It was some ten million years after the Patagonian disaster that the
first elements of a new human species appeared, in an epidemic of
biological variations, many of which were extremely valuable. Upon this
raw material the new and stimulating environment worked for some hundred
thousand years until at last there appeared the Second Man.
Though of greater stature and more roomy cranium, these beings were not
wholly unlike their predecessors in general proportions. Their heads,
indeed, were large even for their bodies, and their necks massive. Their
hands were huge, but finely moulded. Their almost titanic size entailed
a seemingly excessive strength of support; their legs were stouter, even
proportionately, than the legs of the earlier species. Their feet had
lost the separate toes, and, by a strengthening and growing together of
the internal bones, had become more efficient instruments of locomotion.
During the Siberian exile the First Men had acquired a thick hairy
covering, and most races of the Second Man retained something of this
blonde hirsute appearance throughout their career. Their eyes were
large, and often jade green, their features firm as carved granite, yet
mobile and lucent. Of the second human species one might say that Nature
had at last repeated and far excelled the noble but unfortunate type
which she had achieved once, long ago, with the first species, in
certain prehistoric cave-dwelling hunters and artists.
[Illustration: Time Scale 2]
Inwardly the Second Men differed from the earlier species in that they
had shed most of those primitive relics which had hampered the First Men
more than was realized. Not only were they free of appendix, tonsils,
and other useless excrescences, but also their whole structure was more
firmly knit into unity. Their chemical organization was such that their
tissues were kept in better repair. Their teeth, though proportionately
small and few, were almost completely immune from caries. Such was their
glandular equipment that puberty did not begin till twenty; and not till
they were fifty did they reach maturity. At about one hundred and ninety
their powers began to fail, and after a few years of contemplative
retirement they almost invariably died before true senility could begin.
It was as though, when a man’s work was finished, and he had meditated
in peace upon his whole career, there were nothing further to hold his
attention and prevent him from falling asleep. Mothers carried the
foetus for three years, suckled the infant for five years, and were
sterile during this period and for another seven years. Their
climacteric was reached at about a hundred and sixty. Architecturally
massive like their mates, they would have seemed to the First Men very
formidable titanesses; but even those early half-human beings would have
admired the women of the second species both for their superb vitality
and for their brilliantly human expression.
In temperament the Second Men were curiously different from the earlier
species. The same factors were present, but in different proportions,
and in far greater subordination to the considered will of the
individual. Sexual vigour had returned. But sexual interest was
strangely altered. Around the ancient core of delight in physical and
mental contact with the opposite sex there now appeared a kind of
innately sublimated, and no less poignant, appreciation of the unique
physical and mental forms of all kinds of live things. It is difficult
for less ample natures to imagine this expansion of the innate sexual
interest; for to them it is not apparent that the lusty admiration which
at first directs itself solely on the opposite sex is the appropriate
attitude to all the beauties of flesh and spirit in beast and bird and
plant. Parental interest also was strong in the new species, but it too
was universalized. It had become a strong innate interest in, and a
devotion to, all beings that were conceived as in need of help. In the
earlier species this passionate spontaneous altruism occurred only in
exceptional persons. In the new species, however, all normal men and
women experienced altruism as a passion. And yet at the same time
primitive parenthood had become tempered to a less possessive and more
objective love, which among the First Men was less common than they
themselves were pleased to believe. Assertiveness had also greatly
changed. Formerly very much of a man’s energy had been devoted to the
assertion of himself as a private individual over against other
individuals; and very much of his generosity had been at bottom selfish.
But in the Second Men this competitive self-assertion, this championship
of the most intimately known animal against all others, was greatly
tempered. Formerly the major enterprises of society would never have
been carried through had they not been able to annex to themselves the
egoism of their champions. But in the Second Men the parts were
reversed. Few individuals could ever trouble to exert themselves to the
last ounce for merely private ends, save when those ends borrowed
interest or import from some public enterprise. It was only his vision
of a world-wide community of persons, and of his own function therein,
that could rouse the fighting spirit in a man. Thus it was inwardly,
rather than in outward physical characters, that the Second Men differed
from the First. And in nothing did they differ more than in their native
aptitude for cosmopolitanism. They had their tribes and nations. War was
not quite unknown amongst them. But even in primitive times a man’s most
serious loyalty was directed toward the race as a whole; and wars were
so hampered by impulses of kindliness towards the enemy that they were
apt to degenerate into rather violent athletic contests, leading to an
orgy of fraternization.
It would not be true to say that the strongest interest of these beings
was social. They were never prone to exalt the abstraction called the
state, or the nation, or even the world-commonwealth. For their most
characteristic factor was not mere gregariousness but something novel,
namely an innate interest in personality, both in the actual diversity
of persons and in the ideal of personal development. They had a
remarkable power of vividly intuiting their fellows as unique persons
with special needs. Individuals of the earlier species had suffered from
an almost insurmountable spiritual isolation from one another. Not even
lovers, and scarcely even the geniuses with special insight into
personality, ever had anything like accurate vision of one another. But
the Second Men, more intensely and accurately self-conscious, were also
more intensely and accurately conscious of one another. This they
achieved by no unique faculty, but solely by a more ready interest in
each other, a finer insight, and a more active imagination.
They had also a remarkable innate interest in the higher kinds of mental
activity, or rather in the subtle objects of these activities. Even
children were instinctively inclined towards a genuinely aesthetic
interest in their world and their own behaviour, and also towards
scientific inquiry and generalization. Small boys, for instance, would
delight in collecting not merely such things as eggs or crystals, but
mathematical formulae expressive of the different shapes of eggs and
crystals, or of the innumerable rhythms of shells, fronds, leaflets,
grass-nodes. And there was a wealth of traditional fairy-stories whose
appeal was grounded in philosophical puzzles. Little children delighted
to hear how the poor things called Illusions were banished from the
Country of the Real, how one-dimensional Mr Line woke up in a
two-dimensional world, and how a brave young tune slew cacophonous
beasts and won a melodious bride in that strange country where the
landscape is all of sound and all living things are music. The First Men
had attained to interest in science, mathematics, philosophy, only after
arduous schooling, but in the Second Men there was a natural propensity
for these activities, no less vigorous than the primitive instincts.
Not, of course, that they were absolved from learning; but they had the
same zest and facility in these matters as their predecessors had
enjoyed only in humbler spheres.
In the earlier species, indeed, the nervous system had maintained only a
very precarious unity, and was all too liable to derangement by the
rebellion of one of its subordinate parts. But in the second species the
highest centres maintained an almost absolute harmony among the lower.
Thus the moral conflict between momentary impulse and considered will,
and again between private and public interest, played a very subordinate
part among the Second Men.
In actual cognitive powers, also, this favoured species far outstripped
its predecessor. For instance, vision had greatly developed. The Second
Men distinguished in the spectrum a new primary colour between green and
blue; and beyond blue they saw, not a reddish blue, but again a new
primary colour, which faded with increasing ruddiness far into the old
ultra-violet. These two new primary colours were complementary to one
another. At the other end of the spectrum they saw the infra-red as a
peculiar purple. Further, owing to the very great size of their retinae,
and the multiplication of rods and cones, they discriminated much
smaller fractions of their field of vision.
Improved discrimination combined with a wonderful fertility of mental
imagery to produce a greatly increased power of insight into the
character of novel situations. Whereas among the First Men, native
intelligence had increased only up to the age of fourteen, among the
Second Men it progressed up to forty. Thus an average adult was capable
of immediate insight into problems which even the most brilliant of the
First Men could only solve by prolonged reasoning. This superb clarity
of mind enabled the second species to avoid most of those age-long
confusions and superstitions which had crippled its predecessor. And
along with great intelligence went a remarkable flexibility of will. In
fact the Second Men were far more able than the First to break habits
that were seen to be no longer justified.
To sum the matter, circumstance had thrown up a very noble species.
Essentially it was of the same type as the earlier species, but it had
undergone extensive improvements. Much that the First Men could only
achieve by long schooling and self-discipline the Second Men performed
with effortless fluency and delight. In particular, two capacities which
for the First Men had been unattainable ideals were now realized in
every normal individual, namely the power of wholly dispassionate
cognition, and the power of loving one’s neighbour as oneself, without
reservation. Indeed, in this respect the Second Men might be called
‘Natural Christians’, so readily and constantly did they love one
another in the manner of Jesus, and infuse their whole social policy
with loving-kindness. Early in their career they conceived the religion
of love, and they were possessed by it again and again, in diverse
forms, until their end. On the other hand, their gift of dispassionate
cognition helped them to pass speedily to the admiration of fate. And
being by nature rigorous thinkers, they were peculiarly liable to be
disturbed by the conflict between their religion of love and their
loyalty to fate.
Well might it seem that the stage was now set for a triumphant and rapid
progress of the human spirit. But though the second human species
constituted a real improvement on the first, it lacked certain faculties
without which the next great mental advance could not be made.
Moreover its very excellence involved one novel defect from which the
First Men were almost wholly free. In the lives of humble individuals
there are many occasions when nothing but an heroic effort can wrest
their private fortunates from stagnation or decline, and set them
pioneering in new spheres. Among the First Men this effort was often
called forth by passionate regard for self. And it was upon the tidal
wave of innumerable egoisms, blindly surging in one direction, that the
first species was carried forward. But, to repeat, in the Second Men
self-regard was never an over-mastering motive. Only at the call of
social loyalty or personal love would a man spur himself to desperate
efforts. Whenever the stake appeared to be mere private advancement, he
was apt to prefer peace to enterprise, the delights of sport,
companionship, art or intellect, to the slavery of self-regard. And so
in the long run, though the Second Men were fortunate in their almost
complete immunity from the lust of power and personal ostentation (which
cursed the earlier species with industrialism and militarism), and
though they enjoyed long ages of idyllic peace, often upon a high
cultural plane, their progress towards full self-conscious mastery of
the planet was curiously slow.