Last and First Men (1930)(gutenberg.org)

This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem
a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of
man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is
taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned
speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination
in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about
the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even
study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not
merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities
that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the
certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to
more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt
to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to
entertain new values.

But if such imaginative construction of possible futures is to be at all
potent, our imagination must be strictly disciplined. We must endeavour
not to go beyond the bounds of possibility set by the particular state of
culture within which we live. The merely fantastic has only minor
power. Not that we should seek actually to prophesy what will as a
matter of fact occur; for in our present state such prophecy is certainly
futile, save in the simplest matters. We are not set up as historians
attempting to look ahead instead of backwards. We can only select a
certain thread out of the tangle of many equally valid possibilities. But
we must select with a purpose. The activity that we are undertaking is
not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is
the effect that art should have.

Yet our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction.
We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A
true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living
or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest
admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which
either violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own
cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of
its culture’s best vision. This book can no more claim to be true myth
than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.

The kind of future which is here imagined, should not, I think, seem
wholly fantastic, or at any rate not so fantastic as to be without significance,
to modern western individuals who are familiar with the outlines
of contemporary thought. Had I chosen matter in which there was
nothing whatever of the fantastic, its very plausibility would have
rendered it implausible. For one thing at least is almost certain about
the future, namely, that very much of it will be such as we should call
incredible. In one important respect, indeed, I may perhaps seem to
have strayed into barren extravagance. I have supposed an inhabitant
of the remote future to be communicating with us of today. I have
pretended that he has the power of partially controlling the operations
of minds now living, and that this book is the product of such influence.
Yet even this fiction is perhaps not wholly excluded by our thought. I
might, of course, easily have omitted it without more than superficial
alteration of the theme. But its introduction was more than a convenience.
Only by some such radical and bewildering device could I
embody the possibility that there may be more in time’s nature than is
revealed to us. Indeed, only by some such trick could I do justice to the
conviction that our whole present mentality is but a confused and halting
first experiment.

If ever this book should happen to be discovered by some future
individual, for instance by a member of the next generation sorting out
the rubbish of his predecessors, it will certainly raise a smile; for very
much is bound to happen of which no hint is yet discoverable. And
indeed even in our generation circumstances may well change so unexpectedly
and so radically that this book may very soon look ridiculous.
But no matter. We of today must conceive our relation to the rest
of the universe as best we can; and even if our images must seem fantastic
to future men, they may none the less serve their purpose today.

Some readers, taking my story to be an attempt at prophecy, may
deem it unwarrantably pessimistic. But it is not prophecy; it is myth, or
an essay in myth. We all desire the future to turn out more happily than
I have figured it. In particular we desire our present civilization to
advance steadily toward some kind of Utopia. The thought that it may
decay and collapse, and that all its spiritual treasure may be lost irrevocably,
is repugnant to us. Yet this must be faced as at least a possibility.
And this kind of tragedy, the tragedy of a race, must, I think, be
admitted in any adequate myth.

And so, while gladly recognizing that in our time there are strong
seeds of hope as well as of despair, I have imagined for aesthetic purposes
that our race will destroy itself. There is today a very earnest
movement for peace and international unity; and surely with good
fortune and intelligent management it may triumph. Most earnestly we
must hope that it will. But I have figured things out in this book in such
a manner that this great movement fails. I suppose it incapable of preventing
a succession of national wars; and I permit it only to achieve
the goal of unity and peace after the mentality of the race has been
undermined. May this not happen! May the League of Nations, or
some more strictly cosmopolitan authority, win through before it is
too late! Yet let us find room in our minds and in our hearts for the
thought that the whole enterprise of our race may be after all but a
minor and unsuccessful episode in a vaster drama, which also perhaps
may be tragic.

American readers, if ever there are any, may feel that their great
nation is given a somewhat unattractive part in the story. I have
imagined the triumph of the cruder sort of Americanism over all that
is best and most promising in American culture. May this not occur in
the real world! Americans themselves, however, admit the possibility
of such an issue, and will, I hope, forgive me for emphasizing it, and
using it as an early turning-point in the long drama of Man.

Any attempt to conceive such a drama must take into account whatever
contemporary science has to say about man’s own nature and his
physical environment. I have tried to supplement my own slight
knowledge of natural science by pestering my scientific friends. In
particular, I have been very greatly helped by conversation with
Professors P. G. H. Boswell, J. Johnstone, and J. Rice, of Liverpool.
But they must not be held responsible for the many deliberate extravagances
which, though they serve a purpose in the design, may jar upon
the scientific ear.

To Dr L. A. Reid I am much indebted for general comments, and to
Mr E. V. Rieu for many very valuable suggestions. To Professor and
Mrs L. C. Martin, who read the whole book in manuscript, I cannot
properly express my gratitude for constant encouragement and criticism.
To my wife’s devastating sanity I owe far more than she supposes.

Before closing this preface I would remind the reader that throughout
the following pages the speaker, the first person singular, is supposed
to be, not the actual writer, but an individual living in the extremely
distant future.

This book has two authors, one contemporary with its readers, the
other an inhabitant of an age which they would call the distant future.
The brain that conceives and writes these sentences lives in the time of
Einstein. Yet I, the true inspirer of this book, I who have begotten it
upon that brain, I who influence that primitive being’s conception,
inhabit an age which, for Einstein, lies in the very remote future.

The actual writer thinks he is merely contriving a work of fiction.
Though he seeks to tell a plausible story, he neither believes it himself,
nor expects others to believe it. Yet the story is true. A being whom you
would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate
brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes
for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age.
Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate
with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We
can help you, and we need your help.

You cannot believe it. Your acquaintance with time is very imperfect,
and so your understanding of it is defeated. But no matter. Do not
perplex yourselves about this truth, so difficult to you, so familiar to
us of a later aeon. Do but entertain, merely as a fiction, the idea that
the thought and will of individuals future to you may intrude, rarely
and with difficulty, into the mental processes of some of your contemporaries.
Pretend that you believe this, and that the following
chronicle is an authentic message from the Last Men. Imagine the
consequences of such a belief. Otherwise I cannot give life to the great
history which it is my task to tell.

When your writers romance of the future, they too easily imagine a
progress toward some kind of Utopia, in which beings like themselves
live in unmitigated bliss among circumstances perfectly suited to a fixed
human nature. I shall not describe any such paradise. Instead, I shall
record huge fluctuations of joy and woe, the results of changes not only
in man’s environment but in his fluid nature. And I must tell how, in my
own age, having at last achieved spiritual maturity and the philosophic
mind, man is forced by an unexpected crisis to embark on an enterprise
both repugnant and desperate.

I invite you, then, to travel in imagination through the aeons that lie
between your age and mine. I ask you to watch such a history of
change, grief, hope, and unforeseen catastrophe, as has nowhere else
occurred, within the girdle of the Milky Way. But first, it is well to
contemplate for a few moments the mere magnitudes of cosmical
events. For, compressed as it must necessarily be, the narrative that I
have to tell may seem to present a sequence of adventures and disasters
crowded together, with no intervening peace. But in fact man’s career
has been less like a mountain torrent hurtling from rock to rock, than
a great sluggish river, broken very seldom by rapids. Ages of quiescence,
often of actual stagnation, filled with the monotonous problems and
toils of countless almost identical lives, have been punctuated by rare
moments of racial adventure. Nay, even these few seemingly rapid
events themselves were in fact often long-drawn-out and tedious. They
acquire a mere illusion of speed from the speed of the narrative.

The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be
haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imaged save by
beings of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to
naïve vision almost as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked
with light. Yet in reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned
in an hour’s walking, the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond
plain. Similarly with time. While the near past and the new future
display within them depth beyond depth, time’s remote immensities are
foreshortened into flatness. It is almost inconceivable to simple minds
that man’s whole history should be but a moment in the life of the stars,
and that remote events should embrace within themselves aeon upon
aeon.

In your day you have learnt to calculate something of the magnitudes
of time and space. But to grasp my theme in its true proportions, it is
necessary to do more than calculate. It is necessary to brood upon these
magnitudes, to draw out the mind toward them, to feel the littleness of
your here and now, and of the moment of civilization which you call
history. You cannot hope to image, as we do, such vast proportions as
one in a thousand million, because your sense-organs, and therefore
your perceptions, are too coarse-grained to discriminate so small a
fraction of their total field. But you may at least, by mere contemplation,
grasp more constantly and firmly the significance of your calculations.

Men of your day, when they look back into the history of their planet,
remark not only the length of time but also the bewildering acceleration
of life’s progress. Almost stationary in the earliest period of the earth’s
career, in your moment it seems headlong. Mind in you, it is said, not
merely stands higher than ever before in respect of percipience, knowledge,
insight, delicacy of admiration, and sanity of will, but also it
moves upward century by century ever more swiftly. What next?
Surely, you think, there will come a time when there will be no further
heights to conquer.

This view is mistaken. You underestimate even the foothills that
stand in front of you, and never suspect that far above them, hidden by
cloud, rise precipices and snow-fields. The mental and spiritual
advances which, in your day, mind in the solar system has still to
attempt, are overwhelmingly more complex, more precarious and
dangerous, than those which have already been achieved. And though
in certain humble respects you have attained full development, the
loftier potencies of the spirit in you have not yet even begun to put
forth buds.

Somehow, then, I must help you to feel not only the vastness of
time and space, but also the vast diversity of mind’s possible modes.
But this I can only hint to you, since so much lies wholly beyond the
range of your imagination.

Historians living in your day need grapple only with one moment of
the flux of time. But I have to present in one book the essence not of
centuries but of aeons. Clearly we cannot walk at leisure through such
a tract, in which a million terrestrial years are but as a year is to your
historians. We must fly. We must travel as you do in your aeroplanes,
observing only the broad features of the continent. But since the flier
sees nothing of the minute inhabitants below him, and since it is they
who make history, we must also punctuate our flight with many
descents, skimming as it were over the house-tops, and even alighting
at critical points to speak face to face with individuals. And as the
plane’s journey must begin with a slow ascent from the intricate
pedestrian view to wider horizons, so we must begin with a somewhat
close inspection of that little period which includes the culmination and
collapse of your own primitive civilization.

Observe now your own epoch of history as it appears to the
Last Men.

Long before the human spirit awoke to clear cognizance of the
world and itself, it sometimes stirred in its sleep, opened bewildered
eyes, and slept again. One of these moments of precocious
experience embraces the whole struggle of the First Men from
savagery towards civilization. Within that moment, you stand
almost in the very instant when the species attains its zenith.
Scarcely at all beyond your own day is this early culture to be
seen progressing, and already in your time the mentality of the
race shows signs of decline.

The first, and some would say the greatest, achievement of your
own ‘Western’ culture was the conceiving of two ideals of conduct,
both essential to the spirit’s well-being. Socrates, delighting
in the truth for its own sake and not merely for practical ends,
glorified unbiased thinking, honesty of mind and speech. Jesus,
delighting in the actual human persons around him, and in that
flavour of divinity which, for him, pervaded the world, stood for
unselfish love of neighbours and of God. Socrates woke to the
ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate
yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity,
Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a
different emphasis, involved the other.

Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain
a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of
the First Men was never really capable. For many centuries these
twin stars enticed the more precociously human of human animals,
in vain. And the failure to put these ideals in practice helped to
engender in the race a cynical lassitude which was one cause of its
decay.

There were other causes. The peoples from whom sprang
Socrates and Jesus were also among the first to conceive admiration
for Fate. In Greek tragic art and Hebrew worship of divine
law, as also in the Indian resignation, man experienced, at first
very obscurely, that vision of an alien and supernal beauty, which
was to exalt and perplex him again and again throughout his
whole career. The conflict between this worship and the intransigent
loyalty to Life, embattled against Death, proved insoluble.
And though few individuals were ever clearly conscious of the
issue, the first human species was again and again unwittingly
hampered in its spiritual development by this supreme perplexity.

While man was being whipped and enticed by these precocious
experiences, the actual social constitution of his world kept changing
so rapidly through increased mastery over physical energy,
that his primitive nature could no longer cope with the complexity
of his environment. Animals that were fashioned for hunting and
fighting in the wild were suddenly called upon to be citizens, and
moreover citizens of a world-community. At the same time they
found themselves possessed of certain very dangerous powers
which their petty minds were not fit to use. Man struggled; but,
as you shall hear, he broke under the strain.

The European War, called at the time the War to End War,
was the first and least destructive of those world conflicts which
display so tragically the incompetence of the First Men to control
their own nature. At the outset a tangle of motives, some honourable
and some disreputable, ignited a conflict for which both
antagonists were all too well prepared, though neither seriously
intended it. A real difference of temperament between Latin-France
and Nordic Germany combined with a superficial rivalry
between Germany and England, and a number of stupidly brutal
gestures on the part of the German Government and military
command, to divide the world into two camps; yet in such a
manner that it is impossible to find any difference of principle
between them. During the struggle each party was convinced that
it alone stood for civilization. But in fact both succumbed now
and again to impulses of sheer brutality, and both achieved acts
not merely of heroism, but of generosity unusual among the First
Men. For conduct which to clearer minds seems merely sane, was
in those days to be performed only by rare vision and self-mastery.

As the months of agony advanced, there was bred in the warring
peoples a genuine and even passionate will for peace and a united
world. Out of the conflict of the tribes arose, at least for a while,
a spirit loftier than tribalism. But this fervour lacked as yet clear
guidance, lacked even the courage of conviction. The peace which
followed the European War is one of the most significant moments
of ancient history; for it epitomizes both the dawning vision and
the incurable blindness, both the impulse toward a higher loyalty
and the compulsive tribalism of a race which was, after all, but
superficially human.

One brief but tragic incident, which occurred within a century
after the European War, may be said to have sealed the fate of
the First Men. During this century the will for peace and sanity
was already becoming a serious factor in history. Save for a number
of most untoward accidents, to be recorded in due course, the
party of peace might have dominated Europe during its most
dangerous period; and, through Europe, the world. With either a
little less bad luck or a fraction more of vision and self-control at
this critical time, there might never have occurred that aeon of
darkness, in which the First Men were presently to be submerged.
For had victory been gained before the general level of mentality
had seriously begun to decline, the attainment of the world state
might have been regarded, not as an end, but as the first step
towards true civilization. But this was not to be.

After the European War the defeated nation, formerly no less
militaristic than the others, now became the most pacific, and a
stronghold of enlightenment. Almost everywhere, indeed, there
had occurred a profound change of heart, but chiefly in Germany.
The victors on the other hand, in spite of their real craving to be
human and generous, and to found a new world, were led partly
by their own timidity, partly by their governors’ blind diplomacy,
into all the vices against which they believed themselves to have
been crusading. After a brief period in which they desperately
affected amity for one another they began to indulge once
more in physical conflicts. Of these conflicts, two must be
observed.

The first outbreak, and the less disastrous for Europe, was a
short and grotesque struggle between France and Italy. Since the
fall of ancient Rome, the Italians had excelled more in art and
literature than in martial achievement. But the heroic liberation of
Italy in the nineteenth Christian century had made Italians
peculiarly sensitive to national prestige; and since among Western
peoples national vigour was measured in terms of military glory,
the Italians were fired, by their success against a rickety foreign
domination, to vindicate themselves more thoroughly against the
charge of mediocrity in warfare. After the European War, however,
Italy passed through a phase of social disorder and self-distrust.
Subsequently a flamboyant but sincere national party
gained control of the State, and afforded the Italians a new self-respect,
based on reform of the social services, and on militaristic
policy. Trains became punctual, streets clean, morals puritanical.
Aviation records were won for Italy. The young, dressed up and
taught to play at soldiers with real fire-arms, were persuaded to
regard themselves as saviours of the nation, encouraged to shed
blood, and used to enforce the will of the Government. The whole
movement was engineered chiefly by a man whose genius in action
combined with his rhetoric and crudity of thought to make him a
very successful dictator. Almost miraculously he drilled the Italian
nation into efficiency. At the same time, with great emotional effect
and incredible lack of humour he trumpeted Italy’s self-importance,
and her will to ‘expand’. And since Italians were slow to
learn the necessity of restricting their population, ‘expansion’
was a real need.

Thus it came about that Italy, hungry for French territory in
Africa, jealous of French leadership of the Latin races, indignant
at the protection afforded to Italian ‘traitors’ in France, became
increasingly prone to quarrel with the most assertive of her late
allies. It was a frontier incident, a fancied ‘insult to the Italian
flag’, which at last caused an unauthorized raid upon French
territory by a small party of Italian militia. The raiders were
captured, but French blood was shed. The consequent demand
for apology and reparation was calm, but subtly offensive to
Italian dignity. Italian patriots worked themselves into short-sighted
fury. The Dictator, far from daring to apologize, was
forced to require the release of the captive militia-men, and finally
to declare war. After a single sharp engagement the relentless
armies of France pressed into North Italy. Resistance, at first
heroic, soon became chaotic. In consternation the Italians woke
from their dream of military glory. The populace turned against
the Dictator whom they themselves had forced to declare war. In
a theatrical but gallant attempt to dominate the Roman mob, he
failed, and was killed. The new government made a hasty peace,
ceding to France a frontier territory which she had already annexed
for ‘security’.

Thenceforth Italians were less concerned to outshine the glory
of Garibaldi than to emulate the greater glory of Dante, Giotto,
and Galileo.

France had now complete mastery of the continent of Europe;
but having much to lose, she behaved arrogantly and nervously.
It was not long before peace was once more disturbed.

Scarcely had the last veterans of the European War ceased
from wearying their juniors with reminiscence, when the long
rivalry between France and England culminated in a dispute
between their respective Governments over a case of sexual outrage
said to have been committed by a French African soldier
upon an Englishwoman. In this quarrel, the British Government
happened to be definitely in the wrong, and was probably confused
by its own sexual repressions. The outrage had never been
committed. The facts which gave rise to the rumour were, that
an idle and neurotic Englishwoman in the south of France, craving
the embrace of a ‘cave man’, had seduced a Senegalese corporal
in her own apartments. When, later, he had shown signs of
boredom, she took revenge by declaring that he had attacked her
indecently in the woods above the town. This rumour was such
that the English were all too prone to savour and believe. At the
same time, the magnates of the English Press could not resist this
opportunity of trading upon the public’s sexuality, tribalism, and
self-righteousness. There followed an epidemic of abuse, and
occasional violence, against French subjects in England; and thus
the party of fear and militarism in France was given the opportunity
it had long sought. For the real cause of this war was connected
with air power. France had persuaded the League of
Nations (in one of its less intelligent moments) to restrict the size
of military aeroplanes in such a manner that, while London lay
within easy striking distance of the French coast, Paris could only
with difficulty be touched by England. This state of affairs
obviously could not last long. Britain was agitating more and
more insistently for the removal of the restriction. On the other
hand, there was an increasing demand for complete aerial disarmament
in Europe; and so strong was the party of sanity in
France, that the scheme would almost certainly have been accepted
by the French Government. On both counts, therefo…

In an instant, the whole fruit of this effort for disarmament was
destroyed. That subtle difference of mentality which had ever
made it impossible for these two nations to understand one another,
was suddenly exaggerated by this provocative incident into
an apparently insoluble discord. England reverted to her conviction
that all Frenchmen were sensualists, while to France the
English appeared, as often before, the most offensive of hypocrites.
In vain did the saner minds in each country insist on the
fundamental humanity of both. In vain did the chastened Germans
seek to mediate. In vain did the League, which by now had
very great prestige and authority, threaten both parties with expulsion,
even with chastisement. Rumour got about in Paris that
England, breaking all her international pledges, was now feverishly
building giant planes which would wreck France from Calais to
Marseilles. And indeed the rumour was not wholly a slander, for,
when the struggle began, the British air force was found to have a
range of intensive action far wider than was expected. Yet the
actual outbreak of war took England by surprise. While the London
papers were selling out upon the news that war was declared,
enemy planes appeared over the city. In a couple of hours a third
of London was in ruins, and half her population lay poisoned in
the streets. One bomb, falling beside the British Museum, turned
the whole of Bloomsbury into a crater, wherein fragments of
mummies, statues, and manuscripts were mingled with the contents
of shops, and morsels of salesmen and the intelligentsia. Thus
in a moment was destroyed a large proportion of England’s most
precious relics and most fertile brains.

Then occurred one of those microscopic, yet supremely potent
incidents which sometimes mould the course of events for centuries.
During the bombardment a special meeting of the British
Cabinet was held in a cellar in Downing Street. The party in power
at the time was progressive, mildly pacifist, and timorously cosmopolitan.
It had got itself involved in the French quarrel quite
unintentionally. At this Cabinet meeting an idealistic member
urged upon his colleagues the need for a supreme gesture of heroism
and generosity on the part of Britain. Raising his voice with
difficulty above the bark of English guns and the volcanic crash of
French bombs, he suggested sending by radio the following message.
‘From the people of England to the people of France. Catastrophe
has fallen on us at your hands. In this hour of agony, all
hate and anger have left us. Our eyes are opened. No longer can
we think of ourselves as merely English, and you as merely French;
all of us are, before all else, civilized beings. Do not imagine that
we are defeated, and that this message is a cry for mercy. Our
armament is intact, and our resources still very great. Yet, because
of the revelation which has come to us today, we will not fight. No
plane, no ship, no soldier of Britain shall commit any further act
of hostility. Do what you will. It would be better even that a great
people should be destroyed than that the whole race should be
thrown into turmoil. But you will not strike again. As our own
eyes have been opened by agony, yours now will be opened by our
act of brotherhood. The spirit of France and the spirit of England
differ. They differ deeply; but only as the eye differs from the hand.
Without you, we should be barbarians. And without us, even the
bright spirit of France would be but half expressed. For the spirit