We find ourselves living in a vast and boundless, yet finite, order of
spatio-temporal events. And each of us, as the racial mind, has learned
that there are other such orders, other and incommensurable spheres of
events, related to our own neither spatially nor temporally but in
another mode of eternal being. Of the contents of those alien spheres we
know almost nothing but that they are incomprehensible to us, even in
our racial mentality.
Within this spatio-temporal sphere of ours we remark what we call the
Beginning and what we call the End. In the Beginning there came into
existence, we know not how, that all-pervading and unimaginably tenuous
gas which was the parent of all material and spiritual existence within
time’s known span. It was in fact a very multitudinous yet precisely
numbered host. From the crowding together of this great population into
many swarms, arose in time the nebulae, each of which in its turn
condenses as a galaxy, a universe of stars. The stars have their
beginnings and their ends; and for a few moments somewhere in between
their beginnings and their ends a few, very few, may support mind. But
in due course will come the universal End, when all the wreckage of the
galaxies will have drifted together as a single, barren, and seemingly
changeless ash, in the midst of a chaos of unavailing energy.
But the cosmic events which we call the Beginning and the End are final
only in relation to our ignorance of the events which lie beyond them.
We know, and as the racial mind we have apprehended as a clear
necessity, that not only space but time also is boundless, though
finite. For in a sense time is cyclic. After the End, events unknowable
will continue to happen during a period much longer than that which will
have passed since the Beginning; but at length there will recur the
identical event which was itself also the Beginning.
Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time
within which it can repeat itself. For time is but an abstraction from
the successiveness of events that pass; and since all events whatsoever
form together a cycle of successiveness, there is nothing constant in
relation to which there can be repetition. And so the succession of
events is cyclic, yet not repetitive. The birth of the all-pervading gas
in the so-called Beginning is not merely _similar_ to another such birth
which will occur long after us and long after the cosmic End, so-called;
the past Beginning _is_ the future Beginning.
From the Beginning to the End is but the span from one spoke to the next
on time’s great wheel. There is a vaster span, stretching beyond the End
and round to the Beginning. Of the events therein we know nothing, save
that there must be such events.
Everywhere within time’s cycle there is endless passage of events. In a
continuous flux, they occur and vanish, yielding to their successors.
Yet each one of them is eternal. Though passage is of their very nature,
and without passage they are nothing, yet they have eternal being. But
their passage is no illusion. They have eternal being, yet eternally
they exist with passage. In our racial mode we see clearly that this is
so; but in our individual mode it remains a mystery. Yet even in our
individual mode we must accept both sides of this mysterious antinomy,
as a fiction needed for the rationalizing of our experience.
The Beginning precedes the End by some hundred million million
terrestrial years, and succeeds it by a period at least nine times
longer. In the middle of the smaller span lies the still shorter period
within which alone the living worlds can occur. And they are very few.
One by one they dawn into mentality and die, successive blooms in life’s
short summer. Before that season and after it, even to the Beginning and
to the End, and even before the Beginning and after the End, sleep,
utter oblivion. Not before there are stars, and not after the stars are
chilled, can there be life. And then, rarely.
In our own galaxy there have occurred hitherto some twenty thousand
worlds that have conceived life. And of these a few score have attained
or surpassed the mentality of the First Men. But of those that have
reached this development, man has now outstripped the rest, and today
man alone survives.
There are the millions of other galaxies, for instance the Andromedan
island. We have some reason to surmise that in that favoured universe
mind may have attained to insight and power incomparably greater than
our own. But all that we know for certain is that it contains four
worlds of high order.
Of the host of other universes that lie within range of our
mind-detecting instruments, none have produced anything comparable with
man. But there are many universes too remote to be estimated.
You may wonder how we have come to detect these remote lives and
intelligences. I can say only that the occurrence of mentality produces
certain minute astronomical effects, to which our instruments are
sensitive even at great distances. These effects increase slightly with
the mere mass of living matter on any astronomical body, but far more
with its mental and spiritual development. Long ago it was the spiritual
development of the world-community of the Fifth Men that dragged the
moon from its orbit. And in our own case, so numerous is our society
today, and so greatly developed in mental and spiritual activities, that
only by continuous expense of physical energy can we preserve the solar
system from confusion.
We have another means of detecting minds remote from us in space. We
can, of course, enter into past minds wherever they are, so long as they
are intelligible to us; and we have tried to use this power for the
discovery of remote minded worlds. But in general the experience of such
minds is too different in fibre from our own for us to be able even to
detect its existence. And so our knowledge of minds in other worlds is
almost wholly derived from their physical effects.
We cannot say that nowhere save on those rare bodies called planets does
life ever occur. For we have evidence that in a few of the younger stars
there is life, and even intelligence. How it persists in an incandescent
environment we know not, nor whether it is perhaps the life of the star
as a whole, as a single organism, or the life of many flame-like
inhabitants of the star. All that we know is that no star in its prime
has life, and therefore that the lives of the younger ones are probably
doomed.
Again, we know that mind occurs, though very seldom, on a few extremely
old stars, no longer incandescent. What the future of these minds will
be, we cannot tell. Perhaps it is with them, and not with man, that the
hope of the cosmos lies. But at present they are all primitive.
Today nothing anywhere in this galaxy of ours can compare with man in
respect of vision and mental creativeness.
We have, therefore, come to regard our community as of some importance.
Especially so in the light of our metaphysics; but I can only hint at
our metaphysical vision of things by means of metaphors which will
convey at best a caricature of that vision.
In the Beginning there was great potency, but little form. And the
spirit slept as the multitude of discrete primordial existents.
Thenceforth there has been a long and fluctuating adventure towards
harmonious complexity of form, and towards the awakening of the spirit
into unity, knowledge, delight, and self-expression. And this is the
goal of all living, that the cosmos may be known, and admired, and that
it may be crowned with further beauties. Nowhere and at no time, so far
as we can tell, at least within our own galaxy, has the adventure
reached further than in ourselves. And in us, what has been achieved is
but a minute beginning. But it is a real beginning. Man in our day has
gained some depth of insight, some breadth of knowledge, some power of
creation, some faculty of worship. We have looked far afield. We have
probed not altogether superficially into the nature of existence, and
have found it very beautiful, though also terrible. We have created a
not inconsiderable community; and we have wakened together to be the
unique spirit of that community. We had proposed to ourselves a very
long and arduous future, which should culminate, at some time before the
End, in the complete achievement of the spirit’s ideal. But now we know
that disaster is already near at hand.
When we are in full possession of our faculties, we are not distressed
by this fate. For we know that though our fair community must cease, it
has also indestructible being. We have at least carved into one region
of the eternal real a form which has beauty of no mean order. The great
company of diverse and most lovely men and women in all their subtle
relationships, striving with a single purpose towards the goal which is
mind’s final goal; the community and super-individuality of that great
host; the beginnings of further insight and creativeness upon the higher
plane—these surely are real achievements—even though, in the larger
view, they are minute achievements.
Yet though we are not at all dismayed by our own extinction, we cannot
but wonder whether or not in the far future some other spirit will
fulfil the cosmic ideal, or whether we ourselves are the modest crown of
existence. Unfortunately, though we can explore the past wherever there
are intelligible minds, we cannot enter into the future. And so in vain
we ask, will ever any spirit awake to gather all spirits into itself, to
elicit from the stars their full flower of beauty, to know all things
together, and admire all things justly.
If in the far future this end will be achieved, it is really achieved
even now; for whenever it occurs, its being is eternal. But on the other
hand if it is indeed achieved eternally, this achievement must be the
work of spirits or a spirit not wholly unlike ourselves, though
infinitely greater. And the physical location of that spirit must lie in
the far future.
But if no future spirit will achieve this end before it dies, then,
though the cosmos is indeed very beautiful, it is not perfect.
I said that we regard the cosmos as very beautiful. Yet it is also very
terrible. For ourselves, it is easy to look forward with equanimity to
our end, and even to the end of our admired community; for what we prize
most is the excellent beauty of the cosmos. But there are the myriads of
spirits who have never entered into that vision. They have suffered, and
they were not permitted that consolation. There are, first, the
incalculable hosts of lowly creatures scattered over all the ages in all
the minded worlds. Theirs was only a dream life, and their misery not
often poignant; but none the less they are to be pitied for having
missed the more poignant experience in which alone spirit can find
fulfilment. Then there are the intelligent beings, human and otherwise;
the many minded worlds throughout the galaxies, that have struggled into
cognizance, striven for they knew not what, tasted brief delights and
lived in the shadow of pain and death, until at last their life has been
crushed out by careless fate. In our solar system there are the
Martians, insanely and miserably obsessed; the native Venerians,
imprisoned in their ocean and murdered for man’s sake; and all the hosts
of the forerunning human species. A few individuals no doubt in every
period, and many in certain favoured races, have lived on the whole
happily. And a few have even known something of the supreme beatitude.
But for most, until our modern epoch, thwarting has outweighed
fulfilment; and if actual grief has not preponderated over joy, it is
because, mercifully, the fulfilment that is wholly missed cannot be
conceived.
Our predecessors of the Sixteenth species, oppressed by this vast
horror, undertook a forlorn and seemingly irrational crusade for the
rescue of the tragic past. We see now clearly that their enterprise,
though desperate, was not quite fantastic. For, if ever the cosmic ideal
should be realized, even though for a moment only, then in that time the
awakened Soul of All will embrace within itself all spirits whatever
throughout the whole of time’s wide circuit. And so to each one of them,
even to the least, it will seem that he has awakened and discovered
himself to be the Soul of All, knowing all things and rejoicing in all
things. And though afterwards, through the inevitable decay of the
stars, this most glorious vision must be lost, suddenly or in the
long-drawn-out defeat of life, yet would the awakened Soul of All have
eternal being, and in it each martyred spirit would have beatitude
eternally, though unknown to itself in its own temporal mode.
It may be that this is the case. If not, then eternally the martyred
spirits are martyred only, and not blest.
We cannot tell which of these possibilities is fact. As individuals we
earnestly desire that the eternal being of things may include this
supreme awakening. This, nothing less than this, has been the remote but
ever-present goal of our practical religious life and of our social
policy.
In our racial mode also we have greatly desired this end, but
differently.
Even as individuals, all our desires are tempered by that relentless
admiration of fate which we recognize as the spirit’s highest
achievement. Even as individuals, we exult in the issue whether our
enterprises succeed or fail. The pioneer defeated, the lover bereaved
and overwhelmed, can find in his disaster the supreme experience, the
dispassionate ecstasy which salutes the Real as it is and would not
change one jot of it. Even as individuals, we can regard the impending
extinction of mankind as a thing superb though tragic. Strong in the
knowledge that the human spirit has already inscribed the cosmos with
indestructible beauty, and that inevitably, whether sooner or later,
man’s career must end, we face this too sudden end with laughter in our
hearts, and peace.
But there is the one thought by which, in our individual state, we are
still dismayed, namely that the cosmic enterprise itself may fail; that
the full potentiality of the Real may never find expression; that never,
in any stage of time, the multitudinous and conflicting existents should
be organized as the universal harmonious living body; that the spirit’s
eternal nature, therefore, should be discordant, miserably tranced; that
the indestructible beauties of this our sphere of space and time should
remain imperfect, and remain, too, not adequately worshipped.
But in the racial mind this ultimate dread has no place. On those few
occasions when we have awakened racially, we have come to regard with
piety even the possibility of cosmical defeat. For as the racial mind,
though in a manner we earnestly desired the fulfilment of the cosmical
ideal, yet we were no more enslaved to this desire than, as individuals,
we are enslaved to our private desires. For though the racial mind wills
this supreme achievement, yet in the same act it holds itself aloof from
it, and from all desire, and all emotion, save the ecstasy which admires
the real as it is, and accepts its dark-bright form with joy.
As individuals, therefore, we try to regard the whole cosmic adventure
as a symphony now in progress, which may or may not some day achieve its
just conclusion. Like music, however, the vast biography of the stars is
to be judged not in respect of its final moment merely, but in respect
of the perfection of its whole form; and whether its form as a whole is
perfect or not, we cannot know. Actual music is a pattern of
intertwining themes which evolve and die; and these again are woven of
simpler members, which again are spun of chords and unitary tones. But
the music of the spheres is of a complexity almost infinitely more
subtle, and its themes rank above and below one another in hierarchy
beyond hierarchy. None but a God, none but a mind subtle as the music
itself, could hear the whole in all its detail, and grasp in one act its
close-knit individuality, if such it has. Not for any human mind to say
authoritatively, ‘This is music, wholly’, or to say, ‘This is mere
noise, flecked now and then by shreds of significance’.
The music of the spheres is unlike other music not only in respect of
its richness, but also in the nature of its medium. It is a music not
merely of sounds but of souls. Each of its minor themes, each of its
chords, each single tone of it, each tremor of each tone, is in its own
degree more than a mere passive factor in the music; it is a listener,
and also a creator. Wherever there is individuality of form, there is
also an individual appreciator and originator. And the more complex the
form, the more percipient and active the spirit. Thus in every
individual factor within the music, the musical environment of that
factor is experienced, vaguely or precisely, erroneously or with greater
approximation to truth; and, being experienced, it is admired or
loathed, rightly or falsely. And it is influenced. Just as in actual
music each theme is in a manner a determination of its forerunners and
followers and present accompaniment, so in this vaster music each
individual factor is itself a determination of its environment. Also it
is a determinant, both of that which precedes and that which follows.
But whether these manifold interdeterminations are after all haphazard,
or, as in music, controlled in relation to the beauty of the whole, we
know not; nor whether, if this is the case, the beautiful whole of
things is the work of some mind; nor yet whether some mind admires it
adequately as a whole of beauty.
But this we know: that we ourselves, when the spirit is most awake in
us, admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright
form with joy.