I have told man’s story up to a point about half-way from his origin to
his annihilation. Behind lies the vast span which includes the whole
Terrestrial and Venerian ages, with all their slow fluctuations of
darkness and enlightenment. Ahead lies the Neptunian age, equally long,
equally tragic perhaps, but more diverse, and in its last phase
incomparably more brilliant. It would not be profitable to recount the
history of man on Neptune on the scale of the preceding chronicle. Very
much of it would be incomprehensible to terrestrials, and much of it
repeats again and again, in the many Neptunian modes, themes that we
have already observed in the Terrestrial or the Venerian movements of
the human symphony. To appreciate fully the range and subtlety of the
great living epic, we ought, no doubt, to dwell on its every movement
with the same faithful care. But this is impossible to any human mind.
We can but attend to significant phrases, here and there, and hope to
capture some fragmentary hint of its vast intricate form. And for the
readers of this book, who are themselves tremors in the opening bars of
the music, it is best that I should dwell chiefly on things near to
them, even at the cost of ignoring much that is in fact greater.
Before continuing our long flight let us look around us. Hitherto we
have passed over time’s fields at a fairly low altitude, making many
detailed observations. Now we shall travel at a greater height and with
speed of a new order. We must therefore orientate ourselves within the
wider horizon that opens around us; we must consider things from the
astronomical rather than the human point of view. I said that we were
half-way from man’s beginning to his end. Looking back to that remote
beginning we see that the span of time which includes the whole career
of the First Men from Pithecanthropus to the Patagonian disaster is an
unanalysable point. Even the preceding and much longer period between
the first mammal and the first man, some twenty-five millions of
terrestrial years, seems now inconsiderable. The whole of it, together
with the age of the First Men, may be said to lie half-way between the
formation of the planets, two thousand million years earlier, and their
final destruction, two thousand million years later. Taking a still
wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is
itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun’s age. And
before the birth of the suns the stuff of this galaxy had already
endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even these aeons look brief in
relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebulae
themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist
in the beginning. Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many
sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a
flash in the lifetime of the cosmos.
Spatially, also, man is inconceivably minute. If in imagination we
reduce this galaxy of ours to the size of an ancient terrestrial
principality, we must suppose it adrift in the void with millions of
other such principalities, very remote from one another. On the same
scale the all-embracing cosmos would bulk as a sphere whose diameter was
some twenty times greater than that of the lunar orbit in your day; and
somewhere within the little wandering asteroid-like principality which
is our own universe, the solar system would be an ultra-microscopic
point, the greatest planet incomparably smaller.
We have watched the fortunes of eight successive human species for a
thousand million years, the first half of that flicker which is the
duration of man. Ten more species now succeed one another, or are
contemporary, on the plains of Neptune. We, the Last Men, are the
Eighteenth Men. Of the eight pre-Neptunian species, some, as we have
seen, remained always primitive; many achieved at least a confused and
fleeting civilization, and one, the brilliant Fifth, was already
wakening into true humanity when misfortune crushed it. The ten
Neptunian species show an even greater diversity. They range from the
instinctive animal to modes of consciousness never before attained. The
definitely subhuman degenerate types are confined mostly to the first
six hundred million years of man’s sojourn on Neptune. During the
earlier half of this long phase of preparation, man, at first almost
crushed out of existence by a hostile environment, gradually peopled the
huge north; but with beasts, not men. For man, as man, no longer
existed. During the latter half of the preparatory six hundred million
years, the human spirit gradually awoke again, to undergo the
fluctuating advance and decline characteristic of the pre-Neptunian
ages. But subsequently, in the last four hundred million years of his
career on Neptune, man has made an almost steady progress toward full
spiritual maturity.
Let us now look rather more closely at these three great epochs of man’s
history.