by HG Wells
As our minds have probed more and more curiously into the space-time continuum in which the drama of evolution has been framed, they have discovered one paradoxical aspect after another behind the plausible face of “normal” Being. The uranium-lead riddle, to which we shall recur, is only among the latest of these absurd posers.
For example we have realized quite recently there is a limit set to velocity. The highest speed at which anything can move is the velocity of light. It is an ingenious suggestion to compare our normal world to a three-dimensional system falling along a fourth dimension at that speed. But this fourth dimension through which it falls implies a residuum of the space-time continuum in which our “universe” is framed. All that space-time continuum is our “universe”. It leaves us still with its evolutionary process and all the rest of it within the confines of our system.
The searching skepticism of the writer’s philosophical analysis has established this Antagonist as invincible reality for him, but all over the earth and from dates immemorial, introspective minds, minds of the quality of the brooding Shakespeare, have conceived a disgust of the stress, vexations and petty indignities of life and taken refuge from its apprehension of a conclusive end to things, in mystical withdrawal. On the whole mankind has shown itself tolerant, sympathetic and respectful to such retreats. That is the peculiar human element in this matter; the recurrent refusal to be satisfied with the normal real world. The question “Is this all?” has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages, and, at the end of our tether, as it seems, here it is, still baffling but persistent.
To such discomfited minds the world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressful story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves them greatly and yet they feel it is faked. The vast majority of the beholders accept all the conventions of the story, are completely part of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the skeptical mind says stoutly, “This is delusion”.
“Golden lads and lasses must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.”
“No,” says this ingrained streak of protest: “there is still something beyond the dust.”
But is there?
There is no reason for saying there is. That skeptical mind may have overrated the thoroughness of its skepticism. As we are now discovering, there was still scope for doubting.
The severer our thinking, the plainer it is that the dust-carts of Time trundle that dust off to the incinerator and there make an end to it.
Hitherto, recurrence has seemed a primary law of life. Night has followed day and day night. But in this strange new phase of existence into which our universe is passing, it becomes evident that events no longer recur. They go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which this obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome.
Our world of self-delusion will admit none of that. It will perish amidst its evasions and fatuities. It is like a convoy lost in darkness on an unknown rocky coast, with quarrelling pirates in the chartroom and savages clambering up the sides of the ships to plunder and do evil as the whim may take them. That is the rough outline of the more and more jumbled movie on the screen before us. Mind near exhaustion still makes its final futile movement towards that “way out or round or through the impasse”.
That is the utmost now that mind can do. And this, its last expiring thrust, is to demonstrate that the door closes upon us for evermore.
There is no way out or round or through.
II
MIND IS RETROSPECTIVE TO THE END
THE WRITER HAS already made the distinction between his very intermittent and specialized phases as a philosophical enquirer and the normal interests of his life. There he is just another ant, albeit sustained in his stoical acceptance by a rare and peculiar vision. But the masses of our fellow-creatures have not that vision to sustain them, and we have to square our everyday conduct to theirs.
There are large ambiguous masses of the formicary, whose leaders, unable to grasp what is happening, are resorting to the most evil and malignant magic propitiations to avert the distressful fate that closes in upon us all. Denunciation, which implements old prejudices with a new cruelty, flourishes. The unfortunate ant involved in these milling masses does his best to keep his faith to those to whom he has given himself over. So he may get away with it to the end. He may feel uncomfortable and disconcerted at times, but he and his associates will for the most part sustain an atmosphere of valiant futility, assuring themselves and one another that presently the old game will be resumed with all its present stress gone like a dream. And even before he is sufficiently awake to tell his dream of his world restored, he will have forgotten it and passed into nothingness for ever.
III
THERE IS NO “PATTERN OF THINGS TO COME”
OUR UNIVERSE IS not merely bankrupt; there remains no dividend at all; it has not simply liquidated; it is going clean out of existence, leaving not a wrack behind. The attempt to trace a pattern of any sort is absolutely futile.
This is acceptable to the philosophical mind when it is at its most philosophical, but for those who lack that steadying mental backbone, the vistas such ideas open are so uncongenial and so alarming, that they can do nothing but hate, repudiate, scoff at and persecute those who express them, and betake themselves to the comfort and control of such refuges of faith and reassurance as the subservient fear-haunted mind has contrived for itself and others throughout the ages.
Our doomed formicary is helpless as the implacable Antagonist kicks or tramples our world to pieces. Endure it or evade it; the end will be the same, but the evasion systems involve unhelpfulness at the least and in most cases blind obedience to egotistical leaders, fanatical persecutions, panics, hysterical violence and cruelty.
After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly. Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength. He would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack. But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.
IV
RECENT REALISATIONS OF THE NATURE OF LIFE
A SERIES OF EVENTS has forced upon the intelligent observer the realization that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out. The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in more and more swiftly on mankind.
That new animal may be an entirely alien strain, or it may arise as a new modification of the hominidæ, and even as a direct continuation of the human phylum, but it will certainly not be human. There is no way out for Man but steeply up or steeply down. Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.
To many of us this crude alternative of up or down is intensely unpalatable. The forces that evolved us in the long succession of living beings endowed us with a tenacity of self-assertion that rebels against the bare idea of giving place to rats or unclean intrusive monsters equipped with streptococci for our undoing. We want to be in at the death of Man and to have a voice in his final replacement by the next Lord of Creation, even if, Oedipus-like, that successor’s first act be parricide.
All over this planet are scattered the traces and achievements of Man, and it demands an intense intellectual effort from most of us to realize that this wide distribution of human products, is a matter of the past hundred thousand years. Radioactive substances and the process of radio disintegration must have begun in the solar system in a period of about three thousand million years and had already ceased long before life had become possible upon
earth. Says Dr. N. H. Feather of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, in CHEMICAL PRODUCTS, Vol. 7, No. 11-12, Sept.-Oct. 1944:
“All radioactive species are ‘natural’ in the sense that conditions must have obtained at some stage in cosmic evolution, and probably still obtain in the interiors of the hotter stars, in which their production has taken place—and is still possible, but those conditions have not obtained on the earth since the time of its separation from the sun, and, as inhabitants of the earth, we conventionally regard as ‘natural’ only those radio elements which are found on our planet to have survived the period of some three thousand million years (3 x 109 years) since separation occurred.”
Thereafter by degrees the planet became a possible habitat for this strange intruder, life. It span about the sun at what rate we do not know, nor at what distance, it acquired a satellite moon whose rotation was slowed down by a tidal wave until it turned its face towards its mother earth for ever. So a lunar month is a lunar day. Our own planet must be undergoing a similar retardation towards the sun, so that early years and ages of life on earth rushed by at a pace out of all proportion to these last deliberate ages. The machine was running with feebler brakes. Somewhen in that headlong phase, under shelter of a dense cloud canopy of steam, the series of rhythms we call life, began.
In the invariable darkness of the deep sea, in the implacable dryness of the dry land, there were no rhythmic possibilities. It was, as Professor J. B. S. Haldane, in one of his admirable popular articles, has pointed out, in the intertidal belt only that they were to be found. Light followed darkness and darkness light, and life, that peculiar throb in matter, ensued. The palaeontologist finds intimations in the record of rocks, of a lifeless phase of unknown duration, before the sunlight actually pierced the steamy veil and inaugurated the process called life.
The sequences of these opening rhythms are still indeterminate. They were elemental, so that their nearest analogies are to be found in the microscopic tissue elements of contemporary life or in the surface waters of the sea. There was a huge proliferation of diatoms and the like, and very early in the story some favourable mutation produced a green substance, chlorophyll, which, in the presence of sunlight, produced a quasi-permanent, infectious compound so long as the light endured. So that the record of the rocks breaks abruptly from lifelessness into a variety of intertidal forms.
These forms in all their variety manifest one disposition in common, an élan vital, a drive to assert their being. They display in its crude beginnings that “struggle for existence” which has become the fundamental theme of the history of life. Quite early this living stuff breaks up into individual fragments, which can meet varying occasions and survive here even if others dry up or otherwise perish there. These primitive individuals seem free from any impulse of conflict either against the food they ingest or against one another. If they meet they will flow together and break up again apparently invigorated by the encounter. This rejuvenescence occurs without any sexual differentiation. It is an affair between equals.
But the establishment of a difference among individuals so that one set is specialized for adventure, experiment and ultimate death while another sort continued the species without ending, began very early in the history of life. The great majority of the many-celled beings upon this planet begin and end as fertilized ova. Some bud and break up; some are propagated by cuttings, by parthenogenesis (as with green fly) or the like, but such methods of reproduction keep the species fixed, inadaptable and vulnerable, and sooner or later, if there is to be survival, there must be a return for invigoration and variation to the male and female roles already established in their present form in the earliest chapters of the palaeontological record.
There are wide fluctuations in the differentiation of the sexes even in the same species, according to the changing imperatives of life. Few of us stay to consider the sex of a tiger or tigeress when we encounter it at large, but the sex of a passing cat or of a rabbit or hedgehog, or of a wolf in a pursuing pack or a fly or a lizard, is by no means obvious.
Even the stigmata of sex in Homo sapiens are far less conspicuous to-day than they were a hundred years ago. The exaggeration of the waist by tight-lacing has ceased. So also has much mysterious cosseting of girls. The bicycle played a part in that release. The growing girl braced herself up and went for a gentle ride on the new toy when her grandmother would have been resting in bed, and found herself better for it. At any crisis our great-grandmothers would “swoon”, but who ever hears of women swooning to-day? Now men faint more frequently than women.
In a brief period, within the lifetime of an elderly man, the relations of the sexes in the British community, the age relations in marriage, the social readjustments consequent upon these changes, have been greatly changed. Older men used to marry and use up young wives; now the world is full of young couples and it is exceptional to meet wintry January married to blooming May. The pendulum may swing back. Or it may not be a pendulum swing we are contemplating. Deliberately planned legislation, food shortages and such like economic processes, waves of sentiment for or against maternity, patriotic feeling or the want of it, the natural disposition to fall in love coupled with a desire to fix a relationship by some permanent common interest, and a pride in physically and mentally well-begotten children, may play incalculable parts in the production of a new humanity, capable of an adaptation to the whirling imperatives about us, sufficient to see out the story of life on earth to its end.
It is claimed by various religious bodies that they protect “the institution of the family”. They do nothing of the sort. The family has existed since animals bred and mated and went apart to protect and rear their young. But priestly intervention has degraded this clean and simple relationship by damning unborn children with the idea that they were “conceived in sin”, making illegitimacy mysteriously shameful, and keeping all the fundamental facts and possibilities of family life from young people until it is too late for them to benefit by their knowledge.
V
RACE SUICIDE BY GIGANTISM
THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL lives to a very great age, measured by the lives of the creatures about him. The Radium Clock gives us a maximum period of far less than ten and probably far less than five thousand million terrestrial years for the career of life. During all this period there has been a constant succession of forms, dominating the scene. Each has dominated, and each in its turn has been thrust aside and superseded by some form better adapted to the changing circumstances of life. Each has obeyed certain inescapable laws that seemed to be in the very nature of things.
First of these laws was the imperative to aggression. The fiat was live, and live as abundantly as possible. Live more than your brothers, grow larger, devour more. In the earlier days the imperative was unqualified by any impulse to mutual aid against a common competitor. So the big individuals ate up the food of the small ones, even if they did not actually eat them, and grew larger and larger. In the record of the rocks it is always the gigantic individuals who appear at the end of each chapter.
The planet spins, climate changes, so that the old overgrown Lord of Creation is no longer in harmony with his surroundings. Go he must. Usually but now always, some entirely different form of life succeeds him. Or like the sharks he may dwindle in numbers until the food supply overtakes him, and then, if nature has contrived no alternative in the meanwhile, he may return to his former abundance. Sharks and their kind live and die violently and nothing is left of them to fossilise. We know of huge contemporary basking sharks and the like. They may have grown to their present bigness quite recently or they may have basked for ages—as soon as there were sufficient fishes to be devoured. We are left guessing.
VI
PRECOCIOUS MATURITY, A METHOD OF SURVIVAL
NATURE IN HER insensate play with the possibilities of life has produced some abrupt novelties in the record by accelerating the fertilization and ripening of the ovum relatively to the other phases of the life cyc
le. We must bear in mind always in these questions that it is a complete life cycle we inherit and not some fixed adult form. And time and after time Nature has cut out an adult form from the record altogether, abolished it, and made some larval stage the sexually mature form.
At one early phase in the record, the Echinoderms, the starfish and so forth, with their radiant structure, were Lords of Creation. They had little or no powers of locomotion in their adult state, and many, like the crinoids, were rooted to the rocks. Among other radiant forms the Tunicata had reverted to the production of cellulose and were markedly vegetative in their habit of life. They discharged their fertilized eggs into the water and dissemination of these was greatly assisted by the development of accessory structures that stiffened the drifting larvae and gave an independent impetus to their movement. The backbone of these traveling emissions has been christened the notochord, and the new fore and aft forms of life of which it was the precursor, are called the Chordata, as opposed to the series of forms without notochords, the Starfish, Sea Urchins, Sea Cucumbers and so on, which had hitherto been Lords of Creation. The whole vast world of backboned animals, including ourselves, owes its existence to this freak of nature. There was no reason whatever in it. It happened so.