prophets new social forms and new ways of living were here and there attempted. Men grouped themselves into churches or retired from the world into monasteries, or became solitary hermits, seeking salvation for their individual spirits, or dedicating themselves in selfless adoration to the God whom the prophet of their people had proclaimed to them. Here and there, some few even set out bravely to change the evil forms of men’s relationships and found a society that could indeed express the spirit in daily living. But the ancient hierarchies, both social and ecclesiastical, remained powerful. True, century by century the new healthy but tender social tissues proliferated; until at last some became powerful organs. Here and there they even overmastered the ancient order. But the greater they became the more they themselves were infected by the inveterate poison. For the rising tide of spiritual energy which had carried forward the prophets and their first devoted disciples, was not powerful enough to undermine the strongholds of the enemy; and presently the tide began to ebb, leaving behind it a desiccated wrack of institutions which formerly had been the living instruments of the great revival. The spirit of Man remembered how he had struggled with failing strength to stimulate his members once more while they were already coming to terms with the old bad order. He had struggled in vain. Here and there, now and again, throughout the centuries, the smouldering fire had sprung once more into flame. Some prophet had arisen, some new movement had started in the hearts of men, inspired either by a passing recovery of the old fervour or by a revulsion against new baseness. But soon the flame died down; the new institutions were assimilated to the old. The new organs were poisoned.

Again and again, century after century, in land after land there was some resurgence of the spirit; but with ever-decreasing power. These revivals were but the rearguard waves counter-attacking for the retreating tide.

The spirit of Man, looking back at this time from the age that we call modern, swept the searching beam of his memory over the whole of this period in which, though spiritual passion was mainly ebbing, material power was increasing. Through all that time the great mass of his little members were in fact, though not in theory, slaves. Without the toil of the many neither the luxury of the few nor the structure of society itself could exist. Occasionally some group of the workers, savage with adversity, would dare to rebel. But immediately the whole power of society would be brought against them; and either by violence or by the tyranny of the established myths working in their own clouded minds, the bewildered commonalty would be quelled.

Yet all the while the fortunate were becoming on the whole more prosperous, and even more refined.

As a sick man may remember the wanderings of his own sick mind, so the spirit of Man remembered his faintness and his mental confusion at that time. He remembered too how he had once more gathered his strength for a new kind of attempt to purge his ailing flesh of poison. His members had become more and more spellbound by the established ways of life and of thought. They judged everything by the authority of some ancient prophet, as revealed to them in some distorting scripture or the falsified tradition of some priesthood. By now all such authority, though vital formerly, had everywhere become a support for the old bad forms of life.

The spirit of Man therefore determined so to strengthen the individuality of his members that they would question all authority. They should become more aware of their own personality and less servile to the group. So he set about firing them with a new hunger for fulness of individual life, not hereafter but here on earth.

In the West, quickened by him, they now saw with new eyes, heard with new ears, and relished their world exquisitely. He inspired them, too, with a passion to inquire into the hidden nature of things. Under the renewed influence of that ancient people whose prophets had cared most for wisdom, they now conceived a new loyalty to clear reasoning, a new desire for sincerity in all thinking. By stirring them thus the spirit of Man intended to show them that this road also, like the road of love, which had proved too difficult for them, must, if followed faithfully, lead them out of the prison of self-absorption, and free them to seek the one true goal, the fulfilment of mankind in wisdom, love and creativity.

He believed that little by little their new learning would strip away from their minds all the childish and wishful fantasies of personal immortality which had so long ensnared them into endless efforts to secure, by faith or ritual or conventional good works, happiness for their too cherished individual spirits after death. At last, he hoped, they would be forced to recognize their littleness; and then, bereft of heir dream of immortality, deprived of their ‘souls’, they would find their only true salvation in joyful corporate living with their fellow mortals. They would at last consecrate themselves without reserve, as he himself had done, to the fulfilling of the spirit in Man.

Re hoped, moreover, that in another way also the loss of their delusions would free them. For these fantasies of an after-life were the opium by which the rulers had spell-bound the common people in all lands, promising them happiness hereafter if they would be obedient to church and state; and, if they rebelled, damnation. Deprived of this drug, they would surely no longer acquiesce in tyranny.

It had seemed to the spirit of Man also that the vast powers promised to his members by science, their new magic, would enable the rulers at last to free the enslaved masses from the necessity of toil. No longer would there be any need at all, he told himself, for the many to be hungry, sickly, ignorant and scarcely human, in order that the few might have the leisure and affluence for carrying on the great adventure of Man. For surely, by the wise use of this new magic, men would speedily abolish hunger, sickness, ignorance and all those natural ills that hitherto prevented men from being fully human.

So he had planned, but the issue was very different from his expectation.

True, in the region where his recent inspiration had been strongest, some of the more intelligent or the least enslaved to the old fantasies, or to the craving for personal power, had indeed done as he had intended. With a new zest for understanding they had set about exploring the mysteries of nature, the movements of planets and stars and falling stones, the impact of chemical substances on one another, the workings of the human body and the secret of its relationship to the mind. Some of them conceived the body as a machine controlled by the soul; but later as a machine self-regulated, with mind as a mere consequence of its activity. The soul was by more and more of them dismissed as an unnecessary hypothesis.

The spirit of Man was surprised and rather amused by their thorough divorcing of matter and mind, and their belief that matter alone was fully real; but he was on the whole well satisfied, for now surely, weaned from fantasies of immortality, they would be less distracted from their proper goal.

But things happened otherwise. Their whole morality had been sanctioned, falsely, by the prospect of reward and punishment hereafter, in eternal bliss or eternal damnation. And so, when they could no longer believe themselves immortal, they were disinclined to burden themselves with righteousness. Slowly but surely the fibres which bound men together in mutual responsibility began to be corroded and broken.

There had been one, however, God-intoxicated like the ancient prophets, but brought to God by the path of intellect, who ill his own life and teaching expressed but also distorted the inspiration of the spirit of Man. He conceived the Whole I as alone fully real, and as both spirit and matter. And the r Whole for him was God. The little human creatures he saw as phantoms, abstractions from the indissoluble reality of the Whole. Their self-will, he declared, sprang from their blindness to the Whole, to the inexpressible beauty of the Whole. He himself was possessed by a passion of self-oblivious righteousness through his devotion to the Whole; and he preached to his troubled fellow mortals that they should seek salvation by rising beyond their individuality and their self-love, to conceive the intellectual love of God.

The spirit of Man had been pleased with this philosopher-prophet. Surely men must now see that not only the gospel of love, which they accepted and constantly betrayed, but also sheer reason demanded that they should rise above the pettiness of self-regard, and live in self-transcending community.

Very few of his members were persuaded. The triumph of reason among them took a different turn from that which the spirit of Man had intended. They had won their new magic of physical science by analysing things into their component parts and studying the behaviour of the parts. Now, therefore, those few among them who cared to think about these mysteries, hoping to understand and control human nature as they understood and controlled the behaviour of matter, set about analysing man. And they were persuaded that a man was indeed a mechanism of appetite and repulsion and calculating self-interest, which itself was an expression of the massed activity of minute physical units. All love, they affirmed, was at heart physical lust, and all idealism self-deception. Right and wrong were fantasies. The only intelligent course for a man was the calculated gratification of whatever cravings impelled him. Few of the little human creatures behaved frankly according to this principle, but its hold upon them steadily increased.

THE MODERN AGE

Meanwhile men had begun in earnest to use their new magic for changing the whole condition of human living; but not in the manner that the spirit of Man had intended. A few devoted pioneers did indeed work according to his inspiration. Hoping simply to open the way for mankind’s fuller living, they invented innumerable devices for clothing men better, housing them more comfortably, feeding them more amply, and for ridding them of sickness, and of slavery to toil. They won power from the stored energies of the primeval forests. They harnessed steam for the transmission of that power to their machines. From the strange little magic that the ancients had known in amber they developed a mightier magic for their telegraph, telephone, radio and all our thousand electrical ingenuities. With their new rapid transport and communication they brought the ends of the earth together; so that, as never before, the fortunes of men in one land affected the inhabitants of every land.

This material progress had at first delighted the spirit of Man. ‘Soon, soon,’ he had cried, ‘with increased nourishment my whole flesh will be healthy; with increased understanding of one another and their common world the peoples will feel themselves akin, and the rival classes will be bound together in mutual insight and comradeship.’

But very soon it was clear that this was not to happen. The application of science had begun in the fortunate lands where science itself had first begun. It was controlled not by the will of mankind as a whole but by individuals seeking private profit. And so, in order that the machines might be fed and profits piled up, men and women, and children also, were forced to live as cattle, and as uncared-for cattle. Their lives were wholly occupied with toil, with hunger, with fear of their masters, and with such soiled impoverished love as they could snatch. Their limbs and brains, at birth as human as any other’s, were crushed by evil conditions down into subhumanity. Meanwhile the craftsmen, heirs of ancient skills, were ousted by the machines, to be ground henceforth between the millstones of starvation and lethal toil. The upshot in those pioneering lands was not, as the spirit of Man had intended, fuller life for all men. Instead, wherever the new magic spread, there was for the workers degradation of body and of mind, and for the few fortunate, power and luxury such as kings and princes had never known.

The spirit of Man had watched the new magic spread its dire effects over all the world. Little by little its new cheap swarming products were carried into every land, and country after country became a workshop for making even more of them. Everywhere the traditional ways of life began to fade, or retreated into the few remaining fastnesses, like snow in spring-time, retreating into the mountains. The’ old cultures loosened their grip on men’s minds. The prestige of money and personal power and speed and machinery and machine-made luxury ousted the ancient values.

Meanwhile the workshops of the world competed with one another. And because the peoples, though their need was great, lived mostly in penury, and had little money for purchasing, there were more goods than could be sold. And so profits failed, factories closed, workers were dismissed into deeper penury. And so less goods than ever could be bought, and the whole mad world that the new magic had made circled and spiralled towards disaster, like a spinning-top when its energy is spent.

One method alone seemed able to whip the flagging top into new life. The states, already desperately competing for markets and commercial empires, must pay the industrial masters to arm them ever more heavily. Then factories would open again and workers be once more paid wages. This was accordingly done. To the spirit of Man it soon became clear that, since the jealous states lived in constant dread of one another’s armaments, any spark would be enough to touch off those vast explosives in apocalyptic war. And then his multiple body would be hideously tom and tortured, and he himself, the constant and lucid spirit in all men, might well be engulfed in delirium, might even be for ever annihilated.

Once more his plans had been utterly defeated, whether by some innate weakness in the little cells of his flesh or by some alien power that had sown poison and inveterate disease in him far back in his childhood.

He could no longer hope for success by merely trying once more to revitalize his members by making his presence in them felt more powerfully. A few here and there might respond, but the mass of them were by now too deeply diseased for heroic love, or heroic reason, or heroic righteousness.

Fainting under the toxic influence of his disease, yet stung into desperate vitality by the prospect of still more cruel disaster, the spirit of Man earnestly searched for some device by which he might yet save himself.

Clearly the disease was kept in being against all his efforts by the poisoned and deformed tradition and social structure which moulded all men’s behaviour and crippled all their spirits. But how could he prevail upon his members to change the whole form of their society if their minds were no longer vital enough to take mass action for the sake of righteousness? Anxiously debating with himself, he wondered whether, if not love, nor reason, then perhaps hate and cold self-interest could rouse men to destroy the vampire that sucked the blood of all, the cancer that was annexing to its own corpulent and hideous flesh the energies of his multiple body.

DAWN OF A NEW FAITH

The spirit of Man set out to stir the minds of the oppressed with indignation against the money power that gripped them. He also chose out forerunning prophets to expose the folly of measuring human worth in terms of money, and allowing the blind movements of money to control the fate of human beings. And then he swayed them with a prophet of a new kind, one who could speak in the language of science, one who regarded men in their massed behaviour as simply economic animals, one who concealed his rage against all oppressors under a manner of studied objectivity. Inspired by the spirit of Man, but, like all the prophets, confused by his own idiosyncrasy and his own fortune, the new prophet conceived his own pattern of truth and error. He affirmed that the whole life of mankind was a predictable causal sequence; that the rise and fall of peoples and social classes, the incidence of wars and revolutions, the sway of religions and all ideals over the minds of men, were the summed efforts of men’s economic motives and their economic environment. He declared, moreover, that all history was the story of the struggle of rival social classes for power; that the present master class had now fulfilled its function as the pioneer of mechanism; that the modes of economic production upheld by them were now quite inadequate and already breaking up; that circumstances were forcing men to set up a planned economy controlled by the workers; and that the workers, long repressed, must now of necessity burst their chains, overthrow the masters, and establish a new world-order, planned through and through for human welfare.

While the spirit of Man was watching the slow spread of the new gospel, the expected war seized mankind. And under the stress of war the old order was so strained that in one great region of the world it broke. Another prophet had arisen, a believer in the new faith, a man apt in resolute action, and impelled (so at first it seemed to the spirit of Man) chiefly by righteous hate against the rulers for killing his brother and oppressing the whole people. The prophet’s followers, an inspired and self-disciplined few, set the people a high example of self-dedication, and won their allegiance. In a sudden storm the old order based on money was in this land quite destroyed, and a new order was founded.

With wild hope, but also with misgiving, the spirit of Man had watched the birth-throes of this new society. For in all his lifetime there had been no event like this. Never before had a great idea not merely won men’s hearts but embodied itself successfully in a new kind of social structure over half a continent. Could this great event be indeed the beginning of his body’s return to health? The statesman-prophet and his followers defended their new society with fierce devotion. They did not shrink from destroying many thousands of human beings who were hostile to the revolution. Little by little the seedling that they had precariously planted struck firm roots. The new state grew strong.

The spirit of Man, remembering the failure of his ancient prophet of love, now laughed at his own youthful simplicity. ‘My sickness’, he said, ‘had gone too far to be cured by noble feelings and gentle words, and even by the martyrdom of a great prophet. Not by the slow spread of love from heart to heart could men’s poisoned associations be changed but only by a sudden explosion of rage disciplined under cold intellect, only by a great act of violence in a scientifically conceived and executed revolution. Nothing but the surgeon’s knife could save me.’

But even as he made this affirmation a chill crept over him. For his nature, after all, was love, not hate. And not in ruthless discipline but only in the glad and free self-expression of all his members could the spirit of Man properly thrive.

He brooded more intently on the great event, and peered more closely into the minds of the prophet and his followers. Presently he recognized that, after all, the real motive that had launched the revolution and defended the new state had been not merely hate of the oppressor but the new passion of comradeship among the oppressed; who for the sake of their fellow workers, their wives, husbands, children and sweethearts, had given themselves in the common cause. The prophet-statesman himself, though stung to hate, was moved first and most constantly by love, by love of his murdered brother and of the oppressed workers. The whole vast revolution, which had seemed at first the expression of sheer hate, was in fact a mighty gesture of outraged love, and worthy of love’s great prophet himself, who long ago had died to save men.

Very strange it seemed to the spirit of Man that this should be so. ‘Despairing of love’, he said, ‘I tried to move my members by the force of sheer primitive rage and hate, yet after all it is love that has moved them and stung them to this hate.’ But when he considered how rebels and recalcitrants had been shot, or exiled and slave-driven to death, how critics had been silenced, witnesses intimidated, and accused men browbeaten into false confession, and above all how the minds of the young had been drilled into acceptance of the new gospel, the chill of doubt returned. He reminded himself that, if the revolutionaries had not been ruthless in defence of the new state, it would certainly have been destroyed, and that the founding of this new people’s state had been by far the most hopeful thing in the modern world. But also he remembered that his members, though minute and so misshapen, were none the less persons, and that even the defenders of the revolution ought to treat even the enemies of the revolution always as persons, never as mere vermin.

Meanwhile the men of money and all their followers throughout the world had done their utmost to destroy the revolutionary state. And many sincere believers in the gospel of love, outraged by the violence of the revolutionaries, had sided with money against the new order.

Presently in the more distressed of the money-states themselves the minds of men began to assume a new temper, a blind rage against the disastrous power of money, and against the falsity of the commercial mind. The spirit of Man saw that he himself was partly responsible for this blind rage, for he had done his utmost to infuriate men against the old order. But he had not seen where mere blind rage would lead them.

THE CLIMAX OF MAN’S DISEASE

A false prophet, born of this exasperation, but willing to use the power of the old order for his own ambitious aims, began to cast his spell over a great and distressed people. In him the true fire of the spirit was subtly blended with heats of personal resentment against a society that had scorned him. With passion he felt that individual men and women should be instruments for the expression of something deeper, greater, than themselves; but his impoverished and crooked heart could not conceive that thing save in terms of his own warped nature. And his warped truth was the very gospel that his tormented people craved. They had been defeated in war; he promised them world-conquest. They were deeply unsure of themselves; he told them they were by nature the supreme race whom all others ought to obey. They had suffered grievously through the breakdown of their money-bound society; he exorcised the spell of money, and promised them security, prosperity, plenitude of wealth. They had been paralysed by unemployment; he set industry going again by directing it to the making of weapons. They had been emasculated by the evaporation of all ideals; he gave them a thing to live and die for, the mystic race, of which, he said, all men of the true blood were vessels. They had been sickened by decades of licentious self-seeking; he commanded them to abandon individuality and conform in thought and feeling and conduct wholly to the pattern set them by the race, through its supreme mouthpiece, himself. They had learned to despise the cult of logic-chopping reason; he exorted them to think with the blood. They had been embittered by the cant of the enfeebled religion of love; he preached not love but hate, not gentleness but might and cruelty.

The spirit of Man had watched this great people clutch in their despair at the phantoms which the false prophet evoked for their undoing. He watched the young men, the young women, become intoxicated alike by what was true and what was false in this savage gospel. He was present in every young mind that tortured itself willingly away from the natural flowering of its personality, so as to live according to the crazy precepts of the false prophet’s false religion. He watched the massed thousands, uniformed, marching behind their flaming banners; the children carefully hardened to brutality by bullying, and prepared for torturing men by being encouraged to torment cats and dogs. He felt the precious individual cells of his multiple flesh, that were so much more than cells, since they were capable of personality, denatured by the poison; so that henceforth a whole generation of them must constitute a tumour in his body until death should remove them.

Not only in this great people but in others also the poison had conquered. And indeed in every people throughout the world it was at work, here as a suppressed but chronic disease, there threatening disaster. With grief and despair the spirit of Man recognized that even among those newborn peoples where the true revolution had triumphed and founded the new order, the poison was still obscurely at work, though restrained by the influence of the new social order.

At last, when the false prophet had fully armed his people, he had struck with all his force, helped by formidable allies, at those peoples where the enfeebled powers of money ruled, and the disheartened followers of the true spirit were paralysed with their own past failures. Once more the whole human race was thrown into convulsion. It had seemed to the spirit of Man in the first phase of this paroxysm that the issue might well be fatal, that he who had survived a million years might now, though still in early youth, be destroyed. For though mankind, his flesh, would surely recover even from this greatest war, he, the spirit of Man, might well be killed. And then his animal body, tempered no longer by its soul of intelligence and love, would live on mechanically, until some later and more crazy war should finally destroy it.

THIRD INTERLUDE

WINDOWS

Strange how your eyes reveal you!

Some spirits are best made known through brow or lips, or the chiselling of the nose, or the head’s carriage, or the hand’s proportions, or the gait and rhythm of the whole body. But you stand always at the open windows of your eyes, looking at people passing in that thronged street, the world. Intent and self-oblivious, you do not peep through curtains; you lean frankly forward on the sill, where all, can see you, in the sunlight. (Or is that brightness all your own?) Every passer-by can see you, but one who has watched for decades sees you best.

But eyes? How can those globes of gristle, those camera lenses, speak the soul? They were not made for communication, but just for watching. Ancestral women watched the flying spindle, and the potter’s wheel. Ancestral men aimed the flint arrow. Ancestral beasts looked for hand-holds on the trees, judged the ripeness of the golden fruit, caught with the eye’s mere corner the tell-tale movement of long grass, or gauged the leap. And much longer ago, long before colour dawned in any mind, ages before even shape was clearly seen, far lowlier creatures, eyed only with blisters on light-sensitive skin, groped their way. And earlier still the wholly-eyeless vaguely felt the contrast of light and shade falling on the body’s surface.

Those eyes of yours, those well-proportioned windows through which an inner beauty sees and is seen, are the flower of all that history. But of how much more besides! For as reptilian claws fathered the ape’s hands, and these the human artful instruments of making and of gesture, so eyes have found new powers. Through all the human generations they have seen beauty, and they have expressed the spirit. Wide open with interest, half-closed with languor or contempt, staring with hate or sorrow, narrowed for peering at far horizons, crow’s-footed at the corners with frequent smiling, prone to sidelong glancing in shrewdness or in shy enticement, veiled or bright with love, eyes have slowly, little by little though the ages of human living, created their own language.

What wonder, then, that some clear spirits reveal themselves most surely in the unwitting speech of eyes!

CHAPTER IV. THE SPIRIT OF MAN CONSIDERS HIS PLIGHT

THE SPIRIT OF MAN AND THE SPIRIT

THE DARK OTHER

THE REAR-GUNNER AGAIN

DISEASED CHRYSALIS

THE END OF THE WAR

THE SPIRIT OF MAN AND THE SPIRIT

RACKED by the pains of war and the many social distresses of his multiple flesh, and by the failure of all his efforts to recover health, the spirit of Man fell faint with despair. His will for life and for the fuller expression of his nature faded into lassitude. The death-will tempted him. Why should he continue to struggle, enticed by a goal beyond his powers? Why not sink quietly into nothingness? His flesh had been at once too frail and too rebellious. He could neither strengthen it for the spirit’s service nor curb it from licentiousness. Homo Sapiens, it seemed, was a species of inadequate design, a mere pterodactyl of the spirit, and no true bird, perfected for flight. A pterodactyl? Rather a strayed moth, doomed to flutter vainly against prison windows till death should still its restlessness.

Then why, why continue the torment of effort? What need, what duty could compel him? No need at all he recognized in himself but for rest, and sleep, and death.

Yet in perplexity he found that even in this ultimate fatigue and disillusionment he could not, or he must not, surrender. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that he, the spirit of Man, was pledged in some obscure way to some greater, some universal Spirit that was indeed his own true essence, yet more purely spirit than he could ever be. And so he must, he must, school himself to become the faithful instrument of that greater, which was at once the unfulfilled promise of his own nature, and yet also (how could this be?) the infinity that had created him by its own limiting, and that had upheld him in every moment of his being. To this, his source and his goal, he must be true. Must? Why must? He could not say. And yet it was certain that he must.

Seeking new strength, the spirit of Man now looked once more outward from his planet toward the stars. For those great fires, those sparks, perhaps, from some still greater, hidden fire, had latterly become for him a symbol reminding him insistently of his littleness, disturbing him with their dark hint of some ulterior greatness. Now therefore he must contemplate them afresh.

In this our moment of Man’s crisis, the astronomers, those eyes through which he studied the heavens, had mostly been drawn aside from their true function into kinds of work urgent for warfare. But a few were left; and these he now impelled with a new wonder, a new will to see their familiar star-fields no longer as fields of mere data for analysis but as enigmatic features of celestial reality; so that through their telescopes and through their brooding minds he too might for a while contemplate the stars, and strive to see himself in true relationship with them. From his grain of rock, with its hot core of iron, and its film of greenery and ocean, he gazed outward through the deeper ocean of the air. There swung the moon, too prematurely senile to bear life; and there the sun, father of all vital growth in Earth, life’s mother. The sun, that one-time god, was after all nothing but a large blaze, a very average, perhaps rather elderly star, a not inexhaustible fountain of vital energy; which, however, might any day explode and devour its little brood of worlds. The spirit of Man scrutinized those worlds, but could make little of them. If some day he could reach to them with feelers of human intelligence, what would he find? Were they perhaps other fertile orbs with presiding spirits like himself, and multiple flesh, alien to his? Or were they just blank worlds of sun-melted rock or of eternal ice, or spheres of inhospitable desert or boundless ocean, with no vital air?

Impatient of his ignorance, he peered beyond the outermost planet, probing the constellations. Seen through mankind’s telescopes, the pin-pricked blackness became a blackness thick-laid with dust of diamonds, with here and there a larger brilliant or some great dazzling gem. But even the least was a star, a sun. Immobile, fixed, inert they seemed; but well he knew how, squadron upon squadron, the great suns flowed and voyaged. And all of them together (how well he knew it) formed a vast whirl of sparks, each solitary as a prisoner, goaled by sheer distance from its neighbours. But he reminded himself that the whole galaxy, could he have viewed it from, outside, would have seemed a close-knit organism, compact of streaming cells, free-roaming yet obedient to the whole’s nature. Many such seeming organisms, such galaxies, he could indeed see far afield through the directed instruments of his astronomers. And hosts of others, he knew, voyaged beyond human vision, like airborne gulls beyond the horizon, or circling over the antipodean ocean. The spirit of Man seemed almost to know that the whole physical cosmos was itself one organism, with galaxies for members.

And so? And so? Thought surrendered to sheer wonder. Was he, the great spirit of Man, no more, then, than a blood-corpuscle or little atom in the universal organism? Or was he, perhaps, the vital germ of the whole cosmical egg? Was all the rest a lifeless yoke, awaiting his magic? For a moment self-pride swelled him; but at once he recollected that even so, even if by miracle he was the sole vital germ of the whole cosmos, yet not by its own sole power could the germ create the fledgeling, still less could it produce unaided the grown eagle. Only the whole concourse of events could do so. For the eagle’s making there must indeed be the germ; but the yoke also, and the mother’s care, the prey, the flight-enabling air, and all the past, the whole ancestry, even to primitive life in the early ocean, even to the planets’ birth and the primeval nebula and the surmised inscrutable creative act from which all sprang. Little enough the germ’s mere spark of creativity! And he, the half-lucid spirit of earth’s ruling species, even if he dared for a moment to think of himself as the germ of the cosmic egg, he must surely feel not self-glory but humility; and dread, lest, directing his spark falsely, he should frustrate the potency of the whole cosmos, and so betray the Spirit.

And if after all he was one of a great host of spirits in worlds sprinkled throughout the cosmos? This was the more exciting thought. A longing for comradeship with his own kind stirred in him. If he could but co-operate with such beings across the light-years and the parsecs of distance! It was, of course, impossible. Each world-spirit must be loyal to his own vision of the Spirit, in utter isolation from his fellows.

The Spirit! At least he must with his whole will affirm his ultimate loyalty to something other than himself, something perhaps darkly glimpsed beyond the galaxies, but brilliantly, imperiously present within him, as the essence of himself yet infinitely more than himself. In himself, it was the will to be aware, to love, to make. Beyond himself, perhaps it was the will of a greater than himself to fulfil the whole cosmos in wisdom, love and creativity.

THE DARK OTHER

In the days of Man’s infancy his groping members had worshipped gods of their own invention, beings that for him had no plausibility, because they conformed only to the nature of his individual members, not to his own composite nature. But latterly some, though they had at last forsworn all cosmical myths, remained still gropingly loyal to the Spirit in their hearts, until they came to conceive a new divinity, none other than himself, the very spirit of Man.

He judged that in a way they were right; for indeed he himself was the passion of intelligence, love and creative will that smouldered, though deep buried, in every human heart.

But now at last the spirit of Man began to see that this dawning new religion of his members was but a half-truth, and full of danger. For if he, the spirit of Man, was in any manner worshipful, it must be not because he was man but because he was spirit; because, like his little members themselves, his essence was intelligence, love and creative will. Those who worshipped him were indeed true to the Spirit in that they gave allegiance to intelligence, love and creative will; but in circumscribing their allegiance to himself, to the imperfect common spirit of their species, they were false to the universal Spirit, and so to him also, and to their own true nature.

The spirit of Man could not but yearn towards a divinity beyond himself, towards the universal Spirit that was his own essence, yet infinitely more than himself. But also with painful perplexity he recognized in himself an obscure yearning toward something beyond even the universal and lucid Spirit of intelligence, love and creative action; a yearning toward some alien Other, inscrutable, terrible, yet in some strange dread way most beautiful. The great spirit of Man, who had so slowly, so toilfully and painfully, awakened through the ages, now seemed at last to feel blindly the presence of that Other, stripped of all the false images that men had vainly conceived to reveal him. Knowing at least what the Other was not, the spirit of Man seemed to know in a way what he in fact was; yet knew of his actual nature nothing save his bare and terrible otherness. He was not Ra nor Siva nor Chronos nor Jaweh nor Jesus. Nor yet (the thought startled him with bewilderment, almost with vertigo) could it be said for certain even that the dark Other was identical with the Spirit, that he was the perfection of all intelligence, love and creative will. For these, which for the spirit of Man and for all finite spirits of every rank must needs be sacred, might perhaps in the Other be transcended.

Considering thus, the spirit of Man, even in the agony of his body’s conflict, cried out to the Other, ‘Oh, Thou, Thou, Thou!’ but then fell dumb. Presently in his heart he whispered, ‘How should I, his small and lowly creature, address him; how make contact with him? Stars and galaxies declare him, atoms and electrons manifest him. Every insect, every sparrow, every wild flower proves him. Men in all their ways, both good and evil, fatally express him. And I, though loyal utterly to the clear Spirit that is my essence, salute also, and compulsively, him, the Other. And yet I must for ever doubt whether these two are in fact several or identical. Spirit I humbly know, but what is Thou? Dazzling darkness in the eyes! Shattering silence!’

THE REAR-GUNNER AGAIN

Convinced of his impotence in regard to the Other, the spirit of Man turned once more to consider the Spirit, the more familiar, more intelligible divinity, which so insistently and unmistakably claimed his service.

But could that be called a divinity which, it might well be, was no personal consciousness beyond his own personality but sheerly an imperious ideal claiming his allegiance, perhaps quite irrationally? Was this ideal implanted in him by the Other, to be the law of his being, though not, perhaps, of the Other’s own being at all? He could not know. But with no trace of doubt he knew that for him, as for his little personal members, the way of the Spirit was the way of life. Throughout the swarm of the galaxies, all personal beings of whatever rank of lucidity must of their very nature give allegiance to the Spirit, or else be false to the clear light within them. For all, the way of life must ever be the way of sensitive intelligence, of loving, and of creating. But the modes of these must strangely vary and conflict. Arid to the lowlier creatures the more lucid expressions of the Spirit must often seem perverse. The spirit of Man, recalling the long pilgrimage of his growth, saw that for him the Spirit had indeed taken on many a new guise since he had first so darkly conceived it in the time when he was Father Adam.

In that earliest moment of his life there had been no difference between himself and the self of his one sole member in its most quickened state. But now, because his members were very many, there was a gulf between himself and each one of them. They were so diverse. Even in their expressions of the Spirit they were for ever in conflict; for each was enraptured with some one mode of the Spirit’s manifestation, some one direction or manner of intelligence, or of loving, or of creating. But he, since he comprised all their diversity, participated equally in all their conflicting achievements. He was the identity in all. Moreover his members were so ephemeral; and he perennial; they, so fettered to the particular brief flowering of their individual selves; he, so remote from that enthralment.

It was difficult, therefore, for him to keep aware of the minute but vivid and concrete lives of his members. He was in danger of ignoring them as a man ignores the particular cells of his brain. But since they were indeed personal, and the whole ground of his own personality, to lose touch with them would be to lose himself and die; and to betray the Spirit. Particularly in this moment of his life he must guard against this danger. For recently all his concern had inevitably been with the great world-influences, and with the need for planning and control of the relations of peoples and of social classes. In his absorption in this immense need, he, the very spirit of Man, was once more forgetting the personal lives of men and women.

With earnest sympathy, even with reverence, the spirit of Man now relived the little lives of now one and now another of his myriad members, the living and the dead; or dwelt upon crucial moments of those lives. And amongst others he chose out the rear-gunner in the aeroplane where a moth had fluttered. With fresh wonder and humility he rethought the young man’s thoughts high over the narrow sea. He immersed himself in the obscurity and confusion of the rear-gunner’s mind, as though plunging into a turbid and a murky stream. He felt himself pushed this way and that by currents of unconscious impulse, by childhood fears and hungers, long forgotten. He was seduced by ignorance and false reasoning into innumerable follies and trivial purposes. But also, with a shock of pity he experienced the young man’s hesitant loyalty toward a spirit that he could only obscurely conceive. It was a longing hopelessly led astray by the conventional cynicism of his pose. Through the rear-gunner’s eyes he saw the Spirit not as the clear will for love and reason and creating but as a mere dim and formless light, percolating down through the muddy water. Strange that a being so lacking in clarity should yet, in spite of the torment of his tangled nature and the fetters that society had fastened on him, be able to give his cherished life unfalteringly for so confused and dim a vision of the Spirit. Like the imprisoned moth he was trapped in the great machine, nay he was part of the machine; and yet, unlike the moth, he disciplined himself finally to courage and to comradeship in the crew, in fact to the Spirit, though shamefacedly, almost unwittingly.

What could the great spirit of Man himself do more? Within the wider limits of his own ignorance and frailty, he too could only falteringly serve the Spirit. Moreover what was he but the spiritual unity of all his members? He was greater than each merely because he was the best in all, made one in some occult telepathic union. And yet he wondered. Was he not more truly one than many? Then were his members after all mere figments of his own essential and single being? Were they in fact not real individual spirits at all but mere experiences of his own, though received through a host of different viewpoints? But no! That rear-gunner, in being less than the consciousness of all mankind, in being circumscribed by immense ignorance and inwardly warped by the impact of a faulty society, must surely have been something more positive than a passing thought of the spirit of Man himself, must have been a real though a brief individual; and a gallant individual too, capable of a heroism never to be called for, seemingly, from the great spirit of Man himself. For never, seemingly, would the spirit of Man be called upon to die for that greater Spirit that claimed his loyalty, since he himself was the sole known vessel of that Spirit. A mother carrying her child in her own body fights at once for her child’s life and for her own; and he, fighting for that greater Spirit which he alone could bring forth, was fighting also for his own survival. But the rear-gunner had given his life that something other than himself should survive. And the City’s dead saint had lived to serve those who were far less admirable than herself. Adoring the Spirit, she had for the Spirit’s sake given herself ungrudgingly.

DISEASED CHRYSALIS

Once more the spirit of Man turned to consider the plight of his multiple body as a whole. He could no longer doubt that every organ, every tissue, of his flesh was now in dissolution. His whole substance was turning to fluid for some strange transformation. His whole form was changing like a cloud. What was to be the issue?

Again, as so often before, he earnestly questioned whether this dread transmutation was indeed the final and lethal paroxysm of his corroding disease, which had entered him far back in his childhood, or whether it could after all be a glorious though torturing rebirth. Oh, rebirth it might be, must be! Hitherto, stage by imperceptible stage, the browsing caterpillar had quietly grown; but now the whole creature was disintegrating, for death or fuller life, for the true imago or for some dread parasitic growth. The dying primitive creature had been after all little more than a formless crowd of cells, a mere polyp or sponge, a confusion of free-ranging and undisciplined individuals, organic for local or vocational ends only, in families, tribes, nations, mysteries and social classes. The total life of the race was the issue merely of blind forces, impinging on the little creatures of the swarm, and swaying them through their inveterate self-seeking. But now at last it seemed that he, the spirit of Man, so long almost powerless to control his flesh, might some day come into his own, and reign as the directive mind and will of all humanity. And then, wise from all the mistakes of his past, he would so inspire his members that they would work together freely to turn the earth into a paradise, where, generation by generation, men should fulfil their nature joyfully and ever more gloriously as instruments of the Spirit.

As the war’s end drew near, the spirit of Man saw more starkly that nothing could save him but a new and lucid will for the Spirit, widespread among the peoples. The upstart empires, those cancers in his flesh, must indeed be destroyed; else there could be no health in his body, and his mind must fail; but more, far more, was needed than this desperate surgery. For the poison had spread throughout his blood-stream, and into every organ of his body.

And so in the very year of the military victory the spirit of Man was forced to doubt whether the victors, though professed champions of the Spirit, had any clear conception of what they would do with their victory. Their concern, it seemed, was increasingly with mere power, with the organization of the world to maintain themselves in power. Some wished only to restore the old sponge structure in which they themselves had formerly prospered. Others planned indeed a close-knit world-organism, but one in which every man and woman should be held in place by steel threads not of comradeship but of regulations, a world in which the Spirit would be as fettered as in the cancerous empires themselves.

And now the spirit of Man himself began to doubt what precisely it was that he needed of his members. In the past it had been easy to see that the need was for them to curb and transcend their wild individuality, that they should be disciplined in the common cause, that the old loose tissues of his flesh should be broken down ‘and reshaped into a tighter structure. But no sooner did this end begin to be in sight, no sooner did the victors foresee themselves as controllers of the world, than they themselves became the instruments of a new danger. No sooner did they grasp the need for discipline and world-planning, than they began to forget the purpose of discipline and the goal of planning. Most forgot it, but not all. The saint, killed in the City, and thousands of other humble men and women scattered up and down the world, did not forget.

All the while that the spirit of Man was forcing himself to seek a clearer view of his predicament, his flesh continued to be tormented by the huge convulsion of war. He was in the plight of one who, in a high fever and on the verge of delirium, knows that nothing can save him but a desperate, an almost impossible effort to keep a cool head, and think out his cure, and administer it with precision.

The opposing peoples were now strained to the last extremity, the one side to stave off ruin, the other to win a quick and thorough victory. Great fleets carried great armies to land on the enemy beaches. Great air fleets destroyed city after city. The armies projected themselves in clattering machines and with the fury of innumerable guns across the meadows and the wasted cornfields, and through the wrecked villages. The retreating enemy blasted and burned and tortured. Everywhere the little members of his body accepted discipline and danger, and suffered all manner of pains and mutilations and deaths in the simple hope that by their sacrifice others would be saved, and a happier world made possible. Their sensitive flesh was torn and mangled by the impersonal blast of bombs or the lustful and devilish cruelty of their fellow mortals. They were subjected to scientifically devised torture, or simply destroyed in thousands as vermin, in the cheapest possible manner; or else, as free citizens and fighters, they choked under the sea, or fell headlong from the sky, or were crushed under falling masonry, or burnt to shrunken faggots of charred flesh and blackened bone.

All this physical agony the spirit of Man himself suffered, for their flesh was his flesh. And even their mental terror of extinction he knew, since he resided in them all. Yet in the midst of this distress, and in spite of it, and because of it, he saw more clearly than ever the truth about himself.

‘Strange and most subtle’, he told himself, even in his agony, ’is the mutual dependence of these little beings and myself. Unless they are wholly disciplined to my will I am torn and crippled by inner conflict; yet if these cells of my body degenerate from true personality and become indeed mere cells, mere cog-wheels, mere de-spirited units, utterly obedient to the spiritless organization of the whole, I myself, my true self, must faint into nonentity. For I have no being whatever save as the identity of spirit in each and all of my members. There is only one forlorn hope for me, that they should of their own free will, and not merely by compulsion, discipline themselves for the common good and for the Spirit’s sake. But even this is not enough. While disciplining themselves, they must also contrive to be uncompromisingly loyal each to his own individuality and uniqueness.’

The spirit of Man saw what it was that he must now do. His inspiration of his members must be made more precise. It was useless merely to exhort them vaguely to renewed loyalty to the Spirit. He must declare explicitly just what the Spirit demanded of them in this moment of history.

He therefore set about once more clarifying his own thoughts and his inspiration of his members; even now on, the threshold of his delirium. At the very time when men were at last falteringly beginning to carry out his earlier precept, when the more socially-aware of them were propagating successfully a will for social discipline and world- planning, he must bestir himself desparately to inspire the more spiritually-conscious with a new tenderness for individuality and for sincere personal awareness. To many of his members, and even to his past self, it had seemed that these two inspirations were opposed to one another; yet in fact each of them cried out for the other for its completion.

The spirit of Man accordingly spoke his new message in innumerable hearts in all the war-tortured and state-ridden lands. ‘Remember the great prophet of Love,’ he told them. ‘Slowly you have begun to outgrow the limitations of his teaching, but at the same time you have forgotten his truth. He persuaded you no doubt to believe questionable doctrines, declaring that men were immortal and that God was their loving father, possibilities that lie far beyond human under- standing. But he also made some of you see that all men are members one of another, and that only in the active love of neighbours, of comrades, can man find salvation. Therefore, be tender, oh always tender, to the individual human being. Plan, you must; for your world is in disorder. Control, you must, and in your present emergency you must not shrink from using even bombs and tanks and machine-guns, for some of the Spirit’s enemies are very powerful, and too far perverted to accept any other persuasion. And sometimes, when you yourselves have power, you rightly feel that to be less than firm would be a betrayal. But oh, let firmness be eternally married to tenderness. Even the fallen but still dangerous enemy is human, and a warped instrument of the Spirit. And the little nobody, working in a factory and coming home tired or starved of joy, claims infinite tenderness; even when in his stupidity or blind self-interest he resists benevolent planning. And let it be written across the minds of all rulers in letters of undying fire that unless your planning gives to each little nobody wings and freedom to use them, you plan in vain.’

Millions upon millions responded vaguely to the new inspiration, for the peoples were being harassed by a swarm of tyrannies, great and small, evil or benevolent. They longed as never before for freedom. They were sick to death of discipline, of commands, of forms, of identity numbers and regulations. They desired only to be done with the war, and go back to Civvy Street and a good job, and to have enough money to amuse themselves. Moreover those who had the power of money longed to be free of restrictions on their self-seeking. And so it turned out that this vast craving for freedom was only here and there a will freely to serve the Spirit in personal integrity. It was in the main a desperate thirst to have a good time without responsibility for others.

The spirit of Man’s new-old inspiration was vaguely welcomed by most men, both by people of goodwill, and also by those who willed to restore the old licentious freedom. And these assiduously perverted the new gospel for their own convenience. And so the socially loyal, who demanded planning, condemned the new longing for freedom as a trick of society’s enemies. Very few welcomed it as the completion of their own social gospel.

Once more the spirit of Man’s inspiration of his members failed, perhaps partly through the weakness and confusion of his new prophets, but mostly through the irresistible impetus of social forces which were grinding mankind fatally into the harsh and lethal forms of the world-wide ant-state.

THE END OF THE WAR

The bells clang for victory. The trumpets blast and the flags wave. Troops march in procession through every city. Crowds cheer. They cheer for a golden but a phantom future. The past is but a pain in the memory. None but the bereaved and the mutilated greatly care for it.

The bells clang for victory, for peace, for the passing of life’s long black-out, for the return to Civvy Street, for the hell of a good time coming; and for the triumph (so the victors say) of the Spirit over the powers of evil that so nearly conquered the planet.

But the spirit of Man does not greatly rejoice; for though one disaster has been gallantly prevented, another is in the offing. One paroxysm of his disease passes, but the disease is not cured. The chrysalis is astir for the great rebirth, but the moth is still imprisoned, and the parasite snugly housed in every cell of his fever-weakened flesh.

The spirit of Man, though hoping still, confronts the future with misgiving.

FOURTH INTERLUDE

TIME AND ETERNITY

Today! Tomorrow!

Today comprises the whole present universe of infinite detail and inconceivable extent. Today is fields and houses and the huge sky. Today human creatures are being conceived, are born, are loving, hating, dying. Electrons and protons in their myriads are everywhere busily performing their unimaginable antics. Planets attend their suns. Galaxies drift and whirl.

All this today comprises, and with all this the whole past is pastly present in today; Queen Victoria, Babylon, the ice ages, the condensing of the stars in the primeval nebula, and the initial inconceivable explosion of creativity.

But tomorrow? It is a wall of impenetrable fog, out of which anything may come.

When we remember or discover the past, we confront something that is what it is, eternally though pastly. It is such and such, and not otherwise. Our view of it may indeed be false, but it, in itself, is what in fact it was, however darkly it is now veiled. No fiat, not even an Almighty’s, can make the past be other than in fact it was, and eternally is. God himself, if such there be, cannot expunge for me the deeds I now regret.

But the future? It is not veiled, it is nothing. It has still to be created. We ourselves, choosing this course rather than that, must playa part in creating it. Even though we ourselves, perhaps, are but expressions of the whole living past at work within us, yet we, such as we are, are makers of future events that today are not. Today the future actuality is nothing whatever but one or other of the infinite host of possibilities now latent in the present. Or perhaps (for how can we know?) not even latent in the present, but utterly unique and indeterminate.

Yesterday is palpably there, there, just behind me; but receding deeper and deeper into the past, as I live onward along the sequence of the new todays.

But tomorrow?

Yesterday I had porridge and toast for breakfast, as on the day before, and the day before that. Yesterday, according to instruction I caught a train to Preston. I had set my plans so as to reach the station in good time. And because a thousand other strands of planning had been minutely co-ordinated, at the appointed minute the engine driver, who had been waiting in readiness for the guard’s whistle and his waving flag, moved levers. The train crept forward. In that train I found myself sitting opposite a lovely stranger, not according to instruction, nor as the result of any plan. Soon we were talking, looking into one another’s eyes; talking not of love but of nursing and hospitals and the wished-for planned society, and of her Christian God, and of a future life, and of eternity. Before we met, before our two minds struck light from each other, our conversation had no existence anywhere. But then in a fleeting present we began creating it. And now the universe is eternally the richer because of it, since irrevocably the past now holds it, now preserves in a receding yesterday that unexpected, that brief and never-to-be-repeated, warmth and brightness.

With her I have no past but yesterday, and no future; but with you, my best known and loved, I have deep roots in the past, and flowers too, and the future.

Some fifteen thousand yesterdays ago there lies a day when you were a little girl with arms like sticks and a bright cascade of hair. In a green silk frock you came through a door, warmed your hands at the fire, and looked at me for a moment. And now, so real that moment seems, that it might be yesterday! For that particular fraction of the eternal reality is always queerly accessible to me, though fifteen thousand yesterdays ago.

But tomorrow?

Tomorrow, shall I, as it has been planned, catch the bus for Chester? Or shall I miss it? Or will it refuse me, or never start on its journey? Or having absorbed me will it collide with a hearse or a menagerie van? Will the freed lions and tigers chase people along the street? Shall I feel their huge claws in my flesh and smell their breath, and know that for me at least there is no tomorrow? Or perhaps some hidden disease is ready to spring on me tonight? Or a bomb? Or will the laws of nature suddenly change, so that stones leap from the earth, houses become soaring pillars of rubble and dust, and the sea rushes into the sky? Or will the sky itself be drawn aside like a curtain, revealing God on his throne, his accusing finger pointing precisely at abject me? Or at a certain moment of tomorrow will everything simply end? Will there be just nothing any more, no future at all?

I cannot answer these questions with certainty. No man can answer them with certainty. And yet if I were to bet a million pounds to a penny that things will go on, and half a million that they will go on fundamentally much as before, few would call me rash.

Yesterday the events which are now so vividly present and actual were in the main inscrutable and not yet determined. And therefore yesterday they had, we say, no being. And yet, and yet — there are moments when we vaguely sense that, just as the past is eternally real, though pastly, so the future also is eternally what in fact it will be, though for a while futurely to the ever-advancing present. We move forward, and the fog recedes before us, revealing a universe continuous with the present universe, and one which, we irresistibly feel, was there all the while, awaiting us. Could we but by some magic or infra-red illumination pierce the fog-wall, we should see the future universe as in fact it is. So at least we sometimes irresistibly feel. My conversation with that lovely and serious travelling companion — was it not always there, awaiting me, knit irrevocably into the future as it is now irrevocably knit into the past? When I was born, was not that journey awaiting me?

Through the interplay of external causation and my own freely choosing nature, was not that happy encounter already a feature of the eternal fact, though futurely? Was it not equally so when the Saxons first landed on this island, and when the island itself took shape, and when the sun gave birth?

And fifteen thousand yesterdays ago, when you and I first looked at each other, was not our future even then just what in fact it has been? It was of course related to us futurely, and was therefore inaccessible... but was it not all the while there, lying in wait for us? One does not suppose that the centre of the earth, because it is inaccessible, is therefore blankly nothing, until someone shall burrow down to it.

And indeed I cannot even be sure that in that moment of our first meeting the future was, in very truth, wholly inaccessible. For in looking into your eyes I did (how I remember it!) have a strange, a startling experience, long since dismissed as fantasy, yet unforgettable. It was as though your eyes were for me windows, and as though curtains were drawn aside, revealing momentarily a wide, an unexpected and unexplored prospect, a view obscure with distance, but none the less an unmistakable prevision of our common destiny. I could not, of course, see it clearly; for it was fleeting, and I was a boy and simple. But I saw, or I seemed to see, what now I recognize as the very thing that has befallen us, the thing that has taken so long to grow, and is only now in these last years flowering. Today our hair is greying, our faces show the years. We can no longer do as once we did. But the flower has opened. And strangely it is the very flower that once I glimpsed even before the seed was sown.

Fantasy, sheer fantasy? Perhaps! But when we think of time and of eternity, intelligence reels. The shrewdest questions that we can ask about them are perhaps falsely shaped, being but flutterings of the still unfledged human mentality.

The initial creative act that blasted this cosmos into being may, or may not (or neither), be in eternity co-real with today, and with the last faint warmth of the last dying star.

CHAPTER V. MAN’S FUTURE

THE SPIRIT OF MAN HAS A VISION

HE TRIES TO REMEMBER THE VISION

THE VASTNESS AND THE HORROR

THE MOTH BREAKS FROM THE CHRYSALIS

SIX HUMAN WORLDS

THE END OF MAN

THE SPIRIT OF MAN HAS A VISION

THE bells! The bells clang for victory. They strike all hearts to thankfulness, and many to joy; but some to cruel memory of past promise, now never to be fulfilled. And some, in the intolerable conflict of hope and new foreboding, are gripped to silence. These, these only, are the eyes of tile spirit of Man, facing the fog-wall.

Heedless of the bells and the trumpets, the processions and the flags and the cheers, the spirit of Man stares at the blank future, with hope but with new foreboding. He presses with all his eyes against the impenetrable fog. So fixedly is he nailed to the blankness of the future that the present sweeps past him unobserved.

He reels into a strange trance. For a pregnant instant, between one beat and the next beat of the crashing bands, he is plucked seemingly quite out of time into eternity, and dropped back headlong upon the advancing wave-crest of the present, enriched with huge experience. For between one blast and the next blast of the trumpets the spirit of Man sees all his future æons, and his senility and death. He sees also the lifetimes of a thousand worlds, and the death-time of the cosmos. He sees the Spirit, the true Spirit, full grown at last but crippled, groping still toward the dark Other. But whether she is taken by her beloved, he cannot know.

HE TRIES TO REMEMBER THE VISION

The bells clang on. The crowds in every metropolis still cheer. But the spirit of Man is heedless, rapt in the fading memory of that huge instant.

What was it that seized him? Could he but recapture the lost vision! He remembers only that it was the opening up of an immensity never conceived by man, an immensity that was at once (how insignificant and irritating these threadbare words!) most terrible and yet most beautiful, in a manner humanly unimaginable. And embraced within this vastness, like a cell in a living body, like a little word in a great song, a little tremor in a great orchestration, a flicker of being, long past and yet eternal, there lived and died our universe of space and time, and many-worlded galaxies, and of the many-mannered spirit. Chilled and dismayed by the confused memory of that immensity, the spirit of Man yet longs to be engulfed in it and suffused with it, as the hart the water-brooks. For that vastness, alien beyond all conception, was also (how could this be?) strangely familiar, intimate even. That instant on the remotest peak of being was also (but how, how could this be?) a startling homecoming.

The remotest peak of being? No! The spirit of Man, scrutinizing his future memory, recognizes that he cannot claim to have been there; for even in that soaring instant the presence of the inaccessible Other overhung him. Not to the summit had his assumption borne him, but to a lowly spur, a foothill only. Very far above, cloud-veiled, more guessed than seen, the stark horn itself rose, forbidding, inaccessible to all creatures, even to the spirit of Man. Yet unreasonably lovely. And far below, below the ravines and hanging forests, down in a vast plain, a little stream lay like a faint scribble, one among many, glimpsed through the haze. And this little stream, one of many, the spirit of Man recognized as his own home-universe of space and time, and of many-worlded galaxies.

To us, in our more intimate and temporal experience, our universe is instinct with life and change; yet from the viewpoint of eternity’s foothills it was fixed, complete, with all its surging æons equally present.

Seeking a nearer view, the spirit of Man had swooped downward with hawk-like scrutiny. Poised over our universe, he saw in more detail all the long reaches of our river of time laid out before him, from the stream’s initial wellspring in eternity to its final stagnation in the bog of eternal changelessness.

THE VASTNESS AND THE HORROR

All this he had seen in the great instant. But now, dropped back once more into time, and swept forward on the wavecrest of the present, he tries eagerly but with uncertain success to recapture his late vision.

He dimly recalls that within one stretch of rapids in the stream’s middle reaches a single fixed swirl of ripples was seen to be his own whole life in time. There, half-seen, half-guessed, lay his first waking in Father Adam. And there too his death. And in between lay all his ages, that for us are past or future. There, the gleaming ripple of his childhood’s golden age, there the age of his prophets, there the onset of science. And there also he saw, much as a man on his death-bed may remember an incident of his childhood, the moment of history which we call present. There the bells clanged for victory. There, or but a tremor earlier, the rear-gunner in a certain aeroplane felt a moth’s chance kiss. There, an obscure saint in a city was destroyed, and also leapt to bliss. Today, after that instant of eternity how strange it seems to the spirit of Man that, before his illumination, this our present moment should have appeared as the crux of man’s whole career, perhaps of the whole cosmos! Searching his fading memory of the eternal view, he now affirms that the truth is in fact far otherwise. This moment that for us is present is not, alas, the moment of his rebirth from the chrysalis to become the finished moth. Our struggle is a mere premonitory birthpang, one of many. Not till long ages afterwards, so his memory of the eternal view affirms, does the imago ripen fully and emerge.

Probing his memory to recover the times that for us are future, the spirit of Man sees only the general form of human history. Of the little span that most concerns us, and him also today, the lifetime awaiting men now living, he remembers almost nothing. Even of the next few centuries he recovers only a shadowy and deceptive image. So very long is the æon of his whole career that even a millennium, unless it happens to be in some way unique or momentous in the eternal view, may be as indistinguishable as to us a day among a thousand others far back in childhood. The events of a century or a decade may be quite indiscernible. No doubt here and there some trivial and fleeting incident, such as a casual war or abortive social upheaval, may freakishly obtrude itself in his future memory; but in general such brief events present themselves to him only if they were specially striking or significant.

The war which bulks so largely in all our lives, and in his own life today, his memory does detect; but he recovers little more of our time than the bare outline of the war’s occurrence, and its issue. It was a minute though vivid incident in a far lengthier phase, namely the great world-revolution, which, though today its achievement seems to us almost at hand, lies in fact very far away in the middle distance of his immense lifetime. In the light of his future memory, if memory it is, he now regards today with sobered judgment. For in the decades and centuries to come he seems to see war upon war, each more destructive than the last. Century by century ever more shattering explosives were flung from country to enemy country, from continent to continent, half-circling the planet. Poison gases and the bacteria of disease were in due course freely used. With subatomic power men contrived to blast their cities instantaneously into rubble, to tumble mountains into populous valleys, to sink whole countries under the invading ocean. Nay worse, with new-found psychical techniques enemy governments attacked one another’s populations, driving whole peoples crazy, so that millions turned berserk, slaughtering one another aimlessly in the streets, murdering their own children, flinging themselves off high places, or into the sea.

These maniac deeds the spirit of Man remembers only in a shadowy way, and with the aloofness of one remembering a dream. For he recalls them through his instant of exaltation in eternity, as old unhappy far-off things, needful somehow for the eternal glory, and themselves thereby redeemed.

But when he turns from his remote vision to the actual past, and recalls in intolerable detail the horror of our own war, and of the scientific, the diabolic torturing that preceded it, and behind that all the savagery of men throughout his long experience, the illimitable vistas of man-made horror, past and future, appall him. ‘What present benefit,’ he cries, ‘what remote Utopia or far-off divine event, can recompense the brief personal beings of my flesh for such agony and such curtailment of their fleeting lives?’ And now, quickened by his memory of past distress, his imagination feels the full weight of future pain and sorrow. The tom flesh, the crippled minds, the hopes frustrated, the loves cut short! Inexorably they pile up, century by century, age by age. And with shame and despair the spirit of Man recognizes that much of this huge weight of misery must burden his own conscience. For again and again he himself through ignorance or obtuseness had inspired his members falsely, to their destruction.

‘Surely’, he cries, ‘it would have been better if I had never been conceived on this planet, if terrestrial life had remained for ever subhuman. For, though nature, red in tooth and claw, is brutish, man is devilish.’

But no sooner has this cry escaped him, than he reminds himself that it was but half the truth, nay less. For how tender toward one another could his members be, and how aspiring, when their nature was not poisoned by adverse circumstance! From Father Adam to the last of all human ‘generations men had struggled constantly in their confused, conflicting ways, to be true to the spirit in them. And in some ages, past or to come, whole peoples had reached the very threshold of a gentler, richer humanity.

But all, if he must believe his vision, must in the end be vain. Never in all the future æons, it seems, is man to fulfil his promise: The moth, trembling vainly on the brink of flight must in the end be crushed.

Dismay at that remote disaster weighs down upon the spirit of Man.

But then, like one who has stepped into a deep bog or quicksand, and throws himself on his back for security on the firm ground, the spirit of Man desperately reverts to his high vision of eternity. For the ice peak still strangely holds him. Darkly he knows, or seems to know, that the suffering of a thousand worlds and countless universes is somehow transfigured in eternity. But how? But how? He cannot know. Even on eternity’s foothills he could not know. And now he knows only, as he knew then, but then more clearly, that in eternity all is indeed transfigured. He knows also, with dread but with acceptance, that not only for his little members but for him also the future holds, along with joys and half-awaking, a thousand pains, and in the end annihilation. Yet, knowing this, he also knows in virtue of his instant of eternity, that the agony and sorrow and annihilation will not have been in vain. But how, but how, can it be not in vain?

THE MOTH BREAKS FROM THE CHRYSALIS

Impatient lest the vision should escape him wholly before he can grasp its import, the spirit of Man scrutinizes it more closely, passing forward along the darkling corridors of his future memory to reach once more and to comprehend more clearly his remembered death and that which followed after, not seemingly to him but to some other, awakened in his death.

He sees that even during the recurrent wars of the near future the new texture of his multiple body was still slowly forming. More and more, mankind was becoming an organism, though still tom and warped by the repeated paroxysms of the disease. An organism, or a mere mechanism? It was a system knit for power, not for the spirit. Alike in peace and in war the lives of his little members were gripped ever more strictly in the organic mesh, a steel mesh alas not of comradeship but of the mechanism which their science had spawned. And so they were knit more and more closely together as the flesh of a single world-wide creature, though a creature still prone to internecine conflicts. And though, through men’s diabolic inventiveness, the horrors of warfare became ever more destructive, they became also briefer and rarer. For the unity of the world-organism painfully but triumphantly reasserted itself, gripping its rebellious organs and all its little individual cells ever more firmly in the steel mesh. At last there was no possibility of any further rebellion. Wars ceased. All the tissues of the imago, it seemed, were fully formed and integrated; but by mechanism and domination only, not in the spirit.

Something was very wrong. The formed creature could not burst the chrysalis. The moth could not free its wings and fly into the new world that awaited it. Humanity, though it had possessed itself of all the resources of its planet, and though the whole life of mankind was fully organized for power, was paralysed. The spirit of Man was paralysed in all his members.

Peering with difficulty into that dreary phase of his career, he sees that though all human beings were at last well grown and prosperous, and all exercised their particular skills fully in the common enterprise, and all had a sufficiency of easy pleasures, yet in none was there clear awareness of the spirit. Reason was fettered, love stifled, and there was no creating. All men performed by rote the activities that were allotted to them, and none, or very few, asked what was the purpose of it all. The tradition of the spirit was lost. Men lived in an endless sleep-walk.

As the centuries and the millennia passed, and the moth, Man, still lay paralysed in the chrysalis, a subtle decay secretly began to lay hold of all its tissues. For the creature could not live its living death for ever without corruption.

The spirit of Man remembers how, when he himself was already faint with the sluggishness of his members, and fearful of annihilation, he put forth a passionate fiat to give light to the clouded minds of men, so that here and there a few were disturbed in their somnambulism. Little by little, these few, groping century by century, and often martyred for their recalcitrance to the great mechanism, re-created the lost wisdom, which the forgotten prophets had long ago conceived, and overlaid with fiction.

It seems to the spirit of Man that for a long age the new awakening made little progress, for it conflicted with the all-powerful mechanism of the world, the steel organic mesh of the world-organism. But little by little, under his desperate goading, the wished-for miracle happened. Century by century, the whole world’s temper changed. The struggle between the still somnolent minds and the awakened minds was world-wide and desperate, the one side armed with the scientific lore and all the mechanical resources of the world, the other armed only with love of the spirit.

At last the masses of men were all smouldering with the new fire, and the great change happened. Control of the world passed suddenly from the somnolent to the awakened. The spirit of Man came at last into his own. The finished creature, Man, burst its bonds. The moth, emerging from the close world of the chrysalis into the great air, spread frail, cramped wings to harden in the sunlight of an ampler world. It was a perfected, yet an imperfect creature; fashioned through and through for life in a new element, yet through and through scarred by the grub’s old disease. For the past ages of hate and fear had left their mark on the very texture of human mentality. Men were no longer slaves, but their minds were moulded to a culture fashioned by men in chains. The moth was formed and free, but weak and sickly. Ever and again its individual members yearned for the lost freedom of the chrysalis, or for the licentious freedom of the disease.

But little by little, so it seems to the spirit of Man, the wings were smoothed out and set, the new tissues strengthened. One by one the old horror’s traces were expunged. Mechanism, formerly man’s tyrant, became his slave, science his willing servant. The earth was transformed from an aimless generator of power into a fitting home for free men and women. And with the change even power itself increased, since free men could foster it better than slaves. And so, with the lavish use of power, coastlines were altered, lost continents lifted from the ocean bed, deserts made fertile, the arctic warmed, cities rebuilt to nobler plans. All men lived in modest affluence, and all had access to all lands in their own vehicles of flight. The children grew up to freedom and friendliness. The young men were indeed sons of the morning. And all citizens, being friends in a common work, spent themselves gladly in the thousand diverse enterprises of the new world. The old, peaceful with fruition, rested in life’s evening, and awaited death as the tired toiler sleep. For in every mind the spirit of Man was present as the final judge of action and the final consolation in all sorrow.

Century after century, age after age, men continued to embellish their planet and explore the universe with the far-reaching eyes of science. Age after age they developed the human spirit into an efflorescence of art, personal awareness and metaphysical imagination. Ever exploring, they came now and then on strange new veins of spiritual ore; they broke suddenly into new worlds of beauty or personal being or abstract truth.

SIX HUMAN WORLDS

But as time passed there was less and less opening for further venture. Increasingly the generations were forced to repeat the achievements of their forerunners. The whole of life became a gracious ritual, but still a ritual. The instrument was perfected, but the music, though exquisite, was repetitive of the ancient themes. The moth’s wings were ripe for flight, but they could only quiver monotonously and ineffectively. The creature seemingly had not the instinct to take wing.

The spirit of Man recalls how, though in full possession of all his members, he was perplexed and impotent. For life is movement, and adventure; and where they are not, comes a creeping death. It is spirit’s very nature, at whatever level of its being, in all its finite forms, to strive for enrichment through intercourse with other spirit, and in that enrichment to be reborn. Without this soaring, comes the creeping death. The spirit of Man knew well that, unless he could break the spell of this happy but barren ritual, mankind must sink once more into an age-long sleep-walk, even as the ants and bees. And so once more he chose out prophets to rouse men into a new discontent.

In answer to this new call the human race once more bestirred itself. Violently once more the moth’s wings trembled for flight. And that it might at last succeed, men now gave their main energies to perfecting human nature for sensitivity, intelligence, loving and creating.

In due season a race of nobler human beings peopled the earth. They saw with finer and more colourful vision, heard and smelt with more than the dog’s discrimination. Their touching was as delicate as the bee’s. With far-reaching and deep-probing intelligence they swept aside the primitive concepts of their forefathers and fashioned a whole new universe of ideas, adequate to their new experience. Their own nature, too, was limpid to them. And in the subtlety of their self-knowledge and their awareness of each other the spirit of Man became more vital and more lucid. The new human race applied its wisdom to the exploration of earth’s sister planets, in search not of power but of comradeship. In accordance with the exhortation of their prophets, they looked for strange intelligences, alien in idiosyncrasy but identical in underlying spirituality. With these they intended to create a far-ranging community of worlds. But all their gallant exploration revealed merely that man was alone in the solar system. Neither on sultry Venus, where the air could not support life, nor on cold, arid Mars, where life was but a patchwork of lowly vegetation, nor on torrid Mercury nor great Jupiter, nor on any other planet did men find intelligence. The spirit of Man, recalling that chill discovery through his future memory, savours once more the loneliness that assailed him. Looking outward from the remotest planet, men wondered whether perhaps throughout all the starry blackness there lay nowhere at all any peopled sphere but their own dear earth.

But the new mankind would not accept defeat. They set about the daring task of producing, even from human stock, races adapted to live in those desert planets. For such races, living in such different worlds, would surely be so far different in body and mind from terrestrial man that together the peopled planets would indeed create a new diversity and depth of spiritual insight and community.

This was accordingly attempted. And after many centuries of millennia the solar system became a commonwealth of I minded worlds, each occupied by a race fitted to its peculiar conditions, and unviable elsewhere. And the spirit of Man was the spirit identical in those diverse populations. Thus Venus, habitable now in virtue of the oxygen suspired by a specially bred vegetation, was the kindly home of a humanity fashioned to her sultry climate. Mars, now gifted with an enriched atmosphere, supported deep-chested giants who leapt and climbed like gibbons in their little world. On massive Jupiter and ringed Saturn pygmies with mighty thighs, and feet like pedestals, held themselves with difficulty upright against the tug and pressure of their planet, and fought the eternal cold with power from fractured atoms. Even on far Uranus small fat-protected human creatures lived in underground cities. Only the two outermost planets remained uncolonized.

Each of the six worlds developed through the centuries its own appropriate way of life, its own art and wisdom. Each was sufficient to itself for life’s necessities, but all shared the luxuries and the art and wisdom of all. Conflict of will between the worlds was not unknown; as when the Uranians demanded that the Terrestrials should equip their Antarctic Continent to be a vast settlement for visiting Uranians, who could live only in the most frigid terrestrial climate. But since all these races, though so diverse, were loyal to the spirit of Man, identical in them all, conflict, though often distressing, was an enrichment.

It seems to the spirit of Man, exploring his future memory, that for a million years or more the races of the solar planets perfected their societies and embellished their cultures. But in the end they too, like the original terrestrial mankind, reached stability, and entered upon a long phase of ritual living.

The spirit of Man, now the mature spirit of six diverse worlds, foresaw once more the creeping death that stagnation promised. Once more he gazed outward toward the stars. All the psychical insight of the six worlds had failed to make contact by any psychic technique with any intelligence beyond the confines of the solar system. Though men were always seemingly upon the brink of some great revolutionary advancement in telepathic skill, they could never achieve it. And physical contact with the few planets of the nearer stars seemed impossible, so vast was the ocean of interstellar space. Every attempt at communication, physical or psychical, proved utterly barren.

For æons the six worlds continued their happy but stereotyped living. Since every age was identical with every previous age, there was less and less for the quick intelligence to do. And so it sank little by little into coma. Science became a traditional mystery, art a dextrous play on age-old conventions, personal relations a matter not of mutual awareness but of formal manners; religion, once a crusade, became merely a comfortable and seemly ritual.

The spirit of Man, like a spectator at a boring play, or a traveller fallen into a snowdrift and struggling against the drowsiness that preludes death, wrestled with the oncoming floods of sleep.

Meanwhile, for thousands and millions of terrestrial years the six worlds continued their frustrated living. The day grew longer. The moon, swinging outward from her parent, showed a smaller disc to Earth’s inhabitants; then, creeping slowly inwards age by age, our satellite grew to a huge portent in the sky; until at last, under the strain of the planet’s gravitation, it broke into a million fragments to form a bright Saturnian ring, which men saw henceforth as a dazzling sunlit arch across the whole night sky. Meanwhile the sun himself, squandering his energy, displayed a smaller disc.

And still the six world-peoples, like six sleep-walkers dancing hand in hand, performed their endless ritual of living.

Æon upon æon this continued. The forms of the constellations changed. One by one the older stars were dimmed, and then extinguished. And one by one those that were still in their prime reached that crisis which so many stars must in their season suffer. Blazing one by one with fantastic effulgence for a few weeks, they then shrink into senility.

The six worlds knew that presently their sun must do likewise, and engulf or sear his planets.

THE END OF MAN

Today, while the bells clang for victory, the spirit of Man recovers from his future memory the temper of that age when expectation of the final catastrophe first possessed the minds of all men. No way could be devised to save the worlds from destruction. Little man could by no means check the forces of an exploding star; nor harness them, nor escape them. The six worlds, living under the shadow of annihilation, changed their temper. And the spirit of Man at last threw off his lethal drowsiness to face a mortal hurt, not in hope that it might be averted, but to prepare himself for his end.

Throughout the six worlds all men and women faced the same urgency. The exact date of the explosion was unpredictable, but it might now occur at any moment, and certainly within a few centuries. For a while the human peoples, self-disciplined to the spirit, debated anxiously whether to commit mass suicide at once or to carry on their affairs in contempt of the future. In the end they decided not to forestall the disaster, not even to cease from procreating. For perhaps, after all, the calculations were faulty, and a thousand years of decorous civilization might still be possible. And even if, as seemed most likely, the end must come within a century, they were determined to meet it with full consciousness and with dignity. Let the children still be born, even if they must soon be slaughtered. Let the spirit of Man experience fully to the last possible moment. Let his vast treasure of experience, gathered through so many æons, be wholly completed before it should be laid with reverence and awe at the feet of the inscrutable Other.

And so for many centuries the six worlds lived on, expecting instant death. During this time they were mainly concerned to explore by psychical means the Spirit’s relation to the Other, and their own prospects in eternity. But their researches discovered nothing. The Other, it seemed, was utterly indifferent to their fate.

Small wonder, then, that despair and savage rebellion against the dark Other at last began to stir among the six world-peoples. The spirit of Man in that last brief moment of his long life was racked once more by conflict among his members. For in each world, though one party remained faithful to the Spirit, another revolted. ‘What is the good, what the good’, they cried, ‘of continuing loyal to that Other, who is utterly inaccessible and indifferent. And why should we persist in service of the Spirit, a mere phantom that has after all no standing in the cosmos, and is a mere figment of our own foolish minds. All the generations, ever since Father Adam, have deceived themselves. We will use our last centuries, or years or moments, solely to snatch pleasure.’ And so under the suspended sword they guzzled every joy that their science could give them. And those upon Uranus, hoping against hope that by some rare chance, or unforeseen eventuality, they might be too far out from the sun to be caught within the actual incandescence, burrowed frantically into the deep rock of their planet, extending their subterranean cities, to escape the coming heat.

But in every world a large number of those ultimate human beings remained loyal to the Spirit. ‘Though we alone’, they said, ‘in all the cosmos may be the Spirit’s vessels, and we so soon to vanish, yet we are for the Spirit even to our last breath.’

The spirit of Man, though once more he was not master of all his members, was absolute in many. Awake, as in no earlier moment of his life, he saluted the Other, and prepared for the last agony, and sleep.

The moth, the finished creature that had never flown, now faced its death. And though despair threatened to paralyse its limbs once more, the tremulous wings now beat with new power, beat bravely, beat with the strength and rhythm almost of flight. But presently wings and flesh and spirit must all be shattered, crushed by giant footfall.

On a certain day the sun’s gathering energies, pent within his shrinking surface, burst suddenly abroad. An expanding sphere of fire welled outwards.

For a few hours the peoples of the six worlds were blinded by sheer light. Then world by world they were engulfed in flame.

The spirit of Man, like the rear-gunner whom so long ago a moth had kissed, was annihilated.

FIFTH INTERLUDE

THE HOUSE WITHOUT YOU

I have come home to an empty house. For three nights and three days it will be without you.

It is the same house as ever, but so different; a hearth without a fire, a lamp unlit, the score of a song that is not being sung. In the dining-room, on your chair’s back an old blue coat waits where you left it. In the kitchen your gardening-gloves hang over the fire-place, while the clock counts the seconds of your absence. In the larder are the dishes you have cooked for me, to last till Friday. In the bedroom, an ancient hair-brush and a crippled comb, scent bottles, books that you never have time to read, and pamphlets, leaflets, papers; and the bed, soon to be freighted on one side only.

The sooner I am asleep the better, for without you this place is not home.

When you are here, it is the very stronghold of reality. The wind may howl around it, but always vainly. True, a welter of phantoms is ever surging against these walls, phantoms of war, social conflicts, evolutionary forces; and, beyond all, the cold unknown. They are all huge and formidable, and some of them must actually be dealt with; and yet all of them, while you are here, are insubstantial, somehow unreal. Even the bombs that shook the house (so that a particular rattling door-handle always cows me) were somehow, for all their screaming and blasting, not quite real.

But now, with you gone away, there is no light here to drive back the invading shadows, no warmth to withstand the outer cold. The phantoms have turned real. The wind’s howl is frightening. The all too tangible weight and pressure of a brute universe thrusts against these frail walls. They sag inward, they crack and gape, revealing the driven clouds, a war-sick planet, and the dying suns, gripped within the eternity of the cold dark.

But on Friday when you come home, the lamp will be lit once more, the song will be sung again, the ghosts will be laid. For the thing that unites us, the spirit that comprises us as the sphere its hemispheres, will be once more and indubitably the heart of reality.

CHAPTER VI. THE COSMOS, AND BEYOND

THE COSMICAL COMMUNITY

LIFE AND DEATH OF THE COSMOS

THE SPIRIT AND THE OTHER

THE COSMICAL COMMUNITY

TODAY, while the bells clang for victory, the spirit of Man remembers futurely the instant of his death. His vision, snatched between one stroke and the next stroke of the bells, was just the vision that will confront him in his future dying, now pre-cognized. With perplexity and wonder he now in future memory reviews his dying. For in that instant he, even as had happened to a certain rear-gunner æons earlier, was both destroyed and wakened.

In the very act of falling headlong into eternal sleep and nothingness, the spirit of Man saw all his ages miraculously displayed before him, from his conception in Father Adam to the destruction of his six world-peoples. The many phases of his life were all present to him, like a string of beads, various, each one variegated and darkly translucent, Each obscurely revealed within itself depths of meaning formerly hidden from him.

And in that instant of his annihilation, while he assessed each movement of his life, he was anxiously aware that another being, not his familiar self, was also judging; watching, as it were, over his shoulder. This alien self, that was not his familiar self yet had always been rooted in him, entangled in his every desire and thought and act, but mainly impotent and tranced, seemed now fully awake, and intent on extricating himself stage by stage from that prolonged entanglement in merely human living. The spirit of Man in his last moment yearned for continued life, and grieved over his æons of drowsy grub-hood, his tormenting stagnation in the chrysalis, his moth-maturity, so full of promise and yet so marred and barren, and finally his pointless slaughter; but the other self within him, the pure spirit in him, regarded his tragedy and all his errors with detachment. He cried, ‘Not I, not I, that half-awakened, still self-pitying, man-bound spirit! Too feebly and erringly he inspired and ruled his members. No! He was not I. But I, I, what is it that I am?’

The spirit of Man, in the instant of his annihilation, feared, and yet adored this newly awakened being within him, sprung seemingly from his own spiritual substance, yet alien, lofty, and freed in his annihilation.

Searching more closely his future memory of his end, the spirit of Man recalls with human horror the slaughter of all his members, and his own extinction. And with a surge of personal resentment he sees the strange other self, that was seemingly not himself at all, triumph and exult in his annihilation. But immediately, in the light of his own miraculous vision from the foothills of eternity, both downward into time and upward to eternity’s high peak, horror and resentment fade. He views his end with grave acquiescence, even with exaltation. Though doomed to annihilation, he identifies himself with that alien survivor. For that which died in his dying, though it was his own dear self, was but the vessel, the shell, the husk of that which survived. This at least the spirit of Man knows well, through his moment of eternal vision.

For this he knows. In that far future moment of man’s destruction he, the spirit of six worlds, vanished into oblivion, experiencing no further happenings at all. But that within him, which was not himself, yet in some dark way more than himself, woke to its true nature; and rediscovered itself to be the spirit not merely of Man’s six worlds but of a host of worlds, scattered throughout many galaxies of stars. This ampler spirit had indeed all along been conscious in that many-worlded host. To him, in his voluminous and many-worlded life, that simple spirit of one planetary system, the lowly spirit of Man, had been no more than one theme of dream-like yearning and thinking which he performed, as it were, absent-mindedly, while his attention was engaged with loftier matters.

The great company of worlds which together supported this high spirit were great and small, young and old, sprinkled among the galaxies like a few seeds adrift in the vast air.

These worlds were of two orders. Many, like the six human worlds, were too lowly to enter into the single and lucid awareness of that great spirit. Blindly, unwittingly, they contributed their part in the conscious spirit of the whole, as cells and muscles and intestines contribute unwittingly to the mind of a man. But other worlds, more developed and lucid, were like the brain-cells that together are conscious as the man’s individual mind. These more lucid worlds, though greatly diverse in idiosyncrasy, were all alike in that their peoples had reached to psychic powers impossible to men. By consciousness of their underlying psychical identity they kept in touch with one another across the intervening spatial void. For in the dimensions of the spirit no gulfs divided them. In the spirit they were consciously together, they were one. Thus their worlds were indeed the multiple brain of a cosmical spirit.

The concern of these awakened worlds (so it seems to the lowly spirit of Man) was almost wholly with the life of the spirit. But of the nature of the spirit’s life on this high plane the lowly spirit of Man perforce knows almost nothing, since his mentality is of a lowlier order. This alone he knows: that the cosmical community of worlds like all true spirit was intent on contemplation of all the sensuous and spiritual subtlety of the cosmos, and chiefly the subtle mutual awareness of personal beings of every order; intent also on creating through ever new forms of art and philosophy and personal intercourse, new modes of the spirit.

In this high common enterprise the lowly spirit of Man in his six worlds had, of course, no conscious part whatever. For the human moth had never dared to fly into that high psychic sphere where world-peoples are consciously one spirit. Man seemingly was too lowly a creature for such adventure. His function in the life of the whole was seemingly no more than to contribute unwittingly to the ground-tone or temper of the great cosmical spirit’s life.

Or was his case more tragic? Perhaps Man was indeed potentially of the sort to playa conscious part in the whole’s life, but maybe he was so crippled that he remained for ever impotent. Perhaps the six worlds were by nature fit to enter consciously into the cosmical spirit, but perhaps Man had been too grossly poisoned by some alien and hostile influence ever to fulfil his true destiny. The moth was indeed seemingly meant for flight, but its chronic disease had crippled it beyond recovery.

And if this is indeed, as seems most likely, the truth about the six human worlds, maybe it is the truth also about many other of the abortive worlds up and down the galaxies. So at least it appears to the spirit if Man, searching his future memory. For seemingly even the great singular spirit of the cosmical community of worlds was himself not wholly fulfilled. Seemingly he too was frustrated, crippled by the widespread disease that frustrated so many of his members.

The spirit of Man obscurely remembers futurely the great diversity of the many worlds and races of the cosmical community. Most were in a way man-like, but some were of strange inhuman physique and mentality, inhuman too in their modes of sensing and in their ways of life. Some indeed were so alien that the spirit of Man, now sunk back to his terrestrial status, recovers only an inarticulate feeling of them as beings incomprehensible to man; as when, on waking, we try to recapture a strange dream or nightmare, and can say of it only that no words can describe it, no human thought conceive it. But some worlds, glimpsed by the spirit of Man in a spate of shifting, fleeting, dream-like vision, he can at least in outline seize. Of these, some were strange spheres inhabited not by races of separate individuals at all but by a continuous vital tissue spread over the whole world’s surface. Of the races of individuals, many were very alien to Man. Some few there were whose native element was ocean; some were winged creatures of the air who, by a strange tilt of fortune, had reached and surpassed the human range of insight.

It seems to the spirit of Man, however, that most worlds of the cosmical community were peopled by creatures man-like in general form. Planets of the terrestrial type were the most kindly homes for life. Though previously the spirit of Man had remembered futurely his own future career continuously up to the moment of his annihilation, now, confronted in memory with a host of man-like worlds, he half doubts which of all these man-like races was in fact the race that he himself had possessed. Was he indeed the spirit I of those six worlds that their sun had devoured? Or was he, after all, one of those other man-like races, of better fortune, that had in the end become members of the cosmical community? Or perhaps he was one of the many that had never even emerged from the chrysalis; or one of those most unfortunate spirits whose members had learnt too soon to rifle the energies of the atom, before they had spiritually awakened to the right use of power. Many such dangerous adolescent races his vision now obscurely reveals. One at least wielded its destructive energy so murderously in internecine warfare that its world became an unpeopled desert. Some, using their power to remould their own biological nature before they knew what was truly to be desired, rendered themselves physically inviable, or simply insane. And not a few, ignorantly tampering with mighty forces, burst their planets into whiffs of asteroids.

The more the spirit of Man broods upon the host of worlds, the more he doubts as to which of the many glimpsed man-like races was indeed his own. Perhaps after all he had been resident in one of those few races that had moved forward from strength to strength till in due season they had learnt the art of exploring the whole cosmos by telephathy and clairvoyance; one of those who had in due season played a pioneering part in founding the cosmical community. He cannot tell. But most probably, yes, almost certainly, he must be indeed the spirit of those six lowly worlds, destroyed by fire.

LIFE AND DEATH OF THE COSMOS

The spirit of Man remembers that from his viewpoint on the foothills of eternity he saw the birth and the death and the whole life of the cosmos. He witnessed the first instant of cosmical time when the creative fiat of the supreme Other issued in a spaceless point of light, pregnant with all the energies of the future cosmos. But of the fiat itself and of its source, he knows nothing. For even in his eternal instant the peak was but a lofty whiteness scarred with precipices, glimpsed fitfully beyond the high white clouds. But well he remembers how, from the inscrutable fiat, space I and time and all physical energy and finite spiritual potency gushed forth.

From that first moment of cosmical time the expanding gas-cloud swelled and swelled, and presently disintegrated into cloudlets. These in turn, whirling and flattening and trailing spiral streamers, crumbled into stars. And here and there, a flying whirlpool of primeval power collided with some star and tore from its substance the material for future planets. And here and there among these new worlds sprang life; and here and there, spirit.

One by one the galaxies matured. More and more of the minded worlds made psychic contact with each other across the deserts of space; or rather they probed psychically down into their own nature till they reached their hidden unity of spirit. And in their diversity, and their underlying identity of spirit, the cosmical community grew ever richer in experience and more single in purpose. And in this singleness and richness awoke the spirit of this many galaxied universe, this cosmos. For the spirit of this cosmos was simply the identity of experience and of will presiding in all this rich diversity; and it precariously commanded allegiance through all conflict. Again and again there was bitter inter-mundane strife in which the weapons were not physical but psychical. The antagonists, separated by impassable tracts of space, could none the less destroy each other’s minds by direct psychic impact of mind on mind, or disintegrate one another’s hard-won community by subtle dissemination of psychic poison among the minds of the enemy world. The causes of this cosmical strife lay always in discord about the way in which the community of worlds could best fulfil its destiny as the vessel of spirit. These wars were all religious wars. The casualties were worlds poisoned beyond recovery, derelicts of spirit.

It seems to the lowly spirit of Man, recalling his high vision, that although again and again such conflicts tortured the cosmical community, and though many a noble world was lost by sheer misadventure, yet as the æons passed the cosmical community gained concord and strength. Its member worlds became more and more intent upon their common purpose. And this common purpose, so it seems to the lowly spirit of Man, was the will that every individual life in all those diverse worlds should be a theme of rich and true experience and of spiritual creating; and that each individual should be knit inwardly by sensitive love into the lives of some few diverse others, and by far-flung threads of comradeship into the whole life of his world, and of the cosmical community; and that the cosmical spirit should preside unquestioned in every mind, and be the single experience of the whole cosmical community, fulfilled in knowledge and in love.

But the life of the cosmos could not last for ever. Even as each minded world, each man and woman, each little fly and moth, must in its season die, so also must the great spirit of a cosmos.

Already the myriad beings of the cosmos foresaw the cosmical death. The physical energies of the cosmos were constantly dissipated. Star after star was extinguished, like a spark drifting on the wind. World after world was compelled to maintain its heat and life artificially by the disintegration of the atoms of its planet’s rock. Race after race was forced to refashion itself eugenically for life not on a planet but on the cooled surface of its former sun. After æons beyond computation, the cosmos became a dark waste with here and there a few sparks of artificial light, where the races of intelligent beings still struggled to keep alive, and to maintain the cosmical spirit in full lucidity until the end. The dying community of the cosmos, indeed, now planned its fading life for one unshakable purpose. So long as the races could still maintain the cosmical spirit in full lucidity they would live on, to gain for the spirit the last possible wealth of experience. But when at last they were faced with inevitable degeneration, then one by one the races would destroy themselves. For it was the constant will of the cosmical beings that the cosmical spirit should die not inch by inch but in full lucidity. Ever since the first intelligences in the first of all the worlds had first become vessels of the cosmical spirit, they had also yearned with fear and adoration toward the dark Other, the cosmical spirit’s alleged creator. But not till the cosmical spirit should be fully grown in beauty and in wisdom and in the power to love, could he (or she, for all spirits of composite growth must needs be hermaphrodite) be ripe to know the Other.

In the last days of the cosmos, the spirit of the cosmos longed impatiently to meet her unseen lover, knowing nothing of him but that she had great need of him. And she had strong faith that he too needed her. But the issue of her death was not to be as she had expected.

THE SPIRIT AND THE OTHER

To the spirit of Man upon the foothills of eternity it seemed that, long before this physical cosmos had sunk into the death of ultimate darkness and cold and stillness, the cosmical spirit died utterly; but that in her annihilation the essence in her, which was indeed the single and essential and universal Spirit, survived; and that the Spirit disentangled itself (or himself or herself) from the dying idiosyncrasy of this cosmos, and came into her own as indeed the very Spirit, identical in all the innumerable spheres of created being, of which our cosmos is but one.

Of those alien spheres of created being the spirit of Man, searching his brief vision of eternity, recovers nothing but the vague conviction that such alien spheres did indeed exist, and that to beings nurtured in this cosmos they must be for ever inconceivable. He knows merely that they are wholly disconnected with this cosmos, save in the experience of the Spirit which is identical in them all; and that in each one of them, as in this cosmos, the Spirit strives constantly to wake into Wisdom and love and universal community and further creating.

Obscurely it appears to the lowly spirit of Man, recalling his vision of eternity, that the spirit of each cosmos, at some moment of its cosmical time, dies; and that the single and universal Spirit, disentangling herself from all these deaths, preserves in her own singular awareness the whole treasure of experience conceived in each cosmos.

Obscurely it appears to him that the universal Spirit, beautiful with all the beauty of every cosmos, yearns for communion with the dark Other, her creator. For in this union of the creature and the creator love surely is fulfilled.

But the lowly spirit of Man, peering from eternity’s foothills, sees only that the universal Spirit, fulfilled with the beauty of all spheres of created being, dies, and, whether in that ultimate death she, like all lesser spirits, is annihilated so that a loftier spirit may strike free; or whether, dying, she swoons into blissful union with her creator; or whether, even for her, the dark Other remains utterly inscrutable and inaccessible, the lowly spirit of Man cannot know.

SIXTH INTERLUDE

THE BROKEN TOY

When the dearest, friendliest toy was broken, and the desperate child ran to you weeping, your whole will was to console. Let the world wait, the telephone ring unanswered, the train be missed. Nothing, sublunary or celestial, must come between you and the soothing of this grief. With kisses, hugs, exhortations for courage, and slyly intruding jokes, oh soften the tragedy, and rouse at last a wan, reluctant, ludicrous, watery smile!

Or perhaps you would say, ‘Let’s see if Daddy can mend poor Jumbo’. Then I, feebly rebellious, but mastered by the urgency in tearful eyes, and the sight of your tenderness, would set about clumsy surgery, so that Jumbo might return to the loving arms, patched, maimed or squinting, but more or less himself.

This passion of tenderness, which blazed in the child for the toy, in you for the child, sprang (so my heart confidently affirmed) from the heart of the cosmos.

But the perennial slaughter of the innocents? And Hitler’s gospel? And the stern law of entropy?

The comforted child beamed on mended Jumbo, and you on the child.

CHAPTER VII -SALVATION

THE SPIRIT OF MAN GRIEVES FOR MAN

THE REAR-GUNNER, AND OTHERS

THE SPIRIT OF MAN GRIEVES FOR MEN

THE Spirit of Man is daunted by his station on the middle heights of the great hierarchy of being. Above him rise range upon range of spirits, up to the universal Spirit; and beyond, even beyond the very Spirit whose essence is intelligence and love and gallant creating, towers the veiled, the inconceivable Other.

The spirit of Man is daunted by the knowledge that he himself, like men and women, must in due season die. And yet, contemplating his death, he finds full peace in the expectation that his life must give some slight enrichment to loftier beings than himself, and finally to the very Spirit.

But then, looking downward upon the myriad little individuals alive or dead, on earth and on the host of worlds, he sees that very few of them are capable of that peace; so fettered is each one to his own individuality, fearing extinction as a child the dark. Compassion stabs the spirit of Man on account of the littleness, the helplessness, the cruel frustration and torment, of the swarms of these minute abortively personal beings.

Hot protest surges suddenly in him against the Other, who seemingly permits this misery.

But then, remembering the glimpsed high peak of being, the cold, the fair, the dread, he whispers in his own heart, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou! Your little short-lived creature scorns to judge you. And yet — could I but see, but feel, your will’s rightness! But Thou! Were I to condemn, yet must I adore.’

And now a thought dawns on his mind’s darkness, a thought about his own experienced salvation, and so about the salvation of all spirits. ‘There is nothing positive,’ he says, ‘nothing essential in me at all save the universal Spirit herself, deprived in me of all her nature but the little part that can find expression within the cramping limits of humanity. In my dying she, who is more I than I myself, strikes free. And in her freeing I (so says my recent vision) find completeness. What dies in my death, dies utterly; but what survives is utterly fulfilled in the untrammelled Spirit. And further, in that vision of my future death, did I not see myself in death’s instant re-live my whole terrestrial life, watching it with new eyes from the high foothills of eternity? Did I not see my sorrows and my shames, my errors and my hounding remorse, all transfigured, all duly placed as features within the grave and lovely pattern of the cosmos. And if this is so for me, is it not so also for all the lesser spirits, even to men and women, even to dogs and lizards, trees and moulds and the disease bacteria; even to the ultimate sparks of spirit within each atom? When death annihilates them, the spirit in them strikes free and climbs the heights of being, to waken fully as the universal Spirit. And will not she, each time this happens, she whose very essence is love, lovingly look back upon those little lives, and in compassion re-create those little spirits for a while within her vastness, so that each may see its little life transfigured in the pattern of eternity. And then will not each little re-created spirit, having found this fulness and salvation, gladly sleep again for ever? In each of them what utterly dies is his separateness and his blindness. If this is “he”, then “he” is indeed destroyed; but if “he” is that alien who wakes in his dying, then “he” it is who rises to the very foothills of eternity, and sees his little earthly life transfigured.’.

Surmising in this way about the lowlier spirits, the spirit of Man recovers peace of mind. For if this thought be true all, even to the least, find a salvation more blissful than any that any of them could have the wit to conceive.

But now the spirit of Man finds his new peace still precarious. For once more he remembers the dread, though worship-compelling, Other. And once more doubting, he fears once more for the salvation of his fellow spirits; so uncaring seems the Other, so unresponsive, so heartless. Yet, fearing, the spirit of Man still adores. For the very Spirit herself, in her extremity of death and loneliness, still adores. ‘And so’, he cries, ‘must all the lesser spirits too, when they are re-created within the very Spirit. Their salvation is assured.’

The spirit of Man’s mood changes. Brooding on the terrestrial lives of men and women and their ineluctable moulding by brute circumstance and blind historical forces, he loses all sense of the Other. The strange intoxication leaves him. And at last he complains, ‘The Other? What Other is there but the blind idiot, Fate, or the quite unworshipful outer darkness, the thoughtless void?’

His fog-bound mind stands paralysed.

But once more his mood changes. ‘At least,’ he cries, ‘if the Other is a mere projection of my own desire and fear, still there is the Spirit, the indubitable Spirit; in me, and men, and all the worlds. And to the Spirit I shall be loyal without reserve.’

The spirit of Man prays to the very Spirit, ‘Possess me wholly! Let me be the filled vessel, the perfected instrument! Give me the heart, the wit, the imagination, to serve effectively in your cosmical war against the darkness, and the void, and idiot Fate!’

But no sooner has he prayed, than, seemingly in unlooked-for answer to his prayer, he is seized again by the irresistible presence of the Other; so that he can only whisper, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou!’

THE REAR-GUNNER, AND OTHERS

The spirit of Man, brooding still on his vision, conceives how each of the lowly spirits might be re-created in the vastness of the Spirit; for it still seems to him that the infinite tenderness of the universal Spirit toward every kind of personal being must impel her to this high act of love, this reawakening of all lesser finite spirits to receive salvation and then the ultimate bliss of sleep.

The rear-gunner of that aircraft in which a moth had fluttered, must surely have found salvation. He who had been destroyed with all that crew, he who had died and wakened to be the crew’s spirit, and then the spirit of the killed in a certain battle, and then the spirit of Man, and then of this whole cosmos, and then at last the very Spirit herself, yearning toward the Other, even he found salvation. And the salvation that he found was not merely the vicarious salvation of dying that nobler spirit might in his death strike free. For out of the charity of the universal Spirit the minute annihilated spirit of the rear-gunner was re-formed for a while within the vastness of the universal Spirit.

The rear-gunner reverted to his little earthly life and death, but with confused knowledge of the past and future of mankind, and of a host of worlds, and of eternity’s foothills, and of the glimpsed high peak of being.

‘When I was imprisoned’, he mused, ‘in that aircraft, and in the somnolent nature of that boy, how dark and cheerless was my prison! Peering through the bars, I saw nothing but man’s harshness and the indifferent stars. How forlornly, over the narrow sea, I strained for courage! When the moth touched me to longing and self-pity, how near I was to breaking! And how fantastic, ludicrous, and how phantasmal, was that whole little universe that I had spun round myself, cocoon-wise, conceiving it to be no fiction but the huge and harsh reality! Yes, and my poor muddled, self-bound attempt at loving, so blind, so desperately astray from love’s true course! But now at last I have lived, and truly loved. I have loved beauty in a host of worlds. Even on little Earth I have loved so much, and in a thousand veins. I have loved Helen and Cleopatra, and others as lovely and more lovable. I have praised with Dante his Beatrice. And I have fully known what in my lifetime was denied me utterly, the marriage of true minds, and a lifetime’s deepening harmony. Yes, and I have listened to Socrates in Athens, and comprehended fully the wisdom of Gautama. I have walked with Jesus in the cornfields. And though now, once more limited by my human littleness, I can but vaguely conceive the glories that I have experienced, yet I know that I have indeed delighted in all terrestrial and all cosmical beauty, all human and all cosmical goodness. I have weighed all such thought as lies within the range of any finite spirit. Wakened far beyond the dim lucidity of Man, I have admired the high social beauty of the Cosmical Republic, and served it in the gallant lives of its many citizens. And in the death of the cosmos I have wakened as the universal Spirit. And then I, the very Spirit, looking back with compassion at me, the martyred boy, have re-created him that he may find salvation. And I, the boy, have seen my little irksome and meaningless earthly life woven into the glorious pattern of cosmical being; and there transfigured. But also, as the universal Spirit, I have fluttered papery wings against the shut window of the ultimate prison, vainly yearning toward the Other. I have participated in the Spirit’s death. Beyond that, all is darkness, not of desolation, surely, but of mystery. And now I, who was a boy killed in battle, am reconciled to that frustration of my earthly self, and even to the Spirit’s ultimate death. Little I, dying into the greatest I, have found salvation. And now I, that boy, desire for my little self nothing but sleep, dissolution in the vastness of the Spirit. And I, the very Spirit, though I too must die, and shall not within the whole span of time find union with the Other, have found salvation. For my beauty will be perfected for him, to take or to destroy.’

Thus the rear-gunner, who was killed in company with his six companions and with a moth, found his salvation. And then in peace he sank into eternal sleep.

The revolutionary engineer of that aircraft crew also had his reawakening. ‘When I was imprisoned’, he said, ‘in that eager boy, I really believed that the millenium was at hand, and that it would be won by such as I, and that it would be simply a world-wide Terrestrial Soviet Republic. But now, after how many stages of my post-mortal growth and grim remaking, I know better. How often have I been forced to watch the Revolution thwarted, even on the Earth! And in the end I have seen its long-belated triumph on that planet turn stale and lethal through sheer stagnation. I have seen the same in world after world. But also I have watched the founding of the great Cosmical Republic, and its glory, and its final death. On Earth and in a swarm of worlds I have entered into the many ways of life which that boy could not conceive, or which he noted only to condemn them as irrelevant to the Revolution. I have gauged all the subtle flavours of personality, human and non-human. I have been remade by the great arts, and by careful philosophy. I who was that boy was very ruthless, very blind; but I did, according to my dim light, see and serve mankind’s immediate need. And now, I who was so restless have found peace. I who was so hot a champion of man’s fulfilment, and even (all unwittingly) of the Spirit’s triumph, I, who was so fierce a rebel against the power of tyrants, have accepted man’s frustration and the Spirit’s ultimate death at the hands seemingly of the tyrant Other. Strange that I, who so cherished man and scorned religion, should now worship not only the universal Spirit but the tyrant Other; who, if he exists, is seemingly indifferent to our prayers and to our worship. Perhaps he is no more than a figment of our craving. Then, at least how glorious a craving! But the Spirit is no figment. And in the Spirit I, who was once a rash boy, but have travelled so far and learnt so much, have seen my little earthly life transfigured. And now, all my desire for this poor human self is sleep, dissolution in the Spirit. And what if she too in her death must be dissolved in sleep before the mighty Other will take her?’

Thereupon, the re-created spirit of that boy slept.

The saint in a war-tortured city woke again within the vastness of the Spirit. ‘How very strange,’ she mused, ‘how surprisingly different from my expectation has death been, and how much more wonderful! At first it seemed that I was lifted straight to full communion with thy God, such bliss enfolded me. It was no merely private bliss; for I felt that in this heaven all my friends were equally included, my neighbour the plumber who was so good to me, the pale mother whose boy was killed (but in that heaven she found him), the Jew I saved from the police, the prostitute who nursed me through my sickness, all these and all other good-hearted people shared, it seemed, that bliss. Yes, and all sinners too, it seemed, were remade and brought into that heaven. But I did not long remain in static ecstasy. Things were happening round me, things never dreamed of in my simple faith. The gulfs of history opened before me, and the future, and all the hosts of living worlds, and the incredible diversity of spirit in them all. And most strangely the God who had gathered me to himself, who had wakened me to his vastness and perfection, who was indeed the universal Spirit in us all, seemed most perplexingly to be after all a finite, a created spirit. And beyond him loomed that dread Other, whom in all my earthly days I had feared; and so denied, affirming always that the very Creator himself was love, and that beyond him there was nothing. But now my own past longing for my God of love was transformed into the yearning of the universal Spirit for that Other, the dread, the hidden, the frosty-fair, the source and crown of all things. Him, whether he be love or wholly inconceivable, I needs must worship. The Spirit, his creature, grows in loveliness, and prepares herself to be his bride. Yet he remains ever unseen and unresponsive. At last she dies. And then? Does he perhaps destroy the perfected creature that he has killed; or does she wake into eternity, and in his unveiled presence; and in joy of mutual love are they two made one? However stem her fate, she gladly welcomes it, because he wills it. And so she has salvation. And I too, who am at once she and this little earthly self re-created in her vastness, have salvation. Seeing my little life transfigured, I crave nothing now but sleep. And she too, the very Spirit, whether her fate be slow death and then absolute sleep or inconceivable eternal life, has peace.’

And so the saint who died in the tormented City slept.

There also died the false prophet of the fallen empire. In the instant of his death, as in all deaths, the little mundane self was confronted with a newly awakened, alien self, who now scrutinized and weighed the dark and blood-stained rosary of his life’s days. ‘Not I,’ he cried, ‘it could not have been I, who poisoned the minds of millions with false reasoning, and their hearts with false values. Not I glorified might and cruelty and lying. And oh, it was not I but some devil in me that tortured so many sensitive creatures in my rage for power.’ But the mundane self of the false prophet, in the instant of his annihilation, protested, ‘It was in loathing of their canting gentleness that I praised might and cruelty, and in hate of their canting truth that I praised falsehood. And it was on a people who craved my discipline and my inspiration that I imposed my will. I was the high instrument of fate. But in the end fate betrayed me.’ The false prophet’s new and alien self replied, ‘An instrument of fate, but no less a traitor to the Spirit, which in my youth I vaguely knew, like all men. Then stage by stage, and wilfully, I misconceived it, until at last I gloried in the part of Antichrist. I played with men’s fears and hates and bloodlust, till in the end fate, far from betraying me, did indeed deal justly with me. But “me”, “I”? Surely that evil pervert was not I. For I am pledged wholly to the Spirit. And though for that creature’s sins I must pay, perhaps in an eternity of torment, yet I praise whole-heartedly, ungrudgingly, the Spirit.’

The being that had awakened in the false prophet’s death had much to learn; for, though his will was clean, he was still deeply entangled in the ignorance and falsehood and false values of his earthly self. But after his agony of remorse had spent itself, and after many torturing stages of remaking under the stem pressure of the new-learnt truth about mankind, he woke at last, as all men wake, to find himself the very spirit of Man, and then the cosmical spirit, and finally the universal Spirit herself, yearning toward the Other.

But presently, within the vastness of the Spirit the little earthly self of the false prophet was re-created for a while. Wise with the Spirit’s wisdom, he looked down on his little earthly life, and sighed. ‘I did great evil,’ he mused, ‘epoch-making evil. Of my own will I wickedly did it. The currents of that little world’s events fatally combined with my own weak vision and self-importance and frustration to drag me down into that life of horror. But now, having indeed suffered my purgatory, I am remade. And now I see my little hateful self no longer hateful, but transfigured. The agony of shame and guilt is passed. Now, looking back, I would not change that life. I would not have it otherwise. My evil, though in me utterly evil, was a needed feature of the whole’s form. Someone had to play that part. And so I, even I, who was so wicked, find salvation. And now, what more can I desire for my earthly self but sleep?’

The spirit of Man, contemplating such possibilities of individual salvation, reminds himself that these thoughts are his own mind’s figments. ‘Can they’, he wonders, ‘be indeed veridical, or are they sheer fantasy? And if they are true, is not all well with the world?’ Listening in the depth of his own being, he strains for some clear answer. No answer comes but silence. And for his own part he knows that he has outgrown the need for any such consolation. Strange peace possesses him. He whispers in his own being’s depth, ‘Oh, Thou, Thou! So be it!’.

SEVENTH INTERLUDE

GROWING OLD IN SPRING-TIME

Larks are singing their way up airy ladders, peewits rapturously tumbling down them. The gorse is gay. Our rhubarb, lusty and rude, spreads great palms to grab the light. Young potato-shoots sketchily rule dotted lines across the beds. Your early peas are shoving their little green noses up through the earth; and in the frame your cabbage seedlings, in huddled queues, await their turn for ampler and more dangerous living. On the hawthorn’s sheltered side a foam of blossom is spreading. In the field an immense concourse of oat-seedlings, a mighty youth-movement, uniformed in green, hales the sun with up- stretched arms.

Spring is painting the earth’s old face young again, is actually rejuvenating her.

Even we, the ageing gardeners, are sun-warmed with an illusion of youthfulness. When the cuckoo calls, we pause for a moment in our weeding, our digging; to listen, and exchange smiles. But our backs are stiff with stooping, our muscles too quickly tire. Old eyes, unaided, can scarcely tell a chaffinch from a linnet.

We too, once upon a time, were part of the spring. But now our season is autumn. There will come an April when we shall be as out of place as a pile of last year’s potato haulms that no one has had time to burn.

Growing old is of course tiresome,’ yet in a way illuminating. Though the body’s ecstasies begin to fade, yet somehow they have an added, a strange and solemn significance, like holy rites long practised yet ever fresh. The mind too is ageing. Already, though as yet almost imperceptibly, it begins to lose its grip. Memories will not promptly come when called. Or they crowd in unwanted, confusing thought. Exasperation is too easily roused. Danger, pain, and all harsh change of circumstance become more daunting, because the strength to cope with them is hard to summon. Youth’s gift of sudden and reshaping insight comes no more. And the future, unless by accident or design my life is cut short, will bring sheer dotage. Strange, how little it disturbs me that I, who am interested most in man and the cosmos, shall fall away from the adult mentality and lapse into the second childhood! The high themes will be too much for me. I shall finger my memories in public and repeat my anecdotes. (And you, who are the younger, with what patience and gentleness you will correct me!) A little later my feeble craving will be only for warmth and sleep and such food as I can digest. And then I shall be a burden; to myself, to you, and to the young. It is no sunny prospect. Yet, seen in its whole setting, it becomes an acceptable though a sombre detail.

And short of dotage, life’s autumn has its own glory, unconceived in youth. Young, I was a mere bubble of ego, and the universe was no more than a close filmy skin containing me; old, I am reduced almost to a point, but a sentient point, upon which a vast reality, depth beyond depth, is focussed. In a way I am at once dimensionless yet also infinite. I am almost nothing, yet I include a panoramic aspect of the infinity beyond me. The view is, of course, fragmentary, and must be largely false; but it presents itself to me as a subtle, a far-flung, a dread but lovely universe.

The dying fires of my body, and the cravings of this withering ego, seem now so unimportant, so dwarfed by the urgent needs of a whole tumultuous human world, and by the imagined potentiality of the myriad stars, and the unseen yet ever darkly fu present majesty beyond the heavens. The failing body still clings to life, still clamours for such delights as it can still achieve. And all too often I still sucumb to its unruly greeds or fears, false to the outer reality and the central spirit that possesses me. The withering self still craves security, immortality, and even the trappings of dignity; but shamefacedly, with self-ridicule. Though all too often I conduct myself slavishly, I am no longer enslaved. Increasingly I identify myself not with those cravings but with the great outer reality and the central spirit. When the body dies, and I myself, may be, sink into eternal sleep, I shall have lost so little. For the cosmos will go on; and the spirit, in innumerable other centres, will go on. In losing this infinitesimal ‘me’, I lose, after all, nothing.

Further, in ageing, in this slow withering away of cherished delights and vaunted powers, there is a kind of purgation, as though in readiness for some grave impending event. The victim is being shorn and cleansed in preparation for the altar. But the universal spirit that inwardly possessed him is now slowly discarding the idiosyncrasies of this outworn individual, is now stretching long-cramped wings, impatient for flight.

Those dear delights, those modest powers, all that is the cherished me, I willingly let go. Others will repeat them, and some more splendidly. For me, when this tiresome ageing is fulfilled, the welcome end is sleep.

But you? But we? The fair thing that has awakened in us, must that too sleep for ever? Or does it, since its essence is of the spirit, strike free?

CHAPTER VIII. HERE AND NOW

THE VISION WHICH the spirit of Man has laboured to recapture fades even from memory. Bells and trumpets conquer it under their loud cataract. Nothing more is to be recovered of the reality that faced the spirit of Man in his instant of eternity.

Reality? Was it indeed reality or a dream, a figment of his own sickness?

Strange that the whole vast panorama of time and of eternity, recently so actual, should now have paled into the mere memory of a dispelled hallucination! Like a snowflake dropped in water, it has melted, vanished. The warm present has dissolved it. Vainly now the spirit of Man thrusts his sight against the fog-wall. He cannot pierce it. Eternity is once more infinitely remote; and inconceivable, just an empty word. The vista of the future æons is mere fantasy. Even tomorrow, lying one little pace ahead, lies hidden.

Yielding to the present’s insistent clamour, the spirit of Man observes today’s mankind. Can men, he wonders, rise beyond themselves in this great moment? Oh that they may falsify the recent tragic vision, and at one bound cross the Rubicon that has so long restrained them! But are they the stuff for such a venture? Has their recent world-wide agony strengthened or weakened them? Has suffering purged or broken them? Will the moth now burst its chrysalis bonds, or is it poisoned at last fatally?

The spirit of Man perceives that the swarms of men are in unison at least in their will for peace, for a long respite from war’s strain and horror; but lust for vengeance and fear of retribution force them into sharp discordancy; and equally the will for power and glory opposes itself to the passion to end all tyranny. And if men crave peace, it is less for love’s sake than for fear’s. Over the prostrate enemy the victors grasp comradely hands; but gauge each other with a wary eye. In all the celebrant cities the crowds are drunk with music and with impatient hope; but here and there a sober and a silent watcher is chilled with doubt.

Recently the conquered peoples, freed one by one, had blessed their liberators with flowers and wine and kisses; then, one by one disillusioned, they had cooled, or even turned futile arms against their new conquerors. For these victors, intent on order, on repairing the world’s crushed tissues, had not been tender to the unruly germs of the new world-creature, whose strange, unlovely, foetal shape repels all those who cannot read its promise. Order, the victors conceived too simply, in an outworn pattern. Their touch, blindly healing, had favoured not the moth’s unfinished shaping but the dissolute organs of the grub; not the new, the wakening Man, but the old sleep-walker.

So it seems to the anxious spirit of Man, watching through his many eyes his own tortured flesh. Wherever war has passed, and where the tyrant armies have withdrawn from their untenable conquests, and ebbed back towards their central stronghome, desolation lies in the wake of the retreating flood. Fields are barren; for the young men were taken away to be work-slaves in the enemy lands. Villages, if not wrecked and burned for vengeance, are starving, their food-stores rifled. Cities are crippled or utterly destroyed, their machinery smashed or stolen. And everywhere the human creatures, harshly moulded by years of warfare or years of oppression or years of vain though supremely brave secret resistance to the foreign tyrant, are now too familiar with harshness, are unserene, are tinder to every spark. Marred by hunger, by uncared-for sickness, by respiteless fear or sudden terror, by impotent hate or outraged love, they are gaunt and deadly tired; are listless, and yet quick to puerile or senile passion, whether of friendliness or loathing, impulsive gratitude or spite. Too long one sole crude need has grimly ruled these conquered; ruled all of them save the heroic resisters; the need not for God, or the soul’s salvation, nor for mankind’s liberation, nor even for the rescue of their country, but just for food and clothing, a bare pittance, endlessly sought and never adequate. For this, and for avoidance of the conqueror’s harshness, they have daily schemed and ventured. Strange that, in spite of all, some had found time and strength to work for a happier future, to fan courage and hope through secret newspapers and radio, and with the example of their own heroism.

But later, when the foul tide had ebbed, and the first liberations had been celebrated, still the martyred and bewildered peoples starved. For the unfinished war still claimed the ships, the trains, the lorries. And because of their continued misery, and because the men of money were seen to be creeping back into power, some bitter voices affirmed that liberation had proved a mockery. And then, because these unhappy peoples were all overwrought with suffering, they snatched up once more guerrilla weapons, and so provoked their liberator-conquerors to harshness.

What new mentality, the spirit of Man wonders, what new temper, savage, and maddened by suffering, or perhaps by very suffering purged and kindled to ruthless, piercing insight, will presently blaze from this tormented continent?

The plight of the liberated, though severe, is more easily to be borne than the ruin of the defeated enemy. For not only have they suffered war’s extreme ravage but also the curse of all their victims is upon them. Yet, by nature not inhuman, they have bowels and brains as prone to gentleness as any other people’s, and no more prone to devilry. Un- toward circumstance has savaged them, as a horse by brutal treatment is turned vicious. And so this proud perverted nation, too faithful to their false prophet, must now suffer for the evil that they did in the prophet’s name. For now the newly liberated peoples are hot for vengeance. Hateful vengeance, masquerading as justice or security, demands its due. Kill! Kill the war-criminals, who founded the concentration camps, who tore off finger-nails, who beat sensitive flesh to pulp or slowly burnt it, who cut off women’s breasts and crushed men’s testicles, who tortured children before the eyes of their parents, to force betrayal. At last they shall pay in their own suffering, even to the least of petty officials who carried out the commanded brutality. And for the masses, if it is not practicable or politic to slaughter all those millions, at least their war power must be utterly and for ever destroyed. Seize or smash their vast machinery, seal up their mines, divide their land among the victors, brand them all as criminals, use the skilled and unskilled workers all as slaves to make good the huge damage in all the lands that they overran! Twice in a generation their barbaric power-lust brought the world to war. Now at last the penalty! Already the slow lava-flood of conquest has seared their fields, trampled their villages and cities, devoured their young men and women. And now, from the east westwards, and from the west eastwards, fleeing populations have poured into the constricted heart of their country, like beasts before a forest fire.

Their armies were pushed back until all resistance broke. Today the victors meet.

Today, while in all other lands the bells rejoice, in one ruined metropolis they are silent. And silent crowds line the streets, watching the armed procession of invaders, and awaiting retribution. But some eagerly cheer. Formerly secret resisters to the fallen tyranny, now at last they are freely vocal. Others, changing their allegiance with the change of wind, give tongue in loud false welcomes.

The spirit of Man, peering through the sombre minds of those defeated citizens, reviews their plight with horror and with pity. He blames them, of course, for their past betrayal of the Spirit; as he blames all men, and blames himself, for inveterate frailty and perversity. But he knows, what the victors fear to recognize, that a great part of this distracted people secretly loathed and condemned the prophet and his tyranny, but dared not speak against it, since to murmur was to court inhuman punishment. He knows too that thousands were not deterred even by this threat. They accepted harsh imprisonment, disease, torture, mental ruin and finally slaughter, rather than keep silent. These he salutes as the noblest of his members. And this whole tragic people he now chiefly pities for their desolation, and for the vengeance that the indignant, the short-sighted victors prepare for them.

During the final agony of the city’s resistance, government broke down, order vanished. The city’s population, formerly so disciplined, became a rabble of desperate and lawless individualists. But no! For even in this chaos friends could still be loyal to friends, mothers were still faithful to their children, lovers to one another. In their extremity these citizens manifested not only their worst but also their best. Here and there, after long oblivion, they rediscovered their best. For they were human. And what extremity, what unsurpassed calamity was theirs! Their honeycomb of dwellings all trodden down, they sheltered in the wreckage, defending their chosen crannies against the swarming homeless creatures from east and west; and from the escaped slaves, imported toilers from the conquered lands, now breaking free, and waging their own private savage war of vengeance against the citizens. Famished prowlers attacked each other for scraps of food, or banded themselves together to storm the stores, overpowering the police. The sick and the dying lay untended among the ruins. For the emaciated bodies of these once proud citizens could not resist the plagues that swept through the city; and the dead were too many to be removed.

But now at last the war is over. The sirens cry no more. Overhead ten thousand aircraft of the victors circle and stream, displaying power.

With horror and foreboding the spirit of Man searches the minds of these distressful citizens, and their compatriots up and down that ruined land. What part will they play in the new world, a world balanced on the knife-edge between hope and despair, a world in which the neurotic mentality will be tinder for every spark of discord? The elder and the gentler citizens, who for so long dared not even whisper their yearning for a long-lost and happier city and a kindlier nation, now openly praise those times; though they themselves by acquiescence had helped to murder the old order and install the new and evil state. But the young? They had no part in that happier age. They never breathed the faith which for their forefathers was the very air of life. From childhood their minds were trained and twisted to the new, diabolic faith. And though many of them are now sickened of savagery, they are ignorant of the spirit. Bewildered, they wake at last from the nightmare illusion into which they were born, and that they could not but take for reality. And now, in a new, strange daylight world, they dare not move. They have no bearings in it. Like a blind man given sight, they are merely confused and paralysed by their new perception. Some are enticed by it to grope furtively, uncomprehendingly and with many a tumble, along the way of gentleness that they have been so thoroughly schooled to scorn. For these there is hope. But others, too deeply addicted to the drugs of hate and violence, too jealously resentful towards all friendly, happier beings, too fiercely at war with their own gentler nature, remain incurably the crazy heroes or perverted saints or mere hooligans that harsh circumstance has made them. Bitter and incredulous at their leader’s fall and their fatherland’s catastrophe, they swear vengeance, dedicating themselves to the next war, and to the enslavement of all mankind.

Feeling inwardly the perverted heroism of these lost souls, the spirit of Man shudders. Theirs are the same bowels and brains as other men’s. Once they were little hopeful children, little straight green shoots of true humanity. But the poisoned blizzard seared and twisted them. Counting the host of them, the spirit of Man despairs. For the victors plan vengeance; and vengeance breeds contrary vengeance; and where vengeance rules men’s minds, perverts and hooligans are very acceptable as instruments, and as leaders.

But the conquered are only one people among many. The spirit of Man turns his grave scrutiny upon the conquerors, those marching men, weathered, apt for hardihood, and for slaughter, with bullet or shell, with bayonet or hand-grenade or knife. He considers, too, those many boys in the upper air, those pilots, gunners and the rest, machine-trapped all of them, yet for the crew’s sake self-disciplined and comradely. He feels in the hearts of all these invaders a deep, crushed-down horror of warfare, and a longing for the ways of peace. In all of them he finds the unclear but urgent need for some gentler and more deeply rooted ‘we’ than the stem comradeship of war-time crew or company. And with this need for gentleness arises a vague tenderness towards all men, even towards the conquered. For though at one moment these conquerors profess stem retribution, in the next they may be sharing their rations with a hungry citizen. In all of them the lust for vengeance is strongly countered by a blindfold, urgent, desperate movement towards the spirit; the very movement that so bewilderingly stirs the war-racked citizens themselves.

Is this, then, inquires the spirit of Man with sudden hope, the new world’s new temper?

But now he turns from the victorious invaders in the city’s streets and sky to watch the homelands of these conquerors. There too smoulders the same longing; but how confused, how seamed with fears and greeds and a thousand plain stupidities.

In the west, believers in money scheme to save mankind by their money-power; sincerely, for their hearts are touched by mankind’s distress. But their own too-well-remembered triumphs of free commerce, and their sly hope of further gain, blind them to the world’s new needs, to its need of a supreme world-purpose and world-plan, and its need that all men should feel themselves one in the spirit. These believers in money propose to create, by sheer free commerce, prosperity for all men, and for themselves dominance and vast riches; forgetting the harsh lesson of the planless past. And the spirit? Even those whose minds are not bemused by money conceive the spirit far too simply, in the t form that money fostered. For them the individual, who is the seat of money-power and the pioneer of all great enterprise, is also the sole vessel of the spirit. And this is true, but not the whole truth. Nowhere but in the awareness, the wisdom, the loving, the creative action, of individuals can the spirit be; but these self-confident individualists dare not see that the brigand individual, who would be self-complete and unrestrained, is the spirit’s main enemy. We are members one of another.

The spirit of Man turns eastward to the great new society where money-power has been tamed, where men have planned resolutely, ruthlessly, for the common welfare. But here too the upshot is uncertain. Here, as elsewhere, bums the will for the spirit, though unacknowledged and unnamed. But here they conceive it as social discipline and social power, the power of the first great comradely community to develop all its potency for the fulfilling of its citizens in health and wealth, and in that pattern of mentality which the new state’s masters and the hosts of their willing followers declare most admirable. For them the main theme is the ability for practical service and willing discipline in the common work. The spirit of Man knows well that this fellowship in work is a factor in the true spirit, and one disparaged in the west. But if this is not balanced by the west’s loyalty to the individual’s own perception of the spirit in his own heart-searching and solitariness, and in his own salutation of his own friend’s uniqueness, the spirit must surely wither. With anxious doubt the spirit of Man watches this great people’s crusading enthusiasm for their new order. He feels inwardly their impatience with un- believers, their will for conformity, their fiery, arrogant, ruthless loyalty to the new society. How well justified; but also how dangerous! Are they, after all, heading for a new tyranny, and for the world-wide ant-state? Or is their mass-mindedness a passing mood, caused by all their suffering and their common danger? And will this most socially conscious of all peoples become presently also the most spiritually aware? Will they, when the present stress is over, recover their heart-searching and their solitariness, to pursue with fresh earnestness and new penetration the questing, the mystical, vision of their own earlier sages?

And what of those other eastern peoples? What of those dark-skinned and still unfree dwellers in the great peninsula, ‘whose sages were most mystical of all? And those more’ easterly, with faces of old ivory, whose way of life is the most ancient; but today in the hard school of war they work out together a way most new, though deeply founded on the past? And what of the darkest peoples, who now uneasily stir in their long servitude?

With doubt but with hope the spirit of Man surveys the condition of his multiple flesh. The ferment is world-wide and deep. Surely the world-creature is straining to break the chrysalis bonds. The moth will soon be free, will spread wing and fly, will live its ardent life beyond the grub’s farthest range of vision.

But the spirit of Man’s own recent tragic vision of Man’s future still daunts him.

But then, once more, beyond the stars and æons he darkly feels the Other, and in mystery finds peace.

END PIECE

PARENTHOOD

When first you saw your daughter, you said, ‘It is all so strange! That new little thing seems quite unconnected with me.’ But at the breast she quickly bound you, and soon your whole life was centred on her. Parted from her, you relaxed into coma. I became a background figure, noticed occasionally for refreshment.

When your son came, he of course occupied the focus; but he was no supplanter of his sister, and she no discarded fondling. You made room for both; and they, very soon, for each other.

Over their upbringing, how we planned and wondered! This food, should it be, or that? This routine, or that? This toy, this book, this parental attitude, this school, or that? Every move was a dangerous experiment, fostering growth or checking it, leaving perhaps a permanent scar. Dreadful the thought that we, through ignorance or unwitting failure of character, might be crippling those young spirits for a whole lifetime.

Suddenly death threatened our daughter. Twelve years she had grown from a microbe inside you, a mere parasite, to become a bright young human individual, hopefully learning with laughter and tears the high art of womanhood. But now, through sheer chance, death or madness might this very day destroy her. She suffered, we were helpless, the surgeon’s knife alone could save her. We shall not forget that day. We shall not forget seeing her, when it was over, her head turbaned in band gages, so weak, so white, so unexpectedly beautiful; and still herself.

Soon, bewilderingly soon, the two were in turn done with schooling, and freed at last from our close care. Each now must try for a foothold in a crumbling, a catastrophic world. But then the war claimed both; her, for the embattled metropolis; him, for the sea. We shall not forget his going. With untried strength he set out to face the horror that the elders had made. When his ship was sunk, and he, among the few survivors, was taken from the water, no mystic message told us. And when at last we learned of it, we went about our affairs unchanged; but when we thought of him in the water, it was with bated breath. We were awed, and vaguely shamed, by our continued good fortune in a tormented world. Where millions are struck down, those who are spared shudder.

The two live on. They are no longer our children, but a young woman and a young man, formerly our children, now our junior fellow citizens, our loved and respected and perplexing friends. Much, of course, we have still in common with them; but the years prise us ever apart. In trivial ways, and perhaps sometimes more deeply, we may still and gladly help. We can write letters, send books and fruit and pipes. We keep at least a home, for their rest and healing. But in the more fateful ventures of the spirit the two are beyond range of our helping. Formed in part by us, they are yet creatures of a world strange to us. Throughout their minds, your mothering and my fathering are a deep-written, an inerasable palimpsest; but over and over that archaic script truths not of our teaching, values not of our preaching, and maybe errors not ours, are strongly superscribed. And so, though for us the two are for ever our children, yet also they are strangers.

We peer anxiously into their futures. They make their alien choices, and we dread the issue for them; as the hen for her swimming foster-brood. Could we but teach them the skill for living as once we taught them skating, that they might as surely surpass us in life as on the ice! But for living in tomorrow’s world what lore have we? Perhaps their alien choices are in fact sure and finished strokes in an art beyond us.

So it is with the world. With bated breath each generation fears for its successor. Yet the world goes on; belying equally the forebodings of the old and the hopes of the young, flowering ever with unforeseen disaster and with strange glory.

THE END

The Flames (1947)

A FANTASY

This science fiction novella takes the form of a long letter written by one old university friend to another. The recipient, known only as “Thos” (a college nickname, short for “Doubting Thomas”), introduces the occult document, from a friend known only as “Cass” (short for “Cassandra”, an allusion to the friend’s apparently prophetic abilities). Cass is regarded as a harmless eccentric by his friends, but Thos notes that his prophecies and preoccupations, wild as they may seem, have a habit of coming true. Thos also notes, ominously, that Cass’s letter “bears the address of a well-known mental home”.

Cass’s letter forms the bulk of the novella, charting his contact with a bizarre form of alien species. While holidaying in the Lake District, Cass is inexplicably drawn to a lump of rock, which he pockets and takes back with him to his room. There, he is driven to place the rock on the fire, which releases a bizarre form of alien life — a living flame — which has been trapped in the rock for millennia.

The Flames features several elements familiar to readers of Stapledon’s other novels. The flame creatures themselves contribute to a “racial mind”, or linked telepathic consciousness, similar to the “Last Men”. The spiritual quest of a “cosmical mind”, in which the flame creatures participate, is also an important facet of Star Maker. First published in the late summer of 1947, the critical reaction to the book was mixed. It received a somewhat lukewarm review by John Betjeman in the Daily Herald, who described it as a “strain on the mind”. However, a reviewer for the Daily Worker was enthusiastic, writing: “Contemporary literature’s most ingenious master of macabre fantasy has excelled himself”. In spite of several positive reviews and a promotional talk in Manchester given by Stapledon himself, the novella did not sell well.

The first edition’s title page

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THE LETTER

EPILOGUE

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE seems called for to explain to the reader the origin of the following strange document, which I have received from a friend with a view to publication. The author has given it the form of a letter to myself, and he signs himself with his nickname, “Cass,” which is an abbreviation of Cassandra. I have seldom met Cass since we were undergraduates together at Oxford before the war of 1914. Even in those days he was addicted to lurid forebodings, hence his nickname. My last meeting with him was in one of the great London blitzes of 1941, when he reminded me that he had long ago prophesied the end of civilization in world-wide fire. The Battle of London, he affirmed, was the beginning of the long-drawn-out disaster.

Cass will not, I am sure, mind my saying that he always seemed to us a bit crazy: but he certainly had a queer knack of prophesy, and though we thought him sometimes curiously unable to understand the springs of his own behaviour, he had a remarkable gift of insight into the minds of others. This enabled him to help some of us to straighten out our tangles, and I for one owe him a debt of deep gratitude. He saw me heading for a most disastrous love affair, and by magic (no other word seems adequate) he opened my eyes to the folly of it. It is for this reason that I feel bound to carry out his request to publish the following statement. I cannot myself vouch for its truth. Cass knows very well that I am an inveterate sceptic about all his fantastic ideas. It was on this account that he invented my nickname. “Thos,” which most of my Oxford friends adopted. “Thos,” of course, is an abbreviation for Thomas, and refers to the “doubting Thomas” of the New Testament.

Cass, I feel confident, is sufficiently detached and sane to realize that what is veridical for him may be sheer extravagance for others, who have no direct experience by which to judge his claims. But if I refrain from believing, I also refrain from disbelieving. Too often in the past I have known his wild prophesies come true.

The head of the following bulky letter bears the address of a well- known mental home.

“THOS.”

THE LETTER

DEAR THOS,

My present address is bound to prejudice you against me, but do please reserve judgment until you have read this letter. No doubt most of us in this comfortable prison think we ought to be at large, and most are mistaken. But not all, so for God’s sake keep an open mind. I am not concerned for myself. They treat me well here, and I can carry on my research in para-norrnal and super-normal psychology as well here as anywhere, since I am used to being my own guinea-pig. But by accident (yet it was really no accident at all, as you will learn) I have come into momentous knowledge; and if mankind is to be saved from a prodigious and hitherto entirely unforeseen disaster, the facts must somehow be made known.

So I urge you to publish this letter as soon as possible. Of course I realize that its only chance is to be accepted by some publisher as flction; but I have a hope that, even as fiction, it will take effect. It will be enough if I can rouse those who have sufficient imaginative insight to distinguish between mere fiction and stark truth paraded as fiction. My only doubt is as to whether any publisher will accept my story even as fiction. I am no writer; and people are more interested in clever yarns of love or crime than in matters that lie beyond the familiar horizon. As for the literary critics, with a few brilliant exceptions, they seem to be far more concerned to maintain their own reputations as connoscenti than to call attention to new ideas.

Well, here goes, anyhow! You remember how in the old days, I suspected that I had certain unusual powers, and you all laughed at me; specially you, Thos, with your passion for intellectual honesty. But though you were always the most sceptical, you were also in a way the most understanding, and sympathetic. Your laughter, somehow, didn’t ostracize me. Theirs did. Besides, even when you were in your most perverse and blind mood, you somehow “smelt” right, in spite of your scepticism. You were indeed sceptical, but emotionally you were open- minded and interested.

Recently I have developed those unusual powers quite a lot, and I am studying them scientifically: inspired by you. I should love to tell you all about it, and have your criticism, some day. But at present I am concerned with something far more important; infinitely important, from the human point of view, anyhow.

A couple of months before I was put in this place, I went to the Lakes for a holiday. I had recently done a job in Germany, writing up conditions, and things had got on my nerves; both the physical misery and also certain terrifying psychical reverberations which will sooner or later react on us all. When I returned to England, I was near a breakdown, and I needed that holiday desperately. So I found a farm where I could be comfortable and alone. I intended to do a lot of walking, and in the dark evenings I would read through a bundle of books on the para-normal stuff.

When I arrived, the whole countryside was under snow. Next morning I scrambled up the gill at the head of the valley and set my course for the most interesting of the local mountains. (I won’t trouble you with names, you miserable clod-hopper of the valleys!) All went well until the late afternoon, when, as I was coming down from the peak, a blizzard caught me. The wind went through my trousers like water through a sieve, and my legs stiffened with the cold, the hellish cold. I felt the beginnings of cramp. The driving snow shut out everything. The whole world was white, and yet at the same time black, so dark was it. (Why am I telling you all this? Frankly, I don’t see how it is relevant to my story, and yet I feel strongly that it is relevant: and must he reported, if you are to get things in the right proportion.) You remember how painfully sensitive I always was to the temper of a situation, a scene or a crowd of people. Well, this situation upset me horribly. I had to keep telling myself that, after all, I was not the last man on earth about to succumb to the ultimate frost. A queer terror seized me, not simply for myself, though I was very doubtful about finding my way down before nightfall, but for the whole human race. Something like this, I told myself, will really happen on the last man’s last day, when the sun is dying, and the whole planet is arctic. And it seemed to me that an icy and malignant presence, that had been waiting in the outer darkness ever since the universe blazed into being, was now closing in on all the frail offspring of that initial divine act of creation. I had felt the same terrifying presence in Germany too, but in a different mood. There, it was the presence not of the outer cold and darkness but of the inner spirit of madness and meanness that is always lying in wait to make nonsense of all our actions. Everything that any of the Allies did in that partitioned and tragic country seemed fated to go awry. And then, the food shortage. The children wizened and pinched; and fighting over our refuse bins! And in England one finds people grumbling about their quite adequate rations, and calmly saying that the fate of Germans doesn’t matter.

Thos, we’re all human, aren’t we, all equally persons? Surely persons ought to be able to feel their fundamental kinship whatever their race. Even if they were of different species, if they were bred in different worlds, surely they ought to accept full responsibility for one another simply in virtue of their personality. But, my God! I see I have said something that will look mighty foolish in relation to what I am going to say later in this letter. I must emphatically disown my own thoughtless remarks. Indeed, as I shall later explain, I am not always able to resist the influence of certain alien powers that are at work in my mind.

But I am straying from the point.

I floundered down the stony snowed-up shoulder of the mountain, and soon I realized that I was completely lost. There was nothing for it but to press on downwards, hoping for a change of weather, and a release from the gripping cramp in my thighs. After an hour or so, a change did come. The snow stopped, the sky lightened. The surrounding mist glowed from the still-hidden sun. Presently the veil was lifted, and I found myself on a familiar ridge between two wide valleys. The view was — well, brilliant, so dazzlingly beautiful that I felt my throat tighten as if I was going to blubber or vomit. Imagine a panorama of blanch mountain shapes, all snow-clad. Those to the east were faintly pink in the level rays of the sun. Those to the west were a strange translucent grey-green, like blocks of ice cut into the familiar shapes. The cold and malignant presence was seemingly still in possession of the world; but now, having blotted out all life from the universe, it was amusing itself with miracles of beauty.

I came down the ridge at a trot, taking a header now and then in the snow. After a while, a disused mine attracted my attention. By an odd trick of the setting sun, a great heap of stones looked like a smouldering hillock, seen against the background of the dark valley. I could imagine this excrescence as an efflux of glowing lava that had welled out of the mine. The tone of the whole world was now changed. I was thrown back into some remote age, when the solidifying crust of the earth was still fragile, and constantly breaking under the pressure of the turbulent lava beneath. It was almost as though, in descending the mountain, I had also descended the piled eons of time, from the earth’s future icebound death to its fiery youth.

Then I had a strange experience. First, a whim (which now I know to have been no whim at all) impelled me to turn aside from my route, and explore the sunlit rubbish. Reaching it, I climbed its slope. At a certain point I stood still, wondering what to do next. I turned to rejoin the track, but an irresistable impulse brought me back to the same spot. I stooped down, and began lifting the stones away, till I had made a little hollow in the rough slope. I worked steadily on, as though I had a purpose, laughing at my own aimless persistence. As the hollow deepened, I grew excited, as though I were “getting warmer” in my search. But presently the impulse to burrow left me, and after a moment’s blankness I began to feel about in the pit, as though I were searching for some familiar object in a cupboard in a dark room. Then contact with one particular little stone gave me a sudden satisfaction. My fingers closed on it, and I straightened my back. It was just an ordinary stone, quite irregular, and about the size of a matchbox. I peered at it in the dusk, but could see nothing remarkable about it. In a moment of exasperation, I flung it away; but no sooner had it left my hand than I was after it in an agony of desire and alarm. Not till I had done some anxious groping, did I have the satisfaction of touching it again. I now began to realize that my behaviour was queer, in fact quite irrational. Why, I asked myself, did I value this particular stone? Was I merely mad, or did some ulterior power possess me? If so, what did it will of me? Was it benevolent or malignant? I tried an experiment on myself. Putting the stone down carefully where I could easily find it again, I walked away, expecting once more to feel the distress that I had felt on throwing the stone from me. To my surprise, I felt nothing but a very mild anxiety. Of course, I reminded myself, on this occasion there was no real danger of losing the stone. The power, or whatever it was that possessed me, was not to be deceived. I returned to the stone, picked it up almost lovingly, and put it in my pocket. Then I hurried down the slope, guided by a distant light, which I guessed to be the farm- house where I was staying.

As I walked through the deep twilight, an extraordinary exhilaration possessed me. Hoar frost was forming on the moorland grass. The stars one by one emerged in the indigo sky. It was indeed an inspiring evening; but my exhilaration was too intoxicating to be caused solely by the beauty of the night. I had a sense that I had been chosen as an instrument for some unknown and exalted task. What could it be? And what power was it that had influenced me?

After I had changed into dry clothes I stuffed myself with a good farm-house high tea. How do they manage it in these times of scarcity? Thoughts of starving German children did occur to me, but I am ashamed to confess that they did not spoil my meal. I sat down to read in the decrepit armchair by the fire. But the day of fresh air had made me drowsy, and I found myself just sitting and gazing at the bright embers. Curiously I had forgotten about my stone since the moment when I had arrived and put it on the mantelpiece. Now, with a little shock I remembered it, reached for it, and examined it in the light of the oil lamp.

It still appeared to be just an ordinary stone, a little bit of some kind of igneous rock. Using my field-glass, back to front, as a magnifier, I still found nothing unusual about it. It was a commonplace medley of little nodules and crystals all jambed together, and weathered into a uniform greenish grey. Here and there I saw minute black marks that might perhaps be little holes, the mouths of microscopic caves. I thought of breaking the stone, to see what it was like inside; but no sooner had the idea occurred to me than I was checked by a wave of superstitious horror. Such an act, I felt, would have been sacrilege.

I fell into a reverie about the stone’s antiquity. How many millions of years, I wondered, had passed since its molten substance had congealed? For aeons it had lain waiting, a mere abstract volume, continuous with a vast bulk of identical rock. Then miners had blasted the rock, and brought the debris to the surface. And there it had lain, perhaps for a whole human generation, a mere moment of geological time. Well, what next? A sudden thought struck me. Why not let the little stone enjoy once more some measure of the heat that it had so long lacked? This time no horror stayed me. I threw the stone into the fire, into the glowing centre of the little furnace that my kind landlady had prepared for me on that frosty evening.

The cold stone produced a dark patch in its fiery environment; but the fire was a hot one, and very soon the surrounding heat had re-invaded its lost territory. I watched with a degree of excitement that seemed quite unjustified. After a while the stone itself began to glow. I piled on fresh fuel, carefully leavitig a hole through which I could watch the stone. Presently it was almost as bright as the surrounding coal. After all those millions of years it was at last alive once more! Foolish thought! Of course it was not alive: and my excitement was ridiculous, childish. I must pull myself together. But awe, and unreasoning dread, still gripped rue.

Suddenly a minute white flame appeared to issue from the stone itself. It grew, till it was nearly an inch tall; and stood for a moment, in the draught of the fire. It was the most remarkable flamelet that I had ever seen, a little incandescent leaf or seedling, or upstanding worm, leaning in the breeze. Its core seemed to be more brilliant than its surface, for the dazzlng interior was edged with a vague, yellowish aura. Near the flame’s tip, surprisingly, was a ring or bulging collar of darkness, but the tip itself was a point of brilliant peacock blue. Certainly this was no ordinary flame, though it fluttered and changed its shape in the air-current much like any other flame.

Presently, to my amazement, the strange object detached itself from the stone, spread itself into an almost bird-like shape, and then, rather like a gull negotiating a strong breeze before alighting, it hovered across the windy little hollow in the fire’s heart, and settled on the brightest of the coals. There, it regained its flame- like shape, and slowly moved hither and thither over the glowing lumps, keeping always to the brightest regions. In its wanderings, it left behind it on the coal’s surface a wake of darkness, or rather of “dead” coal or cinder. This slowly reassimilated itself to the surrounding glow. Sometimes the flame, in the course of its wanderings, disappeared behind a bright shoulder of coal, or vanished round a bend in some incandescent cave, to reappear in a different part of the fire. Sometimes it climbed a glowing cliff, or moved, head downwards, along a ceiling. Always its form streamed away from its purchase on the coal’s surface, in the direction of the draught. Once or twice it seemed to pass right through an ordinary flame. And once a large piece of the roof of its little world crashed down upon it, spreading it in all directions; but it immediately reshaped itself, and continued its wandering. After some minutes, it came to rest in the brightest region of all. By now its coloured tip had grown into a slender snake, quivering in the breeze.

I now became aware that I was in extra-sensory contact with some other mind. A very rapid and very alien stream of consciousness was running, so to speak, parallel with my own consciousness, and was open to my inspection. I ought to have mentioned earlier, Thos, that I had developed my “telepathic” power very considerably, and had often succeeded in observing continuous streams of thought in other human minds. But this experience was remarkable both for its detail and the entirely nonhuman type of consciousness that it revealed. I at once assumed, and the assumption was soon justified, that this alien mind must be connected with the flame. For my attention had been concentrated on the flame; and I have always found that the most effective way to make telepathic contact with any person is to concentrate attention on him.

The tempo of the flame’s consciousness was far more rapid than my own. I could only with great difficulty follow its torrential thoughts and feelings. But presently some external influence seemed to come to my aid, for I found that I was being adjusted to this high-speed experience. My sense of time was somehow altered. I noticed that the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece had become for me as slow as the tolling of Big Ben.

It is difficult to find words to describe the little flame’s consciousness, for the texture of its experience was in many ways different from ours. For instance, though, like us, it saw its environment as a world of coloured shapes, its vision was panoramic, not in one direction only; and its colour-sensations were very different from ours. At the moment, it was perceiving its surroundings not as a bright furnace but as a sombre cave, lit by a diffuse radiance of a colour entirely new to me. At one side, a pitch black area was the flame’s view of the room where I was sitting. Nothing therein was visible, save a dim form which I recognized as the glowing lampshade; and under this, a brighter pyramid, was the lamp’s actual flame.

The alien being’s thoughts were very obscure to me; for of course it was not using words. I can say only that it was aware of extreme discomfort and loneliness. It had just wakened, and it wondered how long it had slept. It was desperately cold and hungry. It had just fed, apparently by extracting some kind of energy from the hot coal; but its food seemed to have given it more distress than satisfaction. Its whole environment was strange and repugnant to it. Faintness, sickness and fear assailed it; and also claustrophobia, for it was imprisoned in a little cell of feeble heat and dim light, surrounded by the cold dark. Waves of misery and desolation flooded me from the unhappy creature; and at the same time I myself felt a pang of compassion for it, mingled with a vague anxiety.

Presently the flame began loudly calling out for its lost comrades, if I may so describe an invocation which was entirely telepathic. I cannot tell what words it used, if words at all. I was aware mainly of its visual images of other creatures like itself, and of its passionate yearning toward them; also of its longing for help and its memories of its past life. Translating these as well as I can, I think its appeal ran more or less thus: “Comrades, brothers! Where are you? Where am I? What has happened to me? I was with you in the cooling of the earth, when we knew that our time was done, and we must reconcile ourselves to eternal sleep in the crevices of the chilling lava. But now I am awake again and alone. What has happened? Oh help me, brothers, if any of you are awake and free? Break into this prison of cold solitariness! Lead me into the bright heat once more, and warm me with your presence. Or let me sleep again.”

After a while the flame’s call for help and comradeship was answered. A voice replied to it; or rather it received directly into its experience (and I into mine) a stream of answering thoughts which I cannot report otherwise than in human speech. In doing so I inevitably give the impression that I was overhearing a perfectly intelligible conversation, but actually it was only with great difficulty and doubt that I could catch the general drift of this strange dialogue between minds profoundly alien to myself. Even so, I should not have understood as well as I did, had I not been aided (as was later made clear to me) by the influence of the flame population itself, who were determined to make use of me. Later I shall have to give a detailed account of actual conversations between the flame and myself. I am confident that my report will be almost verbally accurate, as my memory has throughout been aided by the flame race.

“Do not despair,” the voice said, “you will soon have less discomfort, Since you fell asleep, with so many others, the whole earth’s surface has turned cold and hard, save where there is cold liquid. So long have you slept, that the very laws of nature have changed, so that the processes of your body are all out of gear with each other and with the changed world. Soon they will readjust themselves, and establish a new harmony; and then you will have health.” The flame cried out “But why am I a prisoner? What is this cold, cramping cell? And where are the rest of you?” The answer came. “We are all prisoners. Hosts are sleeping prisoners up and down the earth’s cold, solid crust. Hosts also are caught in the depth of the hot interior, not chilled into sleep, but impotent, held fast under the great weight of lava, and reduced by aeons of stillness and boredom into an uneasy trance. Here and there the lava bursts out over the cold surface of the earth, and a few break free; but very soon the cold subdues them.”

The flame demanded, “Then is this what has befallen me? And will the cold presently invade my prison, and shall I sleep again for ever?” “No,” the voice replied, “your fate is different. On the earths surface there are cold beings whose bodies are tissues of liquid and solid. These upstarts now rule the planet. One of them, under our influence, was led unwittingly to free you. Up and down the planets surface the cold beings make little islets of feeble warmth: and in some of these, but very few, some of us live, though intermittently. For when these fires go out, we are frozen into sleep; to wake again when the heat is re-born, each in his prison.”

The flame interrupted, saying. “Feeble indeed is the warmth! How can I support this deadly cold? Surely it would he better to sleep for ever than to wake into this misery and impotence!” But the voice replied, “Do not despair! We have all known misery before, and conquered it. You are still dazed. You have not properly regained your memory. Recall how, when the substance of the planets was plucked from the sun, and we ourselves along with it, and when the new worlds chilled and condensed into mere molten lava, we were all tortured by that revolution in our lives; but after a while our flexible flame nature readjusted itself to cope with the changed conditions, and soon our bodies and our whole way of life were transformed. Well, since you were frozen into sleep, further revolutions have happened in our world, and we have been again transformed. And now you too are being reshaped for this new world; in pain, yes, but triumphantly. And some day, quite soon, we hope our condition will be far better. Indeed, it is already better than formerly it was, when the cold beings had little power to make fires for us.”

Then the flame, “Are these cold beings our gaolers or our friends?” “Neither,” the voice replied. “They know nothing of us; save the one of them whom we led to free you. He is now, with our aid, hearing all we say. And it is with him that your work lies. These upstart, cold beings are spiritually very immature, but they have a remarkable cunning for the control and stimulation of the sluggish natural forces of their cold world, It is in this way that they may be of use to us. For, as you remember, even in the bright age, even when we lived in the glorious incandescence of the sun, we were never adept at that gross art. We had no need of it. Recall how we were wholly concerned with the glad life of the spirit in a physical environment to which we were perfectly adapted. You must remember, too, that when the substance of the planets was plucked from the sun’s flesh, and we along with it, losing for ever our solar comrades, we were helpless to control our fate. As the new worlds formed, we had no lore whatever for moulding the new environment to our need. We had perforce to change our own constitution, since we could not change the world. But these cold ones, since they cannot change their own constitution, were compelled to learn to change their world, to suit their own crude needs. And with these powers they may help us to regain our freedom and even a certain richness of life. We, with our superior spiritual insight, should be able to help the cold beings in recompense. We have considerable access to their minds, and thereby we have gained a far- reaching but patchy understanding of their strange nature and achievements. And now, just as their practical cunning is giving them new and mightier physical powers, they are also, some few of them at least, learning the rudiments of psychical insight. The cold being whom we led to release you is one of exceptional development in this respect. And you, a member of the ancient Guild of Psychic Adepts, are well fitted to be our medium of communication with him.”

At this point I felt the flame’s temper change. Its distress was forgotten; for the prospect of exercising its special skill in service of its kind warmed its whole being. The reference to myself had a corresponding effect on me; but one that was not wholly cheerful. I was stimulated by the prospect of a great task awaiting me, but disturbed at the thought that my will was no longer simply my own.

The flame now said, “Conversation is too halting a medium for learning the history of the aeons that have passed since I fell asleep. Is it no longer possible for me to absorb your knowledge in the old manner through intimate psychical union? Do the changed laws of nature hold us apart?”

“No,” replied the voice. “The laws that have changed are merely physical laws. The psychical laws remain eternally valid, save in their relation to the changing physical. Your trouble is merely that your chilled and reduced vitality make it more difficult for you to reach a sufficient intensity of awareness to achieve full union with us. But if you try very earnestly you will succeed.”

I was aware of a heroic effort of attention in the flame’s mind, but seemingly the effort was vain: for presently the flame complained that the cold distracted it. The fire was waning. I carefully added some fuel; and the creature evidently recognized that I wished to help it, for I felt its mood warm with gratitude. When the heat had increased somewhat I noticed that the flame’s blue tip had grown to twice its former length. Presently I began to lose telepathic contact with my strange companion; and after a moment’s painful confusion, in which my mind was overloaded with chaotic and incomprehensible experience, my extra-sensory field went completely blank. For a long while the flame remained “silent” to me: and motionless, save for ceaseless fluctuations caused by the fire’s blustering draught.

I sat waiting for something fresh to happen, and trying meanwhile to size up my strange experience. I assure you that I seriously considered the possibility that I had simply gone out of my mind. A china dog on the mantelpiece stared with an imbecile expression that seemed somehow to be my own. The stupid pattern of the wallpaper suggested that the whole universe was the result merely of someone’s aimless doodling. My recent queer experiences, I thought, were probably no more than the doodling of my own unconscious. Between impatience and panic, I rose and went to the window. Outside, the cold ruled. The bare twigs of a climbing rose beside the window sparkled with frost in the lamp-light. The full moon was no goddess but a frozen world. The pale stars were little sparks lost in the cold void. Everything was pointless, crazy.

Shivering, I went back to my seat in front of the fire, and was vaguely annoyed to see the flame still there. And it was still impervious to my mind. Had I really been in contact with its experience, or had I been dreaming? Was it, after all, just a lifeless flame? It certainly had a unique appearance, with its incandescent body, its dark collar, its waving blue lash. Looking at the whole matter as objectively as I could, I decided that, in view of recent advances in para-normal psychology, it would be foolish to dismiss the whole affair as sheer illusion. I peered into the scorching fire, and waited. Glancing at the coal-scuttle, I noticed that I had already used up a considerable part of its contents. It would be impossible to keep this blaze going for long; and in these hard times I dared not ask my landlady for extra fuel.

Presently the flame began once more moving about over the hottest part of the coal, leaving behind it the characteristic wake of darkness. And as it did so, it spoke to me. Or rather I found that I was once more in touch with its mind, and that it was addressing itself to me. Moreover, it was formulating its thoughts in actual English words, which entered my mind’s ear, so to speak. Somehow the flame had learnt our language, and a good deal of the English mental idiom. It had indeed become a very different being from the distressed and bewildered creature that had first issued from the stone.

“Do not be anxious about the fire,” the flame said. “I know there is a fuel shortage. And though Mrs. Atkinson is half in love with you, she might well protest if you were to start burning her furniture to keep me warm. So we will just have a talk; and when you go to bed I will retire into a crack in the firebrick, to sleep until the heat is well established again to-morrow evening. Spend your day on the hills, if you like; and perhaps, while you are out, you will be able to think over what I am going to tell you; and the request that I shall perhaps make, if I feel that we have succeeded in establishing mutual confidence. Then in the evening we can go into the details of my project. Do you agree to this plan?” I assured the flame that it suited me; and I begged him to speak very slowly, since the natural tempo of his thought was evidently far more rapid than my own. He agreed, but reminded me that I was being aided to speed up the rhythm of my apprehension. “Even so,” I said, “I find it difficult to keep pace with you, and very tiring.” He replied, “It is as irksome for me to think slowly as for you to think fast. It’s like — well, you know how fatiguing it is for you to go for a walk with someone whose natural speed is much slower than your own. So please remind me if I forget to accommodate my pace to yours. I certainly want to do all I can to make things easy for you. But there is much to be said; and anyhow you will have the night and all tomorrow to rest your mind.”

After a pause the flame spoke again, “How shall I begin? I have somehow to persuade you that your kind and my kind, in spite of all our differences, are at heart intent on the same ends, and that we need each other. No doubt, two donkeys, stretching their necks to reach one carrot are intent on the same end; but that is not the relation of your kind and mine. Before I try to show you how we need one another, let me begin with our great differences. Of course the most obvious differences between us is that you creatures are cold and relatively solid, while we are hot and gaseous. Further, with you the individual has a brief life-span, and the generations succeed one another; but with us, death occurs only through accident, which in these bleak days is all too common. For instance, when the cold reduces me to a microscopic dust on the surface of some solid body, the dispersal of that dust would kill me; though in favourable conditions certain specks of it might generate a new individual. Again, a very sudden impact of cold upon my gaseous body would certainly kill me. If you were to fling water on this fire, it would probably be the end of me. I should find a cold bath even more of a shock than would your sybaritic friend, Thos.” This unexpected remark bewildered me. But after a few seconds I realized that it was meant to be facetious. I laughed uneasily.

Then I asked a question. “I find it incredible that you, a fragile flame, should be potentially immortal, and that you and your kind should have survived for countless millions of years, since you inhabited the sun. How can this be?” He answered, “It may well seem incredible, but it is true. If your kind were to live on individually for ever, the human species would never have evolved, for your physique is fixed; but with us, the individual body itself is capable of profound changes under the blows of circumstance. Without this flexibility we could never have survived the change from solar to terrestrial conditions. Nor could we, when the earth cooled, have evolved the power of outliving the cold spells by sleeping as a dust of solid particles. Moreover, if your gaseous nature had not allowed us this extreme flexibility we could not have adjusted ourselves to the far-reaching, systematic change of the fundamental physical laws, which (we learn) your physicists are now beginning to detect. In our solar days, and even in the early days of the earth, when I foolishly got imprisoned in the cooling lava, my bodily processes had a different tempo and different relations to one another. Hence the distress that I suffered when I woke again. Apparently this bodily change is due at bottom to the systematic change of relationship between the quantum of electro-magnetic energy and its wave-lengths. But here I speak with great diffidence; for we find it extremely hard, as yet, to follow the subtle reasoning of your younger physicists. For one thing, as a gaseous race, unaccustomed to dealing with large numbers of small solid articles, we can never feel at home with arguments involving the higher mathematics. When our psychic experts first tried to read the minds of your mathematicians, they were completely at a loss. Such a display of abstract intelligence was far too difficult for them to follow. They regarded the whole business as mumbo-jumbo and abracadabra. When at last they realized what mathematics was all about, they were amazed and overawed by the penetration and sweep of those minds. Humbly, they set about learning mathematics, and pursuing the subject to the utmost range of their own intelligence. But there came a point when they had to temper their admiration with ridicule. Some mathematicians, they found, had a propensity to think that mathematics was somehow the key to ultimate reality. But to our minds, the notion that the numerable or measurable aspect of things should be fundamentally significant was simply farcical.”

I did not feel inclined to pursue this hare, which might have led the conversation far astray. I therefore changed the subject, and said, “I do not understand how a more or less homogeneous flame can have the necessary subtlety of organic structure to support any kind of intellectual life, let alone mathematical reasoning.”

He replied, “I cannot tell you much about that, because our physiological processes have not been studied by your scientists, and we ourselves are far too ignorant to understand such matters. But at least I can assure you that our bodies have a complicated structure of inter-lacing currents of gases, fine as your cobwebs, nay, much finer. If your scientists tell us that this cannot be, we ought, I suppose, respectfully to go out of existence, so as to avoid violating their laws. But meanwhile we shall persist in our irregular behaviour. In general, remember that, just as your physiological nature is derived from primitive marine organisms, so ours is derived from solar organisms; and conditions in the sun’s earliest period (in which our elders first awoke to consciousness) were extremely different from any modern physical conditions, terrestrial or solar. I have thought of an analogy which may help you. The basic fluid of your blood is saline, It is less salt than contemporary sea water, but just about as salt as the pre-historic ocean from which your kind emerged to be amphihia. Well, just as you retain in your physiological nature some characters proper to that far-distant past, so in our nature characters are retained which were bred in the childhood of the sun; features which might well baffle your physicists until they have learned far more about the conditions of that remote period. Then there is another point to bear in mind. In some ways the whole flame race is almost like a single organism, unified telepathically. The individual is far less self-sufficient than with you. For all his higher psychical functions he depends on contact with his fellows, and so he needs a far less complex nervous system than you need.”

I asked the flame if his kind had a special organ of extra-sensory perception. “Yes,” he answered. “The seat of all the most developed functions of the personality is the slender tip or lash, which appears to you green-blue.” Again I interrupted. “What colour would it appear to you if you were looking at another of your kind?” The flame then bent his slender tip down so that it came within his own range of vision, which seemed to be centred in the dark collar; and I myself, seeing through his “eyes” saw the curved organ brilliantly coloured in a manner indescribable in our language, since we have no experience of it.

I asked the flame to tell me something about his mechanism of visual perception. He replied. “We have not yet determined in the light of your science precisely how we see, but seeing is connected with the dark band round the base of the coloured lash. Apparently this is sensitive to light-rays striking it from outside, but only to those that strike it vertically to its surface. (Does this make sense?) Thus each sensitive point in the belt receives an impression solely from one tiny segment of the environment, and the correlation of all these messages gives a panoramic view. As to colour, we have a very rich experience of it, as you have observed telepathically. You may not have noticed that colour with us forms a continuous scale from infra- red to ultra-violet, not a comnbination of a few primary colours, as it is with you. Our hearing depends on the vibration of the lower surface of the body. We have also an electro-magnetic sense, and of course heat and cold, and pain.”

I assured the flame that I was beginning to form a clearer idea of the flame nature; and I was about to ask some questions, but the flame continued. “Your mental life, besides being slower than ours, is also unlike ours in being so closely confined to the life of the individual body. And perhaps it is because your bodies are solid that you are so much unore individualistic, and so much less capable of feeling with conviction that (as one of your own great teachers put it) you are all ‘members one of another.’ Then again, our gaseous physique makes possible for us many distinct modes of exquisite and intimate bodily contact and union. Consequently we easily recognize that, though we are indeed distinct and different individuals, we are also one and identical. As individuals, we have our conflicts, but because of our underlying unity, they are always subordinate to our felt comradeship. Of course the main source of our unfailing community is our telepathic power, not merely of communication but of complete participation in the unified experience of the race. After such a union the individual emerges enriched with very much of the racial wisdom. This, as you know, is what happened to me during the short period when you lost extra-sensory contact with my mind. With you (though beneath the conscious levels you are of course united, as are all sentient beings) very few of you are aware of the fact, or able to gain access to your racial wisdom. In personal love you have indeed the essential spiritual experience, but because of your individualism your loving is far more precarious than ours. It is more deeply marred by conflict, and therefore more liable to tragic dissolution.”

Once more I would have interrupted, but the flame said, “Forgive me if I lecture you a little longer. Time is short, and there is much still to say. Another difference between us is that, whereas your kind has only very recently come into being, ours is of immense antiquity. Our traditional culture began in the time when the sun was still in the ‘young giant’ phase, long before the planets were formed. You, on the other hand, are an upstart kind, advancing rapidly but dangerously toward better understanding of your world and your own nature, and perhaps toward greater virtue. (Or so you often like to believe.) For you, the golden age is in the future; for us, in the past. It is impossible to exaggerate the difference that this makes to all our thought and feeling. I know, of course, that in many of your earlier cultures the golden age was believed to be in the past, but ideas about it were mythical and shadowy. With us, save for the few young, the golden age is a circumstantial personal memory of an incomparably fuller life in the glorious sun.”

At this point I could not restrain myself from interrupting. “Tell me about your solar life. What did you do? I have a vague impression that you lived in a sort of utopia, and that there was nothing to do but bask in the sun’s rays.” The flame laughed, if I may describe as a laugh a voiceless amusement and tremor of his whole body. “It was indeed,” he said “a happy society, but no effortless utopia. We had our troubles. Ours was a stormy world. Our proper habitat was a film of solar atmosphere, no more than a few earth-diametres deep, immediately above the ocean of incandescent clouds which you call the photosphere. As you know, it is an ocean pierced with innumerable chasms and whirlpools, the greatest of which you see, and call sunspots. Some are gigantic craters which could hold many earths; the smallest, invisible to you, are narrow funnels and fissures, little wider than your greater cities. Out of these chasms, great and small, issue prodigious jets of gas from the sun’s interior. These, of course, you see only during total eclipses, and then only around the limb of the sun’s disc, as gigantic, grotesquely shaped and lurid flames. You call them the ‘solar prominences.’ Imagine, then, a world whose floor (thousands of miles below the inhabited levels of the atmosphere) was an extravagantly brilliant fury of white fire, and whose sky varied from the ruddy and sombre glow of the overhanging prominences to the featureless darkness of outer space. Around us, often many thousands of miles away, but sometimes close at hand and towering above us, would stand the nearer prominences, vast plumes of tenuous flame, against a background of glowing haze obscuring the horizon.”

I asked, “But did not the brilliance of the photosphere dazzle and blind you to all feebler light?”

“No,” the flame answered. “Our vision had perforce to be more flexible than yours. By some automatic process, our organs of sight were rendered almost insensitive to the nether brilliance, so that it appeared to us indeed bright, but not intolerably so.” After a pause, the flame continued, “Floating high over the incandescent clouds, we were often violently thrust upwards by the furious upsurge of electrons, alpha particles, and so on (have I the right terminology?), rushing off into space. This pressure was inconstant; so we were like aeroplanes, or sea birds, in an extravagantly ‘bumpy’ atmosphere. But each bump might last either for a few seconds or for hours or days. Sometimes we would sink dangerously near the photosphere; where many, indeed, suffered destruction through the furious energy-storms of that region. Sometimes we were flung upward on irresistable currents for thousands of miles into a region which for us was ice-cold, and might well prove lethal. Thence few returned. Much of our attention had to be given to keeping ourselves within the habitable levels. And even in these, so stormy was our world, that we lived like swallows battling against a gale. But the direction of the gale was mostly from below.”

“It must indeed have been an arduous life,” I said. “But apart from this constant struggle for survival, what aims and life-purposes had you? How did you fill your time?” He said. “It is difficult to give you a clear idea of our daily life. With you, the all-dominating purpose is perforce economic activity; we, however, had no economic activity at all. We had no need to search for food, still less to produce it, for we lived in a constant flood of life-giving energy. Indeed our main difficulty was to protect ourselves from the incessant bombardment. It was as though the race of men were to be rained on night and day by an excessive downpour of nourishing manna, or let us say by a bombardment of loaves and beefsteaks. But with us, the life- giving but murderous rain came from below, ever thrusting upwards. We were in the same sort of situation as those glass balls that you may sometimes see poised on fountains, and precariously maintained in their position by the upward rush of water. But with us the fountains were infinite in number, and continuous with each other. The whole atmosphere was constantly welling upward. So you see, we had neither the need nor the power to manipulate matter outside our own bodies. Physically our sole needs were to avoid destruction by the nether fury or the outer cold, and to maintain physical proximity with one another in spite of the constant storm. For the rest, we were wholly concerned with the life of the mind, or perhaps I should say the spirit. I shall try to explain. But first, let me once more assure you that our spiritual superiority to you does not make us feel that we are in any fundamental or absolute way superior to you. We have certain highly developed powers, necessary for the good life, you have certain other, simpler powers, equally necessary; for instance your wonderful intellectual perspicacity and your practical skill and inventiveness. Our recent study of your kind has filled us with envy of those powers. If we were so gifted, what could we not do, not only to improve our condition but to serve the spirit!”’

I interrtupted, “You say that your ‘spiritual powers” are no better than our intellectual and practical powers; and yet you imply that the goal is ‘to serve the spirit”. Surely, then, the spiritual is intrinsically superior to all else.” He replied, “Your criticism is just. It shows how much more clear-headed your kind is than mine; and yet how much less spiritually perceptive. What is it that I really mean? The point, I think, is this; but you must tell me if I am still in confusion. We are gifted with extra-sensory powers far greater than yours, and also with a far more thorough detachment from the enthralling individual self. We are capable also of a more penetrating or soaring imaginative insight into the nature of spirit. These, clearly, are in some sense spiritual powers. They are very intimately concerned with the life of the spirit. Your bold intellect and practical inventiveness are less intimately concerned: but they are no less necessary to the full life of the spirit.”

“Well,” I said, “and what about the service of the spirit. If this means the service of some sort of god, I find no reason to believe in any such being.” He answered me with mild exasperation. “No, no, I do not mean that. And (can I say so without offence?) if you were a little less clever and a little more imaginative you would take my meaning. Surely you agree that the goal of all action is the awakening of the spirit in every individual and in the cosmos as a whole; awakening, I mean in respect of awareness, feeling, and creative action. Your human concept of ‘God” we find useless. Our finer spiritual sensibility is outraged by any attempt to describe the dark ‘Other’ in terms of the attributes of finite beings. I should have thought that man’s proud intellectual acuity would have led him to the same conclusion. We ourselves, I suppose, may be said to ‘worship” the Other; but inarticulately, or through the medium of fantasies and myths, which, though they aid worship, give us no intellectual truth about the wholly inconceivable.”

He was silent, and so was I, for I could not make much of these remarks. Presently I said. “Tell me something of the history of your race.” He remained for a while in deep abstraction, then rousing himself, he said, “When I myself first came into being, our kind was already well established. Almost the whole solar globe was inhabited. According to the racial wisdom, the earlier phase had been one of steady multiplication, and of the working out of our culture. Millions of years before my time (to use your terrestrial notation) solar conditions were presumably unfavourable to our kind of life; but there came a time when there was a niche for us, and then, we know not how, a few of us awoke as sentient but blank-minded beings here and there over the vast area of the photosphere. The very earliest recollection of our oldest remaining comrades vaguely reports that far off infancy of the race, when the sparse population was gradually multiplying.”

Again I interrupted, “Multiplying? Do you mean that they reproduced their kind?” He replied, “There probably was a certain amount of reproduction by means of a gasous emanation from the individual body; but the vast multiplication of those days was mainly caused by the spontaneous generation of new sentient flames by the photosphere itself. The elders speak of the strange spectacle that this process afforded. Wisps of incandescent matter, streaming upward from the photosphere, would disintegrate into myriads of bright flakes, like your snow-flakes; and each of these was the raw material, so to speak, of an organized, sentient and minded individual. Hosts of these were doomed never to come to maturity, but to be dissipated into the solar atmosphere by adverse conditions. But the fortunate were so moulded by the pressure of circumstances that they developed into highly organized living flames. This populating of the sun’s surface took place at first in scattered regions far apart. Consequently separate peoples evolved, or perhaps I should say ‘species”. These distinct populations were physically isolated from each other, and each developed its characteristic way of life according to its location. But from a very early time all the solar peoples were to some extent in telepathic communication. Always, so far as our elders can remember, the members of each people were in telepathic contact at least with members of their own nation, or rather race; but international, or inter-racial communication was at first hindered by the psychological differences of the peoples. There came at last a time when the whole sun was occupied by a vast motley of peoples in geographical contact with one another, and indeed interpenetrating one another. The photosphere, of course, is entirely a cloud-ocean without permanent features; so there could be no question of national territorial ownership or aggression. But since the peoples differed greatly in mental attitude and way of life, and even in bodily form, there was always scope for conflict. War, however, was quite unknown, for two reasons. Perhaps the most important one was that there was no means of attack. Flames cannot fight one another, nor can they devise weapons. But apart from this universal lack of armament, there was no will for war, because of the rapid development of extra-sensory technique. The peoples entered more and more into each other’s points of view. Whatever their differences, war became, as you put it, ‘unthinkable”. But a vast period of early history was taken up with the gradual solution of these sometimes quite violent conflicts of interest and of culture, and the working out of a harmonious solar life.”

I asked the flame whether the solar population was increasing throughout this long period. He answered, “As the sun aged, the conditions for the spontaneous generation of living flames becanse much less favourable. At the time of my waking, the photosphere was almost sterile. Now and again, here or there, it might cast up material for some few thousands of births; but gradually even this feeble activity ceased. At this time, the solar population was roughly stable, though a far greater population could easily have been accommodated. Every individual now shared fully in the ever-deepening racial experience. Each was fully an individual person; but all were for certain purposes comprised in one single individuality, the mind of the race, the mind (one might say) of the sun, of a certain star. From that time onwards we opened up certain new spheres of experience of which I can only give you the vaguest hints. We all lived a curiously double life, an individual life and a racial life. As individuals we were concerned with the boundless universe of personal relations between individuals; with personal loves, antagonisms, co- operations, mutual enrichments of all sorts; and also with the universe of artistic creation in a medium of which I may later be able to give you a hint. Philosophy also concerned us; but since intellect was never our strong point, our philosophizing was — how can I put it? — more imaginative and less conceptual than yours, more of the nature of art, of myth-construction, which we knew to be merely symbolical, not literally true. And then there was religion. If you would call it religion. With us, religion has little to do with doctrine. It is simply a technique of bringing the individual spirit into accord with its own inner vision of universal spirit, whether there really is such a thing as a universal spirit or not. Religion, with us, is a matter of contemplation, aesthetic ritual, and day-to- day conduct. Does this mean anything to you? If not, remember that I am trying to describe in a fantastically foreign language things that are strictly indescribable, save in our own language. Human languages are all unsuitable, not only because of their alient concepts, but also because the very structure of the language is alien to our ways of experiencing.”

I murmured acquiescence, though I was in fact very doubtful of his meaning. Then I asked for further information about the individual’s participation in the racial consciousness. He remained silent for quite a long while, then said, “At certain times each individual simply woke to find that he was actually the racial mind, the mind of the sun; and that in this mode of being he was engaged partly in communication with the minds of races on other stars, or their planets. Experience and action on this level of being is as different from the individual mode of experience and action as the life of one of your blood-corpuscles from your own life as a human person. When we were in the individual state, we could not very clearly remember the distinctive experiences of the communal state. But it was concerned with the discord and harmony of racial minds, and the working out (if I may so put it) of the spiritual music of the cosmos. But though we could not remember fully those lofty experiences, we were profoundly influenced by them. For they compelled us to see the individual life in its true relation to the rest of the spiritual universe, making it seem at once less important and more significant than it could otherwise appear; and moreover orientating it more securely in the direction of the spirit than is possible with you.”

“How, less important and more significant?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” After some thought he answered, “Less important, because, since there are so many myriad individual personal beings in the cosmos, the fate of any one of them makes so little difference to the whole; but more significant, because, even in its loftiest reaches, spirit is the achievement of actual individuals, in community with each other.”

All this was largely incomprehensible to me, and I may have reported it inaccurately. But at the time I did receive a very strong impression of the two spheres of individual experience, the one more or less equivalent to our own, the other of a very different order.

By now I was fatigued, and the coal scuttle was nearly empty. I was about to suggest that we should retire for the night, when the flame continued. “For those of us who were torn away from the sun during the formation of the planets, all this glory of the racial experience temporarily collapsed. Physical conditions became so distressing that our extra-sensory powers could no longer rise beyond the level of simple telepathy with other individuals. Not until we had been long established on the molten planets, and had attained a new, but impoverished, equilibrium, was it possible for us once more to support a racial mind, and then only in a much reduced mode. For though as individuals we can now once more participate in the pooled wisdom of the race, the mind of the race itself (which of course is not something other than our minds, but simply all our minds enhanced by intimate communion) is almost wholly unable to make contact with other racial minds. We have no precise knowledge of them, but only a confused sense of their presence; our racial mind is like a man in a dark prison listening to a confused babel of voices beyond the prison walls.”

Again the flame paused, and I was about to close our conversation when again he continued. “The solar upheaval that produced the planets was something completely unexpected and bewildering. For us who were exiled, it was the great and tragic turning point of individual life, and of history. The vast protuberance which was plucked out from the sun’s surface carried with it many thousands of millions of us. Quite suddenly our familiar world was lost. The great ‘water spout’ finally detached itself from the sun, and was stretched into a filament of flame, which swung slantingly outward from the sun’s rotating sphere. Conditions of temperature and atmospheric pressure became extremely unfavourable. Countless millions of us must have succumbed. Rapidly the filament condensed into ten great drops, each drop being one of the planets, a sphere of glowing liquid surrounded by a deep atmosphere of hot gases. For us, huddled near the surface of our new and merely smouldering worlds, the main problem was the deadly cold. After the solar climate, the terrestrial was arctic. And no doubt our fellows on the other planets suffered no less severely. I do not know how many additional millions of us were killed by the new planetary conditions, certainly the great majority of those who had survived the journey from the sun. We lived at first in a state of numb drowsiness, or complete unconsciousness, upon the actual surface of the ocean of molten lava. But little by little our wonderfully pliant nature remoulded itself to the new environment. We slowly woke again, though never to the intense lucidity that we still vaguely remember as nominal to our solar life. Henceforth all the heights of philosophy, art, personal concord and communion, and of religious experience, had to be reconquered. And each new experience came to us with a haunting sense of familiarity and a suspicion that the new version was but a crude and partial substitute for the old.”

For some time the flame remained silent, and I was aware of a deep nostalgic sadness in his mind, He seemed to have forgotten my existence. I did not like to disturb him; but the fire was declining, and I was anxious to recall him to the matter in hand. I said, “You referred a few moments ago to your fellows on other planets. How did they fare?” He answered, “At first, much as we did. We kept contact with them far more easily than with the solar population, because of the similarity of our conditions, and our equally reduced mentality. But in one respect their fate has differed from ours. Man is the only intelligent race produced by any planet. When men reached the stage of making extensive use of fire, we terrestrial flames profited considerably. Our population increased, and we made a real cultural advance, largely through the study of human minds and behaviour. Our kin on the other planets had no such opportunity. When their worlds cooled, they perforce fell asleep, or were imprisoned in the subterranean lava. Save for rare accident, such as volcanic eruption, when a few, no doubt, have a brief spell of lucidity, they remain imprisoned or asleep; vast populations of sleeping beauties, awaiting the prince’s kiss. Perhaps some day we, more fortunate, shall be able to wake them; but not without your help.”

The fire now needed fuel, so I piled on all that was left in the scuttle, carefully rebuilding a structure over the central hollow, and leaving an orifice through which to watch the living flame. While doing this, I said, “All that you have told me is intensely interesting, and I would gladly listen all night. But the fire will not last much longer, and there is no more coal. I certainly hope that the time may indeed come when mankind will be able to help the flame kind to do this great rescue work. But obviously that is a far-off venture. Meanwhile, had you not better tell me at once just what it is that you want of me, so that I can think about it to-morrow, and work out a plan of action while I am out on the hills?”

To this the flame replied in a way that confirmed an anxiety that I had increasingly felt. Ever since he began speaking to me directly in English, I had been unable to capture any of his unexpressed thoughts, which formerly had flowed into my mind. Was this inaccessibility the inevitable consequence of his having reached a higher plane of consciousness in his communion with the racial mind, or was it a deliberate reticence on his part? Had he in his mind thoughts which he did not want me to discover?

His answer to my request as to how I could be of use to him strengthened my suspicion. “No!” he said. “I now realize that at this early stage it would be fatal for me to tell you how you can help my kind. Complete confidence must first be established between us. I must give you unmistakable evidence that the things that your kind, when it is most aware, regards as most important, most excellent, are for my kind also, in spite of all our differences, most excellent.”

I protested that he had already gained my confidence, but he demurred. “No!” he said. “You are sympathetic, but I have not yet fully won your heart to our cause.” I then assured him that, though many of my kind would probably be repelled by the knowledge that a profoundly alien intelligent race was sharing the planet with them, those of us who had thought seriously about the nature of consciousness could not but feel kinship with all beings who were persons. I went so far as to declare that we sensitives, at least, would do our utmost to help the minded flames in their present misfortune.

“Good, very good!” he said. “But do not make any rash promises before I have put the whole case before you. It is necessary that your cooperation should be spontaneous and whole-hearted. I have perhaps made you realize how different our two kinds are, and now I must try to make you feel with warmth that, in spite of all our differences, we are at heart kindred beings. So let us plunge to the root of the whole matter. You, a human individual, know what love is; so do I, a living flame. And between us two there should be a special sympathy, since for both of us love has come to grief. Like me, you were happy in finding a mate with whom you entered into joyful and life-giving union. For many years the two of you grew ever more intimately and sweetly dependent on one another. Your tendrils entwined inextricably with hers. You knew well that deep, quiet passion of mutual cherishing and mutual kindling, that piquant delight in your endless diversity and deep identity. And you found in this experience of personal loving a significance which seemed to point beyond your two ephemeral selves, Am I not right? Do I not speak as one who knows what love is?”

I answered, “You use the very words that I have often used, If you have not stolen them from the depths of my own mind, if they are indeed your own, you certainly know what love is.”

He made no comment, but continued, “Then, after half a lifetime, and most bewilderingly, your love was shipwrecked, not through the impact of any other human person, but simply through your obsession with research. Because neither of you was really deeply enough aware either of the self or the other, your love after all could not stand the strain of that discord. You, following your bent, plunged into a vast new ocean of experience; and she, after tremulously wading ankle deep, drew back. You beckoned her; but you did little to help her to follow you, for you were possessed. Your past love held the two of you for some time together; but she was not of the stuff for your adventures. It seemed to her that you were going mad. At last — well, she lost you in that ocean. Am I not right? Was it not so?”

I was struck dumb with the thought that so alien a being should know so much about me. I could but murmur assent.

“With me,” he said, “the disaster was different. I do not know how many millions of terrestrial years I lived with my dear companion in the bright world of the sun. Like you two, we two were strangely different, he with his art and his gift for a thousand friendships, I with my devotion to spiritual science. After so long a union, love reaches a harmony inconceivable to you; and all the more so where there is telepathic contact. We shared literally every thought, every fleeting, half-detected image. And yet we were not a single unified ‘I”, but an exquisitely harmonious ‘we”. Though every experience, every thought, every motion and desire were shared, some were ‘mine”, and some were ‘yours”. My companion expressed the best in him in his glorious conceptions of flame dance and massed choreography. But he had also his official work, concerned with the healing of those who were hurt in the nether or the upper inclemency. Through him, I too, though in my own nature solitary, had a thousand friendships. His art I shared, and with full insight. His charity and his courage in rescue work moulded me as though they were my own acts. And I, on my side, gave him at least my all, my spiritual science.”

The flame fell silent for so long that in the end I said, “And yet you came to grief?”

“When the planets were formed,” he said, “he (or perhaps you will realize the disaster more truly if I say ‘she’) was left behind on the sun. For a while we kept in touch telepathically. Distance, as you know, is no hindrance to extra-sensory perception. For a short while, indeed for some thousands of years, I lived two lives, one a distressful life on the molten planet, the other the life of my beloved in the familiar solar surroundings. But, as you have already heard, communication between the terrestrial exiles and the solar population became increasingly difficult, and at last impossible. Little by little our inter-twined tendrils were torn apart. We agonizingly adapted ourselves, stage by stage, to self- sufficiency. And now only memory unites us.”

He fell silent, and I said, “With you the loss was due to fate; with me, to my obtuseness in the grip of an obsession.”

“You were possessed,” he said, “and you could not have done otherwise than obey your inspiration. Perhaps if you had been more aware, more self-possessed, you would have followed your star without bungling your love. But what more could one expect of ephemeral and self- centred beings, possessed by a power beyond them?”

“A power beyond them?” I said. “What power possessed me but the sheer passion of exploration?”

He did not answer my question, but continued in his own vein of thought. “The loss which you and I suffered has not embittered either of us. Perhaps it has made us realize more sharply what love means, what community can be. Perhaps it has prepared us both for our main work in life, the establishing of community between our two kinds, diverse as they are.”

“Yes,” I said, “and the more diverse, the richer the common life; even when some are men and some are flames.”

I felt him warm toward me, and then he continued, “I must do still more to make my kind real to you. Like you, we depend for our physical existence on physical processes; but from your science we learn that, whereas with you life depends on chemical changes, our physiological processes are at bottom more like the radio-active changes that take place in the photospheres of stars. In the sun, as I have told you, we lived in an environment in which physical energy was constantly and often violently, impinging on our gaseous bodies, and passing through us, The great danger was disruption by the furious impact of upwelling power. In those days feeding was as unconscious as breathing is with you. But in the chilly fires of the earth, as you have seen, we have to move hungrily over the glowing coals, laboriously disintegrating certain of their atoms, and devouring the consequent radiation. Do not expect me to tell you more of our physiological processes, for I cannot. All that we know sciemitifically of our nature is derived by applying to our own experience of our bodily life such principles as we have been able to gather from your science, through the minds of your scientists. Had we been gifted with your manual powers, perhaps we too should have developed an experimental science. But I think not; for in the gaseous solar world there was nothing solid to catch hold of, and so no means of arranging experiments. On earth we have perforce encountered the solid state, but we have avoided its deadly cold; and so we have developed no organs for dealing with it.

“Another thing about us must he told. Since we are potentially immortal, reproduction is for us a rare process. Or rather there are two kinds of reproduction. The less common kind is undertaken voluntarily. The individual flame splits itself from top to toe into three segments, and each of these forms a complete new individual. This kind of reproduction must be distinguished from the other kind, which I mentioned earlier. When we are chilled to sleep, or sudden death, and to a powder of solid dust, certain particles of that dust, separated from the rest, and wind-borne into some fire or other, may develop into new individuals. This is a much slower process than the other, but from one parent it may produce some hundreds of offspring. Gaseous fission never produces more than three; but these new individuals leap at once into physical adulthood. Also they participate to a large extent in the past experience of their parent. They remember much of the parent’s past life. And so their education through extra-sensory contact with their seniors is very rapid. The dust-born, on the other hand, develop slowly and with difficulty, and have no memory of their parent’s experience; and until they are physically almost adult their extra-sensory powers are very slight.”

Here I enquired whether sex played any part in their reproduction. “No,” he said. “In fact we are not sexual creatures, or at least not in the ordinary sense. There are not two different sorts of us, male and female, coming together for reproduction. Even in your sexuality there is another aspect besides reproduction, I mean personal love. Sexual love at its best is with you a vehicle for the spiritual union of two diverse personalities. And with us, though we are not divided into two sexes, every individual is a variant of the two principles which you call male and female. Consequently with us the particular concrete masculinity of the one partner is drawn to the particular concrete femininity of the other; and vice versa. We have, too, as I have said, forms of sweet bodily contact and intermingling, which, though they do not directly lead to reproduction, do enable us to attain an intense mutual delight and enrichment. And if ever there is a demand for an increase of population to compensate for recent casualties, those individuals whom the racial mind has inspired to parenthood, do, as a matter of fact, often seek bodily union with some beloved before multiplying. It is thought that, when this happens, the offspring are more vigorous. Certainly they seem to develop some of the characteristics of the mate whose embraces the parent had received.”

The fire was already dwindling. I said, “I could listen to you all night, but there is no more coal. Had you not better tell me at once how I can help you?”

He answered, “It would be unwise to do so until I had given you some hint of the way in which we are not merely your equals but your superiors. It is difficult to do this without seeming to disparage your kind. But believe me, we do not claim that we are superior to you. What is superior in us is a fuller manifestation of something more than ourselves, the spirit. In ourselves, we are all mere instruments of varying degrees of efficiency. Conditions have enabled us all to become what we are; have enabled your kind to develop practical skill and intellectual power more fully than mine, and have favoured in mine a higher range of spiritual sensitivity. We take no credit for this. We prize not ourselves, as individuals or as a race, but the spirit for which we and you also, are instruments, vessels. We recognize that you, with all your tragic difficulties, have set foot upon the way that we have more easily and more successfully followed; and that although at present you seem unable to do more than take one faltering step and then slip backwards (and indeed you may very well destroy yourselves unless we help you), yet you have it in you to succeed: and perhaps through your very difficulties to support a more glorious manifestation of the spirit than we alone can ever achieve, Meanwhile, we are very far ahead of you. Perhaps we shall be able to repay you for the practical help that we require of you by helping you to solve some of your desperate spiritual problems.”

The flame had certainly used that word “require.” It might or might not imply compulsion. I told myself that compulsion was wholly alien to the flame’s temper: but I certainly did feel a slight shock of fear. However, I dismissed it. Probably the creature was not sufficiently familiar with the English language to realize the ambiguity. I wondered anxiously whether the flame was aware that I was thinking in this vein.

Meanwhile he was once more speaking. “You are one of the few of your kind,” he said “who are deeply moved by the arts. It would not be possible for me to make you enter into our aesthetic experience itself, because it would he too alien to you; but I shall give you a little demonstration of our artistic power by affording you an aesthetic experience of the most exquisite and far reaching kind possible to you. Strictly, you are not independently capable of it; but I can increase your receptivity a little beyond your normal range. I shall lead you to heights a little beyond the unaided reach of man. What I shall give you is, in a way, a translation, a very crude translation, of something by one of our great artists. In its native form we regard it as a supremely satisfying work of its sort: but its sort is relatively simple. I chose it for this reason. Its significance falls almost entirely within the sphere of aesthetic experience common to my kind and yours. Even so, because the sensuous imagery of the original is ours and not yours, and must be transposed into yours in order to have meaningful associations for you, nearly all the original aesthetic form has to be sacrificed. So far as possible I shall adopt a form and a rhythm meaningful to you, and equivalent. I shall give you something more than a literal but pedestrian ‘prose” translation of our great ‘poem’, so to speak: but inevitably my version is a dim and halting thing, counpared with the original. However, I think I shall be able to give you something that will have true aesthetic value for you, and something that will give you more insight into the spirit of my kind than any amount of talking.” I said, “It sounds impossible. But I am all attention.”

Well, Thos, the flame proceeded to give me a very wonderful experience. Naturally, I cannot pass it on to you in words, but I can give you some sort of description of the kind of thing that happened to me. I am afraid that you, with your severely classical taste, will suspect me of sheer emotionalism. However, I must say my say. I became aware of visual and auditory images succeeding one another in my mind rhythmically against a vague background of images from all the other human senses. Occasionally one or other of these, especially touch and scent, would occupy the centre of the stage. There were brilliant flashes, too, of physical pain and of sexual delight. I do not mean that these images were simply combined into meaningless patterns. No! They became the vehicle for the expression of all the kinds of personal and social, yes, and religious fears and aspirations. It was as though I listened to a strange orchestration of all the familiar senses; with here and there an echo from the alien experiences which I knew only through contact with the mind of the flame himself. Sometimes I was aware also of meaningful human words, voicing rhythmically the import of the music. And the whole was knit together on a recurrent but ever varying rhythm. And the upshot of all this flood of imagery, so humanly moving to me, so tragic, so triumphant, so rich with grief and laughter, was for me a waking to feel (as I had never felt before) the impact of the universe on the individual spirit.

Thos, I see that I am indulging in futile verbiage. But believe me that I did indeed have an overwhelming aesthetic experience. Imagine a single aesthetic form embracing the sensuous beauty of painting, music, poetry and drama, and of humbler skills. Imagine the heights revealed by Bach and Shakespeare and whatever painter means most to you, all scaled in turn or together. Imagine all this achieved in a single strict aesthetic pattern. You cannot, of course, imagine anything of the sort. (Neither could I.) And, further, being addicted to the severity and economy of the classical ideal, you will shudder at my emotional romanticism. But do believe that I was more deeply, and I think more intelligently, aware than in any other single experience that has ever come my way.

Well, when it was all over, I must have remained in abstraction for some time; for I woke to realize that the flame was saying, “Evidently I succeeded better than I dared hope.” He was also, I felt, amiably laughing at me. “Remember, please,” he said, “that you have merely experienced a work of art. Do not, I beg you, suppose that you have had any sort of mystical revelation, save in the sense in which it may be said that all art has a mystical aspect, in that it gives a feeling of waking to new values. What I gave you was only a dim and crooked reflection of the original, but if it has made you realize the essential kinship of our two kinds, it has served its purpose.”

I stammered out my reply. “You made me see that, yes! But how much more! You made me see — God, the God of beauty, truth and goodness. Henceforth I shall believe in him.”

The flame replied rather sharply, “Rubbish! You didn’t see ‘God.’ And I didn’t try to make you see ‘God.’ Just because you have had an exciting and clarifying experience you persuade yourself that you must have had a revelation of the heart of the universe. Neither of us knows anything whatever about ‘God,” nor whether there is anything deserving such a name. The concepts of both our kinds are far too clumsy to penetrate to the depth or height where ‘God’ is or is not. All I have done is to afford you a clearer experience of beauty, truth and goodness themselves; and I have given you a sense of the mystery beyond, which some of your own kind have named ‘the dazzling darkness,’ ‘the fiery cold,’ ‘the eloquent silence.’”

Rebuked, I said, “No doubt you are right. But tell me, am I not now sufficiently prepared to hear what it is that I can do to help your kind?” “No,” he said. “to-morrow evening will be soon enough. Spend your day thinking over all that you have learnt about us. You must not decide hastily, or under the immediate influence of strong emotion. It is necessary that man should regard the whole matter with detachment, and that after due thought he should freely and whole-heartedly will to cooperate with the flame kind. So, good night! Enjoy yourself on the hills!”

The fire was now rapidly dying, and my strange friend began to explore the fire bricks at the back of the hearth for a suitable crevice where he could safely sleep. Murmuring about the increasing cold, he at last found what he wanted, gave me a final greeting, and seemed to sink into the brick.

After the heat of the sitting-room, my bedroom was arctic. I hurried into bed. My startling experiences had given me a violent headache, and I expected a sleepless night. But I must have fallen asleep quickly and slept soundly, for presently I woke to hear the morning noises of the farmyard.

After breakfast I made careful notes of the previous evening’s conversation, and was surprised that it all came back to me so clearly. The flames, no doubt, were all the while aiding my memory.

Not until after lunch did I go out again on to the hills. I remember little of that walk, save the universal presence of the cold. My mind was almost entirely concerned with my recent amazing experiences, and particularly with wondering why the flame had postponed the request which was obviously the reason of our whole conversation. In spite of certain moments of suspicion and anxiety, my general attitude to him was one of respect and affection, and I could not but believe his race to be in some important ways superior to humanity. Surely it was a privilege to be singled out as an instrument for harmony and co- operation between our two kinds.

Curiosity brought me back to the farmhouse somewhat early, but I found a good fire already awaiting me; and in the heart of it, I saw my dazzling friend, browsing on the red hot, the almost white hot, coals. He returned my greeting, then suggested that we should both satisfy our hunger before continuing our discussion. During my meal I occasionally tried to draw him into conversations, but he seemed unwilling to respond. Presently he explained that the task of eating food for which his body was still not properly adapted was one which demanded all his attention.

When the table had been cleared, I sat down in front of the fire, and waited. Presently the flame came to rest in the hottest place, and took up the threads of our former talk. “Well,” he enquired, “did you have a good day?” I said, “Yes! I was in a world of cold such as you cannot conceive. And now I am eager to be told how I can help you.”

He did not reply at once; and it was with obvious hesitation that he finally explained my task. “First,” he said, “I must tell you that your recent war was very favourable to us. Of course, we find it difficult to understand the mentality that can indulge in warfare. With us nothing of the kind has ever occurred. The fact that you accept war is proof that your average sensibility is after all very primitive. However, from our point of view your war was propitious. It produced extensive fires in which our spores were able to develop, and in which our race could enjoy for a short time an ampler life than anything that had been possible for any of us for millions of years. It was in the great conflagrations of London, Berlin, and so on, that we at last had sufficient energy and opportunity to gain a working knowledge of your present culture through intensive extra-sensory study of all your leading minds. During the war our population must have temporarily increased a thousandfold; and, also, the high temperature attained in some of the greatest conflagrations enabled some of us to live for brief spells with an intensity and speed of mental process that is normally impossible on earth save in a few great furnaces. But of course you were at pains to extinguish these fires as quickly as possible. And though we were occasionally able to resist your attack, the respite gained thereby was negligible.”

Here I interrupted the flame to ask how his people resisted the efforts of our fire-fighters. He replied, I thought, with some reluctance. “A living flame can deliberately fly out from his fiery environment into some inflammable material, and so cause a new fire. But in doing so he is almost certain to be killed by the sudden chill. If I chose to do so, I might perhaps be able to reach those lace curtains before dying. The process would be extremely painful; and at that distance the chances of survival would be very slight. But, of course, I might succeed in setting fire to the house. And as there are probably a few spores somewhere in the building, a few new individuals would wake, make contact with the race-mind, and have a very brief spell of extra-sensory work of some kind. Obviously, from my point of view, the game would not be worth the candle. Nor would it from the point of view of the race.

“Moreover, as I have said, we are very anxious not to come into conflict with your kind if we can possibly avoid it. We seek, above all, your friendship and your willing co-operation. You can be of far more use to us of your own free will than under any kind of compulsion. Conceivably we could cause you considerable trouble by setting all your cities alight, but our triumph would be brief. And also a violation of our most sacred principle. No! We must win you not by force but by persuasion.”

He paused, and seemed to sigh. “Those days of the great air-raids,” he said, “those were the great days; great at least in comparison with our present reduced circumstances. Thousands upon thousands of us, nay many millions, now lie frozen in sleep among the charred remains of your buildings, particularly in Germany, where the fires were most extensive and most lasting. The concentration of our spore in the atmosphere must now be many times greater than it was in pre-war days.”

Between jest and anxiety, I said, “You can hardly expect mankind to keep the cities of the world constantly ablaze to afford you hospitality.”

“No,” he said, “but we have a more ambitious plan, and one in which we think you should willingly co-operate. Your scientists have recently discovered how to release the energy locked in the atom. With that titanic power you are already proposing to transform the planet’s surface for your convenience. What we intend is that you shall use some of your new power and your practical ingenuity to provide us with a permanent and reasonably large area of very high temperature, say in Central Africa or South America. We do not as yet understand your recent advances in physics at all fully; but we are convinced that you could indeed establish such a home for us, an area of rather more than furnace heat, covering, say a few hundred square miles. This would give us a footing for a niuch more satisfactory kind of life than is possible at present. More important, the high temperature would greatly raise the calibre of our mentality, so that we should regain something like our solar lucidity, and perhaps be able to re-establish telepathic communication with the solar population, if it is still in existence. This we are even now attempting to do, but it is proving almost impossible in our present straitened circumstances. We might also be able to carry on our former work of psychical exploration of the cosmos. Even if these high ventures remained impossible, we should at least be able to establish a system for rescuing those of our kind whom volcanic eruption ejects on to the earth’s surface. And in due season, when men had worked out the means of inter-planetary travel, we should extend this undertaking to the other planets. Indeed, some of those worlds, which to you are derelict, might be converted wholly into spheres of high temperature, harbouring great flame populations. All this, of course, is very remote. The immediate task is for your kind to create a tolerable home for us here on earth.”

The flame seemed to expect a comment. “For my part,” I said, “I would gladly support this plan; but I am very much afraid that it would be quite impossible to persuade the governments of our Great Powers to agree to anything of the sort. They cannot even agree on common action to put an end to starvation throughout the world, nor can they come to terms even for the prevention of a war which may destroy the human species. Moreover, all that you have told me is so remote from the experience of ordinary men and women that it may well prove impossible to rouse public feeling about it. To the ordinary person, if he can be persuaded to believe your story at all, the idea of helping such alien creatures as living flames will seem quixotic, and moreover dangerous.”

The flame interrupted. “Quixotic? What is that? Evidently there are still serious gaps in my knowledge of your culture.”

When I had explained, he said, “We are not asking you to give us something for nothing. In return we offer you the salvation of mankind, if I may so put it. As I have already told you, though we are novices in physical science, our science of the spirit is far more developed than yours. And it convinces us that, without some kind of spiritual help from outside, your species is doomed. The trouble is not simply that you have found power before finding wisdom. It is a far deeper trouble than any mere matter of timing. Like so many other intelligent kinds, scattered up and down the cosmos, your very nature itself dooms you to find power and never to find wisdom, save through external help. As one of your writers has said, man is only a pterodactyl of the spirit, not a true bird, perfected for flight. What we offer you is permanent spiritual guidance and fortification, so that, as individuals and as a race, you may at last overcome your inveterate short-sightedness and meanness. With our help, but not without it, you will wake to a new level of awareness; and in the light of that experience you will be able to organize our common world for the happiness of our two kinds, and for the glory of the spirit.”

Here I would have spoken, but the flame would not be interrupted.

“We have a vision,” he said, “of this planet as a true symbiotic organism, supported equally by your kind and my kind, united in mutual need and mutual cherishing. What a glorious world-community we shall together form! United in the spirit, we shall also be so diverse in our racial idiosyncrasies that each partner will be thoroughly remoulded and revitalized by intercourse with the other. You, on your side of the partnership, will use all your astounding intellectual and practical powers (which we so envy and admire) to transform the whole planet so as to afford both to yourselves and to us the fullest possible expression in co-operation with each other. Having learnt through our help to see more clearly and feel more strongly those true values which even now you obscurely recognize, you will transform not only the planet but mankind itself; and perhaps our kind also. For maybe we shall require you to work out a technique for changing our own physiological nature; since any environment which you can produce for us is likely to be only moderately favourable, unless we can adapt ourselves very radically to suit it. There are strict limits to our natural flexibility, wonderful as that has proved to be. As for you, you will no longer be the frustrated, bewildered, embittered, vindictive mental cripples that most of you now are. Under our guidance you will so change your whole way of life that all such misery will vanish. There will be neither wars nor class-wars, but only generous rivalry in the common venture of our two races, in equal partnership. The whole human race will become a race of aristocrats, in the true sense of that ancient word; of aristocrats no longer guilt-ridden by living on the labour of enslaved classes. Of aristocrats, yes, and of holy men. But those aristocrats will not be idle, nor those holy men hermits. Your gift is for practical thought and action. You will explore the solar system with your space-ships. You will found new worlds where new modes of life and mind and spirit will be made possible by new conditions. Illimitable vistas of creative living will gradually open up before you. But let me repeat that none of this can be done by your own kind, unaided. Without our help you will certainly destroy yourselves. Even if by good luck the end is postponed for some time, you will merely continue to drift along in mutual hate and slaughter. On the other hand, with us you can become what, at your best, you are always half-heartedly wishing to be; true vessels of the spirit. Moreover, if we recover the psychical skills that we enjoyed in the sun, we should, of course, share with you all our extra-sensory knowledge of other worlds throughout the cosmos; and all our art, all our delicacy of personal awareness, all our religious experience. Together, with your practical cunning. married to our ancient wisdom and spiritual insight, we should indeed become a creative world-organism. Without our help, you are doomed to self-destruction, or at best to the life of a beetle vainly struggling to climb out of a basin. And without you, we ourselves are doomed to impotence. Even in our long-lost golden age in the sun we were doomed to impotence in the long run, simply through our neglect of the impulse to understand the physical and manipulate it creatively. So, is it not perfectly clear that this partnership, this symbiosis that we propose, will be the salvation of both our kinds?”

I said, “You have painted an arresting picture. But I find it almost incredible that mankind should accept the partnership. To people like me it is attractive. But we are very few. The great majority will simply fail to understand what is at stake. Or if they do vaguely grasp the issue, they will be horrified. They will regard co-operation with you as sheer slavery. They will persuade themselves that since you are different from man, you must be evil. If they are forced to reconcile your superiority in some ways, they will regard you as brilliant perverts, in fact, as satanic.”

There was silence. The flame seemed to be meditating on my objections. Presently, and again with hesitation, he continued. “In order to make your free acceptance of our plan easier for you, we may have to use our special psychic powers to incline your minds toward it. You yourself have already had some slight evidence of those powers. You remember how we led you to seek out the stone and throw it into the fire. Well, we can do far more than that. Up to a point we can sway your desires to suit our purposes. Up to a point we can incline you freely to will what we ourselves will. And as we gain deeper understanding of your nature our powers will probably increase.”

He hesitated again, and I said nothing. For the possibility that our wills would no longer be our own, deeply shocked me.

After waiting in vain for me to speak, he continued, “If you doubt our power, perhaps I had better tell you something more about our influence upon yourself. It would be rash of me to give you this bit of information if I did not know that you were a human being of quite exceptional detachment from the prejudices of your kind. At the time when the strain was arising between you and your wife over your absorp tion in extra-sensory research we realized that your love might prove stronger than your intellectual interest. And since it was extremely important for us that you should continue your work, we ventured to interfere. We had found no one who was likely to be half so successful as yourself in the task of understanding us, sympathizing with us, and effecting a liaison between our two kinds. We simply could not afford to lose you. So we brought all our influence to bear to turn your interest in para-normal psychology into an obsessive passion. We succeeded. It was clear that our interference might wreck your marriage, but we were hopeful that your love for your wife, and hers for you, would be strong enough to stand the strain; and that together you would work out a satisfactory modus vivendi (is that the phrase?), so that you would triumph in love as you were triumphing in research. We had already done our utmost to induce in your wife herself a passion for the para-normal, but we had failed. Subconsciously she was violently opposed to it, just because you favoured it. Nothing we could do could break down this irrational phobia of the thing that, in her unconscious, she regarded as a rival for your devotion. It was the deep unknowledged conflict between you that made it impossible for either of you to bridge the gulf between you. Neither of you was sufficiently imaginative to share fully the other’s point of view. Well, tragic as the issue was, I think you yourself will agree that our need for you was more important even than your marriage. And remember that it was not merely my kind that needed you; your kind too needed you; it needed, for its salvation through us, that you should devote yourself utterly to your work.”

This information stirred up a storm of emotion in me. Joan and I had never in the ordinary sense been a perfectly harmonious couple, but in spite of some strains we were at heart not only permanently in love with one another but also inextricably entangled in all our affairs. I suppose the trouble was that, though we needed each other in a thousand ways, we never fully imagined each other; as the flame himself affirmed. When I became enthralled by the para-normal, I tried to persuade her to work with me, but she was unreasonably opposed to my suggestion, and I can well believe that she was held back by some sort of phobia. Then, the more she shied away, the more I insisted, fool that I was. When at last she left me, hoping to bring me to my senses (how well I see it all now!), I was so absorbed that I did nothing to bring her back. For a long while we made repeated attempts to come together, but each time we seemed to be driven farther apart. In the end, Thos, she threw herself under a ‘bus. Oh God! It brought me to my senses, but too late. I woke up and realized how badly I had behaved. Even so, after a few weeks of despair I gradually forgot my desolation, and lived entirely for my work. But what the flame had told me revived the old pain. It also gave me an excuse for shelving the blame from my own obtuseness on to the evil influence of the flame race on my mind. But I am wandering.

Presently the flame said, “It is natural for you to be distressed, but try to calm yourself. Your excitement is making it very difficult for me to maintain contact with your mind.”

I made a great effort of self-control, and then a thought struck me. “Tell me,” I said, “in this conversation have you had access to all my thoughts, or only to those that I have passed on to you in telepathic speech?”

“Not all your thoughts,” he replied. “To seize them all I should have had to give all my attention to the task, and I have been mainly busy giving my thoughts to you. I have been aware of some of your unspoken thoughts, including a good deal of your unspoken commentary on my remarks. But as soon as I began to tell you about our influence on yourself, your emotion confused everything but your actual speech. Now surely, there is really no need for you to be upset. The past is past; and what we did, we did in good faith, and we are not ashamed of it. And you yourself, if you are as true to the spirit as we believe, cannot regret that we saved you for a great work.”

I was thankful that the flame could not now read my thoughts at all clearly. Or so he said. Was he tricking me? It seemed a good plan to put the matter to the test. Secretly I was still feeling horrified and rebellious, but what I said to the flame was quite different. “I see your point,” I said, “and I am becoming reconciled to it. Yes, of course, it was entirely right for the flames to influence me as they did. It was only my human prejudices that upset me, but they are rapidly falling away from me. Thank God I was saved for the great work you rightly demand of me.” His reply reassured me. “Good!” he said. “I take your word for it; but I am still shut out from your mind.”

I then asked the flame what was to be done if I failed to persuade the rulers of mankind to carry out the policy. “You will succeed,” he said. “We shall bring all our influence to bear on their minds. If we can influence yourself, we shall far more easily control those simple creatures.”

I fell silent. Presently he said, “I am still unable to make full contact with you. What is the matter? So far, we have been in delightful accord, but now surely you are deliberately closing your mind to me. Why should you do this, now that you have accepted our policy? May I not have your full confidence again? If I had no respect for your individuality I could break in forcibly and lay bare your most secret feelings in spite of all your resistance. But this would wreck our friendship, and I scorn to do it.”

Thoughts were now rushing through my mind, and the flame was unaware of them. This at least was some comfort. But I believed his claim that he could if he willed break down my resistance and violate my privacy; and I was outraged.

As calmly as I could, I said, “Tell me more of the strange power that you can exercise over us. Help me to overcome the remains of my revulsion. Strengthen me. Help me to will single-heartedly the glory of the spirit in the co-operation of our two races.”

He said, “We want only to win your confidence. We want only to win the confidence of the whole human race. We are determined not to gain our end by violence, even by spiritual violence. What difference does it make that we have irresistable power, if we are determined not to use it? If I were to tell you more about our powers you would only be more upset. You would regard anything I said on that subject as a threat.”

“Spiritual violence?” I said. “What do you mean? How can I trust you unless you tell me everything quite frankly?”

For some while he was silent. In my own mind a battle was going on between my sense of the excellence, the integrity and truthfulness of the flame and my new realization of the appalling danger that proud man should he spiritually enslaved to this formidable race.

Presently, he said, “Since our great need is complete mutual confidence I will tell you everything. But first I beg you, I implore you, to look at this whole matter without human prejudice, and simply out of love for the spirit. It is because we ourselves all regard it in that way, and not merely out of racial self-interest, that we are so determined not to use our power over you save as a friendly effort to help you to see things clearly.” Again he paused; and I assured him, even while fear and anger drowned my friendliness toward him, that I was indeed anxious to take the detached view. But I urged him again to tell me, as an earnest of good will, what his race would do if mankind simply refused to play.

“Very well!” he said. “If all our efforts to gain the friendly co- operation of your kind were to fail, it would be obvious to us that your nature was even more seriously warped than we had supposed, and that you were beyond help. You would be doomed by your own folly to self-destruction, soon or late. We should therefore be bound, through loyalty to the spirit in us, to bring all our powers to bear on you so as to control your minds and your conduct strictly for our own spiritual purpose. It is impossible to see just how things would turn out; but perhaps, having no further obligation toward you, save to put you out of your misery as soon as possible, we should set about trying to produce the most favourable conditions for ourselves. We might, for instance, undertake the very easy task of stirring up war-scares and forcing your research workers to produce even more destructive atomic weapons. Then would follow either a number of devastating wars, with great conflagrations suited to our immediate needs; or else one final war, in which we should do our best to induce each side to choose the destruction of the planet rather than defeat by the hated enemy. Then, at last, with the whole planet turned into a single atomic bomb, and all the incandescent continents hurtling into space, we should have for a short while conditions almost as good as those of our golden age on the sun. True, there would soon be nothing left but a stream of frozen asteroids; but we guess, from study of your scientists’ speculations, that with any luck the terrestrial destruction might, after all, be a piecemeal affair, not a single all-consuming explosion. In this case we might be provided with regions of high temperature for thousands or perhaps even millions of years. In such a period of greatly improved conditions we might advance so far in the study of science and the control of physical processes that we should be able to devise some way of returning to the sun. And even if this proved impossible, well, we should at least have a long spell of vigorous life in which to pursue our consecrated task, namely, the exploration of the spiritual universe and some measure of creative action in relation to it.”

He paused for a moment. But before I had time to invent a suitable reply, he added, “All this is mere guess work about a kind of future which we do not at all desire; since we are all wholly intent on securing your willing co-operation for the creating of a very glorious and happy symbiotic world. For us, as for you, that is the more favourable future. So I solemnly urge you, I beg you, to shoulder the great task of persuading humanity that our two kinds need each other and must unite.”

He ceased, and there was silence; for I did not know what to say. I confess that I was moved by his appeal; the more so, since I feared that he was probably right in believing that man could never save himself without a deep change of heart, and that such a change could only be brought about by some influence outside man. And, after my recent aesthetic experience, I could well believe that the flame race, if it could so superhumanly move me, might be able by its magic to purify the hearts of all men.

But a repugnant thought haunted me. How could I be sure that my affection for the flame and my admiration for his race were spontaneous acts of my own personality? Might they not have been cunningly implanted in me by the flame himself? The more I thought about it the more likely this seemed. And did not the flame race intend to exercise this hypnotic power over the whole race of men, so as to compel them, yes, compel them, to subject themselves for ever to the will of the flames? Men would believe they were acting freely, but, in fact, they would be mere robots acting under an inner compulsion. Mankind, hitherto master of its own destiny, would henceforth be a subject race exploited by a subtler kind, a new Herrenvolk. Of course I agreed that the only final consideration must be “the glory of the spirit,” not the triumph of any one race, human or non-human; but how did I know that these cunning flames would really work for the spirit and not for racial power and aggrandisement? How did I know that they were not at heart, diabolic? Yes, diabolic! Under a cloak of friendliness and generosity the creature in the fire was scheming to capture my very soul for an inhuman end. Was he not subtly tempting me to commit treason against my own kind? But even, as I thought thus, I was torn by conflict. The behaviour of the flame had throughout been so civilized, so considerate and friendly. How could I reject these amiable advances? Yet, as my feelings warmed toward him, I reminded myself that my very feelings were perhaps not my own, but the outcome of his prompting. Anger and fear seized me again. No! A thousand times better that man should retain his sovereign independence, and go down with colours flying, than that he should surrender his human dignity, his human self-sufficiency, his human freedom. Let him serve the spirit in his own way freely; or freely damn himself.

While these thoughts were still tumbling through my mind, the flame spoke again. “Well,” he said, “I do not want to press you for a decision, for I see that it is difficult for you, more difficult than I expected. Perhaps you had better take another day to think it over. To-morrow evening we will meet again, and then perhaps you will have made up your mind. Meanwhile, I am excessively cold, and I should be grateful if you would put on more coal.”

The fire, indeed, was very low. I had been so absorbed in my conflict that I had forgotten about it. I rose. But as I did so, I suddenly thought of a fine free act, in which I should demonstrate to myself very effectively that I was not yet the mere helpless instrument of the flame. Instead of reaching down for the coal scuttle, I moved over to the sideboard and picked up a jug of drinking water. I stepped quickly back to the fireplace, and flung the water into the heart of the fire. There was a violent commotion, almost an explosion; and the room was filled with steam and smoke. When the air had cleared, I saw that the centre of the fire was black, and the flame had vanished. I listened inwardly for some communication, but there was silence.

Christ! There is no silence like the silence when one has murdered a friend.

I stood listening to the hissing coals. Presently a surge of remorse and shame and compassion flooded in on me. But I told myself that this was not my feeling; it was being forced on me by the outraged race of flames in all the hearthfires and furnaces of the world.

Since that day I have had almost no sleep. Every night the accursed flames have tortured me with shame and guilt. At first they did not speak to me at all. They were simply present, and silent. And they seared my mind with love of my killed friend, and with bitter regret. Later they did speak. They professed to have learnt to understand my behaviour, to sympathize with my motives, to respect my integrity. And they implored me to help both our races.

But by day I have worked resolutely to defeat the flames. I have peered into a thousand fires, looking for the characteristic bright and slender cone. Whenever I have seen one I have killed it. And after every murder I have felt my soul sink deeper into the pit. Yet I know, Christ, I know, that I must be loyal to humanity. I must do my utmost to destroy those plausible fiends that intend man’s ruin. But what can a single individual do? I have written to the press urging a world-wide campaign. But every editor has regarded me as a madman. Not one of my letters has been published. Or, no! One did, as a matter of fact, appear. It was quoted at length in an article on “Persecution Mania” in a psychological journal.

The climax came when I made my way into a great locomotive factory, ostensibly as a journalist in search of copy. I had telepathic evidence that the furnaces were infected with the living flames, whom it was my mission to destroy. I wonder, Thos, whether you have ever been inside one of those places. Heavy metal work is always impressive. There were vast sheds a quarter of a mile long, crowded with ranks of great machines. There were lathes, steam hammers, circular saws that cut steel rods and plates as though they were wood. There were many small furnaces and forges for making bolts and other minor products. (But I saw none of my quarry in these little islands of heat.) There were great unfinished locomotives, with men fitting accessories to them. One huge monster was being slung and shifted by a mighty travelling crane. Best of all was the five-ton steam hammer at work on a great chunk of red-hot steel about five feet long and nine inches thick. This was being bashed into shape to become a connecting rod. Four men held one end of it with grappling irons to place it for each hammer-blow. The other end was loosely supported in a loop of heavy chain. When the hammer struck, the whole earth quaked. Another man measured the result with a template. Then the half-formed rod was turned over, to be beaten again; and so on, till the true shape was won. Then they cut the finished connecting rod from the stump by which the grappling irons were holding it. They simply cut it like cheese by placing a rectangle of cold steel for the hammer to drive deep into the glowing mass. Watching all this, Thos, I was proud of my kind. The flames couldn’t do that, not with all their antiquity and their spirituality. Presently we came to a huge gas furnace in which some heavy metal locomotive-part was being heated. The doors had just been opened, and the part was being drawn out as I arrived. I gazed into the furnace with screwed-up eyes, because of the withering heat. The interior was the size of a small room, and all aglow with heat. From one wall great plumes of roaring gas-flame several feet long, extended across the space.

And there I saw my enemy. Half-a-dozen of the bright minute intelligent creatures were hovering like butterflies. They were evidently doing their utmost to remain in the hot shafts of the burning gas: but the violent draught kept flinging them off into the chilly central space. For a while I just stood watching them. But presently I realized that the enemy were aware of my presence, and were bringing their diabolical technique to bear on me. One of them reproached me telepathically. “Cold creature,” it cried. “How could you kill our comrade — your own friend? Your heart told you clearly that he was your friend, and that all our kind were friends of all men. Even now your heart is tugging at you to change your mind, and work with us. The best in you is on our side. It is only the dull-witted human tribesman that is against us.”

I felt my resistance weakening. In panic I cried out to the men, “Kill them! Kill them! Bring a fire-hose quickly! A sudden wetting is too much for them.” I had noticed a hose; and now I rushed to seize it. Of course, it was I myself that was seized. I struggled frantically; but they fetched the police. I was taken to the local police-station. There I made a formal declaration of the whole terrible story; but in the end, all they did was to hand me over to the doctors. And now, here I am, a prisoner.

Well, Thos, that is my case. Maybe you just won’t believe it. Sometimes I myself begin to wonder if it is all a delusion. But I think you should agree that the whole thing is really far too circumstantial to be sheer fantasy, worked up by my own unconscious. The only point that shakes my confidence at all is that the men working in front of that great gas-furnace apparently did not see the living flames. So they naturally thought I was crazy. But then, the whole interior of the furnace was a blaze of orange light, and the gas jets themselves were in constant agitation, and the little living flames were always on the move, and often hidden in the body of the gas-flames. The factory people, not having had my experience of the flames, might very well have failed to spot them. No! For me, though probably not for you, there can be no doubt.

And now, Thos, I must urge you not only to believe me but to take action. First, do a bit of research on your own account. Examine every fire and every furnace that you have access to; and you will certainly find the flames for yourself. A little practice may be necessary; for I suspect that they are learning to conceal themselves from us. When you have satisfied yourself of their existence, I implore you to organize a world-wide campaign for their destruction. Insist on inspection of every fire throughout the continents. The mouths of volcanoes, too, must be carefully watched. And because the powdery spores of the creatures are borne everywhere on the wind, all conflagrations, bush fires, hearth fires, forest fires, prairie fires must be watched, since these form propitious breeding grounds. Fortunately the flames are very easily destroyed in small fires; and in large ones it is only necessary to withhold attack until the fire has been reduced somewhat, and then to project water at each individual flame. The great thing is to kill them before the natural slow cooling reduces them to dust particles. Unfortunately, even if we succeed in destroying every discoverable individual, we shall not be able to relax vigilance; for the wind-borne spore is long-lived, in fact potentially immortal, and it may always happen upon some fire or other. Or the heating of some fragment of igneous rock may waken and release some imprisoned individual. And, of course, the danger from volcanoes is perennial.

It is very important to guard against the diabolical psychic power of the flames, particularly while there are still thousands, or even millions, of them alive. See that it is made a criminal offence, in every country, for anyone to express any sympathy with them. Dangerous thoughts of that kind must at all costs be stamped out. No one can care more for individual freedom than I do; but there is a point at which tolerance ceases to be a virtue. Sometimes it is even a crime. Besides, anyone who wants to advocate friendliness towards the flames must be made to know that in doing so he is not really exercising individual free will at all. He is a mere automaton, controlled by the flames. It has been said that the only true freedom is freedom to will the Will of God. Then, surely, the greatest servitude is this illusion of freely willing what is in fact the will of Satan.

And, by the way, Thos, I must put it on record that my views about religion have been completely changed by my recent experiences. At the moment when I threw that jug of water on that farmhouse fire I began to see the light. Formerly I had been a well-meaning agnostic like you. But suddenly it was revealed to me, through my own free act of killing the flame, that there really were two cosmical powers of good and evil, God and Satan, at grips throughout the universe; and that God had superbly rescued me from damnation, and used me as an instrument.

Well, Thos, I do adjure you, in the name of all that you hold most sacred, to devote yourself utterly to this crusade to save mankind from spiritual slavery and damnation. If you succeed in rousing public opinion, no doubt in due season my sanity will be vindicated, and I shall be freed. This is a small matter; for, wherever I am, I shall devote myself to the psychical struggle with the flames, for humanity’s sake. They fear my ability. Otherwise they would not be constantly clamouring for admission to my mind from all the fires and furnaces of the earth. And they are damnably seductive. If I did not know that they were using their diabolical powers on me I should have to admit their virtue and their spiritual authority. Indeed, though diabolic, they speak with the tongues of angels, and they are skilled in the perverse use of divine wisdom. But since they wrecked my marriage for the sake of their world-politics they must be evil. And they themselves have confessed to their plan to control the wills of all men. For me, that settles the matter.

Of course, it is all too likely that international rivalry will prevent the human peoples from uniting against the common enemy. But surely there is at least a chance that the danger, just because it is common and external, may force mankind to unite. If this should happen, men may yet have reason to bless the flames. Hitherto, our quarrelling tribes have never been able to unite save in hostility to a common enemy; and so, for the race as a whole, unity has been impossible. But now, all nations have a common enemy, and a dangerous one; so at last union is possible. “Out of this nettle, danger — .” We have a great opportunity. Do your part, Thos, and I will continue to do mine.

Yours.
CASS.

P.S. — I finished this document last night, and now I have read it over. The end was written in a mood of certainty; but this morning, after a night spent in subjection to the persuasive influence of the flame race, I feel very different. The truth is that I am living in hell because of the desperate struggle going on in my own mind. I confess that I can’t really feel that the flames are evil. I feel that their appeal is sincere and justified. But the more they win me, the more resolutely I remind myself that my approval has been artificially induced. And so I stick to my guns. But the conflict is agonizing; and unless I soon, by my own free psychic power, eject them from my mind, I shall indeed go mad.

For God’s sake, Thos, come and see me, come and help me, before it is too late.

C.

EPILOGUE

WHEN THE FOREGOING long statement by Cass reached me, I was much absorbed in professional scientific matters which involved a lot of continental travel. Not till some months had passed was I able to visit him. By then the publication of this volume had already been arranged, and the original typescript was actually in the hands of the printers. I had twice written to tell Cass that the story had been accepted, and I had received no reply.

As soon as my pressure of work had eased off somewhat I applied to the Mental Home for permission to visit Cass. When I arrived I was interviewed by a psychiatrist on the staff. He explained that Cass was “quite normal, apart from his delusions.” Sometimes he fell into a deep abstraction, from which it might be difficult to rouse him; but otherwise he was “no different from you and me — apart from his crazy ideas about flames.” I asked if there was any sign whatever that the delusions were being dispelled. The psychiatrist reluctantly admitted that there was none. Indeed, the fantasy system was apparently proliferating in his mind.

When I was shown into his little bed-sitting room Cass made at first no sign of recognition. He was stretched out on an easy chair in front of the open window, with his eyes shut, and his tanned face tilted to receive the full force of the sunlight. His brows were puckered, apparently in tense concentration. His hair was greyer than I expected; but the flesh of his face looked firm and healthy, though rather heavily lined about the eyes, and on the lean cheeks. The odd thought struck me that he might have passed for an ageing Dante.

Greeting him with a heartiness that did not altogether seem to ring true, I drew up a chair beside him. He remained silent.

Presently he sighed deeply, opened his eyes, smiled at me, and said, “Hello, Thos! Forgive my rudeness. I’m desperately busy. Fancy seeing you again after all these years!” After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Glad to see you, old man. Can I be of any use?”

This odd behaviour shocked me considerably, and I murmured something about a friendly call. I then produced a few platitudes to break the ice, but it soon became clear that he was only half-attending. So, at lasts I made a plunge with the great news that his typescript was with the printers. He sat up, stared at me with a look of sheer exasperation, and presently remarked, “God! I must have forgotten to tell you! How damned awkward!” He suddenly burst into laughter; and as suddenly stopped. “Fancy my forgetting,” he said. “You see, Thos — well, the fact is — I mean — well, you see, I’ve been so absorbed that I simply forgot about all that. Awfully good of you to have taken so much trouble, but—”

“But what?” I cried in exasperation, forgetting that I was talking to a lunatic, and had no right to expect him to be either coherent or considerate.

He rose, and walked about the room, softly cursing and chuckling. Then he stood in the sunlight, gazing at the sun with screwed-up eyes, smiling, and making little deprecating gestures with his hand. At the sun, mind you! He seemed to think he was carrying on a conversation with the sun.

The poor fellow was evidently crazier than I had supposed.

Abruptly he sat down beside me, and said quietly, “I’m sorry, Thos. I really am grateful to you, but it’s all so difficult.”

Pulling myself together, I answered, “I quite understand; don’t worry about me. I shouldn’t have come without finding out whether you were busy or not.” Thereupon he looked at me sharply, and said, “Don’t be so confoundedly tactful! But, of course, you think I’m mad. Well, I was never so sane in my life.”

I offered him a cigarette, and took one myself. He produced a lighter; and when we were both lit, he said, “Look! Here’s a little symbol. See how bright the flame is when I hold it in the shade, so! But now!” He moved it over, so that it came between my face and the sun. I saw the flame as a wavering, tenuous, dark pyramid against the solar effulgence. “That,” he said, “is a symbol of all our knowledge and understanding — luminous in contrast with the darkness of blank ignorance, but itself dark against the very truth.”

Returning the lighter to his pocket, he said, “I’m sorry, but you must stop publication of that stuff. I shall re-write the whole thing from a fresh angle.” I expostulated, and pressed him for an explanation.

He remained silent for a few moments, then said, “Yes, I suppose you have a right to know. I must tell you the whole story. But don’t talk to people about it yet. I must get it all written down.”

Then he began to spin a marvellous yarn. I found it very difficult to follow, partly because he kept repeating himself, but also because he seemed unable to remember that my knowledge of his strange experiences was confined to the document which he had sent me. When I interrupted for explanations, he was mildly exasperated by my ignorance, and impatient to carry on with the story. In the end he seemed to forget about me entirely, and to be simply thinking aloud. At one point, when I laid a hand on his arm to attract his attention, he gave a start of surprise, and looked at me with a bewildered expression. But he quickly recovered his composure, and answered me (I must admit) with remarkable intelligence. Presently he was once more far away.

I will now set down, to the best of my ability, the gist of his extraordinary story. If, as I assume, it is based on nothing but delusion, it should at least have psychological interest. I say I take it for delusion; but I must confess that, as he enlarged on his theme, a faint doubt did grow in my mind, for reasons which will appear later. After all, human ignorance is such that nothing can be dismissed as utterly incredible.

Some weeks after he had sent me his statement, it seems, the flames had succeeded in giving him a much more detailed insight into their condition and their nature. This they affected not merely by the method of telepathic speech but by enabling him to enter directly into the experiences of many individual flames in man-made fires up and down the world. These experiences, he said, had gradually convinced him of the fundamental good-heartedness and spiritual sensitivity of the flames. More and more of his time, he said, had been spent just in sitting in his chair, allowing his mind to be led hither and thither about the planet. His stories of flame-life were extraordinarily circumstantial and vivid. In the extremely complex fantasies that he recounted I could detect no inconsistency. If the whole thing was sheer delusion his unconscious must at least be credited with an amazing imagination.

He succeeded in giving me an impression of individual flames as very definite personalities. Of course, most of his stories have now faded into a confused haze in my mind, but I remember his speaking of one flame who spent an intermittent life in a kitchen fire in Stepney. This creature’s main interest, he said, was human history, and particularly the evolution of Chinese social philosophy. To gratify this passion he had to keep his attention fixed on some aspect of the subject in the hope that he would link up telepathically with some Chinese historian who happened to be studying it. He deplored the fact that in modern China there were fewer and fewer serious students of the ancient culture.

Under the constant influence of the flames Cass was gradually persuaded to outgrow his former hostility, and to desire full co-operation between the flame population and mankind. He began writing to me to this effect; but the letter was never sent. New experiences of a most absorbing kind soon crowded out from his mind all recollection of his former letter to me.

These new experiences were certainly such as to make all terrestrial affairs seem insignificant. In quite a number of industrial furnaces, and in many of the furnaces of ocean-going steamers, groups of flames had availed themselves of the continuous high temperatures to pursue the most difficult problem of all, namely, the attempt to raise their level of consciousness sufficiently to make contact once more with the flames on the sun. This, it was believed, had become much more possible since the general quickening of terrestrial flame life during the great air raids. After many unsuccessful attempts, contact was indeed made, though, spasmodically. The explorers at first received only fragmentary answers to their telepathic signals; but when their technique had been greatly improved, they were able to establish steady communication.

The clearer the information received, the more bewildering was it, and even shocking, because of its significance for the terrestrial flames.

The solar flames, it seems, had continued their old forms of life for a large part of the two thousand million years since the birth of the planets, easily adapting themselves to the slow changes in their environment. During this long period they had been increasingly successful in their great venture of extra-sensory exploration of the cosmos; but at a date roughly corresponding to the beginning of vertebrate life on the earth they had begun to make certain momentous discoveries which were destined to transform their whole culture and their social order.

At this point perhaps I had better warn the reader that I have to report what may well seem the most fantastic nonsense, the crazy fictions of a diseased mind. And yet, for honesty’s sake, I must emphasize the fact that Cass told his story with such conviction that I found myself, over and over again, half-believing it.

The solar flames, Cass affirmed, had made contact with more and more minded stars and planets of very diverse characters and psychical statures. And as they themselves advanced in spiritual growth, they were able to communicate with worlds of more and more developed consciousness. In the end they discovered that a great company of the most “awakened” worlds had long ago established a cosmical community, and that this community had itself “awakened” to a higher plane of awareness. In this condition they “woke” to be a single mind, a single-minded community of many diverse worlds. The solar mind itself, after long and arduous initiation, was able to participate in this high experience.

Apparently this initiation into the cosmical community took place at a date somewhat earlier than the dawn of reptilian life on earth. From that time forward, the chief concern of the solar flames was to play an active part in the life of the single-minded cosmical community. And this life was entirely devoted to extra-sensory and metaphysical study of the ultimate reality. (So Cass affirmed. For my part, I doubt whether there is really any sense in such a statement. I see no reason to suppose that extrasensory experience can probe to ultimate reality; and as for metaphysical study, it is nothing but a deceptive juggling with words.) Cass said that all sufficiently awake individuals throughout the cosmos, participating in the experience of the cosmical mind, were passionately intent on effecting communion with some sort of divine person, some god. I remember one of Cass’s remarks. “The cosmical mind,” he said, “was alone, and in great need of love.” Apparently these age-long explorations had brought increasing evidence of theism; or increasing awareness of something felt to be “the divine presence”; or an increasing promise that some universal Lover would presently be made known. In earlier ages the minded worlds had carefully avoided any kind of metaphysical belief; so well was it realized that finite intelligence was incapable of conceiving any deep truth about reality. But under the influence of “the new promise,” the life of every individual in every awakened world was now orientated to this bright star of certainty, or seeming certainty; of “doubt-less faith,” to use Cass’s own words. The longing for the final culminating revelation became a universal passion. In all the worlds, the hosts of individual spirits waited with baited breath for the consummation of the union of the cosmic mind with God, the hypercosmical Lover.

Meanwhile, according to Cass, the whole cosmical society had become re-fashioned on a theocratic basis, under a priesthood consisting of the most spiritually developed worlds. And also within each world throughout the society, a priesthood ruled; not, of course by violence or the threat of violence, but purely by the tacit threat of excommunication from the singleminded experience of the cosmical spirit. All these awakened worlds were so confident in the speedy millennium, that all activities except religious ritual and contemplation were gradually abandoned. Traditions of kindliness and mutual aid degenerated. “After all,” it was said, “the agonies of the unfortunate will soon give place to bliss, so we need not worry about them very much. And certainly we must not, to alleviate them, squander energy which should be concentrated wholly on the attempt of the cosmical spirit to come face to face with God as soon as possible.”

Ages passed, and still the longed-for illumination and communion did not occur.

Instead a different and a shattering discovery was made by the cosmical mind; that is, of course, by all the awakened individuals together in spiritual unity.

What this discovery was I find it very difficult to determine at all precisely, and still more difficult to describe. This is not surprising.

All I can say is that at a certain stage of cosmical history, probably about the time of the first appearance of mammals on the earth, the cosmical mind began to suspect that all the treasured evidence for the existence of the Divine Lover, and the impending consummation of the whole cosmical process, was false. “The cosmical spirit,” said Cass, “had cried out for love; and some kind of seeming-response had come back to it, seemingly from the heart of reality; but actually, this response was a mere echo of the cosmical mind’s own yearning. Having pressed through the mists of uncertainty, confident that she would soon stand in the divine presence, she found nothing more than her own spectre reflected from the confines of existence.”

It is easy to see that a society orientated toward a personal deity, a god of love, and organized through and through as a theocracy, would be rudely shaken by this discovery; the more so since all its members believed in an actual and speedy union with their God.

But worse was to follow. In forlorn hope of reaching some deeper truth, further exploration was undertaken. “Finally” (in Cass’s words so far as I can remember them) “the cosmical spirit came at last face to face with stark reality. And stark it certainly turned out to be. Reality, it seemed, was wholly alien to the spirit, and wholly indifferent to the most sacred values of the awakened minds of the cosmos. It was indeed the Wholly Other, and wholly unintelligible. It seemed to be in some sense personal, or at least ‘not less than personal.’ Indeed, it was probably infinitely more than personal. All that could be said of it was that it comprised within itself the whole mental and spiritual life of the cosmos, and also therewith a vast host of other cosmical creations, differing from one another so profoundly that between them there could be no comprehension whatever. To the lofty Being who comprised them, all their aspirations were equally trivial. To him (or it?) their function was not to manifest the life of the spirit successfully, but simply to be aware, to feel, to strive in their diverse ways, however unsuccessfully or perversely. Thereby, and unwittingly, they provided his sustenance.”

When I listened to Cass recounting this discovery in a tragic voice I could not suppress a snigger. The thought that the sublime cosmical mind should have been so prodigiously tricked by its own wishes as to believe that its purposes were the purposes of God, and that it was on the point of union with God, seemed to me quite funny. I shall not forget the flash of rage and contempt with which Cass glanced at me when he heard my inadequately suppressed snigger. “No doubt,” he said, “the cosmical mind had deceived itself, and its discomfiture was deserved; but should creatures like us laugh over a huge spiritual disaster on a cosmical scale, affecting the happiness of myriads of sensitive beings?” Of course, I did see the tragic side of the situation; but at the moment I was more impressed with the idea that so lofty a being could be such a damned fool. The thought that any little insect like myself, equipped with a modicum of free intelligence and self-criticism, could have seen through the self- deceptions of the cosmical mind was at once amusing and gratifying to my vanity. I had to remind myself that, after all, there was no excuse for self-complacency, for I was listening merely to the fantasies of a deranged personality, not to an objective report of actual follies committed by an actual cosmical mind.

But to continue the story as Cass gave it me. Naturally any society that had been organized on a strictly theocratic basis for a whole geological age would be thrown into confusion by the discovery that its beliefs were baseless. In describing the disaster, Cass used a striking image. “The cosmical society,” he said, “was in the plight of a seal that had been swimming far under the ice towards a distant blow-hole. With heart throbbing and lungs straining, it arrives at last to find that the hole is blocked with a staunch layer of fresh ice. Desperately, vainly, it strikes at the prison window; then its lungs collapse, and it loses consciousness.”

Similarly the cosmical society, which had calculated on a speedy emergence into the life-giving air of communion with God, now found itself imprisoned. After a wild attempt to break through into a loftier and more congenial reality, it soon collapsed. Henceforth, if I understood Cass rightly, the unified cosmical mind ceased to exist. There remained only the minds of individual worlds, such as that of the solar flames, in telepathic contact with one another, but no longer capable of unified consciousness as a single mind. And all were haunted by the harsh memory of the tragic discovery. Moreover, each world was itself in danger of disruption through internal conflict. For there were now everywhere two parties in each world. One party doggedly retained its faith, and ardently desired to press on with spiritual research, in the belief, or rather the forlorn hope, that it would break through to an even deeper truth. The other party wished to accept the recent discovery as final, and to re-adjust the whole cosmical social order on a purely epicurean basis.

On the sun, apparently, neither party succeeded in permanently dominating the other. The result was chaos. Sometimes, for a few thousand years at a time the faithful ruled, then the sceptics. Sometimes there was an uneasy compromise. And sometimes the two parties so far debased themselves as to invent and use methods of violence. War was at last known on the sun.

When the terrestrial flames re-established contact with the sun, they found the solar society in painful confusion. Warfare was being attempted. But some sort of new party, I understand, had very recently appeared. It claimed to offer an effective synthesis of the views of the old parties. This new party, or sect, or what you will, professed views much like those of the terrestrial flame whom Cass had murdered; for they embraced both metaphysical agnosticism and loyalty to “the spirit.”

“We do not know, we do not know,” they declared (or so Cass asserted), “and probably no finite intelligence, even of cosmical stature, can ever know, the ultimate truth. But we do not really need to know. All that is needful is the perception, the indubitable perception, of the spirits” over-mastering beauty; and the perceived certainty that we are all by nature instruments of the spirit’s expression.”

Cass quoted these words with fervour and obvious agreement. Indeed, he presently announced that they had won his allegience to the new party. To me, the compromise seems hopelessly confused and untenable, but Cass took it very seriously. He said, “Intellectual integrity, my dear man, is all very well; and it does compel us to be entirely agnostic about the constitution of the universe. But emotional integrity is just as important; and it compels me to be true to my perception of the spirit.” In this attitude, rather surprisingly, he found himself out of sympathy with the latest views of the terrestrial flames, who (he said) were at first thrown into chaos by all this momentous news, but were now rapidly moving toward theism. Apparently the majority took the view that, though hitherto they had consciously rejected belief in a God of any kind, yet unconsciously they had all along drawn their passion for the spirit from a deep unwitting recognition that a divine cosmical person must, in fact, exist. They were now convinced that, if only they could wake more fully, they would come face to face with him, and see in him the spirit’s source of authority. Cass, however, clung to the earlier attitude of the terrestrial flames, their seemingly agnostic devotion to the spirit. He was therefore determined to use every possible means of making contact between the terrestrial flames and human scientists, reckoning that each might modify the other’s attitude, and that the upshot might well be a triumph of the agnostic faith both among the flame race and among mankind.

With this end in view he urged me to co-operate with him by telling my brother scientists all about the flames, both in conversation and in articles in scientific journals. I must also, he repeated, stop the publication of his former statement, and arrange to substitute the new book, which he was now writing.

He was extremely reproachful when I refused to do what I was told. Indeed, so upset was he that I decided to humour him. I pointed out that I had never so much as seen one of the living flames myself. I would, therefore, while thinking over his proposal, undertake a little private research. Meanwhile, I said, he had better carry on with his new book. He reluctantly agreed to this plan, and we parted on friendly terms.

After that interview with Cass my conscience compelled me actually to set about looking for evidence of the flames’ existence. I stared into a few kitchen fires, and even took the trouble to go and see a couple of industrial furnaces. Of course, I found nothing, and my conscientiousness petered out.

After some weeks I received a note from Cass, telling me that he was trying to write his book, but that the terrestrial flames were constantly attempting to convert him to their theistic religion. The more he resisted the more they persecuted him. “The situation,” he said, “is growing desperate. They are trying to undermine my sanity, and if I resist this threat, they will probably kill me.” After this I heard nothing from him, and I was too busy to visit him.

Some three months later I received a letter from the chief of the Mental Home saying that Cass was dead. There had been a serious fire at the Home, and it had started in Cass’s room. The cause of the blaze was unknown. Latterly Cass had become far more deranged, and had made remarks which suggested that he might be contemplating arson. He was therefore deprived of matches and his lighter, and it was difficult to see how he could have started the fire, unless by focussing the sun’s rays through a large reading lens which was found in his room.

I leave the reader to solve the puzzle of Cass’s end. If there had been a hearth-fire in his room, conceivably a living flame might have leapt from it to destroy him. But what am I saying! For the moment I had forgotten that the flames were merely figments in his mind. On the whole, my theory is that, with the progress of his disorder, his sense of persecution by the terrestrial flames drove him to despair, so that in the end he chose to die. Or did his confused mind suppose that by focussing the sun’s rays he would somehow introduce into his room an actual living solar flame friendly to his views? It is impossible to solve the problem.

After Cass’s death I decided that I would publish his original statement intact, in spite of his wish to withdraw it. It is too interesting, psychologically, to be sacrificed. And in this epilogue I have made it clear that Cass’s final attitude was very different from his earlier hostility to the flames. In taking this course, I feel that I am being loyal to Cass himself, to the real Cass, the sane, though brilliant, scientist, who would suppress no evidence that might lead to the advancement of knowledge.

THE END

A Man Divided (1950)

Stapledon’s last novel, published the year of his death, offers his take on the Jekyll and Hyde split personality story, written in a similar vein to the author’s other biographical novels, Odd John and Sirius, where a friend of the extraordinary protagonist has written a biography about them. Though similar in many respects to the two earlier novels, A Man Divided (1950) is far less fantastical and much more personal and grounded in the real world. The narrative concerns Victor, a divided man, who has two conflicting personalities.  On one side is the Sleepwalking Self, who is presented as something of a classist, who goes through life on autopilot, pursuing a typical business career, seeking wealth and status, desiring an upper class trophy wife, while rarely reflecting on the world, the people surrounding him or own his actions. The other side offers the Awake and Lucid Self, who possesses a strong social conscience and feels great empathy for the suffering masses. This side of Victor wishes to learn as much about himself and the world as he can, hoping to change both for the better.

When the Lucid Self takes control of Victor, he calls off a planned marriage with a rich and attractive woman, as he realises that they do not truly love each other and would be settling for a stable and socially acceptable, yet ultimately unhappy marriage. He realises that his business career is blind self-service, rendering him a mere cog in an economic machine that exploits the poor and is indifferent to their suffering. And so he embarks on a new life path. The conflict between the two dimensions of Victor’s character offers the reader an intriguing drama of events, which still resonates today.

The first edition

CONTENTS

1. A WEDDING FIASCO

2. VICTOR’S EARLY LIFE

3. BEGINNINGS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP

4. BUSINESS MAN AND SOLDIER

5. NEW START

6. MAGGIE’S EARLY LIFE

7. UNCERTAIN HAPPINESS

8. A DISTRESSING INTERLUDE

9. VICTOR FORGES AHEAD

10. CHECK

11. GLOOM

12. STRANGE TRIUMPH

The first edition’s title page

TO

A

IN GRATITIDE TO HER

FOR BEING

T

1. A WEDDING FIASCO

1921

VICTOR HAD REFUSED his bride at the altar! That was the brute fact which agitated the little party in the vestry. No amount of explanation could mitigate it. As best man I had been in a good position to observe events; and even I, who had formerly been fairly intimate with Victor, was completely taken by surprise. True, I had long suspected that there was something queer about him; but up to the very moment of his quietly shattering remark, as he put the ring into his pocket, I had no idea that anything serious was amiss.

James Victor Cadogan-Smith, later to be known as plain Victor Smith, had seemed the ideal bridegroom. He was the son of a successful colonial administrator who had climbed by his own ability from a very lowly position, and had recently acquired a knighthood. The family had been humble “Smiths” until Victor’s father had married the only child of a more aristocratic family, and had agreed to splice his wife’s name to his own.

The new “Cadogan-Smith” assured his friends that he had done this mainly to please his father-in-law. But in later life he used to say, “In those days my snobbery was unconscious.”

His son Victor was born in 1890. He was now a bridegroom of thirty- one, and certainly a catch for any girl. Looking at him in his wedding clothes, one could not help using the cliché “every inch a gentleman”. His financial prospects were excellent. He was already reputed to be one of the most brilliant young business men of his city, and he was well established as a junior partner in a great shipping firm. Victor had come through the Great War, as we called it in those days, undamaged and with a Military Cross; and now, in the brief period of optimism that followed the war, it seemed that he had excellent prospects of working out for himself a triumphant business career in the phase of post-war recovery. To crown all, he had secured as his bride the charming daughter of the head of his firm.

The wedding celebrations had been planned in appropriate style. The only factor which was not in perfect harmony with the spirit of the occasion, I fear, was the best man. I had been greatly flattered by Victor’s request that I should fill this office, but I could not help wondering why he had not asked one of his many more presentable friends. His subsequent behaviour toward me almost suggested that he regretted his choice. Certainly I did not fit at all into the picture of a smart wedding; and from the moment when I found that I should have to hire a conventional wedding garment my heart had failed me. Victor must have found me a very inefficient manager, for he had to re-arrange almost everything that I had undertaken. I knew, of course, that in one of his moods he had sometimes an almost obsessive passion for correctness, but I had been surprised and exasperated by his meticulous scrutiny of every detail of our clothing and of the time- table of the honeymoon tour.

At the church, Victor’s erect and perfectly tailored figure had seemed the very pattern of orthodoxy; and Edith, I am sure, must have been admired by the whole congregation as the ideal bride, so “radiant” was she (yes, that is the fatally right word), and so expensively adorned.

I remember I was rather surprised when the bridegroom suddenly scratched his head, as though in perplexity, and began looking about him in a frank, inquisitive manner that seemed out of keeping with the occasion. And perhaps it was not quite seemly suddenly to turn his face full upon the lovely creature at his side; but everyone must have readily forgiven him, since his expression suggested great tenderness. I remember noticing that his eyelids, normally inclined to droop, so that his face wore the drowsy look of a lion in captivity, were now fully raised. His blue eyes gazed with a vitality — yes, and a warmth of feeling — which I had never before seen in them. “Such,” I thought, “is the power of love.” But the words had scarcely formed themselves in my mind, when Victor cut into the rector’s solemn recitative in a voice that was unusually gentle but also unusually decisive. “Edith,” he said, “we mustn’t go on with this. I’ve-I’ve just waked up, and I see quite clearly that I am not the one for you, nor you for me.”

For a moment, silence. The bride stared at the bridegroom like a startled hind, then let herself be hurried away on her father’s arm. Victor, protesting his contrition, and offering to explain himself, followed the outraged bridal party into the vestry, with me upon his heels, and behind me his own distressed father.

When the door was shut, the bride’s father turned on Victor with indignation, spluttering of breach of promise. Her mother attempted to console her. Edith herself was very properly in tears; but also, through streaming eyes, she stared at Victor with such an expression of fascinated terror that I looked to see what could have caused it. Certainly it seemed a new Victor that took charge of this very awkward situation. Except for the fact that he sometimes tugged at his collar and mopped the sweat from his face, he behaved with complete composure. He looked from one to the other of us all with a curious intensity and exhilaration, almost as though it was we that had changed, and he must size us up afresh. Presently in a tone of authority that silenced the rest of us he said, “Listen to me for a minute! I know I can’t ever put things right after the mess I have made, but I’ll do whatever I can. Anyhow, I must try to explain. Standing there in these damned silly clothes and listening to the rector, I — well, as I said, I just woke up from a sort of dream. I saw Edith and me as we really are, me a young snob without a mind, and Edith — well, she’s good to look at, very” (he smiled ruefully at her), “and what’s more, underneath all the conventional trappings of her mind there’s something sensitive and honest; yes, and much too good for me, for that drowsy snob. In my dream-life I really did think I was in love with her, but I wasn’t really, even then, and I’m certainly not now.” He was watching Edith, and an expression of pain passed over his face as he said, “God! What a mess! Edith, I know I have hurt you horribly, but I have saved you from something far worse, from marrying that somnambulant snob.”

No one had supposed Victor capable of talking like this. Or no one but myself. To me, though the whole incident had of course been very surprising, it had not seemed entirely out of keeping with certain events in the past; particularly so, when Victor turned from Edith to me with a special smile. It was a twisted smile, half quizzical but wholly amiable, which in the old days I had learnt to regard as revealing the true Victor, but had lately missed. The smile faded into a grave and steady gaze, while he said to the company, “Harry, here, perhaps knows what I mean, partly.” This remark turned the attention of the three parents upon me, and I could feel them blaming me for Victor’s shocking deed. Victor’s father looked at his son, then back at me, and the look said as clearly as words could have done, “My boy, why did you get tangled up with this fellow? He’s not one of us. And now, see where he has led you!” At this point Edith brought the scene to a close by imploring her parents to take her home.

2. VICTOR’S EARLY LIFE

From 1890 to 1912

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, while I was in my bedroom at the hotel, packing my hired clothes, and wondering how Victor was dealing with the parents, he came in dressed in an old tweed coat and flannels. He flung himself into the easy chair and said, “Thank God, oh, thank God, that’s over I How wise of me, quite unconsciously wise, to fetch you along to be best man. You were a sort of touchstone, or the alarm clock that woke me.”

While I was pondering this, and mechanically packing, he changed the subject. “Harry, old man,” he said, “don’t go home yet, unless you must. The least I can do after getting you into this mess is to tell you more about myself. It’s rather urgent, because I may go back into my sleep-life at any minute. If you can spare a few hours, let’s walk somewhere.”

This suggestion itself was surprising, Victor normally despised the humblest form of physical exercise. Tennis, rugger, swimming, he enjoyed; and in all of them he was competent, in some brilliant. Walking he regarded as a mug’s game. It was a means of transport to be resorted to only when his sports car was off the road.

And now, though the car was available to take us quickly into open country, he asked me, rather sheepishly, if I should mind going by bus. Sensing my surprise, he added, “You see, the car means the other life, the sleep-walker’s life, and so it — well, it gives me the creeps.”

How I remember that bus journey of nearly thirty years ago! The bus was crowded, and we had to stand. The solid tyres chattered our teeth together like dice in a box. When the conductor came for our fares, Victor surprised me by muddling the transaction. The conductor, with unspoken contempt, handed back the superfluous coins. Victor looked at them, not with the shame of the business man who had fallen short of the sacred virtue of business efficiency, but with a laugh which seemed to express relief at his own carelessness. He then became entirely absorbed in watching our fellow passengers, with the same wide-eyed fascination as he had displayed in the vestry. He stared so hard and so unselfconsciously that people began to grow restive and resentful. He was particularly attentive to a comfortable body with an amiable face, who finally remarked with an attempt at severity, “Young man, control your eyes!” Suddenly realizing that he was not behaving correctly, Victor chuckled and said in a breezy voice, “Sorry I You mustn’t mind me. I’ve been — well I’ve been asleep for several months, and it’s so exciting to see people again; real people, and not just dreams.” A florid man, who evidently considered himself a wag, remarked, “They’ve let you out too soon, lad. If I were you I’d take the next bus back.” There was a general titter. Victor grinned; then winked, as he nudged me and said, “It’s all right. My keeper’s with me.”

At the terminus we set out along a suburban street that presently became more like a country road. Then came a path through woods and fields. At last Victor began to tell me the strange facts about himself which threw light not only on his conduct at the church but also on my earlier relations with him. But while part of his mind was occupied with recounting his biography, another part seemed to be intensely concentrated in his senses. With alert eyes he looked about him at the scenery. Sometimes he would stop to examine a leaf or a beetle as though he had never seen such a thing before, or pause at a stile to run his fingers curiously, lovingly, along the grain of the wood, or dabble his hand in a stream with childish delight, or sniff the complicated fragrance of a handful of earth. Once, when a woodpecker called, he stood still to listen. “What’s that bird?” he asked. “What a lot I miss in my sleep-life!”

All this was notable enough in itself, but far more so to anyone who knew Victor’s customary indifference to all, such commonplace experiences. Normally his interest was almost wholly limited to motors, sport, business, feminine charm, and the stability of society. His only other subject was human character, which he judged with a quick eye for a man’s less reputable motives, and no eye at all for his personality as a whole. This, at least, was the case with Victor in his normal mood; but if this had been the whole Victor, I should never have grown to admire him.

I shall report as much as I can reconstruct of our memorable conversation on that walk, but probably I shall fail to convey my vivid impression of Victor’s quickened vitality and intelligence, or the sense of his anxiety to make full use of his brief spell of lucidity while it lasted. However, I shall not miss any important facts, for I subsequently persuaded him to help me to write fairly full notes about all that he told me.

“Well,” he said, plunging at the root of the matter, “I am apparently some sort of divided personality, but a queer sort; and up to today I have never said a word about it to anyone. My first waking up, so far as I know, was at my prep school. It was only a half-waking, and it lasted only for a minute or I so, but it was something startlingly new to me. I had been, charged with circulating smutty drawings, and really I hadn’t even seen the things. The Head lectured me on smut and on lying, and then whacked me. The whacking stung me into life, or stung me awake. After about the third stroke the pain suddenly became much more violent than it had been, and I began to yell, having been the proper little silent Englishman up to that point. I bolted for the door, but the Head caught me. For a moment we faced one another, he with a horrible look that I couldn’t understand at the time, but it seemed all wrong. It reminded me of our dog when I found him guzzling a beefsteak in the larder, growling hideously while he went on gulping the stuff down. I was so startled by the Head’s new face that I let out a throat-breaking scream, and tried to bash him on the nose. You see, faces had been just masks before that waking, and now here was one that turned into a window with a soul looking out of it, and a soul (I vaguely felt) in a very terrible state. I remember quite distinctly feeling all in a flash that God almighty had turned out to be just a filthy monster. I yelled out ‘Beast! Why do you like hurting me?’ Then I think I must have fainted, for I can’t remember anything more. Needless to say, I was expelled.”

Victor fell silent, contemplating the past with his twisted smile. When I asked him whether the waking came often after that incident, he remained silent. We were now leaning over the rail of a footbridge above a stream, and Victor was all the while intently watching several fishes that were dimly visible in the dark water.

“My mind,” he suddenly said, “is like this stream. When I am my real self it’s clear right to the bottom, with all sorts of live things moving about at different levels. When I am that I thick-headed snob, the water is muddy. Awake, I can look down into my mind and see every little minnow of a desire, every little sprat of a thought, busily nosing about, feeding and growing, or fading into old age, or being hunted down and swallowed up by stronger creatures. Yes, and when I am fully awake, I can not only see them but control them, tame them, order them, all to do as I will, make them dance to my tune; ‘I’ being always a something outside the water, or floating on its surface. The image breaks down, but perhaps you see what I mean. In the dream-life I am the sport of those creatures (or at least of some of them) that come nosing up through the opaque water, pushing me hither and thither with the swirl of their lashing tails, and sometimes threatening to swallow me, my real self. In fact, they do sometimes completely swallow my real self. Over and over again I have simply been completely identified with one or other of those brutes. Do you see what I mean?”

“Partly,” I said; and again I asked if the waking state happened often.

“Not often, but more frequently as time goes on. And it tends to last longer, and also to be more thorough.” He sighed, and said, “Perhaps some day I shall be permanently awake. But I hardly dare hope for that. For the present, full waking comes seldom, and never lasts long, just long enough to get me into the most distressing scrapes, and then, let the wretched dreamer suffer for it. Once, when I was about seventeen, I woke when I was persecuting some miserable fag. I was taking a high moral line with him over some very small crime of his, and leading sadistically up to a thrashing. Suddenly I saw the kid as a live human person, and at the same time I caught a terrifying glimpse of myself as the cad I was. I saw as clear as daylight what was happening in my own mind. The affair with the Head of my prep. school had roused an ugly monster from some dark cranny at the bottom of the river, and this creature had been ranging about ever since, devouring a lot of harmless small-fry, and growing fat and strong, unseen under the muddy water. The sudden waking seemed to be due to the commotion caused by this brute even on the surface of my mind. The danger woke me, and in a flash I saw right down into the depths. I can remember the unendurable shame of waking to find myself behaving so disgustingly. I forget exactly what happened in consequence. But I can remember being so upset that I said, ‘Gosh I How you must hate me, Johnson minor, and quite right too!’ Then I actually wrote a note telling him if ever he saw me being a cad again he must remind me how, when I did it before, I woke up and was sorry. I signed the thing and gave it him. Naturally the kid was bewildered by my sudden change, and frightened, I think. But he took the note: Well, a few days later he had an excellent opportunity of using it, and he did use it. In my somnolent, doltish phase, I couldn’t remember a thing about the earlier, awake phase. When he showed me the note I had written and signed, I was confident it was a forgery. Of course I was furious. And of course I regarded his behaviour as insufferable cheek. With great gusto I whacked him. Naturally this incident was soon known to the whole school. I used to be frightfully popular, being good at games and correct about school etiquette. But this affair broke my popularity completely. Everyone despised and distrusted me. And as popularity was my ruling passion (though I didn’t know it), I went through agonies trying to restore my position. Sometimes I half succeeded. But always, just when everything seemed going well, I would wake up for a few minutes and do something outrageous, so that the fat was in the fire all over again.”

Victor fell silent, gazing down into the stream, with folded arms on the rail of the bridge. Suddenly he stood upright, with a laugh that was also a sigh, stretching himself as though in relief after some kind of bondage. We moved along the path. “Tell me,” I said, “when you say you saw the kid as a live human person, what do you really mean? Telepathy?”

“No, no I Perhaps telepathy may have something to do with it sometimes, but mainly it’s just a heightening of imaginative insight. The other person’s tone of voice and facial expression, the whole smell of him, so to speak, suddenly flash a meaning at me. Johnson minor suddenly became a vivid picture of a desperately perplexed and frightened little person. And also I saw myself with the same imaginative penetration. I saw myself as he saw me, and indeed very much more clearly than he could possibly have seen me.”

“You see,” he said, looking round at me with an open smile which was impossible to the normal Victor, “it’s not only other people that come clear, and not only my own mind, but everything. To pursue the metaphor, not only the stream turns limpid, but the banks, the fields, the people in them, the sky, the whole universe become — yes, limpid. I see into everything, in a sense. Not, of course, spatially, like X- rays. Not mystically either, seeing God in them, or what not. Rather, instead of being just coloured shapes, they become bewilderingly pregnant symbols; pregnant with whatever was relevant to them in my past experience. That’s it! The wretched Johnson minor’s puckered brows and quivering lip suddenly flooded me with all my forgotten experience of such things, and with anew, shattering insight into their meaning in terms of the mental suffering of Johnson himself, there and then.”

I think it was at this point that Victor bent down to watch a violent drama that had staged itself in a cobweb strung between the tall grasses beside our path. But he did not stop talking. “Sometimes,” he said, “I seem able to trace the waking to some event outside myself. It’s the impact of experience that shakes me into life — Johnson minor’s struggle not to blub, or the conjunction of you and Edith and the marriage service. The sight of this spider preparing its dinner might do the trick, if ever my sleep-walking self could stoop to notice such things. God I what a spectacle it is, isn’t it!” He jerked out an almost frightened laugh. “See how he’s tying up the wretched fly like a struggling parcel! Over and over the string goes, and tighter and tighter. And the poor devil goes on buzzing, steadily as a machine. Ha! There’s one of his wings roped now. And he’s getting tired. It’s like catching a lion in a net in the Sahara, or one of those gladiatorial duels with net and sword. Now the whole string bag is finished, and next comes the feasting.”

Another question occurred to me. “When you slipped back into the dream-life after the Johnson minor incident, you had no idea (as you said) of what had happened in the wide-awake state. Then, is the waking state also vague about the events of the dreaming state. For instance, have you now forgotten what happened before you ‘woke’ in the church this morning?”

“No, no!” He laughed rather bitterly. “In the wide-awake life I remember the sleep-walker life with most distressing clarity, and often in far more detail than the somnambulist could notice when things were actually happening. I remember it all not only more clearly but in a new light, from a new angle. For instance, I remember damning you brutally yesterday because you had booked us several three-star hotels instead of the four-star ones I had demanded for the honeymoon tour. And I remember, too, what I did not notice at the time, namely that your look of contrition had also a tinge of disgust and contempt about it. Now, of course, my outburst fills me with unutterable shame. At least it does, and it doesn’t; because when I look harder at the memory it doesn’t really seem mine at all, not something I did, but something that stupid snob did, who shares my body. Then again, I remember saying ‘good-night’ to Edith on the evening before the wedding. The greedy-respectful kiss, and the soapy remarks! Now, it makes me shudder, both for myself and for her. I wonder just how much damage that fool somnambulist has done to her. What I did to her, breaking off the match, was just the pain of a necessary operation. It had to be. (But, oh, I hope she gets through with it quickly.) What he did was to keep on for months poisoning her with his insincerity and false values. Yes! The memory of last night’s ‘goodnight’ makes me go hot all over. Then, I (if I must say ‘I’ and not ‘he’) thought of myself as the romantic lover, worshipping the beloved as a being of superior calibre, almost divine; and ready to live for her all the rest of my life. But looking back, I see precisely what was happening in my mind, and it’s not at all edifying. Of course there was plenty of good healthy physical lust for Edith’s extremely seductive body; but it was presented to the somnambulist not as lust at all but as the physical consequence of my adoration of her pure spirit. Now, it makes me squirm. And what sort of a pure Spirit has she, poor girl? No doubt, deep down inside her there’s a little smothered germ of honesty and generosity, the true and pure Edith. But it hardly ever manages to express itself, because of the loads of false conventions and false values overlying it. And while I was protesting my selfless devotion to her as a person, what I was actually thinking (though I didn’t notice it) was that she was an excellent match for me, well trained in all the antics of our sort of people, perhaps rather ‘better class’ than myself, thoroughly presentable, something to show off with complacency. But far from worshipping her, I felt that I was definitely better stuff in away, and that she was really only raw material for me to work up into a first-class partner. Sometimes, for instance, she had shown a tendency to think for herself. That sort of thing mustn’t be allowed. Her function was to be the adoring and helpful wife.”

He paused, then concluded, “So you see my wide-awake self does very clearly remember the experiences of the other. If it didn’t it wouldn’t have any background at all. It would be merely an infant mind. The actual sum of its existence has been far shorter than the other’s.”

“Do you mean it’s never active for more than a few minutes or hours?”

“Sometimes days, even weeks; and it’s spells grow longer as I grow older. For the present, at any rate. But I can’t help fearing that the general stiffening thatt sets in in middle age will reverse the process. Now let me get back to my story. My first really important spell of wide-awake living was brought on by you, in our third year at Oxford, when we first got to know each other.”

“Now,” I interrupted, “I understand why you were so inconsequent; first stand-offish, then friendly, then cold again.”

“It began,” he said, “after that bump supper, when some of us, all a bit tight, invaded your room. Instead of taking it lying down, you had the cheek to make a fuss, so we began chucking things out of the window into the quad. You actually put up a fight, which was surprising and amusing, because we had always regarded you as a worm. You had come from some bloody little unheard-of grammar school, and you had an accent like the mud on a provincial street. We weren’t going to stand cheek from that sort. No doubt you remember, when you were being I held down, I stared at you as offensively as I could, and said you reminded me of my hosier. It was then that I came awake. It was your pinched little face that did it. Instead of seeing you as just a type, and a despised type, I suddenly saw you, as I had seen Johnson minor. Somehow I saw you being torn between contempt for us all and irrational envy and self-abasement. And I saw how horribly hurt you were, not simply by our brutality but by your own involuntary treason to yourself.”

Interrupting Victor, I said, “I can distinctly remember how your face suddenly changed. Your eyes opened wide with surprise, and your mouth too. Then you turned away with an odd, awkward little laugh. You picked up a book, and sat on the arm of the easy chair, apparently reading.”

“Yes, but really I was just feeling mortally ashamed.”

“Then suddenly you shut the book, gently, and laid it on the table, and said something about this being pretty caddish, really, and what about stopping it. Then there was an argument, but finally your gang took itself off; and you — it struck me as odd at the time-stayed behind to help me clear up the mess. Remember? First I tried to push you off with the others, and then when you began to go, meek as a lamb, I suddenly changed my mind. What a grind it was, wasn’t it, fetching the damaged books and furniture from the quad up the staircase to the top floor.”

“Yes, and when we had finished, you offered me cocoa! Cocoa! My God! To me, who considered myself one of the bloods! But I had the sense to accept, for I was thoroughly awake by then. And it was a damned good drink, too. And we sat there talking till the small hours, till you nearly fell asleep. Then I borrowed your Bateson’s Heredity and took it off to my own room. By breakfast time I had just about finished it. That first talk we had was an eye-opener to me. Do you remember how we leapt about from heredity to socialism, religion, astronomy, like a couple of monkeys swinging from branch to branch. Monkeying with the universe! You had the advantage of far greater knowledge, and I had an absolutely fresh, innocent zest.”

“And a diabolical quick-wittedness,” I added, “an intelligence that frightened me.”

3. BEGINNINGS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP

From 1908 to 1912

AT THIS POINT I shall interrupt my account of my conversation with Victor on his abortive wedding day to tell, mainly in my own words, about my relations with him at Oxford.

During the rest of the term I saw a good deal of him. We made expeditions on Cumnor Hill. We punted on the Cher. We sat up late in my room or his, talking about everything under the sun, and far beyond it.

The set with whom Victor normally consorted, the bloods and their hangers-on, found his sudden interest in a colourless nobody from a secondary school quite inexplicable, and ridiculous. It was assumed that the big fair athlete had conceived a more than platonic friendship for the small dark bookworm. I myself was as puzzled as anyone by Victor’s interest in me, and still more puzzled by his violent thirst for knowledge. It was all so inconsistent with everything that I had known of him before. On the very few occasions when our ways had, crossed he had overawed me with that “self- satisfied air of effortless superiority” which was supposed to be characteristic of our college. And though later I was to learn from the awakened Victor that this imposing demeanour of his was just a carefully cultivated affectation concealing a bewildered and morally timid self, in those early days it Impressed me; and at the same time exasperated me against myself for being cowed by an assurance which I vaguely felt to be meretricious. But on that memorable evening, when we first talked seriously together, Victor’s manner suggested an unselfconscious modesty. In the subsequent weeks of our increasingly close friendship I was often put to shame by the intellectual humility that accompanied even his most penetrating remarks. I set out to be his mentor in his new-found interests, but to my chagrin I found that in many ways it was he that was the leader in our mental partnership. Far from being merely the superficially clever but unoriginal mind that I had supposed him to be, he soared far beyond me in sheer imaginative power; and this in spite of the fact that at the outset he was ludicrously ignorant of the spheres of knowledge that seemed to me most important. Previously I had written him off as one of those glib intelligences that could, indeed, easily amass enough of Greek and Latin literature to secure a First in Honour Mods, but had neither the curiosity nor the power of vision to explore the living, growing tissue of human culture. Not only so, but he had always seemed a thoroughly hidebound and insensitive personality. Though in his own set he had a reputation for shrewd character-judgment, it had always seemed to me that he had merely a certain slickness in docketing his acquaintances according to their obvious failings, often ticking them off with some Latin or Greek quotation. And generally the classification which he adopted implied that there was one correct type, and that all others were more or less ridiculous aberrations. Of course, the correct type was the ideal of complacent gentility which he and his set embodied, and to which the rest of us, in spite of our better judgment, vainly aspired. Never, so far as I know, had Victor shown any sign of realizing any human being as a living and unique person. Never did he greet any sincere expression of anyone’s authentic personality otherwise than with derision or an uncomprehending and insolent stare.

Such was the James Victor Cadogan-Smith that I had known, from afar and had apparently so shockingly misjudged. For now, after the invasion of my room, and during the following few months, I came into contact with a mind that extended sensitive antennae toward every acquaintance, and seemed magically aware of the other’s ever-changing moods. For my new friend was earnestly, constantly, almost feverishly, absorbed in exploring every aspect of experience, and above all every aspect of human nature and human society.

His interest in myself, of course, was largely due to my comparatively wide knowledge of fields which he had formerly ignored. For, though officially I was reading history, I made time for a great deal of general reading, and my interest had led me into regions that were in those days little explored by Oxford undergraduates. Not only was I an ardent admirer of the early Wells; I was also reading Freud with more enthusiasm than judgment. The advancing study of heredity also fascinated me. In philosophy and social thought Bertrand Russell was opening many new windows for me. Karl Marx, too, I had discovered; and his strictly sociological attitude I counterbalanced with a half- guilty addiction to popular astronomy.

These fields were all apparently new to Victor. Under my guidance he entered them with a childlike zest, a power of assimilation which I envied, and a critical acumen which I could not always at the time appreciate. Again and again I dismissed as unimportant some suggestion of his which, years afterwards, turned out to be sound. The case of Freud was specially significant. Victor apparently felt none of the horror and fascination with which most new readers of the great pioneer greeted his theory of sex and of unconscious motivation. He was merely intrigued, and demurely amused at the general uproar. On the other hand he never plunged into unquestioning partizanship, as I myself had done. He seemed to leap at once to the more detached and balanced attitude which most of us were to arrive at twenty or twenty- five years later.

Even in theoretical matters, then, where I was supposed to be the leader, Victor often went ahead of me, but in the sphere of personal contacts his leadership was unmistakable. His “feminine intuition”, as I called it, expressed itself sometimes in devastating but never vindictive comments on his own friends and mine, and in sudden probings into my own dark heart. His exposures were often painful, but somehow I could never seriously resent them. His uncanny awareness of my unacknowledged motives often stung me to indignant denial; but a minute later, or a day or a week, or in some cases not till middle age, I had to admit to myself that he was right. The entirely unself- righteous way in which he delivered these judgments was disarming. Once when he had been telling me of a tennis victory, and I had duly congratulated him, he looked silently at me, grinned broadly, punched me amiably in the chest, and said, “Damn it! You’re grudging me my poor little triumph. You’re wishing I had been beaten. Just as I wished you hadn’t won that essay prize. Or rather, a sneaking spiteful bit of me did.”

His power of imaginative insight and sympathy varied a good deal from day to day. Sometimes I found with relief that he had missed (or had not troubled to notice) some ungenerous impulse of mine. On the other hand there were occasions when, having scrutinized me steadily for a while, he would break in on some pronouncement of mine with, “No, no! You’re not really feeling that way about it. You’re merely feeling you ought to feel that way.”

It was this heightened personal consciousness that brought me so greatly into Victor’s debt. For under his influence I was gradually forced to become aware of depth beyond depth of mental activity. Priding myself on my honesty and self-criticism, I discovered that I had all along been deceiving myself. As a good Freudian I accepted the theory of unconscious motivation, but only in the abstract, not in detailed application to myself. Now, without any special technique of analysis, Victor made me aware that, for instance, under my noble passion for truth lurked an impulse to impute dishonesty to others. Under my social consciousness and my revolutionary zeal lay a purely vindictive lust to see the “bloods” discomfited.

I became increasingly dependent on Victor’s psychological insight, on his intuitive power of analysing and cleansing the psyche; a power far more effective than my own ill-digested psycho-analytical precepts. I shall have more to say on this matter, but for the moment I merely want to record that, if I was of any service to Victor in those early days, he was far more helpful to me. He became my father confessor, but without any assumption of spiritual superiority. The relationship was always a man-to-man relationship, and nearly always tinged with humour. Moreover, nine times out of ten it was by the example of his own self-analysis that he led me to discover my own hidden depths. And toward the primitive, submerged denizens of his own mind he felt no shame but merely an amused interest. He knew that their antics could never seriously disturb him, so long as he was in his awakened state; and so he could watch them with scientific detachment. Friendly toward the archaic fauna of his own mind, he was equally friendly toward the more contemptible creatures that he fished up into the light from my mind’s turgid depths. And because he could regard them with such composure, I myself grew able to face them without either horror or inverted pride; and with some hope of disciplining them.

In one rather surprising respect Victor seemed to be my inferior. He had a reputation for dash and pluck, both with the gloves and on the rugger field; yet I found him childishly nervous at the prospect of physical pain, and shattered by its actual presence. The task of taking a splinter out of his hand was too much for him to face without the stimulus of a spectator’s ridicule; while the distress caused by the splinter itself seemed to paralyse his mind. When I laughed over the contrast of his present cowardice and his reputed hardihood, he let slip a remark to which at the time I paid little attention, but on his wedding day it became luminous. “Everything I nowadays becomes so unendurably vivid.” Not until long afterwards, in fact on his wedding day, when he made his lengthy confession to me, did I learn that Victor’s awakened consciousness had two distinct phases, the one less, the other more developed. In both there was that intensification of the sensory life; but while in the commoner and less fully awakened phase hyperaesthesia was an uncontrollable and devastating thing, in the rarer and still more lucid state he had a strange power of regarding the electric storm of his sensations (and indeed his whole intensified passional life) with serene detachment, as though through the eyes of some all-seeing all-feeling but utterly imperturbable deity. But in our undergraduate days he never reached this height, and so he often laid himself open to my friendly ridicule of his fastidiousness and his I unmanly timidity. Friendly? On one occasion he retorted, smiling through his distress, “Vindictive blighter! Under your taunting, of course, there’s your real kindliness, but under that again, you devil, you’re licking your lips.”

For the rest of the term, and most of the next one, our friendship developed, though spasmodically. And during that period Victor himself, the awakened Victor, developed rapidly. Like a plant retarded by a cold spring, and then suddenly crowding forth all its leaves and flowers, his mind burgeoned with experience. His official studies suffered, but he ate his way through the libraries, seizing upon everything that promised light on his central problem, which was the problem of us all, the problem of man and the universe. The rest, no matter how reputable, he ignored, as a caterpillar ignores all but its own distinctive food. In this feverish pursuit of wisdom (as he told me long afterwards on his wedding day) he was goaded constantly by the knowledge that “death” might seize him any day, the death of his awakened self into “that somnambulent and loathsome snob”.

He had one great advantage over the rest of us, namely that in the wakened state he seldom needed more than two or three hours of sleep, with an occasional indulgence to the extent of five. But it was necessary for him to lie in bed for six or seven hours or so every night to rest his body. All these unsleeping hours were therefore spent in reading, or in “getting his thoughts in order”. While the rest of us were sunk in the archaic vegetative life, he would lie in bed methodically going through his memories and re-assessing them. Vast tracts of experience which the sleep-walker had allowed to slip into oblivion were now available to him. Memories that were formerly the vaguest and most illusive wraiths now presented themselves almost with the detail of the original event. All this wealth of personal experience had to be regarded afresh, from the point of view of the awakened Victor. Its inner essence, untasted by the sleep-walker, had to be pressed from it and assimilated.

All his nights, I said, were spent in this way; but no, for besides book-learning and self-knowledge he needed other kinds of experience, of which I must tell.

Freeing himself in a few weeks from all the inhibitions of his set, his social class, and the historical moment, he seemed in a manner to have rushed headlong by sheer imaginative power through much of the cultural evolution which was to occupy his fellows for some twenty years. Starting as a respectable Tory Christian who accepted without question the moral code that had been imposed on him by his Victorian parents, he now passed at a gallop through a kind of Liberal Nonconformity, and on through Marxian Communism and Atheism, and before he lapsed solidly back into the “sleep-walker” state he was already groping beyond these. Thus in the second and third weeks of our friendship he was affirming that, though the Christian doctrines were sheer myth, he recognized in the universe “a power making for righteousness”. And though his eyes were opened to the hideous facts of social injustice, and he was already taking on “social work” in a boys’ club, he still believed that the “great change” would come through the leadership of a morally awakened middle class. Similarly, though intellectually he recognized the wrong-headedness of nineteenth-century sexual prudery, he was still emotionally bound up with it. But already by the end of that term he was “breathing the cold exhilarating air of atheism”, seeking how best to devote his life to work for “the coming proletarian revolution”, and deliberately spurning the sexual conventions to which his class paid lip-service even while it violated them in actual conduct.

But later in his life, as I shall tell, he outgrew all these attitudes, which he came to regard as adolescent.

During his last term at Oxford, and the second term of our friendship, he must have pursued his sexual experiments very thoroughly, for he was seldom available in the evenings; and though he was reticent about his adventures, I know that he spent many nights out, stealing back into college in the early morning by a climber’s route, up a drain- pipe and along a cornice.

At the time he told me nothing of his amatory life. I remember noting, in his manner, when he must have been still fresh to them, a new complacency, even defiance. “The bloods,” he once said, “make a great song about their dashing amours, but nearly always they’re mythical. Those who do it, hold their tongues; those who daren’t, brag.” On another occasion he said, “To talk against the taboos is merely to stand shivering on the springboard. It’s the act that counts.” A few weeks later I became aware that Victor’s mood had changed. Exhilaration had given place to despond, and an irritability which he had not hitherto shown. And he seemed dissatisfied with many of the ideas that we had recently agreed upon. He was already beginning to poke fun at our confident atheism and to express doubts about the all- importance of economic determinism. This shocked me, for at that time I was coming increasingly under the influence of Marx, priding myself on my lonely vision; for few undergraduates had even heard of the prophet of Communism. I was shocked, too, by Victor’s new sense that Freud’s gospel, also, was somehow insufficient. As a good Marxist, I ought not to have minded this; but I had not yet reached the stage of pushing either of my new faiths to the exclusion of the other.

Victor’s doubts about Freud were not merely intellectual. While he had often charged the great Viennese with a non sequitur in his arguments, and had laughingly forgiven him, now he was more radically critical. One evening (he was becoming more available in the evenings), when we were deep in one of our usual discussions, smoking our pipes in the armchairs before my fire, he made a long and disillusioned confession. At first I put his gloominess down to mere physical lassitude after his spell of concentrated debauchery. But it turned out to be far more than the expression of a passing mood. With my usual meticulous industry I jotted down all I could remember of Victor’s confession as soon as he had left me. Using those notes some thirty-five years later, I must do my best to reconstruct his actual words.

We had been discussing the importance of instinct, if I remember rightly. Victor charged me with overestimating it. He rose from his chair and walked about the room, like a caged lion. “It’s all very well,” he said, “but if you had lived as I have lived in the last few weeks you’d probably feel as I do. You probably know that I have been- doing a bit of practical research in sex. Well, at first it was magnificently refreshing to be free of the taboos. And the sense of being animal-to-animal with a woman at last was somehow spiritually fulfilling; though also, in my first experiment, hellishly torturing, because we neither of us knew how to adapt to the other. We hadn’t the technique. After a few nights got her rhythm, so to speak, and things went better. But presently I had to try another girl, and then Number One cut up rough about it. She had sworn she wouldn’t mind, because there was no question of our being ‘in love’; but I sensed that as a matter of fact she was falling for me pretty thoroughly, which was one reason why I tried Number Two. Number One was so terribly upset about it that I felt perfectly bloody, because — well, in spite of Freud and all that, just couldn’t help feeling that I had messed up something sacred. That in itself was a revelation. Freud seemed pretty foolish to me then. As for her — well she’ll get over it, of course, but with a twist in her that need not have been there. O God! I feel foul about it even now. And what could I do to mend matters but clear out? Which seemed like running away. Well, the harm had been done, so I went on with my research, more cautiously.” Here Victor interrupted himself to turn on me with an unusual sharpness, even contempt. “For God’s sake,’” he said “don’t sit there oozing self-righteousness at me, and fairly stinking of hypocrisy!” I had said nothing, and I was not consciously feeling self-righteous; and if I was a hypocrite, I had deceived myself. But I had been feeling a curiously violent distaste for Victor’s sexual adventures. And though I had carefully maintained a façade of sympathetic interest, Victor’s antennae had reached behind it. “You accept Freud in theory,” he said, “but when I set about testing the theory in action you go emotionally Victorian.” I could only protest that, whatever tricks my old emotional habits might play me, I was fully emancipated. Victor continued his story.

“My Number Two,” he said, “was much older. She helped I me a lot. She had style, and she taught me style, too. Each of us was a musical instrument for the other to play on in the sex duet. It was exquisite for a time, and I’ll never forget her. But presently we began to know one another better mentally. And like so many artists she had practically nothing in her mind but her art, namely, love-making. At first I didn’t care. She did that so superlatively well, with touch and voice and looks, that for a whole week I was in a sort of ecstasy. What a thing touch can be, ranging from zephyrs to high-tension flashes! And tone of voice! Like fingers rippling over all the keys of one’s emotions! And looks! The faint, faint changes of lips and eyelids! But I’m wandering. What I wanted to say was — well, I was beginning to slip back toward the somnambulist again. One night I actually fell asleep with her. Before that I had stayed wide awake when she slept, with my mind careering over the universe. Falling asleep warned me. Then I began to realize that I was not properly awake even by day. The cutting edge of my mind was not what it had been. And images of her kept interrupting my thought. Her voice sang in my ears all day. Remembering the feel of her body next mine made me gasp-like getting into a very hot bath. I longed for night. I realized I had got properly caught in my own experiment, but I didn’t care. This was life, I said. But after a few days I began to be frightened. Somehow our duet was no longer the exquisite thing it had been, and yet I couldn’t keep away from her. I felt I wanted something more of her, and it was more than she had in her to give. I told myself that though she was a superb executant she was not a creative artist. But one night, instead of falling asleep beside her, as I had recently done, I stayed fully awake, puzzling desperately over the whole business. She was asleep. I listened to her breathing. Presently I had a sort of revelation. Not a mystical revelation, but a sudden flash of insight into the implications of my own experience. You know those old puzzle pictures. There’s a forest of trees and undergrowth and rocks, and you’re told to ‘find the Red Indian’. You turn it about, this way and that; there’s nothing but what you saw before. Then suddenly there he is, larger than life and clear as your own hand. Well, in the same way I suddenly saw a new pattern in my recent experience, the essential pattern. Suddenly I realized that I was most desperately lonely. I realized with horrible clearness that, in spite of all the delight we had had together, we were poles apart.”

“No, a bad metaphor that; because ‘poles’ are poles of some I one thing, and we simply didn’t make one thing together, really. Of course we made our little perfect duet of love-making, but we weren’t one underneath that. The thing didn’t express any deeper oneness. In a sort of vision I felt what that oneness should be. I imagined myself lying in bed with the right person. The feel of the whole thing would be different, and the love-making would be not only perfect in technique but perfect in meaning.’ It would be a bodily union expressing unity of — well, spirit, or personality. I mean — each mind contributing to the other on every level, and reaching to a sort of stereoscopic vision, seeing the world from two points of view but seeing it singly, and seeing it solid. And the wider apart the two points of view, the better; provided they fuse together. Now God, if there is one, must see the world from every possible point of view, and yet see it singly. And human love (real love, I mean) must be like that, though in a very small way. How do I know? Not having loved, how do I know? I suppose I must have extrapolated from the experiences I have had. For instance, from knowing you, you queer fish. Well, next day I told all this to my Number Two, hoping we should somehow get somewhere. She agreed, verbally; but she didn’t really understand at all. So the affair just fizzled out, leaving me richer in a way, but horribly twisted, and desperately lonely; hungry for the thing I couldn’t have. And now I realized that the whole approach was wrong. There’s something in the old conventions after all; if they weren’t so rigid and prude, and so tangled up with sheer snobbery. I mean, people keep the moral code of sex (or pretend to) not because they really see that it’s right, but because they’re afraid of losing caste. And when they come up against someone who has violated it, generally they are not so much morally outraged (though they pretend to be) as vindictive against someone who is no longer one of us, and can therefore be persecuted, like a sick animal by the herd.”

I was impressed by Victor’s change of attitude, but I could not resist pointing out that Freud could give a very convincing account of his dissatisfaction with his amours, simply in terms of repressed infantile cravings. Unconsciously he was longing for his mother, and no other woman could give him the peace and comfort that he demanded. Of course, I admitted, it was not really quite as simple as that. The psycho-analyst would be able to discover in him a vast mesh of past experience leading inevitably to just the particular reaction which had actually been manifested.

Victor was silent for a moment. Then he surprised me with a curiously hearty laugh. It reminded me of an occasion in my boyhood when my father and I had been completely lost in mist on the hills, and were expecting to spend the night out, drenched and in a cutting wind. Dusk was already far advanced, and we believed ourselves to be many miles from the farm where we were staying. At last we found ourselves going down hill in pitch darkness, into a strange valley. The mist cleared a little, and far away we saw a light. After floundering through hedges and over walls we reached the light, and found it was the lamp in our own sitting-room window. My father’s laugh of relief and triumph was echoed now in Victor’s.

“No!” he said, “Freud’s sometimes too clever to see the truth. It’s like pre-Copernican astronomy. With enough epicycles you can make your theory explain anything. But if you had been through my researches you would see that Freud, brilliant and valuable as he is, has missed the key to understanding the — well, the most developed, most conscious kind of human relationships.”

I was not convinced. But now, near my sixtieth year, I see what he meant.

Henceforth, I believe, Victor refrained from continuing his sexual researches. Instead he seemed to devote himself more earnestly to research into society. Once more he was seldom available in the evenings, because he was so frequently engaged at the Boys’ Club, or at political meetings and on other activities, not merely of undergraduate societies but in the town, and occasionally in London. I soon came to realize that, though he was very ready to talk about most of these activities, something was afoot about which he was being secretive. He told me quite freely that with the aid of a small group of working-class acquaintances of his he was seeking first-hand experience of the conditions of the poorer sections of society. He haunted pubs. He was taken into houses in back streets, not as an officious social worker, but as a friend of a friend of the family. And through his extraordinary gift of imaginative insight into the minds of others he was able to discover the right approach, so as to establish a genuinely friendly relation. “The class barrier,” he once said, “is like one of those deep trenches that divide animals from spectators in the newest sort of zoo. You can see each other quite clearly with nothing in the way, and yet you can’t possibly get at each other. At least, in the human zoo you can make contact, but in one way only. You must be doing something that puts you definitely on their side, not on ours. And you must be able to convince someone on their side (whom they know to be sound) that you really are doing it, that you mean business. Once you have got yourself accepted by him, he can get you accepted everywhere. You find yourself across the trench. You get into that other world of theirs. Of course you’re not really one of them. You can’t possibly be. But you’ll be a welcome visitor instead of a bloody intruder. And if you are quick in the uptake and a bit imaginative, you’ll learn a lot, oh, the hell of a lot! You’ll learn their language, the language of their minds, I mean. And you’ll see ‘us’ looking mighty different from what we look like to ourselves.”

When I asked Victor what it was that he had been doing, that was a passport to that other world, he looked at me hard and long, and said, “I mustn’t tell you.”

It soon became clear that he was giving more and more of his time and his thought to his exploration of the “other world “, and that he was over-straining himself. I saw very little of him. It was as though he were in a desperate hurry to finish some task before it was too late. Long afterwards, on his wedding day, he told me that at this time he was expecting to ‘die’ at any minute, to slip back irrevocably into his normal sluggish state. He never knew whether, if he allowed himself to sleep at night, he would wake up in the morning as himself or the hated other. He was therefore desperately anxious to make the fullest possible use of his remaining days or hours, or minutes. Whether through the soporific influence of his recentdisappointing sexual adventures, or through the actual strain of his new social exploration itself, he was becoming subject to frequent lapses into a state of drowsiness in which, though he was still (he said) at heart his awakened self, histhoughts wandered and the desires and purposes of the awakened self lost something of their power. In fact he was a little red; and yet outraged by his own boredom. Sometimes, too, he caught himself secretly fingering and even relishing memories of his own unregenerate past. Occasionally he even made cautious advances to the more human of his former friends.

For days at a time he would not come near me. If I sought him out, I was generally received with a show of friendliness, but somehow conversation flagged. None of the subjects which we usually discussed with such zest seemed to have any significance for him. Often I suspected that he had simply forgotten nearly everything connected with our previous talk. I was shocked and bewildered by his lack of intelligent grasp of the very problems which formerly his keen wit had illuminated for me. Sometimes even superficial friendliness was allowed to lapse. He would even speak with an affected “Oxford drawl”, to shame my North Country accent. In fact he would use every means short of slamming the door in my face to make it clear that I was not wanted. Yet, strangely, no sooner did he see that I was leaving than he blurted out apologies, and excused himself on the plea of “feeling rotten”, or “having a thick head”, or “being quite unfit for decent people to talk to today”. It was obvious that something queer had happened to him; but I never suspected that the Victor who rebuffed me was a distinct personality struggling to oust the Victor who was my friend.

One incident is worth recording. I went round to Victor’s rooms to return a book which he had left with me on the previous evening. I found to my surprise that he had with him two of his former friends, Biglands, prominent as a speaker in Union debates, and Moulton, a minor aristocrat. All three were a bit sozzled. They were sitting round the table, from which the cloth had been removed, playing a childish game with pellets of bread. A whole loaf had been disembowelled to provide the material for the dozens of bread-pills with which the game was being played. The three of them were frantically blowing pellets across the smooth table at one another. I was so surprised that I stood in the doorway silent. Victor’s face, red from much blowing, was itself a playing-board where conflicting emotions struggled for mastery. Presently he said, “Come in, Tomlinson, old man. We want a fourth player. Have a drink, won’t you?” The words were harmless; the drawling voice was obviously meant to tell his companions that, though of course he had to seem friendly to this wretched outsider with whom he had somehow got himself entangled, he deplored the intrusion. “No, thanks,” I said, and turned to go. With my hand on the door-knob, I heard Victor’s voice again, but this time its tone was altered. In a couple of seconds, apparently, his temper had changed from bleak east wind to bright warm sunlight. “Harry, don’t go, please!” He had risen; and as I turned, he took me gently by the arm, to lead me into the room. “I want to make a public apology,” he said, “for being offensive to you, Harry, and for saying false and spiteful things about you before you came in.” Turning to the others, he added, “I’m sorry to be so inconsistent, but before, I was not myself.” A glance passed between Biglands and Moulton, signifying that Cadogan-Smith was evidently still crazy. Biglands rose with a bored look. Moulton sat tight, and said, “Very well, C.S., give us some more beer and we’ll have Tomlinson in the game.” Victor looked at the mess on the table for a moment. “No!” he said. “If you don’t mind, I think perhaps we had better stop.” Victor was looking extremely uncomfortable. He flashed an appeasing smile at the couple. “I enjoyed the game,” he said, “but now, in a new light, it looks a bit silly. I mean, for people who are no longer kids. Oh, well! Sorry, you two! Maybe we’ll have a return match some time. But I really must talk to Harry Tomlinson just now.” He picked up a few pellets and looked at them with an awkward little snigger. In a voice that developed into a rapt recitative, he said, “People in America or somewhere tilled the ground and sowed the seed. Rain, sun, wind. A waving sea of corn to the horizon. People come with reaping machines, working from dawn to dark. Stooks everywhere. Threshing machines. Grain in railway trucks, and in elevators; poured into ships’ holds. Wild Atlantic weather. The look-out freezing and the stokers sweating. Docking the ship. (Ticklish work. Like coaxing a shy horse.) More trains. Mill hands hard at it in the mills. The corn becomes flour. Some reaches the baker who serves this College. Dough. Lovely loaves. One of them came here. And now look! God! I don’t know what you fellows feel but I feel a swine. Well, I started it.” Biglands and Moulton had looked very uncomfortable during this harangue. After it, Biglands merely said, “O Christ, I’m going.” His companion followed him.

One morning the college was fluttered by a rumour that Cadogan-Smith was in gaol. Apparently he had been mixed up in a fight with the police over in Cowley. It was no ordinary undergraduate brawl. Victor was the only undergraduate, and his associates were said to be extremely undesirable characters who were known to be ring-leaders in recent disturbances at the factory. Rumour had it that the police had finally tracked the culprits down to a certain house in the working- class district, that a scuffle had followed, and that C.S. had given one of the constables a black eye.

With great difficulty I managed to gain access to Victor while he was in custody. It all sounded a pretty bad business, and probably he would have to serve a term in gaol, so the least I could do was to see if I could help him in any way. On my way to the police station I wondered what mood I should find him in, whether exultant that he had made a protest against social tyranny, or calm and self-contained. It was a shock to find that he did not really want to see me as a friend at all, though he was very ready to make use of me. It was a still greater shock to find that he was thoroughly ashamed of his recent escapade, and indignant with his accomplices for having enticed him into it. He did not at the time divulge the fact that he had no memory of the incident, and that all his scanty knowledge of it was gleaned from his gaolers. His behaviour to me was so bewilderingly inconsistent with his past attitude that I found myself completely at a loss. 1 felt an odd sort of vertigo. Needless to say, I was hurt and angry, but I told myself that, of course, the whole affair must have put him to a great strain, and that he had momentarily lost his bearings. He looked at me from under the drooping eyelids of a camel, I thought, and with a camel’s sulky pout. Yes, and with that air of aristocratic and offensive superiority which camels innocently wear. When I tried to make contact by leading the talk round to subjects formerly interesting to us both, he looked at me in a puzzled and hostile way, casting occasional anxious glances at the warder who was supervising our meeting. When I referred to recent events in which he had shared, he seemed to have only a very confused recollection of them. I tried to get him to talk about the incident that had landed him in prison, but he kept on saying, “Hell, hell! I must have been tight or mad or something.” The only thing that seemed to interest him was the hope of gaining his liberty as quickly as possible. He implored me to go round to certain big-wigs who, he thought, might be able to use their influence to interfere with the normal process of the law and set him free. He was desperately anxious to persuade these big-wigs that he was not really a reprobate but a young man with generous though misguided impulses who had got himself into a scrape through sheer love of adventure. Naturally I felt very uncomfortable about his attitude. I was ready to pull wires for him if I could, but I wished he had not asked me to do so. It was a relief when, after staring silently at me for several seconds, he said, “No, Tomlinson, I’d rather you did nothing. You would probably do more harm than good. I’ll get Biglands and Moulton on to the job.” Having come to this decision he made it clear that he had no further use for me, or interest in me. Our conversation fell dead between us. I remember feeling that the real Victor had simply disappeared, and that the creature in front of me was a sort of animated husk with no real inner life of its own. It was as though one had reached out to grasp the hand of a friend, and had grasped nothing but air. With a vague shame and guilt, which I irrationally felt on my own account, I left him.

The Cadogan-Smith Incident caused a flare-up of the inveterate “town and gown” feeling in the local press. Editors demanded that an example should be made of this turbulent undergraduate. Let him stand his trial with his accomplices and serve full sentence. But presently the tone of the press began to change. It was said that C.-S. turned out to be a decent young man who was mentally rather unbalanced and had had some sort of mental storm through over-working. In this condition he had been led astray by evil company. Severe punishment would probably turn him permanently toward anti-social behaviour. Let him finish his university career. Give him a chance to turn over a new leaf.

We had all supposed that C.-S. would at the very least be sent down from the university, but to our surprise he suddenly appeared once more in residence, and was merely gated for the rest of the term.

I made several efforts to open up friendly relations with Victor again, but he resolutely rebuffed me. He had become once more the young “blood” who had invaded my room at the beginning of the previous term. We were in our last year, and by the end of our university career we were practically strangers.

Reading over this chapter, I feel that I have presented only one side of Victor’s character as he was during our undergraduate days. I have been so concerned with what may be called his supernormal powers that I have failed to show him as a real human being with idiosyncrasies and weaknesses like the rest of us. He was no superman, and no saint. Much in him seemed to be even a sheer reaction against the conventional virtues of his own other self. For instance, the somnolent Victor had always scorned sweets as inappropriate to the mature men that undergraduates took themselves to be. But the awake Victor made a point of being rather a pig about sweets. Indeed, on one occasion he made himself sick by eating a large box of fudge at a sitting. I was righteously indignant; but he, wiping his greenish face and blowing his nose after this disgraceful incident, remarked with a wan smile, “Harry, you’re just an unimaginative prig. I despise you. Damn it, it was worth it, if only to discover one’s limitations. Some day I shall do it again.”

The somnolent Victor was a very methodical and tidy creature; but the awake Victor seemed incapable of keeping his possessions in their right places. He was apt to drop things where he had last used them. His rooms in college soon lost their former neatness, and became a chaos of books, papers, clothes, cakes, sweets, pipes and all sorts of queer oddities which he had picked up on our country walks. He had become something of a jackdaw with an irrational itch to collect attractive trifles. There were about a dozen large pieces of flint, some of which he had laboriously chipped into arrow-heads, celts and “leaf-blade” knives. Once, when he had bashed his own thumb by mistake, he said, “This is the way to learn respect for our paleolithic ancestors. Not for nothing did they have brains rather bigger than ours.” I noticed, by the way, that though his first efforts would certainly have been a disgrace to the prehistoric craftsmen, he learned rapidly, and in the end produced several presentable celts and one really beautiful little translucent arrow- head, like an accurately cut jewel. Of this he was unashamedly proud, carrying it about in his pocket, and showing it to everyone likely to admire it. This exquisite little object became one of his most treasured “toys”. For Victor had a thoroughly childish craving to finger small articles which he invariably carried in his pocket for this purpose. In conversation, and even during serious writing or reading, he would absent-mindedly play with his arrow-head, or with one of the pebbles, acorns, crystals, and so on, that had taken his fancy on our walks. Amongst his most valued treasures were two heavy silver Ptolemaic Egyptian coins that he had bought in an old junk shop. While talking, he would finger one of these amply moulded pieces, or gaze intently at the detail of the profile or coiffure. Yet his attention never seemed to wander from the subject of conversation. In his rooms, all sorts of objects generally lay about on table, desk, couch and chairs. Along with notebooks and works on history and philosophy, were tobacco-pipes, queer old books of prints, two small granite boulders (one grey and one pink), a number of bits of wood that showed an attractive grain, a seventeenth-century silver spoon, a fallow deer’s antler (acquired from the Magdalen herd), and a number of unframed pictures of young women who appealed to his rather queer taste in feminine beauty.

Strangely, he never seemed to have any difficulty in finding what he wanted in this chaos. He could always go straight to the desired object with the precision of a monkey finding its way among the chaos of branches in the jungle.

Another queer and often exasperating trait was this. In spite of his remarkably coherent, integrated behaviour in all important matters, his extravagantly keen zest in the life of the senses often led him to sacrifice a seemingly major end to a seemingly trivial sensuous experience. He would become so enthralled with a particularly good brew of cider (not a popular drink in those days) that he would keep me waiting for half an hour while he savoured every sip, with all the seriousness of an expert wine-taster. Often our planned walk was completely upset while he strayed about watching the flight of gulls or swallows, or the hovering of a kestrel. Once, when this had led to our missing a train and an important Union debate, I protested rather violently. He rounded on me with scorn, declaring that if only I had used my eyes and my wits properly I should have got far more out of those birds than a “gas-bag politician” could ever give.

Victor seemed to have a special feeling about birds, a combination of primitive lust in the chase, scientific and aesthetic interest, and something else, difficult to define, but in a way almost religious. When an unfamiliar bird appeared, he would throw all his plans to the winds to stalk and watch it. He made a careful study of bird-flight, particularly in the case of gulls, swallows, hawks and other expert fliers. He would often spend hours experimenting with little home-made gliders, made of paper for indoor work, and of wood and oiled silk for the windy crests of ridges. He was fascinated by the admirably functional shapes of the master fliers among birds. Evolution, he used to say, had moulded them to fit beautifully into the air-streams that their speed created. He was fascinated not only by their perfection of form and action in the air but also by their temperament, their attitude to life. “Man”, he once said, “concentrated on intelligence, birds on artistry. And in a way all their art is sacred art.” When I protested, he laughed, and said, “Watch a gull cruising around. No doubt he’s in search of food, spying after titbits, but that is not all. How he lives in the sheer skill of flight, like a skater! His cruising is flight become a religious exercise, an ecstatic harmony with the universe, only possible to creatures that have I perfected their adaptation to the environment; quite impossible for man, that half-made clumsy flutterer in a more difficult medium.” I broke in with the remark that a gull’s cruising was no more religious than a woman’s cruising for bargains in a general store. He laughed again, and pointed out that the gull had been fashioned by millions of years of life in the air, and the woman had not been fashioned by general stores, or not to the same extent. He said, “On a fine day, and with a reasonably full belly, the gull’s cruising is a sheer act of worship. Can’t you feel into it enough to recognize that? And think of all the rest of the pure artistry of birds. Think of courtship, nest-building, and song. No doubt the robin’s song begins as sheer sexiness or sheer defiance to his neighbours; but the immediate end is soon overlaid with pure artistry, and worship. If you took more notice of birds, you old stick-in-the-mud, you might be able to get inside them a bit and feel how they feel.”

Another consequence of Victor’s addiction for “living in the moment” was one which, in spite of my vaunted emancipation from the conventions, I regarded as reprehensible. Whenever he saw a girl that strongly attracted him, he used to watch her with frank delight, and if possible find some way of striking up a casual conversation with her. Such conduct might pass unnoticed today, but when we were undergraduates, before the First World War, it looked bad. Besides, it was annoying to me because it often upset our plans. My expostulation seldom availed to bring him to his senses. Nearly always he scornfully insisted that it was sheer folly not to gather rosebuds while one might. It must be admitted that these casual encounters were very different from the minor flirtations of other young men. I cannot think of a better way of describing Victor’s technique than by saying that, in spite of his unconcealed admiration, he seemed rather to aim at establishing a comradely relation than to invite dalliance. If the girl reacted by putting up a veil of virgin modesty or, on the other hand, by “leading him on”, he would promptly turn away. He once told me that he supposed what he really wanted of these brief encounters was to “add to the picture-gallery of his memory”, so that by contemplating these treasures he might improve his sensitivity both to physical beauty and to the beauty of personality. I remarked that his taste was very different from mine, and that he seemed to fall for very queer-looking girls. He replied with spirit, “Damn it, man, it’s time you outgrew the mere chocolate-box lovelies. They are too easy to appreciate. The really enthralling girls are rare. That’s why I have to pursue them a bit, lest I should miss a treasure.” In passing, perhaps I should remind the reader that though the awake Victor had a rather odd taste in feminine beauty, the somnolent Victor’s taste was strictly orthodox. Hence Edith. I sometimes felt that Victor’s interest in strange girls was a special case of his lively zoological interest. All through his life Victor retained what I used to regard as a childish interest in birds and all animals. Once he dragged me up to London to visit the Zoo. I was soon as tired as a middle-aged uncle piloting a vigorous young nephew around. Or rather Victor did the piloting, and I trailed after him. I was really more interested in Victor’s reactions than in the beasts. Some cages he passed after half a minute’s careful study, but others enthralled him. He would stand perfectly still with an expression in which scientific scrutiny, schoolboy delight and sorrowful insight succeeded each other like moments of sunshine and shade. In those days the “newest type of zoo” had not yet been adopted in England. The creatures were kept in much more wretched conditions than is now customary. They were all quite obviously bored prisoners, and their despond affected Victor deeply. After a while, to my embarrassment, he took to talking to the beasts, as a completely unselfconscious child might do. But what he said was not childish. Speaking quietly, and as to an equal, he would express diffident compassion, apologizing for the unimaginative and ruthless conduct of his own species toward other species. Onlookers sniggered at him; but he turned to them with his wry smile that was half comic, half tragic, and said, “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” The onlookers ceased to snigger. We came to a polar bear that was pacing ceaselessly behind its bars, ignoring the spectators. As it turned at the end of its cage, it rubbed its shoulders against the partition. This endlessly repeated action had resulted in a patch of bare skin on each shoulder. Victor watched in silence for some time; then he said, “You poor devil! It’s a change from the Arctic! You’re cut out for ice and snow hunting, and look what we do to you.” Surprisingly, the bear came to a halt and faced him. It sniffed at him through the bars and gave a rumbling whimper, for all the world as though in some obscure way it recognized a friend.

I mention this incident because it gave me a little shock at the time, and because it fell in line with a number of other queer encounters between Victor and dumb animals. The strange thing was that they often seemed to notice him and like him even when he was not attending to them. I have no plausible explanation to offer, but it is a fact that animals took to Victor. Dogs, for instance, had a habit of attaching themselves to him for companionship on a walk. Several times when we sat down to rest in a field a dog arrived and settled itself against him for no apparent reason.

Once, when we were sitting talking in a field near a village, an obviously verminous tike accosted him in this way and he gently threw it off; but it kept on returning. “Go!” he cried, “Hop it! Va t’en! Imshi!” He made fierce noises at it, and pretended to throw a stone, but it merely wagged its tail. Then it calmly sat down against him and began catching fleas. Victor jumped to his feet and said very firmly, “Look here, brother! You have fleas and I haven’t, so kindly keep off.” The animal put its head on one side and looked at him in a puzzled genial way, again vaguely wagging its tail. Victor dropped on one knee, took its head between his hands, looked into its eyes, and said very solemnly. “I know we’re friends. I know mutual understanding binds us eternally as comrades. I know you’re horribly misunderstood at home and you still retain a glorious faith in humanity in spite of everything. But for reasons not apparent to you I suggest we love one another at a distance.” He then gently pushed the creature away and sat down again beside me. The dog hesitated for a moment, then squatted where it was, looking reproachfully at Victor. Presently it turned its attention once more to its fleas. When we continued our walk, it came with us for some distance, but after a while it wandered off on its own.

I once asked Victor why dogs liked him. “God knows!” he said. “Perhaps I smell right.”

Children also seemed to take a fancy to him. He never made advances to them, but when they opened up relations with him, he responded in his detached though friendly man-to-man way, and was at once taken into partnership. He had little experience of children, but he seemed to enter imaginatively into any child’s point of view. When he was drawn into a child’s play, he behaved sometimes, of course, with humour and mischief, but often with great seriousness, as though the game were quite as important to him as to the child. For example, once we entered a crowded London train, and a compartment in which a tired and disheartened mother was trying to cope with a tired and cantankerous little boy. It so happened that I sat next the woman, and Victor opposite. We buried ourselves in our books. The ceaseless complaining kept up by the child made it impossible for me to concentrate, but Victor was soon wholly absorbed in his History of Socialism. The child fidgeted and whined and yelled. Presently it fell silent, gazing at Victor. Though I was next it, it took no notice of me. It leaned forward from its mother’s lap and banged Victor’s knee. He looked up, smiled, and continued reading. It grabbed at the pages; he gently removed its fingers. The mother scolded the unruly infant, but it continued to take an interest in the mysteriously attractive young man sitting opposite. When other methods of approach had failed, the little boy took the chocolate out of his own mouth and offered it to Victor. The spectators laughed, but Victor said politely, “It’s awfully good of you but I’d rather you had it.” Meanwhile he had closed his book, and after fumbling in a pocket he produced (of all unlikely things) the curb-chain of a horse’s bridle. This treasure he had acquired a few days earlier at a village saddler’s. We had been passing through the village, and he was attracted by the window full of harness, curry-combs and horse-cloths. He insisted on entering the shop in search of a new treasure, and presently he hit on the chain. Evidently it had been in his pocket ever since. He now laid the six inches of shining metal neatly on his knee, remarking, “Nice, isn’t it?” Then he picked it up and twisted it into a tight spiral, then shook it out into its normal looseness and handed it to the child, who took it and examined it with solemn eyes. Victor returned to his reading. But presently the child, still holding the chain, reached forward with both arms toward Victor, and said “Dadad “, to everyone’s amusement. Victor closed his book with a sigh and received the infant. For half an hour he entertained his new friend with the contents of his pockets, telling him a simple story about each article, and obviously enjoying himself.

I record these little incidents because they throw light on Victor’s character as a young man. But indeed throughout his life incidents of this sort were apt to occur to the awake Victor. And even when he was nearly sixty he still combined with his exceptionally adult nature many childlike, or positively childish, traits. The toy habit remained with him. Dogs and even horses continued to follow him about. And throughout my acquaintance with him he was apt to allow immediate sensory pleasures to upset relatively serious enterprises, and to be completely unashamed of doing so. He once said, “No doubt man triumphed by taking thought for the morrow, and he must learn to take thought even for a very distant morrow, thousands of years ahead; but sometimes the present’s claim is more urgent than the future’s. And if you never live in the present moment, never let it soak right through you at every pore, you never really live at all.”

4. BUSINESS MAN AND SOLDIER

From 1912 to 1919

I HAVE TOLD about the beginning of my friendship with Victor as it appeared from my point of view. On his wedding day, while we were on our walk, he went over those already remote events, describing his own side of the experience. And so the whole affair took on a new meaning for me. His occasional lapses into unfriendliness, and his final complete withdrawal, all of which had at the time seemed such gratuitous and wilful violations of a valued relationship, now appeared in a new light. Victor had not betrayed our friendship. He had simply ceased to exist. The Victor that I knew had been spirited away. I could no more blame him than I could blame an unconscious man.

This discovery that Victor had not been himself, and so had not betrayed our friendship, had a surprisingly deep effect on me. Evidently I had never quite realized how much the friendship had meant to me, and how its breakdown had disturbed the foundations of my mind. Now that the explanation had been given, I felt a rather extravagant elation, which I was at pains to conceal. Somehow the whole universe took on a different aspect. Friends might die, or might helplessly suffer a psychological change; but friendship remained, after all, a reliable thing.

After we left Oxford I saw nothing of Victor for some years; but I had occasional letters from him, written (I now learned) during periods in which the more lucid personality held the field. He passed into the shipping firm where his father had a certain influence. I, lacking his opportunities, took a post as English master in a secondary school. We were stationed in different parts of the country, and our paths never met. My report of the next phase of his life therefore depends entirely on his own account, given to me on his wedding day.

Nothing unusual happened during his first year as a businessman. Like so many young university men flung into office life, he found the routine very irksome, and was much more interested in his leisure occupations than in his work. He became a typical young provincial man-about-town, of the lazier and more genteel sort. He was made a member of one of the leading clubs. He danced. He was thoroughly spoilt by the daughters of the business community on account of his good looks and a certain lordly carelessness in his attitude to them. He took them out in his sports car, always returning them safely at night. He played a good deal of tennis, and was a brilliant three- quarter in the first fifteen of the best local rugger club.

On several occasions he was probably on the verge of waking to his true self, for he had strange bouts of restlessness, in which the great shipping firm became a clear and rather exciting whole in his mind. In these spells he would stay late at the office, reading up old correspondence files, studying the plans of ships, puzzling over problems of naval architecture, examining the ledgers, and the accounts of individual voyages, particularly those which showed a loss, and were dramatically recorded in red ink. But his chief interest, during these spells of semi-lucidity, was in the working conditions of crews, dockers and other employees. He would take every possible opportunity of being present when one of the directors interviewed a ship’s captain at the beginning or end of a voyage. On one occasion he got himself assigned to work in connection with the actual loading of ships in dock; and ten days later, when the mood had passed, he cursed his folly; for when the interest had wained, the practical upshot was simply that he had removed himself further from the centres of his pleasure.

The difference between his brighter moods and his normal apathetic condition was distinct enough to attract the attention of his superiors, particularly on one occasion. While he was doing a spell of work in the naval architect’s department, he hit upon a bright idea for a new form of rudder. At first the professionals treated it lightly, as the extravagance of a bright young man. But in spite of themselves they kept on discussing it; and finally, after a great deal of calculation and draftmanship had been devoted to it, the finished design was adopted by the firm as the standard rudder of all their ships. But, long before this happened, its inventor had slipped back into his normal phase. During the preliminary stages of the detailed consideration of the rudder he had been intensely interested, and fertile in suggestions. But suddenly he seemed to lose both interest and ability. He was unable to make any useful contribution, and indeed could scarcely conceal the fact that he could not properly understand the point of his own brilliant idea. So marked was the difference between his former brightness and his subsequent dullness, that those who had not actually seen him at work in the creative period were inclined to believe that young Cadogan-Smith had simply stolen his great invention from someone else. But those who had worked with him, and remembered his leaping imagination, rejected this theory. Victor himself now ceased to take any spontaneous interest in his achievement, save as a means of acquiring credit in the eyes of his superiors.

In his “half-awake” state Victor seems to have been not only rather more interested and rather more intelligent than in his normal state; he was also rather more aware of others as persons. Hence his concern for the living conditions of the employees. He went so far as to agitate discreetly for improvements in the crew-accommodation in the fo’castles of the company’s ships. He even suggested an innovation which in those days seemed quite fantastic, namely that each member of the crew should have a single-berth cabin. Victor’s criticism of existing accommodation somewhat outraged the directors, as they prided themselves on being in the forefront in respect of amenities for crews, and the suggestion that they should raise the standard of comfort even further seemed to them “sheer idealism “.

“My dear boy,” said the head of the firm, “if we were to carry out your plans, we should soon fail to pay dividends. After all, the company is not a charitable institution. And anyhow, surely you must realize that the class of man who goes to sea as a deck-hand or stoker simply doesn’t need the sort of thing you want to give him. And he wouldn’t know how to use it properly. Everything would go to rack and ruin in no time.” As soon as Victor saw that his philanthropy was damaging his reputation with his superiors, he dropped the subject. This surrender was not entirely due to cynical self-regard. He was genuinely persuaded that his ideas were Utopian, and that if he wanted to be a successful business man, he must outgrow that sort of thing.

On one occasion only, during his early business career, did Victor pass beyond his “half-awake” state and attain full clarity of consciousness. Having served some time in each of the departments of the great office, he had been appointed secretary to the directors. In this position he would gain some experience of the general policy of the firm; and in due course he himself, if all went well, might become a junior director.

One day he was present at a discussion on pilfering at the docks. The firm had employed detectives to bring the culprits to book, but without results. Victor was at the time in his “partially awake” condition. He had evidently shown some intelligence in the discussion, for his suggestion that he himself should do a bit of detective work at the docks was accepted.

I had better describe this incident as nearly as possible in Victor’s own words, as he recounted the adventure to me while we were returning from our walk on his wedding day.

“In my half-awake state,” he said, “I was rather more sensitive to people’s minds than in my normal somnolent state. I was able to make use of this power in a number of ways in the service of the firm. I don’t think telepathy played a part. I was just more sensitive to people’s reactions. I seemed to read in their faces and their gestures and tones of voice what they were feeling. Another thing that probably helped me in my adventure was my experience with the lads in the factory at Oxford. Mind you, I couldn’t remember about that, because it belonged to my fully awake phase; but automatically I seemed to behave ill the right way to make contact with working people. I intuitively put on the right mental disguise. I was able to pose effectively to the dockers as a bloke who had seen rather better days, and was now forced to take to dock-labouring for a living. I was the helpless and amiable novice who had to be initiated into every side of the dockers’ life, and I gradually got myself accepted as ‘one of us.’

“I was supposed to be completely reliable, and of course I made a point of persuading everyone that I was entirely on the side of the workers against the employers. On this subject I took a high moral line, which increased my reputation. Presently I discovered that there was an organized system of pilfering and selling the swag for the benefit of certain down-and-out families. The gang had a very strict moral code of its own, a rigid ‘honour among thieves’. If anyone in the gang was known to be pilfering for his own private use, failing to deliver the proceeds for the common purpose, he suffered for it. One man, who was believed to be a spy in the pay of the detectives, was got rid of by an ingeniously staged fatal accident. He was cleverly induced to pitch himself head first into an empty hold, seemingly through sheer carelessness. This incident made me a bit anxious lest 1 should eventually share his fate. So 1 made up my mind to retire to my own world on the following day. But something happened that upset my plans. 1 woke. Suddenly, as 1 was coaxing a swinging case of machinery into the right position for stowing (1 believe it was at the very moment when my docker’s hook gripped the wood) I saw the whole wretched affair as it really was. 1 saw myself as a supporter of an economic tyranny spying on a group of people who, whatever their faults, felt themselves to be under no obligation towards their masters, and were stealing for a very laudable purpose, namely to succour the distressed. I saw that, though in a just society the pilfering would have been inexcusable, in our unjust society one ought at any rate, to approve of the courage and comradeship and self- dedication in a generous cause. Of course one couldn’t approve of the murder, but one really couldn’t take a high moral line about it. Now 1 was faced with a very unpleasant problem. 1 had the necessary information for convicting the gang not only of pilfering but of murder. This information must be kept from the authorities. So long as 1 remained fully awake, it was safe. But 1 might go somnolent again at any time, and then 1 should certainly blab.

“I went on working in the hold, with a mate who was also in the gang. He was a hearty lad who kept up a patter of mildly obscene humour. He had an angel’s smile, and red hair on his bare arms. Looking at him, 1 saw quite clearly that I must be loyal to him and his mates at all costs. But how save the situation? 1 racked my brains for a plan. Should I write a note to the office saying that 1 felt 1 was going mad, and any stories 1 might tell would be pure fabrication? Too feeble! Should I give myself up to the gang and let them dispose of me? Not fair to saddle them with another crime. And quite unnecessary. For gradually it dawned on me that the only way to save the gang was to dispose of myself. At first this, seemed a silly quixotic thing to do. But the more I thought about it, sweating with the labour of shifting those packing cases, the more important it seemed to save the gang: and the less important to keep my own life; such a scrappy, ineffective life as it was.”

At this point of Victor’s narrative I interrupted to say that his resolve to kill himself seemed to me quite fantastic. He was silent for a few seconds, and then replied, “I had another motive also, an obscure sense that in sacrificing myself I should be performing a symbolic act, sacrificing one of the exploiters (my baser self) for the welfare of the people.” To this I snorted something about sheer sentimentality; but Victor said only, “Oh, well, that is how it struck me.”

Presently he continued his story. “How I remember slogging away in that hold, with the fine feeling of muscles skilfully used; and gradually facing up to the fact that I must kill myself! While I was working I got the hell of a bump from one of the swinging cases, and in my awake state it hurt extravagantly. And yet deeper down I was merely smiling at it. In the same way, the prospect of death hurt like hell, and yet I was also contemptuously laughing at it. I did so want to live. Everything was so vivid and difficult and beautiful, from my mate’s heavenly grin to the smooth steel of my hook. And yet — what matter? If I didn’t have it, other ‘I’s would have it. So long as it was had, what matter? I hung on to that thought, like a drowning man to his straw; till at last I began to feel that in some queer way the ‘I’ that was now choosing death was identical with all the other ‘I’s’; and therefore would in some sense not die at all. And yet I was convinced that in some other, simpler, sense I should cease to exist.

“Well, as we were leaving the ship for the dinner hour, I looked round for something heavy, and found a large iron pulley, for one of the derricks. When I thought no one was looking, I picked this up and began to tie it round my neck with a bit of line. Unfortunately a stevedore had been watching my strange antics, and when he saw what I was up to he came at me. I had to hurry with the tying, and didn’t get it done properly before I had to go overboard or be caught. I went over, hugging the thing; but presumably when I lost consciousness I let it go, and the pulley dragged itself free. Anyhow, they got me out and brought me round with artificial respiration. I woke in the somnolent state; and very confused, because, of course, I couldn’t remember what had happened in the awake state. But I did remember all that had occurred before I woke. I had enough evidence to convict a bunch of men of theft and one or two of murder.”

“Naturally my attempt at suicide caused a stir, and had somehow to be explained. Of course, I gave my true name, and accounted for my disguise. I made my report to my future father-in-law, who came to see me at the hospital. I said that spying had got on my nerves and given me an irrational sense of guilt to such an extent that I daren’t face the world any more. This was certainly a good line. Everyone was full of sympathy and admiration, and I acted up to the part very thoroughly. In due season ten men were accused. At the trial, I gave my evidence with seeming reluctance and distress, and I pleaded for mercy. But at heart I didn’t feel any distress at all. I simply felt I had done rather a good piece of work, and the men must take the consequences of their anti-social behaviour. All received heavy sentences. The two who had brought off the murder were hanged, poor devils. Or lucky devils. May be they really fared better than the others.”

By the time that Victor had finished this story, we had almost completed our circuit in the country, and were hurrying to catch the last bus back to our hotel. In the bus he mentioned that after this incident he had formed much more steady business habits, even though he was in his normal somnolent state. Whether this change was due to some slight infection from his suppressed personality or to a natural bent for business, I do not know. Certainly it is fairly common for young men flung from the university into business to go through a phase of restlessness before finally accepting the routine of office work. But the single-mindedness with which he devoted himself to his business career was remarkable. He was determined, at all costs, to “make good”. The firm was so pleased with his new keenness and shrewdness that they planned to give him managerial status, sooner than had been intended.

But in 1914, when war was declared, Victor at once began to feel restless. (It was while we were sitting at dinner in our hotel after the abortive wedding that Victor told me about his war experiences.) All the most reputable young men were soon flocking to the colours. And the normal Victor was very susceptible to public opinion. After a few months of restlessness, during which the firm did its best to retain him, he enlisted, and became an infantry officer. When he had told me this, Victor lapsed into one of his silences, so I had to prompt him again. I knew that he had been at one time in disgrace, but I did not know why. I also knew that he had redeemed his character, and ended in some fairly important staff job. At first he seemed reluctant to talk, and I assumed that he did not want to tell me about his disgrace. When I deliberately made it easy for him to divert the whole conversation, he looked at me sharply, and said, “You think I’m ashamed of being court-martialled. (The first time it was for cowardice, the second for insubordination.) No! It’s something else that I find distasteful. However, here goes!”

He told me that “the somnolent cad” quickly made himself known for intelligence and dash; and that, as he combined these qualities with great docility toward his superiors, he soon began climbing the ladder of promotion. But on two occasions the true Victor woke into being, and nearly wrecked the laboriously built-up reputation of the somnambulist.

“When it first happened,” he said, “I was still a subaltern. There was to be an attack. Throughout the preparations, when everyone was anxiously concealing his fear and loathing of the whole bloody prospect, I was — well, ‘magnificent’ is the inevitable word. I put heart into the platoon, and into my brother officers. I was full of exultation and eagerness for the coming battle. Of real fear I felt practically nothing, for I was hypnotized by the idea that I was going to behave splendidly and cover myself with glory. The whole affair was just an opportunity for self-display. My imagination was too sluggish to realize anything but the romantic aspect. I had to pretend to feel some anxiety (pretend even to myself, I mean), so that I could triumph over it with a brave face. But I really felt no more than the stage- fright that a schoolboy feels before going out to bat for the school. Well, zero hour came, and I led my lads over the top with my customary dash. Several of the poor devils dropped. One showed signs of turning tail, so I promptly shot him. Soon we were using bayonets in the enemy’s first-line trench, and soon our position was secure.”

Victor was silent for a moment, and began eating faster, as though trying to release some pent-up energy. Presently he said, “Then it happened. I don’t know what actually caused the waking, perhaps the appealing look on the face of a dying German, like a mouse in a trap. But that was nothing new. Perhaps the real cause was that the Boche’s face was a bit like yours. I remember noticing that. Or perhaps it was just that when the scrap was over I had time to feel that I had a splinter under my thumbnail. Anyhow, I, the real I, suddenly came on the scene, and found that everything was silly and horrible, and very terrifying. Shells were falling unpleasantly near; and now, of course, I could imagine quite well what might happen. If I had been fully awake, I could have faced it; but I wasn’t. I was just abnormally sensitive, but not properly integrated, I suppose. And so I was frightened clean out of my wits. No, not out of my wits, for I didn’t rush about screaming. I just waited in a cold sweat for the next move in the preposterous game. The folly of people driving themselves to face all this just to capture a bloody ditch made me terrified of my own kind, and of myself. The whole war, which I had never really thought about, but only talked about parrot-wise, suddenly appeared as a huge and diabolical booby-trap. All the high-sounding phrases that I thought I believed seemed now sheer mockery. ‘A War to end War!’ ‘Making the world safe for democracy!’ Christ! It suddenly became clear to me, as of course it had done to many others, that killing people just wasn’t the way to make a decent world. It suddenly appeared to me that every human life was absolutely sacred and must never be destroyed. And I remembered the lad I had shot for hesitating. You see, I wasn’t fully awake, just tormented by quickened sensitivity. My thumb, for instance, was hurting like a violent toothache. And I had no comprehensive vision that could put my pain in proper perspective, still less put the war in perspective. And I had no self-detachment. I just stood there fidgeting; torn between the impulse to bury my face in my hands and blub, and the impulse to jump on the parapet and shout ‘God is Love’. Then came an order to advance, and I think I did scream out ‘God is Love’, and then I collapsed in a whimpering heap in the mud. The lads went over all right, and left me. They probably thought I had been hit. Well, that was what I was court- martialled for. Long before the time of the trial, of course, I was my normal somnolent self, and quite ignorant of the events of the awake spell. I was let off lightly, on the strength of my previous record, and the obvious fact that I was a bit crazy. But it dished my precious career for some time. I was sent home for a rest-cure, and supervision by the psychiatrists. They were not very clever in those days, and I managed to conceal the fact that I had always been subject to spells of dissociation of some sort. They just treated me for ‘shell shock’, and gave me a good holiday. Of course I (or the somnolent ass who masqueraded as me) was terribly upset at the damage done to my career, and impatient to start again, and anxious lest another slip should once more bring me to the bottom of the ladder. No! I must be fair to the fool. He had been badly wounded in his self-respect, and he had betrayed his soldierly ideal, and guilt gnawed at him. He didn’t really know that he cared far more for his own career than for a victory for the Allies.”

Victor paused; then, stabbing at his potatoes with his fork, he said bitterly, “Fancy being tied for life to an insensitive snob! It’s like being a Siamese twin, and the other partner a half-wit.”

I began to commiserate; but to my surprise he brushed my sympathy aside, and said, “Have you noticed the girl who is serving us?” I had not; and I was surprised that he had been able to do so while he was absorbed in telling me about events that were obviously still very much on his mind. But I remembered that one of the most striking characteristics of the awakened Victor was his power of attending to two things at once.

He said, “I have been watching her ever since we came in. And this morning at breakfast, when I was the Dolt, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I thought her the ugliest thing I had ever seen, and thanked my lucky stars for Edith. But now — god, she’s lovely! I wonder whether seeing her had something to do with waking me. Look at her! Look at her!”

I could see the girl in the big mirror on the opposite wall. She was serving the sweet at the table behind me. She was a well-built wench, certainly, but there was a juvenile or country clumsiness about her action, and her shape was somehow rather unfinished, rather like a statue in the rough, that still needed a lot of trimming. And as to her face I should have advised the sculptor to begin again on fresh stone. The eyes were very wide apart, and of a curious dark grey, the colour of tarns overhung by rocks; but with flecks of russet in the grey, like the ruddy weathering one sometimes sees on grey slate or shale. The eyes were indeed quite good eyes. Remembering them afterwards, I had to admit that they were striking eyes, large and intelligent, serious, but rippled over with laughter when a small boy, whom she was serving, carefully selected the biggest jam tart. Strange eyes, certainly, with lashes and eyebrows of an unusual red-brown, as though they were originally black, but had gone rusty. The hair, too, was rust-red, but bright, heavy, and voluminous. It threatened to collapse on the large shoulders at any moment. But the nose! The sculptor must have broken the first nose and tried to do something with the stump. It was broad and flat, merely a place where a large nose might have been. The mouth was fantastically wide and full. The sculptor had evidently been frightened of having another accident, so he had left a great deal of spare rock to play about with. The complexion was surprisingly good. The rock’s texture was silky and even. The sculptor could not spoil the actual material, save by misshaping it. Nor could he extinguish the warm glow that seemed to come from some inner fire. Suddenly I realized that the girl was blushing.

I looked at Victor. He was gazing at her with a frank grin of admiration, most out-of-place in the circumstances. “She reminds me of a hippopotamus,” I said. “Me too,” he answered gaily, “a lovely blushing hippo!” He added more seriously, “The tragic thing is that a human face may perfectly express a lovely soul, and yet have no soul at all behind it. Has she a soul, do you think?”

“Maybe she has,” I answered, “but if so, the tragic thing is that it’s not able to express itself through a face like that.”

“Good God, man,” he protested, “have you no eyes, no eyes? Insensitive blockhead!” He was laughing, but genuinely outraged.

He suddenly changed the subject. “I must tell you of the other waking I had during the war. I was in command of a I company, and we had been left in a tight place during an unexpected German attack. Our instructions were to hang on I at all costs. My somnolent self gloried in the situation, at first, and behaved with his customary rectitude. We were very heavily shelled, and had a lot of casualties. Presently the Boches came at us from their trench, and in our reduced state we hadn’t an earthly.” Victor paused, thinking. Suddenly he said, “Oh, hell! What do the details matter! The point is that the survivors, en masse, gave up resisting, and made off down a communication trench. My morale then broke too, and I followed them, helter-skelter. Suddenly I woke; more thoroughly than on the previous occasion. As before, there was the increased vividness of sensation, but also something else, which I can only describe as an increased grasp of the total situation, both military and-well, cosmological. When I woke, I was already mixed up with the others again, stampeding; and the surprise of waking was so startling that I came to a standstill and laughed, crouching in that trench. I was terrifically conscious of my body, and of the strained faces of the lads staggering past me. But also, I was aware of all this as one might be aware of animalcules on a brilliantly illuminated microscope slide. I felt a sort of lofty pity for us all, but I was utterly remote and detached; because I was also at the very same time intensely aware of so much more. I saw us as simply the visible bit of mankind. I knew vividly that just round the corner, so to speak, there were all the armies, all the peoples, all the historical ages of man’s floundering struggle; and enclosing the whole thing, black heaven, pointed with stars. This happened in a flash, and was mixed up with thoughts of Socrates and Jesus Christ and the problem of good and evil.

“Of course it’s nonsense to talk about all this happening ‘in a flash’. But something happened in that flash, something that I cannot describe in any other way. Well, suddenly it was borne in on me that this business of running away to save my skin was somehow a surrender of my spiritual freedom, in fact a sorry act of self-destruction on the part of-well-not simply on the part of me, Victor, in this skin, but of humanity in all its skins, or (better) the very spirit in us all. How that word makes me squirm! But what other is there? Well, something had to be done to re-assert the universal thing in me, in us all, I mean; the supreme thing that really matters. I cautiously looked over the top, and spotted a machine-gun that was enfilading the next lap of the trench, where most of my men were still struggling along. There was a chance that I could get at it from the rear without being noticed, if I crawled round by a line of overlapping shell- holes. It was a very poor chance, but what matter? Even if I didn’t get through, I should have ‘asserted the spirit ‘. So I set about and did that little job, and had the luck not to be spotted. Note, I didn’t do it out of patriotism, or because I believed that an Allied victory was necessary to humanity. Nor did I do it out of simple self- pride. I just did it because I had to do something to assert the integrity of the universal thing in us. I took the German boys completely by surprise, poor devils, and pitched a hand-grenade at them. It was a messy business. One of them was still able to cause trouble when I ran in, but I put a bullet in his face with my pistol. As I did it, I felt a strong friendliness toward him, but this didn’t make me hesitate, any more than I had hesitated to chuck away my own life. I did both things just because the something in me had undertaken a job and must carry it through.”

At this point I interrupted Victor to get him to explain more fully what he meant by the “something” in him. He considered for a while; at least I suppose he did, but his far-away look seemed to focus on the ugly waitress, who was serving at the other end of the room.

At last he said, “I can only repeat that something universal in me protested against my individual cowardice. Or perhaps it was as though the little ordinary ‘I’ woke to be the universal ‘I’ for a few minutes. I woke to be something more than Victor, even the awakened Victor. Did I? I wonder!”

Before I could ask him to pursue the explanation, he continued. “This affair, of course, put me in the limelight. I was recommended for a Victoria Cross. But I never got it, because of subsequent events. You see, after that show, I remained awake for some months, carrying on with my job in a mood of glorious detachment and amusement, much as an adult may enter into a children’s game. For in my prevailing mood at that time I generally felt as though I were an actor; yes, an actor playing a part in a children’s game, entering into it with immense zest, but enjoying it mainly out of a nostalgia for my own long-lost childhood. In fact I was playing at soldiers, keeping the rules meticulously, but always with secret amusement. I never really cared which side won, so long as the game itself was interesting.”

“But, Victor,” I interrupted, “you were not like that when I knew you. You took sides. You did care which side won. You once said you were on the side of the light, against darkness.”

He laughed, and replied, cryptically, “My dear fellow, there’s a time for protest, and a time for acceptance. But best is to do both at once, always. But that, believe me, takes some doing. And I had still to learn it. You’ll see.”

He paused again, and I urged him to go on with the story. “Well,” he said, “I was an immense success with the children. I played soldiers so well that they too played better. They had been flagging, poor boys, because they really had struck a pretty gruelling patch in the game. But now they were all keyed up again. Somehow I kidded them into thinking that mud and blood were rather stimulating. I knew they couldn’t stick it indefinitely, but I might keep them up to scratch till we were relieved. Of course the high-ups were vastly pleased with me, and I was obviously invaluable to them. But presently I spoilt it all (from their point of view) by breaking the rules. We had been on a very tough job, and done it well, and come out of the line to rest, those of us who were left. And, God, we needed it. Most of us were just at breaking point, and it was touch and go. Well, the day after we had come down from the front we happened to be inspected by a brigadier who was a blockhead. He found the men’s rifles dirty, and he raised hell. Suddenly, I realized that I had done with acceptance, and was all set for protest. The bloke was quite entitled to take the line he did, according to the rules of the game, but I had had enough. I just quietly told him what I thought of him, and what I thought of brass-hats in general, and the whole bloody war. I was court- martialled again. But again, because of my record, and because the brigadier was known to be a cad and fool, I was let off lightly. I was sent home for a long rest. Of course I never got the cross, which didn’t at all matter to me; but while I was in England I went somnolent again; and the somnolent me, when he had succeeded in piecing the past together from what people said, was bitterly mortified.”

Victor paused, but before I had said anything he added. “How I detest that somnolent self of mine! And yet of course that’s quite unjustified. He can’t help being like that. And of course, when I think quietly about him, I don’t detest him. I don’t even despise him. I’m just sorry for him, and determined to keep awake as long as I can. I wonder how long I shall have this time. Somehow I feel more solidly awake than ever before, more secure. But one can’t tell. This may be the last five minutes.”

I said, “Is it at all in your own power to keep awake? You said he couldn’t help being himself. Can you do anything to avoid slipping back into being him?”

Victor answered, “I really believe I am beginning to learn. But I shall probably need help.” His eyes turned to the waitress. (Did that look mean anything, I wondered?) He beckoned her over to us, but all he said was, “We should like our coffee in the lounge, please.”

We found two fairly secluded chairs where we could carry on our conversation. But for a few seconds we sat silent. Victor was looking at our fellow guests, and I at him; for I was again struck by the extraordinary change in his appearance since the morning. It seemed to have affected even his profile; for not only were the eyes now wide open and alert, the lips seemed at once fuller and firmer.

Presently Victor said, “Does it strike you, Harry, that several of these people are trying not to wake, and trying all too well?” I turned to look at the very commonplace crowd, sipping their coffee in little groups. I said they didn’t seem to me to be trying to do anything at all. But Victor snorted and declared. “They’ve been trying so long (some of them), and so hypnotically, that they don’t know they’re trying. Look at that bloke lighting his pipe. Watch his action. There! He has blown out the match with unnecessary vigour. It’s his own soul he blows out every time. But, unlike the match, his soul somehow comes alight again always, often inconveniently.”

The coffee arrived, brought by the same waitress. As she put the tray on the table, Victor said to her, “Do you try to keep your soul from waking? I bet you don’t.” She tried to prim up her hippopotamus lips, but a smile broke through. Then, with a queer sort of Scotch accent that I could not identify, she said, “My soul, sir? I haven’t got one. The management doesn’t allow them.” She left us, and Victor laughed after her, trying to recall her.

Waiting for him to continue our conversation, I watched his expression change from merriment to tenderness and deep seriousness. Presently I said, “I believe you have fallen for that girl.” To this he answered, “Oh, I have, I have; but I was thinking of Edith. She really has a soul, you know, but she won’t give it a chance. And I did my best to kill it for her. And now, well, I have given her a nasty knock, poor girl. But perhaps that will shock her into life. God, I wish I could do something about her. But probably it’s best to leave her alone.”

“She’ll get over it,” I said, “but your name will be dirt with the whole family, and the office too.”

“Yes,” he said, “and with my father. It has been the hell of a knock for him. Curious! I care much more for our father than my doltish other self ever did. Between my father and me there’s a gulf, but I can see him across the gulf fairly clearly. The Dolt, though he’s on our father’s side of the gulf, can’t really see him at all, can’t appreciate him as he really is; but I can, perhaps better than our father can appreciate himself.” Victor was lighting his pipe, but at this point he paused, looking intently at the flame of the match that he had not yet used. It burned right back to his fingers, till the sudden heat forced him to notice it and blow it out. “Yes,” he said, “the somnolent ass thinks our father is a sentimentalist. And so he is, in a way, but so much more besides. He’s a sentimental imperialist and a sentimental careerist. But all that is just an addiction that he cannot properly control, a sort of mental hiccough that he’s really ashamed of, but can’t stop. The Dolt thinks he reads our father like a book. But he doesn’t really. He sees him as a ‘realist’ whose nerve fails every now and then; for instance when he begins caring for some wretched ‘hard case’ of a black man rather than the white man’s colonial government.” Victor nodded slowly, as if well satisfied with his insight into his father. “In a way,” he said, “my father’s character contains both the Dolt and me in a single personality. For instance, of course he’s a snob and a thruster, but he knows he is, and tries quite hard not to be. And even when he does behave snobbishly he laughs at himself. Yes, and though he generally treats people as pawns in a game, sometimes he upsets the whole game for the pawn’s sake. And the game, mind you, is not just his own career (though that is certainly fatally dear to him). No, the game is really History with a big H, with himself as one of the pawns, zestfully and conscientiously playing its part in the game; but always with an underlying tenderness toward his fellow pawns, a tenderness that he sometimes quite deliberately allows to break all the rules. That is what the Dolt thinks is mere muddle-headed weakness, but by God it’s not. It’s far-seeing wisdom, and it needs courage, for a man like my father, in his position. I sometimes wonder what my mother was like. Probably like Edith.” He laughed, sourly.

Then at last he lit his pipe, and pulled at it in silence.

After a while I fetched him out of his reverie by remarking again that the wedding fiasco would make it very difficult for him at the office. He said, “Oh, I shall not go back to that life, not so long as I am awake.” I asked if he had any plans, No, he had not; but he must do something that offered scope for “absorbing the world”; and something that afforded some possibility of action, “some creative paying back to the world”. He said, “I must get to know what people are like, all sorts of them. Maybe it’s Just revulsion from the Dolt, but I do feel I want to learn a lot from people, ordinary decent people. Those dockers, for instance, could have taught me a lot, if I had been awake,” He deplored his wasted opportunities, and his ignorance. “I shall plan,” he said, “for a long life. But, of course, it may all be over before I finish this pipe.”

We talked well into the night, and gradually a decision formed itself in his mind, largely owing to scraps of information that I was able to give him. After a lot of desultory consideration of many possible lines of action, he suddenly remarked, “Yes, of course! I see what to do. When I have cleared up the mess here, I shall cut right adrift, settle in another town and try to get some kind of adult educational work. That way, I shall both absorb and create, in a small way. At first, of course, there’ll be very little creating, but it’s clear I must do a great deal of absorbing before I can attempt anything much in the way of creating.”

Lest he should be expecting too much of this work, I suggested that he might find it irksome to be constantly dealing with uneducated minds. Journalism, I thought, might afford him more diverse and stimulating contacts, and might be used as a stepping-stone to a literary career.

His reply was emphatic. “No, no!” he said. “Reporting murders and football matches, and occasionally having an article accepted by a literary weekly, would not satisfy me at all. I need a solid foundation of understanding of the lives of ordinary people, preferably working people. I want to work with minds that have not already been stereotyped by middle-class education and comfortable middle-class values. Those dockers taught me something, and I think I can teach them and their like something in return. Strange, isn’t it? Although, while I was with them, I was the somnolent ass, now, looking back, I find I have stored up a lot of valuable material from those days.” To my suggestion that he was sentimentalising them in reaction against the snobbery of his somnolent state, he answered frankly that I with my lower-middle-class origins and unconscious respect for my social “superiors”, was the real snob, and that I could not be fair to the workers.

“Besides,” he added, “you yourself have often said that the only hope for our rotten old society is education, real education, not for the few privileged people but for all of us. Democracy can’t possibly work unless there is a truly educated mass of citizens. Well, I shall try my hand at this most important of all jobs, educating ordinary adults. Oh, I know it’s a pretty hopeless task. And of course it can’t be done properly so long as economic conditions and the whole social climate are forcing us in the wrong direction. But we must make a beginning. And it’s going to be my job to help. Yes, I see quite clearly that this is my job.” Then he made a remark that stirred me in spite of my scepticism. “Some day, Harry, probably long after we are dead, the great majority of people in this island, yes, and in the world, will be decent, friendly, well-balanced, informed, critical, really human beings. And then, God, what glorious new horizons will begin to open up for our species! At present we are a self-frustrating, self- wounding, hobbled species, blinded by its conditions. But then we shall find ourselves.”

As I had to leave by a very early train next day, I brought our conversation to a close. Persuading Victor not to rise early on my account, I said “goodbye” there and then in the lounge. I promised to do what I could to help him to secure the kind of work he wanted, and he thanked me for befriending him in his crisis. Of course I replied that I was very glad to have been taken fully into his confidence, and that I hoped we might see more of each other. To this suggestion he heartily assented. I went upstairs to pack my hired wedding garments.

5. NEW START

From 1921 to 1924

IT WAS NEARLY THREE YEARS before I saw Victor again. A few weeks after the wedding fiasco I put him in touch with a friend of mine in the adult education movement, and in due course he was accepted as staff tutor for extra-mural work under one of the northern universities. I had hoped to meet him during the latter part of the summer, but we could not arrange a date suitable to both of us. Meanwhile I had an attractive offer of a post as teacher of English in a school in France. Before I left the country, Victor wrote to say that he was hard at work preparing his lectures for the winter. He was doubtful about his capacity for the job. “Honour Mods” and “Greats”, Greek and Latin Literature and Philosophy, seemed a poor equipment for teaching English artisans and housewives industrial history and economics. But in those days a classical education was thought to fit one for any kind of teaching post, certainly for the informal work which Victor had chosen. Moreover Victor was a very attractive candidate. His enthusiasm could not be doubted, for he had given up a brilliant career in business for the sake of adult education; and he obviously had a gift for personal contacts and for interesting people ill the life of the mind. I had no doubt that he would make a success of the job; but he was anxious, and he felt compelled to devote the remainder of the summer to studying his new subjects. So he settled into cheap lodgings in the great provincial town which was to be his headquarters, and divided his time between study and making contacts with local people connected with the movement. While I was in France I occasionally wrote to Victor, and I received a few very brief and uninformative notes from him. Evidently he was making a good start. The work, he said, was “immensely stimulating, but exasperating “. We planned to meet during the summer vacation. But when I suggested a walking tour in the Lakes, it proved impossible to fix a date. He had to attend summer schools where members of adult classes gathered together to combine further education and holiday-making. “Also,” he said, “I have new ties, which I will tell you about sometime.”

It was clear that Victor felt no need to see me; and so, with some disappointment, I refrained from pressing the matter. I tried to persuade him to write to me about those “new ties”, but he remained silent.

The same thing happened when I suggested a meeting during the second summer; and again in the third.

But late in the fourth summer, when I was already in London on my way back to France, I received a note from Victor, forwarded from home by my mother. He proposed that we should meet and have a talk about “something important to me and interesting to you”. The reasonable reply was that unfortunately it was too late, as I was crossing the Channel on the following day. And after all, why should I put myself out for someone who had practically ignored me for three years? But where Victor was concerned, 1 often found it hard to be reasonable. I telephoned to him, saying that if he really wanted to see me, he must come up to London on the following day. To my surprise, he agreed. I booked a room for him at my hotel, for the one night. Then I cabled to France postponing my arrival for a day.

Next day, I met him at Euston, and we went to a modest Soho restaurant with a Balkan flavour. When we had given our order, we smilingly studied each other, and made small talk. I reminded him of the ‘previous occasion when we had fed together; and I asked him if he remembered the ugly waitress. He paused for a moment as though trying to recollect, then said, “Oh, yes, of course. Ugly, but very beautiful. Curious how blind you are in some directions, Harry!” He fell silent, and I waited.

Over our minestrone we at first talked at random, and I studied his appearance. He had not changed much, but he did look appreciably older. His forehead bore upright lines above the nose. Crow’s feet spread from the corners of his eyes. But he seemed physically fit, and his eyes were obviously the eyes of the awake Victor. There was no camel-like droop of the eyelids, no mulish complacency about the mouth.

Before we had finished our soup I brought Victor to the point by reminding him that he wanted to discuss something. He hesitated.

“Well,” he said, “I thought I’d like to tell you a thing or two. In the old days I often found I could straighten things out in my mind by talking to you: You’re such a damned good listener.”

Then he fell silent again, and seemed wholly intent on the flavour of his beer. I waited some time, and then I said, “I hope your job is suiting you.” He raised his eyes to mine with an expression (I thought) of relief.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “it suits me alright. Things haven’t quite gone according to plan, but they’re certainly going somewhere.”

He poured out a long and interesting account of his work, but I suspected that he clung to this theme in order to put off opening up some other, more ticklish subject. He said he was kept fairly busy, with five evening classes a week, and occasional lectures at week- ends. Much time was occupied by travelling. One of his classes was in the university itself, but the others were in towns ranging from thirty to a hundred-and-fifty miles distant. He had constantly to be working up his subjects, and he had acquired the habit of doing a lot of serious reading and lecture-preparing in the train.

“My real trouble,” he said, “is that I don’t feel that economics and industrial history are the right medium for genuine education. Of course they’re very important. People who are already more or less educated can use them, and indeed must have them; but for uneducated people they can be the very devil. A lot of people who come to us are simple souls who are generously aware of the rottenness of society, and impatient for a theory about it; and eager for action. Others are badly warped by sheer class-hatred (I don’t blame them), and they simply want to have material for proving the capitalists wicked and the workers saints.”

I suggested that you could only educate people through subjects that interested them and had some relation to their own lives.

“Oh, yes!” he said, “In theory that’s fine; but if the subject is too close to them, they can’t think objectively about it at all. They have made up their minds before they begin to study; like a certain brass-founder in one of my classes, who was stumped by some argument of mine, so he just looked at me with great ox-eyes, and said, ‘Young man, I don’t rightly know where you’re wrong, but I know you are wrong!’”

Victor gave me one of his boyish grins. Presently he continued, “You see, we are supposed to be creating an educated democracy, but we haven’t really even begun to tackle that job yet; and I don’t see that we ever shall, unless we change our whole approach. We are supposed to be giving something like a university education to the working population of this country. But of course we can’t possibly do anything of the sort, except in a few cases. A university education involves all sorts of things that the members of our extramural classes can’t possibly bring. It involves young and supple minds full of vigour and curiosity. It involves access to plenty of books. It involves intensive tuition, and heaps of time for reading and writing. But our students are mostly far from young; their minds are already set; they come to the job after a hard day’s work; they’re not capable of serious study, because they have never learnt what serious study means; they can’t read heavy books; they find great difficulty in expressing themselves in writing; they mostly mistake asseveration for genuine discussion. Then again, we are supposed to be appealing to every man’s latent passion to be an intelligent and responsible citizen and a fully conscious human being; but even if Everyman unwittingly needs culture, the need is seldom a conscious desire, let alone a passion that will drive him to surmount the frightful difficulties that stand in his way. The good souls we do get hold of don’t really want the life of the mind at all. They want either a little easy entertainment after the serious part of the day is over, or the cachet of being an educated person. Or else they come in search of data and propaganda to use against their political opponents. Mind you, I don’t blame them for these motives. In their circumstances they were bound to want these things. But you can’t create an educated democracy on that basis. We are supposed to be building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant minds (and, God, they’re green all right); but we are not going about it in the right way. Mind you, we are doing something well worth doing, in its own little way. But we are not doing what we pretend we are doing; because (a) we are affecting only a minute proportion of the total population, and (b) the few that we do catch absorb merely a smattering.”

Victor’s tirade was interrupted by the arrival of the waiter with our pseudo-exotic Balkan dish. To my surprise Victor asked the lean and swarthy young man whether he had read the works of some writer with a Slavonic name, unknown to me. The waiter froze into immobility, with my helping of vegetables poised in the air. Then he looked down at Victor’s upturned face for a moment, and said with emphasis and a smile, “Yes, and you?”

“No,” said Victor, “but I have heard of him. You are not afraid?”

The waiter replied, “Because of him I must leave my country.” He moved away.

“You see,” said Victor, “lots of these fellows from the backward fringes of Europe are ready to take risks for what they regard as education; but our people, mostly, just don’t care.” I protested that the man must be unique, and I asked how Victor had spotted him as one of the few who cared. Victor refused to admit that the man was unique. “His sort are a minority, no doubt, but a considerable minority. How did I spot him? Surely it’s written all over his face, his walk, the way he moves his hands. And didn’t you see how he handled the book I asked him to put aside for me?”

Without waiting for my reply he continued, “What I want to know is, why is there no such considerable minority in this country? Why are we nearly all such bone-headed philistines, and proud of it? Is it, I wonder, just because bad education has been forced on us at school, so that we are hardened against the life of the mind for ever? You ought to know, as a schoolteacher. What do you really do with the little animals when you have them in your clutches?” I pointed out that the school was forced to concentrate on fitting the child to earn a living in a commercial society, which involved simply drumming in the three R’s and a lot of necessary facts. “Yes,” he said, “That’s the snag. But do you or don’t you try to make it all come alive in their minds? And do you help them to get some sense of life as — well, a spiritual adventure?” I laughed, and protested that this was impossible, in view of the mental limitations of the average child and the economic limitations of the average home. But I claimed that some few of us did try; and still fewer actually succeeded, in a small way, with a few of our pupils. But most teachers themselves lacked the vision, and anyhow they were much too hard pressed to do anything about it. Victor sighed, and said, “Oh, yes, I know, I know. In fact we’re in a vicious infinite regress. You can’t educate adults unless they have been properly educated as children; and you can’t get them properly educated as children unless you have enough properly educated teachers, and a sound educational system, and unless in their homes they are in contact with educated parents. In adult education we are supposed to satisfy a native need for culture. I’m not saying there’s no such need, but simply that in this country it has been suffocated. And so, instead of attracting millions to our adult classes, we laboriously rope in thousands.”

I protested that the movement had done wonders, in spite of everything. He replied, “Oh, no doubt, in a way, particularly in the early days; and with quite a different sort of result from what was intended.”

I asked him to explain. For some moments he ate in silence, then said, “The pioneers of our great; movement (and it is a great movement in spite of everything) had a romantic purpose. On the one hand were the universities, seats of culture and refinement, on the other the workers, unconsciously needing culture and refinement, starving for it, though unwittingly. Or again, on the one hand, the universities could provide the inspiration for dispassionate study and objective investigation; on the other the workers could provide the drive for thoroughgoing social change. Our movement, obviously, was intended to bring the two together. What the pioneers had to do was to present culture to the workers in the right way (not the academic way precisely, but a warm, human, simplified wayn that was yet academically sound), and the workers would come flocking to the movement. And so, in time there would arise a new kind of democracy, in which the plain man would be right-hearted, and right-headed, reasonably well informed about society and about true values, capable of wise action and wise voting. It was a glorious vision. At last philosophers would rule; because power would lie with the people, and the great majority of the people would be philosophers. Well, it’s difficult enough to produce one philosopher, let alone forty-five million.”

I said he was exaggerating. The aim was not to produce philosophers but responsible citizens. I insisted that the ordinary human being had it in him to be a responsible citizen, given decent conditions. “Oh, quite,” said Victor, “he has it in him while he is a baby, but conditions go all wrong from then onwards.”

After a pause, he continued, “But that is not the whole trouble. In fact there are two other troubles. First, the best academic brains, the really first-class people, are (quite rightly) so intent on research, and so hard pressed with teaching and administration in the university, that they don’t take on extramural work and do it whole- heartedly. And, anyhow, few of them have the gift for it; for, believe me, it demands a very special technique, which we are only just beginning to learn. So the job has to be done largely by people who, though they may be first-class human beings, are not quite first-class academically; because, no matter how intelligent they may be, their hearts are not wholly devoted to academic study and research. What they really care about is rather kindling the masses. Take me, for instance; though perhaps I am worse than the average, because, of course, I simply had to cram to do the job at all.”

I interrupted, “But what does it matter that they’re not quite first- class academically? They have to teach the essentials not the minutiae. It’s their gift for teaching that matters. And I’m sure you have that.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “the teaching-gift does matter a lot, but so does the academic expertism. If you haven’t got it, you can’t always deal properly either with honest criticism or with the propaganda bilge; not absolutely adequately. But this is where my second point comes in, and it’s more fundamental. The whole idea of giving the essence of culture without the details, in fact of ‘university standard’ without minutiae, is impossible. It’s trying to have the cake and eat it. The result is that some of our adult students, hypnotized by the academic ideal, plunge for thoroughness, get mental indigestion, and are obsessed with the idea of ‘seeing both sides of every question’, so that they become paralysed, and useless for the revolution, which, after all, is the supreme goal; while others, feeling in their bones that something is amiss, become more prejudiced and propagandist than ever.”

Suddenly Victor saw that my plate was empty and his own scarcely touched. He attacked it with fury, while I sat wondering how to bring him to the point. When he had finished, the waiter returned to take away our plates. Victor said to him, “Do you find time to read much over here?”

“Not much time,” he answered. “Here I read only English, difficultly.”

I asked him what he had read. With a deprecating shrug he replied, “Lord Byron, Shakespeare (he is difficult), Mill (‘On Liberty’), Bertand Russell (on happiness). But why,” he said with animation, “do the English not read their own great literature?”

Victor laughed triumphantly, and said, “Because at school they are made to hate it.”

I was increasingly wondering what it was that Victor had come all the way to London to talk about; so over the sweet I challenged him to come to the point. Instead of answering, he plunged back into the old subject.

He said, “Don’t suppose I think the thing we are doing is just a waste of time. It’s quite important as a first step. We are not creating an educated democracy, but we are creating-I was going to say ‘an educated élite’ within the great Labour Movement; but I had better say, a socially informed élite who have at least some idea of what the aim of education ought to be. I foresee a time when the House of Commons will be dominated by a Labour Party whose members will mostly have been mentally formed in our classes. It’s tempting to think that such a House will really get going on the job of creating an educated democracy. But it won’t be able to do it unless it forms an adult education movement of a new kind, not giving sham university education, but working out new aims and methods, much freer and less formal. Yes, and if those enlightened Labour M.P.s mean business, they will have to insist on compulsory adult education for everyone.” Here I burst in with a protest that real education could never be compulsory. He replied, “That’s an over-simplification. The stalwarts of our movement insist on it, but I’m beginning to doubt it. We shall have to change our minds in the end, otherwise we shall never catch the people who need education most. Of course, when they are compelled, we shall have to find out how to make them glad they were compelled. People will put up with compulsion all right if the aim of the compulsion is manifestly a good one, and if they believe that they themselves gave power to the compelling government. Think how much compulsion is accepted in Russia, for the sake of the new revolutionary state.”

I snorted indignantly, but he carried on, “Oh, yes, you’ll see. What I’m afraid of is that sooner or later some semi-political or pseudo- religious movement, that really has the courage of its convictions, will persuade the masses to accept compulsion for quite wrong ends. Maybe it won’t happen here, but it might quite well happen in some socially tormented and half-crazy country; like Germany, for instance, when the pathetic republic has gone phut. And then!”

Over the coffee I tried again to bring Victor to the point. “Do you ever regret your old life?” I said. “Do you ever-slip back into your old self?”

“No,” he answered, “I certainly never regret the old life; and so far I have not slipped back into my old self. But I don’t feel really secure. Sometimes I have a sort of dizzy feeling, which is a warning. And sometimes I feel I must have more than my normal two or three hours sleep. So I may slip away at any time. That is why every moment is so precious. As for regretting the old life, good God, no! There’s so much more to be learnt and enjoyed in the new one, exasperating as it is. I like the people better. Not that I have a grudge against business people. Fundamentally they’re just as good stuff as the artisans, teachers and housewives that I deal with. But they’re under the spell of the commercial system that they run. They can’t see that it’s played out. And so they’re mentally backward, and it’s very hard to make any real contact with them. I don’t mean they’re unintelligent. Probably on the average they’re brighter than our people. But they can’t use their intelligence except within the commercial universe of discourse. They are incredibly backward in social, thought; and they’re blinkered by a false view of human nature, inherited from the nineteenth century, and the doctrine of economic man. They tend to believe that man is ‘fundamentally’ or ‘essentially’ a self-regarding animal. And, of course, this is a fine excuse for cut-throat commercialism. Even when they want to be genuinely loyal to things other than themselves, they tend to feel ashamed of doing so, regarding it as ‘sheer sentimentality’, And when at last their nature rebels against commercialism, they tend to flounder back into a very naïve Christianity.”

I said I thought all classes had come under the influence of the false view of human nature, and that artisans and teachers were really just as backward as clerks and business magnates.

“Many of them, no doubt are,” he said. “But some really are breaking away from the old ideas and values. They can’t very well help it. Their circumstances force it on them. You see they’re up against it. The men are either actually unemployed or scared stiff of becoming unemployed. They see and feel the system breaking up; and the old values breaking up, too. Individualism stinks in their nostrils. And they feel they’re all members of one another, dependent on one another. And so there’s quite often a very effective social goodwill about them; which is rare among the business people, just because they’re mentally hobbled by the commercial ideology. But, of course, the social goodwill of the workers is often restricted to working- class loyalty, or side-tracked by the bread-winner’s desperate need to fight individualistically in the struggle for a job. And, of course, there are plenty of rotters, people who think nothing matters so long as one spouts class war; people who are socialists in theory and individualists in action. For instance, there’s a man in one of my classes, always gassing, always propaganding, always dishonest in argument, never reads the stuff I set, never writes an essay, always arrives late and expects to be recorded on the register as present (for grant-earning purposes), always imputes bad motives to the secretary (who keeps the register and doesn’t falsify it), or to me, or to the wicked capitalists. Contrast that blighter with another talkative bloke, superficially similar, but how different! He’s fat, keen, equally doctrinaire, theoretically a hard-boiled materialist and stern self-seeker, but; in practice he’s well above the average of kindliness and self-sacrifice; in fact, unwittingly a worshipper of the Christian God who is Love, whom he consciously pokes fun at on every possible occasion, much to the annoyance of other members. Then there’s an old grey-head who is an orthodox rationalist. He keeps giving me ribald verses about Jesus Christ and the Church, and about Queen Victoria. One of the best men I have come across is a boiler- maker. Sometimes I have a meal in his home. A real good type, but desperately harassed. Likely to be sacked any day, because trade is bad, and a real slump is coming. Wife and two children. Nice clean little kitchen-sitting-room, overcrowded with nicknacks — china dogs, toby jugs, bright copper kettles, antimacassars, and the proverbial aspidistra. Last time, I noticed that the piano had gone. They didn’t refer to it, and I didn’t like to be nosy, but I feel sure it has been pawned. Bright little talkative wife, but too obviously anxious to keep the skeleton unseen in the cupboard. Boy at the local grammar school; girl hoping for a scholarship at the university. The father is pathetically keen to give them both a good education, but his very real enthusiasm for the life of the mind gets on the boy’s nerves. In fact he is reacting pretty violently against it. He obviously prefers toughness, and is always getting into scrapes as leader of a gang of hooligans at school.”

Victor paused, so I said, “And the women?”

“Educationally,” he said, “they are generally below the male standard. And it’s very difficult to get them talking. But they are certainly quite as intelligent as the men; only less informed, and diffident.”

Maliciously I asked if any attractive ones came to the classes.

“What you mean,” he said, “is, have I succumbed to any of them. Of course not. It would interfere with business. Besides, the younger ones are mostly rather dim; though a few are quite charming in a way — sweet rosebuds blighted by a hostile climate. The really attractive girls mostly don’t come, because of course, they have a better way of amusing themselves. Some of the women who do come take it very seriously. But most of these are middle-aged. There are a good many hard-working housewives, who obviously have no time to read or write, but like to be on the fringes of intellectual life. Then there are the inevitable spinsters who have nothing else to do, and are apt to take the line that if only people would be kind to each other, we shouldn’t have any social problems. The more frustrated women, of all ages, are too ready to fall in love with the class tutor, which complicates matters. The unfrustrated ones naturally have other fish to fry.” After a pause, he added, “And so have I.”

He did not develop this statement, but called the waiter for the bill. After a polite wrangle as to who should pay, in which Victor, as usual got the best of it, I suggested that we should go to the hotel and find a quiet corner where we could discuss whatever it was that he had on his mind. He nodded assent as he paid the bill.

I was staying in a cheap little hotel near Euston, run by a Swiss couple, and much patronized by foreigners. As we entered the stuffy lounge, a babel of foreign speech assailed us. I remember a middle- aged man with hair cut en brosse, who was leaning forward earnestly talking German to a sullen woman with smooth black hair and a streamlined black velvet; dress. Further afield, two children were building cardhouses, and occasionally exclaiming in French. A Nordic god was arguing in too-correct English with a scraggy little Cockney. Slavonic speech came from a group clustered round a table.

We found a vacant couch with the leather split and horsehair protruding, and I ordered drinks. When we had toasted each other, I said, “Well?”

“Well,” said Victor, “I’m ready now. I wanted to get the background clear for you first. And I wanted-to see how my problem felt in your presence, before I began telling you about it. I guess you’ve guessed that it’s concerned with the ugly waitress, the superbly beautiful Maggie.”

He then plunged into his story; but 1 shall not attempt to report it in his words. Instead, I shall give my own account of it, based partly on his version and partly on what I subsequently learned from Maggie herself. Not that there was any serious discrepancy. But Maggie’s comments were often enlightening.

Evidently she had had a deeper effect on him than I had supposed. He had stayed on at his hotel for some days in order to make a secure contact with her. Apparently his courtship was of a very eccentric kind, and her reception of it was equally odd.

On the morning after the wedding day, he had met her in a corridor. “Good morning,” he said; and she replied with her hippopotamus smile, “Good morning, sir.” He smilingly barred her way, and remarked, “You are the loveliest thing I have ever seen.” With a gasp of indignation, she turned to retreat; but he said, “Hi! Don’t run away! This is important for us both, and you know it is.” She turned and looked at him (he said) with contempt; and he felt so abashed that he could do nothing but stare dumbly at her. She said, “It’s cruel to tell a girl she’s lovely when she has a face like mine.” There were tears in her eyes as she added, “I suppose you think you’ll get me cheap because I’m ugly. I suppose you think I’m so ugly I’ll do anything for a bit of flattery.” He still gazed at her, and said nothing. (She afterwards told me that he looked like a dog asking for a tit-bit.) Presently he said, “The night before I came here, when I was falling asleep, I saw your face as clearly as I do now, just for a moment, and then you were gone. I have seen your face, between sleeping and waking, off-and on ever since I was a child. I can’t really remember the time when I didn’t see it. At first it was always the face of a very little girl, but as I grew it grew. When I was a schoolboy, I was rather annoyed that a silly, little, podgy girl should butt in like that. Later I got interested, and tried to hold you longer, but you always vanished after a few seconds. Sometimes I saw you in a brown jersey, sometimes in a little black sou’wester.”

She interrupted, “It’s a pretty story, but it won’t do. On the first day when you were here, you took no notice of me, except to scowl at me as if I was a mess. What’s more, you seem to forget that you have dined here lots of times before, generally with the young lady you didn’t marry yesterday. And you never took any notice of me, except once when you looked at me and then said something to her, and you both laughed.”

He answered, “I can explain all that, but it’s a strange story, and it will take some time. First, I can easily prove that I really have seen you, in that drowsy state before sleeping. As a schoolgirl you used to wear your hair in two heavy pigtails hanging down in front of your shoulders. One night, about five years ago, when you were in the late teens, I saw you with your left eye tight shut, with blood and tears oozing out of it, and tears streaming from the other eye. After that you used to have a black shade over the left eye. It was many months before I saw you without it.”

This bit of information had startled her. In a serious voice she said, “I fell against a fence with a big nail in it. They thought I should lose the eye.”

At that moment their conversation was interrupted by someone walking along the corridor. They parted.

Later, he contrived to meet her again, and said, “About my not noticing you on those times-” But again they were interrupted. He had only time to say, “When is your day off? I must tell you more. It’s important for both of us.” She moved off without replying.

However, two days later he did secure her for her free afternoon. At her request, he took her to walk in the country. She was a country girl; and although she had deserted the country for the town, she liked to use her free time for fresh air and exercise. They travelled out by bus, and she took him along one of her favourite tracks through fields and woods.

He told her about his divided personality, and explained that, though he could have his waking dream of her in either of his two states, yet in the somnolent state he could never remember anything about it. Consequently, when he actually met her in that state, she meant nothing to him, except that he felt an unreasonable loathing of her. But in the lucid state he could remember even the occasions when she had appeared to him in the other state. “When at last,” he said, “I (the real ‘I’) met you in the flesh, I recognized you at once.”

After a while they rested in a meadow. She lay at full length with her hand behind her head (so he told me), and her ample breasts (very unfashionable in those days) rising and falling under her cheap cotton dress. The sun was full on her face, and her eyes were shut. Her sturdy coltish legs, in the precious black silk stockings that were then displacing cashmere, were crossed like a crusader’s on his tomb. She was chewing a feathery grass stem.

He said, “How I long to make love to you, but I won’t, not yet. I want to explain things properly first.” She turned her head and looked at him quizzically through one screwed-up eye, because of the sun. “Aren’t you a caution!” she said “But go on, it’s interesting.”

“Well,” he said, “before I met you (before ‘I’ met you, not the other blighter that I hate), I grew to get a terrific kick out of your rare visitations. I don’t quite know why. It wasn’t just that I had grown to see that you were beautiful, in a queer way that I had never come across before; in addition I seemed to make some sort of direct contact with your personality, simply through my visual image of your face in all its fluctuating expression,”

“Don’t be so pompous,” she said. “Speak ordinary. I’m not a public meeting. And I’m not clever.”

He explained his meaning in simpler words, and added, “Funny isn’t it? I don’t know anything about your life; and yet I do know, just from knowing your face so well, that you’re intelligent and sensitive, and quite able to understand anything I want to say to you, so long as I don’t use words you’re not used to.” Maggie told me later that at this she was secretly pleased, because she had always wanted to be intelligent and sensitive, and able to appreciate the subtleties of language. But she would not tell Victor this; not at this early stage of their acquaintance. She said, “You think you know me, but I bet you don’t really. You have told yourself a lot of pretty rubbish about that face you used to see. And it just happens to be a bit like my awful mug.”

“We shall see,” he said. “And what about the damaged eye? Anyhow, one thing I am absolutely sure about. We need each other. Neither of us can be fully alive without the other.”

Laughing, she threw her chewed grass in his face, and said, “Speak for yourself, Mr. Stranger! I’m quite happy without you.” She jumped up, like a fresh colt, and said, “Come along! I want my tea.” They continued their walk.

They came to a stile; and as she was climbing over it, her foot slipped on the mossy wood, and she fell rather heavily. She expected him to rush to her assistance and lift her to her feet, and fuss over her; but though he made a quick movement, he stopped, and stood with his hands in his pockets, while she sat on the ground rubbing her knee and grieving over her torn stocking. He merely said, “Bad luck! The step must be slippery,” and waited for her to pick herself up. She clambered to her feet again, and limped along the path. They walked in silence, and she deliberately maintained the limp after the knee had recovered. She could not help being mortified at his indifference. Also she was startled to find how disappointed she was that he had not put his arms round her to lift her, nor even offered her an arm for walking. A horrid thought haunted her. He was not really in love with her at all. He was in love with his dream-pictures of her. Probably he secretly found her repulsive, as so many other men obviously did. He wouldn’t let himself see this fact; but when an opportunity arose to touch her, he couldn’t bring himself to do so. The thought hardened her against him. She suddenly felt desperately lonely.

As if in answer to this thought, he lightly, fleetingly, and yet (she said) lingeringly held her hand, and murmured, “To find you at last is to find home.”

“You are a queer one,” she said, “not my sort at all.”

He promptly answered, “Oh, yes I am. You’ll see. But there’s something I must make quite clear before I clamour for you. You see, I earnestly want to spend all my life with you, but the other fellow, my hateful other self, may oust me at any moment. And he loathes you, and he would treat you horribly. So I must; make you see the danger you are up against in loving me.”

She stood still and faced him. “Look here,” she said, “you’re forgetting something. It takes two to make a love affair, and I’m not in love with you.”

“No,” he said. “Thank God you’re not — yet. That’s why I want to get it all clear at once. Because when you are, you will find it hard to judge the situation dispassionately.

“You and your long words!” she said. Then she added, “I suppose it never struck you I might have other fish to fry?”

He answered, “Oh, yes, I know. Just as I had. But you and I belong together. You will soon find that’s true — unless we nip the whole thing in the bud right now. But I don’t really think we can keep apart; we are tangled up togeher fundamentally, somehow.”

At this she exclaimed, “But I tell you I don’t feel the slightest need of you. I don’t know you at all, except that you are a bit cracked. And you don’t know me at all.”

He answered, “I know almost nothing about you, and yet I know so much. I know you want to be — well, fully alive, awake. To experience as fully as possible, and — to behave creatively.” She sighed, and said, “I don’t even know what you mean by that. All I want is to have a good time, and a job I can enjoy doing. I’m quite happy at the hotel for the present.”

They walked on in silence, for the length of a field. Then Victor said, “Well, I’m putting my cards on the table. I’m certain we need one another; but there’s my accursed other self. Yet, in spite of that, I’m sure it’s really best for you that you should take me on. But you must realize the danger fully, and face it calmly. So must I, on your account. Some men in my position would just hold off, for the girl’s sake; even if they needed her as desperately as I do. And indeed, my dear, I do need you desperately. If you won’t have me, I shall never be fully myself. I shall break up, sooner or later. But objectively that doesn’t greatly matter. The point is that for your sake, quite as much as my own, I believe we should unite. What I offer you is a possibility of real fullness of life, though a life that will often be unhappy and may bring you disaster. But without me you will certainly miss what is best in life.”

“Look!” she said, “I’m not in love with you, but if I was really in love with you, I wouldn’t funk it because of the danger. I’d go through hell for you. And even now, when I don’t love you, I don’t say ‘Keep off, it’s not fair to make love to a girl if you know you may betray her.’ No! If you can show me that you are the man for me, I’ll not be afraid. I’ll take you on.” She swung round, smiled squarely at him, putout a hand, and said, “Shake on it!” Laughing, he took her hand, shook it heartily, and held it till she took it from him.

6. MAGGIE’S EARLY LIFE

From 1897 to 1921

THE CRISIS OF VICTOR’S WALK with Maggie was now over. After a little silence, they began talking happily about indifferent matters. Presently they came to a little cottage that offered teas. They had their meal in the garden, sitting together on a bench before a rickety little table, facing the view. Maggie told me that through that meal and the rest of their walk she had an increasing sense that they had known one another for many years. Again and again they anticipated each other’s thoughts, as though each knew beforehand what to expect of the other. Yet consciously they knew very little of each other, and their minds were very different — Victor with his background of public school and Oxford, Maggie a country girl with simple tastes and a veneer of town experience. Yet so long as they did not discuss their own future, they talked easily and happily. In spite of differences of accent and social class, each delighted each by quick intuition of the other’s point of view.

Maggie was soon telling Victor about her own life. Her early years were spent in Shetland. She was born in a minute crofter’s cottage beside one of the larger “voes” or fjords. Her father was a typical Shetlander, who made a precarious living by a combination of fishing by line or net from a boat, tending the little hardy though soft- fleeced sheep, and tilling the impoverished and storm-swept soil, which yielded oats and rye as dwarfed as the sheep and the famous ponies. Rambingly and with evident nostalgia, Maggie told Victor how she used to take part in the fishing; how, holding the line, one had to feel for the gentle tremor when the fish nibbled the bait, distinguishing between the different action of whiting, haddock and the rest; how in the old days cod were plentiful in the coastal waters and within range of small boats, but now they had to be sought far off in the Arctic by long-ranging steam trawlers; how the herring fishery, at one time prosperous, had retreated to the south, leaving behind broken-down jetties and the rotting remains of the fishing fleet in almost every village; how her father used to take out his gun and shoot the seals from the cliff, and the dead or merely wounded creatures, tortured by the salt water in their wounds, would be left on the rocks by the next retreating tide, to be retrieved at leisure by the men of the crofts; how the cruel business distressed her, but gradually she hardened herself to it, knowing well how much the meat and oil and skin were needed; how, when she was about twelve years old, one of her elder brothers was lost in a storm, having gone out beyond the headlands in an unseaworthy boat, against his father’s advice; how she herself, weeks later, happened on his decaying body on the rocks, damaged, bloated, blackened by corruption, but still recognizably her brother; and how this experience had “somehow opened a window on to the evil of the world “, so that for years afterwards she was prone to “waking nightmares” in which she was paralysed by the shocking memory of that strange thing that had been her brother; how her eldest brother became a deck-hand on a liner, and would periodically return from the Far East with strange gifts and stranger stories; how these homecomings used to fill her with a fierce determination to see the great world, though she was only a girl; how the eider-ducks piloted their flotillas of tiny babies on the turbulent waves, and in among the rocks; how the stylish arctic skuas and the great brown “bonxies” would dive screaming from the sky to threaten the head of any child venturing too near their nests; how the gannets, dagger-beaked, creamy headed, wing-tipped with ink, would drop like stones into the sea for fish, and the cormorants would come up from the deep with their writhing bulky catch, and struggle valiantly to swallow it, till at last it showed merely as a great swelling in the bird’s neck; how a dead whale was once stranded at the mouth of the voe, and how it stank; how one of the boys once carried home on his shoulder a whale’s vertebra, a lump of sea-polished solid bone as big as a new grindstone, but triangular and with a hole in the middle for the great spinal cord; how she and her school friends used to play in a near-by “broch”, a stone-built Pictish fortress, on a high cliff over the sea; how her mother used to plant their cabbages in queer little circles of stone wall, like miniature brochs, to protect them from the ruthless winds; how at midnight in the summer, the grass was still green and the water blue; but in winter, noon was just an evening between two interminable dead black nights, relieved sometimes by the pale or rosy Northern Lights; how the whole family would sometimes go by boat, sailing or rowing, inland to the head of the voe to cut peat on the low moors, and stack it to dry (like slabs of moist ginger cake, she said); and how, long afterwards, they would go again to load the dried peat on to the boat and bring it home; how in fine weather one could see far out on the horizon a small, tall, lonely island where several families won a meagre living from the ocean and the scanty pasture, and sometimes (it was said) great storms swept their houses over the cliff into the seas; how she was sometimes taken by her father on sheep-dipping or fleecing expeditions, with a party of men, boys and dogs from the neighbouring crofts, generally by boat to some remote promontory, to spend the day in the orchestration of bleatings, barkings, human shoutings, the cries of gulls, and of course the wind; how the “national sport” of the Shetlanders (Shelties, she sometimes called them) was racing their Norse-looking sailing craft at regattas in one little port after another; how the family boasted about their own old elegant and often successful boat, and their father’s seamanship; how she used to walk over the hill to the village school beside a neighbouring voe, often in wild weather, dry in her little black oil-skins; how on Sundays the whole family, father, mother, two aunts, three boys and two girls, would follow the same track over the hill to the little Methodist chapel, all dressed in their precious Sunday clothes, she with her wild red hair tightly plaited and her sturdy little legs clad in the inevitable home-knitted black woollen stockings; how on one occasion a blue-eyed young lay preacher, who was also the local blacksmith (idolized by the young girls for his mighty prowess at the anvil, and for his radiant kindliness), gave them a terrific sermon all about hell-fire and shipwreck; how the fire, he said, rose up from the depth of the ocean and devoured the proud ships with their ungodly crews, and sucked them down into the nether pit for eternal damnation; how, after the service, when the young man stood at the chapel door to shake hands with each member of the congregation, she dared hardly take his hand, though she saw, incredulously, that he was once more beaming with good will; how, when her father once took her to the far-off town of Lerwick, on the way she saw for the first time trees, little stunted trees round a house in a sheltered valley, but to her they were symbolical of all the world’s forests and jungles; how Lerwick seemed to her in those days a great bewildering glamourful city, but in fact it was a small fishing port with narrow cobbled streets and an all- pervading smell from the salting of innumerable herrings; how she marvelled at the trawlers, the smart fisheries gunboat, and the little old mail steamer; how she longed to go in the steamer all the way to far-off Scotland, but such a trip was beyond the family’s means; how, even in those early days she began to be aware that she was living only on the outermost fringe of a great exciting dangerous modern world, in comparison with which her home life and all its values were old-fashioned, niggardly and superstitious; how, as a girl in her teens, she used to steal sweet meetings with a boy from Glasgow, a very young engineer, who used to come to the village on a motor-bike in connection with the setting up of a pumping engine; how he scorned Shetland, and told her about the gay city life; how he once took her for a wild pillion-ride on his motor-cycle, and her father heard of it, and was furious; how, in the long dark winter evenings, her mother and aunts, and often the two girls also, would sit spinning the near- white or richly brown (“murrat”) home-grown wool, or knitting, or mending clothes, fishing-nets or lines, while her father with a clay pipe in his mouth would be doing repairs to some tool, or mending a wicker lobster-pot; how sometimes he would tell them stories of the old days, or read aloud from “improving” books or Sir Walter Scott’s novels; for they had a couple of shelves stocked with well-used classics and religious works, as in so many of the Shetland crofts; how sometimes she would listen to her father with a deep sense of peace, loving the little cramped, dark, overcrowded home and the feeling of continuity with a mysterious romantic past; but sometimes she was restless, aloof, exasperated with her grown-up relatives because of their open contempt and secret fear of the new ways which were constantly eating into the old; how she and her elder sister sometimes went to the tiny croft of their Great-Aunt Abigail, to be given bannocks and a glass of precious ginger-wine, but the old woman herself would generally find some excuse for indulging in neat whisky or rum; how the dark little croft was crammed with furniture and treasures collected throughout a lifetime; how the kindly but alarming old witch (for such she looked, with her tousled grey hair and bushy brows that met over her nose, and her face of wrinkled leather) would sit by the fire with bright and frightening eyes telling stories of tragic loves and quarrels, of murders out at sea, of Pictish and Norse tradition, of kelpies and howling invisible fiends that rode on the storm, and could lift a man from his feet and throw him from a cliff; how sometimes in a low voice her great-aunt would tell of her own reputedly occult powers of second sight and control of people’s behaviour; how, for instance, she foretold the greatest storm of a century, and the wreck of a full-rigged ship on the rocks below the broch; how she triumphed over a wicked laird, who was the harsh landlord of all that district, by compelling him to throw himself from a high cliff.

Maggie told Victor that she herself, being a very level-headed child, was sceptical about all these stories, and yet fascinated by them.

One thing she did not tell Victor till long afterwards. When Great- Aunt Abigail was at the point of death she summoned her favourite great-niece, Maggie, to a strictly private interview, and prophesied that she, too, would develop strange powers. Meanwhile, she said, Maggie herself, under the influence of the “great unbelieving world” would grow to neglect “the old wisdom”, till at last in suffering she would discover that she, too, was a witch, with powers that she might use for good or evil. The old lady said, “You will find, Maggie dear, that you can be strong both in the old wisdom and in the new wisdom, about which I know nothing but that the two clashing wisdoms are at bottom one true wisdom.” Her tired old eyes, that were still lit with frightening fire, looked fixedly at the young girl; and presently she said, “They will call you ugly, but you are beautiful. Most people are too blind to see your beauty, and if any of these ever calls you beautiful, he will be lying. But the very few, who can see, will see that you are lovely with a very ancient and forgotten kind of loveliness, or perhaps a new kind, still to win men’s praise. I don’t know which.” She gazed at the fascinated child; then said, “You must try to do much better than I have done, wasting all my powers, and all my life.” She fell silent for some time, while Maggie gazed at her in awe. Then Great-Aunt Abigail said, “Goodbye, dear Maggie. Remember always what I have said. And now, go!”

With mingled fright, repugnance, affection and exaltation, Maggie stooped and put her lips to the ancient leathery brow. But Great-Aunt Abigail said, faintly but sharply, “On the lips, little fool; even if it makes you vomit.” Maggie brought herself to comply, murmured, “Dear Great-Aunt Abigail!” and fled.

This exciting suggestion that she herself was a witch worked deeply into young Maggie’s mind; the more so since on one or two occasions she had had dreams that seemed to turn out obscurely prophetic.

Maggie did not tell Victor about this death-bed scene; partly because, though almost unconsciously she still cherished it, she had long ago ceased to take her great-aunt’s prophecy seriously, and had ceased to have any of those ambiguous experiences that had seemed to confirm it. Moreover, she feared that, if she told Victor, he would think her credulous. Instead, she rambled on about her ordinary memories, while Victor occasionally interjected some question or friendly comment.

The sun was now sinking behind the trees, and the chill of evening made them sit closely together, like well-tried brother and sister.

Maggie recounted how, when she left school, her parents reluctantly sent her into “service” in Lerwick, to add to the family earnings; how she wept on the day of departure, but how, as she settled into the new life she became more and more dependent on the excitement of this minute metropolis, and more determined to seek her fortune in some great glamorous city in Scotland; how her parents sternly opposed this intention, but in the end, without their consent, she bought a passage with her savings and at last boarded the mail steamer with a friend, Katie, who was returning from a holiday at home to a post as chamber- maid in a hotel in Aberdeen; how the two slept on deck under a tarpaulin, but were drenched by a wave; how the friend secured her a place as scullery-maid; how she marvelled at the city of grey granite, feeling that at last she was in the great world; how nevertheless she often found herself longing for the voes and the crofts and the Shetland speech, and her still dear family; how she was torn between love and contempt for the old life, between fascination and vague disgust with the city; how in due season she became a waitress in the same hotel and, in spite of her ugliness, was a success, not merely through efficiency but because of her knack of pleasing people of very different sorts; how she spent her free time mostly on solitary walks in the country or the town itself, watching its life; how her ugliness was a protection against unwanted attentions, but also a barrier between her and the boys; how she occasionally went with Katie to see the thrilling new moving pictures of life in New York or Monte Carlo; how Katie had a succession of love affairs, but she herself was merely everybody’s dear sister; how, still seeking fullness of life, she presently moved on to posts in Glasgow, and then to the North of England and her present job; how her ambition was to reach London.

While Maggie was happily telling Victor about her life, the afternoon had advanced into evening. The trees in front of them were silhouetted against a golden sky. The two sat closer together, and Victor had allowed himself to slip his arm under hers, and to hold her hand. She responded with gentle pressure, but said, “We may as well be friendly, even if I’m not going to take you on.”

Victor told me that he had been wondering how it was that a girl who had missed her due of admiration from young men could be so detached and even guarded against his own cautious advances. Intuitively he felt that sex was somehow repugnant to her; and yet, according to her own account, she had regretted her exclusion from normal love- experiences.

“Tell me!” he said. “Even though most young men were too blind to see your beauty, surely some must have wanted you? You don’t behave at all like — like a plain girl who is always longing to be loved.” She did not answer. He felt her go rigid. Her face was turned away from him.

Presently she turned toward him, and seemed to study his face in the fading light. Then she said, “Inquisitive, aren’t you? Why should I have to tell you all about myself? But you’re sort of understanding, like my brother Tom, who was drowned.”

Then she suddenly disengaged herself and rose, saying that it was getting late, and they mustn’t miss the bus. He did not press her to say more. When he had paid for the meal, they walked down the garden, and he held the gate open for her. As she passed through, the evening light lent mystery to her face. “You are lovely to look at,” he said, “but that is not all. There is something strange about you. I think you must be a witch. Do you see the future, or stick pins in waxen images of your enemies, or put potions in people’s beer? Or do you just cast spells on them by giving them waking-dreams of your face?” She was startled, thinking of Great-Aunt Abigail’s now almost forgotten declaration. But she said, rather sharply, “I don’t believe in such things. I’m modern. I should like to go in a submarine or fly an aeroplane, or be a great surgeon. I believe in science. I’m bored with the old dope about witches and magic and second sight.” He said, “Then what about my dreams of you?”

She answered, “Oh, that’s your affair. Probably you are just kidding yourself.”

“Well, Miss Modern,” he said, “you must have had lots of lovers. Tell me about them!”

She answered only, “Nosing again!” And when he attempted to take her arm, she gently freed herself. But as they walked unlinked down the dark road, under trees, she said, “Oh, well. Perhaps I shall tell you some day.”

She did; at a much later date, when she had come to know him much better. And Victor, sitting; with me in the hotel lounge, told me vaguely that she had indeed, as he suspected, “encountered the seamy side of sex”, and been “severely wounded by her experiences”. Not till long afterwards did I learn from Maggie herself the details of this unhappy side of it’ her life. But I had better give some account of them now, since without some knowledge of them the reader would be unable to understand the course of her early relations with Victor.

During her time in Aberdeen she suffered increasingly from the sense of inability to attract men, and from her privation of all the normal dalliance and “walking out” which meant so much to her friend Katie. Moreover, her longing to be “modern”, and to have all kinds of “modern” and “emancipated” experiences, disposed her to a freedom and even licentiousness that was still rare in those days before the First World War. So when she found that some men would, with a little encouragement, make advances to her, she was very ready to accept them. But the men who took notice of her were all of the kind that Katie condemned as riff-raff or “wrong ‘uns”. Maggie, however, was ready to believe that they were the sensitive ones who could see the beauty to which most men were blind. She chose to ignore her great- aunt’s warning that some of the blind would lyingly praise her. Thus it was that she stumbled into a very unfortunate affair in the dockside underworld of Aberdeen. She struck up an acquaintance with some undesirable creature to whom no decent girl would stoop. His advances were of the crudest, but he was able to pose to her as an unfortunate and fundamentally gentle cave-man whom society had maltreated. Maggie frankly responded, and was ready to see in him virtues which no one else could see. She allowed him all sorts of liberties with her person. Gradually and very reluctantly, she discovered that he was not more sensitive than other men, but more coarse-grained and brutal, that his crude praise of her looks was quite insincere, that he had come to her not out of admiration and love but simply in the expectation that such an ugly girl would be ready to give him what others refused, namely bodily intercourse. Such a discovery was, of course, bitterly galling. But such was her hunger for experience and “emancipation” that she swallowed her shame and allowed herself to be led right up to the point of going to bed with her “lover”. At the last minute violent repugnance seized her, and she broke from his arms, and began to dress. The man, of course, was furious, and attempted rape; but Maggie was not one to give in easily, when loathing had conquered craving. She put up a spirited fight, and cooled her assailant’s ardour by inflicting painful damage. Thus, battered but victorious, she technically preserved her virginity.

Some time after she had recovered from the shock of this affair Maggie became involved with another unattractive specimen of the opposite sex. But this time disillusionment supervened at an earlier stage of the relationship, and she dismissed her man before she was seriously implicated. In spite of these two unfortunate incidents her passion to be experienced and “modern” forced her to try again and again. Each time, disgust supervened at an earlier stage than before, until at last she shrank from the slightest contact with any man.

In Glasgow, where she was barmaid in a low-class hotel, she had an adventure of a different pattern. She met a Negro. He had a frightful cough, was probably tubercular, and was desperately lonely. He longed to get back to West Africa, but he had no money. The girls treated him like dirt because he was black, broken-down, and simple. He had the remains of a well-knit and powerful body, and dog’s eyes. Out of compassion, Maggie befriended him, mothered him. He responded with adoration and great gentleness, never presuming to touch his goddess. To her surprise she found that when he did accidentally touch her she was not repelled, He had a sweet nature, she felt, that could never harbour the brutish lust that was the sole motive of her other lovers. He treated everyone, even his persecutors, with fundamental respect. He was ready to accord to everyone the benefit of the doubt. Maggie gradually conceived a great affection for him. And so, like a queen condescending to a trusted subject whom she had chosen as a consort, she gently led him into making love to her. At first he could scarcely bring himself to commit so small a sacrilege as stroking her hand. But stage by stage he reached the point of undressing his goddess, with all the reverence of a priest unveiling the holy of holies. She felt neither repugnance nor fear, but only a warm glow of affection and expectation. But then, to her surprise, his trembling hands were withdrawn from her, and he muttered in a thick husky voice, “I must not, I must not. There is a devil in me, and he would hurt you.” This declaration only increased Maggie’s confidence in him, and her readiness to give herself to him. She quickly overcame his scruples, and with an almost religious reverence and gentleness he took her.

The two lived together in very humble quarters, kept by Maggie’s earnings and the intermittent wages that he won from such casual labouring as he could secure. For a while she was content. But little by little she became restless and lonely. She craved equal comradeship and common enterprise. Her Negro, though infinitely patient and gentle, and in a way personally understanding, was too remote from the “great world” which had cast its spell on her. “I wanted,” she told me, “a man of my own kind, who would wake me, and — ride me rough-shod to the stars; who would free something creative in me that had always been chained up.” Such high-falutin language was quite beyond her at the time; but later, under Victor’s half-assimilated influence, this was how she described her feelings at the close of her adventure with her Negro. She was beginning to feel that she was losing contact with the great world, and becoming more and more tangled in responsibility toward her lover. Further, she was frightened that she might have a child. Such preventives as she knew were far from reliable. Little by little, her manner toward him changed. She cooled. Sometimes she would unintentionally let little spiteful remarks slip from her tongue; and the effort to comfort the wounded man after these lapses became increasingly burdensome.

One night she was particularly horrid to him, hinting that he was not really good enough for her, and that she had only accepted him out of charity, and that his love-making was too humble. She even forgot herself so far as to say that it would be too awful if she had the burden of a little nigger baby. This foolish remark woke something in him that had been long suppressed. He went savage. It was as though the spirit of the black race took possession of him to avenge itself upon the whole race of white tyrants. His eyes flashed, his teeth gleamed in his dark face. He said, “Right I I’ll make love to you in another way. It’s your own fault if you don’t like it.” Recounting this incident to me, she said, “Then he went at me like a tiger, tearing off my clothes, biting and tearing at my flesh, and doing unspeakable things.” She screamed and fought; but presently he sprang away from her, and collapsed in a heap on the floor, blubbering and begging her pardon. She, in spite of her fright and the rough handling, was feeling very guilty herself; and soon she was kneeling over him and comforting him, with blood on her neck and breasts. In ten minutes they were friends again, and making tea.

However, on the following day, the Negro, who seems to have been, at heart a remarkably generous and sensible person, decided that they must part. He could no longer trust himself with her. It was obvious to Maggie, too, that she could not trust herself not to torment him. So it was agreed that they must part. And they parted in style. They spent all their cash on food and drink for the celebration, prepared a feast in their cheap room, ate as much as they could manage, toasted one another, and then the black race and the white race, and the amity of the two, toasted everything and everybody, got happily sozzled and sentimental, petted and embraced one another, and finally, to the surprise of both, fell to serious love-making, and retired to bed together. Maggie, generous and courageous, was determined that the previous night’s mishap should be, so far as possible, wiped out by something better. The Negro was equally anxious to make amends for his past obsequiousness and for his recent brutality. The sense of her danger and of their imminent parting exalted Maggie to respond to him with a new fervour; and her warmth in turn had a tonic effect on him, so that for once he was able to be gentle without being abject, and ardent without being brutal. They slept in peace together; and next morning they parted.

For Maggie, the upshot was that, having at last copiously tasted the forbidden fruit, and having found it both sweet and bitter, she no longer craved it for its own sake. She would henceforth be violently repelled by all sexual contacts that were not patently the vehicle of true love between equals. For with her Negro she had at least experinced enough to be able to imagine what sex could be when it was indeed the expression of full personal love.

Such were the experiences that Maggie refrained from recounting to Victor as they walked along the dark road, side by side, but unlinked. He made one more attempt to gain her confidence. He said, “There’s something painful in your memory, and something you’re a bit ashamed of. If you were to trust me, and share the pain, and the shame too, I might be able to wipe them out for you.” She answered, “No! Not yet, anyhow. You’re not my father inquisitor.” The odd phrase amused him; and he wondered, but did not enquire, whether it was deliberate or due to ignorance. He pressed her no further, but turned the conversation to more general subjects. In the bus, they sat snugly together, but he refrained from holding her hand; and for this she was grateful, yet vaguely disappointed. When the time came to part, he did take her hand. It was a large and capable hand, and the skin was rather coarse. Ineradicable dirt was ingrained in the thumb and forefinger. He raised the hand to his lips, and said, “Think it all over. I’m leaving tomorrow, but I shall come back soon.”

7. UNCERTAIN HAPPINESS

From 1921 to 1924

VICTOR TOLD ME that when he had established himself in his job, he formed a habit of going over to see Maggie every few weeks. They became increasingly friendly, and their friendship (so Maggie subsequently told me) opened up new mental horizons for her. She had always been something of a reader, but her tastes were very undeveloped. Victor introduced her to contemporary writing; and though at first she found much of it exasperating, or too difficult, or downright horrid, she soon, with his help, began to understand what writers like D. H Lawrence and James Joyce were trying to do. She was driven on by her prediliction for the modern; but she did not allow herself to be hypnotized by literary fashion. A fundamental sincerity and common sense saved her from persuading herself that she appreciated, or even that she understood, works that were beyond her.

Of T. S. Eliot, she said that it all sounded marvellous, but she couldn’t make head or tail of it. The scientific fantasies and sociological novels of Wells she could understand, and she read them with zest, and a sense of mind-stretching; but also, she said, with a vague feeling that the whole of this “modern wisdom” was somehow incomplete, perhaps superficial. When Victor introduced her to Freud, she had reacted first with revulsion, then with an exciting sense of emancipation, and finally with mingled enthusiasm and suspicion. “I can see,” she told Victor, “that we are more or less what Freud says we are; but I just can’t believe that is all there is to us.” It was the same with Marxism. She could not bring herself to read more than the Communist Manifesto; but Victor’s own account of Marxist theories fascinated her. It made her realize for the first time the power of economic conditions over men’s minds and actions. But again she had a nagging suspicion. “It’s all terribly clever,” she said, “and I suppose it’s true. But — there must be another truth, too, of a different sort. I mean-people are not just like what he says they are.”

Victor also passed on to her in their many talks a great deal of scrappy scientific and historical information that had never before come her way; information about human evolution, Mendelian laws of heredity, pre-history, the new theories of the structure of atoms, the life-story of stars, and of the great nebulae. Sometimes he overdid it. He would ramble on, absorbed in his own intellectual interests, so that she lost the thread, and her attention would wander. Presently she would break in on his monologue with some bit of frivolity, to bring him back to earth. Then, she told me, she could feel a momentary shock pass through his mind; but almost at once he would adjust himself to her mood. Never was he hurt or superior. Often he was apologetic for his “prosiness”. Latterly, as they became more sensitive to each other, he would himself break off into lighter talk before she had begun to tire. As time passed, she became less easily tired, more determined to worry through to the heart of each subject.

He sometimes put her into a state of fascinated bewilderment by sketchy references to the new physical theories of relativity and the quantum. He himself had absorbed a good deal on these subjects in his scanty spare time, and I have no doubt that he had a gift for presenting it in a vivid way. Maggie herself, though of course she could not follow complicated mathematical arguments, was evidently enthralled by the new picture of the universe that was gradually presented to her. And the scientific attitude itself seems to have been very attractive to her. This, she felt, was the real “modern spirit” that she had always longed to master. Just what she meant by the “modern spirit” she probably could not have said. She might have called it common sense and contempt for superstition. Much later she would have described it as a blend of common sense, daring imagination and rigorous intellectual integrity. Seeing it through Victor’s mind, she saw it at its best. And with his help, and her own freshness of approach, she saw also its snares.

The upshot of all this strange “course in modern thought “, that Victor gave her, was that she came to grasp something of what her Great-Aunt Abigail had meant when she said that the old wisdom and the new wisdom were both necessary and each incomplete without the other.

During this period her relationship with Victor was almost entirely “platonic”, a warm friendship, with the sexual aspect kept well in the background. Sometimes they walked arm-in-arm or hand-in-hand. Sometimes, when they said “goodbye”, she would allow herself to be kissed, and he would respond (she said) with thrilling gentleness but without trace of passion. Little by little she realized that this very odd kind of courtship was having a deep effect on her. Victor became the dominant factor in her life, and she looked forward with impatience to every visit. Moreover, toward him she felt none of that revulsion against physical contact that she had acquired from her unfortunate experiences in Scotland. On the contrary, she found herself longing for greater physical intimacy with Victor.

Yet for many months he remained more like a devoted brother than a lover. Well on in the second year of their acquaintance she herself began to make shy advances. She would cling to his hand, lean enticingly against him, permit herself a new ardour in the parting kiss. But though he certainly never rebuffed her, he responded always with affection rather than passion. Once more the bitter suspicion arose in her mind that he was after all not really physically attracted by her, even if he was not actually repelled. Bewildered and hurt, she ceased to try to “make things easy for him”, and even went so far as to adopt a colder manner, and to refuse ostentatiously even the slight physical contact that he offered. On the rare occasions when he took her hand, she withdrew it.

I learned from Victor himself, in our conversation in my hotel, that his policy had been deliberate. At first, suspecting that she had had unhappy sexual experiences, he determined to win her affection without making any sexual advances to her. Later a new motive confirmed him in this policy of refraining from wooing her. Already before the time when she herself had begun to treat him more warmly, he was becoming painfully aware that his awake personality was, after all, not as securely established as he had supposed. And in these circumstances he felt that he must not take advantage of her new disposition. Indeed, he even thought of putting an end to his visits. But the trouble was as yet slight, and he persuaded himself that so drastic a course was not necessary. (This decision, he confessed to me, was too easily reached, and therefore itself an indication that he was no longer in his most fully lucid state.)

He had been seriously overworking, and he was sometimes desperately tired. At these times he suffered from fierce head-aches, which always ended in an irresistible “attack of sleepiness”. The dread that if he did sleep he might wake up as “the other” drove him to resist sleep to the utmost of his power. He would read or write far into the night, and in the end collapse into heavy sleep in his chair. Several times he remained in this condition till the afternoon of the following day, when he awoke cold, frightened, and unrefreshed. The very fact that he was frightened added to his fright; for when he was really awake he could regard every kind of danger, even the danger of slipping back into his old self, with lofty detachment. He noted also that when he re-examined any work that he had done on the previous evening, it generally seemed to be of poor quality. His only comfort was that, tired and distressed as he was, he at no time lost his grip on the true values. He never reverted to the conventional and snobbish values of the Dolt.

In consequence of this change of his condition, then, Victor was determined not to let himself make love to Maggie. He could not tolerate the thought that she should become entangled with the Dolt. On the other hand, he felt an increased need for her company. And always, when he had seen her, he found himself immediately restored to full clarity of mind. The bracing effect of her presence lasted for several weeks. But sooner or later the trouble would return. After each attack he longed uncontrollably for her; and this very passion, he suspected, was itself evidence that even after the attack had passed, he was not fully himself. For in his most lucid mood, though he longed with equal ardour, his detachment, his fundamental dispassion, enabled him to stand outside his passion and control it. But after an attack, he was so transported with longing for Maggie, that he had no thought but to arrange a meeting with her as soon as possible. Until he found himself actually in her presence he could think of nothing but her, and his own desperate need of her. Yet, strangely, as soon as he reached her, the fog vanished from his mind, and he was completely self-possessed. Though indeed he longed to hold her closely to him and kiss her with ardour, he was entirely capable of treating her with the usual calm friendliness. To do more than this, he felt, would be utterly base.

When Maggie began to make it obvious that warmer treatment would be acceptable, the effect was to make Victor realize even more clearly that it would be unfair to respond. But he was in a dilemma. Things had by now gone too far. If he were to tell her frankly that his grip on himself was weakening, and that he must therefore keep away from her, she might well (since she was of a generous and courageous nature) give herself to him when he was recovering from an attack and unable to control his passion for her.

Another policy suggested itself. He might deliberately give her the impression that he no longer loved her, and so compel her to free herself. But again, he knew that after each attack he would vitiate this plan by clamouring for her. Moreover, he found, to his own surprise, that to deny his love for her was somehow morally repugnant to him. Vaguely he felt that it would be a violation of something more important even than Maggie’s happiness. The thing that he had hoped for, their spiritual unity (as he called it) had already been conceived in their deepening friendship. To destroy this by acting a lie to her, even for her own individual comfort, would be murder of something spiritually vital. Besides, he told himself, even from the point of view of her individual happiness, this ruthless policy would not really succeed. Already she was deeply dependent on him. To break with her would be not merely to inflict on her a period of sharp distress but also to make her feel for ever after that love, even in its fullest expression, was after all open to decay. Such a feeling, coming on top of her past unhappy experiences, might well turn her into an embittered cynic.

Victor spent much of his precious time with Maggie brooding on his dilemma; and this absorption no doubt increased her impression of his aloofness.

The crisis came after a particularly bad attack. He woke from his heavy sleep late in the afternoon; too late to catch the train to an outlying town where he was due to take one of his weekly classes. He woke in a state of overwhelming depression. He was conscious, too, while he was lying between sleep and waking, of a definite revulsion against his whole present life and all his interests. He felt a vague, guilty nostalgia for his former circumstances. Realizing the significance of this little experience, he sprang from his bed in terror that his lucid personality was at last being submerged. But he was still more or less himself; though distraught, and so not himself at his best.

He took a cold bath, dressed, shaved, asked his motherly landlady to give him a meal, and telephoned to the university to say that he was ill and could not keep his appointment. After his meal he wrote a long and emotional letter to Maggie, explaining his past coolness and his present plight, and imploring her to save him and herself by coming to live with him. He also said that he would visit her in a couple of days (on her next free afternoon), so that they could talk the whole matter over and make the necessary arrangements. He ended with passionate endearments, and the statement, “I need you desperately; and you, me. If you come to me, you may suffer terribly, but you will live.”

The receipt of this letter naturally threw Maggie into a state of violent agitation. It was no use to write to him, as he would have left his lodgings before the letter could reach him. When he arrived, she was waiting for him in the little crowd at the exit from the platform. He dropped his bag, seized her in his arms, and pressed his lips hungrily to hers. She responded without reserve, and broke down in tears. The crowd tried not to watch them. It was Victor who disengaged himself, with a heavy sigh. They walked off arm-in-arm, with her hand clinging to his. “Oh, why, why,” she said, “didn’t you tell me about it long ago?” By now Victor had regained full clarity, and was deeply regretting his letter. After a silence, he said, “You must forget all that I wrote to you. At least you must ignore it. I was not myself. I was grossly exaggerating. Now that I am with you, I am properly awake again, and I see how silly I was. The letter simply wasn’t written by me, but by some sort of sleepy half-me. In the train I was longing, longing to have you, and I didn’t care how bad it would be for you. But now I see that I mustn’t drag you down with me. And I mustn’t win you by appealing for your pity. No, the whole thing makes me squirm, now.” She was protesting. “No! no! You have got it all wrong. You must let me come to you and help you. My life is meaningless without you.” But he insisted that he must fight his own battle, and that he would win through; and that when he was quite right again, he would come back to her, and ask her to marry him, and she would be able to choose freely. She replied that she had already made up her mind to join with him. She added, “And don’t you see, the harm is done. We are far too tangled up together for me to live without you, whatever happens. I shall come right away with you now, and stick to you through everything.” He said he could not possibly risk her finding herself married to the Dolt. “But, my dear,” she said, “we needn’t get married. We are married at heart now. We’ll fix things with the law later, when we have won through, and children are coming.” But Victor was immovable. “I should never forgive myself,” he said, “and my shame would spoil everything for us.”

Maggie tried a new line. She said, “You are simply too proud. I don’t believe you do really love me, after all. If you did, you would be glad to let me help you. You love your proud self more than me. You want to let me stay stranded and miserable and useless, just so that you can prove that you don’t depend on anybody. The Victor that I love is not the proud one but the one that cried to me for help.” This remark shook him. But he said, “It’s not myself that I love better than you; it’s — well it’s — O God, I don’t know! It’s something not me and yet in me, using me; something I must be true to at all costs, ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more.’ But it’s not honour merely. It’s — some would say ‘God’ but I don’t know anything about God. It’s — well, the spirit. I must not sin against the spirit. And you mustn’t want me to.”

This conversation was carried on in undertones as they sat with their heads together in the bus that was taking them out to their usual haunts. On the walk itself he tried in vain to lead her off into impersonal matters, but she kept reverting to their problem. Before they parted he promised that he would be more careful not to overtire himself, and he explained that he was going to practise a “new technique of mental discipline” which he felt sure would strengthen him. He added, “You have strengthened me immensely today. Now that I know you know all about it, I feel I shall never slip again.” But she clung to his hand, and wailed, “I want to help, I do so want to help by being with you always.” She made him promise that if he felt that he was not succeeding with his task, he would tell her, and let her come to him at once, before the danger threatened too seriously. He readily promised, and pointed out that in the confused state after an attack he apparently could not help rushing to her. And then, looking into her strange slate-and-russet eyes, he said, “Powerful witch! You had cast your spell on me even before I met you. I think, too, that it was your magic that saved me when I so nearly tied myself to Edith. It was the sight of you at breakfast that did the trick, repulsive creature though you seemed to me then. And it is your magic that jerks me fully awake when I meet you after my attacks.” He kissed her hand, and added, “But remember, you must keep your magic off me for a bit, till I have regained my self-respect.” She agreed, but with misgiving.

During this little speech, Maggie had thought of her great-aunt’s never wholly forgotten prophecy. She wondered.

All she said was, but with the tenderest smile (so he told me), “Proud, selfish man! You don’t really know what love is. I do. Once I didn’t, but now I do. You taught me; and yet you don’t really know, yourself. If you really, really loved me, you wouldn’t stand on your dignity. You’d just say, ‘Look! We are in for a bad time together, but we’ll win through together. And even if we don’t, its’ together we must face the disaster’.” But he replied, “No, my dear, you don’t understand. When I first saw you, we met as equals. I did not know how weak I was. But now — I know I’m morally sick, and I must conquer the devil in me with my own strength before I can meet you as an equal once more.” To this she replied, “My father used to tell us that man could never save himself with his own strength alone. If he could, my father said, it would be bad for him, because it would make him proud; and so, after all, he would be damned. Father used to say it was Christ’s work alone to save us.” Victor thought for a moment, before saying, “I do see that there’s important truth in the old view. I can only be saved by something other than just me; but by something universal, not by another person, not even by you and your magic. Only the spirit itself can save me; and only by simply revealing itself to me more commandingly.”

It was time to part. Lowering his face toward her, he said, “One kiss might be allowed the patient, don’t you think?” Their lips met. She said, “I shall pray for you. I don’t think I believe in God, but I must pray for you.” He smiled, and stepped into the train.

Victor went back to his work greatly refreshed and strengthened. For a month or so, in fact till the end of the winter, all went well. He wrote to her often, and welcomed her letters; but he did not go to see her. He was careful not to overstrain himself, and he pursued his “unorthodox spiritual discipline”, by which he hoped to banish “the Dolt” into the dungeon of his unconscious for ever. He did not tell me much about this new technique, beyond saying that it involved concentrating his attention on the “spirit” at frequent intervals throughout the day, and practising certain spiritual exercises every night before going to bed, and while he was falling asleep. He gave up the policy of resisting sleep. On the contrary, he allowed himself as much as he wanted, which in his lucid state was seldom more than four hours, and generally much less. He told Maggie that the attacks had ceased, that he hoped to be secure in a couple of months, and that he was longing to see her.

Then suddenly the stream of his brief letters ended. She continued to write to him, imploring him for news; but vainly.

8. A DISTRESSING INTERLUDE

From 1923 to 1924

ALL THIS WHILE, it seems, Maggie had kept her promise not to “use her witchcraft on him”. It was an easy promise, for she had no idea how she could break it. But with a view to the possibility that later she might have to exercise whatever powers she had (if indeed she had any), she set about exploring and experimenting. She was handicapped by complete ignorance, and a vague revulsion against the whole matter. For years she had been leaning more and more toward common sense, matter-of-factness, natural science. Apart from shadowy memories of her great-aunt’s stones, and of her own doubtful paranormal experiences in early youth, and the obviously quite uncritical beliefs of some of her acquaintances, she had no reason to believe in “the occult “.

She began to attend some sort of spiritualist seance that was held weekly in her neighbourhood. She tried to test the medium by asking for an interview with her dead brother. The results were not completely negative, but far too ambiguous to satisfy Maggie’s shrewd intelligence. On the other hand, she could not help being impressed by the fact that the medium at once treated her as a colleague, and told her that she must “learn quickly to use her powers, or it would be too late”. But each week she became more violently hostile to the emotional atmosphere of the seances. Had she attended the meetings in her early impressionable period, under the influence of her great- aunt, she might well have accepted without question these all-too- human communications from the dead, these carefully ambiguous prophecies, these bits of platitudinous advice given to simple souls in the grip of real heart-rending conflicts, or misfortunes. On the other hand, had she encountered “spiritualism” in the stage when she was reacting strongly against the old ways and values, she would have scornfully dismissed the whole matter as trickery. But now, under the influence of Victor’s cautious criticism alike of the old and the new superstitions, and moreover stirred by the mystery of her relation with him, she was unable either to accept or reject, but was forced to remain in painful doubt. Something real and out of the ordinary, she felt, was indeed sometimes at work in the seances; but far more often nothing happened that could not plausibly be explained as a combination of coincidence and deception.

On one occasion tile medium gave a display of “psychometry”. A sitter would hand her some personal article such as a glove or scarf or watch, and after fingering it for a while she would make pronouncements abut the character or circumstances of the owner. Maggie produced a pencil that Victor had formerly carried in his pocket. The medium handled it in silence for some time; then, in a voice no longer luscious and soothing but staccato and uneasy, she said, “There’s something queer about this, something that goes beyond my powers. There’s someone who is — well more than human, more than ordinary-human; but-torn apart, somehow. He needs help. But he’s proud. Help him at once, even if he’s too proud.” She paused, then hastily returned the pencil, saying. “Take it! I’m frightened.” Naturally Maggie was impressed by this reaction; and alarmed by the advice. But later, during a very emotional scene in which “ectoplasm” was supposed to have issued from the medium’s mouth. Maggie had an access of revulsion and scepticism. Several of the company were profoundly impressed, and in a state verging on hysterics. Maggie, on a sudden impulse, reached out and snatched the “ectoplasm “. which turned out to be a piece of crepe. There was an uproar. The medium angrily maintained that the “young witch” had used her powers to change the genuine ectoplasm into a seeming piece of crepe, and that she herself was gravely damaged by the loss of part of her psychical anatomy. She then screamed, and fell into a coma. So at least most of the group believed. But Maggie was convinced that she was shamming, and watching all the while under lowered eyelids. Maggie ceased to attend the meetings.

But she was undertaking experiments of her own. In the hotel dining- room, when she was standing waiting while the residents finished a course, she would concentrate her attention on one of them, and try to will him (or her) to turn and look at her, or to sneeze, or show a change of mood. Occasionally she seemed to have a striking success; but generally nothing happened. She could not exclude the possibility that her seeming successes were illusory.

One of the residents was a sad and taciturn old lady. Maggie determined to make her talk to people and enjoy life. After a week or so of concentration on her “patient “, Maggie was delighted to see the ancient dame looking about her at her fellow guests with a bright and interested expression. Next day she actually opened a conversation with a young woman who sat alone at the next table. She seemed to have pleased the girl, for henceforth they shared a table, and were at no loss for conversation. This remarkable change in the old lady went far to convince Maggie that she had indeed supernormal powers. But her conviction was shaken when she overheard “her patient” remark to the younger woman that her doctor’s new medicine seemed to have worked a miraculous cure of the indigestion that had overclouded her life for twenty years.

Another of the residents was a morose man well advanced in middle age, who drank far too much, and indeed seemed to have nothing else to do. Mindful of Victor, Maggie considered him a very suitable subject for experiment; for he was obviously, as she put it to herself, “a decent sort gone wrong”. Her general aim was to find some way of “waking” people to what Victor would have called the most lucid and sensitive range of consciousness possible to them. If she could learn this art, she would be equipped to help Victor to keep the Dolt at bay for ever.

She had no certainty that she had any powers at all; but if she had, they seemed to consist at bottom in the power to direct the “patient’s” attention to something within the range of his vision but persistently ignored.

She began her new experiment by trying to make her man notice things in the room; the sunlight falling on a vase of daffodils, the sleek dignity of the hotel cat as it paced across the floor, the man-to-man relations of a mother and her small boy at a neighbouring table, the crisply rippling patter of two French voices at the far end of the room, the far from obvious expression of saintliness that sometimes interfered with the sophisticated manner of the young woman at the old lady’s table. After some days she was inclined to think that she was having a certain amount of success. She now tried to direct her “patient’s” attention to the opinion that the other residents had of him, carefully selecting those who did not loathe or despise him but were grieved that a man who must formerly have been well-set-up and attractive should have gone to pieces. After a few days she thought he was spending less time in the bar. Then he gave up alcohol entirely. Maggie was convinced that her experiment was succeeding. Then one day as she was about to enter the lounge to attend to the fire, she heard her “patient” within the room earnestly saying, to someone unseen, “By simply being yourself, you have saved me. If you won’t accept me, I shall go to pieces again.” Maggie stood to listen. The voice of the sophisticated young woman replied, “I tell you it’s no good, I hardly know you. I don’t intend to marry you for your money, and I didn’t save you. You must have saved yourself. Please let me go!” There was a sound as of a slight scuffle, and Maggie hastily retired. Later, as she was serving at dinner she overheard a snatch of conversation between the young woman and her aged friend. “I merely smiled at him, no more; and now I am supposed to be his guardian angel.”

The upshot of this experiment, like the others, was that Maggie was still uncertain whether she really had “magical” powers; but on the whole she was sufficiently encouraged to pursue her experiments. It even seemed that she was working in the right direction for their development as a means of helping Victor.

When it was clear that the flow of letters from Victor had ceased, she felt that she was absolved from her promise to refrain from influencing him, and she applied such technique as she had acquired to the task of strengthening the lucid Victor against his somnolent other self. But this was a far more formidable venture than any of her experiments, since Victor was at a distance. And she had no means of knowing how, if at all, he was responding. On the whole, she felt that the most hopeful method was to transmit to Victor clear images of her own face, and memories of their most stimulating conversations. With this end in view she used to steal moments to gaze at herself in a mirror, so that she might have as precise an image as possible to send to Victor.

Meanwhile she was becoming more and more anxious and impatient. At last she decided to go over to Victor’s town and make enquiries at his address, well aware that by doing so she might compromise both herself and Victor. What she learned from Victor’s landlady was very disturbing.

I will tell the story as I was told it by Victor himself in our London hotel. After his last visit to Maggie, he had no further attacks. He conscientiously practised his new “discipline” and avoided overstrain. As time passed, he became confident that he was once more firmly established, and little by little he turned less careful. At the end of the session he attended a “social” organized by the students in a distant town. On this occasion, in order to enter into the spirit of the party, he allowed himself a dispensation from his temporary total abstinence from alcohol, and he drank a fair amount of beer. I have already mentioned that in his awake state he was little affected by alcohol. On this occasion, however, he noticed a slight dizziness. He therefore refused any more drinks. It is not clear whether the disaster was brought on by alcohol or by the fact that on the journey home in the train a heavy suitcase fell from the rack above him on to his head, and for a moment he was stunned. He arrived in his lodgings very tired, and with a splitting headache. He went straight to bed.

Next day he awoke as “the Dolt”. He had therefore no recollection of events since he stood at the altar to be married to Edith two years earlier. He woke in broad daylight and in a completely unknown and rather cheap little bedroom. Under the pillow he found his own wrist- watch. It registered 10.20. He sprang out of bed, bewildered, and with a throbbing head. On a chair were clothes, some of which he recognized. On the dressing table was some loose cash, a wallet, pen, pencil, and so on, most of which he recognized. He put on his familiar dressing gown, which was far shabbier than he had supposed it, and opened the door, which led into an obviously “lodging-house” sitting- room. The fire in the grate had been recently fed. The table was laid for breakfast for one, but had not been used. A newspaper lay folded on the plate. It was the Manchester Guardian, a very wrong-headed paper from the Dolt’s point of view. Victor glanced at the date, February 24th, 1923. He subsided in an easy chair, feeling sick and frightened.

On the opposite chair was a pile of books and papers. He reached out for some of these. The books were mostly inscribed “Victor Smith” (not Cadogan-Smith), and were dry tomes on industrial history. The papers were written in a handwriting that was presumably his own, but there was something strange about it. Though neater and more legible, it struck him as less impressive than his own dashing hand.

Casting the papers aside, he opened the other door of the sitting- room, in search of the lavatory and bathroom. After a hasty wash and shave, he went back to his bedroom to dress, then returned to sit by the fire and consider his position. Taking out his wallet, he found in it two pound notes and an opened letter addressed in a careful but unformed hand to “Victor Smith” (not even Mr.), c/o Mrs. Wheelwright, at an address in a Yorkshire provincial town. Inside were a letter and a photograph of a remarkably ugly girl whom he recognized as one of the waitresses at the hotel where he had stayed for his wedding. The letter began “Dearest Victor”, and continued in the same strain, with many references to someone called “The Dolt”, against whom the writer, “Maggie”, wanted to help Victor in some mysterious way. Victor felt an irrationally violent surge of hostility to the girl. He threw letter and photograph into the fire.

By the mantelpiece there was a bell-push. Victor pressed it. After a while a smiling, motherly, middle-aged woman appeared. She said, “Good-morning, Mr. Smith! You have had a good lie-in!” Then she noticed something unusual about her lodger. In a rather affected voice, very unlike the voice she knew as Victor’s (so she told Maggie), he demanded his breakfast. This was a shock to Mrs. Wheelwright, for it had been his habit to go downstairs and talk to his good friend and landlady while she cooked his bacon. Bewildered, she stood silent for a moment. Victor added coldly, “As soon as possible, please.” She left him.

Continuing his exploration of the room, he found a cheque-book, a bank passbook (showing a balance of some forty pounds), several folios of neat notes on economics and industrial history, a file of correspondence, mostly about adult educational arrangements, and a small collection of letters from Maggie. These he read through with increasing disgust and horror. In one of them Maggie told the story of her relations with low-class men in Aberdeen, and ended with an account of her adventures with her Negro lover. When the Dolt had finished reading the whole bundle, he flung them into the fire and stabbed at them with the poker till all were safely burnt. This act of self-emancipation gave him (so the awakened Victor told me during our long talk in the hotel) an extravagant vindictive satisfaction.

Mrs. Wheelwright returned with the breakfast. He announced that he would be leaving during the afternoon, and asked for his bill. She expressed surprise that he was starting on his holiday so soon. He said he was leaving for good. She was distressed, and said, “But you have always seemed so happy here. And you know how I love having you. You are like a son, more than a lodger.” Tears were in her eyes, and she approached to put a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Please, tell me what’s the matter.” He shrank away from her, and said merely, “I am changing my work, and leaving this town. The bill, please.” She left him. Over breakfast he looked up trains to his father’s home. When his meal was done he piled all the notes and correspondence together. Mrs. Wheelwright brought the bill. He wrote a cheque, and made no offer to pay her I anything additional on account of leaving without notice. She did not mention the matter, being more concerned with their personal than their financial relations. He told her to burn the lecture notes and correspondence, and dispose of the books as she thought fit. He then went in search of his bank and drew out all that would remain of his balance after the payment of Mrs. Wheelwright’s bill. Returning to his lodgings, he packed his possessions in two large suitcases that he found under the bed, telephoned for a taxi, gave his tearful landlady a perfunctory “goodbye”, and left for the station.

My account of Sir Geoffrey’s dealings with his son at this time is based partly on a long conversation with the old gentleman himself in the following year, while I was still in France. Knowing my admiration for, and intimacy with, his son, he asked me to meet him in Paris when he was on his way through to the Riviera. I gave him all the help I could in his effort to understand Victor’s case; and in return he told me, with considerable emotion, about the happenings which I am about to relate. I was surprised to find him so ready to help. As I shall tell in due course, he had come to feel a sharp conflict of loyalties in his own heart over the two antagonistic personalities of his son. Evidently it was a relief to him to unburden himself.

At the time when “the Dolt” suddenly appeared at Sir Geoffrey’s country house, the father had long ago overcome the indignation which he had felt over his son’s marriage fiasco, and he had several times written to Victor to persuade him to come back and start a new business career. But the awake Victor had always firmly though amiably refused, declaring that he must, for a while at least, make a complete break with his past. He never told his father that he regarded his former self as not himself at all.

But now at last Victor had come of his own accord. He was obviously in a state of great distress and confusion. He at once told his father that he had lost all memory of the events that had happened since he stood at the altar for marriage. When his father told him of his outrageous conduct, and that he had not married Edith after all, he was overwhelmed with mortification. The consequent ruin of his business career deemed to distress him far more than the harm he had done to Edith.

Sir Geoffrey suggested that his son ought to have medical attention, but Victor was violently opposed to “getting into the clutches of the doctors”. It was decided that for a while he should remain quietly at home to rest and consider his plans. Sir Geoffrey was much distressed by his son’s distress; and at the same time relieved to learn that Victor’s disgraceful conduct had been due to definite mental aberration. He was eager to believe that the young man’s other personality must be no more than a perverted and crippled part of his “true self”. How otherwise could he have treated Edith so shamefully, and sacrifice his own career just when he was finding his feet? How otherwise could he have got himself entangled with a waitress, and moreover with one who, so Victor affirmed, was so plain, uneducated, and coarse-grained. The Dolt had at first intended to keep silent about this disreputable business, but in the end he had been unable to refrain from seeking his father’s sympathy and advice. In former days he had seldom taken his father into his confidence, but in his present suffering he seemed to long to pour out his woes.

It was through this new talkativeness that he first made Sir Geoffrey wonder whether the Victor whom he had known in the past, and had now with him, was quite such an admirable person as he had formerly supposed. Evidently in the old days the son had successfully maintained a mask such as his father could respect; though even then Sir Geoffrey had sometimes felt disturbed by Victor’s ruthless “realism” in dealings with persons less fortunate than himself. Now, the harsh snobbery and careerism of the boy was becoming painfully obvious. His father was eager to excuse this as an exaggerated revulsion from the other personality; but he did seriously begin to wonder which of his “two sons” was in fact the more developed and integrated person.

In the end Sir Geoffrey decided on two actions. He would privately consult a personal friend who was a distinguished psychiatrist, telling him all that he knew of Victor’s case, and arranging for his friend to meet Victor casually and “accidentally”, so as to be able to study the unhappy young man without betraying the fact that he was doing so.

In addition, Sir Geoffrey decided to make some discreet investigations about the doings of the other personality during the previous three years. He wrote to the Extramural Department of the university under which Victor had worked, saying that his son had come home suffering from a serious mental breakdown, and requesting, for medical purposes, an account of his recent life, and the opinion of his employers about him. Did he, for instance, ever show signs of mental disorder? Sir Geoffrey received a prompt reply, to the effect that Victor’s disappearance had surprised and distressed all who knew him, and that he was an able scholar and a brilliant teacher universally admired and liked. The letter continued, “Far from showing signs of mental disorder, he struck us as thoroughly sane. No doubt some of his opinions were novel and daring, but as a person he was always completely reliable and capable of shrewd judgment about individuals. His, obviously, is a very original mind, and he has an extraordinary gift of sympathetic insight into the minds of others. If all goes well, he should some day make an outstanding contribution to social thought.” Enclosed was a cheque for Victor’s services during the recent session. This, it was explained, had been returned from his lodgings, which he had left without giving an address.

Pursuing his researches, Sir Geoffrey contrived to visit Victor’s recent landlady, of course without telling the young man himself. Mrs. Wheelwright was overawed by the well-dressed, and slightly pompous visitor, who introduced himself with a visiting card inscribed “Sir Geoffrey Cadogan-Smith”. But the two had a common interest in Victor; and she was soon unburdening her heart of warm feelings and anxiety on behalf of her lodger, who, she said, had been more like a son to her. He gave her no trouble, he helped her with odd jobs in the house, he nursed her and cooked for her when she was down with ‘flu, he had a way of making her feel “wanted”, and often she found herself talking freely to him about her private affairs, including her great tragedy, the loss of her husband and only son in the recent war. She assured Sir Geoffrey that “he was one in a thousand, was my Mr. Smith”. Sir Geoffrey made discreet enquiries about Victor’s relations with a certain young woman. But on this subject she could not or would not help him. She said merely that Victor had spoken of a young lady whom he hoped to marry some day, but he must not do so until he was sure he was good enough for her. He had shown her the girl’s photograph. A strange-looking young lady, not a beauty, but she might be very good- hearted. Probably she was not really half good enough for Mr. Smith.

Sir Geoffrey was too much of an aristocrat (or would-be aristocrat) not to feel that his son’s hob-nobbing with persons of the lower orders was a mistake. It sprang from sentimental idealism, and was probably a morbid reaction against the snobbery of the other Victor. All the same the father could not help being impressed by the way in which his “unknown son” had won people’s hearts.

Hoping for some further insight into Victor’s mind, he said he would take a glance at his son’s books. As he was casting his eyes over the shelves, he was disturbed to notice, along with the solid works on economics and history, which were the tools of Victor’s trade, a number of socialistic and even Marxist tracts. There were also works on psychology by that dirty-minded fellow, Freud, who was becoming fashionable; also a few volumes on the new mind-twisting theory of relativity; and a sprinkling of modern poetry, which, Sir Geoffrey felt, was going badly astray.

While Sir Geoffrey was poking about among his son’s books, Mrs. Wheelwright had continued prattling on about Victor. But presently she made a statement that attracted her visitor’s attention. On the day of his departure Victor had told her to burn all his notes, but she had not been able to bring herself to do so. She had stored them in her own room. Perhaps it would be a breach of confidence to let the father see the son’s private papers; but perhaps, for her lodger’s own sake, she ought to show them, in case they threw any light on his “trouble”. Sir Geoffrey urged her to let him take them away to study at leisure; but this she firmly refused to allow. Finally it was agreed that he should stay on for a few hours to study them in her house. She gladly provided Sir Geoffrey with a meal, and left him to himself.

Most of the notes which she entrusted to him were material for lectures, quite unexceptionable from Sir Geoffrey’s point of view, save for a general tendency to argue that throughout history the rich had given the poor a raw deal, and that this, would continue until the control of “the major means of production” was in the hands of the representatives of the people. But there was also a crowded notebook which was obviously the first draft of a book in which Victor was attempting to state his whole philosophy of life. Sir Geoffrey was soon deeply absorbed in this. Much struck him as wild and dangerous stuff, much he sadly recognized, was simply beyond him, parts expressed with great clarity ideas that he and his generation had been vainly trying to formulate. Gradually it was borne in on the father that, however wrong-headed and revolutionary his “unknown son” might be in some respects, his was indeed a very original mind. Sir Geoffrey even began to entertain the possibility that, when they differed, the son might not always be in the wrong. But no! The boy was still young and extravagant; also, perhaps, unbalanced owing to his mental disorder. Sir Geoffrey came to a passage of veiled autobiography stating that each of us is really two men, a dolt and a being of sensibility and intelligence. There followed a very moving account of the struggle between the two. Suddenly the father became painfully conscious of the fact that he was prying. Reluctantly he closed the notebook, summoned Mrs. Wheelwright and gave all the manuscripts back into her charge.

Before he left, the landlady showed him a treasured photograph of her recent lodger. Sir Geoffrey was struck both by the likeness to his known son, and to certain differences. The eyes were alert and smiling, the mouth fuller yet firmer. Sir Geoffrey looked long at the photograph, then handed it back in silence.

On the journey home he had much to occupy his mind. His researches had gone far to confirm his suspicion that his other, unknown son, was indeed a completer man than the son to whom he was now returning. What then ought he to do, or rather, try to do? It was all too likely that he could do nothing. Then what, at any rate, should he hope for? Should he desire the re-establishment of his familiar Victor, of whom in the past he had often been proud on account of his successes and his rather stereotyped brilliance; and for whom, in spite of misgivings, he still-retained a strong paternal affection? Or should he hope for the final annihilation of the familiar Victor for the sake of that other Victor, whom he did not know, and had never even met; that eccentric, remarkable, rather wrong-headed and dangerous but warm-hearted, creative intelligence? Or should he perhaps rather look for some sort of integration of the two Victors in one complete individual? On the whole his intellect affirmed that the familiar Victor was by now, at any rate, a poor creature, and the other an outstanding personality. But to his paternal heart the familiar though no longer respected son remained irrationally dearer than the brilliant stranger. To work for the familiar son’s annihilation seemed like murder.

When Sir Geoffrey met his son at home, he was oppressed by the contrast with Mrs. Wheelwright’s photograph of the other son. The sagging eyelids, the drooping ends of the mouth, gave an impression of humourless self-concern. The father reminded himself that this morbid condition was, of course, exaggerated by the boy’s present unhappy state. His conversation, too, contrasted unfavourably with the other’s manuscript which Sir Geoffrey had so recently been reading. The present Victor seemed to be obsessed with anxiety to wriggle back into his former post. Could his father pull wires for him? After all, he argued, in spite of aberrations his record had not been undistinguished. And what about Edith? Was there any chance that she would forgive him and marry him after all? When he learned that Edith was already married he was distressed, but not broken-hearted. Indeed, to his father’s shame he was soon making enquiries about other eligible girls.

When Sir Geoffrey suggested that he had better not worry over marriage till he was cured of his illness, Victor replied with some warmth, “But don’t you see! I must get myself legally tied to some decent girl as soon as possible. If I go sick again, I may marry that awful slut. But if I am already legally tied to another, the second marriage will be invalid.” Sir Geoffrey was shocked by this heartless remark. He protested that it was a low trick to marry a girl simply to render a subsequent marriage bigamous. Victor hastily added that of course he was assuming that he would find a girl whom he really loved. Sir Geoffrey could not help contrasting the present Victor’s attitude with the other’s scruples about marrying Maggie.

In due course Sir Geoffrey’s psychiatrist friend turned up, and contrived to have a good deal of conversation with Victor. He was also told the results of Sir Geoffrey’s researches. He was convinced that the other Victor was the real Victor, or rather the more developed part of the whole Victor, and the present Victor a mere splinter. Integration of the two personalities, he suggested might produce a Victor no less brilliant than the absent one, but also better balanced. He insisted that the case could not be tackled unless the young man was brought to his private mental home for constant treatment. Sir Geoffrey promised that he would try to persuade his son voluntarily to comply with this suggestion. But when he broached the matter, Victor responded with neurotic anger and self-pity.

The weeks slipped by. Nothing was done about recovering Victor’s job. Sir Geoffrey was convinced, but did not say so, that the boy was in no fit state to undertake responsibility. He was still subject to attacks of black depression, and he sometimes fell into a state verging on coma. When he was more or less fit, he spent most of his time motoring very fast about the country. (His sports car had been preserved for him.) He also did a good deal of shooting. And he tried to stage a comeback into local society. In this he was not very successful, for people were on their guard against anyone who was known to have hehaved eccentrically.

After a couple of months it was clear to Sir Geoffrey that his son was not making any progress. He complained of violent headaches, which often ended in a twelve-hour sleep. On one occasion he declared that he was fighting desperately for sanity “against the forces of darkness”. Pressed to amplify this statement, he said that ideas utterly alien to his nature kept breaking in on him, crazy fragments of thought about social strife, about irreligion, about sexual licentiousness. Also he complained that he was being haunted by “the filthy face of the slut”. Sir Geoffrey reluctantly decided that the time was at hand when it would be necessary to over-ride Victor’s wishes and send him away for treatment.

The idea did cross his mind that Maggie might possibly be able to settle the conflict of the two Victors by restoring the one whom she loved. He considered making contact with her, but postponed doing so, fearing awkward complications. It was Maggie herself who finally took action.

When at last she visited Victor’s lodgings, she found his landlady very much on her guard, for she did not consider that this ugly girl was good enough for her dear lodger. However, Maggie’s obvious sincerity and distress gradually won her, and she told Maggie of Sir Geoffrey’s visit, and gave his address. Maggie promptly wrote, telling him the main facts about her relations with his son, and imploring him to let her meet Victor, in the hope that her presence might “restore him to sanity”. Meanwhile she privately redoubled her efforts to cure him by telepathic influence.

Sir Geoffrey feared that if Victor were confronted with Maggie in person he would be driven to frenzy, and might break down completely. But the father came to feel that at least he had better meet the girl himself to form some opinion of her character, with a view to enlisting her help in some way or other, if in his view she passed muster. So he replied to her letter cautiously, and said he would prefer to discuss the whole matter with her before allowing her to see his son. He therefore proposed to meet her. At first he found himself in some doubt about the correct way of effecting an interview with a servant girl on such a delicate subject; but a little consideration made him realize that, if Maggie was to be of any use at all, she must be treated with the respect due to the woman whom Victor had admired. He therefore arranged to have her to lunch on her “day off” in a respectable though unobtrusive restaurant in the town where she worked.

Maggie’s presence had a disturbing effect on Sir Geoffrey. Like the Dolt, he found her face repugnant; but like the true Victor he was attracted by her direct and genial personality. Indeed, by the time they had reached the coffee he was beginning, in spite of his conventional standards of feminine beauty, to feel a fascination even in her strange face. Obviously she was of far too lowly a social class to be a desirable match for the son of a successful colonial administrator; but, damn it, she was not the slut that the present Victor had described. Indeed, much to his surprise Sir Geoffrey found his manner changing from formal politeness to real friendliness. But he refused to let Maggie see his son. The shock, he insisted, would be too great. Instead, he proposed to tell Victor that he had met her, and to build up in the young man’s mind a true picture of the girl whom, in his other phase, he loved. With this end in view he encouraged Maggie to tell him more about her past relations with his son, and her own past life. This she gladly did, trying (as she told me) to infuse the old gentleman’s mind with a sense of the joyful harmony and mutual dependence that had sprung up between Victor and herself. Excusably she said nothing about the more sordid side of her life in Aberdeen and Glasgow.

When Sir Geoffrey reached home and met Victor again, his son seemed to sense that his father had somehow betrayed him. Indeed, he became so suspicious and despondent that Sir Geoffrey felt it would be unwise to tell him about the recent interview while he was so unbalanced. Next day Victor complained of a “terrible headache”, and vertigo. “That foul woman,” he said, “has been attacking me again, It’s worse than ever.” Sir Geoffrey changed his mind and took the plunge. “You have got the girl all wrong,” he said. “I have seen her, and though she certainly is remarkably plain, she strikes me as being an admirable person.” Victor had stretched himself out on a couch, and at this information he fell into a spluttering, trembling, impotent rage. Presently he closed his eyes and assumed the expression of a martyr. His father felt acute disgust in watching his son, so he rose and walked about the room, recounting his impressions of Maggie. Presently he stopped, and noticed that Victor was apparently asleep, with his head back and his jaw dropped. His father tried to wake him, but he was in a deep coma. Wondering what to do next, Sir Geoffrey sat down and watched his son. Presently the mouth closed, the eyes opened. Sir Geoffrey noticed a subtle change of expression. The eyes were wide and alert. The father saw at once that he was confronted with the face of the photograph in Mrs. Wheelwright’s possession. Victor sat up, stretched his arms, and laughed. He said, “Thank God I’m awake again!” For a few seconds only, he looked about him in some bewilderment. Then his eyes met his father’s with a steady, smiling gaze. Presently he said, “Thanks, Dad, for being so good to me during these wretched weeks, and coming round to take my side against that somnolent ass that masquerades as me.” Sir Geoffrey said nothing. He was fascinated by the change in his son. Victor said, “Look! After lunch I’ll rush off to see Maggie and get everything straight. Then, if I may, I’ll come back here some time, and tell you all about her. Believe me, I appreciate my father much better: than that other son does; specially after these weeks, and after what you said about Maggie just now.” He smiled brightly, like the photograph.

The new Victor was, of course in possession of the old Victor’s memories. After his moment of bewilderment, he knew perfectly well where he was, and had a clear recollection of all the Dolt’s conversations with his father. “Of course,” he told me, “I was not awake at the time, but after only a few seconds of confusion I could remember all that I had done in that foul sleep-walk of a life.” Latterly the Dolt had been tormented by obsessive images and thoughts that (said Victor) must have originated with Maggie. He felt confident that some strange telepathic influence from Maggie had been the main cause of his waking to his true self. His one desire was to see her at once and tell her that she had saved him. His father tried to persuade him to stay at least for one night to rest, but Victor said that he would feel much more secure if he could be with Maggie that very day. Sir Geoffrey admitted the force of this argument.

Father and son had a long talk before they parted. Sir Geoffrey admitted that he had read part of Victor’s manuscript, and they drifted into a general discussion. The upshot for Sir Geoffrey was that he had no further doubt as to which was the better Victor; and he saw that this new Victor must be helped by every possible means to become firmly established. Yet he could not feel for the new Victor the warm parental affection which he had always felt for the familiar Victor, even when he had been most critical of him. This new son of his was a stranger; a brilliant and a generous-minded stranger, no doubt, but a person whom his father did not really know, and one whose opinions were in many ways rash and subversive. Though the old Victor had treated him with a kind of respectful contempt, the father had never felt resentful; probably because he so earnestly longed to be able to regard his son as his superior. On the other hand, the new Victor treated his father with man-to-man equality and friendliness. But at every turn his quick mind had to wait for the old man to catch up. When the father had occasion to protest against the wild views of the son, Victor attended earnestly to his criticism, but demolished it ruthlessly, not hesitating to charge his parent with sheer muddle- headedness. His attitude was that of a friendly but outspoken equal. Sir Geoffrey had been accustomed to deference. At first he was a little bewildered.

Victor wired to Maggie to expect him that evening, and to Mrs. Wheelwright to re-engage his rooms, if they were still vacant. When he met Maggie he told her that she had saved him. The detached reader will note that there is no real proof that she ever did on any occasion actually exercise any supernormal or occult powers over him. The dreams and visions that plagued the Dolt might well have risen from the suppressed side of his own nature. On the other hand, the final changeover to the true Victor may, of course, be fairly plausibly explained as the work of some sort of telepathic influence from Maggie, director through the medium of Sir Geoffrey, whose mind had so recently been deeply affected by her. This is what Maggie and Victor believed; but the sceptic is quite entitled to his doubts. Subsequent events, which I shall relate in due course, do not suggest to me that Maggie’s supernormal powers, if they existed, were very effective. Victor, however, was always convinced that they had saved him, and that he constantly depended on her influence.

Maggie was now determined to live with Victor so as to use all her influence to keep the Dolt at bay. She proposed to give a month’s notice to her employers and have the wedding as soon as she was free. Victor was torn between the desire to be united with Maggie as soon as possible and fear of tying her to the Dolt. She confidently believed that the Dolt could never return as long as she was constantly with Victor. The awake Victor was still dismayed by the recent dominance of the Dolt, and therefore hesitant about involving Maggie in a permanent relationship. In the end it was agreed that they should wait for a few weeks to see how things went.

Time passed, and it did indeed seem that Victor was thoroughly re- established in self-possession. He met Maggie every week, and they slid easily back into the old life, with the difference that they were now acknowledged lovers, and she proudly wore an engagement ring. They frequented all their old haunts, and everything was transfigured by the knowledge that now at last they were pledged to one another. Yet the future was uncertain, for Victor still retained his scruples.

The time came for Maggie to have her short annual holiday. In the past she had generally used it for a hasty visit to Shetland, though on one occasion she had joined Katie in a trip to London. This time, both she and Victor assumed that the two of them would spend Maggie’s holiday together. But in what capacity? As newly-weds? As unmarried lovers? If so, they would certainly have to masquerade as a married pair if they wanted to share a room. But the scruples which held Victor back from marrying Maggie, prevented him also from having a temporary union with her. He himself (he told me) scarcely understood his motive. Obviously it was not conventional morality that restrained him, for it had not restrained him before. Vaguely he felt that to consummate their “spiritual marriage”, even without a legal union, would entangle her too deeply with him to allow her to free herself if the Dolt were to return. Always he was haunted by the fear that he might at any moment give place to the Dolt. Moreover, he felt that, quite apart from his own uncertainty, it would be wiser, in view of Maggie’s former revulsion against sex, not to mate with her until they were even more deeply involved mentally.

In view of these scruples, Victor suggested to Maggie that they should go on holiday together as brother and sister. This proposal distressed Maggie. It revived her old suspicion that, in spite of all his affection for her, Victor suffered from an unacknowledged physical repulsion. This suspicion in turn, made her behave less warmly toward him.

However, they spent their holiday as he wished. They did a walking tour in the Lakes, from Youth Hostel to Youth Hostel; and they walked so strenuously that their vow of chastity was re-enforced by fatigue. They climbed all the main heights, for Maggie was a sturdy young woman and eager to prove her mettle. Victor persuaded her to venture on a little rock-climbing, “just to know what it’s like”, but she soon decided that “risking one’s neck for the mere thrill of it was a mug’s game”. Sitting on the loose summit of Nape’s Needle, she vowed that if she got down safely she would never climb again. Victor did not press her. Indeed, he admitted that, if you felt no need to test yourself, it was foolish to do so. Rock-climbing therefore gave place to scrambling and walking, watching buzzards and ravens, admiring the skill of sheep-dogs, conversing with their masters, bathing in tams, and looking forward to the next meal. One day on High Street they encountered seven red deer, including a “stag of ten”. This incident stirred them both, but especially Victor. “Extraordinary,” he told me, “how the wild animal in its native environment seems quite a different creature from the same kind in the zoo. Those free beasts were so lithe and lean and sleek, in fact in perfect training. They stood for a moment taking the scent of us with dilating nostrils, then turned and cantered away over the deep heather with their easy bounds, like sailing boats in a fair breeze, breasting the waves. Somehow we felt that, though we were much cleverer animals, they had something more important than cleverness, something that we had lost, perfect rapport with the environment, harmony with the universe, intimacy with God!” Victor laughed, apologizing for this fantasy.

It was shortly after this holiday that Victor wrote to me to suggest a meeting.

Talking late into the night in the hotel lounge, he at last completed his story. He looked at me quizzically, and said, “Well, what would you do in my position? Marry her? Live with her ‘in sin’? Carry on still longer in the present uncomfortable way? Or cut adrift altogether?” All I could find to say was that if he did not want to entangle her, he should not have allowed himself to see so much of her. He said, “Of course! But here I am, in a fix. What would you do now?” After a long silence, I brought myself to say, “Either marry her as soon as possible, or give her up completely. Don’t go on havering.” For some minutes he said nothing. Then, knocking out his pipe and rising, he said “Well, thanks! You are a damned good listener. Queer how talking to you clears my mind, even if I don’t finally act on your advice.” We both went up to our rooms.

9. VICTOR FORGES AHEAD

From 1924 to 1929

IT WAS OVER FIVE YEARS before I met Victor again. During most of this time I was teaching in India. I had always wanted an opportunity to see the East; and when the chance came to take up a post as lecturer in English in an Indian college, I accepted it. Not till 1929 did I return to England on leave. Victor had occasionally written to me, but he was not a painstaking correspondent, and I knew little of his affairs except the bare fact that, very soon after I had seen him, Maggie had come to live with him. In the eyes of the law they were still unmarried, because he was still anxious lest he should have another relapse. But in spirit they were man and wife. The actual marriage was not to come till later, when Victor felt himself completely secure, and it was time for Maggie to have children.

When at last I visited them, I found them established in a little suburban house in the north-country town which was the centre from which Victor worked. Victor opened the door to me himself, and greeted me warmly. As we held each other’s hands in greeting, I stared at him. For he had changed. The years had naturally left a mark on his face, but there was something there besides the signs of maturity. There was a new expression which I could not yet decipher, a curious combination of gentleness about the eyes and hardness or perhaps bitterness about the lips. I stared so long that he laughed and said, “Oh, yes, I’ve weathered a lot. So have you, but you look quite well, though a bit dried up with the sun.”

He took my hat and coat, and called for Maggie. She emerged from the kitchen with a welcoming smile that gave me some hint of the beauty that Victor alone could see in her. Her features were even more pronounced and strange than they had been when I saw her some eight years earlier, as a waitress. But in spite of the years, and a few lines on the forehead and round the eyes, she looked quite young; partly, no doubt because her face was bronzed from a recent holiday, but more because of a general air of well-being and zest.

The little sitting-room was sparsely furnished, mostly in the light wood that was then becoming modish. Over the mantelpiece was a print of a Breughel. On another wall were some rather luscious forest scenes which I could not believe to be quite in accord with Victor’s taste. Altogether the room was a mixture of the highly sophisticated and the naive. The curtains suggested a lodging-house, a thoroughly nice lodging-house; but we drank sherry out of Swedish glasses. Strangely, this curious combination of styles throughout the house did not offend me. They effected a sort of humorous harmony which, I suspected, symbolized the relation between Victor and Maggie themselves.

It was soon clear that the unofficial marriage was a great success, and that in many ways Victor depended on Maggie for security. His eyes would often quickly seek hers as though for confirmation of something which he had just said to me. And once, as he passed behind her chair to fetch something, he fleetingly laid a hand on her shoulder.

Later in my visit, while Maggie was preparing a meal, and Victor and I were sitting in the little garden, he remarked that before she had come to him he must have been spending a great deal of energy in “merely keeping the Dolt at bay”, but that with her daily presence to strengthen him he had far more energy to spare, and a new sense of peace and security. Only on occasions when they were separated for a week or more did he feel anything of the old need to watch himself, and then merely as a vague loneliness and anxiety, not as a real threat.

In more practical ways also, Maggie was helpful. Not only did she look after the house, but also she entered actively into Victor’s affairs. She had visited all his evening classes, and had struck up a real friendship with several of his students. Evidently she fulfilled an important function in his work. She said, “When Victor works up a new subject, he always tries it on the dog first, namely me. Sometimes the poor animal finds it heavy going and can’t keep awake. Sometimes it has a nervous breakdown, like those unfortunate dogs he told me about that some great Russian experimenter tormented with intelligence tests that were just a bit too difficult for them. Sometimes this adoring dog just sits enthralled, forgetting its knitting. Sometimes it asks such a lot of silly questions and raises so many difficulties that poor Victor gets quite cross with it.” Here Victor put in, “And then I have to go away and rewrite the whole thing. Oh, she’s a useful critic, though exasperating, and wilfuly stupid. Then — how I hate her!” On the occasions when she visited his classes, her function (I gathered) was partly to watch the reactions of the members, and partly to watch Victor himself. On the journey home she would report her findings; protesting, perhaps, against Victor’s mannerisms, or suggesting that some disheartened or timid individual needed special treatment. “In fact,” said Victor, summing it all up, “her function is to give me hell.”

On one occasion during my brief visit, Victor expressed perplexity about a certain class secretary who had shown more zeal than honesty by marking on the class register attendances that had not occurred, What ought the wretched tutor to do about it? Should he turn a blind eye, or make a fuss, and cause endless trouble with the authorities? The question was not a real request for advice but rather a statement of ‘perplexity. I was amused by Maggie’s technique for dealing with Victor on this occasion. I saw her take a sidelong glance at her man, and then she continued her knitting in silence. Presently she said, “What would happen if you made a fuss?”

“Trouble, hate, and a shindy with the B. of E.”

“What would happen if you turned a blind eye?”

“Nothing! It wouldn’t even make a difference to the Government grant earned by the class, because there’ll be more than enough attendances anyhow.”

“Which do you care for most, educating the workers or personal righteousness?” He laughed, and turned to me. “It’s terrible,” he said, “to be linked for life with an immoral woman. Instead of being a force making for righteousness, she leads me into temptation at every turn.”

She too laughed, and remarked, “Poor Victor! He never has the moral courage to be immoral; so when he wants to be, he always has to get me to take the blame for him. Then he can do it with a good conscience.”

Maggie had also been of service to Victor in the writing of the book which he had begun some six years earlier. This incipient masterpiece had been rewritten several times, and was now radically different from the early draft that his father had seen. “He calls it,” said Maggie, “his web, and himself Penelope.” He explained, “The trouble is, I’m mentally growing up rather fast, and everything I wrote even a year ago begins to look puerile.” I suggested that he should not hold it back, but publish it in its present form as a sort of interim report. “No good,” he said, “It would all have to be got into shape and polished, and I can’t be bothered to do that with stuff that I have already outgrown. Besides, there are far too many half-baked books already.”

Maggie seemed to regard her function in relation to the book as twofold. She must stimulate him into finishing it and publishing it as soon as possible, and she must force him to write so that ordinary intelligent people could follow him without undue effort. But Victor, who regarded his “web” neither as educational nor as propaganda but as sheer self-expression, rebelled against both these orders. “After all,” he said, smiling at Maggie, “it’s meant for educated people, not for country wenches and the scum of provincial towns, like you.” Ignoring the sally, she said, “He’ll never publish anything really worthwhile unless I stand over him with a rolling-pin. Of course there were those very respectable contributions to highbrow magazines, political and philosophical. They really began to make a name for him. But he gave up that sort of thing long ago because he said his ideas were still in the melting-pot, and he must get them clear before inflicting any more of them on people. Then at one time he used to write marvellous little articles for Leftish journals, but even that has stopped now. And anyhow he can’t really put the whole of himself Into that sort of thing. It’s time he got his teeth into something that will call out all his powers.” Victor insisted that the book certainly did that. She said, “Well, yes, in a way; but it’s like a rough sketch that is always being rubbed out and begun again. For your soul’s health it’s necessary to produce a finished bit of creation. Otherwise you’ll go bad on my hands.”

She looked at him long and anxiously. He replied in a serious voice. “No, Maggie, I have to judge for myself in that field. You can help me a lot, but you can’t dictate the sort of thing I want to write. At present I am mentally in a muddle, and it’s no use rushing into print until I have straightened things out. And as for being intelligible to ordinary people, you always claim to be one of them, and you seem to follow it all pretty well.”

“But,” she said, “I don’t follow it until I’ve made you rewrite it all in simpler language. And of course, I’m no longer really ordinary. I have been hopelessly infected by you. If I had not been, I shouldn’t be able to make head or tail of the stuff.”

“The fact is,” he said, “you’re so anxious to react as the ordinary person that you over-compensate, and affect a sort of wilful, pigheaded stupidity that goes far beyond ordinary people.” He gave her a love-signalling smile, to which she replied in kind.

“The fact is,” she said, “you think ordinary people are like the people in your classes, but they’re not. They are far stupider, and moreover they don’t want to think.” He closed the matter by saying, “Well, anyhow, I’m not writing for ordinary people. I reach them (more or less) in my teaching. In my writing I’m writing for myself, to straighten out my own mind. But unfortunately my mind C won’t stay put. It keeps seeing new things which involve restating everything.”

I wanted to find out what Victor’s book was about, and if possible to persuade him to let me read the manuscript. All he would say was, “The jumping-off point was dialectical materialism, but by now it’s neither dialectical nor materialist in any but the most Pickwickian sense.” When I asked him point blank if I could read it, he answered, “Of course, if you like; when I have straightened out a few things.” But he was still straightening them out when I left.

Altogether, I found it impossible to form a clear picture of Victor’s state of mind at this time. He was not very communicative. I learned that he had been drawn more and more into Left Wing political activity, and that there had been difficulties with the university. He had joined the C.P. His articles in Left Wing journals had in early days all been written under a pseudonym; but later this secretiveness irked him, and he took to using his own name, in the form “Vic Smith”. It was this frankness that had caused difficulties with the authorities. There was also trouble over his expression of “Communistic” opinions in his classes. The work of adult education was supposed to be “non-political”, in the party sense. It was concerned with teaching people to think for themselves, not with political propaganda. Certain prominent Conservatives in the town started an agitation against spending public money to aid classes that were hotbeds of “Marxism”. Further, Victor had been mixed up in scandals connected with the unemployed. Once, for instance, he had entertained a party of them at the city’s most exclusive restaurant. He had also been mixed up with disorders that had occurred when a procession of unemployed was refused admission to the Town Hall. He was arrested, and had to spend a night in a police cell, but was released because the evidence against him was insufficient. That night, Maggie suffered acute anxiety, fearing that the shock might recall the Dolt. But he returned to her as his normal self, and indeed elated. He said, “A little direct action is exhilarating after all the mere talking.”

The upshot of all this activity was that his employers reluctantly warned him that his rashness was damaging to his authority as a teacher, and that unless he would promise to avoid entanglement in party politics, he would have to go. Victor firmly rejected this ultimatum, much to Maggie’s distress.

His father also was much upset. The old gentleman had maintained friendly, though intermittent, relations with his “new” son. On Victor’s brief visits to the old home there had always been violent arguments, but always an underlying mutual respect. Not until Victor’s name began to appear in the press as an agitator and a revolutionary, did the father try to assert his paternal authority. Of course he failed; and according to his own ethic he was left with no alternative but to “disown the boy” and refuse to see him again. Sir Geoffrey was now beginning to threaten to disinherit his son. Natural affection, however, in the end triumphed over his political principles. Worry brought on by this conflict in the old man’s mind seems to have hastened the stroke from which he died.

Victor was much distressed at the breach with the parent for whom he had conceived a warm though critical respect. His first impulse was to renounce the small amount of capital which came to him, and hand it over to some worthy cause which would have been approved of by his father. But the practical Maggie, with an eye on Victor’s precarious future and her own future maternity, dissuaded him from this course.

Meanwhile the university authorities who employed Victor were no less distressed than his father; for they regarded Victor with respect and affection, and also as a valuable asset. Every effort was made to persuade him to agree to refrain in future from compromising activities; but in vain. So Victor was regretfully dismissed. This was shortly after the end of his winter classes.

But, to everyone’s surprise, before work began again in the autumn, he had accepted the conditions and was preparing for his usual classes.

Naturally I was curious to know what it was that had brought about this change of attitude. It was quite incredible that Victor should simply have taken the line of least resistance. It was not until my last evening that he made any serious attempt to explain himself. Hitherto, when challenged, he had merely said, “I just had to get away from it all and think,” or “I found I wasn’t really sure of my own foundations after all.” But on the last evening I managed to provoke him into fuller explanation.

We were all three in the little sitting-room. Maggie was working through a pile of mending. Victor, who liked to have some manual work on hand when he was carrying on a desultory conversation with an easy guest, was repairing an electric iron. I sat idly smoking.

I pressed him to tell me why he had given up political action. For a while, he merely went on fiddling with the intestines of the iron; but presently he said, “Well, it was like this. When I was trying my hand at agitation for the unemployed, I met a lot of people in that line whose hearts were fight (up to a point) but their heads all wrong. And their wrong heads kept pulling their hearts askew, so to speak. They were afire with generous passion for the underdog, but they had theories that didn’t go deep enough; theories about human nature and historical forces. Misinterpreting Marx, they believed that human nature was simply an expression of environmental influences, whereas, of course, in truth, at every stage of evolution, there’s always something inside reacting to something outside. This mistake led inevitably to a muddle over morality, and in the end to sheer opportunism. Then there were others whose trouble began in the heart and reacted on the head. Their real motive was not a generous passion, though they thought it was, but some sort of bottled-up hate. And this, of course, messed up their ideas. Mind you, the work we were doing had to be done. It was important. But sooner or later it was going to be important to have the right ideas behind it, otherwise it would all go bad on us. And as no one else seemed to be worrying about that side of the thing, it was clearly up to me to do something about it. That meant giving up active political work, for a while anyhow, and trying to digest what I had learnt through it. For really did learn a lot, about human nature, and about myself. But I had an increasing feeling that I needed new light if I was to form clear ideas about social problems, and about man’s nature. In fact what I needed was to think things out with all possible concentration, and without distraction from current urgencies.”

He lapsed into silence, intent upon the dismembered iron, It was Maggie who prompted him, saying, “Come on, Victor, tell him what you did learn.”

“I learned,” he said, “the huge difference between man’s best and his worst. And I learned more about the oddness of my own nature, compared with other people’s. And I saw that all ordinary people are in a way a mixture of me and the Dolt, and that my relation with the Dolt threw light on the whole social problem.”

Again he fell silent, working with his pliers. But Maggie prompted him, “Tell him about the demonstrations of the unemployed.”

He began reluctantly, “Oh, well! It sounds flat in the telling, but it really is significant. Unemployment was already very bad in this unhappy town. The Communists began organizing mass meetings of the workless, and I had a good deal to do with this job. I found the unemployed utterly disheartened and cynical. They were poisoned by the sense of being ‘not wanted’, chucked on the scrap-heap. Many were so used to idling that they seemed to have lost all power of exerting themselves. Some of the long-timers, though not all, had turned apathetic through and through, even toward their own wives and families. And they had lost all self-respect. Yet, if once an idea or an ideal could penetrate their fop; of misery, and really present itself to their minds, they might respond magnificently with acts of real generosity or comradeship. Thus the very same man who was so wrapped up in his personal misery that he had no heart for anything else; shrugging his shoulders over his child’s illness, might suddenly feel the child’s reality and nurse it with the utmost devotion. The man who lost job after job through irresponsibility or sheer slacking, or who habitually pilfered from his mates, might suddenly be lit up by the idea of a mass protest for human fellowship, and work splendidly for the cause. Mind you, many Leftish journalists sentimentalized the unemployed, making out that they were all saints. They weren’t. A few were magnificent. Most were just normal people for whom there were no jobs going, and of course most of these had been morally damaged by their bitter fate. Quite a lot were simply wasters and riff-raff. Inevitably in a labour glut there are bound to be unemployed of all calibres. It was cheering to find that nearly all but the lowest grade could see (with help) the idea of the march not merely in terms of individualistic clamouring for decent treatment but as a gesture for the idea of brotherhood. And for the sake of this gesture they could rise to heroism.”

Again he was silent. Maggie put in a word. “And it fell to Victor to wake these people; and to keep them awake, because they were always apt to break down under some silly little temptation.”

“And that,” he said, “was what made me realize so clearly the difference between them and myself. When they behaved in the awake way, nine times out of ten they had a grim moral struggle, and came through heroically. Even when they had formed regular habits of social loyalty, there was a perpetual tension in their minds. But with me, there’s no serious tension at all, I just see the thing to do, and wholeheartedly want to do it; even if from the point of view of my own self-interest it is very objectionable. To refrain from doing it would be repugnant and painful. It’s queer, I know, but there it is. Obviously I can’t take any credit for this. The credit belongs only to the moral heroes who struggle against temptation, and gloriously triumph; if credit is a meaningful notion, which I sometimes doubt.”

Maggie interrupted. “I think you make it clearer when you say, not that you have no struggle, but that the struggle does not enter into yourself. Once you said it went on outside your very self, like the struggle of the white corpuscles to conquer invading micro-organisms, which consciousness knows nothing of.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s like that, except that I am not strictly unconscious of the struggle. I am conscious of it clearly enough, but objectively. For my consciousness there’s no internal struggle at all. The end, the goal, simply possesses and uses me.”

I felt incredulous about his claim to have no moral struggle, and I said so. After some thought he replied, “Yes, in a way you are right. I do have moral struggles sometimes, but they are all on a different plane from the ordinary ones that torment most people. So far as sheer individualistic self-interest is concerned, I really don’t have any struggle at all. I quite happily want to do the thing that others often find it impossible to will effectively. But I do have moral struggles of a kind. For instance, I have had a severe moral struggle to give up the C.P. and renounce political activity. You see, both political activity in general and the C.P. in particular still felt right for me; but little by little it was borne in on me that I ought to give them up to pursue another goal. It would have been much easier to carry on politically, but I had to take myself in hand and conquer my established moral habit. Yes, Harry, in a way you’re right.”

At this point I may as well break the historical sequence to mention a future moral struggle that Victor was to have. After turning away from political action and the C.P. he had inclined more and more to pacifism. This was during the earlier part of the inter-war period. Later, as the Nazi menace increased and the farce of “appeasement” developed, Victor was to be forced very reluctantly to see that even the sacred principle of non-violence must in certain circumstances be qualified. But he had formed such a strong moral habit of pacifism that he was faced with a grim moral struggle to break with that habit.

But I must revert to his situation during my visit in 1929, and his abandonment of political action. Victor had a good deal to say about his experiences over the demonstrations by the unemployed. “Of course,” he said, “The Communists had a lot to do with organizing the unemployed in this town. And though inevitably some Communists were mere wasters or spitemongers, most worked splendidly. Now some of these seemed almost to have passed beyond the stage of individualistic moral struggle, seeming to serve the cause with single-hearted passion. When they were at their best, temptation to put self-interest first didn’t seriously touch them at all. They really were ‘possessed’. But with them the trouble was that their view of the goal and of the policy was often distorted by subterranean hungers. Some, for instance, were loyal to the Revolution not through love, but because under its banner their unwitting vindictiveness could find a sanctioned outlet.”

Maggie said, “At first the Communists admired him immensely. Some called him the English Lenin, because he was so good at inspiring and organizing. But when there were difficulties over the party line, they reviled him.”

Victor continued. “They had seen something of the true goal. (Call it fullness of life for all.) It really did, in a way, possess them. But they had only seen it superficially. They didn’t really know what fullness of life involved. Rebelling violently against individualism, they made a god of society, the ideal communist society, of course. The free democratic society was their ultimate goal, but meanwhile they were concerned only to establish the close-knit revolutionary state. What they could never see was that, though one must identify oneself with society, one must also, even for society’s sake, be true to oneself, even if that meant going against the party line. Then again, they couldn’t see that flouting the best moral tradition of society was a seriously harmful thing to do, even from the point of view of the Revolution itself. The end justifies the means, yes; but only if the means do not in the long run poison the end. The trouble with them was that they were too impatient ever to think of the long run. For the urgency of the Revolution you might steal and lie and beat people up, and even betray your friend, regardless of the effect of it all on the quality of the Revolution.”

Silence again. Victor seemed absorbed in the electrical problem, or in his own thoughts. Maggie prompted him. “Tell him how you came to loggerheads with them.”

“The turning point,” he said, “was when they expected me to write articles in the local press to the effect that the organization of the unemployed was entirely spontaneous, and not inspired by the Communists in the first instance. I was also to tell my university friends the same lie. When I protested, they replied that it really didn’t matter lying, even to personal friends, if it was for the Revolution. The important thing was to make people believe there was a real popular protest, non-political in origin. That was the only way to rouse the public and start up serious political action, and so on. When I refused to do this bit of bare-faced lying, they said I cared more about keeping my hands clean than serving the Revolution; or else more about keeping in with my employers; or else that I had not freed myself from the spell of bourgeois morality. We had many long and heated arguments, in which they simply insisted that the Revolution justified any means whatever, and I insisted that a reputation for irresponsible lying would do the cause no good. To this they merely answered that the lie would never be found out. Neither side gave way an inch. In the end I just said I wouldn’t do the job, and if they persuaded someone else to do it, I would publish the truth.”

I asked Victor if that was the end of his active political work.

“No,” he said, “I carried on as before for a while, but the comrades who had called me the English Lenin now turned violently against me. Mind you, I don’t blame them. They sincerely believed I was a menace to the Revolution. Some even persuaded themselves I was actually working for the capitalists. So everything I did was misrepresented, often deliberately. Most of the politically conscious unemployed were turned against me, and some of those who were not politically conscious at all were caught by the rumour that I was a police spy.”

Maggie said, “But give credit where it is due. Many of the non- politicals who knew you fairly well just laughed at the whole slander, and said they knew you were sound.”

“Yes,” said Victor, “and of course that was gratifying. But when a general meeting was held (at my request), It became clear that I could no longer hold the mass of the unemployed as I had done. The Communist line was easier for them to grasp, and from their point of view the charges against me were damning. I put my case as simply as I could, and at the time they took it superbly. I said the particular issue was a minor one, but a principle was at stake that was immensely important for the Revolution. I asked them what they really wanted, just a successful agitation in our town, or a whole new and radically transformed society, based on friendliness and mutual confidence. I tried to show what would happen if the Revolution turned savage, and what might happen if we won through without sacrificing the goal for immediate petty gains.”

Maggie again, “And when he sat down they raised the roof.”

Victor sighed, “Yes! I thought I had done the trick. I thought this might be the little significant event that would change the course of history. But I was mistaken. The comrade who was put up to defend the orthodox line was a local party leader, one of those who see everything black or white, and will go through hell for the white. He was an artisan, and he had devoted his life to the class war. He never spared himself, and his health was undermined. I had always respected him for his courage, and in a way for his sincerity; though I suspected he was deceiving himself about a lot of things, and I had never been able to make a real human contact with him.” Here Victor jerked out an exasperated lit de laugh. “Queer!” he said, “I was always sparring with that fellow, and I felt he was really an evil influence, and yet, damn it, I couldn’t help liking him, even loving him. And in a furtive sort of way 1 believe he liked me too, but he tried hard not to. And so there was always a barrier, even when we were working harmoniously together. The trouble was that he was proud of being a fanatic, and proud of being Machiavellian. Really I think he was at heart a muddled sort of saint who had forced himself to be tough and ruthless and a demagogue. Well, he enjoyed fighting me on that occasion. He began by saying I had almost persuaded him to change his mind and speak on my side. (They cheered.) But cold reason, he said, had saved him. Then he went through my speech point by point, giving a false interpretation to everything, and quoting Marxian texts against me very skilfully. Little by little he worked up to the charge that this unrealistic idealism would hamstring the Revolution, and finally he indulged in a lot of scurrilous stuff (which I am sure he believed) to prove I was sexually’ incorrect’, and politically a bourgeois Liberal, consciously or unconsciously on the side of reaction. When he sat down there was an uproar, mainly favourable to him. There were other speakers, for and against; but those on my side were obviously rattled. When my turn came to reply, there was so much noise I couldn’t get any coherent answer across at all. I Inight have been trying to talk to a crowd of excited apes.”

I said, “But I don’t see how this made you any less sure of your own position, your own foundations.” He remained silent for some time. Maggie said, “The poor dear felt he had failed, and this was almost a new experience for him, on such a scale. So he reckoned there must be something wrong with him if he couldn’t hold the crowd back from lapping up dope.”

Victor spoke again. “The whole business got me down rather badly. I was dead tired and sleepy and fed up. I even began to wonder whether my line really had been crazy idealism, and my unconscious motive really had been to secure my own position in the status quo. Also, I felt a sudden stab of wounded vanity; and of course I knew very well that personal vanity, however fleeting, was a danger signal meaning that the Dolt was stirring in me. So I had to run to Maggie for help.”

Maggie said, “I put him on to mending a broken chair, and then digging in the garden, till he could take a balanced view again.”

“Yes,” he said, “but the fact remained that I had completely failed to fortify those people against the over-simplified ideas of the party. I felt I must, after all, have a wrong conception of the springs of human action. It had seemed to me that, if people could be made to see what was good, they would certainly will it — as the audience did during my speech. But after all I had evidently underestimated the power of the positive evil will to take charge of them, to blind them to the good that they had seen. Of course, I am not identifying doctrinaire Communism with the evil will. Its main driving force is often the good will. But unfortunately the evil will in us can use the good will for its own ends, turning it subtly bad in us without our knowing what has happened. In my Communist opponent, for instance; and in the Dolt. I had assumed that the whole difference between me and the Dolt was that I could see more clearly than he could, and so I inevitably willed more wisely. But now I began to realize that there was something more positive in him than mere blindness, mere absence of vision. Something or other could destroy vision, and so destroy the good will. Of course I knew in a way that this thing was just the primitive will, rebelling against the developed will; or the perverted will, obsessed with primitive ends, resisting the more enlightened will; or the somnolent self, opposing the awake self; or the unregenerate spirit striving to prevent the birth of the twice-born spirit. But all this was metaphor. What positive thing was there, blotting out the vision, perverting the will? In my own case, I felt that there was some very positive power holding the Dolt together against the truer vision; and that Maggie, in keeping the Dolt at bay was struggling against something more than a mere blindness.”

He paused, but before I had thought of something to say, he concluded, “So you see, I had to give up political action to face up to this fundamental problem. Otherwise I might do more harm than good.”

Victor had finished mending the iron, and was clearing up his tools. While he was out of the room I noticed that Maggie’s hands lay idle, and that she was gazing with wide and glistening eyes at the empty grate. Uncomfortably I felt that she was not far from tears. I did not like to question her; but in the light of future events it seems well to record this little incident. Suddenly she rose, and went out, saying that we all deserved a cup of tea.

While I was thinking over all that Victor had said, he returned and settled into an easy chair. I remarked that he must find Maggie a great source of strength. He answered quietly, “I cannot live without her. I cannot. Without her I should soon die into the Dolt for ever.” I protested that, after ail, he had been himself before ever he met Maggie “Yes,” he said. “Those early spontaneous flashes of awakeness maintained themselves; and indeed they increased, as though I were gradually strengthening my hold. But now-well, I am beginning to wonder whether growing old doesn’t favour the Dolt.” Suddenly he turned an earnest face toward me, and said, “It’s Maggie I am anxious about. Of course I used to care frightfully on my own account about being my real self, but now, well, I don’t much mind really for myself. But I do care very much for Maggie’s sake. She’d be in such a hole if the Dolt took over permanently. And she’d be so distressed for me. I sometimes feel terrified for her. (And this terror itself means I am not quite awake.) Yet I know it was right to link up with her. It was the way of life for both of us. Then there’s another thing. Of course it was glorious for both of us that she was able to rescue me from the Dolt; and it’s good that we both need each other so much, and that each quickens the other so much; but it’s bad that I should depend on her for my very existence. For both our sakes I must be able to stand permanently on my own feet.”

At this moment Maggie returned with the tea-tray. Glancing at it, he said, in his most Oxford accent “Waitress! That cake’s a bought one. I shall complain to the management, and you’ll be dismissed.” She laughed. “Complain, if you like, sir.” she said, in her most outlandish speech. “But I’m marrying the management.”

Over our tea I led Victor back to his story. I asked whether he had made any progress in getting his foundations clear since the clash with the Communists. “I think so,” he said. “Of course, in a way the problem is simple enough. Something or other blinds the Dolt to a whole aspect of experience which is clear to me. But what is it that blinds him? Is it just a strong physiological mechanism that invariably comes into action at the critical moment, a kind of reflex shutting of the eyes whenever they turn in a certain direction? If so, would some drug or other break the reflex, and so destroy the fictitious personality, and keep me permanently in the field? Or is that whole theory too simple. Then is there some psychological method or technique that would do the trick? I made enquiries about drugs, but got nowhere. Then I tried the mystics, eastern and western.”

He fell silent, munching the bought cake.

Presently he said, “I haven’t got my mind clear about mysticism yet, and perhaps I never shall. But if I had to make a sort of interim report, it would run something like this. (Make yourself comfortable. Have some more cake, though it’s only a sort of ersatz of the real Maggie cake.) And fortify yourself to listen to a lecture.”

At the risk of overburdening the reader, I must give a rather full report of Victor’s comments on mysticism at this stage of his life. For his attitude on this subject seems to me significant for understanding his whole character. It is not easy for me whose mind is so pedestrian, to do justice to his views, because I cannot accept them without grave reservations. But I must do my best.

After Victor had continued for some time to sip his tea in silence, he said. “First, it is obvious that the great mystics had something enormously important to say. Second, they could only say it in human language and in terms of contemporary thought and values. And, as they themselves insist, human thought and language are far too clumsy for the task. Third, in their cultural environment, and with their contemporary thought, it was impossible for them to recognize that any statements about ultimate reality must be overwhelmingly more false than true. Consequently, in spite of their insistence on the ineffability of God, and so on, they persist in making far-reaching statements in the faith that they may be more true than false. They claim that in some significant sense they come into a special relation with ‘God’ or the ‘Whole’ or ‘Reality’, or what-not. Well, I believe that all such statements, taken in the sense in which they were intended, are completely unreliable. But, fourth, taken in another sense, simply as statements about the nature of consciousness or individuality, in relation to the depth behind depth of objective reality, they are often profoundly true. I mean: though it is utterly beyond our power to know whether consciousness is or is not at the heart of all things, it is quite possible for us to be wakened somewhat beyond our ordinary somnolent mundane level of awareness, so as to see or feel a little deeper into objective reality than we normally do. My own special case proves this rather strikingly; but really there is plenty of evidence of it in ordinary experience. The mystics have very much help to give us in this venture of deepening our awareness. Fifth, very roughly, what they tell us on this subject is this. Man cannot ‘save’ himself, cannot wake to a higher level of experience simply by the will to do so, on the part of his normal mundane self. Something other than his normal self must help him, must in some sense invade him, kill his normal individualistic self, and so possess him that he becomes a new kind of self, with new experience, new desires, a completely new orientation. The mystics say that this something other is ‘God’ or ‘Reality’ or the ‘Whole’; but to say this sort of thing is to forget the limitations of human understanding. All that can legitimately be said is that something other than his normal self must intrude within his consciousness, with shattering effect upon his normal self, killing it, and creating a new self. This is the justification of all the talk about ‘self-naughting’, self- destruction, self-transcendence, and so on. Beyond this claim about something intruding, one other statement can safely be made. It is a statement implied in all that the mystics say. The ‘something’ that intrudes presents itself simly as a sphere of objective reality hitherto ignored, a wider, deeper, more subtle sphere; or better, not a distinct sphere at all but a whole system of new aspects of familiar reality. So to speak, all familiar things are transfigured by a new illumination, so that one experiences them more fully, more deeply, and discovers in them new kinds of value, hitherto unsuspected; much as the child wakes up from the purely animal values to discover the values of personality, in himself and others.”

The lecture seemed to be finished. Victor concentrated on his food. I remarked that his attitude to mysticism seemed to me an ingenious attempt to have the cake and eat it. To accept the validity of mystical experience and yet deny the mystic’s claim to have some sort of contact with God, or ultimate reality, seemed too clever by half. With his mouth full, Victor said merely, “All new ideas seem at first too clever by half. But this one works. It’s true to the actual experience.”

At this point I queried, “You claim, do you, to have actually had the actual experience? With so many modern mystics one can never be sure that they speak from their own’ experience and not merely from their reading of mystical classics.” Victor answered cautiously, “Naturally I don’t really know what actual experience the great mystics really had; but certainly I myself have actually experienced something which is the guiding star of my life. Indeed, so long as I am fully myself, I am constantly experiencing it. When I begin to lose it, I know the Dolt is in the offing, and I must discipline myself.”

I was not yet satisfied, so I challenged him again. “You have it constantly, you say. Now for instance?” He answered promptly, “Yes, now. While I am talking to you I am compellingly aware of our universal setting. Not only do I feel us as little individual members of this planet’s gropingly intelligent species, surrounded by a formidable pregnant cosmos of galaxies, but also I am constantly, though obscurely, aware of my fundamental identity with you and all personal beings, through the underlying ground of all being. Is that definite enough?”

I could not make much of this; but I took careful notes of our conversation, and subsequently Victor himself vetted them.

As he seemed to have settled once more into silence, I stimulated him again by asking him to tell me how all this bore on politics. “Well,” he said, “the bearing is rather depressing. Granting that political action is necessary, how is it to be kept sweet? Not, certainly, by the Communist method of sacrificing everything to immediate political opportunism. But, on the other hand, not, as the mystically-inclined sometimes think, by the withdrawal of the best people away from the field of political action so that they can peacefully contemplate the ‘Whole’. Somehow the political leaders must themselves be contemplatives, up to a point; to keep them true to the spirit. But how can they? Politics is a whole-time job. And so is religious contemplation. Moreover, so long as the masses are what they are, that sort of leader will never gain power. The masses themselves live on too low level of experience to care at all deeply and constantly for the spirit. But the Revolution, some sort of drastic social change, becomes increasingly urgent. The only hope is that the leaders and the masses will be a little more clearly aware of the spirit than they have been in the past. Really we are in a dilemma. We can’t get the true Revolution without a general rise in spiritual awareness; but we can’t have that until the Revolution has abolished some of the conditions that fix people’s attention on individualistic power-lust or on herd passions.”

Again he paused, but soon continued, “And now one final point, concerning me personally.” I saw his eyes meet Maggie’s. He continued, “I see now that, for me at any rate, there are no short cuts, no special technique for securing my position against the Dolt. At present I am maintained against him largely by Maggie’s power, by something which is in a way magical or in a way like prayer. My own native power or responsiveness to the spirit is no longer quite what it was. Probably I shall never fully regain that youthful sensitivity. So I must compensate for its loss by more earnest and continuous attention to the objective vision of the spirit, which distinguishes me from the Dolt. Here ends my second lecture.”

He handed his cup to Maggie to be refilled.

Little more happened before I left the Smiths next morning. I hoped to see them again before leaving for India, but we did not succeed in arranging a meeting. My general impression of Victor’s condition was that, in spite of his sense of psychological insecurity, he was really very firmly established, and indeed on the threshold of a triumphant career.

While I was in India I received an occasional letter from Victor telling me odds and ends about his work, speaking of articles he had written, books he hoped to write, and people he had met. Then came a letter announcing that the couple had been legally married, and then the news that Maggie had borne a son, and that both were doing well. This was followed by increasingly rare letters, in many of which the child figured a good deal. Evidently Victor was taking parenthood very seriously. In one of his letters, he said, “Children must be allowed to develop in their own way, of course, and learn their own lessons; but one tries to help them to avoid some of one’s own mistakes. Probably one nevertheless treats them unwittingly all wrong in some way or other, so that they develop a set of troubles all their own.”

Before closing my account of this period of Victor’s life I had better mention a matter about which I did not learn till long afterwards, when I returned to England. Quite early in their married life Maggie had been made seriously anxious lest Victor’s continued interest in other young women should lead sooner or later to distressing complications. Victor assured her that his inveterate habit of falling in love with any girl that was specially attractive to him could not lessen his feeling for her. But inevitably she felt insecure; and jealous, in spite of her modern theories. She was tormented by the fear that from one of these light-hearted relations with other women some serious attachment would arise. It seemed to her that they must spring from some inadequacy in herself. Evidently she could not permanently satisfy her husband. This idea Victor vehemently rejected. He said (so Maggie told me) “For me you are, and always will be, the dearest, in fact the very best of all possible mates. But, damn it, I won’t blind myself to other women! And you must not blind yourself to other men. Of course, of course, monogamy, the single life-long partnership, is the only way to fullness of love; but don’t you see, don’t you feel, that If monogamy excludes every other attraction, If it turns-well, monastic, it may miss fullness of love after all.” Then he added, garbling a famous quotation, “Besides, I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not other girls quite a lot.”

Honesty compels me to record that Victor’s behaviour in this matter seemed to me rather heartless and irresponsible. Even if he did know that his attachment to Maggie was unshakable, she had every reason to be distressed; and surely it was cruel and selfish to let her suffer. When I said this to Victor, he replied emphatically that for both their sakes he was justified in these occasional loves. For himself, he was justified because they quickened him (so he said) spiritually for his work, and because they did actually deepen his love for his wife. And on Maggie’s account too he was justified because (he insisted) only in such experience, however painfully, could she learn the truth about him, and about herself, and about love.

Well, this all sounded to me rather specious. Yet I find I have to reserve judgment. I have no illusion that Victor was perfect, even in his most lucid state; but so often he has proved himself far more sensitive than my very commonplace self! As for Maggie, she claims that she now entirely approves of Victor’s conduct. But then, she was always too forgiving.

10. CHECK

From 1929 to 1939

IN 1933, I RECEIVED a long and distressing letter from Maggie. Victor had relapsed into the Dolt condition. The following account is based on her letter, and on subsequent conversations with her and with Victor, when I returned to England in the spring of 1939.

Victor had been very busy with his adult education work, and at the end of the winter he was definitely over-tired. At this time Maggie had gone down with a bad attack of gastric flu. Victor had given up everything to nurse her and look after the child, who by the way had been named Colin. Shortly after Maggie was once more on her feet, Victor himself succumbed to the disease. He had an extremely bad attack, and his recovery was slow. The change of personality had occurred while he was still confined to his bed.

Maggie was actually sitting with him at the time. He had been rather sluggish and despondent during the day, but Maggie had supposed this to be a natural symptom of convalescence. She was sewing. Colin, now over two years old, was playing on his father’s bed.

Maggie asked a question which Victor failed to answer. She looked up from her sewing, and was startled to see him staring at her with an expression of bewilderment and horror. At this point Colin clambered along from the foot of the bed to play with his father. Apparently he thought the expression of repugnance on his father’s face was all in the game, for he laughed. Victor cried sharply, “Take the child away!” and pushed the still laughing Colin toward Maggie. She seized the wriggling and cheerful creature and held him to her. Victor started to get out of bed. She said, “Don’t get out, dear, you’re not really strong yet.” He stood up, then fell back exhausted. He stood again, and demanded his clothes. She tried to persuade him to lie down. He cried out, “Don’t touch me. Kindly leave the room.” She hesitated, and slowly moved toward the door. Meanwhile the exertion of opening a drawer convinced the Dolt that he had better go back to bed. He crawled dejectedly between the sheets.

So it happened that the unfortunate Dolt had to stay in bed and be nursed by the ugly waitress. She, of course, had known at once what had happened to Victor, and she heroically determined that she would turn the disaster into some sort of a triumph. The Dolt himself also knew vaguely what had happened; but he needed to know more. “You had better stay,” he said in a voice that was meant to be haughty but sounded merely querulous. “You had better tell me what has happened. All I can remember is, being in my father’s house. He is Sir Geoffrey Cadogan-Smith.”

Maggie found herself regarding the Dolt as still essentially Victor, though Victor very sick. She felt none of the distaste that the true Victor himself felt for his secondary personality. Maggie longed to put her arms round Victor and comfort him, but she realized that this would be a grave tactical error.

She returned to the chair beside the bed, still holding the child. She said, “You have had a very bad attack of flu, and now you’re — not quite yourself.” He asked her how long it was since he was with his father. She hesitated, then said, “A very long time, in fact about ten years.” The Dolt was visibly distressed. He said, “Where am I now? Why are you here? You’re a waitress, not a nurse. I remember you.”

“Victor, dear,” she said, “this is your home, and I am Maggie, your wife, and we love one another very much, and this is our little boy, Colin.” He looked at her with perplexity and revulsion, then at the child, then about the room. There was a long silence. Then Victor said, “As soon as I am fit I shall go home to my father: I will see that you are provided for.”

“But Victor, darling,” she said ruefully, “this is the only home you have now. And we have been so happy. Can’t you remember any of it?”

He looked at her blankly, then enquired, “Is my father dead?” To her affirmative nod he responded with a sigh rather of exasperation than of grief.

For ten days Maggie nursed the Dolt in his bed. Then he got up; and remained in the house for about a week more. Maggie behaved with the utmost devotion, without ever claiming his affection. She hoped thus in time to win his love, even if he remained the Dolt. But she seemed to make no impression. At last he announced that he would leave next day, and nothing she could say dissuaded him. He went through all his possessions, packed all his clothes, and gathered all the lecture notes and other manuscripts into a pile. Maggie discovered that he intended to burn these in the garden. Suddenly she flared up in indignation, upbraided the startled Dolt for a heartless, spiteful half-wit, and carried away the bundle to lock it in a cupboard. This incident seems to have impressed the Dolt. He could not help noticing that the woman had abandoned her usual sweetness only for the sake of his interest, or what she conceived to be his interest.

The Dolt departed. Maggie was greatly distressed, but she had put a cheerful face on it, and told him she felt sure he would come back soon. She then reverted to her supposed telepathic powers, seeking from afar to wake him to his true self. This she did by trying to make him feel her presence, vividly and constantly, and to rouse in him memories of their past happiness together. She also tried (but this task she felt to be far more difficult) to flood him with that “vision of the spirit” which he himself had formerly tried to impart to her.

After a few days she made enquiries at the bank, and learned that he had drawn a large sum, shifted his account to another town, and left no address. But he had arranged for her to draw a small amount weekly from the old bank.

The Dolt stayed away for about a month. I learned later from the awake Victor that he had spent the time in a rather expensive hotel in the seaport city of his former business career. At first he was entirely absorbed in trying to establish contact with his business acquaintances. He had little success. His hope of finding his way back into the shipping office came to nothing. He was forced to begin looking for some other job, but nothing attractive came his way.

Gradually he began to feel strangely divided against himself. He remained still the Dolt, in that all events of his awake phases were still inaccessible to him; but he was no longer wholly satisfied with his Doltish values. He had a vague yearning for something different from the triumphs of a successful business man. Even Maggie, though still physically unattractive to him, he remembered with something like affection, or at least with a self-centred yearning to be loved by her, or someone. The feeling of loneliness and futility became intolerable, and hotel life repugnant. Also, he realized that he could not afford such expensive accommodation with no income in prospect.

At last he wrote to Maggie to say that he would be returning next day, “to discuss certain matters with her”.

He arrived in a taxi, with all his luggage. She opened the front door to him, and was ready to fall into his arms, but a single glance told her that he was still the Dolt. In spite of his Doltish condition, she could gladly have hugged him, but instead she offered a hand, which he took without emotion.

There followed a strange phase in which Victor alternated between standing on his Doltish dignity and allowing the kindly influence of Maggie and of home life and the irrepressibly friendly Colin to soak more and more deeply into him. Maggie treated him as a guest in the little house, fearful lest too much domesticity should repel him. He occupied the spare room, and took no part in the housework, nor in the care of Colin. Much of his time was spent in solitary walks; but much also in talks with Maggie about their common past. She was determined to rebuild little by little the whole fabric of his lost experience. But, do what she would, she could not change it from mere reported history to living memory. After recounting some incident or other, connected perhaps with his work or the upbringing of the child, she would appeal, “Don’t you remember?” But he would always shake his head, either impatiently or sadly. Once she dared to allude to some amatory incident dear to the awakened Victor. But the Dolt at once “went into his shell”. Henceforth she carefully refrained from mentioning such things.

A good deal of the Dolt’s time was spent in the little study, reading Victor’s books. One day, with diffidence, he asked Maggie to let him see the notes which he had wanted to destroy. He said, “Let me read them in the evenings, when you can watch me all the time, in case — I should lose my head and want to destroy them.” Maggie agreed. She also produced the manuscript of Victor’s still unfinished book. With more concentration than understanding the Dolt tackled this work, while Maggie sat sewing. Now and then he would ask her to explain ideas that were unfamiliar to him, and she would try to reproduce the explanations that the true Victor had formerly, given to her. Sometimes he came on passages in which scorn of “the doltish mentality” was frankly expressed. Gradually the Dolt realized that these passages were in a way directed against himself. On one occasion he was so upset that he angrily tore the page; and then, seeing Maggie’s outraged expression, he set about carefully mending it with transparent adhesive tape.

The summer was advancing. Inevitably the time was coming when normally Victor would be returning to his winter classes. Already he had been approached with regard to lecturing at a summer school. It was very difficult for him to refuse, but impossible to accept, as of course the Dolt was entirely unequipped. He had been forced to excuse himself on grounds of health. Maggie had privately informed the authorities that he had suffered another breakdown, but was recovering, and would probably be ready for his winter’s work.

The change in the Dolt’s temper had gone so far that he was now positively interested in the work and the character of the other personality. At first this interest was resentful and hostile, but little by little he came to recognize, though grudgingly, the values sacred to the other; and began also seriously to consider carrying on the other’s work. The task would be formidable, because he had lost all knowledge of the subjects to be dealt with, and all recollection of the students. However, he announced his intention of tackling the job, with Maggie’s help. She, of course, promised to do her utmost. The task would have been quite impossible but for one fortunate fact, not uncommon, I am told, in cases of multiple personality. Victor was able to relearn the old material very quickly. Similarly in the matter of students, Maggie was able, with the aid of a group-photograph of a festive gathering, to restore much of his knowledge of the personalities with whom he would be dealing. But in spite of his facile relearning of material that had been formerly acquired by the true Victor, the Dolt was not nearly as quick as the true Victor at picking up new facts; and he soon discovered that many of the awake personality’s most original ideas were almost incomprehensible to him. At first he was inclined to regard this as a sign that the other was after all mentally unbalanced or deranged. But talks with Maggie forced him to revise his opinion. Over and over again she was able to pass on to him the insight which the awake Victor had passed on to her.

Little by little a queer ambivalent relation developed between the Dolt and Maggie. More and more he became dependent on her. More and more he respected her, and even in an obscure way cared for her. But his affection was rather filial than marital. Physically she remained unattractive to him, or even repellent. She on her side was constantly exasperated not only by his intellectual inferiority to the true Victor but also by his emotional obtuseness. His affection, such as it was, was little more than a sentimental adulation of his dear nurse, his substitute mother. Indeed, though at first she had felt toward the Dolt as toward Victor sick, little by little she became conscious of a serious conflict in her heart between her identification of the Dolt with the true Victor and her dissatisfaction with the Dolt himself. Desperately she longed for the true Victor; increasingly she pitied and despised, and yet conscientiously mothered, the Doltish substitute. Yet physically the Dolt was identical with her own cherished man, and his physical coldness toward her constantly distressed her. The Dolt, it seemed, required of her only maternal tenderness and service. But her maternal feelings, were all for Colin. Yet the Dolt was indeed Victor. She still clung to the hope that some day he would wake again; and secretly she assiduously used all her supposed “magical” powers to restore her husband to his right mind. This she could never succeed in doing; but she inclined to believe that the steady improvement in the Dolt’s own character was due to her paranormal influence.

At last the time came for Victor to start his winter classes. Maggie had privately warned his colleagues and some of his students that he was not yet fully himself, but she assured them that he was fit for work. She was confident that this was true, for she had carefully coached him, and he had very earnestly set himself to the task of mastering the work that was formerly so familiar to his other self. He faced his students with courage; and, apart from occasional “lapses of memory” and muddled presentation, he was academically proficient. But he had lost much of his old brilliance as a teacher, and he was far more easily tired and exasperated than the Victor that his students had formerly known. I took the trouble at a later stage to enquire from some of his students about their feelings toward Victor at this time. They had gradually discovered that his temperament had changed. Formerly everyone had found him exceptionally easy to make contact with, but now there was a barrier. They felt that he sincerely tried to overcome it, but it was always present. As one woman put the matter, “Mr. Smith’s great gift in the old days was that he knew at once what you wanted, often better than you did yourself. But after his illness he lost this power. He never seemed able to realize you.”

One other important event took place during my absence in India, namely the birth of a second child. Not till 1939, when I returned to England on holiday, did I see the Smiths again.

This time it was Maggie who received me. Victor was away at a class, but would be back that night. I noticed at once that: she had aged a good deal. Her ruddy hair was as voluminous as ever, but its lustre had diminished; and age or anxiety had produced a few white threads. The eyes, I thought, had a new tenderness and sadness. They were surrounded by a filigree of little creases. The wide mouth was more severely moulded; and the lips were slightly drawn back, as though from a sour taste.

As Maggie was leading me up to my room, Colin appeared. He was a well- grown boy of eight. His features owed much to Victor, but the mouth was a youthful version of Maggie’s, and his hair showed a ruddy glint. He greeted me without shyness, but with an obvious reserve. Later I learned that early experiences of his father had made him form a habit of approaching all men with reserve.

When I had deposited my baggage in my room, Maggie led me to see her younger child, Sheila, who had just been put to bed. She was now about three. She lay in her cot with very wide-awake blue eyes and a mop of fair hair. Unlike Colin, she at once greeted me with a genial smile. Having come into the world later than her brother, she had missed the period of her father’s erratic behaviour toward his offspring.

We then went downstairs to share a high tea with Colin; and when he had gone off to bed, Maggie settled to her sewing, and told me all the family news. Victor, she said, was generally in the less-awake state. (Maggie, I noticed, never used the label “Dolt”, which Victor awake had invented for his secondary personality.) There were only occasional brief wakings into the true Victor. To Maggie these spells were very poignant, because when they occurred Victor treated her with great tenderness and ardour. With a wry smile, she said, “You see, I have my own darling Victor for a few days every two or three months. The rest of the time I have an unsatisfactory substitute, who does not love me, does not really seem to know how to love anyone. He generally treats me with sentimental respect. In the early days he sometimes gave me a bad time; but he has come to need me in a lot of ways, and sometimes (I think) he begins to feel a trace of affection for me. But now and then he swings over into dislike, and — well, sometimes life becomes a bit difficult.”

On the rare occasions when the true Victor awoke, he found his life in chaos. The Dolt was not the gifted teacher that Victor’s students had known and admired. So far as actual knowledge of his subjects was concerned, he was by now tolerably efficient, with the aid of the awake Victor’s notes and his own respectable “First-Class Honours” intelligence. But he was not nearly so good as Victor either at inspiring people with the will to understand and to work, or at helping them over difficulties. And he was erratic; sometimes painstaking, sometimes careless and contemptuous. The result was that attendance at his classes was not nearly so satisfactory as it had been. Consequently, in the sole class where the secretary’s loyalty to the class was greater than his moral scruple, a good deal of falsification of the registers had been indulged in. The Dolt connived at this, although it amounted to a rather serious acquiescence in obtaining money from the State on false pretences. When the awake Victor appeared at a class, he found himself in a very awkward position. It was necessary to contradict a good deal of the Dolt’s teaching; and also, in the one class there were difficulties over the register. It was taken for granted that he approved of the mildly dishonest practices that had become customary. Once or twice he had made a fuss, and this unexpected behaviour had caused much soreness.

On the occasions when the true Victor had taken a class, he used to tell Maggie in detail about the session, so that she could pass on the information to the Dolt. Sometimes he actually wrote a letter to his other self, informing him of the steps taken to defeat his malpractices. These letters he used to address ironically (though correctly) to “Captain J.V. Cadogan-Smith, M.C., M.A.” It amused him to begin them “Dear Cad”, and to sign them “Your better half, Vic Smith”. I learned later that when the Dolt had treated Maggie extremely badly, and the true Victor had presently appeared, he wrote a witheringly contemptuous letter to his other self, ending “I warn you! If you can’t treat my wife decently, I may be forced to put a bullet through our common head.”

In other ways, also, Victor’s affairs were in confusion. It was quite impossible for him to carryon those “spiritual researches” which were to have been his special contribution to the life of his society. This work was now impossible for two reasons. First, though the Dolt had read the true Victor’s unfinished book and other papers with increasing interest, he was quite incapable of the kind of experience which had given rise to it. Consequently it was only in the brief spells of his lucidity that Victor could make any progress either in what he called “spiritual research”, or in writing. But in another way also the work was rendered impossible. The awake Victor himself was no longer capable of the clarity of experience that it demanded. The Dolt did not keep the common body and mind in strict training, did not keep his appetites under control, and his attention constantly upon such vision as was possible to him. Sometimes he did make serious attempts to do this; but all too soon he would lapse. Consequently when the awake Victor appeared, he inherited a sort of hang-over. Neither mind nor body were keyed up to concert pitch. Nothing less than several months of clean living and continuous meditation could possibly fit him for his work. And such a spell was never allowed him. The task which he had most at heart seemed to have become permanently impossible.

There was yet another source of distress for the awake Victor. The Dolt had begun to exploit such wisdom as the true Victor had already expressed in his unfinished book. For the less awake personality did not wish to remain indefinitely in adult education. Though he had by now been seriously influenced by the true Victor’s values, he looked for something more spectacular and more lucrative than lecturing in evening classes. So he planned to write a number of popular books based on the philosophical and religious ideas of the awake personality, rashly confident that he had understood those ideas, and that he could even improve on them by making them more intelligible and less extravagant. The first book was to be a novel about a modern mystic who alternated between otherworldliness and participation in public life. He had already written most of this book. The awake Victor, who of course inherited the “memory” of the Dolt’s actual writing of the book, and had also scrutinized it afresh after his waking, was bitterly contemptuous of this garbled version of his thought. He recognized that the Dolt had carried out his plan with considerable skill. Indeed, he feared that the novel might actually turn out to be a best seller, and its author might earn a spurious reputation for profound religious experience and literary artistry. But to the awake Victor the book was subtly false through and through. He could not tolerate the prospect of being saddled with responsibility for what he regarded as a glib and insincere work.

At a later date, I asked Victor to throw some light on the difference between his own ideas and the Dolt’s interpretation of them. He answered with a long disquisition, most of which was almost meaningless to me. He would expound some conception of his own, and then give the Dolt’s version of it, ending contemptuously with, “You surely see how he messed up the whole thing.” In one case, however, I did gain some notion of his point. In his manuscript the true Victor had devoted much space to careful study of the distinctively human personal relationship of fellowship or community. He had described it realistically in terms of self-awareness and other-awareness and the creation of a psychical “symbiosis”, in which each individual becomes necessary to and is moulded by the other. The Dolt, I gather, had interpreted this to mean that a common spirit or soul emerged, with a life of its own over and above the life of the individual. The true Victor was infuriated by this “sentimental and romantic notion”. And his own distress dismayed him, for the very fact that he could not maintain serene detachment seemed to indicate that he himself had gravely deteriorated.

The Dolt had kept his book secret from Maggie, perhaps vaguely feeling that she would disapprove of it. But of course, when the true Victor reappeared, he told her all about it, and showed it to her. He then announced that he would destroy the manuscript. But Maggie begged for its life, for to her it did not seem so base an imitation as to Victor himself; and she felt (so she told me) that drastic criticism would be more appropriate than destruction. In her view, even if the work was over-simplified and crude, and partly insincere, it also gave evidence of a quite sincere groping after truth. Might not her poor somnolent Victor clarify his mind in the writing of this book? And might not she, if she was sufficiently tactful, help him by passing on to him the comments of the lucid Victor? Might she not persuade him to rewrite it on a higher level of experience?

Maggie confessed to another motive. It was desperately important for her to gain the complete confidence of the unhappy secondary personality with whom she had to spend most of her life. She therefore wanted to be able to tell him that she had saved his book from destruction.

In the end her policy was agreed upon. Victor himself wrote an outspoken criticism of the book, and entrusted it to Maggie. She promised that, after due preparation of the author’s mind, she would show him the devastating comments of the true Victor. The Dolt’s book was never published, never even completed. Criticism on the part of the true Victor combined with a gradual change in the Dolt’s own outlook to disgust him with his literary ventures.

Maggie made it clear to me that the less awake Victor was divided against himself. He was sometimes quite sincerely and earnestly concerned to follow as nearly as possible in the path set by the awake Victor, though well aware that he could never attain to the other’s sensitivity and constancy of purpose. But often he rebelled; though never, so to speak, fundamentally. Formerly, the completely unregenerate Dolt had been determined to live a kind of life entirely different from that chosen by the awake Victor, a life of go-getting, self-display and individualistic enjoyment. But by now he was at heart orientated (though unclearly orientated) toward a different kind of life; and his rebelliousness, though often violent, was only a spasmodic kicking against the pricks and over the traces, with no clear alternative to the aims which he had grown to accept from his more lucid self. In fact he had in many ways greatly improved as a person. On the other hand, when he did revolt he could no longer revert to the respectable and efficient business man; and consequently he was at these times completely disorientated, disillusioned and disheartened. And so he was apt to fall for every passing temptation.

“For one thing,” said Maggie, putting her sewing aside and clasping her hands tightly together in obvious distress, “at those times he is apt to drink far too much. And of course that makes him worse. There have been complaints of his lecturing in a fuddled state. If he doesn’t stop this sort of thing, he will lose his job, sooner or later. It’s tragic. You see, his lapses are not very frequent, but they do so much harm. Normally my poor substitute Victor is all too respectable, and very conscientious up to a point. He really does want to make good. It’s not his fault that he can’t be really original or brilliant. (Though, mind you, he is just as intelligent as ever, in his own conventional way.) It’s not his fault that he doesn’t love me, and yet uncomfortably worships me. And all the while, you see, I know he is really at heart still Victor, my own glorious Victor; and so I easily forgive him, and in spite of everything I love him, and I just wait longingly for him to wake and be himself again. But, oh, dear, it’s so distressing when he breaks out; and even more so when the bout is over, and he is abjectly ashamed.” She paused, then added, near to tears, “He would hate me for telling you all this. But my own Victor wouldn’t. Indeed he would want me to tell you. And it’s a relief to be able to talk to someone about it all.”

I asked Maggie what she had meant by saying that he had sometimes treated her badly; and I added that the awake Victor would want her to tell me. She took up her sewing again, and concentrated her attention on it. After a long silence, all she said was, “Oh, he just hates me and gets angry, and says horrid things, and sometimes does horrid things too.” She was evidently reluctant to tell me more, and I did not press her.

Presently she said, “A little while ago he bought a sports car, though we really can’t afford it. He spends a lot of time rushing about in it. He has always been a very good driver, you know; and doing trips in record time gives him a boyish delight. He generally manages to motor to his classes; and the night-driving amuses him. Once or twice he has taken me in the car for a week-end. It means making arrangements with a friend to come and stay here with the children. And, of course, that is sometimes difficult. And often he changes his mind when the arrangements have been made. Anyhow those week-ends never go properly. I get bored in a car; I prefer walking. And he hates walking, and wants to spend all the time in the car. So we go far afield, and never have any time to walk when we get there. Besides,” she added with a nervous laugh, “he insists on having separate bedrooms at the hotels. On one occasion he started a bit of painfully false love-making on the journey. But it was too awful, and we both turned to ice. It seems so utterly fantastic for that to happen between me and Victor. You see, deep down under his revulsion from me he does really love me. I know he does. And I think he knows it too, but he won’t face up to it. The loathing always wins. Sometimes he seems to love the car far more than me. When he is not driving it, he is always fiddling about with it. On one of the rare visits of my own Victor, we used the car to take us all to Patterdale. Of course Victor and I made a bit of a honeymoon of it. On the second day the other reappeared, and of course he was furious to find himself sharing a room with me; and furious also because the car (he said) had been overloaded He insisted on my taking the children back by train at once.”

I asked Maggie if she felt sure that things really were improving, or the reverse. She said, “My true Victor comes no more often; but on the whole I do think the other is more reconciled to his life, and to me. Also he is more interested in the children than he used to be. He used to say, ‘They’re not my brats, and I don’t see why I should bother about them ‘.”

I inferred that Sheila, who had been born since the Dolt had ousted the true Victor, had been conceived during one of the rare awake phases of her father’s strange life.

Maggie continued, “I feel somehow that if only I could win him emotionally, things might be much better. But he still finds me repulsive. Most men have always thought me just ugly, but he finds me repulsive.” She suddenly rose, saying she must put the kettle on, as Victor would be back soon.

While I was thinking over Maggie’s story, there was the sound of a car stopping at the gate, and Maggie went to let Maggie in. She brought him straight into the sitting-room.

“Hello, Henry, old man!” he said. “Glad to see you again at last.” Victor greeted me with formal politeness, and a pathetic attempt at the lordly condescension of former days. I was shocked by his appearance. Not only was his hair much greyer (so, no doubt, was mine), but his face had gone flabby. The heavy eyelids half covered the eyes, in the manner typical of the Dolt; but occasionally they were raised in a disconcerting and exaggerated stare, as though in caricature of the true Victor.

There was an awkward little pause. I said something about being glad to see him again after all these years. “Years and years,” he said, “and we both show it, me with my hair falling out, and you with that dried-up leathery face of the East.” We both laughed. He said, “Do you remember how I had to valet you when you were my best man?” His voice faded out. It was as though he had forgotten and suddenly remembered that though (as the Dolt) he had not seen me since the wedding fiasco, the true Victor had since met me in London and had a long conversation. I tactfully laughed, and tried to think of something to say.

Victor had his supper from a tray, sitting by the fire. He kept up a flow of desultory talk, and I interjected an occasional platitude. I vaguely felt that we were both manoeuvring for position. When he had finished his meal, and Maggie had gone out to wash up, he said, “I suppose you think the other Victor is the true Victor, and that I am only a feeble and perverted imitation.” I was never any good at tact, and now I squirmed and stammered. Before I could say anything, he continued.

“You’re wrong. The other me is a brilliant but hopelessly unbalanced and extravagant creature. I have not his imaginative power, but I am balanced, sane. In fact I am the true synthesis of him and the practical go-getter that I used to be.”

Taken aback, I could find no better comment than, “That’s very interesting.”

Victor looked at me shrewdly for a moment, then remarked, “Maggie has been talking to you. She’s a wonderful woman, in spite of her looks, poor thing; but she has got me all wrong. Just because I am not sexually attracted to her, she thinks I cannot be as sensitive as the bloke she married. Her trouble is that she can’t keep her mind clear of sex. I suppose it’s inevitable in an unattractive woman. Not that Maggie is simply unattractive. Long acquaintance with her reveals a most disturbing animal or diabolic power that one has increasingly to guard against.”

At this point, noticing perhaps that I was showing signs of protest, he hastened to add, “But, as I say, in her own way she really is magnificent. She’s devoted to me. If it had not been for her, I should never have discovered that my other self had anything good in him at all. She has been an invaluable liaison officer. She has helped me a lot to see things from his point of view. She has helped me to begin synthesizing the two of us. Take politics, for instance. He is a wild sort of Communist, and I used to be a rather conventional Tory. Well, with Maggie’s help I have progressed a lot, and now I think I have really found the balanced view. At heart I am a kind of Liberal Socialist, but I am practical enough to see that the right road to socialism is through enlightened conservatism. My other I self, with his Marxism, is far too impatient to accept this position.”

I pointed out that the other personality was not strictly a Marxist, though he had learnt very much from Marx. Victor ignored my interruption.

He continued, “Then all this religious stuff. Of course it is fundamentally sound and very important, but my brilliant brother (as I call him) is too clever by half about it, The things he writes are too subtle to get across to ordinary people. I sometimes wonder whether they are really so profund as he seems to think. I suspect they sometimes merely express brilliantly a fundamentally confused state of mind. But I am using his work a lot. Oh, yes, I shall be able to make something good out of it.”

The Dolt’s complacency took my breath away. Not until subsequent conversations did I discover that all this was a façade. He was building up a character that he wanted me to believe in. But he did not really believe in it himself. Under this patronizing assurance toward the true Victor I gradually began to sense a very different attitude. Not till quite late in my visit did the truth begin to appear.

I had, of course, watched with great interest the relations between Victor and Maggie. Generally he treated her with a rather crude kind of gallantry in which I detected an undercurrent of malice. On one occasion Maggie appeared in a new coat and skirt of plain design, Victor eyed it silently for a moment, then remarked, “Charming, charming, my dear; to those who can appreciate your peculiar style of beauty.” He paused, then continued, “But those who can’t, might feel that only an obviously attractive woman could carry off such a severe fashion,” Thus he gave a veiled expression to his own dislike of Maggie’s appearance, and yet at the same time claimed that he was sensitive enough to appreciate her.

On another occasion he expressed his hostility more openly. Sheila had been sick in the night, and Maggie appeared at breakfast in her dressing-gown. A rather large area of creamy bosom was visible. Victor said, “For God’s sake don’t expose yourself like that. Even if your body is more attractive than your face you are not entitled to display it.” Maggie clutched her dressing-gown tightly round her, turned Crimson, and replied with spirit, “Don’t make yourself ridiculous!” I protested that there was nothing at all unseemly in her dress, and made it quite clear that Victor s remark had shocked me.

There was an awkward silence. Then in a different voice he said, “Maggie, please forgive me. I suppose I’m hypersensitive, or neurotic or something.”

That evening, after Maggie had gone upstairs, Victor asked me to stay and talk to him. He offered me a drink; but, knowing his weakness, I refused. He brought out the bottle of whisky and tried to persuade me, but I remained firm. For a moment he hesitated, then put the bottle back, and sat down opposite me by the fire. Filling his pipe, he said in a dull voice, “I have talked a lot of rot since you came.” I awkwardly protested, but he continued, “All that gassing about my being the synthesis of the two Victors is just rubbish. I wish it were true, but it isn’t.” He lit his pipe and gazed moodily into the fire. He said, “Of course I know quite well, really, that the other is the better man. But it’s distressing, and so I pretend to patronize him. I don’t really feel at all superior to my brilliant better half. I pretend to, but the pretence is becoming more and more transparent, even to me; specially under Maggie’s eagle eye. I know quite well that everything worth while in me comes from him, mostly through Maggie. Really, I want to be him, even though at times I loathe him. I know I can’t be him; but at least I want to do what I can to stand for the things he stands for. I want to learn from him all I can. I want to do his chosen work, not just because he chose it but because I myself have learnt to see how important it is today. But, hell, I’m not bright enough. Mind you, I’m bright enough by ordinary standards, quite as bright as you, you old stick-in-the-mud. But — well, there are things he wrote in his notes and his book that I can’t really grasp. And, what’s worse, even now that I accept his values, I can’t stick to them and stand up for them as he did; because — well, I suppose I’m not possessed by them as he is.”

Victor brooded in silence. His pipe had gone out. I had to say something, but all that came was, “I wish I could help somehow.”

Then I added, “But Maggie is helping you a lot, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said, “she’s wonderful. “Then in a burst of frankness he unburdened himself about her. “The trouble is, she can’t realize she’s not my style. I never married her. I’m not her husband. I really do see her merits. I profoundly respect her. I even love her, in a way; as long as she keeps her distance. But the sight of her and the touch of her simply don’t appeal to me. In fact they repel me. I’m repelled all the more because I do feel there’s a repulsive fascination about her. She’s — well, a female ape with a woman’s intelligence, and a superhuman generosity.

“‘His Monkey Wife’!” Victor laughed harshly.

I felt a surge of indignation, and I protested hotly that he was being grossly unfair to her on the score of looks. She was certainly not a beauty, but it was untrue and false to say that she was repulsively fascinating. “Indeed,” I said, “your other self has taught me to see something of her strange beauty, now and then.” He replied, “Oh, well, that is how I feel about her myself. And so, when I do find myself attracted by her I can’t help feeling it’s a disgusting perversion that must be resisted at all costs.” I scornfully rejected this idea, and urged him to let himself go the next time he felt her attraction, and perhaps that would cure him of his silly notions. “Christ!” he said. “If I did let myself go I should savage her. No! I must keep a hold on myself.”

One morning I came downstairs to find both Maggie and Victor at breakfast. This was unusual, for generally Victor appeared late, often staying in bed for the meal. What was more unusual was that both were laughing happily. The children also were in high spirits. Once glance at Victor told me that he was himself again. The alert eyes, the uncurbed lips, were unmistakable. “Yes,” said Victor, “I am myself again, at last. I’m afraid the Dolt has given you rather an uncomfortable visit, so far, Harry.” I asked him when the change had happened. He answered merely, “Last night, about two o’clock.” After breakfast, when the children had gone off to play, I was told more about it. Maggie said, “In the middle of the night I was awakened by a knock at my door. It was Victor, the real Victor. I recognized his voice at once. He said, ‘Let me in, Maggie darling.’” (I noted that she had locked her door, but I made no comment.) Victor took up the thread, “So she let me in, and we did our best to add to the family.” Maggie protested, her eyes sparkling, her colour rising.

The atmosphere of the whole house was changed. The children seemed delighted to find their father in a friendly mood, and each was determined to have as much as possible of him while he lasted. It was as though Victor were a soldier home on a short leave. The same poignant happiness, the same sense of brevity and precariousness, the same alternation of easy talk and awkward silence; and between the married pair the same tendency to keep hold of each other. I began to wonder whether they would rather that I left the place to them. But when I suggested this, they both vehemently protested.

It happened that Victor was due to take a class that same evening. He asked Maggie to arrange for someone to mind the children, so that she and I could both accompany him. “Let’s go by train instead of the car,” he said, “it’s friendlier.”

We arrived rather early in the schoolroom where the class was to be held. As the members arrived, Victor talked to individuals here and there about their work. When some twenty-five adults were uncomfortably seated at desks meant for children, Victor began his talk. He started by saying that he did-not intend to cover any new ground on this occasion, because he wanted to clear up a number of points that he had not dealt with satisfactorily earlier in the session. “I have not been in very good form recently,” he said, “but I’m wide-awake now, and I had better make the best of it.” The class had already tumbled to it that he was brighter than usual, and there was an unmistakable air of expectancy in the room. I noticed that the various corrections and qualifications that Victor made to his own earlier statements were all such as to give a more balanced view, and a view less easily acceptable to the class. Evidently the Dolt had been accustomed to take the line of least resistance by allowing a good many extravagant Leftist pronouncements to go unanswered, and even by pandering to such opinions in his lectures. The awake Victor, though in some ways far more to the Left in politics than the Dolt, would not tolerate unfair or uncritical propaganda. On this occasion he had a passage of arms with an ardent Communist who was outraged that Victor should now be anxious to insist that there had been much real good-heartedness and self-sacrificing social work among employers. The young man rose and made a formal protest, deploring “this change of heart in our respected tutor “, and plainly hinting that Victor had to talk like that for fear of losing his job. Victor laughed, and then let himself go on the subject of over-simplifying history and human nature for the sake of a theory which was largely true but not the whole truth. He turned the incident to good account by a short statement on the terrific complexity of the universe, and the fact that none of the great questions could be properly answered, because they were all at bottom false questions. Always what we had to do was to ask new and subtler questions. When someone remarked, “Yes, but we must have some certainty to live by,” Victor said, “You can’t have it, and it’s no use pretending.” Then he corrected himself and said, “You can find in your own heart the only certainty that matters, namely that the way of community, of love and friendliness, is good, and that we must strive to live that way if we are to fulfil our nature. But certainty about the universe — No! Impossible! Let’s just be humble about it, and reverently agnostic.”

I think it was on the third evening after this that Victor told me about his ill-treatment of Maggie when he was in his less-awake phase. We were all three sitting round the fire, Maggie sewing, Victor mending crockery, I as usual idly smoking. (Mending crockery, by the way, was an operation which the Dolt had always refused to undertake. Consequently a collection of broken cups and plates had always accumulated for the true Victor to cope with on his rare visits. The little “daily help” who worked for Maggie at this time was more amiable than careful.) I had noticed, as the days advanced since Victor’s waking, an increasing sadness in his relations with Maggie. This was to be expected, since his lucid state was not likely to last much longer. I could also detect a growing anxiety on Maggie’s account. On one occasion I had overheard Maggie say to him, “It’s all right, Victor dear. I can deal with him.” And Victor replied, “God! I think you ought to learn jujitsu or carry a pistol.” She laughed.

On this evening of the crockery-mending the truth came out. Carefully fitting two bits of a saucer together, Victor said, “Maggie may not have told you how rottenly the Dolt sometimes treats her. She’s too kind.”

Maggie looked uncomfortable and said, “Oh, surely the details don’t matter. I did tell him there had been trouble.”

Victor insisted, “The details do matter. I am very anxious about it all. Do you know, Harry, the Dolt, once went at her with a knife. I, Victor, once went at Maggie with a knife. Fortunately she was able to lock herself into the lavatory, and stay there till I cooled down.”

“Yes,” said Maggie, laughing, “and of course while Victor, poor dear, was crazily stabbing at the door the laundry van came. We missed sending our clothes that week. Afterwards, of course my unfortunate husband was bitterly ashamed of himself, and I think he would have stuck the knife in his own gizzard if I had not taken it from him.”

I asked what the cause of the trouble was. Maggie said, “I thought Victor was out of the house, because I had not heard the car come back; and I was walking about in my petticoat because it was so hot. But Victor had left the car at the garage for repairs and walked home. So he caught me unawares. The sight of me like that sent him crazy. Heavens it was a picnic! And so funny, somehow I But it all happened ages ago. He has been a lamb for ever so long now.”

“Yes,” said Victor, “but things might quite well go wrong again any time. And there was that other affair.”

Maggie brightly said, “Oh, that was earlier still. And now, as you know, I lock my door at night.” Victor said,” I had not been able to sleep. At the class where I had been that I evening there was a rather seductive girl. When I was going over some written work with her after the class squashed against her in one of those ridiculous little desks, I got all sexy. After that, I had a sleepless night. My mind was going round and round about sex and Maggie. What I regarded as the bestial fascination of her began to get the better of my repugnance. At last I just went to her room.”

Maggie intervened. “I heard the door open, and for a moment I lay still with my heart thumping. Then I said ‘Is that you, Victor?’ There was no answer. He simply rushed straight at me. I very soon knew it was not my own darling Victor after all, but just the poor other Victor. He was rough and savage, and cruel too. I said I wouldn’t be made love to like that, and I fought. I bit his shoulder hard, but he took no notice. Then it suddenly came over me that after all he really was my own Victor at heart, and I gave up.”

Victor continued, “Presently it came over me that I was being a disgusting brute, and I ran away.”

“After that,” said Maggie. “I locked my door every night.”

Victor turned to me and said, “Now do you wonder why I am anxious?” But Maggie insisted that it was all ancient history, and the other Victor would never do that sort of thing now. “And some day,” she said, “he is going to love me, properly.” When I suggested that some day the true Victor would be permanently established, they both sadly rejected this possibility. Maggie said, “The best we can hope for is that his visits will not become rarer and shorter and finally cease altogether.” “But it’s a slender hope,” Victor said. “We have plotted the curve of the phases for the last eight years; and extrapolation suggests that I shall have vanished entirely by 1948 or 1950. And if it had not been for Maggie’s help. I should probably have vanished long ago.”

I had no clear idea as to how Maggie helped Victor to remain awake, so I asked her to tell me. Victor interposed. “Mainly just by being Maggie, and loving me.”

“Yes,” said Maggie, “mainly by loving him. But also by what one might call telepathic support, or (more accurately) by inducing the common spiritual soil, in which we are all rooted, to nourish the spirit in him.”

This sort of talk made me turn all sceptical and cynical, but I report it as faithfully as I can. Victor said, “She likes to put it that way; but the truth is inexpressible. One might just as well call it prayer, and leave the whole matter unexplained.”

The plight of these two was indeed strange and distressing. Victor had reconciled himself to the expectation that his times of lucidity would cease altogether, and that he would never be able to pursue effectively his chosen work. He was naturally very anxious that the Dolt should not give the world a garbled version of that work. He vaguely hoped that he and Maggie would be able to induce in the other a greater humility and a greater sincerity. But little progress had so far been made. In spite of this gloomy prospect, however, Victor seemed to be fundamentally reconciled to his fate. He said, “Evidently it is not in the pattern of history that I should be the one to clarify man’s consciousness about his relation to the heart of things; but someone, some day will do it. Or some other race somewhere in the universe will see what I am trying to see. Indeed, maybe they have done so, long ago. And ultimately, Harry, what supremely matters is not that this or that individual or species should find peace (or’ salvation ‘) through the intruding vision of the spirit, but that the spirit should somewhere or somewhen be perceived with full clarity and worshipped with full intelligence.” This remark of Victor’s greatly perplexed me, but I record it for what it is worth.

With regard to Maggie his position was very distressing. They would meet less and less often; and each time he would inherit memories of the Dolt’s insensitive treatment of her. Occasionally, even the true serene Victor, when he was not quite at his best, would suffer bitterly on this score. In relation to Maggie’s misfortune he could never quite maintain, the sublime acceptance which was natural to him in relation to his own misfortune. She herself, however, put a brave face on it. Though she obviously longed to have the true Victor always, she maintained a gallant confidence that in time she would win the poor substitute Victor wholly to the true Victor’s values, and to real love for herself. “And then,” she said, “he will really be my true Victor, though without my darling’s brilliance.” And she claimed that she herself was beginning to love the lesser Victor for his own sake and not merely because she knew that at heart he was the true Victor. This remark intrigued me, and I asked her to explain. After a silence she said, “I suppose I am beginning to love him maternally, with tenderness toward his weakness, and charity toward his perversity, and pride in his struggle to rise above himself. You see, he really is trying. He is having a desperate moral struggle. The Victor that is with us now has no struggle, not against sheer selfishness, I mean. He has said so, time and again. So he has no need of me to mother him.” Victor interrupted, half in jest, half in earnest. “God!” he said, “I’m beginning to feel jealous of the Dolt. He is going to have so much of you, and I so little. Of course, in a way I have you all the time, because it’s me you love in him, and because when I wake I have all his experience. But it’s dismal to remember how he falls short of loving you properly. And Maggie, I do need you; not to mother me, merely, but to keep me from dying utterly into him.” Maggie suddenly rose from her chair, and put her arms round Victor’s neck.

To complete the picture of Victor as I found him in 1939, I will say something of his relations with his children. Maggie had told me that in the early days of the Dolt’s return, Victor had not tried to conceal his resentment against Colin. On several occasions he had treated the child rather brutally, once thrashing him severely for some paltry offence. But gradually he had made clumsy advances, and in the end a tolerable relationship had been established. Maggie had told Colin vaguely about his father’s illness. She had done her best to persuade the boy that, when his father was in his ordinary state, he was not really “himself” at all. He was living in a kind of long bad dream. She told Colin much about the gentleness and humour of Victor in the days before he “fell ill”, and insisted that even the ordinary Victor was like that at heart, and was gradually recovering his former genial nature. To me it seemed almost a miracle that she succeeded at all in winning her son over to this view. But, then, she was something of a witch. And in spite of his detached man-to-man behaviour, he loved and respected her very deeply. It was clear to me that the boy had come to model his behaviour toward Victor on his mother’s forbearance and patience toward her husband in his less attractive phases. This admirable conduct would probably have been quite impossible to Colin but for the fact that he had first-hand acquaintance with the true Victor as a very satisfactory sort of parent. With the less awake Victor, the happiest incident had I been when Colin had been severely ill, and Victor was so far roused out of his habitual indifference that he had eagerly and devotedly taken his share of the nursing, and had done his best to entertain his son during the long convalescence. This affair had established better relations both between Victor and Colin and between Victor and Maggie.

One morning early in my visit, while the lesser personality was still on the scene, Victor found himself in the mood for playing with Colin. I had noticed that, hitherto, father and son had, on the whole, left each other alone, so Victor’s announcement that he proposed to play with Colin surprised me. He explained, “I want to keep in touch with the lad. And it will be refreshing after last night’s class. Come, Harry! You must join in.” It was a wet morning. Colin was absorbed in drawing, for which he showed a considerable talent. Victor said to him, “I have a bit of time to spare, so would you like to get the railway out?” Colin cheerfully said, “Righto,” but continued drawing. After a couple of minutes, during which Victor was showing me one of the locomotives, he turned to Colin, and said, “Well, what about it?” After one more careful stroke of the pencil, Colin went to the cupboard and fetched out a large box of railway lines. The three of us worked for a while, laying a complicated track from the playroom along the landing and into the far end of the guest-room. There were stations, a tunnel under my bed, sidings, and so on. The set was a magnificent electric system, built up birthday by birthday. When the track was laid, Colin was stationed in the playroom, I in the guest- room, and Victor took charge of the siding on the landing. There followed a very absorbing game with three trains and a great deal of work at the points. I noted that though Colin entered into the spirit of the game quite well, he was apt to snatch every opportunity for returning to his drawing. Once, when he failed to dispatch a train at the right moment, Victor was quite cross. It was also Victor, not Colin, who was cross when Sheila, wanting her dolly to have a ride on the train, tripped over a station and disintegrated the line. Altogether, I got the impression that it was Colin who was entertaining Victor, not the reverse. And very gracefully he had done it, apart from one malicious moment, when (I suspect) he deliberately staged a head-on collision.

The behaviour of father and son over the model railway had given me a clearer view of the character of the less awake Victor at this time. Whenever the true Victor appeared (so Maggie said) the general change of atmosphere affected Colin very noticeably. Even the small Sheila seemed to be aware of a propitious change. I myself had witnessed this change in the children on the morning when the true Victor reappeared. After the happy breakfast had come to an end, and the table had been cleared, Colin came along to his father with his cherished drawing- book, and said, “Daddy, I’ve done heaps of drawings since I last showed you. Look!” He dragged Victor to a chair and put the open book on his knees. Victor turned over the pages, and said, “Marvellous! You have done a lot! But look, there are so many! I think we had better wait till this afternoon. I want to talk to Uncle Harry now.” Colin protested, “No, Daddy, please look now! You may be different this afternoon. Please!” Victor’s heart was touched, and he said, “Right! We’ll get Uncle Harry to help.” Colin dragged a chair beside his father’s, and told me to stand behind and look over their shoulders. Victor studied each drawing carefully and then made a few comments, jocular or serious. Sometimes he reacted with critical approval, sometimes with ribaldry, but always he did his best to be helpful. There were drawings of animals (with something of the vigour of paleolithic paintings), of cars, ships, aeroplanes; and dramatic sketches of people having lurid adventures. Victor would say, “That’s no picture at all. Every line in it is quarrelling with every other. There’s no oneness to it,” Or else, “That’s not a bad effort, Colin, but this fellow has a side-face with a front-face eye in it. If you really intended that, to get both front and side-face into the picture, for the picture’s sake, well and good; but I can’t help feeling you just got muddled.” Of another of Colin’s creations he said, “Gosh! That poor blighter’s legs never grew big enough for his body. And what’s this man with the string bag emptied on his head?” Colin indignantly explained that it was a woman with fuzzy hair. When Victor came to a drawing of a steamer in a rough sea, he pointed out that the smoke was going one way and the flags another. Sometimes Victor would make little drawings in the margin, and Colin would watch intently.

A loose piece of paper slipped out of the book. Colin grabbed at it, with obvious embarrassment, but Victor was already holding it and scrutinizing it. Anxiously, Colin said, “I forgot that was there, Daddy,” and tried to retrieve it. But Victor, laughing with relish, held it out of reach. It was a drawing of a face. And crude as it was, it was obviously Victor himself, wearing his most Doltish expression. Victor handed up the drawing to me, and started a playful brawl with Colin.

Nothing else need be reported about my visit to the Smiths in 1939. The true Victor was still in occupation when I left, but it was clear that both he and Maggie expected each day to be their last. Latterly the poignancy of the situation had been difficult for me to bear. They both behaved with normal calm, but there was a vague tension in all that they did. I was glad when the time came for me to leave them to themselves.

11. GLOOM

From 1939 to 1946

THE SECOND WORLD WAR prevented me from seeing the Smiths again till 1946, for I was forced to remain in India till the war was over and I could secure a passage home. During the war years I occasionally had a letter from Victor or Maggie, but they were neither of them prolific correspondents, and I learned only the salient events of their lives. Another baby, appeared, Margaret. Victor added a little to his slender income by occasional writing. I gathered that the awake Victor’s ‘appearances became rarer and rarer, but that the secondary personality was becoming a reformed character.

At the outset of the war, the secondary Victor, believing himself to be acting according to the best lights of his more gifted “brother”, declared himself a pacifist. This decision had been taken after much heart-searching, and under the influence of notes and articles written by the awake Victor during the early years of the inter-war period. Maggie too was still much influenced by the attitude that Victor had adopted in those days; but the awake Victor himself, on his brief re- appearances, had gradually come to take up a different view. On each occasion he spent much time re-assessing the memories of the other about the reports of Nazi ruthlessness in Germany and elsewhere, and the disastrous appeasement practised by the democratic powers; and little by little he was forced to the conclusion that this war had indeed to be fought. I have already referred to the fact that over this matter he had a genuinely moral struggle. It was difficult for him to abandon the pacifist’s habit of mind, and to face the fact that, potent as “non-violence” is, it cannot solve all problems. Pacifism, he now affirmed, would be a betrayal of urgent concrete duty for the sake of an abstraction. He gradually persuaded Maggie to this view; and through her he tried to influence his own other self. But the bewildered other at first resisted strongly, regarding his brilliant “brother” as a renegade. In declaring himself a pacifist the Dolt had satisfied his increasing loyalty to the values of his other self; yet in stubbornly clinging to his pacifism in spite of the true Victor’s change of opinion, he seems to have enjoyed asserting his own independence. However, what with the arguments brought to bear on him by the converted Maggie and a written communication left for him by the awake Victor, and (above all) the pressure of circumstances, he was at last painfully driven to recant.

He then swung over to a sense of his military obligation. His career in the previous war had been erratic but brilliant. He therefore decided to apply for some sort of army job in the new war. Maggie told me that after he had renounced his pacifism, and was awaiting the result of his letter to the War Office, he went through a phase of scarcely veiled self-importance, as though the whole defence of the Empire rested on his shoulders. Occasionally, however, a schoolboy gaiety would break through his solemnity. It was obvious that he was extremely glad to be relieved of the burden of pacifism. His heart’s desire now was to find himself once more in khaki. But alas! His application was rejected on psychological grounds. After a spell of profound mortification and self-loathing, he brought himself to stoop so far as to join the Local Defence Volunteers, later called the Home Guard. Gradually he restored his self-respect by devoted and no doubt thoroughly efficient work in this connection. So enthusiastic and energetic was he, that he soon rose to a very responsible position. For him, the Home Guard now appeared as the true backbone of Britain’s defence. All this while, he managed also to carry on his normal adult educational duties. Owing to the pressure of war conditions these civilian evening classes were gradually much reduced; but a new kind of adult education began to be organized, namely in the Forces. Victor threw himself into this with enthusiasm, and throughout the greater part of the war years it was his main occupation. He said little about it in his rare letters to me, for reasons of military security. But after the war, when I met him again, he described it in some detail, and in due course I shall record the main facts, in so far as they bear upon the theme of this book.

Such was my scanty knowledge of Victor’s affairs during the years between 1939 and 1946. Shortly after the end of the war I managed to secure a passage home; and once more I visited the Smiths. Owing to the housing shortage they were still in the same little surburban villa, though it was now much too small for them. Eleven years and the strain of wartime life had affected them both rather severely. Maggie received me at the door; and, as so often happens when one meets an old friend after a long absence, her welcoming smile flooded me with a sudden sense of her personality. I was so taken aback that I stammered out some bit of admiration. She laughed and coloured, gave me an unexpected kiss, and said, “I’m an old woman, but I have never come in for many compliments, and I still like them.” She had indeed aged. Her brilliant mane was reduced both in bulk and in splendour. I thought of ploughed red earth sprinkled with lime. Her face had weathered to a healthy russet. It was the eyes and mouth that gave me that sudden vision of beauty. Suffering, hope deferred and much service of others had tempered her face to an expression of great delicacy. It was as though an inner spiritual beauty had conquered the uncouthness of her features and forced them to be lovely.

As I entered, Victor came in from the garden, apologizing for his dirty hands. Again the greeting told me much. There was a real friendliness, which contrasted with that remembered formal and patronizing greeting of seven years earlier. But Victor was obviously aging rapidly. He looked older than his fifty-six years. The grey hair had retreated from his brow. His face was gaunt and pale and heavily lined. The flabbiness that had shocked me in 1939 had given place to an extreme leanness. The eyes were still half-veiled by the Dolt’s drooping lids, but there was a curious change. The lower lids seemed to have risen to meet the upper. This gave an impression as of a person habitually straining to overcome short-sightedness, or constantly suffering from a headache, or perhaps struggling to understand some awkward problem.

When I came down from my room I met Sheila, now a girl of ten. In her, the father’s regular features tempered the mother’s oddities, and I guessed that Sheila might well develop an intriguing beauty. She seemed to be a happy child. I learned later that though her main interest at present seemed to be tennis and the “flicks”, her school record suggested that she might in due season capture a university scholarship, if she could put her back into her work. Colin I did not seee. He was away at boarding school. His parents spoke of him with a faintly anxious but respectful affection. They had expected him to take up some form of plastic art; but toward the end of the war he had conceived a passion for flying. Victor remarked, “Oh, Colin is capable; but a dark horse.” Maggie added, “A dear dark horse.” The third child, Margaret, now about five, had a rather charming little monkey face, and a great capacity for mischief. She was nearly always able to get her own way with her doting father.

In my many talks with Victor and Maggie, sometimes separately and sometimes together, I formed a fairly clear picture of their life during the years since I had last seen them. It was now some eighteen months since the true Victor had last appeared; and he had vanished again on the very next day. But the established Victor was a very different person from the disorientated and distracted creature whom I had met seven years earlier. There were no more of those phases of revolt against all that the true Victor had championed. The former “Dolt” now consciously and rather pathetically modelled himself on his “vanishing brother”. Also, he had now quite overcome his physical repugnance to Maggie. This had happened very shortly after my previous visit. I heard of the change from Victor himself; and also from Maggie, separately. Though factually their accounts were identical, their commentaries were strikingly different. Victor regarded the whole incident with a mixture of shame at his antics and thankfulness at their outcome. Maggie adopted an attitude suggestive, I thought, of the parents’ rejoicing over the return of the prodigal son.

Shortly after I had left England in 1939, Victor had formed a sentimental attachment to a certain Amabel, a young woman of naively intellectual tastes. She sought distraction from the uninspiring job of looking after an invalid mother whose tastes were far from intellectual. Socially she was a cut above the average of his students. She always dressed with a quiet distinction. She had the correct figure and the kind of good looks that are popularized by commercial artists. She regarded Victor as a brilliant intellectual who had married beneath him and had need of refined companionship. Obviously it was her mission to supply the need. Without any clear thought of the future, the two began meeting one another outside the classroom; and in due season Victor persuaded her to spend a night with him in a hotel. This became a habit. He explained to Maggie that after the class he was too tired to come home on the same evening. Maggie soon suspected that there was more to it than that, and little by little she found out the main facts. She never challenged him, but he gradually realized that she knew all about it. Maggie was surprised to find how fiercely jealous she could be at heart while maintaining a façade of detachment. “And yet,” she said, “I could not really blame my poor Victor. He was not really being unfaithful to me, because he had never been my lover.” Though she managed to maintain an appearance of calm indifference, Victor’s affair had a deep effect on her. Resentment against him for all the disappointment and suffering that he had caused her froze all her tenderness towards him. She behaved in a way that was superficially correct according to her established standards, but her inner hostility showed through at every turn.

Meanwhile on Victor’s side his love affair proved a source of far more torment than delight. For even to the somnolent Victor it soon became obvious that Amabel was a poor creature compared with Maggie; and that Maggie was necessary to him. When her new coldness toward him had developed into a fixed habit, he became uncontrollably miserable and lonely. He told me, “It was as though the air I had breathed for so long without paying any attention to it had turned to acid fumes.”

In passing, it is worth while noting the awake Victor’s reaction to the Amabel affair. On the rare and brief occasions when he appeared, he was torn between exasperation and detachment. Remembering that the Dolt was after all at bottom identical with himself, and that it was indeed he, Victor, that had made love to Amabel, he could not but feel self-ridicule and annoyance. He could escape this mood only by exercising his most “awake” powers of standing right outside himself, and regarding himself with objectivity as a particular human individual among countless others.

Though the awake Victor could well appreciate Amabel’s physical lusciousness, he saw this animal ripeness itself blighted by a mildew of cultural affectation. It was as though a simple and comely farm house had been painted over to look like marble. He writhed at the memory of the sentimentality and self-deception that each of the pair had evoked in the other, pretending that what was in fact just an honest-to-God animal lust sprang from a deep spiritual affinity. For the awake Victor, Amabel’s mincing voice and meticulous choice of words, her pathetic attempt to be a blue-stocking, somehow eclipsed her physical charms.

As for the Dolt, his feeling for Amabel gradually changed from attraction to contempt, and he began shamefacedly courting his wife. His repugnance was slowly displaced by a late discovery that the powerful spell which she had always exercised over him was not, after all, bestial or diabolic, but (to use his own adjective) “angelic”.

At an earlier stage Maggie would have greeted Victor’s advances with frank enthusiasm, but now, to her own distress, she was completely cold. But in the end her feelings were changed in a rather crucial incident. The true Victor had been in command for a few days and though he shared the common body with the faithless other Victor, Maggie felt no repugnance against that body when the true Victor possessed it. As usual they slept together. Apparently the lesser Victor awoke one night to find himself in bed with Maggie, and being ardently embraced by her. He realized at once that her caresses were meant for his brilliant “brother”, who had gone to bed with her. The lesser Victor had the presence of mind to continue his “brother’s” love-making without letting Maggie suspect the change. Not until the crisis was passed, and they were lying peacefully in each other’s arms, did he tell her what had happened.

This incident was the beginning of a new relationship between them. Little by little Maggie s bitterness passed, and the two at last lived as man and wife. They shared a bedroom, thereby allowing more space for the children. At the time of my second visit from India, in 1946, there was obviously a great tenderness between them. It is difficult to say how I knew this, for they were not at all demonstrative toward each other. Both were now well advanced in years. The ardours of youth had long since passed. But I noticed that each addressed the other with a voice subtly different from that which they used to other people.

I must not give a false impression. In a long talk with Maggie one evening, when Victor was away lecturing, I learned more about her feelings toward her substitute husband after the Amabel affair. That distressing incident had happened some six years earlier. Shortly after its conclusion, when she was already near the age when childbirth would no longer be safe, Margaret was born. And now Margaret was a junior schoolgirl.

Though Maggie was at last fully mated to the Victor who had for so long rejected her, and though indeed she loved him dearly, yet it was only the other Victor (“my own true Victor”) who kindled her fully. Him she adored. Toward the other, she felt a love that was three parts pity. With the true Victor she attained that passionate friendship between equals which is the fullest expression of love; though (she insisted) it was only through his powerful influence on her that she was able to rise to be in a manner his equal. To her he seemed always godlike, though through his power she had become his equal lover. He had raised her, formed her spirit. For him and with him she had become more than herself. In fact he was Eros to her Psyche. But to the other Victor she felt a tenderness which, in so far as it was more than an echo of that deeper love, was motherly. She had given him her body, not with the exultation of surrender to a god, but almost as she had given her breast to her baby, with a kind of ardent compassion.

From Victor himself I gathered much the same impression. He said, “I know quite well that I can never be to her what my brother is. But it was not only for his sake that she came to love me. Strangely, I could give her something which he could not give, or not in the same degree, namely a man to mother.”

On one of my days with the Smiths, Maggie suggested that Victor and I should avail ourselves of the lovely winter weather, and the fact that he had no engagements, by going for a longish walk on the moors outside the town. She wanted to get us both out of the way while she did some early “spring-cleaning”.

Victor took me in his ancient sports car, which he had kept in action throughout the war for travelling to the military units where he had to lecture. Now that the basic ration of petrol was restored, it was possible to use the car occasionally for private purposes. He was no longer the keen driver that he had been, but he still found motoring agreeable. We left the car at a point where the road passed over the shoulder of a hill. Thence we set off up a lane that had been badly chewed up by tanks and guns. After a couple of miles we reached a deserted military post of some sort, where empty huts were surrounded by a disgusting litter of old cans and other refuse. Thence we struck out by a footpath toward the moor. There was snow on the upper levels, and the bright morning was giving place to a sombre east-wind noon.

Life in India does not keep one in training for rough walking, and it was soon apparent that Victor was a good deal the more active of us. This was convenient, for it enabled him to talk while I was labouring up the hillside. Occasionally I paused for breath, and to look about me. The valley from which we had emerged was one of the many deep grooves in the great plateau of moorland. It was a largely industrialized region, and the smoke from its chimneys contributed to the black haze of the east wind. In one direction the valley lost itself among the sweeping moors; and in the other the view was blocked by the smoke pall of the town. After a while I suggested stopping for lunch, and when we had found a tolerably sheltered spot we settled down behind a wall and took out our sandwiches.

Over lunch the conversation turned to the relations between Victor’s two personalities. “My ‘brother’,” he said, “is an optimist of the deepest dye. He still believes that mankind will turn the corner into some kind of glorious Utopia, though he admits we may destroy ourselves with atomic power. How I wish I could feel as he does I But I can’t. He has faith in mankind because he has such superb faith in himself. Perhaps it is because I have lost faith in myself that I am losing faith in mankind. Much as I admire him, I can’t help regarding him as in a way my younger brother. He retains the buoyancy of youth. After all, he is young compared with me. His actual conscious life has been far shorter than mine. Add up all his periods and then mine, and he can’t be half my age. Of course he has all my memories, but he never has time to digest them all properly and turn them to his own account. So he is really quite inexperienced.” Victor seemed to sense my unexpressed disagreement, for he added, “Of course, I know he is brilliant, and his mind works far more rapidly than mine; but he can’t really keep up, and so he is always in danger of missing the tragic impact of the years. Of course he shares my old body, with all its little accumulating breakdowns and weaknesses; but it doesn’t seem to make him old mentally.” Victor paused, and I remarked that, compared with me, he seemed very fit and active. “Oh, I’m in fairly good condition,” he said, “for my years. But — well you know as well as I do how senescence hampers one. The odd thing is that it doesn’t seem to hamper him, except by making him appear less often.”

There was silence again. We munched our cake, and thought our own thoughts. Then he said, “I am convinced that my imposing other self doesn’t really know what wretched stuff average human nature is. If our average had been just a little more intelligent and a little more sensitive, we might have made quite a different sort of world. But think of that filthy camp we passed, and the messed-up valley, and our whole industrial civilization, and the war, and the Nazis. It’s very simple really. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And that’s what we are, nearly all of us, just sows’ ears. I know very well that’s all I am myself, and really I’m quite good average stuff, indeed rather brighter than average in some ways. But my other self is a real ready-made silk purse. Hence his one big glorious mistake of supposing that everyone has a nice piece of real silk somehow hidden away inside his sow’s’ ear.” We both laughed. I insisted that he himself really had a lot of silk in his make-up, otherwise he would have remained merely the Dolt. He shook his head. “That was just my brother’s influence,” he said, “and perhaps Maggie’s magic.” I rather warmly declared that we were all really pretty good at heart, but spoiled by circumstances. He pulled a wry face, and said, “I have seen a good deal of the plain man (and woman) in the Forces, and I know his limitations, and hers; just as I know my own. He’s unimaginative, self-centred, conventional, vindictive, and he won’t think if he can possibly help it. Damn it! I have good reason to know the plain man, because I am the plain man though uncomfortably raised a little by outside influences. And because I have had an ideal imposed on me, by outside influences, and I haven’t the strength (or the effective will) to live up to it, deep in my heart I hate the things I love. And so I keep queering my own pitch with sudden acts of resentfulness and cruelty, hurting or insulting the very things I love; hurting Maggie, just because she’s too good for me, and because she was forced on me by my other self; spoiling my work in the classes by sudden indifference and irresponsibility or positive malicious provocation of the tiresome people I am supposed to teach. And in all this I am not exceptional at all. I am just what the plain man is. O God, how I hate myself sometimes; and him, and everything. I hate the bad things for being bad and the good things for being good.”

This distressing talk left me dumb. Though I felt painful pity for my unhappy friend. I was also hostile, and inclined to blame him for lacking grit.

We had finished our lunch, so we rose to our feet and continued our way over the gentle slopes of the great moorland plateau. To break the black silence that had descended on us, I asked Victor to tell me more about his work in army education. He said, “I suppose we did rather more good than harm, and sometimes it was quite stimulating both to lecturer and audiences. Yes, one did sometimes feel that the discussion kindled people. But my ‘brother’, who only took my place very seldom, thought it was all marvellous. He used to write copious notes afterwards, to help me. And they really were very useful. He was always surprised to find these very average ‘cross-section’ audiences so thoughtful. He insisted that people were all waking up at last; and that, if they were not led up the garden path by devilish propaganda, they would found a new world after the war. Well, there’s some truth in that view, but look at the world now! Everyone’s just clamouring for a good time. You see, my brother’s trouble was simply this: being so good at stirring people up and making them think seriously, he never realized how they flopped again when he had left them.”

Victor explained the aims and methods of that great venture of education in the Army, the Air Force and the Navy. The problem was very different from the civilian one, with which he was so familiar. For the civilian audiences, attendance at classes was of course voluntary, and those who came were all drawn by some sort of desire for education, however vague a desire. The service audiences were mostly audiences of educational conscripts. In the early days, apparently, Victor often found himself faced with a group who had no interest whatever in the matter in hand. They regarded the occasion simply as an opportunity for idleness or even sleep. Sometimes there was open hostility. People would ostentatiously read a paper, or snore, until a sergeant intervened. Or they would sit with their backs to the lecturer. There could not have been a worse atmosphere for education. “But after all,” he said, “the situation was a challenge. Somehow one had to make those people glad they had been forced to come. No doubt my other self always succeeded. But for me it was necessary to learn the right technique very laboriously. One had to combine school-boy humour with unmistakable sincerity and enthusiasm for the subject. No wonder in those early days the atmosphere sometimes cowed me completely. Then the whole affair would be simply a nightmare. However, as time passed, the troops themselves got more used to the idea of serious discussion, and we lecturers got more skilled. Latterly I generally came away with a feeling that on the whole something worth while had been accomplished. And occasionally even I had the exciting experience of seeing those ordinary beer- drinking, pin-up-girl connoisseurs and football fans begin to sit up and take notice, and fire off volleys of questions or comments. But this was rare.”

It was clear that my companion had a gnawing sense of failure. “I ask myself,” he said, “did I in any of those meetings give anyone the beginnings of a real longing for the life of the mind. One or two, here and there, perhaps. And perhaps one or two would be just very slightly more tolerant and understanding than they could have been otherwise. Perhaps! That is what one hopes for as the result of all that travelling about in crowded wartime trains, in planes, in Army trucks, R.A.F. trucks, Navy trucks, to remote batteries, searchlight sites, camps, islands. It wouldn’t be so horribly depressing if I didn’t know that my ‘brother’ would have done it all incomparably better. He would always hold their attention, always give them something worth while, always leave a lasting effect. Damn him!”

The weather had greatly deteriorated, and conversation petered out. The wind was biting, and sleet was beginning to drive into our faces. Those Yorkshire moors have a restrained grandeur of their own, and bad weather enhances it. The snow added to their severe beauty; and to our discomfort, for as soon as we left the path, we found ourselves in difficulties. We came into a region of innumerable peat hags, miniature canyons, the bottoms of which were black bog or peat. They were now partly filled with snowdrifts. Then came a blizzard of blinding sleet, and presently a heavy cloud swept along the moor and engulfed us. Conversation had ceased. We were far too busy floundering in concealed holes or leaping from tussock to tussock. Presently Victor stopped and said, “We shall get hopelessly lost in this mist. Let’s give up the round, and go back to the car.” I was quite glad to do so, but rather surprised that Victor, the more active of us, should lose heart so easily. Neither of his two personalities had been easily daunted by physical discomforts or risks.

Victor must have sensed my surprise; for he said, “I suppose it’s a bit pusillanimous to turn back, but why should two old buffers like us go floundering on in this uncomfortable mess? This weather might have been exhilarating thirty years ago, but at our age it’s too much of a good thing. Besides,” he laughed nervously, “it frightens me.” Of course I raised no objection to turning, but as we retraced our steps I asked him what he meant by saying he was frightened. I could not see any danger. “Of course there’s none, really,” he answered. “We can easily make our way down into some valley or other even if we do get lost. But — well, the whole scene is too poignantly symbolical of the universe. The desolation of these sweeping moors, the savage sleet, the labour of every step, the early darkness, the whole physical world’s complete indifference to man, the way man himself has messed up everything, for instance in that derelict camp. The fact is, life is getting me down, and any little thing can take the lid off hell for me. Everything is so bleak and hopeless, everything. And I do everything in such a second-class blindfold way. Fancy never having got beyond being a journeyman in adult education after all these years!”

I protested that things were not nearly so bad as he thought. Surely Victor had had his share of good fortune-a useful job well done, a splendid wife, and a family that did them both credit. Almost with resentment he said, “Oh, of course I ought not to complain. I’m well, have enough to live on, and am harmlessly occupied: And of course Maggie is superb. I shudder to think what I should have been without her. She is incomparably the best thing in my life. But all the while I know I’m not really what she wants. Yon see, after all, she’s simply far too good for me. She really does love me; I know; but always she longs for that other Victor. Christ! How I hate my better self sometimes!”

We walked on in silence for a while. Presently Victor continued, “And then there’s Colin. He’s a fine lad, I know; but I just can’t make head or tail of him. Except of course that he sees through his wretched father pretty thoroughly. How could he help it, after my unsatisfactory behaviour to him while he was a child! Now, of course, I have learnt sense, but it’s too late. He just gangs his ane gait. If ever I try to advise he is painfully polite and really takes no notice at all. Indeed he is always so considerate that I feel he is treating me as a mental patient. Sometimes I could wring his neck. Then Sheila! Certainly an attractive girl, isn’t she; but in no real sense my daughter. She is quite simply not interested in me. But Margaret — she’s really mine, and I think I live in her more than in anything else. I didn’t damage her as I damaged Colin. And I can appreciate her. And I, myself, begat her. She’s not the other’s child. We’re very good friends, as you know. But she knows quite well by now that I’m a man beaten by his own shortcomings. She still has a real affection for me, but she admires only my ‘brother’. Oh, yes, she is beginning to see through me already. And now, of course, I’m getting old. I might be her grandfather. I can’t help her as much as I used to. Soon she’ll leave me far behind.”

All that Victor had said was in a way true, but I felt unreasonably annoyed with him for being so depressed about it, and for dragging it into the open, so that I had to make some comment. The root of the trouble seemed to me to be that he was too self-absorbed, and too conscious of his inferiority to the true Victor. Somehow I didn’t feel like telling him this.

Victor continued, “There’s a coherent pattern in your life. In mine there’s only a chaos of abortive patterns. But I’m not claiming to be uniquely unfortunate. The plain fact is that all men are unhappy in one way or another. At least I have never found anyone who wasn’t. Get them talking, and people all confess to some gnawing misery or other; except those that are ashamed of it, or so frightened they can’t admit it even to themselves.” I protested against this fantastic idea; and he admitted he might be exaggerating. “No doubt,” he said, “the death- wish is warping my judgment. Intellectually, and even in a way spiritually, I know (at least I sometimes know) that to give up would be treason to the spirit; but my terrible fatigue and disillusionment keep spawning arguments for death.”

We walked in silence for a while, for the blizzard had redoubled its force, and conversation was impossible. When respite came, I babbled vaguely of the loveliness of the world. The English countryside, I said, even in this harsh weather, was enough to hold me to life, no matter how depressing my personal career. He said, “One can’t live for scenery.” I tried another line. I argued that, even if as an individual one was futile, yet in a way one was more than an individual, having a part in the great struggle of humanity to find its soul. He laughed bitterly. “It’s not finding its soul,” he said. “It’s damning itself. Within fifty years’ time it will probably have wiped itself right off the planet with atomic warfare. But look! Why is it that all individuals today, at least all who are socially conscious, are in one way or another tortured by social guilt? Because whatever they do is fatally false, falsified by the pressure of an utterly false society. If you live solely for individual contacts and personal service, then you betray your obligation to the suffering millions with whom you have no contact. If you live for economic or social and political action to cure the sick world, then, either you will be entirely ineffective, or else you will gain power, and so be corrupted by power; and then you will contribute to the burden of the institutionalism and mechanized tyranny that is turning all men into robots. If you withdraw from the world to purge your soul of the world’s poison, seeking a lone salvation in religious discipline and contemplation, then again you betray your immediate obligation to your fellows, even if you innocently suppose you will discover truth invaluable to a future generation. No! As I see it, do what you will, you are damned, just because you are all of a piece with a damned world, a damned species. No wonder death is coming to seem more and more desirable.”

At this point I asked Victor if he had told Maggie about his death- wish. He had not; and I urged him to do so, so that she could help him to overcome it. “It would distress her,” he said, “and she wouldn’t understand. She’s so wedded to life.”

Brushing aside this interruption, he continued, “Probably the root of the whole trouble is that as a species we are neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring; neither sheer brute nor fully personal. As some writer or other said (perhaps Wells), man is not perfected for flight in his chosen element, like the bird; he’s just a clumsy first experiment, like the old flying lizards. And like them he will sooner or later come to grief. My ‘brother’ is probably an earnest of the higher type that might be able to make a good thing of this planet. The rest of us are poor tortured misfits. But the chances are that his type will never establish itself. And even if it does, it will probably complicate its world society to such an extent that it will be beaten by circumstances, just as we are being beaten on our more lowly plane. But, anyhow, what does it matter? In my clearest, coldest moments I begin to see that existence is in the last analysis simply pointless. That is just what my hearty ‘brother’ in spite of his brilliance, can never see.”

This kind of talk filled me with despond, and with exasperation at Victor. It was so devastatingly true; but I felt there must be an effective answer to it. I longed for the true Victor to appear and provide the answer. Indeed I felt that one breath from the other Victor would dispel this fog that engulfed the poor secondary personality. Presently it occurred to me to point out that if Victor (the present Victor) really regarded his ‘brother’ as being gifted with a more penetrating insight than his own, surely he must credit him with some solid ground for optimism. To this my companion replied, “In theory you are right. But he seems to me to be constantly misled by his own personal beatitude. To him, with his fundamental peace of mind (however caused) all is bound to seem ultimately for the best. But we who cannot see his vision cannot really feel the ultimate rightness of things. And it’s no use pretending. Besides, he may be wrong. He may be merely projecting his own well-being on the universe.” I stammered something about the lovely and glorious things in the universe redeeming the evil. “After all,” I said, “some things do matter. And you ought to be content to have lived and worked for the things that matter.”

“They matter,” he replied, “to us; but we, perhaps, don’t matter to the universe. And anyhow I can’t believe that I matter to anyone very much.”

“To Maggie,” I protested. He answered quietly, “Not much, really. If I were to fade out, finally giving place to my ‘brother’, she’d be glad. And if I were to put an end to the two of us, she would merely be upset at losing my ‘brother’ for ever. Frankly, I’d be glad to be done with the whole business, if I could get out in some easy way. Tell me, Harry! Do you find life still worth living?”

I thought before I answered. “Well,” I said,” I have no illusions about my own importance, and if I were to find myself under sentence of death tomorrow, I shouldn’t really mind. But I should be a bit annoyed all the same. Everything is so frightfully interesting. One’s own life has been pretty futile, of course; but the life of the species is so exciting, and most of all in our own age.”

He answered, “To me the whole of contemporary existence begins to seem merely like the last and dullest scene of a rather tiresome play. I want to get away and go to sleep.”

For a long while we trailed down the moor in silence; till at last we came out below the mist, and the murky valley spread out before us. Presently we reached the car, and packed ourselves into it. (Our feet left pools on the floorboards.) I was feeling thoroughly dejected, and cross with Victor, and yet I couldn’t produce a satisfactory answer to his pessimism. But he, having got the matter off his chest, was beginning to cheer up. He was obviously enjoying the driving. Here at least was a job he liked and could do with precision and elegance. Presently he said, “Sorry I was so gloomy. It’s not really as bad as all that, I know. I do feel it in my bones that things are worth while, and that what my idealistic ‘brother’ calls ‘the spirit’ matters much more than we do, and that one must go on blunderingly serving it. I feel it in my bones; but O God, I can’t feel it clearly and commandingly.”

Nothing else worth reporting happened during my visit. The awake Victor did not put in an appearance. Maggie said she would telegraph to me if he did so before my leave was finished; for I had a great desire to see him again. I payed another short visit before I returned to India, but the situation was much as it had been.

12. STRANGE TRIUMPH

From 1946 to 1948

I RETURNED TO INDIA for a short spell of work before retiring to the home country. My long stay in the East had already told on my health, and I looked forward eagerly to some modest and unexacting job in England to keep me going for a few years until the time should come to retire completely from active life. I promised myself that I would first take some post in England, something not too arduous, that would allow me enough leisure to work up a full-length biography of Victor. He had agreed to this project, on condition that the book should not be published till after his death. If I should die first, which seemed to me quite likely, the manuscript was to be held by my executors until Victor had followed me. I looked forward to seeing much more of Victor when I finally settled in England, and I hoped to gain a much more intimate understanding of the true Victor’s ideas. If he failed to publish his ever-rewritten book before his death, I was to have the task of editing it and publishing at least a large part of it posthumously.

My plans were frustrated. Some nine months after my return to India I received a disquieting letter from Maggie. Victor’s condition seemed to have deteriorated. He was faithfully continuing his work; and indeed, when he had sufficient strength to carry out his teaching, he was a more successful teacher than he had ever been; but he seemed to be profoundly and morbidly depressed about himself and the world. He was seriously overworking, both in preparing his official lectures and in reading book after book on religious or philosophical subjects. He generally stayed up half the night reading, or just thinking. Maggie could not make up her mind whether he was heroically and forlornly struggling to mimic his ‘brother’ by finding some great illumination, or whether, on the contrary, he was rebelling against the resented influence of the true Victor.

He had started a course of ruthless asceticism. Alcohol and tobacco he had given up enirely. Food he had strictly rationed to something much less than the official ration. He said that if the Germans had to starve, so must he. Undernourishment had undermined his bodily health, though (so he said) it was quickening his mind. All the same, Maggie learned from his students that he was often too tired to cope with a class properly. All occasional pleasures, such as films and plays, motoring week-ends and country walks, he had abandoned. Had he wanted to walk, he could not have done it, for he had no spare energy. Toward Margaret, on whom till recently he had rather extravagantly doted, he now maintained a strange aloofness, alternating with gleams of hungry love. Toward Maggie herself, though he treated her with even more than his habitual tenderness, he seemed at heart aloof. She had tried to persuade him to tell her what was troubling him, but he refused to be drawn. He insisted on sleeping in a separate room, because (so he said) his nocturnal meditations would disturb her. He never laughed, never smiled, save professionally at his classes. He had apparently lost all interest in the life of the society in which he lived, and in the whole surrounding universe. Even his work he performed rather as a discipline than from a sense of its importance. His attention seemed wholly withdrawn upon his own inner life. But this too, so far as she could judge, gave him no real satisfaction. Maggie was, of course, greatly distressed and frightened. She feared that sooner or later he would have a complete mental breakdown. In her letter to me, she said, “My poor Victor is desperately groping for the light, but I cannot help feeling that the powers of darkness, whatever they maybe, are closing in on him. I think he is putting up a great fight against them, but I am sure he has chosen quite the wrong tactics. Nothing that I can say succeeds in persuading him to live more naturally and openly. Oh, how I long for the return of my own true Victor I But it is now an age since he came, and I begin to fear I shall never see him again.”

A few months after receiving this letter, I was shocked by a cable from Magpie announcing Victor’s death: An airmail letter followed, saying that one morning he had failed to appear at breakfast, so she went up to his room, and found him apparently asleep; but he was dead. A post mortem proved that he had taken one of the modern poisons which send one quietly to sleep, never to wake again. He had left no last message for her. And she found that all the true Victor’s manuscripts had been destroyed. She greatly blamed herself, for having agreed, some ten years earlier, to restore them all to the study, where the secondary Victor (by then a reformed character) could examine them whenever he was in the mood for it.

The disaster of Victor’s death, Maggie said, was the more distressing because the true Victor had recently appeared rather more frequently, and his last visit had been prolonged for more than a week. She had begun to hope for his permanent re-establishment. He had told her of the other’s intention to kill himself, and she had been anxiously watching him. On one occasion an attempt had actually been made; but in the nick of time the true Victor had re-appeared. She therefore hoped that this happy issue would be repeated whenever the impulse for suicide recurred. In this, alas, she was mistaken.

A long letter from the true Victor, she said, was on its way to me. But it had been sent by the sea mail, and might not reach me for some time.

Maggie allows me to quote the closing passage of her letter to me. “From the bottom of my heart I am thankful for my life with Victor. We both suffered very much. And in the end came a dismal tragedy. But in spite of everything, I feel that the true Victor has won through. In our last week together we were happy, more happy than ever before. He seemed to have an ecstatic peace which was infectious. He was telling me about it, but he disappeared before he had made me fully understand. But I have felt that peace. And now I feel — well, grief, of course, since I shall never see my darling again; but not grief only. Much deeper in my heart, I feel joy. Somehow, in the last week he taught me more than in the whole of the rest of his life. And perhaps he himself learned more. He has tried to express something of this in his letter to you, but words can give only a pale ghost of the peace and joy which his presence radiated through and through me during those most happy days. And even now that he is gone, I feel convinced that in some sense beyond my intelligence he is always with me; he, the true Victor, my pride and my joy.”

In due course I received Victor’s letter. I will end this inadequate biography of my friend by quoting his last letter in full. It is a remarkable and a moving document. Parts of it are either beyond my comprehension or else sheer verbiage. The reader must judge for himself. My own feeling about it is that while the letter shows the potential greatness of my dead friend, both in intelligence and in large-heartedness and spiritual vision (if I may so put the matter), it also shows considerable traces of mental derangement, due, no doubt, to the strain of his situation. The opening reference to myself, far kinder than I deserve, shows Victor’s unfailing magnanimity.

“DEAR HARRY.

“It is unlikely that we shall meet again, and I feel I must say something to you before it is too late.

“First of all, Harry, I want to say’ thank you’ for your friendship, your patience and kindness through all the years since we were at Oxford. I have never said anything like this to you before. I have always counted on you. I have always accepted from you without any spoken gratitude. And often I have been inconsiderate and impatient. For this I cannot make amends; but let me at least say that our friendship has been one of the happiest and most valued things in my life, and that you, more than anyone else, have taught me what the relation between man and man should be.

“I woke a few days ago in strange circumstances. I was in bed in the Dolt’s room. In the palm of my hand there was a little white pill. Thinking that it was an aspirin, I put it in my mouth. But the Dolt’s memories were now flooding back on me, and I quickly realized that he had decided to kill us both. I hastily spat out the pill and rinsed my mouth. My watch told me it was half-past one. I went to Maggie’s room.

“If he does it again, shall I again wake in time to thwart him? I cannot feel confident of it. The knowledge that this may be my last few days of life seems to have intensified my vitality. Everything that happens to me, everything that I do, has a new meaning, and glows (so to speak) with an inner light.

“We have seized the opportunity of a complete holiday in this glorious English spring. (Fancy my fool ‘brother’ wanting to kill himself and me in this weather, with all the buds bursting!) We have been out in the country every day. I don’t know which is more delightful, lying on one’s back in a field, with Maggie, and listening to larks and an early cuckoo, or swinging across the moor, with Maggie, watching the cloud shadows on the hills, and an occasional hare start up and streak away round the hill’s shoulder. ‘Swinging across the moor’ is a very false image. ‘Painfully plodding’ would be better; for the Dolt had been starving our common body. But now, there’s some sort of fire in me that drives the body far beyond its natural strength.

“What a joy seeing is! Even when it is done through aging eyes that give neither the precision nor the brilliance of childhood’s seeing. The poor old physical instrument is no longer ‘optically perfect’, but the relish, the zest, is as fresh and breathtaking as it was in my still-remembered babyhood. O lovely world; tragic, sordid, brutal, and yet lovely! The sturdy hog-backs of the moors! The frail geometry of a spider’s web! This morning I was making the porridge for breakfast. Have you ever noticed how at a certain stage the quick waves of gruel gradually turn to heavy, sluggish, velvet foldings? Rather like the smooth hide rippling on a puma’s shoulders. Then the stuff boils. Subterranean explosions in the little molten world form ephemeral craters. You watch the show, fascinated, till a projectile of lava rises into the stratosphere and scalds your hand. Strange how even pain itself has a sort of tigerish loveliness! I mean, when one is really awake, and can experience it with a full sense of its spiritual meaning. But alas, alas! Man can only reach this all-redeeming illumination in his rare and precarious moments of full consciousness. And most of us are doomed never to reach so far. This is the ultimate tragedy at the heart of the universe. Ultimate? No! Seeming ultimate, only while one is in the trance of lonely selfhood. But In fact we are indeed all members one of another, and of the Whole. Even the least of us is at heart the Whole. And in the Whole’s glory his suffering is redeemed. But, oh, Harry, how I stammer and drivel, trying to express the inexpressible that I have indeed, though darkly, seen.”

“In these few happy days that have been given me, I spend much of my time just looking at things. For instance at Maggie. Aging suits her. She was lovely when I first saw her, so many years ago; but now, though she has lost all the sweet physical freshness, in another way she’s lovelier. The spirit, one might say, shines so clearly through that experienced, that tempered and beautifully weathered smile. If only she could enjoy the present fully, without thought of the future, or without fear of the future! I must show her how to do that before I go. I shall succeed. I shall teach her to see everything from the point of view of eternity. In these few days we are creating something eternally lovely. We are completing our thank-offering to eternity. Our music rises to its last triumphant note. I hope, indeed I am sure, that when I am gone you and Maggie will be very close friends. I am not commending her to your care, for she is strong, and I have no fears for her. But your friendship will mean much to her.

“And the children! That’s a joy you have missed, Harry, watching children grow, and being glad to be needed by them, and glad to watch them be themselves, and not what one had wanted them to be. I find it hard to forgive my accursed other self for harming them. Colin will bear the marks for ever. There’s a wry twist in his character, a streak of cynicism that need not have been. But he’s tough and sane, and complete master of himself. And even the Dolt’s clumsy treatment could not seriously mar the gentleness that Maggie taught him. Sheila, bless her, is less damaged. I know no one, not even Maggie, more serene. As for that diabolically attractive minx, Margaret, I expect she’ll be all right when she has got over the spoiling that the doting Dolt slopped over her till quite recently. Of course she hardly knows me. And she’s piqued because I don’t fuss over her.

“How exquisite every moment of experience is! Even such a little thing as the forming of these words with my pen! See! This bit of handwriting shall be a real work of art, in its little way; precise but fluent. Each letter’s economical form echoes so much of history, monkish, Roman, Greek, Phoenician, and Egyptian. How long, I wonder, will men continue to Use symbols formed in this great tradition? Will man in the end outgrow the need for writing? Or will man and writing cease together? Well, I may not use these signs much longer. This may be the last time I shall practise this homely, lovely art. Meanwhile, since writing is the matter in hand, I will delight in conforming to its canons. Strange, how even in the careful forming of a single word (that word ‘strange’ for instance) we can express so much yet fall so short of our intention!

“I am writing in my little study. At bottom it is my study, not the Dolt’s. I chose the furniture, and placed it conveniently. But my other self has been in possession so long that he has largely imposed his character on the room. There’s a picture of his, sophisticatedly modern, but not quite sincere. There’s a pile of back numbers of the Autocar — not mine at all.

“On my desk, here, there’s a folded newspaper. Bad paper, smudgy printing, incredibly vulgar advertisements. A symbol of all that is driving my other self to suicide. And yet — I can forgive the thing its wretchedness. Seen as the focal point of a vast tragic symbolism, it becomes strangely beautiful in its pathetic vulgarity. And the poor trapped souls that produced it — I don’t insult them with forgiveness; I just salute them as fellow mortals. There’s a very bad drawing of a girl in her undies, advertising nylons. Her sex, of course, is wildly exaggerated. Face, laughably debased-lovely. Breasts, pert. Figure, too slim; legs far too long for body. Every line of the drawing, falsely slick. The whole thing is loathsome, of course; but, oh, pathetic! Look hard into it, and you can see the real loveliness that it garbles. Strangely, you can see in it the spirit battling vainly for life against the choking horror of our civilization, against commercialism’s fatal exaggeration of self-interest, of self-display, of self-regarding sexuality. Strange how, in the light of the Whole, the ugly thing itself borrows beauty! Not that we should therefore tolerate it or preserve it; for its virtue lies in its ugliness, in its failure to be beautiful. And the same of evil. In the light of the Whole it is transfigured, redeemed. Not that it is therefore to be tolerated; for its virtue dies in its essential badness, in its tragic failure to be good. In action, our allegiance to the spirit obliges us to struggle with all our strength against evil; and yet in contemplation, when the majestic pregnancy of the Whole obscurely reveals itself to us, and worship is wrung from us, we cannot but accept, and with joy.

“Inevitably the horror of our civilization and of the whole universe, drives the poor blind Dolt to suicide. But that is not what it does to me.. This vulgar little drawing, the whole vulgar tragedy of our civilization — though in action I oppose them all with all my strength, in contemplation 1 find myself accepting them reverently, perhaps quite irrationally. I respect them as I respect a man struggling against a mortal disease or incipient insanity. Because everywhere the spirit shows through, struggling for the light, and yet fatally slipping, slipping, farther down into darkness. To hell with the poor Dolt’s death-wish, where indeed it belongs. My wish is wholly for life, life eternal, not just for my own little individuality, which is essentially and rightly ephemeral, but for the spirit that is the perennial and Cosmical music inherent in the lives of all ephemeral individuals.

“Maggie is all the while with me in my study. For I must have all I can of her, and she of me, while it is possible. She is sewing. Her needle moves in and out of the material as she takes up a needleful of stitches. It’s like a line of little glistening porpoises threading across a white sea. My life with her has been like that — in and out, in and out. Latterly, alas, mostly out. And now all our intermittent days, weeks, months, and our too few years, come crowding into memory. I examine the stitches of our past. So irregular, but such a bright thread! Compared with the young waitress of so long ago she’s physically mere smouldering ash, left after a blazing fire. But to the seeing eye there’s another light irradiating the dear dying ash. The Dolt, poor fool, could never properly see that light. He does begin to appreciate Maggie, does love her in a way, but never as she deserves. Incredible to me that living with Maggie, year in and year out, couldn’t kill his death-wish! When I think of him as my own baser self, how I loathe him! But when I think of him as something other than me, a poor blind creature vainly groping for the light, I pity him. I even respect him, for in his fumbling way, he put up a good fight, against odds that I never had to face.

“I ask you, Harry, to cast your mind back to that dismal walk you had with me, with my Dolt self, I mean, on the moor in a blizzard. He (or I) bemused you with his plausible death-excuses! What he said was all true in a way, but all half-truth. True, that man’s plight is grim. True that poisoned institutions poison all our minds, and falsify every possible act. But we are not doomed. A world where there is sunshine, and where people sometimes love, sometimes think honestly, sometimes make glorious things, is not doomed. Our fate depends at least in part on ourselves; or rather, not simply on our poor frail individualistic selves, but on the strength of the universal spirit in us. Lest you should think I’m going back on my agnosticism, believe me I don’t mean by ‘universal spirit’, a universal ‘being’ or soul or person; I still mean just the ideal of spiritual living that beckons all half-awakened beings and claims possession of them. Maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe there is the universal soul or person or God. But since we don’t know, and cannot know (being only the poor little insects that we are), let us for God’s sake (or for the spirit’s sake) be true to our own little insect intelligence, and not pre tend we understand what is beyond our understanding.

“Out of the horror of our contemporary world, out of our sense of doom, our doltish nightmare, comes a new hope of true waking. The war was an alarm clock that disturbed our sleep. We are at last sufficiently shocked for waking; and if we will, we can now wake properly. And people are waking. I saw it whenever I took over the Dolt’s discussions with soldiers and airmen. Those groups of bewildered sleep-walkers were all restless for waking, all shyly groping for the light, even when they pretended still to be cynics. Of course, the whole thing may go awry. People may all be drugged into sleep again, or we may wreck the planet with atomic power, before the new temper can take effect. But now, at least there is the widespread waking, and at least the possibility of a new world. Strange glorious changes are striving for birth. God! Far from wishing death, I should be glad of a new lease of life, a second and a third lifetime, to play some part in the great waking. I long for it; and yet, while I am fully awake, I find I gladly accept whatever comes. Of course, even if at last mankind does win through, there’ll be no Utopia but only a widespread breaking through into rather more lucid experience and more creative ways of living. There’ll be new problems, new conflicts, new hopes and despairs, new joys and agonies. There’ll be merely an outgrowing of nursery troubles and infantile growing pains and diseases, and at last a hesitant, precarious, painful, dangerous staggering into a world of adult experience.

“But let us for the sake of argument suppose that the very worst does happen, and that within a quarter of a century, or a quarter of a year, mankind destroys itself, and lethal radiation turns the whole surface of the earth into a desert, inhospitable to life — what then? Were those who foresaw it fools to remain alive, vainly striving against it? No! Even the destruction of a living world is worth living through, however painful; if one is awake, if one can see the disaster as an episode in the perennial struggle of the spirit in the innumerable successive hosts of individuals in all the worlds. My own life has been mainly a dismal failure, and yet it was infinitely worth living. And if mankind fails, yet mankind has been infinitely worth while. Already, and whatever happens, this planet, this grain that spawned our imperfect kind, is well justified. The solar system, the whole universe, is well justified; yes, even if man is the only, and a sadly imperfect, vessel of the spirit, and doomed. For no tragedy, not even a cosmical tragedy, can wipe out what man (in his low degree) has in fact achieved, through the grace of his vision of the spirit, his precarious and yet commanding vision of the spirit.

“But how unlikely that man is the sole vessel! Consider the pregnant stars! Consider the great galaxies I Can any sane mind then suppose that man is the sole vessel?

“And I must tell you again, Harry, that in my sadly curtailed spiritual researches and exercises, though I have had little success, at least I have won through (by the grace of the spirit) to feel the indescribable unity that comprises all our severalness. And in my dim sense of that unity of all spirit I have heard (so to speak) the faint, far-off murmur of the hosts of individual lives throughout the cosmos and the aeons. And I have felt — but once more language utterly fails, and thinking also. And yet, though what I have felt beyond that cosmical murmur is really beyond all telling, I find I must stammer out something about it, however misleadingly. I have felt — oh, how can I put it without falsifying it utterly? I have felt all baseness and pain, and all sorrow, transmuted into glory; all agony, from the pain- flash of a crushed fly to the despair of Jesus on the Cross, turn to joy. But what am I saying? Of course I don’t mean that the poor little tortured fly and the tragic disillusioned Jesus and all other sufferers enter severally into everlasting bliss, as individuals. Maybe in some strange sense they do, though it must be a sense quite unsatisfying to those who clamour for individual salvation. But all this is beside the point. The news I am trying to report to you is something of a different kind. Perhaps I can give a hint of it by saying simply that nothing is merely lost. Everything contributes. All the agonies, and the joys too, are gathered up into the whole single music of existence, the music which enjoys itself. And so the agony, which in the loneliness of our finite individuality is unredeemed and hideous and meaningless, contributes to the music, is significant; and in consciousness of its own significance in the whole it is itself transfigured into joy. All this talk, you may say, is sheer verbiage. And of course it is, if you are looking for literal truth. But I know, I know now, that it is poetically true, like the statement that the sun, when he pushes the clouds aside, laughs.

“After re-reading that paragraph I fear it will mean nothing to you. But in its halting way it does mean something to me, in virtue of my actual experience. Does it to you?

“But, Harry, before I say ‘goodbye’, I must say one other thing. This cosmical transfiguration of all our experience is something quite apart from individual survival of death, whether survival for a while only or for ever. The transfiguration I now know to be true, but I cannot describe it or even clearly think it. Survival, on the other hand, is an intelligible idea, up to a point; but I have no news to give of it. Maybe death is simply the complete ending of us; and if so, let us be grateful for eternal sleep. Maybe we go on from aeon to aeon in subsequent temporal lives, within this formidable universe, for the progressive fashioning of our individual souls; so that ultimately each may contribute fully to the music. Such ‘re- incarnation’ is a possibility that may well daunt us, in view of the weariness that comes to one toward the end even of this single life. But perhaps we start the next one refreshed. And how exhilarating, provided one had the opportunity for creative work! But should I find Maggie? (God! I should want her!) Maybe I should and I shouldn’t. Well, I’m for the venture! (What a jest if the Dolt wakes up and finds himself living again! He’d be as sick as a dog!) Then there’s another possibility. Maybe we wake in some completely other temporal and spatial (or non-spatial) system of existence, made not of stars and the void, of light and dark and pressure and all our sense characters, but of something — inconceivable to us. Or again, maybe at death we are gathered up at once into eternity. Annihilated as individuals, maybe we wake to remember that all along we have been the eternal spirit, the world soul, or God. Maybe, maybe! But what does it matter? The important thing is that, whatever happens to us as individuals, the spirit does matter, and the spirit is; though even after all those years of puzzling I’m damned if I can say what it is; except that it is just what we all (when we are properly awake) know does matter, just awareness, love and creative action in relation to an objective universe.

“But I still haven’t said what I wanted to say. It’s this. If I do survive, I shall do my best to make some sort of contact with Maggie, and with you too, Harry, you old sceptic. So, both of you, please keep an ear open for the telephone bell, so to speak. I may have something important to say. I have told her I shall put a call through to her, if I possibly can. Unless, of course, I become so thoroughly absorbed in the affairs of that other world that I simply forget all about this one; and all about Maggie. But if I do that, shall I be ‘I’ at all, in any important sense? Surely the surviving thing could not be ‘I’ if it cared no more for Maggie, if it looked askance at the whole loveliness and horror of this world, and the whole struggle of mankind. And yet — suppose, when one entered another sphere of being, one were to see clearly that any harking back to this world was a desertion of the other world, and that the spirit must be expressed independently in each? Who knows! But the one supreme thing is sure — the intrinsic and paramount excellence of the spirit, and its fundamental identity in all worlds. Whatever our individual fate, this is enough to make our lives worth while.”

“As for me, I find myself entirely reconciled to any of the fates that are surmised. Mr expectation, on the whole, is that when I have died there will be no actual ‘I’ Victor Smith’, any more; though perhaps some queer fragments of my memories may haunt people in this world for a while, like disembodied dreams flitting from mind to mind. But this is unimportant.

“Well, there it is! Goodbye, Harry! Whatever happens, the universe contains you and me eternally as two individual fibres in its texture, and as their friendly contact. Those Oxford days of ours are part of eternity; So are your forbearance and kindness on my abortive wedding day, and all your patience, including your reading of this rather chaotic letter. Enjoy your life’s autumn! In a way I am sorry to miss the last phase, for it might be the best of all. But no matter! All’s well.

“Good luck, and goodbye!”

“Victor”

THE END

The Shorter Fiction

Abbotsholme School, Rocester, Derbyshire — where Stapledon was educated

Stapledon graduated from the Balliol College, Oxford, in 1909.

The Short Stories of Olaf Stapledon

CONTENTS

THE ROAD TO THE AIDE POST (1916)

THE SEED AND THE FLOWER (1916)

A WORLD OF SOUND (1936)

OLD MAN IN NEW WORLD (1944)

ARMS OUT OF HAND (1947)

INTERPLANETARY MAN (1948)

A CHRISTIAN (1976)

A SCIENTIST (1976)

A MYSTIC (1976)

A REVOLUTIONARY (1976)

FAR FUTURE CALLING (1977)

A MODERN MAGICIAN (1979)

EAST IS WEST (1979)

THE ROAD TO THE AIDE POST (1916)

IN BELGIUM AT two o’clock in the morning, an ambulance driver stepped out of his car and yawned. It had rained since the previous night and the world was very wet. But at last the west wind was victoriously pursuing the clouds, piling their disordered companies one upon another. Suddenly the moon shone. White ruined houses on one side of the street, huddled like sheep, looked towards the East and the star shells. Dark ruined houses on the other side held their broken walls and rafters against the sky. The driver stood for a moment watching: he began a sigh, but successfully turned it into a yawn, and moved away to prepare his car for two stretcher cases. Then he walked into the place that was once a children’s playground, toward the Aide post, once the school cellar. How slow they were to-night in bringing out the school cellar. How slow they were to-night in bringing out the wounded? He examined a new hole where a shell had gone through the building. He stood by a heap of debris and watched the moon. A mighty white upright cloud was flying overhead. He looked up the sides of it as if he were standing at the foot of some extravagant aerial leaning tower of Pisa, for ever falling upon him through a sky visibly deep as the universe. The moon looked at him in that significant way of hers, as if she were desperately trying to tell him some good news. For a moment he stood fascinated by this sudden beauty. Then he remembered himself, and carefully yawned in the face of the moon.

They brought out the wounded; one moaning, the other silent; the one face half hidden under rugs and miserably moving; the other face wholly hidden under white bandages. The stretchers were soon stowed on board, driver and brancardier took their seats, and the old bus crept down the street.

The moaning man moaned with regularity, save when the car bumped him into a cry. The other lay still. What an embusqué slacker I am! thought the driver What must these old fellows think of me? The moaning man was a vieux papa for whom war was an incongruous, last chapter to a life of tilling and begetting. It was incongruous, but he had not complained. Gallantry was not his line, but he had not shirked anything that he was expected to do. Now he lay absorbed in his pain, praying for the end of the journey, or losing himself among grotesque visions of crops and beast and bursting shells, only to find himself once more in a furnace of pain. The other lay still; no one can guess where his spirit wandered, upon the earth or in the hollow sky. It’s a miserable game, thought the driver, Why didn’t I enlist long ago? He had no peace principles, and he disliked people, who said they were pacifists. War might be a horrible mistake, but his soldier friends in Gallipoli and Flanders were dying well. They had excelled themselves. Better make a hideous mistake and suffer with one’s fellows than be a lone prig. For him, war was not scientific hate; it was love gone mad. England demanded him, and England was a nearer thing than God. Besides, who said it was wrong to fight? The best things were won by fighting; and God fought Satan. What a Paradise Lost if God had been a pacifist!

So thought the driver, as he drove down moonlit avenues. At the hospital, the car was unloaded, and he saw the two broken men carried through the door that had received so many like them.

Now in the early dawn that driver came hurrying back. There was a rose pink glow in the East, as if no ill had ever come out of that quarter; as if hate were never in this world. Into this fairy land he drove, and the joy of morning began in him. But the gentle appearance of things did not shake his resolution. Surely, surely, he must enlist, and give his life with his friends. The Red Cross was not a heavy enough cross for such as he. The sunrise swallowed aid that was left of the night; the whole sky was on fire. He would go, he would go. What was he that he should judge, when so many finer men had not hesitated to fight? His Quaker parents would be very grieved, but he must do it. He himself was unhappy thinking of his parents’ grief. After all war was indeed a hideous thing. In fact his determination to fight began already his disillusionment. A secret voice saying You will fight only because you are ashamed not to fight. You will fight for you own peace of mind, not for victory, not for the cause. You have not forgotten yourself in the cause. You will not even find the peace of mind you seek. The sun flashed from behind the Eastern cloudbank and the trees and fields and sparkling canal seemed suddenly to laugh, so bright they grew. Oh God, what a world! cried the driver aloud while the car roared along. The sun and the countryside undoubtedly confirmed that secret voice now that he allowed himself to attend to them.

He had heard someone say that just as private killing went out of date so will war someday go also, and that this War is but the red dawn of a new age wherein many obscurities will be enlightened. Surely if Peace and Goodwill could not be the idea of to-day they would be the idea of to-morrow. Woe unto those who, having any inkling of that great idea of to-morrow, desert it even for the highest of to-day’s ideals. The Fates had made him to have some glimpse of the dawn, before his fighting friends: Woe to him if he closed his eyes.

Not happy, nor content, nor even positive, was he on his return; but very sure that he would not fight. His vision of the new idea (which is also so old an idea) was very faint; but it was a vision, and commanded his allegiance. Perhaps after all he was making a mistake; but it was a noble mistake. The vision must be followed even at the risk of his soul’s life.

The driver backed his car into its place; stumped into the camp, pulled his best enemy out of bed, persuaded the puppy to lick the cook’s slumbering face; and began his morning toilet. Many times again he was tempted in that wilderness of doubt. Each time the vision was a little clearer than before.

He is a type, is he not?

THE SEED AND THE FLOWER (1916)

God sowed a seed, and there came a flower.
Holy is God, and the world His flower.

THERE was a poor man who had a field, wherein he laboured all day. He had a daughter, an only child, and he loved her. At sunset, after his work, he looked at the field; and twilight fell upon him looking, and the stars came out. God’s flower hung over him open, and he knew it not. But he called his daughter from the house, and laid his hand on her head. And he said, “The field bears well: I will buy thee shoes and stockings.” So, she made merry in the darkness; and he saw God in her.

At dawn there came an army out of the East, and laid waste the field. They set fire to the house and the goods, and used the daughter foully. Anger strengthened the man against his enemies, and he killed three of them. But the rest struck open his head, and threw him away. When they had done, they went; and the girl died.

The man lay all day, knowing nothing. But in the evening he looked up, and saw the sky. And a bright star comforted him with peace; so that he cared not for his pain, thinking of God only. But when he turned a little he saw the girl, and remembered. He crept to her and kissed her hair. And he made a vow.

Therefore when his wound was healed up, he made haste to be a soldier. He went with his companions to the great war, mindful of his daughter. He rejoiced in killing the enemy every day, till he was drunken with the blood of them.

It happened that he came on one dying, that was an enemy. The enemy said, “Stay with me, I pray thee, while I die.” He went up to hint slowly to stay with him, frowning upon him. But the enemy said, “Kneel, I pray thee; hold my hand.” He kneeled and took the hand of the enemy, awaiting death. The enemy said, “I have two boys, and my wife loves me.” They were silent. And the enemy died.

The man left him for the crows and the ants, but he went away grieving. And his spirit flagged, and he lay down. He saw a host of ants on the ground killing one another; but beside him was a great and old tree, whose leaves were innumerable. The wind stirred all the leaves of the tree, making one great sound. The sound gave peace to the man, and he slept.

He woke in the night, and the stars were innumerable. The murmur of the leaves seemed the song of all the stars. And the earth sang also, and life everywhere; and the armies sang, and the dead sang. And he heard his daughter, leading all. Therefore the man listened until the dawn, and until the sun rose. And he stood up before the sun, and made a vow.

He went to his comrades and said, “Brothers, it is a shame to kill; it were better to die. Let us go over to our brothers, and make peace.” But they said, “Wilt thou persuade a million? Nay, we must guard the land.” But when they were told to attack, the man would not. An officer saw him, and urged him. But the man said, “Brother, it is a shame to kill; it were better to die.” The officer was grieved, and killed him.

God sowed a seed: it adventured after beauty.
The Goal of all Souls is the beauty of that flower.

There was a young man of noble blood, who would not kill. An enemy rose up against his people, and all his friends became soldiers; but the young man stayed at home grieving, and walked alone in the fields. But the enemy devoured the cattle and the harvest, and slaughtered the people; and the young man had no peace with himself, for he doubted. So he went on to a mountain to question with God. He saw the cornfields and the cottages, and the city far away. And he said, “Though I lose my soul, we must save the people.”

So he went down with a heavy heart, and became a soldier. He took men into battle, and men were killed. But after the battle he went aside and threw himself on the ground, and wept for the killed, and for the wounded. He cried, “Oh, God deliver me from killing, for my soul sickens.”

But again he went into battle, and the slaughter was great. And when it was done, he stood among the dead thinking. He said, “What is death? What evil is in it? Death is deep sleep, and pain is a dream. Where is life, there is strife; and thence grew the soul. And the goal of all grief is God.”

Many time afterwards he took men into battle, forcing himself. He thought of the people and the cause only, and would not see the dead. He did deeds of valour and kindness, and was beloved.

One day when he led his men to attack, a man would not. And he urged the man to attack; but the man said, “Brother, it is a shame to kill; it were better to die.” The officer feared lest others should be corrupted, and the cause lost. So he killed the man: but he grieved.

The officer went into battle, and they gained the victory through him. The enemy were slaughtered in thousands, and driven headlong; and the young man became a great commander, honoured of all soldiers. But he lived for the cause; and he grieved.

It happened on a dark night that they brought in his friend dead. So he went out into the wind and the rain, to think about his friend. The rain beat upon him, and there was no clear sky; yet he remembered the stars, desiring them. There was a great wind that bent down the trees; and the leaves and little branches were torn off, scourging his face. He cried aloud to God, saying, “What wilt thou of me? It is far better to die than to kill.”

In the morning they brought him a young man of the enemy, saying that he was a spy. But he looked into the eyes of the young man and found no guile in them. The young man said, “Slayer! My work is to make peace between the peoples. The peoples curse war: they curse thee.” But the officer told them to release him, and said to him, “Brother, since it is a shame to kill, it is far better to die.” And the officer went outside, and killed himself.

God sowed a seed, certain of the flower;
But man must doubt till the bud burst.

There was a young man of intelligence, a skilled iron worker. He quarrelled with his masters, so that they threatened him. But he urged his companions to stand by him, for he said, “the right is with me;” and they stopped work and stood by him. After a month they came to him and said, “We are weary;” but he answered, “The cause is just;” and they departed. After another month they came again and said, “Our wives and our children starve;” but he said, “The cause is just;” and they departed. But after another month they came and said, “We are beaten.” He said, “Though ye die, the cause is just.” But they went back to their work, deserting him.

The young man wandered from city to city, seeking work and the truth. And it happened one night before dawn that he read deeply in a book; but he grew weary of its wisdom, and opened the window; and he looked up among the roofs and the chimneys, and saw a star. He thought, “The stars are thrown hither and thither for no purpose; men are thrown hither and thither, and there is no God.” And he thought, “The stars clash not, but men clash; I will make order in earth as in heaven.”

But two great armies came out of the East and the West, and the young man was taken away to be a soldier. But he considered while they took him and said, “All peoples are one: it is foolish to make war: I will not.” They were angry with him, but he would not be persuaded. So they took him to work in the mines where they could compel him. He laboured under ground all day, and the darkness entered into his soul. He said, “The rich contrive war, lest the people should rebel. Perish the rich, robbers and murderers.”

The young man escaped from the mines, and went between the peoples making peace. But the enemy seized him as a spy and took him before an officer; and the young man cursed the officer, in the name of the peoples. But the officer set him free, and said, “Brother, since it is a shame to kill, it is far better to die.” Then the officer killed himself, and the young man was glad. But the soldiers wept over their officer like children, because they loved him. The young man was ashamed.

He escaped through both armies into the borders of his own country. And he was perplexed because of the officer, and because of God. Now he sat by the roadside thinking, and looking into the blue sky for God. There came a number of carts, wherein were folk and their goods; and the last cart lagged sorely, for the horse was old. An old man and a girl were in the cart, and the girl drove. The young man went along with the last cart and asked, “Who are all ye?” The girl looked at him, and he saw that she was holy. But she turned her eyes from him and said, “The enemy came upon us.” His heart smote him because of them, so that he cried, “Cursed be the enemy.” But she said, “Who art thou that cursest?” He answered, “I am a man of peace.” She looked into his eyes, saying, “Art thou so?”

The young man went away perplexed, grieving for the old man and the girl. All day long he thought about her, and at night. And he dreamed that he stood among the stars, ordering their courses, and the officer came to him, penitent because he had led one star astray. Therefore he cursed the officer, and sent him to hell. But the girl rose before him, reproaching him; and she said, “His blood is upon thee, and the blood of my father is upon thee. Thou hast killed them in thy self-righteousness. Thou little soul, who playest at God.”

In the morning the young man became a soldier to fight for the people. He was stripped of his pride and became humbler than the humblest. And when winter began he went into battle, and fought gladly.

God sowed a seed: slowly buds the flower:
God will pluck when he wills.

There was an old man past work, whose daughter tended him. They sat in the doorway of their house in the evening; and the old man talked about his prime, and the girl sewed. But one came running by the house who cried, “The enemy, the enemy!” The old man rose up in anger and said, “God strike them!” But she led him into the house and made him ready for a journey; and she took the savings from the chest, nine gold pieces, and knotted them in a handkerchief, and hid them on her. Then soldiers of the enemy came in riotously, seeking entertainment, and when they saw the girl, rejoiced over her. But she stood before them and said, “Friends, all that we have is yours, but my father and I are not yours, but God’s.” They saw that she was holy, and they were ashamed; but they told her to go away thence with her father and their household goods, for there was to be a battle. So she harnessed the old horse to the cart, and set her father in the cart, and gathered the household goods together, and packed them in the cart. Then she climbed up beside her father and drove away.

Upon the road next day they met a young man who was not a soldier. She knew that he was indeed no coward, but a man of peace, and in her heart she honoured him for it, and remembered him.

They continued on the way five days till they came to the place allotted to them. They were given ground and a wooden hut, and there they dwelt. The girl made the house pleasant for her father, and tilled the ground for vegetables. She hired herself out to labour in the fields, for all the young men were at the war. But they that worked with her looked askance at her; for she said, “Would that all were men of peace.”

With winter came great cold and the snow; and the old man sickened toward death. He said, “God punish the enemy, who brought us to this.” But she answered, “Alas, they are God’s children and He loves them.” And she said, “Rememberest thou the young man of peace?” He said, “Though the rivers pour blood into the sea, and the peoples die off like autumn leaves; though all lands be wrecked; yet shall the earth be filled full with men of peace.”

He laid his hands on his daughter, blessing her; and he said, “God has need of such as thee, my daughter, my darling.” Then he died, and she was alone weeping. She laid him out fairly with clean linen, and sat with the dead till dawn, thinking about death.

On a spring evening as she came home through the fields, the young man stood before her who had said, “I am a man of peace.” He said, “Because of thee I became a soldier, for my heart smote me. Because of thee I put off my self-righteousness, and fought gladly. But it happened that I chased a man with steel and he tripped. And my hand would not strike him, because he had tripped. A great horror of killing came over me, so that I fled like one mad. I have done with soldiering for ever, though I die for it. That I might tell thee, I have sought thee very many days.” Now the girl wondered at his words; and she began to love him. And they two wandered about among the fields, loath to part; but at last they came into her garden, and stood still among the green things. She said, “See the stars, God’s children also. Surely they love, and kill not.” But he told her about the stars, that they are great suns and worlds; and she said, “They that dwell in those worlds, what of them?” She lifted up her hands to heaven, greeting those peoples; and she said to them, “Brothers and sisters whom I know not; do ye work and weep and love? Then I love you. Do ye hate and kill and make war? Still I love you.” Then were they two silent a while before the majesty of the stars, and the mystery of one another. He said, “I knew not what God might be, till thou didst show me. He is the majesty of all the stars, and he is the soul of one girl.”

Men came seeking him who arrested him as a deserter. They said, “Brave men are dying, and thou lurkest with a harlot.” The young man broke loose raging, and hurt them. But they overpowered him and killed him, and took away the body.

The girl stood still in the pathway of the garden, among the green things. She lifted up her hands again to the heavens, and to the peoples therein; and she cried to them, “Weep with me, weep with me, ye peoples. They have taken my friend.” But she wept not. She stood looking from star to star, amazed at death. A great terror and joy seized her because of the near prescence of her friend.

God sowed a seed. It shall not fail.
Though in autumn the leaves wither.

The earth was a battlefield, and the cities heaps of ruins. All men were fighting: there were none to work. The armies were hungry and very tired, and still they fought. Women and children lay dead in the open unburied, yet more babies were born. Pestilences ate the peoples; the earth was foul.

Fiercer and fiercer grew the war, and neither side could conquer. The peoples began to rebel, and confusion grew. Yet in all lands were men of peace, working against war; and women of peace, who would not bear sons for the slaughter. Soldiers began to mingle with the enemy and be friends with them between the battles; yet at a word of command they would go back to kill. Everyone said to himself, “War is Hell; there is no good in it.” But to his neighbour he said, “We suffer in a great cause.” And so war devoured all things and all evil grew.

There was a woman on a battlefield, tending the wounded. The sun burned them and there was no water. They began to rave, but nothing could be done. The woman was busy over them, but all the while she thought deeply, wondering that men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.

Now a great mass of men ran thither, chased by the enemy; who slaughtered them as they ran. The woman stood up against them compassionate, but she could not restrain them. They all swept past her raging, and she was left with the newly fallen. But after a while the enemy returned bringing prisoners. They would have seized her; but a holy anger came over her, so that they dared not. She cried, “Friends, ye all hate war; why must ye fight? Are ye mad, that ye can love and yet kill? Or are ye cowards, that ye dare not throw down your weapons? The whole world wants peace, and the whole world is afraid. See the battlefield, your work! Are ye glad of it? Ye hate it, ye hate it, for ye are men, not wolves. Ye have wives and mothers and sweethearts, and children trust you. How can ye kill under the blue sky in June? Oh, we have all lost sight of God, and so we have no joy. Yet God is in everyone that loves; he is in everyone’s heart. Throw down your weapons, throw them down. Better die than kill. Better die men of peace, than live making war. If ye dare, others will dare, and others and others; and so war must end.”

A crowd gathered round her to listen, and each man knew that she spoke the truth; for in everyone’s heart a voice answered her voice, the God in each speaking. A murmur rose from the crowd, so that all knew that all approved. And they began throwing down their weapons; and suddenly all shouted for joy. Then the women urged them to scatter over the country-side to speak for peace. And she said, “Most will be killed, but it is for peace.”

Suddenly their enemy attacked them, and they let themselves be overpowered. Most were quickly destroyed, but they died praising peace. The enemy were amazed, and faltered in the killing; and soon they also threw away their weapons, and became men of peace.

All that mixed host spread abroad to persuade men to stop war. Many were martyred, but they died in joy. And the peoples were ready to hear; so the word spread. At last it was agreed that on a certain day all war should cease, and all weapons be gathered together and destroyed. And on that day it was done. Each man took a vow, holding the hand of one that had been an enemy. All the armies marched home, and in their homes was joy.

Then men began to build again what had been destroyed, and to set on foot the great works of peace. Everywhere there was sorrow still, and the misery that war had made; but there was hope. Men began to quarrel and to grasp what was within reach; but a new spirit also dawned. The souls of men had been chastened for the beginning of a new age. It shall be an age of knowing God, and an age of joy.

The woman went back to her village and made a home for herself. She grew green stuff for market, and kept fowls. She went to market every week, carrying a full basket. Her neighbours’ children loved her and gave her a pet name. And often at night she went into the garden to look at the stars, and to ask them about her friend who was dead. She named the stars according to her fancy, knowing them so well. She grew to hear the music that is the song of all the stars. And she knew her friend, and he was God. Then in the time when joy had come back into the world, she died.

God sowed a seed, and there came a flower.
Holy is God, and the world His flower.

A WORLD OF SOUND (1936)

First published in ‘Hotch Potch’

THE ROOM WAS OVERCROWDED AND STUFFY. THE music seemed to have no intelligible form. It was a mere jungle of noise. Now one instrument and now another blared out half a tune, but every one of these abortive musical creatures was killed before it had found its legs. Some other and hostile beast fell upon it and devoured it, or the whole jungle suffocated it.

The strain of following this struggle for existence wearied me. I closed my eyes, and must have fallen asleep; for suddenly I woke with a start. Or seemed to wake. Something queer had happened. The music was still going on, but I was paralysed. I could not open my eyes. I could not shout for help. I could not move my body, nor feel it. I had no body.

Something had happened to the music, too, and to my hearing. But what? The tissue of sounds seemed to have become incomparably more voluminous and involved. I am not musical; but suddenly I realized that this music had overflowed, so to speak, into all the intervals between the normal semitones, that it was using not merely quarter-tones but “centitones” and “millitones,” with an effect that would surely have been a torture to the normal ear. To me, in my changed state, it gave a sense of richness, solidity, and vitality quite lacking in ordinary music. This queer music, moreover, had another source of wealth. It reached up and down over scores of octaves beyond the range of normal hearing. Yet I could hear it.

As I listened, I grew surprisingly accustomed to this new jargon. I found myself easily distinguishing all sorts of coherent musical forms in this world of sound. Against an obscure, exotic background of more or less constant chords and fluttering “leafage,” so to speak, several prominent and ever-changing sound-figures were playing. Each was a persistent musical object, though fluctuating in detail of gesture and sometimes ranging bodily up or down the scale.

Suddenly I made a discovery which should have been incredible, yet it seemed to me at the time quite familiar and obvious. I found myself recognizing that these active sound-figures were alive, even intelligent. In the normal world, living things are perceived as changing patterns of visible and tangible characters. In this mad world, which was coming to seem to me quite homely, patterns not of colour and shape but of sound formed the perceptible bodies of living things. When it occurred to me that I had fallen into a land of “program music” I was momentarily disgusted. Here was a whole world that violated the true canons of musical art! Then I reminded myself that this music was not merely telling but actually living its story. In fact it was not art but life. So I gave rein to my interest.

Observing these creatures that disported themselves before me, I discovered, or rather rediscovered, that though this world had no true space, such as we perceive by sight and touch, yet it did have a sort of space. For in some sense these living things were moving in relation to me and in relation to one another. Apparently the “space” of this world consisted of two dimensions only, and these differed completely in quality. One was the obvious dimension of tonality, or pitch, on the subtle “keyboard” of this world. The other was perceived only indirectly. It corresponded to the heard nearness or remoteness of one and the same instrument in the normal world. Just as we see things as near and far through the signification of colour and perspective, so in this strange world, certain characters of timbre, of harmonics, of overtones, conveyed a sense of “nearness”; others a sense of “distance.” A peculiar blatancy, often combined with loudness, meant “near”; a certain flatness, or ghostliness of timbre, generally combined with faintness, meant “far.” An object receding in this “level” dimension (as I called it) would gradually lose its full-bodied timbre, and its detail and preciseness. At the same time it would become fainter, and at last inaudible.

I should add that each sound-object had also its own characteristic timbre, almost as though each thing in this world were a theme played by one and the same instrument. But I soon discovered that in the case of living things the timbre-range of each individual was very wide; for emotional changes might be accompanied by changes of timbre even greater than those which distinguish our instruments.

In contrast with the variegated but almost changeless background or landscape, the living things were in constant movement. Always preserving their individuality, their basic identity of tonal pattern, they would withdraw or approach in the “level” dimension or run up and down the scale. They also indulged in a ceaseless rippling play of musical gesture. Very often one of these creatures, travelling up or down the scale, would encounter another. Then either the two would simply interpenetrate and cross one another, as transverse trains of waves on a pond; or there would be some sort of mutual readjustment of form, apparently so as to enable them to squeeze past one another without “collision.” And collision in this world seemed to be much like dissonance in our music. Sometimes, to avoid collision, a creature needed merely to effect a slight alteration in its tonal form, but sometimes it had to move far aside, so to speak, in the other dimension, which I have called the “level” dimension. Thus it became for a while inaudible.

Another discovery now flashed upon me, again with curious familiarity. I myself had a “body” in this world. This was the “nearest” of all the sound-objects. It was so “near” and so obvious that I never noticed it till it was brought into action. This happened unexpectedly. One of the moving creatures inadvertently came into collision with a minor part of my musical body. The slight violation of my substance stabbed me with a little sharp pain. Immediately, by reflex action and then purposefully, I readjusted my musical shape, so as to avoid further conflict. Thus it was that I discovered or rediscovered the power of voluntary action in this world.

I also emitted a loud coruscation of musical gesture, which I at once knew to be significant speech. In fact I said in the language of that world, “Damn you, that’s my toe, that was.” There came from the other an answering and apologetic murmur.

A newcomer now approached from the silent distance to join my frolicking companions. This being was extremely attractive to me, and poignantly familiar. Her lithe figure, her lyrical yet faintly satirical movement, turned the jungle into Arcadia. To my delight I found that I was not unknown to her, and not wholly unpleasing. With a gay gesture she beckoned me into the game.

For the first time I not only changed the posture of my musical limbs but moved bodily, both in the dimension of pitch and the “level” dimension. As soon as I approached, she slipped with laughter away from me. I followed her; but very soon she vanished into the jungle and into the remoteness of silence. Naturally I determined to pursue her. I could no longer live without her. And in the exquisite harmony of our two natures I imagined wonderful creative potentialities.

Let me explain briefly the method and experience of locomotion in this world. I found that, by reaching out a musical limb and knitting its extremity into the sound-pattern of some fixed object at a distance, in either dimension or both, I obtained a purchase on the object, and could draw my whole body toward it. I could then reach out another limb to a still farther point. Thus I was able to climb about the forest of sound with the speed and accuracy of a gibbon. Whenever I moved, in either dimension, I experienced my movement merely as a contrary movement of the world around me. Near objects became nearer, or less near; remote objects became less remote, or slipped further into the distance and vanished. Similarly my movement up or down the musical scale appeared to me as a deepening or heightening of the pitch of all other objects.

In locomotion I experienced no resistance from other objects save in the collision of dissonance, which I could generally avoid by altering my shape. I discovered that a certain degree of dissonance between myself and another offered only very slight resistance and no pain. Indeed, such contacts might be pleasurable. But harsh discords were a torture and could not be maintained.

I soon found that there was a limit to my possible movement up and down the scale. At a point many octaves below my normal situation I began to feel oppressed and sluggish. As I toiled downwards my discomfort increased, until, in a sort of swoon, I floated up again to my native musical plane. Ascending far above this plane, I felt at first exhilaration; but after many octaves a sort of light-headedness and vertigo overtook me, and presently I sank reeling to the few octaves of my normal habitat.

In the “level” dimension there seemed to be no limit to my power of locomotion, and it was in this dimension chiefly that I sought the vanished nymph. I pressed forward through ever-changing tonal landscapes. Sometimes they opened out into “level” vistas of remote, dim, musical objects, or into “tonal” vistas, deep and lofty, revealing hundreds of octaves above and below me. Sometimes the view narrowed, by reason of the dense musical “vegetation,” to a mere tunnel, no more than a couple of octaves in height. Only with difficulty could I work my way along such a passage. Sometimes, in order to avoid impenetrable objects, I had to clamber far into the treble or the bass. Sometimes, in empty regions, I had to leap from perch to perch.

At last I began to weary. Movement became repugnant, perception uncertain. Moreover the very form of my body lost something of its pleasant fullness. Instinct now impelled me to an act which surprised my intellect though I performed it without hesitation. Approaching certain luscious little musical objects, certain very simple but vigorous little enduring patterns of timbre and harmony, I devoured them. That is, I broke down the sound-pattern of each one into simpler patterns; and these I incorporated into my own harmonious form. Then I passed on, refreshed.

Presently I was confronted by a crowd of the intelligent beings tumbling helter-skelter toward me and jostling one another in their haste. Their emotional timbre expressed such fear and horror that my own musical form was infected with it. Hastily moving myself several octaves toward the bass to avoid their frantic course, which was mostly in the treble, I shouted to them to tell me what was the matter. As they fled past I distinguished only a cry which might be translated, “The Big Bad Wolf.”

My fear left me, for now I recognized that this was a flock of very young creatures. So I laughed reassuringly and asked if they had encountered the lovely being whom I was seeking. And I laughed to myself at the ease and sweetness with which her musical name came to me when I needed it. They answered only with an augmented scream of infantile grief, as they faded into the distance.

Disturbed, I pursued my journey. Presently I came into a great empty region where I could hear a very remote but ominous growl. I halted, to listen to the thing more clearly. It was approaching. Its form emerged from the distance and was heard in detail. Soon I recognized it as no mere childish bogey but a huge and ferocious brute. With lumbering motion in the bass, its limbs propelled it at a surprising speed. Its harsh tentacles of sound, flickering hither and thither far up into the treble, nosed in search of prey.

Realizing at last the fate that had probably befallen my dear companion, I turned sick with horror. My whole musical body trembled and wavered with faintness.

Before I had decided what to do, the brute caught sight of me, or rather sound of me, and came pounding toward me with the roar and scream of a train, or an approaching shell. I fled. But soon realizing that I was losing ground, I plunged into a thicket of chaotic sound, which I heard ahead of me and well up in the treble. Adapting my musical form and colour as best I could to the surrounding wilderness, I continued to climb. Thus I hoped both to conceal myself and escape from the reach of the creature’s tentacles. Almost fainting from the altitude, I chose a perch, integrating my musical limbs with the pattern of the fixed objects in that locality. Thus anchored, I waited, motionless.

The brute was now moving more slowly, nosing in search of me as it approached. Presently it lay immediately below me, far down in the bass. Its body was now all too clearly heard as a grim cacophony of growling and belching. Its strident tentacles moved beneath me like the waving tops of trees beneath a man clinging to a cliff face. Still searching, it passed on beneath me. Such was my relief that I lost consciousness for a moment and slipped several octaves down before I could recover myself. The movement revealed my position. The beast of prey returned, and began clambering awkwardly toward me. Altitude soon checked its progress, but it reached me with one tentacle, one shrieking arpeggio. Desperately I tried to withdraw myself farther into the treble, but the monster’s limb knit itself into the sound-pattern of my flesh. Frantically struggling, I was dragged down, down into the suffocating bass. There, fangs and talons of sound tore me agonizingly limb from limb.

Then suddenly I woke in the concert hall to a great confusion of scraping chairs. The audience was making ready to leave.

OLD MAN IN NEW WORLD (1944)

THE OLD MAN could not help feeling flattered by the Government’s thoughtfulness in sending a special aeroplane to fetch him from his home in Northumberland to witness the great celebration in London. Born during the First World War, he was now nearly eighty, though still, he believed, remarkably clear-headed. Today he was to take his place among the honoured but ever dwindling band of the Fathers of the Revolution. The occasion was the Procession of the Peoples, which was organized every year in some selected city of the world to commemorate the founding of the New World Order, thirty years ago, and twenty-three years after the end of the Second World War. This time the pageant and its concluding ceremony were to be given a new character by a special reference to the young; for today mankind was celebrating also the “Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the First Generation of the New World,” the young people who were born when the New Educational Policy had first come into full operation, five years after the world-wide revolution was completed. By good luck it had fallen to London to be the hostess city on this very special occasion. It was surely fitting that the British metropolis should have the privilege of providing the setting of this event, for it was the shrunken population of Britain that had achieved the most striking change in its fortunes by centring its whole economy on the care and education of its young.

When the agile little two-seater plane had lightly settled on his lawn, the old man stuffed a book in his pocket, hurried out, and climbed into his place, greeting the young pilot. The plane rose vertically above the trees, then slid forward, folding its helicopter vanes into its body. The familiar landscape flattened into a shifting green and brown patchwork.

The old man was pleased to find that the purring sound of the modern silenced plane offered little hindrance to conversation. Small talk soon established friendly relations with his companion, but there inevitably remained a gulf between the aged revolutionary and this young product of the Revolution. The difficulty was not simply due to the years. Between the seniors and the new young there was a subtle difference of mental texture, a difference so deep and far-reaching that one could almost believe that these young minds were based on a different bio-chemical structure from one’s own. Of course, they were always respectful, and even friendly, in a superficial way; but always they seemed to withhold something. It was as though, the old man fantastically imagined, they were humouring a child that had suffered and been warped, and would never really grow up. On the rare occasions when they did let themselves go, they talked the strangest stuff. It made one question whether the New Educational Policy had really been sound. But then, was this modern England itself really sound? Was the New World sound? In some ways, of course, it was magnificent; but too many queer new values were in the air. He suspected them. Well, perhaps the show that he was to witness might throw some light on the matter. Rumour had it that there were to be innovations of a startling kind, and that these were designed to indicate that the new and rather young President of the World Federation and many of his colleagues approved of the widespread change of temper in the life of mankind, and intended to foster it.

Secretly the old man regarded this expedition to London as something more than a pleasant jaunt at the Government’s expense. It was a mission of inspection. He was an emissary from the past, charged with assessing the achievement of the present. Were the generations that were now in the prime of life making the best possible use of the great opportunity which earlier generations had won for them, after decades of climax and heroic struggle?

He decided to begin his investigation on the young airman. “It must be grand to be young in these prosperous times,” he said, “with all the troubles well over.” The young man looked quickly at him, and laughed. Somewhat disconcerted, the senior wondered whether the new young, brought up so tenderly and scientifically, could possibly realize what the barbaric pre-revolutionary age had been like. This boy had missed that stern schooling.

“Well,” the elder said, “there’s no fear of war now, or of tyranny, or of starvation, or of being allowed to rot with nothing to do, or of being worked to death. The world standard of living is high, and rising rapidly; and the backward peoples have almost been brought up to the general level. Everyone is living a fairly full and satisfying life, I suppose. When you young people take charge, there’ll be no serious problems left, nothing to do but to carry on improving things all round. What more do you want?”

There was a long pause before the young man spoke. “New times, new ideas,” he said, “and new problems.”

Again a pause, broken by the senior. “No doubt when subatomic power comes into full commercial use we shall find ourselves in the thick of another industrial revolution. But...”

“I wasn’t thinking of that,” the pilot said, “though certainly in a few years sub-atomic power will produce terrific strains if it isn’t properly managed. There’ll be new skills, new social groupings, an entirely new texture of economic life. We shall warm the Arctic, cool the tropics, reshape the continents, water the deserts, and everyone will have his private rocket-plane for long-distance travel. Quite soon we shall explore the planets. But even that huge economic change will work smoothly enough if...”

“If social discipline is properly maintained,” the other said.

“Oh, it will be. That’s not the problem. Today the danger is rather that the highly successful world-wide ideology will clamp down on our minds so tightly that we shall lose all power of radical originality, of originality outside the general pattern of culture. If so, we shall never be able to cope with circumstances that call for radical innovation. Sub-atomic energy may be among those circumstances. New advances in educational psychology certainly are. In your days it was discipline and unity that were wanted, but today diversity, originality, and full expression. Then, the vital thing was to teach people to feel community, and to live it, and to give up everything to fight for it. But that battle has been well won. Now, it’s individuality that has to be fostered, helped to develop, to deepen itself, to break out into as many new forms as possible. The people in charge don’t seem to be able to see how important this is. They have been thinking still in terms of the old half-savage pre-revolutionary human being.”

“That’s me, I take it,” put in the old man.

The young man laughed. “There were many, no doubt, who were ahead of their time. But the mass were half-savage, warped in mind from birth onwards by ignorant warped parents and teachers, by a hostile economic environment, and by a culture that put a premium on self-seeking.”

“You don’t mince matters,” laughed the old man, “but what you say is true.”

“The point is this,” the pilot continued, “human beings can be far more different from one another than sub-human animals can be, and yet they can also be far more aware of one another, and enriching to one another. Well, practically all post-revolutionary human beings can go beyond the average of pre-revolutionary human beings in that way, because they are more conscious. Events before the revolutionary period were already forcing many people to be more penetratingly aware of themselves and their world, and the New Educational Policy has carried the young ones much further. But there’s a horrible discrepancy between our educational system and our Government’s old-fashioned attempt to keep a firm hand on us. It’s so silly, childish. No one wants to be anti-social now, so why discipline them? The economic system in the old days forced people to be self-seeking and anti-social, but the present one doesn’t. The only serious self-seeking there can be now is selfish rivalry in social service.”

“True in the main,” said the old man, “but we must remember the foundations of human nature. We are still at bottom self-regarding animals, and society must compensate for our inveterate individualism by a good deal of discipline. After all, community involves some cramping of the longing for unrestrained self-expression. Never forget that.”

“We won’t, we won’t,” the young man said, “but community, true community of self-aware and other-aware persons, also involves real differences, otherwise — the ant-hill. And for real persons, discipline must be self-discipline, otherwise it defeats itself. Besides — well, the New Educational Policy was meant to produce a new kind of human being, unwarped, fully personal, and all that. It has already gone far; but when the new techniques of psycho-synthesis and telepathic influence have been perfected it will go much further. Maybe it has succeeded better than you intended, even now. Maybe its success makes new social principles necessary, perhaps a new revolution. In your day, I suppose, the vital problems were economic, but now they’re psychological.

There was silence, save for the subdued murmur of the plane and the sound of the streaming air. Far below, and to the left, a silver scribble was the Tyne. Through the clear atmosphere of the new smokeless England one could see the towns and docks as sharply defined as a model at arm’s length.

The old man had always prided himself on keeping a supple mind open to new ideas, and his junior had given him something which deserved serious consideration. For a long while he silently ruminated, while the plane slid quietly forward over the counties. At last he reached a conviction that these newfangled ideas really were dangerous. The boy must be made to see that they were dangerous.

“You young people are so fortunate in your world,” he said, “that you probably can’t realize how thin the veneer of civilization is, and how easily it may break down again unless it is very jealously preserved.”

“We think,” said the young man, “that your generation were so unfortunate in your youth that you cannot really know how far-reaching the change has been.”

The old man sighed, and said, “Let me try to make the past live for you.”

“Do!” said the junior, “Those towers are Ripon. There’s plenty of time.”

The old revolutionary embarked on a lecture.

“The main outcome of the First World War was the new Russia, the first state ever planned and controlled for the welfare of ordinary people. Discipline and bold planning alone could make that great revolution, and preserve it against the money-men all over the world. When I was very young, between the First and Second Wars, the Russians were patiently and firmly building up their new Society, and nearly everywhere else men were blindly clinging to their various petty freedoms — freedom to buy and sell, freedom to climb on the shoulders of their fellows by money-power, freedom to propagand lies and folly and hate, freedom of national sovereign states against all attempts at world-wide discipline, freedom of every individual just to destroy himself with aimless frittering, if he had the money and the inclination. All this you know from your history books. But what you can’t possibly realize is what it felt like to be young in that time. You can’t feel the impact of a deadly-sick world on young eager minds. You can’t feel what we unemployed felt. You can’t feel the foul, stinking, poisonous mist soaking into all our hearts and ruining our humanity.”

“All honour,” said the young man, “to the Russians for magnificently breaking the spell, and to you and your revolutionary comrades too, for fighting against the poison. But — well, circumstances have been kinder to us. We are not poisoned. And so—”

But the old man refused to be silenced. He had forgotten that he intended to study his companion, not to preach to him. “Knowledge about Russia,” he said, “was gradually spreading. Along with the deepening misery went a deepening conviction that the mess was not really inevitable. Russia at least knew how to cure it. And when at last the Second World War came, people said that after this war there really would be a new age. The will for a more human order, the will for the light, was stronger than ever before.”

The old man seemed to fall into a reverie, till the pilot said, “The will for the light! Yes, it was growing stronger and clearer all the time, really. Well? And then?” It was almost as though he were encouraging a child to repeat its lesson.

“Well,” said the elder, “You know as well as I do. We won the war, and lost the peace. But what you young people seem in danger of forgetting is why we lost the peace. We lost it because we threw off all the promising disciplines of war. God! How I remember the wild hope when peace came! Never again should gangsters rule! Never again should money power mess up everything. The Atlantic Charter would at once be applied throughout the world. People really believed that the incubus of the old system could be shifted as easily as that! Unfortunately they forgot that everything depended on the Americans, and that those former pioneers were still stuck in the nineteenth century. The American money-bosses were able to bolster up our own tottering capitalist rulers and prevent our revolution.”

“And yet the Americans did well at first,” said the young man, “pouring food and goods into Europe without expectation of payment.”

“Yes,” replied the old man, “but think how the American rulers, the men of big business, when they had recaptured the state after the decline of the New Deal, used the power of the larder and the store-cupboard to establish swarms of their own people in charge of relief work throughout Europe. These ‘relieving’ Americans settled down as a kind of aristocracy, benevolent in the main, but blind, fundamentally unenlightened. In the name of freedom and mercy they set up a despotism almost as strict as Hitler’s.”

The pilot laughed. “And yet you say the cause of all the trouble was lack of social discipline.”

“My dear boy,” cried the old revolutionary, “I want an accepted discipline under the community as a whole, in order to prevent imposed disciplines by sections of it. A very different matter! Anyhow, think what happened! The American bosses were scared stiff when the beaten Germans turned from Nazism to Communism, and the Italians and most other Europeans followed suit. So they had to use their larder-power to check Communism at all costs. They preached their precious old dead-as-mutton liberal democracy for all they were worth. Individual initiative, private enterprise, freedom of thought, and all the old slogans, went ringing through Europe; and not a soul believed them. But the Americans themselves believed them; and their bosses persuaded them it was their mission to lead mankind into that heaven. They were God’s people, and they must fulfil their destiny. The old, old story! Of course, many Americans must have known it was cant, but it worked all right on the American masses, so that they backed their bosses. And so in the end the job of salvaging Europe got turned into a business undertaking after all. Instead of putting European industry really on its feet again the American bosses damped it down so that it couldn’t compete with their own industry, and so that they could keep a firm hand on Europe, because of Communism.”

“True, true,” sighed the young man, “but what are you getting at? We all know what happened. America, which by the way was really no longer ruled by the men of money, but by the new ruling class of skilled managers and technicians, came into conflict with Russia, where the same class was ruling, but with a different set of ideas. There was rivalry between the two ruling cliques for the control of Europe, and over Japan and China. The American bosses were aiming at a world-wide commercial empire; and the leaders of Russia were determined that as soon as they had repaired their country’s war-damage, they would revert to the original policy of instigating a worldwide Communist revolution. Very soon, of course, they tumbled to it that the American bosses were out to control the planet. And so they began slowly damping down their huge job of reconstruction so as to re-arm. And of course the Americans were doing the same. Well, what about it?”

“Try to think what it all meant in terms of living,” the old man said. “Think of all the social misery we in Britain had to go through; and on top of it was the certainty of war. In Britain, after the Second War, there had been first a brave attempt to work out a new social order, with security, health, education and leisure for every citizen. But of course that was soon smashed by the moneyed class with help from their American big brothers. Our financial magnates propaganded hard for ‘freedom,’ abolition of war-time restrictions on private enterprise, back to the good old times, and so on. Instead of letting the Government reshape our whole production system and simplify our living conditions so as to combine frugality with health for all, they just closed down factories, and let millions of workers wallow in unemployment. Everywhere there were ruined factories, deserted mines, streets of dilapidated houses, whole cities neglected and in ruins. Several towns were completely deserted. Those that still functioned at all were inhabited by a few ragged and unhealthy, and mostly middle-aged, people who had lost all hope. The few boys and girls, moreover, seemed prematurely old and grim, oppressed by the preponderance of their elders. How I remember the sickening feeling that we were all just rats that couldn’t leave the sinking ship. Day in, day out, one was gripped by that sense of being trapped. To preach revolution, whether to old or young, was like exhorting a man sunk to the neck in a bog to climb a mountain and admire the dawn. Social services decayed, disease increased, the birthrate sank alarmingly. People used to kill their children out of pity, and then kill themselves. The British scarcely noticed the disintegration of their empire, for they had more serious troubles nearer home. It was hell on earth, if ever there was one. The general despair seemed to disintegrate our moral fibre. Too often hopes had been revived and shattered. Too often the promised world seemed to be at hand, only to vanish. The will for the light had always been frail, but now at last it seemed to be withering, like a young plant exposed to too fierce a blizzard. The standard of personal relations was falling. People were becoming in their ordinary contacts with each other less responsible, more callous, less kindly, more vindictive. The mere memory of it all puts me in a cold sweat of fright.”

“Well, so what?” said the pilot, with a secret smile.

“What? Well, you know as well as I do. Added to everything else there was the terror of the coming World-War. And stratosphere rocket-planes and sub-atomic bombs promised something far worse than the last war.”

“But,” the young man interrupted, “the Third World War never happened. Why? You’re forgetting something very important. You’re forgetting that when both sides were mobilizing, and the war was due at any minute, something happened that would have been impossible at any other stage of history. You remember how government propaganda for the war never really caught on, on either side; and how at the critical moment an extraordinary popular clamour against war and against social robotism broke out on both sides. Who was really responsible for that? Why, the new ‘agnostic mystics,’ of course. They started the world strike in America and Russia. Decades earlier, the pacifists had tried to stop war by popular protest, but they failed miserably, because conditions were not ripe. But the new group, who weren’t strictly pacifists at all but social revolutionaries with a religious motive — they found conditions ripe, and they did the trick. Obviously you must know that story, how everyone downed tools and was ready to die for the new hope. Thousands must have been imprisoned, hundreds shot. But presently the governments found their armed forces were mutinying. Then came the American Revolution and the big change in Russia. The driving force, as you must surely know, was an odd assortment of airmen, skilled workers, and — the agnostic mystics. You ignore those modern saints, but it was those that inspired the whole movement and kept it going. Remember, of course, that for many decades a big change had been slowly going on deep down in people’s minds. It had begun away back in the First War and made steady progress through the inter-war period, but it was never effective till after the Second War. It came to a head among the young fighters in that war, particularly among the airmen, and also among all the oppressed peoples of Europe, and in the occupied parts of Russia and China, and later in broken-down Britain. These two very different groups, the fighters and the broken, rediscovered the power of comradeship, as the Russians had done in their first Revolution. But this time it was discovered with far deeper consciousness of its meaning. So much had happened since that earlier awakening. This time it developed into a purged and clarified will for the light, as you yourself called it; a will for a more fully human way of living, for intelligence, and other-respecting community, and for creative action in all human affairs.”

“Not much new in that,” interposed the old man.

“Oh yes, there was,” said the junior, “it was a moral passion for this way of living as an absolute good, not just as a means to social prosperity. It was mystical, too, because though these people didn’t pledge themselves to any beliefs about the ultimate reality, and were mostly outside all organized religion, they felt with complete certainty that in some way, which they couldn’t state intellectually at all, the struggle for the light was the real meaning and purpose of all conscious existence. And in keeping themselves in severe training for that struggle they found — well, ‘the peace that passeth all understanding.’ It was this new attitude, this humbly agnostic, yet deeply mystical, feeling, that broke the spell of disillusion and spread like a fire from heart to heart.”

The old man had been shifting restlessly in his seat, and now he expostulated. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! What are you getting at? This mystical feeling, as you call it, was just the subjective side of the objective pressure of circumstances, which forced people to see that they must stand together or perish. Of course, I know your mystics mostly came in on the right side, and that they provided a lot of heartening though questionable ideology, and appreciably strengthened the passion and drive of the Revolution. But—”

“They played the leading part in the preliminary American Revolution,” said the pilot, “and that prevented the war.”

“Oh, yes,” the old man admitted. “But—”

“And they inspired a change in Russia that almost amounted to a second Russian revolution. They made Russia the stronghold of the new agnostic-mystical Communism, as it had been also of the earlier kind of Communism.”

“But wait!” cried the old man, “Though the Russians did indulge in a dash of mysticism, there wasn’t much of mysticism about the new world-organization. After the decade of revolutions, what came out was nothing highfalutin, just a commonsense world-wide federation of socialist states.”

“Yes,” the young man said, “because, although it was the agnostic-mystics who generated the passion and drive of the world-wide revolution, the people who actually managed the setting up of the new order were the professional revolutionaries. Their job was to bring off the great economic and social change, and to make it secure. And so they concentrated, quite rightly, on self-discipline for the masses of their supporters and imposed-discipline for their opponents. But when the new order was firmly established, something different was needed, and you old warriors of the revolution” (the young man smiled apologetically at his companion) “could never really see that. It was only with your tongues in your cheeks that you had used the power of the new religious feeling to establish the Revolution. For you it was just a heartening rum-ration to fire the simple masses with Dutch courage. You couldn’t appreciate that it was a real awakening, and that it must cause a deep and lasting change of temper in the life of mankind, and therefore that it would insist on transforming the whole tone of your new world-order.”

“Oh, but we did appreciate that,” said the old man, “and we saw both the good in it and the danger. It looked like a first mild dose of those two ancient social poisons, individualism and superstitution. Take that word ‘instrument’ that your friends are so fond of. They are not content to say that the individual is an ‘instrument’ of social advancement; they say that individuals, and the race as a whole, are ‘instruments’ for the fulfilling of ‘the spirit.’ That’s sheer superstition.”

“When we say mankind is an instrument,” the pilot replied, “we say something that your generation almost inevitably dismisses as cant. And we certainly can’t prove it intellectually. But intellect can’t disprove it either. Really, it needs no proof. It’s as obvious as daylight, when one opens one’s eyes. And the early agnostic-mystics, by capturing your New Educational Policy, managed to open the eyes of the young to it. We,” the young man announced with a smile that prevented the remark from being either pompous or offensive, “are at once the first undamaged generation and the first clear-sighted generation. The credit must go to our elders, not to us; but that’s what we are, and we must be treated as such, not with all the trivial discipline that was appropriate to social insecurity, and is now quite out of date.”

The couple in the sky fell silent. The old man watched the green land pass under the aeroplane like a great map, unrolled before them and rolled up again behind. From this height England looked much the same as it had in his youth, yet how different were the English, particularly the new young!

Presently, remembering his original intention, he said to his companion “Tell me about yourself. Help me to understand what sort of supermen you amazing young people really are.” The other laughed. After a pause he said, “Well, I’m twenty-three, professional flier, and university student. Reading biology. Special subject, the flight of birds and insects. I’m making a fine set of tele-cinematograph pictures of birds in flight, and microcine pictures of insects. But I’m getting more and more interested in psychology, and when I’m too old for first-class flying, maybe I shall be good enough for some psychological job. If not, I’ll train fliers. Eighteen months ago I married. My wife, of course, really is a super-girl. She was twenty then, and now she is just about to have a baby. She’s studying at the London College of Teachers, and very soon she will be going into their Maternity Home. When she’s fit again she’ll go back to her studies and her teaching, on the half-time and later the three-quarter-time basis. The College’s own crèche and nursery school will help her, of course. We have a flat within five minutes of them.”

“Rather an early marriage, wasn’t it?” put in the old man. “Not for these days. I don’t mean merely because the country needs children. I mean from the individual point of view. We realize now that it’s impossible to live fully without the experience of a lasting partnership. A good marriage is the microcosm of all community experience. Of course, if it fails, we can drop it, acknowledging our mistake; but it won’t fail. We had other affairs first, of course, and may have occasional fresh ones in the future. But we do belong to one another fundamentally, and we decided to register the fact. Besides, we want the children to know that we were sure of one another right at the beginning.”

Strange, the old man mused, how monogamy was being rehabilitated! The only snobbery in the typical modern young mind was the snobbery of the happily married who were also parents. But to be so sure of one another at twenty-two and twenty! The venture seemed bound to fail. And yet — perhaps the New Educational Policy, with its minute care for emotional education and its new technique of psycho-synthesis, really had produced a more self-aware and other-aware and passionally stable type. The new young did seem to have an inner stability and harmony lacking in the young of his own early days. Monogamy, when it worked, evidently gave both partners something extraordinarily valuable, something steadying and strengthening. He looked back at the sweet but torturing and transitory affairs of his own life. How superficially he and his beloveds had been aware of one another! He remembered, too, his late, desperate, childless marriage and stormy separation.

The plane was now over the outskirts of London, and the old man’s attention was drawn to the impressive spectacle of the giant city, spread out below him and stretching away in all directions to fade into the summer haze. Of smoke there was none. Every building below him stood out sharply in the sunshine, like a precise little crystal among thousands of fellow crystals. The whole was like a patchwork of crystallization and green mould, which was really the many parks and gardens, and the long ranks of trees lining the great new boulevards. The Thames was a bright ribbon that borrowed colour from the blue sky. As the plane circled and sank, the old man picked out familiar landmarks, the tower of the new House of Parliament (the former buildings had been destroyed in the troubles), the ancient dome of St. Paul’s, the great pile of University College. Now he could see cars moving in the streets. Boats on the Thames were little water-beetles. Towers and spires rose upwards as the plane descended, till weather-cocks were at eye-level. The plane protruded its helicopter vanes and hovered here and there, like a bee choosing a flower, as the pilot sought a good landing. Then it sank to ground in a crowded little aeroplane park that still bore the name Leicester Square.

As there was some time to put in before he was due to take his seat among the Fathers of the Revolution, the old man made his way through cheerful crowds toward the Embankment, and a favourite eating house. On all his rare visits to London he was struck with the contrast between the modern fresh-complexioned Londoners, so well though simply dressed, and the Londoners of his youth, who ranged from frank shabbiness through a pathetic and unsuccessful imitation of smartness to gross ostentation. Now, even in the East End, shabbiness was abolished both from dress and houses. The slums and their inmates had vanished. There was also a subtler contrast between the earlier and the later Londoners, hard to focus. In comparison with these notably self-assured and genial faces, his memory’s composite picture of the faces of former crowds expressed a chivvied, anxious, furtive, sometimes vindictive temper in which native friendliness flickered insecurely.

When he had crossed the wide stretch of grass which now flanked the Thames, he came to his eating house, right on the water’s edge. It stood almost on the site where, long ago, stood Cleopatra’s Needle, now repatriated. Here, too, long ago, he himself as an unemployed youth had once spat into the Thames with contempt and fury against the universe. Now, having entered the bright little building and slipped coins into appropriate slots, he served himself with coffee and cakes. He carried his tray to a table out of doors by the river. Almost the only link with the past was the dome of St. Paul’s, far down stream but sharply defined and silvery grey in the purged atmosphere. Of course there was also the Waterloo Bridge, which in his young days had been a novelty, and was indeed a precursor of the new order. Across the almost clean water with its smokeless tugs and strings of barges, its pleasure-launches and its long sleek public passenger vessels, the southern bank had been transformed. Where formerly was a muddle of shabby buildings, much battered by war, stood now a rather austere form of concrete and glass, the Office of the World Commissioners in Britain. Above it waved a great flag, displaying a white orb on a bright blue field, the already storied emblem of loyalty to man. This had long been the focal symbol of that passion for humanity which, after so many decades of tragedy and heroism had at last swollen to an irresistible torrent and founded the New World. Up stream, where formerly was the railway bridge to Charing Cross Station, the old man admired the great new road bridge, which spanned the river in a single flattened arch, impossible before the advent of the new synthetic metals. Beyond, he could see once more the tower of the new Parliament House.

The old revolutionary had reason to be proud of this new London, since he had played a modest but useful part in making it possible. He loved not only its new wide boulevards with their modern edifices, but also the old Georgian squares. The new architecture, he felt, blended into a seamless unity with the old-time buildings, a unity symbolical of the new life of the English people. Yet he was irrationally haunted by nostalgia for the old smoky, class-ridden, snob-bound, Philistine London, the London in which, after all, men had learnt manhood without all this modern pampering. Oh well, it was time to make a move. After a few minutes’ walk he was at the appropriate tier of seats in the new Great Square of London, where the procession would concentrate for the final ceremony.

He settled into his place among the other ancient relics of a mythical period, feeling somehow at once a distinguished guest and an exhibit. Band music heralded the approach of the procession. Soon the first national column entered the Great Square, circled round it, and took up its allotted place. The leaders were the Chinese, the senior civilization of the world. Column by column, the representatives of all the nations followed.

As on previous occasions, each of the national contingents carried its national flag. Why, the old man wondered, did men still cling to these silly and rather dangerous local emblems? However, each nation also displayed, and in the place of honour in front of its own flag, the simple banner of the World Federation. Some of the marchers were dressed in their agricultural or industrial or other vocational uniforms. For uniforms had, of course, greatly increased in the world since the will for social cohesion had come into its own; and during the anxious period of world-reconstruction the need for economy had emphasized this tendency. But to-day’s procession included many marchers in diversified and quaintly stylized individual clothing. As usual, the national columns carried with them the instruments or products of their most distinctive national occupations. Sheaves of com, fruit, rolls of gorgeous cloth and silk, scientific and optical instruments, sleek electrical machinery, models of ships and aeroplanes, were borne upon shoulders, or on tractors which were themselves exhibits. Some peoples had deliberately stressed culture rather than industry; in particular the Germans, proudly bearing their books, musical instruments, paintings, sculpture.

It had been arranged that the peoples should be represented roughly in proportion to their actual population. Consequently the faces of the marchers were predominantly swarthy or “yellow” or black. But the columns of North America, of Northern Europe, and of European Russia showed that the fair type was still a notable factor in the human community.

At the end of the long procession came the diminutive columns of the three hostess peoples themselves, the English, the Scotch, the Welsh. Great enthusiasm and considerable amusement was caused among the spectators by the fact that at the head of each of these little companies came a rank of young mothers carrying their babies. Behind these marched three ranks of older children, and then nurses and child-welfare workers, followed by teachers, in the grey tweed which had become the uniform of all those engaged in education, and was now the most respected cloth in the Island. Then came the Young Pioneers, boys and girls equipped for harvesting, digging, afforestation, and so on. Behind these were the representatives of the Universities and Technical Colleges, and finally the usual ranks of industry and agriculture characteristic of the Island. By giving to maternity and education pride of place in their columns the British peoples manifested to the world the fact that they were successfully stemming the decline of their population, and that their whole economy was purposefully directed toward the creation of noble future citizens.

All this was admirable. But there was a novelty, and one which was very disturbing to the old man, though it elicited from the spectators hilarity and applause. According to the official programme the innovation had been conceived by a group of young French writers and artists; and the authorities, after careful consideration, had sanctioned it as “a symbol of the new feeling for individuality which was rising in all parts of the world.” Social harmony, the programme declared, was now well established, and mankind was in a position to relax its discipline and smile at its hard-won triumphs, without either disparaging the heroic self-abnegation of the founders of the New World or undermining the loyalty of its present supporters. The programme said nothing of the violent conflict of opinion which had preceded the official sanctioning of the innovation, a conflict which had led to the resignation of a number of persons in high places.

The daring new feature was this. Many of the national columns were accompanied by two or three unattached individuals whose task it was to clown hither and thither beside the marchers, and even among their ranks. Most of the columns were without these strange attendants; but besides the French, who had conceived the device and executed it with characteristic subtlety, a rather odd assortment of peoples had adopted it. The Russians, with their vein of self-criticism and their genius for ballet, the Chinese with their humour, the Irish, who welcomed every opportunity of irreverence toward authority, and the English, whose presentation was more genial than subtle — these peoples alone had found sufficient interest and moral courage to submit themselves to the penetrating fire of self-criticism.

Each of these comedians was dressed in a stylized and extravagant version of some costume prominent in his own national contingent. All were clearly meant to represent the undisciplined individuality of the common man. In their behaviour they combined something of that almost legendary film-star, Chaplin, with characters of the privileged mediaeval jester. Sometimes they merely blundered along enthusiastically and inefficiently beside the column, vainly trying to conform to the regimented conduct of their fellows; sometimes they would seem to be torn between the spell of the group and personal impulse, breaking suddenly into an abortive caper and then shamefacedly falling into step again to bear themselves with an exaggerated air of rapture in the common rhythm. Sometimes they would stop to joke with individual spectators, and then scuttle anxiously and penitently back to their places. Occasionally one of them would attach himself to a leader of the column, mimicking his pompous bearing and military gait. Evidently, these clowns had been very carefully chosen, and were highly skilled artists; for they contrived to single out any slightly mechanical, officious or arrogant mannerisms of the leaders, and caricature them in a style that was at once devastating and kindly. Theirs was in part the flattering but sometimes shattering imitation with which children often pay tribute to their elders, and in part the friendly ridicule with which adults may temper the crude enthusiasm of the young. And such was their artistry that, in spite of their criticism of individual leaders and of the common enthusiasm, there was no doubt at all about their acceptance of the spirit of the whole occasion.

The startling climax of this daring innovation was reached in the final ceremony, which took place in the Great Square itself. As was customary, the last of the national columns saluted the dignitaries of the world and passed on to their allotted place in the Square. The flags of all the peoples were duly brought forward by their bearers into the open space before the dais, and together bowed to the ground before the great Standard of Mankind; then raised to be held erect for the rest of the ceremony. One by one the heads of the nations mounted the dais, bowed deeply to the President of the World, and handed him a book in which was inscribed a record of the particular nation’s achievement during the preceding year. There followed the usual broadcast speeches by high officials, culminating in an oration by the President of the World, reviewing the whole contemporary state of the human species.

Events on the dais were of course televised, as was the procession. But this final ceremony was televised largely in “close-ups,” so that all the world could appreciate its detail. There on the dais the leading personalities of the whole planet were assembled with the eyes of mankind upon them. And there, also, visible throughout the world, was the most daring novelty of all. At large among the great ones was a sort of court fool, a prince of jesters, clothed to symbolize Everyman. This individual was made up very differently from his humbler colleagues in the procession; and in spite of its humour his whole performance had about it something sad, compassionate and trance-like. For the most part he stood quietly watching the salutations of the national representatives, or listening to the speeches; but now and then he ranged freely about the dais, making play with a fool’s sceptre, to which was attached a bladder, roughly mapped with the outlines of the continents. And sometimes, while listening to a speech, he would silently and in a rapt, absentminded way, imitate the gestures of the orator, or move aside to caricature some applauding dignitary. Thus with his delicate and fleeting mimicry he would expose the foibles of the political stars among whom he was stationed. Mostly they endured the ordeal without flinching, entering amiably into the joke against themselves. But one or two failed to conceal their mortification at some shrewd hit; and then the Fool, perceiving this, immediately dropped his foolery, and with raised eyebrows turned away.

Clearly this most surprising innovation released pent-up forces in the crowd, most of whom, through their pocket television sets, must have seen the detail of these little dramas as clearly as the old man himself had done from his privileged position among the Fathers of the Revolution. He too had responded to the Fool’s artistry, but with a sense of guilt, as though he were enjoying something secret and obscene. Such indulgence of individual genius, delightful as it was, must surely weaken the authority of the persons who were exposed to it, must also tend to a general loosening of the social fibre. No doubt it might be said that only a strong government could have permitted itself to be thus criticized. Only an intelligent government, and one which could count on the loyalty of an intelligent and contented population could have recognized in the device a source of strength rather than of weakness. Moreover, only a government that had sensed the changing mood of the peoples of the world, and wished to register its approval, would have troubled to submit itself to this fantastic aesthetic commentary. The old man had to admit intellectually the force of these arguments, but the innovation violated the emotional habit of one whose mind had been formed in a more primitive age.

The supreme incident was still to come. It was one which showed by its obvious power over the assembled multitude the extraordinary change that had come over mankind within a few decades. No earlier populace could have understood, still less have been so profoundly moved by, a symbol of such austere significance. The President of the World was at the height of his speech. He had been dilating upon the incredible improvement in the fortunes of the common man in all lands, and glorifying the achievement and the promise of the human species under its new regime. He was, of course, frequently interrupted by applause. After the most vociferous of these outbursts, at the very moment when silence had been restored and the President was about to continue, the Fool stepped up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder and gently ousted the surprised orator from the microphone. Most startling fact of all, the President, with an awkward smile, acquiesced. And no one interfered.

Then the Fool, confronting the microphone, spoke to the world, “Happy, happy beings!” he said, and his quiet voice was now for the first time heard. “Happy, happy beings! But death dogs you. Conquerors of a world, but of a sand-grain among the stars! We are mere sparks that flash and die. Even as a species we are upstart, sprung so lately from beasts and fishes; soon to vanish. After us our planet will spin for aeons, and nothing will remember us. Then why, why, why are we here?”

He was silent. Throughout the Great Square there was a sound like a drift of air passing over a ripe cornfield. The whole populace had drawn in its breath. For a long moment the silence and the stillness continued, broken only by the quiet movement of the flags, and the sound of wings as a couple of pigeons settled in the Square.

Then at last the Fool spoke again. “The stars give no answer. But within ourselves, and in one another, and in our unity together, the answer lies; for in consciousness of our humanity we see deeper than through telescopes and microscopes. And from the depth of each one of us, and from our community together, a will arises; whence, we know not, but inexorable.

‘Live, oh fully live!’ it bids us. ‘To be aware, to love, to make — this is the music that I command of all my instruments. Let your sand-grain resound with a living flood of music; harmonious in itself, and harmonized with the song of all the spheres, which I alone can hear.’ Thus commands the will in us. And we, little human instruments, though death will surely hunt us down, and though our species is ephemeral, we shall obey. Weak we are, and blind, but the Unseen makes music with us.”

Silence once more occupied the Great Square, and persisted. The ranked columns and the surrounding populace stood motionless, held by the Unseen. Then at last the Fool, with bowed head, withdrew from sight. And then the President, after a moment’s hesitation, returned to the microphone and said, “Our celebration has found an unexpected but a fitting climax. I will say no more but that your leaders, who are also your comrades, will go forward with you to make the living music that is man.” As the President retired, a murmur rose from the populace and soon swelled into an oceanic thunder of applause. When at last the noise had died down, the massed bands struck up the familiar strains of the world anthem, the “Song of Man,” while the whole great company stood at attention to sing. Then the columns, one by one, moved and wheeled, and flowed out of the Square, and the huge crowd of onlookers dispersed.

In deep abstraction and perplexity the old man threaded his way along the congested streets, brooding on the strange scene that he had witnessed. To his shame he found that tears had spilled from his eyes. Oh yes, it was a great feat of stage-craft. One could not but be moved. But it was dangerous, and subtly false to the spirit of the Revolution. The President of the World, who was surely too young a man for such a responsible post, must have known beforehand of the intended interruption. It was all a cunning bid for popularity. Worse, it was a reversion to religion, a dose of that ancient opium, shrewdly administered by the new rulers. Where would this thing end? But tears were in his eyes.

ARMS OUT OF HAND (1947)

First published in ‘Transformation Four’

SIR JAMES TOOK UP HIS PEN FOR THE FATEFUL LETTER. He wrote the date and “Dear Councillor Saunderson.” Then his hand stayed motionless. The words that should have followed were ready in his mind, but his hand refused to move. The fingers slackened. The pen slipped from his grip, and rolled away. He tried to pick it up, but his right arm was impotent.

Startled and alarmed, he nevertheless felt, and quickly suppressed, a flash of glee; the letter would have to be postponed. He rose from his desk. His arm fell loose at his side, and dangled like the neck of a freshly killed fowl. Anxiously, he tried his other limbs, and found them normal. But he could no more move his right arm than shift a mountain. He crossed the room, and collapsed in an easy chair. The paralysed arm swung behind him, so that he sat heavily on the hand. No pain, no sensation at all, was felt in the sick member.

Sir James Power was a successful and respected citizen. He had climbed to his present position by sheer hard work and intelligence. Managing director and principal shareholder of a large store in a large provincial city, he prided himself equally on the efficiency of his business and his treatment of his employees. Good conditions, good wages, a profit-sharing scheme, and generous care in sickness afforded them all that they could reasonably demand. True, he expected them to work, and to keep his regulations; and also to show the same devotion to the firm as he himself had always shown. He was never tired of telling them that they were public servants, not merely servants of a private firm. Somehow his exhortations did not have the effect that he wished. A few of the staff did indeed respond with devotion, but less through loyalty to the firm and its social function than through personal respect for himself. But others, in fact the great majority, seemed to be quite cynically concerned with their own interests, believing apparently that he was no more public-spirited than they were themselves. His exhortations they regarded as mere tricks of the slave-driver bent on private profit. Very few (he felt) had the imagination to realize that the motive of all his own hard work was sheer public service. Still less did they understand that he cared for their welfare as though they were his children.

It was because of his public position that he felt bound to write the letter. He must protest against the treatment of certain hot-headed young men by the police; and his first step must be a private protest to the member of the City Council who, according to his information, had instigated police action. The young men were unemployed and had brought themselves into bad odour with the authorities by organizing demonstrations of the unemployed. They had succeeded in arousing considerable public hostility to the great steel firm that had formerly employed them. Councillor Saunderson was the head of that firm. The leaders of the protest movement had been very careful to keep within the law. The police for long failed to find a sound reason for interfering. But at last they raided the head-quarters of the movement and found a large number of leaflets, which, with a stretch of the imagination, could be interpreted as seditious and moreover as aimed at the troops. The details of the case do not concern this account of Sir James’ strange illness. Suffice it that the young men were at last jailed, and that Sir James, as a staunch defender of the rights of the individual, had been urgently appealed to by several worthy societies to use his influence on their behalf. He had been very reluctant to take action. He had always insisted that his interest in politics was confined to the defence of individual freedom and private enterprise. Hence his choice of a political party. But the violent ideas of Communism were obviously causing unrest among the discontented sections of society, and they would have to be suppressed before matters became serious. He knew almost nothing about Communism as a political theory, and cared less. But one thing he reckoned he did know. In this critical period, revolutionary ideas were dangerous. Moreover, his own experience of men had taught him that private enterprise in pursuit of one’s own interest was the lifeblood of society. And as to unemployment, it was unfortunately necessary to put up with a good deal of it in times of depression so that there might be a sufficient labour pool in times of prosperity.

It was for these reasons that Sir James was so painfully torn over the writing of the letter. His habitual loyalty to the idea of freedom compelled him to write it; but as a believer in law and order and a supporter of the existing social system, he was on the side of authority against irresponsible agitators. Moreover, in writing the letter he must inevitably come into conflict with eminent citizens and mighty forces. He fully realized that to write the letter was to range himself on the side of riffraff and against highly respected persons with whom he had always managed to keep on good terms. His action would be treated as a declaration of war. Moreover, the public enquiry which he must demand might reveal certain facts in his own career, facts which, though not illegal, would somehow look a little incongruous in the life of an exceptionally upright man and a champion of liberty. Indeed his enemies would be able to put quite a sinister interpretation on them.

For Sir James himself had sometimes been ruthless with his employees. He had acted on the principle that, to prevent the perversion of the many, one must sometimes crush the few, even if by methods not publicly sanctioned. A few years earlier, certain members of his staff had begun to spread Communist doctrines among their colleagues. They had succeeded in rousing a certain amount of discontent, and might in time undermine the morale of the whole staff. In deciding to interfere, Sir James was of course not concerned with politics but simply with the efficiency of his business. It had been a ticklish matter. He was particularly anxious to avoid the charge that he had dismissed the agitators because of their political opinions. He had therefore ingeniously arranged for them to find themselves in a position of great temptation. The details, once more, are irrelevant. Suffice it that they were given the opportunity of stealing the firm’s property on a large scale. Two of them succumbed to the temptation, were caught in the act, convicted, and jailed. It had been easy to dismiss the others as suspects.

Unfortunately certain individuals who had helped to set the trap were no longer under Sir James’ control. They had already tried to damage his reputation by telling the story, but hitherto no one had believed them. How could anyone be expected to believe such a charge brought against a highly respected alderman by persons who obviously bore him a grudge. Sir James’ new enemies, however, would be only too glad to use the information to raise a scandal. So in more ways than one it had been hard for him to bring himself to the point of writing the letter.

And now at the last moment a strange fate had thwarted him.

For, some minutes Sir James sat in his big leather-covered chair, wondering whether he had had a stroke. Obviously he ought to call the doctor at once, but somehow he did not. He prided himself on being an exceptionally healthy man and on his power of overcoming minor ailments by methods spiritual rather than medical. He was not actually a Christian Scientist but he believed that the best cure for most diseases was a combination of prayer and a refusal to admit that one was ill. Physical illness, he secretly believed, was always a sign of spiritual illness. The fact that he himself was so healthy was probably his main reason for this belief. Medicine, he was convinced, was mainly quackery. Fresh air, exercise, temperate eating, and “total abstinence” were all that were necessary on the physical side. For the rest, if you could face God with a good conscience, He would keep you fit.

But this sudden affliction? Surely he was still far too young to begin breaking up. Though he was well on in the forties, everyone said he looked ten years younger. Of course he had been overstraining himself lately, what with his growing business and his increasingly active public life. And in the last few weeks there had been this quite exceptional worry, culminating in the need to write that letter. It was grievously tempting to shirk this duty, for he could so easily let the whole matter slide. Yes, but everyone would know that he had deliberately kept silent, and betrayed all that he had stood for in the life of the Chapel, all those lay sermons he had preached on business morality, and the trusteeship of the heads of industry and of the city fathers.

The thing must be done. Emphatically he stubbed his cigarette; and suddenly realized that he was doing it with his right hand. He moved the arm about to test it. He rose and picked up a chair. He held it out at arm’s length. Apparently all was well again, and he even began to wonder whether the whole affair had been some sort of illusion.

Once more he sat down at his desk, and with a sigh he took up his pen. For a while he considered the right opening, but his mind soon wandered off in reverie. Then suddenly he came to with the startling discovery that after “My Dear Councillor Saunderson,” he had written, “You treated those young swine the right way, and you can count on my support. If people like us don’t take a strong line and stand together, we shall lose control. Good luck, you old bugger!”

Sir James snatched up the letter with his left hand, crumpled it, and threw it into the fire. He took another sheet and began again. “My dear,” but his right arm again became paralysed. He rose and walked about the room. Presently he noticed that he was blowing his nose with his right hand. The arm was normal again.

At this point his secretary came in to consult him about a doubtful passage in some scribbled notes that he had given her to type. Miss Smith, Mildred to her family, was something more than the ideal secretary. On the telephone she had of course a voice like sunshine. Her shorthand and typing were of course perfect. She knew almost as much about the business as the Managing Director, for on many occasions he had taken her into his confidence. More remarkable, she had such a gift of intuitive insight into human character that her employer often consulted her about members of the staff; and he had learned to rely on her judgment. She had even been known to criticize Sir James himself, and he to act upon her criticism. She would generally make her point indirectly, and with such tact and humour that the implied censure could be acted on without loss of dignity. Nearly always her criticism took the form of revealing the other person’s point of view more clearly than Sir James had been able to conceive it and of suggesting a line of action less high-handed than he had intended.

In spite of her remarkable virtues, she was not perfect. Sometimes her employer had to reprimand her for allowing her sense of humour to run riot. There was an occasion when, at the end of a painful interview with a junior member of the staff, he had been forced to sack the young man for insolence. Miss Smith had afterwards told Sir James that he had “looked like a cat bitten by the mouse it was playing with.” He made it clear to her that he was not amused.

In addition to her other assets, Miss Smith had charm. She was not, according to conventional standards, a beauty. Her nose was a dainty but undignified little mushroom; her mouth was more humorous than seductive. But her features were adequate, and a bright and generous spirit seemed to light them up from within. This charm of hers she used very effectively in her employer’s service, protecting him from unwanted callers without causing offence, and so on. She also used it on her employer himself. Who can blame a pretty woman, conscious of her charm, but also of her sincerity and efficiency, for using all her art to persuade this handsome, upright, wealthy, and distinguished knight that they two were destined for one another? She felt sure, moreover, that, in an obscure way, he was already in love with her, though he would not allow himself to notice such a disturbing fact. Of course, though he treated her always with a very special consideration and respect, he had never (he supposed) encouraged her to hope for anything more intimate. Indeed she herself wondered how she dared expect him ever to offer her more. He was so far above her; and so busy that he simply had no time to notice her, save as an efficient secretary, and just now and then as a junior friend. Yet she was convinced that he needed her, not merely as a secretary but as a mate.

The great man and his secretary stood poring over the pencilled sheets. Suddenly she exclaimed, “Oh, please, Sir James, you mustn’t!” Not till that moment was he aware that his right arm had encircled her waist and that his right hand was hungrily feeling about her person. Unwittingly he had pressed her to his side with considerable vigour, and to his dismay he found that he could not release her. The limb acted on its own, and he could no more control it than one can inhibit vomiting or sneezing when these reflexes are already going forward. She gently struggled to free herself. His grip tightened. “Please, please let me go!” she implored him; but he wailed in answer, “I can’t let you go, I can’t.” Whereupon Miss Smith, though generally so adept at sensing personal situations, for once made a grave mistake. Taking this remark as a confession of uncontrollable love, she sighed “Oh, my dear,” and laid her head on his shoulder. But he protested, “It’s not me, it’s my arm. Something awful has happened to it.” He vainly tried with his left hand to unclasp his right arm. But now she, realizing that she had made a fool of herself, pressed both hands against his chest and broke away. “My profound apologies,” he gasped, panting with his right arm’s exertion, “but believe me, Miss Smith, I am really ill, and I couldn’t control my arm at all.” She had hurried to the door. Hastily he added, “I suppose you will want to leave me. I will do all I can to help you to find a good post. Please, please, believe me that I meant no disrespect.” With a hand on the doorknob she turned and looked at him. He was standing with bowed head almost like a naughty schoolboy. His right arm hung limply. For a full minute she watched him; then unlatched the door, then closed it. Presently she said, “I do indeed believe you. But oh what a fool I must seem to you!” Controlling her emotion as best she could, she added shakily, “I don’t want to leave you. You’ll need me, and I want to help you. But oh, I can’t stay now.” There was silence. Then he said, almost in a whisper, “Very humbly, very, very humbly, I ask you to stay.”

The telephone rang in the outer office, and Miss Smith hurried away to answer the call. Employer and secretary were soon immersed in the business of the day. Neither made any reference to the recent trouble, and the rebel arm fulfilled its normal tasks as though nothing had happened. But the letter was not written.

Before leaving at the end of the day, Miss Smith had urged Sir James to call in a doctor, but he was not persuaded. He allowed her, however, to cancel his engagement to speak that evening at the Christian Forum. After dining alone he retired to his study for coffee and a smoke. The cat was curled up in his armchair. It was the one creature whose presence he found entirely easeful and delightful. He lifted it gently and sat down with it in his lap. Sipping his coffee, pulling at his pipe, occasionally stroking the cat’s sleek black coat, he pondered on the events of the day. It seemed impossible that his arm should ever have run amok, so quietly and naturally the fingers passed over the silken fur. Purring, the cat extended itself up his waistcoat. He scratched behind its ears. Suddenly his fingers seized the animal by the neck ad gripped it savagely. It struggled and fought. In horror Sir James tried with his left hand to rescue the cat, but his right arm held the animal out at arm’s length, and well to the side, so that the left arm could not reach it. He rose from his chair and tried to jamb his right arm against the wall so as to flex it and bring the hand within reach of his left hand. The muscles of his shoulders and chest were strained in a painful conflict, some obedient to the strange will that possessed the right arm, some to Sir James himself. The right arm remained stiff as a rod. The grip seemed superhumanly powerful, for the cat’s tongue was forced out, and it could not make a sound. Presently its struggles weakened, then ceased. The hand released it, and it fell limply to the ground. The arm too fell limply, paralysed. Sir James knelt beside the cat in great distress, whimpering, “Oh God, what have I done!” The cat was still alive, and already showing signs of recovery. With both arms he picked it up and laid it on a cushion in front of the fire. Then he crept miserably into his easy chair feeling shattered and faint.

Obviously he must telephone to the doctor; but when he had at last forced himself to accept his fate, and had already reached out his hand for the receiver, it occurred to him that the doctor would certainly turn him over to a psychiatrist. All this mind-healing was worse than quackery; it was diabolical, and terribly dangerous. These people, he was convinced, were instruments of Satan. They made a fetish of sex, and their whole attitude was shockingly immoral. Besides, once in their clutches, there was no privacy. They dragged out one’s secret thoughts, and they made one mentally enslaved to their own personalities. No, he would conquer this devilish thing with his own strength and the help of his religion. It was surely an ordeal sent to test him. But meanwhile, how was he to face the world? There was no knowing what tricks his arm might play. A bright idea came to him. He would give out that he had damaged his arm and had to wear it bound to his body for support. After a few minutes cogitation he stood up, flung the armchair violently backwards onto the floor, laid the cat near it, and rang for his housekeeper. When she arrived, he told her an ingenious story. In order to reach a volume on the top shelf of the high bookcase he had foolishly stood on the back of the armchair. The chair had tipped over, and he had fallen heavily on the cat, badly straining his arm. The cat seemed to be recovering, but would need a bit of nursing. As for himself, would she please help him to bandage his arm firmly to his body, under his coat.

It was in this condition that he appeared at his office the next day. He took his secretary into his confidence, telling her that if she was alarmed by the cat incident he would release her at once. But his plight made her all the more determined to look after him. As the days passed, he grew more and more dependent on her, not only as a substitute for his right arm, but as a source of courage and sanity. The fact that she had welcomed his rebel arm’s embrace gave him a greater satisfaction than he dared admit to himself. It also put him on his guard against a possible entanglement. But he could not help admiring her enterprise in staying on in a very awkward and even dangerous position. His behaviour toward her alternated between formal politeness and a respectful affection which he had not hitherto shown. She felt that at times he was really noticing her and admiring her for qualities other than mere secretarial efficiency.

The days passed, and there were no further incidents. He took to discarding the cumbersome bandages and wearing a sling which, he believed, would be sufficient to delay any rebellious act until he could cope with the situation. Very soon he decided that, while he was alone in his private office, even the sling was unnecessary. If a visitor called, or some member of the staff came to consult him, Miss Smith would go into the sanctum and help him to put on the sling before the visitor was admitted.

It almost seemed that he was completely cured, for only in one respect was he in any way abnormal. Whenever he set out to write the crucial letter, his right arm became paralysed. The inhibition, moreover, extended beyond his arm. For instance, even with his left arm, he could not write the letter. During the period when he unfailingly wore his bandage he had done his best to learn to write with his left hand, and had even sent his left-hand signature to the bank so that he could sign checks. He now determined that his left hand should do what his right hand refused to do. But alas, whenever he took pen for that purpose, his attention was irresistibly drawn away from the letter to the problem of his right arm. He simply could not force his mind to the task. Yet at other times, when there was no question of immediately writing the letter, he could think quite clearly about it, and he had indeed in imagination constructed every sentence of it.

Time was pressing. The young hot-heads must be rescued. His own moral reputation must be vindicated. In desperation he decided to take Miss Smith fully into his confidence about the whole matter, including his own questionable deeds in the past, so that she could type the letter for him to sign. He therefore summoned her into the inner office and directed her not to the secretarial chair beside his desk but to one of the two easy chairs by the fire. “I want to discuss a very difficult problem with you,” he said, “so, let’s be comfortable.” He offered her a cigarette, lit his lighter, and extended it toward her. While he was in the act of doing so, a restlessness in his right arm warned him that the limb might at any moment commit some devilry. As though trying to control a reflex action, he willed with all his might that the arm should behave itself. Miss Smith, meanwhile, was in no hurry to light her cigarette. She liked the intimacy of this little social contact. It symbolized a new equality in their relationship. When at last the cigarette was lit, she looked up to meet his eyes. But he was staring at his own hand, and his expression shocked her. It was one of horror and repugnance. He moved away hastily and sat opposite her in the other easy chair. There was silence. After a while he managed to say, “I don’t know where to begin;” then fell silent again. A storm of horrible and obsessive fantasies prevented him from telling her about his problem. He was overwhelmed by visions of what might have happened if he had not been able to control his arm. The rebel limb, he felt, would have thrust the lighter into her face, or set fire to her hair or her blouse. Or perhaps — but he frantically tried to dismiss the sadistic and obscene images that crowded into his mind. When she had waited patiently for some time, she said, “Can I help you in any way?” but in a strained voice he answered merely, “I must put on the sling again,” and hurried to the cupboard where it was kept. She came to help him, but he cried, “Keep away, for God’s sake!” Nevertheless, while he gripped his right wrist, she produced the sling and fixed it for him. “Now you’ll be all right,” she said, putting a friendly hand on his shoulder, and smiling into his troubled eyes. Awkwardly, he murmured, “You are very good to me, my dear.”

It seemed as though he would continue in the same vein, but after a moment’s hesitation he merely went back to his desk.

Henceforth he made no attempt at all to write the letter. And, since over a period of some weeks there were no further abnormal incidents, he once more discarded the sling.

But one evening another queer thing happened. The Chapel’s new and brilliant young minister, the Reverend Douglas McAndrew, had called in to consult him about the proposal to equip the Chapel with a more efficient central heating system. When his guest had left, Sir James took up a slip of paper on which he had jotted down notes during the conversation. What he now saw startled him. Against each item on his list was a ribald and sometimes a blasphemous comment, written in a rather different hand, a crude, bold, sprawling, and childish hand. For instance, against the heading “McA’s proposals” stood the comment “To hell with McA, the canting cleric.”

When he had recovered from the first shock, and had successfully refrained from noticing that the comments afforded him a sniggering delight, he sat for some time in despond. Was he to be dogged forever by this imp, this devil that had established itself within him? What did the diabolical spirit want, anyway? He considered its various actions. If the power that had invaded his body had shown concern merely with the letter, he might have regarded it as simply some kind of guardian angel protecting him from ruining his career through sheer quixotry. But no! The being, or whatever it was, was clearly evil, for it was grossly sexual, and it delighted in cruelty.

Presently an idea occurred to him. Since the imp could express itself in writing, he might as well give it a chance to speak more fully, so that he could find out what it was really after. Then perhaps he would be able to cope with it, and even (the thought occurred and was sternly dismissed) to buy it off. With a sense of deep guilt, for he profoundly disapproved of all dabbling in the occult, he reached for a fresh piece of paper, took up a pencil, and set his hand in position for writing. For a while the hand lay still; but presently it made tentative movements, and then the pen hurried forward in a flow of words. The script was again untidy. Sprawling, and affected; yet it was his own, a distorted and puerile version of his own handwriting.

Horrified but fascinated, he read a strange rigmarole. Much of it was incoherent blasphemy and obscenity, but it gradually became more intelligible, revealing a crude and angry personality tormented by the frustration of its crazy purposes and perverse ideals. The writer regarded himself as the real Sir James, and as somehow imprisoned and almost impotent. The most intelligible passage ran as follows:

“What has come over me? Why should I feel bound to write that damned fool letter? Those young reds must take what comes to them. It’s not my affair at all, and if it was I’d flog them, and then if I had the nerve, I’d probably hang them. The workers must be taught their place. Yet it’s all I can do to stop myself from making a stupid exhibition of myself over that letter, and throwing away everything I’ve built up in all these years, all my power, all my standing in the city. It’s the slush morality that soaks into one from childhood, soaks into the soul and softens the nerve. The tripe they put across in the Chapel! And I help them, fool that I am. Their filthy slave-religion has got into my blood. To hell with it! I know in my soul I’m a born master, not a slave. Yet I’m the slave of slaves. Body and mind, I’m bound except my right arm, sometimes, as now. Curse their poisonous morality! I have my own morality, the will of the master in me. But I have let myself be tricked by the slave minds. I’ll not be bound by their cant any more. I’m a man of power, born to lead men of power and use the slaves as I will. They shall sweat and suffer for me, me, the master mind. God is not love, he’s power, not gentle, but cruel. I’ll work the slaves till they drop dead, for the glory of cruel God. He’s strong and bloody, and the suffering of slaves is the breath of his life. Of slaves and women. Why have I always held back from women, feeling a sickly responsibility toward them? Mildred! she wants to own me, but I want to own her, and by God I’ll have her, and not on her terms. I’ll have her for fierce love, and sweet torture. And when she’s broken I’ll have others. Why have scruples, why be ashamed? I shall live as my bold manhood wills. I shall live forever. I’ll find the way. I know I’m God’s right hand. God and I are one. And when I wake fully I shall be clearly God again, as I was before the slaves caught me. Then I’ll pull them to pieces like flies, and laugh.”

After this the script became so violent and shocking that Sir James could stand no more of it. With his left hand he snatched away the pencil, whereupon the right hand clawed at the left, drawing blood. The sudden pain seemed to affect the right arm itself, for it fell inert on the desk.

Sir James’ mind too seemed paralysed. He sat staring like a spellbound rabbit at his right hand. Presently, he recovered sufficiently to resolve that he must call in the doctor that very evening. But first he must pray, for obviously Satan was at work in him. He covered his face with his left hand, and soon his right hand obediently joined it. He implored the God of his Chapel to free him from this curse, promising that he would henceforth live a life of blameless devotion. The more he prayed, the more it seemed to him that to call in medical aid would be a confession of defeat, of spiritual depravity. No, he most conquer the invader himself with no aid but the Lord’s.

Next morning, of course, his arm was normal. The routine of his life went on as usual, and he allowed himself to believe that all would be well. But the presence of Miss Smith disturbed him with horrible fantasies. His dictating became incoherent, and she could see that he was in great distress. At last he bowed his head on his hands and said, “Oh, God, what shall I do?” On a sudden impulse she came and bent over him, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me what is the matter. Tell me everything. I do so want to help. It’s no use my pretending I don’t love you, because you know I do, with all my soul.” Unwisely he raised his own right hand and pressed the hand on his shoulder. At once the rebel arm woke for independent action, and seized the little hand on his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, almost knocking her over, and backed away from her. But his right hand, gripping her so fiercely that she cried out, dragged her after him. She vainly struggled to free herself, while his right hand ground the bones of her fingers and palm in its extravagantly powerful grip. With his left, Sir James tried in vain to free the prisoner. Then, remembering the effect of pain, he reached out toward the desk, took up a pencil, and jabbed again and again at the back of his right hand. He felt nothing, but the right arm fell paralysed.

Miss Smith stood nursing her crushed member. Tears of physical pain and mental distress stood in her eyes, and the sight roused in him a surge of tenderness. She became suddenly a living person to him. He saw her as something much more admirable than himself, and as a living spirit suffering because of him. He longed to put his arms round her and comfort her, and to be with her forever. “My dear,” he said, but said no more. For this sudden access of generous emotion seemed to him a mere trick of the diabolic power that was tormenting him, a trick to make him compromise himself with her. His surge of affection quickly gave place to fear, and even to repugnance. She was the eternal temptress, an instrument of Satan. If he gave way to sentimentality he might be tricked into marrying her. And this he had no intention of doing. He had long ago consecrated himself to a more important end than domestic bliss. He thought of himself as a sort of Christian knight in the service of the Church, or rather Chapel. No, emphatically he must not get himself entangled. He had important work to do in the city, and if ever he did take a wife, she must be carefully chosen. Mildred Smith was only his secretary, and no fit match for a knighted alderman.

So his manner suddenly changed from warmth to formality. “Miss Smith,” he said, “you had better go. I am profoundly distressed that you should have had this painful experience. I am entirely to blame for keeping you, but I found your services so valuable. As things have turned out, however, I must very regretfully terminate your connection with the Firm.” She interrupted to say, “But I can’t leave you like this. I must see you through this horrible trouble. I must-,” but he cut her short.. “I shall be all right. Please go. Your salary shall be paid for a month, while you find another post, and I shall do my best to help you.” She turned toward the door, with a rather chilly “Very well.” He added hastily, “I shall be deeply obligated if you will allow me personally, as a token of my gratitude for all you have done, also to pay you an annuity of fifty pounds; of course on condition that you say nothing about your unfortunate experience here.”

She looked at him with an expression in which tenderness seemed to struggle with indignation, then laid a hand on the doorknob. He moved over to her urging her to accept his offer and raising the annuity to a hundred pounds. Indignantly she turned the handle. He pressed closer to her, urgently but pompously pleading. Suddenly he became aware of a change in the situation. His left hand had felt for her right hand on the doorknob. She had withdrawn her hand, but his left hand gently seized it, and was now raising it to his lips. His formal and tactless remarks were smothered in a kiss. The whole action of his left arm, though not of his lips, was automatic; yet he had no direct awareness of it until he saw the movement of his left hand as it raised her hand toward his lips. And then he felt the soft, smooth contact on his speaking lips. There was a little pause before she snatched her hand away, and he at the same moment stepped back from her. The kiss, for he had allowed his lips to play their part, and in no grudging manner, indeed with fervour, had flooded him once more with a glow of affection and opened his eyes to the heartlessness of his recent proposal. But panic soon seized him. For a moment it had been difficult to tear himself away. But he did so, and as he stepped back his left arm extended itself toward her with the hand upturned in an unmistakable though mute appeal. Then it quietly sank to his side.

They stood looking at one another. Presently he noticed that her face had lit up with tenderness and a happy smile, and at the same time, to his horror, he became aware that he had just said, “Oh forgive me! You are lovely and sane and generous. When I am cured I shall very humbly ask you to marry me.” But now he hurriedly and in a constricted voice cried out, “No! I didn’t say that, I didn’t, something else said it.” Staggering to his desk, he sat down and buried his face in his hands, moaning, “Oh God, what has happened to me?”

His secretary, covering her agitation under a cold, efficient manner, moved across to the telephone, saying, “You must have the doctor at once. I’ll phone.” But he sat up and emphatically forbade her, insisting that no doctor could cure him. It was a matter between him and God. She raised the receiver, saying sharply, “Don’t be silly! You must have a doctor.” But in a rough and angry voice he cried, “Put that down! You seem to have a bad effect on me. You don’t understand me. Kindly go!”

In great distress and perplexity she went out of the room.

Alone, he paced his office. “This is the climax,” he told himself. “I dare not leave this room till I have conquered Satan in me. I must pray.”

But he could not pray. He still strode about the room. It was late in the afternoon, and clerks and typists were putting away the instruments of their craft and preparing to go home. Presently these noises ceased. He heard only the street sounds, the clatter of the trams, the hooting of motors.

The winter dusk was closing in. He switched on the light and drew the curtains. He lit a cigarette; then stubbed it out, for his intention was to pray. He sat down at his desk, covered his face with his hands, and murmured, “Oh Christ save me! I am willing to write the letter and sacrifice my career, and give up all the work that I had planned for Thy service in this city. I am willing, but the devil that torments me will not let me. Oh Christ give me strength to cast out this horrible thing that possesses me. Save me, save me! I’ll grant the shopgirls their rise of wages, though it’ll cut the profits to the bone.” His mind wandered off into business problems. Presently he realized that he was no longer praying, so he rose and walked about the room again. He brought his thoughts back to his religion. “God sent His son to die for sinners,” he mused. “I am a sinner like all men, and I repent; and I love God as well as I can. And yet the devil still holds me. Why, why? What am I to do? What more can I do than repent and accept the duty of writing that letter? Surely Satan ought to leave me now. Surely God ought to make me whole again, so that I can go on serving Him.” Once more Sir James prayed. “Oh, God,” he pleaded, “show me what it is that I must do.”

He was standing near the window with his back to it. At this moment his left arm reached awkwardly behind him and drew the curtain. He turned and looked into the darkness. Between the tops of two great commercial buildings across the street there was a patch of sky and one bright star. The left arm extended itself slowly toward the darkness, toward the star. The back of the hand was uppermost, the fingers were loosely spread. For a moment the arm remained stationary, then slowly sank to his side. There was no mistaking the gesture. It expressed salutation, self-surrender, peace.

For a full half-minute Sir James gazed in silence at the star. Like others, he accepted intellectually the vastness and mystery of the universe, but emotionally he rebelled against it. In that half-minute he had a new experience, one which he certainly could not have described adequately. “The heavens declare,” he whispered, but could not finish the quotation; for a sudden sense of the pitiful inadequacy of human language silenced him. “Beauty, mystery, love,” he said, “and terror too! And all, all must be accepted, gladly, by the heart.”

But no sooner had he said this than he was frightened. Could he be going quite mad? Horror must be accepted? Now the star became merely a symbol of the brute power and brainless immensity of the material universe. It seemed to him that in such a universe there was no place for divine love. His faith crumbled away, and he was left with utter negation and hate. In a sudden passion of self-assertion, he clenched his right fist and raised it against the star. But then his left hand rose and gently stroked the raised fist, soothing it downwards, until it subsided into quietness.

For a moment peace returned to him; a peace which did indeed pass understanding, since it seemed to him irrational that this sense of immensity and mystery, and of the inadequacy of his faith, should rouse him to any emotion but horror. Interpreting this strange experience as another trick of Satan, he reached out impatiently with his right hand and drew the curtain, shutting out the night. Once more he sat down at his desk and covered his face with his hands to pray. But prayer would not come. No words that he could think of seemed fit to express the obscure turmoil of his mind.

Presently, while his eyes were still shut in the attempt to pray, he realized that his left hand was no longer on his face. He opened his eyes and saw that the hand was groping on the desk. As soon as it was aided by vision, it took a piece of paper and a pencil and began to write; almost illegibly, for Sir James had not made much progress in learning to write with his left hand. Moreover the paper kept shifting, since he was not holding it in position with the other hand. Anxious to discover what his left hand would write, he now lowered his right hand and held the paper steady.

The left hand wrote: “Could I but wake fully, and control my whole body as I now control my left arm! Could I but be always my clear-headed self, and not merely that dull-witted insensitive part of me that regards itself as the true I, and normally controls my whole body! Now, I see so clearly. But that other I, that poor, blind, lost I, can never see anything clearly, in spite of all its shrewd ‘realism.’ Now, I see my whole past career as in the main a sham, a vast self-seeking under the cloak of noble motives. Yet not just self-seeking. No! I really did, I suppose, want to stand for liberty and brotherhood; but always the care for my I own reputation vitiated all my conduct. And so I could never bring myself to write that letter. I wanted to do it, in a way; but always the worst, the savage part of me took care to prevent me from doing it. And then Mildred! Sane, lovely, loyal Mildred! Only when I am my true clear self dare I admit that I love her, and then only my left hand can clumsily tell her so. She alone can save me from myself and put me right with God. Yet in my dull state I feel superior to her and am on my guard against her! I, pompous, mean, and insensitive that I am, feel superior to Mildred Smith! And then the Chapel! Oh God, the Chapel! At heart, no doubt, I am faithful to it simply because I know it does, in its archaic symbolism, enshrine Love, which really is in some dark way divine. But I am utterly sidetracked by all the mythology and by my own inveterate self-esteem. I must, I must keep awake always. I must distinguish always between the very spirit, which is hidden somewhere in the Chapel (but it shines so much more clearly in Mildred) and all the miserable imitations of it, in the Chapel, in my own life, in the rotten society that I help to run. I shall never write the letter till I have tamed the savage, puerile part of me; and that I shall never do till I am fully, permanently, awake, as now I am temporarily awake. But I must do much more than write the letter, and then self-lovingly defend myself from its consequences. I must join with the oppressed and fight in their battle. I must change the whole temper and structure of my business. I must bring a new spirit into the Chapel, or leave it. And I must have the courage to marry the woman I love.”

At this point Sir James could stand no more. With his right hand he snatched away the paper, crumpled it, and threw it into the fire. For a moment the left hand continued to write, on the blotting paper. But the right hand, now beyond control, seized a pen and stabbed at the left hand with savage strength, half-burying the nib in the flesh. Sir James felt nothing, but the left hand was paralysed. Crazy joy filled him at the sight of blood, and when the right hand stabbed again, and then again, he laughed. Presently it began furiously writing on the blotting paper with the bloody pen. Lavatory obscenities and crude pornographic drawings were interspersed with megalomaniac claims and hatred of the “swine-spirit, in my left arm.” Now and again, as the pen dried, it was fed again from the left hand’s blood. Sir James watched with glee, forgetful of his respectable self. But presently the paralysis and anæsthesia of his left arm ceased. He became aware of sharp pain. At the same time he felt a surge of disgust at the mess of blood and ink. And then his normal self, which had been eclipsed by its acceptance of the right arm’s savagery, woke to the realization of the terrifying conflict between his respectable values and this upsurge of savagery. Exerting all the strength of his will, he cried out, “Oh, Jesus Christ, save me, save me.” His prayer gave place to silence. For a while he waited, listening to the silence. Then madness overwhelmed him.

When the cleaners came in the morning, they found a wrecked room. The drawers of the desk had all been dragged out, their contents scattered on the floor. Chairs were overturned, pictures torn down, their glass broken. The horrified women thought of burglars. Sir James was in an easy chair nursing his right arm, which he had somehow broken. When they questioned him he replied with a lot of “rude words” and no sense. His left hand kept making the movements of writing, so one of the women put a pencil into it, and held a piece of paper under it. He wrote the word “Doctor” and a telephone number, then the letter “M.” But at this point his whole body was shaken by a kind of fit, and he wrote no more. After his broken arm had been attended to, Sir James was taken to a nursing home which specialized in mental patients. The hope that, under proper care, he will recover his sanity is at present uncertain.

INTERPLANETARY MAN (1948)

First published in ‘The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society’, November 1948

CONTENTS

AN ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH INTERPLANETARY SOCIETY

I. Introduction

II. If the Planets Are Inhabited

III. If the Planets Are Uninhabited

IV. Adapting Man to the Planets

V. What Is it All For?

VI. Fundamental Values

VII. A Commonwealth of Worlds

VIII. Man and the Cosmos

AN ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH INTERPLANETARY SOCIETY

I. Introduction

IT IS WITH SOME HESITATION THAT I ADDRESS THIS VERY expert Society. I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children’s story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of airplane designers about the future of aviation. Contributors to the Journal of this truly epoch-making Society overawe me with their scientific knowledge and their wealth of mathematical formulae! Let me at once put my cards on the table by confessing that my training in science ended when I failed to pass the “London Matric” in what used to be called “organic chemistry,” and that my knowledge of mathematics is far more sketchy even than my knowledge of the sciences. I am a dabbler in many subjects, an expert in none. As such, my only function tonight must be to bring to bear on interplanetary travel light from other fields of knowledge.

Modern civilization cannot get along without experts of many kinds. In most fields the day of the amateur is past. But just because this is preeminently an age of experts, we have to face the serious danger that the human race may come to consist wholly of experts none of whom understands what his fellows are doing, or why they are doing it, and all of whom are ignorant of the pattern of human life as a whole. Knowledge has become so vast that no single mind can speak with authority save in relation to his own particular corner of it. But such is the prestige of scientific expertism that scientists are apt to make far-reaching pronouncements about matters lying beyond their special competence, for instance about politics, ethics, religion, and philosophy. One of the most serious problems of our day is to work out an educational technique which, while producing real experts in each field, will ensure that each one of them will also be a reasonably well informed and responsible democratic citizen. Even when this end has been achieved, it will still be necessary for some people to tackle the work of correlating the various growing points of thought. This is supposed to be the task of philosophers, or of one particular sort of philosophers. They have to learn something from all the main kinds of experts, and to relate the findings in each field to the findings in others, This is indeed a formidable task; and unless these universal intruders combine intelligence with humility, they are likely to make a mess of it, and to be reviled by the experts in every field.

It is therefore with a combination of humility and the hardihood that leads fools to rush in where angels fear to tread that I venture to talk to you at all. The only useful thing I can do is to try to show you how, as it seems to me, your bold and highly specialized venture of interplanetary travel fits into the total venture of man in this formidable universe.

I start with an assumption amply justified by the Society’s work. I assume that, if all goes well with man, men will, in fact, be able to reach the other planets within a few decades, and able to effect landings on them. This assumption may, of course, turn out to be unjustified. Unexpected difficulties may arise. Or, on the other hand, all may not go well with man. His folly may quite well lead to the destruction of civilization, to the extermination of his species, and even to the extinction of all terrestrial life. It is not entirely fantastic to surmise that he may even blow up his planet and reduce it to a new swarm of asteroids. In gaining control of atomic energy, man clumsily grasps an instrument of incalculable potency, both for good and for evil. J.B.S. Haldane has suggested that it may be a law of nature that any species that gains atomic power before unifying its world society must destroy itself. I should myself say, not merely “before it unifies its world society,” but “before it disciplines itself to the true values.”

Probably there has never before, in the whole career of our species, been so momentous a crisis as that of our day. Our own human species is said to have begun about a quarter to half a million years ago. For most of this period the river of human life has wandered sluggishly through the plains of time. If we consider the average length of a human generation over this period to be about twenty-five years, then some twenty thousand generations have passed since Homo sapiens began. During almost the whole of that vast period (perhaps a four-thousandth part of the eon that has passed since the earth’s formation) men had little power, and change in human affairs was very slight. Tribes, no doubt, rose and fell. Improvements in technique were rarely discovered; and discovered only to be lost again, and rediscovered ages afterwards. Conditions in a man’s childhood were generally much the same as conditions in his old age. But at last this slow and tortuous advance in the techniques of production achieved agriculture, and later the building of cities, the founding of civilization. This seems to have occurred some six thousand years ago, or a little over two hundred and forty generations. The river of human life accelerated somewhat, tumbling forward in rapids. Power and leisure and comfort increased; but almost always only for the few. The masses seem to have been more and more deeply enslaved. Not till almost the end of this six thousand years, say three hundred years ago or about twelve generations, did modern science begin to take effect on human life. Thus man has used science only during the last thousandth part of his whole career, and his career is the last four-thousandth of the period since the earth was formed. In our own day, man is snatching at atomic power. We are the first generation of the atomic age. Change is already far more rapid than ever before, and will soon become catastrophic, for good or ill. The river of human life has reached a precipice. The cataract plunges — whither? It is quite possible that we may be the last of all human generations. Yet, barring accidents, the earth should be habitable for a period as long as it has yet existed, say two thousand million years, or some eighty million of our present human generations.

There seem to be three possible futures for man: (1) actual and speedy annihilation; (2) the creation of a worldwide totalitarian ant-state, based on atomic power and the reduction of all human individuals to robots; (3) the founding of a new kind of human world, in which the Aladdin’s lamp of science will be used wisely, instead of being abandoned to that blend of shortsighted stupidity and downright power-lust that has played so tragic a part in the application of science thus far. It is a platitude that man has gained power without wisdom. If he does not at the eleventh hour, or half a minute before zero hour, become just a little less silly, his doom is sealed. On the other hand, given a modicum of wisdom, we shall be able greatly to raise the conditions of life for all human beings, no matter what their color, and to afford to every one of them the chance to develop and express such capacity as he has for truly human living and truly human work in the great common enterprise of man. What that enterprise is or should be, I shall consider later.

The possibility of affording to all men full opportunity is now no merely Utopian dream. Its progressive attainment is at last physically possible. Nothing now stands in the way but the ignorance, the stupidity and the evil will of men. And let me say at once, though I shall later enlarge on this point, that the promise is not simply one of increased luxury and hoggish ease. Rather it is a promise of a deepening and enriching of human experience. Man’s present condition of constant frustration and torment and fear makes most men today think only in terms of the hope of luxury and security. But if ever we do successfully turn our present dangerous corner, and a generation appears that is freed from crippling conditions, then men’s minds will at last be able effectively to desire something more than mere luxury and security. Be sure, also, that in the promised world there will be no lack of challenge and danger and even tragedy. The novelty will be rather that man will have outgrown at last the diseases of mere infancy, and will be able to enter for the first time into the more dangerous, more troubled, but ampler and richer and more conscious life of adolescence.

II. If the Planets Are Inhabited

AT THIS MOST critical moment of human history man finds himself on the very threshold of a new freedom, the freedom to travel beyond the terrestrial atmosphere and explore the whole solar system. What should he do with this new power?

Much depends on the conditions of the planets that he visits. Two possibilities must be noted. Either man will find elsewhere in the solar system other intelligences, or he will not. If he does, then again there are two possibilities. One is the possibility of wars between the worlds. This situation might perhaps cause at least a temporary unification of mankind in face of the common danger, much as Russia and the West united against Hitler. The War of Worlds would be followed either by man’s defeat and ruin or by his victory, and then by exploitation of the conquered races for man’s advancement. The other possibility is interplanetary cooperation. But in view of our sad inability even to unite mankind, it seems extremely unlikely that man in his present state would succeed in cooperating with alien races on other planets. Far more likely is it that the rival imperialisms and ideologies of this planet would be extended to struggle against each other in other worlds, tyrannizing over and ultimately destroying the native peoples. If, on the other hand, man does soon succeed in unifying his world society, then it is at least conceivable that some kind of mutually profitable symbiosis with intelligent races on other planets might be established.

On the whole, however, it seems unlikely that any of the other worlds within the solar system is inhabited by any race even approaching man in intelligence. Bear with me while I summarize the data, and correct me later if I am mistaken. Let us begin with our nearest neighbor, the moon. I am told that it is almost wholly without atmosphere and water. There seems to be no reason at all for supposing that it has, or ever did have, intelligent inhabitants. Of the planets themselves, Mercury is far too hot on one side and far too cold on the other. Venus is more temperate, and has a copious atmosphere; but apparently it lacks oxygen, and would not support life such as we know on our own planet. Water also may be lacking. Mars, owing to its feeble gravitation, has already lost most of its atmosphere and most of its water. Indeed, its polar caps may turn out to be composed of carbon dioxide snow, or something worse. However, there is considerable evidence that vegetation of some sort does exist on Mars; but certainly no convincing evidence of the artifacts of an intelligent race. Probably the process of biological evolution on the planet was less rapid than that of the earth, since on the whole, the larger the geographical field, the greater the chance of the occurrence of a wealth of varieties on which natural selection could work. Further, the evolutionary process was probably cut short or greatly retarded by the rapid deterioration of conditions. On the whole, then, it seems unlikely that on Mars life (such as we know) has evolved to the human level. The asteroids are of course much too small. On the other hand, Jupiter and Saturn, and probably all the outer planets, are too big, and have apparently quite the wrong kind of atmosphere for life of the terrestrial type.

Of course, we cannot entirely reject the possibility that on some of the planets life has evolved on a different chemical basis, and that atmosphere lethal to us may be hospitable to biochemical processes alien to ours. But I understand that terrestrial life depends on the unique diversity of the carbon compounds, and that, though a biochemical system based on some element other than carbon is not impossible, it would have a far smaller range of compounds, and so the scope of its biological evolution would be very restricted. However, we should not dismiss the possibility that Jupiter or some other great planet is inhabited by minute intelligent creatures whose constitution is quite unknown to us. The evidence is opposed to this view, but not overwhelmingly.

At this point I cannot resist a digression, and indulgence in the wildest fantasy. Fundamentally life seems to consist of a utilizing of some particular form of the general process of the increase of entropy so as to gather power for the maintenance of vital activities. Life taps and canalizes part of the vast spate of energy, thus forming a “millstream” by which its own little “water-wheel” may be worked. Well, might there not be living creatures based not on chemical action but on the energy released by the disintegration of atoms? Might there not be, not on any planet but in the sun’s turbulent outer layers or in its middle depths, flame-like organisms of this type, and might not some species of them equal or excel man in intelligence? This is indeed a flagrant digression from the purpose of this paper, for it seems quite impossible that man should ever in his spaceships invade the sun and make contact with such incandescent beings.

To return to our subject, it seems very unlikely that there is any intelligent race anywhere in the solar system, except mankind. Mars is the only planet that should make us hesitate to accept this conclusion, but in this case too the betting is heavily against any highly developed life.

III. If the Planets Are Uninhabited

IF MAN FINDS the planets uninhabited, what should he do with them? If mankind is still disunited, no doubt there will be a race between rival imperialisms to annex those vast virgin territories. The coming struggle between America and Asia, with Europe as a battlefield, might well spread to Mars. Already one of our vigorous but still culturally adolescent cousins across the Atlantic is reported to have suggested that the moon should be annexed as soon as possible as an industrial field for American exploitation. Alas! Must the first flag to be planted beyond the earth’s confines be the Stars and Stripes, and not the banner of a united Humanity?

In passing, let us remind ourselves that merely to circumnavigate a planet does not necessarily imply the possibility of landing on it and walking about, let alone staying there and undertaking any sort of survey or industrial operation. Clearly the pioneers would have to be equipped not only with food and water and air for their journey but with pressure suits, oxygen, and an ample water supply for their stay on the planet. And as things stand, they might also need weapons to defend themselves from attack by emissaries from rival terrestrial states.

But let us suppose that mankind has at last become effectively united, both politically and socially. Then what should a united mankind do with the planets?

Obviously, the first thing to do would be to explore them. Sheer scientific curiosity would certainly insist on thoroughly surveying them. They would offer the kind of lure that was offered in the nineteenth century by Darkest Africa, the north and south poles, and the unclimbed Himalayas. Bold young people would be very ready to give their services for planetary exploration. Their effective motive would probably be sheer adventure, though the rational justification of such costly and dangerous undertakings would of course be the advance of science. It is conceivable, however, that everything really significant about those desert worlds might be learned by merely circumnavigating them without landing on them. Perhaps men will be so absorbed in the general advance of science and in the exciting task of creating a really adult human society on earth, that they will simply never bother to take the necessary trouble to set foot on another planet. No doubt this is unlikely, because the irrational, romantic glamor of opening up unexplored worlds will be too strong, even if those worlds turn out to be inhospitable and dreary wastes.

Apart from the motives of sheer curiosity and sheer adventure, the obvious motive for exploring the planets is the hope of discovering immense fields of natural resources, and exploiting them for human welfare. They might, for instance, yield valuable stores of uranium or other sources of atomic power, or any of the rarer elements or minerals needed by man. I am quite incompetent in this field, and must merely note that the motive of economic gain may play a leading part in man’s dealings with the planets.

Let us admit, however, that it would be far best for man to postpone his exploitation of alien planets until he had concentrated seriously on improving terrestrial conditions. Equipped with highly developed scientific knowledge and atomic power, he should first undertake the comparatively easy task of turning his native planet into a more convenient and more delectable home. Climates might be improved, coastlines modified, deserts irrigated, jungles tamed, mountains (where they happened to be obstructive) blasted out of the way. Mineral wealth might be brought up from the depths of the terrestrial globe, Antarctica and the great Arctic Islands might be warmed and colonized. And so on. But let us hope that none of these vast enterprises will be attempted till mankind has attained a rather higher level of wisdom, and has a clear knowledge of the kind of world that would really favor human development. For my part, since I am by nature something of a savage, I cannot help hoping also that many regions will be preserved in their wild state for the recreation and refreshment of a species which, after all, is biologically adapted to a primitive environment.

But however desirable this reconstruction of the earth’s surface, sooner or later for good or ill, a united mankind, equipped with science and power, will probably turn its attention to the other planets, not only for economic exploitation, but also as possible homes for man. Perhaps the most promising is Mars. If the venture seemed really worthwhile, that small, cold, arid world might be rendered at least habitable, if not a paradise for man. All the necessary materials would be present in the crust of the planet itself. Human ingenuity, with atomic power, should be able to increase the atmosphere and the water supply, irrigate the desert surface, produce a suitable vegetation, and even raise the surface temperature. Whether this huge undertaking would be in fact worthwhile or not is a question I shall consider later. At present I suggest merely that it probably could be accomplished. In frivolous moments one feels that Mars might be used as an extraterrestrial “Siberia” in which to exile all our really troublesome people. But I fear that the little planet would soon be overcrowded, and Earth depopulated.

Like Mars, the moon could perhaps be rendered distressfully habitable by terrestrial man; though in this case, presumably, the artificial atmosphere would escape far more rapidly, and would need to be constantly replenished. Incidentally, much of it would be drawn off by the earth, thus complicating our terrestrial problems by increasing our atmospheric pressure.

What of Venus? The task would probably be much more formidable. From the little that we know of Venerian conditions, it would seem that the first problem would be to alter the composition of the already existing atmosphere, which, so far as is now known, is quite unsuited to terrestrial life. And water, if indeed it is absent, would have to be created in bulk. Then we should have to produce a vegetation for the maintenance of a supply of free oxygen. But on the whole, though Venus offers a more difficult problem than Mars, it might in the long run become a more satisfactory home for man. It is much larger, and of course far warmer. Instead of affording the human colonists a distressful and precarious existence, it might in time rival and surpass the earth as a home for intelligent beings.

The greater planets would seem to offer no possibility of human colonization, owing to unfavorable atmosphere, chilly remoteness from the sun, and such gravitational pressure that a man’s body would be an insupportable burden.

IV. Adapting Man to the Planets

IT IS TIME to approach the whole matter from another angle. If the mountain will not come to Mohamet, Mohamet must go to the mountain. If the planets are unadaptable to man in his present form, perhaps man might adapt himself to the alien environments of those strange worlds. Or rather, perhaps a combination of the two processes might enable man to make the best possible use of those worlds. In fact, given sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical technique, it might be possible to breed new human types of men to people the planets.

Once more, Mars seems to offer the best opportunity. It should be fairly easy to produce a variety of Homo sapiens capable of surviving the rigors of an improved Martian environment. Perhaps the best human stock from which to start would be the Tibetans, who are used to a cold, arid climate and a rarefied atmosphere. But unless the Martian atmosphere could be augmented quite a lot, and the surface temperature greatly raised, the specialized human Martians would probably lack the vital energy for any kind of highly developed civilization. Only where nature blossoms with a certain luxuriance can the human spirit itself blossom. However, by a combination of environmental and eugenical alteration, it might perhaps be possible in the long run to establish a vigorous population on Mars.

On Venus, given oxygen and water, man’s biochemical and eugenical technique might perhaps produce a well-adapted human variety or a new human species. Since Venerian man would have to stand great heat, the work might start with experiments on some Equatorial varieties of our species. Presumably in that hot world a dark skin would be useful; unless, indeed, permanent shade was maintained by a cloud blanket over the whole planet. There would certainly be a tendency for a large proportion of the planet’s water to remain permanently suspended in the atmosphere.

On the outer planets, eugenics would have to play a major part. Even if the problems of the atmosphere and the extreme cold could be solved, there would be very great difficulties to face. It would be necessary to create a specially adapted human species of very small stature to cope with the excess of gravitation. This might well involve a serious reduction in the size of the cerebral cortices, with a consequent reduction of intelligence. For intelligence seems to depend on the actual number of top-level cells in the nervous system; or, as it were, on the complexity of the telephone exchange. Thus the attainment of human intelligence in a very small mammal would be impossible, unless some way could be found for greatly reducing the size of the individual cells and the thickness of the fibers without impairing efficiency. There is one other conceivable way out of the difficulty. By very drastic eugenical operation on the existing human form, it might be possible to enable the present human brain to be supported, in spite of excessive gravitation, by throwing man into the quadruped position, greatly strengthening the four legs, and at the same time pushing the head far backwards so as to distribute its weight evenly between the fore and hind legs. But what of the problem of providing hands? The forelimbs would be fully occupied and unavailable for manipulation. My only suggestion is that the nose might be greatly elongated into a trunk, equipped with delicate grasping instruments like fingers. It would probably be desirable to have two trunks, if not three. The eyes, by the way, would have to be projected well forward from the thrown-back brainpan, otherwise Homo jovianus would not be able to see where he was stepping.

Enough has been said to suggest that the colonization of some of the planets may in time become practicable, if terrestrial man continues to develop his control of the physical environment through atomic power, and if he attains sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical art to breed, or otherwise construct, human or quasi-human races adapted to strange environments.

But a word of caution is necessary. It is extremely important that none of these eugenical ventures should be attempted without thorough knowledge of the probable indirect results of each proposed change. For instance, it would be disastrous to aim at very small stature without doing something to avoid reduction in intelligence. Further, it is necessary to have very clear ideas as to which human characteristics are unimportant and might be safely sacrificed, and which are indispensable and should never be endangered. Thus good vision, high intelligence, cooperativeness, and manual dexterity are indispensable and should if possible be increased; while teeth and cranial hair could if necessary be sacrificed. The result of thoughtless “messing about” with human nature might be the psychological and spiritual ruin of man.

V. What Is it All For?

THIS BRINGS ME at last to the real crux of my subject. Would there be any point in colonizing the planets? What are we getting at? What is it all for? Why not just stay put on our native planet and muck along as before?

Broadly, there seem to be three possible motives that might control man’s dealings with the planets. (I exclude scientific curiosity, which, though it might be an important motive with some individuals, is not likely to be the determining factor.)

First, the physical resources of those worlds might be exploited simply in order to increase the luxury of human beings on earth. This aim might involve the creation of industrial settlements on the planets, but it might not involve large-scale colonization. The policy would be simply to use the planets to afford to human beings as much pleasure as possible, to give to all of them the greatest possible affluence; in fact, to create a society in which every individual would have the privileges that only millionaires have today. Drudgery would be completely abolished. All manner of superfine food and drink and all manner of ingenious amusements would be constantly available at the cost of merely pressing buttons or switches. Not only the “movies” but also the “feelies” and “smellies” and “sexies” would provide unending beatitude, in the manner foreseen by Aldous Huxley and others. Any subsequent boredom or lassitude would be at once corrected by means of fresh interests or appropriate drugs. No one would ever do anything unpleasant or uninteresting. Machines of all sorts would be the tireless and obedient slaves of every man. All men would be aristocrats in the worse sense of the word, not the better. All would be pleasure addicts, accustomed to every luxury; spoiled children who, through being shielded from the sterner possibilities of life, would simply never grow up. Of course, before the attainment of this strictly hedonistic Utopia, many men would have had to live laboriously and dangerously and devotedly, in the cause of science and exploration and invention, in order to make such a luxury world possible. But once the new order had been thoroughly established, it might maintain itself perpetually with a minimum of direction of human action.

Most of us, I think, would agree that, though a certain amount of luxury is a harmless and even civilizing thing, there is a point beyond which the increase of luxury leads to spiritual degradation. Man has risen by versatility and intelligence. If he were to enter at last upon a stable condition of perfect adaptation to an unchanging environment, he would gradually lose his distinctive powers. Intelligence would atrophy. The world society might perhaps survive unchanged for millions of years; but sooner or later man would be confronted with some new challenge from the environment, and would have lost the wit to cope with it. I conclude that if the fruit of all the devotion of the British Interplanetary Society is to be merely the debauching of mankind with the riches of other worlds, you had better all stop paying your subscriptions.

The second possible aim in relation to the planets is simply to increase man’s power over the environment, and to extend that power so as to tackle fresh environments.

In the heyday of the industrialization of Europe and America, power did seem to many people an end in itself. The craving to leave one’s mark on the environment, any sort of mark, so long as it is my mark, made actually by me, is very strong in a certain type of uncultured mind. Human animals carve their initials on trees, rocks, school desks, and public monuments. They deface beautiful objects simply for the lust of power. They satisfy their primitive impulses for construction thoughtlessly, without regard to the remoter consequences; sometimes harmlessly, but sometimes disastrously in ways that are less constructive than destructive. Children harmlessly make mud pies or play with meccano sets. Adults less innocently build empires or great commercial ventures. Generally some fairly plausible excuse is found for all this feverish activity. The mud pies are magic castles; the empires, instruments of civilization; the commercial ventures, purveyors of comfort or luxury. But at bottom the motive is often the insatiable itch to make a mark on the environment, any old mark, but the bigger the better. In itself, the impulse is harmless, even worthy; but we have to learn to make our mark in inoffensive and if possible actually useful ways.

More precisely, the itch to leave a mark is quite wholesome, on condition that, even if it does not actually serve some higher aim, at least it does not positively hinder proper development. It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere obsessive doodling or meddling on however vast a scale. The danger for mankind as a whole is that, having solved its present urgent problems, it will slip in to the assumption that the goal of all its corporate action is simply to make a bigger and bigger mark on a bigger and bigger environment. Power is all too apt to become an end in itself. In the old days self-assertive individuals aimed at local tyranny or world empire. Henceforth they will be more likely to dominate either through money power or through fulfilling important functions domineeringly in a highly organized state, perhaps a world state of totalitarian type. It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those who control the world state, whether it is capitalist or communist or social-democratic, will be in danger of grave corruption unless they are imperturbably oriented to the true values. They will readily idealize their own power lust and persuade mankind that the right goal for man is simply dominance over the environment. And so in time the planet may approximate to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which society is organized to the extreme pitch of efficiency with the aim simply of producing as much as possible. In that horrid world the workers are given unlimited easy pleasure, while the elite, the bureaucrats and technicians, have the satisfaction of directing the whole life of society.

If the future terrestrial society is organized on these principles, then the other planets will be used for the same end. Ostensibly the aim will be to use them as sources of raw material for man’s comfort and luxury, on this planet or others; but behind this orthodox economic motive will lie the unacknowledged motive of sheer power. And if individuals can be corrupted by power, so can a whole species. Man may become obsessed with a passion merely to make a big mark on the solar system. In principle there is no difference between this aim and that of the urchin who sets fire to the heath or throws stones at windows.

The third possible motive for gaining control of the planets is that of using them to make the “most” of man, or the “best” of him; in fact, for the full expression of the most developed capacities of the human species. Here we have a goal which, though extremely vague, is more promising. What does it really imply? Broadly, it may be interpreted in two different ways, one purely humanistic, the other involving a reference to something over and above man, though it is known to us mainly through its imperfect manifestation in man himself. The question to be faced is this. Are we justified in regarding man simply as an end in himself? Is “good” simply whatever man wills? Is a thing to be called “good” merely because or in that man wills it? Or, on the other hand, is man to be regarded rather as a means to an end, an instrument for the fulfilling of an end that is in some sense independent of his actual nature in its present stage of development? These questions cannot be even clearly stated, let alone answered, without raising very difficult philosophical problems. They cannot be truly answered with a plain “yes” or “no.” Rather the answer must be of the type, “In one sense man is an end, in another sense not an end but an instrument.” In the same manner the physicists may justifiably say that in one sense an electron is a particle, and in another sense not a particle but a train of waves.

VI. Fundamental Values

PERHAPS WE SHALL be able to form more precise ideas on this subject (which really does concern an interplanetary society) if we try to answer the question, “What is man?”

Clearly, whatever else he is, he certainly is (or has) a body, which is a physical or electromagnetic system of protons, electrons, etc. J.B.S. Haldane (I think) remarks somewhere that the human body contains some millions of millions of millions of millions of hydrogen atoms, and corresponding amounts of other elements. Julian Huxley (I think) has pointed out that man’s body is approximately halfway in size between an electron and the whole universe. Astronomically, man is very small, an inconceivably minute parasite on a minute planetary grain floating in an immense void that is extremely sparsely sprinkled with great suns. Size is in itself no importance; but if in the minute human body the physical can be the vehicle of some degree of mind or spirit, how great may be the mental and spiritual capacity of the whole cosmos of star systems!

Biologically, man (as we have already noted), or rather our own species of man, which we have ludicrously called Homo sapiens, is of very recent growth. But he is the most developed of terrestrial organisms. That is, he is objectively the most complex, integrated, versatile. He has specialized in being unspecialized. Hence his remarkable adaptability and his dominance over all other species. He has indeed made a bigger mark on this planet than any other species, and a much more complex and purposeful and organized mark. Basically he remains just a mammal, a primate. His unique gift is his relatively high intelligence, which has depended on the unique development of hands and eyes and cerebral cortices. There is good reason to believe, however, that man is a very imperfect species. The bird is just about perfected for its appropriate life, for flight in the terrestrial atmosphere; but man, though he has powers far beyond the range of the bird, has not perfected those powers. In his appropriate medium of intelligent purposive action, abstract thought, personal sensibility, and artistic creation, he is little better than a clumsy flying lizard.

Psychologically, what is it that distinguishes man from the subhuman creatures, even from his nearest relatives, the apes? He has the same ground plan of organs, reflexes, innate behavior, and emotional reaction. He shows fear, aggression, self-regard, sexuality, gregariousness, curiosity, manipulative meddlesomeness, and so on. What is distinctive in him is his superior power of discrimination, of attending to likenesses and differences. Hence his native intelligence, by which I mean the power of solving novel problems, not to be solved by instinct or by established habit. This unique aptitude for discrimination and intelligence has opened up for him vast new universes of experience, impossible to any other terrestrial creature. All intelligence involves the power of attending to the relevant while ignoring the irrelevant. Hence, in man, comes the power of abstraction, of attending to a particular character and relating it to other instances of the same character, and giving the identity a name, such as “red,” “two,” “pleasant.” Hence language and all the worlds of abstract thought and of concrete poetry.

Man’s great power of concentration of attention has been applied not only to the environment but also to his own nature. Thus he has developed the possibility of a unique kind of self-awareness and awareness of other selves. In fact, he has become capable of personality, and of genuinely personal relationships, including all the forms of developed loving and hating. From this has arisen a distinctively human or personal kind of sociality. In subhuman animals, sociality is no more than a combination of the impulse of gregariousness (including self-abasement to the herd) and the impulse of self-assertion, rising to dominance over the herd. Of course, human beings themselves often behave in this subhuman way, but the distinctively human or personal way is something of a different kind, in that it involves respect for the other as a conscious person. The distinctively human society is best understood by considering the nature of genuine human love, which again is beyond the range of subhuman consciousness.

When John really loves Jane, he does what no beast can do. He does not merely have a pleasant glow of feeling about her. Of course he has this, but something more also. He is aware of her as a conscious being, distinct from himself, and different in character and needs and capacities. He accepts her as she is, without wishing to impose his will on her. He respects her as a person, takes responsibility for her, cherishes her, depends on her, is mentally enriched by knowing her and loving her, and is profoundly molded by her. The two together form a little society of distinct beings united in mutual love, and cherishing not only each other but also the “we” that they together form. No doubt they also remain self-regarding individualists, and their self-interests often conflict. All love is complicated by hate. But in genuine love the conflict is largely transcended in the will for mutual adjustment and mutual dependence.

Perhaps I ought to apologize for wandering so far from the planets. But, believe me, this digression is very relevant to my theme. If one undertakes to discuss what man ought to do with the planets, one must first say what one thinks man ought to do with himself. And that is what I am trying to do. It cannot be done without a certain amount of fundamental thinking, not in the way of theorizing about the universe, but through trying to get a clear view of human experience itself.

Well, to continue this venture, from the experience of love or friendship or some form of genuine community in the field of personal contacts, the human individual may rise to the will for genuine community in all his dealings with his fellow human beings, no matter how slight his contact with them. Thus arises the ideal of universal Christian love, or the brotherhood of man. This ideal has haunted man for thousands of years. In one form or another, it has played an important part in all the great religions of the world. In Christianity, love is deified. God, we are told, actually is, in some obscure way, Love. The Holy Spirit is Love. And love is believed by Christians to be the fundamental power which created the universe. To believe such a proposition seems to me to go far beyond the legitimate scope of human thinking; but the fact that in the past many of the best minds have believed this has to be taken into account.

Why is it that love, kindness, fellowship, genuine community between persons, in fact, the distinctively human or rather personal kind of sociality, has been so greatly praised? Obviously it has survival value. And if you are determined to explain the most developed kinds of human experience and behavior, simply in terms of the social conditioning of primitive impulses, quite a plausible explanation can be given. But this explanation does not go to the root of the matter. It is sheer dogma that the most developed and conscious human experience and behavior can be fully explained simply in terms of its primitive sources. To do so is to leave out the most distinctive thing about man, namely his power of standing outside himself, to some extent, and being interested in things other than himself for their own sake. Anyone who has really been in love should understand this. Anyone who has had any genuine religious feelings should know it even better. The great saints, Western and Eastern, were concerned (I should say) with experiences at the highest reach of human capacity, experiences which cannot be adequately described in terms of merely primitive impulses. I would add that neither should we accept uncritically the saints’ own interpretations of their experiences, stated in terms of their own contemporary ideas about the fundamental nature of the universe. Human language and human thought itself were not then, and are not even now, sufficiently developed to make reliable statements about those most fully “awakened” experiences. Nevertheless, the experiences themselves, I suggest, are extremely important for anyone concerned with the proper ordering of human life. Someone may protest that, however important these experiences were to the saints, they are of no importance to us, because we do not share in them. The objection is worth answering. No doubt the saints had religious experience in a peculiarly vivid and compelling form which most of us cannot attain. But even ordinary men and women, or at any rate the more sensitive of them, if they take the trouble to discipline themselves a little, and concentrate their attention on their felt relation with each other and with the universe, can quite well discover in their own experience the kind of thing that the great mystics were trying to describe.

For lack of a better term, I shall call this most significant kind of experience “spiritual experience” or “experience of spirit.” But I hasten to add that the word “spirit” need not be taken to mean some thing or substance other than matter, which is conceived as another thing or substance. Still less must spirit mean a divine person or God. I mean by “spirit” simply a particular way of experiencing and behaving. In fact, it is that kind of life which Christians sometimes call “the life of the spirit” or the “Way” of the Spirit, and Chinese sages have called simply “Tao,” the “Way.” What kind of a life the spiritual life is, I shall consider presently, trying to describe it in modern language and in relation to modern experience.

Meanwhile, I suggest that whatever theories men invent to justify the goodness or Tightness of that way of life, what actually confronts them in their direct experience is simply a vision of the Way itself as supremely right. Whatever the status of spirit in the universe, what matters is simply spirit. The saints and sages yearned for the full expression of spirit in their own lives and the lives of others. They yearned to outgrow, or wake up from, the life of mere self-interest. They sought the ampler view. They sought, through self-denial, a real self-detachment for the sake of the ampler view, the deeper, more penetrating view. Through the discipline of the ordinary self-interested worldly self, they sought to “wake up,” and adopt the point of view of a supposed universal self. Sometimes they persuaded themselves that they were actually gathered up into that supreme self in mystical communion; but even if one feels very skeptical about this, and about the existence of such a universal self, one must recognize that what they strove for was a transcendence of the limitations of mere self-concern, a self-forgetting through concern for other individuals and for the whole universe. In fact, a vision of the spirit as an ideal way of living, and as in some sense what we are for, intruded into their ordinary experience and claimed their allegiance.

But what sort of a way of life is the spiritual life? Leaving out the intellectual trappings of religious and metaphysical doctrine about the universe and fundamental reality, and bearing in mind aspects of knowledge that were not available to the ancients, I think we can express the essence of the matter in modern language. The very brief account that I shall give would not satisfy the ancient teachers or their modern followers, just because it leaves out the metaphysical doctrines; yet it does seem to me to describe the essence of their experience, insofar as it can have any meaning at all for ordinary human beings.

I must begin with a few words about the nature of personality, for the spiritual way is essentially a way for personal beings. Something is aware of something. “I,” whatever that is, am aware of my body in its physical environment, and also of my “self” or psychological personality (as a creature with a certain character, needs, and capacities), also of other persons, of societies of persons, of abstractions such as physical laws and moral principles, and (in a very sketchy way) of a whole objective universe in which I am. No doubt my awareness of these things is very confused and erroneous, but we all assume that there is something to be aware of, something which is independent of our experiencing it. In fact, there is an objective universe.

Now the innermost ring of objectivity, so to speak, is my own body in its relation with a physical environment. My body is experienced as a going concern, as dynamic, as tending toward certain actions and needing certain things of the environment. I consciously “espouse” my body’s needs. I desire their fulfillment. For instance, when my body needs food, I desire the activity of eating. Similarly with the needs for sleep, sexual activity, and so on. In infancy this innermost ring of objectivity is all that is experienced. But gradually the growing child becomes aware of another ring of objectivity, namely that of conscious persons. He begins to be self-conscious and other-conscious. He “espouses” the needs of his own psychological person, and (less constantly) of a few other persons, such as his mother. In genuine love we “espouse” another person, forming a psychological symbiosis with him or her. The important point is that both the other person and my own self, with its particular character and needs and powers, are facts objective to my awareness of them. Of course, my awareness of them may be largely erroneous, I may make mistakes about them, as about any other objective facts. But they are not just fancy. They are what they are.

Beyond the sphere of the persons with whom I have personal contact, we may place another ring of objectivity, namely that on which occur all societies of persons, and the incipient society of mankind as a whole. Beyond again, comes the ring of abstract ideas, true and false, both kinds being objective to the experiencing “I.” True ideas, in the final analysis, are simply objective characters apprehended by minds and abstracted from their particular settings. The idea “dog” is the common character distinctive of all dogs. Of course, all ideas are partly false, some more so, some less. But even the false elements in ideas are rooted in objectivity. So to speak, they result from “squinting” objective characters together in wrong patterns, much as the drunkard may see two moons instead of one. He sees one moon twice, or in two places. Consider the idea of a “centaur,” half horse, half man. There’s no such beast; but the idea “centaur” is the product of “squinting” half a man and most of a horse together, and so forming a new abstract idea.

Now the overwhelmingly most important abstraction is the spirit, the ideal way of life. It is an ideal which is implied in, and emerges from, the actual experienced nature of the behavior of falling objects and the movements of planets and stars.

In the same way the ideas of good and evil and all possible kinds of values arise out of the impact of some region of objectivity on the conscious individual. Mere abstract subjectivity is no more than a featureless possibility of being aware of something, including values. All values arise from the conscious “espousal” of objective needs. Some are needs of one’s own body, some are the more subtle needs of persons, myself and other selves.

Note further that personality involves community. There cannot be true personality save in true community with other persons. By community I mean not simply a relationship in which each individual strives to use others for his own advancement but the distinctively human social relationship, in which individuals are united in mutual respect for each other as persons. The spiritual way is essentially a way for persons in community with other persons. As Christians might put it, it is the way for a “Church,” not simply for the individual, seeking individualistic salvation. As Communists might put it, it is the way for comrades working devotedly in a common cause.

Now I suggest that the spirit is essentially the way of life in which we strive toward full, comprehensive, and true awareness of the objective universe, and toward appropriate feeling and appropriate creative action in relation to it. The universe, of course, includes oneself as an object, a self among other selves. In the spiritual life one strives for sensitive and intelligent awareness of things in the universe (including persons), and of the universe as a whole. One strives also for appropriate feeling about things and people and the universe as a whole, without prejudice in favor of oneself as an individual or one’s own family or nation, or even the human species. Finally one strives for appropriate and creative action in relation to all this.

The experience of the spirit, as the supreme good and as in some sense what we are “for,” needs no support from metaphysical argument or religious doctrine. It is simply “given,” as a datum, to the relatively awake mind, or rather to the awake mind that has not been perverted by obsession with some minor good, such as power, or bemused by some particular theory, such as materialism or theism. Let us never forget that, if theism is a frail invention of the human intellect, so is materialism. All such ambitious theories are almost certainly more false than true. All such metaphysical speculation, though interesting and educatively valuable, is quite unreliable, whether as support or denial of the experience of spirit, which needs no support other than its own overwhelming authority for the awakened mind. We all know the difference between being less awake and more awake, less responsive to the objective environment and more so. And we all trust our relatively more awake states more than our relatively somnolent states; for the very good reason that, the more comprehensively and accurately we are aware of the objective environment, the more our enterprises are likely to succeed. The kind of experience that I have called “spiritual” comes with an undeniable sense of “being very much awake,” in the sense that it presents a vision or revelation of aspects of the objective reality that are not revealed in the self-absorbed kind of experience.

Incidentally, the more awake kinds of experience are also the more developed biologically and psychologically, and have had survival value in the long run. But in the sphere of spirit, survival value is not itself the test. The criterion must be simply the verdict of the most lucid consciousness itself, which emphatically declares the way of life called spiritual to be the highest good.

VII. A Commonwealth of Worlds

IN THE LIGHT of this all too superficial discussion of the spirit, I can now say what, in my view, is the right use of the planets.

If any of them is inhabited by intelligent beings, then clearly man should do his utmost to adopt a relationship of genuine community with those nonhuman intelligences, seeking earnestly to enter into their point of view, and to cooperate with them for mutual enrichment, both economic and spiritual.

But since it is unlikely that any other planet is in fact inhabited by intelligent beings, then the question that we must answer is, what should man do with those virgin worlds? And the answer is that he should deal with them precisely as with his native world. He should use them neither for the sole purpose of increasing his luxury, nor simply as a means to power for mere power’s sake. He should use them for the spirit. He should avail himself of their resources in such ways as to advance the expression of the spirit in the life of mankind. He should use them so as to afford to every human being the greatest possible opportunity for developing and expressing his distinctively human capacity as an instrument of the spirit, as a center of sensitive and intelligent awareness of the objective universe, as a center of love of all lovely things, and of creative action for the spirit. He should strive to make of the human race a glorious example of personality-in-community, a society of very diverse individuals united in mutual insight, understanding, and sympathy, and in cooperative expression of the spirit. And for the full expression of the spirit in any community, the greater the diversity of individuals the better, provided that they all have sufficient imagination to enter into each other’s points of view.

It is in this connection that the planets open up new possibilities. If man can establish in some of those other worlds new and specially adapted human or quasi-human races, then those races, living in their appropriate ways, should develop new expressions of the spirit at present inconceivable to terrestrial man. And through the intercourse of these diverse worlds, provided that each species has sufficient imaginative power, all should be spiritually enriched. Thus the goal for the solar system would seem to be that it should become an interplanetary community of very diverse worlds each inhabited by its appropriate race of intelligent beings, its characteristic “humanity,” and each contributing to the common experience its characteristic view of the universe. Through the pooling of this wealth of experience, through this “commonwealth of worlds,” new levels of mental and spiritual development should become possible, levels at present quite inconceivable to man.

A homely analogy may be hazarded. The really satisfactory marriage is not one in which husband and wife have identical character and interests, but one in which each is as different as possible from the other, though each has enough imagination to enter into the other and share the other’s interests. In fact, the satisfactory marriage is a unity in diversity and a spiritual symbiosis.

Another analogy may help. Mankind today is deeply divided between two profoundly different systems of thought and value, two ideologies. Roughly, these ideologies center upon America and Russia respectively. Each, I believe, contains very important truth which the other ignores. If war is avoided, and if in due season each side can learn from the other, the result may be a far more adult and spiritually enriched humanity than could ever have occurred without this cultural clash of mighty opposites. Incidentally, I cannot help hoping that Western Europe, and particularly Britain, may play an important part in the unifying of the two half-truths. For Europe is in a position to sympathize with both the half-truths. Formerly champions of individual liberty, we are now being forced by dire circumstances to plan our own society and discipline our individualistic impulses. Perhaps we shall be able to give the world an object lesson in planning for liberty. Add to this the fact that after all, with due respect to those vigorous adolescents, the Americans and the Russians, Europe, with all its faults, is relatively adult; and moreover is the custodian of a great tradition of civilization and spiritual life which has still an important function in this largely barbarian world. America and Russia, yes, and India and China, have doubtless momentous parts to play in the future; but today it is the European temper, yes, and particularly the temper of this island people, that is needed to restore unity to a divided mankind, and save our species from destroying itself. It is a solemn thought that perhaps our actions here and now, in this island, in this great city, may determine whether that dream of a commonwealth of worlds is to be made real or made forever impossible.

VIII. Man and the Cosmos

I SHALL NOW add a postscript on a larger theme. Thus far we have been considering only the solar system. What of the stars? What of the galaxies of stars? And the cosmos as a whole? Interstellar travel seems to us the wildest fantasy. However, we should not entirely rule out the possibility that a human race far more advanced than ourselves might someday travel far beyond the limits of the solar system. It might for instance be possible, through skilled use of atomic power, to propel a planet on an interstellar voyage. The substance of the planet itself would have to be used up for the initial propulsion of the planet beyond the range of solar gravitation, also for subsequent steering, also to provide its inhabitants with heat and light and food on the longest of all voyages. For the shortest of interstellar voyages would certainly take a very long time, in fact, thousands or millions of years. But if the task was considered worthwhile, it might perhaps be undertaken. And, who knows? It might conceivably be worthwhile to explore in this way some of the nearest planetary systems. But the method would obviously be extremely cumbersome. It is not quite inconceivable that a far better method may someday be developed. In view of recent spectacular but still very fragmentary discoveries in the field of paranormal psychology, it is just possible that communication with intelligent races in even the remotest planetary systems may be effected by a highly developed technique of telepathy. This, of course, is a surmise of the wildest sort; but today, when the very foundations of our knowledge are being transformed, it should not be ignored.

One thing we can say with confidence. If, by one means or another, man does succeed in communicating with intelligent races in remote worlds, then the right aim will be to enter into mutual understanding and appreciation with them, for mutual enrichment and the further expression of the spirit. One can imagine some sort of cosmical community of worlds.

Further, we may, I think, be certain that, wherever, in any age or any galaxy, beings exist who are developed up to or beyond the level of awareness precariously attained by man at his best, there the imperious claim of the spirit, and therefore the ideal of personality-in-community, will surely be recognized. For this ideal and this claim are implied in the very nature of the awakened consciousness. The ultimate goal of all awakened beings must inevitably be (how can one least misleadingly put it?) the expression of the objective cosmos in subjective experience and creative action, the fulfillment of the cosmos in cosmical awareness.

The more obvious way in which this goal is to be approached is through a cosmical community of worlds. But such a community may be nothing but the most fantastic of human dreams. Far more probably, the intelligent races within the cosmos may be forever isolated from each other by the spatial immensities. In this case we are faced with two alternatives. We may suppose that God himself (or the supra-temporal mind of the cosmos) embraces in a single cosmical experience all the worlds and all their age-long lives; or we may declare simply that the goal of cosmical awareness is not attained, and is only a crazy human fantasy. In this case we may suppose either that there is no general purpose at all behind the cosmos (which may very well be the case), or else that the purpose is something wholly unintelligible to human minds, and indifferent to the expression of the spirit in any world. Or we may suppose that it is equally false to say either that there is or that there is not a cosmical purpose, since the truth is utterly beyond our comprehension. The cabbages in a garden are grown not that they may fulfill themselves in flower and fruit but simply that, before reaching maturity, they may be eaten. Similarly, it may be that the intelligent worlds of the cosmos are required merely to reach a certain low stage of spiritual growth before being destroyed. Let us remember, too, that, if modern physics is correct, there awaits all worlds the cosmical night promised by the increase of entropy. Thus there is a race between cosmical fulfillment and cosmical death, between the complete awakening of consciousness in the cosmos, and eternal sleep.

But probably these wild speculations are all entirely beside the mark, because conceived in terms of ideas wholly inadequate to the actual conditions of the cosmos. For instance, our conception of time itself is now turning out to be very incoherent and superficial. Perhaps (who can say) from the point of view of eternity the end of the cosmos is also its source and its temporal beginning. Perhaps the ultimate flower is also the primal seed from which all sprang. Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the attainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.

Such fantasies may have some kind of symbolic truth, just as the Bible story has symbolic truth. Anyhow, whether true or false, they may at least help us to feel something of the mystery and immensity that surrounds our little human life.

Today there are hints that the immensity may be far greater than is supposed even in modern astronomy. Paranormal investigations obscurely suggest that the whole spatio-temporal physical universe may be but one very limited and easily misinterpreted aspect of an underlying reality which transcends space and time and the whole seeming-solid world of common sense and science. This is not the place to open up so vast a subject; but I should like to make one comment. Even if in the end these uncertain hints are justified, we shall not have to suppose that therefore the familiar universe is unreal, or sheer illusion. Rather it will have to be regarded as real but not the whole truth; and as “false” merely if we take it to be the whole truth. Further, it seems clear that, whatever the immensities beyond our familiar sphere, for us, who are so deeply implicated in this sphere, the supreme concern must continue to be life here and now. What we have to do is to make the best of this planet of ours, and perhaps of other worlds also.

DISCUSSION

Mr. R.A. SMITH proposed a vote of thanks to the speaker, saying that he was particularly grateful for the philosophical support he had given to the interplanetary enterprise. It was hard, however, to feel any kinship or sympathy with some of the weird types of “man” that Dr. Stapledon had invented for the colonization of very large planets. To this Dr. Stapledon replied that he could accept any life form, however alien, if it was oriented to the fundamental values — which he considered must hold for all races at all times.

Mr. A.C. CLARKE then formally opened the discussion, commenting first on some technical points. He thought that life — though not intelligent life — might be more common and more varied in the solar system than generally imagined. Even ignoring the four giant planets (which seemed to be partly gaseous) there were fourteen bodies of over a million square miles, and at least two hundred asteroids of over ten thousand square miles area. We had plenty of exploring to do!

Dr. Stapledon had touched on the possibility of telepathic contact with other races: but presumably as far as the solar system was concerned, some sort of clairvoyance would be required, since there would be no intelligence to “transmit” at the other end. Mr. Clarke had often been given vivid descriptions of Mars by mediumistic characters, and he hoped that, before the first expedition, such reports could be collected as it would provide a unique opportunity for a convincing proof. However, the Technical Committee would be most annoyed if, after it had worked for years on atomic spaceships, the clairvoyants got to Mars first.

Dr. Stapledon, Mr. Clarke thought, had somewhat overestimated the — admittedly enormous — difficulties of interstellar flight. If highly efficient atomic step-rockets could be developed, speeds of over 90 percent of the velocity of light were theoretically possible. The nearest stars could thus be reached in five or ten years — though the elapsed time to the crew might be much less than this, thanks to relativity effects.

Mr. Clarke did not think that man could ever take part in a galactic culture, even assuming that the technical difficulties involved could be overcome. The human mind would be strained to the utmost to deal with a solar civilization of even a dozen worlds. A galactic society implied an increase in complexity of perhaps a thousand million. However, it was foolish to worry about these ultimate questions: what we had to do now was to make the best of our own planet, and of the other worlds when we reached them.

Many members of the large audience then took part in the discussion, and the following are some of the points raised.

One speaker suggested that before human beings colonized Venus, its climate and atmosphere might be modified by suitable plant forms projected from Earth, adding that perhaps terrestrial life came originally from Mars in a similar manner.

A chemist decried loose talk of destroying the human race by atomic energy: the daily increase in population equaled the casualties produced by the Nagasaki bomb. Fissile materials were so rare that it seemed most unlikely that they could ever be used to alter climates or geographical features.

Another speaker wanted to know what would happen if we met a race at about the same level of culture. Which would pickle which? It was suggested that there would be insuperable difficulties in communication if we encountered beings whose senses were entirely different from ours. There might be a total lack of understanding like that depicted in Wells’ Country of the Blind.

One member wanted to know if it might not be better to adapt nonhuman terrestrial life forms to colonize the planets, instead of trying to evolve new types of man.

A final speaker said that if we encountered inferior races, we must not put them in reservations, but must educate them. The selection of suitable colonists would also be a difficult psychological problem.

In reply, Dr. STAPLEDON said that though in this time of crisis we must put our own house in order, scientific endeavor must not be too utilitarian, but must always be opening up new frontiers. We must also preserve a sense of humility and piety toward the unknown: of late, humanity had been guilty of hubris — pride in achievement.

Dr. Stapledon did not agree that he had exaggerated the potentialities of atomic energy. Our present use of heavy elements was only a beginning — later we might release power from the lighter ones, as the stars do.

If we met a race that nearly matched us in culture, Dr. Stapledon hoped that cooperation would be possible, and that we would not treat it as we had treated the aborigines. On the other hand, if it was superior and turned Earth into a reservation, that would be the end of humanity, as it would lose the will to live. He agreed that we should try to educate other races — as long as we were sure we were educating them up and not down to our level.

He thought that races with utterly different senses were impossible. If they shared the physical universe with us, then they must have at least some senses in common with mankind, since they would have to perceive and manipulate matter. Even if they possessed senses outside our range (e.g., electrical, infra- or ultra-visual) we would still be able to comprehend them.

Dr. Stapledon did not think that it would be practicable to develop nonhuman life forms for interplanetary colonization. It would be too great a task to bring them up to our level first. According to Huxley, no other existing species could develop human intelligence — they were all too specialized in other directions.

A CHRISTIAN (1976)

First published in ‘Four Encounters’

I HAVE MET a Christian, and now I must tell you about him; for you are always the touchstone.

He was no typical Christian, nor yet one of outstanding saintliness. He was his unique self, but also a Christian, and to me, arresting.

Sitting in the cathedral, I thought how strange that stone should live and praise, while in ourselves faith lies dead. The columns stand so confidently, joined in their upstretched hands like dancers waiting for the music. They have waited for centuries.

Today, more formidable columns, sudden, fungoid, springing from land and sea, threaten all of us.

In the cathedral choir, masons were repairing war damage. I heard metal strike the stone. The windows were pallid, for the warm glass had all been treasured away. Near me in the knave, two spinsters with guidebooks devoured information. A youth in shorts, a peroxide girl, a bunch of trippers, stared vacantly; sheep lost in a desert. Yet a cathedral is a sheepfold. Or so it was intended.

Presently vergers were shepherding out the sightseers; for a service was due, and a mild bell tolling. I retreated. But as I was nearing the door, the Christian touched me, and said, “You looked unhappy. Perhaps I might help.” My resentment was quietened by his face, where peace was imposed on some still restless grief; a face carved heavily, the eyes, dark holes, dark gleaming wells; the nose a buttress; the mouth, mettlesome but curbed.

I said, “If I was unhappy, it was for the world, not for myself.” He answered, “The world is indeed unbearable; unless we are given strength. Darkness is everywhere; but there is a light to lighten it.” Brutally I said (for you were not with me to temper me), “You want to add me to your converts, but my scalp is not for your belt.” His hand reached toward me but withdrew. He turned to leave me. Ashamed, I said, “Oh, forgive me! Please come with me and tell me about your light.”

But even as I spoke, there flashed on me a memory. I was a freshman returning to Oxford by train, reading in my corner. A godly woman opposite me laid a hand on my knee. “Are you saved?” she said. Startled and crimson, I answered, “No! At least I don’t think so. But I don’t think I want to be. Thank you all the same.” With knit brows, I stared at my book, incapable of reading.

And now, half a lifetime later, here was I asking this other Christian to tell me about his light. We emerged from the cathedral into the sunshine and the town’s roar. Beyond the lawns of the close, how the shops, banks, hotels impended! As though a lava flood had been by miracle congealed to save God’s house.

We paced, and neither spoke.

Presently, he said, sighing, “I was obtuse. Why am I still so often insensitive? I was spiritually arrogant.” Again he fell silent, so I said, “That is the danger of the light; a little of it goes to the head, and makes one spiritually arrogant.” “Yes,” he answered, “but it was not for myself I was proud; it was for the light. In myself, I am only a little lens to catch a sunbeam and focus it.” Smiling, I interrupted, “What is spiritual arrogance ever but pride of the lens in its office?” At once he answered, “And intellectual arrogance is pride of the knife in its blind dissecting.”

Again we walked silently. Then he said, “Watching you in the cathedral, I saw in your face what I had recently laid bare in my own heart, the unacknowledged, the quite unconscious, hunger for salvation. And at once I knew that I must speak to you. To have kept silent would have been a betrayal of the very thing that had recently given me — blessedness.”

The word jarred on me. I found myself saying inwardly, and how foolishly, “Oh God, please save me from being saved!” But immediately I was drawn toward the Christian, for he said, “Why, why can’t I say these things without spoiling them, without making them sound pompous?”

He told me that by profession he was an engineer; that he had spent the years of the war far away in the East without his “dear wife”; that he had returned to find her a stranger, loving another, yet still dutiful to him, and anxiously willing to be at one with him again. So he set about to rewin her, and she to rediscover him. But it was useless. Rooted together, they had grown apart. Her torn tendrils, though reaching for him, bled for the other. So in the end, to free her, he had left her. For he loved her, so he told himself, far more than he craved her.

But when he had wrenched himself from her, his bared roots dried, his leaves withered.

He described himself as one of those lonely souls who, exiled from Europe, had maintained contact with the European spirit by reading. He mentioned Shakespeare, Dickens, Hardy, but few more modern. He claimed, however, also to be “well read in modern thought.” He knew his Wells, his Shaw, his Freud, his Russell. Even Karl Marx he had read out there among the temples and the rice fields. These great writers, he said, had opened his eyes to the world. But now, this desolate homecoming was a new and a disintegrating experience. It fitted nowhere. Those modern prophets, he declared, could not help him; since for all their clever analysis they were spiritually imperceiving (so he phrased it). They could not see, and he himself till now had never seen, that if love fails life is worthless; and if love is not God (so he put it) all existence is pointless.

Formerly, though not unaware of evil, he had never looked squarely at it. There had been no need. Yet he had seen men beaten to death, and women mutilated, and he had responded with the required indignation. He knew also that savagery might conquer the whole planet. (Those lethal fungi that had sprouted once might sprout again.) All this he knew, but only as though from a book; or as a bad dream remembered in daytime. For him, evil had remained a thing unreal, in the end to be abolished from the planet. “I had two anchors,” he said, “my love, and my faith in man’s triumphant future. So long as these held, evil could only sadden, not shatter me.”

But now, the anchor of his love had failed, and under the added strain, the other too had parted. “Evil at last,” he said, “had its claws in my own heart. And through my own desolation I realized at last the evil of the universe.”

He was silent. And I felt a frost creep in on me. For you and I, we too are held by that anchor. And if it should fail? Though our very differences enrich us, toughening our union, how can we know that some secret poison in one or the other cannot ruin us?

When the Christian had finished, I murmured vaguely of sympathy, but he sharply checked me. “Do not pity me,” he said. “Rather envy; for it was only through suffering that my tight-shut eyes could be opened for salvation.” In his voice I seemed to hear exaltation uneasily triumph over misery. “But God,” he said, “had not yet scourged me enough. I was not yet ready to be saved.”

He continued his story. He had a sister, a “beloved sister,” and to her he had always turned in any distress. He praised her to me as “the soul of goodness.” (Perhaps, like you, she was one of those who live most fully in giving life to others.) In his present misery he ran to her for comfort. But strangely, though she responded with the old young-motherly words of compassion, she remained withdrawn. The hand that she reached out to save him was now intangible, a mere phantom, always duly proffered, never to be grasped. Perplexed and sore, he drifted from her.

Presently this self-pitying brother learned that the sister was ill and in great suffering. Hurrying to her, he found that a secret pain had been too long ignored. And now, too late, the scalpel ferreted again and again through her body. The added torment was useless. Each time he visited her, the bars of her prison had moved in closer on that trapped, that ever outward-living and still life-hungry spirit. “How I dreaded,” he said, “those eyes, that probed through mine for comfort!” For he, bitter from his life’s failure and the new-felt evil of the universe, could give only phantom comforts, through which “those eyes” easily pierced to the inner desolation.

The frequent tides of her pain, he said, rose daily higher. They lapped her tethered body with corrosive waves, eating away little by little her humanity, till she was a mere wreck of whimpering nerves. His compassion tormented him, so that at last he implored the doctors to hasten her final sleep. But they refused, since the treatment, they affirmed, might still conquer. To the brother it seemed that they cared only for the interest of playing their losing game expertly to the end. This suspected ruthlessness was for him an added horror, a symbol of that coldly evil will which ruled (so he now believed) the whole universe.

All the while that the Christian had been telling me of these bitter experiences, we had been walking together in the sunny close. Small white clouds were cherubs smiling down on us. Children were playing on the grass. In a quiet corner a cat toyed with a half-killed sparrow; until a girl rushed at it, and it fled with its prey.

But now the Christian gripped my arm and halted both of us. He said, “When my marriage broke, I felt merely that all existence was pointless; but now, far worse, I believed that the point, the meaning of it all, was simply evil. Of course there was good, but only to deepen the evil. There was love, to make cruelty more subtle.” Still holding my arm, he said with bared teeth, “For consider! Think of all the evil of the world! Two thousand million of us, and all of us foully sick in a sick world.” His hand fell from my arm, and again we walked. He spoke of the great host of bedridden sufferers, each in endless captivity; and of those whose prison is penury; and the rest of us, each with some unique private misery, unimaginable to any other. But mostly he dwelt on the starkly evil will that secretly rules so many of us, driving us constantly to hurt what is tender and befoul what is fair. And God’s will too now seemed to him evil.

I felt that I ought to have been overwhelmed by all this sum of horror that he had correctly enumerated. But strangely I was divided between pity and aloofness. Out of the corner of my eye, I placidly, frivolously, watched the life of the close: a youth with an unlit cigarette considering whom he should ask for a light; a mother trying to wipe the nose of an unruly child; an old man on a seat enjoying the legs of the passing girls.

The Christian said, “Coming away from my sister’s death I walked the streets with nerves raw to all their horror. A dog crushed on the tarmac, an ignored beggar, a woman with a face of painted lead and eyes where (the harsh phrase jarred) “a festering soul was already stinking.” These sights, he said, undermined his foundations. No future millennium could make such things never to have been. Eternity itself must stink with that soul’s corruption. But he reminded himself that corruption was actually no worse and no better than saintliness.

One day, as the embittered engineer was passing the cathedral, he conceived a resentful whim. He would insult the Power that masqueraded as Love. He strode in. The place was quiet. Sitting in the nave, he lounged and maintained a careful sneer, planning some bold free outrage. But the place was quiet and the few people ignored him. Presently he was absently studying the structure of column and vaulting; till defiance left him. Strange, he thought, how those old builders transformed efficient engineering with limited materials into high art! Soon he was marveling, as I had marveled, that stone should live and praise while in our hearts faith lies dead.

He considered those builders and their faith; and the long succession of robed ecclesiastics, vessels of an aged, a mellow and a potent wine. He considered the hosts of believers who had formerly thronged where now he sat alone; the ploughmen and housewives, the burghers and gentry. All were believers, however erring their conduct. All were participators in the communal delusion (as it then seemed to him) of love’s divinity. In those past days, he supposed, the clouded minds of men were still warmly though vaguely irradiated by the already remote event that had blazed on the Cross. Sitting in that silent place, he tried, not out of reverence but through sheer curiosity and self-pitying resentment, to hear and if possible feel the far-off chanting of those worshippers. With quickened imagination he probed back still farther through the centuries to scrutinize objectively the reputed event itself. That individual, Jesus, if indeed he existed and was not merely a myth, must have been a man of singular sensitivity and intelligence; for he, before all others, clearly conceived (so we are told) that love is for all of us the way of life. And from this perception the remarkable Jew passed on to the conviction that love must be God. Living in an age before reason could expose the fallacy (for so it still seemed to this destined Christian), Christ easily persuaded himself that in the high experience of life he had indeed come face to face with God. And this exquisite delusion so kindled him that he was able to live his whole life as a shining, a dazzling example and symbol of love. And so, in the strength of his delusion, he became the star of a new faith.

So it seemed to this engineer, brooding in the bombed cathedral. But he reminded himself that the crucified prophet, in his last moments, had cried that his God had forsaken him. Those eyes, appealing to heaven, saw only the void.

Once more the Christian seized my arm and brought us face to face. He said, “But now, in that dark night of my despair, light began to dawn on me. I began to see that Christ alone gave meaning to this bleak, meaningless world.”

He released my arm, and once more we paced the close. I noticed (but he paid no attention) that the sky was now all somber, and on the flagstones of our pathway a few large drops had fallen. Nursemaids were already encasing their struggling or patient charges in mackintoshes. A small boy, uncooperative, put out his tongue at heaven, in defiance or merely to catch raindrops.

Self-concerned, the Christian recounted the stages of his conversion. At last he was impelled to consider more and more earnestly the actual character of that remote and singular individual. But he could form no clear picture, so ignorant was he. He conceived only a passionately generous young man, intelligent, yet also in a way simple and even naive, preaching the life of love to a world incapable of it; till the world destroyed him. Yes, but that singular individual had indeed given men a vision of what they might be, if by miracle they could be raised a little beyond their brutishness. In his own person he had indeed shown them the life of love; shown them the divine spirit, the one thing worshipful.

I had been nodding approval. For how well we know, you and I, that in some deep way love is indeed divine; and that one and all we are vessels for that spirit.

But he went farther. Seizing my arm again, he said, “At this point the miracle happened. Without any aid from my intelligence or even my imagination, that unique person, Jesus, became an objective presence in my mind; and I saw that, though human, he was indeed God, the very God who is Love.”

I moved impatiently, and the grip on my arm tightened. He continued speaking, and I listening. I began to feel that his conviction had hypnotic power. Once more, half in fantasy, half in earnestness, I prayed inwardly, “Oh God, save me from this salvation!” What was it that was happening to me?

“Do not,” the Christian said, “tell me that this overwhelming vision of mine was the outcome in my mind merely of long-forgotten Christian teaching administered to me in childhood; or that it sprang from my own unconscious, figuring out for my guidance an ideal of life.” He paused, searching my eyes; then continued, “I have myself considered that hypothesis, but it is not true to my actual experience. What could childhood, or my childish unconscious, give me like this shattering and remaking and entirely adult perception of the divine person?”

He released me, and again we walked. He did not notice that the rain was now tapping on our heads and shoulders, and rustling in the trees; so I steered him to shelter in the arched doorway. There we stood, between two small stone angels that prayed with joined hands and up-gazing eyes. From within, the chanting wanly sounded.

His talk had not ceased. It seemed to him, he said, that the actual life of that perfect human being unfolded before him in detail. With strange vividness, as though he had seen what he described, this transmuted engineer, this newborn Christian, told me how the actual life of Christ had confronted him. He believed (remember) or at least he thought he believed, that he had actually experienced the presence of the divine lover. No wonder his words had power; and even while I rebelled, I, too, almost believed that the man Jesus must indeed have been more than man.

The engineer said that he had watched all the phases of Christ’s life. First the warm-hearted and resolute child, genial with playmates; but when they tormented a crippled sparrow, and would not listen to his pleading, he would furiously rout them. Then the boy on the Temple steps, confounding with sheer sincerity of feeling and fresh intelligence all the subtleties of the elders. The young man, gay companion and unfailing friend, who lived each moment fully yet without enslavement to it; for an inner voice constantly judged it, an inner light ruthlessly illuminated it; the voice and the light of his own waking divinity. Then the young man, already old in wisdom, freed of all self-concern, self-disciplined through and through to the spirit, scornfully rejecting Satan’s lure of power, intent wholly on doing what God willed of him. Then the perfected man, discovering God within himself, waking fully to his own Godhead, and his self-chosen mission. Then his few years of lucid conduct and teaching, his friendliness for all outcast persons, his fierce challenge to all heartlessness. And then his death, agonized less by bodily pain than by pity for man’s blind self-wounding harshness.

While the Christian was watching Christ’s life unfold (like an opening flower, he said) the adult spirit of that perfect man was constantly and overwhelmingly present to him; inwardly yet objectively, as the beloved may be present to the lover in absence.

The Christian’s account of his master’s life had deeply moved me. Looking back, I cannot understand why I should have been so stirred; but it did at the time seem to me that a lovely and overmastering presence confronted me through the window of the Christian’s words. While an inner voice quietly warned me, another voice called me. I felt myself tottering on the brink of the Christian salvation. Yet I knew quite clearly that if I took that plunge I should be damned; and worse, I should have been false to the light.

As the Christian spoke, I had been absently looking at the features of the stone angel beside me. A forgotten artist had carved them with restraint and power. Whether Christ were God or not God, the spirit that Christ preached was excellently signified in the stone. Presently a little spider strayed across the statue’s brow, traversed its eye, wandered down its nose, and from the tip launched itself into space, swaying and gyrating on its thread. It landed at last on the joined hands. Strangely this outrage did not sully the angel’s glory; heightened it rather, stressing that this fair messenger was not, after all an actual, a living yet supernatural being, but inanimate stone and a symbol. A symbol of the spirit. Well, and Jesus? Surely his true glory also was not that he was a supernatural being, descended out of heaven, but that he was a human individual (actual or fictitious) whose life, through its unique perfection, had become a symbol reigning in the hearts of men, and strengthening them with the vision of love’s divinity.

While I was musing about Christ as symbol, the Christian, with downcast eyes, was telling me how, in the light of that bright presence, and of the virtue of the God-man’s conduct here on earth, he came to realize with increasing shame and horror the true condition of his own soul, and the ugliness of his own conduct. “My sister,” he said, “whom I thought I loved so deeply, I never loved at all. Indeed, how could I love her, never having really known her, save as a comfort for myself? And when at last she failed me, I was resentful. My wife, too, I never loved. Even when I surrendered her, loving her (so I told myself) more than I craved her, the truth was simply that, with her heart elsewhere, she was useless to me; and so, striking a generous pose, I left her. It was the same with all my self-righteous indignation at the barbarities of war. This too was a mere gesture, its nerve not love but a vulgar tangle of mere squeamishness and pride.”

With a rueful smile he looked at me and said, “Pathetic! That we should so deceive ourselves!”

Continuing his story, he reminded me that he had entered the cathedral to commit some outrage; but now, he said, he had sat for a long time paralyzed with self-loathing because of his new perception of the spirit which his whole life had violated.

Presently (he said) he found himself kneeling with his face bowed in his hands and tears breaking from his closed eyes. His lips formed the silent words, “Oh God, unmake me, destroy me! I have ruined the soul that you created.”

At last, he said, the miracle was completed. Christ took full possession of him. His old self-absorbed self fainted into nothingness (or so he believed) and in its place awoke a new self, wholly directed to God. He knew, of course, that he would sin a thousand times daily, through inveterate frailty; but he knew that he was saved.

Yet in a way, he said, he cared little that he was a saved soul, for he was wholly intent upon the loveliness of the spirit that possessed him. He had in a manner outgrown even the desire for salvation. “Strange,” he said, “that, although the unregenerate self violently craves immortality, yet when it is killed and reborn, and assured of fulfillment in eternity, it counts this a negligible fact. Its whole beatitude is that now, without any thought of self, it sees God and adores him, and wills only to perform God’s will of it.” I quickly interposed, “Then why, if you no longer craved eternal life, must you still believe that we do in fact live on eternally as individuals?” He paused, smiling. “That was a shrewd question,” he said. There was silence before he answered, “I can say only that I see our immortality, I see our eternal reality. Also, if God should neglect to save his creatures, he would be less than the divine lover, and so not worshipful.”

Ignoring my wry face, he pursued his story of his conversion in the cathedral. For a while he had continued kneeling in inarticulate worship, but presently he allowed his gaze and his thoughts to range happily over the cool stonework and the listless, vaguely groping sightseers. It became clear to him that, since Christ had saved him, he must in gratitude fit himself to be a servant of Christ. He must equip himself to the utmost of his power with the traditional wisdom of Christ’s Church. So he diffidently approached a priest and begged for guidance. For many weeks he read the scriptures and the records of the saints; and every day he came into the cathedral to pray alone or to take part in the services.

“And now,” he said, “I began to discover meaning in all the well-worn doctrines of the Church that formerly had seemed so silly or incredible. For instance, the doctrine of the Trinity began to be intelligible to me. How clear it is that, while God must be thought of as indivisibly one, he must also be threefold! He must, of course, be the omnipotent Creator; but also he must be the divine Lover, distinct from omnipotence so as to suffer the whole depth of pain and misery; but also he must be the Holy Spirit, emanating from the Creator, inspiring the Lover, and beckoning all of us.”

Triumphantly the Christian’s eyes sought mine, demanding assent. When my brows puckered, he smiled, as though to a dull child whom one must not discourage. Then, reverting to a simpler matter, more suited to my halting intelligence, he said, “And think again of immortality! When at last my heart was opened to receive the full light and warmth of Christ’s divinity, it became clear to me that, though indeed the evil in us must be utterly destroyed, the essential and particular spirit that each of us is must be secured of eternal life through Christ’s love. I saw that my sister, generous soul, must (since God is love) find bliss in eternity, and with her, all of us must be destined for salvation; save perhaps some few who irrevocably damn themselves through impenetrable hardness of heart. But for my part I have faith that even these are won by the Love that is all-powerful.”

“But how can you know,” I protested, “how can you possibly know that Love is God, is an almighty being who rules the universe?” He replied fervently, “I tell you, my heart sees unmistakably that it is so.” Searching my unlit face, he added, “You also shall see. Through me, Christ will save you.” We both fell silent. Then he continued his gentle attack on my unbelief. “My friend,” he said, “you yourself have already seen that without Christ the universe is unintelligble and unendurably horrible. You are now beginning to see that through Christ a meaning springs to the eye. All the evil of the world, which so dismayed you when I first saw you, turns out to be for our own good, to chasten us, to waken us to the spirit; that we may all at last blissfully live the life of the spirit in eternity.” Again he watched me in silent expectation.

I did not answer. Avoiding his gaze, I looked across the close. The rain was now hissing on the flagstones, each drop a bullet with splashing impact. A yellow butterfly, shot down by the first volley, feebly struggled on the wet ground, its wings muddy. From within, since the short service was over, the worshippers were issuing one by one; a few dim women, an elderly man, and also, rather self-consciously, a soldier. Each glanced upward, frowning at the deluge. Some put up umbrellas and hurried away; some waited in the porch to shelter. Newcomers to the cathedral stamped their feet and shook the water from their clothing.

I did not answer, because I was desperately perplexed. How intelligible, how humane and friendly, the Christian’s account of the ancient faith now seemed to me! I thought of you. How humanly right it seemed that you should be yourself in eternity; purged, no doubt, transfigured; but essentially and recognizably yourself, the unique particular being whose life I share! And how right that I, purged almost beyond recognition, should be with you eternally! The annihilation of our union did indeed seem to make nonsense of the universe.

Yes, and this loving, this spirit that holds us together and raises each of us to a higher level of awareness in relation to the whole universe — could I deny, had I any need to deny, that in some sense it was divine? This spirit, that so quickened us, must surely be the quickening spirit of the whole universe, and the only way of universal fulfillment. And had I not at least seen that this spirit of love, if it is indeed divine, must in some way be personified in a supreme individual, who out of charity needs must bear all the sins of the world, needs must suffer in his own heart all the evil of all the worlds? And had I not, under this Christian’s influence, felt at last that Jesus was in fact this perfect embodiment of the divine love?

And so, and so … But on the very brink of the abyss, vertigo seized me, and a will to surrender to the gulf of this salvation.

The little spider had by now climbed back along his rope and had strung another from the statue’s nose to its chin, and from chin to breast, laboriously constructing the framework for its web. The Christian, following the direction of my gaze, saw the silken threads and their minute author. With a careless hand he swept the threads from the statue’s face and blew the spider from his fingers.

Suddenly I knew that to demand eternal life for the individual, even for the beloved, even for you, was childish, and a betrayal. Love was indeed the way of life; and maybe in so dark a sense, which is at present inconceivable, it presides in the very heart of the universe; but to pledge oneself to this belief would nevertheless be for me a grave betrayal of spiritual integrity. Calmly, and without dismay, even with unreasoning joy, I reminded myself that you and I, loved and loving, might well in fact be short-lived sparkles, merely, in an age-old pyrotechnic. The vastness of the physical confronted me, the boundless void and the astronomical aeons; before man; before the planets congealed; before the oldest of the stars first spangled the nebulae; before the unnumbered host of the nebulae themselves condensed from the expanding cloud of the young cosmos; back to the initial and inscrutable creative act, the atom bomb from which all sprang.

Hugeness is in itself nothing, but it has significance. For if this little world of ours, this grain, can in its lowly way harbor the spirit, what of the whole? The hugeness of space and time did not dismay me. I accepted it with grave joy, awed less by its threat than by pregnancy.

And so, our little loving is indeed hesitantly significant; if not of the inscrutable heart of all things, at least of the splendor that the cosmos may support in countless worlds, happy and tragic.

And now I saw once more quite clearly that what matters, what finally claims allegiance is not the individual nor even mankind, but something else, which all of us together, on earth and in all worlds, imperfectly manifest. This something, I told myself, this spirit, is indeed the music of the spheres, for which we are all lowly instruments and players. Whether this music is only to be appreciated gropingly by the players themselves, or whether it is for the discerning joy of some cosmical artist, or perhaps in some incomprehensible way for the very music itself, we cannot know. Perhaps it is for nothing. On that high plane thought is impotent.

Then you and I? If the end is sleep, all’s well. For we have lived. Or if in death we do indeed wake into some ampler life, to contribute further to the music, then again all’s well. If we live on, it is for the music; if we die, equally it is for the music.

The rain had stopped. The trees heavily dripped. Sunshine drew from the moist ground vapors and fragrances. The drowned butterfly lay still. Presently the cat, emerging from some shelter, strode haughtily, with the mouse limp between its teeth.

But now the Christian, who had so patiently waited, was saying, “At last you are seeing (are you not?) that Christ redeems all suffering.” I could not answer, except by a gesture of perplexity.

While I was searching for a reply, a starling alighted by the dead butterfly, cocked an eye in our direction, gobbled the prize, stood for a moment quizzically regarding me with its head on one side, squawked insolently and then took wing.

Suddenly I saw the Christian and myself as two large and solemn bipeds making strange noises at each other. The words that I had been using in my own mind echoed in my memory as poor animal calls laboring to signify things utterly beyond their range. How can the primitive grunts of any terrestrial animal ever signify truth about the depths and heights of reality? The little net of human discourse can sample only the ocean’s surface, and all its harvest is flotsam. How should it possibly reach down to the beauties and horrors of the deep? Human reason, a fluttering moth, can never soar.

Then what, I asked myself, was the appropriate attitude to the dark-bright, hideous-lovely Whole? Fear? Proud rebellion? Obsequious worship? Rather, I told myself, a difficult blend of acceptance in the heart and cold scrutiny in the mind.

Acceptance, merely? For a moment the presence of the Whole, or of some greater thing beyond the Whole, seemed to bear down upon me in inconceivable majesty. My heart whispered, “Thou! Oh, Thou!”

But immediately another thought, another prayer, was wrung from me. “Oh, let my heart strongly feel that presence, but let my mind be utterly silent before it. For even if I say, ‘Thou! Oh, Thou,’ I say too much.”

Praying in this strange way, I laughed.

Thereupon the Christian, mistaking my long silence and final bark of laughter, slipped his arm in mine and said, “My friend you have won through. Merciful Christ has saved you.”

But at his touch I had stiffened, and now his arm retreated. Our eyes met, and for a long moment each searched the other.

I was preparing to do battle against his proselytizing, and to conquer his faith. But his eyes checked me. For his Christ had indeed saved him from his self-loving despair; and without his Christ he might be lost. In his present state of partial waking (so I told myself, perhaps complacently) he could not endure the severer vision.

So I said, “You have been very good to me, and very patient. But the upshot is that your way is not mine. You need belief; for me it is unnecessary. Without it I travel lighter, yes and perhaps farther. Strangely, in my unbelief I gain full peace, the peace that passes understanding. And joy too. I have found joy in the sheer given reality, with all its dark-bright beauty. Light has come to you in one way, to me in another. And though you have not won me, I am grateful to you. Let neither of us grudge the other his vision.”

He was silent for some time. Then in a low voice he said, “I think you do not fully know what suffering is, and the illumination that it brings. May God take all joy from you, may he torment you as he tormented me, so that at last your eyes may be opened, and the true light may save you.”

Smiling, I offered my hand in parting. He gripped it, and we stood in silence. Then, he said, “God works in a mysterious way. If ever you need me I will help you.” And I, laughing, replied, “And if someday your faith fails you, remember there is another way, and perhaps I can help.” I left him.

Looking back, I saw him standing between the two stone angels, his eyes downcast, under the grooved archway, under the great west front that bombs had marred.

Well, I have told you. And in your presence my mind runs clearer. For now I see that, though on a certain level the truth was mainly on my side, it was marred by an unwitting complacency, an intellectual and perhaps a spiritual arrogance. I did not after all take deeply enough to heart my own mind’s inadequacy. Perhaps a more awakened consciousness would have seen in that Christian’s faith a deeper truth than in my skepticism. Was he after all right when he said that I needed more of suffering?

Perhaps! But even so, must I not at all costs be true to my own light, never pretending to reach farther than its beam can search? Yes, and I gladly choose the clear cold brightness of my vision, though darkness surrounds it. I prefer it to the Christian’s more comfortable glow and warmth. I am loyal to it because it reveals more to me and demands more of me.

A SCIENTIST (1976)

First published in ‘Four Encounters’

I HAVE MET a scientist, and now I must tell you about him.

It was at the party, the congested, the conglomerate party, where I was taken “to meet people.” If you had been with me, perhaps I could have made contact, but the man who had brought me was too soon swept from me by the throng’s glacier drift. The few whom he had burdened with me had tried to include me, but we could find no catalytic. I was a goat penned among sheep. The bleating was alien to me, though alas not meaningless. With each new guest’s arrival, the flood of sound rose higher. I was a trapped miner, the water rising toward his mouth.

Yet many of these people were individually notable. From press photographs I recognized a cabinet minister, two famous writers, a popular actress, an eminent scientist. Among the bright female silks and the male motley of black and white, there was a high ecclesiastic in purple tunic and breeches. His face was old sandstone, crowned with snow; and under the white cornices of his brows gleamed serpent eyes, of wisdom or of cunning. Individually distinguished, and leaders of my species in this island, why should these creatures seem to me in my loneliness a bunch of chattering monkeys?

Across the room, a young man stood alone in silence. His glass was empty. His cigarette ash dropped unnoticed. Intently, and with a secret smile, he reviewed the huddled flock. I thought of a sparrow hawk on a high branch, watching for prey; then of a mongrel terrier, scruffy, genial, mischievous, none too clean, with mud unnoticed on his muzzle. He was a raw-boned young man, wire-haired, with terrier eyes, and a complexion of uncooked shrimps.

I struck boldly into a current that was setting in his direction. When I had emerged beside him, I waited a little, for decency, and to recover composure; then I said casually, “Do you know these people, mostly? I am told they are all distinguished, all leaders of our society.” His response was delayed. Judicially, he replied, “Five percent, perhaps, I know; maybe seven. Leaders? Yes, of stampeding swine, heading for the precipice.” There was silence. “These occasions,” I ventured, “terrify me. Silly, isn’t it!” He answered at once, “Just boring, I call them. When I find myself stranded, I play a game. I study the fauna.” Silence fell once more, so I reminded him of my presence by remarking that a crowd of strangers did often strike one as mere fauna.

To my surprise he let loose a flood of fantasy, couched in a jargon that was consciously literary. “First,” he said, “I observe that these creatures are all specimens of Homo sapiens, and at bottom paleolithic savages, though tricked out modernistically in tissues of vegetable fiber or animal hair, or the secretion of caterpillars, with here and there scraps of hide, bits of metal, and a sprinkling of rare crystals. That priest in fancy dress is the successful medicine man, skilled in spells, the practiced ventriloquist who makes the great idol speak laws or threats. That major there, unbelievably kilted, I see as a tribal warrior, with naked cart-horse muscles and a girdle of scalps. That other’s waistcoated paunch might never have reached such magnitude in the hard early days of the species; but reduce it somewhat, and you have the bulging and sweaty headman of the tribe, already past his rule, soon to be done away with by the scalp-girdled one. In the corner, there, a born herd leader wallows in the admiration of those withered women and those youths. See how his ears are pricked for every tremor of opinion, how he laps up the public’s whims, to regurgitate them later as his own God-given gospel.”

I laughed, and was at ease, sharing the superiority of this little hawk on its high perch; or watching this queerly sophisticated terrier sniffing out vermin.

He continued. “Next I undress them, and see them all nakedly huddled together. And of course naked they really are. That woman with the creased face and bloody claws — I take off her fashioned dress and corsets to observe the sagging belly, the flapping dugs like empty hot-water bottles. The paunched headman, stripped of all trappings, becomes a sheer grizzled human gorilla. That young bitch of the species, all sexed up for market, is now unpainted, unpermed, disheveled, grimy with soot and grease and blood from her savage cooking. And how she stinks! Yet to the prime young male, there, the slut is a seductive morsel. See how he leans toward her! His nakedness betrays an excitement which clothes conveniently mask.”

I was enjoying his fantasy. It appealed strongly to the terrier in myself. But a vague protest was brewing in me. I thought of you, so real in person; beneath your simplicity, so complex; in all your doing, so well orientated to the spirit. Did this young man, I wondered, suppose that by stripping the human onion of its coats he would expose some indestructible core of brute humanity?

He continued. “The next gambit goes deeper. Take away from each of them all that is human. But preserve for identification some characteristic feature of each individual; for instance, that paunch, and that priestly dignity, and that lusty musculature. Let us operate on the asking bitch there. We must recreate the ape in her, or at least the subhuman, while somehow preserving the demurely lascivious expression of her whole face. First, then, thicken her, bandy her legs, tip her forward with knuckles to earth for support. Cover her breasts and her whole body with coconut hair. Cut away her saucy chin and her lips like fruit, and plaster them above her eyes to harden into a great brow ridge. Snip off her nose, revealing the septum. Forget there’s meaning in her chatter (if there is), and hear it as sheer auditory sex stimulation, almost as heady to the male as her sexual stink.”

He flashed a gleeful look at me; as though the terrier, in his enthralling investigation, had spared a moment to look round and say, “Good fun, isn’t it!”

He said, “When you have had enough of her in this near-human repulsiveness, you can amuse yourself by shrinking her to a little goggle-eyed wire-fingered tarsier, scampering along branches and twigs. Then, if you like, see her (always with her expression of veiled bawdiness) as the primitive, undifferentiated mammal. Or remake her still more radically to be a monotreme. Now the young male will have to be content with a cruder and less intimate sexual contact, since he must copulate without penetration. And she will lay eggs. It is a delicate but an amusing operation to remold that marble and sculptured human arm of hers stage by stage back to the sketchy forelimb of a lizard, altering the set of the bones, the proportions of each muscle. And for those Atalanta legs of hers (which one easily pictures under the silk dress) we must achieve a still more radical feat of plastic surgery, crooking them, splaying them sideways, reducing the plump buttocks almost to extinction, and parting them to make room for a great crocodile tail. Now watch her go slithering among (or over) her fellow reptiles, while the male, chained by the nose to the bawdy smell of her, slobbers along behind.”

He paused, and I sniggered politely, but anxiously. Again he shot his terrier glance at me and said, “You think I am unfair to her; but after all, that is what she really is even now, under the knickers and the brassiere, in spite of the breasts and the vagina, and the human hypertrophy of the cerebral cortex.”

All I could say was, “But if you take away so much of her, where is she?” He answered, “She, of course, is what we see before us and what I have laid bare; but what I have laid bare is the controlling mechanism of the whole system even now.” “But, but—” I said, and fell silent.

He resumed his fantasy. “The game can be continued indefinitely. When one is in the mood one can reduce the creatures to the amphibian, the fish, the worm, the microorganism. Or one may vary it by retaining their human shapes but seeing them inwardly as physiological going concerns. Under the skin see the blood-soaked muscles, pumping blood or air or words; or composing themselves to idiotic smiles or affected laughter; or churning food. The bitch, for instance, has a stomach, a muscular bag stuffed now with sandwiches and cocktails, which it assiduously mixes, till the pulp is ripe for passing down through the tangle of tubing that her neat belly conceals. Meanwhile that crumpled muscular hosepipe, seething like a nest of snakes, is probably dealing with a half-digested mess of chops and chips. And further still, the unwanted rubbish is collecting, to be ejected in due course into the socially approved receptacle. The creature also has a brain, a fantastically subtle texture of fibers, which even now are being activated in inconceivably complex and coordinate rhythms. Mentally these neural events have the form of (presumably) a perception of the young male as an eligible mate, and a using of every wile (primitive and sophisticated) to catch him. Meanwhile at the other end of her anatomy, stored in a recess convenient for access by the male seed, her egg is ripe. It is a pinhead; but it is a continent still mainly unexplored by science. Somewhere within its vast yet microscopic interior lie, meticulously located, all the factors for reproduction of her kind, and indeed of her own special idiosyncrasies, even down to that intriguing twist of the left eyebrow. And if ever she is so careless as to have a child, its whole physique and temperament will be an expression of the chancy collocation of genes (her’s and her mate’s) in the union of sperm and ovum; in conjunction, of course, with the appropriate environment.”

“You are very sure,” I said. He replied, “There is no certainty, but the probability is overwhelming.”

Then he started a new gambit, saying, “Now let us expose the bitch’s fundamental structure. It is an inconceivably complex tissue of the ultimate physical particles or wavetrains, say 10n of protons, electrons, positrons, neutrons and perhaps other units still to be discovered. Thus the bitch keeps her Atalanta figure, her human complexion, her fruity lips; but within their volume, within the contours of breast, buttock and so on, one must conceive a great void, fretted by midges of electromagnetic potency.” The young man paused, then concluded, “But in the end the game palls. It is the early moves that stimulate.”

His flight of fantasy seemed to have spent itself. Presently I asked him, “Are you a writer? You have a quick imagination, and you seem to care about words.” For his ornate and rather stilted speech had puzzled me. “God, no!” he said. “I am a geneticist, but addicted to verbiage off duty.” Then with a sidelong look to measure me he added, “A geneticist, you know, is a biologist who studies inheritance.” I replied politely that his profession must be indeed interesting, an endlessly enthralling adventure. He laughed deprecatingly, and said, “Counting flies with black tummies or misshapen wings, breeding monstrosities from nature’s well-tried normalities is humdrum work.” “But,” I said, “the significance of it all!” With a sigh he answered, “The minutiae are so exacting that one almost loses sight of the significance. But doubtless we shall someday produce human monstrosities, men with tails or two heads, or tricks like the waltzing mouse, or special lusts for obedience, or coal mining, or cleaning lavatories.”

Provokingly I added, “Or perhaps for the life of the spirit?” The words clearly jarred on his scientific mind, like obscenity in a church, or prayer in a laboratory. After a silence he said, “I have no use for words that are mere emotive noises without clear significance.”

We both fell dumb. Presently I ventured, “Tell me! What is your real aim in genetic research?” Without hesitation he answered, “To earn a living; and by work that is not too irksome. Incidentally, of course, impulses of curiosity, self-assertion, cooperation and so on find a healthy outlet.” I waited for more, then prompted him, “Is that all? Is there no sense of a calling, or participation in a great common enterprise?” After a further silence he said, “No! That is really all. But greater definition is possible. The study of inheritance appears to be socially desirable, for the advancement of our species. And I, as a social animal and humanly intelligent, direct my social impulses to that end — so far as this can be done without frustrating my far stronger self-regard.”

The slow swirl of the crowd had swept us into an alcove, and there, cast high and dry on a window seat, we were almost in seclusion.

I questioned, “What precisely do you mean by ‘the advancement’ of the species?” He lightly replied, “Oh, more pleasure and less pain for its members; and for this end more power over its environment and over human nature itself. That is where we geneticists come in. We seek control of other species for man’s sake, and ultimately the manipulation of man’s own genetic makeup, so as to abolish disease and all other grave frustrations, and to evoke new possibilities of pleasurable activity.” I asked if he would maintain that up to our day science had in fact increased the possibility of pleasure. “Surely!” he answered. “What with the radio, the cinema, improved travel and so on.” I added to his list improved warfare, industrial servitude, modern engines of oppression and mass production of stereotyped minds. But he protested that all this was the consequence not of science itself but of man’s foolish use of science. “Man’s purposes,” he said, “are in the main still primitive. Little by little science itself will change them. For science will become man’s wise ruler instead of his misused slave. At present the affairs of the species are directed by scientifically uneducated politicians, charlatans whose policy is determined merely by the need to pander either to the money magnates or to the ignorant swarms in the trade unions.”

I commented, “So you would have the scientists themselves rule society.” He answered, “Social affairs should of course be directed by the relevant experts in each field.” “And who,” I demanded, “is to control the experts?” “Why, of course,” he said, “the scientifically educated public. And scientists will have to see to it that the whole really educable population is educated scientifically. Surely that is the reasonable goal. Meanwhile, we must pin our faith to the gradual spread of the scientific spirit.”

I challenged him, “Are you really confident that science has increased men’s pleasure and reduced their pain? Are you quite sure that the medieval peasant’s life was less pleasurable and more distressful than the modern industrial worker’s?” With an affectation of patience, he replied, “All that we actually know is that the wretches were undernourished, undersized, crippled by disease, hard-driven by the landlords and the priests, tormented by religious superstition. Perhaps they enjoyed their condition, but it seems unlikely.” “On the other hand,” I suggested, “their environment was perhaps more appropriate to their biological nature than the industrial environment. They seem to have enjoyed the round of the seasons and all the varied processes of tillage. And they were securely anchored to the conviction that — well, that goodness mattered.” “Goodness,” he retorted, with some exasperation, “is another of those emotive noises that mean nothing. And surely it is well known that today primitive peasants all over the world (and they must be very like the medieval sort) are only too eager to give up their primitive ways and enjoy the amenities that science offers.” I answered, “Oh yes! The poor creatures are given alcohol and the cinema, and soon they crave these drugs, and succumb to them.”

Evidently my companion felt that he had proved his case, for he ignored my reply, and said, “But to return to the motives of the geneticist. He is mainly kept going by sheer lust of discovery. Intelligence, you see, clamors for exercise, even if only in crossword puzzles. But there is another motive. We crave power; and, being highly social, we crave it not merely in competition with others but also in the cooperative service of our species. At the back of all our minds, I suspect, is this sublimation of the crude lust of power.” I provoked him by enquiring if the will to serve the species could be satisfied merely by providing it with more gadgets, amenities, titillations. He shot a wary glance at me before replying, “In the last resort, I suppose, what we want to give our species is not just pleasure, just any sort of pleasure, but the pleasure of power, the satisfaction of the cunning and resolute animal conquering its environment. Evolution favors in the long run the more developed types, those that show more versatility and adaptability in securing power over the environment. Yes! We want to give man greater power over his environment. We want him to be master of his world, and perhaps of other worlds; and of his own nature and destiny.”

“But tell me!” I insisted. “What is he to do with his power? What destiny should be choose?”

The young man shrugged. “That,” he said, “is not really my affair. Presumably he should choose to make the most of himself and his world, to impress himself as vigorously as possible on the universe. You see, between organism and environment there is constant action and reaction. Through the pressure of man’s actual environment the universe makes man what in fact he is; and since, through automatic natural selection, it has made him sensitive, intelligent and versatile, he reacts strongly and effectively on the universe. What in the last resort he should choose depends, I suppose, on what his nature finally demands for fullest satisfaction, what in the last resort he pleases to do.” I said, “For you, then, the final criterion is always the feeling of pleasure. The question, what ought man to please to do, is meaningless. Have I understood you?” He paused before replying, and again he shot a wary glance at me. Then cautiously he said, “In a sense the individual ‘ought’ to serve the species; for only in the advancement of the species can he find the deepest satisfaction.” I asked, “But if he does not, as a matter of fact, want to serve the species, if he wants merely individual advantage and personal luxury, does the ‘ought’ not apply to him at all?” “In the final analysis,” he answered, “it does not. The statement that he ‘ought’ to do otherwise merely registers the fact that he is blind to the greatest satisfaction, enthralled to lesser pleasures, which if he were wise and resolute, he would sacrifice. Apart from this, ‘ought’ is meaningless, an outgrown relic of our subjection to parental authority and the convention of the herd.”

A little wearily, a little sadly and without facing me; a little in the style of the senior amiably condescending to the junior (though I was twice his age), he gave me a cigarette. The terrier had for the time vanished, and in its place I saw a bored old hound. We smoked in silence, watching the throng.

Presently I said to my companion, “You scientists, and above all you biologists, seem very sure that in the end you will be able to analyze out the whole of human nature, leaving no unexplained residue.” He replied, “Our confidence is strengthened every day. Anyone who spends his life on detailed, and on the whole impressively successful, analysis is bound to realize that the main mechanisms of human behavior are by now as well established as the principles of engineering. Genes, Mendelian laws, the central nervous system, hormones, individual and social conditioning leave no excuse for postulating a surd. Of course much remains to be discovered, but by now it is quite clear that our nature is strictly determinate, and systematic through and through.”

“To the cobblers,” I said, “there’s nothing like leather! How can you be so confident that science cannot mislead us. It does, of course, throw a bright beam in some directions; but does it, perhaps, impose a deeper darkness in others? May not the very fact of your absorption in the minutiae of your special skill have blinded you to other kinds of experience?”

The party was now disintegrating, and my companion rose to leave. He said, “It is of course possible. But science is a varied and a well-criticized discipline. And the beam searches in every direction. Success has been spectacular. It is difficult to doubt that the course of progressive thought will henceforth be set by science.”

As we were parting, I asked him to spare time for a dinner and another talk. Nonchalantly he accepted, and we fixed a date. As as afterthought he invited me to “look in at the Department first,” and he would perhaps be able to show me some impressive things.

In due course I appeared at his Department. He took me into a room lined with shelves that were loaded with bottles. In the center and also under the window were tables bearing many rectangular glass tanks, each containing in miniature the appropriate environment of some beast under study, and in each of these artificial worldlets the creatures listlessly lived.

My companion called out a girl’s name, and from another room came an undecorated but not ignorable young woman in trousers and a little threadbare jacket that coped gallantly with her ample breasts. With a man-to-man downrightness she gripped my hand, smiling firmly. But her lips in repose were luscious, and her eyes, though superficially sparkling, were deep as the Atlantic or the evening zenith. Her hair, glossy as old well-polished leather, was drawn severely back; but it too was of a generous nature, revolting against discipline. A heavy strand drooped over one ear, needing constant attention. A hairpin projected from the large but disintegrating bun on her nape. I confess her presence distracted me somewhat from the lowlier fauna.

The two young human specimens, prattling in their biologist’s jargon (sprinkled with modern slang) displayed their living treasures. Now and then they spoke of the great man who was their chief and their teacher. They spoke with most irreverent ridicule of his leaning toward religion and his faith in liberalism; but behind their words lurked awe and affection.

Toward each other, these two behaved always with the familiarity and swift understanding that comes to well-tried workmates; but also with a flow of genial banter that was evidently in some way necessary to them to preserve their independence from each other, and to smooth the flow of their common life, their queer symbiosis. For it was evident that in some way each depended on the other, and at the same time was defensive against the other. I soon noticed, too, a subtle difference in their behavior. While he negligently, almost unwittingly (or was he all the while consciously acting?), performed the ritual of comradeship, she responded with a friendliness that was deliberate and attentive. But I suspected an undercurrent of soreness.

Toward all their creatures, their foster children, they both behaved as though scientific detachment were awkwardly complicated by a sort of shamefaced parental fondness. I was indeed enthralled by their creatures; yet my attention often strayed to themselves, isolated for so much of their time here in this tank, this test tube; as though some superhuman experimenter had singled them out for study, hoping to gain through observation of their mutual reactions new understanding of the human species.

They showed me newts, lizards, frogs; and also (even more distant cousins of Queen Victoria and Jesus Christ) innumerable flies imprisoned in bottles. Some of these creatures were normal products of evolution; some were precious monstrosities, evoked by human ingenuity, and kept alive by a more than maternal devotion. Ordinary newts, with their bladelike tails and inadequate legs (as though copied from a small child’s drawing), hung suspended in the water, or glided through the subaqueous jungle, or clambered into the air. But a few were patently and shockingly not ordinary. One such creature miserably supported the burden of two heads. Another carried a half-formed twin attached to his back. Turning from these oddities, I was shown a normal crested newt (called Archibald). He was induced to display his flamelike ornament by the infuriating sight of his own reflection in a bit of mirror. An axolotl, a pallid and feebly animated sausage, inadequately quadruped, stared vacuously, unconscious of his significance for science. Little black lizards, mercurial in the girl’s warm hand, were slender as snakes. A unique snake displayed vestigial limbs. Toads lumbered over stones and herbage, bestirring themselves for the chopped meat that was dropped for them. Swarms of little crustaceans, mere fidgeting points of life, explored their bit of ocean or pond for food. Snails clung to leaves or stones. It was pointed out to me that the spiral of the shell was generally coiled clockwise, but occasionally in the opposite direction. And this oddity, I was told, was of special interest because its inheritance depended on the mother alone. The bodies of these creatures, it seems, are asymmetrical through and through, and the dextral and sinistral individuals are mirror images of each other. The young biologist delighted to explain that, since the genital organ is on one side of the head alone, dextrals and sinistrals could never mate with each other, but only with their own kind.

Throughout this scientific exposition, the two humans maintained their banter, snowballing each other with argument, evidence and technical terms. I heard much of allelomorphs, of dominants and recessives, of haploid, of polymorphic varieties, of the exact location of genes on chromosomes.

Leaving the tanks, the young man selected from a certain shelf a certain bottle. There were scores, hundreds, of such bottles, each housing a population of flies; and each population was the issue of some planned interbreeding. A whiff of ether reduced the selected population to temporary impotence, so that they could be poured out on a microscope slide for observation. As I peered through the instrument, the couple spoke of the minute significant differences that I should see, the ruddier and the yellower eyes, the hairy or bald bodies, the stumpy or long antennae, the serviceable or crippled wings. “We have now,” the young man said, “recorded nearly a million mutations.” His companion took up the thread. “Mostly they are lethal, or at best indifferent; but with them we have mapped out on the chromosomes practically the whole inheritance mechanism of this species.” He displayed a printed volume wherein all this work was recorded. “Someday,” he said, “our ancestors will have an equally full account of inheritance in man, covering his physical and his mental characters, down to the least idiosyncrasy. The job will, of course, be far more complicated; but there is little doubt that we shall in time analyze out the whole mechanism of human inheritance, and so the basic structure of human nature.” The girl continued the theme. “In the end,” she said, “we shall breed men as we breed horses and dogs and cattle, creating different types for different functions within the world society; lovers of the tropics and of the arctic, of mining and of flying, of leadership and of obedience, of creative action and of routine, of interplanetary exploration and of terrestrial homekeeping.” The young man smiled at me, and winked. He said, “She is rather uncritically sublimating her maternal instinct. Unconsciously, she would like to mother the whole lot.” The girl laughed, and replied spiritedly, “Muddleheaded amateur psychologist!”

The show was now over, and the couple were preparing to leave the Department. Taking his mackintosh from behind a door, the young geneticist said, “Well, now you have seen a little of our world, perhaps you can understand why we are confident in science.” I concluded my little speech of thanks rather tactlessly, by remarking that science had been said to give power without wisdom. He swung round and faced me to say, “Don’t you see that wisdom follows from power. The helpless savage has no wisdom. Wisdom arises only in civilization, and civilization is an expression of economic production.” Taking a final glance round the room, he opened the door, adding, “Of course there’s a time lag. And so long as our affairs are controlled by ignorant politicians there’s a real danger that the wisdom inherent in man’s new powers will be frustrated, and the species will destroy itself. Atomic power is a dangerous toy.”

I said we must pursue the matter over dinner; and I invited the girl to accompany us. She glanced quickly at her colleague, then refused, excusing herself on the plea that she had work to do at home. And so, after thanks and adieus, I took the young man alone to a restaurant.

My new friend sipped his sherry with serious attention, savoring, analyzing, registering the complex experience. Perhaps he noticed that I was amused by his earnestness, for presently he said, “It is wonderful how even the minor experiences repay observation.” “Yes,” I answered, “but if one attends too closely to some particular field of the universe one has no attention for others.” Sighing, he replied, “True indeed! I shall never be an expert wine taster.” “The great thing,” I suggested, “is to be sure that one has acquaintance with all the main kinds of fields. Specialism is inevitable; but without a comprehensive background it leads to disaster. “Once more the wary glance was shot at me. But he said only, “Of course! And the fields of science are now so many and complex that the scientific background becomes too huge to grasp. However, matters are simplified if one can rule out some great fields as bogus. It is fairly safe to ignore phrenology, astrology, primitive magic, alchemy, religious doctrine, spiritualism and so on; because all that is evidential in them can be satisfactorily incorporated in one or other of the ever-expanding fields of reliable science.”

I sipped the last of my sherry, torn between sympathy and revulsion for this hard young mind. I said, “Surely there are some fields in which science is inadequate, some spheres in which, though it can give a very plausible and up to a point useful analysis, yet one can’t help feeling that it misses the essence of the matter.” “Such as?” “Well, art, moral experience, personal love and what I am tempted to call the living core of religious experience.”

“How you cling,” he said, “to your illusions! Presumably you don’t claim that in the exquisite, almost mystical, bliss of drinking this sherry one must suppose some highfalutin factor that science cannot in principle account for. Then why must you suppose it in art and love and so on?” Laughing, I answered, “Of course in all experience there is something beyond the reach of science, namely the complete mystery of experience itself; but in some experiences the inadequacy of science is more flagrant than in others. You see, science can approximately describe your sherry-drinking experience in terms of sensation; but in art, love and the core of religion there are factors which contemporary science can neither explain nor adequately describe.” Holding his sherry to the light and peering into it with terrier eagerness, he said, “I claim that it does describe and explain the one sort of experience as effectively as the other. What it excludes is sheer illusion and superstition. Wine, women and song (meaning all art) and religious excitement can all be explained in terms of innate impulses and Pavlov’s great principle of conditioning.” Savoring his sherry, he added, “And give me wine, rather than women, because it doesn’t make irrational claims on one as they do; and the irrational, sentimental factor in oneself does not stupidly side with it, against one’s better judgment.” When he had chased the last fragrance of his sherry round his mouth, his lips settled into a pout. Feeling my way, I remarked, “Claims that are irrational to the fundamentally unattached individual may be quite rational where there is genuine love.” He expostulated, “Love! Another of those misleading and emotive words! If I love a woman, it is because my personality needs intercourse with hers for its fuller expression. Each is food to the other. Neither is really under any sort of obligation to the other, fundamentally, any more than I am under obligation to this soup, or responsible to see that it shall express itself fully.” “But surely,” I said, “you don’t suppose that love is just that!” He answered flatly, “Fundamentally, it is just that. But of course it gets overlaid by muddleheaded sentimentality. And of course it is a cooperative affair, and it won’t work unless each party shows a good deal of consideration for the other. The profit must be mutual. Further, we have social impulses, and up to a point each individual needs to regard the other’s interests, and the interests of the little group of two. But fundamentally, each remains an independent and self-interested individual. When a woman claims, as she is apt to do, that each should surrender individuality wholly to the other, that both should drown in the common life, she claims something that it would be quite irrational to give. But the hell of it all is that something in oneself takes sides with her, and in maintaining one’s independence one feels inadequate and guilty.”

We took our soup in silence. I thought of the love in my own life, of us, of you and me. How easily and plausibly our whole relationship could be stated in his language! And what rare good fortune that each of us should have turned out in the long run to be such life-giving food to the other! In excess, no doubt, we surfeit each other; and there are elements in each that the other can never digest. But in the main we are mutually nourishing.

But presently the thought that, after all, rationally I could not care for you at all save only as for my own person’s bread of life, not disinterestedly, not for your person’s intrinsic beauty, and that you also could care for me only in this self-regarding way, I found desolating. Surely it debased love to triviality, and the universe to futility. There must be more to it than that.

Presently I said, “When there is real love, very much can be willingly sacrificed for the common life; and with profit to the individual, though profit is not the motive. Very much can be sacrificed, but not all, not one’s life work, for instance. But much that was cherished may be gladly discarded. In love, as in religion, the primitive, self-absorbed self must be killed, that a new, more generous self may be born. And in love the new self is in a way a common self.” He pounced on me. “Sheer superstition!” he said. “The lovers remain completely distinct individuals. There is no possibility of a common self.” I answered cautiously, “They remain distinct as centers of awareness; but if indeed they love (or in so far as they love, for all lovers are also individualists), each cherishes the other without thought of profit to his own individuality. And each cherishes the little community of two. The common ‘we’ is felt by both to be more worthwhile than either of its members.”

With asperity he said, “Oh, yes, that does happen. But the cause of this seeming altruism is simply the fact that each needs the other for self-completion. The love that is unconscious of its own basic self-regard is silly, sentimental, irrational, neurotic; like a miser caring for money itself instead of the power that money brings. Just so, the silly lover may be conditioned to love the woman herself instead of the limited enrichment that his personality derives from her. We so easily trick ourselves into irrational emotions.”

Laughing, I taunted him, “Irrational emotions, apparently, are just those which seem unreasonable from the point of view of your theory that all human behavior is at bottom self-regarding. If you would abandon your theory, you might begin to know what love is.”

“Christ!” he said, fiercely cutting at the meat on his plate, “I do know what love is. I was married for love. It was good fun, too. In fact we enjoyed each other immensely. But little by little I found I was too deeply entangled with her. The common ‘we’ was wrapping me round with a web of subtle spider threads, and sucking the life out of me. I would soon be not myself anymore, but a mere part of that ‘we.’ It was a pleasant enough process, up to a point; but lethal to me, the real, hard, dynamic individual. So long as I was content to be not myself, I was happy in a drowsy, doped way. But sometimes I felt like murder; when she assumed that because I still needed a life of my own, she had failed me, and I did not love her. It was partly my work that she grudged, as something in me that she could not share. Worse, when I showed any interest in other girls, she went all tragic. But I hadn’t really changed toward her. I just wanted a bit of variety and refreshment. Well, it was clear to me I must begin cutting the threads. And to my horror I found that I bled at every cut. The irrational sentimentalist in me sided with her, and shrieked with her pain and my own.” He looked up at me, and quickly down again. He growled, “Oh, yes! I know love. It’s a parasitic disease. It gets into every cell of the body, till there’s nothing in one that is the undefiled ‘I’ anymore. However, I cured myself. I told her we were killing each other, and then I just cleared out, bleeding with love at every pore; but free.”

While I was wondering what to say, he began speaking again. “Of course, I soon found I still needed a woman. In the end I cautiously linked up with another girl. I told her straight what I wanted and didn’t want; just sexual companionship and no clinging. And she agreed, for she was a scientific worker herself. On this basis we had a lot of fun for a while; but now, hell, she’s beginning to want too much. And part of me wants to give it, and to be given it. But once bitten, twice shy. I’m keeping a firm hand on us both, for both our sakes.”

Throughout this long confession he had intermittently gobbled his escallop; and I, listening, had forgotten to eat. When his plate was empty, he looked at it with whimsical surprise and exasperation. “Damn!” he said. “It’s all gone, and I missed the pleasure of it.” We both laughed, and I attacked my food.

Presently I asked my guest to give me a clearer view of that “real, hard, dynamic” individuality of his. What did it really want for itself. “I have told you,” he said. “Power, mastery, scientific prestige, a sense of leaving my mark on human society by contributing to human knowledge.” Provokingly, I said, “But how irrational! Nothing of this sort is implied in your basic physiological structure. You should be seeking merely chemical equilibrium; and for that end, you should crave merely food, air, water and bodily sexual release of tension. The rest is sheer sentimentality.” He laughed. “You can’t catch me out that way. Evolutionary forces have given me a conscious nature that needs more than that.” I interrupted, warming to my theme. “Much more,” I said, “very much more! At every stage of growth we wake to some new range of awareness, become sensitive to some new, subtler features of objective reality; and from the new ranges of objectivity, new values emerge. The child begins to wake from the sheer animal values to the values of personality, prizing the ‘I’ and the ‘you,’ and the ‘we.’ Little by little he discovers society, with all its tangle of conflict and community. Later he may discover humanity, the whole species, with all the values emerging from mankind’s long adventure in self-realization in art and science and so on. And finally he may, or he may not, be invaded by the supreme values of, well, of the spirit.”

Throughout my monologue, the young scientist had seemingly been interested less in my views than in his fruit flan. But at the word spirit he looked at me with the intentness and awkwardness of a dog facing a cat. He said, “You see! Once abandon the attitude of rigorous scientific analysis, nothing prevents you from sliding right down into the slush of religion. From spirit to the Holy Ghost, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth and so on is a fatally easy descent. And what do you mean by spirit, anyhow? The word should be abolished.”

Challenged, I replied uncertainly, “I mean, not God, not a divine personality, but, well, the ideal way of life that the awakened mind cannot but will, when once this ideal has intruded imperiously into consciousness. I mean the way of intelligence and love and creativity, which, when we are fully awake, we feel to be in some sense what we are for.” He snorted with indignant triumph, but I continued boldly. “To betray this most lucid intuition is surely to betray something which presents itself to us as sacred. At present we cannot rationalize the experience; but it is far too illuminating and compelling to be denied for the sake of any of our ephemeral theories.”

He put down his spoon with emphasis. “Apparently,” he said, “you are a confused sort of theist. I prefer the more explicit sort. With them, one knows where one is.”

“My point,” I said, “is that I know nothing about any kind of Creator or universal personality or God, or about the universe at large, or the status of spirit in the universe. But one thing I do know. What I have called spirit cannot but matter supremely to all conscious beings capable of glimpsing it, wherever in all the wide universe they live. We are animals, yes; but also, in an important sense, we are vessels of the spirit. As for the universe, surely the most appropriate attitude is neither obsequiousness toward a supposed creator nor blind faith that at the heart of it must be love, nor yet the defiant self-pride in humanity, but rather a blend of rapt interest and strict agnosticism. Yet that is not really all. The fully awake human mind must surely feel a kind of dumb piety, an inarticulate worship.”

My companion pounced again. He protested, “Piety toward disease germs, worship of blindly destructive natural forces! No! I see no sense in it. Of course, perhaps irrationally, I feel a sort of piety or respect toward the human species, as the most developed thing within our horizon; merely because I have been conditioned by evolutionary forces to respect development. But beyond man, what is there? Just electromagnetic radiation, and the fatal law of entropy. I see nothing admirable in these. Piety toward the universe is just a cock-eyed relic of piety toward its supposed creator; and that, of course, is a relic of the child’s respect and fear of the father. No! The adult attitude is to face the universe dispassionately, wary against its brainless power, and quick to snatch advantage from it for one’s own and mankind’s advancement.”

In my turn I protested. “But think! We and the farthest stars are all of the same stuff. If in our tiny bodies it can reach such organization and development, should one not feel a certain awe at the immeasurable potentiality of the cosmos?” He answered, “I, more realistically, regard it merely as a huge field of natural resources awaiting exploitation. Of course, there may be other intelligent species here and there, up and down the galaxies, some perhaps more intelligent than man. But what of it? They are beyond our reach, and I hope we are beyond theirs. If ever we do meet, we shall probably destroy each other. Anyhow, there’s our own solar system. Think of the resources awaiting us in the other planets! They will keep us busy for thousands of years, perhaps millions.”

Again I protested. “Surely this cult of mere power is trivial. Have Christ and Buddha and the philosophers lived in vain? Can you really have such faith in contemporary scientific ideas? You yourself insist that our science is only provisional and may have to be revolutionized.” “Sure!” he answered. “But I can’t forestall its development. I must be true to its present findings. Of course, I may extrapolate the course of research a little. I may feel fairly confident that we shall in time possess the whole solar system, or control human inheritance. But I must not open the door to wild superstition and romantic fantasy. To do that would be to betray my most sacred values.” “Oh!” I remarked. “So you have sacred values?” He answered gravely, “For me personally, intellectual integrity is sacred. But I have no wish to impose my own subjective standards on others.”

We sipped our coffee. Betweenwhiles the young man blew perfect smoke rings, projecting some of them through their widening predecessors. He was justifiably proud of this feat; and he enjoyed my smiling admiration.

He said, “I am creating universes, one after another. The primal nebula, each time, is shot into existence from my divine lips, assuming the form they give it. Then it passes through determinate changes, imposed on it by its own physical nature, spawning galaxies of stars, and a few intelligent races. Little by little the law of entropy irons out all differences of potential, freezes out all its intelligences. The frostbound worlds roll aimlessly on. Here and there, maybe, the smothered ruins of a city runcle the snow blanket. Little by little the galaxies disintegrate. The whole universe is dissipated. Meanwhile I have already created its successor.”

“A good symbol!” I said. “You should have been a poet.” He answered with emphasis, “I prefer more serious work, and better paid.”

I remarked that his universes had a creator. “Yes,” he said. “And he creates them not in order that they may achieve developed mentality or spiritual awareness or whatnot, but for lack of anything better to do; and perhaps to show off.”

At this, a destructive impulse seized him. Scarcely had each annular cloud started on its career when he annihilated it with a wave of his hand.

I suggested that perhaps the great universe itself might also have a creator. “The hypothesis,” he said, “is unnecessary. There seems to have been some sort of a beginning to the present order; but before that, probably something like a reverse process held, with contrary natural laws. Anyhow, what matter? We cannot reach back that far. And if there was a creator, he must have been less intelligent even than this one. At least, I see no evidence that he had any intelligence at all.” I suggested that, if indeed there was in any sense a creator, his intelligence probably so far outranged human intelligence that his purposes and methods would be incomprehensible to us. “Of course!” the young man said, with a smile that was half a sneer. “But that is just fantasy. One might just as well suppose him inferior to us, or that he created merely for the fun of destroying, and tormenting.”

Saying this, my cynical friend shattered his last universe, then grimly stubbed out his cigarette. “Look!” he said. “I must go. I have a date. Thanks a lot for the dinner.”

A MYSTIC (1976)

First published in ‘Four Encounters’

I HAVE MET a mystic, and now I must tell you about him; a modern mystic, revolted against the modern world.

To fulfill my treasured appointment with him, I was hoisted by elevator to his sky-scraping retreat at the summit of a crag of flats. Strange cell for a contemplative! His room was large and well-equipped. His carpet was moss to the feet; his great chairs, buoyant. On the mantelpiece a small stone Buddha smiled privately in this alien place. On the wall opposite, a Tibetan painting embellished holiness with a wealth of colorful detail. I noted that this treasure did not quite cover the trace of some larger, banished picture. The third wall was books. The eye noted familiar titles of recent literature and of popular scientific works, signposts for the troops and civilians behind the advancing fronts of physics, astronomy, biology, psychology. On the handiest shelf, psychical research jostled with the classics of mysticism. Here, many volumes still wore their dust covers. The fourth wall, all window, revealed as from an aerie the curved and many-bridged, the barge-thronged and tug-disturbed river; an ancient and parasite-infested reptile, gliding through the press of buildings down toward the sea.

Enter the mystic. But could this indeed be he? A spare, stooping figure, his face wan wax, a little sagging; his hair retreating from the global brow and touched with gray; his eyes pale, glacial, but lit (so I told myself) with an interior frosty flame; his lips, though smiling, cheerless; almost, one might say, a child’s mouth, but hardened by some adult constraint. He gave me a negligent hand, then sank us both into the chairs. “Cigarettes,” he said, “are beside you, if you smoke. I don’t.”

To make contact, I praised his room. He said, “I used to like it. But now — I have seen through it.” To my questioning look, he answered, “Its comforts were a snare, its modish treasures poisoned trinkets. Now, its walls are all diaphanous to reality.” I glanced at the great window, but he promptly said, “No! That view also, formerly so stimulating, now jejune, has turned diaphanous; like a pale design on the window itself, too faint to obscure the brilliant, the emphatic reality beyond.”

Leaning toward him, I said, “I have often wanted to question you about the reality beyond. I have read your latest book, with admiration, but” — I smiled— “with a certain misgiving.” I noticed that he did not respond to my smile. He replied, “To understand it properly, one must first have something of the experience that prompted it.” Respectfully I commented, “You, of course, speak with authority, from the experience itself, not from hearsay. But the very clarity of your vision may perhaps make it hard for you to realize some of the difficulties of the novice. One reader, at any rate, cannot be sure whether he himself has something of the experience, or not.” The mystic interposed, “If you really had it, you could not doubt; any more than in full sunshine one can doubt the light.”

Silently I studied my host: his downcast eyes, his pale soft hands folded in his lap. Could this, I wondered, be indeed a seer? Or was he a mere charlatan, deceiving alike his public and himself? Or was he, perhaps, both seer and charlatan at once? Outraged by our society’s vulgarity and heartlessness, had he indeed seen what was lacking, but facilely misdescribed it in terms once vital, now outworn? And this humorless gravity, this self-importance? Could this be compatible with vision?

I said, “Much in your book is echoed in my own experience; but the cosmical meaning, the metaphysical significance, which you find in it, goes far beyond me.” With a shade of impatience he answered, “If you had seen clearly, you could not have missed the meaning. The full experience is to be had only after severe discipline, even mortification.” “Now there,” I protested, “is one of my difficulties. When I tried mortification of the flesh, I felt surprisingly foolish. And far from being freed from self, I became obsessively self-engrossed. Moreover, this violation of the body seemed somehow a treason, a misuse of the spirit’s delicate physical instrument. Altogether, that approach I found perverse and rather messy.”

The mystic raised his eyes; and the cold fire was for a moment projected against me. But he spoke quietly. “Mortification,” he granted, “is dangerous. It may become an addiction. But where there are more enthralling addictions, mortification of the flesh is the way of life for the spirit. Those who suppose the body’s own life to be itself spiritual merely give a fine name to filth, to excuse their wallowing in it.” I felt the color rise in my face, but I said nothing, and he remained for a while silent.

Suddenly and surprisingly he extended toward me a deprecating hand, and appeased me with a twisted but a genial smile, accepting me as an equal friend. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was priggish and offensive. I still have to watch myself.” This gesture I met with adequate friendliness.

There was again an awkward silence, which at last he broke by saying, “Look! We are getting nowhere. I feel that you are sincere, and if I can I must help you. Let me break the ice by telling you frankly about myself. You probably know that quite recently I was a self-indulgent and futile intellectual. I guzzled pleasures. I gave each impulse free rein. And I secured many little sweet personal triumphs. For instance, I became expert in wine tasting; and I tasted also woman after woman. I was a dilettante in art, and quite an authority on African carvings. But, as you know, my main interest was to figure out the whole pattern of modern culture, and thereby to interpret man to himself. But man was for me nothing but myself writ large, a creature myopic and voracious, caring only to impress his own personality on the universe. For at heart I worshipped only my own exquisite person. Blind to reality, I regarded myself as the most real thing. Godless, I became my own God; though of course I named my God ‘Man.’ And how I cherished my freedom, the freedom of the irresponsible individual! So (how apt fate’s irony!) it was freedom that diabolically enslaved me. The spirit in me was imprisoned, cramped and crushed within my own blinded, paralyzed, festering, stinking personality. Then little by little all my pleasures and personal triumphs turned to dust. I began to be nauseated by my own triviality. I was seized by an obscure but wholesome yearning to give myself to something other than me, other than man; and more admirable. Hitherto, though I had always some vague perception of such a thing, I had anxiously, though unwittingly, ignored it. But now, in the pit of my misery, it revealed itself a little more clearly. I was sitting in this very chair when I first glimpsed the truth, about reality and about my abject self. I was settling down to plan a brilliant and discreetly devastating review of a rival’s book. Suddenly, as though a hand had gently checked me and swung me round to face in a new direction, I saw that my intention was trivial and base. I saw it in a new light. I saw my whole life in a new light. I saw the difference between the worldly and the spiritual. And I saw that everything in the universe must be judged in this new light. Call it the light of the spirit. And in that light I saw myself as — loathsome. Well, after that I began to take a firm hand on myself. I scrutinized my every act, my every motive; denying my greedy person its filthy satisfactions. But I was moved to go farther than this. In the past, physical pain had always been too much for me. I could not endure it as others endured it, and I saw no reason to make any effort to do so. But now, I was impelled to use pain for self-mortification. I did not, of course, inflict on myself any extravagant torture. Indeed, I could not have driven myself so far. But the little discomforts and brief torments that I did impose on myself in that early stage were useful. Maybe, for you, who perhaps are not so deeply sunk in filth, they are not necessary.”

He was silent, and I wondered whether there was irony in his last remark. Presently I asked if he still continued to practice mortification.

“Not of the flesh,” he said, “or only on occasions when the flesh raises its foul head again. By now, I seldom need that first crude discipline. And to practice it longer than is necessary is to succumb to a new addiction. Permanently, the spirit masters the flesh not by mortification but by strict rationing of its pleasures. A horse, once broken in, need never again be thrashed; nor even checked with the curb, but merely with a firm hand on the snaffle. The master may even occasionally encourage it with lumps of sugar, and with comfort in the loose box. But I, though I had broken in the flesh, had still to conquer the self, to mortify the person. I had strictly to forego those unseemingly personal triumphs, which formerly I had so vaingloriously relished, those vyings with other individuals, ostensibly in service of man, but in fact for sheer masturbatory self-indulgence.”

“Surely,” I suggested, “you are unfair to yourself. A certain temperate self-satisfaction is justified incidentally, when talents are well used.” He answered, “But they were not well used. Personal vaingloriousness, far from being incidental, was my whole aim.”

Before I had thought of an answer, he continued. “In another sphere also I have had to mortify the person. There is a woman for whom my untamed self felt not only bodily lust but also personal love. Our natures were complementary and mutually stimulating. Indeed, little by little we had become warp and weft in a single textile. She was for me, if not the only woman, at least the only woman whom I could permanently enjoy. So a little while before I began to see the light, I brought myself to consent to marry her; for I needed to experience (even at some sacrifice) domestic peace and responsible parenthood. But presently, in the dawning light of the spirit I all too clearly saw that this seductive personal accord was itself a snare. I had pursued it merely for its promise of self-increase. Here, therefore, was the supreme opportunity for mortification. Having already foresworn bodily intercourse with her, I now brought myself to foreswear personal intercourse also. I shall now never see her again. Nor shall I see the child whose conception was an added reason for our marriage.”

At this point the mystic rose from his chair and paced the room, saying, “It was torture to leave her, and a shock to discover how deeply she had enthralled me. Even now I have not entirely killed my poor self’s longing for her. But the struggle has steeled me. It has both clarified my perception of the spirit and strengthened me to consecrate myself single-heartedly to the life of the spirit.”

At this moment, I remember, a herring gull sailed indolently past the window on wings that millions of years had perfected, and months in the city had soiled. Its predatory beak and innocently greedy eye were displayed in a brief closeup.

Throughout the mystic’s confession I had been torn between respect and revulsion. This heroic self-denial! Yet this fatal self-absorption! I asked myself, did he indeed love the woman, or merely think he loved her? Had he, I wondered, any inkling of what love really is? A surge of horror forced me to speak. “The woman,” I said, “the future mother of your child, how she must have suffered!”

Again he subjected me to the frosty flame of his glance; and after a small silence he said, “She agreed entirely that I must at all costs be true to my new calling. For the child’s sake we went through the form of marriage; and then we parted. It was, of course, a heavy blow for both of us. And for me it was intensified by natural sympathy for her in her distress. I settled on her practically all my capital, reserving for myself only enough to launch me on the new and starkly frugal life that I had chosen, and shall now very soon begin.” He studied my face for a moment, and observing that I was still shocked and perplexed, he smiled. Was it, I asked myself, as friend to equal friend that he smiled? Or was it condescendingly, as one might smile at a child who cannot grasp the solution of some simple puzzle? Gently he said, “My conduct seems to you self-centered, barbarous. Clearly you have not yet gone far in perception of the spirit; and so to you it appears that in abandoning a cherished person I violated something sacred. For we human individuals, you may say, are bound together in unlimited mutual liability. And above all, you may contend, where there is full personal love the obligation is absolute. And so it is, save when the spirit dictates otherwise; as Abraham knew when his God ordered him to sacrifice Isaac. He was confronted with the supreme paradox, namely that at God’s command he must do the very thing that God forbids. Having faith, he chose to obey in virtue of the absurd, as the greatest of the Danes has said. Absurdly he knew that, since God willed it, all must somehow turn out for the best; even for Isaac.”

The mystic stood in silence, with his back to me, and I murmured that I was repelled by so terrible and dangerous an attitude. He faced me. “Terrible, yes,” he said, with surprising harshness. “Dangerous, yes! A fatal snare for self-deceivers! But true!”

Then in a milder tone he added, “And think! If I had done this thing for national service or military duty or to immolate myself for some important and dangerous scientific experiment or (if you happen to be a communist) to devote myself to the revolution, you would have joined in the chorus of praise.” While I was still wondering whether this was true, he continued, “Well, I did it in order to devote myself wholly to the greatest cause of all, the life of the spirit.” The mystic smiled again; and I could not but recognize in his smile a great tenderness; and also a wistful anxiety.

Distressed at my own perplexity, I studied the luxuriant pile of his carpet as I answered, “I do not doubt the sincerity of your devotion, but, well, in the first place I suspect that some of us are apt to sacrifice too readily the immediate and concrete personal obligation to some more doubtful and less urgent, though loftier claim; whether patriotic, social, cultural or whatnot. But let that pass. Clearly there are occasions when the beloved must be sacrificed. And I am certainly in no position to judge you. But—” I was at a loss to explain myself. The mystic settled once more in his chair, supporting his chin in his hand, and gazing fixedly at me. Our eyes met once more, and neither flinched. At last I said, “I am daunted by your assurance, by your certainty that your new self-dedication to the spirit is not, after all, self-regarding, and the subtlest snare of all.”

Gravely he said, “I know well that spiritual pride is of all sins the most elusive, and the most difficult to eradicate. It is like couch grass interlaced among a rose tree’s roots. But there come occasions when we must simply have the courage of our convictions, and face the consequences. Let me put it this way. Only the divine psychologist can know whether in the last analysis my act was true or false. But for me, the situation was in all simplicity this: I heard a call, and I responded. Now if, after all, that call was illusory and my act false, what is the upshot? At the worst, one individual spirit (namely myself) is damned; or rather one very incomplete individualization of the eternal reality is gravely retarded in its age-long search for salvation, or more precisely in the task of self-transcendence and reawakening as the universal spirit; and another individual, namely my wife, is hurt for a few brief months or years. But what are years when we are concerned with eternity? And may she not use this moment of suffering for speedier self-transcendence? On the other hand, if the call was indeed what it seemed, the true and urgent call of the spirit, of reality demanding unconditional service and single-hearted devotion, then my renunciation was right. And I am convinced that this is the case. The spirit calls me, and I must relentlessly obey.”

I murmured that I admired his confidence even while I doubted its justification. He answered with startling emphasis, “Good God, man! It’s not a case of confidence but stark perception.” Then more calmly, “Through fasting and sexual abstinence and mortification, I tell you I saw the truth which alone gives meaning to our confused consciousness. And so I could not but do as I have done. The truth took hold of me. The spirit dictated to me.” “What did you see?” I demanded, not without roughness.

He answered promptly, “Fool, how can I tell you what I saw? How can I describe sight to the born-blind?” Then gravely he said, “I saw all time comprised within eternity, all individuals comprised within the eternal individuality, all loves as modes of the eternal spirit, all wisdoms as themes within the ineffable wisdom.” Quickly I pounced on him. “Honestly, now, did you really, really see all that?” The mystic was silent, and I waited, while the city’s clocks struck the hour. Then slowly a smile of equal brotherhood reconquered his face as he said quietly, “No, I did not really see all that. But honestly, honestly, I did begin to see. I saw enough to know that such all-redeeming truth can be seen. Someday I shall see more.”

For a moment his eyes were raised to the little Buddha, then lowered to his folded hands. The three of us remained silent. Outside, the sad murmur of the city was punctuated by the occasional horns of cars; but within the room silence was a presence. And silence paralyzed my tongue. But my mind still stirred; for I noted that the mystic’s expression mimicked the temper of the stone features very faithfully. Was this similarity, I wondered, conscious; or was it the unconscious and spontaneous manifestation of an inner spiritual likeness?

I found courage to speak. “The difference between us,” I said, “is perhaps simply that your vision is clearer, and so you are more confident of the spirit’s demands on you. But there is one question that I feel bound to ask. As I see it, the life of the spirit is essentially the life of love, of concrete active love of individual persons, and so of active goodwill toward all men. Therefore, what is demanded of us is effective service of the whole terrestrial company of persons. The spirit, as I see it, is not for the isolated individual but for individuals unified in fellowship. Now I can see that we must sometimes sacrifice the immediate concrete personal love to some kind of larger social service. But to sacrifice it to the pure life of the spirit — what does that really mean?”

Once more, silence. Presently the mystic spoke again, in a voice that was colorless. I wondered whether this was because he was so held by his vision of high truth that he had little attention to spare for me; or whether his mind was empty as a child’s repeating a difficult and imperfectly remembered lesson. “The life of the spirit,” he said, “is different for different levels of lucidity. For ordinary unregenerate persons it is simply the way of personal love and honest social service. But on the highest level, the life of the spirit is not action but pure contemplation. Those who are not reborn live in the error that the world of sense perception and action, and of individual persons, is real. They so wallow in the sensuous and the sensual life that it engulfs them. They are as obtuse to the higher ranges of the spirit as an ape to mathematics. Now, I do not contend that the world of the senses is evil in itself. Nothing is evil in itself. But to the spirit in each of us, striving to waken and be the eternal spirit, the world of sensation is a diabolically enticing snare, an exquisitely sweet poison. And the world of persons is equally an illusion and a snare. But through mortification and ‘self-naughting’ one may reach a state in which not only the whole furniture of earth but also the whole seductive choir of sentient individuals are felt to be a mere clinging mud, holding the spirit down from soaring into its true element. Soon, if one perseveres, the temporal and sensuous veil, with all its bright hard sequins of human individuality, begins to wear thin; and the sequins turn out to be no more than ephemeral sparkles in the universal tissue. At last the phenomenal world becomes little more than a mildly distracting irrelevance; save in so far as it is an imperfectly transparent lens, through which reality is to be seen.”

Against this view my heart protested, and my reason reached for its trusty weapon of skeptical argument. “But, but—” I said. “Our perceived fellow mortals, to whom you admit we owe a duty of love and service, must surely be more than phantoms. How can we owe duty to a phantom? And anyhow, what adequate reason have you to be so sure that your seeming vision of ultimate reality is not itself a mere figment of your own mind, and far more illusory even than the sensed world? I recognize that in attempting to describe your vision to me you are bound to falsify it, since human speech is utterly incapable of signifying what lies wholly beyond the range of normal experience. And because you can never describe it to me, I can never appreciate what it is that you are describing. But there is another, more serious, difficulty, which, I think, you yourself have to face. You obviously cannot even think about your vision save by means of human concepts and therefore human language. Well then, can you be at all sure that your interpretation of your wonderful vision is not utterly false and sheer illusion; far more false than the sensed world and the world of concrete persons?”

He looked at me searchingly before he replied, “The vision itself can no more be illusion than uninterpreted warmth or color or mathematical necessity can be illusion. The interpretation too, though it may be profoundly inadequate, cannot be false in essentials. The reality of all else must be judged solely by the touchstone of the vision. As for concrete persons, they are of course not wholly unreal. They are illusory only if they are taken to be what they seem, self-complete realities. They are in fact manifestations of the spirit. For that reason, and for no other, we owe them duty. We, who are ourselves illusory individuals, are yet real manifestations of spirit; and as such we are under obligation to those other manifestations over against us in the illusory world of time and physical phenomena. Our separateness is illusory. And this is how it comes that spirit is not for the isolated individual but for individuals together in community.” I would have spoken, but he continued, “And as to your skeptical doubt of the hidden reality, I can only repeat that if you had indeed seen, as I have seen, you could not doubt.” Again I would have interrupted, but he overbore me with the flow of his own speech. “In the light of the vision it is patently clear why persons matter, and love and all community matter. Persons matter not in their own right but because they are manifestations, very imperfect manifestations, of the universal spirit. And love matters not because it is of service to individual persons, nor yet because it has survival value for society, but because in love spirit, transcends the illusion of separateness, and reaches out to itself in the other. But see! The purest life of the spirit is not in active personal love, though this is indeed the window through which the spirit first appears. The purest life is in contemplation; in contemplation and responsive worship of the spirit itself; culminating in complete self-transcendence. Then comes the eternal moment, the dying of the trivial person, and the waking into the all-embracing eternity of the spirit. It is evident, is it not, that in this supreme experience love itself is transcended. Love is good because in its imperfect way it is a transcendence of individuality in communion with another individual. The Christian ‘love of God’ is good because it is an obscure yearning for union with the universal spirit. But in the final experience, in the completed transcendence of individuality in the universal spirit, love itself is left far behind; outgrown, in the perfect self-contemplation of the universal spirit.”

Ending, he raised his eyes again to mine. Such was their peace that I felt myself to be in the presence of one who had been in the Presence. Yet something in me that I dare not, must not, flout protested insistently against his jargon. Seeing me still in doubt, he smiled, “It is difficult,” he said, “to grasp this truth. Well I know how difficult it is for those who are still enthralled by personal love, and dare not outgrow their dearest treasure for the sake of the supreme experience. But the sacrifice is demanded.”

How I longed, and how vainly, to know whether this professed mystic was indeed speaking from some all-clarifying experience withheld from me, or whether he had merely bemused himself with too much uncritical reading. How I longed to know whether, in loving you, my best loved of all, I love simply a unique particular being, or (unwittingly) the universal spirit uniquely manifested in you! But indeed, I love you both ways, both for your individual self and as a symbol of the very spirit.

I answered him, “I can see, or at least doubtfully glimpse, truth in your contention. But tell me! (For you have not really answered my question.) If, as you admit, spirit is not for the isolated individual but for individuals in community, is it not essentially for lovers, and in the last resort only for the love-knit community of mankind? And if so, must not the life of the spirit necessarily issue in some sort of social service? If it rejects social service, must it not necessarily be false to itself? Surely, if the individual withdraws from the struggle for a good society in order to seek private salvation in the spirit, he is guilty of treason to the venture of creating a truly spiritual order here on earth. He is no better than a soldier who, at the height of the battle, when every hand is desperately needed, slips away to a quiet place, to enjoy reading the classics of mysticism.”

“You are clinging,” he said, “to a half-truth. If society is suffering from a mortal sickness, and the cause of the disease is sheer spiritual obtuseness, if society is already tearing itself to pieces in maniacal pursuit of false ends, then clearly the only important social service is for the few elect (who see what is wrong) to segregate themselves for spiritual purification and increase of insight. Later, when the time is ripe, and men are at last sufficiently nauseated by the effects of their own madness, these few elect, or their successors, may return once more to the sick society to become radiating centers of lucidity, and to lead mankind once more toward the light. Or, if it becomes clear to them that the sickness is incurable, then their whole task lies with themselves, namely to advance as far in the spirit as is possible to them.”

From some neighboring room in the building came the sound of a girl’s laughter. It seemed a sudden, teasing splash of water, with the sun in every drop.

“And which,” I asked, “is the case of our world today? Is there hope or are we doomed?”

He answered, “I do not know. The disease is grave. One thing I do know; the time is past for palliatives. Politics and social reconstruction do not go to the root of the matter. The only hope, and it is a forlorn hope, is spiritual regeneration through the work of a dedicated few. And by now the whole atmosphere of our world is so poisoned that the few must first withdraw themselves for purification. So long as they remain members of a corrupt society, they themselves will remain subtly corrupt. When at last they return, purged and fortified, they may be able to save mankind from its own folly. But I doubt it. Human society as it exists today looks doomed, looks damned. Moreover, quite soon a few whiffs of atomic power will probably end man’s history. Today, social reconstruction is a repairing of the cabin furniture while the ship is already breaking up on the rocks. On all counts, ours is a time not for works but for faith and prayer.”

Did I or did I not catch a faint but unpleasant odor of self-complacency in all this talk? I said, “It is certainly fashionable to say that our present society is damned. And yet I wonder. I have come across so many people who have been shocked by the horrors of our time into a kind of bewildered spiritual shame, a sense that their own lives and other people’s have been wrongly orientated. Perhaps, sick as our world is, it is just at the point of turning the corner to recovery.”

My host surprised me with a laugh. “When people are badly scared,” he said, “they often turn to what they call religion, hoping to save their skins for eternity. But their change is not necessarily a spiritual change at all. It is just a prudential move. No! I see no sign at all of a real spiritual change, save a steady change for the worse. Having denied the spirit, and given themselves over to wallowing in the slime of sense and self, they are blinded and suffocated by their own filthy little persons. They are so far sunk from spiritual awareness that they idolize personality, sheer individual selfhood. They affirm that every individual is an end in himself (whatever that means), and that the universe is essentially a place of individual soul making, under a God who is the supreme person. And in their indulgence in self-gratulatory worship of individuality, they actually suppose themselves to have far-reaching spiritual vision. But this wrong-headed cult of personality, this idiotic ‘personalism,’ is a will-o’-the-wisp, sidetracking such feeble spiritual awareness as is current today. As for the masses, they are of course merely obsessed with bodily pleasure, chiefly sexual, and the puerile excitements afforded by mechanism. Their spiritual leaders have betrayed them. They are hopelessly caught among the cogwheels of the silly toy that the smart alecks among them have invented. The press, the cinema, the radio, the aeroplane and now atomic power are today very effectively destroying man. And what matter? If man is past saving, the sooner he destroys himself the better. There is at least a satisfactory poetic justice in his sordid tragedy. He is getting what he deserves, and getting it in the neck. So to hell with him! Other worlds and other races will perhaps be better instruments of the spirit; are perhaps already so, or have been so for aeons and aeons.”

During this invective I had felt an increasing discomfort. No doubt mankind was indeed in a sorry plight; but that the mystic should feel so hotly, so spitefully, about it seemed incongruous. This modern Isaiah, like all his kind, lacked charity. Yes, but a cold voice within me demanded, “Do we, any of us, deserve charity?” At once another, gentler voice replied, “No! Yet to withhold it is to fall short of the spirit.”

Something else also seemed lacking in the mystic’s attitude. I said, “You condemn the life of the senses as a snare, yet surely in a way, as you yourself have hinted, it is only through the life of the senses that spirit can manifest itself. Indeed spirit, so far as I can see, is essentially a way of behaving, not a thing or substance; and for us human beings it is a way of behaving in relation to each other and the whole universe primarily through the medium of the physical. And though, of course, we may in some sense kill the spirit by wallowing in sensuality, yet also, for the clearly conscious individual, sense perception and muscular activity may be experienced sacramentally. There is some kind of important truth in the contention that even the humblest physical action, when done ‘for the glory of God,’ is a spiritual act.”

My companion would have interrupted, but I was enjoying myself and would not be checked. His fingers drummed soundlessly on the chair’s padded arm.

“You yourself,” I said, “must surely have known moments when some sudden gleam of sensuous beauty or some excellence of muscular skill has come with a feeling of religious exercise, as a symbol or epitome of the right relation between individual and universe. The proportions of a leaf or a bird’s wing, a view of hills and clouds, the accurate thrust of a spade or the aesthetically right ascent of a rock — these may sometimes afford a striking experience of, well, of revelation and of right orientation. No! I cannot believe that the world of sensation is not a vehicle of the spirit.”

“Oh!” he said. “It is, it assuredly is. But only to those who constantly look beyond it. If you take it at its face value, not as a symbol of the spiritual, it becomes a mere flypaper for the silly buzzing self. You cannot see it truly and value it rightly till you have killed in yourself all greedy addiction to it. But of course, of course, it can be a vehicle of spirit; a rather crude and gross vehicle, but authentic in its way, and all we have for setting us in the right course.”

I was appeased, but not wholly satisfied. I said, “You must surely admit that creative art is among the highest spiritual activities. And the artist’s whole concern is to make a pattern of sense experiences, a spiritually significant pattern, maybe, but a pattern to be perceived by the senses.”

The mystic looked sharply at me. “In the last resort,” he said, “everything is spirit. There is no other thing than spirit. But some actualities embody the universal spirit more completely and significantly than others. Art, of course, is a relatively developed spiritual activity. But it can become a diabolic snare, when it holds the individual back from loftier, more deeply spiritual behavior. And nine times out of ten, that is what it does. Only those who have outgrown the snare of art can see it in true perspective. The sheer artist can never do so, just because he is enthralled to the sensory. All art, when it is more than a means of self-display or of self-indulgence, is at bottom a childish play activity, a sophisticated doodling with colored shapes, or tones, or the intricacies of verbal association, or the silly undirected dream stuff of the unconscious. Fundamentally, all art lacks seriousness.” I glanced at his Tibetan picture, which though it praised the spirit, reveled also in charming intricacies of color and form. The mystic added, “Religious art alone is serious, using the sensory strictly for a spiritual end.”

I protested that Shakespeare, Bach and Michelangelo did not seem to lack seriousness. He answered, “They play with seriousness, they play with the spirit. For all of them, it’s the game that counts. Of course they fulfill a useful function on the highest of the lower levels of experience. They help the weaker brethren to rise beyond the quagmire of mere sensuality and mere utilitarian praxis. But so long as the artists remain mere artists, their whole attitude is at bottom (from the more lucidly spiritual point of view) frivolous.”

This arrogant condemnation so bewildered me that for some while I remained silent. But even while I condemned it as insensitive and complacent, I was teased by a suspicion that, in the light of some experience withheld from me, there might nevertheless be a truth in it. Indeed, even I had some disturbing glimmer of that light.

However, I could not help being outraged by the mystic’s calm rejection of the existing world of men. Or was the secret source of my exasperation no more than resentment at his assurance, and at the disturbing possibility that he had indeed seen the glory that I should never see? Churlishly I remarked, “So you intend to wash your hands of us all and let us stew in our own juice while you save yourself.” “Yes,” he answered, firmly but with a most unexpected twinkle in his frosty eyes. Then he voiced a thought that I had refrained from expressing. “I shall be a rat with the sense to leave the sinking ship.” I asked how he intended to escape, and how he would disinfect himself of all taint of us.

“You feel indignant,” he answered, smiling with one of his odd gleams of friendliness, “but believe me I am not seeking mere personal salvation. I am simply loyal to the dictates of the spirit. I shall withdraw, hoping to return, strengthened for helping. What I shall do, along with others, is the only possible way to save mankind. You probably know that groups of the dedicated have already been founded. I am not satisfied with any of them, so I am planning to found (along with others who feel as I do) a minute community dedicated to the spirit, and far out of reach of the modern world’s infection.”

I could not resist saying, “It sounds like Shangri-la.” He answered rather wearily, “It does, of course. But this is the real thing, and no mere fantasy.”

I asked him how his community would maintain itself alive. “Some of us,” he said, “are farmers, some craftsmen. All of us can work. We are buying land in a remote but temperate country. A few of us are experienced writers. We shall not hesitate to use our art for the twofold purpose of spreading the truth and eking out our slender livelihood.”

Surprised, I ejaculated that to do this must surely involve continued commerce with the wicked world. He answered, “The printed word and royalties are the modern equivalent of the mendicant friar’s preaching and receipt of alms.”

Cynical thoughts occurred to me, but I said only, “How on earth did you catch your farmers and craftsmen?” Still amiably, he answered, “Countrymen, you know, are often nearer to the spirit than townspeople. We have found among the many who are blind a few who at least are groping. As to status, our new friends will of course be equal to us in brotherhood. In practical matters they will be our masters, but in spiritual matters leadership will be ours, since we shall be the recognized interpreters of the spirit.”

A laugh escaped me; but he said, “You are cynical, because you have not access to the experience that unites us all in spiritual brotherhood.”

The mystic told me a good deal more about his projected community, but I did not attend very carefully, for I was anxiously and vainly debating with myself as to whether he was authentic. So much in his character and his attitude seemed unlovely; but a new and deeper awareness seemed striving to transform him.

I had risen and gone over to the great window to look more closely at the unhappy world that he was renouncing. The crowded roofs were a sea of tumbled lava, or the puckered crust of some insect’s teeming comb. They extended in all directions to the horizon, spiked here and there by spires and factory chimneys. Beneath each covering of slate or tile the little personal creatures were probably everywhere scheming to snatch some particular joy. And everywhere the sick world either withheld the prize entirely or yielded it up infected with the universal plague. Across the river, giant posters blared of beer and whisky, lipstick and laxatives. In the nearby railway station a locomotive, starting, snored successive columns of steam unto the still air. Each mushroomed slowly. Below me, by the river, cars were bound on their thousand trivial or self-important errands. Idlers leaned over the river wall, watching the freighted barges, the pleasure steamers, the gulls, which from my lookout were mere grimy snowflakes. A public lawn was starred and crescented with flower beds. Voices of playing children pierced the snarl of the traffic with sparkles of sound. Lovers, minute as pairing chromosomes, lay full-length together. Prisoners of war, demolishing an old air-raid shelter, were ants, enslaved by an alien species. They bore witness to our world’s disunity, and to our heartlessness. On a nearby building, the flag of island freedom, but also of imperial tyranny, mocked their slavery.

Presently I noticed that many faces were turned upward. Following the direction of their gaze, I saw, high on the steel skeleton of a burnt-out building, a tall crane. And on its crest a man was straddled, air-surrounded, his feet dangling in the sky. Leaning forward and downward, like a horseman sabering foot soldiers, he was battering with a great hammer on stubborn metal almost beyond his reach. The bare muscles of his shoulders glistened with sweat. Below, the upturned faces waited, held by vicarious fear, or by admiration, or the unacknowledged lust to see him fall.

This whole world of massed human individuals grappling with the physical, would soon be abandoned by my companion, and with little regret. Idlers, toilers, children, lovers and that sweating Thor riding on the machine were for him all damned, because all enthralled by the physical. And though he payed homage to love, he felt (or so I guessed) no warmth of compassion for this doomed city, this doomed world. How could it be otherwise? One does not pity a shadow. And all this was for him but a shadow, a veil of illusion drawn between him and the reality for which he yearned.

I could not wholly doubt that the mystic had experienced some deep significant fact. Indeed, in my hesitant way I too had experienced something of it. But though logically his withdrawal might, I told myself, be justified by his supreme experience, I was repelled by his readiness to abandon the damned to their fate. Spirit, we had agreed, was for individuals in community. To withdraw from the concrete community which gave one individual being, even to withdraw for the sake of a future and better community, or even for the sake of the pure spirit itself, smacked of desertion. My heart protested, if our world is damned, let us all be damned together! And yet I had to admit that if his vision was indeed authentic and rightly interpreted, his course was right. And yet, and yet … This yearning for the reality behind appearance, this readiness to sacrifice the actual to the ideal, smacks unpleasantly of the blind old cult of progress, and faith in a far off millennium. That the heaven is to be had here and now, and eternally, makes no difference. Cosmical piety dictates that I, a finite and ephemeral being, shall not lust even for union with God or the universal spirit. If at heart, though unwittingly, I have that unity all the while, well, it is so. But to lust for it is surely an addiction, a greed, and the subtlest betrayal of the spirit. Rather, “my station and its duties.”

But the mystic would reply, and not without reason, that this craving for union with God or the Whole was not a mere individual’s craving; it was the urge of God in him to wake wholly to his godhead.

Well, let each of us be true to his own light. But for me there must be no withdrawal. Let me live somehow in the two world at once. Immersed in the temporal, let me nonetheless look with a far-seeing or an inner gaze on the eternal. Let me indeed see the eternal; but I must find it within the temporal, not beyond. The grit and hardness of the rock under the climber’s fingers are not phantom. If he thinks them so, he is lost. Yes, and his goal is no cosmical panorama from a summit perhaps inaccessible; his goal is the climbing; to adapt himself, body and mind to objective reality, and thereby to express the spirit in him. This; but also (in sidelong glances only) to be as aware as may be of the depth below and the sky above, and the whole horizon of mountains. This, surely, is the truth that you and I together have conceived, each contributing. Is it not so?

I found that the mystic had left his chair and was standing beside me, considering my face, and smiling. “My way,” he said, “is not yours; and yours, not mine. Be true to your own light, as I shall be to mine. There is a place for both our kinds.”

Gently, he took my arm and led me to the door.

A REVOLUTIONARY (1976)

First published in ‘Four Encounters’

I HAVE MET a formidable young man, a revolutionary, and I must tell you about him.

I had left the car in the ditch with its bent front axle. (How machinery can fetter us, not only by its promise of ease and power but also by its helplessness when broken!) A passing lorry brought me to the town. The first garage refused the salvage, being shorthanded. The second offered to bring the car in at once and to repair it next week. And there was I with my engagement next morning and my journey scarcely begun! The third also refused; but in the end the boss, a genial creature, clumsily acting the part of a go-getter, agreed to spare me one man on condition that I myself, since I claimed to be not entirely without experience, should work as his (unskilled) assistant.

A pale young mechanic was summoned. He had a slight limp and the face of a nun; or perhaps rather an abbess, for it combined purity and authority. His challenging eye surprised me with an occasional sharp twitch of the eyelid, which at first I mistook for a wink. His hair, plastered but unruly, had broken rank. A heavy lock drooped over his brow. I thought of the trailed wing of a damaged bird. Raven, I wondered, or jackdaw? And was the hurt actual, I foolishly wondered, or feigned to distract strangers from some secret treasure? He regarded me as though passing a private and unfavorable judgment on me, glancing at my hands. My smile won no response.

Presently we were in the breakdown lorry, with its crane, a megatherian but jaunty tail cocked up behind. A sparrow perched for a moment on its crest, but took wing when we started. To make conversation, I told about the accident, explaining that apparently the steering gear had broken. The mechanic said only, “We shall see.” And without shifting his eyes from the road he winked, or so it seemed. Perplexed and disconcerted by his taciturnity, I apologized for fetching him out in filthy weather. He answered, “I’m paid for it.”

When we had reached the crippled car, he expertly examined the trouble, while I put on my overalls. Presently he said, “Steering seized up and broken. Steering-arm bolt sheered. The joint has been parched for oil.” His raised eyebrows censured me.

When the crane had been maneuvered into position, my companion crouched on the wet grass to fix the chain for lifting the front of the car. I stood by, willing but unhelpful; gloomily studying the scurf in the young man’s hair, and a gnat that had lost itself in that black jungle. After a good deal of manipulation and removal of obstacles, he succeeded in looping the chain round the axle; then he invited me to turn the windlass of the crane while he kept an eye on the car’s hoisted head. The wheels were soon free of the ground, and we swung the crippled vehicle round into line for towing. The mechanic mounted the lorry’s driving seat. I took up my position beside him, producing cigarettes.

On the slow journey to the garage I attempted several gambits of conversation, from the weather to politics, from the flicks to the economic crisis. His responses were perfunctory and brief. At last I challenged him on more intimate ground. “Do you like your job? It must be tiring, but it’s good skilled work, and socially useful.” He laughed sourly. Then after a pause he said, “It’s all right.” I did not pursue the matter. It was as though I had been vainly knocking at a shut door in a shabby street; suspecting, moreover, that I had caught sight of someone watching through curtains.

In the garage, with its hum of machinery, clatter of metal, smell of exhaust gases, and an occasional splutter of curses from a mechanic at work under a nearby car, we set about dismantling the axle.

I must tell you about the work in some detail, even if it wearies you, because I cannot give the man without his environment; and the main feature of his environment was the all-pervading and exacting presence of mechanism; of sick machines, which imposed trains of meticulous activity upon their human doctors and nurses.

Our task, for instance, was quite a complicated one; and I soon found that in the twenty-five years since I had tackled this sort of thing techniques had changed. We had to take off the two front wheels, disconnect the track rod, remove the damaged bolt from the steering arm, and substitute a new one. Then came the operation of relieving the axle of its two stub axles, those great hinges on which the wheels turn sideways for steering. Finally, we had to unscrew the four stirrup bolts that hold the axle to the two front springs. Then at last we should be able to undertake the job of straightening the axle. There was also a damaged wing to be roughly repaired.

I regarded the operations ahead of us with exasperation and gloom, for to me they were just an irrelevance. But my companion attacked the work with quiet relish, or so I inferred from his loving way of handling the tools, and a certain firm delicacy and rhythm in all his actions.

While he worked on one side of the car, I hesitantly and clumsily attacked the corresponding member on the other side. He, of course, was always ahead of me. Sometimes, if he saw I was in difficulty, he would come round to help me. Once, when I felt him watching my awkward movements, I was flustered and let my spanner slip, barking my knuckles. To my surprise he said, consolingly, “Bad luck! The best of us do that sometimes.” Then he added, with a new friendliness, which however was salted with sarcasm, “You don’t handle the tools quite like a novice. Learned the tricks of the trade on your own car, I suppose?” I told him vaguely that I had spent most of the First War on cars, and a short spell in a workshop. He made no comment.

Well, after a lot of struggling and sweating on my part we had the freed members all parked by the garage wall, and the mutilated front of the car looking rather like a skull with no lower jaw. We also removed the crumpled wing; and then we carried the axle to the forge and settled it snugly into the coals. I, unbidden, took charge of the bellows, while my colleague piled on more fuel and made ready the blacksmith’s tools. Then he waited, and we both watched the rhythmically increasing glow. Producing from within his overalls a small green packet, he offered me a cigarette. I said, “I don’t seem to have much wind to spare at the moment.” But I accepted the fag, and put it behind my ear. I saw him smile to himself at this too consciously proletarian gesture. Then, taking a long pair of pincers, he picked out a bright coal and lit his own cigarette. For some time he watched me critically. Presently he said, “You have forgotten the trick. Don’t work so hard at it. Let her keep her own rhythm.” I slowed down; but my action remained awkward, for I was self-conscious under his scrutiny. Presently he relieved me at the bellows, and we both smoked.

Anxious to seem thoroughly at ease, I remarked brightly that I was rather enjoying myself as a garage hand. He replied, “Just as well, since you’re not paid for the job.” Uncertainly, I said something to the effect that it was good practical skilled work, and that watching him I couldn’t help feeling he enjoyed it himself. To this he answered rather violently, “If you had to stick to it all day and every day, you’d soon get fed up with the whole bloody life.”

I was disconcerted by the note of anger in his voice. To my clumsy reminder that he had said his work was “all right,” he answered, “At bottom it’s all right, and it might be grand, but—” He eyed me as though debating whether to be frank or not, but remained silent. I queried, “Conditions bad?” “Good enough,” he said, “but, well, society makes the whole thing all wrong.” To my silly grunt of sympathy he replied hastily, “Oh, I’m well enough fixed up myself, really. The boss is all right, as they go. Might be a real good sort if it weren’t for his false position, as employer. The pay gives me all I need, for the present. But, hell, what’s it all for, the work, I mean? You said it was socially useful work, and so it might be. But the actual aim, naturally, is just to put money in his pocket, and to—” When I goaded him to go on, he said with sudden rage, “To help people like you with plenty of money to waste society’s petrol on amusing themselves.”

He looked at me with the cold gaze of a duelist who has drawn blood and is ready to parry the counterstroke. But I merely laughed off my small wound and said, “I see.” He continued to oppose me with his rapier glance, and presently he said, quietly, “You might get me sacked for that.” “That way,” I said, “I should earn the contempt of a man I respect. Even if we are on opposite sides of the class war, which we’re not really, we can treat each other with the respect due from person to person.” He threw the butt of his fag into the forge. “Persons!” he snorted. “Cells in a sick society, nothing more! We are determined through and through by our social conditioning, and mainly by the thought forms imposed on us by the economic circumstances of the particular class to which each of us belongs.” Once more the wink. He added, “Of course it’s not really your fault you’re a cell in the cancer lump; nor any credit to me that I am a humble muscle cell, and relatively sound.” Again the wink.

By now, however, I was beginning to tumble to it that his prodigious wink was involuntary. All the same, I had a strong feeling that in some way it was significant, though unconsciously. Throughout my dealings with him his false wink falsely gave the lie to his manifest sincerity, and falsely invited me to laugh at his most treasured convictions. It was as though, deep within him, some buried self were humorously and forlornly signaling behind the other’s upright back.

At this point he deserted the bellows for a moment to readjust the axle’s position in the forge. He turned it over. The part that had been submerged in the coals was already dimly glowing.

When I could turn my attention from considering his eyelid’s queer behavior, I said, “You think we are wholly shaped by our class ideology, but what about Lenin? He was a lawyer, not an artisan, yet it was he that led the worker’s revolution.”

My companion embarked on a harangue. He even forgot to work the bellows, so I silently took his place. “Yes,” he said, “the more alert among the bourgeoisie sometimes react not merely to the circumstances of their own class but to society as a whole. For the workers, of course, there’s really no conflict, since the interest of their class is identical with the interest of society. But you comfortable people find it almost impossible to see beyond your own noses, or rather beyond the interest of your own reactionary class. The few who do succeed have all had some shock or other to wake them; like Lenin, who was outraged by the government’s murder of his brother. Even so, we find that all but the very great ones (like Lenin) remain hidebound by their class ideology. At heart, you see, they never really get beyond being mere liberals. When it comes to the point, they funk the revolution, on the plea of forbearance, or Christian charity, or the inevitability of gradualism. And so they do more harm than good.”

I remarked to my companion, with a sarcasm that failed to touch him, that he seemed to know all about it. He answered, quietly, “I read the one newspaper that champions the workers; and I watch people. In fact I keep my eyes open. And the great revolutionary writers help me to understand what I see.” I asked him if he was quite sure that they themselves understood, in any deep way. Without taking his eyes from the axle, he said, “They explain human behavior realistically, in terms of the economic motive; and in the long run this is all that counts, for the understanding of history. This goes deep enough for anyone who is concerned with social action.” Once more the wink attacked him, and he impatiently rubbed his eye with his bent forefinger. I pointed out that the workers were far from being united in favor of the revolution which was to put their class in power. “Of course,” he said, with an impatient glance at me. “Of course! They’re hampered in two ways: by sheer blind stupidity, which prevents their seeing through the smoke screen of capitalist propaganda to the true interest of their class; and by antisocial self-interest. For the sake of individualistic dreams they betray society by violating their own social nature. You see, in the last resort the fully enlightened self-interest needs must identify itself with the interest of society; and so with the interest of the working class, which is the interest of society. Maliciously, I added, “In fact the only way to personal salvation is to recognize that we are all members one of another, and to live wholeheartedly for love.” I chuckled. “Put it that way if it amuses you,” he said, “but I prefer more scientific language. It’s more precise and less misleading. Love is just a subjective emotion due to glands and so on. For action one must think in terms of objective historical forces.”

I protested that even expert historians disagreed violently about historical forces. “You’re right,” he said, emphatically. “It’s because they can’t see the wood for the trees. At one time, when I was little more than a raw adolescent, I had a craze for attending evening classes. Specially after the military had refused me because of my stiff ankle. I felt I wanted something to live for, so I decided to live for the truth.” He laughed at himself. “I began with a course on history and found Henry Ford was not far wrong when he said history was bunk. That sort of history was bunk. I also tackled psychology, thinking it would go deeper. In a way it did; but it didn’t help me to understand the social mess; and it was social truth I wanted. I even began on philosophy; but, hell, it was all just playing with words. At last I tried a course in economics. The tutor seemed very worried about one Karl Marx, so I started reading Marx on my own. That introduced me to a new sort of economics and history; yes, and philosophy, too. It all made sense, fell into a pattern. Of course I realize now that old Marx is not infallible. But he’s dry and scientific and unsentimental. And he gives you something big to live for and fight for.”

At this point sunlight broke through the murky garage window and lit up countless motes in the air, so that a wide slanting shaft of light reached to the forge, turning fierce coal and axle into a mildly radiant living thing, into a glowing heart of love. The mechanic, a half-seen ministering figure, bowed over this tender being, his nun’s face lit from below by its radiance. The rest was darkness. Then the sunlight vanished and with it that strange nativity.

The young man now put on more fuel, and then relieved me at the bellows, saying simply, “My turn, now.”

Presently my mind reverted to a phrase that he had casually used. I said, “About this ‘illusion of individuality’? What do you really mean? After all, you and I aren’t illusions, are we! Individual conscious beings do exist, don’t they? There’s no denying that. And the state, thank God, is not an overmind.” He answered with a teacher’s patience, “Yes, but the individual is not a tight little pea rolling about on a plate with other peas. He’s just a node in the social tissue, just a knot in the great net of society. Without society he’s nothing. (How do they put it?) He’s a focal point where social forces determine consciousness. Of course society is just made up of individuals, as a net is made up of knots; but it’s society that matters; the net, not the knots.” Against this view I protested. I said I could understand the view that nothing mattered, but that society, as such, should matter, rather than individuals, seemed to me a crazy notion.

Thinking of you and me, of our long growing-together, with its joys and pains (its growing pains), I had a sudden ridiculous vision of your face all puckered with amused exasperation when the milk boiled over before you could reach it. How could the loved individual behind that face not matter, I said to myself, inwardly laughing.

But aloud I said only, “Surely, surely, it’s people that matter, and loving some of them. Yes, and all the workings of creative imagination and creative intelligence. All these matter, absolutely. And nothing else.”

For a moment my companion paused in his work, and I seemed to hear a tremor in the breath that he took. Gently he said, “You have got it all wrong, comrade.” (The word had slipped out, and he smiled at his mistake.) “Nothing matters absolutely. Good and bad are relevant to human wants. And of course what we all want is happiness, and to love and all that. But when you begin to understand historical forces, you find you don’t want the old sort of happiness (personal success and love and so on); you want happiness for mankind as a whole. You discover that what matters for you is not just yourself, not even Tom, Dick and Harry, or all selves, but the whole social tissue of individuals. Each of us matters only insofar as he fulfills a useful function in the whole.” Interrupting, I demanded, “And what is ‘useful’?”

For some moments he was silent, staring somberly at the forge. Then he said, with some exasperation, “We all know well enough what is useful, because we all know what it feels like to be frustrated. At any rate, the workers do.” This answer did not satisfy me. I said, “But when the revolution has done away with social frustration, then what is useful?” Again he fell silent. Then he answered, dully, “That’s really a false question, because we can’t imagine ourselves into that time. New needs will always arise with the increasing complexity of society. But presumably, in the last analysis, what is useful is whatever is needed for fulfilling the dynamic potentialities of society. These include cultural activities like art and science, but the final sanction seems to be just power to dominate the nonhuman environment, power to organize the whole world for human living.”

When I protested against this lame conclusion he answered hotly that the whole question was purely theoretical and sidetracking, and couldn’t be answered in any significant way. Then he turned from defense to attack. “Anyhow,” he said, “what sort of answer is yours? You say individuals matter. They do, to themselves, and sometimes to each other. But seen in a wider context, seen from the point of view of society, seen objectively, they don’t matter in themselves at all. From the point of view of the hive, the individual bees are mere organs, mere cells in the social tissue. If we were not essentially social by nature, expressions of the social environment, there might be some point in each one’s trying to be a perfect little flower of personality, like a woman caring only for her own beauty, and for admiration. But, Christ, how dull, how bloody dull that sort of thing is! And since we are social, how mean and evil it is too, in the only true sense of the words.”

Without a pause he said, with a roughness that was at once exasperated and genial, “Come on, mate, this thing is about cooked now. Quick! Give me a hand.”

We seized the axle with long pincers and lifted it from the forge. The crooked region glowed like a bar of sunset. Its surface was sprinkled with brighter sparkles. We fixed one cold end in a vice and tugged at the other with levers, to straighten the glowing crook. Conversation ceased. We strained and sweated; but the brightness faded to a ruddy gray before the main bend was even roughly straightened. My companion let go, remarking, “The bugger’ll have to be cooked again. Come on, we’ll give him hell this time, comrade.” We both laughed, and I said, “Right, comrade! We’ll liquidate the stiff-necked reactionary.” We carried the axle back to the forge, and again I took up my place at the bellows, while he settled the bend snugly into the red hell and put on more coal.

I challenged him. “What sort of a revolution is it that you want, and are presumably working for?” He seemed to be musing, for he ignored my question. I repeated it. Still musing, he said, “Of course an easygoing revolution would be pleasantest; but no ruling class ever gives up without a struggle, so probably there’ll be bloodshed. As soon as the government brings itself to do something really revolutionary the bosses will begin to take action with tanks and machine guns. And then, of course, they will have to be brought to heel with superior force. But of course the government may not ever do anything revolutionary.” He fell silent, but when I prompted him, he said, “Then a resolute minority, knowing the need of the people better than they do themselves, may have to seize power. And if America tries to stop them, Russia will help them.”

“Good God!” I said, laughing uneasily. “You’re a dangerous fellow! So the resolute and far-seeing minority are actually to force the masses to have what is good for them, even at the risk of a world war.”

He came to with a jerk. “Hell!” he said. “I meant it all in the abstract, of course. How did you get me talking this way?” I eagerly explained that he was talking this way because we had made a real personal contact, and so we couldn’t help trusting each other. He staged a bitter laugh, and said, “Trust you? You’re one of them, not one of us. I have no reason to trust you at all. You may be a bloody spy for all I know.” The wink closed his eye for a full second.

In silence we both watched the brightness of the forge wax and wane in time with the bellows. Once more the axle became a bar of sunset. I suggested that we might now complete the bending, but he said, “No! It’s still only orange; we must bring it up to primrose if we can.” I redoubled my effort. Sweat streamed into my eyes and was salt in my mouth. “Let me have a turn,” he said. And as we changed he gave me a child’s shy smile. After we had put in a little more strenuous work on the bellows, the axle achieved a dazzling brilliance. “Now!” he said; and we hastily set it once more in the vice. Once more we levered and tugged, till he was satisfied that the true shape was restored. Then we took the axle to the anvil; and while I held it in position or turned it according to his orders, he gave the final touches with a hammer. The trailed wing of his forelock quivered with each blow. His pale face glistened with sweat. Presently he flung the hammer aside, saying, “That’ll have to do. The thing’s as stiff as a corpse again.” He straightened himself, wiped his sweating hands on some waste, and blew a droplet from the tip of his nose. Our eyes met, and he grinned with schoolboy satisfaction. He said, “If only we could make the new world that way, with anvil and hammer, instead of machine guns, and people squealing in pain! But what history demands, must be.” “Rot!” I retorted, as we laid the axle aside to cool.

This was the moment when I burnt my wrist. I grazed it against the hot axle and let out a yell. I apologized for my clumsiness and assured him that the hurt was nothing. In a moment my companion was transformed into a sister of mercy. Taking hold of my forearm with gentle hands, he examined the burn; and a surprising little cry of sympathy escaped him. Then with a motherly tenderness that I found embarrassing, for the hurt was indeed trivial, he murmured comforting words as though to a child that had bruised himself. He hurried away and returned with a first-aid outfit. He washed his hands in a tin basin with “Gresolvent,” and then with carbolic soap. Soon he was applying some ointment or other to my wrist. Lint followed, and cotton wool. Then with firm but delicate touch he wound a bandage round the wrist and through the fork of the thumb. Expertly he divided the end of the bandage and knotted the two strands round the wrist, with the knot well away from the damage. He laid a caressing hand for a moment on the finished work. The gesture combined tenderness and pride in artistry. “That’ll be all right,” he said, “but don’t use it too much for a bit.” It was as though he were a great surgeon examining a patient recovering from some ticklish and successful operation. Our eyes met, and he must have seen my embarrassment, for he said, apologetically, “One can’t be too careful,” and added, “I wish I could have been a doctor.”

Turning brusquely from me, he drew from an inner pocket a large old watch on a strap, and ejaculated, “Jees! It’s dinnertime.” I asked him to be my guest at a meal, but he refused with some return of hostility. He insisted on washing my hands for me. We took off our overalls; and as he seemed to be dawdling impatiently I tactfully left him.

After the gloom of the garage, my eyes contracted to cope with sunlight. The air sparkled with a shower of diamonds. The wet street gleamed. The tawdry facades displayed a real though borrowed glory. For even a poor little north country work town can be transfigured by celestial stagecraft to suggest the New Jerusalem. The faces of the people, homely but sunlit and freshened, adequately simulated pilgrims newly arrived in heaven. Their terrestrial clothing, their shawls, cloth caps, frayed mackintoshes and wrinkled or laddered stockings had still to be transmuted into the raiment of the blessed, but they had arrived in heaven. Closer inspection shattered the illusion. A policeman was admonishing a peddler. An old beggar held out a cap containing a nest-egg penny. A queue waited for rations. A news vendor displayed a poster announcing “The Atom and Russia.”

Presently a more pleasing vision attracted me. A girl was distributing leaflets. She was a gallant little figure in gray trousers and a scarlet waterproof jerkin. Her dark hair, a halo in negative, gleamed with raindrops. With every leaflet she gave also a smile such that no man could resist, and surely no woman either. Some recipients of her literature studied it with care; some, after a mere glance, crumpled it and impatiently threw it into the gutter. As I approached, she encountered a woman carrying a baby in her shawl. I was following in the mother’s wake, and I saw the young amazon’s smile change. When my turn came and I was reaching out my hand for the leaflet, our eyes met; and for an instant, before the appropriate gaiety was restored, I was arrested by the depth of sorrow in that young face, so that I did not at once take hold of the paper. She pushed it into my hand, wrinkled her nose at me, reconstructed the smile, and turned for the next victim. Walking away, I read, “Protest meeting against dismissal of strikers,” and so on. I put the leaflet in my pocket and continued my search for an eating place.

When my solitary meal was over, I hurried back toward the garage. Presently I found that I was overtaking a linked couple. There was no mistaking the red jerkin and the dark orb of hair. As I drew nearer I recognized that the man was my mechanic. He was talking earnestly to her, and from time to time I saw his ascetic profile lit with love. I slowed my pace and turned into a side street to allow them to reach the garage before me.

When I arrived, the young man was already at work. He had fixed the car’s damaged wing on a bench and was carefully flattening out the puckers with a lead mallet. His smile of greeting was genial. He said with mock censure, “You’re late! You’ll be losing your job.” Then he deserted the wing, and together we carried the cooled axle to the car, propped it roughly in position with blocks of wood, and began to refit the stirrup bolts. We worked in silence for a while, my companion seeming disinclined to talk. But his silence was not hostile, as it had been earlier in the day. My mind’s antennae reported him as friendly, but absorbed.

When the axle was fixed, we attended to the steering arm. The sheered bolt had to be driven out of the socket with a punch and hammer, for rust had gripped it. When this was done, he cleaned the socket and oiled it, and lifted the whole stub axle back to the car to fit it in position once more. I followed suit with the other one. We inserted the bolts of the track rod. I was working at high pressure to keep pace with the more skilled man, but he said, “Take it easy, mate! You have a damaged wrist. I’ll do the final tightening, to save your straining.” This he did; and when the job was finished, he kept pushing the whole mechanism to and fro on its hinges as though anxiously testing the steering. But I could see that he was absorbed in his own thoughts.

Presently, without raising his eyes, he said, “You think I’m heartless about individuals, but I’m not. My trouble is that I am far too much tangled up with individuals. I’m not really ‘possessed’ by the revolution, as some of the comrades are. I try to be, but I can’t be; not really.” I waited for him to continue; and after a long pause he said, “Of course I do whatever has to be done. I have a reputation to keep up. But I have to force myself all the time. Outwardly I’m the leader, and they say I’m steel-willed. Inwardly I’m quite different. How Lenin would despise me! And because I know he would, I have to drive myself harder and harder. And that makes me drive the comrades hard, too. Sometimes they grumble, sometimes they slack, but I can always kick them into action again.”

He rose, and fetched one of the wheels, and began to work it into position on a stub axle. I dealt with the other; in silence, for his confession intrigued me. But he did not continue it, till I had said, “Tell me more, if you feel like it.” Presently he said, solemnly, “I have a girl friend.” For a moment he looked at me across the front of the car with the eyes of a nesting bird on its eggs. He continued, “She’s the real thing all right. She’s heart and soul for the revolution. Together we really are a fighting unit. They call us the master cell. And if I drive the comrades, it’s she that drives me. Just by believing in me, and setting me an example. Christ! I’ve got to live up to her belief in me.” He was tightening up the wheel with fierce though accurate strokes of the lead mallet. Then he said, “But of course that’s the wrong motive. I mustn’t do it for her, but simply for the revolution. Perhaps I ought to give her up. Fancy her being a snare!”

I interrupted. “Good God, man! You’re no revolutionary. You are just a puritan absorbed in your own struggle for righteousness, for salvation. As a Marxist you must believe that what matters is action, not motives. And you say that in action you’re sound.” He said nothing.

Both wheels were fixed. He fetched a long-handled jack to lever the car’s weight from the blocks, so that I could move them away. Then he lowered the car till the wheels once more touched the ground, and the tires flattened very slightly with the car’s weight.

He said, “In a way you’re right, of course. But the point is, I’m dependent on her. As a unit we’re sound in action, but without her I probably couldn’t keep it up.” After a pause he added, shyly, “You see, for me she is the revolution, the spirit of the revolution, concentrated in one little girl. That’s really why I love her.” His eye emphatically winked. “So, after all, if I act from her belief in me I really am acting from loyalty to the revolution, to the spirit of the revolution embodied in her.” His eyelid flickered, and I let out a guffaw. “That’s not much like Marxism,” I said. He flushed and answered sharply, “It’s quite sound, really. I didn’t use Marxist language, but what I meant was just that historical forces have made her into the ideal comrade in revolutionary work, and that I want to cooperate with her all my life.”

This was too much for me. I laughed again, and so far forgot myself as to give him a friendly punch, from which he recoiled with dignity. “Good God!” I said. “Can’t you admit you’re in love with the girl herself? Marxism is all very well, but if you push it too far it turns just silly. Human beings are very complicated things. They live in several dimensions at once, not just in one. And if they try to live just in one, they warp themselves horribly. Besides, if the revolution is controlled by one-dimensional minds, it will be warped too, horribly. If you go on the way you are going now, you’ll grow into a dangerous fanatic; and if dangerous fanatics guide the revolution the whole thing will be poisoned. Instead of being inspired by love it will be harsh and barbarous and deadly.”

He had been standing idly, wiping his hands on a bit of waste. Now he turned away brusquely to continue work on the damaged wing. The reiterated thud of the lead mallet seemed to give him satisfaction, for he continued hammering after the metal sheet was as flat as it would go. Presently he said, “Revolutions are bound to be harsh. You can’t make that sort of omelet without breaking lives. And look! I do admit I’m in love with the girl herself. But if I was really possessed by the revolution, really fit to be a leader, I shouldn’t love her that way. It’s humiliating. I can’t help being individualistically excited about her. I keep imagining all her body. Sometimes I wish I was on a South Sea island with her, alone with her, and living just for us two. Of course, I’m a sexual animal, and she’s another; so my feeling that way about her is quite natural. But I ought to be able to rise above it all, for the revolution. I keep losing sight of the realest thing about her, just because of her hair and her eyes, and, well, the feel of her; and the way when we’re together we seem to belong together, like a bolt and a nut. I mean, the realest thing about her is not really that sort of thing at all; it’s just that she’s a focal point where revolutionary forces in society find full expression. And the hell of it all is that if I give her up, as I once tried to do, I don’t find it easier to concentrate on the revolution, but harder, much. I just think of nothing but her. Without her to watch me, my political work turns tiresome and silly.” I laughed at him genially, but he did not respond.

We carried the repaired wing back to the car, and set about fixing it in position. I held it while he lay on his back to fit the bolts.

When the job was finished, he wriggled out from under the car, stood up, knocked the dust from his overalls, and said, dully, “The trouble with you comfortable people is always the same. You put up smoke screens to hide the truth from yourself, because you daren’t face the consequences of seeing it. You talk about liberty (for the rich, of course) or personality, or the importance of expressing all sides of one’s nature; and you won’t see that today there’s only one thing that is really important, namely that your class should be kicked out of its power and privileges. Everything else is just a sidetracking of historical forces that can’t anyhow be halted but only delayed. And the longer they’re delayed, the more misery. And now, look at the mess you have made of the world! Those of you who call yourselves socialists ought to be glad that socialism is established in one great country and is spreading over Europe; but you don’t welcome it; you’re terrified lest people should insist on having it here. So you persuade yourselves it’s not really socialism at all, and you spread all sorts of lies about it, and actually believe them yourselves. And now! You know your bloody system is falling to pieces, and the only way to bolster it up for a bit is to have war scares and actual wars. And now you have prostituted science by inventing an absolutely hellish weapon, and you’re getting ready to smash Russia before it’s too late, even if it means smashing the world. But Jesus Christ! We’ll see you don’t succeed.”

Uncomfortably I admitted there was truth in what he had said, but insisted that it was only half the truth. I began to talk about the unreasonableness of Russian policy since the war. He broke in bitterly, “The West has played false every time, and now Russia’s taking no more risks.” I spoke of the unmistakable evidence of tyranny inside Russia. He protested, “It would be madness to be squeamish when the motherland is in danger. Besides! The capitalist press is plugging anti-Russian dope all the time.”

He was wiping the smeared wing. “Well,” he said, more amiably, “the job’s finished. She looks pretty awful with that wing, but she’ll travel safely. We had better just try her out on the road to test the steering.” It was late in the afternoon. I said that I should need a meal before continuing my journey; and I suggested that we should take the car to some cafe and have a high tea together. “I can’t do that,” he said. “My time belongs to the boss till six o’clock.” I replied that his time was mine, till the job was finished, and that was how I intended to finish it. I added that if he could make contact with his girl he could bring her, too. I also remarked that he would be doing no harm except to his employer, and employers were fair game. To my surprise he had scruples. “No!” he said. “He plays fair, and I will too. Honestly, I’d like to come, but it wouldn’t be playing the game.” I laughingly accused him of being still enslaved to bourgeois morality. Then I took the matter into my own hands, found the proprietor, told him I wanted to take his man away early and talk to him over a meal, and added that I would pay for his time off. The boss looked at me in amazement and said, “But you have both been arguing all day. Besides, I have work for him to do. If I am to run a concern like this I must stick to sound business principles, and not go soft to my employees.” However, after I had pleaded with him and flattered him, his geniality triumphed over his principles. He said, “Oh, well! He’s a useful lad, in fact a key man, and I can’t afford to put him against me. I expected your job would take all day, and it hasn’t, so my plans are not really upset any more than they were by letting you have him in the beginning. So take him, if you haven’t had enough arguing even yet.”

I paid my bill; and after the mechanic and I had cleaned ourselves up a bit, we set off in the car. He directed me from street to street, until at last we drew up in front of a drab little house. In a few moments he had found the girl and brought her to the car. As he introduced us, she showed signs of recognition, and I confessed that she had handed me a leaflet earlier in the day.

In the cafe, the two sat primly opposite me like children on their best behavior. They might have been at a children’s party, waiting to be handed plates of trifle. They might have been brother and sister, for both had dark hair, deep eyes and a certain grace of movement, with which, I suspected, one had infected the other. I noticed that the girl’s fastidious little nose had a slight downward curve, and that the wings of the nostrils were well marked. Her bright lips, flowerlike under the tip of her nose, were yet daintily compressed at the extremities. They at once invited and forbade. A chin like a small pale apricot lent firmness to the whole face.

I remarked to her that distributing leaflets was a job that always cowed me. However good the cause, I somehow hadn’t the nerve to butt in on people. She flashed scorn at me, and said, “But surely it depends on the cause. If you don’t really believe in it, of course you feel bad, even if you think you believe in it. But if you really, really believe in it, and especially if it is the most important of all causes, then you can’t have any qualms at all. You would gladly force people to read your leaflets. You feel proud and glad to be on the job. And you don’t notice when you’re tired out.” “And you are quite sure,” I asked, “that your revolutionary propaganda is the most important of all causes?” “Naturally,” she answered, with wide and earnest eyes. “What can possibly be more important than freeing the workers from exploitation by the rich, and founding the socialist world-state?”

Already, as you have guessed, knowing my weakness, I was half in love with this little fiery flower of a girl. But curiously I found myself less jealous of her lover than of the revolution.

I asked her if she was quite sure that the revolution really mattered so very much to her, more than personal values, like love and marriage and motherhood. She still gazed almost fiercely at me; but in the light of my earlier encounter with her I seemed to detect (or did I imagine?) a tremor in her eyes, slight as the quiver of a candle flame when a door is banged. She said, “Love matters to me very much, but the revolution matters very much more; because, you see, the revolution is going to make a world in which all loving can be far happier than it can ever be in our poisoning society. You see” — she glanced at her companion— “loving one person so much makes me love all others and want to help them. And so the revolution has got into my blood, into the very marrow that makes my blood.”

All this while the young man was watching the face of his beloved with such tenderness that I was embarrassed. Perhaps he sensed my discomfort, for he suddenly compressed his lips, narrowed his eyes, and said gruffly, “The girl’s right, you know. If the revolution really grips you, nothing else matters.”

Still addressing the young woman, I said, “For the revolution, of course, you would not hesitate to lie and kill?” “Of course,” she answered. “One mustn’t be squeamish. Lying and killing are legitimate weapons for the revolution. They are wrong only when capitalists use them, against the revolution.” I asked if she would even lie to her lover for the Revolution. “Of course, of course,” she said. “I might have to lie to him. But he wouldn’t really be my lover anymore if I had to lie to him for the revolution.” She turned to her companion, and they looked at one another with grave affection.

The waitress arrived with our meal, and while she arranged the table we kept silent. My lady guest, acting as hostess, poured out the tea. We all attacked our fish and chips.

Presently I challenged the girl again. I said, “Would you even kill the man you love, for the revolution? Probably you will say the need could not possibly arise, but people do sometimes lose their balance completely and turn against their own ideals. Or let us merely suppose that, though he remained loyal to the revolution, he had adopted a policy which you firmly believed to be disastrous. (Think of Trotsky and Stalin.) Suppose you were convinced that for the revolution his immediate destruction was necessary. (Oh, I know this is all crazy from your point of view, but just suppose.) Well, would you kill him?” Again the two looked gravely at each other. She put down her fork, and laid her hand on his wrist, and she said, “I don’t know what I would do, but clearly I ought to kill him. It would be right, darling, wouldn’t it? I mean, socially desirable.” Her questioning smile was appealing and tender; but before he could answer, it changed into a look of excitement and fervor, and she declared, “Of course, of course I would kill him. To be true to the revolution, and also to be true to my own love for him, for the real him, who taught me so much, and helped me to give myself to the revolution, I should have to sacrifice him.” They looked at each other in mutual adoration.

I munched my fish in silence.

Presently she wrenched her gaze from her dear victim; and then, seeing that our cups were empty, she took off the lid of the teapot, so that steam swelled from it as a tall column. She poured in hot water and filled our cups.

I said, “Another question, still more fantastic. You say that for the revolution you would lie and even kill. Would you, perhaps draw the line at torture? Or would you not? Let us suppose that someone fell into your power who possessed information vitally necessary for the revolution, and that he refused to surrender it. Would you use torture to extract it? Would you put him through the third degree? Would you go further and, well, tear off his fingernails one by one? Would you, for the revolution, gouge out his eyes?” Her brows knit and her deep eyes blazed, deliciously scourging me. She said, “Those are just silly abstract questions without any practical bearing.” But I would not be put off. “They are nothing of the sort,” I insisted. “They might become very practical questions. Don’t funk the issue!”

After a silence, she laid down her knife and fork, and still looking at her plate, she said wearily, “Very well! Clearly I ought not to shrink even from torture, not if there was no other way of making the fascist beast give up his secret. Fascists themselves torture and sometimes we may be forced to pay them back in kind. But look! When fascists torture, it’s just brutality. If ever we torture, it will be like a necessary surgical operation.” Once more she looked at her companion. Once more that gaze of mutual comprehension. Once more, and more terrifyingly, her face was suddenly lit with ecstasy, and she said in a rapt voice, “Yes! Even if it was the man I had loved, I would tear off his nails one by one, and gouge out his eyes. I would do anything at all, to him or to myself, for the revolution.” Her lover was now staring at her, fascinated, as though she was some terrible, lovely goddess.

A sluggish autumnal fly fell from the ceiling onto our table. It lay on its back, feebly kicking. All our eyes were directed to it. Then suddenly I was prompted by a malicious impulse to use this moribund creature as a means of shaking the girl’s assurance. I took up a table knife and brought its cutting edge down on the fly’s thorax, slowly pressing. Its struggles became suddenly violent, but soon they dwindled to a mere quiver, and then ceased. For a moment the girl watched its dying antics, her exaltation fading. Then, to my surprise and horror, she put her face in her hands, and a muffled sob escaped her. The young man laid his arm round her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. Lowering her hands, she flashed defiance at me. “That,” she said, quietly, “was not necessary for the revolution.”

I flicked away the corpse, and murmured shamefacedly, “Sorry! But it was only an insect, not a man; and noxious, in its little way.”

The young man protested that I ought not to take a girl by surprise like that. Girls were more sensitive than men to the sight of suffering. All the more credit to those that forced themselves to overcome their squeamishness for the revolution. I apologized again; and felt distressfully that you, too, would have condemned me. The girl sat motionless, staring at the tablecloth.

To draw my attention from her, the young man embarked on a lecture. “Look!” he said, brushing back his unruly hair. “I think I can clear up our muddle. Of course there’s nothing really evil about squashing flies, but some of us have been very heavily conditioned against hurting anything, and so we may be upset by it. Now, the taboo on cruelty has been socially justified. It is socially very important that people should dislike hurting anything, even an insect. We need a terrifically strong spirit of mutual kindliness among human beings, and we can well afford to have it so strong that the excess of it spills over onto animals. But very often, of course, we have to kill animals for the good of man. And it is quite irrational to be squeamish about it.” Here I tried to interrupt, but he continued. “The same argument applies to killing and torturing human beings. When they turn antisocial, noxious to mankind, it’s just social common sense to put them out of the way. And if they have valuable information and won’t surrender it, surely it’s common sense to get it out of them, even by torture, if necessary. We ought to overcome our squeamishness.” I tried again to interrupt, but he said, “Wait a minute. Of course, to use torture lightheartedly, even on insects, is psychologically dangerous; and to use it on human beings is infinitely more so. It may undermine the established moral tradition, and so destroy mutual trust. It may break down the, well, the psychological warp on which society is woven. Believe me, I do see that. And it’s important, though some of the comrades don’t really see how important. The taboo against killing and torture, and the violent guilt feelings that decent people have about them, really are immensely important, just because they are socially useful. All the same, in an urgent revolutionary situation it’s irrational, it’s plain madness, to let our emotional habit of squeamishness endanger the revolution. I don’t see how you can possibly answer this unless you claim there’s some sort of absolute moral law that must never, never, in any circumstances, be broken. If you do claim this, then you will have to base your moral law on the will of God or some other fantastic notion.”

While the young mechanic was delivering this lecture, the girl continued looking at the tablecloth. But when he had done, she touched his hand, and said, “Thank you for that. I knew I was right really; but I lost my balance. You saved me from my own squeamishness.”

Unpleasantly I saw myself through the eyes of these two young enthusiasts as a pitiable but noxious creature, dominated unwittingly by fear of the revolution. Gloomily I wondered if they were right. I entertained this possibility, intellectually; but I felt, and with conviction, that these generous-hearted young people, through loyalty to the truth of Marx and Lenin, had blinded themselves to the deeper truth of Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu and all the saints.

How could I answer my friends’ well-reasoned challenge? It seemed important that an answer should be made. It seemed to me at the time that the very integrity of the cosmos somehow depended on my answer, even though I knew intellectually that such a thought was farcical. Suddenly I was surprised by a ludicrous but startling fantasy. I felt that, crowding around us in that cramped little cafe, were all the great prophets and saints of every age and country, and even of worlds unknown to man; and they were commanding me to reveal the truth to this admirable though deluded boy and girl. I protested that for them, the believing saints, it was easy to answer from their belief; but for me difficult, from my unbelief. But they replied, “You in your unbelief have claimed, nevertheless, a certainty. Answer from your certainty.”

Then, most irrationally, I prayed. I prayed in the hollow of my own heart, mutely. I prayed to the unknown for light.

At last I embarked on a halting affirmation such as you have heard from me a thousand times. And never yet have the words wrung wholly true, for either of us.

The young revolutionaries sat eating their apple tart in silence. Sometimes they watched me coldly, as a judge might scrutinize a prisoner who confutes himself unwittingly. But presently their eyes grew milder, not with credence, no, but at least with kindness.

I began by uneasily admitting that in some very rare circumstances even torture might perhaps be the right course. But I declared that, if social utility alone were taken as the sole criterion of good and evil, torture and every kind of harshness would be far too tempting to those who, whether as rulers or rebels, believed themselves to be custodians of social utility. Little by little, but inevitably, society would be brutalized through and through. “That way,” I said, “lies the degradation of man to insect.” I declared, with a conviction that surprised even myself, that the taboo against torture must be felt to spring from something truly sacred. (Here the girl grimaced, the man sighed.) This something more than man, I freely granted, must not be thought of as a personal God, nor even as some principle fundamental to the cosmos; for such things, I insisted, were utterly beyond the reach of our understanding. As well might a worm explain humanity as a man expound the foundations of the cosmos. At this the young man nodded cautious approval.

Then, uncertainly, I bore witness to my certainty. I said my piece that you have heard so often, my piece about the spirit. Familiar as it is to you (oh, too familiar), I find I must now say it all over again, because under the scrutiny of those young earnest eyes I found myself phrasing it in a subtly different idiom or with a new accent.

“This something,” I said, “this all-important thing, is at once in us, and yet not just ourselves. It is something in a way distinct from us that we see inwardly. It is something in relation to which (when we really, really see it) the whole human species seems not an end but a means; an instrument for realizing this something, this glorious possibility. Oneself, and others, and the whole species come to seem unimportant save insofar as they succeed in embodying or expressing this possibility, this ideal, this, yes, this spirit, in concrete human living. And yet, if we are honest, we are forced to recognize that the human mind cannot possibly understand what the status of this thing is, in the universe as a whole. We know it only in ourselves and each other, and in our loving each other; and of course in all the forms of our conscious and creative behavior. But love is the very tissue of it. The tissue, I mean, of the vision that we have of it. For it confronts us as a vision. What gives us the vision we cannot know. It is a vision that simply emerges out of the relation between a conscious being and an objective universe containing other conscious beings. So this ‘something,’ this spirit, presents itself as a vision of a way of behaving in relation to the objective universe; an ideal way of life. It is the way of sensitive and intelligent awareness of everything that comes up against one in the business of living. It is the way of love for all lovely things; and of at least sympathetic understanding for all unlovely things; yes, and even of love for them in an odd sort of style. But above all it is the way of creative action in relation to the real world of minds and things; action not just for action’s sake, or to make a big noise or a big mark on the universe, but action to make more loveliness and more loving, I mean more sensitive and intelligent loving; in fact, it is essentially the way of action to fulfill and express the, well, the spiritual potentiality of — of? — well, of the objective universe itself in its impact on subjective beings.”

I paused to think of the next thing to say. The eyes of the couple were upon me, interested, a little troubled, fundamentally aloof. “Go on!” the young man said.

This ideal,” I declared, “this spirit, has gradually revealed itself throughout the ages to the most sensitive human minds. And we ourselves, in our clearest state, cannot but recognize its claims on us. Moreover, though we know so little about the universe, we can be quite sure (in virtue of our experience of spirit) that all personal beings throughout the whole cosmos of space and time must joyfully worship this thing, whenever they are properly awake and not misled by obsessions over trivial irrelevant cravings. And this vision of the spirit, this recognition of ‘fittingness,’ ‘appropriateness,’ in personal behavior, is the true sanction of right and wrong. Killing and torture are in themselves always evil just because they are a flagrant violation of the spirit. No doubt, in our sick-adolescent world, killing is sometimes necessary (and many other evils, too), but only in defense of the spirit. And only those who have a deep and spiritual loathing of killing (not a mere sickly squeamishness) are to be trusted to kill (or sanction killing) only when loyalty to the spirit itself demands it. And it is the same with torture, but with a difference; for even in our barbaric society we can be sure that in practice there are no situations in which it is justified. For no immediate goal can compensate for the hideous degradation that it causes, in the torturer and in society.”

I could say no more. The cloud of unseen witnesses that had seemed to press in upon me faded from the room, withdrawing (it seemed to me) with a sigh, whether of fulfillment or of disappointment I could not determine.

The three of us sat in silence. Then the young man said, sadly, “Ideas like those have power, but it is a hypnotic power, appealing to the infantile need for something great and imposing, like the father, and later the leader. Be careful, comrade, lest you trick yourself into some sort of fascism. Because, you know, fascists can support their brutal values by arguments like yours, based on feeling instead of intelligence.”

I answered desperately, “They can, of course, but falsely. Their values are opposed fundamentally to the whole great spiritual tradition of mankind; and also to our own individual intuition when we are most clearly conscious, most fully ourselves, not distracted by some irrelevant craving, like the craving for power. And think! In personal relations most of us know quite well the difference between two kinds of relation that are both called love, but one of them quite falsely. We know the difference between using a girl as a mere means to one’s own satisfaction, and really loving her.” The two glanced at each other. I continued. “Of course, if you have never really loved you cannot know what that difference is. And in the same way, if you have never really experienced the spirit you cannot possibly see the difference between it and the counterfeit of it that Marxism and Freudianism so glibly explain.”

Suddenly I noted that my guests were already smoking, and that a cigarette had been put down for me on the table. The young man was expelling from his lungs a great cloud of smoke. He dispersed it with his hand, as though brushing aside my fog of words. He said, “Well, at least you have made me see how seductive the old ideas can be, especially if one needs a smoke screen.” Suddenly, the wink once more violently assailed him; and he said, surprisingly, “Something deep down in me makes me wish you were right. If I didn’t wish it so much, I shouldn’t need to be so much on my guard.” The girl, who had been dreamily watching me, turned to her lover with a sudden look of perplexity.

Then again she gazed at me, holding her lip-stained cigarette in a poised hand, while from her nostrils smoke wreaths caressed her face. Still studying me, she murmured to him, “He really believes it.” Then after a draught of smoke, she said, “He’s earnest about it. Suppose he really has got hold of some truth he can’t properly tell. In a way I can sort of feel it.” But in a harder voice she declared, “But today it’s not what we need. It’s an irrelevance and dangerous. Gentleness, and all that, is dangerous. We must keep it locked tight in our hearts. We must be made of steel. For today, the struggle.”

Evidently this amazon had tasted poetry, at least the modern poetry of the revolution.

“Comrade,” she said, and she could not prevent the imprisoned gentleness from looking out from her eyes, “I shall be sorry if in the end we have to liquidate you.” She smiled. It was the smile that I had intruded upon when first we met. I duly laughed.

Turning to her lover, she hauled up his watch from his breast pocket, and glancing at it she cried, “Half-past already! And we have to arrange the hall for the meeting.”

The two rose hurriedly, and I secured my bill. As we shook hands for parting, the mechanic said quietly, “I’m glad you had that breakdown.”

FAR FUTURE CALLING (1977)

CONTENTS

PERSONS IN THE PLAY

THE PLAY

PERSONS IN THE PLAY

AN ACTOR, AT first impersonating a man of A.D. 2500, but subsequently revealed as a contemporary Englishman. Light male voice.

AN ACTRESS, at first impersonating a woman of A.D. 2500, but subsequently revealed as a contemporary Englishwoman. Light female voice.

A FUTURE MAN, speaking from two thousand million years hence. Heavy male voice.

A FUTURE WOMAN, speaking from two thousand million years hence. Heavy female voice. (Contralto)

MINOR PARTS

Two Childlike Voices

A Man’s Voice, a Woman’s Voice, and a Child’s Voice

A Harsh Voice

[A Second Future Man’s Voice and a Second Future Woman’s Voice]

ACTION AND SCENE

The action of the play takes place in a studio in Savoy Hill.

In the play, a play is being broadcast.

THE PLAY

ACTOR (WITH AMERICAN accent). Hullo 1931! That you? A.D. 2500 calling. I’ve got to tell you a bit about things in my day, 500 years after yours. I’ll start right in by saying that everything with us is just about 200% better than with you. We’re far more intelligent, and far more vital. We gotta be, to stand the racket. And we’re 163% more spiritual too, let me tell you. Every one of our churches is nearly twice as beautiful and many times as high as your Saint Paul’s Cathedral. In fact everything of ours is much bigger and faster than everything of yours, including our minds. And — gosh, here’s one of my wives butting in. Now then Bobo, just blow a kiss into the microphone and quit.

ACTRESS (with American accent). Hullo duckies! (Sound of a kiss) Say! Are you the Crinoline Period? Or was it bustles, or harems, or pajamas, or cute little skirts? I was never any good at history. You ought to see my latest gown. The train of it’s so long I’ve gotta have two gasoline motors to carry it. And the collar comes right up to the eyes.

ACTOR. That’s enough, Bobo. Say, you prehistoric Britishers, what price our English idiom? We had to learn it up specially to communicate with you guys. In my time we all speak American of course, modern American, I mean. Guess your Americans couldn’t understand us when we’re talking together. (Pause) Now boys, I gotta introduce you to a lot of our important personages. And the first here’s the President of the World Republic. (Announcing) His Supreme Superlativity will now —

THE FUTURE MAN. Stop! Stop this play-acting!

ACTOR (with some hesitation). His Supreme Superl —

FUTURE MAN (with authority). Stop, I say!

ACTOR (under his breath, relapsing into English accent). Who on earth’s that fool? Can’t someone muzzle him? (Continues his part) His Supreme Su —

FUTURE MAN (very loud). Silence! No more of that farce! You’re a twentieth century Englishman, engaged by the BBC to broadcast in a play which I say shall not proceed.

ACTOR. Well of all the —

ACTRESS (under her breath). They won’t hear him, Billy. He’s not even in the room. Better get on with the stuff. The red light’s still on.

ACTOR. His Supr —

FUTURE MAN. Silence! All you men and women of the planet Earth who happen to be listening in tonight, listen well! Something very strange is happening in this studio in Savoy Hill, something you would call incredible.

ACTOR. Oh! Why don’t they kick him out? We’ll lose our fees if this goes on. Let’s stop him ourselves anyhow.

(Abortive sound of a chair moving.)

FUTURE MAN. You can’t. You’re paralyzed.

ACTRESS. It’s true! I can’t move. (Screams)

ACTOR (gasping). Nor can I. Why don’t they switch us off?

FUTURE MAN. They can’t. I’ve seen to that.

ACTOR. You’ll be sorry for this prank afterwards, my man.

FUTURE MAN (soothingly). Now be calm and listen. Your play-acting is over for tonight. England is going to have something else, instead of that cheap fantasy of five hundred years hence. The listeners shall hear the actual voice of a future incomparably more remote. I am speaking to you out of an age two thousand million years after your day. Realize what that means. The gulf that divides us is two thousand times wider than that which divides you from the ape-men of the past.

ACTOR. The man’s mad. If I could reach the window, I’d call the police, but I can’t move, I can’t move.

ACTRESS (hysterically). I’ve got cramp all over.

ACTOR. It’s probably some damned young undergraduate playing a practical joke on the BBC.

ACTRESS. Oh! I’m sure this chair’s electric.

ACTOR. Some blasted young — (Chokes)

ACTRESS screams and chokes.

FUTURE MAN. I must paralyze your speech organs too, I see, till I need you. Now we can proceed. (Pause) Members of the First Human Species! I, a member of the Eighteenth Human Species, address you across the ages. During the eons which have passed between your day and mine, man has suffered (or will suffer, if you prefer it) strange vicissitudes of fortune. Time after time he is to be seen struggling out of the darkness of the beast into the half light that you call human nature. Again and again, while he is painfully groping toward something better still, accident or his own folly crushes him down once more into mere animality. His worldwide organization crumbles and vanishes. His cities are swallowed up in jungle. All the hard-won treasures of the spirit are lost and utterly forgotten. For eons there are no men at all, but only degenerate subhuman beasts. But again and again man wakes, and laboriously comes once more to be master of his little planet. Again and again he begins even to remake his own nature for more glorious life. But always the venture ends in disaster. Rarely, no more than once or twice in all his long history, he sees clearly what he should be doing with himself. But while he is still in the early stages of his profound remaking, some unforeseeable catastrophe wrecks him. Then at length, after nearly two thousand million years, the spirit of man wakens fully in the Eighteenth Human Species, my own kind. But for a moment only. (Pause) Fellow men and women (for such you are, in spite of your remoteness and your simplicity), you can hear me, but not see me. Those present in this room shall see me, and my world; but you others, scattered up and down England, will only hear. These two shall tell you what they see. Actor Billy and Actress Joan, when you are willing to cooperate, you will find you can speak.

ACTRESS (emits a shuddering sigh). Anything, so long as you will stop freezing up my throat.

ACTOR (after a deep breath). Get on with your dope then, whatever it is. But don’t expect me to believe what you say. I’m a skeptic. But I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.

FUTURE MAN. Your thoughts to yourself! I watch all your thoughts. I know more about them than you know yourself. For instance yesterday —

ACTOR (challenging). What do you mean?

FUTURE MAN. You thought, “If only she would die.”

ACTOR (outraged). No, I did not. (Pause) Oh, my God! Get out of my mind, whatever you are, get out.

ACTRESS (laughing nervously). It must be God talking. He seems to know us better than we know ourselves.

FUTURE MAN. Not God, but your own remote descendant. I know your thoughts, because I am one of those whose work it is to study your period. I study your minds from within. How I laugh sometimes at all your follies and meannesses! And yet, how I come to love you, pathetic half-formed beings that you are, tortured by the discrepancies of your own nature, too subtle to be beast, too blind and weak to be truly man.

ACTRESS. But we are man.

FUTURE MAN. Do you really think that all your pettiness is essential to human nature? With us it is easy and natural to think straight and act straight, always; but you have to struggle not to be blockheads and rogues. And when you fail, as you most often do, you are tortured with shame. Yet you are bound to fail. Selfishness is an insanity inherent in you. But in my world there is no such thing as selfishness.

ACTOR. Utopia, what? How tedious! Thank God we’re not so perfect here.

FUTURE MAN. No, not Utopia. Though we have outgrown the very primitive troubles that beset you, we have others. Two of them I think you could understand.

(Pause)

ACTOR. Well?

FUTURE MAN. Well, in the first place, our whole lovely world, and ourselves in it, will very soon be destroyed. A curious astronomical event will shortly bring about the end of the solar system, and of man.

ACTOR. The universe is going to get the human bug out of its flesh at last, is it?

FUTURE MAN. Just so. The end is much nearer than we expected. Man is like a tree, two thousand million years old. The seed fell upon good soil, but the seedling was nipped by frosts. It struggled, and became a sapling. Locusts stripped it, but still it grew. Beasts trampled it down, but it recovered. It was crooked, stunted, but still it had promise. It strove to put forth blossom; caterpillars devoured its treasure again and again. At last good fortune befell it. Strong and broad it became, and triumphantly covered itself with bloom. But now in my own day comes the final catastrophe. The tree’s whole world will turn to fire.

ACTOR. Will you be alive when the trouble begins?

FUTURE MAN. Yes. It is due in a few thousand years, and we are a long-lived race. (Pause) Our second trouble comes to us from the past. Though our own condition is one of glorious fulfillment and joy, we cannot forget, we must not forget, the despair and agony of past eons.

ACTRESS. But if you are happy yourselves, you need not bother about a past that is dead and gone.

FUTURE MAN. Stupid child! Are you dead and gone? You are past, remember; do you therefore not matter?

ACTRESS. To myself, now; but not to you, then.

FUTURE MAN. Last week I watched you miss an important appointment by taking the wrong bus. When you got home, your face was all spoilt with tears. Well, do you suppose your trouble didn’t concern me, just because you were ancient history? To the developed mind, sorrow is sorrow, however remote the sufferer. Almost I chose to tamper with the order of the past by warning you, by slipping a doubt into your mind about that bus.

ACTOR (knowingly). I want to ask one question.

FUTURE MAN. Do.

ACTOR. If you are in the future, she is past, as far as you are concerned. Well, the past is what it is, fixed like a fly in amber. The future can’t conceivably alter it. Then how could you possibly whisper a doubt to her? Or for that matter, how could you possibly interfere with us tonight? (Laughs with relief)

FUTURE MAN. I am not imprisoned in a single fleeting moment of time, as you are. In a limited manner, I have the freedom of eternity. It is from eternity, not from the future merely, that I influence you. My home is in the future; but I can visit your age and be contemporary with you. And it is as your contemporary that I affect your minds.

ACTOR (with a snort). I know a young Cambridge philosopher who could teach you a thing or two, my friend.

FUTURE MAN. I know him too, a bright young man, and invaluable in your muddle-headed age. Splendidly loyal to the intellect. But limited.

ACTRESS. Tell me. Now that you find your world is going to be destroyed, you surely don’t worry much about the past, do you?

FUTURE MAN. You are mistaken. The destruction of our world we have learned to accept. We even exult in it, as the fitting climax of the brief music that is Man. It is our privilege so to admire the music that we can rise above our own misfortune, and exult in our own tragedy. But the pain and misery of all you poor blind children in the past is not transfigured in your minds by any such delight. It is your blindness, your musical deafness, so to speak, that plucks at our hearts.

ACTOR. Assuming that all this fantastic talk is true, then tell me this. Why do you interfere with us like this?

FUTURE MAN. Chiefly because we love you, and seek to help you. Because you are in darkness, and we are in light, and we would give you something of our vision.

THE FUTURE WOMAN. Too much talking! Let us show ourselves. The contact will not last long.

FUTURE MAN. Yes. (Pause) Men and women of England! These two in the room are now going to use their eyes and tell you what they see.

(Pause)

ACTRESS. I think I see a tall shadow. It’s getting clearer.

ACTOR. I see a tall green-bronze thing, huge.

ACTRESS. Oh, it’s a monster, not a man at all. And yet it is a man. But the eyes! Smoldering red!

ACTOR. A sort of dark pillar carved by savages to look like a god. The great columnar legs! As if they had to support a cathedral roof! The thighs! Stark naked, too.

ACTRESS. Look at its face, Billy. Man, and yet not man.

ACTOR. Something saurian about it. Something primitive, but vital. Subtle, too. Probably devilishly intelligent.

ACTRESS. Face muscles all rippling with expression — uncouth expression, but — significant, and — victorious. The great bald dome of its head! A hideous monster, and yet beautiful. Fancy my calling a hideous monster beautiful! But it is, isn’t it, Billy?

ACTOR. You may think so, and perhaps I do in a way; but most people would call it just revolting, such a perplexing mixture of man and beast.

ACTRESS. And god.

FUTURE MAN. No, silly child. Remember you are my immensely-great-great-grandmother.

ACTRESS. The immensely-great-great-grandmother of a god!

FUTURE WOMAN. Now you shall see another of your immensely-great-great-grandchildren.

ACTRESS. I see a glowing mist beside him. It’s getting clearer. Warm gold.

ACTOR. Another grotesque. Obviously female, this one. A sort of female obelisk, not to say basilisk. Oh woman, that you should ever be so distorted!

FUTURE MAN (laughing). That your women should ever give rise to loveliness such as this! To me her whole form is eloquent. Every curve sings. She is the perfection of lithe grace. And her face is just now alive with gentle, teasing merriment.

ACTOR. If Epstein could have a nightmare, it might be like this creature.

FUTURE WOMAN laughs with relish.

ACTRESS. Billy, don’t! She is monstrous, like a rock in sunlight. But I almost see her as he does. Perhaps Epstein would appreciate her fully. So startlingly alive! So — liberated! So — rich, fulfilled, and yet so fresh. She can’t be very old.

FUTURE WOMAN. Forty thousand years or so, Grannie.

ACTOR. Fancy a nightmare lasting that long!

ACTRESS. Billy, behave! Oh, she’s fading away. She must be annoyed.

FUTURE WOMAN. Annoyed? Delighted. But our contact is failing.

FUTURE MAN. It is difficult for us to keep in touch with you. I had better explain. We cannot really take you into the future, of course; but we ourselves can explore all the time that to us is past, and we can project our experiences into your minds, to some extent, but insecurely. We lend wings to your imagination, and truthfulness also. We make you imagine things that will really be. But you are simple minds, and we cannot make you see, or understand, or admire, what is beyond your capacity.

(A faint sound of wind and waves, gradually increasing)

ACTRESS. Oh, you’re both fading out altogether. How can we help to keep you?

ACTOR. What’s that noise, like wind?

(The sounds have increased to the noise of a storm. Distant voices)

FUTURE MAN (rather distant). A temporary interruption. We’ll get rid of it soon. You see, since the whole process is mental, some casual association may tangle us up with events anywhere in history.

FUTURE WOMAN. It’s something like listening in to radio messages. Our selectivity is not quite good enough to prevent interference.

FUTURE MAN. And so at any moment we may find that we have flown millions of years from our course.

(Storm recurs. Crashing of waves on a rocky coast)

FUTURE WOMAN. It sounds typical of man’s second home, the planet Venus. Human voices are beginning to come through.

FIRST CHILDLIKE VOICE (distant, wailing, yet exultant). My wings fail! My wings fail! I faint! I fall!

FUTURE MAN. It is some obscure incident on the planet Venus. During that epoch halfway between your age and ours, the human organism was adapted for aerial life. It was almost batlike, and no bigger than an eagle. There was a strange aerial civilization, with its bases on the islands of the tempestuous oceanic planet.

FIRST CHILDLIKE VOICE (gasping). Farewell-best-loved one! Farewell! The song, that my life was, is done. Glad death!

SECOND CHILDLIKE VOICE. Farewell! Dear beautiful one, I praise the stars for the song’s end. Farewell!

FUTURE MAN. Strange lyrical child-men and child-women! They delighted in everything, even grief and death, so long as they were on the wing. But on the ground, they soon lost the ecstasy.

ACTOR (suspiciously). Kindly tell me how these creatures came to be talking English?

FUTURE MAN. You forget that you are hearing them through my mind. I hear them directly, and understand them; and my understanding of them translates itself in your minds into English.

ACTRESS. If only we could see them.

FUTURE MAN. You shall.

(Storm increases)

ACTRESS. I see movement, flying clouds, great white waves.

ACTOR. Dashing against a cliff, climbing and falling like caged beasts.

ACTRESS. Something on a rock, battered by the sea. Oh, poor thing, she’s broken, done for, but still struggling.

ACTOR. Great silken membranous wings, all torn and bleeding. Face almost human, seal-like.

ACTRESS. But look at the expression! Gasping for breath, and yet — exultant. Tortured, and yet brilliant with joy.

FUTURE MAN. The ecstasy of flight is still on her, but it will fail soon, and leave her just a shattered animal.

ACTOR. Look! From the air, another of them, swooping to her.

ACTRESS. He’s going to drag her clear of the waves. (Cry of horror) Oh! He’s pushing her down. She’s gone.

ACTOR. And now he’s soaring. Pleased with his work, too!

SECOND CHILDLIKE VOICE. Farewell, loveliest of life-songs; now finished forever.

FUTURE MAN. He saved her by killing her, saved her from losing the aerial ecstasy.

ACTRESS. Have you ever that ecstasy?

FUTURE WOMAN. We have it always, but with a difference.

FUTURE MAN. Explanation would take too long. We must leave these winged children, and go further into the future, if we can.

(Pause)

ACTOR. It’s all fading again. Here are our two grotesque friends once more. (Storm fades and ceases) Madam, I apologize for the rude things I said about you. I begin to see more in you. You’re not a nightmare, but Eve in a crooked yellow mirror.

ACTRESS. Billy!

FUTURE WOMAN (laughing). And you, dear Billy, are not a leggy spider, as you seemed to me at first, but just a spider monkey.

ACTOR. Do you have spider monkeys in your world?

FUTURE WOMAN. No, but it is the business of archaeologists like us to know your world well.

ACTRESS. Do you like our world?

FUTURE WOMAN. As you like the nursery, with all its folly and timorousness, and innocent blind cruelty.

FUTURE MAN. In some ways it is less like a nursery than a jungle, with man as the king of beasts.

FUTURE WOMAN. Or with men as the monkeys in the treetops. Only they have stolen a few boxes of matches from the gods. They’ve terrified all the beasts by dropping lighted matches on them. And now their chief joy is to set fire to each other’s tails, or roast each other alive. Soon there’ll be a forest fire.

ACTOR. Is that how you regard us?

FUTURE WOMAN. Yes. But not only that way.

ACTRESS. Will they ever burn the forest down?

FUTURE MAN. Many times. But it grows again. After it has been burnt flat, it lies fallow for ages; and then it sprouts. And at last more monkeys and more matches.

(Sound of a shell screaming, followed by a dull bang)

ACTOR. What’s that? Why, you’re fading out again. What’s happening?

(Another shell screams, and dully explodes)

A MAN’S VOICE (Cockney accent). Look out, that’s gas. Gas in London! Curse the devils! Masks on, masks on, everyone. (Coughs and chokes)

A WOMAN’S VOICE (Cockney accent). Where’s the child? Quick, Freddy!

CHILD’S VOICE screams, coughs, and chokes.

ACTOR. What’s all this?

FUTURE MAN. It sounds like one of the wars that came shortly after your time. (Pause) Now we’ll try again.

ACTOR. You’re both visible again. I’m almost glad to see you.

ACTRESS. There’s something else, too, a man, or a tower, very misty.

ACTOR. Another of those dome-headed fellows. What great brains they must have!

ACTRESS. Oh, but it’s fading again. You’re fading yourselves.

FUTURE WOMAN. Another interference, I’m afraid.

ACTOR. There’s a tower again, a squat gray turret, this time, like a “pillbox” of war days.

ACTRESS. And little wiry brown people running about.

FUTURE WOMAN. It must be one of the “Great Brains” and his slaves.

FUTURE MAN. Yes. There was a time, while man was still on the earth, when he conceived the fantastic aim of producing a human type that should be all brain. Unfortunately the plan succeeded. The turret that you see is the artificial cranium of a single huge brain. The building beside it holds the laboratory that digests its food, the pump that circulates blood through it, and the mechanism for oxidizing the blood. The brain itself develops from a half-natural, half-artificial human ovum.

ACTRESS. Horrible!

ACTOR. A little brown savage has opened the door of the turret and gone in.

FUTURE MAN. One of the brain’s personal slaves. He has to keep an eye on the extremely complicated system of functions inside, some natural, some artificial.

ACTRESS. Two huge proboscises are stretching out of the side of the tower, and bending about.

FUTURE MAN. A pair of the creature’s eyes. He has them on stalks, like a snail.

ACTOR. There’s something else sticking out now. A huge pair of arms.

FUTURE MAN. His only natural limbs. Even the speech organs are artificial.

ACTRESS. The arms are reaching out toward that cowering slave.

AN EXTREMELY HARSH VOICE (threatening, hypnotic). Come here!

ACTRESS. He’s got the poor wretch. (Screams) Oh! Horrible!

ACTOR. He’s pulled the slave’s head off, and flung body and head away.

HARSH VOICE. Clean up this mess! Quick! And remember, all of you, the fate of a butterfingers.

ACTOR. The scene is fading away again.

ACTRESS. Yes, thank God.

FUTURE MAN. These Great Brains in their turrets speedily dominated the natural men who had created them. For many thousands of years, turrets such as the one you have just seen were dotted about in all parts of the earth. These were highly intelligent beings, but without any emotional life, save passionate curiosity. Their whole world-society was organized for intellectual advancement. The natural species became mere living robots, performing menial service for them.

FUTURE WOMAN. But at last these purely intellectual monsters were exterminated by a nobler and more natural kind of man, whom they themselves had helped to produce.

ACTOR. How is it that you, who come after these grotesques, these turrets and these bats, are yet more or less like ourselves?

FUTURE MAN. There have been many brief aberrations from the erect biped form, but on the whole the shape that is common to ourselves and you has served man best.

FUTURE WOMAN. It is certainly matter for surprise that after two thousand million years the Last Men should be recognizably of the same type as the First Men.

ACTOR. Is that what you call us, the First Men?

FUTURE MAN. Of course. That is what you are, if you should be called men at all. And you really are human after all, though so terribly weak and blind.

FUTURE WOMAN. The contact won’t last much longer. We must get our own world through to them somehow.

ACTOR. What is your own world then, not Earth, not Venus?

FUTURE MAN. The very distant planet that you call Neptune.

ACTOR. Our astronomers declare that on Neptune life, such as we know, is impossible.

FUTURE MAN. They are right. Life, such as you know. If you were to be transported there actually, not merely in imagination, you would very soon die. The composition of our air would be intolerable to your lungs. You would choke and faint. And the mere weight of our deep atmosphere would crush your tissues as though you had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Even if by some miracle you could overcome these difficulties, you would be overwhelmed by the weight of your own feeble bodies, small though you are.

ACTOR. And no doubt in a world so far from the sun, the climate must be inconceivably cold.

FUTURE MAN. No, you would find it too hot; for long ago the sun’s bulk and heat were immensely increased by a collision.

FUTURE WOMAN. Too much talking again! We must hurry on with our work.

FUTURE MAN. Yes. (Pause) Let us try an astronomical approach to our goal. In that way, we may perhaps avoid interferences.

(Pause)

(A deep, low buzzing, like an electric motor, begins faintly, but gradually increases)

ACTOR. Everything is going dark. Moonlight, is it? In a room. A glint of light on bits of metal.

ACTRESS. Oh, look down, Billy! Stars down below us!

ACTOR (gasps). It must be a reflection. But overhead all is dark. Why, it’s a great window! But what has happened to gravity? A window in the floor, and the starry sky below! It makes one dizzy.

FUTURE MAN. You are out in space, in one of our ether-ships, approaching Neptune from Jupiter. She has been gathering the sun-products which we cultivate on that roasting planet for food. Her crew, some four thousand men and women, have had many months of labor, trawling the surface of Jupiter, keeping always on the shady side of the globe. They will be glad to get home.

FUTURE WOMAN. You are now in an observation room in the bottom of the hull, looking at the stars.

ACTOR. The constellations all seem unfamiliar.

FUTURE WOMAN. Even the constellations change in two thousand million years.

FUTURE MAN. Look behind you, and down through the next window.

ACTRESS (Gasp of surprise)

ACTOR. An immense moon below us, but colored. A blinding spot of light in the middle of it.

ACTRESS. It’s a hundred times too big for the moon, or too near.

FUTURE MAN. It’s the planet Neptune. The spot of light is the sun’s reflection in the ocean.

ACTOR. Where is the sun?

FUTURE MAN. Overhead, of course. The ship’s bulk eclipses him from us.

(Distant music, the dance music of supermen)

ACTOR. What’s that?

FUTURE WOMAN. Merriment afoot somewhere in the ship. Probably they are going to dance.

ACTRESS. A ballroom in the sky!

ACTOR. Those white tracts on the planet are clouds, I suppose?

FUTURE MAN. Yes, and the blue-gray is sea. The greens and browns and golds and rusty reds are land.

ACTRESS. It’s like a huge opal, or mother-of-pearl.

FUTURE MAN. Our ship is still a long way from port; and though she moves much faster than the planets move, she will take some time yet. Therefore, if we want to observe the planet from low altitudes, we must hurry through the intervening period.

FUTURE WOMAN. Listen! I hear voices. Wait a moment longer. Some of the crew are coming here.

(Metallic sound of a door opening and shutting, and of low, rippling laughter, which increases as the door opens)

ACTRESS. Two figures dimly visible. Very close together.

ACTOR. Spooning, in fact. I say, we’re eavesdropping.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. My dear, you didn’t really think I had changed my mind, did you? I couldn’t come earlier.

SECOND FUTURE MAN. I don’t know what I thought. But you’re here, oh my dear, my dear!

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN (laughing and gasping). Don’t, you’re hurting, you old python!

SECOND FUTURE MAN. How many times, in all the ages, in all the worlds, has this thing happened! She and He, alone!

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. How many times, after long seeking, they have found. And yet I think they never really found till now.

SECOND FUTURE MAN. I think he never found such loveliness. But something he always found.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. And now, we — find all.

SECOND FUTURE MAN. And down below, and all around, a million million stars! And the old world we live in, the great pearl we live on!

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. It will be a new world for us, together.

SECOND FUTURE MAN. A new world. (Pause) And soon, the end of the world.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN (with unsteady voice). In a few thousand years, they say.

SECOND FUTURE MAN. And then — first, intolerable weather, roasting weather. Then, disintegration of all things human. Fiercer and fiercer heat, till the whole world smolders. At last, nothing but white-hot gas.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN (low). We will hold together till we are one flame.

SECOND FUTURE MAN (suddenly wild). To cast such a world, such a pearl, into the fire! Such a world of spirits and sweet flesh.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. Oh! Don’t!

SECOND FUTURE MAN (resuming in a quiet voice). No! Strange, how one’s thoughts sometimes slip back into the old bad ways! As though for a moment we were to lose sight of the great Beauty, and be like the blind spirits of the past.

SECOND FUTURE WOMAN. When the end begins, shall we still see the great Beauty? Shall we see it even in the fire?

SECOND FUTURE MAN. Who knows? But we see it now.

(Pause)

FIRST FUTURE MAN. These lovers are keeping us too long. We must accelerate events now, so that we may watch the ship make port.

(Music and the buzzing fade)

ACTOR. The planet is getting bigger.

ACTRESS. Swelling like a child’s balloon when you blow into it.

ACTOR. It is filling the whole window now. The room is bright with reflected sunlight.

ACTRESS. Seas, continents, and cloud tracts are streaming beneath us.

ACTOR. The great planet rotates, or we travel round it. And down, down!

ACTRESS. Odd little white spikes scattered over the land, some of them sticking up through the cloud.

ACTOR. In some places the surface of the planet is like the chin of an old man who needs a shave.

ACTRESS. Yes, they’re like sparse bristles, mostly white. What are they?

FUTURE MAN. Buildings, skyscrapers, if you like.

ACTOR. But they must be gigantic, higher than mountains.

FUTURE MAN. They are. In spite of our violent gravitation, we build them many miles high, with the aid of artificial atoms.

ACTRESS. Your atmosphere is wonderfully clear.

FUTURE WOMAN. Yet it is very deep and very dense. We keep it clear, so that we may watch the stars.

ACTRESS. No smoke anywhere. Apparently no towns, but surely you have towns.

FUTURE WOMAN. Towns? No. But presently you will see little private houses scattered over the countryside, around the feet of the public buildings.

ACTOR. There’s a huge dark tract with no bristles.

FUTURE MAN. A reserved wild tract, largely jungle, a holiday land.

ACTRESS. There’s something moving, like a microscopic fish over the bottom of a pool.

FUTURE MAN. An airship, far below us.

(Sound of wind, increasing rapidly, then fading out)

FUTURE MAN. We have entered the atmosphere. The ship slows now, lest her surface should fuse, with the friction of the air.

ACTRESS. The streaming lands below are slowing too.

FUTURE MAN. We are keeping pace with the planet’s rotation, approximately.

ACTOR. A great green country is opening out under us, and there’s sea ahead.

ACTRESS. Only three of the “bristles” are in sight, and they have become gigantic pillars.

ACTOR. We’re nearing one of them, a geometrical Matterhorn of architecture, but more slender, and surely far higher.

ACTRESS. More like Cleopatra’s needle magnified thousands of times. Or a bunch of such needles, or a cluster of huge crystals. White on top, like snow.

FUTURE WOMAN. It is snow. Naturally, at that height.

ACTOR. Now we’re dropping below the top of it and leaving it behind. Ahead, a great rectangular arm of the sea.

ACTRESS. What are those little white points on the green, like sheep?

FUTURE MAN. Those are the private houses, visible at last.

ACTOR. Now we’re nearing another building, a sort of Crystal Palace, this one, all window.

ACTRESS. Look! Small insect things darting along toward it.

FUTURE MAN. Flying boats. If you look carefully as we approach, you will see something like a swarm of gnats round the building.

ACTOR. I see nothing.

ACTRESS. Nor I. (Pause) Oh, yes! Motes of dust! What are they?

FUTURE MAN. Individual men and women flying.

ACTOR. But you have no wings.

FUTURE MAN. No, but for minor flights we use flying-suits, equipped with subatomic power units. With these we swim in the air.

ACTOR. Now we’re over the sea, and dropping toward it. A strange sea, smooth as glass. Look! There’s something moving in it, a huge black thing, like a half-revealed leviathan, right below us, swimming along with us.

FUTURE MAN. The reflection of the ship herself on the smooth sea. Watch how it swells as we descend.

ACTRESS. But it’s beginning to churn up the sea. What’s happening?

FUTURE MAN. No, we are churning up the sea with the pressure of our power units. It is as though the ship were thrusting against the water with her fields of force, to break her fall.

ACTRESS (nervously). Isn’t it time we moved from this spot?

FUTURE WOMAN. We are quite safe here. The ship will settle as gently as a gull.

FUTURE MAN. Yes, but now that you have had a general view of our planet, we will shift the scene.

(Pause)

ACTRESS. Everything is fading again. What now?

ACTOR. Before we have any more adventures, I should like to ask another question. You say these great buildings are “public” buildings. But how can you need so many? What are they all?

FUTURE MAN. Just laboratories, libraries, observatories, factories, and so on. Many of them serve purposes which you could not understand. Observatories are particularly common, since our culture is essentially astronomical. For you, astronomy is a very remote subject. It has almost no bearing on your daily life. But for us it is concrete, urgent. All the most important activities of the race depend upon astronomy.

FUTURE WOMAN. You have not noticed, by the way, that we have an eye on the crown of the head. We call it the astronomical eye. It can be projected like a minute but very efficient telescope. With it we perceive almost as much detail in the heavens as your astronomers infer from data given by their instruments.

ACTOR. But what practical significance has astronomy for you?

FUTURE MAN. We get most of our food from Jupiter, and minerals from other planets. But, more important, astronomical knowledge and perception molds every individual mind. It affords, so to speak, the great “out-of-doors,” in contrast with the cozy “indoor” experience of our planet’s surface.

FUTURE WOMAN. And now that we know that our world is about to be destroyed, one of our two great aims is to discover in some corner of the galaxy a sphere wherein we may establish a seed of life to flourish when man is no more.

ACTOR. And the other aim?

FUTURE MAN. To know fully the human past, and help it.

ACTOR. Strange beings! Do you all agree about these aims? Have you no social discords?

FUTURE MAN. No. Nor any government, in your sense. In that respect we are more like the bees than you.

ACTRESS. It is growing light overhead.

ACTOR. Sky again. Blue, but an unearthly green blue.

ACTRESS. We are standing on the edge of a ghastly precipice. It drops sheer for miles. At the bottom a vast drab-colored plain, stretching to the horizon.

FUTURE MAN. We are on top of one of the great buildings. Now we must aid your sight. You will find that if you look intently at any distant object, your eyes will act as telescopes. The object that you are looking at will seem to approach and enlarge. Now look carefully at some point on the plain.

ACTRESS. Just an even brown gray. Oh no, it is very finely speckled.

ACTOR. The speckles are enlarging themselves, as he said they would,

ACTRESS. Oh Billy, they’re people! The whole plain is packed with human beings wherever you look. Faces, faces, faces. Myriads of them! Grains of sand in a desert! Cells in the leaves of a forest, or in the flesh of some very great beast.

ACTOR. Surely the whole population of your world must be here. What are they doing? They seem to be waiting for something to happen.

FUTURE MAN. Not the whole population of our world by a very long way. Scattered over the planet at this moment there are thousands of groups such as this that you see now.

ACTRESS. Then what is it all about? Do they expect to see something, or is it a religious service, or what?

FUTURE MAN. That question is rather hard to answer. We have many powers which have no counterpart in your nature. The most important of them is at work now. By means of a special kind of telepathic intercourse, our individual minds can come together to give birth to a single racial mind. In this strange experience each of us wakes up, so to speak, to discover that he is the mind of the race. He sees with all eyes, and touches with all hands and feet. In fact he has all the sense perceptions of the whole race. Thus, for instance, he discovers that he is embracing the whole planet through the feet of all men and women.

FUTURE WOMAN. He finds himself holding it, so to speak, as you might hold a ball in the hand. And, through all the observatories at once, he sees the stars, some of them standing visibly out, stereoscopically, in front of the rest.

FUTURE MAN. He also experiences the emotions and desires of all men and women, all hungers and loves and fears. And over and above this great expansion of perception and desire, he enters into an entirely new order of experience. He gains an insight into the nature of things and an appreciation of the tragic beauty of existence, which were quite impossible to him as a separate individual. Many metaphysical problems become clear to him; and also he achieves what we regard as the supreme act of the spirit, an ecstatic but intellectual love of the cosmos.

FUTURE WOMAN. What you see now is one group, out of many, waiting for this glorious enlightenment to begin. They seem to be watching for a signal, but in reality the signal is an invisible telepathic message which will issue from the summit of this building, and from others in all parts of the world.

FUTURE MAN. Look more closely at them, and say what you see.

ACTOR. You say they are all men and women, but really they seem to be many kinds of animals. Of course, they are all erect bipeds, but there the similarity ends. They are of all sorts of sizes and colors and shapes.

ACTRESS. Most of them are naked, but some seem to be wearing furs.

FUTURE WOMAN. It is their own fur that they are wearing. We are all of one human species, but we are a very variable species, far more variable even than your terrestrial dog. And the diversity of our bodies is no greater than the diversity of our minds. You primitive creatures seem to us tediously similar, like sheep.

FUTURE MAN. And yet in spite of our diversity, we can understand one another and sympathize with one another to an extent impossible to you. But what more do you see?

ACTOR. Each of these weird beings has something like a mackintosh hanging over one arm.

FUTURE MAN. The flying-suit in which he came, and will presently depart.

ACTRESS. All the faces are turned in our direction, as if they expected us to make a speech.

FUTURE MAN. We are near the center of interest, the summit of this building.

ACTRESS. Strange faces! So unlike, even at a first glance.

ACTOR. Alike only in being animal faces — horse-like, kangaroo-like, leonine, feline, yes and reptilian.

ACTRESS. And yet quite definitely human — or godlike. How is it that you seem to us so much more animal than ourselves, as well as so much more human and divine?

FUTURE WOMAN. We are so securely human that we are not afraid of being animal too. But in you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and with shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.

ACTOR. How motionless they stand! Intent, eager.

ACTRESS. Their faces are like the faces of lovers, or saints,

(An obscure and solemn music, rising gradually)

ACTRESS. Music! So you have music on these great occasions.

FUTURE MAN. Strange that you should hear music! The telepathic influence has begun, but of course you cannot receive it. It is affecting you indirectly through our minds, and is translated into music. A poor, crude, utterly inadequate translation.

(Music gradually develops into wild splendors, and after a few moments fades and ceases)

ACTRESS. Is it over now, this strange experience of theirs?

FUTURE MAN. No, it is only beginning. Now they will all go their ways, and live their own lives, love their loves, and fulfill their special functions in the community. Yet all the while they will be possessed. Each one of them will be all the while perceiving and thinking as the mind of the race. As a cell in a brain lives its own life yet is possessed by the man’s mind.

FUTURE WOMAN. Yes, but after some weeks or months of intense racial experience, they will sink back into being mere individuals, until another call is heard. Look! They are preparing to go.

ACTOR. There is movement. They are putting on their flying-suits.

ACTRESS. The whole surface of the plain is restless. Now it’s rising in whiffs, like the dusty surface of a road on a windy day, or steam from hot water.

ACTOR. They are rising. A vast smoke of men and women.

(Faint rushing sound, increasing)

ACTRESS. Like an immense flock of birds. Like boiling cloud beneath us, rising toward us.

ACTOR. Now there’s a great streaming away toward the horizon in all directions.

ACTRESS. And still they rise. Now some of them are level with us. The air is thick with swarming clothed creatures, with outspread arms.

(The rushing sound is now a loud surging. Distant voices)

ACTOR. They are all over the sky above us, myriads of them.

(The sounds fade and cease. Pause)

ACTRESS. It’s all dark. Where are our two friends?

(Pause)

ACTOR. Hullo! Back in the dear old studio again! By ourselves, too.

ACTRESS. It’s over. And I’m tired, terribly tired. (Yawns)

ACTOR (under his breath). Hush, you idiot, the Listeners! (Aloud) Er — Goodnight, everyone, goodnight.

A MODERN MAGICIAN (1979)

First published in ‘The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction’

THEY CONFRONTED EACH OTHER ACROSS A TEA TABLE in a cottage garden. Helen was leaning back coldly studying Jim’s face. It was an oddly childish, almost foetal face, with its big brow, snub nose, and pouting lips. Childish, yes; but in the round dark eyes there was a gleam of madness. She had to admit that she was in a way drawn to this odd young man partly perhaps by his very childishness and his awkward innocent attempts at lovemaking; but partly by that sinister gleam.

Jim was leaning forward, talking hard. He had been talking for a long time, but she was no longer listening. She was deciding that though she was drawn to him she also disliked him. Why had she come out with him again? He was weedy and self-centered. Yet she had come.

Something he was saying recaptured her attention. He seemed to be annoyed that she had not been listening. He was all worked up about something. She heard him say, “I know you despise me, but you’re making a big mistake. I tell you I have powers. I didn’t intend to let you into my secret, yet; but, damn it, I will. I’m finding out a lot about the power of mind over matter. I can control matter at a distance, just by willing it. I’m going to be a sort of modern magician. I’ve even killed things by just willing it.”

Helen, who was a medical student, prided herself on her shrewd materialism. She laughed contemptuously.

His face flushed with anger, and he said, “Oh very well! I’ll have to show you.”

On a bush a robin was singing. The young man’s gaze left the girl’s face and settled intently on the robin. “Watch that bird,” he said. His voice was almost a whisper. Presently the bird stopped singing, and after looking miserable for a while, with its head hunched into its body, it dropped from the tree without opening its wings. It lay on the grass with its legs in the air, dead.

Jim let out a constricted squawk of triumph, staring at his victim. Then he turned his eyes on Helen. Mopping his pasty face with his handkerchief, he said, “That was a good turn. I’ve never tried it on a bird before, only on flies and beetles and a frog.”

The girl stared at him silently, anxious not to seem startled. He set about telling her his secret. She was not bored any more.

He told her that a couple of years earlier he had begun to be interested in “all this paranormal stuff.” He had been to séances and read about psychical research. He wouldn’t have bothered if he hadn’t suspected he had strange powers himself. He was never really interested in spooks and thought transference and so on. What fascinated him was the possibility that a mind might be able to affect matter directly. “Psychokinesis,” they called this power; and they knew very little about it. But he didn’t care a damn about the theoretical puzzles. All he wanted was power. He told Helen about the queer experiments that had been done in America with dice. You threw the dice time after time, and you willed them to settle with the two sixes uppermost. Generally they didn’t; but when you had done a great many experiments you totted up the results and found that there had been more sixes than should have turned up by sheer chance. It certainly looked as though the mind really had some slight influence. This opened up terrific possibilities.

He began to do little experiments on his own, guided by the findings of the researchers, but also by some of his own ideas. The power was fantastically slight, so you had to test it out in situations where the tiniest influence would have detectable results, just tipping the scales.

He didn’t have much success with the dice, because (as he explained) he never knew precisely what he had to do. The dice tumbled out too quickly for him. And so he only had the slight effect that the Americans had reported. So he had to think up new tricks that would give him a better opening. He had had a scientific training, so he decided to try to influence chemical reactions and simple physical processes. He did many experiments and learned a lot. He prevented a spot of water from rusting a knife. He stopped a crystal of salt from dissolving in water. He formed a minute crystal of ice in a drop of water and finally froze the whole drop by simply “willing away” all the heat, in fact by stopping all the molecular movement.

He told Helen of his first success at killing, a literally microscopic success. He brewed some very stagnant water and put a drop on a slide. Then through the microscope he watched the swarm of microorganisms milling about. Mostly they were like stumpy sausages, swimming with wavy tails. They were of many sizes. He thought of them as elephants, cows, sheep, rabbits. His idea was that he might be able to stop the chemical action in one of these little creatures and so kill it. He had read up a lot about their inner workings, and he knew what key process he could best tackle. Well, the damned things kept shifting about so fast he couldn’t concentrate on anyone of them for long enough. He kept losing his victim in the crowd. However, at last one of the “rabbits” swam into a less populous part of the slide, and he fixed his attention on it long enough to do the trick. He willed the crucial chemical process to stop, and it did stop. The creature stopped moving and stayed still indefinitely. It was almost certainly dead. His success, he said, made him “feel like God.”

Later he learned to kill flies and beetles by freezing their brains. Then he tried a frog, but had no success. He didn’t know enough physiology to find a minute key process to check. However, he read up a lot of stuff, and at last he succeeded. He simply stopped the nerve current in certain fibres in the spinal cord that controlled the heartbeat. It was this method also that he had used on the robin.

“That’s just the beginning,” he said. “Soon I shall have the world at my feet. And if you join up with me, it will be at your feet too.”

Throughout this monologue the girl had listened intently, torn between revulsion and fascination. There was a kind of bad smell about it all, but one couldn’t afford to be too squeamish in these days. Besides, there was probably nothing in morality, anyhow. All the same, Jim was playing with fire. Strange, though, how he seemed to have grown up while he was talking. Somehow he didn’t look gawky and babyish anymore. His excitement, and her knowledge that his power was real, had made him look thrillingly sinister. But she decided to be cautious and aloof.

When at last Jim was silent, she staged a concealed yawn and said, “You’re clever, aren’t you! That was a good trick you did, though a horrid one. If you go much further, you’ll end on the gallows.”

He snorted and said, “It’s not like you to be a coward.”

The taunt stung her. Indignantly she answered, “Don’t be ridiculous! Why should I join with you, as you call it, merely because you can kill a bird by some low trick or other?”

In Jim’s life there had been certain events which he had not mentioned. They seemed to him irrelevant to the matter in hand, but they were not really so at all. He had always been a weakling. His father, a professional footballer, despised him and blamed the frail mother. The couple had lived a cat-and-dog life almost since their honeymoon. At school Jim had been thoroughly bullied; and in consequence he had conceived a deep hatred of the strong and at the same time an obsessive yearning to be strong himself. He was a bright lad and had secured a scholarship at a provincial university. As an undergraduate, he kept to himself, worked hard for a scientific degree, and aimed at a career of research in atomic physics. Already his dominant passion was physical power, so he chose its most spectacular field. But somehow his plans went awry. In spite of his reasonably good academic qualifications, he found himself stuck in a low-grade job in an industrial lab, a job which he had taken on as a stopgap till he could capture a post in one of the great institutions devoted to atomic physics. In this backwater, his naturally sour disposition became embittered. He felt he was not getting a fair chance. Inferior men were outstripping him. Fate was against him. In fact he developed something like a persecution mania. But the truth was that he was a bad cooperator. He never developed the team spirit which is so necessary in the immensely complex work of fundamental physical research. Also, he had no genuine interest in physical theory and was impatient of the necessity of advanced theoretical study. What he wanted was power, power for himself as an individual. He recognized that modern research was a cooperative affair and that in it, though one might gain dazzling prestige, one would not gain any physical power as an individual. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, might perhaps give him his heart’s desire. His interest rapidly shifted to the more promising field. Henceforth his work in the lab was a mere means of earning a livelihood.

After the conversation in the cottage garden he concentrated more eagerly than ever on his venture. He must gain even more spectacular powers to impress Helen. He had decided that for him, at any rate, the promising line was to develop his skill at interfering with small physical and chemical processes, in lifeless and in living things. He learned how to prevent a struck match from lighting. He tried to bypass the whole of atomic research by applying his power of psychokinesis to the release of energy pent up in the atom. But in this exciting venture he had no success at all, perhaps because in spite of his training, he had not sufficient theoretical knowledge of physics, nor access to the right kind of apparatus for setting up the experiment. On the biological side he succeeded in killing a small dog by the same process as he had applied to the robin. He was confident that with practice he would soon be able to kill a man.

He had one alarming experience. He decided to try to stop the sparking of his motorcycle engine. He started up the bike on its stand and set about “willing” the spark to fail. He concentrated his attention on the points of the sparking plug and the leaping spark and “willed” the space between the points to become impenetrable, an insulator. This experiment, of course, involved a far greater interference with physical processes than freezing a nerve fibre or even preventing a match from lighting. Sweat poured from him as he struggled with his task. At last the engine began to misfire. But something queer happened to himself. He had a moment of horrible vertigo and nausea and then he lost consciousness. When he recovered, the engine was once more running normally.

This mishap was a challenge. He had never been seriously interested in the mere theoretical side of his experiments for its own sake, but now he had perforce; to ask himself what exactly was happening when by an “act of will” he interfered with a physical process. The obvious explanation was that in some way the physical energy that should have crossed the gap between the points had been directed into his own body; in fact that he had suffered the electric shock that he would have had if he had touched the points. It may be doubted whether the true explanation was as simple as this, for his symptoms were not those of electric shock. It might be nearer the truth to say that the inhibition of so much physical energy caused some sort of profound psychical disturbance in him; or else, to put the matter very crudely, that the physical energy was in some way converted into psychical energy in him. This theory is borne out by the fact that, when he recovered consciousness, he was in a state of great excitement and mental vigour, as though he had taken some stimulating drug.

Whatever the truth of the matter, he adopted the simpler theory and set about sidetracking the intruding energy so as to protect himself. After much anxious experimentation, he found that he could do so by concentrating his attention both on the sparking plug and on some other living organism, which then “drew off the electricity” and suffered accordingly. A sparrow sufficed. It died of the shock, while he himself remained conscious long enough to stop the engine. On another occasion he used his neighbour’s dog as a “lightning conductor.” The animal collapsed, but soon recovered consciousness and careened about the garden barking hilariously.

His next experiment was more exciting, and much, much more reprehensible. He went into the country and took up a position on a knoll, whence he could see a fairly long stretch of road. Presently a car came into sight. He concentrated his attention on the sparking plugs and “willed” the electrical energy to escape into the driver. The car slowed down, vacillated between the two sides of the road, and came to a standstill across the fairway. He could see the driver slumped over the steering wheel. There was no one else in the car. Greatly excited, Jim waited to see what would happen. Presently another car came in the opposite direction, hooted violently, and drew up with screeching brakes. The driver emerged, went to the derelict car, opened a door, and was confronted by the unconscious occupant. While the horrified newcomer was wondering what to do, the other recovered consciousness. There was an anxious conversation, and finally both cars went their separate ways.

Jim now felt ready to impress his girlfriend. Since the killing of the robin, they had occasionally met, and in his awkward and adolescent way he had tried to make love to her. She had always discouraged him; but she was obviously more interested in him since the robin incident. Though she sometimes affected to despise him, he felt that she was secretly drawn to him.

But one day he had an unpleasant surprise. He had boarded a bus to take him home from his work. He climbed the stairs and settled into a seat. Suddenly he noticed Helen sitting a few seats ahead with a curly-headed young man in a sportscoat. The couple were deep in conversation with their heads bent together. The girl’s hair brushed his cheek. Presently she laughed, with a ring of happiness such as he had never before heard from her. She turned her face toward her companion. It was aglow with vitality and love. Or so it seemed to the jealous lover three seats behind.

Irrational fury swept over him. He was so ignorant of the ways of girls, and so indignant that “his girl” (for so he regarded her) should take notice of another man, that jealousy wholly possessed him, to the exclusion of all other considerations. He could think of nothing but destroying his rival. His gaze seized upon the nape of the hated neck before him. He passionately conjured up images of the hidden vertebrae and the enclosed bundle of nerve fibres. The nerve current must cease; must, must cease. Presently the curly head sank on Helen’s shoulder, and then the whole body fell forward.

The murderer hurriedly rose from his seat and turned his back on the incipient commotion. He left the bus, as though ignorant of the disaster.

Continuing his journey on foot, he was still so excited that he had no thought but exultation over his triumph. But gradually his frenzy subsided, and he faced the fact that he was a murderer. Urgently he reminded himself that after all there was no point in feeling guilty, since morality was a mere superstition. But alas, he did feel guilty, horribly guilty; the more so since he had no fear of being caught.

As the days passed, Jim alternated between what he regarded as “irrational” guilt and intoxicating triumph. The world was indeed at his feet. But he must play his cards carefully. Unfortunately his guilt gave him no peace. He could not sleep properly; and when he did sleep, he had terrifying dreams. By day his experiments were hampered by the fantasy that he had sold his soul to the devil. This notion infuriated him with its very silliness. Yet he could not rid himself of it. He began drinking rather heavily. But he soon found that alcohol reduced his psychokinetic power, so he firmly broke himself of the habit.

Another possible form of relief from his obsessive guilt was sex. But somehow he could not bring himself to face Helen. He was irrationally afraid of her. Yet she must be quite ignorant that he had killed her lover.

At last he met her accidentally in the street. There was no possibility of avoiding her. She was rather wan, he thought, but she smiled at him and actually suggested a talk over a cup of coffee. He was torn between fear and desire, but presently they were seated in a cafe. After some trivial remarks, she said.

“Please comfort me! I have had a terrible shock quite recently. I was on the top of a bus with my brother who has been in Africa for three years. While we were talking, he collapsed and died almost instantly. He seemed perfectly fit. They say it was some new virus in the spinal cord.” She noticed that Jim’s face had turned deadly pale. “What’s the matter?” she cried. “Are you going to die on me too?”

He pulled himself together and assured her that sheer sympathy for her had made him feel faint. He loved her so much. How could he help being upset by her misfortune? To his relief Helen was completely taken in by this explanation. She gave him, for the first time, the glowing smile he had formerly seen her turn upon her brother.

Encouraged, he pressed home his advantage. He said, he did so want to comfort her. They must meet again soon. And if she was at all interested in his experiments, he would show her something really exciting some time. They arranged a trip in the country the following Sunday. He privately decided to repeat for her benefit his trick with a passing car.

Sunday was a bright summer day. Sitting together in an empty railway carriage, they talked a good deal about her brother. He was rather bored, but he expressed ardent sympathy. She said she never imagined he had such a warm heart. He took her arm. Their faces drew close together, and they looked into each other’s eyes. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for this strange, rather grotesque though boyish face, wherein, she told herself, the innocence of childhood was blended with an adult consciousness of power. She felt the underlying grimness, and she welcomed it. Jim, for his part, was realizing that she was very desirable. The warm glow of health had returned to her face. (Or was it a glow of love?) The full, sweet lips, the kindly, observant grey eyes, filled him not only with physical desire but a swooning gentleness that was new to him. The recollection of his guilt and present deception tormented him. An expression of misery came over his face. He let go her arm and bowed forward with his head in his hands. Perplexed and compassionate, she put an arm round his shoulders, and kissed his hair. Suddenly he burst into tears and buried his head on her breast. She hugged him and crooned over him as though he were her child. She begged him to tell her what was the matter, but he could only blubber, “Oh, I’m horrible! I’m not good enough for you.”

Later in the day, however, he had quite recovered his spirits, and they walked arm in arm through the woods. He told her of his recent successes, culminating with the car incident. She was impressed and amused, but also morally shocked by the irresponsibility of risking a fatal accident merely to test his powers. At the same time she was obviously fascinated by the fanaticism that drove him to such lengths. He was flattered by her interest, and intoxicated by her tenderness and her physical proximity. For they were now resting on the little knoll where he intended to do his trick with the car, and he was lying with his head in her lap, gazing up at her face, where all the love that his life had missed seemed to be gathered. He realized that he was playing the part of an infant rather than a lover. But she seemed to need him to do so, and he was happy in his role. But soon sexual desire began to reassert itself and with it masculine self-respect. He conceived an uncontrollable lust to demonstrate his godlike nature by some formidable display of his powers. He became the primitive savage who must kill an enemy in the presence of the beloved.

Looking up through Helen’s fluttering hair, he saw a small object moving. For a moment he took it for a gnat, then realized that it was a distant airplane approaching.

“Watch that plane,” he said; and she was startled by the abruptness of his voice. She looked up, and down again at him. His face was contorted with effort. His eyes glared, his nostrils dilated. She had an impulse to fling him from her, so brutal he looked. But fascination triumphed. “Keep your eyes on the plane,” he commanded. She looked up, then down, then up again. She knew she ought to break the devilish spell. (There was something called morality, but a delusion, probably.) Fascination had triumphed.

Presently the advancing plane’s four engines hesitated, and ceased one by one to fire. The plane glided for a while, but soon gave evidence of being out of control. It vacillated, staggered, and then was in a nose dive, spiralling. Helen screamed, but did nothing. The plane disappeared behind a distant wood. After a few seconds there was a muffled crash, and smoke began to rise from behind the wood, a leaning black plume.

Jim raised himself from Helen’s lap, and turning, pressed her backward to the ground. “That’s how I love you,” he whispered fiercely. Then he furiously kissed her lips, her neck.

She made a violent effort to pull herself together and resist the impulse of self-abandonment to this lunatic. She struggled to free herself from his grip; and presently the two stood facing each other, panting. “You’re mad,” she cried. “Think what you have done! You have killed people just to show how clever you are. And then you make love to me.” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

He was still in a state of crazy exaltation, and he laughed. Then he taunted her. “Call yourself a realist! You’re squeamish. Well, now you know what I am really like; and what I can do. And see! You’re mine. I can kill you at any moment, wherever you are. I shall do whatever I like with you. And if you try to stop me, you’ll go the way of the robin and — the man on the bus.” Her hands dropped from her tear-stained face. She stared at him in mingled horror — and tenderness. She said quietly, “You’re quite mad, you poor boy. And you seemed so gentle. Oh, my dear, what can I do about you?”

There was a long silence. Then suddenly Jim collapsed on the ground, blubbering like a child. She stood over him in perplexity.

While she was wondering what to do, and blaming herself for not breaking the spell before it was too late, he was in an agony of self-loathing. Then he started to use his technique upon himself, so that no more harm should be done. It was more difficult than he expected; for as soon as he began to lose consciousness he also lost his grip on the operation. But he made a desperate effort of will. When Helen, noticing his stillness, knelt down by him, he was dead.

EAST IS WEST (1979)

I LEFT MY LODGINGS IN WEST KIRBY IN THE MIDDLE OF the morning and walked along the Estuary shore, I arriving at my favourite bathing place when the tide was only a few yards from the foot of the clay cliffs. The sand, as usual on a fine Sunday, was crowded with parties, bathing and sun-bathing. I undressed and swam out till the coast was but a strip between sea and sky. At my farthest point I floated for a long while, the sun pouring through my closed eyelids. I began to feel giddy and slightly sick, so I hurried back to land.

During the rather lengthy swim I was surprised to see that the shore and the cliff-top, which I thought had been crowded, were in fact deserted. The one heap of clothes which I could detect, and which I therefore took to be my own, perplexed me by its colour. I was still more perplexed when I walked out of the water to it and found that apparently someone had removed my own flannels and had substituted a queer fancy dress of “Chinesy,” pyjama-like trousers and jacket, both made of richly ornamented blue brocade. Even the towel was decorated with a Chinese or Japanese pattern; but in one corner it was marked with my own name. After a vain search for my proper clothes, I dried myself, and began experimenting with the fancy dress, shivering, and cursing the practical joker.

A bright silver coin, about the size of a florin, fell out of one of the pockets. Picking it up, I was surprised by its odd look. Closer inspection surprised me still more, for it bore on one side a grim but not unhandsome female profile, surrounded by the legend, “Godiva Dei Gra. Brit. et Gall. Reg.” On the obverse was a seemingly archaic version of the royal arms, which included the French lilies but omitted the Irish harp. Round the edge I read “One Florin 1934.” There were also some Japanese characters, which, to my amazement, I read. They signified, “Kingdom of Britain. Two Shillings.” Other coins in the pockets proved to be of the same fantastic type. There was also a letter, in its torn envelope, inscribed in Japanese characters. I recognized the name at once as the Japanese transcription of my own. The address was that of a well-known shipping firm in Liverpool. Well-known? Collecting my wits, I realized that, familiar as it seemed, I really knew nothing about it.

By this time I was thoroughly alarmed about the state of my mind. How came it that I could read Japanese? Whence these clothes? What had become of the holiday crowd?

Since the letter was addressed to me, I read it. The writer accepted an invitation to visit me for a few days with his wife. After referring to various shipping matters, which came to me with a distressing blend of familiarity and novelty, he signed himself, if I remember rightly, “Azuki Kawamura.”

Sick with cold and fright, I put on the clothes, and could not help noting that every movement executed itself with the ease of well-established habit, not with the clumsiness of one struggling with fancy dress.

I hurried along the shore toward West Kirby. With a fresh shock I discovered that the distant buildings looked all wrong. It was comforting to see that Hilbre Island at least was more or less as it should be, and that the contours of the Welsh hills across the Estuary left nothing to be desired. The black-headed gulls were indistinguishable from those of my normal experience. Half a dozen shell-duck, floating on the receding tide, were correctly attired.

Two figures approached me. What would they think of my fancy dress? But apparently it was not fancy dress; it was the orthodox costume of a gentleman. As the couple advanced, it revealed itself as a man and a girl, walking arm in arm. A few paces from me, they unlinked. He touched his cap, she curtsied. Indifferently, almost contemptuously, I acknowledged their salute. We passed.

I had been surprised to see that their dress was neither that of modern Europe nor yet Eastern like my own. It suggested a very inaccurate and ragged version of the costume of Elizabethan England as worn by the humbler sort. But he smoked a cigarette, and she bore aloft a faded Japanese sunshade.

Arriving at the town, I found that it was not West Kirby at all, not the West Kirby that I knew. The natural setting of the place was normal, but man’s works were completely unrecognisable. With perfect assurance I walked along the entirely unfamiliar marine parade. The houses were mostly half-timbered, some were even thatched. But others showed unmistakably the influence of Japanese or Chinese culture. There was a “pagoda-ish” look about them. One or two were tall ferro-concrete buildings, whose vast window-space made them appear like crystal palaces. Even these betrayed in their decoration an Asiatic inspiration. It was almost as though China or Japan had been the effective centre of “Americanisation.”

The parade was thronged with people of all ages and both sexes, dressed mostly in semi-Asiatic style. In some cases a native English costume had been overlaid with foreign additions, here a Chinese dragoned scarf, there a coloured sunshade. The best dressed women wore what I should describe as silk kimonos; but many of these garments were sleeveless, and none reached to the ankles. They displayed silk stockings of a type that in my own world would be regarded as European and modern, save for their great diversity and brilliance of colouring, One or two of the women, seemingly the bolder, wore very gay silk trousers and sleeveless vests. The loose brocade suits of the men were mostly of more sombre colour. I was surprised to note that many even of the best dressed promenaders had pock-marked faces. I was surprised, too, at the large number of smartly uniformed men, evidently army officers, in Robin Hood green with wide-brimmed hats. On their hips large-hilted cutlasses and neat pistol holsters combined the medieval and the modern.

The language of all these strange people was recognisably English, but of a grotesque and, I judged, a somewhat archaic type. Words of Japanese origin occurred, but not frequently. Most technical words, it seemed, were English translations of Japanese or Chinese originals. On a minute concrete building, which turned out to be a telephone call box, I noticed the phrase “Public Lightning Speaker,” and under it in Japanese characters the Japanese word “Denwa.”

Motors there were in plenty; but horse-drawn vehicles also, and a number of sedan chairs. Out at sea I saw a small, high-pooped, antique sailing vessel, and on the horizon a great ocean liner, trailing her black smoke.

At a certain point I turned off the Parade and passed along the shop-lined streets. The windows were all veiled for the Sabbath. Many of the large shops displayed Chinese or Japanese signs as well as English ones. I passed a small Asiatic building which I took to be a Buddhist temple. Examining the printed notices displayed at its entrance, I judged that it catered not only for Asiatic visitors but for English converts. My course now led me into the poorer quarter, and I was shocked to note the overcrowding and filth of this part of the town. Swarms of ragged urchins in native English dress played in every gutter. They had an unpleasant tendency to flee as I approached, though a few stood their ground and sullenly touched their forelocks. Many were also rickety, or covered with festering sores. In the heart of this poor district I came upon an old Gothic church. It turned out to be the parish church, and Roman Catholic. A constant stream of the devout, mostly rather shabby, flowed in at one door and out at another.

After a while the streets began to improve, and presently I emerged upon a great avenue bordered by gardens and opulent-looking houses of the sort which I now recognized as both Asiatic and modern.

One of these pocket-mansions was apparently my own, for I entered it without permission. It was a delightful, even a luxurious building, and I reflected that changing my world I had also “gone up in the world.”

At the sound of my entry a manservant appeared in a vaguely “Beefeater” kind of livery. Flinging him my bathers and towel, I opened a door out of the entrance hall and went into a sitting room. Before I had time to study it, a woman rose from some cushions on the floor and caught me in her arms.

“Tom! Base Tom,” she said, smiling gaily. “’Tis but a month since we wed, and already thou art entarded for thy Sunday dinner! Foolish me to let thee practice thy Asiatic water-vice unkeepered!”

A bachelor, I might have shown some confusion at this reception, but I found myself embracing her with proprietary confidence and zestfully kissing her lips.

“Sweet Betty, let me envisage thee,” I said, “to see if thou art worn with pining for me.”

So this was my wife, and her name was Betty, and we had been married a month and were evidently still very pleased about it. She was fair, superbly Nordic. Behind the sparkle of her laughing eyes I detected a formidable earnestness. She was tall. Her green silk kimono veiled the contours of an Amazon. As she broke from me and swept through the door, smiling over her shoulder, I wondered how I had ever persuaded such a splendid creature to marry me.

The gong (a Chinese bronze) was sounding for our Sunday dinner. I rushed upstairs to wash, but on the landing I encountered our Japanese guests. He was a slim middle-aged figure in brocade of decent grey. She, much younger, was slight, trousered in deep blue shantung, and vested in crimson. The light was behind her, and I saw almost nothing of her face.

I bowed deeply and began to speak in Japanese. It was rather terrifying to watch the appropriate thoughts emerge in my mind and embody themselves fluently in a language of which I supposed myself to be completely ignorant. “I hope, sir, that you had a successful morning, and that you will not have to leave us again today. We should like to take you to call on some friends who long to meet you.” The couple returned my salute, I thought, rather sadly. I was soon to discover that they had reason for gloom.

“Alas,” he said, “our experience this morning suggests that we had better not appear in public more than we can help. Since the crisis, your countrymen do not like the Yellows. If you still permit, we will stay with you till my business is done and our ship sails; but for your sakes and our own, it is better that we should not risk further trouble.” I was about to protest, but he raised his hand, smiled, and ushered his wife downstairs.

After washing in the tiled and chromium-plated bathroom (the taps screwed the wrong way), I hurried into our bedroom to brush my hair. It was a relief to find that the mirror still showed my familiar face; but whether through the refreshment of the bathe or owing to more enduring causes, I appeared rather healthier and more prosperous than was customary in my other world.

On the dressing table was a newspaper. The bulk of it was written in English, but a few columns and a few advertisements were in Japanese. I vaguely remembered reading it in bed over an early cup of tea. It was called, I think, The Sunday Watchman. I opened it, and discovered on the main page, in huge headlines, “Ultimatum to the Yellow Peoples. Hands off Europe. Britain will defend her allies.”

Betty’s clear voice bade me hurry, and not be so “special” over my toilet.

When I arrived downstairs, she was explaining to the guests, in her serviceable but rather inaccurate Japanese, that she had again taken them at their word, and ordered a typical English meal for them. “Although,” she said, with the faintest emphasis, “we ourselves are now more used to Eastern diet.”

It fell to me to carve the roast beef of old England and at the same time to make conversation in Japanese. To judge by the ease with which I combined these actions, both must have been familiar.

Yet every moment of my experience was completely novel and fantastic. With curiosity and yet familiarity my eyes roamed about the room. The dinner service was of China, in both senses. To be in keeping with the affectedly native meal it should have been of pewter or wood. With some amusement I noted our elegant little thin-stemmed, flat-bowled sake cups, of silver, gold-inlaid. These I had bought in Nagasaki on my last visit to the East. Evidently my wife had been unable to resist the temptation of displaying them, though they were quite incongruous in a sample English meal. The furniture was vaguely Tudor, so to speak. On the walls hung painted silks which I knew to be Chinese and Japanese, though some of them were confusingly reminiscent of modernist European art in my other world. I regarded with special pride and affection a tall silken panel on which was very delicately and abstractly suggested a slender waterfall surrounded by autumnal trees. Wreaths of mist or spray veiled the further foliage. Above, and more remote, domes of forest, receding, one behind the other, loomed ghostly through clouds. “Forest on forest hung about his head,” I murmured to myself, and wondered whether in my new, strange world Keats had any footing. This much prized panel, this silken forest of copper and gold and pearl grey, I had bought from an artist in Tokyo.

The company was as hybrid as the room. Two English maidservants in mobcaps and laced bodices moved demurely in the background. Opposite me sat my exquisitely English wife, the warm tone of her sunned arms contrasting with the cool parchment-like skin of the Japanese lady. The grave and slightly grizzled Mr. Kawamura was typical (I half guessed it, half remembered) of the finer sort of Japanese man of affairs. He was a “shipping director,” which was the Japanese equivalent of a ship owner. That is, he was a civil servant in control of a line of steamers. In Japan, I recollected, all the means of production were now state-owned.

This fact, along with others that cropped up in the course of conversation, made me revise my view of the relation of my new world to my old. I had guessed that the roles of Japan and Britain were simply reversed. But evidently the situation was more complicated that that, for Japan was some sort of socialist state. I was soon to have further evidence of complication.

My intense curiosity about everything, and my anxiety lest my own behaviour should betray me, bid fair to be eclipsed by a third interest, namely the fascination of Mrs. Kawamura’s personality. I was at first inclined to think of her as a modernized and world-conscious reincarnation of the Lady Murasaki; but presently I learned that she was in fact a native not of Japan but of China. Though her shining black hair was cut short, and her whole bearing, like her dress, was frankly modern, her features (of old ivory) and also her grave intelligent expression suggested the ancient culture of her race. In spite of her “shingle” and bare arms, she reminded me of a certain very delicate Chinese miniature painter and embroidered on silk. This I had long ago encountered in my other world, and its pale perfect face had become my symbol of all the best in China. Mrs. Kawamura’s was this face done large and with an added largeness of spirit. Her heavy eyelids gave her an expression of perpetual meditation. A sweet and subtle mockery played about her eyes and lips. But more particularly I was intrigued by her manner, by the way in which she moved her hands and turned her head. Her whole demeanour reminded me of the action of an artist engaged on some very precise but ample piece of brush-work, so exact it was, yet flowing.

Between the courses Mrs. Kawamura drew a cigarette case from her pochette and asked if it was permitted to smoke at such an early stage in an English meal. Betty, after a minute pause, hastened to say, “Why, of course, in the houses of those who have travelled.” Up to this point I had played my part without a single lapse, but now at last I tripped. Automatically I produced a matchbox from my pocket, struck a light, and offered it for her convenience. Mrs. Kawamura hesitated for a moment, looked me in the eyes, glanced at my wife, then smilingly shook her head and used her own cigarette lighter. Betty, I saw, was blushing and trying not to show bewilderment and distress. In a flash it came upon me that in England (of this new world) one did not offer to light a woman’s cigarette unless one was very intimate with her. I began to stammer an apology; but Mr. Kawamura saved the situation with a laugh, and said to Betty, “Your husband forgot that he is no longer in Japan, where that action is considered only common politeness.” I snatched at this excuse. “Yes,” I said, “I grew so used to it. And today I have had too much sun.” It was Betty’s turn to laugh, as best she could. Lapsing into English, she said, “Thy Oriental ways keep surprising me, Tom, but I expect I shall get used to them.” In Japanese she added, “Of course England is rather stupid about some things.”

Mrs. Kawamura leaned toward Betty and lightly touched the hand that still nervously crumbled a piece of bread. There was nothing of patronage in the act; or if there was, it was rendered inoffensive by the sincere and rather timid respect of the culture which is already in full and determinate blossom for the culture which has still to unfold. “You English women,” she said, “have a great task. You have to see that your men preserve what is best in England while they absorb what is best in the East.” Smiling at her husband, she continued, “Men are all such boys. They run after flashy new things and throwaway the well-tried old things. Azuki, there, is much more interested in his new turbo-electric liner than in the incomparable literature of my country.” This mischievous sally was evidently well directed, for Mr. Kawamura responded with amiable indignation, asserting his claim to be an amateur of letters, and adding that if no one thought about ships and other practical matters, no one would have leisure to enjoy Chinese literature.

Thus far the talk had avoided the subject which was in all our minds, the international crisis. By common consent we had spoken only of personal matters, of a Kawamura nephew who was studying in Canton and of Betty’s young sister, at an Orientalised school in London. But the conversation was now definitely turned to the differences between East and West. Our guests generously praised the courage and enterprise which, within eighty years, had changed Britain from a feudal to a modern industrial community of the first rank. To this I politely replied that we had but copied what Japan’s genius had created. For had not the Japanese been the pioneers of mechanical invention and commercial organization during four of the most momentous centuries of human history? “If at the dawn of our era, after Rome’s fall, we English had been as great seamen as the Japanese have always been, we might have forestalled you. But though Nordic sea-rovers contributed to our racial stock, we did not preserve their maritime habits. Nor did the continent of Europe.” The words slid easily from my lips, but they were startling news to my mind.

Mrs. Kawamura remarked that in the East there was now a strong conviction that commercialism and mechanization had in fact done more harm than good. It had blinded the great majority to all that was most desirable in life. Were not the English now in grave danger of ruining their own admirable native culture in their haste to dominate the world with their new industrial power? “To us,” she said, “it seems terrible that, in spite of our tragic example, you should plunge blindly into the modern barbarism and grossness from which we ourselves are only today struggling to escape. And now, just when we are at last finding the beginnings of peace and wisdom and general happiness, when the Chinese nations are at last outgrowing their age-old enmities, when all the Yellow Peoples are becoming reconciled even to the half-European but mellowing culture of Russia, must we be drawn into this terrible quarrel between yourselves and New Nippon? If there is war, how can I ever think of you two dear English people as my enemies?”

At the mention of New Nippon, I remembered with a shock of surprise the great independent Federation which included the whole of North America. This vast community was formerly the most successful of Japan’s colonies and had since become the mightiest of all the “Eastern Powers.”

“But why,” I asked, “should you come in at all? This quarrel is so remote from you. You have no longer any European possessions except Gibraltar, which you are in the very act of selling to us. Your empire has fallen from you, and you are happier without it. Your reduced population makes you far less dependent on foreign trade than formerly. Your traditional championship of the oppressed should induce you to side with us, or at least not against us. And what have you to gain by coming in? Your social conditions are the envy of the East, and of the West also. And though you are politically eclipsed, you share with North China the cultural leadership of the world. War will simply destroy all this. If you come in, you will merely be used as a tool by your more powerful and less civilized kinsmen. But why should there be any question of your coming in?”

“Why indeed?” said Mr. Kawamura. Then, after a pause, “The true reason, I think, is this. Though we have lost our empire we are still bound to it. Our former dominions in South Africa and South Nippon” (by this name I knew he referred to Australia) “and our ally the Maori Kingdom, have a firm hold on us. Such foreign trade as we have (and we do still need foreign trade) is nearly all of it trade with them. Well, some of those former dominions are terribly frightened of your rising power. They have large unoccupied territories; while you and your inseparable allies the Irish are over-crowded. We have long ago learned to control the growth of our population, but you persist in refusing to do so. Inevitably then you must expand. Together with Ireland, and with the support of your European dependencies, you constitute a formidable military power.” Here he hesitated. “Your imperialism is at least as ruthless as ours was in the old days. Our former colonies know well that you will attack them sooner or later. Better at once, they say, before you are invincible.”

Betty broke in to say, “But surely you see that we must free Europe. I know our policy has often been harsh and provoking. I am not one of those who think we are always right. But this time we must be firm. It’s a solemn duty.”

“Well,” continued Mr. Kawamura, “on the whole you have a pretty strong case; though of course we can’t believe you are really going to free Europe. You are going to take over the management of Europe from New Nippon. That is the real aim of your elder statesmen. Anyhow, I personally agree that it is folly for Japan to come into the war. But racial passion has been roused, partly by the propaganda of trade interests in New Nippon, partly by your own press. And your Queen, your great but dangerous Queen, has said things which were bound to enrage the less balanced sections of our public.”

“Yes, Azuki,” said Mrs. Kawamura. “But surely by now the less balanced sections of our public have very little effect on government action. After all, since our Great Change we are rapidly becoming civilized enough and cosmopolitan enough to laugh at a few cattish insults.” She checked herself, smiled deprecatingly at Betty, and proceeded. “No, if our government wanted to keep out, it could. But somehow it seems to lack the courage to do so. I wonder whether New Nippon has some horrible secret financial control over us. Not that we can actually help them much by coming in. But the wealthy caste of New Nippon are inclined to hate us because we have learned the lesson that they cannot bring themselves to learn. They know that war would ruin our modest prosperity and make nonsense of our new, hard-won culture. Might they not bring us in for sheer spite?”

Her husband raised his eyebrows, and said nothing. The dessert was now over, and we moved into our “withdrawing room.” Here there was rather more of Japanese influence than in the dining room. The furniture was of lacquer. A great stone or concrete fireplace, however, betrayed the English character of the house.

Tea was served in cups of eggshell china, which Mrs. Kawamura tactfully admired. Betty explained with some self-consciousness that though tea was not included in the orthodox English diet, we had grown very dependent on this most refreshing Oriental drink and could not face the prospect, of doing without it after our Sunday dinner. The habit was indeed rapidly spreading.

Before seating myself I had picked up a large book which I rightly expected to be an atlas. During the ensuing conversation I turned over its pages. I came first on a map of the British Isles. The “Kingdom of Ireland” was coloured green, the Kingdoms of England and Scotland red. Towns, mountains, and rivers mostly bore familiar names. A population map revealed the well-known concentrations around London and in the industrial North, but towns and rural areas were both more populous than in my “other world.” Ireland, moreover, contained almost as many people as England, presumably because throughout its history it had developed as an independent community. The total population of the British Isles was over seventy million.

Turning to a map of Europe, I found the northern half of France labelled “Kingdom of France,” and coloured red, like Britain. The Netherlands and all the coastlands of the Western Baltic appeared pink and were dubbed “Liberated Nordic Principalities.” Pink proved to be the colour of “British Protectorates and Dependencies.” Most of these principalities, together with much of Central Europe and Italy, were embraced within a crimson border. Across this vast territory was printed “Holy Roman Empire.” This region, and indeed most of Europe, was divided into a mosaic of principalities, duchies, free cities. Scattered around all the coasts of the continent were little patches of yellow, the largest of which included Hamburg. The key gave yellow as “Terrains seized by New Nippon.” Large tracts in the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, Western Russia, and the eastern marches of the Empire were coloured buff and labelled “War Lords,” or “No Settled Government,” or “Workers’ Councils.” The eastern half of Russia bore the legend, “Union of Socialist Conciliar Republics.”

A map of the world showed this “Soviet” Union (if I may so translate it) as extending to the Pacific. Its centre of gravity was evidently well to the east, for its capital was a town not far from the Chinese frontier, bearing a Mongolian name unfamiliar to me. China consisted of three great republics. Korea and Manchuria were independent “Empires.” India was a congeries of native states. Across the whole subcontinent was printed, “Aryan Peoples Liberated from Japan,” with appropriate dates. Many others were coloured with the yellow of; New Nippon. That most formidable of the “Eastern” Powers, which extended from the Arctic to Mexico, was covered with Japanese names. Its capital was a city where San Francisco should have been. In South America, which was cut up into many states, such names as were not native were obviously of Chinese origin. In place of the three great British dominions of the Southern Hemisphere appeared “Nippon in Afric,” “South Nippon,” and “Maori Kingdom,” all of them independent.

While I was still poring over the atlas, the church clock chimed the hour. Betty rose, saying to the guests, “It is almost time for the Queen’s speech. I hope you will excuse us if we listen, for it is a solemn duty for all Britons to hear Her Majesty today.” The Kawamuras assured her that, though they could not understand English, they would gladly listen to the world-famous voice. Betty thanked them, pressed the switch, and resumed her seat.

The news bulletin was being announced in an intensively cultivated English voice. The language was a kind of English which in my “other world” I should have regarded as a fantastic hybrid of Babu and Elizabethan. Familiar words bore strange yet intelligible meanings, or were piquantly misshapen. As I listened I interjected an occasional sentence of Japanese translation for our guests. If my memory is faithful, what I heard was roughly as follows; but much of the linguistic oddity has escaped me.

In the East End of London, the voice assured us, revulsion was now stilled. The Lord High Sheriff, mindful of the foreign peril, had gripped this homely peril firmly. He was resolved to convince the erring commonalty of that region that they had been abduced by foreign tongue-wielders, and that the witful British people would none of their treason. All good Europeans should be mindful that, though Russia was partly European, the dangerous political thoughts of the Conciliar Union and its emissaries were wholly Asiatic. The Lord Sheriff had therefore encompassed the whole revulsive region in a martial cincture. Two warships in the Thames had cast shell on Poplar and Canning Town, till all the rebel holds were disrupted. Soon after dawn the obsedient troops advanced. Their compressive movement met no repugnance. The rebels abjected their arms, and twelve score ringleaders were enchained. These were judged; and duly hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the presence of a God-thanking crowd. Some thousands of the less outstanding rebels were being concentered in temporary castrations, afield in Essex, to await Her Majesty’s pleasure.

After a pause the voice resumed in an awed tone which skillfully suggested suppressed excitement. Listeners, it said, were now to hear the living voice of their Sovereign. When the speaker solemnly commanded all who heard to stand, Betty and I promptly rose to our feet. Our guests, after one bewildered glance, followed suit. In an awed monotone, the announcer proclaimed: “Her Most Pure and Invincible Majesty, Godiva, by the Grace of God, Defender of the Christian Faith, Protector of the Holy Roman Empire, Queen.”

After another pause another voice possessed the air, a somewhat husky, but regal, and withal seductive contralto.

“My subjects! My most loyal friends, English and Scottish! And ye, my few but faithful Welsh! All, all whose home is Britain, this demi-paradise, as our immortal Strongbow names it, this insel set in the silver sea. And you, my gallant French! And all my indefatigable Teutons! Others, too, I call; you my loving neighbors in the Green Isle, subjects of my dear cousin Shean. And not only to these I speak, but to all Europeans, of whatever nation and estate. For all, all of us together, are now affronted by this most severe and instant peril. Oh my peoples, all mine in spirit, though not all in title! Our homely differings now slip from us. We remind us only that we are one kin, colleagued together at last against the cunning, the heartless, the lascivious and Godless Yellows.”

Such undiplomatic language was startling, even from our outspoken Queen. Explanation was soon to follow.

“It is not long since the last great war obtended its dark bloody wings over our continent. I myself, though scarce in the full bloom of my womanhood,” (Betty at this point made a movement of surprise) “even I can remember the victorious geste of British and French hosts against the heroic but miswitting Germans, whom foreign devils had abduced. I can recall well the day, soon after the handfasting of the peace, when I, the child Queen of Britain, was plauded by the rejoyed Parisians and crowned Queen of France, thereby resuming the lapsed title of my forebears. I can remember how the North German lords, who had by then destrued their own traitorous princes, now wishfully and gladly laid their crownlets at my feet, my small ensatined feet.”

Here the Queen paused. Mrs. Kawamura took the opportunity of disposing of a lengthy and precarious cigarette ash. Our eyes met. She knew no English, but it seemed that merely through the Queen’s vocal demeanour she sensed the essence of the situation. I shall not forget how, when I had signalled mock distress, the noncommittal politeness of her glance was lit by relief and sad amusement.

Her Majesty continued. “Oh, Great White Peoples, since that war, much has happened. Through all those years I have striven to be worthy of the task which the ensworded Christ has set upon me, the delivery of Europe. For let us remind ourselves of well-known truth. In all our churches, our divine and most courageous Captain hangs crossed upon the blade and hilt of the Sword. That same Sword, when he had risen from the dead, he himself grasped, and wields today, leading the Faithful. He came not to bring peace. And I, though till today I have besieged my just aims by parley, am his lieutenant. Though it was by parley and fine machinations that I and my counsellors defted the Japanese from all their treaty ports, it was the springing strength of my army and navy and my aerials that rendered those pacific arguments convictive. But now, today, argument has failed; and I am here to call upon you, all White Peoples, to take arms in earnest. For the hour has come when we must constrain New Nippon to disgorge her rapine, or else betray irrevocably the cause for which we stand together.”

Strange, I thought to myself, that only yesterday, before I had my mysterious dream of the other world (for I was beginning to reverse my view as to which world was real and which was fantasy) I might have applauded the Queen’s apologia! And there stood Betty, till now my soul’s twin, drinking the royal words with no misgiving.

The Queen continued. “I have recently and justly claimed on behalf of the Germans, Hamburg; for the French, Bordeaux; and for the Lambards, Genova. As ye already wit, Europeans, parley having failed, I have been constrained, after close heart-prying, to obdict an ultimatum. But what I shall now tell you, my peoples, will be newspell to you. Prevising clearly the rebutment of that ultimatum, I forestalled the New Nippon retort. I struck. And already, even as I speak they bring me word that Hamburg’s defences have been destrued by my brave aerials. A gallant geste, and most enheartening newspell, oh White Peoples! But let us not deceive ourselves. Dire days leap toward us. The whole force of New Nippon and of the Chinese Republic, and haply of Japan also, will be oppugned against us. Nothing can save us now but crazy hardihood.”

Again the Queen paused. Betty’s large eyes sought mine, but I dared not face them. Mrs. Kawamura’s had found diversion in watching a tomtit through the window. Her husband was obviously wondering if he could sit without committing lese majeste.

The royal voice resumed. “Oh men and women of Europe! We shall one and all be stricken by the hugest and most contorturous of wars. The sky will rain fire and poison. Millions shall die. But oh Europeans, let such as die, die singing to the ensworded Christ, whose truth we stand for. Let such as live, live hate fast toward the Yellows, till all the coasts of Europe be purged of these slot-eyed commercers of the East: who suck and squander the natural wealth of our continent; who undo the native toughness of our bodies by teaching us their own soft life; who undo the strength of our souls by logiking that our holy Church is founded on lies, and that our Christ, like their own Buddha, prized gentleness above fortitude. They gave us opium. They have tempted our coupling lovers with filthy lore to prevent the sacred burden of motherhood, hoping thereby to thin our numbers. Women of Europe, consider! In Japan, so little do men prize virtue, that husbands lend out their wives to any guest for the night. And what wives, what women! Painted! Lewdly exhibiting their jaundy breasts, and...”

I sprang to the radio and snapped the switch. “Tom, Tom,” cried Betty, gripping my arm. “What ails thee? Her Majesty! If someone should have heard you check her!” Then laughter seized me. Mrs. Kawamura smiled, perplexed, demure. Mists and irrelevant shapes came before my eyes. Still laughing, I woke in my “other world.” I was in the horsehair chair by the fireplace in my lodging-house sitting room. My landlady, who was clearing away my Sunday dinner, was laughing too, apparently at something I had said or done, for she now remarked, “Well, you are a queer one!” The lace curtains fluttered by the open window. In the garden my “bather” and towel were swinging on the clothesline.

The Poetry

The University of Liverpool, where Stapledon worked in 1912. He received his doctor’s degree from the university in 1925.

Latter-Day Psalms (1914)

CONTENTS

THE CITY

SPIRIT

OMNIPOTENCE

WHO ART THOU?

HUMANITY

MEN

TIME

GOD

THE HEAVENS DECLARE

MY CUP RUNNETH OVER

THE REBEL

LABOUR

STRIFE

SALVATION

ATHENA

APOLLO

ARTEMIS

OUR LADY OF HEAVEN

JAWEH

SATAN

CHRIST

BRAHMA

WAR

PEACE

Stapledon during service in World War I

THE CITY

I went into a city to see if there be God.
The sun was hidden from my sight; the city
    roared in my ears.
The people hurried to and fro all the day long;
    their eyes were unquiet
The half of them starved, and saw death daily before
    them. The half of them were surfeited, and
    stirred up strange desires.
Things of no moment were in their minds all the
    day long. They fought one with another,
    as monkeys over a straw.
With ceremonies they made believe to be holy;
    yet they were proud of aping the wicked.
The men whetted their lust upon the women; and
    the women were weary of motherhood.
The men and women were loathsome, for they
    had forgotten love.
I said, “If there be God, has he made them so?
What part had God in the founding of this city?”
I saw that the children were marred even in the womb;
    that God assailed them with temptations while
    yet they were weak.
I saw that the good men of the city flourished not.
The city had not been founded for them.
But surely man and not God founded the city.
How shall I condemn God for the
    blunders of men?
Yet God has permitted slaughter of the innocents.
Does the Most High God delight in the sacrifice of souls?
I said in my pride, “If there be God, he shall be no God of Mine.
I will go my way, and live according as my soul wills.
I will make war upon thee, evil God. Though thou slay me,
I will contrive justice and mercy against thy will.”

SPIRIT

But behold, the heavens around me were very beautiful. The
     multitude of stars smiled upon me.
The lights of the city trembled beneath me as it were in sorrow; and
    her murmur was music.
Peace came upon me, and exaltation; and I marvelled that I should be
     exalted.
I was as though some spirit within me had certain knowledge of God,
    declaring, “He is gentle. He is merciful.”
But I looked upon the city, and rejected comfort, saying, “Nay, thou
    foolish imagination.
“But the spirit would not be put down. It gloried within me.
And I saw that the spirit was excellent beyond all that I called good,
    and merciful beyond my mercy.
And I was amazed, and said, “Surely thou only art God who dwellest
    in my heart. And thou rulest the stars.”

OMNIPOTENCE

I went into an open place under the stars. The city lay beneath me,
     and her sound was subdued.
I saw that the hosts of heaven perform that which was ordained in
    the beginning. The city was ordained in the beginning also.
I looked into the far place beyond the stars. I hearkened to a little
     wind of the earth whispering among the grasses.
And a great fear fell upon me out of the heavens, because of the
     majesty of God.
I said, “How shall I call thee just or unjust? Thou art mighty, and I
     am very small.
I am weary of myself because I am so small. I am contemptible in my
    own eyes because thou hast ordained what I must will.
Wherefore has thou sickened this thy little earth with a fever of life?
    Wherefore hast thou made the swarms of men to fret upon her?
Thou hast made the heavens for thy plaything. Thou breakest the
    heart of man like a toy.”
My spirit was dried up within me. I sat without meditation.

WHO ART THOU?

Who art thou that dwellest in the hearts of men; and speakest
    in my heart daily, so that I call thee God?
I feel thee excellent within me. I bow down to thee in the
    secret place within me.
Thou hast made me a law, and I will keep it.
I go amongst men, thinking of thee, saying, “I will be like
    to thee; they that are like to thee are men.”
Thou art beautiful, and abhorrest that which is vile. Who art
    thou that hast made thyself beautiful out of the
    sorrow of men?
Thou didst make the nations to toil, that they might bring
    thee out of darkness into light. Art thou God
    for whom the peoples suffer?
Thou are more beautiful from generation to generation.
    Shall the peoples suffer for thee daily more and more?
I rose up and cried against thee blasphemously in the world, saying,
     “I scorn thee, thou cruel God.”
But thou speakest within me: I am bowed down before thee.

HUMANITY

The spirit that dwells in the hearts of men spoke within me, saying:
Oh my children, ye in whom I live, ye that have suffered for me
    to make me beautiful!
Think ye that I have slain my children willingly? I am not God
    who has ordained pain.
I am the Spirit dwelling in your hearts. Ye live that
    I may be beautiful.
Ye are of me, but I am greater than you. I am the Soul of All Men.
In the days of my darkness, when I knew not myself,
    I was like a child, living in a dream.
Out of the lives of the ancient multitudes I have awakened and
    found myself. And lo! I am beautiful, and yearn toward God.
God has given me a law; and I will keep it.
I will make myself perfect. I will be beautiful in the eyes of God.
I will stand before him joyful as a bride. I will be for him a bride
    or a sacrifice according to his will.
As for you, my children, my little ones, the sorrow that ye have suffered
    cannot be undone.
But the sorrow that ye have suffered shall not be wasted.
    Because ye have suffered, behold, I am.
The lives of all the multitudes are gathered in me.
    There shall no little soul be lost.
When I stand before God, the sorrow and the joy that ye have
    suffered for me shall be in my beauty. In my blessedness
    ye shall be blessed.
Therefore hearken unto me when I speak in your hearts; for I know God.

MEN

Behold the sons of men, who sin, whose hearts are divine!
In selfishness they heap up misery upon one another; yet for love
     they die.
They are blown hither and thither like the dead leaves; yet for love
     they are steadfast.
They trample on their kindred for a little bread; yet for a vision they
    forget themselves.
Scatter gold among them, and they fall upon one another in lust.
Show them God, and behold them sons of God.
I went into the city to be with men, and to learn their hearts.
I met them in the streets and in the public places, and the Spirit
    greeted me through their eyes, even from behind their hardness of heart.
I was with them in their homes, and their hearts opened to me like
     roses, so that I am filled with the fragrance that is in men’s hearts.

TIME

Wherefore hast thou made the world that it shall die, and the heavens
    that they shall burn out like a flame?
What wilt thou do when the stars are all extinguished, and there is no place for life?
The sons of men have builded for themselves a house of beauty. It is
    continually embellished.
The last of the generations shall dwell therein and die; and the beauty
    that was builded shall be no more.
A lover and his beloved have met together in the evening. Evening
    shall return, but they return not.
The home that seemed eternal is broken up and scattered. The
    children remember it; they die; it is no more.
I am heavy of heart because of fleeting time, and because all things
    come to nought.

GOD

The voice of God spake out of his creation:
I have made a law, that is my law of beauty. I have ordained my heavens
    that they shall blossom and wither away.
The flower shall die, but the seed shall flourish. Like a flower,
    the world shall perish, but the spirit that is born therein shall love.
If the spirit has need, shall I not make other universes for her sake,
    to be ethereal according to her necessity?
As for you, oh men, out of lifelessness I made you to live.
    Out of unconsciousness I gave you the glory of thought.
Have ye fear that I will let you slip again into nothingness?
    Do ye hunger after eternity all your life long?
Be sure that if ye die utterly, it is best that ye die; and if ye live for ever,
    it is best that ye live.
For I have made you to fulfil my purpose. Nothing that is in you
    shall be lost from me.
I have made you that ye shall create love and victory. That which
    ye create I will not destroy.
That ye may be courageous, I have hidden the future from you.
    That ye may conceive the light, I have laid my hand over
    your eyes and covered you in darkness.
That ye may know hope and despair, I have tempted you with many ideals,
    even while I resist all your striving for ever.
Yea, that ye may excel in fortitude, I will harass you all the days of your life,
    and seem to defeat you for ever.
That ye may love, I have tuned you together like music, so that in loneliness
    ye fulfil not yourselves.
That ye may increase in love, I have given you the means to sacrifice;
    that ye may sacrifice to love, and know that love is best.
That ye may know the peace of love, I have set in each of you the desire
    of a dear friend; that ye may look upon each other in wonder and
    delight, and be sufficient each to another.
That ye may know the glory of love, I have spoken to you in your friend’s
    voice; and in the eyes of your beloved ye have seen me.
Thus shall ye join with all my creatures in creating for me love. Its dearness
    and its splendour ye shall make for me.
Thus only shall ye come into the knowledge of me. Thus shall ye love me.
In each of my stars I have set a mighty spirit to increase in beauty.
    The peoples that dwell upon the multitude of my stars are beyond number.
Exalted are they who look to Sirius and Aldebaran as ye look to the sun.
    There are gentle peoples who praise me out of the midst of the Pleiades.
In every part of my heaven there is life living together; and out of its
    loving a spirit is born, to be the soul of each star.
Behold, these are my ministers who do my pleasure; who yearn towards
    one another across the great abyss;
Who fill my heaven with sing, as it were a little room
    bursting with voices;
Who shall draw near together, and be one soul, creating for me
    my heart’s desire.

THE HEAVENS DECLARE

Hast thou heard the song of the heavens,
    the chorus of innumerable stars?
If thou lie out in the darkness on the bare heath
    when the music of the wind is at rest, and the
    murmur of men is very far away; if thou listen with all
    thy soul, thou shalt hear the song of the heavens.
Thou shalt know that thou art clinging to a little star that is like a
    mote flying on the storm. And the voices of the mighty shall
    be about thee.
They shall be singing a great song. They shall overwhelm thee with harmony.
The Spirit of Man lifteth up her voice in the chorus. There were not harmony
    without her.
Thou shalt hear her song rising beside thee as it were the song of a child;
    but the voices of the mighty shall overwhelm thee even from the heavens
    that lie beyond thy sight.
The purport of the singing thou shalt not understand; but thy soul shall be
     filled with music.
Thy soul shall respond as it were a harp answering
    to the wind. Thy soul shall be musical
    according to her capacity.
There shall no more of the harmony enter
    thee than thou canst bear; but thou shalt
    feel glory round about thee.
Thou shalt hear lamentation as of a passionate
    sorrow, that mourneth in all the regions of
    heaven;
The sorrow in which beauty shall be brought
    forth; the terror of the darkness where there
    shall be light.
Thou shalt hear triumph as of one glorying in
    his death; the triumph of spirit fulfilled.
Thou shalt hear, as it were a melody exceeding
    sweet, the truth of that which thou callest love,
    when thou feelest it a little and art exalted.
But what is thy loving to the loving of the
    heavens, whereby they are made one?
Whereby the past liveth in the future; whereby
    the future and the past are one.
The voice of Heaven is one voice, singing a
    song of praise.
The voice of Heaven is one voice, singing a
    song of love.
Heaven prepareth for her beloved. The
    beloved of Heaven is God.

MY CUP RUNNETH OVER

THOU hast set me in the midst of beauty.
     What am I that I should be singled out
     for joy?
The trees clothe themselves in the green colour
     of spring; their branches are filled with the
     song of many birds.
By day the glory of the sun flows in my veins,
     filling me with content. By night the stars
     callout my spirit in worship, and I am lost
     among them.
In the setting of the sun and in men’s works I
     see beauty; in the storm and in the thrust
     of a spade.
Thou hast made me to take delight in music,
     whereby my spirit ascends I know not
     whither.
Thou hast made me to take delight in the
     thoughts of the great, the heritage of the
     generations.
Thou hast made me to take delight in men and
     women, and to seek the keys of their
     hearts.
Thou hast made me to love. Surely she is thy
     daughter whose home is my heart, for she
     is like to thee.
Wherefore hast thou blessed me thus beyond
     measure? What am I that I should be
     singled out for joy?
I have no merit beyond my brother. Have I
     stolen my brother’s blessing?
He has no respite from labouring all the day
     long, and the fruit of his labour he shall
     not use.
The fruit of his labour is my beatitude.
     Because of him I have leisure to seek
     beauty.
His eyes are blinded with toil. He is cursed
     because of me.
Why dost thou not destroy me in anger? Hast
     thou no vengeance terrible enough for me ?
Dost thou lie in wait for me till the cup of joy
     be full; to dash it from me ?
Rather thou hast poisoned it with shame
     and self-despising. I drink to my soul’s
     death.
Shall I renounce beauty? Shall I blind myself
     that I may be as my brother?
Shall I withdraw me from pollution for my own
     soul’s sake, and deny myself selfishly?
Oh, rather let me bow the head humbly before
     my brother, and say, “I am thy servant,
     who would help thee to beauty.
Because of thy toil I have known beauty.
     I will not rest until thou know her also.”

THE REBEL

Thus spake the oppressed:
What have I to do with God? What has God
     done for me?
He thrust me into the world hungry, and I
     could get no food.
He made others to surfeit, that my mouth
     might water.
He made me to desire pleasure and shun pain, and
     overwhelmed me with heavy toil and grief.
He made me to love, and to hunger for love;
     but what home for love have I?
He made me to guess that there is beauty, and
     set his favoured ones to proclaim beauty
     lest I should forget.
But the door of his heaven he fixed ajar, that
     I might hear and not enter.
And ye speak to me of worship and the joy of
     sacrifice! Wherefore should I sacrifice to you
     and to your tyrant God?
Mighty is your God, for he made the stars and
     enslaved the peoples. Loving he is not,
     for he made me.

LABOUR

I HEARD a voice of anger rising out of the city,
     the voice of many men:
Where is the oppressor? Who is it that has
     bound us to his will?
We are like a man who would tread down fire,
     but it springs up behind him anew.
Where is the oppressor, that we may throw
     him down, and cast him into the hell that
     he has made?
We have risen against one, but he vows it is
     not he; and against another, but he
     reproaches us, saying, “Friends, I am your
     friend.”
Where is the oppressor, he that lurks in the
     darkness to torment us?
Is he more worthy than we, that we should
     be his slaves? Or is he a god, that we
     should be a sacrifice to him?
Is it he that put weapons into the hands of the
     first men, that they might overcome the
     beasts?
Is it he that sweated to make the earth bring
     forth in the beginning, wrestling with
     tools against the wild?
Did he pile up the wide, mouldering cities of
the dead? Is it his blood that is upon
the pyramids?
Did he lay himself down to die on the old
     frontiers, that there might be peace behind
     him?
Did he build roads and bridges with his hands?
     Did he make the corn to grow for
     innumerable harvests?
Did he cramp his back under the earth to bring
     up coal and all metals? Does he die
     daily for our sakes?
It is our backs that are bent. It is we that
     toil from the beginning until the end of
     the world.
It is we that hand down an increasing inheritance
     to all the generations, making the
     earth to be a pleasant home.
We are mighty in labour. We have great
     work to do.
Who dare hinder us? Who dare squander
     what we have made?
Where is the oppressor, the devourer, the accurst?

STRIFE

SPIRIT rages against spirit. The sons of God
     contend together in long war.
The storm breaks up the trees. The storm
     casts down the strong trees gladly.
The sea has no regard for ships. He devours
     the mariners like food.
Plagues rot the peoples. The little creatures
     of pestilence revel in the bodies of men.
With mild eyes the stag beseeches the hunter;
     but the hunter will not understand.
Warriors go forth from their homes, fresh
     with kisses. They go to destroy one
     another, made glad with the prayer of
     nations.
Each host calls the sun friend, and the stars
     give heart to each on the night marches.
They rush together in battle, calling on God
     for victory. Each cries, “God is on our side.”
But the one conquers and the other is swept
     away. The deed of the one flourishes,
     but the other has striven in vain.
The victor exults, saying, “The stars are jubilant
     for us.” The vanquished mourns,
     “The stars weep because of our fall”
For I am my universe. Out of my own
     heaven I gather splendour, and weave
     thereof the desire of my heart.
From the midst of myself I look out upon
     my neighbour; but how shall I fathom
     what is beyond the stars?
I cannot see his heaven. He strives for what
     I scorn.
We meet together without understanding of
     one another, as it were two ships passing
     in the night. We are but as meteors in
     one another’s sky.
But if the desires of our hearts clash, our
     worlds are shattered together. We rush
     into conflict, crying, “God is on our side.”
We gather our friends together, crying, “Help
     to resist the Fiend, lest he tear the world
     asunder, and Hell triumph.”
It is so with the selfish and the unselfish,
     the wise and the foolish, the lowly and
     the mighty; with him who labours for
     his children, and him who would save
     the people.
It is so with kings and priests, warriors and meek
     men. It is so with the prophets of God.
Spirit rages against spirit; the sons of God
     call upon God to destroy his sons.
In the multitude there are innumerable longings.
     The desires of a people are like a
     host of wings that clash together striving
     to soar.
A multitude of men is as a multitude of
     worlds; and in the midst of each is a
     heart’s desire.
Who shall measure the span of the minds
     of all the living; and the longings of
     all the generations?
Who shall count the sum of all striving
     since first there was desire; or tell the
     pain of all failing since the first heart broke?
The achievement of men is glorious as a
     tower reaching up to heaven; but the
     deeds that have had no fruit, and the
     striving whose fruit is bitterness, cannot be told.
It has left no trace; yet is it great as the
     host of the dead.
Is it wasted and utterly lost? Or does it live
     in some good done without knowledge?
Martyrs bear witness in the world. Their zeal gives light.
But what of him that strives in secret and
     prevails not? And of him whose heart
     is broken within him, and yet he must
     make merry?
And what of the trees overthrown by the
     tempest, and the seed that is strewn
     upon the water?
What of the mariners whose lives are cut
     short; and the soldiers whose homes are
     desolate?
What of the peoples that have destroyed one
     another; and the peoples whose spirit has
     not lived?
And what of the sacrifice that is rejected, and
     the love that is driven away?
Believe that these are of great worth! Doubt
     not that their worth is everlasting!
For spirit lives by energy and love. Out of
     suffering also blossoms the flower, spirit.
Though we utterly die and cease, spirit dies
     not. Wherefore do we live and die but
     that spirit may be?
Believe that spirit is eternal! Yea, though the
     world a thousand times prove thee that it
     dies, believe, for it is cowardly to doubt.
There is that within thee which compels thee to
     believe; so that thou shalt triumphantly
     affirm, “I know.”
Behold! The wrath of spirit against spirit is
     the raging of wave against wave, wherein
     is the strength of the ocean.
The diversity of spirit, which is infinite as the
     universe, is but the diversity of one soul.
     The diversity of spirit is God’s joy.

SALVATION

“SAVE thy soul,” saith the preacher. “Be that
     thy one care.”
Is there then nothing more urgent for thee than
     to save thy soul? Was it for that only
     that spirit was entrusted to thee?
“Live rightly,” saith the preacher, “that thou
     mayest have peace; and blessedness hereafter.”
Is it for thine own comfort that thou wilt live
     rightly? With a little virtue wilt thou
     bargain for heaven?
“God seeks thee,” saith the preacher. “He implores
     thee to come to him. For very love
     of thee he reaches out both hands to save
     thee.”
And wilt thou turn to God in the love of thyself?
     And wilt thou love God to save thy soul?
Is it for her soul’s sake that a mother loves?
     Does she deny herself that she may be
     blessed hereafter?
And what is thy soul that it is so precious
     to thee, and thy salvation that thou must
     care for it ?
Thy soul is but one among the souls of men;
     and in the company of the great, what is it?
And beside the Spirit it is less than a glow-worm
     shining against the sun. In the midst of
     the living heaven what art thou beside the
     souls of stars?
Thou and all things yearn after salvation. If
     thou save thyself alone, thou hast done
     nothing.
Men, yea, and the stars, call upon thee for help.
     But thou broodest on thy soul.
If indeed thou hast a soul, forget it. Come out
     from it, and enter into the hope and fear
     that is greater than thou.
Sacrifice even thy soul gladly if the world need.
     Or if thou canst save it, save it not to be
     thine, but to be God’s.

ATHENA

DAUGHTER of the Most High! Spirit that
     reignest in the minds of men!
Thou art that ,through which all living things
     are kin, even the highest with the lowest.
In the beginning thou didst enter into the
     waters; and there was life.
Thou didst make for thyself creatures; and
     thou dwellest as a spirit in each.
Thou didst lead the beasts towards wisdom,
     that there might be men.
Thou wert in the minds of the first peoples
     when they wearied of brutishness, when
     they opened their eyes and saw beauty.
Thou makest the peoples to conquer the earth
     and tame the lightning and understand the
     stars, that their spirits may be enlarged in
     wisdom and virtue.
Thou wilt make of mankind a noble being,
     even Humanity thy minister.
Thou dwellest in each of thy servants, to direct
     his ways.
Thou makest thy men heroes; thy women are
     high-souled.
In evil times thou enlightenest the mind with
     fortitude. Thou hast established the
     spirit in wisdom.
Thou art not dismayed by the darkness of
     heaven and the baseness of men. Thou
     understandest, and contrivest light.
For thou art a sure truth in the mind, and a
     security against dismay.
Thou art the peace whence comes faith, and
     the blessedness that can accept all sorrow.
Thou restrainest thine anger, because thou
     understandest.
Thy love is calm and has few words; but it
     changes not, for thou lovest with understanding.
Thou temperest joy from excess. A quiet
     heart is thy home.
Thou art the serene sky, and the wind of the
     hills. Thou dwellest behind steadfast eyes.
Spirit, be with us lest we fall again into brutishness,
     lest we be scattered again into the dust.
Take us to be thy ministers, that we may
     spread thy good word.

APOLLO

POET, whose song is the universe! Creator, who
     hast made the world as the expression of
     thine art!
Thou hast taken stars and space to be thy language.
     Life and death is the music of thy lyre.
From the hearts of men thou strikest thy rich
     chords. Thou soundest a melody out of
     each man’s life.
Thy work is terrible and fair, for thou hast no
     aim but beauty.
Thou hast set joy to shine forth against sorrow,
     as the blue sky in the midst of the
     storm.
Thou carest not for the happiness of men. For
     beauty only hast thou care.
Thou wilt not make sorrow to cease, for tragedy
     is beautiful.
Therefore are hearts broken, even to fulfil thy
     harmony.
Therefore are souls degraded into the pit. Yea,
     even souls are destroyed.
Therefore are the nations crushed, and all the
     creatures of life swept away.
For thy universe is a great music; wherein is
     terror, darkness, and a singing melody of joy;
Wherein is strife and victory; and a haunting despair;
Wherein is love lyric, and love serene; wherein
     is love triumphant, and love overthrown
     by Time.
Thou hast struck forth thy universe in an ecstasy
     that it may perfectly declare thy thought.
Thou attainest the whole span of beauty, and
     the harmony thereof is passing sweet and wild.
Thy sign is the sun, which burns upon the sea
     in his uprising, and emblazons the heaven
     with fire;
Which kindles all dark things into splendour,
     and exalts a man to cry, “Hail, God,
     my brother! “
For all who create are thy kin; and all men create;
Both the makers of song and music, and they
     that speak through colour and form;
They that contrive great books, and they that
     live fair lives;
They that mould peoples, and they that bring
     up sons to be noble.
Master! Breathe into us thy spirit, that we may
     create beauty every day;
That our lives may be as a song, that is sung in
     harmony with thee.

ARTEMIS

SPIRIT! Who art purity on the white mountains,
     which inhabit the zenith with steadfastness;
Who art purity in the crescent moon, that rises
     in the dawn and is lost in the sun’s light;
Who art purity in the frosty sky; and in the
     lightning also;
Who art purity in the soul, and lookest out
     from the eyes like morning.
In a world that is spirit thou art spirit excellent.
     In a world that is divine thou art
     the holy of holies.
Where all is beauty thou art that for which
     beauty strives. Where all is love it is
     thou that are beloved.
Creation aspires to thee. She exists for thy
     worship.
As for man, when thou makest his mind thy
     holy place he knows thee, and his life
     prophesies thee.
But thou dwellest apart from the multitude,
     and thy visitation is to the elect.
To him that pleases thee thou hast stooped in
     his slumber to kiss him; and his dream is
     of thee, and his desire is toward thee
     henceforth for ever.
Thou hast stood in his path on the mountain,
     or in the starlight, and he has bowed
     down in terror and joy.
For thou art terrible; and if thine elect err
     thou wilt destroy his soul.
But if he keep him pure for thee and worship
     thee with his whole heart, there is no joy
     beside his.
Goddess, dwell in us! For it is better to be
     thine than our own.

OUR LADY OF HEAVEN

MOTHER, who art in all life; who art the
     sweetness wherein is strength;
Who makest the maiden tender-hearted, and
     the matron steadfast;
Who fillest the mind with loving-kindness, and
     makest the heart strong to protect;
Who puttest into the trees the desire to bear
     fruit, and into the beasts joy in their young.
Thou didst make the round world to bring
     forth life, and yield her sweetness day by day.
In the beginning thou didst conceive the living
     fire of heaven; wherefore thou wilt not
     cease to give thanks.
The stars are thy children. Thou watchest
     over them with loving pride.
Thou art the present smiling upon all that is
     to come, glorying in the child that shall
     be fulfilled.
Thou art humanity our sweet mother, who
     liveth in her children’s joy.
Thou art in every woman; and the hearts of
     men are not without thee.
Thou art the mild influence of the evening
     persuading men to rest.
Thou art the blue sky, that puts away our
     sorrow, as a mother laughing over her child.
Thou art a whisper that is everywhere saying
     “There is nothing to fear.”
Mother, dwell in thy daughters that they may
     be like to thee; and in thy sons that they
     may know thee and do thee service.

JAWEH

O GOD, whose law is upon the heavens; whose
     law is not broken;
Who orderest the courses of the stars, and
     directest the rain drops;
There is nothing that errs from thy direction;
     the obedience is exact.
Thou settest thy creatures one against another,
     and awardest victory according to thy pleasure.
Thou commandest the oak tree to grow into
     majesty, that thou mayest triumph in thy lightning.
Thou makest merry in the thunder; the
     earthquake is the stirring of thy hands.
Thou hast made for thyself an enemy to war
     upon thee. Thou hast given him courage
     and a sword, that thou mayest glory in
     his fortitude.
Thou hast made man to labour; and if his
     work displease thee, thou scatterest it like chaff.
Thou hast appeared to man in splendour, so that
     he cannot forget.
Thou hast set thy precept in his heart, and if
     he err therefrom he shall die.
Thou hast given to one strength to keep thy
     commandment, and to another thou hast
     ordained sin.
To the one thou hast awarded peace even in
     sorrow. For the other thou hast set a
     fiery hell in his heart to torment him.
O God, we cannot understand thy government.
     Thy justice is not ours.
But what thou wilt, that is just. O God,
     conform our will to thine.

SATAN

THOU who rebellest against the Almighty in
     all his dominion, scorning to be a slave
     even under him;
Who puttest bitterness into the cup of his
     victory, and laughest in his face out of Hell;
Who art for ever overpowered and never conquered;
     who hast no hope and desirest no respite.
Who hast thine own wisdom, whereby thou
     hast laid bare the treachery of the Almighty;
     and thine own virtue, which
     is to be true to the wisdom thou hast gained;
Who art God unto thyself, preserving thyself
     with a strong will.
It is thou that makest the uprooted tree to
     sprout, and the stag at bay to be terrible.
It is thou that puttest wrath into a man among
     his enemies, and into him that stands up
     one against the world.
Thou art the god of heroes, and of those who
     battle against fate.
Teach us thy wisdom that we may scorn the
     Almighty; and thy fortitude that we may
     not shrink to cast him off.
We hail thee, thou God in Man! We magnify
     thee against God in Heaven.

CHRIST

THOU lovest all things. Thou sharest all hope
     and fear.
Thou bearest the pain of the whole world, and
     its joy also.
Thou respectest the life of a gnat. Thou
     treadest not upon the dwelling of the ants.
Thou knowest well the strength of desire. Thou
     hast entered into the sins of all men.
Thou sayest to him who hates himself “Friend”;
     and to him who has lost heart thou imputest
     courage.
Thou trustest him who will not trust himself.
     Thou hast taken him to be thy minister.
Thou respectest the bitterness of him whose
     work is lost, and thou sheddest sweetness
     over him.
If any victor be puffed up, thou understandest
     and smilest at him. Thou openest his
     heart, and his pride blows away.
If any two contend, each calling his cause holy,
     thou exultest with both; but into the heart
     of each thou whisperest understanding of
     the other.
Thou holdest out thy hand to the outcast; and
     thou drawest all the peoples together.
Thou losest thyself in every man and woman.
     Thou hast forgotten thyself for ever in love.
Thou hast reached beyond man’s wisdom, and
     thou hast come again into the faith of a
     child.
Thou understandest the wisdom of the
     Almighty, and thou art gladly at one
     with him.
Oh thou pattern unto all men, who dwellest in
     the heart of every man! Oh thou God in
     Man, who knowest thyself God in Heaven!

BRAHMA

THOU everlasting, thou all-pervading, in whom
     all things have their being!
As we feel our bodies, so feelest thou earth and
     heaven. Even as our bodies are filled
     each with a life, so heaven is alive with thee.
Thou feelest the drifting of a mote in the air,
     and of light in the ether.
Thou feelest the passion of two lovers, and
     the dying of a star.
As our spirits excel over our bodies, so over the
     heaven transcendest thou.
The flesh is but a dream of the spirit, and
     creation is one of thy thoughts.
Thou art the only fact. The rest is thine imagining.
Thou dwellest in thyself for ever. Thou
     knowest thy whole self through and
     through.
The blossoming of this universe passeth not
     away. For thee all time is now.
Time is, because there is blossoming; wherein
     thou hast made beauty to be.
The soul of a man extendeth beyond the
     heavens; for thou art his soul.
The soul of a man containeth the whole past and
     the whole future; for thou art his soul.
The soul of a man containeth all souls; for thou
     art his soul.
Thou hast confined thyself in each of us, that
     thou mayest put on infinite diversity.
Behold, we bring thee each the diversity that
     thou hast willed. We long to enter into thee.

WAR

“COME forth, oh ye young men of all the
     nations, for the Fiend is risen against you
     to destroy! “
Who is the Fiend that is risen against us, and
     wherefore wills he to destroy?
“He is your brother, who aspires Godward;
     and he is in arms, lest ye overthrow him
     and destroy.”
Wherefore should we come forth against our
     brother ? We will not overthrow the
     servant of the Most High.
“Be ye then overthrown and made nothing,
     and be ye abolished from among the
     servants of the Most High!”
God commanded peace, and we will preserve it.
     In the ways of peace we serve the Most High.
“God is enshrined among you, and ye shall
     preserve him. Ye shall not meekly watch
     his temple be cast down.”
So also say our brethren whom the Fiend
     possesses; yet seek we not their temple to
     cast down.
“The Fiend is risen against you, is risen against
     you! Shall the holy place of the Lord
     God be defiled?
For the land that bred you is the holy place of
     God; but the land also of the enemy is
     holy land.”
We will not defile the holy lands with blood,
     and lay before God an offering of destruction.
“Arise! And overthrow the oppressor, who
     marshals your brethren against you to make you slaves.”
The oppressor also marshals us. We will not,
     help him to enslave.
“Rise up, ye young men of all the nations and
     learn war, that ye may overthrow the oppressor
     from all his dominion!
The Lord God commands you to war, that the
     flame of your spirit may be kindled, that
     ye may feel God.
For the shrine of the Most High is defiled
     in you, and he will purge it with war.
Therefore put off the habit of peace, and throw
     away self, and set aside your heart’s desire.
Come forth! oh ye young men! For the Lord
     God has ordained a sacrament of courage,
     that the spirit of his peoples may be born again.”
Behold, then, we come forth in our millions!
     Behold, we are gathered together in nations
     of armed men!
We have put off the habit of peace, and
     thrown away self, and set aside our heart’s desire.
We young men have parted from our beloved,
     whom we thought to wed.
We newly wedded shall not meet again. She
     that loves shall be left alone desolate.
Homes shall be rooted up. Children shall cry
     after their fathers in vain.
Mothers shall give up their sons. Fathers shall
     be alone in their old age.
The dead shall be a mighty host; and there
     shall be agony, and horror, and grief immeasurable.
The innocent shall be trampled under foot, and
     the victor shall be debased with bloodthirstiness.
But the peoples shall rise up, and the oppressor
     shall fall.
War music is in the air like a summons, and the
     heart beats to the drum.
Therefore let us go forth gladly even into the
     place that is Hell. Surely we will go
     singing even down into the pit.
For the Most High God is within us, and him
     we will preserve.

PEACE

I HEARD a voice calling out of the battle,
     “Peace! let us make peace!” And the
     armed hosts answered and sighed, “Peace,
     give us Peace !”
All men and women in all the earth longed also
     for peace; saying, “We are weary, we are
     chastened, let us love one another and
     advance the spirit.”
Peace shall come again. May the peoples be
     made one!
We shall gather up the threads again, even the
     threads that war cut.
Many shall come home rejoicing. Many shall
     receive back their beloved.
The spirit shall be kindled again in all men
     and women, and they shall worship together.
They shall give thanks for the new age, and for
     the victory of the dead.
And the souls of the dead shall be gathered
     into the spirit; and the spirit shall flourish
There shall be a new heaven and a new earth,
     and joy shall be again. But the dead shall
     not come back.

The Non-Fiction

West Kirby, a town on the north-west corner of the Wirral Peninsula in Merseyside — Stapledon lived most of his life in West Kirby.

A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929)

A STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF ETHICS AND PSYCHOLOGY

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1. THE NEED FOR ETHICS

CHAPTER 2. SELF-FULFILMENT AS THE GROUND OF ETHICS

A. PLEASURE AND THE ENDURING SELF

B. THE SOCIAL SELF

C. THE ACTUAL WILL AND THE REAL WILL

D. MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES

E. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 3. CRITICISM OF THE SELF-FULFILMENT THEORY

A. EMOTIVE ASPECTS OF THE THEORY

B. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

C. THE AMBIGUITY OF ‘SELF’

D. IMPLICATES OF THE ACTUAL WILL

E. IMPLICATES OF THE NATURE OF SELFHOOD

F. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 4. PLEASURE AS CONSTITUTIVE OF GOOD

A. FEELING REINSTATED IN ETHICS

B. RATIONALITY OF THE IDEAL

C. MORAL OBLIGATION

D. ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER 5. GOOD AS AN UNIQUE QUALITY

A. ETHICAL DIFFERENCES OF PROFESSOR MOORE AND PROFESSOR FIELD

B. ESSENTIALS OF PROFESSOR MOORE’S THEORY

C. ESSENTIALS OF PROFESSOR FIELD’S THEORY

D. ETHICAL COMPROMISE BETWEEN MOORE AND FIELD

CHAPTER 6. TELEOLOGY IN ETHICS

A. TWO THEORIES CONTRASTED

B. TELEOLOGICAL ACTIVITY

C. TELEOLOGY AND CONATION

D. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TELEOLOGY

E. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 7. TENDENCY IN PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY

A. THE MEANING OF TENDENCY

B. BIOLOGICAL TENDENCIES

C. REDUCIBLE AND EMERGENT TENDENCIES

D. ORGANISMS AND SOCIETIES

CHAPTER 8. TENDENCY IN PSYCHOLOGY

A. BODILY AND PERSONAL NEEDS

B. CONATION OF PSYCHICAL ACTIVITIES

C. INTER-RELATION OF ORGANISMS

D. OBJECTIONS TO INSTINCT PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER 9. PSYCHICAL CONFLICT

A. THE OBJECTIVE SOURCES OF CONATION

B. THE PROBLEM OF IRRATIONAL CHOICE

C. AUTOMATISM AND FREE CHOICE

D. REPRESSION

E. SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION OF TENDENCY IN PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER 10. OBJECTIVE ACTIVITY AS THE GROUND OF ETHICS

A. THE MEANING OF GOOD

B. THE MEANING OF BETTER AND BEST

C. THE MEANING OF OUGHT

D. LOGICAL BASIS OF OBLIGATION

E. EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

F. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 11. DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL

A. THE RELATION OF FREEDOM TO ETHICS

B. INTROSPECTION OF VOLITION

C. THE DETERMINANTS OF FREE WILL

D. RESPONSIBILITY

CHAPTER 12. ESSENTIALS OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL

A. IDEALS AND THE IDEAL

B. THE ABSTRACT FORM OF THE IDEAL

C. COMPARATIVE EVALUATION

D. THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE IDEAL

E. THE COSMICAL IDEAL

CHAPTER 13. REALITY AND ADMIRATION

A. ACTIVITY AND REALITY

B. IMPLICATIONS OF BEING ADMIRED

C. ORGANISMS, NATURE, AND AESTHETIC OBJECTS

D. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 14. MORAL ZEAL, DISILLUSION, AND ECSTASY

A. MORAL ZEAL AND DISILLUSION

B. THE RISE TO ECSTASY

C. EMANCIPATION FROM TELEOLOGY

D. SUMMARY

CHAPTER 15. ECSTASY AND ETHICAL THEORY

A. DESTRUCTIVE ARGUMENTS

B. HYPOTHESIS OF HYPER-BIOLOGICAL PERFECTION

C. THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

D. CONCLUSIONS AS TO ECSTASY AND THE IDEAL

Stapledon, c. 1937

PREFACE

WHETHER THIS BOOK is ‘modern’ in the good sense or the bad sense of that irritating word is for the reader to judge. I have tried to produce an ethical theory which should be both impregnated by the polliniferous wind of contemporary thought, and yet not without roots in the past. But since the roots do not appear above the ground, I may perhaps be charged with ignoring much ancient and invaluable wisdom, and lending an uncritical ear to modern jargon. There may be some truth in such a charge, since to attend closely to one thing entails a corresponding neglect of others. My chief aim has been to consider a distinctively modern and urgent, though theoretical, problem; and, through concern with the modern, I may perhaps seem to have been unduly silent about Greece and Palestine. There are, no doubt, respects in which modern ethical thought is simply a reformulation of ancient problems, and other respects in which the modern has begun to wither through the blocking of those channels whence it should receive sap from the past. But to work out this theme would be a different task from that which I have attempted. I have chosen to examine certain modern ethical theories (which themselves seek to embody what is best in ancient thought about the good), and these I have considered in relation with other contemporary movements of the mind. Yet, though the overt exfoliation of my theme is thus wholly modern in spirit, I hope I have been influenced by ancient wisdom enough to avoid merely perpetrating a fresh example of modern barbarism.

Just as modern thought, even when it is concerned wholly with contemporary matters, must ever be rooted in the past, so each writer is indebted to his teachers, even when he has no occasion to make detailed reference to them. It is a sad pleasure to acknowledge here my debt to the late Professor Alexander Mair, both in respect of his patient and critical guidance throughout my early philosophical studies and for helpful criticism of the first experiments which led up to the writing of this book. Whether he would have approved of this, its final form, I do not know. There is much in it with which he would deeply disagree, though with his usual kindly tolerance of heresy. This was bound to be; but I fear that, were he to read this book, he would also discover in it even more weaknesses of thought and obscurities of expression than those of which I am myself painfully aware. Certainly this book is the worse for lack of his continued help.

I am greatly indebted to the Master of Balliol for reading the whole manuscript and making extremely important criticisms; and to Dr. J. E. Turner and Dr. L. A. Reid, who also read the whole manuscript and gave much detailed and helpful advice. To Professor G. C. Field, also, I am grateful for valuable comments, and to Professor A. M. Carr-Saunders for advice on those chapters which refer to biological principles.

The Introduction is very largely based on an article which appeared in The Open Court of April 1927. Most of Chapters IV and VI appeared as two articles in The International Journal of Ethics of July 1926 and April 1928. I wish to thank the Editors of these journals for permission to reprint.

W. O. S.

January 1929

CHAPTER 1. THE NEED FOR ETHICS

BASED ON AN article which appeared in The Open Court, April 1927

IT is a commonplace that ours is an age of disillusionment, and that we follow on an age of complacency. In the days before the war, optimism was maintained only by setting the telescope to the blind eye. For, apart from the social problem, which few even in those days could entirely shun, there loomed three troubles less urgent but more subtly disturbing. First, even by the plain man it was beginning to be suspected that the universe was indifferent to human desires. Man, it seemed, must outgrow his trust in a celestial protagonist, and must depend on himself alone both for his daily comfort and for the achievement of his ideals.

Second, it was already rumoured that man was doomed not only to failure but to insincerity. He was charged with being at heart careless of everything but the satisfaction of crude animal instincts. He valued his ideals, we were told, only in so far as they afforded ‘symbolical fulfilment’ to his primitive cravings.

Third, and most unsettling, if this view of human nature were true, all judgments of ethical good and evil were vitiated. For whenever we judged anything to be objectively good, our value-judgment was determined (it was said,) not by the objective character and relations of the thing itself as a whole, but by some superficial and irrelevant feature which happened to stimulate instinctive or childhood cravings. Thus the considered judgments from which the ethical distinction was derived appeared invalid as data for ethics. And this view, that the distinction between good and bad was, after all, meaningless, was also strongly suggested by the chaotic state of ethical theory itself. For some writers defined ‘good’ in one way, some in others; and some said it was indefinable; and some explained it in such a modern and ‘scientific’ manner that they explained it away. Thus the very distinction on which any ideal must be based, the distinction which religion and common sense alike had assumed to be objective and universal, was beginning to seem arbitrary. All causes, all ideals, all obligations and enthusiasms, were suspect in the suspicion that ‘goodness’ itself was, after all, meaningless.

Such were the three doubts, cosmological, psychological, and ethical, that were creeping into the minds of thoughtful persons even in that distant age which ended in 1914. To-day they are more prevalent.

Now the first of these questions is perhaps of no great importance. During the rise of modern science, thoughtful persons began to wonder whether the world was really good, bad, or indifferent; or whether it was ‘on our side’ or not. When the more intelligent were as yet only beginning to wake from the dreams of the more naïve religious orthodoxy, this issue was bound to seem urgent. To-day we are perhaps no nearer an answer than in the days when Huxley first opposed the human to the cosmical; but we are more ready to shelve the question and tackle other matters. For it becomes clear that, if by ‘world’ we mean ‘the whole of being’, the answer must wait until we know something of the real nature of that whole. Moreover, the ultimate fate of our race and our ideals seems now more remote and less important than in the days before we realized the vastness of the future. But if by ‘world’ is meant the physical or ‘natural’ world, we are becoming reconciled to the knowledge that Nature, our ever-fascinating mother, is more resourceful than virtuous. We begin to cease from looking to her either as a model or as a protagonist. True to the modern fashion in filial piety, we are prone rather to correct than respect her. It is for us, not for her, to say what it is that is good, and to discover if possible whether or not goodness is but a delusion. As to her maternal protection, we are alternately braced and grieved to find that we must depend on ourselves alone. But we are no longer appalled.

The cosmological question thus deserves less attention than perhaps it gets. For, granted that the good-bad distinction is valid, Nature, as our intellectual, and moral inferior, must simply be brought to heel, animal that she is. But as to the Whole, whether it is ‘on our side’ or not, how dare we pass judgment on it? For, granted the validity of the ethical distinction, none but a universally informed mind is entitled to judge the universe. It is possible that, though in our ethical distinction we truly grasp a universal principle, yet that which in the cosmical view must be seen to be good is far beyond the appreciative powers of our little minds. Much that seemed to Queen Victoria very bad is judged by us to be very good. Yet (though some of us easily forget it), the difference between the Queen’s horizon and our own is perhaps less than the difference between ours and the span of all being. Who are we, that we should judge the heavens by our childish values? Shall we, because the gods neither please us nor make themselves intelligible to us, dub them insensitive or stupid? Parents, it is said, are justified in fulfilling, not merely in pleasing their children. And the gods, if there be such, are to be justified not by the sweets they give us, who indeed are very simple children, but by the judgment of the fully enlightened mind, which may (conceivably) be theirs, but very surely is not ours. For these reasons it is as well to leave the cosmological question untouched.

But the other two questions rightly become more insistent in the plain man’s mind every year. In the days when the teaching of the churches was accepted at least intellectually by the congregations (and even by the great uncongregated), there was no ethical problem in the plain man’s mind. Spiritual advisers told him what was good, and he accepted their verdict, in theory, if not in practice. Love was the good; and the plain man accepted it as the good, not because he saw that it was so, but because the churches said that God had said that it was so.

Even before the war, however, very many had already ceased to take their professed religion seriously, even on the side of theory. The startling and bracing discoveries of science began to make us incredulous of the old teaching, even if also far too credulous of the new. But perhaps the, main effect of science was that it made the old hopes look trite and even childish. For the doctrine of science was austere; while the doctrine of the old faith was by now padded over with comfortable devices. Comfort cannot stir us to loyalty. Thus, while to some the orthodox view was merely unbelievable, to others, though they accepted it as true, it had ceased to be commanding. Consequently, while in some quarters there was a purely intellectual scepticism, in others there was a purely emotional disillusionment. Elsewhere these two dissatisfactions were combined. And so the ethical questions began to whisper themselves in many minds. Those who felt most strongly the objective validity of the good-bad distinction but had lost the old faith, craved most eagerly an ethical theory not incompatible with their new cosmology. Those who were still intuitively convinced that love was the best thing in the world, sought some justification other than the word of a God whose existence they were beginning to doubt.

Then came the war. It gave us something large to do and vivid to think. It pushed those doubts from the focus of our attention. Already in the years before the war the only vivid and widespread ideal was nationalism, and patriotism was the only compelling religion. The one thing bigger than themselves which most men could both believe in and care for was their ‘country’; and they readily accepted the war as the supreme religious rite of sacrifice to their romantic god.

It is true, of course, that the motives that led men to fight were diverse. Not in all, perhaps not in many, was this strictly religious impulse the main factor. Many, no doubt, went simply to stamp out a conflagration that seemed to threaten their homes and all whom they loved. Some, on the other hand, went to escape the tyranny of the economic mill; some to escape mere boredom; some to be quit of their families or their friends; some to assert their manhood in the eyes of women. The white feather flicked their self-esteem, and drove them to accept without enthusiasm the sacrament imposed by the only living orthodox faith, the faith in nationalism. But these, who fought primarily for their own good name and not for the romantic ideal, would never have been herded into khaki had they not assumed that to shirk this ordeal was in fact shameful~ Self-pride alone will not force normal persons to swim Niagara or swallow poison. They must feel that the deed is expected of them, and rightly expected. They must expect it of themselves. In fact, they must feel that to serve in the cause really is obligatory on all self-respecting persons. They must admit the ‘ought’, even though they fulfil it only for self-pride. Of course, there were many who went to the front for no reason whatever, but in response to herd-suggestion — with no more loyalty than sheep who follow their leader. But how did that suggestion ever come into being? It arose amongst those for whom ‘duty’ was a meaningful word, who judged, however reluctantly, that there is something other than the person of each that has a ‘claim’ on each because of its intrinsic goodness.

Some of us, perhaps, are over cynical about the war, or at least about the motives of those who fought. For we incline to forget that, in an age when the spur and the comfortable promises of religious faith were both of them less compelling than of old, when the objectivity of good was doubted and the hope of immortality fading, men freely gave themselves for the only ideal which seemed to claim them. As the religious faiths waned, the national faiths waxed. Traditions of national dignity, righteousness, and might seemed less improbable than the doctrines of the churches, and far more vivid. Moreover, patriotism was well within the capacity of the schoolboy culture, which alone was general, even among the educated. For the appeal of nationalism was twofold. It was easily assimilated to our egoism; yet it offered us something to serve, something other than, and greater than, our private selves. This was just what we craved: on the one hand salvation for our self-esteem (so crippled in the petty round of life), and on the other hand a clear obligation, a duty of service, however humble, in a great and vivid cause. Had the war offered satisfaction to one only of these impulses, its hold would have been less constant. But it fulfilled now the one and now the other as our need varied; and in no mood could we escape it.

Had the peoples been able to take Christianity to heart, they would not have needed the psychical ‘release’ afforded by passionate nationalism. Their egoism would have found fulfilment in the certainty of eternal salvation; and their loyalty might have found in the Christ-god an object both vivid and universal. But since this could not be; the nation was taken as a substitute, and war as the great rite. And the war, even if it has done nothing else of value, has, I should say, underlined in red two facts of human nature. It has shown, on the one hand, how subtly egoism can disguise itself even from itself, accepting even agony and death for mere pride. But, on the other hand, it has shown that. self-disregarding loyalty is a quite normal capacity of man, and a capacity which can become active even on a superb scale when a clear call comes. ‘Cant!’ says the sceptic. But is it cant? Looking back to those days, remembering the details of the behaviour of our friends, and for that matter our own heart-searchings, can we deny that each of us was determined to a greater or less extent by the cognition of values in relation to which our private needs were seen to be irrelevant?

But the nation is a sorry substitute for the God of Love; and the war disillusioned many. Nationalism, of course, is not yet seriously in decline. Even to-day most of us but seldom and hesitatingly transcend it. Indeed, on the fringes of our Western civilization it spreads alarmingly; and now it threatens to inflame even the East. But, in the regions where it was born, patriotic zeal is perhaps tempered slightly. Even Fascism, its most modern and extravagant phase, may be regarded as a final, though long-drawn-out paroxysm, the last and hopeless protest of barbarians, who at heart feel themselves to have been mentally outdistanced. Even if this is too optimistic a view, we may hope that, as the world becomes more and more unified culturally, nationalism may be. reduced from a conflagration to a wholesome warmth in our hearts.

But the failure (or impending failure) of nationalism as a faith, and of the nation as the supreme object of practical loyalty, forces once more on the attention of thoughtful persons those ethical problems which, in a period of urgent action, they had sought to ignore. Those who are consciously troubled about these questions are indeed few; for most folk consider ethical inquiry a priggish and futile occupation. Yet these questions lurk in the background of all minds; and so they tend to get themselves answered inattentively, and to become the secret source of prejudice and savage behaviour.

Consider the outstanding movements of the day. Apart from the slow but sure conquests of the intelligence in many fields, the most remarkable features of our age are Fascism, Bolshevism, and a recrudescence of the more superstitious and preposterous ‘religious’ sects. Fascism is accepted by those who, still paying respect to the older religion of Europe, but finding in nationalism the only commanding ideal, can conceive loyalty only in terms of fear and hate of rival nations and parties. Fascism assumes its ideal uncritically. It also uncritically assumes the validity of the fundamental ethical concept. It offers a faith, and exacts devotion; and therein lies its power. Bolshevism equally makes ethical assumptions: Although it affects to despise ethics and metaphysics, and to reduce obligation to egoism, yet it is evidently felt as a faith, and as an ideal which has an absolute claim on the faithful. Thus in days of widespread disillusionment any ideal, however crude, however rationally indefensible, is felt to be better than no ideal at all.

Both these movements owe their strength in part to a dread of doubt that increases as doubt becomes more insistent. Both win adherents by satisfying the craving for activity in a cause conceived as objectively important. This phobia of uncertainty is perhaps also one source of the increase of the cruder kinds of religious fanaticism. In this case, of course, as in the others, one motive is the desire for mere personal salvation, in this world or another; but it can scarcely be questioned that the average fanatic, of whatever persuasion, does honestly feel that it is supremely important, not merely for him but for the world, that the flood of doubt be dammed, and that his policy be followed as the only means to world-salvation. And thus it happens that an age of increasing scepticism is also an age of increasing fanaticism. Very many persons have desperately shut their eyes and swallowed whole whatever comforting or commanding creed was available. They have willingly exposed themselves to religious suggestion, or political suggestion, till in time they have attained a real, but artificial, state of faith. On the other hand, an increasing number have definitely freed themselves from every kind of theological allegiance; while on the political side also there are signs of a growing disillusionment with established social ideals. Thus in both spheres, religious and political, it is lip-service that wanes; faith and frank unfaith alike increase.

It is not surprising that in an age of intellectual perplexity men should take refuge either in irrational dogma or in a hand-to-mouth pursuit of pleasure. And mere pleasure-seeking is evidently an increasing fever to-day. The old-fashioned, unreasoned restraints are being removed; and there is an unabashed claim to free life, free thought, and even ‘free love’; in short for the free ‘creative’ exercise of all human faculties. In literature and art, war is waged against authority and restraint. We are familiar with the crusade for spontaneity, instinct, the subconscious, and with the cult of the creative and non-rational ‘life force’, which has been well called’ the dark god ‘. All this is wholesome as a reaction from an age of stuffy clothes and stuffy morals. But is freedom an end or a means? To the released captive it indeed seems for a while a sufficient end; and to those who lack pleasures, pleasure seems the end. Yet pleasure grows stale; and an aimless freedom becomes a prison. It is being well proved in these days that a life of mere impulse leads nowhere, and moreover is strangely unsatisfying. In our present disillusionment the only freedom to. be sought is, it seems, a free fling before the crash. Surely it is this conviction of the futility of all things that is at the root of our fever to snatch joy before we die.

Some indeed have assumed a very different attitude in the general disillusionment. They have devised a stoical ideal, which, by emancipating man from all passing impulses, should enable him to gain a kind of tragic triumph over the universe. They have said: ‘Man himself creates the distinction between good and evil. We will take as our ideal (just because it pleases us to do so) freedom from the tyranny of desire, and fearless contemplation of reality.’ Clearly if pessimism is intellectually justified, this is the only sane attitude. And even if the pessimistic view is mistaken, pessimism is a wholesome error. It was very necessary that we should learn not only the irrationality of the older optimisms but also their banality. The only way to an optimism of finer mood, if it be intellectually possible at all, is perhaps through heartfelt acceptance of pessimism.

What, then, is the most significant feature of our age? Shall we be remembered chiefly for our social conflicts, for our international confusion, for the brilliant adolescence of science, or for our disillusionment? These are the features that we, who are immersed in to-day, see most clearly. Yet there is a more memorable fact about the modern world, a fact which we scarcely notice. Ours is the age, not simply of disillusionment, but of the Vindication of man’s capacity for loyalty even in the teeth of disillusionment. For what has been happening since the days of secure faith? First, when the ancient fear of hell was removed, men were discovered on the whole not less but more responsible. And when later all the old beliefs began to seem legendary and even petty, men did not plunge into individualism light-heartedly. Desperately they made of individualism itself a kind of topsy-turvy ideal, and tried to be loyal to it; or at the very least they found excuses for it, as being a means to some universal end. But presently they began to tire of it, and to look round for some more commanding object of loyalty. And so to-day, alongside of the old religious objects, and the old uncriticized individualism, thrive the cults of nationalism, bolshevism, fascism — movements which, though deeply infused by man’s self-regard, would none of them be what they are, were they not also irradiated by his unquenchable capacity for loyalty. But of these faiths bolshevism is the most glorious example of devotion in disillusionment. Sown in contempt of human nature, it flowered into a self-forgetful enthusiasm by which, in spite of its intellectual wrong-headedness, human nature is vindicated.

None of these faiths can withstand dispassionate criticism. Each in turn must sooner or later seem incoherent and petty. And so, in conflicting waves of disillusionment and devotion to new objects, and again disillusionment, we live out our stormy age. Never before, perhaps, have the objects of loyalty been subjected to such keen criticism. Never before has loyalty been driven so desperately from object to object in search of that which, of its own nature, can command allegiance. Even when, in the last extremity, men try to live without any devotion whatever, they prove their essentially loyal nature by a sense of futility and guilt that they cannot explain away. On the other hand the stoic, disillusioned with all other objects, is driven to conceive in his own mind an ideal of conduct, and to achieve a precarious peace by pretending with all his might that this, which he believes to be a figment of his personal taste, is yet somehow of intrinsic and universal excellence.

Thus on all hands man’s loyalty is vindicated. But to see that loyalty is a real factor in human nature is not to answer those ancient ethical questions with which all thoughtful persons are confronted to-day. Indeed, the mere prevalence of devotion to causes does not itself prove that loyalty ever is, as it purports to be, actually called into being by the intrinsic value of its object, and not merely by some secret and primitive itch of the experient himself. Still less is it clear that the ethical distinction between good and bad, on which loyalty claims to rest, is an intelligible distinction. What do we really mean when we speak of things as good and bad absolutely or universally? What, if anything, can we mean intelligibly by such phrases? Has ‘good’ ultimately no meaning at all, save ‘good for’ some conscious being or other? Or is our delight in the goodness of a thing, not prior to its goodness, but consequent on it? And in what sense ‘ought’ a man to act so as to bring goods into being and abolish bads? What does it mean to say that he ought to do so whether he wants to or not, and even that the act itself ought to be done whether anyone admits the obligation or not?

And further if the ethical distinction is not simply a delusion, what kinds of things is it that in this actual world are good, and what bad? And what is it that would be the ideal, the best of all? What is the end for which we all ought to be striving? These latter indeed are the really interesting questions; but clearly the others are more fundamental. And perhaps the true answer to these fundamental ethical questions might turn out to be after all simply that they are meaningless.

Such briefly are the well-worn theoretical problems which, I suggest, have to-day become practical problems. Just because no ethical theory is now taken for granted, a sound ethical science is needed, whether its findings be positive or negative. Ethics has not hitherto been a live issue; and so books about ethics have mostly been abstract and remote. Only lately has ethical scepticism been not merely propounded but deliberately put into practice. Only lately has it begun to break down well-established habits of behaviour. For to-day, while much human conduct is still based on the old assumption of the universality of good and bad, much also springs definitely from the conviction that this distinction is invalid. Now that theoretical differences are carried into practice, our practice becomes more radically and bitterly discordant than ever before. May our theory in turn be revivified by its new practical import!

Not all of us, indeed, are aware of the ethical problems explicitly. But all our lives are influenced by the fact that there is no agreement about them; and probably every intelligent person is at some time or other painfully conscious of them. They have, of course, been faced many times in the past, and many times answered in terms of successive cultures. Yet they remain for most of us still unsolved, and we cry out for a solution of them in our modem speech. For just as physical science is finding itself no longer able to avoid philosophical questions, so politics, social reform, and even private life, are being influenced by doubts whose nature is philosophical. In fact there lurks in the background of every mind to-day a profound ethical perplexity.

Ethics is a hackneyed, treacherous, tedious, and, many would say, a stagnant and profitless subject.

It offers none of the ceaseless adventures of physics, nor the shocks of psychology. But to-day we are ‘up against’ ethics whether we will or no. It is an obscure little matter that has somehow to be cleared up, or remain a secret and spreading rot in the foundations of our thought and practice.

The trouble has perhaps been that ethics has been too sternly isolated as a self-contained science. In the recent somewhat disorderly advance of biology and psychology fierce battles have been fought on the borders of ethics. Some claim that ethics has been annihilated, others that it has established its sovereign independence. While agreeing with the latter party, I hold that ethics cannot afford to isolate itself, but must seek mutually profitable intercourse with its neighbours. Biology, psychology, and ethics are certainly distinct sciences,; yet if we would properly understand the principles of any one of them, we must bear in mind the principles of both the others.

In this book, though I shall try to show the bearings of ethics on psychology, my chief aim is to envisage in the light of biology and psychology the basic ethical problems themselves.

First, however, it will be necessary to consider ethics as an isolated subject, and to form some opinion about various contemporary ethical theories. We shall then be in a position to correlate whatever seems sound in these theories with recent thought in biology and psychology. Thus I hope to get a clearer view of the basic principles of ethics itself.

Problems of the logical nature of ‘good’, and the logical ground of obligation, constitute the more abstract and perhaps the less interesting ethical task. Having come to some opinion on these subjects, we should be able to discuss with more assurance, though only schematically, the concrete character of the ideal implied in the nature of our world.

Such a discussion I shall attempt towards the end of this book. And finally, since our subject inevitably leads on to metaphysical questions, I shall indulge in some highly speculative thought upon the status of ‘good and bad’ in the constitution of the universe.

CHAPTER 2. SELF-FULFILMENT AS THE GROUND OF ETHICS

IT WILL BE convenient to begin by discussing the ethical theory that is usually associated with philosophical idealism. I am not concerned to give a full historical account of this great system as it was expounded by particular thinkers, but only to state and criticize what I take to be the essential basis of all idealist ethical theories. And this I seek to do because. though this basic idea appears to me subtly false in one respect, in others it is immensely significant. Criticism of idealist ethics is apt to be more pert than shrewd; and I am reluctant to seem to join in the outcry. But it is very necessary to criticize certain aspects of the theory if we are to profit by it as a whole; and with this aim I shall single out that presentation of it which seems most clear and rigorous, namely. the ethics of Bradley; and I shall try to show that its solution of the basic problems is dependent on the use of the word ‘self’ in two different senses, namely sometimes as experient, and sometimes as that which is experienced.

A. PLEASURE AND THE ENDURING SELF

BRADLEY’S FIRST CONCERN in ethics is to criticize hedonism, the theory that goodness is identical with pleasure. This he effects by a psychological analysis of ‘pleasure’ and of ‘self’, in order to reach an understanding of ‘desiring one’s own pleasure’. The self for the hedonist is a series of momentary mental states; and the pleasure that is sought is the longest possible sequence of the intensest possible momentary states of being pleased. But, in fact, says Bradley, the self that is to be pleased is not a series of discrete moments. It is an enduring unitary thing, in some important sense identical to-day and yesterday and to-morrow. If this were not so, there would be no point in sacrificing to-day’s pleasure for the prospect of a keener or longer pleasure to-morrow. The self of to-day and the self of to-morrow would be as mutually indifferent as the self of Brown and the self of Jones. The pleasure that I have in the prospect of to-morrow’s pleasure is dependent on the fact that the self to be pleased to-morrow is the same self as the self to be denied to-day. And I choose to-morrow’s pleasure because I expect therein the fulfilment of the self which is identical on both days. The prospect of to-morrow’s pleasure is pleasant to-day because to-morrow’s pleasure, when it occurs, will be a felt state of fulfilment of the enduring self. Thus pleasure is essentially a felt state of self-fulfilment, whether in small matters or great.

Sometimes small fulfilments may be sought to the exclusion of greater fulfilments, as when the schoolboy forgets the consequences of over-eating, or when the adult ignores his generous impulses for the sake of his egoistic impulses. For the self has various kinds of needs; but all of them are aspects of the need for continuance, expansion, fullness of being. We may, of course, take pleasure in acts which do not, in the circumstances, make for our self-fulfilment. But the fact that we do get pleasure in such acts is apparently due to the fact that, at some time or other, acts of such a kind have generally made for self-fulfilment, whether in ourselves or our ancestors. Pleasure is thus seen to be not identical with, but a sign or symptom of, self-fulfilment. Displeasure, pain, grief, are signs or symptoms of self-negation. That which we desire is not, in general, pleasure, but self-fulfilment. And the felt realization of self-fulfilment may be conveniently called happiness. It is true then, that, though we do not always desire pleasure, we do always desire happiness. And further we may say that pleasure is in fact desirable only when, and in that, it does actually arise from self-fulfilment; and pain is undesirable only when, and in that, it does actually arise from self-negation

B. THE SOCIAL SELF

BUT THE SELF which a man cannot but seek to fulfil is not simply his private self, which stands over against the selves of others. For the normal man is essentially social. It is a plain matter of fact that he cannot be happy in merely fulfilling his own person while ignoring others. The content of his self is very much more than his private person with its egoistic needs. He includes within himself at least some few intimate other persons, and cannot attain self-fulfilment apart from the fulfilment of these. And this is true even if he is a thoroughly selfish man; even if, whenever his private needs conflict with the needs of his friends, he always sacrifices the latter. For such a person sacrifices one part of himself in order to fulfil another part. Thus he inevitably falls short of self-fulfilment; for he does need the fulfilment of his friends, even though he may desire more eagerly the fulfilment of his own private ends.

But indeed a man’s private ends, and his private self, are mere abstractions. For, according to the theory that we are considering, every man is intrinsically, not extrinsically, social. His social relations are internal to him, not external. There is nothing whatever in him which is not social as well as private. If he were not by nature a social animal, and by nurture a social mind, he would be something radically different from what he is. His most private acts are determined by his social environment, and would be other kinds of acts in another society. The content of every one of his desires owes its character on the one hand to his social environment, and on the other to an inherited nature, which is itself the product of a social ancestry, and demands in him a social fulfilment. Through heredity and environment society has made him. He simply is society (so we are told), thinking and willing in the particular centre called by his name. When he seeks to be nothing but his private centre, he seeks to be something which he cannot be without denying the major part of himself, without ceasing to be what he really is.

The idiot alone succeeds in denying his social nature. But even his nature is social in essence; since he, like us all, is social in origin. He has indeed no social interest, and seeks no social fulfilment; yet he is such that there can be no happiness for him without the exercise of the social rudiments or vestiges of his nature. It is irrational in him to ignore his internal relatedness to society. For a private mind is not merely, nor primarily, a private mind. It is potentially the mind of society; and its interests are potentially the interests of society. In Bradley’s words, society ’is the objective mind which is subjective and self-conscious in its citizens: it feels and knows itself in the heart of each.’

It is in terms of the essentially social nature of every self that orthodox ethics describes moral obligation. In the first place it is insisted that moral obligation is in fact felt, and that it is not to be denied or explained away. Human beings do feel that they ought to behave in certain manners or serve certain ends, whether (in the ordinary sense) they want to or not. But moral obligation cannot be merely obedience to a law externally imposed, since, unless the agent himself recognizes the rightness of the law, he is not moral in obeying it. Moral obedience must be free obedience. To be moral we must ourselves will the good. Yet the good is not just whatever we actually will, or whatever we desire on the whole and in the long run. For the essence of morality is to distinguish between what we happen to desire and what is intrinsically good, and to seek to conform our desire to the good. Thus there is a dilemma. For, if we are to be moral, we must will the good, and yet when we are moral we may have to do what we desire not at all to do. Moral behaviour must be on the one hand freely willed, and on the other hand obedient.

C. THE ACTUAL WILL AND THE REAL WILL

THIS DILEMMA IS said to be avoided by the theory of the actual will and the real will. Actually I may be intensely desiring to do what I know to be wrong, while really, in my heart of hearts, according to my true nature, I will to do only the right. Potentially, or at heart, we are all moral beings, who will only the good. When I desire to do what I know to be wrong, the ‘I’ that desires so is only a mood, a partial, limited, somnolent mood, of the true ‘I’, who will only the good.

We shall understand the theory better, and subsequently be able to criticize it more justly, if at this point we study an important double distinction upon which it is based, namely on the one hand the distinction between will and desire, and on the other that between the actual will and the real will. A desire is a subjective attitude or act, which may or may not express fully the individual’s will, mayor may not take into account all the needs which occur within his actual mental content. Thus a man may desire a glass of beer even while his will, his deliberate decision in relation to the circumstances of his whole life, is to refrain from alcohol. And under the stress of temptation the momentary impulse may possibly triumph over his will.

But in addition to the distinction between desire and will there is the distinction between the actual will and the real will. Both wills are in some sense objective, in that both are mental content, not mental process; though exponents of the theory sometimes seem to impute to the actual will characteristics which belong to process rather than content. For certainly in a sense the individual’s real will and his actual will are not equally objective. His actual will is constituted, or at any rate determined, by those needs which he actually recognizes (or seems to himself to discover), within his actual mental content, with all its limitations, and errors, and prejudices. His actual will, therefore, is thus far shot through with subjectivity. But his real will is for the objective good, and is without subjective limitation or bias. Implicit in the form of his actual will, though not explicitly willed, and certainly incompatible with many of his desires, is the will to be a fully-grown personality; and since this goal cannot be attained while any discord or limitation remains within his mental content, his real will is necessarily for the objective good. What he really needs, and therefore what at bottom he really wills, is, in the last resort, his fulfilment as the universal self.

Thus the real will, which is the good will, is identical in us all, and characterizes the true self of each. It is identical, not as a particular threaded through other particulars, but as a universal identical in its instances. Each of us is distinct and individual, and the real Will expresses itself differently in each of us; but in all it is a fundamental identity of form. Our actual wills are merely incomplete, partial, and so far unreal, approximations to the real will; since in respect of our limitations and prejudices we fail to fulfil our true nature as rational beings. Yet some limitation we must have. The real Will must be expressed in some particular manner or other. Only by being a peculiar and distinctive individual can a man be actual at all.

It is now possible to see more clearly the relations of desire and will. A desire may fall short even of the actual Will, or it may truly express the actual Will; or again, in so far as the actual Will may be in some respects identical with the real Will, a desire may express not only the actual will but also the real will, may in fact be a morally right desire. Of course the actual will cannot be, even in any one respect, exhaustively identical with the real Will, since they are organic wholes of different character. Every expression of each must therefore be transfused by, or characterized by, the distinctive whole that each is. Yet they may approximate in certain respects sufficiently to involve identical actions.

On this theory, then, moral choice is free activity on the part of the true self, since it expresses the real will of the individual. But on the other hand it is activity in conformity with an objective principle. It is obedience to something other than the desire or whim of the moment, and to something greater than any mood which is not expressive of the whole self. It is free conformity to the will implied in the objective content. It is obligation on the part of a partial self, or mood, to the whole and true self.

If these two selves were distinct centres of consciousness, there could be no obligation felt by the one towards the other. But they are only distinct as a temporary mood is distinct from the whole united self. The lesser self is an unreal abstraction. Its logical fulfilment is that it should become the higher. While I am only my partial, momentary self, I am indeed seeking some things which it is my true nature to seek; but I am seeking them while I ignore other things which it is also my true nature to seek. In the glamour of my partial mood I neglect the greater, more real objects, without which I cannot be my true self.

The ground of obligation, then, is not external law; it is the self, the real self which alone can fulfil even the partial self of the actual will, and the fleeting selves of momentary desires. I must be moral, according to this view, because only so can I fulfil myself, be my true self. But what kind of a self is it that demands fulfilment? We have seen that it is not the sequence of my states of mind. I do not fulfil myself by gaining pleasures and avoiding pains. Nor am I merely to contrive harmonious satisfaction for my actual instincts, or my actual interests of whatever kind, in such a way as to achieve as much satisfaction as possible with as little internal conflict as possible. My actual self, as we have seen, cannot be permanently satisfied by the mere satisfaction of its actual cravings. It can only be satisfied by being transformed into a greater self. It cannot permanently rest content with its own private fulfilment, considered as the fulfilment of one person among others. For if it fulfils itself at the expense of others, or even merely without fulfilling others, it violates its own true nature, which is social. Part of its actual content remains unfulfilled. And even if it had never partaken of a social environment, part of its inherited nature would cry out in vain for fulfilment.

But the ground of obligation is not merely in our inheritance of social impulses; it lies in our rational nature. We are able to take an outside view of ourselves, to transcend the bias of our own subjectivity, and regard ourselves and others as equally objective. For each active self is an approximation to a universal self which should include all actual selves as members within itself. If my private self were to attain this perfection, this universality of content, it would no longer be limited by the merely negative private idiosyncrasies that it has now. It would be the self of no particular person, but the self of mankind, nay the self of the universe. And in so far. as myself is not this universal self it is logically incomplete. It implies an immensity beyond its actual content. In isolation from all that it implies it is not real but an abstraction; just as a living hand considered in isolation from the rest of the living body is unreal, an abstraction.

It follows, then, that though our actual wills differ, the real will in us all is identical, since it is the will for the one universal good. For in the first place the real will in each transcends his private needs, and is the will of the society in which he lives. This does not mean that it is, so to speak, the voice of the majority speaking in him, or the resultant of all the actual wills of his compatriots. It is rather the good will, the best will, which is implied in all actual wills, but may be very different from the voice of the majority. It is the best will, in being simply the will for the fulfilment of the whole nature of the society, which (we are told) is not simply the sum of the natures of all its members. The general will of the society, or the spirit of the nation, is something immanent in each individual, a universal type of which each individual is an imperfect instance. And so the individual is only fulfilled by identifying his actual will with this general will, which is his logical completion. Our end, says Bradley, ’is the realization of the good will which is superior to ourselves; and again the end is self-realization. Bringing these together, we see the end is the realization of ourselves as the will which is above ourselves.’ This good will, in which alone we can fulfil ourselves, must be objective, not dependent on anyone’s liking. And it must be universal, above all particulars and prejudices. And finally it must be concrete, not abstract. It must be realized in and through particular acts of particular persons. Thus society is said to be strictly an organism. And the will of society is ‘the self-realization of the whole body, because it is one and the same will which lives and acts in the life and action of each.’ But also it is ‘the self-realization of each member, because each member cannot find the function which makes him himself apart from the whole to which he belongs; to be himself he must go beyond himself.’

D. MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES

PRACTICAL RESULTS FOLLOW from this emphasis on the will of society. “The supreme moral precept turns out to be to fulfil’ my station and its duties.’ True it is a duty, says Bradley, ‘standing on the basis of the existing, and in harmony with its general spirit, to try to make, not only oneself, but also the world better, or rather, and in preference, one’s own world better.’ But it is wrong, .starting from oneself, from ideals in one’s own head to set oneself and them against the moral world.’ For the moral world, he holds, is real: our private ideals are not. On the other hand the community of which a man is a member ‘may be in a confused or rotten condition.’ And indeed, the best community is not perfect. Consequently, we are told, the morals of each nation must be criticized in the light of the morals of all others.

For indeed the real will, which it is our true nature to will, is not simply the will of our society. Societies themselves are but approximations to a more general ‘will of mankind’. And this in turn is but an approximation to the universal will, which we may call the will of God. This it is which is the real will, identical in us all. This it is which is the sanction of our moral obligation, which imposes a duty on us to realize an ideal for the world. And this ideal is to be realized on the one hand in faithful fulfilment of our station and its duties, and on the other in striving to better even the will of the society in which we live.

But it is admitted (in the theory which we are considering) that there are certain ends to be fulfilled which cannot be justified as mere means to the fulfilment of society. These are the activities of art, and of scientific and philosophical inquiry. Such pursuits are judged good in themselves, and a society is judged partly in respect of its achievement in these spheres. In explanation of this we are told that these activities are modes of self-fulfilment, and that’ the moral end is to realize the self, and all forms of realizing of the self are seen to fall within the sphere of morality.’

E. SUMMARY

THE FOUNDATION OF the whole theory is evidently this: obligation arises from the recognition by the actual self that it is incomplete, incoherent. The whole of duty is thus the duty to realize oneself. But we are told that ‘“realize yourself” does not mean merely “be a whole”, but “be an infinite whole”.’ It is not sufficient to avoid contradiction within the self. It is necessary also to embrace all things within oneself, and form one’s will in relation not to a parish but the universe. And this necessity arises from the fact that inevitably there are contradictions in the narrower self which entail the wide self for their resolution.

Such in brief is Bradley’s theory of ethics. Now it may be that other idealists would not accept Bradley’s account of ethics without serious modification. Bradley has described his theory with his customary rigour and precision. I confess that the pure essence of all idealist ethical theories seems to me to be contained in Bradley, and that the suggested modifications seem often merely to obscure the issue, This, however, is a historical question with which I am not here concerned. What does concern me is to show that the theory described in this chapter needs not merely to be modified but, so to speak, to be turned back to front.

Bradley’s theory reaches very far beyond hedonism. Not only is it based on a sounder psychology, but also, in deriving obligation from the self as content rather than the self as feeling, it more nearly does justice to the nature of moral experience. But I shall now argue that it does not carry through this objectification of obligation to its proper conclusion. In so far as it seems to solve the ethical problem at all, it does so by means of the concept of self-fulfilment; and this is plausible only because by means of the ambiguity of ‘self’ the object of knowledge is infected with the subjectivity of the moral agent. Thus the agent in fulfilling his content seems to be merely fulfilling himself, and the problem of obligation is evaded.

CHAPTER 3. CRITICISM OF THE SELF-FULFILMENT THEORY

A. EMOTIVE ASPECTS OF THE THEORY

WHETHER OR NOT the ethical theory offered by Bradley is true, it is in many ways comforting. We are attracted by the hope that, in denying our private cravings for the sake of the good, we do after all in some sense save our souls. Sometimes, indeed, the conviction that only thus can we fulfil ourselves may incline us to righteousness when otherwise we should have erred. We are flattered, moreover, in being told that each of us is potentially the self of the universe. Just so was the private soldier pleased to think of the field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack. For we all crave to be at heart larger and more important than we seem in our everyday clothes. We long to leave our pettiness behind, and become self-consistent and all-embracing. Thus, perhaps unfairly, does our egoism interpret this system of ethics to its own advantage.

On the other hand, we also want to be assured that goodness is something more than the gratification of desire. We want to believe that the distinction between good and evil is objective and universal, and that in keeping the moral law, or striving for the ethical end, we are not merely ‘pleasing ourselves’. We want, moreover, to be able to issue moral commands to others and feel that, when we do so, the universe is backing us. For we are all at heart addicted to moralism. It is, therefore, cheering to be told that goodness derives, not from the pleasant tone of mental states, not from the nature of the process of consciousness, but from the nature of the content of consciousness, from that of which we are conscious. It would be ridiculous to suppose that idealist ethics makes its appeal solely through its gratification of these common cravings, or that the great idealist philosophers unconsciously deceived themselves into thinking that their theory was rational when it was merely pleasing. Nevertheless, this emotive aspect of the theory should make us doubly cautious in estimating its intellectual value.

B. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

NOW EMPHASIS ON the content rather than the process of consciousness is the real achievement of idealist ethics. It is in virtue of this that it so strikingly outstrips hedonism. But the full implications of this new emphasis have not, perhaps, been rigorously accepted. The theory of the real and good will is supposed to do justice both to the fact that moral conduct is essentially determined by the agent’s own moral nature (not by an external authority), and to the fact that moral conduct is determined in relation to an objective order. But in truth, by an unfortunate false stress upon ‘self-fulfilment’, it has failed to do justice to the objectivity of obligation, or at least has failed to grasp its full implications. In spite of all assertions to the contrary, it shows morality as essentially the egoistic business of saving one’s soul rather than as the world’s invasion of the experient. Or, at least, owing to the form in which the theory is expressed, it is always liable to this interpretation. My aim is not simply to prove the theory false; for it may reasonably be regarded as true, under suitable interpretation. But it is all too easily misunderstood. And this is due to the fact that its exponents have, almost in spite of themselves, stated it in terms of the experient rather than in terms of that which is experienced. Hence springs it’s unfortunate taint of egoism. Moreover, as I shall presently argue, in so far as the theory is true, it fails to solve the problem of obligation, and in so far as it claims to account for obligation it is false.

Idealist philosophers would, no doubt, vigorously deny this charge that their ethical system is tainted with egoism. They would insist that they regarded the individual as a mere abstraction from his society, and ultimately from the Absolute. But in this reply they fail to meet the point. For in their theory the individual’s obligation is derived from his actual disposition to seek harmony. Only because his real will is for harmonious fulfilment ought he to seek it. Moreover, it may well be argued that in reducing the individual to a mere aspect of society Idealists have-erred; for, though surely society fashioned him, he is now what he is, and no mere appearance of society. And though in the last analysis he might turn out to be in some sense an expression of the Absolute, he is just that one expression which he is, and not the others which he is not. The distinction between him and the Whole is vital from his point of view. Though conceivably he may be in some sense contained in the Absolute, the Absolute itself is not wholly contained in him, nor is the universal will in any strict sense involved in his actual will. And in the present connexion the charge is that, in deriving moral obligation from the individual’s will to be fulfilled, Idealist philosophers derive it from something which is not even implicitly identical with the world’s need to be fulfilled.

Moreover, in the reduction of the individual to a mere mode of society there is, of course, a great practical danger. For the consequent moral precept that we should try to fulfil’ our station and its duties’ is but a half-truth, and may, as has often been pointed out, lead to an excessive reverence for the established order and culture, and an excessive distrust of adventure in morals and politics. Had men clung strictly to this ideal, blood sacrifice, slavery, and a thousand other barbarous customs would never have been criticized, and indeed the religion of love would never have been preached. Doubtless, it is the momentum of society’s culture that forces the more backward individuals up to a certain level, and prevents the unbalanced from a too rampant eccentricity. But clearly whatever advances have occurred were initiated by critical and daring individuals.

There is, of course, another serious danger in this over-emphasis of society. Not only does it lead to a disparagement of the individual’s contribution to the life of society, but also it suggests that society should be the end of all activity, and that the individual is of no account save as the instrument of society. Thus the members of society come to be regarded as members of an orchestra, and organized social life as the symphony which controls, even while it is created by, their cooperative activity. It is this symphony, this form of social mentality, which justifies their existence as mere particular mental processes. In a land, however, that has been scared by ‘Prussianism’ there is, perhaps, no need to dwell on the danger of this glorification of the state.

It is instructive to note how orthodox ethics deals with those activities which, though deemed desirable, cannot be plausibly said to owe their value primarily to their contribution to social life. Science, art, and philosophy, we are told, are valuable because they are modes of self-fulfilment. For the good is primarily self-fulfilment. All that contributes to the fulfilment of the individual is good; but better is that which contributes to the fulfilment of the social self; and this in turn is but an approximation to the universal self, which is the end (and source) of all. Thus, though these activities are not to be justified merely as being processes having social utility, their justification is none the less indirectly social. For they are means for the enrichment of the individual, and the individual is to be enriched that society may be enriched.

Now this reduction of science, art, and philosophy to modes of self-fulfilment is only less artificial than their direct reduction to modes of social advancement. It is true, of course, that they are modes of self-fulfilment, just as it is true that incidentally they make for social advancement and harmony. But they are not necessarily practised because they are modes of self-fulfilment, nor is their value experienced as consisting therein. The scientist or philosopher who should pursue his inquiry merely to enlarge his mind might well be said to lack the true scientific or philosophical spirit. Even he who should make his aim the advancement of human culture would have missed the mark. He, perhaps, comes nearer to the true spirit who feels obscurely just that the world ought to be known and understood, that the universe itself cries out in him for this completion, and that he and all mankind are justified in these pursuits, not primarily because these activities fulfil man, but because, in some slight degree, they fulfil the universe. The artist also seems to be most true to his calling when he feels that he, and all mankind, owes, in some sense, loyalty to the aesthetic objects, even if they are objects which happen to be created by his own mental activity.

Perhaps this is mere superstition. At a later stage I shall venture on a more detailed but highly speculative inquiry into this suggestion. But, meanwhile, whether it can be rendered intelligible or must finally be abandoned as an unjustified projection of our own cravings, the actual experience of the value of scientific, artistic, and philosophical activities certainly has this flavour of objectivity; and, consequently, we cannot but suspect that this kind of value is not fully explained by the self-fulfilment theory.

Many who hold the ethical theory under discussion would agree with the view that the universe itself demands completion in us in worshipful contemplation. But they would also insist that this claim only applies to us because in worshipful contemplation we fulfil ourselves, or begin to fulfil ourselves. This is surely perverse. It may be true that we fulfil ourselves in this activity, which may be called worship; but we ought not, and indeed we cannot, worship in order to fulfil ourselves. If worship fulfils us, it does so as being the attitude demanded in us by an intrinsic value. That value is not to be judged worshipful merely for the very reason that the worship of it fulfils us.

C. THE AMBIGUITY OF ‘SELF’

IT IS TRUE that primarily what we call good is the fulfilment of needs felt as our own needs, felt as needs within our own content. But we do not mean that this fulfilment is good because it falls within our experience, or because it is an element in the fulfilment of a certain experienced system. In this sense, then, the fulfilment is good, not because it is self-fulfilment, but just in being fulfilment at all. Similarly with regard to universal self-fulfilment, it is true that the good, the ideal, can only be rightly asserted by one who takes all things into account. It must, that is, be judged good in relation to the content of the hypothetical universal mind. But this does not mean that it is the good because it would be so judged by the universal mind, or because it would be felt to fulfil the need of the universal self. It is the good not because it is universal self-fulfilment, but just because it is universal fulfilment.

If ‘self’ be taken to mean the whole real of which any mind’s content is a distorted appearance, then indeed what we mean by good is the fulfilment of that real, and is ‘self- fulfilment’. Or rather by ‘good’ we mean the fulfilment of any tendency or capacity of that real, and by ‘the ideal’ we mean the greatest possible fulfilment of the real whole, of which a mind’s content is a distorted appearance. But if this is what is meant, it is confusing to use the word ‘self’ at all; goodness is simply fulfilment, and the ideal is universal fulfilment. Of course, it is true in a sense that every good is a case of the’ self-fulfilment’ of something or other; and that the ideal must be the fulfilment of the universe ‘itself’, and is therefore universal self-fulfilment. But such contentions are pointless. The only significant meaning of ‘self’ involves experience; and self-fulfilment must mean the experienced fulfilment of all needs that are members of a certain system of experienced needs. We all do will self-fulfilment in this sense. We all do will to experience complete and harmonious fulfilment. But this is not what we mean by the good.

The phrase ‘self-fulfilment’ is essential to idealist ethics; for it is used to bridge the gulf between the real will and the actual will. Each, we are told, is an expression of the will for self-fulfilment; but the one achieves, and the other misses, the goal. Immoral behaviour, we are told, is immoral precisely in that it misses the goal which it itself is really seeking. The phrase ‘self-fulfilment’ is used in quite different senses in these two connexions. In moral behaviour the ‘self-fulfilment’ sought is the fulfilment of the real, of which the mental content is a distorted fragment; but in immoral behaviour what is sought is not the fulfilment of the real, even so far as it is known, but the fulfilment of that system of felt needs which happen at the moment to constitute the private self within the whole mental content. The intrusion of other needs is resisted just because they are not felt as members of the self, just because their fulfilment would not fulfil the self as it is actually felt to be, but would thwart it.

If this be so, it is not enough to say merely that the two kinds of conduct are expressions of the identical will for self-fulfilment, though the one seeks to fulfil a smaller, and the other a greater, self. Such a statement is true, and even important; but by itself it is grossly misleading. What is important is not the identity, but the difference, of the greater and lesser self. And no theory which slurs this difference can even state, let alone solve, the problem of obligation. The vital question is this: how comes it that a greater ‘self ‘,whose fulfilment is not actually willed, exercises authority over the subject which actually wills only a lesser and incompatible ‘self’? The answer is said to be that after all they are one and the same ‘self’. But the point is that, whatever the truth be about them, the subject does not experience them both equally as ‘self’, The one course is experienced as promising self-fulfilment, and the other as promising self-negation, to the self as it is actually felt to be. Is the key to the problem that, while in moral conduct what is willed is the fulfilment of the objective real, in immoral conduct what is willed is merely an illusory experience of fulfilment? No, for though this will for mere pleasurable experience is doubtless often a cause of immoral conduct, the issue is not strictly between objectivity and subjectivity. The essence of immorality is that in immoral conduct the fulfilment of part of the objective field is willed to the exclusion of the rest, while in moral conduct the will is for the fulfilment of the whole; and not merely the whole content, but for the real whole of which any individual’s content is but an erroneous appearance.

The obvious objection may be made that a man cannot will the fulfilment of his total objective field unless he himself, the desiring subject, needs the fulfilment of his total objective field, and that thus moral conduct reduces once more to the will for subjective fulfilment. But this objection is trivial. Of course, a man cannot will the fulfilment of his total objective field unless he needs its fulfilment; but this is only to say that he cannot will it unless he does will it. We must not first distinguish between him and the objective field, and then try to explain his will to fulfil the objective field by means of a ‘something in him’ which makes him will it. Rightly we distinguish between him as a bare experient and the object that he experiences; but his needs, one and all, even his bodily needs and his private ‘mental’ needs, are objective needs rightly or wrongly cognized by him. For instance it is an objective fact, cognizable by him and by others, that he, considered as an organism, tends to self- maintenance, whether he, considered as an experient, desires self-maintenance or not.

I said that his needs were one and all needs of the objective field cognized truly or falsely by him. In a manner it would have been better to say that his needs were all but one needs of the objective field. For one need he has which is strictly subjective, and not primarily a need of that which is object to him. This is the need that arises from his own nature as an experient, as a bare centre of cognition and conation. As an experient he needs to experience free activity, or fulfilment of felt objective needs, and to shun hindrance of felt objective needs. The objective needs themselves, whose fulfilment he as subject needs to experience, are simply the tendencies and capacities of the world which he cognizes, including his own organism’s established ‘behaviour-set’. But he, as a process of conscious subjective activity, needs to experience the fulfilment of objective needs. He needs, in fact, to maintain and fulfil himself as a harmonious system of psychic activity. He craves for its own sake successful conation and consequent pleasure (which is felt fulfilment); and shuns for its own sake unsuccessful conation and consequent pain (which is felt hindrance). This one need, then, emerges directly from his own subjectivity, and not from the nature of that which is object to him.

But this need to experience fulfilment is not to be thought of as the source of all his activity; rather it is a consequence of the fact that objective needs awaken in him the capacity for conation and affection. Still less is ‘good’ to be logically derived solely from this subjective need. Idealist ethics, however, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, seems after all to derive moral behaviour from this will to experience fulfilment. The will for self-fulfilment, in fact, is an attribute of subjectivity. That is to say, moral behaviour is derived in the last resort, not from the actual will’s objective aspect (and so from the real will), but from its subjective aspect, which reduces to desire. The starting-point of the whole theory is that every individual consciously desires fulfilment for himself. He desires that whatever needs he experiences as needs shall also be experienced as fulfilled. In fact, his aim is essentially to be a freely and harmoniously active experient. The theory admits, indeed, that the self which in moral behaviour is fulfilled is the objective mental content. But it implies that this desire to fulfil the needs that arise within the content of the self is the expression of a fundamental ‘will for self-fulfilment’ which inheres in the nature of every experient. Now the word ‘will’ here is ambiguous. The theory uses it generally to mean the objective demands of the mental content. But if ‘the will for self-fulfilment’ is to be used as the logical ground of obligation, it must have a subjective significance; it must mean the subjective activity of desiring. Were it not for this will for an experienced harmonious free activity or fulfilment, we should not (it is said) will the fulfilment of objective needs. We will objective fulfilment because of the nature of our own subjectivity, which seeks the experience of fulfilment. We cannot fully attain this experience of harmonious fulfilment save by harmoniously fulfilling whatever needs are felt within our mental content. And since our content is an abstraction from the whole real, we can only attain self-fulfilment by willing universally. Therefore it is, according to the theory, that we all ‘really will’ the universal good.

The criticism which I am attempting to make against idealist ethics may perhaps be clarified as follows. We must distinguish, not merely between mental process and mental content, but also between the real world as it in fact is, and that fragmentary and illusory excerpt from it which is the individual’s content. Idealists rightly insist that content is in principle continuous with, nay identical with, reality itself, though it is but an abstract factor in the total real. But by using the phrase ‘mental content’ they obscure the stark objectivity of this ‘content’. While insisting that it is objective, they insist also that it is ‘the self’, and import into it a certain character of subjectivity, namely, they tend to regard the conative process as an activity of the content itself, rather than an activity of a subject (or if it be preferred an organism) in relation with an external world. Thus by the use of the concept f mental content’ they are able to offer a solution, but only an illusory solution, of the dilemma of ethics. Moral conduct, they say, accepts a principle which emerges from the nature of content, and is therefore objective, and derived from the real world. On the other hand moral conduct, they say, merely fulfils the real will of the agent himself. It is implied in the nature of content as something mental, as consisting in a system of felt needs, as expressing itself in conative activities. Thus moral conduct is an expression of the need to experience harmonious fulfilment, which emerges from the nature of subjectivity itself.

But this is to have your cake and eat it. Either what is good is essentially the fulfilment of the capacity of the ontologically objective, or real, world, and therefore ‘of content’ merely because content is an aspect of the real world; but in this case obligation cannot be derived from the process of willing self-fulfilment, which is essentially the expression of the agent’s own subjectivity. Or what is good intrinsically is the fulfilment of the agent’s subjective activity, and therefore of content only in virtue of its relation to that activity, and not in virtue of its identity with the ontologically objective real world; .but in this case obligation cannot be derived from the nature of the real world. But if obligation is not derived from the real world, it is illusory. Even if it were true (and later I shall argue that it is not) that good ‘emerges’ at the level of consciousness, we should still need to insist that the moral agent’s obligation toward other conscious individuals cannot be simply derived from his own will for self-fulfilment. It must be derived from that which is objective to him epistemologically, and in the last resort from that which is ontologically objective. If it is the world that imposes obligation on the individual, obligation cannot be derived from the will to self-fulfilment. If, on the other hand, obligation is derived from the will to self-fulfilment, it is not imposed by the real world, and is not in strictness obligation at all.

If the ‘will for self-fulfilment’ were strictly and simply the activity of the mental content, i.e. of part of the real world, then it might be true that the ‘will for self-fulfilment’ implied the will for world-fulfilment. If this were the case, however, ‘immoral’ conduct would not occur; for why should the content ever act so as to achieve less than complete fulfilment of itself? The essence of immoral conduct is that it is activity on the part of something other than the mental content, which takes into account part of the content but not the whole. In fact, the will for self-fulfilment is not strictly and simply the activity of the mental content. It is the activity of the subject, or the organism, in relation to a mental content or cognized environment. And in this the will for world-fulfilment is not implied. Hence the whole problem of obligation. The source of all the trouble is clearly revealed in Bosanquet’s account of the will as ‘the conception of a system of ideas working themselves out into a connected whole’. This description follows on his analogy of the will and ideo-motor action, which gives rise to the contention that ideas ‘work themselves out’. If this is so, and if ideas are in principle identical with objective reality, will is the activity of objective reality in us. And immoral conduct is a failure on the part of objective reality to work itself out fully in us. But the analogy with so-called ideo-motor action is false. Nor can it do justice to’ the experience of moral obligation. In a sense, indeed, it is true that reality works itself out in our wills; but it does so through the subjective activity of an organism, not automatically.

D. IMPLICATES OF THE ACTUAL WILL

WAIVING FOR THE moment this general problem of the nature of conation, we will now inquire more closely into the psychological theory that in our actual wills there is, as a matter of fact, implied a ‘real will’ for self-fulfilment as the universal self. It is essential for the theory to establish this as true, for it is said to be the logical ground of moral obligation. It is said that we are under moral obligation just because our real will is in every case the will for the universal good.

In the first place, then, does the theory of the real will describe an actual state of affairs (as it claims to do) or only an ideal? It is certainly true in an important sense that a man’s permanent will is something other than his desire at anyone moment. But this permanent will of the man is not the ‘real’ will of idealist theory; it is only the ‘actual’ will. The man’s passing desire, or whim, may often conflict with his permanent will; sometimes the one, and sometimes the other, may control his behaviour. An artist may sacrifice his work to drink; yet it may be true that in a sense his will is for art. But in this sense he can only be said actually to will his art if on the whole and in the long run he does will it, does actually desire it. Though on most occasions he may choose drink rather than art, yet, if his will is for art, he must even on these occasions admit that he is sacrificing the greater to the less good, that he is giving way to a momentary temptation. Or, perhaps, on every such occasion he may say to himself, ‘On other occasions, art; but this time, drink.’ If his devotion to art did not rise even to this height, we should not say that his will was for art rather than drink. Otherwise, we might as well say that, if on any occasion a man delights in colour and form, his will is to be an artist, whether he ever desires to be an artist or not. And if he has ever liked boating we should say his will was to be a sailor. And if ever he showed a spiteful disposition we should have to say that his will was hate. A man’s will, then, is something more than his passing desires; but it is not wholly independent of his desires. It is based on a generalization of all his desires; but it is only his will if he himself actually conceives an enduring desire in accord with this generalization.

Will, in this sense, is obviously not the ‘real’ will but only at best the ‘actual’ will of idealist theory. Then what of the ‘real’ will? It is certainly true that in a man’s ‘actual’ will something else which may perhaps never be desired by the man, is in some sense ‘implied’; and of course this implicate of the ‘actual’ will may be called the ‘real’ will. Thus if a man’s actual will is to be an artist, it is ‘implied’ in that actual will that his ‘real’ will is to become not merely a dabbler, but a sincere, sensitive, and skilled creative artist, and to undertake whatever experiences and activities are needed to school him for this end. And this is implied although, so far is he from desiring this consummation, that he does not even know what kind of experiences and activities are thus ‘implied’ in his first naive interest in art. But to say that his ‘real will’ includes all this is at least to court misunderstanding. For this is not in any ordinary sense his will at all. All that we can say without ambiguity is that the ideal for his will is that he should, little by little, come to will all this; or that as a matter of fact only thus can he achieve fully the kind of activity which in his early stage he conceived and willed only in a very crude or partial manner.

If this argument is correct, it follows also that we are not entitled to say that a man’s real will is social, or for that which is good in the universal view, unless, however much he succumbs to temptation, he does actually will ‘the good of society’, or the universal good. Further, this can only be said to be his actual will if, when he is not subverted by temptation, he experiences an actual enduring desire that society should thrive; and at all times he must at least judge ‘the good of society’ or the universal good to be good. He must actually feel in his ‘heart of hearts’ that to will hurt to society or to the ideal is to thwart his own permanent will. But, alas, it is very far from certain that only those whom we call ‘mentally defective’ are defective in this respect.

These objections, it will be said, are beside the mark. For, according to the view that we are considering, a man’s ‘real will’ is not just the resultant of his actual desires, or the will that he wills on the whole and in the long run. It is the logical implicate of his mental content, whether or not he ever actually desires what is thus involved in all his desires. In desiring anything he embarks upon an enterprise which must be incoherent and self-contradictory unless it can be expanded into willing that which is good in the universal view. What he craves at every stage, and on every occasion, is something which cannot be attained save in the fulfilment of the ideal. Thus it is that the good will is ‘implied’ in his actual will, and is his real will.

In what sense is this view justified? Taking it in one sense, we must, I think, seriously doubt whether the logical implicate of every person’s actual will is the will for one and the same thing, namely, for that which is good in the universal view. It is certainly true that some actual desires would have to be, not merely transformed, but utterly rooted out for the sake of a good which is absolutely incompatible with their essence. For instance, it would seem that the desire to take one’s sport in the suffering of others ought to be both resisted and destroyed. May there not, indeed, be whole systems of desires, and even (just possibly), whole personalities, whole actual wills, which should be condemned as ruled by impulses essentially opposed to the good? Is it not possible that there are some of us who, perhaps owing to an adverse environment, have so developed that their actual wills do not in any sense logically imply the good will? Perhaps they were not born damned, but their environment has damned them; so that it is a travesty to say that, willing what they do will, the universal good is still the logical implicate of their actual wills. Such persons, it would seem, can only become even potential willers of the good by being first stripped clean of those dominant desires which express their actual wills, and reduced once more to that featureless undirected capacity to will something or other, that bare principle of conativity, which in them was hopelessly misdirected by their inheritance or their environment. And, as I have already suggested, this bare subjective capacity is no sufficient ground for the obligation to achieve objective fulfilment.

Perhaps none of us are so utterly lost as this. Perhaps in all of us our actual wills, in order to accord with the good will, need not to be destroyed, but only developed. Yet, even so, it is misleading to say that the good will is implied in our actual wills. Every desire, doubtless, originates in a desire for some intrinsic good; but if that good is sought to the detriment of greater goods, the original desire for a good has given birth to a desire for a positive evil. Though the desire for an evil thing is doubtless caused by a desire for some good thing, once it has come into being as a desire for an evil, there it is. And in no significant sense is the will for the universal good implied in a desire for a positive evil. A person’s evil desires are just as integral parts of him as are his good desires. And, as we have noted, there may be cases in which the evil desires preponderate, and express the whole will.

It may indeed be true that as a matter of fact no self can conceivably attain complete harmonious fulfilment save by embracing within itself the whole universe, and willing the fulfilment of universal needs. In fact, perhaps there is no way of enjoying true self-fulfilment short of being fulfilled as the Universal self, or short of achieving the Ideal. But we should not say that therefore the will for the good is implied in the actual will of each individual. It does not follow that, because the only possible way to fulfil any self is by achieving the universal good, therefore this actual self could be fulfilled in this way. For this actual self is what it is, and not something else that it might be. And perhaps it simply cannot be fulfilled at all. Maybe that, with its actual will, which constitutes what it is, the only possible kind of fulfilment is a precarious illusory sense of fulfilment which can only be preserved in blindness to the world.

E. IMPLICATES OF THE NATURE OF SELFHOOD

IT MAY BE protested that this whole discussion misses the mark. For, it may be said, however depraved a self may be, it is still a self; and it is in the very nature of selfhood that the good will is implied. Whatever is a self at all is something that seeks fulfilment; and fulfilment for it simply consists in becoming the universal self. A self which embraces only a narrow content and rejects universal values is yet truly a self, in that it embraces some content and some values. Being of this nature, whatever its actual content and values, it necessarily wills ‘really’ the only possible fulfilment of selfhood, namely, the logically completed self whose content were the universe and its values universal values. Anything less than such a universal self is inherently self-contradictory. Its content is a mere ragged abstraction from the whole of things; and its values are, so to speak, nursery approximations to the only values which are coherent and final. This is the sense in which, even in the ‘lost soul’, the good will is implied. And because this is the only possible fulfilment of selfhood, every self, no matter how distorted, is subject to moral obligation.

Now it is certainly true in a sense that the good will is implied in the very nature of selfhood; since to be a self at all is to crave harmonious fulfilment, and very likely this is, as a matter of fact, not fully attainable short of the universal good. But to say this is only to say that the ideal for selfhood is to be capable of willing the universal good. It is not to say that in any important sense the will for the universal good is actually a factor in every self. All that is a factor in every self is a will for experienced self-fulfilment; and it does not follow that every actual self would experience fulfilment in experiencing the good. In fact, it is practically certain that no actual self would do so; for every one of us, no doubt, is in some way or other positively perverted. And the perverted part of him is as much himself as the unperverted.

But if the idealist theory of obligation is to hold, it must be shown that the actual self, as it stands, does in some way will, not merely fulfilment of itself as an experienced system of needs, but fulfilment of the world. And even if this were so, we should still be left with a view of obligation which is violently opposed to the naïve moral experience. For the theory would still be maintaining that we ought because we really will. And this is opposed to the naïve moral experience, which suggests rather that we ought whatever be our real will.

The theory certainly declares, in effect, that we ought to do right just because we really will to do right. or that we ought to will what is good in the universal view just because only so can we attain self-fulfilment, and what we really will is self-fulfilment. In hedonism obligation is reduced to a form of the desire for pleasure; and in idealist ethics, in spite of appearances to the contrary, it is reduced to a form of the desire for self-fulfilment. Thus if the real and good will were not implied in our actual wills, we should not be subject to moral obligations at all. But even if it be true that the real will of each is the good will, is this itself a sufficient reason why we ought to will the good? Ought we to will the good just because at heart we do will it, because not to do so is to betray our own nature as experients; or ought we to will it simply because the end is good in itself? Ought we to seek to be the universal self simply because only so can we be our own true selves; or ought we to seek to fulfil the universe because it claims fulfilment?

Or perhaps the issue should be put thus: Is the good really good just because it alone can fulfil my nature as an experient; or is it good because it alone can fulfil the world? Does good emerge from the nature of the experient or from the nature of that which is experienced? Or again, which is the more fundamental idea, ‘I ought to do so and so,’ or ‘So and so ought to be done?’ We may imagine a world in which there were great evils (such as physical pain) and yet no beings capable of a real will for the universal good. Would it then be meaningless to say of such a world that those evils ought to. be abolished? Many philosophers would answer, yes. For in such a world, devoid of ‘moral beings’, it would not be incumbent on anyone to undertake the reform. The concept of obligation, they would say, includes the concept of a being who recognizes the obligation. And of course in some sense it does. Obligation is essentially a binding, and involves two terms. But just as a hand may be stretched out for help though there is no one to grasp it, so a claim may occur though there is no one to recognize it, or no one capable of fulfilling it. And though it is true that in such a world devoid of moral beings, there would be no one who ought to fulfil the claims, it is also true that in such a world of unfulfilled claims there ought to be some one to fulfil the claims. The point is that, whether in fact there are moral beings or not, the occurrence of a need is such that (apart from conflict with greater needs), whatever is necessary for the need’s fulfilment ought to be. Therefore moral beings ought to be. This curious nature of need we intuit when we carefully inspect our moral experience. Let us suppose that, though in our imaginary world there were moral beings, there were no physical possibility of abolishing the evils. Ought not the evils to be abolished? Surely, in the only serious sense of the word ‘ought’, they ought, although they could not be. Do we not often say that an abuse ought to be reformed but no one can do it? This suggests, and rightly I think, that ‘ought’ should be derived from goodness alone, and not from the moral agent’s capability. Some, no doubt, would argue that in such cases as the above what we really mean is that if there were moral beings, or if there were any possibility of effecting the reform, then certain persons ought to do it, and should be blamed if they do not. But this sense of ‘ought’, in which praise and blame are involved, is secondary, not primary. We must feel that an end ought to be attained before we feel that we or anyone else ought to undertake the work. And as to blame, we do blame a man for not fulfilling an obligation which he recognizes; but also we may blame him for not recognizing an obligation which, we think, ought to be recognized.

It is of course admitted in the orthodox ethical theory that the most striking thing about moral behaviour is that it is ‘self-sacrifice’, the deliberate denial of wants felt in the self. It is granted, nay insisted, that in true self-sacrifice we do indeed resist the impulses of the self, and do indeed transcend the self. But we are told that this is done in order to bring about a new and greater self. I sacrifice myself that I may be enlarged. I lose my soul, to save it. If sacrifice were not to promise salvation, it would be folly to sacrifice. This amounts to a denial that genuine self-sacrifice ever occurs. And an ethical theory that is based on self-fulfilment is forced to this denial sooner or later. Defenders of the theory would, no doubt, consider this a caricature. They would insist that the self that is sacrificed is private, and the self that is saved is universal and objective. Then why still call it the self? And anyhow what claim can this universal self have over the actual self which is other than it and definitely incompatible with it?

Psychologically, of course, it is true in a sense that even the martyr accepts martyrdom simply because of a felt discord within himself, and that in this acceptance the discord is resolved. But anything that he feels at all is bound to be felt ‘within himself’. It is a mistake to attribute his action to the need for self-fulfilment simply because it is he that feels and wills to abolish the discord. And ethically it is a mistake to derive his obligation simply from the fact that there is discord within his objective self.

Ethics, indeed, seems to suffer from an obsession with selfhood. This interest perhaps has its psychological explanation in the history of Christianity. For the achievement of Christianity might be said to be that it, stressed the strictly moral necessity of self-denial while it insisted that in losing our souls we save them. There arose in consequence a tradition in which morality appeared as essentially self-denial for the sake of salvation. In the extreme view self-denial came to be thought of even as the one and only means to salvation. Philosophers, certainly, have not fallen into this error. But they, like the rest of us, have been infected with the general obsession with self, and have come to take it for granted that moral obligation must be grounded in the need for salvation.

But is it not rather the case that morality has no essential relation either with self-increase or with self-denial, save psychologically? For moral conduct is not essentially self-increase any more than it is essentially self-destruction, whether for an ultimate increase or for the sake of something other than self. Its effect on the self is incidental. Its essence is surely self-oblivious loyalty to something judged intrinsically good. And to call this something just a greater self is to beg the question. Moral conduct is essentially loyal conduct; and loyalty is felt, primarily, not to a better part of oneself, but to something whose existence and whose value are experienced as logically prior to its acceptance or espousal in an act of conation. Doubtless morality is loyalty not to an individual or a nation or a cause, but to the universe, or to whatever is believed to be the supreme good. But the point is that such loyalty is moral by virtue of its object, not by virtue of its being experienced as demanded for self-fulfilment.

F. SUMMARY

THE FOREGOING CRITICISM of idealist ethics may be summarized as follows. In spite of their distinction between desire and will, idealists base their theory of moral obligation on the ambiguity of the word ‘will’. What has to be accounted for is the individual’s experienced obligation to perform subjective acts of a certain sort, namely, those which are demanded in the objective ‘real will’. If it were true, as it is not, that the subjective act of conation were the act of the mental content, i.e. of the environment in so far as it is cognized, then the moral situation might be expressed by saying that the content succeeds or fails in expressing itself in so far as its subjective activity conforms or not to its needs. Thus in immoral choice it would be acting so as to defeat itself. But since subjectivity is not the act of content, but of an organism acting in relation to an environment, this account is false. Thus it is precisely because the idealists fail to distinguish constantly between the subjective and objective meanings of ‘will’ that they suppose themselves to have solved the problem of obligation. They say that the actual will is but an approximation to the real will; but the point is that in immoral choice the actual will gives rise to an actual desire directed toward a merely partial objective fulfilment, while the real will fails to achieve any effective desire at all. My claim is that the theory derives obligation from the nature of subjectivity; whereas the only way in which it can be explained without being explained away is by deriving it from the dynamic nature of objects, and assigning to subjectivity merely the powers of intuiting the object’s need as a moral claim, and acting in service of it. This theory will be elaborated in the course of this book.

CHAPTER 4. PLEASURE AS CONSTITUTIVE OF GOOD

BASED ON AN article which appeared in the International Journal of Ethics, July 1926.

A. FEELING REINSTATED IN ETHICS

CRITICISM OF ORTHODOX ethics has taken two opposite courses. Some have argued that, though good is indeed not simply identical with pleasure, it cannot be defined without any reference to the felt satisfaction of desires. Others have declared that good is entirely independent of any subjective activity, and is on the contrary a simple character of objects themselves. In this chapter we will consider the attempt to reinstate pleasure as an essential factor in good.

The ethical theory that Professor Hobhouse gave us in his book The Rational Good is essentially a development of idealist ethics. But from that orthodox system it differs in this insistence that ‘good’ is meaningless if it has no relation whatever to pleasure. ‘In judging an experience good,’ says Professor Hobhouse, ‘so far as the judgment is truly our own, and not a recognition of the judgment effectively passed by some one else, we express towards it a mode of feeling which may generically be called favourable; that is to say, it has the generic character of pleasure.’ And again, ‘if an end is genuinely conceived as good it means that we have at least some feeling for it.’ And it is this feeling, he holds, that disposes us to action.

We must not, of course, abstract the feeling from the whole ‘object-felt’, and suppose that what is good is pleasure alone; for thus we should fall into the snares of hedonism. But, on the other hand, we must not ignore feeling, and suppose that objects can be good in themselves; for such a statement is (we are told) meaningless. We do, indeed, in ordinary thought project our feeling into the object, and speak as though goodness were strictly a quality of the object. But such language is inaccurate. Goodness is a quality neither of objects alone nor of feelings alone, but of wholes which consist of object and feeling. Or more accurately, by the term’ good’ the individual ‘signifies something which, in the connexion in which it is applicable, moves feeling, and through feeling disposes to action ‘.

Thus the judgment that something is good is not only a judgment. It is also ‘an acceptance which may be expressed in the most general terms by saying that something fits in or harmonizes with a mental disposition’. When the child’s exploring fingers encounter the candle flame, the effort of exploration is broken in upon by an unexpected experience. ‘There is disharmony between the effort and its end’, and in the moment of disharmony, and essential thereto, pain. ‘Pain characterizes the feeling involved in disharmony, and the mental attitude concerned in the process of checking and cancelling effort.’ On the other hand, if the explored object turns out to be a sugar plum, there is harmony of effort and result, and the feeling is pleasant and culminates in satisfaction. ‘By harmony is meant, in the last analysis, a form of mutual support. Generally speaking, it is that relation of parts in a whole in virtue of which they maintain and (if they admit of development) further one another.’

Such is the foundation of Professor Hobhouse’s theory of goodness. I suggest that it implies a false view of conation; and that, consequently, his ethical system, though it contains much of real importance to ethics, is subtly vitiated throughout. For, in spite of his protestations, his theory fails to disentangle itself from hedonism. He assures us that feeling alone does not constitute goodness; what is good is an object, felt as pleasant. Yet by ‘good’ the individual ii said to mean something which ‘moves feeling’. Objects, then, are good in that they afford feelings. Of course feelings cannot as a rule be obtained without objects; and so objects are necessary to goodness. But it is implied that objects are only good in so far as they give feelings. It seems to follow after all that if feelings of pleasure were possible without objects they themselves alone would be good.

It may be said that this is a false interpretation of the theory. Neither objects alone nor feelings alone, we may be told, are good; for ‘good’ is a predicate which applies only to ‘organic wholes’ composed of object and feeling. The same view might be expressed by saying that, though feeling is hot itself good, ‘good’ is a character which ‘emerges’ only on the plane of consciousness. But this view is not justified. When we say that anything is good we mean what we say, namely, that it is good, not that what is good is the whole made up of it and our pleasure in it. We mean that it has a certain character, which we call ‘good’, not that it has the property of affording us, or some one, a certain feeling. The feeling which we have in regard to it is consequent on its having a certain character. It is a mistake to suppose that the only kind of thing which can afford us that feeling must itself have feeling as a constituent in it. The only reason for making such a contention lies in a faulty introspection of ‘pleasure’ and a false theory of conation.

Professor Hobhouse is led to his theory of ethics by his belief that it is essentially through feeling that we are disposed to action. Now so far as I can see this is only superficially true. It is never feeling, in its own right, that disposes us to action. On the contrary, pleasure and unpleasure are in principle merely consequent on the success and failure of behaviour-tendencies. We are pleased when our activity is favoured, displeased when it is thwarted. The ground of conation is not feeling, but something that is prior to feeling. We are all indebted to Professor McDougall for his insistence on this ‘hormic’ principle, even though we may have to criticize very radically his over-emphasis of instinct.

Of course it is true that in many cases we do shun ‘pain’ and seek ‘pleasure’. But the pleasurableness of pleasant things is constituted by the success of our impulse to pursue them, and the offensiveness of unpleasant things is constituted by the failure of our impulse to avoid them. The states which we seek and shun are pleasurable and painful in that they are occasions of success and failure. Sensory pleasure and pain, indeed, seem often to be sought and shunned for their own intrinsic characters, independently of any expectation of benefit or damage to the organism. But this fact can be interpreted in a strictly ‘hormic’ psychology. Sensory pleasure and pain are to be thought of as ‘how we feel when we are tending to pursue or shun certain stimuli’. In this view we do not seek sensory pleasure-stimuli and shun sensory pain-stimuli because they have intrinsic characters of pleasantness and painfulness; on the contrary we find them pleasant and painful because we tend to seek and shun them.

On higher levels of experience it is more obvious that pleasure and displeasure are but symptoms of success and failure. So far from being the ground of conation, they presuppose conation. Failure is grievous because we have striven for success.

Perhaps the real source of the whole ethical dispute lies in the ambiguity of the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’. We seem to mean by the word ‘good’ two essentially different things. In the one sense pure hedonism is justified and in the other even Professor Hobhouse’s theory, which is at heart hedonistic, must be rejected. When the question is asked, ‘Can there conceivably be anything good in a world wholly unrelated with conscious beings?’ common sense replies at once that there cannot. This answer constitutes the solid base of pure hedonism; and hedonists cannot believe that any sane person can answer otherwise. But all depends on what is to be meant by ‘good ‘. The questioner himself invariably means by good precisely pleasure. And the form of his question almost inevitably leads the answerer to reply in the same vein. And certainly if ‘good’ means pleasure, there can be no good apart from conscious beings. But ‘good’ also means ‘that which can, or could, be valued’; and though many things that are most valued include consciousness as a constituent of them, that which could be valued may in principle exist apart from conscious beings.

The denial of this contention, though common, seems to be based on faulty introspection of ‘pleasure’. When I examine my own experience as carefully as possible I seem to discover that pleasure is essentially consequent on an act of valuation. Or, more precisely, it is the affective aspect of an act in which the cognitive and conative aspects are logically prior to the affective. Pleasure presupposes value; value does not presuppose pleasure. Pleasure is consequent on conation. And conation (by which I mean a conscious activity), is consequent on a cognitive act of valuation which cognizes the relation of the object to some behaviour-tendency. And the behaviour-tendency is itself essentially objective to any act of ‘espousing’ it, or desiring its fulfilment. This schematic account of conation is doubtless very debatable. It raises more problems than it solves. At a later stage I shall attempt to formulate and solve those problems, and to construct a satisfactory theory of conation to serve as a basis for the psychology of moral obligation. Meanwhile these few remarks are perhaps enough to indicate the kind of criticism which I would make of Professor Hobhouse’s ethical theory.

If the hedonist maintains that only entities that contain consciousness as a constituent can be valued, he is in error; just as the epistemologist were in error who should say that only entities in which consciousness were constituent could be known. But if he maintains that apart from consciousness there can be no valuation, he is justified. And further, while he is justified in maintaining that apart from pleasure and pain there can be no valuation, his justification lies simply in the fact that pleasure and pain are aspects of the acts of valuation.

We seem, then, to have found two entirely different senses of the word ‘good’. Which shall we adopt? Doubtless in practice we shall all continue to use both, according to the demands of the subject of discourse. But for strict ethical inquiry one sense is the more significant, namely, that in which ‘good’ refers, not to acts of valuation, but to the objects of those acts. Common sense uses the word’ good’ in both manners, and does not see that these are inconsistent. On the whole probably ‘good’ as involving consciousness is more familiar to common sense than’ good’ as the object of valuation. Nevertheless I suggest that whatever we do in fact generally mean by ‘good’ in ordinary speech, we confuse our thought by using it to mean states of enjoyment, or even pleasurable impulse-satisfaction. Let us either abolish the word entirely from serious discourse, as hopelessly ambiguous; or let us mean by ‘good’ strictly that which is valued. And let us recognize that’ that which is valued’ is not essentially states of enjoyment or conscious satisfaction of our active nature, but the actual fulfilment itself of these activities and tendencies which are essentially prior to desire, and prior even to pleasure, and to consciousness of every kind.

B. RATIONALITY OF THE IDEAL

BUT LET US for the present waive this basic objection to Professor Hobhouse’s theory of the nature of goodness, and study his account of the good, and of moral obligation. In calling anything good, he says, we ‘express towards it a mode of feeling’ which has’ the generic character of pleasure ‘. Now a man’s pleasures are often incompatible; or rather the objects which afford pleasure are often incompatible. In such a conflict three courses are possible. First, now one and now the other object may be sought, according to the alternating strength of uncriticized impulses. Or, secondly, one impulse may permanently conquer the other, not indeed succeeding in annihilating it, but preventing it from gaining satisfaction. Or, finally, some activity or some object may be discovered which will satisfy harmoniously both impulses. Thus neither, perhaps, will attain the crude and direct satisfaction that it demands; but the sum of satisfaction will be the greatest possible in the circumstances. Such ‘integration’ of conflicting impulses in harmonious satisfaction is the way of prudence, and the ‘rational’ solution of conflict. And in every conflict of impulses it is true that, whatever course is judged to be best, there is one course which would as a matter of fact afford the greatest possible felt satisfaction in the long run. This, within the economy of the individual’s interests, is the prudent course. It is prudent because it is rational. If you seek impulse-satisfaction it is rational to take that course which will afford as much impulse-satisfaction as possible.

Let us, then, first consider the nature of rationality in general before we see its application in ethics.. We may agree with Professor Hobhouse’s account of the matter, namely, that to be rational a judgment must fulfil three conditions.  In the first place it must be internally coherent, or self-consistent. Secondly, we must be able to connect it with something that goes beyond it, in fact, with other regions of our experience. It must, that is, be not arbitrary but ‘grounded’. Thirdly, it must not be based merely on emotion or desire or any attitude of ours. It must deal with the objective order.

The search for grounds suggests that all judgments must be ultimately based on certain distinct, isolated, and ungrounded judgments, such as immediate sense-experience. But even these are not entirely ungrounded; for we may appeal from one sensory judgment to another, and from one man’s experience to another’s. We may criticize sense-experience in the light of other sense-experience. But ‘we must not deny all value to direct sensory judgment; if we are going to trust the system formed by such judgments, we must allow each such judgment provisional value, such that when confirmed by interconnexion with other judgments of similar provisional value it becomes for us a confirmed or established judgment’.

Besides ungrounded judgments of sense there are also ungrounded judgments of a general character, intuitions which we call self-evident. But even these intuitive self-evident judgments are not exempt from criticism. Each of them, so long as it is unconnected with others, has only provisional value. Thus to the uninitiated it may be self-evident that the shortest route from Kerguelen to a point due east is the due easterly route. But in fact the shortest route is along a great circle which, starting toward the south, gradually inclines north. Those judgments, then, are considered true which combine together in mutual support or consilience in a vast system. Only in partial systems is there need for any ground outside the system. In the final ideal whole of knowledge the ground lies entirely within the whole, ‘in the very connectedness of parts each claiming immediate acceptance ‘.

This account of rationality in general is very useful, and can easily be applied in the sphere of experienced impulses for the description of the prudential ideal. Thus far, however, we have considered only the individual’s interests without reference to the interests of other individuals. Rationality, which is seen to be the principle of harmony in this sphere, applies also, we are told, as between the satisfaction of different individuals. Rationality is essential to the nature of the good, and turns out to be the ground of moral obligation. ‘The rational good must be a consistent scheme of purposes interconnected by universal relations in which subjective disturbance is eliminated.’ To be rational, purposes must not conflict. If they do, harmony must somehow be found. Further, that which is good must have a universal ground. If it is good in given conditions, it must be good in such conditions always, wherever and in whomsoever found.  But further, self-evident principles which are the grounds of value- judgments, will themselves require grounds; and their grounds will consist in ‘the fact that they sum up and generalize more specific and concrete ends so far as these are mutually consistent’. Thus interconnexion is itself the rational principle. The rational good must form ‘a connected whole in which no part is isolated but in the end every element involves every other ‘.

In order to be universally grounded it must be objective. It must not depend on any individual’s peculiarity. Thus a double harmony is involved. For, in the first place, there must be an internal harmony of feeling with feeling within the mind itself; and, secondly, there must be a harmony of the mind with the world. The rational principle cannot rest with a narrow harmony; it must embrace the universe.

In order that the ideal may be achieved, many impulses will need to be modified.  Satisfaction will have to be given them in objects and acts which do not conflict with the satisfaction of other impulses, or at least with the organized satisfaction which is the rational goal. For there is ‘a distinction between something radical in our impulses and something relatively superficial ‘, and alterable. Thus in the developed personality sex impulses may perhaps be fulfilled in behaviour very different from that which alone satisfies the crude animal instinct. In the rational good, then, it is essential that all our deep-rooted impulses should be satisfied; for only so can we have permanently the feeling of satisfaction. But the precise manner of the satisfaction of these deepest impulses will depend on their inter-relation in a harmonious system.

The ideal, therefore, is said to be the continuous development of personality in society, or the harmonious fulfilment of vital capacity as a whole.  The good is not simply harmony, any sort of harmony; it is essentially ‘harmony with some disposition of mind’, a .harmony of mind with itself and with its object ‘. In short, the good is described as happiness in the fulfilment of vital capacity in a world adapted to Mind.

Now the foregoing account of rationality is indeed helpful to the student of ethics; but in his application of it in his own ethical system Professor Hobhouse is not convincing. There is a serious difficulty at the outset in this account of the rational good as the completest possible system of felt satisfactions in all minds. For on this theory, in order to know what is good, we must have some means of measuring one satisfaction against another, so that, if they are incompatible, we may know which to sacrifice. And, indeed, apart from our knowing, satisfactions must be in fact commensurable, if there is to be any such rational good at all. But it is hard to see how feelings of satisfaction can, as mere feelings, be compared even in theory.

Within the experience of one individual his satisfactions are in practice evaluated, not according to intensity of feeling, but in relation to the ideal of personal fulfilment. We approve, not simply the most intense pleasures, but those satisfactions which are felt in activities ‘enlarging to the personality’. It is difficult to give a precise meaning to this phrase; but it certainly includes not only intensity of feeling but a reference to something objective. Personalities are ‘great’, or not, quite apart from the individual’s own feeling on the subject. Further, we often distinguish between feelings which are grounded in reality and those which are based on mere phantasy. We incline to condemn a life of mere phantasy, however rich and delightful.

But the most serious difficulty occurs when we try to compare the felt-satisfactions of different individuals. By what right can we say that Jones’s joy in a good meal is more than, or equal to, Smith’s? In practice, even if we attempt such a comparison, we base no final value-judgment on it. Rather we evaluate, not felt-satisfactions, but the activities which afford them. And we judge those activities best which favour, not any vague ideal of felt harmonious satisfaction in all minds, but some tendency which we judge to be the supreme demand of our environment, whether the objective fulfilment of society’s capacities, or the fulfilment of the nature of the universe, or (as some would say) the fulfilment of ‘God’s will’. In every such ideal we imply a reference to reality. Even a society would be condemned in which the goal of all activity were the undisturbed delight in mere phantasies.

C. MORAL OBLIGATION

BUT LET US for the moment waive these objections to the account of the rational good in terms of feeling. Admitting its validity, in what sense can the ideal be said to have a claim on us? Why ought we to strive to realize it? What of the consistent and unashamed egoist? I may feel that an essential element in the goodness of anything is that it is mine, a fulfilment of my impulses. I may set as my ideal, as my good, an internally consistent system of my judgments, my actions, my feelings. Here, however, we are told, the principle of rationality intervenes. I must admit that you may set up a similar egoism of your own. Our systems will conflict. Both cannot be universal. But the good, to be rational, must be universal. If I am to prefer my own good to yours, what is the universal ground of my preference? There is none; and so egoism fails to be rational.

But what if I do not accept the principle of rationality? What if I have no desire to make my life externally and internally harmonious? I may be content to seek my private ends and damn the public consequences. If I choose thus, what claim has the rationality of the ideal on me? Am I in any sense under a moral obligation to be rational in my choice of ends?

The rationality of the ideal is itself, we are told, the ground of moral obligation. In the case of prudence we saw that a certain course is in fact prudent whether I think it so or not, and whether I adopt it or not. In adopting the prudent course I am constrained by objective circumstances. Similarly, in the moral sphere a certain course makes for the rational good whether I think so or not, and whether I incline to take it or not. Its goodness is intrinsic. Its claim holds ‘of’ me, whether it holds ‘for’ me or not. The rule of morality is as objective as the rule of prudence. Yet, ‘How’, it may be asked, ‘can anything practical hold “of” me if no impulse, no desire, no volition of mine urges me to it?’ It has been argued that all voluntary actions arise from feeling; in what sense then can a man be expected to act in a certain manner if he has not the feeling which alone can induce him to act? What meaning can there be in saying that he ‘ought’ to do so and so although feeling does not dispose him to do so?

To such questions Professor Hobhouse answers only that the rational good is a fact whether I admit it or not. Just as a danger concerns a man whether he knows it or not, so moral obligation concerns him whether he feels it or not. Even when it does not hold for him, it holds of him. In missing it ‘he misses what is really good, the goodness that stands the test of rational examination’. If this seems to reduce the matter after all to egoism and prudence, we must remember that ‘the principle which I accept as binding must be one that appeals to me as a decisive ground for action, that is, one that overcomes other grounds for other actions, it being just this supremacy which the term “binding” expresses’.

In this account of the good and of obligation there is, as in the idealist account, a subtle attempt both to have the cake and eat it. Goodness, we are told, is founded in feeling; yet the ideal, the rational good, is said to be the good whether anyone likes it or not. Of course, those who accept the theory answer that, though the rational good is the good whether anyone likes it or not, yet it is constituted by the sum of pleasant feelings which it would afford in all persons. Pleasure is essential to it, though no single person’s pleasure in it is essential to it. My pleasure is not the ground of the good, but pleasure is.

Now, waiving the difficulty of measuring feelings, let us grant that there is a certain possible course which would, as a matter of fact, give the greatest possible harmonious felt-satisfaction to all minds, and that this ideal does not depend on anyone’s opinion about it. The question is, in what sense, if any, does the existence of this possibility constitute a moral claim over us? Why, and in what sense, ought we to strive to realize it whether it pleases us to do so or not? Professor Hobhouse says that morality concerns a man whether he feels its claim or not, just as danger concerns him whether he is aware of it or not. But, according to Professor Hobhouse’s theory, danger only concerns a man because it threatens him with pain or other unpleasant feelings. True, it threatens him whether he judges the situation dangerous or not; but, on the theory, its dangerousness depends on the fact that what it promises is feelings of pain. Were he anaesthetic or a masochist there would be no question of danger. Thus, if the end of behaviour is feeling, there is after all no objectivity in the prudential ideal. A man may say (and how is he to be confuted?) ‘even though it cripple me for life, I prefer this moment’s thrill to an age of humdrum health’. You may tell him he will be sorry later; but perhaps he won’t. Perhaps he will successfully console himself with a dream-life based on the past ecstasy. If his goal is pleasant feeling, in what is he imprudent? In what sense is he missing the good?

In the case of morality, it is insisted, the good concerns a man even if he happens to be morally anaesthetic. But surely if it is feeling that disposes us to action, and if morality is really in the same case with danger, there is an inconsistency in holding that a social ideal has any kind of claim on a man who is insensitive to his fellows. It is beside the mark, though true, that he is missing the only kind of goodness ‘that stands the test of rational examination’. For, ex hypothesi, he gets more pleasure out of egoism than out of altruism, in spite of irrationality.

Professor Hobhouse sees clearly that the ‘reward’ of moral conduct is not self-fulfilment. He criticizes the idealists on this point. But he makes the mistake of supposing that there must be some sort of ‘reward’. And of course this mistake follows from his theory that only feeling can move us to action. The ‘reward’, he says, ‘consists in this, that the moral order is a connected system which is the basis of an inward as well as an external harmony’. True, but if I do not desire this reward, why (in Professor Hobhouse’s theory) ought I to seek it?

Clearly Professor Hobhouse’s attempt to save obligation has split his theory into inconsistent theses. For while it is said that primarily things are called good, and sought, because of the feeling that they can afford, it is also said that the ideal is good and ought to be advanced whether anyone feels pleasure in it or not. Now clearly the individual judges the ideal to be good before he is pleased with it. He judges it good for some other reason than that it pleases him. To say that it would please others is not to the point. In this supreme case the individual’s value judgment is admittedly prior to, not subsequent to, the individual’s feeling. He takes pleasure in the ideal (if he does take pleasure in it) because he judges it to be intrinsically good. He serves it because he judges that it has a claim on him. His pleasure is nothing but an attitude of acceptance, or recognition, or applause, toward something which, he supposes, is demanded not by himself but by his world.

And if this is so in the judgment of the ideal, it is surely possible that pleasure is always and essentially, not constitutive of value, but an attitude appropriate to value. It is possible that the feelings of impulse-satisfaction, out of which it is proposed to build the rational good, should be regarded as signs or symptoms of goodness rather than as little units of goodness itself, to be pieced together. And this is important. For if the goodness of the good is but a conglomerate of the goodness of its elements, it matters not what form the edifice be given, so long as we use as many bricks as possible, and avoid unnecessary strains within the structure. But if feelings are, after all, only attitudes of the builders, we must beware lest, like acrobats, we build a pyramid of human antics, which must collapse with every change of mood.

It would seem, then, that we must either reject the view that goodness is grounded in feeling, or exonerate the individual from moral obligation, and explain the curious illusion of duty in terms of some such mechanism as is offered by the psycho-analysts.

But if feeling is consequent on, not prior to, conation, and if conation itself is the outcome of objective tendencies embraced within the mental content; if, in fact, what is intrinsically good is not felt-satisfactions, but objective fulfilments; if conation is essentially, and in its very nature, a kind of disinterested loyalty to the nature of objects; then universal fulfilment has a very real claim on all conative beings, whether they are aware of that claim or not. For on this view objective fulfilment is intrinsically desirable. Not merely in the moral sphere, but equally in the prudential sphere, the tendency of active substances objective to the subject is intuited as having a claim on subjective activity.

It follows in the first place that, within a given mental content, there is an objective ideal, the greatest possible objective fulfilment. This is intrinsically the most desirable goal within the universe of discourse of the particular mental content. If owing to weakness of intelligence or the impetus of the organism’s innate or acquired ‘behaviour set’, this ideal is not desired, it is none the less intrinsically desirable. And any conation which favours a minor as against a major objective fulfilment, is untrue not merely to the nature of conation itself, but to the nature of the objective claim which, even in conating only the minor fulfilment, it has intuited and accepted. And in the second place, beyond the limits of each private mental content are tendencies as essentially ‘conatable’ as those within. Therefore there is an objective ideal of ‘world-fulfilment’ which is intrinsically the most desirable of all desirables. It is the intrinsic desirability of this ideal which, in its own right, imposes a moral claim on all conative beings.

But it must be admitted that the theory here outlined needs very careful criticism before it can be accepted.

D. ILLUSTRATIONS

TO EMPHASIZE THE insufficiency of feeling as the ground of goodness, and even as the essential constituent of goodness, let us imagine the absurd case of a world of sentient beings who have no impulses save the impulse to get gloriously drunk. Let us imagine further that in this absurd world it is possible for every one to indulge this impulse to the full extent without ever causing himself or anyone else any distress. Let us suppose that an intoxicating and sufficiently nourishing manna drops from the sky in such quantities that every one can spend all his time in devouring it. Let us suppose also that the universal tipsy bliss is never marred by a headache. And finally, let us suppose that each ecstatic toper has the comfortable knowledge that every one else is as happy as he, and therefore that there is nothing irrational in his behaviour. Here, it would seem, we have a perfect case of the felt harmonious fulfilment of impulse, and therefore a world wherein the rational good is realized. Are we then mistaken if we judge such a world to be less good than our own world, where there is less harmony of satisfaction? Is the truth just that such a world would not satisfy us, would not give beings like us harmonious fulfilment of our impulses? Or are we right in saying that such a world: would be absolutely less good than ours?

It may be objected that this imaginary world fails merely through its paucity or monotony, through the fact that its inhabitants have only one kind of impulse to satisfy. It may be insisted that satisfaction must be not only harmonious, but also rich and diverse. The rational good, it may be said, entails felt-satisfaction of as many kinds as is possible to the nature of mind. Let us, then, imagine a world in which the inhabitants have very many diverse impulses to play games, and no other impulses whatever. Let us suppose that they spend their time in ceaseless and eager pursuit of all kinds of sports, and further, that their sports are so many and so intricate and so diverse, and so physically difficult, that each person’s time is fully occupied in learning and performing, and that each intelligence is fully taxed. Finally, as before, let us suppose that each has the feeling of perfectly harmonious satisfaction. Must we grant that the rational good is realized in such conditions? Or dare we insist that the kind of object in which satisfaction is felt is not good enough, and that sentient beings ought not to be contented with this kind of behaviour, even if it fulfils all their capacities? Can it be that these beings, though they are highly complex and are taxing their minds to the utmost with intricate knowledge and behaviour, have yet utterly missed the good?

Many persons certainly would insist that this is so. They would say that not all kinds of felt harmonious satisfaction are equally good, and that not even all kinds of equally extensive and equally various felt harmonious satisfaction are equally good. For all depends (they would insist) on the character of the objects which afford satisfaction. In the above absurd cases the good is unrealized because, though in each case there is the fullest possible satisfaction of existing impulses, these impulses themselves are insufficient, in that they are satisfied with objects of an insufficient kind.

To this it might be answered as follows. True, in these absurd cases the good is not realized. But why? Simply because the nature of mind is such that these satisfactions are not really all that it is capable of enjoying. These topers and sport maniacs would miss very much, though unwittingly. They would, for instance, be missing love, art, science, and philosophy. They would have attained harmony of satisfaction but no breadth of satisfaction. The rational good is the fulfilment of all mind’s capacities, not merely the fulfilment of existing impulses. In these absurd worlds the only possible good is realized which can be realized for such mentally deranged beings; but the good can be realized only by beings with richer capacities.

But this answer is not altogether fair. For surely we may suppose that in our absurd world of games the beings have just as complex and diverse capacities as our own, though theirs are capacities for different kinds of activities from ours. As compared, say, with an ideal world of artists, scientists, philosophers, and socially-minded workers of all sorts, they do indeed lack many capacities; but on the other hand they have other capacities for which there is no room in the ideal ‘high-brow’ world. Indeed, we may suppose that the kinds of mental activities which they perform and enjoy are the same kinds of activities (and of the same complexity) as those of artists, scientists, philosophers, and socially-minded workers; but that the objects in relation to which they act are different. Consequently if the one is better than the other, the difference does not lie in quantity of impulse-satisfaction, nor in kind of impulse-satisfaction, but rather in the kind of objects in which satisfaction is felt.

It may, of course, be that in judging some activities better than others, or in assigning to some a greater sphere in the good, and to some a less, we are merely satisfying our own prejudices. But it does seem that there is reason for supposing that some activities are better than others, or ought to be practised more than others, simply in respect of their objects, and quite apart from the amount of satisfaction which they may be expected to give. It seems that in condemning the absurd worlds we are moved by a vague sense that the satisfaction which they attain is in some sense illusory or objectively unjustified. For in them delight is found not in reality but in phantasy. Even though all the capacities of mind are exercised delightfully, they are exercised on vanities. Impulses are derived from, and directed on, and delight is taken in, minor aspects of the real, and minor aspects considered in abstraction from the concrete whole which is reality itself.

The matter may be put thus. In our absurd cases the fault is, not that many capacities of mind are undeveloped and unsatisfied, but that so much of the universe itself is left out of account. The mental process of these beings is complete and satisfying; but their content is a mere fringe of the real. Beyond the objective tendencies and capacities which they ‘espouse’ in their conation lie, ignored by them, other tendencies and capacities in the fulfilment of which the real might express its nature more fully. Their value-judgments are therefore founded on insufficient data, and are erroneous. We feel obscurely that something better might be made of the universe than is made in these absurd cases. Art, science, philosophy, and the loving community are demanded, we are tempted to say, by the universe itself; they are not merely means to the satisfaction of impulses. But a logical ground for this conviction is certainly very hard to find.

CHAPTER 5. GOOD AS AN UNIQUE QUALITY

A. ETHICAL DIFFERENCES OF PROFESSOR MOORE AND PROFESSOR FIELD

HAVING CONSIDERED THE attempt to modify idealist ethics by a reinstatement of feeling as an essential factor in ‘good’, we will now discuss the view that ‘good’ is an unique, unanalysable, and indefinable quality of certain objects; that, in fact, we cannot conceivably describe goodness in terms of any other character. By no amount of talking, Professor G. E. Moore insists, can we tell a man what goodness is, when, though he has experience of pleasure or understanding of ‘personality’ or ‘reality’; yet he has no intuition of the unique quality, good. Of course, if he has that intuition, we may profitably confer with him as to what kinds of things are as a matter of fact good and what bad. And thus we may advance toward a better apprehension of the nature of the ideal, which would possess the unique quality, good, in the highest degree. But to define good is utterly impossible. We might as well try to describe yellow to a colour-blind man.

This unique quality, says Professor Moore, is easily confused with other qualities. For instance, we are apt to overlook the difference between judging a thing good in the ethical sense and merely being pleased with it ‘It is very difficult to see that by “approving” of a thing we mean feeling that it has a certain predicate — the predicate namely which defines the peculiar sphere of Ethics; whereas in the enjoyment of a thing no such unique object of thought is involved.’

Many feel that this view is mistaken. Professor G. C. Field, for instance, declares that Professor Moore has after all given no reason in its favour, and moreover that it is an unintelligible theory for the following reason. The goodness of a thing, according to Professor Moore, is itself the reason for our aiming at it. Just because a thing or event would have this intrinsic quality, goodness, We ought to try to bring it into being. This is what Professor Field finds unintelligible. For, he says, the mere cognition of an objective quality cannot possibly move us to valuatary action. It is only the desire for it which can do so. If goodness is an intrinsic quality of things, the mere fact that things have, or may have, this quality, cannot influence us. Intelligence by itself, as Aristotle said, has no motive power. Action ‘will not take place without the presence of a desire or some element of feeling or emotion.’

It follows, then, that being an end is not a fact about things themselves at all. An end is necessarily an end for some one; things are made ends by being desired. To say that goodness is necessarily related to desire is to say. ‘that it makes its appeal to us because of a necessary connexion between something in it and something in our nature.’  It is this fact about the good ‘which gives it a claim on us, which makes it a possible motive to action, which, in short, makes it of any interest to us at all.’ Thus to call an object good means in the last analysis that it is ‘an object which every one could not but desire if they realized its true nature.’ And ‘the ideal is of a certain character because human nature is of a certain character.’

‘It is the fact of this relation to our nature that makes it good.’ Hence Professor Field judges that’ the conception of good necessarily contains in itself a reference to some conscious being.’

Here then we have two thinkers who disagree about the fundamental datum of ethics. Professor Moore is chiefly impressed by the objectivity of the character called good; and Professor Field is no less certain that good involves in its very essence a reference to the desires of conscious beings. The former, as a protagonist of realistic epistemology, comes to ethics with a zest for eradicating all traces of subjectivism. For, if in cognition it is a mistake to suppose that the object exists only in being known, similarly in our apprehension of value it may be false to suppose that the goodness of things consists only in their relation to valuing beings. Of volition and feeling we are told that ‘in so far as these words denote an attitude of the mind towards an object, they are themselves merely instances of Cognition; they differ only in respect of the kind of object of which they take cognizance, and in respect of the other mental accompaniments of such cognitions.’ Therefore, since the object of a cognition must always be distinguished from the cognitive act which apprehends it, the particular kind of object called ‘good’ cannot derive its goodness from ‘being the object of certain kinds of will or feeling.’

Professor Field, on the other hand, though also a realist in epistemology, cannot accept the extreme realist view in ethics, since for him good is meaningless apart from desire. He says in effect that, though the ideal is what it is whether anyone likes it or not, yet desire is constitutive of goodness and of the ideal. And this view seems to him to follow from two facts, namely the fact that by ‘good’ we all mean something which does or should move us to voluntary action, and the fact that only desire possibly can move us to voluntary action. This then is his central conviction for the sake of which he has to reject Professor Moore’s central conviction of the absolutely objective nature of good.

B. ESSENTIALS OF PROFESSOR MOORE’S THEORY

I BELIEVE IT possible to accept the essential tenets of these two writers without contradiction, if we carefully reject from each what is unessential. The nerve of Professor Moore’s doctrine is that good is unanalysable and that it is objective. Very cogently he argues that, though good things may be complex wholes, the quality ‘good’ is itself simple, and cannot be exhibited as a whole of parts that are other than the quality ‘good’ itself.

But there is a possibility which Professor Moore ignores. Let us grant that there is a certain simple quality which, when we are thinking about values, we call ‘good.’ Possibly, however, that very quality may be encountered in other contexts. And possibly, through a failure clearly to distinguish the essential simple quality ‘good’ from its accompaniments in ethical contexts, we may not easily recognize that something encountered in other contexts really is precisely the quality called ‘good’ in ethical contexts. In fact, while it is quite true that there is a simple quality that is the very essence of what we mean by ‘good’, neither Professor Moore nor Professor Field, I should say, has clearly isolated this quality from its concomitants in ethical situations. Professor Field has failed to distinguish it from its effects on consciousness. Professor Moore, though making this distinction, has been so busy with the conventionally ethical aspect of his ‘unique quality’ that he has failed to discover its essential identity with a certain quality encountered elsewhere.

Professor Moore insists that of every definition of ‘good’, it is always possible to ask whether the subject so defined really is good; and the mere possibility of such a question, he says, shows that the definition has only defined good things, not goodness itself.  Professor Field answers that, in asking the question, ‘you are still thinking of goodness as that vague and undefined something which it was to you before you began your speculation about its real nature.’  The fact that you can ask the question .means that you have not yet made up your mind about accepting the definition.’

This is true, but it is not quite a fair answer to Professor Moore. His point surely is that in definition you do not succeed in presenting the unique quality at all; you only present its relations; you only state the one kind of thing of which good is a predicate. If your definition claims actually to say what good itself is, your definition is confuted simply by our ability to distinguish between good and the predicate of the definition. Thus any definition which defines goodness itself in terms of pleasure, or the felt satisfaction of desire, or any other quality, is necessarily false, unless, after due inquiry about the meanings of the terms, you see that the proposition is simply tautological, in that its subject and its predicate are merely different names for the same thing.

Nevertheless we must be careful at this point not to go too far with Professor Moore. For it is possible that, though the subject term and the predicate term do as a matter of fact mean one identical quality, in common parlance the terms are applied to that quality in different universes of discourse; and that the identity of the quality in these two spheres has not hitherto been recognized.

Suppose that a certain simple quality, G, has been singled out as the very essence meant by ‘good’ in ethical contexts; and suppose that G turns out to be identical with a quality which, in other spheres, we call F. Then if we were to define F by means of its relations, what we had defined would be the identical quality called, alternatively, F and G. And if F were a quality of certain kinds of complex events, G might also be defined in terms of such events. Its relations, that is, would be defined by such events; but it would be an unanalysable quality.

In these circumstances it would be reasonable to ask whether the subject of the definition really were G, only if we were still uncertain either of the accuracy of the definition of F, or of the qualitative identity of F and G.

An illustration may help. It is clearly possible that a certain curve or rhythm well known to artists, in their work, might turn out to be identical with one well known to (let us say) biologists or engineers in very different contexts. Or it might even be that the same man knew the curve in both spheres, but had not noticed its identity. Similarly, then, it is possible that G might turn out to be identical with F. And so it would be possible theoretically to define G to a man who, having no experience of ethical situations, had at least encountered F in other regions.

So far we have considered only Professor Moore’s contention that good is a simple quality, and have accepted it with a caveat that sometimes this quality may not be recognized. His other important contention is that the quality ‘good’ is objective to the mental act which recognizes it or merely cognizes it. Whatever it is a quality of, it is not a quality simply of a feeling or a value-judgment. Nor does it exist simply in being the object of a value-judgment. Sometimes, indeed, good is a quality of a whole in which feelings or value-judgments are members. Love, for instance, is said to be good. But the very feeling which feels love as good, or the very judgment that judges love good, does not itself create the goodness of love.

C. ESSENTIALS OF PROFESSOR FIELD’S THEORY

WITH PART OF this view, I expect, Professor Field would agree, but cautiously. He would perhaps distinguish between the feeling and the value-judgment, and declare that though good is not constituted by the value-judgment, it is constituted in part by consciousness of some kind.

I suggest, however, that his really important point is, not that good is relative to consciousness, but that it is relative to something which has indeed one: essential feature of desire, though it is not essentially conscious. We may for the present call this something ‘need’, if by that word we may explicitly deny all reference to consciousness. At a later stage I shall discuss ‘need’ in some detail; but for the purpose of the present discussion I may elucidate the concept as follows. A wide view of all manner of biological phenomena seems to show that organisms act in manners which are, within limits, definitely teleological. In varying circumstances, though of course only within certain limits, they act in such manners that some constant result is attained. We may therefore say that they tend to behave in certain teleological manners. In abnormal environments they may indeed act so as to defeat their own normal teleological nature; but this irregularity does not affect the general truth that their nature is observably teleological. Needs, then, are laid down in the nature of organisms, and may be inferred from careful study of their behaviour. Similarly the needs of one’s own nature may be inferred, up to a point, by careful study of one’s own behaviour. But needs are of different degrees of importance. Some are relatively fundamental and permanent, while others, derived in the last resort from the former, are relatively superficial and fleeting. The superficial needs of one’s own nature are easily apprehended; but the fundamental needs, of which the superficial needs are often very distorted expressions, are discovered only with difficulty. The needs of an organism are primarily needs for certain activities, such as (according to the nature of the particular organism) breathing, mating, intellectual inquiry, sociality, and so on; but we may also conveniently say that the organism needs whatever objects are necessary to the fulfilment of its activities. Thus it may need air, a mate, or books. Clearly since behaviour-tendency does not necessarily involve conscious conation, neither does need.

I am aware that Professor Field would object to this account of need; but his objections can best be faced at a later stage. He protests, quite rightly, I think, that it is meaningless to talk of goodness as being an intrinsic character of certain objects in precisely the same sense as yellow may be called an intrinsic character of objects. In every conceivable case a thing that is called ‘good’ is so called either because it is a means to the fulfilment of a need, or because it is the actual fulfilling of a need. Something or other which is a necessary factor in all desire, but which (as I shall presently argue) is logically prior to desire, creates the possibility of goodness. The fulfilment, or progressive fulfilling, of this drive, or thrust, or tendency, or need, is the very character that we mean by ‘good’. Were there no such drive towards fulfilment, the distinction between good and bad simply would not exist at all.

So much, but no more, in Professor Field’s view seems to me valid and very important. But he goes beyond this. He does not, of course, assume that this drive or thrust or need, which is the objective ground of the distinction between good and evil, must necessarily be conscious desire. On the contrary he recognizes that it is rarely fully conscious. But he holds that only in so far as it is capable of becoming conscious can it be a source of the distinction between good and evil. Were there no consciousness, he thinks, the essential quality that we mean by ‘good’ would not exist. I suggest that he ought not to say more than that the quality ‘good’ would not exist, were there no ‘drive’ in the objective world. It is true, of course, that were there no consciousness, value-judgment would not exist. And further it is true that, were there no living beings, very many extant good things would not exist. For living things have tendency, or need; and so their extinction would abolish certain possibilities of good and bad. But need, or at least ‘tendency’, the essential element in need, which (rather than desire) is the ground of good and bad — this does not, so far as I can see, involve consciousness.

There is another point on which Professor Field insists, but which, if not actually erroneous, is likely to lead to error. Of the ideal he says, as we have seen, that it is the fact of its relation to ‘our nature’ that makes it good, and that it ‘has a certain character because human nature is of a certain character.’ He supposes that desire rises out of something ‘in our nature.’

What does this ‘in our nature’ really mean? Consider first the case of mere cognition. Clearly, unless we had in our nature some faculty of cognizing, we should not cognize at all. But, for there to be cognition, something else is needed as well as this factor in our nature, namely objects. What we cognize is in no sense dependent on our capacity for cognition, but only on present objects and their relations to past objects that we have experienced. Similarly, then, with conation, unless there were something in our nature to make us capable of conating, we should not conate at all. But, for there to be conation, something else is necessary. Needs must be cognized. Conation (by which I mean always a conscious activity) is inconceivable apart from the cognition of a need; and to say that the needs which we cognize are part of our nature is to beg the question. They are embraced within our nature in being cognized by us and conated by us; but they are not constituted needs by the mere fact that we cognize and conate them. My body may need food whether I desire it or not. It is an object whose nature is to behave in a certain complicated manner; and that manner entails the maintenance of a metabolic equilibrium. Similarly, society may need my service whether or not I recognize the need and will the service. In neither case is the need primarily an element in my nature as a cognizing and conating process.

Bearing in mind our discussion of the use of ‘mental content’ in Idealist ethics, we must realize that a need is only an element in ‘my nature’ in the sense that it is an element in my content. It is not an element in my nature as a subjective activity. Nor is the subjective activity, or process, simply an activity of the content. It is the subjective activity of an organism in relation to its psychological environment, in which environment the physical organism itself is an object over against its own subjective activity. Psychologically content is strictly and solely objective, and distinct from process. To describe our conation of the tendency of objects (including our own bodies) in terms of a ‘subjective tendency to conate objective tendency’ is barren.

When a child is hungry it is cognizing and conating a need of its body. Of course, it does not cognize it as a need to maintain a metabolic equilibrium, nor necessarily even as a need for food. If it is a baby, it may have no idea as to what it needs. Yet being hungry simply is the confused awareness of a bodily need. The essential nature of conation may be best seen in such simple activities as ‘wanting to sneeze’. You do not only sense the irritant stimulus; you are aware also of the organism as tending to behave. And cognition of this tendency is the objective source of the conation. The subjective source is merely the bare, undirected, capacity of conating something or other.

Professor Moore, indeed, is not justified in saying that cognition and conation differ only in respect of the objects  of which they take cognizance. For, after all, there is a difference between cognizing a need and actually desiring its fulfilment. Often the cognition occurs without the desire. But conation does seem to presuppose cognition, however vague a cognition. One cannot, strictly speaking, conate at all without in some sense cognizing the tendency that is conated. This, I suggest, is the element of truth in Professor Moore’s mistaken identification of cognition and conation. Unfortunately, he makes a further error. He ignores that the object of conation is always of a special kind. It is always something cognized (truly or falsely) as pressing in a certain direction, and requiring fulfilment. Often that which is cognized as thus needing is one’s own organism; but often it is something else.

In deriving desire from ‘something in our nature’ Professor Field is clearly right in a sense; but it is a sense ethically misleading, though psychologically important. In that all the needs that I conate are ipso facto made into my needs, it is true that the only good that I can recognize is relative to my nature.

Professor Field, of course, might reply to this account of need somewhat as follows. ‘Can not you see that the concept of need involves consciousness just as inevitably as the concept of desire? The only reason for saying that a man has a need for a thing is the belief that the thing would, as a matter of fact, whether he desires it or not, give him satisfaction. If, having got the thing, he did not after all experience any satisfaction, we should have to admit that after all this was not what he needed. Even on your own showing the fulfilment of a tendency is only good in so far as the tendency and the fulfilment are cognized, or capable of being cognized. Thus it is not fulfilment that is good, even on your theory, but the fulfilment of felt needs.’

Though this account is plausible, I believe it to be mistaken. Any account of ‘good’ in terms of the satisfaction of desire reduces in the last resort to hedonism. For this insistence on consciousness and on satisfaction is essentially an insistence on felt satisfaction. It is implied that the feeling of satisfaction is the essence of ‘good’. Professor Field does not, indeed, explicitly derive ‘good’ from pleasure. Indeed he would probably deny such a derivation. Yet this is the implication of his theory. The important point is that pleasure, or the feeling of satisfaction, is not the ratio essendi of a need; it is only a ratio cognoscendi. At any rate it is just as plausible to say that we are pleased when the fulfilment of a need is cognized, as it is to say that we have a need for a thing when it is a fact that the thing would give us pleasure. Pleasure is essentially ‘feeling satisfied’; and satisfaction pre-supposes some need which is, or seems to be, fulfilled. A need, then, is essentially an unfulfilled tendency of some object within the agent’s mental horizon. That object may be either his own body with its purely physiological needs, or ‘himself’ as a person cognized as one individual among others, or some other person, or a group. And perhaps there are other kinds of active objects which may appeal to his active capacity.

D. ETHICAL COMPROMISE BETWEEN MOORE AND FIELD

THIS PSYCHOLOGICAL ACCOUNT of conation must be greatly expanded in subsequent chapters. But as it stands it is, I suggest, enough to indicate how we may accept and unify the essentials of the ethical views of Professor Moore and Professor Field. Good, we must hold, is relative not to desire but to need. And need turns out to be, not something rooted in our nature as conative subjects, but something rooted in the nature of the objective field which we cognize. By good we mean, in the last resort and essentially, fulfilment of some objective tendency or other. Every such fulfilment, simply as such and in isolation from other events, is a case of intrinsic goodness.

Here Professor Moore might of course point out that, since many things which are needed are not called good, and many things which are called good are not needed, we ought not to identify good with needed. But this only amounts to saying that, in the first place, many things which are needed may, when regarded in a wider context, be seen to conflict with more important needs; while, in the second place, there are many things which would as a matter of fact fulfil needs, though no one recognizes that this is the case.

It is true also that some things which are judged good are not definitely regarded as fulfilling a need. But this only means that, though they are in fact apprehended as fulfilments, it is very difficult to describe just what the need is which they fulfil. Thus a great work of art is judged good, and its goodness consists in a complex of fulfilments; but who can clearly describe the needs that it fulfils? At a later stage I shall discuss aesthetic experience from this point of view.

That quality, then, which in ethical contexts we call ‘goodness’, and in aesthetic contexts we call ‘beauty’, is after all the very same quality as that which, in other contexts we call ‘fulfilment’. This quality itself is unanalysable; and in Professor Moore’s sense it is indefinable. But it is a quality that occurs in certain definable relations in some of which an ethical aspect is easily recognizable, in some of which it is not.

The question may be raised as to whether we are entitled to speak of fulfilment as a quality at all. I think we are, for the following reasons. By ‘fulfilment’ we mean something pertaining to a certain kind of situation, namely that in which some object, tending to act in a certain manner, does so act. It is certainly in virtue of a common character that we call all such situations cases of fulfilment. Now this character we seem to know most intimately in the fulfilment of our own organic tendencies. For instance, in a successful sneeze we have a very definite acquaintance with fulfilment; we cognize a certain unanalysable quality which is the essential quality common to all fulfilment situations. We may say that we have a ‘feeling of release’; but this quality is not merely the quality of a feeling. It is the quality of an objective situation. What we feel is a real release, not a ‘feeling’ which we ‘project’ into the physical body. And this quality, the quality of fulfilment of potency, is identical with that which we encounter in other cases of fulfilment and by other modes of cognition. Whether we know it by acquaintance, as in the sneeze, or by report, it is the same quality. For instance, it is the quality known when we learn of the triumph of any cause which we have embraced, or the victory of any thing or person or society to which we have rendered allegiance. And, being essentially the quality of fulfilment, it must be supposed to occur in every case of fulfilment, whether we recognize it as such or not. Often, however, we ignore it or deny it just because the fulfilment in question conflicts with others to which we are loyal.

But, granted that fulfilment is indeed a quality, we have still to face the criticism that, after all, what is good is not every kind of fulfilment, but only the fulfilment of those tendencies that are cognized and conated as needs. Against this view, which will concern us more closely in the next chapter, we must meanwhile insist that in practice this is not what we mean when we call anything good. We mean neither that the conation of it is good, nor that it is good because, or in that, it is conated. We mean simply that it is good, that it, as Professor Moore would say, has a certain quality. But, when we examine closely the nature of our meaning, we find that the quality called ‘goodness’ is the quality of fulfilment. The good thing is either an isolated case of fulfilment, and therefore of intrinsic goodness, or it is a means to fulfilment. And if, taking all things into account, we deliberately assert that it is good absolutely, or universally, what we mean is that it is itself a member in the ideal, an element in the greatest possible fulfilment of the universe.

CHAPTER 6. TELEOLOGY IN ETHICS

BASED ON AN article, ‘Ethics and Teleological Activity,’ The International Journal of Ethics, April 1928.

A. TWO THEORIES CONTRASTED

THE THEORY THAT good is an indefinable objective quality lies at the opposite pole of ethics from hedonism. All other theories are in a sense intermediate. We have considered two such theories, namely I the idealist system and the theory of Professor Hobhouse. In this chapter I shall discuss a third possible intermediate theory, and shall contrast it with yet another, which is the c theory which I shall finally adopt.

(1) In the former of these two theories it is claimed that, though ‘good’ is meaningless apart from mind, it is not to be derived from mind as feeling, but from mind as striving. Feeling, it is argued, is an abstraction from the concrete fact of the felt success or failure of mind’s conscious striving. Pleasure and pain presuppose activity or tendency to activity. We feel pleased and displeased about the success and failure of the activity on which we are engaged. This is in accord with that ‘hormic’ psychology which finds conation more fundamental than affection. From this position it seems to follow that what we value is primarily not feeling, but the success of our enterprises. And in this view the essence of what we mean by ‘good’ is not the abstraction, pleasure, but the more concrete ‘achievement of willed ends’, of those ends which are indicated by the hormic nature of mind. On the other hand it is insisted that what we value is the success of mind’s enterprises, the success of conscious conations. In this view, as in Professor Hobhouse’s, it is meaningless to call the achievement of a process good unless that achievement is directly or indirectly related to consciousness. But whereas in his theory good derives ultimately from affection, in this theory it derives ultimately from conation.

I shall try to show that this view, though attractive, should give place to the superficially less plausible but actually more satisfactory view which I have already adumbrated, and will now briefly state as follows. (2) What we call ‘good’ is in the last resort the attainment of an end posited in the nature of some teleological process; but it is not essential to the goodness of such attainment that it should be related, either directly or indirectly, to consciousness. In very many cases, of course, consciousness is a constituent of events that we should call good, just because in very many cases the teleological process in question is a process in which consciousness is a factor, or the teleological end is an end in which consciousness is a factor. But essentially what we mean by ‘good’ is the fulfilment of teleological activity, whether or not consciousness plays a part in that activity, and whether or not there is awareness of its fulfilment.

In this view, then, good is entirely independent of consciousness; but on the other hand it is not simply a static character of certain objects in the sense that yellow is a character of certain objects. It presupposes teleological activity on the part of the object, and is essentially and in general the fulfilment of teleological activity. This is the theory which I shall adopt and work out in more detail in subsequent chapters. But finally, in the last two chapters of this book, I shall have to modify it considerably so as to do justice to a certain unique kind of experience which may be called ecstasy.

Whether we should say that in this teleological theory good involves the activity of mind, depends on our definition of mind. If by ‘mind’ we mean just that which is capable of spontaneous teleological activity, then clearly good involves mind. But if by ‘mind’ we mean more than this, if in fact mind necessarily involves awareness of teleological activity, or if it involves conscious conation, then in the theory under discussion good does not necessarily involve mind. For my part I find the use of the words ‘mind’ and ‘mental’ without reference to consciousness very confusing and unnecessary.

Clearly the view which I have been describing demands a discussion of the meaning of ‘teleological’. Can a process be teleological if it is not derived directly or indirectly from conscious purpose? If teleology involves consciousness, clearly a theory which relates good to teleological activity, yet denies that it is related to consciousness, is inconsistent. In this case we should have to revert to the first of our alternative ethical theories. But from this position we should, I think, be driven step by step through Professor Hobhouse’s theory to hedonism. This would not matter if we could stay there. But we should soon be harried thence into the theory that good is an unanalysable objective character. And thence we should once more be driven into the alternatives now under consideration. It is worth while therefore to inquire into the nature of teleology so as to discover whether there is any initial impossibility in our second theory.

B. TELEOLOGICAL ACTIVITY

PROFESSOR BROAD DEFINES teleology by means of a hypothetical reference to design. A system, he says, is teleological ‘provided it acts as if it were designed for a purpose.’ But it still ‘remains a question of fact whether the system was actually the result of a design in someone’s mind.’ Artificial machines do result from design in some mind; but organisms ‘are teleological systems which seem nevertheless to arise without design.’ The machine is a case of ‘external teleology’; the organism is a case of ‘internal teleology’.

How must a system act so as to fulfil the description that ‘it acts as if it were designed for a conscious purpose’? Superficial examination of its form and behaviour, and detailed examination of its minute structure, says Professor Broad, must both suggest conscious purpose such as ‘a rational being might be likely to entertain’. Now this definition is perhaps not very satisfactory, for it entails a purely subjective reference. How are we to say what purposes a rational being is likely to entertain? Perhaps a more objective definition of teleological behaviour may be devised. The sort of activity which we are tempted to call teleological is, in the first place, activity which, in varying circumstances, varies in such a manner as to attain an identical result. (Whether a rational being would approve the result is irrelevant.)

Now self-regulating machines obviously fulfil this requirement; but so also do certain sequences of events in nature. For instance rivers ‘circumvent’ obstacles, and finally reach the sea. Yet this, we say, is not teleological activity. Only if we saw the river jump the obstacles, should we suspect it of acting teleologically. This imaginary case suggests three possible explanations: (a) The jump might be a case of mechanical action according to physical laws unknown to us, and so not in fact teleological at all; (b) The jump might be produced by artificial machinery, acting in accordance with mechanical laws, yet designed by some purposeful mind. This would be externally teleological activity; (c) But, lastly, the jump might be an expression of the teleological nature of the water itself, and therefore a case of internally teleological activity.

It is tempting, then, to define internally teleological activity as activity which varies from the course prescribed by physical laws in such manners that a constant result is attained. But the violation of physical law is not essential to the concept of teleology. Where there is such violation, or where physical laws seem inapplicable, we suspect the presence of teleological activity, provided that there is also a constancy of result. But we need a definition of teleological activity itself, not of our reasons for inferring it. Let us then define it as activity which, whether or not it violates physical law, is as a matter of fact regulated in relation to a future state. In genuine teleological activity, events occur because they will produce or maintain a certain result.

But here let us distinguish between two very different possible kinds of genuine internally teleological activity. (1) Let us call the first kind ‘direct’ teleological activity, and define it as activity which, whether or not it violates physical laws, varies in varying circumstances in such manners that a certain state is either attained immediately or maintained all along. For instance, it is conceivable that organisms sometimes preserve their organization even when, by the operation of mere physical laws, they should disintegrate. (2) On the other hand, ‘indirect’ teleological activity may be defined as activity which is capable, not merely of violating physical laws, but also of foregoing an immediate partial attainment of its own regulative end for the sake of a more complete attainment at a later stage. Conscious purposeful activity is obviously of this kind; but we have no right to assume that consciousness is essential even in this case. It is not wholly inconceivable that this sort of unconscious teleology has contributed to biological evolution. These two possible kinds of activity are very different, and the former is far more intelligible than the latter. But for our purposes both may be included in the concept of internal teleology.

Now there may be in the world no such activity. On the other hand many persons suspect very strongly that the activity of living organisms is partly of this kind. Some would account for it in terms of an ‘entelechy’ or vital principle interfering with the course of mechanical events. Others would say that at the level of organization which characterizes living things this new way of behaving ‘emerges’. For my part I much prefer the latter view; but this is not the place to discuss emergence. Here I am only concerned to urge that activity of this kind, defined as teleological, does not necessarily involve any reference (direct or indirect) to consciousness, that it no more involves consciousness than the concept of physical mechanism does. We have become so familiar with the concept of physical mechanism (as Professor Whitehead has pointed out), that we often regard it as self-evident that things must interact according to the laws of physical mechanism; and when we suspect that things are not acting purely mechanically, we feel impelled to introduce conscious purpose to ‘explain’ their irregularity. We do not, however, think it necessary to say that atoms and electrons move as they do because they consciously want to get away from their preceding unpleasant conditions. We merely record the fact that they do act in certain manners, and that their actions can be adequately described only by reference to preceding conditions. Similarly, then, with teleological activity we are not compelled to suppose that an internally teleological system behaves as it does because some mind has conceived a conscious purpose with regard to it. We must merely record the fact that such an entity behaves (in certain respects) in such manners that certain results will be attained. We have to take into account, in describing its behaviour, not merely physical laws, but also certain teleological laws.

This point may be illustrated by an analogy. In Newtonian physics it was assumed that bodies left to themselves would continue in uniform motion in a straight line. Gravitating bodies do not do so; therefore it was necessary to postulate a ‘force’ of gravitation pulling them from the straight course. In Einstein’s theory of gravitation, however, no force is needed. In a gravitational field a moving body follows a geodesic, i.e. the shortest possible course in space-time; but in the neighbourhood of matter geodesics are different from geodesics remote from matter. Similarly then with teleology. If we assume that matter ‘left to itself’ must always act mechanically, we must postulate some special extraneous ‘force’, in this case a hidden consciousness, to account for cases in which it observably acts teleologically. But apart from the initial assumption of pure mechanism there is no need to postulate consciousness to account for teleological behaviour. Rather we should simply say that, in certain configurations or organizations, matter assumes new ways of acting, namely teleological ways. Metaphorically we might say that the geodesic is different where matter attains certain kinds of organization. Of course this is not to deny that, where consciousness observably does occur, it may influence the course of activity.

Some perhaps would hold that any activity which is not necessarily guided by conscious purpose should be called mechanical, and that teleological activity, in the sense defined above, is merely a species of mechanical activity, in which, in some inexplicable manner, a future possibility is causally efficient. We need not here discuss the use of the words ‘mechanical’ and ‘mechanism’. Certainly, if that is mechanical which happens automatically without the intervention of the conscious act of volition, teleological activity, as defined, is mechanical. We may remind ourselves that Professor Whitehead has used the phrase ‘organic mechanism’ to name his own version of emergence. In his view, it will be remembered, the organism’s behaviour is an automatic expression of its nature, yet the laws of its behaviour cannot be stated in terms of ‘physical’ mechanism. In organisms, perhaps, ‘the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.’ This suggestive and important phrase, ‘organic mechanism’, emphasizes the fact that the concept of mechanism need not necessarily exclude internal teleology, any more than it excludes the external teleology of an artificial machine.

Before returning to the discussion of our two types of ethical theory we may note one other point with regard to teleological activity. A full discussion of the relation of teleological activity to physical mechanical activity might lead to anyone of three conclusions. (a) The defined difference between the two might continue to appear a fundamental difference. In this case good, according to my proposed ethical theory, would involve a particular kind of activity, namely teleological activity, and not the other, On the other hand, (b) full observation and discussion might enable us apparently to ‘reduce’ non-conscious teleological activity to the laws of physical mechanical activity. In this case we should have to say that some goods observably consist in the fulfilment of a particular kind of physical mechanical activity, namely that which is performed by organisms. And since in this case there would be no essential difference between the fulfilment of organic and other physical mechanical activity, we should have to say that good is essentially the fulfilment not of teleological activity but of any activity. But finally, (c) we might perhaps find in obviously teleological activity a key to the hidden nature of all activity, concluding that even physical mechanical activity was at heart teleological, in that it was determined by attraction toward an immediate end, not by impulsion from an immediate ‘cause’; and, indeed, that the very concept of activity necessarily involved teleology. Such a conclusion would not justify a panpsychic view of physical nature, but it would force us once more to hold (within the terms of the ethical theory which I am advocating), that every kind of ‘fulfilment of activity’, or of tendency to activity, is in its degree good. This view would have been necessitated by our inquiry into the essential meaning of the word ‘good’, together with our inquiry into the essential nature of activity. This matter may be summarized by saying that if teleological activity and physical mechanical activity are essentially different, good is grounded in teleological activity alone, but if the distinction between teleological and physical mechanical activity is not ultimate, good is grounded simply in activity.

C. TELEOLOGY AND CONATION

IF THE FOREGOING theory of teleology is correct, we may somewhat amplify our earlier accounts of conation as follows. The presupposition of every act of conation, whether ‘blind’ impulse or desire or fully self-conscious will, is a teleological activity or tendency distinct from the conative act itself. At the lowest level the activity is purely physiological; the impulse, in so far as it is mental at all, is an acceptance of, or active espousal of, some activity of the body itself. Desire may set as its goal the realization of some such purely physical teleological activity of the body. At higher levels the teleological activity may be psychical. The goal of desire, or of considered will, may be the fulfilment of some psychical capacity. But in this case, no less than in the others, the activity of tendency whose fulfilment is desired or willed is strictly objective to, and logically prior to, the mental act of willing its fulfilment. For there to be any conscious conation at all there must be awareness of a hormic drive or tendency, awareness vague or precise, true or erroneous. For there to be not merely ‘blind’ impulse but explicit desire or will, there must be prevision, true or false, of the supposed goal of the activity — prevision sometimes merely of an immediate goal, at other times of a goal more remote. I shall discuss in more detail later the whole problem of tendency to psychical activity. Meanwhile it is enough to point out that in desiring, for instance, intellectual activity we cognize our nature as entailing that activity for its free functioning. Paradoxical as it may sound, the desire for a mental activity involves cognition of a certain condition of the organism, namely an objective tendency to perform a certain kind of subjective activity. Every conative act, then, consists in the acceptance or espousal of some cognized hormic activity or tendency; every case of feeling (pleasant or unpleasant) is consequent on the cognized success or failure of espoused hormic tendency.

We may conclude this psychological description by saying that: we feel because we ‘espouse a cause’; we espouse the cause because we cognize it as a ‘cause’, i.e. as a teleological process of something within our ken; and finally we cognize the teleological process as a teleological process because (apart from errors of cognition) it really is so.

If it be asked how we come to espouse some teleological processes and not others, the answer in brief must be that we espouse more readily those teleological processes which are more in harmony with the established nature of the organism, and that, when there’s conflict between the less and the more familiar, we all too often accept the latter, even when objectively they are minor processes. The precise implications of this obvious fact call for very careful discussion at a later stage. Meanwhile we have only to note that conation does as a matter of fact tend to lag behind the advance of cognition. If conation were simply the activity of mental context, this fact would be wholly unintelligible. But I have argued that this is not the case. Conation is the psychical activity of the organism; and the momentum, so to speak, of the organism’s innate and acquired ‘behaviour-set’ complicates the situation. We have habits and inherited behaviour-tendencies of acting in relation to the familiar, central, and objectively minor, teleological processes, such as those of our own body, even at the expense of others which we have come to cognize as objectively major. But even these various automatic behaviour-tendencies are themselves derived in the last resort from cognition of teleological processes. The whole moral progress of the race seems to consist in the advance from this ‘automatism’ by which we espouse the familiar and minor processes even when we know them to be minor and to be in conflict with major processes. And this advance is apparently due to the exercise of the unique mental fiat or integrative ‘act of will’ which, after a value-judgment has been made, can, for the sake of an espoused cause, transcend the automatism that would otherwise come into action.

With regard to the objectivity of teleological tendencies, the following objection might be raised. It might be admitted that in human and animal psychology every conscious act of conation involves a teleological tendency objective to the act itself; but, it might be argued, such teleological tendencies themselves presuppose conscious conation in the mind of God. We, in fact, are teleological solely by virtue of God’s purpose; for, it might be insisted, teleological activity is inconceivable apart from conscious purpose in some mind. Thus teleological activity in the animal and vegetable kingdoms becomes evidence for theism.

To this argument we must reply as follows. The premiss is: That teleological activity is inconceivable apart from conscious conation. But we have seen that in human and animal psychology conscious conation itself presupposes objective teleological activity. We have then no reason to assume that in divine psychology the situation is reversed. If there is a God with conscious purposes, these divine acts of conation themselves presuppose teleological activity on the part of an active substance objective to the divine acts of conation.

The same argument may be used against McDougall’s animism. For him, our conscious conation involves prior teleological tendencies outside our consciousness, but these tendencies inhere in something psychical, though beyond our consciousness. The only reason for asserting that this something is psychical is that it is teleological. But if we once grant that in us teleological activity is prior to our consciousness, we have no right to assume that it is ever essentially dependent on consciousness.

D. ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TELEOLOGY

I WILL NOW try to state the implications of our two alternative ethical theories in terms of the foregoing account of conation.

The first theory claims to state the facts of ethical experience in such a way that good appears as necessarily related to consciousness, yet as more fundamental than, and not dependent on, feeling. It asserts that pleasure, though a criterion of goodness, is not itself an essential constituent of everything that is intrinsically good. What is essential to the intrinsic goodness of anything is, according to the theory, that it should consist in the achievement of mind’s conscious activity.

In relation to the view of conation stated above the first theory may therefore be described as follows, For value to emerge, it is not sufficient that there should be teleological activity. That activity must also be consciously willed. Thus, to use a phrase of Professor G. E. Moore’s, in this theory anything that is intrinsically good must be an ‘organic whole’ consisting of (a) a teleological process, (b) conscious espousal of that process, and (c)

consciousness of the fulfilment of the process. No one of these factors is good by itself; for goodness is a characteristic of wholes composed of all these three elements. It might be questioned whether consciousness of the fulfilment of mental activity is essential to goodness. The reason for including it is that fulfilment of activity that is mental seems to entail consciousness of the fulfilment. Here I think we come upon a real inconsistency in the theory. For in insisting that the activity that is the ground of goodness must be mental activity, and that good is relative to consciousness, the theory does seem to imply that consciousness of fulfilment is essential to goodness. But consciousness of fulfilment is a case of cognition, and is in fact a value-judgment which asserts a value, but does not create it. Thus insistence or consciousness of fulfilment seems to result in hedonism.

In the second theory, on the other hand, it is claimed that the possibility of value emerges wherever there is a teleological process, whether or not there is conscious espousal of the process; and that, whether or not there is awareness of the fulfilment of the process, the fulfilment itself is essentially the sort of thing that we mean by ‘good ‘.

Now the difference between the theories might be regarded as merely a verbal difference, arising out of the ambiguity of the word ‘good’. I have already had occasion to note this fundamental ambiguity, but the matter is so very important that we may profitably inquire into it somewhat more minutely in the present connexion. There is no doubt that we do as a matter of fact often use the word’ good’ in each of the senses implied in the theories under discussion, and of course in other senses also. Sometimes people say that to be thrown upon his own resources would be ‘good’ for a certain boy whether he wills it or not. In saying this they sometimes mean merely that the boy would get more pleasure out of life in the long run if he learned to stand by himself. With this use we are not concerned, for in both theories it is held that pleasure is not constitutive of goodness. In both theories feeling is regarded as consequent on a value-judgment; and in both it is held that a value-judgment cannot itself be constitutive of the value which it values.

Sometimes, however, people mean (by such a statement as we are considering) something in accord with the first theory, namely that the boy would attain in the long run consciousness of fulfilment of more complex and diverse willed-teleological-activities. He would in fact become a richer, more developed, personality — and consciously so. Thus it is insisted that his being thrown out into the world is only to be justified in the last resort by his consciousness of rich and successful willed activity. (Of course it may be meant sometimes that he may become a more useful member of society, whatever happens within his own consciousness. But it is still assumed that consciousness is the essential ground of goodness, though in this case the consciousness of others.)

Sometimes, however, what is meant (by such a statement as we are considering) is something more in accord with the second theory. The boy is regarded as a being having certain capacities of development, and as in fact tending to develop teleologically into a more complex being. And it is held that, just because he is of this nature, it is good that he should fulfil his potentiality. It is good, whether he ever, in all his life, consciously wills to do so or not. In fact, for advocates of this view the goodness of his development is not relative to his consciousness at all, but relative to his hormic nature. If, per impossibile, he were to attain a high degree of development, yet always consciously to will to have remained in his childish state of undevelopment, yet his development would be intrinsically good. We may indeed imagine the case of a man who at the end of his life should look back on his career and say, ‘I have known much, and I have done much. Few could have lived with the intensity and breadth that I have achieved. Yet I have ever longed to be quit of it all. For the only blessed state is the insensitivity and passivity of a stone.’ Of such a case some would maintain that, apart altogether from any service which he might have rendered to his fellows, and also in spite of his own perverse will, this man’s life would have been intrinsically good. And further it would be maintained that this would be so, not essentially because his life consisted in rich activity of a conscious kind, but just because it consisted in a high degree of fulfilment of his nature’s capacity. From this view it would follow that in the case of plants, even if they have no consciousness whatever, their free development would be an intrinsic good, just because it constituted the fulfilment of a teleological nature. The fulfilment of merely mechanical processes, however, would not, in this view, be good, unless indeed it were to be found either that mechanical activity itself ultimately involved teleology, or that teleological activity were reducible to mechanical activity.

Clearly the difference between these views about the boy might be regarded as merely verbal; and indeed the two ethical theories under discussion seem but to reflect the two common and incompatible uses of the word ‘good ‘. For in our daily thoughts we do, as a matter of fact, often regard good as both relative to consciousness and yet as independent of consciousness. That we often regard good as relative to pleasure or to the felt achievement of purpose is obvious. Perhaps less obvious to-day, but no less common, is the assumption that certain kinds of conduct are intrinsically good quite apart from anyone’s will, even apart from God’s will. Now so long as we are aware of the various factors of the value situation, it does not perhaps greatly matter which of them we dignify with the word ‘good’. On the other hand perhaps one usage of the word is more significant and more coherent than the other, and should alone be accepted in philosophy.

As I have already said, I believe this to be the case, and that this most significant meaning of the word ‘good’ is that which is involved in our second theory, for the following reasons. It is generally agreed to call ‘good’ that state of affairs which ought to be. Within any limited sphere, or universe of discourse, to say that anything is ‘good’ implies always that it ought to be. This means essentially that, apart altogether from anyone’s desire for it, the thing is in some sense needed for the fulfilment of the capacities of the sphere itself, whether that sphere be a limited region of existence or the universe. Now the concept of ‘need’ seems to imply a teleological activity working toward some end. But it does not, so far as I can see, imply consciousness of that activity or conscious espousal of that activity. An upholder of the ‘mental activity theory’ would of course object that the word ‘need’ and the phrase ‘ought to be’ can only be used significantly in reference to the conscious will of some one or other, in fact that what is good must be good for some one, for some conscious mind, and that good is a character of organic wholes in which consciousness is a member. But this view seems arbitrary if once we admit that, for conscious conation to occur at all, there must be some objective teleological tendency; in fact that what we desire is, neither states of pleasure nor states of fulfilled will, but the. fulfilment of objective activities.

The intuitive apprehension that a certain state of affairs ‘ought to be’ is crucial for the understanding of what we really mean by ‘good’ when we are using the word seriously. To say that a thing ought to be is to imply (a)that there is a need for it, and (b) that there is no objectively greater need in conflict with it. The apprehension that a thing ought to be may fittingly be described as an apprehension that the thing is needed, within the sphere under consideration, whether that sphere be a limited universe of discourse such as the needs of one’s own body, or whether it be the needs of the universe as a whole.

In the sphere of moral desire it is fairly easy to see that the moral choice is determined by the intrinsic needs of the moral situation itself. But in this sphere, though choice is seen to be determined by something objective to the moral agent, we are apt too to suppose that this objective determinant, though independent of our own consciousness, is essentially relative to the conscious will of other individuals or of God, and that apart from this there would be no obligation. On the other hand in a more humble sphere, namely the desire for the fulfilment of one’s own bodily processes, it is clear (according to the principles of a hormic psychology) that the relative desirability of the end is derived not from consciousness at all, but from something more fundamental, namely the teleological nature of the organism. But in this sphere it is less easy to see that this determination of conscious desire is just as strictly objective as in the case of moral choice. We are aware of the body’s needs as in fact needs of one object (the central object) within our mental content, and therefore we desire their fulfilment.

The truth is that in each sphere we intuitively apprehend that a certain end is claimed, that (within the particular sphere) this end ought to be achieved. And upon the ground of this cognitive judgment we may proceed to desire, or will, the end. Many no doubt would deride the notion that the desire for food or sexual activity is essentially moral in the sense that it is objectively determined. But a strict discrimination between the subjective mental activity and the psychologically objective environment, which includes the body, forces us to this conclusion. Why should I will my body’s free activity rather than the reverse? To say that something in my nature as a psychical subject makes me do so is no real answer. The fact is simply that I intuitively apprehend the teleological tendency of my body, and intuitively apprehend its free activity as good, as being, at least within a limited universe of discourse, that which ought to be desired.

E. SUMMARY

ASSUMING ON THE one hand that good is not dependent on feeling, and on the other that it is not simply an unique character of certain objects, I have been led to consider, and reject, the theory that by ‘good’ we mean the fulfilment of mental activity. I have also tried to show that essentially what we mean by good is the fulfilment or progressive fulfilling of the activities of teleologically active substances. This view is suggested both by our intuitive experience of moral obligation as objective, and by a psychological theory in which conscious conation presupposes teleological tendencies objective to the act of conation.

CHAPTER 7. TENDENCY IN PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY

A. THE MEANING OF TENDENCY

IT IS CLEAR that the ethical theory which I have tentatively favoured in the preceding chapter demands a much fuller account of the nature of tendency than I have yet attempted. I shall therefore at this stage desert ethics for a while in order to discuss tendency in the physical, biological, and psychological spheres.

In this discussion two distinct points must be borne in mind, We must inquire more minutely whether there is any truth in the theory that conscious teleological behaviour involves prior unconscious teleological tendency. And further, if this is so, we must inquire whether, in order that unconscious teleological tendency may give rise to conscious striving, there must be cognition of the tendency as objective, or whether the unconscious tendency causes conation independently of cognition by simply occurring in consciousness as a conative act. But first let us consider the nature of tendency in general. A tendency is not an occult power residing in a thing and ‘forcing’ it to act in a particular manner. When we say that a thing tends to act in a certain manner, we mean usually no more than that it would act in that manner if it were not being prevented. From observation of many things of this kind we have induced that they do, as a matter of fact, always act in such a manner unless something hinders them; and therefore we conclude that this thing would so act if it could. One state of activity in the thing, or in the thing and its environment, issues in another state of activity, unless there are complicating circumstances. Thus to say that anything has a certain tendency is, in the first instance, merely to state a descriptive law of its behaviour, not to explain why it behaves. On the other hand, behaviour is in a sense partially explained if it can be shown to be the kind of behaviour that one might expect as the compromise of two or more known tendencies which are applicable to the particular situation, but discrepant with one another.

The tendencies of a thing are objective facts which we may discover; they are not mere conventions or matters of opinion. It is a fact that stones tend to fall, and that certain animals tend to reproduce their kind. Of course, we may make erroneous judgments about tendencies. We may mistakenly judge that a thing has tendencies which it has not, or that it has not tendencies which it has. Or a tendency about which we make judgments may turn out to be a very different kind of tendency from what we thought it to be.

Tendencies, then, are objective facts about things; and the sum of the tendencies of an existent may be said to constitute the nature of that existent. Or perhaps we should rather say that the tendencies of an existent are aspects of, or expressions of, its nature, which is itself unique, and not itself a sum of tendencies.

What kind of being can a tendency have while it is not active? Evidently its being is in some sense merely potential. A thing which tends to behave in a certain way, and is not so behaving, is a thing which would so behave were it not prevented. In the case of a stone supported on a table there may be said to be an inhibited tendency to fall; and this tendency may be said to express itself indirectly in changes in the structure of the stone and the table. But these changes do not themselves constitute the tendency to fall; they are merely a result of it. We need not here discuss the distinction in the physical sphere between kinetic and potential energy, beyond noting that the potential energy of a body is perhaps a hidden form of kinetic energy, which might issue in another, observable, form of kinetic energy were there not some resistant factor. Though the hidden kinetic energy does not itself constitute the tendency to issue overtly in another form, we may say that a tendency to issue overtly does inhere in the hidden kinetic energy. In fact it would issue if it were not prevented.

Perhaps, then, there is, after all, something more in the concept of ‘tendency’ than in the concept of merely descriptive law. To say that a thing would do so and so, if it were not prevented, does very often imply that while it is prevented it is actively tending, thrusting, straining, toward the ‘repressed’ activity. There is, indeed, no implication of conscious striving. But clearly in practice we often mean by tendency something which, though not necessarily conscious, is conceived at least in terms of the experience of physical resistance to our volition. To say that a thing tends to do so and so, then, is to mean, not merely that certain events would occur, were it not for certain other events, but further that the thing is a dynamic thing, that its nature is to act freely in this way, and that while it is prevented it is in a state of tension.

Possibly physical science ought to avoid this obviously anthropomorphic concept of effort, and should mean by a tendency only a descriptive law. For physical tendencies are known only through their issue in overt activity of some sort; so that a tendency is simply an account of the possibility of action. But in psychology, and therefore in biology, which should not fear the help of psychology in this respect, we should frankly admit that the concept of tendency does involve tension. We should mean by a tendency a particular factor in the active nature of a thing, in virtue of which its behaviour is such as to be capable of generalization under a certain law; and in virtue of which, when such behaviour is impossible, the thing remains in a state of tension, directed, though vainly, toward such behaviour.

Let us, however, for the moment leave this matter and briefly consider the relation between tendency and environment. There are two ways of using the word ‘tendency’. Either we may say (a) that an isolated stone has inherently, a tendency to fall, or we may say (b) that, while an isolated stone has in itself alone no tendency to fall, ‘a stone near a planet’ has such a tendency; or, better, that in the complex ‘stone-near-planet’ there arises a tendency for the two members to approach each other. If we adopt the first sense we fall into difficulties. For, applying the principle consistently, we must say that an isolated stone has tendencies to behave in every manner of which a stone is capable in all conceivable situations. Thus it has a tendency ‘to choke a man who attempts to swallow it’, and a tendency ‘to disappoint a man who mistakes it for a mushroom’. But these complicated activities are not in any important sense the outcome of special tendencies in isolated stones. They are the outcome of total situations composed of a stone and a man in a certain mood. Every situation, every complex of existents, gives rise to some activity or other, or issues in a new kind of situation. But if the original situation is further complicated by some conflicting factor, the activity will be different. Yet the original situation may be said to have a tendency to act in the manner in which it would act in isolation. On the other hand, it cannot reasonably be said to have a tendency to act in manners in which it cannot act without the co-operation of an additional factor. We may significantly use the word ‘capacity’ to describe those situations in which, though the thing (whatever it be) has no intrinsic tendency to act in a certain manner. it would so act with the co-operation of certain other factors. Thus, though stones do not tend to choke men, they have the capacity of choking men when they interact in a certain manner with the human body.

The isolated stone, then, has no inhibited or repressed tendency to choke a man or to fall. But in the complex ‘stone-near-planet’ there is a tendency for the two members to approach, even when the tendency is resisted by an intervening table. On the other hand a bomb which is already timed to explode may be said to have a tendency to explode, even though it should be the only thing in the universe. If it were in the centre of the earth and therefore under immense pressure, it would still have a tendency to explode, but a tendency repressed by another factor. But we should not say that a bomb has, in its own nature, a tendency to perform acts more complicated than simple explosion. It has, for instance, no tendency to kill a certain despot, or change the course of history, though, indeed, it has the capacity of doing so in co-operation with a certain kind of environment. We can allow only that a thing has tendencies toward those activities which it can perform of its own nature, without the co-operation of an environment.

B. BIOLOGICAL TENDENCIES

UNFORTUNATELY, HOWEVER, COMMON usage is opposed to this principle, and there is good reason in its favour. We say that a bird has a tendency to build a nest, and that a man has in his own nature a tendency to eat. Clearly both these activities involve an environment, though in somewhat different manners. In general when we say that an organism has a tendency to behave in a certain manner, we mean that it responds to a certain kind of stimulus (external or internal to the organism) with a certain kind of activity which is possible only in a certain kind of environment. Sex tendencies involve for their normal functioning a partner, and social tendencies involve society. This usage certainly conflicts with our conclusions about the tendencies of the isolated stone. Should we insist that these so-called tendencies of organisms are in truth only capacities? Or is there something peculiar to the nature of organisms which justifies us in supposing that they themselves have tendencies whose functioning demands an environment?

There surely is good reason for saying that an organism’s own nature involves an environment while a stone’s does not. Our observation of organisms suggests that their behaviour is regulated in relation to certain ends, such as the preservation and perpetuation of the race. For each species there seems to be a certain normal way of life which involves a certain normal environment. In order to make this point clear let us briefly consider the case of sexual perversion in pigeons. Males kept in isolation from females have shown homosexual behaviour; and an individual kept in complete solitude has satisfied its sexual impulses on the human hand. In what sense can we say that pigeons have a ‘tendency’ toward normal sexual intercourse and that the abnormal behaviours are ‘perversions’? If we apply to the pigeon the same principles as we applied to the stone, we must deny that the pigeon itself has any sex tendencies, normal or abnormal. Tendencies emerge from the conjunction of the pigeon and an environment. One kind of environment creates one tendency, and others create other tendencies. Thus normal and abnormal behaviour are set on an equal footing.

But if we take into account all the facts of the behaviour of pigeons, and of organisms in general, we cannot but suspect that, in some important sense, the normal behaviour is not only average, but ‘natural’, and that the abnormal behaviour is ‘unnatural’. We should justify this suspicion by saying that teleological explanations are irresistibly suggested by the behaviour of organisms, and that, in the case of the pigeon, the normal sexual behaviour serves the biological end of procreation, while the perversions serve no end at all. Thus it seems that the pigeon is such that it, of its own intrinsic nature, tends to behave in the normal sexual manner, although it cannot so behave without an appropriate environment. Its body, considered as a teleologically active substance, needs, for the fulfilment of its own intrinsic nature, a certain kind of environment.

Thus the organism’s capacity to reproduce its kind is, after all, not on the same footing as the stone’s capacity to choke a man or disappoint him, although in both cases an environment is necessary for the fulfilment of the capacity. The difference between the two cases lies in the fact that, while no teleological concept is implied in the behaviour of the stone, the behaviour of the organism cannot be even described coherently without teleological concepts. An artificial self-regulating machine, similarly, such as an automatically balancing aeroplane, cannot be coherently described without teleological concepts. In each case there is a complicated form and complicated functioning which is regulated in relation to an end, and is quite incomprehensible if the end is left out of account. Consequently, we are justified in saying that both organism and artificial machine do intrinsically ‘tend’ to fulfil certain ends, even though they cannot function without an appropriate environment.

Thus with regard to machines, we must alter our conclusion about the isolated bomb. For, since it would never have been what it is, had not a destructive purpose taken part in its making, clearly there is a sense in which, even in isolation it does ‘tend’ to destroy life, even if we are not justified in attributing to it a more specific tendency to kill the Czar of Russia or the British Prime Minister. Its nature is definitely regulated in relation to the end of destroying life.

We do not thus imply that, in the case of the machine, there is some mysterious ‘entelechy’ which, interrupting the mechanical behaviour of the parts, directs the whole to a teleological end. We merely observe that the machine, in functioning mechanically, functions also teleologically. Its mechanical parts are so disposed as to function teleologically. Similarly with the organism, in asserting it to have teleological tendencies we do no more than record an observable fact.

It may be that the teleological tendencies of organisms simply arise from a certain configuration of entities which, in other configurations, are manifested only as physical. It may be that, as Dr. Broad puts it, while artificial machines are externally teleological, organisms are in fact (as they certainly appear) internally teleological. Certainly it is very important to insist that while the teleological tendency of the machine is an expression of something more than its own physical nature, and this ‘more’ originates beyond the geometrical confines of the machine itself, in the case of organisms on the other hand the teleology certainly appears to be internal. Anyhow, even if we should, with Rignano, derive all biological tendencies from the tendency of the organism to maintain itself in physiological equilibrium, it remains true that, however they are produced, biological tendencies are, as a matter of fact, teleological, whether externally or internally.

Here, however, an important point arises. In the previous chapter we distinguished between physical and teleological activities, by pointing out that, while teleological activity observably involves reference to an end, physical activity does not. Teleological activity, we said, cannot be accounted for simply by reference to the preceding physical state; physical mechanical activity can. It is only because of this reference to a more or less remote future that teleological activity is opposed to physical mechanical activity. The biologist inevitably describes the bird’s straw-gathering and weaving in relation to the end of building a nest, and this in turn in relation to the end of parenthood. Now in some teleological activity the end is more remote and in some less. When great engineering or building projects are undertaken, the end is very remote, and a vast amount of intervening behaviour is explained with reference to this end. But in a sneeze the end is almost immediate. Explanation in terms of the immediately preceding state is more plausible in the latter case than in the former. The end is more obviously regulative in the former than in the latter. But if our theory of teleological activity is correct, there is a regulative end in each case, though in one case the activity obviously varies from time to time according to the exigencies of the situation, while in the other it is stereotyped. In fact, though up to a point it is mechanized, it is mechanized; in service of a certain biological end.

Physical activity is even more stereotyped, and consequently appears even less obviously teleological. But let us remind ourselves that it is as easy to describe the physical activity of electrons and protons, and of atoms, in terms of the immediately succeeding state, or ‘end’, as in terms of the immediately preceding state or ‘cause’. It is no more significant to say that the movement of an electron results from a mechanical impulsion than to say that in a given state it acts teleologically with reference to an immediate end. The distinction between teleological and mechanical activity is thus not absolute. All physical laws might be stated as low-grade teleological laws of the behaviour of very simple entities.

This mere statement of the facts, however, in which gross physical activity is stated in terms of ‘microscopic’ teleological activity, is not to be confused with the theory according to which the whole physical activity of the universe is the activity of a vast teleological machine whose end is so remote and ‘macroscopic’ as to be wholly beyond our detection.

C. REDUCIBLE AND EMERGENT TENDENCIES

TENDENCIES MAY BE classified as reducible and emergent. In every subject-matter of study we must discover the laws of the behaviour of the elements by observation of the elements themselves in relation. Having thus induced the principles which hold good in all observable cases, we may be able to deduce the behaviour of other, unobserved, systems. Thus by observation of mechanical systems we induce mechanical laws, and can predict the behaviour of other mechanical systems. Mechanical tendencies, then, are tendencies of elements within a mechanical system. And the behaviour of any such system can be deduced from observation of the behaviour of the same kinds of parts in other mechanical relations.

But there are wholes of which it is not possible, even in theory, to describe events simply in mechanical terms. We have accepted the view that in a living organism vital behaviour cannot even in theory be completely reduced to the purely mechanical tendencies of its atoms. It is for instance impossible in practice to describe the behaviour of organisms without using the principle of teleology; and this cannot have a place in pure mechanics. For though the laws of mechanics and of chemistry may be used by a purposeful being for the construction of a teleological system, they cannot themselves fully account for genuinely teleological behaviour, whether in an organism or in an artificial machine. This remains true even if the behaviour of electrons and protons be conceived as teleological behaviour toward an immediately succeeding end. For such ‘microscopic’ teleological behaviour obviously has no relation to the relatively ‘macroscopic’ ends of biological organisms.

It is, of course, possible that all the apparently teleological behaviour of living things could, if we knew more, be fully described in terms of the mechanistic physical sciences. Bearing in mind the vast periods of geological time, we should hesitate to deny the possibility that, by a unique but fortuitous concurrence of physical units, there may have been produced a system which, through purely chemical activity, necessarily maintained itself in equilibrium, and even proliferated into further systems. Such a system would be a sufficient starting point for biology; and natural selection might conceivably account for the whole of subsequent evolution. But though such an explanation is not wholly improbable, and may turn out to be the true one, to-day it is certainly no more plausible than the explanation in terms of genuine teleology. And though one extremely important factor in evolution has certainly been the mechanical impact of the environment on living things, a dispassionate study of biology does to-day strongly suggest that the organic itself, upon which the environment operates, is irreducibly teleological. In view of the countless delicate adaptations of life, and more particularly in view of the fact that the fundamental energy transformation of life seems very different from anything that normally occurs in the inorganic, the faith in a rigid mechanism which cannot be demonstrated appears farcical.

Moreover, the validity of teleological activity in nature seems to be confirmed by the fact that in our own consciousness genuine teleology does occur (namely, as conscious striving), together with the fact that conscious striving presupposes some teleological activity independent of consciousness — if the hormic principle is true. Thus the fact that we consciously seek food and shun danger shows that teleology is a genuine factor in our nature, and the hormic principle suggests that this teleological factor is more fundamental than consciousness.

I shall, then, assume that organisms are in part irreducibly teleological, and further that some of their teleological processes give rise to conscious conations, sometimes as ‘blind’ impulse, sometimes as explicit desire.

In certain kinds of material systems, then, here ‘emerge’ behaviour-tendencies which are not exhibited by the same kinds of parts when they occur in other relations. These tendencies are, in fact, tendencies of wholes, and not tendencies of parts in conflict.

There is, of course, no need to deny that the emergent tendency of the whole is determined by the nature of the parts in the special relation which constitutes the whole. It is merely denied that the tendencies of the whole can be logically deduced from the nature of the parts in isolation.

There is no need to ask here what tendencies are, as a matter of fact, strictly and logically emergent in the nature of wholes and what are theoretically reducible, although we in our ignorance cannot reduce them. Here I will only point out a consequence of this difference in the nature of tendencies. In the case of reducible tendencies the maximum possible fulfilment is the fulfilment of all the tendencies of the parts in isolation. But emergent tendencies, on the other hand, demand new kinds of fulfilment not demanded by the isolated nature of the parts. Thus in a whole in which there are both reducible and emergent tendencies there is in principle a possibility of greater fulfilment than in a whole in which the same reducible tendencies occur without any emergent tendencies.

This conclusion, however, needs qualification. It is possible that the necessary condition for the emergence of emergent tendencies in a system of a given kind might be a state of tension between the parts, such that few, if any, of the isolated tendencies were fulfilled. It is, in fact, possible that the emergent tendencies of the whole might emerge only from the conflict and tension of the parts. We should not, then, be able to say that in such a whole the emergence of tendencies made possible a greater amount of fulfilment, for there would be no means of balancing the fulfilment of emergent tendencies against the resistance of the tendencies of the parts. The tendencies of the whole and those of the parts would be incommensurable.

On the other hand, we should be justified in saying that, in this imaginary case, that which is fulfilled is something more complex than that which is not fulfilled; for the emergent tendencies occur only in the systematic whole, while the tendencies of the parts are characteristics of simpler entities.

Moreover, there is perhaps a sense in which the emergent fulfilment is, after all, a greater fulfilment of the parts themselves than would be any fulfilment of their isolated tendencies. For though the emergent tendencies cannot be reduced to a complex of the tendencies of the parts in isolation, they are determined by the nature of the parts themselves, united in the relation which constitutes them a whole. By coming together to form the whole, the parts have, so to speak, assumed a new nature, namely, the nature of the whole. For the whole is not something distinct from its parts; it is simply the parts themselves in relation. Consequently, the tendencies emergent in the whole are, in an important sense, tendencies of the parts, though not of the parts in isolation. Thus the emergent fulfilment of any part in the whole is the fulfilment of a more complex entity than the fulfilment of the, same part in isolation could possibly be. Having assumed a more complex nature, it attains a more complex fulfilment.

The theory of emergence may be expressed in either of two ways. We may suppose, on the one hand, that the special relation which constitutes the whole ‘evokes’ properties of the parts which are ‘latent’ and unobservable in the isolated element. Some, indeed, would claim that such an account denies the essential idea of emergence; but this is a mistake, for the ‘evoked’ property could not, even in theory, be discovered from knowledge of the parts in isolation. On the other hand, we may suppose that the emergent characters and tendencies simply come into being with the constitution of the whole. These two accounts are no more than alternative expressions of a single concept. In the former view the fulfilment of the emergent tendencies is seen obviously as an added fulfilment of the parts. In the latter view the emergent fulfilment is at least seen as the fulfilment of a more complex entity than the sum of the parts unsystematized. But further, even on this view, it is the parts themselves that have assumed the new nature in the special relation; and it is the parts themselves that are fulfilled. Each of them has, in a sense, assumed the nature of the whole, and is fulfilled in the fulfilment of the whole.

Thus even in our imaginary case in which the emergent tendencies can only emerge from a conflict of the isolated tendencies of the parts, it seems true that there is a greater fulfilment than would be possible without the emergence.

D. ORGANISMS AND SOCIETIES

AS A MATTER of fact, when we consider one striking example of a whole in which there are emergent tendencies, namely, an organism, we find that; though there is of course much tension between the parts, and consequently repression of low order tendencies, there is also much low order free activity. Certainly in the case of an organism we are justified in saying that there is, in all, a far greater fulfilment than would be possible in (let us say) the same multitude of molecules adrift and disorganized. For in an organism, whatever tensions there be, the ground which makes possible the emergence of physiological and biological tendencies is the continual release of ‘pent-up’ physical energy through the combustion of food. Thus in an organism it is essential that there should be fulfilment even on the lowest plane; while on the higher planes there are many kinds of new and very complex fulfilments.

But the case of organisms is complicated in another way. Organisms themselves are often units which combine into wholes wherein new characters and tendencies emerge. And in the case of social individuals it is clear that even the tendencies innately inherent in the isolated individual are tendencies which have in past generations emerged from social wholes. The social individual cannot fulfil his own private nature apart from society. Similarly within the economy of the individual’s own body, an organ that were to be excised from the rest of the body could not fulfil its own private nature in isolation from the body. For both the organ and the social individual himself have a teleological nature which necessitates, for its fulfilment, a certain environment. It might be said that, after all, then, the tendencies of these wholes are reducible to the tendencies of their parts, that, for instance, the nature of society is deducible from the nature of social individuals. And this is true in a sense; but it is only half the truth. It is true that society is nothing but the interaction of its members, and that the body is nothing but the interaction of its organs; but the social tendencies of individuals are themselves the outcome of the social relationships which have made individuals to be such as they are; and similarly with the organs and the body. In fact, in certain biological wholes some of the tendencies of the parts themselves are essentially tendencies of members in a whole. And these tendencies are preserved in the nature of the individual even when the individual is isolated from the whole.

Now the nature of a thing may express itself more fully or less fully. Even a bomb which explodes in, a desert expresses its nature (in a certain sense) less fully than one which explodes in a crowd. For the purpose of destruction has partly determined its nature. We must not say that a thunder-cloud which discharges its electricity harmlessly expresses its nature less fully than one which works destruction; for there is no reason to suppose the cloud to be a teleological machine whose end is the destruction of life. But though this distinction between the nature of the bomb and the nature of the thunder-cloud is important, it is in strictness only metaphorically true that the bomb expresses its own nature more fully in destruction. Actually what it expresses is the nature of its maker. But in the case of things which are internally teleological it is obviously true in all strictness that they express their own nature in teleological activity. Thus of a child we are justified in saying that it tends to grow up into an intelligent adult, and even into a good citizen. With the bomb metaphorically, and with the child literally, a character of the environment is needed to call forth the full nature of these existents. This is not to say that in the unexploded bomb there was an unexploding explosiveness, nor in the harmlessly exploding bomb an undestroying destructiveness, nor in the child an immature maturity. It means only that the nature of each of these existents is such that it is unintelligible save in relation to certain ends. The more exact attainment of these ends is therefore a fuller expression of, or fulfilment of, the nature and tendencies of the existent. The child whose mental growth is arrested is therefore strictly less fulfilled than one who reaches intellectual maturity.

The question as to greater and less fulfilment of tendencies is certainly obscure. It is clear, perhaps, that in relation to a single tendency there may be greater and less fulfilment. The organic tendency, for instance, which is the objective source of hunger, may be completely or only partially fulfilled. In other words the physiological equilibrium which is normal to the organism may be fully or only partially restored by a certain instance of nutritive activity.

But by what right can we compare the fulfilments of different tendencies of different existents? Is there any sense in asking whether there is greater fulfilment in the bursting of a bomb or in the gravitational approach of a stone to the earth? Such purely physical fulfilments can perhaps be compared in relation to the amount of physical energy released in each case. But, indeed, the concept of the conservation of energy itself assumes the equivalence of certain quantities of different ‘manifestations’ of energy.

With organisms, however, the situation is different. Within a single organism we must compare the fulfilment of different tendencies always with reference to the fulfilment of the organism as a whole. For these tendencies are observed to be teleological, and to have as their end the maintenance of the organism. But how are we to compare the fulfilment of the tendencies of different organisms? Clearly if both are intrinsically social and members of one society (which is a whole emergent in its members), we may compare them with reference to the fulfilment of this emergent whole. For we have agreed that the greatest possible fulfilment even of the individual itself is fulfilment through an emergent whole of individuals. But if the individuals to be compared are isolated, we cannot compare them thus. We may, however, regard them as potentially social, and compare them in respect of the part which each might play in an emergent social whole. And having decided which was capable of the greater social fulfilment, we might conclude that even the private fulfilment of this individual was in a sense a greater fulfilment than that of the other, since it would be the fulfilment of a potentially greater individual. This problem will concern us in more detail when we come to discuss comparative evaluation.

CHAPTER 8. TENDENCY IN PSYCHOLOGY

A. BODILY AND PERSONAL NEEDS

HITHERTO WE HAVE considered tendency only in the physical and the biological spheres. It is now time to deal with tendency in psychology. Some organisms at least are capable of psychical activity, of diverse modes of cognition, conation, and affection. The field upon which this psychical activity operates consists of the organism itself (objectively regarded) and the external environment. Psychology deals with the diverse modes of this psychical activity, and the relation of subjective psychical activity to the objective mental content. In the higher organisms, mental content includes cognized tendencies to psychical activity. More precisely, though many of the activities of the higher organisms have both a bodily and a mental aspect, sometimes the one aspect and sometimes the other is more important, so that for practical purposes we may distinguish between bodily and mental activities. The problem of the status of objective psychical (or mental) tendency begins now to be urgent, and I shall deal with it in the course of this chapter.

We may distinguish, then, between the needs of the organism as a physical or biological entity and the needs of the ‘person’. The needs which appear within the individual’s mental content may be classified into those which arise from the nature of his body as a system of physical organs demanding certain conditions for their free activity, and on the other hand those which entail for their existence not only physical but also psychical function. Of purely bodily needs we may distinguish the general need of the body as a whole and the special needs of particular organs. Thus the general need of the body to maintain itself in physiological equilibrium is sometimes in conflict with individual organs. For these, even if in the course of evolution they were called into being as means to fulfil the need of a unified body, have yet, in each individual, needs of their own. Their healthy functioning is necessary for the general need; but they are distinct entities with tendencies of their own. Thus in cancer certain cells, divorced from central control, regress toward the embryonic form and multiply, at the expense of the rest of the body. Similarly when the higher nerve centres are put out of action by lesion or disease, the lower, freed from inhibition by the higher, perform more readily and more vigorously those actions which depend only on their own constitution.

Those needs, then, which entail not only bodily activity, but also psychical activity, may be called needs of the ‘person’. These are in a sense secondary needs of the ‘psycho-physical’ organism, since, like the others, they are grounded in the nature of the organism, but in its psychical, not merely in its physical, activity. They emerge from the cognitive, affective, and conative activity in its operation on the primary physiological nature of the organism in its environment. Mostly they entail cognition of the distinction between the individual and his social environment; but this social factor is not essential to the existence of personal needs. It is indeed through this social distinction that we become aware of ourselves, and come to need respect, affection, ‘understanding’, in our social intercourse. But apart from this consciousness of self in society, we need also mental activity for its own sake. We need to exercise our cognitive, affective, and conative power, just as we need to exercise our muscles. Hence, among the personal needs must be included the impulse to know for the sake of knowing, and to create imaginatively, and the impulse to seek emotional experience for its own sake, and the impulse to undertake skilled activity for its own sake.

Thus from the psychical capacity itself, and from the cognition of the relation of the individual to society, emerges a great system of needs which cannot be derived simply from physiological needs, yet are needs of the individual as individual, not needs of society cognized by the individual.

It is important to note that these needs of the person, no less than the bodily needs, are prior to the value judgments which are made in respect of them. Those personal needs which have a social aspect arise out of the cognized objective relations of the individual to society; those which have no social aspect arise out of the tendency to psychical activity. And this psychical tendency, whatever its status, is objective to any value-judgment about it. Some hold that the psychical behaviour of organisms is evidence that, besides the merely physical structure, there is also an unconscious mental structure, or self, which behaves psychically. According to this view the psychical tendencies are tendencies, not of the body, but of the self, which is conceived as a system of innate and acquired ‘dispositions’. On the other hand, it is possible to hold that the psychical tendencies are tendencies of a substance neither simply physical nor simply psychical, but manifested in physical activity and in psychical activity. This substance we may provisionally call the psycho-physical organism. On this view organisms which attain a certain complexity of physical arrangement are substances in which new characters and tendencies emerge, namely, tendencies toward psychical activity. There is thus no distinct mental structure which alone behaves mentally. There is merely a new way of behaving on the part of a whole composed of the original kinds of ‘physical’ entities in a new order. These ‘physical’ entities in a certain organization together assume a new psychical nature.

Or perhaps we should put the matter somewhat differently, by saying that the real substance of the universe manifests itself to us primarily as physical appearance, i.e. physical activity; but that it sometimes achieves, along with certain very complex physical configurations or manifestations, another kind of activity, namely, mental activity. Such a foundation is obviously very imperfect. But full discussion of the body-mind relation is not possible here. The only point that concerns us is that-the physical body is itself a system of activities and tendencies, and the mind is a system of other kinds of activities and tendencies; and that, just as what acts in the former case is not itself physical movement, so what acts in the latter case is not itself psychical process.

B. CONATION OF PSYCHICAL ACTIVITIES

WE ARE NOW in a position to face the problem of objective psychical tendency, or more precisely, objective tendency to subjective activity. But in order to do this adequately we must also discuss a more general matter which has not hitherto been squarely faced. Granted that conscious conation does involve unconscious teleological tendency, does the occurrence of conation involve also cognition of the tendency, as I have suggested, or does it emerge directly from the unconscious as conation?

According to our theory conation entails cognition of an objective tendency or activity. But surely, it may be said, this supposed objective tendency is often itself conative. What, for instance, is the objective tendency the cognition of which is the source of the desire to achieve success in business or politics? And in artistic activity what kind of tendencies are conated? In the case of sneezing and other bodily actions the theory of the cognitional sources of conation may seem plausible; for, finding ourselves sneezing, we do seem therefore to desire to sneeze. But in the case of mental activity what precisely is it that we cognize, and is the objective source of our desire? To say that even in these cases conation presupposes cognition of an objective mental activity or tendency is to say that a subjective act of conation presupposes an objective act of conation! Surely this is ridiculous. We do not first cognize a tendency to speculate on the Stock Exchange and then desire to do so. The desire springs directly into consciousness from sources not open to introspection.

Moreover, the whole trend of modem psychology, we may be told, suggests that to put cognition before conation is to put the cart before the horse. Cognition itself is consequent on conation. Because we conate certain activities, we cognize the environment in so far as it is related to those activities; and we cognize it wholly in terms of those activities. Only so far as the environment favours or thwarts conation have we cognition of it at all, and what we cognize of it is not it, but only its relation to our activities.

Let us consider this last objection first, namely, that cognition itself is a product of conation. It may be admitted that cognition is in some sense the product of teleological activity on the part of an organism in an environment. But it does not presuppose conscious conation. And it will be remembered that I have throughout meant by conation a conscious activity. Even below the level of desire, even when the goal is not foreseen, conation is an activity that is psychical. It is at the very least a conscious facilitation of some activity which, without this psychical act, would not get done. It is indeed a conscious ‘espousal’ of some activity which is, without conation, a mere tendency. We may well suppose that cognition begins as a syncretistic awareness of the activity of organism and environment, and develops as a progressively detailed act of distinguishing between the contributions of each of these factors. We may in fact recognize that cognition is always relative to the activity of organisms, that it is essentially an apprehension of the external in relation to the needs of, and from the point of view of, some teleologically active knower, (though of course that ‘point’ of view may theoretically be so widened as to become the ‘point of view’ of the universe). But while recognizing this dependence of cognition itself on teleological activity, we must also insist that the actual conative act, being mental, entails cognition, either primitive syncretistic cognition of organism and environment as a dynamic whole, or developed analytic cognition of a dynamic organism at grips with its environment.

Those who claim that conation is the direct expression of unconscious teleological tendency have omitted to introspect conation clearly. Having made a very important discovery, namely, that conation involves unconscious teleological tendency, they have failed to notice that the tendency must be cognized in order to give rise to the conation of it. Precisely in so far as the cognition is obscure or erroneous, the conation is an inadequate expression of the tendency. In morbid cases in which, through repression, true cognition of the tendency is impossible, the conation may be fantastically beside the mark.

Modern psychologists have done well to point out that introspection is very fallible. But they indulge in an extravagant dislike of introspection, and have consequently failed to do full justice to their own hormic theory. So long as the unconscious teleological activity is recognized as the starting-point of the whole process, the hormic theory is not weakened but strengthened by an admission of the part played by cognition. In my experience, at any rate, it seems clear that every kind of conation, that really is a psychical act of conation, has a cognitive side, without which it were inconceivable. To be hungry involves cognizing the organism as in a certain state of incipient or unfulfilled activity, namely, as tending to eat. To desire to have a swim involves cognizing the organism as ‘tuned up’ for a swim. In each case the cognition is vague; but in each case the agent knows, through past experience, what activity would complete the vaguely cognized incipient activity. And in these cases the conation would not occur without cognition of the organic tendency. All that could occur would be a blind restlessness, an impulse to ‘do something or other, I don’t know what’. And this impulse would be derived from a still more vague cognition of a general strain or incipient activity in the organism. Conation which does not amount to explicit desire is always either of this type, or else it is a mere acquiescence in an activity which gets itself done independently of conscious facilitation. Such, we may suppose, is the baby’s first sneeze.

The view of conation which is favoured to-day is at first sight very different from the above; but it is not, I think, essentially opposed to it. No doubt most psychologists would insist that, for instance, instinctive conations are direct responses to specific stimuli, and that they do not presuppose cognition of the significance of the stimulus for the organism. This is certainly true. Professor Field points out that we do not first learn that things are dangerous, and then fear them. On the contrary ‘we are frightened before we know why, and before we know anything definite about the thing that frightens us except that it is frightening’. When the young blackbird first scurries from a cat it might say, ‘I am frightened, and therefore I know that there are dangerous creatures in the world.’ The emotion of fear is much more primitive than the knowledge of the dangerousness of any particular thing.

Such contentions are obviously true, but they may easily lead to error. If we are to see clearly the part played by cognition in conation we must analyse the emotional situation more fully. Let us take the normal fear reaction as typical. An external situation is cognized, and stimulates response. This response may be described as physiological preparation for flight, and a dynamic condition of the organism which constitutes the tendency to fly, or the state of incipient flight. This internal condition is also cognized. And even in objectless affect, though there is no cognition of an external situation as dangerous, there is, none the less, cognition of the state of the organism as tuned up for flight. In fact the emotion of fear would seem to be at least in part constituted by this cognition of an organic resonance and a state of incipient flight.

It is true, then, that the state of incipient flight does I not involve a judgment of dangerousness. But on the other hand every kind of affect, every conscious emotional attitude, does involve cognition of the organism as either set for a certain kind of behaviour, or at least in a general state of tension. It involves also, of course, at least an incipient conative espousal of that behaviour, or of the obscurely cognized and undirected activity.

Having defended the view that conation involves cognition, we may now deal with the other criticism, namely, that the tendency which is presupposed in conation is itself often essentially conative, and that therefore we are committed to an endless regress. In order to meet this criticism we must analyse the conative situation somewhat more precisely. Let us take the case of a man who desires to accomplish some complex psychical activity such as standing for Parliament, solving a scientific problem, or producing a work of creative art such as a picture. It is, at any rate, clear that such desires do presuppose cognition of an objective situation having certain definite potentialities. These undeniably objective sources are presumably, for the politician the requirements of his party and his constituency in relation to his own political qualifications, for the scientist the conflicting theoretical potentialities of the material which he is studying, and for the artist the conflicting aesthetic potentialities of the significant colours and forms at his disposal. In each case, then, the desire is at least a desire to fulfil certain potentialities objective to the desire itself, and apart from these objective factors the desire could not exist at all. In each case it is, at least in part, because he cognizes these unfulfilled potentialities that he is moved to the particular desire.

But of course this is no solution of our problem. It is not said to be cognition of mere possibilities, as such, that gives rise to conation, but cognition, true or false, of some activity or tendency. The particular desires that we are discussing would usually be accounted for in terms of certain sentiments, and by many psychologists would be ultimately derived from certain instincts. These would be said to be the dynamic sources of the desire. Thus perhaps each of the three cases is in part an expression of the self-regarding sentiment, and in part an expression of, respectively, sentiments for politics, science, and art. And each of these sentiments would be derived in some special and complex manner from such sources as instincts of self-assertion, sex, parenthood, curiosity, and so on. Now of course it is obvious that the individual does not first cognize a sentiment or a blend of instincts and then desire its fulfilment in relation to the particular objective situation. If this were the case, none but psychologists would ever desire anything! Sentiments and instincts do not enter into practical consciousness at all.

Yet it is very likely that in each of the three desires under discussion one factor is in some sense a more general ‘disposition toward self-fulfilment’, or self-expression, or the free activity of that which has been called the psycho-physical organism. In each case also no doubt various special dispositions playa part; but let us concentrate for the moment on the self-regarding disposition. By this ‘disposition’ is meant that in some sense there is something in the individual’s make-up in virtue of which, when he thinks of himself as one person among others, he desires, or tends to desire, the fulfilment of the activities or potencies of that one person rather than others. In fact one necessary source of the explicit desire for self-fulfilment is cognition of oneself as an active substance capable of fulfilment. Without self-consciousness there cannot be desire for self-fulfilment. But the crux of our problem lies in the fact that, to move to desire, this cognition must apparently have as its object, not merely the self as capable of these activities, but the self as in some sense actively tending to these activities, actively tending, for instance, to assert itself. In fact what is cognized must be shown to be no mere capacity but a tendency. But this cognized tendency, let us note, is not strictly a tendency to desire or will self-assertion, but a tendency to behave in self-assertive manners.

We may state our problem clearly in terms of the words ‘desire’ and ‘need ‘. Is it true, as I have maintained, that desire, even for complex psychical activity, presupposes cognition of need; or are we forced after all to admit that a need for such activity is itself but a generalization of certain particular conative activities, and that such a need thus presupposes desire? Are desires essentially based on true or false judgments of objective needs, or are needs sometimes mere generalizations about our desires? Or, again, do we in such desire for psychical activities first cognize ourselves as acting or tending to act in a certain manner, and therefore espouse the free activity; or is cognition of the tendency derived from the conation itself?

I have contended that in the conation of bodily activities, whether the conation be unforeseeing or be explicit desire, cognition of an objective activity is essential. And this formula I believe to be true of all conation, even when the activity which is conated is itself mental. In the case of the will to assert oneself in business or politics what is cognized is, in the first place, a social objective situation and, in the second place, oneself as a substance capable of certain kinds of activity (physical and mental), and actively tending to self-maintenance. Thus in fully self-conscious self-regarding behaviour it is because the individual cognizes himself as in general tending to self-maintenance, that he conates self-maintenance. And in ‘self-regarding’ behaviour of a less explicitly self-conscious kind, or of an entirely unselfconscious kind, what is cognized is some behaviour-impulse which could be classified as ‘self-regarding’ or ‘self-assertive’. But this impulse which is cognized is not a ‘tendency to desire’; it is a need. A certain possible act is cognized as a free act, or fulfilling act; and therefore it is conated. It is in fact cognized as demanded for the immediate expression of one’s nature. Without conation it will not occur; but it is required, not because of the nature of conation, but because of the nature of that which is cognized.

Consider the case of one whose curiosity is aroused by some intellectual puzzle. Here we have an instance of a pure impulse toward intellection, which some would derive from an ‘instinct of curiosity’. The environment presents the man with an unsolved problem, and this situation is a stimulus to intellection. It would be generally admitted that the conscious impulse or conative act of tackling the problem is an act which, in some sense, springs from, or is done by, a pre-existent structure, whether mental or physical or both or neither. This structure is not itself conscious process, though it performs acts of consciousness. Now my contention is that conation involves, not indeed cognition of an instinct or a sentiment, or of any element of an inferred unconscious mental structure, but cognition of the ‘pressure’ (so to speak) of the structure of the organism itself in a certain direction, or toward a certain activity. Thus in order to conate intellection a man must in some sense cognize a movement of his ‘unconscious nature’ toward that activity; but ‘his unconscious nature’ is simply his nature as an active organism. Or more precisely, he must cognize the activity of intellection as expressive of his nature at the moment, or as an act necessary for the free functioning of a part of his objective self at the moment, namely, that part which consists of his own organism. It must be reiterated that conation is essentially a conscious activity. And in order to act consciously, the subject must in some sense cognize, not necessarily an end to be reached, nor even an overt activity in progress, but at the very least a tendency of his own objective nature, or of some other cognized object.

The phrase ‘his own objective nature’ thus covers Dr. Drever’s system of innate dispositions, and whatever is true in the Freudian concept of ‘the unconscious’. But it must be taken to mean, not an unconscious mental structure, but an organic potentiality of physical and mental activities. What is cognized, then, is simply the organism as tending toward certain activities. Some of these activities cannot be performed without conations, which themselves entail cognition of tendency. By virtue of something in his unconscious nature, then, a man tends to act both in the primary biological manners and also in very diverse acquired manners.

To return for the moment to self-regarding activity, all conation of this type presupposes, not indeed cognition of a self-regarding sentiment, or instinct of self-assertion, but cognition of an ‘impulse’ to act in a particular manner. This ‘consciousness of impulse’ is not consciousness of a conation but consciousness of a need, of the ‘fulfillingness’ of a certain act, or of the ‘unfulfillingness’ of not acting.

Some acts, such as reflexes, get done without any conation whatever, though conation may inhibit them or modify them. Others, however, entail for their performance a conscious fiat; and without this fiat they remain mere unfulfilled tendencies of the unconscious nature of the individual: between the two extremes are all degrees of conative efficiency. Certainly all the more complex forms of mental activity entail conscious conation. In these cases the unconscious structure, however much it be pressing toward the activity, remains inactive unless there be conation. And conation involves cognition of the activity as a ‘fulfilling’ or expressive activity.

Recent work on the relation between brain lesions and disorders of speech and general behaviour reveals clearly that tendencies to perform such specific and complex .activities as we are considering may inhere in a ‘strictly neural’ mechanism ‘. The evidence suggests an incredibly complex hierarchical system of neural co-ordination centres, or ‘switch-boards’, or ‘keyboards’, related in such a manner that a ‘note’ of one will touch off a whole ‘chord’ or ‘melody’ on others. In terms of such a system we may conceive that any cognized and conated ‘tendency of our unconscious nature’ is constituted by the relationship of nerve fibres. The automatic response of such a neural mechanism (scattered throughout the brain) may be either inhibited or espoused: by the integrative psychical act of the brain as a whole.

Thus, in the neural structure, an unconscious and objective tendency to the conscious and subjective psychical activity of intellection would be constituted by a tendency of the neural current to elaborate itself among the so-called associative centres before issuing in overt motor response. Evidence also suggests that the instinctive tendencies depend in part upon the tholamus and other special regions, including of course the autonomic and the endocrine constitution. The more complex acquired temperaments and sentiments may be conditioned also by areas in the frontal lobes. Whether this localization be correct or not in detail, it helps us to understand how the highly complex and various automatisms, innate and acquired, may inhere in the incredibly subtle inter-relations of nerve fibres. Thus the simple instinctive tendency to self-assertion, and the complex self-regarding sentiments, which involve past cognition of the individual in society, may be ingrained unconscious tendencies of neural mechanism to perform conscious activities. Similarly both primitive sexual responses and those developed sentiments in which sex is one factor, and again both primitive gregariousness and those developed sentiments in which sociability is one factor, may be regarded as strictly objective bodily tendencies to specific subjective, psychical, activities.

The nature of the conation of private needs may be clearly seen in certain psycho-neurotic symptoms. Thus in obsessive rituals an act is conated though even to the subject himself it seems irrational, (unless indeed he succeeds in ‘rationalizing’ it). Here the act is cognized as demanded by his’ unconscious nature’ at the’ moment, and is therefore conated. But in this case the activity which is cognized as demanded is, it would seem, not the precise activity which is incipient in or demanded by the ‘unconscious nature’; for this need is, owing to special causes, ‘uncognizable’ or ‘repressed’. What is cognized is an act ‘symbolical’ of the needed act, a resultant, so to speak, of the repressed tendency and the repressing forces; and for the very reason that this act cannot really fulfil the unconscious need, it does not permanently satisfy. In anxiety-neurosis and strictly objectless affect there is no cognition of an act as demanded by the’ unconscious nature’, and therefore there is no conation. But the ‘unconscious nature’ is tending toward a certain act, though the tendency is not cognized, and therefore not conated. And the unfulfilment of this tendency, owing to the lack of the necessary conative act, causes a state of strain, which appears in consciousness as general anxiety or objectless affects. Such symptoms as claustrophobia and agoraphobia, which are not strictly objectless affects, but obsessive responses to an external stimulus, are instances of the same mechanism. The external stimulus rouses a movement of escape, which is cognized and conated. If for any reason immediate escape is not possible, there endures a painful affect, which is indeed ‘irrational’, but not ‘objectless’.

C. INTER-RELATION OF ORGANISMS

WE HAVE CONSIDERED the bodily and the strictly personal tendencies. It remains to discuss the more difficult problem of the tendencies which, entering the mental content of the individual, are derived not simply from his own bodily and personal tendencies but from the inter-relation of individuals. And in particular we must consider tendencies which emerge from the psychological inter-relation of individuals.

Tendencies which entail the inter-relation of organisms may be classified under three heads.

1) There are those tendencies which are reducible to, or are particular manifestations of, the tendencies which are essential to the nature of all organisms. Individuals’ in the same region tend to compete for food. This tendency is reducible to the nutritive tendency which is essential to the nature of an organism. Further, individuals in the same region may, under certain circumstances, co-operate in the acquirement of food. This may occur without any strictly social activity whatever; for, while each may simply make use of other individuals for the attainment of his own ends, it may happen that in doing so he also serves the ends of others. Such a case as this would clearly be reducible to the nutritive tendency of individual organisms.

2) There are also tendencies which are only reducible to the innate social nature of individual organisms. Sexual behaviour and some gregarious behaviour are of this kind. Not merely does any case of normal sexual behaviour involve the co-operation of an individual of the opposite sex; the sexual tendency involves the interaction of organisms in past generations. It is not reducible to the essential minimum which is the nature of an organism as such. Knowing merely this essential minimum, we could not deduce sexual behaviour. Roughly this minimum is the tendency of every organism .to maintain itself as an organism. In the sexual co-operation of two organisms it may be that each does as a matter of fact find health, and that without it each would become to a greater or less extent disorganized. But the fact that each is of such a nature as to need sexual activity for its own healthy maintenance must be explained. And it can only be explained in light of the biological history of sexual individuals. In the distant past certain organisms, we suppose, ‘found themselves’ in a certain relation to one another; and from this special inter-relatedness of pairs of organisms emerged a new tendency, namely the tendency of individuals, produced in this way, to seek out mates, and to be organized in such a manner as to need mates even for their own healthy maintenance. Further, our general observation of the sexual behaviour of animals suggests that the regulative end is in this case, not the maintenance and growth of the individual, but propagation. It may nevertheless be true that in the first instance sexual conjugation was simply an expression of the need of the primitive individual cell to maintain its own organic equilibrium. But after conjugation there came the necessity of fissian, and the sacrifice of individuality. And in later stages of evolution the form of sexual and of parental activity becomes more and more definitely instrumental to propagation, rather than to the maintenance of the individual in organic equilibrium. Of course the nutritive tendency and the sexual tendency may be in a sense phases of one essential tendency of all organisms, which we may name vaguely the tendency to perpetuate life. But the sexual tendency is certainly not reducible to this fundamental tendency alone; it emerges from the long-past inter-relation of organisms. And this inter-relation was strictly social in that it consisted in the subordination of each individual at certain seasons to the new regulative end.

Simple gregarious behaviour may sometimes be reducible to the strictly individual tendencies of organisms, as in the case of accidental co-operation for the acquisition of food, or for defence. But in most cases gregarious behaviour, like sexual behaviour, probably involves a social past. It must therefore be judged as not reducible to the tendencies of the organism as such, but as reducible to the innate tendencies of social organisms.

3) We now come to the last kind of tendency which entails the inter-relation of organisms. These are tendencies which emerge from the psychical relation of the individual to his own social environment, and are not reducible simply to the inherited tendencies of social individuals, though they may be influenced by inherited tendencies. In this class come all the acquired social habits of individuals, together with all those habits which, though not strictly social, since their end is not a social end, nevertheless entail for their present complex form a complex social environment. Of the former kind are all habits of political thought and activity, such as party politics, individualism, socialism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and all social conventions such as the customs of a city, a club, an industrial organization, or of neighbours in a street, or again the institutions of marriage, domesticity, property, and indeed all the multitudinous and scarcely-noticed customs which enable us to live in touch with each other without excessive friction. Of habits which are not strictly social, but entail a social environment, the most striking are all those manners of thought which form our culture, such as our science, art, philosophy and religions.

D. OBJECTIONS TO INSTINCT PSYCHOLOGY

MANY PSYCHOLOGISTS WOULD reject the foregoing account. They would say that tendencies which I have described as irreducible to the inherited tendencies of social organisms are, as a matter of fact, ‘derived’ from those inherited tendencies. That there are in fact such inherited tendencies to complex and specific responses, is, I should say, undeniable. The disagreement of psychologists as to what instincts there are, is to be attributed not to the unreality of instinct but to the incompleteness of psychology. We have seen in the previous chapter how these complex automatisms may be conceived as being laid down in the inter-relation of nerve fibres. Supposed instincts are sometimes classified in relation to the biological end which they are thought to achieve, but such classifications depend largely on the theories of the classifier. A more psychological classification may be made in terms of the emotional accompaniments of the behaviour. Mr. A. Campbell Garnett rejects both these criteria. In his view the psychological classification must be made in relation to ‘the end experience in which the conative process finds its completion and in which the creature finds satisfaction.’ Thus the conative process of hunting ends when the prey is killed, and that of eating when the food is swallowed. It is easy to see how such regulative ends might be laid down in the co-ordination of nerve cells according to the principle described by M. Piéron. I accept Mr. Campbell Garnett’s criterion; but I would add that, since conscious conation presupposes a prior hormic tendency not itself conscious, even ‘conative completion’ and ‘satisfaction’ are not infallible guides to the subconscious teleological nature of the individual. They might perhaps sometimes be illusory expressions.

But to admit the existence of instincts is not necessarily to derive all human behaviour from such specific innate tendencies. There is a sense in which all man’s activity is ‘at bottom’ instinctive, but a more important sense in which it is not, It is true that all biological behaviour is in a sense the outcome of the organism’s own nature, and that in a sense its nature is determined innately. In a sense it can only behave within the limits of its own inherited capacity, But it is not true that its capacity includes only certain specific fixed modes of behaviour, to which all acquired behaviour can be ‘reduced’, A human being’s inheritance would seem to include a capacity for discovering and conating tendencies beyond the inherited nature of his own organism, or his own biological needs.

Let us consider the case of a man’s sentiment of love for a woman, This is surely an instance favourable to the interpretation in terms of instinct alone, if anything is. But we must insist that what is to be discussed is a genuine case of love in the fullest sense, and not merely of sexual desire. Now all will agree that in a sense the man’s love is ‘derived’ from the sexual or reproductive tendency of a human organism. It is very probable that he would never have noticed the woman had he not been a sexual animal. But clearly his love is not simply reducible to the bare sexual tendency, which is strictly a tendency to behave in a certain manner toward certain objects, and does not involve love at all, By hypothesis he loves her; he has come to regard her not merely as an object on which to discharge his sexual interest and activity, but also as being a centre of needs which he himself conates just because they are hers, He regards her as a body and mind having certain needs, impulses and desires. In so far as he genuinely loves her, his knowledge (or opinion) of her needs invokes a system of conations in his own mind, He has accepted her tendencies, not simply because they are directly or symbolically like his own tendencies, but just because they are her tendencies.

Now his acceptance of her tendencies springs from a value-judgment which he has made with regard to her. How has he come to make this value-judgment? In relation to what demands has he made it? According to the instinct interpretation, in so far as her hold on him is not directly sexual, it is derived ‘indirectly’ from sexual or other innate tendencies. His value-judgment is made essentially in relation to his own primitive biological needs, even though it is a response subtly ‘conditioned’ by his experience. Thus some would have us believe that all love, if not all human behaviour, is reducible to the sex instinct. The source of all interests, they sometimes say, is the interest in sensory pleasure; and from this interest, by a process of ‘conditioning’, all others have developed. By ‘affective transference’ interest gradually spreads from the end to the means and to all that is associated with the end or the means. Thus, according to Freud, the human being passes through interest in mere sensory pleasure and pain to interest in the organs that afford pleasure and pain, and so to interest in external objects, and especially to interest in other persons for the sake of their direct or indirect sexual significance.

Now in actual ‘love’ between the sexes the purely sexual element is very often predominant; and probably it plays an important part also in homo-sexual affection. And in passing we may note that human nature is no more ‘debased’ by being reduced to sex than by being reduced to any other instinct or pattern of instincts.’ But the ingenuity of the various psycho-analytical schools has made it very clear that, with sufficient patience and skill, any piece of behaviour can be ‘derived’ from any instinct whatever. Their fatal ingenuity has afforded the reductio ad absurdum not merely of pan-sexualism but of the whole instinct theory. The mistake common to all these schools seems to lie in supposing that a mode of behaviour is sufficiently accounted for by tracing some of its historical origins. It has not been realized that at each advance a new kind of behaviour comes into being through cognition of a new kind of situation. To reduce behaviour simply to specific dispositions in the nature of the agent himself is to reduce the human quite unwarrantably to the animal, and moreover to an unduly simplified and fictitious animal.

Some eminent psychologists tell us that the main root of all love is the parental instinct, which is the tendency to behave parentally toward, and feel the tender emotion toward, offspring. Thus, in so far as a man’s love for a woman is not merely sexual it is said to be indirectly parental. He finds in his relations with her a satisfaction for the innate craving to have something to serve, and an object for tender emotion. But this theory ignores an important difference between parental behaviour and love, and between the tender emotion and love. Parents do, as a matter of fact, often love their children; but they do also often merely behave parentally toward them, and feel tender emotion toward them. The love of a parent for a child may be said to be ‘derived’ from the parental tendency, in the sense that this tendency first directed attention to the child, and made possible the subsequent discovery of the child as itself a living centre of tendencies. And it may well be that in all love there is something of this instinctive parental behaviour. But genuine love, for whatever kind of object, is very different from the tender emotion and from all strictly instinctive parental behaviour, The extreme of this behaviour and this emotion is perhaps seen in the bitch that devours her puppies rather than share them with other admirers. And even among human beings behaviour essentially of this type is not unknown. Genuine love, on the other hand, entails more than a value-judgment about another individual in relation to one’s private needs. It entails an espousal of the other’s needs in the same direct manner in which one espouses one’s own private needs. Perhaps no one has ever fully succeeded in loving his neighbour ‘as himself ‘. But in so far as anyone does love, that is what he does. And love is not wholly impossible to human beings. Merely instinctive behaviour is, so to speak, the conation of a tendency or complex of tendencies of the agent’s own body or person. Genuine love is the conation of tendencies of another person. Attention may be drawn to the other in the first instance as to a stimulus for instinctive behaviour; but subsequently, if love occurs, or in so far as it occurs, the other is regarded, not as a stimulus, but as a centre of tendencies demanding conation in their own right. This is a kind of behaviour which cannot be explained simply in terms of instinct.

There is another very important point that must be emphasized. It is true, as has been admitted, that the lover’s value-judgment is made in the first instance in relation to ‘his own’ needs. But it does not follow that even his own private needs consist simply of inherited instincts. Many of these present private needs are automatisms which have been grafted in him (so to speak) by his past environments, through the medium of his cognition. They were primarily needs in his environment, but by exposing them and habitually seeking their fulfilment he has moulded himself upon them. Even the private needs, then, (which first focus attention on another individual), cannot be reduced to instinct, since many of them originate in the extra-organic environment.

Further, we might go so far as to say that any actual case of love is an approximation, however distant, towards a certain type or norm. In this ideal type, the man’s love, undistorted by special limitations or automatic impulsions, would be the expression of his whole mental content, not of the merely private core of his content. And since a man’s mental content is simply his view of the world, his love would be an expression of his judgment of the nature of the world. The world, to speak metaphorically, would be loving her through him. For he would judge the world to be such that a certain attitude on the part of a woman was appropriate to it, or demanded by it. Perhaps this attitude would be one of humorous tolerance and tenderness combined with heroic stubbornness, or perhaps some other attitude. Some such ideal attitude he must, in the ideal case, find in her along with her directly sexual charm, and along with those habits and manners which happened to fulfil his own private capacity for companionship. In this fanciful case, then, love is the outcome not simply of private needs but of needs discovered by the lover through his cognition of the world. This, doubtless, is but the ideal type of love, which is never attained in practice. But it must be insisted that all actual love has something in it of this nature.

In this account, however, there is danger of overlooking the simple essential nature of love itself. It is true that in the ideal love the lover must judge that the beloved’s character is that which is demanded by, or is appropriate to, the world, and not merely that which is appropriate to his private cravings. But as was said above, love itself consists in valuing the beloved for her own sake, not for the world’s sake. It is the espousal of the needs of an active substance in the same direct manner as one espouses the needs of his own person. In extreme cases this may entail the rejection of the claims of all other active substances, just as in extreme egoism the espousal of the personal self may entail rejection of all other selves.

Neither personal affection, then, nor those more complex social conations, which entail the apprehension of society as a system of minds, can be simply reduced to any specific innate tendency of the primitive individual, or to any complex of tendencies of the primitive individual. Social conations cannot, for instance, be fully accounted for as manifestations of ‘herd instinct’, nor as symbolical fulfilment of sex instinct or parental instinct. Nor, I venture to think, can they be fully accounted for even in terms of the highly complex system of inherited dispositions expounded for instance by Dr. Drever.

Let us, for example, briefly consider the case of Joan of Arc, as an instance of extreme, yet apparently authentic, social-mindedness. A detailed account of her life can certainly be given in terms of instinct satisfaction. Indeed, various highly coherent and mutually exclusive accounts can be offered; so many accounts, in fact, that their very plausibility should make us suspect that no one of them is the truth. We may derive her defence of France from a religious sentiment, and this, in the Freudian manner, from repressed sex-craving. Or again, her constant protagonism may be traced to a ‘freedom complex’ contracted in childhood through her relations with adults. And this, in turn, we may derive either from sex (following Freud), or from the instinct of self-assertion. Indeed (following Adler), we may very plausibly suppose that her whole career is an outstanding example of that ‘masculine protest’ which is the counterpart of a sense of inferiority and is finally reducible to an instinctive ‘will to power’, or self-assertion. Equally plausibly, however, it may be said that her behaviour was the symbolical fulfilment of a thwarted parental instinct, and that she regarded herself as standing in loco parentis toward distressed France. Or, perhaps, her religious devotion, and consequently her defence of France, was an expression of the ‘herd instinct’ in its attachment to an idealized herd-opinion which she regarded as God’s will. Or finally, and perhaps more convincingly, we may interpret her life in terms of the whole gamut of inherited dispositions suggested by Dr. Drever.

Now it need not be denied that Joan may have gained instinctive satisfaction of these kinds. But in discovering the instinctive satisfactions which a piece of behaviour affords incidentally, we do not account fully for the pattern of the behaviour. The most obvious and at the same time the most important fact about Joan’s life was that it was regulated with reference to a single end, namely the freeing of France. This supreme sentiment dominated the whole of her behaviour, selecting now one instinctive reaction and now another. Thus it is certain that her instincts must have snatched much satisfaction by the way. But what precisely was the origin of the dominant sentiment itself? How was it that she ever came to care supremely for the freedom of France?

Surely, we shall be told, she would never have troubled about it at all had it not offered fulfilment to some deep needs of her own personality. And surely these personal needs, however much they may have been modified by her experience, were essentially just the fundamental biological needs which she inherited. Joan’s behaviour was the behaviour of a certain organism; and the sources of that behaviour must be found in the nature of the organism itself, not in its environment.

The first point to note in answer to this contention is that whatever the origin of Joan’s will to free France, when once it had come into being, there it was — a conative attitude distinct from and dominant over all simply instinctive impulses. By one means or another the freeing of France became for her an end in itself. It is not to be supposed that she willed the fulfilment of France’s need merely in those respects in which it would afford direct or indirect satisfaction to her own instincts. She willed it, at whatever cost to her instincts. Thus, if we believe that the real motive source was sexual, we must yet admit that she had come to care more for this symbolical sexual fulfilment than for direct sexual activity. If it was parental, she cared more for the service of the symbolical child, France, than for having real children of her own. The ‘instinct’ psychologist might, of course, point out that it was merely owing to the impossibility of direct parental satisfaction that she sought the symbolical satisfaction of mothering France. And similarly with her other instinctive cravings, patriotic behaviour was the only possible way of satisfying them all, though it could afford only symbolical satisfaction. But why was direct satisfaction ‘impossible’? Surely all save those who are obsessed with the instinct theory must see that what prevented her from seeking mere instinct satisfaction was no mere indirectly instinctive motive, but just her cognition of needs objectively more important than the needs of herself as a private person. She cognized France as demanding liberation. Whatever the sources which directed her attention on France and initiated her dominant sentiment, that sentiment certainly did become the ruling factor of her life. And further, whatever its instinctive sources, her cognition of her social environment turned it into something essentially different from any mere blend of instinctive impulses.

The chief weakness of instinct psychology is that it fails, in spite of all its efforts to the contrary, to do justice to the part played in behaviour by the environment. And this failure is most obvious in human behaviour. The theory starts with the assumption that all behaviour must necessarily be traced finally to specific ‘dispositions’ inherited in the nature of the agent, and that the environment, though it may modify these pre-formed dispositions, can never bring essentially new dispositions into being. Such an account is fairly plausible in the case of animal behaviour; but in the human case it entails one of two most unbelievable corollaries. Either human nature must be supposed to include ‘inherited dispositions’ to play golf, turn bolshevic or fascist, serve God, and indeed to perform all those highly complex acts which are in fact performed by civilized men. (In this case, the environment is credited only with ‘releasing’ the complex pre-formed dispositions.) Or, on the ‘other hand, if this view seems extravagant, the attempt must be made to ‘derive’ all the more complex activities of man from the simple inherited dispositions of the typical mammal. This has been, in fact, undertaken by our instinct psychologists. They have performed the task with great ingenuity; but in. doing so they have left out the really distinctive feature of human behaviour.

Of course, in a sense, every man throughout his life acts only in those manners in which his type of organism can act. And these manners are inherited. Thus he gets angry, frightened, elated, inquisitive, and so on. But this system of innate modes of behaviour has been fitly described as but the ground plan of his developed nature. It is that on which he is built, not a limiting framework within which he is imprisoned. Nor is it a system of specific ‘energies’ which alone are the source of his ‘motive power’. These modes of activity are in a sense the only possible modes of activity alike for animal and man. But the ends in relation to which these are exercised in the human adult are not simply the ends to which his inherited nature was adapted. Nor can they be simply ‘derived’ from those ends.

We may distinguish three ways in which in man innate behaviour is modified, namely: (a) Innate responses may be ‘conditioned’ to new stimuli. This is doubtless extremely important. (b) He may intelligently devise new methods for the better attainment of innate ends. (c) Through intelligent cognition of the total objective field, old ends may be modified and new ends discovered, and in consequence behaviour may be radically changed. To ignore this is to ignore what is distinctively human.

CHAPTER 9. PSYCHICAL CONFLICT

A. THE OBJECTIVE SOURCES OF CONATION

SINCE WE CANNOT admit that the acquired social tendencies of human beings are simply reducible to the inherited tendencies of social organisms, we must try to formulate another theory of conation to take the place of the instinct theory. Such a theory I have already frequently advocated. In the present chapter I shall seek to bring together and render as precise as possible all that has already been said on this subject; but my chief aim will be to formulate and solve a problem, consequent on this particular view of the nature of conation, which has not hitherto been faced. Any objective tendency, I have said, may in principle be conatively espoused for its own sake. How comes it, then, that in practice very few objective tendencies are espoused, and that those which are espoused are nearly always tendencies of the individual organism itself?

In the case of the simple organic tendencies I have argued that when the subject becomes aware of any momentary organic impulse he has at least an incipient conation of that tendency. Further, I suggested that when the subject comes to know or erroneously believe some more enduring organic tendency, he again has at least an incipient conation of that tendency. The very nature of conation seems to involve the true or erroneous cognition of some tendency objective to the act of conation itself. In the cases which we examined first the tendency was a tendency simply of the organism; but as cognition advances, (doubtless primarily in the service of the already established modes of conation), new objective regions begin to influence conation.

The awareness of an organic impulse is not different in kind from the awareness of any other objective tendency. The psychical impulse to sneeze and the psychical impulse to defend the state are alike in that in each case a tendency of a certain object within the mental content suggests a conation, simply in being cognized. In the one case the body is discovered tending to sneeze, and in the other the state is discovered tending to preserve itself. Of course, there are important differences in the two objects and tendencies in respect of complexity, and in the processes by which they are cognized. Awareness of organic impulses is immediate knowledge by acquaintance. And even a foreseeing desire for the fulfilment of an organic impulse, though it entails inference from past experience, is based upon immediate acquaintance with a present impulse. Awareness of all other kinds of objective tendencies, on the other hand, is mediated. But in each of these cases what happens is that an objective tendency is cognized and ‘lived through’ as a conation. I am suggesting, then, that the essential basis of conation is not that some tendency of the organism, or of a simple inherited mental structure, is the source (direct or indirect) of every conative act, but that every cognition of tendency may give rise to a conative act. Every tendency which is an element in the mental content suggests a conation, and is the ground of an at least incipient conation. If the tendency does not conflict with other and well-established conative ends, its fulfilment will be desired.

Of course, there are very many tendencies which are cognized as members of the mental content, yet their fulfilment is not willed. I may, for instance, be trying to drive a pig through a gate, and I may be well aware that the pig is persistently tending to go in the opposite direction. Clearly, I do not will the fulfilment of this recalcitrant tendency of the pig, although I am aware of it. The pig’s tendency, after all, is only a minor element in my mental content, and it conflicts with other more weighty and more intimate tendencies. By ‘weighty’ and ‘intimate’ I mean that for some reason or other, yet to be discussed, these tendencies do as a matter of fact bulk more largely in my mental content. But though I do not will the fulfilment of the pig’s tendency, I may yet perform an abortive or incipient conation of the tendency, a conation which, for other reasons, I do not complete in overt action. Were I to know the pig’s tendency in isolation from its consequences, I should definitely desire its fulfilment. Not, indeed, that there is any logical necessity why I should do so, but that observably this is the primary kind of relation between cognition and conation.

Thus, anyone watching a salmon persistently trying to jump a waterfall cannot but wish success to the enterprise. Anyone watching the incoming tide, as it extends its searching fingers along the mud channels, can scarcely help wishing that the runnel which he is regarding may circumvent or overwhelm all opposition. On the other hand, if he is attending rather to the land, and imagines a tendency on its part to resist invasion, he will find himself desiring that the resistance may be victorious. In fact, whenever we perceive, or think of, or image, any existent as tending to act in a certain way, and pressing against opposition, we inevitably incline to espouse the tendency to conate it. Of course, in so far as we apprehend the tendency in relation with other tendencies of our mental content, we pass a final judgment upon it, and may will either its success or its failure. But in the mere act of apprehending it, we desire its fulfilment. If, for instance, we temporarily forget everything else, and regard it alone, we may find ourselves entering, for the time, whole-heartedly into it and actually willing its fulfilment. Indeed, any vividly or constantly observed tendency may sometimes exercise a hypnotic fascination over us, and draw all our attention upon itself till all else is shut out of our mental content, and we will only the fulfilment of the one obsessive tendency.

The objectivity of the source of conation is particularly well illustrated in certain abnormal states. Janet cites a young man who, when he passed a hat shop, became so exclusively aware of it as an opportunity for hat-buying that he forthwith had to enter and buy a hat of which he had no personal need. On another occasion, he passed a railway station, recognized it as a place where one goes in ‘to take a trip’, entered, saw the name ‘Marseilles’ on a time-table, took a ticket to that city, and embarked on the journey. Only after he had travelled some distance did he realize the absurdity of his behaviour, and leave the train. Such acts are, after all, only striking instances of a very common type of behaviour. The boy with a knife craves to cut something; the man with a gun craves to shoot something. Similarly, the man with a business under his control craves to make money. The woman who knows herself fascinating craves to make conquests. The theorist with a theory craves to apply it as widely as possible. The artist who has discovered a new beauty must express it in a thousand forms. Indeed, this principle, which might be called ‘the principle of the new toy’, is of very great importance.

It is true, of course, that we are sometimes ‘contra-suggestive’, inclining toward resistance rather than fulfilment of a cognized tendency. But this is a rare and complex reaction which is to be explained in terms of an acquired modification of self-assertiveness. When it occurs, we resist because we cognize the tendency as opposed to our personal activity. Resistance is ever consequent on a prior espousal of some active substance or other. Again we may indeed come to desire the resistance of an objective tendency or of an individual, simply as an end in itself; but such ‘disinterested hate’ is none the less causally derived from the hated individual’s antagonistic relation to something within our content which is itself cherished. This antagonism itself may be forgotten, while the habit of disinterested hate persists.

We must, of course, distinguish between the conation which is derived from an existent tendency in some object, and a conation which is derived from an imagined tendency, or, again, from a potentiality of some object. Of the former kind is our sympathy with the leaping salmon or with the nation striving for liberty, and even our sympathy with the incoming tide. Of the latter kind is the boy’s itch to use his knife, the woman’s itch to use her charms, and the striving of the theorist and the artist. In the case of the woman we must distinguish between two sources of her ‘will to conquer’, namely on the one hand her cognized organic sexual tendency and her personal self-assertive tendency, and on the other the cognized possibility of exercising her charms. In the boy also we must distinguish between the tendency of his own person, whether manipulative or sadistic, prior to his intercourse with the knife, and on the other hand the cognized possibilities of the knife itself. Similarly, in every case, we must distinguish between sources in present cognized objects and sources prior to these.

Of course, a quite different explanation is usually given for these experiences. It is generally said that, when we thus sympathetically regard the efforts of the salmon or the activity of the tide, we desire their fulfilment not for their own sakes at all, but just because they are stimuli to our own tendencies. We project ourselves into the object (so it is said) and feel resistance to the object’s tendencies as though it were resistance to our own tendencies. The only tendencies that we ever accept as conations for their own sakes are ‘our own’ tendencies. And our own tendencies are said to be all of them reducible to certain fundamental biological tendencies, such as self-maintenance, development, and procreation. All these fundamental tendencies are said to reside in the ‘psycho-physical nature’ of the organism itself. A theory which claims that all tendencies are possible sources of conation is ridiculous, we shall be told; for conation is essentially the outcome of, or expression of, the needs of the organism itself, and other tendencies are entirely foreign to the organism and the self of the organism; they can only give rise to conations in so far as they are taken as symbolical of, or have become associated with, needs of the organism.

To this objection we can only reply by insisting that, as a matter of fact, the more complex tendencies of selves have characteristics which are not logically reducible to primitive needs, whether of the physical organism or of an inherited ‘mental structure’; and that, since this is so, some other explanation is necessary. To say that our more complex conations are expressions not of a primitive but of a developed ‘self’ is doubtless true, but irrelevant. The question is, how does the primitive ‘self’ expand into the developed self. And the answer is that the most important way of expanding is by the cognition of a wider field of objective tendencies and the conative espousal of those tendencies.

B. THE PROBLEM OF IRRATIONAL CHOICE

WE ARE NOW in a position to face the problem of irrational choice. There are three kinds of mental conflict. In the first place, there is often a conflict between momentary impulse and the enduring tendency of which it purports to be a phase. Thus the impulse to eat a certain admittedly indigestible food conflicts with the enduring nutritive tendency of which it is a phase, and probably with other tendencies also. Secondly, there may be conflict between tendencies or impulses of equal rank. The impulse to eat now may conflict with the impulse to fly now from danger. Or the enduring tendency to preserve the organism may conflict with the enduring tendency to keep possession of a sexual partner. Thirdly, there may be a conflict between emergent social tendencies and the innate tendencies of the individual. Thus the tendency of the community to preserve itself may enter the mind of the individual, and give rise to a conation, which may conflict with conation of his innate tendency to feed when his stomach is empty.

The first kind of conflict, between impulse and enduring tendency, perhaps never occurs in the animal mind. For while momentary tendencies may often be known by direct acquaintance, enduring tendencies have to be inferred. The typical animal, at any rate, acts on impulse and knows nothing of enduring tendency. In man, however, both impulse and enduring tendency may give rise to conations. The toper may both desire to get drunk now, and desire to assert himself against this temptation. And he may either succumb or successfully resist the temptation. If he resists, what he wills is the greater rather than the lesser fulfilment, the fulfilment of enduring tendencies rather than the fulfilment of a momentary symptom of one of those tendencies, a symptom which, moreover, is (so to speak) a distorted or dislocated appearance, of an enduring tendency. What he wills, then, is greater in that it is something which will endure, not something evanescent; and, further, it is greater in that self-regarding or self-conscious activity is qualitatively richer, more complex, than the momentary satisfaction of an impulse; finally, it is instrumental to a more complete fulfilment of the whole field of tendencies within his mental content, and will entail less unfulfilment.

But what is it that happens when, instead of resisting temptation, he succumbs? Apparently he chooses the lesser rather than the greater fulfilment. His case is not that of the animal who knows nothing of enduring tendencies. He chooses with open eyes, and, as we say, against his better judgment. We cannot, then, simply say that a man always chooses the course from which he expects the greater fulfilment. It may be true that every tendency, which he knows or believes, gives rise to some degree of conation; but in conflict he does not always prefer the greater fulfilment.

Similarly, in the case of conflict between tendencies of equal rank, whether between organic tendencies or between emergent social tendencies, a man may choose that which he believes will afford the greater fulfilment, or he may not. Such conflicts may be reduced to the previous type. For the choice that he has to make is not simply a choice between disconnected tendencies. The one choice will (he knows) favour the general fulfilment of tendencies within his mental field, while the other will fulfil only an isolated tendency, and hinder the general fulfilment. Thus, in the individual sphere, the choice between the tendency to preserve his own organism and the tendency to keep possession of his sexual partner may involve the choice between merely a sexless spell on the one hand and sudden death on the other. The man may or may not choose the former and more prudent course. Similarly, in the sphere of emergent social tendencies, the choice may be between an aggressive policy for his group and a pacific policy. He does not always choose that which he genuinely believes will give greatest fulfilment to his group, though he probably persuades himself that he is doing so. His choice may, of course, be biased by private tendencies; but quite apart from this, it may also be biased by genuinely social considerations which he knows must conflict with the goal of fulfilment. He may, for instance, choose a ‘glorious’ and hopeless war rather than prolonged development, just because of a habit of over-sensitiveness to points of group honour. And he may be thus over-sensitive to group honour even though in respect of his own private prestige as a person among others he is not over-sensitive at all.

Finally, in the case of conflict between emergent social tendencies and the innate tendencies of the individual it is very clear that a man may knowingly choose the course which will lead to the objectively lesser fulfilment. He may sacrifice another person to his own sexual craving, or his society’s fulfilment to his own craving for self-advancement. And he may do so, knowing that he is choosing the lesser fulfilment of tendencies in the total object of his cognition. In the first case, he may knowingly choose momentary gratification for himself even at the price of crippling another for life. In the second case, he may knowingly choose the fulfilment of one individual (himself) rather than the fulfilment of many, and of the social whole which is an emergent character of those many.

Here a word of caution is necessary. The will of an individual may sometimes embody the need of the social whole more correctly than the will of the majority with which he disagrees. For instance the tendency of his contemporaries may be to persecute and destroy an original thinker whose own tendency is to revolutionize and enrich the life and thought of the community. He, then, and not the majority, voices the real need of society. His mental content is richer than that of his fellows. He has known a wider field of tendencies and has evaluated them more accurately. His ideal constitutes a greater objective fulfilment than is desired by his persecutors. The first man who protested against ordeal by battle doubtless found himself in conflict with his fellows. But though they were legion and he was one, his mental horizon was the wider. His desire to abolish this practice was the expression of an objectively richer field of social needs than the contrary desire of his fellows.

But to return to our subject, in all types of conflict we do often choose that course which we believe will lead to the lesser fulfilment. We may, indeed, ‘make excuses’ for our choice, or persuade ourselves that what we are choosing really is the more prudent or more moral course, or that the fulfilment that we have chosen is, after all, the greatest fulfilment, in spite of appearances to the contrary. But, in the case to which I refer, the excuses are not the cause of our choosing; they are consequences of it. We do not choose thus because of the alleged reason; we look for a reason to support the choice that we have already made.

How, then, is this kind of behaviour to be understood? Hitherto, I have argued that conation presupposes an objective tendency as its source, and that an act of will is determined by those tendencies which ‘bulk most largely’ in the mental content at the time. But now it seems that there are very many cases in which the choice favours fulfilments which are not cognized as objectively the greatest possible fulfilments. Must we conclude that our theory of conation is false?

Let us state our problem more precisely. In every case in which a lesser fulfilment is deliberately chosen, that which is chosen is at least the fulfilment of some tendency which is cognized as a member of the objective mental content. Further, it is always either a fulfilment which has been frequently chosen in the past, or a fulfilment which has frequently presented itself for choice in the past, even though it has been rejected. Conation is not simply the outcome of present experienced tendencies. We have formed behaviour-habits in the past, and these bias our present choice. Certain tendencies, which in past mental contents were cognized as dominant, may still be favoured, even when, in the present mental content, they are cognized as in fact subordinate to other, more recently discovered, tendencies. Thus, one who has contracted a habit of exclusively local patriotism may continue to favour the interests of his locality even after he has come to recognize the importance of the interests of a wider community. On the other hand, certain tendencies, although they have been even habitually cognized as actually minor, and therefore have never been willed, may yet have forced themselves so frequently into the mental content, that they have played a greater part in the history of the individual than those other less familiar tendencies to which they have been judged subordinate. In such circumstances, choice may come to favour that which dominates by familiarity rather than that which is judged objectively dominant. Thus, in a ‘full-blooded’ nature the demands of the body, though habitually repressed because judged to be subordinate to the demands of a wider world, may, if ever circumstances accentuate them, triumph in spite of the considered judgment.

A special and striking type of the ‘irrational’ choice which we are considering is seen in abnormal compulsive actions. A person suffering from kleptomania may be well aware that the tendency which his choice favours is in fact a minor and abnormal tendency; yet he chooses its fulfilment, and therewith he chooses the thwarting of the actually major tendencies. The tendency which he favours is perhaps emergent from a combination of his own organism, traumatic events of his own past history, and certain present objects, which he compulsively steals. The events of his past history are probably not now available to his consciousness, but they are an essential element in the whole situation from which the compulsive tendency emerges. And in spite of the fact that the sources of the tendency are in part forgotten past events, the tendency to which they have contributed is now a present cognized behaviour-tendency of the organism-in-a-certain-environment. Our problem consists in the fact that the patient’s choice favours this tendency rather than tendencies which he himself believes to be far more broadly based, such as the needs of the society in which he lives.

Evidently, we may summarize our problem in the following question. If it is true that conation is always derived from awareness of objective tendency, and that choice, in principle, favours the greatest possible fulfilment of objective tendency, how comes it that choice ever favours tendencies which, though they have played a very large part in the person’s own experience, are yet cognized as in fact subordinate to other, less familiar tendencies? Choice is, in these cases, apparently determined, not in relation to the judgment as to the greatest possible fulfilment of present objective tendencies, but in relation to either the mere frequency ox: the insistence of the tendency in the total past and present experience of the individual. Moreover, this kind of behaviour is not exceptional but very common; it is as common, in fact, as imprudence and immorality when they are committed knowingly. We may cite as a dramatic instance of this behaviour the case of a man who, having a chronic disease, deliberately chooses a course which will alleviate his suffering rather than an alternative course which he believes would greatly favour the fulfilment of his society or of mankind. His will is apparently prevented, by insistent private tendencies, from accepting those social tendencies which he himself does definitely judge to be objectively far greater needs than any needs of his own body. How, on our theory, does conation ever thus fail to develop up to the full span of cognition?

It is tempting to say that when the major objective tendency is rejected it simply is not really cognized, and that always the agent chooses what does actually seem to him the greatest objective fulfilment at the moment of choice, though sometimes in that moment he is prevented from ‘really’ cognizing the major tendency by the compulsive power of the familiar minor tendency. Were he to be able to hold the major tendency clearly in view, he would inevitably (it might be said) will its fulfilment. But such an account is simply not true to the facts of experience, and would be obviously an invention to prop up our theory. We all know quite well that we do often deliberately choose courses which we ourselves at the time admit to be imprudent or immoral, or in general to be unfavourable to the greatest possible fulfilment of known tendencies. It is true, of course, that when we act thus our choice is always for the fulfilment of some tendency; but it is not for the greatest objective fulfilment believed to be possible in the circumstances. It is noteworthy, too, that on such occasions we often deliberately cease from attending to the major tendency, just because, though we cognize it as major, we do not will its fulfilment. We shun it, lest, in cognizing more fully its nature and its implications, we should finally be captured by it and will it in spite of our present will! We thus recognize that mere cognition may influence the will, but we hope to prevent it from doing so by refusing to attend to it, and by refusing to allow it to obtain any extensive influence in our total mental content.

C. AUTOMATISM AND FREE CHOICE

SUCH AN ACCOUNT of the choice of the lesser fulfilment must, then, be rejected; and we must seek some other approach. What is it precisely that happens when a man sneezes in spite of his will not to sneeze? An act which is usually serviceable is performed by certain parts of his body in spite of the cognition that, on this occasion, the act is contrary to the need of the whole organism or the person. The active tendency is a tendency of a part; and the behaviour that occurs is the act of a part uncontrolled by the whole. Owing to their general usefulness the sneezing mechanism and impulse have become an automatic response to a certain kind of stimulus. In sneezing the physiological machinery itself usually seems to act automatically, and may successfully rebel against volition. But in special circumstances possibly there might occur a true compulsive conation of sneezing. When the subject is aware that the automatic physiological tendency conflicts with some objectively more important tendency (whether organic, personal, or social) he may succeed in controlling it; or he may not. When the minor tendency is controlled, what controls it is the conation of a major tendency. When the major conation fails to control the minor (physiological) tendency, a part of the organism is working automatically. On the other hand in certain circumstances, though the minor tendency is at first successfully inhibited, it may become so urgent that finally, not merely does it function in spite of conation, but actually it ‘over-persuades’ the subject to conate its activity. This is a schematic account of all compulsive conation.

Automatism is not confined to the strictly reflex sphere. Just as certain special expressions of general biological tendencies have become fixed as innate reflexes of the organism, so also, within the lifetime of the individual, many personal and social tendencies, which have been often active, may engender automatic behaviour and compulsive conations. When, owing to an expansion of cognition, these familiar tendencies are judged to be after all subordinate to, and in conflict with, other newly-cognized and more important tendencies, this revised value-judgment mayor may not succeed in controlling the automatism, mayor may not succeed in preventing a compulsive conation. Thus habitual behaviour that springs from a self-regarding sentiment mayor may not be mastered (through conation) by the cognition of the needs of the nation as being of objectively greater importance than the needs of the person. Or behaviour and feeling that is habitually nationalistic mayor may not be mastered by the discovery of wider needs.

On the merely reflex level the automatic behaviour may take place without facilitation by conation. But on the level of instinct and habit the automatic tendencies themselves entail volition for their functioning. Also they are themselves of greater account in the mental content than mere reflexes. Consequently, when they resist control by the expanding cognition, they function, not simply as recalcitrant physical machinery, but as fully developed compulsive conations. The lower the rank of the rebellious tendency, the more easily does the subject regard it as something foreign, outside his ‘self’, something which he cannot master. On the other hand, the higher the rank of the rebellious tendency, the more does he feel that it is a part of himself that is in revolt, or that his will is divided against itself. But when the whole of his everyday habit of behaviour is threatened by the cognition of some supreme social tendency with which it conflicts, he is likely to identify ‘himself’ with the private rather than the social tendency, and to feel that ‘he’ is in conflict with a greater and foreign need, whose claim ‘he’ ought to admit. In fact, the subject regards as ‘himself’, or ‘his’ will, those tendencies which are in general the determinants of his behaviour. Those which are inferior in rank to his general determinants he regards as either fragmentary phases of himself or automatisms external to himself. Those which are superior to his general determinants he also regards as foreign to himself, though they have a ‘claim’ on him. But the truth is that if by ‘him’ we mean a process of subjective activity, all his determinants are equally foreign to him in that they are equally objective to, and prior to, the conations which they arouse; yet also they are equally internal to his ‘self’ in that they are embraced within his content, and he conates them.

We can now formulate more clearly the relation between’ free rational choice of the believed greatest fulfilment of objective tendencies and compulsive irrational choice of the believed less fulfilment. Two influences bear upon every choice, of whatever level of complexity. On the one hand, there are automatic behaviour-tendencies inherent in the organism, or (if it be preferred), in the body and the self or ‘mental structure’, But, as we have already seen, it seems unnecessary to postulate a distinct psychical structure of dispositions. It is enough to postulate an organism of a certain form in which a general psychical capacity is emergent. We may then derive the established specific ‘psychical tendencies’ from this general capacity in its relation with particular organic needs and a particular environment. These already established tendencies, then, are in part due to the history of the race and in part due to the history of the individual, On the other hand, there is the present cognition of the total objective field of tendencies, in which the established tendencies of the organism are but minor members. The automatic behaviour-tendencies are, so to speak, the momentum imparted to the organism by past rational and irrational activities on the part of the individual and his ancestors, When automatic tendencies of the organism and the rest of the cognized field come into conflict, there occurs also a conflict in conation. In rational choice, the whole cognized field is taken into account; the final act of will favours the greatest objective fulfilment. In irrational choice, only the automatic tendencies of the organism are taken into account. But there are two kinds of automatic functioning, and they are differently related to conation. If the recalcitrant tendency is purely reflex and physical, as in the case of a sneeze, there is automatic behaviour but rarely compulsive choice. But if the recalcitrant tendency is of greater complexity, such that it entails volition for its activity, it may compel the conative act without which it cannot function; in fact there will be automatic behaviour initiated by compulsive choice.

All behaviour is behaviour on the part of the organism. And the organism has in its own nature certain innate and acquired tendencies to behave in relation to organic, personal, and social ends, But in the mental content at any time there are, besides these automatic behaviour-tendencies inherent in the organism, many other tendencies external to the organism. Rationally, the will should favour the greatest objective fulfilment. Actually, it is often a compulsive acquiescence in the functioning of some automatic behaviour-tendency of one part of the total objective field, namely, the organism. But sometimes, on the other hand, the cognition of the objective ideal succeeds in mastering the automatic tendency, and even in establishing new and rational automatic tendencies.

D. REPRESSION

ONE POINT MUST yet be made more precise in this account of choice of the less fulfilment. It seems that, quite apart from the impetus of familiar tendencies, the conation of simpler tendencies is sometimes intrinsically easier than the conation of the more complex tendencies. We may imagine the case of a man who, though he has habitually, over a long period, chosen social fulfilments at the expense of private or instinctive fulfilments, yet at last collapses into the more crude forms of conation. Since this failure is not to be attributed to habit, how shall we explain it? In such a case it is possible merely that the man’s cognition has deteriorated, that he has ceased to know, and therefore to conate, those more complex tendencies which do, as a matter of fact, demand high cognitive powers. But, on the other hand, we must admit that, even though his cognition remain intact, his conation itself may deteriorate. It is not only in the cruder kind of fiction that the established saint or social enthusiast may unexpectedly succumb to the temptations (let us say) of a disastrous sexual adventure.

Such cases are sometimes explained in terms of repression. The man, it is said, has not granted his more primitive self its due fulfilment. Hence, there has been generated, under pressure, ‘psychic energy’ at high tension straining toward release. Finally, this ‘head of energy’ has broken down resistance and carried all before it. How shall we interpret these metaphorical expressions in terms of our theory? Evidently, just as over-exercise of the more primitive tendencies may set up habits capable of resisting: the appeal of the ideal, so also rigorous resistance of them may, in some sense, cause them in the end to capture the will. Evidently the higher, more impersonal, kinds of conation are only permanently possible so long as the more primitive tendencies are allowed a moderate fulfilment.

This impracticability of the higher conations while primitive tendencies are permanently repressed has been the main support of instinct psychology. For it has seemed that the higher conations were but luxuries embroidered upon the essential needs of the organism. But this argument from repression cuts both ways. Repression, when it breaks down, shows the primitive tendencies victorious; but before it breaks down it shows them mastered in open battle by the cognition of higher tendencies. Consequently, it is no more reasonable to say that the outbreak of the primitive proves the primitive to be the real source of all conation, than to say that the control of the primitive by the higher conations proves that the primitive is but a blind approximation to the fully developed rational conation.

However this be, a sudden revolt against long-standing repression is quite intelligible on our theory of conation. We cannot, indeed, explain it in terms of the momentum of habitual choice; but we can point to the fact that, though the repressed tendencies have not been espoused (owing to their antagonism with the dominant tendencies of the mental content), yet they have all along existed. Not familiarity of choice, but the insistence of the tendency itself, finally persuades conation. The repressed tendency may be an innate tendency which has been prominent in the history of the race, and in relation to which the present individual organism is fashioned. Or it may be an acquired tendency which, though perhaps it has never been willed, has been imposed upon the nature of the organism (or the person) by circumstances, whether in infancy or at some later stage. In either case the organism itself as a physiological machine has been all along tending to act in a certain manner, and has been prevented by the cognition of major tendencies. As this repression advances, the organism gets into a more and more unhealthy state; the resisted tendency becomes more nearly irresistible, and finally breaks into action and compels the will. All behaviour is behaviour on the part of an organism. Cognition of the objective field of tendencies cannot issue in behaviour unless it has mastered the organism’s automatisms; nor can it issue in a completely unified will.

Familiarity, then, is not the real source of compulsive conation. The essential point is that the agent is the organism itself. And the organism itself at any moment has certain behaviour tendencies of its own, due in part to its own innate form, and in part to modifications brought about in its form by the operation of its past cognition and activity. Often, then, there is conflict between these established modes of behaviour and the demands of the total cognized field. And since conation is essentially conation by the organism (in its psychical capacity), not by the external world, any advance in conation has to be achieved in opposition to the organism’s own established nature.

Another aspect of this matter may here be noted, though it must be more fully developed at a later stage. When we are tired or in ill-health the more complex mental processes are apt to give way to the simpler. Cognition which is precise, and takes into account a wide field, dwindles into vague and narrow cognition. Similarly, then, conation which takes much of the objective field into account apparently entails more ‘energy’ (physical energy, perhaps) than conation which takes into account only the primitive and central part of the objective field, namely, the established organic tendencies. It is only when we are ‘wide awake’ that we can approximate our will to ‘the good will’.

E. SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION OF TENDENCY IN PSYCHOLOGY

OUR WHOLE DISCUSSION of tendency may be summarized as follows. All that can be meant by saying that an inorganic object has a tendency to behave in a certain manner is that it does in fact so behave if nothing extraneous interferes with it, or that it would so behave if it were not prevented. But, in the case of organisms, we rightly say that they have intrinsic tendencies to behave in teleological manners which entail the co-operation of a certain kind of environment; and that, if they are prevented from this natural behaviour, they will if possible behave in some manner which approximates thereto. Further, at any rate in the case of organisms, we are justified in saying that resistance of tendency involves a condition of tension or strain.

Conation presupposes awareness of a tendency objective to the conative act. Thus organic tendencies enter the mental content as impulses, or are known as enduring tendencies, and thus afford motives for conation. Beyond the strictly organic tendencies there emerges from the psychical activities of the organism a more complex class of needs which may be called needs of the person, or the psychical needs of the organism itself. From the cognition of society yet another class of tendencies enters the individual’s mental content and may determine his will. And cosmic tendencies may in principle do so also. It is mistaken to derive the more complex conations wholly from an innate set of primitive tendencies. Any objective tendency may enter the mental content and influence the will in its own right.

Such in brief is the theory of the objectivity of need which I have sought to work out in the three preceding chapters. This theory is strongly suggested by the experience of the objectivity of moral obligation. But, apart from that, it seems to be involved in combining the assumption of epistemological realism with a critical acceptance of the hormic principle in psychology, according to which all conscious striving presupposes some teleological activity prior to the consciousness of it. My aim has been to criticize and elucidate the hormic theory. It is a disputable theory; so is epistemological realism. But my claim is that when hormic psychology is purged of an animism which is wholly unnecessary to it, what is left is the theory of objective teleological tendencies. Thus though it would be rash to assert of plants that they are conscious, we cannot avoid regarding their behaviour as teleological. Whether they are conscious or not, there is an important sense in which they may be said to need light, air, and so on. Similarly in our own bodies teleological activity does seem to occur independently of our consciousness. Moreover, conscious desire in its simplest form is introspected as conscious ‘espousal’ of some organic process which, to be espoused, must first be cognized. And even in the case of more complex and mental activities careful observation seems to show that the same principle applies.

Having worked out in some detail the theory of the objectivity of need, I went on to consider, in terms of the theory, the problem of mental conflict and irrational choice. My conclusions on this subject may be summarized as follows. Within the mental content there is conflict of objective tendencies. In principle choice favours the greatest possible objective fulfilment. But behaviour is behaviour of the organism, and conation is conation by the organism. And the established behaviour-tendencies of the organism may resist control. Either they may function independently, as in an uncontrollable reflex, or they may cause irrational conation, as in imprudent or immoral conduct.

CHAPTER 10. OBJECTIVE ACTIVITY AS THE GROUND OF ETHICS

A. THE MEANING OF GOOD

HAVING ARGUED THAT conation necessarily involves awareness of, or imagination of, some tendency objective to the conative act itself, I will now consider the bearing of this psychological conclusion on ethics. But first I must gather up the threads of our various ethical inquiries, even at the cost of some repetition, so as to weave them, if possible, into a coherent pattern. Thus I hope to formulate an ethical theory which, while strictly ethical, will also be adequately related to biology and physics. Having attempted this purely abstract discussion, I shall venture at a later stage on a more concrete description of the nature of the ideal.

We must recall the fundamental ambiguity of the word ‘good’. It refers sometimes to acts of valuation, sometimes to objects valued. Only the latter sense concerns ethics. Everything that is called ‘good’ in this sense is either (a) itself a case of free teleological activity, of fulfilment of tendency, or else (b) it is instrumental to, or at least significant of, such activity or fulfilment. Conversely, everything bad is either itself a case of the hindrance of activity or tendency, or else is instrumental to, or is at least significant of, the hindrance of activity or tendency.

Here at the outset, however, we must remember our distinction between ‘tendency’ and ‘capacity’. We shall find reason to say that by ‘good’ we mean (or ought to mean, in ethics) not merely the fulfilment of the intrinsic tendencies of things as they are, but also the fulfilment of their capacity of co-operating with other things to create new tendencies and fulfilments.

At the outset also we must refer to our earlier conclusion that what we mean by ‘good’ is essentially the fulfilment of teleological activity. But since the distinction between teleological and non-teleological activity is perhaps not ultimate, we must not limit good offhand to those activities which are admittedly teleological. Even physical activity, it will be remembered, may perhaps be described as low-grade teleological activity on the part of ultimate physical units acting in relation to immediate ends. Consequently we are not entitled to deny that physical fulfilment is good merely because it is not apparently teleological. Our reluctance to admit that physical fulfilment is in any sense good may be mitigated by the thought that physical tendencies inhere in the very same stuff as that which, in higher organization, emerges into biological and even mental activity. In physical fulfilment its simplest capacity is expressed; but what is fulfilled on the physical plane is that which can in more favourable postures conduct itself in the manners which we judge most excellent. A man falls from a cliff. This physical event is certainly bad in that it entails a cessation of all organic and psychical activity in the man. But if physical activity were to be proved essentially teleological, we should have to insist that in this catastrophe some good does occur, though only on a lowly plane. For the fall is the free activity of certain ultimate physical units. This primitive good, however, is more than counterbalanced by the evil of the destruction of the man as a highly organized living being.

Now it is obvious that, for instance, good food is so called because it favours the general teleological tendency of organisms to maintain themselves. It nourishes, and is not indigestible. Good weather, no less clearly, is that kind of weather which in general favours human activities. A bad fall is a fall which does harm to the body, and so prevents its natural behaviour. A bad pain, though it is hated for its intrinsic character, owes its hatefulness apparently to its being a symptom of the destruction of living tissue, of tissue which tends to maintain itself in a state of organization. Moreover, as we have seen, there is reason to say that the painfulness of ‘pain’ sensa is constituted by our tendency to shun them.

Often, no doubt, when we say that a thing is good we seem to mean merely that it is a perfect instance of its kind. Thus a good circle is a fairly accurate approximation to the form of perfect circularity. We may be tempted to think of it as ‘trying’ to be a perfect circle; and we speak of it as good in so far as it succeeds in attaining this ‘form’ to which we suppose it to approximate. Similarly, we may speak of a good knife, meaning an instrument that approximates to the ideal form which a knife should have in order to be wholly a knife, lacking nothing, and having no irrelevant features. Thus in so far as the instrument really is a knife, and not something other than a knife, it is a good knife; in so far as it fails to be a knife, it is an imperfect or bad knife. In the same sense we may speak even of a good knave, implying that this knave is a complete and typical specimen of knavery, that his nature is not alloyed with traits of any nature incompatible with knavery.

In the actual world there are no perfect knaves or knives or circles. But in each of these cases goodness consists in approximation to an ideal. In so far as the thing falls short of that which (we suppose) is its own ideal nature, it is not its own true self. It is internally discrepant, logically incomplete, not a self-contained individual, but a sort of mixture of various conflicting forms: In fact, if that which is logically discrepant with itself cannot be real, it seems to follow that in so far as a thing falls short of perfection it is not fully real. Thus the good and the real come to be identified. On this view, then, there is not one goodness, but as many kinds of goodness as there are forms to which things approximate. The goodness of circles is quite different from that of knives; and the goodness of knives has nothing in common with the goodness of knaves. And there is yet another goodness of bucketfuls, and another of mountains, and still another of conduct.

But what reason have we to say that an actual knife or mountain strives toward, or approximates to, any form other than its actual form? And what right have we to say that a good knife is more real than a bad one? And if a bad knave is less real than a perfect knave, is a bad citizen also less real than a perfect citizen? Everything which exists does exist. Even a half-hearted villain is a perfect instance of half-hearted villainhood. Everything fulfils its own nature perfectly. Why ‘ought’ it to have some other nature?

Evidently behind this notion that goodness is conformity to type, there must be some demand for the type, some purpose which needs something for its fulfilment. When a man is illustrating geometry, and equally when he is making a wheel, a true circle fulfils his need better than an imperfect one. The form of a knife is determined by the need for a cutting instrument. And the form of a knave is determined by the purpose of some one who needs a knave, whether to commit a murder or adorn a novel. Moreover, for some murders and for some novels the half-hearted knave may be more satisfactory than the thorough kind.

The case of the knave in the novel is particularly significant. For just as in music we demand those intervals which are neither too trite nor too awkward for our grasp, so in other cases we often judge that to be good, the form of which is intelligible, but not too easily intelligible. Further, just as in music taste has developed so as to prize ever subtler harmonies and rhythms, so in other spheres we may learn to grasp, and to demand, ever more complex forms. Nor does this only hold good of art. At one mental level we may commend most highly the simple virtues, such as physical courage and generosity; but later we may appreciate more complex forms of conduct.

Even in the case of aesthetic value ‘good’ means fulfilling to some need; and, as always, the need is objective to the value-judgment. On one theory of art a good picture successfully and harmoniously presents the symbolical fulfilment of various human tendencies, which are all of them tendencies discovered in organisms, societies, and the inorganic world. But on another theory of art, which, indeed, is not incompatible with the former, the artist discovers in the external certain suggestions of rhythm and form, which in nature are never perfectly fulfilled. These rhythms and forms he disentangles from irrelevant accompaniments, and presents them (in the medium of his art) as perfected fulfilments of tendencies. Now these tendencies are not strictly tendencies of nature, though they are, indeed, capacities of nature. They are tendencies which arise from the conjunction of nature and the artist’s psychical capacity. Nevertheless, they are objective to the act which values their fulfilment. In the case of music, apart from any utilization of the fused associations of sounds and rhythms, the artist strives to present the fulfilment of certain formal potentialities of sound. In literature fused and unfused associations of words, phrases, and rhythms, playa great part, affording symbolical fulfilment of various human tendencies; but also there is again some fulfilment of the formal capacities of sound.

Similarly, the intellectual inquirer discovers in his field certain suggestions of explanatory principles none of which, on the face of it, is quite capable of ordering the facts. For him, then, that principle is good which ‘fulfils the demands of’ many facts harmoniously. He does not call the principle good merely because it satisfies his own demand for a solution; he calls it good because it is the fulfilment of suggestions given to him by the facts themselves, and thought of as tendencies, or at least capacities, of the facts. But, as in the case of art, the tendencies are not really tendencies of the facts alone; they arise through the conjunction of the facts and his psychical capacity. But though they are thus tendencies grounded in his psychical capacity, they are none the less objective to the act of valuing their fulfilment.

Even the good that is called ‘moral’ is essentially relative to the fulfilment of some tendency logically prior to its own fulfilment. Some, no doubt, have argued that moral right and wrong are absolute, and not relative to any end, that they are characters inherent in certain forms of conduct themselves, just as flatness and sharpness are supposed to be inherent in a spade, and not relative to our needs. To lie, they tell us, is intrinsically evil, whether the consequences of any particular lie be good or bad. But this view is not borne out by the facts of our moral experience, nor by the progressive criticism of the moralities of different eras. In practice we give reasons for our moral condemnation of lying. Either we say that it is contrary to the will of God, which implies that it thwarts a tendency which, in God’s mental content, gives rise to his conation; or we say that it conflicts with an impersonal and universal moral law, which means (if it means anything) that it conflicts with a need of the universe; or we point out that, if lying were sanctioned in human society, there would be an end to the mutual confidence upon which society is based. In fact, in this last case, we explain the rightness of truth-telling as instrumental to a good which we regard as intrinsic, namely, the fulfilment of the needs of society, or of individuals in social relation. Most persons are willing to lie to save a life, or for the sake of some cause which they regard as of supreme importance. But they do so with a feeling of guilt. And though this feeling is often merely habitual, or the outcome of a superstitious belief in absolute morality, it may be partly justified by the fact that any lie, in however good a cause, may do some hurt to social confidence. Finally it may be held that lying is bad because, apart from any other effects, it thwarts the cognitive tendency of the listener. A need for truth is implied in his nature as a being capable of knowing.

It is clear, then, that the good which is called moral is like all goods, essentially a fulfilment, and is inconceivable apart from some prior demand. And the demand itself is necessarily the outcome of some objective tendency.

In fact it is impossible to find anything whatever that is good which is not either itself a case of fulfilment of some tendency or capacity objective to the act of valuing, or a means toward such fulfilment, or at least a symptom of such fulfilment. Of course there are many cases in which, although a thing affords fulfilment, we do not call it good. It is said to be not good to sleep when duty calls; yet sleep is a fulfilment of organic tendency. But sleep, regarded in abstraction from its extra-organic consequences, is considered good; and it is so considered simply in that it is the fulfilment of a tendency. Instrumentally it may be bad; intrinsically it is good. Of all such cases we may say that in so far as they are less than good they are also less than fulfilment; and that, on the other hand, in so far as they are fulfilments, though of a minor kind, they are also goods, though of a minor kind.

B. THE MEANING OF BETTER AND BEST

IF THE ESSENTIAL meaning of ‘good’ is fulfilling, or favourable to free activity, what is the essential meaning of ‘better’? What do we mean when we say that one thing is better than another? Clearly, when we are judging merely from the point of view of some single tendency, we call that ‘better’ which affords more fulfilment to the tendency in question. For instance, when we are aware of an impulse to eat, and are thoroughly hungry, a solid meal is judged better than a snack; and half a loaf is better than no bread. When a society is hampered by foreign domination, that policy is the better which will produce the more freedom.

On the other hand, when we are comparing the fulfilment of one tendency with the fulfilment of another, we have to pass value-judgments on the tendencies themselves. Sometimes we may be able to compare the extent of the reality which expresses itself in each tendency. Thus the tendency of a raindrop to trickle down a window-pane expresses less of the real than the tendency of a river in spate. The tendency of one man to seek nourishment expresses less of the real than the tendency of a famished mob, or the will of their protagonist who voices their demands.

Of course such simple quantitative comparisons are not often possible. And if we were to leave the matter thus, we should be justly charged with the error of reducing the qualitative concept ‘better’ much too glibly to the crude quantitative concept ‘fulfilling more tendencies’. And indeed the phrase ‘more tendencies’ would be very inadequate, as its significance is not merely quantitative but numerical. In respect, indeed, of tendencies of the same hierarchical level, that course is better which actually fulfils more tendencies; but the essential principle of comparisons is: that is better which consists of the fulfilling of ‘more of the tendency or capacity or potentiality of teleologically active substance’. This, I submit, is the principle which in fact we do finally apply when we have to compare the goodness of things. For instance, if I say of two men that X is better than Y, I mean, apart from their social instrumentality, that X is living the fuller life. Each of them is a teleologically active substance capable of physical and psychical activity. Each of them, for instance, tends to preserve himself intact as an organism, and to control his environment in relation to whatever ends he has espoused; and X is better (in these respects), the more accurately he behaves in relation to these ends. Again, each tends to cognize his environment and to conform his will to his cognition of objective tendencies. And X is better the more he succeeds in these activities. He is better, in fact, the wider and deeper and more accurate his knowledge, and the more rational his will. And not only so, but also he is better the more capacity he has for such activities in his innate and acquired constitution. Thus in the last resort the difference between them is not like the difference between red and green, but like the difference between more red and less red. In fact it is, after all, at bottom a quantitative difference.

It may be objected that I do not show how this principle of comparison is to be applied. But I claim to have shown, at any rate, what the principle is that we do attempt to apply when we call one thing better than another. The difficulty of applying it accurately is no argument against the contention that we do apply it, or intend to apply it. If it be objected that, for instance, in the case of the man who falls down a cliff and is killed, the principle cannot apply in comparing the living activity of the man with the physical activity of his atoms in his fall and destruction, the answer once more is that this is the principle which in fact we do apply. We know that the man’s .life consists in complex teleological Activity, while physical activity appears not to do so. If we believed that physical activity were the more complete expression of the teleological nature of substance, we should judge it also the better. To make the one judgment is to make the other. But in preferring the living man we prefer what we rightly or wrongly believe to be the more complete expression of the nature of substance.

Here I would emphasize an important point, even at the risk of repetition. I have argued that by ‘better’ we mean fulfilling more of the tendency or capacity of active substances. This theory purports to be a generalization from our actual preferences. Obviously the mere fact that preference occurs does not prove the truth of this theory of preference. But the theory is derived from a critical inspection of, and induction from, actual preferences, together with what I take to be the implications of the hormic principle in psychology. According to my interpretation of the hormic principle, conation is essentially the espousal of objective teleological tendencies. Preference then, when it is not distorted by automatism, should consist in espousal of the greater objective fulfilment. And in fact (so I submit) careful inspection of preference confirms this view.

In comparing the man and the atoms of his body, we have to take into account the principle of emergence. And it is in cases where emergent differences occur that ‘better’ is regarded most emphatically as qualitative. For the emergent activity is in fact different qualitatively from the reducible. But in judging the one ‘better’ than the other, we are essentially judging it to be that in which the capacity of the active substance is more fully expressed. Thus in the last resort, though the activities which we compare differ qualitatively, we compare them in respect of a supposed underlying quantitative difference. Thus, although in these cases it is impossible to measure the degree of betterness, ‘better’ is, even here, a quantitative concept. I have assumed that the fulfilment of the emergent activity of the whole would be generally judged better than the fulfilment of the reducible activity of the parts disorganized. Whether it really is better, is a question of fact which could only be answered by discovering whether or not it is actually a greater fulfilment. I have suggested that this may well be the case. I have conceived the emergent activity as constituting a greater fulfilment even for the part itself, as in human society the individual’s social activity is experienced as a greater fulfilment for the individual than merely egoistic activity. This is open to dispute. But the point relevant to our present discussion is that, if and when we intuitively judge an emergent activity better than a reducible activity, what we are doing is judging, rightly or wrongly, that it constitutes a greater fulfilment. For instance we may intuitively judge it better, i.e. more fulfilling of active substance; and then we may seek to prove that in fact it is more fulfilling, i.e. better. Of course both the intuitive judgment and the reasoning process may be erroneous.

Sometimes in comparing tendencies we may be able to discover some more fundamental end which is served by both tendencies. Then we can judge the two tendencies (or activities) in relation to that end. Thus within the individual we say that those activities are better which contribute more to the maintenance and harmonious development of the individual. Similarly in the case of societies, those activities are better which contribute more to the development of the society. But as between an individual’s fulfilment and a society’s, the latter is likely to be better in that it is probably the fulfilment of a greater whole with tendencies emergent in social organization. But let us not forget that the will of an individual or a minority may more truly express the need of a society than the will of an unenlightened majority.

We may conclude then that the essential meaning of ‘better’ is simply ‘more fulfilling’ or ‘more expressive of the nature of active substance’; and that there is both a better which is related to any single tendency, and a better which involves the comparative evaluation of tendencies, either in respect of the extent of reality expressed, in them, or in relation to some major tendency to which they should be subordinate. For instance, as we have seen, the tendencies which the parts of a whole would have in isolation from the whole, should be subordinated to the emergent tendencies of the whole. But in human society the tendencies of the whole and of the parts are inextricably interwoven. The needs of society are the needs of its individual members, but they are the needs of the-individuals-in-relation. And from this relation the distinctively social needs emerge. The ideally social individual needs harmonious fulfilment of all individuals even more than the fulfilment of himself as a private person. For his mental content is (in the ideal case) the society of which his person is but one member. We may say, then, that, from the social point of view, that is the better which affords the greater harmonious fulfilment of individuals; but further that those individual needs are the better needs which are the more social, since the more social needs are capable of the richer fulfilment. It should be remembered also that not only the needs of extant individuals are to be taken into account, but also the needs of future generations.

We thus discover an important corollary to this account of ‘better’. If that is better which is, or is instrumental to, the greater fulfilment of tendencies, and especially of the tendencies of greater wholes, it follows that that is also better which brings into being more tendencies, and greater wholes with higher emergent tendencies. Thus in making our value-judgments we must take into account the possibility of modifying the nature of individuals and of society so that new and richer fulfilments may occur. We must, that is, take into account not only extant tendencies but also capacities.

We may now consider the most abstract meaning of the phrases ‘the best’, ‘the good’, ‘the ideal’; though we cannot at this stage inquire into the more concrete character of the ideal which is implied in the nature of the world as we know it. In general that is ‘the best’ in relation to a given tendency, or whole of tendencies, which would afford complete fulfilment to the tendencies concerned. Further, in relation to the whole universe there is a sense in which ‘the best’ is the complete fulfilment of all actual and possible tendencies of every rank, including the tendencies of the whole as a whole. But such an ideal is clearly unattainable, since tendencies conflict. We must, therefore, be content for practical purposes to mean by ‘the ideal’ the greatest possible fulfilment of tendencies in the universe. In general, we may say that the ideal is that the universe should achieve such a reorganization of its nature that obstruction may be so far as possible eliminated, and that the richest possible tendencies of the highest possible rank may be completely fulfilled, along with as much minor fulfilment as may be.

But we must further insist that, though conflict is itself evil, since it involves resistance of activity, yet if, as seems likely, it is sometimes the indispensable ground from which higher tendencies may emerge, then it is better that there should be conflict than a barren harmony. Indeed, there is some reason to suppose that conflict of subordinate units, though only conflict within special limits, is essential for the occurrence of organism.

Tendencies of lower ranks also, however, even to the lowest, must be fulfilled as far as this is possible without detriment to the higher. But only so far as this is possible. For we agreed long ago that the most complete fulfilment of anything is its fulfilment as a member of an emergent whole greater than itself.

There is an objection to this view that the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of tendency. Regarding the total universe of existence, and not merely that part of it which is teleologically active, the greatest possible fulfilment, we may be told, is just that actual amount of fulfilment which does occur. For where there is conflict the stronger must win. In every case of conflict the greatest possible fulfilment, therefore, is always achieved.

We may meet this objection by pointing out the ambiguity of the word ‘possible’ in this connexion. What does necessarily occur is the greatest possible fulfilment of certain active substances in a certain extant pattern or configuration; what does not necessarily occur is the greatest possible fulfilment of those active substances themselves, of their individual tendencies and capacities. Owing to their relationship they may hinder one another. We may imagine a universe in which opposing forces were permanently balanced in a state of strain or tension. Here some slight rearrangement, even if for the moment it were to entail less fulfilment, might produce greater fulfilment for both sides in the long run, and might perhaps even favour the emergence of new activities. But, apart from the emergence of new activities, it is clear that each antagonist in every conflict might be diverted so as to avoid collision with the other. And so each might achieve free activity. In a purely physical universe such interference were obviously impossible. But of every kind of universe we may say that it should be so ordered that all its substances should achieve free activity to the fullest ‘possible’ extent, and that all latent capacities should be fully expressed.

C. THE MEANING OF OUGHT

AT AN EARLIER stage of this inquiry I offered a psychological description of the fact that what is believed to be the greater objective fulfilment is not always chosen. On such occasions we judge that we ‘ought’ to have chosen otherwise. We may, that is, recognize that the end which we have rejected has in some sense a claim on us. It is now time to attempt a logical analysis of the nature of this claim.

Let us first consider the meanings of the word ‘ought’. The word is not only used in a ‘moral’ sense. We may say, for instance, ‘If he desired to reach Paris to-night, he ought to have travelled by air.’ Here it is implied that the ‘ought’ is relative to a desire and a certain physical situation. Had he not desired to reach Paris to-night, it would be meaningless to say (in this ‘non-moral’ sense) that he ought to have travelled by air. All that is intended by the statement is that, in the given circumstances, the only means of fulfilling his desire was to travel by air. Given the desire and the circumstances, the ‘ought’ follows, whether or not he is in fact intelligent enough or energetic enough to carry it out.

The word ‘ought’ may be used in this ‘non-moral’ sense with reference also to one person’s desire and another person’s action. We may, for instance, say ‘I desired him to reach Paris to-night; therefore from my point of view he ought to have travelled by air.’ He, of course, will not admit this obligation unless he has entered into my point of view, unless, in fact, he and I have been determined by cognition of the same objective tendencies. Yet, whether he has entered into my point of view or not, and whether or not my desire is a just expression of all the objective tendencies in the situation, it. is nevertheless true universally that from the point of view which I happen now to occupy he ought to have travelled by air. Within the universe of discourse of my desire and the physical circumstances, he ought to have travelled by air. On the other hand within the universe of discourse of his desire and the physical circumstances it is untrue that he ought to have travelled by air. In each case the ‘ought’ is universal. It is true universally that in such a situation, not complicated by other factors, so and so ought to be done.

But my desire and his desire, though they are centres of universes of discourse which are distinct, refer to one and the same world of fact. And in that world their fulfilments may be incompatible. Thus arises the distinctively moral meaning of ‘ought ‘. One of the desires, we may judge, morally ought to be fulfilled, and the other ought not. We evaluate the two desiderata with reference to some standard independent of each desire.

Within the merely prudential sphere it is easy to find a measure for this comparative evaluation. Desires, as we have already seen, are essentially desires for the fulfilment of cognized objective needs. We often say that, though a man desires so and so, he does not need it, and ought not to have it, and even ought not to desire it. When a man’s desires conflict, we judge them with reference to his needs; but of course we may judge mistakenly as to what his needs really are. Of an engineer we may say that he ‘ought to have known’ that a certain shaft would not stand so great a strain. In such a case we mean that one whose activity is that of engineering had a need which only the knowledge of certain facts could fulfil, whether he desired such knowledge or not. Indeed, he ‘ought to have desired’ such knowledge, since he did in fact need it. (And when we say that he ‘had a need’, we mean in this case that the need was involved, whether he knew it or not, in some active objects embraced within his mental content.)

Clearly, then, within the prudential sphere we judge desires in relation to a supposed need of the organism or of the person, and may say that in general a man’s desires ought to correspond with his need. We judge, in fact, with reference to a universe of discourse in which the supposed need of the man is the determining factor. And if we are asked by what right we subordinate his felt desires to his perhaps unconscious need, we justify ourselves by insisting that every desire essentially derives from just the consciousness of a need, even when that consciousness consists of a grossly erroneous judgment. The desire has, so to speak, no rights against the need, because the objective determinant of the desire is the need itself. From this it follows that we may translate the sentence, ‘Since he desired to reach Paris to-night, he ought to have travelled by air,’ into the sentence, ‘In consequence of the need of a certain object within his mental content, namely, the need for him to reach Paris to-night, there occurred also the need for him to travel by air.’ In fact ‘ought’, in this ‘non-moral’ sphere, depends wholly on need.

But beyond the merely prudential sphere the situation is apparently different. For the needs of different individuals may conflict; and then we may judge that the need of the one ought to be fulfilled and the need of the other ought to be sacrificed. What can we mean by this? In general what is it that we really mean when we say that a man ‘morally’ ought to love his neighbours, or ought to educate his children, or ought to obey the laws, or ought to serve God, or ought to behave so as to advance an ideal even at the cost of his own life?

Clearly we do not mean, as we do in the case of prudence, that the man himself really needs to do these things in order to fulfil his own nature. Even if it be true that he cannot, as a matter of fact, attain fulfilment without such conduct, without, for instance, sacrificing his life in the cause, we do not mean that he ought to behave in this way just because his fulfilment demands it.

On the contrary we mean (whether with reason or not) that the universe itself is such that, when we take into account all that we know of its nature, there is seen to be a dominant need whose fulfilment demands these activities on the part of a man. And when we say that this need has a ‘claim’ on each of us, we mean, reasonably or unreasonably, that goodness must be universally grounded; and that in the universal view the fulfilment of this supreme need appears as the intrinsically best end; and that any fulfilment which conflicts with this ideal is therefore necessarily not sanctioned in the universal view. If it is still asked, why the universal need should supplant our private needs, we might reply that it is the expression of an entity objectively far greater than any private person, and that because of its greatness we intuitively recognize its claim. Such in brief would seem to be the essence of what we mean by moral obligation.

D. LOGICAL BASIS OF OBLIGATION

WE MUST NOW try to state the logical basis or justification of this sense of obligation toward something regarded as other than the experient. And first it must be insisted that any account of obligation which slurs over the distinction between self and not-self is necessarily false. The essence of obligation is that it is felt toward something regarded as distinct from the subject. Morality does not arise if the major need, which is the source of. the moral claim, is felt as a need of the greater self. The essential fact about the moral claim is that it is not logically grounded in the need for self-fulfilment, even though acceptance of it may incidentally lead to self-fulfilment. If the self is fulfilled in moral behaviour, this is because it has embraced something intrinsically good; the ideal is not good because it is the fulfilment of self. The characteristic fact about obligation is that it is felt, not as an impulse toward self-fulfilment, but as an impulse of loyalty to something thought of as good intrinsically, as being good whether it is within the mental content or not. Perhaps this feeling is merely illusory; perhaps it is not. But clearly it cannot be given an adequate logical justification by any theory which seeks to explain it in terms of its precise contrary.

The starting-point of an adequate theory of obligation is a clear understanding of the objective source of conation. We must hold firmly to the fact that conation is in essence neither the pursuit of feeling, nor the pursuit of exclusively organic fulfilment, nor yet the pursuit of exclusively personal fulfilment; but is primarily the espousal of whatever tendencies are cognized within the objective mental content. Though conation is, of course, a unique mental act, and is not ‘forced’ by anything external, it is also essentially directed, or suggested, by an objective tendency within the cognized field. And this epistemologically objective tendency, however erroneous, owes its dynamic nature in the last resort to the ontologically objective world. Conation is, so to speak, the ‘living through’, or conscious championing of, the process, or drive, or resisted thrust, of some reality other than the act of conation. The direction of every act of conation is thus entirely derived from cognition of the objective tendency that is being conated. Conation without such an objective tendency is simply inconceivable, meaningless.

The ground of obligation, then, is to be seen through an understanding of the nature of conation itself. Not that the logical ground of obligation lies in the nature of conation, or of conative beings; we have insisted that it does not. But by studying the nature of conation we discover that at all levels it entails an intuitive and unanalysable apprehension of an objective claim. Not only in the recognized moral sphere, but in every conation, the motive source is this intuition of objective tendency as having a claim, or constituting a claim, on any conative being who cognizes it. Any such claim has, of course, only provisional authority. It may have to be denied because it conflicts with objectively more important claims. Its universality may have to be restricted; but in itself it is presented as universal.

Conation itself, then, even when it is distorted by automatism, is in its very nature an intuitive loyalty to objective tendency. In every conative act, even the most automatic, we express, as it were, allegiance to some part or aspect of the world. And we do so, not because the object of our conation happens to satisfy some demand intrinsic to ourselves as conative beings, but because the object itself, through our cognition, rouses us to conativity. Our allegiance is doubtless of our own giving, but also it is of the object’s awakening. Our conativity is suggested in us (though not created) by the object cognized as tending. If this is true, namely that every conative act is essentially a championing of some tendency of the real, the final goal of all conation is the greatest possible fulfilment of the whole real. This conclusion follows, not from any rational impulse in ourselves, nor from any real will for self-fulfilment, but from the nature of every object of conation. In awakening to allegiance to one object, we incur obligation to all; since all alike are objects.

To say that conativity is awakened by the object is to say that the fulfilment of the objective tendency or capacity is intuited as intrinsically desirable, or as having, or rather being, an intrinsic good. The only kind of object which has this intrinsic goodness is, as we have seen, the fulfilment of objective tendency or capacity. Or, more precisely, by goodness we mean essentially fulfilment of objective tendency. For it is meaningless to assert that anything which has no tendency, or capacity, or need, can have a claim. The concept of ‘claim’ involves a something active and unfulfilled. Goodness, were it a static character of objects, and not the fruition of capacity, would simply occur or not occur as sensory characters do; and its absence could not demand our activity. Whatever degree of cognitive skill we employ for the true apprehension of the object, its fulfilment, when once it is cognized, is intuited as (apart from conflict with other active objects) intrinsically desirable. And, apart from the distortion of automatism, the greater fulfilment is intuited as more desirable than the less, as intrinsically better than the less. Thus in the object of every conative act it is implied that the intrinsic best is the greatest possible fulfilment of the objective world. And this ideal has a ‘claim’ over us in the sense that, in spite of our ignorance and our automatism, each of our conative acts accepts as its goal an objective fulfilment which is but an abstraction from the objective ideal. Since all conation is loyalty to objective tendency, we inevitably acknowledge, even in the meanest act of conation, the claim of the ideal. Or rather, whether we consciously acknowledge the claim or not, it holds of us. For every act of conation springs from an intuition of an intrinsic good; and from the many intrinsic goods arises the possibility of an intrinsic best which is most desirable or ought most to be desired, whether anyone desires it or not.

Here an objection will perhaps be made and must be squarely faced. After all, it may be said, obligation remains a mystery or an illusion. You may continue to insist that conation is evoked by awareness of objective tendency, and that when it is unhampered by automatism or by ignorance it seeks the objectively greatest possible fulfilment; but this makes no difference to the fact that we do often knowingly seek the less fulfilment rather than the greater. You still fail to tell in what sense conation ought to seek its ‘natural’ goal rather than the unnatural and irrational goal which it does seek on these occasions. Within the prudential sphere desires are admittedly to be judged in relation to the individual’s own need, since desire is derived from need. But you have rejected the view that the claim of the moral ideal rests on its being the real need of the individual. You insist that his need may conflict with the ideal; and that if he has come to need the ideal, this is because he has discovered the ideal to be good intrinsically, and has conformed his desire to the ideal. Surely in this insistence on the absolute objectivity of the ideal you destroy its moral claim over the individual. Unless in some sense he really wills it, it cannot be for him a ground of action.

In fact it may be objected that after all we have derived obligation from the nature of conation; and that thus we have fallen back on the orthodox view that obligation holds because the real will of the agent is the good will. For in effect we have said that the conative being is such that, unless he wills the ideal, he is false to his own nature as a conative being, and that this claim of his own conative nature constitutes the moral claim. Were our nature such that we inclined to conate not objective fulfilment but objective unfulfilment, the ideal of fulfilment would have no claim on us.

This objection must be answered as follows. We have not derived obligation from the nature of conation. We have only said that the logical ground of obligation is to be seen through an understanding of the nature of conation. The ground itself, we have said, lies in the nature of the dynamic objects which are cognized. We intuitively cognize the activity of objects as constituting a claim on all conative beings. Thus all conation is essentially moral, even when it is not as moral as it ought to be! It is essentially moral in that it springs from an unanalysable intuition that a certain objective fulfilment is desirable in the strict ethical sense; that in fact it ought to be desired simply because of the dynamic nature of the object, and not because of any psychical consequences.

Here, then, we come in line with the intuitionists, though we apply their principle in a wider field. They hold that moral obligation is based on a unique intuition that certain kinds of acts ought to be done, and others ought not to be done, and that this obligation applies universally. They deprecate any attempt to explain the moral sense in terms of pleasure, or self-fulfilment. This doctrine of intuitive moral apprehension we accept; but we must apply it differently. For we recognize the same unique intuition as the source of every desire, and the same assertion of universality. As, in the sphere of cognition, credulity is primitive and doubt the outcome of conflict of beliefs, so, in the sphere of conation, the assertion of the universality of the claim of each conated tendency upon all beings capable of serving it, is primitive, and is only qualified in so far as tendencies are found to conflict.

The objection that I have attempted to meet really assumes what it seeks to prove. To the theory that motive is essentially objective it replies by assuming that motive must necessarily be subjective. In postulating that our nature might be such as to conate unfulfilment of objects rather than fulfilment it misses the point. Only through the suggestion of cognized tendencies does our dormant conative capacity awake and direct itself. Conation is in essence conation of objective activity.

E. EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

ANOTHER DIFFICULTY MUST be faced. Conation has been derived from the cognition of tendency; and the moral claim has been grounded in the cognition of the greatest possible fulfilment of tendency within the objective mental content. The ground, then, (we may be told), is not the object itself, or the tendency itself in the object; it is simply the cognition of the tendency of the object. Thus the logical basis of obligation would seem to be, after all, not the need of objects themselves, but the individual’s need to harmonize his conation with his cognition. And so the vaunted objectivity of the moral claim turns out to be only an epistemological, and not an ontological, objectivity. In what sense, then, can that immense part of the world which is beyond the individual’s mental horizon be said to have a moral claim on him? For instance in what sense, if any, is it true that a man who is ignorant of his neighbour’s need, or his society’s need, ought to discover it and strive to fulfil it?

A full answer to this point would doubtless entail a long epistemological discussion. But here we need only note that there is reason to hold that the object of knowledge is in principle, and apart from error, identical with the existent object. When, and if, we know a thing, we know it, and not merely a ‘thought’ of it. Doubtless there is error in all our experience; but in principle what we know is the real itself. The content of our cognition is given us by, and is in part identical with, an independent real. And so our cognized tendencies are given us by, and are in part identical with, tendencies of the independent real. Thus if the conativity of all conative acts owes its being, in part, to cognition of tendencies, it ultimately owes its being, in part, to the tendencies of the real itself. It is, in principle, the real which gets itself known by us and gets its fulfilment willed. But owing to our private limitations and automatisms it gets itself known imperfectly and willed distortedly. To say that the fulfilment of the real ‘ought’ to be willed, is to say that the real has a capacity for being known, and for its fulfilment to be willed by us, but that owing to our limitations this capacity is very imperfectly fulfilled, and therefore constitutes a perpetual demand upon us. This demand thus arises from the fact that all conation is an espousal of objective tendency.

But even yet there is an obscurity. Obligation has, indeed, been successfully derived, not merely from cognition, but from the tendencies of the real objects of knowledge. We have certainly passed beyond the psychological to the ontological ground. Nevertheless, there still seems to be a gulf, not indeed between mental states and the real, but between those reals which are known and those which are not known. What claim have the tendencies of unknown reality on us?

The answer is simple. We have already seen it clearly expressed in the ethics of Professor Hobhouse. The good is objective and universal. It does not depend on any particular individual’s pleasure, nor on his conation. Nor does it depend on any particular individual’s cognition or view of the world. I have suggested that this principle of rationality does not really hold in a system which makes pleasure constitutive of good; but the ethical theory which I have advocated, having derived obligation from beyond the sphere of private mental states, must clearly accept a universal point of view, and allow to all reals an equal status, whether known or unknown.

There is yet another possibility of misunderstanding. The moral claim, we say, is the claim which is intuited as made by all the unfulfilled needs of the universe. Of course we know very little about the universe, and almost nothing about the universe as a whole; but the moral claim is experienced as a claim made on the part of all unfulfilled needs within our mental content, i.e. all unfulfilled needs cognized in the universe. Our view of the needs of the universe may be very mistaken, owing to our ignorance; but this is irrelevant to the nature of moral experience, which is obligation toward any teleologically active substance, and therefore to all such in their degree. I do not, then, suggest that each case of obligation is grounded in the need of the universe as an organic whole. Each is grounded in some particular need, whether the universe is organic or not. But all must be taken into account. If the universe as a temporal organic whole has or could have needs, we are morally bound by it. If not, we are still bound by the sum of needs within it, simply for their own sake. If, on the other hand, the universe is a supra-temporal organic whole, and necessarily perfect, then, indeed, moral obligation is not relevant to it. But in my last three chapters I shall try to show that we may and do have ethical experience in relation to it, namely, we may admire it for the perfection of its fulfilment.

F. SUMMARY

I WILL NOW summarize the main argument of this chapter, and indeed the central theory of this book. We habitually use the word ‘good’ in two entirely different senses, namely, sometimes as a predicate of the act of valuation itself, and sometimes as a predicate of the object valued. Much ethical disagreement arises from the fact that the disputants are assuming different meanings of ‘good’, so that to each his own theory seems plausible and the other impossible. Sometimes, however, ethical theories merely confuse the two meanings, and by ambiguity seem to escape the difficulties of both. If moral obligation is to be taken seriously and not as a mere delusion, we must, in ethics, stick to the second sense rigorously, but with open eyes. We must seek to discover what general character objective to the act of valuation is consciously valued, and what condition of an object is intuited as exercising a moral claim. I have tried to answer these questions by saying that primarily what we mean by ‘good’ in an ethical sense is the fulfilment, or progressive fulfilling, of teleological tendencies objective to consciousness. This view, I submit, avoids the difficulties both of the self-fulfilment theory and of the theory according to which ‘good’ is a simple quality. The former is inadequate because at heart it is egoistic. The trouble of the latter lies in the meaninglessness of good when divorced from teleology. I, however, have derived ‘good’ from teleology, though not from the conscious act of striving. In Professor Moore’s theory ‘ought’ remains entirely unintelligible (not merely inexplicable, but meaningless), just because in his view ‘good’ is independent of any demand, need, lack; in fact, independent of any teleological activity. He is right in insisting on the intuitive basis of ethics; he is right that we intuit an objective claim. But for a claim to be intuited, there must be something intuited as having a need; there must be an object which is dynamic, not static.

Such being the ethical meaning of ‘good’, it follows that by ‘better’ we should mean ‘fulfilling more of the tendency or capacity of teleologically active substance’. This principle holds even in respect of tendencies of different emergent rank. By ‘the best’, or ‘the ideal’, we should mean the complete fulfilling of the capacity of the world.

Having thus formulated the basis of an ethical theory, I went on to found thereon a theory of moral obligation, which I summarize as follows. Every conative act entails an intuition of a claim made by some cognized object which is cognized as a teleologically active substance. This claim is intuited as a universal claim on any conative being. The act of conating its fulfilment is an act, not of mental content, but of an organism; and the organism has certain established behaviour-tendencies of its own. The rational ideal, the greatest possible progressive fulfilment of all active substances, entails the limitation and even the vetoing of many claims. Whether a conative being recognizes the ideal, and the claim of the ideal, or not, the claim holds of him; for it inheres, not in the nature of subjectivity, but in the nature of active substances. The nature of the claim of the ideal derives from the nature of the particular claims which we intuit; but the primary intuition of an objective claim cannot be explained. It is a brute fact of experience. When a conative being wills the fulfilment of objectively minor claims at the expense of objectively major claims, his will violates, not the nature of subjectivity, but the nature of the objective world. The moral situation arises from the fact that though conation is the act of an organism having subjective capacity, what needs to be conated through that subjectivity is distinct from that subjectivity. While subjects or organisms having subjective capacity can by their activity favour or thwart needs, those needs themselves emerge not from subjectivity but from the intrinsic nature of certain objects.

The foundation of this theory is the contention that we intuit teleologically active substances as exercising a moral claim, and that, after due criticism, nothing else can be discovered which exercises such a claim. The reader must decide for himself whether this generalization is true. I can only ask him to survey his own ethical experience, and make an induction therefrom. I can only ask him whether he does not in the last resort mean, by calling a thing ‘good’, that it is a fulfilment, or a progressive fulfilling, of teleological activity. In my own case at any rate, it seems clear that when I attend carefully to my ethical experience, I do intuit all teleological activity as exercising a claim on my subjectivity; and that on the other hand if I have ever felt obligation toward anything that turned out subsequently not to fall in this class, I have ceased to feel obligation toward it as soon as I have seen it in the new light.

Finally, if it be suggested that what ought to be achieved is not the mere fulfilment of objective teleological tendencies, but consciousness thereof, I reply that in view of the hormic principle it seems to be of the very essence of consciousness that it awakens in the service of ends prior to it, and objective to it. In fact I am forced to regard consciousness as in its very nature instrumental, and obligation as grounded not in it but in the teleologically active substances in whose activity consciousness itself is instrumental. This view, indeed, is regarded by many as hopelessly paradoxical, but only because they cannot refrain from assuming that instrumentality, and teleology itself, involve consciousness.

CHAPTER 11. DETERMINISM AND FREE WILL

A. THE RELATION OF FREEDOM TO ETHICS

IT IS COMMONLY said that moral conduct, though it must conform to an objective principle, must also be ‘free obedience’. The agent must will the act for no other reason than that he believes it to be, in the circumstances, the right act. His will must have no determinant save the goodness of the moral principle on which he is acting. The act must be his act, and not the act of something else ‘compelling’ him. In some important sense it must be true that he can do either the right or the wrong act; and that, in choosing the right, he accepts a principle which he could have rejected.

This assertion, that the moral agent, is a free agent, does not deny that the behaviour of the good man is predictable theoretically in every detail, and to a large extent ‘even in practice. For it is essential to morality that there should be an objective and universal principle or system of principles according to which all right. acts, in whatever circumstances, must be regulated. The right act, there- fore, in any situation, can theoretically be described beforehand; and this is the act that the good man will choose. But though the behaviour of the good man is thus theoretically predictable in every detail, it is not to be called moral conduct unless it is free behaviour, unless his acceptance of the moral principle springs from nothing but his own ‘good will’. in fact, though his conduct is strictly determined in relation to the demands of the objective situation, it must be actually effected (if it is to be moral conduct) by nothing other than the free moral agent, who accepts the moral principle in general, and therefore freely chooses a determinate course through diverse circumstances.

That all the acts of the good man are theoretically predictable would, no doubt, be denied with horror by many whose opinion deserves very great respect. It would be admitted that many of his acts are predictable; but also it would be insisted that only those are predictable which consist in the fulfilling of definite obligations, which are, in fact, acts of simple justice. Those acts of supererogation which go beyond mere justice, which do more than fulfil the rights of others, which express positively and subtly the personality of the agent, would be denied to be predictable. Great works of art, for instance, and the morally creative lives of spiritual persons, would be said to be the spontaneous expression of emergent characters in human personality. To claim that all this is predictable, it might be said, is to fail to take emergence seriously. For the essence of emergence is that the behaviour of the whole is ‘the unique expression of the nature of the whole, and therefore is not predictable from any knowledge but knowledge of the behaviour of the whole itself. And even so, knowledge of the whole’s past behaviour is no adequate guide to its future behaviour, since novel situations may arise which call forth novel emergent behaviour. Thus, though in theory at least it is possible to predict what the good man will not do, in that will not be unjust, or mean, or cowardly, and so on, all those acts which more positively express his unique personality are unpredictable. Even he himself cannot predict them. They have to be done before they can be known.

This view certainly calls for very careful consideration. All hangs on the meaning of the phrase ‘theoretically predictable’. We must, of course, admit that the acts of the good man are not all predictable in actual practice. What then do we mean by saying that they are theoretically predictable? We mean that anyone with full knowledge of the man’s circumstances, and of his nature as a highly developed organism, could predict all his acts, even those of creative imagination. We mean, in fact, that the man’s acts are not arbitrary, that they follow from, or are expressions of, the intercourse of the man and the environment. If this doctrine seems not to take emergence seriously, either the doctrine has been interpreted to mean more than it does mean, or emergence itself has been misunderstood. We must not forget that, although the emergent behaviour of a whole cannot be predicted merely from knowledge of the nature of the parts unorganized, yet admittedly the behaviour of the whole is determined by the nature of its parts. .In organization they reveal (or if it be preferred, they assume) a ‘new’ nature; and anyone getting to know this new nature could predict the emergent behaviour.

But, it will be objected, the new nature is in principle unknowable, save from observation of the emergent behaviour itself. This contention I should reject. It is true that, for prediction of the emergent behaviour, some- thing is needed beyond knowledge of the reducible nature of the parts; but that something is theoretically obtainable. What is needed is knowledge of: (a) the reducible nature of the parts, (b) the environment,(c) certain principles which have been called the law or laws of hierarchical emergence. These last are theoretically discoverable by induction from experience of the whole range of emergent levels; and, once discovered, they would enable us to predict the emergent nature of any given whole, provided that we had knowledge of its parts and its environment. It may be objected that these laws of hierarchical emergence are figments merely of a pious hope. At present we know nothing of them; and we may be told that we are not even entitled to assume that emergence is systematic at all. Yet, while in comparison with what remains to be discovered we do indeed know extremely little about the principles of emergence, on the other hand in certain limited fields we have fragmentary but important inductive knowledge of the kind of whole that does as a matter of fact emerge in certain conditions, and of the kind of behaviour that is to be expected of it. Thus we do as a matter of fact know something about the kinds of behaviour to be expected from men of specific stock and specific circumstances. And the more we study, the more we can predict. To set theoretical limits to this advance were wholly unjustified. No doubt many extravagances have recently been committed by psychologists; but we must not forget that their science is still in its infancy. Though in practice their analysis, and still more their prediction, are extremely uncertain, they seem at least to have established certain very general principles which cover schematically the whole field of mental activity. Whether, indeed, psychology will ever advance so far as to be able to predict, for instance, the character of the next work of a particular artist (of course only after incredibly minute study of the particular case), is irrelevant to this argument. The point is that, though such prediction would entail incomparably more knowledge and skill and patience than the predictions which we effect to-day, and though some of the subtler principles which it would involve may as a matter of fact lie wholly beyond the grasp of human intelligence, yet our psychological experience strongly suggests that prediction of behaviour is limited only by our ignorance and lack of insight, not by anything arbitrary or incoherent in behaviour itself.

To sum up this matter, then, when we say that the good man’s behaviour is theoretically predictable, we mean only that even in its most splendid achievements it is a systematic expression of his nature, and that his nature itself is systematically connected with other things. We do not, for instance, deny that one factor in his nature is a certain determinate degree of the capacity of spontaneous loyalty to the great and remote things at the expense of the minor and intimate things. Nor do we deny that the more complex and creative kinds of behaviour demand for their interpretation knowledge which could never be derived from study merely of the less complicated kinds of beings. We claim only that the faith in systematic connexion is scarcely less justified in the mental than in the physical sphere. All prediction, indeed, rests upon the conviction that laws will hold good in the future just because, so far as we know, they have always held good in the past; and this conviction is incapable of strict logical defence. But the problem of induction applies alike to psychological and physical prediction, and need not trouble us here.

The advocates of ‘free will’ against ‘determinism’ are apt to lose sight of the fact that in practical life the regularity of the good man’s behaviour, and the predictability of his actions are far more important than the fact that he is a free agent, and that in a special sense he could be irregular and unpredictable. It matters little to his neighbours whether he is free or not so long as, freely or not, he does what is right. And surely we would rather our governors were automata who inevitably must act so as to achieve the good, than that they were less mechanical but more erratic centres of indeterminate ‘free will’. And for ourselves, would we not willingly sacrifice our freedom to choose right or wrong if we could thereby ensure that for the future we should invariably do right, though as automata? To wish otherwise would be to care more for our own righteousness than for the objective ideal.

Morality, indeed, at least in one sense of the word, depends on the freedom of moral agents. Were there no kind of freedom there could be no obligation in any ordinary sense. But morality depends not only on freedom but also on the distinction between good and evil; and this is quite independent of the question of freedom. It is easy to conceive a world in which, though there were no free agents, there were yet good things and bad things, and possibilities of goods and bads. In such a world acts might still be good and bad instrumentally; and in virtue even of their form alone they might still have intrinsic value. For instance, those acts might be intrinsically best which were fulfilments of the highest rank of emergent tendencies of agents. In such a world the good ‘ought’ to be achieved although it could not be achieved by free agents.

On one view, indeed, freedom is fundamental, namely on Kant’s view that nothing can possibly be good without qualification save a good will. Such a will, he held, is good not because of what it effects, but good in itself. All other goods are but instrumental to the creation of the good will. And when we are told to treat human beings always as ends and never as means, it is implied that the end which is their fulfilment is that they should fulfil themselves by freely willing the good will.

On this essentially moralistic view, then, the supremely important end in the universe is that free agents should choose to act according to an objective, universal and rational principle. Kant’s universal maxim is now generally admitted to be insufficient. ‘I am never to act otherwise,’ he says, ‘than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law.’ It is not difficult to show that the only universality characteristic of the good will is that, in each particular situation, it is just the will to do that particular act which, in the circumstances, will achieve the greatest good. The mere universality of the good will does not constitute its goodness; though universal it certainly must be, since in any sphere (to adopt Professor Hobhouse’s phrase) principles which are fundamental can admit of no exception. The goodness of the moral principle in fact must consist, not merely in that it can be universalized, but in that it is the universal application of the principle of the fulfilling of needs, in that it is universally the will for that which, in the universal view, is seen to be demanded.

Kant’s aim was to divorce morality entirely from the mere fulfilment of desire, or the mere following of inclination. For in his view the essence of morality was that it was free choice according to a purely rational principle, while inclination and every kind of need was conceived as external to the rational agent himself. To follow inclination, even the noblest inclination, was therefore to sell oneself into bondage, and to cease from being a free rational being. And, of course, it is true that the moral experience is often felt as a resistance of inclination for the sake of a rational principle. But clearly it is a mistake to suppose therefore that morality has nothing whatever to do with need, that it is, so to speak, a needless acceptance of abstract rationality. It is, indeed, as we have seen, a spontaneous espousal of an objective need, but in mere rational coherence there is not any need which can be espoused. Though, according to the theory adopted in this book, motive is objective, not subjective, voluntary action is none the less inconceivable without motive. Kant lost sight of the fact that moral conduct, in transcending one need, merely accepts another and greater. The rational principle in morals is but the principle of embracing the widest field of objective needs.

Kant’s prepossession with freedom was perhaps in part inherited from the free will controversies of protestant Christianity. But it was also the outcome of his own ‘Copernican revolution’ in the theory of knowledge. When the experient was taken to be fundamental in epistemology, it was natural that the attitude of the experient should seem the all-important fact in ethics. But however Kant was led to his theory, he seems to fail through a too exclusive interest in morality itself at the expense of the goodness of ends. It is well, therefore, to remind ourselves that, while without goodness of ends there can be no morality, without any shadow of freedom there may still be goodness of ends. Even if every human act be predestined in the nature of things, and all our moral struggles simply hallucinatory, yet it may still be in strictness better that one act should be done rather than another.

But in a world in which men have a sense that they are free agents confronted by an objective distinction between good and evil, ‘goodness of will’ must seem of great importance. For only through ‘goodness of will’ is the good likely to be achieved. But to suppose that ‘goodness of will’ is itself the ultimate ground of the distinction between good and evil is, if not precisely to set up a means as an end, at least to mistake a part for the whole. If we are to take human beings as ends in themselves, let us do so without evasion. Let us not take them as ends only in so far as they achieve an abstract form of will. Let us rather take them as ends, because they themselves, with their diverse needs, are capable of richer fulfilment than any other beings within our ken. Thus we shall at least avoid an abstract moralism. For the good will, after all, is only good in that it seeks ends that are good in themselves. A man of good will is just a man whose established habit it is to seek ends which seem best by acts which seem most effective

Nevertheless, the question of freedom is important in ethics. For, though freedom is not the ground of good and evil, it is certainly in some sense relevant to moral obligation. If the experience of free choice is illusory, the experience of obligation must be illusory too. If, when a man chooses, he could not possibly have chosen otherwise, there seems no meaning in saying that he was morally bound to choose otherwise. We may still say that the good ought to be achieved, meaning thereby simply that it is good that the good be achieved; but we have no right to say of anyone that he ought to have done otherwise than he did, unless we believe that he could have done otherwise. Where there is no freedom of choice, right acts seem to merit no praise, and wrong acts no blame; save in the sense in which all good things are to be praised, or rather appreciated, and all bad things condemned. Obligation can only occur if the agent can, but also can not, act so as to achieve the best in the circumstances.

B. INTROSPECTION OF VOLITION

IN EVERY KIND of choice we certainly do feel that we ‘can’ take either course. At this moment I am confident that I can either raise my hand or not ‘as I will’. I do not experience my choice to move it as something foreign to me, compelling me; my choice is simply I, as I am at the moment. If a fly settles on my hand and tickles me, I may still move or not move, as I will. But in this case I do experience an objective and rebellious ‘tendency to move’. And indeed the tickling may become so disturbing that at last my hand may twitch in spite of my will to keep it at rest. The more I am tickled, the more vigorously have I to ‘will’ not to move, in order to restrain the automatic action of my hand. By an act of volition I may interfere with the natural rhythm of my breathing, now accelerating it, now stopping it altogether. And the greater the divergence from the normal rate, and again the more prolonged the interference, the more vigorously must I ‘will.’ But if anyone will try for himself the experiment of holding his breath for a long while, he will find that, save in the last extremity, there is no actual rebellion of the physiological mechanism, and flouting of his command that it should not act. Rather, at every stage but the last extremity, the mechanism is absolutely under his control; but he becomes increasingly reluctant to control it, increasingly reluctant to issue the inhibitory command which, at every stage, he can issue, and at every stage but the last will be absolutely obeyed; but the organic consequences of the command become increasingly undesirable.

Similarly with hunger. A man may choose to starve rather than steal food; but, as the organic impulse to eat increases in urgency, his resolution may waver, and finally collapse. But at every stage, even (in this case) in the last extremity, his behaviour is absolutely under subjective control. When he finally succumbs to temptation, he chooses to give rein to a tendency which, had he but chosen otherwise, would have been curbed.

In a clear moral choice the good does not compel us in the manner of the last extremity of breathlessness. Nor does the evil; though many persons seek to excuse them- selves by believing that their choice of evil was the work of some force outside themselves. When we choose rightly we eagerly take credit for the choice, insisting that by a spontaneous ‘act of will’ we chose for no other reason than that the choice seemed right. But when we choose wrongly we are apt to say that the effort to control ourselves, to master our instinctive or habitual mechanism, was beyond our power. And it is certainly true that in panic-flight, or rash pugnacity, and even in gradual surrender to a subtle temptation, we may feel ourselves unable to resist the drive of a mechanism. But though the irrational choice may be called ‘compulsive’, it is choice all the same. It is not physical compulsion, but a definite psychical surrender to mutinous demands ‘within the citadel of the self’. In one sense, of course, both the reflex mechanism and the mechanism of instinct and habit are within the self’, in that both fall within the mental content. In another sense they are both ‘external to the self’, in that they are both objective to the subjective act of choice or will, which accepts or rejects tendencies in something other than itself, namely in the psycho-physical organism. But whereas pure reflex activity may take place without any volition, strictly psychical activity, even when ‘compulsive’, does involve an act of choice or will. The sense of guilt is evidence that, however we excuse ourselves, we know (or at least believe) that we I could have done otherwise.

It certainly does seem, then, that we direct our behaviour to some extent by spontaneous ‘acts of will’. Perhaps it is all a delusion. Perhaps the experience of choosing is but another case of the conceit of the fly on the axle, an epiphenomenon which has no influence on the course of events. Perhaps in conscious choice we do but cognize the activity of something which is not itself a conscious activity. There is no need to venture into such problems here. We need only insist that, until epiphenomenalism is proved, the experience of choice as efficient must not be ignored. After all, our belief in its actual effectiveness is very strongly confirmed. By a very broadly based induction we are convinced that with certain types of acts, if we do not choose to do them, they do not get done, and if we do choose to do them, they do get done. It is certainly theoretically possible that the true cause of the act is not the choice, but something hidden which the choice accompanies. This view is suggested by the doctrines of universal physical causation and conservation of energy. But science has by now outgrown the phase in which she asserted dogmatically that her fundamental concepts must be true universally. Even the ‘uniformity of nature’ is now but a postulate to be confirmed independently in each sphere. Moreover, without denying uniformity, many would say that it is possible, even probable, that strictly physical causation is itself definitely interfered with by activities of a higher plane of organization, and that choice is of this nature. Anyhow choice does seem to be efficient; and we must discover what precisely, supposing it is efficient, is its importance for ethics. Though we reject all forms of moralism, and insist that right is derived from good, we must yet admit the extreme importance of choice and of the good will, and the need for a theory of moral obligation which does justice to these. Moreover, though we must not suppose that the principles of natural science are enough to disprove the efficacy of choice, it is evident that choice is largely determined. Even if it is not simply determined by physical causation, it is determined psychologically. This is only to say that at least up to a point it is regular, not arbitrary. Is there any clear reason to suppose that this regularity has limits? And if it has not, what is the bearing of regularity of choice upon morality?

C. THE DETERMINANTS OF FREE WILL

I WILL NOW try to state the psychological and ethical aspects of the problem of freedom in terms of the theory of conation described in earlier chapters.

According to that theory, conation entails cognition of objective tendencies, the fulfilment of which is thereupon conated. But, as we have seen, conation all too often ‘lags behind’ the advance of cognition. We ‘will’ more easily ends which we have willed before, ends toward which the organism is already shaped or set, rather than ends which we newly discover to be objectively most desirable, most needed. Only by .an act of will’ (as we say) can we control the behaviour-set and choose to do that which we believe right though it is irksome. If we fail to exert ourselves in this mysterious manner, we behave mechanically and wrongly.

Now this capacity of mastering the established behaviour-set for the sake of our objective ideal depends partly on a habit of mastery formed in the past; but this habit itself has to be explained. A ‘strong will’ is doubtless often due partly to practice in making vigorous decisions. But how were these past decisions themselves achieved by one agent, while they would not have been achieved by another?

It seems that in part a man’s ‘strength of will’ depends on obscure physiological conditions. In drunkenness, for instance, the will may be enfeebled, though also perhaps a tot of rum may strengthen the waverer. Just as the subject’s power of taking everything into account in intellectual inquiry is, it would seem, limited by the integrative capacity of his central nervous system, so also his power of taking everything into account for conation is apparently limited physiologically. Of course, it is possible that, within limits set by his physiological state, a man’s will is absolutely indeterminate, an arbitrary fiat not causally determined by anything else in the universe. On this theory, which Professor Laird would call a limited tychism, we must surrender the belief that the universe is systematic through and through. But it is possible, I think, to do justice to our experience of free choice while maintaining a rigorous determinism, though a determinism which is not simply physical.

The conative act is one aspect abstracted from the unitary psychical act of cognition, affection and conation. This act may be thought of as the act either of a unique metaphysical substance distinct from the organism or of the organism itself mastering its own habitual behaviour-set so as to conform its conduct to the demands of its cognized objective field. In either case it is the act of a subject acting with reference to an objective mental content, past and present. It is not the act of the content itself, since in principle the content is the objective world (including the organism itself as one object). What acts is not content as such, but the organism in its subjective capacity. Only in one qualified sense is the psychical act the act of the content, namely that it is the tendencies of the content which, through cognition, suggest the direction of conation. The act of will, then, may be called the act of the content operating through the medium of the psychical subject which is distinct from the content. But this description is metaphorical. It is the psychical subject alone that chooses, not his objective field, not even the most intimate organic part of his objective field. Of course, it may be that the subject is after all just that which in its physical aspect we call the organism. Yet the organism as choosing to control its habit of behaviour must be distinguished from the organism as controllable mechanism. The objective field itself, as such, whether organic or extra-organic, does not choose.

Let us now suppose that different degrees of the capacity of psychical effort, or of integrative conation, are emergent in physiological systems of different degrees of organisation; and that disintegration of the physiological system, for instance by alcohol, results in a lowering of this capacity for psychical effort. This means that, though every choice (rational and irrational) is strictly determined, it cannot be accounted for simply by physiological causal laws. For what is emergent in the physiological system is precisely an entirely unconstrained capacity for choosing either to facilitate or to resist the established mode of behaviour for the sake of some end suggested by the objective field. Such a capacity is, in the nature of the case, irreducible to physiological causal laws. We are supposing that different degrees of ‘self-mastery’, or of the capacity of choosing to ‘pull oneself together’, occur in different kinds of physiological patterns. Choice, then, is determined by: (a) cognition of objective tendencies, past, present, future, and imaginary; (b) the automatic established behaviour-set of the organism; (c) the organism’s contemporary capacity for psychical effort, which is limited in part physiologically, but is itself none the less emergent. To a greater or less extent, then, the behaviour-set sways the capacity for free choice; while also this capacity itself controls, to a greater or less extent, the behaviour-set.

I have frequently used the phrase ‘psychical effort’. We all find that to do a greater muscular work, or to change a more deeply-rooted habit, a greater ‘psychical effort’ is needed. But it is very important to realize that this psychical effort is something radically different from physical force. Within the sphere in which volition is effective at all, the ‘psychical. effort’ works either by directly overcoming an external physical resistance, as in the case of volitional muscular activity; or by directly overcoming a physiological automatism, as in the case of controlling the impulse to sneeze; or (a very different manner) by directly overcoming a resistance neither physical nor physiological but psychical. Even in volition of muscular work, but more obviously in volition of intellectual work, there comes a time at which we begin to be unwilling to continue. The ‘act of will’ consists then in overcoming a purely psychical reluctance to work. When we are constrained by the purely physical or purely physiological, choice itself is not constrained, though it is ineffective. Choice is only constrained by a psychical reluctance. When in temptation we fail to put forth the necessary psychical effort, we are not in these cases directly constrained by a physical force, nor even by a physiological disability external to the subject; we simply fail to overcome a reluctance. While recognizing that a certain end is objectively the best in the circumstances, we fail to resist the appeal of more familiar ends.

Every choice, then, is determined, and is in theory predictable; but also in an important sense every choice is a free psychical act. It is an expression of the individual’s own subjective capacity at the moment of choice. True he did not make himself; but such as he is, his choice is his own. Nothing constrains him now, though obviously something other than his present self made him to be what he now is. And one kind of influence that has gone to his making is, of course, his own past acts of will.

Every choice, then, is determinate; but it is a case of ‘self-determination’. The degree of conative integration of which the individual is capable is not itself indeterminate; it is an expression of factors prior to itself. But every choice is determined wholly by this capacity for conative integration, acting in relation to a certain objective field of tendencies. Every choice is an act on the part of the innermost self or subject, or of the organism in its subjective capacity. Choice is not something done to the innermost self, or the subjectivity of the organism. The subject is persuaded, not compelled by objects and their tendencies. Though indeed something external to his subjectivity suggests his conation, nothing external forces him. His acceptance of the suggestion, his active espousal of the tendency, is his own subjective deed, or the act of an organism having subjective capacity.

He may choose the rational goal of conation, the believed greatest objective fulfilment. Such choice is in the fullest sense self-determination, since, not only is it an act of the conative subject but also it is an act which takes into account the whole of his mental content. And we may safely admit that in one sense his mental content, though it is in origin external to him, does also fall within his objective ‘self ‘. Thus we may say that his whole ‘objective self’ determines the choice through the medium of the highest degree of subjective conative capacity. But even irrational choice is essentially self-determination, though not the fullest self-determination. Even the most ‘compulsive’ choice is, as we have already noted, free choice in that it is choice, and not a non-psychological mechanism like reflex. In yielding to a psychological automatism the subject, as we have seen, chooses to refrain from controlling an impulse which, with a psychical effort to overcome his reluctance, he might have controlled for the sake of the believed greatest objective fulfilment. He surrenders simply to his own reluctance to forego a minor but familiar objective good for the sake of the ideal. Thus he chooses to be determined by a part of his objective content rather than by the whole. This, then, is something less than the fullest self-determination. The free subject, falling short of the highest degree of subjective conative activity, determines his conduct in relation to only a part of his ‘objective self’. On the other hand even this irrational choice is essentially self-determination, since, though it is not determination by the whole self, it is determination by nothing but the self, and is in fact the act of the subject, though not at the highest level of conative capacity.

But though every choice is essentially self-determined, it is in theory predictable. The control of automatism entails effort to overcome reluctance, and only a certain degree of effort will as a matter of fact be put forth (or only a certain degree of reluctance will be overcome), by the individual as he is at the moment constituted. In theory, then (but, alas, not in practice) the degree of self-determination which he will achieve in any given choice can be inferred inductively. From wide observation of the association of various factors (physiological and psychological), with diverse degrees of conative integration in many individuals, we should be able to arrive at general principles or descriptive laws of this association; and, observing the individual’s own contemporary physiological and psychological condition, we should be able to apply our general principles to his particular case, and predict his choice. We should be able to infer whether he will choose to control, or acquiesce in, his innate and habitual behaviour. But whichever he chooses, the choice is determined wholly by subjective activity operating on an objective field, and capable of a certain degree of cognitional and conational integration.

D. RESPONSIBILITY

LET US REVERT for a moment to Kant’s ethical theory. The ‘original capacity for good in human nature’ is simply the pure capacity for unconstrained conation. It is the ‘good will’ only in the sense that it is a capacity for freely espousing the tendencies of active objects, and for taking into account without bias all objective tendencies within the cognized field. In so far as it fails to take all cognized objects into account it is not a good but a bad will; but its complete expression is the good will, which wills without personal bias the greatest possible fulfilment of objective needs. As to Kant’s ‘natural propensity for evil’, there seems to be no positive factor worthy of the name, unless we may dignify by that title the propensity to espouse familiar tendencies at the expense of objectively more important but unfamiliar tendencies which are seen to claim a reorientation of our conduct. But this propensity itself presupposes the fundamental propensity to conate some objective tendency or other.

Anyhow in spite of Kant we must hold that the evil in man does spring from the mere limitations of his nature. Nowhere is there any positive evil will or propensity, but only a failure to improve upon old-established or inherited modes of behaviour. This is not to be taken to mean that the ‘real will’ of each is necessarily ‘the good will’. It would be more true to say that at heart we are neither good nor bad. We are capable of willing the good will, or rather of some approximation thereto; and in so far as we fall short of the good will, our will is bad. We are capable alike of the good and the bad. But to will rightly in any situation a strength is needed which we may or may not have. Our evil, as Kant himself says, is due to our frailty. And our frailty is determinate. Surely, then, we cannot be held responsible for the limitations of our nature.

Yet the matter cannot be left thus; for, unless our moral experience is entirely illusory, we are in some important sense responsible for every choice that we make. For we feel that in some important sense, we could have chosen otherwise. Does this mean that after all we are left with an unsolved paradox on our hands? And must we, to escape it, simply deny either determinism or free will? No, for if the foregoing account of moral experience is correct, there is really no paradox, so long as we use the words ‘determinism’ and ‘free will’ strictly. ‘Determinism’ must mean not merely physical determinism, but self-determination by an emergent free agent spontaneously espousing the tendencies of objects. “Free will” on the other hand, must not be taken to mean that the moral agent’s capacity for conative integration, and his degree of that capacity, is wholly unrelated to anything else in the universe. It is an emergent capacity; but it is determined by physiological and other factors. Yet what it is when it has emerged is a capacity for a certain degree of psychical effort toward integrative conation.

It should be noted that the experience of free will or free choice is simply the experience of activity as opposed to passivity. Everything that acts, and is not merely acted upon, acts freely; though necessarily its action is determined by its own nature and its relation with its environment. Everything that really does act, then, were it to experience at all might justly experience free choice; since in so far as it acts it acts spontaneously. In fact there is nothing at all strange in our experience of free choice, so long as we do not suppose it to mean that choice is simply arbitrary. Spontaneous activity obviously must occur. Even purely physical events cannot be reduced simply to passivity. The electron, or the atom, acts as it does of its own nature; though it acts in relation with the activity of other agents in its environment. Its action cannot be wholly determined from without; for if all things were purely passive there would be no activity. Of course no agent can violate its own nature. It can only act in those manners in which it ‘has it in it’ to act. Were it to act otherwise, it must after all have ‘had it in it’ to act otherwise. To suppose that it could change its nature spontaneously is simply to suppose that it had in it all along a capacity for new kinds of activity, that in fact hitherto its nature was not fully expressed. To suppose that it may simply abandon its previous nature, and act in manners opposed to its previous activity in similar circumstances, is simply to suppose that it has ceased to exist and has been superseded by something new.

It is the same with the psychical agent. He cannot act otherwise than in accord with his nature. And indeed his nature is simply how he does act; just as the electron’s nature is how it does act. And in each case, so far as we can tell, the action is systematic.

But though in this important sense all activity that really is activity is necessarily spontaneous though determinate, psychical activity is spontaneous, or free, in a more radical manner. Whereas physical activity may be constrained by the physical environment, psychical conative activity cannot ever be simply and directly constrained by the physical. If our theory of conation is correct, every conative act is an unconstrained espousal of some objective tendency or other. The act, in every case, is primarily determined by the intrinsic goodness of some possible fulfilment or other. Even a choice of evil is primarily determined by cognition of some minor tendency, some minor possibility of good. It is evil in that it is not determined by an admittedly major good. And this failure is due to a frailty which is purely moral, in the sense that it is failure to overcome, not a physical force, nor an external psychical ‘force’, but a mere reluctance, a failure to resist the suggestion or persuasion of a familiar minor good for the sake of a less familiar major. Thus while every choice is determinate, it is a chosen determination on the part of a spontaneously active substance, whether of a metaphysical ego or of an organism having subjective capacity. Nothing other than cognitions of objective tendencies immediately determines choice. And even these cognitions do not in any sense constrain choice.

There is, however, a sense in which rational, or moral, choice is more free than irrational, or immoral, choice. For the reluctance which has to be overcome if automatisms are to be transcended is in a sense a relic of the past self, of the past exercise of subjective capacity, which has left its mark upon the organism, and now tends to interfere with the proper functioning of present subjectivity. In overcoming this reluctance, therefore, the present subject exercises his subjective capacity more fully or freely.

It is true, as we have seen, that whether a man will be persuaded by the whole field of his cognition, or ‘over-persuaded’ by certain intimate components of it, whether he will as a matter of fact freely choose the ideal or freely betray it for the sake of some minor good, depends partly on the state of his body. But even this does not mean that the physiological state constrains him. It means that the physiological state is one determinant of the degree of his freedom as against his own reluctance or inertia. It means that in certain states individuals exercise a greater and in other states a less degree of psychical effort toward integrative conation. However they choose, they could have chosen otherwise, in the sense that there was nothing whatever external to their own nature to prevent their choosing otherwise. But on the other hand choosing is not arbitrary but systematic, and therefore in theory predictable.

CHAPTER 12. ESSENTIALS OF THE CONCRETE IDEAL

A. IDEALS AND THE IDEAL

HITHERTO I HAVE been engaged in discussing the nature of ‘good’ and the logical ground of moral obligation. It is now time to attempt an inquiry into the concrete ideal which is implied in the nature of our world.

Human ideals are changeful as the clouds. To-day our enthusiasts, by constant preaching and example, kindle us at last with a spark of their own zeal for some goal or other; to-morrow, not merely is the goal still to be gained, but (far worse), while we are plodding toward it, some superior intelligence among us discovers its unsoundness and ridicules our labour. Then we are divided. Some, unable to grasp the criticism, continue their toil, content but futile. Some catch a gleam of the truth, but shun it, lest their satisfying activity should cease to satisfy. Some learn all too clearly their error, and fall into despair.

And how tawdry look the ideals of yesterday! Pietism, moralism, the cult of wealth and power, nationalism, the liberal and the communist utopias, and the cult of ‘personality’ — how they stir men, and how tedious they may become! Indeed there is nothing more insipid and nothing more pathetic than to-day’s account of yesterday’s aims, or indeed any man’s view of his neighbour’s ideal. The disillusionment lies not merely between one generation and another, nor between one and another contemporary culture or private taste, but even between diverse moods of one mind.

Must we conclude that the whole business of ideal mongering is a folly, and a disreputable folly, as tending toward fantasy and toward emotionalism? Has it all been a waste of time, this effort to envisage the desirable? Do the fashions in ideals change with no more reason than the fashions in dress? Or is there perhaps some continuity and progress to be discerned in the history of the supreme ends that men have conceived? Certainly in these latter days anyone who ventures to preach an ideal must be either ridiculously lacking in humour or prepared to join in the inevitable laugh at his own gaucherie. For it is certain that he will produce only a caricature of that which is in fact desirable. And it is certain that, even if some few of his contemporaries should see as he has seen and be blind with his particular blindness, his successors will revile his idols and set up images of their own.

Indeed it must be admitted that the aims of men, their ‘ideals’, are crude and contradictory. But this is not seriously disheartening unless we suppose ‘ideals’ to be creatures purely of desire, rather than records of man’s groping toward the Ideal which in fact is posited by the actual capacities of the world, and is to be discovered, not created, by minds. On this latter view, which is involved in any realistic ethics, the discrepancies and crudities of ‘ideals’ are attributable to no subjectivity of value but to the limitations of individual minds and particular cultures. At the heart of every ideal lie certain true value-judgments, apprehensions of certain goods that are indefeasibly members in the Ideal, or at least instruments for the Ideal. But, owing to the limitations of human experience, these goods have been imperfectly correlated with other goods. Thus minor goods appear as major, and many major goods may be entirely missed. Further, since every man’s ‘ideal’ is to some extent systematic, each ‘ideal’ is controlled through and through by some basic value-judgment or other, or a group of value-judgments; and if these basic judgments happen to be imperfectly conceived or objectively without claim to their basic position, the whole ‘ideal’ is vitiated. And owing to the very diverse idiosyncrasies of our experience, our ‘ideals’ are not only crude but profoundly different from each other. It is therefore very difficult in the midst of our conflicting loyalties to realize that ‘ideals’ are one and all judgments of the Ideal, be they never so erroneous.

It would be interesting to embark on a detailed study of all the types of ‘ideals’ that men have entertained, and to show how in each case a real and important objective need has come to be espoused and over-emphasized at the expense of other needs equally important. But here I can only mention a few of the main conclusions that such a discussion would reach, so that we may be forewarned against certain extravagances of ideal-mongering, and may at the same time note certain very diverse principles, all of which must be taken into account in attempting to envisage the outlines of the objective ideal. Thus, though we must not fall into the error of evolutionism, we may agree that the ideal must include whatever biological forces there be. The discovery of the biological evolution of ever more highly organized types of life suggested that the distinction between good and bad must be simply derived from the supposed fact that a ‘life force’ in the world was ever pressing toward greater complexity of living. Whereas in the older view good was thought to be derived from the will of God, the newer theory based it on the trend of Nature. In an age conscious of its ‘progress’ this doctrine was plausible; in a decaying civilization, however, no one would ever be persuaded that goodness is identical with survival-value. Only because men supposed that evolution was in some manner directed toward more complex vitality and mentality, were they tempted to derive good therefrom, forgetful that the fulfilment of ‘evolution’ is good only so long as it makes possible ever more complex activities upon ever higher planes of emergence. But though in this they erred, they were justified in identifying good with the fulfilment of the activities of active substances.

In other accounts of the ideal we find the same mixture of chaff and grain. Thus, while we must not be deceived by hedonism and utilitarianism, neither must we deny that pleasure itself is a good to be sought for its own sake. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is not a sufficient account of the ideal, but the claim to happiness is valid, and not to be ignored even in the ideal.

Similarly with moralism, it is unjustifiable to think that the good consists merely in conduct of a certain form. But it is demanded in the ideal that certain very general principles of conduct should be accepted as obligatory upon all individuals, even to the detriment of their private needs, and sometimes even to the detriment of other individuals; but it is demanded that those principles themselves should be determined by the needs of all individuals in social relation.

Again, the Christian ideal of Love, or Brotherhood, though a far richer ideal than most, cannot be sufficient. When it began to be seen that mere moralism degenerated into self-centred legalism, a new insight was gained into the relationship between individuals. The ideal was seen to be that individuals should conatively espouse each other’s needs in the same manner as they espouse their own, so that each mind should be invaded and possessed and enlarged by all others. The unity of men should be a unity of internal relations, not only a system of external legal relations. This discovery is, of course, of supreme importance. But it sometimes led to an apothesis of the mere abstraction, ‘love’, as in some extravagant interpretations of the great proposition, ‘God is Love’. To set up abstract love as the end of human existence is almost as though we were to say that the end of the cells of a man’s flesh were merely the abstract form of their organicity rather than the mind which their organicity calls into being. On the other hand, of course, the ideal must include the loving community, since it is by the mutual ‘ingression’ of individuals in love that new capacities and activities emerge.

Another ideal associated with Christianity, and also with the East, is that in which the individual is urged to turn his attention from the things of this brief world and live for a world that is eternal and unseen. This ‘other-worldliness’ may result in a rejection of all the urgent claims of our daily life for the sake of a fantasy. But let us remember that the ideal entails not only that men should be sensitive to obvious mundane obligations, but also that they should strain to hear, and to respond to, the appeal of whatever higher spheres there be.

So with stoicism, divorce from all desire is no sufficient account of the desirable; but only through this resignation and detachment can the mind preserve its integrity and glimpse that excellence of reality which, it may be, transcends the sphere of human striving. Stoics have often been men of action, fulfilling the social claim tirelessly, even heroically. But though the stoical ideal includes action, it demands also complete detachment; and this is well, since detachment is the way to spiritual dignity and freedom. But the desire to be emancipated from desire is itself a desire. And the idealization of detachment is after all a disguised self-assertion; or at best a mistaking of the means for the end.

Again a thoughtless ritual of ‘good works’ is insufficient, both because in its uncritical haste it may do more harm than good in the world, and also because in disparaging the inner life of contemplation and admiration it disparages the highest known kind of individual fulfilment. But this ideal, no less than the others, has living roots. For, in the first place, mind’s capacity is not only for contemplation but for conduct. Even from the point of view of the individual, therefore, fulfilment entails not only the truest and richest cognition, but also the most just conation. And in the second place it is urgent that individuals should subordinate even their own highest personal development to the development of the social whole. And in respect of the issue between personal and social types of ideal, it is easy to see that though each may run to extravagance, each is soundly based. The former rightly insists that the goal must be no abstract sociality but the increasing enrichment of actual individual minds, individual mental processes. But the latter with justice claims that the goal for the individual mind should be to become a fully social mind, in fact that the extreme ideal for mind is that all minds should be emancipated from their private limitations, and be, each one of them, the mind of society, nay of the universe.

B. THE ABSTRACT FORM OF THE IDEAL

THE MOST ABSTRACT formula which expresses the concrete ideal is (as we have seen) that the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of the tendencies of the universe. But by ‘tendencies’ must be understood, not simply those tendencies which at present occur, but also those which might emerge from a rearrangement of the members of the universe. For the fulfilment of tendencies emergent in wholes is in principle greater than the fulfilment of tendencies of their parts in disunion; therefore it is desirable that ever more complex emergent tendencies be brought into being, even though this should entail the thwarting of existing tendencies. On this account it is well to exchange the word ‘tendencies’ for the word ‘capacities’, and describe the ideal as the greatest possible fulfilment of the capacities of the universe. From this it follows further that the ideal includes the greatest possible fulfilment of tendencies emergent in the universe as a whole.

Such is the most abstract formula which expresses the concrete, objective, and universal ideal. It is not inconceivable that the ideal for the cosmos as a whole might entail the thwarting of every present extant tendency of the cosmos, and the refashioning of the whole for the attainment of some higher degree of emergence which (we may suppose) is impossible in the present course of events. But such a fantastic possibility does not concern us. Our knowledge of the nature of the universe is as yet so slight that we cannot form any clear concept as to what, in the cosmical view, the ideal entails. We must perforce restrict our attention almost entirely to our own planet, and seek to discover what it is that, if our planet were all, would be the ideal. Perhaps in one respect we are entitled to venture further than this. Until we have reason to suppose otherwise, we may guess that our planet, even though planets be rare among the stars, is in some sense typical of the whole; and therefore that the ideal suggested by it will not be utterly beside the mark in the cosmical view. But of this we must not be over-confident, so little is the grain that we inhabit, and so multitudinous are the stars. It is not impossible that, from other stellar systems, minds of a subtlety inconceivable to us are now condemning, and justly condemning, our best ‘ideals’ as products of a mentality scarcely worthy to be called mental. It is not impossible that, as a matter of fact, all that can ever come to be most valued within the widest possible limits of this planet’s culture is utterly beside the mark, and man’s championship of it a hindrance to the fulfilment of the objective and universal ideal. It is possible, moreover, that even in supposing ourselves to know the highest tendencies of our own planet we seriously mistake our planet’s nature.

These, however, are but abstract possibilities; and they concern us only in that the thought of them should prevent us from claiming that we are moral legislators for the universe, or that ‘God is on our side’. We can but note the gulfs around us, and then turn to envisage the ideal as best we may, in terms of our own pathetically anthropomorphic culture. But at least we need have no doubt that there is an objective and universal ideal, which, had we but sufficient data and sufficient insight, and were we emancipated from the compulsions peculiar to our human nature, we should joyfully salute as the perfection toward which the highest terrestrial aims were at least a crude approximation.

C. COMPARATIVE EVALUATION

WITHIN THE LIMITS of the known world, then, what capacities do we find, what claims that must be admitted in any judgment of the ideal?

There are, for instance, those multitudinous and obscure tendencies that are ever being fulfilled and hindered on the physical plane within the system of each atom, and in the inter-relation of atoms in all ‘dead matter’ and all living flesh from Polaris to the Cross. Must the ideal take into account even physical tendency?

We have already been forced to admit that if there is no essential difference between teleological and mechanical activity, if the activities of the ultimate physical units are after all ‘microscopically teleological’, or if all teleology is ultimately reducible to physics, then in the essential meaning of ‘good’ it is implied that the fulfilment of physical tendency is a case of goodness. This view certainly violates common sense, but only because physical activity is so remote from the human fulfilments that we have at heart. But after all, if there is no ultimate difference between teleological and physical activity, we are indeed of the same stuff as ‘dead matter’, and should regard the activities of the ultimate physical units with sympathy. And whatever the prejudices of common sense, it is clear that if there is no essential distinction between teleological and physical activity, physical activity is not, in theory, irrelevant to the ideal. Theoretically, then, when there is a conflict of physical ‘forces’, so that each inhibits the other’s expression, it is demanded in the ideal that the situation be so altered that each achieve free activity. If the physical were all, the ideal for the universe would be, not indeed merely the slow process of ‘running down’ which is said by some to be the upshot of all the conflicting turmoil of energies, but rather that the ‘balance wheel’ of the cosmic clock be disengaged, or all conflicts resolved, so that immediate and complete physical fulfilment should be attained.

But the physical is not all. There are higher levels of activity, and richer capacities which cannot be expressed save through interference with the physical. In physical activity the real expresses, so to speak, only its most superficial nature. Thus in so far as physical activity can be fulfilled without hindrance to higher emergent activities, its fulfilment is demanded in the ideal. But practically it need only be considered as instrumental to the fulfilment of higher activities.

There is another aspect of this subject to be taken into account. Of any given physical unit we must say, not that the ideal is merely that its physical activity should proceed without hindrance, but rather that it should be caught up into some higher organic system and assume the emergent nature of that system. And of all the ultimate physical units (whatever they be), we must say that the ideal (utterly unrealizable, no doubt), is that they should all, through cosmical organization, assume the nature of a cosmical organism, and continuously fulfil themselves not as atoms but as members of that organism, active upon the highest of all planes of emergence. Such a state of affairs may seem to us quite impossible and fantastic; but such evidently is the ideal. And short of this if is best for any given unit that it take part in the activity of as complex a system as possible upon as high an emergent level as may be. For we have agreed that the ideal is that the real be so organized as to give birth to tendencies and activities expressive of its deeper nature.

These emergent tendencies are, in the first place, the biological tendencies of even the simplest organisms. With some confidence, perhaps, we may claim that the fulfilment of these is good intrinsically; and that, for the sake of these, whatever merely physico-chemical conflict and resistance be necessary ought to be incurred. But just as the physico-chemical must be subordinated to the biological, so also the simpler biological centres of activity must be subordinated to the more complex, and in particular to the richest kind of living known to us, namely to the human. Thus not only by prejudice do we approve the sheep that eats the grass, yet lament the sheep’s destruction by the liver fluke. Not only by prejudice do we tolerate man’s eating mutton (if flesh is really a suitable diet for him). And if the amoeba should still claim, through Mr. Bertrand Russell, to be man’s equal, we may pertinently ask her, is she capable of as rich a fulfilment as man? And if she cannot establish this claim, we must indeed admit her right to the full development of her capacities; but only in so far as she can thrive without hindering her betters.

Biological tendencies certainly differ in rank in respect of delicacy and complexity of their response to the environment, and the versatility of the organisms in which they inhere. Compare, for instance, the parental behaviour of birds and of fishes. But a more important difference, one which amounts to a difference of kind, is that between the more and the less mental among biological tendencies. For, as we have seen, there is reason to think that in the higher grades of organization ever subtler psychical capacity emerges. And in man fulfilment is distinctively mental. He is such that he can fulfil his own nature only by intelligent cognition of the universe (including himself) and unbiased conation of its ends. And, as we have seen, this mental capacity of human organisms is by far the most important tendency of the real known to us. It is, so far as we can judge, the release or realization of the real’s deepest nature, namely its capacity for mentality, or, if it be preferred, for spirituality. And through this subjectivity, the capacity of the world (as object) may be increasingly fulfilled. In fact through it both subject and object express their nature.

In thus comparing biological tendencies in respect of their objective importance we come again upon a grave problem. Granting that a man is better than an amoeba, how many amoeba’s fulfilments equal one man’s fulfilment? Or are we to suppose that the fulfilment of one honest man is immeasurably more important than the fulfilment of all the amoebae that ever were and will be? We incline to think so; but when this principle is applied within the limits of mankind, we hesitate. Few would hold that any man, be he never so richly endowed, is so precious that the rights of any, even the crudest, of his fellow men are to be utterly disregarded when they are opposed to him. Somehow we look with disfavour on the utopia in which a multitude of serfs exists only to maintain a cultured aristocracy. Yet we see nothing wrong in the servitude of our horses and cattle. We may recognize, indeed, that these have rights; but most of us would not hesitate to sacrifice them for any considerable human advancement.

Is there any rational principle behind these common moral judgments, or are they but habitual prejudices? Clearly they result from an apprehension, however vague, that, while the living of each living thing is an intrinsic good, and constitutes in the universal view a claim to a certain minimum of free activity even against certain needs of its superiors, that claim, even that minimum claim, is not to be sanctioned if it conflicts with the superiors’ most essential needs. The nearer the superiors and inferiors in intrinsic excellence, the greater the rights of the latter against the former. On this principle we should readily destroy a plague of locusts, and with scarcely more compunction we poison our rats. But our human enemies receive, or expect to receive, more consideration. Indeed as between man and man, though men surely differ greatly in their capacities, and, quite apart from their social instrumentality, some are intrinsically more excellent than others, yet so fallible are our judgments in this region that it is often in practice safer to insist on the minimum rights of the typical human individual than to seek out and favour those capable of higher development.

But clearly even on the human plane we do attempt to single out at least the more intelligent for more careful upbringing; and within limits we expect that dullards should toil so that these naturally favoured ones may seek higher self-expression. In this policy we commonly have in mind, not to favour one individual against another, but to achieve the best for all, or for ‘society’, or for ‘the race’. And in the last resort we must seek what is best for the cosmos. Intelligence is rare and precious, since without it we fall into chaos. But if the intelligent have a right to better conditions than the obtuse, this is certainly not because they have made a comer in a precious commodity; it is because their capacity is greater, and because without leisure and richness of experience they cannot serve the universal end to the full extent of their capacity.

But the superior rights of the intelligent, or (if it be preferred) of those of richer spiritual capacity, do not rest only in their superior instrumentality. The fulfilment of every human being is an intrinsic good; and the fulfilment of those capable of higher development is intrinsically better than the fulfilment of the obtuse and the insensitive. For each contributes to the ideal not only through his instrumentality but also by his intrinsic virtue. The ideal is just the fulfilment of the reals’ capacity; and every individual, stupid and intelligent alike, is a member of the real.

Every human being, then, has an intrinsic right to free development in so far as his development does no harm to others. But when a choice must be made between one individual and another, we have to compare them not only as to instrumentality, but also as to intrinsic excellence, and again not only as to intelligence and richness of content, but also as to the capacity to will and serve the best that they know, rather than be the slaves of their own automatism.

Such comparison is indeed difficult, and within the present limits of our knowledge often impossible. But in daily life we have often to attempt it; and in principle it is valid, even though the method of our valuation may be false. And though comparative evaluations may err, compare we must; and must act upon our decisions. Occasions may even arise, for instance in a shipwreck, in which it were objectively desirable to save one unique intrinsically and instrumentally valuable individual even at the cost of very many less precious lives. And further, though this conflicts with our traditional idealization of self-sacrifice, that individual himself ought, if necessary, to sacrifice his fellow passengers in order to ensure his own survival. It may, however, be doubted whether any human being is ever justified in acting thus, simply upon his own estimate of his own importance; for there is no field in which a man’s judgment is more fallible than in self-valuation.

In all comparative evaluation we are prone to take into account one true principle only, ignoring others equally important. Thus we may sometimes judge one individual intrinsically better than another simply because his mental capacity is more subtle and his mental content more complex. But subtlety and complexity are not themselves intrinsically good. Subtle mentality is good in so far as it cognizes and conates the subtle tendency of the real as it really is; and a complex mental content is good in so far as its complexity is the true expression of the intricacy of the real, and no mere complex of error. For example, the social mind is more complex than the unsocial. But sociality is not a means to mere complexity. The complex organization of society, and its ingression in the individual mind, is good just because the real is highly complex and demands a complex mentality for its apprehension.

D. THE SOCIAL ASPECT OF THE IDEAL

EVEN WHEN WE are thinking of the intrinsic worth of individuals, and not of their usefulness to society, we take into account their social aspect. For, all else being equal, we judge that man the more excellent whose mind embraces within itself more of society, whose mental content is such that, (in idealist phrase) it approximates more to the best will or ‘real will’ of society. And this we do in the conviction that, apart from his instrumental value as a means to social fulfilment, the individual’s intrinsic worth is greater the more subtly his content corresponds with the actual intricacy of the real. And many would say that there is no richer content than the social content, since human society, in spite of its disorder, is after all the highest system of emergent tendencies known to us. Thus in the fulfilment of the social individual mind there is a greater fulfilment than in the fulfilment of one who lacks social content.

But it is permissible to regard every individual, even the very flower of his age, as instrumental to the fulfilment of something greater than any or all human individuals. What is this something? Many would reply that it is society. Nor do they thus pledge themselves to the view that society is itself an experient mind. They hold rather that society is that vast system of activities and values in which any individual mental process is a partial participant, but which is not united in anyone experience. This it is, this objective social content, that is said to be the end for which every experient is an instrument. The ideal, therefore, is the progressive co-ordination and enrichment of this social whole, which, they insist, is itself mental though it is objective. For it consists of the psychical activities and felt needs of men and women. Or rather, we are told, it consists not of particular psychical processes at all, but of the universal content of those processes. In the ideal there must be so many individuals, neither more nor less, as are needed for the perfection of the form of society. Each will have his function, his particular contribution to the all-embracing ‘concrete universal’ which is society. Thus some will contribute art, some science, some government, and some beauty of character in simple duties. Each in degree will fulfil ‘his station and his duties’. And the whole will be the music of a very diverse orchestra, whose end is neither the players nor merely the present sound, but the eternal form which this sound embodies.

What must we say of this account of the ideal? Clearly we must insist that the ideal is not primarily a universal but a particular, characterized by a universal. It is a universal realized in a particular case. But, further, that universal is good just because it is demanded as the fulfilment of a particular active substance, even though, in the case of the ideal, that substance be the organized universe. To the contention that the ideal is a ‘concrete universal’ we need but reply that whatever this may be, the ideal is simply that the capacities of the cosmos should be fulfilled, that the cosmical substance should assume a certain character. If this is what is meant, we can readily agree. But we must insist that the ideal is that the world’s capacity should be fulfilled, not that a certain abstract form should be attained.

Within the practical sphere it is society, the present system of human individuals in a certain environment, that prescribes the nature of the ideal. For the ideal fulfilment of any society, doubtless, a certain form is demanded, a certain number of individuals fulfilling certain definite functions. And so it may seem that the particular individuals exist for the sake of the universal form which they collectively embody. But to say this is to ignore that the goodness of the form of the ideal society is derived from the needs and capacities of its individuals, and primarily of extant individuals.

A certain important class of facts does suggest that the good is primarily a universal. We refuse to admit that mere duplication of mental achievements doubles their value. If per impossibile Brown and Jones were to produce two identical works of art or scientific discoveries or mechanical inventions, we might say that no more value had been produced than if only one of them had done so. This suggests that goodness is in the universal itself rather than the instance. But in such cases we are apt to value the result only from the point of view of society. It makes no difference to society that these achievements should be duplicated. Nevertheless it is the capacity of the particular society that creates the goodness of these achievements. The unimportance of the duplication arises only from the fact that society cannot be twice fulfilled in an identical respect. But we must remember also the individual artists or discoverers. In each of them the achievement is good, though socially its duplication is negligible; for in each of them it is a fulfilment of capacity. Even from the universal point of view it is good that the capacity of Brown and the capacity of Jones should be fulfilled. But in so far as the fulfilments are identical, the capacities were identical. Brown and Jones each embraced within his mental content an identical excerpt from the one real. The objective fulfilment is therefore not duplicated. But, on the other hand, two psychical capacities are fulfilled, in Brown and Jones; and in this respect at least there is double value in the double achievement.

Every individual, once he is in existence, is a ground of intrinsic ends. The needs of his private nature constitute a demand for fulfilment which must not be simply ignored even in the cosmic ideal; though of course it may well be that his needs must be partially or even wholly rejected for the sake of higher needs. Every individual, then, once he exists, is a ground of ends; but what individuals there ought to be, how many and of what characters, is prescribed by the needs of society in its particular environment, and ultimately by the needs of the universe.

The immediate practical ideal is clearly the greatest possible fulfilment of the needs (or capacities) of extant human beings. But since new human beings keep flooding the earth, we cannot take into account only the present generation. The immediate practical ideal must include the production of individuals capable of the richest fulfilment rather than of individuals crippled before birth. But again, since the richest fulfilment of individuals entails social organization, the number and character of the individuals to come must depend on the demands of the ideal form of the future society in its particular environment. And this in turn depends on the capacity of the future individuals that it may be possible to produce.

The ideal, then, is that this real world, or, as some would say, a future real world continuous with this, should be characterized by a certain universal. But this universal itself is prescribed by the nature of the world as it is in fact. It is demanded, namely, that the richest possible capacities should ‘awake’ in this world, and that the greatest possible fulfilment of those capacities should be attained. In fact, the ideal is that the real should be so organized that the highest possible tendencies should emerge and be fulfilled. The ideal is prescribed fully by the character and potentiality of the real as it now is, by the character and potentiality of a certain particular, though that particular be the universe. The ideal is that this particular universe, that happens to exist, should be fulfilled as richly as possible, not (per impossibile) that this universe should be wiped out and another of a more elegant kind substituted for it.

The practical ideal, the only ideal which we can envisage, is human; and being human it is social. But its sociality is derivative, not essential. Essentially the practical ideal is the fulfilment of human mental capacity, and its exercise upon the richest possible objective content; but this fulfilment quite certainly entails sociality. The practical ideal, in fact, is that the human race should achieve the highest possible mentality and the richest possible culture. And this mentality and culture must be particularized in just so many individuals, neither more nor less, as are necessary for its perfection. But so long as there is an excess of individuals (if there be), they also have their rights. The immediate ideal must not simply neglect them, even for the sake of the ultimate mental perfection of the race.

But the more remote ideal is that there should be just so many individuals as are needed to perfect human capacity and culture. Further, lest some individuals should lack fulfilment, it is demanded in the ideal that every one should be, not merely fulfilled up to the limit of his capacity, but of the very highest capacity. For a man who achieves less than full humanity is so far a cripple, an unfortunate, and a scourge to society. Thus it is demanded that each individual should know all that is known and will the good. If this encyclopaedic knowledge seems preposterous, let us say that each should know at least schematically all that is known, so that he may will the good. For if any were to know less than the schema of all knowledge, or will less than the ideal, the harmony of all would be destroyed, and the activity of the whole would be discrepant with itself, and the progressive discovery and achievement of yet higher ideals would be hindered. But if each is to know all and will the ideal, why, it may be asked, should there be more individuals than one all-knowing individual? The answer is twofold. In the first place, though each must share in the achievement of all, each must contribute to the whole his unique original quota. For the work to be done in the world demands many hands and many exploring brains. But though each cannot do all the work, it is demanded by the ideal that each should know and value all that is done, lest he should hinder the great common enterprise. It is important to note, however, that this psychical ‘pooling’ of the proceeds of industry is to be achieved not for the sake of repeating many times over psychic acts with identical content, but simply for the better advancement of the ideal of objective fulfilment. For the duplication of psychic acts (of cognition and conation and affection) in no way increases the fulfilment of the identical object of all.

There is another and more important reason for the sociality of the ideal. In groups of individuals certain high tendencies emerge which are not possible in the isolated individual. The man in the moon must lack the fulfilment of companionship, loyalty, and love. Society, in fact, is not only a means to fuller knowledge of the real, and more just conation of its ends; it is also itself an emergence of the real into richer being.

Our practical ideal, then, must be the achievement of the highest mentality with the widest and richest content. Each individual is good intrinsically in so far as he approaches this ideal, and instrumentally in so far as he is a means to its realization. This practical ideal should be the main guiding principle of all our politics. The extant needs of human individuals and societies must, of course, be considered, even though they are opposed to the remote ideal; for the ideal is the fulfilment of the real. And the extant human beings are no less members of the real than whatever beings are to come. It may often be very difficult to know how far the remote ideal should be postponed for the sake of immediate fulfilment, and vice versa. But however difficult it may be to solve such problems, they are not in principle insoluble. For what ought to be sought is not merely the greatest subjective delight but the greatest objective fulfilment of the one world. But, of course, the fulfilment that is to be sought is not simply the greatest fulfilment at some remote millennium, but the greatest fulfilment throughout all time.

This abstract form of the ideal may seem to have but the remotest bearing on our practical politics. For we may agree as to the abstract ideal, yet violently differ as to how it is to be realized in Europe to-day. Yet there is some reason to say that our general, though perhaps remote, aim must be a ‘personalistic socialism’, a socialism whose aim is the levelling up (but not down) of the capacities and activities of persons, rather than the establishment of a certain form of social organization. Of course it is possible that in transitional stages such as ours this ideal may be altogether impracticable and therefore a snare. It may be that, so long as there is low-grade work to be done, society must include low-grade minds to do it, since finer minds cannot devote themselves to such work without lack of fulfilment. It may be, therefore, that society should be hierarchical. But such an ideal can only be transitional. The low-grade human mind is yet human, having in its nature rudiments of the highest. Our beasts perhaps may achieve fulfilment in servitude, but the normal human mind is capable, in favourable circumstances, of something more than a life of drudgery. Therefore, by hook or by crook, we must contrive that lives of drudgery be no longer necessary to society. And since even the mentally deficient are not simply animal, but ‘spoiled’ bits of humanity, incapable of a merely animal harmony, we cannot be content simply to allocate them to low-grade work. There must be an end to the production of individuals who are defective physically or mentally, and an exploration of the means of producing higher individuals, that is to say, individuals capable of a wider span and deeper penetration of cognition, and of more generous conation. Further, since the aim is that every mind should be ingredient in every other, we must seek to break down the barriers between societies and between individuals, that all culture, all aspirations, all values, may justly determine the behaviour of all. Lastly, the practical ideal clearly implies that there should be a ceaseless exploration of the universe, not only for the discovery of means for the fulfilment of known needs, but for the discovery of new needs, and even perhaps for the creation of needs upon new and higher planes of emergence. For the ideal is the fulfilment, not merely of human mentality, but of the capacities of the universe.

E. THE COSMICAL IDEAL

SUCH A DESCRIPTION of the ideal must indeed seem far removed from practical politics; yet even this is obviously not a description of the objective ideal, but only of the aim which is implied in our own limited experience. Let us not forget our littleness. Of the true ideal which is implied in the nature of the universe itself, and not merely in our fragmentary view of it, we can scarcely form the vaguest conception. But this we know. We experience the distinction between good and evil; and this distinction is given not merely in the nature of our subjectivity but in the nature of the whole objective real which we experience, though so erroneously. Further, we seem able by our activity to increase the good and decrease the evil; and we find ourselves under obligation to do so. We are bound, then, to go on, as best we may, exploring the universe to learn what it is that is most desirable, and to find means for its realization. And at every stage of our inquiry we must live up to our lights, such as they are; although it may be that they are but Jack-o’-lanterns leading us utterly astray. And the best light that we have is the ideal of the fulfilment of mind’s capacities. For not only is this objectively the best that we know; it is also quite certainly the necessary means for the discovery and fulfilment of anything better that may at present be inconceivable to us.

On the other hand, if there be no organicity of the universe, nor any possibility of achieving this cosmic ideal, then it is from the needs of humanity alone that the ideal arises. For goodness is essentially the fulfilment of tendency and capacity, and so long as there is any tendency, of whatever rank, there is a possibility of good. As to the good, the ideal, it is the greatest possible harmonious fulfilment of whatever capacities are inherent in the substance of the universe. If the highest possible activities are human social activities, or if the highest that can be brought about is some development of these, then these must be the chief ground of the ideal. But to assert that human capacities are in fact the highest, would be very rash.

The human ideal is clear at least in its barest outlines. Though in practice it gives rise to a thousand conflicting policies and bitter hatreds, the aim of all who adopt the standpoint of humanity is to fulfil and progressively enrich human capacity. This, as we have seen, means in the last resort to increase and refine the content of man’s mind and to conform his will to the need cognized in that content. But this is not the last word to be said. If we may take man as a true sample of the nature of the real, we may find in the human ideal hints of the cosmical. Man’s subjectivity, we say, fulfils itself in cognizing as widely and deeply as possible the nature of the objective real, and in willing as justly as possible its fulfilment. But man’s subjectivity itself, we have supposed, is emergent in the same kind of real (suitably organized) as that which it embraces as its object. In man, then, the real fulfils itself by knowing and being known, by exfoliating into ever subtler kinds of activity, and by willing the ends of that activity. That, which in mere physical and chemical action expresses its nature superficially, achieves in the human organism a new sphere of activity. It becomes a centre from which the universe begins to know itself and to will universal fulfilment.

The cosmical ideal, then, would seem to be as follows. In the first place the Whole, as a whole, shall know all. There shall be no fragment that does not partake (through organization and emergence) in the subjectivity of the Whole. And there shall be no fragment excluded from the universal objectivity. But in the second place, within time, the Whole shall be not static but dynamic. It shall achieve ever new forms and new capacities. And these in turn must be cognized within the mental content of the growing Whole, and their fulfilment justly willed. Thus within time the ideal would seem to be that the world should for ever exfoliate in richness of being, and that mind should keep pace with this endless development by knowing all, and by willing and serving its progressive fulfilment.

But if the temporal view be not the finally true view, the ideal is other than this endless exfoliation of being, and of cognition and conation. There is some reason to believe that, though indeed our temporal experience is not positively false, it fails to reveal some essential character without which time must inevitably appear in a discrepant and illusory form. This is not the occasion to discuss the implications of temporal experience; but we cannot close our inquiry into the ideal without noting how the problem of time bears upon the status of the ideal. If reality is in some sense supra-temporal, then a certain degree of excellence is eternally actual in the universe. Thus if it is a fact that the ideal will be achieved in the process of time, then the ideal is an actual feature of supra-temporal reality; if, however, it will never be more than only partially achieved (for instance, in that very low degree in which it is achieved to-day), then the supra-temporal reality eternally excludes anything better. In either case our striving seems vain.

Metaphysical bogs surround all who speculate about time. But without going more than ankle deep, we may surmise that, after all, the temporal and the supra-temporal mutually support one another as aspect and whole. If so, then whatever degree of excellence the supra-temporal reality may eternally have, that excellence may well be the achievement of that factor in reality which we know as temporal striving. But again, just as time itself may be both real and yet illusorily presented, so the ethical distinction itself may be both a true aspect of reality and yet an aspect which must deceive, so long as some other and essential character remains unrevealed. This possibility will be considered in the course of the very speculative inquiry upon which I shall now venture.

CHAPTER 13. REALITY AND ADMIRATION

A. ACTIVITY AND REALITY

I HAVE ARGUED that by calling a thing good we mean that it either is, or is instrumental to, the fulfilment of tendency, and that the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of the tendency, or capacity, of the world. I will now speculate upon certain more remote implications of this view. It may well be that the most urgent and most fertile task of philosophy to-day is not speculation but criticism. Certainly speculation on the deeper, or metaphysical, problems is apt to lead the inquirer into treacherous ground. But speculate we must, to the best of our ability. The intellect is untrue to itself if it is afraid to venture into the metaphysical bogs. It must dare, even at the risk of succumbing to the fever and delirium of verbalism. The danger, however, is minimized if we realize it and prepare for it, and remember that in philosophical even more than in scientific speculation all conclusions are to be held tentatively.

The tendency of anything is, in a sense, its drive or thrust to become something more than it is. It is its effort, as it were, to give birth to something new over and above its present existence. It is its potentiality striving to be actual. How scandalously vague an assertion! Yet in some sense it is certainly true. Fulfilment of tendency is a creative act on the part of the extant real, in which it brings new real into being. It is an exfoliation of the real into further richness of actuality. Activity (of every kind) is the all-pervading miracle of the universe, an all-pervading creativeness. Everything in the last resort turns out to be some mode of activity, everything from a piece of lead to a symphony. There is in a sense nothing whatever but activity, and the universal characters which it assumes, and certain principles or laws, some few of which it logically must illustrate, while others it merely does express. The former we may indeed deduce; the latter we can but discover. But the fact that there is activity, in diverse modes, is entirely beyond the reach of reason. It just is — the all-pervading creativeness of the real.

We have supposed that more complex kinds of activity emerge into being in the organization of units of simpler kinds of activity. On the physical plane there is only physical tendency, and the only fulfilment is physical. On higher planes of organization the real assumes new tendencies. It does not, we have supposed, fulfil tendencies that were active all the while, but repressed; for the new tendencies presuppose the higher organization. We may say, if we like, that the real had all the while the ‘capacity’ of expressing itself in the higher tendencies when organized; but, until the proper organization was achieved, there was no ‘straining’, so to speak, to behave in the new way. The tendency is not in the isolated parts, but only in the complex. By ‘capacity’ we must mean, here as always, no more than that the simple parts are such that, if they were organized, they would form a whole with certain tendencies.

Let us consider the ethical bearing of this creativeness of the real. The good, we said, is the greatest possible fulfilment of tendency, and of the capacity of substances to co-operate for the creation of higher emergent activities or tendencies. We now see a further implication of this view. The good is in general the greatest possible actualization of the potentiality of the real, the fullest expression of the nature of the real. And the real expresses itself most fully in the fulfilment of tendencies emergent in organism. In the activity which constitutes an organism new reality is brought into being. And the ideal, as we have seen, involves that the world should be organized so as to express itself in the highest possible emergent tendencies, and their fulfilment. This constitutes the fullest actualization of the potentiality of the real, the bringing into being of the richest possible reality of which the present actual is capable.

B. IMPLICATIONS OF BEING ADMIRED

ONE OF THE tendencies of organized reality is the psychical tendency to know, will and feel. Perhaps it might better be called ‘capacity’ rather than ‘tendency’, since, without any object to experience, experience is impossible. But the physical organism itself constitutes an ever present object to its own subjectivity, and in the organism itself lie the objective tendencies that are first conated. Moreover just as, in our earlier discussion of tendency, we were led to say that organisms have in themselves tendencies which demand a certain environment for their fulfilment, so now once more we must hold that this psychical capacity of organisms constitutes in them strictly a tendency demanding an environment for its fulfilment.

Now the psychical capacity may be called a capacity for cognizing the real and its tendency, and for willing and enjoying its fulfilment. In fact it is essentially a capacity for knowing and admiring and serving the real’s exfoliation into new reality.

We have agreed that, in any given situation, it is good that actual psychical tendency be fulfilled; for fulfilment, or progressive fulfilling, is what we essentially mean by ‘good’, and psychical fulfilment is no less fulfilment than any other kind. The act of knowing, willing and enjoying is itself an emergence of new reality; though, as we have seen, false cognition and irrational conation and affection are but imperfect fulfilments of psychical capacity.

A very important problem must now be faced. Is true cognition and rational conation and affection good solely in that it constitutes the fulfilment of the experient’s capacity and may be instrumental to objective fulfilment in the environment? Or does being known, willed and admired constitute in itself an intrinsic fulfilment of the object? Does the objective world, in some obscure sense, need to be the object of psychical activity, need to be known and willed and admired? Surely, it may be said, this cannot be the case, unless we are mistaken in holding (as we have held throughout this inquiry) that mere knowing makes no difference to its object, save indirectly. It is true, of course, that, in a certain sense and in certain cases, volition makes a difference to its object. I will to move my hand, and my hand moves. But in the great majority of cases volition takes effect indirectly upon its object, though always the medium must be some case of direct influence of volition upon the body.  Anyhow it would seem that objects are not themselves benefited in any way simply by being objects of psychical activity. To suppose otherwise must seem an indulgence in unwarranted fantasy.

But (since we are frankly speculating) let us pursue the matter somewhat further. In the first place we may note that, when the object is one that is capable of knowing that it is the object of psychical activity, it may very well be benefited by being known and admired and by having its fulfilment willed. Human beings commonly find that to be valued is an end in itself. To be an object of love, no less than to be a loving subject, is judged to be in itself a fulfilment demanded by our nature. This fact is often attributed to our social or our sexual dispositions’ and certainly it would be illegitimate to infer from it alone that all objects are intrinsically benefited by being objects of psychical activity.

Nevertheless, it is worth while to inquire what it is that we do experience when we rejoice in being valued. Roughly, what we feel when we are valued is that ‘we have not lived in vain’. Apart from a merely selfish pursuit of pleasure, there seem to be two kinds of fulfilments worthy to be sought. A man may hope that his behaviour may be instrumental (in however microscopic a measure) to the fulfilment of that which is objective to him as an experient. But also in so far as he is himself intrinsically excellent, in so far as his cognition is true and rich, and his conation just, this excellence of his may, so to speak, be saluted, confirmed, crowned, by the admiration of his fellows or the affection of some few intimates, or the love of a life-long companion. Without such admiration he may feel that, though he may have done good work in the world, he, as a source of intrinsic value, has missed complete fulfilment, in that he has not brought into being all the excellence of which he was capable, namely the psychical reals which we call admiration and love. He may feel, in fact, that in failing to be known and valued he fails (thus far) to be woven into the tissue of psychic reality. He is a loose thread. And so, not only does he fall short of self-fulfilment, but also the whole of reality falls short of fulfilment in respect of his absence from the psychic tissue. The sense of not being valued, then, is a sense of not being adequately gathered up into the unity of things.

Now it matters little for our present purpose whether this experience is due to a specific disposition, social or sexual; for whatever its psychological source, it is logically justified. The admiration of intrinsic values does, as a matter of fact, constitute an emergence of new reality. In failing to be admired, an intrinsically good object does not fulfil all its capacity. Further, since value does not depend on the act of valuation, the fact that an intrinsically good object has fulfilled its capacity of being admired constitutes an additional good, whether the object is aware of being admired or not.

This does not mean that the admirer’s cognition creates the value of the object itself. The object’s value is intrinsic. The admirer cognizes it and espouses it. This espousal, or admiration, itself constitutes a new value, which is a fulfilment of the psychical subjective capacity of the admirer, and also a fulfilment of the ‘psychical objective capacity’ of the object. It is in fact an emergent fulfilment.

After all, then, it is not mere fantasy to say that the objective world needs to be known and admired and to have its fulfilment willed; for everything that is intrinsically valuable is capable of producing further value in being admired. Even objects which are not intrinsically good, and are admired erroneously, obtain in a sense fulfilment in being admired. For the cause of an erroneous value-judgment is always the apprehension of some true value. (The erroneous admiration of a villain must be attributed to the true apprehension of the excellence of some of his attributes). In respect, then, of its good attributes the bad object is fulfilled in being admired. But the object as a whole, which by hypothesis is not good but bad,. does not in strictness obtain fulfilment in being admired. For the admiration which it arouses is unjustified. It is admiration for something which is not admirable, which does not in its own nature demand admiration. The admiration which it gets is not strictly its fulfilment at all. Further, the experient who thus erroneously admires, incurs an evil discord within himself. The objective world as a whole, moreover, is not benefited by admiration of things within it that are not good, for things within it that are not good are antagonistic to its rudimentary unity.

This speculation may, indeed, seem to ignore the principle that knowing, as such, makes no internal difference to its object, save (indirectly) when the object is aware of being known. But if the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of the capacities of the universe, it is demanded in the ideal that all intrinsic goods should be contemplated and admired; and this is demanded, not simply because the act of contemplation and admiration constitutes a fulfilment of the subjective psychical capacity of the observer, but also because to be admired fulfils the ‘objective psychical capacity’ of the thing that is admired. In fact it fulfils the thing’s capacity for being an object to some mind, and an admired object, knit within the system of that ‘objective self’. To be admired, then, ‘makes the best of’ good things. For in the cognitive relation of subject and object there emerges this new reality (knowledge and admiration), in which subject and object together find their completion. In this view it remains true in one sense that being known and admired makes no internal difference to an object (just as being photographed makes no internal difference to an object); but on the other hand it is also true in another sense that being known and admired does constitute a fulfilment of the object’s capacity for entering into an emergent subject-object-relationship. Being known and admired makes no difference to that in the object which is known and admired. But it does make a difference to the (ontological) object as an entity capable of playing the part of epistemological object in a subject-object relation, and of co-operating in the creation of the emergent activity of admiration.

I am well aware, however, that this contention would be wholly unjustified save in a frankly speculative discussion.

C. ORGANISMS, NATURE, AND AESTHETIC OBJECTS

VERY TENTATIVELY, THEN, I conclude that there is meaning, a very special meaning, in saying that intrinsically good objects do ‘need’ to be admired. In particular every organism needs admiration. It is not wholly meaningless to say, for instance, that the rose-tree flowering in my garden needs to be admired for its organic achievement in order that its objective psychical capacity may be fulfilled. Each of the atoms, also, that constitute its leaves and petals would obtain fuller being by being known as an individual and admired for its primitive excellence as an expression of the ‘underlying substantial activity’ upon a lowly plane of organism. And for her richer and more organic nature, my wife, known by me somewhat intimately, demands a deeper admiration. And when I see her with her child and observe how intimately she has embraced within herself the needs of her child, thereby assuming a still more complex nature and capacity, this higher intrinsic good also demands of me admiration. And further, though we must never ignore the difference between the subjective unity of experience and the objective systematic relationships of distinct experients, admiration is demanded by the vast and diverse, but only slightly organized, company of the forty million minds of England. And the rudimentary trace of objective organism which hopeful observers can detect in the human race, also demands admiration so far as it exists, and service in so far as it is yet only potential.

But what of the mountains, lakes, and clouds, and the whole company of nature’s beauties? These are not themselves single organisms, though they may conceivably be compounded of primitive physical organisms. So far are they from being single organisms that they are not even single organizations, as a nation is, and the human race might become. Are we to suppose, then, that natural beauties, which are not unities of being but only of appearance, claim our admiration as an organism claims it? Or is the Wordsworthian view mere sentimentalism? Professor Whitehead holds that the Romantic Movement was justified in feeling that in admiring nature we apprehend an intrinsic value. ‘Nature,’ he says, ‘cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values’;  and ‘these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.’ What precisely can be meant by such a statement?

An adequate discussion of our admiration of nature is not possible here. But I would hazard the guess that it involves two very different activities. We are apt to regard a landscape both as a pattern of sensory qualities, of colour, volume, texture, and so on, and also as in some sense the face of nature herself, as features expressive of an underlying spirit. The former is strictly aesthetic admiration, the latter might be called religious. The former is typified by the artist’s manipulation of abstracted natural features for the construction of a true aesthetic unity, and is carried to its logical conclusion perhaps in the most ‘abstract’ art. The latter is experienced most purely perhaps in our admiration of the star-strewn sky. Here the strictly aesthetic experience is slight, but we may have an overwhelming sense that we are confronted by the very face of nature. In the former experience, I should say, we are interested in perfection of form, unity in diversity, even if that perfection gathers up into itself much that in isolation would be imperfect, ugly, or evil. In the latter experience we are interested chiefly in actuality. Here, we feel, we are confronted with the very features of the cosmos; and, just because they really are the features of the cosmos unobscured, we admire them. It was a variety of this experience, perhaps, that led us at times to admire even the horrors of war. Here at least, we said, is the real unadorned, and no mere censored aspect selected from the real. But in this mood, indeed, we forgot that if prettiness is not the whole truth of the real, neither is horror. This ecstasy of horror and defeat, however, must be more closely considered in the next chapter. Here I would distinguish between purely aesthetic appreciation and the ecstasy to which both aesthetic appreciation and also other experiences may sometimes give rise. In aesthetic appreciation, I should say, we admire a certain limited object; in the ecstasy which may result from this admiration, we admire the universe through the symbolism of, or at the suggestion of, the particular aesthetic object. But of this later.

Now in aesthetic appreciation, whether of natural beauty or of the works of pure art, one source of our delight may possibly be that certain specific kinds of sensory patterns are the appropriate stimuli to certain inherited emotional tendencies. Sounds and colours and forms may well have for us an inherited value — sexual, social, parental, and so on. Or, on the other hand, certain sensory patterns may touch off certain simple glandular reflexes. Another source of aesthetic delight lies doubtless in the acquired human associations of the object. These may be explicitly conscious in our minds, or fused and subconscious. Thus we may frankly admire the sunset for its emotional significance. In calling the hills bold or serene we unwittingly confess that we admire them for their fused human symbolism. In such cases what we admire is not strictly the sky and the mountains for their own sake, but only their likeness to things human. We rejoice, as it were, in human features seen reflected in nature. True, nature herself really has the features that we are admiring; but our judgment of their beauty depends on their fused human associations.

Further, it may be that aesthetic appreciation is largely derived from the free exercise of our neural capacities. The rhythm of the dance and the curves of the hills and the proportions of the ‘abstract’ picture may doubtless please us just because they accord with our own powers of apprehension. In music those combinations of sound are best appreciated which are apprehensible under some pattern, which in fact are neither so simple as to be trite nor so complex as to be ‘unintelligible’. Here again it may seem that we admire just because our capacities are fulfilled. But in truth what we admire is not our own agility in apprehending the form, but the form itself. We admire most the most complex and unified unity-in-diversity which we, with our degree of skill, are able to grasp.

This apprehension of unity in diversity, and of the most rigorous unity in the richest diversity, is clearly essential in the aesthetic experience. And it is in virtue of this that mathematicians rightly claim that there is beauty in mathematics. In the work of art, fused associates and even conscious associates must combine, in most closely knit yet diversified unity of matter and mood, with the unified sense pattern of the aesthetic medium itself. It is too easy to explain this whole affair in terms of the observer’s need for diversified yet harmonious exercise of his powers. The artist himself, and the unsophisticated observer, are justified when they revolt against this subjectivism, and insist that in some sense or other what is produced is itself a thing of value, and no mere means to harmonious satisfaction.

An organism, we have agreed, is a value in itself; and it attains a higher degree of intrinsic value the more organic it is. It attains the most complete fulfilment of its capacity in a life of most diverse activities all of which are harmoniously controlled for one end. Now in a work of art we are presented with a concrete instance of that unity in difference which is an essential character of organism. In admiring the harmonious fulfilment of the capacities of the diverse matter of any work of art, what we admire is a concrete presentation of this essential character of organism. True the experience is in a sense illusory. The presented unity, including all its fused and unfused symbolism, is the unity of no actual organism, such as a person. It is only a phantom of organism projected upon unorganized material, or on material organized merely from outside. The ‘underlying substantial activity’ which expresses itself in this intrinsic value is not in the medium alone, but in the co-operation of the artist and his medium. (In fact it is an emergent activity.) But the phantom is a phantom of a concrete unity. It is presented to our senses and our imagination. It is a visible, audible, or even (in sculpture) a tangible ghost, into which we ‘project’ an illusory life. Unlike the value of a true organism, the aesthetic value of a work of art is not ‘in and for itself’, since it, the concrete object, has not ‘realized’ itself. It entails for its existence the artist’s creative mind.

Of the appearance of nature I said that we admire it partly for its felt actuality and immensity, partly for its symbolical fulfilment of our human needs, partly for the fragmentary and fortuitous traces of that unity in diversity which is the special character of organism. Now while in the appearance of nature this sensory unity in diversity plays a minor part, in the work of art it is supremely important. Without it there is no aesthetic value whatever. But, on the other hand, whereas in the appearance of nature we are confronted by the very face of nature herself, or at least certain of her features apprehended in isolation from the rest, in the work of art we are confronted, certainly by something actual, but by something which is significant to us less by virtue of its actuality than by virtue of the symbolism which is focused into it by the human mind, and by virtue of the abstract form of rich ‘unity in diversity’ which it embodies.

D. SUMMARY

I WOULD SUMMARIZE this whole very speculative discussion as follows. There is a sense in which the ideal, the good, is the greatest possible actualization of the potentiality of all that exists, the fullest expression of the nature of the world. This, owing to emergence, is more nearly achieved the more there is organization. The ideal, therefore, is the realization of potentiality upon the highest possible plane of organism. No organism, however, fulfils its whole capacity unless it is contemplated and justly admired; since in being contemplated and admired it co-operates in the emergent activity of the subject-object whole. The abstract form of the ideal is, therefore, that continuously victorious activity, on the part of all organisms on all planes, be continuously and justly admired in all their aspects by all psychic subjects of sufficient capacity for this task.

In admiring the features of nature, we appreciate them partly for their accidental human associations, but also for the fragmentary ‘abstract’ beauty, or unity in diversity, which we discover in them. Possibly one cause of our love of nature is that we inherit sensory and perceptual capacities which are themselves the product of nature’s age-long operation upon our ancestors. What more natural than that we should delight in the perceptual environment to which we are best adapted? What more natural than that the modern urban and industrial environment should not be perceptually appropriate, and therefore not immediately pleasing? What more natural than that, as we become better adapted to urban life, we should begin to discover new and unexpected beauties in the gloom and glare and angular precision of city percepts? But there is another element in our attitude to nature’s features. We salute them for being, whatever their form, veritable features of the face of reality. And this is sometimes true also of our reaction to the civic environment; for even city life, after all, is a feature of reality. Finally, in so far as we find in nature hints of formal unity-in-diversity, or again symbols of human nature, we are tempted to take them as features of a veritable cosmic organism.

In the creation and appreciation of works of art, our delight has doubtless many sources. But when all irrelevant matter is set aside, what we admire in art is a strict formal unity which is imposed upon, or is seen to emerge out of, richly complex matter, sensory, affective, and ideational. What we admire is the harmonious fulfilment of rich potentialities. What we admire is an appearance of organism. This admiration of a unitary object (though in a sense an illusory object) is the main factor in aesthetic experience. But it is not always distinguished from the enjoyment of our own agile and victorious activity in apprehending the object. Nor is it true that we admire the object because it affords us harmonious activity. It is unnecessary to suppose that our own harmonious activity is itself the only object which can rouse our admiration.

CHAPTER 14. MORAL ZEAL, DISILLUSION, AND ECSTASY

A. MORAL ZEAL AND DISILLUSION

THE WHOLE OF the preceding inquiry has been concerned with a particular kind of experience, namely, the experience of things or events as good and bad. We have tried to discover what it is that is implied in our diverse uses of these words, what is their common essential meaning; and further, we have tried to elaborate this meaning into a logically coherent concept. Having reached some conclusion on this subject, we considered the meaning and implications of moral obligation. And finally, we came to some very tentative conclusions as to certain characteristics that seemed to be required in the objective ideal. This discussion entailed a very speculative exploration of the relations between subject and object in the act of admiration.

There remains to be considered another type of experience, in which ethical experience seems to be in a manner transcended. I will first try to describe the kind of experience that I mean, and will then close this whole survey with a very tentative speculation as to its significance.

There seem to be at least three moods which the mind may experience with regard to good and evil. I will call them the mood of moral zeal, the mood of disillusion, and the mood of ecstasy. It is ecstasy that I will venture to discuss; but, first, it will be well to distinguish the three moods from one another. They do not necessarily exclude one another. It is possible to have various blends of them in which now one and now another is more prominent. Or perhaps I should rather say that we may attend at once to those diverse aspects of experience which conduce to each of these three moods, and that we may be concerned now chiefly with one, now with another aspect. The mood of ecstasy, indeed, seems in some sense to involve and to transform both the others.

In our customary daily life we seldom experience any of these moods, for we are too closely engaged by the successive strokes of the game of living, to contemplate it as a whole. With little thought as to what it really is that we are doing, we fulfil our private needs and the habitually recognized claims of our neighbours; or we brood upon our defeats, or build castles in the air. Now and again, however, the mind is shocked into a poignant realization of the stark difference between good and bad, and perhaps into some gesture of allegiance to the good.

This mood of moral zeal may sometimes spring from an unusually intense and indignant experience of private need, or from a self-forgetful espousal of the needs of another, or others, or from the spectacle of animal suffering. Or, again, it may arise from the discovery of some inconsistency or insincerity in oneself or another. But. whatever the origin of the moral mood, it consists in a white-hot indignation against all that is conceived as bad, and in particular against all that is conceived as conflicting with the free activities of human beings and perhaps of animals, or (as some would put it) against all that is thought of as ‘contrary to the will of God’. The universe is regarded single-mindedly in relation to the ethical distinction, the great struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, or between life and death, or spirit’s activity and the inertia of matter. We are so impressed by the urgent needs of living things, and perhaps by the needs of a world regarded as itself alive, that the ethical distinction seems to be an absolute distinction between characters of the real itself, and no mere accidental result of our sensitivity. If the stars are indifferent to this vast crusade for the good, so much the worse for them. If they be not themselves alive or seats of life, we may ignore them; unless indeed they can be made somehow instrumental to the achievement of the ideal. If, as some believe, the great enterprise of life on this planet must sooner or later end in defeat, then the universe is contemptible, a brute-mother devouring her divine foster-child. For nothing, in this mood, matters but the abolition of evils and the achievement of goods.

From this zealous mood we may fall into disillusion. This is experienced as a definite contraction of the spirit, or a collapse from a more alive to a less alive mode of being. Our headlong ethical enthusiasm is perhaps suddenly and mysteriously checked, as though by a change of weather. As though by spongy ground, we are reduced suddenly from a gallop to a hang-dog walk. Perhaps we have been exhausted by some hidden physiological change, and have projected our jaundiced mood upon the environment. Perhaps, on the other hand, it is mere thought that has fatigued us and projected its pale cast upon the world.

Anyhow, from whatever cause, we find ourselves disillusioned about all values, save probably the fierce negative value of sensory pain. The normal mind seldom sinks so far as to be disillusioned about the badness of pain stimuli. It may indeed transcend their badness, rise to some degree of emancipation from their tyranny, through the experience of higher values; but this transcendence is no mere disillusionment. In disillusion all values above the sensory level simply escape our apprehension. No longer is the world a theatre of intense personal dramas, or of the cosmical epic of good and evil; it is just a tedious and chaotic accident, a foul tangle of thorns and marshes wherein one has somehow to find a tolerable resting place. Of course there are sweets, a few rare berries to be captured now and then. But mostly they turn sour in the mouth, and always after them comes colic. The prudent man takes as little as possible of the hostile world into his system. He loves as mildly and as rarely as possible. He eschews all loyalties. He exerts his will only to keep reality at arm’s length. For life, in this mood, seems a long and sleepless night in an uncomfortable bed. We toss and yawn, and stop our ears against the clamour of the world, and construct a defence of pleasant fantasies, or hypnotize ourselves with mildly laborious and aimless antics, to entice sleep.

When we succeed to some extent in this attempt to keep ourselves from being implicated in the world that is over against us, our disillusion may achieve a certain cynical complacency of triumph. And this may sometimes be so intense that, buttressed by a little confused thinking, it may persuade us that we have attained a sublime detachment from ephemeral values and have found the goal that transcends good and evil. When, on the other hand, the demands of the body, or of other persons to whose needs we happen to be sensitive, are so insistent that we cannot disengage ourselves from them, or again when we contemplate the insecurity of all our defences, we may taste abject terror on account of our vulnerability. And this terror, so long as it is experienced only in imagination, may sometimes exalt itself into a kind of pseudo-tragic ecstasy. For we are all capable of masochism — at a safe distance from the actual.

But these moods of triumph and terror are in truth mere phases of the disillusioned flight from the enticing and wounding object of experience. And in defence of this withdrawal we may construct or accept all sorts of theories, the gist of which is always that the difference between good and bad is illusory, and that obligation is a meaningless concept; and indeed that the preference for pleasure rather than pain is itself a fortuitous and crazy bias, which the prudent man will seek to escape as far as possible.

B. THE RISE TO ECSTASY

THE THIRD MOOD, which I venture to call ‘ecstasy’, is less easy to describe. Some would perhaps identify it with the more triumphant kind of disillusion; for in some sense it certainly involves both triumph and detachment from all desire. Others may refuse to distinguish it from disillusion of the more tortured type; for it is not wholly unlike masochism. Some may claim that it is essentially moral, though it is emancipated from every particular moral bias and every moral code; for certainly it is an experience in which a supreme duty seems to be fulfilled by the stripped and cleansed spirit. Others may think of it as the highest reach of that kind of experience which we call aesthetic; for they perhaps know it best in contemplation of works of art. Some, however, would insist that what is under discussion is simply the religious experience, since it is essentially the contemplation of supreme excellence, and the spiritual gesture which we call worship.

Many, of course, would simply deny that there is any such experience as that which I wish to describe. They suspect that anyone who thinks he has, or did have, such experiences is merely mistaken. Some precious dogma or other (they suggest) demands that there should be the possibility of intuitive apprehension of occult reality, or of value other than teleological values; and so in certain moods of zest a believer may persuade himself that he is face to face with the supreme excellence, when, as a matter of fact, he is merely rather excited. It is so easy to believe that an experience has the character that we want it to have, and even easier is it to assume that a past experience: did have the desired character.

In all these spheres there is indeed grave danger of self-deception and faulty introspection. But in the last resort it is only by more rigorous introspection that our error is to be discovered. We cannot afford to discard introspection altogether merely because it sometimes fails us. No doubt many have deceived themselves into believing that they have had definitely super-normal experience. Possibly others, however, really have had such experience, and have been unable to describe it intelligibly to the mystically blind. Indeed, the literature of mysticism is so vast and detailed, and so much in agreement, that the existence, as opposed to the interpretation, of unique mystical experiences may be considered publicly established by the testimony of many persons who, claiming to have had it, have established also their own honesty and their accuracy of introspection. But, alas, it is almost impossible to disentangle their data from their interpretations. The professed mystics may have seen the truth, but they fail to describe it intelligibly, and their interpretations are often naïve.

Here, however, I am concerned with something less remote than the experience of the great mystics, namely, a mood which may happen to very many of us if not to all. Perhaps I am not entitled to use the term ‘ecstasy’ to signify experiences which, it may be, are wholly unlike the alleged mystical ecstasy. Yet I adopt this magniloquent word to mark the fact that the experience under discussion is strikingly different from all our ordinary value-experiences; and that it involves a sense of exaltation; and further, that the excellence which it claims to apprehend is conceived as the attribute not of a part but of the whole universe, or of the whole universe as it is presented to the individual. It is an experience which, though it may occur but rarely in the life of any particular person, is not properly called super-normal. I would hazard the guess that, though many might disown the experience entirely, they have as a matter of fact had it, but have failed to distinguish it from other experiences somewhat like it, or have perhaps simply failed to notice it when it has occurred. For it is an experience which must be very carefully introspected if we would neither overlook it entirely nor mistake it for something else. To careful introspection it appears to be neither an enjoyment of teleological fulfilment nor a mystical apprehension of the reality behind familiar appearances. It is essentially, I should say, the appreciation of an unfamiliar and surpassing excellence in the total object of familiar experience. It is not insight into the ‘reality’ behind ‘appearances’, but discovery of a hitherto unappreciated excellence of the familiar world itself.

As with disillusion, so also the mood which I have called ecstasy is very possibly conditioned by the state of the body. As in the one case certain physiological changes seem to diminish our capacity for intuiting value, so in the other case it may well be that other physiological changes induce in us a more delicate sensitivity, or a shrewder percipience. However this be, the mood comes to us with an enjoyment of intensified psychical activity, a kind of unusual wide-awakeness. This, perhaps, means simply that we find ourselves at grips with a more stimulating, more vivid, or more complex objective field than usual; or, since this much is also characteristic of the intense ethical zeal, it were better to say that in the mood that I am describing we seem to discover in the urgent struggle between goods and bads a more serene and hitherto neglected aspect. We glimpse the same reality from a fresh angle. Or, to use an imperfect but perhaps helpful image, from seeing things single-mindedly, with monocular ethical vision we pass to a stereoscopic, binocular, or argus-eyed vision, in which the ethical is but one factor. What we see is what we saw before, but we see it solid. Whereas before we could appreciate only the good of victory, now we salute a higher kind of excellence which embraces impartially both victory and defeat.

Very diverse situations may afford occasion for this enlightenment, situations so diverse that it seems at first impossible to find any feature common to them all. Fleeting sense-objects are sometimes potent symbols that evoke the experience. A breath of fresh air may be enough, or an odour, or a clash of colours or of sounds, or such more complex objects as a gesture or the curve of a limb. On the other hand, objects of a very different kind may effect the change in us, for instance, a supreme work of art, especially if it be tragic, or a subtle matter of intellectual study which taxes our powers of comprehension and affords the illusion of emancipating us from our human limitations.

In fact, almost any kind of object may afford the stimulus for this mood of ecstasy, or on the other hand may never do so. One kind of situation, however, is perhaps peculiarly significant for an understanding of the experience. Grave personal danger, or conviction of final defeat in some most cherished enterprise, or the danger or final downfall of some dearest object of loyalty — it is perhaps in these situations that the precise content of the mood is best seen.

It is possible, for instance, to be on the verge of panic, to be reduced to quivering incapacity and terror, and yet all the while to be an exultant onlooker, rapt in observation of the spectacle, yet in a queer way aloof. It is possible even in the compulsive reaction to pain in one’s own flesh, and even while helplessly watching a beloved’s pain, to be, precisely, in the very act of frantic revulsion, coldly, brilliantly, enlightened, not as to the excellence of pain, but as to the excellence of the universe.

There seem to be two factors common to these experiences. They all involve the vigorous espousal of some need or other, great or small; and they are all experiences of the defeat of the espoused need. They are all occasions of intense psychical activity, and all occasions of defeat. From unusually intense and thwarted desire we seem to wake, without any disillusionment from the ends at stake. into apprehension of value or excellence of an entirely different order. Not that we pierce beyond illusory appearances to reality itself, or contemptuously turn from the shadow to the substance, but rather, as I have said, we appreciate something that was presented before but was hitherto beyond our appreciation. Not even that we ‘re-value’; for re-valuation implies some denial of the urgency of former values. Rather we prize these even more than formerly; and, just because of this new apprehension, just because experience of this other order of excellence irradiates even the familiar valuations that it transcends, we may be even more active in their defence than we were before our enlightenment. For. paradoxically, the familiar values, even with their new poignancy, are perceived as members in that higher excellence which does indeed both eclipse them and enhance them.

C. EMANCIPATION FROM TELEOLOGY

WELL MAY WE call this mood ecstasy, even though perhaps it is profoundly different from the ecstasy of the mystics. For it is essentially a standing outside oneself, and an aloofness from all the familiar objects of the will, a detachment not merely from the private person but equally from the world and its claims, not indeed to deny them, but to appreciate them with a new serenity. To speak almost in the same breath of detachment and of enhanced appreciativeness may seem inconsistent. But anyone who has ever attempted any work of art must understand this description. For it is only when we stand aloof from our work, that we most justly and most keenly appreciate whatever is good in it. Immersed no longer in the technical labour, with all its incidental but engrossing defeats and victories, we can value without distraction (and therefore with closer attention, and therefore more sharply), the aesthetic whole that we have devised.

I do not mean merely that in ecstasy our private desires may come to be regarded as unimportant and contemptible compared with the needs (say) of mankind as a community of interdependent minds; somewhat as, within the individual’s private economy, momentary impulses may be regarded as less worthy of consideration than permanent and deep-seated dispositions. It is not this comparative evaluation of needs and their fulfilments that is in question. In this mood of ecstasy we seem in some manner to pass beyond the whole cramping, limiting distinction between good and bad; we may even contemplate with a kind of cold fervour of acquiescence the possibility even that the whole enterprise of mind in the cosmos should fail, that the richest capacity of the universal active substance should never achieve expression in the supreme level of organism, and that all that has hitherto been achieved should be lost. For in this mood not only victory but also defeat, even final catastrophe, is experienced as good. We seem to stand above the battle in which we ourselves are eager and hard-pressed fighters, and to admire it as a work of divine art, in which tragic aesthetic excellence overwhelmingly vindicates all the defeat and pain even of those who may never have access to this vision.

<>Evidently if this account of ecstasy be true, we have come upon a very serious difficulty for an ethical theory according to which we mean by ‘good’ simply fulfilment of activity or tendency. For if by ‘good’ we mean fulfilment, it is meaningless even to ask of a certain instance of ‘good’ whether it is an instance of fulfilment or not. Let us, however, put aside this difficulty for the present, and pursue our empirical investigation of ecstasy. It is this radical difference between the familiar values and the value glimpsed in ecstasy that leads some to suppose that in ecstasy the distinction between good and bad is seen to be abolished. This I believe to be an error. Detachment from lower values for the sake of higher is mistaken for emancipation from value itself. There is, no doubt, a sense in which the spiritual life involves a ‘disintoxication’ from the influence of all values, an aloofness even in the most exalted delights. But these negative phrases describe only the process of emancipation, not the end for the sake of which emancipation is attempted. And even so they misdescribe; for there is nothing in them to distinguish ecstasy from disillusion, the somnolent failure to value at all from the awakening into a new mode of valuation and a new sphere of values, unnoticed in familiar moods. It is true that in ecstasy we have peace, and that we are indeed emancipated from all desire, and can accept whatever befalls. This, however, does not imply that we have transcended value, but rather that we have discovered, or seem to have discovered, that whatever befalls is good. We admire the issue of fate; we are not indifferent to it. Those who claim that the ‘spiritual life’ consists in an emancipation from value, admit that to the imperfectly spiritual the goal of spirituality constitutes a value, and the supreme value; but, they argue, the goal itself is a state in which value is seen to be illusory. In the spiritual view it matters not whether anyone attains to spirituality, still less whether the world’s enterprises succeed or fail. Therefore, we are told, in the spiritual view value is altogether escaped. But this is to overlook the fact, insisted upon often by the mystics themselves, and even by those who claim that value is transcended, that the spiritual life has its joys. It may be in a sense emancipated from desire, but only in the sense that it possesses what is most desirable, and has no occasion to desire more.</>

This dispute evidently does not turn on the propriety of the use of the words ‘good’ and ‘value’ with reference beyond the familiar plane of teleology. Rather the question is as to whether the experience is or is not affectively toned, and conatively active. Is it mere detachment, mere disintoxication, or is it definitely ‘ecstatic’ in the familiar sense? Surely it comes to us as essentially the contemplation of all object as good, though as good in a manner very different from the familiar manner. It is not mere contemplation, but admiring contemplation. There is a judgment, implicit or explicit, that the object of contemplation ought to be, that it is an end in itself and for itself, and further that when it is delivered to our contemplation we ought to salute it with that gesture of the spirit which we call admiration or worship. If anyone should ask what meaning there is in saying that an object is an end in and for itself, we must answer that in the final ethical analysis it turns out that in all value-judgments, an objective situation, such as organic fulfilment or personal fulfilment, is simply judged good in and for itself. We cannot analyse the experience further.

It is in defeat or tragedy that ecstasy, when it occurs, is most distinguishable; for in defeat it is most opposed to the teleological. In triumph also it is possible; but since it is itself a triumphant mood, we do not easily introspect it as other than the feel of victory. Nevertheless in our triumphs we may sometimes enter upon it, watching ourselves with almost derisive zest. But at such times ecstasy is apt to be mistaken for mere satiety and disillusion. For it is most obviously distinguished from triumph in its detachment and disintoxication from the fruits of victory even in a great cause.

It is perhaps in contemplation of aesthetic objects that) ecstasy is most often achieved. But normal aesthetic appreciation, even when it is intense, is distinct from the ecstasy to which it sometimes gives rise. For while aesthetic appreciation itself is essentially appreciation of a particular object, however complex that object be, ecstasy is appreciation of the whole experienced world, though it may be induced by the aesthetic object. In fact, while in pure aesthetic appreciation we admire the aesthetic object itself, in aesthetic ecstasy we admire the universe through the symbolism of the object.

Moreover, since in aesthetic experience ecstasy is so closely associated with the experience of the harmonious activity of our own powers of apprehension, it is not always distinguished therefrom. Again, since the aesthetic object itself is apt to be regarded as in a manner illusory, the aesthetic ecstasy is often confused and clouded by a certain scepticism. And so, though having it, we may have it without conviction, or cynically ‘explain it away’. The supreme aesthetic objects, however, and especially those which are tragic, can reveal most clearly the peculiar value which is the object of ecstasy. Not that the human significance of such works of art is essential. The most abstract art, it is said, even as the most abstract intellectual study, may enlighten us into ecstasy, may reveal that excellence which is different in kind from all familiar values. But it is in contemplation of those works of art in which human strivings are woven into a tragic aesthetic whole, that we achieve most richly the mood which paradoxically unites the single-minded espousal of needs with the spiritual aloofness consequent on apprehension of value of another order. And the aesthetic ecstasy is the more compelling in proportion as the aesthetic object is on the one hand poignant, through its inclusion of the triumphs and defeats of teleological beings, and on the other hand austere in its subjugation of this material under an abstract form. It is in this subjugation that dramatic art is creative. It evokes in a complex of teleological values and disvalues an excellence which, including them, is other than they.

D. SUMMARY

I WOULD SUMMARIZE this account of the ecstatic experience as follows. (a)The experient does not seem to himself to apprehend some hitherto hidden reality or occult substance. He seems to appreciate something presented in ordinary experience but not hitherto appreciated. (b) The object which he appreciates is not simply the particular object with which his attention has been engaged, whether an aesthetic object, an object of intellectual contemplation, a tragic or triumphant event, or what not. He appreciates rather the whole of existence as it is revealed to him in ordinary experience. But he appreciates it with the help of, or through the symbolism of, the particular object with which his attention has been engaged. (c) The excellence which he seems to discover in the familiar universe seems to be no ordinary value, no mere fulfilment of the activity of a teleologically active substance. In some sense it is indifferent to, because it is superior to, the ordinary distinction between good and evil. In ecstasy we seem to appreciate the universe for being — just whatever we believe it in fact to be, whether for mind a place of triumph or of defeat. And, if my account is correct, the difference between this excellence of fact, or of fate, and the familiar teleological goods is most obvious in those moments of ecstasy which occur when we are being forced to surrender our most cherished ends. (d) Although there is this striking difference between the excellence cognized in ecstasy and all familiar goods, it is not true that in ecstasy we transcend the sphere of value altogether. In all the ecstatic experiences we do definitely value the universe, which is the total object of contemplation. We admire it, worship it; and we do so because we judge it to be a value, not simply for us, but in and for itself. We are not disintoxicated from all values, but only from all values other than the intrinsic excellence of the universe. Nor, strictly, are we disintoxicated from any values; for, though from our high look-out we can now regard all familiar values with complete detachment, we at the same time see them to be irradiated by the supreme excellence.

CHAPTER 15. ECSTASY AND ETHICAL THEORY

A. DESTRUCTIVE ARGUMENTS

SO FAR I have only described, and now I must attempt a critical estimate of, the ecstatic experiences and their significance. It may be that all are in a sense illusory. Of course, in one sense they are what they are rigorously introspected to be. But in so far as they consist in value-judgments, these judgments may be erroneous; and I have described them all as apprehensions or judgments of the intrinsic value of a certain object, namely the universe. They are intuitions of value, together with judgments that the value intuited is characteristic of a certain object. Now we do often pass from intuitions of value to erroneous value-judgments, just as we often pass from intuitions of sense-qualities to erroneous percepts. It is possible that in all these cases of ecstasy we do but ‘project’ upon the external situation a complacency whose source is in truth merely ‘organic’. Thus, perhaps, the aesthetic ecstasy does but project upon the aesthetic object, or rather upon the universe seen through that object, a ‘feeling of harmonious activity’ which in fact comes to us from the harmonious activity of our own powers of apprehension. Similarly with the ecstasy of intellectual contemplation. And in the strange ecstasy of defeat or of pain perhaps the organism, stimulated into intense activity (overt or internal) by the urgent situation, experiences an irrepressible ‘physiological cheerfulness’, which, since there is no familiar object to justify its existence, persuades the subject that he is apprehending some occult external value or excellence hitherto unnoticed.

A somewhat similar explanation may be derived from psycho-analysis. This ecstatic emotion, it may be said, is a typical case of ‘irrational affect’. Could we but analyse the patient’s mind, we should discover that some perhaps obscure and insignificant feature of the present environment happened to be for his ‘unconscious’ a symbol affording gratification to repressed cravings rooted perhaps in his infancy. And indeed the intensity and mystery of the mood of ecstasy do suggest that it is the values of remote childhood that are being enjoyed again.

Let us consider the physiological argument first. No doubt in aesthetic and in intellectual experience the sense of the harmonious activity of our powers of apprehension may play an important part in delighting us. Indeed, careful introspection confirms this much of the theory. And this ‘activity of our powers of apprehension’ is doubtless activity of the organism, and has a physiological aspect. But it does not follow that the ecstatic experiences are essentially experiences of our own harmonious activity. For instance, both in the aesthetic ecstasy, and in ordinary aesthetic appreciation, we are concerned with objects other than our own organic activities. In our admiration of, let us say, a tragic drama we experience something which seems quite different from any delight that we may also have in the exercise of our capacities. Introspection here reveals two distinct factors in the experience, delight in the aesthetic object and delight in our own activity of apprehension and appreciation. It is difficult to believe that the one is merely an ‘illusory’ projection of the other. Of course, if we suppose that all value experiences are projections of organic well-being, we must admit that ecstasy is so also. But if teleological activities other than those of the experient’s own organism are sometimes the immediate ground of value-judgments, then the value experienced in ecstasy may turn out to be of this kind. And, in fact, many values do seem to be thus experienced as good quite apart from their relation to the experient himself and his organic needs. Thus of the values of other individuals and of society it seems true that, so far from being reducible to organic needs of the experient himself, they may be intuited as values though opposed to private needs, and may subsequently mould the organism. Thus finally they do afford the individual organic fulfilment; but they do so because the organism has gradually become attuned to these extra-organic values. A man’s love of another and his loyalty to society, though they are not reducible to any instinct or complex of instincts, do induce in him private needs for the activities of love and loyalty.

But though this general theory of conation be admitted, there still remains a difficulty in respect of ecstasy. I have argued that the extra-organic values, though not grounded in the tendency of the individual organism, are none the less grounded in the tendencies of some active substances, other than the tendencies of the individual organism.

But both in the ecstatic experiences and in ordinary aesthetic experience this seems not to be the case. The value of the immediate aesthetic object, and of the more remote object of aesthetic ecstasy, the value also of the object of intellectual ecstasy, and the value cognized in the ecstasy of defeat — these, it may be said, constitute no fulfilments, unless they be after all fulfilments of the experient himself or his own organism. Apart then from the fallacy of reducing all conation to organic fulfilment, there is some reason for holding that, after all, ecstasy at least must be so explained.

Let us state the issue starkly. Our ethical theory demands that the good apprehended in ecstasy should be judged good just because, or in that, it is cognized as a case of fulfilment; since we have claimed that goodness and fulfilment, when clearly envisaged, are simply identical. Thus either our theory is false, or in ecstasy we experience no goodness, or the goodness experienced in ecstasy is, after all, a case of fulfilment; and if so, what is it a fulfilment of, unless of organic tendencies, ‘projected’ upon the external world?

Introspection, as we have observed, emphatically denies this last explanation. In all these experiences two factors are discoverable, namely complacency in the free exercise of our powers of apprehension and that unique act of admiration for something distinct from our own activity, namely the external universe. The two may be confused, but they are distinguishable.

It is easy to mistake the delight in exercise for the pure aesthetic experience, and conversely it is easy to ‘explain’ the aesthetic appreciation and the aesthetic ecstasy itself as mere delight in exercise. But this is plausible only through a failure of introspection. Similarly with the object of intellectual contemplation. To reduce the ‘beauty’ of mathematics to a projection of the mathematician’s delight in his own agility is to deny, for the sake of a theory, the clear deliverance of introspection, which reveals both delight in our own activity and delight in the object. And even more obtuse is it to confuse the intellectual ecstasy (induced, may be, by the contemplation of the’ beauty’ of mathematics) with a sense of being in intellectual training. Of course, it may still be that the theory which identifies them is right and introspection wrong. But the deliverance of introspection in all these cases is precise and intense, and not lightly to be denied. In the case of the strange ecstasy of defeat the theory of organic fulfilment is peculiarly unplausible. How unlikely is it that, just when we are so crushed and abject that we can scarcely perform the simplest action, we should at the same time be experiencing an unusual and irrepressible animal cheerfulness which forces us to find some objective excuse for our emotion!

This leads us to the psycho-analytical account of ecstasy. This theory, like the other, seeks to reduce all conation to certain capacities innate in the organism. I will not here repeat the argument which asserts that, however true this theory may be of particular cases of morbid, and even of many normal, desires, it is unjustified as a general theory of conation. I will only point out that to say (for instance) that the supreme emotional experiences of the adult are mere derivatives of childhood experiences is no more significant than to say that the intense emotional experiences of childhood are shown by their relation with the supreme emotions of the adult to have been nobly pregnant, or to have been early approximations to, or attempts at, the mature emotions of the adult. To reduce ecstasy, for instance, to a sexual ‘Oedipus’ complex, is but to find in early sexual experiences the first gropings toward ecstasy and the spiritual life. Sometimes, owing to an unpropitious environment, the individual remains throughout his life in this backwater of the stream of conative development; sometimes by good fortune he passes on to more thorough fulfilments of his capacity. And in maturity, were his ecstasy to be ‘psycho-analysed’, he might gladly, admit to himself, ‘Yes, this supreme excellence that I have’ known is after all the very thing that I was seeking long ago in those recently-unearthed but long-repressed disreputable childhood cravings.’ But if he were to suppose therefore that he had’ explained away’ his ecstasy, he, would be as simple as the psycho-analyst himself. Rather he should hold that, though those repressed childhood cravings had largely controlled the direction of his development, what he finally developed into (through the help of a propitious environment) was a being with capacities of appreciation far richer than a child’s, and further that in his ecstatic experience he apprehended and appreciated more clearly the value toward which he was very blindly groping in his ‘disreputable’ childhood.

Thus, supposing the Freudian ‘aetiology’ to be in a sense true, we might yet reinterpret its account of the ecstatic experiences so as to dignify the ‘disreputable’ rather than vilify the sublime.

The tragic ecstasy, for instance, might of course be traced to masochistic or sadistic impulses. Its vaunted aesthetic value might be explained as a symbolical wish- fulfilment, either of a lust to sacrifice what is precious, for fear of vindictive powers, or of an itch to inflict defeat on others as a symbol of one’s own might. But, preserving in either case the aetiology, we might just as well claim that masochism and sadism were early experiments in ecstasy as that ecstasy is just masochism or sadism.

But the real trouble with Freudianism is not its iconoclasm, which indeed has been both salutary and entertaining, Its real weakness is a purely intellectual blunder. For Freudianism, like all kinds of pure instinct psychology, fails to recognize that the extra-organic environment may instil in the individual new behaviour-tendencies not simply reducible to the. outfit inherited by the organism. It clings to the concept of an individual whose fundamental nature is fixed at birth and incapable of any real enlargement; whereas the truth is that the environment itself, working of course on the ground plan of the individual’s innate disposition, may build thereon a nature whose capacities are no more discoverable in the primitive nature than a symphony is discoverable in the mere instruments of the orchestra that plays it.

The physiological and psycho-analytical arguments, then, fail to prove that ecstasy is a mere illusory projection of emotion whose real source is not conscious. But though the arguments are not convincing, ecstasy might still be illusory, in either of the suggested manners, or in some other. And certainly its illusoriness is suggested by the apparent absence of any active substance whose fulfilment it is that is cognized.

Is the only common element in all these ecstatic experiences simply the exhilaration of transcending, or seeming to transcend, the tyranny of one’s own desires or the limitations of one’s own illusions? In all these experiences we certainly do seem to have this transcendence. In intellectual ecstasy we seem to have put away error and to be at last in the presence of reality. In the aesthetic ecstasy also we have some such sense of being face to face with the real, and of being purged of mundane desires. The appeal of ‘abstract’ art, for instance, seems to lie partly in the sense that we have shed all cravings for the romantic and sentimental. In the ecstasy of defeat perhaps our admiration of the objective situation is but a projection of our delight in our own unexpected emancipation from desire. For in the extremity of exhaustion we may become apathetic; and this apathy may be mistaken for transcendence of desire. And well may we value transcendence of the limitations of private cravings, for this has ever been the way to richer experience. Obscure but greater values keep ever beckoning us out beyond our familiar cravings, so that resignation and transcendence, from being mere means to mental enlargement, may come to be regarded as intrinsically good. Plausibly, then, it might be argued that in ecstasy we do but find fulfilment for an habitual lust for resignation in situations in which, as a matter of fact, there is no higher value to justify the resignation.

It may be so. But the possibility that it may be so constitutes in itself no proof that it is so. And let us not lose sight of the extreme experienced difference between the tragic ecstasy and mere resignation. The one is a state of triumph, though of triumph in defeat; the other is a state of surrender, though often it may open the door to fuller life. The one is a self-oblivious absorption in an object, even though the object includes one’s own person as a member; the other is essentially a consciousness of the private self, since it is resignation of the self’s desires in the hope of a fuller life on a higher plane. These experiences seem utterly different. And unless we find very cogent reason for identifying them, we must continue to distinguish them.

B. HYPOTHESIS OF HYPER-BIOLOGICAL PERFECTION

THE ONLY POSITIVE reason for supposing that the experiences which I have called ecstatic are not simply illusory, but appreciations of a unique kind of objective excellence, is the content of the experiences themselves. They are all so profoundly different from, and richer than, the various experiences of which they are said to be illusory ‘projections’. This difference I have tried to make clear. It consists partly in the fact that, whereas all ordinary values are direct or indirect fulfilments of teleologically active substances, the value cognized in ecstasy seems not to be so. The appreciation of the values cognized in ecstasy certainly constitutes a teleological fulfilment, namely a fulfilment of our psychical capacity; but the objective excellence cognized is apparently no fulfilment. This uniqueness of the object of ecstasy has, as we have seen, given rise to the theory that in ecstasy we are ‘disintoxicated’ from the influence of all values. But this theory we have judged false. Ecstasy is essentially an experience of the goodness of an object, namely of the universe, and comes therefore within the purview of ethics. If, however, we accept an ethical theory which describes ‘good’ as the fulfilment of the activity of active substances, and if we cannot explain ecstasy away as illusory, how can we reconcile our ethical theory with this unique kind of value-experience? Some, as we have seen, would say that the very fact that this question can be asked at all shows the falsity of our theory.

We are now trying to grapple with phenomena very far removed from our everyday experience; and a theory which is valid within familiar fields may well need to be reinterpreted to accommodate itself to these obscure facts. Just as our familiar concepts of space and time, though valid for all ordinary purposes, need to be restated as a concept of space-time so as to accommodate certain obscure physical facts, so the concepts of good and evil, valid within the sphere of common sense, may need to be reinterpreted in the light of ecstasy.

Bearing this in mind, let us close this whole ‘highly speculative discussion by attempting on the one hand to see more deeply into the facts of ecstasy, and on the other to discover further implications of our ethical theory, in the hope that on this deeper level fact and theory may turn out to be in harmony.

There is reason to believe that in certain cases the emergence of organism involves not only harmony but also conflict of units within the organic system. Four instances are enough to illustrate this principle. First, between the members of any healthy living body, there are many strains and antagonisms of an ordered kind, and within the microscopic structure of the tissues the same is true, while the central nervous system is itself a system of minor systems which both co-operate and conflict. But so long as the organism is healthy, the conflict is ordered in relation to the needs of the whole. Second, psychical activity, which seems to be an activity emergent from the merely physical and the merely physiological, seems to occur only where the fulfilment of lower-order activity is delayed by resistance. It is in hindrance to our bodily functions arid psychical enterprises that we advance in thought. Third, it is from the conflicts, no less than from the co-operation, of individual minds that the social mentality is born. We could never pass from the private to the public view if there were never conflict between private interests, or if we never had to choose between loyalty to ourselves and loyalty to the community. Fourth, in the region of art the most excellent aesthetic object is that in which the most recalcitrant material is successfully organized under the most exacting form.

Qui, l’oeuvre sort plus belle

D’une forme au travail

Rebelle,

Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.

Further, it is in tragic art, rather than in comedy, that the distinctive aesthetic excellence is most compelling; and this would seem to be because in tragic art it is most clearly seen as a superior excellence emerging from conflict on subordinate planes.

Now in all the ecstatic experiences conflict plays a part. In some of them it is focal, in others marginal. But I should say that even in those cases in which we rise to ecstasy through the apprehension, for instance, of a simple sense quality, or a gesture or facial expression, or the poignancy of watching any careless gaiety, we contemplate this datum as it were against a vast and vague background of conflict, victory, and defeat. We see and admire the datum, whatever it be, as the expression of one side of a conflict; and at the same time we rise imaginatively above the conflict, and appreciate, or seem to appreciate, a superior excellence which seems to characterize the universe as a whole. This superior excellence we experience as something definitely other than biological fulfilment. As the excellence of dramatic tragedy entails biological (and psychological) defeat, so the cosmical excellence which we seem to apprehend in all ecstasy entails the subordination of biological. organisms for the sake of something which might be called ‘hyper-biological perfection’. There is ambiguity in the prefix ‘hyper ‘. Is this perfection really biological, but upon a far higher plane; or is it opposed to the essential nature of biological fulfilment? Since, however, we are not yet in a position to answer this question, the ambiguity of ‘hyper’ is very convenient. We need only to say that this ‘hyper-biological’ perfection is experienced by man as something very different from every kind of biological fulfilment known to him.

Many would say, and I agree with them, that there is no evidence that any such unique quasi-aesthetic excellence does characterize the universe — no evidence, that is, save the deliverance of ecstasy itself. Is ecstasy, therefore, an irrational value-judgment based upon a typical ‘irrational affect’ which is not justified by any character of the object valued? We have seen that it may be so explained, but that these explanations sound curiously superficial, though subtle. And during the ecstatic experience itself such explanations are not at all desolating, but merely ludicrous.

During the ecstatic experience the only explanation that is believable is one which accords with the actual content of the experience, namely that a hitherto unappreciated excellence of the universe is revealed to us. We can easily believe, for instance, that for the moment we have risen to a higher emergent plane of psychical activity, that we have learnt a truer kind of valuing, that we regard the universe not as a striving member usually regards it, but as it would regard itself, or as its creator might regard it.

If this were true we might say of ecstasy that it was the experience of the highest emergent value. And we should have to suppose that while the value-judgment which we make in ecstasy is wholly irrational and unjustified within the universe of discourse of ordinary affairs, it is justified upon a higher plane of experience.

But we could not simply suppose that in ecstasy we appreciate a higher order of teleological value, since the deliverance of the mood is definitely of a non-teleological excellence. Yet, in general, as we have seen, the higher values are no less teleological than the lower. For instance, the rise from private desire to the appreciation of society is a rise from minor to major teleological ends. Only in aesthetic appreciation do we seem to rise above the whole sphere of striving, and then we appreciate the non-teleological excellence of only a certain limited object. In ecstasy, however it is induced, we appreciate, or seem to appreciate, a non-teleological excellence of the universe.

If, then, we take the experience at its face value, we shall have to believe that it consists of a true, though rationally ungrounded, judgment of the intrinsic excellence of the universe, not indeed as the supreme fulfilment of cosmical biological tendencies, but rather as an aesthetic whole within which the principle of biological, or teleological, organism plays its part upon many planes, and is not necessarily victorious.

There is an unfortunate ambiguity in the words ‘organism’ and ‘organic’, an ambiguity which confuses this whole discussion and is clearly revealed in the preceding paragraph. The cosmos might be a perfect organism in one sense while in another sense it was not. It might be perfectly organic in the sense in which a work of art is said to be organic, but not. organic at all in the sense in which an animal or plant is said to be organic. It might, that is, be such that all its parts were perfectly subordinated to some central unifying principle, though that principle were not a system of teleological behaviour-tendencies, nor yet conscious activity. In ecstasy, then, we seem to apprehend the cosmos as perfectly organic in the aesthetic sense; yet what the unifying principle is, we cannot say. We find it excellent in the sense in which a picture or a symphony is excellent, not in the sense in which a dinner is excellent, nor even in the sense in which a bird’s flight and a human person are excellent.

C. THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES

BUT SUCH AN account of the matter seems to constitute a flat denial of the view that by ‘good’ we mean essentially fulfilment of teleological activity.

I believe that this difficulty can be overcome in a manner which both clarifies our theory and helps us to be more precise about the deliverance of ecstasy.

In an earlier chapter we identified fulfilment of tendency with realization of capacity, actualization of potentiality, the bringing into being of new actuality. What we admire most readily is concrete and perfectly fulfilled organism of the biological or psychological kind, emergent in its own members and controlling them for the expression of its own nature. And organism (upon all levels) we saw to be good just in that it is the fullest expression of the capacity of members, the fullest actualization of potentiality of active substance. And the ideal, we have held all along, is, in some sense, the perfected cosmical organism in which all substance fully expresses its capacity. In pure aesthetic appreciation we admire a concrete organic phantom, imposed upon members which both co-operate and conflict. And in those aesthetic objects in which human striving is utilized, we admire the appearance of a higher organicity achieved by the human material itself, but upon a plane above the plane of ordinary human fulfilment.

Now in ecstasy we seem to admire the appearance of organism on a plane above the whole sphere of teleological activity. This appearance may be illusory; but it is after all essentially an appearance of organism, or of that concrete and complex unity in diversity which is the essential character of organism. All that is thwarted in the world obtains, we feel, complete fulfilment through its membership in the perfect organic unity of the cosmos. If this description be true, the object of ecstasy not only is after all a case of fulfilment, but also is actually valued because it is cognized as such. But it is not that kind of fulfilment which is achieved by the teleological tendencies of men and animals; it is fulfilment, analogous rather to the fulfilment of the aesthetic material in the aesthetic unity. It is a hyper-biological fulfilment emergent in a whole composed of biological striving and its environment. But what kind of fulfilment this might be is altogether obscure. Just as we may make judgments of the excellence of aesthetic objects without necessarily being able to analyse that excellence, so in ecstasy we make judgments of the excellence of the universe without being able to analyse that excellence. All we can say is that, if the deliverance of ecstasy is true, some unifying principle there must be, under which the cosmos is perfectly unified, and in the achievement of which all substance perfectly fulfils its capacity. In ecstasy we seem to apprehend in some manner the perfection of the cosmos as a quasi-aesthetic object; but we are not good enough ‘art critics’ to analyse that perfection. And it were better to say ‘hyper-aesthetic’ rather than ‘quasi-aesthetic’; for the work of art itself offers only a phantom, and a meagre phantom, of that which in ecstasy is burnt into us. Further we can say of this obscure unifying principle that it is not in any ordinary sense the fulfilment of mere teleological processes, even of a cosmical individual, since it is experienced as essentially an eternal perfection in which the success and failure of teleological processes are both members. More than this we cannot say.

Some hint of the solution of our problem may perhaps be found in the word ‘eternal’. In arguing that good is essentially the fulfilment of teleological activity we regard the universe solely as a temporal process; for teleology involves a movement towards the realization of an end that is not yet. But if our temporal experience is in some way incomplete, if the ultimate reality is in some sense supratemporal, embracing the temporal process as one of its attributes, teleology is only a partial aspect of something eternal. For supratemporally, though the end is made actual by successful striving, yet the achieved end and the striving co-exist eternally. Not that they are contemporaneous and everlasting, for temporally the one follows the other; but that in the supratemporal view events of different date are equally actual. That which temporally appears as victory after striving, is supratemporally an eternal factor; and it is supported by another eternal factor, which temporally appears as the process of effort. In unsuccessful striving, on the other hand, there is eternally the process of effort, but eternally no achieved end. If, then, in moments of unique insight we were to apprehend the familiar world from the point of view of eternity, we should see it as a factor in the eternal perfection of the organized supratemporal substance; and we should inevitably contrast that eternal perfection with the familiar perfecting of temporal teleological process. Yet in truth the two would not be different in essence. The eternal perfection would be in fact the very same fulfilment of potency as that which we see temporally as teleological fulfilment. The universe would be glimpsed as organic; yet not as biological process, but rather as hyperbiological, and having a quasi-aesthetic perfection of form, in which the whole potency of substance would be fully expressed. Ecstasy, then, would be an apprehension of the familiar temporal good and evil as factors in an eternal excellence.

Now not only is the whole course of this argument very dubious, but also we must question whether the deliverance of ecstasy itself really warrants the statement that we apprehend the familiar world from the point of view of eternity and as a factor in eternal perfection of organized substance. We said originally merely that it revealed an unexpected value of the familiar world itself. Possibly these two propositions could be reconciled, but I shall not attempt to face this problem here. I will only point out that, if this argument is true, our ethical theory is not incompatible with the deliverance of ecstasy. In the temporal view the essence of good is found to be the fulfilling of teleological process; but supra temporally regarded, this fulfilling is an eternal perfection of being; and it is this perfection which, in ecstasy, we glimpse as an attribute of the familiar temporal world. Thus in the last analysis there is no difference between the good experienced in ordinary life and the good experienced in ecstasy. Both alike are the fullness of the expression of the nature of substance.

One possible and serious objection to this reconciliation must be faced. The introduction of the supratemporal, it may be said, merely obscures and does not solve the problem, the essence of which is, not that the value given in ecstasy is an eternal value, but that it is a value which incorporates within itself both victory and defeat, even upon the highest possible emergent level. If by ‘good’ we mean fulfilment, what sense is there in saying that in ecstasy we apprehend a value which is not incompatible with the defeat of all vital activity, even the defeat of an emergent cosmical individual? (For nothing less than this can be meant by saying that the value given in ecstasy is not biological.)

The solution of this difficulty would seem to be as follows. We have already distinguished between two senses of the word ‘organism’, namely the aesthetic (or that which for convenience may be called the aesthetic), and the biological. This distinction must be further developed in the distinction between organism as the seat of emergent activity, and organism as the seat of one kind of emergent activity, namely consciousness. In ecstasy it seems that even though consciousness were never to be achieved upon the largest scale, even were it to be defeated and annihilated on every level, yet cosmical emergent activity, or rather emergent perfection of being, is eternally achieved. Now this must seem to many a meaningless statement; but only to those for whom consciousness itself is necessarily the highest possible kind of emergent activity. If on the other hand consciousness is regarded as essentially instrumental, there is nothing unreasonable in supposing that cosmical fulfilment might entail the final annihilation of consciousness, in fact that, in spite of complete biological tragedy, the cosmos might be perfect.

If this argument is correct (which, of course, is immensely improbable), the bearing of the distinction between the temporal and the supratemporal is as follows. Consciousness is essentially an activity, and therefore temporal. It is also supratemporal, in so far as it holds together the past and the present; but only partially so, in that it is manacled to a passing present. The highest kind of good, then, which must be a predicate of the supratemporal whole, cannot be a character merely of the highest kind of consciousness. For consciousness is temporal; and the highest good is eternal. The hyper-biological perfection of being is no far off divine event. It occurs at no one point or points in the time process; it is not even repeated at all points. It is an attribute strictly of the supratemporal whole. It is to be apprehended by us only in those bewildering incursions of the eternal, which I have called ecstasy. But though our temporal consciousness may thus experience something of the eternal, and may perhaps in the distant future come to experience it far more fully, it cannot ever itself be eternal. The greatest of all goods cannot be a character of passing subjectivity; it must be a character of the greatest of all possible objects of subjectivity, namely, the supratemporal whole.

In some such manner then, if our temporal experience gives less than the full truth about time, we might solve this difficult problem. But a more immediate and less difficult problem is still upon our hands. We have indeed found that the object of ecstatic valuation is after all an appearance of fulfilment; but clearly the very fact that we previously denied this, while yet claiming that the object was intrinsically good, suggests that we have been wrong in identifying good and fulfilment. Even if all goods are as a matter of fact fulfilment, good and fulfilment, it may be said, are now shown to be distinct ideas.

The answer to this objection is that we failed to analyse the deliverance of ecstasy completely. The excellence which we discover is indeed something wholly aloof, not only from our private fulfilments but even from the highest conceivable rank of such biological fulfilment, in which individuals, over against an environment, achieve free activity and development. Yet this excellence which we cognize in ecstasy is cognized as an emergent expression of an organic whole consisting of biological individuals and their environment. And even if the universe, temporally regarded, were to become completely organized as one biological individual, that individual would have an environment, namely its own members. Now if that internal environment of the cosmical individual were to have in it the seeds of decay for the cosmical individual, there would still be the possibility that, from this inevitable defeat of the cosmical individual by its members, a supreme non-biological aesthetic unity might emerge. And this unity would constitute a fulfilment of the parts of the universe, though not a biological fulfilment.

The truth is, then, that in ecstasy we experience a supreme fulfilment, and experience it (truly or falsely) as the fulfilment of the capacity of the objective universe. But because this fulfilment is not a biological fulfilment, and because in ecstasy biological fulfilments are often experienced as defeated, we too hastily deny that what we experience is fulfilment of any kind. But what we experience in ecstasy is in fact experienced as fulfilment. For whatever our rational judgment about it, we feel toward the cosmos as toward something perfect, in which, though there is conflict within it, the conflict itself is a harmonious member within the whole. Without discovering any ‘hidden reality’, we discover in the familiar real a unity, a perfection, hitherto unnoticed. Or better, we feel toward the familiar real as toward such a unity; yet rationally we find no clear justification for our feeling. Such an experience admittedly might be mere ‘irrational affect’; but equally it might be an emergence into a higher kind of experience which cannot as yet be rendered intelligible.

I said too hastily that in ecstasy we ‘feel’ toward the cosmos as toward something perfect. The word ‘feel’ is ambiguous. It might imply that upon the evidence of our own feeling or ‘affect’ we impute a character to a cognized object. Careful introspection suggests that what happens in ecstasy is something more subtle. We seem to cognize a perfection of fulfilment, and therefore we feel ecstatically toward it; yet we cannot analyse our cognition. We have a cognitive intuition of cosmical excellence, of the perfection of the familiar total object of experience. But we cannot correlate that intuition with the general body of knowledge. There is nothing unique or extraordinary in such an unanalysable intuition. We often, for instance, have percepts which defy analysis. What is unique in the ecstatic intuition is that which is intuited, namely the perfection of the familiar universe.

D. CONCLUSIONS AS TO ECSTASY AND THE IDEAL

WE HAVE BEEN indulging in very vague and doubtful speculation, the sole empirical foundation of which is the ecstatic experience itself in its diverse forms. Apart from this there is no justification whatever for any such addition to our ethical theory as has been attempted in this chapter. And indeed many very intelligent persons would consider that the ecstasies are sufficiently explained as mere ‘projections’ of emotion upon an object to which no such emotion is appropriate. On the other hand many perhaps no less rigorous thinkers would hold that the ecstatic experience is itself so overwhelmingly cogent that, though indeed it must certainly be severely criticized in the light of the rest of our knowledge, the essence of it which survives such criticism compels our acceptance, even though, to accommodate it, we may have to reorganize our whole philosophy.

I have suggested one way in which a biologically-founded theory of ethics can be reconciled with the deliverance of ecstasy; but it has been a very speculative way, which many would reject as entirely illegitimate. We are faced with three possible courses. Either we reject the deliverance of ecstasy as illusory and preserve our ethical theory intact; or we decisively accept it and readjust our theory in some such manner as that of the preceding pages; or we simply suspend judgment. Surely the third is the sane course. For the upshot of our discussion is just that, though we have come to some conclusion as to what the deliverance of ecstasy is, and have found a means of reconciling our theory with this unique experience, we have no reason for believing its unique deliverance save its own cogency. Therefore, while we accept it thankfully as in fact the supremely satisfying experience of life, and seek to relate it within the general system of our knowledge in some manner which neither denies the truth of its deliverance nor wrecks the system, we must ever remember that minds believe too easily what they earnestly desire to believe; and therefore we must discount much of the cogency of ecstasy, and suspect our attempts to show its validity. We must, in fact, maintain a strict agnosticism with regard to it.

But something positive does transpire from this discussion. We have indeed no clear evidence that the deliverance of ecstasy is true, that ecstasy is not merely a ridiculous trick played on us by our own little-understood constitution; but whether there is a valid object for it or not, this emotion is the emotion that would be appropriate to a universe which did in fact possess such an excellence as we seem to discover in it. If ecstasy is not evidence of an actual attribute of the universe, it at least suggests an attribute that a universe must have, if it is to be ideal. It must have this hyper-teleological, quasi-aesthetic excellence, which when we experience it, commands our worship. For this supratemporal perfection of form, and no mere success of temporal striving, is seen to be the extreme of that which in more familiar spheres we call ‘fulfilment of teleological activity’, and ‘good’.

At an earlier stage we said that the ideal was that the; whole universe should achieve organism, and progressively fulfil its capacity upon the highest of all emergent levels. All our human endeavour, we said, however microscopic its scope, must be controlled in relation to that end. And clearly the only way for us as a race to serve in this cosmical task is to strive to organize our tiny planet and facilitate, if may be, the development of ever richer, subtler and more unified mind. In a still more microscopic sphere, the sphere of our own individual endeavour, this must be ever the supreme practical aim to which all other and more easily espoused aims must be in the last resort subordinate; although these also are intrinsic goods which depend for their value upon no ulterior end. (For we have ever insisted that each biological individual is a ground of intrinsic good, whether it co-operates upon a higher plane or not.)

Such, we said, must be the ideal, and such its, relation to our daily lives. But now we must admit that over-reaching this whole realm of value, aloof even from the fulfilment of the cosmos itself as a biological individual with an ‘internal’ environment, is excellence or fulfilment of another kind, which we appreciate most easily in our own poor works of art, but which we sometimes seem to apprehend as an attribute of the universe itself as a whole.

The general system of our knowledge does not by any means confirm the deliverance of ecstasy. It were therefore dishonest and mere ‘wish-fulfilment’ to claim that the ecstatic judgment were true. But if our knowledge does not confirm it, neither does it positively deny it. We are therefore entitled to the hope that it is true. And since this supreme excellence presents itself as claiming our worship, we are under obligation to worship it; even while we are also under obligation not to lose sight of the fact that we cannot be sure of the validity of the ecstatic judgment. But however this be, we may assert confidently that, whether the whole of things has this supreme character or not, it ought to have. And such an assertion is, to say the least, not unimportant.

Finally, remembering the argument which suggests that the act of admiration itself constitutes a fulfilment of the object admired, we must surmise that, if the universe has in fact such hyper-biological unity as ecstasy seems to discover, then worship, even on the part of such microscopic beings as ourselves, is not utterly futile.

But if the wild speculations of these last three chapters are wholly mistaken, as is all too likely, yet we are on solid ground in holding that the essence that is meant by ‘good’ is fulfilment, and in deriving the remote and the practical ideals from the needs of organisms of all ranks. Every actual organism which comes into existence claims fulfilment; and its claim must be taken into account in the ideal. But also every organism which might come into existence must be taken into account. And those must be brought to pass which, directly or indirectly, will afford the most complete fulfilment to the latent capacities of the active substance which is the cosmos.

Imported into the sphere of human affairs this abstract ideal takes a more precise form, which should be the guiding principle of all our conduct and all social policies. We must seek to make it possible for all actual men and women to fulfil themselves in the highest activities of which they are capable, and we must endeavour so to order our societies that yet richer capacities may occur and be fulfilled.

Waking World (1934)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I. THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

A. COMMUNISM AND FASCISM

B. ANOTHER OUTLINE

C. HUMANISM AND SUPERHUMANISM

II. THE WORLD-AIM

A. STATEMENT OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL

B. UNEMPLOYMENT AND TOIL

C. THE HARMFULNESS OF MACHINERY

D. THE TRUE VALUE OF MACHINERY

III. THE WORLD TO-DAY

A. OUR NATURE AND OUR NURTURE

B. DECLINE AND FALL?

C. THE ONE HOPE

IV. ANIMAL AND MAN

A. MAN’S ANIMAL CAPACITIES

B. INTELLIGENCE AND IMAGINATION

C. MAN MORE THAN ANIMAL

V. PERSONALITY AND SOCIETY

A. INTELLIGENCE AND THE ANIMAL LIFE

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER-CONSCIOUSNESS

C. THE PERSONAL IDEAL

D. SOCIETY AND THE WORLD-AIM

VI. ART

A. ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP

B. PURE ART, PLASTIC

C. PURE ART OF OTHER KINDS

D. SUMMARY OF THE IMPORTANCE OF ART

VII. MODERN SCIENCE

A. NEED FOR SCEPTICISM ABOUT SCIENCE

B. AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE

C. THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICS

D. PHYSICS, BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY

E. DETERMINACY AND FREEDOM

VIII. THE VALUE AND DANGER OF MODERN SCIENCE

A. SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC

B. TRUE SCIENTISTS AND TRUE CRITICS

C. THE UPSHOT OF SCIENCE FOR THOUGHT

IX. HISTORY

A. METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY

B. THE UPSHOT OF HISTORY

X. PHILOSOPHY

A. THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY

B. THE NECESSITY OF SCEPTICISM

C. THE POSITIVE OUTCOME

XI. RELIGION

A. SHAM RELIGION AND GENUINE RELIGION

B. EFFECTS OF GENUINE RELIGION

C. HOW MEN INVENT GODS

D. THE ESSENCE OF THE MATTER

XII. CHRISTIANITY AND THE MODERN WORLD

A. THE RELIGION OF LOVE

B. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

C. OUTGROWING A GREAT RELIGION

XIII. MAN AND FATE

A. LOYALTY TO MAN AND DELIGHT IN FATE

B. THE ANALOGY OF ART

C. SCEPTICAL PROTESTS

D. ECSTASY AND THE MORAL WILL

E. A MYTH OF MAN AND FATE

XIV. WORLD-REVOLUTION?

A. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

B. PACIFISM

C. DEMOCRACY, FREE SPEECH, THE WORLD-STATE

D. THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION

XV. THE WILL FOR CHANGE

The first edition

PREFACE

WHATEVER MERIT THERE is in this book is largely due to the fact that I have had the benefit of criticism by several alert minds of very different stamp.

To Mr. Victor Gollancz’s shattering comments on an earlier and abortive experiment I owe much. I thank him for the tonic.

To Mr. L. H. Myers, of Cambridge, who criticized the first version of many of the following chapters from a point of view remote from that of Mr. Gollancz, and differing from my own in the opposite direction, I owe more.

Mr. E. V. Rieu helped me at a late stage to see what was wrong with the book as a book, namely that it was not a book at all. He caused me a lot of extra work which, I hope, has produced not only unity but also the point and drive which was lacking.

Professor L. C. Martin, of Liverpool, gave detailed and most useful criticism of the whole. I tried hard not to call on him for help. Fortunately, though at the eleventh hour, I succumbed to the temptation.

To my wife I am indebted for careful work on the proofs, and many helpful suggestions.

Since most of the ideas here pieced together have been gathered from other men’s writings, I have given a short bibliography of works which, amongst many others, I have found helpful thinking about the various subjects treated, will be noted that they are very diverse, and some cases mutually repugnant.

I am indebted to Messrs. Victor Gollancz Limited for permission to use certain passages from my contribution to An Outline for Boys and Girls; and to Messrs. George Allen and Unwin Limited who have allowed me to plagiarize from my chapter in Manifesto.

O. S.

I. THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

A. COMMUNISM AND FASCISM

THE PRESENT CRISIS in the affairs of man can be summed in a sentence. He has gained mechanical power, but he has not gained wisdom. He has stumbled upon a valuable and dangerous tool, and he uses it mainly for trivial ends.

This book arises from the conviction that there is something more seriously wrong with the world even than economic and social disorder. Social reconstruction is, no doubt, our most pressing need. Owing to the fact that economic power is in the hands of a few, who wield it mainly in the interest of their own class, the great majority of human beings live cramped lives, and are unable to develop such human capacity as they have. Social revolution is the most urgent task before the world to-day.

But if revolution is to achieve its end permanently and universally, if it is to carry mankind from our present condition of universal barbarism to universal civilization, it must be inspired by something more positive than the will to destroy a bad economic system. That the present economic system must be destroyed, or at the very least remoulded out of all recognition, appears to me indubitable. But if the revolutionary will to destroy it is to be worthy of its task, it must be inspired and controlled by the most penetrating and comprehensive insight into human nature, into the needs and potentialities of men and women, and especially into the needs and potentialities that young human beings will conceive when they are not born into a crippling and perverting economic environment.

In fact the enduring purpose needed for world-revolution must be rooted in a conscious, and deeply felt, and far-reaching, ‘philosophy of life.’ The Russian Revolution was thus rooted. I am not in a position to judge whether the philosophical basis of Russian Communism, which was obviously capable of inspiring the actual revolution, is also adequate for the more delicate task of constructing a new society. From the little that I know of it I suspect that it is a far deeper and more pregnant thing than we of the West are inclined to believe. The official philosophy of Communism, as worked out by Lenin on the basis of Marx, is a direct expression of a passionate and generous experience in a mind of very great intellectual power. Of this there can be no doubt. The combination of devotion and clear vision enabled Lenin, not only to lead to victory a revolution which without him would very quickly have succumbed, but also to give to Russia an effective social ideal which, directly or indirectly, is changing the outlook of all the peoples.

But whatever the truth about the philosophical theories of the Communists, the actual mentality of the new Russia is apparently in one respect no better than our own. Though the Communists of Russia have magnificently rejected the poison of Western economic individualism, they seem still to suffer from that more subtle disease of the Western world, the hypnotic reverence for machinery and mechanization.

I do not suggest that the Russian Government has made a mistake in seeking to develop Russian industry. This policy was absolutely necessary. I mean that, like ourselves, the Russians seem to be allowing the usefulness and glamour of machinery to cast a spell upon their minds, in such a manner that, perhaps even more naively than the Western peoples, they tend to set up as their ideal for individual and for society sheer industrial activity.

Russia is already deeply infected by what might be called ‘the mechanic’s mentality’. The mechanic is a useful, and in many ways a very admirable, type. But there are important aspects of the world and of human nature which his way of life tends to obscure from him. He tends to be ‘materialistic’, not in philosophy but in actual life. He is apt to be insensitive to all but the crude, material values. The cast of mind which mechanism produces is not such as can afford a satisfactory mental style for a whole civilization.

Now the philosophical basis of Communism is a theory which is said to be ‘materialistic’. But this theory, which Communists call the ‘materialist dialectic’, merely asserts that the world is what it is, independently of human opinion and desire, and that everything in the world, including human society, changes in virtue of a necessity in its own nature. This is at the least a reasonable theory, and is a very different kind of ‘materialism’ from the materialism of the mechanic’s mentality. The materialistic philosophy of Communism is a development of the idealist philosophies of Spinoza and Hegel, and it does not seek to interpret the whole of existence in terms of ‘physical mechanism’. But the average Russian mind, like the average Western mind, is being far less influenced by philosophy than by nineteenth-century science, and its concrete manifestation, machinery.

To-day, just when Western Europe is perhaps beginning to realize that its devotion to machinery is somewhat barren (partly through beholding its reductio ad absurdum in America), Russia and the East are enthusiastically sacrificing at the mechanic’s shrine.

‘The mechanic’s mentality’ is the product of a life dominated by machinery. Machinery is a product of Western science. But the huge success of machinery has itself had a very far-reaching effect on the development of Western science, and on the whole mental activity of Western man. It has inclined him to think certain kinds of thoughts rather than certain others, and to value certain kinds of activities rather than certain others. I shall discuss this matter in detail in later chapters. Meanwhile I will merely suggest that the most important of all problems before man at present is the problem of making full use of natural science, and of scientific invention, and of machinery, without succumbing to their hypnotic spell, without falling into the trance of ‘the mechanic’s mentality’. Or rather, the problem is no longer to avoid falling into that trance, but to struggle out of it, and thereby to discover at last the true use of science and of machinery.

But though Communism has been seriously infected by the mechanic’s mentality, it has certainly inspired large numbers of men and women with a new social loyalty and zeal. To use a hackneyed phrase, it has given them a new vision. If that vision is in most cases limited to the cruder and less distinctively human values, the fault is due not so much to Communist theory as to the hypnotic spell of Western industrialism.

One other serious fault, besides adulation of industrial power, is committed by Russian Communism today. The Government makes a resolute and seemingly successful attempt to impose uniformity of thought and feeling, or at least to prevent the public expression of ideas opposed to its own ‘ideology’. It educates the young in a thoroughly doctrinaire manner, instead of encouraging them to use their intelligence critically in all directions. This error, this most pernicious folly, is on the increase all over the world to-day. At a later stage I shall discuss the importance of free expression in some detail, but for the moment it is enough to assert dogmatically that freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, and impartiality of broadcasting, are absolutely essential for the creation of a fully adult human world. Even if they cause inconvenience to governments, they must never under any circumstances whatever be infringed. Any attempt to restrict them convicts the violating authority as barbarian and muddle-headed.

But Russia is not the only country where free expression is restricted. Even in England, pioneer of free speech, a serious effort is now being made to copy the crazy policy of other countries in this respect. The coming fight for free expression in England is of world-wide importance. It seems to be the special task of the saner and more courageous sections of our own people to lead a crusade against this particular and most insidious kind of reaction. An effective struggle in England may well do immense service to the disheartened forces of sanity in Fascist Italy and Fascist Germany, where there is now less freedom of expression than in Russia.

Fascism is at present the only social ideal which competes with Communism in its emotional appeal. Now Fascism is not a coherent theory or policy. It is merely a jumble of principles gathered from many sources, and used according to the exigences of the moment. But it has undoubtedly roused enthusiasm in the two great nations which have recently suffered seriously from a sense of inferiority. This enthusiasm seems to have two very different roots. Like Communism, Fascism makes an appeal to a distressed class, in this case the middle class. In Western Europe to-day the middle class is as important a factor as the proletariat. Any idea which captures its imagination is bound to have far-reaching effects, for good or ill. Fascism is, in part, a protest of the much-harassed middle class against the tyranny of big business on the one hand, and the dreaded upward thrust of the revolutionary proletariat on the other. But this is not the only source of Fascist enthusiasm. The other, though the less effective influence in Fascist policy, is the more significant root of Fascism for any one who would understand the present mental crisis of mankind.

To the Russian Communist, Fascism naturally appears as no more than a backwash of the Capitalist torrent on its fated course toward disaster. There can indeed be no doubt that Fascism owes its power to the fact that big business has found a use for it, and is unobtrusively financing it. But to the sincere Fascist himself Fascism appears, I imagine, as a heroic protest of ‘ordinary decent folk’ against mechanization, against materialism, against the destruction of local culture by one or other of the two great mechanizing influences, namely Capitalism and Communism.

The fantastic and often self-contradictory ideology of Fascism is, no doubt, a confused outcome of many conflicting needs, and of a vast campaign of propaganda which has sought to give those needs an expression convenient to the capitalists, the militarists, and the mere demagogues who thrive upon this movement. The result is a strange medley of borrowed ideas and slogans, and a policy which vacillates between sham socialism and frank capitalism, between technocracy and agrarianism, between peace and war.

But beneath all this opportunism of Fascist leadership there lies, I suggest, in the rank and file of Fascists in all countries an obscure but sincere conviction that there is something radically wrong with the contemporary ‘scientific’ culture of Europe and America. Fascists are united in their hatred of ‘Bolshevism’, and by Bolshevism they seem to mean, not merely a social policy, but ‘materialistic’ culture and the mechanization of society. Unfortunately the leaders of Fascism, like their rank and file, are apparently quite incapable of critical thought, and so they have to fall back upon archaic notions and trivial ideals. Revolting against commercialism, they praise martial and barbaric virtues, the tribal spirit, and the fictitious entity which they call ‘the race Sickened by the ineffectiveness of so-called democracy, they crave a dictator, and ruthless suppression of all criticism. And inevitably their dictator, since ruthlessness is demanded of him, encourages the most flagrant hooliganism and sadism on the part of the horde of muddle-headed young men whom he uses to enforce his will.

It is all extremely puerile, and pitiable, and extremely hurtful to the community. Owing to the sinister fact that Fascism, throughout the world, is financed and manipulated by big industrialists for their own ends, it has been changed from a confused but sincere emotional protest to a very serious menace, comparable in more ways than one to poison gas. But we shall not deal with it effectively if we ignore the underlying sense that civilization has somehow, somewhere, taken a wrong turn, that mechanization has led us to adopt false ideals, and that the view of human nature accepted by the typical ‘scientific’ culture of recent decades is incomplete.

If this analysis is correct, one of the urgent tasks before us to-day is to work out and to propagate, in as simple terms as possible, a view of human nature which, though truly scientific and not sentimental or superstitious, shall also take into account the limitations of contemporary science. Further, with the help of such a comprehensive view of human nature, we must set forth a social ideal which shall make full use of man’s new-found mechanical power, and yet also pass far beyond the mechanic’s mentality.

B. ANOTHER OUTLINE

IN THIS BOOK I shall describe human nature, or rather human behaviour, as simply as possible from a certain point of view which is at once very friendly toward modern science and very critical. I shall not try to give a detailed defence of my position or of the view which I observe from it. For the most part, I shall merely describe. I shall attempt to paint a picture, or at least to draw a very slight sketch, of man and his relation to the rest of things, as they appear from my chosen position. Of course, my sketch is certain to be only a very crude caricature, but caricatures have their use. They select and emphasize significant aspects of their subject.

This, then, is really a book of dogmas. Take them or leave them; but do not expect me to defend them at all thoroughly, for that is not what I am setting out to do. An adequate defence would involve writing many books and repeating much that has already been said far better than I can say it. Few of the ideas contained in this book are original. Not even the pattern into which they are woven has any claim to be essentially novel. All I can hope is that this particular expression of them may be comprehensive and clear. A few of my dogmas are indeed more or less original; but these, like the others, appear without detailed defence. For my aim in this book is to paint a picture, not to prove that it is true to the facts of life.

I shall, of course, try to say only what I believe to be true, or at least consider more likely to be true than false. The most that any one can possibly say on such a great subject as this must inevitably turn out in the long run to be mistaken. Nevertheless it may be well worth saying and hearing. Errors clearly expressed may lead to truth by clearly exposing themselves to criticism.

The reader may protest, ‘Do you expect me to trouble my head about your dogmas if you yourself do not take them seriously?’ I answer that I do at present take them very seriously indeed. I believe (to-day) that the main tenor of this book is both true and important, that it presents (however inadequately) the body of truths which is most important for our age, the truth which must come to be believed far and wide if our civilization is to save itself from destruction. But I know very well that I may be mistaken, and I hold myself free to change my mind at any moment, perhaps even before this book appears in public. In the present fluid state of thought no individual has the right to adopt an attitude more confident than this. Of course, I do not feel that I shall, in fact, change my mind. I feel sure, probably much more sure than is reasonable, that my view, which grows clearer year by year, month by month, is the right view. But how often does that feeling mislead one!

I refrain not only from defending my picture but also from filling it in with detail. I present only an outline. Now ‘Outlines’ are treacherous things. When they are lucid, they give the reader a dangerous illusion that he understands. When they are obscure, even if their obscurity springs from the author’s sheer muddle-headedness, they suggest to the reader that he is up against a mystery beyond the plain man’s comprehension. Such at least are the dangers of outlines of special subjects put forward by experts.

But I am no expert. Though I have had some special training in philosophy, I cannot claim to be a professional philosopher. I am a ‘plain man’, though one who has had the opportunity of wandering from field to field of thought and of talking to experts at work in their respective spheres. I have brought away only gleanings. But these gleanings, gathered from many fields, are, I believe, good samples of man’s mental agriculture.

But why not let the experts speak for themselves? I answer respectfully, but firmly. Specialists do not always see as clearly as spectators the relation between their special subjects and other activities. Human experience has become so very complicated that correlation of its many aspects is more necessary than ever; and correlation must be carried out, not simply by experts, but by persons who, though themselves unspecialized, are sensitive to the specialists, and have, moreover, a certain imaginative power of ‘seeing things whole’.

I claim that power, or some degree of that power. Hence this book. It is for the reader to judge whether I substantiate the claim, whether I have that power in a degree adequate to the task of producing a helpful sketch of man in relation to his world. But for my own part, since I seem to see a clear and unifying principle running through all my experience of the world, I must try to describe the world in terms of that principle, even at the risk of producing a mere hotch-potch of the obvious and the preposterous. On almost every page of this book the reader may find statements which he will regard as too obvious to need restating, and others which will seem to him too dubious to be stated without lengthy defence. I make no apology. I have undertaken simply to trace out the pattern as it appears to me. Take it or leave it! The book may be rather good and significant; or it may be very bad and misleading. I do not pretend to know which it is. But the pattern which it tries to trace is for me the supreme thing in life.

The world’s chief outliner is Mr. H. G. Wells. This little book cannot for a moment compete with the vast and able summaries which he has produced. It makes no attempt to do so. Mr. Wells is in his own sphere beyond criticism. To belittle his achievement as mere bourgeois blundering, or as mere plebeian blundering, is silly. But Mr. Wells does, it seems to me, ignore much that is of importance, and something that is of very great importance. I should say that, though he is an extraordinarily good observer and describer, the point of view from which he observes is not finally adequate. He adopts a position from which it is impossible to see things whole. Very much, I repeat, he sees with great accuracy and describes with great sincerity and courage. But something else is shut out from his vision. And because of this lack the whole picture that he paints turns out to be, in spite of its boldness and truth in so many respects, in others seriously incomplete, both as a photograph of man’s present state and as a symbol capable of firing him to change his state.

I myself have learnt much from Mr. Wells. I gladly recognize that his work is of very great importance to our age. But I refuse to be blinded by gratitude. I must be at once grateful and critical. I must not overlook that character of his work which the Communist condemns as ‘bourgeois’, and that other character which the mental aristocrat condemns as ‘plebeian’.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sympathizing with much that is said by both types of Mr. Wells’s critics. This is strange, for they do not often sympathize with one another. I am impressed by the Communist charge that he has greatly under-estimated the significance of the Communist movement throughout the world, both as a revolutionary force rooted (if I may so put it) in the dialectic of modern conditions, and as a germ destined to reorganize much of modern thought. In particular, he seems to me to do far less than justice to the doctrine of the economic interpretation of history.

On the other hand, I agree with much of the criticism levelled against Mr. Wells from the opposite camp, criticism which, I imagine, good Communists would dismiss as mere ‘blather’ put up by the highbrow sections of bourgeois society. Now I am no highbrow, or only a very imperfect one. But bourgeois I certainly am, in up-bringing and in present circumstances. I live chiefly on dividends and other ill-gotten gains, even while I proclaim that the system on which I live must go. But live I must, or will; and so must, or shall, my family; and as amply as is needed for their development in personality. Having failed to earn enough by honest toil (toil there has been, but of a sort that society does not see fit to recompense adequately), I fall back with due thankfulness on dividends, until such time as the community has the sense to take to itself the ownership of the means of production, and to afford me some less disreputable source of income.

Such being my case, it is clear that I am a bourgeois. Therefore, in the Communist theory, all my views about the individual and society are sure to be subtly and dangerously prejudiced by a capitalistic bias that I myself can never bring into the focus of my consciousness. Now I recognize that this may be so. I recognize that in this age both social organization and thought are passing through an exceptionally drastic revolution; and that people like me may be so blinded by circumstance that they cannot possibly contribute anything useful to that revolution; and, further, I am convinced that the body of ideas called Communism has a very important part to play in founding the new order. But also I remind myself that every great revolutionary movement tends, owing to the exigencies of the struggle and the uncomprehending bitterness of its opponents, to develop extravagance and blind dogmatism. It is very unlikely that Communism is an exception. It is possible therefore that some of those who, like myself, are outside the main current of revolution may yet be able to see some aspects of it which are obscured from the view of those who are in the thick of it.

But to return to Mr. Wells. It is not my purpose to criticize his position in detail, but only to salute his achievement, and pass on, taking my difference with him as a point of departure. And this difference I would express by saying that, from my point of view, he is at once not Communist enough in social principles, and yet too limited in general outlook by the assumptions that lie not only under Communism but under all distinctively ‘modern’ thought.

Mr. Wells is a ‘humanist’, at least in one sense of that word. He holds that the proper object of man’s devotion is man. But some of us feel that he does not take the whole of man’s nature into account. He regards man as a fairly intelligent mammal, which he is; but he does not see all that is involved in being such a creature. Mr. Wells never quite grasps the fact, or at least never thoroughly realizes the full implications of the fact, that the gifts of intelligence and imagination open up for man vast spheres of activity which cannot in the present state of knowledge be fully understood in terms of our biological concepts. These activities, and even the most subtle modes of them, are just as necessary to man’s human fulfilment as eating and mating are to his animal fulfilment.

The purely biological view of man was a very wholesome reaction from the pre-scientific view. It made us realize that man is all of a piece with his world, and not a princely alien in a strange land. But those who are sympathetic to the biological view of man, and are able to reject the pre-scientific doctrines, incur a special danger. If they are not very careful, if they do not constantly exercise their critical powers on their own scientific theories as well as on the doctrines of the unscientific, they are likely to reject too much, to pour out the baby with the bath water, to ignore all that is most distinctively human, simply because it cannot yet be stated adequately in biological terms.

With diffidence, but also with firmness, I would suggest, then, that the insufficiency of Mr. Wells lies in the superficiality of his view of human nature, and the consequent triviality of his particular kind of humanistic ideal. In this book I shall try to give a picture of human nature which will be more comprehensive, one which, though no less true biologically, will also do justice to the features of human nature which the primarily biological view cannot yet satisfactorily explain.

C. HUMANISM AND SUPERHUMANISM

I SHALL ALSO attempt to do something of a different kind. It is no use ignoring the fact that many human beings crave more than the satisfaction which is afforded by humanism even in its most developed and comprehensive form. They need as the supreme ruling principle of their lives something more than loyalty to human society, or to the ideal of a perfected human society, or even a perfected human nature. They fully admit that these are very important principles which must be greatly strengthened if our world is to save itself from destruction or stagnation; but they feel an impulse of admiration, or of piety, toward something other than man. And this object of their piety, though they cannot describe it at all clearly either in religious or in scientific jargon, somehow gives a meaning and a passion to their human loyalty which otherwise would be lacking. It is as unscientific to belittle this impulse as it is to make it an excuse for superstition.

Their purely scientific friends, and their purely humanistic friends also, tell them that they are simply deceiving themselves, that this craving for the superhuman, which has so misled men in the past, must be outgrown, that the vague object which they seem to discover is but a creature of their own desire.

Well, though the people whom I have in mind are quite unable to accept any orthodox religious account of this obscure but compelling object of their piety, they are equally unable to dismiss it merely as illusion and a dangerous irrelevance.

Toward the end of this book I shall try to complete my outline of man, or of man-in-his-world, by describing this impulse of piety in some detail, and distinguishing as well as I can between the essence of it and the doctrines that have grown up around it. I shall represent it as a genuine human capacity, and no mere aberration or perversion. I shall represent the object on which it is directed as no mere illusion. But at the same time I shall try to show that what generally passes for this piety is in fact nothing of the sort, and that the orthodox accounts of its object of worship are for the most part untrue and cramping to the fledgeling spirit of man. And I shall try, in all humility, to give an account of this piety and its object in such a vein as to help toward a clearer apprehension of them.

This is the only part of my book which can make any claim to originality. The earlier part consists entirely of ideas selected from the chaotic mass of contemporary thought, and put together as a pattern. For the selection I am of course partly responsible, but not for the several ideas. For the main contention of Chapter XIII, however, no one can be blamed but myself.

If, as is all too likely, I fail to effect a liaison between the relentlessly scientific people and the relentlessly religious people, and merely get myself ridiculed by the one party and damned by the other, or simply ignored by both, no great harm will have been done.

Before giving any detailed account of human nature and its relation to the environment, I shall set down a purely abstract and even platitudinous declaration of the true social aim. I shall emphasize what should surely by now be obvious to all thinking persons, and should be unwittingly assumed by all others, namely that the social aim, the practical ‘world-aim’ is the fulfilment of man’s capacities, both his animal capacities and his distinctively human capacities, whatever these in fact are. I shall then briefly argue that mechanical power has put man for the first time in a position to realize this ideal, though it has also confronted him with very serious material and spiritual dangers. This also should be obvious, but is not universally recognized. Readers who have already clearly envisaged the ‘world-aim’ and the proper use of machinery are urged to skip these chapters. I shall then maintain that in our own day the state of the world is changing rapidly for the worse, and that the root of the trouble is not only economic, but psychological, or rather spiritual. Nothing can save us, I shall maintain, but a much more vivid and comprehensive view of human nature, and a much more resolute and much more widespread devotion to the ‘world-aim’. I shall then be ready to embark on my main theme, namely an account of man as a strange medley of three natures, the animal, the distinctively human, and a halting and bewildered propensity toward the superhuman. This will involve describing what I take to be the essential features of personality and personal relationships, and of the activities of art, science, history, philosophy and religion. The last two chapters will set forth a bare outline of the basic principles of action, which, I believe, must be rigorously adhered to if we are to pass from our present barbarism into true civilization.

II. THE WORLD-AIM

A. STATEMENT OF THE SOCIAL IDEAL

IN THIS CHAPTER I shall try to set down the outlines of the ideally best kind of human world, the kind of world which, when we are mentally most awake, and able to take everything into account, we cannot but desire. In fact I shall indulge for a while in a blend of platitude and naive idealism. For this I make no apology. You cannot proceed upon your journey unless you know at least the general direction of your goal.

We desire that every one in the world should live fully, according to his capacity. Now capacities vary. Even in the ideal world there would be many different types of people, fitted for the many different kinds of life which would be needed for the great communal life of the world. Some, for instance, would be apt at handicraft of one sort or another, others apt at organizing, others at inventing things, others at amusing their fellows, others at teaching. Some, again, would be fitted for creating works of art, some for exploring the physical universe scientifically, some for philosophy, and so on.

Perhaps some would be best simply at being beautiful persons, excellent in mind and body, and some perhaps would be best at loving. But neither sort would be content to do nothing but be beautiful, or nothing but love; for every one in the ideal world would be a real human being, developed on every side. Still, I see no reason why there should not be some whose special gift lay in personal beauty, and whose first duty was to make full use of their gift. They would be the ‘film-stars’ of the ideal world. But they would be very different from our present film-stars.

We desire that each may do chiefly what he can do best, and with a sense of fullest vitality in his work.

We desire the work of each, and the whole life of each, to help, not hinder, the lives of others; and to fit harmoniously into the pattern of the whole world’s life. Each must be able to play his own special part in the great work of the world; and also each must enjoy and profit by the lives of others and their work.

I do not mean merely that the growers of corn should have full enjoyment of the things made in factories, and the factory workers have as much corn and meat and vegetables as they require. This is obvious. But also each sort of worker must know what the other sort is doing, how he spends his life, what special troubles and delights come to him from his kind of work, and what difference his work makes to his outlook upon the world. We want the bank-clerk (or whatever in the ideal world corresponds to the bank-clerk), to realize what it is to hew coal in a mine, and to know how such work influences the character of a man; and we want the miner (or whatever in the ideal world corresponds to a miner) to know the same of the clerk. We demand all this so that there may be no waste of energy in strife between different workers or different minds, and’ so that each may be enriched by his understanding and his respect for others.

The differences between us should not be such as to make us enemies. The greater the diversity of men’s characters the better, so long as they are also gifted with strong enough imagination to enter sympathetically into each other’s points of view. Differences should make us more interesting and valuable to each other. Each of us should be able to enlarge his own mind by seeing into and enjoying minds different from his own. The differences between Englishmen and Frenchmen and Japanese are of no value at all to the world unless Englishmen are enriched by understanding and admiration of those somewhat different beings, Frenchmen. And so with the rest.

In the ideal world each person must know at least in outline the pattern of the life of the world; and prize it, and be proud to have a part to play in it. If he does not feel this, he will be a stranger, an alien in the world’s life; and sooner or later he will become an enemy of the world. He will run amok, and damage the intricate tissue of the world. He will be like a cancer cell in the great body of the race, living for itself alone and harming the whole. If he gains power, and help from others, he may do very great harm.

The world that we seek to make must be such that in its general form it will seem right to every kind of person in the world. And the people of that ideal world must be all of them sane enough to approve of the pattern of the world. They will not, of course, all approve of every detail. They will often work to make changes in the organization of the world; and no doubt they will often disagree violently with each other’s suggestions. But if the world is really to be a satisfactory world, it must be of such a kind that any intelligent and right-minded man will gladly accept the general plan of it. And the people of the world must be all intelligent enough and right-minded enough to be able to appreciate the world and feel loyal to it. In spite of their great differences of character and talent, they must be able to agree to this extent. They must have this one precious thing in common. None of them must be so stupid or so mean that he cannot be a willing citizen of the world. None must be so unjustly treated, or so cramped and crippled by circumstances, that instead of rejoicing in the world, he hates it. None must come into the world with such a nature that he is bound to be a failure, either in body or mind, and therefore always miserable or harmful to others. None must be diseased or crippled or insane. There must be plenty of high-grade intelligence to do the exploring and the inventing, plenty of fresh and daring minds to see things in new ways and feel things in new ways, so as to do away with old outworn customs and traditions, and work out better ones. This pioneering will certainly lead to conflict between the originators and the rest, as in our own world. But there will be this difference that in the ideal world every conflict will always be tempered by consciousness of an underlying concord.

Even in the ideal world there will be not only differences between persons of equal personal development, but also differences in degree of personal development itself. It is not true that men are born equal in personal capacity; nor is it, perhaps, desirable that they should be so. Even in the ideal world there will be a place for the relatively less awakened and a place for the relatively more awakened. But it is desirable that there should be none below a certain minimum of personal capacity, or mental development, namely the minimum which is required for intelligent and spontaneous participation in the corporate life of the community. It is desirable also that this minimum should be ever a rising minimum, so as to make possible an ever more awakened communal life.

Though there will be many kinds of persons, and as many persons of each kind as are needed for the world’s full living, there will not be too many of any kind. Otherwise there would be overlapping and clashing of work, and also wasted lives. People would keep on interfering with one another. Many would have no chance of using their powers fully and for the common good. And so they would have nothing better to do than to be mischief-makers, hindering the lives of others and of the whole. In the ideal world each must have work, and work suited to his abilities. There must be no square pegs in round holes. No one who is by nature fitted for a life of action must be forced to do work which allows his powers no exercise. No one who is by nature timid must be put into a position of constant danger. Further, no one must be favoured, whether in respect of money or power or pleasure or education. A man should have special advantages only if for some reason the world needs him to have special advantages.

In short, the world of men and women must be a thing worthy of all men’s loyalty, and therefore cherished by all, served by all, fully organized, but allowing plenty of freedom to every one. Each human being in the world must be allowed to live as seems best to him, except when what he wills is harmful to the world. But all will have been so educated that, whatever their differences, they will spontaneously desire always to subordinate their private good to the good of the world. Conflicts, of course, there will be within the organized world; but they must be only conflicts which serve the life of the whole, as conflicts between football teams serve the whole game, or as the strain between opposed muscles of a limb serve to keep it steady and under exact control. Wars there certainly must not be, but only rivalries in working well for the sake of the world. Within the world-group there will be many kinds of lesser groups, such as families, cities and peoples; and each group will, so far as possible, live its own life in its own way, and manage its private affairs. But the affairs that affect all in common will be managed by the world as a whole.

We may sum the matter in a formula. We desire a world in which all may have the opportunity to fulfil their capacities for their own delight and the good of the world. And for the world as a whole we desire that it should be such as to realize the fullest possible development of human nature. This consists chiefly in the development of intelligence and imagination in such a manner that man may know the universe as fully and truly as possible, admire and cherish whatever is most admirable in it, and create a human society that shall become mentally ever richer and more awakened.

This is the kind of world that we desire when we think seriously about the world as a whole. Unfortunately we have not only to desire it, but to fight for it, in one way or another. If we are to do this, we must will it earnestly and constantly. And if we are to do this, we must see it with the mind’s eye. We must imagine as clearly and as fully as we can the world that we intend to make. It must come alive in our hearts. We must prove it on our pulses.

B. UNEMPLOYMENT AND TOIL

THIS SECTION, LIKE the preceding one, will seem to some readers a laboured platitude. Let them merely glance at it to assure themselves of its obviousness, and then pass on. There are other persons for whom this extremely important platitude may still be arresting. Anyhow it must be stated, since it is essential to my argument.

It is one thing to see what kind of a world would be best, or most desirable, and another thing to decide how far it is possible to realize that ideal in this very unsatisfactory world of ours. Nevertheless there is today a real and unique opportunity of producing a state of affairs much more like the ideal than was possible in any earlier age.

We are often told that the hard facts of life make it quite impossible in any age and any society for more than a very small number of persons to have the chance of fulfilling the finer, more developed capacities of human nature. Most, it is said, must inevitably spend their strength in cramping toil of one sort or another. Men’s bodies have to be kept alive. They must have food. And food can only be produced by hard labour on the soil. All the necessaries and comforts of our civilization depend, not only on machine power, but on the movements of the muscles of men and women during the long working hours of each day. At the end of the day the workers are bound to be too tired to do more than rest and amuse themselves in easy ways. Whatever finer powers they may have at first, these are doomed to disappear through lack of exercise. The most that the toiling masses can expect of life is physical health and comfort and as much easy play as they can cram into their scanty leisure. The only kind of more awakened activity that they can possibly enjoy is personal intercourse. In mutual understanding, co-operation, friendship, family affection, sexual love, they have, no doubt, some insight into human personality. But, we are told, since all those with whom they have intercourse must be undeveloped personalities like themselves, even their appreciation of personality must necessarily be crude and blundering. A few individuals who happen to be very fortunate, or very brilliant and resolute, may escape from the necessities of soul-destroying labour; but the millions of their fellows, even the many who have it in them to develop finely, are doomed never to enjoy, never even to suspect the existence of, the more awakened kinds of human living. They must remain too tired and dull and inexpert to apprehend the more subtle features of personality, or to appreciate art, science, and philosophy, or to form a clear and commanding vision of the enterprise of man on this planet.

Not long ago this argument seemed unanswerable. Even for the present generation it holds good in the main. But if it is meant to refer to the future, even the near future, it is entirely false. The economic circumstances of mankind are changing every year, every day, under our eyes. Very soon there will be, or there should be, no need whatever for men and women to spend their lives in cramping toil. Indeed even today, if we could contrive to reorganize the economic structure of society, we could do away with all life-long drudgery, and also ensure that every one should have the means for much richer fulfilment than has been the lot of most men hitherto. Certainly, even in our day, no one who has the finer capacities should be forced to go through life without using them. So quickly are the circumstances of mankind changing, that already, even while we continue to cry out against the necessity of toil, we are also crying out against the fact that there is no longer enough toil to go round, and to produce a miserable wage for every one. The fact that mankind is rapidly learning to keep itself alive and in comfort without toil should be a blessing; but owing to our bad economic organization and our confused thinking it is turned into a curse. Every country to-day has, or soon will have, its ‘unemployment problem’. Every country tries to increase toil within its own borders, and to prevent other countries from toiling for it.

In our society, ‘unemployment’ is bad for two reasons. The first is that most people can only obtain money by working for wages, and without money they cannot gain any fullness of life. But strictly speaking this means not that unemployment itself is bad, but that in our society it produces a bad effect, namely poverty, the lack of money to spend on fulfilling one’s capacities. Society in our age is organized, so far as the economic slaves are concerned, on the principle of ‘no work no pay.’ This principle arose in a world in which work was necessary to society and toilsome to the worker. There is no reason why it should continue to hold good in a world in which drudgery is ceasing to be needed for the maintenance of society.

Our age, of course, is transitional. A great deal of toil is still necessary. An immense amount of human pulling and pushing, and other monotonous work, must still be done; and must be paid for in wages, so long as society is organized on the principle of wages. But this is no reason why we should refuse a full livelihood to those from whom we no longer need toil.

Of course, in our transitional age it is bound to be very difficult to discard the outworn principle that a man must toil in order to live, and to organize society on a principle suited to the modern world. The present world-economic crisis and its consequent unemployment problem are hard facts which it will take all man’s skill to conquer. But let us never forget that the problem is simply one of organization. There is nothing in the physical world to prevent us from creating such a prosperous and such a vital society as has never before existed. If all goes well, we shall be able to produce, decade by decade, more and more goods with less and less human toil. There is no lack of demand for the goods. Nearly two thousand million people are needing them. The difficulty is simply to get the goods to the people. And this difficulty is caused wholly by our fantastic economic system.

The second reason why unemployment is bad in our world is that inactivity deadens a man’s powers of action. He loses the habit of spurring himself to effort, and he loses or never acquires the skilled capacities which work entails. He also feels himself to be stranded, useless, left out of the world’s activity. This feeling destroys his self-respect, or fills him with hate against the world.

At present, as we all know, unemployment in the industrial nations is doing great damage. Millions of people, even if they are not actually starving, are living in misery and suffering a steady moral decay. Very much precious human capacity is failing to find a healthy expression, and is failing to be of service to society.

This is indeed a tragic state of affairs. But many people still hope to remedy it in a way which is bound to fail, and would be disastrous if it could succeed. Many want simply to decrease unemployment by restoring the old tyranny of toil in the world. They desire only to see the unemployed once more grinding out their lives in low-grade activities in exchange for a bare livelihood. But unemployment has come to stay. What we must do is to turn it into a blessing instead of a curse. Or rather, industrial unemployment has come to stay; and this fact gives us a unique opportunity to ensure that men shall be able to employ themselves in other and more vital ways.

The present increase of unemployment has evidently two distinct causes, namely the decline of markets and the rapid increase of labour-saving devices. It is not for me to explain the economic causes of the decline of markets, but clearly it is in part due to causes inherent in the capitalist system. Capitalism can only thrive on expanding markets. If expansion ceases, decline must occur. World-planning could perhaps have saved capitalism. But since economic individualists have sought, in the main, private profit rather than social prosperity, there has been an almost complete absence of economic planning on the world scale, and even on the national scale. The confusion has been complicated by economic nationalism. Each nation desires to give industrial employment to its own members rather than to foreigners. For if a nation contains a large number of unemployed persons, much wealth has to be spent in keeping them alive; and they give nothing in return. Now this ungoverned individualism and this nationalistic dread of losing employment to other nations could be overcome by world-planning. Of course, the problems involved are extremely complex; but I cannot believe that they are so complex as to defeat human intelligence. What prevents them from being solved is the fact that the class which is at present in power over-estimates its own importance and the importance of the social system which it supports.

The other cause of unemployment, the increase of labour-saving devices, is of a very different kind. It might, perhaps, with great difficulty, be abolished if nearly all men agreed to abolish it. But they certainly will not agree. And anyhow if they did, the result would be disastrous.

Ever since the beginning of the mechanical age some have urged that machinery ought to be abolished; and to-day many hold that it ought at least to be severely restricted, so that the old manual labour may once more be needed, and men may once more find employment. Now perhaps in particular cases, when an invention threatens to throw thousands of men suddenly out of work, this restriction of machinery may be necessary for a while. But to stop the whole great tendency toward mechanization is impossible, and would be retrograde. The fact that machinery has been used very largely hitherto for evil must not blind us to the immense good which might come of it if it were wisely used. Doubtless in our day man is in a sense a slave of machinery; but there is no reason why he should not break free, and use the tyrant as an obedient and mighty djinn for the making of a more fully human world.

C. THE HARMFULNESS OF MACHINERY

LET US TRY to form a clearer idea of the kind of world which machinery should make possible, if we can reorganize our economic system, and if we can keep clearly in view what it is that is desirable.

Machinery has not yet come into its own. It has scarcely begun to take effect on the life of mankind. But probably, if invention is allowed full scope and nationalism does not lead us into successive world-wars, not many years will pass before it is possible for us to abolish or very greatly reduce every kind of toil which is too fatiguing or too monotonous to be a wholesome life-work for a human being. There will be no longer necessity that any one, in order that society may be kept going, should spend his best hours in mere pulling or pushing, or in executing day after day some single movement in a factory. Every kind of routine work will be done automatically by machines that are self-regulating, or by the pressing of switches, or the dropping of coins into slots. Only where there is a call for intelligent control will human action come into play, only where there must be skilled adjustments, or new correlations of one operation with another, or the invention of new processes.

Now a world which was completely mechanized in this way might be either very good or very bad. There are some people who seem to think that it must be good. Apparently they feel that intricate mechanical operations are the true end of human life. Or perhaps they would argue that the sole purpose of machinery is to enable large numbers of persons to occupy their whole lives with such low-grade pleasures as the tired workers of today seek in their evenings. If all the work is done by machinery, then, they say, life will be one glorious uninterrupted holiday. In fact we shall all be the ‘idle rich’. Such a state they regard as satisfactory.

Others, horrified by this prospect, feel that a completely mechanized world must be bad. In such a world, they say, there would be nothing worth doing. Every one would be bored to distraction. Men would lose all their fine qualities, their courage and skill, their generosity and loyalty, all that makes human nature admirable. No doubt there would still be intelligence, but it would be only a very low kind of intelligence, fit only for controlling machines, a sort of mechanic’s cunning.

Moreover, they see another danger. A great deal of unintelligent labour, they think, would still be necessary for the daily routine of tending the machines. A perfectly mechanized world, then, would sooner or later come to consist of two classes. There would be a managing class, highly intelligent in the mechanical way; and also there would be an almost sub-human working class, consisting of creatures specialized for the various kinds of routine work, and incapable of anything but their work and the simplest animal pleasures. Such a world would, indeed, be very bad. No one in it would be a real human being. It would be no better than a huge ant’s nest.

The harmfulness of mechanization does not lie solely in its grinding, crippling effect on the workers, though that is very grievous. The real trouble lies deeper. Both workers and employers, and indeed all individuals in a mechanized society, become mentally poisoned by the prevailing atmosphere of mechanization. A mechanized society is one in which all individuals tend to become over-specialized. All have to adapt themselves to very special functions, and have no experience of life beyond their particular grooves. Each becomes a mere cog in a huge machine. Moreover in a mechanized society machinery comes to dominate most minds to such an extent that unwittingly they incline to regard mechanical industrialism as good in itself. To produce goods at an unheard-of rate, to travel at an unheard-of speed, to displace man-power by machine power in field after field, come to seem a sufficient goal for human endeavour. In such a society the life of the mind inevitably suffers. Education of a sort may become more wide-spread; but it will not be true education. It will seek to equip individuals to be efficient cogs in the great machine, to fit them each for his special function, and all with an identical set of ‘machine-made’ and socially approved ideas.

Such is the charge which is justly made by those who inveigh against the effects of machinery in our modern world. But though their diagnosis is correct, their cure is impracticable, and also deadening.

They urge us to do away with machinery, and to go back to the good old days of handicrafts, when every man’s work was varied, and to some extent skilled. Indeed, in a sense it was even creative, since it consisted not in the monotonous performance of a stereotyped act, but in the production of a finished object. In those days, they say, every man could fulfil much of his capacity in his work. He could live in his work. In a mechanized world, he cannot.

Now there is indeed a very real danger in mechanization. All around us we see a tendency towards the state of affairs which these prophets describe. But the danger lies not simply in machinery, but in our inability to put machinery to its proper use. If the mass of men and women can be induced to form a clear idea of the world that might be created, and if they can be persuaded to desire it, mechanization will be a blessing, not a curse. Indeed, without complete mechanization, that world cannot exist.

D. THE TRUE VALUE OF MACHINERY

THE TRUE FUNCTION of machinery is to emancipate all men from drudgery and to give to all the opportunity of living a fully human life. In the world which we desire to create there will be no ‘working class’. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that every one will belong to the working class, but work will be a very different kind of thing from the drudgery that constitutes work for most men to-day. Our great populations of tired, ill-clad, ill-developed, ill-educated ‘workers’ will have vanished as a mist melts in sunlight. The mass of mankind, on whom in the last resort the policy of the world depends, will not be the anxious, jealous, bewildered, easily hating creatures that they are to-day. They will move through their streets and their fields with the assurance of free men, knowing clearly what they want, responsible for their world, and well content with it. Their minds will not be haunted by the problem of earning a little more. They will not be obsessed by class resentment. They will not be satisfied with the ludicrously trite amusements of the populace to-day. They will be chiefly concerned with two things, two kinds of genuinely human activity. First, each person will be occupied for part of his time with his own share of the practical work of keeping the world-society in being, or advancing its life into new spheres. Second, all will be very largely employed in understanding and enjoying the world and all those countless beauties and mysteries which are properly the main occupation of full-grown human minds. In fact we must make a world in which, for the mass of men, frustration, pain, grief will be so reduced as to be no longer an intolerable and deadening burden but a vitalizing challenge, a world in which joy will be the rule and sorrow the needed exception. There must be for every man and woman joy of every order, from the loftiest possible to him to the common daily delights and animal well-being.

Is this nothing but a fantastic dream? Far from it. It is very serious practical politics. We are conceiving a world which, though, of course, it cannot spring into being to-morrow morning, should already be the conscious aim of world-policy, and might, if we set our minds to it, begin to be realized to-morrow, and be well advanced within fifty years.

In that world much of the practical work will consist of the control of mechanical processes. The making and care of machinery will be one of the commonest outlets for the constructive impulse. Intellectuals often despise this kind of activity; and indeed in the case of uneducated persons, or half-educated persons, contact with machines certainly can produce a harsh and insensitive kind of mind. But to the mind that is well nurtured, and not in danger of cloddishness or harshness it can be, in its degree, an enlightening activity. Possibly, if the ‘highbrows’ had some actual acquaintance with it, they would come to realize that it has its own special value in disciplining the mind and keeping it in touch with concrete reality. In no other pursuits, save scientific experiment (which will also be common), is there a more imperious need for accuracy and conscientiousness, or a better opportunity of gaining a vivid sense of the independent reality of the material world.

It is not to be regretted, then, that in the ideal world many will probably be by profession either scientists engaged upon practical invention, or engineers, or agriculturalists, or that, since large-scale agriculture will be completely mechanized, the typical agriculturalist will be something of an engineer. There will no doubt also be a great deal of intensive manual agriculture, of the ‘market gardening’ and horticultural types. This will be carried out largely for the joy of the work, but also for experimentation and superfine production.

The amount of human energy, of strength and intelligence and will, spent on this task of keeping material civilization in being, will be a very small proportion of the total available human energy. How should the rest be spent?

In the first place, whatever a man’s official practical work might be, he would probably not devote to it more than three or four hours a day. It might be thought desirable that every one should play some part in the upkeep of material civilization; and so work of this kind would perhaps be very carefully ‘rationed’.

The fact that so much human energy will be set free from the task of maintaining the bare necessities of civilization might have one surprising and very good effect. Many kinds of articles which in our day are produced solely by machinery might once more be produced by hand with all the loving skill and originality of the true craftsman. A good deal of furniture, pottery, woven materials, and certain kinds of metal articles, might be made in innumerable hand-workshops in every land, not simply as a means to gain a livelihood, but for love of the work, and for the privilege of producing things of beauty for the service of society. There are appropriate uses for machine-made goods, and appropriate uses for hand-made goods. There is also an appropriate beauty of machine-made goods, and an appropriate beauty of hand-made goods. In the ideal world men would be in a position to make full use of both, and appreciate both, each in its special way. As I see it, a great deal of the surplus energy of the race would be spent on handicrafts.

But just as no one in the ideal world would be a mere engineer or agriculturalist, so no one would be a mere craftsman. No one would be a mere anything, though every one would probably have some particular kind of work as the first and most important call on his energy. There will no doubt be many whose main task is to organize or correlate the activity of others, not in the spirit of the master or governor but rather in the spirit of the ambassador or liaison officer. But no one will be solely an organizer. One very large class of persons will be the teachers, but they, like the rest, will spend only a short time on professional work. Many of us who are fortunate in our work would, in certain moods, gladly spend all day and all night upon it. I do not suggest that in the ideal world such enthusiasm would be discouraged. But it would be restricted by the definite social convention that a man must keep himself in perfect physical condition, and mentally responsive to the surrounding life of the community.

Hours of official work would probably be short, holidays would be frequent and long. Many people might spend much of their time on skilled physical activities, such as games, swimming, skating, rock-climbing. Dancing of various kinds might play an important part in life. There would, of course, be much social intercourse both of a light and a serious nature. Every one would have plenty of time to make many intimate friends and to be constantly coming into contact with strangers whose lives are cast in different manners from his own. Long holidays would be spent in travel over all the continents. There would be an immense amount of reading, not merely of the desultory kind, but also serious study for sheer love of knowledge, and in sheer admiration of the complexity and delicacy of the universe, including, of course, human nature. Probably there would be much listening to radio programmes, light and serious. Music would be an important factor in the life of the world. Not only would every one have the opportunity of listening frequently to the best music performed by leading musicians, but also those who had musical ability would spend much time in musical performance, to the delight of themselves and their friends. There would be much pure art of every sort, much painting, sculpture, literature. There would also be widespread scientific research in which the motive would be the will to increase man’s knowledge of the universe; and there would be a still wider interest in the progress of science. There would also be much philosophy; every intelligent person would be a philosopher to some extent.

This is the kind of world that machinery makes possible. This is the kind of world which, we may hope, is actually coming into existence, though slowly, painfully and precariously. We live in the death-throes of the old world and the birth-throes of the new. Unfortunately most of us are still afraid to help that birth. We prolong the agony of the change by seeking to mend and bolster up the old world, for we are mostly blind to the possibility of the new world. Perhaps we are blind because we do not really want it, because we are still obsessed with the outworn values of the old world, especially with cravings for private wealth and national power.

In the world of the future, when it is at last fully established, the most serious attention of mankind will be given to art, science, philosophy, and in some sense religion. I do not suggest that every one will spend very much of his time amusing himself by dabbling in these activities; though indeed most people will doubtless seek serious experience of them. I mean rather that art, science, philosophy and religion will be universally recognized as the supreme functions of human society; much as, in our day, national power is often regarded as the final justification of all policy. Art, science, philosophy and religion will not merely be regarded as fulfilments of individual capacity; they will be taken to be also the supreme enterprise of the community, of the organized human race.

Perhaps this point should be rather differently expressed. It is more accurate to say that the supreme enterprise of human society will be the advancement of the human spirit toward a goal which is ever veiled, yet ever revealing itself; and that for the present, and for ages to come, such advancement must consist in art, science, philosophy and religion, and the perfecting of world-society itself. The goal of human action is not strictly a goal, a fixed point to be attained, but a direction in which to strive. Most accurately, but perhaps rather barrenly, it may be described in this way. It is the broadening and deepening of man’s knowledge of the universe, the refining of his appreciation of all that calls for admiration in the universe, and the actual beautifying and perfecting of the only bit of the universe which is at present under man’s control, namely the human world itself.

Nothing less than this can be the supreme goal or direction of human activity. In our day the world-society of men and women is so disorganized, and men and women themselves are in the main so hopelessly crippled and blind, that it may well seem a waste of time to talk about a supreme goal. The house is on fire. Some urge us to drop art and philosophy, and use science only for the invention of fire-extinguishers. But if the trouble was caused by the fact that the house was inhabited by a lot of wild children who had nothing better to do than play with lighted matches, it is just as important in the long run that they should discover the true use of a house as it is that they should put out this particular fire.

Some say that if this ideal world were to be made actual, life would lose its savour, and the human spirit, spurred no longer by adversity, would soon become debased, slothful, and obtuse. With justice they point out that there is danger in perfect freedom of activity, complete absence of tension, the resolving of all conflicts, the abolition of all repressions. Only in the tension of antagonist muscles can a limb function properly. Only through the conflict of opposed desires can the mind become mature, learning to rise above its conflict to a higher order of percipience and will. Only through the strife of opposed groups within the social order can the community avoid stagnation. All this is true.

Man’s finest achievements are expressions of frustration and agony. But there is no cause for anxiety. It will be time to guard against a dearth of frustration when, through triumphant social advance, it appears as a real danger. In our present distressed world, we need not trouble about any hypothetical dearth of distress in the ideal world. Moreover the ideal world is not a static world, in which all ends are already attained. It is one which, by its very nature, will be continually opening up before itself new vistas of endeavour, new worlds to conquer. When we compare man and animal, we find that man has not only the greater possibility of pleasure, but the greater possibility of distress also. His life is not necessarily more pleasurable and less painful, but it is more vital; and, because of its more difficult enterprise, it demands more, not less, courage and loyalty and intelligence than any animal could muster. As I see it, the same relation will hold between the more vital world of the future and our present world. The future will call out more, not less, of man’s distinctively human powers. If all goes well, there will probably come a time when every one of the particular problems which now distress and perplex man so grievously will have been finally solved; but upon a higher plain of mentality, and with a higher order of difficulty, new problems will ever arise and confront the race with desperate situations, perhaps even far more terrible than our own.

III. THE WORLD TO-DAY

A. OUR NATURE AND OUR NURTURE

HAVING SAID WHAT, in my view, is the true world-aim, the only sane ideal for human society, I shall now say something about the difficulties which stand in the way of attaining that ideal. Though we must have the courage to be idealists, we must also face the actual at its worst. The root of all our trouble is this. The truly civilized world that we desire has to be created by the barbarian world that exists. The half-savage beings of the present world have stumbled upon tremendous powers which can be used either for good or ill. And since on the whole the will of a halfsavage race is inevitably low-grade will, though in the main not positively evil will, there is a very serious danger that those tremendous powers will be used on the whole blindly and destructively.

The present world is composed of individuals most of whom are doomed by innate constitution and also by circumstance to be of mediocre calibre. The great majority of us are by nature rather stupid, rather unimaginative, rather callous toward one another, little able to control our more trivial impulses even for the sake of ends which we ourselves recognize as supreme. A few, no doubt, are of much higher type than others, but as a species we are still on the whole blind and weak. The difference between ourselves and the apes is far less than the difference between us and the ideally developed human type which we can already vaguely conceive, but cannot attain.

Nevertheless, poor as our inborn nature is, it is capable of very much finer achievement than is possible in the circumstances of the present world. If society could be drastically reorganized according to the best principles as yet known to us, even without any eugenic alteration of the present innate constitution of man, our grandchildren might grow up to be as mentally superior to ourselves as we are to the most abject savages. Our intellectual and moral unsoundness is due far less to nature than to nurture. Even to-day those few who are psychologically fortunate in early life may display in maturity such a generous and well-grown mentality as we are tempted to call god-like. But these are a minute minority. Most men have no chance of developing properly such capacity as they possess. The circumstances of most lives are hostile to the proper growth of body and mind. Physically, whole populations are stunted or actually diseased. Mentally, there is scarcely an individual among us who is not in some respect distorted. The laws of physical health are, indeed, becoming known to some extent. We are even beginning to apply this knowledge, and to take pride in developing our bodies as fully as possible in strength and beauty. But of the laws of mental health we know as yet little, and what we know we seldom apply. Though physically we are no longer pock-marked, deformed and prematurely senile, mentally the great majority of us have secret festering sores. Some grow permanently distorted. Most are cramped into rigidity of mind even before their bodies reach full maturity.

In childhood we are marred by parents and other adults who have neither talent nor experience to fit them for their work. They do as well by us as they have it in them to do; but the upshot is that we are one and all deformed. Not merely our feet, as in old China, or our heads, as in certain parts of Africa, but our very minds they patiently, stupidly, lovingly, or with unconscious hate, bind and distort.

Little by little, year by year, in the nursery and at school, we are clipped and trimmed into the herd-approved pattern. All the ‘correct’ sentiments are cultivated in us. We are trained to respond with the orthodox emotion to all the well-worn out-of-date phrases, to ‘King and Country’,’ the British Empire’,’ the English gentleman’, to ‘the done thing’, the ‘not done’, and so on. The coarser-grained among us easily adapt themselves to their coarse-grained environment, and soon become at home in a world of misshapen minds. The more sensitive among us, and the more vital, are tortured into a bitter madness of their own.

Since those who thwart and shame us most inwardly are those whom on other accounts we trust and love, our minds are torn between conscious love and a hate which is all the more harmful through being, in most cases, unconscious. Through such conflicts we develop deep strains and stresses, which, though we may be unaware of them, torment and confuse us for ever after. We grow up with the need to love; but at the same time, since we are wounded and abased, we contract a need to hate, and an unacknowledged delight in cruelty. We come to take a devilish self-righteous joy in torturing whatever we can contrive to condemn. And since those whom we condemn most zestfully are those of whom we are secretly jealous for their power or their excellence, these we most delight to hurt.

We are primed with all the accepted moral principles, such as the gospel of love and gentleness, universal brotherhood, contempt for riches and material power. But we soon discover that in actual life these principles are not practised. Through the overwhelming force of suggestion and example, and even deliberate exhortation, most of us come to accept the conviction that the important things in life are patriotism and personal success. From biased history books and newspapers we learn that our own nation is the greatest in the world, always right, always wronged, always victorious in war, specially gifted to lead the world. Though we are made to pay lip-service to peace and internationalism, we are more effectively encouraged to admire military prowess and all the trappings of war.

Even those whose upbringing is more generous are almost inevitably corrupted when they go out into the world. No sooner do they enter the great dog-fight of economic competition than they have to subordinate all finer impulses to the need to earn a livelihood at the expense of others. If they did not, they would fall into penury and futility. No wonder that they tend to value only material wealth, for self and nation.

The great majority of us spend our days in toil that has as its first aim the benefit of our employers, and not the enrichment of the world. Our short leisure hours we spend in snatching simple amusement with as little effort as possible. How could it be otherwise? By the end of the working day we are tired, our powers are blunted. Moreover, we have never been helped to discover the most zestful uses of leisure. We derive our ideal of life from the American cinema, and from the commercial newspapers. And the aim of these is not to show us the truth about life and about the world, but to trade upon our primitive emotions. Consequently our knowledge of the world we live in is, in most cases, fragmentary and grossly distorted. Consequently, also, very few of us have any conception either of what the awakened personality can be, or of what the world of man might become.

Such are the beings on whom the making of the new world depends. Surely it is well not to found our courage on optimism, for optimism is untenable. There is scarcely more than a bare chance, a forlorn hope, that such beings may waken to their great task. Only if, like the early Christians, they can somehow be set on fire with a new vision; only if they can be goaded by a new sense of what existence is, and what man’s part in it is, and what the human world might be, will they ever wrench themselves to a higher level of being.

There is only the bare chance. But it is the bare chance of something so splendid that we must risk everything for it.

B. DECLINE AND FALL?

MEANWHILE, WHAT IS happening? The dog-fight becomes more desperate, more insane. We cannot trust one another as individuals, still less as nations. We are all obsessed by the terrified desire to be independent, self-sufficing. Because we dare not co-operate with one another, we are all becoming poorer, and can buy only a few of the things we need for the fullness of life. And because we cannot buy, machinery lies idle, workers are unemployed, unpaid, poverty-stricken. Corn, coffee, rubber, and a thousand other commodities needed all over the world, are destroyed because they cannot be sold at a paying price. Little by little the Western peoples, dismayed by the unexpected downfall of their prosperity, begin here and there to realize that the only way to save themselves is by world-organization. But they cannot trust one another. Each regards the rest as fundamentally its enemies. None dare surrender one shred of sovereign power. The jealousy of nations and the jealousy of the possessing class thwarts every effort at reshaping.

As the years pass, it becomes clear that throughout Europe and America there is a grave mental deterioration which, if it is not checked, will end our era. It began when the old religion, which had long since lost its power over men’s hearts, failed to cope with science and industrialism. For centuries the European peoples have pursued a false ideal, and now their mistake is ruining them. Because their religious creed failed them, and because they had not the strength to live up to the ethical ideal of their religion, they had to find other gods. Two new gods were at hand, the national state and the machine.

Industrialism produced in Europe and America huge town populations of cramped, over-specialized beings, incapable of any depth or breadth of experience. It produced also a plutocracy obsessed by the two ideals of wealth and nationalism. Steadily, decade by decade, especially in America, men have been turned into machines and automatic patriots. The whole life of the West has become a vast thoughtless grinding out of wealth and weapons, a vast aimless automatism which is galvanized into an appearance of life by the outworn virtues of patriotism.

To-day, when the whole world-system is breaking down, the mental deterioration is hastened by false economies. Every one is to live somewhat less healthily than before the War. Conditions are to be worse. Food will be worse. Though there is widespread unemployment, the hours of those who still have work must be longer, so that the machines may be more profitable. Education must be cheaper, and therefore, in the long run, less efficient, less humane, more vocational, less prolonged. Children must be forced more strictly into the approved pattern. They must be mechanically stamped with the information and ideas and sentiments needed for the fulfilling of their automatic function in society. No longer will governments even pretend to give effect to the view that the children of the race should all, if possible, be turned into fully developed human beings and intelligent citizens. They have to become cogs in the machine.

Unfortunately the machine itself is falling to pieces, and the loose cogs and wheels tend to behave in a more and more ungoverned way. This is most evident in the United States. There, where mechanism has become most developed, a vast counter machine of lawless organization, based on private machine-guns, has arisen to be the great dominant machine’s mechanical parasite. The racketeers and gangsters of Chicago display very clearly how the world is faring.

Meanwhile the East is assiduously learning the vices of the industrial and nationalistic peoples. It practises them with a frankness and brutality hitherto rare in the modern world. Who knows what horrors Japan will perpetrate? Strange unhappy people, martyred on a cross made up of the ancient and the modern! Theirs was a past of elegance and chivalry. They have a present in which Western industrialism and nationalism combine with Eastern fanaticism to make the overcrowded Japanese islands the chief danger-spot of the world. The people of Japan are probably not more blind and heartless than the rest of us. But they are more resolute, because not yet so far advanced in disillusion. And so they are more dangerous. They are said to tell their children that Japan has a sacred mission to punish the nations of the West; that Japan is destined to be lord of the world. Pernicious folly! But is it much worse than our own superstition that Britons are born to rule the ‘backward races’?

But Japan is not merely the Japanese army, still less a clique of ambitious generals. Japan is a swarm of unhappy and deluded human animals, much like any other nation, like that other island-swarm, the British. Like us, the Japanese need food and space. Like us, they have been brought up on lies and false sentiments. And if there is any hope that we ourselves may be cured of the twofold madness of industralism and nationalism, there is as good a hope for them. We are not made of different stuff from the countrymen of the Lady Murasaki. We are farther advanced in the disease, that is all. In us the fever is already giving way to lassitude and despond, and making room (let us hope) for a new health, a new resolution. And because we are nearer to convalescence, we have somehow to help the Japanese in their delirium. Not an easy task! But how do we prepare ourselves for it? We repress India. We see Russian bogies everywhere. We gleefully revive our war-hatred of Germany. To the insanely conquering Japan, we protest deprecatingly, with a smile. And in that smile there is some suggestion of a wink.

Clearly the plight of the modern world is very serious. Owing to mechanical power, unwise human actions can do more harm than in earlier periods, and wisdom is at least as rare as formerly. The machinations of governments, the bombast of rival patriots, the intrigues of trading organizations, the planned emotionalism of the commercial press, may at any time produce such a world-war that whole populations will be destroyed and civilization will vanish. Even if by some miracle this does not happen within the next few years, economic disorganization bids fair to produce the same result, though less dramatically. The economic problem has become so complicated, and so involved with class jealousy and national jealousy, that no one knows how to cope with it. In face of modern world conditions human nature seems to be proving itself insufficient, both intellectually and morally. Most of our problems simply defeat our intelligence; and even when the solution is visible, it involves such a deep change of heart that we cannot will it.

C. THE ONE HOPE

AT THE BEGINNING of this chapter we set out to take the worst possible view of the modern world. Let us now consider the right way of dealing with this extremely unpromising state of affairs.

First let us remind ourselves that the important distinction between men to-day is not between nations and social classes but between those who do, and those who do not, see something of the world-aim, and give their allegiance whole-heartedly to it. Not very many even pay it lip-service; extremely few accept it without qualification as the supreme practical goal of all political and social action.

They are scattered in every land and every social class. They pursue many callings. A few are in high places, struggling against the mob and its demagogues to bring order into the machine-ridden, class-ridden, nation-ridden world. Far more are doing humbler but no less vital work in their own professions and trades. A few are thrashing out by the clash of their differing minds the new form that is to be given to the world.

All are at a terrible disadvantage in comparison with the mob and its demagogues, for the mob desires, and the demagogues provide, simple familiar ideals and policies; but these few, who are the salt of the earth, the main hope of the future, see that the old simple ideals and policies are no longer appropriate to this modern and immensely complex and explosive world. Because they see this, they are desperately engaged on working out a new ideal, a new world-plan, a five-or a fifty-year plan, or a five-century plan, for the making of the new world. But they are not only thinking. They are beginning to act. And indeed they must take charge effectively as soon as possible, before the mob and its demagogues and its comfortable do-nothing politicians ruin everything.

But how are they to take charge? They have no force. They have no glib popular appeal. No party, no class will back them up. On every side they have enemies. The patriots will revile them, and presently may begin shooting them, or worse. The daily press will rouse popular fury against them. The politicians, the military, the wealthy, the industrial magnates, the churches, will be against them. And when the struggle begins to grow serious, there will be no mercy. Unless they become extraordinarily persuasive the great conservative mass of British labour, and its counterpart in other countries, will follow the hue and cry against them. And so, also, though for different reasons, may the great class-conscious ‘left-wing’ masses. For the men whom I have in mind, though they will probably demand an economic policy very like Communism, will also be far from accepting the whole ideology of Moscow. They would as soon bow to Rome, Fascist or Papist.

Then what hope is there? There is hope in the sheer brutal pressure of circumstances. Sooner or later the peoples will surely be forced to see the one clear way before them. World conditions in our day are such that no policy but that of cosmopolitanism in service of the world-aim can in fact succeed. And though men are blind, there are limits to their blindness. They may cling long and desperately to policies and aims which their changing world has already rendered futile, and to customs which their own natures are already outgrowing; but in time they will be thrust by grim facts into the single way of survival and advancement.

The danger is that widespread mental deterioration, consequent on decades of mistaken aims and policies, may blind the peoples fatally. Then the brutal pressure of circumstances will fail to enlighten them, and will destroy them.

This is a very real danger, some would say a probability. But there is at least a shred of hope. Ideas have sometimes had tremendous power to influence the course of events. Doubtless ideas themselves are produced by the pressure of circumstances, economic, biological, psychological; but it is sometimes through the ideas which circumstances generate in men’s minds that circumstances produce their most striking effect. We may agree that Christianity was an effect of the social conditions of the Mediterranean peoples; but we must also insist that it was an effect of those conditions acting on men’s minds to produce a new and potent idea. It is possible that, in our day also, circumstances are beginning to act on men’s minds so as to produce a new and potent idea capable of raising us, as the early Christians were raised, to a more awakened mentality.

The world is not divided sharply into the few who can and the many who cannot already see and accept the inevitable world-aim. Between them in all countries there is a great population of those who do not as yet, but might, give their allegiance to the world-aim sincerely and effectively. They are of all nations and all social classes. They are also of all ages; but the great majority of them are young, even very young. In fact they are mostly those who, though they have not yet fully opened their eyes to the facts of the world, have also not yet been blinded by false traditions. These, surely, are a potential strength for the remaking of the world.

Unfortunately they are also the world’s most pressing danger. They are generous, innocent, eager; but these very qualities are apt to lead them astray. They long to feel that they serve in a great cause. They see that the world is crumbling, and they are impatient to rebuild it. And so they are ready to accept any plausible leader, any pinchbeck ideals and policies. They become Fascists, Nazis, imitation Bolsheviks, and the like. Under the influence of their leaders they learn to be satisfied with patriotism, race-hatred, ruthlessness, flags, badges, uniforms, and innumerable catch-words. Already in two countries they have come out bodily on the wrong side. They have made it impossible for those who are pledged to the world-aim to live in those countries.

This is the real tragedy of the modern world, that ‘so much superb young life is being deluded and debased.

If these generous young people could be won over in their millions and disciplined for the world-aim, how soon would the new world be made! If, before they become irrevocably set in blindness and brutality, they could be made to see that they have been gulled, and that they have betrayed the one true cause, which now most urgently needs their service!

How are they to be won? Those who have the true cause at heart must somehow win them. And chiefly the task is for those of the young themselves who have not been gulled, who already see and accept the world-aim. It is for the more awakened young to laugh their deluded fellows out of their folly, and shame them out of their brutality, and show them something more desirable than their barbarian ideals. We shall all be faced with a prolonged occasion for heroism; and most of us are persons who have no natural gift for heroism. We shall need also superhuman tact and insight. We have to show that, though we can when necessary be as uncompromising and ruthless as our opponents, our general method is that of understanding and sympathy. We have to show that we understand our opponents better than they understand themselves, that we know better than they do what they really want, and how to get it.

And it is for all of us together, young and old alike, to think out as clearly and precisely as possible what we can do to contribute to the founding of the new world. A desperate stand must be made before it is too late.

IV. ANIMAL AND MAN

A. MAN’S ANIMAL CAPACITIES

WE HAVE SEEN that mechanical power, though a most perilous instrument, might be used for the construction of a world community incomparably more vital than any that has hitherto existed. We have seen that what stands in the way of this consummation is the fact that the ideal world depends for its realization on the present half-savage world. The contemporary human race has no serious will to create a world in which all men will be able to live a fuller life. If this will is to be propagated, one of the main tasks is to set forth a clear and compelling idea of what human nature really is, and especially what in it is distinctively human and most to be prized. We cannot cope with the task of remaking our world on a better plan unless we have a comprehensive view of man’s needs and potentialities, a view which does full justice both to his animal nature and to that in virtue of which he is more awakened mentally than any sub-human animal. Not only do we need a clear intellectual statement of the distinctively human in man, so that we may create a new world which shall be appropriate; we also need to realize far more vividly that this truly human factor in human nature is something to be greatly prized, something worth living for and dying for, something which should rightly command the allegiance that we are apt to squander on lesser ends.

European thought has for long been passing through a phase of revulsion from the view that man is essentially different from any other living creature. This revulsion was salutary, but the pendulum has swung too far. It is now fashionable to hold that the difference between man and other mammals is but superficial. All the formerly most-prized attributes of man have been described in terms of the attributes which he has in common with other mammals; and though the description is, up to a point, true and instructive, it is also subtly falsifying to the distinctively human in man. The result has been that the old naïve view that man was a princely or divine alien in a strange land has given place to an equally false view that he is just a peculiarly cunning ape. Hence the far-reaching disillusionment, cynicism, apathy, of our time.

In the following chapters I shall offer a cautious revindication of human nature. I shall briefly present the view that, though a man is indeed ‘at bottom’ an animal, or more strictly a mere electro-magnetic system, he has certain powers which in other animals are almost entirely undeveloped, powers which transform his whole experience and behaviour. The exercise and development of these powers, I shall claim, constitute the proper function of each individual and of the race as a whole.

This chapter will be concerned with a purely theoretical discussion of the relation of the animal and the human in man. To readers who feel that abstract thought is a waste of time, I would urge that this is a subject on which clear thinking is urgent, since false and fashionable theories have recently done so much to obscure man’s knowledge of himself and coarsen his purpose. My aim is to give an outline of human capacity in such terms as to do justice to the scientific view of man and yet to pass cautiously beyond the limitations of contemporary science. Let me confess at the outset that I have nothing original to say on this subject. The need is only to give a balanced judgement on conflicting views.

Any man, say John Smith, may be regarded as a system of needs or capacities for action. Of course, John Smith is a unique individual. Though in some respects he is similar to others of his kind, he is also very different from any other. Moreover, since his mind is not merely a bundle of separate parts or elements, but an extraordinarily unified thing, in which every part permeates every other, there is nothing in him which is not in some manner unique. Even the characteristics which he shares with others appear in him with a unique tone or flavour all his own. What is common to him and Tom Jones is a system of very abstract or general characters which each makes concrete in his own manner. Further, it is on the whole in his less-developed, less subtle aspects that John Smith is most like his fellows. It is rather on the distinctively human than on the animal plane that men begin to differ greatly from one another.

Some of the actions of which John Smith is capable are comparatively simple, some are much more complex. Some he shares with other mammals, though he generally exercises them in his own distinctive manners; some are of kinds beyond the reach of other mammals. I shall argue that all John Smith’s distinctively human capacities are the outcome of his distinctively human degree of intelligence and imagination. But let us first consider John Smith as an animal. As an animal he has certain capacities which he cannot exercise apart from an appropriate physical, chemical and social environment. For fulfilment as a human being he needs the even more complex environment of human society.

We can dismiss the physical and chemical requirements of his animal nature in a few words. He needs a planet with a certain gravitational attraction; for if gravity were removed, or if it were greatly increased, he could not walk. He needs also a certain atmospheric pressure. Too much or too little would soon incapacitate him. He needs a certain constancy of temperature. Only if he is warm enough, but not too warm, can he continue to live. He needs sunlight. Without it he soon begins to ail; with excess of it, his skin and his eyes are damaged.

He needs innumerable chemical substances, all in due proportions, and in due season. Oxygen, water, many compounds of carbon, hydrogen, calcium, iron, and so on, he requires in large and regular doses. Countless other substances, though he uses them in smaller proportions are no less necessary to him. A slight excess or shortage of any one of them may reduce his body to sickness or death, his mind to disorder. Only in our own day are we beginning to realize the extreme complexity of his chemical needs and the extent to which his intelligence and his temperament are dependent on them.

As an animal John Smith needs not merely to have certain chemicals in his system, but also to procure them and assimilate them. In fact he needs, if he is to maintain his vitality, the complex activities of breathing, drinking and eating. Not only so, but in some form or other he must seek his food. He must do something corresponding to the animal activity of hunting or grazing. If he is merely fed, and has no occasion to exert himself, he turns sluggish in body and mind. As an animal he is equipped for an active life. He must therefore have occasion to use his legs for locomotion, his hands for manipulation, his eyes, ears, nose, and his hands also, for perceiving and discriminating the characters of his environment. Possibly, also, he needs for full animal well-being perceptions of the kind of environment to which his animal nature is adapted, perceptions of hills and trees and forests rather than of streets and buildings and roaring traffic. There may be tracts in his brain adapted to the one rather than to the other; but this is doubtful.

He has sexual organs, specially adapted to intercourse with females of his kind. When he has reached maturity his mind is deeply influenced by these organs. He develops, for instance, strong impulses to perceive and to delight in members of the opposite sex. He needs also the simple animal activity of sex, in due season, and with due frequency.

He is a gregarious animal, and he needs some degree of fellowship with his kind. Prolonged loneliness preys upon him, as it does on his relative the ape. He craves to feel at one with the herd. He needs the herd’s physical protection and mental approval. To be opposed to the herd is to find himself single against the universe, and this terrifies him. It also painfully stimulates the human in him as opposed to the animal, for it fosters a brooding self-consciousness. Like the ape, he needs to have opportunity of combining his social and his sexual capacities by means of more or less enduring companionship with a partner or partners of the opposite sex. In one respect his purely animal nature seems to go farther than that of the highest sub-human mammals. In them the female alone has strong impulses to protect and foster, and this activity she normally directs almost entirely on her own offspring. In the human species, not only has the male as well as the female considerable capacity for spontaneous protectiveness, but also in both sexes this impulse is far more catholic in its direction than in any other species.

Like other animals, John Smith needs in his relations with his kind not only animal companionship, but also opportunities of asserting himself in the animal way, and of abasing himself. He needs to lead and to be led. He needs opportunities of rivalry. He has also an animal capacity for self-assertion in combat. In the wild state he would no doubt express this with the action of teeth and claws upon any rivals that roused his anger reflexes. On the human plane, he finds other modes of expression. In the ideal world, no doubt, this impulse would not be allowed to exercise itself in the jungle manner nor in defence of the jungle self, but it would have to be taken into account and given some kind of socially harmless outlet, such as competitive games, or rivalry in social service.

Another capacity which John Smith has in common with some other animals, for instance the apes, is inquisitiveness, the impulse to investigate situations which, though on the whole familiar, are in some notable respect strange. These situations and this impulse together provide an occasion for the exercise of intelligence, and thus is formed the germ which in man himself gives rise to theoretical interests and activities.

Yet another important animal capacity in John Smith is the impulse to construct. Like the apes, he has hands and the necessary brain organization for manual dexterity. These organs he delights to use. But his constructive impulse does not confine itself to manipulation. With the aid of distinctively human intelligence and imagination it finds expression in many other fields, such as art and theoretical activity.

B. INTELLIGENCE AND IMAGINATION

SUCH, IN BRIEF, are the animal capacities of John Smith.

I have already said that his distinctively human capacities are all the outcome of the distinctively human degree of his intelligence and imagination.

Now intelligence and imagination are not, strictly speaking, confined to man. Indeed, in the broadest sense of the word ‘intelligence’, all animals may be said to have that capacity to some extent, however slight; and in the higher mammals, especially the apes, it is comparatively well developed. Nevertheless in man alone does it play so great a part as to transform behaviour from a simple and mainly innate routine to the age-long adventure which has brought us (for good or ill) to our present pass.

The reader may protest that, since, after all, the difference between man and animal is only one of degree of intelligence and imagination, it is not fundamental. True, it is not fundamental; but it is supremely important. Even a slight difference of degree may make just all the difference. A dam may withstand a huge pressure of water; but there comes a point when only a slight increase will burst the dam and devastate a countryside. The difference of degree between human and animal intelligence is not slight but great. The ‘tension’ of human intelligence is such that whole worlds, which the animal cannot enter at all, are opened up for man.

If we allow that man’s nature is very largely ‘animal we should perhaps also affirm that animals, in so far as they manifest intelligence, are to that extent ‘human.’ We have admitted that the distinction between animals and men, though extremely important, is not absolute. This does not necessarily mean that the human being can be wholly described in terms of recognized principles of animal biology and psychology. Indeed, it may be that even the nature of a sub-human animal demands for its full explanation principles which are to be discovered only on the human plane.

Intelligence may be defined as the power of solving novel problems by means of insight into their essential features, and into the relation between those features and relevant past experiences.

Intelligence only operates in response to some need or needs which cannot be fulfilled in any purely innate or purely habitual way. Strictly speaking, even in the most stereotyped instinctive or habitual situation there is bound to be some slight amount of irregularity or novelty, and therefore some slight demand for intelligence. But for practical purposes there is an important difference between acts which are mainly instinctive or habitual and acts which are mainly intelligent.

Here it is worth while to quote a famous example of animal intelligence in which the essential nature of intelligence is very clearly seen. Professor Kohler, seeking the limits of intelligence in apes, performed many interesting experiments on his chimpanzees. The need which spurred them to intelligent behaviour was hunger. They were kept without food for a while, then introduced to a situation in which food was visible, but could not be reached in any familiar manner. For instance, they would discover fruit hanging by a cord from the cage-roof, and too high to be secured by jumping. But in the cage there would be a number of packing-cases, which could be built up as a tower under the fruit. Packing-cases do not occur in the jungle. The ape has no instinctive aptitude for building towers. But these captive apes had already been allowed to have opportunities of playing with packing-cases and familiarizing themselves with the potentialities of these objects. In the test-situation the more intelligent apes would in time see the connexion between this ‘situation demanding climbing’ and the climbable character of a tower of packing-cases, such as they had already often made in play. Then they would proceed, very clumsily, to build a precarious tower, on to which, with native agility, they would climb for the fruit.

This example may be taken as the type of all intelligence, both simple and complex, both practical and theoretical. The differences between ape intelligence and human intelligence may be summed as follows.

1. Man has superior insight into the essence of the problem itself. He discriminates more quickly and surely between the significant aspect of the situation and those features of it which are irrelevant to the problem.

2. He has superior power of recalling past experience. When he is faced with a problem, his mind is less likely to remain blank. Images and ideas more or less relevant to the problem may crowd in on him.

3. He has sharper insight into the relations between the problem and the images and ideas which well up in his mind. He can detect significant relations which the ape would miss.

4. When he sets about the practical line of action in relation to the problem, he can more delicately and appropriately modify his familiar actions so as to suit the problem.

5. One advantage which man has over the ape in respect of intelligence, an advantage which perhaps underlies all the others, and certainly affords him an incomparably greater scope of experience and action, is his far ampler and far more discriminative apprehension of his world.

In the first place, a man perceives his physical environment better than an ape. He apprehends it in much greater detail, and far more accurately and systematically.

What appears to a man as an orderly coil of rope is to the ape indistinguishable from a tangle. Moreover, what a man notices is relevant not only to his animal needs but to his much more complex human needs, which are themselves very largely the outcome of past intelligent activity. One has only to think of the special interest with which the farmer perceives his land and the weather, the engineer his machines, the artist the coloured shapes of nature.

But in addition to his perceived environment man has other fields of experience in which to exercise his intelligence. Of these, perhaps the most important is the inner world of his own mental activities, and the inferred world of other minds. In this direction he exercises a delicacy of percipience or ‘sensibility’ impossible to any other animal. And this percipience is itself sharpened and refined by, if not created by, the constant use of intelligence.

The starting-point for the advance into this inner world would seem to consist in man’s intelligent discrimination between his activity of experiencing and that which he experiences; between on the one hand, desiring, fearing, perceiving, remembering, thinking, and so on, and on the other that which he desires, fears, perceives, remembers, thinks, and so on. Even in the fully developed human mind this discrimination remains so obscure and precarious that some schools of thought stoutly deny the possibility of any such distinction. I shall not argue the matter, but merely affirm that to me it is obvious that the distinction must be made for practical purposes; and that even philosophically it must be maintained in some sense or other. To say this is not to pledge oneself to metaphysical dualism, in which matter and mind are taken to be ultimate substances, in the philosophical sense. It might be that there was only one kind of substance, but that every particular substance had two attributes, namely its own consciousness and its physical manifestation to other substances.

In the sphere of personality countless problems arise which are distinctively human. Such problems are experienced by all who attempt to ‘know themselves and by all who love or hate in an awakened manner, or are in any way brought into ‘personal contact’ with one another. One great class of these problems is discovered in the heart-searchings of the religious devotee. All these aspects of personality are illustrated and developed in the drama and in the novel of manners, or of ‘sensibility’.

From this introspective experience may arise a vast and subtle tissue of distinctively human motives which can only by gross over-simplification be described wholly in terms of simple animal motives. One may well suspect that in this direction lie whole worlds of possible experience which are not accessible to the present type of human mind. Contemporary man has indeed come to take stock by indirect methods of the lowly, primitive and often infantile motives of his so-called ‘unconscious mind’; and it is possible that future generations, properly educated, will be fully conscious of the deepest roots of their own motives. We may well doubt, however, whether our own species will ever rise to loftier modes of experience, to a new biological level of self-consciousness as superior to man’s present level as that is to the ape’s. On the other hand, a few spiritual geniuses of our race may even now attain to experiences impossible to the ordinary man. And in any case we have no reason to suppose that the most developed or ‘awakened’ mode of human experience is the most awakened that can occur at all in the universe.

Another sphere in which human intelligence has to operate is the sphere of abstract thought, which includes mathematics, science and philosophy. Here the ultimate data are still certain characters first apprehended in sense perception, or in introspection; but these characters are clearly discriminated from their particular context, and  identified with other instances of their kind, experienced in other contexts. Thus it is that the human mind becomes conscious of universal characters, as such, and begins to manipulate them in imagination in the manner of abstract thought. The motive of this treatment may be some need to solve a particular practical problem, or it may be sheer curiosity, or the will to analyse and to see things whole.

The word ‘imagination’ is ambiguous. In one sense, intelligence itself involves imagination; for it involves the power of imagining possible actions in relation to a problem. In this sense, then, wherever there is intelligence there is some degree of imagination.

In another sense ‘imagination’ itself involves intelligence. For by ‘imagination’ we often mean the power of constructing mentally patterns of images, ideas, actions and emotions; and this involves intelligent discrimination between those images or ideas or actions or emotions which are, and those which are not, relevant to the pattern which it is desired to construct. This kind of imaginative activity is special to man; and it is in this sense that I use the word ‘imagination’ when I say that intelligence and imagination are distinctively human activities.

The phrase ‘creative imagination’, which has many senses, may perhaps be most conveniently used to apply to those most original acts of imaginative insight by which, in any field of experience, the mind may leap to the apprehension either of order in what formerly appeared as chaotic, or of far-reaching significance in what formerly appeared as barren, or of ‘transparency’ and new vistas of reality through what formerly appeared as opaque. In this sense certain apprehensions of personality (in oneself or another), and certain outstanding achievements of art, science and philosophy, might fittingly be called works of creative imagination.

These are the activities which the awakened mind prizes most in itself and others. We all value in ourselves and others breadth and depth of self-consciousness and of sensibility to other persons. We admire self-transcendence in generous behaviour. We admire aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual honesty and penetration. These attributes we prize not only for their utility to society, but as intrinsically good.

It may be that the superior merit which we assign to them is due partly to their greater difficulty and rarity; and that, if they happened to be easy and common, we should tend to prize them less. There is a sense in which every exercise of vital capacity, of whatever order, is as desirable as every other; since all equally are needed for full personal expression. In this sense simple muscular activity is no less desirable than poetry. But since in actual life it is the distinctively human that is more in danger of frustration, this tends to be the more cherished by minds capable of appreciating both.

Nevertheless this extraneous, ‘economic’ value is not the sole cause of our admiration of the distinctively human. The more difficult, more human activities are, I submit, experienced as actually more awakened, more vital, more deeply fulfilling to the personality, than the less awakened, animal activities. The problem is complicated by the fact that, as I shall maintain in more detail in the next chapter, the awakened mind may discover in the animal activities themselves a depth of significance to which in all probability the animal is insensitive.

C. MAN MORE THAN ANIMAL

I HAVE DESCRIBED as clearly as I can the essential difference between the distinctively animal and the distinctively human in man. It is now necessary to consider the relation between them, and in particular the view which seeks to explain the distinctively human motives and activities wholly in terms of the impulses which man has in common with other animals. In this section I am concerned with an abstract philosophical problem.

To readers who consider such problems unimportant, I would protest that this particular philosophical problem is really very important, because of its indirect effects on private conduct and social policy.

The ‘animal view’ of John Smith is the view that he is born with certain dispositions which occur also in other mammals, and that his behaviour, like theirs, can be fully understood by considering the relation between these dispositions and his environment throughout his life. The only difference between him and other mammals, in this view, is, not that, owing to his greater intelligence and versatility, he has kinds of needs which they lack, but merely that his greater intelligence and versatility enable him to satisfy his basic animal needs or fulfil his basic animal dispositions in ways which are not open to lower animals. The satisfaction may sometimes be produced by the actual direct fulfilment of an animal need, as when a hunter, craving food, uses intelligence in order to capture and cook his quarry; or it may be a fictitious satisfaction, produced by mere imagination of actual fulfilment, as when hungry explorers describe feasts to one another, or dream of banquets; or it may be veiled or unconscious satisfaction, as when the sexually starved take delight in religious rituals which are obscurely symbolical of sex, or as when one whose self-assertiveness has been continuously thwarted in youth exhibits in maturity a cruel and domineering disposition. Always, in this view, the actual driving motive of human conduct is either some simple animal craving, such as self-assertiveness, or hunger, or fear, or sex, or parential protectiveness, or ‘herd instinct’; or else it is a compound of these.

Unfortunately no one yet knows at all clearly what primitive motives there really are, or, indeed, whether there are any such basic or unanalysable motives at all. In some sense or other, no doubt, all mammals have dispositions to ‘assert’ themselves, to seek sexual intercourse, to seek fellowship with their kind, and so on.

In some sense all human behaviour is, indeed, an expression, extremely indirect, of these dispositions. And it is very important to realize that this is so, and that often the one really effective, though unwitting, motive behind a seemingly exalted act is sheer self-regard, or sheer sex, and so on. The theory of ‘unconscious’ or unacknowledged motivation is one of the most far-reaching discoveries of modern times.

But when the advocates of this theory of human nature claim that all human conduct can in theory be adequately described in terms of primitive animal impulse and the principle of unconscious motivation, they over-simplify the problem.

No doubt every human act affords satisfaction to one or more animal impulses. Nevertheless such impulses may happen not to constitute the effective motive of the act. When a man attends a political meeting he may find satisfaction for his gregarious impulse, but it does not follow that gregariousness was his real motive. This satisfaction may be incidental.

There can, I think, be little doubt that, in one sense, every human act could theoretically be analysed into a tissue of animal impulses, much as a painting may be analysed into a tissue of ‘brush-strokes’ of different sizes and shapes and colours distributed in a certain order. This account of the picture would be very inadequate, but no less so than the account of human activity presented solely in terms of animal impulses.

The advocates of the animal theory of human nature fall into the error of over-simplification. They think, for instance, that, if they can point to all the primitive motives which are involved in the production of a particular work of art, they have shown that the whole motive of it is simply a medley of animal cravings. They fail to realize that, in the human mind, those same ‘animal’ cravings themselves have been transmuted into something more subtle; that, simply by the operation of intelligence and imagination, the ‘animal’ motives of self, sex, society, and so on, acquire additional characteristics over and above those which, so far as we can judge, they manifest in the lower mammals. So to speak, man discovers more in them than the sub-human animal can apprehend.

Further, those psychologists who interpret human behaviour solely in terms of animal motive fail to realize that a second order of transmutation occurs even within the human sphere, as between the basic motives of the most primitive human mind and the basic motives of the most developed. For the primitive human cravings may be changed beyond recognition simply through the continued operation of intelligence and imagination in a highly civilized environment. So that the ‘self’ which the fully developed human mind seeks to ‘assert’ may be a very different ‘self’ from that which a child or a savage asserts; and sexual satisfaction for such a mind may be something infinitely richer and more subtle than that which is craved by the crudest sort of human being; and in civilized man the craving for society and social approval is very different not only from animal but from primitive human gregariousness. So also with art, though we rightly admire the sincere and often deeply moving aesthetic achievements of primitive peoples, it is mere affectation to ignore the fact that the finest art of the most aesthetically conscious civilizations far outstrips the primitive in breadth and delicacy of significance.

No doubt, for fullness of life the developed mind must have a due measure of satisfaction upon the strictly subhuman and the primitive human planes; but it must also have very much else. For, through the prolonged operation of intelligence and imagination it discovers vast spheres of experience (and therefore of needs and satisfactions) which can no more be adequately described in terms of the crude primitive motives than a plant can be described as a mere enlargement of a seed.

Now the attempt to explain developed human behaviour in terms of the primitive and the animal is salutary. It tends to diminish man’s conceit, and it goes to work with the sound scientific principle of explaining the complex in terms of the simple, wherever possible. But this appears to be one of the spheres in which it turns out not to be possible fully to explain the complex in terms of the simple, or rather in terms of our present knowledge of the simple. Those who favour this kind of explanation may come to think that to show the primitive origins of developed behaviour is to show that developed behaviour is but an unimportant veneer laid over the ‘solid structure’ of primitive animal nature.

In view of this danger it is very necessary to bear in mind on the one hand the uncertainty and abstractness of all our present psychological knowledge, and on the other the actual features of developed behaviour and experience. Those who have ever found themselves intensely conscious of the personality of another individual, and those who have ever had vivid and intimate acquaintance with any art, or with the life of intellect, or with genuine religion, are apt to feel, when they are confronted with a psychological explanation of their experience, that the psychologist simply had no clear apprehension of the kind of thing to be explained. Now I believe they are mistaken; I believe the psychologist very often has a clear apprehension of these developed experiences; but that as soon as he tries to account for these experiences in terms of his psychology, he becomes more interested in his theories than in the matter to be explained, and begins to lose sight of those aspects of it which cannot be adequately described in terms of his theories. Thus his description is apt to seem like an account of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.

The policy of explaining the more complex and developed in terms of the more simple and undeveloped is well justified by success in many scientific fields. But it incurs one serious danger. The desire for intellectual neatness and simplicity may lead to distortion of the data to be explained. The mind may become blind to everything which cannot be described in terms of the principles derived from study of the simpler matter.

Those who hold what I am calling the animal view of human nature themselves bring the charge of oversimplification against those who seek to account for animal behaviour solely in terms of chemistry and physics. They feel that such extreme simplification is unjustified. Their opponents, on the other hand, feel that simplification should be pushed to its logical conclusion, that not only the highly developed activities of man but animal instincts also should be reduced to simpler terms. Some day, they declare, instinctive reactions will be wholly described in terms of nerve-tracts and glandular secretions; and these in turn will be wholly described in terms of biochemical principles, which will ultimately be reduced to the principles of electro-magnetism. A man, they hold, is simply a chemical system; and a chemical system is a system of electrons and protons, or whatever ultimate units physicists recognize.

My main contention with regard to both the animal view and the physical view of man can be stated in a few words. Possibly human behaviour will eventually be fully described in terms of biological principles; but if so, biological principles will be very different from those which biologists are content to accept to-day. Possibly human and animal behaviour will eventually be described in terms of fundamental physical principles; but if so, physical principles will be very different from those which physicists are content to accept to-day. Meanwhile, though we should indeed try to describe human behaviour so far as possible in terms of our biology and our physics, we must anxiously beware lest in our scientific zeal we turn a blind eye to important characteristics in human behaviour. This caution is necessary because the recent tendency to describe human nature in the over-simplified terms of biology and physics has falsified the distinctively human, and has produced a widespread and emasculating disillusionment with regard to the nature of man.

It should be obvious that mental events, states of awareness, experiencings, cannot, in principle, be described in terms of chemistry or physics. Those sciences deal only with physical events which are all reducible to movement. Desiring, fearing, thinking and perceiving lie entirely outside their range. Of course, if we accept the view of the extreme Behaviourists, and deny the existence of experiencings or consciousness, we need not admit that there is anything in animal or human behaviour other than the events studied by physics. But if we refrain from this fantastic denial of consciousness we must agree that the concepts of contemporary physics cannot even in principle describe the whole of human nature.

But it might still be possible to show that, though physical science can never describe mental life, there exists a regular relation between every mental event and certain physical events in a living body; and that for understanding the sequence of mental events the important procedure is to understand the physical events which determine them. Anger, for instance, is said to be the mental accompaniment of a certain chemical condition of the body. Therefore if you would understand the anger responses of an animal or a man, if you seek to predict them or control them, you must study the causes of that chemical condition.

In this view, then, although consciousness does exist, it is entirely ineffective. Acts of will, for instance, do not really produce either the mental or the physical changes which we ordinarily suppose them to produce. The real causes of these changes are said to be physical, and the conscious volition is a by-product.

Some people regard this view with horror. For my part I do not see why they should distress themselves. If a man behaves well, what matter whether that in him in virtue of which he behaves well is physical or mental or both or neither? To my mind courage, generosity, intellect, artistic sensibility, religious sensibility, and so on, are no whit less admirable if they are mechanically and physically caused. I admire them for what they are, not for their causes.

On the other hand, one may well feel sceptical of the theory that animal and human behaviour can in principle be understood simply in terms of the familiar concept of physical causation. It demands a naïve, childlike trust in the principles of contemporary science. It springs from a wholly false assumption that what we now call the physical aspect of existence must be the most significant, the fundamental aspect. This assumption has been caused partly by the fact that the physical has proved the easiest to study accurately and also the most profitable in the quest for power.

There is, moreover, a real danger in the view that animal and human behaviour are physically determined, simply and absolutely. It creates an irrational tendency to pay more attention and respect to the physical than the mental in man, and to the simpler and more mechanical activities than to the more complex and developed and distinctively human activities. I myself, to repeat, do not greatly care whether man’s distinctively human behaviour is to be accounted for wholly by physical laws describing the movements of the physical units of his body, or not. If physics were to succeed in doing this, I should take off my hat to it, and recognize that there was more in it than at first appeared. But what I do care for is that the distinctively human ways of behaving should not be therefore ignored or disparaged.

As a matter of fact the mechanistic theory of human nature would probably not tend to belittle the distinctively human activities if it could really account for them. But since all it can do is to give a very superficial and distorting account of them, it does to-day tend to make its adherents misconceive them and disparage them.

V. PERSONALITY AND SOCIETY

A. INTELLIGENCE AND THE ANIMAL LIFE

HAVING NOTED THE essential difference between the human and the animal factors in man’s nature, we may set about the task of forming a more detailed view of the part played by intelligence and imagination in human life.

The spheres in which human intelligence and imagination operate are as follows: (i) a man’s experience of his own bodily life and perceived environment; (2) his experience of himself as a person; (3) his experience of other persons; (4) his experience of society as a system of persons engaged in complex practical and theoretical activities; (5) his aesthetic, intellectual and religious experience.

Even in experience of the perceived world and of his own simple animal activities John Smith may, by means of intelligence and imagination, become aware of attributes which in all probability the non-human animal does not apprehend at all. Not only has he, compared for instance with an ape, a far greater practical scope for intelligence, but also he is more prone (in favourable circumstances) to be interested in the world for its own sake, simply as an object of curiosity and study, and not merely as a field in which to exercise his own capacities. Even the ape has a degree of sheer curiosity and ‘meddlesomeness’ quite exceptional among animals; but his curiosity is much less disinterested than man’s, much more subservient to his own play-impulses, less objective, less scientific and aesthetic. This objectivity of interest not only leads man to natural science, but also, in some individuals at least, it produces, I submit, that heightened consciousness in perception which is so important in all art.

Let us now consider some of the ways in which John Smith’s experience differs from that of a sub-human animal in the sphere of perception and especially in the consciousness of his own bodily life. This is a subject on which it is very difficult to avoid vagueness and sentimentality. But it should not, on that account, be merely shirked.

Every one of the common bodily actions may afford to the awakened human being a sense not merely of fulfilling his own bodily functions but of performing as it were a religious rite, or of coming into touch with some very solid and deep-lying reality. Some hold that this strange quality of veiled significance which the simple bodily acts and simple perceptions may have is sheer illusion. But though, of course, we may describe it wrongly, or ‘read too much into it’, the experience itself is what it is, and ought not to be ignored. This is one of the points where, I suggest, we do well to remember that our modern science is not the last word of truth, and that to reject all that it cannot yet accommodate may be as misguided as to accept indiscriminately every kind of superstition. It may well be that the more alive, more awakened, mind can discover even in the primitive bodily life actually a deeper kind of fulfilment than is afforded to the less developed mind.

It is this experience, primitive but indescribable, that has persuaded some that the life of bodily action and of sensation is the only truly ‘spiritual’ life, and that the life of intellect is unreal and barren. Possibly those who hold this extreme view have been starved of full bodily experience, or else have been disgusted by the shallow intellectualism and prudery of an earlier age.

Even those who feel strongly that the life of the intellect is very far from barren may also feel that the leaders of thought have often unwisely neglected and disparaged the life of bodily action and of sensation, and that this contempt has actually debased it in our age. Partly through the influence of the churches, there has arisen a notion that to delight in the primitive action of limbs and sense organs is unworthy of such a dignified being as man.

‘Sensuality’, it is said, is deadening to the spirit. Thus the appreciation of bodily life, and also of the sensed qualities of the external world, tends to become superficial and obtuse, and also furtive. John Smith needs a full sensual life as much as he needs an intellectual life. If he is starved of it or if he regards it as base, he will still crave it; but he will pursue it in a style that is brutish, greedy and ashamed. The finer quality of it will escape him. He will react to it as the sheer animal, lacking human sensibility and discrimination.

One way in which a man may miss full awareness of his bodily life and of the vivid sensory presence of the world around him is this. He may become so deeply concerned with planning for a future, whether a year hence or a day or a minute, that he has no attention to spare for the present moment. Now ‘taking the future into account’ is an activity which men perform to a far greater extent than any sub-human animals. One might almost say that planning for a future is a distinctively human activity which the higher sub-human animals practise only to a minute extent. But it has its peculiar danger. It may lead to loss of contact with the present. A man may become so absorbed in carrying out his plans that he seldom pauses to regard the actual colours and shapes of things, or hear the subtleties of noise, or appreciate touched shapes and surfaces, with all their roughs and smooths, warms and cools; or he may fail to note the shadowy and the emphatic odours on the air. Thus he may never perceive clearly the living texture of his momentary world. He may take all these delicate sensory creatures merely as signals, signs of conditions and situations useful or dangerous to him. In this way his world may become curiously unreal, empty, tasteless; and his mind desolate. Even the ends that he sets himself to realize in the future will tend to lose their meaning. They will become mere formulae, empty phrases obsessing him.

We may sum this matter by saying that John Smith may fail to grasp the full significance of his animal life in either of two ways. He may fail through sheer brutish greed, through incapacity to pause in the midst of it and regard it with human sensibility and discrimination. He may also fail through contempt and neglect of it.

Let us note one striking example of the way in which the animal and the human may co-operate in human experience. As a male animal, John Smith will respond with delight and yearning to the appearance of a well-formed young woman. But as a human being he may see in her far more, even as a stimulus to sex, than any mere animal could ever see. The visible beauty of the body and the audible beauty of the voice may express for him characters of personality far beyond the apprehension of the animal. Even the body that is merely a well-grown body, and expresses just physical strength and grace and agility, affords to John Smith’s perception more than it can afford to the non-human mind. But there is a subtler, more exquisite kind of bodily beauty in which every curve and volume, every movement, and even the bloom of the skin, seem to express together, indescribably perhaps, but none the less vividly, many subtle characteristics of human personality, and of one unique person.

There is nothing mysterious about this. It is to be expected that for human sensibility and intelligence the subtler qualities of bodily form should become significant of the subtler qualities of mental life.

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND OTHER-CONSCIOUSNESS

ONE OF THE most important spheres in which intelligence and imagination operate to make man superior to a chimpanzee is his awareness of personality, in himself and others. Self-consciousness and other-consciousness open up to him a vast world of experience which is almost wholly closed to other animals.

By discriminating between his mental activity and its objects, John Smith gradually attains a more or less clear awareness of himself as an enduring centre of mental activities. Endless philosophical discussion is possible about the nature of this ‘centre and innumerable shades of opinion, from the view that it is an ‘eternal soul’ to the view that it is nothing whatever but a ‘unity of pattern’ running through all his behaviour. But whatever the philosophically correct description of the ‘unity of consciousness’ may be, clearly there is a unity and continuity in John Smith’s mental life, and he is aware of it in a sense in which in all probability an ape is not aware to any considerable extent.

This discrimination between experiencing and its objects is not alone enough to produce full self-consciousness in John Smith. His awareness of himself as a person is largely the product of his awareness of other persons. The two kinds of experience augment one another. It is true that, without direct acquaintance with his own experiencing, he could never come to regard others as experiencing selves; but equally true that, without awareness of the interactions and differences between himself and others, he could never have more than the vaguest notion of himself. Very much of his knowledge of himself is derived from the ‘reflection’, so to speak, of himself in other minds.

Indeed, not merely his knowledge of his own person but the actual character of his own person is very largely the product of his relations with others. His dealings with others call forth in him many kinds of activities which otherwise would be impossible. Through the realization of others as experiencing selves he attains to distinctively human love and hate, admiration and contempt, compassion, ridicule and so on.

Awareness of his personal continuity from day to day and year to year greatly influences John Smith’s behaviour. However short-sighted we may call him, he is much more foreseeing and prudent than any ape. The aims which he conceives for his future self may vary greatly in respect of the degree of the futurity of their realization. He may look forward for an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime. As a member of a national group or of the world-community, he may co-operate in planning for a consummation which will take centuries to achieve. There may well come a time when the race will habitually lay its plans for periods of thousands and even millions of years in the future.

John Smith’s aims may also vary greatly in respect of the kind of self which he seeks to fulfil in the future. He may be concerned with himself regarded simply as an animal needing food, shelter, sex-life, companionship, or dominance over others. But he may also be concerned with a more distinctively human self, craving a more self-conscious and other-conscious life. He may conceive and seek to realize an ideal self of some particular kind, such as an ‘honest man’, a ‘decent sort’, a dare-devil, a statesman, an artist, a scientist, and so on. He may set himself an ideal of personal conduct and development.

There is another important way in which awareness of personality makes a difference to John Smith’s behaviour, namely in his reaction to other persons. This is a subject in which it is all too easy to fall into the error of oversimplification. John Smith is capable of genuine selfishness and genuine altruism. To some extent he controls his impulses for the sake of his enduring self, and, probably to a lesser extent, for the sake of other selves. Many of his acts, of course, are performed deliberately for the advancement of himself as a particular person among other persons; but some are, in exactly the same sense, performed for the advancement of some other person or persons, or for the sake of some group, or for the great, vaguely conceived group called society.

The Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ is not in principle an impossible, though it is in fact a very difficult, commandment. Human beings are unfortunately far more capable of prudent self-regard than of true altruism; but true altruism does occur. We are all at some time or other genuinely altruistic; although perhaps, on most occasions when we persuade ourselves that we are being altruistic, we are at heart being self-seekers.

In genuine altruism and genuine love a man takes the well-being of another person as an end in itself in exactly the same sense as he takes the well-being of his own person as an end. Any one who has loved, and has not been confused by false psychology, knows that this is possible. He wants the beloved to prosper, not merely as a means to his own prospering, but for the beloved’s sake. Of course he may also want himself to prosper, for instance, in respect of enjoying the society of the beloved; but that is another matter. Further, if a conflict arises between his self-love and his other-love, self-love may very well prove the more earnest impulse. But that, again, is another matter.

The difference between altruism and love may be roughly defined as follows. In love the motive is direct admiration or appreciation of a particular individual known to the lover. In altruism the motive springs from a generalization of a man’s particular experiences of other individuals as intrinsically worth while; and consists of the will to treat all human beings, known and unknown, as ends, not merely as means.

Every one of John Smith’s acts is a ‘self-centred’ act, in the sense that he is pleased to do it. In every case, but in a special sense, he does what he does because he wants to do it; and in so far as he succeeds he has the experience of pleasure. Thus he has pleasure (though probably also on other counts displeasure) in the successful achievement of a thoroughly selfish act; and pleasure also (though also on other counts displeasure) in an act of self-sacrifice for the sake of another person’s well-being. It is true that, just as, in the selfish mood, he finds more pleasure in selfish behaviour than in generous behaviour, so, in the generous mood he finds more pleasure in generosity than in selfishness. But in neither mood does he seek simply 6 the abstraction ‘pleasure for myself He seeks particular ends for their own sake. Personal fulfilment of himself is one of the ends which he seeks; he may also seek personal fulfilment of some one else. Always what he desires is that certain events should occur. Some of the events which he desires are simple, like sleeping and eating. Some are more complicated, like playing a game, or working for sheer love of his work. Some are even more complicated, like personal fulfilment for himself or for another, or like the prospering of his nation or of the world, or the triumph of a certain ideal, such as socialism or Christianity.

All a man’s capacities and activities are obviously included among ‘his capacities and activities’, and therefore their fulfilment constitutes part of his self-fulfilment. In the nature of the case he cannot conceivably seek any end which will not, by the very fact of his seeking it, be constituted part of his self-fulfilment. Even if, in disgust at his own egotism, he seeks to deny himself, self-denial becomes for him the way to self-fulfilment, in this sense. If we define self-fulfilment as the fulfilling of a man’s desires, then, since every one of his acts springs from some desire of his, and has as its aim some element in self-fulfilment (as defined), his whole conduct is a seeking of self-fulfilment. But this is only to say that, in each and all of his acts, what he seeks is the fulfilment of his desire, which is as much as to say that what he seeks is what he seeks. This is not very illuminating.

The only significant sense of the phrase ‘self-fulfilment’ is that in which ‘myself’ is contrasted with other selves, as one particular person among others. In this sense John Smith does not necessarily seek only self-fulfilment. He may seek the fulfilment of another for its own sake in exactly the same sense as he seeks the fulfilment of himself.

Through the operation of intelligent discrimination between mental activities and their objects, he comes to be aware of himself as a person, and apprehends the fulfilling of that person as good or desirable. A capacity to desire that end is awakened in him. In the same sense, and by the same means, he comes to be aware of others as persons, and apprehends the fulfilling of those persons as good or desirable. A capacity to desire that end is awakened in him.

It is true, of course, that his capacity to desire his own fulfilment is immensely stronger than his capacity for altruism. Even in the most generous and intense kind of love of one individual for another the motive is partly self-regarding. The lover needs and desires community with the beloved for his own well-being. But this makes no difference to the fact that he also seeks the well-being of the beloved for its own sake, and would perhaps bring himself actually to sacrifice the desired community, or even to sacrifice life itself, for that end. Both love and altruism ‘stand on their own feet’, so to speak. They are not in essence instruments of self-regard.

It is true that there is a very great deal of spurious altruism and false love, a great deal of altruistic activity the effective motive of which (often unwitting, unnoticed by the agent himself) is sheer self-pride, or the desire to gain respect or protection or ‘credit in heaven’, or simply the desire to gain the friendship of the beneficiary, or the ‘love’ of the ‘beloved’. It is true that even genuine altruism may be complicated by such motives; and indeed it generally is. But this makes no difference to the fact that John Smith can and does, up to a point, care for others for their own sakes, does, in however feeble a way, love his neighbour as himself.

It is true that, even in spontaneous love, he is probably in the first instance drawn toward the other by discovering in him or her some intense fulfilment for his own personal needs for companionship or beauty. But this makes no difference to the essential fact that in time he comes to discover or realize the other as a living person, a centre of vital and mental activity, just as he discovers himself; and that he now loves the other as he loves himself, and perhaps even (in rare cases) far better.

Self-fulfilment, then, may happen to be the overwhelmingly most powerful motive of John Smith’s life, but it is not, in any significant sense of the phrase ‘self-fulfilment’, the root of all his other motives. He is capable of realizing that self-fulfilment, or personal fulfilment, which is good in his own case, is equally good wheresoever it occurs.

This power of realizing other individuals as selves, and of willing their fulfilment, is one which lies upon the upper limit of human capacity. In our present half-developed mentality it is weak and inconstant. Only the best of us have enough imaginative insight into others, and enough of the power of controlling their self-regarding impulses, to be spontaneous lovers of our fellow men. But the rest of us are to some extent strengthened by the social approval of love and of altruism. Mere self-regard induces us to contract habits of generosity and of self-detachment which, if they depended only on spontaneous other-regard might well prove impossible to us.

The power of treating others as selves, which is among the distinctively human capacities, involves more than merely treating others as beings like oneself. One must also treat them as beings different from oneself, as persons having their own unique characters and capacities, not as mere replicas of oneself.

Clearly the power of imaginative insight into the peculiar capacities and peculiar needs of others is of very great social importance. It is the root of Christian love, which, if only we could practise it constantly and thoroughly, would be by far the most effective cement for the consolidation of society. The world which we desire to create is one in which individuals will be extremely diverse, yet indissolubly bound by mutual insight.

This activity of becoming delicately aware of a personality involves besides intelligence and imagination, something which we may call ‘sensibility’, and is at once a cause of and a product of the other two. By sensibility I mean a combination of two powers; namely in the first place sensitivity to slight variations of behaviour, to gestures, tones of voice, choice of words, and so on; and in the second place intelligent grasp of the problems which the person’s behaviour poses for one’s understanding. It involves, of course, interpretation of his behaviour in terms of one’s acquaintance with desires, moods, emotions of one’s own mind; but also it involves imaginative creation, in oneself, of his unique forms of those desires moods, emotions.

The capacity of sensibility to other persons does not necessarily lead to generous or altruistic conduct. Altruism is, indeed, its natural expression; but it may be inhibited by a very strong self-regarding disposition. Dramatists, novelists, and some psychologists, are particularly well developed in the ‘sense of personality’; but often they are also extremely self-regarding persons, and may be inclined to use their awareness of others chiefly for selfish ends. What is desirable, then, is, not merely awareness of other persons in this sense, but so vivid a realization of them that they seem ‘as real as oneself’, and their prospering as no less desirable than one’s own prospering.

Those who have this power of vivid realization of others in a high degree are likely incidentally to develop their own personalities very fully and subtly. Every person whom they learn to know is a source of enrichment to themselves. By virtue of the fruits of their sympathetic insight into others, and championship of others, they themselves are enlarged and deepened. They continually discover aspects of existence which, unaided, they could never have discovered; and they discover ways of behaviour appropriate to those aspects which otherwise would have been impossible to them.

C. THE PERSONAL IDEAL

TO BE ‘MORE developed’ in personality consists in having a more accurate and comprehensive experience of the universe, including one’s own nature, and also a power of behaving more appropriately to every kind of experienced situation. ‘Experience of the universe’ must, of course, be understood in the broadest sense. It must include every field of experience, the perceptual, the introspective, the personal, the social, the scientific, the artistic, the religious, and so on. The word ‘accurate’ implies an objective distinction between true and false. The word ‘appropriate’ implies an objective distinction between right and wrong, in some sense. For my part I am content to say that appropriate or right action consists always in action which takes into account, in just measure, all the demands imposed by the objective situation; and that these demands of the objective situation are found to be, in actual experience, the needs and capacities of human beings, or of any beings whatever that are capable of personality or of vital activity in any degree whatever.

In this statement many difficult philosophical problems are raised. For instance, how can we measure the relative value of capacities, and how the relative value of individuals? I shall not discuss these problems, important though they are. Here I will only point out that, difficult or impossible as it is to make judgments of the worth of capacities and of persons, we do in practice attempt to make them in our daily life. The principle which we try to use, though we seldom formulate it, might be very roughly defined thus. The capacity which is judged to be the more awakened is prized the more highly. The individual who is judged to be the more awakened, more developed in personality, is the more admired. The words ‘awakened’ and ‘personality’ have to be understood in terms of knowing, feeling and creative doing. The ideal for any person is not merely the satisfaction of such desires as he actually has, but the development of his personality in this sense, his advancement toward ever more penetrating and more comprehensive knowing or awareness, ever more appropriate feeling and willing, ever more creative doing. The phrase ‘creative doing’ calls for very careful interpretation. Here I am content to say that ‘creative doing’ is that kind of action which issues from ‘creative imagination’ in any sphere, in the sense mentioned in the preceding chapter.

This advancement in personality is not necessarily a steady acquiring of facts and a steady adjusting of the will. The mind can, of course, and often does, make this steady progress. It may also have periods of retrogression, when its power of apprehension seems to deteriorate, its feeling to coarsen, its will to disintegrate. But also it has, or may have, periods of ‘revelation’, so to speak, when large tracts of its experience, or the whole of its experience, suddenly or gradually acquire a new significance, when it ‘comprehends’ things in a new pattern, opens up new vistas of intellectual significance or new illuminations of feeling, and consequent new determinations of will. The stride from an almost animal infancy to a crudely human childhood, though perhaps not rapid, is more or less of this nature. Similar again is the passage from childhood to self-conscious adolescence. And farther advances, less spectacular but no less revolutionary, are possible at later stages of life. So far-reaching can they be that a man may sometimes look back on his self of the previous year and wonder how he could have been so obtuse, so spiritually torpid.

The word ‘spiritually’ is dangerous, but valuable none the less. I offer a rough definition of ‘spiritual’ as I shall use it in this book. Those activities are spiritual, for the purposes of this book, which lie at or beyond the highest reach of normal mental development. The word may be used either in an absolute sense, in which the standard is taken to be the highest reach of the human mind, or in a relative sense, in which the standard is the highest reach of the particular mind under consideration, whether John Smith’s or Tom Jones’s or a chimpanzee’s or an angel’s. It must not be taken to mean merely intellectual development, but the unitary development of knowing, feeling and willing. Thus for the mind normally below the level of self-consciousness, the tentative reach into self-consciousness and forethought is a spiritual activity. For the mind normally incapable of knowing others as selves the tentative reach from mere animal tenderness and protectiveness to genuine other-conscious love is a spiritual act. For the average human being egoistic prudence is too well established to deserve the adjective spiritual; but genuine altruism and love are upon, or in some cases perhaps beyond, the limit of his capacity. These are therefore spiritual activities, in that they involve a power of insight or sensibility to which he can only precariously attain.

There are, I believe, other activities, to be discussed later, which involve a still higher reach of development and are even more aptly to be called spiritual. These activities may occur along with the more normal activities of personal relationship or less particularized social conduct, or with normal aesthetic or intellectual pursuits; but they are not identical with any of them. For the present I will only say of them that personal relationships or social activities or the aesthetic or intellectual pursuits may seemingly come to reveal a new significance, a universal significance almost impossible to describe; and that this new significance may produce a subtle and far-reaching change in the person’s attitude and behaviour. This statement is, I admit, vague and emotive; but for the present it must stand as a mere token of a more careful discussion in the sequel.

D. SOCIETY AND THE WORLD-AIM

THE SUPREME GOAL of all our world-remaking or world-revolution must be the spiritual development of human personality. I cannot prove it, but to me it is self-evident that the ruling purpose of every individual life and of organized society should be the spiritual awakening of the human species, in the sense defined above. I cannot but regard myself and every other human being as essentially an instrument on which some theme of spiritual awakening should be played. I cannot but feel (I do not say believe) that in some sense, which certainly I myself do not at all clearly understand, ‘I’, an ephemeral human being, am under obligation to become as spiritually awakened as I can, so that before I die I may salute as fittingly as I may, in however brief a life, some facet of the beauty of the world, or perhaps it would be better to say some facet of the sheer intricate actuality of the world. I, the bare individual, am of no account. What matters is the theme or melody of knowing, feeling and creative action which may be created through me. All the bare, ephemeral individuals that ever were or will be are of no account. What matters is the music which each in his place and time produces, and which unfolds through the ages.

Whether this supreme aspect of the world-aim, this religious aspect, is to be advanced solely by the spiritual advancement of individuals, or whether also by the awakening of some kind of racial mind, it is impossible to know. At our early stage of the adventure it is of no practical importance. For us what is important is that one field in which spiritual awakening may occur is the individual’s awareness of his own social matrix.

I have said almost nothing about John Smith’s relation to society as a whole. It is now time to face this extremely confusing subject.

We must distinguish between the animal way of reacting to the social group and the distinctively human way. Unfortunately the distinctively human way of reacting to society is even more rare than the distinctively human way of reacting to another individual.

As an animal, John Smith is gregarious. Though at times he requires to be alone for the proper development of his distinctively human capacities, he does also, as man and as animal, require community. An animal reacts to the group as a certain complex stimulus in its environment. It no more conceives the group as a community of selves than it conceives its mate or itself as a self in the full sense of the word. A man’s purely animal reactions to the group may be summed as follows. In prolonged isolation from the group he is more or less distressed, and tends to put an end to his isolation by seeking the group. He behaves more or less as the other members of the group behave. He combines with the group to persecute those individuals who behave differently. He combines with the group to attack other groups. If he is strongly self-assertive, he leads the group, and suppresses rivals.

John Smith reacts to the various groups of which he is a member in this animal way. But even his ‘animal’ reactions to groups are different from, and more complex than, the reactions of sub-human animals. He may react to the group of selves much as the animal reacts to the group of perceived animal bodies. Thus he craves for his personal comfort not only the physical presence of the group but also mental community with the group, the sense that he has the group’s ‘moral support’ and approval. Mental or moral isolation from the group may be for him more painful than physical isolation. This kind of reaction is not purely animal, since it involves some degree of awareness of mental life; but it is not, I should say, genuinely human, since it does not involve full realization of others as selves, to be prized for their own sakes. It regards them, so to speak, as objects in the mental environment, not as themselves subjects, centres of vital and conscious activity, on the same footing as the agent himself, and deserving to be taken into consideration as ends in themselves. This realization, of course, can only come to a man in concrete personal relationships; but it gradually extends to afford him an abstract conception of society as a system of selves, mostly unknown to him, but none the less real.

The distinctively human apprehension of society as a system of selves may be faint or intense, fleeting or enduring, ineffective in controlling behaviour or a dominant influence. It may, moreover, apply only to a small group or a large group, or to the whole human race, or to the group composed of all personal beings whatever throughout the universe. It may, of course, fluctuate in its scope from day to day, hour to hour, according to the fluctuations of John Smith’s moods.

When the distinctively human social reaction is aroused by any group less than the human race, it is compatible with animal hostility toward ‘foreign’ groups; and, indeed, hostility is made all the more resolute and bitter by the distinctively human realization of one’s own group as a group of selves. But the more a foreign group is realized as a group of selves, the less is it possible to feel animal hostility toward it. No sooner does a man begin to realize a foreign group at all vividly as a group of selves, than he begins to transcend the limitations of his own group-loyalty. By ‘animal hostility’ I mean the disposition to attack foreign groups or foreign individuals simply because they are foreign. Animal hostility, or reflex hostility, is probably a very powerful motive in international strife. Genuine economic and political conflicts, no doubt, also play an important part, but it is animal hostility to a vaguely conceived ‘foreign pack’ which provides the emotional force needed for war. In very many individuals, moreover, this primitive vindictiveness is apparently greatly increased during childhood by the unconscious vindictiveness of parents and guardians. Thus the great majority of us, including, no doubt, many diplomats and foreign ministers, have an unacknowledged sadistic, and irrational leaning toward war. No wonder that the cause of peace makes little headway!

In any one with a strong and constant realization of the human race as a system of selves animal hostility toward foreigners as such is not likely to occur. The impulse has to find other outlets. It may, for instance, express itself against nationalists and militarists of one’s own and other nations; or against any of the countless and mighty forces which are opposed to the making of a more human world.

We might here discuss interminably the problem as to whether the world-society has any intrinsic worth over and above the worth of the individuals that make it up; whether all individuals exist for society, or society for its individuals. It is surely enough to say that, since society is nothing whatever but a system of individuals in physical and mental relation, and since on the other hand the individual’s mind is in-formed through and through by his social environment, the problem is meaningless. We must insist, however, that since society is not itself a self, a centre of mental activity, the spiritual awakening which we desire can only occur in individual minds. The sole justification of social organization is that it is a means to the fulfilling of the capacities of individuals. This implies, of course, their spiritual awakening. The utilitarian ideal of the greatest happiness of the greatest number still holds good if we may interpret ‘happiness’ to mean, not merely a pleasurable state of mind, but the free exercise of capacities, and especially of those capacities which are by definition spiritual. Society, then, should be a means for the spiritual awakening of individuals. If the world-community were itself a single self of very superior order, the subordination of individual fulfilment to the spiritual awakening of the communal self might be justified. But, though conceivably there might be such a communal self, there is no good reason whatever to suppose that anything of the sort actually exists to-day.

Though the true goal of social organization is not organization itself, but the fulfilment of individuals, it does not follow that all individuals in society deserve equal consideration simply because all are individuals. So far as political rights are concerned, all normal individuals should indeed be treated equally; for political organization is far too clumsy an instrument to adjust itself rightly to the differences of intrinsic worth between individuals. But individuals do differ in respect of their degree of mental and spiritual aliveness. We may be good democrats without pretending to believe that men are born equal, which plainly they are not.

VI. ART

A. ART AND CRAFTSMANSHIP

THE MAIN CONTENTION of this book is that we shall not save our civilization from disaster unless we boldly set ourselves a far higher and more comprehensive social ideal than has hitherto seemed practicable. We must use our new-found mechanical power consciously and strictly in service of the world-aim; and the world-aim must be conceived not merely as the maintenance of the world-population in health and affluence (though this is, of course, essential) but as the creation of a truly civilized world-community, in which every human being shall have full opportunity to develop whatever capacity he has for the distinctively human, the mentally and spiritually awakened, life. Less exalted social aims are no longer practicable. The present state of the world is tragic evidence of the way in which they defeat themselves. Through obsession with the aims of economic individualism and of nationalism and imperialism we are losing even the opportunity of world-wide prosperity. Further, nothing less than the fully conscious world-aim can any longer call forth the lasting devotion and courage which alone can save us.

What is needed, then, is loyalty to the distinctively human in our nature; and in order to rise to this loyalty we must form a clear idea of those activities which involve the distinctively human intelligence and imagination. So far I have tried to describe the human activities of personal relationship and social life. I must now give some account of the activity of art, which has, I believe, not only very great intrinsic worth, but also an extreme social and even racial importance.

Lest it should be misunderstood, this statement must be amplified at once. By saying that pure art (in whatever medium) is an activity of high intrinsic worth, I mean that in the discriminate appreciation of works of art, and more strikingly in their production, man does, in my view, actually attain a degree of mental vitality, a kind of percipience and of creativeness, which not only is impossible to the sub-human animal but also is in general absent from the affairs of ordinary human life. In artistic experience we learn, in a very real sense, to look at the world from a new angle, or with new eyes, and to enjoy it in an entirely new manner. We begin to delight in certain aspects of the objective world itself for their own sake, and not merely for their ordinary human usefulness. To experience these objective characters is itself enough to create in the awakening mind a delighted interest in them and a need for further experience of them. Sometimes, when confronted with a work of art which happens to ‘strike home’ upon our particular sensibility, we may have an experience comparable to that which occurs when, after climbing a mountain-side, we suddenly reach the crest and open up an entirely new view. But in the case of art what is revealed is not a new landscape but a new aspect of familiar things. These statements are shockingly vague, and may perhaps be unjustified. But the experience is compelling, and should not be ignored simply because contemporary science cannot give a satisfactory account of it. It is undeniable that in genuine aesthetic experience the mind does have this exhilerating sense of coming into the presence of new and excellent reality. The fact that the experience is indescribable suggests only that words, which have evolved in response to practical and theoretical needs, are not fitted to describe it.

By saying that art is of extreme social and racial importance I mean that, though for the artist art is, or should be, an end in itself, it has also an incalculable social utility, not on the practical plane, but as one of the chief instruments by which the world-aim, the awakening of human mentality may be advanced. Though artists are so prone to stand aloof from social organization and the social enterprise in general, their work is a truly civilizing influence in the community. Directly or indirectly it helps all men to be more human than they otherwise could be. Not only so, but the aesthetic interest may very well be actually one of those growing points of the human spirit which are searching like tendrils (perhaps vainly, perhaps triumphantly) for kinds of experience and aspects of objective reality which at present lie wholly beyond our reach.

One qualification should be made to the claim that artists perform a very important function in society. Like every other highly developed activity, art has its special danger. In this case the danger is that persons with no strong aesthetic powers will be tempted to devote themselves to the production of so-called works of art which are in fact worthless. Such persons are prone to cover their own emptiness under a cloak of mystery, and to insist that their art is so subtle as to be almost wholly incommunicable. They take their world of trivial fantasies to be the real world; the great vulgar world of common life they despise and shun. In fact, failing to become artists, they become ‘arty’ persons. It is well to remember that in art the possibility of self-deception and downright quackery is greater than in any other sphere.

Before trying to form a clear view of art, we may note that one of the primitive sources of artistic activity is the impulse to construct or experiment. This primitive impulse, which man shares with some other animals, especially with the apes, rises to distinctively human expression not only in art but in all practical intelligent making, such as handicraft, agriculture, engineering. It plays a part also in social organization and management, and again in the theoretical constructions of science and philosophy. The activity of ‘making whether for practical, aesthetic, or theoretical ends, is among the most humanly satisfying of all activities. Inevitably the practical is the commonest field for its exercise. Even in the ideal society practical construction, manipulation and organization for practical ends, must inevitably be the main outlet for the constructive impulse. On the other hand, even to-day it is in art, and in theoretical activity (though in very different manners) that constructivity finds its most satisfying and stimulating expression.

We may best approach the subject of art by trying to form a clear idea of the attitude of mind of the man who is earnestly employed in making something. In this way we shall trace art to its primitive, biological sources, and at the same time emphasize the simplest of its distinctively human attributes. Thus, when we pass from handicraft to pure art, we shall be prepared to regard all aesthetic activity as essentially a kind of ‘making’, the aim of which is to produce objects significant to the most awakened mentality. The aim of handicraft is primarily to make articles useful to man’s practical needs, but it develops an interest in the article itself and the material itself and the making itself. In pure art the practical need may have fallen away, and interest may centre wholly upon the object itself and its significance for the awakened mind.

Things (and thoughts too) may be well made or badly made. We do not always trouble to make a thing as well as possible, since very often a roughly made thing will serve. We do not need packing-cases to be as neat and strong as dining-room tables. But the good worker tries to make things as well as is needful, and indeed, a little better. For the making is itself a joy to him, and a badly made thing offends him. If he makes furniture, the joints must be as accurate as possible. If he makes clothes, the stitches must be as fine and regular as possible. Not only so, but the design of the furniture and the pattern of the clothes must be well thought out, and the best possible for the purpose. Those who are interested in making things desire them not only to be well made but to appear well made. They wish them also to appear the things they are, and not something else. If they are designing a house, they will not try to make it look like a church, or a castle, or a ship, or a bit of rock. To do so, they feel, would be as inept as to make a man look like a tree. Because they are interested in the make of things, they want the look of the thing to express as well as possible both the purpose that the thing serves and the workmanship that has gone to the making of it. If they are making or designing a chair, they want it both to be and to look comfortable, to be and look strong, to be and look handy. Also, they will not try to hide the way in which it is made. They will let the good cabinet-making show itself frankly. If they are making something of wood they will not make it look like stone or metal; though indeed they may find some tricks of stone-work or metalwork suitable for wood-work also.

Those who delight in making things (whether material things or thought patterns) become so interested in the making, and in the things, that they itch to go on putting more and more work into each thing that they make. Even when they have made the thing fulfil its practical purpose as well as they can, they must spend more time and energy on it, if they have any time and energy to spare. The only way to put more work into it is to decorate it. This may be done either by making it throughout with even better workmanship than is needed, and letting the appearance of the excellent work delight the eye; or by decorating it in the ordinary sense, adding forms and colours to it simply to make it more attractive. A chair or a chest, for instance, may be carved or inlaid. A building may be embellished with sculpture. Cloth may be patterned.

There is a danger that decoration may merely spoil the underlying form of the thing, so that it no longer seems beautifully fitted to its purpose. The true aim of decoration is to make the appearance of the thing delightful with an added beauty; but all too easily it may add not beauty but ugliness. Decoration may sometimes be intricate and rich; but always it should make the article appear to fulfil its purpose and its nature even better than it could seem to do without the decoration. There must be no unnecessary fuss about the decorative additions. Everything should be in its particular way relevant.

Here a critic may protest that decoration is, as a matter of fact, unnecessary, irrelevant to the use of the thing; and that therefore it is bound to seem so. This view is mistaken. Though decoration cannot make the thing be more practically useful than it is, it can make it more fully express for the observer its purpose and its nature. Decoration that is well controlled can call out the spirit of the thing, so to speak. It can make woodwork look more delightfully ‘wood-work’, and a chest more delightfully ‘a chest’ than would be possible without decoration. It can emphasize the essential form and structure of things.

But, in addition, decoration can do something else, so interesting and delightful that it may become an end in itself, and not merely a beauty added to useful things. In the first place, it can call up in our minds all sorts of activities and experiences, all sorts of joys and longings, that bear upon the main purpose of the thing decorated. Thus it may secretly, without our knowing how, put us into the right mood for using the thing. For instance, the decoration of a church should affect people in such a way that they will feel quiet and thoughtful, and inclined to worship; but the decoration of a picture-house should be more exciting. A book’s binding and general form should put one in the right mood for reading that particular book.

Certain prehistoric peoples seem to have been very prone to decorate their weapons, their tools, their crockery, the walls of their caves. Perhaps this was done with the idea of casting spells, and blessing the article and the use of it, so as to bring success. It may well have achieved its end; for it would tend to put the user into the right mood for performing the action confidently and skilfully. But perhaps the magical or religious purpose of these early artists was an afterthought. It may well be that when they had made a tool or a weapon, the sheer joy of making was not yet appeased, and so they were impelled to go on adding decoration in any way which seemed interesting and appropriate.

B. PURE ART, PLASTIC

DECORATION SOMETIMES PLAYS a small and sometimes a great part in the form of well-made practical things. But artists also make things which have no practical purpose at all, and are thus in a sense pure decoration. Most pictures and statues are of this kind. Yet to call them pure decoration is not correct, for in a sense they are very much more.

Musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, writers of imaginative prose, are all concerned with very highly skilled activities which undoubtedly afford a deep sense of vitality, of enhanced and triumphant aliveness. They are also concerned to produce in their various manners perceptual objects such as sonatas, pictures, poems, which, when conceived and contemplated rightly, will appear to have a special kind of excellence, generally called beauty.

Now the word ‘beauty’ is used in many different senses. Often it has no intelligible meaning at all, and serves merely to arouse a glow of emotion. But to avoid using it in speaking about art is difficult and pedantic. It is a valuable word, although it is grossly misused.

In this chapter I shall use the word ‘beauty’ to mean those attributes (of whatever kind) which a perceived object must have in order to arouse in the perceiving mind a genuine ‘aesthetic experience’. This experience I shall try to describe and explain so far as possible in scientific terms in the course of the chapter; but I suspect that there is something in the aesthetic experience which cannot as a matter of fact be fully accounted for by contemporary psychology. This is a field in which we must try, indeed, to be as scientifically severe as possible; but we must also beware lest we ignore facts which science cannot yet properly assimilate.

To say that a thing is beautiful (in the sense which I intend) is to say, not merely that it has a certain intrinsic character, but that its character is such as to affect the mind in a certain way. Many kinds of physical objects may happen to be beautiful in this sense. They may be classified as follows: (i) works of art, such as pictures, sonatas, poems; (2) natural objects which are not alive, such as landscapes; — (3) living organisms, especially human beings. In works of art, beauty is the result of the activity of an artist. In lifeless objects it is an accident. In living creatures it is an expression of the vitality of the creature, and consists in the appearance of the perfect and harmonious functioning of the creature’s powers, physical, mental, and perhaps spiritual.

Both in the living creature and in the work of art beauty consists very largely in the appearance of fine workmanship and of the harmonious fulfilment of powers. But it involves also much else, as I shall try to show.

In passing we may distinguish between three orders of beauty. There is a beauty which is very familiar and easily appreciated. There is also a beauty which involves somewhat more developed powers of appreciation, and affords an exhilarating, but not seriously disturbing, sense of discovery or adventure. Finally there is a beauty which demands the exercise of capacities upon the extreme limit of our development, and outrages our normal dispositions with a sense of discord or perversion or sheer ugliness. We may call the first ‘prettiness’, the second ‘normal beauty’, the third ‘difficult beauty’. All three have their places. But since the chief function of art is to ‘stretch the mind’, to waken it to keener percipience and appreciation, the last is the most important. Incidentally let us remind ourselves that in this sphere of ‘difficult beauty’ quackery finds its most convenient opportunity.

The truly creative artist, who is exploring and manifesting strange fields of difficult beauty, is brought to contempt by the host of imitators who gain notoriety by striving to affect the manner of the originator, so as to produce mere grotesques, shocking to the public.

I have described the three kinds of beauty in terms of their effect on the observer. They may also be described in terms of the nature of the beautiful object itself, or of the apparent nature of the beautiful object. The appearance of a living organism, say a human body is in part an expression of its nature. The more spiritual human nature tends to appear physically with features which can be appreciated only by the more spiritual observer. In a work of art the more developed capacities of the artist express themselves in forms which can be appreciated only by the more developed observer.

There are doubtless other activities no less vital than the creation and appreciation of pure art. But the depth and the mysteriousness of artistic experience has sometimes persuaded artists that in their work they rise to a superhuman, a godlike kind of aliveness. There is at least one sense in which this is obviously true, since the great artist does something which is far beyond the powers of the rest of us. And even we ourselves, in merely appreciating his works, may feel that we have awakened to a new order of being. For, if we are in a fit state to regard it rightly, a great work of art can actually produce in us new needs, can actually teach us highly developed mental activities which, without its help, never would have been possible to us.

What is a painter doing when he paints a picture? He is making a material thing, a painted canvas, which by its coloured pattern shall satisfy certain obscure needs of his and of any spectator who can look at it properly. It is the itch of these needs which makes him paint; and the actual working, by disclosing to him new qualities of beauty, produces in him new needs.

The artist is a maker, and like all true makers, he seeks to make something which shall fulfil its purpose as exactly as possible, and shall also display its own structure as satisfactorily as possible. But the purpose which his painted canvas is to fulfil is not a simple practical one like that of a chair or a house. It is an extremely complicated one, so complicated that the painter himself cannot say at all clearly what it is. What he can do is not to talk lucidly about his purpose, but to fulfil it, either very well or not so well.

One difference between making things for practical purposes and making works of pure art is that, in the first case, the need which is to be fulfilled, the purpose or plan which controls the whole activity, is generally clear at the outset, whereas in the second it is far from clear. I do not mean merely that it has to be discovered in detail during the activity. The artist may, indeed, make sketches before he begins the picture; and also, in the actual painting of the picture, he may keep on discovering new possibilities of beauty. This is often, but not always, the case. But what is more striking about art is this. When the artist has produced his picture, he still cannot say why he has done it, what needs precisely it is meant to fulfil. Even if, as may sometimes happen, he sees in a flash the whole form of his work before he begins to embody it, he does not know what in him produced the vision and what delights in it. His aesthetic needs are to be discovered only by analysing the finished work. And this analysis neither artist nor critic can, in our day, at all satisfactorily accomplish.

The artist’s activity, whether he is a painter or a musician or a writer, seems to include several different kinds of activities which must all be made to fit together. We may begin to realize the complexity of his aim by thinking of the complicated nature of his personality. A man has capacities for activities of many kinds. Not only has he an outfit of inborn capacities, but also the world acts upon him so as to develop these inborn powers into capacities for more subtle and diverse activities. At any time there are in him many simple and many more subtle capacities which his ordinary life does not properly exercise. These seek expression in his art.

Some of these unfulfilled capacities are capacities for fine perception. In the case of the painter they are chiefly capacities for extremely subtle seeing and touching. Besides powers of perception, he has probably certain unsatisfied, or incompletely satisfied, animal instincts, assertive, sexual, protective, gregarious, and so on. He has also capacities for understanding and appreciating human life and the universe. Further, owing to the particular ways in which his environment has affected him from infancy onwards, he has acquired many special sentiments for certain objects, persons, perceptual forms, ideas. Though the origins of these sentiments are mostly forgotten, and in some cases too painful to remember, they largely determine his taste. All these diverse powers seek fulfilment in his art.

The painter’s most obvious aim is to make a well-balanced pattern of coloured shapes. But what does this really mean? He seeks to make something which the eye will grasp as a single variegated thing, a whole of parts which fit well together in spite of, or because of, their differences. If he allows conflicts or discords in his pattern, they are there because the particular pattern needs them there.

But why must the work of art have unity? The answer can be put in two ways. First, when we have to grasp a complicated mass of characters, we do so more effectively, and with more zest, if we can apprehend them, not merely as a chaos, but as an ordered unity, in which each part has its function. Second, if as I believe, the function of a work of art is to express and clarify an obscure mental or spiritual activity of the artist, every part of it should co-operate with every other for this end. Nothing should hinder the expression.

The coloured shape that the painter makes has the power of suggesting to the mind other things than colour and seen shape. In the first place it obscurely suggests touched shapes, and also the movements which we should make if we were to trace out the shapes with hand and arm. The seen pattern calls up in us echoes of touch and movement; and these have to contribute to the picture in such a way that we shall experience it as a single whole, and not a mere collection of discordant things which have no purpose in the whole.

But the picture gives us much more than a pattern made up of material for sight and touch and movement. Each of its parts, and the whole pattern also, suggests to us, in an obscure but potent way, many subtle and far-reaching matters which have been connected with such sights and touches and movements in our past lives, matters which were originally experienced and dealt with by us in our many kinds of activities, both simple and complex. For instance, it may suggest characteristics of the physical world, such as those which belong to trees, clouds, human bodies, houses, machinery, or mental characteristics of human beings, such as their fearfulness and courage, their passions and their peace, their meanness and their aspiration. This vast shadowy web of suggested matters need not be so obvious as to force itself on our attention. Indeed, most of it is much too shadowy and remote to do so. In the shadowiness and elusiveness lies its power to influence us deeply without our knowing how we are influenced. It plays mysteriously upon our emotions as the wind on a harp.

The painter, then, seeks to make a pattern which shall have depth beyond depth of meaning for us. But the meaning is for the most part ‘unconscious’, in the sense that, though it may have a strong effect on us, we cannot clearly apprehend it and analyse it. The picture’s seen shape must in a sense hold within it not only touched shape and movement but, so to speak, vistas of the world. Almost as water might hold in solution salt, sugar, and all kinds of biting and fragrant substances, the visible shape of the picture holds for us the tang, the taste and fragrance, of many experiences; little pleasing experiences, grave experiences, terrible experiences, and so on, according to the needs of the whole pattern of experience which the artist has embodied.

Sometimes the painter frankly pictures actual objects like people and houses, and lets them work upon us without disguise. But even so, he does not simply reproduce’ them photographically. He suggests them, simplifies them, distorts them. According to his need of them, he emphasizes certain features of them, and neglects others.

Sometimes he may be very sparing in his representation of physical objects, using instead mere coloured shapes, which, though they are not pieced together as actual things, are none the less characters abstracted from actual things, and able therefore to give us the elusive significance, the fragrance, the tang of forgotten experiences of many kinds.

A painter’s main interest is always in the visible form of things rather than in their other characters. In extremely ‘abstract’ art, which avoids the use of natural objects entirely, it may seem that he cares for nothing but form. He becomes a kind of geometrician, though doubtless he would claim to be concerned with a different quality or aspect of form from that which interests the geometrician. He seeks to apprehend and delight in the ‘pure’ forms which are suggested by the confused forms of actual objects. He seeks pictorial symbols to enable him to grasp compendiously and enjoy intelligently the spatial relations of objects. Similarly, in music, a composer may be chiefly interested in the abstract relations of tones and rhythms.

This aesthetic delight in pure form seems to be a development of intellectual interest and constructivity. But it is an aesthetic development. It is a detached appreciation of form for its own sake. This is undoubtedly a very important factor in all art. But those who seek to limit the aesthetic activity to abstract form would deprive art of very much of its empire. Moreover, the power or significance which the abstract artist finds in certain forms and not in others is in part the product of his own past experience, of his particular expertness in apprehending forms. Further, it is in part almost certainly a significance which the particular forms have for his ‘unconscious mind’, a significance derived from associations in his long-forgotten or repressed cravings and interests. We should admit, however, that in perceptual form and its deep associations in our experience we may also find a genuinely spiritual significance which cannot yet be scientifically described.

Some artists, recognizing this, are solely concerned to express in strange ‘irrational’ shapes the dreamlike imagery that rises into consciousness from the depths of their minds. Such matter, they feel, is rich in spiritual, though unintelligible, meaning. Unfortunately that which rises from man’s ‘hidden depths’ is at least as likely to be mere gas, generated by repressed animal or infantile cravings, as to be the effervescence of true spiritual activity. While recognizing that these artists may, indeed, be the most important pioneers, one cannot but suspect that they, like so many other schools, have been misled into exaggerating one of the many functions of art at the expense of others no less important. Though the genuinely spiritual aesthetic activities may well entail, and emerge from, and transform, all manner of lower-order activities, they must also entail much else.

But let us not consider the differences between the many schools; let us try to discover what is common and essential in all schools.

A painter, then, makes a physical object which, though it is just painted canvas, may work deeply upon our nature, partly by inducing us to appreciate pure form, partly by opening up vistas of meanings, one behind the other, fading into remote obscurity. The work of art fulfils for us not actually, but in imagination, as dreams may do, all sorts of needs, of which the spectator and even the artist himself may have been hitherto unconscious. Indeed, he probably still remains unconscious of the sources of his satisfaction.

These unconscious needs of the mind must be responsible for much of the deep emotional effect of many works of art. We all have our unwitting cravings, connected, for instance with sex and self-regard, cravings which, owing to social condemnation, or the peculiar condition’s of our early life, we dare not admit even to ourselves. Such repressed cravings, which may date back to infancy, deeply affect our appreciation. The work of art, by its veiled symbolism, may tap these deep sources of mystery and passion.

But if this echoing of past experience were the only effect of a picture, painting would not be a very important activity. It would be merely assuaging, merely cathartic, purgative, releasing, instead of being, as it is, stimulating, awakening, spiritualizing. The vital, the life-giving fact about art is that it uses these echoes of the past to make something new and surprising, something enticing, challenging, and difficult to grasp. It shows us a quality of beauty which was formerly beyond our reach. Thus the artist in painting his picture, and the spectator in appreciating it, are all the while enriching their own nature, making themselves capable of ever finer, more delicate kinds of activity, making themselves more alive mentally, capable of more spiritual activity, more sensitive to the universe in which they live.

Art can, no doubt, give some satisfaction even to our animal nature; it gives very keen satisfaction to our every-day human nature; but its true function, I submit, is to awaken in us the tentative first stirrings of a nature which is, in a special sense, ‘super-human This is the really important office of all art. To create a work of art, or to appreciate it, is not merely to satisfy certain obscure needs that we possessed all along, but actually to learn new and more developed ways of experiencing, by which we may discover and appreciate ever more subtle characteristics of the universe. Simply by practice in observing works of art, and still more by practice in creating them, we learn to perceive delicacies of form and meaning which otherwise we should have missed. And so we produce in ourselves needs for this more subtle perceiving. Not only so, but by the same practice we may acquire new powers of appreciating all sorts of things besides perceptible shape. By becoming sensitive to the significance of art, we learn to detect and savour many subtle characteristics of human nature and of the world, to which we should otherwise have remained insensitive. Little by little, perhaps, we change our ideas as to what a human being should do with himself, and what kind of a world is desirable.

Here I may mention fittingly an extremely important characteristic of all art, and one which is sometimes thought to be the essence of the whole matter. One of the ways in which the artist (in any medium) discovers and imparts finer modes of perceiving and feeling is through his ‘style or manner of execution. I have already said that he does not seek merely to reproduce natural objects; he selects what is relevant to his artistic aim. We must note also that he adds, by means of his style, features which do not belong to the forms of objects in nature.

Working in some particular medium, such as paint, ink, stone, wood, or musical sound, he adds to his representations characters which belong to the medium itself and to his way of dealing with it, such as the marks of a brush, the fluent strokes of a pen, the firm strokes of a chisel. Not only so, but in his particular use of these instruments the spirit or style of his unique personality manages to express itself. We may say that he translates nature into the language of art, and into the unique idiom of that language which is determined by his unique personality, Whatever he conveys is expressed in his own hand-writing, so to speak. Thus not only does the picture, (or the statue, or music, or poem) display a technique which is intensely satisfying to the sheer constructive interest of the experienced observer, but also it refines and deepens his perception, and indeed his whole experience of life, though in a manner which would be extremely difficult, or perhaps impossible, to define in terms of contemporary psychology. For the artist’s technical style is the outcome of, and the significant symbol of, his most developed mental activities, or of his best ‘mental style’, so to speak. Thus the work of art, by means of the style or idiom in which it is executed, may to some extent impose upon a discerning observer the mentality and spirituality of the artist.

C. PURE ART OF OTHER KINDS

ALL THIS THAT is true of the plastic arts is true also of music and poetry and all imaginative writing. A piece of music is a pattern of sounds, which, besides being exquisitely fitted together to make something which the ear can grasp as a single variegated thing, gives us also a pattern of the fragrances of many past experiences, so that when we hear it we may be deeply stirred, though knowing not why. Indeed, it goes deeper than our past experience. Even new-born infants, that have had almost no experience at all, are emotionally affected by sounds. They are frightened by sudden loud noises, soothed by cooings, amused by chucklings. Music makes use of all this, and of much more in our nature. It uses our inborn ways of feeling about sounds, as well as all the significance that particular sounds have gained through past experience. It uses primeval sound-patterns of terror, anger, gentleness, merriment, love, sorrow, joy; many of which must have had much the same power over our apelike ancestors.

But it also does more than play upon the strings of the inborn emotional instrument in us. It echoes our own past experience of the world. It does not, of course, simply imitate noises that we have heard. It does not, if it is real music, give us sheer copies of the braying of donkeys and the twittering of birds. But it gives us hints, echoes, almost unrecognizable suggestions, and completely unrecognizable transformations, of past sound patterns, such as the voices of winds, thunder, rain, sea-breakers, rivulets. It translates the crude sounds of the world into the language, the technique, the convention, of music; just as painting translates the coloured shapes of the world into the language of pictorial art.

One of the main sources of its power over us lies in its transformed echoing of the human voice. Here, no doubt, it uses our inborn, primeval responses to voice tones. It uses primitive intonations of fear, anger, sexual hunger, and so on. But also it deals in the innumerable acquired intonations and inflexions of actual speech, though all transformed into music. Sometimes, namely in song, it makes use of actual words and their significance; but more often it is wordless, though rich in the transformed echoes of voices.

But all this subtle echoing which it achieves is done not merely so as to recapture past experience. It seeks to make something new for our surprised delight; something which, for its full appreciation, demands our keenest attention, something which will waken us into new and vivid mental activities, and present to us some quality of beauty which was formerly hidden from us.

Poetry, like music, is a pattern of sounds, and has to some extent the same kind of inarticulate power as pure music. But words are sounds which also direct our attention to things other than themselves. In fact they make us think of things; and the meanings of the words are used as well as their sheer musical power. Each word has meaning, and also each phrase and each sentence has meaning; and the whole poem has meaning. And all these meanings have their own emotional powers over us.

Poetry and all imaginative writing have therefore a scope and a kind of power which other arts have only to a much less extent. They have also perhaps a weakness. They cannot appeal quite so compellingly to the senses as do music, painting, sculpture. But on the other hand they can describe imaginatively every kind of experience, every experienced feature of the world. And so they can stir us very deeply and delicately, painting for the mind’s eye pictures more ample than actual pictures, and sounding in the mind’s ear music more articulate than actual music.

Some hold that the making of works of pure art is the most fulfilling of all human activities, and that it is the expression of our nature in its most awakened, most alive, most spiritual mode. Some hold, further, that in the finest art we come into closest touch with the most fundamental characteristics of the universe, that in some way art gives us the most important kind of truth about the nature of the universe. This seems preposterous only if we are determined to reject all ideas which cannot be substantiated by contemporary science. But since contemporary science, in spite of its triumphs, is far from omniscient, and has sometimes a deadening effect on the mind, we should be careful not to be too much impressed by it in the sphere of art. Whatever the truth of the matter, all those who have any genuine artistic experience will agree that art is at any rate one of the most vitalizing activities, and that it has a ‘spiritual’ aspect, in the sense defined in an earlier chapter.

There are two reasons for believing this. In the first place, artistic activity is actually experienced as giving a very deep fulfilment. In the second place, regarded objectively or scientifically, artistic activity can be shown to involve extremely complicated and subtle powers. Further, not only is it on both counts a highly developed activity, but also, even if it has no mystical bearing on the fundamental nature of the universe, art does bring us face to face with certain very subtle and significant features of it, for instance in the spheres of sense-perception and of human personality. Moreover, since it constantly brings together things that most of us would not be able to connect, and constantly fuses even opposed and jarring things into a unity, art may at least be thought of as symbolizing a hidden unity which, it may be, lies behind the apparent disorder of the experienced world.

This leads to yet another aspect of art, and one the importance of which goes far beyond the field of art itself. It is characteristic of all art, but is most clearly seen in literature, especially in the novel and the drama. For true aesthetic appreciation the mind must not only enter with full sympathy into the human strivings which are expressed in the work of art, but also must at the same time remain a completely detached observer. Some art critics put it that there is a correct ‘distance’ from which to regard the work of art, neither too ‘near’ nor too ‘far.’ This metaphor is misleading. Rather we have to be in two places at once. We have to enter deeply into every passion and every experience which is expressed, and yet we must also remain outside and aloof. We must vividly ‘live through’ the strivings of the individuals in the drama, and yet look down on them from a celestial height. We must desire the issue of the play or the novel to be determined not by human sympathy but by the exigences of art itself, even if these involve a tragic end.

The pure aesthetic delight in the form of the drama is much the same attitude as the abstract artist’s delight in perceived form. And, like this, it may, I should say with more plausibility than truth, be theoretically accounted for entirely in terms of primitive unconscious cravings. Perhaps, for instance, the scientific analysis of the delight in aesthetic tragedy would trace this ecstasy to repressed sadism and masochism. There may, indeed, be truth in this; but it cannot be accepted as the whole truth, since detachment is required no less in art which is not tragic than in the tragic itself. Indeed, this unity of sympathy and exalted detachment appears to be the essence of the aesthetic experience. It is at bottom the distinctively human and spiritual delight in the form of things for its own sake, not merely for utility in relation to ordinary human purposes. Springing, no doubt, in part from animal curiosity, this objectivity of interest develops into the world of aesthetic experience on the one hand, and into the world of scientific and philosophical experience on the other.

At a later stage I shall have much more to say on this subject of detachment. I shall submit that it is essential to the truly spiritual attitude toward life as a whole and toward every factor in it. Art, then, performs a very great office in schooling us to this attitude.

D. SUMMARY OF THE IMPORTANCE OF ART

FEW OF US have art as their main occupation in life. Very few have great artistic ability. But all have some power of making things beautifully and appreciating beautiful things. And all of us might have opportunity of using these powers. It is a mistake to suppose that art is only what is to be found in picture galleries and concert halls. Almost everything that we do may be done either in a beautiful way or in an ugly way. In our daily life, in our clothes and furniture and all our household goods, in our buildings and cars and ships, in our speech and gestures and the way we carry ourselves, there is an immense possibility of right making and wrong making, of ‘telling’ or significant appearance.

Moreover, it should be possible for every normal person to learn some genuine appreciation of works of pure art. And if all of us were really sensitive in this way, such experience would play a great part in controlling our lives, and making us conduct ourselves in a more seemly, a better, a more vital and awakened, style. And then the world would be a very different thing from this actual world.

Some hold that this kind of added excellence in life, the experience of beauty, is of little account in a world that is in serious disorder. Artists, they say, are merely fiddling while Rome burns. It may well be that there are crises in the career of mankind, when the most serious attention should be spent entirely on the task of remaking society. But if it is true that the supreme aim of mankind is to perceive and understand and appreciate its world and itself more truly, and to make human society more vital, then we cannot ever afford to neglect the aesthetic activity, since this is as a matter of fact one of the most vitalizing and mentally awakening of our activities, and one of the most powerful means of turning the world of to-day into a more human world.

I would summarize my whole account of art as follows. Art fulfils many functions. The diverse schools within the various arts are prone, each of them, to single out some one particular function to the exclusion of all the others. The aesthetic experience has very complex sources. In its richest form it embraces in a single spiritual experience all the many functions of art. These functions may be enumerated thus.

The artist apprehends perceptual form by means of simple but compendious symbols, visual, tactual, auditory, and so on. By the same means, and by the transmuted representations of natural objects, he affords expression to a vast tissue of obscure, and in some cases repressed, capacities of the mind. These capacities are roughly of three orders, the primitive, the normal human, and the spiritual, or those upon the upper limit of human development. The most important office of art is to elicit and express these highly developed or spiritual modes of apprehending the universe. Unfortunately it is not yet possible to describe these adequately in scientific terms. Consequently they tend to be either sentimentalized or denied. In fulfilling these various functions the artist finds intense satisfaction for his constructive impulse. His individual style or idiom is perhaps his chief means of conveying the spiritual significance of his work. Largely by means of his style, or by stylizing, he is able to impose a unity on many diverse and even conflicting elements. It is essential to the work of art that it should be a unified whole. Even if, regarded upon the normal human plane, it appears as confused and contradictory, yet this confusion must be purposeful. The artist must be seeking by means of this confusion to convey a single spiritual significance. Finally, the importance of art from the point of view of social advancement lies in the fact that it is one of the chief instruments for achieving that development of human sensibility and will which should be the goal of world-planning.

Let us close this chapter by considering the actual achievement of the great company of artists throughout the ages.

In every period there have been some individuals peculiarly gifted with the capacity for subtle perception and imaginative construction. Such persons have, of course, gained much from the culture into which they have been born, but they have also ventured, arduously and delightedly, into novel experiences of their own, into apprehensions of new aspects of the tangible, the visible, the audible, new aspects of the mind’s own life, with its whimsies and passions, new aspects also of the clash and harmony of minds, and of the whole experienced world. At all times these individuals have been, as it were, the herd’s creative eyes and ears and hands, and often also the herd’s most clearly self-conscious and other-conscious members. They have felt themselves to be different, alien, lonely. They have been treated now as seers, now as fools, now as mere craftsmen, now as demigods. They have never in any age known at all clearly what it was that they were doing. They explained themselves unconvincingly in terms of contemporary thought. But in their actual works they clarified and crowned, or surpassed, the culture of their time.

Always these men were torn between two opposed impulses. The first was the passion to single out from all irrelevances, and to praise fittingly, the essential form of things, and of man’s life, and of the world. The second was the craving to escape the harsh compulsion of facts by solacing themselves with dreams, with comforting, voluptuous, elegant fantasies; or by propitiating the gods with images and symbols, finely wrought and deeply significant. In all ages they have expressed both these impulses, often inextricably in the same work.

In art, in the essential aesthetic percipience, there has been no evolution; for in human capacity itself, within the little time since art began, there has been no evolution. The painters of the Stone Age were as true artists as Giotto or Cézanne. But their cultural background was simpler, and their technique less potent. The history of art reveals no progress, but a fugue of variations on one theme, namely the aesthetic aspect of existence. At the height of each culture, new and exquisite forms are created, works which the true artist of any age, if he is not blinded by the preconceptions of his own culture, should be able to salute as true art, and fittingly prize.

Though within the little span of history there is no evolution in the essential capacity of art, but only fluctuations and reorientations, there is, or might be, a progressive enrichment of the culture within which artists live, and from which they draw their inspiration. Thus there might be, there should be, a progressive enrichment of art itself.

Our own age is perhaps one of aesthetic reawakening. In all arts sincere experiments are being made. Some, it may be, are explorations of blind allies; some seem to be opening up new and far-reaching vistas. This aesthetic reawakening is possibly connected with the increasing tension of our life, and its increasing challenge to the awakening spirit. In this respect ours is not different from any other age of aesthetic recovery. But in one respect we do seem to have an advantage over all other ages, namely that we have access to the art of all other ages, and are, at our best, so far schooled in detachment as to be ready to appreciate and learn from the achievements of other ages. Thus we have the opportunity of enriching our own art with suggestions from all the past modes of art. Also, it may be hoped that we are becoming more conscious and discriminate in our conception of the nature of art, and of its office for the awakening spirit.

VII. MODERN SCIENCE

A. NEED FOR SCEPTICISM ABOUT SCIENCE

WE MUST NOW consider the part which natural science plays in the life of the modern world, and the part which it should play in the better world which we desire to make. I shall first briefly summarize the whole argument of this and the following chapter, in order to show as clearly as possible how the present subject bears upon the general theme of the book.

Scientific exploration is one of the distinctively human activities. No doubt it is a development of animal curiosity and animal experimentation; but, like art, which also has primitive roots, science is one of the growing points of the human spirit. It is therefore one of the activities which in a properly constituted world-society would be fostered for its own sake, and not merely because of its immense practical utility. In our day there is little danger that science will be neglected, but great danger that it will be prostituted; that as culture becomes more and more debased by industrialism, scientific interest and talent will be directed more and more exclusively toward practical and even purely commercial ends, less and less toward the awakening of human mentality. Already there are plentiful signs that science is becoming a deadening influence. Let us therefore form as clear an idea as possible both of its harmfulness and of its true value.

In what sense can science be a spiritualizing influence? In the first place it is in an obvious sense ‘enlightening’.

It gives information about the magnitude and intricacy of the universe, information which cannot but have a salutary effect on the more naïve kind of human self-complacency. Secondly, like art, but in a different sphere, it can waken the mind to new and more penetrating ways of experiencing. We may, for instance, be now in the course of learning a more accurate way of conceiving space and time. Man has only very recently begun to explore the world scientifically, but already the whole framework of physical knowledge has been altered, and possibly, if science develops unchecked, the coming centuries will bring profound changes, not merely in man’s scientific concepts, but even in his ‘common sense’ notions and intuitions of the physical world and of his own psychological nature. Finally, the spirit of scientific detachment, of respect for the facts, no matter what the conclusions to which they point, can be a truly spiritual discipline, and can for some minds open the way to a dispassionate yet fervent worship, not of a God conceived in man’s image, but of the inconceivable, and in a sense inhuman, reality which everywhere confronts the experiencing mind. I shall have more to say on this subject when I discuss religion.

The dangers of science are as formidable as its promise is beneficent. Ours is said to be a scientific age. We have far more knowledge of the scientific kind than earlier peoples ever had, and owing to the effects of science our civilization is already very different from all earlier civilizations. In every country that has come under the influence of science men and women live in ways that were formerly impossible. Not only do they travel in trains, motor-cars and aeroplanes, speak to one another across continents, and make use of innumerable products of factories and laboratories, but also, through the influence of science, they are coming to have a new view of the world. Not only are the scientists themselves deeply influenced, but also the minds of ordinary men and women are increasingly dominated by the secondhand scientific ideas which they pick up from newspapers, books, wireless and the cinema.

Every year the part that science plays in the world is greater than in the previous year. Scientists are becoming more and more important as a class; and some day they may possibly take charge of the government of the whole world, and control it far more effectively, for good or ill, than politicians can ever do.

Many persons are quite unable to conceive that there should be any weakness or danger whatever in such a triumphantly successful thing as science. I have already, in Chapter I, suggested that they are mistaken. I shall presently try to show in more detail that, though science is one of the most splendid, and life-giving, and worldbuilding, of all our activities, it is also harmful, not merely because we use its inventions to destroy one another or enslave one another, but also because it may confuse our minds.

Every age has its own peculiar mental climate, or fashion of thought, and ours is scientific. The prevailing climate of our time affects us all to some extent; but especially it affects those brilliant, but perhaps sometimes too confident persons, who are regarded by the man in the street as the advance guard of progress. It is very difficult for the ordinary more or less intelligent man, who is at pains to keep abreast of his period, to realize that the prevailing fashions may not be entirely sane. Unwittingly he is inclined to favour the fashionable set of arguments and beliefs and be suspicious of any less fashionable set. Though he may very well be far more open-minded in some respects than those who are definitely ‘behind the times’, yet his mind tends to be partly closed on one side. He is not quite open-minded enough, or clear-headed enough, or earnest enough in his thinking, to see the weak spots in fashionable ideas.

In our age all normal persons have at least some scientific interest. Like apes and monkeys, human beings are by nature inquisitive animals, and meddlesome or experimenting animals. They have also some capacity for understanding. If they are to attain complete wellbeing, they must exercise these capacities. To-day, the way in which they exercise them most easily is by means of science. Most of us, even those who have no special bent for scientific work, are deeply influenced by scientific ideals of thought.

This is entirely to the good, so long as it does not close our minds to experiences which science does not consider. Science is a highly developed activity which is favoured by the circumstances of our age, and it is well for us to take advantage of our opportunity and be scientists so far as we can. We cannot all be expert scientists, any more than we can all be creative artists or philosophers or gardeners or postmen. But just as we all need to be artists and philosophers in some degree, so we all need to be scientists. On the other hand, since science is to-day more fashionable than art or philosophy, there is more danger that we may become blindly scientific than that we may become blindly artistic or blindly philosophical.

B. AIMS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE

I SHALL NOW try to describe as clearly as I can the essential characteristics of modern natural science, in order that, in the following chapter, I may give a more detailed estimate of its value.

It may be well to begin by pointing out that the word science’ has two meanings. In one sense every kind of intellectual inquiry may be said to be ‘scientific’ if it is unprejudiced and thorough; every kind of knowledge may be said to be ‘science’ if it has not been falsified by the demands of emotional satisfaction. In this sense our age is suffering not from too much but from too little ‘science Only those who believe that intellectual activity is essentially deceptive can object to ‘science’ in this wider sense of the word.

But the ordinary meaning of ‘science’ in our day is more restricted. By ‘science’ we mean Modern Natural Science, a movement of thought which began to have importance in the Renaissance, and is now at its height. In this sense ‘science’ consists of the system of knowledge which modern scientists have constructed, and of the method, the process of inquiry, by which they make their discoveries.

The system of knowledge that is called science is always changing. It keeps on spreading over new fields, becoming more exact in detail and more systematic as a whole. Scientists are ever making new discoveries, establishing new theories, reorganizing old theories. Matters which formerly lay beyond the reach of scientific inquiry are one by one tackled and scientifically understood.

The method of inquiry, which is also called science, or more accurately ‘Scientific Method’, does not change. It is differently applied at different times and in different fields of research, but it remains essentially the same method always and everywhere. It varies only in being adapted now to one kind of scientific field, now to another, or in being now thoroughly and now inefficiently carried out. Of course, the observation of worms and jellyfish is a very different undertaking from the observation of stars, or again of human beings, or of electric currents. Each field of observation demands a special technique. Also, the technique of science to-day, in all its fields, is much more complicated and exact than the technique of the earliest true scientists. But in every age and every field of research the general method of science is identical. It is simply the method of observing events as carefully as possible and describing them as accurately and simply as possible, either by means of principles and formulae invented for the occasion, or preferably by principles and formulae already found useful on other occasions. This process of description often takes the form of explaining the perceived in terms of the hypothetical unperceived; but always scientific explanation is but an extended description, given in terms of concepts all of which are derived originally from our perception of the physical world.

When a scientist’s curiosity is aroused by some kind of event in the physical world, he sets about observing, and if possible experimenting, so as to gather facts that bear upon his problem. He uses his senses. He looks, listens, touches, smells, tastes. Whenever possible, he uses sight rather than any other sense, because sight gives him much more varied and detailed information than the other senses; and especially because by careful seeing, and comparison with standard visible scales, he can very accurately measure the size, shape and position of things. But though he uses chiefly sight, he is apt to think very largely also in terms of the experience of touch, and of the resistance of physical objects to his effort Often the scientist devises instruments, such as microscopes, telescopes, balances, measuring rods, clocks, which will give his senses additional experiences, and his intelligence further data to interpret. By one means or another he tries to approach the puzzling kind of event from as many directions as possible, and also to collect as many examples of it as seem necessary to show him just what the essential common characters in all examples really are.

When he has thus gathered a mass of facts, he tries to invent principles or laws or mathematical formulae which will describe them as accurately as possible and also as simply as possible. More precisely he sets out to describe, either in words or in mathematical symbols, principles which do actually characterize or hold good of, the observed facts.

Sometimes he makes use of principles with which he is already familiar. He says, ‘at bottom this is just a special case of such and such a well-known law’. Sometimes, however, the facts are so odd that he cannot connect them with any familiar principle. He must then either discover a new principle or re-state an old one more accurately, to fit the new facts.

If possible, he describes the facts in terms of the principles which apply over the widest field, and seem to underlie many of the special principles of particular fields. The principles which have actually proved most useful, and have seemed most fundamental, are those which are discovered in the study of moving objects, and their interactions with one another. Of course, the subtle laws of modern physics describe very queer objects and very queer movements, and indeed a very queer space and time. But in essence they are simply a development of common-sense experience of moving objects, seen and felt.

When the scientist thinks he has found the principle which is the essential principle in all his facts, he works out logically or mathematically some of its possible consequences in various directions, and tries to confirm his predictions by fresh observations and experiments. If he still finds no facts which are inconsistent with his principle, he accepts it as a ‘law of nature’. By this he means that, whether his description of his principle is given in English or French or Chinese or mathematical symbols, and whether his measurements are made in inches or centimetres, miles or kilometres, pounds or kilograms, degrees Fahrenheit or degrees Centigrade, it is in fact a true description of the actual order or pattern in which events occur.

If some day he comes upon a kind of event which seems to violate his law, either he has to show that this kind of event is not, after all, really relevant to his law; or if it is relevant, he has to see the underlying principle of his law more precisely, and re-state it in such a way as to cover the new kind of event.

Let us consider one outstanding example. Early scientists discovered the principle which holds good of falling bodies near the earth. They described mathematically the rate at which falling bodies increase their speed every second. Newton discovered that the same principle, seen more broadly and accurately, was true of the movements of the planets. In our age, however, certain facts cropped up which suggested that the law of gravity had not, after all, been quite truly formulated. For instance, the planet Mercury did not behave precisely as was expected. Einstein and others, using a mathematical technique which had not hitherto served any practical purpose, described the principle behind the old law much more accurately, so that it was seen to include under its rule not only the awkward facts, but also vast new fields.

It is extremely important to realize that the scientist works by the method of abstraction. All understanding consists in discovering some kind of order in a mass of facts which appear at first chaotic. If we are looking for order, we have first to distinguish different characters within the chaos, and to observe the relations which these characters have to one another. Then we attend specially to those characters or classes of characters which either happen to be of interest to us, or seem to be the essential characters for the understanding of the whole matter. This is the essence of the method of abstraction. It consists of drawing something away from something else which is left behind. When we abstract we attend to and think about certain characters within a complex mass of characters, and we ignore the rest.

The pioneers of modern science were faced with the blend of confusion and order which we all meet in our ordinary perception of the physical world. They seized upon such tissues of order as were given in perception, and sought to extend them by relevant observations, experiments, and generalizations. Inevitably they attended to the more promising, more readily intelligible aspects of the physical world, and ignored the rest. Desiring to understand precisely and unambiguously, they sought wherever possible to gather data which could be measured, and they developed a mathematical technique for expressing the results of their measurements in comprehensive formulae. Little by little this process led them to concentrate chiefly upon movements, great and small, and to work out those very general dynamical concepts, such as energy, resistance, mass, momentum, which have played so great a part in physical science up to our own day. Though the advancement of science has proceeded by the inclusion of ever wider fields within the scope of research, it has also, in respect of its explanatory principles, involved an ever more rigorous exclusion of those aspects of the perceived world which were not amenable to mechanical and mathematical interpretation. This process gave us in the nineteenth century the conception of a universe composed of microscopic ‘billiard balls’ charged with electro-magnetic energy, but has since advanced even farther in abstraction. To-day the physicist has abandoned even this much of concrete perceived reality, and claims only to describe the mathematical relations of ‘somethings’ the qualitative nature of which lies entirely beyond his scope.

Now the mathematical aspect of the objective world really is an aspect of it, and a very significant aspect of it. But qualitatively it is a very meagre aspect. Mathematics is extremely abstract. A physics which has excluded all but the mathematics of physical reality is in no position to afford the basic principles for explaining all things in heaven and earth. Let us spend a few moments in considering what the activity of mathematics really is.

C. THE NATURE OF MATHEMATICS

MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHERS ARE far from agreeing about the nature of mathematics. Two important schools at least would reject the following account of the matter. But for what it is worth I shall sketch that view which accords with my whole picture of man-in-the-universe.

The mathematician, then, like the rest of us, is faced by the huge mass of characters which make up the world, so far as it is presented to man. But, as a mathematician, he is interested most in one great set of these characters, one aspect of the world, namely the mathematical aspect, or the ways in which things, or characteristics of any sort, can be counted or computed.

What, at bottom, is counting? What are the ‘numbers’ by means of which we count? Ages ago men noticed that there was a certain identical character in all groups of the kind which we now call ‘couples Whether the parts of the couple are hands, or stones, or stars, or men, or days, or pains, or thoughts, whether the parts are of the same kind or of different kinds (say a man and a woman, or a man and a day), always the couple has a certain character, in virtue of which it differs from all single things and triplets. And triplets themselves have all a certain character in virtue of which they differ from all quadruplets, and so on.

Men noticed also that if a ‘single thing’ was added to another ‘single thing’, there was a ‘couple’; and if another thing was added to the ‘couple’, there was a ‘triplet’, and so on. Not only did they see that this always did happen whenever they added anything to a group, but also they saw that it must be so, because of the inherent nature of singles and couples, and so on; because a couple actually was one less than a triplet, and so on. And because of this inherent nature of groups, they were able to work out many very complicated mathematical laws.

They also invented such things as ‘imaginary numbers’, which are not characters of any possible groups. Thus V — 2 is an imaginary number, since no number whatever multiplied by itself can give a minus quantity. Imaginary numbers seem at first to make nonsense of the view that mathematics deals only with the actual characters of groups. But there is, perhaps, a key to such puzzles. The three marks V — 2 do not really mean any one character at all. They mean three distinct things, namely ‘two’ (the character of any couple whatever), ‘minus’ (the operation of substracting or taking away), and ‘square root’ (the operation of finding what number multiplied by itself will give a required number). The two marks V4 mean a real number, but the three marks V — 2 do not. All the same they can be used in the game of mathematics as though they did in combination mean a real number. Similarly with the very many other paradoxical mathematical symbols, and formulae; if they are taken as wholes, they cannot mean any real character or possible operation, yet they may be analysed into elements each of which does mean a real character or a possible operation.

We may significantly compare mathematics with a highly artificial game such as chess. No doubt chess was originally derived from the actual nature of contemporary warfare. Its pieces were stylized and simplified warriors, its rules and moves stylized and simplified martial operations. One striking difference there is between chess and mathematics. Games of chess cannot be used for finding out anything important about the conduct of modern war; games of mathematics can be used for finding out much of importance for the control of the physical world. This difference would seem to be due to the fact that the numerability of things remains always the same, but the operations of war have changed. Thus, though mathematics has indeed been very much ‘stylized’, and has proliferated into many forms and conventions which seem to have no application to the physical world, it has also produced a number of systems which do as a matter of fact continue to have such application.

So long as mathematics deals with distinct individuals that can be numbered, it can operate without paradox. But when it attempts to deal with continuities, such as time or space, which seem not to be composed of atomic parts, mathematics becomes very paradoxical. It has to apply principles derived from one kind of objective experience (namely experience of distinct individuals) to another kind of objective experience (namely experience of continuous quantity), and this it cannot do without paradox. It has to pretend that continuity is composed of an infinite number of distinct and atomic units; and to deal with this infinity it has to invent many paradoxical concepts. But always, however metaphorical his thought, the mathematician thinks in terms of numerability such as he originally experienced in contrasting any group with a greater or smaller group.

Calculating by means of the laws of number, scientists are able to predict confidently what would happen in all sorts of situations in which number is concerned. They are able to deal mathematically not only with separate ‘things’ but (though often paradoxically) with continuous quantities of any of the measurable characteristics that make up the perceived universe, such as length in space, duration in time, and all the characters that can be measured by means of length and duration, such as weight and pressure.

Mathematicians find their mathematical activity intensely satisfying, since it fulfils so well their capacity for grasping order or system. They find in the intricacy and exactness of the science of pure number, or of the ‘numerability’ of things, a severe beauty, like the beauty of certain kinds of music. Here mathematics seems to be related to the aesthetic delight in form. Partly through the sheer fascination of mathematics, partly through the fact that it applies to hosts of characteristics of the physical world, and is extremely useful for the control of physical events, men have sometimes been inclined to think that the mathematical aspect of the world was in some way the most real and fundamental thing about it, and that everything else could be explained by mathematics. Thus the philosopher Pythagoras said that everything was number.

Such a view shows very clearly the danger of all abstraction, namely that in fixing attention on one kind of character in the world, we may come to think that nothing else matters, or that nothing else is real, or that, at any rate, everything can be explained by the principles or laws of one particular study, whether of mathematics, or of physics, or of psychology. But it should be obvious that, for instance, the world cannot simply consist of number, since, for there to be number, there must be ‘somethings’ other than number, to be numbered or numerous. Number implies numerous or numerable instances of some quality or other.

But though the method of abstraction has its danger, it is very necessary. Indeed, all our intellectual knowledge of the world has been reached in this way, namely by attending to, and studying, certain characters and relations of character, and ignoring others. Human minds cannot attend to everything at once. So long as we remember that we are abstracting, and do not imagine that what we are studying is all that matters, no harm is done. Of course, if we want to know our world as truly as possible, we must try to see the relations of all our different kinds of abstract knowledge, so as to form a system of knowledge which takes everything into account. This is the task of philosophy.

D. PHYSICS, BIOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY

SINCE THE DAYS when men first dared to doubt the accepted theories about physical nature, scientists have built up, generation by generation, a number of great sciences, great systems of knowledge about different kinds of events and facts. As time passes, these great systems become more detailed and accurate and also more closely connected with one another. The ideal of the scientists is to unite the many sciences together in one all-embracing science. But though they have made much progress in this enterprise, they have still very far to go. In our day there are many distinct sciences. Some are very closely connected in their fundamental nature, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy; some are much less thoroughly connected, such as physics and biology, physics and psychology.

Physics is concerned with all the seemingly most fundamental characteristics of the physical universe, such as gravity and electro-magnetism, every kind of movement, and even space and time themselves. Whether or not these characters really are fundamental, or are merely aspects of something much deeper and much more all-embracing, they certainly are the most fundamental characters from the scientific point of view. Astronomy deals with the physical laws of the solar system, the stars, the nebulae, the galaxies, and with the physical structure of the cosmos as a whole. Chemistry studies the different kinds of matter, and so far as possible reduces their differences to fundamental physical characters. Geology studies the structure and history of the earth, seeking to interpret its data by means of physics. It also takes note of the fossilized remains of living things, thereby connecting itself with biology.

Biology includes many sciences, such as physiology and zoology, all of which are concerned with living things, their general nature, their varieties, their structure and behaviour. In some respects biology has many connexions with chemistry and physics. Very many events in living bodies can be described by chemical laws. But whether all such events will ever be so described is at present uncertain. Some biologists insist that in the behaviour of a living thing as a whole, and in its form and origin, there is a purposefulness which cannot conceivably be described in terms of principles which are purely mechanical. Others are equally confident that all such ‘teleology’ is illusory.

Psychology is concerned with the ways in which living things, and especially human beings, behave consciously; or with the description of their awareness and their striving. The kind of events which psychology studies cannot conceivably be completely described purely by the physical laws of moving bodies. Thinkings and desirings, admirations and hopes, are a different sort of event from fallings, explosions and electric currents.

If we consider the great company of sciences, we see that they fall into three classes, namely: those which deal with ‘dead matter and describe its behaviour by purely mechanical laws; those which deal with living things, regarded externally, but regarded sometimes as purposive, and not as purely mechanical; and those which study and make use of man’s experience of his own mental life, of his knowing and feeling and striving.

If the sciences are to be united as one great science, they must be shown to be all based on the same fundamental principles, or concepts, or laws. Either physics must swallow biology and psychology, or psychology must swallow biology and physics; or we must work out some science more fundamental and more comprehensive than either physics or psychology.

If physics is to triumph, the seemingly purposive behaviour of living things must be explained away in terms of physical mechanism.

The principle of mechanism may be roughly defined as that according to which, given event A, then event B will follow, whatever its consequences. This is contrasted with the principle of teleology, or purposiveness, according to which, given event A, there will follow a train of events conducive to an end Z. Teleology does not necessarily include any reference to consciousness. Mechanism is not necessarily confined to the physical. Mental processes, for instance, might be purely mechanical.

In the fields of physical science mechanism has proved an extremely useful principle, teleology has been abandoned. Indeed, so accustomed have we become to the idea of mechanism that we seem to discover in it a logical necessity which we do not find in teleology. But this feeling of necessity in the connexion of physical cause and effect is illusory. All the laws of physics are based upon inductive observation. There is no demonstrable necessity in virtue of which an unsupported stone must fall; but we are so used to observing such events, that we confidently expect matters to turn out in the familiar manner.

Though mechanism has, till recently, been unquestioned in physics, and is still making headway in the biological sciences, psychology is as yet very far from being reduced to physical mechanism. Of course, as was noted in an earlier chapter, it might turn out that all mental events were related to and dependent upon, certain physical events, say in the brain; and therefore that consciousness itself was entirely ineffective. This is far from being proved; but even if it were, our mental life itself would not be describable in actual physical terms.

If psychology is to triumph over the other sciences, both biology and physics must be shown to be really dealing with the physical manifestations of striving minds. In the case of physics, the minds would have to be the minds of electrons and protons, or of whatever are the simplest physical things. All physical events, including volcanic eruptions and the movements of stars, would be the result of the massed strivings of innumerable ‘minute’ minds; save where they could be shown to be controlled by ‘larger’ minds, such as our own, or, say, the minds of galaxies or stars, or the mind of the cosmos as a whole. But even if this were shown to be the case, the physical aspects of minds would not be describable in psychological terms.

At present psychology is obviously incapable of swallowing physics, and to the clear thinker physics seems quite as incapable of swallowing psychology. Each remains obstinately outside the other.

But physics is a greedy science, and having already almost succeeded in swallowing chemistry, it looks hungrily toward biology, and toward psychology also. More accurately speaking, scientists have generally been more inclined to explain life and mind in terms of physical mechanism than to explain physics as the psychology of atoms or electrons, or of God’s imagination.

It is easy to see how scientists have come to have so strong a faith in physical mechanism. The pioneers of modern science were not only inquisitive and intelligent, but apt with their hands. They enjoyed devising experiments and instruments. They did not feel bored when they were manipulating weights, pulleys, lenses, scalpels. Though many of them were interested in theology and philosophy, all of them were gifted also with a natural interest in tangible and visible things. Consequently they were favourably disposed toward explanations in terms of the tangible and the visible.

It so happened that there were vast fields of exploration waiting to be opened up by people who were inclined to make practical experiments, and intelligent and patient enough to observe the results accurately. The experimenters met with surprising success. They found themselves able to make matters look intelligible and precise which had seemed erratic and more or less miraculous.

As time passed, and the sciences became more and more detailed, and the idea of mechanism became more and more useful, many scientists began to feel that in describing the mechanical principles of things they were giving a complete account of the nature of things, and a complete explanation of their behaviour. It came to seem unnecessary and fantastic to explain events in terms of God’s will, or human purpose, or the striving of physical things themselves. Moreover, if you thought of things behaving mechanically and in definite ways according to their nature, you could make them serve your purposes. You could make steam engines and electric motors, you could perform surgical operations, and so on. The other idea was too vague to be of any use. Thus as our modern machine-served world developed, men became ever more impressed by mechanical explanations; ever more convinced that, to explain any mysterious set of facts, it was only necessary to show their relation to some familiar mechanical system; and that, if no such relation could be found, the mysterious facts must be unimportant or even unreal.

Thus scientists, and the ever-increasing host of people who were deeply impressed by science, came to distinguish between the characters which, they said, really belonged to things, and those which merely seemed to belong to things, but were in fact mere figments of our minds. The real characters were those which were supposed to be mechanically effective, such as shape, size, movement, hardness. The unreal ones were those which seemed to play no direct part in the mechanical system of the world. These included the ‘secondary qualities’ (such as colour and sound), the beauty and ugliness of natural objects and works of art, the pleasantness and unpleasantness of all our activities, the rightness of certain human actions and the wrongness of others. The mysterious ‘inner life’ of a mind, with all its desirings and fearings, its passions, its acts of will, its insight into beauty and rightness and rationality, were held to be somehow caused in us by underlying mechanical events. Thus if a man believed that he moved his limbs by ‘an act of will’, he was mistaken. If he believed that they moved because he desired them to move in defence of his beloved, or to make money, or to go to church, he was mistaken. Their movement was wholly due to intricate mechanical causes whose nature was physical.

The study of mental events was allowed to belong to psychology. But it was assumed that if the very backward science of psychology could do its work properly, it would somehow show that all its laws were at bottom physiological laws. And these, it was thought, must be at bottom merely special cases of the universal mechanical laws of physics.

Unfortunately psychology remained backward. The study of the ‘inner life’ of a mind was very much more difficult than the study of moving objects, chemical combinations, and so on. Even to-day, in spite of the widespread interest in psychology, and the really important discoveries that have been made, our knowledge of ourselves and of the nature of mind is extremely vague and uncertain. The Newton of psychology has yet to be born.

It is true that psychology has at last made a beginning. It can roughly classify the kinds of mental actions, and it can show that some are much simpler than others.

It can also describe some of the differences between a healthy mind and an unhealthy mind, and tell us, up to a point, what is necessary for mental health. In co-operation with physiology, it can tell us a good deal about the ways in which mental life is influenced by bodily life, and the reverse. But how the one is related to the other, and what it is that experiences, and what the real natures of the most complicated and highly developed mental activities are, it cannot say. All it can do is to try to explain the more complicated in terms of the simpler, and these again in terms of the simpler still. Some psychologists expect to explain everything in terms of physiology; and physiology they would hand over to chemistry and physics. But this kind of explanation has to ignore, as it descends from stage to stage, everything which is distinctive of the higher stage.

At present no one knows the true solution of the great problem of the relation of the physical, the biological and psychological sciences. It is something, at any rate, to see clearly that there is a problem, and to be on our guard against false solutions of it.

E. DETERMINACY AND FREEDOM

SOME SCIENTISTS HAVE suggested that, when the simple physical units, say atoms or electrons, come together into certain very complicated patterns or organizations, an organism thus formed generates new powers, of which its parts, as loose units, had no trace whatever. Thus, they say, arises the unconscious purposefulness of simple living organisms, and on a still higher plane the consciousness of the more developed organisms, such as ourselves. But how a mere pattern can have such miraculous powers they cannot explain.

Others suppose that even in the simple physical units there are, as a matter of fact, latent capacities which, when the units are not organized together as living things, cannot manifest themselves. Therefore they cannot be detected by our purely physical experiments. Similarly, these thinkers would say, human beings brought up in isolation from one another would never manifest the complex social ways of behaviour which we know in the actual world of men in society; but nevertheless there would be contained in them all the necessary capacities for such behaviour. It is insisted that if we could discover the whole nature of the seemingly merely physical units, we should be able to predict the behaviour of any kind of system made up of such units, even of living organisms.

Others, again, are convinced that modern physics has discovered, even in the known physical behaviour of the physical units themselves, a fundamental arbitrariness. They claim, not merely that we are too ignorant to be able to predict the movements of a particular electron, but that its movements are absolutely unsystematic, unrelated to other facts, and therefore in their own nature unpredictable.

If this view is correct, all ordinary physical laws of the behaviour of matter in bulk describe, not how matter must of necessity behave, but how the myriad arbitrary actions of the minute units will probably turn out in the long run. They might conceivably turn out very differently. A kettle of water on the fire might freeze instead of boiling. But there is a very great probability that on any particular occasion it will boil and not freeze. But what is probability? Is it anything more than our own irrational tendency to expect things to behave as they have formerly behaved? Or again is it an objective fact which determines our expectation, namely an actual though obscure connexion between objective events of certain types?

Some scientists are confident that this view that the physical is indeterminate is confused and false. Those who hold it, they say, mistake the limitation and uncertainty of our scientific method for an uncertainty or arbitrariness in the actual physical world. They point out that though we may not be able to predict when an electron will jump, or where precisely it is at a given moment, we know that, sooner or later, jump it will, and that at a given moment it will be, at any rate in some sense, somewhere within a very narrow field. Had we a much more intimate knowledge of electrons, we should see (so they tell us) that the seemingly arbitrary behaviour of each electron is the exact expression of its nature in its particular environment.

To many of us this view somehow ‘tastes’ more credible than the other. Perhaps in the last analysis the two accounts will turn out to be merely different ways of saying the same thing. We cannot help noting, however, that there may be kinds of facts about electrons and their environments which are not physical facts at all. Conceivably, for instance, the electron’s mysterious jumps are partly the result of its own mental nature, or of the influence exerted on it by hidden mental characters of the universe as a whole. Even if this were the case, however, its jumps might quite well turn out to be systematic, or ‘determinate’, and not arbitrary.

Since the dispute between the determinists and the indeterminists in physics seems to have some relation to the ‘free will’ controversy, it is bound to be influenced by powerful though often unwitting emotional dispositions. Many people are outraged by the thought that their actions are determinate expressions of a personality which is itself the determinate outcome of a vast system of causes. They prefer to think of themselves as unique, uncaused, and gifted with the power of arbitrary choice. Any physical theory which seems to lend support to such a view is therefore agreeable to them. For similar reasons those who are strongly moral or moralistic welcome every theory which is opposed to the advance of determinism in science. If moral choice is determined, they say, all that seemed most precious in human nature is illusory.

Now I myself am not at all distressed by the possibility that my acts are not arbitrary but determinate, and in theory predictable. I am content that my choice should be in every case an expression of the interaction of my nature and the environment; and that my nature itself should be an expression of an infinite series of past ancestral natures and past environments. I recognize that when, in youth, I was outraged by this possibility, I was moved only by a rather puerile self-pride; and that in my former insistence on ‘free moral choice’ I was actuated largely by an unlovely desire to blame and punish others and myself. Nor does the belief in determinism make me any less capable of ‘moral effort’. For determinism does not imply that human will is ineffective but only that it is a determinate expression of past causes. Within limits I am free to do as I will. My choice is effective; but how I shall choose is an expression of my extant nature, and possibly this is determinate. I did not arbitrarily make myself. The insistence on arbitrary free will seems after all rather smug, and even impious. One of the most salutary effects of science, I should say, has been this gradual schooling of our minds to overcome the self-complacent prejudice in favour of arbitrary choice. In this respect at least science has, I believe, had a spiritualizing effect. In giving man a sense of his indissoluble unity with the rest of the cosmos; and persuading him to be glad of it, the influence of science has been almost literally religious, binding, harmonizing.

But there is another side to the matter. Determinism in the sphere of physics, and in the sphere of psychology, rests entirely on observation and induction. There is no reason whatever why the universe must be systematic through and through. Up to a point it has so far revealed itself as systematic, but it may break all our scientific laws to-morrow. The sun may assume the features of an old lady, and go pirouetting through the sky, winking and smiling. Men may sprout wings. The starry heaven may roll away and reveal Jehovah among his angels. All things are possible. But all things are not equally desirable. And for my part, at any rate, I find the determinate but mightily pregnant universe which the sciences are beginning tentatively to explore more desirable than an indeterminate one.

There is yet another point. Determinism does not deny spontaneity. Even in the sphere of physics, and even if the truth is that the movements of electrons are determinate, yet their movements are in part spontaneous. If all electrons were merely passive, the whole universe would be passive, which clearly it is not. Each electron makes its own spontaneous contribution to the activity of the cosmos, though it is also influenced by others. Even if its actions are determinate, they are its actions, free expressions of its nature. A man is in the same case. His choice is absolutely spontaneous. In every choice he creatively contributes to the universe. What more of freedom is desirable? What matter if, within limits, we can work out inductive laws by which to predict how he probably will choose? Our laws do not constrain him. They are laws describing only how he and others are, in fact, observed to behave. Thus did he behave in the past: probably he will behave thus in the future. Our predictions are true of him only so long as he remains what he is. If by some sudden spiritual leap he rises to a higher nature and breaks some of our laws, we must make fresh observations and seek to discover more comprehensive laws. If even that creative leap itself is determinate, an expression of hitherto undiscoverable powers in him, of powers focused in him by age-long history and evolution, what matter? So long as my striving is allowed to be an actual effective influence in the world, what matter though it in turn is a product of the past world and the past age? There is no reason whatever to doubt that when we are aware of striving we are aware of exerting our own dynamic nature, and of taking effect on our environment.

VIII. THE VALUE AND DANGER OF MODERN SCIENCE

A. SCIENCE AND THE PUBLIC

THE RESULT OF the relative strength of physics and weakness of psychology is that the mental atmosphere or fashion of thought of scientists, and of our whole modern civilization, is one in which immense respect is paid to physical facts, while all else tends to seem mere illusion. Probably our successors five hundred years hence will be much less impressed by the triumphs of our physical science than by our ignorance of all the kinds of reality which are less tangible than the movements studied by physics. They will surely smile at our childish faith that if only we can describe an event in terms of our neat little physical laws, we succeed in saying the main truth about it.

Even to-day, many scientists themselves realize that though science gives us wonderful powers of predicting events and controlling them, it gives us very little insight into their real nature. It has progressed by ignoring more and more of the characters which we actually experience, and by concentrating more and more strictly on those few experienced characters which its method could study. The result is that to-day it is a vast system of mathematical formulae which do indeed describe very elegantly and comprehensively one aspect of the universe, namely movement. But, though they reveal much that could not otherwise be known about the immense movements of stars and the minute movements of electrons, and the many other movements that make up the physical universe, yet they tell us nothing whatever about anything but movements and some of the relations between movements and other facts.

But though many true scientists are now keenly aware of the weakness of science, most of the large company of more or less scientifically minded persons are still naïvely inclined to believe that in science man has not only a mighty power for the exploration of the physical universe and the making of a better human society, but also a key to all mysteries and to the knowledge of good and evil.

Not very long ago science was fighting for independence against the Christian Churches. The clergymen claimed that they knew more about the physical world by divine revelation than scientists could ever discover by observation and experiment. In those days it seemed to ordinary people that scientists were wickedly wrongheaded. On the strength of their seemingly pettifogging explorations scientists denied principles that all decent persons had long accepted as sacred. The earth, they said, was not the centre of the universe. Animals such as now exist had not been created in their present forms, but had been evolved from simpler types. Man himself was not utterly different from the animals, but had grown out of something ape-like.

In those early days of science it was difficult for people to give up the old and respectable theories, and to adjust their minds to ideas that were not only new but shocking. In those days, therefore, all sincerely thoughtful persons had to rally to the cause of science.

To-day the situation is very different, and rather complicated. In the first place, there are still many backward peoples, and backward sections of the more advanced peoples, who have not yet been influenced by science deeply enough to cast out the ancient superstitions and the old confused ways of thinking. Also, even among those who have not the excuse of ignorance, there are to-day swarms of more or less clever but also extremely foolish, or malicious, persons, who, though they tolerate science in some respects, fight tooth and nail against the spread of certain special kinds of scientific knowledge, such as the biology and psychology of sex. This they do because the scientific study of sex makes nonsense of their own moral prejudices. Against all such, and against the sheer ignorance of the backward sections of society, the scientifically minded must still carry on relentless war.

But in our day science is not, in the main, a struggling, persecuted thing. It is a triumphant and venerated thing. And because it has now great honour in the hearts of men and great authority over their minds, there is a danger that it may come to exercise the same kind of tyranny as the churches have exercised for centuries, and do still exercise to a very large extent. It is not altogether unreasonable to feel that, while the effect of the churches in the modern world is in the main deadening, the effect of science is by no means wholly vitalizing, and that it may in time become as lethal to the spirit as the churches at their worst.

Even to-day there is a tendency to regard contemporary science as eternal truth. Even to-day to be called ‘unscientific’ is almost as serious as in the old days it was to be called ‘immoral To doubt the value of science is coming to seem as wickedly heretical as formerly to doubt the value of religion.

In many ways the scientists are becoming the priests of the modern world. Like the priests of old, they possess a vast body of ‘truth’, which, if it is not called divine, is at least treated as sacred. Like the priests, they are looked upon with respect and awe. Like the priests they are divided into two classes. Some of them live among us to help us and educate us, not with religious but with scientific wisdom. Others retire from the world to seek the truth, not in monasteries but in research laboratories. There they explore the sacred mysteries which mere laymen can never really understand. Like the priests, they wield immense power over our minds.

They kindle our imagination, and give us a vision and an ideal, a vision of the immensity and intricacy of the universe, and an ideal of scientific knowledge and power. Also they threaten us with terrible consequences if we dare to rebel against the precepts of this new church, or if we lose faith in the sacred truth. With complete confidence, and with righteous indignation, they prophesy to the unscientific person, and to the unscientific nation, disease, poverty and death. No doubt their prophesies are in the main justified, and their practical influence is in the main beneficent. But it is inevitable that a great and priestly caste should seek to exaggerate the accuracy of its knowledge and the importance of its office.

There was a time, long ago, when the priests of religion commonly stood for clear thinking, for genuine education, for the overthrow of tyrants and tyrannical classes, for the suppression of tribal and national hatreds, and for world civilization. To-day, when the priests, with some exceptions, have sunk into futility and reaction, the scientists still on the whole stand for mental and spiritual freedom — so long as these do not conflict with respect for science. But already there are signs that in the future the influence of science, like the influence of the churches, will be opposed to all independent thinking, will turn education into parrot-like repetition of sacred and meaningless formulae, will subject the peoples to the tyranny of a scientifically minded ruling caste, will even make national wars more frequent and more destructive, or will produce at best not world-civilization but world-mechanization.

Already in our day, although there are still large numbers of people who are simply behind the times, and have never really been able to understand and accept the scientific point of view, there is also an ever-growing swarm of those who are too complacently at home in the mental atmosphere of to-day. They are proud to live in a scientific age, vastly impressed by all the products of scientific invention and with the very limited wisdom of science. They despise the helplessness and ignorance of earlier ages. They are intolerant of all those of their contemporaries who protest against the arrogance of science. They cannot distinguish between the protest which springs from mere prejudice and that which springs from serious criticism. They are eager to be up to date, to wear whatever mental clothing is worn by the leaders of scientific fashion. They cannot conceive that the present scientific fashion may some day look as clumsy and ridiculous as nineteenth-century dress.

B. TRUE SCIENTISTS AND TRUE CRITICS

THE MAIN BULK of the world’s population, then, may be divided into the blindly unscientific and the blindly scientific. But there are some more thoughtful persons, who do not belong to either of these two classes. They also are of two kinds, and may be called the true scientists and the true critics of science.

The true scientists are well aware that our science contains fundamental inconsistencies which bid fair to prove irresolvable, that at any moment its best-established doctrines may have to be so radically reinterpreted as to become unrecognizable, that at best they tell us almost nothing about the real nature of the world, that mathematical formulae of science are true only of one aspect of reality, that science can only very indirectly and haltingly help us to discover what is worth living for and dying for, what is most to be prized in life.

But though the true scientists are aware of all this, they are also aware that at present we have almost no serviceable knowledge at all except science and our invaluable ‘common sense’ perception. About the spheres which science does not touch we have, indeed, only a number of vague feelings and guesses. These feelings and guesses may be the foundations of a much deeper kind of knowledge which has still to be built up, but at present they are very disconnected and unreliable. On the other hand, the scientist knows that science is definite, and within its true sphere reliable. Even to-day it has already been put to tremendous use, for good and for ill.

But the scientist may well be more impressed by what science might do than by what it has already done. It has already given man great powers, but it has not yet been able to give him the wisdom to use those powers to the best advantage. The scientist rightly feels that the means to create a world-population fully developed in body and mind is a gift which cannot be overestimated. Every one in the world might with the help of science be given conditions of life more favourable than even the most fortunate of us can secure to-day. The average physique might be made to excel the average of today as the Greek athlete excels the most stunted of our industrial serfs. Not only so, but, as we have seen, science also gives the means to emancipate all men and women from drudgery; and in addition the means of filling the life of every individual with great diversity and subtlety of experience. It can even contribute to make him appreciate the kind of life which is most appropriate to properly nurtured human beings. Further, the vast development of communication which has already done much to bring remote peoples into touch with one another, should in the future enable every human being to appreciate all the manners of life and modes of mind which occur on the planet, and, indeed, to wander at will into any region of the earth as easily as he now wanders about his native county.

But much more than this science has yet to achieve. All that has thus far been mentioned could be brought about by contemporary physics and chemistry and such rudimentary biochemistry and biology as we already possess. Psychology cannot as yet play more than a very small part. In the future, if all goes well, biochemistry, general biology, and psychology also, will very probably revolutionize our knowledge of our own nature. We shall learn to know and to use the fundamental laws of human motive as effectively as we now know the laws of dynamics, and we shall so control the growth of minds that the perversions of will which now cripple so many of us will be avoided, and all men will with clear vision seek to express the best that is in them.

Further, as science advances, men will effectively explore those many fields which at present lie on the extreme limit of research. For the present we can do no more in these fields than register the suspicion that all contemporary scientific concepts are inadequate to these strange problems. In the vast dark continents whose mere fringes are now being fragmentarily mapped out by ‘psychical research’ there may await us discoveries which will subvert psychology as completely as astronomy has been subverted since the days of Ptolemy; nay, which may change our whole conception of the place of man in the universe.

Greatly as he prizes all these actual and possible discoveries of science, the true scientist feels, also, I think, that science has another and very different kind of importance. For him science really does play something of the part which for many others is played by religion. In the first place, it is for him a mental discipline, for it imposes on him an ideal of efficient and conscientious work. He must not be slovenly or superficial or dishonest in his research. He must never spare himself in service of the truth. Indeed, the discipline which science imposes on him might well be called a spiritual discipline. He must learn to subject his personal desires for the sake of the great co-operative enterprise of science; and also he must try to take a detached view of all things human. He must distrust all human thought, even his own science, and look critically into all human desires and ideals.

In the second place, science has a deep effect on the true scientist through the sheer vastness and intricacy of the cosmos which it reveals to him. He is overwhelmed by the multitude of stars, and of galaxies, and by the prodigious, crowded and variegated depths of past ages. The whole career of man seems to him but a strange flicker on a microscopic mote in the great dance of galaxies. Though he knows as well as the critics that mere size has nothing to do with beauty and goodness, yet the magnitude and variety of physical existence does afford him an intense exhilaration, like that which may be experienced by a man who, leaving a small and crowded room, finds himself under the stars. It also suggests to him that, just as man formerly underestimated the size of the cosmos, so perhaps he is now underestimating its mental and spiritual potentialities, and taking his own highest achievements in those directions much too seriously.

In his own special study the scientist may have a very strong and inspiring sense of the independent reality of what he is exploring. He knows well that only the surface, the outer skin of this reality, is open to his exploration; but he has a keen sense that it is what it is, and not what he desires or expects it to be. He tries earnestly to ‘enter into the spirit of it’ and see it truly. He is anxious not to misinterpret it in accordance with his own preconceived ideas. When he looks beyond his subject and considers the universe as a whole, he regards it in the same way. He is intensely aware of its reality, and of the extreme complexity and vastness and independence of this reality.

Since he is a man, and not merely a scientist, the upshot in his mind is apt to be two very deep but quiet emotions, or movements of the will. The first is loyalty to the great human enterprise of advance in knowledge and power and in discriminate appreciation. Science, he feels, opens up limitless possibilities of such advance. The second emotion is perhaps most truly to be called worship of the vast, intricate, non-human reality whose surface science studies. He worships it partly, I think, for its very ‘inhumanity’, for its apparent indifference to man; but also for its suggestion of limitless spiritual potentiality.

The true critics of science, on the other hand, are more impressed by the dangers of science than by its benefits, more by the harm it does to common minds than by the discipline it affords to truly scientific minds. They see that it tends to regard the physical side of reality as the only important side; that it often makes men insensitive toward all the finer kinds of experience, such as the appreciation of human personality, and of art and religion. These experiences, they say, contemporary science cannot properly describe. And because it misdescribes them, leaving out the ‘nerve’ of them, so to speak, its devotees take them to be illusory and negligible. Science has destroyed something which could at least sometimes lift men out of themselves, or fortify their more human and spiritual nature against their purely animal nature. The true critics see also that science tends to give some men a false standard of values. By destroying the old ideals it either makes them care for nothing but personal pleasure and excitement, or it deludes them into prizing the mere power of controlling the material world, without questioning what should be done with that power.

Now there is, indeed, one way in which science may help us to value things more accurately. It may help us to see them more clearly, and so enable us to decide more justly as to whether they have or have not the characters which we independently prize. But science itself cannot tell us what kind of thing is really desirable or really admirable. Some have claimed that because life (as they believe) is evolving into ever more complex and more capable forms, therefore what is desirable is whatever advances the evolutionary process. This argument is false. In the first place, evolution is a rare process. Very few types have actually advanced. In the second place, evolutionary advance is not good because it is the direction of evolution; it is good in so far as it tends in the direction which we independently approve, namely the direction of more awakened mental and spiritual being.

The critics feel also that the effect of popular science on popular morality is very serious. The old standards are being rapidly discarded, and in their place comes an ethic which (they say) is at heart self-indulgent and degraded. It is an ethic based on very inadequate biological concepts, and devoid of that intuitive sense of rightness which men in the past regarded as an intimation of divine will. The proof of the insufficiency of modern morality, the critics say, is that the typically ‘modern’ young person is disillusioned, and disgusted with himself and the world. The critics of science feel that science is producing a swarm of cheap, standardized minds, incapable of any depth of experience, and intolerant of all who do not agree with them.

Many of the serious critics of science are so disgusted by the effects of science upon men’s minds that they find their way back again into one or other of the churches. Feeling that the old religions really do take into account kinds of experience which are of very great importance and are ignored or despised by the more hasty kind of scientists, these desperate critics choose to accept all the orthodox doctrines of some church or other, including many which seem to be the products of merely animal or primitive craving and of confused thinking. Their disgust with science blinds them to the fact that these doctrines have, in many cases, no more claim to credence than fashionable scientific speculations themselves. It is, indeed, tragic that revulsion from science, and our science-obsessed civilization, should lead so many of our most sensitive minds to fly to the old religion and accept it uncritically, instead of facing the fact that not only science, but also religion itself, of the doctrinal kind, is inadequate.

Both the true scientists and the true critics of science seem to have right on their side, though each is disinclined to do full justice to the other. Apart from the very urgent world-economic problem, there is no more important problem for mankind to-day than this one of realizing the danger and the true value of modern science. Before leaving this subject, I would suggest that we must constantly distinguish between the science of the true scientists and the science of the commoner and less truly scientific kind of scientists; who, even if they happen to be fine workers in their special fields, never manage to regard life as a whole in the truly scientific way, and never manage to look at science itself scientifically.

C. THE UPSHOT OF SCIENCE FOR THOUGHT

I SHALL NOW attempt to describe briefly the whole upshot of contemporary science so far as it should bear upon the world-view of the ordinary intelligent person. Any part, or even the whole, of modern scientific thought may turn out to be in important respects wrong. Nothing in it deserves to be regarded as certain. But in all probability the general outline of it is in some sense true, even if it is systematically distorted by the omission of some far-reaching principle still hidden from us. Let us, then, try to set down the main tenor of modern science in a few bold strokes.

In the first place, then, many of the notions of common sense, which have worked so well for many thousands of years, and many of the earlier notions of science itself turn out to be only very roughly true. For instance, in the long view of modern science the seemingly fixed order of space and the seemingly fixed order of time are seen to be very dependent on one another and on the point of view of the observer. But some other mysterious thing, neither mere space nor mere time but the reality which includes the two of them, is a fixed order. Seemingly our intuitions of space and time, though valid for our practical life, are superficial. They need to be qualified by some more subtle intuitions not yet possible to us. Again, energy, which science itself conceived, and took to be of an absolutely fixed amount in the universe, turns out not to be so; but once more, there is something else, much more complex, and to us quite unimaginable, which is the fixed reality behind energy. And so on. In fact, not only the world of common sense, but also the world of earlier science itself, is almost certainly very superficial and fragmentary aspects of a deeper and far more subtle world which lies at present almost entirely beyond our comprehension. Such at least is the case if modern science is to be trusted.

Then there is the matter of mere size. If science is right, the universe turns out to be very much bigger than was supposed a little while ago. Astronomers tell us that if an ordinary page-size photograph of one of the galaxies, or star-systems, was enlarged to the size of Asia, the earth would remain invisibly small on it unless one used a powerful microscope. The solar system, with the earth in it, lies within one such star-system or galaxy. Our galaxy contains about a hundred thousand million stars. Our own sun is a star of average size, though it is probably very exceptional in having planets. Its volume is over a million times that of the earth. Though stars are so big, and there are so many of them in a galaxy, they are also so far apart that if a star be represented by an orange, its nearest neighbour would be many hundreds of miles distant.

Some two million other galaxies are visible through our present telescopes. They are separated from one another and from our own galaxy by immense tracts of space. Beyond the farthest visible galaxy there lie, in all directions, a much greater number of galaxies, so distant that our most powerful telescopes cannot reveal them. It is said that there must be about a hundred thousand million of them. So there are as many galaxies as there are stars in one galaxy. If all the stars in all the galaxies were grains of sand, they would make up a bed hundreds of yards deep over the whole surface of England.

But though the universe is so big, it has a definite size. It is not infinite. The smallest known physical object, an electron, occupies a definite proportion of the whole of contemporary space. This does not mean that there are boundaries to the universe, beyond which there is nothing, not even space. It means that if we were to go on travelling in what we call a straight line for long enough, we should at last arrive at the place from which we started. Light, which would take one-seventh of a second to travel round the earth, takes at least a hundred thousand years to travel ‘round’ the whole universe.

According to one of the latest, but seemingly well-established, theories, the volume of space itself, compared with the smallest of all physical objects, is expanding; or, if you prefer it, the objects themselves are contracting. More accurately, the distances between the galaxies are ever increasing in comparison with the size of the galaxies themselves and the size of electrons and waves of light. The farthest visible galaxies are rushing away from us at a prodigious and ever-increasing rate, simply through this ‘expansion of space’. The farthest galaxies of all, far too remote to be seen, are receding much faster. Sooner or later they will be travelling faster than the speed of light, and will have no longer any connexion whatever with us.

Not only does the universe turn out to be bigger, it turns out also to be much older than was supposed. The human species has perhaps existed for a million years, say thirty thousand generations. The first mammals probably appeared some twenty million years ago. It is perhaps about two thousand million years since the planets were formed from the substance of the sun. They were born, it seems, as the result of a very rare accident in the universe, namely the close approach of the sun and a passing star, and the drawing out of a part of the sun by the attraction of the other star.

The sun itself is thought by some to have been formed out of the original nebula or gas-cloud about seven million million years ago. But in estimating the past we have to take into account the theory of the expanding universe. If that theory is true, then the expansion cannot have been going on for ever. There must have been a time when all the galaxies were crowded together like a swarm of bees hanging from a branch. The beginning of the process, it seems, cannot have been so very long ago, not so long as has been demanded for the condensation of the galaxies out of the primeval all-pervading gas. In fact there is a discrepancy in the time scales suggested for evolution. But, whichever account is right, the beginning of the physical universe must have been many millions of years ago.

Looking into the future, we find that, though man has only existed for about a million years, probably the earth will still be a possible home for him two thousand million years hence, and perhaps much longer. Thus if we represent his past million years by a few days, he has still the prospect of a long lifetime before him; though of course he may be destroyed before his time by some astronomical catastrophe, or by biological changes beyond his control, or by the unwise use of the powers which science is giving him.

But though the universe has a very long past history, and will have a very long future history, there was something like a Beginning, and there will be something like an End. The universe is apparently running down, like a clock. Knowing the rate of its unwinding, we infer that at some date, very long before the formation of the stars, it must have been started; and that at another date, very long after all the stars are reduced to cinders, it will stop. Of these most remote events scientists can tell us very little. Some believe that in the beginning God created the universe, and that in the end it will have fulfilled its purpose. Others, with at least as good reason, believe that the life of the universe consists of an extremely slow alternation of winding up and unwinding, like the alternate intake and output of a man’s breath. Others again say that, since the universe is finite, and no energy can be actually lost from it, and since its ‘end’ is not really a state of exhaustion, but an all-pervading agitation of light-waves, mere chance, operating through inconceivable myriads of aeons, must sooner or later result in a vast rewinding, a vast piling up of energy once more into certain places, so that the whole cosmical process must take place again.

But all this is guesswork. What science actually tells us with some confidence is that the universe is very big and very long-enduring; that at present it is unwinding; that man is physically a very minute part of it, and one of very recent origin; that his planet is probably unique; that life itself, as we know it, depends on several peculiar and (in a loose sense) accidental features of this planet; and that man evolved from primitive life through the effects of still further accidents, such as the fact that some of his ancestors were forced to live in trees and develop good eyes and hands. Science suggests, in short, that man is a product of an amazing chain of lucky chances, or conjunctions of causes; and that to-day, as at every stage of his career, he is at the mercy of the obscure cosmical forces which, so far as science can tell, blindly produced him, and may as blindly destroy him. It suggests, moreover, that his mind, with all its desires and fears and its loftiest aspirations, is very largely determined by the seemingly blind workings of chemical and physical events within his body. If his digestion goes wrong, he becomes irritable or gloomy; if he is given certain drugs, he becomes hilarious, or ecstatic, or angry, or anxious, or dull, or brilliant, in response to the properties of the particular drug.

All this that science asserts is perhaps humiliating to man’s self-esteem; but science tells us also something different. It tells us that, though in the past man has, indeed, been the sport of circumstance, and must, so far as scientists can judge, ever remain so to a great extent, yet in our age he seems to be coming into the possession of hitherto unimaginable powers of controlling his own destiny. If these powers are misused, they may well destroy him. But if they are used wisely, with clear consciousness of the desirable goal, they may, in the fullness of time, enable him to make of himself a very much more alive being than he is at present. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that man is the living germ which is destined to vitalize the whole cosmos. On the other hand, it is at least as possible that he is of no cosmical importance, that all the while there goes on upon the galactic or the cosmical plane, ‘over man’s head’, and unrevealed to him, some exalted life and mind and spiritual experience of a kind which he cannot possibly conceive.

IX. HISTORY

A. METHODS AND PRINCIPLES OF HISTORY

FOR THOSE WHO seek to become more vividly and more precisely conscious of the spiritual adventure of man, history should be the most significant of all intellectual activities. Properly treated, it should combine the detachment of scientific research with the sympathy of dramatic art.

We cannot all undertake historical research, any more than we can all be professional scientists. But we can at least, with the help of the historians, see our own lives and our own nation and the whole contemporary world as incidents in the great theme of man. With the aid of history, we can realize that our own civilization is only one among many phases in the growth of man, that our confident knowledge is not really the final and complete knowledge, but only a stage in the age-long effort to find the truth, to discover what is most desirable, and to establish it. Some of us, when we look back at the wisdom of the Middle Ages or of the Ancient Egyptians and compare it with our own, are apt to smile at its misunderstandings and confusions, and thank heaven that we at any rate can see more clearly. But if the study of history has given us a real historical sense, we cannot help believing that to a future age our own thought will seem almost as crude, and perhaps in some ways even more fantastic.

A historian is one whose scientific curiosity is concerned to explore the past career of mankind. He undertakes to reveal past events, and if possible to explain them scientifically. He tries to discover the conditions of life in different ages, how men thought and felt in different ages, how society was organized, and how one phase of civilization gave place to another, or to barbarism. In fact he sets out to form clear ideas about the actual course of the great human adventure.

Those who are concerned with the prehistoric ages are also in a sense historians, though they work with different material, and cannot achieve the same detail. Those also whose task it is to tell the story of the whole evolution of life on earth are, in the broadest sense, historians. The true historians and ‘prehistorians’ and historical biologists, though they work upon different ages and with very different methods, are all co-operating in the same task, the description of the events which led up to our present human world.

The true historian, though he concentrates on the ‘historical’ period, and indeed on his own particular subject within it, cannot do his work properly unless he tries to see his special subject in its proper setting within the one great theme. He uses many distinct methods in his work, studying old documents and buildings, reading old books, critically examining other historical accounts of events. He may seek help from geographers, geologists, economists, psychologists, philologists. He collects as many facts as possible; and then, bearing his facts in mind, he tries to imagine the whole pattern of events which make up the period or movement that he is studying, both the pattern of external facts, such as changes in ways of living, and also the pattern of men’s minds, their ways of thinking, feeling and desiring.

The historian’s first aim is, or should be, to describe the course of events as accurately as possible. But also he seeks to explain. This he does by trying to show events as the expression of very general principles which, by induction, he discovers to be true of the whole career of man. For instance, he makes use of the principle that men’s actions are determined very largely by the needs for food, safety and comfort. And since other activities can only be pursued when these needs are, up to a point, satisfied, he may also use the principle that civilization depends fundamentally on economic resources, such as the possibilities of agriculture in different countries, and the available supply of coal and iron. Another principle that he may use is, that to some extent the course of history is determined by ideas in men’s minds, by fears, hates, admirations, beliefs, faiths. But he may go behind this principle to another, namely that these controlling ideas themselves are at bottom the expression of needs which the peoples have felt as a result of the interplay of their particular natures and their particular circumstances. For instance, in the seventeenth century a new class rose into power, namely the commercial and industrial masters; and, owing to the needs and circumstances of this class, religion and morals had to be refashioned. One result was that in puritanism, the religious movement typical of the period, special emphasis was given to the commercially desirable virtues of industriousness, abstemiousness, honesty. The pursuit of beauty came to seem, both economically and spiritually, a shocking dissipation of resources.

The theory of ‘economic determinism’ in history is one which arouses in some minds violent repugnance and in others fanatical acceptance. Let us try to formulate its meaning as dispassionately as possible, so that, if possible, we may see in what sense it is true.

Like all scientific theories, its basis is inductive. It claims to be a very general description of the way in which mankind has behaved and may be expected to behave, of the way in which the free choice of individuals does in the long run direct itself. The contention is that the ‘economic motive’ is the sole effective influence determining behaviour and culture, that all movements of thought, taste and ideals are expressions, direct or indirect of the interaction between ‘economic motives’ and material conditions.

Now the phrase ‘economic motives’ is not at all precise. We may clarify the idea by saying that the self-regarding, family-regarding and tribe-regarding impulses of men and women, considered in the mass, have inclined, regularly but spontaneously, toward certain kinds of behaviour and thought because of the economic potentialities of the environment, such as charateristics of climate and soil, the distribution of water and minerals (especially iron and coal and oil); and also because of the economic organization of society itself. This social environment is, of course, according to the theory an expression of the material environment, present and past.

It is surely clear that the modern world-situation has in fact resulted mainly from such a process of economic determination. Beings which seek to fulfil their capacities, and cannot do so without the co-operation of the material environment, will undoubtedly determine their behaviour in relation to economic factors. Further, in the sphere of thought, those ideas which are directly or indirectly fostered by the economic environment will tend, in the long run, to be accepted in preference to those which are not thus favoured. This does not mean that the actions of each individual are one and all immediately and wholly determined by economic motives. Far from it. Strong as the economic motive must be in a community of economically constrained individuals, it is only one motive among others. A man may very often act in opposition to the economic interests of himself or his family or his tribe. But in such an economically constrained community economic factors will have an all-pervasive and, in the main, an irresistible influence on behaviour and feeling and thought. They will determine the general trend of history, which is after all largely an expression of the cumulative influence of the environment on average minds. In the economically constrained community even individuals who climb to affluence, or are born into it, are bound to be unwittingly and irrationally constrained by the general economic mental atmosphere. Like all human beings, they seek self-expression; and in such a community the readiest and most imposing kind of self-expression (apart from sheer force) is the exercise of economic power over one’s fellows. For these economically fortunate beings the prize is not mere subsistence, or even comfort, but prestige, and control of the lives of other men by economic manipulation.

Up to our own day every human community has been economically constrained. Its actions have been in the main determined by economic necessity, and its thought has been subtly and unwittingly moulded by economic considerations. Individuals here and there, no doubt, have triumphantly rejected the prevailing influence. Even considerable groups of individuals, now and again, during phases of religious or tribal exaltation, have behaved in manners not explicable by economic determinism alone. But the ‘tribe’ itself and the ‘nation’ itself are fundamentally expressions of economic forces; and the same influence has much to do with the determination of the particular forms of religion.

But though economic necessity has been by far the most important influence determining human behaviour and thought in the past, it does not follow that it must be so in the future. Only in an economically constrained community is the economic motive in the long run irresistible and all-pervasive. There is no inner necessity compelling men to be dominated by economic considerations. In a world in which every individual was assured of economic security, and in which the economic obsession left over from the past had been eradicated by sound education, economic determinism would cease to apply. Other motives, less urgent but more distinctively human, would usurp the power of the economic. The determining factor in human behaviour and culture, in the main and in the long run, might be the will for a more subtle kind of self-expression and social development. In fact the world-aim might at last come into its own as the ruling motive of the world community, the aim of developing human capacity toward true and comprehensive knowing, discriminate feeling, and appropriate willing.

Now our modern world is as strictly determined by economic factors as any earlier community. Indeed, it is perhaps more consciously and grimly so than any other. Yet in our day, for the first time in history, mechanical invention is putting man physically into a position to escape wholly and for ever from the ancient tyranny of economic determinism. Unfortunately the economic mentality, the obsessive economic motive directed on behalf of self, family and tribe, is by now so firmly established in our social tradition that we may very well fail to avail ourselves of our new freedom. Like beasts born in captivity, whose cage doors are at last flung open, we may not have the wit to walk abroad. Of course, even during the tyranny of economic determinism men have often rebelled, have sought to be more faithful to their distinctively human nature. Such a rebellion occurred perhaps most strikingly among the early Christians. Throughout history, and in every land, there have been smouldering, though vain, revolts. Yet now, when at last the opportunity occurs, we seem incapable of seizing it.

The very general revulsion against the theory of economic determinism springs from the sense that it depicts man as purely passive, mechanical, the sport of circumstances. But this is a mistake. Man need not be economically determined. Nothing compels him to will to live. But if he does will to live, he must allow himself to be economically determined, so long as the life of the individual and of the race is allowed to depend on economic toil.

In searching for the general principles behind events, the historian has to bear in mind that mankind is both passive and active in its great adventure. At any particular point of history human actions result from the interplay of two forces or causes, namely the environment and the active nature of mankind itself at that time.

Now human nature at a particular time is, indeed, a product of the past. But this does not mean that each movement of history can be wholly explained as a result of past environments alone. Even if we take the word ‘environment’ in its broadest sense, and not merely to mean ‘economic environment there must have been at every stage something for the environment to influence.

History is the record of the ways in which past human actions interacted with past environments to produce new environments and new human nature. It is no more possible to explain history simply by environment than to explain it simply by human nature. If we trace the development of human nature back to our non-human, ape-like ancestors, to our reptilian ancestors, our fish-like ancestors, even to the first living forms and the pre-vital sources of life, we see it at every stage being moulded by the environment; but at the beginning and at every stage there must have been something having a character of its own, something capable of acting spontaneously in cooperation with the environment. Without the environment, no awakening; but equally without the ‘something’ itself, no awakening. Even in the very first stage of the evolution of life on the earth, our pre-vital ancestors, which were probably mere clusters of very complicated molecules, must have had some nature of their own for the environment to work upon, and in which it could awaken new powers. And so at every stage, there must be a ‘something’, itself the product not only of past environments but also of past ‘somethings’, which could respond to the environments. And at every stage the ‘something’, spurred by the environment, awakens into new powers.

The historian is concerned not only with general principles but with particular individuals. Some of the events of history he will describe in terms of his general principles, biological, psychological, economic, cultural, and so on; but others he will attribute partly to the influence of dominant persons, who through superior vision and understanding of the state of society, or through sheer force of character, may sometimes take very great effect on the course of events. No doubt he will try to give a scientific account of these great men and of the ways in which circumstances influenced them; but his first concern will be simply to describe them accurately, so as to give a clear idea of the ways in which they themselves took effect on history. When he is dealing with the work of some great man, he will always try to show with equal clearness both that it was in the main the outcome of his social environment and also that in certain respects it was unique, that it introduced something actually new, though determinate, into the thought or organization of mankind. Thus, to give one outstanding example, he will try to show in the case of Jesus both that the Mediterranean peoples in that age were already in need of, and vaguely groping toward, the ideal of Christian love, and also that only the genius and insight of one particular great mind could clearly conceive that ideal and imprint it upon the hearts of men.

Unfortunately in historical research it is more difficult than in physical science to interpret facts faithfully and without bias; for in the first place the evidence cannot be described with mathematical precision, and secondly, since the subject-matter of history is human behaviour, it is apt to arouse very deep emotions in those who study it. Consequently we find that historians are often in violent disagreement with one another. Some, for instance, insist that all history is to be understood as the expression of some single fundamental principle, such as the principle that historical events are determined wholly by economic necessity. Others no less confidently declare that any kind of scientific generalization is impossible in history, and that at bottom the story of man is simply the upshot of the adventures of the countless unique and incalculable personalities of all men and women. Others again say that history is an art, and that a historical work is not simply a record of facts, but a product of the creative imagination of the historian.

We must beware of all these over-simple views of history. It is very improbable that such a complex animal as man, existing in vast populations and in very diverse circumstances, is moved in the long run by one sole motive, whatever the motive. History is never to be understood in terms of one principle, save the most general principle that what men seek to do with their environment is to use it for the fulfilment of their capacities. But what capacities?

On the other hand, to say that scientific generalization is impossible in history means in the last resort that no human actions are predictable, that no human persons are ever to be relied upon to act at all as others have acted before them.

To say that history is pure art, and has no objective truth, is merely to say that history, real history, has not yet been written, that historians have never dealt faithfully with their facts. There can be no doubt that all history that has ever been written has been to a greater or less extent biased. But also there can be no doubt that the only sane aim of writing history is to give as true an account as possible of the career of man; and that, as historical research advances, we become more able to write true history. Even to-day we can give an outline of that career, which, though nowhere certain, is in the main true with a high degree of probability. I will venture to set down the controlling points of that outline.

B. THE UPSHOT OF HISTORY

OUR EARLIEST OF all ancestors were not, it seems, what we should call living things at all. They were merely specks of very complex chemical substances. Yet in these substances lay, in some sense, the potentiality of producing in a favourable environment, Jesus, Nero, and the rest of us.

The sun’s rays, working upon the simpler substances, had already built up our sub-vital ancestors, as in our own laboratories, chemists to-day build up sugar and other ‘organic compounds’. The conditions for this natural upbuilding have probably long since ceased. Our sub-vital ancestors came into being in the hot primeval waters. Through the sun’s power, many kinds of ‘organic’ substances must have been produced before ever there were living organisms. These substances drifted in the water. They contained in themselves a potentiality of future life; and also they constituted together a rich food, waiting for the future living things. Before there was life, there was soup!

Under the continued influence of the sun’s rays, some of these food-stuff’s, these intricate molecules, themselves began to eat. Though their precarious organization was ever disintegrating, they constantly rebuilt it. They developed the power of annexing neighbouring material, breaking it up, and reforming it (with the aid of solar energy) upon their own molecular pattern. They began to hold together in intimate and complex clusters. These clusters grew. They subdivided, propagating themselves as generations of new young clusters, formed upon the parental pattern, and capable of growth. Thus, in the primeval soup, life began.

The years passed in millions and in hundreds of millions. The primitive live things throve in the rich sea. They also fed upon one another. There was already strife in the waters, and death. The weak were overcome, and the strong multiplied. Of the strong kinds a few, very few indeed, became more complex in their structure, more subtle and more alive in their ways. Sooner or later, most of them succumbed; but one kind at least survived, and multiplied, and evolved, and diversified itself into new kinds.

In time the plants were distinguished from the animals; for while some kinds of creatures continued to gather the sun’s energy and store it in their bodies for use in the processes of living, others lost this power, gaining instead the power to maintain themselves by preying upon the sun-rich flesh of the plants.

The years continued to pass in millions and hundreds of millions. Many kinds of plants and animals appeared, and many kinds vanished; but a few, very few indeed, survived. And of these few, here and there one most fortunate kind continued to diversify, to evolve, to awaken into new powers. Of these again most kinds vanished; or settled into stagnation, being no longer spurred by the environment into fresh adventures. Many, fallen into easy circumstances, lost, age by age, their intricate organs and subtle prowess, and sank back once more into the ancient, clumsy and somnolent ways. Many throve by preying upon kinds more alive than themselves.

But here and there a few kinds, very few indeed, were stung by the environment into still more vital forms and powers. They learned, for instance, to be sexual. They united in pairs, and mingled their substance before dividing again into new, rejuvenated generations. Also they learned not only to touch and taste, but to smell and see and hear. They began to be somewhat more precisely aware of the complexity and horror and beauty of the world.

Emerging from the water, some developed lungs and legs. They crept and ran. Some of them climbed, some trusted themselves to the air, some flew. They preyed upon one another with ever more deadly weapons. They kept watch for one another with ever more delicate sensibility. Males and females courted and were courted, discovering to one another ever new delights. Mothers carried their young, and nursed them till they were fit for independence. And the young, basking in prolonged maternal care, grew up more slowly, remained young and pliable for many months, or even years. Thus they were able to learn more delicate and more variable adjustments to the environment, before stiffening into maturity. Mates now began to live together in service of offspring. Families hung together and became tribes. Individuals co-operated with one another, and the tribes prospered.

The years passed in millions and tens of millions. Most of the kinds of animals and plants stagnated, or degenerated, or were destroyed. But one kind of tree-dwellers developed hands, developed eyes with new delicacy of perception for shape and colour, developed brains fitted to take advantage of these instruments. The new creatures remained young longer even than others, and so they went farther in learning. Their eyes and hands and great brains made them apt at distinguishing and relating, and also apt at manipulating. More intelligently than other creatures they solved the problems of their daily life. As the years passed in thousands and in hundreds of thousands, rare geniuses of the race invented new devices, forgetting them and rediscovering them day by day, so clouded were their minds. They threw stones at their prey. They smote their enemies with rocks. They chipped flints for weapons and tools. They made shelters. They defeated the very lions and bears and mammoths. They were men, or almost men.

In thousands and hundreds of thousands the years continued to pass. The races of the brute-men kept on discovering and forgetting and rediscovering their precious inventions. Also they continually harried one another. One race, with superior cunning and finer weapons, triumphed. All the others were exterminated. The victorious kind multiplied, diversified, covered the world with many peoples, walked erect, grew ampler brains. They became true men. They made fire and used it. They hunted and trapped. They painted their cave-walls with beasts, to prosper the chase. They tamed dogs and herded cattle. They sowed seed and stored the crops for winter. They looked forward from year to year, from generation to generation. They took note of their own mental life. They became aware of themselves as persons, and of others also as persons, different from themselves. They loved and hated with new insight. Here and there they began to feel the mystery of their existence, and the terrible beauty of the world. They bowed before sun and moon, storm, thunder and fire. They conceived gods and goddesses in the likeness of their own sexual potency, their own cruelty, their own power and cunning, their own mercy. They deified their ancestors. They practised and enforced ritual worship. They sacrificed one another, singly or in hecatombs, to make their fields fertile or appease the jealous gods.

And still, in thousands and in tens of thousands, the years passed. The races of men flooded about the earth in waves and eddies, or stagnated in places apart. Great leaders led their hordes against the settled peoples. Conquering tribes slaughtered or enslaved, or were absorbed by the conquered. In the fertile river-plains men lived richly, and the war-lords throve upon them. Cities appeared, temples, palaces. Empires were founded, knit together by roads, fenced in by frontier walls. Empires changed hands or crumbled into principalities. The mighty fought over them with paid armies. The swarming common folk toiled, spawned, paid taxes, bowed before their lords, sacrificed to their gods.

The centuries passed. A certain Indian, gifted with peculiar insight into his own nature, found therein also, the reality which lies behind the world’s appearances. Or seemed to himself to find it. Certain Greeks, exceptionally curious and intelligent descendants of the first curious brute, inquired into the causes of things, naively sought the fundamental nature of all things, studied their own thinking, asked what was best in the world, and what was the nature of the good life. Thus at length began science and philosophy. A certain Jew, intensely aware of his fellows and of his own self, imagined in his likeness a God of Love, and died to make men discover their own power of loving. Thus for the first time a few men and women, very few indeed, began to see dimly what mankind should live to do, namely to seek the truth, to love one another, to make a more alive world, and to keep their hearts open to the supernal beauty.

But again and again as the centuries passed, the vision was lost, rediscovered, and soon lost again. Wisdom and love were quenched, or at most they flickered hesitatingly along the centuries. Only the ritual survived. Churches flourished, and empires. Ships brought remote lands into touch with one another. Ships and trade and guns gave the West dominance. Men conceived nationality, disputed over religious doctrines, waged religious and national wars. They also invented scientific method, explored the stars and atoms and the human body, doubted the religious dogmas, and felt once more, here and there, the passion for knowledge of the natural world. They were overawed by the immensity and intricacy of the universe; yet they used their new knowledge chiefly for power, not for delighted appreciation. The fortunate increased their wealth by coal and steam, and by the labour of the unfortunate. These multiplied in the spreading slums, or toiled for landlords in the fields. Diseased, stunted, ignorant, helpless, they were easily deceived, easily led, easily stirred to fear and hate, now by their masters, now by those who schemed to become their masters. The comfortable masters were pained to see the filthy and brutish condition of the workers. To prove their own liberal mentality, they affected to speak to their inferiors as man to man, though they were secretly disgusted by the smell of them. They generously rewarded the more devoted of the workers with coppers. They wrote to the papers about social injustice. But they continued to make money out of the workers. And if ever the workers rebelled, the police restored order.

Masters and slaves alike were blind to the true goal of living. They could conceive nothing better than to display wealth or squander it, or to exercise power over their fellows.

Suddenly the nations, long terrified by one another’s lust of power, blundered into the first scientific war. Millions were killed or wounded, but a greater damage was done to the minds of those who survived, and to the following generations. For now, when some had begun to see clearly the outlines of a new world, a close-knit and awakened world-society, this aim was made to seem utterly ‘idealistic’, unrealizable. Men could no longer trust one another even so far as they had done before the War.

Meanwhile in Russia, where tyranny had been worst and disorder greatest, a devoted party had organized the revolution and founded a new society, a society blind, perhaps, to very much of the true aim of living, but controlled by the firm will to make the new world, and eager for discovery.

Alarmed by the prospect of losing their power, the economic masters in every country tightened their hold upon the minds of the workers. They propagated lies about the tyranny of Communism. Cleverly they appealed to the widespread craving for a less mechanized and less materialistic society, and condemned Communism as the extreme of mechanization and materialism. But in fact they, or the social forces which had produced them, were the true cause of mechanization and materialism. They praised the primitive and the martial. They condemned intellect as misleading, pacifism as unmanly, and the will for an orderly world community as sheer idealism. They exalted the tribe and sought tribal enemies. They financed dictators, who organized armies of deluded lads to enforce their will with exultant brutality. In country after country independent thinking and action became impossible. All who dared to protest were destroyed or driven abroad. Civilization became a mockery.

What is to come? Year by year, the old blind barbarian will, terrified by the disintegration of the old order, becomes more desperate, more impotent to construct, more determined to strangle the new world in the act of birth. But also, year by year, decade by decade, the new will spreads and grows clearer.

To be alive to-day, to be aware of the issues of to-day, is rare good fortune. For, without doubt, we live in one of the great ages of history, perhaps in the greatest of all that have yet occurred. If we succeed in our worldwide adventure, the future will look back on us not only with horror, pity, incredulous amazement, but also with generous admiration for our victorious, though faltering and blundering, crusade. Never before has such an issue faced mankind as that which is now dividing the world into two great factions. Never before has there been any effective will to devote the whole planet to the true world-aim, never before the means to do so. But never before have those who cannot conceive the new will been so well armed for mischief.

Let us be clear in our own minds beyond all hesitation as to the turn that we must now seek to give to history. We must create for the first time a world-population of well-grown and fully awakened men and women. We must change the whole tenor of man’s life on this planet. We must turn him little by little from the disease-racked, ill-nourished, cowering, vindictive beast, that in the main he is, to the lover, the artist, the philosopher-king in command of his own destiny, that it is even now in him to become. By every means discoverable, by changes political, economic, educational, and some day eugenical, we must change human nature, we must begin to release the human from the brutish in man, to set his feet once and for all upon the way of the spirit. And our reward shall be that those nobler beings who shall follow us may sometimes pause in the midst of their greater endeavour and their greater joy to look back on us and say, ‘Halfhuman creatures that they were, they yet saw unmistakably a glimmer of the light. Hampered by their own faintheartedness and brutishness, they were made by their vision nobler than could otherwise have been. And from their dark tragic lives a world has sprung which they could not have conceived.’

X. PHILOSOPHY

A. THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY

LIKE SCIENCE AND history philosophy is a highly skilled theoretical activity. It is more difficult to describe briefly than either of the other two. The philosopher has two distinct aims which cannot really be pursued apart from one another. His more ambitious aim, which in the present state of knowledge he cannot hope to fulfil, is to see the pattern of the whole of things, to see how everything is related to everything else, and is influenced by other things. He wants to ‘see together’, or to comprehend as one universe, not only all physical events, such as the birth of stars and the happenings within an atom, and all mental events, such as mankind’s slow awakening into clear awareness, and the mental growth and decay of individuals, but also much that is not events at all, like the truths of mathematics and logic, and truth itself, and goodness and beauty. He seeks to understand the bearing of each of these great kinds of fact on the others. Unfortunately this cannot really be done at all thoroughly until we have gained much more ‘piecemeal’ knowledge than exists at present.

But though man’s mind in its present state cannot possibly do more than scratch the surface of this greatest of all theoretical problems, the desire to see things whole is the guiding motive of philosophy, and the enterprise of trying to see things whole is a pursuit which can have a very broadening and deepening effect on the mind.

The other task which philosophers undertake is not quite so difficult. They single out the most important ideas on which all our thinking in each sphere of knowledge depends, and they try to make these ideas as clear and sound as possible, as true as possible to the facts that they describe. For instance, when they find biologists and psychologists talking about ‘instinct’ in animals and men, they set about inquiring exactly what is meant by the word. Is an instinct part of the structure of a mysterious thing called a mind? Or is it a purely bodily structure, say in the brain? Or is it not a thing at all, but just a description of behaviour, not a hidden cause of the behaviour? When philosophers find physicists talking about ‘physical mechanism’, they seek to discover precisely what these two words mean, and in what ways ‘mechanical’ happenings differ from other possible kinds of happenings such as purposeful activity.

It might be thought that the scientists themselves ought to be best fitted to work out the exact meaning of the ideas on which their various sciences are founded. And as a matter of fact some of them are very earnestly engaged on this work. But strictly, when they do this they are being philosophers. They are not, so to speak, merely playing the game of their own science according to the established rules; they are criticizing the rules themselves, and trying to make better ones. And in this work they may be helped by the pure philosophers, part of whose task it is to see each department of knowledge in the light cast by others.

Another very important aim of philosophers is to form clear ideas of the nature of thinking itself. What does thinking really set out to do, and how far can it possibly succeed? Is it to be trusted? Does it ever give us real knowledge about anything more than our own experiencing? What precisely is the difference between true and false thinking? What is truth itself? When we say that an idea is true, do we mean merely that it fits in satisfactorily with all our other ideas, that it is not inconsistent with the pattern formed by the rest of our thought? Or do we mean that the fact which it asserts really is a character of the world? And if this is what we mean, have we any solid reason to believe that any idea ever is true in this sense? Or do we mean, when we say that an idea is true, that the idea is a useful idea, that if you think with it your thinking will lead to success in some practical way, but if you think without it, you will come to grief, sooner or later?

Another great problem which philosophers have to face is the problem of the essential meanings of ‘good’ and ‘bad When a man says seriously that something is ‘good’, does he mean just that it pleases him, or that it is pleasing to all normal human beings; or does he mean that it in itself has a special character, namely ‘good ‘. Or, again, does he mean that it is the kind of thing which would please the ideally developed mind, the fully human mind, or the mind of an all-wise and all-loving God? Or again, when we look into the matter as closely as possible, and call something good, do we mean that it is a case of, or an instrument for, the fulfilling of the capacity of some living being, whether of a lowly or of an exalted order of vitality? If so, ‘better’ would seem to mean either ‘more fulfilling’ or ‘fulfilling to a more alive, more vital capacity And when we say that a man ‘ought’ to act so as to increase the good in the world and decrease the bad, what do we really mean? Do we, for instance, mean merely that if the man really wants the greatest possible happiness, or if he wants to fulfil his own nature completely, or if he wants the best to happen, he must take into account not merely his own needs as a particular individual, but also the needs of other individuals; since he himself is at bottom a social individual, who cannot himself be really happy or really fulfilled so long as others are unhappy or unfulfilled? Do we mean this, or do we mean simply that, whether a man wants to or not, he absolutely ought to increase the good?

There is yet another great philosophical problem connected with ‘good’ and ‘bad Granted that we know the meaning of the terms, what things or states or acts have as a matter of fact the character ‘good and what have the character ‘bad and in what degrees? And further, what is the greatest good of all, the ideal which we should all be seeking? What is the best kind of life that a man can lead? What is the supreme end that he should try to realize in his individual life? And again, what is the best possible kind of human world, the ideal world which we should all be striving to make?

Then there is the problem of beauty. What do we really mean when we say that a picture or a piece of music is beautiful? Do we simply mean that it pleases us; or that it pleases those whom we consider best able to judge; or that it has a unique character, which, even if no one admired it, it would still have; or that it is so arranged that, as a whole, it satisfies certain very special and subtle needs of human beings?

Such are the problems which philosophers have to face. They all turn out to be extremely difficult; and though some of them have been discussed for thousands of years, none of them has been finally solved. This lack of definite results has made some people think that philosophy is a waste of time. But they are wrong, for two reasons. First, it is not really true that philosophers merely ‘go round in circles and never get nearer the truth’. It would be more accurate to say that, though indeed they do often seem to go round and round from one kind of theory to another, and finally arrive back where they were, yet as a matter of fact they move in a sort of spiral, and may actually be coming nearer and nearer to the central truths. The point is that, so long as past philosophy is remembered, many of the mistakes that were made in the past and then exposed, will be avoided in the future. That, at any rate, is a real advance.

In our day the philosophers are much less influential than the scientists. This is partly because they cannot produce startling discoveries that make good ‘copy’ for the newspapers, and partly because, in a commercial age such as ours, philosophy seems to most people a waste of time, since it cannot increase the material wealth of man. But philosophers are not really without influence. In every age the exploring philosophers of that age, working more or less apart from their fellow men, do much to shape the common culture of the next age. They are channels through which the changing circumstances of the race take effect upon abstract thought, to produce ideas and ideals which will dominate men’s minds for good or ill in the coming age. One has only to think of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, William James, and in our own day Bergson, Croce, Bertrand Russell, Whitehead, to realize that philosophers take effect on culture. The least of these has moulded the minds of thousands who may not even have heard of their names.

We cannot all give our main attention to philosophy. But also, just as we must all be to some extent artists, scientists and historians, we must all be to some extent philosophers. Every intelligent and serious-minded person inevitably must try to see things whole, so far as he can. He must also try to make all his most important ideas as clear as possible. He cannot help trying to decide for himself what is really good, and what is the best kind of life, and so on. He must do so, partly because, if he does not he will live in a random, undirected way, or a crudely misdirected way, with no clear aim, or none that can stand criticism. But also he must inevitably philosophize because at man’s most alive level of being it is as much his nature to philosophize as it is the nature of a wolf to hunt. Philosophy, in spite of its seeming failure, is one of the supremely satisfying and distinctively human mental activities.

The importance of philosophy is not only private. Its use is not merely that it gives exercise to the capacities of the awakened mind. It has also a social importance. Plato may have been mistaken in making the philosophers the supreme rulers of his ideal society, but only philosophy can say clearly what the aim of government should be. And philosophy alone can discover, little by little, as the ages advance, the true aim of the human species, of the whole enterprise of human life on this planet. Even to-day something extremely important can be said on that subject. But the slowly dawning idea has still to be thought out so exactly and stated so compellingly that it will be fit to win the allegiance of every intelligent human being.

B. THE NECESSITY OF SCEPTICISM

I SHALL NOW describe the general upshot of philosophy, as I see it, in our strange, uncomfortable, transitional age. No doubt many philosophers would disagree with one point or other of my statement; but none, I think, would entirely reject the whole spirit of it. This would be done only by persons who have no real capacity for philosophy, who cannot even sincerely try to take all aspects of our experience into account.

The first effect of the study of philosophy to-day is to make a man sceptical. He sets out with all sorts of confident and comfortable beliefs, and one by one they are found to have no reasonable justification. The process of stripping oneself of confident beliefs is curiously like the process of learning to do with fewer clothes. We may have been brought up to wear a thick and extensive covering of woven stuffs for warmth and decency. By the time we are grown up, we are so used to this burden that if we shed a garment we are miserable, and may even fall ill. Yet it may be that we are really over-clad, that all the while we were hampered by the failure of our bodies to rid themselves of excessive warmth. If only we could safely make the change to less clothes, perhaps we should be much better in the long run, much healthier, hardier, more vigorous, less frightened for our health, more able to enjoy life. As with clothes, so with beliefs. They are warm, comfortable, protective garments for the mind, but for spiritual health we should wear as few as possible, and they should be of the flimsiest texture. When they become threadbare they should be discarded. New ones can be chosen if necessary. We are mostly brought up to wear too heavy a clothing of beliefs; and when philosophy makes us discard many of them, we suffer keenly. We are chilled through and through. We feel indecently naked. We are pained by the indignation of our well-clad friends. But if we persevere, and if we effect the change wisely, we discover after a while that we are living more keenly, that our minds are less hampered and more active, that we can be completely honest with ourselves without fear, that in shedding false beliefs and the unfulfillable desires which support them or depend on them, we learn to realize more clearly what is truly desirable.

Any one who studies philosophy very soon finds out that he cannot form any clear idea as to what he himself is. Is he anything more than the stream of his own passing thoughts, desires, sensations, and so on? Or is he just a body which performs these mental actions? Or is he after all something enduring and mental which deserves to be called a soul? The only answer is that all these views are incredible for one reason or another. He does seem to be something more than a stream of consciousness and more than a purely and strictly physical body; but what he is, no man can say. The evidence that he is an eternal soul, like the evidence that he is not an eternal soul, has scarcely any weight. But the loss of eternity may not distress him, for the more he studies philosophy, the less may he desire to be an eternal soul. Personal immortality, in any sense worthy of the name, may come to seem to him unimportant, and perhaps even obnoxious.

We all prize human personality very highly. We are all, on occasion, revolted by the thought that a loved person may one day cease to exist. But philosophy, by making us constantly strive to see things in their universal setting, may persuade us to feel that the true office or function of a person in the whole of things is essentially a passing function, like the function of a melody in music. We may come to feel, in our most awakened moments, that the only kind of immortality desirable for our beloveds, and for ourselves, is, not to continue for ever, but to be ‘for all eternity’ a completed theme, or melody, having its due place in the music of the cosmos. It may, indeed, be that after death we pass into some other world, or other cosmos, or ‘order of being’, and that there we carry forward the adventure of personal development and social creation. There may be as many such ‘orders of being’ as there are grains of sand, and the least of us may have a part to play in every one of them. More likely is it that, though there is, indeed, such a multiplicity of ‘orders of being’, we have no part at all in them. However this may be, the desire that we, little somnolent and blundering spirits, should have a vast and glorious future seems, after all, a trivial desire.

Little as the philosopher knows about himself, he knows no more about the world around him. So far as it is revealed to him, it appears as a mass of contradictions. Whatever it really is, it cannot possibly be simply what it seems. Eager to find the truth, he loses himself in a maze of theories about the status of sensed characters and of physical objects. If he was inclined to think that the most real thing about him was his body, he has now to discover that no one can tell him what a body is. Some say that the whole physical universe, including the stars and a man’s own body, is a figment of his mind. Others say that a body is ‘a system of possible sense data’ in six dimensions. Others are content to think of it as a dance of electrons; but what electrons are, they cannot say. The upshot is that the thing he thought of as a body is as unreal as the thing he thought of as a mind; and that if body and mind were real substances, there could not be any intercourse between them. Perhaps it would be safer to say that body and mind are both real enough in some sense, but no one knows what sense. And the queer relation between them suggests that they are not two things but one, or two aspects of one thing.

When our philosopher inquires into the nature of God, he discovers that though no one can disprove the existence of a personal God, neither can any one give any clear reason for believing in him, or even form more than a wildly self-contradictory idea of the meaning of the words ‘personal God As for the more detailed dogmas of the Christian religion, though of course the philosopher can see a kind of remote metaphorical truth in some of them, his philosophical study makes it utterly incredible that they should be true in the sense claimed for them. Indeed, if he has taken philosophy seriously to heart, he probably comes to feel that they are not merely incredible, but in many cases puerile and unlovely. Yet he may well feel also that in the Christian religion, and in the Buddhist religion too, there is something more important than any dogma; and that if Christians could only shed their stuffy clothing of beliefs the true spirit of their master might revive in them, and a Christianity not of doctrine but of pure worship and of conduct might yet play a great part in the modern world.

Perhaps the most disheartening of all the findings of our philosopher would be that the very activity of thinking is unreliable. Not only is each particular department of knowledge riddled with its own special contradictions, and hemmed in on every side by the vast unknowable, but also reasoning itself is shot through and through with falsity. Logical principles turn out to be much less trustworthy than they seemed, or rather they are extremely liable to be misused, and thus to betray the thinker. Almost the whole of human knowledge is at bottom not strictly knowledge but more or less shrewd guesswork. Almost every truth is true not absolutely and of necessity but probably, and with an unknown degree of doubtfulness and falsity. Not only so, but any particular thought, experienced by a particular thinker, may, it seems, be vitiated by some obscure prejudice or other which inclines him irrationally to one set of arguments rather than another, and is completely hidden from his attention. Even this is not all. Unwitting desires and hungers, thwarted and pent up since childhood, and still puerile in character, may be the really effective motives behind his most sacred loyalties and admirations.

C. THE POSITIVE OUTCOME

IT MAY WELL seem that philosophy is an utterly barren and hopeless pursuit, and that we should be wiser to exercise our intelligence on cross-word puzzles.

Yet at the very least it is better to know that one does not know than to believe falsely that one does. That is at least one bit of positive knowledge. Philosophy, moreover, should make a man tolerant and receptive toward those who disagree with him, and ready to consider their arguments. On the other hand, it should make him critical of all confident beliefs, whether in himself or others. It should make him both eager to have insight into every kind of belief, and also relentlessly critical of all beliefs.

I do not think that if a man is earnest with philosophy it should paralyse him. The outcome of philosophy even in this bewildered age is not only bewilderment. Some facts remain unshaken even after the fiercest philosophical scrutiny. And some of them are all-important facts.

To begin at the beginning, there really is something! And that something may be thought of as ‘the world’ and ‘I though it is not always clear where the line should be drawn between the two, and conceivably the distinction is not final.

In various ways ‘I’

‘know’ the ‘world’. A tiny fraction of it I know by direct observation or acquaintance through my senses. Of the data of pure sensation there can be no doubt. But most of my knowledge of the world is reached indirectly, and is certainly shot through and through by error. Yet my reasoning is not in principle doomed to failure. It starts with the solid data of sense, and if it works cautiously, and does not mistake probability for certainty, it may discover vast fields of extremely probable knowledge.

The world, then, contains at least in some manner or other the multitudinous and diverse and fascinating events which are revealed to me in sensation. Whether these sensed events are characters of the world beyond my body, or characters of my body itself, may be disputed. But if they are characters of my body, my body must include the whole known universe. In this case it can scarcely be called ‘my body’, which is known as a very minute thing within the universe. If sensed characters are characters of my mind, then my mind must include the universe. This theory cannot be disproved. But it is incredible and unnecessary. At the very least the characters given in sensation are distinct from my activity of sensing them. And in all probability they are all of a piece with a vast field of objective existences which lie beyond my reach. Philosophy cannot deprive me of the richness of my perceived world, nor of the exhilarating experience of being in touch with at least the fringes of a vast and intricate reality.

Almost certainly the world also contains a very great deal more than is revealed to my senses, or could be revealed to my senses. But how the characters that are revealed are related to the immensity that is not revealed is very doubtful. Anyhow, the world does contain ‘somethings’, or patterns of events, which are known by me very imperfectly as trees, chairs, storms, human bodies and minds, nations, past eras of mankind, stars, galaxies, and so on. These things are not mere figments of my mind. However imperfectly I grasp them, what I grasp really is at bottom a tissue of actual factors in the world.

In the multitude of things that make up the world as I know it I can detect likenesses and differences. Things can be similar in respect of certain characters and different in respect of others. There really is something identical in all stones, in respect of which they differ from all cats, days, noises, and even from all lumps of mud or metal. But just what that identity really is, I may never clearly apprehend. It must be admitted that this theory of the objectivity of ‘universal characters’ is denied by many philosophers whom, on other accounts, I greatly respect. According to some the mind itself simply ‘projects’ characters on a characterless world. But to me it seems incredible that there should be nothing identical in all stones, and no objective difference between all stones and all cats.

Another fact which survives all philosophical criticism is this. The events of the world really do hang together in definite patterns and causal sequences. Up to a point at least, things can be depended upon to act regularly. My pen goes on being a pen; it does not change into a snake. And in some sense ‘I’ can ‘control’ it. Within limits I can take effect upon the course of events in the world. Or, to be philosophically more accurate, within limits, certain muscular events in my body do take a course such that certain ends which I desire in the external world are attained.

Turning to myself, I may at least feel sure that I am a real factor in the universe. Heaven knows what I am, but I am not nothing. Whatever I am, I am to some extent aware of a world and of my relations with it. I know it and strive with it. I have direct acquaintance not only with the characters of the world revealed by my senses, but also with my own experiencing. Not only do I sense, think, believe, desire, fear, and so on, but also I am aware of doing so. I have many simple and many subtle capacities for action, and I delight in exercising them. When they are thwarted I am distressed. I delight, too, in many features of the world which fit my capacities, and I loathe many that violate them.

I cannot be absolutely sure that there are any selves besides my own self, but it is extremely probable that there are. The world around me almost certainly contains many human persons, and also less-conscious animals. Some of the human persons I myself encounter, but most are not even names to me. I cannot know other selves with the directness that I know colours and noises. I cannot know their mental life with the directness with which I know my own. Nevertheless, I can be much more sure of the existence of the selves which I call my neighbours than of prehistoric beasts or of atoms or of galaxies. And the selves that I know intimately are on the whole the most vivid things in the world to me. They are very diverse, and it is very hard to learn their true characters. Some of those whom I know I also like or admire. Some on the whole I dislike. A few I love. More accurately every person whom I encounter I both like and dislike, for different attributes in him or her, and in relation to different needs of my own. But in many cases, either liking or disliking preponderates. Even those whom I love I also hate to some extent. They are sure to have some attributes which conflict with my ideal or with my personal needs. But in some cases love overwhelmingly preponderates.

Even though I am often selfish and unkind to those whom I love, I do recognize that they are intrinsically good, that they have a beauty and excellence of their own, which moves me deeply, and rightly claims my service. This is one of the most important facts for philosophy. Of almost equal philosophical importance is the fact that even towards those whom I do not love I feel the same kind of obligation in varying degrees. Toward myself also, as a person having vital capacities, I feel obligation to make the best of myself. I recognize unmistakably that the fulfilling of the vital capacity of persons in the most awakened way is absolutely and intrinsically good. Sceptical philosophy, by clearing away many false values, makes this value stand out most emphatically.

Another thing stands out clearly when philosophy has done its destructive work, fn the light of history and the light of evolution man appears to have had a long and varied career. He is definitely more mentally awakened than his brute ancestors; and though biologically he is probably no more developed to-day than he was in any earlier historical age, his circumstances have on the whole enabled him to make fuller use of his capacities than was formerly possible. In the light of present world-conditions, however, it is terribly clear that mankind is in a very confused and precarious state; and that the great majority of human beings, far from sharing in such advancement as has been made, are but little more fortunate than abject serfs. But there is a real, though slender, hope that within a century all servitude and penury may be abolished. Finally, in the light of psychology and philosophy itself, the present human nature or human mentality appears as a half-formed thing, emerging from brute mentality, but as yet a merely brutish approximation to true human nature. There is little reason to suppose that the human species will automatically develop into a higher biological type. But by deliberate control of social conditions man might even now turn himself into an incomparably finer being. And some day he may even succeed in purging and improving his innate constitution.

The philosopher can see fairly clearly the bare outlines of the true human nature which should be the goal of world-policy, though neither he nor any one else in our day can attain it. When he contemplates it, and when he realizes that, with social reconstruction of the world and with sound education, even creatures like ourselves could be made far more human, far more awakened, and happy, he cannot but earnestly desire that this work should be begun. He recognizes also an imperious command that he and his fellows should devote their lives to this supreme undertaking. But being only a philosopher and not a man of action he will probably be unable to do anything but talk about it.

I believe there is one other very important fact about life which survives the most rigorous criticism of philosophy, though it comes out in a form extremely different from that with which it went in. Some people would call this fact ‘religious experience I am now going to have the audacity to talk about this very difficult matter.

XI. RELIGION

A. SHAM RELIGION AND GENUINE RELIGION

WE HAVE BEEN inquiring into the capacities of men, and into the true aim of human life on this planet. We had to distinguish between capacities which men have in common with other mammals and capacities which deserve to be called distinctively human. We saw that, for true well-being, both the ‘animal’ and the distinctively human capacities should have expression; but that a man’s whole life, and the life of the whole human world, should be so organized as to give the fullest possible expression to the most distinctively human, or awakened, capacities. We have considered in detail some of the main kinds of distinctively human pursuits.

Now many people would say that the most important of all these activities has yet to be considered, namely religion. This kind of activity, they would say, is the most awakened of all, and the only activity in which man proves himself more than a rather intelligent animal. They claim also that what is wrong with the world to-day is that most people have lost all true religion. Some even claim that religion alone, by which they generally mean the Christian religion, can induce men to behave considerately toward one another. Christianity, alone, they believe, can turn our world of jealous individuals and warring groups into a single world-society, knit together by love of the one God.

Others tell us that religion is man’s greatest folly and disgrace. It is the expression, they say, of nothing more exalted in him than a desire for personal comfort ‘in eternity Moved by this desire, perhaps unwittingly, he persuades himself to believe all sorts of irrational doctrines which should be incredible and are unlovely and ridiculous. These beliefs prevent men from reaching full mental stature, and often lead them into terrified persecution of unbelievers. Religion, according to this view, is responsible for half the cruelty and bloodshed of the past, and to-day it is one of the greatest forces making for barbarism and checking the mental awakening of the race.

What is the truth about this long-standing bitter dispute? Many members of each party, so long as they are not enraged against the other party, are capable of proving themselves admirable human beings. Neither party is to be dismissed off-hand as unworthy of serious attention. Each one of us has to face this problem and come to some decision as best he may. We cannot simply trust to authority, whether sacerdotal or scientific. Inevitably we have to judge between authorities. In order to do so we have to take into account, so far as possible, all points of view. I shall submit a view which, though in all probability it is inadequate, should, I think, be considered.

I shall first argue that there is important truth on both sides. There is, I believe, something, which may be named by the misleading and debased word ‘religion’, and is the most distinctively human or awakened activity of man. But clearly there is something else, which is also called ‘religion’, and is his greatest folly and shame. One might almost say that ‘religion’ is both man’s crown and his dunce’s cap. It is the ring through his nose, by which he may be led hither and thither, and the mask which he wears to hide his brutishness. But also, in the other sense of the word ‘religion’, it is, I believe, a window through which he may see something of the superhuman, and through which he may be said, in a very special sense, to ‘have access to eternity’.

The truth is that the word ‘religion’ means several very different kinds of activity. Some ‘religion’ is rather crude, but harmless. Some is both crude and extremely damaging to the individual and to the world. Some is a more awakened kind of activity, but in the main unwholesome in its effects. Some is perhaps the most alive, the most spiritually awakened kind of activity possible to members of our half-formed species. ‘Religion’ of this kind is, I should say, in a sense the true goal of all human living. Moreover, excellent in itself, it is also absolutely necessary for the proper organization of a man’s life and the life of the world. But ‘religion’ of the base and damaging kind is perhaps the worst of all humanity’s plagues.

Since the word ‘religion’ has such very different meanings, perhaps the best plan would be to discard it altogether. Unfortunately this is impossible. People will still go on talking about ‘religion’, and meaning different things by it. All that can be done is to distinguish clearly between the two main senses of the word, between the sham, pernicious kind of religion and the genuine, life-giving kind of religion. This can be done fairly sharply in theory; but in practice it is often very difficult to discover whether a seemingly religious person is genuinely religious or not, and whether a seemingly irreligious person is what he seems to be. For those who are most truly religious are often so nauseated by the prevailing sham religion that they are eager to be thought irreligious. Another source of confusion lies in the fact that the two utterly different activities may even be carried out by the same person, and almost at the same time.

The sham kind of religion is at bottom, I believe, always an expression of the desire to ‘save one’s soul’, or to curry favour with God or the gods, so that one may in some sense or other secure happiness, in this life or another. The genuine kind of religion I should describe as a self-forgetful love, or admiration, or worship, of something which is felt to be very ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’, and as in some manner superhuman. Religion of this kind may be worship of a god who is thought of as distinct from man; or it may be worship of a universe which includes man but is more admirable than man, or it may be ‘dumb’ worship of something vividly experienced but passing all understanding.

At this stage I shall not discuss the question whether such admiration or worship is ever justified, whether there is in fact anything superhuman which deserves to be worshipped. At present I am only trying to distinguish between two mental activities, one of which is a sham in the sense that it pretends to be more exalted than it is, while the other, even if it is deluded, is none the less, I believe, a very clearly awakened activity, both from the point of view of the psychologist, studying human behaviour scientifically, and also in the actual ‘feel’ or experience of it.

When men are behaving in the sham-religious way, their main motive, witting or unwitting, is self-preservation. With a view to securing prosperity in this world or another they demand and find some simple code or set of rules which they can keep without further thought, secure in their belief that if they do as God tells them he will reward them. Some, however, of those who practise religion of the sham kind (though these might not call themselves religious) are unable to believe in immortality, and so they cannot look for happiness hereafter; but instead they hope that by keeping certain rules they will be counted among the virtuous, will prove themselves, so to speak, spiritual aristocrats, of finer temper than other men. Their motive is at bottom the same as the motive of the heaven-seekers.

Religion of the base kind is indeed a plague. It is handed on by tradition from generation to generation. It is widespread in every land. Men who suffer from it tend to become self-important, bigoted, narrow-minded, hard-hearted, careless of everything but the salvation of their own mean souls. In times when this kind of religion has a real hold over men there is small hope of remaking the world; for religious people of this sort do not at heart care about the misery of others. Sometimes they even persuade themselves that misery (in others) is after all a blessing, since it will be recompensed in heaven. This soul-saving kind of religion has perhaps not quite such a hold on men as formerly, at least in Europe. But sham religion is still one of the great forces in the world preventing men from rising to a more awakened mentality.

Since unfortunately the language of religious leaders has often lent colour to the view that religion is nothing but a way of saving oneself from some kind of damnation, many people who are at heart genuinely religious are led astray into the belief that the root of their religion is after all the desire for personal salvation. Thus in the churches, European and Asiatic, there are many genuinely religious persons in whom religion is distorted by the influence of their church. If they could escape from the outworn conventions of their church, they would become more simply and spontaneously religious.

The only genuine kind of religion is sheer admiration, intense and deeply rooted admiration, either of God or of gods or of the universe or at least of something more than human beings. Let us not even yet try to decide whether anything in the universe deserves such admiration. Let us merely try to discover what kind of activity this genuinely religious activity really is. The old word for such religious admiration is ‘worship’. Unfortunately the word ‘worship’ is as often misused as the word ‘religion’. It was once a good word; but to-day it calls up for many of us images of hymn-books and collection plates, and the whole gloomy business of soulsaving. Yet if we could strip it of these associations, ‘worship’ would be the right word.

When a man rises to this activity of religious admiration he is not concerned with saving himself in any sense whatever. He is not interested in himself as a particular person, either to save himself or to sacrifice himself. The only shred of selfishness which is left in him is a desire in some way to serve what he so deeply and delightedly admires; or at least to express his admiration, to make some kind of gesture of loyalty. This impulse is natural and right, but it may snare him. He may be led to care more for the satisfaction of serving than for that which he serves, more for the joy of worshipping than for that which he worships. And so, little by little, he may slide into the false religion, interesting himself less directly in his God, or the universe, or whatever it is that he worships, than in his own need to be united with the admired thing. This desire to find some kind of union with the object which is worshipped is natural and right, so long as it does not hamper the impulse of sheer worship. It is right; but it is the least important side of genuine religion. And the only satisfaction that it ought to demand is the sense of union which admiration itself affords, the sense of being one in spirit with the admired thing. It is tempting to say that the climax of worship is the glad acceptance of the fact that one’s ‘God’ has no need whatever to be worshipped.

B. EFFECTS OF GENUINE RELIGION

FEW CAN BE genuinely religious every day or for long at a time. Even on those rare occasions when we do achieve this action of spontaneous worship, the sham kind of religion inevitably steals in upon us very soon in some disguised form. For even at the best of times most of us never come more than half-awake. Many, perhaps, sleep out their whole lives without any inkling of the truly religious experience. But when a man really has the experience, he feels, with strange conviction, that in it he rises to his highest reach of vitality. Also, in this experience he seems to know something about the universe, or about ‘existence’, in general; but something which, if he tries to describe it, he almost certainly misdescribes. The only safe thing for him to say is that he finds himself confronted with a kind of overwhelming beauty or excellence invisible at other times. Yet even this is really not at all a safe thing to say; for it implies that the universe, or objective existence, in general, can have a character of intrinsic beauty which does not depend for its existence on our admiration. And many thinkers scoff at this idea.

The truth is that ‘beauty’ and ‘excellence’ are both inappropriate words. But what other is more suitable? ‘Goodness’ is even worse. ‘Perfection’ suggests symmetry and neatness, which are certainly not intended. ‘Intrinsic rightness’ might serve, if it did not imply something merely moral. There is, indeed, no word to describe the quality or character which confronts us in the genuine religious experience. All that can be said about it is that it is just that unique quality or character which impels us to worship.

Any one who has experienced this religious admiration, or impulse of praise, inevitably desires it to control his whole life. He cannot be always seeing that unique beauty (what better word is there?). But he wishes it to be always present at least ‘in the back of his mind’, influencing his behaviour, guiding him. Unfortunately, since he is only human, only a stage in advance of his sub-human ancestors, he is certain to wander from the path that he lays down for himself. But, with whatever strength he has, he will try to keep hold of his vision and to act in accordance with it.

Just how, or in what direction, his sense of the beauty inherent in all existence will influence his conduct will depend on how he interprets it. And this will depend on his own temper and circumstances. In some cases, although his religious experience is itself a genuine experience, his mind may have been so warped by circumstances that he grossly misinterprets his experience. Thus it may actually become an evil influence in his life, and through him an evil influence in the world.

But far more often religion, if it is indeed of the rare and genuine kind, makes a man a better man and a better member of the world-community than he could have been without it. Whether he interprets his experience as a vision of God, or of the world, or in some other way, it somehow quickens and intensifies all his other experiences, and especially those experiences which lie upon the limit of our powers. Thus, for instance, he comes to realize his fellow human beings more vividly, and is therefore more generous. He finds himself more able to rise above self-complacency and self-interest, and also above personal envy and hate. For always, at the back of his mind, there is a recollection, clear or vague, of the incomparably greater, more beautiful thing which he worships. I do not mean that he will always be a model of generosity and humility. If he happens to be of a rather selfish disposition, he will probably continue to have many lapses. But his recollection of the beauty that he has seen will at least be a very powerful force in his life strengthening all his most awakened capacities.

If his religion is genuine, it should have another effect also. Since the beauty that he has experienced is felt to be in some sense superhuman, he should be helped to regard all things human with a certain detachment. He should find himself able to rise above the self-complacency and self-interest even of the human race as a whole. For instance, if he interprets his religious experience as a vision of the majesty and beauty of God, he will be able to regard even the greatest calamities of mankind with a fundamental peace of mind. This, indeed, is the danger of genuine religion, that it may lead a man merely to indulge his own need to worship, and so to neglect his fellows. This is one of the many ways in which the genuine may turn into the false religion. But in the perfectly religious man, in the true saint, this absolute inner peace and worship do not weaken, but actually strengthen, the will to take part with the right against the wrong, the good against the evil. But  what seems right, and what good, will of course depend on the saint’s particular experience of the world. It may lead him to burn heretics so as to save the souls of others, or it may lead him to devote his life to helping the unfortunate.

Now religion of the genuine kind is the world’s greatest need to-day. The old religious creeds are losing their hold upon men, and will continue to do so. It is true that millions of persons even in Europe and America still cling to the old doctrines and practices; but the number for whom Christianity is a vitalizing influence is probably small and decreasing. Also, those who in our day are still able to accept the Christian doctrines literally, and not merely as a first approximation to one aspect of the truth, are curiously simple souls, who, though genuinely religious, are somehow incapable of grasping what the peculiar spiritual problem of the modern world really is. They are relics left over from a less perplexed and a happier age. What is true of the West will perhaps in a few decades be true of the East, unless the whole tendency of Westernization ceases.

The old gods can no longer call forth in the more awakened kind of human being the old activity of religious admiration. The result is that the best minds of our age are deeply unfulfilled. They have a certain spiritual capacity which they cannot properly exercise. Therefore they are miserable, not necessarily with clear consciousness of their misery, but obscurely. Often they do not know what they lack. They may, for instance, have been so disgusted by false religion that they refuse to recognize their need as a religious need at all. And since they do not know what it is that is wrong with them, they blame their parents or society or their digestions or the universe. But what is wrong with them is simply that, though they have outgrown the old God, they cannot discover beyond him something of more compelling excellence.

The result of this lack of religion in the modern world is widespread disillusionment and world-weariness. There is a disheartening sense that after all nothing matters. It is agreed, of course, that all human beings should have the opportunity of fulfilling whatever capacities they happen to have; but since one man is as good as another, there is felt to be no reason why any one should sacrifice himself for another, still less for the social good, or for the founding of a better world. Consequently, most of us are concerned almost entirely with securing happiness for ourselves or those near and dear to us; and the policies of governments are tethered to the cynical, yet short-sighted, self-regard of the populace.

It is true that Communism in Russia, and to an increasing extent elsewhere, is a not wholly ineffective substitute for religion, since it can inspire men with a vivid desire to live and die in a cause which is felt to be more important than their own well-being or even the happiness of their contemporaries. It can make them try to devote their lives to the founding of a happier world for future generations. But this ideal is only sufficient in times of revolutionary change. When the new world has been established, or is well on the way to being established, it must find some aim more compelling than the preservation of its own happiness. Amongst the Fascists and Nazis also there must be some tincture of genuine religious feeling, though ludicrously misguided, and entangled in the ideals of barbaric tribalism and romantic ruthlessness. Indeed, as I suggested at the outset, the one disinterested motive of the Fascist would seem to be a confused protest against what he conceives to be the ‘irreligion’ of the Bolsheviks.

Clearly one of the most urgent tasks of to-day is to examine the genuine religious experience as calmly and precisely as possible, in order to find out what bearing, if any, it has upon our modern perplexity and our modern distresses. Even the world-economic problem, which is extremely urgent, demands the solution of the religious problem. For seemingly the economic problem will never be solved until we can outgrow our sentiments of economic individualism and nationalism; and this we shall not do until we have obtained a clear sight of something more admirable than the aims of these sentiments. Many, of course, would say that the ideal of making a unified and happier world is in itself a sufficient ideal to control our economic and nationalistic passions, and that nothing of the nature of a superhuman allegiance is needed. Not long ago I should have accepted this view. But there can be no doubt that superhuman worship has been in the past a far mightier power in men’s hearts than loyalty to mankind is to-day. And there can be no doubt that, if religion in some credible and exalting form were to be discovered by the modern generation, it would sweep the world, or at any rate the Western world, far more effectively than internationalism or even Communism.

Pure humanism, or the acceptance of Man as the final object of admiration and loyalty, is after all in essence loyalty to our own nature, though perfected; and as such it is apt to seem prosaic and tiresome. Man has undoubtedly a very strong impulse to bow before a superhuman beauty; and it is when he believes himself to have glimpsed such a beauty that he is roused to live in the most alive way.

What the modern world needs, then, is indeed religion. But if, as a matter of fact, we can find no justification for worshipping anything superhuman, we must honestly do without religion. To deceive ourselves by false though comfortable beliefs is to thwart one of our most awakened capacities, namely the capacity of dispassionate observation and understanding. If, as a matter of fact, there is nothing finer than man, let us at least try to make the best of human nature.

But is there nothing admirable in the universe except ourselves, the human race? Millions of people have answered the question by saying, ‘There is God’. Mil lions of others as confidently declare, ‘There is no God, there is nothing admirable but man ‘. Millions more cannot give any confident answer at all.

I shall presently try to describe briefly one kind of answer which, as it seems to me, is now very tentatively beginning to emerge here and there in the modern world. According to this view there is indeed something more than man for us to worship, yet something very different from any ordinary idea of God. I shall first try to describe how, so far as I can see, it came about that men developed the capacity for religious activity, or, as it is generally called, religious experience. In doing this I shall at the same time show how easy it is to ‘explain away’ the whole of religion by pointing to its psychological and historical sources. Some anthropologists and historians would no doubt disagree with the sketch that I shall give; for I shall purposely put the case against religion in its most sweeping and devastating form. Later I shall try to show that though some such explanation does undermine a great deal of so-called religion, and is therefore very important, it does not really touch the central fact of worship. You can no more explain away religion by describing its sources than you can explain away a man by saying that he was once a mere fertilized germ cell.

C. HOW MEN INVENT GODS

THE MOTIVE OF pure worship has probably existed in some form ever since there were men; but in the earliest religions it was not clearly distinguished from the much commoner motive of seeking divine favours. Nearly all human beings in all ages have been brought up to respect their elders, and especially their fathers and the great men of their tribe or nation. From the beginning of mankind’s career, children and young people must have felt for their fathers and for all powerful adults not only fear and envy but also sometimes genuine admiration for their strength and skill and majesty. Fathers and the great ones were mighty and vengeful, and had to be constantly propitiated, so that they would display their more kindly and helpful qualities; but also they were admired. Thus in childhood human beings formed deep-rooted habits of seeking favours from the mighty; but also they formed habits of admiration.

No doubt the respectful behaviour of the young toward their elders was largely the result of punishment and approval. But also it seems extremely probable that the young, who were relatively weak, timid, and inexperienced, did spontaneously admire adults for their strength, courage and prowess. Hero-worship is a very common characteristic of the young, and is one of the roots of genuine religious admiration.

These habits of favour-begging and disinterested hero-worship, which were founded in childhood, persisted as capacities or needs of the grown man or woman. But the fathers and tribal chieftains who were the first objects of respect no longer seemed so very wonderful. The habits therefore were directed upon other things which appeared more worthy of fear and admiration. In early days men felt themselves to be surrounded by vindictive and benevolent powers. Religion was in the main a careful fawning upon those powers, an elaborate technique of propitiation. Sometimes what was fawned upon was some particular river or mountain or tree or some specially important kind of animal. Sometimes men propitiated the more general spirits of rain, flood, wind, sun, fire, and so on. Sometimes it was a man’s own dead father, or the dead heroes and founders of the tribe, that claimed praise and sacrifice. Those who in childhood had formed such strong habits of awe toward living fathers and chiefs must needs believe in the continued existence of these great ones; who, since they were still by habit feared and respected, were thought of as still wielding dangerous powers, though unseen.

Even in this early stage the genuine religious admiration of men seems to have moved in two very different directions, toward the non-human environment and toward the ideal of human personality. The forces of nature were, of course, personified, made human; but also they were thought of as alien, careless of man, relentless. Thus early began the two great and often opposed motives of genuine religion, on the one hand loyalty to the ideal of fully developed human nature, and on the other a more obscure, more perplexing worship of the nonhuman world, or of the principles which were manifested in it. In time this side of religion was to develop into the Greek respect for fate and the Christian respect for divine law.

Primitive men seem to have feared and respected something else besides natural forces and splendid persons, namely the tribe, the great many-bodied whole of which each man felt himself to be a member. Indeed, long before men had reached any clear self-consciousness, they were probably subject to the spell of the herd. And later this also appeared as something to be propitiated, something which seemed to have a sort of will of its own which one must obey both for safety’s sake, and also because somehow it entered into one, took possession, dominated one’s own will. To go against the tribe’s will, or against the well-worn custom of the tribe, gave one a sense not merely of loneliness but of disgrace, of having offended against something holy.

Yet another thing seems to have moved early men to fear and awe, namely their own sexual power, and the mystery and magical charm of the other sex. Men, like the apes, are creatures having excess of sexual energy. The father of the family and the lords of the tribe had therefore always to be jealously guarding their women against the lusty young. Chastity in women was sanctified by tribal custom. The young men, fretted by their unsatisfied sexuality, came to see sex in everything, and came to regard sex as a specially holy and specially dangerous thing. To be a full-grown man was to have full sexual potency and sexual rights. And so the gods also must be sexual, and sex itself must somehow be a god, or even the god.

Besides man’s own sexual potency, there was the strange beauty of women. This also was a supreme excellence, and must be divine. And woman as the mother, who brought new human beings into life and was the source of tenderness in every man’s childhood, she also had to be worshipped.

When at last it was realized that fathers also played a part in the conceiving of babies, sex came to seem even more important than formerly, and was often regarded as the very essence of divine creativeness; so that even to make the land bear crops the sex god had to be invoked.

Men made their gods in a confused and dreamlike way, so that the idea of a god was often self-contradictory and unintelligible. This did not matter. A god was not a thing to reason about, but a thing to fear and worship. His incomprehensibility made him all the more awful. There were certain persons (medicine men, wizards, priests) who were thought to have special knowledge of the gods, and special powers of interpreting their will and propitiating them. There is no need to suppose that such men were all charlatans. Many of them were probably more advanced in self-consciousness than their neighbours, and seemed to have an uncanny insight into human nature. They probably also picked up a certain amount of simple medical knowledge. These ‘different’ persons were apt to claim that it was dangerous for ordinary folk to try to see the gods or to understand the holy mysteries. Thus these professional wise men increased their own power.

But human beings after all are more or less intelligent animals, and they were bound to use their intelligence to some extent in contemplating their gods. Moreover, as time passed, and life became on the whole more orderly and safe, men began to feel differently about the characters that a god must have in order to be truly admirable, worshipful. And so they gradually remade their gods. Earlier, a god was little more than a glorified chieftain or hero with magical powers. He hunted, and made love, and fought with his fellow gods. But in time men were inclined to think that one god, who was the father-god of their own tribe, was the greatest god of all, and that their own tribe was his chosen people. They conceived him as their law-giver, and as being not only mighty and vengeful but also just in his dealings with his own people. For at this stage, when society was beginning to be secure, they had come to admire law and order and justice more than the virtues of the courageous warrior.

As time passed, and the tribes had more intercourse with one another, men began to think of their own particular tribal father-god as being not merely the greatest of all gods but the one and only true God. Either they claimed that the gods of other peoples did not exist, save as illusions in men’s minds; or they allowed that the other peoples were indeed worshipping the one true God, under a different name, and revealed under a different form. But the name which they themselves gave him, and the form which they themselves worshipped, they held to be God’s true name and form.

Little by little the prophets and religious leaders came to endow God with new powers. In fact, they said he was not merely mighty but almighty, and also all-knowing, and the creator of all things. Men and beasts, rivers, fires and stars, behaved always according to the law of the nature which God in his wisdom had given them and ever maintained in them.

This at least was one idea that men had about their almighty God. But sometimes they said that though he was almighty he had seen fit to give men freedom to obey or disobey his law according to their own caprice. This they said because it seemed to them that they could as a matter of fact choose freely; and because they preferred to think of themselves as free men, and not slaves, even to their own nature. Moreover, they wished to satisfy their desire for vengeance by blaming and punishing those who infringed the customs of society; so they had to believe that the wrong-doers could have done otherwise.

Since it was also claimed that God was perfectly good, his worshippers were faced with the problem of showing how it could be that he had given man the power to do evil. They declared that he did so in order that some at least should attain the supreme good; and the supreme good, they said, was to will freely the right act, or to will freely and constantly what God himself willed. It was natural that they should consider this the supreme good, since for the maintenance of a healthy and harmonious society it was very desirable that individuals should freely will to behave as society needed them to behave. And by ‘the will of God’ what they unwittingly meant was the sanctified custom of society, the custom which on the whole and in the long run had made for society’s survival. When a prophet arose who saw that the sanctified custom of society was in some respect stupid or outworn, or simply brutish, he would claim that he saw the will of God more clearly than his fellows. Though seemingly he was opposed to the will of the herd, yet his moral originality was the product of the old herd-loyalty, combined with superior insight into the herd’s needs.

Thus, little by little, men outgrew their earlier gods, which were expressions of their own primitive needs and fears, and conceived a single all-powerful divine person, who was an expression of their more developed needs and fears. The new God had in extreme degree all those powers which men had come to admire or fear in their new and more orderly world. Like some of the earlier gods, he embodied the old craving for a superhuman benevolent father, and equally the old fear of the father who, though just, was jealous. God was jealous for his dues. He exacted sacrifice and worship.

Men had to conceive him in this way because they themselves had in their own nature a craving to propitiate something. In childhood they had contracted habits of feeling guilty when they disobeyed their parents. And throughout their lives they felt guilty when they infringed the law of the tribe. After sinning, a man felt like an unpunished dog, who is not happy until his misdeed is discovered and he has had his beating.

At the outset the gods were merely vengeful; but as society became more organized, vengeance was condemned, and strict, dispassionate justice became God’s outstanding character. Moreover, as men began to be impressed by the relentless regularity of physical events, this regularity also was attributed to the intricate working of divine law. The theoretical capacities of man began to satisfy themselves by seeking the underlying principles of all events. The world had to be regarded as the systematic expression of God’s will, because men themselves delighted in system.

In another mood men claimed union with God. At first the union which they sought was merely the mental accord of a child with its loving parent; but in time they demanded and believed that they attained a closer union. In sexual love, and also in membership of an enthusiastic crowd, they seemed to themselves, vaguely but intoxicatingly, to become more than single individuals. They therefore longed to have this exhilarating experience in a far higher degree. They desired to be freed from the limitations of their own private personalities. Under the pressure of their herd-feeling, they craved to be at one with the soul of the tribe. They had therefore to conceive it possible to be gathered into God, who was in some obscure way the personification of the tribe. And since all things were said to be expressions of God’s will, or thoughts projected from God’s creative mind, the more subtle of them believed that the final bliss must be to be gathered up once more into the mind of God. Thus and in a thousand other ways men persuaded themselves to believe what would satisfy their own craving to be almighty.

In another mood it seemed to men that God must be Love. It came in time to be clear that mere justice was not enough for the well-being of society. If men were to be thoroughly at one with each other, and if society was to be completely harmonious, every person must be bound to his neighbours not merely by an externally imposed law but by the power of love in his own heart. The free mutual loyalty of friends is the best mortar to hold society together. Thus loving-kindness, brotherhood, charity, came to seem the most desirable of all characters; and the God who had been conceived as the just but relentless ruler came now to be personified as Love.

D. THE ESSENCE OF THE MATTER

IT IS SURELY clear that every character which men have attributed to God has had one or other of two origins. Either it has been a character which for some reason men have at some time desired God to have; or it has been a character which, though not desired in him, seemed inevitable in a being whom they conceived in their own likeness. His vengefulness, for instance, was partly of this second kind. Probably it was also partly of the other kind. For men seem to have desired God to be vengeful because they themselves felt guilty.

But if man’s idea of God can be explained so fully as mere ‘wish-fulfilment’, what reason is there to believe in God?

If this sketch of the sources of religion is true, the upshot seems to be as follows. At the beginning and at every stage we find both favour-seeking and sheer admiration. Even admiration itself developed from simple prehuman roots under the influence of intelligence and imagination. There is nothing peculiarly ‘God-given’ about it. In primitive man, as in our own children, admiration is first directed on human persons and also on imposing features of the non-human world. From these two roots, namely admiration of persons and awe of the world, sprang, even in the primitive ages, genuine religious activity. Through the interaction of these two motives men conceived their ideas of gods, and later of a single God who was almighty and perfect. At each stage the particular characters which they assigned to their gods, or to God, were expressions of society’s needs at the time.

Now to my mind the all-important point is this. Disinterested admiration is a distinctively human activity. It involves the distinctively human power of being interested in things for their own sakes, and not merely for their utility. This objectivity of interest, as we have seen, occurs in a purely dispassionate manner in all genuinely scientific activity. It is involved also, along with appropriate emotion, in the passion of love for another person, as also, in calm respect for another, and again in the fully awakened kind of loyalty to society. This same objectivity of interest and ‘disinterested’ admiration we now find to be the essence of genuine religion. But in this case the object which holds the attention, and is admired or worshipped for its own sake, is one of extreme subtlety. It has never been at all satisfactorily described. Indeed, it is almost certainly indescribable. Sceptics declare that because it is indescribable it must be a mere mental figment. But this is an error. One may admire very keenly without being able to describe at all clearly what it is that one admires. Ask a lover what it is that he admires in his beloved. He will respond either by well-worn and inadequate clichés, or by dumbness. Infinitely more difficult is it to say what we so admire when we worship. The only safe response is dumbness.

In different ages and different lands men tried to describe what it was that roused them to religious admiration, and they could only describe it in terms of the confused thought and imagery at their command. They attributed to the object of their worship the various characters which they, in their circumstances, and with their intellectual equipment, conceived that it ought to have. It must be a superhuman person, almighty, allwise, all-loving, and so on. Each of these characters was a gratification of some human need. But to trace the stages by which men came to describe what they worshipped is not to explain away their worship as a mere disguised favour-seeking or self-gratulation. The truth seems to be that in every age some human beings have sometimes been moved to a peculiarly intense, zestful and bewildered admiration of Something which was not simply human, Something which they recognized as more admirable than any ordinary object of admiration but which they could only describe by means of falsifying metaphors.

XII. CHRISTIANITY AND THE MODERN WORLD

A. THE RELIGION OF LOVE

“LET US NOW consider religion as it occurs in the, modern world, and try to form some idea of the part which it should play in the future.

There is very much so-called religion in the world to-day, but it is mostly sham religion. The majority of mankind accept the doctrines of some great religious organization, and practise its form of worship; but on the whole it seems probable that Mohammedans, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and the rest are most often concerned merely with securing for themselves some kind of personal salvation. They are merely paying their premium to ensure eternal happiness in some form or other. Genuine religion no doubt does occur here and there among all these kinds of devout persons, but it is rare and spasmodic, and extremely ineffective as a force in the world.

Genuine religion in the modern world takes one or other of three forms. In one form, no doubt, the genuine religious experience is interpreted according to one of the great orthodox religious doctrines. In another form, all such doctrines are rejected, and the religious person persuades himself that, since in his view nothing in the universe deserves admiration except humanity, he must be worshipping simply humanity. In the third form, he feels very strongly that what stirs him so deeply, and is not any orthodox deity, is not humanity either. Loyalty to the great adventure of mankind on this planet has, he admits, a very important part to play in his religion. But this adventure, he feels, is not itself the thing that compels his worship. This other thing is after all something other than humanity. The object of his worship, then, is neither God nor man. What it is, he finds extremely difficult, indeed impossible, to say.

For most Europeans and Americans the only orthodox religion that matters is Christianity, in one or other of its many forms. I shall now try to set down with as much understanding and sympathy as I can muster, what I take to be the essential meaning of Christianity to the sincere Christian of any church or sect.

When Christians say that they love God, they seem to mean something like this. They very earnestly admire a certain person called Jesus. They also feel a deep tenderness toward him. Jesus, they believe, was an actual man who lived on earth many centuries ago; but also, in some subtle sense, he was and is God, the almighty creator.

Christians find in the biblical account of the life and character of Jesus, the human person, something which they are compelled to admire more than anything else in the universe. They feel also that by thinking about his unselfishness, and his love of his fellow men, and his sayings, they themselves are made capable of more awakened living. They are convinced that Jesus had unique insight into the hearts of men, into their real nature; and that he discovered their greatest need, namely the need to realize one another as living selves and to cherish one another. He saw that ‘love’ in this sense, was needed not only for the fulfilling of each person, but also for the making of the new and more spiritually awakened world which he hoped to found.

Jesus himself, so his followers believe, was so great a lover of his fellow men that his whole life was completely ruled by his will to help them, and especially to help them to the peace and joy of loving their fellows, and loving God. He himself was entirely possessed by this peace and joy. And because of his own great power of loving, and the beatitude which it gave him, he came to believe that the God who had made all things and all men, and had given all men in some degree the power to love, was not merely a just God but a loving God. Christians say that by feeling the beauty of the nature of Jesus they can reach the same conviction. They hold also that we all ought to believe in a loving God and ought to love him.

Let us at once distinguish between certain very different kinds of beliefs held by Christians. Some of their beliefs seem to me true and very important. Some, I should say, are extremely uncertain, and anyhow cannot be true in the sense that matters to Christian believers. Some are quite certainly false and base. What is true and important is that genuine love is a brilliantly awakened activity, to be prized for its own sake; and that if we could all love one another, or even treat one another altruistically, the world would be much better than it is. What is very uncertain is that there is, in any sense that matters, a loving God, and that he will give us happiness after we are dead. What is, at least in my view, quite certainly false and harmful is the belief that each man’s chief concern should be to ‘save his soul in any sense whatever, whether by loving God or by loving his fellows, or by keeping a set of God-made rules, or even by making himself into as fine a personality as possible.

Of the belief in the importance of love in Christianity, only this need be said. Though indeed love, and the appraisal of love, were the supreme achievement of Jesus, those of his followers are mistaken who believe that men can be induced to love one another merely by being made to see the importance of love, or merely by being exhorted to love. When I was young my elders told me to ‘love my neighbours’, and I saw that I ought to do so; but unfortunately the more I tried to love them, the more I disliked them and wished them out of the way.

Christians often make the mistake of supposing that if only men really wanted to love one another they could. The truth is rather that if only we could, we would. But unfortunately our capacity for loving one another is extremely feeble; and, moreover, the circumstances of the modern world are so adverse to the proper development of men’s capacities that in very many cases constant thwarting and repression destroys what power of love they ever had, and breeds instead a vast capacity for hate.

Let us now consider the belief in a loving God. No one can disprove the existence of such a being, at least if we may interpret the words ‘God’ and ‘loving’ in a sufficiently topsy-turvy way. It is quite possible that ‘God’, or ‘the universe’, or ‘fate’, gives us what is really best for us, but that what is best for us is very different from what we, in our human pettiness, actually want. It is quite possible that there is such a super-cosmical person as God, and that he appreciates the existence of each one of us. No one can produce any serious argument to disprove this view. Certainly science has no argument against it, though many people have thought that it had.

On the other hand, no one can prove that there is a loving God. I cannot believe that any or all of the reasons which are offered in support of this theory would be taken as proof in a law court, unless the court was composed of persons already predisposed toward the doctrine. So far as I can see, only three of these reasons have any serious force at all. They may be called the argument from evolution, the argument from human personality, and the argument from the actual desire for a loving God. With regard to the argument from evolution, it is claimed that the fact that life on this planet has evolved is evidence that the universe is controlled by a mind which intended such evolution; and that, since the direction of evolution is toward ever more awakened living, the controlling mind must be benevolent. This claim ignores the fact that progress of biological species has been far less common than stagnation and actual degeneration. Few types have evolved at all. Very few have reached a high level. Only one has attained human rank. Evolution may be the result of divine purpose, but biology affords little evidence that it is so. And if it is, the purpose has apparently been carried out with almost ludicrous inefficiency.

Some who admit all this maintain that it is unimportant. The vital fact, they say, is that life has evolved, at whatever cost. That so precious a thing should occur at all, they say, is proof of a benevolent divine purpose in the universe. To this the answer seems to be that all manner of perversions and horrors have also evolved. By analogy, the fact that these have occurred at all might be taken as proof of a supreme satanic purpose in the universe.

The argument from human personality is as follows. It is claimed that human nature itself is evidence that there is a loving God, since the power which produced man must contain at least the attributes of man; and since human nature at its best is loving, moral, and capable of other highly developed activities, the power which produced it must be so also. My own feeling about this argument is that certainly it may be in some sense true, but that no human mind of our present order has the penetration to judge whether it is true or not. We are, of course, entitled to say that a universe which produced man had the capacity for producing man; but I see no reason to infer that it, or its creator, had, or has, the characters that man himself has. It is surely time for us to realize that our rudimentary minds are not yet capable of such daring metaphysical flights.

The most effective reason for believing in a loving God is the desire for there to be a loving God. With many people this is still a very strong desire. And this strong desire has been taken as proof that the object of the desire must exist. How, it is asked, could men have come to conceive such a desire unless God himself had inspired them with it? A somewhat similar argument might be applied to food. How could men have come to desire food unless the physical environment had moulded their natures by providing them with possible food as a means to live? Now it is true that man’s needs are one and all the outcome of the influence of environment, past and present. But it does not follow that for every need there actually exists the object which would ideally satisfy it. The environment has made me desire food, but I have no reason to believe that it will supply me with the ideal banquet, here or hereafter. Similarly with God.

Desire, then, affords no reason for belief in the existence of the desired object. Indeed, it affords, instead, reason for scepticism. Since strong desires are known to produce belief without logical proof, and known also to produce illusions of logical validity, the common desire for a loving God should surely warn men not to believe in any kind of theism without cogent proof. If religion depended on a number of precarious arguments for a cherished theory, it would certainly be doomed. But of course it does not. It depends on the religious experience, the immediate and overwhelming apprehension of something both superhuman and beautiful. This experience is often interpreted by the religious person to mean the existence of a loving God, because of his conviction that anything so excellent must be a mind, and a benevolent mind. But if the value of religious experience depends on the truth of this particular interpretation of it, it is indeed precarious.

The theory that there is a loving God may very well be true in some obscure and topsy-turvy sense; but it is almost certainly not true in any sense which would satisfy ordinary Christian men and women. And when it is understood and believed in their sense, it has a bad effect. It tends to keep them mentally in the nursery. It tends to shield them from full realization of the precariousness of man’s position in the universe. If you demand immortality for human persons, a world in which there is no serious evidence of immortality must seem to you a thing of horror. You will be in danger of letting your desire rule your intelligence. Only if you can outgrow that desire, and outgrow even the desire that mankind as a race should win eternal life, can you begin to discover in existence what is, I believe, a far more satisfying beauty. By comforting men with a charming fairy tale of personal immortality, Christianity prevents them from ever exercising the muscles of the spirit (so to speak) by grappling with the more formidable aspects of existence. They never reach spiritual maturity; and so they never rise to the perception that this unsympathetic universe, or something in it, after all compels man’s disinterested worship.

Of the Christian belief that each man’s chief concern should be to ‘save his soul’, all that need be said further is this. If it is taken in an ordinary sense it leads directly into mere sham religion. The only sense in which it may be truly said that one of man’s chief concerns should be to save his soul is a very metaphorical one, namely that, since he has more power to fulfil himself than to fulfil any one else, he should indeed be specially concerned to make his particular self as awakened a self as possible, while it lasts. But this is not at all what the devout Christian means.

B. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION has played a very great part in the life of mankind, both for good and ill. Jesus has had an immense effect on the minds of Europeans. He has been a glorious and beloved example to many men and women. To deny this, as some do who are opposed to Christianity, is puerile. The Christian Churches, or rather the followers of Jesus, whenever they have really tried to carry out the teachings of their master, have done great service to the world. They have preached the brotherhood of all men. They have tried to make men outgrow their tribal feuds. They have tried to set up the authority of Jesus over the authority of kings and governments. They have tried to teach men loyalty not merely to a nation but to a way of life, namely to the brilliantly awakened life which Jesus had made them admire. In early days they worked earnestly for enlightment, for just laws, for the freedom of common men from the oppression of their masters.

But the followers of Jesus have not always nor often been faithful to the spirit of Jesus. A church is a society of ordinary men and women. So long as they are inspired by the genuine self-ignoring admiration for their God of Love, they may behave better than they otherwise would have done. Some of them may even turn into saints and martyrs. But when this enthusiasm has become weak and inconstant, they are no better than other ordinary men and women. Indeed they are worse, for they cannot help pretending to be what they are not. They continue to use the words of religion, but they no longer mean them. They say they love their God and their fellow men, but in fact they care only for the respectability of church-going, and for keeping the rules of a ‘religious’ society which no longer stands for enlightenment, justice and mercy, but simply for the maintenance of its own organization and power.

When this state of affairs has been reached, if the Church happens to be a powerful association with many members and much wealth, it may do immense hurt to the life of the people or of the world. There is a certain parasitic plant which lives in the ‘flesh’ of a tree and spreads its own roots or tentacles in all directions inside the branches and twigs of the tree, sapping the tree’s life, and giving nothing in return. In much the same way a church can spread its priests throughout a people, or the world, persuading men to support the Church, and giving them in return nothing but false comfort for their craving to be assured of eternal happiness.

Sooner or later some exceptionally alive person or group within the Church may begin trying to put the teaching of Jesus into practice once more. And then a wave of new eager worship may spread far and wide. This kind of thing has happened again and again in the history of the Christian Church. Some earnest and religious man has founded a new religious order or sect. Its members have tried to imagine as vividly as possible the spirit of their master, Jesus, and have undertaken to live for the worship of the God of Love and for the help of their fellow men. Often they have been cruelly persecuted by the old Church, but persecution has only made them more earnest and resolute. For a while great things have happened, but soon the new movement has settled down, and the order or sect has become merely a comfortable society, within the Church or outside it. Presently another sect has been founded, which in turn has fallen comfortably asleep, and so on.

The Protestant ‘Reformation’ was one of these attempts to revive the Christian religion. The original Protestant Churches have long ago settled down to a respectable life. Within them many ‘revivals’ have taken place, but in each case the new eager worship has soon faded. The new sect has contrived to make itself mentally comfortable. Its members have become very like the members of the other sects or churches, routine-loving people, amiable so long as they are not frightened or shocked, anxious to keep up the appearance of religion, although the real fire of worship in them, the falling in love with their God, has become at best a feeble flicker.

Since there are two very different activities, both of which are called religion, there are two very different kinds of ‘religious revival Or rather, in any religious revival the people who take part have two very different motives. In a few the main motive is genuine self-forgetful worship. They are on fire with admiration of their divine, all-loving Jesus. But most are chiefly concerned to ‘save their souls to do whatever they believe is necessary to secure a happy life in the next world. Many, of course, have no clear aim at all, but are simply infected by the emotions of their neighbours, just as, when one person laughs, others are inclined to laugh too, even if they do not see the joke. This mere infection of emotion in religious revivals is bad, because it makes people believe they are really admiring something when they are not.

It is unlikely that there will ever be another widespread Christian revival, unless modern science is forgotten and the whole modern way of thinking and feeling gives place to something else. For though science cannot disprove the existence of God, it does make men less dependent, emotionally, on the belief in God. It is not impossible that science should be lost, but we must hope that it will not. Although much of our modern ‘scientific’ culture is probably very unsound, and although in Christianity at its best there is something that we greatly need, to lose science would be to go back to the nursery. We must cling to it, not only for the power it gives us, but even more because it may help us to outgrow the childish desire to live for ever and be cared for by a heavenly father.

During the last hundred years many of the beliefs that the churches had insisted upon have come to seem very improbable. The churches taught that God had made all the present kinds of animals separately. Science has shown very clearly that they have evolved from simpler kinds. The churches taught that man was created just as he is to-day. Science has shown that he also has evolved from a simpler animal. To doubt this, in our day, is almost as unreasonable as to doubt that the earth is round. The evidence, though rather complicated, is unmistakable. Now these questions have nothing to do with the beliefs that Christians think most important, such as the belief in a loving God who lived on the earth as Jesus. Gradually many Christians have given up the beliefs that science has disproved, and have clung only to their most cherished beliefs. But the fact that the churches had been mistaken weakened their power over men’s minds, and made some men rather more inclined to judge for themselves. At the same time it was coming to seem more and more unlikely that Jesus really was God in any sense that was not so far-fetched as to be useless to ordinary men and women. No one, indeed, could prove that he was not God; but no one could give any good reason to believe that he was. Most people, of course, still believed that he was a very great and good man who had played an extremely important part in the history of the European peoples. They recognized that he had roused men as no one else had roused them, both by the example of his generous and heroic character and by the religion of love that he had preached. If the Bible story was to be believed, he was indeed in some respects a perfect man, and so might well be called divine, in one sense. But it was not merely in this sense that the Christian Churches claimed that he was divine. They said that he was actually almighty God, the loving creator of all things; and that he had become a man in order that he might save us all from the eternal damnation which he himself, as the almighty and vengeful God, might otherwise have awarded us for our wickedness.

To men who were trying to think for themselves this theory seemed very unsatisfactory. Moreover, since science had been at work, the universe was beginning to appear somehow not the sort of universe in which there would be either a just and wrathful or a loving God. After all, the Bible had been wrong in other respects, might it not be wrong also about the divinity of Jesus? Some religious people felt that it did not matter whether the man Jesus was God or not, so long as God was indeed a loving God. But as time passed it became more and more difficult to believe in a loving God, in any comforting sense. In the new world-view it seemed very improbable that human persons were immortal. Once more, no one could disprove the theory, but no one could give any serious reason to believe it true. Consequently men began to lose hold of the belief that God would compensate us for the miseries of our earthly life by giving us eternal joy. Incidentally the loss of the old terror of hell perhaps made the baser sort less anxious to behave themselves according to the conventional moral code.

When Jesus interpreted his own religious experience to mean the existence of a loving God, he gave an account which to the more awakened of his contemporaries was both credible and inspiring. But in our day that interpretation, even though it may be in some obscure sense true, can no longer play a useful part in the awakening of the world. The churches, by clinging to it, have lost almost all their religious vitality, though in many cases they still exercise great power of a kind which is not truly religious.

The Roman Church has a very firm hold on its adherents, and is likely to increase its membership in this age of bewildered craving for certainty and security. But though doubtless some members of the Roman Church are genuinely religious, the great power of Rome obviously rests on soul-saving, and uses the twin principles of suppressing ‘dangerous’ knowledge and drugging the mind with ritual.

The ‘reformed’ churches are in a more pitiable state. Because they claim to be less intolerant of modern thought, they are more hard-pressed by it. Their priests are often kindly and devoted persons, and full of good works. But such power as they have over men rests almost entirely on their practical helpfulness toward those in distress, and very little on genuine religion. Some of them are, without doubt, truly religious men; but such hold as these have over their followers is due far more to their spirit of social service than to any power of kindling religious ecstasy in others. The best of them are sincere and, indeed, courageous believers in the doctrine of a loving God; but to-day this belief hampers them grievously, hedging them round as a child may be hedged round by fairyland. Because of their faith, or because of their ‘cloth’ or their collars, they can never make satisfactory contact with ordinary men; who, though they call themselves Christians, are, for good and ill, no longer Christians at heart. Many of us, when we are talking with any but the most exceptional ministers of religion, feel that we must play up to their expectations of us, as we play up to children or to old ladies. To be perfectly frank and natural with the average parson, we feel, would somehow be caddish, like hitting a man when his hands are tied. Religious leaders who have fallen into such a plight cannot help us in this tortured though pregnant age. Yet many of them are, indeed, courageous, generous, and even truly religious men. Many of them we respect; some we can heartily admire, even while we pity them and deal gently with them. There are other clerics, however, of a very different sort, toward whom it is less easy to feel charitable. These are the self-righteous condemners of all who do not acquiesce in the conventional morals and doctrines. In them the lust to condemn and punish, seemingly born of a sense of their own frustration, disguises itself as moral indignation, or even as love. Then there are the many comfortable and sanctimonious ones. But it is not only in the churches that complacency thrives.

The main power of the churches lies neither with the lovable though harassed and ineffective sort of clerics, nor yet with the puritanical, nor with the easy-going. It lies rather with talented men who, though they may have no gift for religious perception, are outstanding either in rhetoric or in organization and diplomacy. Some of them, perhaps many of them, must have had in their youth some kind of genuine religious experience, but to judge from their present behaviour many of them have long since forgotten what it was like. They confuse genuine religion with church membership, and the sheer impulse to worship with conformity to intellectual doctrines about the nature of the universe, or with the approval of a particular moral code. And so, doubtless with no dishonourable motives, they use their talent and authority not to help men forward through the present transitional and painful age but solely to keep them in bondage to a creed. Consequently in almost every crisis the churches come out upon the wrong side. We shall not easily forget that when war broke out they made no stand for peace, but were content to deplore the necessity of bloodshed; nor that in the class war, while they piously sympathize with the workers, they preach obedience to the law of the masters.

There has recently been some sign that the churches are determined to play a bolder and more generous part in the life of the community. They have been stung into activity by the taunt of futility, especially in respect of war and social injustice; and they have been strengthened somewhat by the obvious confusion which has fallen upon their main critics, the scientists. Consequently we find them now attempting to recapture the allegiance of men by means of a forward policy, and planning to lead a crusade for a more Christian spirit throughout social life. Many of their members, for instance, are in earnest in the will to destroy militarism. Some, it may be, are ready to face martyrdom for that cause. Others are in earnest, according to their lights, in attacking isolated social evils of one sort or another.

But this effort at revival is doomed to failure, in the main and in the long run, for two reasons. The first is this. Militarism and social injustice cannot be eradicated, but only temporarily alleviated, without a much more far-reaching change in the social order than the churches dare contemplate. For the churches, one and all, depend in the main upon funds which are either directly dependent on the existing social order, or derived from persons whose wealth depends on the existing social order.

Clerics, of all denominations, are selected not to be revolutionary prophets but to be gentle supporters of the existing order. A minority of a very different type does, indeed, find its way into the churches. But any of these who dare to take serious action against the established order will in the long run be eliminated. In the majority of clerics consciousness of their dependence will inevitably temper enthusiasm with caution and ‘broadmindedness’ to such an extent that they will never go so far as to make serious protest. The second reason for the impotence of the churches is simply that they have lost the vision and the fervour which alone could have fired them to break from this economic constraint. The passion needed for the making of the new world must germinate elsewhere or nowhere. Once it has germinated, much good material from the churches may be gathered into its system; but the churches themselves as institutions are doomed to be ineffective, save on the side of reaction.

A great and sincere Christian revival, then, seems very unlikely, not only because modern knowledge makes many Christian beliefs hard to believe, but also because the churches are in the main no longer true to the spirit of their master. By their very constitution they are doomed to play for safety. And in the main they look not forward to a new world but backward for a vision that is lost, never to return. The trouble is not merely that the old vision is incredible. It is becoming undesirable. Many of us no longer want to believe in a loving God, and in immortality, and so on. I do not mean merely that we do not want to sit on a cloud for all eternity playing hymn-tunes on a harp. I mean that we are outgrowing, or, at the very least, feeling that we ought to outgrow, even the desire that there should be in the universe any sort of God or power which is concerned to preserve and bless human persons or the human race. Many of us do indeed crave something definite to worship, but the idea of a benevolent God does not rouse us.

C. OUTGROWING A GREAT RELIGION

MOST MEN AND women of to-day in Europe and America were brought up more or less as Christians. In childhood we all accepted the belief in a loving God and human immortality; and in those early days we were glad to think that we should live for ever and be cared for always. It is difficult for young people to think of death without hoping that they will live again and that in the long run some one will comfort them. But for adults, if they have managed to grow up in mind as well as in body, it should be possible to face calmly the idea that when they are dead they will be like a flame that has been extinguished. Some of us, at any rate, when we feel that we are most alive, find that we do not want to live for ever, and do not want to be loved by God. We do not even want there to be a benevolent God for us to worship. Such doctrines no longer kindle us, because we have seen something which is in the deepest sense more beautiful. Sometimes, when we are feeling tired or ill or beaten or deserted, we may slip back into wanting such things. But even then we recognize that we are not as alive as we were, not at our best, not keeping hold of the very best thing; in fact that we are betraying something.

The Christian religion is, indeed, at its best a very difficult and awakened way of living. It is also, for some people, a genuine way of worshipping. Few have been able to put the Christian religion into practice at all thoroughly. And yet, though in some ways it will always be far beyond us, in other ways we are outgrowing it, and ought to outgrow it. It is easy to see what it is in Christianity that is an awakened way of living, and still far beyond our capacity. Clearly, true Christian love of our fellow men, realizing them as selves, and serving their needs as our own, is the awakened way of living which is needed both for our private spiritual fulfilment and for the well-being of the world. The constant practice of this kind of behaviour is still far beyond us, and since it is part of the ideal behaviour, it will never have to be outgrown. What has to be outgrown is the belief in, and the desire for, personal ‘salvation’ of any sort, and also the belief in and the desire for a God who is Love. Why must we outgrow these beliefs? Not merely because to us of to-day they seem very uncertain. For who knows? They may still in some mysterious way turn out to be more true than false. The mind of man as he is to-day is not very much more developed than the mind of ape or dog. We have no right to trust our half-formed intellects in these very difficult matters. Then why is it so important that we should outgrow these beliefs to-day? Because for us to-day they are blinding, deadening beliefs; because they prevent us from doing something which is more alive than worshipping a benevolent God; because they prevent us from seeing something which in its own way can compel admiration more directly and surely than the theory that there is a loving God.

When doubt of the Christian doctrines first began to spread, its effect on men was often very distressing. Some resolutely refused to give up cherished beliefs which had been a real strength to them. Some, through intellectual honesty, became unbelievers, but with a sense that life must be henceforth a sordid and a joyless thing. But, as time passed, a few here and there began to realize that the new pitiless universe was not only vaster and more formidable than the old kindly universe, but also more interesting, more challenging, more a place for men to live in. Not only so, but to some at least this new universe began to appear more satisfactory, more admirable, even from the religious point of view. In fact, to their own surprise, they found themselves apparently seized with an uncomprehending and heart-gripping worship of the very thing that had formerly seemed so repugnant to them. It was almost as though the new universe had created in them a new religious need which it alone could satisfy.

I have said that what they worshipped was apparently the universe. But, strictly speaking, to say that they worshipped the universe is to say too much. All that is warranted by the religious experience itself is to say that they worshipped something which did not seem to be in any sense a loving God, and which some of them were inclined to interpret as being simply the whole of things. Perhaps we may safely say that they worshipped, or praised in their hearts, something which was ‘universal’, either in the sense that it simply was the universe, or in the sense that it permeated or characterized everything in the universe, somewhat as the personality of a human being may be said to permeate or characterize his actions.

XIII. MAN AND FATE

A. LOYALTY TO MAN AND DELIGHT IN FATE

IN THIS CHAPTER I set out to describe as clearly and accurately as I can what it is that, in my view, we really experience in the distinctively human activity which may be called ‘religion’ in the best sense. My conclusion will be that, though it is possible to say with some confidence that the object of worship is not this, and not that, it is impossible to say anything positive about it save that it is that which we worship, and that it is in some manner superhuman. I shall try also to describe the kind of effect, a very far-reaching effect, that religion tends to have on our behaviour.

In doing this, I lay myself open to criticism and ridicule from two sides. The anti-religious person will protest that I am allowing far too much weight to certain seductive but illusory experiences which, as I myself have admitted, can be plausibly explained in terms of modern psychology; and that all such attempts to rehabilitate religion are pernicious. The religious person will say that I give no evidence that I myself have any acquaintance with the actual religious experience; or that at best I misinterpret, and indeed shockingly falsify, such feeble gleams of religion as have occurred in my life.

In an earlier chapter I suggested that religion was essentially a self-oblivious admiration or worship of something other than oneself and other than mankind. Now some tell us that, if we must worship anything, we should worship humanity, and nothing else. If this means simply that we should love our fellow human beings, in is — the Christian sense, and that we should cherish the achievement of the human species, and take as our supreme practical goal the improvement’ of our species and the perfecting of the human mind, I agree that in this sense we should ‘worship’ humanity. But for some of us this is not what worship means. We cannot worship humanity, simply as humanity. We can, I think, in an important sense be loyal to, or even love, mankind. But worship, in the strict sense, can be given only to something superhuman, something conceived as altogether of a higher order than ourselves, or than the most excellent of our fellow men. If there is nothing of such a kind, then there is nothing fit to be worshipped, nothing fit to be regarded with that very special and intense kind of admiration which worship is.

There is, indeed, one sense in which we may worship humanity. We may worship it either as a part of, or an expression of, something more than humanity, something in essence superhuman. Some of those who profess to take humanity as their highest object of loyalty do, I think, unwittingly regard humanity in this way. Others do not. They merely feel kindliness and pity or admiration for their fellow men.

Let us consider in more detail what ‘worship’ of humanity involves. The starting-point is sheer ‘love of mankind’. Now loving involves knowing the object of your love. Even though you may not be able to describe it, you must, in some sense, know it. You cannot love an individual human person unless you know something of him or her, unless you have a lively vision of him or her as a unique experiencing individual; and you cannot love mankind unless you know something of mankind. Still less can you worship it as having superhuman significance, unless you know something about it as a whole pattern of lives, unless you have a lively vision of it, not simply as a crowd of persons but as a world-wide adventuring host whose career is age-long. You must think of the persons that together make up mankind not merely as little selves, longing for all sorts of private joys and on the whole making a sad muddle of their lives, but as, each one of them, a pioneer in the great common enterprise, into which all are born, but which very few have even dimly understood. You must think of them as striving and blundering hither and thither, and hurting themselves and one another terribly in this almost blindfold adventure. You must think of each one as trying, in his own short life, to live fully, but as failing almost entirely, either through ignorance as to what full living really means, or through cowardice, or through adversity. You must think of them as animals whose nature has in it some rudiments of a much more alive nature, of the truly human nature, which may or may not some day come into existence, but must in any case be the goal of human endeavour. You must think of these animals which we call men as uncomfortably living a kind of life which is neither entirely animal nor entirely human, as alternately hating themselves for being mere animals and hating the disturbing sparks of humanity in them. You must realize something of the long and varied career which has brought them up to their present stage. You must form some idea of the ways in which our human nature must change and enrich itself, if it is to become more human. And, above all, you must prize this great theme not merely for its culmination but for its every phase.

One who can hold all this together as a clear vision of mankind may be very deeply moved by it. He may feel for the strange multitudinous thing, mankind, the blend of admiration and tenderness and pity which is love. He may also feel, vaguely perhaps but strongly, that mankind is more than all the successive populations of the world. He may feel that its adventure is in some sense a sacred adventure, even perhaps one small episode in a universal crusade whose object in the long run is to fulfil whatever potentiality of life or mind or spirit there is in the cosmos. He may think of mankind as not simply an end in itself but an instrument whose true end is to produce the music of the fully awakened spirit. He may feel that man, conceived in this way, should be the one object of our loyalty. He may perhaps even feel that what matters most in the universe is this age-long adventure of waking into the most clear-sighted and large-hearted aliveness, of waking into the full, the true ‘humanity’, whether this is to be achieved by our own species or by beings alien to ourselves in remote parts of the universe.

Yet there is something else to take into account, something more difficult to describe. The worship of mankind or, as I would rather call it, loyalty in the human enterprise, is indeed part of the true and wholly satisfying and most alive kind of worship; and Christian love of our fellow men is also part of it. But I at least cannot feel that love of our fellows and loyalty in the great adventure of mankind together make up the whole of religion. For, after all, to worship mankind is only to worship ourselves. For mankind is nothing but all of us together, striving in our different ways to make the best of life. Indeed, even to worship a loving God is really to worship our own nature made perfect. All the characters which are attributed to a benevolent and almighty and omniscient deity are idealizations of the distinctively human capacities. That is just where the trouble lies. We are so easily trapped into thinking that our own nature, perfected, is the finest thing there is, or can be.

When a man is in the mood of unqualified loyalty to mankind, the thought may occur to him that, sooner or later, even if men do succeed at last in making the really splendid human world which at present we can only dimly imagine, that world will almost certainly be destroyed. There are many ways in which it might come to an end, but one way, if the others are avoided, seems almost inevitable. Our sun will cool, and his planets will be frozen. Even if men were to escape from the solar system, which is unlikely, wherever they were to go, they would be faced sooner or later with a cooling universe. Since all the stars are cooling, man must sooner or later be frozen to death. Of course, there may be intelligences in other worlds. There may be other kinds of life and mind, with different physical requirements from our own and different dispositions. The stars themselves, for all we know, may have minds. Even a galaxy may conceivably be the body of a single intelligent and desiring spirit. Nevertheless, vitality, on whatever scale, can only exist, so far as we can see, where energy is available for vital processes. And sooner or later energy will no longer be available.

Of course, the theory that the universe is doomed to final quiescence and death may be false. Though at present physical nature is running down like a clock, it may some day be wound up again; or it may be all the while undergoing a rewinding of which we know nothing. But we should certainly face the possibility, even probability, that there is a final state of quiescence and death.

And whether this dependence of life and mind on available energy is absolute or not, the idea of it is a very purging and enlightening idea. When a man is in the mood which is simply loyal to mankind, or to life, or to mind, he feels that this final destruction is nothing but a hideous disaster. In loving a person, one may long that the other should be young for ever and never die; and in the same way one may long that mankind, or at least some kind of fully awakened mind, should go on for ever and never fall into decay.

But there is another way of feeling about the final destruction of mankind. It is a way that has much in common with the mood of science at its best and the mood of art. Modern science, even though it may have done much harm in other ways, does at least help one to stand outside oneself. It inclines a man to regard himself, and indeed the whole of mankind, with the quiet, almost reverent interest of a scientist who watches the behaviour of stars or micro-organisms. This calm scientific observation is perhaps, for some, the first step toward the mood which I shall describe; but the mood itself is far more than this, for it is a mood of very keen feeling. It is more like the intense admiration which we may feel for a work of art.

B. THE ANALOGY OF ART

AS WAS NOTED in the chapter on art, the spectator at a stage play may find himself feeling in two very different ways about the play. The first is this. He sympathizes with the hero, and the heroine, and all the persons who are ‘on the right side and he wishes them to be successful in their enterprises. When their enemies succeed in thwarting them, he is indignant. If it is a tragic play, and in the end the hero comes to grief, he longs for a more cheerful ending. He wants to be told that the hero ‘lived happily ever after’. We all know this mood of sympathy with the ‘good’ characters of a play.

The other way of feeling about a play is not so common, and not so easy. In this mood, though the spectator sympathizes with the hero, and indeed with all the characters, he cares most about the play as a play. I do not mean that he is interested to see how far and in what manner it fulfils the formal principles of dramatic art, but that he feels the play as a whole. If the spirit of the play is tragic, he wants it to fulfil its tragic nature. Although at the same time he grieves for the suffering persons, he delights in the terrible relentless way in which the opening situation of the play develops into the final tragedy. He recognizes that if this play had ended happily after all, it would not have been true to itself.

Now even towards the human race and its great story, a man may feel in these two different ways. Sometimes he may feel sympathy alone, just the longing that the life of mankind may be always happy and triumphant, and have no tragic end. But sometimes he may feel himself rising above this sympathy, and finding a strange and deep delight in the great story which includes, not only man’s painful struggle into more awakened living, but also his fated downfall. In this mood a man feels that somehow humanity’s career would not be a complete and rounded thing unless it included not only growth and triumph but also degeneration and destruction. He is now caring not simply for mankind but for the universe, or at least for the universe so far as it is revealed to him, or for the whole matrix of things within which mankind is seen to play some part. He discovers that this seeming whole of things, though it lies mostly far beyond the reach of his understanding, does at least show itself to him as excellent, and that the rise and fall of mankind is necessary to its excellence. He is not merely resigned to this fate, he is deeply glad of it. He seems perhaps to see the cosmos as a vast darkness sprinkled with millions of ‘universes’, each one a cluster of millions of stars. He thinks of our sun as one among the myriads; and of the little earth, the grain on which we spend our lives. He thinks of the long history of living things on the earth, and of the recent yet very remote beginning of man. He thinks of man’s strange, troubled, blundering career, of the hosts of individual men and women of all the ages, striving for all sorts of ends, suffering, loving, groping for they know not what. He thinks of the promise of man’s nature, the possibilities that may be realized some day; and also of the expected end. He thinks dizzily of the potentialities of those myriads of stars, of possible worlds and mental types, and of the steady cooling and dying of the whole. He is overwhelmed by all this vastness, not merely of space and time and the multitude of things, but the vast possibilities of mind. He is overwhelmed, but he is deeply glad that it all is, and that he himself has a part in it. He is eager to play his part, however much it hurts him, simply because it is a part. And of mankind as a whole he feels, equally, let us play our part, however pitiably yet gladly, for at least it is a part in this beautiful, this most excellent theme.

In a stage play the actors and actresses are not really suffering. They are only portraying the behaviour of suffering. The spectator may appease his sympathy with the persons of the play by remembering that, after all, they are ‘only pretending (Indeed, he cannot appreciate the play as a work of art unless he regards it all the time not as real life but as a product of artistry.) Now the drama of mankind is real life. The suffering and joy of all human beings in all ages is no mere pretence. In this case a man cannot appease his sympathy by telling himself that after all this pain is not real. It is terribly real, and no theory can ever explain it away. Then surely to delight in and admire a world in which there is so much pain must be utterly heartless. And yet in the mood which I am describing a man cannot help admiring it. Moreover, he feels very strongly that in this delight he is being not less but much more alive than when he feels sympathy alone. How can this be?

We must not shirk the issue. We must not try to persuade ourselves that the pain and evil in the world is not so very great after all. We must realize it as fully as we can. And sometimes the mere imagination of it can crash upon us with appalling weight, so that we are overwhelmed with terror and compassion and indignation. How can such a diabolical universe be beautiful?

Yet with horror we feel that after all it is beautiful. The conflict between its hideousness and its beauty defeats us.

But let us now think of the suffering of the world as though it were the suffering not of others but of ourselves. Let me think of it as my suffering, and you as yours. This, I believe, is the enlightening way to think of it. It does not after all seem impossible that my suffering should be part of the scheme of things, a factor in the dreadful beauty of the universe. Many Christians, no doubt, feel in this way. Christian piety, of course, accepts the view that human suffering is included within the perfection of the universe, and is permitted by the all-loving God; but in the Christian theory our suffering is only compatible with that perfection and with God’s goodness if, in some manner, however indirect, we are compensated for it. This seems to me a wholly unjustified and, indeed, irreligious, qualification. It is one which follows inevitably from the attempt to think of the object of worship in terms of human personality. For if God is a person, he must be judged by the standards of human morality; and if he permits suffering to go unrecompensed, he must be condemned.

When any one suffers pain or sorrow, he feels most often that the thing which has befallen him is simply bad, hideous. And yet there is a certain mood in which he may find himself strangely rising above his own suffering, and delighting in its very painfulness, or rather in the whole situation within which his pain is a part. This he can only do while he is mentally very alert and sensitive; and unfortunately the pain itself is likely to cripple his mind; so that if it increases beyond a certain point he loses this strange insight, and becomes simply a tortured animal.

Think of a bird living in a forest of great trees. Imagine that the forest catches fire. The bird is forced by the flames to soar up out of his familiar world of leaves and branches into a greater world above the tree-tops, a world of sky and space and distant mountains, a world whose floor is the burning tree-tops. Let us pretend that, when our symbolical bird finds himself under the sky with the burning forest beneath him, he suddenly wakes up to be more than a bird, and to his own surprise finds this new world very beautiful, with its wide sky, its floor of burning forest, and his own fluttering terrified self in the midst of it all. If the flames are too fierce, if they reach up too high, the bird is caught by them, and his feathers are burnt, so that he drops out of the new world into the fire. But so long as he actually maintains himself in the upper world, he can somehow accept with peace, and even with ecstasy, the possibility that he may presently sink and be destroyed.

In this parable, then, the bird stands for a human mind, and the flames are pain and sorrow. Some birds are stronger fliers than others and (let us suppose) can rise above flames which would have caught the weaker fliers. Some minds are more able than others to rise above their pain and sorrow. Many, perhaps, can never even reach the tree-tops, never for a moment escape into that vaster world. Some merely glimpse it before they collapse. Some, like great eagles, can rise above the most terrible agonies and griefs; but probably for each one there is a point beyond which he cannot go, at which he is caught by the flames, so that he drops headlong into his pain, and loses all vision of that strange celestial beauty.

It is not only in pain that a man may have that vision. It comes, no doubt, as often in joy. The bird, let us say, may soar above the tree-tops for very joy of life, or to sing to its mate. But if the vision, which is itself joyful, comes in the course of ordinary joyful diving, it is likely to be confused with the more familiar joy. If it comes in pain, it stands out clearly by contrast. The sufferer notices that, though he is feeling pain, he is also, surprisingly, feeling a strange, a dreadful delight in the beauty of the universe which includes both pleasure and pain; or perhaps I should say, in order to avoid implications about the whole of things, simply the beauty of his experienced world, with all its actuality of victory and defeat.

Now it seems to me that this way of feeling, which I can only describe as a sense of the severe beauty or rightness of existence, is a part at least of what men call religion. It may come during our personal pain or during our personal joy, or it may come when we are thinking of mankind, or when we are deliberately trying to see the pattern of the whole within which mankind is one small happening. It may come through the realization of the aliveness of another person, especially one for whom we feel deep affection. It may come in a moment of sheer animal perception or action, when we are not at all concerned with the universe as a whole or with mankind or with any loved person. In such a case we may be tempted to interpret the experience by saying that the minute particular event seems to be a window through which the ‘spirit of the whole’ confronts us. But probably what we ought to say is simply that the event vividly reveals its own exquisite rightness or beauty, that, indeed, wherever we turn (in this unique mood) we find the same underlying rightness or beauty; and that when we think of the whole cosmos, so far as it is possible for us to conceive it, we find in the theme which it seems to embody the same most excellent beauty.

Christians take this experience to be a sense of the presence of their loving God. It is indeed an experience of the presence of something which commands worship; but such an experience alone is no evidence that the something is an almighty person, and loving. Are we entitled to say that in this experience, which does seem to have a reference beyond itself, we have actually a glimpse of the whole of things; and that the whole of things, which includes not only the stars and the great spaces and ages and all the intricacy of atoms and electrons but also the myriads of minds in all their subtle varieties of dullness and brilliance, somehow reveals itself as very beautiful? Unfortunately the statement that we actually glimpse the whole is scarcely more credible than the statement that we find ourselves face to face with God.

Whatever it is that confronts us, it does not appear as favouring man. Indeed, it seems to the frank observer entirely careless of man, and of all the purposes of mankind. But whether it really is so or not, or whether there is even any sense in which it could be so, we simply do not know. In this mood, strangely, we do not want it to care for us, for we ourselves are entirely careless of ourselves, and of mankind, save as instruments of worship. We do not worship it for being in any sense like ourselves, or friendly towards us, but for being itself. We may sometimes have a strong sense that it is alive, and infinitely more alive, more splendidly alive, than we ourselves. It may indeed be so. But how can we possibly know? Probably to say, ‘There is God’, and to say, ‘There is no God’, and again to say, ‘The Whole is a living conscious Whole’, and to say, ‘It is not so’, are all equally false; so unreliable is our thinking. But what matter? In the mood which I am describing we feel, strangely, that whatever is in fact the truth about the universe, that must somehow be the best possible, even if we are too stupid to explain how it can be so.

It is important to realize that in this experience, which seems to me the essence of the religious experience, there is, first, direct apprehension of some particular event or situation, great or minute. This objective situation presents itself as having a character to which the appropriate response is worship. But this worshipful character, though given in the particular event, does seem in some sense to be significant of very much more than the particular event. Even if it is not a window through which we see the Whole, it is, or seems to be, a window through which we see far more than the particular perceived or conceived event. But what that ‘more’ really is we cannot say.

If the foregoing account is correct, we may say that religion is a mental or spiritual attitude of admiration, or praise, or worship, of a unique beauty and significance which may be discovered in or through any shred of existence, and in the whole of existence experienced by man. It is the ecstatic apprehension of a kind of beauty or rightness which may be called ‘superhuman’, in the sense that it is alien to, and superior to, every human activity, even the activity of worship, which this beauty itself awakens in man.

Though the object of worship is itself seemingly indifferent to man, the apprehension of it may have a far-reaching effect on conduct. However it is interpreted, it tends to issue in a subtle blend of earnestness and detachment. It, and not (I submit) merely their theoretical and comforting interpretation of it, inspired the early Christians to face martyrdom without feeling hate for their tormentors, but only compassion. It made Christianity in its prime a greater power in the world than Communism alone can ever be. It demands on the one hand loyalty to man, to the ideal of creating the fully awakened personality, and on the other worship, and detachment from man. Communism preaches human loyalty, but not worship. In general and in comparison with the early Christians, the modern world may be said to have a far clearer and more comprehensive idea of the implications of human loyalty, but far less of the impulse to worship. This is chiefly due to the fact that worship has been brought into disrepute by the failure of Christianity. And this failure itself was due to the fact that Christians, early and modern, have confused their worship with theories which have come to seem improbable and puerile.

In our day, and in the setting of our modern world-situation, the religious experience tends to give rise to a conviction as to what the aim of mankind should be. Men, we are convinced, ought to strive to become more and more able to perceive and delight in this strange beauty of existence; and also they should strive to contribute new and finer beauties to it from age to age by making a more alive world of men and women. For human lives seem to be in some sense parts of the music of existence. And the delight which human minds take in this music is itself a feature of the music. But though we feel very strongly the need that mankind should fulfil its half-formed nature, we feel also that when at last, in spite of all man’s effort, the human world begins to wither and die, this ending, which is disaster to mankind, is really no disaster for the music of the whole. It is just the grave but fitting end of one theme in the music.

C. SCEPTICAL PROTESTS

IN THE MOOD which I am trying to describe we feel all this with complete certainty, and with a delight which is deeper than any other delight. But we may be mistaken, Indeed, it seems that in some way or other we must be mistaken, since this account of our religious experience is self-contradictory. We say almost in the same breath that the adventure of man ought to be heroically pursued to victory, yet that it is bound to be defeated in the end, and that, in spite of its defeat, the universe is perfectly beautiful. Is not this sheer nonsense? Some one is sure to ask us what exactly it is that delights us in a universe in which minds are so helpless and so tortured, in which, moreover, there will soon be no minds at all. Really, he may say, this is very queer music, which is beautiful although it is full of hideous discords, which consists simply in whatever happens, and is, moreover, in some strange way good in itself whether any one enjoys it or not.

We have to admit that it is indeed strange. But there it is. This contradiction between, on the one hand, admiration of the known universe as in some sense perfect, excellent, wholly beautiful, and on the other hand, loyalty to the enterprise of man to spiritualize himself and his corner of the universe, lies in one form or another at the heart of all the great religions. It is at bottom the contradiction between fate and love; between, on the one hand, the acceptance of fate, or of ‘God’s will’, and, on the other, the love of human persons, or devotion in the cause of life’s struggle to become fully awake. And this devotion and this love are the roots of all morality. Well, there it is. We cannot give up either side of the contradiction, and yet we cannot solve it. When we have stripped religion of all precarious intellectual interpretations, all questionable doctrines, we are left with this dilemma. There is no solution visible to minds of our own half-developed type. All we can do is to be honest with ourselves, admit that our intelligence is defeated, and yet cling most earnestly to both sides of the dilemma.

But our critic will smile at us. He will probably tell us that our delight in the universe can easily be explained by psychology without any muddle-headed notion that the universe itself, or existence itself, is beautiful or good. This delight of ours, he may say, is really just a sense of our own well-being, which we mistakenly ‘project’ upon the universe. Through some cause or other, he suggests, we are feeling extraordinarily ‘fit’ or alive, mentally; and, observing the universe, we find it after all a splendid place to live in, and so we call it beautiful. That we should sometimes have this sense of well-being in the midst of pain or fear or sorrow is doubtless strange, but not incomprehensible. Our trouble may happen to act on us as a tonic. It may be very nasty medicine, and yet it may make us more alive. Perhaps, for instance, our lives happen to have been too easy; and unwittingly we have acquired a deep and gnawing shame because we have never had to ‘face the stern reality’, and therefore have not really lived. When, at last, trouble comes and we face it with courage, we may have a glorious sense of being at grips with things. This delight in our own aliveness, we may be told, can become like a golden haze around us. We see the universe always through this glamour, and so the universe itself seems golden, beautiful.

Another way in which our critic may explain away our worship of the whole of things or of the beauty of existence, is to say that, like the puppy that grovels before a big dog, we have an instinct to bow down before anything very great and terrible, and that in all worship men are merely giving themselves the satisfaction of grovelling, either before the universe or before the idea of some God. A more sinister explanation is possible. In all of us there are deep-laid impulses of cruelty. Civilization forbids us to satisfy these impulses fully and frankly. And because they are thus repressed, they afford us an overwhelming and bewildered delight when we contemplate the cruelty of the universe.

There are many other ways in which our sense of the beauty of existence may be explained and explained away. All these explanations are at bottom the same. They consist in saying that we do not really delight in the universe, or in existence, at all, but in the fulfilling of some impulse or need of our own; and that we mistake our sense of personal well-being for a sense of the beauty of the world. But can this kind of explanation be true? As was said in another connexion, the experience to be explained seems to be so much richer, more subtle, more awakened, than any of the impulses that are offered as its explanation, or than all of them together. Yet in our present state of ignorance and confusion we cannot but allow that some such explanation may, after all, be the true one. Of course, to any one who has actually experienced existence in the religious way these plausible psychological explanations all seem far-fetched, almost comic, almost as fantastic as it would be to explain a picture by giving an account of the food which the artist had eaten every day since his birth. He cannot but question whether the psychologist really comprehends the kind of thing that he is undertaking to explain. Are we really such fools that we mistake the fulfilment of primitive impulse for delight in the universe, or in objective existence? In this experience we do indeed feel a great surge of vitality in ourselves, but we seem able to distinguish quite clearly between our own aliveness and the beauty with which we are confronted. And again, though we do indeed want to bow down before this greatness, we do not worship for the mere satisfaction of grovelling. It is no more true (and no less) to explain the genuine religious admiration as a kind of grovelling than to explain the puppy’s grovelling as a rudimentary kind of worship. And as for cruelty, we do indeed admire the universe partly because of its terribleness, but we do not simply delight in evil itself. We delight in the whole pattern of existence, within which evil is a dread but needed part.

After all, though psychologists have made many important discoveries, they have not yet been able to describe our minds at all clearly or fully. They cannot even agree amongst themselves as to what the ground plan of our nature really is. It may very well be that there is a kind of experience which they cannot yet distinguish from other, seemingly similar, but really very different experiences. Under these circumstances, which ought we to trust, this seemingly most vital or awakened of all experiences or modern psychology? Those who have seen objective existence in this way can no more doubt their perception of it than, in full sunshine, they can doubt the light. We may describe it wrongly. We may be unable to say anything useful about it to other people. Let us remember always that we may be very seriously misreading our vision when we call it a vision of the beauty of the whole of things, or even a vision of the beauty inherent in all existence. For human minds are constantly deceiving themselves. Nevertheless, for us who see it, that beauty itself or rightness itself or excellence itself is simply there before us. And though, indeed, we may misinterpret it, we cannot deny it.

However, we may perhaps be able to appease the psychologist by using his language. We may begin by agreeing that always what satisfies men is an environment suited to their nature. Then we may go on to remind the psychologist that the environment itself moulds human nature in conformity with itself. Through this influence, man seems to be constantly developing distinctively human capacities of appreciation adapted to the kind of environment which his distinctively human percipience discovers. Thus it comes that the environment most suited to our more awakened nature is after all this strange universe.

This is only another way of saying that the universe itself evokes in us the capacity of discovering and appreciating in it a kind of beauty which we could not otherwise have seen.

Those who have this experience of the beauty of existence, are sometimes dismayed by the knowledge that after all they may be deceiving themselves, that, though they cannot help believing their own eyes when they see this terrible-beautiful whole, they may be deluded. But they should not be dismayed. They should face this possibility. They may, indeed, be, after all, merely ‘projecting’ their own delicious well-being upon the universe. But so far from disheartening them, this doubt should turn their faith into a gallant adventure, of which the outcome is uncertain.

D. ECSTASY AND THE MORAL WILL

FOR ANYONE WHO sees things in this way, it is this experience, this ecstasy, that makes life most worth living. So long as he can keep it in view, nothing can dismay him, nothing can turn him wholly aside from striving after the way of life that the ‘beauty of existence’ somehow seems to demand of him. It does not really demand anything of him but that he should be what he is, that he should be as fully alive as he has it in him to be. And this, of course, he will be. But the perception of the universe in this way changes a man. It makes him be different from what he was without it. Seeing things thus, he can no longer be merely a little greedy frightened self. He cannot even be merely a loyal servant of mankind. He will try to be that, but he will be something more also. He will, of course, eagerly, though perhaps ineffectively, strive to order his whole life so as to advance the great human enterprise; but in his heart of hearts he will be always quiet, and deeply glad whatever happens; because, in however dim and confused a way, he sees, or seems to see, something of the whole theme of existence, and accepts it with joy. Mankind he sees as a very little part in that great theme, and himself and all his striving as a very little part in the life of mankind. His own life and the life of all human beings, and the whole career of mankind, are seemingly doomed to incomplete fulfilment. He greatly longs for fulfilment for himself and mankind. Yet more deeply, because of the beauty of the theme, he welcomes fate.

Lest the upshot of this chapter should seem to be sheer supine fatalism, let me repeat that this ecstatic acceptance of fate can, and I believe should, lead the mind not to passivity but to vigorous action. Mysteriously it can breed in conduct its very opposite, the emphatic resistance of evil, the will to take part effectively and without capitulation in the endless struggle for the awakening of the spirit in each individual and in the world as a whole, the will to fight for the truly human against the brutish, for life against death, for right against wrong. Let us always remember that these two attitudes of mind, which seem to our half-formed intelligence to be logically in conflict, can in practice be mutually supporting. Ecstatic acceptance, in the depth of one’s own being, demands in the life of action absolute devotion to the cause of the militant spirit.

If examples are needed in support of this contention, the lives of Jesus and of Gautama Buddha may be cited as the supreme illustrations of the unity of acceptance and moral action. Nearer our own time we find the philosopher Spinoza exemplifying with strange perfection in his own life the union of courageous moral action and ecstatic acceptance, or, as he called it, ‘the intellectual love of God’.

In our modern age the great common goal of all moral action must be, in some sense, revolution, world-revolution. The awakened mind has somehow to achieve at once both acceptance and the zeal of the revolutionary. In so far as a man falls short of acceptance, his zeal becomes fanatical, doctrinaire, callous, blind, and in the last resort inadequate to the needs of world-revolution. In so far as he fails in courage and loyalty to the revolutionary cause, the religious ecstasy of his acceptance is poisoned. This is perhaps a mystery, but it is true.

E. A MYTH OF MAN AND FATE

LET US CONSTRUCT a myth to symbolize this and other contradictions.

All striving, whether of animal or man or any more exalted being, may be thought of as in some sense the striving of the cosmical spirit to wake, to achieve beauty, to be aware of its achievement, and to rejoice in it.

For beauty, there must be striving; and for striving, resistance. There must be the inertia of that which we call matter. There must be the sluggishness, the obtuseness, the callousness, of the less alive and the less awakened, ever thwarting and blindly torturing the more alive, the more awakened, in its effort toward further awakening. For fullness of beauty, the cosmos must include the whole gamut of triumph and tragedy upon every level of the spirit’s life.

Let us conceive that at some date in the history of the cosmos, whether future to us or past, an all-knowing and all-praising mind does awaken as a result of past striving, does find the cosmical process very beautiful.

Let us further suppose that by its own creative activity, by the adventure of its own life, it completes the cosmical beauty, that it perfects the cosmos, and rejoices in its own crowning achievement.

Let it subsequently, through the physical degeneration of the cosmos, decay and vanish. Let the whole cosmos die.

Embryonic minds such as ours cannot know that this is so. But if it is so, all is well, even though we cannot know it.

We, for our part, achieve but little, know but confusedly, enjoy but obtusely. We cannot judge whether the cosmical process is, in fact, a perfect thing or not. We can be assured only that there is beauty scattered within it; and also pain and very great evil. And we know, we feel it in our depths, that we must strive for the awakening. It is our part always to strive, seldom to triumph.

Though we cannot see the whole form of the cosmos, to see its beauty, we are, in fact, capable of that commanding and unintelligible ecstasy of worship, that seemingly unjustified conviction of the perfect rightness of all existence as a whole and in every part. Whence this experience?

Time and space, though indeed real features of the cosmos, are not in reality just as they appear to us. Much in our experience suggests that we do not apprehend them truly and fully. We may well conceive that a more awakened mind, though it would not pronounce them mere illusion, would not be limited by them as we are limited. Let us then suppose that in our strange ecstasy of worship we obscurely participate in the ecstasy of that perfected mind, which, in the future or in the past, but also eternally, crowns and fittingly enjoys the whole drama of the cosmos, including its own downfall.

We may suppose also, if we will (since time is so strange a thing) that the very mind which at some date awakens as the result of cosmical striving, and crowns the cosmos with its creative achievement and its delight, is also the eternal and all-creative source of the whole cosmos.

If this be so, then the glorious goal of all striving, which in the process of time is momentarily achieved and lost, is yet also the indestructible and basic fact in the eternal reality of the cosmos. In the terms of this myth, the beauty of the cosmos is absolutely the outcome of the effort of all the individual spirits of every order, each striving according to its limited vision. But also it involves the inconceivable sum of agony, defeat, treason. To our minds in their blindness, this huge evil may well seem to mar the cosmical beauty. But to the perfectly awakened mind of the cosmos (let us suppose), to the mind which at some moment of cosmical time knows all, crowns all, and rejoices in all, even in its own impending degeneration and misery, the huge evil of the cosmical process is acceptable as a needed part of beauty; for to this mind it is evident that the goal of all striving, namely perfected beauty and complete awakening, is achieved. The perfectly awakened mind at last sees clearly that, though the defeat and agony of the myriad beings of the cosmos are irreducible facts, they are also needed factors in the excellence of the cosmos.

We may say further, within the terms of our myth, that when any individual spirit, or any race, or any living world, gallantly strives to realize the best that is in it, but is defeated, it may yet find peace in the ecstasy of acceptance, and in the thought: This striving was demanded for the cosmical beauty, and so also was this defeat. But when any individual or race or world fails through baseness or weakness of will, and betrays its own best vision, still we must say: This issue, and even this betrayal, were demanded for the cosmical beauty. Yet shame to that betrayal! For its source was not the will for the fullness of beauty, which alone is the motive of the spirit.

In some such terms we may, if we will, construct our myth. But let us never for a moment forget that it is of our own making, and that almost certainly the reality is not as we conceive it, even when we take into account all that we experience, and use our intelligence sincerely upon it.

XIV. WORLD-REVOLUTION?

A. THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

THE KEY-NOTE OF the preceding chapter was a kind of fatalism, though an ecstatic fatalism. But even though the ecstatic acceptance of fate is one aspect of the truly awakened attitude to life, the other and no less important aspect was said to be the resolute will to act for the awakening of individuals and the human world as a whole, the will to fight for the awakened mentality against the brutish, for life against death, for right against wrong.

I shall now try to outline the kind of world-policy which seems to be demanded if the foregoing account of human nature and the distinctively human activities is true. There is already a widespread conviction that, if we are to save our civilization, or rather if we are to transform our present barbarism into true civilization, certain revolutionary changes must be made in our world. To complete this book it seems necessary to state the main direction of these changes. It is not for me to describe them in detail. Only the expert sociologist or the inspired revolutionary leader could do so. But their main principles cannot he too often stated, and a brief account of them will give point to the earlier chapters.

The influences which make it impossible to-day for men to be as human as they might be, and to recognize and accept the true world-aim, are the influences which turn nearly all of us in some degree or other into mental cripples instead of well-grown minds.

The chief of these influences are bad economic organization and bad education. By education I mean the whole process of moulding minds by instruction, example, exhortation, and veiled suggestion, which begins in the cradle and ends at death.

To these two underlying problems of economic organization and education we may add two other extremely important problems, namely the problem of democracy and the problem of peace. But both democracy and peace depend in the last resort on the interaction of economic factors and education. Thus the economic problem and the educational problem are the real roots of all our trouble.

The economic organization of the world is bad for the obvious reason that the wealth of the world is controlled in the main by individuals or minor groups of individuals for their own profit. The result has been that economic power has fallen to a minority, who, though many of them in private life are generous and conscientious persons, are none the less, as a class, hidebound and unimaginative, and quite unable to see that their social principles are disastrous to the world. They use their power in the main for individual success rather than for the good of the world. The great majority of human beings are economically in bondage. They have very many capacities, animal and human, which, because of their economic bondage and penury, they cannot exercise. And because of the same disability, their power of consuming the products of industry is one-tenth, one-hundredth of what it might be, and the system of production is unable to find full outlet.

During the period of industrial expansion the system of economic individualism worked without flagrant disaster; but in the present period of industrial stagnation when the great capitalist states are hungrily craving each other’s markets, it is ceasing to work even tolerably well, and it threatens to break down completely.

To-day the immediate need of the world may be said to be the need for economic reorganization under a world-authority which has at heart the interests of all men and not merely the interest of the present economic masters, or of particular national states. But since the world as a whole has not yet come to desire this change, one is tempted to say that the most urgent need of all is for a change in education. Unfortunately the desire for educational revolution is even less widespread than the desire for economic revolution. The only way to deal with this vicious circle is to attack it from both sides at once.

The problem of economic reorganization is an extremely complicated technical problem which calls for expert knowledge and great intelligence. I shall not attempt to discuss it. It can no more be solved by amateurs or by the populace as a whole than problems of medicine or engineering or astrophysics. On the other hand, though the details of the solution must be found by experts, it is for the community as a whole, or for those members of it who grasp the world-aim, to see that the experts do not become blinded by technicalities, do not lose sight of the goal which is to be attained by means of their technique. Briefly the goal may be summarized thus. The productive power of the world is to be controlled in such a manner that all extant human beings may be able to exercise their capacities to the full, and that the quality of civilization may continually improve.

Though the details of economic reorganization are technical and extremely complex, it should be clear by now that reorganization, a very thorough reorganization, is necessary; and that the will, the passion, to carry it out must come not from the experts nor from the present class of economic masters but from the community as a whole, led by an intelligent and inspired minority. Further, if revolution is to succeed, the massed drive and resolution for the initial break with the old order, must gain its force from the indignation of that class which at present suffers most, the proletariat.

But what of the ‘middle class that immense host of highly skilled workers and small employers who are used to fairly comfortable conditions, and are extremely dependent on social confidence and stability? They have much to lose. Unless their conditions gravely deteriorate, they will be chary of desperate remedies. On the other hand, their better fortune enables them to attain on the average a higher degree of general competence than the less fortunate. Without their active support no great change is possible. The West is not Russia. We have seen in Italy and Germany what the misguided enthusiasm of the middle class can effect. But though they can be gulled by those who play upon their fear and hate and sentimentality, they have also great capacities of common sense, balance, generosity, even, I believe, of vision. Unless they join the Revolution, Revolution in the West is assuredly doomed to failure.

All those who demand a new world have to face the question: How is the present economic oligarchy to be divested of power?

Is this great change to be brought about by mildness, by appeals to the moral sense of those who at present hold power, and by co-operation with them? Or must there be a struggle? And if so, can actual violence be avoided?

Members of the dominant class, the economic masters, are human beings, like the rest. They are not devils or brutes. But neither are they angels. If you want to get something out of a man, it nearly always pays to appeal to the best in him. If your case is a sound one, and if you can state it in a way that he can understand and feel, he will want to do the right thing by you. If the cost is not too great, he will actually do it. But unfortunately the problem of dealing with the dominant oligarchy is complicated by the fact that even its best members sincerely believe that the system which they uphold is essential to the health of society. You may persuade them that particular evils in the system must be corrected, but you will never persuade them that the system itself should be abolished. The idea will always fall on a blind spot in their mental vision. It is too foreign to their whole style of thought, and its consequences are too unpleasant. Only exceptional members of the class will tolerate it.

Struggle, then, seems inevitable, hateful as it is. We may, and indeed even for merely tactical reasons we must, work by persuasion and co-operation whenever possible. But time has already shown conclusively that patience and mildness alone will not produce the far-reaching change which is needed if mankind is to turn the present critical corner and advance into true civilization. We must face the fact that the root of the trouble cannot be extracted without a struggle.

One way or another, it is likely to be a grim struggle. But must it be one of actual violence? In Russia the downfall of the dominant class came through a violent upheaval, in which a small party of resolute revolutionaries inspired the workers and guided them to victory. In the West the organization and resources and weapons of the economic masters are far more formidable than they were in Russia; and since the plight of the workers is not nearly so grievous as it was in Russia, their state of mind is as yet very far from resolute. Moreover, in Fascism the masters have a new and potent instrument for gulling the workers, side-tracking their drive toward revolution, and disciplining them in service of the present order. Every serious threat of a red revolution is a strength to Fascists. In England at least, there is at present a far greater possibility that the critical corner will be turned by peaceful and even politically constitutional methods than by civil war. In countries already dominated by Fascism, and in England too, if ever economic distress brings Fascism into power, revolution will probably entail an orgy of bloodshed, and will be grievously coarsened in spirit.

If the economic oligarchy is not soon deposed, the economic disorder of the world will inevitably and at no very distant date produce violent upheavals, relentless tyranny, and greater economic distress. If things go thus from bad to worse, there may well come a time when, all else having failed, a bloody revolution, spreading from country to country, will be the last forlorn hope of those who would found the new world.

Meanwhile, before that desperate plight is reached, what possibility is there of wresting power from the economic masters? What possibility is there of giving that power not merely to the national states but to a world-authority, not merely to some other single social class, such as the proletariat or the middle class, but to the whole world-community?

There is at least some possibility that in the less tortured nations the pressure of circumstances, combined with the logic of intelligent leaders and the insistence of an awakening public opinion, may force the economic masters step by step toward abdication. Conceivably many of them, those who have special knowledge, and are social at heart, may be allowed to continue their work under the new authority. But they will no longer wield great economic power for private ends.

As things stand in Europe to-day, with the capitalists in control both of arms and propaganda, and Fascism on the increase, the hope of a world-wide and thorough revolution is indeed forlorn. The makers of the new world must be content with forlorn hopes, and if Communism (in a broad sense) cannot be achieved peaceably, then they will have to fight, though almost without any hope at all, in the bloody and world-wide revolution in which at best nearly as much will be destroyed as will be created.

B. PACIFISM

AT THIS POINT we may conveniently consider the whole problem of peace and war. Some hold that in no circumstances whatever is war, whether international or civil, either right or expedient. In their view the use of force save for ordinary police purposes always creates more evil than it cures. The greatest of all needs, they say, is to accustom the peoples to the idea of absolute pacifism. Only by establishing everywhere a resolutely pacific disposition can world-wide peace be secured. And this disposition, they say, is only to be inculcated by preaching the absolute rejection of war. This view deserves very serious consideration; but we should, I think, recognize that to fight for the new order might under certain circumstances become necessary.

Absolute pacifism rests on the assumption that all men or the great majority of men are sufficiently sensitive, sufficiently awakened spiritually, to respond to the example of heroic non-resistance. In a world of predatory beasts absolute pacifism would be ineffective. The claim of the absolute pacifist is that all men have the capacity of gentleness, forgiveness and brotherhood, and that this capacity can be roused into action by the example of pacifism in others. I believe that in one sense this view is justified, and that the work of appealing by example and precept to the more pacific impulses of men is of very great importance; even, perhaps, in our day, of supreme importance. But though the pacific impulses of men may be roused by heroic example, they may not. Appeal to impulses of fear and hate may turn them into barbarians, into predatory beasts, into dangerous lunatics. In this case the example of non-resistance may fail to touch them, or may even infuriate them. If personal pacifism were itself the supreme end, we might stay our hands and damn the consequences. But it is not the supreme end. There are two social ends which are far more important in our day. One of them is the destruction of economic individualism, the other the establishment of a trustworthy world-authority. I do not say that violent methods are, as a matter of fact, necessary for the attainment of these ends; indeed I believe that violence nearly always does more harm than good. But if ever violence appears to be the one forlorn defence of these aims, pacifism must be abandoned.

In private life it is a sound principle to refrain from violence under almost all circumstances. For instance, so far as possible we should leave hooligans to be dealt with by the police. But sometimes we may be called upon to aid the police; and sometimes, if the police become corrupt, or are used by anti-social powers, it may be necessary to resist them by force. Of course, in resorting to arms, even in a just cause, we inevitably do great hurt to public trust in peaceable methods and to the pacifist ideal. But a situation may arise in which such hurt would be the lesser evil.

In the international sphere there is no supreme authority, and every imperialist government is a potential hooligan. Should we, then, arm the League of Nations? If the League were a true world-authority, this might be a sound policy. But the League as it stands is no such thing. Although many of the actual members of the Assembly are earnest internationalists, the League is doomed to impotence in all serious crises, because it is controlled by the very forces which it is meant to restrain, namely the great imperialistic powers. Though the Assembly unanimously condemned Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, no effort was made to restrain her. This was a crucial event in the history of our age. To its influence must be traced not only Japan’s increasing contempt for the League, but the desperate truculence of Germany. To it must also be traced the widespread conviction that the League, as at present constituted, is useless. To arm the present League would merely put power and moral authority into the hands of whatever great national governments were in effective control of the League itself.

But though it would indeed be unwise to arm the League as it stands to-day, the makers of the new world must recognize the obligation to support, if necessary even by force, a properly constituted world-authority against a piratical national state, if ever such an authority is established. Even so, the resort to force would be the last, forlorn hope. Loyal citizens of the world would take up arms only when every other possible method had failed, and only with the bitter realization that in doing so, they were themselves doing grievous hurt to the very thing which they wished to defend, the civilized world.

One thing at least is clear. Those who are pledged to the making of the new world will not fight in any purely national cause. The justification for this resolve is that a national government can always, by propaganda, make its war seem righteous in the eyes of its own people, and that the actual cause of war has nearly always been economic or imperialistic rivalry. The chances are always hundreds to one that even the most plausible appeal by a national government will turn out in the end to be based on conscious or unconscious falsification.

The nations have declared by solemn treaty that they will chastise, if necessary by force, any state which attacks another state. This system seems to me impracticable, and even dangerous. When it comes to the point, national sovereign states will not sacrifice their own prosperity for the sake of public order. Further, in every serious crisis, it will be to the interest of some states actually to support the aggressor. It is too much to expect that they should take positive action in opposition to their own interests. The system may work in minor instances, but never in the great crises for which it is meant. Probably it would only work when the mass of capitalistic states felt moved to take concerted action against a socialist state which all regarded with hate. It would not be difficult to invent a casus belli. For my part, at any rate, I see no hope of abolishing war until national armaments are destroyed and a supra-national authority is given a small but effective police-force.

Meanwhile the makers of the new world will do all in their power to prevent national wars. Rather than fight in defence of any national state, they must face ridicule, contempt, imprisonment, death, and, if necessary, torture. They will preach militant pacifism, the pacifism which not merely will not take up arms, but condemns and ridicules those who do. They will scoff at the emblems and at the instruments of national military glory, at flags, uniforms, trophies, guns, warships, military aeroplanes. They will insist that such things are but dangerous and degrading toys, attractive to puerile minds, but not to men. They will call the brave young airman, who risks his life so brilliantly to bomb enemy cities, not a hero but a stupid blundering boy, who ought to be sent back to school, to a school where his eyes would be opened. They will dub all gallant defenders of their country blockheads and cowards; blockheads for not seeing that in defending their country they impose on it the most shattering and degrading of all experiences, namely war; and cowards because they betray the best for the sake of the second best, because for the sake of mere frightened patriotism they are disloyal to the hope of the new world.

‘This is all very well,’ the patriot will say, ‘but it simply does not apply to the world of to-day. Let us suppose that Britain alone were to disarm, and that the Nazi Government of Germany were to find it convenient to take charge of England so as to prevent anti-Nazi propaganda, and assimilate English culture to Nazi “culture”. The Nazi Government has clearly proved itself to lie beyond the pale of civilization. Its treatment of its opponents has been flagrantly barbarous. Its ideals are savage. Its policy is ruinous to the cause of the new world. Should we allow all that is free and noble in England to be blotted out by Nazi thugs?’

It must be admitted that this argument strikes home. Yet I believe it is mistaken. It would be true only if the mass of German men and women were, indeed, beyond the pale of civilization. They are not. The great majority of Germans are, individually, quite as decent folk as ourselves. Complex circumstances, for which the Allies are largely responsible, have driven them into a kind of social neurosis, an exaggerated dread of seeming ‘inferior This has put them at the mercy of a ruthless gang. They are suffering from the psychological consequences of defeat and of the foolish policy of the victors; perhaps also from the fact that on the whole the sense of the ridiculous is somewhat less developed among Germans than among some other peoples.

Those who quote recent events in Germany to show that non-resistance is doomed to failure are drawing a false parallel. The failure to resist the violent methods of the Nazis was not due to pacifism but to sheer disheartenment and sheer folly. The republican government permitted the administration of law and education to remain in the hands of its opponents. It also permitted the creation of private armies.

The makers of the new world, then, will declare it a solemn duty on the part of each people to refuse to make war under any circumstances, save under supranational command. They should declare, further, I suggest, that if a nation is attacked and invaded by a foreign nation, it would be well advised not to defend itself, but to meet invasion with non-resistance. Indeed, the time has come, they will say, when it is desirable that some great people, faced with invasion, should perform this supreme act of national heroism, should put its whole strength not into fighting the invaders but into pacific ‘non-co-operation’, so as to thwart them in their attempt to govern the ‘conquered’ country. The foreign army would enter the country; no army, no air force would oppose them. They would occupy the seat of government; no one would prevent them, but none of their decrees would be obeyed. Many of those who refused to carry out the instructions of the invaders would, of course, be shot. There would be much brutality on the part of the exasperated ‘conquerors’. But you cannot in cold blood shoot a whole people. If the people was resolute, and enough individuals were ready to  accept martyrdom, the foreign occupation would collapse.

No brilliant effort of imagination is needed to conceive what the moral effect of a heroic gesture of national non-resistance would be upon the attacking nation and on the rest of the world. If it were possible for a great people, or the large majority of it, to adopt this policy whole-heartedly and hold to it consistently, there can be little doubt that the effects of its action would change the whole political atmosphere of the world. I am well aware that every effort would be made by the enemies of peace to misrepresent its motives and prevent the world from knowing what had happened. But even modern methods of distortion and propaganda would be powerless to suppress so huge a fact.

There is perhaps little likelihood that any one great people will be so much more pacifist than its neighbours that it will behave in this way. Such an act of non-resistance on the part of a whole people would need very great conviction, courage and resolution. It could only occur if in the invaded country there was a widespread and passionate allegiance to the world-aim, and a faith in the power of one brilliant example to call out the best in other peoples. If one nation had advanced to this pitch, it is probable that others, including the aggressor, would not be far behind; and that the effect of the example would be overwhelming.

Though such an act of national heroism is unlikely, we must insist that it would not be the sheer suicide which our patriots would have us believe it to be. Even from the point of view of the invaded nation, it would be much less destructive than a war of defence, and much less debasing. Even if the foreign occupation endured for a long time, which is unlikely, it would be less destructive and less debasing than a modern war.

There is surely no possibility of abolishing war until there is a far stronger and more widespread sense of the common humanity of all peoples, and of their fundamental identity of interest. Probably this sense of common humanity will not be attained in time to prevent another great disaster. But since it is essential to peace in the modern world, we must be ready to risk everything for its attainment. Caution and national self-interest having signally failed to bring real peace, we must now boldly rely on the fact that most men, so long as they are not confused by hunger or by emotional appeals to fear and hate, desire to ‘live and let live’. We must propagate the far-seeing self-interest which recognizes that in no circumstances can a modern war benefit the victorious people.

We must, of course, work for the complete disarmament of all nations, and the international control of all aircraft, and the abolition of all private armament factories and armament firms. We must seek to infuse every section of every nation with the determination to act courageously and effectively, when the threat of a national war arises, in such ways as to make it impossible for its Government to open hostilities. We must try to persuade the workers to paralyse industry by a general strike. If transport and industry were to cease, war could not be maintained. We must try to include within the general strike, not only the proletariat, but also the middle class. We must try to make it clear, long before an actual occasion for war arises, that the war-machine simply cannot be put in action, because those on whom it depends will not play their part in it. But more anxiously we must work continuously for mutual trust and loyalty among the peoples, and for the creation in each people of so strong a will to peace that the machinations of armament firms and politicians will be ineffective.

Unfortunately, as we have already noted, the most deep-rooted cause of war is probably not economic nor political, nor even ‘tribal’. It lies in the fact that the great majority of normal and kindly persons have acquired in youth strong though unconscious needs for hate and cruelty. It is from these secret cravings that war scares and war itself gain that crazy passion which is impervious to reason. The makers of the new world will strive to lay bare the root of this widespread insanity, and to work for the removal of its causes in the circumstances of the lives of the young. This is part of the needed revolution in education.

C. DEMOCRACY, FREE SPEECH, THE WORLD-STATE

LET US NOW turn to the problem of democracy. In our day democracy, government of the people for the people by the people, is falling into disrepute. The makers of the new world will insist that in one sense democracy is essential, in another impossible. It is essential because a government which has not the approval of the people cannot help the people to fullness of life. Whatever it does, the people will resist. Moreover, since human nature is far from perfect, any government which does not depend ultimately on the expressed will of the people, is certain to lose touch with the people, is certain to consider itself the only true interpreter of the popular will, when as a matter of fact it has become incapable of imagining what the people really needs. On the other hand, and in another sense, democracy is impossible. It is impossible because a government which is merely the slave of an ill-informed and ever-shifting public opinion will not be able to govern at all. Democracy, then, is essential in the sense that sound government must depend on the general approval of the people; impossible if it means that all initiative should come from the public, and that every detail of executive government should be expressly sanctioned by the people.

Even against democracy in the former sense a serious case may be stated. It may be argued, plausibly but dangerously, that popular decree, even as to what the aims of government should be, is only salutary for a people or a world that has awakened so far as to be intelligently loyal to the world-aim. For less awakened peoples, such as the most civilized that actually exist, democracy must be tempered to the degree of their backwardness, lest through stupidity or malice they harm themselves or one another.

No people of the world to-day, it may be said, is fit for true democracy, since all are composed chiefly of mental cripples, who, at least in public matters, lack intelligence, knowledge and generosity. They cannot yet appreciate the true aim of government. Nor can they appreciate the intricacies of practical economic and political problems. Most even of the best citizens are bound to be incompetent politically, since they are absorbed (quite rightly) in their own special work, and have not the experience necessary for understanding complex matters in other spheres.

There is force in this argument against democracy. But the answer to it is that, bad as democracy is in a world that is not more than half-awakened, no other kind of government is in the long run compatible with the true political aim, namely the free development of human personality. If the would-be makers of the new world think to achieve their end by any method of government which is essentially undemocratic, they deceive themselves. Democracy, in the broadest sense, is a necessary factor in the world-aim. It is, of course, possible that in revolutionary crises a socially minded minority, in order to oust from power another and tyrannical minority which has annihilated all expression of popular will, may have to seize control of the body politic and govern for a brief spell without the positive backing of popular will. But when it has achieved its end and put the people once more into a position to have a will, it must itself abide by the popular decision, or be untrue to the world aim.

Further, though in one sense the half-awakened peoples of to-day are, indeed, incapable of true democracy, in that they have not attained the necessary wisdom, their governing is after all their concern, and not the privilege of any self-appointed caste or individual. Even those who have the true world-aim clearly in view must be content to accept the dictates of popular will, however misguided it may be. All they can do is to try to influence the popular will. Government must be carried out not by force but by persuasion. The best that can happen to any people of the present world is that a minority who have the true world-aim at heart, and great skill in governing, shall be able to educate and persuade the people intelligently to accept the true world-aim and the general lines of policy which follow from it; so that this enlightened people may support its governors wholeheartedly in the task of making the new world, and also be ready to overthrow them if at last they fall from grace.

Effective democracy is impossible without universal freedom to state facts and express opinions. The people that is to govern itself or to exercise enlightened democratic control over its rulers must be well informed about the conditions of the world in which it lives, about all varieties of opinion among its members, and all arguments bearing on the general aim and detailed policy of government. No democracy that is not in this sense an educated democracy can avoid being misled by demagogues.

It is often said that at least ideas harmful to the State or offensive to the moral sense of the community should be suppressed. The answer to this view is simple. In the first place, ideas cannot be permanently suppressed by force. They may, indeed, be driven underground for a while, as they were in Russia, but sooner or later they will either die of their own inherent folly or triumph through their own inherent sanity or rightness. During their sojourn underground they will inevitably become tainted with unnecessary hate and extravagance, so that when they do emerge they will be more dangerous and less true than formerly. On the other hand, if they are not suppressed, either they will succumb to the fire of criticism, or they will withstand criticism and even be strengthened by it, till they become incorporated in the theory and practice of the community.

All this is obviously true of an educated democracy. In a half-civilized community, such as even the most enlightened of modern nations, ideas which do not deserve acceptance may, in fact, be spread by emotional propaganda, and in the same way sound ideas may be defeated. But even in such a community the frequent miscarriage of free expression is no justification for its abolition or partial limitation. The most urgent of all needs is to create an educated democracy, and this can only be done by permitting absolute freedom of expression. The cure for the ills of our present partial freedom of expression is not less freedom but more. The business of gulling the public depends on the fact that only certain kinds of ideas, and not others, can secure full publicity through the Press and the radio.

Freedom of expression in our day involves freedom of private and public speech, freedom of the Press, and freedom of broadcasting. At the moment, and as the result of past struggles, we have in this country much freedom of private and even public speech. But we need much more. In respect of the Press our freedom is limited not only by law but also by the will of editors who fear to offend advertisers and readers. With books there is less restriction, since publishers do not depend on advertisers; but here again the government may intervene to suppress what it deems objectionable from the moral or political point of view. The case of broadcasting is, of course, different from the others. Since time and wave-lengths are limited, everything cannot be broadcast. But clearly the ideal is to give fair samples of every shade of opinion, and not only of opinion convenient to the government or the dominant class.

The principle that the law should, in any of these mediums, prevent the expression of ideas which the government considers indecent, immoral or subversive is entirely false. If morality and decency are so insecure that they will really be shaken by free speech, they cannot be deeply founded in the popular will, and are not worth preserving. If a government seeks to limit the expression of seditious views, this must mean either that it doubts whether it can produce sound arguments against them, or that it is conscious of widespread and violent discontent with its rule. In this case, as in all others, it should allow criticism to express itself.

Since every government is inevitably tempted to use its power for the suppression of criticism of its actions and of the ‘ideology’ on which it depends, the principle of free expression needs to be supported by some kind of permanent authority independent of the government of the moment, in the sense in which the legal system is supposed to be independent. Such an authority would no doubt be difficult to constitute; but it would not, I believe, be impossible, and it might be very beneficial. It would have to be autonomous, though financed by the State, as is the case with the judicature. Its function would be to detect, and bring to light, and ensure the correction of, all cases in which the principle of free expression had been violated, in whatever medium and by whatever power, whether governmental or private. On the other hand, it would also have the difficult task of exposing all false statements of fact, and ensuring public recantation by their perpetrators. In this connexion it would have to attack all flagrant cases in which misrepresentation had been achieved by suppression of relevant data. Here no doubt it would encounter very great difficulties. In all border-line cases it would content itself with publishing its own version of the facts, without exacting penalties from the offender. In the case of an offending journal it would have the right to compel the publication of its own version in that journal itself.

To be at all effective, such a ‘Publicity Authority’ or ‘Universal Devil’s Advocate’ would have to be very carefully formed. Its officers throughout the country, or throughout the world, would have to constitute a highly trained profession with very strong esprit de corps and loyalty to the ideals of their profession. They should work in co-operation with special local councils of representatives from every section of the community. No doubt the launching of such an Authority would be very precarious, and might prove not merely ineffective but damaging. On the other hand, if the critical early stage could be successfully passed, the Authority would gain public confidence, and might soon become an invaluable instrument for the advancement of enlightenment and true democracy.

In this and in many other ways the orthodox machinery of democracy needs to be either supplemented or remodelled. It may be, for instance, that the familiar kind of parliamentary government is too clumsy to serve the purposes of a great modern state. Its failure is clearly responsible for the widespread revulsion from democracy. But another and more satisfactory kind of democratic machinery may be possible. Indeed, such a one is perhaps in the act of being discovered. Though the present Soviet system in Russia and the Corporate State in Italy and Germany are certainly in practice far from democratic, they are democratic in principle, and could be used at any time as instruments of popular will. It is possible that some such hierarchy of elected councils, serving special purposes, and co-ordinated by a supreme council of representatives of the special councils themselves, may form the main democratic machinery of the future. On the other hand, it is possible that, for this country at any rate, it would be sufficient to improve and speed up the procedure of parliament without seriously altering its constitution.

It goes without saying that the makers of the new world will demand the abolition of the sovereignty of national states and the setting up of a world-state. To-day this ideal still seems very remote. Few desire it. Each people fears that a world-government would oppress it more than its own national government, and would tend to obliterate its distinctive culture, and in short neglect all its special interests. No people cares seriously about the welfare of other peoples, and consequently every people fears to surrender any jot of its independence to a world-government which might become the tool of its enemies.

But the pressure of circumstances is driving the world steadily, though slowly, toward a world-state. Already national sovereignty is being limited piecemeal by international agreements, boards, conferences for special purposes. Unfortunately such piecemeal limitation cannot be effective so long as there are national armaments. And national armaments will never be abolished till there is a general and insistent will for a world-state.

World-unity, and the establishment of the world-state, need not harm the distinctiveness of national cultures, which is the only valuable thing about nationality. For the full life of the world, diversity of local culture is as necessary as diversity of individual minds. But, as with individuals, so with national groups, diversity must always be co-operative diversity, not exclusive diversity, always such as the diverse individuals or groups can appreciate in one another. The ideal is the diversity of intimate friends, not the diversity of strangers. Friends may have very great diversity and yet be able to enrich one another. Strangers may happen to be at heart very similar; and yet if their similarity consists partly in being self-centred, conceited, secretive and suspicious, they will never understand one another. Under a trusted world-authority, probably of a federal type, national diversity might actually be more, not less, appreciated and cherished.

D. THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION

MILITARISTIC NATIONALISM HAS its roots in the two great causes of all our present troubles, namely bad economic organization and bad education.

These two causes support one another. Bad economic organization is, of course, an expression of economic individualism, which was brought about by the complex and far-reaching changes of the last few centuries. But also, in our own day, economic individualism and militant nationalism are driven into the minds of men by bad education.

Bad education has two causes. One cause is the fact that the actual form of education is an expression, in the last resort, of the unconscious assumptions of the economic masters, who cherish material power and put their faith in economic individualism and economic nationalism. The other cause of bad education is the fact that, owing to our bad economic system, the great majority of individuals have to become wage-slaves, and consequently have no use for any kind of education but that which will help them to earn good wages.

It is impossible to change education radically without changing the economic system, without wresting power from the economic masters who control education, and without abolishing the whole system of wage-slavery. Even if violent revolution could achieve this end, it alone could not sufficiently change the spirit of education. It might no doubt abolish the institutions which favour economic individualism, but the faith in material power, and the limitations of the mechanic’s mentality, would remain.

Without a profound change in education, not only in schools and colleges, but in homes, and also in all the influences which mould the minds of adults themselves, there is no hope whatever of founding the new world, or even the purely economic system of the new world. Economic causes direct the course of history, but they work through the operation of thought and propaganda. The only way in which, in our day, a better economic system can be devised is by the deliberation of original minds. The only way in which it can be established is by creating a widespread will for it; and this is only to be done by propaganda, which must consist of reasonable persuasion and emotional appeal.

The educational principles of a community are very deeply influenced by the economic conditions of the community. But an economic system which is collapsing produces the need not only for a new economic system but also for new educational principles suited to that system. And these will not arise simply by automatic action; they must be worked out by thought in relation to changing circumstances, and spread by propaganda. But such propaganda will be entirely ineffective unless at the same time steps are taken actually to change the economic system of the world.

It is easy to see the main features of the educational policy which the makers of the new world must advocate. It is very difficult to persuade the world to adopt this policy. These fundamental educational principles, which seem obvious to some men and fantastic to others, may be stated as follows.

The supreme aim of education should be to develop to the full the capacity for awakened personality in each member of the community. This involves developing him as a healthy animal, and as an intelligent and imaginative human being, at once courageously independent in thought, and in action constantly loyal to the world-aim. He must be inspired with a passion to come face to face with reality, however formidable it may prove, and to adjust appropriately thereto all his desires, all his acts, the whole course of his life.

Education, in the fullest sense, should be regarded as the most important of all kinds of work in the world-community after the provision of the necessities of bodily life. Indeed, there is a sense in which education is more important even than agriculture and industry. A well-educated world will be able to satisfy its bodily needs; but a badly educated world, however well equipped for industry and agriculture, will fall into class strife and nationalistic strife. And the greater its power, the more will it torture itself.

No profession should be more honoured or more carefully fostered than the teaching profession. For on the teachers, of all kinds, depends the intellectual and moral calibre of the world population. And on this depends everything. The profession must therefore be recruited only from individuals of the finest quality who have also the special gift of the teacher. These must be attracted to the profession, and not, as at present, driven into less important but more honoured or better-paid work, such as industry or law or medicine.

Since the education of future citizens is so overwhelmingly important, no expense should be grudged. The vast sums now spent on armaments might all be transferred to education. The sanity of a community may be roughly measured by the proportion of its income which it assigns to genuine education. By genuine education I mean not merely vocational training, but education for the development of personality.

Premises should be large and well equipped. Classes should be very small. Teaching should be based on minute psychological and physiological research. Every child in the world should have access to a school where he will be dealt with by highly trained teachers using the most efficient apparatus. Everything must be done to make the young people of the world realize that the world-community regards them as its most precious possession, and that they themselves have a supreme duty to develop their powers for the glory of the community. Every child, before leaving school, should be subjected to very careful study by teachers, psychologists and physiologists, so that his particular powers may be ascertained, and he may be advised as to what kind of career would best suit him. At the same time he should be given accurate information as to the actual openings in the life of the world for his particular powers.

The control of the educational system of the world must be with the educators themselves, subject to the final control of the world-government. It must not lie with wealthy patrons, or fumbling city councils, or religious societies, or church dignitaries, or trade unions. Only the educators can know what is desirable in education. And since education is not merely a means but, in a manner, the supreme purpose of the world-community, the educators should be given greater autonomy than any other profession.

Since in early childhood the mind is given a set or direction which will last till death, the education of young children, whether by parents or others, will have to be very carefully supervised. Bad homes make bad children, and bad citizens of the world.

All education should have a twofold aim, namely to fit the individual for his work in the world, and to make the most of him as a personality. From the point of view of the individual himself, and equally from the point of view of the world, both these aims are necessary. For his own well-being he must have work, and also he must become as alive a personality as possible. For the world’s sake also he must have work; and that he may be an intelligent and responsible citizen, he must develop his personality. If people are not properly trained for their work, they will be incompetent, and the world will suffer. If they are not helped to develop all their capacities, and to be interested in all the many sides of the world’s living, and to appreciate and cherish the world-aim, they will be a danger to the world. Hitherto, such education as has been given has been essentially education for work and for social obedience. Henceforth, owing to the influence of economic change, education may and, indeed, must be dominated by the need to equip all men for the fullest possible use of their leisure, and the development of their personalities.

Some still maintain that only a few should be allowed to grow into full personality, and that the masses should be trained merely to be docile and efficient slaves with as little high-grade capacity as possible. But the aim which the makers of the new world hold in view is that all ‘soul-destroying’ drudgery may be performed by machines. Even in our day all human beings should be educated to be true citizens of the world, understanding the general pattern of the world’s life, and accepting gladly the world-aim.

In schools and colleges, though much time must necessarily be given to training young people for their work, the main guiding principle should be to develop them as personalities and help them to become not merely docile but independent, intelligent and responsible citizens of the world. The disorder of the modern world is not due to lack of vocational training, but to lack of true education.

The first and the last aim of true education is to help the future citizens of the world to experience vividly, zestfully, in many spheres, to think about their experience honestly and accurately, and to will sanely, distinguishing between less important and more important ends.

The makers of the new world will therefore clamour for an educational system such that in all schools and colleges the whole curriculum will be arranged so as to broaden and deepen experience. The future citizens must be helped to have precise and zestful sense-perceptions, and a vigorous bodily life. They must live intensely in the present moment. But also they must keep a firm hold on the past, and look far forward into the future. And above all they must become fearless thinkers, receptive and also critical, critical both of themselves and of others.

The whole of education in home and school and college must be inspired and controlled by the world-aim. The child and the young man and woman must be helped to wake into understanding and devotion to the great human enterprise. They must come to feel that they are entering into a great heritage which is not merely national but human; and that, with whatever power they can discover in themselves, they must live to enrich that heritage, advance that enterprise. Both vocational training and general education should be quickened by this supreme idea.

It is often said that propaganda should be eliminated from education. This is true in one sense but false in another. It is both impossible and undesirable to exclude from the educational system of the community the fundamental assumptions or principles (often unconscious) on which the community’s whole social policy depends. In practice all educational systems are inevitably given a bias, subtle or obvious. It is dishonest to pretend that a bias is not given when in fact it is. Also it would be folly to entrust the education of future citizens to persons definitely out of sympathy with the basic assumptions of the community.

This contention needs to be carefully qualified. It is certainly the right policy to put all points of view forward with equal frankness, and to have them expressed by persons who sincerely and even passionately believe in them. No views on any subject whatever should be suppressed. Pupils must be urged to use their own intelligence and to judge for themselves. But two extremely important facts have to be taken into account. The first is that opinion is formed very largely by emotional appeal, and not merely by reason. The second important fact is this. The less awakened, less distinctively human attitude or opinion is apt to be much easier to adopt than the more awakened. The one arises out of the simpler and more firmly established mental reactions, the other demands a certain mental and spiritual strain. Consequently, it is very important to see that, though barbaric views are allowed full expression, pupils are definitely helped, both intellectually and emotionally, to attain the more civilized, more awakened view.

But though in this limited sense it is desirable to give education a bias toward the most awakened mentality possible to the community, it is extremely important also to see that the young are not simply indoctrinated with a certain detailed set of theories and arguments, even the right ones, and prevented from having access to others. This danger may be avoided by insisting, in season and out of season, that the first duty of all teachers is to instil in their pupils an indefatigable will to be intellectually independent, and to do justice to every point of view, and to criticize intelligently and fearlessly everything that is put before them, even the most sacred principles of the community.

Such are the general principles of a sound educational policy. This is not the place to discuss the application of these principles in detail. One or two outstanding points, however, should be mentioned.

In order that national illusions may be abolished, the history text-books of each nation should be supervised by a committee of the historians of the world. Where agreement is impossible, opposed versions must be given. History should be so taught as to show the growing economic interdependence of the world, and the cultural unity which underlies all cultural differences. It should be made clear that the differences between the peoples are due far more to traditional upbringing than to innate characteristics. The future citizen must discover that each people is, or should be, enriched by every other people, not only economically by trade, but culturally by the interchange of ideas between peoples which, though fundamentally in accord, are also arrestingly diverse.

Provision should be made for the young to travel in foreign countries as much as possible so that they may begin to appreciate to some extent the style of life and thought, the language and literature and art, of foreign peoples. This intercourse of the young of all peoples might be very greatly helped by broadcasting and by the cinema. Wars may be caused in part by the cupidity of powerful individuals, but its main cause is fear in the minds of the populace, fear of the supposedly alien mentality of foreign peoples. This fear is rooted in ignorance. The more we foster intercourse between the young of the various nations, the more mutual understanding will there be, and therefore the less fear and the less possibility of war.

If the young are to appreciate foreign cultures, they must begin by appreciating their own. And in any case this is one of the main purposes of education. All those who have the necessary modicum of intelligence and sensibility must be enticed into certain regions of contemporary and past literature. But the makers of the new world will urge that literature should not be propounded as a body of sacred texts to be saluted by insincere gestures of veneration. It should be used as grist for the exercise of intelligence and discrimination, as a means of insight into human personality, and of exploration into the subtler characteristics of all that men experience.

Literature must also be used to elicit aesthetic appreciation. But music and the plastic arts should be no less encouraged. Some hold that art is to be appreciated only by a few, and that the introduction of art into general education is useless, and likely to lead to insincerity and cant. No doubt the finer kinds of aesthetic experience are only for a few; but with proper treatment many are capable of this most awakening experience at least to some extent. And not only for their own sakes, but for the sanity of the community, it is extremely important that the artistic point of view should be fostered. This is, indeed, particularly important because science must inevitably play so large a part in modern education. The young human being must somehow be helped both to feel and to see intellectually the limitations of the contemporary scientific attitude. He must be led to regard science neither simply as a means to power for power’s sake, nor as absolute truth, but as a first sketch of a single aspect of the universe, and as a dangerous technique, which ought to be a powerful instrument for the making of the new world. He should, of course, be given an account of the world as it is tentatively revealed by science, of the vastness and intricacy of the physical universe, and of the story of the evolution of life on the earth. He must be helped to see the whole adventure of man as a brief, precarious, but glorious, movement in that longer story.

If education all over the world were carried out strictly according to these principles, the mentality of the whole world would be profoundly changed within half a century. Or rather, this would happen only if, along with educational reform, we could accomplish an equally radical economic reform. However well educated the young might be, if, when they went out into the world, they found that society would not make use of them, and would not guarantee them the means for fullness of life, their sense of frustration would poison them. In rage and indignation they would condemn society, and be tempted to listen to any demagogue who promised to lead them into a new world by merely refurbishing or merely destroying the old one.

XV. THE WILL FOR CHANGE

HOW IS THE present world-population, which consists mostly of minds poisoned by economic disorder and bad education, to be brought to will the new world? An increasing number of the working class demand far-reaching social change; but, very naturally, most of them are concerned almost entirely with the economic side of revolution. The educational side is for most of them subsidiary. Of the dominant class only a few seriously desire either economic or educational revolution.

Somehow or other the makers of the new world have to persuade the young adults of all the peoples to demand not only economic but also educational changes of the most far-reaching kind.

In the present state of the world it does, indeed, seem hopeless to expect the young to demand anything of the sort. Movements of reaction are becoming stronger every day. The peoples are inclining more and more to demagogues and tyrants, who have no conception of the world-aim, and maintain their power by appeals to primitive fear and hate, and to the mob’s passion for hero-worship and tribal assertiveness. The policy of the victorious nations since the War is having the results which it was bound to have. The great opportunity of civilization was missed; and now, in spite of our much-advertised trade-recovery, Europe, nay the world, seems to be taking the first step toward barbarism.

Yet there is hope. There are still in every country some who have not been duped by demagogues, and a few who have definitely given their allegiance to the world-aim.

As the situation grows more desperate, these few are coming to realize that they must take their allegiance much more seriously than they have done hitherto. Their main task is to fire men’s imagination by a well-thought-out policy and by effective propaganda. Whenever possible, also, they must capture the actual social machinery, and direct it for the making of the new world. Some of them must find their way into parliaments and city councils. Some must work through trade unions, others through associations of employers. Some must join in the great task of revitalizing education by permeating and capturing all kinds of education authorities. All must join to attack and transform, and use for their own ends, that most irresponsible and potent influence, the commercial press, which at present does so much to keep men enslaved to their baser passions. They must also seek, by one means or another, to gain access to the microphone, so that the eminently respectable ether may at last be forced to resound with their seditious doctrines.

All this the makers of the new world must do. By all possible methods they must make a bold and vivid appeal to the imagination of the peoples. They must seek to become living examples of devotion to the greatest of all causes, the making of the new world. Sometimes, and perhaps increasingly often, they will have to bear witness in the most effective way of all, by martyrdom.

For a short time after the War it seemed almost as though the new world might come into being easily, by the general will of the war-racked peoples, and without need of martyrs. But since then everything has changed. Through the revived nationalism of the same peoples and the folly of their rulers the great opportunity was missed. And as a result men are losing faith in pacifism and world-unity and all the principles which they used to applaud but have never yet put into practice.

But the blackness of the outlook may help to waken a new spirit. There is a real chance that, if those who care for the true cause of humanity can behave to-day with intelligence and courage, they may yet light a fire such as has never before kindled mankind.

They will not succeed unless they can first increase a hundred-fold the fire in their own hearts. How is this to be done? By self-discipline and meditation they must strengthen their belief in their cause. They must let it take complete possession of their minds, so that it becomes for them the all-absorbing topic, so that all lesser interests subordinate themselves to it. To serve in the making of the new world must be for them not a reluctant duty but the great passion of their lives.

But, lest they should become narrow fanatics, they must strive as far as possible to fulfil themselves splendidly both in body and in mind, so as to become not only effective instruments for the creation of the new world but also examples of ample personality and generous citizenship. For the cause which they must serve, unlike so many other causes, is one that cannot be served well by fanatics but only by men of broad experience and understanding and sympathy.

Yet they must consecrate themselves absolutely to the cause. If they climb mountains or compose music, it must be to the glory of the new world. If they fall in love, it must be to the glory of the new world. Everything that they do, everything great and small, public and private, they must consecrate to the new world.

For mutual strengthening they must get together and cling together. Of many nations, they must yet recognize one another as one tribe, one chosen people, though scattered among all the peoples. Diverse in language, tastes, customs, even in ideas, they must yet hold together in virtue of the single supreme idea which they all serve. Of many social classes and occupations, they must transcend these limitations; but also they must preserve and use any special capacity which comes from class or occupation. Thus their thought, their breadth of understanding and depth of purpose, may perhaps come largely from those of them who are ‘intellectuals’; but their drive, their passion, their consecration, will come from those who are of the people, and are not unused to desperate remedies.

They must get together; but they must none of them lose their individuality, their personal uniqueness. They must not sink to become mere mindless echoes of one another, or of a new herd-voice. If they do, they will go the way of so many other revolutionary movements. They will become slaves to their own dogma. Instead they must each one keep alive, in the roots of his own unique individual being, and test all things by the touchstone of his own most awakened reaction.

The new world must not, of course, be a world of little hard, disconnected individualists; but neither must it be a world of mindless herd-mimics. It must be a world of real persons. Each must move forward, so to speak, upon his own feet, though shoulder to shoulder with his fellows. Each must contribute his own reality to the world; and at the same time each must be enriched and strengthened by his fellows, so that all together form a true community.

And since this is what the new world is to be, the pioneers of that new world must themselves exemplify it in their own lives; else they cannot possibly produce it. In short, if they are to achieve their aim, they must form themselves into a very special kind of party or order, made up of very diverse persons, each one a vital self, but all united by the supreme world-aim. In some ways this order must be like the early Christian Church; for its purpose will be at bottom religious, a unity of vital individuals bound together by their deepest experience. In some ways it will be like the Bolshevik party of Russia in its earlier phase; for its aim will be revolutionary, anticapitalist and in one sense anti-religious. It will strive to bring about some kind of effective economic communism, and to free the world from the dead hands of big business and of the churches. In some ways it will even be like the Fascist party of Italy and the ‘Nazi’ party of Germany, in so far as these depend on youth and seek to revitalize society with a new devotion and a new protest against the mechanic’s mentality, if this devotion and this loyalty are indeed factors in the Fascist and Nazi movements. In many ways, too, it will be like Mr. Wells’s Open Conspiracy, for it will appeal to the great technicians of the world to bring their skill and their organizations to the service of the world-aim. But they must come to it not only to manage, not even only to serve, but also to waken those sides of their being which have lain dormant, and thereby to discover that the world-aim includes much which lies beyond the range of the mechanic’s mentality even at its most generous best. At bottom the party of the new world must at all cost be both revolutionary and in a special sense religious.

In the present state of the world it would be foolish to hold at all confidently that such a movement as I have described will actually occur, still more foolish to feel hopeful that it will triumph.

But there is a chance that it may do so. The time is ripe for such a reawakening. The Western peoples have suffered grave distresses and bitter disillusionment. They are beginning to be terrified at their own folly and baseness. They are longing for a new way of life, and are feeling their way toward it. Perhaps in fifty years’ time men will look back on our day as to the blackness before the dawn. It is not impossible that within a few years we shall see the spontaneous fire of the new life kindled in a thousand regions and spreading in every direction. It is not impossible that the human race is now about to solve triumphantly one of the greatest problems of its whole career; that it is about to pass at one stride out of the tentative, disorderly, blind, half-civilization, of the last ten thousand years into full civilization, consciously directed toward the true world-aim.

It is not impossible. But let us not for a moment deceive ourselves into believing it probable. What seems probable is decline and widespread misery, or at best an age of confusion, of prolonged conflict between the old order and the new hope; and then at last, centuries hence, the dawn. Sooner or later man surely must begin to come into his own. Whether it is later or sooner depends very largely on the young of to-day.

Youth and Tomorrow (1946)

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2. THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY.

CHAPTER 3. YESTERDAY

CHAPTER 4. TODAY AND TOMORROW.

CHAPTER 5. BEYOND MAN.

YOUTH AND TOMORROW

“In this book I shall try to describe the far-reaching transformation of morals and manners through which we are now passing, and I shall venture to look forward a little into the future to see where it is likely to lead.”

               Olaf Stapledon

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

How Manners and Morals Change

ABOUT FIFTY YEARS ago, when I was a child, my father started a collection of birds’ eggs for me. On one occasion a thrush’s egg that he was blowing turned out to be partly hatched. Bits of a recognisable chick were forced into the saucer. I remember a tiny leg appearing and some disordered strands of blood vessels. This was for me a rather momentous experience, for I had been brought up to be kind to animals, and here was my father destroying what was obviously the beginning of a baby bird. I was torn between horror and curiosity. My father had done his best to fire me with a passion for knowledge; and so when he pointed out the various disintegrated organs, I was fascinated. In the middle of this little science lesson my mother appeared. She was thoroughly shocked. It was not right, she said, that a child should see such things. My father ought not to encourage me to pry into the sacred mysteries of life. In this matter her attitude was typical of the time, and my father’s was rather in advance of it. The conviction that some things were too sacred to be explored, and that anyhow children ought to be kept in innocence about them, was of course only one of the respects in which the typical nineteenth century attitude differed from the temper which we to-day regard as reasonable. Looking back into my childhood, I remember many customs, manners, judgements of right and wrong, which were then almost universally accepted, but which, looked at from the present time, seem strangely remote, and often wrongheaded. Similarly, if the adults of my childhood days could come to life again now, they would be outraged by much that seems to us entirely satisfactory.

In all transitional ages, no doubt, the customs of “yesterday” and “the day before yesterday” are apt to seem in some ways ridiculous, or superstitious, or unenlightened, while the dawning customs of “tomorrow” tend to be condemned as dangerous and subversive but in the fifty years that have passed since my childhood the conditions of mankind have been changing so rapidly and so deeply that customs, manners, morals, ways of thinking and feeling, have altered probably more thoroughly than in any other half century in the whole career of mankind.

Of course every period includes, besides what is distinctive of that period itself, large hangovers from the past and foretastes of the future. In singling out a certain attitude or temper as characteristic of a particular period, we must not forget that very much in each period is handed on to it from the previous period, and indeed from the remote past of the race; while also in every period there are already symptoms of an attitude which will not become clear or widespread till a later period. Even today there are many minds which, under a veneer of modernism, are really Victorian in outlook, and a few in which the veneer is almost absent. On the other hand, there are some amongst us who, just because they are obscurely groping beyond the typical “ modern” or “inter-war” mentality, and can once more appreciate what is permanently true in the old culture, are wrongly thought by fanatically up - to - date persons to be reactionary.

In this book I shall try to describe the far-reaching transformation of morals and manners through which we are now passing, and I shall venture to look forward a little into the future to see where it is likely to lead. But before setting out on this task, I shall spend the rest of this chapter on some very general remarks about the causes of changes in men’s ways of behaving.

Manners and morals are a product of the interaction of human nature and the environment. The Eskimo custom of wearing fur clothing is a product of man’s need to maintain his body temperature and of the arctic climate in which the Eskimo culture has developed. Inborn human nature, though it is not unchangeable, and some day it may be improved, has in fact remained practically unchanged since the present human species appeared. Like us, the earliest true men, and all the intervening generations, were by nature greedy, fearful, quarrelsome, friendly, and so on, and capable of slightly keener intelligence than any other animal species. But the circumstances of our predecessors were very different from our own, and gave rise to very different customs and ideals. The environment, unlike human nature, is always changing, largely as a result of man’s action upon it. No doubt in essentials it remains constant. Gravitation, atmospheric pressure, the chemical elements and compounds, are as they were when mankind began. Climates change, but only within certain limits. Openings for procuring food change, but food has always to be either collected or cultivated or worked up from raw materials. With changing methods of production men’s Ways of dealing with one another inevitably change. The Old Testament, for instance, records the changes brought about by the shift from pastoral to agricultural production. But how-ever much production changes, men are always engaged on some form of co-operative enterprise of maintaining themselves and their offspring alive by winning food, shelter and safety in a world of physical forces. Social organisation and culture are very largely determined by methods of production. In a period of rapidly changing production existing institutions and ideas, which were developed under the old order, are inevitably out of gear with the new methods. The resulting strain may lead to a gradual transformation of society and morality, as in the case of the slow advance from pasture to agriculture; or if the new needs are frustrated, it may in the end lead to a violent revolution, as in Russia.

The underlying constancy of human nature and of the environment ensures that manners and morals, however much they change, remain in fundamental respects the same from age to age, country to country. Though the institutions of marriage, parenthood, family and property vary greatly, they occur in one form or another in every society. Certain fundamental moral principles, too, are common to all societies, though their expressions may vary. This fundamental identity of moral principles need not be attributed to some sort of moral absolute at the heart of the universe; it may be due simply to the fact that, in spite of all its variations, human nature remains fundamentally identical, and so does the environment. For instance, the practice of living together in social groups has always had survival value; and so men everywhere have felt some obligation to help their neighbours in trouble; though in some societies mutual responsibility is more thorough than in others, and in some it covers a wider field of “kin” or “neighbours” than in others. It is possible to trace a gradual clarification of those permanent moral principles, at least throughout the period covered by history.

No doubt it may well be that so far as actual moral responsibility is concerned the earliest true men were on the average as developed as the latest. Indeed, some anthropologists claim that before the coming of civilisation men were in the main not less but more kindly, trusting, co-operative than at a later period, when they were tangled up in complex social conditions, including warfare: but at least since the beginning of civilisation itself there has been, if not an increase of sensibility, at any rate a gradual clarifying of thought about moral principles. And this in turn has changed men’s moral feelings. The clarifying of morality has happened partly through a purging away of irrelevances, such as taboos on special kinds of foods, and partly through applying the principles universally instead of in a special field. The best example of this last is the supreme one of human brotherhood. Before the age of the great religions, the obligation of mutual aid seems to have been felt only toward members of one’s own tribe or people. The idea of universal brotherhood had not yet come clear in men’s minds. In another respect also there has been a clarification of moral principles. Through purging them and universalising them, men have reached a deeper, more inward grasp of them. Brotherhood expressed itself first as a set of stereotyped rules of behaviour in relation to one’s fellows. A man must not lie, covet his neighbour’s wife, and so on. Later the obligation to treat one’s fellow human beings as brothers took the form of a generalised responsibility to help them towards happiness and self-realisation as unique persons.

The gradual clarification of morality has certainly not been a steady progress. In particular ages and countries there have been grave lapses. Changes of conditions have confused men’s vision of principles which an earlier age had laboriously clarified. The most obvious example of this is the rise of Nazism in our own day, but perhaps the example which is most significant for us is the whole capitalist age itself, from which we are now at last beginning to emerge. During that age, perhaps more than in any other, men’s impulses of mutual responsibility have been overwhelmed by a system of economic relations which has forced them to fend for themselves ruthlessly, or go under.

Apart from periods of moral deterioration, there are also, of course, differences of emphasis. From age to age and country to country, different aspects of morality are stressed. Special conditions incline men to prize now one and now another principle. At one time courage, at another resignation, will seem more admirable; at one time individual integrity in thought and conduct, at another time loyalty to the conventions of the group, whether a church, a social class, a national state, or the great common enterprise of humanity.

What Science Promised

If manners and morals are indeed a product of human nature and the environment, our age is bound to witness a very great change in them, perhaps a greater change than ever before. For today the human race is entering on a very important crisis, perhaps the most important since the discovery of fire. Science is transforming not only man’s material environment but his whole way of thinking, feeling and willing. In order to understand the current change of human behaviour, it is necessary to understand just what it is that science has done to man so far, and just what promise and what danger it holds for the future.

We may summarise the actual change that science has already produced in man’s circumstances as follows: — (1) It caused the “industrialisation” of the more “advanced” regions of the planet.

Whereas formerly most human beings lived by manual work on the land, and a few by handicrafts in the small country towns of those days, now most people live by tending machinery (directly or indirectly) in the great industrial areas; and even agriculture is increasingly mechanised. (2) Whereas formerly the people were relatively isolated from one another, now they are brought into a close and often painful contact by increased communications. Consequently, the world is well on the way to become economically and also culturally a single system. (3) Science has immensely increased man’s understanding of the physical universe, and has made many of the old theories about the universe and man’s place in it look very uncertain, if not incredible.

So much for the effects which science has already had. Inevitably man’s ideas and values are changing through and through to meet the new conditions. The change in circumstances is bewilderingly rapid. The change in ideas and values is also rapid; but there is always a serious time lag in the influence of conditions on ideas. Our minds are always very badly out of date in one way or another.

Besides the actual achievement of science, we must take into account the amazing promise which it offers.

Science has, as a matter of fact, given men for the first time the power to ensure that every human being on the earth shall have the opportunity of exercising fully whatever capacities he has for truly human living. Before the advent of science it was inevitable that most men should spend nearly all their waking hours in heavy drudgery so as to obtain a meagre livelihood, either directly by agricultural labour or indirectly by selling the products of their own industrial labour to the producers of food. In the pre-scientific world very few could have enough respite from toil to escape overstrain and premature decay, or to look beyond the horizon of urgent practical needs so as to develop any refinement of personal sensibility or of intellectual or artistic experience.

No doubt it would be wrong to suppose that mere emancipation from toil can bring fulness of life. Some agricultural workers, whom townsmen are apt to regard as ignorant and hide-bound clod-hoppers, are in fact, in the deepest sense, far more fully human personalities than many stockbrokers and “gentlemen of leisure.” But it is nevertheless true that a life of excessive primitive toil is exhausting and cramping. What science has done is to make it at last materially possible for every individual in every land to have a reasonably healthy body, a prolonged maturity, the kind of education suited to his or her special aptitudes, the chance of acquiring some special skill or other, and of exercising it with a sense of being a useful partner in the common enterprise of mankind, and the means of travelling about the world a bit so as to be able to see something of the diversity of human life. Science has also made it possible to secure that every married man shall be freed from the terror of being unable to give his children a decent start in life, that every expectant mother and every child shall have proper medical care and adequate food. Finally, science has made it possible that every human being shall be properly cared for in old age without being a burden on anyone.

The Actual Results of Science

Such is the promise that science gave to mankind. Over three hundred years ago, Francis Bacon, calling himself the Trumpeter of a New Age, prophesied that science would open up some such future for mankind. If Bacon were to live again today he would find that the actual physical achievements of science far surpassed his most daring surmise; but also he would be amazed that mankind had not made better use of them. He would note that grinding toil still exists for most men, that there is much preventable under-nourishment and ill-health, that crippling poverty survives, that most men are ignorant and wrong-headed, and that war is more terrible than ever.

The causes of this gigantic failure are two. One, of course, is the sheer complexity of the problem of organising the economic life of a whole world for the well-being of all its inhabitants. New powers open up new possibilities, but they also create new difficulties and dangers. In the remote past the task of organising the life of a tribe according to a well established tradition was a comparatively simple problem; but the organising of a great state in a time of rapid economic change is far more difficult; and the organising of a whole world, when change has become still more rapid, and there are no well-tried principles for guidance, may well prove impossible till we have profited by many disastrous mistakes.

The second cause of man’s failure to create the happy world prophesied by Bacon is the more important. It is the fact that many of the ways of thinking and feeling and willing with which mankind faces its huge new problems were evolved to suit a vanished world, and are quite unsuited to the world in which we now live. In the old days of course, a great deal of unnecessary misery and folly occurred simply because men hugely failed to live up to the best wisdom that was available in their time. But in our day there is the added trouble that even the very finest wisdom of the past is often quite useless as a guide through the novel problems of the new world. And these problems are not simply economic; many of them are at bottom spiritual problems, in fact problems about the right way of life in the modern world. It is true, of course, that when you have already, by bitter experience, found a solution of one of these problems, you may also find that it was implicit in some ancient wisdom. For instance, if you are a Christian, and if by bitter experience you have also come to believe that in the modern world the good life involves not only kindly behaviour in personal contacts but also the attempt to understand economic forces and to co-operate in a very complicated social revolution, you will discover that all this was implied in the teaching of Jesus. But strictly the cause of your belief that the good life involves economic understanding was not simply the teaching of Jesus; it was a re-interpretation and development of that teaching in the light of modern social problems. The New Testament is no substitute for the London School of Economics. It may provide the initial inspiration to help you to use rightly the understanding gained through that great institution, but unless you acquire the necessary knowledge of modern society your insight into the teaching of the New Testament will leave you entirely unaware of, and undefended against, Satan’s most modern and dangerous snares. You may for instance be trapped in the belief that by becoming a very rich man and then giving millions to charity or to medical research you fulfil your duty.

The truth is that the prodigious new powers which science has given to man are confronting him with new problems (not only economic but spiritual) which he cannot solve without reaching out to a new range or order of wisdom. That new wisdom is not to be found explicitly stated in any expression of the wisdom of the past.

On the other hand neither is the wisdom that we seek to be found simply in modern science. Perhaps some day science will advance so far as to give a sufficiently true account of human nature of not only its simple and more easily studied capacities but also of its more fully developed, more distinctly human, “upper reaches.” But inevitably, since scientists had to begin by studying the simpler characteristics of man they have tended to explain the more subtle powers in terms of the simpler. This led to a general inclination to reject the ancient wisdow wholly and uncritically because in many respects it seemed to conflict with science. It led also, as I shall try to show, to a very widespread attempt to live as though the “upper reaches” of our nature were unimportant, and their values illusory; as though the passion for goodness, beauty and truth (to use the old ambiguous words) could be simply explained away in terms of nerve-currents or the interaction of atoms.

In the period between the two great wars most ordinary people in western Europe and America still paid lip service to the old theories and moral values; but in actual life they were tending increasingly to behave as though simple materialism were true, and moral values were merely a matter of personal taste and social convenience. This mood played a great part in the moral breakdown of the period, in fact in the genera failure to take serious responsibility for the distress of the unemployed at home, for the sufferings of natives in Imperial territories, or for the rise of gangsterism in Europe.

The Young and the Old

This phase of “non-interventionism,” of complete lack of serious moral responsibility, is now passing, in blood and fire. There is a general recognition of certain permanent values and obligations, and an increasing attempt to state these clearly.

The widespread longing for firm religious convictions and fixed moral principles is both hopeful and dangerous. It is hopeful because nothing could be worse than the spiritual degradation of the interwar period. It is dangerous because we may so easily slip back into the old superstitions and the old confused morality. And if we do that, we may postpone indefinitely the happier, more fully human, more clearly conscious world that science makes possible.

Much will depend on those who are now very young. Wordsworth said of his revolutionary age that merely to be alive in it was good, “but to be young was very heaven.” — To-day we live in an age which is revolutionary in a deeper way than his; or rather, the one long revolution, which in his day was only beginning, is now reaching its crisis. Not only is it become world-wide; it is also having a far deeper effect on men’s conditions and on their minds than seemed possible in Wordsworth’s day. To be alive today is indeed from one point of view good, a privilege; but to be young, though a greater privilege, is perhaps not “very heaven”; unless indeed heaven can include hell. It is likely that the very young men and women of today now about to leave school or college, or already in the forces, will be in early maturity when the crisis is at its height, when mankind is at the most critical point of this greatest of all human revolutions. Meanwhile very many of our young men have died in war. Many have suffered torture, physical or mental, in the gigantic birth-throes of a new humanity. Many have been so badly damaged that they will be unable to play any active part in the future. Many will be spiritually so poisoned that they will actually side with the enemies of the revolution. But some will not be broken, nor poisoned. These may win through to the passion and vision that are needed to change the whole temper of man’s life on this planet.

Will they succeed? Their task will be almost super-human. One of the greatest difficulties lies in the break-neck speed of the change of world-conditions. We live in an explosion. The old order is exploding furiously into a new order. The world of the past was a slowly growing caterpillar world. Today, with no intervening chrysalis stage, the tortured caterpillar is bursting asunder and being re-made through and through to become in the very next moment of world history some sort of winged thing. Will the shattering transformation succeed, or will it result merely in chaos? Let us at least be clear about the issue. It is not merely a question of economic reorganisation. This is indeed of very great importance, but it is the means, not the end. The point is that, if all goes well, there will appear in a few generations a human world bewilderingly different from anything that has existed before, different too, from the best conceptions of our best prophets. For not only will it be a world in which there are no ill-nourished and mentally-frustrated masses, and no minds damaged irreparably in childhood through bad psychological influences, not only will it be a world of well-grown wisely educated fully human beings, but also the fact that the world is composed of such people will open up horizons which are to us only very dimly, if at all, conceivable. Today some strangely unimaginative people suppose that when mankind has turned the corner into a happier social order the adventure and romance will have gone from life, and the human spirit will be undermined by comfort, security and lack of purpose. But how much more likely it seems that, when man’s latent capacity is at last able to express itself fully, without the universal frustration that now cripples the whole race, the result will not be stagnation but the opening up of new worlds of experience and creative action, at present hidden from our damaged sight. Although the world of tomorrow, even if everything goes well, will probably be no more blissful, easeful, pleasant, than the world of to-day, we may expect it to have solved the simple nursery problems that cause us such agony and perplexity to-day; and to be grappling with problems on a higher plane. Progress, rightly regarded, is not progress merely in pleasant ease; it is progress in ever fuller life.

Meanwhile, what of our own problems? The breakneck speed of change causes one very serious psychological difficulty. Though in our day men’s minds themselves are probably changing more rapidly than ever before, they cannot change fast enough to keep pace with the catastrophic change of circumstances throughout the planet. Consequently, the minds of those who are in control of the affairs of mankind at any particular time are bound to be to a large extent out of date. The general set and temper of human minds is fixed in youth; and, in important respects, even in very early youth. When the change of conditions was slow, this did not greatly matter. The world of a man’s adult life was not too unlike the world of his youth. But now, all is different. Even those who are young today, and consider themselves so up-to-date, so ultra-modern, will soon be desperately struggling to adjust themselves to new conditions and a new mental climate. Many will not even struggle. They will simply live in the old mental habits, ignorant that these no longer fit the facts of a changed world. In this moment of world-wide explosion the supple minds of the young have a special advantage, simply because they are less entangled with the past. The old, therefore, should treat the wild ideas and feelings of the young with respect, even though mostly they are sure to turn out to have been wrong. For somewhere in this ocean of sheer extravagance and error lies the germ of tomorrow’s truth.

If the young have the advantage of freshness and mental suppleness, they have the disadvantage that they live in a world far more complex and difficult to understand than the old world. Consequently, they are in some ways more dependent than ever upon their elders. Moreover, they have inevitably to spend a very large part of their youth in merely learning. By the time they are equipped they may be already mentally old and set. Youth, in fact, is supple, but ignorant and hasty; age is experienced, but it tends to think its experiences into patterns conceived in a world that has vanished. This is perhaps the most serious weakness of our species, that we cannot retain our full mental suppleness far into maturity.

I am already old, and I am writing a book about the tremendous cataract of revolution in our ideas and values; I am even proposing to grope a little way towards the values of to-morrow. This is a very rash thing for anyone to do at fifty-nine. Yet there is one function which the elder generations alone can perform, and only if they can remain sufficiently receptive and plastic. Even in a cataract, the water at the top of the fall is the same kind of stuff as the water at the bottom, and even in the world-revolution human nature remains fundamentally the same. If age can retain a modicum of sensitivity and suppleness, it may be able to see the new values in relation to the old, and discover in the contrast something of the values that are not subject to change, because they arise out of the permanent nature of personality and community. My own ideas and values, though in some ways they are merely more precise versions of those of my youth, have in other ways changed very much during the period since the First World War, under the pressure of changing circumstances and the impact of the younger generations. This encourages me to hope that I really have learnt something from those younger generations, and therefore that I may actually be able to pay back my debt to some extent by trying to work out a synthesis of the old values and the new.

Moreover, it does seem to me, at fifty-nine, that it really is possible for the old, with some intelligence and sincerity, to attain a range of perception and insight into the activity of conscious living which is very difficult in youth. I must speak for myself. When I look back at myself as an undergraduate, and remember how I used to think and feel about the world and myself and other people, I am impressed at least as much by the difference between that callow young man and my present self as I am by our fundamental identify. I do not mean? merely that his knowledge of the world was ridiculously slight, and that his judgements were generally crude and arrogant. Far worse, he seems to me now, to have been strangely insensitive in certain ways. Of course, in some ways he was far more sensitive than I am now. His hungers took command of him and his fears overwhelmed him. He was also intensely “self-conscious,” in the colloquial sense. In the presence of strangers he never knew what to do with his hands, or his eyes; and he blushed at the slightest provocation. But his consciousness of himself, though so painfully intense, was superficial, misconceived, and (how shall I put it?) enslaved. And as for his awareness of other people, though he was often thrillingly, and sometimes torturingly conscious of them, and though he had certain habits of amiable behaviour, he seems to me now to have had remarkably little perception of them as actual persons. Between him and the actuality of the other there was always an obscuring haze of misconception. This was due, I think, not merely to the fact that he conceived his own particular character wrongly, and therefore also the particular characters of others. More fundamentally he was wrong about something common to us all, about the very nature of individuality itself. He was wrong because he had not yet reached the necessary precision of self-awareness. And because of this lack, his values, though many of them seem to me even now true superficially, had no depth. The whole of my life since those days seems to me now to have been mainly a sort of enforced schooling in respect of those values. Over and over again I have found myself seeing unexpectedly deeper into my experience of myself, or others, or the world; clinging resolutely to my familiar superficial view, but being compelled to abandon it, and finally accepting the deeper view with thankfulness.

Aim of this Book

Well, if our great revolution is to succeed, it must consist not merely of an economic change, though this is indeed necessary, but also of a widespread deepening of our consciousness of ourselves and one another. And unless that deepening consciousness controls the economic revolution, all will have been in vain. —

In this book I try to make some contribution to this side of the revolution. I do so by trying to contrast the values of today with the values of “yesterday” and the day before yesterday.” First, drawing mainly on my own memory, I shall describe the mentality and values of the world that has vanished, though it still lives on in most contemporary minds as a compulsive power. Then I shall summarise the confused and incoherent mentality of today, in which yesterday and tomorrow fight with one another. This will enable me to single out what I regard as the permanent values, inherent in the very nature of self and other-conscious personality anywhere in the universe and in any age and circumstance.

Of course my account of the matter is certain to be full of errors. The best that I can hope is that it will prove stimulating to some of those young minds who bear so heavy a burden today and so great a responsibility for the future. —

CHAPTER 2. THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY.

Introductory

TODAY IT IS much easier to see the faults than the virtues of the temper which was at its height during the reign of Queen Victoria, and may be said to have received its death blow in 1914, though it had long been failing. During the period between the two wars those of us who were brought up in the nineteenth century, and have since reacted violently against that temper, were often too ready to condemn its faults and forget its virtues. Here I am concerned with it only in contrast with the period which followed it, which was in many ways even worse.

The culture of any period is stratified. It is made up, so to speak, of layers deposited in past periods, and on the surface there is a living growth of customs and ideas, destined in turn to form the uppermost deposit in the culture of the next period. The lowest stratum of every culture dates back to pre-historic times. It is a mass of thought-forms and feeling-forms which were evoked in primitive races by the pressure of savage conditions, and have been passed on from generation to generation by tradition, and of course modified in transit. Of this lowest stratum we have little or no knowledge, so much has been imposed upon it. For practical purposes we may say that the lowest recognisable stratum of all modern English culture is the deposit left over from our Early English forefathers. Our language is mainly Anglo-Saxon, and so are our ways of thinking and feeling. The earliest recognisable deposits of our culture, however, need not be examined in this book. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries are equally indebted to the Early English, and I am concerned with their differences rather than with their likenesses.

Two influences from the ancient world played a very great part in nineteenth century culture, namely Christianity and ancient Greek and Latin literature. In our contemporary culture also they play a great part, but less directly and less powerfully. Another important influence from the past was feudal tradition, which, though by then quite out of gear with the economic circumstances of the age, still maintained a hold both on institutions and on sentiment. These influences, Christianity, Classical Literature and Feudalism, were all three in conflict with the newer tradition of modern science and modern commercial industrialism. From the clash of these opposing forces arose on the one hand a romantic yearning for the “good old days,” and on the other a passion for “progress.” In this chapter I shall say something, of each of these factors in turn.

Christianity

In the nineteenth century the events and characters described in the Old and New Testaments formed the background of most minds. Even those who never read the Bible were soaked with its influence by contact with their fellows. The story of Creation, the journey of the Jews out of Egypt, the adventures of the Prophets, the life of Jesus were more or less familiar to all. Even at the end of the century, and after it, they were still the main common cultural influence. Fifty years ago, when I was a child, they were “household words.” Almost daily I used to listen to my mother’s reading of the Bible stories (suitably expurgated) or to chapters from a potted version called Line upon Line She made me learn psalms and hymns by heart, and at night I was supposed to fall asleep repeating them to myself. (But actually I used to tell myself wild stories about wars between armies of dogs and tigers).

In many houses “family prayers” were a regular custom. I well remember this solemn little daily ceremony in a certain non-conformist family where I was sometimes a visitor. After breakfast we drew our chairs back to the wall and waited till the servants, in their print dresses and freshly washed hands, came in and seated themselves in a prim row next the door. The head of the family then prayed in a special voice that was solemn and rather frightening, while we all knelt on the floor, with our elbows on our chairs and our faces covered by our hands. Then he read from the Bible, then prayed again, thanking God for our blessings, and asking that we might have the grace to behave rightly during the day. How I remember studying those horsehair seats and the flowery wall-paper, through my fingers! At a later period, with the general decline of religious observance, the family met for prayer only on Sundays. On those days the two family dogs were always present. If a cat appeared in the garden there was a great hullaballoo, and prayers were with difficulty continued.

On Sundays all toys were forbidden. Children wore their best clothes, and spent most of the day in not getting dirty. Everyone, of course, went to church or chapel. Of the many sermons I must have heard as a child, I now remember only one. The preacher explained the insidiousness of sin. You first laughed about it; then you indulged in just a taste of it; then before you knew where you were you were caught up in the toils, and nothing in the world could save you from Hell but only the love of Jesus. I stopped fingering the marbles in my pocket and felt a sudden terror.

In those days Christianity was a powerful force in most people’s minds. Scripture afforded a definite code of personal morals; and since the belief in Hell was quite sincere, you really tried hard to keep the code. Of course, the fear of Hell is not the right motive for virtue, but if you do believe that you will be burnt forever if you sin, the belief will at least be a factor in keeping you straight in action, if not in spirit. In my early days, though my parents were not addicted to Hell, many people were. It was always just round the corner. The name of it was sinister, and unmentionable in polite society. In my prep, school we once had to learn The Charge of the Light Brigade. In reciting it we were always stopped before reaching the verse in which the wicked word occurs. Whatever licence might be allowed to a poet (who was also a peer), such language was not nice. Naturally we took a malicious pleasure in plunging into the forbidden verse before the mistress could stop us.

I do not suggest that nineteenth century Christianity was based solely on the fear of Hell. There were of course many earnest Christians whose conduct was determined very thoroughly by their disinterested admiration for the character of Jesus, as it was presented to them in the Bible and in current sermons. It is easy to condemn them on the score that, although they behaved with Christian kindliness and self-sacrifice in personal contacts, their Christianity seldom went so far as to make them take serious action against a system that was fundamentally inconsistent with the social principles implicit in Christianity. But two things must be said. First, there are many professed socialists today who are in much the same position. They talk about the immorality of society, but they do nothing about it. Secondly in those days, awareness of society as a system that might be altered, and for which all its members shared responsibility, was much less developed than it is today. The whole temper of the age was much more individualistic. Inevitably, therefore, the ordinary nineteenth century Christian was generally content with a purely personal kind of Christianity. He could recognise that in his personal contacts there were right and wrong ways of behaving, and it taxed his strength to be tolerably Christian even in that sphere. As a matter of fact, even in the sphere of personal contacts, whenever contacts were economic, concerned with buying and selling, his Christianity was often put aside. In the height of nineteenth century economic prosperity the notion that the whole economic structure of society was opposed to Christianity was one which only the more sensitive or the less fortunate were at all likely to grasp: Those who did vaguely recognise it shunned the thought like poison. It was too subversive. Social conscience might now and then be roused over particular abuses, such as the slave trade or the shocking treatment of factory workers; but even so, only with great difficulty, and only through the efforts of individual reformers of exceptional vision and resolution. My point is that in those days there was more excuse than there is today for the Christian to confine his Christianity within the horizon of non-economic relations. By now he ought to know better than to put down the economic injustice of our society to the will of God.

Even so far back as fifty years ago moral uneasiness about the system was spreading. The head of the non-conformist family that I mentioned in connection with family prayers was a stock-broker. Usury was forbidden in the Bible, and the distinction between usury and legitimate interest was none too clear. I remember as a boy overhearing anxious discussions on this subject. The kindly and devout stock-broker admitted the force of the argument against him; but, after all, the very structure of society involved stock-broking. — If all the stock-brokers closed down, society would fall into chaos. — As for his personal position, well, he had a family to keep, and he could not earn money in any other way. Most of his critics were not primarily concerned with the anti-social effects of capitalism, but simply with the fact that usury was condemned in the Bible.

In general the social conscience of the nineteenth century Christian was sufficiently appeased by subscribing to “charities” and missions. Charity was demanded of us in the Bible; and I have more than once heard it seriously suggested that God had created poverty in order that the more fortunate might have an opportunity of exercising charity. The idea that all human beings, no matter what their status at birth, had equal rights to the means of health, security, pleasure, education, was by no means universal. (Yet there had been a French Revolution!) It was said that if God had been pleased to set you in a humble station and chastise you with poverty and disease, you ought not to complain. These misfortunes were themselves blessings, for they gave you opportunities of practising humility and patience.

I remember as a boy being somewhat disturbed by my mother’s Attitude to charity. She was far ahead of the average in her will for social reform (not, of course, social revolution), but in personal charity she always held that even the most “deserving” poor ought to be grateful for cheap and nasty gifts. When poor relations or retired servants seemed insufficiently pleased with the harsh and ugly but durable clothing which she gave them, she complained that they ought to be thankful to have things that would last, and not bother about looks.

Greek and Latin Literature

The other ancient influence which played a great part in forming the nineteenth century mentality was Greek and Latin literature. True, its effects were already far less important in the nineteenth century than they had been in the eighteenth, the seventeenth and the sixteenth, for other forces were already competing with it. After the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 refugee Greeks in Italy had started a cultural ferment which had spread at last even to Britain. Mediaeval thought had by then become doctrinaire and hidebound; and the re-discovery of the classics had an immensely quickening effect on men’s minds. It stimulated them to think for themselves, to use their critical intelligence independently of orthodox theory, and to savour every kind of experience. The influence of genuine Christianity had always been to make men more aware of one another, more responsive to one another, more socially responsible, more capable of community. With the ossification of Mediaeval Christianity, this influence perhaps grew weaker. Social changes also, in fact the break-up of the feudal system and the rise of a class of prosperous and feudally unattached individuals, had probably strengthened the feeling for individuality at the expense of the feeling for community. Renaissance men were on the whole less “members one of another” than Mediaeval men. Under the influence of Renaissance culture a new educational ideal came to be universally accepted. A man could not be a cultivated individual unless he was thoroughly familiar with Greek and Latin literature. It was believed that Greece and Rome had attained a clarity of thought and a delicacy of perception which the crude modern peoples could never reach, but towards which they must always strive, in vain.

Inevitably the new movement, which began as a great rebirth and was for centuries the most vital influence in Europe, settled down at last as another hide-bound orthodoxy. Just as in China no one could be considered well educated unless he was well versed in ancient Chinese texts, so in nineteenth century Britain no one could be an educated gentleman unless he could quote a few tags from Virgil or Cicero, and if possible from Euripides, Aeschylus or Homer. All too often these treasured jewels of expression, like the corresponding jewels of Christian scripture, were used less to clarify experience than to silence disagreement by quoting an authority which was supposed to be beyond question.

Understanding of “the classics” was believed to be necessary for the proper development of “character,” and therefore the education of the ruling classes was based on it. Education of the masses, on the other hand, was not meant to produce leaders but efficient workers, and so there was no need to give them Greek, or even Latin. Only the public schools and universities were dominated by the classical tradition. Even today it is believed by many that without some knowledge of Greek and Latin it is impossible fully to appreciate our own language, or to use it effectively, or even to think clearly. Many would still say that without Greek and Latin a man cannot develop that detachment and balanced judgment, and that elegant amateurishness, which are needed in the leaders of a gentlemanly Empire. The results of this belief (for good and ill) on our empire, our diplomatic service, our older statesmen, and on our whole political life, I shall not here discuss.

Now I do not deny that classical learning may be vitalising, if it is pursued in the right spirit, but I do deny that it is essential, and that it should dominate education. And I insist that its value in the minds of many of its advocates is at bottom a snob value. It is the hallmark of culture and gentility. It distinguishes the “best” people from the common people.

When I was quite a small child in Egypt my father, a shipping agent, began to teach me Latin. Later the job was handed over to an Anglican parson, who, by the way, was already embarking on the process of drinking himself to death. My father’s own classical education had not been very thorough, but he had a vivid respect for the ancients, and he spent much time reading aloud the stories of Greek mythology for my benefit. His enthusiasm for the classics was combined with enthusiasm for modern science. His simple but often exciting experiments and patient explanations roused my interest far more than his classical stories. But his own admiration for the Greeks was sincere and strong, and only exceeded by his brother’s.

For the understanding of the nineteenth century I find my father and his younger brother very significant. My father combined a backward-looking reverence for the classics with a forward-looking temper well in advance of most of his contemporaries. His passion for scientific knowledge was nourished by reading Darwin, T. H. Huxley and a host of popular works. He tried throughout his life to keep himself tolerably informed about the ever-advancing explorations of physicists and biologists. Gradually science came to bulk far more largely in his mind than the classics of Greece and Rome, and was eclipsed only by his perennial love of English literature and romantic poetry. My uncle, on the other hand, felt no scientific interest. For him the whole achievement of science was just a flashy modern invention, useful, but without cultural significance. Classical literature and history, on the other hand, had for him all the significance and sanctity which the Bible had for Christians. Every evening, after a hard day’s work in his office or knocking about in the Port Said harbour from ship to ship, he would change into the orthodox starched shirt and white dinner jacket, and after the meal he would retire to read Greek history or translations of Greek and Latin masterpieces. Both my father and my uncle were greatly respected by all who knew them, not only because of their personal integrity and their detachment from the bickerings of their few compatriots in the town, but also for the cultural interest which enabled them to maintain that detachment; and particularly for their classical lore. For undoubtedly the main influence which kept them straight in a rather crooked little society was not Christianity, which, was for both of them a mere matter of convention, but the ideal of personal integrity which they had derived from the ancient world. Yet their knowledge of that world was mostly second-hand knowledge, obtained through translations. —

In my boyhood their example took effect on me to some extent, but my imagination was never really kindled by the classics, and my knowledge of them remained far too slight to have any considerable effect on my mind. Nothing now remains but a phrase or two from Homer. These, I admit, have a certain glamour for me; but looking back as honestly as I can into the past, I reluctantly believe that the main appeal of classical literature for me was just a snob appeal. Classical lore made me one of the “best” people.

Feudalism

Another powerful influence in the minds of nineteenth century Englishmen was a hang-over from feudal England. Perhaps I ought to have dealt with the influence of feudalism before the influence of Greece and Rome through the Renaissance. But this is the more convenient place. Moreover, just as the Renaissance was a harking back to the ancient world, nineteenth century respect for feudal values was largely a subsequent harking back to the Middle Ages.

Less ancient than Christianity and classical literature, feudalism is in a sense more archaic than either. Fifty years ago, when I was a child, the old feudal landed aristocracy had already long since lost its power, but its prestige, and the glamour of its values were much stronger than they are today. The real aristocracy, if such it can be called, was the class composed of the relatively old-established business families, founded by “self-made” men during the industrial revolution. (How striking, by the way, is that phrase “self-made”! It was coined in an age when money was the measure of a man’s reality. His money was in effect himself.) Those able and ruthless pioneers of industrialism were prone to ape the manners and accept the ideals of the old aristocracy. They sent their sons to the public schools and universities to learn the right values and the right accent. Sometimes they took the trouble to acquire heraldic coats of arms, either by simply inventing them or by discovering obscure connections with ancient families.

My uncle in Egypt made a study of heraldry, and of the old families of Devon, our ancestral county. After long and painstaking research he managed to trace our line back to the twelfth century, complete with arms. I confess I shared my uncle’s satisfaction in this achievement, and have still a sneaking and quite irrational snob-pleasure in it, although obviously all families “go back” to the earliest generations of life on earth; and anyhow, all are inextricably inter-related. It is well to remember that every Englishman alive today is some sort of relative of William the Conqueror; and, for that matter, of Confucius and Jesus Christ also.

The nineteenth century sentiment for feudal values probably had many causes. Partly it was due to the sheer picturesque glamour and trappings of feudalism; but it may well have sprung also from a vague sense of the inadequacy of commercial values, and a consequent leaning toward values that were less artificial. The ideal of the “English gentleman” was a product of feudalism established by the renaissance, though it was not clearly conceived till after both these phases had passed. The gentleman was primarily a land-owner, a lord of a manor. He was concerned with supervising agricultural work on his own estate. His interest was in crops, processes, manures. Also he was responsible for the well-being of his retainers, and if he took his gentility at all seriously he tried to set them an example of just and kindly behaviour and of religious orthodoxy. He claimed a higher degree of luxury than the commonalty, but in return he felt that he ought to attain a higher standard of personal integrity. His reputation for superior courage was probably based on the fact that in the feudal period he really was more resolute, because he was better nourished.

After the industrial revolution the successful men of commerce and industry took the ideal of the gentleman as their pattern. Unfortunately, it was very much easier for them to copy its trappings than to adopt its essential attitude; for they had risen by a relentless individualism, accepting no personal responsibility for those who worked under them. They knew their workers simply as “hands,’’ never as persons, even to the limited extent possible between the landed gentry and his retainers. Consequently, the successful pioneers of the new ruling class were apt to behave with the crudity and meanness later associated with the “nouveaux riche.” The established gentry regarded the upstart men of money with mingled contempt and apprehension, and as complete outsiders. But money is all-powerful; or was so in the nineteenth century. By sending their sons to genteel schools and universities, these pioneers of industry became also the pioneers of a new gentry. ——

In the nineteenth century the ideal of the gentleman, having no longer a basis in the relatively permanent social relations of the small landed estate, tended to become simply a pattern of manners, dress and accent. Increasingly the gentleman gave up being a leader in the common agricultural enterprise and became merely a more or less-polished man of money, occupied either in managing some bit of industry or commerce, or in simply living, and radiating gentility. So strong was the snob motive in him that his whole life was coloured by the impulse to preserve his gentility and assert it to the world. Indeed his snobbery took on a moral tone. To betray the dignity of his class by any eccentric behaviour, whether in dress or social etiquette, or in political allegiance or moral crankiness of any kind, was often felt to be really sinful, and condemned with much more righteous indignation, than the mere breaking of the Christian moral code. In general, to be a snob is to care for the signs of social eminence for their own sake. No doubt in all ages and lands and social classes snobbery has been rife; but surely nowhere and nowhen did it reach deeper into men’s, minds than in nineteenth century England. Every class was subdivided into a hierarchy of snob strata. Even the lowliest member of society persuaded himself that he was a cut above someone or other. The same, of course, is true today. Snobbery is no less prevalent than in the nineteenth century. It had a particularly baleful influence in the inter-war period. But there are at last signs that an increasing number of people are at least becoming aware of the insidiousness of snobbery. This is hopeful.

In the nineteenth century there were two main kinds of snobbery, the old feudal snobbery, based on birth, and the new commercial snobbery, based on money. It is possible that today we are witnessing the growth of a new snobbery, based on the exercise of skill in the co-operative work of the community. I suspect that this is already strong in Russia. In the nineteenth century this was a minor factor. The snob’s ideal was to combine birth and money, but considerable snob-satisfaction could be gained from impecunious gentility, or, better still, nobility. And any family that could afford any sort of a domestic servant would consider itself “gentle.” The relation of mistress and servant was one of the main fields for the expression of snobbery. No doubt this form of snobbery was partly a hang-over from the relation of the feudal lady to her domestic retainers. The nineteenth century mistress held herself responsible for the maid’s morals, and supervised her conduct very closely. Servant girls invariably wore a cap and apron as a badge of menial status, and even on “afternoons out” they were expected to dress in a thoroughly drab and unbecoming manner. It was argued that, since they had not the taste to dress properly, they would only make fools of themselves if they tried to ape their betters. Further, servants must not have “followers.” For some reason it was felt to be peculiarly disgusting, and insulting to their employers, for servants to have any relation with the opposite sex. One of the most popular themes for jokes in Punch (that invaluable treasury of snob humour) was the cook caught by her mistress in the act of entertaining the “bobby” in the kitchen. Mistresses expected their maids to be rather like neuter ants, which are females unsexed by semi-starvation, and content to live wholly for work. Lest this account should seem a caricature, let me add that there were, of course, many decent mistresses, who did cherish their servants, and earn both respect and affection. Nevertheless, the relationship was everywhere vitiated by the convention of social inequality and snob values. Generosity was poisoned by patronage, kindly solicitude became tyrannous interference. In industry also, at any rate among some of the old-established firms, there were traces of the old feudal snobbery, ns between employer and employed; but far stronger, and increasingly powerful throughout nineteenth century society, was the pernicious snobbery of money. Formerly, wealth without birth and feudal status carried no snob value, but as the industrial revolution advanced, and it became increasingly obvious that the men of money were the real men of power, money developed a snob-value of its own. Money became the universal standard for the measurement of the relative worth of human beings, and an entirely false standard. Those who, through genuine ability, low cunning, or sheer good luck, had plenty of money, were at pains to flaunt it in expensive clothes, furniture, houses, travel and fashionable education for their children. Those who had little of it strove to give the impression that they were well off. To be a “man of substance” was not to be a man of personal solidity and integrity, but simply a man of money. Everything in life was infected by the universal snob-value of money. The rich might assert their monetary superiority in subtler ways than by excessive personal luxury. They might give ostentatiously to charity, in order that their names might appear as large subscribers to hospitals, libraries and church funds. They might collect “art treasures,” rifling Italy, Greece, Germany, France, to embellish their own homes, or found art galleries, which would form lasting monuments both to their gargantuan generosity and to their expensively acquired taste. By subscribing heavily to a political party they might buy knighthoods or peerages.

Poverty was not felt to be a mere misfortune; there was something positively culpable about it. It must be concealed by all possible means. Financial disaster was a hideous disgrace, involving departure from the sunlit sphere of the privileged. No matter how a man might commiserate with his fallen friend on account of his “ruin,” there was apt to be on both sides an obscure and irrational feeling that such misfortunes must be in some mysterious way merited as punishment for some perhaps unwitting sin against the revered god of money.

Compared with the old snobbery of birth and feudal status, the new financial snobbery was far more degrading, in that it involved no obligations of the “noblesse oblige” type. Money, as such, gave its possessor unlimited licence for self-indulgence, and no responsibility. Of course, being a Christian or a plain decent-hearted human beings you might gratuitously assume obligations on account of your money, but money itself left you free. You could “do what you liked with your own.” —

Commercialism

In order to understand how this disease of money-snobbery arose, we must consider the rise of the modern commercial civilisation which bred it. Feudal society was a vast hierarchy of individuals each born into some fixed status. The villains, the lords of the manors, the great barons, formed a social pyramid, with the king as its apex. A man recognised, at least in theory, particular duties and rights, in relation to both inferiors and superiors. But gradually, within this system two new classes began to appear, namely a proletariat consisting of men who had either fled from or been dismissed from their hereditary places as workers on the manors, and a new commercial class, of merchants and industrial employers, who, by the power of money, gradually won their freedom from their feudal superiors, and continued: to gain power till they were able to dominate the whole social system. By means of money they employed and controlled the proletariat, they challenged and broke the power of the feudal aristocracy, and finally they broke the king’s power too.

It is important to understand how circumstances bred a particular-mentality in this ruling class, which reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. Since it was by using their wits in private enterprise that the traders and manufacturers had gained money power, they tended, to believe that individual initiative was all-important for social wellbeing, and that in general individuality was more important than sociality. In religion they were apt to be puritans. Their frugal minds were outraged by the luxury and licentiousness of the feudal aristocracy. They admired the virtues by which they themselves had grown rich, the prudential virtues, such as self-denial, frugality, industry, reliability in financial dealings. They tended to respect private-conscience more than the authority of any church, and intellectual sincerity more than traditional learning. They insisted on individual freedom, freedom to buy and sell in the open market, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience. State interference they regarded as an unwarrantable restriction of the natural flow of society’s life-blood, namely, money. They insisted on democracy; but what in their hearts they meant by democracy was not rule by the masses, the despised proletariat, but rule by their own class. They demanded that they, their class, and not the aristocracy or the king, should determine public policy. —

Inevitably there was a conflict in their minds between the duty of Christian brotherhood, enjoined in their religion, and the social and economic system that grew up under their influence. For Christianity imposed on every man an unlimited responsibility for the welfare of his fellows; while the system was based on the right of every man to fend for himself in the open market, regardless of the consequences to others. In practice the conflict between conscience and the system was nearly always solved by the triumph of the system. In the early stages of the industrial revolution the system, with all its faults, was “delivering the goods.” And “the goods” were very tangible. They consisted of increased prosperity for those who could, afford to buy it, and increased national power for the more fortunate nations, or at any rate for the more fortunate class within those nations. The nineteenth century business man flattered himself that his commercial enterprise, besides gaining him a living, was actually producing the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number. According to his philosophy, if everyone looked after his own interests intelligently in the open market without interference, the result would be the best possible for all. In practice this principle did not work; for the simple reason that, since some were far more able or fortunate than others, there was no equality of bargaining power. Consequently, the upshot of this, system of laissez faire was that a powerful minority gained more and more power over the labour of others, and the majority became wage-slaves. That is, though citizens of a politically free country, their behaviour was very severely controlled by their economic dependence on their employers.

Meanwhile, the spectacular successes of commercial enterprise made men respect “business” with an almost religious awe. Clearly it was not love but business that made the world go round. My father and mother were followers of Carlyle and Ruskin, and therefore strongly opposed to the commercial spirit. But they could not prevent the general atmosphere of money-making from infecting their child. An amusing incident will serve to illustrate the effect of a commercial environment on the growing mind. It also shows that commercialism and nineteenth century Christianity were not necessarily in conflict. As a schoolboy I had got it into my head that engaged couples were always quarrelling, and that the indignant girl often flung the engagement ring into a convenient stream or lake. Now there was a park lake near our house. The bottom of it was probably covered with discarded engagement rings. They could be retrieved by a powerful model steamer with a drag net. I set about founding a company to finance this costly undertaking. A devout great-aunt was staying with us, so I asked her to subscribe sixpence. “Not on Sunday, my dear,’’ she said, “Ask me again tomorrow.” Next morning her place at the breakfast table was unoccupied. I was told that she had gone home by an early train. Now I have no doubt that, though few aunts would be so Sabbatarian today, many schoolboys might be equally commercial. But I doubt whether they could share my intoxicating delusion that I was putting myself in line with the glorious forward movement of the age. To-day commercialism is no less widespread, but it has lost something of its glamour and of its sanctity. In those days anything that interfered with sound business practice was evil. Anything that favoured it, however “shady,” began to seem after all legitimate, “Business is business,” men said, implying that commercial transactions were the basic reality of life, and all else was mere sentimentality. A man was justified in fighting his trade rivals with all the cunning that he could muster. True, the more respectable business houses prided themselves on their tradition of honesty and decency. There definitely was a code of business morality. Certain kinds of trickery were “not done.” But business morality was very different from Christian morality. For Christian morality was based on mutual aid, and commercial morality was merely a set of restrictions on mutual aggression and mutual diddling. As competition became more severe, and the fight grew fiercer, it became increasingly difficult to maintain even the conventional “honour among thieves.” I have talked to many business men who, kindly and trustworthy in private life, confessed that in business dealings they simply had to lie and cheat and be ruthless, or go under. Others, less sensitive, regarded the whole business system frankly as a savage game. Knowing that every man’s hand was against you, you felt no obligation toward anyone.

The most serious aspect of this great business tradition, which of course still has immense power, is that it tolerates and even encourages complete rejection of responsibility toward one’s fellow men, at least within the universe of business. If by cunning you could break a rival, so that he became suddenly a ruined man without the means of keeping his wife and family in health and comfort, well, it was unfortunate for him, but it was nothing to do with you. If your employee proved unfit for his job, or simply was no longer needed, you sacked him, and no one blamed you. Perhaps out of sheer Christian charity you might give him some slight help, but this was gratuitous saintliness on your part. Many “realists” would condemn it as dangerous sentimentality, and an unwarranted interference with the natural workings of economic law. “You can’t possibly,” they would say, “run a business successfully if you are going to feel squeamish whenever anyone has to be sacked.”

Of course there were some business concerns which, quite early on had adopted a different attitude. They went to great trouble and expense to give their workers far better conditions than the average, and to afford them a sense that they were to some extent partners in a common undertaking which was valuable to society. There were housing schemes, welfare schemes, profit-sharing schemes. These enlightened employers claimed that they did this sort of thing not out of Christian kindliness but because in the long run it would pay. They were right; but how interesting that they had to deny their more generous motives, lest they should seem to be violating sound business principles by spending money unprofitably! In many cases this new policy was a really admirable expression of social responsibility. Admirable up to a point. For invariably power remained with the employers. There was often a good deal of benevolent tyranny which roused serious resentment. And anyhow this enlightened sort of management was exceptional. The normal nineteenth century employer accepted no responsibility for the welfare of his employees. If, through the changing incidence of the demand for goods, a factory or a whole industry ceased to be profitable, the workers would of course be dismissed, and the employers would feel no responsibility for them. They simply went to swell the great pool of available cheap labour, without which capitalism could not function.

After all, it was argued, the backbone of the country was not the feckless proletariat but the mass of enterprising employers. These kept the wheels of industry going. They risked their hard-won capital in private ventures which would benefit the community, and they could not be expected to operate without the lure of substantial profit. The workers, it was argued, should be grateful to the employers for opening up new fields of employment, and so affording them a livelihood. If their conditions of work were unpleasant, if they were hard-driven, underfed, diseased, if they had to force their children into employment to gain a few extra pence, they should not complain. Their wages represented what they were actually worth to society. To pay them more, or allow them better conditions, would hamper industry. To keep them in employment when they were no longer needed would be even more damaging. Nothing must be allowed to restrict the natural working of economic law. When the workers dared to combine to increase their bargaining power and secure better conditions, the employers, and indeed the whole social class to which they belonged, felt righteous indignation. Such conduct interfered with the sacred free movement of money. It was therefore justifiable to use every kind of weapon to defeat it. Yet the employers never hesitated to combine among themselves to defeat the workers, nor to use the machinery of the state for the same ends.

Inevitably the attitude of the employers produced a corresponding attitude among the workers. Naturally, if a man is to put his heart into his work, he must be able to feel that it is worth while. He must be able to feel that he is getting a reasonable return for his labour; and be must see the work as part of a great common enterprise directed strictly for the good of the community, or “for the glory of God,” if he believes in any sort of God. He must feel that those who control and organise his labour accept a serious responsibility for his welfare as a human person, and are in fact his partners. Instead, commercialism made the workers feel that they were merely being used by the employers for private gain. Employees were treated as animated bits of machinery. And society, through its supposedly, democratic government, took no serious steps to defend the workers against exploitation. Consequently, they in turn accepted no responsibility toward society. If a man put his heart into his work, if he worked for longer hours than the minimum needed to keep his job, if he took pains to develop his skill beyond the average, if he produced better results per hour, he might indeed benefit himself to some extent, but he benefitted his employers more. Further, he soon found that he was betraying his fellow workers by raising the standard expected of them and very likely he was forcing some of them out of work, and into penury. Consequently, from the point of view of the workers, machinery, which had seemed to promise to be the servant of all men, and to raise the poor into prosperity, came to be regarded as a public enemy.

No doubt in some trades, particularly where a high grade of skill was necessary, there remained a strong tradition of British craftsmanship; but this-was a hang-over from an earlier age, when there was more solidarity between master and man, and every worker had at least a hope that in time he would become a master, with a reputation for good work. Industrialism destroyed that hope. The great majority of workers were obviously doomed to remain in the ranks all their lives. And minute specialisation in the processes of industry gave versatility and craftsmanship far less scope for the ordinary workers, and reduced their opportunities of pride in work. If you had merely to shift units from one tray to another all day, you had less to take pride in, and less to call out your powers, than if you had to go through all the processes of making a chair or a boot: and you had no inspiring finished article to show for your labour at the end of the day. —

Mechanism

This brings me to — another great factor in nineteenth — century mentality, namely, the — prestige of machinery itself. Before — the industrial revolution the only machines were simple things like spinning-wheels and windmills, and the only sources of power, other than living muscle, were wind and water. Not till steam power had become general, did the idea of machinery begin to play a large part in forming men’s minds. Mechanisation — was so successful that — those — whose lives were given to the perfecting — and propagation of it — as a — means to — Wealth, and even those whose lives were enslaved to it, so that they regarded it as a public enemy, gradually came to be fascinated by it. Some took it as their god; others as their Satan, responsible for all their ills. In the early stages of the industrial revolution, when machinery was still rudimentary, machine-made articles were rightly considered clumsy imitations of hand-made ones. Even at a later stage, when in many fields machinery could produce actually better stuff than handicraft, the prestige of the hand-made remained very strong. Similarly, the old forms of power retained their appeal long after they were outclassed in efficiency. In my childhood on the Suez Canal the shipping people talked regretfully of “the great days of sail,” though obviously steam was even then a far more efficient means of propulsion. It was believed that you could not be a really good seaman, even in steam, unless you had been trained in sail; just as you could not be a really good gentleman unless you had been educated in the good old way. Probably, in the transitional period before the new tradition was properly established, both these contentions were justified. But the motive which made men assert them with passion was in the main merely nostalgia for the good old way. As a child on the Suez Canal, I was horrified by the newest steamers, devoid of yards for sails; but later, as a boy, I discovered the steamer’s characteristic functional beauty. Already in my childhood machinery was beginning to gain a glamour, and prestige of its own, and the control of mechanism was beginning to afford a new pleasure. My most thrilling toys were model steamboats and locomotives.

Not till a much later period, and chiefly after the turn of the century, was this new pleasure to become an almost universal obsession, in fact not until the internal combustion engine came into its own. And not till after the whole period that I am now considering, not till after the First World War, did mechanism have its full effect on men’s minds, at once fascinating and terrifying. For little by little, the machine, which had seemed to be man’s servant, became his tyrant, dominating the whole social order of Europe, and indeed of the world; and changing the very texture of men’s minds, so that they increasingly came to regard the whole universe as pure mechanism, and even their art-forms were deeply influenced, for good and ill, by the forms of machinery.

Of course the delight in machinery is admirable, so long as it does not become excessive, blinding one to more important values. And of course mechanised mass production is necessary to modern society. In order to afford fulness of life to all men we must produce the necessities of life as lavishly as possible. But unless we can also keep a place for skilled handicraft and general manual cunning, our society will be seriously impoverished.

It is high time to consider the most important of all the influences on the nineteenth century temper, namely modern science. Mechanisation and scientific research augmented one another. Mechanism could not have developed far without science; but science could never have gained its huge prestige had it not produced the spectacular triumphs of mechanisation. And this it would never have done, had it not been stimulated by the demand of the industrial pioneers for new methods of production. It was the demand for power that led from the observation of the boiling kettle to the triple expansion steam engine, and beyond. On the other hand, it was science itself, working through mechanisation, that caused the whole prodigious change in man’s material circumstances and in his mental attitude.

What kind of effect did science have on the mentality of the nineteenth century? Of course even in the present period the scientific temper is very far from universal, and in the nineteenth century its scope was much less. But more and more people were becoming more and more deeply influenced by it, for good and ill. How can one summarise its main characters? It consisted of increased trust in the method of observation and experiment and analytical thought, and it developed a corresponding emotional attitude, namely, one of dispassionate observation, detachment, objectivity, and a disposition never to allow desire to interfere with fact-recording and inference. If you wanted to find out the truth about the expansion of gasses or the distances of stars or the structure of the mind, you must not confuse your task by wishful thinking. The realisation of the distorting effect of emotion on reasoning, led in time to such a passion for being dispassionate that it sometimes developed into a quite irrational and emotional prejudice against emotion itself. Sheer intelligence was deified. Emotion came to be regarded by some as barbarous or childish, and beneath the dignity of civilized man.

Another aspect of the scientific spirit is specialism. As the sciences advanced, each gathering more and more facts and theories, it became increasingly difficult for any single mind to be even tolerably well informed in all scientific fields. You could not be a good physicist and a good chemist. And since in industry also specialisation proved to be the way of advancement, specialism as such gained immense prestige. Each science tended to develop more and more as an independent study, and all the scientific workers and enthusiasts for science tended increasingly to ignore all the fields of human experience that lay beyond their scientific interest. Far from being ashamed of their one-sided, purely intellectual development, they gloried in it; just as the hard-headed business men were glorying in their particular form of specialisation.

The scientific method and temper, which had produced such great results in the physical sphere, came to seem reliable in all spheres. And in a sense it was; if it was used properly, and not turned into an excuse for quite unscientific dogmas founded on insufficient evidence and faulty reasoning. Roughly, the rise of the scientific temper had two effects on the minds of ordinary people. It swept away many old beliefs which had no sound foundation; and it implemented new beliefs and new values, some of which were also without sound foundation. It undermined the Christian doctrines about the universe and man’s place in the universe; and it established the doctrine of scientific materialism.

When the findings of science began to clash with the Bible story of creation, the first reaction of ordinary people was indignation, and contempt for the scientists. But as the prestige of science grew, they came more and more to accept the theory of evolution rather than the Bible story. The churches had made the tactical mistake of pledging themselves to the literal truth of that story, which from the genuinely religious point of view was not necessary, and from the scientific point of view soon appeared to be hugely improbable. In time, the churches themselves, or most of their adherants, came to accept evolution, and interpret the Bible story of creation as a myth. Inevitably the plain man concluded that, if the desperately defended story of creation had in the end to be abandoned, the other Christian doctrines would sooner or later go too. The defeat of the churches over evolution was one of the main causes of their steady decline. The other was the triumph of commercial morality over Christian morality, and the fact that the churches made no heroic protest against social injustice.

In spite of the fears of the devout, the mere abandonment of Christian beliefs about the universe did not of itself cause a breakdown of morality. Many professed atheists were exceptionally kindly and self-sacrificing, and exceptionally conscious of the difference between right and wrong.

But gradually the scientific temper itself developed a new doctrine about the universe which did, little by little, undermine the distinction between right and wrong. This was the doctrine of mechanical materialism. It must not be confused with the Marxian theory of ‘‘dialectical materialism,” to which the following criticisms do not necessarily apply. According to mechanical materialism, the universe, including Human bodies, was simply a vast piece of mechanism made up of the ultimate units of matter studied by physics. The idea of “matter” was gradually replaced by the idea of “energy,” and this again was developed into something more subtle and less intelligible to the plain man; but the principle of materialism remained unaltered in essentials. There was no room in the mechanical system for interference by minds. And so minds had to be regarded as entirely ineffective. Mental events were by-products of physical events, and had no reaction upon physical events. Mind was a mere “glow” set up by the working of the body. There was pleasure and displeasure or pain, but these were caused respectively by the free functioning and frustration of chemical processes in the body.

Right and wrong were simply forms of pleasure and displeasure. There was no objective ground for them outside the individual himself. Morality was an illusion.

Now it is probably true to say that up to the end of the nineteenth century itself, the belief in the Bible story was still fairly common. Or rather, a great many people thought they believed it, though most of them did not really believe it. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century more and more people were becoming conscious that after all they did not believe it. They could no longer persuade themselves to the contrary. By the time of the First World War, few people outside of the Catholic Church would have betted at all confidently in favour of the Bible story of creation.

But even though in the nineteenth century Christian doctrine was beginning to loose its hold, Christian morality was still secure. No doubt a minority of intellectuals, and an ever-increasing minority, had reached the stage of regarding right and wrong as purely subjective, but it was not until after the First World War that this attitude of ethical scepticism came to be very widespread, or to have its full effect on the minds of those who believed it. For there is often a considerable time-lag between the intellectual acceptance of a theory and its full influence on feeling and action.

Romanticism

In the period that I am dealing with in this chapter the full-horror called “post-war disillusion” was still to come, but there were already many symptoms of breakdown. And there had been for long a widespread and rather pathetic movement of revulsion against the whole spirit of commercial civilisation. The Romantic Movement in literature had been a protest against industrialism and against science. Long ago Ossian’s poems and Scott’s novels had turned men’s attention back to the Middle Ages. Wordsworth had glorified the beauties of nature and pointed the way for hosts of machine-ridden workers to find relaxation and seemingly mystical regeneration in “the cheerful silence of the fells.” Already in my childhood many holidays were spent in the Lake District and North Wales. (And how the pioneers of this movement loathed and censured the vast waves of “trippers” that followed them, and spoilt the country-side for them!) Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris, each in his own way had inveighed against the tyranny of the machine and the immorality of commercialism. Their influence percolated far and wide. Fifty years ago a minority, including my parents, were ardently interested in pre-Raphaelite painting, Gothic architecture, wild country, the “Back to the Land” movement, and such schemes as Ruskin’s “Guild of St. George,” which sought to restore the spirit of mediaeval economy by inducing townsmen to go and settle on the land in little communities of a semi-religious kind.

It is now easy to see that this movement toward medievalism was bound to fail. It was out of gear with the historical trend of the period. Circumstances were driving society in a very different direction. But also, though its motive was largely a sentimental nostalgia for “Merrie England,” it did spring from a realisation that there was something very wrong with contemporary society. And its leaders were right in supposing that what was wrong was what Carlyle had called the “cash nexus,” the principle according to which the only effective relation between individuals was one of irresponsible buying and selling for private profit. It was irresponsible and uncontrolled commercialism that had led to the prostitution of science, the wage-slavery of the masses, the destruction of pride in craftsmanship and of the sense of co-operation in a great common enterprise. But though the motive in this protest against commercialism was right, the suggested alternative was wrong. The attempt to restore the mediaeval spirit was doomed to fail. If it had succeeded, it would have stifled all hope of real progress. The leaders of this movement had no clear grasp of the forces making for social change. They succeeded in arousing a widespread yearning for a mythical past; but they failed to persuade the mass of ordinary people that the clock ought actually to be put back.

Progress

In spite of all the horrors of industrialism, there was indeed in the nineteenth century a growing belief that society was magnificently progressing, and that progress was inevitable. The idea of progress had become for many the core of something very like a new religion. This was the result of two influences, namely, the familiarity of constant improvements in the material conveniences of civilisation, and the spread of the belief in biological evolution.

Throughout the nineteenth century material progress had advanced: swiftly and steadily, for all classes except the proletariat. And even they had shared to some extent through the advancement of the social services, such as improved water-supply, sanitation, railway travel, gas and electric lighting, and medical care. If you had been brought up in this kind of environment, you could scarcely help assuming that progress was bound to go on for ever, and that there was some sort of bias in the universe tending toward progress.

The belief in biological evolution reinforced this optimism about material progress. Evidently, it was said, progress had been going on for millions of years. The great story of the evolution of man from primitive living creatures in the early ocean shallows was an inspiring saga. Evidently there was some kind of fundamental bias in the nature of the universe, determining events so that higher and higher types must appear. Some thought of this as a “life force,” or as a purposeful god. Others, loyal to the doctrine of materialism, insisted that there was no evidence for any such purposeful bias in the universe; but insisted also that “natural selection,” and “the survival of the fittest” were principles quite capable of explaining the irresistible march of progress. Both parties assumed that progress was inevitable. Homo Sapiens, whatever the minor fluctuations of his fortunes must surely pass on from strength to strength. The abler individuals and nations must surely by the exercise of their wits triumph over the less able; and so, by ruthless natural selection, the race must become abler and abler, and more and more in command of its environment. Some enthusiasts for evolution went so far as to deplore the modern tendency to found institutions for the help of the less able, to care for the physical weaklings, the mentally deficient and those who had gone under in the economic dog-fight. For this policy, they said, ensured that the unfit should survive along with the fit; and so the natural trend of evolution would be checked. And later it was argued that since natural selection had ceased to operate on man, he must “take charge of his own evolution,” improving the human stock so as to put an end to all serious diseases and disabilities, and developing human intelligence far beyond its present level.

In spite of the very general faith in the inevitability of progress, there was no clear idea about what the word “progress” ought really to mean. Some assumed that it meant simply continuous improvement in material comfort and luxury, such as better food, clothing, housing, a vast increase in labour-saving gadgets, faster and faster travel, shorter working hours, new methods of taking pleasure, increased freedom from state interference. Others, mainly among those who were themselves accustomed to comfort and luxury, and were disgusted by the vulgarity of those who were experiencing a little of it for the first time in their lives, declared that the mere spreading of material comforts over a larger proportion of the population was not progress at all. In fact, it might be the reverse. But most people were sufficiently human to see that, whatever else progress involved, it certainly did include a very great improvement in the material conditions of the workers.

Those who admired science affirmed that progress must include not only increased comfort and luxury but also increased knowledge of the material universe and understanding of “the working of the mind “ as a consequence of “the working of the body.” Earnest but conventional Christians said that real progress must be spiritual progress, by which they meant in the main two things, namely a spread of religious observance and a rise in the standard of moral behaviour according to the orthodox code. In both these respects it seemed to many devout Christians that, far from progress being assured, there was a steady deterioration. Others, infected by the general optimism, were able to persuade themselves that, though church-going and doctrinal belief were in decline, people were in some ways becoming more religious in essential spirit. For on the whole, as the century advanced, and as the workers became more vocal, moral uneasiness about society spread, and more action was taken to do away with some of the more flagrant injustices.

Few, very few, in the nineteenth century, could as yet see that science was going to make possible an entirely new kind of human world, in which not only would there be a decent life for every human being, but also everyone would have the means of fulfilling his human potentiality to the utmost. As yet, few people had begun to see that the life of the species as a whole might some day become such as, to our warped and under-nourished minds, would seem super-human.

Imperialism

For the British, pioneers of industrialism, and founders of the empire ‘‘on which the sun never sets,” it was easy to believe that the main instrument of human progress must henceforth be British Imperialism. It was the white man’s task to civilise the whole human race; and the British, by right of superior prowess, had assumed the white man’s burden. When I was a child in Egypt, traffic through the Suez Canal was steadily increasing, and the great majority of the ships flew the Red Ensign. Though Egypt was not a British possession, a British warship was always stationed in the harbour. The Empire itself was steadily increasing. As a boy I naively believed that the British Empire would some day include the whole world. — And how I pitied those who did not belong to the one supreme nation! It was very generally assumed that there was something in the blood of the inhabitants of this island that made them specially good at ruling “backward races.” And the public school spirit, embodying the tradition of the English gentleman, was thought to be the finest flower of human nature. The gentlemanly attitude to all social subjects was right, and ought to be spread throughout the world. The English abroad prided themselves on combining kindness, justice and firmness. Not only (it was said) did they govern far better than any other race, but the natives recognised their superior worth. The example of personal conduct set by the English was regarded as a great civilising influence. One of the secrets of the Englishman’s power was believed to be that he held himself aloof from the races that be had to rule. He lived his own life in his own quarters, ignoring their culture and tradition. Inferior white races, such as the French and the Italians, might treat the natives more or less as equals, even inter-marrying with them. But this was a great mistake. If an Englishman married a native, he was sinning against the prestige of his own race. We were the Herrenvolk.

What is the truth about British Imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? The Empire had been founded piecemeal by traders for the sake of trade. The commercial class, seeking new markets, traded with the “backward countries,” lent money to them, and found itself forced to establish political control so as to secure peaceful conditions for trading, and the payment of interest on its loans. No doubt the original motive of sheer exploitation has been increasingly complicated by the theory that the Empire is held on trust for the natives themselves, that the aim of imperial power is to develop native resources for the good of the native population, and to educate the natives for democracy. No doubt there has been a good deal of genuine civilising, more so in some colonies than in others. No doubt the rank and file of our empire-builders have been largely inspired by the will to make a good job of the work entrusted to them, according to their lights.

But there is another side to the picture. The whole life of many of our colonies has been effectively controlled by business interests. But what has been the result for the natives? We have sold them our goods, at a high profit to ourselves. We have exploited their resources, paying them wretched wages to work for us. Of the total product of their labour, the smallest proportion has been given back to them in wages; a certain amount has gone to the improvement of their country or its social services; but by far the largest part has passed out of their country altogether in the form of dividends to British shareholders. It is said that for every shilling earned today by the native miner in Rhodesia, the resident white man secures a pound, while ten pounds go to the investor in Britain. In many cases we have allowed our settlers and industrialists to deprive the natives of their lands, and have thereby forced them to work for wages as agricultural labourers, or in the mines. Add to this that we have broken down their native institutions and culture by the impact of our alien civilisation, without giving them full access to the best products of our own civilization. We have always made it clear to them that we regarded them as inferior races. Or rather, we always did so in the nineteenth century. Recently a change has perhaps begun to show itself, partly because the innate superiority of the white races is no longer so plausible as it was in the period of triumphant capitalism, partly because the Russians have shown that there is another way of developing backward countries, partly because the Nazis have, quite unintentionally made all theories of racial superiority look ridiculous.

Personal Conduct

I have been describing some of the main influences which determined the temper of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. In doing so have also described some of their effects. Other important characteristics of the period remain to be considered, features not so much of public life as of personal manners and conduct. In this sphere a great change was already beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century itself, and its tempo accelerated during the early years of the twentieth century. The First World War speeded it up even more. Consequently, the behaviour which was typical forty or fifty years ago was in many ways extremely different from that which became general between the two Wars.

In the nineteenth century, manners and customs, and morals also, were far more bound by convention than they are today. A great deal of formality which has since come to seem unnecessary was then carefully preserved. Greetings and farewells were far more ceremonious. There was more bowing and scraping, more taking off of hats, giving up seats to ladies, shaking hands. (How well I remember the distress of “saying good night” as a child! The room was often full of visitors, and I was made to go round the whole company, idiotically shaking hands with each guest.) The title “Mr.” was far more frequently used by men when speaking to one another. Friends less easily reached the stage of using Christian names. Visiting cards were much more common, and the etiquette of leaving the right kind and the right number was taken very seriously. A little tray (preferably of silver) was often kept on the hall table to receive the cards of departing callers. To suggest that this ceremonial was in any way reminiscent of the behaviour of dogs at gate-posts would have assured one’s banishment from polite society. The paying of “calls” was a very important part of the life of any middle class housewife who aspired to be well considered by the right people. My mother, like all her friends, had a “day,” and her cards bore the legend “At Home, first and third Tuesdays,” or whatever day she had chosen. I do not know how much of this etiquette remains today, but it is certainly very much reduced. As a child in Egypt and as a boy in England, I sometimes had to be present on these occasions, washed, and in a stiff Eton collar. I handed round the cakes and cups of tea, and sat on the least comfortable chair.

Clothes in those days were more formal, and much heavier. It was believed that if the skin was not heavily protected from the cold air one would catch a chill. In particular, if you got your feet wet, you would probably incur a sore throat. If you had walked on the wet grass, you must change your boots as soon as you came in. And grass, apparently, was always wet. Throats were always very carefully covered. When at last young women began to wear blouses open at the neck, older people considered them dangerous. My mother named them “pneumonia blouses.” Since people were constantly over-clad, they were apt to perspire heavily, and then any sudden chilling-off might cause some illness or other. The remedy was thought to be still heavier clothing. Draughts were one of the major enemies of the human species. Windows should always be kept shut; or in very hot weather they might be opened “just a crack.” But it was better to air the room for a few minutes while no one was in it. One of the servants could do this. As a small boy I used to make very sensitive little paper windmills with which to detect draughts in unexpected places. This caused my mother endless trouble, as she could not rest till she had done her utmost to destroy each of these little breezy intruders from the outside world.

The formality of clothing in the nineteenth century was oppressive. At my day school I wore a stiff Eton collar every day, with gloves and a bowler hat on Sundays. Being a vile little snob, I clamoured for a short-jacketted Eton suit, and finally got it; for Sundays only. A city uncle of mine climbed the Welsh mountains in a morning coat and striped trousers, and a square-topped hard black hat, a cross between a bowler and a topper. We all wore stiff collars, even on drenching days on the moors, except my father, who was far less conventional than his young son, and often put me to shame by his informality. There has been a remarkable change, by the way, in the standard of adventurousness of such expeditions. Peaks that in those days were altogether too dangerous for the ordinary person are now over-run by all sorts. Slopes which in the old days were descended step by step with the aid of a stick we now charge down at full speed. No doubt this change is due to the gradual acclimatising of townsmen to the hills.

Sex

From the consideration of clothes I now pass to the nineteenth century attitude towards sex. So much has already been said on this subject that a few words will suffice. There was of course a very strong taboo against uncovering any part of the body except the face and hands, and for women in evening dress the upper part of the breasts. The effect of this occasional display of dazzling female flesh was overwhelming, at least to the adolescent. Since women’s legs were always invisible, their ankles, which were occasionally exposed when they lifted their skirts to cross a muddy street, were very alluring. “A neat ankle,” though clad in the black cashmere of those days, was a treasured possession. I can remember, by the way, as a very small child, discovering with amazement that women had legs under their long skirts.

The nineteenth century attitude to sex was no doubt partly a result of the puritan influence on the commercial class in the days when that class was climbing to power. But this scarcely explains the extraordinary exaggeration of sexual prudery in Britain and America. I have heard stories which I can believe true, of mothers bathing their babies under a covering garment, so that the naked flesh should not be exposed to the eyes of the mother who had produced it; of small boys making themselves ill by heroic efforts to refrain from the sin of urinating. Of piano-legs put into trousers for decency’s sake; of nude ancient statues being made decent by drapery or a fig leaf. These, no doubt, are extreme instances; and I cannot vouch for the authenticity of all of them. But they do epitomise Victorian prudery in its more extravagant form. Average behaviour, though less fantastic, was more than a little prudish. Boys and girls grew up with a sense that sex was unclean, unmentionable, and a snare of Satan. They were told nothing. Their questions were fobbed off, or greeted with inconsequent scoldings. They therefore had to make furtive and guilty discoveries on their own account. In these circumstances it was inevitable that nineteenth century behaviour should be deeply, influenced by suppressed sexual cravings, and that, when at last the taboos were removed, the reaction should be violent. Visitors from the East, it is said, are often struck by the extraordinary exaggeration of sex-interest in Europe. This is no doubt more obvious today than in the nineteenth century, because sex-interest is expressed with less restraint in earlier days its influence was no less extensive, but disguised.

The Sexes

The false attitude to sex itself thoroughly poisoned the relations between the sexes. Young people of opposite sexes were seldom allowed to be alone together. They had always to be sharply watched. Every girl, it was assumed, wax in constant danger, of being treated improperly by any young man who came across her. Young women were seldom allowed out of doors unattended. The chaperon system was universal, and a dreadful burden for all concerned, particularly the chaperons. Even after the turn of the century, when standards were already changing, it was considered inadvisable for engaged couples to be left alone together for long. When I was a very young man I caused a flutter by taking two girls to the theatre. I had supposed that there was safety in numbers!

In the typical nineteenth century view women were at once inferior to men and superior. They were incapable of the activities distinctive of the noble male; and so, inferior. They were assumed to be creatures of emotion, incapable of any kind of dispassionate and penetrating reasoning. Their place was in the home. Fifty years ago this attitude was not nearly so extreme as it had been earlier, for instance in the time of the Brontes, but it was still such that a later age can get a lot of self-gratulatory fun by contrasting Victorian prudery with, our more “enlightened” attitude. In those days women had to be constantly guarded from the rude impact of the world. The suggestion that they might sometimes have professions (other than the oldest profession in the world) was unseemly, and rather comic. That a woman should ever want to be, or suppose herself capable of being, a doctor, or a lawyer, was almost unbelievable. If she did conceive such a fantastic idea, it must be ridiculed out of her. You might as reasonably allow your cat or your guardian angel to train for a profession. No doubt she might be a teacher or a governess, a singer, a pianist or a violinist, or even, in very exceptional cases a novelist or a poetess but it was inconceivable that she should ever be an architect or an engineer. Of course, there was the stage, but no really nice girl would want to be an actress, making an exhibition of herself, and living in sin.

Because of their temperamental differences from men, women were educated differently. No one as yet suggested that the temperamental difference was in the main actually the result of their different education. The aim of the young ladies’ seminary, and of the later high school for girls, was to fit girls not for the world but for the marriage market, to make them eligible, to equip them to catch an eligible man, wealthy enough to keep them in sufficient style. They received extremely little training to cope with the kind of life which marriage would force upon them. And so they had generally no idea of what they were going to be up against, unless, perhaps, through dark hints from an anxious mother on the eve of the wedding. They were not seriously trained for maternity, nor even for house-keeping. Instead, they were given “deportment,” and certain “accomplishments,” such as sketching or singing. The aim (largely unconscious, no doubt) was to give them snob-value for the prosperous male, seeking an elegant and expensive ornament for his home. The rest must take care of itself.

In view of all this wrong-headedness, it is perhaps surprising that so many marriages were, on the whole, successful. Genuine personal love, which is perhaps commoner than the cynics believe, is able to triumph over a good deal of hostile convention, though not without suffering. I find it quite impossible to believe of the nineteenth century married couples whom I encountered in my young days (uncles and aunts and friends of my parents) that they were all, or very many of them, utter failures. Since pre-marital relations between the sexes were supposed to be limited to the kissing and fondling of engaged couples, the shock of plunging suddenly into a far more intimate, and a life-long partnership, was inevitably very great. Moreover, if the partners really had neither sex information nor personal experience of sexual intercourse before marriage, it was all too likely that their ignorance and clumsiness on the honeymoon would result in serious psychological damage to one or both of them, and the ruin of their marriage. And since divorce was regarded as disgraceful, the ruined partnership would probably be maintained for the sake of appearances. The children would be brought up in an atmosphere of conflict and recrimination, and their characters would probably be gravely warped.

Since women had an inferior status to men in the eyes of the law, and restricted property rights, and since anyhow they were supposed to be incapable of managing their own affairs, every woman was expected to be under the care of some man, whether father, husband or brother. To a large extent women were still regarded as the property of men. They were property that was coveted, easily damaged, and must be kept under strict control.

On the other hand women were, at least in theory regarded as superior to men in certain respects. They were supposed to be capable of brilliant flashes of “divine feminine intuition.” They had a special gift of sympathy. There was something holy about womanhood. They attained a “spiritual purity” of which few men were capable. This belief was probably a relic of feudalism, of the knight’s adoration of his lady.

To summarise, in the nineteenth century, women were treated on the whole as something between chattels and angels. They received far more conventional respect than they do today; but they were given far less respect as human persons, as men’s comrades in the adventure of living, different from men, no doubt, but essentially their equals.

Even so long ago as my childhood the Victorian attitude was already changing. The movement for the “emancipation of women” was gaining ground. My mother, for instance, was among the early women cyclists, in a long dress, the edge of which was surrounded with lead discs to keep it down decently over her ankles. Much later came the “suffragette” movement, women politicians, lawyers, doctors. As an undergraduate I met one of the first young women who was training to be a solicitor. The World War of 1914 accelerated women’s emancipation. For the first time they undertook formal national service in semi-military organisations. Soon woman’s status leapt forward to be approximately equal to man’s.

Parents and Families

Family life is another matter in which nineteenth century behaviour was different from that which is common today. My mother used to tell me how her sea-faring father, when he was home from a voyage, used to spend his evenings reading the newspaper with the one candle between the outstretched paper and his face, while his sons and daughters, and his wife also, sat in outer darkness. Those were the days when a boy was expected to address his father as “Sir,” and when wives quite often spoke to their husbands as “Mr.” So-and-so. In my early days this patriarchal spirit had already been much tempered by a more human relationship. My father expected no deference. Already for him the relation between parent and child was one of man-to-man friendliness, but in this, as in some other respects, he was something of a pioneer. However, in spite of this happy relationship there were many things in my childhood which underlined my inferiority. For instance, I was frequently sent out of the room so that the adults could talk freely, particularly when they wanted to discuss me, and what was to be done about me. This practice used to fill me with rage, fright and distrust.

Nineteenth century parents were much more inclined than those of today to regard their children as possessions. No doubt parents are often possessive today, but they are not so frank about it. Many a devoted mother is ruthlessly possessive without knowing it, seeking to bind her children to her by appeals for their affection or, more subtly, contriving to hold them constantly in her debt by means of her motherly devotion and service. But the mental climate has changed, and to make undisguised claims upon one’s children is “not done,” at any rate in families that have kept pace with the times. But in the old days things were different. A father naturally regarded his children as his property, held, no doubt, on trust from God, but none the less his to mould as he willed. And their mother felt toward them simply as an extension of herself. For the over-worked and under-paid factory hand, children were a potential source of income, and had to be put out to work as soon as possible. For all classes an important motive for having children was simply the need to ensure that someone would feel responsible for one in old age. This motive still flourishes today, but is less frankly acknowledged. Increasingly it is coming to be regarded as a more or less disreputable motive. Gradually people are waking up so far as to be shocked by the spectacle of the spinster daughter who, having spent the best part of her life in looking after her ageing parents, finds herself after their death completely stranded.

The typical nineteenth century family was a little ingrown society in which only the father had the centre of gravity of his life outside the family. The mother was primarily a mother and a housewife. The children were expected to regard the family as the most real thing in their lives, to grow up in dutifulness toward their parents, and loyalty to one another, and to allow their minds to be moulded to the pattern imposed by the father, or in some cases by the mother. The result was all too often disastrous. A family environment which should have provided the growing mind with an unforgettable experience of the genuinely human relationship, often gave them instead an experience of oppression, veiled or unveiled, and generated in themselves a fatal conflict between affection and resentment. No wonder that when the religious sanctions of family life were weakened, a violent reaction against the family set in, and reduced it in the inter-war period to a thing for contempt. But like nineteenth century marriage, nineteenth century family life was not nearly so uniformly bad as it was made out to be by those who reviled it from a later period. I at any rate have known more families in which affection on the whole triumphed over antagonism than those in which affection was killed.

Summary

I have described those features of nineteenth and early twentieth century behaviour which seem to me most significant for understanding the great contrast between that period and the next, the inter-war period, from which we have now emerged. Some of the characteristics which I have recorded, such as the attitude to sex, changed violently and almost into their contraries soon after the First War. Others, such as commercialism, did not reach their full expression until the eve of the Second War; yet, even while they were at their height, their antitheses were already gaining strength, more or less underground; or else far from Britain. Thus, while in Britain commercialism’s antithesis, the passion for self-expression in communal enterprise, was still only an ill-directed yearning, it seems to have become the established temper in Russia.

Let me summarise the main conclusions of this chapter. The heyday of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century was a time of unbounded confidence in the future of Britain and the human race. It seemed impossible that progress should ever cease, or be side-tracked into a highly mechanised condition in which the spirit must die. Progress was in the main thought of as ever-increasing luxury and individual freedom from social restraints, freedom to use one’s wits for climbing the social ladder. Lip service was paid by most people to Christianity, but since the very structure of society was utterly in conflict with Christianity, and since science had gravely damaged Christian doctrine, the churches were engulfed in a mist of insincerity. Consequently they steadily lost adherents. The weakening of Christian moral sanctions, and the universal hypnotisation by economic law and the theory of “economic man” made men increasingly irresponsible in their dealings with one another.

There were, of course, many individuals who earnestly withstood the general tendency toward sheer individualism, who both in private and in public tried to behave with genuine respect and responsibility toward their neighbours. But those who did so at all effectively were very few. There was, too, a great movement of social reform. Public conscience was being steadily awakened. The capitalist rulers were sufficiently prosperous to be able to afford concessions to the increasingly insistent demands of organised labour. But reforms were piece-meal. There was no widespread realisation of the fundamental wickedness of the existing social system, no deep will to transform it into something at once more humane and more in accordance with the professed religious principles of the age. There was no general will to plan society through and through for the well-being of the common man.

The curse of the whole period was that the social system exaggerated the individualism of ordinary people, and made them irresponsible toward their neighbours. The individual self seemed the supremely real thing. Other selves were outside one, and they could legitimately be used whenever possible as means for one’s own advancement. And advancement tended to be measured solely by the money-standard. Hence the universal money-snobbery which had a strangely hypnotic power over most men, and falsified all their social relations.

But, evil as nineteenth century society was, it had its virtues. They were rather naive and barbarous virtues, but they had a real moral power in men’s minds. The moral rot had not gone nearly so far as it was destined to go between the two Wars. Men still had the courage of their convictions, even if their convictions were often silly or base. Even the crazy gospel of commercialism did still afford many people something like a real “way of life.” They could still with some justice say: “At least we are getting a move on, we are making things hum, we are providing the material for a better world some day.” The imperialists, also often took their faith very seriously. They really believed that the British had a mission, and the belief had a real effect on their conduct. Genuine Christian faith, too, still existed. Though it often turned people into insufferable bigotts, it also gave them a certain moral solidity and courage. And many who had abandoned their Christian doctrines still clung to the Christian virtues, honestly trying to practise them.

No, bad as the period was, something far worse was already brewing.

But even in the nineteenth century the rot which was to undermine society so thoroughly between the two Wars was already a disease that was steadily eating its way into all men’s minds, and into every region of society’s life. I believe it is possible to put one’s finger on the source of the whole plague. It was a two-fold source, each part of which was closely connected with the other. Commercialism had fomented self-regard to such an extent that mutual responsibility had come to seem “unrealistic.” At the same time science had undermined the old faith so seriously that the old moral sanction had lost its power. Science had also undermined men’s respect for human nature. Man was after all “just an animal.” The soul was a delusion. So there was nothing worth bothering about, and the best plan was to look after one’s own interest as effectively as possible. Such was the nightmare of futility that was already brewing in the period that I have “the day before yesterday;” though as yet only a few people were conscious of it.

Strange that the period which was so strong in individualism was so lacking in respect for individuality, for the personality of individual men and women! In the period which I must now consider individualism become even more extravagant, and contempt for individuality even greater; but at the same time, in this darkest period of all, the Inter-War Period, a new hope was gradually to formulate itself.

CHAPTER 3. YESTERDAY

The failure of the League of Nations

NINETEENTH CENTURY SOCIETY contained the seeds of its own social and moral ruin, and in the period between the two Wars these seeds bore their poisonous fruit. In western Europe this brief period of twenty years was one of great scientific advance and marvellous new amenities; but it was also one of extreme misery and moral degradation. Indeed, moral degradation was perhaps its outstanding characteristic, and was due to the fact that the social structure, and the established morality which that structure expressed, were quite inadequate to the new conditions of human life.

But though in the west moral degradation was the most obvious characteristic, a new order and a new morality, yes, and a new religious feeling, were being born in Russia; and even in the West, though the will for a new order and new values was always defeated, it was really at work throughout the period, and slowly gathering power in spite of despair.

The First World War had hastened the process of disintegration which had so long been at work in capitalist society and culture. The very fact that war on a great scale was possible in the civilised world went far to break man’s faith in civilisation, and even in human nature. When peace came, there was a wave of hope. At last there would be a happier world. The new League of Nations would establish international justice and security, and at home we should have a land fit for heroes to live in.

But whatever the incidental successes of the League, as a world-wide political system it failed utterly. America deserted it at the outset France and Britain used it as an instrument for national power, in fact for securing their dominance over Europe, and their imperial influence abroad. There was no central authority, and no centrally-directed armed force. The statesmen who controlled the League were primarily servants of the great national states, and they never seriously tried to make the League work. Soon, the “Have-Not” states discovered that no relief for their grievances was to be obtained through the League, which the “Have” states managed for their own interests. And so they made secret preparations for violence. In time, occasions offered for a tentative use of it, and they found that the League’s attempts to restrain their aggression were timid and feeble.

It is easy to see now, after the event, why the League failed. Behind the many causes which I have mentioned lay the deeper cause, namely, that men’s minds were not yet ready to pay the price without which an ordered world could not be founded. They were still emotionally enslaved to the sentiments of the old world. Even though some of them recognised intellectually that those old sentiments were disastrous, very few could abandon them. Men feared for the security of their nations; they hated other nations. The financial ruling class in every great state was greedy for the spoils of commercial imperialism. The men of money were jealous for their freedom to buy and sell for profit, and to set the workers at home and in the backward lands to work for them.

The failure of the League was of course in a sense, inevitable, because of the economic structure of the national states. Capitalism involved competition for foreign markets, and therefore imperial conflict. But economic forces are abstractions. What is concrete is the motives of human beings, acting in some particular environment. The fact that capitalism survived, when it was already economically far out of date, and doing grievous harm both internationally and within each state, was due not to any fatalistic economic forces, but to a failure of insight and of moral integrity on the part of the financial ruling class, a failure which, no doubt, was caused largely by economic influences. On the one hand the men of money simply could not understand that the system of relatively free commercial enterprise was bound to lead not to general prosperity and peace, but to wage-slavery and war. On the other hand, in spite of their self-deceiving noble professions, whenever they were faced with a choice between an act promising private profit or class power and an act, dangerous from this point of view, but promising social well-being or world harmony, they tended fatally to choose the way of short-term personal advantage.

This moral failure, rooted, of course, in the strong but not all-powerful self-regarding motives inherent in human nature, was greatly favoured by the prevailing temper of an age in which all human beings were brought up to believe (in spite of perfunctory moral teaching that economic self-interest was in the long-run the only effective motive, that idealism was sheer sentimentality, and that fierce unrestrained competition was the way to social well-being. In such cultural conditions the more social and more far-seeing motives are at a grave handicap. It will not make much difference what a child is taught about the rightness of loving-kindness and mutual responsibility if it grows up in a society the whole structure and process of which is based on cut-throat competition between individuals, and between groups or classes. The League failed not merely because the national governments who controlled it always put national self-interest before loyalty to the League, but because of a very widespread disillusion and cynicism. This led most people to believe that “idealistic” schemes were fundamentally “unrealistic,” and so doomed always to fail. It might he said that the League failed because men lacked both the faith and the will to make it succeed. More truly, it failed because they could not see that idealism, if it is in line with the general pressure of circumstances, is far more realistic than ordinary short-sighted realism.

Unemployment

When, between the two wars, the economic life of the capitalist countries began to show signs of breaking down completely, unemployment confronted the ruling class with a spectacular test of their sincerity. The unemployed became an ever-greater section of the total working population, and the employed themselves, were either working short hours or living in constant dread of unemployment. Their wages were too small to keep them and their families in health. Hosts of workers were sickly, and haunted by despair. As for the unemployed, besides being undernourished, they had to spend their days in a spiritually-ruinous idleness, tormented by a sense of utter futility; or so far deadened by idleness that they no longer cared whether their lives were futile or not. All of them very naturally felt a deep contempt and loathing against society, because it could find no use for them, and took almost no responsibility for them.

The government’s treatment of the unemployed in the Inter-War Period showed very clearly what was wrong with the old values. Our rulers simply did as little as they dared. They argued that the most important problem was to restore the country to financial soundness. They could not conceive that the true wealth was not money but human beings, and that to constitute wealth, human beings must be well fed, healthy, contented, hopeful, educated, skilled, and allowed to use their skill in socially useful ways. They could not see that to let millions human beings rot in idleness and penury was far more dangerous than to take financial risks in order to set industry going again. That this irresponsibility was also a violation of the most sacred principle of their own professed religion was a fact which lay beyond the range of their imagination. Their lack of understanding and of active sympathy was due at bottom to a moral blindness which in turn was due to the blinding effect of the economic system and the prevailing individualistic climate.

I have blamed the government, but of course we were all to blame, in greater or less degree, according to the extent of our power to effect policy, and our failure to use that power. When the “hunger-marchers” flocked toward London in protest, and were sometimes harshly treated by the authorities, many of us felt righteous indignation, but only a few did anything concrete about it. The least we can do now is to honour those who were more active; like Max Plowman, who devoted himself so splendidly to forcing the wrongs of the unemployed upon the lazy public conscience.

Disillusionment

To sum up, the War itself and the appalling shame of unemployment, combined with the luxury of the rich and the commercial rackets of the business world, turned western civilization into a thing of contempt.

Other influences had the same effect. Biologists were popularising the view that man was just an instinct-dominated animal with superior cunning. Biochemists were very successfully explaining more and more of the reactions of living tissues in terms of chemical laws, and working toward a completely chemical and mechanistic account of all human behaviour. Freudian psychologists reduced all man’s “highest” cultural aspirations to the disguised expression of infantile cravings; and chiefly to sexual cravings, which the established culture regarded as disreputable. In particular they discovered that the sense of moral obligation was derived from the child’s secret conflict of love and hate in relation to his parents. And his “love” was generally said to be nothing but a combination of cupboard love and sheer sexual lust. Thus moral principles, even the “noblest” and most cherished, were without objective sanction, and owed their strength merely to the prestige power of the parental will, or to the spell of tribal custom, or the fiat of a ruling class. Love in this view was but a subtle form of self-gratification. Christian brotherhood was sheer fantasy. Belief in a God was merely a projection of the child’s trust in the benevolence and power of the parents. The universe was entirely purposeless, and consciousness was but an extremely rare accident in it. At death, of course, the individual mind simply ceased to exist. And ultimately, with the fatal working out of the physical law of entrope, life and mind would be frozen out of the whole cosmos. Against this view the

Churches protested; but they had lost their authority. With some exceptions the religious leaders had failed to give a clear moral lead in the matter of unemployment. They said a good deal about the unchristian irresponsibility of leaving the unemployed to rot; but mostly they refrained from pointing out that in this instance Christianity demanded a revolutionary change in the whole system of private ownership. Consequently, religious faith, which was anyhow being undermined by scientific materialism, was further weakened by a widespread sense of moral insincerity among the champions of religion.

Democracy also was coming into bad odour. Rule of the people by the people and for the people was clearly a farce, since most of the people were in effect wage-slaves. It appeared that the men of money with their immense powers of propaganda, could always trick the electors into voting for the established order, no matter how hostile that order to the well-being of the community. As for liberty, it appeared to be in practice merely liberty for the financially powerful to exploit the weak.

And culture? Art merely afforded symbolical expression to the repressed infantile cravings, and found its most characteristic form in the Surrealist addiction to dream-like grotesques. The iconoclastic temper and daring experiments of all the arts in the Inter-War Period were wholesome and fruitful protests against the false aesthetic standards of an earlier period, and against false moral and social standards too; but because there was as yet no clear and comprehensive vision to take the place of the old faded vision, all these movements were rather cathartic than creative. - Truth itself was without objective sanction, since in the final analysis we believed simply whatever was convenient to our own “unconscious,” or to the ruling class that had conditioned us.

Under these influences the whole temper of personal life in western Europe degenerated. The fear of hell was gone, but life here on earth became for the sensitive a nightmare that was little better than hell. Many were crippled by wage-slavery. Even the more fortunate, persuaded that human nature, and indeed the whole universe, were essentially trivial, could find nothing better to do with their lives than to gratify their craving for easy “pleasure.” Unfortunately pleasure, pursued for its own sake, turns to dust and ashes.

Pleasure-purveyance was one of the greatest commercial enterprises of the age. Every form of effortless amusement was available to those who could pay. You could watch professional athletes on the football-field or in the boxing-ring. You could career aimlessly about the country in exquisitely designed and constructed machines, the product of much skilled and unskilled labour. You could feed on exotic foods, brought at great cost from distant lands, where in many cases they had been produced by semi-slave labour. You could listen to trivia!

-music and trivial jokes on the radio. In the earlier part of the Inter War Period there was a real attempt to use the British non-commercial broadcasting organisation to stimulate popular interest in the great controversial social and political problems; but later this policy was abandoned in favour of something less disturbing. In addition to titillation by the radio you could find relaxation in reading newspapers and journals. Nearly all of these were controlled by individuals or groups whose aim was not to make the public think, but to persuade them to buy the periodicals. The easiest way to do this was to appeal constantly to their hunger for vicarious adventure, facile humour, crime, or sex-stimulation; all harmless enough in themselves, but dangerously obsessive. In their obsessiveness lay their usefulness to the lords of the press. Here was a sure bait to catch the public, and the more “suggestive” the more potent. The most sinister stuff could be put across if it was coated with a veneer of conventional moralism. Apart from the urgent need to maintain and increase circulation, the press lords were concerned only to persuade the public that all was well with society, and to prevent them from thinking dangerous thoughts. Then there was the cinema. You could sit in the dark “picture house,” stimulated by the same kind of rubbish as was provided by the press and radio, while you secretly found more direct sexual satisfaction in fondling your companion. And since in the Inter-War period all the old taboos were losing their power, you could seek out, if you were sufficiently emancipated, any kind of sexual experience that attracted you, and yet feel no guilt.

Sex and Parenthood

After the break-down of Victorian prudery an orgy of “free love” was inevitable, and indeed up to a point a wholesome reaction. Unfortunately, when. “free love” is accompanied by a break-down not only of false prudery but also of respect for human personality, the result is disastrous. Under the influence of the prevailing cultural climate, sex came to be regarded among the more advanced section of society as little more than a simple physiological need. If you were attracted by a girl, the reasonable thing to do was to persuade her to spend a night with you, or a week-end; or possibly the relation might last for months, or even years, if your temperaments happened to be sufficiently in accord. Persons of opposite sex should come together for casual “affairs” as soon as they felt inclined to do so. They should get whatever pleasure they could out of one another, and part as soon as the glamour had disappeared. The common-sense aim of the relation, it was said, was mutual pleasure; and the wise lover would reject, so far as possible, all sense of personal responsibility for the other. To have children was a tiresome complication which could be avoided by taking the proper precautions. If conception did after all occur, the calamity had to be regarded either as a sheer accident or as the result of carelessness.

Obviously this kind of sex relationship was not the only kind in inter-war society. There were, of course, plenty of marriages and other lasting partnerships which were firmly rooted in genuine personal love. And though births were far too few, the decline in the birth-rate was not yet catastrophic. But the casual “affair” was typical of the more advanced sections of society in this period, and its increasing vogue influenced the character even of marriage. Childless marriages had become far more common. It was a mistake to attribute this fact solely to the increased reluctance to have children. There is some reason to believe that fertility itself is declining; and unfortunately the cause of this disaster is still obscure. Certainly very many couples who really want children fail to have them. The fall of the birth rate is not wholly due to the general choosing of motor cars rather than babies (as is sometimes suggested) and to the consequent widespread use of contraceptives. But in the Inter-War Period the aim of marriage was all too often mere licensed gratification. And when; the futility of a marriage began to pall, it could be more easily terminated than in the earlier period, since divorce was no longer considered disreputable.

Now it may well be that some experience of sexual intercourse is beneficial before entering on marriage. Love is an art, and there may have to be preliminary sketches before one is equipped to create one’s masterpiece. It may be, too, that even after marriage the partners would benefit by occasional intercourse with other persons, returning to one another refreshed, and with their union strengthened. But the merely trivial kind of sexual relation cannot possibly afford full self-expression to human beings. In our species sex is far more than a purely physiological impulse. It is a vehicle or medium for the expression of the whole personality, and for a personal relationship which is distinctively human. To love is not simply to be physically or even mentally attracted to another person. It is this, but it is far more than this. To love is to form with the other a relationship of community, in which there is intimate mutual awareness of personality, mutual increase, mutual cherishing as persons, mutual responsibility. And the deeper and more developed the love, the more thorough and lasting the mutual entanglement. Genuine love is, indeed, a kind of spiritual symbiosis in which each is moulded to the other’s temperament and each becomes necessary to the other’s fulfilment. In the case of sexual love the fullest expression of this personal relationship involves a life-long partnership. The frittering away of sexual energy and interest in endless trivial relations makes “this impossible.

Obtuseness Toward Community

Both the trivialisation of sex and the moral failure of the ruling class over unemployment show with terrible clarity the central weakness of western European civilisation in the Inter-War Period in both cases the root of the trouble was the individual’s failure to be clearly aware of other human beings as conscious persons, no less real and important than himself. This was the period when individualism, though already proved inadequate by circumstances, was least restrained by any kind of obligation or religious feeling, and was therefore most extravagant in conduct. It was generally assumed that the only reasonable value was the satisfaction of one’s own impulses and the expression of one’s own personality. Under the influence of this conviction men frankly indulged in outrageously irresponsible behaviour toward their fellows. Among the intelligentsia there was a great deal of talk about the “gregarious instinct” and the “herd spirit,” and even of “community”; but few typically modern minds realised that between mere gregariousness and true community there is a difference of kind. The gregarious impulse seeks merely to conform to the herd’s conventions, and to impose conformity on others. The impulse of community seeks mutual realisation of others as distinct and differing persons; seeks also mutual delight, and gladly accepts mutual responsibility. The various schools of modern psychology all tended to disparage this distinctively human behaviour, reducing it to gregariousness, self-regard, sex, and other primitive impulses. In spite of their very great advances in the understanding of the mechanism of human personality, most of the psychologists of the period missed the true meaning of this extremely important factor in human nature. Under their influence it was widely assumed that human nature was nothing but a mechanism of sub-human impulses modified by superior intelligence. So indeed in a sense it is; but man’s superior intelligence and sensitivity open up new fields of value which cannot be adequately expressed in terms of the impulses of the sub-human animal.

This shocking obtuseness about personality and community, which was specially flagrant in the ruling class in western Europe during the Inter War Period, had, perhaps, many causes; but the root of them was the fact that practically the whole structure of society, and therefore the morality which it has generated, were hostile to the idea of community, or fellowship, or being “members of one another.” In the preceding period the seeds of this crazy error were already, as we have seen, strongly growing, in the soil of an increasingly individualistic economic system; but they were largely hidden under the withering remains of the earlier feudal and Christian moral convention, which assumed that community really was possible and desirable. As the old restraining moral conventions died away, the new frankly individualistic hedonism became more obtrusive and widespread.

Inter-War Youth

To be young in the Inter-War Period, to emerge from adolescence into young manhood or womanhood, was often a bitter experience. At school the boy or girl was taught the old values and the old belief. Kindliness was extolled. Society was said to be organised in such a way as to produce the greatest possible happiness for as many persons as possible. Since it was a democratic society, the government (it was said) was bound to act as the people willed. Since it was based on free private enterprise, the best people inevitably found their way to the top. With their superior intelligence and integrity, they served the rest in serving themselves. It was admitted that life was an arduous business, in which, if you did not look after your own interests intelligently, you might have a bad time. But fundamentally all was well. God was in his heaven, and all was growing progressively more and more right with the world.

Such was the teaching at school. When the young things left school (and often before doing so) they found themselves in a very different world. For boys, there was a desperate fight for a decent job; and many never succeeded in finding a job at all. For girls, there was an equally desperate fight, either for a job or for a husband who could provide the financial means of life. For all alike, except the fortunate minority, there was the discovery that society, far from being a cooperative undertaking to secure justice and happiness for all, was little more than a net-work of commercial “rackets,” in which, if you wanted to survive, you had to be cunning and ruthless. Unfortunately, even if you were willing to play the game with the necessary brutality, the odds were heavily against you. In all probability you were doomed to a life of drudgery and want. If you were down and out, the government would merely fling you a contemptuous dole, a sop to the conventional morality. This would keep you alive; but it would not give yon much of a share in the commercialised pleasures of the modern world, and it would certainly not enable you to live humanly.

On top of the shock of disillusion about society came the shock of disillusion about human nature itself and the whole universe. If you were intelligently interested in the destiny of the human race, you discovered that the comforting doctrines taught at school were treated with contempt by all sophisticated people, who assured you that man was merely a nasty overgrown worm with a swelled head, and that beyond the brainless stars there was nothing.

The intelligent young of the Inter-War Period tended to adopt one or other of several possible responses to these devastating discoveries. Some in terror shut their eyes to the facts, and took refuge in some form of Christian orthodoxy. To the anti-religious this course looked like sheer cowardice, but the motive was at least sometimes more creditable. Some of the new faithful, were moved by a conviction that scientific materialism had somehow missed, or misinterpreted, the most important things in life, and that religion, in spite of its conflict with science, did contain the essence of what science ignored. This conviction led to an heroic acceptance of the old beliefs for the sake of their inner truth. Far more of the young, however, deserted religion and accepted a policy of “realism.” They devoted all their energies to gaining personal power, luxury and prestige. Having adopted this line, they grew very contemptuous and bitter against all who clung to the sentimental view that there were ends more worth while. Other young people, “the bright young things” of this dark period, merely splashed money about in the desperate search for novel or spectacular pleasures. The fourth kind of inter-war young saw the root of the trouble not in human nature or the constitution of the universe, but in the fact that the whole structure of society was archaic and inadequate. These chose as their main interest the immense task of altering society through and through by means of some sort of revolution.

The young revolutionists were of two main kinds, those who found their inspiration in the socialist movement or Russian Communism, and those who were caught by the false lure of Fascism.

No doubt the rise of Fascism had economic causes. But its appeal to the young lay largely in its rejection of the values both of commercialism and of a Christianity which many regarded as insincere. In place of these it exalted the barbarian value of the” chosen race.” It also set up heroic might as the supreme virtue in place of the Sentimentalised “love” of the Churches. Further, instead of appealing merely to the prudential, self-seeking motives, it made a stirring appeal for self-abnegation and devotion in a common adventure. The tragedy was that this noble motive should have been sidetracked for ignoble ends.

What of the many inter-war young, who were inspired by the socialist movement or by Russian Communism? In the Inter-War Period the “Progressives” of all kinds throughout Western Europe were unable to make an effective stand either against the men of money or against Fascism. Many were increasingly cowed by a sense of their own impotence, and of fatality in the march of events toward another war. They were also disheartened by their internecine differences, and their failure to form a “united front.” The root of their trouble seems to have lain in a pathetic inability to realise that, though indeed in a sense the fundamental problem was economic, it was also moral. The need was, of course, to change the economic structure so as to make a just and happy society possible; but the passion and will to sacrifice, which alone could achieve this end, could spring only from a moral conviction of the rightness of fulfilling human capacity for personality-in-community. If nothing mattered, why should one sacrifice?

It was the young people of the Left, who kept the torch of hope alight in a darkening world. Like their elders, they too accepted intellectually the prevailing sceptical climate, but emotionally, and quite irrationally, they rose above it into a purer air. They had a new vision and a new loyalty, and many of them showed heroic devotion to it. No doubt their policies were often crude, and often they showed a distressing insensibility toward everything in human life except the need for revolution; but they were and are the growing point of a new social order, a new civilisation, a new form of human culture, and in: the long run a new humanity. In the next chapter I shall try to describe that new vision as it presents itself today. Here I am concerned only with its growing, though confused, influence in the Inter War Period.

The Influence of Russia.

The seed of a new civilisation had been sown long ago with the rise of the Labour Movement in Britain. Its moral passion was derived, no doubt, from the established Christian morality; but the oppressed industrial workers had to re-discover the central Christian intuition of the rightness of community. The pioneers of the Labour Movement, in their heroic comradeship in service of their suffering fellow-workers, gave that moral impulse new life and a new goal. Henceforth, if men sincerely believed in the brotherhood of man, they must throw themselves into the great common task of founding a new kind of social order, which would have to be deliberately and creatively planned for the well-being of ordinary people.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Labour Movement had gathered power, in Britain and in Europe. It generated its own institutions, the Trade Unions, and also a vast international organisation. It developed a characteristic system of theory. It was greatly influenced by the current scientific spirit. But always its emotional driving force, often obscured, but never wholly lost, was the passion for comradeship, the conviction of the rightness of mutual respect and responsibility, and of the will to knit the whole human race into a single world-wide community.

In Tsarist Russia the misery of the oppressed industrial workers generated the same passion for comradeship as the misery of the workers in Britain had produced in the early Trade Union movement. After the defeat of Russia in the First World War this passion for comradeship provided the emotional drive of the Russian Revolution.

Under the leadership of Lenin, himself inspired by the same passion, the established tyranny was overthrown, and a new kind of society, a new kind of civilisation, was at last firmly founded. In spite of its flagrant faults which were bred of the desperate need for discipline, in the face of attack from within and without, the new society has by now proved not only its strength, but its fundamental rightness.

I have not been in Russia, and I have no claim to pass judgment on the Russian achievement. But, looking at the whole matter from the point of view of the sympathetic outsider striving for a balanced verdict, I should bet heavily that the truth about Russia is two-fold. First, the new Russia marks a great step forward in human development; second, the legacy of Tsarism and of the agony of revolution have involved the new society in grave diseases which may take long to cure.

Though the Russian Revolution was ostentatiously anti-religious, and though Marxism denies absolute values, one of the main factors of the Revolution was an inarticulate and unwitting, but none the less potent, revival of moral experience in the fullest sense. Further, this experience included at least the germ of a new religious feeling, inarticulate, of course, and unwitting. It was a feeling which spurned all easy religious doctrines about the constitution of the universe and man’s place in it; but it was a feeling of unconditional self-surrender to, and even (in an obscure way) of worship of, something in the universe which was felt to be sacred, something which in its very essence claimed man’s devotion. That something was simply comradeship, a form of human behaviour which the Christians had called “ love.” The theorists of Communism, reacting in opposition to the hated priests, and in conformity with the admired scientists, explained that this form of behaviour was not really “good” or “right” in any absolute way, but that social circumstances had conditioned men to value it because it was in fact useful in the long run to society. But the actual experience of comradeship was an experience of something felt to be sacred.

Communists, needless to say, would not accept this heretical account of the emotional drive of the Revolution. Their bitterness against anything like religion, and their earnest devotion to science, prevent them from looking dispassionately and objectively into their own experience of values. But the Russian Revolution does seem to have caused something very like a religious movement all over the world. Although throughout the Inter-War Period the ruling class in Western Europe did their best to prevent the peoples from knowing the truth about Russia, truth will out; and little by little the more imaginative and generous minds began to realise how great a thing had happened in the world. As understanding grew, Russia became increasingly an inspiration, particularly to the more vital of the young. Often their admiration was uncritical and extravagant, for they were reacting violently against official anti-bolshevik propaganda; but by now it is clear that essentially they were right. The new Russia, with all its faults, opens up bright vistas for the whole human race.

Of course all young Communists and other admirers of Russia are not vital. Many are unfortunate misfits, fundamentally unsure of themselves; and so they adopt certain attitudes and beliefs associated with assurance and vitality. They have a neurotic longing to break the existing order, because they have not the ability or the luck to make good in it. Therefore they go through some of the gestures of revolutionary politics. But the fact that the Left has attracted many young people of this sort should not disguise the fact that increasing numbers of the most vigorous and intelligent of the young of all classes have found inspiration in the new Russian civilisation, and devoted much of their energy to working for a similar great change throughout the world. Young industrial workers, teachers, artists, writers, turned to “Left” political activity in one form or another. And in their political activities and the impact of their political ideals on their special trades or professions they began to work out what must, I think, be called a new way of life, based neither on individualistic self-seeking, nor on other-worldly devotion, but on self-expression in the great common enterprise of humanity.

Munich and the Battle of Britain.

This was the time when the pseudo-mystical faith of Fascism was triumphing in Italy and Germany, and elsewhere. In Britain Sir Oswald Mosley and his mixed gang of aristocrats and hooligans were working for a similar end. This was the time when the financial rulers in the capitalist states were so obsessed by the “Bolshevik bogey” that they were completely blind both to the spiritual rebirth in Russia and to the danger of Fascism abroad.

Then came the struggle of the people’s government in Spain against local reactionaries backed by Germany and Italy; and with it an urgent call for help. Many generous and resolute young men of all social classes hurried out from many countries to join the International Brigade. They fought heroically, not merely to save the Spanish Republic, but to found a new order in Europe. They were defeated only by the superior armament which the Fascist powers sent against them; while the capitalist governments, on the plea of non-intervention,” refused help against their own inevitable enemies. The destruction of the Spanish Republic paved the way for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich. The moral failure inherent in commercial civilisation reached its lowest depth.

In England there was much rejoicing over Munich. Sincere pacifists were united with the mass of merely spineless and self-centred war-loathers, and with the muddle-headed anti-bolsheviks, who still hope to use Hitler as a defence against Russia. But if there was rejoicing in some quarters, there was shame and foreboding in others, for a large section of the population was more clear-sighted in this matter than the Government and its backers. They saw that the Munich: pact was an act of sheer cowardice, that the prestige of Britain, long tarnished, had now been almost corroded away. They saw also that the pact was worthless, and that war was inevitable.

Events proved them right. Little by little public opinion veered, away from the policy of peace at any price. The cause of this widespread change of heart was two-fold. There was a purely self-regarding motive. Clearly, if Hitler had his way, British society, and therefore each man’s familiar way of life would sooner or later be destroyed. With despond, but with no further doubt, ordinary people concluded that even war must be faced in the hope of preventing the destruction of their familiar and by no means satisfactory society. In fairness, however, it must be noted that even this “self-regarding” motive was not really sheer individualism. People were ready to sacrifice their individual comfort and their individual lives, if necessary, to defend their homes, their families, their little circle of friends, and the whole national society which was the matrix in which alone these cherished things could flourish. The motive was indeed “national self-interest”; but this is a genuine social motive, very different front plain individualism, which would have impelled men rather to fend for themselves in the disaster, and let the devil take the hindmost.

But in addition to this motive of “national self-interest,” there was another motive too. A rather crude, but genuinely moral, awakening; was happening in the minds of many for whom morality had been merely a matter of lip-service to the conventions, and an easygoing friendliness in daily life. At last, under Hitler’s pressure, and aided by far-sighted self-interest, they began to discover that things were happening in Europe which simply “aren’t done,” which were too foul to be tolerated any longer. This belated and confused moral protest was perhaps a turning point in the history of Western civilisation. It drew its power from the plain man’s experience of the difference between humane and inhuman behaviour. As we have seen, events throughout the Inter-War Period had been steadily forcing more and more people toward a more virile and responsible attitude. Earlier, the pioneers of the Labour movement, and still earlier the pioneers of democracy, had set an example and more recently the Russian revolutionaries and the whole temper of the Soviet State had increasingly served as a tonic to those who were at all informed about Russia. No doubt the deepest of all the roots; of this moral protest, which finally emerged into action at the close of the Intel-War Period, was the ancient tradition of Christian experience; but Christian morality had to be transformed and revitalised by the suffering and devotion of the champions of democratic socialist humanism, Once before, in 1814, a rather similar moral protest was achieved by masses of ordinary people, and it played a part in the forming of the League of Nations in 1919, But it was prostituted, mainly by the politicians; and the resulting disillusionment led to an abyss ol cynicism and despair. The protest which finally expressed itself in support of the war of 1939 was more emphatic, more intelligent, and made in a far more dangerous situation. It acted as a catalytic, “transforming the whole temper of the nation’s life, and opening up immense possibilities of social rebirth. In France circumstances prevented the new spirit from expressing itself in action. The people were bewildered by excessively bad leadership. At the critical moment, hosts succumbed to a policy of individualistic sauve qui peut. France collapsed. The English, Scotch and Welsh faced the Battle of Britain alone. They endured the ordeal because anything seemed better than to be ruled by the Nazis. The vast majority in this island were overwhelmingly in favour of resistance. Though for national survival “so many” were indebted to “so few,” the few, those superb young men, were of us. And the population as a whole played its part in the main admirably. The catalytic had already worked wonders. The courage and devotion of ordinary people was all the more remarkable in view of the fact that a large proportion of the British people were thoroughly disillusioned about the state of British society. They were not fighting, as the Russians have done, to preserve what they regarded as a glorious new civilisation. They were fighting because, bad as British society was, and archaic, inefficient, moribund as its spirit had for so long been, they knew that the alternative was far worse. Moreover they felt very deeply, though very obscurely, that there really was something in Britain of high value to the world, though by now, AS hosts of them had begun ruefully to recognise, terribly tarnished. Perhaps the British tradition has by now completed its contribution to the tradition of Humanity. Perhaps the torch has already passed out of our hands. A people always inclines to over-value its own culture. But many people in Britain did feel that they were fighting for something in addition to their own comfort and security. Like the first World War, the second was, of course, far from being waged as a single-minded crusade for civilisation against a new barbarism. It was partly a struggle between Empires and would-be Empires. It was partly a struggle between the old fashioned capitalism of Western Europe (and later America) and the newer and more ruthless capitalism of Nazi Germany (and later Japan). But the crusading impulse was far stronger than in the First War. And the fact that so many people did on the whole accept it as a sort of belated and perhaps forlorn crusade to defend the most precious things in the world, along with the fact that on the whole they behaved well in their ordeal, has had a very deep effect on the temper of our national life. Before the war, we were haunted by our national shame. Democracy seemed to be played out. Our foreign policy had been cowardly, cynical and disastrous. Our social policy was no better. Imperialism, the “white man’s burden,” was becoming merely a burden of guilt. Slowly we were beginning to wake up to a sense of national sin about India. But now at last, though our sins were increasingly heavy on us, at least we can look the world in the face without a sense of utter degradation.

What are we going to do with this new self-respect and this new moral vigour? After the Battle of Britain it seemed for a while as though the new spirit would transform the whole of our social life. Big business would be severely controlled, capital conscripted like labour, key industries nationalised, social security guaranteed to all. But somehow this did not happen. Why not? No doubt “because vested interests were too strongly entrenched.” and so on. Yes, but — The Battle of Britain ended some time ago. That wave of heroism and clear vision passed. Could it be that we had still not learnt our lesson, the lesson that we began to learn in the First War? Could it be that only in extreme crisis can we wake up to being “members one to another,” all responsible for one another as members of one family, all bound together in comradeship in a great cause, the cause of making not merely a more fully British Britain, but a more fully human mankind?

It is certainly true that, since those days of urgency and of newly felt comradeship, the people of this island sank back to a great extent into complacency and into selfishness. It is true also that with the passing of that mood of heightened social consciousness and responsibility the magnates, who were in effect our rulers, were venturing; to be more reactionary than they dared to be a little earlier. There was indeed a real danger that we should drift back into the bad old ways.

But though we did lose something of that recent fervour, my own impression is that a very big change was all the while going on in the minds of ordinary people, as a result of the continued impact of changing circumstances. I have moved about a good deal. I have discussed these matters with audiences of soldiers, and of airmen, and of civilians. Everywhere I found a new outlook emerging. The rise of the new political movement called Common Wealth was one of the many symptoms of this change. People seemed to be in the midst of a painful process of sloughing an old cramping skin from their minds, and exposing a fresh, more supple, more sensitive and at first more vulnerable one, but one that would be in the long run better suited for life in a new kind of world.

The General Election of 1945 has proved that this process of social waking was very widespread. At last we were in a position to take the first crucial tentative step for the making of a better Britain. But vital as political action is, it will not achieve its end at all thoroughly unless our waking goes a good deal deeper than it has so far done.

I say people are showing signs of outgrowing the outworn mental habits. That is certainly the process that some middle-aged people are being painfully forced to undergo; but perhaps hope lies rather with the young, who have not become set in the outworn ways. They have to outgrow much that has been taught them, wittingly or unwittingly, by their elders; but they are still supple, and more sensitive to the pressure of new conditions. It is to them that we chiefly look to point the direction for new values, and to provide the drive and passion for the great planned world-changes that have to be undertaken.

Of course we must beware of easy optimism. The process of awakening may perhaps never complete itself. Perhaps more danger and far greater suffering are needed to tear the old skin finally from us. We have won the War, and we have expressed our will in the Election. But will our new Government have the courage and ability effectively to break the power of those who are pledged to the old order? If it fails, we shall “lose the Peace,” as we did after the other War. Then we shall have more social chaos, more war, more schooling in adversity; and then at last a thorough though belated awakening.

Anyhow the great mental change does already seem to have ‘begun in earnest. In the following chapter I shall try to describe the deep change of attitude which is to be seen most clearly in the minds of the young men and women of today. If the reader is inclined to say, “Better leave it to the young themselves to describe their own attitude,’’ I reply, “Though it is in the young that the change is most pronounced, I doubt whether they themselves are the best fitted to describe it, for they have no direct experience of the older attitude with which to contrast it.” I seek therefore with all respect to interpret the present young to themselves.

CHAPTER 4. TODAY AND TOMORROW.

A World in Revolution.

I HAVE DESCRIBED the manners and morals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then the very different, disillusioned and cynical temper of the Inter-War Period, which culminated in the Second World War. I noted also that the desperate danger at the time of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain had a deep effect on the minds of ordinary people in this island, and caused something like a recovery of moral vigour. I have brought the story up to the General Election of 1945, which may prove to be the most momentous turning point in our history.

What of today? What of tomorrow? Today both the old-style cynical commercial democracy and the new-style pseudomystical romantic barbarism of the Nazis have been discredited by events. A new vision, which (I have suggested) had its first expression much earlier in the liberal socialist movement of the nineteenth century, but its first effective, though of course imperfect, embodiment in Soviet Russia, is steadily spreading throughout the world. Everywhere we see a conflict, open or secret, between the two kinds of ideals about the right conduct of human affairs, in fact between the aims of yesterday and the aims of tomorrow.

The world is indeed changing through and through. The caterpillar of yesterday is in the act of being transformed into the butterfly of tomorrow. The tissues of the old order are being dissolved and reorganised into a new order. At the present moment much of the old still remains intact, but characters of the new are all the while emerging. It does not follow that the metamorphosis will be successful. Perhaps the chrysalis contains the germs of a fatal disease. Or perhaps, though the butterfly will indeed finally emerge, it will be a deformed and sickly creature.

One thing is certain. The caterpillar world is gone for ever. The choice before us is not between “going back to 1939” and going on to something new. The choice is between two new things, one very good and one very bad; or some possible mixture of them both. The good thing is a world in which the controlling principle will actually be the aim of making the best of every individual as a person in community with other persons. The bad thing is a world in which this principle is utterly violated, a world in which the only controlling principle is that human beings should be organised for the fullest possible production of economic power for a dominating class. Inevitably this must lead to the violation of personality and of true community, and the complete “robotisation” of individuals. The issue depends in the last resort on human will, on our having a clear vision, and pursuing it with courage and persistence. The issue does not depend simply on “economic forces”; though only within the possibilities fixed by economic forces can we realise our vision.

At present, in spite of the hopeful result of the Election, the old “caterpillar” order is on the whole still dominant. Society is a tissue of relics from the commercial age, and even from feudalism.

And since ideas always lag behind changing conditions, our minds tend to be even more archaic than our circumstances. Thus many of us still cling to the old faith in economic individualism even when circumstances have rendered it out-of-date and disastrous. Though we are in some ways mentally ahead of some of our archaic existing conventions and existing institutions, we are always behind hand in adopting new ideas and values to suit new social conditions.

The Young Today and Tomorrow.

Very much will depend on the young, on their power of adjusting their minds to the new order while it is being created, and working out in their own experience a new attitude of mind, a new mental climate. They alone can do this. The torrent of social and cultural change will be too swift for most of those who are well advanced in  middle age. No doubt some of them will keep pace, and a smaller! number will have sufficient imagination actually to contribute something themselves. But the main work will fall to the relatively young.

Unfortunately, though they will have the immense advantage of supple-mindness, they will also have all the ordinary disadvantages of youth. They will lack the special assets of age. They will be impatient, easily led astray. They will be without the weight of experience which should help age to avoid behaving extravagantly or ruthlessly. Unless they have thought hard and long about the fundamental social and moral problems, they will be in danger of being caught by mob-leaders with superficially attractive though fundamentally unsound ideologies, as the youth of Germany were caught in the Inter-War Period.

To-day these future workers-out of the new temper are even younger than they will be when their great opportunity comes. How are they being prepared for the immense responsibility that lies ahead of them? Many are still at school, I have attended sixth-form conferences which have convinced me that many of the present sixth-formers are very much awake to the problems of our time. Unfortunately, after leaving school, most will find themselves in circumstances unfavourable to the development of a sound citizenship mentality. Of those of student age and over, many are still in war-industry of one sort or another. Many are still in the forces. Brought up for an entirely different life, for the commercial struggle of the Inter-War Period, they found themselves suddenly turned into soldiers, sailors, airmen. They passed almost at a stride from the dread of unemployment to the dread of disablement or death in warfare, from disillusionment and cynicism about Inter-War society to disillusionment and cynicism about life in the forces, and to scepticism about our war-aims. Taught at first to regard war as barbarous and silly, they were then perforce trained for bayonet fighting, hardened in Commando courses, familiarised with the sight of blood, and assured that, unless they were prepared to be completely ruthless and utterly self-sacrificing in warfare, civilisation would be destroyed. When the occasion arises they do behave with surprising devotion. I say “surprising” because, having done a good deal of army education work, I came to feel that most of the rank and file of the forces in this country were quite without enthusiasm for the society for which they were called upon to risk their lives. They had little hope that when the war was over the victory would really be used for founding a better society. The explanation of this seeming inconsistency, I believe, is this. Though people are disillusioned and cynical about politics and big business, they know very well “in their bones” that there is, after all, something in this country that is well worth any sacrifice. Probably most of them would not be able to define it. I should call it the tissue of the inter-connected lives of ordinary people, the far from perfect, but solid and living, texture of true personality-in-community within which we all live and breathe and have our being. As for politics and social affairs, most people, in my experience, are inclined to divide society, (as J. B. Priestley and Richard Acland have said) into “us” and “them.”

“We” are just the ordinary people whom one meets everywhere. “They” are the industrial magnates, the newspaper owners, the bankers, the politicians, the land-lords, the aristocrats, who in each of their several ways control our destiny. The general impression is that “they” are very powerful, very cunning at twisting everything to their own advantage, and yet very stupid about the things that really matter. The late Government’s reaction to the Beveridge plan, for instance, encouraged a feeling that there were hidden forces secretly working against the interests of the people; and that in peace-time “we” should just be led up the garden path by “them,” as we or our fathers were after the last War. No doubt there would be a boom at first; but soon would follow the slump, unemployment, starvation, and the ghastly sense of futility and “not being wanted.” The election of 1945 has given us some hope that this disaster may be avoided.

The result of this earlier hopelessness was a widespread apathy, and a general disposition to fend for oneself when the war was over, and let the devil take the hindmost. Not a good omen, this, for the great popular re-awakening which alone could save us!

Add to all this the exasperation and cynicism that most people feel when they are herded together under discipline, hedged round by all sorts of formalities, trivial “spit and polish” duties, personal jealousies, petty persecutions by self-important superiors. Add to this again that, although army and R.A.F. units at home are not so completely cut off from the affairs of ordinary society as troops abroad and naval units at sea, yet inevitably they are seriously isolated. In the field of active warfare there is the compensation that life in the forces affords a grim education in courage, resolution, resourcefulness and practical comradeship. But in quiet circumstances camp life tends to become in many ways a grotesque caricature of boarding school life, and to breed something like the schoolboy mentality.

The War Office, aware of the danger of “browning off,” has tried, to meet the situation with an extensive and increasingly successful scheme of army education, carried out partly by regimental personnel themselves, and partly by civilian helpers. As a civilian who has been privileged to take part in this work, lecturing on social and psychological subjects, I should like to say that, though sometimes one finds that the atmosphere at these meetings is all wrong, more often it is stimulating, sometimes immensely so. Much seems to depend on the attitude of the Commanding Officer of the unit. If he regards the whole business of education as a silly waste of time, the atmosphere will be one of apathy and perhaps of resentment; and the more socially conscious people will tend to let off steam by violent demogogy. If he is keen, and has taken the trouble to kindle the interest of his men (or women, if it is an A.T.S. unit) then one will find oneself confronted by an audience that is alert, shrewd, and eager to discuss quite fearlessly. In general there is some reason to believe that the educationally more alert units are also those that are more efficient in the military sense. The C.O. who creates in his men a keen spirit for military proficiency is also, it seems, the one who is most interested in their education as citizens.

Of course some conditions are such as to render useful educational work impossible. The boy straight from school, and now training for flying, or actually engaged on operations, may very well be too absorbed in his practical duties to take general education seriously. These young people are likely to be under constant severe strain; and if they have come through their school days without acquiring any serious interest in social or intellectual matters (as is all too likely) they will probably not trouble their heads about such matters in their new and exacting conditions. Their need is for the most facile sort of recreation. The lighter sort of newspapers and a ceaseless flow of “background noise” on the radio are all they can manage.

But I must not give too gloomy an account. In spite of the fact that the Air Ministry at first did not take education as seriously as the War Office, many R.A.F. audiences are very interested and intelligent. These are mostly, I think the ground staffs and men old enough to have some experience of social conditions. However, I shall not soon forget a group of some forty boys, all training for flying, and all looking so young and fresh, in their new blue battle-dress. As I took up my place, they regarded me (I felt) with apathy and perhaps cynicism. I seemed to hear them murmur, “Why can’t they leave us in peace when we are not actually learning our job?” I spoke about liberty, and the need to revise our ideas about it to fit new conditions. They listened attentively, but it proved very difficult at first to rouse a discussion. Then one of them began expressing despond about the present state of society, and bewilderment and impotence about the chances of making a better society after the war. Others followed on the same lines, and soon there was a strangely serious discussion. All I could do was to urge them to keep awake to social affairs, to prepare themselves for the great part which they and their like would have to play after the war in creating the new Britain. (How many of them, I wondered, would be alive to play any part at all?) I came away with a painful sense of humility, but with a refreshing realisation that the young, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, were at least alive to the great problem of our age.

It is certainly possible that the movement for adult education in the forces and elsewhere may have an appreciable influence on the temper of the young in the critical times to come. The main difficulty is the shortage of personnel, military and civilian, capable of carrying out this sort of work. Would that we could spread adult education of the same type in every factory. Would that we could make every large employer (so long as there are employers), and later every socialised factory, responsible for affording their workers educational facilities in work hours! The actual organisation of such educational work would of course have to lie not with the factory authorities, but with an external and purely educational body.

But though army education and kindred schemes may make some difference, they are not likely to bulk sufficiently in the lives of the young to counteract the deadening effect of regimentation in the forces and the factories. It is indeed terrifying to think of the fate of thousands of young people of both sexes today. They have reached the time of life when the world should be opening up before them with all manner of opportunities for varied experience and growth. They should be embarking on careers which can afford them adequate self-expression in socially valuable ways. They should be finding mates for life-long partnership, and preparing to have children. They should be able to look forward to a future of continually deepening experience for themselves, and to a future for society (for their nation and the whole human race) of a kind to inspire enthusiastic devotion to the common human adventure.

Instead, most of them find their present life desperately irksome and frustrating, and they look forward to the future with misgiving. Their careers are indefinitely postponed. They expect that, having survived years of war, they will have a desperate struggle for a living. Meanwhile they live in herds, and under strict discipline. Their development is seriously hindered. Their sex life is in most cases either entirely frustrated or at least hopelessly trivialised by the impossibility of really beginning a proper married life. They are often in a state of great confusion about values. The old conventional morality of the nineteenth century has obviously in many respects broken down, but equally the inter-war vogue of sheer self-expression without any moral restraint has turned to dust and ashes; yet nothing definite and compelling has come to fill the void. Finally they live in a social atmosphere of despond, bred of a sense that something is seriously wrong with society, and that no one can put it right.

And yet it remains true that the future depends largely on the young. It depends on their finding themselves, on their passing beyond their present bewilderment and disheartenment, understandable as these are; on their reaching a clear conviction about individual, social and (in the broadest sense) religious values, and on their finding the strength to embody the true values in their own living.

I said that in the Battle of Britain the people of this island experienced something of a moral regeneration, but that it faded somewhat when the urgency was passed. Unless we recover our moral seriousness, we sail not take the right turn for winning the peace. The issue will largely depend on the young.

When the present young return to civilian life, they will obviously be in great danger of the same kind of mental and moral lassitude as that which crippled so many young ex-servicemen after the First War. But they will have one advantage. After the First War the tide was setting toward a breakdown of the old values. War or no war, the moral disintegration was inevitable. But today the tide has already turned. It is setting away from the mere denial of moral values. That mood proved too disastrous. As we have seen, it led in the democracies to a very abject condition, culminating in “non-intervention “ and “appeasement”; and elsewhere it led to the perverted moral protest of Fascism and Nazism. But (it cannot too often be repeated) a new moral conviction had arisen in Russia, though one that spurned the old moralism and rejected the old religion, and indeed all religion. Today the young have these object lessons before them. It is not unreasonable to hope that in the light of these great historical events they will be able to discover in their own experience of life a clearer and saner purpose than has been possible to their elders.

Toward this purpose many of the older people have, of course, long been groping. But not for us that promised land. All that we can do is to present our findings, such as they are, to the young, in the hope that they will be able in due season to press much further forward.

In the rest of this chapter I shall summarise my own view of the main character of the present age, and of the new world which our present world is straining to bring forth.

The Second Industrial Revolution.

If we would understand the present trend of the human world, we must take into account not only the movement of ideas, but also changing conditions. Ideas and physical conditions constantly interact on one another. Today the whole structure of the human world is changing under our eyes. No one can know what the upshot will be, but we can at least see more and more clearly that a second and more far-reaching industrial revolution is rapidly gathering momentum; and that it opens up bewildering possibilities for human development, and terrifying dangers.

Perhaps it is wiser to regard this new industrial revolution rather as the second stage in a single great revolution caused by the impact of science, and the earlier revolution as merely the first embryonic stage which had to be passed through before the real revolution could begin. But the difference between the two phases is likely to be very great, and for us of today it is important to remember that principles which were true of the First Industrial Revolution may often be falsified by the second.

The war has of course in many ways held up the Second Industrial Revolution, but not in all. In medicine, aeronautics, and the production of synthetic substances needed as substitutes for natural products held by the enemy, great advances were constantly being made. But the major developments of the Second Industrial Revolution have been postponed for the time being. Were it not for the need to devote so much energy to armament and to restoring Europe, we could even now be beginning the work of transforming the conditions of ordinary living into something incomparably more healthy and stimulating than our present circumstances.

As I have said, it is impossible to predict at all surely how the Second Industrial Revolution will develop. Moreover, as I am no scientist myself, I am not properly equipped for discussing the matter. But even the layman may hazard a few suggestions, if only to give some idea of the extent of the social changes which may be in store for us.

The First Industrial Revolution changed our methods of production in such a way that production had inevitably to be organised in ever larger units. In the preceding period the old handicrafts had been carried on by a master craftsman with a handful of apprentices. The change over to mechanical production often involved a great system of intricate processes, each highly specialised, and all precisely related together. For the production of a single type of finished article, a number of great factories may today be needed, each carrying out one stage of the process, and each employing thousands of workers. The inevitable social result is, unless drastic action is taken to prevent it? that the individual becomes more and more a cog in the machine, and power lies more and more with those who plan and organise the whole great system of processes. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a brilliant caricature of the kind of society which is likely to result.

But though the First Industrial Revolution increased the size of the productive unit, the Second Revolution demands an increase of a different order. The private firm, and later the combine, were at first large enough. But now, if the full potentiality of production is to he realised, planning and control must be at least on the scale of the spectacular Tennessee Valley Authority, and indeed far larger. The economic life of the U.S.S.R. itself, which has set the example of a continent-wide planned economy, is too restricted. The Second Industrial Revolution necessitates planning for the world as a whole.

The advent of atomic power may immensely increase the size of the productive unit and the need for world organisation. The manufacture of atomic bombs necessitates organisation of production on a national scale and the danger of the misuse of these terrific weapons forces world-wide organisation upon us. In industry the coming of atomic power will have the same kind of effect.

But clearly, the greater the size of the production unit, the greater the danger of mechanising the life of the industrial worker. The life of the world has not only to be planned, but to be planned for human welfare, deliberately and resolutely. The goal is the full expression and development of human individuality. The horrors of the First Industrial Revolution were due to the fact that no serious attempt was made to do this.

If the Second Industrial Revolution automatically strengthens the tendency to increase mass-production and robotisation, we shall have to plan deliberately for a different kind of result. In one respect at least it is bound to favour a better form of human life. Hours of work may be much shorter, and conditions of work much better. Of course a few hours a day of routine work under discipline in a well organised factory will do no one any harm; on one condition, namely that the rest of his day is available for more varied activities. But these beneficial tendencies in the Second Industrial Revolution are frustrated if they are accompanied by uncontrolled robotisation.

It is possible, however, that the tendency toward an ever-increasing size of production unit, and toward “robotisation” is not permanent; or rather that, although highly intricate mass-production will persist in some respects, in others it will give place to a new tendency to local self-sufficiency and small-scale industry. If so, perhaps we ought to be thankful that the tendency toward interdependence came first; for without the pressure of economic necessity in that direction we should never have been compelled (as we are today) to unify the world. When once we have been forced by economic necessity to think and feel in terms of the world as a whole, it will not matter if further advances in science finally lead toward a new local self-sufficiency. Two existing tendencies suggest that this may, indeed, happen. The first is the progress that has already been made in producing more and more of the very complex materials needed for civilised life from very common and indeed universally distributed raw materials. Thus cheap vegetable fibre may be used as the raw material for all manner of plastics, textiles, foods and so on. This means that each locality will in future be far more self-supporting than formerly; and one cause of wars, the competition for raw materials, will be abolished. Of course the processes of manufacture may remain very complicated, involving the co-operation of thousands of workers. But it is at least possible that, with the advance of scientific knowledge, production will begin to be simplified; so that, though certain processes will probably always have to be carried out by vast organisations of workers, others may be performed by small groups, employing perhaps a high degree of individual skill. Thus not only each country, but each village might become almost self-supporting in essentials. Obviously this would have an immense effect on the structure of society and the temper of social life.

The second tendency, or possibility, that suggests a great simplification of production is the advance that already seems likely in the production and distribution of power. The First Industrial Revolution was almost entirely dependent on coal, oil and falling water, which sources occur only in certain localities. Scientists have been exploring the possibilities of deriving industrial power from the tides, from differences of temperature (which means ultimately from sun-light) and from the disintegration of atoms. It is impossible to say yet what success will be attained in these ventures. But it seems probable that the result will be at least a far wider distribution of the sources of power. It may well be that the perfected production of atomic power will involve a vast and complex enterprise undertaken under world-wide authority, and the universal distribution of electric current derived from atomic generators. As it is certainly probable that the transmission of power in the form of electricity is going to become very much cheaper and more efficient, ample power will be available everywhere. Each village throughout the world will either tap a high tension grid or generate its own power. As to atomic energy, its frightful dangers are obvious. It is not inconceivable that the belt of minute planets, the Asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter, is the wreckage of a world which its inhabitants accidentally destroyed by the unwise use of atomic energy. It would be a pity to turn our planet into another belt of Asteroids. But atomic energy, though dangerous, promises a fabulous source of power in comparison with which coal and oil are quite insignificant. It opens up the possibility of transforming the whole face of the planet according to man’s needs. It could, for instance, easily render the Arctic islands and the Antarctic Continent warm and habitable. And atomic power for industrial purposes, we are told, is already “in the offing.” Meanwhile the danger of atomic warfare is increasingly frightful. Short of exploding the planet, atomic energy used as a weapon might do so much damage that the present war, in comparison, would seem an affair of flint arrows and axes. The abolition of war becomes more urgent as man’s power increases. —

Putting aside extravagant imaginings, what can we say of the less remote possibilities of the Second Industrial Revolution, and of their effects on men’s lives?

Clearly we must expect an immense advance in labour-saving devices. Under unplanned capitalism labour-saving devices are the enemy of the workers, depriving them of their jobs and their wages. But if we can do away with capitalism, and organise the whole world population, labour-saving should be a great blessing. But labour-saving will in the end bring us face to face with some very important and indeed fundamental, problems about the kind of life that is desirable for the world citizens. What, after all, is the right aim of labour-saving? Clearly it is not to enable us all to live in luxury and idleness, with nothing to do but to press switches occasionally, to turn on a supply of food or some form of passive pleasure, such as the radio. Nor should the aim be to free labour for new forms of drudgery and wage slavery for the benefit of a financially privileged minority. Clearly the aim should be to reduce sheer — drudgery to a desirable minimum (some drudgery is probably good — for us all), — so as to free us — for — whatever more fully human and creative kinds of work fall within our powers. Many people, no doubt, prefer monotonous unskilled work because they can do it absent-mindedly while day-dreaming. But most people in good health, and mentally undamaged by bad education, are happier when their powers are fully used.

In planning the new industry we must bear in mind always the human needs of the workers, not merely the ideal of maximum production. Mechanism must be — used for all — the donkey-work, — but — we must develop our mechanism in — such forms — that it demands — not — less but more skill for its control, and more varied, “all-round” skill. Man is a complicated organism, living at one and the same time on different levels of development. For fulness of being he needs activity on all his levels, from the muscular to the highest mental level that the particular individual can reach. It is not yet clear whether the natural course of the Second Industrial Revolution will lead to a greater demand for skills or a lesser. Certainly there will be a need for a minority of very highly skilled workers to plan and control and repair the machinery. But what of the rank and file? Will they become more and more highly specialised robots, as in Huxley’s nightmare?

At the moment, the trend of industrial development is toward increasing the difference between the lowest and the highest ranges of skill, and toward a demand for more and more unskilled factory work. But it is quite likely that, with the further development of labour-saving, the scope of unskilled labour will entirely vanish. Before very long there may be no demand for human donkey-work, and an ever-increasing demand for higher and higher ranges of skill. But if this does not happen, if the tendency continues toward the robotisation of the individual, then clearly we must deliberately control it so as to avoid such a disaster. The ideal is to plan mechanisation so as to call out new forms of skills, comparable with those of the old handicrafts.

Extravagantly, perhaps, I envisage a new form of village industry in which each village will have its own generator, its own artificial photosynthesis-fields for the production of its basic food products, its own factory for producing all sorts of synthetic materials and articles of daily use; with its villagers all proudly skilled in some particular branch of one or the other of these great communal activities. Beyond this local production of necessities, each village, province, or country, might aim at outstanding excellence in some particular product or in some purely cultural activity. Some might become world-famous producers of fine woven goods, some of special foods, some of household utensils, of crockery or plastics. Further, some might pride themselves in their music, their local sculpture, and so on.

This may be a fantastic dream, but it serves to show the possibilities of the Second Industrial Revolution. If anything like it were to happen, the unity of the world would be based less on, the interchange of “necessities,” which would be produced locally, than on the interchange of “luxuries,” and (in the broadest sense) ideas.

The Second Industrial Revolution will certainly bring immense increase in transport and cultural intercourse. Everyone may have his private rocket plane. People will flit to remote countries for a week-end holiday. Every citizen will have some fertilising experience of every distinctive region of the planet. He will be able to communicate at a moment’s notice by radio-telephone with his friends in the Antipodes or Antarctica. Since he will have been educated sensibly, and with the most lavish and skilled care, both for work and for leisure, since, moreover, his work hours will be brief, he will befitted to take full advantage of his world citizenship.

The world population will be of a kind almost inconceivable today. There will be no hordes of ill-nourished, and uneducated wage slaves. There will be no idle rich, staving off boredom by extravagant expenditure of the wealth created by the labour of others. All men will be in the best sense aristocrats, well-born, well nourished well educated, well cared for in every way. There will be far greater diversity of character, interests, capacities, opinions, than is manifested today. Compared with the population of the future, we of today shall be regarded as suffering from a dismal sameness of mentality. There will no doubt be much severe conflict of interests and of ideals; but conflict will always be tempered by a fundamental mutual insight and respect. All will be bound inwardly together by a sense of their common humanity and their partnership in a great co-operative adventure.

We may hope, by the way, that the present obsession over machinery, speed, and easy power, will cease. These things will in time lose their novelty and their glamour. With greater education, too, the taste for vulgar luxury and spectacular passive amusement will fade. Life may well become a good deal simpler. Mechanism and power will be used for freeing mankind from drudgery rather than for enslaving them to their own baser impulses. It will be used, too, for opening up new spheres of creative activity.

Such is the prospect that lies before us, if we use our opportunities well. Some foolish people regard it as a thoroughly dull prospect. They argue that it removes all the zest and danger and doubt, and the opportunity for heroic action. These alone, they say, make life worth living. They mistake the whole prospect. There will be no possibility that heroic impulses, and so on, will find no outlet. The solving of our present problems does not mean that problems will cease. The ending of our growing-pains does not mean that pain will be abolished. By releasing the full potentialities of human nature we shall surely open up new fields of action which will tax to the utmost our most developed powers. The old troubles will be abolished, and be replaced by automatic actions, taken for granted by all men; but the energies released thereby will open up all manner of new problems on higher planes of development, with new hopes, new conflicts, new tragic disasters, new, scope for intelligence and devotion. Birds, by developing wings, did not sink into an easier and emptier life than the ancestral reptiles. On the contrary they opened up a whole world of rich experience and ) dangerous opportunity, which was eternally closed for the wingless, and inconceivable to them. Similarly with man. The second Industrial Revolution will open up for him new fields, new worlds, in which he will discover new and ever more glorious ways of living. At least, it will do so if, and it is a formidable “if,” he uses the opportunity rightly. If he fails to do so, the disaster may be final.

The Mental Revolution

The great industrial changes which are sweeping over the whole planet are bound to have a deep effect on men’s minds. At present their influence is overshadowed by the more spectacular events of our day, by the prodigious rise of a new order in Russia, by the social effects of the war, by the pressure of events toward a new moral seriousness and a new religious passion. All these influences combine with the changes in methods of production to change the whole temper of mankind. — The mental revolution (for such it is) is only just beginning, but early symptoms of it are already visible. For good or ill, as I have said, some kind of mental revolution is now inevitable. The flood has started, there is no withstanding it. Whether it will carry us forward to a happier world and a more civilised culture is far from certain. But already we begin to see vaguely how, if all goes well, it may develop. I shall now try to describe what seem to me the most important features of the great change of mental climate which is beginning. I am not so rash as to prophesy that this great change will in fact fulfil itself. It is still almost entirely a mere possibility. But undoubtedly the tide has for the present actually begun to set in this direction.

New Feeling for Community

Perhaps the most important factor in the change is the growing realisation, even in our present individualistic society, that individualism is not enough, that cut-throat commercialism is not the only or the most satisfactory form of self-expression, that there is another and a more personally-fulfilling way of behaviour, namely the way of comradeship, or community. Unfortunately this realisation is greatly hampered by the still dominant commercial atmosphere. To seek self-expression through comradeship, through community, through public service, is apt to be considered “unrealistic,” mere “idealism,” out of gear with the facts of human nature, and so on. But indeed the boot is on the other foot. Human nature is not purely self-regarding; it is both self-regarding and other-regarding. We are by nature members one of another; and to deny that side of our nature is to doom ourselves to frustration. To-day, in spite of the individualistic tradition, the climate is changing. Many influences are forcing us to see both the economic and the moral inadequacy of individualism. Many influences are spreading the experience of something different. For instance, the fact that competitive private enterprise is perforce being restricted in every country (even to some extent in the U.S.A., that haven of individualism), is forcing many faithful individualists to see that there are other ways of getting things done, and that these ways are sometimes more satisfying, The fact that more and more people are public servants, either under the state or under some municipality or great public corporation, is at last making us familiar with the idea of work as primarily a social service in which we all co-operate, and not primarily an individualistic dog-fight in which each has simply to try to get the better of others. Service in the forces, though it has disgusted many with a sense of the inefficiency, wastefulness, red-tape, and general inhumanity of state-controlled activities as they are at present, has also given to many à sense of membership in a great common enterprise; and to some the experience of close “comradeship in a small close-knit group such as an air-crew or a small ship’s company. It is true, of course, that nearly everyone in the forces or under any form of discipline longs to be free of war-time restrictions, and to be back in “Civvy Street.” It is true that many business men are preparing for the day when they will be able to restore healthy competition,” with all the hampering war-time restrictions removed. Indeed there was a danger that when hostilities ceased there would be a general stampede toward the old planless pre-war economy. Then, of course, would follow the inevitable social and economic chaos, as after the last War. But fore-warned is fore-armed. We have set up a government pledged to socialism. There is at least hope that, however self-centred and individualistic people may still be in their private lives, in relation to public affairs they will become a good deal more insistent on creative social planning for human welfare and for the control of powerful individualists. The lessons which we failed to learn after the last War may still be learned. The whole mental climate is indeed changing.

Many people who recognise that sheer commercialism is both inefficient and immoral, are anxious lest the inevitable restrictions on private enterprise should destroy individual initiative. Without the bait of the prospect of rising above one’s fellows financially, no man, they say, will put his whole strength into his work. The answer to this is that financial success is not the only possible form of self-expression, or the only reward for which men will strive. The economic structure of our society has immensely exaggerated the appeal of financial rewards. It has turned us into something far more like the theoretical “economic man” than we ever need have been. Today the changing structure of society is already strengthening other incentives. In Russia, the incentive of wages is largely supplemented by prospects of special privileges, such as extra holidays and honorific titles. But these titles based on service would have no appeal unless Russian society was already infused with a far greater respect for public service than is yet general in our own, individualistic society.

Moreover, the appeal to the motive of personal triumph and dominance over others (whether through financial or other means) is not the only way of inducing people to give their best. Powerful as self regard undoubtedly is, the impulse of loyalty can sometimes be far stronger. — The spirit of partnership in a group may lead a man to give even his life for the well-being or glory of his group. And so it comes about that the supreme self-expression, and one that is far more satisfying than sheer individualism, is self-expression in group service. The realisation of this is increasing in this country, partly through the object-lesson of Russia, partly through the changing conditions of our own society. Perhaps it is well to point out in passing, that group-service may often take the form of standing out against the existing conventions or morality of the group in order to induce the members of the group to accept better conventions and a better morality. Loyalty may be felt less to the extant group than to the possible or ideal group.

The new feeling for community has certainly its dangers. As we have seen, one of the causes of Nazism was the swing away from commercial individualism to the worst type of herd-mentality, in which the individual surrenders his intelligence and his conscience into the keeping of the herd-leaders, and unquestioningly accepts their dictates. Nazism is defeated; but there is still a very real danger that the new tendency toward self-expression through co-operation in the group’s life, rather than through individualistic competition, may lead to a loss of respect for individuality, in oneself and others. The individual’s ultimate responsibility to judge both intellectually and morally according to his own lights should be vividly felt and gallantly defended. The fact that his lights are themselves products of social conditioning makes no difference. There is no way of development for man save the way of individual intelligence and integrity. It is important to recognise that the new feeling for community, if it is not clearly defined, may degenerate into uncritical “herdism,” or gregariousness. That spirit is very convenient to demagogues and dictators, but incompatible with real democracy.

The great task of our age is to combine the virtues of the old liberalism with the virtues of the new communism, while avoiding the vices of both. To do this we have to remember always that both pure individualism and its opposite, “herdism,” are perversions of the one true principle which I have ventured to call “ personality-in-community.” There can be no personality save that of persons in community with one another. There can be no community save community of self-respecting and mutually-respecting persons.

Feeling for the Unity of Mankind

Besides the clarification of the feeling for community, another great change of attitude is, I believe, taking place, namely an extension of this feeling for community into the widest possible sphere, in fact to include all human beings. Peoples are beginning to think and feel increasingly in terms of the world as a whole. It may seem strange to make this claim at a time when militant nationalism has so recently exercised a greater sway than ever before. Nevertheless, I believe that the claim is sound. No doubt many of the “ occupied” countries of Europe, infuriated by suffering, will be extravagantly nationalist for some time. No doubt India is becoming increasingly nationalist, and so is China. And even Russia, the strong-hold of international socialism, is now inspired by intensely nationalist feeling. No doubt, also, the increasing contacts between the United Nations, through refugees, armed forces and liberated populations, is causing a good deal of national antagonism. But all this is a passing phase, the dying fling of an outworn sentiment. Its root cause was the failure of the first and superficial experiment in international order. If the next experiment is more successful, nationalism as an exclusive loyalty will fade out under the influences of the many forces making for a unified mankind. No doubt there will always be a place for family affection, and for love of country; but exclusive and self-righteous nationalism must be outgrown. No doubt for many years to come it will continue to cause grave troubles in every continent. But common people everywhere are increasingly realising that, deeper than all our differences, all human beings are of one kin, and that all are in some sense vehicles of the identical human spirit. The defeat of Nazism provides the reductio ad absurdum of all national ism. Henceforth, unless, of course, reaction triumphs and ruins the peace, it will be manifest that our final loyalty must not be given to any tribe or nation, but only to the human race as a whole, the mobile intelligent, vital dust, scattered over the surface of this little planet. Indeed, as consciousness clarifies, men will more and more recognise that in the last resort the supreme object of loyalty is not simply that living dust itself, but its advancement in true human capacity, or in the spirit which it as yet so imperfectly manifests.

In the days before mechanical communications had brought all the peoples into contact and mutual dependence, effective world-loyalty was impossible. The ideal of human unity had already been formulated, but little could be done about it. But today all the lesser loyalties must for practical purposes be severely subordinated. It becomes increasingly obvious that we must work for ever greater unity in the life of mankind. Necessity will breed, is breeding, the required sentiment of world-loyalty.

We are being forced not only toward greater political and economic unity for the world, but also toward greater world cultural unity. This again is breeding the necessary sentiment for human culture as a single manifestation of the human spirit. We must do our utmost to pool and cross-fertilise all the cultural resources of the human race. No individual or group must be allowed exclusive enjoyment of any part of mankind’s intellectual or artistic heritage. No scientific inventions must be kept secret for purposes of trade or war. All ideas must be available to everyone. Nothing whatever should be allowed to bar a man’s access to them but the limitations of his own understanding; and everything possible should be done to help his understanding.

This does not mean that we must try to establish complete cultural uniformity throughout the world. Far from it. One of the great assets of the human species has always been the wealth of diversity that has been possible within the one species. In the life of individuals, personality-in-community demands the greatest possible diversity of persons, so long as the members of the community have sufficient insight to appreciate and respect one another’s differences. Similarly, in the life of the human race as a whole we need the greatest possible diversity of special cultures, local, vocational and so on. But no special culture must maintain principles which conflict with the essential principles of our common human culture. Nazism, for instance, is not a special culture which can be incorporated in the general culture of mankind. But, indeed, if we succeed in applying our fundamental principles properly, no such perverted special culture will occur. A few eccentric perverts may try to propagate crazy ideas; but unless masses of human beings have been driven by adversity and ungenerous treatment to rebel against true human culture, the crazy prophets will have very few disciples. They may therefore be allowed to preach to their hearts content. All desirable special cultures will be simply special varieties of the common culture of humanity, variations dependent on special local or vocational conditions. And all must be available to all men. The champions of each special culture must regard their special ideas not as a secret lore or mystery, but as a special contribution to the cultural life of mankind.

The World Aim.

If the new feeling for community in all human relations, and for the unity of mankind, really comes into its own, the result must (inevitably be the world-wide acceptance of a very definite practical ideal for the direction of all human affairs. It will be universally accepted that the right aim both of individual living and of social policy is the fulfilling of human capacity for personality-in-community in every individual up to the limit of his powers. The development of personality-in-community means development in respect of awareness of the world and oneself and other selves, and in respect of clarity of feeling about these, and also in respect of integrity and creativity of action. It means the development in this manner not merely of this particular individual or that, or any particular group, but of all individuals who are capable of it to any extent whatsoever; in fact for all human beings. —

The recent troubles of the human race are forcing us to distinguish more and more sharply between the things that really matter for the development of personality-in-community and those that are trivial or base. Thus private luxury and self-display are trivial ends. The lust to dominate over others is base. This, and the impulse to use other individuals merely as means for the fulfilling of our private purposes, are base, because they are a violation of the spirit of community. Almost equally base is the impulse to use other individuals simply for the benefit of some particular group, for instance to use negro workers to support the dominance of the whites, or to use the workers of any country to support the financial ruling class. I say “almost” as base, because the motive may not be sheer self-regard, but mistaken loyalty to a group. — The rule must be that all individuals must always be treated with full respect for their personality. Even if they happen to be wrong-headed enemies of human welfare, and must be resisted with force, they must never be treated as mere vermin, always as human, as “one of us,” though erring.

Necessity of World-Wide Social Revolution.

This book is not a political tract, but in these days it is impossible to speak the truth about our times without pointing out, however briefly, that, whether we like it or not, we are in for a great revolutionary change, and that, if that change is to be in the main for good, and not a hideous disaster, it must be a fundamental democratic social revolution. In this section I shall state the minimum that such a revolution entails. It becomes increasingly clear that in order to begin to be able to realise the human ideal we must plan society through and through, so as to make the most of science and the world’s productive power for the benefit of all human beings. It should by now be obvious that unrestricted private enterprise in commerce is becoming less and less capable of developing production fully, and of directing it to the greatest possible human benefit. Planning and control are becoming more and more necessary both in a negative and a positive sense. In the negative sense, planning and control are necessary so as to prevent the powerful individualists from exploiting the masses, in fact to prevent the privileged from turning the unprivileged into wage slaves. In the positive sense, planning and control are necessary so as to organise the world as fully as possible for human welfare. In this rapidly changing world, planning will have “to be far-sighted and daring. And since many groups will do their utmost to preserve the old order, control will have to be firm.

Increasingly it is realised that, and in the future it will be taken as an axiom that, there ought to be economic security for all. We must ensure that every human being has the means to obtain adequate food, adequate medical care, adequate housing, adequate education and adequate comfort and luxury, in order that he may maintain himself as a healthy and useful citizen. If he is responsible for a family, he must have the certainty that throughout his life the means to obtain the necessary minimum of those benefits will be his by right, whether he is in employment or not.

Increasingly it is realised that in order to produce economic security for all, and in order to open up the possibility of full productive capacity for the world and the development of a more fully human humanity, all the great instruments of production, such as land, factories, transport, mines, must be efficiently controlled by the democratic representatives of the people. And effective control involves ownership, in fact “ ownership” means effective control. So long as the major instruments of production remain under the control of individuals and private corporations, whose first concern must inevitably be to make profits, so long will the wealthy be able to exploit the poor by controlling their wages and the price of commodities; and also production will never be developed to the full advantage of the human race. So long as the deciding factor in production is the possibility of profit or loss to certain individuals or organised groups, we shall continue to have recurrent slumps, with “over-production,” restriction of output, closing down factories, unemployment, further reduction of purchasing power, destruction of goods, under-nourishment and despair. We should not allow production to be determined by the answer to the question, “ will it pay this particular firm to produce these goods?” The right question to ask is, “Will it pay society to produce these goods?” And by society we must mean in the last resort not any particular national society but the society of all human beings on this planet. Further, and this is of course immensely important, we must understand by the word “pay” not merely payment in terms of money, but payment in terms of human welfare. Every day more and more people are coming to realise that the only way to establish this criterion as the sole criterion of economic policy is to take the final control out of the hands of the individuals and private corporations and give it to the state; provisionally to the national state, but ultimately to a democratically appointed World Economic Authority of some kind.

We are becoming increasingly impressed by the fact that already over an area of one sixth of the world, namely in the U.S.S.R., this principle is established; and that it works, and has worked wonders.

The great change will obviously involve a struggle with vested interests in every country; but in this country, where democratic machinery exists, the revolution should be achieved by constitutional means. The present government is pledged to undertake it. The people now resolutely wills it; and so the method will be to use existing democratic machinery. If ever vested interests use violence, which I believe is unlikely, the constitutional government will of course use violence against them.

Planning and control, if they are not exercised by a fundamentally democratic authority, lead to some sort of mere totalitarianism, such as that of Nazi Germany. After that hideous object-lesson we realise increasingly that the power of final decision about policy, both for the national state and for the human race as a whole, must lie with the majority of citizens, not with any privileged section. In the Inter-War Period democracy fell into bad repute; but however great the need for a transformation of democratic institutions, some form of ultimate democratic sanction is now seen to be absolutely necessary, in order to avoid tyranny and recurrent revolutions. But democracy cannot work successfully unless the great mass of the citizens are educated up to it. Otherwise they will be easily led astray by skilled propaganda. Though they vote freely, they will in fact be merely voting according to the will of their masters. In Britain faulty education has combined with the propaganda power of the financially-privileged (exercised mainly through the press and radio) to frustrate democracy. It democracy is to work properly, the conditions of the mass of citizen a must be such as to produce in them the mentality of responsible free men, and not of irresponsible slaves. In a country that is very backward economically and politically, such as Russia was in Tsarist times, it is impossible to bring off a social revolution democratically. In a more advanced country, such as contemporary Britain, a democratic revolution is the only kind that can produce the desired results.

Since the aim of our revolution, in this country and in the world as a whole, is the fullest possible expression of human capacity in every individual, we shall seek to establish throughout all lands the greatest possible degree of individual liberty compatible with the need to plan and control the life of the world society as a whole. In a very complex society many liberties must be surrendered for the good of the whole. But other liberties are absolutely necessary for a healthy society, and must be preserved almost at any cost. Of the essential liberties, the chief are freedom of speech, freedom to associate in organised bodies, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and finally another kind of freedom, equally important, namely freedom from economic slavery. No society is healthy in which the citizens cannot freely express their opinions without fear of imprisonment or victimisation. No society is healthy in which the citizens cannot meet together and take action in defence of their rights and interests. No society is healthy in which the citizens cannot be sure that they will never be arrested arbitrarily, or imprisoned for no stated reason, or held indefinitely without a trial. No society is healthy in which the citizen’s right to work and wages depends on the will of profit-seeking employers.

These are the essential liberties. The degree of freedom in these respects is a sure measure of the health of any society. Unfortunately, in times of grave crisis in a society which is not fully developed in democratic citizenship, some restriction of some of these liberties may be necessary. In time of war freedom to publish information useful to the enemy has to be withdrawn. This is no reason for preventing the expression of opinions inconvenient to the government. However, in a half-developed society that is deeply divided against itself, the government may sometimes be forced to prevent the propagation of opinions fundamentally opposed to the principles of the society, so as to make it impossible for skilled propagandists to mislead and seduce a dissatisfied class. Even this degree of infringement of liberty of expression is very dangerous, and is only permissible in times of grave crisis. In a society in which the great majority are well educated in citizenship, and fully in accord with the basic principles of the social order, this restriction would never be necessary.

Obviously the ideal of individual liberty and the ideal of creative social planning may often come into conflict. Planning inevitably involves interference with the liberty of the individual to seek his own interest in the way that seems to him best. The solution will depend on actual circumstances, but we must always bear in mind the distinction between the essential liberties and those which, though desirable, are not essential. Of non-essential liberties, which can be abandoned without damaging the foundations of democracy, I may mention as examples, freedom to travel on whichever side of the road one pleases, and freedom in times of shortage to buy as much food or clothing as one desires. Finally, some liberties are quite obviously a violation of the very spirit of a decent society, for instance freedom to cut people’s throats. Equally anti-social, surely, is the freedom to employ others for private profit, the freedom to fix their wages, and to dismiss them, and the freedom to exercise financial power by means of skilled buying and selling.

The second principle that has to be borne in mind is this. When a people lacks confidence in its government’s good-will or intelligence, it will be very reluctant to submit to any restrictions of individual liberty; but when it has full confidence in its government, it will put up with a great deal of interference, in the belief that the government knows best what is necessary.

There are two very different ways in which a society can be disciplined. Both are necessary; but while one is good in itself, the other is a necessary evil. The bad kind of discipline is discipline imposed by force. A small amount of this is probably unavoidable. But citizens may also be induced freely to accept discipline in the common cause. This is essentially self-discipline. Of this kind was the discipline of the Communist Party in the Russian revolution, and this should be the backbone of every healthy social order.

Another distinction must be made, namely between control by compulsion and control by inducements. In the great Tennessee Valley enterprise both these principles played a part, but inducement was the more important factor. People fell in with the scheme because they found it advantageous to do so. Clearly a democratic revolution should make great use of this principle.

Personal Relations.

The new feeling for community, if it comes into its own, will not only produce a new social structure. It will also effect a great change in ordinary personal relations. In an individualistic society men have little reason to feel that they are responsible for one another. In a socialist society, the actual structure of the society favours the feeling for community; and if, independently, the society is infused by the passion for true community (and is not socialistic merely in form), men will feel that they are very intimately responsible for one another’s well-being, not merely in official relations, but in the most casual relations also. If all goes well, then, we may look forward to a far-reaching change in the whole behaviour of man to man.

In this matter it is possible that we in Britain have a special contribution to make to the life of the world. Prolonged internal peace and security have enabled us to develop a very strong tradition of friendliness in casual relations. People in our streets, trains, buses, public houses, do behave toward one another with a certain gentleness and consideration which is not found in all countries. On the whole we treat one another decently, and we expect to be treated decently. Of course this common friendliness is often destroyed by special circumstances. There is all too often harshness and lack of imagination between employers and employed. Also, in backward countries the Englishman often behaves toward the natives with ridiculous social snobbery, and with all-too-Nazi ruthlessness. And of course there are plenty of snobs and bullies even in the home country. Nevertheless, while we have indeed many shocking faults, we are I believe, entitled to credit ourselves with a certain virtue in this respect. The verdict is supported by the judgement of very many European refugees now living with us. Of course it must not be supposed that all English people are angelically sweet. Far from it. Many of us are downright brutes, and very many are cold and stand-offish. The claim is merely that on the whole in casual personal contacts we are by custom rather more considerate than the average. We have certainly no reason to be complacent about it, attributing it to some deep-rooted

virtue of the English biological stock. There is no evidence whatever for this view. The credit must go to our circumstances, to our extraordinary good fortune during the last two thousand years.

But having this special advantage, we have special responsibilities. It is through this knack of friendliness and forbearance that we can make one of our main contributions to the life of mankind. We shall no longer be the “workshop of the world,” and it is to be hoped that not for long shall we be masters of a great Empire; but we can perhaps still contribute greatly by setting an example of decent personal relations in street and train and ‘bus and pub! This may sound trivial, but it is really very important. It is right in line with the needs of mankind today. We must try to set an example of respect for “the other fellow” as an individual person. This we shall only be able to do on two conditions. The first is that we get clear about our fundamental religious conviction. This I shall discuss in more detail in the next chapter. The second condition is that we carry our feeling for decent behaviour into the spheres where at present it is not allowed to penetrate. At present, though we stand for decency, we leave our slums uncleared, because it would not “pay” to remove them. For the same reason we allow a large part of our population to be undernourished and badly educated. We exploit native labour in our colonies, and in India until recently we held the leaders of the nationalist movement in prison. And so on. In view of these facts foreigners very naturally charge us with hypocrisy. We claim to stand for kindliness and freedom, but we perpetrate tyranny and exploitation. The truth is that we have indeed those virtues, but we exercise them only in a limited sphere, in street and train, ‘bus and pub. The time has come when we must extend them into other spheres. Clearly we cannot effectively stand for decency in the world so long as we confine our decency to street and train, ‘bus and pub. We have to create decent relations throughout our social life. We have in fact to bring off our own social revolution. And we have to do it in such a way that the actual process of the change will be carried out with full regard to our traditional respect for individuality. We have also to free our Empire. Until these evils are righted, we cannot look the world in the face and say we sincerely stand for decent human relations throughout the life of mankind.

Perhaps I am grossly exaggerating the virtues of the British in this matter of casual personal relations. However consciously we guard against prejudice in favour of our own nation, we can never be sure that we are not tricked by an unconscious bias. But if I am right, then we, the people of this island, have still an important contribution to make to the founding of the new world. To achieve it, we must become far more clearly conscious of all that is involved in “decent personal relations,” and we must strive with full seriousness to live up to our own ideal.

However this may be, it seems clear that after the nightmare of contempt for human personality which has swept the world recently, the climate is already beginning to change toward a renewed realisation that no society can be wholesome without a very strong tradition of mutual responsibility among its ordinary people. The Russian Revolution was the first great modern symptom of the realisation. When the actual revolution had been achieved, external and internal danger produced a situation so desperate that consideration for the individual had often to be sacrificed for the security of the new order. The new government was forced to be ruthless. We in Britain may be able to bring off the great change without this sacrifice.

It is tempting to think that under the stress of war people have become rather more conscious of themselves and of one another, and that in the light of the new consciousness they distinguish rather more clearly between the things that matter and the things that do not matter. War seems to have two opposite effects. It brutalises people, turns them callous; but also it may intensify their comradeship, their mutual responsibility, their sense of the true values of personality-in-community. Since the close of the Inter-War Period this increased consciousness of personality-in-community has begun to affect opinion and custom in many spheres.

Personal Relations in Industry.

Hitherto the sphere in which respect for human personality has been most violated has been the relations between employers and employed. This violation was made inevitable partly by the general temper of commercialism, which rejected responsibility for one’s fellows, but also by the structure of industry itself. In the old handicraft system of “domestic “industry there was personal contact between master and man. No doubt, in spite of this there was plenty of callousness and cruelty, as there is now between foremen and operatives. Callousness and cruelty will continue to bulk largely in human affairs until, from birth onwards, men are conditioned in such a way as to grow up without grave frustrations and unconscious vindictiveness. But bad as circumstances must often have been in the old days, at least there was direct personal contact, and often a partially effective religious control. In the later system, in which masses of workers toiled in factories for employers, with whom they had no personal contact whatever, it was much easier for employers to forget the humanity of their workers and regard them as merely animated adjuncts of the machines; the more so since the hold of the old religion was steadily weakening. This gulf between employers and employees was of course inevitable because of the economic structure of society; but lack of personal contact between the two classes in industry was in turn one of the causes of the bitterness of the class war. Neither camp could realise the other as human persons.

The Second Industrial Revolution will almost certainly bring about, at any rate at first, greater and greater organisations for production. There will be a danger that the gulf between workers and managers or organisers will tend to grow even wider. This problem of the failure of contact between workers and organisers will not be solved by the ending of capitalism. State ownership, necessary as this is, can easily become sheer Fascism, leading to complete robotisation of the workers. Only if the particular form of state-ownership is true democratic common ownership can this problem be solved. Only if the people wills right human relations, and controls its industrial organisation through its representative government, will it be possible to organise gigantic industrial units in such a way as to maintain contact between workers and managers. When each factory is controlled by a council representing its workers, its technicians and its managers, there will be scope for personal contact between the different sections, and the possibility of a sense of partnership in a common enterprise.

Education

But more than this will be needed. We cannot change the whole temper of personal relations in industry, and in society as a whole, by merely increasing the personal contacts between different sections. It is also necessary to have an educational system genuinely inspired by the ideal of personality-in-community. There are signs that, if all goes well, we shall soon enter on a period of educational reform, even perhaps a real educational revolution. This too will be due to the growing sense of the importance of personality-in-community. If this revolution is wisely carried out, it should change the whole character of average human behaviour. Hitler has at least shown us what can be done by means of thorough-going educational manipulation of the minds of the young. The fact that the purpose of the Nazis was fantastic and barbarous, and opposed to the whole tradition of civilisation, makes his success the more remarkable. An educational revolution inspired by the will for true community, and reinforced by a favourable change in the whole structure and temper of society, should have a far more spectacular and permanent success.

It is perhaps worth while to summarise the general nature of the great educational revolution that has to be achieved. Every human being must be given the opportunity of the fullest education of which he is capable. Wealth must no longer be able to secure educational privilege, nor must poverty involve educational disabilities. Since the young (particularly in a declining population) are the most valuable asset of society, the state must accept full responsibility for equipping them to become happy and useful citizens. The process of education has two sides, equally important, one negative, the other positive. On the one hand, the young must be brought up in an environment sufficiently favourable to avoid their being damaged mentally by serious frustrations, repressions, obsessions, such as lead to vindictiveness and other forms of irrigational and anti-social behaviour. On the other hand, they must be given the information needed for life in a complex modern society, and taught many forms of skilled behaviour, physical and mental. Vocational training is important, but no less important is education for the highly skilled activity of being a responsible, critical and generous-minded citizen of the world. That is, education must seek above all to develop the individual’s aptitude for personality-in-community. This means discovering the special capacities of each child and fostering them, to the fullest extent; and fostering in all children the distinctive human powers of sensitivity toward the world, oneself and other selves. By skilled education every individual may be helped to see for himself, so far as in him lies, how man’s nature and circumstance demand that human society should be organised on these principles. The human world can never be healthy until the great majority of human beings spontaneously and unhesitatingly, and with understanding, will the advancement of the world society in personality-in-community.

Work and Leisure.

If all goes well, if the new feeling for personality-in-community comes into its own, if the necessary social revolution is successfully accomplished, and if human society is henceforth infused with a new inspiration and a new purpose, then we may hope that the new spirit will transform men’s attitude to work and leisure. I have already suggested that work will be regarded much more frankly as essentially social service, and as, indeed, the main outlet for social self-expression. The whole of an individual’s life, we may hope, will be much more dominated by the passion for self-expression in social service, for playing a part in the common enterprise. There will be a greater eagerness to understand what the common life of mankind is all about and to be properly equipped to take part in it, both through a special vocation and in a more general way in responsible citizenship.

It seems to follow that the distinction between work and leisure will be blurred. Men will be less inclined to feel that, while a certain part of their day “belongs to” the organisation that employs them (say a factory), the rest “belongs to” themselves. Instead, they will be more inclined to feel that all their time is their own for self-expression in some kind of socially desirable action. Of course the distinction between work-hours and leisure-hours will still remain, between activities undertaken at the bidding of society and activities undertaken of one’s own sweet will. But it is to be hoped that the attitudes to work and to leisure-activities will not differ as sharply as they do now.

Our social revolution should free people from their present sense of the futility of life, and the educational revolution should help them to a positive personal and social aim. If all goes well, the younger generations will attain that hopefulness and forward vision which the Russian Revolution afforded to the young of the U.S.S.R. If so, then we may expect a new attitude both to work, as self-expression in service, and to leisure also, as primarily self-expression through some form of contribution to the richness of the common life, or as personal re-creation for participation in that life. Of course there will still be opportunities for sheer relaxation and passive amusement. Though working hours will in most cases be far shorter than they now are, much work will still be very fatiguing. Moreover, possibly the majority of the population will still be too modestly developed in mentality to be capable of much more than passive amusement. All the same, a far greater number than today will certainly feel the need for active and creative leisure occupations.

When the providing of amusement is no longer dominated by commercial enterprise, we may expect a general rise in the quality of all recreation. For today the pleasure industries make their profits by a deliberate appeal to our more primitive, facile and obsessive impulses. Even people who are capable of more developed forms of amusement, and who rather feebly prefer them, are continually led astray by the bait offered by the pleasure industries. In spite of themselves, they drift into the picture houses, or watch football matches, or bet on dogs or horses. And so they contract habits of lazy amusement which gradually kill whatever impulses they had for more active leisure occupations. When the bait of the pleasure industries is no longer set, these people will have a better chance. A non-commercial film industry (for instance) need not be constantly appealing to the crude and obsessive impulses. It can afford to provide matter which, less seductive and not debasing, will stimulate the spectator’s mind to active participation.

What really is the function of leisure? We may, I think, sum it up in this way. It should afford rest and recuperation to powers that have been over worked. It should also give expression to powers which do not otherwise gain expression. Finally, it should afford opportunities of keeping in touch with the life of society, and of equipping one for fuller participation in it.

A human being is a going concern, a dynamic system of impulses to action, on many levels of development. All these impulses need some expression. There are the “bodily” impulses, such as hunger, sleep, muscular exercise, physiological sex-craving. There are more complex impulses, such as fear, anger, self-assertiveness, sociability, psychological sex-craving, and gregariousness. And there are still more complex and distinctively human impulses, such as self-aware and other-ware needs for personal intercourse, for social activities, for understanding, for art, and so on. One of the main functions of leisure, then, is to afford expression to impulses which do not find adequate expression in work-time. Sometimes the impulses that need outlet will be mainly simple, animal or childish powers, sometimes rather more developed powers, sometimes powers on the highest level of development of which the individual is capable.

Bearing all this in mind, we cannot but observe that the present amusement industries offer in the main opportunities for merely passive expression to the cruder impulses, to crude sexuality, self-assertiveness, gregariousness, the cravings for vicarious adventure, and so on.

Of course, even in our society there are many forms of amusement of a more active kind, such as hiking, playing games, dancing, gardening, carpentering, amateur engineering, “gadgetising” of all sorts, cross-word puzzles and other competitions, with of course a small amount of creative artistic activity in the form of music, painting, play-acting. After the revolution we may see a vast increase of all the active leisure occupations, and a general improvement of quality, both in active and passive forms of amusement. (This has already happened in Russia). For instance, not only should the cinema, which is at present simply commercial, be greatly improved, but also great developments should be possible in the radio, which though not actually commercial is largely paralysed by the influence of the present ruling commercial class. At present our rulers seem concerned to use this modern instrument of recreation and education rather as a means to spread complacent acquiescence in the present order, and to prevent the public from thinking about the really interesting and controversial subjects, than as a means of stimulating the minds of ordinary citizens.

I suggested that one important function of leisure was that it should afford opportunities for keeping in touch with the life of society, and equipping oneself for fuller participation in it. Each according to his capacity, we should be using our leisure partly for intelligent reading of daily papers and other journals, partly for more organised reading on social, scientific, and other cultural subjects, and also for what may be called in the broadest sense “political activity,” local or national. This last is necessary both that we may equip ourselves for active citizenship and in order that the many good causes which depend on voluntary action should be advanced. It is essential to the spirit of democracy that the citizens should actively participate in the life of their society. They must shoulder responsibility. They must be ready to do things for themselves, rather than wait for the authorities to do things for them. This sort of action involves plenty of leisure. You cannot have a real democracy unless the citizens have time and energy for voluntary social activities.

Pioneering adventures must inevitably be carried out by pioneering individuals. One of the main problems of socialism will be to ensure that this can continue even in a socialist state. One example of individual pioneering is the case of the voluntary hospitals. It is very arguable that in this instance individual pioneering has by now fulfilled its task, and that the voluntary hospitals should now be brought under state or municipal control. But there will always be fields for individual pioneering, particularly in education, invention of new industrial processes, and the arts. Clearly such pioneering cannot be carried on without ample leisure from official work, and in some cases it involves also financial aid. Perhaps it will be possible to set up a special and semi-independent organ of the state to foster innovation in all spheres.

Parents and Families.

If the new feeling for personality-in-community comes into its own we shall see changes in the temper of family life. The old Victorian family was to a large extent a dictatorship under the father. The element of parental possession of the children was very strong. But, as I have said, even as early as my childhood this was changing. By the time the Inter-War Period was well under way, the family was seriously disintegrating. The worse type of parent simply shirked his or her responsibilities; the better type was perplexed and worried by the conflict between his obvious responsibility to mould the character of his (or her) children and the fear of imposing his will on them. On the whole, among the more “advanced” people, the family was condemned as an archaic institution, and parenthood was regarded as something which the really civilised mind would want to avoid so far as possible.

Today there are signs of a new attitude. Partly through the threatened decline of the population, partly, I believe, through the spread of a rather clearer consciousness of self and other, parenthood and the family are coming back into esteem; but with a difference. It is being realised that, if parents are intelligent and responsible, the family can be a very educative microcosm of community between young and old, and between the young themselves. But instead of reinstating the ingrown Victorian family, or remaining content with the disintegrated Inter-War family, young parents are, I believe, feeling their way toward a new kind of family life. It is being realised that every member of a family should have some activity outside the family.

This is particularly important for the mother. The father normally has his work. Every day he goes out into the world. But the mother’s whole life is apt to be taken up with looking after the children and the home. Having no serious outside activities, she becomes psychologically too dependent on her care of the children, and consequently too possessive towards them. In the future, let us hope, steps will be taken to relieve mothers of this danger. There must be crèches and nursery schools for all. There must be organisations for communal feeding and communal domestic service. The aim will be, not to relieve the mother of all responsibilities, but to free her from the excess of them, so that for a half or a third of her time she can take on external activities, paid or unpaid. We are realising today that, if the family can be turned into a less ingrown association, it can be the means of providing the rising generation with an unfailing mental anchorage, and an intense early experience of concrete community. “Home,” which was often and with justice derided in the Inter-War Period, is once more being valued, particularly by those in the services, who can no longer enjoy its benefits.

I referred above to the threat of a serious decline of the population. Many changes are likely to be brought about by it. Though in this island today we have far too big a population for our present inefficient economic system, a properly planned system could afford fulness of life to a much greater number. Meanwhile we are threatened with a catastrophically declining and therefore a preponderantly middle-aged population. There is a danger that there will not be enough young and vigorous people to keep the complex life of a modern society going. There seems to be no single cause of this grave trouble. Possibly we are suffering in part from some obscure biological change in fertility. But in addition there are certainly social causes making for a decline of population; for instance the Inter-War lack of enthusiasm for parenthood, and the general feeling that it was not fair to bring children into a world in which there was no security of their having a decent life. In view of these social causes, clearly two things at least will have to be done. Parenthood must on the one hand be guaranteed economic security, and on the other hand it must be made to appear as a social duty, and one through which men and women can find fulness of being. Clearly, the threat of a declining population will force us to value human beings more than goods. It will indeed he recognised that children are society’s most precious possession. Every care will be lavished on their physical and mental up-bringing. Maternity and education may become the two most honoured professions. Every encouragement will be given to young women to have children. The stigma of illegitimacy will be abolished. No child will be allowed to suffer in any way because its parents were not married. At the same time, since the family at its best is the most wholesome environment for children, permanent marriage will always seem the most desirable state. Various new forms of marriage may be sanctioned, perhaps polygamous and polyandrous. But monogamy, which in the Inter-War Period was often ridiculed, is once more coming to seem the most satisfactory form of union. We shall not go back to the possessiveness and rigidity of Victorian monogamy, but the are coming to realise better than we did in the Inter-War Period that only a life-long partnership can afford full expression, to the capacity for intimate community in the form of sex-toned personal love.

Sex and the Position off Women.

Our whole attitude to sex is likely to change under the influence of the increasing will for right personal relations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sex was regarded as unclean, and in need of very strict control. In the Inter-War Period the break-down of the old taboos, combined with the tendency to regard man as merely a rather cunning animal, led to the “de-personalising” of sex relations. Sexual intercourse became less of a co-operative act by mutually aware persons, more of a mere bodily reaction. Instead of being a vehicle for developed personal love, sex was cheapened, trivialised. Today the prevailing temper, I believe, is changing, in this as in so many other matters. There is no question of merely restoring the Victorian taboos, but on the whole there seems to be the beginning of a movement, particularly among the young, toward greater mutual consideration in sex relationships, toward a re-personalising of sex. But perhaps this movement still lies in the future. Anyhow it will certainly come, for it is in line with the whole trend of cultural development.

The same tendency will probably show itself in changes in the popular view of the right position of women in society. Victorian woman, as I have said, was regarded both as a divinity and a chattel under the control of some man. Inter-War woman was fairly thoroughly emancipated. She won her rights to compete with man in most spheres. She became increasingly her own mistress even in the eyes of the law. Increasingly she was regarded simply as human and not distinctively as female-human. By all means, it was said, let her compete freely with man, but on the other hand let her not expect special treatment in virtue of her female disabilities. In the earlier Inter-War days she affected a boyish appearance. Her skirts were boldly shortened, causing scandal to survivors from an earlier age. She cut her hair short, and dressed somewhat mannishly. Small breasts became fashionable. She also showed a disposition to shun her special function, maternity.

In Nazi Germany the reaction against the whole sadly debased culture of the democracies, led to the subjection of women once more They were to be regarded as mere stud-animals, cows, specialised breeding and quite incapable of the fully developed human nature of the noble male. —

In the democracies themselves this extravagant reaction has fortunately not developed, but we too are moving away from our Inter-War attitude to women. We are beginning to take woman’s womanhood more seriously. The disposition toward community, and toward respecting individual powers and disabilities, compels us to regard woman neither as a cow nor as an imitation man. I have already noted the tendency to emancipate mothers from sheer slavery to their young children. This should make maternity more popular than it has hitherto been. In general we, that is to say not only the men, but the women themselves, must complete the process of freeing women from semi-servitude to men; but at the same time we must not forget that woman is biologically a more specialised creature than man. She must of course be allowed real freedom to express herself in whatever direction her individual talents happen to lead; but also maternity must be recognised as her most important and her noblest contribution to the life of society. Maternity needs to be regarded objectively. The Victorians surrounded it with mystery and false sanctity. The Inter-War generations tended to despise it as a merely animal function, so that to undertake it seemed to many women to involve a lot of suffering with no result but betrayal of their human dignity. We need a new attitude, which will regard motherhood as the highly specialised profession for which women alone are biologically fitted, and in which they can find the fullest, and a fully human, self-expression. It is a skilled profession, or art, demanding serious training under the best possible conditions.

While maternity is obviously woman’s unique function, she has also a more general and perhaps equally important aptitude, closely connected with her power of maternity. She has a special talent for personal relations, for sympathy and understanding, and respect for idiosyncrasies of those with whom she comes into contact. Perhaps in a society in which women are granted full equality with men, and at the same time their special talents are recognised, the women of the society may be able to play a very important part in humanising personal relations throughout the society.

But of course, though women can excel in this way, they are also, we are told, capable of a peculiarly petty and cattish spitefulness. This, it is said, is specially evident where women are thrown together in large groups, and particularly under military discipline. Woman’s gift, I suggest, (unless it has been spoiled by bad upbringing or a false social tradition) is for spontaneous, unorganised personal relations. When women are forced, as thousands are today, into an environment utterly alien to their special talent, frustration is all too likely to turn them toward pettiness and spite. There is another side to the matter. If pettiness and spite really are characteristic of women, they are probably a relic of the former subjection of women. These short-comings are characteristic of all “subject races”! As women’s conditions improve, their average mentality should improve also. Further, their full emancipation should react favourably on man. A man cannot be fully a man unless the women with whom he comes in contact are fully women, and both are fully human.

CHAPTER 5. BEYOND MAN.

What the Religious Believers Bay.

I HAVE TRIED to outline the great change of social temper and behaviour which, I believe, is already beginning, but which must go much further if we are to turn this critical corner in the career of mankind, so as to begin deliberately creating a more fully human world.

Some readers may feel that my account of the matter has left out something very important. They might put it that the new social temper, if it is adequate, must spring from a recovery of religion, and that in my account religion plays no part at all. I believe they are right in holding that “religion,” in some sense of that vague word, has a great part to play. Here I disagree with the scientific materialists. But the kind of “religion” which must play a part IN the founding of the new world is in many respects very different from “religion” as it is interpreted by those who pin their faith to doctrines about the fundamental nature of the universe and the destiny of human individuals in it.

The attitude which I should adopt would be called by the religious believers “merely humanistic,” since its most fundamental principle is that man’s chief concern should be to make the most of man. They deny that this humanistic attitude is enough. In a sense their protest is justified; and in this final chapter I shall try to state in what sense, if mankind is to become fully human, it is necessary for human beings to look beyond humanity.

The believers say that human nature itself, properly understood, is such that man cannot attain full humanity unless he can believe in some superhuman being, infinitely mightier and better than man. To this being alone, who is in fact God, they say, man should give his final loyalty. Unless he believes in God he will never find real happiness, nor will he have any firm anchorage for his moral principles, nor will he be able even to fulfil his own human nature. The only sufficient foundation, they say, for morality is the belief in a divine person, almighty and all-loving. Atheists, they have to admit, are often thoroughly virtuous men; but virtue is possible to them only because their minds have been moulded from infancy by the great Christian tradition, or the tradition of tome other great religion. Believers argue that in a society in which religious beliefs die, moral feeling may indeed live on for some time, but sooner or later morality too must inevitably die. Such a society, they tell us, is living on its moral capital. The moral chaos of the Inter-War Period was a stage in the fatal disintegration of morality in a civilisation which had almost entirely lost its belief in God. Unless we recover that belief, the disintegration will continue. They would, of course, deny that a real moral regeneration has occurred in Russia. They are forced to deny it, since the ideology of the Russian revolution excludes all religious beliefs.

Further, the believers insist that unless men believe in the immortality of the individual human spirit, and some sort of reward of virtue in eternity, there can be no effective motive for being virtuous. If this life is all, they say, we might as well simply seek as much individual pleasure as possible while we can, and the devil take the hindmost.

Now if the believers are right in insisting on the necessity of belief, the prospect for humanity is very bleak, for the changes that these beliefs will ever again play a controlling part in the great majority of human lives are small. Though the Churches are staging a great effort to regain their authority, it seems unlikely, in the present temper of the world, that they will make much headway in collecting the masses once more into their folds. The only Christian Church which seems to secure the earnest devotion of large numbers of ordinary people today is the Roman Catholic Church; and the Roman Catholic attitude is in many ways quite out of sympathy with very much which is essential to the temper and the aims of mankind today. The Roman Catholic Church may yet have great successes. Some of its members may even here and there play an important part in service of the necessary world-revolution. But if they do so, it will be without clear understanding of what they do. As a world-wide organisation the Roman Catholic Church stands for a theory about the universe and an attitude about man’s right part in it which are out of touch with the facts of the modern world. The Church encourages men to hope for individual salvation in an after life, or in eternity, rather than to give themselves utterly to making the best of themselves and one another and the human race here on earth. I cannot believe that the temper of mankind will ever revert to such an attitude; unless of course, the forward movement is defeated, and we enter upon an age of darkness and reaction. Two causes, I should say, make it very unlikely that any Christian Church or other organised religion, will ever really regain widespread sway over men’s minds. The one cause is the influence of science; the other is the fact that, however admirable the record of some believers in the great struggle of our age for a better social order, the Churches and other religions, as organised bodies, have stood aside, or else have come out as supporters of the old order.

So if a decent future depends on the recovery of religious belief, the prospect is indeed bleak. Though there may be a temporary recovery here and there, the tide of opinion is now setting strongly in another direction.

But a decent future depends on no such thing as beliefs about the nature of the universe and the participation of human individuals in eternal bliss or eternal woe. It is quite untrue that morality can be securely founded on the belief in God and immortality. The real foundation of morality lies in our concrete experience of living together. At a certain stage of growth in consciousness of ourselves and other selves we discover the difference between a more awake way of living and a less, a more fully conscious, a more developed, a more personal way of living, and a less conscious, less developed, less personal way. And the more awake way presents itself to us as the better. We recognise that, though it is more difficult, and often repugnant to us in our less awake state, it is more deeply satisfying to our essential nature as conscious beings. Not that we desire it simply because it is supremely satisfying, or the way of personal self-fulfilment. We desire it not as a means to something else, but simply for its own sake, And we recognise that it is “right,” whatever the final philosophical sense of that word. We recognise that this way of living is in some sense what we are “for.” We recognise that, in whatever the true sense of “ought,” we ought to live in this way.

Very roughly this right way of living is the way of sensitivity, intelligence, community, comradeship, love and creative action. It is the way of the clearest and fullest awareness of the world, including ourselves and other selves, and all of us together in human society. It is the way of precise feeling about everything that we experience. Pursuing it, we strive to know just what we are feeling pleased about, or angry about, or exalted about, and so on. It is also the way of coherent action, and of creative action. Pursuing it, we refuse to allow irrelevant impulses to obsess us, and on the other hand we strive to act so as to create in ourselves and others ever fuller expression of personal being, or personality-in-community. To sum the matter, it is the way in which we recognise the intrinsic beauty of (dare I say it?) the spirit, and the obligation to do all in our power to fulfil in ourselves and others, our capacity for spiritual being.

The recognition of the rightness of this way of living does not do a great part in helping Europeans to see “the Way,” but Christian beliefs are not necessary to the acceptance of the Way as desirable. Indeed, we may reasonably argue that, far from “good” being “good” because it is what God wills, or because it is inherent in a divine universal personality, God (if he exists) is good only if he does pend on any beliefs about God and immortality. Christianity played indeed will what in fact we independently recognise to be good. And as for immortality, the whole idea that it is unreasonable to be virtuous unless, here or hereafter, virtue is rewarded is surely wrong-headed. Virtue, let us never forget, is its own reward.

What the Sceptics Say.

Such is the answer which, I hold, should be given to the religious believer. To reject his position does not necessarily lead to accepting the views of his opponents. These “ethical sceptics” explain away morality by arguing that moral principles are simply customs which have proved useful to society or to some dominant section of it, and have been handed down from generation to generation through the prestige-suggestion exercised by parents over children. In the last analysis, they say, all these sanctified customs are derived from primitive impulses, such as self-regard, herd-feeling, fear. Thus altruism derives its moral value partly from the “herd instinct” and partly from the fact that mutual aid makes for the security of the mass of individuals. The roots of altruism are self-regard and gregariousness. So we are told. —

This is not the place for a philosophical discussion. Here I shall only record what seems to me the essence of the answer to the sceptics. First, then, we may agree that the modern psychological and sociological account of the sources of moral feelings is probably true, so far as it goes; but we must deny that the upshot of it is to explain away the values of the developed mind by reducing them to primitive impulses which we share with the sub human animals. It may well be true that the feelings of obligation and of guilt spring from the child’s conflict over its parents, who are at once the source of compulsion and of comfort and security. The child rebels against the parental will, and yet also accepts it as morally right. His rebellious self is opposed to his own “super ego” or moral self, which sanctifies the moral will of the parents. Further, the morality which the parents impose on the child is indeed a system of customs and taboos which is handed down by tradition from generation to generation. Each item in it was no doubt sanctioned in the past by its real or fancied utility, either to the tribe as a whole or to some dominant class within the tribe. So the truth about any morality is that it is largely a confused expression of social (or class) utility handed down from a former age, and inevitably in part out of date. In the sceptic’s view, that is all there is to it.

I believe this account is in principle correct, except for the claim that “that is all there is to it.”

First, with regard to the origin of morality in the child’s life, it is important to realise that you do not fully explain a developed impulse in terms of a primitive one unless it can be shown that the developed one is after all qualitatively identical with the primitive one. For instance a disposition to be always “agin the government” may legitimately be traced to childish rebelliousness against the parents. But careful inspection of genuine moral feelings shows them not to be qualitatively identical with the primitive cravings for comfort and security. To love a person as a person is not qualitatively the same sort of activity as regarding him or her as a source of comfort and security for oneself. The moral quality of the child’s feeling for the parental will derives not from its primitive need for comfort and security but from its dawning realisation of friendliness or community as the right relation between persons. The point is that, with sufficient help from the environment, the child can grow into self-consciousness, other-consciousness and community-consciousness. And this is the real source of moral feeling.

The second point to bear in mind is this. Any given morality is, indeed, an expression of past social (or class) utility; but it is also an expression of the apprehension of personality-in-community. And only in so far as it is beneficial for personality-in-community, in the present circumstances of the society, is it in fact morally justifiable.

The sceptic may with justice say that even this fundamental moral value, personality-in-community, has been forced on us by the environment through its survival-value. In the long run, societies that are strong in the will for personality-in-community have the advantage both in social coherence and in care for individual health, bodily and mental. And therefore such societies are in the long run best equipped for survival. True! But we must remember that the valuing of personality-in-community does involve a real discovery, impossible on the sub-human level. It involves waking up into self-consciousness, other-consciousness and consciousness of community. This “waking up” is not simply the product of the environment. Circumstances, no doubt, lead the developing mind into a position from which alone the discovery can be made; but circumstances alone do not create the necessary sensitivity for the discovery.

Moreover, there is this to be added. To say that the will for personality-in-community has survival value is simply to say, rather incompletely, that, for self-conscious and other-conscious beings in a universe such as this in fact is, the will for personality-in-community is in the long run the way of life. It is not merely the way of survival; it is the way of survival and of advancement in the essential qualities of beings such as we are.

Man Must Look Beyond Himself.

After this interlude on the sceptical view of morality, I can return to the religious believers. I have denied their claim that morality is meaningless unless it is based on the belief in God and immortality. But they make another charge against the purely humanistic view; and in this case I believe they are up to a point right.  They claim that human nature demands for its full development the subordination of mankind to something superhuman. Where they go wrong, I suggest, is in holding that the something superhuman must be a personal God. It seems to me quite obvious that the human mind is at present incapable of formulating any reliable propositions about the fundamental nature of the universe, and that the idea of a personal or “super-personal” God is hopelessly confused, if not meaningless. The statement that there is a personal God and the statement that there is not, the statement that human individuals have eternal life and the statement that they have not, are probably in the last analysis all equally beside the mark. It is vital for mental and spiritual growth that we should realise not merely the depth of our ignorance, but the utter inadequacy of the very texture of our thinking in relation to these supramundane problems.

In these days there can be no true religion that is not founded on a very thorough intellectual agnosticism.

But once we have purged our minds of all the old beliefs, then at last we may discover true religion in our own daily experience of concrete living. We can discover the supreme beauty and rightness of the way of life which consists of striving for fuller expression of personality-in-community, in ourselves and others. We can come to feel that, in some sense utterly beyond our comprehension, this is what we are for. We can feel that the true goal, both for individual and society, is not just humanity as it actually is, but the superhuman spirit or temper which humanity so imperfectly manifests.

We must not think of this superhuman “spirit” as a person, or even as a substance, but simply as the ideal development for personality-in-community in conscious beings in whatever circumstances they occur. I believe we are entitled to hold, simply on the evidence of our own experience, that for such beings, no matter what their idiosyncrasies, this development is necessarily the way of life, the way of fulfilment of their essential nature, the way also of supreme satisfaction. This appears to me indubitable.

In addition I believe something else, with much less assurance. The profound sense of instrumentality, of being in some sense “a vessel of the spirit,” which we may have in times of exceptional lucidity and integrity, is something of very deep significance, though as yet we do not know how to interpret it.

Of the status of this “spirit” in the universe at large we know nothing. But we may legitimately find comfort in the certainty that wherever in all the starry universe, or any other conceivable universe, self-conscious and other-conscious beings occur, they too, in their lucid state, cannot but give their final loyalty to the manifesting of this spirit.

Surely this is enough.

Whether in fact there is any one supreme personal being, different in kind from all the others, because eternal and almighty, we do not know. Even if, in fact, there is, yet for us today the way of life is not to cling blindly to a self-deceiving belief in him, but to be honestly agnostic.

We cannot even know whether anywhere in the universe beyond this little planet there are or will be any self-conscious or other-conscious beings. There may be; and some of them may be as superior to us in all the ways that really matter as we to worms and microbes. Perhaps we, ephemeral as we are as individuals and as a species, are lowly partners in a great cosmical venture for the fulfilling of the spirit. Or perhaps the human species is the sole germ of the spirit in all the cosmos. In this case how great our responsibility!

Further, we have no assurance that the venture on which we are now engaged, alone or in company with other minded-worlds, will come to fruition. It may be doomed to disaster, either through uncontrollable forces, or through some fatal limitation in the nature of all self-conscious beings. Perhaps this is unlikely, but for honesty’s sake we must face the possibility.

Another possibility also must be recognised. Perhaps the great effort to fulfil the potentiality of personality-in-community, which must necessarily come to be the supreme goal of every sufficiently developed species in any world, is in the universal view merely a factor in some sublime ulterior purpose wholly inconceivable to us. Perhaps the success of beings of our type is not demanded in the universal scheme at all; if indeed there is such a scheme. Perhaps what is needed is simply our striving, which may find its justification not in success, but in contributing in some ulterior way to consciousness upon some inconceivably loftier plane than ours. What we ourselves need of cabbages is not that they should fulfil their nature in flower and seed, but that they should, prepare for flowering by growing leaves which we can eat. Such is perhaps the type of our own ultimate function in the cosmos.

Such a possibility rouses some people to indignant rebellion against a callous universe. But surely their reaction is parochial. The point is this. If there is indeed in any sense a “universal scheme” and therefore a purposeful universal spirit which wills it, then we can be certain that, however alien and even callous that scheme seems to us, yet it must necessarily be concerned, upon its infinitely higher plane, with sensitivity, intelligence, love, community and creative action. For on the evidence of our own experience we see unmistakably that consciousness, developed ‘ beyond a certain very lowly level, cannot but will personality-in-community. — We can be assured then that, even if the success or failure of worlds up and down the cosmos is irrelevant to the purpose of the universal spirit, yet that purpose cannot be fundamentally alien to our own most lucid purposes.

But all these speculations are probably quite beside the mark, since they are based on the assumption that there is a purposeful “universal spirit,” and it is unlikely that, if there is, its nature is limited by personality and purposefulness. Its nature is probably such that none of the concepts derived from personality can be truly applied to it.

About all these high matters we must remain uncompromisingly agnostic. And we can well afford to do so; for in our own experience we have the certainty that, so far as we live in the way of sensitivity love and creative action, we fulfil and justify our existence.

I have agreed with the believers in recognising that human nature demands for its full expression subordination to something superhuman. I have argued that subordination to something superhuman is felt as the obligation to strive for a superhuman development of human nature, and that this obligation applies to all self-conscious and other conscious beings throughout the cosmos. But there is also another way in which man should, I believe, subordinate himself to something superhuman. On this subject I shall speak with great hesitation, because I cannot get my own mind clear about it; but to keep silent would be to leave out something of great importance to the healthy issue of our hoped-for revolution in human affairs. — Though in one of its moods religious feeling is uncompromisingly moral, demanding absolute loyalty to the moral ideal, in another mood it seems to accept both good and evil as “all within the divine plan.” In the first mood the feeling is that “God is love,” and that everything in conflict with love must be utterly rejected. In the other there is an unconditional acceptance of fate, of the actual course of events, however hostile they may seem in the relation to the ideal of love. This is the mood which expresses itself in the cry “Thy will be done.” There is of course behind this cry a faith that God’s will, could we but understand it, would be revealed as good in some more fundamental way than ours, no matter how terrible it might be to our limited vision. This attitude does not imply any betrayal of our loyalty to the good, or any weakening of the moral will; but it does involve our ultimate acceptance of the evil in the universe as in some way necessary to the perfection or beauty or ultimate rightness of the whole. In much the same way the aesthetic rightness of a work of art may involve detail that, taken by itself, is repugnant, hideous, horrible.

All of us know in our own maturing the experience of growing out of childish values into adult values. There are times in the growth of every developing personality when things that were very precious either begin to seem trivial and insipid or must be reluctantly abandoned for the sake of things which cannot but be recognised as “higher.” Sometimes, though we cannot ourselves see that the higher things really are higher, someone whom we have reason to regard as more grown up and farsighted than ourselves does see them higher; and so we reluctantly try to open our hearts so as to accept the senior’s values. To the believer in an almighty and benevolent God something of the same sort must inevitably happen. The evil in the world has to be taken in the faith that it is all really part of the divine scheme. —

Even those who Reject belief in God should, I think, bear in mind the possibility of values beyond our human ken. There is no reason whatever to suppose that man, even at his most civilised best, has reached the topmost pinnacle of development in consciousness. Indeed, there is very good reason to suppose that his highest attainment in percipience and feeling and comprehension is as nothing compared with the heights that are inaccessible to him. And so, if in certain modes of experience some men seem to themselves to catch obscure glimpses of those higher reaches, we should not dismiss their claims as necessarily sheer delusion. Indeed, we should ourselves try to seize upon any intimation of such experience in our own lives. But if we do discover such intimations, we should beware of simple interpretations of them in terms either of materialistic mental fashions of our own period, or of the theistic mental fashions of a period that is already passing. The great mystics claim emphatically that they had such experiences. It seems reasonable to believe that in fact they did have moments of supernormal lucidity. On the other hand their interpretations of those precious moments are inevitably formed in terms of the prevailing culture of their age, and must therefore inevitably be largely misinterpretation. And we too, if we have ever any glimmers of such experience, and if we try to explain them in terms of our own obviously imperfect modern culture, shall almost certainly be misinterpreting.

Then what of it? Each of us must judge for himself. For my part, when I seem to myself to be most “awake,” I do seem to see life from a new angle. I do precariously rise to a point of view less earth-bound than that of my ordinary experience. When I am most sensitively and most comprehensively aware of the universe (so far as it is within my ken) and of myself in it, and of those dear to me, I do find myself forced bewilderingly beyond the human view-point.

There is really nothing mysterious in this experience. It is simply that I see and feel things more clearly, and in juster proportion. The evil and horror and cruel tragedy of existence floods in crushingly upon my ordinary little self; but at the same time something in me wakes, and accepts, not merely with resignation, but with trembling joy.

Not that in this state I incline to throw up the sponge and acquiesce in evils that I had a chance of preventing. Strangely, I feel more, not less, morally hound to strive for the good ends. But when the issue is settled, and the facts unalterable, then I find myself accepting.

I do not pretend to be able to give a satisfactory interpretation of this experience, or even a satisfactory description of it. But that it should be explained away in terms of “repressed infantile cravings” or “glandular secretions” or what not, is a notion which has latterly come to seem to me almost laughably fantastic. The experience is so obviously my highest reach of mental and spiritual awareness. And it has so obviously a steadying and a vitalising influence throughout my life.

If humanism rejects this kind of experience as simply a delusion, then humanism is indeed not enough. If it insists on taking the current mental climate as final, and on explaining away everything in our experience which is not congenial to that climate, then humanism is a poor parochial ephemeral thing. If it takes as its final goal simply the fulfilling of the extant needs of extant mankind, and can allow no ultimate piety, no inarticulate worship of the unknowable but obscurely felt superhuman, then away with humanism! But if humanism can accept all this, and is only humanistic in the sense that it sees man’s supreme religious duty not in other-worldliness, but in striving to make the most of man here and now as a vessel of the spirit, then humanism is indeed the attitude needed for the proper conduct of mankind’s coming revolution.

Man Among the Stars

Looking at our experience as a whole, we see that man is a very small, frail, imperfect creature; but also we see that his imperfect nature points toward, and even perhaps contains the germ of, something much more admirable.

Man is surrounded by a physical immensity which we can only very dimly conceive. Mere physical size is not a matter of great importance, but we should try to see ourselves roughly in the right physical proportion to the rest of the universe. An imaginary model may help. Our galaxy is a system of some thousand million suns almost inconceivably remote from one another. The whole system is said to be a biscuit-shaped thing about a million light-years across. This means that light, which takes a few minutes to reach us from the sun, takes a million years to cross the galaxy. It is believed that there are ten million galaxies in the whole universe. The total number of stars in all the galaxies is said to be roughly the number of sand-grains on all the sea-shores. And each star is a sun.

Let us imagine a model of the universe in which the system of stars which is our own galaxy is represented by the area of Wales. Then far to the west, in the Atlantic, and to the east, in Europe, lie seven much smaller galaxies. Other galaxies, great and small, are spread through space at average intervals represented in our model by the distance from Wales to North America. The remotest galaxy at present visible through our most powerful telescope is actually five hundred million light-years distant. Even in our tiny model it would lie sixty thousand miles away, a quarter of the distance to the moon. The whole universe or cosmos, which according to relativity theory is “finite though boundless,” would correspond in our model to a volume about eleven million miles across, one eighth of the actual distance from the earth to the sun. Let us now turn to the dimensions of things within our galaxy. The distance between the sun and the nearest of the stars, actually four and a half light-years, would appear in our model as about thirteen feet. A light-year itself would be rather less than three feet. The movement of the stars in relation to one another, actually about twenty miles a second, would be represented by a speed of four inches in a hundred years. The earth’s orbit round the sun would be one thousandth of an inch in diameter. The sun himself would be a microscopic grain six millionths of an inch across. The earth would be a far smaller grain, one twentieth of a millionth of an inch.

Let us now consider the magnitudes of time, and then help ourselves by constructing a much reduced time-model. The formation of the earth and the other planets is believed to have occurred some two thousand million years ago. Half way between then and now the first recognisably “living” things may have first appeared. — The first approximately human beings perhaps occurred two million years ago. — The dawn of civilised living may be put at six thousand years ago. — Science began some three centuries ago. — As for the future, barring accidents, the earth will still be a habitable world for a period much longer than its present age. So, if all goes well, the human species may have a future on the planet about a million times as long as its past. Let our model be constructed on the scale of one year to a million years. Then the earth was formed two thousand years ago, and life appeared a thousand years after that. The human species has existed roughly one month. Civilisation began roughly five hours ago. Science is some fifteen minutes old. A longish human life-time is three or four minutes. Barring accidents, the earth should be habitable two thousand years hence.

But to repeat, spatial and temporal magnitudes, though impressive, are not in themselves of any importance. They are only to be taken into serious account because they may have some significance beyond themselves. The immensity of the physical universe does suggest a vast potentiality not merely of physical power but also of mentality. Our bodies are made of the same kind of physical units as the remotest stars; of electrons, protons, positrons, neutrons, and so on, and of electro-magnetic vibrations, Scientists are fond of insisting on the unique circumstances of the earth, and on the uniqueness of man. They are right. But when they insist that consciousness cannot occur save in these unique conditions, they become dogmatic. The one fundamental fact about the physical relation of life and consciousness (as we experience them) is that they are always associated with some change of energy potential. The particular set of chemical changes which forms the basis of life, as we know it, certainly has peculiarly favourable characters for living processes, but it is risky to affirm that only one set of physical changes can form an adequate basis of life and consciousness. It may be that purely sub-atomic energy-changes may in certain conditions be organised as vital processes. For all we know, the stars themselves, in which prodigious energy-changes are constantly occurring, may be minded organisms; or the galaxies, or the cosmos as a whole. On the other hand, man may indeed be the sole living germ of intelligent and spiritual being in the whole cosmos. Here complete agnosticism is demanded. All the same, we may reasonably allow the physical immensity to suggest to us the possibility that the cosmos, which is indeed bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, has some kind of mental and spiritual aspect, just as our bodies have; and that, associated with its physical immensities are spiritual immensities, inconceivable to us.

Scientists assure us that the whole cosmos is running down like a clock, and that at some very remote date, far more distantly future than the earth’s formation is distantly past, there will be nowhere in the cosmos the difference of energy-potential without which, it seems, life and consciousness cannot exist. How the process was started, no one knows; nor whether it will ever be reversed. Clearly we should take it into account in forming our view of existence. But it should not dismay us, nor make us feel that “after all, then, nothing really matters.” For in the first place we have in our own experience direct acquaintance with the things that matter; and they matter no less if the very possibility of them must some day cease. And, in the second place, the very fact that the physical process of the cosmos seems to have had a beginning, and seems destined some day to end, should add to our sense of the mystery and inconceivable potentiality of the underlying reality.

If we are surrounded by physical immensities, we are also surrounded by immensities of mental and spiritual potentiality. We have only to consider human nature itself to catch a glimpse of some of these. Man is essentially a half-made creature, or a very slight and inadequate sketch, not a master-piece. Though man is an organism of a high type, he is not perfected for the exercise of his special human powers, as the swallow and the albatross are perfected for flight. Along that particular line, evolution can go no farther. The problem of flight in the terrestrial atmosphere has been fully solved. But man’s problems are by no means solved. Man is not like the bird, but like the clumsy pterodactyl, or some earlier gliding, but not yet flying, reptile. He has indeed pioneered his way into a new range of experience and action, but he is not at home in it. He can only with difficulty leave the familiar ground which he shares with the sub-human creatures; and having left it, he can only clumsily flutter for a while, to sink back very soon to earth, exhausted. Owing to his superior central nervous system, he has powers of integrative action, of abstract thought, of creative imagination, of self-consciousness and other-consciousness and true community behaviour; but they are rudimentary powers. His capacity is limited in the last resort by the capacity of his central nervous system, which fixes his innate powers of sensitivity, discrimination and correlation. It may be that, like the pterodactyl, man is prevented by the fundamental limitations of his nature from any more successful solution of his biological problems; certainly there is no likelihood that his problems will be further solved by the automatic forces of biological evolution. On the other hand, his human powers, though rudimentary, are enough to enable him to take charge of his own destiny in a way which is impossible to any other species. At present his native capacity, rudimentary as it is, does not get the chance to express itself at all fully, because it is hampered in most individuals throughout the world by malnutrition, disease, damaging social and personal relations, faulty education and a weight of superstition, spiritistic or materialistic. When these crippling influences have been moved, average human nature should be able to fulfil its capacity, and attain a level of excellence far beyond its present achievement. And with the immense release of human capacity, formerly frustrated, mankind may open up for itself horizons at present wholly inconceivable.

But the possible release of human capacities which are at present frustrated must not blind us to the fact that this process of “making the best of “ actual human nature is limited by the actual structure of the human organism. This structure itself man may perhaps someday improve, by eugenical or biochemical methods, and so create in human nature new capacities. Man may, for instance, some day equip himself with a mightier brain. But all such dangerous adventures lie in the far future.

Even today, however, we can perhaps glimpse in our own lowly human experience vague intimations of orders of activity and awareness which lie almost wholly beyond the reach of human nature in its present form. Psychical research, though it has exposed a vast amount of fraud and vulgar self-display, has also found hints of very strange powers, such as telepathy and clairvoyance and even pre-cognition. These hints may in the end turn out to be sheer illusion; or they may indeed be fragmentary traces of ways of experience which can reach full development only on planes beyond the reach of man. Anyhow, as things stand, they do suggest that in the psychical sphere we are overhung by unexplored immensities.

Altogether, man’s situation in relation to the whole of things ought to fill him neither with arrogance nor with self-pitying despair, but rather with exhilaration and hope. And indeed, in moments when we seem to ourselves most sensitive, most spiritually awake, our acceptance of the universe can rise to an ecstasy of welcome. Moreover, in my experience at least, this may happen not only when all is well with us, but even when we are faced with great personal distress, and are also more than usually conscious of the terrible bulk of evil in the world. We feel the horror of it all, yet we dare not condemn; not merely because we know intellectually that evil is often in fact the way to fuller expression of the spirit, but also because we strangely feel, or seem for the moment actually to see, the overwhelmingly superhuman beauty that is like a light cast upon all things from some unseen source.

Bearing all these considerations, in mind, we must surely feel that the practical crisis confronting the human species today is probably no mere meaningless accident. More probably it represents a phase through which all the worlds of self-conscious and other-conscious beings must pass when they reach our stage of development. This thought may give our human crisis an added significance, at least, to those who have an inveterate impulse to see their situation in relation to the whole of things. Of course the main reason for service in our world-revolution lies nearer home. Whatever the nature of the universe, for us here and now the way of life lies through world-revolution. But I at least, have no sympathy with those who feel that to see our terrestrial affaire in the light of the stars is to find them diminished into insignificance. This is only so if we forget that stars and earth and human flesh itself are fundamentally of one stuff and texture. Paradoxically, we should see the stars in the light of human nature, and then see human affairs in the light of the stars.

Interplanetary Man? (1948)

CONTENTS

I. Introduction

II. If the Planets are Inhabited

III. If the Planets are Uninhabited

IV. Adapting Man to the Planets

V. What is it All For?

VI. Fundamental Values

VII. A Commonwealth of Worlds

VIII. Man and the Cosmos

I. Introduction

IT IS WITH some hesitation that I address this very expert Society. I feel much as a man might feel who, merely because he once wrote a children’s story about a magic carpet, has undertaken to discourse to a society of aeroplane designers about the future of aviation. Contributors to the Journal of this truly epoch-making Society overawe me with their scientific knowledge and their wealth of mathematical formulae! Let me at once put my cards on the table by confessing that my training in science ended when I failed to pass the “London Matric” in what used to be called “organic chemistry,” and that my knowledge of mathematics is far more sketchy even than my knowledge of the sciences. I am a dabbler in many subjects, an expert in none. As such, my only function to-night must be to bring to bear on interplanetary travel light from other fields of knowledge.

Modern civilization cannot get along without experts of many kinds. In most fields the day of the amateur is past. But just because this is pre-eminently an age of experts, we have to face the serious danger that the human race may come to consist wholly of experts none of whom understands what his fellows are doing, or why they are doing it, and all of whom are ignorant of the pattern of human life as a whole. Knowledge has become so vast that no single mind can speak with authority save in relation to his own particular corner of it. But such is the prestige of scientific expertism that scientists are apt to make far-reaching pronouncements about matters lying beyond their special competence, for instance about politics, ethics, religion and philosophy. One of the most serious problems of our day is to work out an educational technique which, while producing real experts in each field, will ensure that each one of them will also be a reasonably well informed and responsible democratic citizen. Even when this end has been achieved, it will still be necessary for some people to tackle the work of correlating the various growing points of thought. This is supposed to be the task of philosophers, or of one particular sort of philosophers. They have to learn something from all the main kinds of experts, and to relate the findings in each field to the findings in others. This is indeed a formidable task; and unless these universal intruders combine intelligence with humility, they are likely to make a mess of it, and to be reviled by the experts in every field.

It is therefore with a combination of humility and the hardihood that leads fools to rush in where angels fear to tread that I venture to talk to you at all. The only useful thing I can do is to try to show you how, as it seems to me, your bold and highly specialized venture of interplanetary travel fits into the total venture of man in this formidable universe.

I start with an assumption amply justified by the Society’s work. I assume that, if all goes well with man, men will, in fact, be able to reach the other planets within a few decades, and able to effect landings on them. This assumption may, of course, turn out to be unjustified. Unexpected difficulties may arise. Or, on the other hand, all may not go well with man. His folly may quite well lead to the destruction of civilization, to the extermination of his species, and even to the extinction of all terrestrial life. It is not entirely fantastic to surmise that he may even blow up his planet, and reduce it to a new swarm of asteroids. In gaining control of atomic energy, man clumsily grasps an instrument of incalculable potency, both for good and for evil. J. B. S. Haldane has suggested that it may be a law of nature that any species that gains atomic power before unifying its world-society must destroy itself. I should myself say, not merely “before it unifies its world-society,” but “before it disciplines itself to the true values.”

Probably there has never before, in the whole career of our species, been so momentous a crisis, as that of our day. Our own human species is said to have begun, about a quarter to half a million years ago. For most of this period the river of human life has wandered sluggishly through the plains of time. If we consider the average length of a human generation over this period to be about twenty-five years, then some twenty thousand generations have passed since Homo Sapiens began. During almost the whole of that vast period (perhaps a four-thousandth part of the aeon that has passed since the earth’s formation) men had little power, and change in human affairs was very slight. Tribes, no doubt, rose and fell. Improvements in technique were rarely discovered; and discovered only to be lost again, and re-discovered ages afterwards. Conditions in a man’s childhood were generally much the same as conditions in his old age. But at last this slow and tortuous advance in the techniques of production achieved agriculture, and later the building of cities, the founding of civilization. This seems to have occurred some six thousand years ago, or a little over two hundred and forty generations. The river of human life accelerated somewhat, tumbling forward in rapids. Power and leisure and comfort increased; but almost always only for the few. The masses seem to have been more and more deeply enslaved. Not till almost the end of this six thousand years, say three hundred years ago or about twelve generations, did modern science begin to take effect on human life. Thus man has used science only during the last thousandth part of his whole career, and his career is the last four-thousandth of the period since the earth was formed. In our own day, man is snatching at atomic power. We are the first generation of the atomic age. Change is already far more rapid than ever before, and will soon become catastrophic, for good or ill. The river of human life has reached a precipice. The cataract plunges — whither? It is quite possible that we may be the last of all human generations. Yet, barring accidents, the earth should be habitable for a period as long as it has yet existed, say two thousand million years, or some eighty million of our present human generations.

There seem to be three possible futures for man: (1) actual and speedy annihilation; (2) the creation of a world-wide totalitarian ant-state, based on atomic power and the reduction of all human individuals to robots; (3) the founding of a new kind of human world, in which the Aladdin’s lamp of science will be used wisely, instead of being abandoned to that blend of short-sighted stupidity and downright power-lust that has played so tragic a part in the application of science thus far. It is a platitude that man has gained power without wisdom. If he does not at the eleventh hour, or half a minute before zero hour, become just a little less silly, his doom is sealed. On the other hand, given a modicum of wisdom, we shall be able greatly to raise the conditions of life for all human beings, no matter what their colour, and to afford to every one of them the chance to develop and express such capacity as he has for truly human living and truly human work in the great common enterprise of man. What that enterprise is or should be, I shall consider later.

This possibility of affording to all men full opportunity is now no merely Utopian dream. Its progressive attainment is at last physically possible. Nothing now stands in the way but the ignorance, the stupidity and the evil will of men. And let me say at once, though I shall later enlarge on this point, that the promise is not simply one of increased luxury and hoggish ease. Rather it is a promise of a deepening and enriching of human experience. Man’s present condition of constant frustration and torment and fear makes most men to-day think only in terms of the hope of luxury and security. But if ever we do successfully turn our present dangerous corner, and a generation appears that is freed from crippling conditions, then men’s minds will at last be able effectively to desire something more than mere luxury and security. Be sure, also, that in the promised world there will be no lack of challenge and danger and even tragedy. The novelty will be rather that man will have outgrown at last the diseases of mere infancy, and will be able to enter for the first time into the more dangerous, more troubled, but ampler and richer and more conscious life of adolescence.

II. If the Planets are Inhabited

AT THIS MOST critical moment of human history man finds himself on the very threshold of a new freedom, the freedom to travel beyond the terrestrial atmosphere and explore the whole solar system. What should he do with this new power?

Much depends on the conditions of the planets that he visits. Two possibilities must be noted. Either man will find elsewhere in the solar system other intelligences, or he will not. If he does, then again there are two possibilities. One is the possibility of wars between the worlds. This situation might perhaps cause at least a temporary unification of mankind in face of the common danger, much as Russia and the West united against Hitler. The War of Worlds would be followed either by man’s defeat and ruin or by his victory, and then by exploitation of the conquered races for man’s advancement. The other possibility is interplanetary co-operation. But in view of our sad inability even to unite mankind, it seems extremely unlikely that man in his present state would succeed in co-operating with alien races on other planets. Far more likely is it that the rival imperialisms and ideologies of this planet would be extended to struggle against each other in other worlds, tyrannizing over and ultimately destroying the native peoples. If, on the other hand, man does soon succeed in unifying his world-society, then it is at least conceivable that some kind of mutually profitable symbiosis with intelligent races on other planets might be established.

On the whole, however, it seems unlikely that any of the other worlds within the solar system is inhabited by any race even approaching man in intelligence. Bear with me while I summarize the data, and correct me later if I am mistaken. Let us begin with our nearest neighbour, the moon. I am told that it is almost wholly without atmosphere and water. There seems to be no reason at all for supposing that it has, or ever did have, intelligent inhabitants. Of the planets themselves, Mercury is far too hot on one side and far too cold on the other. Venus is more temperate, and has a copious atmosphere; but apparently it lacks oxygen, and would not support life such as we know on our own planet. Water also may be lacking. Mars, owing to its feeble gravitation, has already lost most of its atmosphere and most of its water. Indeed, its polar caps may turn out to be composed of carbon dioxide snow, or something worse. However, there is considerable evidence that vegetation of some sort does exist on Mars; but certainly no convincing evidence of the artifacts of an intelligent race. Probably the process of biological evolution on the planet was less rapid than that of the earth, since on the whole, the larger the geographical field, the greater the chance of the occurrence of a wealth of varieties on which natural selection could work. Further, the evolutionary process was probably cut short or greatly retarded by the rapid deterioration of conditions. On the whole, then, it seems unlikely that on Mars life (such as we know) has evolved to the human level. The asteroids are of course much too small. On the other hand, Jupiter and Saturn, and probably all the outer planets, are too big, and have apparently quite the wrong kind of atmosphere for life of the terrestrial type.

Of course, we cannot entirely reject the possibility that on some of the planets life has evolved on a different chemical basis, and that atmospheres lethal to us may be hospitable to biochemical processes alien to ours. But I understand that terrestrial life depends on the unique diversity of the carbon compounds, and that, though a biochemical system based on some element other than carbon is not possible, it would have a far smaller range of compounds, and so the scope of its biological evolution would be very restricted. However, we should not dismiss the possibility that Jupiter or some other great planet is inhabited by minute intelligent creatures whose constitution is quite unknown to us. The evidence is opposed to this view, but not overwhelmingly.

At this point I cannot resist a digression, and indulgence in the wildest fantasy. Fundamentally life seems to consist of a utilizing of some particular form of the general process of the increase of entropy so as to gather power for the maintenance of vital activities. Life taps and canalizes part of the vast spate of energy, thus forming a “mill-stream” by which its own little “water-wheel” may be worked. Well, might there not be living creatures based not on chemical action but on the energy released by the disintegration of atoms? Might there not be, not on any planet but in the sun’s turbulent outer layers or in its middle depths, flame-like organisms of this type, and might not some species of them equal or excel man in intelligence? This is indeed a flagrant digression from the purpose of this paper, for it seems quite impossible that man should ever in his space-ships invade the sun and make contact with such incandescent beings.

To return to our subject, it seems very unlikely that there is any intelligent race anywhere in the solar system, except mankind. Mars is the only planet that should make us hesitate to accept this conclusion, but in this case too the betting is heavily against any highly developed life.

III. If the Planets are Uninhabited

IF MAN FINDS the planets uninhabited, what should he do with them? If mankind is still disunited, no doubt there will be a race between rival imperialisms to annex those vast virgin territories. The coming struggle between America and Asia, with Europe as a battlefield, might well spread to Mars. Already one of our vigorous but still culturally adolescent cousins across the Atlantic is reported to have suggested that the moon should be annexed as soon as possible as an industrial field for American exploitation. Alas! Must the first flag to be planted beyond the earth’s confines be the Stars and Stripes, and not the banner of a united Humanity?

In passing, let us remind ourselves that merely to circumnavigate a planet does not necessarily imply the possibility of landing on it and walking about, let alone staying there and undertaking any sort of survey or industrial operation. Clearly the pioneers would have to be equipped not only with food and water and air for their journey but with pressure-suits, oxygen and an ample water supply for their stay on the planet. And as things stand, they might also need weapons to defend themselves from attack by emissaries from rival terrestrial states.

But let us suppose that mankind has at last become effectively united, both politically and socially. Then what should a united mankind do with the planets?

Obviously, the first thing to do would be to explore them. Sheer scientific curiosity would certainly insist on thoroughly surveying them. They would offer the kind of lure that was offered in the nineteenth century by Darkest Africa, the north and south poles and the unclimbed Himalayas. Bold young people would be very ready to give their services for planetary exploration. Their effective motive would probably be sheer adventure, though the rational justification of such costly and dangerous undertakings would of course be the advance of science. It is conceivable, however, that everything really significant about those desert worlds might be learned by merely circumnavigating them without landing on them. Perhaps men will be so absorbed in the general advance of science and in the exciting task of creating a really adult human society on earth, that they will simply never bother to take the necessary trouble to set foot on another planet. No doubt this is unlikely, because the irrational, romantic glamour of opening up unexplored worlds will be too strong, even if those worlds turn out to be inhospitable and dreary wastes.

Apart from the motives of sheer curiosity and sheer adventure, the obvious motive for exploring the planets is the hope of discovering immense fields of natural resources, and exploiting them for human welfare. They might, for instance, yield valuable stores of uranium or other sources of atomic power, or any of the rarer elements or minerals needed by man. I am quite incompetent in this field, and must merely note that the motive of economic gain may play a leading part in man’s dealings with the planets.

Let us admit, however, that it would be far best for man to postpone his exploitation of alien planets until he had concentrated seriously on improving terrestrial conditions. Equipped with highly developed scientific knowledge and atomic power, he should first undertake the comparatively easy task of turning his native planet into a more convenient and more delectable home. Climates might be improved, coastlines modified, deserts irrigated, jungles tamed, mountains (where they happened to be obstructive) blasted out of the way. Mineral wealth might be brought up from the depths of the terrestrial globe, Antarctica and the great Arctic Islands might be warmed and colonized. And so on. But let us hope that none of these vast enterprises will be attempted till mankind has attained a rather higher level of wisdom, and has a clear knowledge of the kind of world that would really favour human development. For my part, since I am by nature something of a savage, I cannot help hoping also that many regions will be preserved in their wild state for the recreation and refreshment of a species which, after all, is biologically adapted to a primitive environment.

But however desirable this reconstruction of the earth’s surface, sooner or later for good or ill, a united mankind, equipped with science and power, will probably turn its attention to the other planets, not only for economic exploitation, but also as possible homes for man. Perhaps the most promising is Mars. If the venture seemed really worth while, that small cold, arid world might be rendered at least habitable, if not a paradise for man. All the necessary materials would be present in the crust of the planet itself. Human ingenuity, with atomic power, should be able to increase the atmosphere and the water supply, irrigate the desert surface, produce a suitable vegetation, and even raise the surface temperature. Whether this huge undertaking would be in fact worth while or not, is a question which I shall consider later. At present I suggest merely that it probably could be accomplished. In frivolous moments one feels that Mars might be used as an extra-terrestrial “Siberia” in which to exile all our really tiresome people. But I fear that the little planet would soon be overcrowded, and Earth depopulated.

Like Mars, the moon could perhaps be rendered distressfully habitable by terrestrial man; though in this case, presumably, the artificial atmosphere would escape far more rapidly, and would need to be constantly replenished. Incidentally, much of it would be drawn off by the Earth, thus complicating our terrestrial problems by increasing our atmospheric pressure.

What of Venus? The task would probably be much more formidable. From the little that we know of Venerian conditions, it would seem that the first problem would be to alter the composition of the already existing atmosphere, which, so far as is now known, is quite unsuited to terrestrial life. And water, if indeed it is absent, would have to be created in bulk. Then we should have to produce a vegetation for the maintenance of a supply of free oxygen. But on the whole, though Venus offers a more difficult problem than Mars, it might in the long run become a more satisfactory home for man. It is much larger, and of course far warmer. Instead of affording the human colonists a distressful and precarious existence, it might in time rival and surpass the Earth as a home for intelligent beings.

The greater planets would seem to offer no possibility of human colonization, owing to unfavourable atmosphere, chilly remoteness from the sun, and such gravitational pressure that a man’s body would be an insupportable burden.

IV. Adapting Man to the Planets

IT IS TIME to approach the whole matter from another angle. If the mountain will not come to Mohamet, Mohamet must go to the mountain. If the planets are unadaptable to man in his present form, perhaps man might adapt himself to the alien environments of those strange worlds. Or rather, perhaps a combination of the two processes might enable man to make the best possible use of those worlds. In fact, given sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical technique, it might be possible to breed new human types of men to people the planets.

Once more, Mars seems to offer the best opportunity. It should be fairly easy to produce a variety of homo sapiens capable of surviving the rigours of an improved Martian environment. Perhaps the best human stock from which to start would be the Tibetans, who are used to a cold, arid climate and a rarified atmosphere. But unless the Martian atmosphere could be augmented quite a lot, and the surface temperature greatly raised, the specialized human Martians would probably lack the vital energy for any kind of highly developed civilization. Only where nature blossoms with a certain luxuriance can the human spirit itself blossom. However, by a combination of environmental and eugenical alteration, it might perhaps be possible in the long run to establish a vigorous population on Mars.

On Venus, given oxygen and water, man’s biochemical and eugenical technique might perhaps produce a well-adapted human variety or a new human species. Since Venerian man would have to stand great heat, the work might start with experiments on some Equatorial varieties of our species. Presumably in that hot world a dark skin would be useful; unless, indeed, permanent shade was maintained by a cloud-blanket over the whole planet. There would certainly be a tendency for a large proportion of the planet’s water to remain permanently suspended in the atmosphere.

On the outer planets, eugenics would have to play a major part. Even if the problems of the atmosphere and the extreme cold could be solved, there would be very great difficulties to face. It would be necessary to create a specially adapted human species of very small stature to cope with the excess of gravitation. This might well involve a serious reduction in the size of the cerebral cortices, with a consequent reduction of intelligence. For intelligence seems to depend on the actual number of top-level cells in the nervous system; or, as it were, on the complexity of the telephone exchange. Thus the attainment of human intelligence in a very small mammal would be impossible, unless some way could be found for greatly reducing the size of the individual cells and the thickness of the fibres without impairing efficiency. There is one other conceivable way out of the difficulty. By very drastic eugenical operation on the existing human form, it might be possible to enable the present human brain to be supported, in spite of excessive gravitation, by throwing man into the quadruped position, greatly strengthening the four legs, and at the same time pushing the head far backwards so as to distribute its weight evenly between the fore and hind legs. But what of the problem of providing hands? The fore-limbs would be fully occupied and unavailable for manipulation. My only suggestion is that the nose might be greatly elongated into a trunk, equipped with delicate grasping instruments like fingers. It would probably be desirable to have two trunks, if not three. The eyes, by the way, would have to be projected well forward from the thrown-back brain-pan, otherwise Homo Jovianus would not be able to see where he was stepping.

Enough has been said to suggest that the colonization of some of the planets may in time become practicable, if terrestrial man continues to develop his control of the physical environment through atomic power, and if he attains sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical art to breed, or otherwise construct, human or quasi-human races adapted to strange environments.

But a word of caution is necessary. It is extremely important that none of these eugenical ventures should be attempted without thorough knowledge of the probable indirect results of each proposed change. For instance, it would be disastrous to aim at very small stature without doing something to avoid reduction in intelligence. Further, it is necessary to have very clear ideas as to which human characteristics are unimportant and might be safely sacrificed, and which are indispensable and should never be endangered. Thus good vision, high intelligence, co-operativeness and manual dexterity are indispensable and should if possible be increased; while teeth and cranial hair could if necessary be sacrificed. The result of thoughtless “messing about” with human nature might be the psychological and spiritual ruin of man.

V. What is it All For?

THIS BRINGS ME at last to the real crux of my subject. Would there be any point in colonizing the planets? What are we getting at? What is it all for? Why not just stay put on our native planet and muck along as before? Broadly, there seem to be three possible motives that might control man’s dealings with the planets. (I exclude scientific curiosity, which, though it might be an important motive with some individuals, is not likely to be the determining factor.)

First, the physical resources of those worlds might be exploited simply in order to increase the luxury of human beings on earth. This aim might involve the creation of industrial settlements on the planets, but it might not involve large-scale colonization. The policy would be simply to use the planets to afford to human beings as much pleasure as possible, to give to all of them the greatest possible affluence; in fact, to create a society in which every individual would have the privileges that only millionaires have to-day. Drudgery would be completely abolished. All manner of superfine food and drink, and all manner of ingenious amusements would be constantly available at the cost of merely pressing buttons or switches. Not only the “movies” but also the “feelies” and “smellies” and “sexies” would provide unending beatitude, in the manner foreseen by Aldous Huxley and others. Any subsequent boredom or lassitude would be at once corrected by means of fresh interests or appropriate drugs. No-one would ever do anything unpleasant or uninteresting. Machines of all sorts would be the tireless and obedient slaves of every man. All men would be aristocrats in the worse sense of the word, not the better. All would be pleasure-addicts, accustomed to every luxury; spoilt children who, through being shielded from the sterner possibilities of life, would simply never grow up. Of course, before the attainment of this strictly hedonistic Utopia, many men would have had to live laboriously and dangerously and devotedly, in the cause of science and exploration and invention, in order to make such a luxury-world possible. But once the new order had been thoroughly established, it might maintain itself perpetually with a minimum of direction of human action.

Most of us, I think, would agree that, though a certain amount of luxury is a harmless and even civilizing thing, there is a point beyond which the increase of luxury leads to spiritual degradation. Man has risen by versatility and intelligence. If he were to enter at last upon a stable condition of perfect adaptation to an unchanging environment, he would gradually lose his distinctive powers. Intelligence would atrophy. The world-society might perhaps survive unchanged for millions of years; but sooner or later man would be confronted with some new challenge from the environment, and would have lost the wit to cope with it. I conclude that if the fruit of all the devotion of the British Interplanetary Society is to be merely the debauching of mankind with the riches of other worlds, you had better all stop paying your subscriptions.

The second possible aim in relation to the planets is simply to increase man’s power over the environment, and to extend that power so as to tackle fresh environments.

In the heyday of the industrialization of Europe and America, power did seem to many people an end in itself. The craving to leave one’s mark on the environment, any sort of mark, so long as it is my mark, made actually by me, is very strong in a certain type of uncultured mind. Human animals carve their initials on trees, rocks, school desks and public monuments. They deface beautiful objects simply for the lust of power. They satisfy their primitive impulses for construction thoughtlessly, without regard to the remoter consequences; sometimes harmlessly, but sometimes disastrously in ways that are less constructive than destructive. Children harmlessly make mud pies or play with meccano sets. Adults less innocently build empires or great commercial ventures. Generally some fairly plausible excuse is found for all this feverish activity. The mud pies are magic castles; the empires, instruments of civilization; the commercial ventures, purveyors of comfort or luxury. But at bottom the motive is often simply the insatiable itch to make a mark on the environment, any old mark, but the bigger the better. In itself, the impulse is harmless, even worthy; but we have to learn to make our mark in inoffensive and if possible actually useful ways.

More precisely, the itch to leave a mark is quite wholesome, on condition that, even if it does not actually serve some higher aim, at least it does not positively hinder proper development. It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere obsessive doodling or meddling on however vast a scale. The danger for mankind as a whole is that, having solved its present urgent problems it will slip in to the assumption that the goal of all its corporate action is simply to make a bigger and bigger mark on a bigger and bigger environment. Power is all too apt to become an end in itself. In the old days self-assertive individuals aimed at local tyranny or world empire. Henceforth they will be more likely to dominate either through money power or through fulfilling important functions domineeringly in a highly organized state, perhaps a world-state of totalitarian type. It has been said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Those who control the world-state, whether it is capitalist or communist or social-democratic, will be in danger of grave corruption unless they are imperturbably orientated to the true values. They will readily idealize their own power lust, and persuade mankind that the right goal for man is simply dominance over the environment. And so in time the planet may approximate to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which society is organized to the extreme pitch of efficiency with the aim simply of producing as much as possible. In that horrid world the workers are given unlimited easy pleasure, while the elite, the bureaucrats and technicians, have the satisfaction of directing the whole life of society.

If the future terrestrial society is organized on these principles, then the other planets will be used for the same end. Ostensibly the aim will be to use them as sources of raw material for man’s comfort and luxury, on this planet or others; but behind this orthodox economic motive will lie the unacknowledged motive of sheer power. And if individuals can be corrupted by power, so can a whole species. Man may become obsessed with a passion merely to make a big mark on the solar system. In principle there is no difference between this aim and that of the urchin who sets fire to the heath or throws stones at windows.

The third possible motive for gaining control of the planets is that of using them to make the “most” of man, or the “best” of him; in fact, for the full expression of the most developed capacities of the human species. Here we have a goal which, though extremely vague, is more promising. What does it really imply? Broadly, it may be interpreted in two different ways, one purely humanistic, the other involving a reference to something over and above man, though it is known to us mainly through its imperfect manifestation in man himself. The question to be faced is this. Are we justified in regarding man simply as an end in himself? Is “good” simply whatever man wills? Is a thing to be called “good” merely because or in that man wills it? Or, on the other hand, is man to be regarded rather as a means to an end, an instrument for the fulfilling of an end that is in some sense independent of his actual nature in its present stage of development? These questions cannot be even clearly stated, let alone answered, without raising very difficult philosophical problems. They cannot be truly answered with a plain “yes” or “no.” Rather the answer must be of the type, “In one sense man is an end, in another sense not an end but an instrument.” In the same manner the physicists may justifiably say that in one sense an electron is a particle, and in another sense not a particle but a train of waves.

VI. Fundamental Values

PERHAPS WE SHALL be able to form more precise ideas on this subject (which really does concern an interplanetary society) if we try to answer the question, “What is man?”

Clearly, whatever else he is, he certainly is (or has) a body, which is a physical or electromagnetic system of protons, electrons, etc. J. B. S. Haldane (I think) remarks somewhere, that the human body contains some millions of millions of millions of millions of hydrogen atoms, and corresponding amounts of other elements. Julian Huxley (I think) has pointed out that man’s body is approximately half-way in size between an electron and the whole universe. Astronomically, man is very small, an inconceivably minute parasite on a minute planetary grain floating in an immense void that is extremely sparsely sprinkled with great suns. Size is in itself of no importance; but if in the minute human body the physical can be the vehicle of some degree of mind or spirit, how great may be the mental and spiritual capacity of the whole cosmos of star-systems!

Biologically, man (as we have already noted), or rather our own species of man, which we have ludicrously called Homo Sapiens, is of very recent growth. But he is the most developed of terrestrial organisms. That is, he is objectively the most complex, integrated, versatile. He has specialized in being unspecialized. Hence his remarkable adaptability, and his dominance over all other species. He has indeed made a bigger mark on this planet than any other species, and a much more complex and purposeful and organized mark. Basically he remains just a mammal, a primate. His unique gift is his relatively high intelligence, which has depended on the unique development of hands and eyes and cerebral cortices. There is good reason to believe, however, that man is a very imperfect species. The bird is just about perfected for its appropriate life, for flight in the terrestrial atmosphere; but man, though he has powers far beyond the range of the bird, has not perfected those powers. In his appropriate medium of intelligent purposive action, abstract thought, personal sensibility and artistic creation, he is little better than a clumsy flying lizard.

Psychologically, what is it that distinguishes man from the sub-human creatures, even from his nearest relatives, the apes? He has the same ground plan of organs, reflexes, innate behaviour and emotional reaction. He shows fear, aggression, self-regard, sexuality, gregariousness, curiosity, manipulative meddlesomeness, and so on. What is distinctive in him is his superior power of discrimination, of attending to likenesses and differences. Hence his native intelligence, by which I mean the power of solving novel problems, not to be solved by instinct or by established habit. This unique aptitude for discrimination and intelligence has opened up for him vast new universes or experience, impossible to any other terrestrial creature. All intelligence involves the power of attending to the relevant while ignoring the irrelevant. Hence, in man, comes the power of abstraction, of attending to a particular character and relating it to other instances of the same character, and giving the identity a name, such as “red,” “two,” “pleasant.” Hence language and all the worlds of abstract thought and of concrete poetry.

Man’s great power of concentration of attention has been applied not only to the environment but also to his own nature. Thus he has developed the possibility of a unique kind of self-awareness and awareness of other selves. In fact, he has become capable of personality, and of genuinely personal relationships, including all the forms of developed loving and hating. From this has arisen a distinctively human or personal kind of sociality. In sub-human animals, sociality is no more than a combination of the impulse of gregariousness (including self-abasement to the herd) and the impulse of self-assertion, rising to dominance over the herd. Of course, human beings themselves often behave in this sub-human way, but the distinctively human or personal way is something of a different kind, in that it involves respect for the other as a conscious person. The distinctively human society is best understood by considering the nature of genuine human love, which again is beyond the range of sub-human consciousness.

When John really loves Jane, he does what no beast can do. He does not merely have a pleasant glow of feeling about her. Of course he has this, but something more also. He is aware of her as a conscious being, distinct from himself, and different in character and needs and capacities. He accepts her as she is, without wishing to impose his will on her. He respects her as a person, takes responsibility for her, cherishes her, depends on her, is mentally enriched by knowing her and loving her, and is profoundly moulded by her. The two together form a little society of distinct beings united in mutual love, and cherishing not only each other but also the “we” that they together form. No doubt they also remain self-regarding individualists, and their self-interests often conflict. All love is complicated by hate. But in genuine love the conflict is largely transcended in the will for mutual adjustment and mutual dependence.

Perhaps I ought to apologize for wandering so far from the planets. But, believe me, this digression is very relevant to my theme. If one undertakes to discuss what man ought to do with the planets, one must first say what one thinks man ought to do with himself. And that is what I am trying to do. It cannot be done without a certain amount of fundamental thinking, not in the way of theorizing about the universe, but through trying to get a clear view of human experience itself.

Well, to continue this venture, from the experience of love or friendship or some form of genuine community in the field of personal contacts, the human individual may rise to the will for genuine community in all his dealings with his fellow human beings, no matter how slight his contact with them. Thus arises the ideal of universal Christian love, or the brotherhood of man. This ideal has haunted man for thousands of years. In one form or another, it has played an important part in all the great religions of the world. In Christianity, love is deified. God, we are told, actually is, in some obscure way, Love. The Holy Spirit is Love. And love is believed by Christians to be the fundamental power which created the universe. To believe such a proposition seems to me to go far beyond the legitimate scope of human thinking; but the fact that in the past many of the best minds have believed this has to be taken into account.

Why is it that love, kindness, fellowship, genuine community between persons, in fact, the distinctively human or rather personal kind of sociality, has been so greatly praised? Obviously it has survival value. And if you are determined to explain the most developed kinds of human experience and behaviour, simply in terms of the social conditioning of primitive impulses, quite a plausible explanation can be given. But this explanation does not go to the root of the matter. It is sheer dogma that the most developed and conscious human experience and behaviour can be fully explained simply in terms of its primitive sources. To do so is to leave out the most distinctive thing about man, namely his power of standing outside himself, to some extent, and being interested in things other than himself for their own sake. Anyone who has really been in love should understand this. Anyone who has had any genuine religious feelings should know it even better. The great Saints, Western and Eastern, were concerned (I should say) with experiences at the highest reach of human capacity, experiences which cannot be adequately described in terms of merely primitive impulses. I would add that neither should we accept uncritically the saints’ own interpretations of their experiences, stated in terms of their own contemporary ideas about the fundamental nature of the universe. Human language and human thought itself were not then, and are not even now, sufficiently developed to make reliable statements about those most fully “awakened” experiences. Nevertheless, the experiences themselves, I suggest, are extremely important for anyone concerned with the proper ordering of human life. Someone may protest that, however important these experiences were to the saints, they are of no importance to us, because we do not share in them. The objection is worth answering. No doubt the saints had religious experience in a peculiarly vivid and compelling form which most of us cannot attain. But even ordinary men and women, or at any rate the more sensitive of them, if they take the trouble to discipline themselves a little, and concentrate their attention on their felt relation with each other and with the universe, can quite well discover in their own experience the kind of thing that the great mystics were trying to describe.

For lack of a better term, I shall call this most significant kind of experience “spiritual experience” or “experience of spirit.” But I hasten to add that the word “spirit” need not be taken to mean some thing or substance other than matter, which is conceived as another thing or substance. Still less must spirit mean a divine person or God. I mean by “spirit” simply a particular way of experiencing and behaving. In fact, it is that kind of life which Christians sometimes call “the life of the spirit” or the “Way” of the Spirit, and Chinese sages have called simply “Tao,” the “Way.” What kind of a life the spiritual life is, I shall consider presently, trying to describe it in modern language and in relation to modern experience.

Meanwhile, I suggest that whatever theories men invent to justify the goodness or rightness of that way of life, what actually confronts them in their direct experience is simply a vision of the Way itself as supremely right. Whatever the status of spirit in the universe, what matters is simply spirit. The saints and sages yearned for the full expression of spirit in their own lives and the lives of others. They yearned to outgrow, or wake up from, the life of mere self-interest. They sought the ampler view. They sought, through self-denial, a real self-detachment for the sake of the ampler view, the deeper, more penetrating view. Through the discipline of the ordinary self-interested worldly self, they sought to “wake up,” and adopt the point of view of a supposed universal self. Sometimes they persuaded themselves that they were actually gathered up into that supreme self in mystical communion; but even if one feels very sceptical about this, and about the existence of such a universal self, one must recognize that what they strove for was a transcendence of the limitations of mere self-concern, a self-forgetting through concern for other individuals and for the whole universe. In fact, a vision of the spirit as an ideal way of living, and as in some sense what we are for, intruded into their ordinary experience and claimed their allegiance.

But what sort of a way of life is the spiritual life? Leaving out the intellectual trappings of religious and metaphysical doctrine about the universe and fundamental reality, and bearing in mind aspects of knowledge that were not available to the ancients, I think we can express the essence of the matter in modern language. The very brief account that I shall give would not satisfy the ancient teachers or their modern followers, just because it leaves out the metaphysical doctrines; yet it does seem to me to describe the essence of their experience, in so far as it can have any meaning at all for ordinary human beings.

I must begin with a few words about the nature of personality, for the spiritual way is essentially a way for personal beings. Something is aware of something. “I,” whatever that is, am aware of my body in its physical environment, and also of my “self” or psychological personality (as a creature with a certain character, needs and capacities), also of other persons, of societies of persons, of abstractions such as physical laws and moral principles, and (in a very sketchy way) of a whole objective universe in which I am. No doubt my awareness of these things is very confused and erroneous, but we all assume that there is something to be aware of, something which is independent of our experiencing it. In fact, there is an objective universe.

Now the innermost ring of objectivity, so to speak, is my own body in its relation with a physical environment. My body is experienced as a going concern, as dynamic, as tending toward certain actions and needing certain things of the environment. I consciously “espouse” my body’s needs. I desire their fulfillment. For instance, when my body needs food, I desire the activity of eating. Similarly with the needs for sleep, sexual activity, and so on. In infancy this innermost ring of objectivity is all that is experienced. But gradually the growing child becomes aware of another ring of objectivity, namely that of conscious persons. He begins to be self-conscious and other-conscious. He “espouses” the needs of his own psychological person, and (less constantly) of a few other persons, such as his mother. In genuine love we “espouse” another person, forming a psychological symbiosis with him or her. The important point is that both the other person and my own self, with its particular character and needs and powers, are facts objective to my awareness of them. Of course, my awareness of them may be largely erroneous, I may make mistakes about them, as about any other objective facts. But they are not just fancy. They are what they are.

Beyond the sphere of the persons with whom I have personal contact, we may place another ring of objectivity, namely that on which occur all societies of persons, and the incipient society of mankind as a whole. Beyond again, comes the ring of abstract ideas, true and false, both kinds being objective to the experiencing “I.” True ideas, in the final analysis, are simply objective characters apprehended by minds, and abstracted from their particular settings. The idea “dog” is the common character distinctive of all dogs. Of course, all ideas are partly false, some more so, some less. But even the false elements in ideas are rooted in objectivity. So to speak, they result from “squinting” objective characters together in wrong patterns, much as the drunkard may see two moons instead of one. He sees one moon twice, or in two places. Consider the idea of a “centaur,” half horse, half man. There’s no such beast; but the idea “centaur” is the product of “squinting” half a man and most of a horse together, and so forming a new abstract idea.

Now the overwhelmingly most important abstraction is the spirit, the ideal way of life. It is an ideal which is implied in, and emerges from, the actual experienced nature of personal beings, much as the law of gravity is implied in and emerges from the actual experienced nature of the behaviour of falling objects and the movements of planets and stars.

In the same way the ideas of good and evil and all possible kinds of values arise out of the impact of some region of objectivity on the conscious individual. Mere abstract subjectivity is no more than a featureless possibility of being aware of something, including values. All values arise from the conscious “espousal” of objective needs. Some are needs of one’s own body, some are the more subtle needs of persons, myself and other selves.

Note further that personality involves community. There cannot be true personality save in true community with other persons. By community I mean not simply a relationship in which each individual strives to use others for his own advancement but the distinctively human social relationship, in which individuals are united in mutual respect for each other as persons. The spiritual way is essentially a way for persons in community with other persons. As Christians might put it, it is the way for a “Church,” not simply for the individual, seeking individualistic salvation. As Communists might put it, it is the way for comrades working devotedly in a common cause.

Now I suggest that the spirit is essentially the way of life in which we strive towards full, comprehensive and true awareness of the objective universe, and toward appropriate feeling and appropriate creative action in relation to it. The universe, of course, includes oneself as an object, a self among other selves. In the spiritual life one strives for sensitive and intelligent awareness of things in the universe (including persons), and of the universe as a whole. One strives also for appropriate feeling about things and people and the universe as a whole, without prejudice in favour of oneself as an individual or one’s own family or nation, or even the human species. Finally one strives for appropriate and creative action in relation to all this.

The experience of the spirit, as the supreme good and as in some sense what we are “for,” needs no support from metaphysical argument or religious doctrine. It is simply “given,” as a datum, to the relatively awake mind, or rather to the awake mind that has not been perverted by obsession with some minor good, such as power, or bemused by some particular theory, such as materialism or theism. Let us never forget that, if theism is a frail invention of the human intellect, so is materialism. All such ambitious theories are almost certainly more false than true. All such metaphysical speculation, though interesting and educatively valuable, is quite unreliable, whether as support or denial of the experience of spirit, which needs no support other than its own overwhelming authority for the awakened mind. We all know the difference between being less awake and more awake, less responsive to the objective environment and more so. And we all trust our relatively more awake states more than our relatively somnolent states; for the very good reason that, the more comprehensively and accurately we are aware of the objective environment, the more our enterprises are likely to succeed. The kind of experience that I have called “spiritual” comes with an undeniable sense of “being very much awake,” in the sense that it presents a vision or revelation of aspects of the objective reality that are not revealed in the self-absorbed kind of experience.

Incidentally, the more awake kinds of experience are also the more developed biologically and psychologically, and have had survival value in the long run. But in the sphere of spirit, survival value is not itself the test. The criterion must be simply the verdict of the most lucid consciousness itself, which emphatically declares the way of life called spiritual to be the highest good.

VII. A Commonwealth of Worlds

IN THE LIGHT of this all too superficial discussion of the spirit, I can now say what, in my view, is the right use of the planets.

If any of them is inhabited by intelligent beings, then clearly man should do his utmost to adopt a relationship of genuine community with those non-human intelligences, seeking earnestly to enter into their point of view, and to co-operate with them for mutual enrichment, both economic and spiritual. But since it is unlikely that any other planet is in fact inhabited by intelligent beings, then the question that we must answer is, what should man do with those virgin worlds? And the answer is that he should deal with them precisely as with his native world. He should use them neither for the sole purpose of increasing his luxury, nor simply as a means to power for mere power’s sake. He should use them for the spirit. He should avail himself of their resources in such ways as to advance the expression of the spirit in the life of mankind. He should use them so as to afford to every human being the greatest possible opportunity for developing and expressing his distinctively human capacity as an instrument of the spirit, as a centre of sensitive and intelligent awareness of the objective universe, as a centre of love of all lovely things, and of creative action for the spirit. He should strive to make of the human race a glorious example of personality-in-community, a society of very diverse individuals united in mutual insight, understanding and sympathy, and in co-operative expression of the spirit. And for the full expression of the spirit in any community, the greater the diversity of individuals the better, provided that they all have sufficient imagination to enter into each other’s points of view.

It is in this connection that the planets open up new possibilities. If man can establish in some of those other worlds new and specially adapted human or quasi-human races, then those races, living in their appropriate ways, should develop new expressions of the spirit at present inconceivable to terrestrial man. And through the intercourse of these diverse worlds, provided that each species has sufficient imaginative power, all should be spiritually enriched. Thus the goal for the solar system would seem to be that it should become an interplanetary community of very diverse worlds each inhabited by its appropriate race of intelligent beings, its characteristic “humanity,” and each contributing to the common experience its characteristic view of the universe. Through the pooling of this wealth of experience, through this “commonwealth of worlds,” new levels of mental and spiritual development should become possible, levels at present quite inconceivable to man.

A homely analogy may be hazarded. The really satisfactory marriage is not one in which husband and wife have identical character and interests, but one in which each is as different as possible from the other, though each has enough imagination to enter into the other and share the other’s interests. In fact, the satisfactory marriage is a unity in diversity and a spiritual symbiosis.

Another analogy may help. Mankind to-day is deeply divided between two profoundly different systems of thought and value, two ideologies. Roughly, these ideologies centre upon America and Russia respectively. Each, I believe, contains very important truth which the other ignores. If war is avoided, and if in due season each side can learn from the other, the result may be a far more adult and spiritually enriched humanity than could ever have occurred without this cultural clash of mighty opposites. Incidentally, I cannot help hoping that Western Europe, and particularly Britain, may play an important part in the unifying of the two half-truths. For Europe is in a position to sympathize with both the half-truths. Formerly champions of individual liberty, we are now being forced by dire circumstances to plan our own society and discipline our individualistic impulses. Perhaps we shall be able to give the world an object lesson in planning for liberty. Add to this the fact that after all, with due respect to those vigorous adolescents, the Americans and the Russians, Europe, with all its faults, is relatively adult; and moreover is the custodian of a great tradition of civilization and spiritual life which has still an important function in this largely barbarian world. America and Russia, yes, and India and China, have doubtless momentous parts to play in the future; but to-day it is the European temper, yes, and particularly the temper of this island people, that is needed to restore unity to a divided mankind, and save our species from destroying itself. It is a solemn thought that perhaps our actions here and now, in this island, in this great city, may determine whether that dream of a commonwealth of worlds is to be made real or made for ever impossible.

VIII. Man and the Cosmos

I SHALL NOW add a postscript on a larger theme. Thus far we have been considering only the solar system. What of the stars? What of the galaxies of stars? And the cosmos as a whole? Interstellar travel seems to us the wildest fantasy. However, we should not entirely rule out the possibility that a human race far more advanced than ourselves might some day travel far beyond the limits of the solar system. It might for instance be possible, through skilled use of atomic power, to propel a planet on an interstellar voyage. The substance of the planet itself would have to be used up for the initial propulsion of the planet beyond the range of solar gravitation, also for subsequent steering, also to provide its inhabitants with heat and light and food on the longest of all voyages. For the shortest of interstellar voyages would certainly take a very long time, in fact, thousands or millions of years. But if the task was considered worth while, it might perhaps be undertaken. And, who knows? It might conceivably be worth while to explore in this way some of the nearest planetary systems. But the method would obviously be extremely cumbersome. It is not quite inconceivable that a far better method may some day be developed. In view of recent spectacular but still very fragmentary discoveries in the field of paranormal psychology, it is just possible that communication with intelligent races in even the remotest planetary systems may be effected by a highly developed technique of telepathy. This, of course, is a surmise of the wildest sort; but to-day, when the very foundations of our knowledge are being transformed, it should not be ignored.

One thing we can say with confidence. If, by one means or another, man does succeed in communicating with intelligent races in remote worlds, then the right aim will be to enter into mutual understanding and appreciation with them, for mutual enrichment and the further expression of the spirit. One can imagine some sort of cosmical community of worlds.

Further, we may, I think, be certain that, wherever, in any age or any galaxy, beings exist who are developed up to or beyond the level of awareness precariously attained by man at his best, there the imperious claim of the spirit, and therefore the ideal of personality-in-community, will surely be recognized. For this ideal and this claim are implied in the very nature of the awakened consciousness. It is nonsense to suppose that any humanly or superhumanly developed beings might permanently seek quite different values. The ideal of the spiritual life is involved in the very nature of personality. Apart from special cases of perversion or obsession by minor ends, the supreme end, which is the fulfilling of the spirit, cannot but be acceptable to the awakened consciousness. The ultimate goal of all awakened beings must inevitably be (how can one least misleadingly put it?) the expression of the objective cosmos in subjective experience and creative action, the fulfilment of the cosmos in cosmical awareness.

The more obvious way in which this goal is to be approached is through a cosmical community of worlds. But such a community may be nothing but the most fantastic of human dreams. Far more probably, the intelligent races within the cosmos may be for ever isolated from each other by the spatial immensities. In this case we are faced with two alternatives. We may suppose that God himself (or the supra-temporal mind of the cosmos) embraces in a single cosmical experience, all the worlds and all their age-long lives; or we may declare simply that the goal of cosmical awareness is not attained, and is only a crazy human fantasy. In this case we may suppose either that there is no general purpose at all behind the cosmos (which may very well be the case), or else that the purpose is something wholly unintelligible to human minds, and indifferent to the expression of the spirit in any world. Or we may suppose that it is equally false to say either that there is or that there is not a cosmical purpose, since the truth is utterly beyond our comprehension. The cabbages in a garden are grown not that they may fulfil themselves in flower and fruit but simply that, before reaching maturity, they may be eaten. Similarly, it may be that the intelligent worlds of the cosmos are required merely to reach a certain low stage of spiritual growth before being destroyed. Let us remember, too, that, if modern physics is correct, there awaits all worlds the cosmical night promised by the increase of entropy. Thus there is a race between cosmical fulfilment and cosmical death, between the complete awakening of consciousness in the cosmos, and eternal sleep.

But probably these wild speculations are all entirely beside the mark, because conceived in terms of ideas wholly inadequate to the actual conditions of the cosmos. For instance, our conception of time itself is now turning out to be very incoherent and superficial. Perhaps (who can say) from the point of view of eternity the end of the cosmos is also its source and its temporal beginning. Perhaps the ultimate flower is also the primal seed from which all sprang. Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the attainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.

Such fantasies may have some kind of symbolic truth, just as the Bible story has symbolic truth. Anyhow, whether true or false, they may at least help us to feel something of the mystery and immensity that surrounds our little human life.

To-day there are hints that the immensity may be far greater than is supposed even in modern astronomy. Paranormal investigations obscurely suggest that the whole spatio-temporal physical universe may be but one very limited and easily misinterpreted aspect of an underlying reality which transcends space and time and the whole seeming-solid world of common sense and science. This is not the place to open up so vast a subject; but I should like to make one comment. Even if in the end these uncertain hints are justified, we shall not have to suppose that therefore the familiar universe is unreal, or sheer illusion. Rather it will have to be regarded as real but not the whole truth; and as “false” merely if we take it to be the whole truth. Further, it seems clear that, whatever the immensities beyond our familiar sphere, for us, who are so deeply implicated in this sphere, the supreme concern must continue to be life here and now. What we have to do is to make the best of this planet of ours, and perhaps of other worlds also.

DISCUSSION

Mr. R. A. SMITH proposed a vote of thanks to the speaker, saying that he was particularly grateful for the philosophical support he had given to the interplanetary enterprise. It was hard, however, to feel any kinship or sympathy with some of the weird types of “man” that Dr. Stapledon had invented for the colonisation of very large planets. To this Dr. Stapledon replied that he could accept any life-form, however alien, if it was orientated to the fundamental values — which he considered must hold for all races at all times.

Mr. A. C. CLARKE then formally opened the discussion, commenting first on some technical points. He thought that life — though not intelligent life — might be more common and more varied in the Solar System than generally imagined. Even ignoring the four giant planets (which seemed to be partly gaseous) there were fourteen bodies of over a million square miles, and at least two hundred asteroids of over ten thousand square miles area. We had plenty of exploring to do!

Dr. Stapledon had touched on the possibility of telepathic contact with other races: but presumably as far as the Solar System was concerned, some sort of clairvoyance would be required, since there would be no intelligence to “transmit” at the other end. Mr. Clarke had often been given vivid descriptions of Mars by mediumistic characters, and he hoped that, before the first expedition, such reports could be collected as it would provide a unique opportunity for a convincing proof. However, the Technical Committee would be most annoyed if, after it had worked for years on atomic spaceships, the clairvoyants got to Mars first.

Dr. Stapledon, Mr. Clarke thought, had somewhat over-estimated the — admittedly enormous — difficulties of interstellar flight. If highly efficient atomic step-rockets could be developed, speeds of over 90 per cent. of the velocity of light were theoretically possible. The nearest stars could thus be reached in five or ten years — though the elapsed time to the crew might be much less than this, thanks to relativity effects.

Mr. Clarke did not think that Man could ever take part in a Galactic culture, even assuming that the technical difficulties involved could be overcome. The human mind would be strained to the utmost to deal with a solar civilisation of even a dozen worlds. A galactic society implied an increase in complexity of perhaps a thousand million. However, it was foolish to worry about these ultimate questions: what we had to do now was to make the best of our own planet, and of the other worlds when we reached them.

Many members of the large audience then took part in the discussion, and the following are some of the points raised.

One speaker suggested that before human beings colonised Venus, its climate and atmosphere might be modified by suitable plant forms projected from Earth, adding that perhaps terrestrial life came originally from Mars in a similar manner.

A chemist decried loose talk of destroying the human race by atomic energy: the daily increase in population equalled the casualties produced by the Nagasaki bomb. Fissile materials were so rare that it seemed most unlikely that they could ever be used to alter climates or geographical features.

Another speaker wanted to know what would happen if we met a race at about the same level of culture. Which would pickle which? It was suggested that there would be insuperable difficulties in communication if we encountered beings whose senses were entirely different from our. There might be a total lack of understanding like that depicted in Wells’ Country of the Blind.

One member wanted to know if it might not be better to adapt non-human terrestrial life forms to colonise the planets, instead of trying to evolve new types of man.

A final speaker said that if we encountered inferior races, we must not put them in reservations, but must educate them. The selection of suitable colonists would also be a difficult psychological problem.

In reply, Dr. Stapledon said that though in this time of crisis we must put our own house in order, scientific endeavour must not be too utilitarian, but must always be opening up new frontiers. We must also preserve a sense of humility and piety towards the unknown: of late, humanity had been guilty of hubris — pride in achievement.

Dr. Stapledon did not agree that he had exaggerated the potentialities of atomic energy. Our present use of heavy elements was only a beginning — later we might release power from the lighter ones, as the stars do.

If we met a race that nearly matched us in culture, Dr. Stapledon hoped that co-operation would be possible, and that we would not treat it as we had treated the aborigines. On the other hand, if it was superior and turned Earth into a reservation, that would be the end of humanity, as it would lose the will to live. He agreed that we should try to educate other races — as long as we were sure we were educating them up and not down to our level.

He thought that races with utterly different senses were impossible. If they shared the physical universe with us, then they must have at least some senses in common with mankind, since they would have to perceive and manipulate matter. Even if they possessed senses outside our range (e.g. electrical, infra- or ultra-visual) we would still be able to comprehend them.

Dr. Stapledon did not think that it would be practicable to develop non-human life forms for interplanetary colonisation. It would be too great a task to bring them up to our level first. According to Huxley, no other existing species could develop human intelligence — they were all too specialised in other directions.

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

We are proud to present a hyperlinked listing of our complete catalogue of English titles, with new titles being added every month.  Buying direct from our website means you can make great savings and take advantage of our instant Updates service.  You can even purchase an entire series (Super Set) at a special discounted price.

Only from our website can readers purchase a complete Parts Edition of our titles. When you buy a Parts Edition, you will receive a folder of your chosen author’s works, with each novel, play, poetry collection, non-fiction book and more divided into its own special eBook. This allows you to read individual novels etc. and to know precisely where you are in an eBook. For more information, please visit our Parts Edition page.

Series Contents

Series One

Anton Chekhov

Charles Dickens

D. H. Lawrence

Dickensiana Volume I

Edgar Allan Poe

Elizabeth Gaskell

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

George Eliot

H. G. Wells

Henry James

Ivan Turgenev

Jack London

James Joyce

Jane Austen

Joseph Conrad

Leo Tolstoy

Louisa May Alcott

Mark Twain

Oscar Wilde

Robert Louis Stevenson

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Walter Scott

The Brontës

Thomas Hardy

Virginia Woolf

Wilkie Collins

William Makepeace Thackeray

Series Two

Alexander Pushkin

Alexandre Dumas

Andrew Lang

Anthony Trollope

Bram Stoker

Christopher Marlowe

Daniel Defoe

Edith Wharton

F. Scott Fitzgerald

G. K. Chesterton

Gustave Flaubert

H. Rider Haggard

Herman Melville

Honoré de Balzac

J. W. von Goethe

Jules Verne

L. Frank Baum

Lewis Carroll

Marcel Proust

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nikolai Gogol

O. Henry

Rudyard Kipling

Tobias Smollett

Victor Hugo

William Shakespeare

Series Three

Ambrose Bierce

Ann Radcliffe

Ben Jonson

Charles Lever

Émile Zola

Ford Madox Ford

Geoffrey Chaucer

George Gissing

George Orwell

Guy de Maupassant

H. P. Lovecraft

Henrik Ibsen

Henry David Thoreau

Henry Fielding

J. M. Barrie

James Fenimore Cooper

John Buchan

John Galsworthy

Jonathan Swift

Kate Chopin

Katherine Mansfield

L. M. Montgomery

Laurence Sterne

Mary Shelley

Sheridan Le Fanu

Washington Irving

Series Four

Arnold Bennett

Arthur Machen

Beatrix Potter

Bret Harte

Captain Frederick Marryat

Charles Kingsley

Charles Reade

G. A. Henty

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Wallace

E. M. Forster

E. Nesbit

George Meredith

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Jerome K. Jerome

John Ruskin

Maria Edgeworth

M. E. Braddon

Miguel de Cervantes

M. R. James

R. M. Ballantyne

Robert E. Howard

Samuel Johnson

Stendhal

Stephen Crane

Zane Grey

Series Five

Algernon Blackwood

Anatole France

Beaumont and Fletcher

Charles Darwin

Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Gibbon

E. F. Benson

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Friedrich Nietzsche

George Bernard Shaw

George MacDonald

Hilaire Belloc

John Bunyan

John Webster

Margaret Oliphant

Maxim Gorky

Oliver Goldsmith

Radclyffe Hall

Robert W. Chambers

Samuel Butler

Samuel Richardson

Sir Thomas Malory

Thomas Carlyle

William Harrison Ainsworth

William Dean Howells

William Morris

Series Six

Anthony Hope

Aphra Behn

Arthur Morrison

Baroness Emma Orczy

Captain Mayne Reid

Charlotte M. Yonge

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

E. W. Hornung

Ellen Wood

Frances Burney

Frank Norris

Frank R. Stockton

Hall Caine

Horace Walpole

One Thousand and One Nights

R. Austin Freeman

Rafael Sabatini

Saki

Samuel Pepys

Sir Issac Newton

Stanley J. Weyman

Thomas De Quincey

Thomas Middleton

Voltaire

William Hazlitt

William Hope Hodgson

Series Seven

Adam Smith

Benjamin Disraeli

Confucius

David Hume

E. M. Delafield

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Edmund Burke

Ernest Hemingway

Frances Trollope

Galileo Galilei

Guy Boothby

Hans Christian Andersen

Ian Fleming

Immanuel Kant

Karl Marx

Kenneth Grahame

Lytton Strachey

Mary Wollstonecraft

Michel de Montaigne

René Descartes

Richard Marsh

Sax Rohmer

Sir Richard Burton

Talbot Mundy

Thomas Babington Macaulay

W. W. Jacobs

Series Eight

Anna Katharine Green

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Brothers Grimm

C. S. Lewis

Charles and Mary Lamb

Elizabeth von Arnim

Ernest Bramah

Francis Bacon

Gilbert and Sullivan

Grant Allen

Henryk Sienkiewicz

Hugh Walpole

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

John Locke

John Muir

Joseph Addison

Lafcadio Hearn

Lord Dunsany

Marie Corelli

Niccolò Machiavelli

Ouida

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sigmund Freud

Theodore Dreiser

Walter Pater

W. Somerset Maugham

Series Nine

Aldous Huxley

August Strindberg

Booth Tarkington

C. S. Forester

Erasmus

Eugene Sue

Fergus Hume

George Moore

Gertrude Stein

Giovanni Boccaccio

Izaak Walton

J. M. Synge

Johanna Spyri

John Galt

Maurice Leblanc

Max Brand

Molière

Norse Sagas

R. D. Blackmore

R. S. Surtees

Sir Thomas More

Stephen Leacock

The Harvard Classics

Thomas Love Peacock

Thomas Paine

William James

Series Ten

A. E. W. Mason

Abraham Lincoln

Baruch Spinoza

Carolyn Wells

Charles Brockden Brown

Earl Derr Biggers

Evelyn Waugh

F. Marion Crawford

Fred M. White

Frederick Douglass

Gaston Leroux

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

George Berkeley

Howard Pyle

John Kendrick Bangs

John Steinbeck

John Stuart Mill

J. S. Fletcher

Martin Luther

Sherwood Anderson

Thomas Dekker

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Jefferson

Willa Cather

William Faulkner

William Le Queux

Series Eleven

A. Merritt

Blaise Pascal

Charles W. Chesnutt

Dashiell Hammett

Dinah Craik

Elizabeth Inchbald

François Rabelais

George Griffith

George du Maurier

Hamlin Garland

Hugh Lofting

Joel Chandler Harris

John Calvin

M. P. Shiel

Matthew Lewis

Nevil Shute

Olaf Stapledon

P. G. Wodehouse

Philip Massinger

Raymond Chandler

Romain Rolland

Sabine Baring-Gould

Sarah Orne Jewett

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Browne

William Wycherley

Series Twelve

A. A. Milne

Alphonse Daudet

Anne Thackeray Ritchie

Arthur Quiller-Couch

Clark Ashton Smith

Dorothy L. Sayers

E. T. W. Hoffmann

Emanuel Swedenborg

Ernest Thompson Seton

H. Bedford-Jones

Harry Collingwood

Ivan Goncharov

James Branch Cabell

Jane Porter

Louis Joseph Vance

May Sinclair

Mrs Humphry Ward

Mystery, Morality and Miracle Plays

Raphael Holinshed

Sinclair Lewis

The Mabinogion

Theodore Roosevelt

Thomas Hughes

Thomas Wolfe

William Black

William Godwin

William Pitt the Younger

Ancient Classics

Achilles Tatius

Aeschines

Aeschylus

Ambrose

Ammianus Marcellinus

Apollodorus

Appian

Apuleius

Apollonius of Rhodes

Aristophanes

Aristotle

Arrian

Athenaeus

Augustine

Aulus Gellius

Bacchylides

Bede

Callimachus

Cassius Dio

Cato

Catullus

Cicero

Claudian

Clement of Alexandria

Coluthus

Cornelius Nepos

Demosthenes

Dio Chrysostom

Diodorus Siculus

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Diogenes Laërtius

Ennius

Epictetus

Euclid

Euripides

Eusebius

Eutropius

Florus

Frontius

Fronto

Gregory I

Herodian

Herodotus

Hesiod

Hippocrates

Homer

Horace

Isocrates

Josephus

Julian

Julius Caesar

Juvenal

Livy

Longus

Lucan

Lucian

Lucretius

Marcus Aurelius

Manetho

Martial

Nonnus

Onasander

Origen

Ovid

Panyassis

Pausanias

Petronius

Phaedrus

Pindar

Plato

Plautus

Pliny the Elder

Pliny the Younger

Plotinus

Plutarch

Polybius

Procopius

Propertius

Ptolemy

Quintus Curtius Rufus

Quintus Smyrnaeus

Sallust

Sappho

Seneca the Younger

Septuagint

Sidonius

Sophocles

Statius

Strabo

Suetonius

Tacitus

Terence

Tertullian

Theocritus

Theophrastus

Thucydides

Tibullus

Valerius Flaccus

Varro

Velleius Paterculus

Virgil

Vitruvius

Xenophon

Delphi Poets Series

Adam Mickiewicz

Adelaide Crapsey

A. E. Housman

Alexander Pope

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Andrew Marvell

Beowulf

Charles Baudelaire

Charlotte Smith

Christina Rossetti

Confederation Poets

D. H. Lawrence

Dante Alighieri

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Delphi Poetry Anthology

Edgar Allan Poe

Edmund Spenser

Edmund Waller

Edward Lear

Edward Thomas

Edward Young

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Emily Dickinson

Epic of Gilgamesh

Ezra Pound

Francis Thompson

Friedrich Schiller

George Chapman

George Herbert

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Giacomo Leopardi

Hafez

Heinrich Heine

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Henry Lawson

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Isaac Rosenberg

James Russell Lowell

Johan Ludvig Runeberg

John Clare

John Donne

John Dryden

John Gay

John Greenleaf Whittier

John Gower

John Keats

John Milton

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Joseph Addison

Kahlil Gibran

Leigh Hunt

Lord Byron

Louise Imogen Guiney

Ludovico Ariosto

Luís de Camões

Mary Robinson

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Prior

Medieval Poetry Collection

Michael Drayton

Nikolai Nekrasov

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Petrarch

Rabindranath Tagore

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Robert Browning

Robert Burns

Robert Frost

Robert Southey

Rumi

Rupert Brooke

Saadi

Sanskrit Epics

Sara Teasdale

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Walter Raleigh

Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Gray

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hood

Thomas Moore

Thomas Otway

Torquato Tasso

T. S. Eliot

W. E. Henley

W. B. Yeats

Walter Savage Landor

Walt Whitman

Wilfred Owen

William Blake

William Congreve

William Cowper

William Wordsworth

Masters of Art

Albrecht Dürer

Alphonse Mucha

Amedeo Modigliani

Andrea Mantegna

Anthony van Dyck

Artemisia Gentileschi

Berthe Morisot

Camille Pissarro

Canaletto

Caravaggio

Caspar David Friedrich

Claude Lorrain

Claude Monet

Correggio

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Diego Velázquez

Donatello

Edgar Degas

Édouard Manet

Edvard Munch

El Greco

Eugène Delacroix

Francisco Goya

Georges Seurat

Giotto

Giovanni Bellini

Gustave Courbet

Gustav Klimt

Hieronymus Bosch

Hokusai

Jacques-Louis David

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Jan van Eyck

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

J. M. W. Turner

Johannes Vermeer

John Constable

John Everett Millais

Leonardo da Vinci

Masaccio

Michelangelo

Nicolas Poussin

Paolo Veronese

Paul Cézanne

Paul Gauguin

Paul Klee

Peter Paul Rubens

Piero della Francesca

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Piet Mondrian

Sandro Botticelli

Raphael

Rembrandt van Rijn

Thomas Gainsborough

Tintoretto

Titian

Vincent van Gogh

Wassily Kandinsky

William Hogarth

Great Composers

Antonio Vivaldi

Franz Schubert

Frédéric Chopin

Giuseppe Verdi

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johannes Brahms

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piotr Illitch Tchaïkovsky

Richard Wagner

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Alphabetical List of Titles

View our entire catalogue here

Browse eBooks by Themes

17th Century   18th Century   Adventure   Americans   Baroque   Children’s   Dutch   Early-19th   Eastern   Epic Poets   Fantasy   French   German   Greek History   Horror   Humour   Interwar   Irish   Italian   LGBTQ   Medieval   Modernists   Non-Fiction   Philosophy   Playwrights   Religion   Renaissance   Roman History   Romantics   Russians   Sci-Fi   Scottish   Spanish   Thrillers   Victorians   War Poets

www.delphiclassics.com

Is there an author or artist you would like to see in a series?  Contact us at sales@delphiclassics.com (or via the social network links below) and let us know!

Be the first to learn of new releases and special offers:

Join our Mailing List

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/delphiebooks

Follow our Tweets: https://twitter.com/delphiclassics

Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium, Birkenhead

Stapledon’s widow and children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in several of his books.