The Martian mind was of a very different type from the terrestrial,
different, yet at bottom identical. In so strange a body, the mind was
inevitably equipped with alien cravings, and alien manners of
apprehending its environment. And with so different a history, it was
confused by prejudices very unlike those of man. Yet it was none the
less mind, concerned in the last resort with the maintenance and
advancement of life, and the exercise of vital capacities. Fundamentally
the Martian was like all other living beings, in that he delighted in
the free working of his body and his mind. Yet superficially, he was as
unlike man in mind as in body.
The most distinctive feature of the Martian, compared with man, was that
his individuality was both far more liable to disruption, and at the
same time immeasurably more capable of direct participation in the minds
of other individuals. The human mind in its solid body maintained its
unity and its dominance over its members in all normal circumstances.
Only in disease was man liable to mental or physical dissociation. On
the other hand, he was incapable of direct contact with other
individuals, and the emergence of a ‘super-mind’ in a group of
individuals was quite impossible. The Martian cloudlet, however, though
he fell to pieces physically, and also mentally, far more readily than a
man, might also at any moment wake up to be the intelligent mind of his
race, might begin to perceive with the sense-organs of all other
individuals, and experience thoughts and desires which were, so to
speak, the resultant of all individual thoughts and desires upon some
matter of general interest. But unfortunately, as I shall tell, the
common mind of the Martians never woke into any order of mentality
higher than that of the individual.
These differences between the Martian and the human psyche entailed
characteristic advantages and disadvantages. The Martian, immune from
man’s inveterate selfishness and spiritual isolation from his fellows,
lacked the mental coherence, the concentrated attention and far-reaching
analysis and synthesis, and again the vivid self-consciousness and
relentless self-criticism, which even the First Men, at their best, had
attained in some degree, and which in the Second Men were still more
developed. The Martians, moreover, were hampered by being almost
identical in character. They possessed perfect harmony; but only through
being almost wholly in temperamental unison. They were all hobbled by
their sameness to one another. They were without that rich diversity of
personal character, which enabled the human spirit to cover so wide a
field of mentality. This infinite variety of human nature entailed,
indeed, endless wasteful and cruel personal conflicts in the first, and
even to some extent in the second, species of man; but also it enabled
every individual of developed sympathy to enrich his spirit by
intercourse with individuals whose temperament, thought, and ideals
differed from his own. And while the Martians were little troubled by
internecine strife and the passion of hate, they were also almost wholly
devoid of the passion of love. The Martians individual could admire, and
be utterly faithful to, the object of his loyalty; but his admiration
was given, not to concrete and uniquely charactered persons of the same
order as himself, but at best to the vaguely conceived ‘spirit of the
race’. Individuals like himself he regarded merely as instruments or
organs of the ‘super-mind’.
This would not have been amiss, had the mind of the race, into which he
so frequently awoke under the influence of the general radiation, been
indeed a mind of higher rank than his own. But it was not. It was but a
pooling of the percipience and thought and will of the cloudlets. Thus
it was that the superb loyalty of the Martians was squandered upon
something which was not greater than themselves in mental calibre, but
only in mere bulk.
The Martian cloudlet, like the human animal, had a complex instinctive
nature. By night and day, respectively, he was impelled to perform the
vegetative functions of absorbing chemicals from the ground and energy
from the sunlight. Air and water he also craved, though he dealt with
them, of course, in his own manner. He had also his own characteristic
instinctive impulses to move his ‘body’, both for locomotion and
manipulation. Martian civilization provided an outlet for these
cravings, both in the practice of agriculture and in intricate and
wonderfully beautiful cloud-dances and gymnastics. For these perfectly
supple beings rejoiced in executing aerial evolutions, flinging out wild
rhythmical streamers, intertwining with one another in spirals,
concentrating into opaque spheres, cubes, cones, and all sorts of
fantastical volumes. Many of these movements and shapes had intense
emotional significance for them in relation to the operations of their
life, and were executed with a religious fervour and solemnity.
The Martian had also his impulses of fear and pugnacity. In the remote
past these had often been directed against hostile members of his own
species; but since the race had become unified, they found exercise only
upon other types of life and upon inanimate nature. Instinctive
gregariousness was, of course, extremely developed in the Martian at the
expense of instinctive self-assertion. Sexuality the Martian had not;
there were not partners in reproduction. But his impulse to merge
physically and mentally with other individuals, and wake up as the
super-mind, had in it much that was characteristic of sex in man.
Parental impulses, of a kind, he knew; but they were scarcely worthy of
the name. He cared only to eject excessive living matter from his
system, and to keep _en rapport_ with the new individual thus formed, as
he would with any other individual. He knew no more of the human
devotion to children as budding personalities than of the subtle
intercourse of male and female temperaments. By the time of the first
invasion, however, reproduction had been greatly restricted; for the
planet was fully populated, and each individual cloudlet was potentially
immortal. Among the Martians there was no ‘natural death’, no
spontaneous death through mere senility. Normally the cloudlet’s members
kept themselves in repair indefinitely by the reproduction of their
constituent units. Diseases, indeed, were often fatal. And chief among
them was a plague, corresponding to terrestrial cancer, in which the
subvital units lost their sensitivity to radiation, so that they
proceeded to live as primitive organisms and reproduce without
restraint. As they also became parasitic on the unaffected units, the
cloudlet inevitably died.
Like the higher kinds of terrestrial mammal, the Martians had strong
impulses of curiosity. Having also many practical needs to fulfil as a
result of their civilization, and being extremely well equipped by
nature for physical experiment and microscopy, they had gone far in the
natural sciences. In physics, astronomy, chemistry, and even in the
chemistry of life, man had nothing to teach them.
The vast corpus of Martian knowledge had taken many thousands of years
to grow. All its stages, and its current achievements, were recorded on
immense scrolls of paper made from vegetable pulp, and stored in
libraries of stone. For the Martians, curiously enough, had become great
masons, and had covered much of their planet with buildings of feathery
and toppling design, such as would have been quite impossible on earth.
They had no need of buildings for habitation, save in the arctic
regions; but as workshops, granaries, and store rooms of all sorts,
buildings had become very necessary to the Martians. Moreover these
extremely tenuous creatures took a peculiar joy in manipulating solids.
Even their most utilitarian architecture blossomed with a sort of gothic
or arabesque ornateness and fantasy, wherein the ethereal seemed to
torture the substance of solid rock into its own likeness.
At the time of the invasion, the Martians were still advancing
intellectually; and, indeed, it was through an achievement in
theoretical physics that they were able to leave their planet. They had
long known that minute particles at the upper limit of the atmosphere
might be borne into space by the pressure of the sun’s rays at dawn and
sunset. And at length they discovered how to use this pressure as the
wind is used in sailing. Dissipating themselves into their
ultra-microscopic units, they contrived to get a purchase on the
gravitational fields of the solar system, as a boat’s keel and rudder
get a purchase on the water. Thus they were able to tack across to the
earth as an armada of ultra-microscopic vessels. Arrived in the
terrestrial sky, they re-formed themselves as cloudlets, swam through
the dense air to the alpine summit, and climbed downwards, as a swimmer
may climb down a ladder under water.
This achievement involved very intricate calculations and chemical
inventions, especially for the preservation of life in transit and on an
alien planet. It could never have been done save by beings with
far-reaching and accurate knowledge of the physical world. But though in
respect of ‘natural knowledge’ the Martians were so well advanced, they
were extremely backward in all those spheres which may be called
‘spiritual knowledge’. They had little understanding of their own
mentality, and less of the place of mind in the cosmos. Though in a
sense a highly intelligent species, they were at the same time wholly
lacking in philosophical interest. They scarcely conceived, still less
tackled, the problems which even the First Men had faced so often,
though so vainly. For the Martians there was no mystery in the
distinction between reality and appearance or in the relation of the one
and the many, or in the status of good and evil. Nor were they ever
critical of their own ideals. They aimed whole-heartedly at the
advancement of the Martian super-individual. But what should constitute
individuality, and its advancement, they never seriously considered. And
the idea that they were under obligation also towards beings not
included in the Martian system of radiation, proved wholly beyond them.
For, though so clever, they were the most naïve of self-deceivers, and
had no insight to see what it is that is truly desirable.