We have now followed man’s career during some forty million years. The
whole period to be covered by this chronicle is about two thousand
million. In this chapter, and the next, therefore, we must accomplish a
swift flight at great altitude over a tract of time more than three
times as long as that which we have hitherto observed. This great
expanse is no desert, but a continent teeming with variegated life, and
many successive and very diverse civilizations. The myriads of human
beings who inhabit it far outnumber the First and Second Men combined.
And the content of each one of these lives is a universe, rich and
poignant as that of any reader of this book.
In spite of the great diversity of this span of man’s history, it is a
single movement within the whole symphony, just as the careers of the
First and of the Second Men are each a single movement. Not only is it a
period dominated by a single natural human species and the artificial
human species into which the natural species at length transformed
itself; but, also, in spite of innumerable digressions, a single theme,
a single mood of the human will, informs the whole duration. For now at
last man’s main energy is devoted to remaking his own physical and
mental nature. Throughout the rise and fall of many successive cultures
this purpose is progressively clarifying itself, and expressing itself
in many tragic and even devastating experiments; until, towards the
close of this immense period, it seems almost to achieve its end.
When the Second Men had remained in their strange racial trance for
about thirty million years, the obscure forces that make for advancement
began to stir in them once more. This reawakening was favoured by
geological accident. An incursion of the sea gradually isolated some of
their number in an island continent, which was once part of the North
Atlantic ocean-bed. The climate of this island gradually cooled from
sub-tropical to temperate and sub-arctic. The vast change of conditions
caused in the imprisoned race a subtle chemical re-arrangement of the
germ-plasm, such that there ensued an epidemic of biological variation.
Many new types appeared, but in the long run one, more vigorous and
better adapted than the rest, crowded out all competitors and slowly
consolidated itself as a new species, the Third Men.
[Illustration: Time Scale 3]
Scarcely more than half the stature of their predecessors, these beings
were proportionately slight and lithe. Their skin was of a sunny brown,
covered with a luminous halo of red-gold hairs, which on the head became
a russet mop. Their golden eyes, reminiscent of the snake, were more
enigmatic than profound. Their faces were compact as cat’s muzzles,
their lips full, but subtle at the corners. Their ears, objects of
personal pride and of sexual admiration, were extremely variable both in
individuals and races. These surprising organs, which would have seemed
merely ludicrous to the First Men, were expressive both of temperament
and passing mood. They were immense, delicately involuted, of a silken
texture, and very mobile. They gave an almost bat-like character to the
otherwise somewhat feline heads. But the most distinctive feature of the
Third Men was their great lean hands, on which were six versatile
fingers, six antennae of living steel.
Unlike their predecessors, the Third Men were short-lived. They had a
brief childhood and a brief maturity, followed (in the natural course)
by a decade of senility, and death at about sixty. But such was their
abhorrence of decrepitude, that they seldom allowed themselves to grow
old. They preferred to kill themselves when their mental and physical
agility began to decline. Thus, save in exceptional epochs of their
history, very few lived to be fifty.
But though in some respects the third human species fell short of the
high standard of its predecessor, especially in certain of the finer
mental capacities, it was by no means simply degenerate. The admirable
sensory equipment of the second species was retained, and even improved.
Vision was no less ample and precise and colourful. Touch was far more
discriminate, especially in the delicately pointed sixth finger-tip.
Hearing was so developed that a man could run through wooded country
blindfold without colliding with the trees. Moreover the great range of
sounds and rhythms had acquired an extremely subtle gamut of emotional
significance. Music was therefore one of the main preoccupations of the
civilizations of this species.
Mentally the Third Men were indeed very unlike their predecessors. Their
intelligence was in some ways no less agile; but it was more cunning
than intellectual, more practical than theoretical. They were interested
more in the world of sense-experience than in the world of abstract
reason, and again far more in living things than in the lifeless. They
excelled in certain kinds of art, and indeed also in some fields of
science. But they were led into science more through practical,
aesthetic, or religious needs than through intellectual curiosity. In
mathematics, for instance (helped greatly by the duo-decimal system,
which resulted from their having twelve fingers), they became wonderful
calculators; yet they never had the curiosity to inquire into the
essential nature of number. Nor, in physics, were they ever led to
discover the more obscure properties of space. They were, indeed,
strangely devoid of curiosity. Hence, though sometimes capable of a
penetrating mystical intuition, they never seriously disciplined
themselves under philosophy, nor tried to relate their mystical
intuitions with the rest of their experience.
In their primitive phases the Third Men were keen hunters; but also,
owing to their strong parental impulses, they were much addicted to
making pets of captured animals. Throughout their career they displayed
what earlier races would have called an uncanny sympathy with, and
understanding of, all kinds of animals and plants. This intuitive
insight into the nature of living things, and this untiring interest in
the diversity of vital behaviour, constituted the dominating impulse
throughout the whole career of the third human species. At the outset
they excelled not only as hunters but as herdsmen and domesticators. By
nature they were very apt in every kind of manipulation, but especially
in the manipulation of living things. As a species they were also
greatly addicted to play of all kinds, but especially to manipulative
play, and above all to the playful manipulation of organisms. From the
first they performed great feats of riding on the moose-like deer which
they had domesticated. They tamed also a certain gregarious coursing
beast. The pedigree of this great leonine wolf led, through the tropical
survivors of the Martian plague, back to those descendants of the arctic
fox which had over-run the world after the Patagonian disaster. This
animal the Third Men trained not only to help them in shepherding and in
the chase, but also to play intricate hunting games. Between this hound
and its master or mistress there frequently arose a very special
relation, a kind of psychical symbiosis, a dumb intuitive mutual
insight, a genuine love, based on economic cooperation, but strongly
toned also, in a manner peculiar to the third human species, with
religious symbolism and frankly sexual intimacy.
As herdsmen and shepherds the Third Men very early practised selective
breeding; and increasingly they became absorbed in the perfecting and
enriching of all types of animals and plants. It was the boast of every
local chieftain not only that the men of his tribe were more manly and
the women more beautiful than all others, but also that the bears in his
territory were the noblest and most bear-like of all bears, that the
birds built more perfect nests and were more skilful fliers and singers
than birds elsewhere. And so on, through all the animal and vegetable
races.
This biological control was achieved at first by simple breeding
experiments, but later and increasingly by crude physiological
manipulation of the young animal, the foetus and (later, still) the
germ-plasm. Hence arose a perennial conflict, which often caused wars of
a truly religious bitterness, between the tender-hearted, who shrank
from the infliction of pain, and the passionately manipulative, who
willed to create at whatever cost. This conflict, indeed, was waged not
only between individuals but within each mind; for all were innately
hunters and manipulators, but also all had intuitive sympathy even with
the quarry which they tormented. The trouble was increased by a strain
of sheer cruelty which occurred even in the most tender-hearted. This
sadism was at bottom an expression of an almost mystical reverence for
sensory experience. Physical pain, being the most intense of all sensed
qualities, was apt to be thought the most excellent. It might be
expected that this would lead rather to self-torture than to cruelty.
Sometimes it did. But in general those who could not appreciate pain in
their own flesh were yet able to persuade themselves that in inflicting
pain on lower animals they were creating vivid psychic reality, and
therefore high excellence. It was just the intense reality of pain, they
said, that made it intolerable to men and animals. Seen with the
detachment of the divine mind, it appeared in its true beauty. And even
man, they declared, could appreciate its excellence when it occurred not
in men but in animals.
Though the Third Men lacked interest in systematic thought, their minds
were often concerned with matters outside the fields of private and
social economy. They experienced not only aesthetic but mystical
cravings. And though they were without any appreciation of those finer
beauties of human personality, which their predecessors had admired as
the highest attainment of life on the planet, the Third Men themselves,
in their own way, sought to make the best of human nature, and indeed of
animal nature. Man they regarded in two aspects. In the first place he
was the noblest of all animals, gifted with unique aptitudes. He was, as
was sometimes said, God’s chief work of art. But secondly, since his
special virtues were his insight into the nature of all living things
and his manipulative capacity, he was himself God’s eye and God’s hand.
These convictions were expressed over and over again in the religions of
the Third Men by the image of the deity as a composite animal, with
wings of the albatross, jaws of the great wolf-fox, feet of the deer,
and so on. For the human element was represented in this deity by the
hands, the eyes, and the sexual organs of man. And between the divine
hands lay the world, with all its diverse population. Often the world
was represented as being the fruit of God’s primitive potency, but also
as in process of being drastically altered and tortured into perfection
by the hands.
Most of the cultures of the Third Men were dominated by this obscure
worship of Life as an all-pervading spirit, expressing itself in myriad
diverse individuals. And at the same time the intuitive loyalty to
living things and to a vaguely conceived life-force was often
complicated by sadism. For in the first place it was recognized, of
course, that what is valued by higher beings may be intolerable to
lower; and, as has been said, pain itself was thought to be a superior
excellence of this kind. And again in a second manner sadism expressed
itself. The worship of Life, as agent or subject, was complemented by
worship of environment, as object to life’s subjectivity, as that which
remains ever foreign to life, thwarting its enterprises, torturing it,
yet making it possible, and, by its very resistance, goading it into
nobler expressions. Pain, it was said, was the most vivid apprehension
of the sacred and universal Object.
The thought of the third human species was never systematic. But in some
such manner as the foregoing it strove to rationalize its obscure
intuition of the beauty which includes at once Life’s victory and
defeat.