For nearly a quarter of a million years the Second Men passed through
successive phases of prosperity and decline. Their advance to developed
culture was not nearly so steady and triumphal as might have been
expected from a race of such brilliance. As with individuals, so with
species, accidents are all too likely to defeat even the most cautious
expectations. For instance, the Second Men were for a long time
seriously hampered by a ‘glacial epoch’ which at its height imposed
Arctic conditions even as far south as India. Little by little the
encroaching ice crowded their tribes into the extremity of that
peninsula, and reduced their culture to the level of the Esquimaux. In
time, of course, they recovered, but only to suffer other scourges, of
which the most devastating were epidemics of bacteria. The more recently
developed and highly organized tissues of this species were peculiarly
susceptible to disease, and not once but many times a promising
barbarian culture or ‘medieval’ civilization was wiped out by plagues.
But of all the natural disasters which befell the Second Men, the worst
was due to a spontaneous change in their own physical constitution. Just
as the fangs of the ancient sabre-toothed tiger had finally grown so
large that the beast could not eat, so the brain of the second human
species threatened to outgrow the rest of its body. In a cranium that
was originally roomy enough, this rare product of nature was now
increasingly cramped; while a circulatory system, that was formerly
quite adequate, was becoming more and more liable to fail in pumping
blood through so cramped a structure. These two causes at last began to
take serious effect. Congenital imbecility became increasingly common,
along with all manner of acquired mental diseases. For some thousands of
years the race remained in a most precarious condition, now almost dying
out, now rapidly attaining an extravagant kind of culture in some region
where physical nature happened to be peculiarly favourable. One of these
precarious flashes of spirit occurred in the Yang-tze valley as a sudden
and brief effulgence of city states peopled by neurotics, geniuses and
imbeciles. The lasting upshot of this civilization was a brilliant
literature of despair, dominated by a sense of the difference between
the actual and the potential in man and the universe. Later, when the
race had attained its noontide glory, it was wont to brood upon this
tragic voice from the past in order to remind itself of the underlying
horror of existence.
Meanwhile, brains became more and more overgrown, and the race more and
more disorganized. There is no doubt that it would have gone the way of
the sabre-toothed tiger, simply through the fatal direction of its own
physiological evolution, had not a more stable variety of this second
human species at last appeared. It was in North America, into which, by
way of Africa, the Second Men had long ago spread, that the
roomier-skulled and stronger-hearted type first occurred. By great good
fortune this new variety proved to be a dominant Mendelian character.
And as it interbred freely with the older variety, a superbly healthy
race soon peopled America. The species was saved.
But another hundred thousand years were to pass before the Second Men
could reach their zenith. I must not dwell on this movement of the human
symphony, though it is one of great richness. Inevitably many themes are
now repeated from the career of the earlier species, but with special
features, and transposed, so to speak, from the minor to the major key.
Once more primitive cultures succeed one another, or pass into
civilization, barbarian or ‘medieval’; and in turn these fall or are
transformed. Twice, indeed, the planet became the home of a single
world-wide community which endured for many thousands of years, until
misfortune wrecked it. The collapse is not altogether surprising, for
unlike the earlier species, the Second Men had no coal and oil. In both
these early world societies of the Second Men there was a complete lack
of mechanical power. Consequently, though world-wide and intricate, they
were in a manner ‘medieval’. In every continent intensive and highly
skilled agriculture crept from the valleys up the mountain sides and
over the irrigated deserts. In the rambling garden-cities each citizen
took his share of drudgery, practised also some fine handicraft, and yet
had leisure for gaiety and contemplation. Intercourse within and between
the five great continental communities had to be maintained by coaches,
caravans, and sailing ships. Sail, indeed, now came back into its own,
and far surpassed its previous achievements. On every sea, fleets of
great populous red-sailed clippers, wooden, with carved poops and prows,
but with the sleek flanks of the dolphin, carried the produce of every
land, and the many travellers who delighted to spend a sabbatical year
among foreigners.
So much, in the fullness of time, could be achieved, even without
mechanical power, by a species gifted with high intelligence and immune
from anti-social self-regard. But inevitably there came an end. A virus,
whose subtle derangement of the glandular system was never suspected by
a race still innocent of physiology, propagated throughout the world a
mysterious fatigue. Century by century, agriculture withdrew from the
hills and deserts, craftsmanship deteriorated, thought became
stereotyped. And the vast lethargy produced a vast despond. At length
the nations lost touch with one another, forgot one another, forgot
their culture, crumbled into savage tribes. Once more Earth slept.
Many thousand years later, long after the disease was spent, several
great peoples developed in isolation. When at last they made contact,
they were so alien that in each there had to occur a difficult cultural
revolution, not unaccompanied by bloodshed, before the world could once
more feel as one. But this second world-order endured only a few
centuries, for profound subconscious differences now made it impossible
for the races to keep whole-heartedly loyal to each other. Religion
finally severed the unity which all willed but none could trust. An
heroic nation of monotheists sought to impose its faith on a vaguely
pantheist world. For the first and last time the Second Men stumbled
into a world-wide civil war; and just because the war was religious it
developed a brutality hitherto unknown. With crude artillery, but with
fanaticism, the two groups of citizen armies harried one another. The
fields were laid waste, the cities burned, the rivers, and finally the
winds, were poisoned. Long after that pitch of horror had been passed,
at which an inferior species would have lost heart, these heroic madmen
continued to organize destruction. And when at last the inevitable
breakdown came, it was the more complete. In a sensitive species the
devastating enlightenment which at last began to invade every mind, the
overwhelming sense of treason against the human spirit, the tragic
comicality of the whole struggle, sapped all energy. Not for thousands
of years did the Second Men achieve once more a world-community. But
they had learnt their lesson.
The third and most enduring civilization of the Second Men repeated the
glorified medievalism of the first, and passed beyond it into a phase of
brilliant natural science. Chemical fertilizers increased the crops, and
therefore the world-population. Wind- and water-power was converted into
electricity to supplement human and animal labour. At length, after many
failures, it became possible to use volcanic and subterranean energy to
drive dynamos. In a few years the whole physical character of
civilization was transformed. Yet in this headlong passage into
industrialism the Second Men escaped the errors of ancient Europe,
America, and Patagonia. This was due partly to their greater gift of
sympathy, which, save during the one great aberration of the religious
war, made them all in a very vivid manner members one of another. But
partly also it was due to their combination of a practical commonsense
that was more than British, with a more than Russian immunity from the
glamour of wealth, and a passion for the life of the mind that even
Greece had never known. Mining and manufacture, even with plentiful
electric power, were occupations scarcely less arduous than of old; but
since each individual was implicated by vivid sympathy in the lives of
all persons within his ken, there was little or no obsession with
private economic power. The will to avoid industrial evils was
effective, because sincere.
At its height, the culture of the Second Men was dominated by respect
for the individual human personality. Yet contemporary individuals were
regarded both as end and as means, as a stage towards far ampler
individuals in the remote future. For, although they themselves were
more long-lived than their predecessors, the Second Men were oppressed
by the brevity of human life, and the pettiness of the individual’s
achievement in comparison with the infinity round about him which
awaited apprehension and admiration. Therefore they were determined to
produce a race endowed with much greater natural longevity. Again,
though they participated in one another far more than their
predecessors, they themselves were dogged by despair at the distortion
and error which spoiled every mind’s apprehension of others. Like their
predecessors, they had passed through all the more naïve phases of
self-consciousness and other-consciousness, and through idealizations of
various modes of personality. They had admired the barbarian hero, the
romantical, the sensitive-subtle, the bluff and hearty, the decadent,
the bland, the severe. And they had concluded that each person, while
being himself an expression of some one mode of personality, should seek
to be also sensitive to every other mode. They even conceived that the
ideal community should be knit into one mind by each unique individual’s
direct telepathic apprehension of the experience of all his fellows. And
the fact that this ideal seemed utterly unattainable wove through their
whole culture a thread of darkness, a yearning for spiritual union, a
horror of loneliness, which never seriously troubled their far more
insulated predecessors.
This craving for union influenced the sexual life of the species. In the
first place, so closely was the mental related to the physiological in
their composition, that when there was no true union of minds, the
sexual act failed to give conception. Casual sexual relations thus came
to be regarded very differently from those which expressed a deeper
intimacy. They were treated as a delightful embroidery on life,
affording opportunity of much elegance, light-hearted tenderness,
banter, and of course physical inebriation; but they were deemed to
signify nothing more than the delight of friend in friend. Where there
was a marriage of minds, but then only during the actual passion of
communion, sexual intercourse almost always resulted in conception.
Under these circumstances, intimate persons had often to practise
contraception, but acquaintances never. And one of the most beneficial
inventions of the psychologists was a technique of auto-suggestion,
which, at will, either facilitated conception, or prevented it, surely,
harmlessly, and without inaesthetic accompaniments.
The sexual morality of the Second Men passed through all the phases
known to the First Men; but by the time that they had established a
single world-culture it had a form not known before. Not only were both
men and women encouraged to have as much casual sexual intercourse as
they needed for their enrichment, but also, on the higher plane of
spiritual union, strict monogamy was deprecated. For in sexual union of
this higher kind they saw a symbol of that communion of minds which they
longed to make universal. Thus the most precious gift that a lover could
bring to the beloved was not virginity but sexual experience. The union,
it was felt, was the more pregnant the more each party could contribute
from previous sexual and spiritual intimacy with others. Yet, though as
a principle monogamy was not applauded, the higher kind of union would
in practice sometimes result in a life-long partnership. But since the
average life was so much longer than among the First Men, such
fortuitously perennial unions were often deliberately interrupted for a
while, by a change of partners, and then restored with their vitality
renewed. Sometimes, on the other hand, a group of persons of both sexes
would maintain a composite and permanent marriage together. Sometimes
such a group would exchange a member, or members, with another group, or
disperse itself completely among other groups, to come together again
years afterwards with enriched experience. In one form or another, this
‘marriage of groups’ was much prized, as an extension of the vivid
sexual participation into an ampler sphere. Among the First Men the
brevity of life made these novel forms of union impossible; for
obviously no sexual, and no spiritual, relation can be developed with
any richness in less than thirty years of close intimacy. It would be
interesting to examine the social institutions of the Second Men at
their zenith; but we have not time to spare for this subject, nor even
for the brilliant intellectual achievements in which the species so far
outstripped its predecessor. Obviously any account of the natural
science and the philosophy of the Second Men would be unintelligible to
readers of this book. Suffice it that they avoided the errors which had
led the First Men into false abstraction, and into metaphysical theories
which were at once sophisticated and naïve.
Not until after they had passed beyond the best work of the First Men in
science and philosophy did the Second Men discover the remains of the
great stone library in Siberia. A party of engineers happened upon it
while they were preparing to sink a shaft for subterranean energy. The
tablets were broken, disordered, weathered. Little by little, however,
they were reconstructed and interpreted, with the aid of the pictorial
dictionary. The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but
not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store
of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document.
The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve
and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of
the earlier species was invaluable. So little of the old world had
survived the volcanic epoch that the Second Men had failed hitherto to
get a clear picture of their predecessors.
One item alone in this archaeological treasure had more than historical
interest. The biologist leader of the little party in Siberia had
recorded much of the sacred text of the Life of the Divine Boy. At the
end of the record came the prophet’s last words, which had so baffled
Patagonia. This theme was full of meaning for the Second Men, as indeed
it would have been even for the First Men in their prime. But whereas
for the First Men the dispassionate ecstasy which the Boy had preached
was rather an ideal than a fact of experience, the Second Men recognized
in the prophet’s words an intuition familiar to themselves. Long ago the
tortured geniuses of the Yang-tze cities had expressed this same
intuition. Subsequently also it had often been experienced by the more
healthy generations, but always with a certain shame. For it had become
associated with morbid mentality. But now with growing conviction that
it was wholesome, the Second Men had begun to grope for a wholesome
expression of it. In the life and the last words of the remote apostle
of youth they found an expression which was not wholly inadequate. The
species was presently to be in sore need of this gospel.
The world-community reached at length a certain relative perfection and
equilibrium. There was a long summer of social harmony, prosperity, and
cultural embellishment. Almost all that could be done by mind in the
stage to which it had then reached seemed to have been done. Generations
of long-lived, eager, and mutually delightful beings succeeded one
another. There was a widespread feeling that the time had come for man
to gather all his strength for a flight into some new sphere of
mentality. The present type of human being, it was recognized, was but a
rough and incoherent natural product. It was time for man to take
control of himself and remake himself upon a nobler pattern. With this
end in view, two great works were set afoot, research into the ideal of
human nature, and research into practical means of remaking human
nature. Individuals in all lands, living their private lives, delighting
in each other, keeping the tissue of society alive and vigorous, were
deeply moved by the thought that their world-community was at last
engaged upon this heroic task.
But elsewhere in the solar system life of a very different kind was
seeking, in its own strange manner, ends incomprehensible to man, yet at
bottom identical with his own ends. And presently the two were to come
together, not in cooperation.