It has always been a serious matter for men when a civilization
decayed. But it may at some future day prove far more serious
still. Our hold on the planet is not absolute. Our descendants
may lose it.
Germs may do them out of it. A chestnut fungus springs up, defies
us, and kills all our chestnuts. The boll weevil very nearly baffles
us. The fly seems unconquerable. Only a strong civilization,
when such foes are about, can preserve us. And our present efforts
to cope with such beings are fumbling and slow.
We haven't the habit of candidly facing this danger. We read our
biological history but we don't take it in. We blandly assume we
were always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even
be considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance
certain religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe
in Easter should still believe this. For the facts are of course
this is a hard and precarious world, where every mistake and
infirmity must be paid for in full.
If mankind ever is swept aside as a failure however, what a brilliant
and enterprising failure he at least will have been. I felt this
with a kind of warm suddenness only today, as I finished these
dreamings and drove through the gates of the park. I had been
shutting my modern surroundings out of my thoughts, so completely,
and living as it were in the wild world of ages ago, that when I
let myself come back suddenly to the twentieth century, and stare
at the park and the people, the change was tremendous. All around
me were the well-dressed descendants of primitive animals, whizzing
about in bright motors, past tall, soaring buildings. What gifted,
energetic achievers they suddenly seemed!
I thought of a photograph I had once seen, of a ship being torpedoed.
There it was, the huge, finely made structure, awash in the sea, with
tiny black spots hanging on to its side--crew and passengers. The
great ship, even while sinking, was so mighty, and those atoms so
helpless. Yet, it was those tiny beings that had created that ship.
They had planned it and built it and guided its bulk through the
waves. They had also invented a torpedo that could rend it asunder.
It is possible that our race may be an accident, in a meaningless
universe, living its brief life uncared-for, on this dark, cooling
star: but even so--and all the more--what marvelous creatures we are!
What fairy story, what tale from the Arabian Nights of the jinns, is
a hundredth part as wonderful as this true fairy story of simians!
It is so much more heartening, too, than the tales we invent. A
universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is--blind
or not--a good world to live in, a promising universe.
And if there are no other such accidents, if we stand alone, if all
the uncountable armies of planets are empty, or peopled by animals
only, with no keys to thought, then we have done something so mighty,
what may it not lead to! What powers may we not develop before the
Sun dies! We once thought we lived on God's footstool: it may be
a throne.
This is no world for pessimists. An amoeba on the beach, blind and
helpless, a mere bit of pulp,--that amoeba has grandsons today who
read Kant and play symphonies. Will those grandsons in turn have
descendants who will sail through the void, discover the foci of
forces, the means to control them, and learn how to marshal the
planets and grapple with space? Would it after all be any more
startling than our rise from the slime?
No sensible amoeba would have ever believed for a minute that any
of his most remote children would build and run dynamos. Few
sensible men of today stop to feel, in their hearts, that we live
in the very same world where that miracle happened.
This world, and our racial adventure, are magical still.