The Fifth Men had not been endowed with that potential immortality which
their makers themselves possessed. And from the fact that they were
mortal and yet long-lived, their culture drew its chief brilliance and
poignancy. Beings for whom the natural span was three thousand years,
and ultimately as much as fifty thousand, were peculiarly troubled by
the prospect of death, and by the loss of those dear to them. The more
ephemeral kind of spirit, that comes into being and then almost
immediately ceases, before it has entered at all deeply into
consciousness of itself, can face its end with a courage that is half
unwitting. Even its smart in the loss of other beings with whom it has
been intimate is but a vague and dream-like suffering. For the ephemeral
spirit has no time to grow fully awake, or fully intimate with another,
before it must lose its beloved, and itself once more fade into
unconsciousness. But with the long-lived yet not immortal Fifth Men the
case was different. Gathering to themselves experience of the cosmos,
acquiring an ever more precise and vivid insight and appreciation, they
knew that very soon all this wealth of the soul must cease to be. And in
love, though they might be fully intimate not merely with one but with
very many persons, the death of one of these dear spirits seemed an
irrevocable tragedy, an utter annihilation of the most resplendent kind
of glory, an impoverishment of the cosmos for evermore.
In their brief primitive phase, the Fifth Men, like so many other races,
sought to console themselves by unreasoning faith in a life after death.
They conceived, for instance, that at death terrestrial beings embarked
upon a career continuous with earthly life, but far more ample, either
in some remote planetary system, or in some wholly distinct orb of
space-time. But though such theories were never disproved in the
primitive era, they gradually began to seem not merely improbable but
ignoble. For it came to be recognized that the resplendent glories of
personality, even in that degree of beauty which now for the first time
was attained, were not after all the extreme of glory. It was seen with
pain, but also with exultation, that even love’s demand that the beloved
should have immortal life is a betrayal of man’s paramount allegiance.
And little by little it became evident that those who used great gifts,
and even genius, to establish the truth of the after life, or to seek
contact with their beloved dead, suffered from a strange blindness, an
obtuseness of the spirit. Though the love which had misled them was
itself a very lovely thing, yet they were misled. Like children,
searching for lost toys, they wandered. Like adolescents seeking to
recapture delight in the things of childhood, they shunned those more
difficult admirations which are proper to the grown mind.
And so it became a constant aim of the Fifth Men to school themselves to
admire chiefly even in the very crisis of bereavement, not persons, but
that great music of innumerable personal lives, which is the life of the
race. And quite early in their career they discovered an unexpected
beauty in the very fact that the individual must die. So that, when they
had actually come into possession of the means to make themselves
immortal, they refrained, choosing rather merely to increase the
life-span of succeeding generations to fifty thousand years. Such a
period seemed to be demanded for the full exercise of human capacity;
but immortality, they held, would lead to spiritual disaster.
Now as their science advanced they saw that there had been a time,
before the stars were formed, when there was no possible footing for
minds in the cosmos; and that there would come a time when mentality
would be driven out of existence. Earlier human species had not needed
to trouble about mind’s ultimate fate; but for the long-lived Fifth Men
the end, though remote, did not seem infinitely distant. The prospect
distressed them. They had schooled themselves to live not for the
individual but for the race; and now the life of the race itself was
seen to be a mere instant between the endless void of the past and the
endless void of the future. Nothing within their ken was more worthy of
admiration than the organized progressive mentality of mankind; and the
conviction that this most admired thing must soon cease filled many of
their less ample minds with horror and indignation. But in time the
Fifth Men, like the Second Men long before them, came to suspect that
even in this tragic brevity of mind’s course there was a quality of
beauty, more difficult than the familiar beauty, but also more
exquisite. Even thus imprisoned in an instant, the spirit of man might
yet plumb the whole extent of space, and also the whole past and the
whole future; and so, from behind his prison bars, he might render the
universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded of him.
Better so, they said, than that he should fret himself with puny efforts
to escape. He is dignified by his very weakness, and the cosmos by its
very indifference to him.
For aeons they remained in this faith. And they schooled their hearts to
acquiesce in it, saying, if it is so, it is best, and somehow we must
learn to see that it is best. But what they meant by ‘best’ was not what
their predecessors would have meant. They did not, for instance, deceive
themselves by pretending that after all they themselves actually
preferred life to be evanescent. On the contrary, they continued to long
that it might be otherwise. But having discovered, both behind the
physical order and behind the desires of minds, a fundamental principle
whose essence was aesthetic, they were faithful to the conviction that
whatever was fact must somehow in the universal view be fitting, right,
beautiful, integral to the form of the cosmos. And so they accepted as
right a state of affairs which in their own hearts they still felt
grievously wrong.
This conviction of the irrevocability of the past and of the evanescence
of mind induced in them a great tenderness for all beings that had lived
and ceased. Deeming themselves to be near the crest of life’s
achievement, blessed also with longevity and philosophic detachment,
they were often smitten with pity for those humbler, briefer, and less
free spirits whose lot had fallen in the past. Moreover, themselves
extremely complex, subtle, conscious, they conceived a generous
admiration for all simple minds, for the early men, and for the beasts.
Very strongly they condemned the action of their predecessors in
destroying so many joyous and delectable creatures. Earnestly they
sought to reconstruct in imagination all those beings that blind
intellectualism had murdered. Earnestly they delved in the near and the
remote past so as to recover as much as possible of the history of life
on the planet. With meticulous love they would figure out the life
stories of extinct types, such as the brontosaurus, the hippopotamus,
the chimpanzee, the Englishman, the American, as also of the still
extant amoeba. And while they could not but relish the comicality of
these remote beings, their amusement was the outgrowth of affectionate
insight into simple natures, and was but the obverse of their
recognition that the primitive is essentially tragic, because blind. And
so, while they saw that the main work of man must have regard to the
future, they felt that he owed also a duty toward the past. He must
preserve it in his own mind, if not actually in life at least in being.
In the future lay glory, joy, brilliance of the spirit. The future
needed service, not pity, not piety; but in the past lay darkness,
confusion, waste, and all the cramped primitive minds, bewildered,
torturing one another in their stupidity, yet one and all in some unique
manner beautiful.
The reconstruction of the past, not merely as abstract history but with
the intimacy of the novel, thus became one of the main preoccupations of
the Fifth Men. Many devoted themselves to this work, each individual
specializing very minutely in some particular episode of human or animal
history, and transmitting his work into the culture of the race. Thus
increasingly the individual felt himself to be a single flicker between
the teeming gulf of the never-more and the boundless void of the
not-yet. Himself a member of a very noble and fortunate race, his zest
in existence was tempered, deepened, by a sense of the presence, the
ghostly presence, of the myriad less fortunate beings in the past.
Sometimes, and especially in epochs when the contemporary world seemed
most satisfactory and promising, this piety toward the primitive and the
past became the dominant activity of the race, giving rise to
alternating phases of rebellion against the tyrannical nature of the
cosmos, and faith that in the universal view, after all, this horror
must be right. In this latter mood it was held that the very
irrevocability of the past dignified all past existence, and dignified
the cosmos, as a work of tragic art is dignified by the irrevocability
of disaster. It was this mood of acquiescence and faith which in the end
became the characteristic attitude of the Fifth Men for many millions of
years.
But a bewildering discovery was in store for the Fifth Men, a discovery
which was to change their whole attitude toward existence. Certain
obscure biological facts began to make them suspect, on purely empirical
grounds, that past events were not after all simply non-existent, that
though no longer existent in the temporal manner, they had eternal
existence in some other manner. The effect of this increasing suspicion
about the past was that a once harmonious race was divided for a while
into two parties, those who insisted that the formal beauty of the
universe demanded the tragic evanescence of all things, and those who
determined to show that living minds could actually reach back into past
events in all their pastness.
The readers of this book are not in a position to realize the poignancy
of the conflict which now threatened to wreck humanity. They cannot
approach it from the point of view of a race whose culture had consisted
of an age-long schooling in admiration of an ever-vanishing cosmos. To
the orthodox it seemed that the new view was iconoclastic, impertinent,
vulgar. Their opponents, on the other hand, insisted that the matter
must be decided dispassionately, according to the evidence. They were
also able to point out that this devotion to evanescence was after all
but the outcome of the conviction that the cosmos must be supremely
noble. No one, it was said, really had direct vision of evanescence as
in itself an excellence. So heartfelt was the dispute that the orthodox
party actually broke off all ‘telepathic’ communication with the rebels,
and even went so far as to plan their destruction. There can be no doubt
that if violence had actually been used the human race would have
succumbed; for in a species of such high mental development internecine
war would have been a gross violation of its nature. It would never have
been able to live down so shameful a spiritual disaster. Fortunately,
however, at the eleventh hour, commonsense prevailed. The iconoclasts
were permitted to carry on their research, and the whole race awaited
the result.